When I dropped my son off at kindergarten this morning, he resisted with every fibre of his being. We parted with a kiss as he was dragged off, crying most pitifully. What a scene.
Like on the many other occasions that this has happened, I felt awful - my being, empathizing with him, under tension because I had to leave him to go get "work" done. Besides, it's all for his own good. Right?
But who exactly do I need to impress by getting "work" done? As a person who knows how to feed, clothe, and shelter herself from scratch, and how to heal her own sickness and injury, why should I need to build a business, earn money, follow a schedule - especially when I'm competing in a dying culture with a dying economy that does everything it can to create a dying biosphere?
And why should my little boy be enculturated to submit to this ethic? I have no delusions whatsoever that the school system has goals for him other than basic factory-style work and becoming another consumer (a.k.a. "productive member of society")
Once upon a time I would have said that my son and I are doing this because of the story we tell one another in our culture about what is the Right Way to Live. But now I've got a different sense.
Now I've got a sense that if we don't at least make the appearance of trying to be "productive members of society," we will be hurt or perhaps eliminated altogether by a secret, controlling system made up of people I don't know but who have got the full story on everything that is done by counter-culture activists like myself. BRRRRRR! How's that for something to stay up all night worrying about?
I don't know what to make of the conspiracy theorists who are now becoming more numerous than can be counted. I don't even believe the climate change story anymore, since EVERYTHING EVERYTHING EVERYTHING!!! that comes to us from the mass media is a lie.
Thoughts like these are just little moments of darkness that I connect with from time to time when I'm upset about the mundane details of daily life. On the whole, my opinion has always been that if there is anyone reading over my shoulder from a military satellite, or keeping a file about all my non-vaccination and political protest activities, perhaps my secret observer(s) will actually learn something about how to be happy. I really don't have anything to hide, and would be delighted if someone would pay attention to what I have to say.
But lately there has been a change in my sense of how things work. Lately I've had a big turnaround in opinion; now I think that
there is an Illuminati, and they are controlling every piece of
information that comes from the mass media and they're orchestrating a
30+ year plan that came out of the conclusions of the Club of Rome's
"Limits to Growth" report: since it's all got to collapse around now
anyway, the Illuminati has been planning its own soft landing.
Through fear tactics, through the whole climate change thing, through
the pandemics stuff. The destruction of the American economy, etc, all
planned - or at least expected and now being "managed." the result is
that soon there should be several billion poor people and a few hundred
powerful people, with a buffer in between called "government" - who
believe they are actually helping the billions of poor people by doing
what's best for them.
Our now-global society is returning to its second infancy: to the way that it was in the beginning, with a few grossly-powerful kings terrorizing the great majority into submission. All of this is carried out through a "middle class" priesthood, those who benefit substantially from the protection of the kings, and in return, enforce the lies and the laws upon the people whose labour and lives are being stolen for profit by a tiny minority.
When a system grows in complexity for thousands of years and then begins to have a loss of complexity - much as our culture is doing right now - it is a symptom that the system is about to collapse. What we are seeing right now with the no-holds-barred terror campaign of climate change and global pandemics is the grand simplification that precedes the end of our culture.
A few years ago I sat in on a presentation about the significance of the year 2012 by a group that promotes the use of natural time, through the Mayan calendar. The basic message was not that the world would suddenly end on December 21, 2012, but that in the years leading up to that point, things would get weirder than any of us could possibly imagine. In my perception, that is exactly true.
I think I like it.
November 18, 2009
The Nature of Cancer
"In a sense we suffer from too much
individuality,
and not enough community. This is probably why cancer is a
disease
common to this time, for cancer involves a part of the whole taking a
course
of growth all on its own. In our civilization, all manner of
individuals
and groups want something for themselves, and the rest be damned. Their
selfishness is like a cancerous growth in the body of the community."
- Joel A. Wendt, The Coming Collapse: Civilization on the Brink
Cancer, as we have all been taught to understand it, doesn't really exist.
It is nothing more than the world we see outside ourselves, projected inward in a complex - but fictitious - medical drama.
We are so immersed in our cultural viewpoint of terrorists and vermin and other enemies clamoring always at our ramparts, that we can't help but extend that understanding to the biological world that is invisible within us.
Our cultural viewpoint is also fictitious.
Our
culture is based on a fundamental myth that we are above nature, not
subject to its laws. This is the origin story of global civilization:
the idea that human beings got hold of the power of the gods (by eating
of the gods' special tree of knowledge), and that with that power we are no
longer subject to the foibles of Nature.
Because
of this special status of humans, we can, and should, control our own
food supply, the shape and character of our own bodies, the minds and
interests of our children. We can, and should, control all other
species on this planet. We are the stewards of the Earth. By our great,
godlike power, we are the boss!
