Life-Dance Check-in March 14, 2009

 

Family Member 

 

no real initiatives, no changes. I don't think I'll go into much detail here since I am not trying to "shame" my familial venue by giving the impression that I think it is especially dissociated (Though I also don't want to contribute to complacency either). Suffice to say that the nearly universal public/private social model; in-groups, rituals of inner and outer apartness such as gossip (that is, putting people on trial without their presence or representation, often over various consciousness-and-conscientiousness-inhibiting substances or during competitive games), goes on here as it goes on everywhere. The alternative of conscious and deliberate forms of coming-together informed by a commitment to inner and outer healing and to co-creatively making  our household into a place that world facilitate real belonging and Individual-Personhood is probably just as unlikely to happen these days as when I got here 6 years ago.  

 

Still, none of the status-quo-rituals involved seem exactly rituals of Pure apartness, and i suppose it can and does happen that some healthy gesture spontaneously erupts in the general lameness, its just that this is overwhelmingly likely to fizzle out or even be spun to the advantage of the dominant culture of false solidarity and connivance. In general it certainly is a pretty eroded soil for any kind of seed of healthy culture to take root. Moreover, being more or less outside all of the factional cliques and duads in which these rituals go on exposes me to attack from any or all of them, though there is really nothing to be done about that.

 

Sometimes I wonder if I need to look at all of this in a different way. One can only go so far naming what is unhealthy and expecting this naming to be met with good will, good faith, and a generally adult attitude, especially if one of the things you are naming is the consistent repression of subordination of such attitudes in the very culture and individuals in question. What I have been affirming to myself is the life-logical truth that both healthy and sick culture exist in everyone, even when sick culture is the predominating norm. In such a case acting towards people as if they did have an active and non-repressed inner Adult (which they could indeed have in that moment) could be a way of helping to actually activate and support that adult at the same time as helping to keep my own adult active and alive. In other words, one way of trying not to succumb to the toxic smoke of a burning house is to keep reminding others and oneself of the situation--which at least might help the reminder stay awake even if others are too far gone to respond at that moment.

 

I still don't see a clear alternative to this. In fact, putting it has I just have, i am not sure if the problem is that I am  making such gestures and remarks, or that I am not making them enough. Not doing this--being somehow secretive about my judgments of the health of what is going on--seems to me just a set up for the kind of quietly self-serving, if inconspicuous arrogance that I have engaged in the past; a kind of preemptive writing-off of people that precludes all possibility of inner or outer healing. I suppose one could even call it "gossiping to oneself" about others. I can't say that I do this very much nowadays; if I get into a discussion of any length with anyone at all, the topic is generally about sick culture in some way, though I tend to leave a lot to be inferred, rather than directly "challenging" (not quite the right word) the person in front of me.

 

I used to invite the other person to participate with me in a Life-Dance Party, Check-in or other ritual of Healthy Culture some point in such a conversation, but experience has taught me that little ever comes of this, even when the person agrees to do it and it actually happens. I think that this is because the motive for participating (on the part of the other person) is never fully integrative if it is integrative at all. Healthy Culture rituals, which are somewhat like (outer) political actions and (inner) therapy at the same time, require as much  long term commitment as either, but don't have the loop holes, or hidden ego-perks of either. They have other and infinitely deeper cumulative benefits of course, but these require time to reveal themselves. Most people don't have the faith in togetherness required to invest the  time it takes to find this out, so Its sort of a catch-22 situation.

 

All of this leaves me with the familiar familial balancing act. Ultimately I do live together with these people and though it is important not become fixated on the familial aspect of my life (and only the Human aspect of the familial at that) to the exclusion or neglect of the local, civil, socio-religious, and my own coming-together as an Individual, it would be equally wrong and unhealthy to connive at the fact that I live with people who suffer from sick culture just like me--but without (at least most of the time and so far as I can tell) a deep enough consciousness of this and what it means, to be able to see the need for the co-creation of some kind of cultural 12 step program. Ultimately I have to try to make some kind of gesture at that simply because of entropy and the fact that things will only get worse without some kind of intervention. This worsening must ultimately take the form of either my losing what little consciousness I have of the situation and so becoming a full part of it, with me being otherwise really harmed by it, and/or with me voluntarily or involuntarily leaving it. There is of course also the possibility of me healing it, but outside of the miraculous intervention of Spirit, I don't feel my own little flame anywhere near warm enough to effect the degree of "sogginess" I feel around me (not, as I've said, that this sogginess is greater than in most places). I often feel pretty soggy myself.

