RENAISSANCE MAN

The worst of my Desert Exile is now over. For me personally, the last year (or so), encompassing both my time in the Desert and the 6 months that led up to it in Sydney, I have undergone a Dark Age. Now, I can see the light, and what was once dark and unknown, and uncomfortable for me a year ago, is now no longer cloistered in shadows and uncertainty.
To be clear, uncertainty is an essential part of life, and I would never be so dumb as to say I am certain of everything (or indeed, anything in particular). But what I am certain of is this: The Dark Age is approaching its end. This End is inexorable, undeniable, and inevitable. I believe those are all synonymous with one another, but the multiplicity in use gives is a certain flavour, don't you think?
I find myself approaching a new Dawn in life in general, and it is only possible because of the long Night that has preceded it. More Dark Ages are to come, without a doubt, but although each appears as a shadowy abyss, they really cannot be crosses until I get to them.

It is a Renaissance.

I believe it important to refresh your memory, because this word "Renaissance" is not a common one these days (and for a solid reason).
THE Renaissance is the period referred to in human history when thought, imagination, and science finally began to supercede dogmatic religion. In broad terms, the DARK AGES can be said to have begun with the fall of the Roman Empire. Europe fell into political chaos when that behemoth died, and after some special, yet abortive attempts to bring it back together, Christianity ended up forming the glue of society in the West. In the as-yet-undiscovered "New World", indigenous populations at this time continued doing what they had been doing for centuries already - enjoying their fertile land and lack of Europeans and Asians, and praying to their heathen gods. And not much else in the way of Advancement.
In Asia, Empires rose and fell, and civil wars began disrupting what had once been the greatest pace of human development ever. The Human World fell into a Darkness, that is defined by a general and suffocating lack of knowledge, learning, exploration, and advancement. It is arguable how long the Dark Ages lasted, but I personally like to say it went from around 400AD to about the 1500s AD. Around one thousand years.
I look at my life now, and what has been accomplished in the last 500 years, or even just in the 20th century alone, and I often get frustrated that this all could have happened 100 years sooner, and I could have been born on the Moon or Mars, flying spaceships between the Worlds!

But just like my personal Dark Age, the historical Dark Age had to happen for a reason: namely, we didn't know any better. It was inevitable.

But one the likes of Leonardo DaVinci started designing flying machines, cutting up cadavers, building scuba gear, and everything short of re-inventing the wheel, things in the Human world really started to pick up. "Renaissance" is a French term, and like all French terms, it sounds really nice. But the English term (when not stealing the sweet French term) is "The Enlightenment". And truer than any other time, the Enlightenment was a philosophical age of light! Things were being learnt, new things were being known! People were discovering, exploring, and creating and advancing!
But before you, too, feel the frustration I sometimes feel, you should remember the key point:
One cannot know light without darkness.
Equally fundamental to our world, one cannot know darkness without light!
As modern Homo Sapiens, we like to catalogue our existence so that we needn't use any more than the 10% of our brain that we are comfortable with using. As a direct result of this, we see times of sadness and depression as "darkness", and continue the metaphor for the good times - the "light". Because we have capabilities that are painfully latent and ignored, more often than not we find ourselves dwelling on the Darkness. The trend sticks with us, and we come to expect the good things as granted, whilst focusing on our problems. This is all good and well for self-improvement enthusiasts, but it is a one-way street to depressive breakdown! If the positive things in our lives are 'expected', and the only surprises are the negative ones, then I GUARANTEE you that your life will be a cold, grey, and miserable existence.

The Renaissance is the light. The classical interpretation of it is that from somewhere unseen a great light washes over the Darkness in our world. This WRONG, and I'll tell you why:
Light of this sort only comes from one place, and that place is not a God, not another planet, and not a drug or anything like that. It is Within ourselves. When Shakespeare said, in "Julius Caesar", that we must not look to the Stars, but to ourselves, he wasn't just trying to be witty.
If you, too, find yourself in a Dark Age, then you, too, will eventually find yourself clawing your way out of it all on your own. You will switch on a light that was always there, using a switch that was always within your reach. You just didn't know any better.

