I read that book recommended on Skilluminati web and I felt it verbalized some intuitions i had about some things, but at the same time it left me with a strange feeling. Maybe the verbalization of it can be found in a well articulated essay that can be found here (PDF).

Some quotes:

It is fundamentally fallacious to project into (or attribute to) Nature the notions of good or evil, and subsequently derive Human Nastiness from Evil Nature. Nature is quite amoral (not to be confused with immoral), it is beyond good or evil. The systematic use of the moral/ethical/legal category ‘murder’ to refer to animal killings (whether intraspecific agonistic behavior or interspecific predatory behavior it does not make much difference to Bloom) is intentionally misleading. A lioness is not ‘murdering’ her prey, and even an infanticidal male lion cannot be said to be ‘murdering’ the cub. ‘Murder’ presupposes ethical knowledge and reasoning, (self)consciousness and intentionality, and ‘malice aforethought’, i.e., premeditation.

Chimps and gorillas (and, of course, humans) make war, Bloom asserts, but he does not seem to wonder why warmaking is confined to these few species, and why it is so conspicuously absent in the many thousands of other (especially mammalian) species, even though, predominantly sublethal, intergroup agonistic behavior has been documented for a number of social carnivores and primates (in which it is, by the way, the females of the species who do the threatening and the vociferations). The resemblance of chimpanzee ‘warfare’ to raids in human preindustrial societies should be explained, not treated as extra evidence of natural and human depravity.

I think it’s pretty condescending to lions—who are clearly a vastly superior species—to deny them the self-consciousness of pre-meditation.  The intelligence of animals makes it clear they’re at the very least actively self-aware, and capable of projecting scenarios and planning several moves ahead.

I also agree that Nature, red in tooth and claw, is “beyond good and evil”—I think Bloom was trying to remind us that humans are monkeys are animals, too.

I agree that Bloom doesn’t “wonder why warmaking is confined to these few species”—he makes it very clear it’s because they’re directly related to us, in his mind at least.

thirtyseven - 03 January 2009 09:50 AM

I think it’s pretty condescending to lions—who are clearly a vastly superior species—to deny them the self-consciousness of pre-meditation.  The intelligence of animals makes it clear they’re at the very least actively self-aware, and capable of projecting scenarios and planning several moves ahead.

I also agree that Nature, red in tooth and claw, is “beyond good and evil”—I think Bloom was trying to remind us that humans are monkeys are animals, too.

I agree that Bloom doesn’t “wonder why warmaking is confined to these few species”—he makes it very clear it’s because they’re directly related to us, in his mind at least.

Hi, sorry for the delay but brainsturbators web was banned in the job’s terminal.

Still I think that giving animals characteristics as self-awareness or intelligence is to project the human mind into them, and that could be wrong. No one is doubting that nature has his own ways of intelligence--jeremy narby has some good stuff about it in his book “Intelligence on nature”:

The ability of individuals to adapt to their environment, found in even the most primitive of life-forms, is described by the Japanese term Chi-Sei, meaning “to know.” Throughout the book Narby uses Chi-Sei to describe the apparent intelligence of everything from birds to slime molds.

Slime molds actually provide a perfect example of Chi-Sei. Lacking even a rudimentary nervous system, slime molds are capable of fusing with others to form what are essentially enormous single cells with thousands or even millions of nuclei. If chopped up and spread through a maze, these massive cells will rebuild themselves along the shortest route through the maze.

Other examples of Chi-Sei include orangutans recognizing themselves in mirrors; honeybees memorizing the location of food and then describing it to the other members of the hive; dodder plants, which can scrutinize potential hosts and “decide” whether or not to parasitize them; and even some advanced proteins, whose ability to react to other proteins and adapt to them forms the basis of life.

Narby also delves into the ability of some organisms to feel pain, and makes a very good case for the presence of this ability in even the simplest animals.

Narby outlines in detail the nervous systems of insects, particularly bees and butterflies. Apparently their outer exoskeletons are devoid of nerve endings, so that they may endure great external force without being hurt. However, when exposed to heat or electric shock, insects will demonstrate the classic signs of pain.

My point is, let’s take Kosmos as a living organism in which symbiosis is the main game. Maybe Kosmos symbiotizes in different ways with each organism. Some months ago I went through a study that showed crowns have more avanced cognitive capacities than monkeys, so maybe that’s why crowns are depicted in a lot of cultures as symbols of the magick path.

So maybe lions are not self-aware in human terms, and that’s why i think is the criticism of Bloom goes to. Also, Bloom seems to me that has a big emotional implication in what he’s saying--something that it is not necessarily a bad thing, but maybe can distort his conclusions. I read elsewhere Bloom saying that yep, he’s somekind of an aspie and that he had very little success with girls in ihis life (hey, me too), so maybe the book is too the history of an mild-autistic higher self person taking contact with the monkey he maybe has symbiotized with. I find interesting Steiner’s notion of being “too luciferic” and the necessity of balance these forces with the christic and ahrimanic ones.

So yes, i agree with you humans are monkeys. But maybe not only monkeys, i do think. So the question could be what is exactly to be a human. And that’s a big one.

Of course all of this is pure speculation, i’m only playing with ideas to make my point clear. Maybe even i don’t have a point anyway.

Anyway the book was superb and read along with Reich’s “Mass Psychology of Fascism” is a good cocktail.

