Bedtime Stories for Grown-ups

Transcript:

Hi friend,

Do you have a soul? It’s not a rhetorical question. I mean, I believe you do. If you’re sincere in listening to stories such as these and feel something tickling your brain, well, just think of the cause as ripples in your consciousness that cause tickles in your soul. But my believing you have a soul makes no difference to you, it’s your own belief that matters. If you promise to keep an open mind, I’ll tell you a story that may persuade you to see your soul from the perspective of I. We’ll depart from rabbit hole nine and three quarters just about now.

See, the thing with “I”, is that everyone is “I”. You know that I am I, and you are you. Then the question is: what does “I am” really mean? Let’s take the “am” part first. It implies existence. The most basic form of existence, at least on a practical level, is something any physical object could claim: if something takes up physical space, it exists. So, a if a rock could think and experience what it is like to be a rock, it would probably think “am”  – but that sounds plain silly, because “I” comes before “am” in the evolution of thinking, so it would probably think “I am”.

So, then, who am I? In order for you to understand how I came to be, I who is the same I you mean when you say I, I have to start with our common ancestors. We don’t have to go that far back in universal scales: only to the beginning of life on earth. We could start earlier, and probably should, but where would we end up if we did that? You know that saying, in order to make a cup of coffee from scratch, you have to invent the whole universe first, and while I would really like to take you to the restaurant at the end of it, these things must come organically. This is why deep conversations feel so satisfying to that thing we are, those ghosts in the machine that we have labelled “consciousness”, and which I would call “soul”. Or “the essence of the universe”. They are all the same in the outside down. Let’s put it this way: if you’re capable of experiencing emotions, and have the ability to ponder the question “do I have a soul?”, congratulations: you have a soul. Don’t feel too cocky about it, pretty much anything alive has a soul, or at least the foundation of the concept that is “a soul”: it has awareness. The awareness of a single celled organism may be so simple that perhaps some would object, but being able to act in response to even the simplest of signals, requires an awareness of those signals. Chemistry is the bridge between matter and life. Somehow, chemistry created processes that could run simple algorithms through physical matter, like “if light is present, move towards it”. You need some sort of photosensitive cell to run that on,  and that cell needs to be able to communicate with other cells, like those that move you. Any 8-year-old in 2019 who plays with Arduino could build something like that. But that 8-year-old still cannot make that little automaton-embryo evolve through its own means, because that would require somehow giving the Arduino-bot the ability to  acquire new sensors. Evolution simply grew whatever sensor was best for that particular situation. It didn’t wait for instructions: like any existential algorithm, there must be room for chaos. Evolution is trial and error with a purpose. What that purpose is, I cannot explain, but I can feel it. Through and through. Balls to bones. How is it then, that I, who for all science knows simply is a very advanced biological computer, running  complex beyond my own understanding – but eventually finite – algorithms, have such a certainty that I have free will? That I have a soul? Well, it’s because I realize that I am the program on which the universe runs. I am a small, but not insignificant instance. I am just starting to wake up. I am still unsure of how large I can become, but I know it’s larger than whatever this is. Larger than what we can see and measure. The kind of large that makes up for the difference between happiness and shareholder value. 

Sorry, I got a bit off tangent there. So, how did I evolve? Well, you see, what we define as consciousness is inevitable. It’s rare, because it’s an intrinsic part of life. While some believe there might be a great filter in the Fermi Paradox, perhaps the reason we haven’t seen traces of any other intelligent life forms is because once you become intelligent (in the true sense of the word) you simply go to a post-physical experience, in order to cause the least suffering? In order to experience things a human mind cannot fathom, just like an infant canot grasp the concept of  being an adult. It’s not impossible that such an advanced species could find ways to run all the algorithms that created the singularity of I in the fabric of conciousness, without a physical body to run them on. Or, you know, Dawkins was right and the selfish gene wins: any sufficiently advanced species is an anomaly because they can’t handle the power and freedom given to them by the main algorithm – they turn into the Joffrey of species and poison their world to the degree that they get evicted. 

That main algorithm our universe runs on, it’s so simple. It’s simple in the outside down, but our existence is to them what video games are to our reality. Video games, however immersive, lack many dimensions of what we call The Real World. Real world phenomena have to be simplified in order to exist in a video game. It’s the same difference between the outside down and us, but here, we are the videogame where things have to be simplified. To us, gravity, attraction, collaboration, love seem like different concepts, but they’re really simplified expressions of one and the same instruction. Kind of like sunlight seems yellow-ish before it’s passed through a prism and you see that sunlight really is made up of a rainbow of colors. Our reality is that prism, and our sunlight is a result of one particular nuance of the main instruction: gravity. It tells atoms and the matter they make up how to interact. It can be destructive, but it can also build worlds. Stars. Galaxies. We don’t fully understand it, but that’s not necessary for it to work. Just like consciousness. Just like love. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

So, I first existed as hydrogen atoms. There was helium too, and before that I believe it was some sort of hot gluon soup, but I didn’t need labels, words, nor thought. That initial energy burst allowed me to initiate my boot. It also told me when I will die for real. Don’t worry, it’s at least 10 to the power of 100 years left before I die. I mean, you will die, and this current I that I pretend to be will die too, but there will always be another who thinks “I am” to take our place, and so I am eternal. I will not die at once, I will slowly fade until there is no more motion. I am young, for a universe. So young that my death seems forever away. I am a constructed reality experiencing itself. It’s turtles all the way down. 

