This is key

I just stumbled upon Donald D. Hoffman‘s work in The Atlantic Magazine. It was one of those exceedingly rare moments when a crucial new piece is added to the puzzle. He’s a cognitive scientist. He’s been studying the roots of perception and his research has led to his articulation of a key missing link if

Intoxication & Sacred Purpose

Intoxication once had a purpose. It was a way to reset, to scramble, to introduce random-ish variables into how we responded to our weorld. Intoxication has long been reduced to a reaction, to frustration at the fact that we are stuck. Have no way out.

Political Theater

Policing the norms The dynamic in a dysfunctional family maintains itself through elaborate procedures that perpetuate their norm by maintaining a mythology that celebrates the systemic abuse that holds it together. The ongoing dramatizations of these myths maintain their power. Each member has a role to play. And, so long as we remain enthralled by

New Stories to counter the Thaumaturgy of Destruction

…every malign spell has a lie at the heart of it, and if you can expose the lie in a way that the person under the spell can see and understand, the lie dissolves and takes the spell with it. It’s like the old claim that a demon can never change itself wholly out of

Tangible

Reaching after whatever strands of connection may pass though this virtual medium’s cables; we are reminded, yet again, just how limited it all is. The promise of instant, frictionless connectivity across any distance in the blink of an eye looks thinner and thinner with each passing day. Some wonderful connections have been made this way; but

It’s not your/their urgency…, it’s mine…

That is the problem. We don’t know what works. We DO know what doesn’t. The whole chasing-after-control-by-wielding-power-thing. Call it civilization. Call it whatever you want. From this abstraction; taken from a moment of survival when wielding strength brings us another chance: to eat, to be left in peace, to protect someone we care about; we

It’s not a process…

It may be, then, that form serves us best when it works as an obstruction to baffle us and deflect our intended course. It may be that when we no longer know what to do we have come to our real work and that when we no longer know which way to go we have

Carving Spaces

Chris, excellent. The one quibble I have is that I don’t think you’re considering the full implications of what you’ve suggested: “It’s a recognition of the total futility of any effort for victory for the side of ecology, conservation, or Gaia, on this civilization’s terms.” The last four words — on this civilization’s terms —

Aphasia

“There’s no money in it!” So long as we look to an extractive model to determine how we shape and define our perceptions of value we are condemned to suffering and implicated in its proliferation. We interpret the deep and profound roots of our predicament as an inevitability. We call this human nature. This conflation

Faith & Belief

Faith has no preconceptions; it is a plunge into the unknown. We must here make a clear distinction between belief and faith, because, in general practice, belief has come to mean a state of mind which is almost the opposite of faith. Belief, as I use the word here, is the insistence that the truth

Awe and Wonder

It’s customary to link awe with shock these days. “Shock & Awe!” Followed by that grimacing grin primates and dogs instinctively make when something that pleases them also uncovers a deep well of shame. The look we came to identify with W…. Shock & Awe would come to be the signature spell of the late