Outlands Community USA

LLAM:  You were correct!  The apocalypse began six years ago this month.  One more person decided that the current mode of reality wasn't working and they decided that they wanted something different, something better.
ROY:  Do you know who that person is?
LLAM: (smiling) Noooooooooo!
ROY:  I got the sense that this wasn't a static event but that it's an ongoing process.  You know, I first understood the idea of a "process" as opposed to a "thing" about 20 years ago.
LLAM:  Well, there is no such thing as a "thing," everything is a process, but from a mortal viewpoint when a thing sticks around for a while, its nature as a process is obscured.  When you see something every day for a year, or for ten years, you think of it as a thing.
ROY:  That goes for people as well.
LLAM:  (grinning)  Umm, yes, you mortal folks are well-known for seeing each other as things!  And even your own selves; did you not tell me that Aldous Huxley said one of the things by which people deceive themselves is when they believe that they are always the "same person?"
ROY:  (laughing)  Huxley said that a umber of times and in a number of ways, but he said it and he's correct. We're always and all of the time, "in process" as entities. But when you've been around for a few million years, this "processing" is more noticeable?
LLAM:  Certainly.  You had told me that as a child you had a powerful microscope and that you were fascinated by watching living microorganisms.  I suppose you saw them die on occasion.
ROY:  Yes I have.  I used to watch paramecium and amoeba, euglena and other critters swimming around in drops of water.  After a while the water on the microscope slide would evaporate and they would die, or at least become dormant.  Even if I added water they eventually would die.  Their transience struck me kind of hard.
LLAM:  Someone of my......age is surrounded by transience, everything is, everything is in process.  You mortals are impressed by the franatstically short duration of quantum particles; we witness this in all things.
ROY:  What about yourself?
LLAM:  This may come as a surprise, but the other devas and I are aware of being in a continual state of change.
ROY:  Flux.
LLAM:  I suppose.  Good a word as any!
ROY:  Are you aware of......qualities of change?
LLAM:  That has a couple of answers.
ROY:  Okay.
LLAM:  Sometimes there is a lot of change in a short amount of time.  That's not exactly a quality, but it should be kept in  mind.
ROY:  An explosion is a lot of change in a short amount of time.
LLAM:  Exactly my point.  But you're asking more about things like, "Is the current flux a cool flux?"
ROY:  Huh?  Cool flux?
LLAM:  Yes, is it cool or is it umm, boring?  Tedious, bad, uncool.  You have a saying, "going from bad to worse."  Lately some things seem to be going either from bad to very much worse or from bad to surprisingly much better.
ROY:  I would elect the world economy as going from bad to very much worse.
LLAM:  And I would agree with you.  But the world economy is more of a byproduct of the current process, there is just too much information around to grasp what is going on.  When a bank or a nation fails, it reinforces this like a feedback loop.  And this is one of the reasons that more and more people are going to say "to hell with it!, government and civilization doesn't work."
ROY:  This brings us to what Traehmlyn showed us.  People will just walk away from civilization.
LLAM:  That too is exactly my point.  Let me ask you: has civilization worked?  Do governments work?
ROY:  (after a short pause)  Civilization worked well enough to bring some of us to the point where we began to realize, this isn't working.
LLAM:  You told me how you began thinking along these lines some seventeen years ago.  Perhaps, for the benefit of our readers?
ROY:  Sure.  For many years I'd been studying the Christian Bible and the literature from the various cultures in those areas.  Mind you, this cuts across a few millenia and dozens of cultures which came and went.  At some point several thousand years ago some groups began to build cities along the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in Mesopotamia.  They also built them along the Nile and Ganges, but we're concerned with the first two.  The people in these cities developed a rudimentary idea which had already been around: writing.  And they wrote down everything, not in books as we know them, but on wet clay tablets, marking them with a stylus.  When the clay dried, you had a text.  Of the myriad of texts which have come down to us, there are a number which tell what is called "The Epic of Gilgamesh."  There are parts of this story which seem to parallel the Biblical story of  "Noah's Flood,"  but that wasn't what I was seeing as I read through it.  There is another section of this "Epic" which form a curious, if antagonistic parallel to another Biblical tale called "The Tower of Babel."
LLAM:  You're saying it seems to tell the same story but from different viewpoints?
ROY:  Only in certain gross features.  In the "Tower" story, people gather on a plain named "Shinar" and begin to build a city, and in this city they start erecting a tall tower.  Now the fact is, many of the ancient cities in this area did have such towers and they were used as astronomical observatories.  But the folks who wrote the "Tower" story ascribed a kind of infernal pride to the city-dwellers,  They said that the tower was being built to reach up into heaven.
LLAM:  You mean, up to where the god of the Bible was supposed to live?
ROY:  Yup.  And this afrontery was met by said deity making each person speak a different language and thereby inhibiting the completion of the Tower.
LLAM:  An odd tale, I must say.
ROY:  It would be odd to a person who lived in a city.  But the moral that seemed to leap out at me was, "It's wrong to live in a city.  Humans were meant to live nomadic lives."
LLAM:  What does the story in the clay tablets say?
ROY:  It mentions nothing of a tower or a dispersal of the builders.  As I said, there are gross features which struck me.  Now with that moral I imagined in mind, the Gilgamesh story has an episode in which a man named Enkidu makes appearance.  He's shown as a wildman, someone who lives with and communicates with animals.  He is drawn into the city culture by a priestess who is intimate with him.  After their liason, the animals want nothing to do with him, and he goes to live in the city, eventually becoming friends with the king, Gilgamesh.  In other words, he becomes civilized.
LLAM:  I am not wrong, then, in assuming that each story pokes at the way the others live.  To the nomadic peoples who wrote the Tower story, city dwellers were proud and arrogant and were punished by the deity.  In Gilgamesh, it sounds like the nomads were depicted as little more than wild animals.  Are those the only parallels?
ROY:  No.  In the Tower version, the city dwellers are made to say, "Let us make a name for ourselves."  In Gilgamesh, after Enkidu becomes civilized, he bewails the fact that no-one will remember him after he dies.  He too wants to be immortal in the memories of those who live after him.  And both are preludes to the story of a vast flood which destroys most of humanity.
LLAM:  The Tower version sounds rather anonymous.  I mean, there is no-one like Enkidu or Gilgamesh in that story, correct?
ROY:  Correct.  There is one other little factoid.  In the Tower version, up until the time when the Tower was halted, everyone spoke the same language.  Afterwards everyone spoke a different tongue.  Now we know from other clay tablets that the people in these earliest cities came from all over the known world, as it was known then at any rate, and there is an impressive list of ethnicities in these texts.  There is another tale in clay, "Enmerkar and the King of Aratta," in which just the opposite is told:  everyone spoke different languages, but the god Enki got them all to magically speak the same tongue.
LLAM:  But, what a strange punishment!  As if no-one had ever used hand-signs, or could no longer learn another tongue!  Or draw pictures in some fashion!
