TRANSCENDING THE ANIMAL EXCERPT…

“We are not concerned with maintaining the momentum of life as we have come to know it. To live lost, to live without life. We are interested in the nature of reality itself, the mechanics that underpin that construct, and the potential liberation from all such relational impositions bred into the animal and built up upon the Earth, deforming and depressing its spirit. This work seeks to expose the actively latent nature of this peculiar animal inwardness, delivered upon each through the increasingly mechanized acculturation process. A nature that must be fully understood, and rendered absolutely impotent, before the underlying mechanics of the animal may be revealed. The very mechanics that must be fully exorcised, before we can approach the sacred ground of the actual. Have you begun to appreciate the terrain we dare walk upon? For all of human history, no matter which thread you tug at, has been enmeshed in the continuity of animal inwardness, and we are speaking of its irrevocable end. Its absolute absence. To completely uproot the infiltrated constituents of consciousness, the source of incoherence, itself. Allow me to voice the repercussions of such a revolution outright: the result of walking through this door, of walking upon this most virgin landscape, will be the trans-conscious speciation of the human lineage. Not by choice, a hallmark of acculturation and insufficiency, but through consequence. The consequence of opening the floodgates of our world to this endless movement of life, indivisible.”

(the following is an excerpt from the beginning of the book…)

We Are Animals 

It is easy to overlook the fact that we are animals, given how terrifically advanced our societies have become. That we are of ape ancestry, a subset of primate, does not seem to inform our conscious awareness at all. Mammals, we are. Mammals, as you may already know, constitute a diverse range of animal defined by being warm-blooded, with a backbone and hair, who feed their young with milk. That is us. We may now feed our young with formula and have far less hair, but we remain mammals, one of several surviving primates, of ancient ape ancestry. Again, difficult for us to conceive of, when reflecting upon ourselves, given how drastically divergent our evolutionary path has been. In fact, the human-animal stands so far astray from the rest of life that it is hard to fathom how such distance arose in the first place. Look at it this way: while it remains fair to say that all animals are born directly into the naked bosom of the Earth, such a fate no longer awaits us, the animal we call homo-sapiens. The human-being.

Each of us is born, not into the naked bosom of the Earth, but rather, into a self-domesticated world, far from the reach of that naked bosom. Born into a purely, and proudly, human-centered existence. For we have become the preeminently cultured animal. Cultured in a peculiarly insular manner that has entirely transformed who we were yesterday, evolutionarily speaking, into the worldly creature we are today. This world we inhabit may appear, even feel, drastically different, depending on where one calls home, but the fact remains that we are, every one of us, born into such a world. Have all, every one of us, become such a creature.

A creature that engenders a world of meaning, painstakingly built, and ever-maintained, by the countless hands and minds that have come before us. Of course, from our present point of view, what we have just described is but an enduring testament to that which, within the pages of this work, I have come to refer to as the wrong turn. The very turn that, in time, gave rise to the human being. That gave rise to our sense of humanity, our shared purpose. Our ever-narrowing destiny. The very turn that opened the gates for the insatiable appetite, forever stirring deep within, to rise, and move through. To rise and meet an utterly novel landscape. A landscape it will make its home.

The Animal

Today, one could easily describe the world they inhabit as a haphazardly construed psychological milieu. A world one forever finds themselves attempting to successfully navigate. A world, of consequences. For each of us are, in fact, moving through a substance which is attracted, in a most peculiar manner, to our very motion. An attractive force, which instantiates within each of us, as our increasingly disparate world-view, sense of being, and belonging. In other words, the milieu becomes you. Of course, the infant is unaware of being born into such a substantive landscape. The infant enters the world simply, as any mammal would: helpless, vulnerable and utterly dependent upon its mother. A mother who, in turn, is wholly reliant upon the greater environmental set and setting surrounding her. So it is fair to say that the arrival of the infant sets in motion a phase shift of a truly monumental scope.

Which is to say, the world the infant has been delivered into is quite different than the world of its inception, that of the womb. From its first gasping breath, this realm of incalculable compulsions demands the infant engage with its continuous bluster. Which the infant most assuredly does. Hour after hour, day after day, like clockwork, the uninterrupted entrainment of infant and environment unfolds. As this relentless feedback intensifies, we find age-old, biologically resonant tendencies, required for survival, begin to emerge. For the infant’s brain is feverishly taking shape, making contact, coming on-line, in order to effortlessly confront and sync-up with this most fluid and dynamic of motions. A world it increasingly finds itself an inseparable aspect of. We are, of course, quickly glossing over what is, in fact, a long, drawn-out process of establishing what we may refer to as an effectively persistent form of embodiment. In other words, the brain is, in essence, learning to mirror the world it finds itself inextricably bound to, so that it may, in turn, seamlessly reflect itself, with the utmost efficiency, into that world.

To be of that world, so astutely, so as to navigate, understand, survive, and thrive. This world, however, is not even remotely similar to the ancestral landscape the animals of our lineage navigated so long ago. Our instincts may be remarkably similar, but the world in which our instincts are now entrained is nothing like the environment of the primates, great apes, or any other animals of the Earth. For the creature we now are, locked within this world of ours, is no longer an animal of the Earth.

The Earth And The Animal

As we are told, or possibly intuit, millions of years ago, the animals we are today were not walking the Earth. In fact, we were not walking at all; residing instead, above the ground, in the trees as great apes. For such is the congruence of life. Born upon the Earth, in the bosom of the Earth, we were of the Earth, pure and simple. Shapes of the Earth. Animated shapes of form and function. Going back much further still, there comes a point where only single-celled bacteria were living upon the Earth. They too, were our very distant ancestors, and they too, were of the Earth. For such is the congruence of life. Life sprang from the Earth; the Earth suffered life into existence, made up, as it were, by the universal elements of Earth itself.

What we are drawing our attention to is the fact that the Earth is of a bifurcated nature. It is both the metals, minerals, and liquids that constitute its rocky form, elementally rich atmosphere, and water-filled trenches, as well as being all the life-forms instantiated upon and within it. In other words, when we refer to the Earth, throughout this book, we are referring to this dual nature, that of being both the planet and the life upon it. In fact, there is no way to separate the constituent elements of the planet from the life-forms that emerged from them, for they are of the same process. Which means, a great ape, millions of years ago, giving birth to an infant ape, is delivering a functional form of the Earth into the bosom of that very same Earth, where it will grow, develop, and procreate before passing away. All the while, this functional form of the Earth, living within the bosom of the Earth, will be consuming the Earth, for such is the relation of body to bosom.

Until, like we said, the body passes away, returning, as it were, the elemental form of the Earth it was, back to the bosom of the Earth it is. For everything, eventually, is consumed. One may, at first glance, suggest such a view is nothing more than some romantic assertion. However, if you consider the actual qualities underlying the nature of this living Earth, such as bifurcation and congruence, you will find yourself tugging upon the golden thread running through planet and life-form. Forms come and go, but the universal movement, as function, remains. Of course, the animal we are today does not reflect this truth in their actions, nor consciousness, but that ignorance is due to an entirely different phenomenon.

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