cosmology awakening

Origins & Earth Day

Where cosmologyawakening began...
   The website name comes from my own awakening to the possibilities that there was much more to life and the universe than what I had been taught in school and church. More and more there seemed to be a connection between everything, including those teachings and what was happening in the world and to the Earth. It was a major wake up call to realize that there was something really wrong with the system I was living in and a part of. Every day is still amazing that it just keeps going on and on. Launching this website is part of my attempt to do something about it at least by sharing my thoughts, ideas, artwork, and journal entries...well, it's something one person can do in modern times anyway.
    I painted my first painting in the summer following the first Earth Day when everything seemed so hopeful to so many while I personally questioned everything around me and wondered what the heck was really going on. I wanted to know more about the universe than what I was being told and taught, and that's where the wishes, dreams, visions, and ideas began.
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"The Earth will go on without us, but we shall perish without the environment in which we evolved. This seems so obvious to me, yet millions of people do not believe we are really from here at all and that The Earth does not really matter. That these beliefs comdemn their future generations to death, or non-existence, is lost in the mix."
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Happy Climate Crisis Day...
"Are we just getting around to beginning to do some of the things that needed to be done way back in 1970 when the first "Earth Day" was declared? Can we actually learn from this history and really get something done this time, or are we just going to declare "Global Warming Day" and each year we can turn off the lights and eat by candlelight and recycle some cans and ride a bike to work, etc., until clouds of gas roam through our backyards, the water tastes like chemicals, and we need drugs just to breath and function "naturally". So far, we are repeating history. What will it take to wake us up before we really fall asleep in the way that one never wakes up? It may just be that we are just like Lemmings rushing to the sea and there is nothing that can stop us."
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The first Earth Day...(2007)
  It may not seem at first that there is any direct connection between cosmology and the nature of the universe and environmental issues and Earth Day, but the truth is that one relates to the other through the manner in which our ideas and beliefs relate to the natural world and what we are doing that changes things. This is not a popular idea and it is not so easy for many of us to understand, but it is the assertion of this site that the only way to solve Earthly problems is to examine our ideas about what the larger cosmos is all about.
   In other words, if we believe we are not really Earthlings then why bother with the environment. And, if we believe the entire universe sprang out of nothing as well and is sort of a mystical metaphysical magically expanding thing in the middle of nowhere and no space and no time, well, the two things just go together.  It's one single Paradigm: Cosmos disconnected / humans disconnected. The cosmology of a people relates to everything about them is the general idea here.
   So, to begin looking at the Cosmos we can take a look at our relationship with how and where we live.  And, why things just seem to be getting worse instead of better even though we have an idea that we really wish to fix things. If in fact we do not really believe we need the Earth at all, then does this not have a great impact on whatever we do?
   What has happened since that first Earth Day in 1970? Why are we on the brink of global catastrope when we said we were going to do something else?
    Though there is sometimes a great deal of emphasis placed on the power and responsibility of the individual in making these critical changes, even in much of my own writing over the years, it has become more and more clear that a lion's share of the blame can be placed upon those people holding the reigns of power in government and industry, the big oil companies for example and the current White House regime, etc.   This is not to say that individuals cannot do great things, but that when there is a conspiracy going on to undermine these great things, well, look around and see for yourself. It's such a big mess and it is so clouded with confusion that it makes seeing clearly difficult or impossible.
The main point of this little ranting and raving is that sometimes the best intentions of very well meaning individuals can be turned around, thwarted, disguised, and colored green even though it is purple underneath, etc., and what we think we want does not always turn out that way.
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Earth Day (1970)
“Big problems are messing up planet Earth with too many cars, landfills piled up with bottles and cans, and toxic waste all over the place. We proclaimed the first Earth Day (in 1970 when I was a senior in High School) and it seems that everything is going to be ok. It is just a matter of making some changes and cleaning things up. The Earth is now saved by a new sort of consciousness about not messing things up so much."

I spent much of that first Earth Day silk screening posters, flyers, and tee shirts with a symbol of my own design which reads “GIVE EARTH A CHANCE”, and that’s about all I did. Recycling paper, bottles and cans became a more common practice after that and everything seemed like it was going to be ok.

Of course things were not ok after all. People just sort of needed a way to stop being worried about pollution and the environment I guess. The real problem, that people did not live as though the environment is part of our body and where we come from and how we live, was almost totally ignored. The fact that we are of the Earth was overlooked in a real and deep sense and it seemed that people believed their spirits were extraterrestrial and that the Earth was just a stopping place, or something like that. It was as though Earth did not really matter so much and that it was expendable or just there for us to do whatever we wanted to do with it.