ROY:  It was likely that there were several language families represented in the region.  It is apparent that people from India and Egypt traded with these dwellers on the Tigris and Euphrates, and it is likely that there were traders from Central Asia, the Caucasus, parts of eastern Europe, possibly even China.
LLAM:  I do not know much specific information, but I am aware that mortal humans began exploring the world after the last ice age.  It seemed to be a very "in" thing to do: set out on a caravan or ship and see where they wound up.  Now I have noticed something in these ancient stories and wondered if you had as well.
ROY:  Hey, Llam, I often miss the obvious! (grins)
LLAM:  (drilly) Do tell.  What I see in the stories told on the clay tablets is that the visitors to these cities had learned at least the basics of the local languages, and that it likely the natives of the cities learned at least some of the languages of the visitors and merchants.
ROY:  You're right!  Hadn't thought of things that far!  But it also asks a question, one for which we may not have an answer.  Which group, what part of the city's society, provided the impetus to understand other languages?  You might choose between the merchants, the spiritual or royal hierarchies or the military.
LLAM:  As I have observed humanity, cities are dependent upon trade, so I would say the merchants would have spearheaded the notion.
ROY:  And I would agree.  Without mercantile trade, cities are nowhere.  And this has a peculiar pertinance to our stated theme.
LLAM:  Are you still thinking in terms of historical occurrences, or are you talking of the present day?
ROY:  Well, I have another historical document in mind.  The last book of the Christian Bible is called "The Apocalypse."
LLAM:  That's the one where that god destroys the world.
ROY:  Yes, it is.  And there is one great city, called Babylon, which gets it worse than any other place.  The writer was probably thinking of Rome.  But the hapless citizens of this dying world are mourning the loss of this great mercantile city.
LLAM:  Sounds surprisingly current.  Are not economists saying how difficult it will be for the economies of the world to stabilize and recover?  In that sense then, the apocalypse has already happened.
ROY: At the end of the Tower of Babel story, everyone left and went in different directions.  Which is kind of what Traehmlyn said was going to happen.
LLAM:  (grinning)  Now I have a question for you about this!  Are we really witnessing an economic apocalypse or are you yourself seeing one through the lens of this story?
ROY:  Hmmm!  At best you could say that I'm seeing some similarities between what is happening now and what I know of these Biblical stories.  One thing which I wish to make clear is, I am NOT saying the "prophecies" in the Biblical Apocalypse are either true or are happening today.  If you look into the history of Western society, at any date, any point, you could legitimately say that the Biblical apocalypse was occurring - but without the return of Jesus.  Between wars and the black plague, roughly 13,000,000 people died in Western Europe in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries CE.  But what we are seeing is certainly apocalyptic: economies around the globe are tanking at an alarming rate.  What is unique this time is the global nature of this, all over the world there are nations in deep economic trouble - and the information becomes immediate, thanks to the Internet and all. Every nation has taken an economic beating in some form.
LLAM:  Some of your mortal economists talk of "failed nations" and "failed economies."  Sounds pretty grim, even from my viewpoint.  Does this mean that a "failed nation" can no longer function as a nation?
ROY:  That is the end result if no action is taken to keep the structure of a country going.  No police, no military, no medical care, no education.  It's a system failure.  Money literally disappears from a country because banks go out of business and must pay back what ever they owe to creditors.  They do this before even thinking about people, ordinary people who have put their money into these banks.
LLAM:  That is quite grim.  Go on.
ROY:  The current system is based upon what you might call capital worth.  In American terms, a company which makes ten billion dollars' profit has at least that much capital worth.  At the same time, much of this "profit" goes to paying back loans to other organizations which have helped the company get to where it is; and some of it is paid to organizations which have invested in the company.....this is a little different from a loan, in that an investing company can decide to pull out of the investment.  Employees must be paid, taxes paid, supplies for whatever it is the company does must be paid for.  So the real profit of such a company may be much much less than ten billion dollars.  If they are late in loan repayment, they usually have to pay a default penalty, which is usually quite severe.  Now, should this company have a couple of bad sales quarters, where they are suddenly not making a lot of profit, that's how it starts.  Loans are paid late at penalty, then workers start getting fired or laid off, buildings sold, cutbacks made.  And it's happening all over; it has not been this bad for many decades.  Simply put, a company's capital worth can easily evaporate or become totally meaningless.
LLAM:  To my mind then, would not this leave some kind of void?  If your ten billion dollar company was supplying some kind of demand, simply because they went out of business - "tanked," as you say - that would still mean that there was a demand for that.....thing, whatever it was, that they produced.  Is this so?
ROY: Yes, it is, and this is where economic pictures can change radically.  Other groups, companies, try to fill that void.  But this time the situation is different.  If a company goes out of business, the nation where it makes its home has, in the past, had a decently stable economy and a new business could take up where the failed company had to leave the market.  But that's just it.  Too many nations are in deep financial trouble.  No-one wants to lend money to others unless there are absolute guarantees of payback. Never mind penalty payments, never mind sale proceeds from the breakup of a company should it fail.  The attitude is this, "You will get no money unless you already HAVE money with which to secure your loan."
LLAM:  You have discussed barter as a means of trade and payment with some people.  But what can be, could be bartered between individuals?  Never mind companies, although I think it would be interesting to see a company based solely upon barter! (grins)
ROY:  In certain areas, barter was a means of commercial business in America at the beginning.  While the European settlers often just killed off my Native ancestors, not all of them were so barbaric.  Some set up trade methods with the Native peoples of this country.  You would often see a place in a town called a "trading post," where people would bring things to trade for other things.  Hunters might bring in meat and animal hides and trade them for home goods, gold, whiskey or tobacco.  A whiskey distiller might bring several barrels of his brew and trade them for meat and the like.  What was fair about this was that both parties had to negotiate what each felt was "fair value" for the things involved, umm, whiskey, meat, gold.
LLAM:  I do not think that can happen today.
ROY:  Well, not in the traditional ways!  (smiles)  I can't go kill a few deer and take them to the local supermarket and trade them for stuff.  We in the mortal world have all but eliminated barter because we manufacture so many of the things we need and want.  If we want something, anything, chances are good that someone, somewhere, makes it.
LLAM:  What I see in this that I find disturbing is that much of your food could be considered to be "manufactured."   City dwellers do not keep animals for food - well, not in the West, at any rate - and few are in a position to grow enough of their own fruits and vegetables.  Should food producers have economic setbacks of a major kind, food would rapidly become scarce.  I am, of course, speaking of the Western cultures, but food is already scarce in much of the world.  Thousands of people starve to death every day.  These same starving people also are plagued by a lack of clean drinking water, lack of housing, medical care and education.
