In February 2004, it began to dawn on me why I was so unhappy, why I felt trapped and disengaged inside what I was coming to perceive as civilization’s prison walls. I was well along in absorbing the lessons I’ve since compiled in my Save the World Reading List, and was going through a period of profound self-change. This is what I wrote: Ducklings — photo by my friend & colleague Karen’s sister I am beginning to believe that civilization has so warped us that, to a greater or lesser degree, we have all forgotten who we really are. Perhaps some of us never knew. Who are we? We are each our own story, a culture of one. Our story begins at birth with a discovery, an exploration, a connection with the world around us. Whether we are human or animal, we are at first profoundly connected to the rest of the world through our senses. We are filled with wonder. We are incredibly vulnerable, but we are not helpless. It will take several years before the brainwashing of those who have forgotten who they really are convince us that without them, we are helpless. The real truth is that we are brilliantly equipped for survival. Evolution has seen to that. If we were living outside of our terrible civilization, the first things we would learn would all be through our senses. Our senses are there to give us joy, to make us want to live, and to help us survive and thrive in communion with the rest of life on Earth of which we are a part. As animal babies we immediately start to move around and see, hear, feel, smell, and taste. We do the things that give us sensory pleasure. Our instincts guide us — they tell us to smell our Mother’s breath to learn what is good to eat, and find those things to eat, and, for reasons we don’t really understand, or need to, not to eat other things. And our instincts also tell us when to flee and what to flee from, when to migrate, and when to stay and, if need be, to fight. We learn enough language, depending on our species, to communicate the location of food, our presence, and the presence of danger, and to express ourselves. But most of our time for our wholelives is spent just experiencing sensations and enjoying life. But then… |
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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
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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
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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
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Your Self: An Owner's Manual (Satire)
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Hi Dave, good article. > How can we reconnect with the true self that we leave behind when we take that strange abstract journey into otherhood?If iam right, you imply here that our ‘true self’ is the instinctive / sensual self. Whereas our ‘abstract thinking’ is ‘untrue self’. Iam not sure how we can arrive at which one is true and which one is not.To me, these are simply different ways of life to interact with the world. One instinctive. One intellectual. Both are evolutions of nature. Iam not sure why one has to be more truer than the other.The question you ask in this post is exactly what is dealt with in eastern philosophic thought. But, whereas you seem to suggest a return to “instinctive / sensual” way of perceiving the world, the eastern philosophies have a different approach. I think last week you had a link to mindful meditation. Mindfulness exactly deals with this question. It asks us to be first Aware of the chatter thats going on in the brain (the chatter of language, ideas, beliefs, thoughts .. all abstract stuff). From that awareness, it says, one begins to interact with the world in a different way. What that new awareness means, one can only find out by practicing. It seems to me, these approaching are worth pursuing as they seem to be hinting at future evolution of humans beyond abstract thought level which, as you pointed out, has so many limitations.