RascalPuff's Blog

THE HEAVENS BEGAT THE GALAXY

THE GALAXY BEGAT THE SUN

THE SUN BEGAT THE EARTH

THE EARTH BEGAT THE GRASS

The Grass Begat Seeds,

Flowers, Insects, Reptiles,

Mammals and Humankind

Humankind, link between Heaven & Earth,

Begat:


NOMADS, CIVILIZATION & WAR

The Hinges of History



"Once upon a time, there were no flowers".
- Loren Eiseley, THE IMMENSE JOURNEY


The only green on the fairly cooled and stabilized planet was lichens, algae, ferns and certain kinds of trees. None of these have seeds and must be rooted in or near water, regenerating only by way of spores. Whereupon the existing trees created the first grass seed.



The Original Dragon’s Egg

An armorized casing, containing an already fertilized living embryo. The first ‘space ship’, enveloping and transporting its own moisture within its protected, dormantly waiting contents - a portable dragon-sprout carrying its own wet canteen, from which emerges:



Grass, The Planet’s First Living Nomad

"Let the earth cause grass to shoot forth, vegetation bearing seed, trees yielding fruit according to their kinds, the seed of which is in it, upon the earth. And the earth began to put forth grass, vegetation bearing seed according to its kind. Then God said that it was good." - Genesis 1:11

The Grass Routes of Civilization

The ensuing abundance of nutritional food for the reptiles resulted in the evolutionary emergence of all warm blooded - mammal - creatures, eventually including of course, the horse and humankind. A drop of wheatgrass juice is - of the 6000 evolved varieties of grass, including corn, barley and bamboo - the molecularly qualified mother of all red mammalian blood. Quite literally - hemoglobin is nearly the same molecule as grass chlorophyl. That is to say, grass begat blood - warm, liquid animal tissue. Not to forget in this consideration, the direct parallel of ocean kelp and terrestrial grasses; certainly including the more than coincidental fact that the salinity (salt content) of the world’s oceans is the same percentage of salt dissolved in the human bloodstream.

Unprecedented grass abundances marching all over the continental conduit, far beyond lakes, ponds, rivers and streams; far beyond any other kind of vegetation previously confined to being in or near large sources of ground water. Grass seeds and their contents stoked far flung, unprecedented biological fires - providing a widely ranging salad for the grass eaters, and for all the predators who likewise, provisionally feed upon the grass eaters.

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"While much is known about the cattle cults in the Middle East, South Africa and ancient Europe, far less athropological attention has been given to a second locus of bovine (cattle) influence that emerged independently, thousands of miles to the north, on the vast grasslands on the Euroasian steppes, an area bounded by eastern Europe and the Ukraine in the west and Mongolia and Manchuria in the east.

"The nomadic herdsmen of the steppes survived by conquest and confiscation. They were highly mobile, warrior like and expansionist in outlook. They followed the grasslands south into India, east, into China proper, north into the baltic peninsula and Scandanavia, and west into the Spanish Peninsula and British Isles." - BEYOND BEEF: The Rise & Fall of the Cattle Cultures, by Jeremy Rifkin, p.p. 27 - 28

Citizens of civilization do not customarily dwell in the wilderness. Wildernesss dwelling is tribal and may or not be agriculturally based, depending on whether the tribe 'wanders'. When a tribe wanders it is said to be a pastorally nomadic, traveling people. When they are keepers and breeders of migratory animals, the people follow the animals, the animals follow the grass, and the grass follows the seasons. If ever was an original rennaissance - and universal history waxes and wanes with such 'beginnings' and 'endings' - it was in the consequential wake of the profound and botanically revolutionary appearance of grass.

No warm blooded quadruped ( four footed) animals would have come into being, had the grass not designed them. The grass in turn having been designed by the preceding trees, which take their turn out of having been designed by lichens, algae and ferns. Grass began to find a way beyond trees, because trees found a way to become grass.

