Let’s use a metaphor. If you are standing outside of the dance hall, the music sounds noticeably distorted. Most peoples conscious point of view is from there, and they start talking about things like money and moralism, obligation and rectitude or lack there of. Righteousness is a popular term with the religious set. Everyone feels that they are at liberty to decide policies, points of view, that they can at any time change their minds, change their behaviour, change the steps they take along their path in life, decide whether or not to dance. On what basis is this view held? It honestly escapes me.

These tracks of analysis, news trends in any circle, fringe or mainstream media, they all reflect the same pattern. Is this not so? On the surface there are nations. Just beneath the surface there are dance partners, trade partners, ethical partners, whether they are coupled by chains or emotional embrace, it ultimately doesn’t matter. But even the invisible dance of history, the long held patterns that sustain our supposedly progressing world, are really just a nuance of the surface exchange. The lines that we keep colouring in.

I made a joke once that American Foreign policy is like turning up the stereo so the neighbours could dance.

Us Brits have been just as guilty of this.

You are asking why people feel free to change their minds, even though they had professed a different belief earlier?

Have we any choice but to believe in free will? You do, but free will as you have come to subscribe to it is a farce, an illusion.

I have often in the past been chained by my own words. If I had promised to do something, I would follow through even though the other person had not shown the same level of honour. I feel differently now.

I am aware of the illusion side of it, but still we fall back into this illusion. Like Einstein said, reality is an illusion albeit a very persistent one.

Linear time is the only progressing thing to observe so I guess the rest is nuance. Even linear time is inconsistent, an emergent face of a deeper physical process beneath the surface of the dance of conscious awareness and all the meta entities we currently idolize. It is these entities that are doing the dancing. Economists do not have to track you as an individual agent. They can and do supposedly construct meta models, persons exhibiting generalized traits, and their projections work better now than they ever have before. They can even describe those meta persons physically.

Funny you should say they don’t because I just got sent an ad for something I googled. Market trends are not the same as marketing strategy, but I will describe that next.

I am trying to figure if this means my idea about turning away from the oil industry as a collective moral choice is an illusion of mine or the dance of the deity’s. It’s not, but I have to work up to explaining how it’s not.

Beneath the behavioural constructs, and the information they generate, are the feelings and needs and general perceptions they engender. Beneath the superficial front of human behaviour, actually even biological behaviour, they are beginning to abandon the old model of baseline biological exploration. There are too many novel behaviours observed that aren’t being explained by their efforts at chemical breakdown, too many meta-factors like bacterial quorum sensing. Beneath all the psycho social slam dancing public meta-entities are enacting, there is a level of activity that we usually only sense on the fringes of our attention. It’s what gives us such a strange inclination to believe in our free will. Information exchange in the environment doesn’t conform to information exchange in the social milieu, and when there is too much disturbance in this seemingly fringe domain, you get both an individual and societal crisis of faith.

Perhaps to elaborate on the metaphor, the slam dancing of the social domain is taking place during a masquerade ball, and the masks sustain damage from the violent interaction of the social meta entities. Now we are pretty skilled at duct taping these faces. We don’t much like genuine change so we add some new rationale, convince ourselves we understand that we were doing much better now and the party goes on. So far does this summarize the cycle as we experience it, pretty well?

We have pronounced stress these days from yet a third domain though. Our bodies themselves are sensitive to stress in the life force exchange that we are constantly immersed in, and although for the most part we are not conscious of it, this domain is not without its psychic content. I use the term psychic in the sense of the psychological jargon. They are proving that the species memory is a fact and is very complex, multi faceted beyond the range we have so far explored. Epigenetics as a field may need a new name, but stress, biological stress, is now governing more of human behaviour than the forces of nature as we now designate them ever has.

To describe this influence as new would be mistaken. It was just largely ignored before now. There is a reason they can plot the patterns of stress so reliably rather than these just showing up as random noise against the backdrop of social and perceptual / observational data. The patterns emerge not as an isolated expression of human nature, but as a pattern of distress reinforced by our ecological jeopardy. Our fundamental being has the patterns of nature encoded in it. We know that the damage done to life around you threatens us, instinctively, even if we are busily deafening ourselves with the spiritual equivalent of overly loud ego pumping grandstanding – insert whatever style of music you feel does this. So stress doesn’t just kill bodies, it kills minds and it kills societies. We have to get the hierarchy of power clear here, do we not?

That domain, the living entrainment, is full of more than just rest and distress and it shares in the intelligence of all species involved.

It’s been thought that bees are disappearing not from any one thing, but from the stress of dealing with multiple problems. Stress kills more than humans, yes, and it also twists, life, DNA. Single cells are not unthinking. Matter itself remembers, and changes, but the point is, we live at this level also, and we need not continue to be blind to ourselves as they exist on this level.

Your thoughts are welcome. Be well friends.

Travis Saunders
Dragon Intuitive
~science,mysticism,spirituality~