 

 However there might be a little arrogance (in the form of false humility) in what I've just written and there certainly seems to be a lack of faith in Togetherness in it. I am learning and growing a great deal in various ways so there is no reason to prejudge the ultimate issue of my experiment in this household. Anything is possible. Listening, considering, support....

Neighbor

 

The Neighborhood situation is pretty much the same as the familial one. I seem to have stopped going to meetings as the prepackaged agendas tend to assume things that are very much at issue as far as I am concerned.

 

There are two relatively new businesses happening at Twin Oaks, both of them more appealing and seemingly sustainable than making polypropylene hammocks or even Tofu. There is the Seed Business that is sort of an outgrowth of the Acorn (sister community) seed business, and there is work installing solar panels and such like. I am happy about this and though these businesses are not at all in the forefront of things it seems possible that a trend is in that  direction.  But I am also worried about that very possibility since I already  begin to feel the same kind of frustration with the state of things that I always feel on the political front when the Democrats are in office and everyone feels like its aright to stop thinking about even diagnosing (much less curing) our underlying disease, since the amelioration of certain symptoms (usually confused with the disease itself) seems immanent. Its very difficult to keep saying, like the "Enemy of the People" in Ibsen's play, that the waters are still poison when everybody so much wants to have everything turn out well at so little expense. 

 

I suppose I still play this role--sort of a Noam Chomsky type role i guess--whenever i am overheard talking about things in conversation, but I haven't written or posted anything on the opinions and ideas board since the paper on Due Process during the "feed back episode". I am working on two papers currently however; one that goes into detail about the kind of multi-lateral "community hearing" due processi proposed in that paper, and the other on the meaning of "efficiency" from the healthy culture point of view. 

 

Two persistent themes of my being here (although I guess it would apply equally of my being anywhere), is that I am always engaged in experiments of self-transformation (or self healing) which, besides having various unforeseeable side effects, have these intermediate periods of extreme vulnerability in which I am neither my old selfnature or fully my new (hopefully more realized) selfnature. This is ameliorated by the fact that I spend so much time alone but it still worries and frustrates me sometimes. The other but related theme is that ultimately, as I grow in healthy culture (if I do, and whatever that means exactly) it makes sense to assume that I can expect more and more "culture shock" and "cognitive dissonance" between myself an every one else here. I consider this kind of trouble almost inevitable, but it wont be the kind of "good trouble" that I want it to be if it only happens on some kind of private local level. Good trouble is not "private" or "public" trouble understandable in factional terms, but its the kind of trouble you get into when you really begin to make progress in (inner and outer) healing as an individual-person, and I feel like i need to time things so that I can make the most of it as it begins to happen (or to intensify).

 

But the fact that I myself still (and probably always will) suffer from sick culture is quite essential to both the creation of this kind of "Good Trouble" and the fear I have of it. It is essentially more a Comic business than a tragic heroic one. It would certainly be a complete misfire if I had people envying me or pitying me or taking me too seriously or to lightly--all of which I am sure will happen if anything happens (there has always been some of what I've dreaded as well as what i hoped for in any future I have actually lived through).

 

All in all though, I guess I am holding my own (which is to say "keeping my balance) well enough as a neighbor...listening, considering...

 

 

here I'd like to try the experiment of making an Individual Check-in. Its different from checking-in about my progress over time in healthy coming-together as an individual, as it is meant to be a more or less immediate snap shot of what it happening  in my whole "vertical" individuality. Example:

 

 

So that was an Individual-Check-in (as distinct from a full Individual-Personal Life-Dance Check-in). I introduce it here more or less on a whim, since the point of the Individual Part of the Life-Dance check-in is not so much how these four aspects of my Individuality are doing separately, but how well I am doing in integrating them, in facilitating inner consensus between them so as to be able to act with more with more integrity as an individual. I find that the frequency and quality of various Life-Dance Rituals I do have a lot to do with that. So I'll speak to that a little.

 

Today is my Death Day, which was preceded by  fasting, a Life-Dance walk, and the first part of this Check-in which I am finishing today. I've done most these rituals at this time (half a year from my Birthday) every year for the last 3 or 4 years, as part of a Vision Dance ritual, (I have yet to do the Life-Dance Party, another traditional part of the experience), which is supposed to last 5 days. (I describe all of these rituals in my in lifedancelog.motime.com so I won't do so here). So far, this years Vision Dance is being somewhat less than i hoped. Owning mostly I guess, to the circumstance that my Labour-balance (the number of Twin Oaks labour credits I have saved up) is rapidly dwindling, I think I have been insufficiently intentional and generous with my own time. The rituals that  I have done have actually been very moving and magical so my distress about it is not extreme. Nevertheless, I think I need Challenging (and maybe also a little support) in this area, so I am planning something similar to my March Death Day Vision-Dance on Jun 15, halfway between now and my birthday. 