Everyone
who is part of the Great World Religion believes this myth deep in
their heart, so fervently that most people accept it as self-evident
law. Hundreds and hundreds of millions of people have lived out their
entire existence believing this absurd notion without question.
But then there is a big problem: the fact that we are subject
to the foibles of Nature. We are subject to illness, death, bad crops,
property damage from hurricanes, tsunamis, falling off of rooftops
during LSD trips and so on.
How can
this be?
Within the great and ongoing effort to answer this question lies the
origin of philosophy, from which have sprung religion and science and
all the other dogmas of how we should live our lives. And, since day one, the only way to
continue to believe that heartfelt idea of human supremacy over nature is to come up with a whole other supernatural explanation for disease, food shortages, and the other forces that steal from us our godly birthright.
And this is exactly what our culture has done. Our cultural ancestors invented the Devil.
Sure,
the Devil has evolved over the millennia, but he's still there to blame
everything on. He's got a different set of names now that we are a
modern, scientific society, but he is the Devil, just the same.
The reason we must have a devil in our society is because we must always have an enemy to fight.
It is the only way that any of us can sleep at night and wake up in the
morning to strive forward into another day of greedy individualism.
So
we have, over many centuries, put together a story about our
righteousness and our need to defend ourselves against our enemies, and
this story has only been reinforced a millionfold by the fact that
there are enormous profits to be made in the construction of that defense
system.
Nature is our enemy only because we must have an enemy.
It
seems normal that a society should have a complex defense system and a
military strategy by which to go out and take what it rightfully owns
away from its enemies who aren't using those resources properly
anyway. Most of us would not feel comfortable without a military force
to protect us - if not from human enemies, then at least from the
forces of Nature when Nature gets petulant and shuts off our electrical
supply or dumps eight feet of snow on us. We at least need an army for that.
We
also need locks on our doors, guns, self-defense training, and we need
to educate our children about stranger danger. Yes, folks, every human
being out there that you have not met is a murdering pedophile. The
world is absolutely filled with strangers, all of them out to get you, personally. After all, it's human nature.
But what else can we expect when we are a culture of individuals hoarding as much as we can for our own personal comfort?
If murderous pedophilia and selfish greed aren't human nature, then what is?
In
tribal societies, which are the natural human societies, the
"richest" individuals are those who are owed the most favours - not
those who have the most power to force others to do what they want. In
natural human societies, a person is best off if they have shared what
they have with the greatest number of people possible. In any social animal society, the alpha leaders are not those who are the most forceful, but the ones that are most social.
It is the tribal group that does well or does badly, not just certain individuals within the group.
In
a naturally-functioning human society, the class clown is the king - not
the thug who stole your lunch money and beat up your sister in the
bathroom.
The tribal, sharing way of
life is called the immediate-return economy or the sharing economy.
Every individual is motivated to give away as much as possible, in
order to get what human beings really want, which is support and love
and adulation for every moment of our lives. Any idiot who got the
notion of stockpiling vast amounts of wealth in hopes of leaving everyone else behind would be ostracized, banished, or killed as the sociopathic
threat to the stability of the community that he or she truly is.
The
only thing the sociopath could do to hope to survive with this kind of
behaviour is to develop two things:
1) a whopping story to explain why
it's okay for him to act like an abomination and why everyone else
should support him in that endeavor, and
2) a large and complex defense
system against those people who think he's full of shit.
Alas, rather than snuffing these occasional freaks out for their own good, our society is run by them.
This is because most of us have been raised to believe the tenets of the Great World Religion, and we actually believe that the owners of corporations are better than us.
We give all our power over to them because we believe that they, through the unseen hand of the profit motive, are protecting us. From the Devil.
Nowadays,
this doesn't mean that we worship kings and high priests, like it did
in the good old days when the Egyptian pharoah was king and god all
rolled into one. Nowadays, we have to believe a much more complicated
story, handed to us by benevolent scientists, politicians, lawyers, and
corporate leaders. Nowadays, we have to believe in a whole pantheon of
devils, and we have to have a whole pantheon of defense mechanisms
against them.
There are two main devils out there now: terrorism and disease.
To
protect ourselves from terrorists, we have to live a lifestyle that
involves nothing more than getting as much money as we can. To protect
ourselves from terrorists, we must become as rich and powerful as
possible, and then hire a huge army of poor, working-class men to
defend us. (And those who aren't in the army support our troops by spending as
much money as they can to increase the health of the overall economy).
To protect ourselves from disease, however, we need biological defense
systems. No matter, the richest among us have concocted a story about
the "human immune system," which happens to be perfectly analogous to the defense system against terrorism.