ROY:  There is in your picture a serious imbalance, it could even be called an evil.  Here I am living well, shall we say, while others aren't.  Even in the Community there are people who don't have enough to eat and have serious medical problems which are not being attended.  And they live in North America.  I shudder to think of what is going on across the globe.
LLAM:  Counter to this are the many fine people who give in some manner to help those in need.  This is one of the shining examples of human merit.  I think it belies the claims of anyone who goes around thinking or saying that humans are basically evil.
ROY:  Mmmm....yes.  Unfortunately, many give to those who do NOT need.
LLAM:  What do you mean, "do not need?"
ROY:  Name one religion, one spiritual group to which you would want me to give money?
LLAM:  Absolutely none whatsoever!  The principle of "giving" as we have established it since we came on line is a viable one.  If someone does something good for you, you in turn do something good for another person.  In that manner the giving is spread abroad.  While there are, of course, some things for which you ought pay, "payback" limits generosity and transforms it into a debt.  I can say with delight that our policy of not charging anything for anyone for anything the Community offers is a good one.  We are not processing large amounts of money or goods.
ROY:  I think the fact that spiritual groups are forced to become "businesses" is in itself a serious drawback.
LLAM:  A church might own it's church building; a home for the spiritual leader; a means of transport, usually a car for that person; an income for them as well.  When we had approached you with this idea of "doing it all for free," it was that you, as the mortal representative of the ethereal world, would not be encumbered with such cares.
ROY:  You told me from the beginning that anything we might need in the way of material things would fall from the sky.  This has happened exactly as you declared, even down to the computer with which I'm writing this.
LLAM:  As we assessed who you all were in those very first hours after our meeting, it became apparent that we might create what is in a practical sense, an anachronism.  From an eternal viewpoint, there is so much that modern humanity could do without!  I would include automobiles, governments, laws - you didn't have these things ten thousand years ago!  But I'm not a dummy, I know that your whole world is built on these things and that they are not going to go away.  You cannot dispose of any of them.  By introducing this modestly different model upon which Outlands is based, we have an alternative way of doing things which is operating along with the current methods of buying and selling.
ROY:  I don't want to get into what you guys knew or did not know, three or four years ago, but I'm just remarking, it seems pretty prescient that we've established "our way" before the destruction of the world's economies began in earnest.
LLAM:  Although you are hardly an economist, I would ask your opinion on the subject.  In what condition do you see the global economy?
ROY:  Money has either been seriously injured or outright destroyed and there will be no easy fix.  In economic terms, this is a post-apocalyptic era.
LLAM:  Everything evolves, so there are new economic models in the offing.  But this would, no doubt, involve a whole new kind of legal system.
ROY:  (thoughtful pause)  I'm listening.
LLAM:  I would begin by asking, why are there laws?  What laws are necessary?  Are there evil laws?  I am asking your opinion; I have my own.
ROY:  Classically speaking laws are consensual agreements within a society by which its citizens can seek and get redress for wrongdoings of individuals.  If someone bops me on the head, I should be able to go to the police and ask them to do something about it.  Or if someone steals something that I think is mine, same thing.  These laws have been around for thousands of years.  Most nations adopt them.  In so-called free or liberal nations, these laws are agreed upon at the formation, or during the evolution of, the country.  In so-called despotic countries, the laws are imposed on the people with little concern for their desires or needs.  In our current world these laws are written out in at least one central constitutional document.
LLAM:  Perhaps it is to my advantage, being an ethereal person, that I see things in this way, but it seems that many nations have laws which are unneccesary or downright evil.  I have never understood laws which discriminate one group of humans from another.  How to put this......to me, you are all too much alike to be harping about your differences!  (smiles)
ROY:  (laughs)  This is you, making your second question into a statement.  Yes, there are many unneccesary laws and there are - going into your third question - evil laws.
LLAM:  What laws would be essential?  I'm asking you, as steward of the Community.
ROY:  Oh, chee, tanks, Llam!  (grins)  There should be laws for when one person physically or emotionally harms others.  There should be laws about theft.  And really?  That's my 'umble opinion.  If someone willfully murders - remove them from society.  If someone steals - well, the ancient model works well - pay back anywhere from four to ten times the value of the stolen goods.  (pauses)  Look, Llam, in thinking about this, you're asking me guided questions.  They're going somewhere, you have something in mind.  What is it?
LLAM:  (laughing)  My, you look smug!
ROY:  (laughing also)  Oh, yes I do!
LLAM:  (still giggling)  Because they discriminate between human beings, the current laws which guarantee the current legal and economic system have also guaranteed an apocalyptic scenario.  When one group is outcast or becomes a scapegoat, that group will seek vengeance, psychically and in real physical terms.  There is one very large group that has been created by the psychotic manipulations of multinational corporations and the compliance of those nations in which they operate.  These nations are becoming increasingly fascistic.  This vast group of you mortal humans, numbering into the billions, are the poor people of this planet.  Those who have no food, no water, no shelter, no medical care or education. and above all, no FREEDOM.
ROY:  (staring at Llam)
LLAM:  I see that I have succeeded in doing what few people have.  You're silent!  But, you knew these things.
ROY:  ......uh, yeah.  I've never said it, or thought it through though.
LLAM:  Watch in the days ahead.  Multinationals and nations failing.
ROY:  I think everyone kinda senses that.  But I don't think that that is such a bad thing.  I think it goes along with something I have been wondering aloud for almost three decades.  I've often thought that it would not take much for the United States to become a number of smaller regional nations.  It happened when the Soviet Union broke up twenty years ago.
LLAM:  It is mostly a matter of when, not if, countries implode and re-organize as many much-smaller nations.  There are what - roughly 200 sovreign countries?  They could easily become a thousand.  And then.....
ROY:  ......and then, WHAT?!
LLAM:  I am not certain.  Like Traehmlyn I can see things, but that does not mean I understand them.  Or that they will be so.  But I have a couple of ideas.  Mortal scientists are filled with wonder when they observe ants and bees, how their colonies are seemingly mindless but act in a "mindful" way.  Or how the human body is actually in symbiosis with a great deal of "benevolent" bacteria.  Imagine if an ant colony was aware of its "self."  Imagine being in communication with the bacteria in your body, or with the cells that make up your body.  There is a shift in human awareness coming, but I really do not know what it is.  It is NOT catastrophic.  Anything but.
ROY:  You're not describing an apocalypse.  You're describing a metamorphosis.  Like a butterfly emerging from a cocoon.  WHOA!
LLAM:  What, "WHOA!?"
ROY:  Twenty two years ago, Stro told me, "In the end, we shall all be transformed into butterflies."  I asked him what he meant and he just smiled.
LLAM:  I dare say, we are both wearing the same smile!

