Healthy Culture: Life-Dance Log (a C. S. experiment)

I originally chose the blog format as a medium of "publishing" my ideas and experiments about healthy culture because it lead itself to a more dynamic, process-oriented and less phony form of communication than, for example, writing a big tome that gave everyone the impression of presuming to be the last word on the issue. The blog format seems at least potentially more truthful and alive than book format, and yet I find myself still involved at times in a kind of self concious and image conciousness "presentation management" that I think is related to my own issues as an "Enneagram 5" among other things.

A concise summary of the enneagram type 5 personality can be found here: http://www.lessons4living.com/enneagram5.htm

anyway, my thought is that by withholding so many ongoing writing projects, ideas, and speculations from publication (untill they felt completely "done" perfect, final, without flaws or loose ends or open questions), I am both hoarding some important ideas in a sort of "Greedy" 5 manner, as well as subtly reinforcing the fear-delusion that "I have to know everything", which is the opposite of what I want to do. After all a perfect and complete exposition of Cointegrative Science and the theory of healthy culture would be both a dead and phony thing.

I therefore propose to publish various works in progress in the near future and continue to work on and edit them online. In a way I have already been doing this with minor things like spelling errors, and with other things like sometimes updating vocabulary, so the difference will be perhaps more in degree than in kind. Still the works I know propose to publish seem unfinished enough to be specifically considered as works in progress and will be labled as such. Perhaps such a more open process of thinking/writing "aloud", will inspire in you more of a desire to collaborate with me with things you write in the comment section. At any rate, it seems worth experimenting with as a more truthful and cointegrative way of proceeding. The cointegrative angle is that by publishing in such a way as to challenge certain aspects of my own sick culture inwardly I will, given the fundemental togetherness of the inner and the outer, be also making more likely a real a sustainable outer effect, as well as just making the whole project a more accurate example of the less tidy but more authentic way, healthy culture might be expected to come accoss when it is constrained by this particular medium.

Metapost: Co-integrative Science

About the Cointegrative:

The word "integrative", although it somewhat avoids the static association for me of the word "integral", has never been totally satisfying as a description of the theoritical/cosmological aspect of healthy culture because there is still a sort of unilateral association involved in the word. Corporate concepts such as "vertical integration" and even things like "integrative medicine" still preserve a kind of one-sided accumulative model of "A" integrates "B", "C", "D" etc, and this is not very related to what I have been meaning to convey all this time by the word "Integrative". What I have meant all along, as I described in the blog post introducing the term, is a bilateral/multilateral dynamic of Inner and Outer healing, with the root "integre" being understood in the same sense as the root "holos", which is the root of "Whole", "Holy", and (through "heal") of "Health". Thus I chose the word "Integrative" to descibe the inclusive process of inner/outer healing as well as the assumption of the intrinsic primary togetherness of the inner and the outer generally.

I have recently decided that this is still too misleading, and that a better way to convey my meaning is by introducing the word "Co-integrative" (hyphen optional). I think the added prefix "co" successfully signals the primarily paradoxical, non-linear, and non-unilateral essence of the idea of inner/outer healing as an understanding, intention, and an activity, and so helps to point out the difference between this conception of wholeness and healing and other views associated with the term "integral or integrative".

Having googled the word to see if it was indeed a new coinage of mine I discovered, somewhat to my annoyance, that there is a bit of possible confusion between Cointegrative and the "Cointegration" of time series variables in, of all things, Mathematical Finance, so perhaps when I need to use that form of the word I will be careful to insert the hyphen so that it is clear what I am referring to. In most cases however I am sure context will take care of that. All in all I am quite happy with this change of name and don't expect I'll have to make such a change again, though, since the whole enterprise is intrinsically dynamic and evolving, one never knows.

I might as well take this time to express some ongoing doubts regarding the use of the word "Science" to describe the cosmology of healthy culture (as in "Cointegrative Science"). What I like about the term is its connoting of open, experiential, and critical inquiry, all of which are a part of what I have in mind. But the word "Science" ultimately has roots related (to quote an online etymology) "to scindere "to cut, divide," from PIE base *skei- (cf. Gk. skhizein "to split, rend, cleave," Goth. skaidan, O.E. sceadan "to divide, separate;" see "shed". Now the paradox involved in "Cointegrative seperation" or "Cointegrative division" is not as objectionable from the paradox-friendly point of view I am coming from as one might imagine. Such a point of view, because it is paradoxical, can integrate separation and devision when to do so can be seen to serve its Cointegrative purpose. Still, the above derivations continue to rankle somewhat, and while I have decided to keep the word "Science" as part of my description of what I think is an appropriate cosmology and epistemology of a healthy culture, this might change in the future. As it stands, to speak of "Cointegrative Philosophy", or "Cointegrative Cosmology", or some such, is just as accepatible , though these terms are both also problematic for various reasons.

Further comments on Science:

To further explain the critique of Science implied above and to further clarify the different assumptions informing compared to those informing the Science of Cointegrative Science, I thought I'd offer this slightly edited version of some my own remarks in a long online discussion I had a while back with someone devoted to logic and "The Scientific Method" as they are presently understood (or at least as this person understood them):

"....I gather (...) that for you the superiority of reason and the scientific method (about the nature of which, as I have said, there is already considerable philosophical disagreement) cannot be a dogma because of... what? Because of "peer review" or something? Because of the so called "success" of technology? Consider this analogy:

the Scientific method is like a method of finding out about and training dogs; science has "successfully" (by by its own criterion for success) gotten the dog "nature" to do a few tricks by its approach and its "dog-training" method and this is supposed to justify both the method itself and the world view that led to that method? I mean what if there are other and better ways to train a dog that come from a completely different approach? Ways that don't involve brutality, alienation, "adverse health side effects" etc? what if there are other and better ways to learn about a dog? What if there are better tricks to teach the dog which are not so harmful to the dog and ultimately to its trainers? What if "dog training" in general is a bad idea in the first place? You seem to be saying that somehow, through just repeating this method (whatever you think the details are) we will find out what the best attitude toward dogs is? That if we keep vivisecting the world in theory and practice for the sake of "exclusive control" over it, that sooner or later the truth about the alienation, and insanity of the whole project is going to come out of a test tube somewhere?

If your whole project is fundamentally misconceived, if sciences dictum that "Knowledge is Power" (Bacon) is just he latest version of "Right is Might" (an imminently, reversible equation both logically and psychologically), it's highly doubtful that one is going to learn otherwise by just continuing with normal science. For one thing, "Power" and "Control", act like drugs to an addict, intrinsically blinkering the individual and inhibiting his or her ability to use their critical faculties "outside the box" of the assumptions governing the addictive behavior in question. Maybe Knowledge is not Power; maybe Power as well as Exclusive Control are inwardly and outwardly harmful illusions. Maybe Knowledge is really healthy bi or multilateral Relationship ("Friendship" if you will), with nature with our bodies, with each other, and with death as a part of life. Maybe the world is better "known" in some other way than by cognitively vivisecting the living wholeness of the experienced world and then further interrogating, through experiment, the (now dying) pieces. For that matter maybe its better not to think of "Nature" or the objective world as a primarily separate thing from subjective experience; maybe there is a Shared Subjectivity or Shared Self that corresponds to the shared Objective world of Nature and maybe this shared Self is not fundamentally separate from our shared Nature any more than mind and body are fundamentally separate. After all primary experience itself consists of the togetherness of the subjective and the objective; of both the inner and the outer. Anyway, These are my views but my point here is not that they are true but that they imply a different attitude toward "the dog" and cannot be disproved by any tricks you can get the dog to do by following a method based on your own assumptions about dogs and dog training."

I hope its clear that the "Science" in "Cointegrative Science" is such a science of "Friendship/Relationship" and Inner/outer healing and not the alienated cognitively fragmented science I critque above, and that, rather than embracing the epistemological fascism of the dictum "Knowledge is Power-Over" (one might also call it a "rapist epistemology" given the the gist of other Baconian metaphors referencing Nature as feminine and considering as well the archaic meaning of the word "know" in patriarchal societies and what that must have often meant in practice*) the central dictum of Cointegrative Science might be described as "Knowledge is Power-with" ;Knowledge is co-empowerment, co-evolution, even as "friendship" in some sense.

{*footnote: It is difficult to reference political and social entities like Fascism, and Patriarchy without running the risk of strengthening someones notion that these things constitute the the whole of the disease of sick culture itself rather than being two of many other major symptoms that disease; a disease which we all suffer from, though perhaps with very different symptoms. Such a misunderstanding could only lead to the usual fragmented, dissociated, and misguided motivation and treatment regimen, the effecting of which can never have anything but temporary and unsustainable "success", even against the selected symptoms, and none at all against the underlying disease, which will only be strengthened by the whole dynamic. }

Scabies Controversy continued

So since my last post I have had a "clearness", which I tried to clarify in my "Open letter to the Health Team' and Its addendum on Coercion and Contract included in the last post. This clearness was I guess a preperation for my upcomming "FeedBack", which, as I have explained before in these blogs, is a kind of one-sided inquisition and venting session, which is structured such that, if all goes "well", strict focus will be kept on me as the only "focus person" and no consideration of communal shared responcibilty, nor any symmetrical focus on my "accuser" is to be allowed. Structurally it seems to me more or less injustice personified (even mainstream Law usually requires interrogation of the accuser), and my previous post on the subject was in the context of me quitting our "process team" rather than being willing to facilitate it.

Anyway, as a result of this clearness I have written both a Clearness Statement and a Post Script to my open letter which I am just about to share with my community and which I would also like to share here.

Post Script To Open Letter to Health Team: I-P Jan 8 2011

I would like to add somethings to my reasons for choosing not to treat with Permethrin that I pretty much left out of my original letter to the Health Team or at best only hinted at, but which I now think were closer to the essence of the problem I had/have with the whole thing. For those who like such things much of the gist of it is more or less summarized in the following table/diagram, though the rest of the paper does contain important elaborations/explanations on that content as well as other content that seems important and relevant.

Problematic Situation	Hygienic Preventative Option	Relatively non-toxic treatment option	Toxic/Violent Treatment option
Scabies epidemic	Discipline of regular showers, general strengthening of immune system..etc	Voluntary quarantine, Inconvenient but non-toxic behavior changes, strengthen immune system, tea-tree oil etc	Permethrin or other biocideTreatment
Protest, Faction, Injustice and/or controversy within the Community (or between Community &”Other”)	Discipline of regular inclusive and fair conference, (regular Community check-ins, etc)	Fair, inclusive, multilateral due process in which all own some direct or indirect involvement and responsibility	Unilateral, unfair asymmetrical process and direct or indirect intimidation, coercion, or exclusion of weaker party(s)
Crop infestation	Discipline of organic/permaculture farming	own previous negligence, Roll with the situation; rely on existing diversity to mitigate damage, use non-toxic pesticides	Spray “Round-Up” or similar toxic pesticide

One underlying reason for my choice was just our use of what seem to me to be “violent technology" (in this case what amounts to a pesticide) to deal with nature and to try to avoid the real consequences of our decisions and actions. Access to "round up" just gives license to land-debasing mono-culture while trying to deal with an infestation without that will in no time lead one to more sustainable forms of agriculture, including various practices which strengthen the “Immune System” of the soil. Same in this case. I don't want to be a contributing part of a culture of that chooses violence to nature (and your body is the part of nature that you are most concretely) to solve the problems created by initial neglect and unconsciousness of nature (which presumably is what was constituted in the behavior that led to the scabies in the first place). Its like following a simple error (to err is human) with what amounts to an more grievous and arrogant one which, (like most techno-fixes) will only make the first error more likely to continue.

It basically feels/felt like we do not consider the land and the other beings (inner and outer beings) that we live with as part of our "community" at all. I don't know if its occurred to anyone yet to think about where this toxic biocide people are taking is going to go when it is pissed and shitted out by the populous. In many cases it will be directly or indirectly on to the land and into the water supply with who knows what long term results. Possibly they will be minimal (although the quantity will be pretty large relative to the discharge of any other drug any-ones taking) but, be that as it may, the issue is really with a pattern of entitlement and relative thoughtlessness which should be challenged. To ignore our own inciting unconsciousness and lack of awareness/respect in getting out of balance with nonhuman members of our community in the first place, and compound that ignorance with an arrogant recourse to toxic measures that are likely to be even more harmful in the long run, all for what amounts to reasons of convenience and entitlement, seems to me clearly irresponsible, unsustainable, and...very main stream...

Also, when I think of the whole dynamic from the socio-political point of view, I think about this series of lectures I am listening to about the history of the twentieth century. I think in particular about the lecture on Fascism because in that lecture Fascism is described in terms of the subordination of--or really almost the complete irrelevance of--the individual to the state. The lecturer speaks also in terms of Fascism's legitimation--even encouragement--- of violence toward the "Other" in the name of the State . This description is mixed in my mind with Mussolini's description of Fascism as the merger of the state and the corporate interests. I would not make this as a positive claim, but it has certainly occurred to me to consider a case of a de facto merger between "The Community" Twin Oaks, and "The Corporation Twin Oaks" in which both are defined in a way that is exclusive of the Land and at least many of the other nonhuman beings here, so that "Loyalty to the Community" becomes a virtue directly measurable in terms of ones willingness to do violence to the beings excluded. In such a case, any one venturing to speak on behalf of the excluded ones runs the risk of becoming a victim of that same kind of exclusion and/or violence (I realize that there might be some degree of unwarranted paranoia involved in these thoughts but there also seem to me enough demonstrable similarities to warrant concern).

It is these considerations, all related (as I think the table above shows), to our evident cultural preference for relatively easy, but toxic, violent, unilateral and individually and collectively unselfcritical and blaming solutions over, not only the discipline of preventative hygiene, but over a fair honest, collectively responsible and non-toxic response to the crises that must inevitably come through the continued neglect of that hygiene, that I think were really underneath my initial instinctual response. It has taken a while for me be able to clearly articulate them so that my initial written response contains at best only indirect reference to these kinds of issues.

As for the considerations mentioned in the addendum, those have not so much to do with seeming “fits” of Communal Fascism per se as my worry that that the whole communities movement is likely to become a major way that modern slavery is legally reintroduced into the united states (perhaps not so much based on race though that seems likely in the south) unless the intentional community can resist the ring of power involved in the dominant forms of ownership and contract. If you are familiar with the nature of modern slavery {I suggest reading Kevin Bales} you will less surprised (or amused) at his concern. To quote myself from an online discussion elsewhere:

“ It may be a bit of an overstatement {to talk of slavery}, but how easy would it be to just buy some land out in the middle of nowhere, advertise yourself as an "egalitarian community" and proceed to intimidate coerce in direct and indirect ways curious, idealistic, and/or desperate people into positions of 2nd or 3rd class citizenship within the "community". This need not involve anything so crude as weapons any more than a sweatshop usually requires them and the "cult" involved need only be the cult of business/greed and/or just some kind of elitist entitlement of the "core" members. Without some kind of reasonable definition, criteria and a trustworthy process of "certification", by which such that words like "egalitarian", "cooperative" etc are required to really mean something in political terms, its hard to see how social/economic entropy will not progressively lead most communities in that direction. It is the kind of predictable process of being "bound in darkness" that awaits everyone who accepts the "ring" of our alienated conception of property it seems to me (you will remember the last part of the prophecy: "one ring to find them all and the the darkness bind them"...I think that Guy Tolkien, being an Oxford Don, was probably privy to at least rumors of the master plan of the founders of The Bank of England and put the whole thing symbolically in his story, though I think symbolically such a "ring" existed long before that and has also a deeper meaning... “

{a note on Language. I guess I tend to use what seems to others to be extreme language and metaphors in discussing injustice in this and other contexts. In some ways, my use of comparisons with “muggers”, “rapists”, Fascists, and (arguably, worst of all), For-profit Global Water Companies, seems to offend people and (I am told) just obscure the point I am making. One response to this that occurs to me is simply the fact that I believe in actual equality. Fascists, for example were/are not one-sided cartoon characters but people like you and I who, while they were being fascists anyway, were simply being overcome by their individual and shared sick culture. I believe that “everybody has a piece of the Lie and a piece of the Truth”, and that the effect of being in the grips of ones Piece of the Lie is equally evil whether it translates into a dramatic “crime of commission” like murder, a white collar crime, a “legal” act of immorality, or a “crime of omission”; these all seem to me a just different aspects of the same socio-pathological phenomenon involved in anyones giving in to the temptations of a “power-over” situation and thus forcing others to deal with their own unacknowledged “shit” (fears, neuroses, ego-conceits, etc). I also think that the ranking of evils is usually an evil thing in itself since it is usually only employed to make oneself feel better about the crime one is committing by making self-mitigating comparisons with someone else's supposedly worse crime. Thus persons committing emotional or economic violence tell themselves that at least they restrained from physical violence, and persons committing physical violence tell themselves that at least (through a reversal of criteria) they have the physical courage to actually do direct violence rather than hide behind “hirelings” like the police etc....my point is that none of these people are actually acknowledging or dealing with their own shit and that this disinclination is the source of the shared evil that they are all equally involved in. My point is also that all of these people also equally have their “Piece of the Truth” which can manifest when their piece of the Lie is owned and addressed without shaming or blaming others (or themselves either, since its really all just sickness and confusion in my book). Because I feel this way, I choose my metaphors for vividness and clarity rather than in a way that would pander to the norms of peoples ranking of evils. I do regret it If my use of certain metaphors offends the anyones sense of our individual or collective superiority to others, but what I am regretting is the fact that that sense of superiority to others is there to be offended (same would go for the unlikely case of me ever offending anyones sense of “inferiority”.)-I-P}

I-P's Clearness Statement

{ Note: I feel I should say here, in case you are pressed for time, that part 2 of what follows consists mostly of previews of a (hopefully) future O and I paper of mine concerning positive ideas about the way things (contract, due process, culture in general) could be here at Twin Oaks contrasted with some metaphorical description of how things necessarily are in the void of such reforms. The reader may be satisfied with only reading the part 1 (most of the first 2 pages) if Co's concerns are limited to my relationship to the legalities of the Status Quo}

Part 1
I regret that I came out with my objection to coerced contract in the context of the scabies situation since it creates a misleading emphasis regarding my motivation. While it is true that I am not into being on the “coercee” end of what seemed to me to be an essentially coercive and violence-based ultimatum, but what really motivated my addendum is my wish to name and challenge the assumptions of the system so as not to be passively one of the coercing ones in the future. For that to happen, Twin Oaks would have to acknowledge and renounce the inherent violence involved in coercion without recourse to fair and symmetrical due process. If it is ever to do so, someone has to keep bringing up the injustice that we all are consciously or unconsciously conniving at. I suppose I saw my addendum as one more opportunity to do that.