Conveniently, the human
immune system also helps us to defend ourselves against real terrorists, because
it provides for enormous corporate profits, which, in theory, help the
overall economy, which then pays for our military defense
systems. This is because the human immune system is like a personal
computer or a car - so complex that only highly-paid professionals can
really do the necessary maintenance work such as checking for flaws in
the system, repairing breakdowns, or removing offending "enemies" that
have made it inside.
Health
professionals around the world - natural and conventional - sell us
every kind of immune-system-supporting magic foo-foo dust they can
dream up. Everything from mercury ("quacksilber," as it was called when
it was used to treat mental illness) to vaccinations to acai berry
juice has been put out to us at exhorbitant prices and many of us will
take these concoctions into our system (and pay dearly but gladly) in
hopes of protecting ourselves from the devil of disease.
And
if the horrible day comes that we are diagnosed with something awful
and terrible - when we get that heart-stopping news that we have not
done a good enough job in maintaining our ramparts against cancer or
AIDS or swine 'flu or one of a thousand possible syndromes caused by a
thousand unseen viruses - most of us will be completely beaten and will go willingly to whatever fate the experts decide for us. Doctors' orders.
A View from the Outside
The
truth, however, is that cancer, AIDS, swine 'flu and a thousand other
diagnoses are based on a completely fictitional view of Nature as our
enemy.
Bacteria and fungi
participate in breaking down dead tissue in the body, just exactly as
they participate in breaking down dead tissue in the compost heap or on
the forest floor.
And pathogenic viruses don't even exist - even the greatest original proponent of the Germ Theory of Disease and the inventor of pathogenic viruses, Louis Pasteur, completely reversed his viewpoint
later in life, but by then the incredibly-lucrative germophobia
industry (now basically the entire medical industry) had been born and
had no intention of folding up just because of the mind change of its
founding father.
Cancer cells as
we understand them - cells turned criminally insane and power-hungry by
an accident of genetic mutation - do not exist at all. The whole notion
of cellular malignancy (literally, "born to be bad") is an
anthropomorphism: an assumption that the greedy individualists who run
our global economy are so resoundingly normal as to exist in other parts of Nature, too.
And
- greatest fabrication of all - the immune system that is supposed to
protect us from these little germ and cancer cells
doesn't exist either!
Our
body is not a collection of military workers fighting against a
collection of evil invaders. Our body is an exquisitely-complex,
highly-evolved instrument of God and Nature, harmonizing perfectly in
accordance with the energies that surround it.
Never fighting against anything at all.
The Truth about Cancer
What
are labelled cancer cells are indeed our own bodies' cells. However,
they are not cells gone mad and they are not cells intent on hurting
us. They are nothing like the hoarders who rule this civilization.
Cancerous growths, like all other functions of our body, are controlled by our own brain and nervous system.
Cancer
is tissue growth (and sometimes tissue deterioration) in some part of
the body in response to an experiential trigger in our lives, some kind
of problem or conflict with which we need to harmonize. The body,
directed by the brain according to sensory information about the world
that surrounds us, makes more tissue in order to increase our
harmonization with the world that surrounds us.
For
example, if we have an experience of hunger or deprivation because our livelihood is lost, our body
will be directed by our brain to create more digestive tissue in order to extract the most nourishment possible from whatever food we're currently getting. If our
hunger experience lasts long enough - and
if we put ourselves into the hands of the moneymaking medical system -
we will be poked and prodded and given a diagnosis of colon cancer.
Then the doctors will blame us for not eating enough fibre, and we'll
get our intestines cut out and we'll be poisoned with chemotherapy and
burned with radiation and we'll pay for all of that, too.
It's a win-win-win situation for the criminals who lead our world.
This
would all be kind of funny, if the cancer business didn't kill most of
its patients and even that would be kind of funny if cancer patients
didn't die in grief and terror.
There's the real Devil for you. November 16, 2009
Facing Burnout and the Solution to Everything Once in a while - every few months - I get so overwhelmed with important work that I feel like I'm going to burn out.
This
ongoing sense of near-burnout was once my normal mode of existence. So,
to protect my mental and physical health, I quit my career and decided
to spend all my time on things that I believe in.
But real
life takes time, and there are many mundane details that go into any
one grand project. I've got several grand projects on the go, and
they're all fiercely important to me. And I hate mundane details.
So,
despite making this major lifestyle choice five years ago, I still
sometimes get that awful overwhelmed and hopeless feeling, even though
my life now only contains projects that I care deeply about.
I
try various different methods of self-discipline, trying to force
myself to be able to get through my mounting pile of obligations to get
the car fixed, get out to classes on time, get my library books back
without having apple juice dumped on them. Each day, I accomplish less,
feel more and more frustrated, and begin to wonder whether there is any
point to what I am doing.
I begin to wonder whether my
personal goals have any meaning at all, since they're obviously so
difficult to achieve with the gigantic collection of meaningless tasks
that fills my days.
