A Winter Solstice Epitaph For Humans From The Year 2110?

Click on image to enlarge

Christmas photo, text, & composite image © 2010 jim otterstrom

The Kuwaiti Oil Fires background photograph was borrowed from Wikipedia and is in the public domain.

How many more holiday shopping seasons can the earth endure?
My heart reaches out to the other living species of planet Earth during this orgy of consumerism we call Christmas.

Looking Back From The Future, Part 1:

A Cargo Cult Shrine...

Click on photo to enlarge - © 2007-2009 jim otterstrom

...to the Myth of Unlimited Fossil Fuels.

As oil became scarce and expensive, toward the end of the brief but fantastic 200 year Petroleum Age, people built shrines to the oil and automobile culture, continuing to drive their gas-guzzlers in the belief that some new technology would soon produce a cheap replacement for the once abundant fossil fuels which made such extravagance possible.

Unfortunately, they were wrong...

The historical photograph above was made at an actual working tire and wheel store, in one of the 10 most affluent well-educated counties in America, during the early years of the 21st Century.

Such folly seems unimaginable today as those of us who remain scavenge the grotesque ruins of that addictively consumptive oil-addled civilization for tools and materials to help make our humble lives of meager subsistence a bit easier.

But even now, scattered on the fringes of crumbling cities, there are deeply religious and highly volatile cargo cults who maintain vigils and conduct Sunday Prayer Services in ancient Gasoline Station Temples (This custom is rooted in practices beginning as early as 2008, as archived here and here).

Devotees can sometimes keep electric lights on, during sunny days, with scavenged jury-rigged solar panels and the few, dim but priceless, still working LED bulbs they've managed to scrounge.

These poor souls will explain to you, with a desperate distant gleam in their eyes, that they must keep the places "open for business" as much as possible because nobody knows for sure when the big tanker will return to fill their underground reservoirs again.

Twice a year, in late December and early April, you'll see hundreds of the devout, chanting and singing, as they make their sacred pilgrimages to distant rusted out refineries, or long dead oilfields, where they burn effigies of M. King Hubbert.

It's a pitiful and somewhat scary experience to encounter these fanatical groups who cling so mindlessly to obsolete mythologies.

But don't ever ridicule or make fun of their beliefs and rituals, they are known to become violent when confronted with conflicting viewpoints.

Anonymous journal entry

December 12, 2163

© 2009 jim otterstrom

a day for mourning...

Click on image and text to enlarge

The above excerpts and illustration are from the book, American Holocaust, by David E. Stannard --- © 1992 by David E. Stannard/Oxford University Press

~

I share this with you in remembrance of the monstrous legacy of Christopher Columbus, and the crimes against humanity he perpetrated in the name of God & Country, and the pursuit of Gold.

America has continued to build its Empire upon the sick heritage of Columbus as evidenced by our contributions, funneled through the CIA, to the disappearances and murder of hundreds of thousands of indigenous people in Chile, Peru, Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Panama, Venezuela, and elsewhere over the past several decades. People who resisted or disapproved of American-supported military coups and brutal dictatorships which gave control of their countries, their land, their wealth, and their resources to corporations---many of them based in the U.S.

This was the direct result of American-sponsored experiments to spread the neo-liberal (now neocon) corporatist economic theories of Milton Friedman across South America, and there is no defensible or pardonable excuse (such as fighting The Red Scare or putting and end to Creeping Socialism) for these and countless other atrocities committed, just during my lifetime, in the name of freedom and democracy.

Therefore, I, like every other human being, carry in my heart an insidious poison distilled from the suffering of the aforementioned peoples, and from the terror visited upon Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Viet Nam, Cambodia, Iraq, Afghanistan, and so many other places.

Our current human predicament, as well as our future, is surely determined by the karma of our actions, past and present, and the consequences of those actions are coming home to roost more & more, as we live each day with new revelations of unspeakable horrors, and not just terrorist attacks, but psychopathic acts of violence everywhere. Campus massacres, workplace shootings, murder, mayhem, kidnapping, rape, child-molestion, infanticide, maiming, torture, and even cannibalism, committed by ordinary people, male, female---adults and children alike--- whether black, white, brown, yellow or red, here at home, and all around the world.

Yet we continue sowing the seed of monsters even as we reap the grotesquely bitter fruit borne of selfishness and greed.

