I’m intrigued at the idea of self-portraits as a means of learning to love and understand yourself better, and perhaps as a means to Let-Self-Change. UK photographer Victoria Sims, whose self-portrait is above, is a master at this. What I’m thinking about, and planning on writing (and podcasting) about soon: Grasping at Straws: Figuring out how to make the world a better place. I’ve given up on the ‘free market’, political system reform, social consciousness movements, and technological innovations — these are all part of the problem, and we’re deluding ourselves to think they will be part of the solution. The solution must be bottom-up, community-based, resilient, experimental, collectively self-managed, and infused with love for each other, and oriented to creating ‘working models’. Beyond that, I don’t know, we’re just going to have to make it up as we go along. But we have to get going.What Happened to the Spirit of the Sixties?: A new generation is now dissecting the phenomenon of the late 1960s and early 1970s, and has concluded that it wasn’t as big a deal as it seemed at the time. I’m not sure sure, and I was there. To understand what that era was about, I think we need to understand what happened to the momentum that it created. Blog-Hosted Conversations: Plan is for 30-minute conversations, once a week, on the subject of identifying and acquiring the essential skills and relationships we need to be models of a better way to live, and what those models might look like. Still working on practice podcasts, readings of my own works just to try out the new medium. I’m psyched, I’m upbeat, I’m happier than I’ve been in decades. But I’m so damned impatient. I need to learn to learn from everyone I meet, every observation, every experience. I need to learn patience, generosity, grace. What’s the one quality or skill or attribute that you think you most need to acquire in your Let-Self-Change journey? |
Navigation
Collapsniks
Albert Bates (US)
Andrew Nikiforuk (CA)
Brutus (US)
Carolyn Baker (US)*
Catherine Ingram (US)
Chris Hedges (US)
Dahr Jamail (US)
Dean Spillane-Walker (US)*
Derrick Jensen (US)
Dougald & Paul (IE/SE)*
Erik Michaels (US)
Gail Tverberg (US)
Guy McPherson (US)
Honest Sorcerer
Janaia & Robin (US)*
Jem Bendell (UK)
Mari Werner
Michael Dowd (US)*
Nate Hagens (US)
Paul Heft (US)*
Post Carbon Inst. (US)
Resilience (US)
Richard Heinberg (US)
Robert Jensen (US)
Roy Scranton (US)
Sam Mitchell (US)
Tim Morgan (UK)
Tim Watkins (UK)
Umair Haque (UK)
William Rees (CA)
XrayMike (AU)
Radical Non-Duality
Tony Parsons
Jim Newman
Tim Cliss
Andreas Müller
Kenneth Madden
Emerson Lim
Nancy Neithercut
Rosemarijn Roes
Frank McCaughey
Clare Cherikoff
Ere Parek, Izzy Cloke, Zabi AmaniEssential Reading
Archive by Category
My Bio, Contact Info, Signature Posts
About the Author (2023)
My Circles
E-mail me
--- 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)
My Other Sites
“What happened to the Spirit of the Sixties?” I was there too, and I think the steam was knocked out of us by Bobby Kennedy’s assassination. It was just one too many. Haven’t seen the movie “Bobby” yet, but I was at Eugene McCarthy’s campaign headquarters in LA when it happened. We loved Bobby too, even though we wanted our candidate to beat him. After the police riot outside the Democratic National Convention in Chicago a month or two later, the young idealists pretty much folded up our tents and went home. Idealism was dead.I’m glad to see it’s now being resurrected by the looming climate change/peak oil crises. When I first came across your blog a couple of years ago, your essays on civilization’s end left me feeling hopeless at first; not any more. There is a real spirit of hope growing. NoImpactMan.com led me to other efforts, and I joined the 90% Reduction Challenge [ http://groups.yahoo.com/group/90PercentReduction ], where the positivity is positively contagious. I recommend it!
