Looking back on my long life, I notice that it has been governed by two seemingly diametrically opposed Big Ideas. The first felt decidedly negative: a crippling fear of nuclear war, ignited during my third year of life by the  bombing of Hiroshima, which I listened to on the radio with my mother, grandmother and aunts. They were jubilant because it meant that the war was over and Dad could return home. I was terrified, stunned into a shocked state that did not lift until 1990, when I traveled to Egypt and had an encounter with the goddess Sekhmet.

Meeting Sekhmet

From childhood on I had unconsciously assumed that unless I personally changed the world, the Bomb, which could drop at any moment, would blow it up. An impossible burden, of course, and a burden only a small child would make in all earnestness. Nevertheless, that burden had weighed down my all-too-human shoulders since 1945, and colored the whole world in darkness. Then came Sekhmet, who assured me, in no uncertain tones: “WHO DO YOU THINK YOU ARE, YOU PUNY HUMAN? WAR IS MY PROBLEM.”  Thus was I released from lifelong PTSD.

That original terror of nuclear war was balanced by an ultra-intense desire for its opposite: Peace on Earth, achieved through unification of all beings into one. My heroes were Teilliard de Chardin, and his concept of “the noosphere” which the human race would achieve as “the omega point” —

https://modernhistoryproject.org/mhp?Article=DemonRoots&C=3.0

— and someone I’ve since learned was a disciple of his, Barbara Marx Hubbard, one of my generation’s idealistic New Age futurists.

https://www.lawoftime.org/noosphere/theoryandhistory.html

Thinking that maybe I published something of hers in Crone Chronicles: A Journal of Conscious Aging (1989-2001), I searched <Barbara Mars Hubbard Crone Chronicles> on duck duck go and voila!

John Lennon’s utopian song Imagine spelled it out quite beautifully, too.

Note: This noosphere has already been achieved through the internet, and is one layer of what globalists plan to lock in with their long planned New World Order. So of course the above all looks familiar. Cf. Klaus Schwab, pre-eminent globalist:

You will own nothing, and you will be happy.

In other words, taken to an extreme, smearing and removing boundaries of all kinds leads, at least at this point in embodied human history, not to utopia, but to the worst kind of dystopia, where the global police state rules over an increasingly enslaved populace.

So much for my “solution,” Peace on Earth, to the horrific problem of nuclear war.

But it gets worse . . . what if the “nuclear war” story itself is a lie? Not saying that I beLIEve it IS a lie, but I did find this entire article intensely provocative.

Abdication of Kings: Einstein to Aids

In other words, the twin pillars upon which I built my entire life, one dark, the other light, may both turn out to be chimerical layers created by human (or alien? or both?) minds bent on controlling others by hijacking human emotionality. Again, sound familiar? Think F.E.A.R.  (False Evidence Appearing Real) in the current context of the Covid Con.

Meanwhile, as a young adult. another way of approaching polarity had intrigued my conscious attention. This I did not realize until a few years ago, when I began my Recapitulation Project, to archive my voluminous written output (about half of it previously published) as my “legacy.” Whereas I used to think in either/or opposites, gradually I began to think in both/and terms, understanding that I needed to learn how to face and embrace any and all contradictions dreamed up by the left brain in its quest to use “contradiction” as the end point of any argument.

When, as a normally timid 23-year-old graduate student, in a moment of sudden inhibition I raised my hand in a class on Boolean Logic, and asked: “But what’s wrong with contradiction?” . . . and the teacher stared at me, his face reddening to the point where it looked like it would burst and then, sputtering, “From a contradiction anything follows, anything!” — I KNEW I was on to something! This most logical of philosophy professors had suddenly turned intensely emotional! WHY???

I had stumbled upon one of the mental framing mechanisms of western culture. Above all, do not contradict oneself. Everything is always either/or. For example: either Capitalism or Communism. Either Individual or Community. NEVER BOTH! Never a delicate, continuous, dynamic process of balancing apparent opposites!

No longer do I think in terms of, for example, either nuclear war or peace on earth. Instead, what intrigues me is how to recognize and embrace the thrumming paradox in even THIS polarity.

I have no idea how to do that. But I will be pondering it, now that I’ve identified it.

Meanwhile, I have been aware of, and learning how to embrace other polarities, for example, Individual and Community. And to embrace them as dynamic forces, continuously balancing and rebalancing. Now that I’ve been  living in Green Acres Permaculture Village for nearly ten years, I recognize very well that this place is my on-the-ground experiment in learning how to embrace opposites.

Hmmm . . . it could be said that the problem with the Peace on Earth vision of de Chardin, Hubbard, and Lennon is that it smears out Individuality in the interests of Community.  And it may be that the nightmare vision of nuclear war is still present because especially we American “rugged individualists” tend to assume, with Darwin, that the Individual by nature tends to be selfish, leading, when taken to extremes, to a Hobbesian (nuclear) war of all against all, where life (on earth) is “nasty, brutish and short.”

In any case, while this is the first post in three days, it’s not because I haven’t been busy! More than ever, I’m interested in questioning my own assumptions, pushing the boundaries, working that edge.

AK Reader: Questioning Assumptions

Especially, because, as a triple Sagittarian, to the extent that I am NOT conscious, I lean towards judgment and dogmatism.

Mea culpa!