The Forge of Language

Sometimes writing is an act of excavation. Sometimes it is digging things up. Sometimes it is digging one’s self out…. What is writing? What is it for? Why? How? Once asked, these questions proliferate. Looming over them all, Why ask? Who is asking? These all circle around and bring us back to language.

Wrestling with the World in Virtual Reality: a Reblog from Networkolgies

Originally posted on Networkologies:
Doing Battle with the World via "Virtual Reality": The Tibetan Jewel Tree, on the cover to Robert Thurman’s excellent translation/explication On the Difficulty of Understanding the Insights in Classical Buddhist Texts Classical Buddhist texts having something in common with Deleuze, or Networkological thought? I must admit, I’ve spent a lot of…

Craft’s Collision with Civilization, a starting point

Andrew Taggart recently asked me to clarify how I see the deterioration and loss of Craft resulting from its confrontation with civilization. This is a big question! Let’s begin with a few definitions. I’m beginning to see Craft as a central focal point in examining how our confrontation with civilization has led us to where

Crafting Awareness

Skeins of various threads spiral around me. Their common center may be craft. Craft. It’s an interesting word. It seems straightforward enough at first glance but once we start to look more closely it expands. There’s a broadness to it. It means making. It also means a vessel that transports us. It denotes a variety

The Nature of Conditioning

Without this insight there can be much confusion between any action we might contemplate or take and striving. This confusion can lead either to paralysis or frustration. By linking striving to the attempt to outrun conditionality connects the futility of an approach to life that sees only division and seeks to find answers to self generated problems with the deepest manifestation of that impulse in the desire to transcend our conditioned natures.

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

This time it’s global!

Chris Hedges latest essay, This time We’re Taking the Whole Planet with Us! is as concise and clear and exposition of our predicament as you’ll find out there. Two things stand out. They give and then take it away. In his narrative, they take away and then try to give. I’ve brought up this same

The Bad Taste of Clever

System Theory was another of those things, like speaking “prose,” that once it was described to me I realized I’ve been doing it for a long time. There are many fascinating insights to be found there. In the end, I found the “practice” of Systems Theory to be a dead end.

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.

Reciprocity & Regard

…regard is where our ability to chose beats against the limits to our existence.