dialog on recent themes…

2007-12-18

Richard Moore

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From: "Howard Switzer" <>
To: <•••@••.•••>
Date: Mon, 10 Dec 2007 15:52:20 -0600
Subject: Re: Spiritual Transformation, Evolution, and Culture
   http://cyberjournal.org/show_archives/?id=1362

Richard,

I think you did a brilliant job of describing the spiritual aspects 
of cultural change.  I think this helps to demystify "spiritual" 
while honoring the mystery.  I've said to people "that the change 
needs to be spiritually based" and gotten hostile reactions making it 
difficult to then explain what that meant to me, which is pretty much 
what you've described.  I had only meant an attitude of mutual 
respect for all life, etc., so I agree the word is a problem for some 
folks.  I simply love your approach to all this.  I talk about your 
approach via community dialogue with people all the time but haven't 
got any traction yet.  I've been trying to get the Green Party to do 
some of that to get them on the same page.  Alas, too many socialists 
have gotten involved, what a mess.  I realize I will have to do it in 
my own local community and get some experience.  Decentralization and 
personal & planetary responsibility are a couple of the values 
expressed in the 10KV. <http://www.gp.org>

Perhaps this would be a good place to send your article.  YES! 
Magazine - about people and ideas that are changing the world - 
positive solution oriented journalism.  
<http://www.yesmagazine.org/>www.yesmagazine.org/

Although I'm not sure there are any "solutions," which sounds like a 
technophiles word, I think there are only options.

Thank you for writing,

Howard Switzer

----------

Hi Howard,

Feel free to share the posting with your friends, the ones you've 
been talking to about 'spiritually based'.

---

I'm pleased to see that you've been trying to get something going in 
your community, re/wise dialog. Permit me to make some suggestions, 
based on what I've seen work elsewhere.

I wouldn't begin by appealing to organizations for support. They are 
more interested in how you might serve their agenda than they are in 
helping you. Better is to start out by looking for a few people who 
have a bit of community spirit, who are perhaps each already engaged 
in some kind of community-minded effort. Ask each of them about what 
they're doing, what kind of results they've had, where they're headed 
next, etc. Let them know you support their efforts, and that you are 
yourself looking for ways to contribute to improving your community. 
If you can establish rapport, along these kind of lines, then you 
could invite the folks to an informal discussion, to share ideas and 
their various experiences, re/community improvement.

As your contribution to this sharing exercise, you could then 
introduce community dialog as an idea to be considered. In your 
sharing, you'd want to explain the ideas in terms familiar to your 
gathering. For example, if you want to express that "long-standing 
divisions can be healed by the right kind of dialog", pick a specific 
long-standing division, one that has been a problem for one of your 
guests. Point out how much things would be improved if those 
particular 'two sides' began working together instead of arguing. In 
other words, the benefits of community dialog are best expressed in 
terms of the existing values and experience of those present.

If you can successfully convey the potential value of community 
dialog, and arouse people's interest in finding out what the hell it 
is you're talking about when you say things like 'wise dialog', that 
is then the time to try to explain what dialog is about in terms of 
process. In this way you avoid at all times presenting theories or 
abstractions, which many people have a very difficult time following, 
and even more difficulty retaining.

I suggest that you have a handout ready, say 4-6 pages, that shows 
what's been done in other communities with Wisdom Councils and 
similar initiatives. Again, not theory but concrete stories. I've got 
quite a bit of material available from various websites, with 
compelling stories and lots of pictures, if you'd like to discuss 
what might go into such a handout. It wouldn't be difficult to put 
one together. It is really the handout that would successfully convey 
what you need to convey about process, and people will be likely to 
read it if their curiosity and interest has been sufficiently aroused 
by what went before. Your own 'presentation' at this point could 
simply amount to you pointing to a few paragraphs in the handout, and 
relating how they made a lot of sense to you, and then letting that 
lapse naturally into an open discussion around people's reaction to 
the handouts.

Be sure to keep the handouts under wraps until you get to this final 
stage in the discussion. They would only distract from the earlier 
dialog, and confuse the issues. It is important to get people 
interested first, so that they have an inclination to look at the 
material right away and discuss it on the spot.

The ideal outcome of such an evening would be for a few of your 
guests to express an interest in meeting again, to share more 
experiences, and to learn more about community dialog, and to explore 
whether this is something they might want to put some effort into. 
This is now the 'beginning point' in your effort to promote 
community-dialog events in your community. What went before is prolog.

If you do find yourself with such an 'interest group', be sure to get 
their email addresses and other contact information, as well as what 
part of the community they live in. Also point out that the handout 
material has URLs, where they can learn a lot more prior to the next 
meeting. Be sure to get agreement on a time and place for the next 
meeting, and follow up with a friendly phone reminder about two days 
before the agreed date.

If you get this far, or close to it, get in touch with me and we can 
talk further. There are others I'd want to bring into the 
conversation at that point as well, people who would be motivated to 
support what you're doing and who have the skills and resources to do 
so. But you don't need them now, what you need is to find a few 
people to work and learn with you, as discussed above. It takes a 
team to get anywhere with promoting dialog in a community. It's not a 
one-person undertaking.

---

Many thanks for suggesting Yes! magazine as a venue for my material. 
That sounds like a good suggestion, and I really must put more effort 
into 'getting out there' in new ways. In this case, I'd want to 
review the last several postings, and combine bits into a more 
coherent and comprehensive presentation in article style. It's a 
non-trivial amount of work, and I've seldom been able to motivate 
myself for such projects unless an editor has requested an article. 
Perhaps I'll reform my ways, but it's always so much more appealing 
to explore new ideas, and share it with you folks, than it is to send 
off speculative submissions of reworked material to unknown editors.

