Beyond the chase for gold or fame,
A deeper thirst, without a name—
Not sated by the world’s applause,
But found in quiet, sacred pause.
A pearl lies hidden, veiled from sight,
Within the soul’s unending night;
To find its glow, we dive within,
Where transformation must begin.
The world distracts with noise and light,
But clues appear in fleeting sight—
A song, a tree, a lover’s face,
Hints of a deeper, sacred place.
The body’s cells, with purpose aligned,
Reveal the unity we seek to find.
Each serves the whole, each knows its place,
Selfless, bonded, woven grace.
No cell withholds, no cell denies,
They live the truth that underlies—
That giving, joining, letting be,
Is nature’s path to harmony.
We think the outer world alone is real,
But all we touch and taste and feel,
Is born within the mind’s domain—
A dance of signals, joy and pain.
The world is in us, not outside,
The dreamer and the dream collide;
All boundaries blur, all forms dissolve,
As inner worlds and stars revolve.
What you are seeking, you already hold—
The silent witness, gentle yet bold.
No far-off journey, no prize to win,
The treasure stirs in silence, deep within.
But shadows linger, doubts arise,
A silent ache behind the eyes.
We wander lost through tangled thought,
Afraid the pearl we seek is naught.
Yet in the hush where longing breaks,
A deeper knowing softly wakes.
Through every trial, wound, and scar,
We find how near we truly are.
Release the chase, the maps, the strife,
The restless search through outer life;
In stillness, meet the self that stays
When all illusions fall away.
Pain may come, but suffering’s chain
Is forged by mind, in false terrain.
We cling to stories, regrets, and fears,
Confined within our phantom years.
Let feelings pass like streams that flow,
Let truth unwind what isn’t so;
In presence, suffering fades to air—
The real remains, the false laid bare.
A root runs deep, where questions burn,
Threading through chambers as mysteries churn.
It drinks the rains of joy and ache,
And blossoms quietly when you wake.
Ask, and the answer floods your days;
Knock, and the door reveals the ways.
You are the mystery you seek—
The root, the flower, the voice unique.
In darkness pressed by fences, steel and stone,
Where hope was starved and names were all unknown,
A man could lose himself in hunger’s night,
Yet still within, the will endured to fight.
The world reduced to hunger, cold, and fear,
Each day a struggle, every loss severe.
Yet some gave bread, a word, a glance, a hand—
A proof that spirit’s freedom still could stand.
For meaning isn’t found in fleeting gain,
Nor in the chase for power, praise, or fame.
It’s ignited in our labor, love, and pain—
In how we carry sorrow’s quiet flame.
Suffering ignored becomes a shadowed ache,
But how we meet it is the choice we make.
A person, stripped of all but breath and bone,
Can meet the end with honor as their own.
The body starved, the mind began to roam,
To memories of laughter, warmth, and home.
A single tree, a blossom on a bough,
Could whisper: “I am life—eternal now.”
In memory’s shelter, beauty’s fleeting stream,
A sunset, music, or a distant dream—
The soul can rise, though flesh is chained and torn,
And find in suffering the chance to be reborn.
When all seems lost and fate has dealt its blow,
We still can find the course our hearts will go.
For our last freedom none can ever steal—
To choose our stance, to think, to love, to feel.
So though the world may strip you to the core,
And hardship seals off every possible door,
Remember—choice endures when all else fails:
To kindle hope, even as the night prevails.
Dedicated to my cats and the super mutt Shepard dog who looks after them.
We’re all just along for the ride, for as long as it lasts…
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
In gardens where dappled sunlight plays and dances,
Cats move with grace, untouched by fortune’s advances.
They need no deep philosophy to guide their way,
Content to simply bask in the quiet gift of the day.
Cats, arch-realists, slip free from human schemes,
They live each moment, unbound by restless dreams.
Secure in their nature, they simply exist,
While humans, tangled in thought, endlessly persist.
For cats, contentment is their natural state,
No frantic projects, no haggling with fate.
They lounge in the daylight, they hunt when they must,
They play without purpose, in instinct they trust.
Humans, divided, are haunted by thought,
By stories and futures and lessons self-taught.
We chase happiness, forever just out of sight,
While cats, in their wholeness, rest free of our plight.
We seek in others what we cannot find—
The peace that comes from an undivided mind.
While cats possess what we can never claim:
To be themselves without pretense or shame.
Their love is given freely, never owed;
They come and go along their chosen road.
No master claims them, yet their presence shows
A grace that only unfettered being knows.
Cats show the calm that ancient sages seek,
A quiet strength, profoundly pure and meek.
