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Post 5: War God

                 Important: For the first 7 posts on this Blog, it is best to read them in order!

War God

I’ll give one final example of how magical spells embed a mirror within them – money. Money is a potent magical spell that can summon all kinds of potentials into existence. For money is a mirror, or reflection, of the time and space necessary to provide any good or service. And we assume that it therefore is a reflection of wealth.

We often lay paper bills and plastic cards down as we would wave a magic wand. Abracadabra, give me a cheeseburger. Abracadabra, give me a spool of black poly pipe. Let me summon additional weight to the momentum of processes that led to this cheeseburger, to this spool of pipe. We are all continually summoning the world into existence through the magic of money. The power of voting is laughing stock in the face of how this mighty power shapes our world.

And when we truly see how we sorcerer’s apprentices have been using money, we will see that we have all fallen under a spell of our own making. There is no longer any separation of church and state here in America. Regardless of whatever our acknowledged beliefs may be, we have all fallen under the spell of worshipping the same god.

We all go to him daily. His altars and temples are everywhere. And to appease him, we continually lay down and sacrifice the world upon his altar.

This god is a war god. He is out to destroy the world. And his name is the cheapest price.

But where is the gratitude in always choosing the cheapest price? And yet we do it time and time again, summoning more and more weight to the momentum of processes which have taken on a life and mind of their own, that only serve themselves, and that never return the power back to the source.

Who can provide goods and services for the cheapest price? Sure, it sometimes is those who are the most innovative, the least wasteful, the hardest working and/or most intelligent. But let’s be honest. Very often it’s those who operate on the hugest economy of scale, who are able to externalize the most actual costs, and/or pay the lowest wages. We know this.

Some folks look upon the horror of hugely centralized, corrupt powers in this world, and complain that Obama is a communist, or that Bush is a fascist, but I instead say that we are a bunch of clueless honkies unaware of continually waving the magical spell of money around, and every day we summon into the world more and more centralized, corrupt powers.

Who can provide food for the cheapest price? Well, huge farms that are addicted to fossil fuel based fertilizers and pesticides and genetically engineered seeds, that’s who.

Who can provide electricity at under $0.12 per kilowatt hour? Well, huge centralized corrupt powers that blow the tops off of the Appalachian Mountains to scrape out the coal into rail cars, that’s who.

Who can provide a kiln-dried, planed 10 foot 2x6 consistently for under $0.75 per board-foot? Well, huge centralized, corrupt powers that clear-cut stands of old-growth trees in the Pacific Northwest, or that endlessly rotate cloned mono-cultures of clear-cut tree plantations on sprayed lands, that’s who.

There’s no need to go and blame the farmers, or the loggers, or the miners of this world, when it is all of us, through clueless consumption, who continually conjure into the world an economic treadmill where only the most exploitative and destructive can survive.

Cheap food, cheap energy, and cheap timber are the three strands of the rope used as the noose around our necks. 

And, yet, amazingly enough, this is nothing for us to feel guilty about. We all do it to some degree. More and more of us will feel pressed to do it more and more as the coming economic contractions roll in. We will simply have to be more coherent with our magic.

Sure, but what in the world does that mean? Good question. We’re slowly getting there. Thanks for your patience.

We thought we were using money as a mirror or reflection of wealth for all of this time, but alas, it turns out instead that we have been using money not as a reflection of wealth, but of debt. And so we have therefore been confusing debt for wealth for longer than anyone can remember.

What I mean is this – the only way that money comes into being in any country in the modern world is as a representation of debt. Money is created out of thin air, mostly as debt with interest – either as debt to a private central bank who just issued the money, or as simply a loan by a private bank, under the terms of fractional reserve banking.

Before getting too lost down the rabbit hole of fractional reserve banking and central banking practice, the pivotal point I am trying to address here is that every dollar (or other currency) is created as debt by a private bank – a debt payable with interest to that private bank. Now there are some obvious logical fallacies in this system - such as the fact that the creation of that new dollar now requires more money than is presently in circulation to be able to pay back both the principal and interest. So where does the money come from to be able to pay back that interest? Well, you guessed it. More money created as more debt, with more interest. That’s simply not a system with a bright future. 

