**Note that this entry is affixed to the top of this journal. Please see the entries following, for my most current posts. Thanks!**

I would like to present an essay I wrote, setting forth Joanna Macy's concept of  "The Great Turning," which refers to the conscious, human choice of turning away from destructive empire and life-negating ways of being, towards Earth community and life-affirming ways of being in relation to Self and planet. 

After presenting Macy's concept, the next section addresses "A Turning More Personal," in which I attempt to articulate my own social and political organizing activities within the framework of The Great Turning, with a view to illuminating the interconnections between the three "different" dimensions of activity or intention represented by the concept. 

I then explore the theme of "The Personal Is the Political," and delve into how my own personal exploration and re-discovery (or perhaps recovery) might be reflected within the collective.  Since my primary interests fall within the realm of cosmology (aka poetry), I explore Richard Tarnas' thesis of "the double bind of modern consciousness," which he uses to illustrate the psychological ramifications of the modern, disenchanted worldview of alienation and separation.  I also ponder the curious fact that, in a Universe such as ours, which is characterized by acausality, the means are the ends, and ask what might that mean for the evolutionary potential of our species and its social organization?

I conclude that the old organizing mythology of the industrialized world will collapse, indeed it is collapsing as its failures mount up in the form of crises all around the planet.  What will fill the vacuum of power and meaning, left in the wake of the collapse of the modern, industrialized worldview?  Towards this endeavor, I explore the theme of "History As A Metaphysical Problem" in the final section.


The chambers of my heart echo the French poet Paul Valéry's lament that, for an artist, no piece is ever really completed, only abandoned.  And so I abandon this unfinished piece of writing on my blog, in the hopes that someone might take inspiration. . . .or perhaps offense (this might be an even better augur!)

Your comments are welcome. (If you do not have a LiveJournal account, you may still leave an Anonymous comment, or use the OpenID feature.  If you go the Anonymous route, your name and e-mail contact info are welcome and appreciated, for I see great value in dialogue.  All Anonymous comments will be screened, so if you do not want your email address to be in public view, just let me know, and I will leave your comment and contact info hidden from public view.)

 

There’s No Salvation from the Myth of Salvation

Foundations of the Great Turning, Antioch University Seattle

February 26, 2008

The Great Turning

The Great Turning is a concept which Joanna Macy helped to develop over her thirty years of social and environmental activism, which seeks to describe the conscious human choice to “choose life [which] means to build a life-sustaining society,” defined as “’one that satisfies its needs without jeopardizing the prospects of future generations.’” (Macy & Brown, 1998).  The need to develop a life-sustaining society emerges from the modern, industrialized way of life, which Norwegian ecophilosopher Sigmund Kwaloy named the Industrial Growth Society.  While acknowledging the positive aspects of the unprecedented powers wrought by our highly technologized culture, Macy and Brown (1998) highlight the fact that

…[W]e witness destruction of life in dimensions that confronted no previous generation in recorded history.  Certainly our ancestors knew wars, plagues, and famine; entire civilizations, such as Phoenicia and Imperial Rome, foundered when they cut down their trees for warships and turned their lands to desert.  But today it is not just a forest here and some farmlands and fisheries there; today entire species are dying—and whole cultures, and ecosystems on a global scale, even to the oxygen-producing plankton of our seas (p. 15). 

The Industrial Growth Society hinges on an “economy [that] depends on ever-increasing consumption of resources.  To maintain its engines of progress, Earth is both supply-house and sewer” (p. 16).

           

"Psychoanalysis has to get out of the consulting room and analyze all kinds of things. You have to see that the buildings are anorexic, you have to see that the language is schizogenic, that normalcy is manic, and medicine and business are paranoid."

"The word 'normal' comes from the Greek norma, which was a carpenter's square, that right-angled tool for establishing straightness."

--James Hillman, founder of archetypal psychology

“Blessed be you, mighty matter, irresistible march of evolution, reality ever newborn; you who, by constantly shattering our mental categories, force us to go ever further and further in our pursuit of truth.”
--Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Hymn to Matter

"There is a contradiction in wanting to be perfectly secure in a universe whose very nature is momentariness and fluidity. But the contradiction lies a little deeper than the mere conflict between the desire for security and the fact of change. If I want to be secure, that is, protected from the flux of life, I am wanting to be separate from life. Yet it is this very sense of separateness which makes me feel insecure. To be secure means to isolate and fortify the 'I,' but it is just the feeling of being an isolated 'I' which makes me feel lonely and afraid. In other words, the more security I can get, the more I shall want."