Permit me to take this opportunity to appeal for some help in this 
area. If anyone out there thinks that some of my material might be of 
interest to some publication or the other, go ahead and contact them 
yourself, including an appropriate extract of what I wrote, and most 
important -- your own reason for recommending the material. My guess 
is that an editor would give more credence to your message, and your 
reasons, than he would to a self-promotional pitch from some aspiring 
writer (like yours truly). And the editor would not be put off by not 
getting a 'properly formatted submission', since that wouldn't be 
expected from you. If she is at all intrigued by what you send her, 
she might contact me to send her something more 'official'. If she's 
not, then she probably wouldn't like what I might send her either.

So Howard, please consider sending that essay to Yes! along with your 
own thoughts as to why they should be interested.

best wishes,
rkm


--------------------------------------------------------
Date: Mon, 10 Dec 2007 15:47:13 -0500 (EST)
From: Howard Ward <>
To: Richard Moore <•••@••.•••>
Subject: Re: Spiritual Transformation, Evolution, and Culture
   http://cyberjournal.org/show_archives/?id=1363

Richard - Let me add a further clarification to what I mean by a 
'spiritual change'. What I'm referring to is a change in 
understanding related to us all being connected in One Whole, rather 
than 'imagining' ourselves as separate 'independent' beings. When 
this sort of transformation occurs, the well-being of the Whole 
becomes the concern, rather than limiting the concern to the 
interests of a 'self-image' or ego.

A 'shift in culture' can be a 'step' in a healthier more sustainable 
direction, but it's usually a rather limited and partial change. To 
my observation, at the root of our unsustainable human behavior is 
this belief of being independent beings, which leads us to believe 
that we only need to concern ourselves with our own personal 
interests. As long as we fail to see our interconnected relationship, 
I suggest, we will continue to act as if the problems we have are 
"somebody else's problem."

Perhaps Richard Flyer is referring to something else, I don't know. 
But my suggestion is that living 'spiritually' is living with the 
understanding that 'it's all interconnected', or One Whole.

That's my suggestion, anyway.

Regards - Howard

--------

Hi Howard,

Thanks for an eloquent and clear expression of your understanding of 
spirituality -- an understanding that I share and that I'm fairly 
sure R Flyer would agree with as well.

There are of course many varieties of cultural transformation. 
Perhaps the most dramatic of our era was the rise of Nazism in 
Germany.  Clearly 'cultural transformation' in general cannot be 
considered a sure step toward spiritual understanding, nor to 
anything desirable.

The specific cultural transformation I have been writing about, 
however, is very much aimed at facilitating the emergence of a 
feeling of 'connection' and a holistic perspective generally. It's a 
cultural transformation that would provide an 'experiential context' 
that is much more in harmony with a spiritual perspective than that 
of our current culture. Would this not be a step in the right 
direction, toward a spiritual awakening?

rkm

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From: Tom Roberts
To: •••@••.•••
Subject: ways to produce social and humane values
Date: Mon, 10 Dec 2007 18:16:08 +0000

Dear Richard Moore,

A mutual friend forwarded an email from you in which you consider 
relationships between spiritual development and community 
empowerment. There is a pretty good pile of evidence that states of 
unitive consciousness move people away from the values of personal 
consumption, ownership, and power-addiction to more humane values and 
social concerns. Here are some prepublication paragraphs. [omitted 
for now]

You can find earlier versions of this in chapter 15 of Vol. 2 of 
Psychedelic Medicine edited by Michael Winkelman and me and in a 
similar chapter in Vol. 3 of Where God and Science Meet edited by 
Robert McNamara

Good luck on your quest,
Tom Roberts

---------

Hi Tom,

Thanks for writing, and please consider joining this humble 
low-traffic discussion forum:
     •••@••.•••

My own understanding certainly agrees with what you say about the 
implications of a unitive (holistic) consciousness. Your paper delves 
into drug-induced mystical experiences for evidence, and I find your 
results quite believable. Perhaps the problem with youth today is 
that they don't have access to strong enough drugs :-)

My own research has been a bit more low-budget, but for me equally 
convincing. I've looked into the anthropology literature in search of 
societies that have had holistic cultures, and they all lack the 
dominator values (personal consumption, power-addiction, etc.). 
Conversely, those cultures that exhibit the dominator values all lack 
a holistic world view.

There are many ways around the barn of discovery. It is reassuring 
when like-minded seekers end up in the same place by different routes.

again, nice to hear from you,
rkm
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* Note to readers: this next exchange begins in the realm of 
geopolitics, and soon ranges far afield into much deeper issues. 
Ultimately it comes full circle, to our ongoing discussion of 
community dialog, but by the time we get there we are on a profound 
philosophical plane, one I haven't really explored before, at least 
not consciously. All of our recent discussions, and the recent essays 
I've shared, together with everything I've ever written, are eclipsed 
by what develops in this next exchange, for some audiences at least. 
I hope some of you make it through. You've done great so far, and 
your feedback has been absolutely invaluable.

rkm

--------------------------------------------------------
From: Stephen Shaw <>
Date: Tue, 11 Dec 2007 01:31:40 -0500
To: •••@••.•••
Subject: Re: "Bush Insists Iran Remains a Threat" - Is he losing control?
   http://cyberjournal.org/show_archives/?id=1360

Greetings Richard,

Interestingly, shortly before the Iran intelligence announcement I 
had listened to a KPFA Guns and Butter interview with Daniel Estulin 
reporting on the Bilderburg meeting this year. He said the word from 
inside the meeting was that there would be no attack on Iran. If I 
remember right the U.S. wanted it but was overridden. The interview 
is enlightening and I recommend it!

http://www.kpfa.org/archives/index.php?arch=23512

I interpreted Bush's continued squawking about Iran as just an 
illustration that they, the U.S. faction, still wanted the attack and 
couldn't help acting petulant as a substitute for actually being 
defiant. It is interesting to see divisions in their ranks. I wonder 
if the U.S. faction ever thinks of going it alone?

