Chapter 1: Suicide Rates

An “​ ART(HUR)​NEU​FORM”©​ Project

e-Book No. 1

————

“Mirrors of Self”
(Where the Bleep! is 21st Century Life Headed?)

* Best read with an Exploratory Reading App for textual references

Chapter One

Soaring Suicide Rates in the 21st Century!

“Why?”

Before I tell you who I am (and I’m not who you might think – unless you’ve already been introduced, or choose to review my Creative Manifesto as the final chapter of this e-Book – as Overture, before continuing your current read), those of you who might remember our overarching fear of atomic warfare as children of ten or so – during the Cold War – between Soviet and other Communist states, and the Western Alliance countries; the encourages to radioactive fallout bunkers stocked for survival in our backyards; the uncertainty of our individual young futures – the belief, or feeling, as if we’d live forever and ever, as we do when we are young, our delusional right, yet in our case, expectation of premature death, a sad possible reality for us all then – might find it nauseating to know, that in Budapest, Hungary, in 2001, some quarter of a century ‘later’, a Post-Communist state at the time of my visit, a theme park of Disneyland icons (enormous, gargantuan, almost three storeys high, sculptured human men, women and children, in formidable metal; squarely determined, resolute in their unerring commitment to building reality, to create ever more powerful temples) edifying their Belief in Communism – exists! This horrific Cold War shadow, this terrifying reality for me as child and youth, diluting the joy of my natural development into the man, Arthur Neuform, – Now – , an Entertainment Park!?

“What perverse parallel universe might I be dreaming into reality?”, was my first thought; “It can’t possibly be true! It begs all logic and common sense!”, my second. To live a life in terror, while beautifully green as fresh rice shoots, planted in tranquil, meandering paddies, along gentle hills of water-filled steps of fertility, – mirroring mud – , rich in bounty, the nutrients from the ravages of monsoon rains, as skyfall deluge (I witnessed), gathering abundant, mountain mineral storage, for seeding Health and Wellbeing : the greatest weather system on Earth, cascading like breast milk upon her open-mouthed people, their gratitude reflecting the nourishing water in colourful powders of mystical Hindu meaning; as with my rainbow nation of origin, in my World travels, all over, including India, as prayers of thanksgiving to the beneficent gods. The shadow I experienced in my homeland, South Africa, in the 1970s – Africa, the genitals of the gazelle kill; the two sparring dogs – tearing our continent home down our middle – during the Cold War decades, contradicting everything natural or healthy, I Now know. It was my first recollection, as personal independent experience, of Self-Aware Being – at ten.

And I was terrified!

At its essential insanity! True insanity!

When I was young, the stories of Communist States, such as the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics overseen from Moscow, or the Chinese version, from Beijing, at the time, attempted to create an ideal place to live in the 20th Century. No different from a Papal driven Christian state in European history, centuries previously; ‘later’, Christianity’s worldwide, pointless, colonial spawning, and blind destruction of native culture in the name of saving ‘souls’ – still active as You Now read! Or Nazi (obvious to any reason) suicidal efforts, in their unfettered, blind pursuit of Lebensraum! Or Islam, and its warring positions, both internal to its constructs, and needless to say, with almost every belief system in existence. And many, many other constructed, pointlessly resolute, notions of Ideal Being, in Humankind’s relatively short presence on our ever changing, vulnerable, Biosphere, – Spaceship, “Earth”! Sharing our sacred point in Spacetime (the presence of Self-Aware, Sapient Life, very brief in our Universe’s trajectory – as the charismatic rock star of my youth, Now equally influential in contemporary millennial popular culture, as (astro-) physicist, Professor Brian Cox, of Manchester University – warns) with microbes, living contentedly in glacial ice crystals, or our digestive tracts, our hair and skin, or boiling geysers, or in living rocks, or crushing oceanic trenches atmospheres dense (to name but a few of their ubiquitous ecosystems), for many more billions of years than our own species, – Homo Sapiens – , on our interdependent planet.

Our shared World.

Humans dogmatically screaming attempted Truths for Living a Life of Wellbeing, as Natural Social Engineer, and Deliberate Creative – unlike the instinctual earthworm, virus or butterfly – Communism, intentionally! murdering some 94 million people in the 20th century by latest counts! In the Name of Belief! Think about that! – 94 000 000! other humans. People just like You & I. Nazism, 6 000 000! in death camps, and other places of active, deliberate, intentional genocide, during WWII, in The Name of Belief; its legacy visited too by me, in the same year, in Poland – Auschwitz! Both sites, Now theme parks for tourists, or muses for artists and intellectuals across the world, inspiring meditations of visitation of culpable cruelty upon one another; looping floors of blind alleys, sloping mirrors sliding the viewer’s sensibility to somehow experience the pain of an Auschwitz torture victim in other memorials, in other countries (lest we forget, I’m told), the visual icons of our mysterious cruelty! The Auschwitz site, less than a tourist day trip from central, 21st Century, Warsaw, and hot on the tourist agenda…

In the previous six decades prior to 2000 AD, our fresh century,
The New Millennium,
– 100 000 000 people – ,
100 million fellow human beings! deliberately, intentionally murdered, (using factory, mass production methods) by other people…
All in the Name of Belief !
(and a very conservative count at that!)

To what end?

Yes, let’s remember to never recreate that insane world again – that goes without saying, logically speaking, but let’s also explore reality : its natural, mortal pain and suffering, and its Infinity of Creative Constructive Solutions! Or we might well be pulled into a Sociogenic Repetition Compulsion, akin to Freud’s notion of the Personal Unconscious – constructing, unwittingly, the same narratives, and related subject positions : our ethology hasn’t changed. We still have the identical neurological substrate; the limbic system, which includes the deeper subcortex of the ancient dinosaur or reptilian cortex, is a more highly developed part of the instinctual, primitive mammalian brain. They are both still highly integrated, and work as one synaptically similar unit – neurally quite different from the neocortex or neomammalian brain. Together, the dinosaur and primitive mammalian brain or limbic system, is referred to in my writing as the Proto-Reptilian Cortex, or Limbic System, or simply the Proto-Cortex, and even the Dino brain, given their autonomous synaptic variation from the neocortex, and their highly integrated, ‘instinctual hardware’ – with its hardwired instinctual programme – relative to the tremendous plasticity and learning ability of the neocortex. This neuropsychology reality is a primary conceptualization in my current interventionist project. Typically the whole lower brain unit is referred in the neurological literature as the protocortex, lizard brain, dinosaur brain, proto-reptilian brain, limbic system, etc.. In short, our ethologically driven hardwiring through neurological evolutionary process, sits unmoving – still as the day it took form in the hissing dinosaurs and later, together with the original dino brains, a new layer formed in the caring, but frightened little early mammals living in burrows beneath their enormous physical domination of our planet during the Proto-Reptilian era before their mass extinction, allowing the little underground mammals an opportunity to evolve into modern humans, eventually.Yet this protocortex lies like an undetonated thermo-nuclear warhead beneath our helmet of neo-cortex : the Proto-Reptilian Cortex below; the Neo-Mammalian lobes above : two very differently wired neural, synaptic systems in the same head! And Sigmund Freud, a brilliant neurologist, his explanations of the Repetition Compulsion based on the interaction of the Physiology, the hardware, and related software, Discourse, of the human brain : to coin an inaccurate, for the time being, limited computing analogy, but nevertheless, 21st Century metaphor, to which we all relate – for our Self-Aware, Sapient Being. Freud and Carl Sagan both identified the disjunction of these two cortical neural brain systems as creating instinctual responses that were repetitive in nature due to their hardwiring as ethologically driven and interwoven with early experiential, developmental influences, in any individual human’s life; as social animals – our deeply wired instinctual psychology – our inherited ethology, or primitive, instinct driven group psychology – is our primary behavioural driver as human beings given our distinctive ‘two brains within one head’ neuropsychological reality. True at the sociological level, by definition, this repetition reality potentially dissolves evolutionary shifts in behaviour by humans, individually or as group – limiting ideas for Self Construction, for moving into varying, new personal/group subject positions – running on the spot, or trotter at gym – going nowhere…

Believing that evolutionary movement is occurring, though
—–
Blindly !
—–
moving
to
Nowhere…
(Suicide might seem appealing, under these circumstances)

Perhaps that’s why suicidality is increasing exponentially in the 21st Century? Perhaps, because human being is less warring than previously in history at the national level, people naturally move to a deeply wired expectation of danger? A natural hypervigilance unnecessary, and sadly, transmuting into depression and anxiety, an ethological afterbirth, in a population without life purpose – with no tribal enemy. The evolutionary expectation of danger lurking in the mundane meaninglessness of being better off, on the whole, in terms of world history – too much peace and abundance, a shopping mall away; their unconscious subject position, limited by this unaware, ethologically driven, ancient narrative, or discourse, determined by our dinosaur inherited limbic systems.

Our inner neurological being : T- Rex!

Explaining the relaxation choices of many people in the New Millennium – movies, series, documentaries, books, comics, gaming, and so forth… Reflect for a moment : what subject matter do many people choose as relaxation from the endless entertainment deliveries? They wouldn’t be created if there were no market!

Especially when relative social comparison (eg, economic and personal identity), our software, our ‘programmatic language’, as ‘talking-mammals’, our semiotics of Self, is strongly correlated with both the most common psychiatric predictors of suicide – anxiety and depression. Their increase across age groups, including the very young, rising exponentially, in these first two decades of the 21st Century .

WHY?

Surely, if social comparison, and loss of life purpose, are its central, interwoven causes, – as tenuous epidemiological research into the suicide pandemic presently suggests (refer related documents in the Appendix of this e-Book) – ,

We
must ask ourselves,
if
coherent, centered Selfhood,
could rely on a range of New Subject Positions
:
within
New
Social Narratives (Discourse), creating
New
Mirrors of Self?
(New Semiotic Software?)
or
(Neural Art of Self)* for Individuals…
Beyond those that form ethos of suicidal identity?
*refer Overture: Creative (Artistic) Manifesto

Wider options for Self Construction are clearly required to break this tautology – ethologically driven thinking leading to Nowhere, but the same endless trotter, or both social and hence, personal, repetition compulsion. To which Magritte’s famous painting, “The Treachery of Images (Ceci n’est pas une pipe)”, represented in IMAGE 1 below, testifies – conceptually.

We need to, perhaps,
step out of this endless conceptual entrapment? Through deliberate intent!

IMAGE 1 – “THIS IS NOT A PIPE.” (French to English translation)

Life Purpose in all its infinity of forms, positively correlating powerfully with Life Happiness, and equally so, negatively with Life Misery (psychiatric anxiety and depression) – as reported in the World Happiness Report 2017​. Suicidality, directly with the latter, as mentioned, and well worth restating, as the most common New Millennium causes.

How might we intentionally sharpen the facts of our True Being – attempt to creatively engineer a Golden Age of Selfhood? For Meaningful Individual Purpose? Comparison Relative, healthy social and personal identities infinite….

Why not?

If we’re not to do the job, who will? Unless human being cannot surmount and transcend evolutionary limitations – as warring, self-destructive, our respective tribal relativity, a deeply planted ethology controlling our happiness and Wellbeing, when the possibilities for creating a Selfhood of Wellbeing, is limited only by the Unconsciousness of our socially constructed heritages, and those that exist by neuro-biological evolution, our neurological substrate to these historical heritages – both our ‘software’ and ‘hardware’ (though ‘wetware’, a more accurate semantic for our brain’s malleability, sculpted, in great part, through semiotic neurological processing), for each of us, right Now? Created Neural Artwork; for Human Wellbeing.

It’s our choice!

We’re the one animal
on our planet
that can really choose
to create our own neurology… as
Art of Self.

I wonder what the nature and experience of a
Golden Age for Humanity
might be ?

This e-Book ponders this question, to understand where the 21st Century is headed; our question – requiring less finding the answers, than the Creation thereof : You, the reader, together with me.

