Falling Awake

We say, we “fall asleep.” We imagine a vertiginous scene, leaning over a precipice. Just a moment’s loss of attention, and over we go. We see this as a kind of death. A conflation of self-consciousness with life? There is an expectation that attention and reflexive self-awareness are identical, or at least that we cannot

Imagination’s Roots

Imagination is a garbled concept today. We tie it into our obsessions with desire and wish fulfillment. In this way we see imagination as synonymous with fantasy – again in its current accepted meaning, as related to pleasant wishes. When we discover a failure of imagination we are looking at something else entirely. It’s not

Fear, Authority, and Craving After Security

I just came across this quote from Krishnamurti’ Life Ahead. “…you create authority because you are seeking a safe way of conduct, a secure manner of living. The very pursuit of security creates authority, and that is why you become a mere slave, a cog in a machine, living without any capacity to think, to

A Turbulent Stream

This post grew in response to a conversation over at Leaving Babylon around questions of planning. We imagine ourselves on stable ground, or fear that we are otherwise in a chaotic jumble. We are within dynamic flows. These take place around us and within us and can be thought of as motions upon morphic fields

From Negotiation to Dialogue

From negotiation to dialogue we move from scarcity to gift. Quantities are not affected, at least not over short spans – in the long run scarcity negotiations drive us to collapse and the Gift maintains and develops creation while filling innumerable niches to bring forth abundance. Technology is firmly within the realm of negotiation. Craft

Complicity and Contingency

We live somewhere in tension between complicity and contingency. It’s not a linear polarity, this space. These are not categories with any sort of rough equivalency. Complicity is a state. We are within a relationship to the forces that seek to destroy. Some of these we are aware of, others are hidden from us, some

Planning, Superimposition & Palimpsest

How Double Binds Cease and Planning Disappears as We Expose Ourselves to Our Morphic Fields. This title came to me yesterday. It’s quite a mouthful! The time has now stretched out to over a week! Vera’s comment on the last post, “And then, the decisions are turned into a plan. Argh.“ is reflected in it.

Deep Imagining

Here is where I disagree with those still caught up in the optimism/pessimism see-saw. The coming age will assuredly be Tragic, and it will include untold hardship and danger; but it does not have to be seen as a “Fall.” It does not have to be seen as a descent into poverty. As Illich said, “Poverty was invented.” If we can use this opportunity to generate new Forms, actually create a New Age out of the ruins of this one – again, the B.S. attached to this terminology threatens to derail us completely if we do not insist on chipping away the coruscation on our language to find real meanings in what we say. Unless we imagine something else out of the threads that present themselves to us precisely at this moment, we will be condemned to a true poverty, a poverty of imagination, a lack of Deep Imagining.