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Did Darwin get it upside down?

Rumor has it that Darwinian theory is falling out of favor in some mainstream scientific circles due to lack of hard evidence in support of it. A rival theory, equally unsupported but more to my liking, is devolution. “Forbidden Archeology” author Michael Cremo proposes in his new book “Human Devolution” that we’re beings of pure consciousness, temporarily housed in our bodies … devolved from the spiritual plane to the temporal plane.
In her Technology, Entertainment, Design (TED) lecture “Stroke of Insight,” neuroscientist Jill Bolte Taylor describes the sensation of separating from her “self” when she nearly died of a brain hemorrhage in 1996. The stroke occurred in her left hemisphere, the linear-thinking “I am” half that enables us to distinguish ourselves from our surroundings. As her left hemisphere “fell silent,” her right hemisphere woke up, and as it did she says that she could no longer define the boundaries of her body. “The atoms and the molecules of my arm blended with the atoms and molecules of the wall.” She was “immediately captivated with the magnificence of the energy” around her. She felt “at one with that energy” as a sense of peacefulness overcame her and she said goodbye to her life. “My spirit soared free like a great whale gliding through a sea of silent euphoria. I found Nirvana. I remember thinking there was no way I’d ever be able to squeeze the enormousness of myself back inside this tiny little body.”
Eventually she did return to her body and, over the eight years that followed, recovered fully. The insight she gained from this experience is that we can choose to be led by the right side or the left side of the brain. We can choose to emphasize boundaries or connections. We can live in Heaven or Hell.
In my own experience as a creative person I’ve found it beneficial to eliminate myself as much as possible from whatever I’m doing.  My intuition tells me that creative people are conduits for the energy that Taylor says is all around us … not originators, but intermediaries.
When Cremo says that we’re devolved from a purely spiritual state, it seems to me that he’s referring, at least in part, to the left brain’s imposition of it’s me-focused will on the right brain. That imposition is ego, I think. Selfishness.
So I try to stay focused on the joy of the creative process itself, rather than on what part of that process I “own.” It’s less lonely this way. And much more satisfying.

... telling you everything you need to know.

A Greenville acquaintance who summers slightly west of the west coast reached me through my contact form over the weekend to say a few words about J. Michael Craig.  Like me, she believes that he’s innocent and she speaks disapprovingly of the implicit “witch hunt.” How refreshing. Others have been not so refreshing, especially those who should know better. Under similar circumstances and with about as much information to go on, these same people might assume me to be a bank robber or a trafficker in exotic animals. I’m neither, of course, but that wouldn’t matter to someone who’s predisposed to believe the worst of me or too lazy to think for themselves. (And seriously, had Iknown that my suitcase was full of baby pandas, I wouldn’t have tried to get it through customs, now would I?)
We also have our addictions to feed. If it bleeds, it leads. It’s so much more stimulating to think that we’ve rubbed elbows with monsters than with ordinary human beings.
Anyway, my friend says that she’ll be making a small contribution to Mr. Craig’s defense fund. He’s trying to raise several tens of thousands of dollars to hire a private attorney because the public defender appointed for him appears to suck.  I tell you, friend, until you have first-hand experience of someone snared by our vaunted legal system, it’s easy to forget how hollow that “liberty and justice for all” thing can be. Justice, like health, is a commodity, pure and simple. And as for “innocent until proven guilty” … (insert laugh track here).

Our work with the Applied Theatre Center continues apace. So much of the marketer’s time is spent spinning half-truths that it’s good to be involved with a client whose truth requires no spin. It helps also that Executive Director Dale Savidge totally gets what we do. He works with it and within it, increasing and multiplying it. Sort of like what the Holy Spirit might do if … Hey, wait a minute …?!

It’s official. Pimp My Reality will return, for one issue at least, as a full-page spread in next month’s edition of Fete. Video embedded, two of my favorite topics combined. Editor Jay Spivey assures me that the package is a perfect fit for his magazine and I take him at his word. All that remains to be seen is whether I’ve managed to offend anybody. Oplease-oplease-oplease!

