Help from the Co-Creatress, Inside the Spiral of Blooming Doom

Terence Mckenna is famous for founding "Novelty Theory" stating that the universe is an engine that's constantly producing new forms and higher orders of organization. He's mathematically worked out a novelty time wave that maps points in the evolution of the cosmos, life, and human evolution/history that coincide withcertain recurring points on the wave. It actually ends up looking like a tightening spiral with the end point or "zero point" being around the end of the year in 2012.

When looking at the points of high novelty throughout the time wave, it can be deduced that there is a directionality of evolution. Not simply to some perfected form of life that's the most fit in Darwinian terms. If that were the case it would have stopped at the cockroach. No, evolution isn't trying to just make beings perfectly fitted to ever-changing eco-niches. It's really working towards ever more complex organization through which to express consciousness. The history of evolution is the history of increased expression of consciousness loosely defined as the awareness of being aware. That's not a very solid concept. Here's a better way of thinking about it, one that's flattering to us humans: The human brain is not one brain, it's three, there's reptilian, the mammalian, and the uniquely human neo-cortex. Each one a further ramified iteration of natural biological technology using the DNA code framework. What's happening here? Invisible will, consciousness, a creative force is coding matter, dna, cells, neurons, etc. towards greater novelty, complexity, interconnectedness, communication, knowledge, self-reflection, etc. all to increase the ability to co-create with increasing awareness.

The human neo-cortex is the most complex piece of matter in the known universe. Why? Because of a purposeless dead sterile mindless meandering chaotic nonsensical process of natural selection? I'm not a creationist, but I would be if it could be understood and admitted that creation never stopped. 7 Days a few thousand years ago is not satisfying. Rather, an invisible, constant, yearning force beneath and behind matter on this plane on this planet is what is creating in every second.

Evolutionary theorists call it "tinkering". Well if "evolution" is tinkering, doesn't that notion presuppose some kind of sentient, intelligent will? Is it every life form for itself struggling to push the envelope, are there trillians of different wills pushing through mutation to evolve to keep up with the changing environment, or is there some over-arching meta-mind, the Gaian Mind perhaps that's self regulating and tinkering. I'm inclined to believe in the Gaian meta mind. The intelligent awareness of the planet playing all of us life forms like an orchestra.

That makes more sense to me than the idea that some male external vengeful god made the earth in 7 days so that patriarchal male human rulers could have dominion over it all. That kind of self serving androcentric cosmology is exposed for its "Wizard of Oz"ness by looking at some cultures that practice clitorectomy. In order to justify female genital mutilation, origin stories are told that create an eternal punitive curse on women for some original sin. The tight control of women, animals, and the Earth by men is forever carved into womens' flesh as they're forced to be owned, enslaved, and traded like cattle.

Back to evolution, what's happening on the third rock from the sun is much more complex than either the patriarchal male monotheistic view would dictate or the sterile dead purposeless view of science. There simply is a force that's enacting the truism: the only constant is change. Creation is continuing. It's interesting the use of the word "constant" in that phrase. In mathematics, a constant is a quantity assumed to be unchanged throughout a given discussion. Well in the discussion of the time-wave/spiral of consciousness evolution on earth, we can imagine that the constant is the amount of change, and what varies is the amount of time that the recurrent constant amount of change takes place in. To put it simply, more is happening in every moment. More novelty, more change. But why? And what about the paradox that Terence addressed, that the dominator societal archetype that came out of domestication, agriculture, surplus, civilization, capitalism, industrialism, etc. some how seems to epigenetically continue the spiral, yet it's totally antithetical to the Gaian evolution of the natural matrix. Why this horrific, toxic, murderous, omnicidal tangent. Why is "profane history" doing this to us. Is it part of a plan, is it a hard lesson, is it a gestation of consciousness through form? I feel like it's just a cancer. The dominator culture, the partriarchal "cut and control" paradigm has taken the once free and equal creative capacity of our species and grotesquely contorted it into a highly mechanized global doomsday machine. The only way I can reconcile the use of the products of this blood soaked digital age is to believe in my heart the Gaia is still alive, awake, and aware and working through whatever means she can to help us correct this course and get back to co-creation that's balanced and beautiful. Sure not everything in nature is balanced, peaceful, harmonious, gender equal. I'm not naively saying that everything natural is innocent and utopian. I just know that humans are biologically and culturally adapted to co-create beauty on this planet and part of what made that possible was our tendency to share and be equal. Compare Bonobos and Chimps, chimps are violent male dominant brutalitarians, Bonobos are gender balanced if not matriarchal and live in a cooperative peaceful environment maintained by making love not war. Something about the descent into patriarchal human history can be understood by reverse engineering our primate cousins. It's believed now that the reason Bonobos evolved gender equality, peace, and love is that their ecology changed at one point to allow the equal sharing of labor in food procurement on the ground in the absense of larger apes. Chimps conversely have adapted in a way that allows requires males to climb high in trees to get food that will then be hierarchically divided and provisioned. The apes on the ground are a threat, and a competitor so male and female chimps are divided into separate but unequal classes.

