![]() Ci’-vi-lized [adj] subject to government, reduced to order, reclaimed from savagery Fe’-ral [adj] wild, untamed, savage, not civilized Choice’ [n] a variety of alternatives or options Pri’-son [n] a place of forcible (i.e. without choice) confinement, restraint or captivity A’-li-en [n] an organism that occurs in a region in which it is not native (i.e. not naturally at home) Sca’-ven-ger [n] an organism that feeds on carrion, or wild nuts and berries, a cleaner of refuse Sus-tain’-a-ble [adj] capable of being continued indefinitely, without depletion or diminution Can’-cer [n] a malignant pathological (i.e. destructive and unsustainable) growth that expands locally by invasion, and systemically by metastasis (i.e. transmitting its cells to other parts of the organism) until it kills the entire host organism. |
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Radical Non-Duality
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--- My Best 200 Posts, 2003-22 by category, from newest to oldest ---
Collapse Watch:
Hope — On the Balance of Probabilities
The Caste War for the Dregs
Recuperation, Accommodation, Resilience
How Do We Teach the Critical Skills
Collapse Not Apocalypse
Effective Activism
'Making Sense of the World' Reading List
Notes From the Rising Dark
What is Exponential Decay
Collapse: Slowly Then Suddenly
Slouching Towards Bethlehem
Making Sense of Who We Are
What Would Net-Zero Emissions Look Like?
Post Collapse with Michael Dowd (video)
Why Economic Collapse Will Precede Climate Collapse
Being Adaptable: A Reminder List
A Culture of Fear
What Will It Take?
A Future Without Us
Dean Walker Interview (video)
The Mushroom at the End of the World
What Would It Take To Live Sustainably?
The New Political Map (Poster)
Beyond Belief
Complexity and Collapse
Requiem for a Species
Civilization Disease
What a Desolated Earth Looks Like
If We Had a Better Story...
Giving Up on Environmentalism
The Hard Part is Finding People Who Care
Going Vegan
The Dark & Gathering Sameness of the World
The End of Philosophy
A Short History of Progress
The Boiling Frog
Our Culture / Ourselves:
A CoVid-19 Recap
What It Means to be Human
A Culture Built on Wrong Models
Understanding Conservatives
Our Unique Capacity for Hatred
Not Meant to Govern Each Other
The Humanist Trap
Credulous
Amazing What People Get Used To
My Reluctant Misanthropy
The Dawn of Everything
Species Shame
Why Misinformation Doesn't Work
The Lab-Leak Hypothesis
The Right to Die
CoVid-19: Go for Zero
Pollard's Laws
On Caste
The Process of Self-Organization
The Tragic Spread of Misinformation
A Better Way to Work
The Needs of the Moment
Ask Yourself This
What to Believe Now?
Rogue Primate
Conversation & Silence
The Language of Our Eyes
True Story
May I Ask a Question?
Cultural Acedia: When We Can No Longer Care
Useless Advice
Several Short Sentences About Learning
Why I Don't Want to Hear Your Story
A Harvest of Myths
The Qualities of a Great Story
The Trouble With Stories
A Model of Identity & Community
Not Ready to Do What's Needed
A Culture of Dependence
So What's Next
Ten Things to Do When You're Feeling Hopeless
No Use to the World Broken
Living in Another World
Does Language Restrict What We Can Think?
The Value of Conversation Manifesto Nobody Knows Anything
If I Only Had 37 Days
The Only Life We Know
A Long Way Down
No Noble Savages
Figments of Reality
Too Far Ahead
Learning From Nature
The Rogue Animal
How the World Really Works:
Making Sense of Scents
An Age of Wonder
The Truth About Ukraine
Navigating Complexity
The Supply Chain Problem
The Promise of Dialogue
Too Dumb to Take Care of Ourselves
Extinction Capitalism
Homeless
Republicans Slide Into Fascism
All the Things I Was Wrong About
Several Short Sentences About Sharks
How Change Happens
What's the Best Possible Outcome?
The Perpetual Growth Machine
We Make Zero
How Long We've Been Around (graphic)
If You Wanted to Sabotage the Elections
Collective Intelligence & Complexity
Ten Things I Wish I'd Learned Earlier
The Problem With Systems
Against Hope (Video)
The Admission of Necessary Ignorance
Several Short Sentences About Jellyfish
Loren Eiseley, in Verse
A Synopsis of 'Finding the Sweet Spot'
Learning from Indigenous Cultures
The Gift Economy
The Job of the Media
The Wal-Mart Dilemma
The Illusion of the Separate Self, and Free Will:
No Free Will, No Freedom
The Other Side of 'No Me'
This Body Takes Me For a Walk
The Only One Who Really Knew Me
No Free Will — Fightin' Words
The Paradox of the Self
A Radical Non-Duality FAQ
What We Think We Know
Bark Bark Bark Bark Bark Bark Bark
Healing From Ourselves
The Entanglement Hypothesis
Nothing Needs to Happen
Nothing to Say About This
What I Wanted to Believe
A Continuous Reassemblage of Meaning
No Choice But to Misbehave
What's Apparently Happening
A Different Kind of Animal
Happy Now?