Many trees on the Davidson College campus have metal identification tags nailed to their trunks. If it's true that plants have feelings, there may be some corrolation between our treatment of non-combattant maples and the frequency with which extraterrestrials shove probes up our butts.

GPS-assisted travel is similar to subway travel in that it narrows the traveler’s focus. It’s very goal-oriented and efficient. While maps broaden perspective and invite side trips, GPS units invite strict attention to the upcoming turn. I try to compensate for this by pressing the “detour” button on my Garmin GPS frequently.
By the morning of Saturday, November 21, everybody I’d invited to ride with me to the MUFON meeting in North Carolina had bailed for one reason or another, so I traveled alone with my Garmin to Cornelius. I located the Acropolis Café where the meeting was to be held and then, since I had an hour to kill, drove what couldn’t have been more than a few city blocks to Davidson where I discovered the Davidson College campus. I’d been looking for a coffee bar in Cornelius, unaware of Davidson or the college, so the sudden appearance of both came as quite a surprise.
About 25 people were in attendance at what some complained was a too-long-overdue statewide meeting of the North Carolina chapter of MUFON.  State Director Richard Lang spoke at length about MUFON’s new (and, in my opinion, unfortunately named) rapid response investigative unit, the STAR Team, funded by billionaire Robert Bigelow. His generosity makes it possible for Lang, the national director of STAR, to dispatch investigators to close encounter sites within 24 hours of reports being filed.
Lang was followed by Granville Angell, head of what’s called “experiencer support” for NC MUFON. Angell talked about a place called the Monroe Institute where he’d had a brief, self-induced out-of-body experience and he stated his belief that human beings and extraterrestrials are all members of the same spiritual community … or words to that effect. Angell is, himself, an abductee, so I suppose he has more right to an opinion in these matters than most, but my attention wandered. Like Lang, I prefer corroborated testimony, preferably corroborated by physical evidence.
In any event, you’ve probably anticipated the “detour button” tie-in and here it is … I’m imagining some guy sitting in an office somewhere doing whatever it is people do in offices. He’s bored. So he opens a drawer and digs down through the debris there to the button at the bottom marked “DETOUR.” He presses it. And suddenly he’s in Cornelius where grown men and women, “normal” in every other respect, are discussing extraterrestrials and out-of-body experiences as givens. He feels better.
The detour button, my friends. Use it early and use it often.

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The man in the archival Library of Congress photo we're using to promote our production of Coal Creek probably didn't give a rat's ass about normalcy, sanity or anything but living to dig another day.

There’s a passage in the Sinclair Lewis novel It Can’t Happen Here that I’ve flagged. It’s about the fragility of social order, but on this particular day it reminds me of my bipolar friend …
“… The crust of learning and good manners and tolerance is so thin! It would take just a few thousand big shells and gas bombs to wipe out all the libraries and laboratories and art galleries … No inherent reason why our grandchildren – if anybody’s grandchildren survive – shouldn’t be living in caves and heaving rocks at catamounts. …”I think sometimes about how miraculous it is that we make it from zygote to birth … all the pieces that have to fit together properly, all the intricate systems that have to align. And then the enormous leap we make from birth to fully-integrated members of society … dear God.
But the crust of normalcy and sanity and functionality never does get very thick, does it? No matter how well-educated we are, how successful.
Reading one of my friend’s manifestos today, I felt a shock of recognition. I’m every bit as chaotic as he is, I think. We all are. The difference between us and him is our ability to hide our chaos from our neighbors and from ourselves. Look under my hood or your hood or the next guy’s, and you’ll find just as much duct tape and faulty wiring as my bipolar friend’s manifesto shows us he has under his. As quick as we are to shake our heads and say, “There but for the grace of God go I,” a more self-perceptive statement might be, “But for the grace of God, I show everyone that I’ve gone there myself already.”