Your idea of letting Bush act a little crazed to enable someone to 
upstage him makes sense, too.

Best,
Stephen

http://danielestulin.com/?idioma=en
http://www.amazon.com/True-Story-Bilderberg-Group/dp/0977795349/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1197369445&sr=1-1

---------------

Hi Stephen,

As you probably noticed, I've posted about Estulin, thanks to you:
    "A few interesting items for you..."
   http://cyberjournal.org/show_archives/?id=1364

It is important to keep in mind that there is no unified US faction, 
and that the predominate clique driving US policy is not particularly 
concerned with the interests of the US as a nation, apart from 
ensuring that the Pentagon retains the ability to project force in 
ongoing support of the global interests of that clique. The US is but 
a base, a tool to be used like any other by the clique for its own 
private ends on the global canvas. The US may be the Queen of the 
pieces, but it's inside the game, not a player.

The clique I refer to, and I only repeat myself because the need 
keeps arising in these dialogs, are the top financial elites who own 
and control the Federal Reserve, and thereby are the tail that wags 
the USA dog. The Rockefellers are the obvious and well-known members 
of this clique, but there are others less well known, not all 
Americans, and some whose identity remains to this day a carefully 
guarded secret. We don't even know who our slave masters are. Some 
characterize them as 'Jewish', but as we shall see that conjecture is 
totally irrelevant.

Such has been the nature of our 'democracy' since 1913, when the 
Federal Reserve Act was snuck through Congress during Christmas 
recess, by the same folks who became the private owners of the new 
all-powerful central bank. The first major initiative of these folks, 
the ancestors of our current ruling clique, was to finance both sides 
in Europe during World War I, and then to connive the entrance of the 
US into the war just in time to tilt the balance to the side favored 
by the clique.

At the end of the war, the clique had all of Europe and the UK in the 
grip of astronomical debt, and that was only the beginning. The same 
people profited mightily from trade in armaments and supplies during 
the war, and built corporate dynasties in the process. Not only that, 
but most of the money spent by the US in carrying out its part of the 
war was loaned to them by the Federal Reserve, adding another huge 
pile of interest to the mountain of wealth the clique accumulated as 
a result of the war they financed and arranged.

 From that point forward policy-making has been firmly in the hands of 
the original Federal Reserve clique and its descendents. The 
mainstream media is also under the thumb of the same clique, so that 
public opinion is never allowed to interfere with fundamental clique 
objectives. The media can be used to support sitting Presidents, or 
to undermine them, depending on which best enhances those objectives. 
No President who has turned on these people has survived long in 
office, as we saw most recently in the case of JFK. The tentacles of 
the clique reach also into the top echelons of all the Intelligence 
services and the Pentagon, even if 99% of the people in Intelligence 
and the military perceive themselves as 'defending democracy and the 
American way'.

When we talk about the 'American faction', we are really talking 
about this clique vs. everyone else, be they politicians, CEOs, oil 
barons, Presidents, Admirals, heads of the CIA or Joint Chiefs of 
Staff, Congressmen, Mafia bosses, or the Israeli lobby. And this 
collective 'everyone else' counts for nil as regards strategic 
decisions. Control at this level is achieved by the carrot and the 
stick. The carrot is access to power, prestige, fame, wealth, private 
jets, and countless females (or males) on tap in your favorite sizes 
and flavors to tickle your every dark perversion. The stick, if you 
stop playing ball, ranges anywhere from demotion, to public 
humiliation, to mysterious sudden death. The repertoire and resources 
of these folks far exceeds that of the lads in the Mafia, who are in 
fact a subsidiary organization, quite useful for certain jobs, such 
as narcotics distribution.

Bush and the neocons are mere tools-of-the-day for this clique. The 
neocons happened to be promoting a package that appealed to the 
clique, that promised to advance some of its objectives. In selecting 
the neocons to be the drivers behind a new administration, the clique 
was by no means adopting the neocon philosophy, nor were they buying 
into the whole PNAC package. They were simply applying a convenient 
tool that was aligned tactically with clique interests for the time 
being. Any such tool can be discarded whenever its behavior becomes 
counter-productive, or when a better tool comes along. There is 
always a Plan B in the wings, for any tool that might go rogue or go 
sour.

Bush, who has probably never even read the PNAC agenda, was selected 
for entirely different reasons. Knowing that the neocon agenda would 
be highly unpopular, the clique decided that defending it logically 
would be very difficult, even with complete control over the media. 
An articulate and intelligent President would look like a fool if he 
tried to defend the insane policies. So, our clique slyly figured, 
why not put someone up there who is obviously a fool, right through 
his whole little soul, so that the public will believe they are 
struggling against the foolishness of one man, and have no 
understanding of what's really going on. Of course Bush, being 
clueless on all matters apart from golf, looting, cocaine, and 
womanizing, would need to be kept far away from any role in running 
the White House. Hence the need for Cheney, the shadow real 
president, who leaves all the photo ops to Bush and stays out of the 
public eye himself, and who carries the Black Armageddon Box with him 
everywhere he goes, something only official Presidents have done in 
the past.

