How to Save the World?

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Jane

A citizen of America will cross the ocean to fight for democracy, but won't cross the street to vote in a national election. ~ Bill Vaughan

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[jimtzu]

i suppose that i could have left out the word holon in my statement and it would still ring true to me. the word and language in general are all left brain abstractions that are a step away from reality as we experience it. logic and philosophy are also mental constructs that are not absolute that give the ego something to hold onto while we play at communicating.   

[Francis]

If your practices could activate Kundalini then I think that you should admonish your readers on the dangers of kundalini as you see them. Perhaps a short disclaimer would suffice.

I just thought that the force of the word ‘awakening’ has been somewhat diminished by overuse.

The structure of logic is arbitrary. The only thing that’s important is to have rules and to follow them. Aristotle’s logic is the foundation of the success of science and perhaps is revered too much for that reason. The concept of a contradiction is the single most important aspect for science because the scientific method relies primarily on the attempt to reduce theoretical propositions to a contradiction. This process is known as reductio ad absurdum*. To Aristotle, contradictions were “absurd”


Maybe we could propose a new (arbitrary) scheme whereby the contradiction is embraced. Maybe we could have oxymorons that were somehow accommodated in this new scheme. Oxymorons (in the jargon of symbolic logic:  proposition ‘A’ and proposition ‘Not A’ are both true, i.e.  A = Not A) are like the inverse of tautologies (A = A). There may be a plum to be picked here, but someone has to do the homework. Gödel seemed to be on track to do so, but I’m not sure how far he got with it.

On the other hand the motive behind the current employment of the term holon seems to be:

What can we say about the atom that makes up part of a molecule that resides in the cell, that forms part of the leg of an ant, that forms part of the ant, that forms part of the ant colony that forms part of the…., that forms part of the Universe?(for example). What can we say, in general, about all of these things at once? Use of the term ‘holon’ seems to help in this regard. But the fact that you really aren’t saying anything at all is hidden in the fact that the term is eminently ambiguous, being a stealth oxymoron. Stealth because the contradiction is hidden in the definition, which is new. Most oxymorons are phrases, two word contradictions that are more obvious and the goal is to halt consideration and thinking.

To force a new word into circulation is a revolutionary act. Some revolts should be put down. Others are worth fighting for. This one seems to me like the former, but I’ve been wrong before.

If the structure of logic is the problem, then abandon it or replace it. Pretending that you’re being logical and clear by hiding contradiction and ambiguity in the definitions of terms is disingenuous in my view.


*http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reductio_ad_absurdum

[Jana]

BOK is about the dangers of kundalini awakening in a cooked culture...with bodies that are occluded to the light, prone to inflammation, oxidation, fat peroxidation, immune/adrenal overload, imbalance, and that are demineralized, ungrounded and nature deprived. The book is essentially a protocol for awakening in a culture of sleep.

I will probably stick with Awakening...simply so I can go Awakening 1, 2 and 3.
My books won't be on the general market anyway...but globally select...my readers don't care what I call my books.

[jimtzu]

i like the use of awakening in all three, it implies a triology or at least a set.   perhaps you could incorporate francis' suggestions in subtitles?

[jimtzu]

What can we say about the atom that makes up part of a molecule that resides in the cell, that forms part of the leg of an ant, that forms part of the ant, that forms part of the ant colony that forms part of the…., that forms part of the Universe?(for example). What can we say, in general, about all of these things at once? Use of the term ‘holon’ seems to help in this regard.

perhaps holon does get used to often, much like other words (paradigm, for me loses its effect after being tossed around too much).  the uniqueness of the word holon is the whole/part interconnectedness for which there isn't a simple replacement for. 

[Francis]

Unique? We have the word "system" which I think quite adequately emphasizes the whole/part relationship. The words themselves, whole and part, also already have this implication. That's probably the main reason we have the word "whole" i.e to distinguish it from subparts. That, and because the mind ropes itself around groups of parts and arbitrarily calls it a "whole" Even though it's just a group of parts.

[Jana]

www.sciencedaily.com/videos/2008/0403-men_are_from_mars.htm

This is important but don't know what it means yet. When men are stressed (by a mathematical task) the right prefrontal cortex lights up. But when women are stressed by the same task the limbic system lights up.

[Francis]

Both men and women's brain activation lasted beyond the stress task, but the lasting response in the female brain was stronger. The neural response among the men was associated with higher levels of cortisol, whereas women did not have as much association between brain activation to stress and cortisol changes.

