paragliding photo from wallpapers.org

I have started working on a project with Cheryl to create a place on our island in Second Life that will allow our members and visitors to go through a “letting go” exercise. The idea is that they will have their avatar (the character that represents them in the Second Life virtual world) willingly jumping off our island’s mountain, and being wafted by updrafts as they consider what is involved in “letting go” of some thought and/or feeling that is holding them back from being happy and truly themselves, and then landing safely on the ground. It’s intended as a metaphoric journey that may enable them to make a similar liberating journey in real life.

There are many, many websites, self-help books, methodologies and therapies that prescribe ways to “let go”. We are not presuming to tell people what to do or how to self-treat illnesses, phobias or traumas. We recognize that in the immediate aftermath of a tragic or unexpected event, not only should one not “let go” of one’s feelings, they are an essential and healthy reaction and part of the coping and healing process. We also recognize that treatment of profound or chronic mental stress and illness may need professional counsel, or at least the support of people who have the context to appreciate and guide the healing process. But in many cases the need to “let go” is just a matter of self-acknowledging, understanding, appreciating and accepting what is, and what we’re trying to do is create an experience to help people get past their “stuck” places and do this.

So with those caveats, here are some of my early thoughts on what the Letting Go experience might look like.

For those not familiar with Second Life, it’s a virtual world, created by its millions of “residents”, in which the residents create an avatar (a customized cartoon-like character) to represent themselves, and interact with others and the places they have “built”, in real time. Many people in Second Life create a space that gives them what they can’t or don’t have in real life — often a great body, youthful face, dazzling wardrobe, ideal home and longed-for possessions — and allows them to safely act out their avatar’s life anonymously, and in the process practice social skills, learn about themselves and other people, role-play doing things they would never dream of doing in real life, and even fall in love.

The magic of Second Life is that behind each avatar is a real person. And of course those real people have real feelings and real issues, one of which, often, is the inability to let go of thoughts and feelings that hold them back from being who they are, from being happy, or from doing what they really want to do.

Here’s how the Letting Go ritual might work:

1. You walk up the mountain trail thinking about what it is that you want to let go of. It might be a cycle of thoughts and feelings that brings you a recurring sense of grief, sadness or shame. It could be some idea or situation that repeatedly instills anger. It could be some irrational belief, hope or expectation that imprisons you. It could be some constantly triggered anxiety or fear. As you walk up the trail, you just think about it, name it, articulate it in your own mind.
2. As you reach the top of the mountain, you now have clarity about the thought or feeling you want to let go of. Now, you state it, in whatever way works for you. You might just say it quietly. You might shout it, or sing it, or dance it. You might write it down. You might draw it, or otherwise portray it visually.
3. At the edge of the mountain, you pick up a rock from a rock pile. This rock symbolizes and embodies what you want to let go of.
4. Now, you jump. Initially, you fall quickly, but as soon as you throw away the rock, your descent slows and stops, and breezes begin to waft around you, and you are carried by the updrafts so that you are “flying” instead of falling. You might choose to say certain affirmations as part of the Letting Go process, such as
   • I acknowledge and honour my feelings and thoughts as valid and real for me.
   • I will give myself time to understand and heal the damage that holding on to this thought or feeling has caused me.
   • I will spend some time focused on things that I enjoy or care about as I’m working through this issue.
   • I will accept what is, and what can’t be changed, predicted or controlled.
   • I will accept that I am a good person, and be good to myself.
   • I will seek closure about these issues, so they will not be re-stimulated in future if similar situations arise.
5. Finally, you land gently on the ground. At your feet, there is a selection of shells, crystals and other beautiful mementos of your “letting go”. You select one that you like, which you carry as a reminder of this experience, so that if/when something happens to you that might once have provoked the old thought or emotion, you can look at it and remember that you have let go of this thought or emotion, and that it no longer troubles you.

I am not an expert in ritual, so I’d value your thoughts on this idea. What do you think?

forest in France — photo by Luca Montanari

~~~~~

Go for long walks.
Indulge in hot baths.
Question your assumptions,
Be kind to yourself,
Live for the moment,
Loosen up, scream,
Curse the world,
Count your blessings,
Just let go. Just be.

— Carol Shields

~~~~~

For more than eight years now this blog has chronicled my discovery of, and attempts to articulate, how the world really works, and how we might find ways to live better. It’s mainly been written as a public diary of my personal journey of learning and self-discovery, and my search for what I’m meant to do, and how I’m meant to be of use to the world.

When I retired from paid work a year ago, I thought I knew what I would do with my time. I was wrong. Instead of giving back to the world, and working on the projects (like stopping the Alberta Tar Sands, and ending factory farming) I had intended to work on, I have spent most of the past year doing nothing, and wondering why. It is likely a combination of exhaustion, anxiety, inability to handle the sudden freedom, and bewilderment at having too many choices, and not enough.

So for the past six months I’ve been trying to follow a set of principles of personal awareness and behaviour. My hope is that, if I can learn to be truly myself, in the moment, aware and relaxed, I will best be able to see what is, and hence know what I should do, both in the moment, every moment, and intentionally over the longer term.

Those principles are:

• [In relationship to self]: To self-accept and self-manage, and let go of stories. I have been trying to understand myself better, and not try to change or “improve” myself. I now accept that I am most “myself” in warm, beautiful places, and when I am in love. I accept that I handle stress badly, and that I cannot hope to avoid stress in my life, so I need to be aware of it, and of whatever I’m feeling and thinking, and assess and cope with it appropriately. And I have been working to let go of the stories I’ve come to believe about Gaia’s dying, about (what I perceive as) people’s cruel and stupid behaviours and beliefs and unreasonable expectations, about what I imagine will happen if my worst fears are realized, and about my own perceived “failings”.
• [In relationship to others]: To be generous and appreciative. I have been trying to help others, to give, to share, to be open, to see the best in people and situations, to be thankful, and to help radically imagine and generate new things and ideas and possibilities.
• [In relationship to Earth]: To live naturally and presently. I have been trying to reconnect with my senses, my emotions, and with all-life-on-Earth, to trust my instincts, to value my time and enjoy its passage, to live sufficiently and sustainably and resiliently and not fearfully, and to learn to be more present in the moment.

