WADE FRAZIER : A Healed Planet

[Wade Frazier]

Hi sdv:

Have a sip for me.

What I found was that there were at least two ways to read and learn material like what I am writing, as I discovered in my hardest accounting classes (called intermediate accounting, which comprises most of what is covered on the CPA exam). One of my high school chums was a year ahead of me at the university, and I asked him how he studied when I first got there. He said that he would read a chapter, first kind of skimming it. Then he would read it again and begin to ingest the ideas. And he would then read it a third and fourth time, going over it in more detail, and by the fifth and sixth readings, it would finally begin to sink in.

I thanked him for his information. However, when I took the class, I did it differently. I would read each paragraph, slowly, and think deeply about it, and relate it to other information that I knew, fitting it into a comprehensive framework. While it took my friend maybe ten minutes to first skim the chapter, and who knows how much in the other passes, it took me three hours to read one chapter. But when I was done, I did not have to read the chapter again; I had absorbed and integrated it. My friend went on to have a fine career in accounting. However, I got the highest test scores on the national accounting exam in my university’s history, and when I sat for the CPA exam, I did not even study for it. Now, 35 years after I took intermediate accounting, I can tell you that the topic of chapter five of that textbook was on present value concepts, and I can still see pages of that book in my mind’s eye. I have heard that called eidetic memory, but I know my memory is not perfect, and it is not as good as it once was. Did I try to memorize the textbook? No. I hate rote memorization. What I did was study it as deeply as I could, and integrated it with everything else I knew, and when I was done, three hours later, I had absorbed the ideas and information, and most of it is still in my head, 35 years later.

I don’t know many other comprehensive thinkers, and have not traded notes with any of them, but the process that I went through I am imagining is common with comprehensive thinkers. But I also want to know if people who skim once, skim twice, and go deeper on the subsequent passes, can really integrate the information, or if it gets stored in some kind of short-term memory that quickly fades. I’ll ask you in a few years.

I have heard of some high-level geniuses that could read a book a day, among their other activities, probably reading a page or two a minute, and they also integrated and retained the information. All I can say to that is that they have a far higher capacity than I do.

My essay is going to have many moving parts, and I will be bringing them all together. If I can’t help lay readers begin to develop some kind of comprehensive perspective with it, I will have failed. My experience has been that my work is not light reading, and the people that really understood my work the best were geniuses, but they all seemed smarter than me, sometimes far smarter. I have known some people whose IQs go off the scale, but I am going to do my best so that people don’t need to have genius-level IQs or scientific backgrounds to understand.

Back to work.

Best,

Wade

[Melinda]

Posted by sandy (here)
...THANK YOU for saying so eloquently what I often feel and experience too!!..

Thank you Sandy, and thank you Wade, for your wonderful replies.

Posted by Wade Frazier (here)
...If you could have seen Brian when I met him, and Brian ten years later, and Brian at the end of his life, going as hard as ever, as positively as ever, it would have amazed you...

I don’t doubt it. I’m already amazed without having met any of these people. Dennis, Brian, Adam Trombly. All the men and the women with the courage it takes. Occasionally I wonder why am I, this arty little person tucked away in my own little life, feeling so drawn to engage the FE subject, albeit only from a distance? But I know the answer. It is obvious. This world belongs to all of us, as does the responsibility for its future. We do not own this planet. But we own our role on it. And supporting one another with discerning hearts and minds is something that can and does matter - even though the materialist view would have us question its effects. We are always stronger for it.


~ much love ~

[Carmody]

Avalon member 'painterdoug' did this, Wade. I thought you'd appreciate it. (the thread is in the general area)

[Wade Frazier]

Thanks Carmody:

That’s the Brian I knew!

That caught one of my favorite facial expressions of his.

Wade

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

Well, more than 150 pages into the essay, I am finally getting to the parts that will likely begin to interest most readers, and I just drafted this paragraph:

“Did the larger brain lead to the behaviors, or did the behaviors lead to the larger brain? If other evolutionary trends have relevance, and I think they do, they mutually reinforced each other, providing positive feedbacks, and down one evolutionary line it reached runaway conditions that led to the human brain. That stated, the initial behavior was likely the use of a body part (the brain) for a new purpose, and its success led to selective advantages that led to mutual reinforcement. I think that the likely chain of events was walking upright freeing hands for new behaviors, which led to new ways of making and using tools, which enhanced food acquisition activities, which allowed the energy-demanding brain to expand, as well as related biological changes, which led to more complex tools and behaviors that acquired and required even more energy. That, in short, defines the human journey to this day, which the rest of this essay will explore. There has never been and probably never will be energy-devouring animals like humanity on Earth, unless it is a human-line descendant.”

It is in a discussion of the variance in monkey and ape brains, and their food acquisition practices and social organization. I can see that many readers will think, “He finally cuts to the chase!” And many will jump right to that part or maybe all the way to the end, hoping that I will publish blueprints so that they can make FE gizmos in their garages.

But the 150 pages preceding that paragraph, and the probable hundred or more that will follow it, are all vitally important for my intention for the readers that I hope to attract, which is to begin to develop comprehensive perspectives about the situation. I see the essay as a textbook and the beginnings of study, not the end. I would not be able to do justice to the topics that I survey in the next hundred lifetimes, but I think it will be adequate for beginning choir formation. But we will see.

Back to work.

Best,

Wade

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

I am definitely Zoning along, fasting and writing. I just finished the bones of my next chapter, titled The Path to Humanity. I am emotionally-centered:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/spirit.htm#reading

and I get blissful quite often when fasting. I usually wake up that way when I am fasting, and depending on how the day goes ( ), it can last all day, where I am rolling along in an exalted state. Fasting is the ultimate high. Today has kind of been one of those days. Not only do I think that I am doing good work on the essay, but it is coming together more and more with each chapter, and I am getting to the good stuff. I’ll put up a draft of that newest chapter after I polish it up in the next few days. It will likely be only about half as long as my previous two monster chapters, and it stops at the brink of humanity’s first epochal event (s), which were energy and intelligence related. Stone tools were the first big event, and the proto-human human brain began to grow then, likely due to the energy boost that came with the food opportunities that stone tools provided. Stone tools marked the rise of humanity. No animal had ever done anything like it before. Some hundreds of thousands of years later, proto-humans learned to control fire. It was a mental/technical/social achievement that put humans on the fast track to global dominance. Nothing close to it had even been seen before. Nothing could challenge fire-wielding humans, and humans eventually used it to conquer Earth, along with their super-predator toolset and social organization. But I get ahead of myself.

We will see how fast the rest of this essay goes. I may fast until I get it done, so it might go faster than I think, but goal number one is getting it done right, and second place is how fast I do it, and then it will be getting back to the corporate grind.

Best,

Wade

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

About to embark on chores and the like for the rest of the day, and below is a very rough draft of my “path to humanity” chapter, again presented without the notes and links. The notes and links are going to be very important parts of the published essay, to assist deeper study, which will likely be required to form the comprehensive perspective that I think will be needed to be part of the choir. People with comprehensive perspectives will be able to keep their eye on the ball. Perhaps paradoxically, their vision will be about as wide as it gets on Earth, but they will also see the bulls-eye clearer than ever.

Best,

Wade

The Path to Humanity

From their Cretaceous origins through their radiations and extinctions in the Eocene, primates continued evolving. About 35 mya, Old World and New World monkeys, called higher primates (also called simians or anthropoids), split. Simians seem to have split from a group also ancestral to prosimians. Today’s prosimians include lemurs, lorises, tarsiers, and bush babies. During the Oligocene, Africa and Southeast Asia became primate refugia. Tarsiers have lived in Southeast Asia continually for about 45 million years, and the only survivors of their evolutionary line live on islands near Southeast Asia. Primate history in the late Eocene and Oligocene is controversial today, with the fate of an extinct group from primates’ wide geographical range in the early Eocene debated, but they seem to be at least cousins to the ancestors of non-tarsier prosimians, if not ancestral to them.

The disputes of evolutionary lineages and geography continue all the way to Homo sapiens, which this chapter and the next will survey. The debates and drama likely have two primary sources: the first is that humans are descendants from those lines, and the second is that there has been a human desire to demonstrate that humanity is radically differ from its ancestors, possessed of unique traits, not only in degree, but in kind. The debates seem to get fiercer the closer the primate line gets to modern humans.

Early primate migrations and extinctions led to a disjointed geographical distribution, as they could only live in tropical canopies. When tropical forests shrank in the cooling conditions that led to the current ice age, primates such as tarsiers found themselves in isolated refugia. In the late Eocene and late Miocene, when tropical canopies disappeared, the primate lines inhabiting them went extinct unless they used an escape route to a surviving tropical forest.

