Gaia Community: I-P's Blog

Fairness, Inclusion, and Conference

http://HealthyCulture.gaia.com — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 12:39:48 GMT

{So someone in my community of Twin Oaks recently posted an old UK Observer editorial "Life may not be fair, but that's still no excuse for an unjust society" by Will Hutton on our "Ideas and Opinions" board. (the article is at http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/may/03/will-hutton-fairness-unjust-society). The person posting the paper outlined the 4 dimensions of what Hutton (and possibly the person posting the article) believe to be fairness. These (in case you don't bother to read the article) are "Equity", Merit, Need, Proportionality/Productivity. I wrote and posted a long comment to this which I think is worth posting here as I think it shows something of the implications of "healthy culture" assumptions regarding this issue of Fairness. I am thinking and writing a lot about this right now and hope to publish much more (in some form or other) in the near future. --I-P}

I think its good to have "discussions" about things like this so thanks for posting this -----,

As for Huttons argument:

The first thing that strikes me is that all the aspects of fairness Hutton describes relate mostly to Distribution, more or less on the model of a plunderers distribution of spoils. The unfairness involved in Production (for example the production of private property itself through war, exploitation, coercion etc), and Consumption (some things are self-exploitative--addictive and harmful and "unfair to ones body or the environment"--to consume), are left out of account altogether. The author seems to be assuming the intrinsic fairness of production and consumption, whatever is produced, however it is produced, and however it is consumed, so that the issue of fairness seems to be limited to how to equitably, meritocratically, and proportionally distribute the "booty". But production, consumption (and I would add employment) are so inextricably connected to distribution and to each other that to me this approach is crazy already.

Basically, under present and historical circumstances, the people effectively deciding what "fairness" is are usually people who as a result of genocide, violence, exploitation, coercion and terror are taking advantage of the extreme Cultural and economic "Inequity" involved in all of that to claim some kind of in-group "merit" (based I guess on some variant of the "might is right" principle) to exclusively decide, not only what "Fairness" is, including (assuming just for the moment that the four-fold break-down is valid) who really "needs" what, what real "productivity"is (what most needs to be produced and how), what counts as "Merit",etc... They also decide which one of these aspects of the (inevitably self serving) model of "Fairness" trumps another and when. And, of course, they decide the best way of determining all of this.

Examples: what is the "fair" distribution of goods acquired through colonialism, theft, or slavery, via the incentive of corporate investments in the theft and exploitation of those lands and peoples? Is the "equitable distribution" of military and corporate pelf any less a pseudo-issue then "honor among" any other species of thieves? Is not the equitable, proportional, or "need-based" distribution of Heroine, dividends,"Round UP", or Oil, among the various Individuals and institutions addicted to these things, relatively beside the point? Is not the addiction the point? Of course if the relevant in-groups of addicts are themselves to be the sole judges of what the point is, then it is certainly not surprising that "Fairness" is to be defined in such lamely narrow ways.

I guess if one is prepared to ignore the fact that a given status quo was both established and is currently maintained through directly or indirectly enforced exclusion by violence and the threat of violence; if, in short one is prepared to be temporally, socially, and ethically myopic enough, then any lame vile and or corrupt regime or in-group can claim "fairness" simply by effectively excluding from membership--and so from the conversation-- anyone who doesn't already agree with the in-group definitions and assumptions about these things. Whats fair about that?

I guess the needed question is something like "what is a fair way to decide what Fairness is?" The very fact that this is a question rather than a definition handed down by someone claiming to speak for "the majority" (whether he does or not) already makes it a better way to approach the matter in my opinion and the fact that its a paradoxical question just means that it honestly expresses the dilemma involved.

I don't think its much of a dilemma though, since it seems clear to me that states of affairs, (including social states of affairs like what a group decides it means by "Fairness") that are not arrived at (and maintained or altered) through ongoing and inclusive processes of conference and consent, are established and maintained or altered through ongoing exclusive processes of collusion, coercion and repression. Definitions of "Fairness" that result from the latter processes; even when fully consented to by in-group members and in-group wannabes, are basically bullshit whether the in-group is a clique,a gang, a community, or a country...

I mean, if all it took to be fair was for some exclusive in-group to decide for itself (democratically or otherwise) what is fair, than any group of sexist or racist thugs (presumably in agreement among themselves that they are not sexist and racist thugs*) in an alley could bask in the justice of their decision to victimize whatever outsider they came across (as long as the results of the robbery or rape were "equitably", and "proportionally" etc distributed internally i mean). The principal is the same however much one tones down the example; obviously the "outsiders", the excluded, need a say, they need in fact and as much as possible, to be included and their potentially critical and creative voices need to be heard and considered (perhaps especially considered, given the natural tendencies of in-groups to collude). Having the "Might" (because of numbers, or guns or whatever) to do otherwise doesn't mean having the right to do so.

Inclusion is a necessary characteristic of Fairness, and of healthy conference and healthy community, since it is a condition of discovery, mutual learning and growth. This is because the diversity it encourages moves the organization towards growth in fairness as well as creative intelligence. The freer the play of Variation the less arbitrary, contrived, and self-serving the Theme. In fact, in good conference, any Theme beyond that of wholeness and healing is arrived at--and this only tentatively--as a result of the inclusive conference dynamic itself. Otherwise, the discussion Agenda is pre-imptively edited in favor of the status quo and the group will begin to stagnate as its members degenerate into complacency through collusive minimization or denial of its collective flaws and shared blind spots.

The prevalence of this individual and collective stagnation/degeneration in most groups is of course the main reason why inclusion and inclusive egalitarian conference is resisted. Unfairness in general is rooted in a disinclination to "acknowledge and deal with ones own shit" with the ultimate effect that other people have to deal with it (which circumstance in turn makes it hard for them to deal with their own shit, and so on in a kind of lose-lose cycle of stupidity). Fair and Inclusive Conference has a way bringing everyone face to face with their own shit (with their own "piece of the lie") and only commitment to discover and deal with this shit (and so grow as people) can make such a conference seem attractive. Without such a shared conscious intention, groups tend to become tacit mutual protection rackets for the neuroses and addictions of their members with the protection money ultimately going to public or private police or soldiers (that is whoever can enforce or maintain the protective exclusion).

Underlying all of this is, I think, a general alienation from Life, the World, and ourselves. The implicit underlying assumption seems to be that the thing to do with existence (from which we evidently feel essentially separate), is to exploit it---(this is usually expressed by the euphemism of "getting something Out of life" (out of Life into...what, non-Life?). The possibility that life is not an assemblage of experiences for private consumption, a kind of Cosmic Mall with a limited supply of the choicest goods; that it might on the contrary be something to Give to,to "Live Up" to,to Befriend, so that ones life and acts become like ornaments that "set off" and strengthen that which is good and beautiful in the world and ourselves--such an idea seems to presuppose an experience of, and faith in,primary togetherness that our education not only fails to discover and nourish in us but positively represses.

So instead Life becomes a kind of miserably competitive and pathetically desperate looting of itself (which is to say our lives become inwardly and outwardly competitive lootings of ourselves and each other);a kind of self-cannibalizing auto-immune disorder in which the motivation for including some is only the better to access the "booty" of life, to the exclusion and at the expense of others. Such degeneration is the ultimate result of a culture of exclusion and denial (which are essential aspects of alienation;of "apartness"). This exclusion and denial is of parts of our inner world as well as part of our outer world; essentially it is the exclusion and denial of the fundamental togetherness of self and world and of self and other. In the presence of such exclusion and denial, fairness, whether to ourselves, each other, or our shared world, is impossible.

--I-P

{* on rereading this, I find I have a problem with my labeling of even hypothetical others as "sexist racist thugs". It would be better in some ways to allude instead to "individual-persons acutely or chronically suffering from sick culture who are in collusive denial of that state of affairs" and so avoid any misleading "essentialist" implications even about hypothetical individual-persons. But such an allusion would not have been so expressive and illustratively concise as what I did write, so, as a compromise, I leave the sentence as it stands but add this disclaimer as a footnote.")

Tags: Fairness, Inclusion, Conference, Justice

Externalization, Efficiency, and Mal-employment

http://HealthyCulture.gaia.com — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 18:58:46 GMT

{Note: this essay was originally meant to be presented to my intentional community as a paper on our Ideas and Opinions board. It grew too long for that (3 pages is about the most people seem to be willing to read in that context) and so I have decided to post it here as hopefully helping to explain some part of the theory of Healthy Culture.--I-P }

Efficiency, Externalization, and Mal-employment

A"healthy culture" editorial By I-P.

[Argument Summary: The concept of efficiency as it is normally understood imposes, in the area of "employment" and "labor", a psychologically, morally,(and ultimately, even economically) unhealthy practice of dissociated specialization that involves a kind of "externalization of costs and damages" to the wholeness of the individual-person. This externalization of mal-employment is the equivalent in Labor of the "externalization" of costs, and damages to the wholeness of the aesthetic, social and ecological environment that is typical of industrial mal-production and of competitive capitalist culture generally. We should acknowledge that our participation in the culture of such one-dimensional "efficiency" is, like our participation in capitalist culture generally, a necessary evil to be minimized rather than a positive value to be pursued and, in our choice of businesses and our approach to work in general, should be consciously trying to move in the opposite direction. Ultimately the work of being whole and good people is not something we can afford to"moonlight" at, but must be understood to be our main work; our main reason for being here. It's "efficiency" at that work--what I am calling Integrative Efficiency-- that should be the priority.]

Part One: Pseudo-Efficiency

If efficiency means anything it would seem to mean not working against ourselves. If this is so then there must certainly be some consideration of what "ourselves" means in order to judge of efficiency. What I mean by "ourselves" is "our whole selves".

But I guess even this is controversial; Most people habitually fragment themselves when doing something, that is, they sort of take off their, "whole-person-in-the-world" "hat", and put on their "I am a "tofu packer" ("hammock weaver", "this-or-that-manager" etc) "hat", and proceed to understand efficiency in mostly quantitative terms relevant to those specialized tasks and specialized conceptions of themselves.

This process of identity dissociation, of invoking a specialized identity to exclude certain parts of ourselves from awareness and consideration in our work, is really the equivalent (in the "employment" or "labor" aspect of a sick economy) to "externalization", in the "production" aspect of such an economy. In other words, just as the destruction and neglect of certain aspects of our whole ecological and aesthetic environment can be "externalized" in our assessment of the cost and value of economic "production", so the harm to and diminishment of, large aspects of our own lives and experience can be successfully "externalized" (ignored) for the sake of some insanely circumscribed conception of a "bottom line" in the form of "efficiency" as "professionals".

Yet, unless it really is possible to stop being a "whole-person-in-the-world", (with a living body, heart, mind, and conscience that resists reduction to a one-dimensional constraints and criteria), the attempt at dissociated, specialized efficiency is going to be in conflict with our actual experience and functioning as a whole persons, that is to say; efficiency will begin to mean "working against ourselves" (see footnote)

But of course the truth is that, (both in the case of the whole --real--environment and of the whole--real--person), this kind of "externalizing" efficiency does not reflect reality. Thus it is not sustainable. Nor is it responsible. Nor is it even intelligent even in its own one-dimensional terms; it is not real efficiency in any useful sense at all.

In other words, since being "a whole person in the world with a conscience etc" is of course, actually not a "hat" that one can temporarily replace at all; my heart, my whole mind, my whole body, my aesthetic, ethical and other sensibilities, and my role and responsibilities in the larger world, don't just disappear because I decide to they are not germane to what I am "doing". In real life, as in ecology, it is impossible to only be "doing" one thing, and the externalization and suppression, (when I am being an "efficient worker" or a "good Manager" or a "Professional" in the usual isolated sense) of any and everything else I am doing to the whole self-and-world that actually exists beyond my artificial boundaries, is expensive.

It is morally expensive in that it constitutes practicing a mundane version of the kind of "double mind" thinking that, for example, Robert Jay Lifton describes in his book, "The Nazi Doctors"(this might seem an over-the-top comparison, especially if one believes, unlike myself, in what amounts to "immoralities of scale", but bear with me). Those doctors did, precisely the identity "hat trick" that I described earlier; that is, they employed the ethically myopic conception of the "specialized efficiency" of a "specialized identity" embodied in the idea of doing their "job" well as "officers", and so deluded themselves into thinking that bracketing ones humanity (supposedly temporarily) is significantly different from just being inhuman; that the distinction between pawning ones soul and selling it outright is even worth quibbling about. (especially considering the nature of the "pawn broker").

I have given an outsized example as I said, but my point is not only that what those people did is an extreme example of the copout that, in smaller ways, we all make when we split our understanding, identification, experience, and assessment of ourselves in this way, but that their ultimate "performance" during war time was the cumulative result of the many "rehearsals", they went through in the course of their previous lives of being "efficient workers" in the same, (or some other) sick system. One could say that every previous experience those doctors had in the kind of work that obliges and rewards such double-mind thinking (in the name of efficiency, "survival", or anything else) was actually a kind of small rehearsal for and practice in, the great self betrayal, that they eventually made. Our own "work scene" can also become more like those kinds of rehearsal/training grounds if, in the name of "efficiency" or anything else , we continue to give more attention to necessary evils than positive values (or even worse, confuse the two).

I understand that "efficiency" in the narrow sense, if one is good at it, can be "fun"; that many people enjoy pretending that they are only doing one thing, that they have no existence or responcibilities beyond the present narrowly circumscribed and defined task, the performance of which is to be assessed only in terms of speed or some other purely external measurement. But I suspect that this kind of fun only feeds (and so can only be "fun" for) a certain part of ourselves (probably the same part that is capable of being hypnotized by video games or other ethically myopic distractions) while being completely frustrating (and sometimes even harmful to) other parts of our wholeness as persons. I have also noticed that such an approach to work--especially when accompanied by great gravitas--is often being used as a kind of ethical displacement (or as I've said "ethical myopia"), so that the energy that should be going to the work of inner and outer healing as a whole adult person is being displaced and re-channeled into an obsession with a certain level of finish in some task that, taken in and of itself, not only has nothing to do with what really needs to happen (either in the world or in oneself), but is actually destructive and at best a necessary evil. It is as though the constant existential conscientiousness and courage required to actually be a good person in an essentially sick and eroding society has pretty much led to that imperative being abandoned altogether and replaced with the ideal of being a good "worker", "manager" or even a "good communard" (to the extent that that title is used as an escape or distraction in this same sort of way).

Most of the preceeding was in regard to the "moral" or ethical expensiveness of a one-dimensional conception of "efficiency". But specialized conceptions of efficiency are also expensive (and so really inefficient and unintelligent) because the regular maintenance of the " inner externalization" that this approach to working requires, is expensive. It has to be maintained by things like the regular consumption of anesthesia in the form of legal and illegal drugs, visits to the chiropractor and hospital, treatments for carpal tunnel syndrome, treatments for emotional stress related to work anxieties as well as general psychological anxieties relating to the stress of having to ignore or repress the claims of conscience and of ones "inner adult", etc etc...And this is only to mention things that (because they cost time and money) would be considered "internalities" even in a business sense, especially for people who share such expenses.

Moreover, many of these forms of anesthetically motivated mal-consumption, besides being economically expensive themselves, are doubly destructive because, like most forms of anesthesia, they become addictive just because of their temporary effectiveness in facilitating denial by driving below the surface, the very pain (the pain of the meaninglessness involved in working against, rather then toward, ones whole self) that is pointing to a need to change the system. By this time the work itself (which can also be a distraction in its own way) is usually well integrated into a general, and often very "comfortable" lifestyle-routine of benumbed distraction, addiction and denial.

Given all of this, from the point of view of the more holistic conception of efficiency that I will outline below, reluctance or "inefficiency" (in the usual sense of the word) in such work is often just reluctance to externalize in this way; to pawn ones soul; to "work against oneself", against ones conscience, against wholeness, against the future, against our body/minds and their natural rhythms, against Freedom. It is a sign of the successful (or unsuccessful) struggle of our more whole and real selves against our fragmented and fear-based self-image. Ultimately such "inefficiency" is the conscious or unconscious revolt of some part of our better selves against meaningless slavery and the lie of the carrot of future freedom and lasting approval (or at least higher rank as a slave) that leads us into that slavery in the first place.

This being the case, rather than calling this more whole, most essential and less enslaved part of ourselves a bunch of names and brainstorming how we can finally defeat it and become the more "efficient" (and so less human, healthy, and good), we could actually decide to acknowledge that the whole economic system we are more or less forced to participate in sucks; Of course it sucks because of its externalization of costs and damage to our physical and aesthetic environment, but it also sucks because of its equal tendency to encourage a mind set the does the the same thing to costs and damages to our own wholeness as individual-persons (It also sucks for many other reasons not mentioned here). What follows from this seems to me to be some ongoing attempt to re-conceive of efficiency as "minimally working against our whole selves", (or much better, as maximally working towards inner and outer wholeness) and to redesign the way we work so as to affirm such a value and make the work maximally meaningful and nourishing to our whole selves and the world. Where this maximum is still too meaningless and toxic, the intention should be of progressively phasing out that kind of work and replacing it entirely.

I am pointing out all of this right now mostly I guess to influence, not only the criteria behind the choice of whatever new businesses we choose to take on (as well as how we choose to conduct them when we do decide that), but also to encourage reflection about the kind of work we are already doing and the way we are currently doing it. If we could be more conscious of the various ways we put our souls, bodies, hearts, minds, "in pawn" during whatever work we do, we can begin to try to creatively minimize the extent to which this is necessary and, once getting the hang of this, begin to make institutional changes that further facilitate it.

Without naming this tendency to "inner externalization" in the kind of work we do (and, just as important, in the way we do it) as the destructive force it is, and without resolving to work as much as is possible toward progressively making the work we do work for rather than against our whole selves and world, entropy will continue, as it tends to do in the void of conscious and conscientious intention, insight, and intervention, to lead us further and further down the denial and rationalization-filled road of (increasingly "efficient") self betrayal.

I don't want you to get the impression that I think the way we currently work has yet completely succumbed to the, (essentially corporate) conception of efficiency that I have been debunking. At least people still seem to try to make most work "pleasant" rather then simply get it done as fast as possible. The problem though, (and this point would require at least another paper to treat decently) is that this situation is not sustainable for the reason that working For rather than Against ones whole self, is more than just making work "pleasant" in the normal sense. It is in fact something most people have never (or almost never) experienced consciously because they have never fully experienced or attended to their whole selves at all.

Certainly the educational system and most peoples upbringing (in which they are intimidated into trading their wholeness as individuals for "acceptance" as a "good boy" or "good girl" by the generally impatient and ignorant giants on whom they absolutely depend) is just as much of a training in great and little self-betrayals as subsequent work life usually is. Thus having no really reliable conception or experience of what real inner and outer freedom (the freedom express and increasingly and responsibly to, discover, and evolve into, our real whole authentic selves) even is, we settle for a relatively pleasant form of slavery, the best case scenario of which being that of being our own "masters" (which of course means being our own slaves). But becoming aware of and working towards actualizing, affirming, and "internalizing", ones wholeness as a person is not (any more than affirming and "internalizing" the wholeness of the ecosystem is) a matter of "mastery", but of true awareness and true Friendship with of all of ourselves, all of each other, and all of our shared world.

It might be a stretch to call work in this direction "working toward efficiency" but, given that such work is, in the light to our inevitable death, the only work that ultimately has real meaning, I have no problem calling any arrangement that actively or passively discourages us from making it a priority in our lives, not only highly "inefficient" but ultimately insane.

{footnote: In the context of the sort of Newspeak that reigns in the sick culture of corporate capitalism (in which what is called "the Free Market" is really a "slave market" in so far as its actual impact on most people goes), the fact that efficiency in real terms is pretty much the opposite of what it is in market terms is not surprising}

--I-P

Part Two: Integrative Efficiency

It seems a bit lame to end this essay with only a weak gesture toward a positive conception of efficiency and without trying to give some examples of what it might look like to work toward it, even under the constraints of the current eroding economic environment. I think that in the first place doing such a thing involves a clear conceptual distinction between what I call the "work of Living" and the "work of surviving". I think making such a distinction will prepare the way for practical attempts at the integration of the two.

By "the work of Living" I mean the work of "coming-together inwardly and outwardly" as a whole individual person. By coming-together inwardly I mean working toward living in a way that brings together and nourishes equally, ones mind, heart, body, and intuition--the "cardinal points" of ones whole self as an Individual subject--and that minimally involves any kind of externalization, repression, sedation, and/or censorship of any of those four aspects of oneself. Coming-together outwardly is inseparable from this as it means working toward healthy authentic engagement with others in the very social venues of Life that correspond to the four just-mentioned aspects of the individual. Thus the "civil" venue--the venue of "strangers" whom we want to engage and befriend as fellow-citizens of the world, is--or should be--the primary social venue of concern for the "mind". Healthy engagement in the Local venue, or neighborhood nourishes the Heart or "inner child" in us ("it takes a village to raise a child"), and so on as the table below suggests:

Individual (Inner Self, Inner Relationship)	Person (Outer Self, Outer Relationship)
Mind (inner "Adult")	Civil Venue "Citizen-of-the-World"
Heart (inner "Child")	Local Venue "Neighbor"
Body (inner "Animal")	Familial Venue "Family-Member"
Intuition (Inner "Elder")	Socio-Philosophical/Religious venue "Soul"

Its not the point here to try to fully explain or justify these correspondences and they certainly don't represent rigid categories. I bring them up only to help explain the following: that the work of Living means trying to make sure that whatever one is doing maximally nourishes the whole Individual: that it nourishes the inner adult in us by having some kind of relevance to healthy coming together--to healthy culture--in the civil venue of a citizen-of-the-world;That at the same time our work be somehow also made to nourish and heal the Heart, perhaps because it is done in such a way that it can be sensed to be a ornament and a help to the Neighborhood {note; there is much that can be said of the harmful narrowing of the "provence of the heart" to the familial venue that happens in the "nuclear family"-style of dissociated culture, but I will forbear here}

To continue;not only should any given activity feed the heart and mind, it should also and equally feed and nourish the body and so benefit directly or indirectly the culture of the household or Familial venue. Finally, the "work of Living" means the work of including, attending to, and satisfying the Intuition, so that the activity makes sense in terms of "ultimate things" (as a challenge to the separative ego perhaps) and as a healthy "soulful" gesture to others. As is usually the case, the distinctions expressed here are only relative distinctions, describing the essential "cardinal points" of Individuality and Personhood; of course in reality a complete gradiated continuum is involved.

So working towards making every action an affirmation of togetherness in ways such as I have described is, when it is done consciously and in the context of a life committed to pursuing inner/outer healing, what I mean by the work of Living--which I could also call the work of Individual-Personhood or the work of Healthy Culture.

