We don't recognize the greatness inside each human being, furthermore, we have lost our sense of who we are and why we are here. When I mean we, I mean the collective individuated sentient beings on this planet. We must refine this word sentient because many organisms without neurological substrates perceive and react to the environment as if conscious of what behaviors best support their continuity; they exhibit some basic intelligence, yet we could not classify them as sentient. We would have to agree that only a few complex organisms show an advanced conscious agency. Dogs, cats, the octopus, and other cephalopods, elephants, dolphins and whales, some birds as well as all primates belong in this category. However, it seems that the only species on Earth that is capable of self-observation, self-awareness, and self-actualization is the human species.
We are also arguably the only species capable of reasoning, able to think about the past and prepare for the future, capable of designing with the intent of changing the conditions of our environment, supposedly for the advancement of our collective wellbeing. This primacy has led to generations of technological breakthroughs as our tools have become more and more powerful. So powerful in fact that they deploy unmeasured destructive capabilities. So powerful is this drive to control the environment, that it has produced a wealth of material artificiality that is wearing and tearing apart the resources of Earth. Rather than taking, consuming away endlessly in industrial growth, we have the responsibility of caring for each other and mother Earth.
We don't realize that we have come to have an experience, and our home is this terrestrial paradise put here and terraformed for us as a gift. We are the divine individuation of consciousness coated as an astronaut, a suit that comes equipped with appendages and sensory parts that taste the relative flavors of life. We are here to express ourselves and to ride the rollercoaster of sense-perception, making choices that lower the entropy and providing better conditions for our development. The astronaut suit is also equipped with a mind, and this mind does not reside inside the shell or carcass. We have come to mistake the mind as our nervous system which is a two-way antenna that receives and projects out into the unknowable. We have come to observe ourselves, and to render the spatial universe we experience. We are the divine processes having individuated points of view, observing ourselves and the heavens as they materialize the unfolding of time.
The Earth paradise that is before us must be tended and we the stewards and caregivers must honor this. We have the choice of making it the garden of Eden that the universal being intended, or we can follow our dysfunctional mind that has been taken over by the ego. The ego operates for its own benefit; who in their right mind would rape their home and waste such a miraculous gift? We have become perhaps worse, we are pathological infants committing matricide. It is the ego within this mind that has created a discrete identity, an image of us out of sync with reality. Believing we are in a hostile and scarce environment when we are living in abundance and benevolence with infinite potential, surrounded by incredible gifts and compassionate brothers and sisters. We did not come to this planet to suffer nor to live in fear, we came to peacefully grow and evolve and to express our foremost desire for exploration and awe.
Societies come in all forms, our current consumer society mindset leads us to believe we live in scarcity. We believe we have to struggle and conquer limited resources in a rat race for inconsequential commodities, this perspective turns us into rivals competing at life, at war with each other and at war with the environment. This mentality puts us at odds with our true nature. The takeover of commerce by the corporate giants and banking franchises have monopolized and created crony capitalism for their own good, they own everything and are in the process of taking over our most inalienable rights.
We belong in an open society, technologically advanced but also ecologically right and in full comprehension of our biophysical limits, understanding that our savvy minds can change depredation into remediation, depravation into stewardship and slumber into activism; transforming money as a thing and thinking more of money as the energy to put forth the free market of ideas that promotes the most genuine ingenuity of the human spirit. This unbounded spirit is waiting for a collective large enough to catapult us forward to the cashless society of a type 1 civilization; where once again coöperation and sharing will be at the center of what it means to be fundamentally human. When generosity drives the human spirit we will reach a new kind of prosperity that is not measured in terms of current economic wealth. It is the powerful discrete mind that created the egomaniac economic system and declared open war on humanity, attacking our chances for survival and delivering an unsustainable civilization to our children.
The mind has the power to distort our perception of life and can lead us to live in fear, it can rescind our faculties and offset our potential. The mind imposes limits on its parameters, it deals with the realm of fiction, conjuring up impressions that seal our belief systems. The mind is the little me that does not want to observe itself in the mirror, that mirror would reflect back the wholeness of consciousness, and then if the mind were a drop of water, the drop of water would become the sea.
Within each one of us, there is an invincible being that is invisible to our senses, we might not be the special ones after all, but surely we are very special, perhaps unimaginably unique, sentient beings capable of transcending physicality and discovering the cosmos. We have created language and the reasoning mind, the mind and the little me we call the ego is really an interpreter to the soul and it gives us an identity; it is an experiential travel companion riding this relativistic continuum, artificially created by our sentience in order to facilitate the sorting out of our perceptions. It, the mind is just a tool, not who you really are.
There is a larger reality outside what we can sense, unaware that what we see as reality is but an illusory story line, a virtual simulation and we the mutagenic programs acting out the quickening. The simulation is an obstacle course, a plot that has been put here to make us grow. This simulation presents us with challenges and the opportunity for transformation. It pushes us to make choices and to exercise our free will. The meeting of human beings in this transformation is what will make us evolve, enabling all points of view present within the other person, opening up to the other. This communication is fundamental and manifests the language of the heart. When we are in this connection something larger than each individual droplet emerges. Compassion grounding and empathy recalls the best that is in you, getting out-of-the-way, putting the mind to the side. In a world so marked by uncertainty, if we don't learn how to communicate, and stop being focused on our internal dialogue, opening up to the larger I am, we don't have a future.
While we are here, on this relativistic curvature of space-time, we have the choice of doing what our hearts know is right and this is what we are meant to do. Protecting all living creatures on Earth, protecting the atmosphere, nurturing the soil, nurturing the human landscape, letting go of irreconcilable differences, letting go of the obsession to control and enslave people and places. This experience is not by accident and did not randomly occur out of nothing. There are traces and signs of intentional design spread out through the fabric of reality. It would only behoove us individuals of the collective human experience to come to terms with the incredible odds that we are here. In this realization we will discover that we are incredible and formidable creatures, we are the image of God having an experience, playing out the role of mortal humans in an extraordinary stage, capable of the spectacular feat of the phenomenological. Waking up to this discovery will restore the human place in the universe. It will also restore our purpose as caretakers of this planet, this will enable us to look beyond the stars and the cosmos as our final destination.
The experiential simulator has brought us to the quickening of our times where our biggest challenges include mass extinctions and our very own annihilation. We are leaving a barren Mars looking landscape onwards to our descendants, the solution, is to transform trouble into triumph, trouble into opportunity, empowering our outlook, persevering and growing stronger but with acts of courage, selflessness and gratitude, energizing the human spirit, inspiring us to improve and evolve our very own perspective, bringing back the planet, remediating and terraforming the garden we have before us, what an incredible enterprise, what an incredible gift, in the context of a larger collection of people, animals, plants, fungi, cells and atoms, and the emanations of heart, opening up to the age of compassion grounding.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Carlos Cuellar Brown is a New York City media artist and essayist who has written on new media, social theory and metaphysics. His essays have been posted online by Opendemocracy, The Global Dispatches, The Pelican Web, Kosmos Journal, and STARDRIVE.
In 2013 his essay “Intermedial Being” was published by A Journal of Performance and Art PAJ #106 MIT Press Journals. In 2015 Mr. Brown was nominated for the TWOTY awards out of the Netherlands for his essay “Blueprint for Change”. He has been a regular columnist for Second Sight Magazine and Fullinsight.
His book, In Search of Singularity: Reflections and Chronicles from the End of Time, published 29 January 2017, is a series of reflections on the current cultural evolution from competition to cooperation, from patriarchy to reciprocity between humanity and the human habitat.
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