Thursday, December 2, 2010
2 things for sure
2 things to get straight: people are people. all suffer, nothing else bonds us like that. propaganda is everywhere. its been studied and refined, our feelings and thoughts are conditioned. media most evidently. to conclude: people suffer and people are manipulated.
Wednesday, April 28, 2010
Food Stuffs and Land Use
Lumped firmly in the Solutions category is Permaculture, with its emphasis on local food production and sensible energy designs. I have recently found a torrent of this book: Permaculture: A Designers Manual by Bill Mollison, Australian founder of permaculture, and suggest highly, that you too find it too. As well, Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser and the Omnivores Dilemma by Michael Pollan are crucial reads to getting a sense of the industrial food systems; their extreme inefficiency and waste patterns, and the unholy terror exacted upon the animals, dirt systems, water systems, workers, and consumers of their uniform, bland product. Joel Salatin also provides us his hands-on multi-generational wisdom in You Can Farm and Everything I Want To Do Is Illegal.
Nothing can replace the reading experience and its fully imaginative powers, but videos are immediate and can implore the curious mind to seek the written word. So let this be a repository of resources regarding better and local ways to tend to our own health and the health of that which contains us all.
Bill Mollison:
Joel Salatin:
Michael Pollan:
Vandana Shiva:
Nothing can replace the reading experience and its fully imaginative powers, but videos are immediate and can implore the curious mind to seek the written word. So let this be a repository of resources regarding better and local ways to tend to our own health and the health of that which contains us all.
Bill Mollison:
Joel Salatin:
Michael Pollan:
Vandana Shiva:
Friday, April 23, 2010
Communicating and Great Themes
The Great Themes of this Dying Age are everywhere. They ooze out of televisions' marketing blitz and blare out of our stereos. They are the unknown agents in our chickens and cows and the unknowing agents intentionally produced through industrial schooling. There is the political two-party system that is laughably disassociated from the people's voice, with its perverted electoral college and federal reserve. There are the bloated, hidden cities that are American prisons, a product of the capital ethic and its rigid focus and ruthless morals. There remains the expansion of the American military machine and its 700 plus military bases in every corner of the globe. There is the great swirling trash vortex in the Pacific and the Gulf dead zone. Mountain top "mining" remains an acceptable form of industry "progress", as the streams and valley's absorb the obvious and natural brunt of this violence. Pharmaceutical companies dump inorganic waste, chemicals, and antibiotics into the human population which then flows straight into the ground waters, causing unknown and vast chemical disturbances, absorbed by all life-forms on Earth. The Cancer is all around us, in fact, cancer rates soar. Autism and depression rise. Obesity and human population boom like the "good times" will never end. Urban ugly sprawl. Cell phones and laptops zap our bodies with waves of electrical energy and we spend our days in cars, headphones and pods careening at ever faster rates. Isolated beings from self and other, from body and nature, and from ones own power, energy, and agency.
Looming ever background, are the Answers. Sociologists, linguists, and anthropologists have come to the same conclusions as physicists, mathematicians, and Eastern systems of thought; that culture and self are constructs, shifting regularities, not constant and therefor changeable, and wildly manipulatable. We know so many answers and have so much access to the Great Truths of the Human Experience and the Great Sea of Space, yet we do not teach the wisdom of our ancestors, we do not connect the old truths with the new truths, we do not synthesis these into our current reality, whereupon we should redress the old wisdom in contemporary language and de-mythologize how we think about Spirit, Religion, God and Energy. Instead, we get caught in words, symbols and manipulations, forgetting to extract the essence of the knowable human condition. We hold these powerful seeds, but withhold the necessary watering, preventing our becoming, fully human. For the necessary balance of spirit, mind and body, there are the Contemplative Traditions, most succinctly and fluidly expressed through the Buddhist teachings: sophisticated and balanced mindfulness of self (mind) and other (body). Largely, if not solely, our myriad problems, fall into one domain, pedagogy (all the forms learning takes). Faulty education has been rethought and reconsidered numerous times and no matter the form(s) that any of the solutions take, the key focus to real, functional, non-authoritarian education, is on the empowerment of the individuals' own agency. This is essentially creating and expanding the tools of critical thought, awareness of self (mind) and other (body), in order that, he or she can fully express themselves, and skillfully avoid the manipulations of cultural "common sense" or mind control (psychological slight of hand) methods, which attempt to suppress and co-opt ones full power and true potential. The power to grow, cultivate, love, change, think, feel, imagine, forgive. To frame his or her critical thinking within the basic recognition of the Interdependency of all life in the Great System that we all share, and depend upon, for our expression as awake, alive: this, is the role of education. School as we accept it today leaves us essentially tool-less to become anything more than a repeat of our inherited, narrow, and hostile cultural assumptions.
