Don't Hate Nothing Except Hatred

The Chambers Brothers

Dylan's advice is as good now as when he wrote it forty five years ago.  The polity of the world is extremely fragmented and competing truths all beat their chests full of certitude.  Everyone is screaming at everyone else, and I know that I am completely guilty of the same fault.  I'm a news junkie who, mostly, listens to NPR or reads stuff on the web and rants at some folks, cheers for my side, and cringes about the causes that worry me  In Chronicles Vol I, Dylan said that his fame was "big enough to fill a football stadium," but it's a lot smaller than the vast ocean it would take to contain the level of hatred present on this planet.  "Meanwhile, life outside goes on all around you."  Like the Chambers Brothers said, "There are things to realize." things that require our collective attention that are a hell of a lot more important than the next quarter's economic numbers or whether there's going to be a new version of the iPad by Christmas (both of which are important to me). 

Take the grim reaper of climate change, for example.

Franny at a Glacier

The other day, I watched "The Age of Stupid" and left the theater in near despair.  Franny Armstong's documentary was made in 2009 specifically to influence the Copenhagen Summit on Climate Change.  It's grounded in the virtually overwhelming evidence that atmospheric conditions of our planet are approaching a tipping point at which a lot of really bad things are going to happen.  Yet, we move along in our daily affairs as though this approaching tsunami doesn't actually exist,  

John Coleman

For example, an incredible 70% of people who report the weather in the US media do not believe there is such a thing as global warming!  Like Sarah Palin, they rack it up to "natural causes" from things like sunspots.  To the gleeful applause of his fans, the founder of The Weather Channel, John Coleman, claims that "Global Warming is the greatest scam in history!" and sues Al Gore for fraud.  (Full disclosure: I use The Weather Channel all the time.  Further full disclosure:  John Coleman is not a meteorologist; he has a degree in journalism and invented the highly successful local news format known as "happy talk.") One of my best friends contends that "gas coming from cow dung is as big a contributor to global warming as human emissions.  And, what about photosynthesis? Doesn't that release CO2 into the atmosphere."  Louie, the 65 year old guy who bags my groceries at Market Basket points to an ice cold day in February when I tell him that I want to use my own cloth bag rather than consuming plastic that comes from oil and exclaims, "Ya don't see any global warming out there today, do ya!"

Folks, there is no disagreement regarding the scientific evidence for global warming.  There does seem to be a lot of wiggle room regarding what it's going to mean and exactly when those results are going to show up, but the fact that human behavior is altering the climate of this planet is beyond dispute.  I wish with all of my I-love-my-consumptive-lifestyle heart that this were not the case, but it is.  

Now, if there were ever anything to be alarmed about on a global basis, this would seem to be it.  It is incomprehensible that there are not worldwide continuous protests about this ever encroaching threat, but there aren't.  Copenhagen was a disastrous failure and I would bet that most people didn't even know that it was happening let alone follow it closely.  

How do I explain this: we are asleep.  

From "Night of the Living Dead"

When I was in my 20s and the war in Vietnam presented an immediate threat to me and every other young man in the US, you better believe that a lot of us were not asleep.  Someone was trying to kill us for a lie.  Mark Twain said something like, "My country, always; my government, sometimes." and that was definitely the way I've felt from 1966 on.  Ben Johnson said something like "there is nothing like the prospect of noose in the morning to focus the mind." It was impossible to not pay attention to the fact that the Vietnam War was a complete crock that could get you killed, wounded or in the psyche ward.  

But, we got beat, left, and things essentially went back to normal in the Etas Unis, i.e., time to get a job, raise a family, consume, return to essentially "conservative" politics, take vacations, try to save money, worry about retirement and go through Wall Street's gyrations.  

The ugly bugger called Salmonella

The threat of Global Warming is entirely different than that posed by the immediacy of war and death.  I'm presently visiting Mexico where I contracted Salmonella a few days ago at a restaurant.  I went to see a great caring homeopathic physician here, Dr. Sylvia, who advised me not to eat any vegetables prepared by eateries:  "Because they can't see the microbes, they don't believe that they are actually there."  This is the nature of a lot of systemic phenomena like greenhouse gases: they're there all right, we just don't have to pay attention to the extra 18,000,000,000,000,000,000 lbs. of CO2 we put up there every year because we can't see 'em.  Outta sight, outta mind.