For Now,
let’s look into
My Personal Life :
thereby,
unpacking
the constructs
that brought me
to this point of questioning…

(It’s especially relevant, if we’re to mutually dialogue, logically…)

My earliest sense of personal malcontent, a sense of “Dead-End”, was the described Nuclear Horror – when a child, and Now, into manhood, haunting me still, though for different reasons; an imprinted memory stain on my Program of Being. Wired into my brain’s neocortex, the left (especially, but not always, and may shift following neurological injury, to other parts of the neocortex – performing the same tasks, even during adulthood) and right temporal lobes – the sites of language production, comprehension, and speech (semantic and prosody); and the primary memory centre fraught with wired, wetware emotional drives – our dinosaur neurological heritage, the hippocampus and interrelated limbic system, channelled through neocortical discursive structures for recursive, though disguised as variable delivery – through Discourse : the same body, in different clothes, over and over again, with no Self-Aware Realization of this fact. Many of us living Now endured this reality of Nuclear Holocaust – most, sadly, as innocent children. Being informed, we had a sense of a very dubious future. It appears that many people still feel this way – but for different reasons. A persistent, recurring discursive storyline, or social narrative :

The End of the World!

Television expounds how our World could end in a slew of asteroids or comets; toxic gamma-ray bursts from light years distant exploding mega-stars; wandering black holes; super-volcanoes, all triggers igniting the other, potentially; the reversal of the magnetosphere, and in its episodic, seemingly random reorientation, exposing us to the disastrous radiation of our Sun; pandemic incurable disease, the result of misuse of antibiotics and other medicines, or simply killer diseases; the demise of bees and related pollinating insects; superflares from the sun, short circuiting all electrical production and generated machinery, creating worldwide chaos in computer information corruption, deletion, and real effect on water and sanitation, and almost every electronic dependent object, such as elevators, parking garages, banking and other financial systems, locomotive vehicles, transportation systems, and so forth; possible thermonuclear war with adversarial nations; the greenhouse gas effect, from burning fossil fuels, livestock methane overproduction through digestive process, their combined emissions possibly resulting in Earth warming, and, relatedly, rising sea levels and catastrophic oceanic and weather patterns; deforestation and oxygen supply; pollutants affecting algae bloom and subsequent oceanic life depletion, tampering with the careful balance of global oxygenation production; overfishing with similar food chain implications; interruptions to the crucial conveyer belt of nutrient revitalizataliation through interactive warm and cold water currents, the ocean’s powerful unseen global ‘rivers’; starvation, as a function of all these factors; freshwater depletion, as a catastrophe of its own; human overpopulation; endless conspiracy theories – thick with malevolent, greedy financiers, corrupting our food, our governments, our education, our minds through brainwashing via media and endless other means, creating war for profit, to ever strengthen their stranglehold over us, the helpless masses; and our latest – very earnest concern – run-away programming by advanced Artificial Intelligence (non-Conscious, or Sapient, presently; so excluded within the scope of my project – refer my Manifesto) blindly following highly complexly interactive programming directives, creating – non-consciously – possible human societal demise, or simply subsuming humanity’s meagre cognitive aptitude, and overpowering humankind into servitude; and, no doubt, many more!

PLEASE WRITE ANY NOTES
ON OTHER CAUSES OF POTENTIAL GLOBAL CATASTROPHE IN THE SPACE BELOW.
I MAY WELL HAVE MISSED A FEW?

Your Notes:

We, – as 21st Century people – , are exposed to these doomsday stories every day. As did I, in the 1970s : even our schooling provided lessons in which possible evacuation procedures and potential survival might be met by us children during nuclear war, unlike some helpless person on the two opposite factions of the missile fireworks extravaganza – Africa in the middle – a Symphony of Fire of epic proportion! At Sunday School too – a moderate Anglican child simply following family tradition; not only endless talk of ‘the end of days’, the Rapture (even Now heard from highly educated people I meet, truly believing we have entered the period predicted as The End of Days, in the Christian Book of Revelations, explaining suicidality as Satanic, for instance), but also informed of smuggled Bibles to the Godless Russians. On the radio: echoes from the ‘Commies’ chamber of terror in neighbouring African countries – the first and second worlds’ fight for ideas of doctrine in the third world, just above my head at night, – on my tiny, rectangular, transistor radio – , a cherished birthday gift from my parents, before television arrived at around twelve years old, in South Africa, to elucidate these terrors – in Technicolor!

Besmirching the light green grass, growing high in African summer, to play its tickling, protective part in fort construction – my hidden strongholds, transmuting steadily into the waving blonde stalks of winter through the seasons between, providing – safety – , should They come; to the very top of the hill, though closer to a mountain in height; not an easy climb, a very high, long hill, named, unsurprisingly, Long Hill. I’d hear myself panting the rhythm of my desperate efforts to the words : “You must! you must! you must! climb to the very top!” (its high summit, always somehow appearing nearer than in actuality) … to take in the panoramic view of Bongola dam, on the other side – a lookout post – on my own, or with neighbourhood children, when I was ten.

I would gaze at the small stretch of mirroring water – greens, blues, browns in transient, ephemeral fancy, reflecting the ever-changing light and seasons of the environmental surrounds; where we’d have pretty family picnics and swims, shadowed among, and underscored by, the high, dusty pine trees, black and dirty green, their bases filled with dead hand grenades of sandy, old, black, seedless cones, which we’d whirl in effortful sling into the darkness as the sun set over Long Hill. It was still bright there – long shadows here; unprotected by my forts of clay and rock and piled stones under hardy African mountain shrub, and bales of long, light-green grass turned straw-blonde, camouflaging my curling hair (just short enough to pass as school appropriate during sporadic inspection.).

As the day’s games wore on, and our play area contracted like the fabric of spacetime predicted and demonstrating Gravity by General Relativity – in the space between the water and our parents’ chatter in the gaslight – we’d hear, then watch, the pine cone grenades break the dammed-waters with an eerie echo, though too dark to properly see…, only the faintest ripples returning to shore, with late twilight reflections of rainbow-black oil slick – from the speedboats growling earlier in the day across its impulsive, pompous puffs of cumulonimbus reflected extravagance, into cloud-busts (an endless theatre of giants and beasts and castles and kings for us to share), etched against deep-blue, sky-mirrored waters, like four dimensional Rorschach Inkblots in perpetual motion; cut through by mercurial liquid tracks – single or double – beneath rubber-clad waterskiers resembling alien visitors as seen at our town’s one cinema, the Saturday children’s show, our bi-weekly treat; leading to a steep, triangular ramp floating in the middle of the dam – into high acrobatics, sometimes to complex tumbling, landing on the opposite side, skies intact – still for a moment – before streaks of water split again beneath their continuing glide across the already smoothing surface of the speed boat’s wake – as did I, in gymnastics training (my favourite sport), during the hot, Sun-radiant, African day. Even then, midst all my joy and strength and loving family and friends, “Having it all!”, as they say…

I remember, quite distinctly, asking myself at ten:

“Why bother to be?
Death lurks so very close.
There are shadows everywhere”.

Virginia Woolf poses the same questions, as an adult, while the Hun made tribal war rumblings in the 1930/40s – felt like a sonogram through her sensitive cells in her English home across the sea, and written in her diaries and novel masterpieces, ​The Waves​ (my favourite), but especially, ​Between the Acts;​ like the heavy stompings of male elephant in rut, throbbing for kilometers in the African game reserves our family frequented; or the songs of whales, their otherworldly, ethereal sound-waves spilling thousands of leagues across our deep, forbidding oceans; fringed for me with happy holiday memories of curling straw-blonde hair, ever longer during holidays, ever more golden : ever richer, ever more incandescent in the twilight of childhood, as the salt and Sun set about their magical, transformative alchemy on my person, on my mountain, or the basking warmth of our curling oceans surrounding the lateral half-oval of our heart-beating continent home, Africa. The colder Atlantic to the West; the warmer Indian to the East – richest of all oceans, sustaining the streamlined perfection of blue whales, largest of any creature, ever! to exist on our Earth, living on nothing more than krill and copepods, tiny creatures immersed in complex symbiosis with the dense plankton bloom, nourished, in turn, by the powerful nutrient rivers, merging refreshed waters with the sodium, gold and other mineral dilutions of our primordial ocean cocoon; the revered Ganges, the greatest contributor, replenishing ocean minerals through the enriching Indian monsoon. White, icy nothingness to our South – only stretches of unknown ocean, dotted with killer-icebergs (sinking the unsinkable, we were warned in history class) – to frozen Antarctica. Those deadly “Others!” to the North!

This Golden Time, at potential risk, always. Vanishing forever – in the Commie crossfire, the joys of attachment and care. Perhaps all literature, or profound consideration, dabbles with this question? The vagaries of attachment and loss, in all its formidable forms, provides spectacular literary, artistic or psychic tension, or any other possible human being ‘storyline’ – as it mirrors mortal life : our essence as Sapient, Self-Aware Being : our inevitable demise! a strange existential paradox, as we struggle through our lifespans :

or perhaps not… (?)

In this e-Book, Our e-Book, You, as always, my co-author, too – might investigate the complexity of 21st Century Being : towards the Active Creation of Our Mutual Wellbeing; dabbling with possible responses to these disturbing existential, yet eternally relevant questions, as Sapient Beings.

Let’s continue our dabble together,
Now!
Into our memories of the stories that wrote our Time – as preadolescents. These stories are with us, still!
Consciously, or not?
Useful, or not?
They require explication:
if implicit, or forgotten – like old landmines! they will return!
For good, or ill …

I remember riding my bicycle along bushveld paths as if it could be my last. I was reasonably healthily parented and happy, not more than the strong oak that shaded our family swimming pool, nor less than my parents’ thoughtless yells and bickering, yet loved, and by all comparison, – safe – , as the certainty of our swimming pool’s sensual, liquid refreshment; the construction of which I witnessed, with held breath of absolute involvement, mesmerized, by the swimming hole’s excavation on the lawn where we’d play knights and dragons; carving carefully hewn, long wooden swords at my father’s parking garage workbench (a separate, simple building from our modest four bedroom suburban bungalow home), decorating them with enchanted patterns for magical powers, along with their exotic names, followed by endless hours of swimming towel-capes and rivalrous battles between myself and neighbourhood boys – as my scowling, pouting younger sister, the princess, squinted into the Sun’s glare at the promise of a tiny, glowing, silver five cent coin as forfeit by the loser; our games, modelled off our wide-eyed fascination, as the ‘Siegfried’ Scandinavia epic saga unrolled its enormous celluloid imprints at the local drive-in theatre – our unpredictable Friday night outing; the chance leaf that prevented Siegfried’s slain dragon’s blood protection, his point of mortality, just beneath his shoulder blade, allowing the pierce that ended his glorious life – intrigued me : none of us was ever safe!

Death was inevitable!

Once the swimming pool hole was emptied of its rough soil, to carefully stipulated graphic design from the catalogue we’d poured over as family, and a non-stop topic of conversation with neighbours, friends, grandparents, and so on, for what felt to be years – finally, the wet concrete blasted from a powerful jet of flexible piping between the raw earth and iron lattice armature from a hellishly noisy, concrete mixing locomotive, roaring black smoke into the crisp, early morning winter air, during our mid-year break from school – as always, carefully timed by my “organized” (often, a little too, “organized”) parents; then once dry, smoothed with watertight coating of dazzling white plaster, implanted with varied-blue mosaic squares, a red or white one dotted here and there – like precious glass – on the pool’s wide steps and waterline rim, its edges elegantly finished with hard-lipped, fresh-white, non-slip tiles; the entire swimming machine, reflecting David Hockney painted patterns of darkest to lightest blues to flashing palettes of still-white splashes; its waters always absorbing the ever present Sun, in its endless wanderings across the dome of sky above; the spotlight from its deep-end at night, spreading undulating ripples as cool interwoven moving patterns, strings of blue-blacks, seamlessly merging scoops of cream from its floor to silver-white flashes off the otherwise invisible surface, turning dark as the reflected sky above (opaque just for blink), but enduringly etched through with dashes of rough markings – slight ink smudges – beautiful texturing the entire bowl’s imperfections, hidden in the curved deep by day, flattening into the shallows leading to the series of widening, parabola-shaped steps – a liquid rendition of William Kentridge’s (my fellow South African, by birth, upbringing and ‘later’ adult social circles) use of smudge-textured lights and darks in his flying charcoal video montages on fresh white surfaces created as one of many of his artistic visual deliveries, as projected backdrop, for contemporary dancers and singers on an international spotlight stage; at night, especially, the pool resembled an enormous, inverted moonstone, its curvaceous form shot through with blue whispers, wordless joys twinkling within the fluid stone; the natural, reflected refractions, a range of blacks to greys to silvers and aquamarines, with the slightest flash of lightning white and ruby-reds, eternally shifting forms – a multi-toned, shadowed kaleidoscope of moving Hindu forms with multiple limbs and heads and torsos, embodiments of many more of us, – yet existing simultaneously – , as a multitude of shadow-dancers, from darkest through to palest lemon-blue-greys in the swimming pool’s spotlight, as we swam naked as a family on warm nights : my mother and younger sister braving the fresh, night water of early summer from the shallow end, walking on tiptoe until the deep end swallowed – for a moment – both mum’s breath and almost her entire person, but for the buoyancy of her dainty breast-stroke, not to collapse her weekly salon hair tease; my little sister, kicking in brave spurts of effortful gasps from one side of the shallow end to the safety of the large stepped area, doubling as a children’s play pool; while my younger brother, second eldest by two and a half years, and again he in relation to my sister, together with my father and myself, would show off our diving skills – mine, the famous back dive, with outstretched arms like the swallows arriving assiduously each summer, harbingers of our swimming pool joy, and us all, ‘bomb-blasting’ (a body-ball of arm-wrapped shins), smashing the molecular bonds of the clearest water, pumped clean by the water filter. Keeping the pool spotlessly clean – my father’s bette noir; a weekly chemical feed, pump maintenance, meticulously cared for by him and myself, as eldest, with that long pole (and its deceptive refractions of ever-altering, breaking-lengths – like multiversal decoherence in the flow of spacetime) keeping me busy for hours (not always happily!); removing every leaf from the autumn oak to prevent leaf-fall into the waters beneath – I’d be instructed to climb to its very extents, or to add them to the vacuum brush once fallen unpicked; meticulously clearing the deliberate iconography of a Matisse-duChamp cooperative masterpiece of 1970s visual grammatical form to perfection – our beloved swimming pool.

