image from the film Baraka

I‘ve just finished Abram’s follow-up to his Spell of the Sensuous. The earlier book is one of the most important I have ever read, and didn’t feel the new book, Becoming Animal, added a lot to the earlier message. But here for the record are my marginal annotations as I worked through it:

• I liked his term for what Joanna Macy calls the healing and self-healing Work That Reconnects — it’s recuperation. We all need to do this heart-and-soul work if we are to be able to contribute effectively to the marathon transition humanity is now starting to make to a new post-civilization society.
• Amazing description of the sound of a flock of ducks flying overhead into a fierce headwind: “What had sounded like a single repeated utterance now varies subtly in rhythm and volume according to whether the duck speaking is testing the wind with its muscles or simply holding the status quo. Each voice alters its feel when the speaker is blown off course by the gusts, each duck using its quacks to inform the others about the state of the blast just in front of it while also apprising them of its precise location at that moment (since they’re unable to glance around without ceding ground to the wind), each also replying and reassuring the others, so that a whole array of nuanced meanings is passing back and forth above me.”
• The contrast he draws between humans who normally, when they think, temporarily take their consciousness into their heads and out of their bodies, and “other animals, in a constant and mostly unmediated relation with their sensory surroundings, [who] think with the whole of their bodies.”
• An interesting listing of the 9 ways oral cultures differ from our modern “written language” culture:
  1. oral awareness is more informed by place, more local in its orientation
  2. the act of perception is more of a two-way communication
  3. each entity in the place of which one is a part is ascribed its own active agency in the world
  4. all things are seen as expressive, intentional
  5. oral cultures are more aware of their lack of knowledge, of the uncertainty and mystery of everything
  6. the world is articulated as a story rather than as an organized collection of data; it is “verb-al” rather than “noun-al”
  7. time is circle and rhythm and cycle, rather than rectilinear and vectored
  8. the world is the product of its collective imagination, with everything a player in the dream of its creation, fluid rather than static or conceptual
  9. there is an acceptance that we cannot ever perceive of the world the way any other human or creature does; within the a-part-ness of our individual lives there is a pluralism, a collective appreciation of the difference and uniqueness of each entity
• The final passage of the book speaks powerfully again of the grief we all feel for gaia, the collective organism of all-life-on-earth. It is written as prose but works better, I think, in more poetic form (somewhat condensed by me):

Tonight is the winter solstice, the dark of the year.
Too many species have slid into extinction, too many forests felled
and wetlands filled;
so much beauty’s fled the world.
Life’s become cheap: with more and more of us piling in,
humans keep bashing each other in ever more creative ways –
car bombs bursting bodies
and missiles dropped from unmanned drones
splintering families, searing the land
and spattering it with blood.

An addled and anesthetized numbness
is spreading rapidly throughout our species.

There are those, however, who are not frightened of grief;
dropping deep into the sorrow, they find therein
a necessary elixir to the numbness.
When they encounter one another,
when they press their foreheads against the bark
of a centuries-old tree,
or their palms into the hand of yet another child
who has tasted prematurely of wrenching loss,
their eyes well with tears
that fall easily to the ground.

The soil needs this water. Grief is but a gate
and our tears a kind of key
opening a place of wonder that’s been locked away.
Suddenly we notice the sustaining resonance
between the drumming heart within our chest
and the pulse rising from under the ground.

The stars glimmer in the solstice dark, their faint light
mirrored in glints off the crusted snow.
Far below these blanketed fields, deep beneath the bedrock
a lustrous power slumbers, fitfully,
like a bear in its cave.

As this power sleeps, it dreams, pulsing,
its vigor radiating outward in waves,
through the slow solidity of rock,
through thickets of feldspar and quartzite and stratified soils,
outward through stems of dandelions and trunks of sequoias,
through blossoms and budded leaves
and through the craft of our fingers,
through the gleam in your lover’s eye

and the fluted music
upwelling now from the beak
of a blackbird.

A few years ago, a number of weblogging colleagues and I began a practice of maintaining, and updating once a year or so, the obituary for ourselves we hoped would be able to be read truthfully once we’d died. The purpose of the exercise was and is to focus us periodically on our intentions, on the things we hope to accomplish but have not yet done. I would recommend this exercise to you, because, as Goethe once said, there is power in intention.

