The Mainstream’s Misunderstanding, Part 2

The “crises,” the “disasters,” the “mistakes,” and “unforeseeable” consequences that inundate our lives today are not any of those things. They are not the system perverted or de-railed, they are the system expressing itself exactly as such a system would and does and will express itself.

Beginner’s Mind

Maybe there is a simple way to state this difference? These toxic dynamics pit the will-to-control against life’s uncertainty. In the name of “eradicating” uncertainty they permit an escalating violence against all life. They act out a systematic program with an ever-widening scope of destruction “in our name.” They are locked within an Ego delusion of accelerating urgency to provide permission for their ill-considered but overly elaborated “plans.” What is missing, what is aggressively stripped from their equations, is any genuine compassion.

How do we integrate in the face of bad faith?

This title is not rhetorical. How do we?

Creative Destruction

We’ve heard this term spouted by those who want a gloss of legitimacy to pour over the violence of their actions, the hollow emptiness of their motivations. Everything from firing workers to starting wars has been done behind the rationalization that it is creative to wield destruction, after all, without that Asteroid killing those big,

Liberal & Conservative, Bankrupt, empty labels.

Liberal meant freedom-loving once. Conservative meant upholding time-tested values. Their “competition” could be seen, within the noise brought on by corruption and bad-faith, as a way to work out differences held for laudable reasons, a balancing of perspectives. This may never have actually been true, but it was the way the struggles were portrayed, the

Not Individuals, Not Groups

One open question around the brain/mind formulation is what it does to our conception of individuals and groups. It seems easy to criticize a practice of attention that opens us to mind and sees the conditioning of the brain – thought in Bohm‘s characterization – as an impediment; either as swallowing up the individual into

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.

Value, Wealth & Poverty

We compound our difficult position by maintaining ourselves in this state of confusion. Unless we look clearly at the loss of meaning that has hidden the true natures of these three decisive terms we cannot get on with unraveling our condition.

Interrogation of a Dream

Those who chose truth – IF they can cleave to its root and meaning – carry on a different struggle. They, we, are striving to come into alignment with something outside that, while hard and intractable like wood, embodies the dynamic of growth and is rooted in the source of all Life. It is outside of us, but the hints of its existence it leaves us to find all point back to an underlying unity greater than ourselves, but/and, including us. We are not in the position of authority, not wielders of power in the name of will, but searchers grappling with that which can, IS, the only source of confidence or assurance that we can have to guide our actions towards results that bring our expectations into alignment with what can be.

Clearing the Mind

As the ramp-up to the Dark Mountain Festival gains momentum and these ideas find outlets in wider circles so many people don’t know what to make of this view. They seem to equate the active work of plumbing the depths of our actual situation, stripping away shallow assumptions and hazy pseudo-mythologies that cocoon us within an acceptance of the status quo, as the only possible alternative to some deeply dystopian “end of the world.” They equate this action with “doing nothing” while valuing “doing something,” even as they can find no evidence that whatever their particular “something” is will help. It’s not working.