I am told I have been modestly successful in doing these things recently, largely, I suspect, because they don’t require me to be anything other than who I am or do anything I am not inclined to do anyway.

Yet I have a long way to go. I’m not a patient person. I keep making the same mistakes, of unawareness and insensitivity, of inarticulateness, of inattention, of inappropriate reaction, of mismanagement of my time. I’m behind in my blogging and in my project work, and haven’t allowed enough time for reflection and creative writing. I have tried and pretended to be somebody else for so long it’s infuriatingly difficult to just be myself, to just be. I can’t “just be” until I have a good sense of who I really am, under all the “not-me” gunk that has become, over the years, attached to me.

So now I’m forgiving myself. I’m doing the best that I can. The work of saving the world, or my tiny portion of it at least, will inevitably go better when I’m present and ready for it, and when I know at least a bit better what “it” is.

What might “it” be? Damned if I know. I’ve decided to let go of presupposing to know what I’m intended to do to be of use to the world. I have some thoughts, but my sense is that if these things were really my intended purpose I would already be pursuing them, relentlessly. Here are a few things that might be my intended purpose, and why they might not:

• Writing a collection of poetry and songs, or a film. But isn’t this just a self-indulgence? What are the chances my work will be good enough, and sufficiently recognized as such, to make a real difference?
• Developing a series of games that are collaborative instead of competitive, consensual instead of violent, clever instead of derivative, experiential and immersive instead of pedagogical, that could improve how we learn about ecological, social and other complex systems. Such games could allow us to learn more powerfully and enjoyably about transition, about effective facilitation, about living in community, or even about ourselves (I’ll be writing soon about a project I’m working on to create a metaphoric “letting go” experience in Second Life.) Such games might even enable us to shift our perception in important ways that traditional learning tools (courses, books) can’t do. Imagine for example if we could, by entering into a simulated world that has no “clock time” but operates in the “Now time” of wild creatures, completely change our sense of time and free ourselves from its control over our lives, and its constraints? All interesting ideas, but would our dumbed-down, incurious, complexity-loathing culture ever accept such an innovation? And can we really be radical and bold enough in what we imagine to deliver on such a promise anyway?

I believe that my ability to write and to imagine possibilities are my gifts to the world, the things I do uniquely well. Perhaps my way of being of use to the world involves applying both gifts in ways that no one has ever done quite the same way before. Perhaps instead of writing words I’m meant to write musical notes, or images, or scripts of one sort or another, or some new construct for communicating meaning and for imagining that hasn’t even been invented yet.

I believe the key to resilience in the coming decades will be our ability, in the moment, to imagine ways around the crises we cannot prevent, predict or plan for. Maybe I can help with that.

I am hopeful enough these days to believe I could yet become the existential creature I once aspired to be: just “the space through which stuff passes, touching the right stuff in just the right way as it passes through.”

