As with so many things, the devil lies in the details. In principle, the idea of 'superintelligence' seems pretty straightforward and even reasonable. Computing has advanced rapidly, particularly since the era of PCs which began in the 1980s. Computers are able to plot trajectories at far greater speeds than humans. Thus, plotting every possible chess move, and countermove, and subsequent countermove, and so on all the way to multiple ways to achieve checkmate is in their superiority wheelhouse and that will never change. Never mind that it was humans who created the game of chess, it is still pretty impressive in that one respect, analyzing data, plotting trajectories, and so on.
Computers are able to assemble data and configure it, again, much more rapidly than any human can, which is why AI can whip up an 'artwork' or a musical composition in the time it takes a human being to dip a brush into paint. The AI has no passion for wanting to create beautiful art; it just assembles components of art, whether visual or musical, extremely rapidly, within set parameters so that a dog looks like a dog and not a turtle.
All of this is indeed impressive. It has nothing whatsoever to do with 'superintelligence', which is the anticipated moment when computers will be able to do EVERYTHING that humans do better than we can. This would presumably include them being able to create robots which can go beyond us physically in every possible way in addition to mentally/cognitively. Run a hundred times faster than Bolt, smell better than a dog, see better than an eagle, and so on and so on.
In the age of 'superintelligence', we are told, humans will have made themselves utterly redundant. Our invention will have so thoroughly surpassed us in every imaginable way ~ INCLUDING in the ability to evolve rapidly such that this year's AI will be a thousand times superior to last year's AI ~ that we can only hope they will look kindly upon us as their inventor and be nice to us.
Look at it in detail, however, and you can see that it's all bullshit! Let's do that.
Here's a nifty little 'proof' that 'superintelligence' is a myth. It may sound ridiculous, but then so is the premise that it challenges.
The fact that YOU - right where you are, sitting somewhere in the middle of your life - have problems, is proof that 'superintelligence' is a myth.
Why? Because the premise of superintelligence is that it will evolve to the point of being able to solve any problem that humans might face. No more environmental catastrophe, no more wars, no more food crises, and so on.
Now, one might argue, that's all in the future, so how could that have anything to do with my current problems?
Good question, but let's remember the premise of superintelligence: it will surpass human intelligence and capabilities in all manners and all respects, and will continue to improve itself beyond that such that eventually nothing possible in the universe will be beyond its capabilities.
So, if a.) superintelligence is achieved at some point in the near future and b.) time travel is possible, then why hasn't this future superintelligence jumped back to 2025 to announce itself? Why hasn't it solved all of OUR problems like it is presumably solving the problems of everybody in the future?
Surely a little thing like time travel is not beyond its godlike capabilities, right?
And yet, that clearly seems to be the case. If it doesn't exist NOW, then either time travel is impossible (that may well be so) or 'superintelligence' is a myth, because a superintelligent entity, at SOME point in its expanding capabilities, should be able to master time travel. Meaning it should be able to travel back to this very moment, and hopefully use its intelligence to solve our many problems, even if only for the self interested purpose of making sure the human race survives long enough to invent it.

The Kirk Delusion

If time traveling AI isn't ridiculous enough, let's now turn to the Mother of All 'superintelligent' myths: that AI will eventually advance outward to seed the entire universe with consciousness!
Indeed, some futurist/transhumanists see this as the ultimate destiny of AI.
The premise is simple, and based upon their very materialistic conception of the universe; i.e. that it is mostly dead matter, unaware it even exists, whether a planet, a star, or all the matter in between galaxies, stars and planets. Just lifeless 'stuff'.
Do I think that? No, but materialists do. So, to them, what better use for all that incalculable amount of matter than to act as raw material that AI can use to fuel itself as it recreates and 'upgrades' the universe according to its godlike whims?
This is what I call 'The Kirk Delusion'. In the old Star Trek series there were several episodes where Captain Kirk stepped in and did things that nobody else in the galaxy had ever attempted, even sometimes saving the galaxy as a result.
He stopped a war run by computers that had gone on for centuries. He defeated Nomad and The Doomsday Machine, thereby sparing untold numbers of lives throughout the galaxy.
And on and on. If not for this one Earthling, beings across the vast expanse of the galaxy would have perished.
Obviously, it is absurd to imagine that this tiny planet on the outer edge of the galaxy has so much importance. It is arrogant to assume that OUR invention, AI, can have so much impact beyond this minuscule rock.
And yet, that's what some of these dudes believe; that it is somehow mankind's destiny to give meaning, through our invention, to an otherwise meaningless universe.
What are these guys smoking, seriously? The delusions that go along with AI are off the charts.

More Than the Dog

There is an old joke that goes 'what do you need to know to teach a dog tricks?'
And the answer is 'more than the dog'.
Perhaps that is the best we can come up with, that 'superintelligence' simply means being smarter in every way than human beings, whether or not human beings can be considered all that intelligent in the first place.
If human intellect, and ONLY human intellect, is the rather low bar of 'superintelligence', then we can leave out all the nonsense about time travel and taking over the universe and all that blah blah.
Putting aside for the moment that there really isn't anything 'super' about such intelligence, we can at least consider the possibility of it being achievable. Will AI eventually outperform human intelligence in every imaginable way, including such things as creativity, imaginativeness, insight, philosophy, etc., in addition to computation, analysis, and data processing?
I'm going with a hard no, though obviously others disagree.
We might begin by examining how AI came about in the first place. Recall that I wrote that AI began to take off after PCs became widespread.
And why is that? Because the Internet is the main engine driving AI development. Yeah yeah; machine learning, neural networks, large language models blah blah blah.
The fact is that it is OUR data, which we exchange billions of times a day over numerous platforms, that is feeding AI in its growth. Just as a baby's brain only grows with proper stimuli. The brain on its own can only do so much, and the brain replica that is AI is exactly the same. It needs data to grow, and data is provided by human beings.
If PCs had never existed and IBM just kept cranking out more and more powerful supercomputers, you wouldn't get AI, at least not as it is currently configured. What is necessary is all those billions of computers and smartphones talking to each other to generate the stimuli necessary to create 'artificial' intelligence.
You have to make a huge leap in assumption to imagine that AI will eventually transcend that limitation and start growing on its own.

The Superintelligence Under Your Nose

One of the most noteworthy aspects of the 'superintelligence' mythology is that it takes as its premise that human intelligence, or specifically human cognitive intelligence, is the high water mark against which AI's intelligence is to be measured. Presumably, since we have not yet been visited by extraterrestrial inhabitants of a superior race, the brains of our Einsteins and Curies are the highest level of intelligence the universe has yet come up with. And that is the intelligence that people like Kurzweill and Bostrom use as a barometer when positing AI overtaking it.
But that is clearly NOT the case, and this is easily demonstrated.
Ask yourself, how willing would you be to surrender your digestive system; stomach, intenstines, etc., and hand a Ceasar's salad to a computer program to process into fuel for you?
Obviously, not at all. At what point in the future do you imagine AI being able to do the job better than your digestive system, such that your internal organs doing the job now are made redundant?
Probably never. So long as your life, moment to moment, depends on the various systems operating in your body; digestive/circulatory/nervous/immune, etc., you are not going to be willing to hand over ANY of that to AI, even though you ARE willing to hand over numerous cognitive tasks which are clearly less essential to your survival.
Thus, the intelligence that runs your body is FAR more intelligent than your noggin cooking up ideas. I am writing this, and I imagine I am being pretty clever while doing so. But I am humbled to the point of shame when I run that up against all the things happening in my organism - keeping me alive - that my mind doesn't have a clue about. Cellular reproduction, cellular growth, homeostasis, digestion, and so on.
Just because we don't label that 'intelligence' (we certainly should) doesn't make in unintelligent. And AI isn't even in the same borough as that, or even state.
So, transhumanists are imagining a 'superintelligent' computing system taking over the entire universe while not even training it to behave like the MOST intelligent thing we are aware of - intimately, I should add. And the main reason for that is because they don't have a clue where to begin such training models. The second reason is that their worldview is skewed. They are obsessed with human cognitive intelligence because they are so impressed with their own. This is Victor Frankenstein level hubris, and reminds us why Mary Shelley's book is STILL the most important metaphor for our age.

