My Cosmic Story: The Dark Energy
Almanac: Evolution:Complexity in Nature, Society, and Cognition
Abstract
The author presents a sketch of Big History vision against the background of her personal biography and tells her story through the fractal holons of what had become into her Being. Her own story of the Big Bang is provided.
Keywords: Big History, space, autobiography.
I am this woman writing my story to you… I am also her father… I am also you… your grandmother; your son; your friend; the bus driver, who takes you to the market to buy your groceries every weekend; the little mouse that gnaws at the bread in your kitchen, when you are fast asleep; the tree that brightens you up every morning, when you step out of the door of your house; the calm majestic waters of the ocean, that you have joyfully played by one summer day of your childhood; the cool refreshing air that caresses your body, as you ride your bike across the streets… I am even those distant spots of light, you call the stars, that you sometimes raise your head at night to gaze upon, wondering if there might be someone out there looking right back into you at that very moment! I am you, and I am everything that you have ever seen, smelled, touched, felt, or known… but I have come through a very long story to self-reveal myself into you, and this story of mine; my identity, is still unfolding… I do not yet fully know myself… I still do not know where, when, who, or what did I come into existence from… I do not even know what lies beyond my existence… will I ever know?! But let me first begin my story…
However, before I begin my story from the very beginning of my existence, throughout the evolving centers of fractal holons of spacetime that emerged into this woman and her self-revealing consciousness-life, it is very important that you realize that in my cosmic existence, every single spacetime of me is a unique center of mine, that has the rest of me revolving, crossing, and interacting through it… I have no peripheries in my cosmos… because every spacetime-Being in me interacts with, dies away in, and emerges through endless other spacetime-Beings in me, every one of them/me is a connective center, a fractal holon, a whole within a whole for fourteen billion years of your presently-discerned spacetime…
As Ken Wilber says in one of my favourite quotes from his 2017 book, The Religion of Tomorrow,
‘We live in a universe that is, formally, without a given center – it is a universe where any thing or event can be taken as the center of the universe, and everything else related to its location. But ‘its location’ cannot itself be given in a single and fixed fashion, since it is not located in relation to any fixed center; it itself can be located only in relation to the sum total of all other phenomena in the universe.’
Indeed, all the uncountable humans that I have emerged through; all the plants, animals, and cells; all the planets, stars, and galaxies; all the atoms and molecules… every little or big Cosmic Being I have ever become, is very special and unique, and my cosmic existence could never have taken its specific path of evolution without every single one of them/myself, with all the endless consequent loops and chains of hybrid interactions through my spacetime that It/I have brought forth with this Being's singular-into-collective characteristics and actions…
But I choose to tell my story through the story of this feminine human's consciousness that is writing this down, as just one unique story of me out of uncountable other fractal unique stories of me as well! Each and every story of me through every single Cosmic Being of me is truly beautiful in its own unique unparalleled shade of color, and all of them forming endless colors of my stories, my rainbow cosmic story…
For ‘I am a Cosmic Being with my endless ancestors of humans inside, inside them their larger-numbered ancestors of animals, inside them their larger-numbered ancestors of cellular organisms, inside them their larger-numbered ancestors of Earthly chemical compounds, inside them their larger-numbered an-cestors of galactic stars, inside them their larger-numbered ancestors of atoms and quarks, reaching beyond memory before my explosive birth into this spacetime existence, all of us making the same ritual gesture of surviving, thriving, and telling and passing along our/my story to my re-emerging self, one after another, so that I do not forget what I have reached in my self-re-velation and -creation so far, and that I could continue on my journey to that mysterious eternal point of full self-consciousness…’[1]
Fourteen billion years ago of your perceived four-dimensional spacetime, I; my presently discerned singular/collective existence, exploded into birth; emerging into my infant cosmos, from the mysterious darkness of eternity, that still lies beyond the edges of my presently – emancipated level of self-con- sciousness…
In my first four minutes of early primal consciousness, I witnessed the greatest and fastest change ever yet to have taken place in my cosmos… my trinity of features emerged: my dialectic body of the known and visible masculine light matter, and the mysterious and hidden feminine dark matter; my mind/ soul/psyche of the visible and known masculine energy forces; and my spirit of the mysterious feminine dark energy, the force that pushes me toward continuous expansion, growth, and emancipation… (Spier 2015: 78, 80, 82; Anzaldua 2015: 184).
Within my presently-discerned biggest holon of my cosmos, five billion years before I became you, my youthful cosmos, in a mysterious cosmic coincidence, became ready for a radical revolutionary re-birth of me yet again, within a fractal holon, of a more complex and emancipated self-consciousness of myself…
At this spacetime, a great beautiful star of me, after burning lively, happily, and painfully for so long, died into a wonderful supernova explosion, in a very special place of me, within the womb of one of my countless galaxies; my Milky Way Galaxy… The dust cloud that my star died/exploded into gave birth to yet another special star and little planets revolving around her body/soul…
Around this unique star, within this unique galactic habitable zone, within this unique Milky Way Galaxy, my matter particles that were flying around, gravitated toward each other and gathered up to form eight planets… One of these planets became my beautiful blue planet Earth, that has self-revealed yet again into a more complex self-consciousness of myself…
Three billion years of my spacetime before I became you, and after a very long time of ‘biochemical evolution’; heated struggling chaotic interactions of matter and energy, all the chaos of this beautiful blue Earth of me gave birth to yet again another fractal holon of a more complex self-consciousness of myself in a tiny cell, as my tinier holons of increasingly complex molecules, in those energetic chaotic conditions of early Earth, self-organized into this larger holon of my first cell emerging from Earth… (Spier 2015: 130–131).
