How to Save the World?

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[Jana]

WASHINGTON - Paul Wolfowitz, the former World Bank president and former deputy secretary of defense who was instrumental in the US decision to invade Iraq in 2003, has been named chairman of a panel that advises the State Department on arms-control issues.
more stories like this

Wolfowitz, now a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, will head Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's International Security Advisory Board, the State Department said yesterday in a statement.

"The ISAB provides the Department of State with a source of independent insight, advice, and innovation on all aspects of arms control, disarmament, nonproliferation, political-military issues, and international security and related aspects of public diplomacy," the State Department said.

Wolfowitz was among the senior US officials who warned of Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction capabilities, a key justification for invading Iraq and toppling the late dictator Saddam Hussein.

"Disarming Iraq of its chemical and biological weapons and dismantling its nuclear weapons program is a crucial part of winning the war on terror," Wolfowitz told the Council on Foreign Relations in New York in January 2003, two months before the US-led invasion of Iraq.

A United Nations report in September 2004 found that Iraq possessed no weapons of mass destruction at the time of the invasion.

A US-appointed fact-finding commission reached the same conclusion in March 2005.

Joseph Cirincione, a senior fellow and director for nuclear policy at the Center for American Progress, a Washington-based policy research group, criticized Wolfowitz's appointment.

"The advice given by Paul Wolfowitz over the past six years ranks among the worst provided by any defense official in history," Cirincione said. "I have no idea why anyone would want more."

Veronique Rodman, a spokeswoman for the American Enterprise Institute, said she had no comment on Wolfowitz's appointment.

Wolfowitz, 64, resigned from the World Bank presidency in May, less than halfway through his five-year term, amid criticism over his securing a pay raise for his companion.
_________________

[jimtzu]

the manufacturing of fear

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/18056504/truth_or_terrorism_the_real_story_behind_five_years_of_high_alerts

[Jana]

Aussie scientists using solar cycle model of climate analysis:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FOLkze-9GcI&feature=related  —Bob Carter 1-4 debunking the climate change scare.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=VDX2ExKYyqw&NR=1 —David Archibald  Historical view of climate change and benefits of increased CO2 1-4

One mechanism I heard of is that increase solar output reduces the % of galactic cosmic rays that reach earth. Cosmic rays being implicated in the generation of cloud, ie: rain and cooling. David Archibald  says (I think) the next solar cycle will be weaker than norm, while NASA is saying it is going to be big.
Both scientists predict a drop in temps...
Loss of arctic sea ice will change the system of high and low pressures, warming paradoxically causing descent of cold arctic air over the northern continents.

[Jana]

Hotest News of the Century!!!
http://svpvril.com/phpbb2/viewtopic.php?t=1155  —See whole article for tech and assassination details.
Dale Pond posted an article by Tom Bearden on the mysterious death of M. DeGeus who have developed an inexpensive energy-from-the-vacuum  "free energy" battery.
 As an example of the importance of this probably-now-lost "free energy from the vacuum" invention, consider an electric car with a much smaller DeGeus wafer assembly "battery pack" using self-powering "batteries" taking all their energy output continually from the seething vacuum.
The people of this world need to know that the oil companies have become the enemies of mankind. They are withholding and suppressing technologies which could save the planet and eliminate poverty and suffering. As long as we allow there to be a "secret government" this will continue to be so.

Those who toil in basements and garages to bring forth energy from the vacuum in spite of death threats and assassinations are the true heros of this age.

The DeGeus battery sounds a little like John Hutchinson's free energy crystal batteries.

[Jana]

You just gotta watch the first video (3Parts) with Stan Deyo...it ties everything together...most exciting thing I seen in yonkers.

SCHAUBERGER~LIVING WATER
Along with Tesla, Viktor Schauberger is possibly the most forward-thinking scientist this century? Viktor Schauberger realized by observation what Cartesian Reductionist deduction couldn't...that moving fluids can generate energy by reducing entropy!! He was also the inventor of the first man-made vortex powered "flying saucer"!

www.youtube.com/watch?v=P0UTlYft_gE —Steven Spielberg ufo doc 1977 anti gravity- STAN DEYO – Electrogravitics, Anti-Gravity – Magnetic Hydro Dynamic Plasma (MHD) is like a self contained ball lightening that can be sued to store energy, as an energy source and antigravity.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=2154484291617481992 —
Viktor Schauberger segment on UFOs
www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dfh2yrZAm2g —Schauberger, Nazi, UFOs

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7704486331395662247 —IN German, but you get to see the sacred geometry of Schaubergers antigravity flying saucer.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=Twr-eucKhc8&feature=related —Homemade antigravity experiment.