This was the project that went operational in the form of Bush's 
initial Presidential campaign. The ducks were all lined up for 
launching a major imperialist venture, the preparations for 9/11 were 
well underway, and no power on Earth was going to stop the show. Of 
course Bush The Clueless was going to win, no matter how much vote 
fixing and media lying was required, or how many Supreme Court 
Justices were needed to accomplish the task. As a last resort they 
wouldn't have hesitated to off Gore, one of their own boys, if it was 
the only way to open the path for their current man, as they did 
earlier with Bobby. Of course now that we have Diebold machines, all 
of this can be accomplished by a single computer command message, 
specifying which candidates are to get which amount of votes in each 
precinct. Exit polls have been abandoned since they provide hard 
statistical evidence of the systematic fix.

The neocons have thus far accomplished much for their elite 
puppeteers, and have been given in return free reign to loot at will, 
funneling all those billions for the Iraq War into their own 
corporate coffers and investment portfolios. They in turn have 
established the foundations of a fascist state in the US and Canada, 
secured Iraq's oil reserves, built permanent forward mega-bases in 
Iraq, successively destabilized Iraq and prepared it for 
balkanization, secured pipeline routes in Afghanistan, restored the 
profitable opium trade, and made progress toward achieving the 
first-strike capability that will be needed when the time comes to 
take on Russia and China. Quite a bundle of major achievements in a 
very short time indeed. But to our clique, the question always is, 
"What have you done for me lately, sunshine?"

The neocon intention to bomb Iran was the point where the tool went 
sour, and threatened to go rogue. Anyone who thought seriously about 
what bombing would lead to knew that an attack would quickly spiral 
out of anyone's control -- given the advanced arms that Russia has 
supplied to hot-headed Iran, and given the fact that the powder keg 
would involve a trigger-happy, nuclear potent, clinically-deranged 
Israel. Russia and China would of course be on ultra-high scrambled 
alert, poised to intervene with everything they've got if the spiral 
crossed certain unspecified lines in the sand. The neocons knew this 
and the clique knew this. Any attack on Iran, no matter how well 
planned, limited, and executed, would be playing Russian Roulette 
with World War III.

The neocons were ready to take this step, to play this game, and they 
were in a very advanced stage in their preparations, of both the 
military and the psy-op variety. Quite obviously they were not 
deterred by the possibility of all-out global nuclear war. This has 
nothing to do with Bush's pretended belief in Revelations and the 
ascension of the elect, but rather with the neocons' evident belief 
that they were 'ready for the big one', copying a page directly out 
of Dr. Strangelove, with the neocons in the role of Jack D. Ripper. 
Unlike the demented SAC base commander, however, the neocons were 
forced to telegraph their moves, and the clique was not pleased with 
the scenario. They knew the first-strike capability was not nearly 
ready -- and Russian Roulette is not a game they ever play. They play 
only when they hold all the cards and own the casino.

So the time had come to pull the plug on the neocon tool. It was 
surprisingly easy to do so. The first step, taken who knows how long 
ago, was to put the word discreetly to the Joint Chiefs that the Iran 
project is off, regardless of what orders might come from the White 
House or the Black Box. This news, of course, was to be kept in the 
room, as it surely was. Most folks, even at that level, see Number 
One and the White Cat in person only rarely. One whisper is a command 
followed to the death. Once the castle was thereby made secretly 
safe, it was a trivial matter to plant the seeds that would unravel 
the whole gone-sour rogue-threatening neocon bandwagon. A simple but 
devastating Intelligence announcement, a few whispers to key 
Bilderberger players that it was open season on the American 
contingent at the next meeting, and various other subtle and quite 
easy moves. It takes little, after all, to bring down a house of 
cards, particularly one propped up by a weak joker. The clique as 
usual remains invisible. Theories will abound and scholarly books 
will be written about "The Rise and Fall of the Neocons". Only the 
fringe will have any clue. Welcome to the fringe.

Certain elements in the White House know what's happening by now, 
while others still think the neocon agenda is the order of the day. 
It seems pretty obvious that Cheney was briefed in advance, and has 
some kind of golden parachute in his xmas stocking. I haven't seen a 
peep from him since we first learned of the clique reversal, when the 
Intelligence announcement became public knowledge. Bush is by now 
imagining Cheney as a reincarnated Judas, and practicing how he'll 
say "Et tu, Brute?" if the opportunity arises, and "Why hast thou 
forsaken me?". And yet Bush evidently still hasn't caught on that his 
chip has been turned off, him and that fellow Gates, both of whom 
still act as if the tractor is still in gear. I guess they'll go down 
like the fellow in the Monte Python film..."Go ahead, cut off my 
other arm. I'll still beat you."

What happens next will be 'ratcheting in gains' and 'preparing a 
fresh new story line'. That is to say, none of the very impressive 
(ie horrific) achievements of the neocons will be undone, and yet the 
American people will be led to believe that the evils are in the 
past, a standard tactic that we saw work so well when Nixon resigned. 
The media will be filled with fresh new story lines, along with 
bright intelligent confident reassuring empathetic Earth-loving new 
faces, plus other new fantasies -- and the Bush experience will fade 
away from public memory, along with last season's football scores. 
Such an advantage it is for our rulers, that we Americans have such 
tiny memory spans and such limited powers of independent observation, 
compared to the rest of the world's population. I guess the purpose 
of the melting pot was to melt away our basic intuitive judgement.

