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Basic information:
Printed by LULU; self-published (Unbound Art and Fine Books)
ISBN: 979-8-9883822-1-8
Binding: Paperback
Size: 8.5 x 11 X 0.5" (Portrait).      190 pages 
Content: 35 essays interspersed with 38 full-color photographs
Price: $58.00

Please click HERE to purchase a copy directly from Lulu.

If you live in Trumansburg or nearby, I may be able to hand you a copy of the book you want.

To provide you with some sense of the content and intent of this book, I am enclosing below the preamble to the essays and five of the thirty-eight images interspersed with the essays. If you need further information about the book, please get in touch with me here.

Preamble

This book contains a collection of thirty-five essays that establish the blunt disjunctive we face as individuals and as a species: Either the human mind/brain undergoes a veritable mutation or the accelerating growth of interrelated variables of enormous destructive power will continue to bring about increasingly intolerable circumstances and eventually the extinction of the entire species.

The basic premise is that we can no longer expect the grievous levels of mental, social, economic, geopolitical, and ecological disorder we are experiencing to ever yield to the ineffective and contradictory means of personal development and social progress originating from the same deeply flawed general mindset.  We are the source and the victims of this disorder, and all our conflictive pseudo-solutions are merely the means whereby a sick mental system sustains itself.

In the simplest terms, humanity will not be able to survive if the antagonistic and highly destructive cultural division and psychological isolation that has characterized it for ages are not immediately and radically addressed. This general division and its many and ever-multiplying negative effects are not problems we can treat as we do others because no one stands outside of them, let alone capable of doing anything significant to solve them.

The fragmentation, irrationality, and reckless behavior presently bringing us to the brink of extinction are deeply inscribed in our superficially different tribal and personal identities and the conceit we all share of existing in separation from one another and life itself. Worse yet, these harmful traits are also incised in the physiological substrate of memory, thought, fear, and desire: the human brain. Nothing of what we already know or could learn and put in practice in the future can access benignly and efficiently the physiochemical ground that determines how we perceive, feel, and think about ourselves and life and, consequently, how we behave.

Are we then condemned to be the separate beings we think we are and continue acting in the senseless and all-too-often hostile and even murderous ways we do? Has humanity imprisoned itself in a subtle physical/mental ghetto with self-induced extinction as the only way out?
 
These are the seminal questions posed in these essays, along with the suggestion that our toxic mental and behavioral patterns and their neurological underpinning can be dissolved by direct perception (and not mere intellectual understanding) of the falseness of our claim to separate existence and the chronic failure of the contradictory ideologies, methods, and technologies supporting this claim.
The very nature of such a query demands that it be undertaken free of the mediation of any form of external and internalized authority acting in representation and on behalf of preestablished ideological worldviews and the practices and methods they prescribe and police. We have already spent fifty thousand years attempting to improve our separate selves and societies, and all those efforts have led us to the awful circumstances we find ourselves in today and continue to project onto the future.

Consequently, the fundamental challenge we face is to find out in and by ourselves whether the fantasy of existential separation can end and whether that ending gives birth to an unthinkably different mind, a mind free of any form of tribalism and egotism and, therefore, the foundation of a sane, intelligent, and therefore profoundly caring society.
Can the human being, you and I, live free of the conflictive burden of self-isolating and self-projective cultural and personal memory? Can humanity end its suicidal alienation from the integrity of life?

The texts in this book appear more or less in the order they were originally written as blog posts. However, this order is far from mandatory or necessarily convenient. All of them have the theme outlined above at their heart, but each text approaches and treats it in a particular way. The general intent is to shed light on what ails us from many possible angles, thus providing the specific clarity and access different people may require to look at themselves and their particular contribution to the dismal state of human affairs. (Those who realize others may need reiterative and differently expressed messaging irrelevant to them are doubly blessed.) 

The images were selected from Stream Characters, a body of photographic work made roughly during the same period in which the essays were written. These found natural celebrities (sometimes intervened on-site or in post-processing to make them fully apparent) represent in their own peculiar manner the mutation that can make our species whole, one with life.
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                     F.L.   December, 2023