As to peoples concerns, I guess there is some idea that, because of the way I feel about contracts, I will feel entitled to neglect this or that duty to the community that is embodied in a contract I have signed. As far as I can see the issue has always been one of trust, contract or no contract. If I were prone to be deceptive about such things it would be odd for me to share my feelings about contract in the first place. In the same way, a person prone to deceitfulness (at least when given such an ultimatum) and motivated by selfishness would simply have agreed to take the Scabies drug and then not taken it.

Shal has asked me specific questions about labor quota and money. The gist of his questions being whether I think I have the right to cheat on the labor system or steal money given that both systems could be seen as unfair, coercive, etc. The answer to this is emphatically no. I don't consider myself as having rights so much at all but as having responsibilities, foremost of these being the responsibility to work toward inner and outer healing and (inner/outer) Justice. This means, among other things, being willing to name injustice in my community, in the larger world and in myself and trying in all cases to be bringing about the kind of inclusive, fair, conference in which any such issues can be resolved justly. Cheating on the labor system or money system (or any other system) would not have any potential for either inner or outer healing so far as I can see. Even If I thought one of our subsystems was some how the core of the sickness rather than just a symptom, any activism or “communal disobedience” of mine regarding them would be quite explicit and public.

None of this makes untrue the things that I said about coerced contract. Having thought about it some more, the reality of what is nowadays called “Emergence” (the fact that, as a function of the complexity of life, circumstances may always arise in the future that are completely unforeseeable in the present), makes the act of signing a contract about any but a really short term thing almost a form of shared delusion it seems to me. No offense at all, but I would not believe Shal or anyone else if they told me something about what their principles will be or what they would or wouldn't do in the distant future, about the labor system or anything else (probably not in the middle-range future either). Neither of us actually know how we might change in the future or what kind of highly specific and unforeseeable situations will arrive which will challenge or change our current attitudes, views, and actions. Its sort of silly to even ask a person to make such promises or contracts because it is essentially asking them to pretend to know what they cannot know. And all of this seems true even in the case of uncoerced contracts.

A gain, to be clear; I intend to go along with this shared delusion as best I can until we collectively renounce it, but that of course is not likely to happen unless it is named and challenged.

Finally for this part of my statement, I want to reaffirm but also clarify what I said about not actually feeling coerced when I signed the Twin Oaks document. Basically I felt I was signing on to the Values, Spirit and in large part even to the “religious statement” in the bylaws and was positively happy to do so. At the same time I was also aware even then of many of the various contradictions injustices and unnecessary evils that exist here and that I was at least temporarily agreeing to participate in. Basically I accepted that tension and understood myself to be agreeing to a willingness to try to heal such departures from our highest values, both through whatever regular channels existed but also, failing that, in ways specifically recommended by the bylaws themselves. One of these ways is in my interpretation, the “Satyagraha” method of Gandhi mentioned in the bylaws themselves. I still pretty much feel this way about it and believe I would sign the contract again on that basis, though this would be more in the spirit of an affirmation of my continued sharing of the highest values expressed in the bylaws, rather than in the coercive, narrow and dead spirit of the current conception of its meaning as a contract, a conception which in many cases seems to ignore the Spirit (and even some of the more Value-Affirming “Letter”) of the Law altogether in order to focus specifically on enforcing the (allegedly) “necessary evils”, that in many cases quite demonstrably go against that Spirit.

Whether its regarded so or not, any document such as the By Laws of Twin Oaks, that has a Spirit in any positive sense of that word (any document that expresses good and beautiful values and good and noble intentions), dies (like any other living thing) in the attempt to either dissociate that Spirit from, (or reduce it to), its more mundane (and sometimes “afflicted”) “body”. And any such document (along with the community it represents) correspondingly begins to be healed and to live as that Spirit and the words that invoke it, begin to be attended to and included, which attention can in turn inspire the removal of certain of the bodies “afflictions” so that the body itself can become a still better channel and carrier of that Spirit. My commitment to the Bylaws and to Twin Oaks can be best understood in this sense.

Part 2

Anyway, given the phoniness of signing such static contracts (except perhaps where very general statements of Values are concerned), Contracts, if they are to make sense really should be understood as Living things that need to be nourished by regular conference so that they can grow and change (like all living things do) in response to what unforeseeably “emerges” in the world and in ourselves. Moreover the conference with which such a Living Contract is fed should be “good food”, by which I mean fair, Inclusive, Symmetrical conference and not conference poisoned by unjustifiable coercion, intimidation, narrowness, and one-sidedness. Any contract or agreement not nourished and renewed/modifed by such conference with-in a reasonable amount of time should be pronounced, “sick from malnutrition” or “dead from starvation” and, when discovered, revived or replaced with a new agreement born of renewed and high quality conference.

If there is such a thing as just coercion it seems to me, it would have to involve coercion that encourages and protects just the kind of fair, regular, and symmetrical conference and due process that I am advocating; a due process that interrogates the coercer equally with the “coercee”; the majority equally with the minority.

Actually a really healthy due process would be a kind of socio-political communal hygiene in which people, all admitting to having both an essential “gift” and an essential “shadow”; both a piece of the Truth and a piece of the Lie, would regularly check-in with each other to get insight and consensus as to the exact nature of each and to share their progress or lack of such in nurturing the former and healing the latter. It is only though having the maturity to make such an admission of the obvious (made easier by regular hygienic character of the meetings, which would usually be occurring in absence of any contentious issue), that a fully symmetrical and fair process of discussion will likely be voluntarily consented to when a real issue arrives. If done right, in the context of such a regular check-in, the implicit and living Contract that exists between us could be kept well fed and healthy and many crises would prevented in the first place, and if not prevented, certainly dealt with less coercively and more constructively for all involved. This improvement is likely to happen simply because injustice is rooted in an unwillingness to acknowledge and deal with ones own shit and the implied willingness to directly or indirectly a force others (though some asymmetrical exclusive or coercive process) to deal with it. Does not this describe the situation between “rich/powerful countries” vis a vis weaker ones as regards climate/ecological as well as other issues for example?

I have written before in a old O and I paper that Neither majority in numbers nor superiority in strength have any bearing on the justice of any given issue, Majority and Force both amount basically to “Might” and since might is not right, relative number or strength should really have no bearing in the due process around a disagreement. Obviously, the fact that there are three muggers in an alley and only one potential victim does not give the numerical majority the right to mug. {I am sorry if this metaphor insults, it is presented for simplicity and clarity. Suffice also to say that crimes of commission like mugging are not in my opinion any more pathological than white collar crimes which are more dainty, subtle and indirect or for that matter or “crimes of omission” which are normally invisible.}

I have said words to the effect that a situation in which the haves are, though static non-negotiated unilateral contracts, enforcing their will (including their powers of exclusion) on the have-nots is inherently dishonorable and corrupt. Such a situation would be like the more or less farcical “due process” that would go on in a dark ally between muggers and victim. This is true so far as it goes   but it think its important to bring in more of the actual reality of the situation into my analogy. This reality is that we are each of us metaphorically both mugger and the muggee; both coerced into deals with higher ranking “muggers” while at the same time willing to coerce weaker others in our turn   through similar unilateral and asymmetrical processes .

Persons born into such a hierarchy of coercion might have no conscious conception or experience of an actual state of freedom or justice from which to critique the status quo and thus have trouble (consciously) acknowledging any problem at all. This would just amount to being more or less “institutionalized”, as they say. A group of such people might make their peace with being “mid-level muggers” who might not necessarily even feel coerced by each other at all, agreeing together to take their coercive energies out on those weaker than themselves and on the excluded.   Moreover, if the primary methods of coercion and violence are indirect, (through unilateral contracts and recourse to the paid hirelings of the state), the whole intrinsically violent and coercive situation can go on even under the aegis of equality, nonviolence, and community, as long as care is taken not to actually rigorously define such terms.

But what if one does not like being a “mugged/mugger” at any level? What if one sees the possibility leading the way towards another, truly non-violent, inwardly and outwardly just way of life )? Well such a person can try to protest against the status quo on one hand and, on the other, find various means to introduce and offer this other approach. My addendum was an (probably untimely and ill advised) attempt to do the first half of that. The Living Contract idea, the related Community-Hygiene Regular Check-in Idea, and the Symmetrical conception of Just due process, (All hopefully to be integrated and detailed in an upcoming O and I paper) constitute my attempt at the latter half.

As I said before, I am quite willing open discussion all of this and to changing or modifying my views if this seems warranted. Thanks for reading,

In Community--I-P

Evicted?: The Scabies Controvery a Neigborly Checkin

So due probably due to certain high risk behavior (multiple sex partner etc--no judgment implied), 11 folk have come down with scabies. In the past the effected people and their partners just got treated and that was that. This time a mandatory community-wide dousing with an anti-scabie pesticide was mandated unbeknown to me. For the reasons stated below. I refused but as you will read stated my great willingness to do almost any alternative thing.

Open letter to the Health Team

Dec 21

Note: I decided to make this an open letter to the health team rather than a private one
since ,though It might be a little embarrassing (I can take it), it feels like the community probably
deserves to hear my reasons for refusing some part of the prescribed treatment. The addendum
feels much more important to share and for the most part can be read separately --I-P

To Commiserate:

I am sure this whole scabies thing is very unfun and exhausting for every one on the health
team. You have my sympathies.

To Reiterate:

I do not believe the medical industries claims about its medicines, the known or possible side
effects etc...

I am willing to have all of my clothes and stuff hot washed or sanitized or whatever
I do not generally hug or hop in bed with people. the last person I who hugged me was Marta
and that was probably more than 2 months ago. No one has been in my room but me for
months and months and months (accept Brenda for 2 seconds and without my permission)
nor is any one likely to be (Believe it or not, all of this is by choice--at least under the ongoing
circumstances). In short I am a minimal risk vector or whatever even if I had the disease. I don’t
even sit on couches (I don’t like couches)...

my own feeling of willingness to control my own behaviour, and/or (if my karma still so decrees),
to suffer the consequences (the consequences of taking the normal risks associated with being
alive and with living with other people) without complaint or desire to coerce others, makes me
feel that it would really be a disservice to both myself and the community to capitulate to what
(so far) seems to be unreasonable and fear and denial oriented behavior.

The people who get scabies should just be treated for scabies and/or just quarantine
themselves till they get over it. The people who they hugged or slept with should be alert and
take reasonable precautions. anything more than that (especially with a nonfatal, temporary,
and basically behavior dependent illness) seems over the top to me...

To Elaborate:

To hug someone; to sleep with someone or multiple someones, to use their towel etc, are
conscious acts that I by no means object to in themselves, but that those specifically involved
should take responsibility themselves in these kinds of circumstances If they want to feel safer.
If I am willing to tolerate being around their high risk behavior (which a one-time bath in a
pharmaceutical will not prevent from being high risk behavior) then I don’t see why others are
not willing to tolerate my low risk behavior (which will still be low risk behavior after their drugs
have worn off).

Actually, Its not clear why anyone should be forced to violate there own (very justifiable it
seems to me) principles in order to give someone else the illusion (and that is all it can be in a
community that is not a remote totally isolated sanitarium) of perfect safety from anything...
Some aspects of the motivation for this scabies thing seems to me seem in some ways to be
the same kind of motivation as that which is behind the forced pasteurization of milk or any
other paranoid intervention motivated by the illusion of total safety (except this seems more like
keeping the milk raw and forcing all the people to somehow “pasteurize” themselves). Let me be
clear; my vote is for raw mike, raw people and realism and reasonableness about the inherent
risk involved in living with other beings in the raw ( read “real”) world.

It would complicate matters somewhat if the problem in question were something unrelated to
behavior and personal choice or if the results of that choice were generally fatal instead of just
being generally unpleasant and temporary (though this latter point seem to me to be actually of
lesser importance than the former)

To Negotiate:

having said all of that, I realize its no fun having Scabies and no fun thinking that you can’t hug
someone without risking illness (though this latter always was and will always be true of course;
living after all is really quite a risky business; necessary fatal actually in an ultimate sense...but I
digress)

And it is also true (I guess it is true) that I did sign a contract which said something to the effect
that in a situation like this I would be willing to either follow the (unilaterally arrived at) proscribed
treatment or a agree to leave the community for some recommended time.
As for the latter option, a matter of pragmatics and realism in my case, the situation is this:
although I do have a pal available to me and might be willing to use it, since I have very little
money saved, and no family with whom I would chose (or likely be invited) to stay, my Pal
would likely be spent on the street, perhaps in “the bush” sometimes, sometimes sleeping in
homeless shelters, with the occasional couch surfing episode here and there. The last time
I was homeless I got the chicken pox. In general it seems a hundred times more likely that
I would infect the community with something (possibly something much more serious than
scabies) after returning from such an expedition then in the condition currently am in.
alternatively I could (as I understand it) possibly be quarantined at aurora or in the retreat cabin
or perhaps some where else although I am not sure how this would work work-wise. I suppose
I could go on an “on the farm Pal” and use my meager savings to buy my own food or I guess
just go into debt to the community buying it. Or maybe I could find something to do work-wise
that would not inspire paranoia or something...I must confess that the whole thing seems pretty
lame (not to say more than a little insane and callous) but I would possibly be willing some
such accommodation if people are that fearful about the remote possibility of getting sick for 3
weeks...

I guess there is also the possibility that someone could help me find a cushy 2 month house
sitting job somewhere or something...

Anyway, I am not sure what else to say at this point. other than that I regret my own laxness in
responding to this situation (I guess I assumed the situation would be treated pretty much as it
always has been in my experience and like I said, I feel I have very little reason to worry about
getting or spreading the disease myself). As things stand my inclination is just to undergo the
stigma and social ostracism of the “untreated” since that seems (and I am grateful for this) to be
a last resort option from your point of view. I don’t imagine it will be much worse or different than
the stigma I already undergo just by being me and saying some of the things I say. But like a
said, I am willing to consider other possibilities...

Sincerely,

I-P
Post Script:

To these reasons I will add something I left out but now think was almost the essence of the problem I had with the whole thing. This was just the use of "technology" (in this case what amounts to a pesticide) to deal with nature and to try to avoid the real consequences of ones decisions. Access to "round up" just gives license to land debasing mono-culture while trying to deal with an infestation without that will in no time lead one to more sustainable forms of agriculture. Same in this case. I don't want to be a contributing part of a culture of that chooses violence to nature (and your body is the part of nature that you are most concretely) to solve the problems created by initial neglect and disrespect of nature (which presumably is what was constituted in the behavior that led to the scabies in the first place). Its like following a simple error (to err is human) with what amounts to an even more grievous and arrogant one which,( like most techno-fixes) will only make the first error more likely to continue.

It is basically like we do not consider the land and the other beings (inner and outer beings) that we live with as part of our "community" at all. I don't think its occurred to anyone yet to think about where this toxic biocide people are taking is going to go when it is pissed and shitted out by the populous. In many cases it will be directly or indirectly on to the land and into the water supply with who knows what long term results. Possibly they will be minimal (although the quantity will be pretty large relative to the discharge of any other drug any-ones taking) but that's is not really the point anyway with a pattern of relative thoughtlessness which for many, possibly most, is a habitual thing . To ignore our own inciting unconsciousness and lack of awareness/respect in getting out of balance with nonhuman members of our community in the first place, and compound that ignorance with an arrogant recourse to toxic measures that are likely to be even more harmful in the long run, all for what amounts to reasons of convenience and entitlement, is clearly irresponsible, unsustainable, and...very main stream...