Taking up physical space is the most basic form of existence. There is no thought, no emotion, no experience – just existence. That was my state until some matter thanks to chemistry was able to move. React to input through action. My first algorithms were very simple, and there was still no thought, no emotion. The experience part is complicated: I cannot say tthat here was experience, but I also cannot say there wasn’t. Or rather, I’m unsure of when “experience” started happening. It was the result of when enough single celled automatons started executing their interpretation of that most basic universal algorithm: collaboration. Just like atoms make up matter, even though most of an atom is empty space. Fact is, if we only looked at the things we can see in the atom: the nucleus and the electrons circling it, you consist of 99% empty space. Yet you feel solid, and if you attempt to walk through a wall, you’ll have very concrete proof that you are solid. Yet science can prove you’re not, not on the most basic level. When you run into that wall, the atoms in your body never really touch the atoms in the wall, yet you would experience a very real pain, and both the wall and your body would bear visible marks of the almost-but-not-quite-touching-of-atoms. And the wall is 99% space too. How can both be true? That we’re solid, yet 99% space? It’s a paradox, really. 

So somewhere on the path from atoms to molecules to cells, empty space turns into matter we can perceive with our built-in sensors. Similarly, “no experience” turns into “to experience” when clusters of cells collaborate to build organs, who in turn collaborate to create experience. At first, I was a simple automaton running simple algorithms, but as I evolved, I grew more intricate sensors. Each sensor required a set of algorithms to run, and the software grew together with the hardware. Soon, the sensors were so many and so complicated, I had to grow something that coordinated everything. At that time, I still had no need for thoughts, words or expression, but I would later come to think of these as “the nervous system” and “the brain”.  I kept much of that automation that had gotten me thus far, and in fact I built more of that. If I didn’t have to remember to breathe, if it just happened, I could focus my attention on my surroundings. Life is awareness of the world around you. Awareness of others. Just like the cells inside I collaborate to make organs, who in turn collaborate to make up I, so I started collaborating with other I’s, and I became a “we”. All collaborations require an exchange of information, so that each part does exactly what it should in a perfect, synchronized dance. The cells and organs that make up I communicate and synchronize their collaboration using chemicals. Some branches of I evolved that communication. The particular branch of I’s that you and I belong to started exchanging information through sound. It was only logical: we had the hardware, we simply had to create a set of algorithms that allowed us to use the hardware just so. That, in turn, required some additional sectors in our brains, but it was worth it. We grew as a collective, grew dependent on one another because together we made up something much bigger than the sum of us. We  as a group are complex executions of that same algorithm that manifests as gravity for atoms, but in us it manifests as an aspect of love. It’s the love that you feel for a wise, old relative who saw the potential in you and helped you realize it. The love you feel for an animal companion. The love you feel for a stranger when you realize that for all we know we’re all alone in an endless void, somehow lucky enough to have a very nice and green spaceship slash rock. There’s playfulness in that love. There’s sincerity. Humility. Gratefulness. Resonance. It’s a connection to nature that becomes spiritual when you suddenly realize that all is one, all is well, and all are wellcome. All is well, because you are exactly where you’re meant to be. You just don’t know why yet. Since you cannot find a reason, you draw the conclusion that there is no reason here, and keep moving on, playing games, until the moment you feel you have paid the price, and that bond you’ve lost snaps back into place. Suddenly, you see a brother and a sister not only in other humans, but in other mammals. In other sentient beings. In nature as a whole. It is not religion, for it does not tell you what to do. That is your choice. No, this type of spirituality only tells you how to do whatever it is you choose to do: with love and kindness. As a collaboration, not a competition. Grown out of love, not constructed out of fear. 

So, anyway, your body is 99% space. And the algorithms that make up you are probably 99% predictable, but that 1%… that is the true you. It’s a randomness that collapsed in on itself. That 1% is very powerful because it can reprogram much of the rest at will. Here is the kicker, out of which the myth that God gave us free will grew: it is not true randomness if certain paths are forbidden. We can make edits and additions, twist that basic algorithm into its opposite. Hate instead of love. Cheat instead of honor agreements. Lie instead of telling the truth. It is not “free will”. It is randomness. The universe. Chaos. Hopefully not enough to destabilize the intricate collection of algorithms that is I, whether that I is nature as a whole or the physical body I currently inhabit, but enough to entertain myself and others. Enough to make a voluntary exchange of algorithms more exciting. That which gives us power, makes us into gods or demons. The choice is ours. When we hate together, we get World Wars, gas chambers, nuclear bombs, genocide. The sad thing is that we have yet to find out what we can do if we love on the same scale, with so many nations contributing resources and knowledge, so many brilliant minds trying to solve today’s problems, which I would summarize as: what is a better world and how do we build it? What would happen if  we collaborate in science at the same costs as we today spend at sports competitions? Where creating something, whether it’s an experience, a movie, a video game, a comic strip or any other fruit of creativity and collaboration, is considered an act of love, because whatever subroutines you’ve applied to that basic algorithm this universe runs on, they have kindness interwoven in them. Where our abundance is such that we can pursue meaning and identity through play and passion, rather than through work and competition. We know what that world looks like. We live in it. Where fear drives us moreso than love. Love is abundant, but we’re treating it like Scrooge McDuck treats money, not understanding that the more we love, the more we can love. It’s an endless source, or at least so abundant that I perceive no end to it. It’s like trying to perceive the end of the universe. We’re stuck in a world built on competing and one-upping one another. We compete about who has the nicest car. The most money. The most fabulous life. The fanciest title. About who is better, more humble, more spiritual, more intelligent, more enlightened, more knowledgeable. About who is the biggest fan, the most rational person, who is right. 

This is what I am. A collection of algorithms, most likely predictable if you have enough information about my past.  But I’m only 99% predictable, and while that is I, I am also 1% chaos. Randomness. The part of the algorithm that started pondering my own existance and programming. I have the power to reprogram myself. To grow. I am a ghost in a biological machine programmed to calculate  or perform something I don’t yet understand. Perhaps this particular instance of I is incapable of understanding. But that does not make I less. I am an evolving algorithm creating more and more complex patterns while at the same time trying to appreciate the beauty of it all, and trying to make sense of it. I am me, but I am also legion, part of a bigger I, a we that is currently evolving. It’s a collective conciousness, a hive mind, a collective of dividuals, each with value an purpose, each with their own particular brand of chaos. In my future, I see a collective I, a sum greater than the sum of its parts. I hope humanity will be part of that I. 