Not worried by the future, free from anxious fear,
Just wholly present and exquisitely here.
So let us observe, with humility’s eyes,
The grace in a creature that never asks why.
For wisdom may dwell in a nap in the sun—
A life simply lived, and a day simply done.
Beneath the shroud of fleeting hours, We chase the bloom of dying flowers. Yet shadows carved from distant light Spin tales that pierce the darkest night.
The moon, a sage with muted tongue, Casts silhouettes where dreams are hung. Her phases map our deepest fears, And hold the weight of timeless years.
We clutch at dusk, at dawn’s faint hue, As skies unravel truths we knew: The universe is not “out there”— It burns in every breath we bear.
The cosmos weaves through every vein, A pulse that time cannot contain. We’re stardust sewn through Saturn’s rings, And ghosts who ride on comet wings.
Do constellations chart our fate, Or guide the hearts that navigate The void between the flesh and bone, Where galaxies have built their throne?
For within the soul’s uncharted depth, Where secrets of time and tide are kept— The infinite and brief entwine— A supernova’s forge divine.
Autumn leaves descend in amber and gold, Whispering mythic poems and tales of old. Life, a fleeting spark we treasure and hold, Flickers bright before the dark and cold.
In this brief and precious time span, What purpose guides the fate of man? Is love the salve that mends the tear, Or honor’s shield that conquers fear?
For love, though shadowed by the end, Still blooms where hearts and hands extend. It asks no promise of tomorrow, But shares the joy, and endures the sorrow.
In honor’s forge, our brave feats are cast, To keep a flame as present falls to past. Not gold, nor fame, but acts of sacred worth Are the fortress of deeds to outlive ash and earth.
Respect the hands that bear the chain Of life’s sweet joy and mortal pain. In kinship, find the strength to rise, To meet the void with steadfast eyes.
Clocks may still our final breath, But not the bonds that laugh at death. For what we defend in life—love and honor— Endures beyond what time can conquer.
The sands of time slip swiftly away, No hand can halt its pendulum sway. Yet in this dance, so brief, so bright, We reach for sparks against the night.
A child’s laugh, a sunlit stream, A cup of warmth, a waking dream, The crinkle of a loved one’s eyes, A firefly’s blink in nighttime skies—
The autumn leaf, the spring’s first bloom, A ray of light in winter’s gloom. These fragments—small, yet sharp and clear— Are things we keep when death draws near.
For twilight comes with quiet hands, And spreads our ash to foreign lands. Where joy’s deep roots once split hard stone, Laughter still rings, though flesh is bone.
Dust claims what time has spun; Earth forgets the wars we’ve won. Yet briefly, we grasped the light, each fleeting one— A blaze to rival the brightest star and sun.
The moon ascends not through the air alone, But in the marrow of each ancient bone— Where galaxies are cradled in the flesh, And every breath is stardust’s whispered mesh.
Sunset unravels, threads of fading light, A tapestry devoured by the night— Each shadow hums with planets yet to be spawned, And silence wears the cloak of dusk and dawn.
Her scars are maps of epochs long dissolved, A braille of secrets never fully solved. The tides within us rise to meet her speech, A dialogue no mortal tongue can reach.
The stars, like sentinels in iron guise, Carve runes of fire through the vaulted skies— Their light a needle threading through our veins, To mend the rifts where chaos forged its chains.
We drink the ink of supernova streams, Our blood a cursive script of comet screams— Each cell a vault where time’s old hymns are kept, The universe a lung that has not slept.
The void we fear is not some distant shore, But orbits woven in the heart’s hushed core— A billion suns in every fingernail, And endings curled like seeds within a gale.
When dawn exhales its helix forged of flame, The night withdraws—but does not shed its name— For constellations nest in marrow’s keep, Where shadows birth the light they meant to reap.
We are the riddle and the answer spun— The dying star, the cradle, and the sun.
The city hums with cables, steel, and wire; Its neon lights devour the starry night’s choir. Our fingers dance on keyboards that feed desire— Yet hearts grow cold in Wi-Fi’s electronic pyre.
Strangers walk by, hollow eyes downcast, A world adrift, community a relic of the past. No names are shared, no hands clasped tight— Just fractured souls lost in the dark of night.
The machines exhale their sterile, uncaring breath, A language of code that whispers loneliness and death; Our voices drown in data’s unending stream, Our touch reduced to pixels in a digital dream.
But there persists forests that escape human sprawl, Where the wild reclaim the silence lost to all, Running through veined leaves is a pulse we share— A rhythm of life as ancient as earth and air.