His motto was "understand nature, and then copy nature".
http://users.rcn.com/zap.dnai/zeropoint/advanced/vortex.txt
http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/evolving/water.htm

A natural watercourse builds up an energy that flows within the stream in the opposite way and can be seen as a channel of light within the stream. Recently a patent was granted regarding a Schauberger type water vortex which proved that Oxygen is incorporated into the water bonds and showed that the dielectric properties of water are enhanced and the structure itself levitates! Plant growth was found to increase when treated with this "living water."
http://patent.womplex.ibm.com/details?patent_number=5611926
At 4 degrees, water is in its longest chain state, and thus ionic charges
have a chance to build up macroscopically as the long molecules entrain,
if the flow remains ordered or 'laminar'. On a sub-atomic level, this
same spin may have entrainment effects. What if the whole system became
aligned? Is it possible that all the kinetic energy present in a fluid
might be released as motion in a region? This might be analogous to the
way light behaves in a laser, but in this case the output would be thrust
and suction at opposite ends of the vortex.
_________________

[Michael]

Good article:

CATASTROPHE AS SPIRITUAL PRACTICE, By Sally Erickson
May 14, 2007

Sally Erickson says that "...if we let ourselves have the catastrophe that is already happening, we will find new courage to do things we never thought possible."

It is important to see that the main point of any spiritual practice is to step out of the bureaucracy of the ego.

~Chogyam Trungpa, Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism,

That is one of my favorite book titles ever. I love that title because it distills the essence of the book’s message into four words. That makes the book, while being a fairly challenging read, possible to grok. It is 100 proof Tibetan Buddhism. A little shot goes a long way. Trungpa lays it on the line. Most of what parades as spirituality is not that at all, it is spiritual materialism. It is the trappings of spirituality, while missing the guts.

Recently I told Tim he’s spiritually “ahead” of many of the authors he reads. Now Tim is not overly modest. In fact, we joke about his arrogance. But he rankled a little at the description. He didn’t get what I meant. He was not actually flattered by my comment. He has ideas like belief and faith and the image of a grandfatherly figure with tyrannical tendencies associated with the term “spiritual.” The word “God” puts him right over the edge.

And yet, to me, he is a deeply spiritual person.

What does that mean?

The other morning I told Tim I felt like I needed some kind of spiritual nurturing or sustenance, an experience of the presence of someone or something “out there,” offering support, guidance, and affirmation that I’m on the right path through these very dark times.

This was the morning Tim had shared James Lovelock’s most recent comments that the equator will look like Mars mid-century, with the surviving 20% of humans now alive living near the north and south poles. When I hear or read that kind of stuff I get very sad, sick and scared inside. This particular morning I told Tim about how deeply I want to feel that there is something greater than me and my little scared ego available to help.

People who pay attention, who allow themselves to feel, and not just think about the situation, recognize that these are the most emotionally challenging of times to be alive.

In the face of this challenge, some people retreat emotionally, some go on the offensive and run about trying to fix the situation, some people experience profound outrage. Others just go numb. In the face of emotional challenge I’ve always looked for connection and affirmation outside of myself. This hasn’t always been healthy or helpful. I don’t know if it is my birth order (third and the baby), my astrological sign (Pisces), my Myers Briggs type,( INFP), or my Enneagram type (6), but I’ve had a deep and lifelong pattern of neediness for affirmation from “out there.”

So when the shit hits I start looking for help. And shit of this magnitude looks to me to require something more than seems available in the human realm. I want something BIG to help. So I look to the spiritual realm.

Tim can be really good at listening and his observation skills are acute. He pushes me to get clear about what I am talking about, what it is that I really want. The other morning he pushed me to define what exactly IS spiritual? What does that mean?

It’s not based on “belief.” I don’t take blind leaps of faith. I don’t believe because it is just so damned uncomfortable NOT to believe. That’s just denial all dressed up. That’s just being a good girl, looking pretty on her way to church, but really underneath being battered and bruised and suffering. When people say they “believe” that the world will muddle on for several more decades or centuries I bite my tongue and wonder if they also believe in the tooth fairy. Belief doesn’t seem to have much to do with it. Belief doesn’t cut it.

What I want and what I trust is experience. The experience need not be “rational” or understandable or scientifically verifiable. But the experience does needs to be palpable. I need to be able to point to some area of my body between my neck and my lower abdomen and say, “I feel the truth of this.”

I need to resonate with things, not believe in them.

Tim eats this up of course. Because it puts into words his own experience.

