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I remember when I first saw those big red caterpillar busses in Los Angeles I thought the worlds long anticipated sci-fi image was finally starting to take shape...this may have been a superficial observation of a rather mundane vehicle, but Its been striking me lately how much world is changing. Well, yes, you might say, about fuckin time you picked up on this, its been changing, but my point is, people are finally noticing.
Its made me realize, humans are just not optimized to understand intellectual concepts emotionally, it takes direct experience to be emotionally cued in, direct experience is processed more immediately, striking many more physioemotional chords. This isnt to say the intellectual capacities of the human brain are useless, in fact, it seems the thinking capacities of the human brain are finally tuned to comprehend the complex socio-economic networks weve built up just in time to consider re-arranging them.
Being a proponant for the evolution of the human mind, I find it extremely interesting that we find ourselves in the midst of an environmental crisis that requires us to consider the abovementioned complex, non-linear networks and their larger scale impacts, particularly in light of how thoroughly entangled our lives are with petroleum. It seems to me that the human brain has only recently, in the last several decades, evolved to a point where it can retroactively comprehend the networks it has unwittingly manifested. We were always building a non-linearly networked world, our brains just didnt quite compute the sum of its interconnected parts.
But first, how did we arrive at this greater level of across the brain interconnectivity that enables our timely comprehension of greater levels of complexity? I can see in rather plain view two moments in history when the human brain was modified towards complexity on a massive scale. One was the widespread use of LSD, a drug with the potential to speed up the rate at which connections are made across the brain. Next, the computer revolution, which allowed us to instantly access and incorporate the wealth of knowledge collected online into our thought processes and work methods to simultaneously operate in many different mediums that mutually inform and enrich one another.
Now what becomes interesting is whether we can successfully disentangle ourselves from the tightly woven network of material products and processes that we acknowledge as unsustainable and leap into a more intelligent future?
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Here we are on a wild ride round the sun, every day moving incrementaly closer to this date 1/1, till December 31st rolls around, and suddenly we're bracing ourselves for that moment when we make it all the way around this arbitrary placemarker on the Earth's orbital path once again. The start of another wild ride. You'd expect the Earth's rotation to pick up speed. It's quite beautiful really, We made it round again! And the Earth didn't fall out of the sky! 
(let it be known that I wasn't raised with any sort of religion and have never fully explored the origins of the world's religions) and it was brought to my attention that in the beginning, the Christians were a much maligned minority. Though in retrospect my surprise is merely the byproduct of a certain ignorance, it also fascinated me that in the beginning, people were extremely resistant to a worldview that has held so much sway over the Western world for the past few centuries. This was the first bit of information that got me thinking about how hard/easy it is to revise the dominant reality paradigm. 
"conventional criterion of sanity." This criterion is just something we agree upon, and throughout the world the divide between insanity and sanity exists on a sliding scale. (in Holland the saying goes, "act normal, that's crazy enough." Meanwhile, the Truk islanders from the Western Pacific are so accustomed to getting lost at sea and experiencing the hallucinatory effects of isolation, insanity is a much more frequent, and therefore normal occurrence.) 
essentially had the same brain as modern man. In other words, you could throw a paleolithic baby into modern day Los Angeles and it would grow up just like a baby born yesterday and vice versa. 
