27 Intuitions

By Alex Blum

I.

We are the conquerors of nature, the masters of materiality

And yet we will be destroyed by our own mastery

Climate change is this very reckoning, endemic to our nature

The very fuel we burn to survive will seal our own destruction

The means of industry ensure its own demise, it is the snake swallowing its own tail

Will we gag on it?

II.

Christ, forsaken. Christ, aborted. Christ, refused.

We are an empire that worships a pacifist who was crucified by an empire

Everyone supposedly believes in a God of infinite love, and yet they stand for nothing, they will not practice what they preach

The hollow church feels no empathy, not even when crucifixions occur in their own nation:

The black Americans nailed and burned, bled and beaten, the chance for true empathy to arise

And the white church said no. It stood by, and preached hypocrisy, empty empty words with no action behind them

Where were you when they crucified our Lord?

We were masturbating

III.

On 9/11, we cry

In Iraq, we justify

We look at the other, blind to ourselves

“Look at Putin, he’s a barbarian!”

We’ve killed a million people in Iraq and have now salted the lands with depleted uranium

“Look at them! Look at how bad the Russians are!”

Twenty-one women and fourteen children, killed by a drone

“My God, Putin is evil!”

Anything but looking within, anything but confronting ourselves

In the end, we can only control our selves

What does it say about us when we sit atop a mountain of bones and point at others?

IV.

I have an argument that is not an argument

It is nothing but a recognition of experience

When we feel loss, when we feel suffering in our own lives, do we justify it?

No, because it is our suffering

We can only justify their suffering

But who are we? Who are they?

Everyone is the self and the other, it is all purely relative to who we happen to be

When my mother is shot dead by your soldiers, it is a moral abomination

When your mother is shot dead by my soldiers, it is a necessary action

Necessary for what?

The interests of the state

If we place the interests of the state above the lives of others, then others will do the same to us

The world will be built on nothing but hypocrisy, and whoever has the power to kill is happy

Those who get killed must writhe in agony

This is the world we live in

The moral insanity must be transcended.

V.

To justify the death of the other, in Yemen or Iraq or Vietnam or anywhere,

Is to justify your own death

Unless you are a slave to your relative perspective,

All lives are lives

All daughters are daughters

All sons are sons

When I kill your son in a bombing raid, I have killed my own son too

All it would take is the happenstance of birth

If I was born in Iraq instead of America, it would be me dying

It is all of us dying

We have killed the other, and we have killed the self

VI.

“Morality is subjective” says the postmodernist.

A child in Gaza is shot in the head

What is at all subjective about that?

The baseline action of murdering a child – can we justify it?

Only if we can we justify the murder of our own children

This is a bedrock of moral principle that no theory can crush

Why would you abandon this truism? Why lose your moral core for the sake of a power hungry consensus?

Stand strong for the clarity of morality

VII.

Evolution is the means through which all is revealed

The means through which form unfolds

From the atom to the covalent bond, the covalent bond to the biological brain, and from the complexity of brain to the inner landscape of thought, the world unfolds

We are the inheritors of this grand unfolding

The complexity of mind is our claim to prodigy

From matter emerges mind, from mind emerges the aesthetic world

Evolution is the alchemy through which slimes becomes human

From the primordial ooze, conscious apes shall evolve

Why is it so? No one knows

Who are we to the stars? Who are we to the atoms in our flesh, to the chemical bonds in our eyes?

The world is a process, not a thing

It unfolds, and each stage is incoherent until it mystifies us all by actually occurring

Ten billion years ago, the concept of life was incoherent

Half a million years ago, the idea of conscious apes was worse than incoherent

Try to explain the mind to someone, it is still incoherent that matter should think.

From matter can rise mind, and thus all is possible

What is the next stage? Who can even conceive of it?

VIII.

Complexity is a pyramid

From mathematics to physics, to chemistry, biology, to mind

Those who squash the wonder reduce it this way

And yet

Mind reduces to biology, to chemistry, to physics, to mathematics

What is mathematics but a construction of mind?

Dennett weeps

The snake swallows its own tail

We still know nothing

IX.