These days we do it in the name of God, Country, and the pursuit of Oil, not to mention the myriad other resources required to feed the insatiable appetites of rogue Capitalism and unbridled growth.

Atrocities and war crimes committed by the American government and its corporate leaders belong to each one of us because we allow them to happen, through either ignorance, apathy, or intimidation, and we pay for them not only with our dollars, but with the lives of our loved ones.

Many of us would deny that we play any part in this, a denial that ends rather bluntly when you trace the path of the dollars withheld from your paycheck. But we can't stop our payments for war and killing because deep-down we understand that this is not really a democracy and we're afraid of being imprisoned or impoverished like the victims of the foreign policy we pay for.

And besides, we're certainly not the only country guilty of crimes against humanity now are we?

Still, even after we nearly exterminated the people who inhabited this place when we got here, the great American experiment with democracy was seen by many as "a beacon of freedom", "a shining light of hope in the world", an alternative to the tyranny, oppression, and corruption of previous empire-builders. Not so many people believe that about America anymore though, because we've long since given our country, and its lofty ideals, over to the criminals and thieves of Corporatism.

The American experiment with democracy seems to have failed, and, once again, the emperor wears no clothes, but what could we expect?

After all, this so-called democracy was founded upon conquest, murder, theft, injustice and suffering, and all of us today shoulder a good measure of guilt in the continuing creation of a war-torn world full of fear and hatred.

We remake our beds each day, in which we must lie each night...

Will we ever learn?

Or are we simply incapable of transforming ourselves into thoughtful, conscientious, benevolent, sustainable human beings?

On this day of mourning I would humbly ask all victims of American-sponsored terrorism to try and find forgiveness in their hearts, for we are also victims. Corporatist Fascism is rapidly overtaking the world and the average person here has been duped, just like everywhere else.

in PEACE, LOVE, and HUMILITY

jim

JOE BAGEANT TELLS IT LIKE IT IS!

EARTH HOME GARDEN'S

'BOOK OF THE YEAR'

Click on covers to enlarge - © 2007 Joseph L. Bageant/Crown Publishers

I know, the year isn't over yet, and we've read a bunch of good books at Earth Home Garden in the past 7+ months, including Jared Diamond's Collapse, The Humboldt Current by Aaron Sachs, and Limits to Growth, The 30‑Year Update by Donella Meadows, Jorgen Randers and Dennis Meadows. But I'm willing to claim that no other book I read during the remainder of the year will resonate with me like Joe Bageant's Deer Hunting With Jesus.

Articulately profane, gut-wrenchingly honest, and frighteningly well-informed, Deer Hunting With Jesus paints a profoundly vivid portrait of what's become of America and the promise of Democracy, revealing in great detail the tragic consequences of blind faith, of a mis-informed semi-literate right-wing conservative working class, and the arrogant self-defeating intellectual elitism of the so-called liberal left. Joe tells his potentially depressing story with deep affection and generous humor.

If Deer Hunting With Jesus doesn't hit home with you, you're living in a different America than I am.

As in Life… There is much Beauty & Generosity in Death…

Click on photo to enlarge - a fallen Flicker - © 2006 jim otterstrom

Forty some years ago there was a Sycamore tree growing beside a stream along Old Topanga Canyon Road in the Santa Monica Mountains.

A friend and I, through the early hours of dawn, sat above the stream, hanging our legs off the edge of a large corrugated culvert, which guided a small tributary, beneath the pavement we had driven there on, into the stream below.

We languished there in the cool shade, for minutes running into hours, listening to the trickle of water falling between us into the creek below, watching flying insects, and birds, interact with one another in the exchanges that enable their lives and deaths.

Fluff drifted gently down from the surrounding trees to float away on the surface of the water in the soft morning light.

As we watched the drama of life unfolding there before us, this one particular Sycamore caught my eye. It had two trunks, one of which had tumbled over, and was lying across the stream.

The part of the tree still standing was in full summer leaf, healthy, vibrant, and full of life. But the fallen trunk, which had obviously been down for some time, lay decomposing along the sandy banks.

Upon closer observation, I became entranced with the teaming complexity of life being supported by the rotting fibers of the dead part of the tree. Young plants sprouted glorious green shoots from rich black compost, while shimmering, crawling, slithering insects of myriad description---clamoring, tunneling, over and through this visibly wholesome detritus---searched for nutrition, shelter, and procreation.