While simians may have first appeared in Eocene Asia, when the late Eocene cooling began, Africa became the primary primate refuge. Around the early Oligocene, a splinter group migrated to South America from Africa and evolved in isolation for the next 30 million years or so. Just as dinosaurs marginalized early mammals, simians marginalized prosimians, beginning in the Oligocene. Today’s prosimians either live where simians do not, or where they coexist with simians, they are nocturnal. Prosimians have simple social organization, with most nocturnal prosimians leading solitary existences. Lemurs living in daylight have social groups of up to 20. Monkeys have far more complex social organization than prosimians, with baboon societies numbering up to 250 individuals, although about 50 is common. Capuchin monkeys are considered the most intelligent New World monkey, and their societies have between 10 and 40 members. Studies of simian societies have shown them engaging in crude versions of human politics, which have even been called Machiavellian, which has caused some to leap to Machiavelli’s defense.

From their origins around 40-45 mya, monkeys continued evolving in Africa’s Oligocene forests, and about 25 mya, some African monkeys began evolving into apes, with Proconsul a controversial transitional fruit-eating monkey. Mary Leakey’s most famous find was a Proconsul skull in 1948. The main differences between apes and monkeys were apes being larger, losing their tails (not having as much need for balancing on tree limbs), and having a stiffer spine and larger brain. Apes began the descent from canopy to ground. Pretty much all simians will eat fruit if they can, but some early monkey/apes developed thicker tooth enamel. That meant that they no longer subsisted on soft fruit and leaves, but were eating coarser vegetation, which was a consequence of living in a cooler, dryer world. No Miocene apes were as adapted to leaf eating as today’s apes and leaf-eating monkeys. As with the first tetrapods to leave water, a prominent speculation today is that those monkeys/apes changed their diets and eventually left the trees because they were losers of arboreal existence, pushed to the margins as they lost the competitive game with other canopy-dwellers. Gibbons split from the line that became great apes about 22 mya and stayed in the trees, with their swinging mode of locomotion.

By 20-17 mya, apes became common in East Africa, with some apes becoming large, up to 90 kilograms, and some resembling gorillas. While virtually all apes eventually abandoned tropical canopies, and while monkeys were scarce in in the Miocene, they stayed and dominate them today, with the number of monkey species increasing and ape species decreasing rather steadily over the past 20 million years. With that late-Oligocene warming that continued into the Miocene, tropical forests began expanding again. When Africa and Arabia finally crashed into Eurasia and began that great invasion from Asia, apes escaped Africa, beginning about 16.5 mya, with thickly enameled teeth suited to the non-fruit foods available outside rainforests. Their migrations resulted in new homes that spanned Eurasia, from Europe to Siberia to China to Southeast Asia. It was a spectacular adaptive radiation that tallied more than twenty discovered apes species so far. That is how gibbons and orangutans ended up in Asia. About 14 mya in Africa, the ancestors of today’s great apes may have appeared, and about 12.5 mya the likely ancestors of orangutans appeared in India. By that time, tropical forests were shrinking once again, and orangutans continued down their evolutionary path isolated from their African cousins, with one possible ancestor living in Southeast Asia about 9-7 mya. A descendant from the orangutan line became the largest primate ever, at three meters tall and more than 500 kilograms. It lived for nine million years, to only go extinct about when humans arrived, and might have something to do with Yeti legends. Today’s orangutans are confined to two islands in Indonesia, Borneo and Sumatra, and are particularly endangered on Sumatra. All apes besides humans are endangered today due to human activities.

In the mid-Miocene cooling’s early stages, beginning about 14 mya, apes abounded in Eurasia and were adapted to the hardier diets that less-tropical biomes could afford, and one from Spain 13 mya may well be ancestral to modern humans and other great apes. It largely lived on the ground and had a relatively upright posture. Its discovery threw many previously accepted ideas of ape evolution into disarray. The idea of apes ancestral to humanity living beyond Africa is a recent one, but is gaining acceptance. Important new fossils are found with regularity, as with all areas of paleontology, but funding for investigating human ancestry is the most plentiful. A 1996 discovery of a Miocene ape in Turkey, which has features common to both orangutans and African apes, led to questioning whether some key ape features are ancestral or convergent. One early fossil ape finding is still highly controversial as to where it fits into the evolutionary tree, as it had ape and monkey features but lived ten million years after the hypothesized ape-monkey split. The great ape lineages are subjected to great dispute and controversy today, with the human ancestral tree regularly shaken up with new findings.

Around 10.5 mya, after Eurasian forests began thinning out, African rainforests began losing their continuity, breaking up into isolated patches, with woodlands and grasslands appearing along rainforest edges. Whether the direct ancestor of humans moved “home” to Africa from Eurasia around 9-10 mya as the Miocene cooling progressed, or indigenous African lines led to humans is uncertain and may always be so, but by seven mya the evolutionary line to humans was firmly established in Africa, as the forests that could support apes in near-African Eurasia disappeared, with the last of those lines going extinct about eight mya. The gorilla line may have split from the human line about seven mya, but recent findings may push that back to ten mya. Whatever the timing really is, there is little scientific debate whether humans and gorillas descended from the same line, and that that ancestor lived in Africa. The genome sequencing projects show that great ape DNA and human DNA are very similar, with chimpanzees and bonobos, our closest surviving cousins, having more than 98% of their genes shared with humans, and human DNA duplication created more variability so that humans have about 94% of their DNA identical to chimps. Gorillas have slightly less DNA in common with humans, and orangutans understandably have the greatest divergence. Humans also lost a chromosome that the other great apes retained.

The terminology of the ape/human line can be confusing to a lay reader, as it gets sliced ever finer as humanity’s time is approached, and I will try to avoid some of the many “homi” and “homo” terms used to describe families, genera, and species. Homo in Greek meant “same,” while homo in Latin meant “human,” which is the meaning used in ape taxonomy. The ape clade is the superfamily called Hominoidea, and all of its branches have “hom” prefixes. Members of the genus “homo” are of the solely human line, with Homo habilis perhaps being the genus’s first member, although its status is still unsettled.

Orangutans are the most arboreal great ape, and in Africa the great apes had definitely left the trees as their daytime residence, although they slept in trees to avoid predators. Gorillas’ ancestors adapted to a leafier diet and made the rainforest their home. Gorillas and chimpanzees are rainforest denizens, but chimps live more on the edge, getting into the woodlands fringes more, and the evidence is that gorillas may have helped push them there. A gorilla is going to win almost any contest with a chimp, and gorillas eat leafier vegetation than chimps do.

Because gorillas can better subsist on leafy vegetation (although the staple of the western lowland gorilla, which is the most prevalent gorilla species, is still fruit; mountain gorillas primarily subsist on leaves) they generally do not have a daily range as large as chimpanzees’, and live in the heart of rainforests, while what became chimpanzees were likely pushed to the margins by their larger cousins (a gorilla almost always wins that contest) and live more along a rainforest’s woodland fringes, and have to range relatively far to find fruit trees, as fruit is their staple. Similar to the largest quadrupedal herbivores, gorillas ingest a great deal of low-energy vegetation each day, and they are also hindgut fermenters, extracting energy from cellulose, which humans cannot do. Chimpanzees are also hindgut fermenters, but have adapted to more diverse environments and their overall range is far larger than gorillas’. As with all organisms, the ecological situation of great apes impacted their evolution, including social organization and behaviors, which has been increasingly studied since the nineteenth century and has provided valuable insights into humanity, some of which follow.

The chimpanzee and human lines seem to have split between five and seven mya, with six mya a common estimate. The species perhaps the closest to that split found so far dates to about seven mya, but the findings have also been used to argue for pushing the human/chimpanzee split back to 13 mya. But whatever the timing that scientists eventually agree on, the splits of orangutans first, gorillas second, and chimpanzees last (with the bonobo split arguably another key split of about a million years ago) is highly unlikely to change.

A recent find of a possible human-line ape may even displace australopithecines as humanity’s ancestors, relegating them to a side-branch that went extinct. These are still the early days of investigating human ancestry, and rapidly and dramatically changing ideas about the evolutionary path to humanity will continue. That is partly because the fossil record is thin and has only been expanded in recent history by numerous teams digging around Africa, with dreams of the ultimate find haunting their sleep. Darwin speculated that humans evolved in Africa, but in the early twentieth century, Asia was considered the likeliest evolutionary home of humans. In 1921, an early proto-human skull was discovered in a Rhodesian mine, and in 1924 an even more primitive proto-human skull was discovered in a South African mine, and Africa became the focus of investigation of the human line, accelerating with the work of what became the Leakey dynasty, which began with Louis Leakey’s checkered but ultimately triumphant career.

That human/chimp find of 6-7 mya had thick teeth that meant that it likely had abandoned the arboreal ape diet, and brings up perhaps the single biggest question of the early human line: “When did our ancestors became bipeds?” One piece of evidence for bipedalism is where the spinal cord enters the skull; if it is underneath the skull, it suggests an upright posture and, hence, bipedalism. There is disputed evidence that that seven mya ape had a skull hole that meant bipedalism. Skull and vertebrae evidence, changes in the shoulders, arms, and hands of apes from Proconsul onward, as well as the pelvis, legs, knees, ankles, and feet, are used whenever relevant ape fossils are found to determine what kind of posture they had, all the way from swinging from branches to walking upright. The great range of motion of the human arm has that arboreal heritage to thank.

