The Nature of Metaphor

When I look at the evolution of life on this resilient and alive planet, I think of one creature in particular: dinosaurs.

For good reason do these beasts astonish us. Growing big in a world with around 30% oxygen content relative to today's 21%, these dinosaurs were supercharged, super-sized factories of energy dissipation: a lunging beast of a form - a symmetrical miasma - a biting testament to evolution's viciousness.

But then some 65 million years ago, an asteroid is said to have smashed into the sea around the Yucatan, killing off the large oxygen chugging dinosaurs, and leaving the world for the smaller creatures who survived to evolve.

Is this history, or cosmic metaphor? Would it scare you if you yourself were a living metaphor - an ontological transformation within the framework of a historical dynamic, now being exercised by the dynamic center - the self itself, alive, real, and living within as the architect of its actions - mutated into expression through the primates - descendants of rodents - now living in the trees, exploring the trees - exploring life at two perspectives - the low ground and the high ground.

As someone with a deep love for the sciences, I am amazed by the speech that natures meanderings speak: the little rodent survives the dinosaurs - and how? Through some divine intervention, as it were: a chance bombing of the earth by a 6 mile wide asteroid - killing off a species that had colonized many different domains, with the tree eating brontosaurus - an outlier - to the more general carnivorous habit of the dinosaur.

Today, neuroscientists argue that the brain-stem of the Human being corresponds in a very general, autonomic sense, to the brain of the reptile. The association is helped by the fact that crocodiles, snakes and most lizards have small brains - with not much when it comes to the processing and communication of social signals. Of all the reptiles alive today, the most "evolved" is the komodo Dragon, which seems to engage in some sort of play-like activity, but this is itself debated by ethologists. In a very general sense, the external look of the animal very much does correspond to the internal life of its consciousness: reptiles are and have usually been killing machines, although there are interesting exceptions to the rule.

Looking Back

When the philosopher, scientist, theologian, and mystic, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, said that evolution was turning inwards, Chardin was referring to this act of "collecting", as it were, the semantic items of the Earths past, and indeed, our universes past, all the way to the beginning. Chardin saw this as an important research project as well as a spiritual quest - and I agree. I would add that this quest is about honing in on the details, moving from the physics of the beginning of our planets formation, to the unfolding structure which emerged through myriad feedback loops, at multiple emergent levels. The atoms, the quark, the molecule, the cell, the tissue, the body, the mind. All the particles of my constitution cohere through mutual, dynamic oppositions and attractions, with positive and negative charges separating one another, as a "geometric" structure - a symmetry - emerges.

Symmetry. This is where the sciences are moving: towards the wondrous view of the Human being as a "living crystal", in the immortal words of Mae Wan Ho. Tremendous books are being written, and were inching closer, inevitably, as we come upon a more coherent and sophisticated architecture of our species existence - the nature of our consciousness - and how our body, the body of others, and the planet, exist in an invisible "womb" that binds all humans into a single structure with the life systems of all other creatures.

In looking back upon our history - our own personal history as a self, and the history of our species and the planet we evolved upon, our body structures our awareness through a transformation of state from dynamical (systemic/computational) to phenomenological - with an implicit awareness already present, indeed, as the core reality of the structure: the desire to live, to express life, and to express meaning.

From amoeba to the human, the "spirit" of the structure - the eye which watches upon its actions - was implicit and present in all that moves and seeks to be. What happened with the evolution of social mammals was the elaboration of the sensory input and motor output with phenomenological analysis. With more meaning - or being affected in new ways, come new "coherencies" in the structure - and so the geometrical symmetry - essentially taking on more material complexity, in both number of components and possibility of combinations.

Yet with mind, that great big eye - that concept hinted at in the american dollar bill - came an aspect of existence that hadn't yet been incarnated in any evolving dynamical structure on the Earth. Our emergence followed a trajectory of transformations that were simultaneously constrained by normal physics (time budgets, energy, travel, rest etc) and enabled by a new, higher emergent phenomenon with the capacity to do physical work: love. Creatures affected by this force are drawn to use one another in various ways to support their dynamical functioning, but it is only in the Human lineage that this power has become elaborated and accomodated - led and made possible by a "zig-zagging" through the geography and time, and being the one species that hit the right marks, expressed the right dynamics, to achieve a complexity of symmetry, a being totally centered in the most phenomenal emergent property there is: love. From forests to stones, to forests, to elaborating the mind, to experiencing a connection to the objective world that in turn stimulates an affective reaction: just think of how remarkable this is, when thought of the annuls of time, from the big bang, to the supernova that created Earth, to the small molecules that self-organized into cells, to the formation of symbiotic cells that could metabolize oxygen, to the extension of the one cell into a cell asssembly: an assembly of cells, making this emergent property we call an "animal".

