-------------------------------------------------------- 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 -------------------------------------------------------- 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 -------------------------------------------------------- * 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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