Emergence 3.0 - Section Three, Earth; Part Twenty, Collective; Chapter Four, Tribe

Emergence 3.0

A Novel – In One Page Per Day

Day 144, Thursday

May 24th, 2018

Chapter Four: Tribe

There was safety in the tribe, and the ability to test one’s self through competition with peers.

There was jealousy, yes, and envy. There were customs and taboos that were well established, intending to prevent such things from having a deleterious impact on the life of the group, on its cohesion

There were shared customs, and stories, and rituals in the tribe, things that shaped both the structure of the tribe, and its future. The narratives they spun taught all of its members the means by which they could advance, redress wrongs, recover from injury, hold fast to their position.

The tribal life was essentially democratic, the members of the tribe could come and go as they pleased. There were no laws binding them to their place, there was only duty, obligation, the expectation of those who depended on you.

It was only when the migrations ended, and the tribes became fixed into villages and hamlets, that the notion that people could be treated like property advanced and class sytems became entrenched.

During the time of migrations, men and women were essentially equal, neither was the property of the other, the concept of ownership was alien and everyone had a say in the destiny of the group.

The tribe might be governed by a chief, there could be a de facto leader, especially in times of conflict. That person was more often than not merely the voice of the people, the arbiter, the mediator, the negotiator, and a judge.

In place of the single leader, more often than not, a council of elders held sway over the life of the tribe. The tribe did what it could to give every person a voice, to be inclusive. Everyone was a part of the whole.

Then there were the others.

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Emergence 3.0 - Section Three, Earth; Part Twenty, Collective; Chapter Three, Village

Emergence 3.0

A Novel – In One Page Per Day

Day 143, Wednesday

May 23rd, 2018

Chapter Three: Village

Hierarchies emerge in village life, just as they do everywhere in the animal world.

Human beings are animals after all, and in their need to establish social structures they are no different from the wolf, or the lion, or the ram.

The competition for leadership was intense. In the animal world it could be dangerous, even deadly, it was largely physical, and the strongest usually won.

Among humans the intensity was no less, but it was often more deadly, and physical strength was not the most significant indicator of primacy.

Social hierarchies formed in villages; around the well, at the markets, in the places of worship and religious life, and most importantly, in the seat judgment.

The center is everything, with social rank flowing out from it in concentric rings.

A person was either in or out of the village, either in or out of the center, with movement and access regulated between the spheres.

The beginning of cohesion around village life was the beginning of the disintegration of families, clans, and tribes.

The social order was undergoing change, metamorphosis, redefining allegiances.

These developments were not uniform, it did not happen in all places at once. It happened in key places; at the confluence of rivers, along the shores of the great inland lakes, in the desert oasis, at any place where the movements of migratory tribes would bring them together.

The villages were rising.

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Nymphs

Visions of beauty

Moving, in this quiet place

This dry-dusty room

            Dreamlike

The daughters of Zeus

Musing, inhale their perfume

Breathe, in the spirit

Timeless

           

She, just within touch

Curving, my hand at her rib

Feel that missing part

Complete

Enter the pure land

Flowering, the verdant field

Wet, sweet as honey

            Being   

           

Emergence 3.0 - Section Three, Earth; Part Twenty, Collective; Chapter Two, Kin

Emergence 3.0

A Novel – In One Page Per Day

Day 142, Tuesday

May 22st, 2018

Chapter Two: Kin

As families become clans the bonds of loyalty are fixed in the body, constructed by chemicals and enzymes, by proteins and amino acids, by the songs and rhythms unique to each group, and through which they reinforce the knowledge of their history, their ancestral memories, passing them on from one generation to the next.

These are bonds that we do not see, and we never question.

Rituals are developed to lift up and remember the common ancestors, whose great deeds, or terrible failures were such that the clans wrote songs about them, and passed them on to their children, and their children’s children.

Every person reared within the group learned to see themselves as a continuation of the clan’s broader narrative. They saw their own deeds as a reflection of the deeds of their ancestors.

They imagined their departed dead as living beside them, all around them, and they were not wrong.