Part of that late Miocene ground-foraging existence likely included digging roots, as chimpanzees do today. Around 4.4-3.9 mya came the earliest celebrity humanoid fossil, called Ardi today. Ardi has an older cousin, maybe an ancestor, from 5.8-5.2 mya, but Ardi is the most complete early great ape fossil. Ardi had about the same-sized brain as a chimpanzee, but she may have walked upright. Ardi had relatively delicate features, which suggest that she did not eat roots and tough food, but soft fruits obtained by nimbly climbing trees. Her canine teeth are markedly less prominent than chimpanzee teeth, leading to speculation that her species was less aggressive than chimpanzees.

While the human lineage through those early proto-humans can be shuffled, perhaps radically, with the next new finding, today anthropologists are fairly confident that the human line passes through australopithecines. The first ones appeared about 4.2-4.1 mya, and about 3.9 mya, the most famous australopithecine species appeared, called Australopithecus afarensis, of which the original humanoid fossil rock star, Lucy, was a member. She lived about 3.2 mya, and one of Mary Leakey’s greatest finds was what are probably A. afarensis footprints, dated to about 3.6 mya, which demonstrate beyond any reasonable doubt that the human line was bipedal by then. But all early humans up to australopithecines also had shoulder and arm adaptations for climbing in trees, bipedal or not, and all early humans climbed at least every night to sleep; sleeping on the ground is not done by great apes today except gorillas, and adult male gorillas are the most regular ground sleepers, with smaller gorillas sleeping in trees. Gorillas are rarely preyed upon in their rainforest homes, other than by humans, rival gorillas, and the stray leopard, which avoids large males. African predators made sleeping on the ground infeasible for primates, and none do today in the kinds of woodland environments where early humans lived. The human line may have not slept on the ground until it learned to control fire.

The study of intelligence is a young science, and the relationship of brain size (both absolute and relative) and structure to what is called intelligence is currently subject to a great deal of research and controversy, and even the definition of intelligence is hotly debated. The neocortex appeared with mammals, and is the key structural aspect of brain evolution that led to human intelligence. The mirror test attempts to determine which animals have self-recognition, and those suspected of being the most intelligent have passed the test, including all great apes, cetaceans, elephants, and even a bird. Humans do not pass the mirror test until about eighteen months of age.

Intelligence can confer great advantages, with the encephalization of theropods an early indicator of its benefits. For instance, spider monkeys have brains about twice the size of howler monkeys, which is thought to be due to their larger societies (about twice as large), and the fact that their diet is more than 70% fruit, while the howler monkey’s diet is less than half fruit, with leaves providing twice the proportion of the howler’s diet over the spider’s. Remembering where and when fruit is ripe, and navigating more complex social environments, takes greater thinking power. Similar to howler and spider monkeys, chimpanzees have to range far to find fruit, which is their staple, while gorillas can more readily eat nearby leaves, and chimps have more complex social lives than gorillas do. Chimpanzees also have proportionally larger brains than gorillas have, and are considered more intelligent.

Did the larger brain lead to the behaviors, or did the behaviors lead to the larger brain? If other evolutionary trends have relevance, they mutually reinforced each other, providing positive feedbacks, and down one evolutionary line it reached runaway conditions that led to the human brain. That stated, the initial behavior was likely the use of a body part (the brain) for a new purpose, and its success led to selective advantages that led to mutual reinforcement. Although it is by no means and unorthodox understanding, I think that the likely chain of events was walking upright freeing hands for new behaviors, which led to new ways of making and using tools, which enhanced food acquisition activities, which allowed the energy-demanding brain to expand, as well as related biological changes, which led to more complex tools and behaviors that acquired and required even more energy. That, in short, defines the human journey to this day, which the rest of this essay will explore. There has never been and probably never will again be an energy-devouring animal like humanity on Earth, unless it is a human-line descendant.

Many traits of apes, including humans, are evident in monkeys. Sexual dimorphism, where genders are different shapes and sizes, is a minor phenomenon among prosimians. But it is pronounced in simians, especially apes, and is why men are larger and stronger than women. Its ultimate causes are primarily sexual selection, or how mates choose each other. A prominent hypothesis is that early monkey troupes had males as sentinels guarding the territorial perimeter, protecting the female-dominated core where offspring were cared for and where the food was. A defensible food source was the key attribute for any simian territory. Most primates are territorial, and extreme territorial behaviors can be seen in monkeys and apes, including murder, with its apotheosis in humans.

Nursing likely led to the more involved mammalian parenting behaviors and increased female participation, which followed the great investment that females have in gestating offspring. Larger simian males are more likely to become dominant, and dominant males often get the most and best food and have enhanced reproductive rights, with females attracted to them. Virtually all monkey and ape societies are male-dominated, and the modern ideal of human females freely choosing their mates (or, perhaps more importantly, non-dominant males choosing their mates, if they get to mate at all) is rarely in evidence in monkey and ape societies, and is a new phenomenon for humans. The phenomenon of attractive women mating with rich and powerful men has deep roots in the simian evolutionary journey.

In addition to their Machiavellian social activities, monkeys are quite vocal, and a key social behavior is grooming, which is integral to forming social bonds. In crab-eating macaques, grooming seems to be a form of foreplay or even a payment for sex, and male chimpanzees and capuchins have paid for sex, so the world’s oldest profession may be old indeed. Vocalizations and grooming behaviors become more prominent in gorillas and chimpanzees (orangutan social organization is markedly different from African apes’), and a recent and important hypothesis is that gossip largely replaced grooming with humans as a cheap way to form social bonds, and “cheap” is almost always measured in terms of energy, relating to how much metabolism is devoted to an activity. Almost all animals devote the vast majority of their energy toward acquiring and consuming food, or avoiding becoming food, with industrialized humans about the only significant exception.

Female simians usually stay within their society of origin, while males leave. That is how simians prevented inbreeding, but that pattern is reversed in chimpanzees and gorillas, where females usually leave. Sexual coercion of females is common behavior among simians. Bonobos and gibbons are among the few simians that overcame it, and it seems to have been due to ecological dynamics, which will be explored later in this essay. Humans have partially discarded that behavior during the industrial age. Those are obviously highly-charged areas of behavioral research, and sociobiology is a highly controversial scientific study. A falsifiable hypothesis is arguably the sine qua non of science, and the behavioral sciences have often been plagued with a lack of them, going back to Freud, which has caused some to say that psychology is not really a science. This essay will sail into some of those murky waters before long.

Becoming bipedal freed hands for other uses. The non-human great apes all have long fingers and short thumbs. Ardipithecus ramidus is an early example of the growing thumb in the ape milieu from which the human line descended. Changes in australopithecine hands may have been at least partly adaptations to throwing and wielding clubs. Lucy’s species existed for about a million years, going extinct about 2.9 mya, but it might have been one of those “happy ending” extinctions where the descendants eventually changed enough over time to become new species. What seems clear today is that australopithecine species were scattered around Africa, as they were a highly successful line. Lucy’s species lived in eastern Africa, around Ethiopia, while other australopithecines lived in southern Africa and others lived in central Africa, which is in a similar range to where Miocene ape fossils have been found. Not long after Lucy’s species disappeared, an australopithecine line appeared that is called “robust australopithecines” today and its members have been assigned their own genus, while Lucy and her cousins are called “gracile.” The robusts had huge jaws and teeth, with a dramatic sagittal crest to anchor their powerful chewing muscles; a member of the line is nicknamed “Nutcracker Man” because of its gigantic teeth.

Becoming bipedal allowed for far greater mobility than knuckle-walkers were capable of, with further excursions from the safety of trees possible, to the nearby savannas and grasslands. Tooth studies of later australopithecines showed them to be eating generous amounts of C4 plants, likely from grasslands. But ranging further from the safety of trees was also dangerous. Similar to Proconsul, key australopithecine fossil finds were apparently where the remains of predator meals accumulated, usually in caves. Those early apes on the path to humanity were the hunted, not hunters. Cats such as leopards were likely primary predators that feasted on australopithecines, with one robust skull showing leopard puncture marks in its skull. Most surviving bones were those from body parts that would have been more difficult to eat, with less flesh on them, so the predators left those parts largely intact, which fossil hunters discovered millions of years later, such as jaws, teeth, hands, and feet. Skull finds are extremely rare.

The woodland fringes that australopithecines and their relatives lived in were markedly different from where gorillas and even chimpanzees exist today. Today’s most successful primates today in fringe environments similar to what australopithecines operated in are macaques, which also suffer high rates of predation. The social organization of humanity’s early ancestors may well have been more like macaques than chimpanzees.

As this essay may have made clear, Earth’s evolutionary tree of life has many branches, so many that no one person can become intimate with all of them, even only the larger ones, and innumerable lines of animals arose, radiated, and died out, almost always going out with a whimper instead of a bang. All australopithecine branches came to their ends, except perhaps for the line that led to humans. About 2.6-2.5 mya, just as the current ice age began, a gracile australopithecine lived in eastern Africa, another in southern Africa, and the robust australopithecine with that amazing skull lived in eastern Africa. The oldest stone tools yet discovered were associated with that east African gracile australopithecine. Many non-human animals use tools, and some even make them. But all early tools would have been made of twigs, bones, sticks, unshaped rocks and the like, and they have not left behind much evidence for scientists to study.