The "work of Surviving" just means the work of pragmatically coping with the cultural erosion of the dominant culture so as to be able to continue trying to progress in the work of Living. Of course, in a healthy dynamic it is the intrinsic joy and meaning of the work of Living that motivates the work of "surviving" and ultimately--in a certain sense--even replaces it altogether. On the other hand, the work of surviving without the work of Living, is just a kind meaningless slavery and double alienation; alienation inwardly, between the aformentioned aspects of ones whole self as an individual (invariably involving the inner repression and externalisation above alluded to) as well as alienation and phoniness between oneself and others in the 4 outer, social venues of Personhood.

Now the work of Living, of pursuing healthy coming-together inwardly and outwardly as I have described, certainly seems like a tall order given the state of both ourselves and of the dominant culture, but what I want to show now is that, with the proper Life-Logical understanding and integrative Intention and Imagination, it is suprisingly easy to make, within the necessary constraints of a given situation, even the most mundane chore of "survival" into as much of a "work of Living" as it can be.

{note: The example of this that I use here is what, at Twinoaks, the intentional community where I live, is jokingly called "Serfing" (as in being a "Serf"). Everywhere else it is called "house-keeping" or doing ones chores}

So the question then when it comes right down to it is; how can something like weaving a hammock chair, like "Serfing", like washing dishes or mopping the floor, be done in such a way as to nourish my mind, heart, body, and Intuition in the way described above.

Well it helps here to remember that Healthy Culture consists of Cosmology, Identity, Ritual, and Infrastructure, and that even washing a dish can be understood as a ritual of togetherness or a ritual of apartness. Just approaching the act from this point of view, and trying to make of it more a ritual of togetherness is already something that is nourishing to my inner adult since it turns the action into a kind of experiment in healthy culture that I can share (as I am doing now) with others as an example that can be transposed in its essentials to any other action.

Such an experimental ritual naturally involves washing the dish as much as possible, like a whole "individual-person" rather than like a "Dishwasher" or a "Serf". For me this aspect of the experiment starts even before the I reach the kitchen since, for me Serfing is much more like "Surfing",in the sense of surfing on the tides of my energy level and only choosing to wash the dishes at all when I have "inner consensus" of mind, heart, body, and intuition to do so.

Also, because of my ongoing studies of body movement practices like David Gormans, "Learning Methods" and the "Alexander Technique" (both of which uphold an ideal of boyant effortless action, so that conciousness of effort is regarded as a sign of working against oneself in some way), the act of washing a dish can become for me a kind of meditation and an opportunity for listening to the messages of my body and heart; am I holding the dish more tightly than necessary?; am I supported, light, effortless, and balanced on my two feet or am I unconsciously leaning against the sink in some effortful and anxious way? Why am I unconsciously coercing and stressing myself in this way? Are my heart and intuition, through my body, trying to tell me something by these unconscious gestures? etc..). On the one hand, whatever awkwardness or imbalances I find will be the welcome substance of further learning. On the other hand, these being temporarily absent, my body is nourished and my heart is charmed by my own elegant and effortless action. My heart is also free to enjoy the way the light reflects on the dishes though the window, the sensuous beauty of water, to creatively ornament the experience with song etc, (of course this kind of approach to the activity will usually mean slowing it down enough for such things).

All this time, Intuition will perhaps be nourished by the inner struggle against "image-consciousness", ego, and fear of vulnerability involved in my trying to make this action a ritual of healthy culture at all. For example, the growth involved in dealing with such thoughts as "what will happen if others see me pursuing holistic rather than corporate efficiency by working more slowly than I otherwise might?" or "how is my ego doing being deprived of the security of the normal misguided approval of the ethical myopia of "end-gaining" and conforming to default notions of efficiency?". Dealing with such thoughts and feelings help integrate the soul and its concerns into the act and make the action meaningful from that perspective.

There is another issue relating to intuition that has to do with staying available to integrative imagination, inspiration, and creativity; with not becomming so blinkered by the present, past, and future that eternity is excluded and the unexpected unpredictable yet vital insight, experience, or idea has no access to the consciousness. One might say that there is a kind of "Integrative Muse" or "Holy (meaning "healing/wholistic") Spirit" which a person should never become so absorbed as to exclude entirely; a kind of psychic door to which one should always reserve some degree of attention and hospitality should the Unexpected Guest arrive...keeping such a state of inner/outer attention alive is also something that tends to require slowing down and working in as flexible and unhurried a way as circumstances allow...

There are many other ways to pack meaning, and so life, into such simple actions which I have necessarily left out of the above example. The number of angles for such conscious adaptation is only limited by ones creativity, good faith and the details of the specific situation. What all such ways have in common is that they stem from the intention to make the action as much of a ritual of healthy culture as circumstances will allow and to make even ones relative failures at this serve as useful lessons for the future. My dishwashing situation admittedly has wider margins than many others: a person with a dishwashing job at a restaurant would certainly have much narrower margins for modifying the same task (if he or she thought the job was tactically worth keeping at all), but it is not so much the width of the margins as the creative determination to take advantage of (and, if possible, widen) them that is the point.

Of course its not the case that just washing dishes "creatively" (still less creatively doing some more common and more unsustainable and essentially crazy and meaningless corporate task) will ever by itself be sufficient as a form of cultural activism, even though it might end up being (like any other action) ones last act on earth. In themselves such creative adaptations only have meaning as parts of a whole life devoted to furthering inner and outer healing in the largest as well as the smallest venues. In other words, their larger meaning is in their being a part of an active and ongoing larger "conspiracy". Thus, the act of taking the dish-washing job at all should itself be justifiable in terms of some larger unfolding plan having to do with ultimately replacing the general sick culture that the work is itself a necessary adaptation to. (For example; the person washing dishes in the restaurant might be saving the money to travel to some place where they can join others who are interested in experiments in healthy culture). Otherwise the inner Adult, whose concern in all of this for a good future for everyone, is not fed, and so the act itself will not be a Living or truly efficient act.

The efficiency of working in the way I am trying to describe is efficiency on the integrative level of inner and outer healing, of meaning and joy, and it may still be hard at first to see how it can be called "efficiency" at all. Perhaps to truly appreciate it as efficiency requires a little bit more in the way of understanding the cosmology of healthy culture in relation to time.

The concept of time in which what I am describing represents efficiency, is not the linear and purely quantitative conception of time embraced by the dominant culture of apartness, but the Integral conception of Time that is an aspect of the Cosmology of Healthy Culture. Such efficiency is a kind of artistry--a dance--in the context of that Integral Time; a dance in which the concerns of the present, the future and the past and eternity are coordinated and nourished in each action just as the whole Integral Individual-Person is. In fact whenever possible, the considerations represented by these aspects of Time act as the cross-threads through which we sight and choose, among practical possibilities and prospects, the desired place or situation for the dance in the first place, as well as being the criteria informing what it is to be and how it is carried out.

Individual (Inner Relationship)	Person (Outer Relationship)	Time Orientation
Mind	Citizen-of-the-World	Future
Heart	Neighbor	Past
Body	Family-Member	Present
Intuition	Soul	Eternity

Such a Dance, when it is really happening is literally happening outside of the dominant sick culture and can itself function for those who witness it as a door--or at least a window---to a healthy one. As such it is both the means and the end of such a culture; a kind of living centripetal eddy, actively slowing a current that is otherwise going centrifugally out of control...The efficiency involved in such a dance is the efficiency that really matters; the efficiency in bringing healthy culture into the world and the world into healthy culture....

The possibility of consciously choosing and cultivating this kind of integrative ("Life-Dance") efficiency over the fear based, one-dimensional corporate ("death march") efficiency of meaningless surviving, is tied up with other fundamental choices; the choice of Truthfulness over denial, of Love over Fear, of Togetherness over Apartness, of Healthy Culture over Sick culture in ourselves and in our community. Such a conscious choice (the various choices I named really amount to just one choice) is of course certain to effect much more than the labor scene. This paper is just an attempt to explain and show the need for such a choice in relation to that scene and to the ideas of efficiency and "work" in general. Health and Sanity being what they are, equally good arguments for making such a choice can be given in any other aspect of our lives.

Tags: Efficiency, Mal-Employment, economics, Good Employment, dissociation, externalization, integration

"Better" is not "Good"

http://HealthyCulture.gaia.com — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 12:53:15 GMT

I often get the impression that people think I am a perfectionist about certain things. I'll make an observation about a certain aspect of the political, socio-cultural status quo (i don't think its ever about anything that might reasonably be called trivial) and get the impression that I am being some kind of party-pooper; that it is some kind bad manners to actually criticize the status quo dynamics of a group I am actually a part of when every one knows that the way to get along is to always be criticizing Them over There, those other people and their status quo. Often enough, "them over there" really can seem to be in worse shape with respect to whatever I am saying than "we" seem to be (at least superficially), but even when such is the case, this response misses my point completely, and when people respond to a critique of mine in that way I feel extremely frustrated.

If I criticize a situation for not being good, I don't mean "good" in the sense of "Better than some other situation somewhere else", or even "better than the same situation in the past". This is because I am not assuming that the situation I am criticizing is fundamentally separate from other situations or even from what it was in the past. Rather I am assuming that whatever is happening "here and now" is fundamentally "together-with" other situtuations, and thus either a part of a general dynamic of integration, of healing,of helping that whole, (including the only relatively separate "there and then"), or a part of a general dynamic that is further dissociating, fragmenting,repressing awareness of this inclusive whole; the wholeness of "Being/Becoming".

But it's simpler to separate space from time ("here and there" from "now and then") for the purposes of explaining this.

From the temporal point of view, this difference is like the difference between the process of composting or building soil and that of erosion and disintegration of soil. Soil can be in the process of healing (because the erosion has been stopped by say, putting in erosion bars) and yet still look pretty bad for some time (considered from a merely static point of view), while, on the other hand, a certain patch of land can still look pretty good (especially when competitively compared to other more damaged land) and still be in for serious erosion in the next big rain. The erosion process still has the fundamental character of being "bad" no matter what stage of the process one is talking about and in the same way, the composting process is equally "good" at t1 or t1000 no matter how different photos of the land taken at those different times would look; each stage of the process is equally good because the process as a whole is good so the competitive comparison between one stage and another of the same kind of process makes no sense.

Thus if I criticize a state of affairs as not being "good" I am referring to which Kind of process it is currently given over to, rather than comparing it to some earlier or latter stage of that same kind of process. It might be perfectionism to expect eroded land to instantly be intact loamy soil in a climax forest but in is not perfectionism to withhold ones approval of the situation until there is some reason to believe that conditions have been changed enough so that the erosion has been stopped and things are moving back in that direction rather then further and further in the other one.

Moreover, (focusing more on the spacial than the temporal now) the process going on in the soil-building dynamic is, in subtle ways contributing to All the land around it and indirectly making it easier to reverse the erosion in whatever sick soil exists anywhere, since of course that all other land is not fundamentally separate from it at any rate. In the same way, part of something being good "Here" is its contributing to things being good "There", since "here" and "there" are only relative distinctions and not fundamentally separate. Thus "competitive justification", justifying conditions "here" in terms of them being "better" than conditions "there" also makes no sense.

Of course there are many people for whom the idea of "Good" itself is suspect and in the analogy I have presented they would probably just assume some supposedly amoral and aesthetically neutral scientific, philosophical, or or even allegedly spiritual "view from nowhere" (usually involving reference to immensities of time and space or to allegedly themeless variations between cultures) in which there is nothing to chose between composting or erosion, between good and bad. The idea of "Good" (whether it be good soil or good health or anything else) would be considered by them to be merely "subjective", "qualitative" and therefor somehow...well...not....Good (unless one is a post-modernist, in which case things are reversed but not essentially changed). Of course in such objections the now "four-letter" word "Good" would be replaced by a bunch of other, usually longer, words and accompanying circumlocutions that amount to the same thing but are dedicated to the end of preventing such views sounding as silly as they otherwise would).

The present post is not meant to be primarily a response to such people and arguments and I only mention them to suggest that assumptions of primary apartness (this time the primary separation of "the Objective" and "the Subjective"), as well as a corresponding version of competitive justification are also at play here as well. After all, if the subjective and the objective are not fundamentally separate but (like,here and there, and now and then) co-manifest and mutually defining, then judging one of them better than the other (whether or not one is willing to admit to doing this) also makes no sense.

Now, there is much more to all of this and its actually very hard to express all of it well in the language available, so the fact that I am usually being misunderstood in this matter of "Goodness" is not exactly a surprise. I suppose its just a part of the sort of cognitive dissonance and "culture shock" that is inevitable between someone consciously committed to the Life-Logical assumptions of primary togetherness and others unconsciously committed to assumptions of primary apartness. Moreover, since I am actually a member of both of these categories of person, I am sure I complicate and confuse matters considerably sometimes by not being consistent in my conscious understanding, that is, by not being consistently conscious. At the same time, life-logically speaking, I don't suppose I would be very useful if I wasn't really as prone to sick culture as everybody else.

(Even just my putting it in that way might invite this phony, static, competitive thing all over again in some people, but I don't think there is really any sure way to avoid a competative, alienated spin being put on what I am saying since, in a culture of apartness, thats what people do with everything. All I can do is hope that there is and remains in this post --and in all my writings--more encouragement and nourishment for what is Good in both myself and you the reader than for the sick culture in us both).

So, to sum up for now: For someone conscious of primary togetherness, "The Good" (whether in morals, or aesthetics or anything else) is the "Integrative Good"; the Good that Helps the whole to be Good. In other words, entity or situation "A" cannot be justified in terms of being better (whether in a specific respect or generally) than entity or situation "B" (which of course could then try to justify itself by being better than "C", which could... and so on in a way that would reflect only the progressive diminishment and fragmentation of the whole), but is only justified when it is involved in a process of "helping" B, and not only "B", but equally the whole "alphabet" as it were (including itself). By the same token, "A" is not "bad" (unjustified/unjust) because it is "worse" than "B" in some specific or even general respect, if in a general sense "A" is involved in such a mutually helping integrative process, whatever stage of such a process it happens to be at. Thus, cognitive assessments in terms primarily of "Better, Best, Worse and Worst" are totally different from assessments in terms of "Goodness" and are themselves already "Bad" (that is already part of a disintegrative process inwardly and outwardly), since they already assume and reinforce the illusion primary separation.

Also, (and this is, I guess, more of an elaboration than a summary), from this dynamic and paradoxical point of view, "A" (or any other "letter") is itself not a static or monolitic entity any more than it is a fundamentally separate one, thus both the Good and the Bad coexist "equipotentially" in every entity and every specific living situation and manifest only in terms of which is primary in a given actual moment of existance. Another way of saying this is to say that both good and bad are, relatively speaking alive, and so, creatures of the " dynamic actual" rather than the potential or statistical, in as much as any inner/outer situation can be met with integrative assumptions of togetherness or with dissociated and competitive assumptions of apartness. This is more or less analogous to the way an erosion process can potentially can be reversed--and then reversed again--contingent on changes in specific actual circumstances. The process can be reversed because it is not an absolutely "pure" or finished process of erosion (or soil building) at all, but contains within it its own opposite, which can always, in certain circumstances regain the upper hand. It is exactly like the paradoxical sense in which, although everybody does have "a piece of the Lie" and a "piece of the Truth", in any specific situation one or the other of these is Primary, so that one and the same person can be, in a Truthful moment, consciously acknowledging, engaging and healing their own "piece of the Lie while in the next moment they can be possessed by that same piece of the Lie, and so repressing and dissociating from it in a fit of phoniness.

Well that's not the best summary in the world (for example, I am fudging an important distinction between the "integral" and the "integrative" here; the next time I come in the neighborhood of this subject I will be more explicit on this point.), but it will have to do for now. Next time also, this same general idea will be treated and elaborated on in the context of applying the "Integrative Good" more explicitly and practically to the idea and ideal of Justice and specifically in terms of what I am calling "Integrative Justification".

I-P

postscript:

In a previous post I spoke of "Goodness" as one aspect of a four-fold "Virtue" which also includes "Truth", "Beauty", and "Life". My dealing here with this aspect of the Good relatively separately should in no way be taken to reflect some change in that view. In fact, each of the other 3 aspects of this quintessential "Virtue" (and of course that "Virtue" itself) share the same non-competitive, mutualitistic, paradoxical and integrative quality that I am ascribing to "Goodness"( I have shown this somewhat even here in the present post as regards the aspect of virtue I call "Life"). Things could not really be other wise. Its because if this fundamental and paradoxical togetherness of "Goodness, Beauty, Truth, and Life, that "Good Sense, Good Taste, Good Will, and Good Faith all go together.

Tags: Goodness, Competition, integral, integration, integrativ, wholeness

Homelessness

http://HealthyCulture.gaia.com — Thu, 21 May 2009 23:22:39 GMT

I live in a commune where people often put things "up for grabs" when they're done with them. That's how I came across the book-on-tape version of John Grisham's "Street Lawyer", about an attorney who leaves his career with a big firm to become an advocate for homeless people. I often listen to books on tape when working weaving hammock chairs or something, so I "grabbed it", thinking it might be good for that. This is not a review so I won't say anything about the quality of the book as a whole, but its got me thinking about homelessness and my experiences with it, so I thought I would try to process what it brought up in me.

It strikes me that I can sympathize even a little with the feeling of stigma the idea of "being homeless" conveys in the book, even though it's been almost ten years since I experienced homelessness myself (mostly in different cities on the west coast). This feeling is somewhat worrisome to me since I certainly don't remember feeling more "out of it" in those times then I usually feel these days.

Actually I've always kind of felt that I was born "out of it" relatively speaking and I have never really regretted that circumstance. My homelessness was, if anything, part of my attempt to stay out of it--even to get further out of it if I could--at least until I could figure out what "it" was exactly and what I could do to heal "it". Given my, I guess unusually extreme, sensitivity to the insane nature of our collective and individual lives, being homeless seemed to me to be somehow an appropriately extreme response to our general situation. I certainly had a hard time seeing any real " at-home-ness" in the lives of the people whose fate and situation I was supposed to be envying. At the time I believed (and said) that i would rather be in the situation I was in than in that of any of the various "respectable slaves" (whether a high or low ranking slave was immaterial) I saw around me. I actually pretty much still feel this way, though I am less in denial about the real stresses I was experiencing during that time.

Its interesting to me now to compare my situation then to my present one in the light of some of Alifie Kohn's statements in his DVD and book "Unconditional Parenting". Kohn compares the use of rewards to those of punishments in raising children and finds them similarly destructive in the sense that both methods teach selfishness and (what I would call) an inherently alienated and dissociated identity-politics.

For example, threatening, beating, or otherwise punishing, ones child for, for example, kicking his sister has the ultimate effect of encouraging the child to think--not about the fact that the sister does not like to be kicked--but about what will happen to his or her self if they do the kicking (and someone finds out about it). In the very same way, rewarding or promising to reward for a child for not kicking their sister or for being nice to her does not encourage actual concern for the other person for their own sake but rather for the reward they expect to receive themselves in return for compliance. Of course this confirmed, as Kohn's works usually do, the intuition I have always had about such things, but in this case a further idea, a "blue collar"/"white collar" distinction along the same lines, immediately occurred to me as well.

What I thought of was how, when I was homeless I spent a good deal of time alone because, among other things, a lot of homeless people are coming out of situations (such as broken homes, jail, or the military) in which a physical-punishment-oriented lesson of "bully or be bullied" had been transmitted with varying degrees of success , and the result did not make for a very appealing social environment. Nowadays I live (as I had at the private high school I had attended on scholarship before the "homeless" episodes), with more folks whose initiation into sick culture involved more upper class homes and more collage education and who therefore probably have more experience with "white collar version" of alienation in which coercion is usually very indirect, and the "carrot" rather than the "stick" was the more emphasized version of behavioural control. The main lesson most of them learned I suppose was more was more something like "manipulate or be manipulated" than "bully or be bullied".

Of course, these are just generalizations, and in both situations there are people trying to avoid both the white collar and blue-collar forms of alienated relating, but the upshot of the fact that in a sick culture there is almost no escape in society from some part of this "control continuum" (of which the "stick" of physical violence and the "carrot" of manipulating praise are just the extremes), is that I spend just as much time by myself here as I did when I was on the street, and ultimately for the same reason.

Anyway, the little stigma that I feel around the idea of someone "being homeless" bothers me, because it might be sign that, despite my own experience and knowledge, I have contracted some degree of the phoniness, self-delusion and denial of those who think that they are somehow "better off" than such people. I remember reading an interview--it was either with Carlos Castaneda himself or one of his associates....well I just Googled the interview, which was with Castaneda. He remarked on a time when he was trying to get Don Juan to feel sorry for the plight of the Yaqui Indians , and Don Juan said, "Yes, It's a very sad thing but, you see, your situation is also very sad, and if you believe that you are in better condition than the Yaqui Indians you are mistaken. In general the human condition is in a horrifying state of chaos. No one is better off than another. We are all beings that are going to die and, unless we acknowledge this, there is no remedy for us." I've always seen things pretty much the same way, so the idea that I might have contracted (I guess just by osmosis) some degree of this "I'm so fortunate" denial-pity-and-fear-enabling" sensibility regarding "homelessness" or anything else is pretty disturbing. Almost makes me think about leaving here and becoming a tramp/bum or whatever it is I was again.

I have also been thinking about doing that in terms of what I think I have learned about myself through my encounter with "the Michael Teachings", which I discovered when I was living an Hawaii years ago. Its a long story, but I ended up getting a free channeled personality reading (the channel just looks at your photo an blurts out your metaphysical i.d. in terms of this specific cosmological system that involves reincarnation. I am sure its sounds kooky but the whole thing really makes sense to me to at a certain level, though I can't say I actually hold it as a creed. Anyway, besides being, among other things, an "Idealistic Scholar with a King essence Twin and a Goal of Discernment/Sophistication" (all of which makes sense to me having read the explanations of these somewhat misleading terms), I am also supposed to be an "old soul" (though a relatively "young" old soul, there being seven levels to each soul age).

Anyway, it is said that "old souls learn trough terror" and I can certainly remember experiencing a good deal more terror on the streets of various cities than I've experienced (outside of a few vision quests) since I have been here. I'd like to think that I wouldn't hesitate to leave my current situation of relative comfort and security in pursuit of whatever kind of terror is capable of teaching me more of what I need to know to be a more effective catalyst of healthy culture, (if I could get inner consensus on what that kind of terror would be).

Of course if I stay here and continue to grow in healthy culture I can imagine things getting ultimately pretty scary here well, with the advantage that the fear would probably be of a different kind than what I've been through before. Still,becoming homeless again is certainly an option and is infinitely preferable to becoming some hippie, "corporate light" version of the "respectable slave" that I disdained when I was younger (and there are probably almost as many self-employed slaves as otherwise).

I don't disdain such people now, and I am not even interested in pitying them, but I do have a real commitment not to end up, through cowardice, collusion and self-delusion, just becoming a part of the general situation in such a way that I am really only helping to make things worse. I would not only risk death but even seek it if that seemed to be my only alternative.

