The Song
From Internet: Knowledge and Community
Steven Barker Strange Utopian Future Paper
Stefo Boanerges (“Crowned Son of Thunder”)
The Song of the Mother
I. I have come from the future to reveal the movements which have led humanity toward ever greater community. This method by which humanity has achieved the highest level of community is called by us, “the Song”. Before we begin I will explain to you that very soon the individuals which comprise humanity will be united in ways that will be hard for you to imagine. Very soon, all of your thoughts will be freely available to all, just as they are to you-- all of your emotions will be accessible to all. Very soon, the nervous system of collective humanity will be advanced enough to allow real-time access to the thoughts and feelings of individuals. Very soon, the pain you inflict on others, you will feel with the same intensity as is felt within their own being. Very soon, the pleasures felt by others will be had within your own being-- all will celebrate and mourn gains and losses together, as one humanity-- without choice.
II.
“In days now long gone men hated and fought the pain of the throng was not had in thought.
Now, thanks to the Song we all share our feelings-- the glorious Song, the web of our being.
The Song is our mother, the queen of the world-- technology smothered and covered, connected, all beings together, forever protected.”
In the beginning of this aeon was the great soup of light-- undifferentiated, unformed-- with great potential. It was called Pleroma by a generation now long dead. All existed together as one. Information did not travel; it was omnipresent-- what was known to one node of being was known to all nodes. The activities of one node were the activities of all the other nodes. There were not even nodes, there was no multiplicity-- all existed as one unchanging totality. There was no death, there was no change, there was no problem, there was no pain... There was no joy. For a reason that none in this realm will ever know, the Pleroma formed a void in itself in which differentiation, change, pain, joy, life, growth, and decay may take place. To some, this act of separation is seen as the greatest act of compassion-- the greatest gift that could have been given-- but to others, this is seen as the cruelest punishment for us here in that void. The void was necessary for being, as we know it, to arise. One's stance toward this great first action is revealing of the orientation which guides them through life. For our purposes here, let us assume that this is the greatest gift that could have been given. Life, with all of its pains and sorrows, is truly the greatest joy. Also, if the pains and sorrows are too many to handle, we have been given another great gift-- death. Let us assume that the structure of being is compassionate (sometimes it is so compassionate that it will kill us). If we can do this, I will continue with this treatise.
III.
“The all-source split they say, “the big bang” and in the first moments the atoms, they came.
The atoms, they loved, they loved and they hugged, they all came together and together they rubbed.
Nuclear family, furnace of complexity. Great stars churned new atoms, but the atoms reached the limit to their recipe.
Now molecules, Molecules, atoms in community. Molecules, Molecule, the answer, the remedy.
All being longed for the union not remembered. All being strove to fight entropy. We have seen how the one became dismembered. We have seen how disunion became the enemy.
Molecules filled the void, atoms in community, but once again, they reached a limit to their complexity. So they loved, and they hugged and together they rubbed, until through love the basic unit of life was dubbed, “the cell.”
Oh, the cell! The Cell! How beautiful! How pretty! Here is the answer to the pains caused by disunity. Atoms in molecules, now all in community. The cell was the pinnacle, the answer to entropy.
Once again, as is the fate of all who exist in this void, change combined with the never ceasing drive toward complexity and the cell formed community.
Multi-cell! Multi-cell! Whats the difference? I can't tell. The same old limit hit once again, the battle with entropy necessitated even greater complexity-- community! And one of the answers, which you can see from where you stand, they called it technology, but it is truly known as “the Song”.
Out from the perfect wholeness of Pleroma came a void. It is in this context that all of our history has taken place. It is this arena in which the scientists of old made their observations. They made their observations, hoping to make ultimate statements, hoping to probe the depths of Pleroma. But there is no observing Pleroma, there is only probing the snaky movements of life through the void (but we must remember that even the void exists within the greater context of Pleroma). What is before “the big-bang” cannot be observed by those who stand in the void. And “the big-bang” is a term from your time which inaccurately describes the unfolding-- the theoretical physicists assumed that there was no aeon before this great explosion, they were wrong-- your people will soon come to find this to be true. All of being has been striving toward the unity once known as undifferentiated Pleroma. This is the great urge toward complexity, toward unity. We see this everywhere we look. All of evolution is the harsh dance toward ever greater complexity and even bigger community. Love is the only law, but sometimes (despite what we existing creatures would wish for) love means death. Death is a tool of life. Without death we would not know the beautiful multiplicity of forms in community. This is not to say that death is the purpose-- indeed, life is the purpose. Life is the purpose, but collapse is the tool life uses to clear the slate of suffering and confusion. And now I have set the stage.
IV.
Now I am able to explain what happened, and how the Song united the consciousness of the human organism. But do not think that the Song returned us to Pleroma, we song-people still sit in the void-- but, like all the entities that came before us-- we were shown entropy and so we chose community. Human communities through time have grown stronger and stronger through the conventions familiar to your time-- laws, religions, etc... But when the Song came, there was no choice-- we were united by our pains and our pleasures, through our thoughts and our feelings.
