Basic needs

A good quote from Sex at Dawn on page 103, but it's actually from William and Jean Crocker from one of their publications, discussing the Canela people of the Brazilian Amazon region:

"Sharing possessions brought esteem. Sharing one's body was a direct corollary. Desiring control over one's good and self was a form of stinginess. In this context, it is easy to understand why women chose to please men and why men chose to please women who expressed strong sexual needs. No one was so self-important that satisfying a fellow tribesman was less gratifying than personal gain." (emphasis theirs)

So here we see that there is a direct link between our culture's attitudes about sex and our inability to stop fighting with each other. Specifically, we fight because of a perceived lack of possessions. This is because we've made sex into a hoarded and rare resource. There is enough sex out there for everyone, but our society is structured so that we think we don't have enough.

We fear uncertain paternity- when, in fact, such a thing could be our greatest boon. Many of these older cultures see paternity as communal, and to have another man with a stake in the raising of your children is a positive concept that maintains and strengthens community bonds. Ryan and Jetha even mention a quote explaining homosexuality by E.O. Wilson on page 104, "all above a form of bonding... consistent with the greater part of heterosexual behavior as a device that cements relationship."

Now that is even more evidence for my personal folder of evidence against the Judeo-Islamo-Christian worldview. I've known for years that system of thought begets violence, and I've known it had something to do with seeing things linear as opposed to circular. One part of that is to assume we are different from each other, and should only be joined in controlled circumstances. Homosexuality doesn't fit in those controlled circumstances, even if it poses no physical threat to said control. Their worldview seems to be based on the exact opposite of truth and what makes us happy. Now I can understand why some people think that worldview was designed by nefarious intelligences to undermine our nature, it almost seems to be inflicted upon us. But maybe any other worldview equally based on untruth would have similar characteristics.

Kicked into the Garden

That's a point I like from Jetha and Ryan. In essence, the garden is an ordered place where weeds are killed and only the prettiest and only the most desirable plants grow in neat rows. So it makes more sense to say that Adam and Eve were kicked into the garden, where "the curse suffered by Adam and Eve centers around the exchange of the arguable low-stress, high-pleasure life of foragers (or bonobos) for the dawn-to-dusk toil of a farmer in his garden" (page 82).

As sex became shameful and food became something that must be worked for, I'm seeing that the standard food, water and shelter argument as the basic human needs actually could be fixed a little. It seems what we really need are food and sex. Water comes naturally, shelter grows on trees. We've been domesticated by our own designed society, "agriculture, one might say, has involved the domestication of the human being as much as of any plant or other animal" (page 83).

We've been told that this move to agriculture is best for the common good, but it's also the worst for the individual. We've got these behemoth manifested gestalt phenomena, from religious groups to corporations, that don't benefit the human but are sustained by it though misinformation and simply taking advantage of people who don't or can't understand.

One thing I've been thinking on recently is the an idea of Gerald O'Donnell's in which he mentions that the earth has a specific shape that is in resonance with the grand vibration of the universe. Every plant, puddle and rock is placed somewhere specific to raise the vibration of the earth to higher planes. So when we human clear a spot and plant monoculture, it's like sticking some gum on a cymbal- it messes up the whole vibration. The earth is self-directing and self-healing, though, so weeds inevitably sprout in all monocultures as the earth's vibration starts to overcome the dissonant spots.

This is relatable to our suppression of the human's natural state. Our bodies have the highest frequencies when they are tuned to certain resonant states. These states not only involve physical structure, but also the mental and emotional. So betraying our base needs is not unlike monoculture, the weeds will always grow because it's well beyond our abilities to suppress them.

Scientific Community, indeed

As I continue to read Sex at Dawn, I'm not having trouble with the main crux of the argument- that the idea of humans as naturally monogamous and naturally aggressive is simply incorrect. It makes a lot of sense to me. What's interesting is that they are also targeting the research that led to this erroneous point of view in the first place. One specific misguided set of conclusions is the human's relation to chimps and bonobos.

