Thrivalism

You know I will probably never visit the LATOC discussion board when looking for advice on how to handle the coming upheavel in our way of life and while guns-and-gold are doubtless getting a big look in at the moment, Ran is still dispensing his much calmer advice and generally soothing the troubled waters of those who are prepared to listen. I want to take this direction one step further though and talk about how we’re going to do more than just surivive and for that kind of thinking we need Bill Mollison. Old interviews of Bill are all over the internet and I recommend reading lots of them to pick up on his vibe of ingenuity.

One of the worst paths we can follow at this point is to try to preserve our existing way of life even as it becomes increasingly untenable. Maybe out of habit, but more likely because we don’t know the alternatives, we’ll just struggle on with an ever harder daily grind. I’m pretty sure now however that permaculture has the vision we need to chart a new course – and it doesn’t just come with a new plan for the future but also a new way of thinking that will be especially valuable for a culture that has grown dependant on authority figures to do it’s thinking for it.

One of Bill’s interviews compared permaculture thinking to the marital arts philosophy of Aikido in that it seeks to turn adversity into strength. I have to admit I don’t know much about Aikido that here’s Bill Mollison with just one of a million tales of ingenious inventiveness.

We grow a lot of prawns in Hawaii, [Bill is actually from Australia] and you could grow them in your glass house up in Maine, freshwater prawns, and they eat single-celled algae, so we don’t know how to cultivate those, so we just simply float about 20 ducks to a quarter acre and they do the job of growing the algae. The duck manure is almost immediately colonized by algae and that’s what the prawns eat, the algae. So 25 ducks per quarter acre,100 per acre, and you can produce $60,000 worth of prawns per quarter acre twice a year. Think of that. And that’s just duck shit. Duck’s shit is the basic fuel for that system. Now, what are you going to feed your ducks. Very few ducks enjoy eating much grass. They love Tradescantia and sweet potato but they love snails too, so you can put in lots of water lilies in clumps here and there and in between them you put a lot of horseradish. Snails love living in water lilies but they come out and eat horseradish. And also, if you put a lot of nasturtium in, you get a lot of snails, so if you’re going to grow ducks you gotta grow horseradish, nasturtium, Tradescantia, water lilies and Agapanthus (African lily). You’ll get plenty of ducks which means you’ll have plenty of algae in the water and you can grow prawns, and the prawns haven’t cost you a penny. They’re just a second offshoot of your ducks feeding and enjoying themselves. So the system fuels itself.

That’s from a very long and inspiring interview at Seeds of Change. This next example is from another long interview at Mother Earth News

Here’s an example I like to use: I call it my chicken model. Take four separate elements: a hen coop, a greenhouse, a pond, and a small forest. Now you can have these on your farm . . . and place them wherever you like, in no particular relationship to each other. In that situation each one functions individually, and they all consume energy. But if you make the forest a forage range for the chickens by putting the coop in or near that forest . . . if you attach the greenhouse to the front of the chickens’ shelter . . . and if you set the pond in front of the greenhouse — as illustrated in Permaculture Two — well, then you’ve got a nice system of interrelating functions, the familiar checks and balances.

Just look at all the ways you produce energy in this system: the chickens’ body heat, the direct sunlight that reflects off the pond and hits the greenhouse, the radiation of the trees at the rear, the decomposition of chicken manure, and on and on. If you sit down and sketch this system out, you’ll find that it’s fantastically complex — with thousands of functional interactions — and will run itself . Operating on its own energy, the system automatically switches on and off. As the sun gets high in the sky, the greenhouse absorbs more heat . . . so the chickens get hot and go out, thus removing the source of animal heat. While they’re outside, the birds forage in the forest and leave their manure to enrich the soil. After dark, of course, they’ll go back inside to keep warm . . . taking their body heat with them.

Look at each chicken by itself and the variety of functions it’s performing in this one simple model: In the coop the hen operates as a radiator, an egg producer, and a manurial system. In the forest the bird acts as a self-forager, a tree-disease controller, a fireproofer, a fertilizer producer, and a rake. One can use chickens to do quantities of useful work . . . in fact, I don’t know what you can’t do with chickens, once you get started!

I tend to have the view that there’s no problem that’s insurmountable if I think about the solution for long enough, but Bill Mollison seems to operate on the belief that there’s no problem that can’t be turned into an advantage if you think about it just right – and it’s that kind of attitude that we’re all going to need as we go about recreating our culture (and saving our butts) over the next few years. I think we’ll also need some of Bill’s attitude just to keep our energy levels high in the dispiriting face of the diet of doom most of us follow.

Emotional Freedom Therapy

Having spent a fair amount of time on this blog cataloguing the various ills of civilisation and speculating on the cause and the perpetuation of our collective sickness I was quite excited to discover something that has the potential to quite easily undo some of our internal damage.

The previous post about James De Meo’s theories on the origins of civilisation also mentioned Wilhelm Reich’s theory of body armouring. Essentially a theory of how the trauma of our childhood is stored in the body, Reich and his followers have gone on to find ways to physically release this tension from the body through forms of massage. I had heard about Emotional Freedom Therapy before but I finally got around to investigating it a few months back and it reminded me a bit of armouring because central to it’s operation is the idea that trauma is stored in the body’s electrical system – which in turn effects physical aspects of the body.

