You can receive this: “on whatever sphere of being
The mind of a man may be intent
At the time of death”—that is the one action
(And the time of death is every moment)
Which shall fructify in the lives of others: — TS Eliot, “The Dry Salvages”
When I was seven years old I was abducted by aliens. You don’t have to believe me. I’m being as honest as I can, but everything – everything – in the retelling becomes fictional. What is an alien anyways? I can only observe a small bandwidth of stimuli even at my best. And from what I Can see, I only remember a smaller fraction. And of those memories, I can only stitch together the few that make the most sense to me. And when I realized this, I no longer bothered to distinguish between fact and fiction, but only between honest and dishonest fiction. And I’m being honest about something I encountered, even if the event itself is little more than an unreliable dream now, distorted by years of confusion and fear.
Despite all that, I can recall the honest facts, which are given shape by a kind of fictional wrapping paper. Without the shape of the fiction you would see nothing. The experience remains untranslatable otherwise. But look through the paper to see what I mean.
I remember waking up in the dark room and feeling a pulsing heat or color or emotion. I could describe it as any of these, or by a thousand other words, but look, this is what I meant: the fictional telling gives an unavoidable skew to the memory. Words are always distortions, and when I don’t keep that in mind I become delusional with certainty. I become entranced by a hall of mirrors and can’t see through the complicated reflections to the actuality that is not translatable.
But it was about 2:00 am, and I could hear my father snoring, that ratcheting breath that would catch on something, as if his body didn’t want to breathe. Our lives would waver in the pause between each breath. The house itself always seemed to be listening with anxiety. I could hear its old wooden bones bending over us. But I became less concerned than usual, and could see through the walls of the house. Still, I can’t say that I felt drugged, because I was never so rational, and utterly without fear. And it was as if I was being carried along by an enormous current of warmth, humor and intelligence, so that my “private” thoughts had ceased, or I was somehow suspended above my own thoughts in a quieter realm. And it was something far beyond my limited capacities that carried me, like driftwood down the Mississippi. I was as wide and open, and as patient as the river itself. But I could see my “self” too, the body, the thoughts racing as usual. They were like patterns of a mouse in the sand – a scurrying that had no meaning.
To describe this meeting with aliens as a meeting between individuals would be too much of a distortion. Rather, I seem to recall a shift in tone, as if “we” had arrived somewhere. But I still saw the house, and every room, even my father and mother, as if from above. And I saw the stars, so close and bright, although I could feel their astonishing distance too. The size of the world seemed to pull from me a deep breath after years of imprisonment, as if I were not merely 7, but ancient, and I laughed in a way that cleansed me of every ancient worry, which I could also describe as tears of joy, as if some secret fear had been demolished by the mere encounter with a world so gigantic.
I felt “invited” into yet another “room” of sorts. That’s the only way I know to describe some shift in the feel of the moment or place.
What I saw in this other room nearly destroyed me at first sight. I could have turned away right then in the understandable certainty that I had seen hell in the flesh. But they laughed gently. And I felt their genuine love for me. So I looked closer, and it was hard, because I saw somehow the end of everything charging towards us like a meteor. Everything would be annihilated. Why were they sitting so patiently in the midst of this catastrophe?
I realized I was supposed to do something, and that if I did this small thing, the catastrophe would be delayed somehow. It wasn’t a question of my personal importance. It was that I was there, I was part of it, and my coherence was also necessary. The smallest link perhaps. But it had to hold too.
My understanding was that I had to face the catastrophe without falling prey to the illusions of fear. It’s a simple task, they seemed to say, so there is no reason to worry.
But I was facing an imminent execution. Everything depended on me putting aside every thought and worry and facing the reality of the catastrophe. I felt feverish. I was mad with panic, but they invited me to talk in a corner of the room somewhat apart. Let’s just talk for a moment, they seemed to say. As if they had all the time in the world. But I could see the onrushing extinction in the periphery of my vision and was frantic. My bones seemed to melt into liquid, and a ringing in my head was too loud, I couldn’t hear anything. Everything was dying, but still they sat there warmly and patiently, and told me things that I could barely comprehend.
There’s no need to think about what is happening, they laughed. We see it, and we can act. What is the point of thinking about something you already know, and which needs only your unblemished attention?
But even as they were speaking, the annihilation grew visibly closer, and the small thoughts that had seemed like harmless mouse tracks now rose up like demons to torture me. It was like trying not to think of a white bear in order to save the world. This is the turning point, they said. It’s now or never. And that’s a very simple problem, they said. Look, without thought, without image. Let yourself be still, and the stillness that emanates from you stops the disaster in its tracks.
But I tried to be still, and the effort was like a force of violence that quickened the pace of doom.
How can you sit there so calmly? I asked. You must know that it all works out, I said.
No, they said. This is real, this is the end of everything if you can’t do this. But what is the point in panicking? It adds to the misery. We can only watch and advise.
Don’t you love the world? I asked.