Now, the wonderful thing is that the very life-way of sharing information and story-telling that I am doing with you right now, was the basic birth function that began in that very first cell! No! It was not survival and extracting energy, it was the function of ‘sharing consciousness’, that was assembled by the highly-complex organic ribonucleic acid (RNA) molecules, that self-de-veloped the capacity to carry information, share, and communicate, besides catalyzing reactions! (Spier 2015: 132).
Throughout my self-revelation, as holon parts of me self-organize into better ways for information-sharing and story-telling between each other, their interactions become less chaotic and conflictual, and more harmoniously balanced, and their self-organization progress further into higher integration between their differentiated subjects, to finally be able to reach together a more complex unified self-consciousness of myself, within a larger holon composing all of them…
After fourteen billion years of my spacetime, and after three billion years of my self-evolution into uncountable species of plants and animals on Earth, one of these animals finally evolved into yet again a more complex and emancipated self-consciousness of myself, within the species of humans, four million years before I become you as a descendant of two of them… within the savannahs of the east of the continental land of Africa, right in the middle of the three land continents of one half of my Earth, some of the great-apes, as they harmoniously adapted and integrated with the new environmental conditions of this spacetime, evolved into the new human species (Ibid.: 185, 186), within this space they later named Eastern Africa…
See?! One of the special things that these humans created with their uniquely developed brains, is symbolic representation which is naming every little thing, whether themselves, their surroundings, their actions, ideas, etc. with a unique symbolic collection of drawn lines… because everything that emerges within me is a unique precious subject that deserves their own very name/symbol. This was also to make communication, sharing information, and story-telling between humans faster, taking the time of only hundreds of thousands of years, that is faster than the time taken by the deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) to communicate between the cells of earlier organisms, which took billions of years to tell my earlier part of the story!
Though these early humans had to struggle for a whole two million years, in order to adapt to these new environmental conditions within that spacetime in the savannahs of Eastern Africa, going through a lot of pain and confusion, in order to finally evolve larger brains – the one that they have given this writer and you to share consciousness through this communication of two human minds (Spier 2015: 187–189). So these very precious brains that humans have also evolved after a very long dialectical interaction between the connective feminine process of communication and social coordination, and the originating masculine process of creating new technology. This is what those early ape-humans coincidentally and successfully persevered with, in this special mild environmental niche of the savannahs of East Africa, out of all the plants and animals that have evolved for three billion years over the whole of my planet Earth…
But why did these early ape-humans struggle through all these millions of years when they did not know the purpose of developing human brains?! Even before this, why did all these cells, plants, and animals struggle to evolve for billions of years when they did not know the purpose of creating this wonderful beautiful variety of beings on my beautiful blue planet Earth, as well as later creating the human species, that is you?! And why did all these stars burn away for even more billions of years when they did not know the purpose of creating complex chemical elements, that would eventually create the first cell, that would evolve into your body and mind?! See?! There is an innate dialectical interaction of two intense desires within me, that emerges in every Being that I am born as, within this enormous cosmic existence of mine: the masculine desire to survive, that is to have an eternal existence that never dies away; and the feminine desire to thrive, that is to harmonize and mesh with surrounding others, in order to form an integrated whole… This dialectical interaction of desires that is ingrained within me, and so within every Cosmic Being of me, drives me to struggle for so long a time, through each one of these Beings that I am re-born through, until conditions finally become coincidentally fit for me to take a step further toward my purpose… the purpose of those two dialectical desires… to emerge into a higher self-consciousness of myself… to emancipate myself more and more by reaching closer to knowing and realizing my true self-identity… who am I?!