I would never commit suicide as either a rejection of the world or of my self, but I would certainly choose death over the fate of betraying myself and the world. I mean, I'm going to die anyway, why not go before that happens. I guess there is some analogy here of the attitude of say, someone in the French Resistance during WWII choosing suicide rather than possible betrayal of their cause under torture if captured. In both cases its a very difficult judgment call, probably more difficult for me since in my case betrayal is more likely to happen quietly and unannounced (as a result of seduction by the tranquilizing effect of relative comfort and security), than through any Guantanamo-like experiences. My situation is much more common in that way.

Apropos of which, I was listening to Naomi Klein speak recently about her latest book "Shock Doctrine". She made a comparison between "our" governments response to the fear and confusion that the 9/11 terrorism inspired and the goals of torture. She quotes a certain torture manual as explaining that the idea behind torture methods is,( through pain, fear, and disorientation etc), to bring the victim to a state of "regression" in which the torturer is regarded more or less like a father figure {it occurs to me now that the situation revisited is the same one of infant helplessness in comparison to looming parental authority that I referred to in my post about Shame as being the source of our first phony self-image and self betrayal}. At the point that this regression is reached, the hard part is over and the torturer can expect to be given whatever information he or she are asking for. I think Klein was saying that the disorientation and fear of insecurity of the 911 terrorism attacks was used by Bush to keep the American people in a similar state of regression, so that they would give the government (as "the protecting father") carte blanche to do whatever it wanted in response, including take away many of their own rights.

I think the analysis was pretty good except that i would have said that the terrorism situation was just an acute version of what has always been a chronic situation between those offering protection and security in exchange for obedience and those accepting the bargain. Ultimately the fear of insecurity and the denial of death and change will always lead to slavery in one form of another. The post 9/11 situation was just the acute end of a continuum that has a more mundanely chronic--if more subtle--fear/self-betrayal dynamic at the other end.

Is this situation the same kind of "control continuum" I alluded to earlier, a continuum with "Security", "Respectability" and "Prosperity" on the "Carrot" end, and "homelessness, insecurity, and "acute Terror" (as apposed to the chronic terror underlying "security") at the "stick" end of the continuum? If so, then it would seem that the whole continuum, being just a continuum of the same kind of thing, is presenting more or less a false dichotomy, Micheal Teachings or no Micheal Teachings. Presumably though, it is not the same, and the willingness to experience, acknowledge (and transcend?) terror in pursuit of growth, healing and freedom is not just an extreme version of the suppression of chronic low level "terror" in exchange for the illusion of security and respectability . Obviously it is not. The difference would be that facing terror consciously (even if cautiously) with a sense of meaning and purpose is fundamentally different from living in denial of it, whether the terror one is facing is low level chronic or high level acute.

This last qualification (about it not mattering whether the terror is low-level chronic or high-level acute) seems to me to open up various new possibilities in the pursuit of freedom. If we all live in low level terror of "homelessness", death, or whatever, then we live in low level terror. Which is to say, in a real sense "low level terror" is our "home". Which is to say our home (our whole life situation really) is a prison. Which is to say that, in an equally real sense, (if a true home is not really the same as a prison) we are "homeless" already.

Perhaps collectively realizing the pseudo security and pseudo-fortune of our current "fortunate" situations (and the real low-level terror that keeps us in them) is more productive in the long run than rushing out to chase some acute terror, especially if the motive for this latter is really some kind of ego thing (i.e.;"see, I'm not afraid to be homeless so therefor I'm better than you").

What this seems to mean is that I should really be considering myself "homeless" already and that I have always been homeless to some extent, at least in relation to various socio-economic situations I have been in. After all, should anyone feel at home--or want to--in any situation which is enabling, (or even just not effectively challenging), such an exploitation and slavery-based sick economy and culture? If people can come together in acknowledgment of this chronic low-level terror; of this chronic and chronically denied homelessness and slavery, as a part of the sick culture we all suffer from, then the work, however scary it may still be, of co-creating a sane world for everyone would seem to have begun. Of course the terror of fully acknowledging this everyday fear and misery--and of abandoning the false comfort of feeling somehow 'better" or "more fortunate" than anybody else (even though it also implies not being "worse" or less fortunate" than anybody else), is probably a greater terror for the ego then the terror of dealing with actual pain and deprivation and confusion.

But, I don't mean to suggest that this homelessness and fear is our natural condition or even our deepest reality, I am only saying that trying to suppress or deny it--or cover it over with mystical "affirmations" to the contrary--can only lead deeper into inner and outer apartness, denial, and slavery; to getting even farther away from our true Home.

Tags: Homelessness, Home, Terror, Fear, Slavery, Coercion, Manipulation

Life-Dance Check-in March 14, 2009

http://HealthyCulture.gaia.com — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 15:32:14 GMT

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...

Individual:

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:

Mind (inner adult). I feel fairly lucid right now, relatively focused on the task as hand. More generally, my mind is usually investigating, contemplating, and brainstorming all kinds of things relating to healthy culture, which eventually become focused in the coherence of an inspiration usually accompanied by some creative action on my part. Books I am reading include "The Body Movable" by David Goreman, "Law as Culture" by Robert Rosen, "Ending Slavery" by Kevin Bales, and "The Natural Alien", by Neil Everndon.

Heart (inner child). up until very recently I was feeling very sensitive, I even wept (with gratitude) at the grave yard yesterday on my Death Day Eve, Life-Dance Walk. This morning i was feeling somewhat despondent, as i can sometimes do, about the general state of sick culture in the world (an in myself too). It all seems to have evaporated now and I am feeling pretty cheerful. I have especially be enjoying playing with Ts'ui (that is the name I have given my Guqin (chinese "zither") and also working on a few new guitar songs.

Body (inner animal). I feel a bit sluggish right at this moment. This time of the year there are not enough greens from the garden, and since even when things are abundant I sometimes find it difficult to eat the 60 or 70% raw that i would like to be eating (100% is easier if you have access to a big enough variety of food). I currently seem to be spiralling into "cookedness". Things should change as we get deeper into spring. On the positive side physically, I am generally feeling more balanced and buoyant as a result of my Alexander Technique experiments and also from studying David Goremans Learning Methods a little. I am also trying to keep up the Chi Gung (Chinese and Toltec) and doing alright with that...

Intuition (inner elder): I think I might be finally becoming accustomed to the hair-raising nature of my inner and outer adventure. I have actually been warned to expect rather intense cycles given the nature of my task in this world but its not something that's easy to get used to. I guess what I mean is that I am becoming used to never getting used to it... Thinking about Ogun and Legba right now for some reason...it occurs to me that they may be better symbols for certain parts of my false personality than what I can my "inner Malcolm x" and my "inner Marven Gaye" respectively (I mean "false personality" only in the sense that there is a risk of over-identification with at those "archetypes")... also these days I am feeling like checking out some of the Michael Teachings again (particularly "Tao to Earth" and "Earth to Tao" by Jose Stevens). Finally, playing the Guqin has had the effect of tuning me in to things Chinese, so I might just start consulting (or just rereading) the I Ching again.

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.

Soul:

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

Tags: Life-Dance Check-In, Family, Community, Religon. Individualion, Civility

A Poem and Two Songs

http://HealthyCulture.gaia.com — Sun, 12 Apr 2009 18:06:20 GMT

Sold

Old crazy two-fold self-deluding fool
to listen (... to believe!)
this April Apples' offerings; tendertiny
pinkpale promises, bright leaves,
the brash and balmy strength
of innocence sans toughness thoughtless
of its own caprice

Salesman of Light at my hearts door,
keeping up the cheerful patter of the breeze,
displaying on a dozen eager arms
these lovely pseudo-bargains of delight;
"One-time offer"
"Guaranteed!"
"A steal at any price!"

But some lessons it would be too sad to learn,
Some suffering rank cowardice to shun;
We both know that this April pitch has run
on far to long to end in failure; indeed
this year I've lingered longer on the front porch
of my pleasure than the last year

and they say that wisdom comes with getting old!

Well better friend to heart than master
come; the deal is in the bag Sir;
you have won again;
I'm sold...

Brightness

waves of reflection dazzle me
floating in a volume black as mystery
rich loam of perception
I follow you and you chase me
but between us now the distance doesn’t change;
distance is just a name…

Chorus:

How we forget our oldest friends
green leaf and water light and wind
stare up at the clouds until your mother calls you in to dinner
now past future smile at me
beads on the string eternity
pearls for the wedding night of kind experience
and lavish innocence

Brightness...

Body grandmother to the man
Child the father, and the Soul their piety
rocks cradles of laughter
asks grown up childishness to end
and let the child and adult meet again as friends
and our true life begin

Still we forget our oldest friends;
Rest, wonder, walking, breath and skin…
Lie on the grass until your mother calls you in to dinner
past present future smile at me
beads on the string eternity
pearls for the wedding day of kind experience
and hopeful innocence…

Brightness...

Bridge:

prismed sight
contracepted light
cutting outer sky
from the dark womb of our eyes,
wake from single
visions sleep
and blind reasons blight
to the rose of delight
the loud geese in their flight

Brightness...

Sad and conniving arrogance
prideful, pleading innocence of helplessness
of shame of confusion,
even you adding to the mood
just ornament enough to make the gift
the size of the gratitude

and I won’t forget my oldest friends
Bugs, smells and laughter, rocks and wrens
I’ll Stretch out in my life ‘til Mother calls me in to dinner
Then I’ll go on inside and see
all of my friends come back to me
Past, Present, Future, Mother
Time, eternity,
The grass, the Sun, the Sea…

Brightness…

Float

Dance around the Tree of Life
and Levity will come to you;
pull your own weight and strife
will give you that much more to pull

for elegance is effortless
its nothing that you plan or do
give up self-righteousness
and it will find its way to you

Give up this senseless war
with gravity and grace
holding yourself in store
or upright in some precious place
and float...

You say you'll lose control
and probably that is quite true
but only if your soul
is not what you consider you..
How can we live in peace
when we coerce ourselves each day;
holding ourselves aloof
from what supports us anyway?

Pride comes between the fall
and the forgiving earth
delaying for one and all
the day we find our second birth
and float...

Bridge:
So anchors of
self righteousness
away
here comes the adventure
that you and the world have conspired to enter;
the storm that you cannot stay
let yourself go
and not know
the way;
the needle must float in the water to show
were you are where your going
and when you stop holding you'll find where you were
always

see how the lovely moon
floats high above the inland sea
Poised in its gracious love
'twixt levity and gravity?
that is the way things are
the way that we must learn to be
getting out of our own way
we come to set each other free

so may all of us stiff-necked fools
find grace and love some day;
fall from our pedestals
into the sea
of every day
and float....

By I-P Kerren Odori

Tags: Poems, Songs, Spring, Childhood, Memory, Reflection, Light/Darkness/Perception, Poise, faith in Togetherness

Consensualist Songs

http://HealthyCulture.gaia.com — Sun, 15 Mar 2009 14:56:48 GMT

{note:I thought I coined the word "consensuality" but I just googled it and it turned up, though in a rather different sense than I mean it. What I am referring to is the coming together of Inner and Outer Consensus between and within Individual-Persons. Anyway, being a "Consensualist" is by no means something exclusively related to Intimate "relationships", but here are some old songs of mine that deal with in that sense to some extent. There are Hindu (-esque), Chinese (-ish), and Folk-Blues and Soul Ballad melodies and arrangements to the songs respectively. The quotation is there to set the tone I guess. Its from an old essay of mine. Like most statements of my ideals, its meant as a clarifying and orienting statement; something to point a direction to work toward rather than as a council of perfection. I am currently working on an another essay on the subject. –I-P}

"The body is the part of nature that we are most concretely. And the sexual energy that is expressed through the body is not, anymore than nature is, something to be exploited for the pleasure of a dissociated ego. As Taoists, Tantrics, and other have long known, the purpose of sexual energy is to create Life. That Life can be in the form of another being or it can be in the form of greater Life and wholeness within and between the individuals who are generating it. To put it in more modern terms, sexual energy is the energy of evolution. We can evolve as a species via reproduction and/or we can use that same energy to evolve as Individuals. "

--from the Essay "Sex, Gender and Healthy Culture integralscience.motime.com archive Mar/27/06

Serpent in the Sky No. 1

Jasmine smoke unraveling there
Thickening ages to hours
We’ve been waiting calmly aware
Feeling the presence of powers here and
Slowly to the rhythm of Life
So slowly as to leave us shaken
We espy in each others eyes
The Serpent has awakened and the
Serpent is rising…

Tantra Deva enter my night
Let me feel your Kundalini rise
Nothing false and nothing so bright
As the Light in my Yoginis eyes and
Sultry sunset smoldering skies
Mystery into the bargain;
Will we die or will we deny
The Serpent in the Garden of His
Sad satisfaction…

Dawn Creeps to the window again
Incense long since turned to ashes
Where two Lingered neither remain
But ecstasy silently flashes there and
There’ll be no uncoupling though
Neither hot passion and sighing;
Heaven above Heaven below:
The Serpents in the Sky and flying
Into the morning….

Serpent in the Sky No. 2

Here where the Cherry Blooms
Although the summer days end
the Maiden, though with her Groom
Will always be a Maiden
The moon in the dewdrop lives
the Goddess in Our Lady
The Jade Gate receives and Gives;
A Goddess or a Baby..

And brave is she
for the dragons dead
(the red dragon)
wise is she
for the dragons dead
And she is a Person

Now Dragon is
Now Dragon is
The
Serpent in the Sky…

The Stalk rises in the spring
and stays on through the winter
The Bridegroom to become a King
The Jade Palace does enter
And may they Eternal lie
in Happiness together
May Phoenix and Serpent Fly
In blessedness and pleasure

And brave is He
For the Tigers Dead
(The White Tiger)
Wise is He
For the Tigers Dead
And he is a Person

And Tiger is
And Tiger is
The
Serpent in the Sky…

Tinkers

Don’t expect me to connive
like every love song does
at the misery that turns your heart to me
or the desperation or the settling of old scores
with the father I will never be…

There’s a wound that you’ve been hiding from
I have one too
and it hurts to feel the sun shine down on it
It is ugly but it is apart of me and you
And that's not the part of friendship to forget

‘Cause the Devils not the only one who smiles at Sin
God does too, but its a different kind of Smile...
Theres a hole in both our buckets
Will we put more water in
Or practice bein’ tinkers for a while?

I will never just ignore the wino of the world
distracted by your conversation and your grace
theres no market for distractions here, no "guys and girls";
that kind'a money never was green in this place

Well you might think I am ruining the feeling tone
and all the magic of our incipient romance
but its not me who’s the wallflower here I’ll have you know
and this is just my way of asking you to dance..

‘Cause the Devils not the only one who smiles at Sin
God does too, but its a different kind of Smile…
There’s a hole in both our buckets
Will we put more water in
Or practice bein’ tinkers for a while?

Are You Sure?

I am waiting for the question
that I ask of you
I am waiting for the question;
"Are you sure?"

"Are you sure you want to do this?
Is it in our highest purpose?
I am waiting for the question
"are you sure?"

"Are you asking heart and body?
Is it clear within your mind?
Are you checking intuition?
Are you sure?"

"Is there something you're gainsaying,
hiding, censoring, betraying,
Are you sincere or only playing?
Are you Sure?"

Bridge:
"Stop, in the name of Love"
Don't let us betray our love
for all of each other
for all of ourselves (repeat)

I have waited, taken careful aim
and still missed by a mile;
I'm not expecting something perfect
something pure

But If we dream will we awaken
if not well then well mistaken
well intended, undertaken?
Are you sure?

--I-P Kerren Odori

Tags: healthy relationship, sacred sexuality, tantra, consensuality, song

Due Process

http://HealthyCulture.gaia.com — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 13:47:24 GMT

Neighborhood Post

Due Process

So, in order to try to be more involved as a neighbor in my community, I joined the "Process Team", which is a small group of people who, among other things, take on the work of facilitating good communication process between individual members of Twin Oaks and within the community as a whole. Members of the process team do things like facilitate the infrequent community meetings as well as conflict resolution meetings between two or more willing members of the community. We also are involved with coming up with and putting out surveys and questionnaires to members of the community. In general I got a sense that there was some precarious balance being struck between improving community process and facilitating and helping to inform the community about whatever processes happen to currently exist either officially or as norms. I was much more conscious of and excited about the former part of the job than the latter. It seemed to me that the immediate problem was more the lack of participation in any kind of intentional face to face communication process at all then the nature and quality of any of the established processes themselves (In retrospect I find it hard to say why I should have had this point of view).

At any rate, when I joined the process team, didn't have the community "feedback process", much less the process team's required participation in it in mind. The feedback is a kind of one-sided forced inquisition that "a problem person" (by which i mean a person one or more other community members think of that way) has to go through. The person is usually someone suspected of violating some "community agreement or norm" (I put this term in quotes both because the "community" doesn't seem to me to really agree about much at all and because the process by which such agreement might be facilitated and renewed--regular general meetings for example--is passively resisted by those whose positions of relative comfort might be jeopardized by changes in the status quo.) The feedback is not supposed to be punitive in intent but, so far as I can tell, it is certainly experienced that way by the those who are forced (at least people certainly feel forced and there can certainly be both formal and informal sanctions if one refuses) to go through it. Moreover there is often some kind of "contract" that the "focus person" is obliged to sign which is designed to please "the prosecution".

Anyway, it occurred to me, after being on the team for awhile, to suggest that we review this whole feedback process, which always seemed to me to be essentially unfair, and see if we could agree among ourselves about just what was wrong with it and what could possibly replace it, and then post our findings to the community as a joint process team evaluation and recommendation. Maybe there would be enough interest for us to have a well attended community meeting about it followed by the formal adoption of something better. What follows is the result of my own closer inspection and evaluation of the Feedback policy, which, for reasons contained in the text, I posted to my community as an Individual-Person rather than as a member of the process team.

Feedbacks and Due Process at Twin Oaks
posted by I-P for Healthy Culture

One

The punitive aspect of the feedback is in its one-sidedness. since displeasing others (even many others) is not the same as being wrong and since the displeasure (as well as any wrongness) may be just as strong or stronger in the other direction, it is hard, in any disagreement or problem, to see the fairness of putting one of the two parties in a one-sidedly defensive and passive situation, effectively giving the other party the right to question, judge and complain (or even just the right to chose or limit the topic of discussion) without itself being vulnerable to the same treatment.

Moreover, If special punishment is not attached to being put in such a situation then that is even more reason why the feed back should not be unilateral and why the issue in question should not be limited to that chosen by only one party; if its a healthy, non-punitive process, then why limit it only to the "focus person"? There is no a priori reason why either a given individual or any group of individuals should be expected to be less open to correction, change, and growth--and the feedback that can lead to this--then any another individual or group, whatever the relative numbers are between the two parties. Putting any minority through an unpleasant process that the majority is not willing to go through is equivalent to punishing the minority for being a minority and correspondingly privileging the majority just for being a majority. Since more is not necessarily better, any more than might is right, it is difficult to justify the asymmetry of the normal feedback proceedings no matter what the relative numbers are. (I want to be clear here that I am not saying the majority is necessarily wrong any more than that its necessarily right, I'm saying that there is nothing about being a majority that justifies exemption or special privileges in its process with a minority.)

Nor is it clear that, even when numbers are equal, person or group A should be privileged or exempted from inquiry, just because they are more aggressive, proactive (or, it could be, just more intolerant or mean-spirited) than person or group B and so happen to be the ones initiating the proceedings. In other words, there is no reason why a disagreement should have recourse to being escalated in a way where one of the disputants is given the advantage of being exempt from questioning, culpability, correction etc..while the other is not. Not only does it prejudice the out come of the dispute and likely obscure the real nature and causes of the situation, but it provides an antisocial incentive for escalating any such disagreement with out any attempt at balanced inquiry, mature discussion or mutual understanding and accommodation.

Returning to the Majority vs Minority situation, there are countless historical situations of majorities oppressing minorities through legally subjecting minorities (gays, women,witches, people of color, indigenous peoples,poor people, or just unpopular individuals) to one-sided processes just because they can (this is not to mention the analogous situations, of pogroms, mob rule, gag rape, mugging or any other movement of a self-righteous majority against a minority or weaker group or individual without a symmetrical due process). Of course the majority always thinks and feels that it is right in such situations. Often enough the minority also thinks and feels that its right (or at least no more wrong then the majority, even if it might be too cowed and intimidated to say so). Whatever the relative numbers may be, such a situation is morally symmetrical, and it is our collective response in just in such situations (were a majority is against and minority or individual) that reveal whether our institution really has anything at all to do with fairness, equality, or cooperation (much less kindness or{here insert some other relevant community bylaw or value, or just human value}), or whether we are, when it comes down to it, no better than a mob self-complacent bullies and cowards.

What seems to follow from this is that, a case of "the community or some subset thereof against X" , the possibility is just as much that "X" is "right" as that "the community" (etc...) is "right". Since, as in most relationships, it takes two to tango, both the community (or some subset) and "X" are equally likely to be guilty of some failure to live up to the spirit of our values and agreements. The proceedings of a feedback (if it would still be called that) should reflect this likely mutual and general responsibility not only in the form of the investigation or inquiry but in the form of its possible outcomes.

So far as proceedings go, any process between X and the community or some official or unofficial subset thereof, should be conducted in a bilateral and multilateral way in which the "focus person" or their behavior is not presumed at the outset to be the only, or even the main, problem or problem cause. In such a process the focus person, the dissatisfied instigators of the feedback, as well the relevant extant community rules, norms or states of affairs, will be equally subject to potential questioning and criticism in terms of their respective failure to live up to our values and agreements. So far as outcomes go, it follows from the above that any resultant contract between the community and X be possibly bilateral, outlining concrete steps the community (or some formal or informal part of it) should be willing to take to live up to our stated values AS WELL AS what person or group X is also expected to do in this regard. The likely result of such a process, if the details are handled well, is the improvement, growth and maturity, of both the individual and the community as a whole, in contrast to the present feedback process which seems incapable of strengthening anything but resentment on one side and lame complacency on the other.

Though the word "Feedback" is not inherently inappropriate for such a radically improved process, it would probably avoid confusion just to call it something else (a "community hearing" or something) and abandon feed-backs in there current form forever.

Two

I wrote the first part of the above as part of a process team project arguing for a revision of the rules of the Feedback (or perhaps for its possible replacement with something else), on the basis that it violates, among other things the bylaw preference for constructive rather than punitive ways of dealing with problems and individuals. It was the first piece of work that I felt was actually good enough for me to take process team labor credits for. I suggested the project myself, (purely coincidentally), a week before the current feedback situation existed. Having become so clear about the the inherent unfairness of the Feedback in the process of writing the above I cannot, in good conscience actively facilitate it simply because, as a member of the process team, it is "my job" to do so. In the words of Cool Hand Luke and in the spirit (if not the results) of the Nuremberg trials; "callin' it 'you're job' don't make it right, boss...".

