Field Report 13:
Cook Islands - April 13, 1999

By Jeff Bell
 

Greetings from Raratonga, the largest island in the Cook Islands, a rare place indeed!

Perhaps you need to get your bearings, as I did. Start at New Zealand. Go North, into the lower tropics. You hit Fiji. Go RIGHT, Tonga and Samoa. Go farther RIGHT, Cook Islands. (Farther RIGHT some more will get you to French Polynesia (Tahiti), and further somemore, Easter Island being about the only dry spot, a speck in fact, between Tahiti and South America.

Raratonga is an orderly little bit of paradise. Neatly round, 31km in circumference, jagged mountainous green middle, 10k people, no roads except along the coast, neat tourquoise band of lagoon all the way round, sandy beaches. Coconut trees.

The information highway (you're on it) has a single outpost, a well built station here. It comes attached to a two story building, a Telecom office, with a gigantic dish next to it pointed upwards. It's large. You could serve up a big cereal bowl of a half-dozen minivans in this thing. No problem. It's just a block off the main highway in the center of town, but there's nothing behind this behind this building except the King Kong peaks in the background. I just know some scientist in the future is going to get his carbon dating wrong and, along with the nearby landing strip, conclude that this was the site of an alien visitation. The dish IS in fact talking to space, and the airstrip, well, it clearly says "-". That'll be academically debated, assumed to be connected with some sort of monotheist belief.

Yes, the information highway, the fact is wonderful, but filled with dodgy potholes, poorly lit, grotesquely lacking in signage, especially with respect to on and off ramps. Consequently it DOES help to have good split second instincts, nanosecond synapses so to speak, and if you don't, well, a healthy dose of self-control.

Case in point, 'New Zealand, Part II', a 4 hour tome, mass or mess of words, designed to describe a host of outdoorsyness, was self-destructed on launch. 2 weeks ago in Auckland, just before I was leaving, which threw me into the proverbial funk. 2 hours of the 4 were lost due to a silent (no sign whatsoever) 2 hour Hotmail timeout and a series of wrong recovery moves. In Fiji, again, well, the highway is about like the roads, poorly paved. The only reasonably priced 'on-ramp' was one where the connection broke every 5-10 minutes. I gave up.

For those who subconsciously believe that danger increases with increase in physical separation distance, don't worry, I'm fine. Normally you wouldn't hear from me for 2 weeks (if you think about it), and I'm not sure my finances, wits, stamina, will keep me sending messages throughout the summer. I'd like to, I'm most frustrated that I'm only communicating a fraction of what's in my notebook and not in my notebook. South America (May) may be impossible as well. We'll see.

As to tourist risk, I can't comment, except to say: I am having a good time and I was told that Raratonga has exactly 18 people in jail, so this place is probably safer than home. (I actually visited the jail, a minimum facility sort of place with a 3 foot high barbed wire fence. Unless they highjack a plane, the convicts aren't going far.)

This place is the most relaxing place so far, I'm primed, pre-primed, pre-pre-primed for this sort of life. Beaches is an anagram for paradise for me (I was never good at those things). The only danger here—coconuts. Yeh, coconuts. Kinda funny, hard to take super serious, because the coconut is...just funny in and of itself

I took a side trip to Aitutaki, a lagoon-like atoll, (Heaven really. Really.) where the first thing I was told was "don't sit under a coconut tree". When the coconuts fall, which they do often, my mind fills in the blank as a direct hit to the head. A sickening sound. Not the leg, or the edge of the shoe. But a direct hit to the noggin. Conservative thinking. Snuffed by a coconut in paradise is just too strange to contemplate it would seem, but your mind just has a hard time making sense of hammers falling out of trees at random.

One big nut came down one night and must have hit something hard, the sound was a hollow, bassy, musical tone. Another time a whole bunch came down at once. The usual is a direct hit to sand or earth: a deep "thud", usually preceded by a quick forewarning 'whoosh'. (Which you do a quick search/rewind to determine whether that would have been enough to react on. Not.). Distances vary, the distant ones you just get the 'thud', all bass, high frequencies filtered by all the intervening green leafy matter.

