Challenged recently as to my understanding of what "The Perennial Philosophy" means, I thought I'd look it up on the internet and see if it meant what I think it means.
But then I decided not to. Why let criticism turn me into just another wiki-spouting dweeb? Every gardener knows what "perennial" means. It's a plant that doesn't need planting every year. It's a flower that blooms without effort on the part of the gardener; that comes forth when it's time and this old world makes it's cycles. So a perennial philosophy is obviously a set of ideas that correspondingly, don't take much effort. What kind of thinker is a perennialistic thinker? First, there's a level of intelligence beyond the norm, which sets that thinker apart. A reaction against thinking what everybody else says is correct, a desire to think deeply and originally for oneself. Socrates comes to mind. Buddha comes to mind. Lao tzu, most definitely and I'd include Robert M. Pirisig, obviously. Hey, and Jesus too, for that matter All men who had a strong social context but went against it. Called degenerates by those around them, and messiahs by future generations. But it wasn't just about them. They were describing patterns they found in the world around them, freshly and originally and for themselves mainly, and in so doing, found a harmonic resonance with others doing the same. A select club, the perennialists. Even though the world itself never changes, the social patterns evolve and need a bit of tending now and then. Due to the way monoculture comes to dominate through intellectual interference in natural social patterning, I guess. Did you all get that? Understand what I mean about the way monocultures evolve in response to intellectual interference? Ideas come to dominate a social group, in competition with other social groups and the winners blankets an area with their success and breeding habits. A collective arises and chokes out all variety. We need variety in our body politic in the same way a caterpillar needs butterfly cells. Around here everybody plants, harvest and gardens in pretty much the same way. The main crop that pays the bills is cannabis. Which I do grow, but not using the same old methods everybody else uses. They spend thousands on soils and mulches and worm castings and compost tea' and I'm sure it works fine. The farmer is pretty much a conservative fellow, following the tried and true. But I think all that effort and money is a silly waste of energy. Fukuoka farming teaches that the less you do to Nature, the better. So I do it my way. For instance, cannabis is treated like an annual - but its not. It's actually a perennial. And if you can keep it warm through the winter, with a bit o' structure, then it doesn't need to keep getting juiced up year after year. Stem and root growth, once grown, can be reused. People pluck the plants out of the ground in the fall because that's the way they've always done it. Of course, you can't have illegal plants growing past the time of harvest. What would be the point? But the plants aren't illegal anymore, and Califonria has notoriously long indian summer and if you leave the plant growing, it puts out a second and even a third harvest of buds. That's my perennial philososophy, in a nutshell. Squeeze all the juice out of life you can, with as little expenditure as possible. Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org/md/archives.html