I therefor have decided to make this paper also serve as public announcement of my resignation from the process team. Effective Wednesday October 8 2008. I have myself considered the pros and cons of staying on the team and trying to mitigate the inherent unfairness of the feedback process (among other such unfair or coercive processes) from within and I very much respect the decision (of any current members of the process team who might agree with me about some or all such issues), to choose such a path. For my part, I cannot square such a non-mandatory compromise, with the development of my own character. Without some reason to expect likely growth and maturity of the community and its processes as a result of my participation in such a compromise, I think I could be more effective in furthering both my own and its growth as a relatively free agent. I very much enjoyed being on the process team for the short while I was on it and very much wish the best for Tikvah, Ethan, and Purl and anyone else who might join it with good intentions.

Sincerely,

I-P

Postscript

I want to say something about the interpretation of the bylaws in general here. I want to emphasize the distinction between positive values and necessary evils and point up the implications of such distinctions. The bylaws are clear that not only furthering equality and cooperation but actively diminishing competition are among its positive values. Since capitalism in its most typical form is all about competition, hierarchies and coercion, it would seem to follow that those provisions and arrangements in the bylaws which were clearly meant to facilitate our (successful enough) participation in such competition would constitute necessary evils rather than positive values. One implication of this seems to me to be that whenever opportunity allows, structural or otherwise attempts should be made to progress towards that which is a positive value and diminish that which is a necessary evil. Managerial hierarchies, the reduction of individuals to quantitative abstractions, (whether of money or labor hours) are all clearly aspects of twin oaks culture that mimic corporate capitalist culture and thus constitute necessary evils (at best) rather than positive values. As such, active and ongoing experiments in mitigating or eliminating such necessary evils (even when this would involve some ¨lowering" of our ¨standard of living¨) is a reasonable expectation of anyone living here, whereas the reflexive and unquestioning defense of such evils is not.

end of post.

Well, so much for my brief experiment with being on the Process Team as a way of being more formally involved with my Neighborhood in a healthy way. For the time being I feel pretty confirmed in my feeling that working within a "system" that is itself not healthy is something of a last resort to be chose only when there seems to be no way to effect the system for the better otherwise. Actually I mean something like "moving deeper into the system" rather then "working within the system" because, of course I am still "working in the unhealthy system, both of twin oaks and of the world beyond it. The point is that the balance of working to heal the system and becoming a willing and unconscious part of it is likely to tip strongly toward the latter the more one concedes more than the minimum participation necessary to stay alive to effect healing at all. What I want to get practice in is participating in rituals of togetherness not rituals of apartness like the feed back, and staying on the process team and going through with the feedback would just have amounted to my learning (in some sense voluntarily is time) one more ritual of inner and outer alienation. It would have been a disservice to myself and the community even if i could have slightly mitigated its effect by some action of mine. Such an act of mitigation might even have served to help legitimate and disguise the essential nature of a process that is inherently unfair.

3 people signed my post indicating willingness to get together to talk about it and its implications (one of the people was the "focus person" of the most current feedback) and as yet I have not made any gesture to get this to happen. I am not sure what is keeping me from doing so. Maybe this post will have the effect of a reminder and challenge for me either to do so or get clearer as to why I am not...

Welcome and Thanks.

I-P

Post Script

I share the gist of the above post in a dicussion group about intentional community at gaia.com (I had retitled it "Community Due Process; dealing with "problem people"). What follows is the responce I got and my reply.

Re: Community Due Process: dealing with "problem people", Iuval said:

"IP, perhaps we are all “problem people”, although some may be more problematic than others (like some of the animals who were more equal than others in Animal Farm :-)) Can we find a process that is more symmetrical and less punitive? I think Oneida already did it, and other possibilities abound. Their process was called “mutual criticism”, and it wasn't totally symmetrical because their “leader” was exempt. They had it regularly, whether there was a problem or not. Some communists had “self-criticisms” but I think they eventually evolved into charades. I actually like the idea of a self-criticism as long as everyone has to do it and does it in a spirit of humility and being able to laugh at themselves. I think the Bruderhof also have something similar to a feedback, but I don't remember if it is symmetrical or not. IMO, anything that prevents egos from getting too big is a good thing. I personally have no problems with hierarchies based on wisdom and experience and competence as long as they are not rigid hierarchies and there are checks and balances to prevent egos from getting too big."

"I hope we can develop systems that can deal with problem people (that is, all of us) while acknowledging that the responsibility for the problem is systemic, not fully personal. I was dealing with two problem people at the last IC I was at: myself (a provisional member) and the full member , D, who felt like I was the only problem person (as well as the previous members who left feeling like she was the problem person). At the end, D gave me a membership review/feedback where she asked me to leave based on what her assessement of my problem was (unless I was willing to make a correction in my attitude, which I was not able nor willing to make), and I was not really allowed to respond. I chose to leave until the system changes."
-Iuval

Re: Community Due Process: dealing with "problem people", I-P said:

Hi, Iuval,

Thanks for reading and responding to my rather long post. I definitely agree that we are all “problem people” in one way or another, which is why I put the phrase in quotes in my title. I also like the idea of “mutual criticism” though I think it should extend to the community bylaws, and status quo as a whole and not just all of the individuals within it. I think that that was one of the things that was wrong with the “self-criticism” experiments. A healthy culture can, not only stand, but respond to, criticisms of itself and moreover actually encourages them, though again not unilaterally.

I suppose that I can agree with hierarchies that I would describe as situational, consensual and temporary, though I think to call such things “hierarchies” would probably be rather misleading (through the phrase "dynamic integral heterarchy"might describe it). For example, If, in a storm at sea, everybody has consensus to do as the captain says (not because he or she is “the captain” but because they spontaneously acknowledge that he or she is manifesting “experience and wisdom” under the circumstances) then I would say that what is really happening is consensual rather than coercive, even if it would look different from outside. But for me the living and free quality of the consensus on the matter is the point. It could be the case after all that the captain is drunk, that the captain is–even temporarily– succumbing to his or her own sick culture in ways that relate to but transcend the practical nature of the task at hand (for example—and such things have happened in the past-- the captain could succumb to valuing gold more than people and in an effort to lighten the load of the ship declare that certain persons be thrown overboard rather than the gold…)etc…

my point is not only that people exist (and have experience and wisdom) primarily as people (I would say as “individual-persons”) rather then as “officers” or job titles, and that their competence at anything else needs to be evaluated from that shared ground, but that even the shared ground is just as unstable as the deck of a ship in a storm, in that a person who is “well Balanced” as an individual-person and using the best of his or her experience at one moment might lose that balance in the next moment. Given the inherently dynamic nature of such things, I think it much better that an overt and formal egalitarianism generaly prevail over a rigid specialization as the norm and that the latter (even when it is not rigid), be subordinant to the former.

In such a situation of assumed primary equality and primary non-specialization as I am advocating, no one is obliged to turn off or repress their critical, creative, and moral faculties in deference to some pre-established hierarchy (though they themselves might decide to do so in response to the actual details of some real and usually temporary situation). In such a situation no one is in danger of being corrupted either by “power ” on the one side or by servitude on the other, and bilateral habits of universal respect (rather than dangerous and usually unnecessary unilateral and mechanical habits of command and obedience) are formed all around.

Anyway, so far as your experience goes, I can only say that it seems fairly typical. I think that the intentional community movement in general has yet to realize in practice that collective “might” is not any more “right” than Individual “might” and that if a so-called intentional community is going to amount to much more than a mob with a land base, those within it must learn to understand “rights” in terms of responsibilities–not only direct responsibilities to the land and to their own growth as persons, but to the creation of the kind of minimally coercive and essentially healthy culture which I think is alone compatible with the long term health of the Land Base and of all its occupants.

After all, if “Might is Right” , then rapists have the right to rape, child molesters have the right to molest etc…And this implication extends equally to the “right” to private ownership of land (which is ultimately acquired and maintained by “might”). And this is so whether the “right” and “might” is individually or collectively held. Moreover, since ANY in-group with the power or numbers (the “might”) behind them can usually be relied on to convince THEMSELVES (usually with a little more of a farce of deliberation then the average mob), of their “Righteousness” in excluding or coercing others, the only check against the resurgence in so called intentional community of the de facto vileness and pathology of the historical and contemporary state of affairs is, so far is I can see, some culture of coercion/ alienation/hierarchy-minimizing due-process, such as I outlined in the second half of my my post.

The due-process I describe and advocate would of course be only one aspect of the healthy culture in which it could credibly exist and thrive. But it makes more sense to direct folks to my profile and blog if they are curious about my own ideas of what such a culture might be like in general.

Thanks again for your response Iuval! Hope we have occasion to dialog more,

I-P

Tags: Due, Process, Justice, Fairness, Politics, Intentional Community

Soul, Self, & SelfNature (soul post)

http://HealthyCulture.gaia.com — Thu, 25 Dec 2008 12:38:51 GMT

Soul Post

So you might remember that there is such a thing as a healthy culture ritual called the " Individual-Personal check-in" which involves 5 "reports" by each participant (one in each of the 5 venues of Individual-personhood) on what happens to be up in those venues--in the sense of what degree of sick or healthy culture is going on in each of them. The ritual is Ideally one in which at least two people participate but for demonstration and other purposes, I also seem to have adopted that form in certain blog posts here and elsewhere. My last post here in this vein was a "neighbor post' in which I reported sharing some thoughts about "gender and adulthood" at a community meeting here at Twin Oaks.

Another venue of Individual-Personhood is something I describe as the "Soul" or "Social-Religious venue", which has to do with healthy coming-together with others in terms of world-views in general and "Ultimate things" in particular. "Ultimate things" here relates equally to philosophies such as atheism (in which case the ultimate thing is physical death, and "soulful" relating to another means relating to them in the light of that presumed finality) and to any other philosophic or religious assumptions or beliefs. The Idea is to try to engage with others around such topics in a way that facilitates mutual respect, learning, growth and perhaps even some degree of tentative consensus. In practice, this kind of thing requires at least some degree of an "everybody has a piece of the Lie and the Truth" attitude , as this allows folks both to uninhibitedly engage disagreement and at the same time avoid competitiveness and rigid dogmatism. Such a mood is of course rather difficult to reach maintain in practice, which I am sure is one of the reasons people tend to avoid engaging each other around such subjects.

But the vital necessity of learning how to have such a discussion in this venue, is clear for me in the general fact that people maneuver in, and order their world based on their world-views (whether or not their real view is always the same as what they publicly profess) and to the extent to which we live in a shared world, radical disagreements about ultimate things are either going to be constructively engaged in a way that can lead to greater understanding and real cooperation, or they just become the motives for coercion, manipulation, or outright wars of one form or another..

So I happen to be engaged in such a "Soul" dialog with a person called Samatman who I met when he was visiting Twin Oaks. Samatman is very interested in founding a community based on the idea of what he calls the "Shared Self" and on what he calls "Shared Self Practice" which, in my experience of it, focuses on a certain breathing practice. His world-view seems to be inspired in large part by his understanding of physics as well as by his encounters with the teachings and person of Meher Baba and others.

Anyway, we have been engaging in discussions with the Idea of possibly finding some common ground in our world views as a basis for perhaps founding a community together based on some co-created synthesis of his shared self Idea and my whole "healthy culture" thing.

Immediately into our discussions of these issues though, we ran into the difference between his Idea and emphasis on "Self" and my own idea of "SelfNature", as a conception of Ultimate Identity. SelfNature (which it is sometimes more useful to refer to as "NatureSelf") is for me the ultimate "fruit" of which "Individual-Personhood" is the "Flower" (the "Tree of Life" being in some sense the rest of the "plant"). For me the Idea of SelfNature expresses the fundamental togetherness of the subjective (Self) and the objective (Nature), in the way that the idea of Self does not, and so the sticking point in Samatman's and my dialogs seems to stem chiefly on this issue of identity a lot of the time.

Recently samatman lent me the book "God Speaks" by Meher Baba, as a way of facilitating our mutual understanding of each other and I wrote the following to him in response to reading the first 4 chapters:

To Samatman,

so I don't see that it is true (good, beautiful, alive) to believe that "the evolving consciousness of the soul attains its full development in human form" as Meher Baba says, since I think it is precisely through the transcendence of the "human form" and "Human Identity" (and of "species-identity" in general as a separative Identity-Politics), and its replacement with something like Individual-Personhood, that the process of true "development" or "evolution" can begin. I think the whole of "human exceptionalism" and "pride" in the human form, even in the relative sense implied in the "Great Chain of Being" idea, involves a form of separative inegalitarian alienation that prevents living friendship and healthy mutuality between relatively distinct variations on the Theme of SelfNature.

I think that the sense of species hierarchy itself is something that comes from a failure to realize and affirm the ultimate togetherness of SelfNature , since it would seem to imply that that which seems closer to "Nature" is somehow further from some form of "Self" conceived as other and superior (to Nature). I think this assumption of separation and superiority (even, as sometimes happens, when the accent and superiority is given to "Nature" rather than "Self") is actually a conceit of the separative ego which has no real understanding or conscious experience of anything but primary alienation and apartness. It is this egoistic alienation, this mispercieved impression of primary apartness, that is projected on inner/outer experience and leads to the kind of "ranked distinctions" involved in the so called "Traditional view" (which view is, I think, more a function of relatively recent agricultural and in-egalitarian mutations of human culture and cognition than anything truly normative in human culture).

It occurs to me that perhaps another way of saying this (in terms closer to Baba's) is that the "souls" perceptual association with/as a given form of existance is different from the the egos cognitive one-sided attachment to a factional identity. The Soul (or, to be more consistant, the "Soul-Body") in a certain sense "delights in" (and in a certain sense "is") the full continuum between the particular and the general, between the "variation" of particular body and the "Theme" of SelfNature. The Soul is, in other words, fond of togetherness and of the paradoxical togetherness of togetherness and apartness. It likes both Self and Nature, and likes (and in a way ,is) both multiplicity and unity equally because its ultimate consciousness and longing is for the Spirit that manifests through and beyond both multiplicity and unity, beyond even SelfNature/NatureSelf. This delight of the Soul in the means as well as the end is because it knows that it is only such paradoxical delight that will ultimately attract That which is equally beyond both Means and End. it is almost the essense of what the soul is. It is the dissociated (disembodied) ego, on the other hand, that is the "sourpuss" that is always trying to rigidly impose one-sidedness and permanently subordinate one side of a coin to the other. Such a one-sided ego can't dance (by "dance" I mean something like "negotiate paradox"), while the soul is almost the joy of dance itself.

Any way without a paradox-embracing soulfull life-logical form of cognition, the ego must rule and apartness, apartheid, caste must emerge as primary (both in religion and in social order) in a way that they never would if the true paradoxical togetherness of Self and Nature (of SelfNature/NatureSelf) were perceived, conceived, affirmed and realized. What I suspect has happened in India as well as in other "civilizations" is that prevalence of the trauma of factional, war-induced hierarchical social conditions of caste and rank (over any preexisting conditions of "primitive" equality or community) is echoed in a cosmology and Identity politics that at least strongly lends itself to misinterpretation in terms of alienation, estrangement and onesidedness...I think such one-sidedness is implied in the concept of unilateral identity relation in which the Metaphysical Self "absorbs" or includes Nature in a way that subordinates the later (the same onesidedness is of course equally manifest when this condition is held, as in some forms of materialism for example, to be reversed).

SelfNature can only manifest in Entity-Experience when Entity-Experience reaches the "genericly-specific" and so paradoxical level of Identity that I would describe, not as "humanity" but as "Individual-Personhood" (or something very like it). I think the Identity-politics of Individual-Personhood is an example of the kind of paradoxical, togetherness that is in harmony with Soul (perhaps I should say with "World-Soul") and in terms of which this Soul as the Entity-Experience of connected individuality can best ultimately Manifest SelfNature and find its ultimate consummation (and perhaps rebirth) in its trans-formative encounter with Spirit and Ultimate Freedom (which I contend transcends, SelfNature, Entity-Experience and Identity Itself). Well was a bit of a mouthful, but I hope it is at least not a misleading mouthful. Probably, gesturing at Spirit with words is always going to be misleading...

So, for these and more reasons, regarding self and other primarily (or even secondarily) in terms relatively factional identities, as defined by species, kingdom, gender etc, seems precisely the opposite of what is needed to make room for the realization of our Shared SelfNature as Individual-Persons...Putting "Self" (no matter how allegedly different from "self" or ego) as the top of such a one-sided hierarchy is part of what facilitates the one-sidedness and the Hierarchy. The Idea of SelfNature avoids this and, without completely rejecting hierarchy, allows for its paradoxical subordination to equality and mutuality in a way that makes real Friendship and Community between and within all Being(s) possible...

Having said all of this, I think it at least possible that Meher Baba would agree with this interpretation of things and that his presentation of the situation is just a result of his dealing as best he could with the language and tradition which he inheireted. I base this in part on his statement that "God cannot be discussed, explained etc..but only "lived". I feel almost exactly the same about "Spirit". Perhaps we could commune on that level and come to terms about the map leading to that Living experience by filtering out the alienating biases of sick culture in various parts of the world. At any rate, I havent read the rest of the book, so perhaps I'll be the one who ends up changing their language and/or understanding...so far though, this is where I am at with it...

Looking forward to discussion,

I-P

I haven't got a formal reply to this by Samatman but the point for this post is just to report on the nature and quality of how the conversation is being conducted. From this point of view I thinks it is going very well in that, whether or not we will ever fully agree on these things, we seem to be becoming friends and learning and growing as a result of our engagement with each other.

This is probably due in some part to the fact that be are not only sharing world-views but also rituals. In our last meeting, for example, Samatman shared with me his "Shared Self Breathing Practice". The fact that I could not help but immediately modify it into a Shared SelfNature breathing practice" didn't seem to bother him and it certainly didn't prevent me from being very grateful for his helping to engender what will probably become a new ritual of Healthy Culture. Far from being frustrating, I think the whole experience lead to each of us understanding the others ideas and experience better. Similarly, in our meeting before this,I shared with Samatman the non-virtual version of the Individual-Personal check-in ritual, which he participated in and which I think like-wise began to stir up ideas in his mind about how to adapt that ritual to his own assumptions about Self.

So far, my engagement with Samatman as a Soul,that is in the context of worldviews and considerations of ultimate things (but also as a whole Individual-Person), seems to be going well. I think it's progress probably depends on the extent to which we can continue regard ourselves and each other in terms of what we share (or what we believe we share) rather than in terms of what we do not. This is tricky because the identity we believe we ultimately share is not the same identity! Still, my hope is that something (namely "Friendship") is happening as a result of our encounters that transcends dogma, and that will eventually help heal whatever rigidities and fear-based motives and (mis)understandings that exist within and between us.

We'll see...Listening...considering...

PS..

"Considering" has recently joined "Listening", "Supporting", and "Challenging" as a "co-implicated" aspect of the relating dynamic i call "Living Friendship", which I now consider a four-fold rather than a three-fold thing..,hopefully more on this in another post...

Tags: identity, Check-in, Soul-Post, Self, SelfNature

Shame (The Public-Private Image and the Indiviudal-Person)

http://HealthyCulture.gaia.com — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 17:21:12 GMT

"Everybody has a piece of the Truth; Everybody has a piece of the Lie"--Healthy Culture Proverb

Strange how one can feel ashamed for things that one doesn't actually feel guilty for (not because the things are not wrong or stupid but because ...well because no body's perfect...), and feel guilty for the shame itself. At least I can sometimes feel this way...

From the point of view of Healthy Culture, shame is a "public/private" aspect of the culture of apartness rather than an "individual-personal" aspect of healthy culture, and the difference between the public/private and the individual-personal is precisely the one-sided dissociation of a persons "piece of the Truth" from their "piece of the Lie" that is embodied in the concept and reality of a "Public Image". Usually the public side of the image is the side that constitutes ones "piece of the Truth" or rather its the part that corresponds with what is praiseworthy or at least acceptable to "ones public" and usually to oneself. Ones "piece of the Lie" (or at least ones "piece of the currently not respectable") is in this case relegated to ones "private" life if its is acknowledged at all.

On the other side of the public/private coin, the whole concept of the "private" seems to be based on the assumption that "it ain't nobodies business if I do", which is to say that there are certain things and behaviors in our lives that no one has a legitimate interest in but ourselves because they effect no one but ourselves. However its not clear why any thing or behavior would be hidden in this privacy if there were not some chance that sharing it would threaten the one-sided public image of ourselves that we have bought into and identify with. Its also clear that many things considered "private business" in this way, such as excessive drug use (legal or illegal), or alcohol use are arguably the legitimate interest of others since they potentially effect others in the form of car or other accidents emotional callousness or violence to others etc..in fact most "private business" has some kind relevance or effect on others because, from the individual-personal point of view our very existence is inherently social (personal) just as much as it is "psychological" (individual) and vis-versa.

But of course, as I said, what keeps the "private" private is precisely "the public", that is, the one-sided and phony public image that in a culture of dissociation and apartness becomes the norm. In such a culture the actual togetherness of everyones "piece of the Lie" with "their piece of the Truth" and the paradoxical and unpredictable fluidity with which both the Lie and the Truth manifest in this or that given situation and individual, is not accepted at all, and so the dualistic, simplistic either/or kind of logic that dominates all other areas of sick culture does so here as well. From such a public point of view of mandated one-sidedness, a one-sidedly positive public image can only be replaced with an equally one-sidedly negative one. That is, if you are not a "good guy" then you are a "bad guy" and that is that.

Anyone then trying to come out of the passive isolation and alienation of "private life" into a more authentic form of relationship with others and themselves has to expect, not an exchange of his or her phony public image for acceptance as an authentic and imperfect Individual-Person who obviously has changing moral/ethical strengths and weaknesses like everyone else, but rather they can reasonably expect summary relegation to the equally phony and one-sided negative public image of a "bad guy", with all the ostracism and shaming that that implies. This means, among other things, that in sharing ones private life, one either has to reflexively approve of all of ones actions, admitting no values in terms of which one might sometimes be oblidged to judge ones own self lacking, or be dismissed as a hypocrite or worse. Under such silly circumstances its certainly understandable that most people choose to keep their "private life" private even though in the long run this is not conducive to happiness or real belonging.

I think this entire situation has a lot to do with family dynamics and with so called adults being stuck in a less than mature stages of human development in which the unrealistic idealization or blaming of a parent gets carried over into adult life. The parent who can do no wrong (or at least the one on whom we feel most dependent) becomes the first idealized "Public Figure"--the first "hero" for the child who, if they cannot yet be such a hero themselves, can at least find safety and belonging in his or her good graces by being a loyal and obedient "follower". This situation is usually made more complex in that often which ever parent is not awarded this positive hero public image gets to carry the negative "bad cop" or "villain" role. Indeed the "hero" imprint will often arise precisely from the dynamics of feeling "rescued" from one parent by the other (though I don't think the one-sided public figure problem changes any when both parents happen to be idealized or both vilified since, among other things, in that case other adults usually become the "bad guys"). There is also the fact of sibling (and later "peer group) dynamics which however, in the absence of any actual maturity in the participants, can only vary the game of who gets to be the stand in leader/parent/good guy public image role, who gets to "follow" this "hero", who gets to be the "bad guy" and who is kicked out of the game all together. I am sure that this doesn't exhaust the possibilities, but you get the picture.

