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,

History

I’ve long had a sense that the story of the Twentieth Century is hidden behind the stories that century’s victors told about themselves. World Wars, I and II, were not what they appeared. Actually, they were more what they appear to be and less what was so shrilly repeated about them in an attempt to

Doing what I’m told…

Following a link from the inimitable Dwight Towers, I sent him a quick response. This afternoon, I returned to find he’d sent me the following instructions: Tony, cut and paste that, don’t touch a thing (other than writing out Bohm and Krishnamurti), and turn it into a blog post.  Seriously. So here it is:

Stray thoughts on the purpose of gatekeepers

I’ve had difficulty dealing with the disruption in publishing over the last decade or so. I was unlucky to find myself entering the lists just as the publishing world began to fall apart. Those fragments of an old guard I was fortunate enough to encounter showed enthusiasm for my fiction, though in trying to find

Reflection/Projection

I’m not sure what to call this post, even of what to say. It’s time for introspection and time to reflect on media. People whose thoughtfulness matter to me are struggling with the form their expression should take. “We” – an amorphous “group” that might only exits as a projection in my head! – are

Aloof

Reading Simon Winchester‘s Atlantic, I came across an etymology for the term, aloof, deriving from a-luff, the order to maintain a course with sufficient distance for safety off a lee shore. Let’s unpack that. A lee shore is a danger that is downwind, a-lee, of our position. If we lose way, we are in danger

You Can’t Hide from Futility

One of the defenses of denial is that if we were to begin to accept what is in store we would fall into despair. Better to be busy than desperate. This ignores the power of Futility. It continues to amaze me the way the most self-declared pragmatists; political, military, and business leaders; remain by all

The Rich Get Richer…

We all know the old saying. I just ran across it on a new, to me, site: The King James Subversion. What seems to be so hard for anyone to accept is that it is no longer true. Let’s say first of all, that it never was really true in the sense that “rich” as

a Presentation placing Economics in context

New Economy, New Wealth This post breaks with the usual pattern here. Instead of a stand-alone essay, this link. Instead of vaporous ruminations, a direct series of statements. Instead of private musings, someone else’s charts and graphs. Two main reasons for this: motive and opportunity. I’ve been focusing on my new project, Boats for Difficult

A Scary Story for Halloween and the Mid-term Elections

We’ve come full circle. The biannual cycle of Halloween scary stories ending not in All-Souls day, but the Ash Wednesday that follows Election Day, when we wake up to the blessed reconsecration of Business as Usual. Let’s not fret. Let’s be sure to maintain our side of the bargain, after all they’re doing it all for our own good, we should be Thankful.

Futility, the chasm between efficiency and effectiveness

In the tension between our immersion in the fabric of being and the atomized self’s struggle to achieve a stasis, a utopia, not of richness, but an illusory concretion of wealth, in which we wish to stop without falling; we define the human condition. The workings of consciousness are so easily misunderstood as signs of separateness from the rest as epitomized in Cogito Ergo Sum. Yet consciousness, our phenomenological embededness in experience is the only window we have through which to glimpse an awareness of our integration into greater systems and structures.

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.