How do we integrate in the face of bad faith?

This title is not rhetorical. How do we?

Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein in a few days…

… mostly in a single night. In it we find the yet unborn Twentieth Century – and its long tail, cracking like a whip over us even now. No need for any more warnings than that. By then others had already begun to populate dystopias and pronounce prophecies: Milton, …. What if a culture could

What is at the root of our crisis of leadership?

We expect a leader to “play the part.” Anyone caught-up in roles has nothing to offer us in our predicament. Facing our predicament requires that we embrace uncertainty and set-aside the doing-things-twice role playing forces upon us. Someone acting in this way just does not, “Look like a leader.”

Lies

We fall for lies because we want to be told what can’t possibly be true. This formulation came to me recently. Shouldn’t be much of a surprise why lies might come into focus these days….

Build new cities?

We tend to think the concentration camp was something that came out of World War II. If we’re a bit more versed in western history we might think of the Boer War, or even the American Civil War…. But what is a concentration camp? How is it materially different from a city? Perhaps not a

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

“Never Forget!” A recipe for psychosis

Today is an anniversary. A day we have been entreated for fourteen years now to never forget. An insistent cry that was already there, ready-made from previous assaults on American Exceptionalism. A vehemence that has had little to do with remembering the loss of life and everything to do with justifying aggression.

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.

So much that is irrelevant…

How do we move beyond rebellion? Implicit in this question – if it is to be anything but futile – is another, How do we keep from cycling back around? Only to end up that much further down the same barren path?

Cause & Effect

The greatest difficulty when we turn our attention on something like Cause & Effect comes from the astounding inertia of conditioned assumptions. To make a case that Cause & Effect is an illusion is to put one frail voice up against thousands of years of common sense. This is why it’s so important to sort

Approaching Conscience?

Perhaps a way to shed light on where this track is heading is to introduce conscience. We think of conscience as the internal touchstone for an externally directed morality. There is a superstructure of Good & Evil and conscience is where this battle is joined inside each of us. This conception of conscience covers any

It’s Learning…

It is learning! Once we stop thinking of learning as the product of teaching, as an accumulation of knowledge, data, information; we can begin to look at what it is. Learning is how we remain open in the face of conditioning. It involves deciding without making judgments – to mangle Alan Watts.