Skip, if you get to read this comment, you need to be aware that coloring the life of Jesus based on the linear historical perspective, colored by centuries of organizational dogma and personality cult, will only leave you with your tired perspective. Failure to appreciate the timless wonder of Jesus’ revolutionary message, can only lead to a fruitless search for something better - which doesnt exist.

True, religion is a big problem, but that comes from small minded thinking, and bad teachers. It’s not for me to explain it all here for you ( I think I have to a degree on other posts here), but humbly and meekly consider Love to be an endless, powerful source of motivation to assuage the suffering so apparent in the here & now.

This simple “abstract concept” easily gets overlooked as simplistic, but when it takes hold, “one may turn away 1000 attacks, but two can turn away 10,000.”

Jesus was a loser

Well yes, that’s the whole point isn’t it, Skip? I’m sorry my talk of religion sends you into fits of convulsion! It must be difficult to bear!

Tim , one more thing, work is for horses, be careful you don`t ruin your health in your role of making someone else rich. You are what is referred to as a wage slave. You will be thrown on the dust heap when you can no longer perform.

Hahaha. Classic. Thanks for your kinds words!

Don’t know if you’ll catch this, but I wanted to offer some sympathy on the job stress. It’s been sucking out my soul, and 99% of the time I just colapse on the couch for an hour before falling assleap and getting up to go back to work. It’s the perfect, most horrible example of selling ones soul. Can’t quit, because there’s no second job as an out. Can’t get a new job because the first has stolen all the energy to do so.

I appreciate your position, but I didn’t post this to complain about my job. It’s perfectly fine and it’s giving me a great new perspective on things. It’s just causing me to rearrange my schedule!

Occasionally I try to explain to people that religion is actually the problem. It works together with our Political , and Economic system to divide and conquer the people into stupidity.
No doubt you understand exactly what I am saying alistair.

I also agree with you that our present system is doomed. Soon.

Tim maybe you could try and think of it this way.? The more we hang on to the fake values of the present society the worse it will be .

My attitude is that you are either part of the problem , or you are part of solution.
When people hold up the problem as a solution they only makes things doubly worse.

Tim , your statement , Its how its supposed to work, is right in the sense , if you settle for a hate based system , inhuman, and very Christian in principle , you are right on the money. Christ said all kinds of hateful and demeaning things about humans. Take a look at the modern preachers. You won`t find bigger hate mongers anywhere.

As far as I can tell , and I can`t very well, you are an abstracted mystic, somewhere between Don Juan’s school of sorcery , and Jesus.

The Don Juan books are mostly fake , and Jesus was a loser. Jesus was young and stupid. He was carried away with a whole lot of bullshit that got out of control.
He then was killed . It is a sad story. People relate to it because they see the same process in their own lives, and are morbidly fascinated by the story .

That’s the main thing, but I did want to add one quick note. Science at the beginning level is an appeal to authority. The school system pretty much sucks, and that’s all most can hope to get at an introductory level. After that though, it’s just a matter of needing to “read the book” before arguing the fine point of the characters within it. If some scientists seem like pompass asses, think how you’d feel if someone took three out of context quotes from your site and then proceeded to fill in the blanks with smak-talk they heard from ex-girlfriends. There’s nothing stopping anyone from jumping in and publishing in a journal as long as it’s not filled with too glaring a mistake in the experimental design. There’s some pretty far out stuff in the journals, and for all the griping by people who claim the man’s keeping them out, I really can’t imagine ‘anyone’ could find themselves unpublished as long as they didn’t insist on the harvard of their field’s journals. And, of course there are just as many elitist assholes in any scientific field as exist on any other occupation. You can be pretty sure that even if their work is good, their coworkers are snubbing them just as much as the office asshole has anywhere else.

(which I only thought of because I just found myself in that predicament vis-a-vis a bag of Trader Joe’s Sesame sticks)

we are working harder for less all the time.

I don’t feel that way at all. I feel like I’m working harder and getting more out of it, and want to find ways to work even harder.

but the trouble inherent in the money system is that it is becoming increasingly unsustainable.

