A Chaotic Orbit of Planet Gaia: Round the World in 90 Days

Gaia Moves to Intrepid Asia

2010-10-01T16:06:00.001-07:00

A Javanese volcano protrudes from the clouds on the return journey to Sydney

Having completed this world circuit, the blogging journey now travels on to a new assignment "Intrepid Asia in 90 Days with Flashbacks " - completing in full photo coverage our 90 day journey through Asia in 2006, with some excursions to previous visits, to give you a whole new traveling experience!

Intrepid Asia in 90 Days with Flashbacks

This journey begins in Singapore and continues through Bangkok to Calcutta. Then to Varanasi, and up through Nepal to Tibet, circuiting back through China passing Chengdu, Lijiang and Dali to Yunnan. Then overland through Laos, with a flight to Hanoi, traveling down Vietnam to Saigon. From there we continue up the Mekong into Cambodia to Angkor and across flooded Tonle Sap to Battambang. Finally we journey back through Thailand to Chiang Mai, and down through Phuket and Krabi to Malaysia, Penang, Malacca and Singapore again.

This has both photos and video clips, so carries you right into the experience!

You are all invited to continue the journey in this currently emerging photo blog:
http://asiain90days.blogspot.com/

One last thing - my leg is recovering, so being the only 65 year old in the planet that did an overland through Latin America within a week of getting mugged and hit and run and having a broken hip paid off okay in medical terms. The broken leg is 6-8 mm shorter (it looks a bit shorter even from the post-operation x-ray although the implant does allow for further compaction to ensure the bones knit), and my shoe needs a rubber pad, but I was out of crutches from the day I returned and could do things like climbing on the roof to repair winter leaks. A month out I can ride anywhere on a push bike and my long distance walking is coming up to scratch. Had we flown back, we would have likely lost a cool $12,000 NZ in air and other bookings and ended up doing nothing for three winter months. Continuing was difficult and risky, but it paid off in terms of a great experience and an exciting way to convalesce.

Jerusalem Millennium

2010-09-22T05:13:00.000-07:00

The Dome of the Rock from the Mount of Olives

Now here's a time travel time warp chapter back 10 years from this year's visit recounted in Twelve Gates to the City to a time before the current intifada, the schizm between Fatah and Hamas and the building of the wall - a hopeful time when you could traverse Israel and the West Bank without undue hindrance.

My previous visit to Jerusalem was during the millennium, to participate in a 12 day teach-in about religion, gender and the future of biodiversity, as an invited speaker participating in millennium celebrations there, so this posting is not just about a tourist visit, but about time spent giving a workshop and performing some subterranean rites of passage designed to set an example of how the apocalyptic quest could lead to an ecosystemic paradisiacal outcome for us all and our descendants, rather than scorched-Earth tumult and religion driven warfare.

In the event, partly because the whole idea of the Millennium is a Christian notion, the big funding fell through and we ended up having a much smaller celebration, which was nevertheless both charming and provocative.

The Russian Orthodox Magdalen Church

The two together from the Mount of Olives

For most of the time I participated in a series of discussion groups at the Academy of Jerusalem invited by Yitzhak Hayut-man, centered on restoring the sacred feminine and engendering a sustainable ecosystemic future for the Earth and its generations, in the face of the violent scorched Earth apocalypses of traditional patriarchal monotheistic religion.

Many of these discussions, with a variety of liberal Rabbis and Jewish female spokespeople, involved the presence of the feminine in Jewish beliefs and traditions, centering on the Kabbalistic notion of the Shekinah as the feminine aspect of the divine, celebrated in matrimonial concord - the abstract remnant of the Goddess known by various names, from ancient Asherah who was thrown out of the temple by Josiah and her sacred tree burned in the Vale of Kidron, through Hochmah or Wisdom of Proverbs, to Sophia of the Early Christians.

Snow falling on the Wailing Wall

Snow on the temple compound and environs

The Academy was a small apartment complex in the Jewish Quarter of the Old City set on a bridge overlooking Chain Street - the main souk running down to the entrance of Al-Aqsa, providing almost 24-hour coverage of the life of the Old City and its diverse inhabitants. You can see several bridge house like this one in the 2010 blog "Twelve gates to the City".

A series of images of the souks

The Gates of Mercy closed with rubble by the Muslims
to prevent the return of the Mashiach

Opening the gates as in Ezekiel

The Muslims have kept the Gates of Mercy closed and filled with rubble for centuries for fear that someone posing as the mashiach, or messiah, might pass through the gates because of a passage in Ezekiel 46. This is because Muslims want to claim that Muhammad is the final seal of the prophets, hence Muslims persecute and kill Bahais and Ahmadis because they claim their prophets conveyed a newer, fresher vision. This failure to let the world and humanity evolve and progress is counterproductive, so I spent some time documenting pronouncing the liberation of this impediment.

Here is one at night outside the Gates:

"This is a piece of bread. This is the bread of life if you like. Now I'm sitting at the portico. There is no exact portico here. There's a small iron wicket fence with some of the grave stones inside. I'm not intruding here. I'm inviting. I'm not transgressing. I am offering. The way of healing for Islam and for the whole world lies in reconciliation. In Ezekiel it says the prince will eat bread in the porch of the gate and come in and go out, pass through by the gate. This passing through is the release of humanity from bondage in liberation."

Now let's follow our way into the centre of the cyclone and have a look inside the old temple compound and the Dome of the Rock.

Muslim worshipers heading down the souk to Al Aqsa for Friday prayers
Up to 250,000 attend. This is substantially a political initiative for Palestine.

A completely veiled niqab-clad woman among the throng

The Dome of the Rock from the temple compound

A young Muslim dude giving a religious diatribe to a crowd of veiled women

The garden of the temple compound is filled with olive trees

Chris with the Gates of Mercy in the background

A series of images of the Dome of the Rock and its interior
made in the arboreal paradigm of paradise by Sufi craftsmen.

The rock itself

Worshipers unroll Torah scrolls at the Wailing Wall

Ultra-orthodox Jewish men and boys dancing in a circle by the Wailing Wall

Machine guns for protection

Images of the Sanctuaries of the flagellation of Jesus

Images of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre

Images of the Russian Orthodox Magdalen Church on the Mount of Olives

Portrait of Magdalen holding the egg, which had turned red, before the Romans,
supposedly an omen of Jesus' blood.

Images of the all night celebration above the Mount of Olives on Millennium Eve

On the night during which Millennium Eve began at midnight, Yitzhak Hayutman, Devorah Brous and others organized a beautiful all-night celebration with Hebrew folk music and recitations from each of the assembled circle, culminating in blowing the shofar at dawn, and releasing balloons with peace messages over the Old City. Again the theme was the sacred feminine, Shekhinah and the perrennial reflowering of the Tree of Life for Earths future.

I sang the Hymn to the Epoch, which was recut in Jerusalem, with the addition of Tania Suskind on violin and Jane King and Sarah Tov on background vocals.

The Gates of Compassion, temple compound and Dome from the celebration site

Spontaneous incantations. Top Right: Devorah Brous on unity "1+1=1 One is to one as one".
Bottom left: Eliyahu's blessing of the collective mashiach. Bottom right: The anointing reading.

Jane and I made a poetic scriptural incantation, transforming the Isaiah 61 passage which Jesus read in his first sermon at Nazareth into a sacred marriage rite, whose theme, in the shadow of Isaiah's own words is the ecosystemic restoration of the old wastes and the renewal of the perennial garden of paradise:

The anointing reading set to the "Gaia Suite" by Rohan King in mp3

The spirit of God is upon us
the spirit of Gaia is within us
because they hath anointed us
to sing good tidings unto the meek
they hath sent us to bind up the brokenhearted
to proclaim liberty to the captives
and the opening of prison to them that are bound
to proclaim the acceptable year
to comfort all that mourn
to appoint unto them that mourn in Zion
in Palestine, in Sidon, in Syria, Arabia and the world
to give unto them beauty for ashes
the oil of joy for mourning
the garments of love for the spirit of heaviness
that they might be called trees of compassion
the planting of the divine
that all might be glorified
in the abundance of wisdom
and we shall renew the old wastes
and we shall restore the former desolations
and we shall repair the waste cities
the desolations of many generations
they hath clothed us with the garments of salvation
and I as a bridegroom decketh myself with ornaments
and I as a bride adorneth myself with jewels
for as the Earth bringeth forth her bud
and as the garden causeth the things that are sewn in it to spring forth
so shall harmony and fulfillment spring forth
among all the nations
this day is this scripture fulfilled in your ears.
Amen Ah woman!

Eliyahu McLean, before blowing the shofar at dawn, pronounced the collective Mashiach in all of us:

“We are here together the collective mashiach and our vision here tonight will spread peace in our hearts and peace on the City of Peace below Yeru-shalom Jerusalem and bisrata shem in Jah Allah we’ll be as a light and a source for peace in the whole world and in the whole universe”

Three audio tracks from the Celebration:
Rachem
Shekinah
Hymn to the Epoch with Incantations and Eiyahu's blessing

Fire Juggling

Candles for the dawn

Millennium Eve sunrise

Yitzhak Hayut-man greeting the new dawn

Chris at a dance party Millennium Eve night

Palestinian children giving the V on the Mount of Olives millennium night

One small rocket flash over the Old City at Midnight
viewed from the Mount of Olives hypothetical 'ascension site'.

