Navigating Quality

We’re inundated with arguments and counterarguments over what are considered facts and counter-facts. There is a scramble to create ever-larger data-farms to handle…, well, all the data. There’s also been a curious turn of phrase used by one buffoon, George Will to describe another, Donald Trump. Will has claimed that “Trump doesn’t know how to

Aphasia

“There’s no money in it!” So long as we look to an extractive model to determine how we shape and define our perceptions of value we are condemned to suffering and implicated in its proliferation. We interpret the deep and profound roots of our predicament as an inevitability. We call this human nature. This conflation

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

Dissensus, Hygiene, Quality, Rhetoric, and Integration; a Stab at a Synthesis…

Dissensus is a tough master. If I choose to follow dissensus I pledge that though what I espouse holds no intent to violate any other, I will refrain from destroying anyone, though they espouse my destruction and this refusal might lead to my own death. I see no other way to make a break with

Uncertainty and Cause & Effect

There’s something tickling out there at the confluence of our refusal to accept uncertainty and our belief in cause & effect. Even here, as I ponder these two concepts, I’m falling into the expectation that relation equals cause. I was about to say that we refuse uncertainty – vehemently, violently, with suicidal insistence – because

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

A Space for Community

Art, even more so than craft, cannot be contained by technique. If you think, “I know what I’m doing!” You’re either mistaken or you are killing whatever art you might have been capable of creating. Hampered your capacity to enter an involvement in an act of creation. An artist’s materials can be a useful medium

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,

Being Stuck

Déjà Vu is a common experience for those stuck in abusive situations. We find that the current crisis looks much like the last. No amount of feigned surprise, or pronounced insistence from the abusers that, “This time is different!” can shake the feeling we’ve been here before. And, most likely, we’ll be here again. If we

Ignorance Wrapped in Knowing. Belief Lacking Compassion.

…no matter how noble the system would be. A mind that has been trained only to know facts, is simply unable to deal with Life in all its diversity, with its subtleties, with its depths and heights. Krishnamurti Thanks to Julien Matei for this quotation. We suffer under ignorance wrapped in knowing. Belief lacking compassion. The tools of the enlightenment destroying any potential for useful

What does it mean?

Tying our existence to a belief in destruction as the ultimate good is such a contorted position to be in! How we got here, what it means, where it will all lead; these are also questions whose answers appear in glimmers and hints, passing doubts, premonitions and inklings of what is down there, at least as it all appears from “up here.”