Bonobos are know for being sexually liberal. They have sex frequently and not for reproductive reasons, often for mood enhancement and other social reasons. Chimps, on the other hand, have sex primarily for reproduction. Here's an interesting table from page 77 of Sex at Dawn:

-Human and bonobo females copulate throughout the menstrual cycle, as well as during lactation and pregnancy. Female chimps are sexually active only 25% to 40% of their cycle.
-Human and bonobo infants develop much more slowly than chimpanzees, beginning to play with others at about 1.5 years, much later than chimps.
-Like humans, female bonobos return to the group immediately after giving birth and copulate within months. They exhibit little fear of infanticide, which has never been observed in bonobos- captive or free-living.
-Bonobos and humans enjoy many different copulatory positions, with ventral-ventral (missionary position) appearing to be preferred by bonobo females and rear-entry by males, while chimps prefer rear-entry almost exclusively.
-Bonobos and humans often gaze into each other's eyes when copulating and kiss each other deeply. Chimps do neither.
-The vulva is located between the legs and oriented toward the front of the body in humans and bonobos, rather than oriented toward the rear as in chimps and other primates.
-Food sharing is highly associated with sexual activity in humans and bonobos, only moderately so in chimps.
-Genital-genital (G-G) rubbing between female bonobos appears to affirm female bonding, is present in all bonobo populations studied (wild and captive), and is completely absent in chimpanzees. Human data on G-G rubbing are presently unavailable.
-While sexual activity in chimps and other primates appears to be primarily reproductive, bonobos and humans utilize sexuality for social purposes (tension reduction, bonding, conflict resolution, entertainment, etc.).

What I've been taking away from this is the standard model's desire to maintain that humans have a chimp-like mindset. It seems that we act like chimps because we've been denying that we are supposed to live like bonobos. Ryan and Jetha mention earlier in the above quote chapter that upon encountering another group at a territorial boundary, bonobos engage in sex to alleviate tension.

This reminds me of Nisa by Marjorie Shostak, in which a stunning portrayal of an African forager society is given. In their culture, sexuality is introduced at an early age and there is little that is taboo about it save for violent sexual acts. Small children practice sex with each other before maturity. I have often wondered if this portrayal is more accurate than the puritanical monogamy we claim to have here in America that we don't actually follow.

Our modern society seems to be based on creating unnecessary needs - and it all began with the need to preserve food stocks due to a sedentary lifestyle followed by the need to control the woman's reproductive abilities. Now we have a backwards idea of what makes us happy. One of the things that makes for a happy human is women having complete sexual freedom. Denying women their sexual freedom is close to impossible, for one, because they have prominent breasts at all times (unlike ANY OTHER MAMMAL), lack any external cues as to when they are ovulating, and exhibit noises during intercourse that are unique and impossible for any other human to ignore. To assume that women don't like sex and that their bodies should be controlled by a monogamous male simply invites relationship disaster, as we can see in all societies that identify themselves as monogamous.

Women try to hide their sexual nature or become ashamed of overtly expressing their sexuality or even appearing sexual- think of all the different approaches American women have to bearing or covering their cleavage. And then think of their response should they find a male looking at their cleavage! The amount of breast shown and the amount of offense taken are usually independent of each other. Then there's the dreaded female areola- if males are meant to control sex, the female's bare breast has a strange and incongruent potency over the male.

Trying to assume paternity leads to fighting when the male has no idea if he had sex with his chosen mate when she was fertile and he is investing all of his time raising one female's offspring. We should be raising kids as a village, where paternity doesn't matter. Our reproductive developments make it almost impossible without sophisticated genetic technology to determine fatherhood. If we didn't have the need to confirm paternity, we wouldn't feel the need to control our women. And if half the population is under control, the whole population feels the effects.

Most fascinating- we won't have assumed for 100s of years that women didn't experience orgasmic pleasure when prostitutes/ porn stars are trained to simulate that exact thing. It seems that much of the literature that has been published around human sexuality has this Victorian bend where to admit that having a liberal view of sex is to invite sin. Sin in this case not being restricted to going to Christian hell, but also including disease, single parenthood, orphans, and, this is the big one- that if women gave it away for free, they would have no bargaining chips for resources and would fall to the bottom of society (or even further to the bottom).

Of course, in primate societies the opposite is observed, liberal sexuality is correlated with a matriarchal society. The females don't have an aggressive-must-defend type of hierarchy, rather the oldest females simply have more influence. So liberal sex attitudes lead away from war and toward matriarchy.

Conversely, in our societies where women have the least sexual freedom- in Muslim and many Christian societies, for example- we also see the most warmongering. Women in these cultures are desexualized as much as possible- the ostensible reason being that if the women we to be sexual "on the street" so to speak, they would be inviting male attention and thus compromising the monogamous bond they share with their mate at home. This appears to make for a miserable time for everyone, the women don't have freedom to do much of anything and the men have to view porn, visit prostitutes or at least masturbate while fantasizing about other women to be satisfied. True, this seems to work out for the males okay, but factoring in the fact that they could be having all the sex they wanted while not being at war pales in comparison to what's going on now.

