blog032 A New Decision

I think I surf the internet because I am looking for something...
something besides distractive entertainment.

I think I am looking for a way out of what is not me...
and a way-in to contributing my talents and gifts to Earth and her abundance of interrelated beings.


I think I am seeking a way to play full out for life rather than for mere economic survival.

What about you?


If you surf the internet I think you are a social entrepreneur, looking for your playing field, trying to create your gameworld, with an entirely new set of rules of engagement.

I think your gameworld sits directly in front of you, begging for you to take one step along the path that further skills-you-up through taking each further step.

I think a part of you knows this each morning when you wake up - you have a sense of the one possible first step in front of you that you could take...

...it stares you right in the face before you move each morning.

I think the part of you that sees the action you could take tries to look away as fast as possible, for numerous reasons. Reason number one is that you feel terrified.

You are terrified because you went to school where you learned to sit silently in rows and be still, for weeks... for years.

But if you take a step now to apply your unique talents to solve problems in the world, you would have to move.

You would have to step out of line. And you are still afraid of getting punished for being out of line...

Still, here you are, reading this blog. I think you are reading it to get yourself a new possibility.

So here is the new possibility: You are no longer in school. That game is over.

(Or if you are still in school, you shouldn't be, because it is still trying to teach you to "Stand still, Laddy!")

The other part of the new possibility is that if you escape the school system and do experiments as a social entrepreneur you are not alone. There are thousands of social entrepreneurs out here, all around the world, playing full out to make the changes one-step-at-a-time that make the world a better place for everyone.

Social entrepreneur (r)evolutionaries don't have guns. They don't have money. They don't have political power. What they do have is a simple idea for dealing with what is right in front of them in a new way, and they have the same curious, inventive, rule-breaking, nonlinear urges that you have, plus deep inside, the same fear.

The only difference between them and you is that these social entrepreneurs have made one new decision: They have decided that taking that step is more important than the fear that comes with. It's a sacrifice they make. They feel the fear and take the step anyway, and many other people benefit. To them it is a fair trade, part of the job.

What is interesting though, is that through taking the present step, that fear automatically changes into a resource of wisdom and energy for taking the next further step that automatically appears after taking the first step.

So.

What about you? What about changing your mind?



















You can take a breath, make a new decision, and leap.

You will know that you have made a new decision when you suddenly take a step that is right in front of you on the path of being a social entrepreneur, whatever that step is.

It might be simply to watch this Social Entrepreneur video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jk5LI_WcosQ#t=509

It might me to make a Kiva loan: www.kiva.org

It might be to hold a weekly neighborhood potluck dinner at your house to check-in with your neighbors about becoming more resilient together.

It might be to have a rotating neighborhood de-lawning and veggie-garden planting party, like Ron Finley and his Guerrilla Gardening: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EzZzZ_qpZ4w

It might be calling people over for a movie and watching the video End:Civ with Derrick Jensen https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3hx-G1uhRqA and sitting together afterwords sharing about your experiences from it.

It might be a few of you committing to each other as adults helping each other grow up through ongoing initiatory processes - committing to each other to such a degree that even society's money neurosis cannot get in the way of more love happening.

One step leads to another. There is no top end. Please keep going!

blog028 Thumbscrews

Thumbscrews are metallic torture devices progressively tightened on your thumbs until your will is destroyed.

You are wearing thumbscrews since childhood.

If they somehow get a little loose, you tighten them back on yourself, just to keep things feeling normal.



 





With a crushed will you don't even try doing what you are capable of doing because even vaguely thinking about it brings up the fear that the screws will be tightened even more.

You have memories...

With shocking efficiency modern schooling and corporate-herded society have applied thumbscrew devices to your brain, your heart, your body and your being.






1. Screws are clamped on your brain to cripple your perceiving and thinking so you can only function within a framework of external authority. From then on, instead of ongoingly generating interesting new frameworks from within yourself, you search for the "correct" framework outside of yourself. You automatically adapt to that external authority so you know what to do and when to do it without getting in trouble. Your life curriculum is already determined. Nobody has ever asked you what you want to learn (as in the film Accepted) so you can't imagine that asking this question of yourself might be valid. Unpredictable actions never become an option.

2. Screws are clamped on your heart so that feeling numb equals feeling good. Your rocket fuel is locked away. Your squeeze-dried heart can no longer cry out what is important to you.