And then this animal evolves, through fish, sharks, amphibians, dinosaurs, rodents, monkeys, apes, humans, each stage in the process of "neuralization" - of complexifying the meaning-structure that is the mind - we are faced with moral situations - situations of stress and suffering, yet a simultaneous awareness of what relaxes and inspires you: other people. The horror and hell of loneliness against the anger or resentment that aggravates: the solution, as always, is the conscious decision to cultivate an orientation of love - and so love "chooses" itself, through us, and through us, enables a more powerful structure.

The Gray, the Nordic, and the Reptile

I know there are people who really believe that there are creatures from alien planets with the above names. Since this is a conspiracy oriented website, I may as well admit to why I mention this: to point out how our imagination is made - from the fabric of our dynamical structures history - through all those forms mentioned earlier, back to the first animals 530 million years ago.

The imagination is not an arbitrary structure, but a logically built fabric - or quilt - that records the history of lifes many transformations.

The reptile refers to a primitive part of our self-structure, because it emerged in the reptile, its imprint as a metaphorical structure would emerge within the Humans imagination as a reference to a spiritual quality - an earlier quality, but more importantly, a devolved quality from the perspective of man.

The gray alien is similarly a mishmash of human fantasy - a reflection of the Humans own reflectivity upon itself, or at least among those who feel alienated from the normal human condition. The gray is grey - its "unsure", "in between", "confused", "schizophrenic". Its head is also a reflection of its strange nature - insect-like eyes, black and empty; its as if this metaphor were a construction of the western worlds imagination: with a religious belief and fervor in the power of mathematics to explain everything, math invoked by everyone, and everyone following the same tune - the same impersonal, irrational logic - that math - mediated by the parietal lobes (which are very large in grey aliens) express?

Then there is the Aryan - another phantasma, this time of the white supremecist consciousness. The most naive thing about people who believe such fables is that they do not acknowledge the role their biology plays in the construction of awareness: and since their construction is itself informed by an relational environment, their structure is "communicated" by an ecological set-of-conditions, which, truth be told, do not need to be mythologically interpreted as some metaphysical imperative. Th aryan is just this: the transformation of the metaphorical qualities of being white, and being Aryan, and being the group which colonized Europe and then went on to conquer Rome: this Aryan reflection is nothing more than the ego's schizophrenic "a-musement" with its own image. Its no more real than you: whats real is just you: and what you are is entirely a function of what you do: ergo, you - your awareness - cannot ever escape a world to which you yourself are the source and origin: yes, others exist outside you, but the mystery is that they are just like you - and you like them - and together we each persist as reflections of the same reality, to which a convergence in awareness - mediated by intersubjective communications - allow a deeper awareness of this common oneness - this intimacy of commonality which breaks down the physical space around us.

These images - the reptile, aryan, and alien, are stuff for the psychologist to think about - that is, to be thought about scientifically - objectively - and reasonably. They are just images that arise from the flow of an dissipative structure - some look backwards to a primitive image of self-concern; another speaks of a fantasy about intelligence, being alienated, and "distant", and yet another, a narcissitic reflection on ones power, beauty, and goodness.

Yay finally someone has used the word devolved!
Well done and extremely well written.
Whatever you believe is what is! I have been saying that all along.
We are the creators and we are the destroyers of this world .
Different from all aliens because humans (god in man) are the only species given the divine energy of love.
The key to the kingdom let us say.
You would not understand this if you have never had a garden that you planted and loved for yourself.
We will always remain individual as we are the creation of our parents, 2 individuals who had the power to co create another being in whatever image they choose (I suppose they could choose you to be a brad pitt). Not many people realize this and create monsters, abortions, deformity's and accidents because they did not think long enough about their creation before attempting to create it. Now for a metaphor- Like creating a blunt knife, how thoughtless, but so easy to do.

Aliens spend a very long time thinking about their test tube creations before they are hatched/born to ensure they get what they want, the only thing they will never get is LOVE.

You were created sharp and I like the way you write with such a flow, your thoughts unhindered and your facts precluded and relatively precise to your beliefs.

Guess you have never seen an alien then - or If you have is this your logical mind trying to explain it away?.

You mentioned math did that include 1+1=infinity
Have you ever planted 2 seeds in the ground and watched them grow to produce 600 more trees each year- to produce another 600 trees each etc.?
1-1=extinction. that is how the dinosaurs died - killed by humans because they were deemed "of no use "..
By the creator/destroyer , Humanbeings.
This world is real and you are your own entity and your world does revolve around you, you great creator/destroyer you.
Loving at you now. Astrocyte!

a reply to: Woodwoman

"Oh! friend now quit thy learning, One Alif is all thou dost need. By learning thou hast loaded my mind, With books thou hast filled up thy room. But the true knowledge was lost by pursuing the false, So quit now, O friend, the pursuit of thy learning."

a reply to: Astrocyte
Thanks for that... GREAT work.
Good to read something of substance, well thought out, and elucidated.
(rather than just re-posts or trolling)