Sensitized that morning, to the intricately beautiful details of the non-human, after a long night spent in wonder and celestial celebration atop the jagged spine of the Santa Monica’s, I was experiencing, possibly, my most life-changing epiphany.

There was as much life in the dead part of the tree as in the living (& certainly more diversity), and I stood there for a long time, taking my first clear look into death, and what I’ve come to understand as everlasting life.

Since that fine day of my well-spent reckless youth, I no longer fret over the possibility of roasting eternally in the hell-fires of some control-freak God’s vindictive damnation, because I realized right then, that, like everything else, I’m simply going to metamorphose back into the wondrous matrix of the cosmos, where we continue our journey together for eternity, whatever that is.

There will be no Pearly Gates for me, no bean-counting Saint Peter with his ledger of sins and good deeds, no streets paved with cold hard Gold, nor flaming red Devil with his fork up my ass, and no reunion with long lost humans, family or otherwise.

My re-union will be in the giving back of my body---to the living Earth, as sustenance for the continuance of life, and, in the spirit of my consciousness, freed from the reductionism of being human---as my molecules, atoms, and energy once again wander & mingle among the elements of universality.

How do I know this?

I carefully observe the nature around me, seeing that I’m simply a tiny part of something very huge and complex, and I have faith in what I see.

Isn’t faith what your religion is based upon?

Now I’m in no hurry to die! I very much enjoy life as a human being, but the thought of my death doesn’t frighten me either, it’s purely the reality awaiting me when the days of Jim are over.

We are but cosmic dust, charged and electric, yet look around at all the beauty forged from the combination, and evolution, of these forces during the eons which have led to our lives today.

We hear much talk of “a better world in the hereafter” or “everlasting life in heaven above” from the churches and religions of our time, the same religions that would separate, anthropocentrically, our bodies from our souls, and our species from the rest of nature.

But anthropocentricity---the regarding of man as the central fact or final aim of the universe---is a selfish, ignorant, narcissistic notion, that, in life, deprives us of seeing, and fully enjoying, that we are an integral part of something much greater and more magical than ourselves.

Even in death, we humans continue this arrogant selfishness by having our bodies embalmed or cremated, entombed in wood, concrete or steel, thus depriving the earth of our rich life-giving nutrients for as long as we possibly can.

When I put a dead plant or animal on my dinner plate, I’m thankful for the bountiful generosity of nature, and the exchange of energy between life-forms, which allows this whole thing to continue and evolve. We are all part of the food chain.

And when I see a dead animal or a fallen tree, decomposing by the roadside---or along a trail in the wild---I see the even-handed generosity of nature, allowing with every loss, other lives to thrive and grow.

My body, soul, species, and the nature around me, including the whole of the cosmos, are all of one, and I have no fear of rejoining that larger self.

When that time does arrive, I’d like nothing more than to become healthful nutritious worm food.

Yes, these are thoughts of death, but to me, they’re not depressing or melancholy.

They are thoughts about our place in nature, about harmony, balance, and exchange.

They're the result of long-studied observations, and my deeply-felt optimism concerning the bio-centric, egalitarian laws of nature---and the interdependence, resilience, and self-perpetuating tendancy toward diversity inherent to life itself---in its passionate desire to persist and to flourish.

But these are probably not very welcome, comforting, or even fathomable observations to the anthropocentric, who would have the world, or rather, the entire universe, revolving around themselves.

Click on photo to enlarge - the decaying shell of a Carp

Giving Thanks...

Click on photo to enlarge - courtesy of NASA and my tax dollars.

A planet this lovely is very hard to come by.

We give thanks today for the bountiful world we inherited and every species we share it with...

Thoughts on November...

"Even On It's Brightest Day,

November Sings A Solemn Song"

Lene Gary at Counting Petals

Lene asked me to share my reflections on her November 20th post here at Earth Home Garden, so here they are, slightly edited.

Born on November 14th, mid month, I must say that, even on my brightest days, I sing a somewhat solemn song.

Solemn being defined as:

1. Deeply earnest; serious; grave.

2. Of impressive and serious nature.

3. Performed with full ceremony.

4. Invoking the force of religion; sacred.

5. Gloomy; somber.

The American Heritage Dictionary

I'm often guilty of those solemn November traits, but I might eliminate the word religion and re-phrase the number 4 definition to read, 'Invoking the force of the sacred.'