 



3. Screws are clamped to your body so you cannot engage in work that matters to you. Instead you merely survive.

4. And perhaps most horrifyingly, clamp-rings squeeze your being, so you cannot unfold into what you are, which means you cannot give what you have because you don't have it, and you cannot let yourself be seen because you cannot be you.

As we speak, you allow the schools and corporations to screw your children in the same way because your memories prove that, if you interfere, the pain could be applied to you again. You feel completely trapped and helpless.

After a couple decades the handicap becomes normal. Even if you suddenly recognize that present culture is suiciding the planet, you are unable to take unprescribed actions.





You are too numb and scared to leave your pitiful job.

You are too disconnected from yourself to creatively organize with like-minded people to develop a culture that you would love to live in.

You are too ashamed to admit that the slave masters have succeeded in sucking out your will. Since you think you are keeping this a secret you cannot ask for help.

You cannot stop shopping, drinking, smoking, overeating.

You cannot stop those occasional rage fits, or the depression.

You cannot turn off and discard your TV.

You cannot resist the internet sex.

You cannot wear old clothes or go without shaving your armpits or legs.

You cannot hesitate to compare yourself to the computer-enhanced magazine images of ideal product users.

And you cannot speak openly for fear of being beaten into submission again.

What sort of spineless scum have you become?

No amount of increased awareness can get you to change behavior because your will has been snuffed. Any resistance must be nonviolent for fear the pain will return.

























You are a prisoner of memories of childhood nightmares. What is the use of trying to get out? You may as well keep putting on the smiley face and pretending everything is just fine.

Sure it hurts to keep the thumb screws on.

But it probably hurts even more to loosen the screws and feel your lifeblood start circulating into unexpected capacities. Is that even possible? Could unrecognized beneficial talents still come to life?

That is an edgework question.

Who put the thumbscrews on, actually?

What was their original purpose?

Are conditions still the same around you?

Have you learned anything in the meantime that could make a different solution possible for you now?

What if you discovered there were small secret teams all over the world helping each other loosen the thumbscrews on all four bodies? Slowly, carefully, and thoroughly. Without permission. Taking extraordinary actions by the power of their own authority.

blog008 Feeling Bad

No matter how deeply the thoughtware from your parents sticks in your brain, if it is naive and trite, it still handicaps you.

In the case of feelings, outdated thoughtware can handicap you severely. You don't even know you are handicapped until you download new thoughtware and the world suddenly works differently for you.

Take for example, fear.

From modern culture we get the belief that everything comes from either fear or love. Obviously, love is good, so fear must be bad.

Or there is the famous declaration: No Fear! (Photo courtesy AW Sign & Design)

Why no fear? Because fear is one of the "bad" feelings, of course! Like sadness or anger, it is to be avoided. Everybody knows that...

But what if "everybody" is wrong?

What if the socalled "bad" feelings are not a mistake of God. (As far as I know, God only made one mistake: the size of the seeds in avocadoes. I mean, you buy this fabulous fruit and slice into it and - kchunk! - you immediately hit the seed. Take out the seed and there's not much left! This a real pity!)

What if fear is only scary until you grow up and change your relationship to fear as part of your rite of passage to adulthood?

(Photo of Marion Callahan walking barefoot on glowing coals, November 2008.)

What if adult fear provides ongoing information and energy in the exact proper intensity to watch out for things in daily life? To stay alert, pay attention, make plans, make agreements, change things, to scan with your free attention and detect what needs taken care of (Do the plants need watering? Should I call home?), to know what needs protecting, to handle delicate situations with finesse? What if fear is the guideline for humor (saying things with the right intonation at exactly the right moment), for improvising (speaking before you know what you are going to say, committing before you know how to do it), for creating delight (what will delightfully surprise her?), for taking precise actions (slicing tomatoes, taking a splinter out), for knowing when you are at the limits of the known?

If you go to the edge of your comfort zone, you will feel fear. If it is not okay to feel fear then you will bounce back into known territory ten times a day and not even know it, missing your chance to explore and create.

If it is okay for you to feel fear and you go to the edge of your comfort zone, you will definitely feel afraid, but because the fear is no longer automatically bad or dangerous (fear is fear) you can still function. Suddenly fear becomes excitement. You can take the next step further out of your comfort zone into the complete unknown. This is where true creating happens, making something out of nothing (or nothing out of something). Do you need to be creative in your work? If you are not feeling afraid, you are not creating.

