We all dream the story that's between our ears. My people say that we are a part of the Creator who thought this world into existence as a limited place that we could "jump down" into for the purpose of growth. This is a beautiful world but unlike the Mind of the Creator doesn't have the limitation of being unlimited, eternal, all powerful and knowing everything before you do it. Each spirit picks a family, a situation and a set of problems that all have the benefit of limitation, having to work for strength, dying, imbalance, and not knowing what the hell is going to happen. We call those spirits ayvwiyah or "real people." We get a preview of this world in utero where we are in transition.
At first the ayvwiyah are in a wonderful water world where we are introduced to the four universes beginning with the chemical and where we slowly develop the seven minds ending with the visual at birth. Since nothing can be total unless it can also be limited and singular, this is a wonderful place to work that out. (Einstein's obsession with cosmology is very much in tune with our thinking.) Seeking the simplicity of competency or the limitation of simplicity is built into our intention in this world but in the mother's belly we are leaving the old mega reality and when the water breaks and the walls collapse we will experience the fear of death and the limitation of having nowhere that we know about to escape to. (That's what I think Sartre's "No Exit" is really about.) Also we believe that all life is a part of that and we all are given the problem of having to be predators upon one another without being turned into raving lunatics and wasting our time here. But when we are thrown out into this world from that collapsed world that seemed to have no exit except the violent motions of the seismic contractions of our mother, we find that this universe is dry, harsh, bright, loud and stinks. (Some people, however, retain a memory of that other transcendent foundation of this world although I don't. I had some violent childhood experiences with fire and burning water that grounded me hard in this place.) In order to negotiate this world, each of us are given a set of, what indigenous peoples call, "Original Instructions." Ways of learning quickly in the tools (minds) of sight, hearing, touch, smell, taste, feeling and sense of movement. Over the next ten to thirteen years the Ayvwiyah child will learn to balance and even dance. Learn to sing and then talk. Organize our perceptual "minds" into a hierarchy based on our life script and the family and culture we chose. We will break the language code and begin to comfortably fit into the cultural clothes of that system that we picked to begin within. At somewhere around the age of 13, we will begin to lose the Original Instructions and replace that with conscious awareness, analysis and the projection of patterns onto the perceptions that we retain as we systematically organize our worlds. Other cultures place the conflict of that time within sexuality. (Adolescents) That's their story. That is not the Ayvwiyah story. We say the conflict at the beginning of adulthood has to do with the loss of the "original instructions" and the need to achieve conscious awareness of our tools and performance in the world. Loss of the Original Instructions is like the loss of the water sack of the mother. A feeling of abandonment, upheaval and aloneness and the need for competence in order to continue. Our stories don't come from the Middle Eastern Desert tribes. But in English and Greek you have the terms "Formal" and "Formal Education", as an Indian that is consonant with what we call patterning and the "virtue" or your "virtuosity" of Art is what we call education and the building of conscious, aware competence at studying this world. Aesthetics is the recognition and organization of patterns. Virtuosity is the practice and performance of projecting those patterns out onto the world of our culture and the environment in ways that help us develop mastery and evolve new possibilities (creativity). Creativity is important because it is walking the path of what it meant to imagine and build this world as a place to escape transcendence. It ties us to our roots. To a Traditional American Indian, the conflict between science and religion is a misunderstanding of both. Most of the Indian people call that conflict the work of "little brother." But I will not tell that story here. Let me just say that the Ayvwiyah story says that we chose four choices in this universe: Your God (faith), your mate (relationships), your work (competency) and your play (creativity). Each of those are not theories or objects but processes that are the legs to the table where the Aniyvwiya dance the dance of our lives. When we say "walk in balance" or that "life" is about "harmony", we are talking about the legs of that metaphorical table. Each one of us perceives this world from the context that we choose to work within and seek solutions to. We create our future learning by what tools (Art, Virtuosity, Performance) we choose to develop within our psychology and our physical instrument and the environment that we choose to surround ourselves with. Some of the world comes to us as a set of sensations that flow through the four sensual universes that we experience, negotiate, catalogue and then use to infer on the world to complete the story that our perceptions and experience can only partially reveal. To the traditional Aniyvwiyah the meaning of life is education and evolution. (When we finish we return to the mind of the Creator and fill in what was learned here in this mini-world. We say we "cross the rim of the world and enter into the 'nightland' or the gray world of the mind of the Creator.) Our story says that all of life is about patterns. Forms. That's why you see so many geometric forms in our visual artwork and crafts. Patterns and forms are the "stuff" or the "ideas" of the environment that we chose before we came. Loving the Western card game we say "you play the hand you are dealt but you chose to play!" Patterns are the bricks of our psycho-physical houses. They are what constitutes reality in the four sensual universes and the seven minds that we carry around in our heads. As humans we are good at the visual, somewhat the aural and strong in the kinesthetic minds. We are poor in the Chemical while other spirits chose the animal forms that really know the chemical Universe. But all life has to develop those seven universes or we are damaged in this place. How good we are at perceiving the world through those universes, symbolizing and organizing those perceptions into coherent systems is called virtuosity. Recognizing and organizing the patterns is called one thing by us but as near as we can express it, it seems to be aesthetics in the Western Languages. Once you have the Aesthetics and the Art (C.S. Pierce came to these same conclusions as he lived the down the road from our Stompground in Milford, Pennsylvania) in other words, once we have the "tools" then we can dream the world into existence through what Neurologists call the mechanism of inference. We say dream and in some cases "sing", they use the term "infer." Either way it means you fill the perceptual blanks from your memory knowledge. Now, what does that have to do with Keith and the wounded Professor Hirsch? Well, it means that in examining a problem, we need