 

Citizen-of-the-World: 

 

Of course, since my understanding of the world and what is wrong with it (and us) has to do with culture and culture is more fundemental than politics,  I understand the normal political scene to be, for the most part, a confused  affair of relatively sick culture and ultimately unhelpful factional identity politics. I include in this, not only party politics but nationalism itself. I also include "humanistic" organizations such as the United Nations, and even many NGO'S, to the extent that these groups are founded and proceed without an integrative and under the typical assumptions of fundamental apartness common in a sick culture.

 

I am not saying that I "dismiss" any of these institutions since, from the Life-Logical point of view of healthy culture, any given person or institution is bound to have its "piece of the truth" and so its moments of relatively healthy culture, as well as its piece of the lie. The fact that, for the most part, the groups and institutions I have named seem grounded in sick culture assumptions does not mean that they might not be places where healing is possible (after all, where else is healing going to happen if not in places and people that are more or less sick?), it is just to say that the nature of the healing will be such as to transform the understanding, functioning, and conscious Identity of both the persons and the institutions and that the first intial catalyst for such a transformation is not likely to come from within such institutions and groups, but outside of them. 

 

Insofar as my own experiments in trying to be a such a catalyst (or part of such), I can say that I am beginning to lose  a little faith in the idea of a cultural pilot project consisting of myself and a few others who are willing to dedicate themselves to the kind of focused experimental "rubbing together of the sticks of healthy ritual" necessary to start the fire of the kind of "Cultural Singularity" that could spread both arithmetically and exponentially. At least I am losing faith in certain assumptions I had about the order of operations--the "generative sequence"--involved in such the emergence of such a thing.

 

Though I am obviously still doing my blog (and doing all of the other "citizen-of-the-world" things that I have been doing), I am getting other tactical and strategic Ideas about how best to try to integrate the collective venue into healthy culture and visa versa. But I don't have inner consensus to share any of these Ideas or experiments online right now and, since some of them seem inherently to involve the element of surprise, it is not clear if I will ever have occasion to.

 

I guess this means that so far as the civil part of my life is going, I am in the "listening and considering" phase that precedes the conception and execution of new and more formal experiment...

 

It occurs to me that I could finally check-in in this place about my Living-Frienship experiment with Tusti, of more than a year ago now, since it seems to be on the issue of Adulthood as Citizens of the World, that we have floundered (though there is also something about the the Soul; about healthy coming-together in terms of ultimate things that is also involved in a major way). But since I first introduced that in the context of a "Metapost" rather than a Life-Dance post, I think I retain that context for it, rather than this one.

 

   

 

My last post was a Soul Post about the gesture of coming together as Souls I was having with my friend Samatman. That post ended up involving my relating some implications of Healthy Culture ideas in relation to certain aspects of what is called Hinduism or at least to certain aspects of what I gathered from some of the writings of Meher Baba, which I was taking as representative of that Religion. My ongoing study of various cosmologies (religious, philosophical, and scientific) has resulted in many such attempts at translating the understandings of integral science/healthy culture into the terms of such creeds, as well as understand the creeds themselves and their histories in terms of assumptions of healthy culture. Here are a few:

 

 

That every Religion/Cosmology (including Science) has a piece of the Truth and a Piece of the Lie.

 

That "Wholesthesia" is "SelfNature" and that SelfNature is "Original Virtue", the counter and complement of "Original Sin" (Sin being understood as a felt sense of primary apartness from Spirit). Thus SelfNature is part of the fruit of the Tree of Life within and outside us.

 

That callaesthesia (Good Sense) is dynamic and paradoxical consideration of both "original sin" and "original virtue" and so is the both the way back to the "Garden" and the way forward to the "millennium"

 

That Healthy Culture is the something like the "Wu Chi" before the "Individual" Yin of Taoism and the "Personal" Yang of Confucianism...

 

That "Dukka" (The Buddhist term for suffering), is caused by--and in some sense is-- the desire ("Tanha") that comes from accepting a factional identity (including that of a dissociated "individual") as who one is and acting on that false assumption...

 

That both "Dullardism" and the "Sacred Authority Complex" have a rendezvous with Primal Paradox. (this language is from the writings of Morris Berman)

 

That Legba, Mercury, Coyote and all the other symbols of paradox, must be honored before there can be true togetherness with Self or Nature

 

That the "Serpent in the Garden" must make peace with the "Serpent in the Sky".