But I think I must start with the work of self-knowledge and self-acceptance, generosity and appreciation and imagination, living naturally and presently. That’s the road I am, at last, falteringly, taking.

~~~~~

PS: Last month my friend Joe Bageant died. I had the privilege of visiting Joe in his tiny writing studio in Hopkins Village, Belize. Joe taught me the importance of understanding why things (and people) are the way they are, before we begin any work to try to change them. And he taught me that community is born of necessity, so, while we might imagine it, we cannot hope to build a sustainable community-based society until the fall of our globalized industrial society is well-advanced. Damn. We will miss you, Joe.

The green areas on this map (from the Forest Frontiers Initiative) are all that is left of the world’s wild forests, the only remaining areas that are large enough and sufficiently intact to support a natural and largely undiminished ecosystem. At current rates of deforestation they will all be gone in 50 years. The light brown areas are degraded forest, fragile and disrupted and now dependent on human ‘management’. Both the light and dark brown areas, comprising half of the world’s land surface, were wild forests as recently as 8,000 years ago. And most of the world’s deserts and grasslands, shown in white, have also been, at least intermittently, wild forests since the end of the last ice age, before human civilization spread across the Earth.

I think I am irrepressibly, compulsively drawn to ‘gentle’ beauty, and grace.

Some evidence:

• What I have been looking for in a ‘winter home’ here in New Zealand and Australia is a place of extraordinary physical, natural beauty. I have come to see cities as ugly, fragile and crumbling human artifacts that deny and work against nature. Likewise farms and fields, monocultural lands that have been made possible by the atrocious razing of ancient forests. I have found beaches of staggering beauty here, but the best of them have no real forests nearly. So I am coming to the conclusion that my summer home on Bowen Island, Canada will have to fill my need for wild forests, and my winter home (probably Down Under) will fill my need for warm white sand and blue seas. As much as I appreciate and love to visit wild places that are windy or cold or rocky, I am not at home in such places. I long to find and belong to the last few places on Earth that are both gentle and wild.
• What I look for in people is likewise gentle yet wild beauty. That can be physical, or emotional (strength, sensitivity, grace and creativity — I am drawn to artists who share my sense of unbearable grief for Gaia’s death), or intellectual (wit, articulation and ideas can also be beautiful). I don’t even have to have a personal relationship with these people — it’s enough to be in their presence, seeing, hearing, reading, witnessing their beauty.
• I am also drawn to beautiful aesthetics on a smaller scale, both natural and human-made (light and shadow, scents, music, art, the tastes of natural food and the sounds of wild birds, trees and surf).
• Although I once swore I had no needs, only wants, I think I was self-deluded. I need these different kinds of beauty like I need air. Without them I am apart, empty. Without them I retreat inside my head and imagine them. From too much practice I have developed a great imagination, invented a whole world of beauty to replace what has not been in my ‘real’ life. I was drawn to the virtual world of Second Life not for the usual reasons many others were (loneliness, boredom, low self-esteem etc.) but because it is a place of great, collectively-imagined and collectively-created beauty. More ‘real’ than my imagination, and who is to say any less ‘real’ than the physical world?

I don’t know why I need such beauty, or why this need drives so much of my passions and behaviour. When I am surrounded by gentle beauty I am both happy and present, in that magic state of awareness and relaxation that makes everything possible and effortless. In this state I often do my best creative work, and my best writing, and in this state I am most in love. In this state I can spend most of each day just eating and sleeping and playing and making love, and still sometimes somehow find the time to reflect and create and do what I do best to make the world a better place.

When this profound beauty is missing from my life, anxiety rushes in to fill the void, and with it the need to retreat back inside my head, to shun all responsibility and commitment, to create space and time for me to hide from all my fears and anxieties, to imagine them away.

I think this insatiable desire to be surrounded by physical, emotional, intellectual, erotic, sensory and aesthetic beauty accounts for much of my recent and intended behaviour — my move to Bowen Island, my polyamory lifestyle, my desire for company and for time and space alone, my endless fascination with walking at night, sleeping in safe wild places, brilliant women (and sometimes men), raw foods, marathon sex, candlelight, firelight and streetlight, world-weary women singer-songwriters, clever humour, silly infectious childlike laughter until you almost make yourself sick, intense late-night philosophic conversations, making love in the forest and on the beach, brilliant evocative writing, the sight of birds soaring.

Perhaps I’ve never grown up, and that’s why I want to cocoon myself in an impossible world of limitless and inextinguishable beauty. Perhaps I just can’t bear to face, and truly live in, the terrible ‘real’ world. Perhaps I just can’t see the terrible beauty of the real world. Perhaps I’m just still tired, exhausted, from living most of my life as a sheep in wolf’s clothing, pretending, from necessity, to be what I was not for so long I have forgotten who I really am. Still living in my sleep.

When I find out, I will let you know. Until then at least, this blog will continue to be my diary of discovery and learning, sometimes about the world and what must be done, but mostly about myself. I hope it will continue to be of use to you, dear readers, in your own journeys, until I am ready to face the real world and, finally, be of use to it. I owe the world that much, and more.

purrr cartoon by patrick mcdonnell

Last month I linked to an excellent CBC video summarizing the life, work and philosophy of uber-celebrity Eckhart Tolle. Tolle doesn’t really say anything new in his books — I think Richard Moss’ Mandala of Being delivers the same “learn to be Present” message more effectively, and the bookstore shelves are crammed with meditation, spirituality and self-help books claiming to be able to teach you how to do this.

I confess that none of these books ‘works’ for me, though I continue to strive, through a variety of daily practices, to learn to be Present.

What intrigued me about Tolle’s horribly-named A New Earth is that in it he hints at how we humans came to be so un-Present and why it seems so hard for most of us to re-learn Presence.

In both his best-sellers, he tells the story of two ducks:

“After two ducks get into a fight, which never lasts long, they will separate and float off in opposite directions. Then each duck will flap its wings vigorously a few times, thus releasing the surplus energy that built up during the fight. After they flap their wings, they float along peacefully, as if nothing had ever happened. If the duck had a human mind, it would keep the fight alive, by thinking, by story-making…[even] years later… [Imagine] how problematic the duck’s life would be if it had a human mind. But this is how most humans live all the time.”