What's fascinating to me is how blatantly obvious this all is to the modern human, and yet how the scientific community continues to disagree. To say humans would be happier having more sex with each other is just a wrong thing to say. It's treated as if some research proves that humans would be happier if they killed more humans. Researchers wouldn't believe it and wouldn't publish it. Somehow sex has gotten to be just as bad as violence in modern society and to suggest it's healthy somehow seems wrong to most of the traditionalists out there, and most humans are traditionalists.

Next book: Sex At Dawn

The whole purpose of this blog, here is to generate some thought experiments that I can put to use in stories that I write. I'm done with Schwartz, for now, the end of his book dissolved into speculation, some of which has been disproved since the book was published 10 years ago.

So I just started "Sex at Dawn" by Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethé. Basically it's a discussion of how our cultural sexual imperatives are fundamentally at odds with our biological sexual imperatives, and this leads to some serious frustrations, and in many cases out-and-out war.

From page 14, comparing our cultural set-up since the advent of agriculture: "Land could now be possessed, owned, and passed down the generations. Food that had been hunted and gathered now how to be sowed, tended, harvested, stored, defended, bought and sold. Fences, walls, and irrigation systems had to be built and reinforced; armies to defend it all had to be raised, fed and controlled. Because of private property, for the first time in the history of our species, paternity became a crucial concern." (emphasis theirs)

This is a thought-provoking point of view. This most recent culture that we used to have seemed to be based on the idea of unity within the group. All group members were part of the tribe, and shared everything. To hoard or declare personal property was wrong, wrong, wrong, and perhaps unforgivable. Someone who did not consider themselves unified with the tribe was a negative and dangerous person, who may be completely ostracized.

It's important to note that this is not necessarily where we come from, before that we had more of a harem situation, with one alpha male having dominion over many female sexual partners and male slaves. It is, however, where we currently seem to rest biologically. Despite our recent change to want to believe that personal property, which includes our sexual partners, cannot be taken away from us, it's blatantly obvious that this system doesn't fit. Monogamy is one of the most difficult states to maintain for the human, and even if it is maintained with regard to contact with other sexual partners, it is almost never maintained when we bring pornography into the mix.

Dissolving subsystems

Still working on grokking Schwartz. He hit upon a good point on page 163.

When sugar dissolves in water, it disappears, but is still present. There is a new system that involves sugar-water info-energy. We can apply energy to the system in a form that causes the water to be "pushed out", in this case in the form of radiant infrared heat energy. This procedure causes the water energy to redistribute itself outside of the container and away from the sugar energy. The sugar remains, in its original form, but slightly changed by its experience being entangled with water.

Water seems to be a substance that works well with our current level of energy manipulation, so an experiment like the one above is easy to do and even easier to understand. As a metaphor, however, it seems to suggest that nothing ever dissolves completely. Upon death, for example, our systems extend into the void indefinitely. It's Schwartz's position that we merely need to apply the correct energy to the void and the confounding energies that prevent us from perceiving the energy from dead humans will redistribute "outside of the container" and we could see dead human energy. Sure, it would be changed during its interaction with the void, but it would still be unequivocally the same energy, just like the same sugar crystals result from redistributing the water.

Why you should use your whole Self

Holograms, of course. Directly from page 152 of "The Living Energy Universe" by Gary Schwartz and Linda Russek-
"The systemic memory process requires that we hypothesize that the whole that you 'you' is circulated to each and every cell in your body. Hence, each cell theoretically stores 'you' in it. This is why each cell is like a tiny location in a huge hologram. In holograms, information about the 'holo' is stored everywhere in the 'gram'- the more of the 'gram' you activate, the clearer the 'holo' memory received."

This is one more reason why bodywork is important. As I said when commenting on Conscious Breathing, the human is like a musical instrument that must vibrate according to its unique structure. However, negative energies can stick to portions of your body and prevent proper vibration.

Another way to visually represent this is as a hologram instead of a musical instrument. If our subtle energies are blocked, we manifest less of our Selves in reality. Just like if you painted some black ink on a hologram. The image would still be generated, it would just be dimmer. If enough ink was put on there, the image would be indistinct and the hologram would fail to fulfill its purpose.

The vacuum

I definitely needed some more from Schwartz on the concept of the vacuum. I understood the energy vortexes, but I was still having trouble buying into the concept fully. My visualization process would generate the vortex in my mind's eye, but in the absence of A and B I saw it slowing and merging with the surrounding energy as to become indistinct.

He mentioned an interesting experiment by one Rupert Sheldrake that more or less confirmed this stumbling block. Sheldrake is a proponent of the morphic field. Such a field is constructed of energy that surrounds matter and lends it shape. A morphic field is then strengthened by the matter and a positive feedback loop results. Thus all phenomena have a self-perpetuating implicit character that could be tapped into in order to gather information about the object.