However, I have an understanding now that I once didn't: it is my own mind,
the programs running in my subconscious, that make my life this tangled
mess. It is not Life itself (or God, or even Satan) that is doing this
to me. It is my own belief system, some buried program deep in my mind,
that, when supplied with data from my daily life, kicks into action to
lead me to make poor choices about how to spend my time.
Next
thing I know, I'm spending the whole day watching Southpark videos and
hanging out at Twitter, and feeling horrible because I'm not achieving
anything and all I want is more rest, a bigger break from the Mountain
of Mundane.
This is how it works for everyone; when there is a
belief buried in the mind somewhere, and we hurtle ourselves forward in
life as though that belief is not a belief but rather an unbreakable
law of physics, we will smash up against it over and over again until
we reach a point at which the only thing to do is say "I give up!"
This is The Burnout Point.
The
moment of The Burnout Point is crucial, because that's the point at
which we become open to the realization that what we are doing is not
working and that it's nobody's fault but our own. Or, more importantly,
that nobody will deal with the problem except us.
That's the point at which, if we are willing, we will be open to new possibilities.
After
spending months last summer travelling around looking for a new
community to live in and then finally settling at the last minute for a
barely-adequate situation and then moving and trying to get my (also
burned-out) son into activities and trying to get through this mountain
of mundane to get going on my important projects and pick up the pieces
of my unsuccessful summer...
...I began to reach The Burnout
Point. While I never forgot the true purpose of my life, while I never
forgot my vision and the joy of that vision, I simultaneously began to
experience thoughts of suicide and murderous rage. The thoughts would
only flick through my mind for a few moments, but they became more
frequent and more intense, and triggered by the slightest upset in my
life.
I watched my own thought patterns with amazement. I
didn't give in to them because I recognized them as patterns of my mind
triggering emotional responses of my body, but I was still quite amazed
that I could simultaneously know the truth and feel these awful lies in
myself.
So I decided to do something about it. Every mental
pattern is a biological response of the brain to an actual life
experience. I used the German New Medicine medical chart to sort out
the biological causes of the types of emotions I was having, and then I
reflected on my life over the past few months to see what sorts of
experiences had triggered these mental reactions.
The process
led me to the point of recognizing that I definitely had some kind of
mental program that was leading me astray, despite all logic that
pointed to the fact that I should be succeeding.
So I took this packaged-up problem and went for clearing sessions.
In the first session, with help, I recognized the pattern that I was
caught in. In the second session, with help, I recognized the specific
belief and cleared it out of my mind.
It
was a silly belief.
It was formed in my mind as an infant, based on my experiences at that
time, but it had become a silly belief when those circumstances
changed. And yet it stayed with me even decades later when I had
reorganized my
whole life to be able to pursue my true purpose.
The immediate
result of clearing the belief is that those horrible emotions are
released and I feel much, much better. I feel clear and focused,
creative, and ready to hurtle forward again (that is, until I smash up
against the next belief).
I
think I'll make a habit of going for clearing sessions in my two least
favourite months: November and March. It really resets my brain, and it
will make those my two favourite months!
Last spring I went for
clearing sessions and in the first session, with help, got right to the
bottom of what my problem was and then cleared the belief in the second
session. I went home and promptly did what needed to be done to tidy up
my biggest problem in life (selling my house). It took just a few weeks.
This
fall, I went for clearing sessions and in the first session, with help,
got right to the bottom of what my problem was and then cleared the
belief in the second session. I went home and promptly got busy doing
what needs to be done to tidy up my biggest problem (setting up my
various business ventures). I'm beginning to see results, and have
every reason to believe that I'll be well into the new life I'm
creating by the New Year.
I've still got so much to do, but
clearing that silly belief has freed up my mind to let me be very
deliberate and organized and focused, so that I can get through it and
get on with it.
This process works for anyone, but the reason
that a couple clearing sessions does the trick for me is because I have
been on an Enlightenment Intensive and I know the difference between who I am and what my mind
is. For people who haven't learned this very important truth, it often
takes many sessions just for them to get the idea that there is a possible solution to their life's problems - that it's not who they are that makes them miserable.
There always is a solution
- one so amazing, that when we see it, we laugh at how hard we tried
before, and how seriously we took our "silly" problems of cancer,
loneliness, divorce, disabled children, crazy mothers, debilitating
addictions, rejection by others, and all the other dramas of life.
The
Enlightenment Intensive was my way of finding out the truth behind
everything and being able to see that solution to every problem. For
me, and many others, it has made all the difference in our lives. It is
life-changing, puts all problems in context, and makes people happy, no
matter what their circumstances.
It is the most important thing I ever did, aside from being born and becoming a mother.