When someone like Jane Goodall passes away, it is an opportunity for the rest of us. A voice, a library of thoughts and innumerable decisions stemming from those thoughts have departed this plane. But that voice, those thoughts and those decisions live on, and we can give them a home. Let her words, thoughts and deeds become your inheritance.
At a time when clowns, buffoons and thugs run things and technology swallows the biological world with unspeakable gluttony, spend your inheritance from Jane wisely.

A couple of events transpired recently that have me questioning if communication as we know it (or at least as we old timers have come to know it) is in crisis.
The first took place at Kinkos, where I needed to get some material printed. In general, I have never found Kinkos to be the most helpful or customer friendly place. The staff seem to always be busy with other things, often treating paying customers as if they were an annoyance. But this was different. The young lady who took my order certainly wasn't rude. She just....wasn't there. She is a 'digital native' who probably does 90% of her communicating or more via a device. She had an intuitive sense of what I required, but almost zero ability to convey that to me. She would give very brief instructions. She told me to place the number 8 in a box that I could have written an obituary in. So, I wanted to make sure; perhaps there was a smaller little box to place the number in that I wasn't seeing... 'You mean here?' I asked. A tiny 'uh' was all I got. No explanation for what the 8 was necessary for.
Then she wandered off. I had no idea why. I stood there confused. She returned, did a couple things, and told me to have a seat. I assumed she was going to make an order form. She was gone a LONG time. Had she forgotten? Was she taking a break? I went to the desk and nobody seemed to know where she was, or even very interested in finding out. So I sat down again. Finally, she returned, NOT with an order form, but with the materials I had requested! She didn't say she was going to make them, just told me to have a seat. She brought them to me, I was surprised, and she was gone. I took my purchase to the front desk to pay, and never saw her again.
It was as if an efficient robot had served me, not a human. However, to her, young and digitally acclimatized, there was probably nothing unusual. She didn't even acknowledge my expressions of confusion and later surprise. Nothing. She had a series of tasks which she understood, and she did them. Keeping me in the loop didn't even occur to her.
From my perspective, this was not good customer service, but from another perspective, perhaps a more modern one, it was as good as it needed to be, no niceties and no extra words. Welcome to a brave new world.
The second episode happened the following day. In the midst of a disagreement, in an attempt to make a point, somebody informed me that if they judged me from FB only, they would consider me to be a 'consistent and insufferable asshole', while magnanimously informing me that in real life I'm a good person.
I was stunned and hurt by this remark, and also confused as to why this person felt the need to go for the jugular in that way.
This person and I hold political views that are in most cases divergent. We are also both confident and brash in how we communicate our opinions. We haven't held back from each other, and in my assessment there had also been a give and take of ribbing, trusting that the other could take it.
Clearly, I was wrong about this. A comment like that indicates that the person had this opinion of me for a while and resented our previous jousts, and what they had not communicated up till that post was brewing in them, unspoken.
This brings up several things for me. The first was that this person has a very limited view of my FB persona. On my wall, I post artwork, I write copiously about my philosophy and spirituality, I make jokes, and am active in other ways as well. I also post strongly opinionated (but to my mind informed) comments about matters concerning which he and I are in disagreement. Does that, in sum total, make me a consistent asshole?
This person rarely comments upon anything else I post. 95% of the time, he has popped up on my thread solely to take issue with something I wrote about a social or political issue. Basically to point out where I am 'wrong'. Does he not see anything else I post, not care about it, think it is less representative of my online/FB persona than the comments that make me an ‘asshole’?
Clearly, things between us have been poorly communicated, miscommunicated, or un-communicated up until now. And that has been a kind of wake up call, similarly to my interaction with the Kinkos staff.
The thing that struck me about this episode was that people have different ideas about what online personae are, how valuable they are to us, how much they truly represent us, etc. Some people don't even consider whether the persona they present through social media is different from the 'real' them, while others make clear distinctions and thus think it is less rude to attack the persona (i.e. refer to it as an 'asshole') than the person.
What this person didn't know about me is that I am both very aware that my online voice is a persona that I have cultivated and also that I really LIKE it. So to me, it would be like someone went to an art exhibition I was holding and said, 'Andy, this work is all just junk, but I do think of you as a good person'. Essentially, that is how I received the remark.
My online persona arose out of comments made and received back in the days when the Huffington Post was actually an interesting and even important forum for people outside traditional media to exchange views on topics of great interest, ranging from politics to science to entertainment. It was a free for all, but it was also a place where people tended to understand the unspoken rules. If things got a little rough and tumble, people were expected to accept this within limits. Comments that had a certain amount of bite to them tended to get more attention and responses, and these were ways that people gained clout on the site. 
Most of my life, the 'real me' was non-confrontational, mostly keeping my opinions to myself (if I even took the time to form them) and often finding myself just nodding along with what a more loquacious person was saying to me, whether I agreed or not. Thus, I was quite surprised with myself when this new 'me' came into being on social media. Suddenly, I was being bold, being witty, risking offense. I was willing to defend my own views and challenge those of others. I loved the responses I got and the quasi-friendships with kindred spirits I formed through this persona, which I named 'whatsthatsound' after the Buffalo Springfield song, to show that I was left leaning and a bit of a rebel.
My online persona, although it is not to everyone's tastes, is as dear to ME as are my art pieces, the songs that I write and all other manner in which I express myself through some specific medium or endeavor. Insulting it, referring to it as an ‘insufferable asshole’ crossed a bridge and burned it to the ground as far as I am concerned.

These two seemingly unrelated incidents converge upon the point of illustrating just how much communication has changed in the three decades in which the internet and chat technology have emerged. We are playing with a lot of new tools now, and making up the rules as we go along.
We are also, clearly, devaluing earlier ground rules that have existed for centuries. Perhaps the reason the clerk at Kinkos was so unmoved by my nonverbal cues of confusion and surprise was that she was less able to pick up and accurately interpret such cues than someone born half a century ago.
As for the person who insulted me, it seems he just assumed that I view online personae the same way he does, as lesser aspects of one’s being that can be trashed, so long as one takes pains to explain that the 'real' person makes the cut.
My discomfort in the first episode and hurt in the second largely come down to my having different expectations than those I was communicating with, which were not adequately fulfilled. We weren't playing the same game, in other words, though to all appearances we were.
Such miscues are extremely prevalent now, and will surely increase as technological developments keep adding (and by extension subtracting) ways to connect Person A with Person B (or thousands, or millions, of Person Bs).
This may all work out for the best, and then again it may not. Human beings are very adaptable and resilient, yes. But there are limits. Communication is the core of civilization, its sin qua non. Without communication, nothing humans value would have ever been achieved. No pyramids, no Sistine Chapel, no White Album. Technology is rapidly churning out new types of communication modes one after another, but the whole edifice could come crashing down like The Tower of Babel if we don't ensure that the ground floor remains firm.

