There’s no freeing the mind without respecting the limitations of the body.

“(Taoism) isn’t a process of learning more facts or greater skills. It is the unlearning of wrong habits and opinions.” — Alan Watts It’s not just the Singularity Boys who get this wrong…. What is unlearning?

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

Argo F… Yourself!

We do what we’re good at. Propaganda shows the violence of hegemon’s victims while hiding the violence they react against. Today’s propaganda has a willing audience and volunteers lining up to provide it. No need for a dark “Ministry of Propaganda,” or “Palace of Truth.” In this heyday it can even afford to play with

Making Sense

We all know what that means! What does it mean? To make is to put together. It’s not quite the same as create. Not as pedestrian as assemble. It does imply a matter-of-fact doing. The emphasis is on competence and taking things as they are and putting them together so the result will function as

The Forge of Language

Sometimes writing is an act of excavation. Sometimes it is digging things up. Sometimes it is digging one’s self out…. What is writing? What is it for? Why? How? Once asked, these questions proliferate. Looming over them all, Why ask? Who is asking? These all circle around and bring us back to language.

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

Domination is domination is domination

Here’s why he won’t bend to feminist desires. They insist he and his cohorts, “Stop everything, these men are doing good work!” The above was a passing detail in an online apologia for a lack of feminist sympathies from someone I follow, but won’t name here. It brought me to an agonizing halt.

Questions surrounding non-violence

Gandhian non-violence gains its power by putting an oppressor’s hidden violence out in the open where it cannot be denied. Not so much so as to counter it by non-violent means, but so that it must be confronted by the oppressor, for what it is, in its naked form. Every oppressor has layers of self-justification to

Innovation, Creation, and Change

Sick as we are, finding further bad news of our diagnosis and prognosis at every turn; we look to innovation, creation, and change for some way to turn back the clock, or at least carve out some detour from the horrors we see in our path. This is understandable. Predictable. But is it good or

The World, or the world…

I’ve attempted to carve out distinctions and definitions on a regular basis here. Then I’ve backslid and muddied the waters again and again by letting ambiguity and habit blur these distinctions. Maintaining a vocabulary requires the patience of an archeologist, wiping away the dust of the millennia as a current erupting volcano sifts down a

“Movement” toward Dialogue

Along with other actions in which we allow a switch from striving-to-become to simply manifesting an experience of Being, this form of dialogue nurtures the conditions that help us get out of the illusions of Ego and the habits of our brains. Beyond that, it is a fulfillment of our interconnectedness and a refusal to treat the “other” as a commodity, or a means to an end.

Why?

This post began as a response to Warren Draper’s comment on Do we need leaders? Warren brought up B. Traven‘s Death Ship and Robert Shea‘s essay, Empire of the Rising Scum before relating some quotes and insights from Wilhelm Reich. The following began as a response. It moves on to what I think is better