Homo Sapiens Sapiens is broken in an array of ways that rip our world and lives apart with increasing viciousness and frequency as the disease we are proceeds. I have spent the greater portion of my life trying to understand how we became broken, and two models stand out to me, and I think they are both involved. The first is that representational intelligence is at once a necessary and dangerous evolutionary experiment, which has so far gone badly haywire in our species. And this is true, in so far as I can see and determine. This must be amended if we are to survive our own encounter with this form of intelligence.

But the second is more radical. It is that we are the cognitive and relational symbiont of a kind of creature or being who was once common to our experience, but is either gone or has been rendered inaccessible to us by our representational damage. In essence, we are like cognitive remoras in a relational sea where the sharks have become extinct.

Long ago, this being or these beings guided and directed our cognitive and relational activity (from within us). When they left, we went insane, for we no longer had any idea who we were, or what our role on Earth was. This was when ‘religions’ began to develop.

I have had an experience of the symbiont that is gone. It makes the sum of our fictions and religions look like the games of autistic children and is ecstatic beyond all possible description.

It is quite possible that the missing being is simply the Earth, as a relative and transcendent biocognitve hyperstructure. But my own experience suggests that a far stranger and more astonishing web of relationships has been lost.

I believe that we, as a species and as individuals, can recover these relationships. But if we are to do so, we must begin with Nature, and the Earth. We must recover a direct, utterly nondogmatic, personal and human relationship with our actual place here. We must recover the role that led our evolution to the place where our minds shattered, and we became a disease, and we must use that experience to heal our species.