Imagine that, all along, there has been a clause in your 'contract' with the universe ~ something that you, and every other human, can exercise if you so choose; an 'Omega Option', if you will.
This clause enables you to opt out of your human journey being a purely personal ‘education course’ for your soul’s evolution, and use it for something much greater.
Perhaps you believe, as so many do, that the purpose of the journey that your life has been thus far has been to nurture and evolve your own identity, to help you grow spiritually, grow in wisdom, strength and integrity. You may feel that this is true throughout the human collective: each one on his or her own journey to greater awareness and understanding.
But, somewhere along the way, perhaps you got the distinct sense that this might actually be a 'lesser' option, when all is said and done. It doesn't seem to be working out, somehow. The younglings in Gaza being starved and amputated without anesthesia are certainly hard to see as spiritual beings guiding their own evolutionary path. What 'lessons' can such a one learn through abject misery, caused by others? In the rare case of surviving all that, how could that human 'nurture' anything other than hatred and desire for revenge? It is a recipe for endless cycles of bloodletting, NOT gradual awakening.
Back to the 'Omega Option'. What if you, and anyone else who chooses, could take all that you have learned thus far on your personal journey and use it for a higher purpose? Wouldn't that purpose be to elevate collective humanity to a higher plane of awareness and existence such that what is happening in Gaza could never happen again, and the people choosing to commit the unspeakable crimes there could become incapable of even thinking of behaving in such a way ever again? Wouldn't that naturally be your choice? How could you choose to remain 'little old me' with maybe a dream or two of writing a novel or making a documentary while the tsunami of misery grows and grows and threatens to turn this very planet into Hell itself (which is where we are heading now, clearly)?
IF you had that option, to subsume all that wisdom and experience and strength that you have gained from being you into a grander - transpersonal - purpose, and sacrifice personal goals so that your journey's fruits (up until now) can be redirected toward saving humanity from its worst aspects, WOULDN'T you?
If the Omega Option exists, for you and every moment, is there a better time than now to exercise it? And is there a reason NOT to?

When I write "to subsume all that wisdom and experience and strength that you have gained from being you into a grander - transpersonal - purpose", I am not talking about abandoning any personal missions or relinquishing individualized identification. There may be some spiritual traditions that call for this, but this is not and could never be my approach.
I am saying, rather, that we can actually FULFILL our identity as an individual by bringing it, warts and all, along with us to our higher mission of awakening humanity and ending suffering. Everything that we have learned up to this point from both losses and triumphs can be put to good use.
The crucial point is that we go beyond 'personal' and enter into transpersonal. This is not 'transhumanism', as that is a distorted and delusional concept of using technology to move humanity forward. Transpersonal refers to recognizing oneself as more than just an individual, and rather an aspect of Collective Humankind. As from toe to foot to leg to body, we can extend body further to shared body, One human being made up of billions of individuals.
And that One human being is clearly struggling. There is no evidence that if all of us merely continue on our own journeys, spiritual or otherwise, that any evolutionary progress will be made. We cannot imagine that what is happening to the victims of Gaza, or going on in the minds of the victimizers, is all part of some grand divine plan that ultimately leads each one to enlightenment. How long must these cycles of violence continue? Thousands of years? Tens of thousands of years? How about never? As in, such cycles of violence and retribution can NEVER right themselves into a divine path. There must be an intevention.
Unless we come together as a collective force, we will not achieve a New Earth; there aren't enough billions of years in the universe otherwise, and anyway who has time for that when so much misery is unfolding every moment humanity fails to evolve?
So the greater mission, then, beyond any personal evolution, is awakening humanity to its divinity. NOW. We have gone around in circles, fooling ourselves that eventually we will pop out of that groove after a few more spins. Becoming 'enlightened' on a planet where for every enlightened person there are several hundred being tortured, thousands going hungry, and so on is about as useful as going to see a movie with a bag over your head.
IF a person here, a person there, becoming enlightened had any ameliorating impact, that would be one thing, but what evidence do we have for that? The New Age movement, Marianne Williamson, the 'Conversations With God' books and all that stuff has touched millions of lives, but what have they accomplished on a planetary scale? You don't have to think too hard about this. A genocide is unfolding before our very eyes, funded and propagandized for by the 'leaders of the free world'. Individual enlightenment-seeking, if it could do ANYTHING positive for the world, should have been able to do something about THIS, of all things.
But it hasn't, clearly. Because, ultimately, one person becoming enlightened is an oxymoron. The whole POINT of enlightenment is to connect oneself TRANSPERSONALLY to everyone and everything else. It is to see beyond the very illusion of exclusive identification as an individual. Once this happens, the appearance of individuality becomes an expression, no more and no less. In my own case, I no longer identify as Andy Boerger, but I use this personality I have honed and refined as my way of expressing. Since I have been an artist and writer for many years, this has actually not been difficult for me. 'Andy Boerger' is to me only somewhat different from a painting I create or an essay I write. My paintings and essays aren't 'me', but they EXPRESS me, just as my personality/body/mind does.
I no longer have any personal goals toward becoming enlightened. 'Andy Boerger' is as enlightened as he is ever going to get. Rather, I choose to abandon that project completely and subsume all of that into a greater cause, the Awakening of the Human Collective.
So, the Omega Option means choosing to subsume personal expression into the greater project of awakening the human collective and ending the current era of recklessness and rage.
Sounds easy, right?
First, let's consider what I am saying, which is that by exercising the Omega Option we align ourselves with the event of human awakening to the point of merging with it. This is the ultimate transpersonal action. And it may sound impossible from the start, because people can't become 'events', can they? We tend to think of events as having no agency, no real awareness, and having very little in common with human beings.
Let's consider a possible (though hardly hoped for) event, and let's make it a biggie: a massive eruption of the Yellowstone Caldera.
Now THAT'S an event! We tend to think of it in terms of what it would mean for biological beings that would be impacted by it. What would happen to the trees, the squirrels, the coyotes, the eagles, the humans, and so on. We don't imagine the event experiencing itself, we imagine it being experienced by millions, or billions, of life forms, each of them experiencing things more or less similarly to how we ourselves would. Panic, fear, pain, etc. The event happens without experiencing itself, and at some point it is over; history moves on.
That seems so different from the human experience, which we tend to picture as a narrative that unfolds over time. A personality is gradually acquired, it matures, it has numerous experiences including triumphs and defeats, it has a rich and intense inner life, etc. Thus, juxtaposing this with an event like a volcanic eruption, they seem to have nothing in common. And if we are convinced that our human experience IS us, then we probably neither desire to become an event or imagine it to be possible.
But that limits our effectiveness - our usefulness to humanity - because people tend to think only in terms of how they, as an individual, can contribute to a desired event. If that event is the election of a preferred candidate, they think in terms of the calls they can make, the donations they can make, the canvassing they can do, and finally that one vote among millions they can add. If the desired event is the awakening of the human collective, it is the same. People wonder how they, as one individual, can contribute to bringing it about. Typically, they will come up with answers such as 'be kind', 'meditate', 'read and share books with important messages', 'forgive those who have wronged me', 'follow my guru's guidance', and so on. Basically saying, 'I may just be one drop in a bucket, but I will try to be the best drop I can possibly be and hope that by doing so I can contribute somehow'.
Sadly, that holds out very little hope, and a glance at history reveals that it doesn't have much of a track record. We need to think bigger. And here's the thing: by thinking bigger we also learn a lot more about who and what we REALLY are.
The idea of 'becoming a (desired) event' is unusual, to be sure, so let's break it down. First, let's inject the perspective that the alternative is to imagine that we, as individuals, can merely CONTRIBUTE to a desired event or outcome through our deeds and words. Although certainly true, that places us in the position of being a mere drop in a bucket, which doesn't seem all that helpful when the fire is raging all around. And let's be clear: the fire IS raging all around. What is happening in Gaza, as well as this freakishly hot summer (and last year's, and almost certainly next year's) are clear indicators that we don't have a lot of time. Individual efforts are, sadly, not up to the task of bringing about massive change. The forces ~ basically Greed ~ that are resistant to our individual efforts are too entrenched, too equipped with the instrumentation and methodologies required to keep things from shifting in the face of grass roots movements and 'bold new candidates' etc.
We don't have enough time to bring about the required changes, and more importantly, there IS not enough time in the universe for that. Thus, we must BECOME the event, rather than merely contribute to it. You, me, everyone who feels the pull must extend beyond the illusion of individuality and embrace the idea of BEING the Great Awakening of the Human Collective.

