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PAOLO SOLERI: WHAT IF?, COLLECTED WRITINGS 1986-2000 |
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PART 4: Bubbles
Proportionally (scale) if the Political Bubble is the size of an atom, the Historical Bubble is the size of molecule, the Evolutionary Bubble is the size of a seed, and the Cosmic Bubble is the size of a solar system. [2002©Paolo Soleri] The four bubbles are expedient ways of setting one's own compass within reality so as to be able to operate with a slightly less "lost in the fog" position, which we tend to be chronically afflicted by. Bubbles are virtual "membranes" approximating boundaries of different domains. The domain embracing the immediate past and the present I label the Political Correctness Bubble (PCB). The domain embracing a past going back into human history I label the Historical Fitness Bubble (HFB). The domain embracing (reaching) a past reaching back into the 3.5 eons of evolutionary history of life on Earth I label the Evolutionary Coherence Bubble (ECB). The domain that encompasses the cosmos at large, reality, I label the Cosmic Relevance Bubble (CRB). All the bubbles have one and only one point in common: the present, ever changing, as it consigns itself instantly, instant after instant, to the past. One's assessment of things "present," and consequently her course of action, is influenced if not defined by the position in the bubbles domain where the person is "located." For instance: The behavior promoted in the PCB is more than often devoid of meaning for the behavior that the ECB would promote. The discrepancy denotes an incoherence ill fitting the evolutionary drift, therefore, an incoherence that if prolonged might conclude in the death of the evolutionary drift itself. The bubble expedient can help to find the appropriate, coherent compass on occasions big and small if we do not forget (as we habitually do) that we, as stardust, will find relevance -- grace -- only in the conclusive act of total knowledge, that is, in the resurrectional conclusion. No conclusion and a very specific conclusion, no grace or meaning. Only a fatal endless unraveling via an endless chain of lost occasions. Feasibility deprived of desirability. 1/20/99 If the Political Correctness Bubble is the size of a poppy seed, then the Historical Fitness Bubble is the size of a dime, the Evolutionary Coherence Bubble is the size of a planet, and the Cosmic Relevance Bubble is the size of the galaxy. 1/22/99 Suffering and inequity in the bubbles context: In the PCB we have to cope with greed and all the aggressive behavior it generates. The weak and the meek fall by the wayside. The willful and the ambitious become "benefactors" and pride themselves in that light. The politically correct tries to balance the greed and the ruthlessness of ambitions and hedonism to which they aspire with acts of beneficence or munificence. 1/28/99 Political Correctness is the domain of expedience. Historical Fitness is a minefield with all sorts of rewarding and dangerous topographies. Evolutionary Coherence is the domain emerging from all actions engaging the biosphere. Cosmic Relevance becomes a riot because, star dust as we are, that is the truly meaningful domain. Within it the biosphere is transfigured into the noosphere over a few dozen eons more or less. PC is the domain-bubble of expedience: The "I can get away with it" ethos. It hits the single ego and/or it engulfs whole societies. It can be very cruel and is most of the time delusional. HF is the domain-bubble of all sorts of rewarding or demeaning events. The rewards of limited knowledge in a minefield of intolerance and xenophobia. The "God and country" shield. EC is the domain-bubble in which thinking and acting encounter and collide with the ever present biosphere. Most of the time not being with it means to be against it. The biosphere is a nonthinking phenomenon "submitted" to a thinking phenomenon, the noosphere. CR is the domain-bubble, enigmatic and frightening, for which riotous kinds of anticipation can overwhelm our intellection. One often is that, give or take a few dozen eons, the isolated biospheres dotting the universe will transcend and bind (through religio) into one noosphere, the self-revelation of reality. 2/17/99 Perhaps the "art of living" is to break through the sterile sphere of irritant and engage in the force field of challenge-response, and now and then TRANSCENDENCE. The bubbles can be of some help. The bubbles, expedient as they are, come in useful on a daily basis for the balancing act. Where am I within the column of reality, and what can my presence nudge? Within the column, those tumultuous times, and times are perennially tumultuous, how can I be of some constructive relevance? Somewhere there is a normative thread, the thread of an ever changing grace or disgrace ... space dancing at the sound of music. Music of excellence or music of mediocrity. The bubble-conscious art of living. Seeing the landscape from different windows makes for different appreciations of the beheld. The territory in its continuum is the same, but the mapping of it from the different windows reveals the non-self-evident depth of it. The gate to the different bubble (expedient as all devices) is the ever new present(s), the "common singularity" of a paradoxical reality, a reality indivisibly creating pasts upon pasts upon pasts. Two other aspects of the bubbles: One is their objective existence, that is, their metaphorical-symbolic usefulness. The other is in how they can be used by the user or just observed without a personal "application" of them. 3/22/99 Il Mistero Tremendo How to generate love