Rites of passage to adulthood are not provided by mainstream culture. To get to adulthood you need to go beyond modern culture's comprehension limits and arrange a next-culture rite of passage for yourself. For guidance in this and related experiments, you might want to check out the book Directing The Power of Conscious Feelings by Clinton Callahan.

You can learn to have no fear about feeling your fear. This is when things get fun.

blog006 Grow Up Or Die, But How?

27 June 2010

Carolyn Baker, an astute alternative-news analyst, and author of Sacred Demise: Walking the Spiritual Path of Industrial Civilization's Collapse, recently emailed that she published a commentary on my new book. A few days later I clicked back to her website and got the ominous error message: "Website Expired."

A chill went down my spine.
"What?" my mind asked blankly.
I was stunned.
I quickly wrote Carolyn an email to ask what was happening and if I could do anything to support her. My email bounced back to me, unreceived.
The panic of powerlessness grew. I wrote to a couple of her friends who might know what was going on.... nothing.

A day passed. Two more. Then Carolyn sent an email. Whew!!... It turned out she was switching servers - a process that can take longer than instantaneous. The "expired" message came from chasing her website into internet Bardo zones. "Thank God she is okay," was all I thought. I found myself with tears of relief.

Since then the incident reverberates in my system. "What was actually scaring me?"

So far I have two possibilities.

1. Shock. Since I only know Carolyn (and many others) through internet connections I do not know what is going on in her or their daily lives. If I knew Carolyn personally I would also be more aware of her state of health and well being. Now I only know her as an amazing writer. When Juan Santos, another such internet friend, suddenly died in January 2009, I had a similar shock. I was not prepared for Juan to disappear from my life so suddenly. We still had important things to talk about. Same with Carolyn.

2. The Front Lines. The other possibility is this: What if she had died? What's my fear about then? I think it must be fear of getting closer to the front lines. There is a war going on between conscious evolution and business-as-usual. It is an internal war that involves practicing with discipline, paying attention to your attention, growing the matrix that holds consciousness, and taking strong clear actions that are consistent with what is actually needed. Certain people are on the front lines taking such actions. To some degree I am hoping these other people are handling it themselves. But what if so many frontliners have already died that it is already my turn? What if the front lines are at my front door? Then in this moment, these very words are the front lines and you are there with me.

(Some of Carolyn's links are still inactive, so I reproduce her blog in its entirety below. At the end I add a few live links both to Carolyn's blog, and to the Beware the Psychopath, My Son article she refers to.)
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GROW UP OR DIE, BUT HOW? By Carolyn Baker
http://carolynbaker.net/site/content/view/1681/1
Wednesday, 16 June 2010

A commentary on Clinton Callahan's Directing The Power of Conscious Feelings

In May 2008 I was approached by psychotherapist, Clinton Callahan, offering me an article entitled "Beware of The Psychopath, My Son" which asserts that people in places of power in the systems of empire are often devoid of conscience and therefore have participated in setting industrial civilization on a self-destructive course that cannot be altered by rational dialog or appeals to altruism within those individuals. Callahan's thesis brilliantly illumines the aberrant behavior of politicians and corporate CEO's, offering a perspective that makes sense of their anti-social and anti-ecosystem behavior.

More recently, Callahan has published Directing The Power of Conscious Feelings: Living Your Own Truth (Hohm Press, 2010) This book is nothing less than an encyclopedia of emotional healing, offering a "biblio-boot camp" of preparation for the collapse of industrial civilization and the Next Culture that might emerge from it. I highly recommend the book, and although I have not experienced any Next Culture trainings, they appear to complement all that I have written and taught about the inner transition necessary for navigating the coming chaos.

In recent years, writers such as myself and Daniel Quinn, Derrick Jensen, Richard Heinberg, Michael Meade, Malidoma Some, Joanna Macy, and others have written extensively about the infantalization of the citizens of empire and have suggested that rites of passage or an initiatory process is needed in order for us to become responsible adults who accept and live within the limits of our planet. Callahan adds:

Modern culture is a child level responsibility culture, far below adult level. Modern society does not require that a person grow up prior to being given (or allowed to take) positions of responsibility...Our society makes messes without having consciousness of, or taking responsibility for, the consequences of those messes.

The example Callahan gives is the corporate practice of "externalizing costs", but a more timely and poignant example is quite simply, the worst manmade environmental disaster in the history of the United States, created by the BP Corporation, now turning the Gulf of Mexico into a giant dead zone - an event which will soon have unfathomable ramifications globally. In a child's world, there are no worries about cleaning up messes. Caretakers (governments and taxpayers) exist in order to provide the child everything it wants and needs, and if messes are made in the process, then it is the caretaker's job to clean them up.