Yet, we might think that a.) that's not possible, and b.) nor is it desirable, because events are just 'things'; they don't even know they are taking place. If those two concerns were adequately addressed, we might be convinced to exercise the Omega Option.
If someone presented you with the opportunity to trade places with The Big Bang, why wouldn't you? What could possibly be more attractive about being one tiny individual on one tiny planet for one tiny sliver of time than being the grand event that brought everything you are, PLUS everything else that is, into being? The answer is nothing, other than the idea that The Big Bang doesn't even know it happened, and you are aware of your life from moment to moment.
Put that aside, and it's a no brainer. You can trade little old you and your mere decades of life for the biggest thing that ever happened, which resulted in all things that exist existing, and is this very moment causing things to happen trillions of light years away that are beyond our ability to comprehend. Hell's Yes! Sign me up!
However, IF The Big Bang was completely unconscious, was merely a thing that happened without awareness, then we'd probably have to say, 'nah, I'll pass; I'm good as is'. We will take consciousness, even our own limited one, any day of the week.
But, how do we KNOW that events are unconscious? We don't; we simply imagine them to be because they seem so different from the only consciousness that we can comprehend ~ that belonging to biological life forms (and perhaps eventually the inventions of biological life forms such as AI).
If we can think outside that box, suddenly everything changes.
The question comes down to: who, and what, are you, really?
If you believe yourself to be a biological organism that experiences things purely through interactions of your brain and sensory apparatuses with the world around you, then the idea of changing over from 'me' to Event of Human Awakening is pretty much D.O.A., is it not?
With my writing, I continually emphasize the fact that you are so much more than that. You are an expression. Your biology is an expression. Your brain is an expression. Your five senses are expressions. Your thoughts and experiences are expressions, and so on.
Meanwhile, everything identifiable in your world, from news events to forest settings, from spouses and children to stellar nebulae, are also expressions. All of these are expressions of the One Elemental Consciousness that is doing the expressing. Everything and all of it, seeming to be unrelated but actually intimately connected by virtue of the fact that EVERYTHING derives from the same Source. And that Source is your TRUE 'identity', NOT the expression of individualized consciousness you appear to be.
With that knowledge, it becomes easier to bridge the seeming gap between human being and Event. Events are also expressions of Universal Consciousness. The Big Bang, The US Civil Rights Movement, the discovery of oil in Titusville, Pennsylvania, the first manned aircraft flight, etc. ALSO expressions.
And, as you are not the expression itself, but the One doing the expressing, and events such as those mentioned above are similarly not the expressions themselves but rather the One doing the expressing, your ability - as well as your right - to modify your expression seems apparent, does it not? If, at your core, you ARE Source, then what sort of limitations are placed upon your channels of expression? And by whom? Furthermore, at this point in history, what better way of expressing could there be for a human being than to become the event of human awakening? An event that can largely end suffering, end greed, end recklessness, end conflict, etc.?
This is the moment to choose that, by subsuming all that you are expressing as now into a larger purpose. You are familiar with the expression 'Be the change you want to see in the world'. From an outside-the-box perspective, what does that mean? Perhaps it goes beyond advising you to make your own meaningful individual contributions to change. Taken verbatim, it means 'become an event', exactly what I am saying. The 'change' we want to see in the world IS the Event of Human Awakening, is it not?
That is the Omega Option. Choose to become the event. The only step left to learn is……how? First, by embracing the ideas I have offered here. You might not, and that’s fine. They are unconventional, to say the least. However, if what I have written seems true to you and more importantly beneficial to others, then that is where to start. After that, it is a matter of focus and intent. I focus on this all the time! Every day, and often throughout each day, I take time to concentrate on outgrowing my personal identity and subsuming it into the collective, for the purpose of awakening the collective to its true nature. I have not stopped living my life. I haven’t stopped creating art, writing, teaching or anything else. There is no need to retreat to a cave. There IS a need to continually apply focus and intent, and not allow this idea to fade into just another passing fancy or idle daydream. I will not allow that, because of the importance of this to me. And I welcome you finding it to be important as well. Let’s awaken humanity by BEING that awakening. This nightmare has gone on long enough.

PET ARTのアンディ・バーガーによる作品を大幅にリニューアルしましたのでお楽しみください！
"PET ART"のページの"PET ARTを見る"からフルカラー、カラー、モノクロなどの
新しい作品をご覧いただけます。

＊今年9月～12月のイベントは
JOKER浦和店、JOKER三越本店
WANCOTT横浜、田園調布
軽井沢などで開催予定です。

お待ちしております❣

After the Big Bang came the Great Darkness. In indescribable darkness, matter raced away from itself in all directions, pushing space into being as it did so. Darkly, it spun and coalesced, exploded and merged, exploded again, grew heavier, impossibly; formed stars that lived billions of years, died, and in that dying gave rise to new stars, stars that spun off particles that, trapped in orbit, coalesced into planets. Galaxies, containing billions of stars, expanding, moving away from each other, pushing at the frontiers where What Is Not yielded to What Is. Unfathomably, Improbably. And all in total darkness.

Because no one was there to see it. A spectacle of unimaginable beauty, resplendent with colors beyond our own limitations of red at one end and violet at the other, played out over billions of years, and yet this spectacle was for not. As bland as a painting of a snowflake floating in a glass of milk, or an inkblot on a lump of coal. For, for only a brief period of the many billion year history of the universe has anything been seen, anywhere, and only as the result of a chance occurrence. On our planet, and perhaps others, matter formed itself into something that could sense light, and by gradual modifications these light sensing mechanisms became more sophisticated, up to and including our own wonderful eyes. And these modifications; did they occur so that the beauty of the universe could be beheld and appreciated? No. Every modification, from the simplest eyes to the most complex, merely helped an organism secure food. Or not become food. Or perhaps a combination of the two.

Think about that for a moment. Do a gut check. Does it seem credible? That except for on our planet, and perhaps other planets similar to ours, and only in a relatively brief period of this and similar planets' histories, has the grand spectacle of the universe been even partially visible to itself? And only through the vulgar mechanism of keeping one step ahead of a mouth or a grabbing appendage? That up until the time that these modifications came about, on perhaps this planet exclusively, even though it is made up of light and its very mechanisms are circumscribed by the speed of light, the universe was completely and utterly blind?

Such a scenario lacks poetry, to say the least. That a cosmos could be at once so dazzling and yet completely invisible to itself for such a long time, only to finally become visible through the merest chance on an inconsequential rock - somehow seems decidedly unsatisfying to my poetic nature. There, where my mind is free to wander and extend beyond what is rational and explained, the above scenario seems to me to have it all backwards. Eyes, my poetic mind persuades me, do not make sight possible. On the contrary, it is sight that makes eyes possible! Eyes did not develop because, for some odd reason, in a universe that up until then had been completely blind, there was suddenly some reproductive advantage to sensing light (imagine what an extraordinary moment that must have been, and yet so under-appreciated by its experiencer. Hey, now this is interesting. Munch munch).

