The planet is not in danger.
We are.
The planet’ll survive.
The planet’s been through, like, ammonia atmospheres and impossible-to-live-on, and everything dead – and it gets its way back out of it.
We’re in Danger.
Or so we think, because our hubris tells us that
We Are in Danger.
Our hubris tells us that
We’re about to destroy The World;
We’re gonna destroy The Planet;
We’ll fuck The Atmosphere.
No.
We’ll fuck our atmosphere.
But some trilobites’ll come along and live in anything we create.
So that is not the problem.
f
"We all want to have a good time.
So we’ve got to understand that, as a starter.
Beyond that, I found we’ve actually been deluding ourselves in the worst way of all by believing in the individual.
Stay with me on this :
Kafka, Orwell, Patrick McGoohan in The Prisoner.. everyone told us The Individual was the most important thing we could be.
Everyone is fucking ‘quirky’ these days; every shit in their window of MTV is ‘quirky’. Everyone’s cool; everyone’s smart… it’s not true.
What if the individual was the fake?
What if the individual’s the crock?
And we’ve actually been sold that by “Them”; by the man, the establishment.. whatever you want.
Because what occurred to me is that when you talk about the individual, and you deal with the individual, you find that the end of the individual is neurosis. To be individual means that there is “self” and “not self”. Okay?
Why do these fuckers.. why does the Skull And Bones Society, or the CIA.. why do the 33ยบ Masons – why are they different from us?
They’re not –
They want to explain things.
They want an answer.
They’ve found an answer that seems to suit them – which seems kind of uncool and cruel to me, because it involves exploiting other people.
But they’re looking for an answer.
We’re all looking for the same thing:
Why.
Are.
We.
Here?
Why *are* we here? What are you doing here today? What do you expect? What do you expect to take home with you?
Can anyone answer? Can one person tell me what you expect to take home from all of this? Come on, put your hand up.
Yeah?
["Experience!"]
Exactly. Because that is all we have. And that is all I can offer you, is experience. Of having done this shit, tested it, put it in the crucible to see what happens – and it works.
So I began to think more and more about the individual, and I looked into what that actually meant. And what it was, was a structure that was pretty much created… the ego structure was created out of what Julian Jaynes calls the “bicameral mind” becoming one mind.
And apparently – according to him – he says that back in the old days of the Greeks, and the earliest writing of the world, people didn’t have self-consciousness in the way that we have.
They didn’t have egos.
They didn’t understand themselves as “I” in the same way that we do.
Because the corpus callosum – that connects the two hemispheres of the brain – wasn’t connected.
So if you heard a voice, that voice was God.
And Homer, and all those guys, you’ve got plenty of examples of people hearing the voice of God, and acting on that. Alexander constantly acted on the voice of God.
Julian Jaynes suggests that it wasn’t the voice of God – it was the voice of the left hemisphere of the brain communicating with the right hemisphere of the brain, interpreted as a god.
So okay: now we’ve got the two things joined together. We’ve got this beautiful bridge in the middle that links the two. But we have the ego structure – which was created when those things linked.
Suddenly we’re like:
“Oh fuck.
I am I.
I am the I Am.
This is my.. my god is this.
I am separate; I am one.”
We made this idea that we’re somehow separated from nature.
No we’re not.
Bullshit!
Again, I read New Scientist last month, right – and they’re talking about nature: “We must control nature; we must do this. How do we deal with our relationship with nature?”
We *are* fucking nature!
There’s nothing on this planet that is not “nature”.
Power stations are nature;
atom bombs are nature.
Because nature made us to make those things.
Either you trust Nature,
or you don’t trust Nature –
and I Trust Nature.
So we have to ask:
What is Nature getting at here?
If we ignore this crap that we’re somehow isolated from nature; that we somehow have to tame nature… nature knows exactly what it’s doing.
The planet is not in danger.
We are.
The planet’ll survive.
The planet’s been through, like, ammonia atmospheres and impossible-to-live-on, and everything dead – and it gets its way back out of it.
We’re in danger. Or so we think, because our hubris tells us that we are in danger.
Our hubris tells us that we’re about to destroy the world; we’re gonna destroy the planet;
we’ll fuck the atmosphere.
No.
We’ll fuck *our* atmosphere.
But some trilobites’ll come along and live in anything we create.
So that is not the problem.
The problem is we’re standing here at the 21st century, stuck with individuality.
Because we’ve believed in it so much; it *seemed* so important that we should all be distinct.
What happens if we stop being distinct?