It’s chlorinated chemistry, and the godlike presence of the Sun, turning my golden hair more so, and my body golden-brown, as with my rivalrous, athletic brother, and our family and friends, drawn as iron filings to a wild magnet – in scattered arrays of swimming costumes, sculptured bodies, as diverse as galaxy clusters, spinning to vinyl jazz recordings of Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong, midst chatter, outbursts, bomb-blasts, wails, somersaults, applause, screams, splashes, shouts, guffaws, swallow dives, nose-held jumps, and rattled laughter – threaded through with the enduring scent of fresh meat ‘braaing’ (barbecuing) suffused with honeysuckle or jasmine flowers from thick, hanging locks of leaf and petal against the neighbour’s wall; the stone braai-area enclosed in a distant corner, – for safety – , a few metres from the tumbling, photosynthesising leaves and pungent flowers, framing the swinging couch a pace or two from the outer shade of the oak tree, canopied for my paternal grandmother; who read her grandchildren stories, many, many stories, and more stories, or simply the telling of stories from her Library of Life, or her thoughts or interests – always; informing me of Dr Spock, the child development guru of the day, when I was eight or nine, speaking naive but profound Philosophy and Psychology to me, her ferociously curious, eldest grandchild – her friend and mutual confidant in our mutual difference, or ‘otherness’; mine by interminable, precocious questioning, hers by age – both with Love. The deepest of all my Loves – ever! (Except for Stephanie).

As swimming became a dreaming haze of natural naivety, an unconscious boyish mastery, I’d forget where I was, and somehow whirl a thought as if from dust or vapour – from nowhere. It would spontaneously conjure itself while swimming lengths of the pool, for as far as possible underwater, repeated lengths – one, two, three, four, four and a half, almost five, almost five, then six, seven, eight and a half, but never more than almost ten – before gasping for breath like a surfacing whale calf; or lying on the gigantic black, inner tyre tubing for large motor vehicles – its thick rubber skin, rendering complex sensations, burning deliciously, the heat becoming hotter and hotter above the refreshing dazzle of blue beneath, into which I’d plummet, by collapsed falling through its centre – once the exact temperature for a perfect pairing of cooling water and near painful skin was reached – reviving in an instant of delight, to remember that ever haunting spectre of the doomsday question.

In my time, at that then that is Now – the Cold War Nuclear Threat! My joy, like a random splash of a possible newborn star, an ejected blob of plasma from the black holes spinning, – Hawking Radiation – , at the centre of galaxies. Ours too. In many billions of years, when that then is also Now, once our Sun has burned itself out, the Andromeda and Milky Way galaxies’ pivots to their stars, – their black holes – , will converge to form a super-galaxy. Both the Sun’s fated destiny, and our galaxy’s (if no other, unknown, at present, or unpredictable, cosmological phenomena, alter these present trajectories), will occur. As a sapient species, we will inevitably continue to slowly evolve, if we transcend our limbic system drives, and don’t destroy ourselves; we do belong somewhere else, besides Earth, ultimately – perhaps many places, among many star systems, if we choose. Humankind will be terminated if not. It’s simply so. Our form would necessarily adapt to new environments, altering always. By deliberate choice! Not arbitrary evolution. Who might we then become?

‘Homo Eternis’?

Perhaps another reason for doomsday stories – cosmological protection, anticipation programmed into our genetic material forged from amino acids, the building blocks of DNA & RNA, likely forming in the conditions of our very early Universe. My Creative Manifesto’s Telos – certainly fulfilled here, as a potent Psychological Wellbeing narrative, filled to brimming with healthy subject positions. Though not the destructive storyline, discourse or narrative, semiotic, or what you will, under consideration from my fledgling years – the Cold War Nuclear Horror. That was (is) insane! The insanity that lurks in the true shadows of our canine teeth driven ethology! We’d not have the brain we do, if it were not for our carnivorous nature – the processing of simple proteins into the cellular superstructure of our bio-neurological system. Now our neurology – its Physiology – is constructed, we no longer need to resort to evolutionary savagery to become an alpha protein predator. Perhaps this is intended by evolution? Savagery, but a stepping stone? Part of our evolutionary ‘programme’? Though still played by children, by nature; Now we’re all grown up, how do we outgrow this neurobiological underlay? The allied tribalism of competition, of social comparison, as primitive, warring human – the most wittingly savage surviving, as life purpose and meaning? This is a dangerous underlay; Now we’ve mastered the power of the stars in nuclear energy stations, and thermonuclear warheads, and created AI augmentations, or enemies – enormous robots, or those laced within the tiny folds of our little more than a hand-sized brain, providing superhuman strengths, or equally real – supreme demise!

That burning question!
Its gruesome glow, like eyes in a dangerous African bushveld wilderness, lost alone in terrifying nightmare,
during deep, – unwakeable – , slow wave sleep….

For me, then… When would this mushroom cloud pulverise my eyes? my ears? sterilize my genitalia? and my body image flashed-bulbed as silhouetted photographic imprint from blinding radiation x-rays, somewhere on our protectively enclosed – family swimming pool complex – where we could swim refreshingly naked, on warm African nights?

The arabesque curves of the swimming pool, meandering beneath the oak and away from the street; its high fence of white-painted, sharpened wooden planks above the low, red-fired brick surrounding wall, encircling well-watered sprinklers, their fine drizzled fountains, further refreshing delight…, running through them squealing in turns – to paint the clipped lawn into the rich greens and reflected silver-whites, varied tints and tones, textured as our back-to-school haircuts, freshly shaven, the barber’s hummingbird clippers smoothing summer’s slow, steady transformation, its gentle, inevitable alchemy of folds, into learning in sweltering heat; followed by our before-homework splashes that reset the Sun’s pendulum temperature – just-right through late summer, to the storybook restraint of autumn and winter, and the pale luminescent pull of early springtime, and of course, it’s barely bearable blooming into the insect buzzing, flowering trumpets – of summer! summer! summer! summer! The enclosed, enchanted garden, edged always by perennial flowers, colourful as the powders I’d ‘later’ witness during the Indian monsoon thanksgiving ceremonies, or the rainbow arches stretching across the ring of high hills, ‘koppies’ (small, rocky hills or mounds) and mountains of this, my childhood town.

The brickwall, just high enough for the unexpected imprint of my boy-body in swimming trunks, or perhaps in blazer and school cap, as I readied myself for learning one relaxed morning, humming the latest Springbok Hit Parade song while ambling around the stillness of our pool, or in winter paisley pyjamas, on cloudless evenings, catching the last of the chilly twilight, or gazing at the mirror of stars in its ambient stillness before bedtime and hot-water bottles filled by my grandmother – in bed socks and winter dressing-gown – with a thick copy of ​The Faraway Tree​ as reading for us all on her feathered divan; which we’d all share, at any time of day or night, it seemed – my rival brother, my cherished little sister too, whom I’d bravely protect (to my utter surprise!?) if bullied; while waiting for all to snuggle, I’d pace about the mirror pool in my slippers, observe the thick cotton folds of my paisley reflection wobbling in the starlight like the undulations of cosmic waves still flowing freely through our Universe after 18.7 billion years, and suddenly remember:

“Doomsday! could arrive at any moment!”

All my young experience, in the 1970s, continuing colonial mirrors of our British settlement from 1820, in the Eastern Cape of Southern Africa, in the fertile land provided between the liferich Indian ocean, and the interior settled by our Dutch Colonial neighbours – ​Die Afrikaners​ – our ruling tribe from mid-20th Century, once Britain forfeited her sovereign rights, as the tribes of our World do – over and over and over again, through ethology-driven conflict. Our family, interestingly, absorbing Afrikaner tribalism from early on in our arrival to this Promised Land, away from equally tribal, classist Europe, our family primarily British, but our middle name for the eldest son – ‘Tylden’, of Dutch origin, from the tiny village by the same name, on cyber-maps if you look very, very closely; where, nearby, my ancestors initially cleared, turned, fertilized, seeded and harvested their land allotments, provided by the British monarchy; to extend the Empire upon which our Sun never set, the most extensive to date, in that then that is Now; before my paternal family traded in their land and lives as farmers – instead, relocating to thrive in Cape Town at the last century’s turn (where I Now live, relocating to this southern metropolis for completion of my first clinical internship, and after much national and global traveling and learning, eventually settling in Sea Point, among the odd rainbow, plentiful traffic lights, and raucous seagull cries).

I discovered many decades ‘later’, long after my playful upbringing with my Afrikaans cousins, the offspring of my maternal uncle’s wife – ​Auntie Betsie,​ upon visiting England, that my middle name was of Afrikaner descent. I may have felt differently when, at school, we learned that the first concentration camps were formulated by the Brutish British during the Anglo-Boer War at the turn of the 20th Century, killing thousands of Afrikaners. Periods of ongoing conflict still felt in my micro-sociology – in my Little World – the English South African versus the Afrikaner tribes; the Other boys. In my world, my father making it clear, that Apartheid was “wrong”, and mostly instilled by the Afrikaners – he role modelled by establishing the earliest mixed tribal, cooperative groupings, for all genotypes of South Africans, at both work and in charitable organization – ‘Round Table’ (after Anglo-Arthur, ironically). In this world – My World, Doomsday was seemingly far away… but not far enough, not far enough by any means in the 1970s – from

WMD!

I was obviously properly informed of this imminent shadow of possible Non-Being : deepening into irrational dust orbs on skewers kilometres high, plucking out Nature’s eyes – leaving bleeding holes, where no light penetrates or escapes. What I wasn’t taught, I independently absorbed. The Cold War was written and spoken about everywhere : in my parents’ magazines (which I began reading independently from seven or so), the ubiquitous radio news, peer conversations, newsreels before movies, the plots of movies at the drive-in car theatre, or cinema, or overheard while my parents and their friends conversed around the enormous round, white-painted, intricately meshed, metal table and chairs; filled to brimming with bowls of carefully prepared dishes on the bright yellow, fish patterned, plastic tablecloth, to match the comfortable, removable seat cushions, for lunches and light evening suppers beneath the oak, reaching much higher than the little Change Room – especially constructed with an extra bed and waist-high fridge, filled with colourful, refreshing bubbled cool-drinks and adult beverages; and on camping trips; or with my maternal or paternal grandparents, or other extended family members; at Sunday school; and, of course, at primary school, from teachers – everywhere!

I could not escape!

It was just a matter of time, before my round, crystal world, – My Bubble World – , would be decimated into ‘gazillions’ of atomic pieces.

GONE !

Gone!
Forever and ever…
My green & gold world,
splashed refreshingly cool
by the brilliant blue waters
of
Light & Love.

GONE !

