Discuss: Calling All Fanatics

A change in externals alone will not ensure a better world. New laws, social arrangements, means of production, ecological practices, treaties, etc. will not deal with the ultimate source of our problems: us. A new world requires new people. Unless we change where people are coming from (within their hearts/minds) no amount of shuffling external factors will prevent us from maintaining or recreating the same old nightmares of history. How to accomplish this has been the concern of the wisdom traditions of mankind. Creating the modern contexts for this age old alchemy is essential if we are not to be destroyed by our own inner contradictions and lack of true spiritual development. Would be reformers have fallen into the materialist fallacies at the root of our difficulties by marginalizing the role of psychological/spiritual healing. This ignoring of the inner, in favor of energetic doing in the outer, does not bode well for any real and lasting revolution.

People ask me, “What are those groups about?”  Folks always want a label, without realizing that names often distort more than they reveal.  So I just say, “Transformation.”  If they want more, “Transformation of self and world.”  If they ask again, “How are you going to do that?”  I say, “We are figuring that out.”  If they are still really curious, then I say,  “Come and see for yourself.”

Dear Mike,

The word, transformation, strikes me as just right. 

The way things look to me, and to a remarkably large number of people I know who are thinking about this thoroughgoing change of which you speak, another word has come up regularly.  That word is consciousness.  As I think about your idea of change, it occurs to me that “the collective consciousness of humanity” is what needs to be transformed.  That is to say, a transformation of human consciousness somehow needs to be engendered with all deliberate speed.

As Margaret Mead and others have reminded all of us, small groups in which so few as two or three are gathered together make all the difference when it comes changing the world.

Thanks again, Mike, for all you are doing,

Steve

PS: Thanks to those who have or plan to contact Scott Walker. He has already begun to work toward bringing his idea of a Reader’s Corner to fruition.

Steve — You are right; consciousness is what we are interested in awakening, and raising to a higher level. I sometimes hesitate to use that term because there are many who immediately associate it with “New Age” or LSD trips, or some invalid Eastern nonsense. But the truth is, our predicament is altogether about our state of consciousness. Our inability to see this, and hence do something about it, is a central feature of our blindness and denial. We always think the problem is out there, and all we have to do is fix some features outside ourselves to put things right. Of course there are things out there that need major changes, but that will only happen in a constructive way if we change ourselves at depth. Selfish, uncaring, blind, ignorant, violent people will only create a world that reflects their own damaged and deficient selves.

“there are no answers, there are only questions.
Fallible creatures that we are and being ourselves in question, we inevitably demand answers to ease the lack within us. All things must be capable of explanation, every effort must have a cause, each problem a solution. It is thus that we arrive at conclusion, for conclusion brings about the ending that we mistake for an answer. “That’s finished,” we say, mendaciously. “We can go on to something else.”
But nothing in life—nor, perhaps in death—is ever really finished. A book, for instance, is no book at all, unless, when we come to the last page, it goes on and on within us.”

        Pamela Travers

Something for Orion community’s consideration…..What to do now?

http://watd.wuthering-heights.co.uk/mainpages/whattodo.html

As surely as we need to carefully examine the evidence of peak oil (and peak everything), there is an equally urgent need to examine the science of human population dynamics. The topic of human population dynamics has not been and is not now being openly discussed.

Let us imagine for a moment that the growth of the human population today is the “mother” of human-driven global challenges looming before humankind and knowledgeable people willfully refuse to speak about it. How can that behavior be construed as correct? On what authority is silence in response to science condoned? Who has the right to deny the existence of knowledge of something that threatens all of us? Is there no one who has determined that experts have a “duty to warn” humanity in such dire circumstances as exist when the very future of children everywhere could be put at risk soon?

Before I started the AWAREness Campaign, I fully anticipated that the publication of peer-reviewed scientific evidence regarding human population dynamics and human overpopulation of the Earth would be rigorously scrutinized, carefully examined and objectively reported by appropriately trained and educated experts. To my astonishment that did not occur. The experts remained mute. The evidence was neither sensibly refuted nor affirmed. There was only a deafening silence. After some months passed, I concluded that experts must not believe the evidence regarding the human population but could not rebutt it either. So the AWAREness Campaign began. Even now, years later, I believe the silence of so many indicates that the research is virtually irrefutable on the one hand and unbelievable on the other. It appears that we are in need of a “transformed” (with a tip of the hat to mike k) scientific imagination by means of which scientists with appropriate expertise are freed from inadequate thought and time-honored theory…freed to carefully examine and skillfully report new, unforeseen and unfortunately unwelcome scientific research regarding the human population.

So here we are in 2010. With the rare exception of a pre-eminent scientist like Professor Emeritus Gary Peters who is willing to speak truth-as-he-sees-it to the powerful, elective mutism is effectively vanquishing science with regard to extant evidence of human population numbers.

If the research to which I have unsuccessfully tried to draw attention for so long is fatally flawed and completely wrong, then Gary, Scott Walker, my facebook friend Derrick Jensen, and others in the Orion community are invited to expose me for the fool that I surely am. On the other hand, if the scientific evidence is somehow on the correct track, then there is plenty of work for everyone in the human community to begin doing in earnest. In expressing my complete agreement with mike k about the space-time dimension, it appears to me that there is just enough space-time remaining to us to transform human consciousness, adopt sustainable lifestyles and right-size business enterprises, but we need to get started now.

Steve — Your comments are right on target. Underlying the refusal of scientists and others to confront the need for population reduction is the cult of MORE that is central to our culture. To even think of LESS in any area of life is an unthinkable heresy. The whole capitalist mystique is built on an ethic of constant expansion. Nationalism seeks to expand its territory and control of resources, often by violent means.  Every group or organization wants to grow without limit. Long term thinking, and the ultimate health of the whole are thrust aside in the scramble for immediate gains. All of these tendencies are symptomatic of a profound egotism and hubris infecting both individuals and groups.

It is futile to imagine that these systemic dysfunctions can be addressed without engaging processes that cut this pathological egotism at its roots.  We learn in AA that our drinking was only a symptom of our underlying problem: selfishness. The total change of personality in those who successfully engage the AA program of recovery goes far beyond what is achieved by merely stopping drinking.

Most people today are just as clueless about their addiction to oil, as alcoholics tend to be about their drinking problem. The same self centered lack of awareness about the damaging effects to self and others characterizes both groups. We are heedless of the damage we are inflicting on millions of people, other species, and the children of the future in pursuit of our out of control selfish addiction to unsustainable consumerist gluttony. This is not simply an economic or scientific issue, but a deeply ethical and spiritual disease we are in the throes of.

If you think the methods of AA have no relevance to our current world problems, then you have little understanding of AA or of the roots of our dilemmas. It is typical of those in the depths of their addictive disease to deny and pooh pooh the very therapies that could help them. Those in denial will do anything to protect and continue their addictive obsessions.

I am suggesting a small group process to enable folks to awaken to their unsustainable addictive lifestyle, and enable them to embrace a healthier way of being in the world. Without this kind of deep personal reformation, the same old people will continue acting in the same old ways that are destroying all higher values, and ultimately life itself.