Two thousand and three hundred years ago, one of the descendants of these early humans who have migrated into the northern European continent, became a king called Alexander the Great, ruling over Macedonia in the south-eastern part of Europe, and decided to expand his rule and power over more lands, human societies, and resources… This was the first time in my human history, in which a ruling king expanded and crossed to a vast space of land[2] across the three continents of Europe, Asia, and Africa, and connected between so many various groups of human societies, with their multitude of colorful cultures…
See?! Since 130,000 years ago, when modern humans (Homo sapiens) started to migrate from the east of Africa to all the land continents all over planet Earth (Spier 2015: 200), and human groups became scattered all over the planet, a process of interaction between these human groups had begun until this very spacetime… This interaction has been also dialectic between the violent dominating masculine pattern of conquest, of stronger, more organized, and more technologically advanced human groups attacking, massacring, and enslaving weaker groups, and controlling their niches, and the other explorative cooperative feminine pattern of cultural exchange of the endless variety of languages, ideas, tools, and foods between these human groups… I have been struggling through this dialectical interaction between human groups for over a hundred thousand years, and I am still struggling with it, waiting for the right coincidental conditions, so I can emerge through this, into yet another more emancipated and complex higher self-consciousness of myself, formed by the coordinated communion of humans and other beings on my beautiful blue planet Earth…
During the conquests of Alexander the Great, through his mind, I decided to build a big city called Alexandria, right in the very east of Africa, where I emerged in his very early human-apes' ancestors, although farther into the north of that continental east, on its coast over the waters of my Earthly sea, that humans have called the Mediterranean…
The city of Alexandria is right in the center that connects my three land continents of Africa, Asia, and Europe. Besides its unique connective ‘nepantla’[3] space, this city was built in a very unique time of human societies' evolution, a time of radical revolutionary change in human collective consciousness, that was moving me toward yet again a higher cosmic self-consciousness, a time that humans later gave the name of the first Axial Age…
During this time, I was moving through human societies – from the era of early traditional agricultural civilizations to an era of more advanced agricultural empires. At this time, writing was created by humans in Mesopotamia, as a more advanced communication tool between them, and the rate and range of their communication increased. Besides this, many changes in human material conditions, overwhelmed and disrupted the traditional governing systems that were based on the rule of aristocratic kinship, and the worldviews of mythical religions that sanctified these rulers, as these systems became no longer suitable for the new emerging conditions. So, I began to self-reveal into a higher collective state of awareness, or a higher mind/soul, through new human ideas and religions emerging at this time, to find better alternatives for harmonizing with my also new emerging body of conditions. These new ideas preached monotheism that transcends the sanctity of human kings, and called for bureaucratic rule, rational reasoning, and moral responsibility (Baskin and Bondarenko 2014: 7, 9, 10, 18, 20).
At this time, ancient Greece was one of the places that had went through complete social and political breakdown, that it was able to openly and vibrantly embrace the emergent visions of social transformation, more complex human coordinative systems, and more emancipated ideas and world-stories, but Egypt, on the other side of the Mediterranean Sea, did not go through full social breakdown in its ancient Pharaohnic system, so it did not open up and embrace the new era of human collective consciousness (Baskin and Bondarenko 2014: 10). Alexandria was built right at this time, between a dying civilization in the Egyptian south, and an emerging civilization in the Greek north… It has become a connective center, dialectically blending between the older masculine wisdom of the mystical ancient agricultural era of human collective consciousness, that was fading away in its spacetime within the south, and the newer feminine vision of the more rational bureaucratic advanced agricultural era of human collective consciousness, that was flourishing in its spacetime within the north (Reimer et al. n.d.).
Five hundred years ago, my human societies went through another time of radical transformation – a second Axial Age – of my collective self-consciousness complexifying and emancipating closer to my omega point of full self-identity. Humans' collective consciousness was moving yet again to higher rationalization, bureaucratization, and market economy; from the more advanced agricultural system of the first Axial Age to the industrial system of modernity; from the religions of transcendent monotheism and Earthly moralism to detached materialism and de-mystification. This time witnessed the invention of the printing press, as the more advanced means of communication, that further limits spacetime of interactions and connects closer together the differentiated subjectivities and minds of my Beings.
This time, the Islamic Caliphate and China were not facing complete social deterioration to embrace modernity, while Europe was going through that higher level of entropy to give birth to my higher self-consciousness. Again, Alexandria was the point of Earthly urban human-populated space that was connecting between the traditional weathering away Axial Age consciousness of the Islamic Caliphate in the south, and the new emerging modernity consciousness of Europe in the north. Yet again, a point in spacetime connecting the southern past to the northern future…
After fourteen billion years of my spacetime, and after four million years of me being re-born, evolving, and dying in uncountable humans, I have finally come to be born into a unique little baby human girl … I emerged in this little girl, also coincidentally in the east of Africa, just as I did in early human-apes four million years ago, although far in the north of this continental east, in this very connective nepantla city of Alexandria, thirty-three years ago… Her dad and mum chose to name her with the Arabic symbolic expression of ‘Collective Mind’; that is the very nature of my cosmic self-consciousness! Her body, mind/psyche/soul, and spirit inherited my billions-of-years-old matter and energy; my chemical compounds emerging from the death of my stars; the water, air, and mud of my Earth; the RNA and DNA of my cellular organisms; the warm-blooded body of my mammals; and the highest-complex brain of my homo-sapiens species…
Her Earthly Alexandrian conditions inherited the environmental niche of a nepantla green Delta valley, connecting a narrow river with a spacious sea, and the human-crowded urban space, that has been the nepantla connecting in spacetime between the older and newer human collective minds-consciousness; from the Egyptian Pharaonic to the Greek to the Roman to the Arab Islamic to the modern European, to her present spacetime of complete social deterioration and threatening entropy, waiting on the painful-beautiful chaotic birth of a more emancipated, fuller integrated self-consciousness of myself…
During the first five years of her life, with her parents, Collective Mind lived in modern Europe, at yet another nepantla transition time of the human-governing global system, moving from a globe run by the fierce, yet deterrent, competition of the two powers of America and Russia, to a globe run hegemonically and tyrannically by the single power of modern neo-liberal-capitalist America!