In order to develop love—universal love, cosmic love, whatever you would like to call it—one must accept the whole situation of life as it is, both the light and the dark, the good and the bad.
~Chogyam Trungpa, Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism

If I cut to the chase, the essence of real spirituality for me is the ability to look at, and be with, things exactly as they are.

When we look at the current predicament of Peak Oil, climate change, political and economic meltdown, depleted uranium toxicity, desertification of the rainforests, etc. etc. etc. What happens? What happens when we look at these things exactly as they are?

What happens for me is that I feel. And what I feel is not comfortable. I feel what I perceive to be overwhelming sadness and fear about the future. I fear that life will become too much to bear. I fear that the pain will be endless, that I’ll have to die to escape it. I fear that there won’t be any help or comfort or relief or humor.

A scene from the movie United 93 comes to mind. As it became clear the plane was going down despite all efforts on the part of the heroic passengers to take back control, the atmosphere was rife with fear and pain. And as I watched that movie about a plane full of people, going down amidst great chaos, I reflected, of course, on how this is a perfect metaphor for the situation we all face with the impending collapse of life as we know it, perhaps of life on the planet.

As I watched that final scene in the movie I was struck with a very clear image of what I would do if I were in that situation. What I would do is this: I would take the hands of whoever was sitting next to me and I would look into their eyes. I would let them know that they were not alone and that in that very moment they were loveable. And in doing so I would experience the same, my own lovability. As I imagine that scene, there is something that stirs in my gut that feels true and profoundly meaningful.

And relevant.

It is in extremity that all reason for hiding or pretending or defending oneself from utter transparency with another and with life itself, dissolves. In extremity there is the opportunity to be completely oneself, true and real, and to reveal that self fully. That way of being, utterly true and honest and in the moment is the essence of real spirituality.

That’s why I consider Tim to be a spiritually developed person. He demonstrates that capacity to show up and report the truth of his experience, his thoughts, his feelings, his assumptions and his prejudices. As much as any other person I’ve ever known he has the capacity to be utterly transparent.

It has nothing to do with praying to God or meditation or chanting or eating right. Those things may be helpful for different people at different times. There may be all kinds of tools that aid people in developing that capacity. But for me, real spirituality is about showing up and being who you really are, without masks, without delusions, at any given moment.

That kind of transparency and unmasked presence is not uncommon for me to experience and witness. I’ve been a glutton for it most of my adult life. Over the years I have consciously cultivated the ability to hold the people who come to see me for counseling with great regard and a distinct lack of negative judgment. And people respond to that regard and lack of judgment by allowing me to see them, to hear the truth of their experience, to tell me their stories, without embellishment or defense, unvarnished and raw. I make it safe for them to feel the full catastrophe of their lives. And in feeling that catastrophe, in that extremity, they show up and tell the truth.

I’ve learned to engineer my own personal catastrophe by putting myself alone in the woods fasting for a few days every year. Fasting and exposure to the elements creates a physical catastrophe and the body responds by slowing down movement while heightening perception. The catastrophe the ego experiences is even more profound. In the silence, solitude and extreme restriction from cultural distraction, there are no fixes for my ego’s addiction to achievement and productivity. There’s no escape from anxieties, sorrows or unresolved resentments. There’s no running from boredom either. This is indeed calamitous for the ego.

It is no wonder that “vision quest” kinds of experiences, silent retreats to the desert, extended times of meditation in a cave, have been prescribed spiritual disciplines across religious and cultural traditions. These practices are effective because they create a catastrophe for the human ego. Every time I’ve done a wilderness fast I’ve had a breakthrough. I’ve surrendered some part of my conscious identity to Life. And I’ve emerged truer, more courageous, and more compassionate.

The other situation where that truer, less ego-identified self emerges for me is in counsel circles with others. Interestingly these have largely been in workshop or training retreats not specifically devoted to creating a “spiritual” experience. They have been settings where by design or willingness, the group agreed to enter catastrophe together. That catastrophe came about as we encountered our differences and conflicts and crashed, hopefully gently, but not always gracefully, into our personal and collective wounds. Out of commitment, and then necessity, we mysteriously reached inward to find our more essential selves. I say mysteriously because it is a mystery. It not a rational technique learned by the ego. But over and over I’ve seen it is in that place of interpersonal catastrophe, where nothing is working, nothing is being resolved, and the conflict sits as an inescapably gaping wound that magic happens. It is there that my individual ego identity becomes willing to give up, to surrender her stories, to suspend her long held and well-defended assumptions, to let go and open to experience a larger view, a larger truth.