In these woods where ancient trees boldly stand, Free from the scars etched deep by human hand, Swaying branches whisper truths we innately understand, Of holes left in our hearts when we were ripped from the land.
So flee to where city chaos dares not creep, Where roots meander and wild things live and sleep. For in nature do our splintered souls yearn to retreat; Only there, shall we make ourselves whole and complete.
Those who have read my thoughts, sprinkled hither and thither around the internet, will perhaps be aware that I gave up, about one and a half years ago, when I realised that whatever mighty efforts activists might make, it was going to be impossible to save the biosphere. Daniel Drumright was about three months ahead of me.
Nobody who hasn’t fully encountered and absorbed that experience for themselves, in its true horror, has any idea what it really means, and for those who have yet to face it, you have my deepest compassion and sympathy.
There’s no point in going over the technical reasoning in detail. People either get it or they don’t. They can find all the information quite easily.
There are three big, obvious factors that most people do not understand; those are, first, the irreversible self-reinforcing positive feedbacks that Guy McPherson is listing, and second, the time lag, that what we have now is the result of what we did forty or so years ago, and what we get in the future will be the effects of what we have been doing ever since. The third is the astounding rate at which all the changes are happening, when compared with all previous similar or comparable events in Earth’s history. Whatever it is, it is ULTRA DRAMATIC on the geological time scale.
The doom scenario has been, and is being, comprehensively documented by xraymike on this blog. The trickle of folk who are going through the process of coming to terms with this hellish awakening has already grown into a cascade and will soon be millions, and I really have nothing to say to them, because I do not know what to say to them.
Once you get the insight regarding the Mass Extinction Event, it’s a bit like the Buddha’s Enlightenment Experience under the Bodhi Tree, only in reverse, so to speak.
Gautama pondered whether to keep his insight to himself and spend the rest of his days in bliss, or whether to teach others what he now knew, and he chose, out of compassion, to spend the remainder of his life wandering through India teaching his message.
But how do you teach how to cope with doom ? There’s nothing optimistic or pleasing or life-enhancing or joyful about imminent apocalypse. There’s just the anguish and distress involved with the demanding process of navigating your own psychology and emotional responses toward an impossible future.
Each individual IS an individual, as we see on NBL, with their own version of the mixture of belief and disbelief and their own political and philosophical and religious outlooks, and some have children and grandchildren and some are thinking of survival chances, some of suicide, some of resistance, and so on.
I have had more than a year to dwell upon my own position, and to watch the responses in my own being, and in the people whom I like and respect, and the voices I admire, who also grasp the profound and terrible tragedy facing us all. For a long time, there was commiseration, but then what ? Commiseration fatigue ? How can anyone commiserate with anonymous thousands, let alone millions ?
Again, there’s lots of speculation as to the detail of how the crash will play out and how societies will respond as they collapse. I’m not going to add much to that here, it’s all available elsewhere. We either get a die back, and a bottle neck, with a few survivors, or a complete die off and total extinction event. I think we get the latter, but even if it is the former, none of us are going to know any of those people, as to who they will be, or where or what becomes of them, so why does it matter ? And why would anyone choose to have to live through whatever horrendous circumstances they will have to endure, following the trauma of the ending of civilisation ? Perhaps some people will just happen to find themselves in such a situation. Who knows ?
Meanwhile, here we are. Peak just about everything, where we start the big slide down into the abysmal depths of whatever awaits us all… the biggest crisis that the human species has ever faced, 7 point something billion of us, with millions more arriving here every month. There is no discernible global leadership of any kind that comprehends our dire situation, only madmen and corruption and people locked in to dead cultural paradigms.
What does a dead cultural paradigm look like ?
Well, we’ve got Joseph Tainter to give us some clues from the historical record and maybe Heathcote Williams to bring us up to date with the contemporary scene
From what I understand of history, we can expect a hard swing toward fascist dystopia, as regimes try desperately to exert total control over everything, and hard swings from repressed populations and factions which reciprocate with resistance.
The future will be whatever it will be. Every day I walk up and down the Beach of Doom and kick at pieces of poisonous plastic flotsam and miscellaneous cosmic debris left by the virtual tide, and gaze at the orange purple bruises on the tangerine sky and sometimes I bicker and haggle with someone.
Yesterday it was Lidia at NBL to whom I am grateful for an insight into something or other.
You see, people can be very roughly divided into two groups. Those who primarily hold a religious, or spiritual, or romantic, or mythical world view. And those who primarily hold a scientific, or materialist, or rationalist world view.
Of course, this is a crude over-simplification, and speaking to any individual, you’ll soon find they hold all kinds of contradictory beliefs. But roughly, it’s Mythos and Logos, or Iain McGilchrist’s Right and Left Hemispheres.
