As I listen to Dr. Ingold’s youtube video on the social relationships of reindeer, a lot of different thoughts pop into my head randomly.  See, anthropologists are studying human relationships with other humans.  The Abrahamic religions insist that mankind is different from animals, above them on the spiritual hierarchy as the bearers of souls.  Sometimes you have to pick apart some basic assumptions to get a better model of the world, while still understanding that the map is not the territory.

What even is a human?  Why do I ask?  Well, it wasn’t too long ago, that certain medieval Roman Catholic priests were insisting that women did not have souls.  It also wasn’t that long ago that certain people insisted that people without white skin, like, say, Australian aboriginals, or dark African slaves, also were not human.  If they weren’t human, then obviously, they could be bought and sold, treated as property.  These concepts have not left Western Civilization.  How could they?  They permeate the thoughts of the old, the books which they wrote, the laws still on the books, the songs still sung in churches.

At the same time, everything is interconnected.  Who here can claim a relationship with a dog?  Who here can claim to be their cat’s servant?  How did we ever get to the place where it is assumed that humans are separated from the world around them, and only relate to each other?  That is not the case.  I have relationships with the soil which grows my food, the plants I eat, the fruit flies I cultivate on my apple orchard and in my compost, and kill every year in my house during applesauce season.  Humans have many more relationships with non-humans than they do with humans, especially if you count objects.  Do you know anybody who is in a relationship with their car?  Do they treat it better than the humans in their household?

Why is it that humans are held to be separated from their world?  They’re not.  The electricity in my skin passes out of my body and onto the mouse, the keyboard, the floor, and vice versa.  The fungi and bacteria on my skin get replenished from the soil under my fingernails, from the homemade raisins, from the sourdough starter on the kitchen windowsill.  Why would I want to separate myself from the world if gods and spirits are in it?

Ah, so here we come to the crux of the matter.  If a human is mere matter, a mere body, then of course an anthropologist would only study the relationships between this body and that body, because that is all that they can see and measure.  This is the result of a strict materialist worldview, which we know must not be correct.  There is more here than matter.  There is at least dark energy, and parts of atoms which zip across the universe in an instant, first here, and then over there.  Telepathy and precognition exists.  Not reliably, but still there.

If a human, instead, is a spirit, then that becomes a lot more interesting.  It means that spirits can exist without bodies.  It means that spirits can be anchored to a time and place or not, that spirits can inhabit humans, but also animals, and plants, and water, and soil, and rocks, and plastic, and computers, and stories.  Especially stories.  Then, if humans are spirits, we can talk about spirits’ relationships with other spirits.  The old trope about having a relationship with Jesus takes on more meaning, even though obviously Jesus just isn’t all that into me and doesn’t answer my calls.

If a human is much more than a fire monkey, is much more than a meat popsicle, how does that change your worldview?  How does that change the assumptions you make about what you want to do, and what your will is in the present?  If I treat myself as a demon, who can only interact with the material world through the human body I’m possessing, does that mean that I would necessarily take better care of this body than if I identified fully and completely with this flawed vessel which will eventually break down because I’m not a Sith Lord?

I don’t have all the answers, and why would I?  None of the other spirits do either.  Yet relationships of spirit to spirit are still worthwhile, even to tricksters, even to the destructive ones.  Knowing for sure that I am a spirit which does not die at the expiration of this human shaped body changes the foundations of my morality.  I am not a Jew in Egypt, whose entire foundational myth is to kill the firstborn children of the outsiders, to steal all of their resources, and flee in the middle of the night with those resources towards greener pastures like locusts.  Perhaps instead, I am a tree; taking root where I have been planted, and growing towards the light above, as well as the bigger growth towards the darkness below.  A tree which only grows toward the light withers, but a tree which only grows towards the darkness, with the help of the fungi network, can maintain life and sprout decades later still alive.

Now that the Fog of War has well and truly descended upon the global playing field, and the news is lying to us all the time, we can step back, ignore the rabble-rousing, and ask some deeper questions.  What exactly is the United States doing about its population increase?  What is the United States doing to modernize its agriculture in the face of oil imports being cut off and the climate changing?  What is the United States doing to increase the productivity of its work force?  These questions merely beg the question of what Albert Bartlett would have to say about that kind of thinking, for things can not increase indefinitely.

