Homo sapien sapien

There are 183 living species of primates; there have been about 6000 total, the last 65 million years. The genus Homo is said to have been around for about 4-8 million years. Which is an astoundingly short period of time, when you consider mammals have been around for about 300 million years, and life on Earth about 3.5 billion years.

About 1.5 million years ago, certain ape species began to grow a considerably bigger brain. There's an idea that this was caused, in part, by the consumption of psychotropic mushrooms, which is only an idea but a very compelling one. Only about 200,000 years ago, we evolved into this smooth skinned, mostly hairless, big brained, thin skulled, lithe but weak-limbed master of tool making. We weren't conceptually more advanced than our fellow apes, those first 160,000 years. Until about 40,000 years ago, and the birth of what some have called the Logos, when we began to build exponentially on the understanding of who we are, and where, and how.

I think psychotropic plants definitely had something to do with this "great leap" into the esoteric and abstract. Curiously, at the same time we were going through this transformation, there were extant Homo neanderthalis, a very close cousin, stouter, considerably advanced, but also less adept at the making of tools. They disappeared, we are told, about 28,000 years ago. The implication being, that we killed them off. It's ideas like this that add to the idea supposedly supported by evolutionary theory, that competition is the rule, when in fact it is a rare exception. There are thousands of species living on and in your body right now, that you would not be healthy or alive without. Species, with whom Homo sapien sapien is not in competition with but in communion.

Alone then, after Neanderthal, Homo sapien, the most advanced of the apes, began to settle into a life of community and spiritual communion with the world. We domesticated both plants and animals, and our numbers increased. We built. We made maps of the stars. We made maps of the world.

It is entirely possible, I suggest without evidence, that Neanderthal became extinct 26,000 years ago, approximately. And not because we killed them off, but because of some unknown environmental factor. Because, about 13,000 years ago, there was a great deluge. The hypothesis, called Crust Displacement, suggests that the massive glaciers covering Europe and North America in the last ice age, threw the Earth out of balance, until the centrifugal force increased and the entire crust shifted at once in a moment, floating as it does on what is essentially a liquid. There is actually reason to believe that we evolved a lot more than we are told we did, in those intervening years between the end of Neanderthal, and the deluge. We supposedly didn't know what the land mass of Antarctica looked like, until the 1970's and our invention of magnetic resonating equipment that allowed us to look through the ice. But there are five-hundred year-old maps that are copies of far older maps that tell us exactly what the Antarctic land mass looks like. We aren't supposed to have known the continent existed until 1820. Antarctica is supposed to have been under a thick sheet of ice far longer than Hominid has existed.

26,000 years also happens to be the length of the precession of the equinox. Looking to the eastern skyline just before sunrise on the spring (vernal) equinox, you will see the constellation Pisces. Before too long, people will see the constellation Aquarius. 25,920 years from now, Pisces will return to the place where it was on the morning of the last equinox.

The past 13,000 years, we have steadily recovered from that deluge, we began to write (again?), we built cities, we became ever more clever in the art of exploitation, the last 5,000 years at least, having been one long story of masculine dominator's and the many dominated. Empires arising, every one before this one falling. And now we are coming to the end of the cycle. And all the world is in turmoil.

I have been using the word divine; is this a divine universe? It certainly is mysterious. Quantum physics is like a lynch-pin, re-injecting a sense of profound mysteriousness into the world, that Science had been helping the tyrants of the world divest of any meaning. Religion long ago took the divine and placed it somewhere we cant measure. Science, not being able to measure this divine that is somewhere else unmeasurable, says it doesn't exist. It's curious that this Logos that is our language, has made us aware of our place in the universe, at the same time it has separated us from it.

Really, is Science or Religion more responsible for this place we have come to, in this time of the holiness of economic progress, when we are transforming the resources of the Earth into garbage, as if there are no limits, as if we have no responsibility to the Earth? The argument has been made that if we didn't treat the Earth like a garbage dump we wouldn't have evolved into the technologically adept creature we are; if we aren't exploiting everything the way we do, we would be living in trees and caves. Which is fundamentalist garbage, as if we can't be technological beings with a concern for the biological systems on which all life on Earth depends, in cooperation with all the species of the Earth, as if everything matters.

I keep going to this place, like, I don't know what world you're living in, but the one I live in is divine. Something like the way I saw the world when I was a child, as if everything is alive with energy and there is no separation. I still have to live in the world, and that's not always easy with so many people running around as if they are separate from everything around them. With me, stumbling about much of the time, in the culturally-imposed and accepted restrictions that have twisted my body into misalignment.

But I have been cultivating balance, wholeness and healing, and I have every reason to believe that the energy emanating outward from me returns to me. When I returned to this house and started this blog, I had eighty dollars in cash and no credit. I've been down to my last dollar the last three years more times than I've had sex by a factor of about five. But, I'm manager again of Monster Halloween-Minnesota, which I think is going to be the coolest Halloween store in the Midwest; and, I'm now Creative Director for HD Masks, manufacturing and selling High Definition, digital-image masks for promotional and personal use. I didn't see that coming. My friends and family are healthy, strong, beautiful and abundant. Which is in direct contrast to most of what seems to be going on in the world; the prognosis for me and those closest to me seems exceptionally positive.

I mean, really, do you think the volatility in the weather and the markets is unrelated? Is not most of the world volatile, right now, politically and environmentally? Do you really think biological systems are somehow separate, that we do not influence the environment, and the environment does not influence us? As if all is not energy at its core?

What really is the basis for all our neuroses, but either a lack, or excess, or hyperactivity of feeling? Have you ever seen birds or fish in a flock or a school, turn together at the same time? Do you suppose, that this is not more or less what we are doing, on this strange march toward ecological oblivion? Emergent behavior, is what one commenter on this blog, Justin, calls it, each of us like a bee in a hive contributing to the structure of civilization, without any one of us able to create the civilization ourselves. He is trying to imagine a life no longer in service to that collective construct that is destroying the world. I am simply imagining a life in service.

If this universe is in fact divine, then I am like some kind of filter through which energy flows. My contention is, there is an abundance of energy available in this time of radical transformation, any of us might access, to pursue whatever we feel called to do. And if I am in fact divine, then there can be no purpose greater than what emerges from inside me; which I filter with what I hold to be the truth of this world.

No truly rational being could think at this point that Homo sapien sapien, (the name of which with the extra sapien is a kind of conceit of this last 13,000 year cycle - but I still like saying it), is not headed for some kind of apocalyptic end similar to that of Neanderthal, or the supposed civilization of Atlantis. From the perspective of the alchemist, the most fertile time is the darkest albedo, the dark night of the soul. If you haven't gone there yet, I suggest you find a way to fabricate it, because those who do not know themselves are going to have a very difficult time in the times ahead. If you don't know who you are, you can't know why you are here.

It also happens that the sun can be found in a near direct line with the center of the galaxy, which also occurs on a 26,000 year cycle. I'm inclined to think, there are energies abundant, and I am like a tuning fork and a fount, resonating energy as clear as I know how, as clear as I am able. And Enlightenment, whatever that is, is like the clear tuning call of the divine, emanating out from the core of oneself. A kind of deep resonating immersion in and devotion to the physical in which I reside, on this curious, mysterious, profound journey through time.