blog014 Down To The Wire

1. I love Japan. Most of its amazing art and culture is ancient. The modern technology that wiped out The Last Samurai may now also wipe out Japan.

It's a strange thing to me that, as smart as we pride ourselves to be, human beings have not yet figured out how to be more intelligent than bacteria. Seems like we can't actually change our behavior until it hurts too much to keep doing it the old way, even if the old way kills us. To quote Richard Heinberg in his Rob Hopkins interview posted at Transition Culture, "I wish I could say something more cheerful..."

In the interview Rob Hopkins (originator of Transition Towns) addressed Richard Heinberg with this question (perentheticals added by me): 

In Powerdown, you proposed four possible future scenarios:

1. Collapse (social and ecological) (What about the economy? Stupid question.) (regardless of which scenario eventually plays itself out, we are also on the fast road to global collapse),

2. Waiting for the Magic Elixir (hoping for a technological save - or compassionate aliens),

3. Powerdown (conscious global collaboration to downsize consumption and population) (doing this would prove we are intelligent),  and

4. Last One Standing (military contest - winner takes all) (all of what, though...). 

Do you still see those as being the four key scenarios?



Richard Heinberg said: "Clearly, governments of the world still appear to be on the track towards ‘Last One Standing’. Clearly, ‘Powerdown’ is the best way forward on a collective basis, and clearly, ‘Building Lifeboats’ is not a bad idea – to the extent that one is not just going about that in a survivalist frame of mind but on a community basis of building some kind of collective infrastructure for survival and renewal and not just heading for the hills. I don’t think there’s much of a future for our species in terms of individual survivalism."

So we are building a lifeboat called Tempelhof . And you can too, because at Tempelhof we will provide Arkbuilder Training School. You can read about our project at Transition Network or Global Ecovillage Network.

  


Henry and Samantha:  Next Culture Dating

  2. I keep being both inspired and flabbergasted by the insight that perhaps THE key factor to humans taking a path different from the one worn smooth by lemmings is thoughtware.

I'm inspired because it is straightforward to personally upgrade your own thoughtware.

I'm flabbergasted because even though it is so straightforward, the possibility of upgrading your thoughtware is not offered in school or university. One has to leave the center of mainstream and read books and find authentic training programs to do it.

What brand of thoughtware are you using? You may be using very old and, more importantly, very outdated thoughtware.

Along those lines I wrote 5 short videos using http://www.xtranormal.com/ text to video animation. You might enjoy them.

1. Thoughtware Workout      http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QbbwwIwPYJ4

2.  Next Culture Dating     http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mgoRfj0Sx7E

3.  Low Drama Detector     http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VZIv1BSwGNc

4. “Is-Glue” Paint Brush     http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gbEbE1dRGJE

5.  Resentment Kills Intimacy     http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l4YzRiukWZs

 3. I just finished reading a wonderful book by Martin Prechtel called Secrets of the Talking Jaguar. In it he speaks about community in a startling and refreshing way that I never thought of before. On page 279-281 he says:

The secret of village togetherness and happiness had always been the generosity of its people, but the secret to that generosity was village inefficiency and decay... all life must be regularly renewed. To do this, the villagers come together once a year at least, to work on putting back together somebody's hut, talking, laughing, feasting, and helping wherever they can in a gradual, graceful way.

If a house is built too well, so efficiently that it is permanent and refuses to fall apart, then people have no reason to come together. Though the house stays together, the people fall apart, and nothing gets renewed. Smart people might be able to invent excuses to get together, but this is too abstract and hollow, and such contrivance insults the soul. People have a genuine need to make things with their ingenuity and with their hands... Violence is close behind when people won't come together to remake each others' houses.

Great book!

If you liked Robert Wolff's Original Wisdom , or Malidoma Patrice Somés Of Water and The Spirit, you will love Secrets of the Talking Jaguar.

blog009 Re-Teach The Teachers

If Einstein was right about the atom bomb he may also have been right when he said, "No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it." This means school teachers, as they are presently trained, are unable to provide students with what they need to become the leaders who create a bright future for humanity. The challenge is to re-train teachers to deliver a new paradigm, to deliver the practical skills and theoretical basis for creating an environmentally sustainable, socially just and spiritually fulfilling human presence on planet Earth. We cannot create a bright future by duplicating the past. We need a strong and immediate, nation-wide teacher training program to reboot education. Private individuals are rapidly proceeding, already doing this for themselves, leaving the educational system in the dust.

Teachers determine the future of the human race.

Current events indicate that modern education produces adaptive consumers and self-centered, greedy, short-sighted leaders, avoiding responsibility, focused on getting all they can for themselves. It is becoming apparent that the planet will not tolerate this educational orientation much longer. Multiple crises of unimaginable magnitude loom ominously on the near horizon (e.g. peak oil, climate change, corrupted governments, spreading ocean dead zones, plastic contamination, expanding population, vanishing fresh water reserves, methane clathrates, species extinction). New forms of education are immediately required to unleash enough nonlinear human intelligence to create an environmentally sustainable, socially just, and spiritually fulfilling human presence on Earth. Let it be known that the critical educational challenge facing us today is not how to teach the students but rather how to teach the teachers. Today’s teachers are incapable of delivering what is needed by students now.

One must ask: Who are the people choosing to work as teachers? The answer is simple. People become teachers who themselves did well in school. They liked school. They fit into the system. They felt like school was designed and implemented correctly. People become teachers who are prepared to rigidly defend the educational system as it is because this is the system that worked for them. As a result, the mightiest barrier against educational transformation are the teaching staff. They feel no urgency to change, and in fact feel terrified to have school be any other way than it was for them.