--Alan Watts, from The Wisdom of Insecurity

"There can be only patient endurance of the opposites which ultimately spring from your own nature. You yourself are a conflict that rages in itself and against itself in order to melt its incompatible substances, the male and the female, in the fire of suffering and thus create that form which is the goal of life. Everyone goes through this mill, consciously or unconsciously, voluntarily or forcibly. We are crucified between the opposites and delivered up to the torture, until the reconciling third takes shape. Do not doubt the rightness of the two sides within you and let whatever may happen, happen. The apparently unendurable conflict is proof of the rightness of your life. A life without intercontradiction is either only half a life or else a life in the beyond which is destined only for angels. But god loves human beings more than angels."
--C.G. Jung, in a letter to Frau Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn

A tertium non datur emerging from a coniunctio oppositorum, the (re)union of the solar and the lunar....but to have the courage and the compassion to hold those two heavenly bodies equally and with love......

"Trying to create the future without knowing the past is like trying to plant cut flowers."
--Daniel Boorstin, historian and librarian of Congress

How could I run into that magnificent mirror of relationship
by running away from it?
It's not time....time....yet....says Saturn
his boundaries and limitations having their way
with my heart
that knows no bounds

How could I trust that this is what must
be
and not rail against what is
with sheer force of feeling
and shame for the body - pity
not me

How to rub up against the emptiness of the night
the time, the time of no time
and feel its fullness
as drops of water, laughing, caress my face
on the way to the drain, to the
briny sea
saying: you are loved. you are not alone,
child

How to not contrive the story
the sentences of my life
and surrender to autopoiesis
The living web in which
Saturn's hands so deftly spin

And though I long for that discovery
of a mirror so deep it's cataclysmic
I recall: the jewel in the lotus is within

Some nights, the humility of this being human becomes too much
And I have to laugh
to laugh at my frustration with the stupidest thing
Why do I get so upset?
What is the significance of the inconvenience done to me
when the chain
pops off the chain ring of my bike
And I have the gall to swear, and show my prissy ingratitude to the Universe
for the air I breathe,
and the pumping of my heart, involuntarily
lub-dub, lub-dub, lub-dub

then I stop to listen, to notice
the sheer ridiculousness of my frustration
in the face of the humility
of this being human

some nights, it happens in the parking lot of an East Bay BART station
that I must laugh
only at myself

"Failure is unimportant. It takes courage to make a fool of yourself."
 --Charlie Chaplin

...or: I bow to Saturn.  And all the teachers who wander (or barge) through my life.    

Instead of reading one of the 99 books on my plate, I'm moved to post a big WTF here.... I found this item by clicking through some of the links in Sustainable Ballard's calendar of local (Seattle) events:


(From The People's Summit, courtesy the Seattle+10 Organizing Committee, an ad-hoc group of activists and organizations that have come together to mobilize and inspire citizens and civil society to carry forward the lessons and energy of Seattle 1999, when we successfully shut-down the WTO.)

I see all the usual suspects represented in the sponsoring and participating organizations, but I am somewhat shocked to see the white-collar union SPEEA listed here. Not a bad shock, a very good shock, and maybe I'm just ignorant of their previous stands on sociopolitical issues (it was a big frickin' deal, as I recall, when they voted to go on strike against The Man (Boeing Company) a few years back).  While I could speculate on why they endorsed the action, I'm happy to leave it at this: Hallelujah!  I hope to see more of this sort of thing in the near term. 

And I smile at the sweetness of the recent realization of many long decades of fighting, in King County's name change from imperialist overtures to something much more beautiful and inspiring: Martin Luther King County.

I've been (pleasantly) side-swiped by Esalen...only a couple of regrets, and some terror to accompany the beauty.  All my friends' descriptions fell too short of the actual phenomenon, and I am afraid I must admit that I can now actually see living here in this part of the world sans coercion.  It is queer to suddenly feel as if I now reside here, as if there is some greater connection, which maybe only took these last ten months to establish.  I'm certainly more wide open than I have ever been, and wondering--just wondering--who or what else will come closer in.  Every time I definitively break through to another level, "something" happens....  With a knowing wink and a nod to gonzo_md , let's hope it's nothing too ominous.

Words fail me. A most pleasant, if too rare occurrence.... Thank you to the land of Big Sur, the springs of Esalen and of course, the wild Pacific Ocean, for reuniting me with yet another fragment I was carrying around, broken off, its presence an absence I did not miss, because I could not feel it. All these years, and I did not feel it.




October 30, 2009 McWay Falls at Julia Pfeiffer Burns State Park near Big Sur, California.

Thanks also to everyone in and associated with my graduate program, Philosophy, Cosmology and Consciousness...I'm looking forward to next year at Esalen already.

p.s. - Yes, Mom, I'm still very much alive.

