Dear Humanity,
I'm
writing you out of love and concern for your well being. You are both
wondrous and wonderful and I would hate to see you go. You know that
you are sick but you are still confused about what the ailment is and
what to do about it. I know that you are smart and I think you are
figuring it all out. As an honest being you are consuming and
assimilating your accumulated knowledge, all points of view, for
without it you are blind. Your vision is still very blurred but I
believe we can fix that fairly easily, so long as you want to, and I
believe you do.
I don't know what you know and as yet
you don't know what I know, but at least I am listening to you and I
hope that you continue to listen to me, especially since I am you
also. My language is not refined and my humour is often
misunderstood, I can be dry and academic, I can be imaginative and
poetic, I can be confusing or even crass, I can be brilliant but make
the most obvious mistakes, my words have meanings to me that may be
slightly different in meaning to you, but still I think it is
possible that you might hear me, so I shall continue.
Brains
I want to talk about brains for a
moment. Brains, I believe, will be the agents of your journey to
health. Every living being has one. They all function at different
rates, assessing different kinds of data. They are made up of
trillions of neurons all talking to each other. Each neuron
experiencing the world around it and responding in the ways it has
learned. A brain can be sick, and it is notable by its overall
dysfunction. Internally we find that the brain has ceased to
communicate properly, with regions and functions chattering away but
other regions and functions unable to receive or interpret the
messages properly. Some neurons attack other neurons, functions or
even whole regions in the belief that everything else is the problem,
oblivious to the fact that the problem is the miscommunication and
thus only adding to the problem. If only we could just fix those
lines of communication then we might at least ease the suffering if
not cure the ailment. Is it possible that a single neuron or perhaps
a small group of neurons could hold the key to this puzzle? And if it
were possible would that tiny region or function of the brain be able
to get through to the rest of the brain? It seems like a tough
challenge but I see it beginning to work. One neuron is chattering
wildly into the white noise around it, burning up far more energy
that in needs, poisoning itself and those around it with some
misguided notion that its frantic behaviour is the only way to behave
and to communicate. Something changes, perhaps the series of events
that has shaped our brain has led inexorably to a change in the
neuron, but has not affected others yet. The neuron stops chattering
wildly and starts doing what it should be doing. It has stopped
attacking its fellow neurons and the attacks from them are tailing
off as they always do. Its new found behaviour is much more relaxed,
self aware and soothing to those around it. It turns out that this
behaviour is communicating the means by which it became content and
calm and gave rise to its new-found and considerably more harmonious
function. Very soon all of its 'friends' or 'family' are doing what
they should do and they continue to do because they like it. One
might liken this phenomenon with a virus, but then that is the nature
of ideas at every level, both good and bad. Luckily neurons do know
what is good even if they have temporarily been distracted by fear,
anger, sorrow, guilt or any of those intense emotional experiences
that can wash through the population, derailing it from proper course
for a while, but it finds its way again. Saner heads prevail. The
destructive levels of emotion start slowly to drain away and as the
harmonious neurons grow in number their soothing song soon resonates
throughout the population thus restoring balance between heart and
mind.
As you can hopefully see with my
description of the brain here that I am weaving in and out between
observable reality and philosophy or religion as some might prefer to
call it, whilst creating a metaphor, analogy or model. The
interaction of neurons is very much like the interaction of humans,
and in fact of all life. There is a sizzling roar of communication at
every conceivable level in what we call life, assuming you are
prepared to stretch your conception of the term communication for the
purposes of understanding what I am trying to tell you. If you are
prepared to do that then it does not take much more of a stretch to
see that the Earth has both a body and a brain. It has the means of
its own self sustenance for quite some time to come, so there is good
reason to be hopeful.
To the Stars
Is the Earth brain the only planetary
brain? Is it merely a neuron trying to reach maturity where it might
start to communicate with other neurons. How many other neurons are
there? Are any of them already communicating? I don't know, but the
Universe seems awfully big and it would seem like a terrible waste of
space if there weren't other neurons. Imagine the life forms that may
have emerged in different galaxies, their strange but beautiful
technologies. Life may have arisen in many places but never having
reached maturity, dying out before ever having the enlightening and
rapturous experience of reaching out to the stars and communicating
with others. We are tantalizingly close to being able to reach out
but we are not quite there yet, and our sick brain is squinting in
the bright glare of its own activity, on the verge of seeing with
clarity but also perilously close to a fatal fall as it blunders
forward.
The Tower of Babel
There is a tale told in the Bible about
something called the Tower of Babel. The story goes that men tried to
build a tower to reach the place of God, and God brought down the
tower and scrambled the languages of men so that they could not
collaborate in such a plan again, or so he thought...
A tower is a structure, constructed
from substructures and layers. It is hierarchical in construction,
and it is this that we should be looking for if we want to unveil
'T2'. Hierarchy is widespread in human society today though contrary
to common belief it is not necessarily a fixed formation in human
gatherings and organisations. Many ancient and even remote modern
cultures are virtually structureless or flat. In the Western World,
we see towers reaching to the sky all around us but most of the time
fail to see that they are mostly substructures. What separates us
from flat societies is an idea that gained footing before the Romans;
that depriving other sentient beings of life and liberty is good
practice. The idea has been passed by various means but usually from
parent to child.