One can also see the elements of the beginning of competition here, in that the object of such sibling or peer group games in time becomes deciding which of the players will be assigned which of these roles, with the Hero being the same as the "Winner" of course...see footnote.

All of this is understandable in infanthood and childhood because an infant or child by definition lacks the maturity, insight, detachment, perspective, sophistication (and education) to see their parents as simply imperfect "individual-persons" suffering from a sick culture like themselves and everybody else. They are pretty much forced by cognitive limitations to experience everything in a more or less, cartoon, simplistic, almost mythological manner. And of course in such a culture as ours, the sad case is that the parents themselves will also lack the full development of most of these things, though usually to a lesser degree than their children.

Under such circumstances it should not be surprising that such dynamics underly the political and social "games people play" as pseudo adults, which fact accounts for the simplistic one-sided public image of the Leader/Parent/Hero and the negatively one-sided public image of the villain,"criminal", or bad guy. It also accounts for the equally phony and one-sided positive public image of the "in-group" of followers of the "right" leader(s) who like wise exchange their authenticity for the pseudo-belonging of membership in that group (the price of which is a tacit agreement not only to ignore and repress, or downplay the leaders piece of the Lie but in large part their own as well, usually projecting all evil on "the bad guy" and his or her, it or their deluded followers).

Its worth emphasizing here that all of this one-sidedness has its emotional origins not only in the trauma of extremely one-sided feelings of aversion (fear), abandonment, and alienation experienced by every infant and child, but in the further cognitive development by which the child's first phony identity (as a "good" boy or girl in good graces with the parent/¨hero¨) begins to be founded on such experiences, which constitutes a first self-betrayal of their (good and bad and good/bad-transcending) authentic individual selves. This betrayal of authentic experience of self and other in exchange for at least a convincing substitute for real affection, safety, acceptance and belonging (and for the corresponding diminishment of at least the acute form of the experience of unbearable fear and pain), is the template one which later phony Public images are developed.

The implications of this development of, and enslavement to, a phony one-sided persona and self-image (and the "good boy/girl" image can easily be traded for its opposite at a certain rebelious stage of development, without of course bringing the child closer to an experience of their whole selves), and the listing and discussion of all of the contributing factors to it are much too much to go into here. I would like, however, to briefly mention here in passing the unhealthy kinaesthetic patterns that come from the compulsive or reactionary holding of ourselves in postures which trap us in an alienated relationship to gravity and cut us off from the effortless and elegant working of our own bodies, as these are not usually understood as resulting in large part from the trauma and stress of "posing" as a "good or bad boy or girl" (and later as a "cool", ¨sexy¨ or "tough", or "successful" ¨man¨ or ¨woman¨) in exchange for what we accept as belonging and love.

All of the above will be gone into further in future posts, but what I am really bring all of this up for right now is to go into how all of it relates to my efforts to communicate and share my ideas about, and experiments in, healthy culture in this blog (which is after all a kind of "Publication" and as such exposes me to the some version of the "public image" game).

What I struggle with of course is the fact that, if i want to get anybodies attention (even if its just to point out the childishness, and lose-lose nature of the simplistic, competitively one-sided and phony public image game, and to offer an alternative to it), I have to risk entering that very game (at least in the minds of those who cannot help but play the game them selves). In other words, just to communicate, in the dominant sick culture I have to risk being projected upon as a leader or hero or as an equally phony member in good standing of the "right group of followers or even (if more of a sibling thing is going on) the right elite group of co-leaders.

In order to escape being caught in such a "positive" one-sided and phony public image I have often been tempted to focus intensively and exclusively own my own many pieces of the Lie and post that (I've made many drafts of "blog confessions" of this kind). Obviously though, doing such a thing would not actually challenge the one-sided and childish immaturity behind the whole dynamic but just lead to my assuming a negative public image in the minds of those who were previously being one-sided and silly in the other extreme. Just as bad, such an "act of courageous defiance" might strengthen me as a real Hero in the minds of people in whom this whole dynamic is more sophisticated then usual but nevertheless equally unhealthy beside the point.

What makes all of this even more complicated is the fact that I do still suffer from sick culture myself and am of course therefore susceptible under the right conditions (though I think these conditions would be pretty unusual), to any and all of the above forms of phoniness (or to any other form for that matter). I could very well be drawn into some kind of phony "public leadership" role (which silly "rise" would inevitably lead to an equally silly "fall" in the typical tragic hero manner). Moreover, I do have moments of Shame regarding some of the sick culture that I have been, continue to be (and in some cases maybe always will be) involved in simply because I, like everyone else was born and initiated into sick culture and am susceptible to its one-sidedness and alienation. This Shame I speak of is of course itself just another manifestation of that sick culture; of the part of me that buys into one-sided expectations of righteousness and the brief and empty thrill of false acceptance and solidarity that goes alone with all of that. All of which is just to affirm that I myself have a piece of the Lie and a piece of the Truth and that there are conditions (some of which I don't know and some of which I do) during which the former (in this case in the form of a susceptibility to public image and the Shame that goes along with that) would manifest more than the latter. I am not sure if I feel ashamed of this Shame but I guess I still feel somewhat guilty for it, which makes just as little sense (but is just as understandable...).

It occurs to me that in writing this I could still be making some kind off underhanded or unconscious bid for "public approval" rather than making, from one individual-person to another, the appeal to adulthood good sense, goodwill, and living friendship that I think I am making, so I suppose I should say something a little more explicit just to make sure.

The Idea with all of these blog entries of mine is really just to start a conversation that leads to us comparing notes about what is going on in the world and in ourselves with an eye to doing something healing together about both these things (ourselves and the world) at the same time. For the most part, despite my previous "confession", I really am interested in Friendship rather than "public Leadership", and this means to me an inner and outer dynamic of listening, support, and challenge and not any kind of rigidly unilateral dynamics or hierarchies. So far as I can tell, my general understanding is appropriate (tentatively Good, True, Beautiful, Alive,) but a big part of my reason for sharing it is that I know that I could be wrong about this and want to be corrected if I am. (Even I am not corrected, as far a I am concerned, the Theory of Healthy Culture will always be a "Tentative Universal", always susceptible to challenge and alteration either in whole or in part, otherwise it would not be Alive...

So the invitation is something like this:

Lets stop seeing ourselves as leaders and followers with public/private self/other images and just be individual-persons trying to befriend and heal ourselves, each other and the world from the sick culture of apartness, alienation, phoniness, competition etc that we All suffer from, and lets try to nurture the living healthy culture that is also within us all. Lets see what we can do to create a culture of true friendship and adulthood that would begin to transform and heal sick culture inside and outside us. Rather than collude with (or against) each other in complacent in-group self-rightousness, lets create an open circle of listening, support, challenge and inner and outer healing in the egalitarian, compassionate, and paradoxical spirit of living friendship. This blog and my other writings amount to my notes about possible ways and reasons to do that...What are your Notes? What do you think? Lets compare notes and discuss the whole issue critically and in good faith. And if we can get some tentative agreement, lets collaborate further.

Now I am not sure that this message and its implied disclaimer (a disclaimer that disclaims inferiority as well as of superiority mind you) is really getting through in a primary way. Maybe some of my posts sound more righteous and dogmatic and less tentative then they should (I am dealing in many cases with universals, but hopefully it is at least clear by now that these are always offered as tentative universals rather than rigid dogmas)... I can't really get behind the Socratic thing of pretending I have no opinion or ideas about things (as if this were really possible with anybody), and that has always seemed annoyingly phony to me. Its always seemed better just to be explicit about ones diagnosis and prescription and be open to challenge. But that openness to challenge extends to critiques about the way I am going about expressing myself as well as what I am expressing so feel free to give feedback about that too.

Welcome and Thanks,

--I-P

{footnote: I think its worthwhile going into the effect of competition (as a regression to this unconsciously childish game of who gets the phony role of "hero"/winner, and who has to wear the equally phony one of "villain"/loser), on what should be adult discourse. I say this since I think it is the main reason for the future-diminishing dynamics between persons, nations, parties, religions,etc.., during disagreements or negotiations which otherwise would lead to the finding of the common ground and consensus necessary for cooperation rather than coercion. I'm mean, if the subtext of the discussion is really to find out who is the hero/insider/good guy/good boy and who is the villain/outsider/bad guy/bad boy, then the real common ground of unpredictably fallible (and unpredictably "virtuous") human individual-personhood is pretty much excluded at the outset by the implied rules of the game, and with it the possibility of a resolution without shaming. Such an underlying subtext insures that the outcome of the discussion will never reflect the real truth of either the specific or general situation. Since the implication of my "winning" the discussion is that I have no "piece of the Lie" (or at least none worth paying attention to), and your losing forces you to "admit" that you have no "piece of the truth" with the same qualification, the result of the game can never lead to either of our growth into mature self-aware adults since it precludes the possibility of any realization that can lead to such growth from the very outset. (compromise almost never has to do with any such realization or growth, but is usually just an unsatisfying expedient born of exhaustion).

Moreover since the final result of such a game can never be True (and so really Fair, since ultimately Fairness is inherently related to Truth), there is, deep down, no reason to think that "Fairness" has any thing to do with the game at all--the point really being just to win by any means necessary (in order not to have to relive those horrible infant and childhood feelings of "Badness", abandonment, vulnerability, rejection etc...),and to do so by the only means that the game allows, which is forcing that very experience on ones competitor. The fact that such dynamics underly the structure and functioning of basically all our political, economic, social, religious, and international institutions and discourse obviously does not bode well for that realization of a better future which is the primary preoccupation of actual adults (as opposed the ubiquitous psychological children and adolescents posing to themselves and each other as adults in "Public"--and Private-- life..)}

P.S. I suppose one could say that there is a kind of "legitimate leadership" which is based on spontaneous group consensus (at a given time in a given situation) that this or that person happens to know what is happening and what to do about it, and that there need not be any fear, coercion of sick culture involved in this. I acknowledge the phenomenon but decline to call it "leadership" since that word connotes for me a relatively static role and creates expectations beyond the actual moment of authentic collective consensus....in my experience it tempts people into a premature laxity or deferral of responsibility and critical, creative thinking. In this way the circulation of attention, expectation, inspiration and creativity of a group can be short circuited (as it can by the rigidity of the groups boundary itself). The speed at which an individual or groups piece of the Truth can be replaced by their piece of the Lie makes the individual or shared role of Leader misleading enough in its connotations for me to think it unnecessary most of the time.

Tags: Shame, Public Image, Privacy, Childhood, Competition, Adulthood

Three Old Songs

http://HealthyCulture.gaia.com — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 13:36:41 GMT

Three Old songs from my days in the San Francisco. Bay area (almost 20 years ago when I was very into Jung). The Picture above is of Jungs place in Bollengin in Switzerland. The Linz Cafe is the name of a book and building by Christopher Alexander which was built as a part of an "architectural museum exibit", temporarily built on the Linz river in Austria,and which I chose as the scene of the imaginary party...I-P

The Linz Cafe (a waltze)

Carl Gustav Jung, Elizabeth Cotten
talking of Dreams by the Door
while Father Divine, and Ometeotle
drink pulque and sit on the floor
and young Maya Deren was dancing for Messrs.
Arp and Cesaire by the stairs
with Black Elk on drums
and Ornette on tenor
Who wouldn't have wanted to be there?

But after they all have gone away
faded right into the blue Dear.
when I think of The Linz Cafe,
I will remember you, Dear
sitting alone
in one of the Alcoves
of my mind...

Mr. Fukuokua was laughing for nothing
Credo Mutwa and I played along
while Dylan, and Spengler, Arno Gruen and Charo
were singing a Leadbelly song
and the wooden walls rang
and the tarpalin fluttered
and the afternoon drank itself blind
till the Lord of the Dawn
kissed His sister and muttered
"do ya know 'Jesus is on the Mainline'?"

So long ago and far away
nothing was ever so true Dear
But when I think of the Linz Cafe
I'll still remember you Dear
Walking along
under the trellises
of my love....

Frying Pan
(a rock and roll song)

Once I thought I knew a lady
She was swank and Fine..
I was down and out and lonely
And She was right on time..

Well I thought I'd found a saviour
When she took hold of my hand
But she just helped me out the fire
To put me in the fryin’ pan

Chorus: fryin’ pan, fryin’ pan

Now someones stayin’ at a shelter
Tryin’ to get themselfves straight
Tryin’ to get some motivation
Before it gets too late

Well I guess they’re tryin’ to help 'm
But he sure hopes they understand:
Don’t Make no sense to Leave the fire
To Go back in the the Fryin’ pan

Chorus

Bridge:

Well just like the Dealer needs the Citizen
You know the fire needs the fryin’ pan
And just like repression needs wild desire
You understand the fryin’ pan needs…the fire…

Well now they’re on the street in Berkely
Tryin’ to make it pay
You see them struttin’ down San Pablo
Every single day;

They see the world goin’ to blazes
Just as fast as it can…
And not much difference ‘tween the fire
And the fryin’ pan…

Sung for Jung
(sung to a hopefully elegant little piano melody)

Somewhere in Switzerland a tower does stand
Made by a man, made with his hands
Where God and the Devil dine stately and grand
Stately and Grand and touching hands
And touching hands…

Some say war is the father of everything Great
And point as Switzerland and peacetime’s estate
Saying “What out of Switzerland of consequence has come?”
Well I must answer them “Carl Gustav Jung”
“Carl Gustav Jung…”

Tags: song, poetry

The Tree of Life

http://HealthyCulture.gaia.com — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 14:22:48 GMT

The Tree of Life

{Note: for the time being I would like the following letter, which I wrote to a member of an intentional community in Costa Rica, to serve as my introduction to the Idea of Tree of Life Development as an aspect of integral science and healthy culture. Hopefully I will go into more detail in another entry in this blog at another time. -I-P}

Dear Mr. Brooks

My Name is I-P Odori. I live at Twin Oaks and am a friend of Steve Bloom whom I understand you know as having visited your community in Costa Rica this past February. At various times, usually on rides from Twin Oaks to Charlottesville, I have had occasion to share aspects of my Vision, by which I mean my Diagnosis of and prescription for our Collective predicament, with Steve. One of the things he keeps saying in response is that I should get in touch with you, sound you out about it and see if there isn't any way we could collaborate or help each other. This came up again just this afternoon on the way home and I promised him that I would begin a letter to you this very evening. And so I am.

What I am going to try to do in this letter is see just how concise I can be about my vision and about what it might have to do with you and Puntamona community. In attempting a relatively brief outline I will probably leave a great deal unmentioned that I would have liked to include and that you might have found interesting. To compensate for this I refer you to the good amount of supplementary materiel that you can find in the archives of my two Blogs: Integralscience.motime.com and Lifedancelog.motime.com.

I'll start by quoting the advertisement for a workshop I gave at NCOR (National Conference for Organized Resistance) in Washington this past January:

{I leave this out here since what I wrote was basically the same as what is in the first part of my gaia profile}

For more about the details of these four aspects of healthy culture (healthy cosmology, identity, ritual and infrastructure), I again refer you to my two blogs. The part of my Vision of healing that I want to describe now--and the part that seems especially relevant to such a community as yours--has to do with the way I envision Healthy Culture as it relates to human settlement patterns and to what is called "Development".

The Tree of Life

The Tree of life is a metaphor for what seems to me to be the demographic and cultural sine qua non of any truly sustainable way for an intelligent life form to inhabit a planet. Roughly speaking, this metaphorical tree is comprised of healthy Wilderness "roots", healthy Agrarian "leaves", and sustainable Urban "flowers and fruits". The Trunk and Branches represent the paths, trails, streets, and roads and waters, of an appropriately propotioned inconnecting transportation infrastructure.

Wilderness

The roots and ground of the Tree of Life are in wilderness, the indigenous sensibility, and an intimate, relatively unmediated relationship to wild places and beings. It is for lack of experience and familiarity with this humble and intimately indigenous way of knowing and being in and with wild nature that we are alienated, not only from nature, but from Spirit and from our own bodies which are the part of Nature that we are most concretely. Any agrarian or urban culture that lacks such a sensibility and experience of wildness is effectively cut off from its roots and ground and so doomed to dissociation, alienation and eventual self-destruction. Such dissociation is a big part of the reason for the sad state of rural as well as urban America today and is responsible in large part for the very existence of the suburbs. A way of life that does not involve and integrate the wild and the so-called primitive aspect of the world will never be a sane and healthy life.

It is all right therefore-it is in fact necessary-that there be people in the wilderness; it is just that they must be truly Wild People, truly initiated into an indigenous way of life. The archetype of this kind of initiatory and healing relationship with wilderness is the vision quest, but it also includes wild crafting and hunting and gathering generally.

I happen to know of various primitivist groups (one that is even called "Wild Roots") that are very enthusiastic about such a way of life. However, in every case I know, the enthusiasm is informed by the dissociated "Apart-ness" cosmology that rejects and refuses to see the need or possibility for the integration of this primal existance with the rural and the civil. In most cases the "Baby" of real neighborliness and true civility is thrown out with the "bath water" of our sick-cultures corruptions of these things. So far as I can see, such "wilderness roots" must doom themselves, without a trunks and leaves to nourish and be nourished by.

Countryside

For the ground and roots of a tree are not all of it or course, and cannot exist alone either actually or metaphorically. It is not at all realistic that the predominantly Urban population of the world could, or even should, disappear into the wilderness as permanent neo-primitivists. The ground and roots of a tree nourish its trunk and branches, and also its leaves and it fruit. In the Tree of Life development metaphor, The Leaves represent a healthy Agrarian or country way of life that is fully integrated with and supported by Wilderness on one side and equally integrated with and supportive of sustainable relatively "urban" life on the other. If only as a halfway house and reclimatization chamber, the purpose and destiny of rural community is both wilderness outreach and urban outreach.

As we have said, a rural way of life dissociated from wilderness is prone to the disrespect and exploitation of a nature reduced to alienated "I/it" relations of ownership regarding the land and its creatures. With its "cultural immune system" fatally weakened by this hostile estrangement from wildness, it is only a matter of time till such a culture falls victim to the shadow aspects of the necessarily sick urban culture it has unconsciously abandoned itself to. And the Urbanism will necessarily be sick precisely for the lack of the most essential function of the country life; namely a gentle and responsible introduction to wildness and to the art of integrating both it and civility in a sustainable rural lifestlye. Thus rural dissociation from wildness is both a cause and effect of its dissociation from true urbanity. Rural cultures failure to meet the challenge of true xenaphillic civility is a provincially suicidal denial of relationship and responsability, since city dwellers alienated from country life will inevitably destroy it and the wilderness as well along with,ultimately, itself.

Cities

I am well aware that, in their present forms, most cities are parasites on both the countryside and the Wilderness as are almost all suburbs. Yet it is clear to me that, unlike suburbs, cities have the possibility of becoming places of true civility, where the great diversity of human beings can be welcomed and integrated as variations on the great Theme of Individual-Personhood, where a Healthy Culture and Tree-of-Life-enabling world order must be established, and where the coming-together of the human beings with each other and even with nature must also begin to happen.

The cities I envision as the true Flowers and Fruits of our Tree of Life will ultimately be extremely different from the gross monstrosities that we call cities today, and yet it is in such places that we must begin alter the flawed "genetic information" that has thus far produced, not the Tree of Life but the pathological cultural neoplasm that we erroneously call modern "Civilization". It is in just such places, even as they are, that we must begin to dance the dance of healthy culture and true civility and share the map as well as become the guides for our eventual return home.

Trunk, Branches, Stems

Of course all of these parts must be connected to each other to allow for the flow of life between them. Such a system of transportation will necessicarily be generated--by processes of varying degrees of "formality" and scale, through the varying acts of inner and outer comming-together that constitute a living healthy culture.

In particular, I believe that liberated and restored waterways will once again function as major part of the pysical body of the Tree I am describing...

Intentional Community: a vision of healing

Like any vision of wholeness the Vision of the Tree of Life is Holographic. By this is mean that the macrocosmic vision of Global healing can be prefigured and invoked microcosmically in the structure and life of a human community and even in that of an individual human being.

For example: Imagine a rural community that also has a house--a kind community center/residence--in the city and which additionally has access to or owns (in the form of a land trust), a piece of relative wilderness. Such a circumstance already allows the integration of wilderness, countryside and city--and their corresponding and previously incomplete cultures--that i am describing as the only sustainable form of human development. The practice of Healthy Culture (healthy cosmology, identity politics, ritual, and infastructure) in the context of such a situation would manifest the Tree of Life in microcosm and would constitute a living and overwhelmingly inspiring example of the way forward for humanity in the coming centuries.

Imagine further the scenario of an addict--a drug addict, an alcoholic , or really just any ordinary alienated modern person--living in a city where the urban outreach wing of such a community can be found. Such a place would form the center of healthy cultural activism in its neighborhood and in the larger city that could function as an open door to healing for such a person, who might eventually find him or herself visiting the rural aspect of the community, with its fresh air, organic food, and meaningful work and ritual. Perhaps in such a place that person would be inspired to experience the further mental and physical detoxification of a vision quest. Surely the potential for transformation and healing is strong in such experiences when they are rightly presented and understood. And even if such a person should subsequently have to return (due perhaps to population or resource considerations) to his or her previous situation, they would still have the support of the urban branch of the community and the possibility of visiting the countryside and wilderness again and find renewal.

Such a process of integration, which would conceivably also go in another direction for those equally trapped in the incivility and "nonindigenous-ness" of small town or suburban life, would already be a presaging and exemplification of the healing that must inevitably be exponentially increased if the human race is to have a future worthy of the having.

The Tree of Life, Healthy Culture, Puntamona...and me.

Perhaps you can see now what I am getting at, by way of a proposal, with all of this. As I understand it, the situation of yourself and your community approaches that from which a microcosmos of the Tree of Life could emerge. I have presented this outline of my vision of that tree (which is both an aspect of and an effect of Healthy Culture) in the hopes of inspiring you to take advantage of this situation.

Of course what is missing from my presentation of this vision is a detailed description of the Cosmology, Identity Politics, Ritual and Infrastructure of Togetherness which constitute Healthy Culture and without which a single Tree of Life (let alone the Global Forest of such Trees that I ultimately intend) can never be, since only such culture contains (among othrer things) the "genetic information" neccessary for its unfolding. There is much (though not yet enough) about this on my web logs and there will be more. But the proper sharing, cocreation, and transmission of this culture is not really something that the internet can accomplish-even though e-mails between yourself and myself would certainly help matters. What will inevitably have to have to happen, if you become and remain interested in all this, is a non-virtual series of encounters between us which will hopefully culminate in that Culture coming alive between us as we both discuss, practice and modify it together.

Seeds

It is the Culture of Apartness, as we carry it within us and transmit it across the generations through formal and informal education, which has enabled the mutual dissociation of wilderness, country side, and the city in our minds and in our way of "life", just as its leads us to divorce subject from object, self from nature, Living from dying, and the Good from the True and the Beautiful. I feel that only healthy culture--which again is not only a cosmology, but an Identity Politics, Rituals, and an Infrastructure--can bring both the Tree and ourselves back to Life in a sustainable way.

