LEVITATING OVER THE PRISON WALLS: It can be done (sections 3 and 4)

3.

PKD realized this world is deranged, to the point it destroys any attempts to heal it. But the physician (the plasmate) is moved by love, and risks all to plant the seeds of knowledge: that this psychosomatic illness is easily treated, once one becomes aware of what it is that is really wrong. The homoplasmate enables healing, at least among those who seek it, desire it, allow it. It is the anti-virus, the meta-virus. It is the outstretched hand of the universe, eternally waiting for a response to its invitation. It is beauty. It is love. It is the physician. It is what enables us to put the pieces (of the Deranged Mind) back together. From the disparate pieces emerges the One, the All, the Light. The heavenly chorus sings Hallelujah; the golden cords illuminated stretch from each of us, to each of us. We become connected—online, mechanomorphically speaking.

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THE VIRTUE AND EASE OF NON-STRIVING (BLOOMING, WILTING, REPEATING…)

My legacy —
What will it be?
Flowers in spring,
The cuckoo in summer,
And the crimson maples
Of autumn.
—Ryokan

~

Sitting with a lovely Lebanese gypsy girl in Oregon one night (she was telling me about her love for owls), I said something about my love for the wilderness, generally.  We were on a porch, surrounded by lovely trees, a strip of city coming between the houses across the street.  “Of course,” she said.  “That’s what’s real.”  She motioned to the city.  “Everything else is just made up!”

We laughed for a long time.

~

Humans have a strange disposition in the community of life; they imagine that work is necessary to survive, that life must be manufactured, created, quite literally made up. Strife of all kind is the cost of maintaining stability in a human-created environment. Even at the dawn of the agricultural revolution we can see this struggle in full sway: a fundamental shift occurred in which food had to be forced from the ground, it had to be worked for, instead of it arising freely of its own accord.  A fundamental faith in the giving power of the earth and our place within its womb turned to alienation, and a war of all against all.  Here I scorn Hobbes as much as Darwin.

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MOOOOOO!: The many corrals of the modern world

Guest writer, Cody Meyocks, brings us an insightful ditty on drawn-and-quartered time and space. Beware ye of the many faces of segmented existence.

Corrals. Everywhere I look I see corrals. That’s the divine design of harvest: the squared off, the segmented. The fence. The enforced limit. All beings within are plundered of their spirits, domesticated, throttled by control…. Farms. Factories (the farmers of farms). Prisons. Schools. Mental hospitals. Offices. Malls. Capitals. All share the same structural foundations: the clock’s segmentation of time and the wall’s segmentation of space, whose combination forms the mechanical artifice of routine. If you don’t want to play the game of mechanized routine, just try it. They have places for you where a routine will be firmly enforced under penalty of bludgeoning, or drugs, or isolation, or death, or by making you pass more turns of the clock in their confines, until your lesson is learned. If you do play along, however, you’re corralled no less. You submit to the reins of routine, the the grand march of Civilization, of History. It’s a double bind, you see. It’s a double bind.

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SEEDS IN FRUIT & THE LIMITS OF MY CRITIQUE: How the GMO of it all can still get me

Seedless

As I sit here, having just finished my winter grapefruit, savoring the tingly succulence of my newly awakened tongue, I think of all the times I’ve eaten fruit when my experience was hindered by the presence of overzealous seeds.

Call them “pits,” call them “pips,” either way you label them, these little necessities of life have remained a thorn in my otherwise comfortable critique of genetically modified foods and the idea of “civilization” as a whole. I am aware of the role they play, and yet still sometimes loath their presence. I get frustrated with interrupted bites, but am aware of the lesser, worse option: edible laboratories. And yet, still, seeds are an example of the tiny points at which my allegiance to comfort rests on the idea that the world around me should be redesigned to fit my own desires.

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