In favor of rights to our fellow non-human persons

I have a confession.  I grew up in Florida and went to SeaWorld probably a half a dozen times in my childhood.  Watching the dolphins and whales do tricks, seeing the trainers work with them...OMG!  as a child it was mesmerizing.  I was one of the brainwashed kids who was sold an idea that these wonderful creatures thrived in captivity and loved their lives.  I wanted to BE a SeaWorld Trainer!  How could I think any different?  It was magic.

Flash-forward to the release of the documentary, The Cove, several years ago.  I was made aware from the man that was once Flipper's best friend that dolphins aren't smiling, it's just their natural facial expression.  And they are cruelly rounded up, most are bloodily massacred, and some sold to sites around the world.  "Come swim with the dolphins!"  To understand their limbic system and their emotional capacity, it makes me think that having dolphins and whales in captivity is as wretched as the sex trade industry.  It's just sleazy.  

I lived in Seattle for 10 years before coming to the Bay area.  The orcas up there are very special, there's at least 3 pods, maybe more, and they've lived there a long time.  They have their own languages and customs that are very different from orcas in other areas.  I went on a whale-watching tour and I remember the guide showing us the oldest whale, a female, in the J pod was 99 years old.  That's much longer than what SeaWorld told people the orcas in captivity could live.  They said in captivity the whales live to be up to 35 years old, which is much longer than in the wild.  I cringe now to think that we once bought into their lies.   I am glad that California has a bill to ban the shows, and I do hope it passes and a message is sent out into the world that SeaWorld needs to stop.  They are running a slave trade and need to free those highly intelligent beings.

I could go on an on about this, but I have finals to study for.  So I will leave this entry by saying I believe India has it right in making dolphins "Non-human persons" and they deserve rights like humans.  (Whales should be in there too.)  And, if you haven't seen The Cove and Blackfish, definitely put them in your queue.  The world deserves to know the truth!

BAD HUMANS

The human species IS living as if it had more than one planet to occupy. They are wasteful, disgusting, repugnant B#$%RDS and I'm so glad I'm not one of them.

Okay, okay--I am a human. I'm just embarrassed to admit it sometimes. Most people don't care about anything but the Rapture or the Kardashians. Us folks living here in NorCal are living in an elite bubble of higher-ordered thinkers, not that we aren't without fault here too. But, in some parts of our country, people have never even heard of recycling---gigantic gallon milk jugs, boxes, plastic bags--are still being thrown in the trash on a regular basis.

But even here, I've been surprised that more people aren't talking about the drought and water conservation. I'm continually taking "polls" from my clients on whatever I'm thinking about at the time, and my random polls on the drought have been surprising. It's sad to me that there are people out there that think that climate change is a made up conspiracy.

I do try to look at things in a positive light, and I think awareness is the first part of change. And environmental awareness is seeping into mass consciousness through such avenues as more demand for electric cars, paperless statements, better city planning (for less sprawl), and fair trade programs.

Unfortunately, I'm not sure it's happening at a pace fast enough for our poor sweet mama Earth.

The solution? Strategic Marketing. MAKE GOING GREEN SEXY!

Show Jessica Alba using all parts of her chicken when she cooks, casually feeding the liver to her sweet cat. J-Lo driving her Tesla, Brangelina and the kids harvesting the food from their "food forest" in their front yard...and if we could get Justin Timberlake and Jimmy Fallon to do some kind of hashtag rap about the hipness of green living, well we'd have a waiting list for the bandwagon!

I know this kind of celebrity marketing is happening already on a small scale, I just want to see it more and more, like green tsunami waves pounding the shores of mass media.

on a tangent - Kekule's Ouroboros

The birth of benzene came in a dream.  Really?  I struggled to understand how one could get a chemical molecule from a hallucination of an ouroboros--a swirling serpent chasing its tail--and I realized that I was not alone.  I found the New York Times article below which shows that many others also questioned the dramatic dream story. 

http://www.nytimes.com/1988/08/16/science/the-benzene-ring-dream-analysis.html

As corny as it sounds, my intuition tells me that it was sort of a half-truth. 

Are we all "tapped in" to some universal consciousness/knowing that we just have to relax enough into a certain brain state to discover its infinite wisdom?  I have experienced the dream coming true or the sudden intuition that turned out in my favor.  Maybe for Kekule, the benzene molecule had been there (in his mind) for some time but through the mountain of fatique and hyperfocusing he wasn't able to grasp it until his brain relaxed.  Kind of like having a thought "on the tip of your tongue" and only being able to retrieve it driving down the highway 3 hours later.  The ouroboros was Kekule's "ah-ha" moment.

Also, why do some of the most creative acts of genius happen when the artist has gone into oblivion on alcohol or other illegal substance?  Again, a host of memories and collections that were always there, just accessed by being in some other altered state of consciousness.  I believe it's a Buddhist perspective as well that "all knowledge is inside of us", but I don't think I could have come up with the chemical structure for benzene.

And from a TCM perspective, I have been taught thus far that we are not supposed to dream.  We are supposed to "sleep like a rock" at night and wake rested ready for the day.  If that's the case, I'm truly bummed out because I love some of my dreams and still remember some I had years ago.  I do believe that dreams can guide us deeper into ourselves and sometimes just be another form of expression and source of inspiration.  Of course nightmares and highly restless sleep would be pathological, but how can dreams, especially if they are exciting, empowering, and colorful be bad?  I found the article below by an L.Ac. talking about dreams and TCM.  I've pasted the most important part below pertaining to my questions, but if you have time, the whole article is great.

http://www.divinecaroline.com/self/dreams/analyze-your-dreams-traditional-chinese-medicine

"Ancient China did not have the technology to measure brain waves. Instead, they correlated the activities of the mind at night with the activities of the various spirits of elements. From 11 p.m. to 3 a.m., is considered wood element time. At this time, the wood channels are most active, therefore the wood element spirit, the Hun, is also active. This is the spirit of creativity, vision, and imagination. At night, it has adventures that we experience as dreams. Of course, the other element spirits can be involved too if the person has issues to work out. Each element spirit has emotional functions.

While the eyes are closed, the Hun resides in the liver. This is a time for creative energy to restore itself. Dreams are an expression of this creativity. If the wood element channels (liver and gallbladder) are balanced and the blood is strong, a person will have only a few dreams that help him or her work through obstacles along one’s path. If the Hun is not anchored, it flies around following the Shen, the fire spirit, and has many crazy adventures, which leads to excessive dreams. Too many dreams can exhaust the Hun and therefore create imbalances in the liver and gallbladder channels or vice versa."