The work of this blog is to teach, expose, expand, and dialogue (thought that is a rare privilege) about the nature of our existential experience and the nature of our daily Work, and we have work to do. I try to not talk down or be condescending, I take seriously the role of explaining things better or from different points of view, if and when confusion should arise. I want you to teach me. I try to keep my ego out of it, but I am, in so many very specific ways, not a perfect human and I may offend, I may lash out, or speak in reactionary ways but this is the nature of challenging, gently, opinions and beliefs. The less precious we are to holding on to our beliefs, the better off we are. Let the old ones go and take more into consideration, take it all into consideration, but critically so, mindfully so.
I oftentimes think of blogs or facebook as tools of teaching. Certainly they are media, but all media has a point of view, and as the new keyword of the day will become, transparency is central to media: who is telling me that there was "collateral damage" in a Somalian air raid, or where does the money source of facebook, for instance, originate? Actually, facebook was a product of Harvard students and was initially an Ivy league forum, as well, the owner Mark Zuckerberg, has refused LARGE sums of money to sell his baby to Google and others. Regardless, I would most like this blog to become reference points in your intellectual and spiritual (even as this word sags under its own weight) journey, a place to learn and teach others from, and another place to establish symbiosis with curious people, so that the learning and the growing may never end, from all directions at once.
Looming ever background, are the Answers. Sociologists, linguists, and anthropologists have come to the same conclusions as physicists, mathematicians, and Eastern systems of thought; that culture and self are constructs, shifting regularities, not constant and therefor changeable, and wildly manipulatable. We know so many answers and have so much access to the Great Truths of the Human Experience and the Great Sea of Space, yet we do not teach the wisdom of our ancestors, we do not connect the old truths with the new truths, we do not synthesis these into our current reality, whereupon we should redress the old wisdom in contemporary language and de-mythologize how we think about Spirit, Religion, God and Energy. Instead, we get caught in words, symbols and manipulations, forgetting to extract the essence of the knowable human condition. We hold these powerful seeds, but withhold the necessary watering, preventing our becoming, fully human. For the necessary balance of spirit, mind and body, there are the Contemplative Traditions, most succinctly and fluidly expressed through the Buddhist teachings: sophisticated and balanced mindfulness of self (mind) and other (body). Largely, if not solely, our myriad problems, fall into one domain, pedagogy (all the forms learning takes). Faulty education has been rethought and reconsidered numerous times and no matter the form(s) that any of the solutions take, the key focus to real, functional, non-authoritarian education, is on the empowerment of the individuals' own agency. This is essentially creating and expanding the tools of critical thought, awareness of self (mind) and other (body), in order that, he or she can fully express themselves, and skillfully avoid the manipulations of cultural "common sense" or mind control (psychological slight of hand) methods, which attempt to suppress and co-opt ones full power and true potential. The power to grow, cultivate, love, change, think, feel, imagine, forgive. To frame his or her critical thinking within the basic recognition of the Interdependency of all life in the Great System that we all share, and depend upon, for our expression as awake, alive: this, is the role of education. School as we accept it today leaves us essentially tool-less to become anything more than a repeat of our inherited, narrow, and hostile cultural assumptions.
The work of this blog is to teach, expose, expand, and dialogue (thought that is a rare privilege) about the nature of our existential experience and the nature of our daily Work, and we have work to do. I try to not talk down or be condescending, I take seriously the role of explaining things better or from different points of view, if and when confusion should arise. I want you to teach me. I try to keep my ego out of it, but I am, in so many very specific ways, not a perfect human and I may offend, I may lash out, or speak in reactionary ways but this is the nature of challenging, gently, opinions and beliefs. The less precious we are to holding on to our beliefs, the better off we are. Let the old ones go and take more into consideration, take it all into consideration, but critically so, mindfully so.