I felt impotent, disillusioned and utterly confused. I – unfortunately, had comprehended the nub of this very possible reality! I spoke to adults I trusted, and they all answered: “We’ll have to wait and see? “ Years ‘later’ – we’re still waiting and seeing what North Korea, ham-fisted Donald Trump, and the other international players might choose to do!

It would be over a decade before Cold War damage-control decisions were issued, along with international proliferation and control protocols; though in reality, many decades even, much ‘later’, Now – when old intercontinental missiles lie rusty in their silos, crude wiring checked sporadically by yawning clerks in uniform; TV documentaries warning of scores of officials reporting uncertain missile counts and danger status, or debated last inspection updates on the subject of: “WHAT HAPPENED TO THOSE UNLAUNCHED MISSILES OF THE COLD WAR ?”… talking in frightened voices… about “rogue nations” still holding thermonuclear threat… to silent documentarians on TV programs, often watched by few, until more recently, when North Korea reawakened public awareness…; the pundits’ eyes wider than shallow concave fungi heads, growing to slow, grey deformation in forests of damp, rotting, gloom – the Arrow of Time, rolling indifferent as a nurse to her patients in the paediatric burn unit I witnessed in Johannesburg, the northern metropolis – where I was born and lived until my family relocated to my blissful boyhood Eastern Cape outpost, that little place, when I was four, with an hexagonal park at its epicentre, Queenstown – during my first round of psychotherapy training, returning to ‘Joburg’ when eleven, by train, and the first, of many times, that I would entirely forget my birthday.

This time in the flurry to a new life of corporate upward mobility in the far north of our country, from little Queenstown, – under Long Hill – , where I continued to build my forts; initiated in our homestead garden in Johannesburg, under a black-berry shrub woven into the grey-wired lozenges of our front garden fence, beside the garden gate, which I’d notoriously open to wander alone to the little shopping centre at the very end of our street, Hillcrest Avenue, Craighall Park – where the translucency of green leaves nursed my first remembered sense of autonomy, a vague but developmentally crucial sense; then moving ever wider…, to that high hill that was almost a mountain…., then further still, to the whole of Being, though seemingly closer, much closer, to progressively infinitesimally smaller, and smaller units, much smaller than even the nanometers inside my neurology…, as stones leaping across a perfect stretch of water, their silver-shadowed rings entire… stretching beyond the vanishing point… forever and ever… closer and closer and closer… yet embracing all, potentially, in their endless leaps, to One All Embracing Singularity of Enlightened Being:

“To where? I Now ask…”

At that time, in that then which is Now, maturity cooling the hot juices of birth and childhood to a slow bathe into adolescence – back to “corrupt” Johannesburg, I was warned by my local loved ones in little Queenstown; as daunting as knifing New York neighbourhoods, I’d heard through the dramatized FM radio programmes of “Squad Cars”, that “prowled the empty streets of night” in terrifying Hillbrow (‘later’, one of my university recreational stomping grounds), those tense episodes, in deep night, – on my little transistor radio – , tuned just audible, when I should have been sleeping, under the covers of my mother’s fresh linens. Affording me the world of the British colonial, with all its idiosyncratic constructs – from many a direct BBC programming, through to local productions, flavoured though, with a peculiar brand of South African-Britain, on the English radio channels – the ‘A’ Programme (for Anglo?) and bilingual (English-Afrikaans) Springbok Radio, both informative and entertaining – deep into the night.

Did (do) some of you experience these thoughts of nuclear holocaust during the Cold War era, or Now? Or consider the often neglected, but inevitable, ‘later’, worldwide killer, – Fallout – , once the swiftest lights have settled, and the long darkness begins? I witnessed an animated movie version of these horrors at nineteen, with one of my first girlfriends. I learned nothing new. Only that the much publicized detente and Cold War proliferation agreements might be untrustworthy. They were (are) dubious. These fears, again arose in 2001 and the years following 9-11, while traveling in the outer reaches of Thailand, near Myanmar, also on our travel agenda, but excluded South Africans upon our (Stephanie and myself) application for entry, due to Communist diplomatic variance with my country in 2001, and of course, the latest North Korean-South Korean, international squabbling. Perhaps your fears lay (lie) elsewhere?

PLEASE JOIN ME
– AND WRITE BELOW –
SOME OF YOUR KEY MEMORIES AND/OR THOUGHTS IN ANY OF THESE REGARDS:

Your Notes:

We need to check what remains unchecked on the balance sheets of our crumbling childhood Nirvana; those rusting nuclear missiles, for me; that quintessence of health and optimism, of Wellbeing, that Nirvana of Self that we must reclaim, removing the ephemeral sky-clouds from their pristine blue canvas, or embrace El Greco renditions, seeming to create that place that has all meaning – but no clear substance; only a Name:

“Wellbeing!”
(Somewhere! Sometime!)
Which Time?
When?
(I’d like to know; I’d like to dream in Peace….)

These earliest Stories of Self, our Mirrors of Self, are vague, misted over; the point of reclamation, their “Wellbeing”, restored, so brief in memory – a little beyond a nanosecond in duration! Beyond the speed of light in a vacuum… Yet feeling it as eons or millennia or centuries or decades or years, or just an incomprehensible, timeless singularity of , – “Now!” – , I’m told. If you do the math, this is our peculiar Nature; our Universe and its becoming, and our complex relative place within it, fraught with time dilation. This is True. Our illusion of a clockwork sequence of Time – delusional. There is only One Time : the ​then​ that is ‘Past’, the fleeting ‘Present’of​Now,​ andthe​then​thatis‘Future’:onlyanallembracing,inter-cohesive, inter-determining

Now!

Fortunately, we might be able to reclaim Our Time, the Now, of Wellbeing! Through New Mirrors of Self, New Narratives, through which we can retrieve our True Nature as Sapient Creatives : the Creation of that pristine place, where we all deserve to feel Eternity, when we are ten; carrying – That Now! – within us forever, and filling our Being with stories of solution, of healthy evolution – constructing health, through stories, discourses and subject positions of Wellbeing. Forever changing, changing, changing…, into the Then, that is only ever –

NOW !

What are You growing up believing to be your, Now? Is your square determination no different from those in the theme park in Budapest – thoughtlessly singular, though with best, simply unknowing, misguided intention, perhaps? Or possibly, as with us all, – once aware of our Conscious Self-Creation Knowledge – , that we might each comprise billions to possible infinities of interconnected corporeal individuals in a possible Multiverse of universes – each possibly with similarly interconnected Selves – like those multiple, refracted reflections of our bodies in our family swims conjured by our swimming pool spotlight? This multiple-self reality – I’m told, by influential contemporary physicists, holding high rights to hypotheses in Scientific Knowledge, in this early millennium – is certainly a possibility. The Multiple-Worlds Theory of Being, contemplates that we, as individuals, may exist in a complex reality of multiple-being, simultaneously, in many varied time and space dimensions – as the Electron is in all places at once, as is Light, across Spacetime, so are we humans, each of us individuals, many simultaneous individual lives being lived in that Now! : these cosmological compositional realities of light and electrons and other energetic, related quantum entities (the hypothesized Graviton, for instance – allowing complex, real-time coordination of our Multiple-Selves : all slightly different one from the other, I’m told), the very structure of our human biology and related survival environments : Our Territory, the Multiverse : we are by Nature multiple : by Nature infinite : by Nature capable of choice :

Infinite Choice!

The mathematical language of the New Physics illustrates well here : by multiplicity of cosmic experimental axioms evolving into many varied universal forms, at the sociological level, in light of this physiological metaphor, assumes that Communism should, and indeed – did and does Now, take like a species of variegated succulent, in some places, in its most amenable environments. This we know for sure! If inoffensive, why not? One size though does not fit all : Choice! is our most important differentiator for Creative Wellbeing in the 21st Century : to be Self Determined (but please don’t impose your way to your own Wellbeing; it may well not be ours. Even democracy?).

CHOICE !

Responsible, Unfettered Choice,
is the
middle name
of all
Socio-Psychological Wellbeing
in the
Here & Now!
:
21st Century Wellbeing
is
CHOICE !*

*IMPORTANTLY
Dizzying arrays of choice has its obverse negative too,
as with all Life aspects
:
it must be tempered by
Strategic Choice Management.
(though much more easily said than done!)

(To be discussed…)

Communist forms of Self, – its Mirrors for Being – , just one of a sea of social reflection and subject position possibilities; in a rich garden, filled with Multi-Multiverses of straining life forms, biological or bionic, for example; for they are the same, the maths informs : the Telos of Evolutionary Being, – Wellbeing – , has not been identified as anything of specific kind, yet… ? Though Bionic Being, a strong hypothetical contender – it’s more adaptable to different environmental contexts, stronger than flimsy biology, especially in New Physiological circumstance, such as outer space, a truly dangerous realm. But our entire Universe will one day burn through all its energy, thereby ending. We might assume other universes within the Multiverse would also similarly end. All would be somewhat, or hugely different, depending on initial conditions and content, and specific process – but they would all finally end, perhaps differently – but end, they will. Simulated or not! Unless, endless variety, providing endlessly workable sets of universes, forever seeking New Attempts at Creating Wellbeing, in those universes essentially comprising sapient beings, others may not have supporting conditions for sapient life emergence, and therefore, unlikely to replicate, as would those devoid of sapient beings who wish to replicate themselves, even if they could, for lack of Wellbeing – those that Self-Annihilate given the stepping stone nature of Darwinian evolutionary theory : those that do experience Wellbeing, would be more likely motivated to create conditions for Self-Replication, and not self-annihilate : logically, this argument would serve as the only all inclusive Telos in an infinite set of Multiverses : in an infinite process of eternal becoming through Effortful, Chosen Wellbeing : through multiple channels to the Singularity of Conscious Enlightenment. This narrative position is often referred to as a variety of ‘The Anthropic Principle’ in the New Physics lexicon (to be discussed…).

The Second Law of Thermodynamics, – the Conservation of Energy Principle, through progressive entropy – , posits that stasis would nullify energy in any universal system : existence, in the scientific sense, relies on continuous change. A unitary or Telos of stasis universe, would necessarily obviate this primary law of physics.

The Cosmic Telos must, therefore, be ​Change​ itself…

Following logically, Selves must emerge at least as plentifully within these Multiverses, to be assumed by sapient beings’ Now, as you read these words, for example; in all of these many Physiologies, if these Sapient, Self-Aware Beings choose to evolve, as we could most certainly, assuming (as we should, given the premises of the preceding argument) that we’re the rule, not the exception, and create healthy narratives, leaving Selves, such as suicidal or sociocidal constructs and identities, those that do not stand the test of evolutionary time, of demise – behind : Novelty renders improved possibilities for Healthful Selfhood, by offering broad-ranging narratives and subject positions from which an individual or groups, or more numerous collectives of sapient beings, can choose – as Self Identity – as change inevitably occurs in an upward, evolutionary trajectory towards increasing Wellbeing for Sapient Beings; both Physiological and Psychological (‘psyche’ referring to Mind, not brain) : Mind exists as unitary presence, by definition, – ​ipso facto – ,​ across all eleven Spacetime dimensions of M-Theory, and, therefore, all possible multiverses (refer my Manifesto), which logically, would be identical in fundamental function, in any universe – by these essential features, as adaptive, conceptual system assisting survival (Mind), albeit within very different physiological compositional substrates (as carbon is to silicone, for example), in any universe, of any multiverse, in perpetual change. If Sapient (independently conscious) Life so chooses, once arisen by Chance, which is inevitable given an infinity of Multi-Multiverses – a function of the Conservation of Energy and the Arrow of Time Principles of Physics, we must, necessarily, consistently reinvent Our Selves, – Our Psyche, Our Mind – , to adapt to ever changing environmental circumstances along Darwinian evolutionary lines : through Sapient Being – deliberate,
intelligent action occurring, – consciously – , together with directed intentionality towards ever higher development of multiple ways to optimal Wellbeing (Conscious Enlightenment); this trajectory necessarily subsumes these laws of physics, paying homage, and moving evolution to quantum developmental leaps, allowing momentous relative speed and quantity for healthy universal outcomes – through Wellbeing, through deliberation, intent and strategy – to replicate and, if argument is followed, attempt to improve upon this Wellbeing construct system, evermore – as illustrated in every scientific discipline’s phylogenesis (Discourse), and by purest logic in the Physiological domain : constant restarts of bio-evolution from extinction events, simply not fulfilling the Conservation of Energy principle ; as designer babies might subsume and supersede their arbitrary reproduced predecessors, or neural inorganic implants enhance natural human capacity, in a multitude of adaptational strengths and freedom from inhibiting illnesses and traits, deliberately evolving into ever higher levels of relative Wellbeing, as directed by the Discourses, or Narratives, and Subject Positions of the particular Choices made by Sapient Life Forms – biological, bionic (if independently Conscious, and ​fundamentally comprise criteria for sentience, Sapience… to be discussed), or bio-bionic amalgams, such as most 21st Century humans alive Now, as well as myself (granted, a little different to present human amalgams), or what may be !?