Using the same theory of energy meridians that Acupuncturists use Gary Craig, the main promoter and developer of the Therapy claims to be able to relieve emotional trauma (and chronic health issues), easily and painlessly – often in a matter of minutes.

I know, it sounds far too good to be true. At the main EFT website there are plenty of case studies and videos for those who want to read more and there is also a section looking at conventional scientific research into the body’s energy system. As far as I can tell it all seems to stack up but by all means you be the judge.

I have of course tried it and have found that it seems to be successful for me at releiveing head aches and other body aches but that I have had a lot more trouble releasing older and deeper traumas. I think that I have a pretty complex and thorough defence system, when I try to work on any old issues I notice that my breathing gets tighter and it becomes incredibly hard to focus on the issue at hand – my brain seems to be doing it’s utmost to think about anything else. Most likely I need to sit down with an experienced practitioner to find away around this.

One thing that is unusual about it is that when you release a headache it disappears so thoroughly that you feel like you never had it. Unlike when I rub my neck or upper back and can feel the tension being released EFT makes things disappear so thoroughly that it’s like they never existed. I wrote in a previous piece about how I often get breathing difficulties when stressed or tired because my intercostal (between ribs) muscles get too tense. Well the other day I suddenly realised that it hadn’t happened for quite a few weeks and that I must have got rid of it through EFT. (It had come back lately because I had a heavy cold and my breathing was feeling pretty impaired – and it has also come back (lightly) right now while I’m typing which show’s just how much of a psychological issue it is).

Anyway, where I’m going with this is that as well as healing psychological issues that people can easily recall a few people have tried healing issues from very early in life and I’m wondering if using a book like the Continuum Concept as a kind of guide we could look further back and deal with issues from our birth process as well as those developed in the womb where the mother’s potential mixed feelings about her pregnancy can impact heavily on the unborn child.

We can see in our family that our oldest child has clearly inherited a few things from her Mum and I suspect that the 9 months living fully enveloped in the mother’s electrical system may be a way that traumas are sort of ‘built-in’ to every baby. So far I haven’t found anyone else who has made this connection but having read constantly about the difference between civilised and non-civilised people it seems fairly reasonable that something like this is going on.

So from there my speculation has extended to the idea that the complex web of issues that civilisation creates in all of us can theoretically be totally removed from our system – if we were able to work out exactly what to ask the body for. This is all theory though, in practice I still have a long way to go but am intrigued by the possibilities that EFT presents for merely beginning work on my own life.

If anyone reading this has already tried EFT I would love to hear from you, I don’t know anyone personally who has had experience with EFT and even someone on-line would be an advance to reading about complete strangers at the EFT website.

Nice

Dan linked to these excerpts of a book called Waking Up by Charles T Tart. This quote nicely summarises a philosphy that has become more and more important to me over time.

Few of us may be in a position to have a decisive influence on world peace, but cultivation of our own inner resources can create peacefulness and effectiveness in action in ourselves and the people we come in contact with, and this can spread. As we attack those near us less and care for them more, we start to have effects on the kinds of political processes that need enemies for hidden psychological reasons. It is my hope that furthering the creation of inner peace in people will contribute to outer peace.

So being a nice person is a radical act in this world!

The only thing I have to to that add is that attempting to influence world peace or any other issue before we work on ourselves can often be ineffective or even counter productive as our actions are coloured by the need to ‘attack’ those around us.

I saw a great example of this recently. The unschooling list we’re on, which is usually a totally awesome list, started discussing vegetarianism and carbon footprinting. It was very clear from the discussion that the vegetarians and carbon footprinters assumed that they were occupying the moral high ground in these discussions. Leaving aside debate over whether they were right in the first place there were several things I noticed.

The first was the subtle coercive nature of the debate. In fact it wasn’t a debate to start with. No one argued against them until either myself or Karen began that side of the debate and then there was a flurry of responses from people who presumably felt they now had permission to give their ‘incorrect’ point of view.

The other thing that I noticed was that the proponents of these issues seemed to take a semi religious approach to vegetariansim or carbon footprinting. One person told me that angry responses were part of the normal process where people went through an anger stage before they get to the acceptance stage. It’s certainly true but what I didn’t say at the time is that sometimes anger is a stage people go through when someone is trying to lay a guilt trip on them and it usually passes as soon as that person backs off!

Anyway I’m sure most people feel really satisfied after they have told someone off for not being a vegetarian or a carbon foot printer but I’d really like it if they tried a different approach. And as I said at the time I’m not arguing against anyone being a vegetarian or a carbon footprinter – quite the contrary in fact – I encourage anyone who has strong beliefs in these areas to pursue them because what we need more than anything else in this world are people who follow their hearts. All I want is the space to be able to follow my heart too.

Family Matters

Here’s the part of the recent Rigorous Intuition post that I noticed most of all:

So this is my dilemma, and my paralysis. It’s not every day you get to spectate the real-time collapse of a planetary civilization and biosphere. (Or, I suppose I should say, I remember a time when it wasn’t.) But watching this unfold with fascination feels complicit and worse than if I were blithely ignorant, and analyzing it at this seeming late stage futile and ridiculous. What’s important now, what’s more important than ever, are the close-to-home matters: being a good father and husband, and learning how to best cushion the crash of our coddled urban lives.