Our species has demonstrated that it can rise to the occasion when faced with existential threats, and there is no better example of this than the allies defeat of the Axis in World War II.  Hitler in particular exemplified the worst sort of evil that humanity has ever faced, a highly armed, malignant and merciless tyrant who would have devoured all of civilization and life.  The West and the Russians faced him and his fascist allies in Japan down at an unfathomable cost.  That was an instance in which there was a brief moment when there was an organized "hatred of hatred." 

The foe we face now is of a different order.  "We have met the enemy and it is us."  Our own pattern of consumption and self-aggrandizement are driving global warming, and I speak as a participant.  It is not hatred we must hate now, but an ignorance of how systems operate.  We must discard our most cherished myths–religious, national, political, and –most challenging of all–personal.

It is time to change.

We can do this.  

Two weeks after the outbreak of the Civil War/War Between the States, Lincoln gave an inaugural address and his words seem relevant to this moment:

"We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature."

We humans, with all of our disparate and incredibly legitimate and countervailing truths, share the great gift of consciousness.  Death knocks at our door.  Awake and united, we can turn it away. 

An Act of Will

Neil Young recorded "After the Gold Rush" in 1970.  It was the title song to an astonishing album. In the many live versions of the song, the crowd pleasing line is always, "There was a band playing in my head/and I felt like getting high," but the core of the lyrics concerns  "mother nature on the run in the 1970s" and the prospects of "a silver spaceships flying" that are going to take us to a "new home in the sun."

Is this trip really necessary?

No, but it's becoming ever more likely.  If Mother Nature was on the run in the 1970s, she's got to be in an all out rampaging gallop by now.  I don't think that there is any objective evidence to support the notion that our species can keep on burning this planet to a crisp and then dumping the refuse of our consumption on it and keep on living here indefinitely.  And, yet, a lot of us believe that fantasy or feel too worn out and comfortable to do anything about it.  Keep it up and we'll  annihilate ourselves and maybe destroy the prospects of any life on Earth to boot.

From The Gurdjieff Legacy

It's going to "take a lot of love to change the way things are."  And, unfortunately, I'm not sure if love is the quality that alone defeats denial.  Human behavior toward our mother earth lends credence to the Gurdjieffian notion that eons ago some wrong-headed angels implanted human beings with a "kundabuffer organ" at the base of the spine that makes us suffer from "egotism, conceit, vanity, selfishness and the like," which create extreme difficulty for us "to develop objective consciousness and conscience, as well as making humans susceptible to being manipulated and exploited by leaders, warmongers and ideologues for self-serving and profiteering motives." 

(I actually read a fair amount of Gurdjieff–including 800 pages of the 1,100 page All and Everything!–but became somewhat less-than-enamored of the perspective when I came to view P.D. Ouspensky–author of The Fourth Way–as an anti-Semite.  I loved Gurdjieff's Meetings with Remarkable Men, but Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson just became too much of a slog.) 

Gurdjieff or no Gurdjieff, we humans need to think a lot more clearly than we do; we need to see around the corner of our immediate action.  Many of our systems are stretched and stressed to and beyond the breaking point.  About ten years ago, Dylan said that "everything is broken."  I'm not sure that I agree with that absolute indictment of our condition, but I am sure tired of all the "jiving and joking."  How did it get so bad?

Although his The Assault on Reason didn't sell an extraordinary number of books (currently #205,718 in Amazon's book list; available for 1¢/copy), Al Gore's analysis of modern American politics makes the case that our democracy is being systematically dumbed down by corporate interests in particular who derive a short term benefit from the economics of low taxation, low carbon costs, and low investment in things we desperately need to be investing in heavily, such as revitalizing our infrastructure and kicking the oil habit.  Tom Friedman makes the same point in Hot, Flat, and Crowded 2.0: Why We Need a Green Revolution--and How It Can Renew America.  In Merchants of Doubt Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway demonstrate to my satisfaction that a gaggle of corporate interests have been successful in co-opting a relatively stable group of prominent scientists to generate just enough ambiguity regarding very clear data to make it easy for the general populace to question facts and maintain indifference on issues ranging from smoking causing cancer to burning carbon (another form of smoking) causing global warming (another form of cancer).  