I saw a TV program about building the first road through a dense rain forest somewhere. There was this construction foreman, with heavy equipment in the background, talking to a native of the area. The native man had a bone through his nose, just like natives in some cartoons did, and he was repeating the same sounds over and gesturing toward the trees over again to the foreman. The native seemed wild and crazy and the foreman seemed frustrated as though faced with a wild animal misbehaving. Then someone translated what the native man was saying. He was repeating “The forest is me…I am the forest” again and again. The foreman said something to the effect that this was nonsense and that he just did not understand progress and modern technology. The forest was cut and the road was put in.

On that first Earth Day in 1970 we did not have the knowledge that this Rain Forest Native had, that we are the Earth and the Earth is us. The entire ecosystem of Earth may be destroyed before we even begin to attain that sort of enlightened philosophy and world view which our modern society has deemed primitive and uneducated. We just thought that if we recycled our cans and didn’t litter everything would be ok. And, we thought that with our superior intellect and modern technological wisdom that “they” would not let anything really bad happen.”

- It is 2007 now and people are still talking about things that can be done, lifestyle changes that can be made, and new kinds of technology and machines that will make everything better, while virtually ignoring the true heart of the matter. We still do not seem to believe that we are from here. Beliefs in immortal souls and extraterrestrial spirits, etc., are still common even in the highest offices of the most powerful nations in the world.   When will Earthlings learn?
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    "The new "global warming" movement and "climate crisis" has all the potential of being every bit as much of a failure as "Earth day" was. The big Earth Day movement ended up becoming nothing much more than advertising slogans, product tags, and one big bandaid to make people feel like they are doing something to "help the environment". People just do not have the time or energy to look underneath what they read and watch on television, and we just cannot take the risk of bucking the system too much. Are people generally upset, angry, scared, horrified? No, I don't think so, even though predictions indicate that life on Earth for air breathing, water drinking mammals is going to get pretty rough soon. So long as are immediate needs are met, and there is something good on TV, we basically just go on day to day doing what everyone else is doing."

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Building sand castles in the rain...
   "The big surge in recycling and conservation after the first Earth Day was somewhat foiled by the fact that the number of tons of trash increased so much in the following years that the problems were just lessened and not solved. The landfills are still filling and the toxic waste still flowing more than ever. To put it in terms of cars alone, by the time the number of hybrid and low emission vehicles in use goes way up the number of vehicles on the road will have risen so that the same ammount of pollution will be produced in 2020 as in 2007. It makes for a very very slow change, if one can call that change in terms of the effects on the environment, and we are being distracted by these seemingly big moves while in fact the problems are still getting worse. Like trying to build a sand castle in the rain, it is a very futile system."
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website origins and inspiration, 1964...

This all began with....

an 8th Grader's View:

Beginning with the very first time The Big Bang Theory was presented in my Eighth Grade classroom in 1964, from the very instant the teacher described it, I knew this was not a good idea. I thought that squashing something down to the size of an atom was sort of silly. Even to reduce an Orange down by 99.9%, this would still be bigger than just one atom. Reduce a Oak tree down to a single atom, or a human being...impossible. Of course, you can say that the tree was once a seed, but then you have to figure in the soil, water, sun, birds and bees, etc., and the tree cannot exist without these, anymore than a human can be born without parents, etc., or the entire visible universe come from nothing. As far as the Earth or Sun squashing down to a single atom, well that was totally out of the question to me too. The most outrageous part of it though was where this starting place atom was...nowhere in no space and no time. If you don't know what's there I guess you have to assume there is nothing? The other thing about the "Big Bang" was that the farther away things were the faster they were going, like a cannon ball fired a million years ago is going much faster than one fired today, or something like this. Also, if there was nothing there outside it, how could it make any noise? These sorts of questions were what puzzled me in the years to come after that initial introduction to The Big Bang Theory and to this day I still do not see how anyone can take it seriously.

Can a human being be reduced down to a single atom or cell by projecting the bodies formation back in time? No, absolutely not. Unless one forgets about the mother's body and their being a father, then considering the planet, air, water, sun, moon, solar system, galaxy, etc., etc., where does the connection end. Why should the cosmos not sit squarely in the midst of something else as everything does? Does this not make room for more theories, ideas, motivation, models, and explanations? If we human beings are never to actually see "what's out there", must we live our lives believing that there must be nothing?

   The simple answer might be that this sort of thinking is not science. This ignors the idea that making such bold assumptions without concrete scientific basis, such as choices of explanations of microwave background radiation or red shifting of distant light, is not truly scientific either.
   The point here is just that sitting in that classroom listening to a teacher read from notes outlining a topic in a science book about this theory, and all that it implies, it just struck me as preposterous without a single doubt in my mind...I just "knew" that this could not be true.
   At that time I did not realize that this idea, theory, point of view, philosophy, cosmology, and way of seeing life and the universe would relate to the end of life as we know it all over the entire planet. That part of it has slowly dawned on my over time and has become even more important than the idea of seeing a more realistic or reasonable story of the universe. It has become a matter of life and death.

detail of painting #11 of Krallosvierd series.

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