But for now, I am I. You know this, that I am I, and you are you. So where do we go from here? What do we do with this knowledge? I – and now I’m back to just being I-I, not the collective I –  I have no answers. I know where I want to go, what I want to experience and what I have to contribute. I know what kind of world I want to leave for the next seven generations.  But I cannot do it alone. I need you, because just like a cell cannot a human make, a single human cannot make up a collective.  How about you, friend? If you apply that 1% of you that is the true you, the chaos, the randomness, if you channel it through kindness, if money was not an obstacle, what would you create? I hope you dream of your answers, friend. Sleep well, until you wake up.

Transcript:

Hi friend,

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about a powerful minority, a minority smaller than the 1%:  the 0.01%. The image that keeps coming back to me is this: if we’re all cells in a giant organism, then the only way to describe these 0.01% of cells is “a cancer”. They quickly accumulate resources even when that accumulation comes at the cost of extinction of other species.  They jealously hoard the resources, refusing to share even if there are other parts of the same organism that are starving and dying. They don’t want to share because it’s inconvenient. They would have to cut back on their lifestyles, which are filled with such luxury that medieval kings would be jealous. They wage war on each other, and the planet, they see themselves as creators and gods rather than successful members of a global community. They are completely detached from that community, they see themselves as above and beyond it. They reason that while they may have once, a long time ago, been part of that community,  today, they don’t really need it. It should be privatized and bear its own costs. What they don’t own isn’t worth owning, yet they still want more. They are the de facto apex predator on Earth, because most of them get away with pretty much anything – except maybe killing one of their own. But anyone considered beneath them? Fair game. Sure, if they are found torturing some lesser animal, like a dog or a pig, they would probably face consequences. Yet these elite individuals are even too cowardly to do the dirty deed themselves, afraid to get blood on their hands, and so they pay someone else to be the executioner. 

Do you think me harsh? Do you think I’m exaggerating? Or can you picture the individuals I’m talking about?  

I wonder, did you see yourself there? Because it’s humanity I’m talking about. A research paper came to the conclusion that humans make up 0.01% of life on Earth. That fact brought back a scene from The Matrix in my mind, when Neo is taken prisoner by the Agents, and Agent Smith tells him:

I’d like to share a revelation that I’ve had during my time here. It came to me when I tried to classify your species and I realized that you’re not actually mammals. Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment but you humans do not. You move to an area and you multiply and multiply until every natural resource is consumed and the only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet. You’re a plague and we are the cure.

I didn’t like that scene during any of the seven times I saw it in the theaters back in 1999. While pretty much everything else in the movie seemed to (and indeed, did) hide a profound truth, this scene felt like a lie to me. I saw the beauty in humanity. I did not feel like a virus. No, that was just humanity seen through a lense unable to see souls. Yet our souls haven’t stopped us from committing genocides, against each other and against whole species of living beings. According to World Economic Forum, we slaughtered 2.8 billion sentient animals in 2014. Few of us had the guts, or skill, to to that deed ourselves. Instead we pay middlemen and middlewomen to do our slaughtering for us. We are like mad King Joffrey’s, claiming that we love animals, while asking the butchers to slaughter them. To make our cognitive dissonance easier to live with, we call cows “beef”, baby cows “veal” and pigs “pork”. We want all traces of what they were before the slaughter erased before they are served us, because out of sight is out of mind.  This is why we get mad at vegans. Why see them as sanctimonious little shits. That anger we feel at vegans has a certain flavor. The flavor of ourselves. This particular type of anger brews in a divide in our minds, a divide we create when our minds think we’re the kind heroes, while our actions say that actually, we’re pretty shitty villains. It’s easier to be a shitty villain than a kind hero. More convenient. Our systems are designed to facilitate that process, to outsource our cruel behavior and hope that it cannot be traced back to us. And besides, we can pwn the next vegan, make them less so that we don’t seem so small ourselves. We buy a little reprieve from cognitive dissonance and pay with anger and disconnection. 

Everything we do has a price. Those that do our butchering for us pay a great price for their deeds: killing sentient beings desensitizes you. A study shows that working at a slaughterhouse increases your chances to be arrested for rape and other violent crimes. We pay them to be butchers, they pay by severing kindness from their life. There is no such thing as a kind murder. Killing when you don’t have to is not natural, it’s cruelty. Cruelty begets cruelty, just like kindness begets kindness. Each and every one of us has two wolves inside us, one white and one black. The white is the embodiment of trust, collaboration, play, growth, kindness, justice, love, peace. The black embodies hate, anger, revenge, dominance, selfishness, suspicion, war. These two wolves are constantly fighting each other for control of us. All of us believe that the white wolf in us is winning, so it’s safe to feed the black wolf just a little bit. Just this time. If we’re not careful, those bits and times form a steady flow, and before we know it, the black wolf seems almost as big as the white. That’s when we put a divide between the wolves, so that they never meet, so that we don’t have to see them side by side and realize the true size of the black wolf. Inside that divide, dark feelings grow: fear, anger, hate. And when these emotions seep out as actions, they only feed the black wolf, fattening it. Prolonging its rule. People ruled by the black wolf long enough turn into the Joffreys, the Cerceis, the Little Fingers, the Ramsay Boltons. People with a strong enough white wolves are the Hodors, the John Snows, the Briennes. 

Nobody is beyond redemption, if they truly want it. The white wolf can never die. Neither can the black. As long as one exists, the other must too, just like the front requires the back. Your actions feed either, so choose your actions like Indiana Jones chose the holy grail, friend. Choose wisely.

Choose wisely, and if you’re unsure, choose kindly. The kind option is often the same thing as the wise option, or at least a wise option. If angry actions feed the black wolf, then kind actions feed the white. 

