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I took a walk through life, and came uncomfortably to its conclusion. In a parking lot emptied of its day travelers who packed the foul weather gear in their cars and drove home before the sun had stopped compensating for the cold. I have no car here, no ride home. Just a summit of sorts they say I fell from when I was born, and I wonder what all the trouble was for. Those who make pilgrimages to this place don't know the desolation of death. They come for the scenery, the far away abstracted peace of the destination they mistake for the journey's reward. I see, now, from this distance, all that time and obstinance have denied me. All that I once had, held, let go, and left behind. I lived in expectations, and experience was the road that led to them. But each dissolved with the touch and all I see now is the road, meandering in mystery and disappearing into the dusk.

We're all working on our legacy, but, seriously, legacies are overrated. No one would recognize themselves in the caricatures and the biographies which took their places when the memories died with those who knew them. Even the reflections are false, and if our friends were all talented writers able to capture our essence in words, the person each knew would be different from all the others, and none of them would be us. There is no such thing as metempsychosis, the transference of self, the transmigration of the soul, and life after death. The self is as transient and insubstantial as a dream. The soul was conjured in the desolation of a fractured world, divided into the domestic and the natural. The universe and its agents of cause and observation, the gods and the autonomous selves, were all manufactured to appease the wild in us, and make us civilized. God and Self is a circular argument and the wheel of artifice which, with its turning, reduces the universe to someth...

Nature or nurture is a silly argument, and shows just how far down the rabbit hole of reason we've descended. Darwin made death the most essential tool of evolution. The rest was chance, another roll of the dice every time a cell divides. Epidemics and extinctions were the hammer and nail held in reserve for when a screw wouldn't do. We seem to have been made facilitators of the next Big Death by the endowment of our ancestors' inclination to sacrifice themselves to a fiction sustained by their belief. We, and the world, will one day die for the glory of God, Allah, Jesus, the Lizard King, or simply an idea, an ideology, a cleansing truth that rids the world of its pestilent facts, its wearisome reality.

We think that civilization has made the world more complex, and that we, as individuals, long for simpler times. Complexity is a word we use in place of drudgery , the labor we are obliged to do, the pointless decisions and ridiculous choices we have to make before we are allowed to rest quietly. And we relax by doing real work, by putting ourselves in a situation of real complexity, where every decision can mean physical discomfort, serious injury, or even death. We make ourselves vulnerable so that our labor and our choices mean something. We go camping. We play video games. We invest our happiness in outcomes ruled by chance. In the daily drudge of daily life, everything we do, for many if not most of us, is entirely artificial, and is made urgent and necessary by artificial forces whose real purpose is to keep us perpetually busy, with little or no time for quiet reflection or conscious attention. The world we've made is anything but complex. It is in fact absurdly simple...

Like most futurists, he misses the point*, not of why we're concerned about the future (which is clearly all about legacy and immortality, hubris and paradise) but of why we even have a concept of the future, why we spatialize time as a journey from chaos to perfection, from darkness to brilliance, from void to infinity. Why we aren't happy with the permanent present. Why we are obsessed with oracles, auguries, signs, and mathematical formulas that predict what will come to pass. No one has, or ever will, escape the present without the rest of us, and everything else, waiting there when they arrive. It's as if the universe anticipates every move by every traveler, and beats them to their destination. The future is a fantasy whether anticipated or remembered. It is no more, and no less real than memory. But every animal has memory. My dog knows me, and has cataloged a world richer in smell than any world I could conceive in sight. The difference is that I remember memory...

Stand is a very old word, linked directly to the Indo-European word whose English descendants include nearly every word that begins or ends with st . The fixed stars got their name from the ancient word that conveyed staying put, standing by, and is now the -stan in all countries like Afghani stan an Paki stan . It is the stage upon which the action occurs. It is all things at rest , and all things real are sub stan tial, i.e., derived from the changeless, eternal, permanent truth. It's no coincidence that we call them stones , and that when we are astounded , we stop what we're doing and stand , staring like a statue . Conversely, we haven't inherited an equally ancient word for things that don't stay put, which move and change. We describe them only as having been perturbed out of their natural state by some outside influence, some cause to which their restlessness can be attributed. This is, perhaps, one of the deepest and most intractable concepts in th...

It's an interesting trail to follow, the idea that consciousness and the bicameral mind were invented by the State as means of social control. But if consciousness is a precondition to its invention, the question, "Who's doing the inventing?" would seem to lead to a dead end. The question, in fact, discounts all natural explanations for cultural-cognitive evolution, and so we fall back on divine purpose and inevitability. A machine may improve itself through random trials, errors, and the establishment of precedence over coincidence. We understand intelligence as memory and computation, sentience as active programming and reactivity, and consciousness as some miraculous synergy of a sufficiently complex intelligence and a sufficiently expansive sentience. If, however, we assume that consciousness is an emergent property of memory, computation, passive perception and active programming, it must stand apart from the prerequisite conditions. The property of smooth...