Once I was sitting on the beach. A long, long beach. No one there, beautiful calm tourquiose lagoon, skies of a thousand hues of blue, white, and grey. In paradise. Just drifting off when a single coconut came down behind me somewhere. A message came through loud and clear: you're day will come, someday, not now, (not with a coconut), but it will come. OK I got it, now I'll get back to paradise, thank you.

English

Everyone speaks English here. All the signs are in English. I'm still enjoying that advantage on my journey EAST. Same with Fiji. In a Fiji village, we sat around with the villagers (a convenient excuse for the men to drink some kava perhaps), and I can only wonder how early visitors to these lands must have stumbled along without a common language, enduring miscommunication after miscommunication. Had to be painfully awkward.

Of course "OK" is the most recognizable American import to modern English around the world, but I would say that "you know" is fighting for a beachhead as well. OK seems to have some utilitarian value, 'you know' actually seems to be pure fluff, flavoring, ketchup perhaps, zero calories. Flotsom, a weed. To discuss it, as I am now, is in the end, meaningless. Don't know if I mentioned seeing the BBC program where the Commerwealthers debated and philosophize on different accents, with the British fellow infuriatingly getting the last word, making things worse, forgetting that what he says will change nothing. People hundreds of generations from now won't hold our accents against us or the proliferation of McDonald's or a host of other concerns debated at pub level. But they will care if we drove the bald eagle or the kiwi or the Bengal tiger to extinction. That's big picture. No fixing that, a big black mark on our generation if that happens.

The Why of It All

I could tell you (and would like to) all about snorkeling at Muri beach, views of Aitutaki, a host of interesting characters, sunsets, sunrises, blah, blah, blah. Don't get me wrong, these things are worth some words. But at $1.75NZ per 5 minutes, I want to digress from travel to ...bigger stuff. Metaphysics. Creation Theory. Big Bang, Unifying Force, Universes.

Now this is one of those subjects that can kill a party, wreck FUN. So you been warned, you can stop right here. No complainin'.

Start with Logic. The thing of courtrooms. The Greeks championed it. But today, it seems to fade into the background when it comes to most personal beliefs. Does it have to? Take the logic of vegetarianism as a mundane example. Ironclad in many ways. But most lives don't follow it's logic. Logic doesn't rule lives in many cases. But what if you were to seek to make logic your guide, where would that you? Into a Godless black hole with no spiritual beliefs? No guiding moral code?

To begin this little journey, let's start with the logic of our ancestors, who worshipped the Sun. Ra, the Sun God, giver of life, sight. Immortal, powerful, reaching all people at once. Reliable, generous. A tough god, the punishment was blindness if you stared directly too long (interesting that in older times, in the presence of the King/Queen, you weren't supposed to look right at them). The Sun was a god, not the only one, but the greatest god.

Now the "logic" of this starting point followed that the Sun was not the only god. Clouds and wind, for instance, could mute the power of the Sun for instance. Hence a collection of gods was necessary, and that's where the variation, all the slippery muck arose too, that came with sorting out all those immortal forces. Who was greater than who. Who do you pray to first?

Now we come to the idea of the Earth being round. Surely somebody, many bodies in fact, had pondered the notion, even if they were forced to discard the notion in the end. The logical clues: the round moon, the round sun, the round stars, the circling stars, the arc of the sun and moon, eclipses, meteors, shooting stars.

But a round Earth, while true, posed a whole lot of problems that made such a theory laughable. A joke. Falling off the round Earth was the main problem. But the REAL problem was that it made US seem—so much less important. It would not jibe with many religions, would require them to be modified, or tossed out. Difficult to toss out or modify a religion. Doesn't go down well with the faithful.

So in the space of a few thousand years, humans went from beings too dense to be able to perform addition to amazing things—knowing the structure of things small and large which cannot be seen with the human eye.

