**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).

           

"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).

I awoke to a queer, unfamiliar sound on Saturday morning.  A low rumbling, its vibration penetrating through the fog at the threshold of waking and sleeping, reminding me enough of thunder that I thought it could be so, even after this endless drought called "summer" in California, but as the rumbling continued a fright grabbed me: bombs!  Were we being bombed?  For a moment, it seemed more likely than rain to my sun-scorched brain.  

The lightning was so intense that night that my housemate upstairs was awakened, and I heard various tales of people's experiences of the storm, both numinous and ordinary.  The exact same events were experienced by people quite differently, according to their personal timeline, their frame of mind, the private events of their lives and as I listened, the symbolic nature of this strange place called "Universe" (by me at least) rippled through my imagination.  I teased one person who wondered aloud if the powerful lightning over his house had held a message for him, "sure, it's all about you."  His reply, "Well, it's not not about me." 

Indeed.  If it were not a symbolic realm, then a tree could only be a "tree" by my human estimation and classification.  It could not be simultaneously home to acorn woodpecker, sustenance to lichen and moss, protector and co-generator of fresh water for its local aquifer, and heaven forbid anyone would think that humans have somehow determined those roles, for we're a pretty recent development.  It would just be literally a "tree" as however defined.  If it were not a symbolic realm, then we could truthfully rank people as better than, more important, or less than other people.  But, fortunately, no one holds the absolute, total truth; if that were so, then hierarchy would be just, and the person or group with The Truth could get to decide what is just so and righteously force it upon others...the Universe would be with them.  As vexing as relativity is to the human ego, believe me, this is a good design.  (Perhaps better said: it's what we got. We must deal with it, and not with what we wish were the case, believing that somehow "easier.") 

I'm having a hard time imagining a literal universe, actually.  How could anything be related to anything else??  Is movement or change inherent in relation?  Wouldn't a literal universe be frozen, for how could a thing only be just one thing?   That seems to me a single observer, not the infinite multitude of "eyes" that I apprehend constituting the Universe.  I can certainly see the extreme damage done by taking it to be a literal universe, or taking everything so literally, but this only reflects how far from the Truth such an approach is.  The damage, the harm, is the feedback: this is a wrong relation. 

As when I look deeply into people, I can see their tremendous beauty and truth only because I also see their bad side, their weaknesses and shortcomings....if I fail to see the latter, I certainly do not see the former.  And if I see only the bad side, I am also not seeing clearly.  People are many things.  Or as when I look at life, I also see death.  If I do not see death when I see life, then I am not seeing its amazing beauty and truth at all.  And if I only see death, I've certainly missed the boat somewhere.  How odd that this imbalance seems to come from me, the filters on my observation, be they cultivated (nurture) or somehow native (nature).  So much is held in the observation and the action which follows on.

"No journey carries one far unless, as it extends into the world around, it goes an equal distance into the world within."
  --Lillian Smith

Ooooohhhhhh life....how you endlessly amaze me.  That a frail human would try to predict and control you?? 'Tis to scoff....

I am at turns pleased and frustrated with Nature's Open Secret, which was lovely reading for the most part until Chapter 9, "Goethe's Theory of Knowledge."  Whereas Rudolf Steiner (astounding that he wrote this at the age of 21 !!) had apparently shown restraint in trying to impress an audience apparently awfully up itself, he became truly high-falutin' when he finally got to epistemology.  I knew he wasn't writing for our times, nor for my class's audience, but as our professor, himself a scholar of Steiner, explained, Steiner "was trying to convince the German-speaking intellectual class that Goethe was right to consider his scientific research more important than his literary works."  (Well that explains everything.) The modern materialist scientist would scoff at this idea, perhaps even more so today, and I am sympathetic to both Steiner's youth and to his considerably difficult task, but the language is rather unbearable in these parts, and I ran out of time around page 142, as our class commenced last weekend.  And to be very clear about my general orientation, it's not that I think that philosophy should be necessarily "easy," it's the plain fact that if you really know something, you should be able to explain it so that even a child could understand.  I have little patience for intellectual snobbery, which bears little resemblance to true intelligence--and full disclosure, I was not immune from indoctrination by the insane hierarchy and dominator orientation of my culture, and must remain aware of my own tendency to classism, and -ism -isms.