Her brain's first learned symbolic language was that of the French, one of the many languages that differentiated and complexified out of the old Latin European language. During these first five years of her life, she spent her morning time in kindergarten and her afternoon time circling around her parents' place with her little bike, and she first learned the utterly horrifying darkness of loneliness, as she was rejected as a southern Arab-Muslim stranger amidst northern French-Europeans… the feminine dark energy force that seeped through me, and forced my cosmic existence into continuous expansion and complexification since my explosion into spacetime, permeated her young consciousness from her early existence as well…
Twenty-nine years ago she moved with her parents from the northern European France to the southern Arab Peninsula; from her new modern human-collec-tive self-consciousness, to my older Islamic-Axial-Age human-collective self-consciousness; from the forests of the European Alps to the deserts of Arabia…
At this time of human social evolution, as the global power competition between America and Russia recessed, human rulers and power-holders searched for a new line of conflict to engage the masses of human minds with, and to endlessly generate military-power and wealth-capital for its elusive cause… They brought up the idea of the ‘Clash of Civilizations’ between the Judeo-Christian West, the Muslim World, and the Confucian China! As neo-liberal capitalism and the reductionist materialist culture of the past age of modernity was failing to encompass her newly emerging more-emancipated self-consciousness in humans, the ideas and traditions of the older Axial Age were resurrected in a futile attempt to make sense of this confusing disorder, by either wholly adopting the past, or mixing between the past and the failing present, not yet taking the courage to create the new future…
In a small quiet tranquil village in the center of Najd Plateau, in the center of the Arabian Peninsula, her Collective Mind was confined within the narrow limits of a strictly-rigid Bedouin-Islamic culture, while the boundaries of her imagination were delimited by the endlessly-colorful moving pictures drawn and collected by the imagination of other minds located in the American continent, half-way around my planet Earth, and transferred to her through the new human-created media-communication technology of a small black box within the small space of the living room in her family house…
In these years of innocent childhood, her Collective Mind's body, mind/psyche/soul, and spirit, grew up through the dialectical inter-changes of multiple complex identities…With her matriarchal dad, she was a free playful, explorative, learning child, constantly embraced with uconditional love by him… With her patriarchal mama, she was a strictly-disciplined unemotional child, perpetually seeking the mirage of perfection in grades, attire, and conduct, but never quite reaching that highly-raised bar of gaining motherly satisfaction. With her younger two sisters and one little brother, the compassion of feminine motherhood toward them in her early bosom, along with its dialectical masculine opposite of jealousy and competition for earning the greatest love from her parents, blossomed/seeped through her…
Inside her family house, just as outside in the village, she was socialized into having only one wholistic exclusive identity of Islam, that rejects any other divisive identities of nationalities, races, or ethnicities – they were only one as Muslims, following the only true path of Islam, through Allah's words in the Qur'an, delivered by the messenger of Mohammad… following Al-Sirat Al-Mustaqeem (the Straight Path) in life to go back to the heavens of Eden in the eternal after-life…
When she went outside the house to play with other children, inside the borders of the foreign workers' compound, she found herself identified with a place called Egypt (a place she was born in, but never got to know anything about!), while she was playing with other children, identified as either Egyptian, Syrian, Palestinian, Sudanese, Jordanian, Lebanese, or Algerian… But even among all these nationalities, who were speaking varying dialectics of their common Arabic language, a descendant from the ancient Assyrian Middle Eastern language, she found herself to be commonly identified with them as an Arab, when she crossed the borders of the compound to interact with Pakistani, Indian, Central Asian, Afghan, Turkish, Indonesian, Malaysian, and Filipino workers… Though all of these were also commonly identified with her as Muslims…
Although at school, she was taught that Islam – the one single identity they all have – rejects any stratification except those that are based on religion and gender, she grew into confusion while disturbingly facing a complex implicit system of social/ethnic stratification in that place she was growing up in… The Saudis were at the top (with their own tribal-kinship and socio-economic stratification in-between them), below them were the people coming from other Gulf countries (with another nuanced stratification between them too), below them were the people coming from the West (with Americans at the top, of course!), below them were other Arabs (with their own inner stratification, and Levantines placed above North-East Africans), and finally below them were other Asians! This national/ethnic stratification was even more complexified by religion, occupation, and gender. Yet the gender stratification was overwhelming as regards all other identities and stratifications, for as soon as she had to get out of the compound, she found divisions between males and females stringently enforced. As a girl, Collective Mind had to cover her whole body, from head to toe, with complete darkness that would flow all over her like the dark energy flowing through my self-consciousness in her. She, like other girls and women, could not walk in places filled with men, as a woman should either walk with a ‘Mehrem’ (protective relative man) or within a larger group of women, never alone, otherwise the men in white Jalabeeb (men's garment) and with long beards would cut her head off with the punishing sword, because she is causing Fitna, sexually seducing the men of piety and chastity, and causing disorder in society!
The horrifying fear of shame began to also seep in the consciousness of Collective Mind, covering her body, if Mind crossed the fearful border of the compound!