out of indifference. Only memory can have a go at it. A fully crystallized pervasive memory: Duration. A memory that can pluck out of the past any episode, even the most cruel, and by way of its knowledge make it glow in the numinous light of a finally created all- comprehending grace. The luminosity of a posteriori grace, the equitable and esthetic singularity. The Omega Seed. The seed Omega is (will be) everything because it will know everything of itself, a cosmic self-revelation for all of the past, reality in toto present. Space made into the absence of itself Duration. Duration can only be all-knowing, in fact all- experiencing. I am shaping an interpretational model of reality. Interpretation is as far as we can go in understanding reality and in attempting to give a structure and an image to it. My model, a hypothesis, sees that which has happened, the past, as real and indestructible. It is a given and it is unalterable. Part of the human past is the anticipatory faculty. Part of the problematic of anticipation is the unresolvable problem of the feasible and the desirable. Unresolvable because the past keeps adding to itself via the presents and because knowledge and wisdom are in short supply. What is the desirable? The desirability expressed by the deeds of the Nazis was antithetical to humane desirability. Both ends and means were brutally destructive and unfortunately very feasible, as the chronicles of the deed demonstrate. In the cosmic bubble context and if the cosmos had faculties, the Nazi episode like the whole of human evolution would be cause for a sbadiglio, a pretentious irrelevance speaking an unknown language. The language of good and evil, of hatred and love. It could become the task of such (protracted) irrelevance to coax the meaningless cosmos into meaning, via the sufferance of good and evil. Matter invents itself into love and hate, and the astonishing curse needs resolution. But resolution can only embrace reality in toto and transfigure it in the singularity of self-understanding; that is, it can only be self-defining while self-acknowledging. 3/23/99 Apropos of bubbles. Of the four bubbles, the CRB is the clearest instance of knowing and hypothesizing. The knowing deals with what has come about, the past. Hypothesizing deals with what could come about, mistakenly called the "future," as if it existed. I call it the anticipation of what patently does not exist. Anticipation is full of anthropocentrism. The strongest of them is desirability. Desirability is a nonidea for the "mineral" reality. The mineral reality has no ideas; it just acts out its own makeup III quasi-deterministic fashion: One if followed by two, etc. In the CRB are then two positions:
My hunch is that number 2 is the necessary choice if reality has a chance of revealing itself to itself. The success of our great invention, love, depends on it. Utter knowledge is the pursuable singularity taking reality (and us) from where it is now to where it could be "at the end." I will alternate then between the done (past), the feasible, and the desirable (the so-called future). We all live in our own idiosyncratic bubble. In fact, the bubble is the persona. Anything coming from the outside of the bubble persona undergoes a debugging bath, a bubble bath of sorts, and it is then incorporated into the persona identity. The persona identity is the interpretational take on reality via the idiosyncratic bubble. We are what we interpret. It is not a state of Being; it is an ever changing geometry of Becoming within the personalizing plastic confines of the idiosyncratic bubble. One cannot escape one's own bubble. What we do is labor at transforming, rarely transfiguring, this specifically personal bubble. The four bubbles are the hosting "realities" we choose to deal with while prancing around in our bubble. The bubble persona is prone to allergies, tears, delusions, tantrums, fatigue, opacity, exhilaration, contrition, passion, grieving, violence, pessimism, optimism, responsibility, opportunism, altruism ... The bubble persona can achieve a degree of self-reliance and autonomy. It cannot ever be self-sufficient. It is permanently contained and pushed around by the near and far numberless personae and other kinds of bubbles. The bubble persona is in search of grace, and given the Utopian nature of self-sufficiency, the search can only be collective. Bubbles of the world unite. The union includes Fido's lice's bubbles and all other bubbles the cosmos is made of, the cosmos bubble included. Interpretation upon interpretation upon interpretation upon interpretation "ad infinitum" or quasi. 3/31/99 Bubbles and Animism In the PCB and also as a consequence of collapsing godless countries, we bless each other in God's name every inch of the way. We are very generous at it. The most ingratiating words on the lips of unknowns speaking into the 50 or so million households is "God does it for me." Glory to God. In the HFB, we have to tiptoe to keep a safe distance from all the bloody wetlands of persecution and cruelty existing under the flag of the true gods. Theologians as prestidigitators of nuke-their-own theologies do magic. So theologies that at first searched for reasons of survival were tolerant, eventually hardened, etc., into dogmatic sacred books. Every historical age adds its own specific but also monotonously repetitive documentation of the breath delusion injects into reality. The burden on the Homo genome, and incrustations upon incrustations of broken down Utopias and false stations on the relic to paradise, are obscure tiny corners in the stupefying mansion of space "going critical" via paroxysms of novelties and paradoxes. If