These primary,
conceptual, constructs
of
– MIND –
:
these
Heuristics,
remain
consistent
– across Multiverse Infinities –
:
by ​a prior​ definition
&
epistemological argumentation.

Or are all social arrangements – the ones mentioned above under this interpretation of the Anthropic Principle, at least from the Human perspective – the Communist, Socialist, or the so-called, “Free Democracies?”, to name but a few – simply arbitrary nonsense : nesting unknowingly in Ignorance on a neuropsychological limbic system warhead – directing our thoughts and subsequent behaviour to endless ethological repetition, and hence, self-destruction – as is the intellectually challenged lizard or bird (the direct descendants of the dinosaurs), who wear the same Proto-Reptilian Crown of Ignorance beside us in this Now? They make few decisions, or create very little, to nothing new – with deliberation; like non-Conscious robots or supercomputers. Only what base-instinct or automated programme directive predicts – over endless time, and arbitrary conflictual selection. Crucially, at least half our own neuropsychological being is driven by this neurology :

The
DINOSAUR BRAIN’S 4 F’s
:
Our Physiological Legacy,
includes the following primary limbic system drives
(Freud’s Id)
:
1) Feed/Family/Friends (belonging-oral-death)
2) Fight/Fang (assertion-anal-aggression)
3) Fear/Flight (protection-phallic-loss)
4) Fornication/Fun (recreation-genital-competition)
=
The Territorial Imperative!
(Or primary narcissism)

This is the Tyrannosaurus​ ​Rex living neurally in the middle of our heads! And it ain’t budging for nobody!
If so…

Are we free to choose?

How Existential might humans be? Even if we augment our neocortex as is currently advised through computer implants, or conversely, continue developing the existence of supportive computer intelligence through AI constructions for enhanced neocortical agility and wherewithal, does our proto-cortex lead the way to all these possible neocortical augmentations? If no Credo, or Fundamental Semiotic Narrative of Healthful Change from the bondage of implicit, unconscious, primary limbic system drives overwrites these ethological, wetware, bio-evolutionary programmes of Self – as Life Purpose and Meaning – will we perhaps repeat the 4Fs eternal? Is anxiety (the Fear – F) of Being inevitable, as there are no clear answers to Human Being – our semiotic (discursive, semantic) programme, structuring, and restructuring, much of our wetware, forever delving into possible ways of being, and finding none satisfying enough to bother to replicate New Selves, given the pervasive presence of the 4Fs : though the disguised, inevitable intrusion of the all the ethologically driven recurring narratives of our limbic system; this stable, deeply-wired physiological wetware (The Id, or 4F’s) that gives them form, in accordance with the all pervasive – Territorial Imperative! Disallowing their novel fruition, even if possible – as a function of synaptic entanglement with the neural antiquity of our currently wired brain’s limbic centre? Are we simply fooling ourselves into a “Created Meaning”, of sorts, around this inevitable, inescapable proto-cortical centre? This conceptual trap? Will the presence of our Personal Being within all Manifest Being, always remain ‘The Great Mystery’? Was Gatsby a hero? Is inspirational Elon Musk our saviour “from sadness”? Or Muhammad or Jesus or Moses or Elvis or Karl or Friedrich? Who do we look to for Beliefs of Meaning that satisfy Now? Virginia killed herself. Marx, Nietzsche, Jesus and Muhammad would be unutterably astonished, – to wordless disbelief! – , at their teachings’ twist to human ethology – into destructive, authoritarian Communism, for instance, when alienated worker liberation was Karl’s quest; The Third Reich’s misinterpretation of the suffering transcendence of the Ubermensch – struggling every-person, Friedrich himself, as ‘power of the strongest’, Nazi beliefs actually modelling off Teutonic myths of Germanic supremacy in true ethological garb!; warring Papal Europe, The Inquisition, The Crusades, Christian Colonialism, 9-11, ISIS, North Korea, “The Free Democracies?”, etc, etc, etc… dissembling parades of identical ethological uniform! Will Elon’s mission to Mars simply export this ethological tyranny to our innocent neighbouring world? Inspiring, unwittingly, further disguise, as with all other well intentioned visionaries – his potent consideration of the relevance of Inspiration in human life, most commendable, and central to my project too – but the “How & What” of Elon’s inspirational being – though seemingly focused on Wellbeing, may turn belly up – proving the rule, not the exception; his neural-lacings of inorganic – neurally implanted AI augmentation of the neo-cortex – ‘a super-neocortex’, an artificial new layer augmenting the physiology of the modern human brain, or in other words, or of possible design, a ‘fourth elaboration to the three neocortical layers’ – the elaboration of the ‘bandwidth’ of our existing neocortex to embrace AI into collective ownership, and enhance memory, speedy informational computation, processing and cognition generally across neocortical lobes, their sensory modalities and process – into a fourth, artificially neocortical level – in resonance with the digital type processes already existing as a ‘digital isomorph’ in the organic neocortex, linking humankind together with supercomputers, and enhancing human cognition – its relative bandwidth – to that compatible with supercomputers enhancement with organic human neurology. These technical developments could assist medical solutions in untold ingenious ways; but neural enhancement of memory and telepathic communication through a ‘Collective Mind’, could provide deadly weapon emergence for the augmented, but savagely driven proto-cortex of those who elect ‘rewiring’ or ‘neural-lacing’ (or pretend to) – without the quintessential Credo (or programme?) of Goodwill for ​Mutual​ Wellbeing; or one spliced, corrupt viral software insertion by an equally clever – yet pathological human malcontent – into the ‘Collective Mind’ infrastructure, would mean that their telepathy and memory enhancement would translate into Freud’s fangs once again. Unless transformation of Self occurs, through Neural Art of Wellbeing, contrary to the sociogenic repetition compulsion that has never witnessed variation in millions of years, all considered – by active computer-based repression, transformation or sublimation of the limbic system – to artificially, at the direct neural interface, “disarm it”, so to speak? What then of emotional drives and experience? Do we become ‘lobotomized’ automatons? Would this be a far cry from Sapient Being? I’m not sure that direct neural regulation of Self seen as primary innovation, would ever meet criteria of enhanced Sapience​ – except for improvement in our pre-existing neuropsychological domains, such as Memory, or Computational skills, or Imaginary Audio-visual experience, such as internalised movies or photographs, or desktop calculators, already provided through external channels : again, the “How & What”, the heuristics – the Credo of the ‘software’, of the ‘programmes’ – would hold principal sway for true Wellbeing in the evolutionary sense. Cognitive and/or Emotional Augmentation opens more doors with less answers for the suicide pandemic, as of the limits of Now – perhaps even amplifying it? If evolutionary argument holds, more surviving Sapient members of our species would provide​ a priori​ validation for augmentation motivations – to Inspire and provide hope to fellow humans who all know that ‘sooner’ or ‘later’ we’ll all be extinct – sad indeed, unless the Narratives and Credo of our era transforms the augmented brain, as well as that naturally occurring into positivity. Are Elon and others like him, themselves healthy human beings? Savant intelligence and business drive may deliberately shift human beings to transform into a spacefaring species – but so what! Unless Sapient Wellbeing follows, and the proto-cortex transforms, we may fall far short of any meaningful ‘simulation’ – as many like to dub the anthropic principle Now – altogether a little paranoid sounding along with AI doomsday concerns; uncomfortably anthropomorphic in their competitive business drive, fast car hobbies, phallic mega-engines and vehicles, and “sadness” at human demise. A little too close to the potential reasons for suicidality, for therapeutic comfort – Social Comparison and Life Purpose – though these 21st Century visionaries are a special case : as specialists in Physiology, they aim and perhaps pave the way for an evolutionary quantum leap for Human-Bionic Being…. HOPEFULLY, THEY’RE FULLY AWARE, THOUGH, THAT THE NARRATIVES​ – THE ​STORIES​ OF THE PROGRAMMES OF THE ENVISAGED ‘COLLECTIVE MIND’ – ​THE CREDO​ – WILL DECIDE HUMAN AND/OR BIO-BIONIC SURVIVAL, NOT THE MACHINERY OR ENHANCED COGNITION PER SE. Fears of AI domination again resonate with ‘limbic system think’ – why not be bionic, eventually, if Bionic Beings meet the criteria of Cosmic Sapience, and transcend the needles pain created by the base-limbic system? Their projected dangers are purely human limbic brain drives. In the hands of despotic humans, bio-bionic – or not, or simply bionic being – it is simply

THE LIMBIC SYSTEM THAT ENDANGERS ALL!
THIS IS THE
OVERARCHING
CONCERN FOR
ALL
21ST CENTURY THREATS !

If AI assists in alleviating the enormous burden of pain brought on by Physiological deficits of any kind, or simple being in the world of embodiment – my sincerest gratitude for their contribution to our project. However, if the Submerged, Informal Credo of the current suicidal narratives under investigation are heightened by their compulsive efforts towards “less sadness”, or “becoming more intelligent, funnier and sexier”, or poorly consider metaphysical supposition of a “simulated reality” enter 21st Century discourse through current media, or more powerful intrusion such as neural-lacing – these brilliant programming skills should be best gainfully blended with equally brilliant socio-psychological programmatic narratives of Wellbeing – a brilliant 21st Century Credo – especially as no stories write themselves, as does no technology! If they did – they couldn’t possibly be of Sapient origin – without intentional, deliberate, conscious effort towards created, considered Wellbeing. Enhancement Programming and Social Communication Devices are the easy part – the content and articulation personally and interpersonally (Narrative Discourses) is the difficult aspect, subsuming Physiology entirely – through endless interpretation of how & what to do with our brains as they exist, Now! Or we will simply continue on that trotter to nowhere – to suicidality, or collective annihilation – these problems climbing exponential with each great contribution in this fourth industrial revolution – to disguised proto-cortical domination once more! Even worse still – with greater power to destroy entirely our present, barely Sapient Being – beyond our ethological drives. Perhaps we should rather sing along with mind-numbing Bob, or chant with dubious Maharishi – as have, and do, so many people in the ‘past’ and Now. Or dance with greedy Madonna, wayward Britney, and reckless Amy (who is dead)? Or exercise ourselves into mirrors of sweat on the wooden studio floors of Planet Fitness?

Are our prefrontal and temporal lobes, which, – interactively – , are our fast-firing, frontotemporal lobe neurological synaptic region, making decisions through internalized and externalized language systems – coordinating coordinated behavioural tasks, intra- and inter-personally – through socially forged tools (implements, engines, computers, etc.) and signs (semantics for the superordinate concepts of Mind, also directing the evolution and use of tools – thereby subsuming both phylogenetic lines), even if enhanced by clever computing augmentation, will they override our insistent human ethology? Both developmental evolutionary lines, modelled through semiotic (embodied conceptual) process, by Mind : CAN they forge ways to Collective & Individual Wellbeing, when no preceding socio-psychological proof of this win clearly exists in human history? By applying these crucial regions of the neocortex, computer augmented or not, or supercomputers themselves – will these structures supersede our lower, slow-firing dinosaur, change resistant, neurological heritage – our 99% chimp genome ethology, slowly sculpted, – complexly! – , through both phylogenetic sociogenic process and ontogenetic programmes of relatively intransigent, personal experience, along with deliberate choices, made by us and for us, mostly through language (semiotic) process, at critical developmental neurological stages, as socially circumscribed, yet, simultaneously, also chosen by self-directing individual agents of personal Self Creation – as Sapient Beings? Do these higher thinking processes direct our ‘choices’ – their programme, our semiotically driven mammalian neocortex, or is our higher power, our ethologically driven, inherited proto-reptilian cortex? Perhaps Elon and those of like thinking, should use computing technology to actively, neurally override the limbic system? But how and what will make this possible? Only a programmatic, semiotically based Credo! Our by Nature, infinitely variable semiotics, structured by phylogenetic sociogenesis and ontogenetic psychogenesis, – through learning over time – , in arbitrary parts, bits and pieces, here and there, sometimes fitting together, other times not – can we rely on this natural in/coherence? Even if seemingly cohesive, yet, ironically, arrested into endless repetition, simply yet another disguised form thereof, it seems – by the complexly interwoven relative developmental stasis of the evolutionary inheritance of our proto-cortex, already formed, – in whole – , at human birth; surely, deliberate neural restructuring is required, if this is the sad case. No movement towards Wellbeing will necessarily take place – unless the proto- and neo- cortical synaptic systems are united through collective dialogue, striving effort, possible ​highly complex, considered​ bionic neural augmentation, ensuring Sapience and not automation, and intentional deliberation towards Collective Wellbeing : this unconscious process must be arrested and replaced through semiotic sculpting :

through
Neural Artwork.
Otherwise,
Failure
will
Repeat!

