Dear Nexus,
Once upon a time I was an active member in this community, but those days are long gone. Life happened and I lived it. It's been five years since I enacted a change that was desperately needed back then, and ever since I've been changing and growing in ways that were unforeseeable to me. But let me start by introducing myself, since most people here, now, will not know me.
My name is Enoon, which is backwards for no-one, which might be read as a reversal of the reduction of self, hence meant to include and mean everyone. Or perhaps it is just another way to remain anonymous in an anonymous world.
When I was younger I started using psychedelics before I tried any other substances. The things I was witness to, the things I became a part of back then were beyond my comprehension, but they fueled and sparked in me what would become a life-long passion for learning about the human condition, consciousness and the world.
In an attempt to deepen my knowledge I studied physics but grew frustrated with the pettiness of science and its perpetual reduction. I also grew frustrated with new-age and spirituality that seemed to reach for that emptiness that we all carry within us, but falling far short from filling it, these disciplines are blown over by the slightest breath or wind and fade into irrelevance in the face of millennia of cultural conditioning. After all, only matter matters.
But the occasional psychedelic work kept reminding me of a truism of whose implication I only recently became fully aware of: we are all connected. Sentience is ubiquitous.
The great problem arose or arises when as true as it feels and resounds within my mind and body, all I see is separate selves in a world of cold, hard, dead matter. The initial response is to revert to spirituality again - the connection is of a different world, the spiritual world. But how then does it connect to us? Can spirit influence matter? If so, science has never seen evidence of it. Only matter can exert a force on matter. Only matter matters. Spirit is disconnected, and so irrelevant.
A truth that had brought me to my knees, that had driven tears from my eyes, a truth that had shattered my being into rapture, became irrelevant... faded... became an idea, like mental masturbation, something to wonder about, but something not real. Like a fantasy story.
I left the world of psychedelics and the world of science and embarked on an adventure leading me around the world to different countries, meeting different people and witnessing the natural wonders of the world: mainly in the ocean.
Only recently I became witness of the second mass coral bleaching event in the Indian Ocean (the first was 1998), caused by the El Niño event of 2015-2016. I've seen fish populations recline, I've seen coral reefs slowly or quickly recede with the advent of mass tourism and carelessness. I've seen plastic garbage pile up on the shores of paradisiac beaches, I've seen toxins flung into the air to fight plagues of insects. I've seen gigantic boats dig up sand from the ocean floor to fill up lagoons and create artificial islands for tourists, I've seen tiny islands crowded with people from all over the world living on imported foods and using up diesel-generator-generated electricity and desalinated water, as though they were endlessly available. And among all this I have been blessed to see the most beautiful wild animals - sharks, rays, dolphins, whales, fish, cephalopods, crustaceans, etc.
I'd grown tired of seeing the destruction mankind perpetually causes on the biosphere in the name of progress. I'd made my peace with the idea that humans are a disease and that we might as well be wiped from the face of the planet. I bought into more cultural conditioning, teaching that humans are flawed, evil, that our nature is savage and only by more education and conditioning could we save ourselves and the planet from ourselves. I hated the fact that I was part of this deprived and despicable species.
But then a series of books fell into my hands, at the right moment. It started with Daniel Quinn's Ishmael that made me reevaluate my thoughts on what it is to be human. As I was deep into an almost meditative life style these thoughts deeply affected me, revolutionized my way of thinking. Finally Charles Eisenstein's "THE ASCENT OF HUMANITY" came along and made me connect the dots of my own experiences, my previous truths, the reason they failed to stay with me...
The past six months have been an intense psychedelic journey for me, without any substance at all - not even caffeine. Yoga, the ocean and books have been my guides to a new or old understanding of what this world is and what I am in it, funneled by circumstances that initially seemed disappointing and un-conducive to growth but instead proved rather the opposite. My previous experiences with DMT and other substances make sense in a so much deeper context now.
My awareness, the life-form that is writing this now, is an orchestration of all the events and all the totality of the universe. In a deterministic and strictly, reductionist scientific view this is not false. Even if it was all based on chance (which is debatable) each part (read particle/atom/energy-quantum) influenced another (and vice versa) to create these very conditions of which I form part. Without these conditions I would not be. My amness thus arises not from myself/my body but from everything. I do not exist apart from any of it.
My breath is essential to my existence. The air is essential to my breath. The plankton and the forests are essential to creating the air. The insects are essential for the life of plants... Without any of these, I do not exist. How am I not connected to them? If I destroy the forests, am I not destroying a part of myself?
Eisenstein's book has been a great unifying force for me. Unifying my previous experiences, lessons never quite fully learned, my sensations and understandings, my longings, my fears, my desires, my dreams... clarifying to me what it is to be human and not feeling ashamed by it anymore. It has been liberating and eye-opening, even if in a way all of it was known to me before, just never connected in this manner. Never laid out quite this way.
And so here I am again, in the Nexus. Where else could people understand what it means to be one with all? I feel the need to share these thoughts with my extended self - you - so that eventually this new self-awareness can enact its' story. So that we can, collectively, stop pretending we can consume ourselves without any adverse effects, stop pretending that we can fix it by continuing doing the same thing that created the problem... It's either that or we will cause our own extinction eventually, which I am now certain of, would be a great tragedy, albeit not the end of the universe.
Thanks for reading.
Thanks for being.
