Z I N K E T E
N a t u r a l m u t a t i o n
Derelict Aquapark - Post-apocalyptic Earth - 2982
Today, many of the products we can find in the supermarket are wrapped in plastic, and we eat meat from animals that live in concentration camps generating massive amounts of CO2. We already know that hydrogen cars generate zero emissions, but the automotive industry is still manufacturing hundreds of thousands of gas and hybrid cars every year. We cannot buy ink to refill the cartridges of our printers because companies prefer to sell a new plastic cartridge to us every time a color runs out. Computers are designed in a way in which changing the RAM memory module or replacing the processor requires some technical skills that most people don’t have, so it is easier to just throw the whole thing away and buy a new one. And this is just an example of the programmed obsolescence that is built in many products.
While all this is happening, the system blames the consumer instead of regulating the companies that follow these practices, they try to put the blame on us. No one creates laws to limit the amount of plastic big corporations can generate, no agency tells soft drink companies to go back to glass, no government legislates to defend animal rights. While, at the same time, we are being programmed to believe we are the ones causing this damage.
In order to escape this conditioning, we must first acknowledge our own capacity to create change around us. Only when we believe we can change things will we try to do so. If we believe there is nothing we can do, we will do nothing. That is why it is essential to break the “there’s nothing we can do” mindset to realize there is so much we can do. For example, we can start by stopping buying soft drinks in plastic bottles or eating meat that comes from animal concentration camps.
It is time to stop being worried about the direction in which capitalism is moving and start being excited about the possibilities we can create to redirect the system. We seem to have forgotten that the word “economy” is related to optimizing the way in which resources are used to get more using less. We are living the end of a cycle, and every end brings with it a new beginning. Every cycle closing opens a new one. That is the message hidden within the Alpha and Omega symbol on the toy bomb the chicken boy is holding. The first and last letters of the Greek alphabet, the beginning and the end connecting.
Capitalism is unsustainable, that implies that it will fall without the need from us to do anything about it. The trick is not to fight against it, but to jump off it, as if we were in a train going into a cliff. The system we have built is clearly obsolete and it is starting its decline. We can see it all around us, most clearly in our political, economical, and religious systems. The structural pillars of our society are starting to wobble, they do not serve us anymore. We became too conscious about the reality around us to keep falling into the old tricks of the system. At this point, it is important to decide where to focus our attention, to transcend the mainstream apocalyptic narrative and try to see beyond.
This portrait presents a more positive, even comical, approach to the apocalypse concept. A post-apocalyptic world in which life on Earth has evolved and the future inhabitants of the planet enjoy the summer in a derelict waterpark from the Ancient Human age. A futuristic family portrait brighter and more colorful than our current idea of what is coming.
The idea of the apocalypse is not new to us. There are countless prophecies about it. In the year 2012, people said the end of the world was coming because the Mayan calendar ended. But the Mayan calendar happens to be cyclical. In the same way that for us after the 31st of December comes the 1st of January, for the Maya the end of a cycle brought the start of a new one. But, what kind of cycle ended in 2012 and which one was about to start?
Our current Gregorian calendar is a solar calendar, its cycles are based on the revolving of our planet around the Sun. The Mayan calendar was also solar, but it took into account a much longer cycle, the revolving of our Sun around what they called the “Central Sun”. This “galactic year” lasted 250 million years divided into galactic days that lasted 25,000 years each: 12,500 years of night, and 12,500 years of day. In the same way our summers are hotter and our winters are colder, for the Maya, during the galactic night, our system was further away from the Central Sun, so its energy was more feeble, but during the galactic day, we moved closer to it, so its energy became stronger. This had an effect on our consciousness, in the same way we are awake by day and we sleep during the night; our consciousness became more aware of reality during the galactic day and more disconnected from it during the night.
Today we have discovered that it is actually true that our Sun is moving and it revolves around a supermassive black hole that we call Sagittarius A, located at the center of our galaxy. What we haven’t discovered yet is how could the Maya know this before we even realized that the Earth moves.
For many years, Western science believed that black holes only absorb matter. But today we know that they also emit energy. A black hole does not generate heat like a sun, but it creates a massive amount of positrons. So it is not so different from a sun after all. In fact, a black hole is a sun that has imploded at the end of its life. What we don’t know yet is if getting closer to this massive source of energy is going to actually have an effect on human consciousness.
The Maya were not the only ones who talked about great cycles. In Hinduism, time is divided in ages called yugas. According to the ancient wisdom of the Vedic scriptures, we are currently living the Kali Yuga, a destructive cycle full of conflict in which we lose our balance. Fortunately, the Kali Yuga is the shortest of the yugas, followed by the return of the Krita Yuga, the best of the world ages, in which balance and truth come back. It is sometimes referred to as the “Golden Age”. But the Mayan and Vedic vision of our cyclical evolution seem hard to believe today, as they totally contradict the current catastrophic apocalyptic narrative. Even though the capitalism-driven extinction idea is just a theory, when a theory is widely accepted it becomes hard to contemplate alternative scenarios.
When a species acts in an unsustainable way destroying its habitat or overexploiting available resources, there are only two possible timelines for it: extinction or mutation. Our current programming tends towards the extinction narrative, and even the possibility of mutation seems to be quite negative, with dark theories about transhumanism, neural link implants and totalitarian technocratic government control. But we must not forget that the potential timelines we contemplate are just possibilities generated by our collective mindset, and our present actions have a direct impact on our future. The synthetic mutation of the transhumanist narrative is just a potential timeline for humanity, but we can also choose the natural mutation path.
Nature has been creating life for billions of years, while humans have been modifying it for just a few decades now. So mother nature has more experience than us in the art of evolution. That is why the natural path is safer than the synthetic one. Today scientists believe that about 98% of our DNA has no function, they actually call it “junk” DNA. But nature is proven to be very effective in the way it designs living beings, creating a biomolecular organism with such a high percentage of useless DNA seems quite unlikely.
Maybe we should start contemplating the possibility that the fact that we don’t know what is the function of those DNA strings does not mean they are useless; they could be dormant, waiting to be activated. So genetically modifying our genome or implanting chips into our organism when we only fully understand or currently use 7% of its potential does not seem very wise. Natural evolution seems to be a wiser and safer way of facing our uncertain future. That is what the third eye on the “MUTATE” paste-up represents: the amazing potential that the activation of our inactive DNA could bring as we evolve naturally to perceive reality in a completely new way. Opening a new vision of the world, as if we evolved and developed a third eye.
Choosing which timeline we want to manifest is our own decision. Our destiny is not written, it is created. So changing the way we act today can change the place we find ourselves in tomorrow. Recovering the ancient wisdom of the Maya and the Vedic scriptures to create some mental space to hold a more positive vision of our future is essential to face the challenges of our times, and art is the best way to express these kind of concepts that go beyond our rational understanding of reality to create a link with our subconscious mind, where a more colorful and surreal world that connects us with our dreams becomes possible, because our future world is a result of our present dreams.