Wild celebration in Bethlehem including, releasing 1000 doves who were
smashing into the buildings to avoid the fireworks
and were summarily feathered and eaten by the residents.

The Garden of Gethsemane (left) on the Mount of Olives

Making our procession to declare the Gates of Mercy open

On the Epiphany, Yitzhak, Jane and I, together with a small party of 13 others pronounced the conceptual opening of the Gates of Mercy below the blocked portico:

'And your gates shall be open continually
they shall not be closed day or night
the glory of Lebanon shall come to you
the juniper the box tree and the cypress together’ (Isa 60)

Jane and I pronouncing the sacred marriage at the Wailing Wall

We then proceeded through the souks to the Wailing Wall where we pronounced the sacred union in the words of the Song of Songs:

I sleep but my heart waketh : it is the voice of of my beloved that knocketh,
saying open to me my sister, my love, my dove, my undefiled :
for my head is filled with dew, and my locks with the drops of the night.
I have put off my coat; how shall I put it on? I have washed my feet; how shall I defile them?
My beloved put his hand in the hole of the door, and my bowels were moved for him.
I rose up to open to my beloved and my hands dropped with myrrh,
and my fingers with sweet-smelling myrrh, upon the handles of the lock.

Set me as a seal upon thine heart, as a seal upon thine arm:
for love is strong as death; jealousy is cruel as the grave:
the coals thereof are coals of fire, which hath a most vehement flame.
Many waters cannot quench love, neither can the floods drown it.

Giving a talk on the sacred marriage and the future of biodiversity at the Academy of Jerusalem

In the evening I gave a seminar on the future of biodiversity and the paradigm of the tree of life.

You can see a version of the scientific gist of this talk in the Biocosmology seminar on YouTube.

There is a natural progression from this to the Cosmology of Sexual Paradox talk in Jerusalem 2010.

In the evening I gave a talk about the evolutionary future of the planet's biodiversity, the threat to it from scorched Earth religion and business as usual exploitation, and its relationship to restoring the mutual sovereignty in sexual, and social relationships between women and men.

The environs of Miriam's well with wildlife

Later Hanna-Elise took us to the environs of Miriam's well on the outskirts of Jerusalem where there was abundant wildlife, including a mongoose and hence snakes, crocuses, wild asparagus, hawthorn, cyclamen and other plants.

A 1000 fold women's celebration of Ella the Goddess which Jane attended while we were there.

Jane attended a 1000 strong celebration of Ella - the ancient word for Goddess just as El stands for "God".

Trip Costing and Back to the Future

2010-09-19T21:48:00.000-07:00

To complete the 2010 blog I have done a short costing and included a retrospective chapter "Time Travel in Bali" linking our first trip to Bali in 1974 with the latest one a few weeks ago in 2010 visiting some of the same places spaced 36 years apart. I have also expanded Streaking through Greece to include more photo coverage, particularly of Corfu, so the entire journey is fully documented, and done a flashback of my visit to Jerusalem in 2000 to contrast it with the visit we just completed.

Here is a short costing of the 2010 trip so you can see how the expenses panned out:

Total Costs for 2 people 90 days travel = $25416.84 NZ
($1 NZ = $0.71 US)

Transport all sources $17640.91 comprising:
Quantas One World 16 stop air ticket $9690.40
Other linking air bookings $3148.52
Greek Ferries $456.48
Rental Cars $2208.23
Bus/Taxi/Metro/Petrol $2137.28

Accommodation $3682.34
Itemized Large Expenses (visas, textiles, exit taxes, site entry) $1469.00
Food and incidentals $2151.96

Trip capital
Cash $4348.27
ATM $5185.47
Credit Cards ex Quantas ticket $6192.69

Travel Insurance Costs and Claim
Medical Expenses (fractured hip) $9082.88
Insurance Payout $8626.12
Medical shortfall $456.76
Stolen Camera $410

The blogging journey now travels on from here to a new assignment "Asia in Ninety Days" - completing in full photo coverage our 90 day journey through Asia in 2006, to give you a whole new traveling experience!

Time Travel in Bali

2010-09-19T17:23:00.001-07:00

Kuta Beach 1974

To splice space-time in a new direction, here are some very ancient images of Bali from Christine's and my trip there in 1974. They cover many of the same places as in our 2010 trip, in particular Kuta and Ubud as well as some of the other traditional ceremonies and places of interest we missed in 2010.

Women on the beach would offer you local magic mushrooms

We stayed initially at a losmen in Kuta and hired motor bikes to travel around the island. This had some intriguing consequences. When I showed the guy running the losmen that the key didn't quite fit the bike, he said "Wait a minute" and took it around the back, when I followed him I found he was smashing it to metallic pulp between two stones.and just managed to retrieve it in the nick of time to file back into some sort of servicable shape.

Christine at our Losmen in Kuta

A traditional Balinese funeral cremating the body and
sending its spirit to the heavens to avoid it haunting its relatives.

Effigies of animals including a bull with golden horns are burnt in the cremation

On the road

We took off on two motor bikes and drove up to Kintamani on the edge of the volcano, to Besakih and down to the coast and out to the east of the Island, before heading to Ubud to stay for a few days.

Gunung Kawi rock-cut temple dates from the 11th century

The lake in Gunung Batur beside Kintamani

Kintamani 1973

The under roof of a Balinese temple

Besakih with Gunung Agung in the distance

Goa Lawah bat cave

A fishing village on the south Eastern coast.

Here are some images of our time in Ubud which compare in a time travel way with the images shot in much the same place on our 2010 trip.

Christine outside Tjhandri's famly losmen in Monkey Forest Road Ubud 1974

Chris with some of the children

The family compound

The markets outside the palace at the main corner

A series of images of the Ubud market in 1974

Christine and Chris besieged by the monkey forest monkeys

A traditional dance with gamelans in a neighbouring village

This village in south eastern Bali had a reputation for its backward
and isolated culture, which set its people apart from other villages.

Curious children surrounding Christine in the village

Sevilla, Carmona and Constantina

2010-09-14T22:29:00.000-07:00

The Spanish border

We entered Spain on the bus from Faro in Portugal crossing the border at a river separating the two countries, and headed on directly to Sevilla.

There are five blogs in the Andalucia section of the trip and a map of the journey below:
Sevilla, Carmona and Constantina
Old Cordoba and Zuhiros
Priego de Cordoba
For the Love of Ronda
Regreso a Sevilla

Map of the journey

Images on the road to Seville

When we arrived in Seville, the bus station was scorching - full of hot revving buses and the ambient temperature was 42 degrees a baking dry heat taken higher by the fumes and engine heat. Seville proved to have atrocious connections to the airport, so after trying to catch a city bus to link to the airport shuttle we gave up and caught a taxi for 24 euros to make our connection to our Gold Car rental car through Amigo Autos two hours late after managing to phone them to tell them we were on our way.

The Arab pillar Torre del Oro

We then tried in the sunset to find a camp site at Seville but after finding it non-existent, began a long tortuous evening journey first to the historic town of Carmona, striking with white narrow streets a walled inner city and scored a cheesy pizza in the evening in the park where everyone was celebrating the evening in bars and cafes after the hot afternoon siesta.

Streets of Carmona

The central plaza just outside the city walls

The entrance

Narrow streets in the old town

Panoramas of the surrounding country from the heights of the old town

People celebrating in evening in the central park restaurant area

We then drove on in the night up into the mountains through anther historic town Constantina and then San Nicholas del Puerto to a dusty winding 7 km dirt track through the olive-groved mountain park almost by accident finally arriving at the remote little camp site by the river, which we had been seeking all evening, at around 11.20 Spanish time, after getting hopelessly stuck in the evening traversing the towns, sometimes stuck in streets no wider than the car having to make right-angled turns into another street sometimes even narrower, or with parked cars giving you only inches to squeeze through.

Next morning we set off for Cordoba, again getting lost in Constantina.

Constantina

The shining copper spire

Two views of the old castle

The sheltered central park

We then headed back through the Sierras down to the Andalucian plains.

Road through Sierra Norte heading back down to the river valley.

We then turned north again at Lora del Rio and headed along the river valley to Cordoba.

A grand castle by the road approaching Cordoba

Old Cordoba and Zuhiros

2010-09-14T22:11:00.000-07:00

The city castle wall of old Cordoba

Arriving in Cordoba, drove into the central historic district, staging a scorching walk through the old Arab and Jewish quarters to the Mesquita mosque converted to a cathedral. We didn't explore the interior, because it is expensive and freely available on the internet, but have included a good set of representative images to show you what it is like.

Gardens by the wall

A series of images of narrow calles in the old bario

The road running along the walls of the Mesquita

The Mesquita

The garden of the Mesquita

Moorish arches (above) and hybrid Gothic and Moorish meeting (below)

Streets leading away from the Mesquita

On our ay back to the car, we made a detour to the Jewish neighbourhood and the Synagogue, while we missed the opening hours of by a few minutes but have also included here images of the interior to complete the picture and compensate for the dominant Christian and Muslim influence, especially since the Jewish quarter must have existed right through both the Moorish and Castilian periods.

Alleys in the Jewish sector of the bario

The neighbourhood of the Synagogue

The Synagogue interior

Jewish courtyard

The day was seriously hot enough to cause heat stroke when we had to walk several blocks back in the sun in haste to get to the car before the parking fees became extortionate.

