Re: a dialog about beliefs

From: Ed Goertzen

Date: 23 August 2009 13:50:11 IST

To: Richard Moore <•••@••.•••>

Subject: Re: a dialog about beliefs

Hi Richard:

A very worth while dialogue

Thanks for sharing 

Regards

Ed G

_____

From: Andrew MacDonald

Date: 23 August 2009 16:32:08 IST

To: •••@••.•••

Subject: Re: a dialog about beliefs

Hi 

Richard, enjoy your posts. I was “turned on” to them by David Creighton in Ottawa. 

You wrote: and it’s only in our communities, on a face-to-face basis, that we can begin to find our common ground.

The face-to-face conversation is my thing, just starting to blog about it here (http://futuresconversation.wordpress.com/) and welcome any input from you. 

Cheers, 

Andrew

Hi Andrew,

Welcome to cyberjournal. You Future Conversations Group sounds like it’s off to a good start. The exercise with the three columns seemed to work well, and avoiding “helpful suggestions” so as to respect contributions sounds good. I’d like to recommend a video about envisioning futures. I think your group would find it very helpful:

The Pollyanna Principles 

Hildy Gottlieb 

http://www.pollyannaprinciples.org 

http://blip.tv/file/1871539

From: Bill Blum

Date: 22 August 2009 18:05:46 IST

To: •••@••.•••

Subject: question

Hi Richard,

You write:

“Only one President since 1913 challenged their power, and he got shot it in the head. The rest of them, without exception, have been simply mouthpieces for the banks.”

I assume you’re speaking about JFK.  Please tell/remind me how he challenged bank power.

Thanks,

Bill

Hi Bill,

He was having the Treasury start to print currency, cutting out the Fed. That would have been enough to order the hit, but in addition he was pulling the troops out of Vietnam and planning to end the  arms race and the Cold War. He would have set the world on an entirely different course. Since that coup, the White House has been nothing but a PR agency, whose only job is to deceive the people, as we can see so clearly today.

cheers,

rkm

From: Jim Fadiman

Date: 22 August 2009 18:13:07 IST

To: •••@••.•••

Subject: Re: a dialog about beliefs

        Very fine dialogue. You make a clear and self-evident case for the reason for staying in the game and dealing with it as it is, not as we would have it be.

     Thank you Richard for your unrelenting willingness to stay awake. 

An early Sufi, being stoned to death, was forgiving  those who stoned him in their ignorance. He wept however, when one of his own disciples threw one of the stones. 

From: Molly Morgan

Date: 22 August 2009 19:39:14 IST

To: •••@••.•••

Subject: Re: a dialog about beliefs

Hi, Richard –

Thanks so much for taking the time to cut and paste this dialog to share with us, especially since your correspondent seems to be genuinely exploring and asking questions of his/her beliefs. One thing you wrote jumped out at me that I wanted to respond to:

Public education and ‘changing everyone’s consciousness’ doesn’t work because of the dominance of the mass media, and its ability to scare people away from any radical ideas that start to achieve currency. The knee-jerk response of progressives to ‘conspiracy theories’ is an example of this ability of the media.

Basically anything that’s organized on a large scale cannot work. That’s their playground and they are masters at those games, besides having the most chips to play with.

I would say your first sentence slightly differently since I think that shift in consciousness is precisely what is happening and that we are trying to help move along. Based on the context in the paragraph and what else I think I understand about your thinking, I believe you mean here that a mass program to try to change everyone’s consciousness from the outside in won’t work, with which I completely agree. What must happen is that people’s consciousness must change from the inside out, and we are trying to create conditions in which everyone can directly discover that for themselves in their own unique way. And the way you’re advocating awakening is through direct community experiences, which help to awaken people so that they seize their own power as a group, but with each individual contributing their own unique talents and wisdom.

Thanks again for all you do!

cheers,

molly

Hi Molly,

Nice to hear from you. You state my position well, as regards direct community experiences. But what most people mean by “changing consciousness” is that we as individuals need to become enlightened, in some sense, before we can proceed to bring about social transformation. People talk about Indigo Children and Light Beings and those kind of things. Wishful thinking, hoping for a magic bullet to change things for us. It is the pursuit of transformation, by us, as we are, done in the right way, that can change our consciousness.

cheers,

rkm

From: “John Lowry” 

Date: 23 August 2009 03:16:05 IST

To: “Richard Moore” <•••@••.•••>

Subject: Re: a dialog about beliefs

I agree with your conclusion regarding the instant predicament.  To begin I quote Gurdjieff:

  “… It is possible to think for a thousand years; it is possible to write whole libraries of books, to create theeories by the million, and all this in sleep, without any possibility of awakening.  On the contrary, these books and these theories, written and created in sleep, will merely send other people to sleep.  And so on. …  What is necessary to wake a sleeping man?  A good shock is necessary.  But when a man is fast asleep one shock is not enough.  A long period of continual shocks is needed. ….” The Morning of the Magicians

 

That process seems underway.  It is difficult for us “thinkers” to accept the limits of language but an especially smart linguist said “With the exception of things like train schedules, language would not have been invented but for the purpose of lying”  (footnote in “The Politics of the Family,” by RD Laing).  It seeme we err in using black-and-white characters in linear sequence to describe reality, but this, too, seems to be changing.