The culture of Empire, the culture of consumption, is designed to keep people from experiencing these kinds of transformative catastrophe. People are too busy, occupied with work and television, cars and cell phones, mortgages and health care. They are busy trying to look good so no one will see how empty it all feels.

The truth is that the American lifestyle IS a catastrophe. It is shallow and meaningless and disconnected. It is life threatening in every way imaginable. But very few people allow themselves to feel that. They are living a catastrophe already but they can stay numb to it so long as the oil and food and entertainment hold out.

That’s why the prospects of the coming convergence of resource crises and ecological crises and the ensuing economic and social crises seem unbearable. We’re pretending that the worst is yet to come. And so we fear that those things yet to happen are unbearable.

They are not. But to be bearable we will have to allow the catastrophes to do their work, to have their impact on our egos and cherished identities as surely as they will have their impact on our cherished lifestyles. We’ll have to notice that the airplane is in a nosedive, that there is no pilot in control, and that its time to take the hands of our neighbors, look into their eyes, and love them. And let them love us back.

We could do this now, with those other precious souls, the ones that are now self-identified mutants. We could learn together to drop our defenses and ego positions and just be quietly, albeit messily, honest with one another. It won’t be pretty. The wounds of Empire have affected us all. We need to acknowledge that. We need to be willing to look at ourselves and each other exactly the way we are.

If we do that, if we let ourselves have the catastrophe that is already happening, we will find new courage to do things we never thought possible.

Like making a very confronting documentary. Like quitting meaningless jobs and walking away from our addictions to comfort. Like learning to grow food and build cisterns to catch water. Like learning to show up and tell the unique truth we’ve been given to tell in ways we never thought possible.

If we who are awakening do that, we don’t know what will happen.

But if we don’t, it’s pretty clear there won’t be much of a planet left for our children and grandchildren or the millions of other species who inhabit our planet.

Tim and I thought, naively, that we would make a documentary and then run away to the woods to create our lifeboat and hide. It’s not turning out that way. As our new friend Carolyn put it, “Its seems you are being asked to show up and ask people to feel.”

For a recovering “baby of the family,” that’s a catastrophe, but just one of many.

****
I had a similar reaction when I saw “The Day After” about 20 years ago - a TV movie about the aftermath of an atom bomb hitting Lawrence, Kansas.  Those who weren’t dead, but dying of radiation sickness had lost everything they thought identified them - loved ones, home, sexy car, all those toys they’d bought, any sense of power, and now their health as their hair fell out and gums bled and all the food and water were contaminated.   Some still fought over the last crust of irradiated bread, but it was clear that all that was left was the care and kindness they could give each other.  And it was clear that’s all we ever have.  WB

http://www.lists.opn.org/pipermail/org.opn.lists.poclad/2007-June/003574.html

[Jana]

The truth is that the American lifestyle IS a catastrophe. It is shallow and meaningless and disconnected. It is life threatening in every way imaginable. But very few people allow themselves to feel that. They are living a catastrophe already but they can stay numb to it so long as the oil and food and entertainment hold out.

My that is good. I feel the utter hopelessness of living within this cultural sleep, the futility of it. I long to be in a "different" society, and yet I am afraid that anywhere I go on planet earth, it will be just more of the same broken americanism.

As a species we are at a cul-de-sac in our spiritual evolution. We are held captive in a conservative regression and demise of the imagination at present, bought on by sadofascism, or materialism in our childrearing, education and all aspects of culture. The institutional structures of society, and especially the universities are now corrupted by “special interests” that pay for intellect and R&D to be confined to the narrow limits of the exploitive, degenerative regime. Thus our authoritarian “social structures” are holding back spiritual-moral development and benign technological progress. This is done through subspiritual, aggressive formal-operations thinking, and reliance on socalled “laws” and proven “truths” that have been given the stamp of approval by the parasitic cultural mechanism. We live in a society that is made sick through adherence to a subrational, form-op orthodoxy that is fascist in nature…and maintains itself through its own lack of experimentation, general ignore-ance and lack of spiritual insight (gnosis).

The reality of the universe is not confined within limited human laws, which in our hubris we think we can know as fact. The universe and nature is composed of infinite laws of increasing subtly and complexity. And the sooner we humble ourselves to realize this, the faster we will grow away from species suicide toward an unimaginably exultant future. The only limit is your imagination!