The McDonald’s lettuce washer reports
to the floor manager. The floor manager reports to the site franchise
manager. The site franchise manager reports to the regional franchise
manager. The regional franchise manager reports to the franchise
general manager. The franchise general manager reports to the board
of directors. The board of directors reports to the shareholders. The
shareholding corporation market subsidiaries manager reports to the
conglomerate management. The conglomerate management reports to the
conglomerate board of directors. The conglomerate board of directors
reports to the conglomerate shareholders. The conglomerate
shareholders give 'donations' to the campaigns of politicians who
will best represent them, and maybe arrange for the other politicians
interested in their line of business to have other things to worry
about, like where their children are right now, whether will they be
embroiled in a sex scandal in the morning, or perhaps whether they
will have an unfortunate 'accident' in their car on the way home.
Here we have 9 tiers of commercial
hierarchy, and a fairly typical arrangement too. Each tier coercing
the tier below, usually with the threat of losing their job for more
mundane matters..., and ensuring their complicity and compliance in
whatever agenda the tier above is operating. This is one way
communication. Top down.
So up there amongst the gods, we have
military moguls who do so well out of death by metal and other forms
of chemistry, banking moguls who own most of the planet, oil moguls
who are doing so well from poisoning us all to death, the Biotech
moguls who are doing so well out of experimenting on us and
engineering the seeds of life to replace us. It scares us all, but it
is what we have done, not 'they'. Every time you have deferred to
someone else's orders you have been complicit in the crime or
malfunction of the whole. You start to reduce your communication
towards your assailant and defer more and more, just as a trigger
defers to the finger. The communication becomes more and more
unidirectional appearing to lead unavoidably toward a single outcome.
Except you are not a trigger and they are not fingers. You can keep
trying to communicate and even improve communication. You know you
can, you have done it before. So why give up now? Why accept defeat?
Why shouldn’t your point of view at least be heard? Well it wont if
you don't try. It's really up to you. No one else. You.
Way up on the belfry of our tower, the
wind currents are strong and the passengers on deck still cannot see
through the clouds. They can however feel the discontent down below
that is causing the tower to wobble. They fear the wobbling at these
great heights. They also fear the ground because it has been so long
since they were part of the ground dwelling people that they have
forgotten that it is no more or less honourable, stimulating or
pleasurable to be a ground dweller. They have forgotten that they are
no closer to the mind of God or nature than any of us. They don't
seem to care that people are being crushed needlessly under the
weight and blindness of structures they ride contently. In fear of
their own demise they issue more assertive orders to down below, but
down below is still in shock from the last stumble and is busy trying
to survive it but failing to communicate back effectively, that the
tower is not going to hold much longer, and that there is nothing
left to do but take it down carefully if everyone is to make it out
alive. We don't know for sure if we can all make it out alive but we
do know that we won't if we keep the tower up much longer.
Finding the Right Words
Everyone needs and deserves their
freedom, no matter what they have done before. We have all
participated at some level in the greatest evils of our time but
should not forget that at the same time we have all participated in
our greatest good. Blaming others is hypocrisy. It is what
dysfunctional neurons do in their often short and unhappy lives. We
have to stop punishing each other, because we are all responsible.
The saviour neuron leads by example not by hypocrisy. Every neuron
can be a saviour, it just has to stop shouting and to start listening
whilst singing softly in harmonious awe and rapture at all around it.
Many of us have found this pleasant and calm state but we call it by
different names. 'Finding god' and 'being at one with the universe'
will ring cheerful bells to many even if they find the other name
strange or believe it to be wrong. But therein may just lie yet
another broken line of communication. Every single word we know has a
meaning unique to each of us that is a composite of what has gone
before from our experiences to our chemistry. We are right about some
things and wrong about others. Which is which we can never know,
though we may believe. So long as we do not hurt each other or
threaten each others only means of survival, so long as we don't nor
bully or dominate and so long as we try to communicate instead of
giving up, we have a chance to communicate and find blissful union
with what we thought we had lost.
Finding the right words to communicate
with your neighbour is something that you are already expert in. You
can communicate well with your neighbour even if I cannot. If you
find accord or inspiration with this letter you may want to write
your own. You may rewrite this letter and translate it into the
language that you share with your neighbours. I do not own this
letter any more or less than you do. It is yours to do with as you
see fit. Likewise no one owns this planet any more or any less than
you or I do and is ours to do with as we see fit. Seeing fit is what
we must do. If you want to dismantle the tower then you will have to speak your every langauge once again.
I ask of you only this; if you
translate this message, that you append your name below. Then we
might gather a chain of letters and start to understand the meanings
of words to and by those most distant from our own. If you want to
send me a copy of your translation I will be very happy to receive it
and read it.
Your loving neuron,
Ian Kirwan