(By the way, if I sound like an anti-corporate scold, I'm not.  I think that the private sector has repeatedly demonstrated the ability to innovate in ways that the government cannot and will not.  People respond to economic incentives or, to put it another way, I know that I certainly do.  I am very impressed with IBM's Smart Cities initiative and GE's Ecomagination undertaking.   A good friend of mine recently asserted that "the mission of business is to make money."  If that's it, we're in big, big trouble.  I don't believe this.  I think that a lot of corporations are taking the tack laid out by Peter Senge in his important book, The Necessary Revolution where good long term business strategy and ecological thinking and action are tightly aligned.)

What is to be done?  How do we clear our minds and what would be the result of our doing so?

From Pyschosynthesis, Nederlands

Okay, if I really knew the answers to these questions I'd be taking over Dr. Phil's slot on TV, which I would like to do because I can't stand listening to guys (and gals) like that.  There are multiple recommendations on the matter that all seem to cluster around using concentration to cancel out the noise and gibberish.  Roberto Assagioli, the founder of Psychosynthesis (about whom I am going to write in more depth at some point), described the basic challenge confronting humanity as the cultivation of "will."  The ability to think and act not in the interest of immediate gratification but toward the unification of the everyday self with both the individual and the collective deeper self–the self that can see the integrated nature of all being–this is the road out.  While his association with the notorious anti-Semite–is it just me or are they everywhere?– Alice Bailey greatly tarnishes Assagioli's reputation–especially since he was born Jewish –one is advised to separate the great amount of wheat from the fair amount of chaff that can also be found in his writings.  (I should only make anything like as much of a contribution!) 

But, I believe with every fiber of my being–and I know from the most profound experiences of my life– that inculcating the collective will (and courage) to see beyond the seeming fragmentation of the moment to discover the existence of eternity in each instance of the present is not only possible but absolutely transformational.  It will change humanity's attitude toward our planet instantaneously.  That is the knowing what will ripple through the sleeper cell when it wakes up.

 

Itchycoo Park and the Purposes of Education

From RockSolid Monthly Music Magazine

 

 

 

In their delightful song, Itchycoo Park, the Small Faces encourage the listener to spend some time in nature rather than labor over academics:

"We could miss out school
Would that be cool?
Why go to learn
The world's a fool?"

Besides the fact that it spends 2mins and 21 seconds on the marvelous borderline between pure pop and top drawer psychedelia, Itchycoo Park offers a vision of what education might be about:  illumination.

The predominant view of education is vocational:  You need education to get a job or, in other words,  "Twenty years of schoolin' and they put you on the day shift." 

Homeless shelter in West LA  (Photos by Olin Ericksen)

And that is true.  Schooling can give one the technical, bureaucratic and literacy skills one needs to find and hold a position primarily in the private sector. in the myriad of institutions that support industry, or, occasionally, in some government agency or non-profit whose mission isn't directly tied to business, e.g., the Parks service or some aspects of the military and justice systems.  In this era of recession throughout the US and much of the West, having the security that is afforded by a job is a very big deal indeed.  If you can't pay the rent, you're up a creek. 

Innumerable assumptions are built into that model, not the least of which is an expectation that there is something like stability in the economic system, i.e., the jobs that are here today are a lot like the ones that are going to be here tomorrow.  There is certainly a lot of reason to think that this will be true.  Think of all the reasons to hire lawyers, for example!  Shakespeare lamented them, but almost everyone needs 'em. 

However, the era in which my consciousness was formed incorporated the prospect that everything was about to change or certainly could change.  There was no security.  We were surrounded by a senseless war against Vietnam.  The world was careening toward an ugly chaos.  Everyone my age was looking at getting shot at for what, going to jail, leaving the United States, trying to create an alternative with virtually no capital and an enormous amount of opposition, or...all of the above.  We were being educated for a past that was history and we were living in deeply uncertain times.  The situation was unsustainable. 