Rather, eyes are a (but one, I dare say) manifestation of vision. It was not mindless food-seeking that brought them into being.Vision gave them birth, no less so than a painter's vision gives birth to a masterpiece, and an inventor's vision gives birth to a flying machine. Speaking of "flying machines", in the same vein I posit that birds did not develop wings because there were things to eat up there. Birds rose to fill the sky because the sky, because flight, summoned them.

Viewed through the lens of reason, such notions are risible and wholly passe. Where is the evidence to support such outlandish claims? Where do these bizarre notions of vision and flight come from? Obviously, they don't come from a scientific theory or an experiment, or from an objective, wholly rational observation of naturally occurring phenomena. Rather, they come from an area of human consciousness which science knee-jerkedly meets with cool skepticism, if not outright disgust: intuition, subjective feelings, and our mysterious human quality of looking for meaning in the cosmos.

Yet, how firm is the ground upon which science so confidently, even arrogantly, dismisses such rival attributes of human nature? For someone who is convinced that science is man's greatest achievement, and moreover is our greatest hope for improving our condition in the future, the very question probably sounds preposterous, perhaps even insane. Nevertheless, I will dare to ask: as reason and intuition are both essential aspects of a fully human mind, can one arrogate to itself an exclusive "rightness" from which to dismiss the properties the other might bring toward understanding the universe which we inhabit, and our relationship to it?

Science, as we have come to define it, has a very brief history. For all practical purposes, it begins in ancient Greece, notably with Socrates, and his method of questioning hypotheses. From there we move to Aristotle, who applied the Socratic Method, with his own modifications, to a variety of fields such as ethics, poetry, politics, etc., and most famously, science. The derivation of the word is perhaps related to cutting, or more accurately, separating. The Greeks, with Aristotle first among them, learned about their world by dissecting and examining it, reducing it to its parts, separating what could be determined to that point, and then investigating more fully into those "parts" which remained mysterious. Aristotle applied this method to zoology, anatomy, botany, and pretty much all aspects of the physical world. What he accomplished, with his stellar intellect and unquenchable curiosity, is mind boggling.

Aristotle's discoveries and theories went on to fuel scientific inquiry for centuries. His vast achievements functioned as a template for the Renaissance. The great Arab scientist Alhazen refined the scientific method into its current form roughly a thousand years ago. It came into its fullest expression through the Italian super-genius Galileo in the early seventeenth century. Completing the process, the great inventions, such as the telescope and the microscope, along with the higher mathematics of Newton, arrived on the scene in the century after Galileo's achievements, giving birth to the era that we live in now, the Scientific Age. That's pretty much the extent of it. The entire history of science (as we think of it), subtracting its fallow period in the Dark Ages, is less than two thousand years roughly one percent of the history of our species. The duration that it has been the dominant way of seeing the world is much shorter, perhaps no more than three hundred years.

Given such a short history, we can only conclude that science, according to science, was not selected for in the human species. One must keep in mind that according to our present understanding of how natural selection works, traits only pass the test of selectivity if they help the extant, hosting organism to survive. Ask any biological scientist, and he or she will hasten to assure you that evolution doesn't know what it is doing. It has no grand plan, no concept of a future, no notion of how newly acquired traits may spread among the entire species; no such scheme. Rather, it plays out one groping, clawing, devouring organism at a time.

Our large, multifaceted brains were selected for, most certainly. The knowledge we needed to explore caves, to use weapons, to hunt, to organize against stronger predators, was provided by those brains. The human resourcefulness and inventiveness that our brains made possible was selected for along the strict and narrow rules of natural selection. But science wasn't. Remember, for only the last three hundred years or so has there been any demonstrable survival advantage to having scientific knowledge, most obviously in terms of decreasing infant mortality, and extending the average human life span by several decades. For the vast preponderance of the history of the species homo sapiens, approximately 200,000 years, the scientific method provided mankind with no survivability value whatsoever, proved by the obvious fact that we survived without it. In purest evolutionary terms, it is nothing more than a "lucky accident", an ancillary feature of our large brains (which developed, remember, solely to help us secure food and avoid becoming food), that didn't even begin to reveal its usefulness until twenty millennia after our brains' development had made it possible! How utterly insignificant the very feature of human consciousness that devised the theory of evolution is, from the perspective of that very theory!

And yet the champions of science hold it up as a paragon against which all other features of human consciousness cannot even hope to compare. Did intuition and and hunches help our species survive before science? Assuredly so. Did poetic and spiritual insights provide strength and succor to our lowly and set-upon species, huddled together in small tribes against a world vastly more threatening than the one we inhabit today? Bet on it. Without them, would we even be here? That I very much doubt. That science, coming along so late in the game, should nevertheless hoist itself to such a lofty and judgmental position seems rather presumptuous to me.

Imagine a basketball team that plays well enough in the regular season to earn a playoff berth. The team advances, all the way to the last few minutes of the championship game. A talented rookie comes off the bench, and makes a few clutch shots. A star is born! But no, because this rookie then kicks everyone else on his team off the court. He's decided they've outlived their usefulness, and that he alone is the only hope the team has of winning the game. Every error his teammates have made throughout the season that he didn't play in proves to him their unworthiness to even be on the same court as him. Their mere presence weakens his chance of bringing home the trophy. Well, I think we can all imagine how that would turn out! And yet that is basically the arrogant stance that science's staunchest champions take. Any talk of hunches, intuition, to say nothing of spirituality and supernatural phenomena, is met with the same level of disdain our imaginary rookie shows to the very teammates whose efforts have made his appearance on the court possible. Religion? They are convinced that it has been nothing other than an unmitigated disaster for mankind.



I greatly admire science, and am grateful for such benefits as it has provided me. With my poor eyesight, for example, I could never have survived in eras before scientific research yielded eyeglasses. It is scientific triumphalism that I take issue with. What we have today is perhaps less true science than a raging tyranny of the left hemisphere of the brain over the right, and the consequences scream out at us. On the one hand, scientific experiments have improved medicine and lengthened our life spans, and technological advancement has improved the quality of human life. On the other hand, science has damaged the environment to the point where our very survival is threatened. Factory farmed, steroid injected animals harm our health. Acid rain weakens our forests (the very "lungs" of our planet). Oil spills and nuclear disasters point out the price we pay for our brave new technological world. Beyond all that lurks the mother of all environmental threats, catastrophic climate change. That we could have placed ourselves in such a dangerous predicament a mere three centuries into the Scientific Age should clue us that we should be going about things differently.

To me, the Great Lesson of our time is not that the ascension of science over the last few centuries is a harbinger of a new age of enlightenment, if we can just hold on and solve our current existential threats. It is that our survival depends upon striking a balance between the wonderful possibilities that science brings about and the poetic, intuitive, meaning-seeking portion of our consciousness centered in the other hemisphere of our magnificent brains. If that balance cannot be reached, I for one have very little hope that mankind will escape destroying itself. We will,rather, hasten our return to the Great Darkness, clinging to our belief in an unconscious universe that is completely blind to our existence, and never even returned the favor of seeing us.