Tolle, unlike most writers on Presence, seems willing to credit most non-human animals with the “intelligence” to live (almost always) in the Present, in the Now, except for brief moments of stress. In the model below, which I have developed to attempt to illustrate Tolle’s thesis, wild creatures and human beings who have re-learned presence live the conscious, integral life shown on the right side. For such creatures, the triggers that cause suffering for most humans just bounce off; they fail to have any enduring impact. The spirit remains integral, unruffled and unpolluted.

By contrast, most humans live in the unhappy, anxious state shown in the left side. For them, triggers produce a vicious cycle of negative thoughts and “stories” (the “egoic mind”) and negative emotions (the “pain-body”). The stories we tell ourselves about the past, the future, ourselves and others are fictions, but our insatiable human egos grab onto them, and these thoughts trigger emotions like anger, fear, jealousy, hatred, self-hatred, shame, and anxiety, which fester in us and cause our egoic minds to invent even more stories to justify and perpetuate the pain-body negative emotions. Both the egoic mind and the pain-body are easily triggered by negative events (real or imagined) — in fact Tolle thinks they are addicted to them. The ego even casts a shadow over our sensory and instinctive lives, which the egoic mind cannot control and therefore does not trust. We therefore become “possessed” by our egos, which are not us. Our egos would have us believe that our thoughts and beliefs and feelings are “us”, when in fact all along we are really the consciousness that lies behind those thoughts, beliefs and feelings. Presence, then, is developing the capacity to push out and free ourselves from our egos and the negative thoughts and emotions that “normally” possess us, that we “normally” identify with.

Implicit in this model is the intriguing idea that, at some point in our evolution (and perhaps also in the evolution of other large-brained creatures like chimps, whales, elephants and ravens), we became too smart for our own good. Our brains, which were evolved by our bodily organs as a feature-detection, non-urgent decision-making and navigation system for their benefit, at some point passed the tipping point at which they developed ego. This is not the same as consciousness — indeed there is a mountain of evidence now that most creatures possess consciousness. Ego would appear to be an unintended and unfortunate consequence of the development of the brain to the point where it began to mistake its processing of thought and feelings for our consciousness, and we have been in a fight with our egos ever since. Whereas most Present creatures handle stress instinctively, and let it go quickly like the ducks in Tolle’s story, we “too smart for our own good” creatures have become consumed by, perhaps even addicted to, stress, and our egos, ever ready to cycle viciously through negative thoughts and stories and feelings whenever stress hits us, absolutely feed on it, to the point they possess us and we become unconscious of what is real, traumatized and trapped in and by our minds and feelings.

In this hellish unconsciousness, we crave attention and appreciation and adrenaline, anything that will give us temporary respite from our egos’ stories and the wrenching emotions that feed them and feed off them. This drives most human behaviours, which is why our species has become, through its inventions of civilization, dysfunctional, disconnected, massively destructive, and unsustainable.

Having explained this, Tolle then takes us through a variety of practices to relearn Presence. Most of them are familiar and, for most of us, I suspect, inaccessible and unhelpful:

• practice awareness to realize that the egoic mind and pain-body are not “you”
• don’t “mind” being unhappy, to break the addictive egoic thinking/feeling cycle
• give: be generous
• know yourself (i.e. your consciousness, not the “content” of your life — your job, your roles, your possessions, your beliefs etc.)
• appreciate chaos and complexity (e.g. by spending time in “untidy” nature)
• accept, don’t “mind” what happens (i.e. don’t label events as “good” or “bad”)
• don’t “give yourself more time”, but instead “eliminate time”
• learn to be still, and silent, and appreciate both
• practice being at once aware (alert) and relaxed
• become non-resistant, non-judgemental, non-expectant, and non-attached to whatever happens
• rather than acting or reacting, let “right action happen through you”
• practice sensing and perceiving without naming, thinking or conceiving
• be aware of your breathing (and note that this is not the same as thinking about being aware of your breathing; I keep recalling my recent satori experience of waking up at early dawn and seeing nothing but a thick blanket of fog through all my bedroom windows, and then becoming aware of a strange noise and then realizing it was my breathing)
• practice inner body awareness (sensing/feeling parts and then all of your body “from within”)
• recognize and resist your attention- and appreciation-seeking (and other ego gratification) behaviours

All easier said than done, and mostly said better by others. I was intrigued that this list resonated quite strongly with my recently published list of Six Principles (be generous; value your time and its passage; live naturally; self-accept; practice being present; let go of stories). I suspect this might have something to do with the fact that Tolle and I have both spent much of our lives oppressed by anxiety and depression.

None of this is particularly new advice, either: The ancient Upanishad wisdom reiterated in Eliot’s Four Quartets put it more succinctly — datta, dayadhvam, damyata — give, empathize, exercise self-control.

Tolle seems to dismiss the human propensity for daydreaming and fantasizing (including, I would presume, activities in virtual worlds like Second Life), and even “falling in love” as forms of unhealthy, “compulsive”, addictive behaviour. He prescribes breathing and other “awareness” exercises as a means to learn to stop such behaviour from “tricking” you into continuing your compulsion, and learning to stop trying to justify it. This seems outrageously dismissive to me: artists, writers, players, lovers, creators, and other imaginers of possibilities may be “addicted” to their (our) recreations, but I see this as no more harmful or “unconscious” than our addiction to eating or sleeping. And a world of Presence without imagination would be, I think, a poorer one.

In the latter parts of A New Earth Tolle becomes, I think, a little carried away with the power of Presence. He appears to claim it can cure depression, anxiety disorders, addictions and lifelong traumas. While I’d acknowledge that stress (which is everywhere in our modern society, and that is no ‘story’) is only the trigger for many of our modern illnesses, not the cause, I think it’s arrogant and even cruel to encourage people to believe that these illnesses can be extinguished by what is in essence a mental trick.

Tolle also believes that millions of people are now re-learning to be Present and potentially ushering in a new era of global consciousness (hence the title of the book); I think this is a hyperbolic delusion, and the type of magical thinking that is the last thing we need as we begin to cope with the collapse of our civilization.

But the idea that we have become, as an accident of evolution, too smart for our own good is an intriguing one. If only the remedy for that — thinking less and being more — did not require more intelligence than most of us may ever hope to possess.

(Cartoon by Patrick McDonnell of ‘Mutts’ fame, from Guardians of Being, co-written with Tolle)

drawing by hugh mcleod at gaping void

In my recent post The Freedom to Do Nothing, I quoted Ran Prieur:

When you begin to get free, you will get depressed. It works like this: When you were three years old, if your parents weren’t too bad, you knew how to play spontaneously. Then you had to go to school, where everything you did was required. The worst thing is that even the fun activities, like singing songs and playing games, were commanded under threat of punishment. So even play got tied up in your mind with a control structure, and severed from the life inside you. If you were “rebellious”, you preserved the life inside you by connecting it to forbidden activities, which are usually forbidden for good reasons, and when your rebellion ended in suffering and failure, you figured the life inside you was not to be trusted. If you were “obedient”, you simply crushed the life inside you almost to death.

Freedom means you’re not punished for saying no. The most fundamental freedom is the freedom to do nothing. But when you get this freedom, after many years of activities that were forced, nothing is all you want to do. You might start projects that seem like the kind of thing you’re supposed to love doing, music or writing or art, and not finish because nobody is forcing you to finish and it’s not really what you want to do. It could take months, if you’re lucky, or more likely years, before you can build up the life inside you to an intensity where it can drive projects that you actually enjoy and finish, and then it will take more time before you build up enough skill that other people recognize your actions as valuable.

This has certainly been true in my case. Now that I’m comfortably retired from paid work, I have the freedom to do nothing. I’ve been through a long list of things I think I should be doing (and should be passionate about doing), and realized that I haven’t the heart for them. I thought I wanted to work to stop the Alberta Tar Sands, and the atrocity of factory farming. I thought I wanted to create a model community, or at least be part of one. I thought I wanted to increase my connection to my emotions, to others, to all-life-on-Earth, to increase my resilience, capacities and competencies in ways that would be useful to the world.

But I don’t really want to do these things. At least not enough to overcome my internal resistance to getting to work on them. There are, I think, three main reasons for this (these are not excuses, merely explanations):

1. I’m exhausted. For now, I just don’t want to work that hard at anything. I want things to be easy, and/or fun, at least for a little while until I am less tired, less worn out.
2. I don’t think I could handle the stress. As I wrote recently, I have learned that I am anxious and fearful (of many things) and fragile and no use to the world broken, and I think working on these projects would break me, or at least my heart, to the point I would simply have to stop, and perhaps might never recover.
3. I’m not convinced they would or will, in the long run, make any real difference. Industrial civilization has so much momentum, and is taking us over the edge of the cliff at such a pace, that trying to slow it down or divert it seems futile to me. In his latest book Twelve by Twelve (more about this book in an upcoming post), conservationist and international development aide William Powers laments that his work often seems pointless when years of hard work by conservationists can be more than undone by the forces of mindless globalization in a matter of days. When I speak with climate scientists, I find them utterly overwhelmed and filled with despair. The handful of credible economists and energy experts I follow are uniformly pessimistic that the idealistic pursuits of alternative economy movements and transition initiatives have even the faintest hope of working.

So, I keep asking myself, If not that, then what? What do I want to do with all this freedom I’ve just discovered I have? I know I don’t want to do permaculture gardening, which many of the post-civ writers I most admire do. I know local food security and sustainability are important; I just have no calling for them. I know I don’t want to chain myself to tractors or blow up dams or blockade roads or spike trees or break open the closed doors and cages of suffering farmed animals, as much as I know this work needs to be done and hugely admire those who do it. I don’t want to lobby or petition politicians or protest in the streets, in part because, as my friend Keith Farnish argues, this light green environmentalism merely plays into the existing power structure, and changes nothing. I don’t want to write op ed pieces or give talks or teach or otherwise try to persuade people what they don’t want to hear, or act upon.

What is the point of changing people’s beliefs? In the 1960s and 1970s we did manage to get a lot of people to think differently about a lot of things. But what has actually changed since 1970? In 40 years, what are the major changes in the Western world (I won’t presume to identify what major changes have transpired in the rest of the world). I think there have been six real megatrends in that 40 years, and none of them is good:

1. Inequality and Desolation: Expectations regarding income, wealth and job security, for the large majority, have dropped. Average family assets have doubled but average family debts have tripled, so net wealth has not changed. It now takes two incomes to provide what one income could provide in 1970. Resource use and environmental damage have skyrocketed, and almost all of the wealth produced by that use and damage has accrued to less than 1% of the population, which is now obscenely rich. And the damage and inequality are accelerating, even under liberal regimes.
2. Crumbling Public Institutions: Health and education systems, which most people believe to be the two most important services provided by the public sector, have steadily and seriously deteriorated since 1970 to the point that in many countries they are dysfunctional and teetering on collapse.
3. Soaring Ignorance and Mindless Consumerism: The information media have so thoroughly discredited themselves since 1970 that now, virtually no one pays any attention to them or discusses any real news or important current events or problems. As people have stopped believing or buying their ‘information’, they have converted themselves into pure entertainment media, which has been much more profitable for them, since it requires no thorough, critical or investigative journalism, and focuses instead on celebrity gossip, trivia, fear-mongering and sensationalism.
4. Staggering Technology Waste: Trillions have been spent on much-hyped ‘improvements’ in information and communication technologies, but for the vast majority, the principal technology remains the telephone, and the amount of information and the quality of communication of the average user of these extravagant technologies have actually significantly dropped compared to 1970.
5. Endemic Political Cynicism: The idealism of the 1970s has morphed into the anomie and anger of the current decade, and interest and participation in the political process have plummeted.
6. Social Disintegration: The exuberant “whole world is watching” sense of global community and collectivism that prevailed in 1970 has been replaced in 2010 by a new tribalism characterized by extreme individualism, a loathing for government regulation, disenchantment with the idea of single-tier egalitarian essential public services, atomization and anonymization of communities, and the commensurate rise in power of ruthless gangs (street, drug, oligopolist and corporatist).