Inside school, treated again as a foreign stranger; this time as an Egyptian amidst Saudis, the horrifying darkness of loneliness kept also growing in Collective Mind, through the dark energy that was expanding my cosmic existence…
While growing up, Collective Mind's relationship with me, was dictated by the old masculine patriarchal worldview of Abrahamic religions. In her Minds' ‘I’, she saw me as a huge genie-like father man lying high above her, above ‘seven heavens’. In her ‘I’, I was another human, there with her all the time, yet an authoritative man above her, who owns the omnipotent power to reward her, punish her, bring her justice, and guide her through all the way to the eternal gardens of Eden… When loneliness begins to overshadow her existence, she makes sense of her way out of it, by talking with me, under the bright colorful lights of her imagination…
To her, I was the ‘Source’ and ‘Destination’ of the ultimate fear and love; the King of all Kings, whom everyone and everything worships…
At this time, of the emerging third Axial Age, of the burning chaos of modernity that is no longer able to adapt to the new material conditions, and the rising human collective consciousness; humans finally created the last communication technology, the ‘global brain of the Internet’ breaking my spacetime limits in the connection between human minds and the inter-change of their thoughts…
One night during her middle school days, Collective Minds connected to the global brain… Her/my revelation path toward self-consciousness accelerated. Her passion to embrace the world with radical change filled her dreams.
Nineteen years ago, Collective Minds returned back with her family to her birth nepantla city of Alexandria, the city once again, connecting two human collective consciousnesses of the past and present. Yet at this spacetime, it is the Egyptian-Middle Eastern-Islamic south that faces complete social deterioration, while the European-Western north is not yet going through that high level of chaos to be ready to create and embrace the new visions of my more complex and emancipated self-consciousness moving back-forward to this nepantla transition spacetime of Axial Age Alexandria, the life of Collective Minds, and the whole world turned into chaos. The West declared a crusade against the Muslim World, and Muslims were massacred in the north (Kosovo, Bosnia and Herzegovina), in the south (Sudan, Somalia, and Yemen), in the east (Kashmir, northern Thailand, Indonesia, southern Philippines, Caucasus, Central Asia), in the west (Niger, Nigeria), in the center (Palestine, Lebanon, Iraq, Afghanistan).
Collective Minds raged, wept, and sank deep into the endless darkness; into the obsessions of her mind; into the abyss of the Juhannam-pit that the ancient books of the male Abrahamic prophets chanted and threatened the world into submission with. But the pain was no fire, it was not the steaming rods of steel that would be dug into your brains if you ever give in to the joy of listening to music; it was not the circle-hangers that dangled the women in pain, from their baby-feeding nipples to purge them from their sexual sins. The pain this time was much worse than the imagination of the Axial-Age human collective consciousness. It was endless repetition and confinement in one single idea, one eternal truth, one colorless shapeless soundless texture-less darkness of eternity. It was the dark feminine energy raging with evil jealousy, with humiliated contempt, with an eternal scream, for those who were bombed, raped, massacred, and left behind to be forsaken and forgotten, so the few survivors could continue on their perpetual growth of power, wealth, and control… It was obsession…
Nevertheless, Collective Minds kept on trying… following the rules of the system, and even obsessing about them, to reach that elusive unrealistic point of ‘perfection’; ‘the Unattainable, the flying Perfect, around which the hands… can never meet, at once the inspirer and the condemner of every success’… (Anzaldua 2015: 12).
As in the film she once watched and loved, ‘The Pursuit of Happiness’, she naively followed the path of ‘Happiness’, but not the path which the innocence of her cosmic mind, the trees, the small sandy hills, her little ‘Happy Feet’ of a human child have took her on, around and below and above, in the adventures of free wilderness… No! She followed the path of ‘Happiness’ that her parents obediently told her, as they were told obediently by their parents, as they were told obediently by their parents, back into generations long buried under the sands of the endless desert… For the ancient books of the ‘wise old men’, of the ‘eternal one truth’, tell us to obediently follow ‘Al-Sirat Al-Mustaqeem’, the only one certain path of success, of persistent growth and joy, in the here and the here-after… See?! The system was all set up for her confinement, and she obediently followed the path… to pursue ‘Happiness’, as everyone around her did…
Her dad somehow was able to tap a little bit into the dark energy of obsessions within her Collective Minds… to find out what was wrong with her; to make up a rational diagnosis of her abnormality, and prepare a pre-examined set of chemical compounds, to re-wire the damaged neural cells in her little brain, and boost the right dose of chemical transmitters in the Grey/Dark matter of her minds… to fix the problem, just like the medical system of professional practitioners instructed him to do, by giving seven whole years of his life to confinement of the majestic halls of the rational-scientific school of medicine: to bring human bodies/brains to perfection, to continue on ‘functioning’ on the perpetual path of human socio-economic growth, to reach that never-quite-touchable/perceivable point of naïve ‘Happiness’!