We live in a time of great disconnect. Indeed, we are connected to the outside world as never before, but most people have little to no connection to the far more compelling story that is being told to 'I' by 'I' right now and always.
In a sense we are all reactionaries, or are rendered so by the material world, because the story we continually tell ourselves is one of reaction and response. From the moment we wake up to the moment we go to sleep, 'I' am engaged with something else: another person, a problem I need to solve, a task I must perform, and in lieu of any of that, some form of entertainment to engage me.
It's like our energy is on full blast all the time. Extending out from us and into our world.
We call this normal, and take it for granted.
Many who are religious know that this is not the best way to live, but because they have identified 'god' as something outside of themselves, they still find themselves engaging WITH, once again directing their attention outward to learn from and gain happiness from a deity greater than themselves.
This is a time of intensity, even insanity. The world appears to be breaking apart in so many ways. Spending all our time and energy reacting to and responding to an intense and insane world is certainly going to affect us profoundly, and subsequently it is no surprise that stress and discontent are so prevalent.
If we had another option beyond just taking a vacation, we might benefit greatly from it. If a large number of us exercise this same option then the world itself would benefit. The crazy would subside, even a little. The intensity would abate.
It is time to meet the Higher Self.

I'll just come right out and say it: the Higher Self is possibly the most neglected vital thing in the world today. Because the mass of humanity fails to connect to the Higher Self, it becomes easier for us all to engage in lower activities that debase and exhaust us, conflict being the most harmful (and also the most obvious).
So, why do people neglect their Higher Self? Well, because it is something that very few people spend any time thinking about, it is perhaps unsurprising that Higher Self is widely misunderstood. Even those who do consider it important generally have an incomplete conception of it. Thus, its value is not fully appreciated.
Perhaps greater understanding OF it would yield greater interest IN it, so I will attempt to explain Higher Self to the best of my abilities.
Is it our conscience? The 'little voice within' that nudges us in the right direction and guides us to wiser choices?
Not really.
Christopher Hitchens, in one of his many public debates with Christians, indicated that he thinks that's what it is, and that's all it is. Always scholarly, he referenced Socrates' 'daemon' and Adam Smith's 'inner guidance'. Both men were referring to a higher wisdom within us we can seek which can sort between right and wrong actions.
Of course, as is well known, Hitchens was committed to a materialist worldview, which presumably means that he would account for this 'daemon' as having arisen through evolutionary processes which formed the human brain.
Certainly, this 'daemon' is a good thing to have. It's also an extremely good thing for OTHER people to have when they are engaged in some form of relationship with you!
But it is not the Higher Self. Is there a connection? Indeed. But is it the sum total of the Higher Self? Not even close.
So if the materialists are falling short of the mark, how are our religious brethren doing? Actually, not so good. From the Christian perspective, you had better attribute any inner voice of wisdom to Jesus or God, lest you be tricked by Satan! It seems absurd, but even if your Higher Self guides you to make wise and loving choices for decades, but you claim that it comes from within you and not via Christ talking to you, any Christian pastor would caution you. Satan is quite the trickster, they will tell you, and no matter how good his advice might seem to be, he is after only one thing: your eternal soul. Seek spiritual guidance to get back on track, they would advise.
It should be noted that Alcoholics Anonymous has adopted this concept for their own purposes. They refer to a 'Higher Power' that can guide us, once we admit our powerlessness and need of outside assistance to achieve sobriety and the life we dream of.
In both cases, we are cautioned against trusting 'wisdom' that arises from within and is integral to us.
As forHindus, they maintain that the concept of an 'inner guru' is dangerous and fraudulent unless and until one has achieved a high level of enlightenment under the tutelage of flesh and blood gurus who have completed the process themselves. It is not Satan, but 'the ego' that tricks those who do not receive the approved training and instead listen to teachings and insights that come from WITHIN, NOT through masters who have expunged their own egos to the point where they can properly guide you.
So we're not getting a lot of help either from materialists or 'that old time religion', are we?
We must remember that we are talking about 'Self' here, so that means NOT Jesus and NOT a guru, but an actual and accessible higher aspect of OURSELVES that can uplift and enlighten us.
Does it exist? YES, emphatically!
So let's figure out what it is and start working with it.
The Higher Self is exactly what the name implies, a higher version of yourself. Mentally, morally, imaginatively and creatively, yes. But also physically, and this is the part that is easiest to miss.
Hitchens referred to Socrates and his daemon, so I will fast forward a tad and say that Plato is possibly our best guide to understanding the Higher Self, with his concepts of 'real' and 'ideal'.
According to Plato, anything that exists in expressed, manifest form derives from a formless ideal, a template if you will.
The Higher Self is this template from which you derive, both in terms of mind and in terms of body.

Most people, when considering the Higher Self, think in terms of a Higher Mind, but not a Higher Body.
This was me for thirty years. For three decades I have experienced connection with my Higher Mind (on and off I should say; during this period there were moments when I could not feel the connection strongly, or even at all - my 'Father, father, why hast thou abandoned me? moments).
Only recently have I come to realize that Higher BODY exists on the same plane of ideals (to use Plato's terminology) as Higher Mind, and thus I make it a daily practice to focus on aligning my physical form with this Higher Body just as my mind has become aligned (not completely, of course) with my Higher Mind. Higher Mind is thus an aspect of Higher Self, not the totality of it.
We can see that it is like peeling back layers of an onion to come to a fuller understanding of what Higher Self is, and the more important understanding of how we can benefit by connecting to it. Since most people consider the Higher Self purely in terms of Higher Mind, let's start there.
By tendency, I rarely include personal episodes in my essays, however in this instance I feel I may be doing the topic a disservice were I to avoid relating it to my own experiences.
I first encountered my Higher Mind in 1991, during a very dangerous and dramatic situation. I had to escape from the Oakland Hills Fire of that year, which devastated a large swath of terrain just behind the UC Berkeley campus. The apartment I was renting at the time was one of the casualties of the flames, and I easily could have been another.
There was a point when I made my way in haste down the road toward the Bay when I nearly froze up. Imagine the situation. Behind me were hundred foot flames, and on both sides of the road were flames from the burning forest all around, licking at the asphalt. Suddenly, there was nothing in front of me but pitch black. It looked like nothing a sane person would ever choose to drive into, but with flames on every other side of me, what else was there to do? Still, I nearly froze and put on the brakes, which would have meant certain death, but the fear of driving straight into That Blackness nearly overwhelmed me. I was terrified that I was heading straight into the firestorm, which was where the black smoke was most likely coming from.
Then, I heard a voice. It was as clear a voice as one might hear from someone with whom they are conversing. No one else in the car heard it, of course, but it was more than just a thought in my head. At least to me, it was clearly audible, and it said, 'everything is going to be all right'.
'Confidence' is not the right word to use here, but this voice was of no doubt about what it was saying. It wasn't cheering me on, trying to boost my confidence, and such. It was basically reporting the future to me from a place of knowing. There was no trace of doubt in it, as one might hear from another person in a similar situation. It knew, and it wanted me to know.
I received this information differently from how one generally does. The moment I heard this voice telling me everything would be all right, all fear evaporated because I, too, knew that it would. The best way to describe it would be that I downloaded the information, and it became MY certainty as well as the voice's.
And, as it turned out, everything WAS all right. After a few seconds of driving through pitch black, the smoke began to dissipate. From black to gray, from opaque to vapory, and finally to a clear view of the city of Oakland below. I and my passengers were safe. Hardships would follow (we had lost our homes after all) but we would survive.
One other element of this episode has always stayed with me. Before leaving the apartment complex, I spotted out of the corner of my eye a woman who looked very panicky as she stood by the firefighters who had just arrived. I was part of a queue of cars making our way to the exit gate, but in a matter of seconds I made eye contact with her, stopped briefly to open the door, let her in, and chauffeured her to safety down the hill.
This was, I believe, an initiation ritual. If I hadn't stopped to let her in, I think I would not have 'met' my Higher Mind a few moments later. Perhaps my entire life would have unfolded very differently. I suppose it is possible that I would not even have survived that very day. But I 'proved' myself with that simple act, and Higher Mind responded.
That episode in the Oakland Hills marks my first awareness of Higher Self, though I would not call it such for quite some time afterwards. I had been agnostic with atheistic leanings for a good 15 years prior to that experience, so my transition came about slowly, but steadily.
Thus, I did not consider this voice of wisdom and assuredness (and it must be said, a terrific sense of humor as well) my Higher Self at first, and I as I wrote earlier, I no longer do either. In the beginning, I called it 'the conversation', as it was something I could tune into whenever I wanted, and doing so yielded great insights over time.
As for now, I recognize that Higher Self includes both Higher Mind and Higher Body, meaning Higher Mind (that which I have been aligning with for three decades) alone is not Higher Self. There is a 'template' for a more perfect version of our physical expression, just as there is one for our mind.
Ultimately, Higher Mind - and indeed Higher Self - is as temporary an expression as the physical mind and body are. All are mere temporary expressions of formless Consciousness, the Aware Existence from which all matter arises and throuh which dissolves.
The purpose of Higher Mind is to make itself obsolete. Once our 'everyday' consciousness has fully merged with Higher Mind and experiences no separation from it, recognizing higher/lower are merely different aspects of the same thing, its role as a teacher and guide will have been completed.
This will be a shining moment that we all will eventually experience. As more and more of us do, the discord and conflict and sorrow that characterizes life on Earth will attenuate gradually, as fewer and fewer will gather at that trough.