Paolo Lugari the founder of Gaviotas, a 40 year old ecocommunity in Colombia said that people have been hypnotized into thinking that a degree is more important than knowledge, but if the child is raised to be creative, he doesn’t need a degree. He decried the fact that world has too many specialists and that we need more generalists, who can see all the connections and possibilities. Paolo complained that people don’t learn how to think, that their curiosity is blunted. He believed that students should be taught  through a hands-on village-wide apprenticeship in the carpentry shop, the factory, hydroponics, the tree nursery and even the hospital. Paolo stressed that through an experiential education within the community of the imagination (enlightened society), we teach our children that the world is one big opportunity.
Gaviotas, A Village to Reinvent the World, by Alan Weisman

“There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till. The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried. Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string. The magnetism which all original action exerts is explained when we inquire the reason of self-trust. We lie in the lap of immense intelligence, which makes us receivers of its truth and organs of its activity.” ESSAY II Self-Reliance, Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Accept the place the divine providence has found for you, the society of your contemporaries, the connection of events. Great men have always done so, and confided themselves childlike to the genius of their age, betraying their perception that the absolutely trustworthy was seated at their heart, working through their hands, predominating in all their being. And we are now men, and must accept in the highest mind the same transcendent destiny; and not minors and invalids in a protected corner, not cowards fleeing before a revolution, but guides, redeemers, and benefactors, obeying the Almighty effort, and advancing on Chaos and the Dark.” ESSAY II Self-Reliance, Ralph Waldo Emerson
www.emersoncentral.com/selfreliance.htm

[Jana]

“Medicine, education, money, food, energy, media, technology, religion, buildings, economics -- all of these organizing forms that together ought to make culture no longer do so but instead are making a pathological civilization. The new systems are fragmentation, specialization, expertise, depression, inflation, cruelty, hardness, violence, and absence of beauty. Our buildings are anorexic, our business paranoid, detached and abstract, and our technology manic. These symptoms indicate the loss of containment characteristic of the vessel of the soul... [requiring] re-evaluation of the domains of the modern world in terms of metaphor, image, story, and dream.” Robert Sardello

The pariah of corporate feudalism or rank materialism is overcome by increasing the spiritual “depth” potential of each individual. We can will the creation of a mystic civilization, first through not blaming the hierarchies of control and by each becoming a living example to the type of change we desire. A regenerative culture encourages diversity, decentralization, with the prime directive being the spiritual realization of each individual. The myriad of problems the human species now faces are generated by a moral crisis, a failure of rational and spiritual adjustment to reality. These problems will be overcome through a heightened sense of care, intention to do the right-thing and through education in regenerous permaculture principles.
 
As the "inner potency" or "divine power" of the inner life becomes paramount, values change and quality not quantity becomes the driver of commerce. This shunting of the buying power toward earth-friendly values, in itself will curb the parasitic, predatory power-plays allowing the earth to heal. Through the triumph of the imagination and application of a global-vision we can set about greening the deserts, replanting the forests and fulfilling our need for shelter, food, security and energy, all the while enhancing the Nature around us. To survive we must engage a vision of a noble culture and go beyond sustainability to apply the regenerative meme in all our endeavors.
In the Tao te Ching, Lao-Tzu tells us that we should not focus on the problems and to let situations take their course. Rather we should find what can be expanded, worked into success, feeding the tree of life and allowing good to prevail.

“Thought is constantly creating problems and then trying to solve them. But as it tries to solve them it makes it worse because it doesn’t notice that it's creating them, and the more it thinks, the more problems it creates.” David Bohm, Thought as a System

[Michael]

Good essay - Beyond Civilized and Primitive:
http://ranprieur.com/essays/beyondciv.html

Western industrial society tells a story about itself that goes like this: "A long time ago, our ancestors were 'primitive.' They lived in caves, were stupid, hit each other with clubs, and had short, stressful lives in which they were constantly on the verge of starving or being eaten by saber-toothed cats. Then we invented 'civilization,' in which we started growing food, being nice to each other, getting smarter, inventing marvelous technologies, and everywhere replacing chaos with order. It's getting better all the time and will continue forever."

Western industrial society is now in decline, and in declining societies it's normal for people to feel that their whole existence is empty and meaningless, that the system is rotten to its very roots and should all be torn up and thrown out. It's also normal for people to frame this rejection in whatever terms their society has given them. So we reason: "This world is hell, this world is civilization, so civilization is hell, so maybe primitive life was heaven. Maybe the whole story is upside-down!"