The departed spoke to them through the ancestral memory, and the pattern of their consciousness remained with the clans and tribes, with the individual families, bound to the planet in the electromagnetic field called the nous-sphere.

The ritual remembering, the songs they sang, the drums the beat, these reinforced this connection and strengthened it, keeping it vital through that period when the groupings of human beings were still small enough that every person could trace their connection to the other by blood line.

They were migrating, and wandering, and navigating by the stars. They marked their narratives by the movement of the constellations, and projected their own stories into the heavens. They were together, and they were one.

Every individual saw themselves as a part of the tribe, and saw the fullness of the tribe as manifested in them. The clan was the clearest representation of the structure of human unity. It had a sufficient critical mass to draw the individual outside of themselves, and yet it was not large enough for the individual to feel lost within it. The clan was the family writ large, it was intimate, and still offered the safety of numbers.

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Emergence 3.0 - Section Three, Earth; Part Twenty, Collective; Chapter One, Family

Emergence 3.0

A Novel – In One Page Per Day

Day 141, Monday

May 21st, 2018

Chapter One: Family

The care of a loving family is like the wet, clinging mesh of a spider’s web. Humans are trapped in it, suspended, enwrapped. The majority of people who have ever lived, never lived a day apart from these sticky-bonds.

Familial obligations are invisible. We are bound by them through our emotions; by fear and love, hate, pride, anger, hope, jealousy, the feelings that bind us to our parents and our siblings, to our clans like the ligaments that join bones to muscles.

We are conditioned by rituals; by the stories we tell, the drums we play, by music, and language, by the seasons we live, and the hours of the day. We are raised in the patterns that play themselves out, in small cycles and in great.

Everything we are comes from the family, everything we do redounds to the family name,the name of our clan, our tribe, our village, our state.

Our identities are completely enmeshed with the identity of the group we are raised in. Only the most profound betrayal can break the patterns we are raised to live by, and even then, those who break free from their familial identity, or through no choice of their own are cast out from it, they leave and recreate the same structures in places with new people.

The individual can be raised up, lifted high, made strong by their family and tribe.

They can also be shunted, marginalized, and cast aside.

Families have a tendency to cannibalize their strength, in times of great need they will go so far as to eat their own, or set up the strongest and most beautiful as holy victims for the gods they worship.

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A Homily – John 15:26-27,16:12-15 ©

The Gospel According to John – 2018.05.19

Truth and Advocacy

Read the Gospel for today and know this.

There is no deception on God, no falsehood, no fabrication, no prevarication.

The divine does not lie. Those who claim to speak for the divine must not lie or mislead, cover-up or hide.

Know this.

We are all human and we are prone to error, but there is no error in God.

When those who have ascended to positions of leadership in Christian communities lie to you, then you must reject them.

Some will commit errors because they are honestly confused, but many other commit error that are willful. They know they are lying to you and they do it anyway; they do it for wealth, they do it for power, they do it to hide from their shame.

These people have abandoned Jesus, maybe not in the whole of their lives, but in their lying they have, and every time they repeat their lies they do.

Know this, we have all forsaken God at one time or another, but God has never forsaken us. God never will.

This is the truth.

The Spirit of truth will lead you to the complete truth

Jesus said to his disciples:

‘When the Advocate comes, whom I shall send to you from the Father, the Spirit of truth who issues from the Father, he will be my witness.

And you too will be witnesses, because you have been with me from the outset.

‘I still have many things to say to you but they would be too much for you now.

But when the Spirit of truth comes he will lead you to the complete truth, since he will not be speaking as from himself but will say only what he has learnt; and he will tell you of the things to come.

He will glorify me, since all he tells you will be taken from what is mine.

Everything the Father has is mine; that is why I said:

All he tells you will be taken from what is mine.’in my power to take it up again; and this is the command I have been given by my Father.’

Pentecost

Emergence 3.0 - Section Three, Earth; Part Nineteen, Consciousness; Chapter Seven, Other Self

Emergence 3.0

A Novel – In One Page Per Day

Day 140, Sunday

May 20th, 2018

Chapter Seven: Other Self

As we become self-aware we also become “other-aware.” We struggle with the full array of human emotions. We feel the flood of neuro-chemicals, and learn the mechanae to regulate them. The most significant among them being fear.

