Methane-producing microbes may be responsible for the largest mass extinction in Earth’s history. Fossil remains show that sometime around 252 million years ago, about 90 percent of all species on Earth were suddenly wiped out — by far the largest of this planet’s five known mass extinctions. It turns out that Methanosarcina had acquired a particularly fast means of making methane, and the team’s detailed mapping of the organism’s history now shows that this transfer happened at about the time of the end-Permian extinction. (1)
The greatest disaster in life, caused by the – supposedly – weakest organism of all.
Our definitions need re-defining.
Our egoism does not let us see beyond our nose..
We are not all that powerful.
We are not all that clever.
We are just microbes believing we are titans.
But only the humble are truly powerful.
Look at the world from the perspective of a microbe.
Only though knowing our limits, will we become limitless.
Acknowledge you are nothing and you will be part of everything…
First: Where do humans fall in the food chain? You can probably already guess it’s somewhere between cows and polar bears, but a new study now puts a number to it: Somewhere between 2.0 and 2.6, depending on where you live. That’s on a scale of 1 to about 5, in which plants are 1s and carnivorous apex predators like killer whales are 5.5s. In other words, humans are in kind of the same plane as anchovies and pigs. (1, 2)
Secondly: Which organism is the fastest evolving? It seems the slitherers got off to a fast start. The first two full snake genomes to be sequenced – belonging to the Burmese python and the king cobra – show that they have one of the fastest rates of genetic evolution among vertebrates. (3)
If we do not have the largest genome (see here), if we are not at the top of the food chain, if we are not the fastest evolving species, then WHAT are we anyway?
Our efforts to find out who we are via the materialistic “all research and analysis is based on our body” path has met a dead-end. According to that path, we are something between the… strawberies and the anchovies – well behind the snakes.
But do you FEEL unimportant?
Do you FEEL like nothing?
Do you FEEL an animal?
Do you believe you are like a pig or less than a strawberry?
Maybe in order to think more clearly we should stop thinking…
Every place will hold its secrets from you. You can never see the Amazon jungle, if you keep intact the bubble of linguistic assumptions of the place you started out from. (Terence McKenna discusses if reality is real)
Culture and ideology are not your friends. This is a hard thing to come to terms with because some kind of alienation lies at the end of this thought process. Culture is not you. Culture is for the convenience of culture. How many times have your sexual desires, career aspirations, financial dealings, aesthetic inclinations been squashed, twisted, rejected and minimized by cultural values? (Terence McKenna, The Universe inside)
Mystery didn’t die with the fall of Atlantis. It still exists in every moment. It just lies behind the barrier of courage. (Terence McKenna, The Universe inside)
Wherever and whenever the ego function began to form, it was akin to a cancerous tumor or a blockage in the energy of the psyche. The use of psychedelic plants in a context of shamanic initiation dissolved – as it dissolves today – the knotted structure of the ego into undifferentiated feeling, what Eastern philosophy calls the Tao. (Terence McKenna, Food of the Gods)
Try to free your mind.
Try to let go of your brain…
It is just a distraction.
Focus on what you don’t see…
Hear what you don’t hear…
Most of the times something evil lurks behind totalitarian bans like the “all drugs are evil” motto… In the old days the most wise men took (natural) “drugs”. Now drug addicts are just “ill”. Think about it: when was the last time Society or the State cared SO MUCH about your health? …
Could even TED see the truth in that? Could state control of consciousness be the evil behind a seemingly good advice? Check out…
Many people refer to the Middle Ages as a “dark” era.
But take a look closer. Why do they say that?
The main reason is that during these ages research in sciences like mathematics, geometry, astronomy et cetera was not so intense as, e.g., in the era before Christ.
But is that really bad?
Do we need cold geometry more than divine inspiration? Do we need raw mathematics more than the acknowledgement of our higher essence? Do we need astronomy more than a reason to look at the stars?
It is true that Christianism brought a change in philosophy. And for many years people were busy with analyzing this new philosophical system and its implications. Christianism elevated humans to the higher spiritual realm to which they belong. It helped people see that they are not just animals. It helped people realize their true potential, see their soul, understand their esoteric divinity. It taught people look after the eternal life more than profits here and now, making them less materialists and more… well, humans. (during the Middle Ages all people were taught to seek the ‘necessitas’ – every quest for things beyond what is necessary was condemned)
Why is that “darkness”? Why does research in more humanistic issues is “bad” and does not constitute “progress”?
Why is the Enlightenment… “light”? Don’t forget that history is written by the winners. And the winners in this case were crude enough to verify their win by naming their era with a name which is synonym to Light!
Middle Ages had Aristotle as a reference point. How ridiculous is to have it characterized as ‘darkness’ by the era which follows… Dawkins? Why is the belief that many people today have to the Random (everything happened… because!), the purposeless (there is no purpose anywhere in life), the mechanistic (we are just machines doing what our genes tells us to do), the unconscious (consciousness is just an illusion, we are just computers) “light”?
Take a look again.
Dark. Light. Light. Dark.
Famous misunderstandings
Middle Ages have been falsely related to many things…
No, the Galileo case is not what is seems. Neither is the Hypatia case. Read my article here for more on these false stories…
Witch hunting was initiated by the church has been supposed to cost the lives of millions of women who burned at the stake. True? False. The most accurate number of people accused of witchcraft is about 40,000 and one third of them were men. And they were most probably hanged rather than burned alive. The church had nothing to do with these persecutions. [Witchfinders, 2005] [The book of general ignorance, John Lloyd and John Mitchinson – Το βιβλίο της Ολικής Άγνοιας, Τζον Λόυντ & Τζον Μίτσινσον] Using such arguments is deeply flawed and hypocritical. Not only we must recognize that in general all the past societies were more violent because of their structure, imagine what we could say about the Middle Ages if it had millions of dead like the ones our “enlightened” centuries have (see World Wars, atheistic regimes that kill millions, eugenics, etc.).
People in the Middle Ages believed the Earth was flat. True? False. Besides some people before Middle Ages who were not actually related to the church (Lactantius, Cosmas Indicopleustes – see here), the idea of Flat Earth was popularized much after that era. In 1828, American writer Washington Irving (author of Rip Van Winkle) published a book entitled The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus. It was a mixture of fact and fiction, with Irving himself admitting he was ‘apt to indulge in the imagination’. This book spread the wrong perception that people back then thought the Earth was flat. What is more, Samuel Birley Rowbotham (1816–1884) – an English inventor and writer – wrote Zetetic Astronomy: Earth Not a Globe in 1864 and through this work the idea was made famous. [The book of general ignorance, John Lloyd and John Mitchinson – Το βιβλίο της Ολικής Άγνοιας, Τζον Λόυντ & Τζον Μίτσινσον] So it was the 19th “scientific” century and not the “dark” Middle Ages who brought forward this ludicrous idea…
The Middle Ages has brutal punishments for criminals: Nothing can be more misleading. Everything must be analyzed within context. Yes, people in the past was more raw and that applies for every age in the past! However note that during the Byzantium age there was a great reform of criminal punishments so as to better define them and make them more humane. Yes, the punishments still were harsh, but these punishments were mainly inherited from the previous non-Christian regimes. [Ιστορία Δικαίου, Σ. Τρωϊανός, Ι. Βελισσαροπούλου-Καρακώστα, Δ’ Έκδοση, Νομική Ββιλιοθήκη, Αθήνα, 2010]
