The Hsin Hsin Ming + Bach
A spoken version of one of the Hsin Hsin Ming, mixed with bits of Bach. This CD is a public service of Magellan's Log. The price covers only our production and shipping costs. Use, share, copy, give to friends.

I.
We woke up.

We don't know when. 2,000,000 years ago? 200,000 years ago? 20,000 years ago?

We don't know how. Something happened in our brain. We don't know what. Clumsily, we now try to replicate the awakened brain. We call our attempts "computers."

All we have is various prehistoric evidence that we woke up. Primitive tools of increasing refinement. Cave paintings and pictographs of increasing skill. And finally, writing, and thus history.

And thus us.

6,000 years (the length of recorded history) of us. Full of lots of fun (art! science! sport!) and lots of not-fun (starvation! disease! exploitation! greed! war-war-war!).

So far, so good-bad.

II.
"Only connect," E.M. Forster said, insightfully.

Little did he suspect.

Now we hurtle forward, connecting like crazy. The great landrushes of the past give way to the great bandwidth rush of the present. More, more, more! Faster, faster, faster!

Luddites howl profitably at the superficiality of the New Connectedness. But surely some connection is better than no connection (as Forster seems to imply).

So, intermittently, partially connected, we celebrate our paginated, pixelized with-it-ness.

III.
Old, whispering voices persistently filter through the noise. Heretical voices that never shouted. Well, rarely. (Those who shouted usually got shut up pretty fast (the stake, the cross, the dungeon, the strapado).

The voices speak in many languages, in many times, in many places. Some at great length, some at hardly any length at all. Take away the filigree and (as Huxley pointed out in The Perennial Philosophy) you find they were all saying the same thing:

Massive sensory evidence to the contrary, all is one.

IV.
Now, in our connected dividedness, we are so successful that we don't worry about such kooks anymore. Fringe elements, really, unable to compete media- or market-wise with those of us pridefully mastering the capitalist-scientific leviathan.

Still, the quiet voices persist. And begin to become audible to veterans who've ridden the leviathan, verily, who think to have tamed it, only to note eventually with some puzzlement the troubling status of their hearts (empty!) and the transient nature of their achievement (sand!).

V.
Having a billion years ago clawed our way out of the ocean onto dry land, a million years ago out of sleep into this fitful waking called history, and only yesterday out of the roaring surf of information that is the internet, we approach another awakening caused by the bright light of the Great Fallacy.

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