"Women have twice the rate of depression and anxiety disorders compared to men," notes Dr. Wang. "Knowing that women respond to stress by increasing activity in brain regions involved with emotion, and that these changes last longer than in men, may help us begin to explain the gender differences in the incidence of mood disorders."


I.e. women hold grudges. Cortisol release leads to action, fight or flight, and this relieves the inner turmoil. The other alternative is to "stew" Depression is anger without enthusiasm (cortisol).

[Michael]

Thought I'd share an older article that recently crossed my path.  This basic insight seems worth bothering with:

Don't Should on Us

In class last week I had my Penn State students read a horrifying article on tree death in America, and then polled them on their gut response. The four choices I offered were:

      A) This is terrible, and I’m inspired to do something about it.
      B)Yes, this is terrible, and I care, but I’m not inspired because I am powerless to do anything about it.
      C) This is terrible, but for some reason I just don’t care that much. I suppose I should care, but to be honest I really don’t.
      D) It couldn’t be that bad. Besides, science will come up with a solution.

The results of my little poll and the way my students articulated their responses bears great relevance to the much-publicized failure of the American environmental movement today. First, though, a hopeful note: not a single student out of a hundred chose (D)–although probably many would have on the first day of class. Unfortunately, almost no one chose (A) either. Over 90 percent of the class chose the second and third responses, and in the ensuing discussion most of them articulated feelings combining the two. Not caring, it seems, is in part a defensive response for dealing with feelings of powerlessness or despair. It is, also, in part a response to the perceived remoteness of the problem–in the words of Charles Little, “We look out our windows, what do we see? Trees.” Or as one student said, “As long as I can get a Big Mac, fries and shake for less than $5, to be quite honest I don’t care about the environment.”

Somehow, the urgency of the planetary crisis has not penetrated into popular consciousness. If it had, then the envronmental movement’s futile struggles, painfully detailed in Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus’s provocative essay, “The Death of Environmentalism", would not even have been necessary. On the policy level, there has been no progress on carbon emissions or fuel efficiency, even as the victories of generations past on protecting air, water, and forests have been gutted one by one. Meanwhile, the movement has failed to win the hearts and minds of the public. Most people polled don’t even rank the environment among their top ten most important issues. My students’ sentiments are consistent with those of the public at large. Their grades, their job interviews, their love lives, Penn State football, and so forth all trump the environment as urgent issues in their lives.

More than indifference, though, many students evince an outright hostility or annoyance toward activists of all stripes, right or left. Whether social or environmental, the silence that greets today’s activist messages is often a sullen silence, a resentful silence. Environmental and social activists annoy a lot of people, and I don’t think it’s only because they bring up uncomfortable truths. A deeper issue is involved here, one with enormous implications not only for the strategy of the environmental movement, but for its basic conceptual underpinnings.

One reason environmental activists so commonly meet with resentment or marginalization is because of the implicit judgementality of their message. An unstated judgment accompanies such facts as “We are using more than our share of resources,” or “Our way of life is destroying the planet,” or “The average American’s ecological footprint would require five earths to be sustainable.” The judgment is that you are greedy, lazy, ignorant… in a word, bad. You SHOULD do better. You shouldn’t take more than your sure. You should sacrifice some of your selfish interest for the good of other people, other species, and future generations. Stop being so greedy. On the collective level, the same logic pits the economy against the environment, arguing that our society must rein in its rampant materialism and greed. Individually or collectively, we have to try harder and do better.

On the most obvious level, this approach backfires simply because people can always sense judgementality, and they naturally respond to it with hostility. We rarely say it outright, but an intuitive response to anyone who tells us to be ashamed of ourselves is something along the lines of “Screw you!” Alternatively, some people are temperamentally inclined to buy into guilt or shame. The message works on such people, but it cannot spread beyond them.

Even worse, to say that it is our greed that compels us to consume the planet for the sake of our lifestyle, implies that the high-consumption lifestyle is indeed a good thing. To say that the man with the 8,000-square-foot house, and Americans collectively, are selfish is to imply that material extravagance is indeed in our self-interest. That is what selfish means—to seek the aggrandizement of the self at the expense of others. In other words, environmentalists have framed the debate in terms that actually reaffirm the way of life they are trying to dismantle. They reaffirm the delusion that is destroying the world: namely, that the modern consumptive way of life is to our selfish benefit. They assume that the big consumers of the world, the wealthiest and most “fortunate", are actually better off than the typical peasant in India.