evolution had inclination or capacity for laughter, it would at most giggle, or better pluck at, those tiny, obscure, delusionary, vain corners where consciousness forgoes itself and contradicts itself in view of masochism and sadism ... "the gods make me do it." In the CRB, the theological delusions must at least work as fertilizers for the desirable ultimate religio, the embrace of knowing and Being becoming one through the process and the conclusion of Becoming itself. The animism epoch, now 4 million years or so long, remains instantlike in the length of reality, considering also that what reality itself has gone through is such a blink of an eye. Now when the delusion-riddled consciousness is contemplating its own intrusion into the havens, there may be reasons or the faint hope of exiting the theological chrysalis almost buried in the past of 4 million fatiguing years into the emerging butterfly of grace. We must take flight physically and metaphorically to enter the light ... and "save the world." *** What is the animistic bubble in the four bubbles context? In the PCB, all given to the "present," we are watching the paradoxical (though concealed) confrontation of the hardcore physicality of ephemeralization that the microchip is, where photons are more angelic than any "angel" could ever be, this all virtualized physicality confronting the ever more pathetic but powerful delusion of animism with all of its own "spiritual" props. While "virtuous" became more and more materialistic, hyperconsumption, the technologist via science delivers a world of intangibilities putting to shame all shamanism palpably present in all theologies and company. Billy Graham, for one, is at the barricades, and his sermons are an insult to human dignity and the suffering it sheds. He is winning the battle, a sad victory for all of intellection. In the HFB, "traditional" animism has all the cleverness it takes to penetrate practically without adversary all the nooks and crannies of human life. God and greed compete for the body and the "soul," a pernicious and arbitrary duality of persona, from top to bottom of the social-cultural-economic stratification. Only the gods' promises of salvation or damnation can somehow bridle the despotic, the oppressive, and the opportunistic to some semblance of compassion. Life, per se always at the border of cruelty, is emphatically made more cruel by the merchandizing of godly graces via obedience and penance, and fortunately it also scatters around good deeds. In the ECB, the sky is crystal clear. The animistic storm originating and carrying on with desperate enthusiasm, the magic epoch we are in the midst of, 4 million years long, is a latecomer and as yet, marginal. If reality had a mind, it would probably define animism as a baby tantrum, unfortunately of unforeseeable consequences, especially if the genie bottle of this planet uncorks and the animistic virus takes off for our galaxy and then beyond. Will the CRB ever be ready for the Love Project hidden under the wings of mummified god and angels? It has the taste of the ultimate question, and it is all about the Mistero Tremendo of the tremendous mystery reality is. A democratic take on reality and the mystery within would be of great help. It says, let reality create itself with itself, not ever be "created" by and via mandates, injunction, menaces, retributions, extermination from an outside agent, "the Maker." As interpretational agents, we weave our personal, custom-fitted dresses on reality. How fitting and elegant those dresses can be depends on the passion for grace we may hide in our body-brain. The rest is for the birds. (Six-limbed angels are virtual insects.) 5/3/99 Religion captive of theology has been given a bad name. In the PCB, theologies conveniently press on the agenda of the Chosen People, overtly or covertly. Hinduism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam turn to xenophobia and go to extremes of intolerance. They take turns at being first among the first to score points in the violation of the religious quest, always in the name of their gods. It is hard to believe that this kind of behavior is a rehearsal for the final play of religiosity. Three million years or so of animism has been entrenching mankind in deeper and deeper crevices at a loss of the vast horizon of a reality in toto -- that is, the human reality begging for resolution, not the cosmic reality, which is foreign to grace. Our best energies to the internecine fights in a cosmos that couldn't care less (it has no cares). In the HFB we register the past, archiving the "successes" and failures of the theologies turning out their own brand of trueness versus their own gods. To maintain that those theological endeavors have given to wo-man a vast repertory of goodness, blood-dripping aside, is to ignore the possibility that a nondelusory presence of goodness could have taken our ancestors to a far more compassionate landscape. See the BKW, carrying on for as long as consciousness took hold on this planet. In the ECB, the instrument of consciousness and the advent of simulation, theologies simulating religiosity, have by no means exhausted all the choices for evil. See the Nazi explosion, which came from. the most literate people on Earth. Only by jumping into the CRB can we measure the "preposterous" and momentous elan Homo sapiens demonstrates by baffling the dragon of indifference that the cosmos is made of vis-a-vis the condition of man. 5/30/99 The devastation of animism could be, in the pantheon of remembrance, a plaster statuette grimacing and silenced. In the CRB, I mean. The HFB is too often fogged up by racism, exploitation, theology, and power. Those domains find legitimacy in "history," and the HFB tends to be assimilated into the PCB. Once in the ECB, the vested interests are absent and the access to coherence is easier. 