I think the looming crash is helping people to focus on what is important in life. I imagine that when the matrix completlely loses it’s power a lot more people will come to realise what really matters to them but for the moment it’s nice to come across someone else who thinks that attending to family matters actually rates. Some of Jeff’s readers were confused by this new development but Steven Lagavulin was not one of them:

I blogged over at Deconsumption for several years about the impending “collapse of civilization” (as I saw it and still see it over the long haul). And as you alluded, I found it strangely fascinating, perhaps like a deer in the headlights…and I felt a sense of urgency in understanding what might come so that I could “Be Prepared”. And all that study and observation truly helped, I must say. Over time, I stopped being worried about what was coming down upon us. I began to see it as inevitable, but not something I couldn’t adapt to. So eventually, I became confident enought to embrace some big decisions and started steering my life in a way that was both exciting and interesting to me as well as creating flexibility enough to meet whatever may come.

And at that point I became completely bored with apocalyptic news and thinking. So now, just as so many people are just beginning to tune in, I’ve turned off. I used to feel that if you weren’t getting your news from the internet, you were either ignorant of what is really happening in he world or worse, feeding on the steady diet of distractions and lies that is our MSM. I spent at least a couple hours a day surfing and analysing and trying to comprehend the objective picture. Now somehow, I find I lose patience if I’m online for more than about 20 minutes.

And meanwhile, as you perhaps seem to be experiencing as well, my life just gets better and better. Not because I’ve sunk into denial, but because my time is rapidly filling up with things that really matter to me right now. My family and I are in constant movement, but it’s movement towards something. Things are busy and frustrating but also fun and exciting and worthwhile. And it just keeps getting better and better.

But my point is that, at least for my own experience, all of this came about as the result of taking a full look at the worst. But (unlike Mark McKinney’s character) also knowing when I’d seen enough to inform my decisions and to get on with living.

I don’t know if any of the above is even interesting to anyone here, and I apologize if not. But I’ve spent a good ten years coming to a point where I could write exactly that.

The only danger we face over these next few years–as a full understanding of what we’ve truly sown is being reaped–the only danger is that we may succumb to fear, worry, and the desire to calm ourselves through wilfull denial and ignorance.

Yes, I re-posted the entire comment. Call it a guest posting.

I actually wish Steven had kept writing over at Deconsumption because it’s this stage of an individual’s journey that fascinates me most.

Doom, Gloom and Ka-boom!

A few weeks ago I posted a quote from a Bill Mollison interview that included this paragraph:

I can easily teach people to be gardeners, and from them, once they know how to garden, you’ll get a philosopher. But I could never teach people to be philosophers – and if I did, you could never make a gardener out of them.

And now after bemoaning the diet of doom that we get in the peak oil universe I’ve rediscovered this essay by Toby Hemmenway, a permaculturist and philospher who is a great example of what Bill Mollison was talking about.

Toby has this to say about the most common response to a diet of doom:

One of the most common responses to the Peak Oil panic is, “We’re planning on moving to the country with our friends and producing everything we need.” Let me burst that bubble: Back-to-the-landers have been pursuing this dream for 40 years now, and I don’t know of a single homesteader or community that has achieved it.

Toby managed to inspire a bit of hate mail with this series of essay’s, probably as a result of this weird subconsious desire for renewal that exists from one end of our culture to the other.

I’m not a believer in the Peak Oil “end of the world” scenario, where decreasing oil production somehow mutates into the sudden, permanent shutoff of urban water supplies, and contented suburbanites are transformed overnight into looting gangs. Yes, fossil fuels surely will become much more expensive in the next decades, and scarce soon after. I don’t doubt that several tipping points will be broached along the way, with rapid and unexpected changes cascading through society. But civilization won’t end.

I also recently discovered this commennt heading Ran’s Crashwatch page:

When I started this page four years ago, everyone thought that industrial society would keep thriving forever, and I wanted to balance that with evidence that it’s going to crash. Now everyone thinks it’s going to crash, but I’m shocked at how many blows it has taken and how little has changed in daily life

And that’s with a crash that has a decidely engineered look to it. Perhaps then the environment will give us that ultimate catastrophic opportunity for renewal:

I’m no expert on this topic but I am beginning to wonder if we’re getting the real picture on how the environment will cope with it’s own collapse. I’m not a climate change denier in the technology-is-god sense, but any movement that has a member of the elite (Al Gore) leading the charge should immediately be put under the spotlight as far as I’m concerened -and the fact that a person usually gets censured for making such comments in public just makes me want to ask the questions even more.

My trust in our beliefs about the resilience of the planet took another hit when I read this article about jellyfish. I had been lead to believe that nothing could live in these oceanic dead zones that have begun appearing around the planet, (otherwise why call them ‘dead’ zones?), but then I discovered that jellyfish are thriving in them and fisherman who had previously been struggling to make a living are now ‘making easy money’ catching jellyfish for sale in places like Japan.