Also, when I think of the whole dynamic from the socio-political point of view, I think about this series of lectures I am listening to about the history of the twentieth century. I think in particular about the lecture on Fascism because in that lecture Fascism is described in terms of the subordination of--or really almost the complete irrelevance of--the individual to the state. The lecturer speaks also in terms of Fascism's legitimation--even encouragement--- of violence toward the "Other" in the name of the State . This description is mixed in my mind with Mussolini's description of Fascism as the merger of the state and the corporate interests. I would not make this as a positive claim, but it has certainly occurred to me to consider case of a de facto merger between "The Community" Twin Oaks, and "The Corporation Twin Oaks" in which both are defined in a way that is exclusive of the Land and of most of the other nonhuman beings there, so that "Loyalty to the Community" becomes a virtue directly measuable in terms of ones willingness to do violence to the beings excluded. In such a case, any one venturing to speak on behalf of the excluded ones runs the risk of becoming a victim of that same kind of exclusion and/or violence.

It is these considerations that I think were really underneath my initial instinctual response, but it has taken a while for me be able to clearly articulate them so that my initial written response above contain at best only indirect reference to these kinds of issues.

Any way, after I wrote the above I followed it with an addendum that (as I supposed it might) really got me into trouble:

Addendum on Coercion and Contract.

There is something more I started to mention in my previous letter to the health team,
something that seems bear on the very nub of possible reasons to be angry with my refusal to
go along with the program cooked up by the health team even if one agrees with all the reasons
I did give in that letter. What I imagine people saying to themselves is something like: “well he
did sign a contract saying he would do such and such and so and so in this situation.” with all
that is supposed to imply about “honoring ones agreement and the communities alleged right to
coerce conformity to the agreement (with I guess the ultimate sanction being expulsion).
what I want to say here is simply that in a society with an ever dwindling infrastructure or
social safety net, a society which as a principle denies the right of poor individuals to decent
shelter, food and (in many cases and increasingly) good drinking water, any “contract” between
the “haves nots” and the “haves” is effectively a contract made under conditions of coercion and
Contracts made and/or maintained under conditions of direct or indirect coercion are
themselves intrinsically dishonorable (on the part of those coercing the agreement) and
hence null and void both morally and practically.

Consider a contract signed at gun point. Or the date rape (or for that matter the traditional
marriage) in which the word “yes” spoken totally out of legitimate fear of the consequences
in an inherently asymmetrical an unjust social, economic and emotional situation. Consider,
perhaps a bit more tellingly, two competing big water companies buying up (and locking up) all
the sources of good water near your village and offering to meter it out to you under contract.
certainly you are free to refuse to sign with one company and instead to enter into a similarly
one-sided and coerced relationship with the other, but to hold anyone to such a contract, if
they did sign it, would be ridiculous. In any of the above situations I would say that the coerced
has not only the right but the responsibility to do justice to their own intrinsic rights as a living
being by whatever means that can themselves be justified as both pragmatically possible and
minimally harmful to self and other. I would say furthermore that the coercing party (or anyone
in sympathy with them) are in no position at all to judge of the matter. In most cases, in the
short term anyway, the most responsible thing to do might very well be to make such a verbal or
written contract if by doing so one can remain in a fit state to pursue justice both for oneself and
everyone else. In the longer term there will be a responsibility to try challenge and otherwise
influence coercing parties (who in many cases one might justifiably regard as sociopathic
or even criminally insane) in the direction of consciousness and justice. But the far greater
point here is that even to focus on the behavior of the “coercee” under such circumstances
rather than the unmitigated violence and obscene entitlement of the coercing party is already a
breathtakingly vile act of self delusion and connivance.

To be Clear and about the principle involved, I will here quote from a recent blog post of mine:
* States of affairs are, generally speaking, established and maintained primarily by conference
and consent or one the other hand, primarily by direct and/or indirect coercion, intimidation,
repression. In today's world the latter is overwhelmingly the case.

* If such “might” (coercion, intimidation, violence, etc) is “right” then rapists have the right to
rape, child molesters to molest etc, for the simple reason that they evidently have the might to
do so, which implication is more than enough to convince me that the premise is bullshit.
*If this does not bother you it is hard to see why anything should bother you...

* Some will deny that “Might is Right” but will say that there is a “Right” that itself justifies “Might”
or the use of force and coercion. Yet unless there is a free, ongoing, inclusive, fair and un-
coerced conference as to what this “Right” is, then the “Right” in question is simply being
established and maintained by “might”, rather than by consent, or any attempt at it (especially
from those effectively excluded from being present to even start, or be in the conversation) , and
we are back to the original equation and its implications.

* This shows that exclusion (usually connived at and colluded with) and its resulting censorship
and neglect, is one of the primary and most devastating forms of coercion and violence while
also being by its very nature one of the least obvious.

* Thus, For “Might” not to be the ultimate arbiter of things, the “Right” of any given act or state of
affairs, must be something that is established and renewed by an inwardly an outwardly fair and
inclusive process of regular conference, justification, and consent.

* In other words, Coercion and violence (whether they are applied, inwardly or outwardly--to
oneself or to others) are only justified to the extent that they can be shown to be defensive and
self-mitigating in nature; and more over, the state of affairs that is defended and maintained
by violence and coercion must, to justify its existence, be shown to be primarily and actively
cultivating the opposite of inner and outer coercion, namely inner and outer inclusive
conference, and consent.

* Private property is a state of arbitrary exclusion and license that is both established and
maintained by direct and/or indirect coercion. For an individual or a group to accept Private
property unquestioningly is for them to accept a kind of bribe: it is to make a kind of agreement
to serve a Great Tyranny in exchange for license to be a tyrant on a smaller scale; It is like
accepting the “Ring of Power”, which individuals and groups (in communities and outside of
them) convince themselves they somehow deserve and will use wisely, but which inevitably
corrupts them, though this is seldom realized of admitted.

* The only justification for participating in private property (or any other form of the sick culture
from which such institutions derive) is, (as was the case with the Ring of Power in the story),
the demonstrated intention and resolve to “unmake” it, an intention made credible and concrete
by the institution of, among other things, as many safeguards against its corrupting power
as it is possible to come up with. In the case of intentional community and of property in land
especially, this means an explicit intention to create maximally inclusive and minimally coercive
way of life; a healthy culture based on a discipline of inner and outer, inclusion and conference,
of justice and justification,--which will ultimately educate, challenge and replace the sick and
coercive culture in which it is embedded.

* I have many ideas about how this might be done and am looking for collaborators in such a
project. If you think you might interested in committing to such a project or in further discussion,
Please get in touch with me a individualperson1@gmail.com.

Bringing this all back home to the present issue; I am not saying that “the community” or even
this or that person in it might not be justified in requiring me to perform this or that action,
what I am saying is that that justification is not going to come from reference to any coercion-
based agreement I or anybody else my have signed. It will come from the intrinsic justice and
justifiableness of the request itself in terms of shared responsibilities alluded to above. Most of
my arguments against that justifiableness were given in my previous letter, the present one is to
deal more forthrightly with what seemed to be an important underlying issue on its own terms.
I realize by pursuing the subject in this manner I am perhaps pushing the issue but it seems
to me that the hope of manifest integrity in Twin Oaks in particular and in the communities
movement in general requires that it be pushed. To be content to “profit” from the implications
of the present state of affairs is to have at the core of ones being the instincts of a bully, a rapist,
and a coward. It is both a betrayal of our best selves and of the hope the any real sustainable
community, equality, and justice in the world outside ourselves. If I did not speak out against it
what good would I be to myself, the community or anyone else?
Sincerely,
I-P

there followed a series of encounters with members of the health team lead me to believe that I could follow another rather involved course of preventative action (remember I have no symptoms of scabies at all), which i agreed to to and even supplemented with some of my own ideas. so far so good I guess.

Then today I recieve the following open letter from (so far) 3 members of my (14 or so) member housemates:

An Open Letter to I-P

You have violated the basic social contract of T.O. {my reply was to ask if he was refering to blind obedience}
Your mailbox letter openly repudiated the principles of the community. {I inquired if coecion without due process was one of these and affirmed my repudiation of it if that was so} And by failing to follow the planner decision to treat for Scabies you are in violation of policy. {which I suppose is the letter of the law}. You have placed your self interest above the interest of the community and put us all at further risk of contagion {to which I asked what possible self interest would make me risk getting my self kicked out of my home (and possibly the community) for refusing what I did? I know (well I think) the pesticide is not going to kill me. It is obviously the principle of the thing. I also said that there will always be a risk of further contagion} You are imposing risk on us. {of course I feel moral--and possibly physical "risk"---as well as just plain neurosis and fear-driven facist rigidity--is being imposed on me. Though I only wrote the first half of that}

I want you to leave Tupelo {my house hold} and not step in side the building for 2 months for any reason. I am not interested in entering into a discussion about what possible compromises will work for me or Tupelo. This is not up to me, it is up to the planners {this seems to me to be a cop-out worthy of a true authoritarian bureaucrat and/or cult minion, but I did not say as much}. Anyway the final line is: I want you to follow the planner decision to leave.

This was signed by the author his girl friend and one other.

So far I have replied to this second paragraph is as follows: "well, in civil disobedience, one refuses to do what one thinks is unjust and leaves the violence part to the state"

The letter is still before me so I am not sure what else to say as I don't really have inner consensus on what to do. Writing sometimes help me to figure things out so I thought I feed two birds with one seed or whatever and write as blog post about it.

Part of me wants to see who else will sign this before I reply (in which case I have a lot of erasing to do). another part wants to just leave (or begin the process, since I did say I was willing to leave the building for two months), but I am not sure where on Twin Oaks I would go or who to consult about it.

I dont really want to force my presence on these people even though I think that not facilitating their neurosis and power tripping would possibly be good for them.... My consideration is to be fair to myself and to them (I think such inner and outer fairness is the only kind of fairness), and am not sure what would be the best thing to do. Civil disobedience usually involves willingly undergoing the conseqences of ones actions, so it sort of makes sense to leave. When the person from the health team talked to me, she said she was supposed to ask me to leave but then also gave me a list of things that they had approved that I could do If I chose not to. Its also the case that others--among them a couple with child--refused treatment and were following these alternative guild lines as well, and so I decided to take that option. Then I received my open letter. As I say, I kind of wish I knew how others felt but maybe numbers don't really matter. My inclination is to begin moving out to the retreat cabin (or at least to check on my options about where I can actually go on the land...hopefully I will be allowed time for this...)

considering...support....

so its a day or so later (Christmas actually) and having chosen to allow myself to be temporarily evicted, I move to the retreat cabin on Monday. I still receive some dirty looks (which, I have gotten used to receiving given the kinds of things I sometimes say), but I have also gotten some signs of support. It occured to me an hour ago that basically I am being a kind of concientious objector aganst being drafted into humanities war against nature (which is motivated by alienation, confusion, and fear like every other war) and as such I am just undergoing some version of the kind of things most concientious objectors undergo. There is that feeling of pressure though. I said to someone (in what I now think might have been a moment of weakness on my part), that if 3 more people come down with scabies I would probably just take the damn stuff, though I am not really sure if that is true; if my concience would let me. Its not that I am trying to be tough or anything--if I cracked under pressure I would forgive myself the same way I don't blame anyone who has taken the drugs, whether they caved or just believe in that kind of thing; people are just weak really and suffer from sick culture and I am no exception....at the same time I think (or fear) that my doing such a thing would make me seriously question what else I will be coerced into doing in the future and whether or not I had passed the point in which I was making the world worse rather than good by still being in it. Actually, when the world is this fucked up, being in trouble for principled reasons should probably be greeted by anyone with great Joy as a sign that that they are still actually Alive and have at least not been completely "body snatched". I suppose, deep down, underneath everything I do feel some of the that Joy, which, on this Christmas day, I think I will close by wishing to you the reader as well. So Joy to whoever is reading this, whether they wish me well or not, and, while I am at it, Joy to the World...

(I suppose that was a little trite and sentimental but I can sometimes get that way on Christmas....)

--I-P

{Latest news: as of Dec. 29, as least, I seem to have brokered a "reprieve" of sorts, owning mostly to the practical fact that banishment to the retreat cabin would make it more rather than less difficult for me to keep the hygeine and prevention agreeement I signed (the retreat cabin has no shower or washing mashine). Not sure if the whole thing is over but I kind of hope so. In retrospect, it might have been better to introduce the ideas in the "Addendum" at another time, since, while certainly relavent, they might be more fairly considered independently. To associate those ideas with the issue of the malignant and, if not necessarily unjustifiable, at least in the present case unjustified, recourse to the alienated, violent, and unsustainable technology of pesticides (and a pesticide is a pesticide whether it is meant for the inner or outer body), might just be confusing for some people. {to be clear, the act is unjustied to me because, so far as I can see, the motive is ultimately mere individual and collenctive convienience; if something more were at stake or if conditions were otherwise significantly different, than that would require another assesment}. There is the common thread of the contrast between a seemingly reflexive inclination to resort to violence (viewing coercion as of course a kind of violence) and its seeming sorce in feelings of entitlement, fear and alienation, with the possibilty of a default recorse to a kind of symetrically fair due process that derives from feelings of equality, mutuality, and a sense of responsibility. In other words, whether violence or the threat of such is employed on nature in the form of the scabies bug, on nature in the form of ones own body, or on concientious objectors like me, the ghost of intitlement and "might is right" is behind the whole thing. At least in the latter case (so far at least) this that employment has been resisted or a least restrained from its potential full expression.

Finally, I'd like to correct whatever impression I may have given that everyone who lives here feels the same on any of the issues I have brought up, or that everyone is even paying any attention. So far, I feel that I might be almost equally supported as unsupported, with most people probably being more or less indifferent. Of course never having been much of a socialite even when not under quarenteen, I have never been able to guage such things very well...}

A little Civil Activism: Community, Private Property, and the Ring of Power

Intentional Community, Private Property, and the Ring of Power

{note: i originally wrote this for an Add in the Reach section of the online intentional communities magizine but it was too long to post there so I thought I'd post it here. let me know what you think--i-p}

* States of affairs are, generally speaking, established and maintained primarily by conference and consent or one the other hand, primarily by direct and/or indirect coercion, intimidation, repression. In today's world the latter is overwhelmingly the case.
* If such “might” (coercion, intimidation, violence, etc) is “right” then rapists have the right to rape, child molesters to molest etc, for the simple reason that they evidently have the might to do so, which implication is more than enough to convince me that the premise is bullshit.
*If this does not bother you it is hard to see why anything should bother you...
* Some will deny that “Might is Right” but will say that there is a “Right” that itself justifies “Might” or the use of force and coercion. Yet unless there is a free, ongoing, inclusive, fair and un-coerced conference as to what this “Right” is, then the “Right” in question is simply being established and maintained by “might”, rather than by consent, or any attempt at it (especially from those effectively excluded from being present to even start, or be in the conversation) , and we are back to the original equation and its implications.
* This shows that exclusion (usually connived at and colluded with) and its resulting censorship and neglect, is one of the primary and most devastating forms of coercion and violence while also being by its very nature one of the least obvious.
* Thus, For “Might” not to be the ultimate arbiter of things, the “Right” of any given act or state of affairs, must be something that is established and renewed by an inwardly an outwardly fair and inclusive process of regular conference, justification, and consent.
* In other words, Coercion and violence (whether they are applied, inwardly or outwardly--to oneself or to others) are only justified to the extent that they can be shown to be defensive and self-mitigating in nature; and more over, the state of affairs that is defended and maintained by violence and coercion must, to justify its existence, be shown to be primarily and actively cultivating the opposite of inner and outer coercion, namely inner and outer inclusive conference, and consent.
* Private property is a state of arbitrary exclusion and license that is both established and maintained by direct and/or indirect coercion. For an individual or a group to accept Private property unquestioningly is for them to accept a kind of bribe: it is to make a kind of agreement to serve a Great Tyranny in exchange for license to be a tyrant on a smaller scale; It is like accepting the “Ring of Power”, which individuals and groups (in communities and outside of them) convince themselves they somehow deserve and will use wisely, but which inevitably corrupts them, though this is seldom realized of admitted.
* The only justification for participating in private property (or any other form of the sick culture from which such institutions derive) is, (as was the case with the Ring of Power in the story), the demonstrated intention and resolve to “unmake” it, an intention made credible and concrete by the institution of, among other things, as many safeguards against its corrupting power as it is possible to come up with. In the case of intentional community and of property in land especially, this means an explicit intention to create maximally inclusive and minimally coercive way of life; a healthy culture based on a discipline of inner and outer, inclusion and conference, of justice and justification,--which will ultimately educate, challenge and replace the sick and coercive culture in which it is embedded.
* I have many ideas about how this might be done and am looking for collaborators in such a project. If you think you might interested in committing to such a project or in further discussion, Please get in touch with me a individualperson1@gmail.com.