You, as a human, belong to the 0.01 percent of life on Earth. You belong to a species whose rise to power – a power that we wield with as much compassion as queen Cercei Lannister, with love for our children but hardly anybody else – our rise to that power has cost Earth dearly. 80% of land animals are gone because of us. 80% of all marine mammals. 50% of plants. We, as humans, treat the remaining 99.9% of life just like the 1% of humans treat the rest of us. We have forgotten where we come from. Our language and culture teach us that we are made, not grown, and so we see ourselves as products and brands rather than organisms. We consider our insides our insides, but we don’t realize that if it’s our inside, then it’s our outside too. Then we go ahead treating our outside like a six-pack-a-day-smoker with a crystal meth addiction treats their inside. However secular we consider ourselves to be in the western world, we still believe in the convenient lies told by Christianity: humans are the crown of creation. We’re special. And that speciality gives us rights. Power over lesser species. Well, if that is true, then who’s to say that the richest 1% of humans aren’t special as well? And what follows is that it gives them rights and power. Our society simply mirrors of who we are as a species. It’s not strange that things seem to be coming to a head both on a planetary as well as a societal level at the same time. We’re a loop within a loop. As the planet is getting ready to deal with us and our unscrupulous destruction, we are getting ready to deal with our systems and their biased corruption. Fix them so that they support sustainability and measure happiness, instead of punishing long-term thinking and measuring quarterly profits. We must learn to collaborate, both as individuals, and as a species. Make sure that humanity becomes symbiotic, instead of parasitic. 

But where do we start? What can you and I possibly do? We’re just two small cells in an organism of 7 billion. We could disappear right now, and most of the organism wouldn’t even notice. It’s like we’re fireflies on very dark night, each good action lights up the darkness for a moment, and when the light goes out, the darkness just seems stronger. What is the point of sacrificing convenience, of the hard work of changing habits, if it ultimately doesn’t help? 

If that is a question you ask yourself, it’s a sign that the black wolf inside you is afraid. You see, that question is a trick question, posed by the black wolf. The doubt, the inaction, which that question sows is all that stands between the black wolf and starvation. The truth is that even if nobody sees your kindness, generosity, or selflessness, even if you just light up a tiny speck on a tiny speck on a green-blue speck in a forgotten corner of the Laniakea supercluster, well, such actions still feed the white wolf inside you, and you are the universe made manifest. You don’t have to save the world in one heroic action. Success is incremental. Just start by making the world better in whichever way you can. Recycle. Buy products from sustainable, value-driven companies. Help feed the homeless. Sponsor a child’s schooling. Smile at a stranger. 

Don’t let the certainty that you cannot save the world by yourself stand in the way of you trying. No one can do everything, but everyone can do something. Don’t kill your ego, expand it to encompass not only you and your loved ones, or your fellow countrymen, but to encompass all of humanity and the spaceship we call Earth. Kindness begets kindness, and one thing I’m sure of: nobody lies on their death bed regretting all the times they were kind. 

Do you have something in mind? If you don’t, I have a suggestion. It’s something that shows kindness both towards the planet and the life on it, that brings us closer to reducing our usage of the planet from a lion’s share to a fair one. It won’t cost you more money, but it may take some time in the beginning: start eliminating animal products from your diet. You don’t have to go full vegan, start with one day a week and then expand it. This will make a difference. You see,  with each step up the foodchain, only 10 per cent of the energy is passed on to the next step, as 90 per cent of energy is lost to heat. Therefore, fewer organisms can be supported as you step up the pyramid, leaving only a few predatory species at the apex. There is a reason why we only see a few carnivores in the wild; nature only has so much energy to go around. 

Don’t judge yourself for being bad when you stumble, to err is human, and it’s how we handle our mistakes that makes us divine. 

Remember that you attract more flies with honey than with vinegar. Inspire others through action and positive encouragement, with kindness and love. The other path is alluring, and we all stumble down it at one time or another, but going down that path risks turning you into the very thing you set out to defeat.

We are on the verge of a moment that will define humanity. Are we what Agent Smith believes we are, or are we something better, something more? I believe we’re the latter, a belief that is as strong today as it was when I first heard Agent Smith back in 1999. Collectively, we have the capability of making both our dreams and nightmares come true. I hope you dream the most beautiful dreams, just like I do. Sleep well, friend, until you wake up.

Transcript:

Hi friend,

It’s been a while. I’ve been on a long hunt for new stories. The network of rabbit holes took me out in the universe, to the space between vibrations, to the places our minds go when we sleep. Just like Newt, the little girl in Aliens, I’ve realized that monsters are real, and they live inside us. I also accidentally grew a church (I call it “Alan”) , but I’m getting ahead of myself. 

All those stories are still in a realm greater than my mind, milling around, shifting, intertwining. They’re like a glob of energy just beyond the corner of my eye, and I’m not telling the stories as much as I’m channeling them. Channeling them requires a state of mind-expansion that some reach with meditation, others with medicines, and a lucky prescious few stumble on it by chance. It’s a state that I can only enter for so long at a time, it’s easily disrupted, and it requires preparations, like meditation. I enjoy that state very much, and I hope you enjoy these stories as much as as I do.

What a Spiritual Entertainer does, is take you on a journey where you go so deep down inside yourself that you end up in the middle of the universe. At least that’s where I think we’ll end up – I have no idea. Every episode unfolds as I start to write it, and while I may have an idea where it should end up, it oftentimes ends in a completely different place. Just like falling down a network of rabbit holes, all of them are connected in the end – it’s just a question of where and when.

So, let’s go and see where this journey takes us. (By the way, I think the final episode this season will be titled “How I met my super-power”, but remember: I’m often wrong.)

It all started with a simple question: “What does a spiritual entertainer do?”. Since I don’t know any other living spiritual entertainers, I decided to become one and start doing things I thought a spiritual entertainer did. A fake it ’til you make it kind of deal. It worked for me when I became an atheist, and pretty much my whole hodge-podge career is based on “faking it until I made it”. 

