Beyond Judgments and Opinions…

We all have opinions. We all make judgments. None of us is satisfied…. What if these are connected? I’ve long felt a hankering for getting beyond opinions. It’s easy to see this as a form of striving after certainty. We see opinion, as it relates to truth, as a negotiation with authority. Whoever has authority

It’s not your/their urgency…, it’s mine…

That is the problem. We don’t know what works. We DO know what doesn’t. The whole chasing-after-control-by-wielding-power-thing. Call it civilization. Call it whatever you want. From this abstraction; taken from a moment of survival when wielding strength brings us another chance: to eat, to be left in peace, to protect someone we care about; we

It’s not a process…

It may be, then, that form serves us best when it works as an obstruction to baffle us and deflect our intended course. It may be that when we no longer know what to do we have come to our real work and that when we no longer know which way to go we have

Faith & Belief

Faith has no preconceptions; it is a plunge into the unknown. We must here make a clear distinction between belief and faith, because, in general practice, belief has come to mean a state of mind which is almost the opposite of faith. Belief, as I use the word here, is the insistence that the truth

Intelligence

Tossing the Die One thing coming into view is that intelligence is not…. I began to write in earnest when I discovered – not that what I had to say was hard to say – but that I needed to work at…. For me, language is a freedom. As soon as you have found the

The Consequences of Our Precarity

“Most of all you can break out of your mind’s silo and initiate yourself into the tribe — become one of the people. But however you move, you know you can’t do this stuff on your own. Somehow you have to decipher the law. Our ways of understanding life in graphs and linear narrative are

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

It’s Religion

In a recent post John Michael Greer has continued to bring to light how a religious impulse underlies the current governmental crises. Not as the superficial coverage narrates a battle between conservatives and progressives, but how all these contending forces share in the overall religion of Progress. Reason with a capital R, as much as Fundamentalism,

Normalization

The parallels between abusive families and the culture of civilization illuminate why protest has become futile. Futility is not to say that something is difficult, verging on the impossible. Futility arises when an action makes the condition it is meant to ameliorate worse. When unintended consequences pile on, blocking any possible benefit from making a

Relationship, not Integers

As much as I avoid it, there can be something to be gained by listening to public radio once in a while. On a long drive over the holiday I heard a piece on studies being done analyzing the differences between an innate logarithmic sense of quantity and rational, integer-based counting. A French developmental psychologist

Complicity, not conspiracy

The subject of the last post, questions around exploring our vulnerability and finding the sources of violence, leads to, implies, an examination of the questions of complicity in relation to conspiracy. As the objectivization of thought sends us following projections placing what we strive against outside us, we find it easy to see conspiracies everywhere.