So, Lidia was kind enough to describe her worldview, her welt anschauung, her cosmology, her mental conception of how reality is structured, her epistemology, her way of ‘knowing your place in the Universe’.
I hope she will forgive my using her as an example, and the exchange several days ago was only a brief re-run of a much longer version we had on the now defunct NTE ning, some months ago, so I think I do have a fairly full idea as to her thinking, but so as not to risk any personal offence, I’ll take the illustration away from Lidia, and apply it to any generic physicist or scientist or person with a similar belief system, of whom I have met very, very many. This will allow me some poetic license possibly, avoiding danger of maligning the good Lidia, I hope.
You see, according to this paradigm of reality, there is only physics. Everything is physics.
That means that everything is explained by physics. That means no mystery, because even if there is mystery, that’s only due to physics not yet explaining it. And once mystery is killed off, it’s relatives, cousins – things like awe, wonder, sanctity, sacredness, the numinous – easily shrivel and die too.
So, that reality ‘out there’, and this reality ‘in here’, is all meaningless, because it only means something if we impose some wishful magical thinking onto the physics, which, as objective scientists, we are not allowed to do.
And that reality ‘out there’ is just ‘stuff’, and it interacts with this reality ‘in here’, the brain, which again is just ‘stuff’. It’s all physics, it’s all physical stuff, and even though we don’t understand all of it – even don’t understand most of it, or, if pressed, hardly ANY of it, hahaha – in theory, physics can, and will, explain all of it, one day, so no problem.
So, it’s quite interesting to trace back where this story, this Logos story, comes from, and it’s quite easy to do, because it’s well documented and researched, and it goes back to Descartes and his radical scepticism, and the ideas given to him by an angel (Mythos) and his struggle to find anything, something, that he could not undermine by radical doubt, and his arrival at ‘I think, therefore I am’ and then the beginnings of modern science.
Given that the Church of Rome was the dominant power in Europe at the time, an accommodation had to be made between the rising power of science and the prevailing authority, and thus we got an expedient result, the division which gave the material world to the scientists and the spiritual world to the priests. That’s why there’s no God or spirits involved in physics. Which, you may say, is an excellent thing. But let us call it, for the moment, ‘a mixed blessing’.
Because, you see, if you follow the epistemology carefully, and look at it very closely, something absolutely amazing emerges.
Einstein said that our ordinary common senses give us ‘naive realism’. That is, grass is green, rocks are hard, and snow is cold. But physics, if it is true, tells us that this naive realism is all wrong, physics tells us that the reality is quite different, something completely different is actually going on, out there and in here.
Now, it’s all very well for someone like Einstein, or Niels Bohr, or Feynman, to come up with these ideas, as professional physicists, but what happens when this scientific worldview, this basically Cartesian worldview, is taught to us lesser mortals as part of the culture, and internalised as epistemology, and preached to us as ontology, and integrated into general social cosmology ?
This is where it gets really weird, a MOST extraordinary thing – because when I thought over what Lidia had told me, nowhere in the depiction and analysis is there anywhere for A HAPPY HEALTHY COMPLETE HUMAN BEING.
Isn’t that bizarre ? That human beings have come up with a teaching as to what the world is and what the totality of the Universe is, which does not even include the organism that WE ARE, AT ALL ?
I mean, that strikes me as exceptionally odd. Prior to Descartes, the cosmology was a sort of Divine Order, with the Heavens above and layers with angels and God at the pinnacle and so forth. And people were taught this, and their place in the social hierarchy of feudalism was essentially justified because the King was a sort of representative of God on Earth, and so on. So although we can scoff at the nonsense of it, at least at the time, if you were a peasant, you featured in the story.
If you were out in the fields with your ox and your plough and you were gazing at the distant rainbow and thinking about your dead grandfather and you heard the church bells peeling for a wedding in the village next door, all sorts of strange impressions could flicker through your mind, but basically you had a cosmology which placed God somewhere ‘up there’ and you ‘down here’ with a coherent pattern where your birth and living and death belonged with the landscape and the community and the larger reality.
Therefore, the map, the mental model ‘in here’, when projected and overlaid upon reality, had in it the human subject as its focal point, and because that’s what the human subject had been taught, a story was established featuring the ME.
But now, not only have they written God out, with Descartes and the Cartesian Paradigm of reality as the basis of modern science, but you’ve got a model, a cosmology, which has written US, as human beings, biological creatures, right out of the system altogether, as if they were not even involved !
And then people have internalised this model and taken it to be their own personal reality that they use to explain the world to themselves.