Chimpanzees are the most tool-using non-human great ape, and female chimps make and use tools more often than males do. One problem with studying today’s animals and trying to apply findings to their ancestors is that their line has evolved too. The ancestor of chimpanzees when the split was made with the human line did not look like today’s chimpanzee, and probably did not act quite like one. However, chimpanzees and gorillas adapted to environments that have not remarkably changed for the past 8-10 million years, and it is unlikely that they have changed dramatically over that time. Orangutans are similar. Scientists have argued that since there is little evidence of morphological change in those great apes in the intervening years since they split from the line that led to humans, particularly their cranial capacity, that they likely act similarly today and have similar capacities to their ancestors of millions of years ago. Today’s chimps have about the same-sized brains as australopithecines did. They make and use tools, and an orangutan was even trained in captivity to make stone tools, and all great apes have learned to use sign language and some even invent their own signs.

I think it very reasonable to believe that tool use among humanity’s ancestors predates, perhaps by several millions years, those stone tools dated to 2.5-2.6 mya. The proto-human equivalent of Nikola Tesla (although it may have been a female) discovered how to bang two rocks together to create a hard edge used for cutting, maybe with a little inventor’s serendipity. It may not be possible to overstate the significance of that invention. More than a million years of free hands, due to australopithecine bipedal posture, led to the most significant tool-making event in Earth’s history, at least to that time. The shortening fingers and lengthening thumbs of australopithecines led to more dexterity, and in trying to train today’s great apes to make stone tools, their relative lack of dexterity has been noted as an impediment. Also, the increasing dexterity of the proto-human hand is linked with neurological changes, from the hands to the brain, as early proto-humans took tool-making to a new level, in another case of mutually-reinforcing positive feedbacks.

And as with other seminal events in life’s history on Earth, the breakthrough to make stone tools was likely only done once. Although that australopithecine may have been the smartest member of its species, with an ape IQ that went off the scale, his or her brain was the same size as the fellow members of his or her species, but that would not last long. The swift climb to the appearance of Homo sapiens had begun.

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

I have bought a whole lot of books from Amazon in the past several years, as I have been studying for the upcoming essay, and I have spent more than $100 on books before, although I avoid it if I can. Sometimes, even I get sticker shock, such as what I just perused:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listi...condition=used

Maybe I should grab the $1,300 ones before they are gone and I am reduced to buying the $4,300 book. Seriously, I have not seen prices like those before, especially for a book that is less than ten years old.

But the winner is this one:

http://www.amazon.com/How-sell-New-f...=books+on+sale

Looking forward to writing the next chapters, which will be about interesting and seminal times for humans.

Best,

Wade

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

A few odds and ends as I start the week. I have been making posts on the slow collapse of the USA, which began when energy consumption per capita peaked with the first oil crisis of 1973/1974:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Un..._1650-2010.png

and it has been downhill ever since. That measure of the real economy dwarfs everything else. There are financial measures, such as real wages per hour, especially when they adjust for all the accounting fraud that the government and other interests have been actively performing since then, that tell the stark tale in financial terms:

http://www.thestreet.com/story/11480...0-opinion.html

The reason why the average wage has fallen by 50% by those measures, while energy per capita consumption has “only” fallen by about 15% is partly because the elite have been disproportionately managing the decline, waging a class war against the rest of American society, so that income and wealth disparities are at all-time highs:

http://www.mybudget360.com/wealth-di...ed-age-wealth/

and the worst in the industrialized world:

http://www.businessinsider.com/incom...uality-2013-12

There is a great deal of Orwellian perception management happening in the media and with other social managers, but for those whose eyes are open, the evidence is all too clear, from Detroit and other American cities beginning to look like something from out of Planet of the Apes:

https://projectavalon.net/forum4/show...l=1#post774945

to the collapse in mall traffic and many other measures:

http://www.theburningplatform.com/20...-death-rattle/

As the world runs out of hydrocarbon energy, the USA is a preview of the steep decline coming.

I am now at the stage of the essay where I chart the rise of humanity and our expanding brains. While there were positive feedbacks between human manipulative ability and social organization being able to wrench more energy from the environment, the issue of sentience arises repeatedly. As I have written in one of my chapter drafts:

https://projectavalon.net/forum4/show...l=1#post782397

when South America finally crashed into North America about three million years ago, and ended 60 million years of South American isolation, nearly all South American mammals quickly went extinct, at a level of around 95% of all mammalian species. It was not done with malice or forethought by the invaders. They just saw opportunities and took them, and the less competitive ones went extinct.

Three million years later, an upright ape from Africa developed the ability to migrate to South America, and within a few thousand years of migration (and maybe as fast as a few hundred), they drove nearly all large animals to extinction, as those large animals were a source of highly concentrated energy, easily obtained by those apes. As with the invasion of three million years previously, there was no forethought given to the exercise, or really even malice. The animals were there for the taking, and humans kept killing all the easy meat until it was gone. They did it wherever they appeared in the past 50,000 years, without exception.

Ten thousand years later, energetically-advanced humans from Europe ended the isolation of those humans in the Western Hemisphere, and they easily conquered, enslaved, and quickly exterminated about 95% those less “advanced” natives. Because those events happened in the historical era, we have documentation regarding that extermination, and with extremely few exceptions:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/columbus.htm#genocide

the genocide was a mere side effect of a century-long gold rush:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/savings.htm#biggest

an orgy of greed that ended up exterminating the natives, with about a 90% eradication in that time, eventually reaching the 95% of the first invasion of three million years ago, and 100% ten thousand years ago, with absolutely no remorse or thoughtfulness by the invaders. And Spain’s successors merely continued the game until the entire world was under European domination:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/america.htm#jockeying

and in the USA, for instance, the extermination of the natives was cheered:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/lies.htm#custer

Similar to the invasion of three million years ago, or ten thousand years ago, there was virtually no sense of awareness by the invaders that they knew or cared what they were doing to those they invaded, conquered, and exterminated. That is one of many events that bring up the question that Brian O put to me many years ago: Are we a sentient species?

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/brianmem.htm#sentience

Similarly, my great nation, which is history’s richest and most powerful, took a page from Hitler’s playbook and recently invaded a nation and began an imperial genocide:

https://projectavalon.net/forum4/show...l=1#post652292

Hitler had more excuse for his actions than the USA did. And as I have lived in the USA while we committed that great, evil deed, I cannot find hardly any Americans who know or care what we did, as we have plundered the energy resources of peoples who live on the other side of the world.

Once again, the question arises: Are we a sentient species?

I discovered long ago that personal integrity is the world’s scarcest commodity

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/energy1.htm#burn

But the issue may go deeper, and the quest of my essay and subsequent work may be to discover if we are really a sentient species, or if we will do to ourselves what we have done to so many others, as we exterminate ourselves and take most complex life with us. It surely does not seem to have to be this way, but it sure is the way we are heading, and fast. Overcoming humanity’s egocentric inertia and Godzilla’s organized suppression just may be the key test of our sentience, to see if 0.0001% of us can reach the level of heart-centered sentience that can not only take us back from the brink of the abyss, but see us head toward true sentience and a world that can look like this:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/lessons.htm#advanced

https://projectavalon.net/forum4/show...l=1#post672748

Can enough of us attain true sentience? We will see.

Back to chores.

Best,

Wade

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

The rhythm of writing my essay is study, write, edit, repeat. The overall arc of the essay was envisioned long ago:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/upcoming.htm#revolutions

and I have been studying for several years. Depending on the book I was reading, I might take notes, keeping those notes in the book. As I have been writing the essay and referring to the books, I found that I have not been referring to the notes very often, but rereading much of the books. It makes me wonder how efficient this process has been.

After long slogs I take breaks, and then get back at it. The good news regarding writing this essay so far is that the material does not take much of an emotional toll to write, but as I get to the human part of the essay, the going will get harder. But I have already done the heavy lifting for most of that part with my site as it exists today. But it is still going to be work.

I doubt that I will get another stint to write like this in my lifetime, especially when I am still young enough to be near the top of my game. My mind was probably nimbler when I was younger. My memory was definitely better, but I am also on the far end of some pretty steep learning curves. I hope I am in sweet-spot territory. That is a big reason why I took the sabbatical to write it. My mother and her mother both became demented, and I will do all I can so that I do not experience their fates, and working out my brain every day I hope keeps senility at bay for at least a few more years.