That's definitely not "returning the power back to the source". But is instead returning the power back to a narcissistic ego. Talk about taking on a "mind of its own."

However, my point remains that this is not how it has to be. We don’t have to create money as debt with interest, payable to private banks. Money could simply be created as a mirror or reflection of wealth.

What would this look like? Well, it could look like more things than I myself can imagine, so I’m almost hesitant to say an example, for fear that this one example would get pigeonholed as the only possibility, and the whole notion dismissed out of hand.

I will suggest some actual examples in future posts, but for now let me focus on an even larger point, and say what surely appears to be a crazy suggestion at first: governments can print money out of thin air and spend it on the creation of sustainable infrastructure throughout society.

“Whoa, whoa, whoa!” – Most people say. You just can’t go and print money out of thin air! Money would become worthless if you just printed it out of thin air!

Well, the first challenging pill to swallow is that this is exactly how money is already created.

The second challenging pill to swallow, at least for Americans, is just how much money our country’s private central bank has recently been printing out of thin air. To put the amount in perspective – if you spent $1 million every day since Jesus was born, you would not have spent as much money as our central bank has printed out of thin air in the last 9 months. They call it “quantitative easing”. It’s a nice phrase. Look it up.

And what have they done with this money? They have primarily bought toxic mortgage-backed securities from the too-big-to-fail banks. This becomes even more fascinating when you realize that our central bank itself is basically a quasi-private cartel comprised primarily of the too-big-to-fail banks.

Not only does this remove losses from the big bank’s books for the bad bets they made during the housing bubble (bets on bets, actually, with all of their derivative hocus-pocus), it also creates an across-the-board inflation for the currency which increases prices on everything. But this inflation also works in the interest of the too-big-to-fail banks because it counters the deflation of the housing market’s bubble bursting, thereby also decreasing their losses for their bad bets in the housing market.

It is very easy to spin out of control emotionally around all of these issues and jump to all kinds of blame and conspiracy theories.

If I may, I want to reach beyond all of that, and simply make one simple statement and ask one simple question. The statement – this sad state of affairs is simply the unbelievable accumulation of miscast, ungrounded magical spells that have now unfortunately taken on a life of their own.  And have they ever.

The question – what if printing money out of thin air isn’t the problem? Could it be done in a grounded way, in a way that returns the power back to the source?

Instead of the money being printed by private banks, who require it all to be paid back with interest, and who spent it to erase all of their own bad bets; what if we instead printed it as governments, as groups of people, to create sustainable infrastructure throughout our society?

Not only would the money not have to be paid back with interest, it would not have to be paid back at all. What I mean is this – if the money was spent in a manner that increased the overall wealth of the country equal to the amount of money that was created – then there would be no inflationary repercussions. In other words, not only would there be more money in circulation, there would also be more wealth for which that money was a mirror or reflection, so therefore there would be no inflation.

What do we want: money as debt, or money as wealth?

Check out the next Clueless Honky Blog for more.

Thanks for your time and attention. 

Post 4: Magical Mirrors

                 Important: For the first 7 posts on this Blog, it is best to read them in order!

Magical Mirrors

            Since the Sorcerer isn’t coming back to clean up the mess that we sorcerer’s apprentices have made over the millennia by miscasting magical spells, we will have to re-dedicate ourselves to our apprenticeship, and begin using our magical spells consciously, casting circles so as to orient ourselves, and also grounding our spells by always returning the power back to the source, with gratitude

            Yeah. Yeah. But what in the world does that mean?  

That’s a great question to which I can’t pretend to have all of the answers.

            For starters though, it’s very important to remember that we are not only sorcerer’s apprentices, but clueless honkies as well, who have largely exported the effects of our actions out beyond the horizon of our lived experience. For most of us, we never sense the clear-cuts, the mountain top removal, the sweatshops, and the ocean acidification that our lives conjure into being. So to keep it simple, the best first step is to bring the effects of our actions back into our daily lives as much as possible. Then we’ll be able to see how to fold more and more gratitude back into these processes as the role of cheap & profitable energy in our lives slowly wanes.

            As important as it may be to flesh out all of the details of how we might meet our needs in the future both with gratitude and without cheap & profitable energy, in my experience, it is much easier to say than to do. While it will make up the bulk of detailed work we face in the next few generations, and will be the subject matter of many future posts; for right now, I want to zoom out as far out as we can, and see if anything interesting comes into focus from taking a very broad look at magic.