 

Control of a complicated communications medium, such as tv or internet, cannot last.  Survival seeking individuals will find a way to express what must be said.

 

What especially needs saying now was put well by Barry Goldwaters speechwriter, Karl Hess:

  “I served capitalism very faithully for very many years. And now, like most servants, I know a good deal about it in both its dress clothes and work clothes, and even without any clothes at all. … What I have learned about corporate capitalism, roughly, is that it is an act of theft, by an large, through which a very few live very high off the work, invention, and creativity of very many others.  It is the Grand Larceny of our particular time in history, the Grand Larceny in which a future of freedom which could have followed the collapse of feudalism was stolen from under our noses by a new bunch of bosses doing the same old things.”  Dear America,

 

Finally, the words of  Malcolm X:  

“I believe that there will ultimately be a clash between the oppressed and those who do the oppressing.  I believe that there will be a clash between those who want freedom, justice and equality for everyone and those who want to continue the system of exploitation.  I believe that there will be that kind of clash, but I don’t think it will be based on the color of the skin.“

 

Obama is losing ground because he has not taken the corporate larcenists to task.  He needs encouraging.

 

Stay well

 

jl

Hi John

Obama is not losing ground at all. He was hired to keep people asleep while the nation is being dismantled, and he’s doing a very professional  job of it. The right-wing opposition to Obama is being carefully orchestrated so that people don’t examine his programs, and are deceived into thinking the programs must be good since the ‘bad guys’ are opposing them.

There have been clashes between the oppressed and the oppressors for the past 6,000 years. The consequence has been ever-more sophisticated means of oppression. We need to leave clashes behind and begin building the world we want without reference to the oppressors.

Yes, “capitalism = theft” pretty much sums it up. But capitalism as we’ve know it – growth-based economics – is now dead and buried. The real meaning of capitalism, however, is “rule by those with capital” = “rule by wealthy elites”. That is not dead; it is simply changing form and becoming much more vicious. 

Gurdjieff  was right. What he meant by “shocks” is along the same lines as what I mean by “experiences”. Gurdjieff also emphasized the importance of working in groups.

cheers,

rkm

 

Hi Dave,

Trainer’s stuff is very interesting. I also recommend it. I’d like to get in touch with him, and I couldn’t find an email address on those websites. Do you know how to contact him? I agree with him that Transition Towns are in some sense the correct starting point, and that their vision needs to be more radical. I think he’d be interested in some of my ideas along that line.

I don’t agree about establishing ‘outposts here and there’. They wouldn’t be allowed to survive. We aren’t going to have the kind of collapse where centralized command-and-control is disrupted. This isn’t a scenario like the collapse of the Roman Empire. The value of Transition Towns is as a catalyst, to awaken communities. It is the awakening that is important. And the awakening must spread throughout society. We either transform society or tyranny continues. There is no middle ground.

cheers,

rkm

From: “Peggy Conroy”

Date: 23 August 2009 12:54:41 IST

To: “Richard Moore” <•••@••.•••>

Subject: Re: a dialog about beliefs

Many thanks Richard. Seems that most evidence points to the correctness of your position on how the world works. Your belief in the uprising of enough of the masses to correct the more extreme nastiness (is this correct?) looks to be our only hope. ie: women can now vote, still get abortions even though more tricky, black people have been given more a chance, Obama has overturned many anti-environmental nastiness of Bush (behind the headlines), etc.

True, we are all totally POed at the big picture. I’ve seen Obama say that his belief in turning the cumbersome ship of corporate dominance of the planet, small steps at a time in a better direction is the only course. He may be correct in some instances in order to prevent total revolution, but I too wished not. We need  a 180 turn on all fronts! Nader has been silenced by mainstream media, sadly.

In the US it’s the miserable media that convinces an ignorant population to supporte this corporate dominance of $ and power everywhere. That’s what Durbin meant. Very few of the congress isn’t bought and those guys that try only get slimed by the hate media that took off after Reagan got rid of the Fairness Doctrine in broadcasting…..

 

My Dad was bemoaning this sort of thing in the late ’50’s and ’60’s when he saw agribusiness (oil companies among them) taking over the small dairy farm markets and look where we are today! Nobody listened and now we are stuck.

 

Sincerely,

Peggy Conroy-NY horse breeder

Hi Peggy,

Obama is just as ‘bought’ as the rest of Washington. ‘Small steps’ is a very clever trick to make people think he’s on our side. He’s not. If he were on our side they would have promoted someone else into the so-called Presidency. 

There cannot be an effective uprising until we’re all on the same page. Getting on the same page is the problem that needs to be addressed. The uprising will be the easy part. 

cheers,

rkm