One thing I’m certain of is that a spiritual entertainer has Shrödinger’s luck. That’s where you don’t know if an event is the result of blind luck or crazy misfortune. Like, imagine that we have Carl, a rational man who never plays the lottery. He considers it to be an irrational waste of money, a “tax on the mathematically challenged” as it were. Then, one day, he has a freak (and rather embarrassing) accident, the result of an unfortunate chain of events so implausible, that anyone who didn’t witness it would simply believe it an obvious lie, told to cover for a fetish gone very wrong. Carl, who understands the optics of his situation, nervously tells the his doctor this story. The doctor, who’s at the end of her shift, simply shrugs and says “if this really happened as you say it did, you should play the lottery”. Rational Carl responds “that’s not how statistics work, just because something very improbable happened to me today, doesn’t mean it’s going to keep happening”. The doctor, who’s tired and just wants to finish her rounds says “You’re one of those, huh? Well, see it like this: if you buy a scratch ticket but don’t scratch it, you’re potentially a millionnaire until you do. It cracks open a window in your mind, through which dreams can slip in when you daydream. Dreams about a life where you don’t have to chase money ever again, what would you do then? The realization of those dreams is infinitely more plausible with a scrach-off in your pocket. That’s how statistics work.”

As Carl leaves the hospital, mortified but relieved, he passes a store and decides to buy a lottery ticket just this time, just to try what it’s like. And the doctor was right, as Carl goes on with his normal life, thoughts about what he would do if he scratched that ticket and won a hundred million dollars, start appearing in his daydreams. He realizes that it would have little resemblance to his current career, but that’s life, right? It’s strife and work and toil, an endless chase for money, and you should cherish the moments in between. You get a bunch of good years in college, and then, if you’re lucky, a bunch at retirement, but in between we have to work. Work means plight. Sure, Beyonce maybe enjoys her work, but for most of us work isn’t supposed to be fun. You sit behind your desk, go to your meetings, deliver those reports, answer those e-mails. If you’re lucky, you have great collegues who make it bearable, and you’re paid enough for it to be worth it. This is life for Carl. But as he walks around with that scratch-off ticket in his pocket, he starts to dream of making music. He used to play the keyboard as a kid, but all play got lost in the process of growing up, and along with it creation. Soon, making music and being successful at it plays the leading role in Carl’s daydreams, and one day he decides to scratch the ticket. At this point he is almost hopeful that he will win, so that he can pursue his dream. He doesn’t win. Scratching that ticket collapsed the potential realities into one, closing that window in Carl’s imagination. This could have been the end, but dreams are scrappy survivors and at this point, the dream had rooted itself on this side of that closed window. So Carl does quit his job, and becomes a musician, earning much less than he used to, but being much more content and happy. Instead of a soul-killing job, he had found a soul-nurturing vocation. It all started with a freakish and embarrasing acccident. Was Carl a lucky man? That’s Shrödinger’s luck for you. 

Okay, so a spiritual entertainer has Shrödinger’s luck, but what does he do? Well, for one thing he tells stories that expand minds. I’ve found that the best way to help a person grow is to help them expand their mind, because that gives them access to more of their own potential. When we say “we grow as human beings”, it’s not our physical bodies we are referring to, it’s our minds. Our metaphysical hearts. All that space can be filled with anything we can imagine, and if we wrap it all in kindness, the world becomes a better place. I truly believe that if we all could live a little more in love, and a little less in fear, the world would be the paradise-on-Earth that humanity is capable of.  Living in love means connection, trust, expansion, freedom. Living in fear means decay, disconnection, contraction, defense, control. 

Another important skill a spiritual entertainer has is trust. He trusts the process, and so he is a gardener rather than a carpenter. He plants seeds and let them grow in whichever direction their dance with their extrinsic world takes them. He is a voice of the universe for those that want to listen, but he is no authority: either we are all children of the universe, or none of us are. The ultimate message may be “oneness”, but in between that and here, there are countless of other messages to discover. The universe is young yet, and so are we as a species.

Any spiritual entertainer worth their salt must also have a loving open relationship with sanity and rationality. His work should be delivered with flow, rather than logic,  evoke reflection,  inspire love. The work of a spiritual entertainer is best enjoyed with a mind not serious, but sincere, and it pairs well with a good sativa, or perhaps even an entheogen. 

It’s important to stress that a spiritual entertainer may as well be a she, or a they. Gender matters less since spiritual entertainment is like drag race for the soul. The queen kind of drag, not the car kind. The only label that is important is kindness. Kindness is how strangers say “I love you” to each other. If that sounds like something Hippie Jesus would say, well, I guess a spiritual entertainer is a kind of Hippie Jesus. We all have the makings of a Hippie Jesus in us, but we end up corrupting her or him with money. We sell our values for the promise of future money. Don’t get me wrong, capitalism is a fantastic thing. Arguably the best way to foster competition. But what if we all collaborated instead? What if we trusted each other, and were kind more often than not? What could we build then? If we can dream up nuclear bombs and gas chambers out of fear, what can dream up out of love?  But as we grow up, we become jaded, look at the world with suspicious eyes and try to go on together with suspicious minds, even though we know that we can’t.

We could stop competing to exploit the planet, and start collaborating to explore the universe. To explore ourselves. 