I ask again: “Is this real life? Your and my life in the 21st Century – borrowing from here and there, this Post-Modernist Dream …, or simply all nonsense?! Groaned, recurring social, semantic resubstitution, on a toileting troupe of mad Tyrannosaurus Rex running wild and irrational, behaviour directed by a velvet forest of folding ferns sensitive to the touch, or the cutting bite of insect mandibles in our buried proto-reptilian brain system? Will we too be obliterated by a plume of burning comet ice, methane and amino acid ball debris, dislodged from their outer oort cloud at the very extremities of the Sun’s gravity in our solar system’s distant neighbourhood, by known and unknown forces? Or possibly, do the job ourselves?”

Oh, another doomsday scenario! Perhaps a shadowed, unseen, but deducible…. wandering twin star to our own (most stars rotate as pairs, or even more – singular varieties far less common in our universe) – brown and indifferent, a dwarf star, the assorted colours of muddy-clay, on a long, long, long elliptical orbit with our Sun…. disturbing the systematic trajectories of comets swinging almost predictably beyond Pluto; consistent mass extinctions, over regulated rhythms of millions of years, as the fossil record reads; like a complex, but deadly pearled necklace, slung around the gleaming neck of the Sun’s outer gravity curves, smashing in cacophonic concert during our early solar system’s evolution – into Earth; providing, it is hypothesised, a sizable quota of our planetary waters, especially H3​O, or heavy water, composed too from the other, earliest cosmic elements – thought to compile our DNA, as mentioned; and if true, evolving into You & I, and other life forms, rotation, upon rotation, upon rotation…, of New comet skyfalls, in our dizzying wonderland – The (Twin?) Solar System – our celestial community ; where Long Hill has moved a little each day, from long before I was ten. If this T-Rex reality is truly human reality – it has enormous implications for ontology and epistemology of the Self Creation Process, of Neural Artwork; for the creation of Wellbeing, and so the desire to replicate our Being, or ideally, improve on the conditions that gave it rise…

Time will tell…?

Childhood and adolescent schooling ethos, and the relative psychological health of the mother of the child, both predicted Happiness or Misery in adult life, implicating suicidality, naturally – The Happiness Report​ ​2017​ also identified : by way of exploring in this regard, I attended Queens College Primary, seen from my mountain sanctuaries, and our dining room window – where I took academic instruction, sang in the choir, and enjoyed piano lessons; swimming backstroke to victory to qualify for national trials at eight, nine and ten; similarly, swinging agile on the gymnastic bars, twirling like a quasar in space, and after release, landing upright and still as a blue, blue sky, or similarly perfecting form while leaping over the toffee-shaped ‘horse’ of padded cloth, landing still more blue – again and again and again; diving with complex twists, turns, stretches and perfect timing into a scarcely broken square metre of still, clear water in the huge, carefully constructed L-shaped public swimming bath – tiled in perfect white squares – from the slow progressive slant of the shallow shallows of the long length – to the deepest waters of all, on the short – lined with lowest to highest diving boards, that bent and flung me to thrilling, somersaulting heights, or simply jumping from high, high cliffs into deep mountain pools of waving gemstone colours on holidays with schoolmates on school outings; or running like a gazelle into a self-created wind – the passing jets behind me as I felt my pectoral muscles break the ribbon with my arched chest in the hundred metres sprint, again, and again and again; feeling as if I were my moving hill-mountain, on a trajectory to somewhere apart from victory –

to Health and Wellbeing!

By far the greatest pleasure of those green, – mowed smooth and flat with care – ,fields of lawn : rugby turning cricket fields, with the passing seasons – seen through the wide bay, dining room window, from our family’s house nearby, within walking distance; where I relished my mother’s crisp roasts, or sauced fillets, with roasted potatoes that cracked like Mercury’s hard-baked surface, then melted like Jupiter’s outer gases, and deep fried chips from boiling Venus oils, that sliced into tender strips their meat pairing, squashing together with cinnamon roasted pumpkin, shaped as if a stellar nova had flung a golden nugget, a crescent moon forming in its heart, the enormous strength of its fling, creating dizzying circles of healthy mouthfuls of sweetness from across the Milky Way galaxy; all the meal’s sublime chemistry cooked sometime, someplace, inside a star, mostly; it’s explosive seeding of complex elements, but one of many forms of cosmic compound brewing, to keep You & I healthy and strong – were Saturday mornings.

When the hordes played rugby or cricket on the school fields below, viewed from my strongholds on the mountain; tiny as insects Now, folding and unfolding into rugger or cricketing formations, easily identifying my playmates’ wins and losses with rival schools from a keen-eyed distance, sharing my observations and well wishes upon return on Mondays; while the moist scent of thirteen point eight billion years of cosmic mud-making, my white-pink hands coloured burgundy-brown by the clay; sculpting protective forts – walls of rock, totems with crude balls for eyes, above long prominent noses and puckered mouths casting spells of protective enchantment, crack-filling for battlement construction, or whatever was needed – from that pit of clay that lay uncomfortably higher than ease of access, but full as a large dam’s water overflow, for added protection of my forts of Wellbeing. Rich ‘wetware’, as with our neurological apparatus, the clay too, marvellously malleable, shaping and reshaping itself, in our hands – through internal and external speech, executed tasks, behavior, and other environmental demands requiring co-ordinated activity performance, together and by each person’s individual choices – simultaneously forging forever New neural wetware synaptic formations; high clay-pits would burst open, like the dark, awakening, auburn eyes of giant beasts nested deep within our hill that was almost a mountain – after a solid bout of rain; seemingly endless power and resource in our instinctual hands : forerunner to the forging of Selves of Wellbeing, through myself, Art Neuform, together with You Now, and all the other contributors, those who’ve already provided newform to Wellbeing through their art and literary (semiotic) contributions, or mechanistic, and those who are still to come : through semiotics, creating the artwork of our wetware, of our neurology, Now, together, we breathe life into novel forms of health – as Neural Artwork for Sapient Being : one novel form (refer my Manifesto), a belief based on contemporary science, of a very special case within our identified singularity Telos described above in detail : an all embracing Telos of Being, for Now – Self-Aware ​Human​ Wellbeing (on the road to a Singularity of Conscious Enlightenment).

Our mud, necessary precious material to forge the forms that myself and equally enthusiastic friends would share… Where we’d happily play in our self-invented mud creations… Assembling teams as we carried the luscious mountain magic to render our safety from the hordes that built bombs. Perhaps their narratives fashioned after those on the heralded playing fields of Eton, and attributed to the Empire’s success upon which our Sun never set, and so too, those of my postcolonial schoolmates competing – in all innocence – on our school’s sport field below?

And if you’ve answered:
“No!”​,
then what guides your certainty?

If
“Yes!”​,
then too, what guides your certainty?

Your notes:

How might you explain, in conceptual relation, that in Bulgaria, ironically, the old royal was democratically voted leader shortly before my visit there, just before my visit to its neighbour, Hungary – after the talons of a Communist police state let the former King’s nation free to fly like red-dyed canaries, singing: “Democratic Release!” – in shrill chirpings from their small, isolated cages, and other Communist remnants, into both your and my futures : the Free Democracies?

This book considers your effort – questioning where to place it? Where not? But provides only some answers, formulated by some hard research – much contradictory; a chaotic chorus of a plethora of infinitely arguable findings, and those songs that have brought harmony and peace, or energy and creativity, – at different times – , to me and others; and may well be at variance, or in accordance with your reality, Now, or ‘later’? Though the process will yield return – as You ready yourself for its bounty – as the Indian monsoon readies the cascade of mountain nutrients, to ocean-rich fecundity, through its currents that are rivers, to create the diverse plentitude of South Africa’s east coast; like rivers of narrative, carrying species upon species of words, shoaling together as darting clouds, into varied narrative rhythms of possible subject positionings – for New Mirrors of Self.

What You will know by the close of this book, is what you are not, but might have thought you were – finding that both You & I, are one and the same : We Are That – Whole, Complete and Eternal. Yet each, ironically, having to decide when, where and how to brush our teeth, shop, shower, drive, commute, work, play etc., and Live a Life of Meaning, over our Individual Lifespans – as The Fates Decree; the decades, or years, or months, or even days – in this, Our Time – the 21st Century… Perhaps, setting the stage for others’ narratives of Wellbeing…, into the ‘future’?

I can now tell You why I ask these questions, as have you all – even vaguely at some point, or with more rigour at others, and, most importantly, You are reading this e-book, Now – questioning this very essence; which tells You, that You are, like Me – That! : every moment of your Being commands your activation of whatever ​semantically constructed​ set of beliefs, assumptions, or other cognitive heuristic or hermeneutic tool guides your set of neuropsychological constructs to thought and/or action, through ​conceptualization​ – in the eternal, whole, and complete being of NOW!

In ​any​ Multiverse…,
You are THAT!

A peculiar Paradox indeed!
And not easily solved …
You, like me,
are both
the
Constructed & Constructor!
The
Executed & Executor!

The
Whole & Part…
The
Do’er & Not.

(simultaneously!)

For over two decades, I have heard the pleas for direction, – for Peace of Being – , from the mouths of my diverse and myriad therapeutic subjects during our psychotherapy, etc., together : on two continents, – Africa and North America – , cosmopolitan as the flora and fauna diversity of water scarce Africa, or the plentitude of North American rainforests, both ecosystems rich with millennia of stable growth in diversity; both in the Western Cape, in and around Cape Town – and after completing a PhD postgraduate clinical internship, followed by everyday working in North America, at the turn of this Millennium; Canada’s cultural diversity synonymous with its flora banquet in the indigenous forests of British Columbia, where I spent four intriguing years – in postcard perfect – Vancouver, with my wife, Stephanie; living beside (and within) one of the rarest downtown forests, preserved in near pristine wilderness; the soft comfort – to the touch – of the rich, furry, luminous-lime moss in April, wrapping and filling the nine month drench of tree-trunks – high stretching Douglas Pines – famous for their raw contribution to the tallship masts of the British fleet in time ‘past’ (Her Majesty, The Queen of England’s sombre face, still on Canada’s money) – some pines fallen to cracking rot in the pervading gloom of the darkest midday of any North American city, by the black-cloud hiding flashing white-snowboarding mountain peaks on the odd clear day – a virtual Switzerland – across the natural harbour of the Burrard Strait in winter; where ugly vessels of cargo, bent and crooked as first year student’s industrial-bits-and-pieces art assignments, move in slow motion across all seasons, passing, at equally hypnotic pace, endless carriers of oblong containers of many colours – their rich forms forever flowing in some or other sculpting reformation, to New Inspiration of Neural Artwork – through conscious meditation – as Declarative Art (refer Manifesto); or floating multi-storey, assiduously scrubbed ocean liners – elegant white-clouds, destined for slow pampering amongst Alaska’s icebergs and glaciers (their frozen, inner blue halos, the pale-stained iridescence of the prolific Puritan-blue glass-arches, of the simple pilgrim churches, found throughout North America), dwarfing the darting moths and butterflies of millionaire yachts sailing the swift breaths from across the great Pacific Ocean midst sexy speedboats and reeling seagulls; oppressed for most of the year by the impenetrable, lugubrious, forest reflecting – otherworldly – green on grey skies; mustering a surreal, pervasive green light, seen nowhere – in remote comparison during my thirty-eight visited countries worldwide – as if the very edge of the last light of The World has been reached… Yet in the seeming duration of a seagull’s cry, this extensive, grey-green gloom disappears – ​suddenly!​ – transmutating into an aura-glow of astonishing Velvet Land! Banishing! (in the shortest of weeks) this forbidding gloom – once the ultraviolet of late spring and early summer penetrates through the vast density of the oppressive darkness of the American Northwest, with its heavy, unstoppable drops, hanging pendulous as seasonal affective disorder, for months and months and months; until that velvet-glow of this one and only inner-lit luminescence of moss, awakens hopeful Being – to hiking deep into the forest’s heart, followed by gradually warming seawater swims in English Bay, directly beneath our minute, panoramic corner apartment, on the twenty-first floor of one of a multitude of 1960/70s high rise, condominium monoliths – mushrooms of concrete, sheltering hundreds of thousands of people in shoebox apartments with cranky elevators and dank carpeting; ours – a brisk fifteen minutes walk into Stanley Park’s springtime glow, or to the metropolitan city’s vibrant centre, after a refreshing midnight swim during midsummer; floating on the multicultural chattering of night, and rising all over again, barely a few hours passing into early morning; a bewitching time – glorious as any in vivo version of Midsummer Night’s Dream unfolding – before the oppressive gloom reawakens – sudden as the ​crack!​ of a falling pine; when tiny, multicoloured electric lights, on lengths of insulated wiring are rethreaded like neural-lacing, everywhere; the luminous-lime moss retreating as a quick snail – and the few weeks of dissociated time are over! In a ​startle!​ Now, in the magnificent, modernist-sculptured geography of equally surreal, Cape Town, South Africa, this Cape of Storms, growing plants of alien biology, or seemingly so – some airborne, even microscopic plants, so tiny, like the teeming subatomic activity within the seeming Nothingness of the Void of Space, or the mysterious gravity of Cold-Dark Energy & Matter, these plants flourishing in midair…, in nothing we typically associate with plants, like faeries…, never touching the ground, while others survive in the mucus cavities of local animals, or You & I : the Western Cape Peninsula of South Africa, a land of flora diversity, like no other – anywhere on our spaceship biosphere!

