The Language of Destiny

Like all things universal and elementary, destiny is easy to understand, in general, but difficult to comprehend on a personal level. As it builds up through the layers of life from simple to complex, it becomes as convoluted as the world it has constructed.

To perceive destiny, we must return to the basic language of existence, the words of nature.

Last night, after dinner, I sat in the cockpit and looked out over the evening sea. I was thinking about the language of the river, the hills and the bay. As I looked and listened to these languages (they are as visual as they are auditory) I found them so complicated I could understand nothing at all other than their immensity. For each living creature, each structure of the landscape, every part of the world around me there was an enormous volume of information. I sat there playing with each volume, hefting it mentally, thumbing through its pages.

I saw a tree bristling from the crest of the mountain and imagined its volume of words. The tree is a word filled with more words. The mountain is covered with thousands upon thousands upon thousands of plants, each a different word, each composed of a multitude of different words.

Suppose a botanist were to take just one of the plants and begin to write about it. It would have a physical size and shape to describe, and a name to relate it to all the other plants and to all men of science. And each part of the plant has a name and each root and stem and leaf and flower and fruit would have rootlets, root hairs, capillary systems, bark, and on and on down to the two hundred or so different kinds of tree cells and inside each of the cells there is a vast biochemistry to be named and discussed until volume after volume of information was complied about that single plant.

And there is another tree, of a different family, right next to that one.

I thought about the surface of sea, moody in the gray evening. I could sense untold tiny awareness' living there, each with their language. They skittered about on the tension of the ocean's surface and were I to read their monographs it would be long with chapters on how they behaved. What they did to the tune of the great planetary forces within which their awareness' worked.

I began to be afraid that there was too much to the language of Earth for anyone to ever understand. I began to fear the voyage of Moira had grounded on the reefs of complexity and was soon to be beaten into pieces by endless waves of information.

Then I began to think of the commonalties of all those forms of awareness. Though there were endless ways for nature to speak in her language of awareness, each one had some things, basic things, which were the same. And what is the most basic?

To be. Yes, each awareness is one awareness.

To change. Yes, every creature must change for change gives awareness.

To have direction. Yes, all creatures must advance through the cycles of life.

The Observer. Yes, we all observe the results of our actions.

Beginning with these basic words, describing four facets to a single process - I knew the syntax of the language of nature. And I knew the grammar, too. It is more complicated, but simple enough for the smallest living being. It is  Om (to be), Mani (to change), and Padma (to have direction). And that these basic words result in Hum, the observer/observation.

Awareness is the error of expectations, but also the conjunction of mutual surprise. English has no word, no single concept, to represent nature's most basic operant, the process of interaction between an individual awareness and the larger matrix of communications it exists within. To think of a being requires, in English, separating the being into two separate "aspects"; awareness and environment; inside and outside; subjective and objective, body and mind. But nature is not separate things. It is a polar flow of a single complex becoming.

To Be, To Change, To Have Direction exists as a relationship between all the entities in a nested matrix of communications. Nothing does not even exist by itself, but must be framed with something.

And then there is recognition. Recognition. The mirror of awareness. Life emerged from recognition, unfolded, from randomness. Released. It is the fusion in destiny, the surprise in surprise.

There is also effort, intention, will. A will to survive spoken by all living beings on all of the vast nested levels of existence. Even inertia takes determination, at times.

I went to sleep slowly repeating the five elements of the syntax of existence. Om Mani Padma Hum. And the ancient focal points blended, calmed the observer, and I slept.

Dawn. I stand again on Moira's deck and contemplate the sea around me and the course I have taken to arrive here.

I think of the Solomon Islands and I ask about the destinies I witnessed there.

The forests are still vanishing. The islands are "independent" now but the government is still an English Colonial government peopled by men who can only think in English terms and words and systems when they think of government.

Though the government people all have four grandparents born in the Solomon Islands, when they assume their roles for leading their people, they act within the matrix of their legal "English" language. When they seek their reward it is in terms of the value systems and even the money which was printed in England. The language system they were born into has no words for the English concepts of government or financial rewards.

I see again the children in the school, learning English concepts in English words and feel their context within the framework of those school walls. See again their single-file quick march from the jungle to the school door in center stage.