But isn’t the whole “benefit” of the money system the fact that it is inherently unstable? Speculation on markets and things becoming absurdly inflated isn’t a perversion of the money system - it’s how it’s supposed to work!

hunter-gatherer laws tend to be for the common good, whereas modern societies laws tend to be for the protection of assets and corporations.

ie, the common good. The concept of property is much more specific and well-developed than abstract notions of “the common good”. Certainly it leads to trouble, but so does everything

Do we now need private property.?
No.
Why .?
It serves no purpose to have it.
Why do we have it.?
It is the means to maintain a caste or class system, and keeps people in different class`s. It is a way to divide and conquer people , which is the name of the game if you want to brainwash people with falsehoods as being true.
Why would you want to do that. ?
To keep the everything for me and nothing for you system we use presently.

As population rises and resources are destroyed this use of private property and money to organize society becomes more and more dysfunctional , until it destroys everything.
Why.?
To maintain the caste or class system .
This is pointless and self destructive . We need to change our approach in a really radical way from the one we use now.
Money fails as a way to measure things in a good society.

Giulianna, I have argued with a lawyer who accused me of wanting to make laws illegal, to which I replied: Yep

Life is indeed a paradox.

There’s a difference, though, between something not being there and something being forbidden. In no hunter-gatherer tribe is there a rule that you must not have laws. They just don’t feel the need for laws, especially since their way of situational problem-solving has worked for them for generations. And, of course, laws don’t look especially appealing when they glance over in our direction and see how well we’ve “handled” crime.

Passing a law is probably the worst way to prevent a behavior. The only law I’ve ever been tempted to see on the books is an anti-hate group law I came up with this idea a while ago. Instead of making racial hate groups illegal (as they do in places like Germany and Canada), they would pass a law saying that anyone wanting to form or join a racial hate group would have to take a genetic test to prove that they are 100% the race they claim to be. Since no one is 100% any race, since race doesn’t actually exist, this would quickly put an end to hate groups. It might also dissuade them all from those opinions in the first place, once they found out that they themselves were “mixed.”

However, the main appeal of this law to me is its cleverness. If given the chance to actually make it a law, I’m not sure I would. Aside from just driving racist groups underground, thereby making them more radical and violent, people’s DNA, in the hands of the wrong government (and let’s fact it, pretty much every government is the wrong government to some degree or another), can be and has been a very, very bad thing. It would also not apply to non-racial hate groups. And it would also be entirely up to the government to decide what constitutes a racial hate group. (Which is what makes me nervous about hate speech laws; what exactly counts as hate speech?) In a country run by people who want to kill all Armenians, an Armenian-owned hall or church could be considered a “racial hate group.”

It all comes down to: laws suck.

Life is indeed a paradox.

…where people are not controlled … as long as they do not harm anyone.

We could drive an entire civilization through that loophole. Could and did.

A foolproof system is the height of foolishness.

There is no accounting for belief. That’s why Democracy is such a kind of a fascism of the masses.

I would much prefer a system that is fair and just and secular, where people are not controlled, where they pretty much can do as they please, as long as they do not harm anyone. They can live with anyone , or not.

Our so called modernity is really a very barbaric way to live. Think about , Legal contract for marriage.? Fined in money and property if you screw up , or are accused of screwing up. Ha Ha .

You will find some of the most brain washed people on earth here in America..

Which, naturally, made me go, “WTF? I’m heterosexual. Of course I don’t want to make it illegal. I just want everyone to have the same rights.” That’s not the first time it came up, either. Debating with creationists (I want to make “creation science” illegal), debating Christians (I want to make Christianity illegal), debating Republicans (I want to make conservatism illegal), debating with neo-Nazis (I want to make neo-Nazism illegal). Even when debating Democrats, when I was a Democrat, the accusation was that I wanted like-minded people to hijack the Democratic party and not let anyone else have a voice.

Despite the fact that in most of these cases, I literally started by saying that I was an anarchist and opposed the very concept of laws, people always seemed to come to the conclusion that I wanted to pass a law taking away their freedom of speech, simply because I disagreed with them. And it wasn’t just me - I’ve seen it happen again and again to others on the same message board.

Is this projection, given the fact that most of these people were evangelical Christians who genuinely did want to take away other’s rights for no other reason than that they disagreed with them? Is there a communication problem inherent in the internet that makes people come across as more forceful than they (and their beliefs) really are? Either way, I find it kind of weird that so many people so rapidly make the leap between “I think you’re wrong” and “I think you should be in jail”, or “Here’s how I think the world could be made a better place” and “Here’s what I’m going to order you, personally, to do under penalty of death.”