I oftentimes think of blogs or facebook as tools of teaching. Certainly they are media, but all media has a point of view, and as the new keyword of the day will become, transparency is central to media: who is telling me that there was "collateral damage" in a Somalian air raid, or where does the money source of facebook, for instance, originate? Actually, facebook was a product of Harvard students and was initially an Ivy league forum, as well, the owner Mark Zuckerberg, has refused LARGE sums of money to sell his baby to Google and others. Regardless, I would most like this blog to become reference points in your intellectual and spiritual (even as this word sags under its own weight) journey, a place to learn and teach others from, and another place to establish symbiosis with curious people, so that the learning and the growing may never end, from all directions at once.
Saturday, April 3, 2010
Saturday, February 27, 2010
Today and the Other One
WEEK 1:
I wake up and I look around, and wonder, where is our wisdom? How many epochs of grandparents, babies, fathers, mothers, brothers, neighbors have there been? Yet we have no tangible tools to live well by. No output of healthy, whole societies. No cessation of suffering. No grace of movement. Do we live to learn to die and relearn the same lessons, foolishly chasing an incomplete dream?
We all live as motherless children. Making big messes and crying so very loud because its all so wrong, and like children, we don't know how to fix it. We need a wise one, and a wise way to live on, atop the surface of a iron and oxygen planet, common elements in the known universe, hurling away from every given object at the rate of six hundred thousand kilometers per second, like this.
We need to loosen our concepts of how we understand the "real world" in order to gain real wisdom. We need far more contemplation and awe at just this state of being that we find ourselves in. The scope of everything, the meaning of every day, every breathe, is so much greater than we daily realize.
And what of time?
How insignificant we may seem, but how absolutely life affirming that we are here right this very second, and that we do know, to some extent, the scope of time, space, and consciousness, enough anyway, to be wide-eyed awestruck.
WEEK 2:
Perhaps a more intimate discourse would illuminate, to cast light on areas bathed in shadow. We must live in this now, for we are here. We must shed ideologies, and these simplistic grids of understanding, that will never and can never contain the subtle forms of nature, that give us the illusion of safety. We must shine out a new way forth, for what other way can there be?
A lot of these videos are of some length, rather than start at the beginning, I suggest watching a random slice at a time.
Notice how the deeper you look, the more the natural world provides this answer, that there is no one way, no fixed, no static, no rock of truth. But, this does not loose us wisdom. For this may be the wisdom we are under search for, if indeed we are in search. What can be taught, oh natural world?
There exists an ethnosphere. A swath of beautiful extrapolations of the human theme, that can, if we are of a curious mind, expand our own concept of self. For isn't there so much more than what we have been told, in every dimension?
WEEK 3:
There also exists, real world, tried and true, fundamental knowledge of this seemingly unknowable experience. The most practical and alien, to the Western mind's concepts of life, living, and dying, can be gleaned from our "other", the Eastern Way. Taoism, Buddhism, Zen, Mystic Sects, have so much to say, about the daily living, of human beings.
Yet still, we live in a fashion. A passing fade with all the confidence of a teenager.
WEEK 5:
Strange, isn't it, that we know all this, yet we live in a world where we allow for millions of people, to live all alone, isolated on the streets, scrounging. Boxed slaves are imprisoned by the million. So called, mentally ill, whom could just as easily be called the mentally visionary, are treated as inconveniences, as we skirt on in self important ways, ignoring the real in pursuit of the fake. Youth and seniors alike are squandered and shelved as insignificant pre and post consumers. And war provides us waste: people, animals, minerals, grass, soil, trees, rivers and energy be damned.
Well surely the rock of truth is America the Great, no?. For we are all told that this country stands as the great light of the world, and of the very fate of people-hood. But so quickly does history teach us a different truth. The lesson that is unfortunately inconsistent with what we've been told, is that these men of lore, their words, their ways, fall far short of respectable, acceptable patterns of behavior.
War has rippled on for far too long? But, perhaps we don't focus enough on the destruction of human ways. Our direct focus flits past, like those aforementioned homeless, we know, we know, but look away. No, we must look directly into the consequence of the modern man's ways, to know, that this cannot be the way. The examples are more numerous than scarce.
WEEK 6:
In our daily living we must carry, transmit, and receive direct experience. There may be systems, but systems are not it. It is it.
There is no container that will hold the answer, the answer is improvised, every time. But to improvise free from weak, inherited, and incomplete models of thinking, language, and behavior, is the only way to play the "right" notes. For the game is upon us, we must play, but shall we follow the real "rules", or make up interpretive systems that distort and confuse the ever shifting drama?