But then, I guess my religion is Nature, all of which I find sacred.

Winter is a very serious time for survival in the natural world and by November it may be too late to prepare oneself for the long cold darkness.

Thus come the solemn thoughts of self-doubt, when I sometimes feel as if we humans are in the November of our existence, ill-prepared for December and January, as we stare at our reflections in the ice...

...but, when Spring does come again, I'll dance & sing, and devour her as if she were the last delicious supper.

Homo colossus - A colossal failure of values

Click on photo to enlarge-photo by an unknown passerby

A post-election rant...

At 8:30 this morning, during a 5-mile nature-walk with Dallas, I found myself staring at this advertising poster on the front of a gas station mini-mart.

It reminded me of television, of consumerism, of Capitalism and economic growth, of propaganda and corporate funded mind-control, of the recent elections, and, of the colossal failure the human species faces.

As I stood there dwelling on thoughts of colossal import, pondering the species known as Homo sapiens, I remembered sociologist William R. Catton's term for our species as it exists today, Homo colossus.

Catton wrote, in his groundbreaking 1980 book, 'Overshoot-The Ecological Basis For Revolutionary Change';

"The more potent human technology became, the more man turned into a colossus. Each human colossus required more resources and more space than each pre-colossal human. Contrast the environmental impact of the Central Ohio Coal Company and its huge machines with the environmental impact of the Stone Age people who inhabited the same area a few centuries before. The Indians had not necessarily possessed any more virtue; they simply used cruder tools. They were non-colossal.

The same kind of problem would be much easier to recognize if mankind were afflicted with some kind of mutation that had the curious effect of causing children to grow to twice their parents' adult size---so that they required twice as much food and fiber per capita to sustain life and comfort. Suppose, further, that the effect were somehow cumulative, so that each generation grew twice as large and voracious as the preceding one. Quite obviously, the world's carrying capacity would be much less for later generations of giants than for earlier generations of runts. Just as obviously, neither conventional political rostrums nor revolutionary agitation could do much to remedy the situation.

Perhaps we would know this if we ceased to call ourselves Homo sapiens and began to call ourselves Homo colossus. If we were accustomed to thinking of a human being not just as a naked ape or a fallen angel but as a man-tool system, we would have recognized that progress could become a disease. The more colossal man's tool kit became, the larger man became, and the more destructive of his own future."

...and later in the book.

"History will record the period of global dominance by Homo colossus as a brief interlude. Our most urgent task is to develop policies designed not to prolong that dominance, but to ensure that the successor to Homo colossus will be, after all, Homo sapiens. Developing such policies must be so enormously difficult that it is not easy even to accept the urgency of the task. But the longer we delay beginning the more numerous and colossal we become---thereby trapping ourselves all the more irredeemably in the fatal practice of stealing from the future."

Those words were written nearly 30 years ago and no such consensus for change has emerged. On the contrary, population growth, consumption habits, resource depletion, species extinctions, widespread pollution, toxic contamination of food & water supplies, and global warming are all spiraling, exponentially, out of control.

But wait, Jim! Haven't you heard the good news?

There's been a "paradigm shift" in Washington!

Great change is on the horizon because the democrats have trounced the republicans in the American political arena.

Hogwash! When's the last time you heard a democrat argue against economic growth or global Capitalism?

Here's a quote describing the differences between democrats & republicans by another author, Rita Mae Brown, whom, much to my liking, speaks truth with a rather down-to-earth bluntness.

"The difference between the two parties is the difference between syphillis and gonorrhea. Neither one of them has a very compelling program for America. They don't question our whole economic base, and I'm not talking about being socialist or anything like that. What we need to look at is whether our economy is safe for the earth."

As far as I'm concerned, you can apply that very analogy to Capitalism, Communism, Socialism, Libertarianism, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, etc.etc. etc., and any other anthropocentric notion that separates Homo colossus from his place among Nature and her universal laws.

What would be needed for our long-term survival is a profound, species-wide, paradigm shift (combined with a lot fewer people), because, as long as we place ourselves above Nature, instead of within her, the ways in which we live our lives will continue to be a disease upon (or at dis-ease with) the earth that supports us.