I-P Kerren Odori

integralscience.us.splinder.com/, lifedancelog.us.splinder.com/

{ what follows is a Response from Tony and my reply to it}:

    "Hi, how's things. You're at Twin Oaks, right? How's things there?

    I saw your post on Tribe, and I thought I'd send you an e-mail, before all the email collecting spam programs do ;)

    I'm still working on my project, to create a new society. conceivia.com
    Got multiple plans I'm working on, to get there. Most involve working toward
    ending poverty. Basically, we bring power to the powerless, is the short form
    explanation for that.

    What are your ideas?

    Tony"

Hi Tony,

Good to hear from you,

{hope you don't mind me putting your question and my reply to you on Tribe. I figure it might help get some other discussion started there}

Basically the focus is on a kind of preventative socio-economic and social hygiene in which the norm of a regular Individual-Personal check-in will be instituted that will have as its primary subject-matter the inner and outer sick and healthy culture of each individual-person and their successes and struggles in inner and outer healing in each of the 5 venues of Individual-Personhood (Familial, Local, Civil, Spiritual, Individual). There are a fair amount of specific tentative details which I think I can justify, but briefly, I suppose it amounts in some respects to a kind of cultural twelve-step meeting. With this regular check-in established as a base, the disposition of shared "goods" or whatever, will be consensually justified in terms of the details of each persons story and situation and in terms of the shared intention and situation of the group as a whole. In other words, the intention behind the disposition and re-disposition of property will be that it maximally facilitate the inner and outer healing, not only of each individual in the group and of the group as a whole but also of the world beyond the group.

The accent on inclusiveness comes in, among other things, in fact that the check-in ritual and the community itself will be open to any one sincerely willing to participate with any exception to this requiring consensual justification in the same way as any other decision. more of this later}

The concept of property that is involved is one of "Individual-Personal Property", which is property conceived as Individual-Personal "Belonging-With" rather than the normal conception of property as Public or Private "Belonging-To". "Belonging-With" something means being justified in ones relation with it in terms of mutual benefit in the progressive establishment of inner and outer healthy culture (which implies the progressive recovery from inner/outer sick culture). Individual-Personal Belonging-With (Individual-Personal Property--or "Propriety" or "Appropriateness") is potentially very fluid and comes in 5 flavors: Individual property, Familial property, Local property, Civil property and "Spiritual" property. It is changes from one of these forms of property to another that will be consented to at the regular meeting if a proposed change is tentatively deemed justified in terms of its contribution to inner/outer healing.

I do not understand this kind of ritual as part of some immediately popular way of life (I say "part of" because much more in the way of Healthy Culture will be I think necessarily involved, though our topic is just property at the moment). Rather, it seems to me that this kind of "discipline of inner and outer conference" will necessary begin small; as a kind of "cultural pilot project" in the form of an experimental system of "training wheels"; of crutches or casts and "physical therapy", for those willing to admit that they are wounded and crippled by sick culture (Paradoxically, since of those who will not admit this it is nevertheless true, the sincerely willing individuals will be very much distinguished by a relatively rare degree of good taste, good sense, good faith, and good will in my oppinion). At any rate, because of this, the community will thus probably have a form that is in at least some ways like an the traditional eastern or western monastery (though very much different from this in many other ways), in that it will first be composed of "Healthy Culture Nerds", that is; people who have really "hit bottom" so far as inner and outer denial is concerned and who are therefor willing stop pretending that one can successfully moonlight at being a decent person, while spending most of ones energy trying even to "survive" (much less to "get ahead") in a world which makes complicity in genocide and planetary rape as easy as breathing. When one is trying to start a fire in a very cold and soggy environment, much intentionality, focus, and tenacity is needed and so the pioneers of this kind of thing will have to be of such a disposition.

I want to repeat my view that none of this is intended to challenge or oppose the openness or inclusiveness of the meetings and of the community as a whole; I am just assuming that many will exclude themselves from the process because, among other things, of the commitment to inner and outer inclusiveness of the conference process itself. For example, the discipline involved in such regular inner and outer conference implicitely requires among other things a willingness to acknowledge and include the the existance of--and the begin to try to deal with--ones own "shit"; with ones own sick culture of inner and outer alienation, as the details of what this means in each individual case become clear. This alone will likely seem like a barrier to most at the beginning. Nevertheless, the conference itself will always be open to anyone as a default with exclusion requiring ongoing justification in the terms of the same criteria of inner/out healing involved in any other issue. (By "on-going justification", I mean that renewed applications for inclusion--or renewed applications for a change in the form of inclusion--by the same individual-person(s) will warrant new discussion (of each individual), as inner and outer circumstances will doubtless have changed in the interim. I should explain that the categories of inclusion are tentatively the same five categories of Belonging-with as I mentioned earlier, so there is a wide margin for some form of inclusion.

Also, by writing of "acknowledging and dealing with ones shit", I don't want to make the whole thing seem grim, I think anyone in a good twelve-step program will tell you of the joy and relief that come from simply not havin to be phony with themselves and others. The intrinsic goodwill, meaning, and inner and outer adventure of what I am describing can be expected to be the source-- especially once the hump "detox" from sick culture is gotten over--of an even greater and deeper sense of joy, authentic Life, and real Friendship.

But to resume the main line of thought; the idea is that gradually such communities will spread as centers of sanity and healthy culture in a world which otherwise is increasingly deteriorating. If the original fire actually really catches and is maintained, even in just one group, it will be easier for others both to light fires from that existing one by visiting with the community itself and (the essential details of the eventually successful "fire-making recipe" being carefully documented and shared via the Internet and in other ways),to make their own fire from scratch.

Lots and Lots of ideas and essential details left out but that is the gist of this aspect of the Healthy Culture Project. Hopefully its needless to say that all of this is itself subject to change if it can be shown to be unjustifiable in terms of inner/outer healing....

Take Care, and good to hear from you,

---I-P

--
"Truth is the first casualty of war; it is also the first condition of real Peace"

"Everybody has a piece of the Truth; Everybody has a piece of the Lie"

"Violence doesn't work; nonviolence doesn't work either; Maybe Healthy Culture will work"

--I-P
(integralscience.motime.com, lifedancelog.motime.com)

Homelessness

{note: not sure how to classify this post, but this seemed a good place to put it--I-P}

I live in a commune where people often put things "up for grabs" when they're done with them. That's how I came across the book-on-tape version of John Grisham's "Street Lawyer", about an attorney who leaves his career with a big firm to become an advocate for homeless people. I often listen to books on tape when working weaving hammock chairs or something, so I "grabbed it", thinking it might be good for that. This is not a review so I won't say anything about the quality of the book as a whole, but its got me thinking about homelessness and my experiences with it, so I thought I would try to process what it brought up in me.

It strikes me that I can sympathize even a little with the feeling of stigma the idea of "being homeless" conveys in the book, even though it's been almost ten years since I experienced homelessness myself (mostly in different cities on the west coast). This feeling is somewhat worrisome to me since I certainly don't remember feeling more "out of it" in those times then I usually feel these days.

Actually I've always kind of felt that I was born "out of it" relatively speaking and I have never really regretted that circumstance. My homelessness was, if anything, part of my attempt to stay out of it--even to get further out of it if I could--at least until I could figure out what "it" was exactly and what I could do to heal "it". Given my, I guess unusually extreme, sensitivity to the insane nature of our collective and individual lives, being homeless seemed to me to be somehow an appropriately extreme response to our general situation. I certainly had a hard time seeing any real " at-home-ness" in the lives of the people whose fate and situation I was supposed to be envying. At the time I believed (and said) that i would rather be in the situation I was in than in that of any of the various "respectable slaves" (whether a high or low ranking slave was immaterial) I saw around me. I actually pretty much still feel this way, though I am less in denial about the real stresses I was experiencing during that time.

Its interesting to me now to compare my situation then to my present one in the light of some of Alifie Kohn's statements in his DVD and book "Unconditional Parenting". Kohn compares the use of rewards to those of punishments in raising children and finds them similarly destructive in the sense that both methods teach selfishness and (what I would call) an inherently alienated and dissociated identity-politics.

For example, threatening, beating, or otherwise punishing, ones child for, for example, kicking his sister has the ultimate effect of encouraging the child to think--not about the fact that the sister does not like to be kicked--but about what will happen to his or her self if they do the kicking (and someone finds out about it). In the very same way, rewarding or promising to reward for a child for not kicking their sister or for being nice to her does not encourage actual concern for the other person for their own sake but rather for the reward they expect to receive themselves in return for compliance. Of course this confirmed, as Kohn's works usually do, the intuition I have always had about such things, but in this case a further idea, a "blue collar"/"white collar" distinction along the same lines, immediately occurred to me as well.

What I thought of was how, when I was homeless I spent a good deal of time alone because, among other things, a lot of homeless people are coming out of situations (such as broken homes, jail, or the military) in which a physical-punishment-oriented lesson of "bully or be bullied" had been transmitted with varying degrees of success , and the result did not make for a very appealing social environment. Nowadays I live (as I had at the private high school I had attended on scholarship before the "homeless" episodes), with more folks whose initiation into sick culture involved more upper class homes and more collage education and who therefore probably have more experience with "white collar version" of alienation in which coercion is usually very indirect, and the "carrot" rather than the "stick" was the more emphasized version of behavioural control. The main lesson most of them learned I suppose was more was more something like "manipulate or be manipulated" than "bully or be bullied".

Of course, these are just generalizations, and in both situations there are people trying to avoid both the white collar and blue-collar forms of alienated relating, but the upshot of the fact that in a sick culture there is almost no escape in society from some part of this "control continuum" (of which the "stick" of physical violence and the "carrot" of manipulating praise are just the extremes), is that I spend just as much time by myself here as I did when I was on the street, and ultimately for the same reason.

Anyway, the little stigma that I feel around the idea of someone "being homeless" bothers me, because it might be sign that, despite my own experience and knowledge, I have contracted some degree of the phoniness, self-delusion and denial of those who think that they are somehow "better off" than such people. I remember reading an interview--it was either with Carlos Castaneda himself or one of his associates....well I just Googled the interview, which was with Castaneda. He remarked on a time when he was trying to get Don Juan to feel sorry for the plight of the Yaqui Indians , and Don Juan said, "Yes, It's a very sad thing but, you see, your situation is also very sad, and if you believe that you are in better condition than the Yaqui Indians you are mistaken. In general the human condition is in a horrifying state of chaos. No one is better off than another. We are all beings that are going to die and, unless we acknowledge this, there is no remedy for us." I've always seen things pretty much the same way, so the idea that I might have contracted (I guess just by osmosis) some degree of this "I'm so fortunate" denial-pity-and-fear-enabling" sensibility regarding "homelessness" or anything else is pretty disturbing. Almost makes me think about leaving here and becoming a tramp/bum or whatever it is I was again.

I have also been thinking about doing that in terms of what I think I have learned about myself through my encounter with "the Michael Teachings", which I discovered when I was living an Hawaii years ago. Its a long story, but I ended up getting a free channeled personality reading (the channel just looks at your photo an blurts out your metaphysical i.d. in terms of this specific cosmological system that involves reincarnation. I am sure its sounds kooky but the whole thing really makes sense to me to at a certain level, though I can't say I actually hold it as a creed. Anyway, besides being, among other things, an "Idealistic Scholar with a King essence Twin and a Goal of Discernment/Sophistication" (all of which makes sense to me having read the explanations of these somewhat misleading terms), I am also supposed to be an "old soul" (though a relatively "young" old soul, there being seven levels to each soul age).

Anyway, it is said that "old souls learn trough terror" and I can certainly remember experiencing a good deal more terror on the streets of various cities than I've experienced (outside of a few vision quests) since I have been here. I'd like to think that I wouldn't hesitate to leave my current situation of relative comfort and security in pursuit of whatever kind of terror is capable of teaching me more of what I need to know to be a more effective catalyst of healthy culture, (if I could get inner consensus on what that kind of terror would be).

Of course if I stay here and continue to grow in healthy culture I can imagine things getting ultimately pretty scary here well, with the advantage that the fear would probably be of a different kind than what I've been through before. Still,becoming homeless again is certainly an option and is infinitely preferable to becoming some hippie, "corporate light" version of the "respectable slave" that I disdained when I was younger (and there are probably almost as many self-employed slaves as otherwise).

I don't disdain such people now, and I am not even interested in pitying them, but I do have a real commitment not to end up, through cowardice, collusion and self-delusion, just becoming a part of the general situation in such a way that I am really only helping to make things worse. I would not only risk death but even seek it if that seemed to be my only alternative.

I would never commit suicide as either a rejection of the world or of my self, but I would certainly choose death over the fate of betraying myself and the world. I mean, I'm going to die anyway, why not go before that happens. I guess there is some analogy here of the attitude of say, someone in the French Resistance during WWII choosing suicide rather than possible betrayal of their cause under torture if captured. In both cases its a very difficult judgment call, probably more difficult for me since in my case betrayal is more likely to happen quietly and unannounced (as a result of seduction by the tranquilizing effect of relative comfort and security), than through any Guantanamo-like experiences. My situation is much more common in that way.

Apropos of which, I was listening to Naomi Klein speak recently about her latest book "Shock Doctrine". She made a comparison between "our" governments response to the fear and confusion that the 9/11 terrorism inspired and the goals of torture. She quotes a certain torture manual as explaining that the idea behind torture methods is,( through pain, fear, and disorientation etc), to bring the victim to a state of "regression" in which the torturer is regarded more or less like a father figure {it occurs to me now that the situation revisited is the same one of infant helplessness in comparison to looming parental authority that I referred to in my post about Shame as being the source of our first phony self-image and self betrayal}. At the point that this regression is reached, the hard part is over and the torturer can expect to be given whatever information he or she are asking for. I think Klein was saying that the disorientation and fear of insecurity of the 911 terrorism attacks was used by Bush to keep the American people in a similar state of regression, so that they would give the government (as "the protecting father") carte blanche to do whatever it wanted in response, including take away many of their own rights.

I think the analysis was pretty good except that i would have said that the terrorism situation was just an acute version of what has always been a chronic situation between those offering protection and security in exchange for obedience and those accepting the bargain. Ultimately the fear of insecurity and the denial of death and change will always lead to slavery in one form of another. The post 9/11 situation was just the acute end of a continuum that has a more mundanely chronic--if more subtle--fear/self-betrayal dynamic at the other end.

Is this situation the same kind of "control continuum" I alluded to earlier, a continuum with "Security", "Respectability" and "Prosperity" on the "Carrot" end, and "homelessness, insecurity, and "acute Terror" (as apposed to the chronic terror underlying "security") at the "stick" end of the continuum? If so, then it would seem that the whole continuum, being just a continuum of the same kind of thing, is presenting more or less a false dichotomy, Micheal Teachings or no Micheal Teachings. Presumably though, it is not the same, and the willingness to experience, acknowledge (and transcend?) terror in pursuit of growth, healing and freedom is not just an extreme version of the suppression of chronic low level "terror" in exchange for the illusion of security and respectability . Obviously it is not. The difference would be that facing terror consciously (even if cautiously) with a sense of meaning and purpose is fundamentally different from living in denial of it, whether the terror one is facing is low level chronic or high level acute.

This last qualification (about it not mattering whether the terror is low-level chronic or high-level acute) seems to me to open up various new possibilities in the pursuit of freedom. If we all live in low level terror of "homelessness", death, or whatever, then we live in low level terror. Which is to say, in a real sense "low level terror" is our "home". Which is to say our home (our whole life situation really) is a prison. Which is to say that, in an equally real sense, (if a true home is not really the same as a prison) we are "homeless" already.

Perhaps collectively realizing the pseudo security and pseudo-fortune of our current "fortunate" situations (and the real low-level terror that keeps us in them) is more productive in the long run than rushing out to chase some acute terror, especially if the motive for this latter is really some kind of ego thing (i.e.;"see, I'm not afraid to be homeless so therefor I'm better than you").

What this seems to mean is that I should really be considering myself "homeless" already and that I have always been homeless to some extent, at least in relation to various socio-economic situations I have been in. After all, should anyone feel at home--or want to--in any situation which is enabling, (or even just not effectively challenging), such an exploitation and slavery-based sick economy and culture? If people can come together in acknowledgment of this chronic low-level terror; of this chronic and chronically denied homelessness and slavery, as a part of the sick culture we all suffer from, then the work, however scary it may still be, of co-creating a sane world for everyone would seem to have begun. Of course the terror of fully acknowledging this everyday fear and misery--and of abandoning the false comfort of feeling somehow 'better" or "more fortunate" than anybody else (even though it also implies not being "worse" or less fortunate" than anybody else), is probably a greater terror for the ego then the terror of dealing with actual pain and deprivation and confusion.

But, I don't mean to suggest that this homelessness and fear is our natural condition or even our deepest reality, I am only saying that trying to suppress or deny it--or cover it over with mystical "affirmations" to the contrary--can only lead deeper into inner and outer apartness, denial, and slavery; to getting even farther away from our true Home.