6/25/99 In the PCB is buried the persona bubble, the one enveloping the existential-persona domain. The HFB that the PCB is constructing is punctuated by the persona bubbles -- in a way the survivors of the constrictions, if not the coercions, imposed within the PCB, on the strength of ethics and esthetics. 7/14/99 The bubble diagram helps explain the importance of one's position vis-a-vis reality when we try to intervene in its own doings. Judgments and the course of action we may adopt "dictated" from one bubble might be rejected by the judgment and action another bubble demands. The patriotic drive so opportunistic in the PCB, so seductive in the HFB, is a bundle of inconsistencies in the ECB and a nonpresence in the CRB. From the pretentious inclusiveness patriotism displays in the PCB to its relegation into the tinted nothingness in the CRB. Even the "give me freedom or give me death" formula gets deflationary treatment in the CRB. 8/7/99 Year 2000 hoopla. There isn't any cosmic meaning in it, a purely theological invention. Cosmic presence and human inventions are still two separate domains. The moon is there, and it has specific relationships with the rest of astronomical reality. That we are here has no impact on the moon, not yet. If mankind had not come about, his inventions would not exist. Theological constructs are one of his inventions-simulations. Man's inventions impact reality in as yet infinitesimally puny ways. So the gods we invent are part of the impact package we hurl at the stars. Naturally, when we start digging into the moon's surface to carryon our "mission," we will impact the moon more than we have done with 3 million years of theological inventions. A shovel at work is cosmically more relevant than gods and angels battering in our minds at the planet, the stars, and all. We, delusional creatures, will eventually alter the cosmos, but in spite of the heavenly ghosts of our making, not thanks to them. The critical thing is that the transformation we effect on the cosmos (Howness) is nuanced by our delusional attitude. In that sense, theological inventions are cosmic modelers by default, not by "intent." The false is the false is the false is the false. So into the CRB we will carry also the burden of the post-Paleozoic, animistic epoch we invented and fell captive to. A necessary evil? The ECB will not be totally comprehended in its many defaults, organic worlds coming and going, if animism is not given its own sulphurous niche. Broadcasting doomsdays, the salvation-damnation melodramas grinding out love-hatred little gardens. Evolution is made of factual events and of fantasizing about hypothetical factual events, 4 million years now that self-awareness and intellection spike the real with their own anguished fantasies. The HFB is where animism has its birth, and human history is a delusion-saturated ribbon of events. Spirits, demons, angels, archangels, local god, parochial gods, Catholic gods, ecumenical gods, technocratic gods, evil gods ... godless, meaningless Nirvanas ... But the HFB is the splendorous bubble of discovery, esthetics, and technology, the maker. Life and cosmos might eventually get a kick from it, a cosmic kick. As for the PCB, it is the raw flesh of the past maker and all of its devices, expedient games. It must give room to less opportunistic channels to power in favor of the constantly elusive desirable, not the now and here desirable, part of the animistic delusion, but the desirable of and for grace-fullness. In our thinking perhaps it isn't so much about the truth as it is in how much coherence we invest in it that counts. If we were to agree that the real is truth in the making, then coherence is the best attribute for the "manufacturing" of reality, that is, the "slow" creation of truth. 9/20/99 The CRB of love, its presence within the cosmos, is coincidental with knowledge, total knowledge of reality, that is, self-recognition. A coincidence, identification with the esthetic: the nonobsolescent, being itself fully revealed to itself. It isn't naturally the Being being recognized by an outer agency, God for instance; it is Being self-acknowledging. 10/4/99 In the PCB, the hypothetical passed as the Truth has a manipulative power that can reach into the brutal and/ or the ridiculous. The brutality of "in the name of God," the silliness of teaching animism at the expense of evolution. To be pigeonholed as an atheist is to wear the politically incorrect button. In the HFB, theocracy has been on the rampage. It is a litany of injustice, inhumanity, victimization, and death at a level and at scales hardly imaginable. Theological wars and their spinoffs have been and continue to be among the major scourges defining the human condition. In the ECB, the whole theocratic construct is a nonpresence. Since the good and evil balancing act is yet to come, good gods and bad gods have yet to be invented; therefore no simulations are modeled. Theocracy appears on the evolutionary scene in the last split second, but it is raging now within the world of man. Even Fido could probably tell you that. It will be the luck of CRB that theocracy might not be able to indent the vast, somewhat serene unawareness of what fear, desperation, delusion, and vengefulness may do to the Becoming. "In the name of God" has no hold in the CRB, is beginning to "interfere" in the ECB, has been rampaging in the HFB, and is a convenient simulation in the PCB. 10/18/99 An organism's orchestration is on automatic pilot. It seems to be one of the virtues of innerness. If the noosphere were ever to become an organism, then it would have to run on automatic, an awe-full thing to contemplate. A fearsome beast with the makings of an angel. A space-made automaton ready for space, the cosmos. CRB better be on alert. Things may never be the same again, not at least before Duration -- full Duration, I mean. If ever the CRB were to contract, infinity itself would be out of business. But it was never in business in the first place anyhow. That is one of the self-limitations of space after all, of the plenum of space. 