Natural Planning

For the past several years I've been haunted by the idea that agriculture is humanity's original sin. It's quite possible that "Eden" was the Pleistocene world and the world of man, the Holocene, is really a sort of self-made hell. The attempt to escape the cycles of nature and natural systems that make life possible is maybe fundamentally flawed and futile.

If you leave a plot of land alone, it will move to a equilibrium condition that converts as much sunlight as possible to life. If you reformat that land into a garden or a farm, and eliminate most plants and animals from it, only a fraction of the sunlight that falls on it will be converted to life. In fact, you'll have to expend energy by weeding, tilling, or covering the ground to keep the land in a state of disequilibrium.

Farming, though, accomplishes a number of key things: it makes the harvest relatively predictable and labor/time efficient; and it becomes easier to build and use infrastructure near the land that's being worked so harvested food can be processed and stored. That's really the basis for our whole civilization: storing seeds or grain in a jar, or storing hay in a barn. "Wealth" was the province of the god Pluto--the king of the underworld, that is the winter and the dead, that is the stored life.

The dead world, the system world is conjured into existence and animated by men, but it has its own independent existence. It's a sort of parasite that's attached to the living world. It's a god or a demon. It is worshiped and served by some, and fed by many.

It's the eye on the top of the pyramid of the dollar bill; note how the capstone is not attached to the rest of the pyramid. It's basically in a different dimension or plane of existence. I think what's also depicted in that image is their god communicates to this world through the mind's eye and imposes its order through a harsh system. The pyramid is shaped stones piled up in a desert.

The system beast eventually becomes all consuming. We're at that point, today. The transhumanists want to go beyond that point; they are really trans-naturists. Their belief is a 100% engineered and controlled world is possible and desirable. That world is all underworld. It is illuminated by a Death Star.

If you pivot the view of the world 180 degrees and see systematic predictability as alien and draining and become life oriented rather than death oriented, the basis for agricultural planning and labor is so different that it's barely comprehensible. It's an attempt to build the mental wherewithal to participate in the complexity of nature, rather than the dull stupidity of death technology world (see Elf Tech).

The first picture in this post is an exemplification of natural planning--really there was no plan at all. The garlic grew accidentally amid the cover crops. It's the largest bulb by far of those I harvested this year, and it was also the most harmonious, peaceful, least weedy and beautiful corner of the garden so far.

There's something fatally flawed with the "plan to harvest" version of gardening--the death oriented version. The life oriented version requires plugging into a different mind's eye.