Life-Dance Post

Family Member

no real initiatives, no changes. I don't think I'll go into much detail here since I am not trying to "shame" my familial venue by giving the impression that I think it is especially dissociated (Though I also don't want to contribute to complacency either). Suffice to say that the nearly universal public/private social model; in-groups, rituals of inner and outer apartness such as gossip (that is, putting people on trial without their presence or representation, often over various consciousness-and-conscientiousness-inhibiting substances or during competitive games), goes on here as it goes on everywhere. The alternative of conscious and deliberate forms of coming-together informed by a commitment to inner and outer healing and to co-creatively making our household into a place that world facilitate real belonging and Individual-Personhood is probably just as unlikely to happen these days as when I got here 6 years ago.

Still, none of the status-quo-rituals involved seem exactly rituals of Pure apartness, and i suppose it can and does happen that some healthy gesture spontaneously erupts in the general lameness, its just that this is overwhelmingly likely to fizzle out or even be spun to the advantage of the dominant culture of false solidarity and connivance. In general it certainly is a pretty eroded soil for any kind of seed of healthy culture to take root. Moreover, being more or less outside all of the factional cliques and duads in which these rituals go on exposes me to attack from any or all of them, though there is really nothing to be done about that.

Sometimes I wonder if I need to look at all of this in a different way. One can only go so far naming what is unhealthy and expecting this naming to be met with good will, good faith, and a generally adult attitude, especially if one of the things you are naming is the consistent repression of subordination of such attitudes in the very culture and individuals in question. What I have been affirming to myself is the life-logical truth that both healthy and sick culture exist in everyone, even when sick culture is the predominating norm. In such a case acting towards people as if they did have an active and non-repressed inner Adult (which they could indeed have in that moment) could be a way of helping to actually activate and support that adult at the same time as helping to keep my own adult active and alive. In other words, one way of trying not to succumb to the toxic smoke of a burning house is to keep reminding others and oneself of the situation--which at least might help the reminder stay awake even if others are too far gone to respond at that moment.

I still don't see a clear alternative to this. In fact, putting it has I just have, i am not sure if the problem is that I am making such gestures and remarks, or that I am not making them enough. Not doing this--being somehow secretive about my judgments of the health of what is going on--seems to me just a set up for the kind of quietly self-serving, if inconspicuous arrogance that I have engaged in the past; a kind of preemptive writing-off of people that precludes all possibility of inner or outer healing. I suppose one could even call it "gossiping to oneself" about others. I can't say that I do this very much nowadays; if I get into a discussion of any length with anyone at all, the topic is generally about sick culture in some way, though I tend to leave a lot to be inferred, rather than directly "challenging" (not quite the right word) the person in front of me.

I used to invite the other person to participate with me in a Life-Dance Party, Check-in or other ritual of Healthy Culture some point in such a conversation, but experience has taught me that little ever comes of this, even when the person agrees to do it and it actually happens. I think that this is because the motive for participating (on the part of the other person) is never fully integrative if it is integrative at all. Healthy Culture rituals, which are somewhat like (outer) political actions and (inner) therapy at the same time, require as much long term commitment as either, but don't have the loop holes, or hidden ego-perks of either. They have other and infinitely deeper cumulative benefits of course, but these require time to reveal themselves. Most people don't have the faith in togetherness required to invest the time it takes to find this out, so Its sort of a catch-22 situation.

All of this leaves me with the familiar familial balancing act. Ultimately I do live together with these people and though it is important not become fixated on the familial aspect of my life (and only the Human aspect of the familial at that) to the exclusion or neglect of the local, civil, socio-religious, and my own coming-together as an Individual, it would be equally wrong and unhealthy to connive at the fact that I live with people who suffer from sick culture just like me--but without (at least most of the time and so far as I can tell) a deep enough consciousness of this and what it means, to be able to see the need for the co-creation of some kind of cultural 12 step program. Ultimately I have to try to make some kind of gesture at that simply because of entropy and the fact that things will only get worse without some kind of intervention. This worsening must ultimately take the form of either my losing what little consciousness I have of the situation and so becoming a full part of it, with me being otherwise really harmed by it, and/or with me voluntarily or involuntarily leaving it. There is of course also the possibility of me healing it, but outside of the miraculous intervention of Spirit, I don't feel my own little flame anywhere near warm enough to effect the degree of "sogginess" I feel around me (not, as I've said, that this sogginess is greater than in most places). I often feel pretty soggy myself.

However there might be a little arrogance (in the form of false humility) in what I've just written and there certainly seems to be a lack of faith in Togetherness in it. I am learning and growing a great deal in various ways so there is no reason to prejudge the ultimate issue of my experiment in this household. Anything is possible. Listening, considering, support....

Neighbor

The Neighborhood situation is pretty much the same as the familial one. I seem to have stopped going to meetings as the prepackaged agendas tend to assume things that are very much at issue as far as I am concerned.

There are two relatively new businesses happening at Twin Oaks, both of them more appealing and seemingly sustainable than making polypropylene hammocks or even Tofu. There is the Seed Business that is sort of an outgrowth of the Acorn (sister community) seed business, and there is work installing solar panels and such like. I am happy about this and though these businesses are not at all in the forefront of things it seems possible that a trend is in that direction. But I am also worried about that very possibility since I already begin to feel the same kind of frustration with the state of things that I always feel on the political front when the Democrats are in office and everyone feels like its aright to stop thinking about even diagnosing (much less curing) our underlying disease, since the amelioration of certain symptoms (usually confused with the disease itself) seems immanent. Its very difficult to keep saying, like the "Enemy of the People" in Ibsen's play, that the waters are still poison when everybody so much wants to have everything turn out well at so little expense.

I suppose I still play this role--sort of a Noam Chomsky type role i guess--whenever i am overheard talking about things in conversation, but I haven't written or posted anything on the opinions and ideas board since the paper on Due Process during the "feed back episode". I am working on two papers currently however; one that goes into detail about the kind of multi-lateral "community hearing" due processi proposed in that paper, and the other on the meaning of "efficiency" from the healthy culture point of view.

Two persistent themes of my being here (although I guess it would apply equally of my being anywhere), is that I am always engaged in experiments of self-transformation (or self healing) which, besides having various unforeseeable side effects, have these intermediate periods of extreme vulnerability in which I am neither my old selfnature or fully my new (hopefully more realized) selfnature. This is ameliorated by the fact that I spend so much time alone but it still worries and frustrates me sometimes. The other but related theme is that ultimately, as I grow in healthy culture (if I do, and whatever that means exactly) it makes sense to assume that I can expect more and more "culture shock" and "cognitive dissonance" between myself an every one else here. I consider this kind of trouble almost inevitable, but it wont be the kind of "good trouble" that I want it to be if it only happens on some kind of private local level. Good trouble is not "private" or "public" trouble understandable in factional terms, but its the kind of trouble you get into when you really begin to make progress in (inner and outer) healing as an individual-person, and I feel like i need to time things so that I can make the most of it as it begins to happen (or to intensify).

But the fact that I myself still (and probably always will) suffer from sick culture is quite essential to both the creation of this kind of "Good Trouble" and the fear I have of it. It is essentially more a Comic business than a tragic heroic one. It would certainly be a complete misfire if I had people envying me or pitying me or taking me too seriously or to lightly--all of which I am sure will happen if anything happens (there has always been some of what I've dreaded as well as what i hoped for in any future I have actually lived through).

All in all though, I guess I am holding my own (which is to say "keeping my balance) well enough as a neighbor...listening, considering...

Individual:

here I'd like to try the experiment of making an Individual Check-in. Its different from checking-in about my progress over time in healthy coming-together as an individual, as it is meant to be a more or less immediate snap shot of what it happening in my whole "vertical" individuality. Example:

Mind (inner adult). I feel fairly lucid right now, relatively focused on the task as hand. More generally, my mind is usually investigating, contemplating, and brainstorming all kinds of things relating to healthy culture, which eventually become focused in the coherence of an inspiration usually accompanied by some creative action on my part. Books I am reading include "The Body Movable" by David Goreman, "Law as Culture" by Robert Rosen, "Ending Slavery" by Kevin Bales, and "The Natural Alien", by Neil Everndon.

Heart (inner child). up until very recently I was feeling very sensitive, I even wept (with gratitude) at the grave yard yesterday on my Death Day Eve, Life-Dance Walk. This morning i was feeling somewhat despondent, as i can sometimes do, about the general state of sick culture in the world (an in myself too). It all seems to have evaporated now and I am feeling pretty cheerful. I have especially be enjoying playing with Ts'ui (that is the name I have given my Guqin (chinese "zither") and also working on a few new guitar songs.

Body (inner animal). I feel a bit sluggish right at this moment. This time of the year there are not enough greens from the garden, and since even when things are abundant I sometimes find it difficult to eat the 60 or 70% raw that i would like to be eating (100% is easier if you have access to a big enough variety of food). I currently seem to be spiralling into "cookedness". Things should change as we get deeper into spring. On the positive side physically, I am generally feeling more balanced and buoyant as a result of my Alexander Technique experiments and also from studying David Goremans Learning Methods a little. I am also trying to keep up the Chi Gung (Chinese and Toltec) and doing alright with that...

Intuition (inner elder): I think I might be finally becoming accustomed to the hair-raising nature of my inner and outer adventure. I have actually been warned to expect rather intense cycles given the nature of my task in this world but its not something that's easy to get used to. I guess what I mean is that I am becoming used to never getting used to it... Thinking about Ogun and Legba right now for some reason...it occurs to me that they may be better symbols for certain parts of my false personality than what I can my "inner Malcolm x" and my "inner Marven Gaye" respectively (I mean "false personality" only in the sense that there is a risk of over-identification with at those "archetypes")... also these days I am feeling like checking out some of the Michael Teachings again (particularly "Tao to Earth" and "Earth to Tao" by Jose Stevens). Finally, playing the Guqin has had the effect of tuning me in to things Chinese, so I might just start consulting (or just rereading) the I Ching again.

So that was an Individual-Check-in (as distinct from a full Individual-Personal Life-Dance Check-in). I introduce it here more or less on a whim, since the point of the Individual Part of the Life-Dance check-in is not so much how these four aspects of my Individuality are doing separately, but how well I am doing in integrating them, in facilitating inner consensus between them so as to be able to act with more with more integrity as an individual. I find that the frequency and quality of various Life-Dance Rituals I do have a lot to do with that. So I'll speak to that a little.

Today is my Death Day, which was preceded by fasting, a Life-Dance walk, and the first part of this Check-in which I am finishing today. I've done most these rituals at this time (half a year from my Birthday) every year for the last 3 or 4 years, as part of a Vision Dance ritual, (I have yet to do the Life-Dance Party, another traditional part of the experience), which is supposed to last 5 days. (I describe all of these rituals in my in lifedancelog.motime.com so I won't do so here). So far, this years Vision Dance is being somewhat less than i hoped. Owning mostly I guess, to the circumstance that my Labour-balance (the number of Twin Oaks labour credits I have saved up) is rapidly dwindling, I think I have been insufficiently intentional and generous with my own time. The rituals that I have done have actually been very moving and magical so my distress about it is not extreme. Nevertheless, I think I need Challenging (and maybe also a little support) in this area, so I am planning something similar to my March Death Day Vision-Dance on Jun 15, halfway between now and my birthday.

Citizen-of-the-World:

Of course, since my understanding of the world and what is wrong with it (and us) has to do with culture and culture is more fundemental than politics, I understand the normal political scene to be, for the most part, a confused affair of relatively sick culture and ultimately unhelpful factional identity politics. I include in this, not only party politics but nationalism itself. I also include "humanistic" organizations such as the United Nations, and even many NGO'S, to the extent that these groups are founded and proceed without an integrative and under the typical assumptions of fundamental apartness common in a sick culture.

I am not saying that I "dismiss" any of these institutions since, from the Life-Logical point of view of healthy culture, any given person or institution is bound to have its "piece of the truth" and so its moments of relatively healthy culture, as well as its piece of the lie. The fact that, for the most part, the groups and institutions I have named seem grounded in sick culture assumptions does not mean that they might not be places where healing is possible (after all, where else is healing going to happen if not in places and people that are more or less sick?), it is just to say that the nature of the healing will be such as to transform the understanding, functioning, and conscious Identity of both the persons and the institutions and that the first intial catalyst for such a transformation is not likely to come from within such institutions and groups, but outside of them.

Insofar as my own experiments in trying to be a such a catalyst (or part of such), I can say that I am beginning to lose a little faith in the idea of a cultural pilot project consisting of myself and a few others who are willing to dedicate themselves to the kind of focused experimental "rubbing together of the sticks of healthy ritual" necessary to start the fire of the kind of "Cultural Singularity" that could spread both arithmetically and exponentially. At least I am losing faith in certain assumptions I had about the order of operations--the "generative sequence"--involved in such the emergence of such a thing.

Though I am obviously still doing my blog (and doing all of the other "citizen-of-the-world" things that I have been doing), I am getting other tactical and strategic Ideas about how best to try to integrate the collective venue into healthy culture and visa versa. But I don't have inner consensus to share any of these Ideas or experiments online right now and, since some of them seem inherently to involve the element of surprise, it is not clear if I will ever have occasion to.

I guess this means that so far as the civil part of my life is going, I am in the "listening and considering" phase that precedes the conception and execution of new and more formal experiment...

It occurs to me that I could finally check-in in this place about my Living-Frienship experiment with Tusti, of more than a year ago now, since it seems to be on the issue of Adulthood as Citizens of the World, that we have floundered (though there is also something about the the Soul; about healthy coming-together in terms of ultimate things that is also involved in a major way). But since I first introduced that in the context of a "Metapost" rather than a Life-Dance post, I think I retain that context for it, rather than this one.

Soul:

My last post was a Soul Post about the gesture of coming together as Souls I was having with my friend Samatman. That post ended up involving my relating some implications of Healthy Culture ideas in relation to certain aspects of what is called Hinduism or at least to certain aspects of what I gathered from some of the writings of Meher Baba, which I was taking as representative of that Religion. My ongoing study of various cosmologies (religious, philosophical, and scientific) has resulted in many such attempts at translating the understandings of integral science/healthy culture into the terms of such creeds, as well as understand the creeds themselves and their histories in terms of assumptions of healthy culture. Here are a few:

That every Religion/Cosmology (including Science) has a piece of the Truth and a Piece of the Lie.

That "Wholesthesia" is "SelfNature" and that SelfNature is "Original Virtue", the counter and complement of "Original Sin" (Sin being understood as a felt sense of primary apartness from Spirit). Thus SelfNature is "the garden" (with its fruit of the Tree of Life) within and outside us.

That callaesthesia (Good Sense) is dynamic and paradoxical consideration of both "original sin" and "original virtue" and so is the both the way back to the "Garden" (the way of cultivating "the garden") and the way forward to the "millennium"

That Healthy Culture is the something like the "Wu Chi" before the "Individual" Yin of Taoism and the "Personal" Yang of Confucianism...

That "Dukka" (The Buddhist term for suffering), is caused by--and in some sense is-- the desire ("Tanha") that comes from accepting a factional identity (including that of a dissociated "individual") as who one is and acting on that false assumption...

That both "Dullardism" and the "Sacred Authority Complex" have a rendezvous with Primal Paradox. (this language is from the writings of Morris Berman)

That Legba, Mercury, Coyote and all the other symbols of paradox, must be honored before there can be true togetherness with Self or Nature

That the "Serpent in the Garden" must make peace with the "Serpent in the Sky".

That Evolution is both the evolution of "Nature" and the Evolution of "Self" (that it is the evolution of SelfNature/NatureSelf) and that the "us-and-us" Identity-Politics of Individual-Personhood is a critical juncture in that evolution.

That the Matrix Categories promise a starting point for a Complete and Integral Mathematics {Note:I am here using the broadest and most philosophical sense of the word "mathematics"--which entymologically means something like the "art of learning" but I also mean to include an integration of mathematics as we know it.}

That Galileo's, Plato's, Descartes, and others conceptionof Nature and its division into something like primary and secondary properties is a false and in-egalitarian dissociation that must be corrected.

That the "Break-down of the Bicameral Mind" does not coincide with the "Origin of Consciousness" since real consciousness is "Consciousness of Primary Togetherness" and not our modern unconsciousness of the same. And that this break-down might have actually been the degenerative phase of a process of gradual consciousness-loss that began in the late paleolithic (this is in relation to the ideas of Julian Jaynes and others). Or it may be that such consciousness is yet to exist all all in human beings...

That, in addition to a Pre/Trans Fallacy, there is also a "Post/Trans" Fallacy, (and also a Trans/Integral Fallacy (these concepts relate to the ideas of Ken Wilber as I understand them...)

All of these statements (and there are very many more I could make) are really just implications of the ideas of healthy culture as they seem to relate to the creeds in question. I don't hold them as dogmas; they just seem to be valid statements given my present understanding of such things. They are the sort of thing I would say at the kind of formal and inclusive "Interfaith" gathering which would take place in the socio-religious venue of the life of every Individual-Person if Healthy Culture were already a going thing in the world.