10/24/99 At each diaphragm separating the bubbles is the zone of turbulence. It is the invasive character of the Becoming that keeps the bubble interface in the condition of turbulence. One is reminded of observing the sun boiling with some of the most improbable getting out of intense radiations and the formation of vortex ... the edge of chaos. The edges of the now courtesy of nonmathematical but spatial symbolism. The bubbles' reciprocal interference is what makes reality a Becoming, not a Being, but it also converts life into theater of the absurd. Again, in the animistic simulation, the persona (and the "nations") is torn by the loyalty to the immediate, the self, and the loyalty to the rest of reality, the Other, with only one possible recourse: the Creator, a copout of epochal size, the invented domain of goodness and justice iconized as a revealed truth. The theocratization of life is a fact stretching back to the first manifestation of self-awareness, the thou and the it. That is a powerful discrimination instrument, and the battle for equity is raging between the three encampments with no resolution in sight. 10/25/99 The CRB is the domain of the astronomer and physicist-mathematician because it is the bubble of "remoteness" for most of us. The ECB directly concerns most of us, though we don't know it. The scientist and the environmentalists are practically reveling in it, and every day is a surprise day, discoveries upon discoveries (which is true for all bubbles). The HFB is the bubble of historians and philosophers, with ethicists tearing themselves apart to find the answer to the human condition. It is the bubble where the big ego makes history with humanity suffering and rejoicing under the dictat that psychoanalysis captures and thrives on. The PCB sees the politician as the manipulator of the power scene, and opportunism has its own field epoch. "Salvation" might have to reside in the hows that science and "technology" are generating. What of the theologians and what of "the artist"? The theologians are homeless, so they float around in their delusional cloud selling simulations as Truth. For all of their homelessness, they cast ominous shadows on all and everything, intruding in that which does not even acknowledge their ghostly presences, the ECB and the CRB. History and politics are where their garb is seen floating around. And "the artist" has always been in a cloud, not the cloud of delusion but the cloud of transcendence. By "has always been" is meant her-his presence as soon as intellection becomes an evolving fact. All four bubbles are the domain of the esthetic. It is the retroactive power of it. While moving forward, the esthetic is seldom found in the self-proclaimed artist or celebrated by the politically correct trend. The artist is more than often a pathetic creature who sacrifices his own idiosyncratic worth for an altar he knows little about. It is a "hearsay" he hopelessly or half-heartedly chases around and seldom is confirmed by her-his doing. 10/28/99 Bubbles and Philanthropy In the ECB, philanthropy is one way of keeping a hold on goodness but once or twice removed. It is a recognition of failure about the fundamental dignity of man. In the PCB, philanthropy is institutionalized one step further. Socialism has islands of philanthropy scattered on the water of social justice. Capitalism reluctantly acknowledges its own harshness by making philanthropic endowments that amount to large investments. Yet the handout to others cannot but fall short on the domain of equity. That makes philanthropy poorly relevant in the CRB, assuming, naturally, that meaningless cosmos might eventually be invested in by the storm of good and evil. Animism. has made an art of philanthropy. The indulgences openly marketed by the Catholic Church could be judged as the ultimate philanthropy. God dispensing grace or forgiveness at an established market price. 12/6/99 The PCB has very little to do with the ECB, even less with the CRB. The HFB can be of some consequence, though only in the ability of nudging toward more coherence. The opposite is true when the terms are reversed. There is no way the politically correct and the historically fit can have a life, a presence, an impact upon the Becoming outside of their domain. That is the fate of animism, for instance. In terms of evolution and the cosmos that envelops it, animism is dead on arrival. That dead on arrival is what the Lean Hypothesis and the Lean Alternative do not want to be. The presence that the Becoming is is slightly more accessible through the human brain devices we call quarks and, on the other border, what we might call passion. The devices are human propositions. The flat planets proposition-device is dumb; the quantum-passion proposition-device is brilliant. God and his cohorts above, the living below, and the devils under were a flat-planet configuration, clear and unequivocal. Theology was all for it. The sphericity of the planets with gods at the center was not that satisfying. The above, the below, the under would be trampling on each other in ungodly ways. 12/23/99 Disposing of the artificious if convenient distinctions, straddling without breaking down, that is the question posed by the bubbles. A challenge for the brain capacity of each individual and the making of personae. 