It's not quite time for the surprise attack on the Wicked Witches of 
the East. Space-based warfare is still in Beta Test. Nor is it 
necessary to proceed at the moment with the full unleashing of the 
Gestapo, the SS Storm Troopers, concentration camps, forced labor, 
and the whole nine yards. The neocons have diligently built  the 
foundations for all this, both in concrete and in legal precedent, 
but the project is for the moment on hold and the neocons off 
mission. When the time comes to resume project, that will be 
perceived as a new response to an unexpected emergent scenario, and 
no deferred continuity with the Bush era will be noticed. That's how 
it's been for centuries, and that's what I'm referring to when I talk 
about 'The Matrix'. That's how we find ourselves on the verge of a 
one-world fascist government, speaking on a scale of decades, and 
only a few publicly discredited right-wingers and conspiracy 
theorists know about it. Everyone else is for all intents and 
purposes sound asleep, or else out there making things worse due to 
their unknowing.

More than this I cannot say with any precision at the moment. Other 
mighty tidal waves are on the horizon, with unknown energies of their 
own. There are several quite different possible futures, forking out 
from the above 'last clear scenario'.

Simultaneous with the reign of the neocons, for example, we've seen a 
sharp decline in the strategic value of the Middle East altogether. 
Russia is now the largest producer of petroleum, and Venezuela 
evidently sits on more oil than the whole Middle East, provided the 
market price is over a certain figure. The Middle East is now A 
SOURCE of petroleum, but it is not THE ONE KEY SOURCE that would be 
worth fighting a world war over, as it once was thought to be. Israel 
too may be therefore falling from favor, a badly tarnished tool, and 
one no longer key to the control of THE ONE KEY SOURCE. Many friends 
would be made throughout the world if the US were to pull up tight 
that particular pair of reins. One might then see a REAL resurgence 
of anti-semitism -- which was not at all limited to Germany in the 
days of World War II by the way -- and it won't be today's neo-Nazi 
skinheads or swastika-waving loudmouths that will be to blame, 
although they'd probably want to take credit. Look not in old lairs 
for today's wolves.

So any attempt to move into crystal ball land is very iffy at this 
point. If Israel is de-fanged, for example, that would impact other 
global scenarios, and relationships, and the timing and pace would be 
important as well. And Israel and the Middle East are only one piece 
in a big jigsaw.

Look at all the outstanding questions that stare us in the face: Why 
is the clique pushing the US into a Great Depression? What's the 
game? Will it be a tight-money or a high-inflation Depression? Is its 
goal population reduction, capital consolidation, or both? And what's 
all this about the North American Union? Is that Plan B, to circle 
the wagons in Fortress America? Is that what the clique has in mind 
if it decides a first strike will never be a sure thing, that Russia 
and China, with their asymmetric strategy, can trump each Pentagon 
move and at a lower cost, no matter how far in the future we run the 
model and how favorably we tune the parameters?

And what about capitalism? It's been a very faithful tool since the 
Fifteenth Century, a kind of Monopoly game, where all the players, 
big and small, are given little tokens to play with. They get jobs or 
start corporations, and spend their time running around the board, as 
human or incorporated entities, motivated to pursue this or that 
transaction using their toy tokens. Each transaction has an visible 
side and a hidden side. The visible side has to do with the tokens, 
and the bullshit economists go on about. The hidden side is about 
real wealth, and regardless of what happens in token space, each 
transaction transfers a substantial and readily adjustable fraction 
of the resulting real wealth into the bank. You know whose bank I'm 
talking about. Why would our clique ever lose favor for such a 
faithful sorcerer's apprentice, a goose that always lays a golden 
egg, a purse that never empties?

The thing about it is that these folks have read about King Midas, as 
well as about the Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire, etc. etc. They 
learn at their father's knee the dangers of identifying or fixating 
on any given tool. Such fixations have caused the demise of many a 
realm and it's bold tyrant throughout the millennia. Our lad is 
trained from an early age to look every morning in the mirror, and 
think deeply about everyone and everything he is making use of, and 
to ask of each in his mind, "Are you putting out as well today as you 
were yesterday?" "Do I really need you anymore?" "Is your time nigh?" 
Can I do better with someone or something new?"

Again we're dealing with an iffy crystal ball, and leaving out 
considerations of other possible wave interference. But such a mirror 
assessment, I suggest, would these days find the capitalism tool 
falling into considerable doubt. It's beginning to show signs of 
diminishing returns. The net effect of the 'real wealth' 
transactions, over the past few centuries, has been to bring the 
natural resources of the globe increasingly under the tight dominion 
of our clique. Apart from Russia and China, which pose a problem in 
the geopolitical domain, all resources have been in effect secured. 
Capitalism is no longer required for that purpose.  Similarly, 
capitalism, with the help of financial coercion and manipulation, has 
served to consolidate real geopolitical power into the hands of our 
clique, again with the momentary exception of Russia and China. 
Again, capitalism is no longer required for that purpose either.

"So what has capitalism done for me lately?" is a question that must 
certainly have occurred to our clique, as they too contemplate the 
collateral environmental destruction that has been an essential part 
of the capitalist paradigm from the very beginning. They've bought 
this tradeoff up until now: "Better all of a mostly-dead world, than 
only most of a healthy world". That's obvious common sense to our 
twisted clique, who know they, their families, their drinking 
buddies, and their sleeping partners, will be always in whatever 
healthy part remains, no matter how small. But even by this callous 
calculus, there comes a point of diminishing returns. Once you own 
all of the world as it is, there's little sense in further 
destruction in pursuit of no more available gain.  When this point is 
reached, and we've been on the verge of it ever since 1945, every 
single benefit of capitalism will have vanished, as seen by our 
clique.

