What's the problem?

[Teonanacapilli]

Hey 'nauts,

Last night I was baked out of my gourd and re-read some books I had from junior high school (low low level reading). One book is about the ancient world, summarizing from 10 000 BCE to around 200 CE and it looks at the world's major civilizations. The other is about the medieval world to near present. Really basic, picture book type stuff (perfect for me, I can't focus on lots of text when my eyes are red :roll: ). But I was having a good look at the dates, that was most interesting to me, looking at the timeline of world civilizations.

The great civilizations always seem to be either absorbed/conquered (not destroyed fully) by another, or wiped out fully by some barbarian culture. I wondered for a while why we always get cut short. It seems obvious; there has never been a point in time when every human was educated and more importantly, there has never been a time when every human had their most basic physical needs met. With this inequality of health and education it seems only natural that the lower class should destroy what the "civilized" people built, since we fear what we do not know, we destroy what we fear.

I'm sure it's more complicated than that. But we now have all of the technology and knowledge to bring everyone up to the same level. Still it looks like even now, when we can look into history at all of our predeceasing civilizations with their faults and endings, we still haven't the wisdom to do it. So it could be just a matter of time, till the 3rd world wipes out, again, everything we've found, all those discoveries.

It's clearly a crisis of two things: of consciousness and conditioning. These are the two things that the psychedelics attack. We have the technological power, the engineering skills to save our planet, to cure disease, to feed the hungry, to end war; But we lack the intellectual vision, the ability to change our minds. We must decondition ourselves from 10,000 years of bad behavior. And, it's not easy. -Terence McKenna

That pretty well sums up what I see, too. And it's sad to think, when we've come so far.

What do you say?

 

[BrainEater]

the world can be a better place indeed, if all of you just stopped to give away your power to certain powerful parties,persons or well basically anything.

realize your own power and stop giving it away by living in a state of fear. so many people are worse than puppets, as many politicians are just nothing more than puppets. obviously many almost seem to want to be controlled and that's what they are getting. but why??? well maybe because they are too lazy or too stupid. it might be either of that, too... fear and laziness can subtly take over one's life and when that happens YOU need to get back to some sort of control over at least your own life.

history taught us, that we humans are too stupid to learn of history. but not all hope is lost. actually hope dies last. so
we're alive and while we are, we can change something and preferrably change it to how we want it to be, obviously.
so we can also learn and with that process get into a state of "not repeating the errors we made in the past", instead shape
the future and imagine how we'd like it to be, if we could.

positive thinking, honest intention and the will to change something are powerful tools by themselves. it's your own choice tho to make use of them in the way that suits you best... :wink:


peace :weedman:

 

[IJesusChrist]

Yayyy a topic not made by yours truly!

I kind of was thinking about this the other day too! But I see it slightly different: whoa lost my train of thought.

where was i.

fuck.

Ahh!! Heres where I was. I kept seeing a split between humanity (and believe me there is no 50/50 split with anything in humanity). I was seeing the empathetic and the non-empathetic. In order for the empathetic tobe most prevelant, EVERYONE has to be empathetic, no? I was wondering, you know, you go into the jungle - why is it such a hostile environment? Why is life in general on earth dog-eat-dog? Why isn't most of it symbiotic?

Its because the, what I will call 'hostile', animals can survive alone. They do better in groups, but they do not need groups to survive. However, symbiotic and empathetic animals like you and I don't do as well on our own, and have no real way of defending ourselves against a hostile animal except with logic.

But take a look at this: The jungle consists of mainly what type of life? Insects and plants. Plants are purely symbiotic, unhostile creatures. However insects are extremely hostile in most cases. They kill and eat everything they see and want. We progress to animals, and we see yet another hostile environment: jaguars, panthers, snakes, frogs, lizards, etc... all of these are carnivores. Some lizards are herbivores. Carnivores do well alone, herbi's do much much better in groups.

extending this to humans is pretty easy. If you have one fucked up carni, like hmm hitler there is alot of psychology involved, but the end result can be devastating. The peaceful people don't want to or cannot usually fight back, because they don't think that way.

If many hitlers were alive, I would say that no ghandis would be. If many ghandis were alive, I would say hitlers would still be alive.

Of course its not an ideal situation - biology and psychology have very different probabilities than we usually think they do.

Rabbits and wolves.

 

[Teonanacapilli]

Braineater, that reminds me of some things that Jiddu Krishnamurti said. Like

..And as we are - the world is. That is, if we are greedy, envious, competitive, our society will be competitive, envious, greedy, which brings misery and war. The State is what we are. To bring about order and peace, we must begin with ourselves and not with society, not with the State, for the world is ourselves. ...If we would bring about a sane and happy society we must begin with ourselves and not with another, not outside of ourselves, but with ourselves

IJC, that is something I've thought a lot about too. Not long ago I've looked at life with a Ghandi quote- "Be the change you want to see.", but as I start to see it all as a losing battle and with a move to a "life is a ride" mentality, I say fuck that. I don't know, obviously we must fix ourselves before we can fix other people, and then we can fix the planet.

I've been wondering and worrying lately, what the point is. I always come back to the answer that we are living to live- to experience life in all it's aspects.

Eh, maybe it's time to take a trip back to the ol' shrink's office.

 

[IJesusChrist]

Yeah, he'll set you back into societies standards!

 

[Teonanacapilli]

You're right haha. That didn't sound like me anyway. Anyone down for bombing Wall Street? :axe:

 

[IJesusChrist]

yeah, or IRS... or DEA... or the oil pipe lines..... or the oil headquarters.... or...... ...............................