"The Beginning is Near"

I think I have End Times fatigue. Global thermo-nuclear annihilation, rogue meteors, swine flu, AIDS, alien invasion, pole shift, climate change, Y2K, 9/11, planet Nibiru, The Austrailan Jesus that looked like Mark Twain in a jean jacket, Economic Meltdown, ETC.: I've followed them all closely. It's a family tradition that wasn't supposed to be.

I don't know what stressed my parents out more, The End being so close, or The End not showing up . The more elusive the American Dream became for my parents, the more attractive The End became. When I was much younger, say 4, God (speaking through my Dad) and my Dad both told me that we were in the tribulation, and the shit could be expected to hit the fan at any moment. In the interim, i was expected to not touch my penis, pursue a business degree and keep my hair short. The notion of the apocalypse is a large part of what made it possible for me to live in a fundamentalist household. For those of you that have had empathetic relations with fundamentalists, you know: The idea that their suffering through life could be shortened through divine destruction has an understandable appeal. It's no fun being right all the time.


I'm over 40, I'm not a fundamentalist, and I'm not miserable enough to want the entire world to end just so I can stop pretending to be a good person and have my debt wiped. But still, I cannot get enough of the apocalyptic notions, especially when served up with conspiratorial zeal. Tasty. I feel compelled to engage in them. I'm addicted to the high that the specter of doom provides. Just a little suspension of disbelief, and BOOM- Aliens could be living among us, but as trans-dimensional algorithmic forces engaged in the hijacking of the human narrative in order to steer us into a side gig of creating an artificial life form for them to mate with and spawn the next big thing in Life. Or somesuch.

The conspiracy threads on the web, true or not, often entertain me far more than the bland, rehashed, blockbuster narratives of the broader culture. If we agree that truth is stranger than fiction, and say the most extreme conspiracy/doomsday stories are fiction, then that just makes life even more interesting, as far as I'm concerned. I see it as our modern mythology. Metadata. A conspiracy/doomsday story, true or invented, will only live and grow if it appeals to the kind of anxiety that we are addicted to as a culture.

It's natural for people who feel powerless in their lives to be prone to the doom-adrenal fix . Sudden, immanent annihilation of the status quo can be seen as a beacon of hope to people with lots of credit card debt and hateful spouses. "I feel powerless to change the circumstances of my life, so, please, can we just get this over with? Jesus..." The prospect of extinction can become favorable to the onus of reclaiming personal sovereignty, or even just continuing on. I can see lust flash in the eyes of the true believers as they enthuse about the Apocalypse. I think the apocalyptic fetish of our culture comes largely from a national sense of powerlessness and hopelessness.

We were raised on a stress inducing diet of dueling doomsdays, economic boom and bust, energy scarcity, Them against Us : forever! (…er, until the apocalypse). The specter of Doom spikes fight or flight adrenaline, and our eyes widen and we get high on worse case scenarios. A thrill here and there is nice, but It's become a chronic condition in vast numbers of the modern world. And that's not healthy.

It's been shown that prolonged stress can be very hard on a human. It clogs arteries. It's been shown to actually gnaw at the nubs of ones chromosomes and fray the ends like an old shoestring. Stressed humans are not as effective. Stressed people are more prone to violence and illness. Meanwhile, we have become addicted to our media prescribed stress. We're hooked on fear- the MSG in our media diet. We wouldn't eat the nightly news without it, not with the low content infotainment they serve up.

We need 100% real journalism, at some point, for a healthy society to live and grow. A focus on collective human issues instead of the partisan cock fighting. The cocks like to fight, and they like us to watch and cheer them on. We like to watch, cheer and support as a passion pacifier . Eventually, soon eventually, some one has to rise above the cockfight and point out to the spectators that the arena is on fire.

