Unexceptional (eBook)

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THE OMEN

The Chocolate Tsunami That Started It All…

Muddy streaming chocolate. A swelling river of the stuff. Hmm… This should be fun. Chocolate fountains. Chocolate waterfalls. I love chocolate. Wait, no. It’s water. Soil thickened swathes of swirling brown viscous muck. Oh, great. Here we go again. My dream rider always likes to switch horses in midstream. There’s all sorts of crap in the churning waters, too. Chunks of furniture, detritus of all kinds. This is all imagery snatched from internet footage of tsunamis, filling my internal screen. Japan. Chile. Phuket. You Tube on replay.

Anxiety swells. The powerful current is swirling round my waist, a belt of rapidly slithering muscular python. Eddies cascade round the ninety degree angle of a painted white pylon, this tall pallid monolith withstanding the forces at work. Load bearing. Bearing the load. Beginning to strain. Flood waters are rushing towards me, pushing us back. Us. Someone is with me. I’m not alone, but…

The swell is forcing us back, into our home, trapping us. My anxiety swells and rises along with the thickening, viscous tide. Apprehension. Worry. Dread. All threaten to overwhelm me.

I wake up, rip that fucking sleep apnea mask off of my face, sit up quickly, and lean back against the cool wooden bed frame. A thin veneer of perspiration sheens my chest. The dream. Quickly. Have to catch it, catch the swiftly dissipating cerebral wisps. In this moment it is as if a window is quickly sliding closed. Yet for these few seconds, on the cusp between sleep and wakefulness, the window stays open for just a moment, and I can catch a glimpse of what’s going on back there. What was that? What was I dreaming about?

Omen. It’s going to happen. This is an omen of something that’s going to happen. I knew it; I knew all along that we had to move out of this fucking floodplain. I’ve talked with my wife about this so many times. We live in a floodplain. Right at sea level, a quarter mile at best from the immense Pacific. In a river delta. In California. That’s right, California, where it will go bone dry for four or five years running, then El Niño pays a visit, and what was once a gentle, clear running mountain stream swells into a barely contained mudslide pinched between the Army Corps of Engineers’ straining levee walls…

…If it keeps on rainin’, levee’s gonna break…

The chocolate landslide sweeps mighty coastal redwoods under the bridge. The bridge shudders as each collides on their way past, swept off into the Pacific with ease. Veritable twigs.

The media is full of global warming. Calving icebergs. Warming temperatures. Rising sea levels. Stranded polar bears. Island nations disappearing. And the El Niño. That damned El Niño. I knew it. It’s going to kill us. This is an omen. It’s a warning. Sell the house. Get out now.

Wait a minute. I know better than that. Omen? How ridiculous. As the light of conscious wakefulness begins to illuminate the darkened recesses of my mind, I realize that interpreting this as an omen is seriously primitive stuff. Maybe not lizard brain stuff, but damned close. As my wakefulness increases, I can see that this dream is my brain’s way of processing anxiety over the flooding issue. I had a nightmare about flood waters because I am anxious about living in a floodplain during an El Niño winter.

I’ve been through this kind of thing before. Awakening in the middle of the night, frightened by nightmares. Ghosts and the like. Supernatural interpretations of experience happen instinctively. They seem to be a part of our basic default setting, our initial wiring. Welling up from the deeper recesses of the brain, they offer us those instinctive, prehistoric interpretations of experience with which we are all so familiar. Omens. Signs. Ghosts. Demons. Goblins. Premonitions. Communications from the other side.

But then, as wakefulness increases, as the sun rises, as consciousness crests, the supernatural and the mythical are replaced by much more viable, natural interpretations. At least, this is the case for those who have had the good fortune to learn that supernatural explanations do not represent truly satisfactory explanations. If you are never taught option B, however, you are more or less permanently stuck with option A. Forever and ever. Amen.

And that is a microcosmic version of what Unexceptional is all about. My experience illustrates, in a single case, a process which mirrors the more general maturing process which all of humanity is engaged in. We are all in the midst of this shift, this movement upwards, away from the supernatural, towards the natural. That, in a nutshell, is what I will be exploring. I will make the case for this claim, and I will explore some of the revolutionary, and fascinating, implications as well.