to be sure that we realize the paucity of our information and do everything we can to admit that the world is far bigger and more complicated than any system we can imagine. That, unlike BP we need to always plan to leave this world as we found it in order for the next group of souls to have as beautiful a place, as we have, available to them as well. We say, that it should be as if we had never been there at all. The material mechanical world being dreamed by Europe is still a problem for me personally and for our story. It seems to be a problem of cultural obesity and excess. I have a student in Austria who has developed wind power for a large portion of Europe. He is an opera singer and has sung Wagner at Bayreuth. Europe has developed mass transit far more than America or Canada. So Europe seems to be moving on but that doesn't keep the fact away from our nose that it is old European ideas being used here that keep us from working together and dreaming and singing a world into place that will be better than when we came. The old mining and drilling model of banditry is still the fashion here. Trade is not much better. It seems as if a gray, drab, world and I don't mean the mind of the Creator after we die, is the only thing imaginable world. Why is that so? Why so grim? Change begins between our ears and then to our feet where we dance it and our mouths where we sing it. Beginning in beauty makes it much harder to be ungraceful. There's nothing more strange than seeing grim, materialistic souls singing "Amazing Grace." One of the things that European economists have not resolved, or even known, is that the people who lived here, 1. developed 70% of the Agricultural food stuffs of the world today, 2. had the best forestry techniques on the planet, 3. didn't need unsanitary domestic animals to breed disease and 4. did some of the most magnificent public works projects on the planet. They had a life that included much less "work" and a creative use of leisure built around the principle of development of the human instrument. Since I was on this list last, I taught a whole course on the forestry techniques and the creative use of fire for the sustainability of healthy forests and wild animal populations. I have a good bibliography now on what I speak. You can find a lot material on the internet about the Laissez Faire model of forestry development in the forests of Europe including the myths that lead to the market myths like the "invisible hand." We did nothing of the kind. Your forests were "gone to seed" and ours did too once we were gone and the market controlled the forest. We shaped, you let it alone. The entire forest prospered under our model and we had more leisure time to work on ourselves. I don't want to get into a spitting match here but this grim little story about social limits just shows a lack of imagination and vision and probably has more to do with our being old men than any reality about the world. That's my opinion. REH From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Keith Hudson Sent: Thursday, July 01, 2010 3:27 AM To: RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION, , EDUCATION Subject: [Futurework] New education and re-education Despite what the politicians hope for, there can be no orderly march out of the present economic recession of Western advanced countries. There is no chain of brand-new products stretching ahead of the ordinary consumer as there always was from about 1780 to 1980. During that period, every wage-earning individual had in mind at least one new consumer good (or service) to aim (and save) for, which, when gained, would raise the customer's social status one more notch. "Keeping up with the Joneses" may be a trite way of expressing this but this has been the fundamental motivation for economic growth. This has been the working method by which most members of the public -- except criminals who take short cuts -- have, by and large, been kept sweet and orderly. The first (and pretty well the only) prophet of the present dilemma was Professor Fred Hirsch, the brilliant Warwick University economist who died aged 46 in 1978 after a long illness, only two years after completing his great work Social Limits to Growth. His thesis was that the availability of desirable goods and services doesn't stretch ahead in a straight-line fashion but starts to curve upwards -- and increasingly steeply, too. In short, the privileged part of the population enjoy goods, services and experiences which are limited by their very nature (and the limited size of the planet). These, more often than not, concern living and working in beautiful locations. They are not available to the majority of the population, even in so-called advanced countries. Very little further social advancement is available to the ordinary income-earner once his house is stuffed with the latest fashionable versions of 'standard' possessions and his time is fully occupied in earning and enjoying them. But, as Fred Hirsch says at the end of his book, he doesn't "offer an operational blueprint" to politicians. His early death was a double tragedy. It not only cut short his own further thinking about his thesis but also deprived him of the many immense discoveries of the genetic sciences which have only burgeoned in the last two decades. The powerful social implications of two of these are only just working their way through evolutionary biology, never mind the general population or politicians. The first is that evolution principally proceeds not from 'general' survival-of-the-fittest but from the female choice of the characteristics of male partners. The second is that females choose males from as high a social status as she's capable of enticing in order to maximise the economic future of herself and her children. This social and evolutionary steam-roller has economic and political repercussions. If social aspirations in the future are to become orderly from the least able to the most, then advanced country populations had better become very much smaller than they are now and develop entirely different production systems than those that are now based predominantly on the large-scale use of fossil-fuel energy and automation. If politicians want to maintain any semblance of stability then they are going to have to think in terms of much smaller governmental groupings in which social status will be determined more by personal character and reputation than by the exclusive personal possession of the best economic goods. The unconscious wisdom of ordinary people in advanced countries is already leading the way by deciding to drastically reduce the number of children they produce and thus, within a century, start to slim down their populations enormously (and, undoubtedly, increasingly restricting immigration -- which is already starting in a serious way). What remains then are new production systems to take over in a century or two when fossil fuels are too expensive to exploit any longer. Fortunately we have the beginnings of this technology already -- the development of DNA 'machine tools' fed directly by sunlight. But between now and then a very great deal of new education and re-education (on the part of politicians particularly) will have to take place. This, as always between new economic eras, will not be an orderly process. Keith Keith Hudson, Saltford, England
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