November 11, 2009
Remembrance - a Property of Water
A few fascinating things about water, as explained in this
video:
matter, being energy, interacts
with the energy around it, creating its structure and form out of that
energy interaction
water, because of its unique
structure, is both the universal solvent and has the highest surface
tension of any liquid. For this reason, it is the substance which most
readily takes on and holds in its structure the energy patterns around
it
living things - and the entire biosphere - are
made up mostly of water. Human beings are composed 75% to 90% of
water
all the illnesses of our lives - mental and
physical - are mapped and founded in a structural disharmony of our
very molecular structure, water
all the illnesses
of our lives are connected to the environment that surrounds
us
we also influence the environment around us by
our own molecular structure, that is, our own energy
patterns
a living organism, if it is structurally
too disordered, kills itself
a living organism, if
it does not have sufficient interaction with the environment around it,
demolecularizes
no man is an island: even
if a part of ourselves or a loved one is separated from us by
considerable distance, we still respond the same way as long as the
separated parts are still of the same energy
pattern
by our beliefs, we influence the energy
patterns of the environment around us, setting up feedback loops so
that, if enough people believe it, it makes it
true.
It is crucial that each of us
strives to achieve his or her life purpose, and does not simply "go with the flow." The mainstream flow, right now, is life-destroying.
By deliberately moving in the direction of our life's purpose, we begin to bring harmony to our minds, to our bodies, and, incrementally, to the entire biosphere.
November 6, 2009
Self-Sufficiency Happens Incrementally ... and by Doing Less
I've watched a lot of people make the heroic effort to put their philosophies in action, to demonstrate that it is possible for the people of our culture to begin to step away from the consumer lifestyle and the poisonous industrial agriculture system that supports it.
We start our gardens with great ambition, visions of self-sufficiency in food production and marketing our fresh, local, organic produce to an eager forward-thinking community. The dream grows even faster than the beautiful produce: even while we're poring through seed catalogues and securing our garden space the vision expands to the point that we'll soon be retiring from our day jobs to raise healthy, environmentally-conscious children who will never have to break out of the prison as we are trying to do. They will grow up free.
Many of us have made this effort or know someone who has made this effort of moving from the city out to the country to start a new market garden. It makes good business sense, because we know how much more we're willing to pay for good food, and we know lots of others who will pay, too, so we know the market is there and we're more than ready to break free of the day jobs that are slowly killing us.
Running the Treadmill Faster
It might be rewarding work, but it turns out that most gardeners find themselves working three times as hard as they once did, getting more tired and never seeing a replacement of the income they earned through their former cubicle lifestyles. In fact, a lot of market gardeners eventually have to give it up because the debt created in order to purchase land, seeds and equipment simply cannot be serviced with the minimal profits that are made in the first several years.
The hard fact is, market gardening is a fancy way of saying "farming;" unless it's industrial scale, it will earn nothing more than a poverty-level income. If we aspire to accumulate the goods and services that are required by a more lofty income, then we're in for a painful lesson.
Even gardening just to supplement the family income is a net loss: it requires less energy to simply buy the produce at the organic grocery store or farmers' market than it does to buy all the gardening equipment and get out there and do the work.
Industrial-scale farming, where the vast majority of North American food comes from, is destroying the soil, water, air, climate, all the species that depend on them, and the human nutrition base, as well as our general health. Those organic market gardens and backyard family gardens are desperately needed by our society. Unfortunately, our society is not willing or able to pay the true cost of this way of food production.
This is a very serious quandary we are in. The vast majority of us just cannot afford the energy requirement it takes to fight our way, by sheer hard work, out of our Earth-destroying lifestyle. Having to give up on such an important dream is often enough to break the human spirit, to turn us hopeless.
Breaking free requires something else entirely - something that humans specialize in. It requires the conscious use of our great, big brains.
I've been working for about five years, since I quit my career as an environmental officer, trying to beat the great philosophical problem from both ends. And I'm winning - by using my brain.
First, I use my brain to lower my income needs. Second, I use my brain to diversify my income sources. The crossover point, when my income exceeds all my needs, is in sight in the near future.
That point is called financial independence, and it is the unrealized dream of six billion people.
Originally, I just wanted to get some acreage. From there I planned to work hard, do completely without luxuries for several years, and build up a retirement fund as an organic farmer. During the past five years, though, I've come to realize that I have no interest in working like a slave in any kind of traditional farming, organic or not.
I've discovered that what I really enjoy is exercising my creativity to solve the many small problems that add up to the big problem of trying to find a way of life that not only doesn't destroy the planet, but actually helps the landbase.
My interest is only in producing food, clothing, medicine, and other material goods for myself and my loved ones. This would dramatically reduce our income needs and our dependence on the health of the economy. If we have a reduced dependence on the health of the economy, we will no longer care to support it and its ecosystem-destroying processes.