"Pine and spruce tree spores found a way to become primitive vehicles containing some nourishment for the young plant. Once fertilization was no longer dependent upon exterior water, the march over drier regions could be extended." - Loren Eiseley, THE IMMENSE JOURNEY, p. 66

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"They were the great invaders, the feared horsemen from the north who drove great herds of cattle into Europe in successive waves, trampling and subduing the small Neolithic peaceful communities of the ancient world. Nomad gods were weather gods, quick and ruthless as the nomadic herdsmen, and able to protect the semi-wild horsemen of the steppes in their forays into distant lands.

"The gods of the herdsmen guaranteed military victory and booty. The gods of the cultivators guaranteed the spring flood and the harvest.

"The gods of the nomads were mobile and quixotic .The gods of the agriculturists were sedentary and predictable, like the changing seasons." - BEYOND BEEF: The Rise & Fall of the Cattle Culture, by Jeremy Rifkin pp. 27 - 28

SECURING AN ECOLOGICAL PERIMETER

The emergence of grass permitted the evolutionary passage of all mammals including human kind. There were some warm blooded walking and flying reptiles, but the quadrupeds became warm blooded - permitting a gray matter capacity and metabolism to accomodate 'through computation far beyond instinct', as an exclusive and remarkable result of the development and proliferation of wheatgrass, oats, barley, corn and bambu for example. Foundationalizing an anciently many vectored wellspring of ecological networks supporting and sustaining a plethora of botanical and herbologically based biological life forms, including aphids, butterflys, bees, dragonflys, wolverines, horses, cattle, and then of course there's people...

HERE'S THE BEEF

"Much of Western History is an account of the ongoing struggle between two groupings - one herdsman, the other agriculturalist. The first depending on grass, the second on grain. Both paid homage to the bovine (cattle), although each ascribed different attributes to the creature. These two distinct traditions often interacted, each tempering the world view of the other. Their relationship has been stormy, scarred by confrontation and capitulation.

"The clash between the nomadic herdsmen and the tillers of the soil began some 6,000 years ago when the horsemen of the Eurasian steppes first encountered the Neolothic farmers of Europe." - BEYOND BEEF: The Rise & Fall of the Cattle Culture, Jeremy Rifkin, p.p. 27 - 28

Humble Warm Blooded Beginnings

The grass began to happen round about the era of the declining reptiles, two hundred fifty or so million years ago. The mammals amounted to a limited variety of mouse sized varmints staying out from under the enormous reptilian threats to rat like vermin living underground much of the time and in what few bushes and trees there were to take cover in. The mammals had to stay small simply because there wasn't all that much for them to eat; being mostly vegetarian and close to the bottom of the heavyweight reptilian pecking order. Birds had the same limitations at this time for what amounted to the same nutritionally conservative reasons.

250 MILLION YEARS - Or So - Ago

The Creteceus times were then what scientists call them now: the early moment, just prior to the arrival of grass and flowers, respectively. Neither four footed animals nor birds would know tha their forthcoming sudden successes - otherwise showing little promise - would be ushered in by the tree's issuances of the seeds, and the seed's consequential issuance of the flowers. A highway of, by and for mortal life. Grass is the miraculous answer to an otherwise denied request - or hope - for a free lunch. God presented the Green Goddess, and She introduced this record to the EuroAsian Continental Green Grass River Valley Dragon - Keeper of Knowledge and Life. Sentinel of Civilization. Crucible of War and Peace...

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"Here I have given to you all vegetation bearing seed which is on the surface of the whole earth and every tree on which there is a fruit bearing seed. To you let it serve as food. And to every wild beast of the earth and to every wild creature of the heavens and to everything moving upon the earth in which there is life as a soul I have given all green vegetation for food." - Genesis 1:29 - 30

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The High Plains Adrifter

Long before he characteristically stood upon his hind legs, humandkind had experimented with standing up to see over the prarie-tundra grasslands - to see who was departing or approaching his hole in the ground. The little animal was about the size of a house cat, who couldn't make up his mind whether to continue as a grass eater, or, as and animal who preyed upon grass eaters - this creature wound up evolving into what people are.