            Before beginning that, if you’re having a level of cognitive dissonance from my continual use of the term “magic”, that’s understandable. Just remember that for now, my present definition of magic, “to call or summon into existence what was previously only potential”, can be seen as just another way to name what we usually call technology. I am not saying that all magic is technology. However, I am saying that all of what we call technology qualifies for what I’m calling magic.

            The first thing about magic that I want to point out is that within each magical spell we humans have picked up, there seems to be some kind of mirror, or reflection, embedded somewhere within the spell. As you’ll see, “mirror”, and “reflection” aren’t really the perfect words for what I’m talking about. But for now they will serve the purpose. I’ll give a few examples of what I mean. 
          I’ll start with a very old and basic form of magic – specifically the magical spell of writing, since that is the technology most immediately at hand.

When we write, we use hand-prints to leave marks on a mostly flat surface, marks which tell a story of somewhere else in time and space.  

Writing is but a mirror, or reflection, of the age-old practice of reading animal tracks. Animal tracks are, of course, foot-prints that leave marks on a mostly flat surface, marks which tell a story of the past. (Hmm, a big buck elk passed through here this morning.)

A syllabary, of which this Roman alphabet I’m using right now is one, takes the magic of writing up a notch. Writing originated long before syllabaries, and like Chinese Kanji or Egyptian hieroglyphics, was originally pictograms – or pictures for each word. So the written word for moon was a drawing of the crescent moon, and the written word for water was a drawing of a wave. Each pictogram was a mirror, or reflection, of humanity’s experience of the natural world.

A syllabary, on the other hand, offers a mirror, or reflection, of an entirely different sort. A syllabary is a reflection not of our experience of the natural world, but is a mirror or reflection of our own voice. We literate humans who use syllabaries, as a general rule, hear ourselves speak in our own heads when we read – because that’s actually what we are reading, a series of mirrors or reflections of our own voice. Syllabary writing creates a self-referential mirroring, or feedback loop, within the writer’s and reader’s own mind.

This mirroring has had profound effects on the recent evolution of our world, because it has had profound effects on the evolution of human consciousness. As the dawn of computers recently opened a completely new “cyberspace”, many ages ago writing, and in particular syllabaries, opened up mental spaces that were completely new in their day.

Within this new mental space, humans could then place images, and arrange and re-arrange these images in hypothetical scenarios in a way never before possible. Once again, I am not saying that humans without syllabary writing or humans without writing at all cannot think hypothetically. I am saying that the difference in degree between humans with and without writing and syllabaries is so great that it, in effect, almost becomes a difference in kind.

We can even place images of our own hypothetical self on this mental feedback loop. The slowly solidifying image of our own self within this feedback loop is what we have grown to call the modern ego. Once again, it is not to say that illiterate people do not have egos. (Syllabary writing was certainly not the first self-referential mirroring or reflection to occur within the human mind). It is just to say that the degrees to which illiterate people have egos is drastically different than the degree to which we syllabary writers and readers have egos.

Much of what I have written above about writing can be found either in David Abram’s The Spell of the Sensuous, or in Walter J. Ong’s Orality & Literacy. Both are very worthwhile reads.

It can sometimes be easy to make hasty conclusions about all of this material, sometimes even succumbing to thinking that writing is therefore good, or bad. I recommend trying to understand it instead under the framework that I am recommending for understanding all technologies – that we are all sorcerer’s apprentices, and that all of the magical spells we pick up and use must be used with gratitude (returning the power back to the source) – or else they take on a life of their own.

With language, or writing in particular, think of a lie as an example of "not returning the power back to the source". A lie does not honor or give thanks to the truth. Each of us had told a lie at some point. Did it not somehow take on a mind of its own?

How about agriculture as a magical spell? Agriculture was and continues to be an entrance into mirroring symbiotic relationships with other species. For example, the ancestors of the Maya entered into such a relationship with Zea teosinte, the ancestor of modern corn. Before corn’s domestication, teosinte was kind of a scraggly plant that only grew in specific ecosystems. It had the potential to unfold and be red, yellow, blue, white and rainbow colored corn varieties. It had the potential to be dent, flint, flour, sweet and pop corn varieties. It had the potential to be grown in northern climates, as well as be planted a foot deep in Southwestern US desert soils to sprout upwards into the sun, and yet still have its roots deep down toward the moisture.  But these were only potentials.  