I don't have a problem with money. I have a problem with our money-based economic system that is destroying the planet on which it depends - and the economy can't ever stop doing that.
For the next several years, until the money-based economy breaks down to the point where cash is meaningless, I expect to still be interacting with it (though not depending on it for my very existence). This means I'll continue selling and buying products and services.
However, knowing how the game works, I would make sure that I played it with a fair advantage for myself. Any food, medicine, or other material surpluses created, I would market as value-added products only. For example, I would never set up a stall at the farmers' market to sell tomatoes: only to sell gourmet tomato products, created and priced to compete directly with supermarket products and (rising) supermarket prices. A bushel of organic tomatoes sells for about $20 at the farmers' market. The 16 jars of gourmet tomato sauce that could be made from that bushel of tomatoes would sell for at least $80; minus $10 for supplies and the hour it took to make the gourmet tomato sauce, this is still a far more profitable way to sell my garden work.
And I would use only this value-added profit money for interacting with the money-based economy; that is, to buy other value-added products, such as car parts, professional services, or imported olive oil.
I would be happy to trade tomatoes for other locally-grown, unprocessed produce that I need, but I would not trade unprocessed fruits of land and raw labour for money, and then trade that money for other unprocessed fruits of land and labour.
Inserting the commodification step - converting real goods and services to cash and then converting cash back into real goods and services - is precisely the practice that keeps most of us slaves to our jobs for our whole lives. This is because the whole process is inherently wasteful by design.
It only works because billions of people do not grasp the first law of thermodynamics - that there is a sum total of energy that cannot be increased or decreased. We all work along on the notion that we can each have more over time, that the whole economy can grow over time, without any loss anywhere else.
Commodification of necessary goods and services is the one gross inefficiency upon which our entire 10,000-year-old economic system is based. People trade their raw materials and labour for "value-added products" at an energetic loss, and then we must buy back necessary raw materials and labour for our own use, also at an energetic loss. The only ones who benefit are those at the top of this great pyramid scheme: the owners of the corporations who exchange nothing but other people's raw materials and labour. it is no coincidence that these people at the top of the pyramid are our "leaders" - how else could they justify screwing the whole world for their own unimaginable decadence?
This, in a nutshell, is what our planet-destroying global economic system does, and that is why we can never fix it by being a little more efficient here and there, by everyone doing his own little bit.
Think of it like this: if you build a passive-solar house, you construct it in such a way as to maximize the free energy that you receive, maximize the heat that you store, and minimize the waste of heat going out of your house. So you would build a house with a lot of glass windows on the sunward side, with careful thought for thermal mass within the house, and with thick, well-sealed insulation everywhere possible. A house built this way, even in the cold Canadian climate, can be heated (and kept cool in summer) at a tiny fraction of the cost of typical houses - and it doesn't cost any more than a conventional house to build.
However, to do things the way our economic system encourages us to do, our solar house would look a lot different. What you would do is install a whole series of photovoltaic solar panels and batteries, convert sunlight to electricity, and then use that electricity to power electrical baseboard heaters to heat the air of the house, which will be wasted through conventionally-constructed insulating systems. To compensate for heat losses, there would have to be a lot of solar panels and probably some supplemental wind turbine electrical generation during overcast days and the short days of winter. You'll need a whole team of specialized contractors to design and install your system, as well.
To pay for this second kind of "solar-heated" house, you'll have to have a high-paying day job, because this is an extremely expensive system to build. However, it supports the economy by allowing solar panel and wind turbine manufacturers to make a living, which will help to support the alternative energy industry, so that it might someday hope to compete against big oil and coal industries.
The second scenario describes how the global economy works: as inefficiently as possible because the inefficiencies are where profit is made. Profit is always made through value-added practices, therefore our economic system utilizes every opportunity to make things more complex.
Most of us environmentally-conscious types attempt to get away from the conventional way of making our living by making a heroic effort to do exactly the same thing only more so. We try to hurtle ourselves out of the factory by making the assembly line go faster. It wouldn't even work if everyone in the factory used the same approach, because making the assembly line go faster just makes the factory more successful ...which makes it a better prison.
The solution to moving away from the conventional, planet-destroying way of life, is to do it less. Every day, every hour, look for ways to do it less. Instead of increasing your hours to 100 hours a week at your Acme Inc. job so that you can afford to buy yourself free of your Acme Inc., switch to 20 hours a week at Acme Inc. and buy a used book about permaculture. The extra 60 hours available to you each week can be used for rest and contemplation so that you will gain the energy to negotiate your way to freedom.
Putting more and more effort into the conventional system means wasting more and more effort, because the conventional system is built upon wastefulness.