It occurred to me as I wrote these words that if my father had written his own annual ‘intentional obituary’ he would never have had to change a word from year to year. He always knew what he was intended to do, set his expectations low, worked hard, and achieved, quite early in life, almost everything he wanted to accomplish. Having done so, he was free to pursue his insatiable passion for learning.

For most of his life this passion for learning was his principal hobby, beyond enjoying music and the arts, and gardening, and he pursued it with a tireless curiosity and critical thinking mind, with the objective of understanding how the world really worked. His learning imbued in him a very progressive worldview, one that was out of sync with that of many of his friends and family, but which made him, for me, a mentor, an example of how to live thoughtfully, courageously, authentically and responsibly, and a sounding board for my own radical ideas. He gave me the courage to be different, to be myself, and he introduced me to the poem by e e cummings that suggested a way of being and doing that he exemplified and that I have tried all my life to emulate:

Almost anybody can learn to think or believe or know,
but not a single human being can be taught to feel. Why? Because
whenever you think or you believe or you know,
you’re a lot of other people:
but the moment you feel, you’re nobody-but-yourself.

To be nobody-but-yourself — in a world which is doing its best, night and day,
to make you everybody else — means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight;
and never stop fighting.

My father lived modestly, in every sense of the word, and abhorred conspicuous consumption. He was interested in politics but cared about action, not rhetoric. He measured himself and others on what they did, and what they did not do, rather on what they said or professed. He believed in conserving, in listening and understanding, in helping others, in seeking consensus, and in striving for peace.

He told me once that the true measure of what we do in the workplace is not the physical or procedural or financial outcomes achieved in the short run, since these are always transient. The true measure is what we have demonstrated personally, one-on-one, to others we work with and for, that changes forever what they know, that gives them capacities and competencies and understanding that will last their whole lives and which they in turn will pass on to others, and so on, for generations. That wisdom has guided me in my dealings with work colleagues all my life, and with my children and grandchildren as well, and its intangible product is his lasting legacy, and that of everyone he has touched.

Through his actions and his example I learned how to be empathetic, how to listen appreciatively, the importance of honesty and generosity, and of thinking before you speak, that showing is more effective than telling, that we need to slow down and look and really see what is happening. I learned from him the importance of home, the value of writing and imagination and curiosity and critical thinking, and, in his final months, I learned from him how to let go.

He was, in short, an extraordinary father, in a world where so many fathers are dictatorial, intolerant, impatient, demanding, abusive, ignorant, tactless, lacking in self-knowledge, or simply absent. I will do my best to exemplify the qualities that he did, to be as good a role model as he was, all his life, in everything he did.

There’s a poem by the Canadian poet Oriah, called The Invitation, that’s about being authentic and which reminds me a lot of my father’s advice, so I’d like to conclude by reading it:

It doesn’t interest me what you do for a living.
I want to know what you ache for
and if you dare to dream of meeting your heart’s longing.
It doesn’t interest me how old you are.
I want to know if you will risk looking like a fool
for love, for your dream
for the adventure of being alive.

It doesn’t interest me what planets are squaring your moon…
I want to know if you have touched the centre of your own sorrow
if you have been opened by life’s betrayals
or have become shriveled and closed
from fear of further pain.
I want to know if you can sit with pain, mine or your own
without moving to hide it, or fade it, or fix it.

I want to know if you can be with joy, mine or your own
if you can dance with wildness
and let the ecstasy fill you to the tips of your fingers and toes
without cautioning us to be careful, to be realistic
to remember the limitations of being human.
It doesn’t interest me if the story you are telling me is true.
I want to know if you can disappoint another
to be true to yourself.
If you can bear the accusation of betrayal
and not betray your own soul.
If you can be faithless
and therefore trustworthy.

I want to know if you can see Beauty
even when it is not pretty
every day. And if you can source your own life from its presence.
I want to know if you can live with failure, yours and mine
and still stand at the edge of the lake
and shout to the silver of the full moon, “Yes!”

It doesn’t interest me
to know where you live or how much money you have.
I want to know if you can get up
after the night of grief and despair
weary and bruised to the bone
and do what needs to be done
to feed the children.
It doesn’t interest me who you know
or how you came to be here.
I want to know if you will stand
in the centre of the fire with me
and not shrink back.