Before corn’s domestication, the Mayan ancestors had the potential to unfold three different forms of writing, numerous different calendars – some of which are as accurate as any we have today, and a very high civilization. These were only potentials.

Within the relationship between teosinte and the Mayan ancestors, there was a mirroring, a seeing deep into one another as there is a seeing between lovers. And in this mirroring, these potentials were witnessed, and teased out into the light of day.

The technology, or magic, of time-keeping too has mirrors, or reflections, embedded within it. The clock-face is a mirror, or reflection, of the original keepers of time - the celestial bodies. The clock-face overall is a circle, representing the cosmos. The 12 numbers around its rim mirror the 12 houses of the Zodiac that stretch across the band of the Milky Way that wraps around the cosmos from the perspective of our solar system. The hour hand mirrors the sun. The minute hand mirrors the moon. For every “twelve” times the moon travels through the twelve houses of the Zodiac, the sun travels once.

Well, to be honest, actually, it’s not twelve times but 13.36 times the moon travels through the Zodiac for every time the sun travels once.  (And 12.36 cycles of full moon to full moon per sun cycle). But alas, not even the mirroring of lovers is perfect. Nor should we expect any mirroring to be.

(We can expect too much of our symbols, it would be good to remember.)

Check out the next Clueless Honky Blog for more.

Thanks for your time and attention.

Post 3: The Sorcerer's Apprentice

           Important: For the first 7 posts on this Blog, it is best to read them in order!

The Sorcerer's Apprentice

        I’d like to start where we finished last time – with a new definition of magic:

To call or summon into existence what was previously only potential; to breathe together with Mystery.

            And this applies to any and all magical technologies: fire, language, flint knapping, agriculture, writing, mathematics, money, metallurgy, history, alphabetic writing, roads, the printing press, the calculus, time keeping, fossil fuels, Portland cement,  internal combustion engines, electricity, telephones, radios, television, flight, computers, among many others.

            Agriculture, writing, mathematics, metallurgy and money were a pantheon of very powerful magical spells that thousands of years ago gave birth to (or conjured) complex new ecologies we now call civilization. This pantheon gave birth to civilization, but not necessarily to empire.  It was the use of these magical spells in ungrounded, ungrateful ways, in ways that didn’t return the power back to the source that, once again, caused each magical spell to take on a mind of its own.

            What I personally call “empire” is the unbelievable accumulation of miscast, ungrounded magical spells that have now unfortunately done just that - taken on a life of their own.  And have they ever. "Empire" is the institutionalization of ingratitude. We will always behave occasionally with ingratitude, or else, we'd have nothing to learn from. It is when our ingratitude becomes institutionalized that gives birth to empire.

            So how do we bring empire to its end?  Well, we re-dedicate ourselves to our apprenticeship, and begin using our magical spells consciously, casting circles so as to orient ourselves, and also grounding our spells by always returning the power back to the source, by giving thanks.

            Tracking the history of the unfolding of magical spells and of miscast spells, and telling ourselves a story of how we will bring empire to its end – a story so coherent as to unfold as a map for our troubled future – to that end, I dedicate the rest of this project. 

Now, however, before returning to the original three cosmological questions (who are we, where are we, and why are we here), I’d like to make some ridiculously sweeping statements.  Now seems like the time to make it even more plainly clear where I’m personally coming from in this evolving writing.

            I propose that for us humans, the source is the marriage of heaven and earth.  Where the radiance from the heavens, either from our star, the Sun, during the day, or from the Sun’s neighbors at night, falls and meets the earth, either on land or on water – here at the marriage of heaven and earth is the source of our lives.

            I propose that our lives here at the marriage of heaven and earth have meaning and purpose.  I once heard an indigenous elder say that the meaning of life can simply be stated in two words: give thanks.  “Grounding a magical spell”, or “returning the power back to the source” are simply other ways of saying “giving thanks”.