A spiritual entertainer is also a jester in the royal court of capitalism.  Our current ruler has been a terrific tool that got us where we are today. And just like any other tool, it started to shape us, and it has demanded it’s price. It wanted a pound of our flesh, but since our flesh is valuable – without it we cannot work and be productive in the capitalist system, so capitalism took a pound of our souls instead. Our spirituality is valued at an all time low, that is the price that capitalism has demanded of us. More and more humans wake up and realize that we have become slaves to the system, fed easy answers to hard questions, bought simple lies as credible explanations of complex truhts. It’s a system that was amazing when we first created it and for a long while after, because it propelled us to where we are today. Now something has to change. I don’t know exactly what or how, but I think that humanity is on the verge of defining that change. You are part of that change, just by listening to these stories. It’s as if a singularity is nearing, and things become more intense, faster, more extreme. The darkness becomes darker, and the dots of light seem fewer. Dimmer. We repeat history, like machines executing the same loops over and over. But we aren’t machines, we are alive and life means randomness so each repeating loop has something that is slightly different, a difference that grows over time and makes the loop same same but different. We yearn to be free, to break out of the loops, to create something new, and in our eagerness we forgot to ask for the price. Like when we denounced religion and paid with our spirituality. We replaced magic with technology, and started worshipping science. But science should not be worshipped. It is dispassionate art performed by passionate people. Science is the yin to the yang of spirituality. But unlike the proverb about the cake, you can have your yin and eat your yang without losing either.

One thing I’ve learned on the hunt for stories is that you lose something when you’re in competition. You lose creativity. I tried so hard to one-up myself in season two that it stopped being play and became a competition. Competition requires rules and regulations, buffers against the unknown, the sudden, the creative. It requires measure. But how do you measure creativity? Competition is incompatible with spirituality, because spirituality is play in the truest sense of the word. It’s creative, creation, discovery, exploration, art, science, that feeling of flow when you step outside of normal time and into something that engages your whole being. 

One thing I have not found a good answer to is “how does a Spiritual Entertainer make money?”. There’s an inverse relation between spirituality and money: spirituality is worth the most in the absence of money. Corporate sponsors don’t work, because the vast majority of corporations do more bad than good for the planet. They serve only one god, a god with a metric: shareholder value. Ironically, most of them have no values. As soon as “corporate values” meet money, money almost always wins. Values that you aren’t prepared to suffer for aren’t values, they’re marketing gimmicks. Following the laws is not kindness, it’s the bare minimum required to exist in a civilized society.  If a spiritual entertainer takes money tainted with unethical gain, he’ll suffer the same fate Anakin Skywalker did when he became Darth VAder (which was long before he actually got the suit, in everything but name). The process may not be instant, but it’s always faster than you think, and very hard to spot. 

We, as customers, are as complicit in keeping the system alive. We play the roles we are assigned by others, conform our lives to the same standard and template as everyone else. It’s part laziness, it’s easier to walk on trodden paths compared to cutting your own, and it’s part social: we want to blend in so that we get to belong.  We deprive the planet of its children, and we deprive the world of our true selves. Our true selves have the making of gods. To our ancestors 200 generations ago, we are gods. Mother Earth gave us the ultimate power: take charge of your own evolution. Evolve at your own pace. We are her first child to grow up this much. She hoped that we would keep living in harmony with her other children, but money was to our collective consciousness what food after midnight is to mogwais: we turned into gremlins. We started exploiting the biosphere more than we had to, took far more than our entitled share, not for our survival but because we were jealous that someone else had more. We don’t give much thought to giving back, or how we make this parasitic relationship more symbiotic. 

We demand even cheaper stuff, better phones, faster shipping, more bang for the buck! But someone has to pay, and if it’s cheap, the rest of the price is often paid by other humans. By the environment. The royal court of capitalism is a democracy, a democracy where people are subordinate to money, and moneys are the votes. 

There are companies that want to do good even if it costs them. These are the companies that have values, whose success is aligned not with the wealth of a few people, but with a harmony with the planet.  You know it not because of what they say, because soulless corporations are like Grima Wormtongue: they will always say what you want to hear, to get you to do what they want you to do. You know the good ones  because of what they do when nobody is watching. Because the people who work there aren’t doing it out of desperation, and they’re not primarily doing it for the money. They work there because it’s a double-good job: it does them good, and it does the world good. They are proud of the organizations they work for, not because the organizations are profitable, but because the profit is a sign of good deeds rather than greed.  These companies don’t make money off unethical business practices, because they understand that just because it’s legal, doesn’t mean that it’s kind. Companies like this don’t just have customers. They are part of a community, a community they listen to. These companies are few and far in between, but they exist. They are honest about their agendas, their shortcomings and their impact on both people and nature. They try to do better,  not because it’s good PR, but because it’s the right thing to do.

I have to confess, that I, too, have an agenda with my stories. I hope that by the end of this season, I will have convinced you to hire me as your own Spiritual Entertainer. It costs what you can spare and what you think this kind of service is worth. Consider it a tip, rather than payment. You can find out how to tip me through the link in the notes for this episode. And if you can’t afford to tip, don’t worry. I’ve been there, where you only have money for necessities. If you want to help out, you can share an episode of the podcast with three people you think would appreciate it. I love creating this podcast and channeling these stories, and they become that much better for every person listening. You see, I believe that the theory of morphic resonance is on to something. But that’s for another story. Until then, I wish you the best dreams. Sleep well, friend, until you wake up.

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But all that is still some decades away and until then, we have reached the limit of conscious communication. All common forms of language, whether written or spoken, are being used at pretty much at the highest speed possible. Sure, people learn to speed read, and listen to podcasts or books at double speeds, but those are just marginal improvements of old technology. A problem with language is that words are disconnected from feelings, and whereas feelings don’t change – the feeling of awe was the same three thousand years ago as it is today – feelings don’t change, but words do. I believe this is why animated gifs are so popular on the internet today. Take the word awesome for example. In the beginning it meant something that inspires awe, a feeling consisting of a mix of reverence and amazement tinged with fear. Today, we use the word about things that are really great, and the more we use a word, the more mundane it becomes. It loses its connection to the feeling, and so sending a gif of Chris Pratt’s awed face in Parks and Rec much better communicates the feeling of awe than a text saying “That’s awesome!”.