Return to the city walls

Panorama of the Old City from across the river as we leave

From there we set off on a long trip out to Priego de Cordoba, another historic Spanish hill town which reputedly had a camping site nearby.

Castro del Rio

On the way we climbed in the late afternoon to a little cliff top town called Zuhiros famous for its Moorish Castle, bat caves and precipitously panoramic views from the central plaza overlooking the escarpment and surrounding terrain, managing to drive right up into it with the elderly men all gathered in the square in the cool of the late afternoon, after we cheekily drove up a no entry road except for citizens of Zuhiros.

Zuhiros

Panoramas approaching Zuhiros

Navigating our way up the narrow streets to the central park

Approaching the castle

Golden oldies - Old men of the village enjoying sunset together in the park

Panorama of the overlook

The Moorish castle

Priego de Cordoba

2010-09-14T21:49:00.000-07:00

Approaching Priego de Cordoba in the evening

We then took off over the mountains on a little back road reaching Priego de Cordoba at sunset, finding that the camp site was supposed to be closed and after driving through finding the youth hostel closed and the only backpackers inaccessible down a side alley with no parking, finally succumbed to driving up into the mountains and gypsy camping in the moonlight on a mountain hilltop which proved in the morning to be overlooking a huge old castle and sweeping views of the mountains.

Scenes on the way there

The gypsy campsite above Zagrilla Alto

Distant castle from the campsite

Zagrilla Alto

Next morning, after wandering through Priego, which was charming, and recharging our caffeine at a cafe and watching the news that the 45 degree heat was becoming lethal in Madrid, and failing to find a free internet, we finally managed to get a booking for a hostel for tomorrow night for our two nights in Barcelona, by going to an internet cafe. The reservation was becoming a crisis because of he lack of internet access and the fact that Barcelona proved to be 99% booked out days in advance, taking out all the hostels in Lonely Planet, even for the dorms.

Panorama of the overlook from Priego promenade

The park facing the promenade

The Barrio de la Villa is the old Arab district with a strong Jewish presence

The calle is named after the Jewish philosopher Maimonedes

Calle Petunia

Panorama of the castle walls

The Church

The one hostel we could find the evening before had no available parking

The famous fountain Fuente del Rey or Fountain of the King

We then headed as fast as possible across country to Ronda, flagging Granada because we hate the big cities in this blazing heat. However for those of you who lament for the Alhambra in this Andalucian tour here is a sumptuous high resolution image set at Wikipedia's Alhambra site.

Scenes on the road to Ronda

Regreso a Sevilla

2010-09-14T20:42:00.000-07:00

Scenes on the road from Ronda to Seville

From Ronda, we made a direct beeline north-west for Seville to catch our afternoon flight out to Barcelona.

A distant Saracen fortress

Sunflower heaven and cubical hay bales in the near desert

After a concerted drive we made it there with only three hours until our flight, so we raced to the city centre to try to get a quick look at a few of the key sights.

A series of images of the Plaza de Espana and the Exposition Hall

Panorama of the Plaza de Espana and the Exposition Hall

However the one-way traffic system and the difficult parking conditions keep us bottled up for a full 40 minutes leaving me only a 20 minute margin to stump over the the Alcazar and cathedral and take a few critical shots outside, having already photographed the great exhibition hall and a few other sights on the way. I've made up for this by selecting a representative set of shots of the interiors of the Alcazar and cathedral to complete the urban experience as much as possible. There is a high quality photo blog of the Alcazar and Cathedral here.

The vicinity of the Cathedral and Alcazar

The Alcazar

The Cathedral

Christopher Colombus

Plaza de Toros

One Saturday in Lisbon

2010-09-11T17:19:00.001-07:00

Outer Lisbon and the Costa de Caparica across the Rio Tejo from the air

This is the first blog in a five-chapter posting on our trip through Portugal, so this post contains a map of the journey as well as links to the other chapters, which can also be found in the blog contents list on the right of the page.

Portugal Blogs:
One Saturday in Lisbon
The Romance of Sintra
The Macabre Enchantment of Evora
Beja and the Sierras
Aljezur and the South Coast

Map of our journey in southern Portugal

When we arrived in Lisbon there was chaos as thousands of British holiday-makers descended on the rental car companies forming claustrophobic queues, so again we managed to use my current disability to get through the waiting to get our Guerrin rental through Nova care hire and after signing our life away, out onto the freeway and out to Sintra the medieval mountain town outside Lisbon full of strange castles.

After circumnavigating the town, we managed to find our way up the concealed road that wound right to the top of the mountain and I took a 'tram' ride up to the fairy-tale Palace de Pena famed on the cover of the rough guide to Portugal and took a stunning series of shots.

From there we drove along the coast through the searing, eye wateringly bright and hot beaches choked with bronzed bodies and technicolour beach umbrellas and eventually through the Saturday beach traffic around to the old historic centre of Lisbon, which was as charming in itself as Sintra.

Views of Lisbon from the air

Aqueduto das Águas Livres (1748) - Lisbon has always suffered from a water shortage

On the road out to Sintra

The beach coming from Cascais

Crazy colours of beach obsession

It took a considerable time to get from Sintra to central Lisbon, so we were beginning to run out of time to find a camp site on the holiday resort crazed south coast over the Rio Tejo. We stopped for a moment to view the main square - the Terreiro do Paço nostaglically named for the palace that was destroyed in the great Lisbon Earthquake of 1755.

The central square of Old Lisbon - Terreiro do Paço

Panorama

Views from the square out over the Rio Tejo

Ponte 25 de Abril

An historical view of the Terreiro do Paço or Palace Square
named after the palace which was destroyed by earthquake in 1755.

We then took off through the difficult one-way system heading like a sniffer dog for where we imagined the good sites of the old Barrios might be.

Streets leading from the square

Looking for a steep ascending side street, I made a right into a narrow tram lined street which half way up became so obstructed it seemed we couldn't get through.

Streets leading up into Alfama - Arabic for al-hamma - baths

But then we found we had made it up to the promenade of Alfama, one of the most exquisite parts of Old Lisbon, although we had been trying to find the now more upmarket Barrio Alto on the other side of the central nexus. So this for us is home!

Alfama

Panorama of Alfama area with Igreja Sao Vicente in the background

Alfama panoramas

Igreja Sao Vicente

Statue of Sao Vicente

I have included a few images of Barrio Alto for comparison to broaden the view of old Lisbon.

A square we passed through at the lower end of the Barrio Alto district

Internet images of Barrio Alto

Castelo Sao Jorge overlooks the centre of old Lisbon

An internet aerial view of the Castelo with Terreiro do Paço in the distance

After getting lost in the circuitous one way streets, trying to find the access, we eventually made it out over Lisbon's 'Golden Gate' bridge, over the Rio Teja, the Ponte 25 de Abril, linking to the resort cities on the southern spit.

Heading south over the suspension bridge Ponte 25 de Abril

After finding several repulsive packed camp sites full of loud music with no good pitches we nearly got stuck in the sand at a wild beach at the very end point of the coast road and had to be dragged out by eight husky surfers, before driving back to the autostrada and out again to the coast further south, where we found a camp site by a coastal lagoon Lagoa de Albufeira. The camp was full of loud disjointed music for a kids disco jerking and lurching through to past midnight.

A castle on the way to Palmeja

Next morning we threaded back to the local road heading towards Palmeja planning to turn East to drive inland to Evora. We stopped to have a snack in the little rest park by this castle but every shady spot was packed to the gunnels with Portuguese out on a picnic as if no one had until this moment thought that providing enough shade in the inscrutable summer heat might be something that it is worth having.

The road to Palmeja

Further along the road there were fine views in the baking heat of the coast and the castle at Palmeja, before we became hopelessly lost trying to link on to the road to Evora.

Three views of Palmeja looking towards the coast

A row of old sail windmills

Two panoramas looking inland

After driving in circles for an hour we entered the motorway only to find we were driving for at least 10 kms back to where we started as well as finding that unlike the bidge from Lisbon, this section was a toll road, so as soon as possible we took off finally finding the almost deserted road east to Evora.

On the road we began to see buildings with huge chimneys which we figured were convection funnels to dispel the heat in the houses although this may have been a delusion we were suffering from the extreme heat although again the rental car was comfortably air conditioned and was reasonably luke warm as long as you kept driving.

Strange chimneys looking like they are forms of convection-driven ventilation

We passed by Montemor-O-Novo and stopped in to break the journey and glance at the town and castle.

Montemor-O-Novo

Montemor-O-Novo Castelo

Scenes from Montemor-O-Novo

Scenes on the road nearing Evora

Finally by late afternoon we were actually arriving at the vicinity of Evora ...

The Macabre Enchantment of Evora

2010-09-11T15:54:00.000-07:00

Evora city wall

We arrived at the historic mountain walled-town of Évora (a huge castle in itself with an outer and inner wall) after the siesta, shortly before sunset. We drove up to the centre square where we parked and were about to go walking when we saw a bunch of cops at the other end of the square so having chatted them up for a 15 minute stad on the loading zone we actually found a good park and walked up the narrow streets to the Roman temple and Cathedral.

Ascending the calle to the main square

... further up and the square is in sight!

elderly woman waiting for a ride ...