Naturally there’s plenty in the article that makes for sober reading but when I read about jellyfish thriving in what is referred to as a dead zone I couldn’t help feeling mislead by the information the environmental movement is giving us. What mis-information like this does is give an underlying message about the planet’s ability to cope with change that, logically, must also be wrong but which is slipped in at an almost subconscious level.

So exactly how much is our cultural gravitation toward doom misleading us? I’m certainly not making any predictions of my own but I am wondering if most of the predictions I’m reading are missing an important perspective – a perspective that can only be gained from outside our cultural beliefs about catastrophic endings.

Nothing is certain but I’m fairly confident that it’s the permaculturists who are the most grounded amongst us and that they are the ones, just as Bill Mollison promised, who have the best perspective on our future.

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UPDATE: This is what happens when you don’t do proper research: I originally intended to merely post a link to remind people about Toby Hemmenway’s old essay but then all these other connections started popping up and so I prdocued the longer posting above. What I had forgotten however is that Toby has already written an essay covering this exact topic – in greater detail and with proper resaearch and stuff – it’s called Origins of Peak Oil Doomerism and is a much more thorough attempt to get to the bottom of the issue.

Suburbia DOA

I see a lot of people gleefully predicting the demise of suburbia – dependant as it is on the car for it’s full functioning, but I wonder where do we think all these people are going to go?

If overseas examples are anything to go by the first thing that happens (think Cuba and the Soviet Union) when food gets scare is that people start growing food on their own property. I saw David Holmgren talk a few years ago and he pointed out that the old style quarter-acre section was large enough to feed an entire family. He regretted the fact that most of these sections have since been cut in half and now have two houses where their used to be one, but we need to recognise in our haste to usher in a new future that this doesn’t make them utterly useless.

It’s highly unlikely that anyone will be 100% food self sufficient even if they have enough space. In reality people will grow a proportion of their food at home and buy or barter for the rest. And if there isn’t enough space within the confines of the property there’s going to be a lot of park and road space available for other uses as soon as the local council sees the writing on the wall. Permaculture has already shown us how to grow food in small places, and how to repair dead soil, al we need now is the motivation and that’ll come soon enough.

I’ve also seen the suburbs bemoaned for their lack of community but this is mostly because of the car. As soon as daily car travel is taken out of the picture and as soon as adults are at home for the day, and most likely their children too, the suburbs will be a different place.

The suburbs feel kind of dead now but they’re not going to die – if anything they’re probably going to undergo a kind of rebirth. People will very quickly go back to relying on their neighbours for company and mutual support, they’ll start working from home and who knows – all that space currently used to shift cars around might be put to a better use. Given the (admittedly unlikely) possibility of a sensible local council we’ll might yet see roads given over to some kind of food forest or other commons type of space with council just focus on maintaining the footpaths on either side. Who knows, we may even have markets and other communal events springing up at old intersections. It’s hardly like old-style zoning rules are going to be any use to us.

And YES, I realise this is an idealistic view I’m presenting here but it’s actually a hell of a lot more useful than a months’ worth of doom-blogging. I mean we’re all going to look pretty stupid post-crash when people start asking “so if you knew this was going to happen why did you do nothing except standing there saying ‘I told you so’.

Which is the effect of a lot of the doom – it reduces us to numb spectators. How often do doom-bloggers wonder aloud about why people don’t follow their advice, all the time unware that it’s the constant stream of doom that’s got us in it’s glare.

And YES I realise there is a lot of planning for the future going on already but as I said I still think there is a lot of staring into the headlights of the oncoming train too; “Yes, I think those are the headlights coming into view now. Yep, it’s definitely them, they’re getting pretty bright now – just like I said they would…

WHAM!

James Howard Kunstler is a great writer but my biggest criticism of him is that a lot of his solutions are aimed at the level of local or central government – which, ironically enough is kind of naïve of him. Government is the instrument of the status quo, it’s job is more of the same – not change for the sake of the little people. Should be pretty obvious really.

What our communites are going to need in the future, are a few voices of reason – a few people in each place who have thought about what the future is going to be like and have latched on to the few things that are going to help the people in their street or suburb get through the times ahead. They certainly aren’t going to be need a bunch of peakniks saying I told you so – although the peakniks are going to need a stable community in their area if they really want to increase their chances of survival.

Timing is crucial too – it’s great to have a few bright ideas but pushing them before their time will just lead to burn out. It’s probably too early even now for most other people but the most important thing to remember is that the last people who are going to get this are the ones who our culture typically looks too for leadership.

Crash-aware people are going to have to provide leadership in creative non-institutional ways by doing things like starting up seed-saver and permaculture groups and generally whispering in the ear of people who are ready to listen that we need to support everyone in the community if we want to feel safe.

People have also got to be careful to drop the coercive, bash-them-over-the-head-with-the-news approach that our culture usually produces and provide what I tend to think is genuine leadership – which is to say creating a vision and a direction and waiting for the support to grow in behind it. (This concept of leadership is probably the major area of failure for activists today – but that’s another blog post).

For me this lesson about what community consists of has come courtesy of a fateful shift of house. In our new ‘suburb’ we’ve got friendly neighbours on both sides and over the road – two of whom we knew before we moved in. There are lots more families down the street, also I have a work-mate 4 doors down and a few other faces I recognise beyond that. It’s a marked contrast from our last place where we lived in the usual sought after situation of isolation from our neighbours and a nice view. We’ve moved to a less sought-after area but have ended up with more of what we actually need – it feels like a good place to be.