LLAM:  I was wondering why you chose the title of a book by John Ruskin for today's entry.

ROY:  I feel a lot of affinity with him.  He was interested in everything and had an opinion on everything.

LLAM:  Sounds like you!

ROY:  Yeah, well.  As he got older his ability to make a prolonged narrative weakened, until his later works were little more than rants and tirades covering dozens of subjects - although they were well-written.

LLAM:  You tend to wander sometimes, but I don't see that as being pathological.  Yet! (smiles)

ROY:  Actually, the older I get the more I wonder why I should stick with prolonged continuity.  We are by nature not given to paying attention to long threads of discourse; any drawing with hundreds of people in it usually gets a cursory glance and a comment about how complex it is.

LLAM:  Like those "Where's Waldo?" Pictures.

ROY:  Yeah.  What I want is to divest with this idea of prolonged narrative or continuity.  I just want to yak.

LLAM:  So yak!

ROY:  Thank you!  Do you know who Gen P. Orridge is?

LLAM:  He was the fellow who invented Industrial Music, umm, that band Throbbing Gristle.  Then he had Psychic TV.

ROY:  All revolutionary ideas when they appeared in the 1970s and 1980s.  He's still going strong but has made even more radical shifts.  He and his partner have had gender modifications.  They're hemaphroditic.

LLAM:  What a charming idea!