Below is a warm-up for writing a section coming up soon, which I have written plenty about: the megafaunal extinctions. I most recently did it here:

https://projectavalon.net/forum4/show...l=1#post782950

I have been doing more study lately. I find the tale somewhat like a serial killer on trial. The trail of bodies is long and bloody, and the victims all have similar profiles (easy meat, and lots of it), and evidence that the killer was there, independent of the murder weapons, has been adduced at most crime scenes, and plenty of murder weapons have been recovered at the scene. Most murders really have no doubt about whom the guilty party is, and for all recent murders, a guilty plea has been entered. For most early murders, there is really little if any reasonable doubt, but the defense attorneys are working hard at fabricating some reasonable doubt in the jury’s mind. For some murders committed during the spree, the evidence is relatively thin at present, but all victims fit the profile, the scapegoats used try to create reasonable doubt all have airtight alibies, and there are really no other serious candidates. But since the defense’s job is to use any doubt that may exist, in actuality or fantasized, and inflate it into reasonable doubt and thereby get their clients off, they are working loyally to that end.

I have to hand it to the defense; they don’t give ground easily. But the killer is still on the loose, and the spree is actually escalating. Somewhat paradoxically, the defense admits to the current and escalating murders, as those murders are being captured on video. So, what we have left are a few early murders that are not completely accounted for, and as the principle ideally adhered to is innocent until proven guilty, the defense’s attempt at exoneration for those few unsolved but uncannily familiar crimes could be considered admirable, but it sure does not look good for the defendant.

Back to work.

Best,

Wade

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

This post and the next are kind of collecting my thoughts for the humanity part of the essay, which will likely be less than half of it, but it will take up its remainder. Among the works I am currently reading, in preparation for my next chapter, is The Primate Mind.

Going back to Darwin and his The Descent of Man, the idea that human cognitive abilities are only different from other animals’ in degree, not in kind, has been around as a scientific hypothesis for well more than a century. Animal behavior studies have increasingly confirmed that idea. There may not be any human cognitions or behaviors that did not already exist in primitive form in the animal kingdom long ago. Self-awareness, empathy, language acquisition, problem-solving, and tool-making are all well-represented in non-human animals. With our larger and more complex brains, we merely have more sophisticated versions of those activities. Is any of that demonstrating sentience?

Somewhere along the line, humans developed a relatively sophisticated self-awareness, and the idea of the human ego may well be the best presentation of that concept. Again, I am no materialist, and everybody with my highest respect in the FE and related fields is or was, to one degree or another, a mystic, just as the world’s greatest physicists were:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/energy.htm#mystical

But none of them became mystical because they read mystical literature. They all got that way because of their experiences. The physicists could be rather materialistic about their mysticism (meaning that their mystical experience was limited), and atheistic, but that is mainly only in comparison to the tenets of organized religion, which were always watered-down and corrupted versions of the teachings of the masters (yes, there have been some, with the emphasis on some), used for social control. Their primary approach was taking advantage of humanity’s semi-sentience and egocentrism, where they tried to get people to believe in the literal truth of symbologies, and then if people “bought in,” they received material and egocentric rewards. Then by manipulating the symbols, people’s sense of reality could be easily manipulated.

The secular versions of that religious strategy are easily seen in nationalism, capitalism, communism, etc.

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/paradigm.htm#dominant

An example is people thinking that money really means anything or is important. It is only important at the egocentric (AKA microeconomic) level. And as long as people think egocentrically, their economic obsession is what is in it for them, or what money can buy. And it is mutually reinforced in a world of artificial scarcity, which defines today’s world.

But even the sophisticated ideologies, including scientism, rationalism, and materialism, play the same game, only more subtly:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/conun.htm#subtle

In a world of scarcity, they all work admirably, and more than 99.99% of all humans are trapped in those mires. The reason is that people readily abdicate their sentience for the promise of a full belly. That is why personal integrity is the world’s scarcest commodity:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/energy1.htm#burn

I came to those understandings only after many years, but I cannot overemphasize the value of experience. I resisted the primary lesson of my journey every step of the way, until I had it beaten into my head in no uncertain terms. The fact that people are trapped in those ideological straightjackets has everything to do with their level of personal integrity. People are not trapped all that innocently. They can feign innocence and ignorance, but, for instance, any American not in a coma has had ready access to information on the Hitler-scale crimes that we committed and continue to commit against the peoples of Iraq and Afghanistan:

https://projectavalon.net/forum4/show...l=1#post652292

but it conflicts with our national self-image:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/america.htm#cognitive

The “people” have everything to do with those events being totally under the radar and down Orwell’s Memory Hole. We not only have the system that we deserve, but the system that we actively and passively support:

http://www.counterpunch.org/2003/07/...g-the-obvious/

The issue of “What are we here for?” I think is best answered by the best of the mystical literature. The scriptures are all corrupted to further economic and political goals, and the best I have encountered are the collected “channeled” works of Seth, Michael, and Ra, which I began to discover as a teenager:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/spirit.htm#seth

But again, I cannot overemphasize the value of experience. Without my mystical awakening, which I received due to my experiences:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/spirit.htm#how

those works would have been just pretty words and interesting theories. IMO, there is no teaching on Earth that should be blindly followed and become some dogma, whether it is the corpus and foundational assumptions of mainstream science, organized religion, channeled teachings, and so on. The best teachers assist their pupils to gain their own experiences. The rest are merely trappings. That is why nobody in the choir will be somebody who just read my work and “bought” it because it seemed convincing or pretty. Then it becomes just one more empty ideology, competing in the marketplace of ideas and information. That is not what I am doing or aiming for. My desire is that some rare people who care can benefit from my hard-won experience, the kind that was life-risking and life-wrecking, and maybe they can learn some important lessons without having their lives ruined, and if enough of them can do that, humanity will have a much greater chance of turning the corner, because the ship is going down, my friends. It does not have to be this way, but humanity’s inertia and the active herd management by the social managers, of which Godzilla is only the most ruthless, accomplished, and sophisticated, is responsible for the trajectory to oblivion that humanity finds itself on.

That stated, there has been a great deal of scientific investigation of “paranormal” and psychic phenomena, and books such as McLuhan’s Randi’s Prize are great summaries of the state of research. McLuhan clearly demonstrates the irrational and dogmatic approaches of the “skeptics,” and my encounters with them have shown me that they are among the most dishonest groups out there:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/dennis.htm#libel

and that is saying something. Even with McLuhan’s armchair scholar approach, his insights can be keen ones. On the subject of NDEs, he summarized the accounts of NDE survivors and the attacks by the “skeptics,” and clearly shows how they are grabbing at straws as they concoct all manner of strained and untested “explanations” to dismiss NDE accounts. I’ll reproduce a section from the chapter titled “Experience and Imagination.”


“Let's focus on this word “subjective” for a moment. What is true for me - and perhaps also for other like-minded folk - may be in direct opposition to what other people believe.

I touched earlier on the objective status of science, how it concerns itself with what is true for all of us, as biological beings, and about which there can be no disagreement. The tangible and material can be verified by any qualified person at any time, while subjective impressions, on the contrary, are not open to this kind of universal validation. The role this distinction has played in the Enlightenment is clear, enabling an essentially unifying process which, in an optimistic analysis, can be held to have furthered the development of political and social stability.

Late 19th century scientists by and large considered themselves to be “positivists,” subscribing to the philosophical argument that the only real experience is that which is derived from the senses. In the first half of the 20th century this current of thought culminated in logical positivism, which broadly holds that nothing that cannot be verified experimentally is meaningful at all. It's most literal expression in science was the behaviorist school of psychology, which treated thoughts as meaningless ephemera, and instead looked for insights about humans in the behavior of rats, dogs, and pigeons in experimental situations. This historical development is attributable at least partly to “physics envy” among psychologists, a need to demonstrate their scientific credentials by focusing on demonstrable entities rather than intangible thoughts. Now, at a time when human consciousness is being intensively discussed and investigated, it's sobering to reflect that for much the last century it was not even acknowledged by science to exist.

Yet while subjective feelings are of little interest to science, they are everything in the social sphere. Those of us who are not members of ethnic minorities, are not gay or poor or disabled or sick, find it hard to put ourselves in their shoes, to understand the challenges they face. For that matter, being in one particular minority does not necessarily make us more sympathetic to those who belong to others. Our separateness, as Nicholas Humphrey rightly notes, is what makes us human; it's also the source of many of our problems. Our task, as friends, neighbors, service staff, therapists, doctors, scientists, politicians - or as fellow humans, for that matter - is to be aware of what other people are telling us, to try to grasp what they feel and experience, to take that into account in our own reactions. That's what drives social progress.

But when it comes to paranormal claims there are limits to our broad-mindedness, especially in developed, secular-minded countries. It's true that polls show belief in such things as ghosts and ESP can be quite high, and that might seem to be supported by the proliferation of television programmes about the paranormal. But is it really the case? In a fictional or documentary setting the paranormal is perceived to be entertaining, but when it turns up in real life it can be threatening. People who describe having had a near-death experience often say that doctors, nurses and family members got angry and agitated when they first tried to share their experience, and there are those who for years never even dared to mention it.

This is now perhaps less true than it used to be, however a reluctance to listen continues to be a characteristic of professional sceptics. Their defensive posture leads them to talk about claims as opposed to experiences, too preoccupied by the challenge to their imaginations to think at all closely about what is actually being said. From their perspective, people who report paranormal-seeming incidents are creating problems, if not actually setting out to cause mischief, and this point of view is bound to create a distortion in their reader's minds.