Fear lodged deep within the limbic system, in the far reaches of the “reptilian” brain, in the spine, and the neural network flowing out from it into our extremities.

We come into the knowledge of self, fearing any and all others, seeing them first as danger, as threat, every other person we encounter, accept the mother who gave birth to us, who is our anchor to our memory of the womb.

Every person has a different learning curve, a unique capacity for the things of their experience they remember, recall and contextualize.

The acquisition of language gives us a taxonomy, the linguistic tools to understand these differentiations: self, mother, father self, brother, sister, self…it is a code that grows and continues to grow.

It is open ended: self, uncle, aunt, self, cousin, self, offspring, self, niece, nephew, self, spouse, self, friend, self…

It is through kinship, by relating to those whom we believe share our deepest interests that we learn to see strangers as other-selves, even an adversary can take on the aspect of another self.

There are language games, there is neuro-linguistic programming in every culture that can force these issues. They combine word and action, feelings and mystery, through rituals of shame, fear, and empowerment, which can break down barriers, and move a person rapidly through every stage of acceptance in regard to another. Religion, and ritual, military service and shared suffering among them.

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Fear, Anger, Hate, and Violence - Part II

Editorial, The Week in Review – Analysis, Commentary, Opinion

05.19.2018

There was another school shooting yesterday.

In Santa Fe, Texas, a teenage boy with a shotgun and a revolver, guns he had taken from his dad, went to his school and killed ten people, his classmates, and others. He wounded ten more, including the police officer who attempted to confront him, now lying critically injured, in the hospital.

People are saying he was bullied by his classmates and coaches, offering that as an excuse.

Maybe he was

He is also a wannabe Nazi, NRA supporting, Trump trumpeter; his online profile was filled with hateful propaganda. He coldly murdered ten people, and wounded ten more.

He is a white-boy, a mass murderer, and they took him alive.

Fear and anger, hate and violence, they found a place in this boy’s heart.

Maybe he was bullied, that does not explain his crimes.

I was bullied as a boy. Millions of kids are bullied, who do not become bullies themselves, or murderers.

The seeds of hate were planted in his heart, they were nurtured with fear and anger until they blossomed in a horrific act of violence.

Another common flower growing in our community garden, its bright petal grabbing our attention for a moment, before they drop, and recede like an ordinary weed, soon to be forgotten.

Emergence 3.0 - Section Three, Earth; Part Nineteen, Consciousness; Chapter Six, Family

Emergence 3.0

A Novel – In One Page Per Day

Day 139, Saturday

May 19th, 2018

Chapter Six: Family

It is no small thing to reprogram the animal brain, to take the essentially selfish organism and transform it into something new. The suspicious creatures, becomes altruistic, through experience, through the bonding of the senses, and by neural linguistic programming. 

The first stage is complete when the individual person comes to see the family as an extension of the self; their well-being, their fate, tied to the fate and the well-being of others, both in this life and the next.

The brain is an evolving structure. It mutates, both over the course of the life of the individual, and it by procreation, from generation to generation.

Most of the mutations are not visible or even noticeably structural. They are packed into the dense tissues in the neural network of the brain.

With every new experience a new thread is spun, as thin as a sequence of proteins, and the organ of the brain is changed, at the same time the code inside the cells is rewritten, peptides and amino acid redraft the genetic sequence, and the inheritance that is passed on to succeeding generations grows.

The greatest periods of growth and change are infancy and childhood. When every sound and sight, every smell and touch, every taste is actively changing the nascent being, especially at this time when they are learning the language of its family and tribe.

The human being will begin to see the human being will begin to see the well-being of the family and tribe, of the other, as in alignment with their own, identical to it, without regard for the hurts, and minor competitions that ensued while growing together.

We will protect those closest to us with ferocity equal to our own drive for safety, because they have in reality become a part of who we are, our relationship to them, our memories of them have changed our genetic codes, and the physical structure of the brain.

Blood and family, they bind us.

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