He settled for a pair of omnivorous choppers - a combination of vegetarianism and carnivourism- and this wasn't the easy way is what is even more remarkable. The usual decisive shortcuts to vegetarianism or carnivourism were cast aside and the entire feeder and processor beneath and at the service of the entire cranial vault - the mouth parts - got smaller and less powerful. So that the cranial vault and it's contents could grow and enable more self awareness, which was an otherwise completely expendable quality as far as evolutionary standards were traditionally concerned.

The nutrient rich provisional grasses made this cerebral vault and the required enlargement of its contents possible. Using all that grass derived energy to develop brain power was very unusual in Mother Nature's survival workshop. Sacrificing food processing equipment and efficiency was a highly unusual gambit - a different direction - for Nature to have embarked upon.

Whenever a modern day person is at odds with whether or not to patronize McDonalds, for a burger, recall the same self-doubt of the high plains drifting hole in the ground dweller who was having the same kind of trouble deciding which end of the available menu he was going to be on. The sesame seed sprinkled wheat bread on each side of the beef patty fairly sums up the omnivorous solution (so rare?).

The Crown of Conscious Creation

Something beyond the sum total of its survivalist motivated parts began, somehow, to circumspect the two portions of the 'seeing eye'. The sensory perceptions of sight and higher order consciousness were the last arrivals of all of the evolved human senses.

It was the unexplained touch of what is most commonly referred to and understood as being 'self awareness', and 'overview'. With this miracle would come a host of new and growing revelations. Not without subsequential dilemmae - 'the burden of consciousness'; including 'right and wrong', 'good and bad' - would be among the soaring complications for life to become discontent with - discontentment itself being a uniquely human melancholy; ever since the nomadic grass-seed and flowers gave us the ability to timidly and terribly tiptoe, trot, and gallop thunderously hither and thither in and about the temporal heather, more technically familiar as 'extension of self' (Eventually, this would include measured 'horsepower').

Grass revolutionized plant life by traveling in its moisturinzed armorized seeed casing, to places and environments unknown previously to the experiential evolution of all preceding life forms of green vegeration; being of limited variety and proliferating in a limited space - until trees decided to evolve into what became:

Dragon Pastures of Plenty

Leaves of grass photosynthesizing light from the nearest Hydrogen star, converting solar into mechanical energy via chemical solutions in water; combinant soil nutrients processed into chlorophyl, allowing food for the development and passage of other life forms, where no such evolution was otherwise possible. If the earth is indeed the mother patroness of humanity, then grasses are the mammalian reproductive organs of that same maternal issue.

Slim Pickens At The Old General Store

Ferns, algae, lichens and trees were not much of a global salad for the earth's limited animal population, until grass found a method of making vegetable life a self contained protoplasmic material, able to distance itself from a sustaining large body of water. Grass invented a portable package for its own procreation: a hard-skinned canteen for its own soft and moist - already fertilized - procreated self, able to travel long distances as they never had before.

Grass nutrients enabled formerly cold blooded life forms to seek out and become new, warm blooded life forums: having stable metabolism independent of environmental variances, especially temperature. A corporeal independence - a liberty - allowing space itself to become life's final frontier.

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"Beginning around 4400 BC. Europe was rocked by a wave of invasions from the east. Nomadic horsemen of the Eurasian steppes swept into southern and eastern Europe, destroying the tranquil agricultural life that had flourished for several thousand years." - Beyond Beef, The Rise & Fall of the Cattle Culture, J. Rifkin, p.p. 27 - 28
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The Greening of Eurasia

The entire 6,000 variations of grass began with a single method - a revolutionary method - for depending on aqueous solution; that new method of vegetable regeneration and proliferation was to take the water with it wherever it traveled. Grass was the first truly nomadic plant life; therefore the first living planetary nomad - mother of all seeds and flowers. The original planetary dragon's egg. Predecessor to every form of mammalian fertilization, gestation and reproductive process. The Earth Goddesse's Green Grass Riverdragon.