            The purpose of life is to reflect and dramatize the cosmos back to itself.  I propose that every species on earth has a role of reflecting some otherwise un-manifest aspect of the cosmos back to itself.  The role of the human being is not to simply reflect back an aspect of the cosmos, but instead to reflect back the whole freaking thing.  We are the primate that stepped out of the forest out into the open, aligned our spines with the axis of the marriage of heaven and earth, faced the horizon, and just gawked.  It brought tears to our eyes and laughter to our mouths, and somehow, still does. We are indeed apprentices to the source.

           

            Who are we?  We are the sorcerer’s apprentices.

            Where are we?  We are in the sorcerer’s study – at the marriage of heaven and earth.

            Why are we here?  We are here to apprentice in magic, so as to reflect and dramatize the cosmos back to itself, to learn how to participate in and unfold the mystery.

            Once again, “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” is the candidate I propose for a frame story that can provide a comprehensive narrative framework for an evolving Open Source Cosmology, that in and of itself could contain numerous, and on the surface seemingly unrelated, stories.  There are tribes that have stories that take five days to tell.  My dream is for us to craft our own creation story that we look forward to taking 5 days off every year just to tell and hear.

Open Source Cosmology

            So how are we going to create such a creation story?  I’m certainly not going to do it by myself, simply because of a lack of talent.  Most of what I have to personally offer is mostly explanatory, and not allegorical.

            Even if one person was talented enough to pull it off, my sense is that this is not the time for a Moses or a messiah to lay it all down for us.  That’s too much like waiting for the Sorcerer to come back and clean up our mess.  So we’re going to have to do it together. 

            I’ve been dreaming of this project for quite some time, and have never been able to make a bit of headway because of having what, for a long time, seemed like two mutually exclusive desires.  1) To encourage deep clarifications and discussions on all of these cosmological issues.  2) To discourage the type of stubborn fighting that can come from the likes of fundamentalists who are hell-bent on convincing all others of their own perspective. 

            Where I was getting stuck was in assuming that there had to be an open source process that continually had one “most finished” or “most edited” version out in front (like a “Wiki”).  The breakthrough for me was talking to a friend, Harlan, who said he was working on a web-based computer platform for open source collaborative creative projects that is called “Fork This”.  The idea was that the platform would allow multiple parallel versions of a creative project to develop simultaneously.

            I thought, “Perfect!”  I remembered having heard John Trudell speak back in the early 90’s, and one thing he would always say in his introductions was “And, if you disagree with anything I might say, then well, that’s just what it is - a disagreement.”  Meaning - I am here to say some really intense stuff, but I’m not attached to convincing you.  Likewise, don’t be attached to convincing me of your perspective.  If we disagree, so be it.

            For example:  with my presentation of the Sorcerer’s Apprentice above, you may have found yourself disagreeing with my perspective that “humans are the primate that stepped out of the forest out into the open and faced the horizon…”, because you don’t believe in evolution.  On the contrary, you may have disagreed with my perspective that “every species on earth has a role of reflecting some otherwise un-manifest aspect of the cosmos back to itself”, because you believe in evolution, but don’t believe that anything that seemingly “intentional” has a part to play in the process.  Or from even another angle, you may have disagreed with my perspective that the role of the human is to “reflect back the whole freaking thing”, because you believe that dangerously places humans in too “privileged” or “superior” a status within the web of life.

            That’s all great.  You probably have good reasons to see it the way that you do, and likewise do I. And I want to re-emphasize, those are precisely the conversations and clarifications that I want to encourage in this process.  But if after clarifying our perspectives, we still disagree, then “Fork This!”  You go your way, and I’ll go mine.

            In addition to a “Fork” function, the “Fork This” platform would also have “Diff” (difference) and “Merge” functions.  “Diffs” would allow collaborators to see at a glance the difference between two parallel versions of a work.  And of course, “Merges” would allow different parallel versions to merge back together.

            My sense is that as many of the different parallel perspectives each get to unfold themselves, and delve deeper into their cosmological source, that many of the differences that may have so starkly called for a “Fork This” early on in the process, may turn out to be, in hindsight, not so critical.

            On the other hand, after further elaboration and clarification, many of the cosmological differences between people may turn out to be absolutely critical. 

            Alas. 

Check out the next Clueless Honky Blog for more.

Thanks for your time and attention.