We examine the dominant story and find that although it contains some truth, it depends on assumptions and distortions and omissions, and it was not designed to reveal truth, but to influence the values and behaviors of the people who heard it. Seeking balance, we create a perfect mirror image:

"A long time ago, our ancestors were 'primitive.' They were just as smart as we would be if we didn't watch television, and they lived in cozy hand-made shelters, were generally peaceful and egalitarian, and had long healthy lives in which food was plentiful because they kept their populations well below the carrying capacity of their landbase. Then someone invented 'civilization,' in which we monopolized the land and grew our population by eating grain. Grain is high in calories but low in other nutrients, so we got sick, and we also began starving when the population outgrew the landbase, so the farmers conquered land from neighboring foragers and enslaved them to build sterile monuments while the elite developed an empty death culture, and invented technologies of repression and disconnection and gluttonous consumption, and everywhere life was replaced with control. It's been getting worse and worse, and soon we will abandon it and live the way we did before."

Continued:
http://ranprieur.com/essays/beyondciv.html

[jimtzu]

great piece Michael...  i think that if there's anything at all to this integral movement it is the learning how and the ability to have a larger perception, not so much of what we're observing (maps, systems, etc) but how we see.  a wider perspective of the whole which can never have a total perspective because we are part of the whole and we can't reall see ourselves except through others eyes.

here a a few of the parts that resonated with me:


I think the root of civilization, and a major source of human evil, is simply that we became clever enough to extend our power beyond our empathy. It's like the famous Twilight Zone episode where there's a box with a button, and if you push it, you get a million dollars and someone you don't know dies. We have countless "boxes" that do basically the same thing. Some of them are physical, like cruise missiles or ocean-killing fertilizers, or even junk food where your mouth gets a million dollars and your heart dies. Others are social, like subsidies that make junk food affordable, or the corporation, which by definition does any harm it can get away with that will bring profit to the shareholders. I'm guessing it all started when our mental and physical tools combined to enable positive feedback in personal wealth. Anyway, as soon as you have something that does more harm than good, but that appears to the decision makers to do more good than harm, the decision makers will decide to do more and more of it, and before long you have a whole society built around obvious benefits that do hidden harm.

-------------------------

I don't think there's any escape from complex high-energy societies, so instead of focusing on avoiding them, we should focus on making them tolerable. This means, first, that our system is enjoyable for its participants -- that the activities necessary to keep it going are experienced by the people who do them as meaningful and freely chosen. Second, our system must be ethical toward the world around it. My standards here are high -- the totality of biological life on Earth must be better off with us than without us. And third, our system must not be inherently unstable. It might be destroyed by an asteroid or an ice age, but it must not destabilize itself internally, by having an economy that has to grow or die, or by depleting nonrenewable resources, or by having any trend at all that ratchets, that easily goes one way but can't go the other way without a catastrophe.

-----------------


The same way the ruling interests become corrupt through an exploitative relationship with the people, we all become corrupt when we participate in a society that exploits the life around it. When we talk about "nature," we don't mean wheat fields or zoo animals -- we mean plants that scatter seeds to the wind and animals that roam at will. We mean freedom, raw aliveness, and we can't repress it outside ourselves without also repressing it inside ourselves. The spirit that guides our shoe when it crushes grass coming through cracks in the driveway, also guides us to crush feelings and perceptions coming through cracks in our paved minds, and we need these feelings and perceptions to make good decisions, to be sane.

[Jana]

''I think the root of civilization, and a major source of human evil, is simply that we became clever enough to extend our power beyond our empathy.''

Yea the basic division is masculine-leftbrain-external and feminine-rightbrain-internal.
Jung's intellect--feeling, intuition--sensation quadrants are counterpointed such that when intellect is overselected feeling is diminished. When feeling is diminished value and morality decline.

The very best document on the loss of the archaic, deepmind is Stephen Harding's Animate
Earth....I highly recommend it. Fantastic use of language you will want to copy out some of the word combos he uses to develop the gaian language.

Where we must not fail, is in remembering that we have other intelligences that are currently utilized by this culture. In drawing on these intelligences, we can transcend!

"Our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different. We may go through life without suspecting their existence; but apply the requisite stimulus, and at a touch they are there in all their completeness, definite types of mentality which probably somewhere have their field of application and adaptation. No account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded." William James

[Michael]

more good stuff from the same author as the Beyond C & P piece above:

http://ranprieur.com/essays/fallsix.html

[jimtzu]

this article relates to the cultural romaticization that can happen when looking at cultures other than our own that was brought up in the first  Beyond C&P article posted.  this one deals with Tibet and buddhism and it's history...