It doesn’t interest me where or what or with whom
you have studied. I want to know what sustains you
from the inside when all else falls away.
I want to know if you can be alone with yourself
and if you truly like the company you keep
in the empty moments.

Now he spends his mornings in meditative practice, alone and with others, reconnecting with all-life-on-Earth, with his instincts and senses, and with the pain so many of us feel for Gaia and its suffering. He spends his afternoons in facilitation practice, organizing and helping activists to develop innovative and effective ways to undermine and end industrial growth society, so that a new, healthy, natural society can take its place. He is not optimistic about this happening. He spends his evenings in reflective practice, play, imagining possibilities, and writing.

Not sure this will get me invitations to speak at conferences, or to collaborate on projects. But it’s who I am, now, and perhaps, under all the gunk I’d accumulated, who I’ve always been. Nobody-but-myself. It just fits.

I’m still sticking to the set of criteria I outlined back in March. My dream then, as regular readers probably know, was to live simply in an open space structure in the summer in each hemisphere, near forest and ocean, where heating and air conditioning (at least during the months I’m there) are unnecessary, in a peaceful, uncrowded and progressive location, with good Internet access, doing the reconnecting, activism facilitation, and reflecting activities I set out for my ‘retirement from paid work’.

But where? I’ve identified the following criteria:

• A place warm enough not to need heating.
• A physically beautiful, natural setting and house in or near forests and beaches.
• Peaceful and private.
• Not overcrowded.
• Reasonably sustainable when the economy and culture collapse.
• Good public transit, bike and walking lanes and trails.
• Good local organic food store.
• A place where the people nearby have a high sense of well-being, by their own standards, and ideally are progressive in their thinking.
• Connectivity: not too remote for visitors to access, and with high-speed Internet available.

I actually found two places that meet all these criteria, one in Roberts Creek on the Sunshine Coast (map), and the other on Bowen Island, and finally decided on a one-year lease on the latter.

My new home is on a hilltop with vast and amazing views of the ocean on two sides, right beside a park. Bowen has a temperate rainforest climate, so I’m surrounded by immense evergreens. The road my house is on was built specifically for the park and has no street sign, and I have only one neighbour, much further along this road, invisible from where I am. It is astonishingly quiet, lush, and beautiful. The house has huge windows all around, so there is no need for ornamentation — my home is this forested hilltop.

The house is quite a bit bigger than what I thought I would want, but it’s good to have a couple of guest rooms for visitors, and even sparsely decorated every room looks complete, magnificent. The local bus, which runs 1km from the house, hooks up to the ferry, which is 20 minutes to the lower mainland (West Vancouver), so the trip to the Vancouver train station (I plan to take more trains and few planes from now on, since with retirement from paid work I now have my time back) or airport when necessary, is not onerous, and does not require the use of a car. Since it is 6.5km to the ferry (where all the stores and activities are) I’m thinking of getting an electric bicycle to serve as an alternative to the bus.

I’ve already attended one ‘community’ event organized by Chris Corrigan, and in the process met thirty of the island’s most active members, and really started to become part of the community. The local organic food store, craft shops and wellness services are excellent, and, in the summer months, there is an organic restaurant five minutes’ walk from my door.

So I’m delighted: My plans to move forward with my life and to start working more attentively and intentionally on my own reconnection with all-life-on-Earth, and to create models of a better way to live and be active trying to undermine the most destructive aspects of industrial growth society, are beginning to happen. Stay tuned.

These changes seem to display fine in both Firefox and IE, but if they don’t work on your browser, please let me know. Regular blogging resumes tomorrow.

You now know as much as I do. I’m not going to speculate until I get more data. More ina week’s time or so. And thanks for your expressions of concern.

Free Love, by Glenn Parton

Look up at the clear night sky! The free play of two cosmic forces, Eros and Thanatos, Love and Hate, Attraction and Repulsion, Intimacy and Distance, sustains harmony among the heavenly bodies and evolves the beauty, wisdom, and goodness of the universe. What is the message or lesson for human association or society that is written in the cosmos? We know that human society is a microcosm of this great celestial order, and that we have fallen out of balance with the rest of Nature. What must we do in order to become part of the Universal Harmony again?