Complexity is a pyramid

It stacks its achievements into the most fragile of places

All the world of mind, held within a skull

But as the stakes rise, so do the rewards

In the world of physics, things are not so interesting

The world is just ‘a thing in which atoms run’

In chemistry, things are a bit more interesting

There is water, there are stars

In biology, the world astonishes all

Feeling, sensing, perceiving, struggling

The need to survive

And in the pinnacle of biological complexity, the human mind,

Things get quite interesting

And the skull is quite frail

The stakes are higher than ever

Things are more complex and more interconnected than they ever were

We build a tower buffeted by the wind

X.

The hands are the will

The lungs are the breath

The collapse of dualism is a beautiful thing indeed

The colors of the heart, colors of the rippling wind

The fire and the fury, the empathy and the passion,

The aesthetic depth of the world knows no bounds

That which we only know through experience, that which is left out by every theory

That which ape language cannot approach

Why should there be such depth in the lives of apes?

Biology is a beautiful mystery

XI.

Whenever you feel true existential despair, consider this:

It was darkness that allowed us to exist at all

At the end of the Cretaceous period, the sky was seized with dust

It was a true apocalypse

Acid rain, poisonous air

The sun blotted out for days

It must have seemed like the absolute end, the truest demise of all life

And yet a rat still lived

And gave way to the whole world of mammals

If we had gazed into the darkened sky and breathed in poison air, we would have surrendered

And missed our own existence

Mass extinction gave way to creation unbound

Even in the wake of overwhelming death, the world’s greatest wonders were yet to unfold

They are still yet to unfold

XII.

The sun is an altruist

It pours light into the world, waging war against entropy

It is by virtue of the sun that life has evolved

All things break, all thing fade, all things decay

And the sun creates anyway

Until it has no energy left, it will provide

In its final days, it will expand and consume the whole world

Planet by planet will be absorbed in its light

Though the flesh is seared, the light overpowers all

And then it cools

Shrinking

A White dwarf

And then black

The sun rests for all time, its purpose fulfilled

All that light, all that energy, and for what?

So that hands could evolve

The rest is up to us

XIII.

Christ, Lucifer, Vishnu, Shiva, Apollo, Amaterasu, Mara and Thor

The compendium of the soul

Who are these figures? How should we view them?

As patterns. Movement in a direction.

With evolution, they complexity

We personify them in human minds

Our interpretation becomes a cultural meme

And yet what are we interpreting?

The fundamental forces of man,

Through beautiful metaphor

XIV.

This is no democracy

I stand for universal health care

I can vote for nobody (except Sanders)

I stand for moral honesty, for the end of the killing of the other

I can vote for nobody (not even Sanders)

‘Hope and change’

Shall I translate?

Drones, NSA, and airstrikes on ISIS

ISIS was founded in 2003, in the wake of the American occupation. I wonder why

We create demons and kill them

We pat ourselves on the back for it

And point only at others

This is spiritual darkness

XV.

Complexity is a pyramid

Beyond mind could emerge the next step in the unfolding of reality

Within the imagination, within thought, a new primordial ooze may be formed

It is thus our obligation to explore mind to its fullest extent,

To pierce through all limits and usher creative light into the world!

But where are we as a species?

Turning away from mind, away from complexity

Chained to base survival, money has become the means through which all is revealed

Money, a demand on another person to work

And what do we work for?

Money!

The snake can swallow itself no further

What does it mean to be human in the year 2015?

To sit on such evolutionary prodigy and squander it all.

XVI.

We should exude empathy

When we walk past one another, why do you look straight ahead? Such forced tunnel vision?

We both chose to go here

You’re human, and so am I

Why not at least acknowledge each other’s humanity?

XVII.

This is the moral truism our entire civilization must face:

“If it isn’t justified when it’s your loved ones being killed, then it isn’t justified when it’s someone else’s”

It’s as simple as that

Only a monster would justify the deaths of twenty children. Nobody justifies Newtown.

And yet the Iraq War is to be debated just as the Germans debated Poland

Can we please admit that this is insane?

XVIII.

We must ground God within ourselves

In what?

Our moral principles, our aesthetic understandings, and the will that motivates us to act and speak on behalf of them

God without that genuine core is meaningless

This is why religion has become meaningless

Shall someone revive it?