These assumptions prevail across most of the political spectrum. Conservatives think that society’s winners should not be forced into providing for the losers, while liberals think the winners should be legally required (e.g. through taxes) to help those less fortunate. Both agree in principle, though, that the winners are the winners and the losers are the losers, whether this happens through accident of birth or dint of personal virtue.

In other words, much environmentalist exhortation comes down to a demand to sacrifice your own self-interest, with guilt and shame the main mechanisms by which to enforce that demand. Now, I don’t know about you, but I tend not to trust people who want me to act against my own self-interest. No wonder the environmental movement has been so ineffectual for thirty years.

Fortunately, there is another way, rooted in the realization that society’s winners are not winners at all. It is rooted in the observation that the 8,000-square-foot house is a breeding ground for loneliness, isolation, and depression, a pathetic sop to the poverty of modern existence. It is rooted in the realization that the consumer thrills of our luxury cars, entertainment technologies, and sports spectacles feed a gaping void caused by our separation from nature, community, and spirit. The emptiness of the modern formula for success is palpable, as is the robbery of life and youth in exchange for money. Yet the assumption that success as conventionally defined is the key to happiness is ubiquitous in our culture. Just one example: the economic term for anything bought or sold for money: a “good".

The alternative I am suggesting starts by making the point that the rational self-interest everyone buys into is neither rational nor in anyone’s interest. It is not in your interest to work at an unfulfilling job that pays well, to enjoy “security” that isn’t and “goods” that aren’t. Even if we don’t make this point explicitly, it can inform our every interaction in the cause of the environment. When we approach people with the energy of wanting what is truly in their best and highest interest, they will instinctively trust us. Sometimes, to be sure, a person must experience something in order to realize that isn’t what they actually wanted. But the message will stay with them until the time comes for it to sprout. When we act from the knowledge that a person’s “selfish” interest is actually toward simplicity, closeness to nature, and closeness to community, then our urgings lose any judgementality and assume the force of a trusted friend’s support.

Similarly on the policy level, arguments based on the economic consequences of bad environmental policies are ultimately self-defeating, because they reinforce the ideology that for something to be (a) “good", it must take the form of a commodity denominated in dollars. So immersed are we in this logic that it is hard to even articulate the value of nature otherwise: hence the profusion of environmentalist arguments based on cost-benefit analyses. Why should we save the rainforests? Because of all the medicines that might be produced from the undiscovered plant species there? Because of the economic value of their contribution as a carbon sink? Of their pollinating species? Well-meaning as they are, arguments that try to persuade us to protect the environment based on the fact that the long-term cost to the economy of environmental destruction far exceeds the economic cost of preservation only exacerbate the root problem, which is the basic Benthamite assumption that goodness can be quantified, that the way to make life better is to maximize financial returns, and even more deeply, that nature can be made ours, and yet more deeply, the illusion of our separateness. Such arguments grant the disastrous premise that nature is indeed a thing, best disposed of according to the financial consequences.

Cost-benefit arguments for environmental protection have the further disadvantage that they are usually ineffective even as a short-term tactic. I am inspired in this regard to Gandhi’s exhortation to “appeal to their reason and conscience,” and by Edwin O. Wilson’s invocation of a universal “biophilia"—a love of living beings—innate to each one of us, however deeply buried. In the long run and probably even in the short run, it may be more effective to appeal to people’s sense of beauty and their desire to do the right thing. “Let’s save the environment because otherwise it will cost too much” is an appeal to a baser instinct, greed, and therefore disrespects its audience by assuming that greed is their strongest motivation. (It is especially counterproductive when facing people who in fact stand to gain financially from consuming natural capital.) It is also on some level dishonest: I do not know any environmentalist motivated by the long-term economic savings of environmental protection. Let us instead appeal to what is highest in other people: their sense of rightness, beauty, and justice; their desire to be a good person; their longing to enact their innate love for our beautiful planet. The greed behind the plundering of the planet, and the insecurity and anxiety behind the greed, is after all a product of our money system as well as an inevitable effect of our separation from self, spirit, nature, and each other, and not our true essence.

Charles Eisenstein, 2005

[Jana]

Edwin O. Wilson’s invocation of a universal “biophilia"—a love of living beings—that is innate to each one of us, however deeply buried…is based on the primary perception of the cell, and the unified consciousness of all life at the cellular level. We each have a deep drive for ecstasy, a potential for bliss, that is perhaps our most undeveloped capacity…that is the reunion with Source. We eat a raw diet not because we want to be clean and pure, although that too is a consequence, but because we want to rise to our creative edge, to stay contemporary with the Muse, that is to stay in touch with Source, and to realize our omnipotential. The dynamic code of that which is biophilic, biogenic and lifeforce enhancing is written into our structure, and comes to us from billions of years of learned wisdom. Obeying that noetic value of that wisdom, is the spiritual quest toward life-fulfillment and meaning…providing the intellectual intuition that adds an enriching dimension to life through subtle embodiment.