... and then, listening Amazonian people maybe WE ARE VERY WRONG:
http://singingtotheplants.blogspot.com/2009/01/perspectivism.html

In the Amazon, this idea is almost always associated with another — that the visible form of every species is an envelope, a form of clothing, that conceals an internal human form visible only to other members of the same species, or to a shaman. This clothing is changeable and removable; in the Amazon, not only do shamans become jaguars, but also humans and animals constantly shift into each other, in what anthropologist Peter Rivière has called a “highly transformational world.”

Interestingly, humans put on animal clothes and turn into animals, and animals take off animal clothes and turn into humans; but animals never put on human clothes. All beings are human — which is just how they see themselves. “The common condition of humans and animals,” says Viveiros de Castro, “is humanity, not animality.” As Piro shaman don Mauricio Roberto Fasabi says of the kachpero, the strangler fig: “We see the kachpero as a tree, but that is a lie, the kachpero is a person. We just see it as a tree. When we take ayahuasca, we see it as people.”

This is the animist matrix of the Amazonian shaman — as Viveiros de Castro puts it, an “intentioned universe.” Shamans — including my own teachers don Roberto Acho and doña María Tuesta — develop relationships with powerful beings even in the form of stones. This animism is not necessarily benign; social anthropologist Carlos Fausto calls it predatory animism. “Subjectivity is attributed to human and nonhuman entities,” he writes, “with whom some people are capable of interacting verbally and establishing relationships of adoption or alliance, which permit them to act upon the world in order to cure, to fertilize, and to kill.”

It is in this context, too, that we should look at the claim the people in the Amazon believe that shamans turn into jaguars; rather, jaguars, beneath their jaguar clothing, are already shamans. The ferocity of the jaguar is not due to its being an animal, but due to its being a human.

Bloom is PROMOTING the “actual Matrix plan.” I watched Africa:  The Serengeti—IMAX film yesterday.  Most of its 40 minutes—library loan so it kept locking up due to scratches.  I hadn’t read this thread but what stood out to me was the lions kills ONLY for the food they need.  Then the Maasi claim that HEAVEN gave them control of their cattle.  As I note in my blogbook this is the oldest form of religion known—the eclipse of the sun in the Turkana pastoral culture around Kenya.  The moon is seen as the threat to the sun, so that an animal must be sacrificed to save the SON from the female force of Nature.  Animals, in turn, are still “controlled” by the moon—or at least don’t try to pretend they are not controlled by the moon, just as much by the sun.  What resolves the conflict between sun and moon is the female source of the sun as pure consciousness.

The joke is found in martial arts movies—how Taoists can eat meat but Buddhists can not.  Yet in Buddhist Tibet traditionally meat was eaten at the start of the tummo training (to create great internal bodily heat).  But the same tummo training in the original human culture—the Bushmen—relied on a VEGETARIAN diet, even though the Bushmen are hunters.  So all the males had to be vegetarian to learn to be healers and the tummo in Tibet switches from meat to a food-free diet or next to no food, the bigu.  The main issue with meat these days is omega 6 versus omega 3—cows don’t eat corn in the wild and the soy fed to pigs and chickens is genetically engineered besides destroying the Amazon rainforest.  But these problems, among many others (like antibiotics) started back with the ECLIPSE OF THE SUN by the moon in the Turkana pastoralist culture of Kenya—this is probably the oldest form of religion known.  When animals were domesticated the sacrifice of the animal at the eclipse of the sun was to help the SON against the female power of the moon, which is the source of the same electrochemical energy that creates the TUMMO or what the Bushmen call N/um.  Religion relies on repression of the right-brain pineal gland lunar electrochemical energy.  Happy full moon.

Hey...come to think of it, Bloom’s 2nd book really IS promoting the “actual matrix plan” you talked about re:Oliver Reiser

“Howard Bloom has a fascinating vision of the interplay of life, and a compelling style which I found captivating.”
--Nils Daulaire, President and CEO, Global Health Council.

Bloom’s debut, The Lucifer Principle (1997), sought the biological basis for human evil. Now Bloom is after even bigger game. While cyber-thinkers claim the Internet is bringing us toward some sort of worldwide mind, Bloom believes we’ve had one all along. Drawing on information theory, debates within evolutionary biology, and research psychology (among other disciplines), Bloom understands the development of life on Earth as a series of achievements in collective information processing.

He stands up for “group selection” (a minority view among evolutionists) and traces cooperation among organisms—and competition between groups—throughout the history of evolution. “Creative webs” of early microorganisms teamed up to go after food sources: modern colonies of E. coli bacteria seem to program themselves for useful, nonrandom mutations. Octopi “teach” one another to avoid aversive stimuli. Ancient Sparta killed its weakest infants; Athens educated them. Each of these is a social learning system. And each such system relies on several functions. “Conformity enforcers” keep most group members doing the same things; “diversity generators” seek out new things; “resource shifters” help the system alter itself to favor new things that work.

In Bloom’s model, bowling leagues, bacteria, bees, Belgium and brains all behave in similar ways. Lots of real science and some history—much of it fascinating, some of it quite obscure—go into Bloom’s ambitious, amply footnoted, often plausible arguments. He writes a sometimes bombastic prose ("A neutron is a particle filled with need"); worse yet, he can fail to distinguish among accepted facts, scientifically testable hypotheses and literary metaphors. His style may guarantee him an amateur readership, but he’s not a crank. Subtract the hype, and Bloom’s concept of collective information processing may startle skeptical readers with its explanatory power.

Hey you seen this yet—I corrsponded with Michael Persinger about Andrija Pucharich, coauthor of Reiser’s actual matrix plan.  Persinger is a big Puharich fan and he ends this lecture emphasizing the political nature of electromagnetic mind control:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5011230863803398434