 

 That Evolution is both the evolution of "Nature" and the Evolution of "Self" (that it is the evolution of SelfNature/NatureSelf) and that the "us-and-us" Identity-Politics of Individual-Personhood is a critical juncture in that evolution.

 

That the Matrix Categories promise a starting point for a Complete and Integral Mathematics {Note:I am here using the broadest and most philosophical sense of the word "mathematics"--which entymologically means something like the "art of learning" but I also mean to include an integration of mathematics as we know it.}  

 

That Galileo's, Plato's, Descartes, and others conceptionof Nature and its division into something like primary and secondary properties is a false and in-egalitarian dissociation that must be corrected.

 

That the "Break-down of the Bicameral Mind" does not coincide with the "Origin of Consciousness" since real consciousness is "Consciousness of Primary Togetherness" and not our modern unconsciousness of the same. And that this break-down might have actually been the degenerative phase of a process of gradual consciousness-loss that began in the late paleolithic (this is in relation to the ideas of Julian Jaynes and others). Or it may be that such consciousness is yet to exist all all in human beings...

 

That, in addition to a Pre/Trans Fallacy, there is also a "Post/Trans" Fallacy, (and also a Trans/Integral Fallacy (these concepts relate to the ideas of Ken Wilber as I understand them...)

 

  

 All of these statements (and there are very many more I could make) are really just implications of the ideas of healthy culture as they seem to relate to the creeds in question. I don't hold them as dogmas; they just seem to be valid statements given my present understanding of such things. They are the sort of thing I would say at the kind of formal and inclusive "Interfaith" gathering which would take place in the socio-religious venue of the life of every Individual-Person if Healthy Culture were already a going thing in the world.

Of course, to the extent that religions, philosophies, dogmas, creeds, are inherently factional and competative and represent a faith in Primary Alienation and Apartness, the above statements (most of them made in the symbolic language of the beliefs systems in question), will just amount to various forms of heresy, or blasphemy and be dismissed as such.  Even if they were accepted, they would be dangerous and confusing if Healthy Culture and its Life-Logical understanding were not first fully  grocked and accepted on ts own terms.

For, while the essence of the Truths of the childhood and adolesence of humanity will always survive integration into a truely adult understanding, good faith can never be expressed by taking the side of the past against the future any more than good will can be expressed by taking the side of the future against the past. Good faith is faith in ultimate togetherness and It is  only the experience of  a torn and fragmented unconscious present that could lead anyone to accept a false dichotomy between the province of the child (the past) and the adult (the future). When the child and adult in us are at war it is because both are sick; it is because we as a whole individuals in a whole world (child, adult, animal, elder;past, future,present, eternity ) are unhealthy and in the grips of sick culture.  It is only faith in ultimate togetherness that can lead beyond such a confused contest because that faith is itself sourced in a present deeper than our consciousness awareness, in a past older than our current memory and in a future beyond our planning and predicting.
 

What I am hoping is that those who are attracted to their Beliefs for the pieces of the Living Truth that they contain (rather than for the false belonging & factional complacency provided by their pieces of the Lie), will recognize the the attempt at the  preservation, clarification, and integration of those Truths that is part of the  motivation of the present enterprise and  so ultimately find the maturity, good will, and courage to rally behind this aspect of the project of healthy culture. The hope is that, by participating in the conversation critically but in good faith, we can reach the minimum of understanding and consensus needed to help point the way forward to a future of inner and outer healing for all the Individual-Persons of the World. 

 

That such a project of Healthy Culture (that Healthy Culture itself as a whole) has and will indefinitely develop its own "Pieces of the Lie" must be expected. Only the fact that the "Integral Modernism" (which is one way to describe the Healthy Culture that I am advocating), is essentially a negative feedback process that cannot be said to have been established unless it successfully incorporates the mechanisms of its own gradual correction offers any argument for its sustainability. {note: In the phrase "Integral Modernism" I am creatively using the word "modern"--from "modus" or "Way" in a manner synonymous with the "Way of Virtue" discribed in the "Tao Te Ching"}  

 

Anyway, research goes on in this area, and so does my search for a proper venue in which to have these kind of conversations with people. Despite my talks with Samatman and my blog posts, I think I need to challenge myself more in this area,especially in ways that would translate into a more regular and perhaps even more formal rituals...considering...

 

 Welcome and Thanks,

 

I-P Kerren Odori