This is what the idealistic hippie-boomer generation, that vowed to change the world 40 years ago, has actually produced. For all the talk, this is what we’ve shown. How can anyone take seriously the blatherings of those who say we’re at the dawn of some new (social network enabled) global consciousness raising? What real difference has the largest, richest, most educated generation in the history of the planet actually made, except to make the world much, much worse? And that’s despite all the efforts of those who’ve done the hard, thankless work of activism, education, innovation, and other public service — the vital holding actions that have prevented things from being even more terrible than they are. It’s a matter of no small shame to me that I was able to convince myself, for that 40 years, that I was actually doing some enduring good, when actually I was complicit by action and inaction in these six distressing trends, and, aside from benefiting financially (which has at least reduced my fears and anxieties about being poor), it was 40 years largely wasted.

I’ve said before that my distinctive competencies are writing and imagining possibilities, so I keep thinking that perhaps my gift to the world is stories — about how the world really is (in contrast to how the media portray it), and about how we might live better. But what good have stories done so far? Even if they change beliefs, what does it matter if the behaviour, the stuff people actually do, is activities that produce, perpetuate and accelerate the six megatrends above? In my post last year called No More Stories I wrote:

I am coming to believe that all stories, from the unactionable dumbed-down crap that we’re fed by the mainstream media, to the preposterous ‘history’ they pass off as ‘fact’ in so-called institutions of learning, to the regurgitated tripe from Hollywood, to the mountains of lies of corporatists in their greenwashing and advertising, to the formulaic and emotionally manipulative fiction to which we escape from our brutal and mind-numbing lives — are propaganda. They are meant to keep us in our place and distract us from discovering what is really going on in this world. Stories, I am beginning to think, are just more of civilization’s gunk that gets layered on us (some of it self-inflicted) from the moment we acquire the dreadful skill of human language, stuff that prevents us from being nobody-but-ourselves, and from understanding what is really needed, now, what we have to do, with all of our hearts and our minds and our senses and our instincts.

So: damn stories. If one is inclined to “rewrite one’s own story”, perhaps it’s time to give up fiction, turn off the projector, get out of the theatre and improvise living in the real world, where there are no scripts, just work that needs to be done and actions that need to be taken, if only we can readjust our eyes to the light. The director, it turns out, is a mannequin with a pre-recorded playback device in his megaphone, and the script was written by a machine using lines selected with a random-number generator.

And the part that each of us has been playing was actually written for someone else. The set is empty, the props are all falling down and blowing away in the wind. All that is left is Now.

So what next? I have argued before that human behaviour is driven, more than anything else, by what I’ve called Pollard’s Law:

We do what we must, then we do what’s easy, and then we do what’s fun. There is no time or energy left over for doing the right thing, what we aspire to do, what we think we should do, what’s merely important. None. That’s not laziness or cynicism, it’s just the way we (and all creatures) are built. From an evolutionary perspective, it’s a successful strategy, to focus on the needs of the moment.

Let me clarify what I mean by “we do what we must”. Imperatives for action can be externally imposed (“do it or you’re fired”) or internally imposed (“I couldn’t live with myself if I didn’t do this”.) It’s tautological — if a cause becomes so important to you that you can’t not be involved, then it becomes, for you, a “must”. I’ve been told by people whose courage blows me away (e.g. people whose whole lives are consumed with looking after physically or mentally handicapped relatives;  and people struggling every day to cope with the endless aftermath of some horrific past trauma) that it’s not courage if you have no other choice (or believe you have no other choice). It’s just doing what you must.

So now there is nothing I “must” do, I am spending time doing what’s easy and what’s fun. And in this terrible world, when you’re informed, and feel a sense of grief and responsibility for the state of our planet, and a feeling of hopelessness to do anything about it, nothing is really easy or fun. So I’m, largely, doing nothing. Living in my sleep. It’s not bad. But it’s not enough. I owe myself, and the world, more.

When I get discouraged looking for my Sweet Spot, I often try another exercise called Future State Visioning, in which I imagine myself (say a couple of years) in the future, doing what I would like to imagine myself doing, to see if that provides any insight on what I’m meant to do, or at least what might be easy and fun.

And if I’m completely honest with myself (to the extent I know myself enough to be completely honest), I confess I imagine myself doing mostly easy, fun, and pretty useless things:

I imagine myself surrounded by beauty (wild, natural places, art and exceptional people) and peace (places of quiet, little evidence of human activity, no stressful activities or emotions being expressed), living a life of safe, stress-free stimulation. Picture a cosmopolitan group of very bright people, meeting impromptu in a pub in the Alps during a (non-strenuous) bike tour, and talking about Transition. Picture being surrounded by vivacious people, cute animals, interesting lights and shadows, ancient forests, ocean beaches, dazzling sunsets, great music. Picture falling in love, easily, all the time. Picture an extraordinary Game of Cards with people of breathtaking genius. It’s an image of extraordinary awareness and complete relaxation at the same time. Perhaps it’s an image, an imagining of being always present.

I imagine spending half of my time alone, in wild, beautiful, yet still comfortable (to this spoiled Westerner with zero survival skills) places. That “alone” time is spent in equal parts sensing (paying attention), reflecting, imagining, creating (poetry, short evocative fiction, music, film), and writing this blog (with a greater focus on imagining and conveying how we could live more self-sufficiently — unschooling, self-managed health, locally-created entertainment etc.)

I imagine myself spending the other half of my time in the company of people who are exceptional: extraordinarily intelligent, informed, sensitive, imaginative, present, articulate, and emotionally strong. I picture myself just enjoying their company silently, or collaboratively writing, creating, throwing around interesting ideas, playing. I imagine some of these people being just-for-fun lovers who, in order to have acquired the above qualities, are probably 40-somethings, but who I picture looking much younger. (That is probably pathetic and unrealistic, but I haven’t yet outgrown it. During part of my 20s, my love life was actually like this, or at least that’s how I remember it — poly, just-for-fun, joyful, uncommitted, educational, varied, ego-nourishing, free — and I miss this.)

Why should I want my companions to be intelligent, informed and articulate if I just want to enjoy their silent company, when I’m increasingly disillusioned with, and tired of, conversation? I don’t know. I guess I just want to be comfortable with them, to know they’re “my kind” of people. Perhaps, since people are often known and judged by the company they keep, I just want to be known as the kind of person who hangs out in such company — an ego thing, an insecurity perhaps.

Perhaps this is why I was (and still am) drawn to the beautiful world of Second Life. There everyone you meet “is” young and beautiful and, if you take an appreciative approach to the avatars’ actions and conversations, you can imagine your companions having whatever qualities you want them to have. Everyone, especially you, is larger than “real” life. And maybe, then, they do “really” have those qualities. Maybe we imagine people even in “real” life to be who we want them to be. Maybe we imagine ourselves to be who we want ourselves to be, instead of knowing and accepting ourselves as who we really are. An idealist’s dream.