[Francis]

In the long run and probably even in the short run, it may be more effective to appeal to people’s sense of beauty and their desire to do the right thing. “Let’s save the environment because otherwise it will cost too much” is an appeal to a baser instinct, greed, and therefore disrespects its audience by assuming that greed is their strongest motivation. (It is especially counterproductive when facing people who in fact stand to gain financially from consuming natural capital.) It is also on some level dishonest: I do not know any environmentalist motivated by the long-term economic savings of environmental protection. Let us instead appeal to what is highest in other people: their sense of rightness, beauty, and justice; their desire to be a good person; their longing to enact their innate love for our beautiful planet. The greed behind the plundering of the planet, and the insecurity and anxiety behind the greed, is after all a product of our money system as well as an inevitable effect of our separation from self, spirit, nature, and each other, and not our true essence.

This ignores the neurological rule behind effective motivation: bad trumps good.


Why do bad things happen to good people? If, as the book The Secret indicates, people are magically ‘attracting’ what they get, how do we explain the horrors of Darfur, Rwanda, Cambodia, Auschwitz, etc. which were all apparently unprovoked and undeserved atrocities by all rational accounts?

I think that there are two factors in play here; the first is unconsciousness and the second is the butterfly effect. Unconsciousness blinds us to what is possible, like not knowing that a plane is about to crash into our house. The butterfly effect highlights the importance of ‘little things’ These two can combine to bite us in the ass with “big surprises” which are seldom pleasant, as in the above examples.

“The phrase refers to the idea that a butterfly's wings might create tiny changes in the atmosphere that may ultimately alter the path of a tornado or delay, accelerate or even prevent the occurrence of a tornado in a certain location. The flapping wing represents a small change in the initial condition of the system, which causes a chain of events leading to large-scale alterations of events. Had the butterfly not flapped its wings, the trajectory of the system might have been vastly different. While the butterfly does not cause the tornado, the flap of its wings is an essential part of the initial conditions resulting in a tornado.” ~ Wiki

The law of karma is not justice, not at least in any rational sense. Heaven and Earth have no pity; they regard all things as straw dogs (Lao Tzu). Justice holds a sword and a balance (scales). When the pans of the scale become unbalanced, the sword becomes the engine of division. Sometimes the sword is like a razor that shaves off only the slightest sliver, other times; heads roll. There is no sense of ‘fairness’ or equity here. Rather the Law simply asserts that all energetic actions have energetic responses. If you plant ice you’re going to harvest wind. Staying with this metaphor; with the butterfly effect, planting a single snowflake at the right moment can sometimes cause a hurricane to come down on your house. A small deed can cause a world of hurt because it upsets a delicate and precarious balance. Unconsciousness makes much of this tension invisible. An action is neither good nor bad, in itself, but only with respect to the responses that it engenders in the world.

All this brings up the concept of moral hazard. All actions have a price. If the universe is demanding eleven dollar bills and you’ve only got ten; look out! Someone’s gonna pay. History proves as much.

[Jana]

I don't know if anyone has done a good contemporary treatment of karma. Karma is cause and effect...we can perceive that unconsciously, consciously or nondually...ie: unconditional love.

Modern karma would go something like this: you gotta break eggs to make omelettes, sorry about the sacrifice of the potential chickens, but if you eat the omelettes you are going to get heart disease and die, which is a good thing because it reduces population, perhaps if you had lived you might have produced a child that would have grown up to find the cure to cancer so thats a bad thing, stuck in this existential dilemma of doing potential harm wherever you turn great pain is created, if you speak your pain to anyone other than a $150/hr psychotherapist you are going to get more pain as an immediate consequence. Life is screwy, so you just gotta give up and enjoy it.

[Francis]

Jung says that the persuit of a good and just ego, tends to form just the opposite tendencies in the unconsciousness. Here's a less concise explication of the idea:

Quote: "Greatly summarized, Becker's story goes something like this: Man is inherently a "religious being" due in large measure to the fact that he is born into a hostile world naked, with only his mind and his fears with which to negotiate his survival. Ultimately it is his fears (and the guilt that they engender and the associated need for redemption) that are at the base of "socialized man." For the most part, it is the colonization of fear, guilt and the need for redemption that organizes society and culture.