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I. For Lords and Lamas

Along with the blood drenched landscape of religious conflict there is the experience of inner peace and solace that every religion promises, none more so than Buddhism. Standing in marked contrast to the intolerant savagery of other religions, Buddhism is neither fanatical nor dogmatic--so say its adherents. For many of them Buddhism is less a theology and more a meditative and investigative discipline intended to promote an inner harmony and enlightenment while directing us to a path of right living. Generally, the spiritual focus is not only on oneself but on the welfare of others. One tries to put aside egoistic pursuits and gain a deeper understanding of one’s connection to all people and things. “Socially engaged Buddhism” tries to blend individual liberation with responsible social action in order to build an enlightened society.

A glance at history, however, reveals that not all the many and widely varying forms of Buddhism have been free of doctrinal fanaticism, nor free of the violent and exploitative pursuits so characteristic of other religions. In Sri Lanka there is a legendary and almost sacred recorded history about the triumphant battles waged by Buddhist kings of yore. During the twentieth century, Buddhists clashed violently with each other and with non-Buddhists in Thailand, Burma, Korea, Japan, India, and elsewhere. In Sri Lanka, armed battles between Buddhist Sinhalese and Hindu Tamils have taken many lives on both sides. In 1998 the U.S. State Department listed thirty of the world’s most violent and dangerous extremist groups. Over half of them were religious, specifically Muslim, Jewish, and Buddhist. 1

In South Korea, in 1998, thousands of monks of the Chogye Buddhist order fought each other with fists, rocks, fire-bombs, and clubs, in pitched battles that went on for weeks. They were vying for control of the order, the largest in South Korea, with its annual budget of $9.2 million, its millions of dollars worth of property, and the privilege of appointing 1,700 monks to various offices. The brawls damaged the main Buddhist sanctuaries and left dozens of monks injured, some seriously. The Korean public appeared to disdain both factions, feeling that no matter what side took control, “it would use worshippers’ donations for luxurious houses and expensive cars.” 2

As with any religion, squabbles between or within Buddhist sects are often fueled by the material corruption and personal deficiencies of the leadership. For example, in Nagano, Japan, at Zenkoji, the prestigious complex of temples that has hosted Buddhist sects for more than 1,400 years, “a nasty battle” arose between Komatsu the chief priest and the Tacchu, a group of temples nominally under the chief priest's sway. The Tacchu monks accused Komatsu of selling writings and drawings under the temple's name for his own gain. They also were appalled by the frequency with which he was seen in the company of women. Komatsu in turn sought to isolate and punish monks who were critical of his leadership. The conflict lasted some five years and made it into the courts. 3

But what of Tibetan Buddhism? Is it not an exception to this sort of strife? And what of the society it helped to create? Many Buddhists maintain that, before the Chinese crackdown in 1959, old Tibet was a spiritually oriented kingdom free from the egotistical lifestyles, empty materialism, and corrupting vices that beset modern industrialized society. Western news media, travel books, novels, and Hollywood films have portrayed the Tibetan theocracy as a veritable Shangri-La. The Dalai Lama himself stated that “the pervasive influence of Buddhism” in Tibet, “amid the wide open spaces of an unspoiled environment resulted in a society dedicated to peace and harmony. We enjoyed freedom and contentment.” 4

 
more: http://www.michaelparenti.org/Tibet.html

[Jana]

“The violent chaos in the present global society exists because belief systems (worldviews) in most institutions have reached a dead-end:
Scientists avoid dealing with anomalous aspects of human experience and nature.
The religious fear to examine the origins of their own beliefs.
Educators indoctrinate instead of helping students to become self-learners.
Institutions defend their beliefs and authority with arrogance.
Financial and industrial elites rule the world for short-term gain.” www.vonward.com/

Dismantling the Pyramid, Government by the People by Paul Von Ward
“This book analyzes the current unsatisfactory situation, points to organizational and human alternatives, and suggests a process for the dethroning of bureaucracy. It calls for a new vision of the human potential in public service and a creative, joint government and citizen effort to realize in practice the self-renewing principles on which the United States was founded.” www.vonward.com/dismant.htm

“In his book, Our Solarian Legacy (pages 187, 235-236, and 281-282), Paul Von Ward developed the concept of a self-rating of one's level of conscious awareness, CQ. Based on beliefs and personal experiences, CQ differentiates among individuals on the basis of how much they deliberately use various aspects of personal consciousness. CQ is independent of both IQ and EQ measures, but complements their coverage to produce a more complete description of an individual's capacities for communication, problem-solving, and personal self-management.” www.vonward.com/cq.htm

[Michael]