I would have certainly put forth the effort to decode and digest this book, but I hadn't the time set aside to do so, and I was kind of disappointed in myself for the lack of time and concentration.  Fortunately, our professor is a good teacher, and he started with the group exactly where we were at (behind the "at.")  I love his enthusiasm, as well, and reading another very interesting book for an upcoming weekend workshop, called The Living Classroom by Chris Bache, I can see now the important contribution such passion and energy brings to the sharing of erudition.  That's a sort of commonsense idea, but Bache sets it within another context of group fields of learning, something I had observed in completing my undergrad degree and separately examined through independent study. 

I will finish and hopefully master Nature's Open Secret, since Goethe had a method but no system, and Steiner was the one to systematize his scientific approach.  Goethe didn't give a crap about the philosophers, he just wanted to prove that he had gotten beyond Kant's epistemological trap, just as anyone can experientially, which is the insistence that we are trapped within our own subjectivity, and can never have objective knowledge of anything perceived "out there" in the world, because the very structure of our mind prevents this.  Every time I run into Kant, I know that he must be overcome, in my own creative output, which seems to want to be about intersubjectivity.  And my damned masochistic affair with Western philosophy at all, it can be so....well....let me just quote Karl Popper, the most influential philosopher of science of the last century:

"It is very necessary these days to apologize for being concerned with philosophy in any form whatsoever. . . .  In my opinion, the greatest scandal of philosophy is that, while all around us the world of nature perishes--and not the world of nature alone--philosophers continue to talk, sometimes cleverly and sometimes not, about the question of whether this world exists."

Amen.  Much nicer than what I would say.

And now, some Martian action.  I've now been in two institutions of higher learning, where there is more sensitivity than the "norm" to the crisis of transformation that's been underway for many centuries, but reaching some process of quickening by some estimations, and a part of this transformation has to do with the reunion of the horribly alienated and thus distorted "masculine" and "feminine" qualities of the Universe, within human cultural forms.  This reunion must take place on all levels of interaction, including the human to Earth relationship, but where this occurs in the human body, I've noticed a certain trend, while acknowledging that I have the bias of my own personal experience.  More feminine males--that is, men who are not afraid to be whole human beings, and manifest their own individual expression of so-called "feminine" qualities--seem to be accepted fairly easily and appreciated, across the spectrum in these institutions and similar environs.  Those who are much more "feminine" according to the gender-locked consciousness are not typically rejected.  (Probably condescended to on occasion, though.)

But women who are not afraid to be whole human beings and exhibit their unique expression of so-called "masculine" traits seem to meet with a bit of resistance, by comparison--most of it very unconscious.  How is it that the "feminine" could be so threatening?  Carried in men's bodies, it would seem to not be, but in women's arguably less-objectified bodies, it is.  (Meaning, they are subject to less objectification because of carrying the so-called "masculine" traits more visibly.)  It's not a nice picture, but "feminine" has come to mean "object," and the presence of "masculinity" (as so-caricatured) seems to be irreconcilable with this view. 

In general, when the "object" suddenly takes on its own subjectivity, it becomes a frightening thing, certainly unpredictable to the would-be objectifier, who no longer feels safe (in control).  Witness a common reaction to the Earth's signals to humanity that it is an autonomous being, with its own intrinsic meanings and systems, not the object of technologized predict-command-extract-and-control scenarios....(don't forget it's only taken 150 years of amplified "wrong relations" for these "WTF do you think you are?!" feedback signals to get to us, in the context of maybe 14 billion years of Universe)  What was Lovelock's latest book title, "Gaia's Revenge?"  Ha!  Really, now?  So, she's not supposed to be a sentient being??  Ok, yes, the dogma of scientism says not, but I reject dogma, and I know this spaceship is no machine, but a living being.  But here we are with those scary emancipated women.  They're going to take revenge!!! that must be the unconscious fear, and perhaps this is part of the inertial resistance to all attempts to address institutionalized oppressions, within institutions which at least try to or profess to be more enlightened.  Of course, there's also the bit about being accustomed to making decisions on behalf of, or for the "other" and the feeling that, therefore, those suddenly freed objects could not possibly be capable of intelligence, or of acting differently towards those who have been dominating. 

