Good Evening Ladies and Gentlemen. It's been a long time, and yet no time at all, since time is a made up construct anyhow. I have been writing a book. It has been slow going for the Goose Wrangler. I completely lost my mind, end of last January. It wasn't the first time. It all started when it never began, and a clever monkey told a story about itself that it never proved was true.
So here I am in the middle of the night, writing directly into the Googley Blogger, because I must. I have to express myself in some other platform than facebook, where I seem to post endlessly about Bernie Sanders.
This book is about the power that fundamental myths, embedded in our culture, have on our personal, and social psychology.
I started a non-profit called the Open Mind Project a few years ago after I went to graduate school and studied some of the dominant narratives, usually known as religions, on this planet at this time. I'm not going to try and tell you that I embarked on this journey for unselfish reasons.
I fell in love with a girl 18 years ago that I didn't deserve. She came from a different world, and belonged to a different religion, because back then I thought I was a Christian, and her being Jewish, which Sunflower Girl was, would mean I had to change something because she wanted to be with a Jewish guy. That was long before I went to seminary and learned that when Christianity began being Jewish was a prerequisite.
This girl, who is now a woman that I do my best to leave alone, who I screwed up with all those years ago, has been the best muse I could have imagined. When I say muse, I suppose I mean reluctant teacher. She set me on this bizarre path of self-so-called-improvement that has lead me to the discovery that there might not be anything to improve other than the idea that there is something to improve. If I hadn't fallen in love I might not have lost my mind.
This book, that i'm writing out an introduction to in a blog, that I might post on the Open Mind Project, is about how the Abrahamic myth has helped build the world we inhabit, occupy, and create. If you can read this, I count you as part of this world.
If I hadn't already lost my mind it might not have been so easy for me to admit that I was crazy. I've had the privilege of experiencing 3 major psychotic episodes. In fact, these experiences, traumatic as they've been for me and others, have helped to give me a perspective I cannot begin to express my gratitude for.
Once a person has really experienced the irrationality of a mind that believes it's rational, that person can no longer assume its thoughts are "true."
I have trouble imagining that, as a society, we can begin to achieve sanity until we admit that we're really all a part of a very insane culture that likes to call itself civilized while it rapes its life supporting surroundings.
Our science seems to suggest that we are part of nature. It seems that our belief that we are separate from nature has caused us to act in ways that are not in our best interest as a species. Our science has demonstrated that we are indeed a part of the natural world. If we are simply a self-identified "smart-monkey" then we better not take our ideas and beliefs so seriously. We are the self-identified monkey who named itself "Homo Sapiens," that is "The Wise Person," or smart man.
According to the Tao Te Ching, written over two thousand years ago, the man who thinks he is wise, is not wise. Yet the science invented by this seemingly not-so-wise-person has demonstrated that it's related to all the rest of nature, including the monkeys it thought it was so much more advanced than.
This book is about upgrading our mental operating system to reflect the particular context we are met with after a few thousand years of agriculture, and the belief systems that accompanied it, which have conquered the planet. These outdated beliefs are based on the harmful idea that we are separate from nature and have something to fear from things as they are.
The point of the Open Mind Project is to offer possibilities based on a philosophy of not-knowing. The idea is that we don't have to understand how the whole universe operates. We don't have to believe that any outcome is certain. We can live in the present and respond to present circumstances.
My hypothesis is that under alternative psychological conditioning we can reasonably expect different collective behavior, along with a different set of environmental consequences resulting from that alternative collective behavior. If we change the fundamental psychological operating system of a large group of humans then we will also alter the outcomes that stem from the culture made up of those humans. We are presently acting as a collective culture of consumption, and our so-called civilization is destroying the very interrelated natural ecosystems of which we are a part.
We put our faith in something we invented, and presently we refer to it as "the free market." It has to constantly expand in order to facilitate a false premise of never ending growth. The economy we've built is based on a religious assumption of a linear universe, with a beginning, middle, and end. According to this unsubstantiated assumption, about which our understanding of reality is based, there is an expectation that an external deity will interrupt observable reality and end this universe as we know it. I argue that the more a belief in the hope of an apocalyptic end permeates human consciousness, the more influenced we will be to unconsciously bring about that end we've been taught to expect.
So are we are bringing about consequences that are to the detriment of our very life support system, a healthy earth, upon which we depend for our own existence?
This book suggests that we can, through an alternative psychological conditioning system, bring about an alternative set of outcomes.
