Ray,
Such brilliant eidetic memories and future visions make peace possible
in our racing thoughts. Thank you.
That we thought this world into existence is of course the very
contentious and most exciting aspect to recent conclusions of quantum
physics. Science bends its light round a brighter corner, and makes
possible the observation of the subatomic world. Within that, the realm
of intention itself. We'll get to rediscover, in time, what was handed
down through various religions, but with the requisite evidence that
science demands.
Your mention of the course you taught on forestry techniques sparked a
recent memory of a newspaper story from June 20. Still living on site, a
local Vancouver Island ex-eco-forester, Merve Wilkinson, 96, wants his
land back from the Land Conservancy. A decade ago he sold his 32
hectare Yellow Point property which he had logged sustainably for 60
years. He wants to cancel the contract and return the $1.01 million he
received. Claims that he logged twice the volume of wood and still had
100 percent of volume remaining, and that during his stewardship, he
would carefully remove any trees that were old, diseased or overcrowded.
The TLC has only removed 8 trees in 10 years, and of those left the
forest vulnerable to blow-down and disease. The parcel once produced an
income, but now no selective logging occurs, and the forest is no longer
worked. No thinning, nothing. The Land Conservancy claims that because
the purchase funds were donations, they cannot break the agreement. And
these incompetents are supposed to be the good guys with knowledge of
sustainability. Sounds like they could use some lessons from the pages
of pre-1880 Cherokee economy. So could I, for that matter, but will I
find the best on line, through the library, or neither one?
Natalia
Ray Harrell wrote:
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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