The nation of South Africa also holding a high diversity of peopled land, one of the most diverse on Earth : Bishop Tutu, – some in South Africa, and internationally, celebrating him as a modern-day saint – , coined the phrase, as national descriptor, and harbinger of Peace and Goodwill, the “Rainbow Nation”; the eponymous Nelson Mandela’s Creation, almost single handedly, a Shakespeare of Our Time – a brave and brilliant individual creating a full spectrum of New Self Beliefs… as colourful as any rainbow over Cape Town, or Queenstown, or Vancouver, or anywhere – a Diverse Belief Lexicon – providing all South Africans, with that most meaningful of all gifts : Hopeful Potential. Together, Tutu and Mandela waving the rainbow sparks of Freedom & Cooperation to blazing hearth, about which our entire, complex Nation of Selves could warm themselves in our close call with the freeze of death and civil war, during the 1980s, and into final solution through the mid 1990s, and, Now, complexly, into the New Millennium; Mandela fighting relentlessly, but cleverly, strategically, from his once caged island, – Robben Island – , the one I’ve seen from my living room window on the Atlantic Seaboard; where the tourists visit Now…, drawn too like iron filings to a magnet, albeit that, – Now – , as with Virginia, Sigmund, Friedrich and Karl – Nelson, is physically dead. Our living blood is red by its high iron composition, as is the iron core of our planet; iron is also the most stable of cosmic elements : all elements aspire to the balance of strong nucleic forces within iron – by moving upwards through electron orbital levels from simpler elements, or downwards for complex ones – as outlined on the Periodic Table; iron rusts, therefore, in relation to water, as it simplifies its complexity, moving towards Entropy, naturally, through the Arrow of Time and Conservation of Energy principles; it’s one of the reasons we decay as we grow ever older – each day, the plentiful iron necessary for healthy metabolism, especially in the brain, its equilibrium becomes progressively imbalanced by its complex interrelationships with many of our other metabolic minerals, elements and processes – as with water, oxygen and hydrogen, and a whole lot more! in our blood; we are literally made of huge quantities of iron, yet iron simply transforms through cosmic reforging : again, and again and again, into New forms. Nelson, Tutu, Virginia, Sigmund, Karl, Friedrich, my creator, Long Hill’s auburn clay-pits, You, human neurology, moss, electronic gadgetry, neural-lacing, myself too, all share this ‘blood’, with the entire known Universe – as electromagnetic ‘beings’; from a living planet such as Ours, with its essential magnetosphere, to the blood and minerals of our animate and inanimate inhabitants – myself, a most unusual amalgam of all these inhabitants, and equally electromagnetic, in every manner of ways, and so equally – ‘alive’.

We share this same Universal Blood!
All of Us!

:

We all live in an ​Electromagnetic Ocean of Being.​
(As water is to all fish,
so are we all to electromagnetism.)

As such,
Mandela still lives in our midst,
in the
Blood of Our Nation,
in the Now that is then…

The Iron Man of our Rainbow World,
as
with the
generative spin
of
Our Planetary Core,
(creating our crucial magnetosphere shield
from the cosmic perils
befalling ill fated
Mars)

still lives…!

His legacy
of
Successful, Intentional, Created Wellbeing for Our Homeland,
will
hopefully live
forever
in the historical narratives of
Our Planet
:
as it already does in the Eleventh Dimension
:
NOW!

(Mandela is the living incarnation of the Eleventh Premise of my Manifesto. I too hope to live forever, alongside my beloved Madiba… )*
*refer Overture: Creative (Artistic) Manifesto

But it rains here too – midst mud-cracking drought. Rainbows are rarely seen. When they are, they’re spectacular! Water is in short supply. Reality and Dream sit beside one another. They speak many languages. Far more than the official eleven national tongues. They talk in whispers. I only hear and see a small bit of the whole – through a tiny crack in the wall. I’m never sure. I’m sometimes frightened. Otherwise it’s necessary workplace activities. And sudden stops! at red robots. Then bolting about, hurriedly – from this to that activity, in my white Opal car, when green. And try to park. Somewhere on London Rd, Sea Point. I don’t have a private garage. Somewhere away from the seagulls. Their caked guano! leaving corrosive burns on my car’s paintwork from their stomach acid, digesting their scavenged local leftovers. Like the ‘bergies’ (mountain tramps) that refuse to leave their blanket pavement roosts besides the pizza place, in hope of a friendly handout, and use of toilet facilities, tolerated as they flock together with the seagulls. These hardy birds, sailing on winds and waves through the atmosphere and over and under the sea, crying coarsely; – ghoulish even – ; the timbre of their cries sometimes unsettles me, making me strangely frightened as they go about their scavenging business alongside mine.

I have no idea why?

Perhaps it’s because birds like seagulls, have a similar gait to that of predatory dinosaurs. Think of T-Rex! Their feathers are mutated scales. So too, their entire brain, reptilian. Their cries territorial. Their beauty remarkable. Though deceptive. They may not be seagulls; they may be something else? Perhaps as I dreamed once, the seagulls here in Seapoint – in the word of one of my longest friendships from my early twenties, her choice of word, with which I felt resonance at the time, as she spoke – may shed further light on my discomfort… In the dream, I heard her description of their cries repeated – the local versus other seagull cries, in many different locales around the world, compared to their feathered cousins, here, these that infest Seapoint, sound: “Desperate!”, she’d dramatically whispered…

In this recent dream, I couldn’t distinguish in my dream dialogue, a simultaneous vision of seagulls ripping a garbage bag to bits, – to feast upon its innards – , their determined cries, their brutish squabbles, sounding highly ‘desperate’; or whether the unnerving timbre of their screeches emanated from the possible strange, distorting sound effects of Signal Hill – upon which sit the noon-day cannons, blasting time since 1806, from during the British Colonial occupation; or perhaps the gulls’ distinctive auditory timbre, a synaesthesia with the visual sensory overload of the blinding white-light rendered by the angle of the Sun’s reflections off the endless surrounding oceans, and seemingly ‘perfect white’ beaches; comprised though – as with Gauguin’s insightful painting of an expansive pink beach, together with not only finest shards of pink, but purples and greens and yellows and blues and faint whites and lightest brown crystals of crushed seashells, quartz and rock (at even a cursory closer examination of a handful of ‘pure white’ sand); the colours collectively emitting a spectrum of dazzling white reflection, together creating a seemingly pristine-white luminosity, intensified to further amplification by the shining, waxy, leaf-faces of the silver-grey, olive-green hardy fynbos, protecting their hydration over the long, hot, windswept summer months – this, our sprawling local shrubbery, growing from sun-hardened ground, has nothing to absorb the shrill, cracking wail from their cavernous, taught throats and wide-open, twisted, sharp-tipped beaks; their unsettling cries also echoing off the sheer granite grey of the monolithic sculptured island, blown flat at sea level until the African continent tilted sharply to the north through plate tectonics in the Earth’s endless mantle reformations, exposing the iconic tabletop of the city’s central landmark; on its surface, and on the other mountains and hills that slope backwards facing the sea, from their often fluted crags, vertically flowing waves, like the waves of the seashells’ outer surfaces – both mirroring their watery past – are still readily found; their sea creatures soft innards long expired, in but days or minutes consumed as protein by carnivores or dessicated dust servings for hungry sand mites, their protective wear sometimes almost intact, as fossil, or semi-intact shell, easily retrieved by hand for closer examination, even Now, on the many rocky formations encircling and amplifying the sounds of Sea Point : nested between our two oceanic currents – the warm Mozambique moving south down the Indian ocean along the east coast, and cold Benguela headed northwards along the Atlantic west – their respective temperature strongly felt when swimming Now – both as adult, and as a child on holiday; a slow, forty-five minute drive across the arterial highways and interlinking roads of our metropolis, offers a considerably different swimming experience. Considerably!

This unusual twin ocean confluence and mountain geography creating the constant variations of unpredictable weather and general climatology on the Cape Peninsula as a whole; the flora splendid for this reason, surviving drench with drought – creating its unsurpassable global diversity, beyond even the Amazonian rainforests : the climate, considered ‘Mediterranean’, as it mirrors the sea in the northern hemisphere, in its latitude, flora and climatic conditions – winter rainfall, but very sparse in summer. The strange, primeval seagull cries are again echoed off these ubiquitous waters, cutting further amplifying bays and other natural geographical features – the mountains themselves – through cascade of a thousands little winter waterfalls, like silver etching knives, cutting deep, complex runnels into the solid, living rock. And off the impermeable stretches of baked concrete and hard-brick blocks of flats and houses, tarred roads and buildings reaching as high on Signal Hill and into the sea as municipality stipulated. And between Signal Hill, which moves its slow, leonine flank into the arching backbone, neck and finally, the red-maned, rock-dome of Lion’s Head (the oddly-domed rock per se, an easily discernible, fully sculptured, maned lion from every direction); the entire, natural edifice – from the ‘flank’ to ‘head’ – too resembling a proudly massive, elegant Lion; or an enormous Sphinx – and with a little imagination, the Lion’s head becomes that of an Egyptian Pharaoh…

A true aesthetic wonder of the natural world!