ROY:  I think so!  It's about as in-your-face as you can get in challenging some of Western culture's most cherished prejudices.

LLAM:  Such as those against same-sex relationships, or multiple-partner-relationships.

ROY:  Yup.

LLAM:  It's only since I've been with all of you that I've even begun to understand some of those things.  Even so the best that I can do is acknowledge that they exist and have caused untold misery in the world.  Unnecessary untold misery.

ROY:  Here is a law that we'll never see in any Western nation's law-books: all males must live for one year as females; all females must live one year as males.  Minus the surgical procedures and hormone therapy.

LLAM:  It would be a step in the right direction.  A kind of equalizer.  If men knew what havoc they visited upon women, but learned it first-hand from other men, there would be a massive shift in perceptions about gender and gender-roles.  At the same time women would learn as many lessons from other women.  I don't think that all of these "lessons" would be negative, though.

ROY:  Umm, like what?

LLAM:  Men could learn to be tender.  As it is, most men fear being tender.  They equate it with vulnerability.

ROY:  Oh!  Good one, Llam!  Well, guys (looks off page to readers) being tender may make you vulnerable and it may not.

 LLAM:  He ought to know!  Behind that gruff facade is one tender guy!

ROY:  Why does everyone think I'm gruff?

LLAM:  Because you look like a bear.

ROY:  Excuse me, I was swatting a fish out of the stream, what was that?

LLAM:  I rest my case.  You're smiling!  What?

ROY:  Oh, just that I thought I would use this blog entry to drop a half-dozen or so revolutionary ideas on the public!

LLAM:  Go for it!

ROY:  Legalize a lot of illegal drugs.  LSD, MDMA and THC for starters.  Completely, so you could buy them in a supermarket.  This will never happen, but it's a thought.  Misuse of any of these three would occur in a very small minority of people using them; they would tend to exclude such idiots from the gene pool.  If that sounds elitist, too bad.  We don't need to have ignorant fools belieing superstitions telling us how to live.  For the rest of us, creative potentials could be greatly expanded, emotional problems that have been insoluble could approach solution and pain could decrease dramatically.

LLAM:  Good start!  What next?

ROY:  Dissolve all large centralized governments so that there would be something like 1500 small nations in the world.  We'd become a lot more interdependent.  Money would have to become real, I mean, value for product and labor, which is gone missing today.

LLAM:  Judging by the way the American banking system ran amok and ruined the world's financial markets, it sounds like a great alternative.  Seriously, where were the watchdogs when this was going on?  Sleeping?  If you mortals think things are getting bad now, the implications of what the American banks did will only really become apparent in the next nine months or so as people lose everything.  Of course, the people with little or nothing stand to gain the most here.

ROY:  You read my mind!  You must be psychic! (laughs) (Llam grins)  In America especially, institute a sexual education program that Wilhelm Reich would have approved and get it going in all schools.  This means, let young people be educated about what a sexual life is really like.  It is no better now than when I was a kid, except there is a lot more porn around.  Learning about sex from porn is like learning peace from war movies.  And this segues into -

LLAM:  Yes?

ROY: Get the born-again Christians out of politics!  They have lobbying power, they have media power all out of proportion to their numbers.  Get religion out of government altogether!  Start in America!  Keep the Pope marginalized so that his influence on his followers is minimal.  As it is, he's a menace and his words fall right into the hands of his fundamentalist Christian allies.

LLAM:  That's five ideas.  What's the sixth?

ROY:  Give everyone an inexpensive, really inexpensive access to computers and the Internet.  This one is actually underway from a dozen different places.  I think it will help iimplement the other five!

LLAM:  I enjoyed talking with Sanjoy and Noah this morning.

ROY:  Ngmmph.

LLAM:  I've rarely seen you like this.  I know that your patience is about gone, but I would like to be of some help if I could.

ROY:  Mmmmm.

LLAM:  For once I've no questions, okay?  Well, nothing that I can't figure out based upon observation.  (Looks up from the page at readers)  He's trying to stop smoking.  He is not happy.

ROY:  No.  I am not.

LLAM:  Besides a cigarette, is there anything that might make you feel better?

ROY:  I have never known of anything.  The times that I have quit, I just brazened it out.  You missed the last one by a few months.

LLAM:  That was early in 2004.

ROY:  I guess.

LLAM: I see that you are extremely agitated.  Nicotine has acted as a tranquilizer for you, you've said.

ROY:  Yeah.  I'm not very tranquil right now.  I doubt that I'm all that rational, either.  Why the hell did you drag me here?

LLAM:  To get you talking.

ROY:  About WHAT?

LLAM:  Anything that is running through your head.

ROY:  (glares at Llam)

LLAM:  You're not without any thoughts or feelings, obviously, but what do you say about just ranting?

ROY:  There are plenty of places on the Internet where people can read foaming-at-the-mouth stuff.  I get too into it too easily.  I don't like doing it because I think I sound too much like Ruskin when he got older.  Anything could and did set him off.  I'd rather not.  If I can't be part of a solution I'd rather keep my mouth shut.

LLAM:  I must ask you to excuse me for goading you, but I have a reason, if you'd care to listen.

ROY:  Okay....what is it.

LLAM:  I understand well enough that you dislike going off about things that piss you off.  I'm well aware that you can launch and keep going longer than necessary.  I agree with you that that is not healthy.  Honestly though, I think you have gone to the other extreme.  You're bottling up a lot of stuff that ought to come out.