So, how do we make a break from the chronic stress we feel on a national and global level? What would ease our collective survival anxieties? Perhaps working on a pressure point to release some blocked energy? ( Hello Wall Street)

Robert Sapolsky, a neurobiologist from Stanford, studies the deadly effects of chronic stress in humans and other primates. Here he describes a moment in the day of a typical baboon colony hierarchy;

"You've got some big male that loses a fight , he chases a sub-adult, who bites an adult female, who slaps a juvenile, who knocks an infant out of a tree; all in 15 seconds. A huge component of stress is a lack of control, lack of predictability. You're just sitting there watching a zebra, and somebody who is having a bad day comes along and it's your rear end that's gonna get slashed. It's tremendously stressful for the folks further down on the hierarchy."

A Baboon colony that he had been studying in the wild for a number of years suffered a tragedy that yielded a provocative finding. The colony came across an abandoned camp and rummaged through the rubbish. When meat was discovered, the most aggressive alphas, the source of the stress that trickles down through the colony, took it all for themselves. It happened that the alphas contacted a fatal ilness from the meat and all died. The colony continued, sans abusive alpha class. Health improved, violence went down, prospects of longevity went up. As outsider males entered into this liberated colony, they were adjusted or rejected.

The events of one day dramatically altered the stress level, and well being, of a colony for generations after. They Occupied DoucheBaboon Street in the midsts of a self created Alpha Male Meltdown. Having suddenly lost the stress of unpredictable hierarchical abuse, and feeling life without it, the colony of baboons was inspired to perpetuate it through regulation and enforcement.

In my experience, being proactive in civic and social solidarity can serve to cure apocalyptic anxiety. We have an opportunity to have national dialogue beyond the arena of partisan politics. I think most will agree that there must be an intervention in the corporation/lobbyist/politics game. It's an easy thing to rally around. . There are solutions available. That hasn't been the issue. The issue has been lack of participation in the governance of our nation by the best and brightest members of our society. The Fat Cats have thoroughly dominated our political sandbox with their buried offerings, so that any one who jumps in to earnestly shape solutions runs into shit. What decent person wants to jump into a sandbox full of shit? It's too big for one personality to handle cleaning out. We all have to get our hands a little dirty on this.

We need our system of representation gutted and retro fitted before it will have the integrity to move effectively in asserting the will of the people now clamoring for attention. Mike Gravel's proposal of a National Referendum should be dusted off. Everyone votes directly, bypassing the house and senate. Initiate the new and improved tamperproof ballot process nation wide, put a muzzle on Wall Street with a public examination and auditing until sanity has a say in the matter.

The etymological roots of the word apocalypse are "revelation, disclosure, uncover". The modern interpretation, "a cataclysmic event", I think, applies to those that are invested in a concealment. As the scale of the corruption and collusion becomes more apparent, more and more of the population will have to face their personal responsibility in allowing the scam to have happened, or even their collusion in it. Our economic system has been brutally ravaged. I think a certain level of shame is responsible for our not talking about it; shame for having suffered the brutality, or shame for having profited from it. The people flowing into our streets are an apocalyptic force, in that they are uncovering and revealing the truth of our condition. This is where the helpless are very helpful, coming down and showing up to sustain and support as the reality of the occasion percolates. They may not know why they are there, but they feel why. It would be a shame to remain shameful when the opportunity to reveal and heal comes on this scale.

I think that the reality of our condition, as a country, a species, a planet, has been badly photoshopped and edited far out of context. I don't believe that the solutions for our collective well-being are as difficult and abstract as we are led to believe. The impotent alphas that need big stacks to compensate for the lack in their souls have the bullhorn and are writing the narrative. In that narrative we are all doomed without them. Without their guiding hand we will start having sex with donkeys and burning the elderly for winter heat (I suspect that that would not come to pass, though I concede that isolated instances could be inspired by the suggestion). We are due for a new narrative. We can pull out the hook and clear the stage of the hacks. The finiteness of the world has never been more apparent, and at the same time, blithely dismissed as an issue of any real importance.

The age of sustainability is dawning, casting long shadows of the dark age predators exiting the stage.

Rats have chewed their way into the pantry, which isn't surprising. Not bothering to patch the holes has compounded the misfortune. At this point they almost have us convinced that it is their pantry, and that they are busy working on fixing it up. We get the updates from the cockroaches that scurry under the blocked door. We neglected to notice that the cats we hired to patrol the scene were becoming fat, not with rats, but rat kickbacks from our stash. They stopped bringing us heads and gall bladders some time ago, and we were happy not to have to deal with the little messes.