So what then? A new kind of static feudalism, with remote control 
drones instead of the King's troops? A reprogramming of the masses to 
eliminate notions of progress, innovation, and creativity, which were 
essential virtues under capitalism but counter-productive in a static 
society? A green and healed world inhabited by superstitious, 
illiterate, serfs, with no memory left anywhere that anything was 
ever different?...where only the clique would remember, and as usual 
tell would tell no tales? Would we get a new religion in the bargain, 
or just a re-establishment of the medieval church?

The crystal ball at this point in history is not cloudy, rather it is 
exploding inside with potential scenarios that interfere with one 
another in non-linear ways, leading to a variety of quite different 
and each quite plausible future configurations. Its more a 
kaleidoscope of semi-clear and changing images than a murky pool. We 
can actually learn a lot about the nature of these possible 
configurations, if we care to do the math, but the future would at 
this point remain nonetheless unknowable due to the chaos effect. Our 
clique cannot reveal what will happen either, because their power 
does not totally determine all likely configurations. They remain 
however, the locus of power with the greatest capacity to respond 
effectively and flexibly to whatever chaos might throw in its face.

I hope it has become perfectly clear, to some of you at least in your 
own minds and hearts, that none of our possible futures, no matter 
how the images configure and merge, and no matter how chaos plays 
out, can be acceptable to any human being, other than the clique 
itself and its inner court of the day. Within the scope of our 
current analysis, and I've seen no wider scope attempted that deals 
at all with real power in the world today, it would seem that our 
only rational response is to prepare our suicide kits, for the day 
when life is no longer worth living, wherever that line might come 
for each of us. Lots of our youth in the West, and thousands of 
Indian farmers displaced by globalization, have already taken this 
quite reasonable option. Better that than submit to a clueless 
slow-cooking fate, like the hapless mythical frog. Better to emerge 
conscious into the next world.

There is however still hope for this world. Although this analysis 
has been, in my humble opinion, more comprehensive, better 
substantiated, and more carefully reasoned than any other I've seen, 
its scope fortunately does not quite contain all possible futures. 
There is one thin future line, not visible on any recognized radar 
screen, because no precedent exists in recorded history for a line of 
similar character. The energy of this line is extremely feeble at the 
moment, indeed it has no real existence as yet. It exists only as a 
fleeting imaginary vision in a small but growing number of minds, 
minds belonging to people with no visible power or influence whatever 
in today's world.

All creativity, of both the good and bad variety, occurs when reality 
emerges out of imagination, when a line of thought turns into a line 
of action. Until that emergence occurs, only those who do the 
imagining have any idea that the ensuing reality could ever be a 
possibility. For all others that particular future is invisible on 
all their radars. This is the true meaning of the phrase, "mind over 
matter". Everything real in our world has emerged out of imaginations 
that have gone before. Thus far in history, it has been the 
imaginations of elite rulers (chiefs, kings, whatever) and their 
technocrats, that have had the fast track to realization. The rest of 
us have either numbed ourselves with fantasies, like the fellow in 
"Brazil", or we've played the game "If wishes were horses", in 
imitation of creativity, a salve to the state of powerless slavery, 
in the same way that sucking on a stone is a salve to starvation. At 
least it numbs your mind a bit to an unacceptable reality.

In the analysis above, where all the various player types were 
alluded to, and placed in the context of the 'top clique principle', 
there was one player that never got mentioned. This player wasn't 
mentioned because it has played no role in recorded history. This 
player has been like the mat on which the players have danced and 
dueled, necessary to events but not noticed by anyone, an inert part 
of the picture at all times -- although it may appear to 'be doing 
something' if someone picks it up and shakes it or moves it. The rug 
is seldom featured in the stories of any Dojo.

The rug, in case you haven't guessed, is people, you and me, everyone 
everywhere and everywhen, apart from 'the few', the cliques and their 
retinues, who have always arranged the rug to suit themselves, shook 
it up when it needed a clean out, burned parts of it to keep warm, or 
whatever suited their fancy. New rugs are popping out all the time, a 
bit like Shmoos, so they're completely expendable and wastable, 
fodder to be used up carelessly in the course of business or sport. 
The Romans, with their slaves, gladiators and lion feasts, provide a 
dramatic microcosm image of the relationship between power and the 
rug generally, ie the likes of you and me.

The notion that the rug might come alive, rise up and overpower its 
masters, is simply unthinkable, to both the players and the rug. The 
rug is of course course massive enough to do anything it might want, 
all billions of us together,  and the same is true of Mount Everest. 
But inert and unconscious, we like Everest are not a threat to 
anyone, unable to have any realizable thoughts, and apparently quite 
without potential for anything other than fodder material. But the 
rug does, as we recall, sometimes play the game "if wishes were 
horses". And it is here, in our various harmless imaginings, that we 
can trace the origins of our thin-future-line ray of hope, that 
possible future that is invisible on all known radars including our 
own.

All change comes from creativity, and all creativity emerges out of 
imagination. The power of any given imagining to manifest in reality 
depends partly on the situation of the imaginer, in the sense that 
one in power can turn almost any wish into reality with a simple 
phone call, while the rest of us can for all practical purposes only 
play "if wishes were horses". But in the broader scheme of things, on 
the scale of galaxies and ice ages, the content of an imagining turns 
out to be far more important than the situation of the imaginer. This 
is what is alluded to by the phrase, "an idea whose time has come 
cannot be stopped". The phrase is a trivialized metaphor usually 
applied to trivial circumstances, but it nonetheless hints at a truth 
older than humanity and more powerful than anything else in Creation. 
This power is alluded to in the mystical observation, "In the 
beginning was the word".

