George ten Kate – Evolution and Jim Carrey

6 november 2018Businessplan, Home, Locatie, Media, Portretten, Video3

The fact alone that we are born is more then enough to fill my mind with an awe that could easily last a lifetime. This awe may be the result of going so deep into self reflection that one sees the earth as a twinkling star on a horizon, a horizon that has a strange paradoxical nature: it is simultaneously fully individual and yet completely transcendental. This is quite a handicap, since this constant reflection on one subject does not contribute to living life to the fullest – and this is not what I prefer, I like it when life reaches the level of intensity and fullness that has been so beautifully described by Salvador Dali: ‘There are some days when I think I’m going to die from an overdose of satisfaction.’

Most of my life I have been busy with planning things, controlling things, securing things, expecting things and being unhappy. Locked in a cultural belief system invented to restrict the freedom of individuals by tying them to economic chains branded with the word ‘debt’, thinking out an alternative way of being was outside my plane of immanence. It is hard to visualise when the world has been washed of its shine and all the colours have run through each other, turning your whole vision into a blurry homogenised grey separated only by the contrasting colours of $ bills.

We are living in a society where it is more then natural to be talking very seriously about your pension at an age when having lunch break still feels like children’s hour (conclusion based on witnessing such an event a few days ago in a bus in Amsterdam, me being the only person that seemed to be fighting both laughter and the need to pee – quite a challenging combination), and yet we seem to be surprised by the epidemic of depression, addiction and other mental difficulties in Western culture. I think we collectively fail to understand the true source of this wasted life: a lack of meaning giving possibilities and activities. Our spirit(s) crave meaning more then anything else.

I was born in 1986 and thus came to a consciousness understanding of the world in a time when there was (yet another) collective illusion considering the fundamental characteristics of the structure of society in place. True decadence marked this time of economic prosperity, fueled by an irrational belief in the dot com bubble – there were no limits towards economic growth and everybody had the chance to acquire a promising career if ‘you just work hard and did what you need to do’. Many of us have adopted this paradigm on life when we went to school and started to study, believing that economic growth is unlimited and beneficial for all. No wonder my generation faces unseen numbers of mental illness like burn outs and depression.

For times have changed, have they not. From 2000 on, the world was increasingly confronted with economic, environmental, financial and terroristic crises: the implosion of the internet bubble, 9/11, the wars and conflicts in the Middle East and Afghanistan and Latin America and Russia and Africa, the economic crisis from 2009 that has not led to fundamental changes in our financial system, global warming and its denial, the election of a narcissistic psychopath as president of the USA – it is fair to say that the rosy outlook on our close future has somewhat been altered by these events.

Yet, not all seams to have changed for the bad. Speaking and meeting people from all over the world who went through the same experiences as I have gone through the past two years, it became harder to ignore the signs of a global shift in consciousness. It is real. Worldwide, people are opening their eyes, waking up from a dream that was not theirs to start with and refuse to be blinded any longer by a paradigm that reduces us into slaves of made-up needs, making us ‘buying shit we do not need, with money we do not have, to impress people we do not like’.

To some this may sound like drugged-up hippie bullshit. Unnecessary, since there is a very easy explanation for it, since the opening of global consciousness can be explained in a Darwinian way. To do this, let us look at life: what phenomenon transcendents all life, no matter what form? Evolution. And what is evolution? It is not, as many locked in the patriarchal hierarchy assume, the survival of the strongest. It has nothing to do with strength, being the fittest – no, it is about (random?) mutations happening within species, making it possible for them to adept to a changing environment. For me, the force that brings these mutations into being is a deeply creative force: it is nature playing with itself, creating new ways of being aware of itself. The thing that thinks itself creating ways of perceiving itself. I find this a beautiful thought every time I look at a starry night sky: Hi me, how are you doing, you look beautiful tonight.

Now, our environment has changed the last 300 years on a massive scale, a scale that we not even have come to fully realise since some distance is needed to grasp the true size of an event. Driven by the industrial revolution and the disappearance of religion as a way to give meaning to the world, human kind has fundamentally altered some of the key environmental factors influencing all life on earth. It makes perfectly sense that the speed of evolution is correlated with the speed of change of the environment a species finds itself in: when an environment changes really fast, evolution also has to shift gear in order to make the survival of a species probable. Well, what would be a logical next step in the evolution of mankind?

Jim Carrey?

See this beautiful short documentary on him:

Jim Carrey – I NEEDED COLOR

Gepubliceerd op 9 aug. 2017

In this six-minute documentary titled “I Needed Color”, Carrey, 55, reveals his side career as a visual artist.