Language, systems, technology, science, institutions can be the masters of your individual experience, or the servants, but currently, they shape you, they shape us, not the other way around. There are better systems, there are real solutions, but you must begin to transmit the change now. The only other option, is passive acceptance of the Foolish Way, only to pass on your passive acceptance to your children, and theirs.
WEEK 7:
I wake up and I look around, and wonder, where is our wisdom? How many epochs of grandparents, babies, fathers, mothers, brothers, neighbors have there been? Yet we have no tangible tools to live well by. No output of healthy, whole societies. No cessation of suffering. No grace of movement. Do we live to learn to die and relearn the same lessons, foolishly chasing an incomplete dream?
We all live as motherless children. Making big messes and crying so very loud because its all so wrong, and like children, we don't know how to fix it. We need a wise one, and a wise way to live on, atop the surface of a iron and oxygen planet, common elements in the known universe, hurling away from every given object at the rate of six hundred thousand kilometers per second, like this.
We need to loosen our concepts of how we understand the "real world" in order to gain real wisdom. We need far more contemplation and awe at just this state of being that we find ourselves in. The scope of everything, the meaning of every day, every breathe, is so much greater than we daily realize.
And what of time?
How insignificant we may seem, but how absolutely life affirming that we are here right this very second, and that we do know, to some extent, the scope of time, space, and consciousness, enough anyway, to be wide-eyed awestruck.
WEEK 2:
Perhaps a more intimate discourse would illuminate, to cast light on areas bathed in shadow. We must live in this now, for we are here. We must shed ideologies, and these simplistic grids of understanding, that will never and can never contain the subtle forms of nature, that give us the illusion of safety. We must shine out a new way forth, for what other way can there be?
A lot of these videos are of some length, rather than start at the beginning, I suggest watching a random slice at a time.
Notice how the deeper you look, the more the natural world provides this answer, that there is no one way, no fixed, no static, no rock of truth. But, this does not loose us wisdom. For this may be the wisdom we are under search for, if indeed we are in search. What can be taught, oh natural world?
There exists an ethnosphere. A swath of beautiful extrapolations of the human theme, that can, if we are of a curious mind, expand our own concept of self. For isn't there so much more than what we have been told, in every dimension?
WEEK 3:
There also exists, real world, tried and true, fundamental knowledge of this seemingly unknowable experience. The most practical and alien, to the Western mind's concepts of life, living, and dying, can be gleaned from our "other", the Eastern Way. Taoism, Buddhism, Zen, Mystic Sects, have so much to say, about the daily living, of human beings.
Yet still, we live in a fashion. A passing fade with all the confidence of a teenager.
WEEK 5:
Strange, isn't it, that we know all this, yet we live in a world where we allow for millions of people, to live all alone, isolated on the streets, scrounging. Boxed slaves are imprisoned by the million. So called, mentally ill, whom could just as easily be called the mentally visionary, are treated as inconveniences, as we skirt on in self important ways, ignoring the real in pursuit of the fake. Youth and seniors alike are squandered and shelved as insignificant pre and post consumers. And war provides us waste: people, animals, minerals, grass, soil, trees, rivers and energy be damned.
Well surely the rock of truth is America the Great, no?. For we are all told that this country stands as the great light of the world, and of the very fate of people-hood. But so quickly does history teach us a different truth. The lesson that is unfortunately inconsistent with what we've been told, is that these men of lore, their words, their ways, fall far short of respectable, acceptable patterns of behavior.
War has rippled on for far too long? But, perhaps we don't focus enough on the destruction of human ways. Our direct focus flits past, like those aforementioned homeless, we know, we know, but look away. No, we must look directly into the consequence of the modern man's ways, to know, that this cannot be the way. The examples are more numerous than scarce.
WEEK 6:
In our daily living we must carry, transmit, and receive direct experience. There may be systems, but systems are not it. It is it.
There is no container that will hold the answer, the answer is improvised, every time. But to improvise free from weak, inherited, and incomplete models of thinking, language, and behavior, is the only way to play the "right" notes. For the game is upon us, we must play, but shall we follow the real "rules", or make up interpretive systems that distort and confuse the ever shifting drama?
Language, systems, technology, science, institutions can be the masters of your individual experience, or the servants, but currently, they shape you, they shape us, not the other way around. There are better systems, there are real solutions, but you must begin to transmit the change now. The only other option, is passive acceptance of the Foolish Way, only to pass on your passive acceptance to your children, and theirs.
WEEK 7:
Friday, January 15, 2010
Tuesday, January 5, 2010
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