"We did not think of the great open plains, the beautiful rolling hills, and winding streams with tangled growth, as 'wild.' Only to the white man was nature a 'wilderness' and only to him was the land 'infested' with 'wild' animals and 'savage' people.  To us it was tame.  Earth was bountiful and we were surrounded with the blessings of the Great Mystery.  Not until the hairy man from the east came and with brutal frenzy heaped injustices upon us and the families we loved was it 'wild' for us.  When the very animals of the forest began fleeing from his approach, then it was that for us the 'wild west' began."
  --Luther Standing Bear, Oglala Sioux (in Touch the Earth, ed. T.C. McLuhan)

"We must stand apart from the conventions of history, even while using the record of the past, for the idea of history is itself a western invention whose central theme is the rejection of habitat.  It formulates experience outside of nature and tends to reduce place to only a stage upon which the human drama is enacted.  History conceives the past mainly in terms of biography and nations.  It seeks causality in the conscious, spiritual, ambitious character of men and memorializes them in writing."
  --Paul Shepard

"A gold Buddha can't get through a furnace, a wood Buddha can't get through a fire, and a clay Buddha can't get through water.  The real Buddha sits within: enlightenment, nirvana, suchness, and Buddha-nature are all clothes sticking to the body.  They are also called afflictions; don't ask and there is no vexation.

In the noumenal ground of reality, where is there to grasp?  When the individual mind is not aroused, myriad things have no fault.  Just sit investigating the truth for twenty or thirty years; if you don't understand, then cut off my head.

It is useless to bother to try to grasp dreams, illusions, and false appearances.  If the mind does not differ, myriad things are also thus.  Since it is not gotten from the outside what is there to get wrapped up in or hung up on anymore?  Why go on being like goats, picking up things at random and putting them in your mouth?"

  --Chao-Chou

Oh boy....I'm exhausted after listening to a lecture on "Buddhist Philosophical Systems" from the most learned, hilarious (and corny ;-) Steven Goodman following a day of work, then a planning meeting, and reading Animate Earth: Science, Intuition and Gaia, by Stephan Harding. I really wanted to share a fascinating perception/description of the sulphur cycle of Gaia, but I'm too exhausted to condense it down and post it here--but, in short, ocean algae have a surprising lot to do with cloud formation and nutrient distribution to plant life.

I've managed to meet the demands of Saturn (Om Sri Shanaishwaraya Swaha!), which naturally only involved self-overcoming, and formed a campus group "dedicated to the support and growth of an astrological community of learners through the facilitation of peer mentoring and learning, with a view to fostering an approach to the discipline of astrology which is creative, imaginative and intellectually rigorous."  (To the skeptic: yes, there is such a thing as rigor in astrology.  Unfortunately, we need to see a whole lot more rigor, a need perhaps emanating out of the shadow side of being an occult discipline.)  In a lovely synchronicity, the name of it came to me just as the Sun conjoined my natal Moon: Coniunctio.  The archetype of the sacred marriage, the combination of the Sun and Moon being the archetype of the archetype, as it were.  Let's hope the venture shall be so creative.

And speaking of self-overcoming....my word, I have been dealing with the energy of the Uranus square Pluto world transit the last week or so.  I've observed the strong urges arise in me to simply abandon all social convention and restraint and to hell with maturity and wisdom (Saturn)---let's go wild!!!!!!!!!!! hahaahahahaha  I know that it sure feels good to just go with that, but I also know that "fun" is just the short-term experience and a very hollow substitute for deep satisfaction...sort of like a carbohydrate burst, rather than solid, nutritional protein.  Protein for the soul takes time to build, people, forget the cheap carbs.  Saturn, Saturn, Saturn, you taunt me..!!  Good thing for me that I know (not know about, but KNOW) that the five skandhas (aggregates of composition, existence) are shunyata (emptiness, vast, original, ineffable source), and continuing to truly know this, and getting far beyond upside down views, it's possible to transcend misfortune and suffering.  If form is exactly shunyata, and shunyata is exactly form, then, really Saturn is laughing with us.  (I will check in on the nature of this "joke" when Saturn shortly conjoins my Moon-Pluto for a year-long stand-up gig in a very interesting part of my psyche.)

"Modern man talks of the battle with nature, forgetting that if he ever won the battle he would find himself on the losing side."
  --E.F. Schumacher

“There is a vitality, a life force, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique, and if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium; and be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is, nor how it compares with other expression. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open. You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep open and aware directly to the urges that motivate you. Keep the channel open. No artist is pleased. There is no satisfaction whatever at any time. There is only a queer, divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others.”
  --Martha Graham

It is not your business to determine how good it is, nor how it compares with other expression. ...No artist is pleased. There is no satisfaction whatever at any time. There is only a queer, divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others.

"If stories come to you, care for them. And learn to give them away where they are needed. Sometimes a person needs a story more than food to stay alive."
—Barry Lopez, in Crow and Weasel

"What we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning."
  --Werner Heisenberg

Yes...humility, and reverence for the mysteries of life, but we Kant reach the future by remaining at this point (sorry, it was irresistible).