ii scii fii

sci fi, is storytelling that folds around frameworks of logic based on an observed patterns of the material world rather than a logic based in a moral or ethical framework (there is so much to pull apart there, that is in no way a final word just...i have to keep going)

sci fi is great at expressing human desires.
desire is something on the other side of a threshold or barrier.
sci fi communicates our perceptions of the limitations of human capability and reflects to us what is possible beyond those boundaries by constructing other beings and societies that can do what we believe we cannot.

sci fi reveals one of human's deepest desires to be: to know oneself.

*sometimes we really risk sounding a certain way:

i think, write, say things and then feel so compelled

to give this disclaimer

that is

here i am not claiming thoughts that have never been thought

here i say things that upon review seem so obvious

but

i. the more obvious the more susceptible it is to being taken for granted

ii. in order to not take it for granted, i want to pull it apart and examine it

these are things i will stop reiterating the more comfortable i get with the notion that someone may actually read this.

thus i am formatting these disclaimers to at least be physically smaller and thus less present until one day they just disappear.

to know oneself.
in many ways.
but lets start with tangibly:
i just keep thinking about how Picard and co. would meet or visit another society and so often they would know exactly what they needed, what they needed to eat, to heal, to conflict-resolve.
and not from a desire to be homogenous, not through democratic consensus, not from dictation by authority, these ways of being are not habits formed through a pattern of comfort and receding awareness nor choices but rather they are essentially, intrinsically a part of who the people are.

French philosopher and astrologer Dane Rudhyar, in many times and places i am sure, but in a talk given at UC Berkely in June 1975 outlines three universes that one can inhabit:

i. the biological universe, the contained biosphere of earth:
--- this is the universe of survival. the one of plants and animals and elements

ii. the social / cultural universe:
---the structures that humans, for millennia but also just to jump ahead, are currently born into

---this is the family structure, then the neighborhood / localized community structure, then the nation structure, then the global human structure

iii. the cosmic universe

---this is the one that from the smallest outward toward the most encompassing, all structures of the biosphere are contained under, this is the one that stretches over the entire possibility of the universe
these are stages of consciousness he is proposing.
i guess it gets big really fast, it is easy to keep up the delineation between yourself

and another or make boundaries around what one believes in the cultural / social universe because your ways of being become obvious against the textures of another's way of being.
but when you all exist under the same cosmic umbrella those distinctions are minutia : details in the fabric of it all. they comprise the fabric, they are their own whole and a part at the same time.

to me, it feels like it takes the pressure off.
this is not a call for homogeneity or the erasure of cultural traditions. it is a celebration of those and an encouragement to make more. for people to find the ways that feel actually intrinsic to their vibrations : their way of being.
i think that is what sci fi is grasping towards: human desire to know what that looks like when we are aligned thus living and expressing in the way that is exactly natural to oneself. which is not replicable by any other being but can find common ground and thus points of relation with many through that unique mode of expression.
finding ones pure expression of self takes searching, and it is exceptionally difficult to search in a construction of reality that is full of illusion, delusion, hypocrisy and outright lies. culture gives individuals a place to find others but it also tends to mimic larger systemic structures by creating rules about what it is through what it is not. thus the individual as a part of that culture becomes prohibited from being ______ in order to be a part of ________.

there are examples of these rules which are constructed within social universes to be malicious towards other social universes

then there are examples of these rules within social universes

that exist in order to protect the social universe

from control, greed, and malice of outside force

( *often, both exist within a universe, moving in and out in all directions on all the levels of group *)

this creates an inverse relationship where:

an increase in cross-over of identifying factors that a group takes on ^

leads to a decrease in the number of individuals that exists within that group v

*i do not believe this to be an inevitable trajectory for the cultural / societal universe, but rather a tendency caused by the tendency of the cultural / societal universe to make itself smaller by marking more distinctions (boundaries) : provide less space for fewer individuals