Yet few who have addressed infantalization have offered a specific path for the journey from it to adulthood. While Callahan has no formula for this, he asserts that the principal rite of passage from emotional immaturity to maturity is the capacity to consciously, constructively work with one's feelings, directing the power of feelings in service of the entire earth community. In Directing The Power of Conscious Feelings, he validates what most of us have felt all of our lives regarding our feelings in relation to modern culture, namely that none of them are acceptable.

Many of us have experienced that feeling sadness, fear, or anger in this culture is threatening to others, so we keep those feelings in check, preferring to share them only with trusted others. Yet even joy in the culture of empire is unacceptable.

Recently, I was speaking with a friend who had just returned from a visit with her son who is in his late-twenties and works as an executive with a major transnational corporation. My friend has done a great deal of work on feelings and appropriately expressing them. In a conversation with her son, she verbally expressed her sadness about something in her life, and he responded with, "Could we not have any drama today?" The next day she mentioned feeling angry about something that had nothing to do with her son, at which point, he said, "You know, I'm really tired of your drama."

I share this story because as Callahan clearly demonstrates, the ideal in the culture of empire is a state of numbness. No feelings--sorrow, fear, anger, and even joy, are acceptable. People are esteemed for abiding in a state of numbness which is defined as sane, stable, and even-tempered. While following the recent oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, there was a public outcry for President Obama to become outraged regarding the devastation BP had created, but the ideal perpetuated by political pundits and advisors was for Obama to remain "cool-headed". They and the President knew that any passionate display of any emotion would result in a decrease in popularity and a perception of him as "irrational." The desired and only acceptable state in the culture of empire is numbness, and any variation from it is frequently perceived as "drama."

Curiously, Callahan talks about drama in the book but uses the term "low drama" to describe any action that is designed to avoid responsibility. Actions like this are legion, but we could say that any time we avoid feeling our feelings, we are engaging in low drama because the abdication of responsibility begins with numbness.

The author inspires us with the term "next culture", also the name of his website, and gives us a glimpse of what that culture might look like in terms of how people relate to their feelings and to each other. He uses the term "archearchy" to describe a culture that is not dominated by the masculine principle or the feminine, but by both. As he says, it is "a new and truly sustainable culture, oriented more toward being present and being with, and less toward consuming, owning, having, going, and doing."

Directing The Power of Conscious Feelings is filled with diagrams, charts, illustrative photos, and "maps" which make the book remarkably reader-friendly and beautifully clarify the author's concepts in no-nonsense fashion. My favorite is a map comparing the attributes of modern culture and the next culture which contrasts the essential mottos of both cultures and leaves us with: "Human cultures are so immature. Can you grow up?"

By the time the reader reaches this point in the book he/she will have been given a treasure-trove of tools for boarding the ship of feelings and steering it in the direction of a new culture that cannot be realized without conscious emotional, and I would add, spiritual, preparation. I believe that these tools constitute a profound rite of passage for non-indigenous people and provide a structure for psychospiritual maturation.

The work Callahan offers us doesn't look easy, but it does look amazingly rewarding. The time to begin that work is not when we are in the throes of the collapse of life as we have known it, but now, as we create all manner of lifeboats for navigating inner, as well as outer transition.

Clinton Callahan may be contacted at the Next Culture Research and Training Center at: clinton@nextculture.org .

Last Updated by Carolyn Baker (Wednesday, 16 June 2010)

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Working links:

Grow Up Or Die, But How? by Carolyn Baker
http://worldnewstrust.com/index.php?option=com_flexicontent&view=items&cid=183:all-content&id=8017:grow-up-or-die-but-how-carolyn-baker&Itemid=171

http://atlanticfreepress.com/news/1/13405-grow-up-or-die-but-how-.html

http://www.countercurrents.org/baker170610.htm

http://www.aclimateforchange.org/profiles/blogs/grow-up-or-die-but-how


Beware the Psychopath, My Son by Clinton Callahan
http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_clinton__080508_beware_the_psychopat.htm

http://thomaspainescorner.wordpress.com/2008/05/13/beware-the-psychopath-my-son/

http://www.endgame.org.uk/2008/05/civilization-as-we-know-it-is-largely-the-creation-of-psychopaths/