Of course, to the extent that religions, philosophies, dogmas, creeds, are inherently factional and competative and represent a faith in Primary Alienation and Apartness, the above statements (most of them made in the symbolic language of the beliefs systems in question), will just amount to various forms of heresy, or blasphemy and be dismissed as such. Even if they were accepted, they would be dangerous and confusing if Healthy Culture and its Life-Logical understanding were not first fully grocked and accepted on ts own terms.

For, while the essence of the Truths of the childhood and adolesence of humanity will always survive integration into a truely adult understanding, good faith can never be expressed by taking the side of the past against the future any more than good will can be expressed by taking the side of the future against the past. Good faith is faith in ultimate togetherness and It is only the experience of a torn and fragmented unconscious present that could lead anyone to accept a false dichotomy between the province of the child (the past) and the adult (the future). When the child and adult in us are at war it is because both are sick; it is because we as a whole individuals in a whole world (child, adult, animal, elder;past, future,present, eternity ) are unhealthy and in the grips of sick culture. It is only faith in ultimate togetherness that can lead beyond such a confused contest because that faith is itself sourced in a present deeper than our consciousness awareness, in a past older than our current memory and in a future beyond our planning and predicting.

What I am hoping is that those who are attracted to their Beliefs for the pieces of the Living Truth that they contain (rather than for the false belonging & factional complacency provided by their pieces of the Lie), will recognize the the attempt at the preservation, clarification, and integration of those Truths that is part of the motivation of the present enterprise and so ultimately find the maturity, good will, and courage to rally behind this aspect of the project of healthy culture. The hope is that, by participating in the conversation critically but in good faith, we can reach the minimum of understanding and consensus needed to help point the way forward to a future of inner and outer healing for all the Individual-Persons of the World.

That such a project of Healthy Culture (that Healthy Culture itself as a whole) has and will indefinitely develop its own "Pieces of the Lie" must be expected. Only the fact that the "Integral Modernism" (which is one way to describe the Healthy Culture that I am advocating), is essentially a negative feedback process that cannot be said to have been established unless it successfully incorporates the mechanisms of its own gradual correction offers any argument for its sustainability. {note: In the phrase "Integral Modernism" I am creatively using the word "modern"--from "modus" or "Way" in a manner synonymous with the "Way of Virtue" discribed in the "Tao Te Ching"}

Anyway, research goes on in this area, and so does my search for a proper venue in which to have these kind of conversations with people. Despite my talks with Samatman and my blog posts, I think I need to challenge myself more in this area,especially in ways that would translate into a more regular and perhaps even more formal rituals...considering...

Welcome and Thanks,

I-P Kerren Odori

Self, Ego, Soul, and SelfNature (Soul Post)

Soul Post

You might remember that there is such a thing as a healthy culture ritual called the " Individual-Personal check-in" which involves 5 "reports" by each participant (one in each of the 5 venues of Individual-personhood) on what happens to be up in those venues--in the sense of what degree of sick or healthy culture is going on in each of them. The ritual is Ideally one in which at least two people participate but for demonstration and other purposes, I have adopted that form form for this blog.

So just to recapitulate, since its been a while since I've made this kind of post, the venue of Individual-Personhood is something I call the "Soul" or "Social-Religious venue", has to do with healthy coming-together with others in terms of world-views in general and "Ultimate things" in particular. "Ultimate things" here relates equally to philosophies such as atheism (in which case the ultimate thing is physical death, and "soulful" relating to another means relating to them in the light of that presumed finality) and to any other philosophic or religious assumptions or beliefs. The Idea is to try to engage with others around such topics in a way that facilitates mutual respect, learning, growth and perhaps even some degree of tentative consensus. In practice, this kind of thing requires at least some degree of an "everybody has a piece of the Lie and the Truth" attitude , as this allows folks both to uninhibitedly engage disagreement and at the same time avoid competitiveness and rigid dogmatism. Such a mood is of course rather difficult to reach maintain in practice, which I am sure is one of the reasons people tend to avoid engaging each other around such subjects.

But the vital necessity of learning how to have such a discussion in this venue, is clear for me in the general fact that people maneuver in, and order their world based on their world-views (whether or not their real view is always the same as what they publicly profess) and to the extent to which we live in a shared world, radical disagreements about ultimate things are either going to be constructively engaged in a way that can lead to greater understanding and real cooperation, or they just become the motives for coercion, manipulation, or outright wars of one form or another..

So I happen to be engaged in such a "Soul" dialog with a person called Samatman who I met when he was visiting Twin Oaks. Samatman is very interested in founding a community based on the idea of what he calls the "Shared Self" and on what he calls "Shared Self Practice" which, in my experience of it, focuses on a certain breathing practice. His world-view seems to be inspired in large part by his understanding of physics as well as by his encounters with the teachings and person of Meher Baba and others.

Anyway, we have been engaging in discussions with the Idea of possibly finding some common ground in our world views as a basis for perhaps founding a community together based on some co-created synthesis of his shared self Idea and my whole "healthy culture" thing.

Immediately into our discussions of these issues though, we ran into the difference between his Idea and emphasis on "Self" and my own idea of "SelfNature", as a conception of Ultimate Identity. SelfNature (which it is sometimes more useful to refer to as "NatureSelf") is for me the ultimate "fruit" of which "Individual-Personhood" is the "Flower" (the "Tree of Life" being in some sense the rest of the "plant"). For me the Idea of SelfNature expresses the fundamental togetherness of the subjective (Self) and the objective (Nature), in the way that the idea of Self does not, and so the sticking point in Samatman's and my dialogs seems to stem chiefly on this issue of identity a lot of the time.

Recently samatman lent me the book "God Speaks" by Meher Baba, as a way of facilitating our mutual understanding of each other and I wrote the following to him in response to reading the first 4 chapters:

To Samatman,

so I don't see that it is true (good, beautiful, alive) to believe that "the evolving consciousness of the soul attains its full development in human form" as Meher Baba says, since I think it is precisely through the transcendence of the "human form" and "Human Identity" (and of "species-identity" in general as a separative Identity-Politics), and its replacement with something like Individual-Personhood, that the process of true "development" or "evolution" can begin. I think the whole of "human exceptionalism" and "pride" in the human form, even in the relative sense implied in the "Great Chain of Being" idea, involves a form of separative inegalitarian alienation that prevents living friendship and healthy mutuality between relatively distinct variations on the Theme of SelfNature.

I think that the sense of species hierarchy itself is something that comes from a failure to realize and affirm the ultimate togetherness of SelfNature , since it would seem to imply that that which seems closer to "Nature" is somehow further from some form of "Self" conceived as other and superior (to Nature). I think this assumption of separation and superiority (even, as sometimes happens, when the accent and superiority is given to "Nature" rather than "Self") is actually a conceit of the separative ego which has no real understanding or conscious experience of anything but primary alienation and apartness. It is this egoistic alienation, this mispercieved impression of primary apartness, that is projected on inner/outer experience and leads to the kind of "ranked distinctions" involved in the so called "Traditional view" (which view is, I think, more a function of relatively recent agricultural and in-egalitarian mutations of human culture and cognition than anything truly normative in human culture).

It occurs to me that perhaps another way of saying this (in terms closer to Baba's) is that the "souls" perceptual association with/as a given form of existance is different from the the egos cognitive one-sided attachment to a factional identity. The Soul (or, to be more consistant, the "Soul-Body") in a certain sense "delights in" (and in a certain sense "is") the full continuum between the particular and the general, between the "variation" of particular body and the "Theme" of SelfNature. The Soul is, in other words, fond of togetherness and of the paradoxical togetherness of togetherness and apartness. It likes both Self and Nature, and likes (and in a way ,is) both multiplicity and unity equally because its ultimate consciousness and longing is for the Spirit that manifests through and beyond both multiplicity and unity, beyond even SelfNature/NatureSelf. This delight of the Soul in the means as well as the end is because it knows that it is only such paradoxical delight that will ultimately attract That which is equally beyond both Means and End. it is almost the essense of what the soul is. It is the dissociated (disembodied) ego, on the other hand, that is the "sourpuss" that is always trying to rigidly impose one-sidedness and permanently subordinate one side of a coin to the other. Such a one-sided ego can't dance (by "dance" I mean something like "negotiate paradox"), while the soul is almost the joy of dance itself.

Any way without a paradox-embracing soulfull life-logical form of cognition, the ego must rule and apartness, apartheid, caste must emerge as primary (both in religion and in social order) in a way that they never would if the true paradoxical togetherness of Self and Nature (of SelfNature/NatureSelf) were perceived, conceived, affirmed and realized. What I suspect has happened in India as well as in other "civilizations" is that prevalence of the trauma of factional, war-induced hierarchical social conditions of caste and rank (over any preexisting conditions of "primitive" equality or community) is echoed in a cosmology and Identity politics that at least strongly lends itself to misinterpretation in terms of alienation, estrangement and onesidedness...I think such one-sidedness is implied in the concept of unilateral identity relation in which the Metaphysical Self "absorbs" or includes Nature in a way that subordinates the later (the same onesidedness is of course equally manifest when this condition is held, as in some forms of materialism for example, to be reversed).

SelfNature can only manifest in Entity-Experience when Entity-Experience reaches the "genericly-specific" and so paradoxical level of Identity that I would describe, not as "humanity" but as "Individual-Personhood" (or something very like it). I think the Identity-politics of Individual-Personhood is an example of the kind of paradoxical, togetherness that is in harmony with Soul (perhaps I should say with "World-Soul") and in terms of which this Soul as the Entity-Experience of connected individuality can best ultimately Manifest SelfNature and find its ultimate consummation (and perhaps rebirth) in its trans-formative encounter with Spirit and Ultimate Freedom (which I contend transcends, SelfNature, Entity-Experience and Identity Itself). Well was a bit of a mouthful, but I hope it is at least not a misleading mouthful. Probably, gesturing at Spirit with words is always going to be misleading...

So, for these and more reasons, regarding self and other primarily (or even secondarily) in terms relatively factional identities, as defined by species, kingdom, gender etc, seems precisely the opposite of what is needed to make room for the realization of our Shared SelfNature as Individual-Persons...Putting "Self" (no matter how allegedly different from "self" or ego) as the top of such a one-sided hierarchy is part of what facilitates the one-sidedness and the Hierarchy. The Idea of SelfNature avoids this and, without completely rejecting hierarchy of a kind, allows for its paradoxical subordination to equality and mutuality in a way that makes real Friendship and Community between and within all Being(s) possible...

Having said all of this, I think it at least possible that Meher Baba would agree with this interpretation of things and that his presentation of the situation is just a result of his dealing as best he could with the language and tradition which he inheireted. I base this in part on his statement that "God cannot be discussed, explained etc..but only "lived". I feel almost exactly the same about "Spirit". Perhaps we could commune on that level and come to terms about the map leading to that Living experience by filtering out the alienating biases of sick culture in various parts of the world. At any rate, I havent read the rest of the book, so perhaps I'll be the one who ends up changing their language and/or understanding...so far though, this is where I am at with it...

Looking forward to discussion,

I-P

I haven't got a formal reply to this by Samatman but the point for this post is just to report on the nature and quality of how the conversation is being conducted. From this point of view I thinks it is going very well in that, whether or not we will ever fully agree on these things, we seem to be becoming friends and learning and growing as a result of our engagement with each other.

This is probably due in some part to the fact that be are not only sharing world-views but also rituals. In our last meeting, for example, Samatman shared with me his "Shared Self Breathing Practice". The fact that I could not help but immediately modify it into a Shared SelfNature breathing practice" didn't seem to bother him and it certainly didn't prevent me from being very grateful for his helping to engender what will probably become a new ritual of Healthy Culture. Far from being frustrating, I think the whole experience lead to each of us understanding the others ideas and experience better. Similarly, in our meeting before this,I shared with Samatman the non-virtual version of the Individual-Personal check-in ritual, which he participated in and which I think like-wise began to stir up ideas in his mind about how to adapt that ritual to his own assumptions about Self.

So far, my engagement with Samatman as a Soul,that is in the context of worldviews and considerations of ultimate things (but also as a whole Individual-Person), seems to be going well. I think it's progress probably depends on the extent to which we can continue regard ourselves and each other in terms of what we share (or what we believe we share) rather than in terms of what we do not. This is tricky because the identity we believe we ultimately share is not the same identity! Still, my hope is that something (namely "Friendship") is happening as a result of our encounters that transcends dogma, and that will eventually help heal whatever rigidities and fear-based motives and (mis)understandings that exist within and between us.

We'll see...Listening...considering...

PS..

"Considering" has recently joined "Listening", "Supporting", and "Challenging" as a "co-implicated" aspect of the relating dynamic i call "Living Friendship", which I now consider a four-fold rather than a three-fold thing..,hopefully more on this in another post...

Due Process (neighborhood post updated)

I suppose that two back-to-back neighbor posts could be taken as a sign that I am spending too much of my energy and thoughts in the neighborly, local venue of life to the neglect of the civil, familial, socio-"religious", and individual aspects of individual-personhood, but I think it is more true that I have just had more inner consensus to write and post things related to my neighborhood then to write (or at least post) about things that are up with me in other venues. At a certain point, it seems to make more sense to post what I am inspired to post right when I am so inspired than to wait around to be inspired to write or post something about what is going on for me in other venues of my Life-Dance. Besides, the issues involved in this and other "neighborhood" posts, are all seem to be completely relevant to all the other areas of an Individual-Personal life almost by definition. Still, the habit contemplating each area of life individually in relation to the whole is really important and since writing about and posting each helps this to happen, I will try not to make a habit of this posting two reports on the same area of life in secession.

Neighborhood Post

Due Process

So, in order to try to be more involved as a neighbor in my community, I joined the "Process Team", which is a small group of people who, among other things, take on the work of facilitating good communication process between individual members of Twin Oaks and within the community as a whole. Members of the process team do things like facilitate the infrequent community meetings as well as conflict resolution meetings between two or more willing members of the community. We also are involved with coming up with and putting out surveys and questionnaires to members of the community. In general I got a sense that there was some precarious balance being struck between improving community process and facilitating and helping to inform the community about whatever processes happen to currently exist either officially or as norms. I was much more conscious of and excited about the former part of the job than the latter. It seemed to me that the immediate problem was more the lack of participation in any kind of intentional face to face communication process at all then the nature and quality of any of the established processes themselves (In retrospect I find it hard to say why I should have had this point of view).

At any rate, when I joined the process team, didn't have the community "feedback process", much less the process team's required participation in it in mind. The feedback is a kind of one-sided forced inquisition that "a problem person" (by which i mean a person one or more other community members think of that way) has to go through. The person is usually someone suspected of violating some "community agreement or norm" (I put this term in quotes both because the "community" doesn't seem to me to really agree about much at all and because the process by which such agreement might be facilitated and renewed--regular general meetings for example--is passively resisted by those whose positions of relative comfort might be jeopardized by changes in the status quo.) The feedback is not supposed to be punitive in intent but, so far as I can tell, it is certainly experienced that way by the those who are forced (at least people certainly feel forced and there can certainly be both formal and informal sanctions if one refuses) to go through it. Moreover there is often some kind of "contract" that the "focus person" is obliged to sign which is designed to please "the prosecution".

Anyway, it occurred to me, after being on the team for awhile, to suggest that we review this whole feedback process, which always seemed to me to be essentially unfair, and see if we could agree among ourselves about just what was wrong with it and what could possibly replace it, and then post our findings to the community as a joint process team evaluation and recommendation. Maybe there would be enough interest for us to have a well attended community meeting about it followed by the formal adoption of something better. What follows is the result of my own closer inspection and evaluation of the Feedback policy, which, for reasons contained in the text, I posted to my community as an Individual-Person rather than as a member of the process team.

Feedbacks and Due Process at Twin Oaks
posted by I-P for Healthy Culture

One

The punitive aspect of the feedback is in its one-sidedness. since displeasing others (even many others) is not the same as being wrong and since the displeasure (as well as any wrongness) may be just as strong or stronger in the other direction, it is hard, in any disagreement or problem, to see the fairness of putting one of the two parties in a one-sidedly defensive and passive situation, effectively giving the other party the right to question, judge and complain (or even just the right to chose or limit the topic of discussion) without itself being vulnerable to the same treatment.

Moreover, If special punishment is not attached to being put in such a situation then that is even more reason why the feed back should not be unilateral and why the issue in question should not be limited to that chosen by only one party; if its a healthy, non-punitive process, then why limit it only to the "focus person"? There is no a priori reason why either a given individual or any group of individuals should be expected to be less open to correction, change, and growth--and the feedback that can lead to this--then any another individual or group, whatever the relative numbers are between the two parties. Putting any minority through an unpleasant process that the majority is not willing to go through is equivalent to punishing the minority for being a minority and correspondingly privileging the majority just for being a majority. Since more is not necessarily better, any more than might is right, it is difficult to justify the asymmetry of the normal feedback proceedings no matter what the relative numbers are. (I want to be clear here that I am not saying the majority is necessarily wrong any more than that its necessarily right, I'm saying that there is nothing about being a majority that justifies exemption or special privileges in its process with a minority.)

