Now that we humans have brawned and brained ourselves into the status of Earth’s dominant species, having gained the potential to exterminate all higher life forms on the planet, sanity behooves us instead to wise up and devote our intelligence to salutary practices, to develop cooperative ways for Earthlife to flourish.
The inherent mission of our species is to employ our native intelligence so that Earth’s miraculous initiative succeeds. To do so would be to follow that Good Orderly Direction implicit in the cosmos which some have designated as the will of GOD.
*
FUTURE CONSCIOUSNESS
for Tom Lombardo
If you’d be wise, then you would realize
What is revealed through future consciousness
With greater certainty than mere surmise:
Your surest avenue to true success.
To think ahead, anticipating ways
That this or that decision might play out,
Developing the judgment to appraise
Alternatives, will leave you with less doubt
And give you confidence to raise your voice
To advocate for plans and policies
By arguing the wisdom of your choice
Till each opponent finally agrees.
Such consciousness is thinking’s highest end
On which our happy future will depend.
*
BE KIND
Examine all the scriptures you can find
And at their roots you’ll see that we’re designed
For love, the way we’re naturally inclined:
The only true religion’s to be kind.
*
ONE SMART LITTLE DOGGIE
Tiggly-Wiggly, bustle-butt,
Knows the how, the where, the what,
And though it’s more than you might buy,
I think she even knows the why.
*
AGNOSTIC
I don’t know how I came to consciousness
With this capacity to apprehend
Both world and mind, and even to address
The wonderment to which I now attend.
In some mysterious way I’ve come to think
And know I think, with a capacity
For self-reflection looking for a link
Connecting me to cosmic mystery:
The Source of consciousness behind a screen
I’ve yet to penetrate but sometimes sense,
An intimation of what’s yet unseen,
A mind that’s unimaginably immense.
I know enough to know I do not know,
Yet hope in time my consciousness will grow.
*
THE COSMIC LAW
If you’d be wise, then first you must be kind
Since it’s for partnership that we’re designed,
And recognizing that we all are kin
Is how our social order must begin;
Whereas antagonism, hatred, strife
Are the antitheses of civil life:
Although it was at first the jungle’s law,
Such animosity is now a flaw
That our advance in wisdom must transcend
Lest this experiment ignobly end.
The Cosmos over eons has prepared
The way for us and seems as if it’s cared
For our success—how sad for us to fail
When with a show of love we might prevail.
*
WALDEN
We’re brain-washed and addicted to our stuff
Being made to feel we never have enough,
When what we need to do is simplify,
Living essentially until we die.
*