Primitivist Theology

In my last post I wondered at the lengths Ran went to in his recent essay to deal with issues of ideology and today he posted a comment which answers the question much better than my speculation did.

… the main reason I wrote the essay was to go into theoryland and get primitivists out. If you really feel like going into the woods and living on roots and berries and deer that you kill with a handmade bow, go for it! But that’s not what I see. I see people who feel that this society is deeply wrong, and on top of those valid feelings, they build what I believe is a faulty intellectual framework: that we should go primitive. Then they feel guilty that they don’t really like practicing primitive skills, and that they’d rather eat pizza and go on the internet. I’m not trying to stop anyone from going primitive. I’m trying to stop anyone from forcing anyone else to do it…

Perhaps then, it’s an invitation to come and live in the grey areas between the extremes of modern civilisation and pure primitivism. As I said in my last post if we learn to listen to our inner voice (but not to blindly obey it, of course) then we will hopefully lose the need to rely on pre-conceived ideology to guide our lives and will also feel quite comfortable with imperfectly worked-out grey areas.

Stay Human

Our task is to be human.

While that sentence may seem abusurdly obvious to some people, to me it feels like a reminder of something important that I forgot long, long ago.  I’m struggling with the old activist bash-people-over-the-head incarnation of myself and with some of the attitudes I met when I was in that environment. To be fair (and accurate) though coercive tactics is endemic thoughout our entire culture. But then maybe that’s the problem.

The reality of changing the world is that there are two ways to do it. We either attempt to use top down coercive measures, or we become someone who can get alongside people of all stripes and talk to them at an personal level. It’s only when we get that close to someone that we’re truly in a position to effect positive change in their life. The only thing is that if we do we’ll probably find ourselves helping them with a whole bunch of personal struggles before we can move on to convincing them to do some recycling. However, most people just prefer wacking each other over the head with their chosen ideology.

I am seriously questioning the usefulness of my intellectual nature at the moment. As far as I can see all it has done is to disconnect me from my emotions, thereby enabling me to do emotional, mental and spiritual damage to myself – and probably to those around me. The intellectual approach to life means we put ideology ahead of relationships. It’s not so long ago that I found it impossible to be friends with people who I had philosophical disagreements with. Most philosophy is a superficial irrelevancy, the important things in life are our relationships and being able to listen to our inner voice. I find that lots of women instinctively understand this but that most men don’t.

Essentially I burned myself out trying to advance my particular ideology – to what benefit I don’t know. To be fair, opposing the release of GE organisms has a lot to be recommended and putting out news that is more truthful than the mainstream version is not that bad an idea either. The problem is that burned out individuals aren’t a very good advertisement for any kind of cause. They’re not much use to their family and friends either. People often cite their children as a reason for joining any number of causes but the biggest difference we could make to our children is creating a life where we feel refreshed enough to want to spend time with them.

I’m really starting to have a real problem with all these attempts to wake us up – they bloody depress me. I’m pretty sure it’s not just me that has this problem with being told to wake up either. The urge to tell people to wake up reminds me of the ‘tough talk’ that our teachers and parents gave us as kids. It’s the sort of hard talk that usually makes the speaker feel good but never the listener. It’s the sort of thing we refer to as an ear-bashing in New Zealand.

People already feel pretty overwhelmed and trying to shock them into ‘waking up’ is probably just going to add to their feeling of powerlessness – hardly the energising effect actually needed. Dan showed me his copy of What a Way to Go recently. It’s got many of my favourite authors in it but I don’t feel like I can recommend it to anyone. I’m feeling much more receptive of positive visions at the moment

People don’t need more shock treatment, they need encouragement, and they need help with where they’re at. So do I.

Ran’s blog seems to be the best option around here for that at the moment but I’ve also spent some time with a group of people in party mode in the UK recently and somehow, after all the activism I’ve done I’m struggling to explain why I wouldn’t have been better off just fooling around for the last few years. What’s the point of fighting the good fight if we lose ourselves and what it means to be alive in the process. I mean isn’t that pretty much what They are trying to do to us anyway.

So here’s what I think; if we have to live in a hierarchy then I propose a new indicator of social status whereby the people having the most fun, or getting the most satisfaction out of life are at the top. The people at the bottom would be the poor souls who feel compelled to stick it out in jobs, causes and relationships that are bad for them.

This isn’t a-political either, a society full of people who were genuinely focused on enjoying their lives rather than running after more abstract goals would look a lot different to this one.

I have no idea what it would look like on a large scale but on the part of the planet where I can have a useful effect (family and maybe friends) I imagine that we would turn the focus of our lives to repairing relationships so that we are better able to rely on each other. I hope we would be better able to live with each other (not in the same house though, that would be a bit ambitious at this stage) and support each other. It’s much easier to do this when people are physically close. I’d love to see our siblings and parents helping us raise our kids and in a couple of years our kids will be in a position to help to raise their younger cousins. I’d love to be able to break out of my civilised shell a bit so I’m more fun to be around, although I have only a very vague idea of how that might happen, and I’d love to be able to just chill out a whole lot more.