Their insistence that these are mere anecdotes - and for that reason unscientific, undeserving of serious attention - means they lack exposure to first-hand testimony. Blackmore’s Dying to Live, rather tellingly, is sparsely illustrated with direct speech: a comparably bland extract from individuals reported experience at the beginning is followed here and there by a few short quotes, none of which begin to convey the intensity of the experience as it appears elsewhere.

By contrast near-death experience researchers’ studies are laced with copious quotations from individuals who are only too happy to describe something they may have kept locked up for years. This brings the phenomenon alive for the reader; it's more than just a concept, an idea. There is a palpable sense of awe in the first-hand accounts, of euphoria, exultation and mystery. Experiencers struggle to find superlatives to convey the colour, the beauty, the forms, the music - much of which, they insist, is ineffable, utterly beyond description. Those who write it down are able to seek out the most apt word, or turn of phrase, to express the memory. But in a way you get an even greater impact from transcripts of taped interviews, as people who relive the event in their imaginations choke up, grasping for words that will convey the enormity of it.

Listen to these little excerpts, taken at random from extended quotes in Kenneth Ring’s Heading Towards Omega:


“… If you took the one thousand best things that ever happened to you in your life and multiplied by a million, maybe you get close to this feeling…”

“… this wonderful, wonderful feeling of this light…”

“There was the warmest, most wonderful love. Love all around me…I felt light-good-happy-joy-at-ease.”

“I can't begin to describe in human terms the feeling I had at what I saw. It was a giant infinite world of calm, and love, and energy and beauty.

“As I absorb the energy, I sensed what I can only describe as bliss. That is such a little word, but the feeling was dynamic, rolling, magnificent, expanding, ecstatic - Bliss.


How many people can say that anything- anything - they have experienced in this world matches up to these descriptions?

My point is that, without such live comments, readers may be left with the impression that what people experience can be described as “euphoria" or a "a tremendous sense of well-being," a linguistic down-sizing which makes it comparable to the effects of a stiff whiskey or a good workout at the gym. It is then all the easier for a sceptic to argue that it's explicable under scientific terms, a release of endorphins perhaps.

It's natural to look for matches: "That's the claim - this is the explanation." But if the original claim is not accurately represented, the explanation can't be fully trusted.”


That ends the section. McLuhan’s book is filled with trenchant observations like that. But he still writes as an outsider, not somebody who has had his own paranormal experiences. He has class and is perceptive, but experience takes it all past a threshold to another level, and there is no going back. For instance, if Susan Blackmore:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/spirit.htm#blackmore

ever tried to get NDE experiencers to chalk up their experiences up to some illusion born of brain chemistry and wishful thinking – to be polite – she would not get anywhere. As I have said regarding FE, the person who denies the reality of FE until somebody delivers FE to their door is like the materialist who will deny all psychic phenomena until they can have their very own NDE, and not the minor ones, but along the scale of George Rodonaia’s:

http://www.nderf.org/NDERF/NDE_Exper...ia%27s_nde.htm

or these others:

http://www.nderf.org/NDERF/NDE_Archi...20Accounts.htm

Unfortunately, the Silva course is a shadow of its former self, but it is not too hard for a sincere seeker to have the kinds of experiences that awakened Brian O and me:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/brianmem.htm#remote

While they were short of an NDE, they were plenty spectacular enough so that the materialism of modern society and science was readily seen as a religion built on a false foundation, and doors of awareness and possibility opened that simply could not have opened without them. I have had enough “paranormal” experiences that the legitimacy of NDEs does not turn my sense of reality upside-down like it does to materialists.

What I am attempting, on the FE and world-healing scale, is the equivalent of helping the McLuhans of the world seek their equivalent of a remote viewing, and then NDEs will not seem so strange or theoretical, and I also hope to help them understand the magnitude of FE and its epochal importance:

https://projectavalon.net/forum4/show...l=1#post674575

This will be a two-part post, with the rest coming later today or tomorrow. I need to do some essay work.

Best,

Wade

[Carmody]

Posted by Wade Frazier (here)
Hi:

I have bought a whole lot of books from Amazon in the past several years, as I have been studying for the upcoming essay, and I have spent more than $100 on books before, although I avoid it if I can. Sometimes, even I get sticker shock, such as what I just perused:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listi...condition=used

Maybe I should grab the $1,300 ones before they are gone and I am reduced to buying the $4,300 book. Seriously, I have not seen prices like those before, especially for a book that is less than ten years old.
... ... ...
Looking forward to writing the next chapters, which will be about interesting and seminal times for humans.

Best,

Wade

One would have to verify if this is real or not:

http://global.oup.com/academic/conte...cc=ca&lang=en&

It appears to be straight from the Oxford press, $200, a marginally higher outlier of the normal academic pressing rates...but considerably better than the other rate. I used startpage for the search, it seems to give much better results for books than lets say, google, especially when looking for PDFs.

[Wade Frazier]

Thanks Carmody. $200 would be a comparative steal. It looks like it might be available, but my experience has been that once the print run is over and the first edition is sold out, that could be it, and you then scrounge around for one.

I see that the $4K versions are no longer available here:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listi...condition=used

I was not set on buying that book, but it was in an area that I was poking into. I just got sticker shock when I saw the prices, prices I had never seen before.

I paid about $200 for Weapons of Satire several years ago, and today they are “only” about $85 to start:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listi...&condition=all

But before Amazon developed its market with bookstores, I tried for about ten years to find that book, even using services that specialized in finding books like that, to no avail. Independent booksellers hate Amazon, and consider them the evil empire. I am sympathetic to their sentiments, but it was the only way to find out-of-print books. I visited many antiquarian bookstores in the 1990s and early 2000s, when I wrote my site, and it is one heck of a lot easier to surf Amazon.

I communicated with Jim Zwick, the editor of the Twain book, back when you could not find a copy, and he was planning to print a second edition, but he died several years ago. I tried to find it because Chomsky had discussed that that book was the only example of Twain’s anti-imperialist writings that had ever been published:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/lies.htm#twain

Zwick published a second Twain book:

http://www.amazon.com/Confronting-Im...0489177&sr=1-1

just before he died:

http://twainweb.net/jimzwick.html

His excellent Twain site is gone forever. I only found scraps of it on the WayBack Machine.

I plan to have my site as long as I am alive, and hope to make provisions so that my site survives me.

Best,

Wade

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

A lot is happening in my life right now, interfering with my essay writing, and delayed the second part of that post:

https://projectavalon.net/forum4/show...l=1#post787774

As I collect my thoughts, they are a little scattered at the moment, but here goes….

In my lifetime, the study of monkey and ape societies has grown dramatically, and I have been reading the results of those studies. I just finished a book on rhesus monkeys, which is Earth’s most widespread primate next to humans. Rhesus monkeys are extraordinary adaptable generalists, like humans, which is why they have done so well. Rhesus monkeys cannot pass the mirror test:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror_test

but their societies are Machiavellian in organization and functioning. There is continual vying for dominance. Dominance means power, and power means the best food, the best sex, the best and safest sleeping areas, endless grooming by subordinates, and so on. Macaque societies, however, are dominated by females, as are most primate societies. Great apes are about the sole exceptions, but bonobos reversed that trend, and are the only great apes where females are not sexually coerced with regularity (although humans are working at it ). It is very interesting to see that human civilizations operate as only more sophisticated versions of monkey and ape societies. Once again, it is different in degree, not in kind. But in the book I just finished, Dario Maestripieri’s Machiavellian Intelligence, all rhesus macaque behaviors were seen in an economic context, where the ultimate end of all behaviors was getting the most and best, and those at the bottom of the hierarchies got the scraps. But modern theories of the primate mind depicts rhesus behaviors as the result of evolutionarily derived “programming,” without any real thinking on the part of the monkeys.

That is how materialists see it, but even the mystic may see it as hive awareness. Few would argue that rhesus monkeys are sentient. Passing the mirror test is probably a threshold for considering sentience (or ensoulment). Everything has consciousness, IMO, but sentience is something else, at least in theory. But for a pre-sentient species to display many behaviors that are well-represented in human civilization is enough to give a person pause. This goes back to Brian’s question: are we a sentient species?

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/brianmem.htm#sentience

It is not easily answered, and I have long called humanity semi-sentient. Vying for dominance, seeking power, being a patriot in the face of an external threat – all of those behaviors are well represented in pre-sentient species, and IMO, all arise from economic scarcity, which primate researchers would agree with. Even when several hundred rhesus monkeys were relocated to an island near Puerto Rico and all their needs were met and there were no natural predators, they still vied for dominance. When they were first thrown together, they killed each other with gusto as they sought dominance in the island’s pecking order. Even with abundance, they could not overcome their programming and live differently. Can humans? That may well be the crux of my work.