To summarize, the Higher Self is a higher version of you in every imaginable aspect. It exists to bring you into alignment with your Truth, which is that you are Aware Existence and Eternal Source.
If YOU didn't exist, neither would Higher Self. Higher Self has no purpose unto its own; it is your guide in all manners and all respects.
This is not to diminish it in any way. It is indescribably wonderful, beautiful and awesome. But as I wrote earlier, its purpose is to render itself obsolete.
The Brooklyn Bridge is an extraordinarily beautiful work of art, but if there were no span for it to bridge, no gap between lower Manhattan and Brooklyn, it would not exist. Think of the Higher Self this way, then. An extraordinarily beautiful bridge between all that you think you are and all that you TRULY are.
It is impossible that you will not at some point come to align yourself with your Higher Self so that it can serve this function for you. The only question is how long do you want to wait?
It is high time humanity moves forward. We have spent precious time indulging ourselves in the illusion of materialism and 'the cosmos is all there is or will ever be', and look where it has gotten us.
One word to describe the materialistic age: recklessness. We have been reckless with human lives, reckless with the future, reckless with our relationships to our fellow creatures, reckless with our treatment of arable land, reckless in our use of resources, reckless in our pursuit of wealth, and reckless in our choice of leaders.
Reckless, as well, in our concept of ourselves. We are NOT thinking mud, we are beings of Consciousness! Why is it so appealing to so many to feel that they have grokked it all, read their scientific papers and concluded that we are thinking mud?
I will never understand this.
What I will say is that our future hinges on whether enough of us can let that vulgar illusion go for good and reclaim our true value as Immortal Consciousness expressing as and through matter, but in no way limited to that particular expression.
This is where the Higher Self comes in. If you are willing to consider the possibility that it exists, it will take that opening and make something of it, as it has done for me.
You have to be willing to question the premises of materialism, but how is that a bad thing? There is nothing better that can happen to a human being in this or any lifetime than meeting the Higher Self and beginning to align with it.
It is the 'seek thee first' that has been taught about, but misunderstood.
But now is a time for understanding.
You are glorious and wonderful. Love beyond compare and creativity such as you have never known is waiting to introduce itself to you.
May you meet your Higher Self in THIS life, not the next.

lsraeI shows us what we are, and exposes in a harsh light what we are not.

In 1992, Francis Fukuyama published his it-made-sense-when-I-was-stoned NYT bestseller, 'The End of History' in which he argued that history itself had essentially come to an end with the fall of the Soviet Union. He argued that 'western values' had prevailed and would surely go on to encompass the entire world; a triumphant victory not only for 'the West' but for all mankind which would from that point forward concede that these 'western values' of democracy, capitalism and technological supremacy were better than any other form of society that had ever been tried, such as monarchy, papacy, communism, Maoism, Islamism, etc. The long march of history had led inevitably and inexorably to these 'western values' for which we had Socrates, Aristotle, and, grudgingly, Plato to thank.
Ah, Fukuyama, what a pompous dope.
The truth is that his notion of the superiority of 'western values' has always been a hard sell. Witch burnings, the slave trade, France's Reign of Terror were signs enough that something was off with Fukuyama's views, but Auschwitz, Hiroshima, Mai Lai and Bhopal should have knocked the notion out of his noggin for good. Yet, people love myths which paint them as the good guy, and so the idea of 'triumphant western values' continued to have some currency.

Until Israel. Until a genocidal maniac received a standing ovation from both Democrats and Republicans in the US Capitol. Until pathetic clowns purporting to lead the US, Germany, the UK and France all rushed to condemn Iran for committing the crime of being attacked by lsraeI. 'lsraeI is facing an existential threat!' they parrot, excusing an unprovoked attack on a sovereign nation, while ignoring the fact that it is indeed the Palestinian people who truly face an existential threat, FROM lsraeI. The truth is plain to see. These 'western values' are.... valueless.

Not worth the paper they are printed on.

The reality that power - specifically the power to impose one’s will on others - was not merely incidental to the 'triumph' of the West but was in fact its sin qua non, has always been a rather imposing elephant in the room.
Secularists could argue that it was the precise and impeccably organized thinking of the ancient Athenian philosophers that stood as the bedrock of the West, while religious folk could argue that it was Christ (who became blue eyed and Western) and latter Christian scholars like Thomas Aquinas who added a revolutionary morality that combined with Athenian philosophy to make it an unstoppable force.
But now, how hollow that all seems. It was the ships. It was the guns. It was the technological superiority of the West, not its philosophical or moral superiority - or its 'democratic ideals' - that enabled it to prevail over rivals.
The precision of Aristotlean thinking, combined with the the Christianization of the world's most powerful empire, led to the development of Gutenberg's printing press (first used as a Bible press), which led to the European Enlightenment. It all seems to be about the triumph of ideas, does it not? Well, no. This precise thinking and information access yielded the physical and tangible aspects of Western power that account for its 'triumph': steam power, TNT, the internal combustion engine, flight, jet fuel, the unlocking of the atom, and so on.
The West did not persuade, it imposed. This is the brute reality that Western triumphalists either choose to ignore or embrace with a sick child's glee.

And this brings us to lsraeI. What the Zionist state is doing today is not different from what Western powers have done for centuries. From the Age of Exploration onwards, it has always been Western military might, brought about by its technology - NOT the courage of its soldiers or the advanced thinking of its generals - that resulted in the vast empires of Spain, Portugal, England and Holland; France, Belgium and Italy in Africa, the United States in its conquest of the indigenous tribes, and so on.
It was collusion of many of these same Western powers that produced the state of lsrael, a colonialist enterprise that followed a playbook dating back at least as far as the conquistadors. Where is the so-called superiority of Western 'values' in this? European nations treated European Jews so badly that they finally decided to give them a 'homeland' that just so happened to be somebody else's home. What did England, France and the United States care about that little detail? They had made careers out of invading other peoples' homes and slaughtering them. Is it any wonder that should be their game plan with the Zionist project?
There was no chance that the morals they had supposedly picked up from Aristotle and Jesus were going to impel them to make a reconciliation with their Jews in good faith and in the spirit of repentance. It is to laugh.
No, these colonial monstrosities did the only thing they really know how to do well; they created yet another oppressive colonialist state (a proxy governorship, if we're being honest) in the heart of that troublesome land of Arabia, that decidedly un-Western realm whose people they had warred with for centuries. lsraeI was the West's way of preventing a pan-Arab nation that hated the West while possessing massive amounts of the West's new gold - petroleum - from becoming a rival that could possibly challenge their hegemony. From its inception, lsraeI was every bit as much about keeping the Arabs down as it was about uplifting Jews.