I'm not just philosophizing here. I have incrementally progressed about 2/3 of the way to freedom. Meanwhile, my ecological footprint is at a sustainable level - and I still get to use the Internet, see a doctor if I need one, have friends, and eat well.
I also have a lot more time than the average North American to do the things that I find important, which has allowed me to make personal gains that most of my friends and family five years ago would have only dreamed of.
With great care, my current monthly income - government funding for my son, which, for most people I know, would barely supply grocery money, covers all the monetary expenses for my little family. It would be enough for luxuries and travel if I had a good garden. That's without yet seeing any value-added profits from my online businesses, or the garden I don't yet have. And I've got enough money socked away to purchase a few acres of land somewhere. This is after five years of being out of a job and climbing the steep learning curve to becoming an entrepreneur.
Now, I'm not saying that I've gained freedom by living on welfare. First, I don't receive welfare, I only receive the government tax benefits that everyone who has children receives - it just happens that I spend much more of it on raw materials than on value-added items.
Second, I haven't gained total freedom because I still need money for my basic living - food, shelter, clothing. The gaps are not closed. Yet.
I am working single-mindedly on closing those gaps now, but always the immediate needs of my youngster come first. If I had it my way, the majority of life would be spent on fun things like playing with the kids, puttering in the garden, taking nature trips, creating art, philosophizing - and only an hour or two a day on the "work" of getting a living, but I'm not quite there yet.
I still have to spend three or four hours a day on the work of getting a living. And boy do I resent it. My actions are propelled by that resentment, because I have a vision of a life in which doing nothing but the things that I enjoy earns me my living, and I always get just as much sleep as I want.
Getting from Here to There
There are a million ways to get started, but they all begin with a vision; one that is different from the conventional idea of getting ahead of everyone else by just running twice as fast as them on the treadmill. Self-sufficiency happens incrementally, but not until that first mental shift is made.
One of those million ways to get started is the square foot gardening method. As the author of Square Foot Gardening pointed out, most gardeners with ideas about self-sufficiency or reducing their grocery budget are really gung-ho in the late winter and early spring. We get out there half a mile from the house or to the community garden on the other side of the city, with our expensive rototillers and we create huge long rows and plant 2000 lettuce seeds, 2000 carrot seeds, 50 potato plants and so on with visions of an eventual great market garden and freedom from our day jobs by the end of our wonderful harvest.
Then when it's time to haul ourselves out of the house in the heat of July to hoe, thin, and weed, we just can't handle it and we give up, and all that unharvested food rots in the ground the next winter. The whole sorry failure just reinforces our dependence on our jobs and the grocery store.
But, with the philosophy of doing less, gardening, on a tiny scale, can be a lot of fun. Even if the houseplants are herbs instead of just for good looks, there can be a great pleasure because of the simple reward of having still-living greenery gracing our table at supper. Once we have a little success, we start to build on it because of the energy we gain from that success.
Self-sufficiency always happens incrementally. As long as those increments are in the direction of less energy expenditure instead of more - greater efficiency instead of greater waste. Do the math on the bigger picture. If it is going to require that you make a promise on your future leisure time, consider ways to make the effort now instead of later. And if you can't afford to invest the effort now, then don't get in on the deal at all.
The rewards will reinforce the process, and you will soon see your freedom.
November 2, 2009
The New World Religion (That You and I Were Born Into)
My son's great-grandmother has a story that she compulsively tells almost every time I see her. It's an extremely offensive story about how her sister, 45 years ago, received a prohibition from her doctor against having any more children. When the woman spoke to her priest about her medical requirement to practice birth control, the priest prohibited birth control. And so the woman followed the authority of her religious counsel and when she had her next child was punished with a "Mongoloid" baby. My son's great-grandmother managed to correct herself after the first time she used the "M" word, and thereafter referred to her nephew as "mentally-challenged," "that boy," or "look what she got for it."
About a dozen tellings of the story later, when I had begun to overcome my hurt, I started to wonder what the real message of the story was - why did this woman feel such an overwhelming need to tell me this story every time I saw her? It wasn't that she was being deliberately hurtful; the woman is actually slightly daft. It wasn't to be blamed on her poor memory, because there were many other stories from her younger years that she could tell a hundred times at family gatherings.
No, the real reason for this story had to do with two triggers she would experience each time she saw me. First, my son has Down syndrome, and she's had an experience in her life to explain Down syndrome.
Second, I am a holistic health practitioner, which is a direct threat to the Great World Religion. The story of her sister's wrong decision is my son's great-grandmother's religious conversion story from Catholicism to the Great World Religion.
In the Industrial Age, there is a new world religion that has supplanted all the others. This Great World Religion came into existence during the Enlightenment. Because it completely infuses every aspect of our daily lives, it's invisible most of the time. So I'll point it out and then you can see it, too.
