isthmus nekoi said:
I would also ask the uncon for personal symbols regarding this - they are most powerful/illuminating and they are thick in the air these days, just thick....
My vision - giant starbirds. Some explanation:
I used to call it "The Monstrous Vision", because it seems so alien to an anthropocentric point of view (including the scientific one, which still sees human consciousness as somehow special), and everyone who hears it thinks it means human beings mean nothing. They don't really.
For me, what we think of as "consciousness" - self awareness, thinking - is just a mesh of associations helping us survive in whatever situation we find ourselves. For a given life-form, this is brief time, and depends upon a relatively stable environment - which helped the form arise in the first place. Any change could happen which would completely overwhelm any kind of that sort of consciousness. The deepest consciousness is elemental, which does not change except in the mathematical theories of unity of all elements (such as is postulated before the "big bang", when all forces were one - according to which hydrogen formed first, and is in fact the simplest and first element).
I think the human species, a very unstable one (amphibians are another, because they live on the border of two environments, and are extremely susceptible to changes in either), arose out playing with fire, literally, and by the resuscitation re-heating of the earth's surface after the fallout from the meteoric period (and the last major round of extinctions) settled. Thus the mammals arose, much smaller than the giant lizards (because the earth is colder now). It was thus that the metals, elemental consciousness, liberated by the heat, began interfering with us (I'm only speaking from the human point of view, but the metals are really everything there is, taking home in crystalline bodies which grow upward as their aims and the stability of the body permits - so the leaves of trees turn metallic colors as they die seasonally, since the metals are found pushing out of the tree as far as they can go, etc. I guess the image is of purer elements taking up residence in more complex and less stable ones, which forms shapes=life).
The reason it all takes place at all is because of the heat in the center of the earth, which creates an effect like a boiling pot, and the elements in the deeper parts are rising out. As they rise, they take on heavier and more complex forms, which are increasingly unstable, until the surface, which is were the least stable forms emerge - life we call it, but really it is just rapidly changing forms of the same stuff. Life forms are the hot elements in colder molecular bodies, which grow and change according to necessary conditions imposed on them by whatever laws you can think of.
The elements are always trying to rise up to the nearest local source, in our case the Sun - it is the center of gravity; but earth is strong too, and death is the dissolution of a particular form when it tires (all form being unstable), returning the elements that made it up to the earth, or the atmosphere. It is thus that there appears to be a battle between the upward consciousness - which is the elemental consciousness, falling into the Sun - and the downward consciouness, toward the earth, which is much closer and in the short term a stronger force. We are all forms of earth energy in a big soup, and the various bodies that form like bubbles on the earth - all the shapes, some we call "life-forms" but really the rocks are just as alive - are moving and bubbling the hot surface of a soup (if you sped up the film, so to speak, so thousands of years passed in a second, you would see the real life of the earth, and all species would be like brief changing colors on its surface, a little in the air, and lots in the water, but all essentially surface).
The elements, the metals (for the rest, like the gasses, they have their own ways, and interact with heavier bodies only briefly (like in breathing). It is the metals that literally form all terrestrial bodies, and take what forms they can to get higher, (the gasses are trapped by the earth too, becoming the atmosphere) they are literally following an upward path to the center of solar gravity (and the solar system in its turn is following its course around a yet stronger source, the center of the galaxy, and so on...). This is why you find things like lead - a very heavy element, that has no purpose in biological functioning - staying in bodies. One it finds a moving home, it knows it can get higher by staying there (rather than being passed out).
So, if I haven't confused you or made you think I am a lunatic yet, the reason "we" turn our thoughts to the stars is because our unstable bodies, like all bodies, are home to much deeper consciousnesses, the metals, which are trying to get to the source of consciouness, the Sun (not the ultimate, but the biggy for everything that directly concerns us).
This might be getting too long for a post, but here is an "image" I once wrote down, as a sort of vision of the possible future for us. It is conscious union with the imperishable metals; your "cyborg", but not in human form. It is monstrous, I suppose.
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You who have left the earth
Far behind, below,
As you wander among the stars,
What speck of dust, with minute history!
This shall be your heritage
to take outward; not decaying flesh,
but eternal elements.
So I imagine, by the end of the century, there will be people who have become indistinguisable from the machines they operate. There will be no more need for fleshly limbs, even most organs: nourishment comes directly from light. Photosynthesis, but in a mobile, metallic form. People will become gigantic Starbirds, taking energy and nourishment from the stellar winds, living forever. The former life, lives on earth, earthbound human form, will be thought of - if it is thought of at all, or remembered - as no life at all, an ant's life, no consciousness at all.
For us here then, now, still in human form as I write, this image is monstrous. There are of course none of the old human pleasures of sense, only the infinity of discovery in the universe will give pleasure. Vision, thought will remain. But what vision! The whole electro-magnetic spectrum, and more that will be known. Death will be impossible, since we - our consciousness - will be one with the elements that sustain us; all that we will know, will be change of form.
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So my vision - giant starbirds.
This is incidentally where I got one of my mottoes - "Man is the medium of the metals".