Church in the main square

Two panoramas circling the square

The narrow streets leading to the Cathedral and Roman temple

Roman temple

View from the city walls by the temple

The cathedral from various viewpoints

The interior

One classic macabre feature of Évora which we didn't manage to see given our late arrival and hurried departure to look for a place to camp is the Chapel of the Bones, which I have included in the blog as a research addition.

The church housing the chapel of the skulls

The Igreja Real de São Francisco (Royal Church of St. Francis) in Évora is best known for its chapel that is not for the faint of heart. In the Capela dos Ossos (Chapel of Bones), the walls and central pillars are covered with human skulls and other parts of skeletons, held together by cement. The church was built between 1460 and 1510.

Church interior

Its Capela dos Ossos was created by a few Franciscan monks in the 16th century as a practical solution to a problem - as many as 42 monastic cemeteries were taking up valuable space in Evora, so they moved all the bones to a single consecrated chapel. Seeing an opportunity to contemplate and communicate the inevitability of death, the monks chose to display the bones prominently.

Entrance to the skull chapel

Evora from the road south

Then in the early evening we drove on south through the little hill town of Alvito with a castle and church, before heading out to an isolated camp site on the shores of a lagoon, Barragen de Alvito, 15 kms out of town, which was quiet, if expensive at 22 euros.

Stork nests provided on poles

Coming into Alvito

Alvito castle

Barragem de Odivelas

The camp site by the lake

Beja and the Sierras

2010-09-11T15:09:00.000-07:00

Beja castle

Next day we headed south to Beja, which is a neat hill town which we entered finding the castle free to wander through and the nearby church open.

Map of Beja showing the old city wall

View from the castle

The nearby church

Interior of the church

It contains many porcelain tile 'paintings'

We then drove down its narrow winding one way system and became completely lost fruitlessly looking for the bus station to try to get a ticket to Spain, taking at least an hour to find our way out through enclave suburbs, passing the same point several times over (something that has been repeated in just about every Portugese, Spanish and Italian hill town since!

Beja streets

Santa Maria

San Salvador

The old city wall

From Beja we traveled south and then west crossing into the two ranges of Sierras driving up into high wooded country with great views from the summit of the passes.

Entering the mountainous area of Sierra de Monchique

The summit of the sierra on the way to Monchique

A hill town in the mountains

We eventually wound through the hills to the hill town of Monchique which serves the alpine district in terms of silviculture and other mountain economies.

Monchique

The town square

From there we wound around the edge of a second range of Sierras with long-distance views all the way of the narrow stretch of coastal lowlands, finally coming down to the coast.

Coming down to the coastal plain from the Sierra de Espinhaço de Cao

Aljezur and the South Coast

2010-09-11T13:52:00.000-07:00

Aljezur new town on the way in - Aljezur is Arabic for "Islands"

When we reached the coastal plain from the Sierras, we drove into to Aljezur on the coast. When we got to the centre we realized we were in the larger new town and that the prime area of interest was in the old town nestled below the Saracen castle on the hill, so we headed over and up the steep narrow street which after seeming to become too narrow for cars finally ascended up to the castle walls where there was a fine view of the two towns.

Heading up to the new town church

Castle on the hill (right) and old town calle up to it (left)

Church in the old town

The castle (originally Saracen)

Panorama of the old and new towns from the castle

going back down through the old town

and out again by the river

We then headed on to the beaches in the loop arching out from the village of Carrapateira - Bordiera and Amado. This was a combination of a trddiaitonal surfing beach with an ecological area with wild views over the craggy cliffs on a dirt loop road which ran south to the next beach at Amado before winding back to Carrapateira.

Carrapateira village on the way to Bordeira Beach

Bordeira Beach

Bordeira coast north

Bordeira coast heading south

Amado Beach in the distance

Carrapateira village on the way back

We then headed on south down the coast past a battery of large windmills, heading out to the castle military fortress at Sagres that separates the south (Mediterranean) coast from the west cost.

Bispo

Sagres castle

Aerial view

View out to the light

Circular panorama

The south coast

The Castle from inside

The chapel outside (above) and inside (below)

A medieval section of wall

We then had to face up to the fact that we still had no bus ticket to get us through to Seville which we had to do smoothly to lick up our rental car and later fly out to Barcelona. We also had no idea of where to drop off the Guerrin rental car, so after getting help at the first camp site we saw and discovering the car had to dropped off at Faro airport, rather than town, we drove on in the evening to Lagos 80 kms west of Faro, where as luck would have it we found the Eva bus terminal got a ticket for next day (albeit with no seat reservation - "just sit anywhere" they said!) and made it to a crowded urban camp site on the way to the Lagos beach front.

The camp site in Lagos town

The freeway to Faro

Next day we managed, after further confusion over entrances and exits, and the multiple rental car sites on the approach to the airport, to drop off the car (actually at the airport arrivals), catch a bus to town walking the last section in the heat because the bus driver let us off too soon at the station and finding the hot noisy Eva terminal unbearable went and sat out our two hour wait for the afternoon bus on the grass in the Faro seaside park overlooking a series of swamp islands become an eco-park.

Faro waterfront

The waterfront over the boat marina

The ecological wetlands beyond Faro

When we caught the bus, the driver suddenly attacked both our day packs with all our passports and sensitive equipment insisting that they be thrown in the lockers under the bus with no baggage receipts and threatening to call the police if we didn't comply, causing us to leave $1000 under the bus for the whole journey. We have been in a lot of buses in a lot of countries but this is the shabbiest performance of any bus company so far.

The road to the Spanish border

Goodbye to Portugal!

The border is the river

Emerald Isle 2: Tipperary to Dingle Town

2010-09-08T21:34:00.000-07:00

Guinness man at Tipperary

This is the first of several retrospective postings to complete the European section of the photoblog. which we are continuing because of the rich photographic feast they contain. In addition to Emerald Isle 2 you will find two additional new Irish sections at the links below, or in the listing at the right.

Emerald Isle 3: Dingle, Kerry and Beara
Emerald Isle 4: Cork, Kilkenny, and the Canal

The day after arriving at the Rock of Cashel, we set off for Dingle traveling across Ireland on small country roads at high speed bouncing between the hedgerows, passing through Tiperary, Emly and Kilmallock photographing the towns and nipping up to any vantage points to take in the almost saturated greenness of the Emerald Isle on a treacherously uncertain summers day.

Scenes from Tipperary Main Street

View and panorama of the cemetery with Celtic Crosses

Catholic roadside shrine to English- Irish war victims

The church at Emly

A castle become a farm in the fields

Scenes from Kilmallock a walled town with town gates

The Kilmallock ruined abbey

All day long the weather was changing rapidly. A shower here, a patch of sunshine there, so that it was almost impossible to predict whether or not we would be able to camp as at Cashell or whether the whole place would be damp and miserable by nightfall. This seems to be something characteristic of Ireland that must have something to do with its proximity to the end of the North Atlantic Conveyor giving restless moist winds and the relatively flat rolling landscape that makes it hard for the weather to settle on any terrestrial pattern.

Two panoramas of the Irish countryside showing rapidly changing weather conditions

A series of panoramas of the Emerald Isle heading to Dingle Peninsula

We skirted Tralee, which according to accounts was little loss, driving on up the coast late afternoon and then ascending the high excruciatingly narrow mossy Connor Pass over the Dingle peninsula, whose summit looks like a microscopic version of the pass linking Kashmir and Ladark in the Himalayas.

The beginning of the peninsula looking out to sea

As you begin the ascent there is a quizzical sign in several European languages warning you that if you are a bus to turn around now because you won't make it up the very narrow one lane section that goes over the summit.

The road to Connor Pass turns upward and warns buses to turn around!

Panorama looking back to the coast

Winding on up

The coast recedes

The grassy top of the valley has several small tarns

The final leg of the pass is almost Himalayan in appearance

Craggy highlands very rare in Ireland

The road narrows!

A final look back to the north coast.

The other side is fogged out and raining

By the time we arrived in Dingle, which is a very fancy, colourful Irish tourist town, the Irish perfidious rain came down and we found ourselves literally outside the Hideout Hostel for 45 Euro with a free overnight parking space outside, which is where I did the previous posting, so we had a comfortable night in soft beds and a warm room with a hot shower and a nice little kitchen and free breakfast - a bit more sumptuous that a wet night on the grass in a camp site.

The Hideout Hostel our resting place in the rain

Dingle main street

A row of pebble stone houses

The harbour area

The yacht marina and fishing boat harbour

However after arriving in Europe and using rental cars and camp site we had many problems that beset us in keeping online, both technological and cultural, which is part of the reason this blog has only been completed in full after our return to New Zealand.

We brought with us a 240v inverter which was designed to recharge any equipment, but was over-designed and died on the first day of use in Ireland, leaving us with real recharging problems which then made looking for free wi-fi in the towns we went through very difficult when we found that, unlike the backpacker hostels through Latin America, 100% of which offered free wi-fi, camp sites, even when charging a fortune and having expensive bars, games rooms and restaurants, as many do in Europe, failed almost completely to live up to the electronic age throughout our trip through Europe.

Emerald Isle 3: Dingle, Kerry and Beara

2010-09-08T21:03:00.000-07:00

Driving up the south coast from Dingle

Next day we took off to the tip of the Dingle peninsula, which is a wild wind swept promontory with some old pre-historic 'beehive' houses, stone houses lasting from the Irish potato (spud) blight famine, and scattered villages set in the green rolling countryside over the craggy cliffs above the tossing seas.