February 18, 2008
Dropping Shoes
James Howard Kuntsler

      The fall of Britain's Northern Rock bank may be the first dropped shoe in a chorus line of big banks tap-dancing into oblivion. The British government's move yesterday to nationalize the insolvent mortgage lender's remaining operations leaves shareholders holding an empty bag. Their only resort now will be to call their lawyers. What we may be witnessing, in a movement that will surely spread to the US, is a changing of the guard at the top of the financial food-chain between bankers and lawyers.
     Shoes may have begun to drop in the US last week with Citigroup halting redemptions for its $500-million CSO mini hedge fund -- half a billion dollars being something less than walking-around-money in the Hamptons these days. Halting redemptions means that investors in the fund cannot withdraw their money -- the same as going to the bank and being told your account is frozen. Hedge funds can play rough with their investors because they are unregulated. The reason they remain unregulated is the presumption that anybody rich enough to "play" in a hedge fund can afford to lose (or be swindled) with no protection on the sidelines from government busybodies. What's more, the hedge fund managers do not have to make any of their operations open to public view, so that neither the investors nor any regulating authority knows what they are actually doing.
     What the big banks who run many hedge funds are doing is going broke. They are pretending to be solvent by borrowing money from the Federal Reserve, the nation's alleged superbank. But borrowed money is not capital, i.e. surplus wealth wholly owned. Borrowed money is an obligation, a liability, a negative on the balance sheet. You can't have an entire financial system based on nothing more than a giant daisy-chain of liabilities. Somewhere there has to be a "reserve" of assets, items of value owned by somebody.
      Through most of modern times, assets have been denoted by cash money. A given bank will hold in "reserve" say $10 billion in money that is not owed to anybody, allowing them to do things like pay depositors who show up at the window needing money for groceries. Up until a few decades ago, nations held an ultimate reserve of actual gold in a vault (Fort Knox, Kentucky, in the case of the USA) and the physical possession of this gold was said to "back up" the value of the certificates that circulated as a "medium-of-exchange" or currency.
      But that system was considered too awkward and "reserves" were then denoted in just currencies themselves, or certificates that represented the existence of currencies held elsewhere, or pixels on a screen representing the movement of alleged piles of currency from one place to another, or the intention to move a notional pile of currency to a theoretical destination, and then that became an algorithm purporting to represent the future arrival of a notional pile of money at theoretical destination to-be-named-later, and so on.... And after another while, the nature of money became so detached from anything real, so abstract, that its very existence became hypothetical. Even this "worked" for a while, in terms of the managers of this money being able to "cream" substantial amounts of this hypothetical money off the top of their notional operations and translate that hypothetical cream into Tribeca lofts, Gulfstream jets, and other real luxuries.
     The rest of the economic food chain -- and the social order that represented it -- got stripped of remaining asset value (and social value) until they had nothing left to trade with except debt, in one form or another, and this phase of the game turned out to have a short lifetime when the the only debts remaining to be monetized were the contracts on houses occupied by people with no hope of ever meeting their obligations -- and then the whole sorry racket started to go up in a vapor.
     This is roughly where we are, and where the banks stand today. They are pretending to have money and desperately cadging loans from all comers to keep appearances up, but the loans can't come in fast enough. The appearance of confidence is crucial (as it is, of course, in any "con" game) to keep the investors (depositors) at bay. If a bunch of investors (depositors) all got nervous about the solvency of a given bank, they might try to slip in there during business hours and withdraw or redeem their "money" and perhaps translate it into items of value like gold coins, bottles of vodka, or cases of 9 millimeter pistol ammunition. And if enough of this bunch showed up at the same time, we would see a phenomenon called a "run" on a bank. And after that started at one bank, the thing Franklin Roosevelt called "fear itself" could easily spread to depositors in other banks pretending to be okay... and that would be the magic moment that the USA discovered it was no longer a rich nation.
     That would be a very rude awakening. The whole world would know about it in about thirty seconds, and the rest of the world would be in a lot of trouble, too, since so much of its notional wealth is represented by piles of US dollars (or certificates denoting them). Then what you could see is a run by other nations (investor-depositors) on the United States of America as a whole, or an awkward global receivership process, in which all remaining assets were stripped -- including maybe even some of those Tribeca lofts and Gulfstream jets.
     Of course, the rest of the world would have a hard time getting any of this stuff out, or fencing it off at a discount. Rather, they'd probably just eat their losses and quarantine themselves off from the world's new financial-and-economic leper. They'd stop sending us Toyota Highlanders, plastic salad shooters, and, oh yes, oil. We'd be left with a lot of empty big box stores, vacant highways, and houses inconveniently deployed too far from any place of utility. One thing we'd have plenty of, though, is home-grown pissed-off people. Some of them may even be lawyers.

Note: my novel about America's post-oil future, World Made By Hand, is now shipping to booksellers everywhere.  Get one. You'll like it.