5/3/00 The Ego and the Doing When the ego identifies with work, the me, me, me is silenced. It has melted into the doing. That goes for extremes of excellence and also for extremes of cruelty. Himmler identified himself with his extermination work. Dedicated to it and as good a bureaucrat as he probably was, his ego was silenced by being fused into the deed he chose to implement. The movers, whatever the field "chosen," are not so much driven by the me as they are possessed by the task taken up. Not that the task has to be perceived by them as such. The chest-beating me's of the world are at a loss of themselves. To identify with the doing is beside their own reach. They are left out, and that is a hell of a nonplace to be left in. That goes to the core of perceivable reality: the coincidence of container-content. There isn't an expectant empty socket to be filled. The socket and the filling are one, because there isn't, for instance, a brain and a thought to fill it. The brain is the thought. With the breakdown of the brain comes the breakdown of the thought. That is why the memorizing of the brain thought is so essential. It is the bureau of reality, the past that is no other than the hyperfinicky bureaucrat of reality. In it is the making of the "eventual" self-revelation of reality itself in toto. Identifying oneself in the deed is to break out of the idiosyncratic cell and to become "public property" and public conscience and public transcendence or malediction. The true public figure is no longer an ego; for better or worse, he is the people, his people. The bubble diagram might help to gauge the meaning of that. 5/18/00 The murderous caprice of a child that has been handed lethal weapons and the adrenaline-soaked daily instructions, on all media and in all environs, is different from the premeditated, calculated, political-racial, theological murder by (reptilian brained) adults. Eventually some scholarly and bright mind will dissect the documents written by the Founding Fathers (no mothers!) and assess the wise, the good, the optimal, the unwise, the ignorant, the discriminatory, the delusional, the arrogant, the xenophobic ... The reconstitution of the Constitution and the other documents could then be initiated, dropping the naive, the parochial, the ignorant, the self-righteous, the violent, the opportunistic, the hypocritical, the Chosen People malady, etc. ... But perhaps only postsilicon intellection will be up to the task, when "nations" will be curiosities, museum pieces. A bubble treatment would be a good procedure to begin the sizing up of what we have in the Founding Fathers icons. In the process, words like "untouchable," "sacred," "eternal," and "God-given" should be put to rest. They are delusional, inflammatory, cruel. 8/23/00 The importance of the "What is in it for me?" question: It has four "answers" depending on which bubble the me is positioned in. The breast-beating me of the PCB might be a must in the other bubbles if it were not for the fact that the "best of me" is utterly dependent on the other bubbles for its own "final destination." By moving from being a puny instrument for some unidentifiable goal to being an inseparable part of it, a maker of it, the breast-beating and shouting are silenced in the very momentous and participatory cocreation of a possibly meaningful reality: the me becoming grace, part of the self-revelatory reality. As long as reality is unforgetting, none of the past can be erased from it. In addition, reality cannot be forgiving. My malfeasances are in there but in the context of the total me with its own 14 or so eons-long tail, those malfeasances are "destined" to be put in their own place. Ugly and sad "pecadillos" drowning in the oceanic cosmic me with its own tail and its own progeny. Not forgiveness, then, just the right pegging on the board of concluding Being. 8/31/00 The ECB reminds us that of let's say 3 million years of sel-aware life, 2 million and 900 thousand years were spent grunting and slashing our way to the beginning of a social nexus. For those 3 million years or so only estrus transmuting in eros and eros beginning to timidly flow into love and the emerging of the mothering-nurturing "altruism" were cause for the emergence of Homo erectus -- Homo abilis -- Homo faber caterpillar. The coarseness, the primitivism, the idleness, and the violence made of man the mammal one of the least appetizing specimens. Some of the unavoidable brutishness and cruelty are still around. The gray and desperate lives of the first technological era in England and Europe testify to a human condition that no other species has had to suffer. With all the atrocities and horrors part and parcel of the civilization scaffolding, the HFB contains an immense explosion of contaminated joy and humaneness, uncontainable if one wants to cast it in the ECB. We've come a long way. We might want to see that we will go longer and longer into the "endless" night of a dumb cosmos, bringing to it the light. 9/7/00 Placing oneself in the PCB with one leg and in the HFB with the other, most of the time we have to come to compromises. Life is an astute compromiser (symbiosis might be the art of compromise). But the gap between compromise and betrayal is narrow, and body-brain has the acrobatic skill of leaping over back and forth sometimes effortlessly. The astute politician knows a thing or two about it. The desirability domain is hard put to discriminate between compromise and betrayal, especially when there is a mercurial medium that can fill the gap, for the astute, to sail above it easily, sometimes triumphantly. That is the scoundrel-ruffian scenario. 