I wonder what that does for a person’s health ? I wonder what it does, when millions of people do something like that ?
The Christian Fundamentalists may be completely round the bend when it comes to LOGIC but maybe they just feel intuitively that what they are being offered by the people who argue against them, a worldview, a cosmology, which says NOTHING MEANS ANYTHING, and a worldview, a cosmology, which doesn’t have ANY PLACE where a happy healthy human, a biological human being, can even fit into it, is so sterile and horrible, that they intuitively reject it and are hostile to it ?
Because, if you look at anthropology or what Joseph Campbell said about myth, what a belief system provides for a tribal people is a safe mental refuge. When a person takes a mental excursion into fantasy and ponders the nature of their own life and identity, and the dream they had last night, and their relationships with the world around them and other folks, and the stars above and so forth, the whole purpose of the cosmology is to deliver them safely back unto THEMSELVES.
I mean, think of acid trips and ayauasca and mushrooms and vision quests and all that stuff, where you encounter visions of beings from other dimensions and the most mind-boggling experiences, the idea is to get back to start, square 1, more or less sane and intact.
The same applies to ordinary daydreams and fantasies and all our thinking about our ordinary experiences. How can we be sane and healthy, if our fundamental belief system does not even include a home base option anywhere within it ?
You know, who cares what the physics says. Primarily, we are human beings, biological animals, that cry when we are hurt and sad, and laugh when we are happy, and get sentimental about babies and kittens, and need clean water and food, etc. AND we need a meaningful Universe which has a place for US in it, with a STORY that makes sense as to why we exist…
You know, a story we can UNDERSTAND about who we are and what we are doing here.
At the moment, all these stories we are being told are crap because they are not accurate with the science, strictly speaking, since they can’t be; we can’t get any clear picture from the physicists as to the ultimate nature of all the quantum stuff and the Universe. In addition, these cultural stories are unsatisfactory at the human level when they LEAVE OUT the human being and pretend it’s all some sort of abstract empty machine.
What’s more, from what a large percentage of quantum physicists have plainly stated, you cannot leave the physicist out of the experiment because the observer EFFECTS the observation. Now, I recognize this is contentious, there is no consensus, and it’s not clear what this means. But !
So, what does a ‘good story’ look like ? Well, that’s hard… but I’m glad you asked.
I think this is a complicated and difficult problem, and here I am upon the Beach of Doom, with all of human history and culture, every idea that’s ever been recorded, washed up at my feet at the tide line, strewn and tangled and rotting and steaming…
Look at us, pitiful, confused Bonobos, asking ourselves questions we can’t answer, tearing ourselves and each other apart, trying to satisfy Maslow’s Hierarchy…
Is that what we are doing ? Well, the whistle has blown, the sirens are wailing, time is up, the NTE light is flashing, so there is not going to be some utopian Promised Land for the Bonobos to migrate to…
Xraymike was kind enough to point me to the definition of the word Humanistic:
1. A believer in the principles of humanism. 2. One who is concerned with the interests and welfare of humans.
“Humanism is a group of philosophies and ethical perspectives which emphasize the value and agency of human beings, individually and collectively, and generally prefers individual thought and evidence (rationalism, empiricism) over established doctrine or faith (fideism). The term humanism can be ambiguously diverse, and there has been a persistent confusion between several related uses of the term because different intellectual movements have identified with it over time.[1] In philosophy and social science, humanism refers to a perspective that affirms some notion of a “human nature” (contrasted with anti-humanism). etc…”
So let’s take that as a verbal anchorage.
I’d suggest that most human beings have a fundamental requirement, for their psychological, physiological, and social welfare, to understand ‘the world’ in a way that makes sense. So that, whenever they sit down and think things over, and run ideas through their head, they can confirm themselves and they can confirm ‘the world’ and feel okay.
Wouldn’t that be nice ? Look what we’ve got. It’s not THAT, is it.
Is it any surprise that some people want the Rapture or Alien abduction to get the hell out of this confusion ?
The epistemology that science teaches, following on from Descartes, has caused most of the damage to the biosphere over the last century or two, because nothing is sacred, everything is just dead stuff, in a dead machine, inhabited by ghostly meaningless meat robots, zeks, without any dignity or purpose of their own.
You marry that to Capitalism, an elite with power and greed as their motive, and give it to them as a tool, and hand them control of the Military, which was once meant to guard but gets turned into a predatory plundering machine.
Well. We are where we are. The lights will go out, one by one, and then a few million years of silence as the extremophiles have peace.
It could have been, might have been, a very different story, if we had all followed the example of, say, the Bishnois.
Collapse of Industrial Civilization 