This Creature
Did Early Humans Have Selves?
Nothing On Offer Here
Even Simpler and More Hopeless Than That
Glimpses
How Our Bodies Sense the World
Fragments
What Happens in Vagus
We Have No Choice
Never Comfortable in the Skin of Self
Letting Go of the Story of Me
All There Is, Is This
A Theory of No Mind
Creative Works:
Mindful Wanderings (Reflections) (Archive)
A Prayer to No One
Frogs' Hollow (Short Story)
We Do What We Do (Poem)
Negative Assertions (Poem)
Reminder (Short Story)
A Canadian Sorry (Satire)
Under No Illusions (Short Story)
The Ever-Stranger (Poem)
The Fortune Teller (Short Story)
Non-Duality Dude (Play)
Your Self: An Owner's Manual (Satire)
All the Things I Thought I Knew (Short Story)
On the Shoulders of Giants (Short Story)
Improv (Poem)
Calling the Cage Freedom (Short Story)
Rune (Poem)
Only This (Poem)
The Other Extinction (Short Story)
Invisible (Poem)
Disruption (Short Story)
A Thought-Less Experiment (Poem)
Speaking Grosbeak (Short Story)
The Only Way There (Short Story)
The Wild Man (Short Story)
Flywheel (Short Story)
The Opposite of Presence (Satire)
How to Make Love Last (Poem)
The Horses' Bodies (Poem)
Enough (Lament)
Distracted (Short Story)
Worse, Still (Poem)
Conjurer (Satire)
A Conversation (Short Story)
Farewell to Albion (Poem)
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What a lovely and intricate web you’ve woven with words. This has inspired some poems. I will have to work on them after hours. I particularly appreciate in connect between intelligence and scavenging. Beautiful. I’ve always been attracted to the word feral.
me too
Man has institutionalized the non-negotiable blessing of absolutes …. a world view shared by no other life form on the planet. We even sing about it – “Que sera – sera. What will be, will be.” We have fully internalized determinism – and though we insist on blaming the universe – we can really only blame ourselves.
Thanks, Aleah/Sam/David. It’s nice to see that sometimes my ‘experimental’ posts evoke a response other than ‘huh?” ;-)
Dave, I support your environmentalist goals but I don’t think you advance them with these counterfactual fantasies about nature being nothing but cuddly and abundant and civilization being nothing but hard and cold. There’s nothing unnatural about scarcity or population booms and busts. Are the birds of Canada so hardy that they all “naturally” survive every winter? Have you never seen the bodies of birds on the ground after a long cold spell? Do you think every migratory bird survives the difficult passage South? Ecologists tell us that one ‘natural’ strategy for species survival is the production or emergence of very large numbers of individuals simultaneously at certain life stages, e.g. sea turtle hatchlings, marine organism larvae, cicadas, so as to overwhelm the appetites of predator populations. For these species, nature is a cycle of massacres in which many or most of a generation is sacrificed so the species can survive. Looking at the longer term, natural history is full of instance when some species surge in numbers at the expense of others. Massive extinctions of diverse kinds of microorganisms no doubt marked the transition from the Archaean era dominated by anaerobic bacteria to the aerobic world in which we and other multicellular organisms have evolved in all our wonderful diversity. That was abrupt (on a geological timescale), but natural. The growth of the human species is also abrupt, relatively speaking, but no less natural. It will change the Earth’s living systems but cannot kill them. We have the moral capacity to choose, to define our society in ways that are more or less compatible with other species. Let us embrace that moral challenge rather than obscuring it with mythologies of what is natural and unnatural which are all too reminescent of religious dogma.
This chapter invoked a sentence in my mind, I heard from a friend of mine – this is going worse and worse, but perhaps this civilization do not deserve anything better.Nice comparizon – bird&human. What I think is that actually as well humans have more choices just beyond the dogma.
oops – I did it again! Xcuse me!
FERAL: “- Existing in a wild or untamed state. – Having returned to an untamed state from domestication.”WILD:”- Occurring, growing, or living in a natural state; not domesticated, cultivated, or tamed – Uncivilized or barbarous; savage.”Neither feral, nor civilised, but simply WILD!