It has been a very warm fall, with the grass still needing mowing and peppers still alive and well on the "vine" , but the lowering sun has done its work. The trees have turned and are now shedding en mass, and the song birds have long since gone. A few Sand hill cranes are still around, their occasional dinosaur- like cackle only echoing themselves (ok - what I THINK dinosaurs would sound like), and now the last of the flocks of blackbirds and cowbirds are crowded by the thousands in the wood lots, occasionally filling parts of the sky like the shadows of the extinct passenger pigeons, who used to break branches from trees in their collective weight. They are now, or will soon be, heading south. They not only know the time for it, but the direction, and get it right, if not every time, then almost every time.
Birds can do that. We raised mallard ducks for several years when I was a kid, and for a decade after, they would stop by the nearby reservoir on their trips north and south, flying in salute (I tell the truth) around our house each and every time. Gradually this stopped, but the originals and their prodigy knew the routes they flew to the exact house. How?
Scientific American articles have told me that they have an internal compass somewhere - the brain? - that points them this way and that, synchronized in some elegant way with the seasons. Homing pigeons are even more complex - take them anywhere in a vast flying range and they will find their home, to the exact roof-top. That's one hell of a compass. In fact, it's so good I tend to doubt that this tells the whole story. Instead, as biologist Rupert Sheldrake has postulated, there is probably an explicate order as he calls it, a pattern build into everything that has been formed by the mysterious implicate order, which is, in traditional terms, the generating portion of the godhead.
Science or religion, call it what you will, but nature follows patterns so well drawn that few who study them can refrain from awe. The question that I always ask, and have asked here at least several times, is: do we have a pattern? Are we, as human animals, drawn as if by a magnet to a certain cycle of history, as natural as any of the other species? In my own speculation, I have concluded that we are, and can only escape this pattern through the means provided by long-standing spiritual traditions (and it may be that some of us are drawn to them also by design, but that goes farther than I want to here). But lets forget those traditions for now and take a seat back: what are our patterns?
Obviously, we grow and follow patterns that all recognize, from baby to parents to elders to death, but we are, like those birds in the trees, flock or herd animals. What, then, is our compass drawing us towards? Not in the very long term, for that seems clear: we are on a Promethean gallop to become flesh and blood gods, much like Nimrod and his tower of Babble, and we might fall to the same fate. But rather, what is our near-future? Towards what is our compass pulling us?
I come then in this round-about way to the current presidential election. It seems we are in crises, or at least this is what many of us believe. There seems to be two paths towards which we are being pulled. Do we have a species direction, or is that fuddled up by our very American diversity, as is we were flocks of very different kinds of birds? And if this is so, are we now subject to the survival of the most fit, to that flock that is strong enough to overcome all others?
Birds, it seems, move as one, with no apparent or at least no permanent leader to guide them on their travels. Mammalian herd animals, on the other hand, often have a leader, usually the strongest in the bunch who regularly fights with others for that right. He or sometimes she still guides them on the old paths of instinct, however. Is this what our leaders do? Are they only fighting for the right to lead, but in the long run, only along the same path that is inevitable for our species herd? More importantly, do we all, deep inside, know this path, as other migratory animals do? Would we reject a freak, a deviant, who would take us from this path, even if he were the strongest?
History tells us no - that is, in the short run for the smaller herds. However, we do seem to have a direction as a unity, as a species, that is becoming more and more apparent with better communication and means of travel. In the short run (short, that is, compared to the long run towards man-gods), it seems we are coming together as a giant collective which will only have a few, and then only one big, extremely powerful herd leader. With technology, our speed in that direction seems to be increasing, despite the failure of the big totalitarian experiment in Russia and the wavering one in China.
Is the feeling we have about this election being pivotal true, or only hype, or is it for real? Is our compass being fine-tuned for the big collective, or away, or only temporarily away as we eventually succumb to the tide? For me, I intend, after all the voting and discussion, to sit back and people watch, for the magnet seems to be getting stronger, pulling us faster towards something. But towards which "south" - towards what - is the question, whose answer may already be spelled out in our DNA? FK
Birds can do that. We raised mallard ducks for several years when I was a kid, and for a decade after, they would stop by the nearby reservoir on their trips north and south, flying in salute (I tell the truth) around our house each and every time. Gradually this stopped, but the originals and their prodigy knew the routes they flew to the exact house. How?
Scientific American articles have told me that they have an internal compass somewhere - the brain? - that points them this way and that, synchronized in some elegant way with the seasons. Homing pigeons are even more complex - take them anywhere in a vast flying range and they will find their home, to the exact roof-top. That's one hell of a compass. In fact, it's so good I tend to doubt that this tells the whole story. Instead, as biologist Rupert Sheldrake has postulated, there is probably an explicate order as he calls it, a pattern build into everything that has been formed by the mysterious implicate order, which is, in traditional terms, the generating portion of the godhead.
Science or religion, call it what you will, but nature follows patterns so well drawn that few who study them can refrain from awe. The question that I always ask, and have asked here at least several times, is: do we have a pattern? Are we, as human animals, drawn as if by a magnet to a certain cycle of history, as natural as any of the other species? In my own speculation, I have concluded that we are, and can only escape this pattern through the means provided by long-standing spiritual traditions (and it may be that some of us are drawn to them also by design, but that goes farther than I want to here). But lets forget those traditions for now and take a seat back: what are our patterns?
Obviously, we grow and follow patterns that all recognize, from baby to parents to elders to death, but we are, like those birds in the trees, flock or herd animals. What, then, is our compass drawing us towards? Not in the very long term, for that seems clear: we are on a Promethean gallop to become flesh and blood gods, much like Nimrod and his tower of Babble, and we might fall to the same fate. But rather, what is our near-future? Towards what is our compass pulling us?
I come then in this round-about way to the current presidential election. It seems we are in crises, or at least this is what many of us believe. There seems to be two paths towards which we are being pulled. Do we have a species direction, or is that fuddled up by our very American diversity, as is we were flocks of very different kinds of birds? And if this is so, are we now subject to the survival of the most fit, to that flock that is strong enough to overcome all others?
Birds, it seems, move as one, with no apparent or at least no permanent leader to guide them on their travels. Mammalian herd animals, on the other hand, often have a leader, usually the strongest in the bunch who regularly fights with others for that right. He or sometimes she still guides them on the old paths of instinct, however. Is this what our leaders do? Are they only fighting for the right to lead, but in the long run, only along the same path that is inevitable for our species herd? More importantly, do we all, deep inside, know this path, as other migratory animals do? Would we reject a freak, a deviant, who would take us from this path, even if he were the strongest?
History tells us no - that is, in the short run for the smaller herds. However, we do seem to have a direction as a unity, as a species, that is becoming more and more apparent with better communication and means of travel. In the short run (short, that is, compared to the long run towards man-gods), it seems we are coming together as a giant collective which will only have a few, and then only one big, extremely powerful herd leader. With technology, our speed in that direction seems to be increasing, despite the failure of the big totalitarian experiment in Russia and the wavering one in China.
Is the feeling we have about this election being pivotal true, or only hype, or is it for real? Is our compass being fine-tuned for the big collective, or away, or only temporarily away as we eventually succumb to the tide? For me, I intend, after all the voting and discussion, to sit back and people watch, for the magnet seems to be getting stronger, pulling us faster towards something. But towards which "south" - towards what - is the question, whose answer may already be spelled out in our DNA? FK
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