It is interesting to see the kinds of terrorists backed by governments around the world.  There are assassins who go around killing Presidents and microbiologists and the like, because they are told to do so.  There are also corporations who go around killing people with heart disease, cancer, and medical mistake in much larger numbers, and are given immunity from lawsuit by law in some cases when they do so.  There are laws preventing people from receiving effective plant-based medicine, and causing lots of untold deaths via that angle as well.  The food, and soil itself, has been stripped of its vitamins and minerals, with the good food being grown special for the elite class.  We know what the United States is doing about its population increase.  The repeal of Obamacare and lack of access to basic nutrition, housing, medicine, and education are just small pieces of the bigger picture.

The United States is one of the top three oil producers now.  It doesn’t intend to change its agricultural practices of stripping the soil bare of the microorganisms required for soil health any time soon, nor does it intend to stop watering the desert and causing sinkholes.  The other countries will lead the way into restoring their traditional and effective agricultural practices long before the United States manages to do so.

There are less working age people with full-time jobs than there have been for a long time now.  The robots have taken over manufacturing, and are working their way into retail, as well as agriculture.  Inequality of income is also mirrored in inequality of employment.  Productivity is up, but so are the unintended consequences, the casting off of risks onto those who can not bear them.

This is how roads and bridges fall apart while B-21 bombers and fast-breeder reactors that don’t work yet get built.  There are places where, when Empire centralizes, and squeezes its fingers for more star systems to slip through, you can find yourself outside of the grasp of Empire.  These places increase as the grasping hands of the senile and greedy squeeze tighter.  Empire loves to seed excessive violence in these places, in the hopes that they will beg to be back under Empire’s boot heel.  That’s why they’ll infiltrate and fund your local protest group.

Some analysts think that the psychopaths and sociopaths who populate the working groups to steer civilization have no right or wrong, no good people or bad people, only winning the great game in mind.  I’m not so sure, actually, that winning is the goal.  It was the Gnostics who clued me into this.  When God is not a good guy or a bad guy, when utopia does not exist, when perfection does not exist, then we might as well run this place ourselves.  However, running this place ourselves is not the same as winning.

Surviving another day is not the same as being the best, nor should it be.  Those who are at the top know that they don’t know everything.  They are not omniscient.  They are therefore also not omnipotent.  Not even close.  If they’ve been playing the game long enough, they know that they’ll never be these things, and stop trying to win, just as the old Buddhist monk stops trying to be happy.  He simply is, right here in the present, and losing is sometimes better than winning, getting lost is sometimes better than following the well-trod path forever and ever without straying.

Armistice Day isn’t celebrated in the US, but its distant cousin Veterans Day is.  On this day, many people celebrate that two sides to a war finally decided to stop sacrificing millions.  The word “sacrifice” is often used in this context, and it is no wonder.  Moloch is hungry, you know.  If it isn’t Moloch, then perhaps the Tree of Liberty is hungry, thirsting relentlessly for the blood sacrifice to appease itself.  Perhaps it is to be noted that these deities or ideologies requiring periodic blood sacrifice will never stop requiring blood sacrifice.

Oh, I see, you thought war was just about materialistic death and fighting over materialistic “things” such as land, oil, gold, or other resources?  Well, perhaps it was.  Is material reality all there is?  Or is everything illusion and a hologram and nothing is real?  Well, look at that.  That looks like a philosophical false dichotomy to me.  As with all old and deep truths, the answer must be a paradoxical “both.”  The material is all we see, yet the numinous animist spirits are all that is.  Which means that the rocks are alive, because everything material is connected with red threads in the tapestry of spirit.

What then are we to make of declining physical health?  When my body betrays me and refuses to heal, is that because of the physical causes of degeneration and inflammation and infection?  Or is it because of a spiritual problem such as stress and carrying too much worry and feeling too much sadness and hatred and loneliness?  And why would we need to know which one caused the other anyway?  Isn’t the answer “both”?