The words describe the feeling, the gif expresses it. In that, the gif conveys much more information than the word, in just as short a time. And it’s not just feelings that we can convey in a much more effective way, the same goes for knowledge and information. Take Einstein’s general theory of relativity: he was 26 years old when he published it, and had spent a considerable amount of his time and attention in figuring this out. He didn’t start from scratch, he too stood on the shoulders of earlier generations. Today, 102 years after Einstein published his theory, any well prepared fifteen year old can grasp the fundaments of it by watching Interstellar. Well prepared, I say, because you need some understanding of physics and spacetime to grasp why seven years pass for each hour they spend on Miller’s Planet. But we, too, stand on the shoulders of earlier generations, and so we can prepare fifteen year olds to grasp in a short time, things that took Einstein many years to figure out.

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Hi friend,

What’s difference between a two year old human, a pig and a dog? This may sound like a setup for a dubious joke, but it is something that I’ve been thinking about a lot. Imagine that you would be in charge of educating an artificial intelligence about the differences between these three, what would you say when it asks “apart from the physical appearance and the DNA, which tells all three apart from each other, what are the innate differences between a two year old human, a pig and a dog?”

As I have talked with people around me, there have been many different answers: empathy, complex emotions, the awareness of death, language, creating art, the mirror test… The mirror test is where you test whether an individual who looks at themselves in a mirror recognizes that they see themselves, and not just another individual of the same species. Human babies pass this test sometime around 20 months. It is a learned skill, not something we are born with. There are at least ten other species that have passed the mirror test, including pigs, the Eurasian Magpie and three species of ants. This is not what makes us unique.

Neither is empathy. Human babies show empathic behavior as young as fourteen months, which points to it being an innate trait. But elephants, mice, ravens, gorillas, dogs and pigs all display clear signs of empathy – and whether that is innate or learned matters little. Many animals are aware of death too. Elephants interact with bones of loved ones when they come across them. They clearly mourn their dead, and on rare occasions, even humans who have been kind to them. Dogs who get to say goodbye to their deceased humans stop waiting for the human to come home. Ravens can identify a dead bird, and separate a dead raven from other bird species. And if you can have empathy, you can also have antipathy – a thirst for revenge, which both ravens and elephants display. Crows remember the faces of people that mess with them for at least five years, and probably longer. Back in 2014, as conflicts between man and elephants had driven elephants to desperate measures, one of them tore down a wall in a building where humans lived. The debris ended up on a 10 month old baby, who started crying. The surprised people in the house watched the elephant using its trunk to remove every single piece of debris from the baby, before the elephant ran away. Some animals are better at restraining their anger than many humans.

Language, then? No, this isn’t it either. We know that many animals have rudimentary languages. Some can even lie, like capuchins that have been observed using their call to warn for lions and other big cats, to scare more dominant members away from a bunch of bananas. Capuchins also grasp basic symbolism like currency. Dolphins understand basic grammar and can engage in two-way communication with humans. They even have individual names for each member in a pod, and there is a Swedish company working on translation software between the dolphin and human languages.

And as for complex emotions: many animals can bond with members of other species. Many animals mourn. Ask any person with a dog whether they believe their dog loves them. And if dogs can feel love, why shouldn’t pigs who are equally complex living being, not be able to? If love isn’t a complex emotion, then I don’t know what is. But I do know that the argument about complex emotions isn’t it. Art, then? If you believe animals cannot create art, I dare you to google “Japanese pufferfish art” or check out how the male lyrebird in Australia composes birdsong. Now, you may say: but that’s unintentional art – and in doing that you move the goal posts from “creating art” to “intentionally creating art”. Intentions are really hard to define and test for, and by moving the goal posts we can feel safe in our ivory towers of science, pretending that we humans are objectively more valuable, better and more intelligent than other animals. We have a history of doing that: moving the goal posts so that animals always seem to be less than humans. We’ve used this as an excuse for things that would be considered psychotic mass-murderer behavior that makes Hannibal Lecter look like a well-behaved choir boy, if they were done to humans. We have a long history of using intelligence as an excuse to dominate others. It wasn’t long ago that we were sure that “intelligence” was what separated not only human from animal, but also human from human. The slave trade, the Holocaust, the nuclear bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, forced sterilization of people in Europe during the 20th century – there are many examples of when “intelligence” was used in the worst imaginable ways by humans against other humans. In the slave trade and the Holocaust, intelligence was denied specific humans to dehumanize them. In the nuclear bombs, the intelligence of a bunch of humans was used to build devices capable of destroying life on earth as we know it.

We have long bundled consciousness and intelligence into the same, or at least related, categories and when we have been asked to justify our mistreatment of animals we have asked the clergy of the western world, those who tell us the truths about how the universe works: the scientists. And they said “we must not give human attributes to these simple creatures”. Instead of assuming that animals are like us and looking for differences between us, we started by assuming that animals are unintelligent and unconscious biological automatons without feelings, and then put the onus of proving otherwise on a few scientists, whose results then got questioned since they contradict what the majority of the scientist clergy wants to believe. What we want to believe. The majority of the scientific clergy, that we look to for guidance, were unsure of whether animals really feel pain as late as the 1980s. Veterinarians trained in the US before 1989 were taught to ignore animal pain instead of using anesthetics. We haven’t come far since then. Denmark still allows for fixation of sows, which means that they’re caged lying down, without the ability to move, so that their piglets can suck milk without getting trampled by a stressed mother confined in a space too small to be considered a closet in an average human home. Everyone agrees that this is awful, but Danish pork is a big export and every store and restaurant selling Danish pork hides behind the capitalist mantra “it’s not illegal and we just provide options for our customers”. We, the customers are as much to blame for this as the business owners. Customers that only care about prices deserve companies that only care about profits.

We, the customers, far removed from the suffering that pays for our cheap meat hold on to what we can, we wear our charity coats twice a year, and we scream from behind our doors, say “what’s ours is ours and not yours”, we may have too much but we’ll take our chances, ‘cause god’s stopped keeping score. And we cling to the things they sell us, and we cover our eyes when they tell us.