The revolutionary seed casing and its already fertilized contents carried all of the necessary embryonic ingredients of its parent derivation to repeat the creative role of the proto-plasmatic system that produced it: to produce in turn regenerative tissue of its own regenerated self, extrapolated in a progressively geometric, logarithmic value of square....

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"The invaders, known as the Kurgan people, are believed to have descended from a stock of earlier mixed agriculturalists who farmed and herded along the periphery of the Eurasian steppes in the region of the Ukraine. As these people exhausted the land with primitive grazing techniques, they were forced to move their small domestic herds to more marginal land to the east, where they continued to farm and herd." - BEYOND BEEF: The Rise & Fall of the Cattle Culture, by Jeremy Rifkin, p.p. 27 - 28

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The Itinerant Angiosperm

Another name for the subjected mobile canteen of moisture laden living protoplasm, able to leap vast, arid distances and start a colony of itself elsewhere, is, 'angiosperm'. The traveling genetic code - the nomadic genetic code by any other name; having both female and male qualities. The grass goddess of earth. Soon - in geologic time - to explosively emerge in thousands of variations as 'the grasslands', extending far beyond the banks of rivers and streams - where lichens, algae, ferns and trees were formerly restricted. Along with all the other living creatures who were previously confined to depending upon them.

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Original Field Infantry & Parade Grounds

Trees root deeply into the ground , one at a time, while grass marches over the surface of the earthly maternal host. In plant life the tree is the noun that the grass verbiage springs out of and moves away from. Grass empowered primitive plant life to move much more quickly over greater distances, evolving in many more ways under a much wider influence of environmental conditions.

Trees especially were based on large amounts of silicates, to build correspondingly massive groups of constructive cell walls, holding minimal quantities of moisture and what biologically translates as 'animal nutrients'. The evolving tree extended itself to become grass, whereupon the latter inevitably began to experiment with its ever increasing new environments and conditions.

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"The people of the steppes left no impressive physical monuments, no great works of art, no written language describing their deeds and exploits. Perhaps that's why their influence on Western Civilization has been virtually ignored, until recently; by historians who prefer to dwell on the cultural legacy stretching from ancient Sumeria to imperial Rome." - BEYOND BEEF: The Rise and Fall of the Cattle Culture. Jeremy Rifkin, p.p. 27 - 28

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Different climates, temperatures and soils - all determined by the molten, churning geological masses before there was 'steam' anywhere on the isoprotoplasmic planetoid; derived from the sun, galaxy and heavens. All of these interactive dependencies - these innumerably covariant events - unfolding precisely into the ever culminating present.

The earlier grasses begat an abundance of previously non existent flowers, betting insect forms which in turn provided a host of newly evolved birds and small mammals who fed upon grass and its seeds, who were in turn fed upon by carnivorous predators. Having effected these living variations of insects and mammals, the latter in turn lived to further effect the grass, which became more plentiful than before there had been any indigenous, grass dependent insects and mammals and so on. The deadly - spiralling - feast. The fertilized ability to flower being the sexually bi-polar, grassily extrapolated power.

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The Original Space-Ship and it's Earthly Orbits

Now that I, the tree, have experimentally become the grass, and now that I the grass have experimentally produced this little furry critter that evolved into being by eating my shoots, roots and seeds, and thereby further fertilizing the earth that I sustain my grassily evolving self upon, I shall innovate what would have been a leaf, for a shell encasement containing the usual genetic code, moisture and chemicals.

But, this time the outside casing will not be smooth and featureless. No. Indeed, it shall be designed to take hold of the coat of another form of life that travels even further - and much more quickly - than my own vegetable based kind. Yes. I, the grass created a vehicle designed to hitch hike upon and be transported by another species. Did I think about it, you may ask... Yes. I did think about it. For a long time. I, the humble grass, magnificently circumspected the entire ecologically rounded gestaldt.

Ground Control, We Have Contact and Lift Off.

