On Form

There’s a connection and relationship between the way we internalize honesty/deception and how we relate to form. Form is the means by which error is recognized and the means by which correctness is recognized. There are, it seems, two Muses: the Muse of Inspiration, who gives us inarticulate visions and desires, and the Muse of

Approaching Conscience?

Perhaps a way to shed light on where this track is heading is to introduce conscience. We think of conscience as the internal touchstone for an externally directed morality. There is a superstructure of Good & Evil and conscience is where this battle is joined inside each of us. This conception of conscience covers any

A Gathering

“The more you walk this road, the farther you are from the ordinary ways of society. You may see the truth, but you will find that people would rather listen to politicians, performers, and charlatans.” -Deng Ming-Dao * I’m struck by the difficulty we have sticking to the basics. Continually struck by our insistence on

Hygiene

Pathologies surround us. The time for establishing a hygiene is before a crisis becomes acute. There is a window for this, as for everything. The system of latent belief, habitual preoccupations, and elaborate denial mechanisms that allow us to stagger through our days, propping us up, will at some point in the ongoing collapse cease

I haven’t got time for this!

This common complaint came to mind recently in relation to the resistance I often encounter to my interest in looking at the basics, at how we tend to glide right past fundamental discrepancies – incoherence – in a rush to “Get on with it!” What came to mind was how this had been the attitude

Separation Anxiety

We’re expected to, “Get over it!” In a time with few acknowledged initiation rituals this traumatic breaking of unity is almost universally accepted as a rite-of-passage. Why does separation – let’s consider it in any and every form it can take. Why does it create anxiety? What does this say more generally about the violence,

Religion, Mental Proprioception, and the Implicate Order.

JMG has repeatedly pointed out that a religious impulse is always at work. There are many avenues for this impulse to work through. There are many places it can hide in plain sight, as it does in civic religions. As it does in our belief in science/technology, distinct from the practice of science. There are

Stop Counting

In dreams we approach a form of knowing that we find difficult to access while awake. We tend to discount the sensation that there was “something to it.” Or, we displace our fascination within the dream in a vain attempt to narrate its dramatic particulars. As this fails to match our original wonder, as we

Consuming the Internet

We consume the internet. A movable feast. Lights kept on by a belief that someday it will “pay.” Or. that it is just too good an attention trap to let it go. It’s supposed to be easy. It’s supposed to provide visions of “freedom.” Where free means there is no up-front cost to us. Somebody

“Why Is It Important for You That History Have a Direction?”

This question is asked by John Michael Greer in a reply to a comment on his most recent post. He has been slogging through the log-jam of our cultural resistance to abandoning the bi-polar insistence that we are bound either to Heaven or Hell, Utopia or dystopia. That if we cannot have our heart’s desire

The confusion arising from doing everything twice.

We’re all familiar with the frustrations of being caught in a feedback loop where everything is out of synch. We hear things twice. We respond, but then cannot verify that it registered so we do it again, hit a key, or repeat what we’re saying. This only sets off another cascade of rebounding echoes and

The point is… not to build a more just prison…

This paraphrase, taken from the end of Ishmael, continues to reverberate with me. “I have neglected one small point…” Ishmael begins to say, almost as an afterthought. “One of my students was an ex-convict…” “…what is crucial to your survival … is not the redistribution of power and wealth within the prison but rather the