Map pf the three peninsulas of south western Ireland

Above is a map of the three peninsulas so you can see roughly the roads we took, except for the fact that on the Iveragh peninsula inland there are heaps of country lanes not shown which led to it being a literal maze of indistinguishable routes in the centre.

Further towards the tip of Dingle peninsula

NZ cabbage trees are all over Ireland

A row of 'potato famine' cottages

A traditional stone ford

Remains of prehistoric beehive houses

Coming to the last corner before the final spit

A shrine at the corner

Three images of the road into the final bay

The little beach cove at the turning point

Panorama from the beach

The islands and craggy peninsulas on the north face

There were a few more ancient ruins, Gallarus oratory believed to be a 6th to 9th century Christian church and Ballinskelligs Priory. On the way back we got lost on little side roads that snaked all over the north side through farming hamlets and ended up about 8 kms north at the wild little fishing wharf at Brandon Heads.

Turning back inland

Ballinskelligs Priory

Gallarus oratory

An accidental detour to the little fishing harbour at Brandon Heads

If that wasn't enough, we then drove on back down the south side of the Dingle peninsula to the Iveragh peninsula containing the Ring of Kerry. Instead of going round the ring, we decided to go over the very tiny road across the mountains through the Ballagbeama Gap. This took off cleanly enough from Killorglin and the road wound up a valley to a ridge crossing into forests in the interior past a little lake, or lough, or loch.

Iveragh (Kerry) peninsula from the south side of Dingle peninsula.

Three views of Killorglin

The coast road (wrong way for us)

Lough Acoose

But then chaos struck. What was one little scenic connecting road on the map turned into a rabbit warren of unsignposted lanes, leading in every direction. Other Irish travelers were as lost as we were and we met them several times driving in short circles and asked one another directions. Finally, after making it to Glencar and asking a local with an exceedingly broad Irish accent, which we could barely decipher, we passed another three or four unmarked crossings and entered what looked like a deserted farm track which nearly petered out.

Stopping to ask the way at Glencar

Getting nearer the gap

Is this the right road?

Is this one any more then a farm track

But then became a very narrow tar sealed road which snaked around, winding up to the Ballagbeama Gap, a precipitous little pass leading eventually through through more ambiguous turnings to Kenmare.

Ballaghbeama Gap

The summit

Then road down

On our arrival in Kenmare, it again perfidiously rained and we ended up noticing by accident a sign saying 'Private Hostel 50 m' and staying there with a lone 75 year old Irish woman for the grand sum of 30 Euros.

The owner of the "Private Hostel"

We began the next day making a short trip up the coast of the Beara peninsula before deciding to travel on south to Cork and Kilkenny to avoid time running out before we made it back to Dublin for our flight out.

Two views along the coast of the Beara peninsula

Three ancient stone circles, this on the Beara peninsula

The druid's outlook on the road south on Beara

Druid's outlook stone shop

Emerald Isle 4: Cork, Kilkenny, and the Canal

2010-09-08T16:20:00.000-07:00

Summit of the road to Glengariff can be seen in the distant streak at the top

Next day, rather than circuiting the third Beara peninsula, having had a bit of a look up the coast, we ascended another pass, with more panoramic views of the endless green of a summer full of spring rains to Glengariff.

Panorama looking back to the west side, with double tunnels in the distance

Two panoramas on the east side with a small tarn in the hills

Coming down to the coast

We then hit the coast briefly but wound inland to to Blarney via the River Lee valley full of a series of swampy fishing lakes, only to find the Blarney castle too expensive and literally besieged by Irish tourists.

A castle and church yard on the way

A stone circle protected by an alleged raging bull

A trout fishing boat on the River Lee

Blarney Castle

Blarney Manor

Blarney Village

We then made it to Cork, which despite its claim to be second only to Dublin, appeared to have inherited Dublin's rather bleak dreary appearance, combined with choking traffic jams in the centre, so peeling off in frustration, we set off down the coast to a typical holiday camp site at Tramore beside a bay on the south coast.

A series of views of Cork

Back to the coast at Youghal

Panoramas of Youghal Bay

Coast near where we camped at Tramore

A small ruined castle just off the beach on the way to Tramore

Next day we spent a good time in Kilkenny (once we two cats of) which is a genuinely cultural Irish city with some good period buildings because it was previously a seat of government.

Images of Kilkenny

The old parliament house

St. Canices' Cathedral

Kilkenny Castle

The stables are now chick stores

Grace's Castle now a Court House

We then wound our way in a confusing trail north and around the outskirts of Dublin to a traditional caravan camp site on the east coast at Rush just north of Dublin airport.

A castle on the way north to Dublin

The Grand canal

More views of the Grand Canal

The beach by the camp site at Rush just north of Dublin Airport

At 4 am next morning we uncamped at speed and took off back to the M1 and down to the airport, ditching our Budget rental car and racing to AerLingus to check in for our 6.50 am flight. Their service was abysmal, because they have become a bucket shop airline for servicing holidays to Europe and had atrocious organization, directing massive queues of people to different check in points on small signs which left us standing for ages in the wrong queue until I tore into one of the service people as a disabled person and got transferred to another check in directly and got us on the flight. When we got on they wanted to charge for everything even water to drink, even though it was technically an international flight (although inside the EU).

NZ Cabbage Trees and Flax at the camp site in the morning.

The only thatched cottage we saw in Ireland

The Cosmology of Sexual Paradox and the Fall

2010-09-03T17:18:00.000-07:00

Fig 1: The mind-brain relationship remains the unfathomed abyss in the scientific description of reality.

Fine printable PDF

This is the article that came out of our talk in Jerusalem, while on our 90-day orbit of the planet. It is an in-depth and wide ranging review supported by cosmological science and human cultural and genetic history with significant implications for religions and the future of humanity.

1: Sexual Paradox of Existence - Mind and Body

Our experiential universe remains poised on a paradox, so acute, that neither the scientific description of reality, nor the religious cosmologies of history have succeeded in revealing its inner nature.

From birth to death, the only avenue we possess to knowledge of the world around us is not through the physical universe and objective reality of the world at large, but through our subjective conscious experience. In all our experiences of the everyday world it is our private subjective consciousness which is doing the experiencing and this consciousness can take on many forms, spanning dream, memory, reflection, and hallucination.

And despite the fact that we all have physical brains, the relationship between brain states and conscious states remains the abyss in the scientific description of reality, for which there is as yet no convincing explanation. In a sense although many of us think of the physical world as the primary reality, our understanding and acceptance of the objective physical universe comes about only indirectly, through the consensual agreement of our subjective conscious experiences of the everyday world. Thus in a sense all we know is conscious experience.

Nevertheless, the scientific era has brought about a new understanding of the physical universe which has come about only through applying skeptical principles that a theory is never proven, but only gains validity when critical experimental attempts to disprove it fail, and applying stringent tests for refuting fantastic and incorrect theories, by careful examination of inconsistencies and replication of experimental results. The end product is our extraordinary scientific model, in which we have come to understand that the dynamics of physical processes and the future of life around us depend on microscopic forces and the generation of fundamental wave-particles that give rise, through their interaction, to the atoms and molecules which comprise the world around us and govern its reactions, structures and changes.

This has led to an explosion of scientific knowledge, which has literally overturned our preconceived religious notions of the universe and taken us to the brink of a cosmological description, which is penetrating beyond our wildest dreams, reaching back to the cosmic origin and weaving together the great cosmological events shaping the universe at large with the microscopic forces that makes us the molecular organisms we have discovered ourselves to be.

However this knowledge is and has always been gained indirectly through experiments which ultimately change our subjective conscious experiences, for example through witnessing the strips of dark and light chemicals that decode a DNA sequence, or the dark or light resonance bands in the hydrogen spectrum which can tell us the universe appears to be flying apart at close to the speed of light.

Fig 1b: (Left) Brain activity associated with language and (right) local parallel processing of color and motion in vision.
Although brain scanning has made it possible to associate specific regions of the cortex with specific aspects of conscious
thought and experience, these are just correspondences between biological brain states and perceived conscious events.
We still have no idea how the brain actually generates subjective consciousness.

No one knows how the brain generates conscious states, which are our complete and only avenue to experiencing the physical world, or even if it is a meaningful question to ask, since brain states are objective molecular events and conscious experiences are entirely subjective and do not have the same existential status as physical events, being the ephemeral miasmas of dream, memory and reflection.

For the purposes of brain science it is convenient to think of the conscious mind as an internal model of reality constructed by the brain to carry out its central integrated decision-making tasks, but this begs the question of how it can generate extra-physical impressions, such as the incredibly detailed experiences sometimes accompanied by vivid dreams or the kaleidoscopic landscapes of psychedelic reverie, where alternative realities, as real and palpable as waking experiences of the world around us, are invoked in similar detail.

Indeed Indian philosophy sought to reverse this relationship between the physical and the mental, considering material forms as grosser than the finer mental ones, so that mind could not be described in terms of physical forms and structures. On the other hand, we all know that if we are hit on the head or cut our wrists, we may lose consciousness or may even expire, so the primacy of the physical world cannot be taken in doubt, even though it is experienced indirectly through our subjective consciousness.