As this recent movement swells, I believe that the already overstated rhetoric of apocalypse will grow as well. I'll start: This is an apocalyptic event. The Occupiers are the revealing, what gets revealed behind the corporatist veil of WallStreet/Washington with be The End of something. We can be minion victims of the mighty corporate menace, or the producers of the show, willing pull the plug of a vulgar and abusive segment.

Pedantic Complexity

Evolution. The theory supposes an ongoing process. We, according to the theory, should be evolving. Right now. A significant difference between homo sapiens ("wise" or "knowing" human) and the rest of the primates, I think, is that we have the capacity for consciously choosing to evolve. I really like the idea of evolving, consciously. That is premised on making the choice to evolve. But, evolve into…what?

Deciding to sprout wings, or have our bad teeth grow back like a lizards tail may not be the must efficacious avenue for such an ambition as conscious evolution. Our biology and genetics will likely not want to play ball with such imaginings, not on short order. However, our consciousness might be more game on the idea, and in fact, our DNA might be suggesting it.

Astronaut Edgar Mitchell thought it might be worth exploring what the next phase of evolution might look like, and went so far as to name it; Homo Noeticus ("inner knowing"human). He co-founded the Institute for Noetic Sciences with Paul N. Temple in 1973 to do just that. During Edgar's return trip to Earth on Apollo 14, he had what he called an epiphany concerning the human condition in the scheme of things: "The presence of divinity became almost palpable, and I knew that life in the universe was not just an accident based on random processes ... The knowledge came to me directly…"

Edgar's didn't claim a religious conversion or decide to become a born again, zealously campaigning for Team Jesus, though the description of his experiences mirror what many born-again's describe as their own. But this was a man who's perspective on the world was afforded by science. His objective realization was not facilitated by a church (though his experience might have had some help from being spawned in a Christian dominated culture). Of course, this experience of divinity does not belong to the province of astronauts (for many described similar realizations) or Christians alone, but has been reported by people of all religions and practices, and enjoyed a lot of air time out of the mouths of psychedelic seekers since the cultural revolution of the 1960's. I consider the premise of Edgar's institute as laudable in my opinion. Even if the endeavor was a bunch of New Agey hooey as the critics claim, I admire and respect his taking the unpopular road of exploring inner-space and challenging the cultural narrative of a Judeo-Christian God.



As far as the "Sheeple" notion. Sheep are going to flock, with or without a Shepard, and humans, with or without a chief, are going to tribe. Traditionally, the black sheep of the flock and tribe both have had a harder go of it. Being conspicuous in the wild invites predators, so, one can see an attractive evolutionary advantage to belonging.

There are a myriad of shepherds of the human flocks. Some honor their charge of protecting, some sheer the fleece too close. Some lie their way into their roll to devour, some sacrifice themselves in earnest. But the flock will accept one or the other arbitrarily. Holding up a mug shot of a wolf, real or imagined, is often enough to scare a consensus into them. "Outside the consensus lurk the devourers, so, I will hang with the flock rather than take my chances."

A central aspect of the Homo Noeticus that Edgar's was interested in was what the institute termed "integral intelligence," or a working awareness of the oneness of life. For convenience, I'd like to focus on the notion of the oneness of humanity as a single body.

Within this body of humanity we can find the brains, the immune system, the nervy people, the muscles, etc. The body won't do much without coordination between all the parts of the organism. The brains may tell the muscles to start the feet in the direction of nourishment, but not without a signal from the gut. After that task has been completed, the asshole becomes necessary. Coordination (cooperation) is not negotiable if the body is to survive another day. From my own experience of operating a body, conflict cannot be avoided. My sex organs have caused problems for my brain, and vice verse. My brains have motivated me to do things for the sake of my adrenals at the expense of my flesh and bones. In spite of all this, life still endorses my being.

