Deadbeat Philosophy

Pithy thought for the day:
Support your local musician. Remember, buying a cd, or a download, from the artist themselves puts food in their stomachs. Buying from a Chain Store puts petrol in some tosser's Porsche.

Pissy thought for the month:

I was urinating through the fence, to the strains of Pink and Ruby doing their trance set, watching the day come up over the Smallworld spring gathering and noticing how lush and green the grass was by the fence, when I noticed that some thoughtful reveller had laid a big fat turd just inches away from where I was standing.
That was the moment that this revelation occurred.

First of all, the pessimistic bit. The world, as it stands and is developing now, is doomed. Or rather our world, seeing as how when we kill ourselves off something else will adapt to the new environment and then it will be their world. I can't for the life of me see how we can reverse the environmental damage that we wreak, any more than yeast cells in a demijohn can stop producing the alcohol that will kill them. I believe this to be a fundamental attribute of life itself - survive and multiply. The same force that causes grass to grow up between flagstones in big cities, expressed with the sophistication of a couple of hundred million years of evolution, causes us to suck all the treasure out of the earth and turn it into the shit that will drown us.

Now the optimistic bit. There is a hope for the world. It's a long shot, Jim, but we might just make it. The hope lies in the establishment of a global consciousness. A baby becomes conscious when there is a sufficiently intricate structure - enough neurons and all the paraphenalia that goes with that - and a certain energy level is reached. At that point there is a coalescence (probably of virtual photons) into consciousness (at some time round about birth or a bit before. That bit is still under discussion). It is just possible that exactly the same thing could happen to the whole world. Once there are enough people - or conscious entities - on earth, and inter-relating like neurons, and when the wanton consumption of all the earth's resources pumps enough energy into that system, the planet might wake up. Maybe the imminent demise of the ecosphere will be the wake up call the earth needs (It surely isn't going to get another. Hit the snooze button, Big Girl, and it's Goodbye Gaia).

In which case, we are the dreams in the mind of the still-sleeping world.

The Smallworld gatherings, along with all the the other collections of positive consciousness - from sewing circles and mates down the pub to universities and MySpace friends - are the happy dreams. Wars, famine,plagues and the like are the nightmares.
When/if the world wakes up, these dreams - the preconscious flickerings of awareness -will compete (in the true manner of all life) to determine the basic orientation of the emergent global mind.

So go to all the parties you can - you might actually be saving the world.

More next month...

Cheers!

Deadbeat