ROY:  (looks thoughfully at Llam)  Okay.  Yeah, okay.  I am sitting on some stuff.

LLAM:  You're not just sitting on it, you're holding it down with all of your might.  Let off a little steam.  Be irrational.  Foam at the mouth a little bit.

ROY:  Llam, one of the reasons I refrain from doing that, and especially on the Internet, is because many people find it entertaining.  I don't mind looking or sounding like an idiot but I hate being someone's mental masturbatory fantasy, you know, "Oh, wow, look at what this dude's written, he's nuts and saying all kinds of crap, it's funny!"  Things like that are not, in my view, meant to be entertainment.

LLAM:  There will always be fools.  We have encountered a number of them over the while we have been on line.

ROY:  Mmm.  (looks down at his hands)  I've had enough of 2012 for one month, okay?

LLAM:  That's fine.

ROY:  Well, you mentioned fools.  Some fools are cool.  Some are beyond jackass.

LLAM:  Indeed.

ROY:  I mean, here we have the finest communication tools our species have ever developed and some people use them to call each other names for bandwidth without end.  People like that should have their brains removed and a pickle put in its place.  Only, the pickle should not be inserted through any of the head cavities.  I was thinking of an orifice a lot lower in the anatomy.  With an airhose.

LLAM: (grinning)

ROY:  I've really had my fill of any religious group which claims that they represent any nation which is not a theocracy.  Here in America, or in Iran.  For example.  But since I live in America I'll focus on America.  Iran I know only by hearsay.  There are too many Christian groups which claim that America is theirs and that the country belongs to god.  It doesn't.  It belongs to all of us - atheists, Buddhists, Muslims, Hindus, Satan worshippers, goddess worshippers, Wiccans, gostics, agnostics.  That is effrontery of the first order.  The claims of these zealous loonies are way too exclusive of anyone who disagrees with them.  Oh, my, are you gay?  The Bible condemns you - you're out of the game.  Which is nonsense.  If people wish to hold to the Bible for something like that, they'd better start stoning their disobedient children to death, and the men had better start gathering up troops of wives and concubines.  After all, if it was good enough for Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, David and Solomon, it ought to be good enough for them.  But of course, the same mentality went after the Mormons in the 1880s and 1890s because they practiced polygamy.  You know I am no fan of the LDS but what the USA did then was shameful.  And today the targets are gay people and women who want abortions. In a larger sense, anyone wishing to alter their brain chemistry is in for hell and high water.  Anyone espusing Marxist or anrachist ideals too ludly will get sat upon, and it all stems from belief in the Bible.  (Looks out at readers)  You want a Bible?  Check out the Bible that Thomas Jefferson creted, just Google "Jefferson Bible."  He took English, French, Latin and Greek Bibles and scissored the New Testament up to create a biography of Jesus - minus any of the supernatural stuff.  It ends with the rock being rolled in front of his tomb.  The idea was to provide the Native Americans of his day with the story of someone whom Jefferson beieved to have reached a moral ideal.

LLAM:  Splendid!

ROY:  I also have had enough of people who think that science is gonna save us from ourselves.  The climate, hunger, what have you. Science is largely in service to what ever flag is flying over the universities, institutes and what have you.  The order of the day from most governments is, build better weapons.  Anything else is secondary.  Look, we are nearing the timeout limit and I really feel bad, okay?  More at another time.

LLAM:  Very well.

LLAM:  Very curious that this keeps coming up.

ROY:  It keeps coming back and now that I'm not the only one having the visions, I wanna talk about it.

LLAM:  I saw the comment you'd left on Dori's journal at DA, watched the conversation you'd had with Joey the other night.

ROY:  Quite a while ago I'd had a chat with Lindsay about it also, this was after Traehmlyn's first visit.  She has the sense of something coming also.  I talked with her about two months ago and she still has it, but relates everything to 2012.

LLAM:  In at least a superficial way, many people are afraid of that.  It's like a big virus.

ROY:  Do tell.  So I think it behooves us to just do our job.  I mean, what is the difference between 2012 and Jesus coming back?

LLAM:  Jesus said no-one knew when that would be, didn't he?

ROY: Yup.  And Christians ever since have been confidently predicting his return on any number of dates.

LLAM:  He hasn't come back.

ROY:  He isn't going to, either.

LLAM:  Okay.  Is this Joan Osbourne?

ROY:  Yeh.  So first of all, let me spell it out: 2012 was concocted by Terrence MacKenna and is 100% fabrication.  Not gonna happen, people.

LLAM:  What do you think is going to happen?

ROY:  While you were busy watching over Sara as she looked for me, were you aware that the Soviet Union collapsed?

LLAM:   Somewhat.  I knew that people were going crazy in some of the cities.

ROY:  That will happen in the United States.  The country has gotten too complex to run properly.  The sheer complexity of providing for millions of people in a fair and equitable manner is beyond our capabilities.  The government of the USA is too centralized, every smaller unit at state and city level must answer to the federal government in some way.  At some point, various states and regions will do what is called "seceding from the Union," meaning, they'll declare their independence from the United States.  I've been saying that for over twenty years and now I have reasons to back it up.

LLAM:  I've watched you chat about that.  What parts will leave, do you think?

ROY:  First ones out the door will be the Texans and they'll probably take Oklahoma with them.  They have wanted to be a separate nation since roughly 1834.  As things deteriorate the idea of independence will become more and more attractive to more and more Texans.  But they will refer to themselves as they did then: Texians.