Entertain for a moment the remote possibility that some piece of the 
inert rug, in idly wishing that its wishes could be horses, happened 
to stumble on a powerful imagining, an imagining the imaginer 
couldn't understand except at the most superficial level, but an 
imagining that inherently carried the power to awaken the rug, to 
liberate humanity and create a future that no one now could believe 
is possible, neither our clique, nor our rug, and least of all our 
initial imaginer. If you've read Cats Cradle, then you'll recognize 
in Ice Nine a fictional metaphor for the kind of imagining I'm 
talking about.  The Einstein-like character, the one who invented Ice 
Nine, for a certain military application, had no idea that it would 
lead to a frozen Earth and an end to all life. The power was in the 
imagining, not in the Einstein character himself, nor even in the 
Pentagon blank check he got to pursue his research. Those were 
unknowing channels of the power of creation, unfortunately the 
unfavorable kind of creation in that case, the dark side of Shiva.

For some time now I've been operating under the unwarranted 
assumption that there exists somewhere in imagination space a 
benevolent ice nine, a 'hidden secret of the universe' you might say, 
a secret that needs only to be imagined in order for the 
transformation of the world, and the liberation of humanity, to be 
thereby seeded. A secret that can begin a process, a process that at 
first is likely to be invisible to all, as might be a small acorn, 
but a process that like the acorn, carries inevitable and profound 
transformation within itself. My only justification for adopting this 
assumption was hope, and the realization, as reviewed in the 
preceding analysis, that if my assumption was unwarranted, no hope 
was possible. I find it unpleasant to live with no hope, and so I 
chose to follow this totally unrealistic path, searching for a 
possibly non-existent secret of the universe. What better way is 
there to spend ones time in the those last minutes on the Titanic, 
after all the lifeboats are long gone?

My only effective method of searching for the secret was by 'back 
calculating'. That is to say, I didn't try to find the secret acorn 
directly, as that would be impossible (as in the spoon-bending scene 
in The Matrix film). Instead I tried to imagine what the ensuing oak 
tree would be like. To put it in concrete terms, I was imagining what 
a liberated world might look like, without any notion of how it might 
come into existence.

This ass backward approach, however, did not turn out to be a waste 
of time. From a systems perspective, I soon noticed that imagining a 
'liberated world' was not a matter of painting a happy picture, but 
rather a matter of identifying the relevant system constraints. A 
liberated society, it turns out from pure system considerations, must 
have certain specific characteristics, if it is to survive, 
characteristics that are independent of how that society might have 
come into existence. It must, for example, be directly democratic in 
its governance, without institutionalized hierarchical forms of any 
kind, or else it can be easily shown that clique dynamics would 
inevitably re-emerge. Governmental bodies of any description are 
simply incompatible with a liberated society.

At this point in my journey, I had moved further from my goal than 
when I began. Not only did I have no clue as to where the secret 
acorn of transformation could be found, if it existed, but the oak 
tree I was imagining turned out to be an impossible kind of oak tree. 
Who's ever heard of a society without government, and who could 
believe such a society could be stable and viable? How could direct 
democracy possibly work, when you consider how short-sighted and 
self-serving nearly everyone seems to be, and how perverse human 
nature obviously is.  Confused and cut off from my intuitive judgment 
at this point, I proceeded like Sherlock, trusting in the 
infallibility of my logic (while knowing all the time my logic is not 
at all infallible). I saw no other path with any ray of hope at all. 
"When all other options have been eliminated, the impossible must be 
the truth" -- that was the faith of that got me through that rough 
patch. Democracy MUST be possible; government MUST be dispensable, 
otherwise my Sherlock self erred in his logic, and that possibility 
couldn't be entertained if hope was to stay alive.

It was at this point that I realized I needed to do some basic 
research. What did I know about human nature? -- nothing but what I'd 
been told in random conversations and gathered from anecdotal 
experience and Hollywood films. I was evaluating my imagined oak tree 
with totally inadequate metrics, the metrics of raw ignorance. And 
what did I know about direct democracy? -- to me it was just an 
abstract property that must hold if certain critical system 
constraints were to be satisfied.  I had no idea what real democracy 
might look like or how it might operate, or what 'the people' would 
actually be doing when 'democratic' decisions were being made. My 
uninformed intuition doubted that democracy was even possible, while 
at the same time my system mind knew it was necessary, unless all 
hope was to abandoned.

If I wanted to home in on the likely location of our possibly 
non-existent transformational acorn, I needed to develop a much 
clearer understanding of this mysterious, impossible oak tree that 
was supposed to emerge from it. I jumped first into researching human 
nature, which I surmised might be informed by what we know about 
psychology, sociology, and anthropology. Psychology seemed to have 
nothing useful to say, as it seemed mostly concerned with helping 
people distort their natures in order to survive in sick societies. 
Sociology seemed to be the study of forms that can be found in 
various sick societies, and I couldn't see any anything to be learned 
there, other than to notice the empirical confirmation that 
hierarchies are inevitably harmful. So I turned to anthropology, with 
my hopes at a low ebb. It was here however that I eventually found 
some real pay dirt.

