Karmic interludes on a burning ship

When the ship is on fire you don't sit around and debate whether it is or not. You grab a hose and point. It's all hands on deck. It's not a time to practice the socratic method in determining how bad it is. Industrial civilization is the fuel for this fire. Purge the boat of fuel, use the fire hoses to suppress the fire - turn the lights off, shut down the power plants, decommission the nukes, stop the incessant slaughter houses, chicken mills, crop dusting, tractor dozing, car making, mining, damming, road building, refining, drilling, processing, manufacturing, printing, tree cutting, harpooning, commercial fishing, and stop making babies. Leave the grass, tree's, bee's, flowers, bugs, wolves, and fish alone for a while. Let go. Trust the planet because it knows how to give everything we need.



We could indeed put the fires out if we acknowledge the ship is on fire and come to attention. Look to your right, look to your left, and grab a fire hose. On command, point and work back and forth in a cone pattern working your way through the ship. The analogy is simple because it needs to be, we're really not that smart, more amygdala driven than anything.

Our pleasure seeking fat brain is largely governed by that little thing. The ship is our world, the Earth; which is not to mean it's "our" Earth because it's not, but rather we're the Earth's animal. We have started a fire that began deep down in the holds and has spread throughout the ship, that fire is civilization. It was one thing to have a fire out on the deck, controlled by ecological checks and balances (predation and natural diseases), but it's entirely different to let it burn everywhere. We are acting like yeast in vat of sugar, doomed to a yeast apocalypse. If we don't want the ship to be a floating burned out hull we better start stomping out the fires which are now burning everywhere. That fire is a 10,000 year old living arrangement we have been orchestrating from one spot of the ship to the other, and now it's everywhere. Stomping it out is merely snuffing out the fire's air - our consent to live that way. Once we do that, sit back, clean things up, and don't start anymore fires.  But we're not going to do this to any degree that matters, not willingly at any rate, and so we're going to have to embrace the mortality of the species. Homo Sapiens cannot live without the tree's, the water, the bee's, and all the stuff that really matters, the stuff of legend and natural power. Real power laugh's at our rough-necking and god want-a-be hubris, and that power is always ready to drop us to our knee's when the fancy arises. Just the mighty sun alone could slap mankind back to the stone age with one magnetic plasma belch pointed at us like a loaded shotgun. How beautiful the aurora's would be, no? The exploding transformers and substations would be like sparklers on the fourth of July, celebrated by the frogs and fireflies. Smile - I would. More likely though, our own fires will burn us. Consider if you would the Fukushima reactor cores, now melting deep below their once tidy but broken containment shells, flushing and hissing high energy matter capable of zapping DNA into malignant manifestations. See here The fire is racing out to the ocean seeding it with cancer causing death to be washed ashore on the tides and consumed by the animals feasting on the flesh. We did that, and have taken no lessen from it. No, we do the complete opposite and are busily making more of these suicidal sources of power. We have made a fine tool for seppuku, but it's a blade we stick in everything. You have to wonder about a specie so enamored with energy that it seeks it at all costs, that we will pay anything, even with our lives. If only we had the logic of  Star Trek's Vulcan species. I suspect some planet in the universe has a species that might. When I die, I hope my molecules dissolve and buzz out transcendentally to that planet. I'd like to be reconstituted somewhere where the intelligent animals know not to open Pandora's box because they know and understand where the power really is. They are content not to expand and grow like a rogue cancer cell.

We had a nice run I suppose, while taking out a bunch of dazzling creatures in the process, but our specie longevity is nothing like the cycad revolutus, Alligator mississippiensis, or Limulus polyphemus. Those species have proven their superiority over homo sapiens and they have small brains or none at all. Cyanobacteria even more so. Our dazzling display of fire welding and dominance will wane and ebb into something else entirely. Growing, climaxing, withering, and then dying - the real meaning of life. The only thing immortal is this cycle. The Buddhist call it the wheel of Samsara, the wheel of life. Birth, life, death, over and over again. Karmic interludes of creation and destruction, and we are in the destruction phase of that cycle. All the things we, as a species, have taken will by necessity be taken back. Our extinction will flip the energy see-saw back the other way. All the carbon, water, and light will dissolve out of us and back into the soil, the water, and the air. How long that takes is immaterial because time has no meaning to the universe. It is always just "now."

So grab a hose and spray away, but just remember, until your neighbor and his neighbor come to attention and start understanding what all this really means, you'll be using a garden hose against a raging firestorm. Humans are really only powerful when working together as a team, and that's what it will take to put these fires out. If we're lucky, and if they do come to attention I bet most of the ship will be toast. Can't you smell it? Siberia & Colorado

 

So if any of you survive could you not play with the matches again? This mother planet will give you everything you need to be content without the fires of civilization. Look around, the other animals get what they need without burning the ship down. "Stupid is as stupid does."