LLAM:  Okay, that's one area, very large and capable of self support also.

ROY:  Right!  I don't know that they would be next, but the so-called "Mormon Territories," Utah, parts of Idaho, Montana, Wyoming and the Dakotas are capable of becoming independent.  And they have a reason.

LLAM:  What is that?

ROY:  As originally set up, the Mormon Church - or Latter Day Saints, as they call themselves - practiced polygamy.  The men married several women and kept house that way.  The government of the United States directly interfered with the autonomy of Utah Territory during the 1880's and 1890's by refusing statehood to the people in Utah, and then sending in Federal troops to enforce the ban on polygamy.  The LDS had lost in the US Supreme Court when they tried to maintain their way of life.  It was a shameful event and a mixing of Church and State in my view.  The people in the US government at the time based their opinions on the prevailing "Christian" ideal of one man and one woman as constituting a "family."

LLAM:  I do not understand that.  Aren't the major figures in the Old Testament all polygamous?  Moses?  Abraham?  Isaac?

ROY:  Yup!  But somehow in the passing of time, polygamy and polyandry became......unfashionable, I guess is the term I'm looking for.

LLAM:  And I suppose that earlier models, I mean, partnerships of several people, partnerships of same-sex couples, went by the board also.

ROY:  Long before the United States ever existed.  There was a small group in the state of Rhode Island which practiced "sexual freedom" in the 1600's but they were murdered by the Puritans from Massachusetts.  I don't know too much about them, wish I did.

LLAM:  You were really going there!

ROY:  (smiles)

LLAM:  So what other regions do you see breaking away?

ROY:  New York City could become independent tomorrow.  They might include New Jersey in that.  The southern states, those which seceded during the American Civil War, would certainly leave.  California, Oregon and Washington would be another region.  The central states of Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, Ohio would become a Fundamentalist Christian stronghold.  Illinois and Indiana would form yet another region based around Chicago.  The states north of there, Michigan, Minnesota, Wisconsin, could become an area on its own.  Pennsylvania might be divided.  And Washington DC would be surrounded by all of these little nations.

LLAM:  But wouldn't these smaller regions, or countries, have the same problems of being overly-complex to manage?

ROY:  (grins)  Yeh!  And that would lead to even more subdivisions.  But it won't be just the USA.  I think that this will happen all over the world.  It happened in the USSR and it happened in Afghanistan.  Americans perceive Afghanistan as one nation and it's not, it's several small nations.  Africa is rapidily splitting up into small decentralized nations, and will continue doing it.  The downside is all of the criminal groups which will attempt to seize power.  But with the breakdown of commerce and banking they'll run out of money.

LLAM:  Where does this leave the Outlands people?

ROY:  I think that many of us will hit the road on foot.  That was the essence of Traehmlyn's visions, people walking to nowhere in particular.   Actually, we would or should meet somewhere.  But if you're an Outlands Member or Associate, remember what it says at the bottom of every e-mail you get from us:  See you on the road!

LLAM:  Umm, not everyone in the OC is in great health.

ROY:  Which means, we'd go get them.

LLAM:  And what is it that has you so agitated this fine day?

ROY:  String theory.

LLAM:  I do hope that you are referring to something in physics and not something about string or twine.

ROY:  (grins)  Physics.

LLAM:  I detect a full-blown rant coming on.

ROY:  You detect correctly!  But before we get going, what did you think of that fellow the other night who took the Learn Telepathy exercise?

LLAM:  What was his percent - 93% correct?  Very impressive!

ROY:  Well, you and Dioth had gathered round while we were doing it.  He actually saw Dioth in some way.  Only Anwarii has done that if I remember properly.

LLAM:  Actually Valyn has also, but that was on a flyby some time ago.  But he was a non-Westerner if that is the right term.

ROY:  Right or not it will have to do, I promised not to divulge anything about him, although I'd like to get his permission to post some of the test in the Telepathy section here.  Have you noticed that "non-Westerners" generally do better on the test?

LLAM:  Oh my yes.  They're not bound by Christian culture, or whatever label you want to give it today.  Western culture?  But it all says you mortal folks can't do that and if you can it's from the Devil.  Have you ever met the Devil?

ROY:  Yeah.  Don't you remember Sara had lunch with him some months back?

LLAM:  Oh, oh, yes, I do!  Silly old deva I am!  But what did you think of him?

ROY:  He was kinda hot, actually.  For someone who has had the bad press he's had and for so long, he's in a remarkably good frame of mind. I think that I would have said 'the hell with it!' long ago.

LLAM:  You didn't just say that!

ROY:  (cackling) Of course I did!

LLAM:  Well, listen, from the little talks we've had since the last blog entry, you've a lot more on your mind than just string theory.  You were going on about what is science and what is not quite a bit there.  Why don't you start with that?  String theory is pretty esoteric a subject and enough people lose patience trying to follow what you and Yvgeny have discussed in the past.

ROY:  Alright.

LLAM:  (after a short pause)  Well?

ROY:  Well what?

LLAM:  You were going to start by talking about what is science.

ROY:  (chuckles)  Oh yeh!  Okay.  Here goes.  Science is that branch of human life which seeks to explain things about the world which are unknown.  It usually begins when someone observes something.  Then they think about it.  Then they try to explain the why and how of it.  (scratches head)  I have an example.

LLAM:  Okay.

