METAPHOR about the Earth & Mankind The earth is sometimes called a "heavenly body." Imagine now that the earth is like one physical body, your own body. Imagine that all of humanity is like one brain, the intellect, psychology and spirit.... and you are a cell within that brain, and the planet is the body where this mind you are part of resides. Imagine the animals of the earth as lobes of that brain, the memory, the instinct. Using more and more of the fossil fuels is like demanding the heart to pump blood faster and faster. What point is it to give ourselves a heart attack? The icecaps are like our skin, so why burn off our skin? The trees are like our lungs, so why fill our lungs with poison or chop them out? The ozone is like our sunglasses and suncreen lotion. If we bleach the glasses and use up all the lotion, we will be fried and squinting. We are part of a truly fantastic mind which has developed and grown for centuries. Our mind speaks many languages, and because we are one mind, the confusion of language is overcome by other forms of communication which is non-verbal. If we look at problems of health, political strife, war and poverty as a personal problem, we can apply metaphors of psychology, family life, or life cycles in nature to reveal another perspective to solve the problem. Don't forget it is a part of YOU, not some unrelated accessory you can throw in the garbage. Human culture is not an accessory, it is the spirit. Cultural artifacts are like the children, the physical offspring created by a united effort, a cross-polinated effort. Cultural artifacts are not created in a vacume. All wars are made over resources, cultural artifacts, and personal freedom. If the system your cells have devised to protect a local treasure cause neighboring cells to try and steal or "relocate" the treasure, look for agreement that the treasure is worth protecting, then devise a new way to share it, and learn to evaluate the potential value of the negative space of the neighbors. Remember that flow between neighboring cells is healthy for good circulation. When there is violence or destruction going on in part of the "mind" and "body" imagine it as if it was a parasitic desease on yourself, or a cancer. The "cells" are being deranged and acting funny. Are they pointing out a bigger potential problem like an iceberg, are they a warning? Don't forget, it is a war within yourself. Anything that kills part of yourself is not good, no matter what color uniform it is wearing. Sending in the army like surgeons is like amputating the limb. The limb will not grow back, and you will miss that limb. Look at the problems early, before you become totally consumed by this illness. You don't want to cut off your limbs. When there is a flourishing growth from good circulation, nurturing, and sharing of work and play together, make sure this sucess is not hiding a system of theft, slavery, and false hopes that are suffocating an unseen part of yourself. Don"t wake up one day and find you have been eating your tail to make yourself fat. Don't canabalise yourself. Using slaves in one part of the world to glut yourself is like cannabalism. It is uncivilised, like wearing perfumes to hide a bad smell does not cleanse the smell. There is nothing wrong with enjoying a beautiful perfume, but if you have to create an abominable stench in one corner to have a pretty smell in the other corner, have a closer look at the corner you are creating the stench in and ask yourself if there is not a better way to protect all the corners. The bad smelling corner you are sacrificng is your own backside. You will turn around one day and be hit with a poison gas. So, to conclude this exercise in being, I suggest that solutions for a better life are within us. We are part of all problems, because they are part of us. We are part of the potential solution too. If we are the ones in the smelly corner who do not want to turn into a toxic gas, we have to deny the cannibal to continue eating his own tail, we have to wiggle the tail. Since the tail is part of the cannabal too, there must be a way without killing the cannibal or cutting off the tail to transform the cannibal. If we are in another corner that does not stink yet and is not glutted by the cannibal, if we are like the cannibal's conscience, we have to speak up loud and clear and save ourselves! One important question is, are we really evolving as a planet, a culture, a species? Are new generations of an old species really ever young? This would be a similar question to the religious theory of "original sin", are we born with guilt? I would argue we are born with intellectual and instinctual inheritance, not guilt. The more that information becomes free to access, the more we are free to learn and recognise the larger base of resources we have to offer collectively, as a "world-mind" and "world-body". You could say that having potential open access to the world's useful knowlege and intellectual treasures is a paradise, and the portal to paradise has been opened. The new religion that can unite the species is an audio visual ocean of music, art, and testimony available 24 hours a day. So, where is Ben Laden and why is he such a pain in my ass? What is Ben Laden? If Ben Laden is part of us, what is he? If part of us is a liberated and educated female that has no interest or credence in the Koran, and the other part of "me" is a religious madman that is busy uniting my unhappy cells to destroy my happy ones....what does that mean? Can I communicate with Ben Laden? When you get sick from a cold, you don't know exactly what it is. You have behaviors you suspect can aggrevate or bring on a cold. You try to balance your activities, but somehow, kissing everybody at year's end cellebrations, or studying all night and leting the dust accumulate on the bookshef...you find yourself sneezing. You don't cut off your nose though, you look for ways to get back in balance. What metaphor helps me get back on my feet and regain my strength and happiness? If this cold causes my nose to swell up and I start suffocating, I may panic and cut my nose off. Even if I reason that the unseen thing causing the problem is unpredictable and dangerous, I don't want to loose my nose. A diamond would be an irritant in my nose and if my nose was filled with diamonds, I could die. If I look at this irritant as something that may have value but is in the wrong place, then I have to find the good pocket for that diamond and find a way to let it shine in the light again. This is a thinking diamond after all. The worst problem I get into philosphically is to try and think of where I draw the line morally, and then ask myself if compromise is unavoidable no matter where you draw that line for survival? Does it come down to an unavoidable question of cultural suicide or cannibalism? Raping children is an easy place to draw a moral boundary. There are no excuses to tolerate that. If it is children raping each other, then what do we do? That changes things a bit. Maybe the child-rapist learned this behaviour from being raped himself, and he is a damaged child, but not a monster. And what of human moral monsters? At some point does an animal, human or otherwise, reach a pont of no return where he or she can not be salvaged? Well, we don't ask ourselves so many questions when it is a monkey and not a human. Either we isolate and study the monkey, or we kill it. If it is a clever monkey we might supervise it and keep it away from other monkeys, but only to the extent that we still benefitted by the monkey's talents. The crazy monkey becomes a tool. As we all know, sometimes we even take a fine healthy monkey and drive it crazy with special training so it becomes a trained killer monkey. In fact, we take a lot of fine healthy humans, turn them into killers. Most do re-adapt, but they are scarred. Unfortunately, some of them snap mentally and physically and never revert to their fine healthy status. As a society, we are taught that this is OK and our killers are patriotic heros and THEIR killers are rebellious terrorists. Most of us civilians are so hepped up on drugs and tv we don't think twice about it and just don't give a damn. We are clever enough to avoid this killer indoctrination by sidestepping that whole process however we can, and we make a paralel world where we buy and trade with the profits of the warriors but we try to keep our distance. So, here we are at the threshold of a new delemma, we have been eating our own tail, sold to us by kamakazi money junkies. That is what I see on the X-ray anyway. As I said at the beginning, I see how the salesmen are part of ourself, just like the warriors and the happy pheromones flying around. To be continued...