Ockham & the Shrinking Magic Bag

I was raised as an atheist. But, contrary to family tradition, I spent twenty-five years associated with religious organizations and studies, learning to interpret experience in the traditional supernatural ways that have become extremely common in American culture and around the world. Coincidences are actually messages, signposts guiding you. Actions have karmic, moral repercussions. Tradition is all important. Obedience. Adherence to scripture. Worldly knowledge is untrustworthy. Everything is being overseen, and there is a grand, but always mysterious, plan. Spirit forces. Omens. God.

Yet I was often suspicious of these interpretations. And deeply curious, always, about what was the truth of the matter. Suffice to say that my relentless, genuine curiosity did not endear me to my religiously inclined fellows. Today I believe what the compiled totality of known data, the sum of all the worldly evidence, suggests in any given situation. For example, rather than omen, it seems vastly more likely that my dream was an expression or manifestation of my anxiety, and nothing more. This is the interpretation which most closely aligns with all of the evidence. As William of Ockham, noted descriptor of ‘Ockham’s Razor’1, also known as the Law of Parsimony, might well say, the best explanation is the one with the least extra parts.

Omens. Psychological transformations. Ebenezer Scrooge.2 Altruism. Disease and addiction. All of them. Shifting from the magical and the inexplicable, to the knowable and the known. Volcanoes. Earthquakes. Floods. Crop failures. Mothers and babies dying in childbirth. Hurricanes. From the supernatural to the natural. History can be depicted as a process wherein each one of these, one by one, has shifted from the magical, supernatural, and the unknowable, over into the realm of the knowable and the known. Stunning that, in our day and age, Hurricane Katrina’s destruction of New Orleans was interpreted by some religious people as was done back in the dark ages: god punishing us for being gay, or whatever the alleged sin du jour was at the time.

And yet, sadly, not quite so stunning. Not so stunning at all, as suggested by research showing that eighty to ninety percent of Americans believe in god, or at least say they do, the success of ‘spirituality’ themed self-help books, the popularity of 12-step culture, Fundamentalism both Christian and Muslim, the rise of the mega-churches, not to mention medieval interpretations of calamities great and small, and antiquated religious weltanschauungs which are still, unfortunately, frighteningly, very much alive and well.

So, this is where we are at. Absolutely basic facts about reality are shockingly unrecognized by many. Evolution is a fact; we are animals; naturalistic interpretations of reality can explain a great deal more than we generally give them credit for; religious and dualistic interpretations of reality may have run their historic course and, at this point in time, come to do more harm than good. At the very least, these dualistic interpretations of reality serve as a hindrance to the ever fruitful human propensity towards curiosity and inquiry into naturalistic, data-driven and evidence-based interpretations of the cosmos within which we live.

What I have to say in this book is straightforward, true and simple. Unfortunately, many have yet to get the memo. Hell, many of my fellow Homo sapiens would attempt to murder me if they read this, or at the very least stone me or beat the shit out of me. But, for many of us, it is more and more becoming the case that what was once interpreted as spiritual, divine, or religious, is starting to be blasphemously mocked as ‘woo woo’. Three cheers for blasphemous mockery. It’s way, way better than cowed silence!

Our questions are more and more succumbing to empirical rather than dualistic interpretations, to common sense rather than sixth sense, to science rather than faith, to replicable findings rather than personal revelation. As this continues, the bag of supernatural answers will continue to dwindle in size, perhaps until one day nothing is left. Many people foresee this as a potential disaster. I am telling you that this is, on the contrary, entirely good news. Absolutely nothing good will be lost in the process. I promise.

This Is Your Brain on Windex

When I was just a boy, a young philosopher in training, I remember swimming in the crystal clear tropical waters where we lived. My folks were up at the beach bar, gin and tonics, dad smoking his Camels, mom her Kents, passing around a joint with the two local bartenders, one of whom was a regular in our party home every night. I may have only been ten years old, but I already...