And, evidently, that paradigm shift isn't going to happen.

It's become quite obvious that, as a civilization, we are incapable of understanding the colossal changes we need to make in ourselves if we wish to continue as a viable species. Eventually though, forces beyond our apparent control will greatly reduce our numbers, and, for the sake of our species, as well as the diversity of life on earth, I hope that happens before we ourselves end up on the ever-growing heap of extinctions we are causing.

So, did I vote?

Yes, I always vote...

...although, in recent memory, I haven't voted for anything, or anybody, that had much of a chance of winning. Yet I keep on voting lest those creeps in power think I just don't give a damn. I go to the polls and make my contrary little statement of displeasure with the status-quo, no matter how inconsequential that statement is.

It's kind of like the words, and time, I've wasted here today, when the above picture already said it all...

Still, I often feel a need to speak my mind, and, as I said in my October 11th post, "I’ll take protest and dissent over war or collapse any time", but that doesn't imply that I usually get my way, because world events almost never go in the direction I'd like to see them go.

Dirt Road Dogs...

Click on photo to enlarge

All bundled up in our warmest coats, Dallas and I walk toward the water at 8:14 this morning in one of the last best places on the south shore of Big Bear Lake. It's way below freezing and an icy wind blows strong out of the northeast. A very beautiful morning if you're dressed for it, and we are.

Dallas and I aren't big on roads, but if we have to travel one, this is the kind we like, two ruts in the dirt, minus the clunkers that it was made for.

I don't know why Dallas likes them so much, maybe because they're full of life, because they smell better than asphalt or concrete, or because he never has to be on a leash in a place like this.

I like them because they're quiet, slow, meandering, compelling, picturesque, interesting, pliant (as opposed to rigid), impermanent, and not the slightest bit oppressive, unless some drooling yay-hoo in a belching groaning 4X4 comes barrelling through, which hasn't happened to us here yet, knock on wood!

But most of all, for me I guess, it's nostalgia.

These are the kinds of roads I lived on when I was a kid, and I wish all kids could grow up someplace like this, running with their dogs, off the leash, dodging tumbleweeds & chasing dragonflies in the summer.

Tampa Avenue in Reseda, California was like this in 1952, except there was no lake. But the rutted little road did run right down through the Los Angeles River, just a cowpath through a meandering creek in those days.

Today, fifty-four years later, the kids on Tampa---now a six lane ribbon of hardened petroleum goop & gravel slathered through the midst of the 1,700,000 lost souls of The Greater San Fernando Valley---sit on their fat diabetes-prone asses in front of TVs, killing things in video games. Good practice for when they must go outside and dodge real bullets in the alleys behind their apartment slums, or in the prison yards they call schools, or in the future wars they're going to fight defending Halliburton & The Carlyle Group's freedom.

Progress? Sure, tell that to the family & friends of the suicidal 8th grader the cops shot to death as he wielded a pellet gun at his school in Longwood, Florida on Friday.

Right here, in our County of San Bernardino, kids are killing each other every week and the community solution is to hire more police, create a stronger Police State, and enforce the law!

"WE'LL TEACH THEM TO RESPECT THE LAW!", our newspaper headline screams.

Yeah, the law of private property, the law of growth, the law of profit, the law of Capitalism, the law of selfishness and greed, the law of the Military-Industrial State, the law of the rich & powerful, the law of the thief and gangster. The law of servitude & slavery, The law of No Trespassing, No Skateboarding, No Swimming, No Fishing, No Boating, No Loitering, the laws of self-annihilation.

In my 60 years I've seen enough of what we call progress, and its laws, thank you!

But, in my early childhood, I learned from the laws of Nature, the laws of beauty, magic and mystery that draw us into the world, not push us away and alienate us from it.

Generous inviting laws which point the way to our skills and nurture our interests, the laws of natural instinct that teach caution, self-preservation and wisdom.

We humans can make all the laws & rules we want, but as long as they're incompatible with the laws of Nature, as long as we think we're separate from, and above Nature, as long as we treat this planet like it's ours to do with as we please, we'll continue toward our own destruction, and the demise of what we claim to hold sacred.

I personally, am way fed up with the patriarchal tyranny of the
Corporate State, the leadership of the almighty dollar, and I've also heard enough about an even more patriarchal GOD that says we're too helpless to change ourselves, that only HE can save us from the eternal misery of sin, for Christ's sake!