Sheldrake did an experiment where he had an artist draw 4 embedded figures, which is a type of illustration where the shape lines of an object are hidden by other lines in the drawing. Once the object has been shown to the viewer, however, it becomes easy to find it again. So he sent these 4 drawings via post (he's a Brit, no mail over there) to a series of subjects all over the world. He also hosted a television show with one of the drawings where he pointed out the embedded object to the viewers. Then the people who received the drawings in the mail (and had not seen the show) looked at their pictures and reported if they could find the object or not.

According to Sheldrake, if his theory is correct, people trying to find the object in the drawings that were shown on television would be affected by the morphic field and be able to find the objects easier. There was success, with a caveat. The further from Britain that the subjects got, the less likely they were to find the object that has been on TV. So this suggests a locality to the morphic field, and that it does "shine brighter" closer to its generating source.

Then, if we bring in quantum mechanics, we can add in "locality and non-locality" as Schwartz puts it. Quantum mechanics says that a particle can be anywhere at any time, but is more likely to be found at certain locations according to its energy level. So the morphic field, which follows much of the same laws as quantum mechanical wave-particles, can technically be accessed from anywhere and it is the energy level and resonance of the receiver that allows communion. Those folks closer to morphic field are already in a closer resonance and better able to pick it up.

My other issue with his theory is how fields in the vacuum interact with each other and perpetuate even in the absence of the original objects that generated them. I think the logic step there is to know that the fields are reality and what we see as "objects" are manifest from the vacuum, not the other way around.

A to B and back again- the soul

Still reading Schwartz and Russek, and he came to a really good point that took me a sec to pick up on but is really good.

One of the big concepts he mentions is non-material reality. Imagine a two-object system that consists of A and B. A and B transfer energy all day long and are different at time 1 than they are at time 2 due to the nature of their interaction (I'm skipping over part of the main crux of Schwartz's argument by simplifying the interaction like that). When these two objects interact, they do so through the "vacuum"- or the space between them.

Physicists have spent some time pondering exactly what the vacuum is- they currently assume that two objects transfer some sort of force carrier (mesons are the current force-carrying candidate) that moves through the vacuum and delivers information by its unique energetic structures. This doesn't hold for all interactions, of course, it can't be proved yet for gravity because no mathematical model allows for a force-carrying gravity particle. It also can't be proved for objects that are entangled, there's just no equation that allows for "strange action at a distance".

Schwartz takes the interaction for granted- that there is some sort of radiant and energetic information expressed by all objects in reality at all times. To interact with each other, different objects are actually interacting with this radiant info-field. That's not to hard to assume, there are quite a few examples of force-carrying particles that have been predicted and found- photons come to mind.

So if all objects are radiating this info-field, then we are awash in information at all times. We know this to be at least partially true by pointing our primitive telescopes anywhere at all- there is a lot of information out there, and it's constantly bombarding us as a background hum. This info-field is omnidirectional, even though we study the interactions between two objects, the field is actually available to any objects not in the study.

So the fields of objects A and B interact and revise with regard to the flow from A to B and the flow from B to A. Schwartz's point is that the fields can and do continue to exist in the "vacuum" in the absence of A and B. There is only one contiguous vacuum, and it is what allows interaction, and hence all of reality, including A and B, to exist. So, in the absence of the generating power of the fields, a virtual memory still exists of their interaction, a spinning vortex that will be unrecognizable after the generating power stops, but is not gone. This "memory vortex" is free-flowing around in the vacuum, just waiting to be accessed.

My first sticking point here was getting around matter and energy being different. Imagine A and B are two electrodes in a filament and their interaction is manifest as visible light. Turn off the power and there's no more light. Or is there? Everything that light shined on was changed slightly by its energy. If we see the filament as A and surrounding objects as Bs, then the into-field is still in existence and could be accessed with the right equipment.

By the same token, imagine our eyes are A and the brain is B. The two create a memory vortex between them. This vortex is the essence of the interaction, and thus the most important aspect. Logic suggests that in the absence of the eyes, it is still totally possible for the memory vortex to process light and generate neural impulses, for from the perspective of the brain, that's all that ever happened with the eyes, they processed light and generated neural impulses. This is not to say that someone can see without eyes- rather that the eye-brain memory vortex is how visual information gets to the brain. And this vortex is not some mystical thing- it's photons and other measurable phenomena. Hence the idea of out-of-body experiences and clairvoyance- since the brain does not depend on the eyes to see, an interaction with the eye-brain memory vortex is enough to generate neural impulses that the brain then "sees". And since that vortex is in the contiguous vacuum, there are quite a few things indeed that could interact with it.