Sunday, June 29, 2003

Ice and Fire Howard Bloom writes: There is a power in the push and pull of opposites. Gravity's shackle fights momentum's fleeing force to keep a planet racing on the circle of its course. The battle between flexor and extensor muscles gives a strongman might to lift the front end of a car. Inhalation and exhalation vivify the lungs. Compression and expansion pound the heart to pump a tank-truck-full of blood a day. At Ice Age's end, sociality would draw men and women into conformity chambers of unprecedented size. One byproduct would be conformity's antithesis - diversity - surging ideas at ferocious speed into the arteries of the inter-human brain. Old networks would give way to new, hastening the pace at which the fuel of concepts from afar would kindle flares of fire in the furnace of mass mind. Roughly 130,000 years ago, the diversity generator drove tribes to run an artificial crease down their centers, sorting shoulder-rubbing neighbors into two opposing groups. These primordial forms of fabricated cleavage, known to anthropologists as moieties, were apparently a way to keep the deformities of inbreeding at bay. The members of a moiety were forbidden to marry each other, but were forced to pick their mates from among the members of the competing coterie, no matter how distasteful that prospect eventually may have seemed. For moieties soon showed earliest man's ability to build mountains of separation from molehills of similarity. If one moiety identified itself with day, its pouting Siamese twin would declare itself an avatar of night. If one chose to be summer, the other marked itself as winter. If one was earth, the other was defiant sky. (06/29/03) UnCommon Sense - Understanding Life Timothy Wilken, MD writes:  Let us begin our journey towards understanding the human condition by examining life. Modern biology uses a number of different terms to represent living entities. These terms include life forms, living organisms, and more recently living systems. We humans are a form of life. This is a fact of reality paramount to understanding ourselves. And, yet this fact is so pervasive and constant that it rarely enters our consciousness. Our clear and distant superiority to all other forms of life have made it easy for us to neglect our biological basis. As we have seen ourselves different and superior to all other forms of life, we have missed the point . While we differ from plants and animals, we share their aliveness – we are still forms of life – we are still living organisms –we are still living systems . When we examine ourselves scientifically, we discover that humans are living systems, and it follows therefore that our powers and our problems will be those of life.  If we are to create a safe and comfortable future for ourselves and our children, we must understand our connection to life. Our life connection is not only relevant, it is the crucial factor in determining a safe passage through the current human crisis. (06/29/03) 7:20:48 AM

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