More than you can imagine, they said. There is so much beauty and love that it’s ridiculous; it surpasses these small words in such a ridiculous manner. It would be a catastrophe beyond any possibility of knowledge. But they said this lovingly, and without the least hint of pressure.
I can’t, I said. I can’t do this.
There’s nothing to be done, they said, except look without resistance, without effort, without recoil. It’s the simplest thing. Your thoughts do nothing in this situation, except delay the inevitable.
It’s a nightmare, I said.
But again, they led me to a quiet corner, although the approaching doom was always in the periphery. Just shut your eyes for a while, they said.
Are you Kidding?? I thought. But they shut their eyes and I felt waves of love and humor, but I also felt as if I was hanging over a cliff and needed to drop to my death in order to save the world. And I couldn’t do it. The selfishness I felt was overwhelming. The panic was indescribable.
Now is the time, they said. All you have to do is look without delay or resistance, and the chain of reactions breaks, a resistance that is pulling this catastrophe towards all of us. They weren’t imploring me, they were showing me, and backing off, despite how much they loved the world. They were letting it die, because there was nothing, nothing at all, they could do. It was up to me.
“Seconds” of a sort remained. I may have passed out for a moment, and they gently revived me, and laughed. The doom was so close. It has to be done now, they said gently, like a mother waking her child. Come here, and they held my hand and led me to the edge of the apocalypse.
It was happening, and I saw it begin, and in the horror of the situation I was lost. It was like looking into a black hole at the center of existence. There is nothing there, they said. You can’t imagine nothing. And then I saw the majesty of the destruction. The universe was in its death throes, and all the hidden color and magic of the world seemed to spill out like a gutted animal, all the potential that would never show, and I was swallowed whole in the infinite sorrow.
You did it, they said. You looked without recoil. You let it die. And I could see that the catastrophe, though still rushing towards us at breakneck speed, had been delayed by only a little.
It’s still coming, I said, horrified. They laughed and said, this is life. You can’t escape it. You have to Live with it always. We know we’re alive only if we know we’re dying. And every single atom of this world has to face this fact, or the dance ends in inanimacy, which is the death even of death itself; of any possibility of life and love.
But surely it can’t be dependent on a small boy like me, I said.
This is what we show everyone, they said.
Negative Geography 
An interesting article on Long-Termism, a tremendously dangerous secular creed that is likely to become the foundations of the emerging fascism. The author, however, is embedded in his own dangerous philosophy, which is a reactive boomerang against long-termism in some ways.
https://aeon.co/essays/why-longtermism-is-the-worlds-most-dangerous-secular-credo?utm_source=Aeon%20Newsletter&utm_campaign=68275837a1-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2021_10_17_10_25&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_411a82e59d-68275837a1-70654789&fbclid=IwAR2Ydh2RBDAzls6L-NZBRRNoBl0_Dzi3yhT_aorELvXntHl4Y6hF4cwJBg4
Long Termism is very sick. That’s the main thing. But in a subtle way the writer is making some big mistakes too. But Long Termism is not surprising, it’s an extension of production-oriented living, an economic system and society that constantly aims to be mechanically perfect.
And guys like Elon Musk ruining a wildlife sanctuary in Texas to build the world’s largest rocket (against the law supposedly but they look the other way) are examples of this new fascism.
This is the predator gaining a bigger foothold. It’s mechanical, non-organic. An inorganic being that pushes dependency on AI.
But it all stems from a literal perception of the world. it creates these sub-realities and AI rules over them as a demiurge:
From Wikipedia: ” Sophia (Greek: Σοφία, lit. ‘wisdom’), the Demiurge’s mother and partial aspect of the divine Pleroma or “Fullness,” desired to create something apart from the divine totality, without the receipt of divine assent. In this act of separate creation, she gave birth to the monstrous Demiurge and, being ashamed of her deed, wrapped him in a cloud and created a throne for him within it. The Demiurge, isolated, did not behold his mother, nor anyone else, and concluded that only he existed, ignorant of the superior levels of reality.
The Demiurge, having received a portion of power from his mother, sets about a work of creation in unconscious imitation of the superior Pleromatic realm: He frames the seven heavens, as well as all material and animal things, according to forms furnished by his mother; working, however, blindly and ignorant even of the existence of the mother who is the source of all his energy. He is blind to all that is spiritual, but he is king over the other two provinces.”
But the author of the article above could have approached this more prismatically. Instead of arguing that the idea of “humanity” is wrong, he could have looked at where it’s helpful and insightful and where it’s not.
He inadvertently makes his view reactively atomistic by rejecting the notion of a human potential. He doesn’t distinguish between a “human potential” which is like a destiny or goal or particular, reductive endpoint; and human potential which is open-ended, freedom from Literalism. The longtermers use “human potential” as a dismissal of individual worth. But human potential can also mean the potential to see through one’s own Self perpetuating, atomizing schemes now, not in the idealized future, which is both an individualistic transformation and a communal or “human-wide” change. This meaning of potential takes no idealized or reductive form. It’s the negation of such closed thinking, not the positing of some dogmatic destiny.
