Archive for June 3rd, 2007
California As Visionary State
Having recently written about the first evidence of the Clovis culture being found at Farpoint, Malibu, I also found out the Chumash Native Americans are that State’s oldest recognised inhabitants, dating back some 10,000 years. They apparently dwelt both on the mainland as well as nearby islands, which as accomplished mariners they accessed by use of ‘tomol‘ canoes, and had constructed a complex society which recognised ‘class and rank divisions’. Out of an original population of 18,000, their number had been reduced by the effects of European contact and its associated outreach teams, keen to snap up all the available land, and the subsequent abundance of dispossessed humans, thereafter considered fit only for slavery and hard labour.
Despite this brutal end to one people’s existence and culture, what eventually sprang up in its place was another culture that not only sought out and embraced spiritual teachings and beliefs from around the world, but also went to the trouble of inventing a few of its own, at least one of which was fictional.
Here, I’m referring to the cult of ‘Selfosophy‘ as discussed at some length in ‘Jose Chung’s Doomsday Defence‘, and whose origins were owed to one Onan Goopta, whose own early days are described thus…
Once upon a time, two East Indian immigrants gave birth to a baby boy, whom they loved very dearly. Yet, nevertheless, named “Juggernaut Onan Goopta“. Other than the name, and, uh, the beard, he was a normal boy, who suffered all the usual humiliations of a normal childhood.
Upon graduating High School, he went off to college with a dream of someday becoming a famous neuroscientist. His goal was to be the first to comprehend how the biology of the brain gives birth to the greatest mystery of life: self-consciousness.
Unfortunately, his own brain could not comprehend basic biology. He quickly switched majors to philosophy; but alas, while reading Kierkegaard’s “Sickness Unto Death”, he became sick and nearly died.