ROY:  For we mortals, when we stand on the earth it appears flat.  Even in the mountains, it just goes on a certain distance to the horizon.  Then there's the horizon.  Many people in the past said with reasonable certainty that the world was flat and that it had an edge.  If you walked to the edge you could see whatever was below and beyond.

LLAM:  I suppose that many people tried to do that.

ROY:  Many people said that they'd actually done it, but that was fabrication.  Early on it was noticed that the horizon was circular and that the sky overhead was like a dome.  Those who noticed that were able to deduce that the earth must be round, globular.  The proof came in watching ships come into harbor among other things.

LLAM:  This is what is called the 'empirical' method, correct?  Sound deduction from close observation.  And thus we have the beginning of science proper long ago in mortal human culture.  I can add another.  Eat this plant and get sick; eat that plant and be nourished; eat the other plant and get high.  But this was gathering of facts, pretty much, based upon practical experience.

ROY:  Yeah, that's the basics.  Of course the explanations as to why certain plants made you sick, or why the world was round were pretty fancy and divorced from what was later discovered.

LLAM:  I recall very long ago, some of your human ancestors thinking that plants that got you sick or killed you had evil spirits or angry ancestors in them.  You all were living in a world where everything was animate in some way.  Or you thought it was all animate.

ROY:  Everything is animate after a fashion.

LLAM:  That is not a scientific statement.

ROY:  "After a fashion."

LLAM:  That's fudge.

ROY:  (glares at Llam)  Everything has an awareness.

LLAM:  That's different.  But that's not scientific either.

ROY:  It is the sum total of my experience.

LLAM:  It's mine as well, but it's not scientific.

ROY:  (long pause)......right.  You're right.  I can say it, it's my experience, but I can't demonstrate it and others can't have my experience.  I have no method, no experiment which others can do to have the same experience.  And in that regard, you're right, they aren't scientific statements.

LLAM:  I gather that you would need some sort of detection device to see if, say, a rock was animate, or aware.  At the very least, anyway.  You'd need an idea of what the rock was aware of, or in what way it was animate.

ROY:  Well, you just described a part of scientific method.  Theory.

LLAM:  (smiling)  And we have plenty of theories here at Outlands, don't we?

ROY:  (laughs)  Yup!  And many of them aren't really scientific either!

LLAM:  I know, I know!  (laughing)  But can they ever be scientific theories?  Not only our thing about rocks, but, say, consciousness?  (looks up from computer screen to whoever is reading this)  If you're not aware of it, we have a theory, which I think is valid, that consciousness does not reside in the mortal human brain, that it just uses it.  Normally human consciousness is in the larger ethereal universe.  But it's not scientific because it can't be demonstrated.

ROY:  (looks at readers)  At the same time it explains things like Multiple Personality.....Disorder - gawd, I hate that word - and maybe schizophrenia.  But that's the "tiger explanation."

LLAM:  Beg pardon?  (looks back at Roy)

ROY:  (looks at Llam) This guy is walking down the street and sees a fellow snapping his fingers very loudly.  He goes up to the snapper and asks, "What are you doing?"  The snapper replies, "As long as I stand here and snap my fingers, this street is safe from tigers."  The first guy asks, "How do you know that?"  The snapper asks, "Do you see any tigers around here?"

LLAM:  (cracks up laughing)  (after a pause, looks back out at readers)  Hey!  That was funny!  Laugh a little!  (looks back to Roy)  How could that be demonstrated?

ROY:  Any demonstration would be a far stretch.  I mean, way the hell out there.

LLAM:  Are you stalling to think of a good one, or do you actually have something in mind?

ROY:  I do have something in mind. You'd need someone who was very good at out-of-body.  Out-of-body isn't accepted as a scientific fact by and large, but that would be the first thing.  Second, you'd need three or four people like myself who can channel.  That isn't generally accepted by the scientific world either.

LLAM:  Are you thinking of Susan Blackmore?

ROY:  Among others, yes.  Bu the experiment would work like this.  Someone - not the out-of-body person, not the channelers, would write something down and seal it in an envelope.  The out-of-body person would open the envelope, read what was written there and then give it back to the writer.  Then the astral traveller would leave for a bit and make contact with the channelers, one after the other.  The message would be passed to the channelers, who would report to the person that wrote the secret message.  Even one channeler getting the message right would be a large problem for many people.

LLAM:  So, are you going to give a secret message to Professor Blackmore?

ROY:  LLAM!

LLAM:  (cracks up laughing)

ROY:  So I like her hair, so what?

LLAM:  (still laughing)

ROY:  And I think she's cute, so what?

LLAM: (still laughing)  You mortals!  Oh, how hard was that?

ROY:  Everybody knows that!

LLAM:  Everybody HERE knows that!

ROY:  (snorts, looks up at readers)  See what I have to put up with?  (looks back at Llam)  Okaaaaaay, Big Blue.  That would be a scientific experiment.

LLAM:  (regaining composure)  Yes.....yes, it would.  When are you going to try it?

ROY:  Huh?

LLAM:  Have some of the Members and Associates write down a sentence or phrase and e-mail the phrase to others.  You visit those others and find out what the message is, then report it back to the people who wrote them.

ROY:  (very quiet)

LLAM:  (looks up at readers)  See what I have to put up with?  My mortal steward, who normally is pretty smart, gets dumb sometimes.  (looks back at Roy)  Well?

ROY:  Uhhhhh, yeah.  I'll work on that later.

LLAM:  Good!  Now that we've had them read this far, what is it that is pissing you off about string theory?

ROY:  It's not science but its practitioners say that it is.