See, if he looked at things like a prism or as a spectrum of truth, he’d see the word “human potential” in different contexts meaning different things. And not get so absolute with dictionary definitions, rejecting the whole idea of anything exceeding the atom of individuality.
The author made the issue into a contest between humanity and individuality. It didn’t have to be presented that way.
But I listened to a German sociologist the other day and he came closest to describing why concern for the future is misplaced. There’s nothing we need to do (nothing to be done). He said it differently, but it lit a fuse. I’d love to find a translation and share with you. It’s hard for the interviewer to see what he means, but it struck a chord with me.
Not really “nothing to be done”, but nothing to plan. Paraphrasing roughly he said every new climate catastrophe is being interpreted as a “wake-up call”. But they’re not wake-up calls. They are the thing itself and we turn away from this moment towards a plan in the future, thus securing our destruction, postponing the necessary action.
We’re always preparing to wake up in the future, but the future is the problem.
Long termism is essentially a growth mentality that sees the future only. It can’t see any mystery in the world, only a task.
It’s Ayn Rand philosophy. Yes, it’s a real dangerous thing, but I wonder if they are all self-annihilating ideas. I think the Sapiens author didn’t question that enough.
The only way to defeat this might be to not engage on its level, not argue with it, but move into the new way of relating to the world, which is proprioceptive. I think the human being will discover “potentials”, powers that far exceed the machine.
The reality of proprioception is coming close at times. Our typical response to ourselves is transhumanist or long-termist at heart, because we look to the future and establish a task, a way to change ourselves in the future, and this is mechanical, so it’s like a union with machines, because we want to be perfect, perfectly good, and we want a mechanism that can erase our actual humanity and replace it with consistency and perfection. Until we can do that we don’t like ourselves. That’s a machine mind looking at humans as impurities. But the human is like any animal, a character, not a cog, a peculiar angle, a rascal with quirks that emerge and disappear, making him or her very interesting and unpredictable and not entirely moral. This is good, this imperfection, not something wrong. Accepting that fact means laughing through it, seeing the idiocies we commit without repressive disdain. Hey, I really don’t behave nicely all the time, and instead of defending that or denying that, I appreciate it, recognize it and don’t mind being who I am at this moment (without regard for the future). This makes everything more interesting, less black and white. It makes things funny too.
There is a “human potential” in discovering this ease with oneself, but each individual can take this human potential in their own direction, so it doesn’t repress individuality. The potential is to be neither a transhumanist merging with machine superpowers, nor is it to be an atomistic individual, where there is no sense of a broader or more profound whole or “humanity.” Proprioception or meditation is how this potential opens. And an easy way to access proprioception is to realize that we’re always trying to hide our own behavior or actions or motives from ourselves in order to conform to a perfect image. This can’t be stopped, it can’t be the objective or task to stop this, because that is also an attempt to hide from ourselves what we’ve done. So there is no task in learning proprioception. There is no need to end anything. There are no preparatory thoughts we need to have. We don’t need to “pay attention” to our thoughts as a task. What happens instead is you begin to notice that your “mood” is in reality a repressive effort to hide from some imperfection, or some thought or behavior that didn’t conform to the ideal image. So you can unpack the mood and discover a thought you were trying to pretend you didn’t have. Once you release that thought from its prison, it looks a lot smaller and more fleeting than you imagined. By releasing the thought, the mood lightens and you see it as a fleeting thing, as part of your pattern of perceptions. Then things change quickly.
They change now, however, without any regard for the future. So the change can’t be captured and preserved as a perfection. We are learning to let go of perfection and allow ourselves to lose things.
There will be no perfection in this learning.
So at every moment (Every moment) we can feel the pressure to repress ourselves, our disquiet, our frustration. This is a rich harvest of sweet fruits to devour. We open the bag of the moment and out spills color and vitality, even if it’s stupid and mean, who cares. It’s got to get out, because either way it’s who we are at this moment.
All these efforts to become peaceful and good are repressions that cause us to hate ourselves and look past the moment to a glorious future. All bullshit. Find the humor of our boorish behavior, laugh at ourselves, that is more lively and honest and leads to a more quickly morphing moment.
Repression is the great treasure chest. Where we find pain, repression, frustration, emptiness, boredom, guilt, that is where we find integrity.
And a good and rowdy companion for life, ourselves.
It’s interesting to notice that we are turning towards the future as a futile escape. And the more we notice it happening the less concerned we are with ending it.
And this is what that german guy was saying. All our plans to do something about climagte change are escapes from the fact of climate change, postponements of the moment of honesty.
I never realized how perfect I was secretly trying to be, and now all theproblems surrounding that seem silly.
I was unconsciously trying to give voice to this realization in the story about aliens abducting me as a 7 year old. the whole point of the story was learning to face the onrushing death without doing anything about it.
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