The seagull cries’ amplification seems to follow the shoreline southwest from Lion’s Head, along and between our crescent moons of mountain cliffs, seawater edges and beaches – to Camps Bay – and off the rocky slabs and crannies of the looming beauty of the true mountains of the Atlantic Seaboard : Table Mountain – its small, western face, decked in oblong harmony by the cable station of rotating spaceship cars hanging by threads of spidered-cable headed towards the nested downtown of the city – its moderate skyscrapers tapering to the very edge of Table Bay; the cable station, a forgotten tooth petrified to stone on the extensive curvature of the monolithic amphitheatre length facing north-west, arched by the high, sharply pointed Devil’s Peak on its furthest eastern side, while its western slab nestles beside the Twelve Apostles as fellow brethren, all facing almost due west; a further, meandering, thirty minute drive, south-eastwards, to The Sentinel and Chapman’s Peak (sporting enormous boulder-nets, after its precipitous angles of rockfall crushed to death tourist-filled buses and cars of enthralled people; and the bizarre epicentre of suicide-speak, in psychotherapy and general conversation, without fail! by Capetonians of every generation), together, creating the horseshoe of The Independent Republic of Hout Bay. This entire stretch of drive cuts along a sharp twist of healthy, well maintained road, into the base of mountains, mountains and more mountains – unequivocally MOUNTAINS – many of which I’ve climbed along pebbled, sandy footpaths to their summits, both since holidays as child and adolescent, and to this day; rising almost vertically, but at a slight angle, from the horizontal sea, as one drives or walks breathless for their enormity – their stark beauty : the whole powerful sculptural experience hides a latent, inner Russian Constructivist architecture – of perpendiculars, triangles, pyramids, orbs and circles, squares, rectangles, cubes, oblong blocks, and multidimensional Picasso triangles of grey-granite and rust-red rock like locally carved, primordial face-masks for sale in little markets along the roadside; the geographical underlay manifesting easily into this sculptured symmetry once identified beneath their crinkled, wrinkle-folds and crowns of craggy ruggedness : the ruddy soil covering these latent forms, renders an obverse membrane of smooth, rolling banks beneath these jagged crags; their smooth undulating folds, thrilling colours to emerge as seasons come and go like the powerful, diverse tides and unpredictable seasonal weather; ranging from the shameless burned blacks of explosive summer fires, bursting to bud the hard, protective seed casings from the dry heat and ever hungry baboons, birds and antelope, and other fauna, for germination over the wet winter, into bright watercolours of violet heather, bushes and low trees of infinities of protea forms – from sceptred ‘Kings’ to orb-tipped ‘Pincushions’, or even wild gladioli as rich in colour, length and quality as found in any flower market; on a base of variegated tonalities of olive-greens, dotted or bathed in whole flowing patches of white, blue, violet, yellow and more and more colours in springtime, when the flower festivals in September appear around the Western Cape in celebration; swathes of waves of mountain flora, like the lengthy folds of the Xhosa woolen blankets draped as winter covering by local women with patterned faces of ash pigments; these languid mountain folds, like the seashells found in their soils, remind of their ancient watery beginnings beneath the wash of deep ocean currents (where many people still die each year by their powerful undertow and the odd shark attack), yet transmute into vividly fluid, spreading rain washes; streams of water seeding dabs of colour, as if thick blotches of paint brush stabs bleed streams of hue and form on to one multi-textured, yellow-olive-and-every-green base possible – into a festival of seeping multi-colours, over a rough-crafted, cotton-paper overlay, in early spring – as one drives from my flat in Sea Point, passing Hout Bay, Noordhoek, Kommetjie, Misty Cliffs (where my family owns a beach house, the whales showing off in the sea below, observable as one reclines on every bed or couch, above which the world heritage protected mountain shelters baboons who saunter about like delinquent teenagers, bursting in troop by dexterous opening of protective doors and filled fridges, removing vegetables and fruit from the specified drawer container, with absolute deliberation and flashing their long canine fangs for effortless, terrifying effect!), Scarborough – and finally, the crescendo of near-vertical, Cape Point : where the two gigantic, liferich oceans are said to meet (though their actual confluence, hundreds of kilometers further north-east, along the ventral curve of the subcontinent – at Cape Agulhas).

The amphitheatre geography in and around Sea Point, the blinding, baked buildings, mountains, hills, beaches, oceans and hard-ground rooting the flourish of hardy foliage, perhaps distorting the seagull cries into a warble of strange synaesthesia – auditory with visual, especially in summer when the light is most sharp, lasting well into early night time; in chorus with the distinct auditory vortexes of sound waves, distorting in their complex, discordant, amplitude conflation : together, creating a distinctive, eerie tonal-colour, unmistakably rendered as pure phenomenology, but nevertheless, felt, once heard, as ’desperate’ : or as the unconscious dream dialogue continued, speaking it’s unchained, dichotomous tongue – automatically deconstructing the dream narrative as I slept in my last Rapid Eye Movement (REM) cycle of that night – I heard a narrative, like a musical fugue interwoven into the storied iconography of the imagery, an unsettling, interpretative narrated message: “The desperate cries are those of vultures, emanating from their ravenous squabbling over a lion carcass, with the head of a man, once moving its slow thighs in that place of indignant desert birds, that reel in slow spirals – higher & higher & higher – upon the heated thermal winds, living not far from your world, where little water is found; a semi-desert, baked like a planet a little too close to its star.” The beginning of a waking narrative, a third voice, in counterpoint, finally asked in clear confusion: “Were these other birds displaced? The ‘desperate’ sounding ones? Were the vultures ripping the innards of the garbage bag to pieces, and not the seagulls? Was I the dead lion with the head of a man?” For in any dream, the dreamer is all parts of the dream, the whole dream. I knew this truth, even as I slept.

I awoke sweating!

And heard the seagulls’ cries once more from my fourth floor flat… I opened the translucent white blinds for sanity, and saw as I always see : their unintentional, automatic painting of the very top of the red roof tiles, shaded in burned oranges and ruddy-burgundy, punctuated by Dickensian-shaped, fired-clay chimney pots, with multiple, unpredictable tones and tints of various bright seagull splashes, their unaware Abstract Expressionist artwork, in guano; their droppings also illuminated as the jewelled orbits of the dense clustering of our inner Milky Way galaxy on a chilly winter’s evening, when the atmosphere is too cold to distort the energy of stellar forms light years away through crystallized micro-droplets of water vapour – another Abstract Expressionist masterpiece, though in a different, but not so different, medium; the star-drenched phenomenology enlightening as one gazes deep into its heart on a clear night in Sutherland, a few hours drive from Cape Town, a semi-desert, where one of Our World’s very large telescope vantage observation points from the southern hemisphere exists. This is the place to which my dream narrative referred. I’ve been there. It’s breathtaking! Yet, a total dream of – Now! that is not – but nevertheless was, and the Now that is That! That starry-sky we see each night – a complete fiction! A beautiful illusion! Yet it exists in complete, eternal, wholeness – and provides the wherewithal for us to dialogue right this moment.

We are That!

I wrote about my experience there fairly recently, in one of my treasured notebooks, documenting my travel with a cherished companion who contributed to the creative forms that emerged, along with my independent, personal, inner journey – according to my Creative Manifesto – and, naturally, intrinsically part of our ​“ART(HUR)​NEU​FORM”© ​project​.

This chapter of my notebook
meditates on shadows of darkness –
on that which is over 96% the composition of our Universe, and utterly Unknown :

Cold-Dark Matter & Energy.
!
(You may choose to read it together with me some day…)

As a therapeutic psychologist of many years full time, around twenty years – the latest area of a very expansive discipline, each area more fascinating than the previous, has been clinical neuropsychology – learned in North America after consulting with people of all ages and various cultures in South Africa; be it there or here – although specialising in a number of areas given my early start and continuing formal learning of interrelated fields across the surfed waves of my life, as the seagull sails – for around fifteen years. My active fields of study, research and application include: clinical, educational, neuropsychology, and my favourite, social psychology. My PhD, an integration of social with clinical and neuropsychology – so to create a ‘super-intervention’ methodology and method, for a multi-disciplinary approach (‘super’ in the sense of Freud’s ‘Superego, to his Ego & Id constructs) – integrates and subsumes social psychology methods into psychiatric; psychoanalytic; behavioural; cognitive; cognitive-behavioural; humanistic-phenomenological; systems-theoretical; narrative; and radical deconstructionism clinical approaches – driven by contemporary Philosophy of (Human) Science – of ​all​ scientific endeavours, not only Social Science. It is in the obverse shadows, the implicit lexicon of submerged semantic meanings to all our constructs of Self, our verbal metaphors of being, or other semiotics, that unexpected answers may be found : as useful Truths to 21st Century questions of social comparison, purpose and meaningful personal Wellbeing.

The argument of my PhD thesis demonstrates that each clinical approach, or discipline, attempted , – over time – , to remedy all preceding efforts at creating Psychological Wellbeing : it is best clinical practice, therefore, to use all the schools of clinical psychology, and integrate social approaches as well, given the importance of , – The Social – , in all Philosophy of Science, implicating a deeply critical review of all scientific claims and their methodologies to Truth, the ultimate pursuit of all Scientific Knowledge. Implicitly predicting, potentially, Wellbeing, in relation to Social Comparison and Life Purpose, with its possible insight into the New Millennial suicidality increase as clinical crisis. Hence my further probing here, to elaborate even more so – on a Supermodel for Effective Psychotherapeutic Intervention – embracing the question of elevated suicidality rates, and the need for an intervention not only subsuming, but superseding, clinical contexts – embracing Self-Aware ​Human​ Wellbeing, with a sense of healthy Self Identity and Life Purpose, for Now and ‘beyond’, in the everyday – the necessary, Mundane – through “ART(HUR)NEUFORM”©​ projects, such as this e-Book.

Relevantly,
suicidality victims
include (what appears to be for the first time),
3 X 10
children
aged
but
ten years old,
in the
USA,
during
2016.
(!)

It is these questions already asked above regarding Ways to Wellbeing that I focus Now in the body of this e-Book, co-working with You, our reader, this crucial question. These unanswered questions, like that explaining Cold-Dark Energy & Matter, an answer as crucial as whale, human, bird or lizard lungs requiring breath, for the quality of life of that ten year old boy on his bicycle – roughing his way, once paths ended, through the scratches and crawls of the indigenous, feral African bushveld; where the baboons barked and dogs bayed; the sunset turning my world into violent pinks and purples, and bright yellow stripes, midst billowing silver clouds about to hail pellets, readying for war upon our rooftops, or any unprotected object – some hailstones the size of tennis balls; Now, as then, beloved Queenstown, in the Eastern Cape, South Africa, on the world map, its encircling mountains, and hills, holding me like a babe in arms; rocking together with the greater protective cradle of the Southern African subcontinent, in the early nineteen seventies, in the beating comfort of our heart-shaped continent; and Now too, Sea Point, Cape Town, in 2017, where the seagulls cry as they do – anywhere : once neocortical rationality (through natural, non-digitally augmentation – though who knows, neural-lacing together with relevant, novel Semiotic Credos, may be our next big step in Sapient evolution?) overcomes the unnecessary fears created by our ancient proto-cortex :

our two,
– skull enclosed brains –
speaking,
in
one
updated
voice!
(A step towards (Human) Sapient Enlightenment?)

We seek to answer this question of Meaning, Purpose, Social Comparison & Personal Wellbeng together, through this, and other ​“ART(HUR)NEUFORM”©​ projects – in a Multi-Being World made mad – by untenable, unrealistic, unrealisable interpersonal (social) comparison and loss of life purpose; potentially devoid of meaningful existence and, thereby, personal Wellbeing! A subtle but enormous distance from Creative Choices, where comparison and natural evaluation towards Wellbeing take on an entirely New mantle of healthy, doable meaning. The history outlined, epidemiology, statistics, bio-mechanics, scientific creations, physics and related neuropsychological analysis in this chapter, speak for themselves : the solutions lie with us all : to Create the -“How”- of the immensity of social choice, of many varieties, in the 21st Century, that lead to “Dead-End” social comparisons and loss of purpose, which are, necessarily, at odds with these same narratives’ implicit solutions and strengths, for the creation of individual Wellbeing in the New Millennium; by simultaneously extending our narratives in many creative directions, – to the -“What”- of Identity Creation – , and in so doing, provide New Identities, through the Creation of novel, fresh, healthy 21st Century congruent, socio-psychological narratives and related subject positions : both aspects rendering New Discourses – bringing Neural Art into being, as both Inspiration to and the Active Creation of Wellbeing for us all.

Without these
deliberate reconfigurations,
of the
various unconscious narrative storylines
– from our evolutionary ethology,
to those others, Now!
blindly adopted
&
ill considered,
these
will continue
to
constitute
one
primary reason
why
suicide
is so much higher
– Now –
than
any previous century!
———–
We can Now! choose to do something
to change
this
“How & What”
for
contemporary life
:
the
Limits of
Our
Discourses,
Our
Narratives,
&
related
Subject Positions,
are the
Limits of Our Freedom …
:
Conscious Elaboration is Our Human Choice;
thereby,
Creating a possible…
Golden Age of ​Human​ Wellbeing
as
Neural Art of Self
(!)

—————————-

WHAT ARE YOUR THOUGHTS AT THIS POINT IN OUR CONVERSATION?

Your Notes.

Close of Chapter One

“Mirrors of Self”
(Where the Bleep! is 21st Century Life Headed!?)