Once upon a time I was an active member in this community, but those days are long gone. Life happened and I lived it. It's been five years since I enacted a change that was desperately needed back then, and ever since I've been changing and growing in ways that were unforeseeable to me. But let me start by introducing myself, since most people here, now, will not know me.
My name is Enoon, which is backwards for no-one, which might be read as a reversal of the reduction of self, hence meant to include and mean everyone. Or perhaps it is just another way to remain anonymous in an anonymous world.
When I was younger I started using psychedelics before I tried any other substances. The things I was witness to, the things I became a part of back then were beyond my comprehension, but they fueled and sparked in me what would become a life-long passion for learning about the human condition, consciousness and the world.
In an attempt to deepen my knowledge I studied physics but grew frustrated with the pettiness of science and its perpetual reduction. I also grew frustrated with new-age and spirituality that seemed to reach for that emptiness that we all carry within us, but falling far short from filling it, these disciplines are blown over by the slightest breath or wind and fade into irrelevance in the face of millennia of cultural conditioning. After all, only matter matters.
But the occasional psychedelic work kept reminding me of a truism of whose implication I only recently became fully aware of: we are all connected. Sentience is ubiquitous.
The great problem arose or arises when as true as it feels and resounds within my mind and body, all I see is separate selves in a world of cold, hard, dead matter. The initial response is to revert to spirituality again - the connection is of a different world, the spiritual world. But how then does it connect to us? Can spirit influence matter? If so, science has never seen evidence of it. Only matter can exert a force on matter. Only matter matters. Spirit is disconnected, and so irrelevant.
A truth that had brought me to my knees, that had driven tears from my eyes, a truth that had shattered my being into rapture, became irrelevant... faded... became an idea, like mental masturbation, something to wonder about, but something not real. Like a fantasy story.
I left the world of psychedelics and the world of science and embarked on an adventure leading me around the world to different countries, meeting different people and witnessing the natural wonders of the world: mainly in the ocean.
Only recently I became witness of the second mass coral bleaching event in the Indian Ocean (the first was 1998), caused by the El Niño event of 2015-2016. I've seen fish populations recline, I've seen coral reefs slowly or quickly recede with the advent of mass tourism and carelessness. I've seen plastic garbage pile up on the shores of paradisiac beaches, I've seen toxins flung into the air to fight plagues of insects. I've seen gigantic boats dig up sand from the ocean floor to fill up lagoons and create artificial islands for tourists, I've seen tiny islands crowded with people from all over the world living on imported foods and using up diesel-generator-generated electricity and desalinated water, as though they were endlessly available. And among all this I have been blessed to see the most beautiful wild animals - sharks, rays, dolphins, whales, fish, cephalopods, crustaceans, etc.
I'd grown tired of seeing the destruction mankind perpetually causes on the biosphere in the name of progress. I'd made my peace with the idea that humans are a disease and that we might as well be wiped from the face of the planet. I bought into more cultural conditioning, teaching that humans are flawed, evil, that our nature is savage and only by more education and conditioning could we save ourselves and the planet from ourselves. I hated the fact that I was part of this deprived and despicable species.
But then a series of books fell into my hands, at the right moment. It started with Daniel Quinn's Ishmael that made me reevaluate my thoughts on what it is to be human. As I was deep into an almost meditative life style these thoughts deeply affected me, revolutionized my way of thinking. Finally Charles Eisenstein's "THE ASCENT OF HUMANITY" came along and made me connect the dots of my own experiences, my previous truths, the reason they failed to stay with me...
The past six months have been an intense psychedelic journey for me, without any substance at all - not even caffeine. Yoga, the ocean and books have been my guides to a new or old understanding of what this world is and what I am in it, funneled by circumstances that initially seemed disappointing and un-conducive to growth but instead proved rather the opposite. My previous experiences with DMT and other substances make sense in a so much deeper context now.
My awareness, the life-form that is writing this now, is an orchestration of all the events and all the totality of the universe. In a deterministic and strictly, reductionist scientific view this is not false. Even if it was all based on chance (which is debatable) each part (read particle/atom/energy-quantum) influenced another (and vice versa) to create these very conditions of which I form part. Without these conditions I would not be. My amness thus arises not from myself/my body but from everything. I do not exist apart from any of it.
My breath is essential to my existence. The air is essential to my breath. The plankton and the forests are essential to creating the air. The insects are essential for the life of plants... Without any of these, I do not exist. How am I not connected to them? If I destroy the forests, am I not destroying a part of myself?
Eisenstein's book has been a great unifying force for me. Unifying my previous experiences, lessons never quite fully learned, my sensations and understandings, my longings, my fears, my desires, my dreams... clarifying to me what it is to be human and not feeling ashamed by it anymore. It has been liberating and eye-opening, even if in a way all of it was known to me before, just never connected in this manner. Never laid out quite this way.
And so here I am again, in the Nexus. Where else could people understand what it means to be one with all? I feel the need to share these thoughts with my extended self - you - so that eventually this new self-awareness can enact its' story. So that we can, collectively, stop pretending we can consume ourselves without any adverse effects, stop pretending that we can fix it by continuing doing the same thing that created the problem... It's either that or we will cause our own extinction eventually, which I am now certain of, would be a great tragedy, albeit not the end of the universe.
Thanks for reading.
Thanks for being.
hi there