I got a call from Harry the Human, strange if only because he doesn't have a phone. Harry is a telepath, the real kind, retired from playing nightclubs and cruise ships, where he pretended to be fake (plus a one-year stint teaching 2nd grade where he discovered that children are telepathic up to the age of 7). He inhabits a one room shack in the Mojave desert north of L.A.
Harry gets his fill of human communication out of the air and has no need for additional verbiage via technology. Nevertheless my phone rang and it was Harry.
"I need help, man."
"Harry? Why aren't you telepathing me, if that's a verb?"
"I need you to help me think in human language."
"Why?"
I knew why. Harry, in his communing with animals and people has concluded that human language is designed to manipulate what it describes (except when diverted from its purpose by poetry).
"You know why," Harry continued (he's telepathic, after all). "For once, I want to control things."
"This must be serious!"
"We're all in the same boat," Harry sighed, "...the same sinking boat."
Harry is pessimistic by self-definition, whereas I continually strive to burnish my optimism (figuring my pessimism needs no burnishing). Put differently, I view the glass as half full (of shit).
Harry believes that human consciousness is a construct, one of whose purposes is to individualize us, so that we believe we are independent actors, "people" if you will. When Harry telepathically travels outside of human language he sees other possible constructs for consciousness. He gets absorbed in other states. Once he experienced being a porpoise with half its brain asleep; another time he was Zephyr- the spirit of the West Wind.
But Harry is alarmed by what he's picking up lately from random media and real time humans and animals who pass his way. He increasingly sees "us" - his loose term for atoms and molecules of all sorts, including his own- as unstable, fissionable material.
In other words: Ka-Boom!
The city of Los Angeles offers a phone app to alert users to imminent earthquake. Harry wants to function as something similar. He says we should be alert for psychic mindquakes, possible earthquakes and maybe even a volcano. Once the distinctive shaking starts, it will not stop, but will gradually accelerate to its maximum.
Harry notes that the instability will appear localized in time but will have been eons in the making, the latest in a series of shake-ups that started hundreds of millions of years ago, when predation first appeared on the ocean floor. Over long ages, single-celled life had grazed and meditated, observing the precept: "Good fences make good neighbors," until one day God said, "Let them eat each other, for their sins," and, at least per popular opinion, added, "The penance of the living shall continue until the final eruption of The Big One."
I don't think Harry would mind if I contrast his version of The Big One with Christian apocalyptic thinking, as expressed in Revelation, the final book of the Bible. Revelation supplies a point to the human endeavor: Its end. Though widely popular with early Christians, Revelation at first met resistance from Church authorities, who were perhaps wary of its explicit message. Revelation was rejected for inclusion in the canon by the Council of Laodicea in 363 AD. The Synod of Hippo, in 393 AD, was poised to reject it again but had second thoughts when it realized that Christians were going to read Revelation whether it was deemed canonical or not. After all, it provided human life with a purpose: To die.
Harry strives to offer more than an afterlife, the qualities of which he can't guarantee, but most of the time he aspires, perhaps Quixotically, to survive.
The duration of The Big One, from start to finish, is unclear, but its outcome is clear: The entire surface of the earth will be transformed. To read Harry's message on this, go to Harry the Human and keep reading until you come to "The Big One,"
@ http://harrythehuman.harrythehumanpoliticalthoughtsfrombeyondthepale.com/.