Being where you ought to be, with no doubt that you are doing exactly what you ought to do, might be in the clutches of a lion, or at a desk in a sterile office building. Happiness is rarely found, and then only briefly, in a lounge chair surrounded by slaves attending to your whimsy. Happiness is the impossibility of anything else taking the place of the moment we currently occupy. In a life or death struggle, no thought interferes with the necessity of doing what we're doing right now. Are we happiest when our options collapse to one, necessary choice, regardless of the circumstances that focused our attention on the preeminent "now?" I think so. The present always satisfies, whether it's painful or joyful, whether it's filled with exigencies or void of responsibility. The pursuit of happiness, then, would seem to be an oxymoron. The mythology of our time is the idea of God, become Man, finding His way home. Civilization persists and is driven forward by...

Measurements suffice in lieu of a definition, and there are many measurements of wealth to satisfy us that we're happy, but neither word stands for a well understood concept. Wealth comes from the same root as power , and the wealthiest persons were simply those who controlled the natural and human resources of their realm. If the measure of wealth is the power of the State, then we, its subjects, are wealthy only in so far as our service and dedication deserves its recognition. Happiness , on the other hand, has never been a measurable quality; and, in modern times at least, happiness can't be earned, stolen, or even pursued. Happiness, like any happening, happenstance, or mishap, is a matter of luck. It is, like all good things, bestowed only by fortune. The Indo-European root word for happiness conveyed "fitness", a different attitude toward the joy and comfort that we now regard as a self-indulgent luxury or guilty pleasure. Happiness was the condition of bein...

Consciousness in many ways made us less intelligent, and may have been invented as a means of social control. We know it's possible to have language and culture without consciousness, but it may be impossible to conceive of the State without it. Consciousness made us vulnerable to illusions, and the State was the dream weaver. We know that consciousness is taught, that it didn't emerge as a high-level property of neurological processes. Language gave us imagination and populated the world with spirits. But consciousness gave us ideology, quieted the spirits, and gave us God. The State had its origins in the bicameral kingdoms, and its kings, no doubt, had a degree of consciousness that grew more refined as their kingdoms grew. Consciousness spread, I think, not in the nurturing of a child by its mother (as was certainly the case with language) but as indoctrination. Far from being recognized as a precious cultural artifact, consciousness was the end result of a ruthless off...

The State preceded consciousness, and the evidence for the bicameral mind is in the iconography of power. Language is only a tool, and the Mind it creates is infinitely varied. Because it's the power-obsessed narcissists who leave legacies in stone and precious metals, it's from their fealty that we write history. The co-evolution of language and consciousness wanders and branches as much as biological evolution, and no one has come up with a principle or law for its trajectory. We all seem to believe, however implicitly, that evolution is directed, and that some law, some divine purpose, some invisible hand, has charted its trajectory and, if left unmolested, will follow its true path to paradise. But we only believe in Paradise because our lives have been made miserable by domestication. Those who successfully avoided the spell of the State were free to invent a more limber and accommodating kind of consciousness, one that didn't set itself apart from the natural world. ...

Truth is abstraction and reality is metaphor. Both occupy consciousness and define the split between heaven and earth, the sciences and the humanities, the holy and the profane, and, to some, nonsense and sense. There are sanctioned abstractions, and there are abstract concepts which rely on abstract experience for their meaning. Mathematics is a tool for manufacturing the abstract causes and effects which align with the abstract concept. Truth is always internally consistent, and because consciousness contains the whole universe, external contradictions can be discarded as false. We all know this, but we choose to believe in truth because it's easier than doubt, skepticism, curiosity, and the shame that comes with being a social irritant. Science, say its true believers, is self-correcting. But if we take the long view, so is every religion. Despite the claims of fundamentalists, every religion adapts to its time and evolves along with the environment which it domesticates to ...

When in history, which has really just begun, have we ever, as a global civilization, despaired of its trajectory? Civilization, which we define as the domestication of nature, has only in the last 50 years or so became global. There had been, until recently, perfectly well-adapted cultures occupying worlds of their own and operating without the "benefits" of financial markets, industrialization, corporate agriculture, and private property. Increasingly efficient means of subjugation and control, in transportation, communication, and weaponry, provided the State's missionaries, in the form of blundering tourists, anthropologists, misguided NGOs, and paid scientists scouting for exploitable natural (and human) resources, with the means to domesticate the planet. So, the answer is no; there has never been a period in history when the steady march of civilization was paused so we could consider our options. There were certainly individuals who, as history was unconsciously...

Might and Right have always been on the same side. Like professional wrestlers, like any sporting contest, its exhibitions and competitions are arenas where our heroes act out the fantasy that we are the agents of our fate. We matter in the opposition, and "right" is defined by might's relent. The sides have always been manufactured, whether the artifice is obvious or subtle. Football teams can arouse our patriotic and religious passions, just as nativism and racial identity can. Ideologies can be as simple as a flag, an icon, or a football jersey, and any of them can be as complicated as the statisticians, theologians, or political pundits care to make them. We are right, or we are powerful, but we're spectators and participants in the same game. Power's real opposition are those who walk away, who simply dodge the iron fist and doubt the orthodoxies of every true believer. Power's real opposition is invisible and ostensibly harmless. Gandhi and MLK unde...