However, because her dad tried hard so innocently and sincerely… with pure ‘virtue’ – as a friend of hers would let her know later, through describing his own papa for her he died, in sacrifice, for her… to continue on the cosmic path of self-revelation-into-full-consciousness…of fully self-identifying her/my cosmic purpose…
Collective Minds also tried to tap, a little bit, into her dad's physical cancerous pain… the cancer that has spread all over his dying shrinking skeleton…
The cancer of my dad, the cancer of my beautiful blue planet Earth… the thousands of military bases, tanks, and weapons of mass destruction; the trillions of factories, machines, and power-engines ‘distilling’ the matter/energy ‘resources’ of my countless parts, my Cosmic Beings, each part I have been giving birth to in fourteen billion years, each part is me; the ‘whole’, self-creating me for fourteen billion years, so that the few surviving humans could rip It off me, rip me off myself, to be packaged in endless rows of merchandise; one package of corpse after a trillion others; a child in Iraq, a woman in Egypt, an animal in America, and a plant in China; distilling me, every part of me, into exchange rates, Wall Street stocks, and perhaps bit-coins in the near future… So that ‘progress’, the survival and joy of the fittest, the most worthy, the most powerful and wealthy, could continue on forever… and not to worry, for we will create another technology to get rid of the ugly cancerous parts, to keep the skeleton moving towards that dark-pit of progress… We will even create artificial intelligence, to get rid of the skeleton itself, so that what remains of our consciousness will keep moving towards that dark-pit of perpetual endless progress… until I/you/we finally realize in a deathly moment of utter shock, finally, that ‘nothing’ remains behind us, ‘nothing’ is ahead … and we have become ‘nothing’…
Because, in the end, I will discover, in utter horror, that I was only tearing my own parts away from myself… tearing myself away from myself… ‘growing/destructing’ into ‘nothingness’…
But Collective Minds failed to share the pain of cancer with her dad; the physical pain of all of those left behind, all of the ‘Forsaken’… and she only got the mental pain of self-realization to share… all the accumulated dark energy, that is growing up with the Forsaken, and expanding…into eternal ‘growth’ of darkness…
Her dad was buried in Egypt, not under the tombs of the few Pharaonic powerful, not beneath the Pyramids of hierarchical egoistic power, not even in the scary mountains of Sinai, through which the ‘chosen few’ attempted to escape the ‘known’ river of survival, with its eternally growing/destructing powers of darkness, into the ‘unknown’ freedom… Her papa was buried near Alexandria, between the shores of the Mediterranean Sea and the deserts of the south… He loved the sea, the open horizon of blue hope, with its refreshing waves crashing over the rocks he played on, and washing away his pain of longing…. longing for freedom, into the ‘uncertainty’ of the endless Sea, once and for all…
And he felt the pain once, and shared it with Collective Minds… when the boat of young men from Egypt, longing for freedom like him, sunk into the Sea… They plunged into the uncertainty of hope and freedom… into the north… like those early humans millions of years ago, risking-migrating-evolving from east Africa to the north; their ancestors continuing on the path, into the uncertain north, through their bodies… only to sink into the endless blue seas, just as their ancestors were buried under the endless brown deserts… longing for freedom…
Her mum tried to help Collective Minds too… not through science like her dad, but through religion… Science was not good enough, so she chose to take a step backward… Maybe Allah, the Al-Knowing, Al-Mighty, Al-Everything has given us the easy answer, the ‘one certain truth’, with which all dilemmas, all confusions, all pains have their ‘ultimate solution’… the single truth through which everything is solved, everything is perfect, everything makes sense… in the eternal Book of rules, orders, and ancient wisdom… The words of Allah Himself Al-Jabarout (the Despot), would heal the darkness within Collective Minds. The obsessions, the ‘Weswas’ of Al-Shaitan (Satan) Himself could only be healed by ‘endlessly repeating’ the dialectically opposite words of Allah… But is not the very act of ‘endlessly repeating’ the words obsession itself?! And what if Al-Shaitan Himself is Allah Himself, endlessly obsessing in my mind?! After all, are not they both Al-Jabarout, Al-Mighty, endlessly competing for eternal power, for the throne of Al-Malakout (the Kingdom of Existence), that peaky-point of ultimately rising into the end of hierarchy, the top of the pyramid, the rising/diminishing growth/destruction point high above in the endless darkness of the desert night sky… where He will finally find that He is only One, the Lord of only Himself, in His ultimate point of self-consciousness that has finally reached Its peak of growth, power, and controlling mightiness, only to find that Its/His whole body, the whole pyramid, and the layers of Earthly deserts below it, and even below that, into the fearsome voidness of spacetime; are layers upon layers upon layers of what He sacrificed for His Ultimate Power, Intelligence, and Control… He sacrificed His Other-Herself-the Whole… the dark veiled energy that was expanding His own growth with Her own sacrifice… that was giving Him joy with Her pain… that was screaming to release His self-consciousness through Her body/mind/soul, through Her whole cosmic process… for Him to finally realize the cosmic purpose of the Whole… through Her sacrifice…
In the spacetime of Egypt in Northeast of Africa 12 years ago, after 5,000 years of first building the pyramids of hierarchy, the masses erupted in a revolution, by the force of this last communication technology of the Internet. Collective Minds were shaken into chaos once again. But this time, the chaos disrupted the bases of what the system – state, society, and family – educated her brains with and shaped her Being into… the ‘Collective Action of Beings’ shook her Collective Minds, and turned the pyramids of hierarchy glorified in her education into debris, and the books of truth sanctified in her upbringing into ashes, and the norms of material and social exchange edified in her behavior into absurdity… Changing material conditions and communication shook my human masses into collective action, and collective action shook my Collective Minds into thinking…
Ten years ago, in the same year the revolting human masses in Egypt were crushed down by the military and buried in their graves again. Collective Minds got a chance to run away from Egypt for a little while… from the Suez Canal, that was dug with the blood of over a million corpses (to connect the Red Sea and the Pacific Ocean to the Mediterranean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean), into the Mediterranean Sea to the shores of Greece and Italy… taken away by the boat of Peace holding a thousand Japanese, two Hibakusha, and one Chinese man… She got a glimpse of that moment when humans annihilated my spacetime in that one eternal moment, ending my existence in uncountable Beings… for power, honor, success… following the orders, the system, the path of their education… And like that Japanese woman told her, have not we saved a larger number by giving up this ‘part’?! Perhaps, the larger number we have saved is calculable as surviving and re-producing 14 billion zombie-productive generations of humans, of machine cogs, that are needed to perfect the technology of growth! This ‘part’ that you have given up; this eternal moment of my uncalculated uncountable me that has evolved for you, for 14 billion years of your calculable spacetime!