Exchanging current ideas for new ideas is neither comfortable nor easy. Embodying new education would change everything: agriculture, business, city planning, social services…

How long would it take for teachers to change their classrooms into safe havens for learning how to love, how to communicate authentically with feelings, how to liberate nonlinear creative intelligence, how to unfold each individual’s contribution to humanity? The good new is that the entire school system could transform in one day. How do we know this? Because the people of Estonia have already proved it.

On one day, May 3, 2008, more than fifty thousand people (4 percent of the Estonian population) suddenly changed their behavior and removed ten thousand tons of garbage that for decades they themselves had scattered throughout their forest lands. True, operation Let’s Do It! required intelligent fore-planning, but it also awakened local communities to their ability to self-organize – and it worked! It was the most ambitious volunteer action in modern times. The entire territory of Estonia was cleaned up in five hours at almost no extra cost. In the same way, teachers across the country - or across your village - could self-organize a new curriculum in one day and transform the relevancy of school.

What would education then be about? That is a reasonable next question. The answer is also simple: It would include what has been excluded by the patriarchal empire.

But asking about the contents of next education is a trick question, for how can a teacher or administrator understand what is next to be taught while still thinking within the constraints and values of the old paradigm? Einstein was quite confrontive when he stated, “No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it.” But remember, Einstein was right about the atom bomb. He may be right about this. Einstein’s observation explains why it would be nearly impossible to describe to a modern day educator what next education is. Still we must begin somewhere, so here are a few distinctions from next education:

• Irresponsibility is an illusion.
• Each person’s childhood survival strategy is like a cocoon housing the still-forming adult. Education explains what is going on, in so far as something better than the survival strategy is awaiting them.
• Education prepares children for their rite of passage to adulthood during the ages of fifteen to eighteen. In the rite of passage a person is guided to distill their destiny and their hidden purpose, connect to their archetypal lineage, and re-commit to deliver what they came here to contribute to humanity.
• There is a difference between surviving and living. If you work for money, you are merely surviving. You do not need money to live. Thinking that nature has value only when money changes hands is a suicidal paradigm.
• There are specific practices for building the matrix for holding more understanding. There is no top end to human development.
• There are tools and procedures for creating possibility for one’s self, for other individuals, and for groups and organizations.
• Communications persist until they are completed. The central message in every communication is, “I love you.”
• There is a difference between low drama and high drama. Low drama is not life; it is merely low drama that creates scarcity, competition, and “I win, you lose” games. There are other games to create.
• Each person has four bodies, physical, intellectual, emotional and energetic. Traditional education focuses almost exclusively on feeding the intellectual body, so it is grossly over-expanded out of proportion to the other three bodies. Almost nothing is fed to a child’s emotional or energetic bodies. These bodies are starving.
• Each of the four bodies requires its own kind of food, and has its own kinds of pain, ecstasy, and intimacy. There is a difference between heart food of the emotional body and soul food of the energetic body. If this difference is not respected people are less likely to be healthy and capable adults.
• Resentment is caused by expectations that are not fulfilled. In this way expectations are relationship killers. Even one resentment blocks intimacy. Resentments can be healed and avoided.
• There is a difference between thoughts and feelings, and between feelings and two kinds of emotions. The difference can be learned experientially through inner navigation skills.
• Personal and professional relationships can be navigated into ordinary, extraordinary and archetypal spaces. If a relationship space is not navigated consciously to serve bright purposes it will be navigated unconsciously to serve shadow purposes. Serving shadow purposes feeds Gremlin.

• Each person has a shadow side and a Gremlin who is king or queen of their inner underworld. If you do not consciously own your Gremlin, he owns you.  
• Each person has an energetic center of being. No one can take your center away. A typical childhood survival strategy includes giving your center away to authority figures so you are no longer a threat to them. As an adult you can take your center back. An adult owns their own center.
• Where your attention goes your energy flows. Whoever has your attention has your wallet. An adult owns their own attention.
• There are true leaders (responsible) and Gremlin leaders (irresponsible). Neither is good or bad. An adult can trust themselves to take care of themselves around any kind of leader.
• Feedback contains design instructions for what to shift to create better results.
• Adults serve the evolution of the world. The world is not changed through creating a critical mass of people thinking in a certain way. The world is changed through making critical connections that weave community and create systems of influence for the emergence of a more humane and intelligent future.
• There is no present culture. The concept of “present culture” is a marketing scam that tries to homogenize humanity and convince people to accept a McPizzaKing and WalBucks on every corner. Human culture is as rich and diverse as nature, and can peacefully coexist as soon as adulthood is defined as including cultural relativity, the clarity that all cultures, religions, and worldviews are merely stories, a matter of personal taste and entertainment.
• Next culture is beyond matriarchy and patriarchy. It is archearchy – the creative collaboration between the archetypal masculine and the archetypal feminine.
• The appropriate topic of study for modern education is how to create and hold space for a global meshwork of sustainable, socially just and spiritually fulfilling next culture settlements.

There are many distinctions and procedures beyond these, but the above list would provide a starting point for next education.

Can we make this shift? Yes. Without question.

Will "we" make this shift? Ah. That's the point. There is no "we" when it comes to shifting. I and many others have already shifted to next education and will continue shifting, regardless of what the law says, regardless of what anybody else does.

The relevant question is: Will the modern school system simply be left in the dust of history or will it bootstrap itself into what is actually wanted and needed now? Teachers determine the future of the human race. To upgrade the morphogenetic field of the human race we would begin with re-training our teachers.

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.