In kindergarten I painted with my fingers. I painted the sky as a blue stripe across the top, even though I knew it was wrong. Mingling the sky with all things under it just seemed impractical, and messy. I was deliberately abstract, even then. I suppose most kids knew the difference, that their stick figures with over-sized heads weren't literal representations of themselves. I suppose that many might even have known that their artistic choices reflected something more personal and private: their feelings about the world rather than the world itself. Self-expression at that age didn't require any special effort. Art was spontaneous and natural. We didn't know there was a difference. Everything was happening inside our heads. and reality, the reality that adults insisted on our knowing, occupied only a small corner of our imaginations. For most of us, I suppose, the corner where we once kept all things corrupted by convention would come to define the boundaries of o...

Worth is a word worthy of more study. It's the Germanic synonym for the Latin "value," and both were pulled reluctantly from their original contexts to suit a new world order of privilege and drudgery. The original metaphor for worth was the tropism of plants and the winding of vines toward sunlight. The tending toward and the twisting were conflated so that any deviation from a straight line was an example, or a result, of worth. When we "ward" things off, we change their linear trajectory. Things move inward and converge , or outward and diverge . Verge is a phonetic variation of ward , and "verse" comes from both. Poems turn, while prose marches in a straight line. Worship is derived from worth, and in its earliest usage was probably synonymous with obedience and submission. And so, from ward also came wrangle , wrath , writhe , worry , and wrong . The conflation of worth with value must have come much later. Value has its deep origins i...

We're all quite mad, and any one of us could be made ridiculous through exposure of our beliefs; and, under pressure to defend them, we could all be made quite dangerous. We get along because our public declarations of identity suffice in societies whose beliefs have been made conventional and secure through precedent. These public declarations include dress, language, common interests and aversions, and all the nuance we've learned to signal our fitness for one society or another. Once identified as fit, it's necessary to maintain our authenticity. But none of our identities are natural, no one is more authentic than another. We're comfortable in roles we've been practicing since birth, but they're roles just the same, parts we play, identities which we'll quickly discard in the absence of the societies they're suited for. World travel and cross-cultural experiences can seem to erase the pretense and leave our true nature exposed. But we adapt by playi...

Fuller described the "Jitterbug" transformation as the loss of the nucleus, causing the vertices to move closer to the center and creating the icosahedral shell. But if the vertices of the icosahedron are closer to the center than the vertices of the vector equilibrium, then why does it expand? The faces move closer together, but the vector equilibrium and the dodecahedron occupy the same, minimal, amount of space, and it's the icosahedron that occupies the most space. If Bucky didn't know this, it's surprising. But he didn't have access to 3D computer software. He only had his physical models. From an isotropic perspective, the vector equilibrium does, indeed, appear to shrink during its transition into an icosahedron. Jitterbug in VE phase -- Isotropic Jitterbug in Icosahedron phase -- Isotropic But from other perspectives, it's obvious that the icosahedron phase is the point of maximum expansion. Jitterbug in VE phase -- parallel p...

The Greek word, “geo”, like the Germanic word, “earth”, probably meant the hard, flat surface, the dirt and rocks beneath the dome of the heavens. The Greek “cosmos”, the German “world,” and the Latin word from which “ecumenical” originates, were words for the inhabited earth, the ordered and rational which we'd managed to wrestle from the unconscious void, the chaos beyond our borders. Geometry is a Roman word, not a Greek one, and they used it to mean the measure of the civilized world, the boundaries and boxes, the walls behind which order was maintained and preserved. Pythagoras didn't have a word for geometry. Instead, he used the words for number from which “arithmetic” originates, and learning , which was the original meaning of “mathematics”. Ancient Greece had no use for geometry in the Roman sense. Their domain was a cosmos of water surrounding islands which each functioned as independent worlds. “Cosmos” comes from the Greek, and the Romans seemed to have little...

Our neurology rewards us for relinquishing control, and we're punished for resisting. Survival requires the group be favored over the individual, but consciousness isn't easily assimilated. If in childhood the culture is unambiguous and stable, our world view is naturally entangled with the group's and we're easily indoctrinated. The same easy assimilation can occur when we're raised to be multicultural. But when the cultures are in conflict, the legitimacy of them all is questioned, and we grow up to be skeptics, believers in nothing, resistant to assimilation. We're not alone, as John Lennon noted, but we are isolated.

Are psychopaths autonomous agents of their personal ambitions? Are they thoroughly independent of the identities which the rest of us, as tame as sheep, have adopted without question?  The question is rhetorical because the answer is unquestionably, No. If anything, the psychopath is the very archetype of group identity. He or she embodies the culture, the country, or the creed, without suffering the inconvenience of an individual conscience or the indignity of doubt.  Sociopaths, on the other hand, disregard group identification and construct their own, idiosyncratic and narcissistic identities. Whatever family or tribe a sociopath might recognize would be synonymous with a cult, home-schooled and incestuous. At best, the sociopath is a critic of the psychopath's unwavering defense of empire, while the psychopath is, at best, the charismatic leader of a broadly unifying ideological identity (racial, religious, national, economic, etc.), and a critic of those cultist id...