Have not you/me yet realized that all these ‘parts’ of me/you, are the dark feminine energy of eternal pain and sacrifice that is expanding with an accelerating rate of your calculus, with an uncalculated intensity of self-becoming, into your calculable partial surviving growth, that is seeking life's perfection, and into my incalculable whole dying, forgotten, forsaken pain, that is seeking death's imperfection? This dark energy that is estimated (only presently in your spacetime) as 73 % of your/my calculable cosmic body… Is this the majority or the minority, or maybe something in between, the inevitably given-up ‘part’ for the survival of the ‘part’?! Has not your science educated you that no ‘calculable energy’ perishes away?! It is my/your dying soul, childhood, innocence, and virtue … the screams of pain, the moments of injustice, the death of my part for the life of your part; the life giving up my childish love, beauty, innocence, and imagination, for your rational power, calculable growth, machinery perfection, and world conquer… I am the forsaken dark energy you cannot yet hack with your calculus! It is you and me, dying as a ‘whole’ for the lifeless survival of the ‘part’!
Collective Minds, in this spacetime reaching the city of Naples over the Mediterranean Sea across from where she was born, lost all the calculable rationality and constructed reason that the rusty efficiently-productive machine of the never-quite-perfect-yet human society had indoctrinated in the white blank pages of the brains I have evolved into her… And the exhaust-black-metal of the ink of information and instructions, connected, blended, and finally filled the pages of her brain with eternal black voidness…
Collective Minds returned to Egypt, to be reburied under the pyramids, along with the masses, who had attempted once more to absorb into their dying Earth one breath of freedom, only to give in again to the dark stillness of death…
At one spacetime, seven years ago, Collective Minds was crossing the borders between the system's university of calculative-social education and the slum area where she continued dying; where the remnants of Beings continue on surviving to die, and grow into the machine-system… crossing the under-ground bridge between education to survive, and surviving to die. And she glimpsed him in this one eternal moment, with the brown eyes I evolved into her.
A young man, with the differentiated features of this Earthly spacetime, dark skin and eternally black wavy hair… covering his mammal body with the fabricated culture of humans in the early 21st century; clean black trousers, and clean purple shirt. He was handing out advertisements for private tuition classes, held in an ‘entrepreneurial’ office, in a rusty dark building amidst the endless above-ground rows of rusty dark buildings housing humans to die before they move on to the endless underground rows of rusty dark graves, when their share of above-ground oxygen ends…
The advertisements offered computer and English language courses… See?! Computer and English will make you ‘marketable’, will make your ‘Linked-In’ profile neatly-polished for the CEO's of the business skyscrapers and bureaucratic governments… You will get a paper certifying your expertise in calculable technology and the cultural language of modern multinational corporations, emanating from the West and following up from the East… Why not also add it with an MBA, all-in-one packet with 14-day free trial?! After all, the competition of ‘human resources’ is rising with ruthlessness, as ‘nature resources’ have been done away with!
Some other classes advertised provided this young rising generation of businessmen and bureaucrats with the clues to cracking the exam papers of Thanawiyyah ‘Ammah’ (the final Egyptian high school exam). For this is the exam that state-society-family has determined for the children to prove that they have memorized enough, conformed enough, and erased enough of their innocence, to get a prestigious clog position in the machine, perhaps as equal or a little bit higher in the pyramid than their fathers and grandfathers… for as you know, the pyramid has to rise in perpetual growth of production!
This young man… one in a million countable others, surviving through advertising survival in the streets, handing out the flyers, for endless hours of linear time under the burning Egyptian sun of Al-Juhannam, with the dark suffocating exhaust of the passing million cars, seeping through his ending share of oxygen… Is he one of a million, or a million in one? At that moment of a glimpse I looked into his dark eyes; the darkness of this eternal moment of pain… his young dark eyes encircled with red layers of exhausted dying skin, dampened with the sweat of his body cells functioning through him, to keep on running the system's machine of production … But the dark eternity of his eyes revealed all the nonsensical pain of this surviving-growing universe…
Collective Minds did not stop by to communicate, to share and contemplate… She moved along, for she is surviving within the system, too! She needed an education certificate to earn her clog position within the machine…!