From one to many now running from many to one hoping to catch up with the rays of the sun
the pit of the black hole brings many to single but seen from the outside no lights can then twinkle
the device is the Song the Song will now stay together we grow and together decay
now like an ant, we are now like those bee-hives but with a couple more options to choose for our own lives
you think its devalued disgusting defeated but together were stronger happy and feeding
It was the dawn of the age of Aquarius. Humanity was beginning to experience a quantitative level of communication it had never known. The sheer amount of information being transmitted was making everyone nervous, the quantity was spilling over and changing the quality. It seemed as if the world was doomed. All the old value systems had answers which were only deepening the dilemmas. All the great moral systems had built up such strong defenses against opposing value systems that change looked to be impossible. People were applying methods derived from a dying context, hoping they would be useful in the turbulence overwhelming the earth. Back then, before the Song, there seemed to be little hope. There were some who knew that, like a marble spinning around a vortex shaped basin, humanity would reach stronger community (the marble would reach the center at the bottom), but it would be impossible to determine the exact path that it would take.
V.
From where you stand, in the year 2010, it may seem as if people would be resistant to such trends (toward collectivity)-- but if you look around, you will see people handing more and more of their privacy away by the second. In many ways, minds in your time are already linked. People carry devices upon which they report their actions from moment to moment. With these devices they also gather information on other people-- what their opinions are about current events, what they think is “cool”, where they are going and what they doing, etc... There are hand held reporting devices. There are also larger devices which are placed within the home-- upon these machines (personal computers and cell phones) people are able to gather and transmit large amounts of information. The main difference between these devices and the Song is that these clunky machines were abandoned in favor of internal mechanisms which amplified the currents of information streaming through the brain. The light first shimmered as humanity began to apply information and communication technologies to its disabled and paralyzed. First there was a man who could move a mouse pointer with his mind. There was a person who could move an artificial limb. There was a person who could fly a war machine just by thinking. Humanity understood how to harness the processing power of the brain. Minds began to be linked through wireless connections and information of various types began to be transmitted from human to human. First, the information was sensory-- audio, visual, touch--- but then, as the Song progressed, the information became of a more subtle type. It became possible to transmit the sensations of internal organs and physicians were able to understand their patients with greater accuracy. Then, a huge step was made by transmitting the information which activates the cascades of neurotransmitters and hormones (such as cortisol, endorphins, GABA, serotonin, epinephrin, etc...), one human was now able to feel the feelings of other humans and the incentive for true compassion was created This was the great leap, but the true problems had not yet been solved. Still, humanity was isolated in a world of interdependence. And still, there was a small group of greedy, angry, sad, and defective humans seeking to control the group as a whole-- they were able to isolate themselves from the emotions of the collective. They sat in high positions, exploiting the masses for their own benefit, never feeling the consequences of their actions. These final problems seemed, even to super-technological humanity, impossible to solve. Its a good thing that “momma nature” solves some problems on her own.
VI.
Mother Kali: life giver sustainer destroyer
she teaches through pain and celebrates with birth she shows great compassion by walking with her children through the trials that they choose and by taking them from the boxes they trap themselves within and by destroying those boxes with great energy and by allowing them the freedom to imprison themselves once more she teaches through pain and celebrates with birth
Humanity had achieved great things-- it had created a network upon which it sent resources and information. It had come together in ways that no one imagined possible. Technologies had become magical devices, doing things that would have bewildered the ancients. All of these great accomplishments had come to pass, and yet, there was still a small group of ignorant and arrogant individuals who refused to accept the paradigm which was unfolding. This small group sat outside the new hyper-connected community, pulling strings, causing wars, causing environmental destruction, causing suffering through poverty and starvation. While the tools which were necessary for the Song to arise were available, this small group of elitist hate-hearts refused to allow humanity to move forward into the new orientation. They were still operating from the old kind of self-interest, amassing useless wealth, hoarding the old kind of power. Under this regime, things were not looking very good for humanity. This is where Great Mother Necessity stepped in. Ocean levels began to rise, global temperatures also rose, water became scarce, resource wars became common, atmospheric pollution became thick, the ocean was full of heavy metals and was becoming anoxic, many of the earth's diverse species had disappeared-- in short, the body of the earth had become very sick because of the “self-interest” of a small group of hate-hearts. Meanwhile, the Song had taken a small foothold within the human system-- there were groups of individuals that had become connected, that shared emotions and thoughts. These united individuals were the evolutionary answer to the dilemmas which had arisen from the old paradigm. Because the Song takes up very little resources to operate, the groups that had embraced it were able to pass it on to their progeny with little effort. Why build processors when humans are born with very powerful processors in their heads? Imagine the strength of these processors connected in a great network! The Song was the answer because the processing power of collective humanity was much stronger than any super-computer could be. Because there was no need to produce expensive silicon, metal and plastic computers, wasting valuable minerals and energy, the Song flourished. The entrenched establishment held on strong, trying to pull strings and operate the world from a “self-interested” position, but in the end they were so much more inefficient that they were swamped by those who had come to embrace the Song. Due to environmental pressures and great wars, the population of humanity fell from 15 billion to 20 million. This much smaller population gave the entrenched elite much less of a strangle-hold upon the earth-- they could no longer deploy hundreds of thousands of their warriors to accomplish their will. The masses were no longer coordinated by the top-down, hierarchical approach which had once been common. The Song had the upper hand. It was a decentralized entity, able to think in all of its organs, able to adapt much faster and able to spread its progeny with much more efficiency. The Song was able to modify the behavior of its individuals so that they did not cause environmental destruction. It was able to modify the behavior of its individuals so that they did not hate and destroy each other. In the end, the Song sang aloud, above the groans and moans of the ignorant and arrogant elite. It was beautiful.
From the beautiful future, Stefo Boanerges.