I didn't know any better. Others told me better, but I wasn't prepared to listen. (See one of the many previous blog-posts for background on this- sorry, can't remember which one).

The Dark Age I am coming out of now is being lit by candles that I have fired up myself. The materials to do it have come from multiple sources, and to these sources I give the moniker: "lessons" (usually "life-lessons").

The Renaissance Man is a man who has opened his own eyes, and lit his own light. Doesn;t really matter how he lit it, just that he remembers the key points. If a man doesn't light his own darkness, and allows someone else to do it for him, he is robbed of that crucial fundamentality of the exercise - and once the external helper goes away (which it must, eventually) he will be in Darkness yet again.

In practical terms, the Renaissance Man seeks to broaden his knowledge base as wide as possible. It is all good and well, and even economically viable to have just one speciality; but knowing a lot about one thing gets you only one thing. Indeed, knowing a little about many things won't get you far, either. But the Renaissance Man knows more than a little. He has a grounding in as many surfaces of knowledge as possible. He seeks the connections between his spheres of interest, and soon enough he realises that Golden Truth: EVERYTHING IS CONNECTED!

My personal Dark Age is nearing its end - sooner than I ever anticipated, I can happily say to myself.

But the outside world is still in a Dark Age. God is back, just in a different form. Economics and Money are the modern religion. The Bailout Panic of 2009 is the economic and monetary equivalent of the great Inquisition of the Dark Ages - a whole lot has occurred, and Nothing has been achieved.
Even now, as I write, global stock markets are rising and falling like a choppy ocean. There is absolutely NO control being exercised. Corruption is everywhere, and ineptitude has infiltrated the highest levels of business and government. We have seen all this before, in all the same Functional ways, with the Inquisition.

The Renaissance Man is the man who will weather this storm of artificial making - because he will be the first and only to understand that it IS, all of it, artificial.
Everything is connected. Artificiality is the birth-mother of both corruption and the artistic humanities. Corruption of the bank account leads to bankruptcy. Corruption of the soul (excuse the biblical phrasing) leads to personal weakness. Those who are not Renaissance Men find themselves focusing all their attention, all the limitless potential of their wonderful Human minds, on finicky details, useless statistics, and tedious numbers.
When once the United States of America had its greatest minds working on the race to the Moon, it now employs all its greatest minds in Finance and number crunching and paper-money snafooing.
What could we do if only we sought the limits of our Potential?

When The Bombs Fall, and Humanity is wiped off the face of the Earth, aliens will beheaded this way. Coming from so far away, they will be able to pick up all the electro-magnetic radiation that our species has put out into the Universe - radio waves, TV signals, Internet transmissions. (It is kind of humbling to think that an ET somewhere thousands of light-years away could be reading my blog one day!).
Those aliens will be able to see the entire broadcast history of our civilisation. They will pick up the Documentaries, and be impressed by how far we came. They won't be impressed by our Dark Ages, but they will quickly note that it was all necessary. They will hear radio shows from the early 20th century, and all the TV shows we have ever produced - even cable. They will, again, not be impressed by a lot of the shit that we make these days, but at the same time they will have more opportunities to see all of our Human Spectrum. And when they get here, they will be disappointed. Bot because the Earth was turned into a lump of radioactive slag by the nukes, no - they will be disappointed because however long their million-light-year journey took, they will form the same impression as I am trying to give to you now:
They will define us, right up until our fiery, green-tinted end, as a Tragic Race, a species of essentially limitless potential, but never willing to explore it.

But they may spot one or two Renaissance Men among the seething mass of Humanity, and note to themselves that there are always exceptions. The Renaissance Men were not tied down by one vocation in life, not told things like: "you can't do that", or "you'll never be able to make it!".
The Renaissance Man will be the one to break the bonds of society and artificiality that hold him back, and then turn around and use the nature of those bonds, artificiality, to his advantage. Renaissance Man will take the state of his race as he sees it, build on it, and make his life as eventful and adventurous as he can muster the power to do.

I will be a Renaissance Man, to the best of my ability.
How about you? Care to find out what the Best of Your Ability may be?

From The Tominator.