9/12/00 The drivers of the capitalist engine and the politician have no idea what is going on, and would not be interested if they did. Timid forays into the ECB would be the most they would want to engage in. The CRB is absent from their body-brain. The stardust devolution into dust. Entropy? It is the unconscious loyalty to the nation-under-God delusion, a collective delusion. Expensive! Monstrously expansive. The planetary muda! 9/24/00 This week politicos are basking in the USA education dream. Both programs and teachers are up for scrutiny, not to mention the very physicality of sites, schools, security, etc. If there is a place where the bubble device can be of help, this is it. For learning the PCB is a lethal bubble, because where the practical takes over, the real is quarantined and the practical is wrapped around greed and success, cousins of mediocrity and fun. The HFB is good as a normative pool, is bad when it is the glorifier of xenophobia. The shorter the historical horizon the more difficult to interpret history itself and to emerge into the normative -- that is, learned information on its way to more solid learning with knowledge as a primary target. The ECB speaks to survivability and transcendence. Interpretation there is easily short on the kind of knowledge that has had the fortune, or better, the stamina, to sufficiently break out of the two preceding bubbles. The environmental movements suffer from this peculiarly parochial dedication to a problem that evidently is on the threshold of universality, the cosmos condition in toto. Only the CRB can offer at last the frame of reference for long-lived knowledge once filled as it needs to be by the cream of knowledge skimmed from the three preceding bubbles. A blasphemous suggestion: Substitute the morning devotion with a reminder by teacher and professor pointing at the bubble chart from where the perspective of the day is taken. The reminder could be underlined by three words: We are stardust. From theology (delusion) to knowledge in a short breath. Teachers and pupils could engage periodically in disentangling the problem of the day via the positioning of the class in anyone of the bubbles and trying to phantom out the ambiguities, the ambivalences, and the contradictions. These are brief and mostly innocent (not yet knowledgeable) takes on the condition of man. 10/8/00 We all go through life in a sort of bubble we call persona. Persona is an original interpretational machine acting out the injunctions that the personal interpretation (of reality) presents to us. In a way our bubble persona is our destiny. It forges itself among the flow of all becomings and it is for real. It is our personal history, and it is step by step cast in the past. A swarm of virtual bubbles travels, hitchhikes with the persona. They have a sort of life of their own, but they distinguish themselves by existing only in the persona's brain, exercising upon it, often unduly, delusional influence. Their reality is only such influence, a sort of self-inflicted punishment if and when our brain confers to such bubbles a concreteness they do not possess. The swarm is the simulatory virtuality that our brain wrongly attributes, endows the persona with. Sometimes the persona swarms of simulatory interpretations join other such persona swarms and the animistic domain is born. An interpretational powerhouse running on empty. The fraud of a nothingness sold as somethingness. If we were able and willing to navigate the persona bubble and his delusive swarm, from one to the other four comprehensive bubbles indicated in the bubbles diagram, the persona would be in a better position to burst, one by one, all of the swarm bubbles hitchhiking their ghostly simulacra on the bubble persona we all are. If we were to be able as Homo sapiens to burst a sufficient number of delusional sub-bubbles we could exit the animistic epoch (3 million or so years long) and enter the epoch of Esthequity. 10/11/00 The brain, a powerful and fragile space engine located in the larger space engine of its body is the only loco of animism. As the body-brain connects with other body-brains, the animistic virtualities migrate from brain to brain, retaining their "exclusivity." The brains are the only presences that contain the animistic "world." The animistic "world," a virtuality, exists only in body-brains, and it exists in them only as a virtuality. Virtuality is then an "old profession" copresent with the body-brain self-awareness, the animistic epoch (3 million years, plus or minus). The distinction between reality and virtuality is of essence in our interpretational domain. As long as we cannot make such distinctions we are prey to delusional thinking. Our interpretational skills are fogged in with scant chance of defogging. The ghosts in our brains -- spirits, gods, and angels -- are the dimmers of our Becoming and history shows they can be lethal: the mortification of the real (space becoming) by the virtual that the same real has nested in "her body-brains." Eventually the virtual must be drained from the real, that is, the simulatory erased from it. That (long) day will exit us from the epoch of myth, a rite of passage from the wished (in this case fraudulent) into the real. The brain is not a placid bowl of jelly; it is an "infernal" concoction with a history of four eons or so. In it, Howness, and of it, automation, are the twin pranksters making each of us an example and desperate. If the first realistic act is to ground ourselves in reality, then reality has to be defined within the borders of our capabilities and then abided by. Most of the time, this demonstrates the constitutional fragility of the practical. The animistic "world" has relevance; it exists only in the PCB and the HFB. It does not exist in the ECB or the CRB. But as a powerful virtuality it can sway the evolutionary progression to a point of destruction, an unenviable capability now shared with the upcoming postsilicon virtualities. 