Exit Conspiracy

This was supposed to be posted about a week ago when it would have been much more timely. On the better late than never theory, here it is, late;

Tim’s got a post about stepping out of the conspiracy theory headspace and it’s got me thinking about how much good judgment is missing in our world. I have friends who like to tell me that people are spontaneously getting stupid or that we have evolution in reverse or some such. Frankly I think this is just another sign of poor judgment, it’s a step up from common poor judgment but we really need to get to the top of the stairs and not just be smug about being on a different step to the rabble.

One of the problems is that our judgment is stripped from us as we grow up. We’re supposed to learn to use our own judgment via our relationships with stable adults and from our ever-growing body of life experience. School very effectively prevents this by separating us from the grounding experience of our connection with our parents and presenting subjects as discrete disconnected areas of information, which can only ever be verified by reference to a higher authority (the teacher). It’s interesting how often the word separation comes up in there, (almost) needless to say it also separates us from genuine life experiences and nature.

The mess this creates is then locked-in as adults by the media, which both distracts us and distorts the flow of information that we need to make sense of the world. By now we’re getting into the 3rd generation of this carry-on and you can see the results in these comments of an old teacher that I keep hearing about ­everywhere. It obviously strikes a chord but I don’t think anyone knows what to do with it.

The teacher is right about technology short circuiting kids brains but he misses the part of his institution in it. Both serve to provide disconnections. The technology is particularly insidious though and is worth dwelling on. Under the guise of connecting us up it actually serves to disconnect us. Teenagers don’t have to learn the dance of saying what they want to say without insulting people (it would help if their own parents hadn’t insulted them throughout their child hood of course) because it’s not necessary to worry about that when you txting. Me, I can’t stand txt, I always want to be as clear as possible because I’ve learnt the need for clear communication from a lifetime’s experience of a million communication failures. Tis is only one example of the real-life experiences that kid are missing out on as they sit in the fake environment of school texting each other under the desk.

I mentioned before that no one knows what to do with this situation but there is perhaps one person who does. Gordon Neufeld, psychiatrist, dissects the issue of ‘peer attachment’ in Hold on to Your Kids and leaves the reader with the distinct impression that teenagers today are basically a case of the blind leading the blind (with occasional help from Britney Spears). Once I read about this issue a lot of things fell into place. It certainly explains what the old teacher is talking about and has stopped me from passing off such comments as merely being the result an ever-widening generation gap.

Back to Tim:

Upon my return to terra firma, it was rather difficult to untangle the effects of looking at the world through this lens. But I somehow did it. Part of it, I think, was simply having to go through unrelated emotional drama in my own life,

Emotional drama (if properly dealt with) must be a very grounding experience. I don’t know what Tim went through but I know that my own experiences have taught me a lot about myself – basically all the things I had to forget in order to be good at school. I was very good at school so I have a lot of things to unlearn.

I mentioned before about the anchoring effect of adults in a child’s life and I think once you get to know yourself better you reclaim the internal anchor that you were supposed to have from the moment you became an adult. Once that is achieved I think we can all start to work outward from our own center to create a properly functioning model of world. The key about this model is that it will not be handed to us, we will base it on our own judgment – which is another thing we can claim back as adults.

Tim refers to Jeff Wells as being someone who has learned to swim in the world of conspiracies. It’s possibly one reason his site is so popular, I always feel strangely calmed after visiting his site despite having just read about all manner of strangeness. I really don’t understand how he does this except to guess that he is the rare, maybe unique, event of a person who really does have a handle on the conspiracy landscape.

Of course he can’t really help his visitors who still bang on about how Noam Chomsky is a CIA asset or those who think that if we could just prove the JFK was assassinated by the powers that be or that 9-11 was organized by people in power we could finally change the world.

I think the main reason Chomsky won’t go into that territory is that he’s well aware that the evidence he presents of corruption in high places should be adequate to prove things are not as they seem. If his iron-clad and easier-to-stomach evidence can’t convince someone then swimming in the much murkier waters of JFK or 9-11 conspiracies is not going to achieve it either

The reason I back Chomksy as a person of substance is less about the evidence that people put forward and more about my understanding of people and emotions. To me it defies good sense to think that Chomsky is a construct of any kind. His analysis of the issues he’s prepared to entertain is far too good to be faked and I just think that he doesn’t want to confront the weirder more confusing stuff at an emotional level. This should hardly be considered a matter of surprise given that every one has their limit and most people’s limits are much less radical than Chomsky’s. Essentially what we’ve got is a guy who is more radical than 95% of the population and people are criticizing him for not going far enough.

To be honest, even if David Icke’s reptiles turned out to be the real deal I’m not sure what I’d gain by learning about it. There’s not much I can do about reptiles, I alredy know that the mainstream is just a matrix of lies and I’ve already decided to leave the beaten track and chart my own course – what more can I do?

I’ve got far more from following the truths I’ve learned in anti-civ writing about how I have been effected and how I might change in order to have the sort of life I want. Maybe the attraction of conspiracy land is that it takes responsibility away from people so that they don’t have to enter into the much more difficult territory of working on themselves – which means that all they have done is swap one matrix for another one. If a lot of mainstream people consciously make the decision to not get into this stuff because they know what it will mean for their lives (and they do) then living in conspiracy-land where you still don’t have to change anything means all you’ve done is move sideays into a much more cunning matrix.