And only the seeds of such a healthy culture (seeds that both produce are produced by such Trees of Life) are worthy (if it must happen at all) to be sown beyond our present home on earth to any other in the distant future.

Conclusion.

The lack of healthy culture has created the meaninglessness and alienation that must culminate in our permanent estrangement from wilderness, countryside, true urbanity, and from our real selves as Individual-Persons. I invite you to join with me in the project of living another possible future and of inspiring the world with the beauty, meaning and intrinsic joy in even the attempt at such a thing.

Eagerly awaiting your reply,

Sincerely

I-P Odori

Tags: human demographics, healthy culture, development, intentional comunity, wilderness, countryside, urbanism

On Health and Health Care (Illich's Manifesto with my commentary)

http://HealthyCulture.gaia.com — Sat, 30 Aug 2008 19:58:56 GMT

Hygienic Autonomy: A Manifesto {from the essay Brave New Biocracy}

By Ivan Illich

Many persons are confused today about something called "health." Experts prate knowingly about "health care systems." Some persons believe that without access to sophisticated and expensive treatments, people will be sick. Everyone worries about increasing costs. One even hears talk of a "health care crisis." I would like to say something about these matters.

First, I believe it necessary to assert the truth of the human condition: I suffer pain; I am afflicted with certain impairments; I will certainly die. Some undergo greater pain, some more debilitating disorders, but we all equally face death.

Looking around me, I see that we -- as people in other times and places -- have a great capacity to care for one another, especially in the moments of birthing, accidents and dying. Unless unbalanced by historical novelties, our households, in close cooperation with their surrounding communities, have been wonderfully hospitable, that is, generally adequate to care for the real needs of living, celebrating and dying.

In opposition to this experience, some of us today have come to believe that we desperately need packages, commodities, all under the label of "health," all designed and delivered by a system of professionalized services. Some try to convince us that an infant is born, not only helpless -- needing the loving care of household -- but also sick, requiring specialized treatment by self-certified experts. Others believe that adults routinely require various drugs and interventions in order to become old, while the dying need medical treatment.

Many have forgotten -- or are no longer able to enjoy -- those common-sense ways of living that contribute to one's well-being and ability to recover from illness. Many have allowed themselves to become dependent on a self-aggrandizing technological myth, against which they nevertheless complain, because of the impersonal ways in which it impoverishes many while enriching a few.

Sadly, I recognize that many of us are infected with a strange illusion: a person has a "right" to something called health care. Thus, one states a claim to receive the latest assortment of technological therapies, based on some professional's diagnosis, to enable one to survive longer in a situation which often ugly, injurious, or depressing or just boring.

I believe it is time to state clearly that specific situations and circumstances are "sickening," rather than that people themselves are sick. The symptoms which modern medicine attempts to treat often have little to do with the condition of our bodies; they are, rather, signals pointing to the disorders and presumptions of modern ways of working, playing and living.

Nevertheless. many of us are mesmerized by the glitter of high-tech "solutions, " we pathetically believe in"fix-it" drugs, we mistakenly think all pain is an evil to be suppressed, we seek to postpone death at almost any cost.

I appeal to the actual experience of people, to the sensibleness of the ordinary person, in direct opposition to professional diagnosis and judgment. I appeal to people's memories, in opposition to the illusions of progress. Let us look at the conditions of our households and communities, not at the quality of "health care" delivery; health is not a deliverable commodity and care does not come out of a system.

I demand certain liberties for those who would celebrate living rather than preserve "life":

* the liberty to declare myself sick;

* the liberty to refuse any and all medical treatment at any time;

* the liberty to take any drug or treatment of my own choosing;

* the liberty to be treated by the person of my choice, that is, by anyone in the community who feels called to the practice of healing, whether that person be an acupuncturist, a homeopathic physician, a neurosurgeon, an astrologer, a witch doctor or someone else;

* the liberty to die without diagnosis.

I do not believe that countries need a national "health" policy, something given to their citizens.
Rather, the latter need the courageous virtue to face certain truths:

* we will never eliminate pain;

* we will not cure all disorders;

* we will certainly die.

Therefore, as sensible creatures, we must face the fact that the pursuit of health may be a sickening disorder. There are no scientific, technological solutions. There is the daily task of accepting the fragility and contingency of the human situation. There are reasonable limits which must be placed on conventional "health" care. We urgently need to define anew what duties belong to us as persons, what pertains to our communities, what we relinquish to the state.

Yes, we suffer pain, we become ill, we die. But we also hope, laugh, celebrate; we know the joy of caring for one another; often we are healed and we recover by many means. We do not have to pursue the path of the flattening out of human experience.

I invite all to shift their gaze, their thoughts, from worrying about health care to cultivating the art of living. And, today, with equal importance, to the art of suffering, the art of dying.

IVAN ILLICH The philosopher and theologically trained historian Ivan Illich published his seminal and highly controversial study op health care, medical nemesis: The Expropriation of Health, in 1976.

In his first major essay on this subject in the nearly 20 years since Medical Nemesis Illich argues here that the modern social construction of "a life" into an abstract, disembodied and dis-integrated entity -- a "fetish" -- prepares the way for depersonalized manipulation and management of our existence from womb to tomb.

Going beyond his argument in 1976 that the medical establishment itself had become a threat to health through doctor-induced suffering, Illich here renounces as an indecent demand the very idea of "responsibility" for one's health in a sickening environment. Instead, he takes a radical leap and calls for the only "decent" alternative: hygienic autonomy from any system of health care.

COMMENTARY:

I posted the above snippet from Illich's essay here because it seemed at the time to be a good summary of my own views on the matter of Health as it relates to Health Care. After rereading though, I am not really satisfied. What I miss most in Illich's manifesto is the assertion of a positive, progressive conception of health, sickness, and of "health care. I think that such a positive though tentative formulation, is possible and that, just because it would gesture at responsibilities as well as rights, is necessary, if the needs of what I call the "Inner Adult" are to be respected.

I certainly agree that "health is not a commodity and care does not come out of a system" but to leave it at that frustrates the part of me that really cares about how to move toward real health in a way that includes the collective dimension. Illich hints at the possibility of some form of this in that p (see footnote) seems to be implicitly, almost explicitly, asking for a general (collective) dialog on the proper limits of professionalized health care, and perhaps on the meaning of health itself. Here I want to both bring out and emphasize that implied request and also try to help that dialog happen by contributing my part to it. In doing so I'll make explicit the view of health behind my own critique of the status quo and I'll also be showing another path than the one I think Illich took (Illich was an ordained Catholic Priest, while I am coming from the assumptions of what I call Healthy Culture) to reach the same (or at least a similar) clearing in what seems otherwise the dense thicket of confusion of our current conceptions of health and health care.

What follows is adapted from an essay in my other blog at integralscience.motime.com.

Medicine and Individual-Personal Health

--I-P Odori

The difference between Individual-Personal Health and the view of health implied in such conceptions as "Health Care", "Fitness", "Wellness", and various other products of mainstream and so-called Alternative medicine, is as extreme as the difference between healthy culture and sick culture generally. In a culture of apart-ness and dissociation, the vary concept of health and of wholeness--and so of "medicine", must necessarily be distorted and fragmented out of all recognition if it is to have anything but the most tenuous viability within that dominant culture. After all, any conception of health that was at all integrated would have political and economic dimensions that would inherently challenge the status quo of any society in which the alienated Individual, rather than the Individual-Person is understood as the unit.

By saying this I don't mean to single out capitalist or libertarian views as especially distorting of the concept of health or even as especially pathological manifestations of sick culture. A healthy, Individual-Personal, view of Health would be equally unwelcome in a more "socialist" or a more "traditional" society that downplayed Individualism in favor of one or another (or even all four) of the four roles that constitute the nexus of relationship and responsibility that I call "Personhood". In other words the concept of "familial health", or "local health" or "civic health" or even "religious or psychological health" would be just as dissociated oxymoronic, pernicious and pathological as that of "Individual health" if such terms are pursued in reductive isolation and understood from the dissociated point of view of sick culture.

Since, however, the dominant manifestation of sick culture in this society is more in the capitalist vain of Individual-focused dissociation (of the dissociation of the individual from the whole social nexus of that individuals' Personhood), most of the following essay will primarily address the misrepresentations of Health and Health Care that derive from this particular form of unhealthy view of health.

Firstly, from the point of view of Healthy Culture, the phrase "individual health" is an oxymoron, since it already falsely assumes our primary identity as relatively isolated, dissociated "individuals" without the inherent relationships and responsibilities of Personhood as any inherent part of the reality of who we are. Starting from such a false view, any kind of "health care", whether it came from a system or not, could not do anything but treat some obscenely diminished version of who we are; usually not even our whole selves as individuals, but only our bodies as viewed through the filter of mechanized and reductionist assumptions. The best that could be hoped for regarding any such "treatment" would be a mere prolonging of the fear and existential pain of inner and outer alienation and unconsciousness.

From any sane perspective, such a diminished view, such a diminished experience of who we are is itself a profound sickness and indeed the primary one to be "treated" for anyone with any understanding of what real health is. Since this unacknowledged sickness is usually shared equally by both the "cared for" and the "care-giver" (such labels are themselves part of the problem), what happens instead in most kinds of "health care", is that inner and outer alienation is not only not treated, but is actually reinforced in everyone involved through the alienated farce of mutual connivance and denial that constitutes the "care".

For one thing, such pseudo-care of our pseudo-selves, can only increase our fear and our alienation and repress any latent sense of community and mutuality with the whole great world of living, suffering, celebrating, killing, eating, and dying beings; with the Tree of Life which brought us in to being, which fed us with the lives and deaths of countless other Indivdual-Persons, and the roots of which we ourselves are destined to feed in our turn with our own deaths.

Of course the kind of care for ourselves and each other that stems from such a realization of who we really are, the kind that would manifest as an expression of realization, contrition, affirmation, and growth during a time of physical suffering or mortal illness, would not be something that only began on the onset of such difficulties. I can't imagine that an entire life-time of the culture of apartness, denial, anesthesia, repression, and competition is likely to be completely counteracted even by the sanest kind of care in such times of acute crisis, though I think times of crisis are times of acute opportunity as well. Our capacity to care for ourselves and each other as individual-persons, to acknowledge and learn the lesson of equality and compassion from the experience of suffering and death, to acknowledge and take up the challenge to really Live that is the gift of forknowledge death,all of this is the proper part of eveyday life and everyday culture, everyday community.

For ultimately caring for the health of ourselves and each other as Individual-Persons, has to do, not with "surviving" in inner and outer apartness, but with Living every day in a way the affirms and moves us toward the realization of ultimate inner and outer togetherness. In a sense, real living is such inner and outer care, real health is such care, and if our every day culture is not about such care, but is instead one of fear-based, technology-and-"substance"-assisted, (inner and outer) denial and apartness, then future death and suffering should really be the least of our worries.

And of course we can care for our own and each others Health in this everyday sense, that is, as a matter of every day culture, but not in some unilateral and specialized way as "medical professionals", "care givers" or "patients" or "the sick". All of these roles diminish, isolate, and keep us in denial of our essential equality as beings who are going to die, as being that suffer inwardly and outwardly from sick culture in various forms, and as beings that also have within themselves the capacity to love and learn, laugh and heal. It is only when the denial and separation that these roles imply begins to dissolve that the healing balm of true inner and outer Friendship and Belonging in the light of healthy culture can begin to effect not only our physical, but our mental, social, political/economic and ecological health in a way that opens the door to real change for the better.

In short, only healthy culture and living friendship between individual-persons constitute real Health and real Health Care. Under the present circumstances such healing can only take the form of Lapses or breaks in the assumptions, identity-politics, rituals, and infrastructure of the dominant culture of apartness. In such moments our fear-and-image-based identities and assumptions in terms of profession, class, race, species or anything else, drop away and we can perceive ourselves and each other clearly and compassionately in our paradoxical mutuality as wounded and yet also whole Individual-Persons. At such times, the appropriate gesture--the appropriate care--can then flow out of that changed perception in all directions-though probably not without some cognitive dissonance in superficially unaffected onlookers.

At any rate, without some way of understanding, talking about, and deliberately cultivating such moments of authenticity and wholeness--of true health--, they will be both few and brief; easily explained away or even perverted into the service of the sick culture that they would otherwise threaten to transform. The purpose of these blog entries, of Integral Science, of my life really, is to progressively further the creation of such moments both in myself and others, and to create and develop the situations, actions, concepts, understandings, and infrastructure, needed to both enable and sustain such moments.

As a practical answer then, to those who consider themselves in need of health Care in any way, (as well as to those who consider themselves needing to be healers in any way), I can only offer my own hospitality and equalitarian friendship in the co-creation of the kind of Healthy Culture in which, among many other things, the roles of "health care-giver and receiver, of healthy and sick, are not only unseperated but inseparable. For outside of such a culture of ego-and-faction-transcending wholeness and living compassion, I can honestly see no possibility true healing, either of ourselves, of each other, or of the world...

Welcome and Thanks,

--I-P

Tags: health, health care, healing, identity, sickness, living, dying

More Song Lyrics Old and New

http://HealthyCulture.gaia.com — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 16:59:58 GMT

I will remember my Dreams

Here in the country

I wake up in silence and alone

chasing the visions

That flee into a wildness I have known

frustrated I wonder

at the retreating scenes inside my mind

affirming in darkness

to retrieve light that darkness leaves behind

I will remember my dreams

I will remember...

Here in the city

fear walks upright in the shapes of men

screaming into the distance

between the inner and the outer alien.

says; "if dreams are like memories

what do we remember when we dream?

and what do we dream

when we remember?"

I will remember my dream

I will remember...

On a beach on an island

staring out through leaves at a throbbing sea

I cried for my vision

and I heard my vision sing for me

"you wish to awaken

to things as they are not as they seem.

are they truly awakened

who cannot remember what they dreamed?

do not wake up in silence

do not wake up in darkness and alone;

you are dreaming with others.

sing to them the vision you are shown..."

that is all I remember

do you remember more--you were there with me--

we were all dreaming together

when the sun met the moon on the shimmering sea...

We will remember our Dream

We will remember...

Touch

I've seen them kissing

in every conceivable way;

flesh of the evening

pressed close against the flesh of day

call it love or passionate lust

either way you know that they must...touch

Time just be patient

cause Space is playing coy again

both of them waiting

neither one knowing where or when

know enough or else you can trust

that they already if only just...touch

Old Good and Evil;
true virtue and the vilest sin

fight like the devil
or like the angels in the end

root for good but evil you trust

still it's odd how both of them must...touch

how can we touch now

when inwardly we're far apart?

how can our bodies minds and souls be

brought into communion with our hearts?

how can we--but somehow we must:

for us "to be" and "not to be" must...touch

The Door

(new song)

A cheerful sky

A feral cry

A glimmering of day

I'm out

And following

The paths of earth

Of mellow clay

Damp verdure smiles at me

Insouciant affection wild

The taste of plantain leaves

Deep golden inside me

A dream of Thirst

Awakens first

Then the reality

I rise

And wondering

If my life will be

A comedy

of only two and forty years

My hearts gone wild and dizzy

But my soul composedly

Smiles at the irony

Chorus:

And there's a door

Before me

I could knock or walk away

It would be so very easy

Just to stroll right past into arms of clay

Ah but oh

don't worry

There is so much left to do

And I'm only just beginning

to keep my word to you...

How strange it is

reliving all

Of someone elses life

Tableaux

Scenarios

I witness them

But only know

What I've learned to memorize

A tracing of reality
A dream, dreams disguise

Yes, a dreams disguise....

Bridge:

Glory, Quiet Glory, Glory

Sailing into shore

Meaning itself arrives reminding me

Who is Being what and what is Being for

whole lifetimes of contingency

dissolving at your door...

This moments like

A Kansas June

The sky over my head

erased

Dimensionless

A dangerous

Dark thunderhead

Of otherworldly love

Is whorling all around me

No below and no above

To fear or be unworthy of...

And there's a door

Before me

I could knock or walk away

It would be so very easy

Just to stroll right through into arms of day

Ah but oh

don't worry

There is so much left to do

And I'm only just beginning

to keep my word to you...

I-P Odori

Tags: poetry, song lyrics, mystery, longing, solitude, dreams

When is competition valuable?

http://HealthyCulture.gaia.com — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 03:22:18 GMT

I think competition is a social and psychological pathology involving a relative failure of individuation, extrinsic and relatively ego-based motivations and insecurites and many other relatively unhealthy tendencies and I can't remember ever not feeling this way though i can certainly remember not being able to the feeling into words). probably twenty or so years ago I came across a book that confirmed most of my intuitons about this whole subject. The Book is Called No Contest by Alfie Kohn and I recommend it extreemely highly. Heres a summary on the book I got onlline:

No Contest

The Case Against Competition

(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1986 / 1992)

From the Book Flap:

No Contest, which has been stirring up controversy since its publication in 1986, stands as the definitive critique of competition. Drawing from hundreds of studies, Alfie Kohn eloquently argues that our struggle to defeat each other -- at work, at school, at play, and at home -- turns all of us into losers.

Contrary to the myths with which we have been raised, Kohn shows that competition is not an inevitable part of "human nature." It does not motivate us to do our best (in fact, the reason our workplaces and schools are in trouble is that they value competitiveness instead of excellence.) Rather than building character, competition sabotages self-esteem and ruins relationships. It even warps recreation by turning the playing field into a battlefield.

No Contest makes a powerful case that "healthy competition" is a contradiction in terms. Because any win/lose arrangement is undesirable, we will have to restructure our institutions for the benefit of ourselves, our children, and our society. For this [1992] revised edition, Kohn adds a comprehensive account of how students can learn more effectively by working cooperatively in the classroom instead of struggling to be Number One. He also offers a pointed and personal afterword, assessing shifts in American thinking on competition and describing reactions to his provocative message.

What People are Saying:

"Alfie Kohn marshals the evidence that [competition] is not the mainspring of achievement in industry, the arts, education, or games."

-- Dr. Benjamin Spock

"We have been in prison from wrong teaching. By perceiving that cooperation is the answer, not competition, Alfie Kohn opens a new world of living. I am deeply indebted to him."

-- W. Edwards Deming

"Alfie Kohn's critique of the role of competition in our society is a really impressive piece of work. Challenging and thoughtful, it reaches to the heart of many problems of our social life and the ideology that constrains and distorts it."

‑‑ Noam Chomsky

"Well‑researched and sound, No Contest exposes erroneous assumptions about the inevitability and value of competition. This book...deserves our attention."

‑‑ Carl Rogers

"Superbly researched, lucidly written."

-- Los Angeles Times

Table of Contents:

1	The "Number One" Obsession
2	Is Competition Inevitable?: The Human Nature Myth
3	Is Competition More Productive?: The Rewards of Working Together
4	Is Competition More Enjoyable?: On Sports, Play, and Fun
5	Does Competition Build Character?: Psychological Considerations
6	Against Each Other: Interpersonal Considerations
7	The Logic of Playing Dirty
8	Women and Competition
9	Beyond Competition: Thoughts on Making Change
10	Learning Together
Afterword

There are a lot of good reviews of this book at Amazon.com which i was tempted to copy and paste here but it makes more since to just direct folk to them. I am feeling lazy right now or I would write my own review, adding a few more arguments against competition from a Healthy Culture perspective. Maybe I'll do that some other time. If you are intrigued and interested but would like a shorter sampling of Kohns writing on competition and similar subjects.before diving into the Book, you can find a fair amount of shorter essays and interviews at Alfiekohn.org.

--i-p

Tags: QaR, competition, competitiveness

Genderism, Sexism and Adulthood (neighbor post)

http://HealthyCulture.gaia.com — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 16:13:25 GMT

{note: I meant to do another Life-Dance check-in for this post but, as is the convention of the blog Lifedancelog.motime.com in which I started this practice, I find its often worthwhile to treat some issue in one of the five venues of Indvidual-Personhood (Family-Member, Neighbor, Citizen-of-the-World, Soul, and Individual) separately, even though the idea is to never dissociate them. To wit I have decided to make this post only a "neighbor" post and hopefully follow it with posts in each of the other venues before another synthesizing Life-Dance Post proper.}

Neighbor Post: Gender and Sex

I suppose the biggest neighborly gesture I've made since I got back from England (this itself is a long story involving a series of very unfortunate events, some of which I might go into in other parts in future check-ins) was the remarks I made at the meeting on sexism at my neighborhood of Twin Oaks intentional community. I came in somewhat late but was in time for a fishbowl discussion in which people were supposed to talk about personal experiences of sexism here at Twin Oaks. {A fish bowl discussion is one in which a few people in the middle of the room stage a conversation and are gradually replaced by members of their audience who want to have their say on the issue.}

I should say that this meeting had a facilitator, whom I know, though I am not sure what exactly was behind this person's choice of meeting structure. I have always been very much aware of the inherently non-neutral role of facilitation however, even though facilitators claim to be only neutrally serving "the Group". I mention this as this issue came up for me at the very end of the meeting.

Anyway, in the midst of what seemed to me a lot of score-keeping regarding differentials of respect, attention, local groups and institutions, etc for male-identified and female-identified people, I saw fit to get into the fishbowl (as usual in such circumstances, it would have been too excruciating for me, once I was there at all, not to say my say) and confessed to finding both male and female-identified people equally frustrating since such identity uniforms, besides being inherently competitive (competition is one of the things Twin Oakers are trying to transcend according to the Twin Oaks bylaws) such uniforms have the property of inhibiting the full expression of anyones authentic individual-personhood. I said that this was just as much a problem of people who switch gender-stereotypes (persons with testicles and penises identifying as "women" and persons without them identifying as "men") as it is with those who identify along more traditional lines...

I am glad I spoke as much as I did but, as this issue for me is much more involved then the above implies, I wish I had been able to elaborate more, and I find I can't resist taking the opportunity of this check-in to do so.

Basically my idea about "Manhood" has been that a "Man" is simply an "Adult Male Human Being". This seems uncontroversial, but the key word here for me was "Adult".

For me an "adult" is someone who has a primary interest in there being a better future in this world we live in. The idea is simply that as a person becomes physically able to reproduce themselves, that aspect of the personality that is concerned with the future; with the world in which potential children, and children's children etc, would live in (I call this part of us the "inner adult") wants to become prominent in the personality, and that when this concern becomes primary in a male then that male becomes a Man, that is an "Adult Male". In the same way, when the same transition happens to a female, that female becomes an Adult Female or "Woman".

Put so simply to myself, it was immediately obvious that this transition to adulthood was actually something which is extremely rare, and that, in a sick culture such as our own, something happens (and something else doesn't happen) usually in adolescence, which leads to some kind of inner estrangement from this adult, long-term view, so that the emegrent inner adult is either starved altogether or fed on some kind of "junk-food".