10/13/00 "In the national interest," as opposed to the non-national interest. A good example of" dualism" the ECB has no use for. There is no dualism there because there isn't dualism anywhere else. There is decrepitude. It is the spotted leopard hide, the decrepitude of xenophobia vis-a-vis the supple zebralike guild mode seeking only boundaries of expanding excellence (see EXPO 2000 proposal). 10/20/00 If I were to put one label on the PCB it would be without hesitation opportunism. That goes also and even more for the ECB. Both are awash in opportunism. In fact, in the absence of it we could perhaps imagine an angels bubble but nothing else. But the opportunism of ECB is an opportunism of populations. In the PCB, it is an opportunism of individuals, and there is the blessing and the curse of the human condition. Capitalism hasn't been able to cope with the curse side of individual opportunism. One could suggest that communism is attempting, poorly, to cope with the negative side of opportunism. The compassionate capitalism of George W Bush is for now an unconvincing gambit, a shadow play in the pursuit of equity. In the HFB the opportunistic drive has practically no boundary to crash against. Tyranny and despotism reach peaks of pure, sometimes "exotic" malevolence, and are we good at that!? Breast-beating and hypocrisy aside, reality deals only with the unforgettable and the unforgivable. Animistic delusions aside, that which comes about comes about for good, and the forgiving faculty is made almost unmeasurable because of our puniness. Who or what am I to dispense forgiveness? And as for reality forgiving its own deeds, that is really good for a laugh, I mean a cry. Only theology can come up with such cosmic nonsense. When you forgive me you put a drop of care and sweetness in the brew you and I are in. Only a self-transcended reality can invest the bad deed with the light, its own light of grace. In the contingence of reciprocal hurt, words don't amount to too much. Forgiveness, if we want to stay with the word, demands deeds. I can tell myself forever, "love your enemy" and just land in the limbo of hypocrisy. Shield your enemy from suffering and you don't forgive him, but you confirm the not-just-only potential goodness of Homo sapiens. A far grander step in the direction of love-grace. *** 11/24/00 I see the biosphere as an unintended introduction to the noosphere and the noosphere in its most promising probes as a quasi-intentional premise to the cosmic bubble vivification. In our infinitesimal persona bubble, the contention (nondualistic) passion-reason is not yet a founding resolution. The intellectual exhilaration wears the glorious scars of passion, and any golden rule devised for the reconciliation Dionisio-Apollo turns out to be a Utopian delusion, tepid at best, sterile at worst. It could take a postsilicon "monstrosity," a monster of evo-revolution to predispose a novel "loving" landscapes. (Howness looms larger than ever.) The apt love the cosmos could eventually pursue would be a strange, even unappealing, sort of thing to our puny cognition. In the self-segregating stampede, diverging faster and faster from one another, the galactic clusters are quite probably dumb and blind to cognition and reflection as they are dumb and blind to will and passion, and yet they are us, because we are of them. Remember religio. It is a truly magnificent, equally desperate, going-on, you little carbon wiggle! Chances are it will all come to naught. Presence (reality) denying its own presence, Nirvana triumphant, you bloody bastard! ... Unless ... unless the past recoiling into its own Second Coming surprises itself by surprising- revealing itself to itself. The taming of the cosmic beast resolved into self-knowledge, that is, self-love, the self being then reality in toto. The road to such improbable resolution is paved with nanotech and postnanotech ... the Hows of Hows, the immensely small gulping the immensely large. Space dancing itself into thought ... Mamma mia! Mamma mia! Is MCD giggling or not ... yet? The nanotech road is targeting infinity but as we should know, infinity is nonsense. Infinite presence is nonpresence ad infinitum. Space is boundary. Boundary is by definition of limits, limits separating presence from its own (self) negation. *** The appreciation of crescendo comes with the appreciation of diminuendo, something our shouters-screamers of today have forgotten. *** I am trying to distinguish true monologuing from false dialoguing. Monologuing goes on between the cranial walls; it is a virtuality. Dialoguing is for real. The passage from virtuality to "concreteness" conies first in the recognition of monologuing as such; second as the possible power the monologue acquires in orienting or reorienting the Becoming in the direction of knowledge and desirability. I maintained for years that the monologuing misconstrued as dialoguing is conducive to the animistic take on reality and is counterknowledge and highly undesirable and therefore should be seriously scrutinized and made coherent in the grand scheme of things (the Becoming).
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