I think once we’ve learned enough factual truths about our reality to see that a lot of mainstream beliefs are based on lies then we need to move on to dealing with the spiritual/mental truths of reality – which is why I get so much from Ran’s writing. I’ve learnt enough about how corrupt power systems are and now I’m learning how to undermine them with a different kind of power.

Kevin has arrived at a similar point, he’s more technical about it than Ran but has proven over and over again that the most powerful act we can undertake is to drop out of their system and to stop feeding the beast.

People on the Rigorous Intuition comments board sometimes refer to people like Chomsky and Amy Goodman as being Gatekeepers who’s job is to prevent people from looking too far least the uncover truer and deeper conspiracies. In my case Chomksy wasn’t a gate-keeper so much as a gate-way who led me into a new world that included Derrick Jensen, Ran Prieur, Jeff Wells…. It’s a long list. I think if people aren’t going through the gate it’s got more to do with what’s happening in their minds than Chomsky’s.

Essentially I used Chomsky as a stepping stone as I moved further and further into the fringes and gradually built up my map of the world. I’m now in a position where I can make all the connections from my personal experience out to those fringes. I think it may well be the people who haven’t used any stepping stones but have gone directly to deep conspiracy that have lost their anchor and tend to see a conspiracy behind every rock. At the very least if I keep my emotional intuition intact I can read Chomsky and evaluate what he has to say based on, well, what he has to say. Usually it seems pretty smart and I’ll take it on board. If I don’t like what he has to say, fine, I can leave those comments behind without having to build a great conspiracy theory to explain my actions.

Really, I think learning on the fringes (regardless of how deep you go) is great but at some point you need to get into some kind of action because that’s a natural human response. From Ran and Kevin I would say that dropping out of the world’s system is a key strategic move but if you really want to cement these changes in place then choosing how you raise you kids is going to make have biggest long term impact. To inform this decision I think that Hold on to Your Kids, for it’s technical insight and The Continuum Concept for it’s inspirational value are important resources but essentially they the can both be summed up with the advice to simply love your children. I have to add though, because many people love their kids but somehow don’t respect them, to remember that loving them includes respecting their opinions and the choices they make, even when they’re very little.

Healing

Coincidences between blogs are always interesting, while I just wrote a piece called Climax Culture the Archdruid was writing one talking about Climax Community. We were of course coming at the issue from very different places and the respective articles don’t look that similar but we were both talking about a more successful way that our culture might operate. The implication of what the Archdruid was saying is that the time is right to be building toward a k-selected culture and that the short term, ‘me-first’ thinking of our current culture is ready to burn out and be usurped by a different approach.

Another implication was that looking back at stone-age or climax cultures is a good place to go to figure out what our future cultures might be like. Stone-age cultures meet the definition of climax community due to their success at maintaining their lifestyle for who-knows-how-long but I’m not sure the Archdruid will like me making that conclusion. I’m not a hard core primitivist though. I’m not interested in actually living in a jungle and nor do I think that I am capable of doing so, at least not on an emotional level. I am however, interested in what I can learn from primitive, climax cultures about how it’s members inter-relate, and of course how they treat their children..

It’s not just theory driving that thought for me either but the observable fact, as evidenced in the likes of The Continuum Concept, that many primitive cultures provide a very happy and joyful life for their individual members.

Also coincidently Ted has been writing about Soul Wholeness and the shamanic process of soul retrieval – I think we’re both agreed that this is verging on new-agey territory but the need to repair ourselves from the trauma of our lives, be it the sort of abuse our culture acknowledges or the ‘normal’ low level abuse that we all suffer as children, is a strong need in members of our society.

One Ted’s posting reminded me of was this fascinating paper Technoshamansim: Spiritual Healing in the Rave Subculture, which took raves, and the people who attended them, seriously enough to investigate claims by participants that they enjoyed ‘meaningful spiritual experiences’ during a rave. The author writes:

References to shamanism and catchphrases about self-empowerment and spiritual healing permeate raver discourse and invite an anthropological perspective similar to that applied to nonbiomedical healing in small scale, non-western societies.

before embarking on an analysis of rave culture from just such a perspective.

Specifically, I argue that the DJ acts much like a shaman who, aided by key symbols, guides the ravers on an ecstatic journey to paradise–a presocial state of nondifferentiation and communitas. It is this return to paradise through altered states of consciousness which brings spiritual ease to ravers facing an anxious and uncertain society

I’m going to tie this back into the same part of The Continuum Concept (Chapter 5, Deprivation of Essential Experiences) that I referred to in my previous posting where the issue of achieving high degrees of serenity was discussed. Jean Liedloff writes:

…it appears that there are two separate contributors to the to the feeling of wrongness that is so general in us. One is the individual’s sense of the continuum in him acting as a gauge of what is up to it’s expectations; the other is an even more primordial one.