And so we can finally bury the idea of the 'triumph' of Western values, morals, philosophy yada yada, in the most unceremonious way at our disposal. It would all be hysterical - a Monty Python skit brought to life - if it weren't so heartbreakingly tragic. In the 20th century European colonialists made a deal with their ancient victims - European Jews - to victimize non-European people (the Palestinians) by brutally stealing land from them that supposedly had been 'promised' to the Jews - by a SKY GOD no less - centuries before Socrates and Aristotle had ever breathed air. Hardly 'the West' as it likes to see itself.


It's all as phony as the blue eyed Jesus.


Truly a tale told by an idiot, signifying nothing.


The End

"Ain't it funny how they're all Cleopatra when you gaze into their past? When you ask about their birth signs, you realize there was no need to have asked"
~ The Who, In a Hand or a Face

Ah, reincarnation. Typically a mere punchline in our 'enlightened' western culture, it is an important and fundamental element of many Asian cultures, although it is hardly limited to Asian religions. It was nearly expunged from the Bible (beyond a few references to Jesus and/or John the Baptist being reincarnations of Elijah) because church elders bent on control felt that telling people they had more than one shot at getting it right made it harder to terrify them into submission and obedience (Hell does a much better job of that), but clearly people of the Mediterranean regions from which our western culture derives were as open to the idea as were those of the Indian subcontinent at one point.
It is certainly a head scratcher. If there are eight billion people on the planet today and there were only two billion a hundred and fifty or so years ago, then the mathematics of reincarnation becomes a bit...problematic, does it not? Reincarnation is curious and paradoxical, somewhat like what Richard Feyman had to say about quantum physics - if you think you understand it, you don't.
What is reincarnation, exactly? Is it even worth considering? Is it a useful concept to aid us in our growth as individuals?
Yes, no, maybe.... get out your crystal ball, because we are diving in!
Reincarnation is a paradox. Even the question, 'do you believe in reincarnation'? is somewhat absurd. Let's say you DON'T believe in reincarnation, but it is real. That means that you in THIS life have a belief about your very own self that fails to include all the other 'selves' you have been until now. It's like the caboose saying it doesn't believe in the train that pulls it.
Or, let's say that you DO believe in reincarnation and it ISN'T real. Then you are creating a false sense of identity populated with former 'selves' which the one self that DOES exist tries to place on itself like articles of clothing. You're still YOU no matter how many 'yous' you have been in the past. It's this life, not those, where your attention needs to be. Imagine a guy on a date trying to impress a lady by saying, 'I may not make much now, but in a former life I was a multimillionaire!' and see how far that goes!
That's why reincarnation so easily becomes a punchline in our secular, 'logical' society. It sort of seems like one big absurdity begging to be parodied.
If it IS real, it is doubtful all those former versions of yourself are shaking their fists at you for not belieiving in it, and cursing you for not including them in what you call yourself. They had their own concerns that they took to the grave with them.
If it ISN'T real, then believing in it is just storytelling. If it's anything more than a hobby to you, then perhaps you'd be better off using your time and energy seeing to the goals, mission, responsibilities, etc. of THIS life. Even if you were an accountant in a former life, he or she is not going to help you prepare your taxes.
But still, the question remains; is it something that really happens? We can't dismiss the concept of reincarnation (or rebirth) altogether, largely for two reasons. The first is the more compelling. There ARE cases of people, typically children, who have given accounts of former lives, ranging from the description of places (which turn out to exist) to clear memories of themselves as former people, with jobs and families. Some even include familiarity with other languages the child has never been exposed to.
Are there a lot of these? No, not in general population terms. Do some of them fall apart under critical examination? Of course. Do ALL of them? No. If even two or three cases involve a person being able to give an informed account of pre-birth experiences, including some familiarity with a former mother tongue - with no possibility of having come into this knowledge in any other way - then the book on the subject is clearly open.
The other is hardly a slam dunk, but I find it interesting. It has to do with prodigies. There are cases of children, even very young ones, displaying extraordinary talents, such as in the arts. As with the reason given above, there are most certainly examples of this which invite curiosity. Children who, for example, pick up a paintbrush for the first time at six and produce truly extraordinary artwork. Where did the talent come from? By any measure, prodigies are an interesting subject of inquiry into the ways of the human mind, whether or not one wishes to admit the possibility of former lives. Personally, I feel that some of these cases give every indication of a child carrying over talents acquired through former lives’ experiences. This is an opinion, nothing more. Either way, reincarnation, and the evidence as such for its existence, is not something that interests me greatly.
What DOES interest me is the question of how these past ‘yous' - if indeed they do exist - figure into a cosmos based on the principle of All being One? If, as I maintain and often declare, everything including the personality and all our thoughts and experiences, are nothing more than mere temporary expressions of Self/Source and have no 'reality' other than as such, then how might we come to look at the incarnational sojourn?
If all are One, what is the point of reincarnation/rebirth? You are EVERYTHING; you are every human who has ever lived. Heck, you are every Neanderthal who ever once lived. You are every speckle of color on every butterfly's wing. ALL of it emanates from a single Source, and that Source is what YOU are. Therefore, why even bother with multiple lifetimes as one individualized consciousness?
Think of it this way. Let's suppose that you come across a painting that strikes you. It's by an artist you have never heard of, but for the sake of clarification, let's make this artist famous. So you see a brilliant painting by Gustav Klimt, and you've never seen his work before. You are spellbound! You want to see more works by this wonderful artist. Lucky you, because it just so happens that there is a retrospective of Klimt's work at your city's museum. You go and are enchanted.
The first painting gave you some information about the artist, Gustav Klimt. His unique vision was shared with you, but only very partially. The retrospective changed that. After viewing it, you now have a more complete vision of his genius. The one painting you first saw could not possibly have conveyed as much of the artistic genius of Gustav Klimt as the retrospective exhibition did. All those works together do a much better job of revealing him to you.
Reincarnation can be likened to this. You are like one painting, and your (re)incarnating lineage is like the total oeuvre of an artist. Your many lives taken together are like a retrospective exhibition of a soul's journey.
Now, obviously, that retrospective of Klimt's work, as comprehensive and revealing as it was, still left out most of the entire picture of Klimt. His thoughts, his relationships, his meals and sexual encounters, religious beliefs, vacations, etc. Very little of the totality of the man can be understood or engaged with simply by looking at what he did with paint, brushes and canvases.
Thus, as a painting represents one small aspect of an artist, and a retrospective exhibition of his/her works represents a much larger aspect of him/her while still only representing one small aspect of the total person, similarly does the incarnational sojourn come into clarity. Klimt represents Source/Self, the retrospective exhibition represents one particular expression of Source/Self played out across lifetimes, and one painting by Klimt (the one you fell in love with) represents You! We could take it even further, of course. You could be one single brushstroke on that one painting in that one oeuvre of that one artist who was oh so much more than just his/her artistic output.
The Source expresses, as is Its nature. 'You' may have lived as an Egyptian slave working on the Great Pyramid of Cheops, and as a can can dancer in fin de siecle France, and so on, and those former lives will have influenced the person you are today. But all that is still a mere particle of your TRUE self, which is Everything and All Eternally.