Everyone recognizes that friendship cannot be mandated or legislated, that it arises naturally, spontaneously, one person at a time, and that it is possible and desirable to have many friends, on different levels of communication, conversation, and commitment. The hope of peace on earth, and peace with the earth, has a lot to do with spreading friendship around the world, but I do not believe this ideal will ever be realized (enough to save the world) until we acknowledge that Yin and Yang, the feminine spirit and the masculine spirit, are also cosmological principles and/or forces, which change the balancing point between men and women by adding sexuality to the mix. We should not pursue a vision of worldwide peace and friendship that ignores, minimizes, or misunderstands the sexual-polarity of human association.

My heavenly vision, and long-range political solution, is Free Love between man and woman. By free love I mean sexual love that does not restrict itself to one person at a time. It means holding oneself open to the possibility of sexually loving more than one, and taking that voyage when the opportunity arrives; it means taking each man/woman relationship on its own terms, as far as it will go, as far as it wants to go, including sexuality, until it finds its own point of equilibrium between Love and Hate, Intimacy and Distance. That is the Way to reach the proper balance between men and women. The message of evolution is that each being finds its balancing point with all other beings, according to the laws of nature, including Yin-Yang, creating a self-balancing dynamic whole in which each being is what it is in terms of the totality of its relationships.

Human beings must freely associate, form, and bond, including Yin-Yang sexual energies, or we disturb the natural order of human society, our alignment or agreement with the logic and love of the cosmos. Human society, with its sexual-polarity, must freely arrange itself, or we will not achieve a harmonious community, and without a harmonious community we will not reach consensus on the political level because sexual frustrations, conflicts and hostilities spill over into the major areas of life, work and government.  In other words, the ideal of friendship will remain an empty ideal if we do not understand that free love is part of the original architecture of human togetherness, and that we must allow sexuality between men and women to work itself out, according to inherent interests and desires, or we will never build good government, real democracy, or a true Republic because if we do not first put our sexual lives in proper order, then politics will collapse on a faulty foundation. Out of the fundamental harmony of a sexually balanced civil society will come political intelligence and wisdom.

Respond, as much as you can, to all heavenly bodies orbiting around you. Thatís how the suns and moons and planets behave toward one another, pushing and pulling everything into a vibrating, pulsating, interconnected totality. Of course it is not possible to love everyone with the same intensity and completeness (with some people a simple nod or smile, or even silent toleration, is enough), but each man/woman relationship has its natural sexual closeness and distance, and we must have the courage to seek it, and go there, without interference from custom, convention, or imposed morality. Friendship is always, at bottom, a relationship between two people, but everyone knows that it is not socially desirable, not community-building, for each person to have only one friend. Rather, each person is permitted and encouraged to have a diversity of friends, each one created on its own unique terms, as deeply as possible, with no outside direction or definition. If sexual love was free to follow this path, like friendship, then we would have discovered the secret ingredient in a self-balancing social constellation (of friends and lovers), and secured the social foundation for rational discourse and action.

If there was only Love, then the Big Bang would not have occurred, and the world would collapse (into undifferentiated Oneness), and evolution would have to begin again; if there was only Hate, then the world would fragment, scatter, and fly apart. The Great Harmony is a balance between the forces of Attraction and Repulsion, Contraction and Expansion, Integration and Disintegration. Free Love is the mystery of the universe, and if human beings would learn to sexually love who we want, when we want, in the way that we want, as much as we want, instead of imposing artificial constraints, or false morality, on love, then the gravity of love would create a tight and intricate web of human connections in which we would not have to struggle for political consensus because we would already basically have it.

The first and foremost criticism that is raised against free love is that it harms children, but actually it is best for children because the nuclear family is too small a world for the development of the vast potential of children. The nuclear family limits childhood reality to the overbearing influence of two adult perspectives, making it nearly impossible for the child to escape from prejudice, ignorance, narrowness, and parental unconsciousness. The wounds of the parents are visited on the children, and the cycle of the neurotic family is perpetuated from one generation to the next, which slows down the evolution of the human species tremendously. Free love makes intimate communities (like tribes), rather than isolated families, the center of childhood upbringing, exposing the child to many viewpoints, expanding his/her consciousness, increasing the opportunities for sanity and self-realization.