Who knows for sure, and there is always more to know....  As for me, I'm noticing Saturn squaring my Mars now, and indeed the whole litany of outer planets descending on my Mars, which commenced with that watershed life event in January 2006--emancipation ~~ oooohhhh Pluto (and Saturn)--and ending, hopefully triumphant in pulling my head out of my arse, with a Jupiter conjunct Uranus trine, in about five years.  I'm curious about the pattern I see there, for my Mars WILL express itself, so repressed as its been and time to wake up and play now, and I'd best choose to be conscious about it.  After all, the one and only message is: WAKE UP.    

"When I despair, I remember that all through history, the way of truth and love has always won. There have been tyrants and murderers, and for a time they seem invincible, but in the end, they always fall. Think of it, always."

"It appears that the impossibility of full realization of Truth in this mortal body led some ancient seeker after Truth to the appreciation of ahimsa [nonviolence, or love]. The question which confronted him was: 'Shall I bear with those who create difficulties for me, or shall I destroy them?' The seeker realized that he who went on destroying others did not make headway but simply stayed where he was, while the man who suffered those who created difficulties marched ahead, and at times even took others with him. The first act of destruction taught him that the Truth which was the object of his quest was not outside himself but within. Hence the more he took to violence, the more he receded from Truth. For in fighting the imagined enemy without, he neglected the enemy within."

--Mohandas K. Gandhi

Fields Book Store is worthy of the label "dangerous."  Aaaarrrr, damn!  I only needed Nature's Open Secret: Introductions to Goethe's Scientific Writings by Rudolf Steiner (which is going to be a delightful read, I can tell already by page four!), but I browsed their mostly eclectic selection of "esoteric traditions of East and West" (since 1932) and was bitten by a lovely binding of Alice Raphael's Goethe and the Philosophers' Stone: Symbolic Patterns in 'The Parable' and the Second Part of 'Faust.'  My class involving Goethe this semester is more of the experiential variety (which always takes me into deeper, transformative territory--let's hope CIIS delivers as much as Antioch University Seattle has), but I have a feeling I will get some use out of this over the long term, for how could I neglect a thorough study of such a one as Goethe?? 

New books (of course, not the ones I was looking for, but we take what we can get):

Saturn: A New Look at an Old Devil, by Liz Greene

The Luminaries: The Psychology of the Sun and Moon in the Horoscope, by Liz Greene and Howard Sasportas

The visit with mom continues to be interesting in many ways, especially as I am trying to "own back" stuff (you psyche-people know what I'm talking about), and then get her to tell me stories about my dad. Once she's gone, that's it, those stories are lost forever....


* consider [14] Etymologically, consider means "observe the stars". Amongst the most popular of ancient Roman methods of divination was astrology, and so the Latin verb considerare was coined (from the intensive prefix com- and sidus "star", source of English sidereal) to describe the activity of carefully noting the stars' courses for the purpose of drawing auguries. From "observing stars" it soon broadened out in meaning to simply "observe", and hence figuratively "think over something", but the sense "have an opinion" seems to be an English development of the 16th century. English acquired the word via Old French considerer, but borrowed considerable directly from Latin considerabilis; the modern sense "large in amount" arose in the mid-17th century, on the basis of an earlier "worthy of consideration because of great quantity".(source: Word Origins, by John Ayto, p. 139)

Let the beer flow! I'm piling mom into the car and hitting the city. The piles o'books (and dirty and clean clothes) stacked all over my room indicate some serious work has gone down here...damn, I count thirty separate sources, but I'm familiar with a lot of them. I had a few favorite sentences in these three papers, but I hope I will learn my lesson of the first two semesters and start giving myself more breathing room to complete them.

“I am quite sure,” Mark Twain wrote, “that (bar one, [the French]) I have no race prejudices, and I think I have no color prejudices nor caste prejudices nor creed prejudices.... All that I care to know is that a man is a human being—that is enough for me; he can’t be worse.” (Foner, 237)

hehe