Quotes From THE DISPOSSESSED by Ursula K. LeGuin, p.335

FULFILLMENT, Shevek thought, is a function of time. The search for pleasure is circular, repetitive, atemporal. The variety seeking of the spectator, the thrill hunter, the sexually promiscuous, always ends in the same place. It has an end. It comes to the end and has to start over. It is not a journey and return, but a closed cycle, a locked room, a cell. OUTSIDE the locked room is the landscape of time, in which the spirit may, with luck and courage, construct the fragile, makeshift, improbable roads and cities of fidelity: a landscape inhabitable by human beings. IT is not until an act occurs within the landscape of the past and the future that it is a human act. Loyalty, which asserts the continuity of past and future, binding time into a whole, is the root of human strength; there is no good to be done without it. SO looking back on the past four years, Shevek saw them not as wasted, but as part of the edifice that he and Takver were building with their lives. The thing about working with time, instead of against it, he thought, is that it is not wasted. Even pain counts.

The Dispossessed by Ursula K. LeGuin, Quotes, p. 314

As he started down, the air grumbled a little and he felt a strangeness: no jolt, no tremor, but a displacement, a conviction that things were wrong. He completed the step he had been making, and the ground was there to meet his foot. He went on; the road stayed laying down. He had been in no danger, but he had never in any danger known himself so close to death. Death was in him, under him; the earth itself was uncertain, unreliable. The enduring, the reliable, is a promise made by the human mind.

Quotes From THE DISPOSSESSED by Ursula K. LeGuin

-----The Dispossessed is about a man named Shevek, who has come through unusual circumstances to live on another planet, the one of his ancestor's origin, Urras. His own, former planet, is a desert, barren and devoid of complex living organisms. The people live off of what they can. The reason for their self-exile is the desire for a utopia; anarchy against a government, wars, and battles of class. The reader also feels what it means to move to another country, very different from one's own, and what it is like to be an ex-patriot, or be between two worlds. The sense of not knowing where one belongs anymore, feeling at once with one and with the other, never again of your own world. I would like to thank LeGuin for once again in this novel as well as all of her others, giving us the ability to see with great depth and genius empathy, of what it is to feel life from within the heart of another. -----Shevek is shocked by the opulence of Urras, which is actually very much like our society. We wouldn't think twice about a "nightmare shopping street", equivalent to one of our malls. As far as empathy goes, most people would not immediately be able to imagine his situation, but perhaps we might imagine being a person working in a sweatshop in Southeast Asia or South America somewhere, and how we might feel if we were to suddenly be in a mall, maybe surprise mixed with envy and anger, maybe... But she gives a very interesting perspective of someone coming from a place where THERE IS NOTHING, and what there is, is made, and sold directly by the makers, like it might have been before there were mass transportation, as in medieval times, but even more intense, because even in the old days, there were rich and poor, but in Shevek's society, there is no money, and so, there is no concept of buying, not concept of the haves and the not haves, and so there is no concept of crime, and no hierarchical power over others. Instead, there is beaurocracy controlled by computer, waiting for years, a lack of being able to choose your life, not being able to ask and receive what you want, your children are taken from you, and if you choose not to follow or fit into the system, you are ostracized by the people around you and cannot fulfill your desires at all, or only with a fight. It seemed really frustrating. Having come from an exiled Cuban family, and hearing the stories of the people who lived there or died there in Communist Cuba, it reminded me of many stories (Even more sadly, Cuba, like all communist governments on this Earth, is not an all-are-poor situation. Castro and his buddies enjoy steak and wine every night, while the rest of the country starves. As far as I have been able to see, a true communist society - on this Earth - can only exist in very small numbers...if at all. I lived on a commune of 20, and can attest to the difficulties of it.)

**P.98** _____“Excess is excrement,” Odo wrote in the Analogy. “Excrement retained in the body is a poison.” _____Abbeney was poisonless: a bare city, bright, the colors light and hard, the air pure. It was quiet. You could see it all, laid out as plain as spilt salt. Nothing was hidden.

*******p.131***** ______Saio Pae had taken him "shopping" during his second week in A-Io. Though he did not consider cutting his hair - his hair, after all, was a part of him - he wanted an Urrasti-style suit of clothes and a pair of shoes. He had no desire to look any more foreign than he could help looking. The simplicity of his old suit made it positively ostentatious, and his soft, crude desert boots appeared very odd indeed among the Iotis' fanciful footgear...

