Discuss: Imagine

D.J.always keeping it real and insightful.
Emancipate ourselves from mental slavery- step one. Begin. Peace

I agree Joseph, the chains that bind us to a doomed vessel of life afloat on the vast seas of galactic space are in our minds. Real freedom can only come if we work to liberate our minds.
Jensen says:  “And many addicts cannot imagine life without their addictions, whether to heroin, crack, television, the internet, entitlement, power, economic growth, technological escalation, electricity, or industrial civilization.”  The addicted mind is a conditioned mind. There are methods to be liberated from this inner slavery; they have been called spiritual paths. But whether you choose to call them spiritual or not, they are effective means of realizing freedom from conditioning. The 12 step program is a generic version of such paths. Addiction, denial, attachment, willful ignorance, resistance to change — these are the universal human problems that these methods have been devised to counter.

Small groups dedicated to going beyond our addictions need to first focus us on awakening to the nature of our plight and its fatal nature. Lacking at least a beginning awareness of this situation, there is little to be done. We have to identify and own the problem before we can engage the work needed to grow beyond it. We have to meet the enemy, and it is us.

The enemy is not “us” per se. We are not Weyerhauser, destroying old-growth forests; we are not BP, raping the land for fossil fuel and dumping toxic waste into the ocean; and we are not the world’s militaries, killing as a career. Jensen speaks on this all the time; we liberate our minds by being open and mindful to reality, to what is actually happening, and then by acting to stop the real enemy from continuing to kill the planet.

We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.

-Albert Einstein

This entire issue of ORION seemed like a wonderful, crazy circus barker monologue: See the elecricity emancipator!! Watch technology SAVE nature!! Jump on and off the merry-go-round of education!! See the fish Gargantuan!! Ride the car of the Future!!  Discover the meaning in Art—Believe it or Not.

Quite amazing.

There are some who say the problem many too many refuse to speak of openly started 10,000 years ago. Then they go on to conclude there is nothing that could have been done in all that time. Long before I could see things the way I can now, it was possible to apprehend that there must have been a point in time, during those thousands of years, when things could have been different….but only if someone could have adequately communicated widely, loudly and clearly enough what continues to be denied everywhere until this very day. This is how silence kills the world, I suppose.
The family of humanity has a problem and, as a consequence, Earth has a colossal, human-induced challenge. Human life is the problem. No one, literally not a single person with any credibility, is willing to point to the science indicating with remarkable simplicity that the human population is both the primary and proximate cause of the global ecological threats to the human community which we are called upon to confront now here.

Steven, as much as I admire your tenacity in articulating this point, I still wonder.

    I wonder: What if tomorrow, every news channel, every twitter feed, every magazine, newspaper and website proclaimed that human population growth is the root problem of all mankind (and I agree with that premise, BTW), and everyone who heard it took that to heart as the ONE issue of our time ..what would result?

    I think the real reason that nobody wants to talk about poplulation growth is that nobody believes that we have even the remotest chance of reigning that in voluntarily. I think we’re accepting that we will have even more substantial overshoot until that point where nature delivers us a good, swift kick in the ‘nads. Rinse and repeat.

    There are certain things we can control, and problems we can forestall. Human biology and the genetic compulsion to make more humans as long as the resources hold out is a trend no population of living organism has ever ceased to do voluntarily, as far as I know. No, we’re not bacteria in a petri dish, but everything I’ve ever seen tends to support the view that, yeah, well maybe there is not much of a difference.

    What am I missing in your message?

Population control dialogues are hot buttons for many, many people (see what happened with Ted Turner & Bill Gates advocating population reduction).

24 countries are in population deficit (-population growth), dozens more have declining population but the high growth nations (mostly poor and African) make up the difference and then some. Trends show that wealth, education, stability and more advanced infrastructures tend to diminish the size of families over time.

China looked at the science and acted (in a way only a totalitarian gov. can); Japan absorbed the data and there was/is a cultural shift. European nations and affulent US citizens are diminishing family sizes.  It seems poverty, cultural mores and lack of knowledge (and empowerment) create exploding populations.

The real sticky discussion is who decides what’s a sustainable human population globally and regionally.

Mr. Salmony—what’s the numerical tipping point—what’s your ideal # for population(s).  ?

A major factor in population increase is the anti-life policies of the catholic church. We might also include the growth at any cost basic philosophy of capitalism, not to speak of this pernicious theory’s responsibility for driving most people on earth into poverty. Any significant change in population dynamics will depend on a whole new worldview based on spiritual principles, such as caring and sharing. To effect such a shift is our real problem. Piecemeal approaches will be wholly inadequate. Do it right or forget about it.