The Great World Religion has exactly the same structure as all world religions - that's why it counts as one. But because all world religions share the beliefs of, and support, the Great World Religion, the new world religion is the real one and Judeo-Christians, Muslims, Hindus, and all their variations and derivatives are just sub-cults within the one world religion. Even humanists, atheists, and New Age spiritualists belong to the Great World Religion.
A religion, by definition, is a set of tenets and practices, centred on claims about reality, and codified by prayer, ritual, or religious law. In other words, it is a belief system by which people tell one another how to live their lives.
The components of every religion, include:
The Central Dogma - a central story that people believe to be the One Truth The Central Prohibition - a self-replicating meme that says "any other belief is evil" (or at least really dumb) The Central Law - a central set of rules, laws, or principles The Central Practice - a set of practices that must be carried out in daily living The Central Authority - authority figures to explain the central story and enforce the rules The Central Punishment - a threat of consequences for breaking the rules The Central Reward - a promised reward for following the rules
Every religion of civilized culture has this exact structure to it: a structure very different from tribal, shamanistic, and animistic spirituality. Even humanists and atheists participate in religion that shares these precise components, because religion does not require a spiritual directive.
Religion is not about spirituality. It is about giving people a direction in their daily lives.
And it is not done for spiritual reasons. Every civilized religion has the same structure and components, because every civilized religion has the same goal: to amass power and control.
No matter which of world religions we are talking about, the goal of each person or group within the entire pyramid is to amass power. This structure is a direct reflection of the structure of civilization itself: steeply pyramid-shaped, stratified, the great majority blindly following the dictates of a very small elite minority - but believing we are doing it for some higher good.
In fact, we are really following our religion because of a combination of fear of punishment and desire for reward.
All people in the great pyramid believe that they are superior to everyone below them. Those at the very bottom, believing themselves inferior to other people, enact their superiority upon the rest of the natural world - and this is how our civilization is destroying the planet: not because there are haves and have-nots, but because we all labour under the impression that any one being can be superior to another. And we all labour under the goal of amassing more power and control: of becoming more superior.
Like a drug addiction, there can never be enough power. This is because religion - and civilization itself - is a positive feedback system, and positive feedback systems automatically self-organize, becoming more complex, getting more energy, growing, becoming more of whatever is their essence. Systems do not willingly become more simple, but only do so in response to an end to their energy supply. This is no less true for a religion than it is for a rainforest. The only difference is that the energy supply for a religion is human minds, while the energy supply for a rainforest is living species and the sunlight that infuses them.
Recognizing the Great World Religion It's all around us: the priests are medical doctors and thousands of scientists who work toward product development and systems to protect our physical comfort. The body of law is cobbled together on a daily basis by government bureaucrats, enforcing hundreds of thousands of laws - not one of which can physically prevent anything bad from happening.
The threat of punishment for noncompliance is in our face all day long: loss of protection from evil forces of germs, terrorism, and not being liked by anyone. Conversely, if successful, each of us has the opportunity to be rewarded with untold luxury in the form of wide-screen digital televisions, sex with hot bimbos, and getting listened to by everyone.
Our sacred texts are now in digital format, coming at us as "news" and "education." The texts are translated and delivered to us through advertising messages and publicly-funded political propaganda.
The central dogma: a flat-out denial of the natural laws that govern our universe and everything in it, including our own bodies and minds. We are not a part of this world, but are separate from, and superior to, it. Technology is our messiah, our cherished savior from the evils of biology, resource limitations, physics, and any kind of personal responsibility.
And the god, of course, is The Economy.
Leaving Your Religion I would never tell anyone to leave their religion (unless they asked); the religions of the world have helped people for ten millennia to endure the boredom and meaninglessness of civilized life by being the only milieu in which a small amount of creativity, philosophy, and spiritual experience can be tolerated.
However, I would like to mention one thing, just to complete my thesis about the Great World Religion. In order for anyone to belong to any religion - and for that religion to have power over your mind and life - we must embrace every single component of the religion.
So, in order to belong to the Great World Religion, a person must believe that this is the One Right Way, and that all other ways of life are wrong. We must desire the promised rewards of luxury, and we must fear the threats of nature. We must listen unquestioningly and obediently to the authority figures who tell us how to live our daily lives and we must contribute to the growing body of law by being a watchdog against any insurgency.
Most importantly, in order to belong to any of the religions of our civilization, we must live our lives with the goal of amassing tremendous force and control while believing that every other being will lose nothing by our doing so. In other words, we must believe fervently that the laws of thermodynamics and biology do not apply to us. You must believe that these are all "theories," and that the truth is that money makes the world go round.
If you should happen to change your mind about any of these components of the Great World Religion, the scales will have fallen off your eyes and you will never be its slave again.