XIX.

The world of evil cannibalizes itself, it cannot stand

‘I don’t care about you, I’ll destroy you to achieve my ends’

Everybody says this to everybody else

No one will remain standing

So, you see, humanity is doomed either way

The reckoning of nuclear weapons, combined with the steady devastation of climate change,

The ethos of this age will obliterate itself

Why not stand for something greater?

For the world of the aesthetic, and the empathy therein?

It is a power that will not fade

Our reasons come and go, but the soul stays the same

Why not grasp it in your palm and live in its image?

Set your will to the impossible task, and the beauty of your ambition will carry you through

XX.

Bring moral truisms to political issues

Won’t that shape the dialogue?

XXI.

In the wake of 9/11, there was a soul in the air

It was clear what it stood for

Militarism, aggression, mass destruction,

Cowards unable to look at themselves

Hunting for the blood of others

When the beast finally feels pain,

It goes insane

Bush had a 91% approval rating

That was your fellow man

Why were you not among them?

It was no argument that ultimately swayed you

It was a clash of souls

It was clear what warmongering stood for

It was not an intellectual decision at all

It was the refusal to participate in darkness

91%

The darkness is within us

All around us

It cannot be destroyed

Only understood, and resisted

XXII.

What is Regular Theology?

What does it refer to?

The aesthetic depth of our experience

In art and music, and in each day,

We find it

We don’t have language to refer to it, so we hold it within ourselves

But it should inform everything

The subtleties of our experience

The allusions of the soul within each thing

You feel what I’m talking about, don’t you?

You know it but you cannot articulate it

Cannot argue for it

And yet its essence is at the soul of the world

Without it, life is empty

I think that when people talk of God, they’re talking of this subtle depth

It is all that is life, all that it means to be

Beyond language, beyond theory, beyond symbols, beyond it all

Is the raw aesthetic character of the world

It has been lost to modern man because it fits into no theory

And yet to each individual, it means the world

There is an empathy, and a sublime knowledge, within the aesthetic

It informs reality in ways we must become aware of

It is our hope that the human journey amounts to something

It is that which we yearn for

Let it be known!

And let us revel in its wonder

But what should we do with it? With such overwhelming power?

Align your will with it, and create

Embody the light

And let it speak for itself

You have no ambition? You have no will?

Nonsense!

Feel the tug upon your heart and turn it into the future

Such beauty and such light

Is this not what apes aspire to?

XXIII.

We are apes

This idea depresses people

We are apes

It is the deflation of religion, or so we’re told

We are apes

Just apes

Apes aspire to all this?

This is what apes yearn for?

Then anything is possible!

What a beautiful world we live in, where apes can speak

Apes are exceptional because evolution is exceptional

It is slow, no doubt. But do not lose sight!

What’s next after thinking apes?

Think hard!

And feel!

And maybe we’ll see

XXIV.

How do we define the other?

I see through my eyes, not yours

Immediately, there is the other

You are my neighbors, my friends

I can see you closely

And put aside some of my fear

But you

Over there

In that country

Who are you?

What do you want?

Power?

So do I

But I’ll win

Power is the means through which I will assert myself over you

Self and the other

Power makes the difference

Guns, bombs, propaganda

External power for use against an external foe

But what if we’re our own foe?

We seem to have everything in common with those we cannot trust

XXV.

Support the troops

What troops?

Russian troops?

Venezuelan troops?

Chinese troops?

You don’t give a damn about troops, you only care about your troops

It is a one-sided game, nothing more

XXVI.

Force is a cowardly broker.

It cares not who uses it.

Though today you fire the gun, tomorrow you may be shot

Crimson spray is the death of the mind

All its patterns falling freely

And they cannot be saved

Those who use force are truly testing the mettle of creation

XXVII.

Add up Charlie Hebdo, 9/11, Boko Haram, everything Al Qaeda ever did, every act of terror

Now look at the US bombing of Iraqi cities alone

At least 100,000 people dead, on a lie

Now look at the world, and who is considered ‘good’

Our one-sidedness is our moral downfall

And as soon as another side gains power

Well,

We’re finished