The Plant Communication Diaries - Year 3

For the third year in a row, I've had the inestimable privilege of having the plant kingdom 'speak' to me in my dreams, always at around the same time of the year.

(Although it seems to get later in the month by 4 days each year-I wonder why?)

This year, on the night of the 14th May, I was visited by the Prickly Pear, technically a damn nuisance invader species in this country, yet nonetheless prized in gardens around Gauteng, especially in front of the yard wall.

The Prickly Pear in this dream appeared to have its lower ends wrapped in another form of vegetation - I wasn't sure what, but it was long and clingy.
So off I went to the Internet, where I find that this particular cactus is sometimes an ingredient in the entheogenic brew ayahuasca, and can be combined with the vine of souls to produce a brew which has taught humanity about other worlds than the material one for thousands of years.

I'm not wholly clear on what was being communicated here. On the one hand, I would never drink of the sacred brew made from these two plants, as I am both an alcoholic and a drug addict.
On the other hand, I really don't need to. My brain is capable of some pretty fancy other-worldly trips on it's own, thankyouverymuch.

As a species, we may be leaving behind our dependence on these ancient teacher plants and starting to strike out on our own. There is most certainly, to anyone who considers for a minute, an evolution in human consciousness which has been underway for some time now, but which seems to have been gathering steam lately.

We are anatomically identical to our ayahuasca-swigging ancestor-shamans, yet our minds have definitely undergone a shift and a growth. This indicates that there is in fact something other than the bones and blood of a human on which the evolutionary force may work.

Personally, I find that a pretty compelling argument against gross materialism, right there.

Shame on Us

Photo: Shayne Robinson, The Star

From a distance, it looked like a pile of bedding that had been set alight. Then a head peered through the top of the fiery mattress.

Incredibly, arms flailed weakly from the inferno. Not a scream. Not a whisper. Not a word.

"He's still alive!"

Today's Star

Shame on you, my people.

Is not your own anguish, your own suffering, still within living memory?

What the fuck do you think you're doing?

Relationship - Mapping the Soul

Oh noes!
Cosmologists have been having a butchers at the cosmic background radiation and some of them have concluded that quantum mech could be wrong.

What will all the newage profiteers try to spin their products off then?

Caught somewhere betweenEmma Restall-Orr's spirit to spirit, a beautiful way of relating to the world, and Ken Wilber's You are the river, I have found myself acknowledging that while there is no part of us that is not of the gods, proving the converse (there is no part of the gods which is not of us) is a tad more challenging.

Since I equate the gods with the totality of the universe, including you, me and that pied crow over there, I'm in effect trying to force a one-to-one mapping of the cosmos onto or into my self.

I didn't think I could prove this, but then I had a thought:
As a three dimensional map can be compressed into two dimensions and still understood (albeit by a three dimensional map reader), I wondered if the mapping of the universe onto ourselves was seen by us in a distorted form because it has been forced to squash 4 or five (or eleven) dimensions into effectively three.



The two dimensional representation of a three dimensional object (a land map) may be read even by the two-D Mr A Square of Flatland if he learns to decode isolines and contour lines and possibly different colours, too.

So what is it we need to learn in order to read the holographic compression of the universe upon our souls? A Holy Book of Words? I doubt it. A method of meditation? Perhaps. Compassion? Bodhichita?

I frankly don't know. But I'm willing to go looking.

I don't even know that the one to one (or perhaps one to many) universe-to-me mapping holds at all, although I have had strong intimations, in moments of peak experience,that this may be close to something approximating the truth-whatever that may turn out to be.

Pic:People doing the black-hole impersonation,Ctheory

Tackling the Skeptics' Gordian Knot

It's not easy being a Skeptic, with a capital Skep.

I should know, for I made a valiant attempt to be one, for many years, and failed dismally.

The ability to hold onto the sort of Skepticism which usually goes along with Atheism, with a capital disdain for the Gods, has been one of the more spectacular failures in my life so far.

For a while, it's sort of comforting.

You know all those loose ends, all those questions for which you don't have any good answers? Well, they can all be tied up nice and neatly, no ends flapping in the breeze, if you subscribe to the 'It must have a rational explanation, and any rational-sounding explanation will do' form of skepticism.

Of course I was always going to be miserable at this - but it seems I had to try, if only to justify, in some manner, all the time and energy I'd put into becoming a scientist.

Pity it didn't last-then I could take a satisfied look at that giant knot of resolved unresolved questions, label the whole boiling 'explicable' and turn my back on it.

On Sunday night, I woke up from my customary light sleep when I heard my name being called, clearly and distinctly.

I looked at my sleeping partner who was snoring and who has never been given to talking in his sleep, and wondered, for a brief moment, if I could blame it on him.
After all, it was a male voice of approximately the same range and timbre that had called me awake, so it could have been Warren, couldn't it?

For that brief moment I also ignored the fact that my body was trembling quite violently - that my earthly components were already in full possession of the fact that I had been woken up by my father calling my name.

I'm not as stupid as I would have made out when I was still a Skeptic. I had heard that voice for more than 40 years and have recalled it in my mind many times over the last 7 years since I last heard it and, unlike poor old Carl Sagan, I know the difference.