By "starving" the inner adult, I mean ignoring altogether the responsibility to take such a long view, (the taking of which involves spending ones adult life, trying to find out and put into practice that which would make a better future for posterity). Often the repression and neglect of this impulse is rationalized by pointing to the seeming hopelessness of creating such a better longterm future, so that a willfully myopic warping and narrowing of temporal vision seems justified. Such an behaviour, is not much more than a demomstration of fear, demoralization, and a general misunderstanding of what is at issue; it is an abdication of the right and responcibility to live fully, and without such fullness of life there can be no real meaning and hence no real joy. Moreover, such an abdication merely recapitulates the vary attitudes of our ancestors that both diminished their own lives and led to the diminished world we now live in.

Just as often as such myopic pseudo-realism is employed to avoid the challenge of adulthood, a kind of (hyperoptic?) pseudo-spiritual or pseudo-religious displacement is used to the same end. This sort of cop-out is employed by artfully devaluing and shifting attention away from the "merely mundane" future completely, and so overfeeding what could be called the "Inner Elder" at the Inner Adult's expense. To be sure, the Inne Elder; the part of ourselves which acknowledges "ultimate things" and is aware of the need for inner growth and transformation, needs to be "fed" just as well as the inner adult, but far from such feeding of the "soul" being contradictory to the needs of adulthood, these aspects of our selves are mutually dependant on each other, so that Adulthood that is not "soulfull" is not real adulthood and "spirituality" that is abandons the responcibilities of adulthood is not healthy spirituality at all... In neither the pseudo-realistic nor the psuedo-religious discounting of the future of this world does one sense anything implying the need for any real resistance to the inertia of whatever happens to be the current way of "life". On the contrary, both points of view are obviously contrived so as to rubber stamp the inner and outer status quo and so seem to me equally symptoms of immaturity, unconsciousness, and confusion.

There is also the trick of simply feeding the Inner Adult "junk-food" in the sense of participation in politics in the various established senses of that word. These kinds of politics are both established and permitted precisely because they are manifestations of, rather than challenges to, the dominant culture of apartness, and as such cannot in their very nature really lead to a more healthy and sustainable future. It is not that I deem it quite impossible that such things as voting in elections or joining some factional political group can be engaged in in such a way that the behavior might play some tactical part, though only as a necessary evil, in an overall strategy that would lead to Healthy Culture. The fact is that, as things are, I see no evidence that such a thing actually ever happens, and this makes me see such behavior as equally pseudo-adult in nature; more like sports, and other childish rehearsals for war (the ultimate in future-degrading behavior) then anything involving Goodwill and real adulthood.

This kind of pseudo-adulthood is, so far as I can tell, pretty ubiqitous, even in progressive movements, including the intentional community movement that I myself am a part of. Myopia is alive and well here also, sometimes accompanied by a kind of complaceny and self-rightousness which makes it even more adverse to the kind of inwardly and outwardly open attitude that is consistant with adulthood. Such an attitude is neccessary because a good faith experiment in being apart of a better future (and this is true of a good faith attempt at anything really) must obviously remain fully open to the negative feedback that alone can tell it the degree to which it is deviating from its end. Nor can any status quo be suffered to remain that inhibits or distorts such feedback or that is too institutionally and psyhologically inert and inflexible to be able to respond to it appropriately when it is recieved.

There are many ways, subtle and unsuble, to igore all of this, and many more ways to pretend that such concientious, good faith adulthood is happening when it is not. Individually the repression of feedback usually involves habitual use "Anesthesia" and distractions of various kinds; things that drown out and numb the prickings of the inner adult. Collectively this can manifest as the collusive aviodace open face to face communication, or more often, in the collusive structuring and managing of conversations (community meetings for example) so that they touch on anything but that which is the real problem, thus using the illusion of feedback and goodfaith to actually avoid the reality of these things.

Given all of this, I would have to say that I don't really consider myself to have met any Men (or Women either) in the course of my life so far; just stunted adolescents at best, even in so-called "progressive" movements. It begins to seem obvious to me that humankind has generally speaking not yet collectively "grown up" at all.

However, the paradoxical thing about this conception of Men and Women as gendered adults is that, once the inner adult is really primary in the personality, Gender itself is seen as just another identity-uniform, (like that of race, and often enough, religion), that itself facilitates the kind of competition, self-betrayal, and power-over tendencies that threaten the collective and individual future. Such adult persons are therefore likely to be the first to see and agree that gender roles need to be replaced with an identity politics that emphasizes, what is shared rather then what is not, including shared and common responsibilities as well as "rights". In other words it is the True Men and True Women who, because they are true "Adults", will be the First to respond to the necessity of transcending gender-uniforms altogether in the affirmation of something like the "us and us" identity-politics of what I am calling Individual-Personhood. From this point of view, Manhood and Womanhood might be seen as brief phases of identity and thus as part of a natural transition from that of the adolescent male or female to that of the adult Individual-Person; a stage of the transition that most people have not reached at all.

Ultimately however, although there is definately something to all of the above, such a conclusion would still reify the abstraction of gender roles in a way that could exclude or confuse, for example, individuals born with both sets of sexual organs. In such a case, gendered thinking would seem to require some kind of choice, as though genitals of either this or that kind were somehow necessary to be an Adult. Since the door to Individual-Personhood is really Adulthood, and since this Adulthood is completely independent of ones genitalia, (independent really even of whether one has any functioning genitalia at all; since I am quite sure that promptings of the inner adult kick-in at a certain age regardless of this), it makes more sense really, that the transition from adolescence to adulthood not be seen to essentially involve conceptions of gender at all, however much they do need to involve some understanding of the healing and responsible use of ones specific genitalia, and sexual energy in general (among many other things).

I want to be clear here that, though the Adulthood I am speaking of is an absolutely necessary aspect of individual-personhood, I do not mean to imply that a healthy individual-person must be functioning exclusively from that place anymore than healthy eyes must always be rigidly fixed on the horizon. On the contrary, for proper seeing the eyes must be free to focus on the near and the far; on the near in relation to the far and vis versa. They must also be free to blink; and in dreaming, to turn inward. In the same way the healthy functioning of an individual-person implies not only a healthy inner adult (mind or thinking-function), but a healthy inner child ((heart/emotions), inner animal (body/sensations), and inner elder (soul/intuition) as well, so that the general dynamic is one in which considerations of the future are coordinated with those of the past, present, and eternity as well. Healthy Individual-Persons can be very "childlike" for example, but this behavior is "childlike" rather than "childish" precisely because it ornaments and augments the persons healthy adult function rather than detracting from it.

Continuing such a metaphore, one can say that the healthy individual is like a relatively "happy" family in which the inner child, (heart/emotions) inner animal (body/sensations), inner elder (soul, intuition) and the inner adult (mind, thinking) are all being fed as well as possible and are involved in each others healing so that to neglect one member is to harm the whole. Those focusing on the future to the exclusion of (rather then in coordination with) the past, present, and eternity are demonstrating, not healthy adulthood, but some version of the kind of Hyperopsis I alluded to earlier.

And, of course, as always, its necessary to apply good sense and life-logic to this whole understanding. The "healthy individual-person" is a kind of ideal type after all. I should probably have written "the healing individual-person" or even just "those who are conscious of their individual-personhood", since those ways of saying it seem to make more room for the truth that, since we all suffer (probably almost constantly, though in varying degrees of intensity), from the stunting and alienating imprint of the default culture of apartness and fear that we were all "initiated" into, being an "healthy individual-person" means being aware of being "sick" or "wounded" individual-person" as well, and so being willing and able to acknowledge our sick imprinting and, when they happen, the lapses in integrity that derive from that. This willingness and ability is a part of that coming-together of "soulfulness" and "adulthood" that I alluded to earlier, and is in fact, a major part of the work of inner and outer healing as an individual-person, which has nothing at all to do with keeping ups some kind of image of perfection or "righteousness".

Anyway, I couldn't say all of that at the meeting I went to, so I had to be content to limit what I said to what I related at the beginning of this check-in. Still, I think my even saying that little was pretty challenging to probably most of the people there, though, as usual, it doesn't seem to have been enough to counter the prevailing trend toward what seems to me to be essentially immature and childish (however understandable) factional identity-politics. It even seems likely that a "men's group", such as there have been here in the past will evolve out of the meeting so as to be "equal" to the women's groups that exist here. I would not have anything against such groups if they functioned as crutches are supposed to function; namely as tools to eventually be transcended as those using them gradually learn to stand and walk upright as each individual-persons in their own right, but that does not seem to be the intention at all. Besides, as I have already suggested, it would be better to call any such group devoted to human maturity an "Adult Group", which could certainly be "coed", though individuals might occasionally divide along "genital" (rather then "gendered") lines, to talk about genital-specific things such as prostate cancer, yeast infections, pregnancy etc...though even here I don't see any reason to keep such information separate from individuals with different genitalia, sharing such knowledge and concerns without regard to gender could only enhance general understanding and compassion anyway, so far as I can see. After all, no individual with prostate cancer, morning sickness, or hot flashes responds to it in exactly the same way anyway, and approaching such events with gendered prejudice seems to me more likely to obscure (or lead to the repression of) important individually relevant details rather than to there expression.

In general, my attendance at meetings here has not been so good as I would like, though I try to befriend (listen to, support, and challenge) my neighborhood in other ways. As I said above, neighborliness is only one aspect of Individual-personhood, and it would not do to focus on it to the exclusion of other responsibilities except perhaps in a special emergency or as a response to a strong inner-consensus/inspiration that such a focus is imperative in a specific situation. Still, I think I there is room for challenging myself right now to find out some more regular and conscious way to be a Friend and good neighbor in my neighborhood (though this might get me in more trouble) and am making a few experiments in this direction, even though I don't think I'm doing too bad right now under the present circumstances.

Welcome and Thanks,

I-P

Tags: gender, sexism, adulthood

Sample Life-Dance Post

http://HealthyCulture.gaia.com — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 13:33:43 GMT

{note: so this is a sample Life-Dance post from my "lifedancelog.motime.com blog. The Idea is to check-in in each of the 5 major venues of my Life-Dance as an Individual-Person (Individual, Neighbour, Citizen-of-the-World, Family-member, and "Soul"), both to encourage myself in trying to live up to that identity-politics and to share with others the ups and downs of what it means to be trying to do this. There is too much theory behind it to go into here but I should probably say that the words "listening", "support", and "challenge" represent the 3 main aspects of Living Friendship, and I mention one or more of these in each of the 5 areas of my check-in as a kind of short hand to myself and my Friends as to what kind of friendship energy I feel is appropriate in that area of my Life and that time. Anyway, although I am always thinking in these terms, I have definitely been slacking in making posts in this form online. I still don't know whether or not I'll start back up any time soon, but I thought I would transplant my last such entry here (since I seem to visit this profile so much more anyway). Maybe, in the coming year seeing it here will inspire me to take up this practice again...--I-P}

Life-Dance Post (3/14/07)

Well I have been somewhat remiss about this part of my blog experiment. I have a few posts in progress but I can't seem to finish any of them. Today is my Death Day Eve, the day before my annual Vision Dance (see posts from a year or so ago) though, and since I traditionally do some kind of check-in, as well as a life-dance party and life-dance walk on the day before my death day, I thought I would do my check-in online.

Individual: A Living-Friendship beckons from England (I hope). Maybe we have a rendezvous, a Life-Dance date. It is challenging; we are very different in many ways; we haven't met in person; we correspond and plan to meet. There is love, (some kind of love) and very much affection. She has read my blogs; I don't think there is much in the way of big secrets between us. It seems fortuitous as I have just given myself a refresher course of the practice of Taoist Sacred Sexuality (I intend to post something about my ups and downs with this soon) and she is game for this kind of thing; She seems game for the whole adventure of these blogs describe and point to. Amazing. We will see. I am not being so credulous about it as I sound but at a certain point, I would be willing to take the chance. Even if it's not too good to me true, it will certainly be a real (possibly even harrowing) adventure. Heroic just to think about it really (comic-heroic-which is good) considering the odds that are against us. Listening.

As I said, Vision Dance tomorrow. We've been having lovely weather and I am looking forward to it. Besides the DVD's about healing love, I have been collecting and practicing from lot of Mantak Chia Taoist chi gung DVDS. They are very helpful.

Neighbor: A week or so ago, at a community meeting called "What are we doing Here", I felt moved to question whether we have the right to be here at all. I mentioned the Monacan Indians who originally lived on this land, some 1400 of whom still "live" near Lynchburg Virginia. I conjectured outloud how, from their point of view, the history of this land would be a story in which one bunch of arrogant white people chased them from their land, taking the land for themselves and making up a bunch of (mostly self serving) rules, and then much later, another bunch of arrogant mostly white people (and a few "black white people") ,more or less piggy-backing on the violence, theft, and systems of coercion of the 1st group, claimed the land (with just as little Right) and made up a different set of mostly self-serving rules (this latter group being the founders and most of the subsequent members of Twin Oaks). At no point did anyone call the original inhabitants back to ask them anything about anything even though they, (more because they lived more lightly and wisely on the land than because they were here first) have more of a right to be here than anyone who has lived here since.

I suppose I was bordering on Factional Identity politics (my inner Malcolm X--or maybe it was my inner Techumsah if I can claim to have one--might have surfaced a little), but factional identity was involved in the whole thing anyway by implication (us "Twin Oakers", vs. the world) and it seemed to me that even in those kind of terms, we were not thinking very clearly. I actually wanted to add outright, (rather than just imply), that, unless might is right, (in which case rapists have the right to rape their victims, child abusers have the right to abuse children etc...) we really have no right be here. Certainly a "might is right" justification for our being here (and for excluding certain others from being here) would be more than a little problematic for a non-violent community to hold, even if it wasn't obviously bullshit any other point of view as well. Of course, once objecting voices are forcibly excluded by the membership process (or just ignored if, as in my case, one happens to get pass that) it is relatively easy to come up with a bunch of rationalizations, justifications, and excuses for our being here--even to the point of smug complacency. Such excuses, however essentially fallacious, are certainly not going to be challenged by most of the members of the very in-group that benefits (or rather; that thinks it benefits) from the very status quo in question. All so called "power" is like that and can almost be defined by the ability to not have to listen to or respect, or come to any kind of terms of mutuality with, someone else (whether they be indigenous people, the poor, or any other group) usually because they can be (and are being) forcibly excluded (whether directly or indirectly) from any conversation that matters.

I suppose the remarks I did make were probably inspired by my feeling about "our" (in my opinion basically irresponsible) decision to expand our Tofu Business when, among other equally important things, we don't even take enough care of the waste produced by our present level of production. For many reasons, I think it will we bad for both the land and the culture here even if (and in part even because) it will lead to us making more money (as it probably will). That issue was probably some part of my motivation for saying what I did, but mostly it was a general and ongoing frustration with what seems peoples determination to make the world safe for there own neuroses, and avoid the challenge of even trying to get Twin Oaks to actually live up to even one of the adjectives it uses to describe itself.

Anyway, I don't want to just rant and I really don't (usually) indulge in negative feelings towards people here; they don't suffer from sick culture any more (or less) than the average person, and I know that I am just suffering from my own sick culture when I judge them/us more harshly than anyone else. They/We aren't fundamentally "Twin Oakers" anyway, or even people of this or that race, class, gender, or even species (although I am sure most of them would not agree with this--which is part of the problem), just Individual-Persons suffering from sick culture like everybody else. Besides, judging and frowning at people all the time just feels too bad and takes up too much energy for which I have better uses. Its just really sad and lame situation that's all.

Having said all of that though, I don't want to give the impression that I am either complacent or hopeless, whether about the situation here or about that of so-called intentional community in general (though it's true that all the communities I have experience of seem to suffer, among other things, from this same collusion, presumption, and denial regarding the unacknowledged "might-is-right" implications of private property whether collectively held or otherwise), so anyone serious about co-creating a community of real Life, healthy culture, and real inner and outer healing, please get in touch with me. (more on this in another place).

Anyway, having said what I did say at the meeting, I doubt my comments will have any more lasting effect on the course of events here than your average political protest in the world outside of here. I have gotten a few negative looks and even some positive affirmation but I'd be crazy to think it will lead to anything. Still, as long as this is my neighborhood (I am never sure how much longer that will be) it feels good to at least be able to make, even a slightly distorted gesture at the truth of what's happening in it; It makes me feel more alive being here...listening...support...

Citizen of the World: I have been going into town weekly but since BtTV ("Better Than Television", a volunteer community center) closed, I haven't been moved to volunteer for anything and so haven't really been having many interactions with folks. Still, things are happening just on the energetic level of dealing with and not succumbing to the pervasive alienation and vanity of this kind of environment. Now that it's spring I would like to start back doing more formal rather than less formal life-dance parties and Music Liberation Front stuff there. I have also been trying to get Healthy Culture Groups started on MySpace and Tribe.net, but not really very hard. Those groups are pretty much languishing...support. I have already told a little about my encounter and incipient life-dance with the person from England, we seem to be pretty much on the same page as citizens of the world but--I am tying to establish a habit or willingness to express and explore disagreements on this, (and every other) score--even if this threatens to provoke a change, re-assessment and even a reconsideration of what we plan to do together. I think I could to this more tactfully, and considering the great hopes, longing and affection I feel for this person as a Life-Dance partner, it may seem crazy to do it at all, but, the increased willingness to take such risks in the name of an Authentic Living Friendship is one of the only things that make such friendship really alive, and different from the collusive and fear-maintained and relatively stagnant state of affairs usually called a "relationship". I am learning to be less unnecessarily intense, concentrated and blunt about such things though. Listening...

Soul: Still just doing research exploring different religions, finding differences and similarities with the cosmology and ritual of Integral Science. I'm learning a lot but I need to challenge my self to more in this area experientially. It occurs to me to try to correspond with people, perhaps relatively open-minded people in the main religions and also minor ones and in science, (probably best in sequence rather than concurrently! Haven't made a post to an interfaith group in a while...

Family-Member: Nothing really new here except slacking on my part so far as Life-dance Parties go. I intend to do one here after this post because of Death Day and just to see how it feels and if I might want to try some other kind of ritual here) We've had another house meeting here since my last familial post about where I live now, but I didn't see fit to go to it, not really knowing what I would say about the state of familial culture here and not wanting to just discuss peripheral things and not central ones. I regret not going a little and for the next meeting I intend to put Healthy Culture on the list of agenda items and attend and say...something...support. As for my family of birth, my older sister got in touch with me briefly about sending me something in the mail, but only by e-mail, and I didn't take the opportunity to pursue anything else or deeper online. I still intend to call or write my younger sister and my mom sometime this spring...

Thanks and Welcome

Tags: identity, ritual, check-in, Individual-Personhood

Sick and Healthy Economies

http://HealthyCulture.gaia.com — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 13:36:43 GMT

Money As Debt

Healthy Economies

So this is a part of a discussion I started a while back in a progressive economics group that I thought I would repost here. At some point I intend to make explicit the relevance of what follows to the economic situation described in Paul Grignon's video cartoon. For now I'll just let both things stand as things to think about in themselves…--I-P

{note: what follows is a slightly modified copy of an article of mine that appeared in Communities Magazine in 2003. It is an extreemly edited and almost over simplified version of what I originally submitted, but still serves to gesture toward the different and more qualtitative and integrated way of thinking about economics that I would like to share with you , so I reproduce it here. The more complex and detailed and unedited version of the same essay is in the archives of my blog integralscience.motime.com (august 2004). Though my evaluation in this case is of the economy of a specific intentional community, i believe that the concepts and understanding involved are valid in general–I-P}

A Twin Oaker Considers Healthy and Unhealthy Economies

By I-P Odori

These excerpts are taken from an open letter to Twin Oaks community in April, 2003. 812 words

"Mal-employment, Malproduction, Malconsumption, and Maldistribution. These are the cardinal points of an unhealthy economy. Where any one of these can be found I contend that the others can be found also. Let's take the old plantation economy, for example. In order to supply an overseas population addicted to tobacco (Malconsumption), the institution of slavery and slave holding (Mal-employment), supported by unsustainable farming practices (Malproduction), maintained a regime of social and economic injustice (Maldistribution) inherited from Europe.

Of course this misery of slavery (and slave holding) required some sort of anesthesia to be tolerable and this, in various forms (whiskey, sugar, etc.) was usually malproduced by some other mal-employed and miserable people—or perhaps by the same ones. This enabled them to continue to malproduce their major cash crop of tobacco to be malconsumed as anesthesia for the miserable and mal-employed rich and poor overseas and so on.

I believe that it was possible at that time to end that vicious circle and lose-lose dynamic by sufficiently transforming even one of these four aspects.

For example, show me a sustainable and appropriately scaled agriculture that is really healing and restorative to the land (Good Production), and I'll show you a bunch of happy and diversely occupied growers who are themselves being restored by what they are doing and how they are doing it (Good Employment). And because the healing nature of their work (not only as "farmers" but as whole Individual-Persons) is a gift to themselves as well as to the land, these people will have less and less need for anesthesia of any kind (Good Consumption) and will have the time and energy and inclination to give both of and to themselves and of and to each other in other ways (Good Distribution).

What does his have to do with Twin Oaks? I think our labor system is, in many ways, among the most progressive of such systems of any community in the world. And yet the Mal-employment involved in making hammocks is obvious by the ubiquitous presence in the hammock shop and woodworking shop of malproduced and anesthetic "enticements" (coffee, sodas, "canned" entertainment) that seem to be necessary in order to get people to work sufficiently long labor shifts. And is it just a coincidence that the hammocks themselves are in many cases made of unsustainably produced, potentially toxic and non-biodegradable glues and polypropylene materials?

Another sign of Mal-employment here is the exclusive use of the hour quota system to monitor only "under work" and not overwork. I'm sure that most of us really do care, more than the average corporate employer, whether we work each other and ourselves to mental or physical sickness, but our formal work culture does not affirm or validate this. And we certainly seem to be willing to put ourselves and each other through much stress to maintain a standard of "living" that amounts to not much more than the availability of gadgets and substances which we would neither need nor want if we were better and more sustainably employed.

And in a real sense, even sustainable employment in a sustainable economy is not enough. Just as extreme soil erosion can only be successfully countered by actually creating soil (for example, by composting) rather than by just slowing down the erosion process, a degenerative economy can only be successfully countered by a regenerative one. The progressive erosion of our economy and culture is a reality which makes any work activities which aren't regenerative ultimately not even sustainable. And of course a cardinal aspect of a regenerative economy is regenerative or Good Employment.

What I believe we really do need for a regenerative economy at Twin Oaks, for Good Employment, is a system that rewards the good work of healing ourselves, each other, and the world around us.

Beginning this work of healing and mutuality would mean giving ourselves the gift of a labor credit system that validates and encourages us to realize our whole personhood as good community extended family members, good community neighbors, good citizens of our wider area, and good souls. Such a regenerative labor system would reflect the paradox that a healthy Twin Oaks can only be one that facilitates the integrity and wholeness of ourselves as individuals, as households, as a community, and as a network of communities (the Federation of Egalitarian Communities.) Such a gift of healing—to ourselves, each other, and the world—is already the Good Distribution which is consistent with Good Consumption, Good Production, and Good Employment, and consistent with an economy of mutuality rather than one of parasitism.