Engles established this material determinism in the Origin of the Family, Private Property and State where he demonstrated that in societies where men seized the means of production, women were soon marginalized and banished to the domestic sphere. While of course women worked as much if not more, some slippage in the equal valuation of gendered work occurred and thousands of years later here we are, a world of missiles and sky scrapers.

Losing gender equality has meant that our species' uniquely evolved ability to co-create with Gaia has been bastardized by a rogue primate framework that we gracefully shed long ago.

For at over 30 years now, ethnographers have studied the last living egalitarian human societies to find that in the state of nature, as uncivilized, non-industrial, matrifocal tribes/bands, our ancestors flourished socially and ecologically without domination. Terence Mckenna simply describes the archaic world as one of human partnership societies.

If the constant is that consciousness is evolving through form to manifest ever more co-creative beings, imagine what could have been created by now had we not descended into the dark realm of patriarchy. No we didn't need to wipe out almost all traditional cultures and all ecosystems just to become cyborgs to reach the evolutionary trajectory of telepathy. We could have peacefully found our way there, tripped our way there, danced, sang, painted, loved... If telepathy is the next plateau of consciousness evolution, I would have rather our species got their through plant worship than cybernetics, natural vs. artificial intelligence if you will.

Terence said he felt that computer technology was very feminine. I think he meant that it was mirroring the gaian matrix. I extend the notion to say that our co-creatress, Gaia knows that we're trapped in history, and the internet, and the anarchic egalitarian spirit of the open source movement are gifts from Gaia that the pure-hearted can use to derail apocalypse and engender the archaic revival. It's as if she's reaching through matter to hand us this gift to save our selves.

I always think about how totally hopeless I would have felt if I had this critique of progress and patriarchy in the middle ages, or on the American frontier. I certainly couldn't have blogged about it. I couldn't have joined an international digital social network. I would have been burned at the stake, like so many witches and heretics.

That's why I'm so astonished that anyone can be apathetic or hopeless now! I'm going to try to be the spirit of a burned witch or alchemist who's last blood boiled thought was 'if only I could create a device through which to interconnect human intelligence so that centralized domination of culture and creation would be forever subverted...'

Well, the digital revolution is an alchemists dream. With these tools we are limited only by our dreams. Memes compete in the primordial ooze of social networks. Are people of conscious who want change engaged in this ecology of ideas? Yes, but sadly not enough. Now marginality is optional. There is no excuse. Spread the memetic revolution by word of mouse! The revolution will be bookmarked, texted, syndicated, emoticoned, popped-up, uploaded, downloaded, shared, tracked-back, pinged, , backed-up, hard-driven, and ranked number one in Google's "organic" search results!

Consciousness is evolving, we are being given more and more tools to co-create. We have the biological and cultural technology to reclaim the dream from the nightmare.

Hopefully we'll break the chimp spell before 2012 when the next great opportunity for intensified consciousness and material restructuring occurs.

As different as we are from chimps, is as different as we'll be from ourselves, will it be a beautiful free, equal, loving and peaceful tranformation, or will it be more grotesque domination?