Would I quickly get tired of this idyllic, lazy, always-present, easy/fun life I imagine, if I were able to find it in “real” life? Would I then be ready to put this Vision, which I’ve had for most of my life, behind me, and move on to something more mature, more useful to the world?

Of course, a personal Future State Vision like this is just another story, subject to the same frailties and objections to stories that I outline above. Perhaps it’s just a trap, a fiction, an impossibility to chase, futilely, narrowing my focus to the point I miss the possibilities that could arise if I just went out and did some things that are completely different, since my stories are inevitably constrained by what I know, and not open to what I have never experienced or learned about myself. Perhaps my real Sweet Spot has yet to be discovered.

As much as I accept the validity of this argument, I know myself well enough to know that (a) the things I have recently done that are completely different have turned out not to have been particularly interesting or, in my mind, worth pursuing, and (b) as soon as I venture outside my comfort zone I again run up against the risk of stress, and commensurate meltdown.

“Where do you grab the dragon’s tail?,” William Powers asks his mentor in Twelve by Twelve, thinking about the need to address climate change and other crises of our time. She replies: “I think you should grab it where the suffering grabs you the most.” But what if that suffering, that grief, grabs you so hard you ache all over, but you lack the courage, the “intestinal fortitude” as it used to be known, the emotional strength, to grab the dragon’s tail?

Maybe sometimes it’s best not to fight the dragon.

Just in case anyone is still reading this endless exercise in self-examination, this public diarizing of my semi-competent personal truth-seeking, perhaps it’s time to wrap it up. What I think I believe, for now, is:

• I should acknowledge my exhaustion and my many fears, not with the intention of trying to “fix” or change them, but just to accept them and accept that, at least for now, I should give myself time to recover, to get my strength back, appreciate who I really am and who I am not.
• Since my Vision for myself seems to revolve around always being present, I should look more actively for ways to achieve that state of simultaneous awareness and relaxation — perhaps with greater presence, my purpose, my intentions, my gift to the world, what I should do next, will become clearer. Brief anecdote: I woke up from a dream last night just at dawn and the fog outside the bedroom windows (I normally have an amazing view of mountains and ocean) was so thick that for a moment I felt as if I were floating. Suddenly I became aware of this strange sound, and listened to it carefully, and then realized that it was my breathing. For the first time I was really focused on listening to my breathing, not (as I tend to be when I try to meditate) focused on thinking about listening to my breathing. This seems an important distinction, a revelation. Is this a taste of what real presence is?
• I should acknowledge that, in some of its details at least, my Vision is not realistic, and, like all fictions, it’s a story I should, at last, let go of. No more stories. Less thinking and living inside my head. Instead: See. Be. Do.

That’s all I’ve got.

In a recent tweet, Jerry Michalski asks:

Is the www really connecting us? or just creating thin, artificial relationships?

To which I replied:

What is the ‘stuff’ of relationship anyway, and have we forgotten what it means, in the growing dearth of authentically shared experience?

Twitter is a great place for posting interesting rhetorical questions, but I thought these questions merited a blog post.

Let me start with Jerry’s questions. In a recent post, I posited that the number of relationships you can sustain at one time varies from 2 to perhaps 150, depending on their depth, since we only have a finite amount of time to invest in relationships. I hypothesized that one could develop a ‘quantum’ model of relationships that would depict them from inner to outer circles in decreasing level of intensity, with an outward shift making room for a closer one elsewhere in your community of relationships, and an inward shift forcing you to move other relationships to the periphery or even out of your orbit entirely.

Jerry’s question suggests the risk that online relationships, which are easy to establish and jettison, are mostly the ‘outside ring’ type, thin and somewhat artificial. Yet most of us have seen some such relationships blossom into close friendships and romances, not to mention powerful work colleagues, suppliers, customers, employers, publishers, and artistic, scientific or philosophical collaborators. What does it take for ‘gravity’ to kick in and add weight and depth to a casual relationship, online or face-to-face?

Looking at my own relationships, I would say the main gravitational forces are need and passion. What defines relationship most, however, is reciprocity. A one-way need or passion is pretty sad, but one that is reciprocal is powerful, what I have called (to use another term from molecular chemistry) covalent (literally ‘sharing or exchanging capacity’). This is the stuff of relationship — sharing or exchanging (knowledge, ideas, experiences, perspectives, and/or love, through conversation, in the broader sense of ‘turning together with’ another person).

How deeply can we share or exchange with ‘online’ relationships, where it is difficult to appreciate the other person’s context, needs and passions, and when there is usually not enough time or attention to nurture the relationship to move it to the inner circles — the circles of intimacy at which relationships really bubble, sizzle and soar. But there are exceptions. I have fallen in love online (in Second Life). I have developed online friendships so close that when we first, finally, met face to face we immediately embraced and talked for hours as if we had known each other a lifetime. I have been so sparked — intellectually, emotionally, or otherwise — by the ideas or rhetoric or creativity or knowledge or articulateness of some people that I first encountered online that I have aggressively pursued them to the point they are now good friends, lovers, intimates, and some of these relationships have lasted and others faded, largely based on reciprocity and whether the spark was sustainable.

What drove me to move these relationships to a more intimate level was a sense that, without close and frequent connection and an acknowledgement of reciprocal interest (need or passion), these relationships were really imagined, fantasies, exaggerated by my anticipation and imagination of their possibilities. I wanted to authenticate these relationships.

As I’ve mentioned before, relationships are complex phenomena, not predictable nor controllable. They are a form of dance, or play (in both sense of the word), that is largely unstructured, with the moves and ‘plot’ of the relationships co-developed by the players.

What do you think? Are we fooling ourselves into believing our 150 ‘relationships’ online are more valuable, reciprocal, and authentic than they really are? Are we imagining them to be what we want them to be because it’s easier than actually negotiating a ‘real’ relationship? And are we settling for large numbers of superficial relationships at the cost of true, dizzying, powerful, deep, intimate, authentic relationships, the kind that fill us with love, with intention, with meaning for our lives?