The good news is that as standards of living have risen, particularly in the industrial age, humans have changed their modes of thinking and behaving. As I have stated plenty of times before, watching people being forced to murder each other was the favorite pastime in the greatest ancient civilization:

https://projectavalon.net/forum4/show...l=1#post769646

and three hundred years ago, nobody on Earth challenged the legitimacy of the institution of slavery, and the leading scientist of the day saw nothing wrong with getting rich in the slave trade:

https://projectavalon.net/forum4/show...l=1#post753632

The coming chapters of my essay will deal with the rise of humans and civilization, and I have been doing plenty of study of hunter-gatherer societies and early civilization. Anthropologists found some hunter-gatherer societies that did not regularly conduct war with their neighbors, but that was usually because they were isolated. Once hunting and gathering territories began to abut each other, the violence began. But even in isolated hunter-gatherer societies, they were still violent, with women often bearing the brunt of it. Those “peaceful” hunter-gatherer societies still killed outsiders. With the Inuit, any strange man was killed on sight, no questions asked, as it was assumed by all that he was there to steal a woman.

Places such as this Paleolithic slaughter site:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cemetery_117

provide mute testimony to the awesome violence of hunter-gatherer humans before the Domestication Revolution. Early civilization was also extremely violent and steeply hierarchical, with the first set of laws that survive hinting at its brutality:

https://projectavalon.net/forum4/show...abi#post769646

To think that such peoples would respect megafauna or the “environment” out of some kind of mystical appreciation of them I think is a big stretch. Some humans, out of self-interest, realized that razing forests and engaging in plow agriculture was disastrous in the long run, and there were attempts to ameliorate the process, but they were sporadic and regularly took a back seat to imperial prerogatives. All early civilizations devastated their local environments, with those in the Fertile Crescent and along the Mediterranean all in the ruins of their self-made deserts or buried in the silt of deforestation and plow agriculture. The first city in North America, Cahokia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cahokia#Ancient_city

collapsed from environmental fatigue, and as with Old World civilizations, the death rate in the city was so high that the only way the city survived was a constant influx of people from the hinterland. As the hinterland became devastated by the unsustainable practices, Cahokia eventually collapsed, just like all the others.

In the industrial age, the devastation has accelerated, as humans wrench energy and other resources from the land, which has led us to the brink of the Sixth Mass Extinction, which really began about 50K years ago when humans invaded Australia:

https://projectavalon.net/forum4/show...l=1#post782950

But with each epochal event, which was always initiated and sustained by a small group of humans achieving the social organization and technological prowess to tap a new energy source:

https://projectavalon.net/forum4/show...l=1#post674575

the human “intellectual capital” increased, and their ideologies became more complex and sophisticated, which helped lead to the next epochal event. In ways, the Big Bang hypothesis is only a more sophisticated version of the fairy tales in Genesis.

The next epochal phase is already here, technologically:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/camelot.htm#underground

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/brianmem.htm#sweet

but it will take an unprecedented effort of social organization and mental horsepower to make it manifest in the public sphere.

If it can manifest, worlds like these become feasible:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/lessons.htm#advanced

https://projectavalon.net/forum4/show...l=1#post672748

The required social organization is what I am attempting to help form the nucleus of, and it will be a nucleus of love (AKA personal integrity), which has never been seen on Earth before (http://www.ahealedplanet.net/energy1.htm#burn ), and the mental horsepower part is learning to think comprehensively, and my upcoming essay is intended to help people along on that front. I recently had a big time scientist review my current draft of the essay, and his response was about, “Holy Sh*t. This could be big.” Well, I only want it to be big because people do the work and gain comprehensive understandings, not because it becomes some bandwagon to jump aboard. Bandwagons are easily derailed, as I saw during my days with Dennis.

I actually don’t want it to become big too fast, because Godzilla will then try to kill it, fast. But a slow build, supported by people who have their hearts in the right place and develop comprehensive perspectives, which necessarily has energy front and center, will be hard to defeat, especially when it begins in cyberspace and its members are scattered across the planet. The only problem I really see is being able to find those needles in haystacks. I think they are out there. I really wish that I was just one of five hundred people trying to get going what I am, but there is nobody else trying it, and the audience/participants pretty much do not exist today, so I have to go it alone for now. But I found that my days at Avalon have born some fruit, and for that, I see that my approach might have a glimmer of hope.

Back to work.

Best,

Wade

[Ilie Pandia]

Hi Wade,

You've said often that impatience is your Achilles' heel, but I am constantly amazed by your focus and your determination to get this done.

I actually don’t want it to become big too fast, because Godzilla will then try to kill it, fast. But a slow build, supported by people who have their hearts in the right place and develop comprehensive perspectives, which necessarily has energy front and center, will be hard to defeat, especially when it begin in cyberspace and its members are scattered across the planet.

Here is how your approach is different. With the situation that we currently find ourselves in (starring into the abyss) one would be tempted to rush into this, to grow an audience as fast as possible, to blast it all over the web. And yet you choose to take small but very focused steps . Boy, is that hard!!

It's so easy to lose sight of the "big picture". But I guess your own life experience has somehow given you the strength and clarity to follow this through!

You say that you are alone in your efforts and sadly... that is true. While there are many people that know about Free Energy these days and some may even have got a glimpse at the actual suppression, I did not read about anyone seeing the Energy at the core of all things and Abundance (or extinction) as the next Epochal Event. More jobs, more economic growth, more money and less pollution is about as far as I've seen others go. And I remember my first months of writing on this thread when you've shot down all my bright ideas and initiative about how to solve this. I was beginning to think you don't actually want this come about. Your essay Keys to Comprehending Abundance-Based Paradigms was the one that lit a bright light in my head.

Unfortunately I'm pretty sure that without your constant writings here I'd lose sight of this pretty often. But there is some good news as well. I think I got it, like really deep, that Energy is at the core of everything. And so anytime I see some new movement, some new idea, some "channeled information" I ask myself two questions: 1. Is it about Energy? and 2. Is is about Personal Integrity? I think those two are stuck with me right now, and they are a good focus lens (at least for me).

Your new essay, when done, should make it pretty clear that it was always about Energy. I wanted to make a count of how often you said: "and as always it was an Energy dynamic". From the very first life forms to us humans today.

I still struggle with where "nature of personal reality" and perception fit into all of this. Sometimes it looks like free energy or not... in the grand scheme of things, everything will be "OK", even if the Earth (and Sun) will be destroyed... Life will continue its journey onto a different planet or Universe. At some point it's bound to hit the Free Energy stage . So the question then remains if we will be aware enough to change the current game we have here now on Earth.

[Wade Frazier]

Thanks Ilie:

If I seem patient, that means that I am making progress on my Achilles’ heel!

I have told those close to me that when this life ends, I can probably cross impatience off my list to work on, as I have gotten to work on it every day, and what “better” way to work on patience than have the entire world be in danger of melting down, as I try to help prevent it.

But that seeming patience may only be a function of persistence. And my persistence has to do with understanding what is important. I was just telling my wife that Bucky, Dennis, Brian, and I all began with some kind of Utopian yearning, and we eventually all came to FE. For those who are really thinking deeply about the world’s problems and pursuing solutions, you eventually realize where the energy situation sits (at its foundation), and you eventually come to learn that FE is real, but suppressed. And when you are one of those being suppressed:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/advent.htm#hitting

the part of it being suppressed is easy to accept.

I fully admit that my journey was anything but “normal,” with a voice in my head, etc., but Dennis:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/energy1.htm#voice

Brian:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/brianmem.htm#remote

and Bucky had similar experiences and moments of truth. Those seem to come with the territory.

I think that my approach is really just the result of trying so many times, and trading notes with people like Brian and the few like him, watching Dennis keep going at it, and digesting all the ways it can go wrong. After three failures, two of them Hindenburg-type wrecks (and I ended up jumping off before the fourth and declined getting involved in the fifth), I decided that the business route to FE was not only insanely risky, but doomed to failure. I helped Dennis rebuild a few times, but each time he had to build a new navy and recruit sailors, and they always mutinied, but usually only when there were already big holes in the ships due to the cannonballs of the assailants. Only Dennis can keep up like that, and I have watched his efforts with a mixture of awe and horror, as he was always taken out. So, I realized that his way probably would not work, and only somebody like him has any business even trying:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/lessons.htm#howmany

Then I carried Brian’s spears for a while, and while Brian’s spears weighed nothing at all compared to Dennis’s, I saw Brian run out of the USA, fearing for his life:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/brianmem.htm#new

and then he was basically kicked out of the organization he founded, once again. My wife is happy that I did those relatively recent instances of spear-carrying, to get it out of my system. For me, they were just more lessons on what does not work and is extremely unlikely to.

So, I kind of came to my current approach by keeping on trying stuff, seeing what the outcome was, tweaking it, trying something else, and the like. I don’t know if what I am planning will work, but as a professor pal recently told me, it won’t hurt. I really am not looking for heroes. Would-be heroes can go sign up to be cannon fodder for Dennis’s next attempt. I really don’t see what I am about to attempt as being the critical missing piece that puts FE over the top, although it could be. What I am really attempting is to help form a nugget of heart-centered sentience that can end up supporting an FE effort that goes over the top. But it does not need to do that; it is one possible outcome of building the choir, and probably the most important one, but a choir like I envision has never been heard on Earth before. What might shake loose if it is heard? For me, that is the mystery that I would gladly spend the rest of my life’s “free time” pursuing. That adventure I hope is not like being Indiana Jones’s sidekick, like my days with Dennis were. Getting dragged beneath the truck with the Nazis riding along with the talisman of unlimited power is not as easy as in the movie.