I had imagined 'primitive man', as we used to call 'him', to be only 
genetically different than the apes. As regards social behavior, I 
assumed we were talking about alpha-male patterns, as inherited from 
the chimpanzees, and later passed on to civilization where those 
patterns became the seed of hierarchy and our earliest top cliques. 
Human nature always was and always will be about dominance and 
subjugation. Only after civilization, despite its drawbacks, did 
'man' acquire higher sensibilities and the ability to develop the 
intelligence that lay latent in 'his' genes All quite obviously true, 
right? Isn't that why courses in the history of humanity begin in 
Sumeria and Egypt, where 'man' first emerged from 'his' animal nature?

How naive can one fellow be, even one who shows signs of a generally 
sound intelligence! It didn't take much research at all for me to 
learn how totally wrong I was about our pre-civilization ancestors. 
That 'great dark era', where 'man' lived in superstition at the level 
of animals, with nothing really happening until civilization came 
along -- all that turned out to be a total myth, indeed a conscious 
deception of early civilized cliques that has stuck with us all these 
millennia. In fact the 100,000 years and more of this 'dark era' was 
the Golden Age of humanity, where higher sensibilities, wisdom, and 
spiritual knowing, flowered as they never have under civilization, 
where such higher things simply don't fit in. Wise sheep are not 
productive sheep, according to the metric of sheep owners. That's why 
the Native Americans were slaughtered. Their land could have been 
confiscated easily over time with little cost or bloodshed. It was 
the wisdom and higher spiritual attainments of these 'primitives' 
that could not be readily molded to the requirements of civilization, 
and that is why they were seen to be redundant and in need of 
extinction. Their very existence might poison the minds of the 
long-civilized sheeple who were living under the illusion that they 
were 'free' and in every way superior to the redskin animal-people, 
whose scalps were being taken for sport.

So human nature turned out to be not at all what I had imagined. 
There had been a 'grand discontinuity' of 100,000 years or so, 
separating the alpha-male behavior of the primates from the analogous 
behavior of 'civilized' societies. Dominance was not inherited by 
civilization from anywhere, it was reinvented in the process of 
subjugating free human beings into the mental yokes required to 
enable civilization to proceed on its exploitive and destructive 
path, a path that has brought us directly to where we are today, with 
the Earth on the brink of bio-collapse.

Human nature is not only totally unsuited to this form of 
civilization, a round peg forced for six millennia into a square 
hole, but human nature, contrary to my initial assumptions, is 
ideally suited to thriving in a direct democracy, where each follows 
his or her natural common sense informed by his or her inherent 
spiritual knowing, in voluntary collaboration with ones neighbors -- 
everyone's inherent wisdom naturally blending into a thriving global 
society in complete harmony with itself and with the rest of the 
natural universe. The oak tree makes sense after all, whether or not 
an appropriate acorn exists or can be located.

I was pretty happy with my progress at this point, but was still no 
closer to my goal. I still didn't know where to look for the 
all-important and possibly non-existent acorn -- ie, the 'powerful 
imagining', arising from someone's 'wishes were horses' game, someone 
who might be living in a desert town somewhere, speaking some 
little-known language, and whose lucky discovery of unperceived value 
might die in the desert with the mortal body of the unknowing 
imaginer, having never materialized on the real plane. Such a very 
thin future-line indeed was I pursuing.

It was then that I stumbled, by blind chance of course (ha ha), onto 
the work of people like Rosa Zubizarreta, Tom Atlee, and Jim Rough. 
These people shared a 'strong imagining', of some degree of power or 
another, and I could see in their 'imagining' certain characteristics 
that would be at home in the kind of acorn that might be able to grow 
into the 'oak tree of my dreams'. I descended on these folks, 
tracking them down wherever they lived, to learn more about their 
slightly promising acorn, and to find out what kind of oak tree they 
were envisioning in their minds.

The more they told me about their acorn, their 'strong imagining' -- 
this weird, counter-intuitive 'wise dialog' 'co-intelligence' mumbo 
jumbo -- the more I kept seeing the very qualities that I was looking 
for in my own acorn quest. They even showed me some tree shoots, 
where they had brought their imagining into the real realm, in small 
and tentative dialog events, and these tiny shoots for all the world 
looked to me like miniature versions of the very oak tree I had been 
dreaming of. Had these folks stumbled onto THE 'imagining', the very 
one whose existence had been in question all the while, and the one I 
had been searching for? That one and only imagining that has the 
capacity to realize itself, over time, in the form of a liberated 
global society? Was that single weak future-line beginning to emerge 
onto the real plane, the one and only future line that lacks the 
clique?

I can't be sure yet, but the more I learn, and the more I watch the 
maturing and proliferating tree shoots, in Victoria and elsewhere, 
the more hopeful I become. I can't help but talk about this, as in 
this posting, but words are just words, of little real value or 
meaning. The unfolding process will be whatever the unfolding process 
is destined to be. The most I can hope for, as a writer, is that my 
mysterious words might somehow inspire some people to entertain the 
imaginings of these dialog pioneers, and join them in planting more 
of those dialog tree shoots, in communities hither and yon. If their 
acorn turns out to be THE acorn, we'll find out soon enough, as 
transformations go, and if not we remain trapped in the 
clique-dominated chaos class of futures, and we've lost nothing for 
the trying.

rkm


-- 

--------------------------------------------------------
Posting archives: http://cyberjournal.org/show_archives/
Escaping the Matrix website: http://escapingthematrix.org/
cyberjournal website: http://cyberjournal.org

How We the People can change the world:
http://governourselves.blogspot.com/

Community Democracy Framework:
http://cyberjournal.org/DemocracyFramework.html

Film treatment: A Compelling Necessity
http://rkmcdocs.blogspot.com/2007/08/film-treatment-compelling-necessity.html

Moderator: •••@••.•••  (comments welcome)

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