Photo “love and friendship’ by Nesis Elisheva from artmajeur.com

Just about a year ago, I posted an article on the work that Christopher Allen had done on:

• optimal size of groups for sustainability and collaborative effectiveness (short answer: around 5-7 for work groups and around 50 for networks/communities), and
• maximal span of any one person’s relationship ‘circles’

Christopher illustrated his answer to the second issue (the one this article is about) with the lovely drawings of Nancy Margulies, shown above, of three concentric circles/spirals, which he called, respectively, the support circle, the sympathy circle, and the trust circle. He argued that there are rivers or threads running through all three circles representing common ‘context’ for these relationships (work, shared philosophy or beliefs, kinship, love etc.), what he calls ‘geographies of connection’ on the topographical map of our relationships. Here’s Nancy’s illustration of these threads:

Over the last week, I’ve been chatting with Tree Bressen, Rob Paterson, Melinda Fleming and Nancy White about how many meaningful relationships we can sustain without exhaustion. I hypothesized that (based on people I know) most people have either 5-7 really close (family/love/other partnership) relationships that essentially take up all of their social time, or they have somewhere north of 50, almost all more tenuous, relationships. In either case there’s a constant struggle I would argue, to give and get the aggregate attention and appreciation one wants from one’s social network.

The prevailing view is that we can (and do) have both — an intimate inner circle and a more tenuous second and third circle (or perhaps there are more circles, or perhaps it’s just one continuous outward spiral with strong links at the centre and weak links further out). But my observation is that very very few people really have both, and that people are pretty willing to give up on their large networks if they can find what they want in their inner circle. There’s a constant tension, though — since that inner circle is “putting all one’s eggs in one basket” there is a risk of losing those relationships and not being able to replace them, so many people, I think, try to keep that larger network ‘in reserve’ as a safety net(work).

Because we only have a limited number of hours per year for social activity (take away sleep etc., work time and time wanted for solitary activities and I’d guess we each have between 1500 and 3000 hours a year of social time to parse out), cultivating our networks (which are largely outside our control) can be hugely challenging.

And on top of all this, some of us (sensibly I think) are trying to rediscover or maintain another essential relationship, to Gaia, to all-life-on-Earth, to the natural world. For most of us there is a huge disconnect here — the people in our circles, like we ourselves, live outside the natural world (both physically and especially psychologically) so there is no context of place in which to situate and ‘make sense’ of these relationships. There is, in short, no real community. The relationships, and the attention and appreciation that draw us to others and others to us, are substantially all in our heads.

I have said before that I think humans were and are meant to live a tribal, place-based life as part of community and of all-life-on-Earth. In that natural, prehistoric, and now ideal and unachievable world, we are, at a certain age of adulthood, given the choice of asking to be invited to join the community in which we grew up, or leaving the community and seeking another that gives our life more meaning and value. We can be a part of a community, or we can live peripherally to it, as a visitor or traveler or nomad, until we find the place and community (the two are largely inseparable) where we know we belong. In the natural and prehistoric world one is always a part of the greater circle of all-life-on-Earth, so even those who live on the periphery of community still feel a larger belonging, connection, and appreciation. But there is relatively little choice in such a world of who we can choose to live in community with. Most natural tribes (and not just in human societies) have significant buffer zones between them, and a certain Darwinian reticence to accept strangers. One earns one’s place in a community, and the relationships with the tribe naturally follow.

My Gravitational Community — the 50-70 people listed in the right sidebar — has evolved over the years but stayed roughly the same size. As some of the people who have come into my ‘orbit’ have become much closer to me, the attention I have for the rest (manifested mainly through this blog, IM, e-mail and Second Life) inevitably wanes and these relationships tend to weaken and ‘fall out of orbit’. I wonder if there’s a Quantum Theory for social networks, a ‘rule’ that determines, based on your total social time and energy and on the number of people in various levels of intimacy or proximity to you, how many ‘spaces’ are left in the outer orbits?

If all your relationships are shallow, I can envision you having 150 (Dunbar’s number) such relationships, and juggling them competently. At the other end of the spectrum, I suspect the maximum number of sustainable meaningful relationships for newlyweds and new mothers is between 1 and 2. Perhaps an inverse-square law applies. And then, as we all struggle with Tom Robbins’ great question How do we make love last?, some of those inner circle covalent relationships slide out to outer circles or out of orbit entirely, making room for either a host of new outer-orbit relationships or a new ‘one and only’.

It will not come as a surprise to my regular readers that I believe we are naturally polyamorous, and that there is more strength and sustainability in an set of 3-7 covalent relationships that are intimate and loving and appreciative and attentive but not exclusive, not demanding of the lion’s share of one’s time, and full of accommodation and compersion for each partner. These relationships (especially in today’s world) need not be reciprocal — each of the 3-7 others one has a poly relationship with may have 3-7 other relationships, such that the total poly network could involve dozens of people. This provides a lot more flexibility and support than can be expected from any monogamous relationship. But it is a lot of work, especially when the relationship members live far apart.

My Gravitational Community is broken down into categories that show how the people with whom I have meaningful relationships came into my life, but it would probably be more honest if I were to categorize them by what draws me to them (and hopefully, them to me): that draw may be emotional/visceral/erotic appeal, shared purpose or ideals, or any of three types of intellectual appeal (great intelligence, great creativity, or great communication skill or other attractive competency). Think of these appeals or ‘geographies of connection’ as spokes or rivers flowing out from the centre, as a second dimension (along with ‘quantum level’) of the ‘map’ of one’s social network. Might be a little too personal and too revealing to show for the Gravitational Community on my right sidebar though!

Please feel free to join the dialogue, and let me know if and how you think it’s possible to have it both ways — the ‘cold fusion’ of a fulfilling and intimate inner circle as well as a large and diverse and dynamic ‘outward spiral’ of people with whom one also manages to sustain an enduring and meaningful relationship.

And also please let me know if you have thoughts on how it might be possible to somehow ‘situate’ the people you have important relationships with, within the larger relationship we all have (but have largely forgotten) with all-life-on-Earth. To meld and merge all these juggled relationships into real communities.