We thus end up in a paradox, because neither the physical, nor the mental world description on its own can adequately describe our existential cosmology. Moreover they are complementary to one another, evoking together the complete dynamics of conscious existence in the physical world, and they are symmetry-broken in the sense that their properties are qualitatively different from one another in such a way as to comprise a complementary whole from their fundamental differences. This is the state of symmetry-broken complementation leading to paradox, we refer to as sexual paradox.

Fig 2: Sexual paradox in physical cosmology: Top-right Wave-particle complementarity. Top-left symmetry-breaking of the forces of nature, invoking boson-fermion or matter-radiation complementarity. Bottom left: Cosmic evolution is a reflection of this symmetry-breaking. Bottom right: Despite the idea of super-symmetry between bosons and fermions, the pivotal group E8 believed to be at the core of the cosmic design shows symmetry-breaking between its bosonic and fermionic roots.

2: Sexual Paradox in Physical Cosmology

The quantum universe consists entirely of wave-particles - that is quantum entities display both the properties of a traveling wave and a moving particle - sometimes manifesting as one, and at others as the other, but never both in the same situation. For example, in a double slit interference experiment, as in the top right hand of fig 2, photons are released in localized particulate units from excited atoms, but then radiate as waves through the apparatus before reappearing as particles with bands of statistical density following the wave amplitude, when they are reabsorbed by the detector.

The wave and particle aspects are both complementary and symmetry-broken topologically in the sense that the wave and particle aspects form discrete and continuous descriptions of the quantum dynamics. They are also robustly sexually paradoxical. Any description attempting to derive from one aspect only, implicitly carries the other aspect within it. For example in quantum field theory, although the fields are described as an infinite collection of interacting particles acting as force carriers, the particles are still transmitted according to a wave propagator function .

There are also a further series of complementarities emerging from quantum reality. Wave-particles come in two types: The bosons, such as the electromagnetic photon, which have integer spin, and mediate forces and exists as radiation because they are able to infinitely superimpose, as in lasers. By contrast, the half-integer spin fermions can only enter the same wave function in magnetically complementary pairs of opposite spin, thus forming incompressable matter.

The standard model of particle physics involves a highly symmetry-broken divergence between both the four fundamental forces of nature and its bosons and fermions. In particular the bosons and fermions occupy very different classes, although both respect the internal symmetries of the forces. The complementary and opposite positive and negative energetics of the bosonic and fermionic components has led to the idea that nature must be super-symmetric - i.e. that for each boson, there should be a corresponding fermion partner so the positive and negative energies almost perfectly cancel, except that this symmetry is broken by one or other of the partners gaining a very high mass so they would only appear at high energies e.g. in the LHC.

However super-symmetry may also be discretely broken in a way which might mean the overall contributions of the bosons and fermions cancel, but there are different numbers and arrangements of each. The group E8, which is central to many super and string theories attempting to unify gravity with the other forces, carries within it a discrete symmetry breaking, which nevertheless generates the entire 240 dimensional root system for E8 from an asymmetric distribution of 112 'bosonic' root vectors with integral components and 128 'fermionic' ones (with half integer coordinates), as in the lower right of fig 2.

Complementing this is a cosmological description of the origin of the universe derived from it, in which an early rapid inflation, caused by the high negative-energy of the symmetrical state of the forces, traversed into a shower of hot fundamental particles with attractive gravity, as the symmetry-breaking occurred, knitting the evolution of the universe as a whole into the same process. We thus end up with a gigantic universe whose kinetic energy of expansion is just balancing its gravitational potential energy, leaving it on the edge between expanding forever and ending in a big crunch. A more subtle symmetry-breaking is being searched for, e.g. in the weak force, which can help explain the preponderance of matter over anti-matter which is essential for a material universe to exist without annihilating itself back into pure radiation.

There are further manifestations sexual paradox in the partially conflicting assumptions of relativity and quantum theory in their treatment of space and time.

Fig 3: Biological tissues (right) display a fractal architecture on ascending scales from the molecule to the organism in a manner reminiscent of the Mandelbrot set (left). This may be more than a mere analogy. Symmetry-breaking results in symmetry-broken structures - atoms - in which positive nuclei are orbited by negatively charged electrons. The resulting interaction between the electromagnetic force and the electron's charge distribution is highly non-linear resulting in chemical bonding. These non-linearities are not resolved by covalent or ionic bonding, giving rise to a chain of cooperative weak-bonding effects, which enable the action of large protein enzymes (lysozyme with substrate centre) and the formation of supra-molecular complexes and cell organelles. The architecture of tissues is thus a consequence of the symmetry-breaking of the fundamental forces.

These symmetry-breakings are essential for conscious life to exist, because the asymmetric arrangement of matter results in a complete symmetry-breaking of electromagnetic charge with respect to the nuclear forces, which is subject to highly non-linear energetics as a result in the effects of distributed charge on wave orbitals, resulting in the chemical bond. It thus gives rise not only to atoms, but molecules, and molecular complexes. The non-linear nature of chemical bonding means the forces are never fully resolved at any stage and display a spectrum of cooperative weak bonding effects. These are able to generate the fractal molecular structures of biology from cell organelles to whole tissues, and ultimately to the conscious brain, making it a final interactive result of cosmic symmetry-breaking.

Fig 4: Human sexual symmetry-breaking at the single celled level (top left) and organismic level (top right).
Symmetry-broken prisoners dilemma matrix (bottom left) and cusp catastrophe (bottom right).

3: Strategic Sexual Paradox and Human Evolution

If we come back for a moment to the biological realm, at a single celled-level we are profoundly symmetry-broken. The fertilization of an ovum by one of a multitude of sperm is reminiscent of the wave particle complementarity of fig 1, and this may reflect more than a mere analogy and represent a deeper quantum complementarity in biology. Sperms have evolved to become little more than motile particulate DNA with almost all their organelles digested to avid cytoplasmic warfare. By contrast ova, while also containing a full complement of DNA are solely responsible for cytoplasmic inheritance and the continuity of the cytoplasm itself and have evolved to make a split second wave excitation-triggered fast reaction to discriminate the statistical rain of prodding sperms into a single wave-particle fertilization event at least reminiscent of reduction of the wave packet.

Here we are talking only about binary fusion sex, but there are other forms of pan-sexuality and sexual paradox in the biological realm, from bacteria and viruses, up through fungi, which demonstrate the versatility and universality of the principle, running back to the source of life itself. Bacteria and viral elements share an ecosystemic relationship, where viruses and extra-chromosomal plasmids act as sexual agents, promoting active conjugation and the exchange of genetic material through viral transfer, even between different species of bacteria. Fungi also have forms of conjugation sex, which can permit up to 22 different sexual strains, instead of the mere 2 of fusion sex. The gene which precipitated fusion sexuality may also have been an autonomous 'jumping gene' which, unlike the two sexual partners, who can contribute only half their DNA to their offspring, managed to contribute its entire genome, to cause sexual determination, just as mitochondrial genomes continue to do in the maternal line.

The Prisoners' Dilemma is a famous strategic paradox in game theory which arises, when two agents are caught in a situation where they can both gain a moderate benefit from cooperating but because of the high payoffs for successful defection, each is tempted into betraying the other, resulting in both receiving a negative outcome when both spill the beans implicating one another. The classic situation is two prisoners who are tempted to betray one another to get off a serious charge, but it also applies to situations from nuclear confrontation to evolutionary competition, and in particular the polarized reproductive strategies of the two sexes of a species, neither of which can escape the other, but each of which is evolving to take advantage wherever possible. When modeled dynamically, the Prisoners' Dilemma results in unstable dynamics on a cusp between cooperation and outright defection, as shown in the lower right of fig 4.

In all higher animal species, each is also running an evolutionary Red Queen race (running while standing still), just as occurs between parasites and their prey, because, while one sex is evolving to pursue a strategy to replicate their own genes as effectively as possible, given the sexual prisoner's dilemma of sharing half your genes, the other sex is doing the same, leading in many species, from fruit flies to sea urchins, to outright genetic warfare, where the male may literally try to poison the female to cause her to be able to bear only his current offspring, or to strategically break through the egg's defenses, with compensating reactions from the female in each case.

The reproductive strategies of female and male organisms are also as significantly symmetry-broken as sperm and ovum. From the moment the two gametes became polarized to avoid cytoplasmic gene warfare, the investments of the female organism became fundamentally different from the male because the larger size and smaller number of her eggs causes the female to have a much higher reproductive investment per offspring then the male. In live-bearing mammals, whose females get pregnant and lactate and thus have a huge parenting investment in a small number of offspring, this difference is at a peak.

Time lapse video of pregnancy shows just how symmetry-broken the human sexes are.

In all animals, because of the higher investment of the female in reproductive parenting and the greater investment of males in fertilizing as many females as possible, females tend to be choosy and try to select males with the best genes. Female reproductive choice is thus paramount in humans as it is in all mammalian species, although given our strong pair bonding, mutual mate choice is also a major player.

In mammals the XY form of chromosome-based sexuality results in XY males with unique expression of a single X, while XX females collapse one or other of their two X's in all somatic cells including the brain, to avoid poisoning the non-sex cell lines, resulting in a chimera of brain X-expression, just as in a (female) tortoise-shell cat's patchy coat. Partly due to their unique X expression, male have a much higher variation in natural intelligence. This puts mammalian females in the best position to select males with good X genes, many of which figure in brain development, as well as good genes on the other chromosomes.