Nor is it clear that, even when numbers are equal, person or group A should be privileged or exempted from inquiry, just because they are more aggressive, proactive (or, it could be, just more intolerant or mean-spirited) than person or group B and so happen to be the ones initiating the proceedings. In other words, there is no reason why a disagreement should have recourse to being escalated in a way where one of the disputants is given the advantage of being exempt from questioning, culpability, correction etc..while the other is not. Not only does it prejudice the out come of the dispute and likely obscure the real nature and causes of the situation, but it provides an antisocial incentive for escalating any such disagreement with out any attempt at balanced inquiry, mature discussion or mutual understanding and accommodation.

Returning to the Majority vs Minority situation, there are countless historical situations of majorities oppressing minorities through legally subjecting minorities (gays, women,witches, people of color, indigenous peoples,poor people, or just unpopular individuals) to one-sided processes just because they can (this is not to mention the analogous situations, of pogroms, mob rule, gag rape, mugging or any other movement of a self-righteous majority against a minority or weaker group or individual without a symmetrical due process). Of course the majority always thinks and feels that it is right in such situations. Often enough the minority also thinks and feels that its right (or at least no more wrong then the majority, even if it might be too cowed and intimidated to say so). Whatever the relative numbers may be, such a situation is morally symmetrical, and it is our collective response in just in such situations (were a majority is against and minority or individual) that reveal whether our institution really has anything at all to do with fairness, equality, or cooperation (much less kindness or{here insert some other relevant community bylaw or value, or just human value}), or whether we are, when it comes down to it, no better than a mob self-complacent bullies and cowards.

What seems to follow from this is that, a case of "the community or some subset thereof against X" , the possibility is just as much that "X" is "right" as that "the community" (etc...) is "right". Since, as in most relationships, it takes two to tango, both the community (or some subset) and "X" are equally likely to be guilty of some failure to live up to the spirit of our values and agreements. The proceedings of a feedback (if it would still be called that) should reflect this likely mutual and general responsibility not only in the form of the investigation or inquiry but in the form of its possible outcomes.

So far as proceedings go, any process between X and the community or some official or unofficial subset thereof, should be conducted in a bilateral and multilateral way in which the "focus person" or their behavior is not presumed at the outset to be the only, or even the main, problem or problem cause. In such a process the focus person, the dissatisfied instigators of the feedback, as well the relevant extant community rules, norms or states of affairs, will be equally subject to potential questioning and criticism in terms of their respective failure to live up to our values and agreements. So far as outcomes go, it follows from the above that any resultant contract between the community and X be possibly bilateral, outlining concrete steps the community (or some formal or informal part of it) should be willing to take to live up to our stated values AS WELL AS what person or group X is also expected to do in this regard. The likely result of such a process, if the details are handled well, is the improvement, growth and maturity, of both the individual and the community as a whole, in contrast to the present feedback process which seems incapable of strengthening anything but resentment on one side and lame complacency on the other.

Though the word "Feedback" is not inherently inappropriate for such a radically improved process, it would probably avoid confusion just to call it something else (a "community hearing" or something) and abandon feed-backs in there current form forever.

Two

I wrote the first part of the above as part of a process team project arguing for a revision of the rules of the Feedback (or perhaps for its possible replacement with something else), on the basis that it violates, among other things the bylaw preference for constructive rather than punitive ways of dealing with problems and individuals. It was the first piece of work that I felt was actually good enough for me to take process team labor credits for. I suggested the project myself, (purely coincidentally), a week before the current feedback situation existed. Having become so clear about the the inherent unfairness of the Feedback in the process of writing the above I cannot, in good conscience actively facilitate it simply because, as a member of the process team, it is "my job" to do so. In the words of Cool Hand Luke and in the spirit (if not the results) of the Nuremberg trials; "callin' it 'you're job' don't make it right, boss...".

I therefor have decided to make this paper also serve as public announcement of my resignation from the process team. Effective Wednesday October 8 2008. I have myself considered the pros and cons of staying on the team and trying to mitigate the inherent unfairness of the feedback process (among other such unfair or coercive processes) from within and I very much respect the decision (of any current members of the process team who might agree with me about some or all such issues), to choose such a path. For my part, I cannot square such a non-mandatory compromise, with the development of my own character. Without some reason to expect likely growth and maturity of the community and its processes as a result of my participation in such a compromise, I think I could be more effective in furthering both my own and its growth as a relatively free agent. I very much enjoyed being on the process team for the short while I was on it and very much wish the best for Tikvah, Ethan, and Purl and anyone else who might join it with good intentions.

Sincerely,

I-P

Postscript

I want to say something about the interpretation of the bylaws in general here. I want to emphasize the distinction between positive values and necessary evils and point up the implications of such distinctions. The bylaws are clear that not only furthering equality and cooperation but actively diminishing competition are among its positive values. Since capitalism in its most typical form is all about competition, hierarchies and coercion, it would seem to follow that those provisions and arrangements in the bylaws which were clearly meant to facilitate our (successful enough) participation in such competition would constitute necessary evils rather than positive values. One implication of this seems to me to be that whenever opportunity allows, structural or otherwise attempts should be made to progress towards that which is a positive value and diminish that which is a necessary evil. Managerial hierarchies, the reduction of individuals to quantitative abstractions, (whether of money or labor hours) are all clearly aspects of twin oaks culture that mimic corporate capitalist culture and thus constitute necessary evils (at best) rather than positive values. As such, active and ongoing experiments in mitigating or eliminating such necessary evils (even when this would involve some ¨lowering" of our ¨standard of living¨) is a reasonable expectation of anyone living here, whereas the reflexive and unquestioning defense of such evils is not.

end of post.

Well, so much for my brief experiment with being on the Process Team as a way of being more formally involved with my Neighborhood in a healthy way. For the time being I feel pretty confirmed in my feeling that working within a "system" that is itself not healthy is something of a last resort to be chose only when there seems to be no way to effect the system for the better otherwise. Actually I mean something like "moving deeper into the system" rather then "working within the system" because, of course I am still "working in the unhealthy system, both of twin oaks and of the world beyond it. The point is that the balance of working to heal the system and becoming a willing and unconscious part of it is likely to tip strongly toward the latter the more one concedes more than the minimum participation necessary to stay alive to effect healing at all. What I want to get practice in is participating in rituals of togetherness not rituals of apartness like the feed back, and staying on the process team and going through with the feedback would just have amounted to my learning (in some sense voluntarily is time) one more ritual of inner and outer alienation. It would have been a disservice to myself and the community even if i could have slightly mitigated its effect by some action of mine. Such an act of mitigation might even have served to help legitimate and disguise the essential nature of a process that is inherently unfair.

3 people signed my post indicating willingness to get together to talk about it and its implications (one of the people was the "focus person" of the most current feedback) and as yet I have not made any gesture to get this to happen. I am not sure what is keeping me from doing so. Maybe this post will have the effect of a reminder and challenge for me either to do so or get clearer as to why I am not...

Welcome and Thanks.

I-P

Post Script

I share the gist of the above post in a dicussion group about intentional community at gaia.com (I had retitled it "Community Due Process; dealing with "problem people"). What follows is the responce I got and my reply.

Re: Community Due Process: dealing with "problem people", Iuval said:

"IP, perhaps we are all “problem people”, although some may be more problematic than others (like some of the animals who were more equal than others in Animal Farm :-)) Can we find a process that is more symmetrical and less punitive? I think Oneida already did it, and other possibilities abound. Their process was called “mutual criticism”, and it wasn't totally symmetrical because their “leader” was exempt. They had it regularly, whether there was a problem or not. Some communists had “self-criticisms” but I think they eventually evolved into charades. I actually like the idea of a self-criticism as long as everyone has to do it and does it in a spirit of humility and being able to laugh at themselves. I think the Bruderhof also have something similar to a feedback, but I don't remember if it is symmetrical or not. IMO, anything that prevents egos from getting too big is a good thing. I personally have no problems with hierarchies based on wisdom and experience and competence as long as they are not rigid hierarchies and there are checks and balances to prevent egos from getting too big."

"I hope we can develop systems that can deal with problem people (that is, all of us) while acknowledging that the responsibility for the problem is systemic, not fully personal. I was dealing with two problem people at the last IC I was at: myself (a provisional member) and the full member , D, who felt like I was the only problem person (as well as the previous members who left feeling like she was the problem person). At the end, D gave me a membership review/feedback where she asked me to leave based on what her assessement of my problem was (unless I was willing to make a correction in my attitude, which I was not able nor willing to make), and I was not really allowed to respond. I chose to leave until the system changes."
-Iuval

Re: Community Due Process: dealing with "problem people", I-P said:

Hi, Iuval,

Thanks for reading and responding to my rather long post. I definitely agree that we are all “problem people” in one way or another, which is why I put the phrase in quotes in my title. I also like the idea of “mutual criticism” though I think it should extend to the community bylaws, and status quo as a whole and not just all of the individuals within it. I think that that was one of the things that was wrong with the “self-criticism” experiments. A healthy culture can, not only stand, but respond to, criticisms of itself and moreover actually encourages them, though again not unilaterally.

I suppose that I can agree with hierarchies that I would describe as situational, consensual and temporary, though I think to call such things “hierarchies” would probably be rather misleading (through the phrase "dynamic integral heterarchy"might describe it). For example, If, in a storm at sea, everybody has consensus to do as the captain says (not because he or she is “the captain” but because they spontaneously acknowledge that he or she is manifesting “experience and wisdom” under the circumstances) then I would say that what is really happening is consensual rather than coercive, even if it would look different from outside. But for me the living and free quality of the consensus on the matter is the point. It could be the case after all that the captain is drunk, that the captain is–even temporarily– succumbing to his or her own sick culture in ways that relate to but transcend the practical nature of the task at hand (for example—and such things have happened in the past-- the captain could succumb to valuing gold more than people and in an effort to lighten the load of the ship declare that certain persons be thrown overboard rather than the gold…)etc…

my point is not only that people exist (and have experience and wisdom) primarily as people (I would say as “individual-persons”) rather then as “officers” or job titles, and that their competence at anything else needs to be evaluated from that shared ground, but that even the shared ground is just as unstable as the deck of a ship in a storm, in that a person who is “well Balanced” as an individual-person and using the best of his or her experience at one moment might lose that balance in the next moment. Given the inherently dynamic nature of such things, I think it much better that an overt and formal egalitarianism generaly prevail over a rigid specialization as the norm and that the latter (even when it is not rigid), be subordinant to the former.

In such a situation of assumed primary equality and primary non-specialization as I am advocating, no one is obliged to turn off or repress their critical, creative, and moral faculties in deference to some pre-established hierarchy (though they themselves might decide to do so in response to the actual details of some real and usually temporary situation). In such a situation no one is in danger of being corrupted either by “power ” on the one side or by servitude on the other, and bilateral habits of universal respect (rather than dangerous and usually unnecessary unilateral and mechanical habits of command and obedience) are formed all around.

Anyway, so far as your experience goes, I can only say that it seems fairly typical. I think that the intentional community movement in general has yet to realize in practice that collective “might” is not any more “right” than Individual “might” and that if a so-called intentional community is going to amount to much more than a mob with a land base, those within it must learn to understand “rights” in terms of responsibilities–not only direct responsibilities to the land and to their own growth as persons, but to the creation of the kind of minimally coercive and essentially healthy culture which I think is alone compatible with the long term health of the Land Base and of all its occupants.

After all, if “Might is Right” , then rapists have the right to rape, child molesters have the right to molest etc…And this implication extends equally to the “right” to private ownership of land (which is ultimately acquired and maintained by “might”). And this is so whether the “right” and “might” is individually or collectively held. Moreover, since ANY in-group with the power or numbers (the “might”) behind them can usually be relied on to convince THEMSELVES (usually with a little more of a farce of deliberation then the average mob), of their “Righteousness” in excluding or coercing others, the only check against the resurgence in so called intentional community of the de facto vileness and pathology of the historical and contemporary state of affairs is, so far is I can see, some culture of coercion/ alienation/hierarchy-minimizing due-process, such as I outlined in the second half of my my post.

The due-process I describe and advocate would of course be only one aspect of the healthy culture in which it could credibly exist and thrive. But it makes more sense to direct folks to my profile and blog if they are curious about my own ideas of what such a culture might be like in general.

Thanks again for your response Iuval! Hope we have occasion to dialog more,

I-P

Neighbor Post

I suppose the biggest neighborly gesture I've made since I got back from England (this itself is a long story involving a series of very unfortunate events, some of which I might go into in other parts in future check-ins) was the remarks I made at the meeting on sexism at my neighborhood of Twin Oaks intentional community. I came in somewhat late but was in time for a fishbowl discussion in which people were supposed to talk about personal experiences of sexism here at Twin Oaks. {A fish bowl discussion is one in which a few people in the middle of the room stage a conversation and are gradually replaced by members of their audience who want to have their say on the issue.}

I should say that this meeting had a facilitator, whom I know, though I am not sure what exactly was behind this person's choice of meeting structure. I have always been very much aware of the inherently non-neutral role of facilitation however, even though facilitators claim to be only neutrally serving "the Group". I mention this as this issue came up for me at the very end of the meeting.

Anyway, in the midst of what seemed to me a lot of score-keeping regarding differentials of respect, attention, local groups and institutions, etc for male-identified and female-identified people, I saw fit to get into the fishbowl (as usual in such circumstances, it would have been too excruciating for me, once I was there at all not to say my say) and confessed to finding both male and female-identified people equally frustrating since such identity uniforms, besides being inherently competitive (competition is one of the things Twin Oakers are trying to transcend according to the Twin Oaks bylaws) such uniforms have the property of inhibiting the full expression of anyones authentic individual-personhood. I said that this was just as much a problem of people who switch gender-stereotypes (persons with testicles and penises identifying as "women" and persons without them identifying as "men") as it is with those who identify along more traditional lines…

I am glad I spoke as much as I did but, as this issue for me is much more involved then the above implies, I wish I had been able to elaborate more, and I find I can't resist taking the opportunity of this check-in to do so.

Basically my idea about "Manhood" has been that a "Man" is simply an "Adult Male Human Being". This seems uncontroversial, but the key word here for me was "Adult".

For me an "adult" is someone who has a primary interest in there being a better future in this world we live in. The idea is simply that as a person becomes physically able to reproduce themselves, that aspect of the personality that is concerned with the future; with the world in which potential children, and children's children etc, would live in (I call this part of us the "inner adult") wants to become prominent in the personality, and that when this concern becomes primary in a male then that male becomes a Man, that is an "Adult Male". In the same way, when the same transition happens to a female, that female becomes an Adult Female or "Woman".

Put so simply to myself, it was immediately obvious that this transition to adulthood was actually something which is extremely rare, and that, in a sick culture such as our own, something happens (and something else doesn't happen) usually in adolescence, which leads to some kind of inner estrangement from this adult, long-term view, so that the emergret inner adult is either starved altogether or fed on some kind of "junk-food".

By "starving" the inner adult, I mean ignoring altogether the responsibility to take such a long view, (the taking of which involves spending ones adult life, trying to find out and put into practice that which would make a better future for posterity). Often the repression and neglect of this impulse is rationalized by pointing to the seeming hopelessness of creating such a better longterm future, so that a willfully myopic warping and narrowing of temporal vision seems justified. Such an behaviour, is not much more than a demomstration of fear, demoralization, and a general misunderstanding of what is at issue; it is an abdication of the right and responcibility to live fully, and without such fullness of life there can be no real meaning and hence no real joy. Moreover, such an abdication merely recapitulates the vary attitudes of our ancestors that both diminished their own lives and led to the diminished world we now live in.

Just as often as such myopic pseudo-realism is employed to avoid the challenge of adulthood, a kind of (hyperoptic?) pseudo-spiritual or pseudo-religious displacement is used to the same end. This sort of cop-out is employed by artfully devaluing and shifting attention away from the "merely mundane" future completely, and so overfeeding what could be called the "Inner Elder" at the Inner Adult's expense. To be sure, the Inne Elder; the part of ourselves which acknowledges "ultimate things" and is aware of the need for inner growth and transformation, needs to be "fed" just as well as the inner adult, but far from such feeding of the "soul" being contradictory to the needs of adulthood, these aspects of our selves are mutually dependant on each other, so that Adulthood that is not "soulfull" is not real adulthood and "spirituality" that is abandons the responcibilities of adulthood is not healthy spirituality at all... In neither the pseudo-realistic nor the psuedo-religious discounting of the future of this world does one sense anything implying the need for any real resistance to the inertia of whatever happens to be the current way of "life". On the contrary, both points of view are obviously contrived so as to rubber stamp the inner and outer status quo and so seem to me equally symptoms of immaturity, unconsciousness, and confusion.

