“Let’s be realistic!”

We feel the weight of this admonition upon us everywhere we turn. It stands like a wall between us and it echoes in our minds. We take it as a warning. In fact it is our prison.

The Consequences of Our Precarity

“Most of all you can break out of your mind’s silo and initiate yourself into the tribe — become one of the people. But however you move, you know you can’t do this stuff on your own. Somehow you have to decipher the law. Our ways of understanding life in graphs and linear narrative are

Economic Viability, a contradiction

We spread poison and paralysis around us …in that we want to educate all the world around us into reason. C. G. Jung Economic viability, I came across this expression in one of JMG’s comments. A commonplace of Peak Oil debate. I think it deserves a closer look. It is a grounding assumption for just about

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

The Trouble with “Uncivilization”

There is a tremendous lurking flaw in any initiative that frames itself as a negative. We know that, yet we struggle with finding a framework, and a simple title for it, that denotes the activities around weening our attention from the grip of civilization without resorting to this awkward and negative term, Uncivilization. This may

Crafting Awareness

Skeins of various threads spiral around me. Their common center may be craft. Craft. It’s an interesting word. It seems straightforward enough at first glance but once we start to look more closely it expands. There’s a broadness to it. It means making. It also means a vessel that transports us. It denotes a variety

“Sentimentality is the superstructure erected upon brutality…”

Sentiment takes any criticism, real or only inferred, and turns it into an excuse for a reaction, anything to return the focus where we demand it belongs.

Charmed Particles

I believe that the interleaving ecology of our relationships is one of the mechanisms driving what Jung alludes to in his statement about Fate. The compounding of illusions and denials distorts our relationships; our own, and our partner’s. Each of these brings forth a corresponding error from the other in a cascade of self-fulfilling projections that take us further and further from our intentions and bring us seemingly inexorably towards the outcome we fear most.

Pushing Past Futility

I’ve always had a poor tolerance for futility. Faced with a task I sense is futile, I’m like a cat with a sock on its back. I just collapse under the weight of absurdity. This has rarely made me popular. The war of attrition waged by this on friendships forged under the sunny skies of

Double Binds

In a life of double-binds there are no useful “answers,” because every way “out” leads to another barrier. We are shocked by this. We spend all of our energies trying to avoid this truth. We will do anything to get out. At some point, if we’re lucky, we come to realize there is no way out, but death or insanity. The choice then narrows to a decision to succumb or accept what is.

A Politics of Profound Disillusionment

Cheering “liberation” by proxy, is no more ethical than fighting wars of repression by proxy. We do a disservice in either case. In both cases we are condescending to our “lessors.” Instead we should be working on our own disillusionment while hoping that our example as it gains authenticity might “travel.”