In humans, mammalian sexual polarization has reached a further climax, due to the massive and risky nature of human pregnancy and the long term parenting required for human development. Thus, despite our lip service to being culturally defined by a common intellectual endowment, the reproductive strategies of the two human sexes are maximally polarized, by comparison with just about all animal species.

This state of sexual polarization may explain both the evolution of human super-intelligence and the emergence of human culture, art and intellectual discovery. The unstable dynamic of the cusp on which the polarized prisoner's game of sexual paradox occurs, is where reproductive choice has its most powerful effect. The Red Queen race of mutual mate selection, biased by female reproductive choice may have put Homo sapiens in a position where choosy females favouring good hunting, art and music, story-telling, and supportive and resourceful parenting in their men folk, repeatedly selected for the best genes for emergent super-intelligence, the female generations retaining the same genes in a way which may have promoted their own astuteness of choice, leading to a runaway peacock's tail of intelligence and social complexity.

Fig 5: Top-left Male (left) and female (right) language areas show differing degrees of lateralization. Bottom-right: Difference in stroke locations causing aphasia (language loss) in men and women. Top-right: Differences in gray and white matter utilization indicative of different cortical couplings. Bottom-right: Differences in amygdala expression when faced with a fearful scene suggesting male targeted and female context-related focus.

There is also evidence for sexual symmetry-breaking in brain function. Men tend to have superior targeting and mental rotation and females better recognition by landmark. Female humans also tend to have less lateralized speech areas, more connections between the hemispheres and greater natural capacity for early language acquisition and may have originated human speech through common gathering, following the grape-vine of gossip about sexual relationships essential for reproductive success, and 'mother-talk' with their infants, while men spent more time in silent vigil, hunting. Brain lateralization has a deep evolutionary basis in distinguishing predator and prey strategies, is driven by testosterone and correlates with greater male involvement in hunting for sexual favours.

These considerations eliminate from human emergence both 'Flintstones' man the hunter scenarios where men secure women by clubbing and abduction, and patriarchally enforced marriage choices under threat of dire penalties for adultery. These by contrast inhibit the evolution of super-intelligence, because the male sex, which should be subject to primary selection, is preventing evolution taking place, by repressing female reproductive choice. There is a deep reason for this - paternity uncertainty. Men do not produce live young, as women do, and thus, in addition to their heightened sense of mortality from not bearing live young, they fear the offspring of a female partner may be another man's child, so they are liable to attempt wholesale defection against female reproductive choice through gaining control of institutions of culture, society and religion.

Fig 6: Several religious creation cosmologies involve sexual paradox, including (a) Tantra (top left), where the universe is a coitus of mind and body that has become fragmented into the plethora of phenomenal existence, the Tao (lower left) where nature is the complementation of creative yang and receptive yin and 'the way that can be told is not the countless way', the 'Elohim of Genesis 1 creating humanity 'male and female in our likeness' (modern rendering centre). However the Eden creation story (right) begins a tragic defection, setting a lone God in conflict with the primal human pair over their presumed sexual transgression, leading to the fall from paradise.

4: Sexual Paradox and its Breakdown in the Religious Imperative

Several of the key religious creation cosmologies agree with the sexually paradoxical origin we have seen in the first two sections.

The Tantric origin conceives the cosmos as a deep coitus between Shiva as the observing cosmic mind and Shakti as the integrated material universe. As the coitus disengages, and the experience fragments into maya, or illusion, this cosmic consciousness becomes divided into separate conscious beings observing the plethora of phenomena of the world around us.

The Tao is likewise a cosmology of nature, in which two inter-dependent principles receptive yin and creative yang lie at the source of all phenomena and any attempt at fully explaining it lies in paradox because in Lao Tsu's own words 'the way that can be told is not the countless way'.

The 'Elhoistic origin ('Elohim is the [male] plural of God) in Genesis 1 is also sexual in archetype, since Adam and Eve are made male and female 'in our likeness' implying the godhead is a sexual dyad in partnership, as in polytheistic religions, from Sumeria to Hinduism, as it is in the creation stories of many ethnic peoples.

Fig 6b: The Fall from Eden like the Tantric origin begins in a state of sexually paradoxical union.

In the 'Yahwistic' origin in Eden of Genesis 2 also begins with a sexually paradoxical union, as Adam and Eve are separated from one flesh, which Jewish folklore suggests was a kind of Janus with both female and male attributes.

This is similar to the soul mates presented by Aristophanes in Plato's Symposium, according to which humans originally consisted of four arms, four legs, and a single head made of two faces, but Zeus feared their power and split them all in half, condemning them to spend their lives searching for the other half to complete them - a kind of reverse Tantric origin undoing the Fall.

The Red Thread of Fate legend of China and Japan that tells that the gods tie an invisible red string around the ankles of men and women who are destined to be soul mates and will one day marry each other. The two people connected by the red thread are destined lovers, regardless of time, place or circumstances. This magical cord may stretch or tangle, but never break.

However in Eden there is now an emerging tragic sexual breakdown in the cosmology. The now lone God YHVH patriarchally makes Eve out of the rib of Adam, subjugating Chawa, the Mother of All Living, to a secondary existence. YHVH then curses humanity and throws them out of paradise, ostensibly for eating the fruit of knowledge of good and evil, which Eve mistook for the wisdom of the Tree of Life. However we can see from the fig leaves, that this is actually because of their sexual transgression in the act of carnal knowledge, for which both are cursed with mortality, with the woman henceforth doomed to the pain of childbirth, and obedience to her husband, just as the man is doomed to obedience to God by the sweat of his brow.

There a fundamental change in God's nature from beneficent creator in partnership to a jealous moral deity and wishful lover of the bride Israel, who curses the people if they stray from worshiping Him and Him alone, despite the fact that in Proverbs, Hochmah or Wisdom declares she was with Him from everlasting before his works of old - i.e. in the very cosmic origin.

The role of the moral deity has several functions which can also be though of in social evolutionary terms. By making everyone obliged to worship an unseen God who is claimed to be able to see into our very souls, it strongly encourages moral action towards one's co-religionists, discourages internal defection within a society and enables a society to become robust and dominant in the face of external competitors, leading to large conservative societies which convert or annihilate their competitors. While religious cultures have certainly acted to impose such processes, they may also arise from a genetic component which is reinforced reproductively by the imposed cultural constraints.

The societal role is coupled with a more insidious and frankly diabolical role, in repressing female reproductive choice, because religions, particularly monotheistic religions of the 'one God' have also set in place patriarchal marriage laws and dire punishments, such as stoning for adultery, which are generally aimed at punishing women for their perceived transgression, in exercising any degree of autonomous reproductive, or partner choice, in the face of imposed patriarchal laws. In several major religions these imperatives are also designed to encourage demographic expansion of the religious following by unmitigated reproduction.

Contrary to the claim that, unlike the false pagan idols, the abstract God of creation acting in history is the one 'true' God, we shall see shortly that this idea is neither new, nor a 'superior' development.

Fig 7: Sabbatical creation of Genesis 1 (centre) surrounded by Christian (above) and Muslim (below) views of the supernatural demonstrate that these are products of the mental realm sharing affinities with imagination, dreaming, prophetic vision and hallucination, rather than being descriptions of any form of objective physical reality.

Religious descriptions of the greater cosmos including heaven and hell share features which clearly place them in the mainstream of conscious mind constructs, rather than physical world descriptions. While the sabbatical creation can be forgiven for its flat Earth cosmology with the 'Elohim placing stars in the dome of the heavens, and evoking the plants before the sun and moon, later descriptions of paradise, heaven and hell in Christian and Muslim theology have much closer affinities with the dream time and visionary imagination than any model of reality consistent with the physical world.

Both show compensatory attempts to resolve sexual contradictions in their imposed beliefs. The Christian heaven is permeated by sexless angels, as a reflection of the belief that the carnal sin would be undone in eternal life, who instead sport large feathered wings, which lost all meaning when Galileo demonstrated the Earth orbits round the Sun and we discovered the upper atmosphere converges towards the lifeless vacuum of space and would provide no lift for such airy appendages. By contrast the Muslim paradise is packed with seventy-two black eyed houris made virginal every morning for the insatiable sexual pleasure of men, again violating the procreative essence of sexual existence, and the equally biological nature of women. Both in turn look to a hellish day of judgment when the final cookie crumbles and the moral deity exerts his terrible final accounting, launching the moral imperative from social evolution to fully fledged cosmological catastrophe and with it promoting one evangelical path or another as the final rulers of the planet and its people.

These extremes of apocalyptic utopia amid violence and tumult, demographic inflation, and the frank repression of female reproductive choice, present a significant risk to the future of humanity and the fecundity of planet Earth. They represent a fundamental break down of sexual paradox, to form a fascist rule of order in frank contempt of the sustainable continuity of life. It is essential for the world to address the fascist utopian aims of world religions to engender a world where ecosystemic survival and the continued survival and evolution of the human race will be fostered instead of end-of-day conflict.