The earth, which provides man with most of his sustenance, still remains a little understood cosmic force, a gift from the gods, as it were, that man imagines must be returned in kind if the life cycle, the cosmic life force and man's own prosperity and ultimately, which his very life depends on, is to continue. Thus the cosmic force is the primary source of all power in the world. And since time immemorial, man has seen as one of his primary tasks of survival: that of accommodating, or at the very least not antagonizing or offending, this invisible source of power and cosmic force.

However, whether invisible or not, returning the "offerings," became a rather complex psychological task for man. It required the bureaucratization and management on earth of an invisible or superior cosmic force. The most efficacious way of doing this was through representatives who could act openly and visibly as indirect agents of the gods. And here Becker of course means the Shamans, the Priests, the Popes, the Chiefs, the CEOs, the Presidents and Prime Ministers, and the Magicians. With primitive man (and of course in a much more sublimated sense) even with modern man, a system and process of rituals including an altar and rules, ceremonies, customs and traditions for invoking the pleasure of the gods, (and avoiding their approbations) was required in order to properly make sacrifices to them; sacrifices that would of course ensure continued prosperity.

The whole process of ritualization still amounts to a technology of social psychology; one that is co-terminus with all cultures that attempt in their own way to ensure that the sustained gifts of the cosmic force continues the cycle of life and prosperity. Ritualization as a technic of religion and of society, becomes a new sacred modality for vicariously extending the life giving forces, and thus of taming and bringing the mysterious power of the cosmos down to earth; and of course, most importantly, of making it available to ensure the continued success of man's earthly "prosperity projects."

It is axiomatic in human nature that anything that represents the gods, also represent an indirect contact with the power of the cosmic forces that the gods bestow. Such central source of power must at all times be respected. Ultimately, it is the indirect delegation of, and amplification of this power downward to the lowest levels, coupled with the personal tendencies already inherent in man's psychological makeup (to give over his power and freedom to a leader with special powers attached to the cosmic force) that is responsible for providing the motive force for the machinery of evil: Men asked to be mystified, they wanted and needed kings and leaders, and that is the great weakness in man's nature: Ultimately man is scared of operating alone within the confines of his own freedom.

Once the refracted and reflected power of the gods is delegated, bureaucratized, socialized, and eventually colonized, taken together with man's inherent tendencies towards self-subjugation, the turning of the gears towards evil has already been set fully into motion. It is but a short hop, skip and jump through history before god's designated representative's quest for personal power has irretrievably corrupted man's otherwise pristine and free nature. Without being aware of it, man has slid into an unholy "freedom stripping" quid pro quo: trading in his freedom for the comfort and the tyranny of a community invariably based on shared fears and insecurities, shared guilt and shared hopes of redemption -- all orchestrated and ruled by powerful representatives with mandates from their gods. As Becker puts it on page 51 "Men fashion un-freedom as a bribe for self-perpetuation."

In rapid evolutionary succession, personal property acquisition, inequality, greed and all other known forms of social corruption follow: First in the name of the sacred and the divine, and then in the name of the less divine: that is, in the name of ideology and eventually in the name of the state. Once it has evolved to this last stage, of the state, man has irretrievably lost all control of the corrupting machinery. From there on, his descent into evil is all but automatic. Oppressive power, corruption and inequality have always taken place in the service of the legitimate and all too often, in the service of the religious order. As Hegel has put it: Men cause evil out of good intentions not out of wicked ones." ~ http://www.amazon.com/Escape-Evil-Ernest-Becker/product-reviews/0029024501

[Jana]

  Oh my did you buy that book...fantastic stuff, but does he offer a way out.

I was watching this last night and an anthropologist was livid that they did not find weapons of war in this 5000 year old settlement. In Peru at least civilization began through trading and lasted peacably for a thousand years. White males want to prove that civilization began as a defensive strategy, rather than accept the notion that civilization was benign at the outset.

 Horizon episode 'The Lost Pyramids of Caral' regarding the discovery of a long lost city in Peru.
      www.youtube.com/watch?v=VfJntU5C4yg

We need a world conference and university to study the history and to rewrite the premises of civilization soas we can get back on track.

A friend pointed out that male/female relationship is founded on Male-truth and Female-love. I say that we have had enough of that swing of the pendulum and now we need to do Male-love and Female Truth.

[jimtzu]

i've seen that before... it's pretty good..  history is really the propoganda-story. 

how about male-female/truth-love?       and getting out of the binary paradigm into the trinary.