I know again the deep concern in the eyes of the young woman as she spoke of the danger to the forests of Rendova. And I remember the taste of anger I felt in Paradise Lost.

I feel again the presence of Holy Mama, though he is now dead. I know his existence in Destiny. For his name and words and actions will direct the flow of awareness for all time in the New Georgia Islands.

I sit again with Bosakuru and touch the tender soreness of a departing magic.

I fly again through the moonlight and shatter against the vision of the Giant Whales.

And in these experiences I see Destiny, revealed sharply in the warp and woof of the threads of the Moirae.

Each part of the whole is imbedded in a matrix of behavior. It exists because of the whole. Randomness truly is a myth. Oxygen and Hydrogen can only combine to form certain things, given a set of environmental parameters. They might be gasses, mixing together, or liquid water, or steam, or vapor, or ice, or heavy water or hydrogen peroxide. Those are the only things those two atomic words can say.

The parameters of destiny are complex indeed. Controls are never random, never exist independent of that which they control. The awareness' and the controls exist as one system, change together to ever higher levels of knowing. They can only move in certain ways. As in Thomm's "Catastrophe Theory" systems (comprised of awareness' within the matrix forming their awareness) can only respond within a set range of possibilities.

Given the economic, social, political conditions of the Planet and the geographic and geological realities of the Solomon Islands, the political leaders, children, villagers, do not have an unlimited number of options. Each act is part of a dynamic play. They do have freedom to choose within the bounds of their knowledge and abilities, but how can they select a path they do not know about or cannot reach?

The fineness of detail of the control systems determines the number of possible options of any one awareness. The control systems we know about include Language, Religion, Politics, Law, Education, Cultural Background (Tradition), Resources (both geographic, natural resources and human resources). These control systems impact each and every individual. They permit a narrow range, a locked set, of behavior patterns. In each community there are a whole range of local, family, interpersonal behavioral control systems; often based on unwritten, unconscious signals of body language.

I accept these control systems as being responsible for human destiny. Humanity itself is a self-defining concept; one that also dictates the destiny of the plants; the trees, the flowers, the food plants of the community and surrounding areas. And it dictates what will happen to the myriad other animals and organisms in and around the human community. If the human control systems fail to understand the natural control systems that support it, the human control web eventually vanishes. The error of cultural expectations.

The same principle applies to populations of any organism. Layers upon layers of behavior controls delineate the destined actions of a herd of elephants or a culture of blue-green algae. Or a whole ecosystem like a coral reef, assuring a harmonious development, like the form of a complete atoll, and mutual survival.

What I want to know, what the whole search is about, is how this principle results in such fineness of detail as to enable a single human to perceive an event in the future as if it was a frame from a movie; an episode previously unimaginable by the human; an episode which cannot be avoided. By definition, Life is non-random, but how did the Moirae weave the tapestry with such detail that I was directed through a series of impossible coincidences in the voyage from Florida to the Solomon Islands? How do such synchronicities work?

We have experimental evidence to say that it somehow does work. And within the model of existence found in the Voyage of the research vessel Moira, the explanation is not hard to imagine. For at each level of awareness, the behavioral complexities and selections leap to new plateaus of potential. In the language mind of Man we achieve a level of control beyond the ability of any one human to imagine. This language system is the consciousness of our planet-sun. But there is more to awareness than consciousness. Awareness appears within a vast ocean; a magic sea beyond the horizons of conscious perception. A Magic Sea surrounding us, flowing through us,  and carrying us along in vast currents and eddies we can only know in brief moments when our own awareness filters down into the depths, like a diver trying to see in a sea lit by phosphorescence, with a desperate ache to return to the surface to breathe again.

As the diver knows there is a wealth of awareness within that dark sea, we know deeper layers of awareness exist for each of us and for all of us together. We may not be able to control them, or even perceive them directly, but we can detect them through their impact on our existence.

We are woven in the warp and woof of the tapestry of the Moirae, able only to speculate on the phenomenon of the tapestry, the image it might reveal to a disinterested observer, and the motivations of the three sisters who weave the thread of life, measure it, and cut it off. The Moirae exist and grow stronger and smarter with each moment of existence, with each new thread of awareness woven into the tapestry of life.

For more on the polarity between free choice and fate, go to random chance and synchronicity.