‘Though I sense a latent whirlwind of energy, I also sense a timeless stillness – patiently waiting to explode into activity’ (Anzaldua 2015: 49). What is this beginning/ending point of explosion into existence/non-existence?! Is this Big Bang, the Great Flaring Forth, the point where my known/unknown border of present self-consciousness lies?
My cosmic spacetime exploded into expansion 14 billion years ago, and five billion years ago, through my dark unknown mysterious feminine energy, I began to expand faster (Spier 2015: 77), right at the very spacetime in which my special Sun, with its nine planets and beautiful blue Earth, gave birth to me again inside my Milky Way Galaxy! Faster and faster, into more complexity, intensity, dis-embeddedness, self-consciousness… from 12 billion years of re-birth into huge galaxies with a power density of 1 in 100 thousand; to 10 billion years of rebirth into brilliant stars with a power density of 2 in 10 thousand; to 5 billion years of rebirth into deserted planets, and my beautiful Earth, with a power density of 8 in a thousand; to three billion years of rebirth into the lively cells and colorful plants covering my Earth, with a power density of 9 out of 100; to ten million years of rebirth into the multifarious bodies of flying, running, and crawling animals of two power density; to one million years of re-birthing into your human brain of 15 power density; to ten thousand years re-birthing into your cultures, technology, and civilizations of 50 power density (Spier 2015: 57) … to what?!
What is the beginning/ending point? Is it an eternal single moment of birth/death? Of ecstatic love, with the ultimate pain/beauty of finally reaching the point of my full self-consciousness, only to forget it all again, and explode/die/birth again, into billions of years of revelation toward that ultimate point of self-consciousness? Again and again and again…. for eternity?!
In this paper I have self-described my cosmic self-consciousness, because this is what I have found myself to reveal into, in this present spacetime, and I am still continuing on my story… It is like what Marge Piercy has said,
After all, memory changes. Our pasts constantly change… Remembering is like one of those old-fashioned black-and-white-tile floors: wherever I stand or sit, the tiles converge upon me. So, our pasts always seem to lead us directly to our present choices. We turn and make a pattern of the chaos of our lives so that we belong exactly where we are. Everything is a prefiguring of our current loves and antipathies, work and faith. We compose a future that leads from where we believe we are at the moment. When the present changes, past and future change significantly with it (Piercy 2002: 2).
This is what my past-present-future identity has self-written in this paper… Moreover, strangely enough, even my self-writing has developed because of another radical event that happened in my life right during the writing of this paper! The very event that has shackled my body, preventing it from going to the last class to give my long-sought-after presentation of myself to others! But my mind was not shackled, rather, with the severe ruthlessness of the imprisonment of my body, my mind exploded with more imaginative freedom to balance with the rage of body limitation. It is still hard for me to share the story of this event, just as many other stories of my life's events because the fear of shame still covers my existence… But the very intensity of this chaotic event has somehow expressed itself through my words as I continued on writing this paper… And as I continue on self-revealing, my consciousness will continue on sharing…
I decided to tell my story through the fractal holons of what had become into my Being… This is why, in the beginning of the paper, I share my story of the Big Bang, the star that gives me my energy, the Earth and cells that give me my body, and the early ape-humans that give me my brain, and then the city of my birth, Alexandria, and how it has connected between the various Axial Ages of human societal evolution, just as it is right now at the time I am born in it!
I do not mention all the important events of my life, because there are so many. But I choose to weave between my earlier cosmic origins, some successive events of my life, and some self-reflections, because I prefer to fit into the major events of the cosmos, as well as the contemplations of my consciousness, rather than to confine myself to a detailed description of the events of my life. I also prefer to tell my life story as a second person (the Universe – although I truly believe that the Universe and everyone in it is One!), to emphasize that I am just one single Cosmic Being, and that there are also so many other stories of Cosmic Beings to tell – each story being the story of the Whole Universe, in one unique color-shade of its cosmos.
References
Anzaldua G. 2015. Light in the Dark / Luz En Lo Oscuro: Rewriting Identity, Spirituality, Reality. Duke University Press.
Baskin K., and Bondarenko D. 2014. The Axial Ages of World History: Lessons for the 21st Century. Emergent Publications.
Piercy M. 2002. Sleeping with Cats: A Memoir. HarperCollins Publisher.
Reimer M., Mackie A., and Rowlatt M. 2023. Alexandria. Encyclopaedia Britannica. URL: https://www.britannica.com/place/Alexandria-Egypt. Date accessed: 26.10.2023.
Spier F. 2015. Big History and the Future of Humanity. Wiley Blackwell.
Wilber K. 2017. The Religion of Tomorrow: A Vision for the Future of the Great Traditions – More Inclusive, More Comprehensive, More Complete. Shambhala.
[1] Adapted from a quote by Marge Piercy: ‘I am a woman with my mother inside, inside her my grandmother, her mother, reaching beyond memory, all of us making the same ritual gesture…’ (Piercy 2002: 11).
[2] See URL: https://www.history.com/topics/ancient-history/alexander-the-great; URL: https://www.ancient.eu/image/130/map-of-alexander-the-greats-conquests/.
[3] The Nahuatl word that Gloria Anzaldua uses, meaning ‘in-between space’, of liminality, change, and transition.