And what about the major religions of today? When were they born? the core of their belief systems? 2,000 years ago, some more, some less. But all during a "middle period", in difficult times, when life was hard, very hard, the whole was flat and God was up above, in heaven. Above. The multiple gods of the past were discarded, both the animist and the gods based on observed phenomena, in favor of a single God, ambiguous. An interventionist God in many cases, perhaps a concept without "logic", and some which claimed "uniqueness", unique access to God and the afterlife, concepts that "logic" would define as negative big picture view (think of all those who aren't going to make it.).

The Bible, exaggerations, exaggerations, worse than fish stories. The end of the Earth, which save all from hard lives was welcomed in those days. Ever thought of what it would be like to be attacked by a machette? That was essentially the weapon of the day back then. Bad, bad. It was a cruel time, and out of it came a devotion, a worship, to sweetness, kindness that even logic defines as irrefutably RIGHT today. God is Love, an immortal, indestructable, timeless belief which could never be wrong.

Religions evolve, but slowly. Man's scientific knowledge—the scientific methodology based on logic providing this knowlege—piles up at an exponential rate. Mountains of evidence on evolution. The secrets of space and now perhaps, (would be a "positive" finding in the logical sense) life out in space.

All this causing ever widening schisms in current religions between those that believe and those that ... can't possibly believe.

So where is all this going? Paining you with discourse on my own personal beliefs, am I? Yes, but here's the part that I find interesting, just out of the oven, so I'm spitting it out because it feels "fresh", so take it with a grain of salt:

(1) The "Design" of the Universe "makes sense"

What if, just what if, it turns out that the universe was "designed" (some signs in science that suggest this—the universal physical laws that seem consistently applied across the universe [suggests fixed design/unfixed internal evolution, the fundamental "building block" nature of the atomic level), look at how it make a lot of sense that life is isolated into "packets". What I mean is (1a) that multiple finite, regenerative individual lives is a "greater" concept that single, long living lives (1b) it makes sense to separate lives completely (unique lives) if a life cannot be guaranteed to be "successful", (1c) it makes sense to have a lifespan be limited and able to regenerate a new life if a life cannot be guaranteed to be "successful", (1d) it makes sense to separate lives into bunches (planets) because no one bunch can be guaranteed to be "successful" (no cross contamination), (1e) it makes sense for regenerated lifes to be similar to the makeup of the parent, regeneration being a primitive indicator that the parent wanted to "live on", (1f) it appears that universe itself lives and dies, a safeguard that harm cannot be eternal, (1g) the universe is stable, it cannot it appears be destroyed (hasn't so far) from within or without.

(2) There may be a purpose in the logic afterall

In such a logically "designed" universe, where's the spirituality? No guarantees? Perhaps there are no safeguards, but it is a truth that lives "tend" to the good (they want to live on). AND...there is great complexity in the world and the living experience has rich limits in terms of its capacity for enjoying the living experience. But in this scenario, lives come to an end, there doesn't appear to be any purpose to living, and the possibility of danger/evil/suffering is something the individual along with the support of others can only try his or her best to avoid.

So let's make up a purpose, at random perhaps, but a sort of best fit with logic that I can think of for the moment: Eventually we, life, will evolve if luck has it, to be able to create other universes. Perhaps we will make the universe out of the matter in this universe, perhaps not, we don't know. It's not a bad goal. We aim to be the force that creates life on a massive scale. Perhaps improve on the design along the way too. A LONG term goal. Lots of team work needed to get there, lots of time to enjoy your own life along the way, since it idn't gonna happen to you in your own life.

And as to the ending of your life... That's always a tough one, always has been, always will be. It requires a belief which is exactly the same as is taught in all religions today—to look out for others, just as you look out for yourself. That would be the future generations, those who will live lives very much like your own, if you have taken care not to muck things up. So there's the tie back to spirituality, to that universal—God is, and has to be Love.

That's what I think, right now, right this moment on the Cook Islands. Finding a way to make my religion match the speed of evolution of science. Can be done. Speed of the information highway. Nanosecond synapses. Gotta have 'em, gotta work 'em.

Cheerio, do what's best, enjoy day.

********** Jeff
 

To read more Field Reports, click here.