Many features of Western society from economic short term boom and bust, winner take all venture capital exploitation, rape of the planet in tragedy of the commons type resource exploitation, and the vast differences in wealth between the rich and the poor all appear to derive from the types of gain and advantage of spermatogenic reproductive strategy, risking mortality to achieve disproportionate competitive fortune, in the absence of any countervailing long-term out-front female reproductive investment strategy that protects successive generations of offspring and the ecosystems in which they have to survive.

To see how this situation may have arisen and to help us gain a more sustainable long-term solution to the problem, we need to look deeper into human evolution over the last 150,000 years and the emergence of human culture and religion from the smaller social groupings of ancient gatherer-hunters.

Fig 8: (a-c) Three evolutionary trees of the root of the mitochondrial evolutionary tree of humanity
which is the basis for the "Out of Africa" evolutionary Eve hypothesis (d).

5: Human Evolutionary Origins, Sexual Paradox and the Religious Quest

One way of testing the idea of human cultural explosion through sexual paradox in reproductive choice is to examine the history, cultural practices and genetics of some of our most ancient gatherer-hunter populations, whose social patterns have changed little over tens of thousands of years. Good candidates for such investigation are the !Kung-San Bushmen of the Kalahari and some of the Pygmy peoples of the Congo Basin, both of whom have an ancient presence close to our African origins and a genetic footprint and history that places them close to the root of human cultural origins.

By a variety of measures, the !Kung appear very close to the root of our evolutionary tree. Mitochondrial measures which first advanced the Out of Africa hypothesis genetically, consistently show the !Kung-San as closer than any other group to the common root of the African Eve. Further refinements of the mitochondrial tree have exposed an ancient division in !Kung mitochondrial evolution involving a deep split separating Khoisan mitochondrial inheritance from other groups, including those migrating out of Africa, and a deep division between two Khoisan types L0k and L0d going back 140,000 years, suggesting a separation of some 100,000 years, possibly caused by long term drought in Africa. This is thus consistent with a continuing !Kung presence in Africa going back up to 150,000 years.

Fig 9: Human divergence trees calculated by single nucleotide polymorphisms top left , bottom right.
The remainder are trees for haplotypes and copy number variation between populations.
San are very close to the common root.

Other genetic measures, including autosomal single nucleotide polymorphisms, haplotypes and copy number between populations also put the !Kung very close to our evolutionary root. Male inherited Y-chromosome studies show a more complicated picture with some evidence for cross breeding with an Adam genome deriving from the Ethiopian region, consistent with human migration in which migrating males take local wives.

Given these genetic measures and the long lived, slowly changing, demographically static nature of the !Kung way of life, which has preserved the high mitochondrial diversity of the !Kung female population, it is pertinent to examine the patterns of !Kung socio-sexual interaction, and their cultural and religious traditions to see how they reflect on our vastly more recent cultural developments from the time of the Sumerians on.

Fig 10: Nisa in old age

When the gods gave people sex, they gave us a wonderful thing.
Sex is food: just as people cannot survive without eating,
hunger for sex can cause people to die!
Kung saying - Nisa.

Fig 11: Fulton cave drawing 1000 BC celebrating the first menstrual rite, Drakensberg Mountains, Natal

Paradoxically at the end of a long period of patriarchal repression of women's rights and choices in major civilizations over the last 4,000 years, !Kung women have been noted to have retained a similar degree of reproductive choice to modern Western women, although there is some physical abuse by their men folk and the male elders try to exert a degree of influence over marriage and sexual relationships by endeavouring to define culture and set rules about marital disputes. Although they follow a nominally patrilineal inheritance, it is recognized that women will traditionally go to the maternal household to assist with their first birth. The personal accounts and experiences of a !Kung woman pursuing her various sexual relationships in !Kung society are eloquently recorded in the book 'NISA' by Marjorie Shostak.

As an indication of the ancient influence of women over sexual favours, southern Bushmen women last century were reputed to refuse sex unless given meat, forcing the men to end up becoming arrested for rustling cattle.

Fig 12: Modern Eland ceremony celebrating a girl's menarche.

The !Kung retain respect for menarche as a sacred process of immense ’spiritual’ power, rather than being ‘unclean’, celebrated in the Eland ceremony, whose records go back as far a Fulton's Cave 1000 BC, in which the woman is conceived as being so powerful that if a young warrior sets eyes on her he may be magically put off his hunting prowess.

!Kung religion embraces abstract deities with consorts which belie the claim that the notion of an abstract creator God acting in history is a new and superior development, or any evidence that such a God is thus real and absolute or part of a destined progression from native ignorance to religious enlightenment. They embrace their deities metaphysically in contrast to the compulsive, superstitious rule and fear-based worship of modern world religions, such as Christianity and Islam.

Bushmen believe in the existence of two gods: a greater god manifesting the creative force and a lesser god invoking the malevolent forces of uncertainty and misfortune, each with a shadowy consort.
They have many names, but the !Kung Bushmen most commonly call them Gao!na and //Gauwa. The Bushmen do not see these as a good and bad god. When a missionary inquired into a Bushman's ideas of good and bad he was told it was 'good' to sleep with another man's wife, but 'bad' if he slept with yours.

Gao!na, the !Kung Great God, using one of his seven divine names, created himself: "I am Hishe. I am unknown, a stranger. No one can command me. I am a bad thing. I follow my own path.”

Then he created a Lesser God who lives in the western sky where the sun sets; and after this two wives for himself and for the Lesser God. Gao!na, tallest of the Bushmen, was in his earthly existence a great magician and trickster with supernatural powers, capable of assuming the form of an animal, a stone or anything else he wished, and who changed people into animals and brought the dead back to life.

Their creation story reads poetically along very similar lines to the Sabbatical creation of Genesis ...

But as the Great God who lives beside a huge tree in the eastern sky, he is the source and custodian of all things. He created the earth with holes in it where water could collect and water, the sky and rain both the gentle 'female' rain and the fierce 'male' rain thunder and lightning, the sun, moon, stars and wind. He created all the plants that grow on the earth. He created the animals and painted their individual colours and markings, and gave them all names. Then came human beings, and he put life into them; and gave to them all the weapons and implements they now have, and he implanted in them the knowledge of how to take all these things for themselves.

Thus their hunting and gathering way of life was ordained from the very beginning and Gao!na ordained that when they died they should become spirits, //Gerais, who would live in the sky with him and serve him. He set the pattern of life for all things, each in accordance with its own rules.

The !Kung also practice mystical union with the unknown in ancient trance dancing rites which are also recorded on rock drawings and currently consume cannabis in a manner similar to Indian sadhus. They thus carry both a tradition of abstract religion with a sophisticated philosophical streak as well as a mystical shamanic tradition of direct contact with the ineffable. There is thus no evidence that modern world religions constitute a progression from primitive beliefs and more of an implication that such aspects of religious experience and practice may have a genetic component.

Fig 13: Modern !Kung family.

The picture of human sexual relationships conveyed by !Kung society strongly suggests that human cultural emergence did indeed arise from a social climate in which each sex retained sufficient autonomy over reproductive choice, so that each had to run while standing still resulting in the evolution of super-intelligence from a state of sexual paradox.

This is also supported by deeper evolutionary traits in Homo sapiens, indicative of evolution driven by female reproductive choice, including a lunar coupled sexual cycle involving menstruation, rather than declared estrus, concealed ovulation depriving males of any easy opportunity to know when a female is fertile, pronounced ecstatic female orgasm and the loss of a bony penis in men requiring male sex to demonstrate a genuine indicator of genetic fitness.

Archaeological evidence from southern Africa also points to an early cultural emergence up to 150,000 years ago and to cultural patterns consistent with both jewelery and make-up consistent with women being free and able to make themselves beautiful and attractive to the opposite sex. While there is no evidence how these were used or by which or either sex, the use of ochre is consistent with the need for women to appear nubile and healthy and is associated also with the menstruation.

The prominent appearance of both beads and ochre contrasts completely with the repression of women's adornment in conservative burqa and niqab clad Muslim societies, where any attempt by a woman to ornament her beauty is regarded as punishable by whipping or arrest.

This implies that such religious sexual repression, which has also been shared to varying extents by other patriarchal religions as well as Islam, is a modern aberration caused by male defection against a more ancient pattern of female reproductive choice to which we are indebted for the evolutionary emergence of human super-intelligence, culture art, music and good husbanding and parenting, and must needs respect and preserve into the future for our species to survive and prosper.

Fig 14: Ancient beads and marked ochre. Left: Ostrich shell beads Yoilangalani river Serengeti National Park (c 40,000 - 110,000)
Centre: Scored ochre block. Blombos (c 77,000). Ochre use dating back to 164,000 years has been found at Pinnacle Point in South Africa. Right: Pea-sized Nassarius kraussianus shells pierced and showing wear from leather thongs. Blombos cave (c 75,000).

The discovery of carvings on a snake-shaped rock along with 70,000-year-old spearheads nearby has also dramatically pushed back the earliest evidence for ritual behavior that could be called religion. The finding comes from a cave in the Tsodilo Hills of Botswana, a mecca of sorts for the local San people, who call it the Mountain of the Gods. The 6m rock bears a striking resemblance to a snake, including a mouth-like gash at the end. Hundreds of small notches are covered the rock. Entrants to the cave apparently made these markings to enhance the snake illusion by creating the impression of scales and movement. Snakes feature prominently in the traditions and the mythology of the San, sometimes called the Bushmen.

Fig 15: Tsodilo Hills Cave