The Trouble with Movements

The student protests in Britain have captured our imaginations. It’s been a long time since a movement of social protest has occurred in the West. Many of us hunger for the imagery and the projected trajectory such events seem to prophecy. As soon as the conversation moves beyond the righteousness of the calls to reject

Realms. How we position.

“How we position.” Seems to call for an object, “What?” before we can get into wondering about “how;” or even, who “we” are; we want to know what.

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

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,

Coherent Action, from unintended consequences to catalytic response.

We struggle with unintended consequences. In frustration we turn to chasing after power to force our will to prevail. We enter a spiral of increasing suffering and greater dislocation as the violence this process unleashes destroys every remaining scrap of coherent life. Blinded to our delusion by delusion, we increase our efforts. We twist and

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

Meaning & Action

” … minor twists of fate and individual decisions very often have much more dramatic consequences in dark ages than they do when the settled habits of a mature civilization constrain the impact of single events.” JMG “Failure provides clarity. We perceive that our knowledge is incoherent.” David Bohm Two comments that circle each other

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

Our Gorbachev, The politics of disillusionment.

It was June of 2009 when I first realized that Obama was to be our Gorbachev. June 2010 when I first wrote about it. We are now living through what that means. What happens when the apparatchiks themselves no longer believe their own propaganda? If a people are lucky, and Russia was, to some extent,

Shadows, Murmurs & Inklings

an anecdote about Martin Luther King, who apparently said to Harry Belafonte, just before he (i.e., King) was assassinated, that he thought he might have been making a big mistake; that he sometimes felt like he was herding people into a burning church. This is a very different insight, quite obviously, than the notion that

Measure

Confronted with a recalcitrant reality we all want to measure. In measuring we seek control. In the evidence of the failed metrics of others who came before us we see a challenge to do better. Our method will work! How? The issue is in scaling, a matter we are confronting on all sides as we

What does “Not business as usual” look like?

Movements. I’m pretty sure it doesn’t look like movements. Or advertisements for money making ventures.