It was a period in which the power of a completely alternative frame of reference could make head way; the future had no boundaries...if we could only get there.  As The Small Faces put it, if one got "high," one would see that "It's all too beautiful!"  A  radiance envelopes us and lives in us. See how beautiful it is and you will cry tears of joy. 

Psytrip, by psion005

I don't think that anyone can have the epiphany of illuminated reality and be a cynic–at least not at the moment that it's happening.  It might turn you into a drug addict, which would be unfortunate; but, it will make you into a pursuer of beauty as a goal of consciousness, even if only for that moment that you'll never be able to recall with full clarity again.  And, if you know what you're looking for and have some way to find it, the experience of enlightenment will make you an idealist, a person who can't and never wants to turn your back on your vision–your moment, your lifetime in eternity.

So, if the ability to witness beauty truly and let it shape one's life is a worthy aspiration for the nurturing of consciousness, what does that imply for the purposes of education? 

Here are a few Itchycoo Principles of Pedagogy:

1.  Education should foster the ability to concentrate.  Many  challenges yield up their mystery to one who can concentrate and the emergence of the web and its collective intelligence will reveal the wholeness underlying many more seemingly tangled-up situations. 

2.  Education should excite imagination.  The education person ought to see possibilities because virtually everything is possible.  The Singularity Buzz is an example of the fact that a very thin membrane stands between cold hard facts and mind boggling science fiction.  Will computational power achieve a liftoff velocity in 2025 and allow our species to break the "shackles of its genetic legacy and achieves inconceivable heights of intelligence, material progress, and longevity"!!!! Well... maybe.  It's possible.  Some really smart people are imagining it.   If anything like the Singularity happens, getting a paycheck will be the least of your worries.  If you can imagine it, it can happen. Education should demonstrate the truth of that statement.

3.  Education should encourage respect.  The rabbis have a saying, which goes something like this: "Two universes interact when two people meet."  Here is how my friend and mentor, Mark Horowitz, describes  the principle of mutual respect:  "I am a person of value and worth and you are a person of value and worth."  Mark has activated this vision as one of the creators of Mediem, a place for people holding strong and maybe differing perspectives to interact.  Education should address the fight, flight and distancing mechanisms of human existence that make it very difficult for us to show respect when we feel threatened, bored or disengaged. Respect is the door to humility.

Concentration, imagination and respect would make a powerful contribution to humanity's evolutionary prospects.  There are definite threats to the viability of our species on Earth.  (And, if we can't make it here, where are we going to make it?)  Education mostly operates in an atomistic fashion, training people for specialties that may well disappear with hardly a trace.  Education should  bring us into deeply visceral awareness of the existence of a shimmering reality within us and without us. 



 

Looking for more joy as the New Year begins

I am generally an upbeat guy who sees a lot to be hopeful about.  For example, I'm pleased about Google's newest advancement in search technology  and I'm looking forward to Keith Richard's memoir.  But, I must say that this is not a particularly hopeful season.

Matt Bai's searing analysis in today's Times makes it pretty clear that the Obama administration squandered a chance to really put the country on a better track after the complete disaster of the Bush administration.  I am starting to think that Obama may be a one term president.  I like him and I like a lot of his policies, but– by turning the stimulus package and much of the health care planning process to the Congress and especially the House–he allowed fiscal policy to fall into the hands of a crowd who festooned the bills with a lot of things for special interests and not nearly as much for nation as a whole as was needed.  As a result, both bills were both too big and too small.  Unless Obama is able to reframe the situation in the next 55 days, he and the Democratic Party are going to get their collective butts kicked by an outraged public.

That leads me to the next problem: the Republican Party is bankrupt both conceptually and morally, plus it's embracing sheer lunacy.  As has been stated many times, insanity is doing the same thing that didn't work before thinking that things are going to turn out better this time.  The Republican economic policy of cutting domestic expenditures and promoting the interests of the country's richest people is the same lousy trickle down approach they've been pushing since Reagan,  which keeps putting the country in deeper and deeper trouble.  The notion that we'd cut government spending, when corporate America (let alone private individuals) has shown an unwillingness to put its $1.6T in cash and near cash into investment at a time when that is sorely needed and banks are tightening the screws on credit to the extent that I can't get a $3,000 bump in my credit limit on an Amex card...Well, it seems absolutely boneheaded to me.  And, as if their economic approach weren't enough of an indictment of the Republicans, the fact that they are putting forward haters who are completely unprepared for executive positions (including a governor of a very rural state who quit her job after two years in order to make money as a gadfly commentator for Fox News) makes it clear that they are in no position to take over the power that seems likely to fall into their hands in November.  If you didn't like Nancy Pelosi as Speaker, wait till you see the job that chain-smoking John Boener does. 

