Monday, December 5, 2011

Just to let you know ...

I've added some blogs to the sidebar here that you might like. I only mention this because those of you who just read feeds (like I do) would miss that if I didn't. ;)

Life goes on as it has for the past ten millennia, empires rising and falling, with the "common man" and the "elites" playing their parts in the charade. I wonder when Toto will finally pull the curtain back to reveal the sad old man who's controlling the show in this iteration, and who it will be.

I feel a great deal of affection for those of you who visit here. It's always good to know that there are others out there who want to become B and have a vision of what life could be.

Saturday, October 15, 2011

Occupy ... what?

So all my friends list is in a uproar about the 99% and the 53% and the 47% and whatever % people want to argue about.

But when I try to get them to explain what the hub-bub is about, they talk about corporations and the Fed and all that.

Apparently the Occupy movement is a bunch of people who are waking up to the fact that something is wrong, sort of like their spiritual progenitors the Hippies did.

The more astute among them think there's a cage somewhere, and that they're in it. The rest are sure all their discomfort is the fault of the corporations for messing things up for everyone else and taking all the goodies for themselves (they can't grasp the idea of a cage yet).

From what I can see, the discussions are about how to make the cage tidier and nicer and so everyone has health care and jobs while in the cage. Or we could build a new cage, one that WE run instead of the corporations! Stuff like that.

No one seems to consider that they could just walk out of the cage and do something else.

(Gasp! What would we do without civilization, with hierarchy and rulers and police! Without totalitarian agriculture? How would we eat? Do you want to go back to the Wild Wild West? The Stone Age?? Think of the children!!!)

But I think that will come someday soon, because there are enough neo-Leavers (or proto-Leavers, in my case) around to point out the bars, which wasn't the situation back in the 60's.

Friday, September 30, 2011

Who are the Leavers, anyway?

I ran across an insightful post just now which did something I hadn't thought of doing: deconstructing exactly who these Leavers are ...

Leavers
  • live by the Law of Limited Competition; food is freely accessible to all
  • live in the hands of the gods; this is an easy, carefree, and satisfying way of life
  • have a highly evolved social system that works well for humans as they actually are and places limits on disruptive behavior
  • live without devouring the planet; their wealth is giving and getting support
  • see themselves as belonging to the world

... Leavers are people who are both willing and able to live in co-adaptation with each other and the Earth. (Contrast that with the Takers, who are people who insist on controlling and dominating each other and the Earth.)

... Invariably, Leavers have been sharers. Their economic lives are guided by the rule of thumb that says, Take the small stuff, share the big stuff. A hunter who caught a rabbit fed his own family. But a gazelle was shared around. And studies of recent Leaver tribes show people acutely aware of the dangers of power who keep a close eye on how it is used. Many readily available cultural means nip power abuse in the bud.

Amazing. I love it.

And look at this!

It seems that at least some of the "primitive tribes" that have been recorded over the last 200 years or so have been refugees from civilization. Folks who said no to the civilized way of life, took to the hills and evolved their own culture away from takerism. (emphasis mine)

Wow. So it is more than possible, it has already been done. All we have to do is have the courage to start.

Sunday, August 7, 2011

Just started reading this:

The Dark Mountain Project Manifesto

Other than the overly pretentious title (manifesto? really??), it seems to be written by someone who gets it.

Saturday, July 30, 2011

The third denial

The second denial -- read it
Aka on the way to becoming B ...

... but honestly, I think to become B, you must be past the simple acceptance, on to the third denial. B understands and accepts that civilization was an aberration, something that should never have happened, something that has weakened us a as a species, that held us back from what we were meant to become.

B has grieved that loss, those 10,000 wasted years, and all the death and destruction that came with it, the loss of our potential and our guides, and has come out of the other side, changed. Repentant. Reborn.

Sunday, June 12, 2011

The "Sky God" and vertical thinking.

This right here is a fantastic post, for several reasons.

But what I really want to focus on is near the ending of it:

...people came to confuse the true and original animating force of the universe with the Sky God, when he finally emerged out of pantheism, simply by virtue of the fact that both are unitary. The Sky God has nothing whatever to do with the animating force and in fact is not even real. It doesn’t exist.
Something Schultz’s post makes clear is that the Sky God is vertical. I’ve always assumed this was a result of an imbalance between feminine and masculine principles in the mythology, but perhaps it’s something else, I honestly don’t know. But wherever the Sky God appears, so too appear massive vertical structures, vertical social hierarchies, and a pathological drive to build society via conquest, thereby enlarging the bottom of the pyramid and pushing those at the top of the hierarchies and buildings up even higher.
Doesn't this sound like Takers? It sure does to me. The social tower of Babel is leaning, Pisa-like, and it's clear by the news that it's about ready to fall.

Sunday, May 22, 2011

So ...

Guess we're all still here.

The idea of the Rapture (which once upon a time seemed exciting) now seems laughable. Get whisked up to the sky? Been done before (Close Encounters).

We were in the Garden and blew it. But like any other really bad mistake, it's not too late to make amends, to turn around, to fix things. Why do we think that we can't just go back, stop the megalomania and the greed, just let the rest of the world alone? Why does so much of the world have this obsession with getting away from the Earth?

(Independence Day aliens come to mind -- we'd probably trash heaven too)

People who are happy don't dream of running away. People who love someone (God, for example) also love what that person made, but most people shudder at the thought of being out in "the wild" for more than a few minutes.

I no longer understand any of it. This whole "rapture" seems like a sad, cheap way to distract Taker people from dealing with the discomfort they feel at being at war with creation.

Saturday, April 23, 2011

programs

I found out about peak oil (the theory that global oil production, like what happens with individual oil wells, has a bell-shaped curve) back in 2007. That led me indirectly and many years later to the Ishmael books, but there's a more direct connection I want to talk about today.

Reading the discussions about what should be done about the situation (yes, situation, as peak oil production happened sometime either in 2005 or 2008, depending on what statistics you use) sometimes is interesting, sometimes boring, but this last time it made me laugh. Not because that article is particularly funny, but because its basic premise is so flawed.

If you want, you can go read the article, but the underlying assumed premise is that living in a civilization is a given, and if we do various things then we can continue to do so pretty much the way as we do now, just maybe "conserving" or something.

It's the first time an article of this nature has hit me as so laughable. It brought to mind B's saying: the world won't be changed by programs, but by changed minds without programs.

Until people get sick of the madness, all the programs and "intervention" in the world won't do a damn thing.

And it's making me think that maybe I've changed more than I thought I had.

Sunday, April 3, 2011

The unforeseen cost of civilization

I watched this video today, and I think you'll find it interesting.

Sunday, February 13, 2011

An encouraging thought

I'm reading The Story of B again, and I think I have a lot in common with Jared, in that I tend to hold off making conclusions about things for a long time. And that I've pretty much lost my faith a while ago, but I come at it not with a naivete like he did but with a cynicism borne out of being shanked over and over again through the years by people who only thought of me as a disposable tool for their agendas.

I hold off making conclusions to the point of not trusting my gut, which is something I've worked to overcome.

And I'm starting to see where DQ is coming from here, because while Jesus came to save souls from the "world", I'm thinking that B worked to save the world (and us as part of that world) from the depravities of the Taker so-called soul. I wrote the "human" soul at first before I remembered that we are not humanity.

Which is an encouraging thought.