______The whole experience had been so bewildering to him that he put it out of his mind as sooon as possible, but he had dreams about it for months afterwards, nightmares. Saemtenevia Prospect was two miles long, and it was a solid mass of people, traffic, and things: things to buy; things for sale. Coats, dresses, gowns, robes, trousers, breeches, shirts, blouses, hats, shoes, stockings,...clothes to wear while sleeping, while swimming, while playing games, while at an afternoon party, while traveling,...- all different, all in hundreds of different cuts, styles, colors, textures, materials. Perfumes, clocks, lamps, statues, cosmetics, candles, pictures, cameras, games, vases, sofas, kettles, puzzles... figurines and souvenirs and kickshaws and mementos and gewgaws and bric-a-brac, everything either useless to begin with or ornamented so as to disguise its use; acres of luxuries, acres of excrement..."The coat costs 8,400 units?" he asked in disbelief, for he had recently read in a newspaper that a "living wage" was about 2,000 units per year..."Pretty thing isn't it? Women love furs." And they went on. After one more block Shevek had felt utterly exhausted. He couldn't look any more. He wanted to hid his eyes. ______And the strangest thing about the nightmare street was that none of the millions of things for sale were made there. They were only sold there. Where were the workshops, the factories, where were the farmers, the craftsmen, the miners, the weavers, the chemists, the carvers, the dyers, the designers, the machinists, where were the hands, the people who made? Out of sight, somewhere else. Behind walls. All the people in all the shops were either buyers or sellers. They had no relationship the things but that of possession.

The past, the present, the future

I walked into the lab, excited. The head grad student was there, and I excitedly told him what my idea was.
"I don't think that Darwin's Theory is complete. There are too many holes in it. Too many evolutionary jumps in nature don't add up. I would like to study why this is, and try to disprove the current theory of evolution as complete in itself."
"You're wasting your time. If there were some other theory, someone would have come up with it a long time ago. Its impossible, so just give up."
And I did.
As easy as that.
And that was the last straw in solidifying my feelings of disrespect toward the study of what is called "Biology", in its incestuous stance of approval of theories and the progression of the so-called science. Its like going back to popularity contests in High School! Wherein the most popular theorists get their theories approved and then subsequent submissions must be based upon the approved theories.

Despite this, a few years later, there was an article in Science or Discovery that supported my theory, someone else had indeed found that it was true. Not that it is taught in schools.
My original theory was this (It is not based on anyone else's thoughts):
That there is a CONSCIOUS EVOLUTION underlying the traditional theory of evolution, which is due to mutations, time and natural selection (the weak or disadvantaged are taken over by the strong and advantaged).
Of course natural selection is a basic part of evolution. It is a central force to evolution. However, it is not the end all be all of evolution.
I believe, and have since childhood, that evolution is guided by consciousness, and consciousness comes in many forms. It is a desire to be a certain way. It is recognition of necessity, or a recognition of possibility, that guides living things into their future position or state. I believe that conscious evolution can be unconscious as well, it just means that it is the mind and purpose of a living thing that governs its future, and not only its situation in the world.
This is easy to say about humans, who use language and can thoroughly understand each other. But what about animals, and plants? I believe that they also have chosen their future, their path. My biggest examples are of mysterious symbiotic relationships, such as those between clownfish and sea anemones, or pilot fish that clean sharks in return for not being eaten.

Actually, my thoughts go much further, and far beyond the theory of conscious evolution. But for the purpose of todays blog, I'll limit it here.

The reason that I am posting is because I found a bookmark from a few months ago, one linking to Jean Houston. Jean Houston's book with Robert Masters, Mind Games. Shinpei says he is concerned at the use of the book to open human consciousness. He says that perhaps humans should not be able to do such things on a day to day basis, and that there might be a reason why we are not all enlightened at all times. Perhaps. But I believe that there are those who are ready to jump into that state, and that the book is a tool. {Its like Kundalini Yoga. Those who are ready to have their Shakras opened do not suffer, and indeed are given a great gift. But those who are not ready, have their shakras "ripped open" as an old friend called it, and their protective layers tattered by the "Serpent Energy", and are left to struggle in a strange world between madness and reality, sudden flashes of heat or shivering in different parts of the body, and a general sense of malaise. Apparently it takes months to years to recover. I met a young man once who suggested that I never do it, his eyes wide with fear, because he was still struggling after having given it up. After that, I stopped doing the Fire Breathing if I felt that my body could not take so much, and never suffered. I did feel a wonderful tingling sensation in my hands, which felt as though it reached out about two feet.}

In the book Mind Games, players are lead on hypnotic journeys into themselves. There is a guide, someone who reads the book and watches over the players. The games themselves are tools for opening up the mind from what is considered reality by the conscious and unconscious mind into an "outside the box" ability to look at the world. I have lead several friends on these journeys. Some people remember them, some don't. All feel very well afterward.
So how do the Mind Games and Jean Houston fit into my theory of conscious evolution?

Well, I went to Jean Houston's page. I really respect what she has done in life, and her works with other people, but recently what she has done seems kind of creepy, and really stinks of lies. Like her video with the Dalai Lama and her website. I have a feeling that she has been sucked into trying to make a living by manipulating spirituality to her own design. Her eyes are scary, too... But maybe I am wrong.
Anyway.
On her wiki page was a link to the noosphere, and that was where it got interesting. It seems that not only is my theory possibly correct, but it began in 1907 with the studies of Henry Bergson
...
I have to make dinner now.