Meanwhile, the international context is extremely troubling to me.  An authoritarian China is definitely on the march, using state capitalism to make investments that the United States could have been making for the last sixty years, since we invented all the stuff that the Chinese are now using to green their economy.  The Chinese are taking over a space our economy should own in part because they are flagrantly disregarding a variety of international agreements they've signed and in part because the US has been too flabby to move in concert with the Europeans in a greener direction and in part because the Europeans don't have the power to sway the Americans electorate away from the short term thinking that is getting us into so much trouble. 

And, as if we needed more bad news, the Islamists have us pinned down. 

From the New York Times: An American soldier protects Afghans eating at the end of the daily Ramadan fast (Photo by Adam Ferguson)

The fanatics among the Muslims have created such a stir in their sectarian-oriented societies that we've got to be deployed all over that part of the world to keep bin Laden in his hole.  Maybe these folks will form functional, democratically-styled governments after lunch is over?  Probably not. 

So,  I'm not feeling nearly as happy as this New Year unfolds as I would like.  The end of the world isn't necessarily near but the near term future doesn't look that great from my vantage point. 

I welcome your reactions. I'd love to have another way of seeing things.

I am a sleeper cell

The concept of a sleeper cell has been hijacked by violent fanatics. Sleeper cell has come to connote zombies who come to life in order to engage in acts of destruction, preferably against targets in Western societies where they've been living, studying and working.  

Echinopsis aka 'Sleeping Beauty'

I am not that sort of a sleeper cell. This blog is dedicated to the redemption of the concept of the sleeper cell.

I'm more like a Sleeping Beauty sort of sleeper cell, but maybe without a lot of mush and maybe not even that much beauty for that matter. 


I am a person who was socially radicalized during the late 1960s by–I may as well admit it right away–a pretty steady diet of sex and drugs and rock and roll.  That Vietnam War thing helped out a lot too.  The idea of getting shot so that the US could impose puppet dictatorships on Indo-China and extract a whole lot materiel from that part of the world while our own society choked on racism and a whole bunch of other isms had zero appeal to me.   

Bob Dylan got to me.  I'd get stoned and Dylan would show up singing inside my head.  He was speaking directly to me.  He can say whatever he wants to say now, but I don't think anyone who's been there has any doubt that he was there too.  No one wanted to be "Mr. Jones."  


I was an angry young man who knew how to have a good time.  


I was a flower child.  


I was a fairly upper class guy with a good education, refined manners, and a career path in investment banking I was about to throw under the bus. 

I was uncomfortable in a suit.   

I was infused with apocalyptic hope.

I saw the 60s die at Altamont.  I watched The Fat Man get beat over the head with billiard cues.  I am not a fan of Sonny Barger. 


By 1976, the Vietnam War was over.  It was becoming increasingly evident that the United States was turning the page.  The expectations that many of us had for a new age–spiritually, economically, politically–were becoming just that, expectations that weren't going to be realized.  I didn't know that at the time, but that's the way it's turned out...so far.


Time to get a job.


And that is what I did.  I got a good job, one I pretty much invented.  


But I've never forgotten nor abandoned the visions that have rained down on me my whole life: visions of illumination and extraordinary possibility and magical  enchantment that are always just a shot away.  

My work has been sort of a methodical approach toward that state of being, but a tipping point, a breakthrough to the other side is what I need.  It's my elixir. 


I'm not alone.


I figure that there are about three to four million of us waiting for that wake up call, that moment when we will be galvanized to act in a way that we thought we never would again but have always wanted to: the voice of destiny.  


We are sleeper cells.  


This blog is dedicated to our dawn, our heroism, our courage, our vitality, our future.


Let us awake.  Let us take it down and build it up.