That we are so universally subject to a conviction that serenity has been lost to us can not be accounted for solely by the loss, at an early age of , of our place in a continuum of appropriate treatment and surroundings. Even people like the relaxed and joyful Yequana, who have not been deprived of their expected experiences, have a mythology that includes a fall from grace, or bliss, and the notion that they live outside that lost state.

Considering that we have been referring to some primitive cultures as living in an Eden-like, pre-fall state this is a comment that should force us into a major rethink. Perhaps the The Fall was less a metaphor for a decent into civilisation than a descent into self awareness and the ability to worry about the future – and perhaps some of us have fallen further than others. You’ll often hear people around here saying that our current mess became inevitable the day we invented agriculture but maybe agriculture became inevitable the day we acheived self-awareness. Maybe that’s where all this began.

Anyway, despite primitive cultures now appearing to be on the same side of the fence as us they are still a good place to go for pointers on how best to go about healing. In fact they may be an even better place to go than I first thought because not only do they have the same goal in mind as we do but they’re also better placed to do something about it being as they are in a climax culture.

I have to confess that prior to this I had been somewhat put off by the discussions of shamanism coming out of either primitivist or (sort-of) sixties drug cultures head spaces. I not sure what it says that it’s taken an academic paper and comments from someone who has moved away from primitivism (Ted) to get me to look closer at it, but this healing aspect of shamanism is something that interests me. A lot of healing is, and still will be hard work but the virtues of healing by dancing or merely laughing shouldn’t need any promotion. Jean Liedoff goes on:

It would seem that in the enormously long period…before our antecedents developed an intellect able to reflect on troublesome matters like our mortality and purpose, we did indeed live in the only blissful way: entirely in the present. Like every other animal, we enjoyed the great blessing of being incapable of worry. There were discomforts, hungers, wounds, fears and deprivations to be endured even as beasts, but the fall from grace, invariably described as a choice made the wrong way, would have been impossible to creatures without mind enough to make a choice. Only with the advent of the capacity to choose does the fall become possible.

So perhaps it’s not just civilisation that we need healing from but the even deeper unmet need of being unable to live in the moment. Maybe ignorance really is bliss. Jean Liedloff again:

In the age old pursuit of this sense of unalloyed being… unconditioned by choices or relativities, men have sought and found disciplines and rituals by which to reverse the tendency to think. Ways have been discovered to still the galloping thoughts of man, put him at peace, leave him not to think but only to be. Awareness has been trained by various means to rest upon emptiness or upon some object or word, chant or exercise…

Meditation is the word usually given to the procedure of dethinking [Un-thinking perhaps?]. It is at the centre of many schools of discipline that seek to raise the serenity level. A commonly used technique is the repetition of a mantra, a word or a phrase as an eraser of thoughts of the associative kind that the mind tends to pursue. As the procession of thoughts is slowed and stopped, the physiological state of the subject changes to resemble, in certain ways, that of the infant. Breathing becomes shallower, and recent experiments have shown that brain waves are produced of a sort that are unlike those of either adult wakefulness or adult sleep.

For those who meditate regularly, there is an apparent increase in serenity…which also lends a stabalising influence to the rest of their time….It is as though they were, in the case of the civilised, in-arms deprived persons, filling in the gap in infant experience which would have provided greater serenity, by putting themselves into a state like that which was missed, that which possibly is also attained through the use of opiates. The most deprived people, those of our western cultures, if they meditate, would be putting in a great deal of time moving up to the centredness of a year-old continuum-complete baby. It would take them a vastly greater amount of time to catch up on the missed doses of serenity than people of other cultures whose infancies included a larger proportion of in-arms experience.

When I knew them the Sanema Indians – more than the neighboring Yequana – were engaged in active cultivation of this extra serenity, or spirituality. Their method includes the occasional use of hallucinogenic drugs, but consists mainly of chanting. The chant, begun with the repetition of a single short musical phrase of three or four syllables, is continued, like the mantra in an effortless manner until it commences to elaborate itself with added notes or syllables, with no conscious effort on the part of the chanter.

…With a fulfilled personality based solidly in a sense of his own rightness, the Sanema who reproduces the mindless bliss of the infant in himself with frequency and at length, can build a freedom from the fringe liabilities of the intellect with far greater speed and effect.

And from that point the book continues into the passages I quoted in my previous posting.

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Naturally after reading this I cast about in my own life looking for similar experiences much as I did after I read about the healing nature of true-community. Usually I find music is involved. There is a song by Ben Harper (‘God Fearing Man’ off the album, Fight For Your Mind) which disappears into a dream-like jam state for most of it’s 11 minutes, that has the potential to take my mind away from itself, especially if I am feeling sleepy. I know I found the last U2 concert in New Zealand to have a minor healing quality to it, although I should admit to being a huge fan of theirs, and I have always found that sitting in while friends of mine jam on various musical instruments to be a particularly enjoyable experience. Much better though if I could play and join in myself .

The last thing it kind of reminds me of is rock climbing. There is nothing like clinging to the side of a rock face high above the ground to make your mind focus on the here and now and I’m sure it had a lot to do with my recovery from the somewhat oppressive time I had at Architecture School ten years ago.

They’re all rather fleeting moments and compared to my work in the building industry, which is all about the burden of making decisions (with expensive consequences if you get it wrong) it pales into total insignificance. At the very least I may look at music differently now.