Image via Wikipedia Mankind's awakening from animal to man swept panic through each who found the inner mind. A new world disported itself for all to see and, suddenly, to try to understand. Such complexity. So many hidden cross references.
A 'not so simple as it first appears' sort of world. From the avalanche and death to the reasoning behind the avalanche and death. Why? 'Intelligence' created this seemingly clean cut thought process and found harmonics and rational inter-relationships where only rocks, sea and sky had once been.
The Why became a new-found maze, a head-space filling new-found maze of eternal puzzling. Every generation passed this puzzle to their kin. Each social cluster, each tribe, held answers to their breast and lorded this 'god' acquired knowing over those who had lesser knowings. The 'animal' was abruptly found to be anything that was not of this 'knowing' band of 'fellow' man.
Neanderthal. Homo Erectus. Homo Sapiens. As the thinking non-animals changed their ways, as millennia passed with differences shaping habits, skulls, stances, teeth, weapons, dwellings, clothing, dreams. So it was that man became this complexity of gods and rules, laws and emotions, professions and institutions, countries, cabbages and kings.
J. Edgar Hoover once said " If I wasn't a man who loved men more than gal's I might have run for President ". This one, fabricated, distorted, half truth- all garbage, sentence should show how far Modern Man has come from such simple beginnings. From the first 'why' - Why does my food always run faster than I do?- to a statement that contains personal comments about a private life of a dead man on a different continent which might be true but is false because there is no record, that is known, of him ever saying those exact words. Less than a tadger's worth of wordage and New Man shows the space that is wasted, the space that is free for fantasy and creative illusion, that is there in each thinker of now.
What space? There is no physical embodiment of this 'space'. Nowhere in the human body is there physical room for such realities. It is the mind and its synaptic flashings that can create so many differing 'truths'. The mind, the brain, grey matter weighing pounds that is accountable for the civilisations, the knowledge, the scientific foundations, society.
But. And, as they say, it's a big but. But what about modern man who is frightened of the actualities of being awake in this life? No simple journey from start to finish, no more the herd animal but a chooser of what's true. How frightened is the person who sees their own death, who wonders at the after death- is it a nothing? Is it harps and clouds? Is it going to be fire and Sulfur? The expanse of life between then and the present must be filled with many happenings, some good, some strange, some awful. How is the empty space to be filled? Luckily there is an answer. It is the answer of the one before and the one before that. Passed down by generations the gods, the traditions, the reactions to events are all presented in a user friendly package for those that need the filler to block the possibles and allow the 'realities' to remain.
As each of the awakened ones choose the truths of one society or another then the limitations of the 'possibles' occurs. Each clique faces its own realities with its own stock answers to those realities. For each tolerance that is built in there are many intolerance's that must be obeyed in order that the mind-stage remains untrammeled by the potential confusions of conflicts. However, the mind is a major playground and new thoughts, new indecisions will happen. It is now that the side-slip into creative construction begins. Creative construction. The ability to make up reasons for the intolerance's of the structured surround. Black people are made slaves because they are dirty, because they are dark like monkeys and must be as stupid. Alchohol is legal because it only damages already sick people. Capitalism is right because rich people are rich and happy- if a man is poor it is because he is not a good capitalist. God is real because it must have taken some form of thinking being to create a world such as this. Women are the lesser sex because they can't beat up their husbands. Good people can't be wrong or they would be in prison. Think of any option and there is a group who believes that this is so because of .... then think of any possible rationalism for this 'truth' and it is locked in place.
Aldous Huxley wrote of 'horizontal self-transcendence', Humanities need to be seen to grow as life goes on. The inability of the majority to reach upwards with their locked thoughts and patterns, the seeming uselessness of such a pathway in the face of daily bread gathering, leads to the possession of the inner space by any hobby, work, emotion, desire, creative activity- particularly if it means a fulfillment of earthly wants. The space must be part of a structured totality, after all, isn't it 'true' that Anarchy has to be equal to Nihilism? Co-operative structure must only be possible if blood is spilled and tracts of humanity are put to the saw? The tree of knowledge must be chopped to kindling and each new man must burn his bundle in his politically allotted grate? Destruction of all that is held dear must happen in order that this world eventually works as it is deemed right for it to do so?
Surely the space must be emptied of all that is within in order that the new 'true' reality can be inculcated?
As man-'Kinder' has fabricated the empires of this planet so it is that the best sites have been built upon with towering multi-aeon castles dedicated to the proof of each reality. No man of sane mind walks into the desert in search of water when the oasis is brimming. No intelligence wantonly destroys the perfected edifice in order to use its rubble for the foundations of another. Unless the new machination is merely a new-faced replacement sameness for the gap in the space of the man. Nature abhors a vacuum. Isn't it more likely to be that mankind is frightened of the empty chasm and thus we have to see a possible justification for the negative realities of today's structured whole? The opacity of the senses can be lessened, clarity of vision, of hearing, of speech can be attained- but at what cost? That fear we once felt as we staggered into the realities of the new mind and found the unfilled space? The terror of standing alone without the answers for comfort? It must be better to remain as we are than go through all that again.
So society moves in eddies. Any precipitous falls are filled with old reason. Any upward visions are collapsed by the downward drag of social inequality. This new man has been waiting to move forwards into a better future for decades now. And still we wait. As space-fillers fight space-fillers for precedence over the mass reality. When will we ever learn?
He wrote.
Side slipping with the best of them.
Nov 29 1999, 9:00 am
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