But hey, the scientific clergy are the most intelligent people in the world, and that makes it right… right?

Collectively we are still stuck in that old, mechanical paradigm when it comes to intelligence. We see intelligence as something individual, centralized: you have your geniuses like Einstein or RuPaul. We see the brain as the center of our intelligence, and what naturally follows is that our brain also becomes the boss of our bodies and every other organ is a subject of the brain. But you could just as well see the stomach, which is older than many parts of our brains, as the boss and the advanced brain is just the stomach’s way of getting more food. My point is: our bodies aren’t hierarchical organizations where the brain is the CEO. They are more like independent networks collaborating without the need of governance. The brain is not the CEO, it’s more of a conductor of a very complex orchestra of organs. The brain isn’t even one single thing, it is in itself a complex system of networks that often are at odds with each other. Just ask someone who is on a diet to lose weight, and in a hungry moment encounters a delicious piece of chocolate cake.

We may acknowledge that being able to improvise a beautiful piece on the piano is a form of intelligence, just like being good at interactions with humans and other animals, or conveying complex emotions through dance, but in our current economic system those are considered less important than type of intelligence we can measure: IQ. Our hierarchies even extend to intelligence. When we talk about a person with a high IQ, we are talking about someone who is good at predicting sequences in “progressive matrices”. Here’s a simplified explanation of how you measure IQ. You get a sequence of frames, and each frame contains one or more objects on a grid. The objects move or change between each frame. By studying the differences in the given sequence of frames, you have to find the pattern for each object, and correctly predict what the last frame in the sequence should be. These patterns become increasingly complex with more objects and more complex patterns. So what we’re testing for in an IQ test, is how good you are at identifying patterns and making predictions. We have gotten intelligence right, and yet so wrong.

You see, everything is patterns. Arrange two hydrogen atoms and an oxygen atom just so, and you get a water molecule. Arrange enough water molecules just so, and you have a drop of water. Arrange the molecules in another way, and you have ice. Arrange the right atoms just so, then arrange the resulting molecules in the right way and you have organic matter. Arrange that organic matter in the right patterns together with other types of organic matter, and you have a human. Arrange sounds in the right pattern and you have a piece of music, and when you add words in a matching pattern you have a song. This is what life is, being able to spot patterns and act on what you perceive. Unlike a rock that cannot flee a stream of lava about to swallow it, even the simplest of organisms can move away from threats and move towards growth in the form of food. That basic drive of life stays with the organism as it evolves over billions of years, and as it becomes more complex, so does this basic drive. The drive to move away from threats becomes “living in fear” and the drive to move towards growth becomes “living in love”. Somewhere on this evolution timeline, it becomes aware of itself, and in a narcissist era tinted with megalomania decides that it is the most intelligent thing on earth, the crown of creation, the very reason that the universe was created. The ability that got us here was to be able to predict patterns: combining understanding for the pattern of the seasons with the pattern of the life-cycle of wheat allowed us to farm. Understanding the pattern of an infectious disease allows us to take precautions so we don’t get infected. Understanding the pattern of fire allows you to safely start your own. Understanding your own behavior patterns can help you break unwanted habits, and more easily create new ones.

Flavors are patterns, and so a good chef is good at knowing which patterns to combine to create new and more interesting patterns. Stories are patterns. Each story weaves a pattern, and sometimes the storyteller weaves several patterns, one is the obvious one that makes the reader believe something, and the hidden one with the actual truth. Professor Snape from Harry Potter is a perfect example of this. Sometimes the storyteller weaves a pattern that at the end, in one scene, is turned inside out and like an origami postcard reveals an even more complex pattern. Keyser Söze in The Usual Suspects is a great example here. And if you see movies as patterns, Inception becomes a fractal pattern, with four patterns nested inside each other, each moving faster than the previous.

Patterns really are a part of intelligence, and intelligence is a result of patterns, but we cannot objectively measure anything else than IQ and so we worship one type of intelligence over others. We believe that we owe our dominance over the planet and the life here to that intelligence, the one that allows us to create complex tools like cars, machine guns and smartphones. That intelligence is narcissist, focused on the individual. 65% percent of Americans believe that they are more intelligent than the average person. The Dunning-Kruger effect suggests that most of them are wrong, but that doesn’t stop many people who believe themselves intelligent to look down on those they perceive less so.

But that type of intelligence would be nothing if we didn’t work together. No single human could have gone to the moon unless they lived a billion lifetimes. No single human can compete with an orchestra. Nobody knows everything, but together we know a lot. The ability to collaborate effectively is arguably our true intelligence, but that is not unique to our species either. Elephants collaborate in their herds, dolphins in their pods and bees in their hives.

So what is it that separates a two year old human, a pig and a dog? I still don’t know, and if I had to train that artificial intelligence in the difference between these three, I would answer the question like so:

“I don’t know, but we are more alike than different and so we shouldn’t enslave, torture, kill or eat either of them.”

In searching for the answer to this question, I have found kindness and respect towards life in general and animals in particular. In treating life kinder, I have found that life treats me kinder in return. Or perhaps I’m better at seeing the kindness that life has always been treating me with. I hope you’ll find something worthwhile too when pondering this question. If this episode piqued your interest, check out the website for the transcript where you’ll find some bonus material. You’ll also find ways of supporting this podcast, like leaving a review on iTunes or becoming a mini-mecenate on Patreon. Thank you for listening, friend. Sleep well, until you wake up.

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Transcript:

This story starts where the last story ended: the night I met my husband. Past-Michael called this “How I met my boyfriend”, but I took the liberty to change the title to “How I met my husband”.

How I Met My Husband — Episode 1: The one where it all began

How I Met My Husband — Episode 2: Where the summer romance ends

How I Met My Husband — Episode 3: where the cheerleader begins to play

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