The GOD of the same religion that has ordained the barbaric murder & torture of millions of indigenous people around the world as their land was stolen and colonized. The same religion that still defends Capitalism and Imperialism everywhere, as we today, continue robbing people of their land and livelihoods, to satisfy our bottomless gluttony, with GOD on our side.

This isn't the Dark Ages, it's the 21st Century, and we're educated enough to know how we got here, what we're doing, and exactly why we're doing it.

Just pick up the paper, it's all there in black & white, although you'll need to read some non-Western press to get the whole picture.

So let's get real friends, the future of life as we know it is very likely in the hands of those of us living today, and it's our decisions that will determine where we go from here.

Civilizations, their myths, superstitions and religions come & go, just as species do, and our civilization, and species, though young in historical & geological terms respectively, are teetering on the brink of extinction.

But we now have the information to understand our predicament, and maybe even the tools to do something about it!

We no longer have to sacrifice victims to the Volcano God, The Earthquake God, The Tsunami God, The Hurricane God, The Automobile God, or even the Almighty Dollar God! We know where & why things happen, where & how we should, and shouldn't be living, it's our choice now, not blind fate.

Los Angeles is forever doomed to destruction, as is San Francisco or New Orleans, and any other location where we choose to live out of context, or scale, with the Nature of the place.

We can't escape disasters, tragedy, or death in our lives, but we certainly don't need to be this incredibly stupid anymore, by now we should know better.

And, there's certainly no desirable future for humanity in the Orwellian nightmare that civilization is becoming before our very eyes.

For the sake of our kids, of their future, of our species, of all species, everything we do & say now is important.

But to pretend there's hope in this system isn't optimism, it's either ignorance, foolishness or fraudulence. It's time to speak not of progress and growth, but of change, personal change, spiritual change and societal change, of paradigm shift in the true sense of the phrase.

I believe most people instinctively know this, but nobody knows what to do.

How do we change, where do we go, what do we do?

Well it's obvious that we can't stay here, we can't go back, and we can't continue on the course we're on.

I, for one, am going to try and be more thoughtful each day on how to discuss what change is (not compromise), so...

More police isn't change, it's more of the same!

More military isn't change, it's more of the same!

More corporate imperialism isn't change.

More paving, more freeways, more housing developments, more unsustainable livelihoods, more materialism, more celebrity worship, more corporate sports, more brand recognition, more slums, more bling-bling, more gangs, more people, more wars, is just more of the same.

And voting for any so-called leader who has enough corporate contributions to get elected isn't voting for change, it's voting for more of the same.

Less greed, fewer possessions, less cars, smaller families, smaller homes, less people, less private property, more community, less racism, less imperialism, less laws, less pollution, less extinctions, more commons, more wildness, more diversity, More Nature! That would be a change...

A welcome change, in my book.

As it is now, we are rapaciously changing the living planet into dead objects of our own creation.

So, if we don't change, where are we going?

You tell me, and please don't say, "To Heaven", or to "To Hell", lest I vomit.

If we don't all change radically, and soon, where are we going as a civilization, as a species, as part of this beautiful living planet?

So you tell me.

Then, go tell your kids...

...but don't lie, or tell them fairytales, most of them aren't buying it anymore either, or haven't you noticed?

There, you've heard my Martin Luther King Day rant!

And there's no apology for it.

So maybe we could turn off the fuckin' TVs, get out of the cars, and start talking with each other?

Temple Of The Lost Civilization

Click on photo to enlarge
Buddha meditates in front of our Lost Civilization pagoda.
But no, we're not Buddhist, or Christian, Muslim, Hindu or Wiccan.
Nor are we agnostic or atheist.
We believe in nature, in earth and solar systems, in the sun, the stars and the cosmos.
We are made of that, and something of us will always be part of it.
We also believe in life, everlasting life, though not as individual human beings.
Our atoms and molecules are infinitely part of the profound beauty of nature, and we are elemental components of the living evolution of all existence, like everything that came before us.
We're mammals, homo-sapiens just recently walking upright, and don't feel that our young self-aggrandizing species yet knows enough to define or name what the whole of IT is.
Some might call it God or the Holy Spirit, but we simply know it as the thing we are one with forever.