Intoxication & Sacred Purpose

Intoxication once had a purpose. It was a way to reset, to scramble, to introduce random-ish variables into how we responded to our weorld. Intoxication has long been reduced to a reaction, to frustration at the fact that we are stuck. Have no way out.

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.

“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.

What is missing…

The change of the seasons is so powerful…. It is disorienting…. We tend to view this as a collapse of whatever momentum we had developed over the months spent within a circle of similarity that allows us to feel a kind of certainty building. Yes, even for those of us talking endlessly about the pitfalls of

Isolation, Cross-post from Concentric Dialogue

One of the great killers, leading beyond mere death into extinction, has been the fragmentation of biological communities. Our networks of communication and trade have cut through its living fabric, reducing undisturbed remnants into scattered scraps too small to maintain abundance and diversity. A death by a thousand cuts. Not as dramatic as harpooning whales

On the Impossibility of Mediated Ritual

Attempting to watch a video of a recent gathering in Britain I was struck by this thought; that no actual ritual can survive passing through a mediated filtering intact. Not only will our understanding of it be broken, but any value it might have held risks being destroyed in the process. If we give it

Images, Projections, Reflections; Perturbations on the Surface of Sorrow

In this second segment of a video-taped dialogue Krishnamurti speaks of sorrow and compassion, death, and the sacred. At one point David Shainberg, who sits in for “every-person,” makes a connection between images and the surface of the sorrow that underlies existence. He suggested that images were like waves upon this river of sorrow. I

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

Austerity, and the Ways We Disguise What We Lack

Austerity, a term that’s been hijacked by financial criminals to cover their extortion. What else could it possibly mean other than a gloss, a moralistic veneer poured over the dismantling of the lives of great masses of people so as to mine whatever whiff of monetary “value” they might still have lodged in the corners

The love of the Fire-hose

The sign that we’ve arrived is to be complemented – and self-congratulating – on our capacity to “drink from the fire-hose.” The elite universities are fire-hose drinking academies. Their graduates’ claim to fame, ticket to success, that they can thrive at the fire-hose. The Future! is always seen as a place where even greater fire-hose

Stories

There is a world of difference between a map and a story. The power of the reductivist world-view resides in the ruthless insistence that everything can be boiled down and that signs are equivalent to reality. Whatever doesn’t fit is thrown away as an externality or dismissed in disgust as chaotic. The rush to efficiency is not to be slowed because of any “messy” “complications.”

The Limits of Imagination

I want, I want! I WANT!” “Well, you can’t have! YOU can’t HAVE! YOU CAN’T HAVE!