“What’s the one quality or skill or attribute that you think you most need to acquire in your Let-Self-Change journey?”Develop a quiet mind. Our mind is constantly in a chatter of thoughts, continiously looking at a present situation through a screen of past knowledge. The past knowledge is ALL your experiences, memories, ideas, beliefs, basically everything **you**. So, our brain, the instrument if you will, is looking at present through a box of all the past conditioning and memory. Is it possible to look at the present without this box interfering in the middle ? A sort of complete deconditioning ? What would it reveal to us ?Iam in the middle of reading perhaps one of the most impactful books of my life — “A wholly different way of living. Dialogs of J.Krishnamurti with Prof Allan Anderson”. I highly recommend it. If anyone is curious to checkout what it’s about, there’s free online copy at http://tchl.freeweb.hu/ ).
I am working on feeling gratitude.
“The solution must be bottom-up, community-based, resilient, experimental, collectively self-managed, and infused with love for each other, and oriented to creating ‘working models'”Dave – you got it right. And here is the good news – the technology is there, the need is urgent, and the people are ready – what with YouTube, MySpace and Facebook? This is the best time, if any, to begin a grass roots movement.
“What’s the one quality or skill or attribute that you think you most need to acquire in your Let-Self-Change journey?”For me it’s patience. It’s like when I’m waiting for the bus. As I don’t wear a watch, I don’t know how long until the bus will show up, or how much time will pass until then, but I know that it will show up eventually, just like I know I’ll come around to working through whatever that’s holding up my evolution.
“What’s the one quality or skill or attribute that you think you most need to acquire in your Let-Self-Change journey?”Mine also is something like “quiet mind”. I have become more and more convinced that the constant rush of sensory stimulation is no accidental companion to the chaos and confusion in our society, but one of its main products and catalysts. I’m trying hard to give myself time to settle my mind and just be. I’ve become a pain in the ass around the house, since deciding a couple months ago that I was no longer interested in TV/video/DVD/YouTube audio/visual “entertainment”, after finally getting tired of the endless nonsense and nerve-jangling crap that I was subjecting myself to. Something in me finally revolted against the tedium of sitting in front of a screen and turning my mind off for a couple hours at a time. Now I read more or listen to music; meaning really listen, as opposed to have music on as the background to other things. What I really need is to set time aside to sit & meditate; but I seem to resist taking that step…
“What’s the one quality or skill or attribute that you think you most need to acquire in your Let-Self-Change journey?”The willingness to abandon the belief that I can or should be anything, or in any way, different, from what I am.
Dave, reading your Saturday musings about what you were thinking about writing soon I was struck by a link between, “Figuring out how to make the world a better place” and “What Happened to the Spirit of the Sixties?”One of the definable characteristics of the Sixties was a willingness for people to make it up as they went along in a very open minded and exploratory way. Of course, somethings that came out of this were just plain silly, somethings, however sensible they seemed, just didn’t work,but many more, particularly about the way we relate to one another as human beings, were absorbed into everyday life and their origins forgotten.As Germain Greer wrote in Oz in July 1969: “The political character of the underground is still amorphous, because it is principally a clamour for freedom to move, to test alternative forms of existence to find if they were practicable, and if they were more gratifying, more creative, more positive, than mere endurance under the system”.In other words, we were making it up as we went along.Which as Jane Jacobs has pointed out is the healthy human way of proceeding:”In its very nature, successful economic development has to be open-ended rather than goal orientated, and has to make itself up expediently and empirically as it goes along. For one thing, unforeseeable problems arise. The people who developed agriculture couldn’t foresee soil depletion. The people who developed the automobile couldn’t foresee acid rain. Earlier I defined economic development as a process of continually improvising in a context that makes injecting improvisations into everyday life feasible. We might amplify this by calling development an improvisational drift into unprecedented kinds of work that that carry unprecedented problems, then drifting into improvised solutions, which carry further unprecedented work carrying unprecedented problems …” (Jane Jacobs, “Cities and the Wealth of Nations”, Pelican Books, 1986, pp221-222)So I would suggest a strategy of muddling our way through to making the world a better place is a more plausible strategy than one driven by grand visions and trying to bully the world into conforming to them.
Thanks, everyone. This is wonderful stuff, inspiring, thoughtful, valuable. It’s interesting how a kind of ‘community’ has emerged around personal self-change, doing things locally, and experimentation. It’s as if we’re learning that the way to do extraordinary things is through humility.