The aesthetic it inspires is along the lines of the Japanese wabi sabi. Which reminds me: time to re-read Tanizaki’s essay on shadows…

Does anyone think that our political system has a future.? A positive future that is.

Politics is run on money and phoniness. Are Politicians qualified to run a high energy, complicated system like we have.?

Are politicians more interested in representing international corporations that have no conscience regarding the environment , and do politicians perpetuate the hate-mongering attitudes that lead to the paper-pushers making money on wars that are fought over abstract, false belief systems.?

These are the kind of things I think about as I also enjoy the change of weather in Minnesota. Today the temp will be 65. It is bright and clear.

Our political system has poisoned the minds of the people of America.
Our military is currently taking a hard look at Bush , and Bush is currently a little nervous.

Could there be a coup in the works. ? The military,industrial,congressional complex we were warned about has taken over 1984 style , and run by the corporatocracy, which is world wide , now looting North America.

The military may play a serve and protect role at some point. Does any one doubt that our system is run by corporate thugs with religious dissemblers as front men for them.?

I am saying this not because I wish it, but because this might actually be a best case scenario. Many of the of the scenarios other than a coup against our political system end up even worse. Is it now time for another American revolution.?

There are no political solutions for the problems of society that we face now.

Getting rid of this political system would be a way to start going forward in creating a good society. A good society is one that is free and open , and does not prey on the human spirit as a gullible machine that can be brainwashed as a mechanical toy for the power possessors.
A good society would not have a cast or class system. A good society would not use money. A good society would say that no human is worth any more than any other human.

Time to put on the tennis shoes and go outside. The leaves are turning and coming down here now a little.

Blessing and a curse? Human nature = human error? Forward is all we have? … or is all we really have is the past and now? What if “the meaning of life” is discovering “the meaning of life” each as indivduals - a global ideal, but with an enigmatic application for each of us. It’s all a struggle, thats for sure, between dynamism and intertia, and the mutliple paradoxs causing our confusion.

This is the purpose for transcendance and clarity as a goal, as the yogis say. Being not conformed to the world, but seeking first the kingdom of heaven, as the christians say. Keeping don’t know mind, only going straight in the present moment, as the zen masters say. These are the sacred principles which resolve the worldly swirl of change and flux.

Somehow there is merit in a heavenly desire to eliminate worldly desire in ourselves. Buddha and Christ thought so, which is how the perplexing paradoxs we each find in life (like zen koans) render the ‘discriminating’ mind useless, and allow the discerning spirit to give rise to life. Death gives life, and life always finds a way. Row, row, row yer boat ….

Not much spectacular about Seattle autumns, aside from the brisk air as a harbinger to change, and a sudden plunge into darkness after we fall back. I hear it’s to be warmer and drier this winter.
Enjoy!

But the one word that you use which provides the focus for Tim’s rebellion, I suspect, but certainly my own rebellion against your ideas, is “we”. “We” is generalising, reductive, presumptuous, analytical, & overlooks the greatest discovery of civilization: the individual “I” (which is perhaps why you like the word “we”, for it suggests we are a tribe).

“I” is a wonderful word. “I” takes us to the depths where we find God, though I’d prefer here to say “Jah”, because “I” is the favourite mystical word of Rastafari. They say “I and I” to mean “we”, but in a special sense of oneness. Not that I am a Rasta.

I man like this thread because “I” predominates. In the matter of “I” each of us is entitled to speak with authority and it does not count as authoritarian!

As a Seattle born and bred nativist, it’s rain rain rain all the way until April or May. Good luck, you foreign devil.

Of course, I say this having moved to Oakland just about four months ago. It hasn’t rained a day since I got here. I’m in hell.

Could we stop sentimentalizing this process?

Not sure what you mean by that! There’s nothing wrong with sentimentality, after all.

If we can’t go back or forward then what can we do? Be mad at each other over our word choices?

I thought you were talking about going back. I realize some of that is my own projection, but you also may want to reflect on the fact that you really do make it sound like you are all about going back.

I wish people would stop saying this — as if there’s some linear path-way between this and that.

I could suddenly become a “primitive” hunter-gatherer or whatever — I still wouldn’t be going back any where. You can’t even go forward; you just do different stuff after a while. Could we stop sentimentalizing this process?