Untangling monism from dualism is tricky when you’ve got skin in the game.  Obviously, there is a mind-body connection.  A hyperthyroid condition can cause anxiety instead of the other way around.  But a connection between two things, no matter how much overlap there may be between them, does not necessarily mean that they are the identical thing.  Am I my body?  Have I identified with this meat-bag so much that I have forgotten who I am?  Or is there a difference?  Am I more than this body?  Am I a spirit instead merely wearing a body temporarily?  Am I Ik or Oversoul 7, inhabiting all material objects at once yet unaware of myself in others?  What are we to make of telephone telepathy or precognition if the material is all that there is?  What are we to make of being very limited in psychic powers if the spirit and the hologram is all that there is?

Perhaps, then, the War In Heaven is much more than a myth.  If what is bound on Earth is also bound in the heavens, then can peace on Earth cause peace in the Heavens?  Is that what happens when billions of humans get together and all think about one thing?  Perhaps such things are what magic and prayer are about.  The physical affects the spiritual, and the spiritual affects the physical, even though they are not the same thing.  Knowing which one to use is not necessary, because you’re supposed to use both!

It is turning out to be a very expensive medical year.  So far, I’ve been to four different specialists, because one thing led to another.  I have learned a lot about biology on google this year.  My approach to research is not necessarily doctor approved, but I do it anyway.  I take a multi-pronged approach.  I look at the official sites like mayo clinic, I look through the pub med research papers or abstracts that I have access to, I look on the quack sites as well to see what they recommend that is free or very cheap that might work as well as their comments, and I scan through forums to see first-hand accounts of descriptions of conditions that aren’t garbled medical code-speak.

I’m a big picture kind of person.  When a problem is multi-system or multi-factorial, that’s my jam.  I’ll spend hours looking at a problem from a lot of different angles, until I reach the point where I can spend a few hours saying to myself “so that’s why” over and over again.  Condition A leads to Condition B which leads to Condition C and is complicated further by Condition D.  Only Condition B is obvious.  I’m hoping for some testing to see if Conditions A, C, and D are also real, although that isn’t strictly necessary, because the same thing used to treat Condition B is also used to treat Condition A and C.  Condition D, however, that’s another matter.

It’s annual enrollment time.  People are looking at their medical insurance options for next year, and since the new POTUS has changed a few laws, people are finding that their premiums are increasing.  I know one friend who has $6000 in premium payments, and a $7000 high deductible this year.  Next year?  More where that came from.  My family’s medical payments are not as high as that, but still aren’t nice.  Since I’m well over the deductible already, I have economic incentive to actually get this stuff checked out before the end of the calendar year.  So does everybody else, judging by the scheduling delays I’m experiencing.

This is the way the world ends.  Not with a bang, but a whimper.  It is interesting to see how the older doctors cope with, or don’t cope with, technological progress in computing.  These days, most younger doctors document everything they do on the computer quickly and efficiently.  One doctor I saw used paper and pen, a tape recorder, and faxed the referral.  I liked him.  He’s sharp as a tack, and paid close attention to me instead of documentation.  When I brought in my two and a half pages of typed descriptive medical history, he appreciated it.  When it is all written down like that, you can see the patterns better than asking me question after question about everything.  Plus, I communicate better in writing than orally, probably due to Condition D and Condition A, although Condition C might have something to do with it.

As usual, I go into a doctor’s office knowing what I want out of it.  Do I want drugs?  Tests?  A better understanding?  A referral?  Then my legal training gathers the evidence and presents it in a way that hopefully gets me what I want.  Sometimes, however, the 70 year old doctor sees things that I didn’t notice.  Google research gets you a long way, but not necessarily all the way to where you need to go.  Sometimes you need an experienced outsider’s viewpoint to see more clearly.  I never would have considered Condition D on my own.  Even the best researcher needs a colleague or mentor to banter with in order to think through a problem better.  This, by the way, is why people talk to deities and spirits and ancestors in their head.  Because it works, when the culture doesn’t allow them to show weakness by admitting the problem exists in the first place.  That’s why the dominant of witchcraft is arising, why the millennials are more likely to be Animist than Christian or Atheist.  If you pay attention at the edges of conversations, you’ll notice.