I-P Odori has lived at Twin Oaks community in Virginia since Feb. 2002,He is a visionary philosopher and autodidact. He comes to Twin Oaks after living for 2 years in a raw food permaculture homestead on the big island of Hawaii. His primary interests are Integral Science (a sustainable and healthy alternative to the dominant scientific and cultural paradigm) and the Life-Dance, which is its primary experiment. He facilitates a cultural pilot project called "the Life-Dance Party " at Twin Oaks once a week."

end of article.

Re: Healthy Economy
Bill said Jun 29, 10:36 AM:

Kind of a nice article. Altho I notice that you don't really propose how a healthier economy for a community like Twin Oaks or any other community would work.

Or more importantly, how the transformation to a less "monocultured" economy could be started and carried out.

It's kind of like a miniature of the larger economic problem that 'deep economy' describes.

Re: Healthy Economy
I-P said Jun 30, 2:41 AM:

"Survival makes a good servant but a very poor master".

"When anesthesia is the primary commodity, pain is the primary reality."

–some integral science proverbs

Hi Bill, your comment is certainly appropriate for this (as I say) heavily edited article. It is somewhat difficult to explain the details of my prescription without, on the one hand going more into the Theory of Healthy Culture (it would be helpful to read my profile for a brief overview of this), and on the other hand, into the details of how Twin Oaks works. There is a little more of both of these in the original version of this essay, which is on my Blog.

In terms of Twin Oaks organization; there is a Labor system and a Labor quota of 40 or so hours a weak. The work that is "Labor creditable" is pretty much exclusively what I would call "the work of surviving": of making money in one of the businesses or maintaining the Farm in various ways. From my point of view, there is also the work of Living, which is the work of "coming-together inwardly and outwardly as what I call an Individual-Person, that is; in terms of the relationships and responsibilities inherent in everyone existence as a family-member, neighbor, citizen-of-the-world, "soul", and Individual.

For example, the work of regularly coming-together as neighbors (in this case perhaps taking the community as a whole as the 'neighborhood") to check-in, discuss and work through disagreement so that real cooperation is possible), this should be understood as being part of the work of Living as it manifests from the point of view of ourselves as neighbors. As such it should be "Labor creditable" as well.

The same could be said with experiments in coming-together with others outwardly as Family-members, Citizens-of-the-world, "Souls" (and here i just mean in terms of "ultimate things"), and also, with experiments in coming-together inwardly as an Individual (which could involve anything from "Chi Gung", to Therapy, to a Vision Quest). I am saying tthat all of this isb part of the work of Living; the work that gives meaning and so joy, to existence, and I'm saying that, when this work is primary and the work of surviving is secondary, then that survival work will inevitably change both in quantity and quality in a direction that is more healthy, sustainable, and sane.

Within the system of twin oaks, making such work primary would involve us agreeing to a Quota of the "work of Living", in the same way (though to a greater degree) that we agree to a quota of the "work of surviving". Working out and consensing on the details of what this work of Living is to be for each of us would be something that would take place at the regular community meetings, attendance at which would be itself part of that work of Living Quota. (the details of how this could be done would require even more about twin oaks labor system to understand, so i will forbear). suffice to say that the idea is that the dynamic of such a system would be one of cultural and economic "composting" rather than the "erosion" that happens other wise.

As things stand however, with the work of survival being primary (which it is at twin oaks as everywhere else), what happens is that that which is intrinsically meaningful has to try to fit into the ever-decreasing spaces left by that which is essentially fear-based in its motivation and so relatively meaningless (the spaces are ever-decreasing because there is no end to space and time encroachments of "growth" and keeping up with the ever-advancing "competition") . People can't help but feel the pain of this meaningless stress, and so the need to consume "anesthesia" to numb and distract from this pain is what engenders the Malconsumption that distorts and bloats the economy. Maldistribution of both this anesthesia and of legitimate products comes in at the same time since the anesthesia of malconsumtion becomes addictive and its differential distribution becomes an essential "motivator" ("carrot") for production while the threat of its deprivation (as well as that of essentials) becomes an equally essential "stick", to the same end. The Production in question has of course at the same time become Malproduction since it is now being directed not by good will (either toward, the individuals, the land, the community, or the world beyond it) but by the imperatives of fear and Malconsumptive Addiction.

This vicious circle of malconsuptive, addictive "Demand" existing mostly to numb the very pains of mal-employment inherent in the mal-production and maldistribution of the "Supplies" demanded, is the essence of the lose-lose "economic erosion" that I believe the sort of thing I am proposing can not only halt but reverse in a process that would analogously be called "economic composting".

But it is a mistake for me to have limited this discussion to the subject of economics (a difficult one not to make since that is the focus of this group); Nether a full understanding of, nor a successful issue to, the experiment I am proposing can be had without the understanding that economics as just one aspect of Culture in general (and in the case of the dominant economy, as just one aspect of the culture of apartness, in particular) and that the changes from sick to healthy economy that I am advocating cannot be sustainably made accept as a part of the general shift from the Culture or Apartness to Healthy Culture.

Tags: Economics

Is beauty truth? (Or truth beauty?)

http://HealthyCulture.gaia.com — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 22:43:43 GMT

Hello everyone,

is beauty truth (or truth beauty)

Well...Yes! to me a thing is True (with a capital T anyway) only to the extent that it is also Beautiful, and also Good (which means that it is an "ethically appropriate" conception/expression under the circumstances) Likewise I believe that a thing is Beautiful precisely to the extent that it partakes of and reflects Truth and Goodness ("ethical appropriateness). And lastly I think that a good sign that an act or gesture is Good is the extent to which it is a Beautiful act in the context of what is "ultimately" True. So these three things are kind of a trinity for me (a tetrad really, though I'll stick with the trinity here since since I kind of vacillate on which of a few things would be the forth term.)

Needless to say, there are a lot of things that might be considerd beautiful these days which from this point of view are merely "hypnotic" or worse. Actually from this point of view a lot of "Art" can be understood as an attempt (an intrinsically ugly but usually unconsious attempt) to dissociate Beauty from Goodness and Truth so as to make it a viable commodity in a sick culture. True Beauty in such a culture as is dominant today might even involve some illegality since, being also Good and reflective of Truth, it's creation would be seen to constitute a serious challenge to the status quo.

I am into music and song a lot these days so I think of that. Which is more beautiful? the loud off-key singing of songs once secretly sung in defiance of the tyranny of Mao's regime by two old chinese friends reunited after more than 40 years, their voices full of genuine affection, sorrow, and celebration of the miraculous survival, not only of each other but of each others Spirit and Good Will, or the pitch-perfect ornamentation of some Verdi aria in a concert hall? If the context of each of these events is not artifically narrowed and flattened in a dissociated manner ,the former should,in all likelihood, be considered the more beautiful music, though probably not so beautiful as it would have been 35 years ago. moveover, I think this difference in beauty is even something I should, with practice, be able to hear, and hear even if i was not aware of the context around the events...

Anyway I think that, by the same token that true Beauty is in danger of being replaced by "Art", so I think most science and philosophy can be seen as unfortunate results of the devils bargain of conceptually dissociatingTruth from Beauty and Goodness so as to secure some illusory "domination" and "control" of some equally dissociated conception of "Nature". I Certainly don't think that vivasection and suchlike practices could exist in science if the Truth that science proposed to be seeking was such an Integrative Truth as I am suggesting is Truth, nor would I expect so much of the eggregious usurpations of the results of supposedly "value-free" and "pure" research by corporate and other enitities, for purposes quite clearly evincing, not only bad taste but ill will...

I think a lot of "religion" and "spirituality" suffer from the same alienated dissociation...this is where I would venture to add the Idea of "Life" or "Living Spirit" as the fourth element of what I said i thought of more as a tetrad than a trinity. Since, when the Spirit is gone from a given formulation of "Truth", because that formulation ceases to be ethically appropriate "Good" under the circumstances, then the physical expressions of that no longer Living "Truth" cease to be "Beautiful" (Beauty is also, somehow "Living Beauty"), and the "Truth", having lost its Living Spirit is no longer the Truth...

I think that in "the west" the percieved separation and sometimes dissociation of "Truth-Goodness-Beauty-Life" seemed to hit its stride with plato's (and others) dissociation of Truth from Goodness and Beauty. Plato says somewhere: "there is Truth, Goodness and Beauty: but the Greatest of these is Truth" (I have a sense that most "Sophists" would not have agreed with this, having probably had a somewhat less dissociated view of such things). Later this already dissociated "Truth"--which for Plato was a supremely subjective (I would say "hyper-subjective) "idea"--later became rather hyper-objectified (with aristotle and subsequent "science"), as the sum of all objective "facts". Anyway I think the whole dissociation was a misperception and bad idea in the first place which probably came from folks spending too much time in cities (hyper-specialization and relatively dissociated life-styles going along with hyper-specialized and relatively dissociated forms of thought...)

I don't have the time to elaborate more on all of this right now but in my Blog there is a post called "Life-Logic" that elaborates somewhat...

take care,

I-P

post script:

I have considered calling the quality or manifestation that is both the source of this Truth-Goodness-Beauty-Life, and the singular manefistation of which these four qualities are different facets, by the term "Virtue". In the past I have rejected this word because of its historically gendered associations ("virtue" among the ancient Greeks meant something akin to the essense of masculinity, while--oddly enough-- it later came to mean something like the essense of "in tact" femininity). However, I think the word has probably also always had a non-gendered sense as well (for instance it is commonly used to translate the term "Te" the "Tao Te Ching", ) so maybe, by now, its alright to use that word "Virtue" in the "Te" sense, to decribe, in one word, the quintessential essence of Truth-Goodness-Beauty-Life in actual manifestation.

If so than, for the most part, I think the history of "education", both formal and informal, can often be fairly well described as little else but the transmission of a sick culture in which the next generation is intimidated into trading this inherent integral, four-fold, Individual-Personal Virtue(without even being fully conscious of its existence) for the (relatively speaking) fools gold of "achievement" within the dissociated and rootless, and intrinsically meaningless world of "facts", specialized fields, "Professions", "procedures" and"training".

All of which goes a long way in explaining why things are the way they are...

Tags: QaR, truth, beauty

goodsense and the meaning of life

http://HealthyCulture.gaia.com — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 10:44:06 GMT

GOOD SENSE AND THE MEANING OF LIFE
© 2008 by I-P Odori (aka Kevin Thompson)

THE MEANING OF LIFE

Whether or not we choose to accept it, we are all Philosophers and have some working hypothesis regarding the Meaning of Life that, however unconsciously, guides our actions. To regard Life as "meaningless" is as much a philosophical and even religious position as any other on the subject. To say that the question is unimportant is to make a value judgment that is guided by some conception of Truth, importance, reality, and meaning. Perhaps we avoid going into the matter because of the dread that our working answers to such questions of ultimate meaning are not substantial or sturdy enough to withstand much scrutiny and that the real Truth about the matter (which we all think we "know" at some level) is unbearable. And perhaps some eschew or abandon conscious inquiry because an intuitive despair of finding an answer that would make any difference or do any good. But, as we will see, what I am calling Integral Science, involves a theory as to this question of the Meaning of Life that is not only intuitively, emotionally, and empirically obvious, but surprisingly has much potential for making a difference and doing some good.

"WHOLESTHESIA"

"When the shoes fit, the foot is forgotten; when the belt fits, the belly is forgotten". The essence of this observation by the Taoist sage Chang Tzu, when translated into the cognitive idiom of the West, is the concept of "Wholesthesia" or the relative silence of health. As with the shoes and the belt, so with a well "fitting" or functioning organ, muscle, or cell in a living human being. The conscious awareness or sensation of any such parts of ourselves is usually (though not always) a sign of some relative problem or malfunction in that area, whereas fullness of function in them might be described as a kind of silence. All of this is a fact or every day experience.

Why not call this state of affairs "Homeostasis" as modern medicine does, and drop the neologism? Because the concept of "Wholesthesia" points up, in its logical implications, profound and until now, collectively unconscious truths that the other terminology obscures. The word "wholesthesia", which has the etymological meaning of "complete" ("holos") sense perception ("aesthetikos") reveals, like some proof of socio-psychoanalysis, the Freudian –or perhaps I should say "Jungian"—slip of our collective unconscious involved in the currency and use of word "anesthesia". This word has the etymological meaning of "without" ("an") "sense perception" and relates to what might be called the "relative silence of sickness." This is because the lack of feedback involved is, far from being a sign of health, usually a suppression of information to the contrary.

What can we make of these concepts and how can we relate these two phenomena? Well, in modern medicine there is the recognized (though of course dreaded) progression of local anesthesia to general anesthesia, possibly leading to coma and even to death as numbness and the chemical inducing it, is made or mistakenly allowed to effect progressively deeper levels of the organism. This, of course, is a dynamic of disintegration.

It is possible though, through recourse to the "opposing" concept of Wholesthesia, to map out a dynamic or process of integration in the opposite direction through a kind of inverse analogy:

The phrase "Local Wholesthesia," to begin this analogy, is meant to describe the relative silence of health, as it exists in all of us, as described above, in those local and relatively circumscribable areas of our bodies of which we are relatively unconscious. A relatively healthy liver, for example.

From local wholesthesia we can infer the possibility of "General Wholesthesia". This refers to a general state of physical "Lightness" and effortless functioning that begins to involve the whole of the physical organism in a more inclusive way. To be sure, the experience of this rare state, in comparison to its predecessor of less than healthy functioning, will be very noticeable at first. However this awareness and appreciation is upheld more by memory and imagination, and by its altenations with local Wholesthesia, than by any essentially "positive" quality of the state of being itself, and my be expected to pass after a given time.

Just as the application of General Anesthesia can go awry, so that the patient in an operation slips into coma or "sleep", so can the state of General Wholesthesia, as it penetrates more deeply into the nervous system, lead to what may be called "Phenomenesthesia" or "Awakening." I infer this state to be a sense of the totality of phenomena from a center, which has ceased to be the relatively unconscious one of the ego-body and to have become the relatively conscious one of the Soul-Body. I write Soul-"Body", in order to suggest that, to the same extent that the true personality or soul of the individual is now relatively awakened, transcending and changing the nature of the ego, so too has his or her physical body been transcended and changed in nature. As the ego is to Soul and Soul is to Self so the body, is to "Body" and this more inhabited "Body" is to Nature. And the reverse is true as well, so that alienation of the physical body from Nature is symptomatic of a corresponding unconscious alienation of ego from Self, with the loss or sleep of Soul-Body that this implies. Since I am as yet at a loss as to what else to call the physical aspect of the soul, which is at this point no longer any more only a "body" than the Soul is the same as the ego, (nor is it quite "Nature" with a capital "N" --the Nature that is really SelfNature), I speak of "Soul-Body" with a Capital "B". In all three cases (that of ego-body of Soul-Body and of SelfNature), I choose the unity/duality of the nomenclature in an attempt to be more accurate or at least more appropriate to our time and Idiom.{see also footnote}

But to extending our inverse analogy; the chief difference between coma and Death is that coma is a possibly reversible state of affairs whereas Death—at least usually—is not. Precisely the same distinction can be made between Phenomenesthesia ("Awakening") and Numinesthesia (or "Life"). The experience of awakening can be temporary. The individual may fall back into a closed egoic-personality state and forget his or her Soul-Nature almost completely. But the conscious experience of Life is understood as an abiding sense of the Numinous "Whatness" of Being that is somehow permanent and irreversible. To be alive is to be in the presence of The Ultimate, The Holy, in a conscious way. A state of mystical awareness is being experienced by the soul that is paradoxically consistent with the limitations of everyday life. This is to Live out of in ones Soul-Body.

And does the process end there? The state of conscious awareness of Spirit, of the Presence of "God" is not the same as a sense of Union with that Presence. Soul-nature is not the same as Self-Nature and even this is not quite Freedom. In this manifestation of SelfNature, both the body and the soul are presumably fully inhabited/transcended and so can manifest that which is purely Self and so also Purely Nature and which is the individuation of the Tao, the Great Mystery, The sense of union with Spirit that is Freedom transcends even the Whatness of existence and nonexistence. Freedom is arbitrarily predicable and it is unpredictable and yet Freedom and Life are the "strange attractors" and final cause of all evolution and of the world itself. And to say even this about it is perhaps to say too much.

To summarize so far: just as there is a progression from local Anesthesia, to General Anesthesia, to Coma, to Death, so also is there a progression from Local Wholesthesia to General Wholesthesia to Awakening (Phenomenesthesia) to Life (Numinesthesia). And beyond (as well as within) all this there is Freedom as something like as sense of union with the immanent/transcendent final cause and ultimate source of all of the above. To experience mostly only ego-body is to be only unconsciously aware of all of this. To be in any given moment consciously aware of all of this is to be, relatively speaking, in ones awakened or Soul-Body. To be stabilized in this Soul-Body is to be Alive. To progress in ones Soul-Body is to progressively realize (or be realized by) SelfNature, which is the manifestation in an Individual-Person of Freedom itself.

GOOD SENSE

In the light of all this we might regard our normal state of being as manifestly somnambulant amnesia, dissociation and only rudimentary consciousness. We exist for the most part in an unhealthy and unconscious "synthesis" of the "thesis" of anesthesia and "antithesis" of wholesthesia, which is, not a stable synthesis but rather dialectic of progressive degeneration. To become conscious and sensible of this condition is already to partially transcend it and enter a dynamic of integral, conscious, and healing synthesis, which is also of both wholesthesia and anesthesia. This sensibility intuits, feels, and understands the reality of Life and Freedom as ultimate goals as well as their reality in the here and now of a specific situation. It is a progressive intellectual moral and physical reorientation and an indwelling confirmation of Healthy Knowledge. This sensibility and understanding is the opening of the ego-body to the Soul-nature that is none other than the Good Sense of our title.

If Anesthesia is "Nonsense" and Wholesthesia is "Complete Sense", than "Good Sense" (or "Callesthesia"), is that sensibility that recognizes and welcomes them both and yet distinguishes them from each other. It does this in the context of what we have said of their ultimate implications all well as in the context of everyday life. It is the innate understanding of the Soul-Body active in the ego-body in each real and definite everyday situation. Good sense includes and does not exclude, nonsense (anesthesia), which it intuitively understands as a necessary and even essential aspect of what is recognized to be the souls journey to Spirit. Good sense is the healthy instinct/intuition to aim for an overall predominance of wholesthesia over anesthesia in the context of the peculiarities of the individual Soul-nature and situation. Abstractly and morally, the intention is to move toward greater wholesthesia, Life, and Freedom. Practically and ethically the dynamic is more sophisticated and evolves a kind of tacking and a balancing of exigent "weaknesses" and limitations against strengths and possibilities in an ultimately progressive way.

This more sophisticated existential dynamic involves the coordination and balancing of attention to the future, the past, and the eternal with and in the present moment. It is an improvisational sensibility that makes good use even of mistakes, which are in fact indispensable to its manifestation. For without the recognition of the redeeming complementarity and preexistent paradoxical synthesis of "nonsense" and "complete sense" in real experience, Awakening, Life, and Freedom would be Meaningless, even as the ideal orienting types. Good Sense is this sense of the mutuality and presence of the remembering of Healthy Knowledge even within our forgetfulness of it, and as such it is the integral crossroad of the categories and the back beat of the Life-Dance itself.

And of course, as with all the Theories of Integral Science, we all really already know all of this, at least deep down in our souls we do. That is just the point. Nevertheless, we seem to need a more formal reminder every now and then, and that is what this essay and the rest of Integral Science are for.

The relatively unconscious, relatively anesthetic (Mal-aesthetic really) nature of the modern/post-modern diet, medicine, architecture, -- of the modern/post-modern world in general-- is too much to go into in a brief essay. But the prescription for all of these disintegrating fields of activity is the same; it is that of Good Sense in the light of Healthy Knowledge. By such Good Sense I mean the sense, not only of the current numbness under which the jewels of Life and Freedom are buried but also the equally strong sense of the very real presence of the jewels there nevertheless and the gratitude and resolve that come with this (And be assured that they are there, for if they were not within us at some deep level then we would literally be dead). And by such Good Sense I mean a consciousness and embracing of our sick knowledge and our sick culture that can only be effected by truly Healthy Knowledge and Healthy Culture. Such Good sense is, above all a sense of Togetherness; a balanced, paradoxical dance of the awareness and welcome of both realities in the service of progressive healing and aliveness.

And such Good Sense also implies Good Taste, the taste or sensibility of such paradoxical togetherness and the ability to discern the relatively beautiful, healthy, and appropriate in the context of Mutuality and of Ultimate as well as more immediate truth.

And it implies Good Will, the integrative, willed affirmation and acknowledgment of essential Togetherness and the intention toward its increasing realization both inwardly and in outward practical world affairs. Such good will is a will to inner and outer Life and Freedom in the light of Life Truth that implies conscious understanding and moral commitment to the great common Theme of our collective existence as well as its variations in cultural and individual manifestation.

And it implies Good Faith, a Living Faith in Togetherness, which (because it is alive) involves a constant checking of any Belief (including the theories of Integral Science) against the inner consensus of ones intuition, heart, mind and body as to its Living Truth and value, with an eye to either its reformulation or its replacement with something else if this be appropriate. It is faith in the existence of some healing and useful shared understanding of reality and a commitment to critical participation in the best that we have yet found.

The role of Death in evolution is to provoke individuals and species toward Life and Freedom. We are going to die anyway but be are not going to "Live" anyway, in the present (new and also very old) sense of the word. To seek death is to be in a state of unconsciousness that is not worthy of our humanity—it is to seek nothing at all. To seek Life and Freedom with humility, humor, wonder, and gratitude is our common privilege as beings that are going to die. Whether or not we succeed in taking advantage of this opportunity is ultimately not in our hands but to make the attempt is the only gesture that is consistent with sapience, with true happiness, and with Good Sense.

Footnote: This use of the word "soul" may seem inconsistent with its use in the concept of "Individual Personhood", since in that context it relates to one of the four main "horizontal" or social aspects (or "roles") of the Identity of "Individual-Personhood", while the present use of the word seems to relate more to the "vertical" Individual/Individuating aspect of Individual-Person. Similarly, the way I am defining Life here seems to differ somewhat from the way I use the word "Living" when I contrast it with "surviving", as in "Individual Living Person". In the former case, that of the Soul, I am refering in the present essay to what might be called the "Spiritual" aspect of being a Soul, while as regards to Personhood I am referring to what might be called the "Religious" aspect of that same word. Hopefully in the future I will hit upon an appropriate term to replace one or the other of the two senses of the word "Soul" and so end the ambiguity. As for the later ambiguity I can say that it is incipient "Life" that inspires "Living", which can be decribed as the "callesthetic" pursuit of Freedom and nurturing of Life in the light of inevitable death. Without such inspiration, there can only be a meaningless and ultimately illusory "survival" that can only evince relative unconciousness both of Death and of Life (and so of Spirit and Freedom as well).

Tags: life, sanity, philosophy