I the lowly grass, directed, produced and cast this space ship, right here upon and from the earth, over the grassy plains of this planet. Willed a space ship to make contact with and be transported by another species. One small step for a botanically flowering, nomadically inclined angiosperm, one giant leap portending all of civilization. By way of the nomadically extrapolating history of grass, flowers, and the mammalian-human family.

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"While the Kurgans introduced large scale herding and superior military technology (*including the cross bow and gun powder) into Europe, they also introduced very different concepts of security - concepts that would lead the Europeans to become the great colonizers of the earth in the modern era (*Concepts that drove Europeans across the ocean to colonize America. That is affirmative.)

"The Kurgans measured security in terms of speed and mobility. In this sense they differed fundamentally from the grain producing empires of the Middle East and North Africa and the small, village based agricultural societies of ancient Europe". - Rifkin, Ibid

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The First Extra-Vehicular Ride

The compact, mammal riding seed casing with its humidified, incubated coil of tap root was headed for parts unknown. Very often to be scratched or nipped from its involuntary carrier onto an unlivable landscape or into an equally unaccomodating quagmire. There are only 6,000 presently manifest types of grass, and that is out of untold zillions of lost, expeditionary failures on the parts of these individually space traveling seed casings with their colonizing contents.

Angiosperm did - and failed to do - all of the above. Not to forget the latest emergence of energy pods whipping up all twenty six letters of the Arabic invented English alphabet like this. Without grass and its flowers, none of this highly questionable writing and reading activity would or possibly could unfold. All about the readably legible powers of the grassy flowers.

Grass went places no other preceding vegetation had gone before, creatively seeking out new life forms and avenues of gastronomical endeavor that had never before existed or been so nutritiously or abundantly sustained at such great distances from landlocked sources of water. Part of its quarter million year mission. obviously, was to create a language and an alphabet, in order to write, distribute and read this report on itself.

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Constructive Co-dependence and Original Symbiosis

Bees had a lot to do with several kinds of grass that didn't exist before earlier kinds of grass designed the ever cross-pollinating bees. And so on. Flower arranging may not only be adventuresome fun, it can also be eco-biologically fateful.

From the trees the grassy revolution burst. From the grass emerged with ever more astonishing swiftness, the mammals and especially human kind: the crown - and shame - of consciously living creation. An unexplained morphological island of mysteriously marooned, warm, wet, sentiently conscious, biologically humming, electrochemically stimulated, cellular containers of water based protoplasm; hard and soft tissue.

This Loren Eisely (The Immense Journey) inspired record can peripherally reflect what it does about this subject; very little else is understood by anyone, about why grass, the horse, man or mastadon, evolved and came into being the way they certainly have; toward what such life-forms are becoming still. Perhaps they always will...

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"The Kurgans had no allegiance to place. The land was something to capture, possess and exploit. Their sense of being was internalized and bound up in their weapons and cattle, the things they could take with them.

"They brought a new consciousness: fiercely independent, militaristic, detached from the land, acquisitive and utilitarian. Over time, their world view and their blood lines merged with the people they subdued, creating a unique mix of European sensibilities and Eurasian restiveness. If Kurgan consciousness helped prepare the psychological ground for the modern era, it was Kurgan cattle that helped prepare the economic ground for modern capitalism and the colonial era in world history..." - Jeremy Rifkin, Ibid. p.p. 27 - 28.

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Passengers on the Arrowhead of Evolutionary Time

Life seeks to improve its own vehicularization in any way that works. This is not a proper social or moral consciousness in the course of human conduct, but in its context on a biological and botanical level of application and practice - growth and improvement being better: able to somehow transport itself from here to there - stay small and conserve growth energy for survival priorities. So say the anthropologists and corroborate scientific representatives; that we are not 'arrived' as human beings in the present so much as we are a given moment of higher mammalian evolution, on its way to 'somewhere else'; 'somebody else'.

Excerpted from Chapter One, Nomads, Civilization & War, by K. B. Robertson

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