Who knows whom we are dealing with when we interact with other people. We may be dealing with a scatological function, someone we feel is "talking shit." How we deal with that can help us understand our own function. If we can relax enough, we may facilitate a healthy movement. Trying to stop it out of repulsion may not be good for the system as a whole. This can be where we make a conscious choice to honor the asshole and let it do it's duty. Or we can make a conscious choice to be a sphincter muscle and contract the anus. When we choose to identify our personal being with the body of humanity, we can be mindful of the appropriate time for all these functions, but the herds/tribes/body goes a long way to inform us what that appropriateness may be.





Homo Sapiens are capable of this kind of integral awareness, and through the exercising of this mindfulness of our interconnection, integral intelligence can be developed. I wonder if the Homo Noeticus may not be a new kind of human to develop in the future, distinct from the Sapien, but a necessary function of the human species right now. High functioning Sapiens have an awareness of the body of humanity, the interconnectedness of it with our environment, and all other life within it. But perhaps the function of the Noeticus concerns itself with that awareness of life, as well as the notions of life beyond that, in and out of time, on and beyond this planet. Someone has to do it.

So, where does the heart fit in all this? It's a mystery. The brain doesn't tell the heart to beat. The heart can continue beating even if the brain is "dead." The heart can continue to provide life for all the other parts of the body, even with no brain to put those parts into action. For a while. Some say the heart, the motor for the life-blood, has it's own intelligence capable of overriding the brain, and seems to have impulses that are as counter intuitive as they are powerful. The head holds our vision, but the heart tells the head which way to look and motivate the body into action. It can seem as though the heart doesn't care what price the body and mind pays for it's mysterious motivations, even as it pumps life into every part of them. Sometimes this doesn't work out so well, as far as the body, or the brain's perspective, and a resistance forms in the system.

I have so over metaphored. I'll try some science sounding stuff now.

The Internet told me that a Russian biophysicist named Vladimir Poponin made some interesting discoveries in the early 1990's concerning the nature of human DNA. The story goes something like this;

Poponin put some human DNA in a container and blasted it with photons. The random acting photons then glommed onto the DNA. When the DNA was removed, the photons continued to hold the DNA spiral form in what has been called the "phantom effect." It was surmised that we are leaving phantoms all around us as we move about, phantoms specific to our particular DNA, at a particular moment.



Conventional Science has begun to rethink the function of the 98% of human DNA called "noncoding" or "junk" DNA. Because noncoding DNA does not encode proteins for sequences, it was believed that it had no biological function. More recently however, various functions have been attributed to sections of the "junk" DNA including pseudogene sequences that "appear to accumulate mutations more rapidly than coding sequences due to a loss of selective pressure." and "allows for the creation of mutant alleles that incorporate new functions that may be favored by natural selection; thus, pseudogenes can serve as raw material for evolution and can be considered 'protogenes.'" This noncoding DNA could be considered a kind of biological 'open mic' that allows new talent to take the stage and catch the attention of the organism. The Internet also told me that scientists were able to detect a contracting of our DNA when we are experiencing anxiousness or fear, and that the DNA had an expansive quality when were were experiencing compassion, or love. So we could be walking around leaving stroboscopic phantoms in our wake in the shape of our contracted or expanded DNA, depending on how we feel that moment.

So, when we choose to look at our fellow humans with love and compassion, we are creating ghosts of our condition that others unwittingly encounter. At the same time, our DNA can "wear" this condition, to try it on for size to see if it wants to walk out of the store with it. Inversely, when we choose to carry the burden of fear based emotions, we cancel the open mic and stick with the golden oldies.

So, to go back to the sheeple thing: The sapien resists anything not of it out of survival fears, and thus perpetuate their state, where a Noeticus can walk amongst them, incognito, all the while shedding impressions of an integral intelligence that leaves a very real impression; people in sheeple clothing.


If humanity is ailing, the affliction comes from within. Our right arm has a mind to punch us in the head while the left arm reaches behind our back, trying to hold our butt cheeks together. Meanwhile the left and right brain argue over control, forgetting they are one. Let us pray that our DNA has a plan to get us through this mess.

Or, we can choose to trust that it will, and in that trust serve an integrative function.