Nature Brain and Koans

The fundamental problem with civilization is it makes people ever dumber as it converts more and more of the world into a sort of amusement park version of nature. People lose fundamental knowledge, and more importantly, get cut off from natural world feedback.

While the human civilization hierarchy is seen by many as a pyramid, where those on the pinnacle are the freest, highest consciousness, most human people, in fact they're the most abject slaves and the least human and creative. Their lives are spent in gilded cages as servants of their all-consuming insect mind gods.

The rogues gallery of non participants and anarchist weirdos at the periphery of civilization--the frontiersmen, the cave dwelling monk ascetics, the woods walking poets, the shaman are the most human. They're on a quest looking for communion with the real gods.

Let's compare and contrast these "axis mundi" (world axis):

• The Washington Monument (the obelisk in DC)
• Yggdrasil (the world tree)
• The Koan (little poems)

One of the most famous Koans is "what is the sound of one hand clapping?" The koan is paradoxical and knocks the mind of the thinker out of logical and symbolic and lingual thinking. In a sense the koan is alive. It's a life in a different dimension of reality than the mere letters on the page. In a sense, the mind of the person contemplating it gives it life, the same way consciousness gives life and a mind to the matter of the brain.

I think the obelisks in various cities around the world have a similar symbolic meaning. They represent the life of a systemic creation of a state. It's like a spear through the land that joins the creature of the nation to the soil and the  people. The system has its own cyclopean, insectoid mind. Where the koan knocks the mind of the thinker into a creative, novel place, the state is all laws and dogma and lies.

Yggdrasil is like the obelisk, but it ties the earth and humans to an order that transcends the world of man.