A second objection that is raised against free love is that it will not work because human beings are competitive, jealous and possessive creatures, but actually it is monogamy that causes these problems because it makes us fearful that if s/he loves someone other than me, then s/he cannot also love me. If your concept of love is limited, then that creates jealousy and possessiveness because you are afraid of loss, abandonment and loneliness, but if you ìseeî that it is possible to love more than one, then you will not fear abandonment and loneliness when love overflows to include others. Free love makes intimate networks (like tribes), rather than fragmented couples, the center of personal life and love, exposing the adult to a diversity of potential lovers, broadening the horizon of intimate contact, communication, and knowledge, increasing the opportunities for security and happiness.

Another criticism leveled against free love is that there is not enough time to love more than one, but of course love concerns quality, not quantity. Eliminating the boredom of monogamy alone would provide more than enough time for at least a few additional lovers, and then there are those habits, routines, hobbies, and fantasies that could be replaced, for almost no money, with deep and thrilling real sexual love adventures. There will never be enough time for co-dependent individuals because every gesture or sign of independence is seen as a minimization or devaluation of their relationship, and there will never be enough time for someone who is waiting for the one and only perfect lover. Such people cannot get enough love no matter how much they get because they misunderstand free love. To these people I say: contemplate the heavens and let your personal life become a feeling and thoughtful expression of the Will, intention, and intelligence of the Universe! ]]> http://howtosavetheworld.ca/2005/04/14/free-love-by-glenn-parton/feed/ 6 http://howtosavetheworld.ca/2005/04/01/convergence-bridge/ http://howtosavetheworld.ca/2005/04/01/convergence-bridge/#comments Tue, 30 Nov 1999 05:00:00 +0000 Dave Pollard http://howtosavetheworld.ca/2005/04/01/convergence-bridge/ (posted from Montreal)
As many of you know, I have recently become enamoured of complexity theory, and this has caused me to re-think many of the ideas presented here on How to Save the World. I am blogging today from Montreal, where I have been attending the First Annual Global Colloquium on Complexity and Chaos. The event has catalyzed or emerged some new conceptions about the nature of communications, and specifically blogging, and I have decided, starting tomorrow, to incorporate these thoughts into this online journal. So get ready for some big changes here. Beginning tomorrow:

• The red, blue, and green system charts and process charts you have become accustomed to on this blog will be discontinued. In their place you will see graphics such as the one above. The lack of borders on these charts indicates the omnipresence of intellectual miasma, and the lack of connections on these charts represents universal uncertainty. All that we can presume to know is that ideas and conceptions have the apparent quality of co-existence and that understanding of their relationship will, with time and contemplative study, gradually emerge.
• No arrows will appear in any graphics from now on. Such presumptions of causality are, at best, oversimplifications and, at worst, dangerous misinformation.
• The words question, answer, problem and solution will be scrubbed from posts on this blog. In our world, as a complex system, these concepts are meaningless. There are no answers or solutions, just learnings about ideation, being and nothingness, consciousness and unconsciousness.
• You will no longer read the words ‘how’ or ‘why’ on this blog. In the absence of causality on the edge of chaos such terms are pretentious. Effective tomorrow the name of this weblog will be Convergence Bridge.
• The categories feature of this weblog will be discontinued. Since everything is related and the true relationship between the conceptions discussed uncertain, it no longer ‘makes sense’ to have artificial categories. And instead of arguing, as I have in past, in favour of personal taxonomies and ontologies, I will argue, in the first article tomorrow, that there are no taxonomies or ontologies, and that such arbitrary categorizations are fraudulent.
• I will also eschew the use of the question mark in all posts, since questions imply the existence with reasonable certainty of answers. Instead, I will begin using the ‘degree’ symbol (†), the circle representing the endless pursuit of perfect understanding at points in my discourse where a ‘pause’ for considered thought is called for. Likewise, periods, with their naive implication of order and finality, will be replaced by commas, the perfect symbol of tentativeness and uncertainty,
• And finally, the absurd words ‘know’, ‘knowledge’ and ‘information’ will no longer appear in my posts. Again, a symbol, the colon, with its gentle suggestion of possible relationship, will be used in place of such anachronisms,†

It is my sincere belief that these changes will allow a higher level of intellectual discourse on these pages: I look forward to our continued journey together:† ]]> http://howtosavetheworld.ca/2005/04/01/convergence-bridge/feed/ 19