Back to work.

Best,

Wade

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

As I write and think, one way to think about the fifth epochal event or the sixth mass extinction, both of which we are on the brink of, is that both are all about where we get our energy from.

The sixth mass extinction is not only about how the industrialized world uses hydrocarbon energy to power it. In the USA, 86% of energy used is hydrocarbon based, 6% nuclear, 6% hydroelectric, and about 1% “alternative”:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_...tion_by_source

If you look at the entire world, you will see a slight change, where essentially firewood accounts for 11% of energy consumption:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:To...ource_2010.png

Those comprise the two great vectors of destruction. The hydrocarbons are raising the carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere, and no credible climate scientist denies that that will ultimately warm Earth. The only question is how much and how fast. Carbon dioxide concentrations are the ultimate cause of Earth’s Hothouse and Icehouse phases:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenho...eenhouse_earth

with other causes of lesser importance, which can cause short-term fluctuations. In the big picture of Earth’s ecosystems, raising the carbon dioxide levels has many effects, such as acidifying the oceans, warming them, raising the sea levels as ice sheets melt, melting the permafrost and releasing more greenhouse gases such as methane. All of those conditions have happened in Earth’s past, and all have caused mass extinctions, such as killing the reefs (warming, acidification, and rising sea levels all kill reefs), but it was the speed of them that determined how major the extinction was. This one that humans are causing may be the fastest change in the eon of complex life, other than the bolide impact that wiped out the dinosaurs.

Such fast changes can drive numerous species to extinction just due to climate change, but that is only one aspect of what may be coming. A five foot rise displaces 17 million people in Bangladesh alone. A twenty-five foot rise displaces about half of humanity. All scientists agree that a five foot rise is inevitable from what has happened already. Rising and warming oceans are likely already responsible for events such as that hurricane that recently drowned New York City.

But extreme weather will have an even greater impact on ecosystems. Vast crop failures due to epic droughts and floods are coming and are actually here in the USA, as California is currently experiencing its greatest drought ever, which is part of a national drought:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012-20...erican_drought

I am already reading where there may be food shortages where I live because of it, and we are history’s richest people. This all likely at least partly due to burning hydrocarbons to fuel the industrial age. That burning firewood in the non-industrialized world is the other fork of the extinction twin. Humans are deforesting Earth and driving species to extinction via habitat destruction, and it is the greatest cause of extinction today. They are doing it to eat. They take the wood for cooking (in India, as readers of this thread know, they use cow pies) and they use the remnant soils to get crops out of the ground.

Of course, the USA has been committing genocide in Asia to control the greatest hydrocarbon deposits:

https://projectavalon.net/forum4/show...l=1#post652292

and the other nations will not just stand back forever and watch. If we have World War III, it will likely be over the hydrocarbons, not food or water. The rich nations will not run out of food or water until they run out of hydrocarbons.

So, the energy practices of both the rich and poor peoples are causing the sixth mass extinction event. It is happening now, and got its start about 50K years ago with the invasion of Australia.

With FE, what can happen? No more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, for starters. And in fact, with FE, taking out the excess carbon dioxide from the atmosphere will be feasible, to take it down to pre-industrial levels, if we want.

But far more importantly, raping the ecosystems for energy will become obsolete, and that includes deforestation and farming. People will no longer need to grow their food by commandeering and plundering the ecosystems. People won’t even need to live on today’s land, as underground, space-based, underwater, on the water, and floating-in-the-air civilizations become feasible, with the antigravity technology that I know is also being kept under wraps. We could take just one asteroid and mine it, and it would literally provide all of humanity’s material needs. No more need to mine Earth, and even if we still did, it could be done with about zero environmental impact. But I prefer the asteroid solution, as Brian used to advocate:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/brianmem.htm#oneill

In short, all the ways that humans are destroying the planet can end with FE, and fighting wars over resources or dominance will look insanely stupid, and fast, and I have enough “faith” in potential human sentience that those kinds of events will not be allowed to happen.

So, in summary, our current energy practices are creating the sixth mass extinction, and FE cannot only halt that extinction in its tracks, but it would usher in the fifth epochal event, and humans could live a Star Trek level of existence.

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/abund.htm#abundance

The choice is truly ours.

Back to work.

Best,

Wade

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

As a cautionary note to those who aspire to be in the choir one day, I now have no relationships with my immediate family. My last one just ended, when I would not give the person all the money that he thought he was entitled to (they were pure gifts from me, which have been coming steadily for several years, amounting to $50K or so, although the relative was performing some work for me, as I wanted him to feel at least somewhat useful, and he eventually came to think that he was entitled to whatever he asked for), and then came all the personal attacks that he could think of. I might have had one person in all of my family, all the way to grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, parents, and siblings, who kind of understood what my life’s work is about. Some would feign understanding while they could get something from me, but I was essentially renting their feigned understanding.

That just comes with the territory of pursuing these kinds of activities. When I have shared my experiences with people such as Dennis, Brian, and the like, the response was always, “Join the club.”

The vast majority of humanity is locked in an egocentric struggle for survival in a world of scarcity, and caring for something beyond their immediate existences is simply incomprehensible to them. That is a key aspect, probably the key aspect, of why personal integrity is the world’s scarcest commodity:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/energy1.htm#burn

I was a super-kid from the time I was born, a science prodigy who was raised to be a Golden Boy, and when I became what I was raised to be, then I was disowned and attacked, with the very people who raised me unable to understand what they had raised.

And this situation is maybe why I am deluded about what I am trying to do. Maybe too many people have sold out their sentience for the promise of a fully belly for the appearance of FE to help them regain their abdicated sentience and attain a semblance of integrity. All they will do with FE and abundance is take their egocentric power and control games to new levels, and we will destroy the planet even more quickly and thoroughly than we already are. Environmentalists, Peak Oilers, and others like them seem sure of this, with their Level 5 fear reactions:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/paradigm.htm#level5

more than implying that people cannot be trusted with abundance and personal empowerment. Seeing where humanity is today, I have some sympathy toward their fears. But their reactions are purely of the knee-jerk variety, and I found that what was really happening was that they feared having their entire worldview and carefully-carved niches of hell become obsolete. In the end, it was still an egocentric viewpoint, and one that takes a dim view of the human potential.

Studies have shown that when people are in fear, their neocortex shuts down and the reptilian brain takes over, which controls the fight/flight response and other pre-sentient behaviors.

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/...e-anatomy-fear

http://charlottehenleybabb.com/fear-of-the-neo-cortex/

http://healthland.time.com/2013/04/1...#ixzz2Qf3N3pTS

What if fear and scarcity became obsolete? How would the human organism react? Would we all be like those rhesus macaques, still vying for power?

https://projectavalon.net/forum4/show...l=1#post789097

Or would people begin to achieve true sentience, the kind that Brian wondered if humanity was capable of:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/brianmem.htm#sentience

We are already on the fast track to oblivion, with the masses unknowing and uncaring, and Godzilla riding herd as we stampede toward the cliff. Really, what do we have to lose in trying to become a truly sentient species? Maybe what I am attempting is infeasible, primarily because there are not enough sentient people on Earth today, but does that mean that I should not try? Are people capable of sentience? I think that people like Dennis and Brian are proof that we can be. Whether we do or not is up to us, but it is a conundrum. Humanity’s primary trait today is inertia, or as Michael would say (http://www.ahealedplanet.net/spirit.htm#michael ), people are in thrall to their false personalities, which is due to their herd conditioning, where their beliefs and understandings are not based on personal experiences and deep thought but what they were indoctrinated into. In the USA, that kind of conditioning has been refined to a science:

http://www.ahealedplanet.net/intro.htm#paradigms

The needles that I will looking for soon are those who have overcome their conditioning and are approaching something like sentience, contacting their essence, and whatever other terms seem to describe the state. I know that there are very few people on the planet who have achieved that or even want to, but they are whom I will be seeking. And if my work does not quite hit the mark, as I have my own foibles and lack of understanding, I only pray that others take it to a higher level and heal the planet with it.

Back to work.

Best,

Wade

[Limor Wolf]

Wade, stay strong there, good winds are blowing your way. Not being understood is part of the 'heroe's path' that you walk (you may define it as the 'anti-hero', if you like), your 'language' and vision is not yet familiar one to most citizens of this planet, as rooted as it is in reality (the real one). In the meantime it may feel like being a leper in understanding what you understand. Something will break in the inertia soon, then what you are aiming for will pick up steam

I have nothing to end with other then

Love,

Limor

[Wade Frazier]

Thanks Limor:

Brian, Dennis, myself, and others like us I think always hoped that we were only slightly ahead of our time. I hope that I live to see what Brian could not and Dennis may not, but time will tell.

Love,

Wade