Recently I suffered a big emotional wound, and soon after the bad news, finally decided to throw away a house plant which had been dying for a while. I did it in a huff, deciding that there was no more appropriate time than then, when I felt like something in me had also died and had to be cast off.

I can only hope that there is a relation to that dead matter of my own which somehow can fuel what remains alive in me.

Coming from my usual narrow “esoteric” perspective, here are some discussions using the enneagram’s processes of death/renewal/construction/crime/etc.:

http://www.rahul.net/raithel/otfw/sixProcesses.html

I would seem to be in the “Process 132,” or “Life (1), acting on form (3), produces matter (2).”

One thing that strikes me right away though: is that with plants, there’s not a great deal of separation between living and dying. You can have part of a plant be dying, or even part of a single leaf that’s dying. And the rest of the plant can be totally utterly fine. In those cases, we simply clip dead leaves and branches off, partly for aesthetics, but also so that the plant doesn’t waste its resources continuing to send nutrients to the dead area. Then, when these things die, they naturally fall back down to the soil, where the plant overtime recycles the nutrients of its own self (thanks to helpful bugs and microbes).

Also important is that you can remove a big important limb from a tree without killing the tree itself. And that there are plants which you can clip it all the way down to the ground, but that as long as its roots remain, it will grow back next season.

And also once again, you are not a jukebox and we know it–but…

…my thoughts recently have been on Death because of the events in my own life.

Not only literal Death–but also metaphorical Death. About processes ending. About Phoenixes rising from ash, but especially about what it takes to make that ash.

Can you use your rich new experience with “dead matter” to talk about what you think it takes to let parts of ourselves willingly die…and hopefully be reborn?

Just a few indicators that may/may not take you somewhere fruitful (heh heh).

D.

That’s why I keep talking about going beyond civilization, the phrase Daniel Quinn used as the title to one of his books. There is no back; back is gone. The question is how do we move forward.

Oh cool, I totally didn’t realize that’s what you were saying! I thought you were talking about going back. I realize some of that is my own projection, but you also may want to reflect on the fact that you really do make it sound like you are all about going back.

Cause, hell, forward’s all we got!

That in order for us all to be equal, you have to admit that we know better. Which makes the rebel in me, of course, even more rebellious when I unpacked it for what it really is (or at least what I perceive it to really be from my unique life vantage point).

Naturally. I have to say, when you talk about your relationship to “authority,” that resonates with me. I’m surprised that you find primitivism to contain that element, though, which I can’t say I ever felt in it. Perhaps it’s because I’ve never agreed with anyone–primitivist or otherwise–100%. I have big arguments with all the big names in primitivism; I always have. And of course, on one level, everyone always thinks they’re right (if you thought you were wrong about X, you’d just change your mind about X so you felt you were right about it, right? I mean, who believes things that they believe to be wrong?), but I think that’s a far cry from the kind of imposition of others’ ideas that you seem to be suggesting. Heck, I keep saying that the most likely to enjoy primitive egalitarianism are the least likely to be the hippies and ecologically minded–it’s going to be the people who disagree with me vehemently and stumble into it through no fault of their own.

But it is a very interesting reaction. I can’t really speak to it since I’ve never felt it. Perhaps you’ve mistaken me for “the Voice of Primitivism.” I’m not even the voice of Anthropik. I’m the voice of Jason Godesky and no one and nothing else. If I’m persuasive, great, I’m glad we agree, and if not, it’s me you disagree with, not some organized philosophy. Primitivists are all over the map. All we really have in common is a basic respect for the way humans evolved, and a basic understanding that we’ve really screwed up a good thing over the past few millennia. Most of us have faith that we can get it back, but even that isn’t universal.

I don’t think primitivism’s about “going back.” I think it’s about sankofa, about how we make things better. I think it’s more about abandoning all the things we’ve been doing that haven’t been working, and trying some of the stuff that used to work before, and seeing where that takes us. That’s why I keep talking about going beyond civilization, the phrase Daniel Quinn used as the title to one of his books. There is no back; back is gone. The question is how do we move forward. I see the dividing line between me and the Technocrat as being Technocracy’s cry to keep going the same way we have been, whereas I echo Quinn’s skepticism: it didn’t work last year, or the year before that, or the year before that, or the year before that–what makes you so sure this is the year? I’d rather try something else, something that we know DOES work.