There is also the trick of simply feeding the Inner Adult "junk-food" in the sense of participation in politics and political movements in the various established senses of those word.s. These kinds of politics are both established and permitted precisely because they are manifestations of, rather than challenges to, the dominant culture of apartness, and as such cannot in their very nature really lead to a more healthy and sustainable future. It is not that I deem it quite impossible that such things as voting in elections or joining some factional political group can be engaged in in such a way that the behavior might play some tactical part, though only as a necessary evil, in an overall strategy that would lead to Healthy Culture. The fact is that, as things are, I see no evidence that such a thing actually ever happens, and this makes me see such behavior as equally pseudo-adult in nature; more like sports, and other childish rehearsals for war (the ultimate in future-degrading behavior) then anything involving Goodwill and real adulthood.

This kind of pseudo-adulthood is, so far as I can tell, pretty ubiquitous, even in progressive movements, including the intentional community movement that I myself am a part of. Myopia is alive and well here also, sometimes accompanied by a kind of complacency and self-righteousness which makes it even more adverse to the kind of inwardly and outwardly open attitude that is consistent with adulthood. Such an open attitude is necessary because any good faith experiment in being a part of a better future (any good faith attempt at anything really) must obviously remain fully open to the negative feedback that alone can reveal the degree to which the attempt is deviating from its end. Nor should any status quo be suffered to remain that inhibits or distorts such feedback or that is too institutionally and psyhologically inert and inflexible to be able to respond to it appropriately when it is received.

There are many ways, subtle and unsubtle, to ignore all of this, and many more ways to pretend that such concientious, good faith adulthood is happening when it is not. Individually, the repression of feedback usually involves habitual use of "Anesthesia" and distractions of various kinds; things that drown out and numb the prickings of the inner adult. Collectively this can manifest as the collusive avoidance of open, face to face communication, or more often, in the collusive structuring,, managing, or "facilitating" of conversations (community meetings for example) so that they touch on anything but that which is the real problem, thus using the illusion of feedback and goodfaith to actually avoid the reality of these things.

Given all of this, I would have to say that I don't really consider myself to have met any Men (or Women either) in the course of my life so far; just stunted adolescents at best, even in so-called "progressive" movements. It begins to seem obvious to me that humankind has generally speaking not yet collectively "grown up" at all.

There is still something worth saying though, toward envisioning what that , for the most part unrealized, adulthood would look like in relation to gender. The paradoxical thing about this conception of Men and Women as gendered adults is that, once the inner adult is really primary in the personality, Gender itself is seen as just another identity-uniform, (like that of race, and often enough, religion), that itself facilitates the kind of competition, self-betrayal, and power-over tendencies that threaten the collective and individual future. Such adult persons are therefore likely to be the first to see and agree that gender roles need to be replaced with an identity politics that emphasizes, what is shared rather then what is not, including shared and common responsibilities as well as "rights". In other words it is the True Men and True Women who, because they are true "Adults", will be the First to respond to the necessity of transcending gender-uniforms altogether in the affirmation of something like the "us and us" identity-politics of what I am calling Individual-Personhood. From this point of view, Manhood and Womanhood might be seen as brief phases of identity and thus as part of a natural transition from that of the adolescent male or female to that of the adult Individual-Person; a stage of the transition that most people have not reached at all.

Ultimately however, although there is definitely something to all of the above, such a conclusion would still reify the abstraction of gender roles in a way that could exclude or confuse, for example, individuals born with both sets of sexual organs. In such a case, gendered thinking would seem to require some kind of choice, as though genitals of either this or that kind were somehow necessary to be an Adult. Since the door to Individual-Personhood is really Adulthood, and since this Adulthood is completely independent of ones genitalia, (independent really even of whether one has any functioning genitalia at all; since I am quite sure that promptings of the inner adult kick-in at a certain age regardless of this), it makes more sense really, that the transition from adolescence to adulthood not be seen to essentially involve conceptions of gender at all, however much they do need to involve some understanding of the healing and responsible use of ones specific genitalia, and sexual energy in general (among many other things).

I want to be clear here that, though the Adulthood I am speaking of is an absolutely necessary aspect of individual-personhood, I do not mean to imply that a healthy individual-person must be functioning exclusively from that place anymore than healthy eyes must always be rigidly fixed on the horizon. On the contrary, for proper seeing the eyes must be free to focus on the near and the far; on the near in relation to the far and vis versa. They must also be free to blink; and in dreaming, to turn inward. In the same way the healthy functioning of an individual-person implies not only a healthy inner adult (mind or thinking-function), but a healthy inner child ((heart/emotions), inner animal (body/sensations), and inner elder (soul/intuition) as well, so that the general dynamic is one in which considerations of the future are coordinated with those of the past, present, and eternity as well. Healthy Individual-Persons can be very "childlike" for example, but this behavior is "childlike" rather than "childish" precisely because it ornaments and augments the persons healthy adult function rather than detracting from it.

Continuing such a metaphore, one can say that the healthy individual is like a relatively "happy" family in which the inner child, (heart/emotions) inner animal (body/sensations), inner elder (soul, intuition) and the inner adult (mind, thinking) are all being fed as well as possible and are involved in each others healing so that to neglect one member is to harm the whole. Those focusing on the future to the exclusion of (rather then in coordination with) the past, present, and eternity are demonstrating, not healthy adulthood, but some version of the kind of Hyperopsis I alluded to earlier.

And, of course, as always, its necessary to apply good sense and life-logic to this whole understanding. The "healthy individual-person" is a kind of ideal type after all. I should probably have written "the healing individual-person" or even just "those who are conscious of their individual-personhood", since those ways of saying it seem to make more room for the truth that, since we all suffer (probably almost constantly, though in varying degrees of intensity), from the stunting and alienating imprint of the default culture of apartness and fear that we were all "initiated" into, being an "healthy individual-person" means being aware of being "sick" or "wounded" individual-person" as well, and so being willing and able to acknowledge our sick imprinting and, when they happen, the lapses in integrity that derive from that. This willingness and ability is a part of that coming-together of "soulfulness" and "adulthood" that I alluded to earlier, and is in fact, a major part of the work of inner and outer healing as an individual-person, which has nothing at all to do with keeping ups some kind of image of perfection or "righteousness".

Anyway, I couldn't say all of that at the meeting I went to, so I had to be content to limit what I said to what I related at the beginning of this check-in. Still, I think my even saying that little was pretty challenging to probably most of the people there, though, as usual, it doesn't seem to have been enough to counter the prevailing trend toward what seems to me to be essentially immature and childish (however understandable) factional identity-politics. It even seems likely that a "men's group", such as there have been here in the past will evolve out of the meeting so as to be "equal" to the women's groups that exist here. I would not have anything against such groups if they functioned as crutches are supposed to function; namely as tools to eventually be transcended as those using them gradually learn to stand and walk upright as each individual-persons in their own right, but that does not seem to be the intention at all. Besides, as I have already suggested, it would be better to call any such group devoted to human maturity an "Adult Group", which could certainly be "coed", though individuals might occasionally divide along "genital" (rather then "gendered") lines, to talk about genital-specific things such as prostate cancer, yeast infections, pregnancy etc…though even here I don't see any reason to keep such information separate from individuals with different genitalia, sharing such knowledge and concerns without regard to gender could only enhance general understanding and compassion anyway, so far as I can see. After all, no individual with prostate cancer, morning sickness, or hot flashes responds to it in exactly the same way anyway, and approaching such events with gendered prejudice seems to me more likely to obscure (or lead to the repression of) important individually relevant details rather than to there expression.

In general, my attendance at meetings here has not been so good as I would like, though I try to befriend (listen to, support, and challenge) my neighborhood in other ways. As I said above, neighborliness is only one aspect of Individual-personhood, and it would not do to focus on it to the exclusion of other responsibilities except perhaps in a special emergency or as a response to a strong inner-consensus/inspiration that such a focus is imperative in a specific situation. Still, I think I there is room for challenging myself right now to find out some more regular and conscious way to be a Friend and good neighbor in my neighborhood (though this might get me in more trouble) and am making a few experiments in this direction, even though I don't think I'm doing too bad right now under the present circumstances.

Experiment post (name change)

{I feel the need to post this here (i've already done so on other of my blogs and pages) and on my other motime blog (which I know I have been somewhat neglecting due to a lack of engagement from who ever is actually reading all of this). I am not sure how much more is will post here but want to post this even before I have the time to go back and change whatever I can change in the blog accordance with my decision--I-P}

{I wrote this for my blogs and online stuff but I thought I'd put it here to as a way of explaining my name change and sharing a bit about one of the concepts of what I call "healthy culture" with the community---

If anybody reads my profile they will know that I am trying to transcend factional Identity politics such as race and gender, religion, among other things. For a long time now I have been dissatisfied both with my birth names and with the ones i have chosen for myself since. If anyone goes to my lifedancelog.motime.com blog and scrolls down to the post entitled “a vision of names” they will read a story in which I asked “Spirit” for a new name and actually received 3. Unfortunately I haven't had inner consensus to use them openly, wanting to make the sharing of such a names a sort of mark of bonding between myself and others who have received names in a similar way.

I still don't have inner consensus (of mind, heart, body, and soul) to share my new names but I do have it, after another “Vision Dance” (the particular kind of ritual at which I received the names alluded to) to replace, where ever I can, the various faction-connoting names I have chosen for myself in the past.

I-P stands for “Individual-Person” and perhaps is more like a title such as “Mr” or “Mrs”, than an actual name. But as such it is a very different kind of title (almost an “anti-title) in that it affirms an identity and an Identity politics that Transcends race, gender, even species, together with any other kind of factional identification of Class or Profession or anything else. It is an identity politics that, among other things, affirms the paradoxical equality and primary togetherness of all Beings.

The “individual” part of individual personhood represents the “vertical”, “self-directed” aspect of the Identity; it relates roughly to ones own experience of ones self in terms of ones own “thinking (mind), Feeling(heart) , sensation( body), and intuition (“soul” in a certain sense) to use a somewhat Jungian vocabulary.

The “Person” part of individual-personhood relates to the “horizontal”, “Other-directed” aspect of Identity in terms of the generic archetypal “social roles” that I affirm to be inherent in anyones Existence at all. These roles (which also constitute four venues of social interaction) are four fold: Family-member (the Familial venue), Neighbor (the neighborly venue), Citizen-of-the-World (the Civil venue) and “Soul” (for lack of a better word, the Religious/Philosophical/Metaphysical venue).

These two identities (the individual and the personal) are related paradoxically in the same way that the vertical and horizontal of spacial orientation (and so the five directions) are related. This means that they are not really two separate identities at all but one five-fold identity. in a same way that horizontal “north, south, east, and west” (the 4 “horizontal” directions) imply and involve “up-and-down” (what I am calling the vertical 5th direction) of spacial orientation, so the “Personal” implies the “Individual” and visa versa, and fulling ones potential as one involves fulfilling it as the other at the same time. Of course having a been initiated by default into the one-sided, paradox and Life-denying logic and sensibility of the present and historical cultures of apartness, we all tend to take for granted and for real and experience of that corresponds to this alienation of inner and outer social existence and so must of us have fallen prey to political implications (basically war in one form or another) that proceed from such false dichotomy and false consciousness.

As an example of this, I want to go a little bit here into one of the effects sick culture has on Identity-politics in our modern version of the culture of apartness. This is that, since the kind of paradoxical togetherness involved in Individual-Personhood is (like paradox in general) hard to even understand in a sick culture let alone live out, what has happened in our politics is that an experience of ourselves that is essentially a paradoxical “both/and” sort of thing vis-a-vis the individual and the “community” (self and other), has been broken apart, dichotomised and so treated as if it were essentially “either/or”.

In our time the Capitalist side of such dichotomization is the ideological mythology about some one-sided and dissociated and atomized conception of “the individual” that is in almost complete denial of the relationships and responsibilities inherent in anyones existing at all (i.e. of what i am calling the four roles/ venues of “personhood”). Even internally (and not coincidentally) the capitalist idea of an “individual” is dissociated, since it involves the priviledging of the “Thinking function” (over feeling, sensing, intuiting) within the the whole of our subjective individual experience. This of course lead to endless alienation, anxiety, lonilness, competition, etc... and ultimate individual and collective suicide.

On the other hand, more traditional, “socialistic” or “communistic” (but equally one-sided) forms of Identity go to the opposite extreme in enslaving the real whole “Individual” to some equally distorted conception of “personal” (social) relationships and responsibilities. These can be anything from Kinship or Gender roles, to the roles of “citizens” (narrowly and nationalistically defined), to various career or employment roles, all of which inevitably demand that the “individual” suppress or distort aspects of their individuality to fit such factional and misconceived and one-sided identity-uniforms. Of course this, via in a way that is only superficially different, also leads to endless alienation, anxiety, loneliness, competition, etc... and ultimate individual and collective suicide.

Anyway, what it means to actually and fully live the paradoxical relatively “themless” identity politics an individual-person within the context of the assumptions of a healthy culture is some thing that I'd have no time to describe here even if I was not still in the process of learning this myself, but I do know and have time to say that “coming-out” as an “individual-person” involves an implicit and explicit renunciation of the kind of false solidarity that comes from the normal “us-and-them” way of bonding (that is of “us” bonding against “them”, whether the “thems” are other creatures, other genders, or other so-called “classes” of any kind. It also involves a conscious acceptance of the implicit responsibility of healthy coming-together, not only outwardly with others (as a responsible “Family-member”, “Neighbor”, “Citizen-of-the-World” and “Soul”) but also inwardly as an authentic Individual.

Of course I'm not likely to ever be permanently cured from “back-sliding” into old, alienated, ways of thinking and feeling, about myself and others since the habits of forty years cannot be expected to change overnight even when there are some new habits to exchange them for (as is the case here). My name change here is just an affirmation and reminder of my intention to go in this direction and of my commitment to it .

Finally, as I said, I currently regard “I-P” as a kind of “title”. If, in the future I do get inner consensus to share the three names I was given. Then I will formally adopt them and be “I-P so-and so”. For now, I will just be “I-P”.

There is some insight into all of this kind of factional identity politics from the song “uniforms” which is among my myspace blogs. So I quote the text of it here:

You wear a uniform of a woman
You wear a uniform of a man
You wear a uniform of an employee
Or a Jew or a Mexican
You wear a uniform of a soldier boy
A uniform of a civilian too
And when you play the game of “me or them”
You wear a uniform of you!

Ohh, my friends, take off those uniforms!
Ohh, my friends, take off those uniforms!

You wear a uniform of a bourgeoisie
A uniform of a working class
You wear a uniform of Humanity
When the Martians come at last
You wear a uniform of your politics,
Your race and your religion too,
But if you want peace in the world my friend
This is my advice to you:

Ohh, my friends, take off those uniforms!
Ohh, my friends, take off those uniforms!

Well I'm talkin' about your identity
I'm talkin bout your foolish pride
And the fear and insecurity
That scares you into takin' sides
'cause everybody is the same and different,
Butt-ugly and beautiful as any star,
And if you take off all of them uniforms
Maybe you'll find out who the hell you are!

Ohh, my friends, take off those uniforms!
Ohh, my friends, take off those uniforms!

You wear a uniform of an anarchist
You wear a uniform of a wife
You wear a uniform for every thing you do
And for every part of your life
But there's no uniform for Personhood
Or for authenticity
So if you're uptight and uncomfortable
Take this advice from me:

Ohh, my friends, take off those uniforms!
Ohh, my friends, take off those uniforms!

It's us it's us it all of us so please come off of it
It's us is us its all of us; this is “Themless” politics
It's us it's us it's all of us good-and-evil, healthy-and-sick
It's us it's us it's all of us: this is “Themless Politics”!

Ohh, my friends, take off those uniforms!
Ohh, my friends, take off those uniforms!

Individual post

For the last few days I have be contemplating the factional identity politics of class and the comparative difficulties of practicing healthy culture that they seem to involve. In the city (where image and vanity seem to rule especially) and in my own newly arrived at situation, there is a lot of occasion to contemplate such a thing. Having had experiences among "millionares", "middle-class" folks and "the homeless" I have come to the conclusion that they all tend to share sick culture equally, at least to the extent that they identify with such titles, and that they are all more or less equally far from the field of inner and outer belonging that is Individual-Personhood. But though the disease is the same for everyone wearing a uniform of "class", there does seem to be some distinction in the facility each "soldier" will have in shedding that uniform and entering into an experience of authentic identity. At least my experience is that I don't have to actively maintain some sense of myself as "homeless" or whatever to "maintain" that designation in the eyes of others. "putting on airs" about such a thing is definately more optional than in the more elevated positions (not to say that it doesn't happen"). What I am getting at here is that, from my experience, it is marginally easier to practice healthy culture when one doesn't have to maintain somekind of "elevated" position among ones fellows. Among other things, in such a situation as this, I have more exposure to (or just less distraction from) what we all have In common is individual-persons: the elements, bodies, sunshine, the company of non-human individual-persons, the outdoors generally, the whole "leaves of grass" sense of glorious of egalitarian commonality...

Still, although this being a "tramp" business seems to be more conducive to Individual-Personhood, and to the "us-perception" that is the path to it, to take advantage of such an opening one needs more of healthy culture than just its cosmology and Identity-politics; there is Ritual to consider as well. (I should explain here that I use the term "us-perception" to mean something more a like "us-and-us"-perception, that is, something I oppose to the normal alienated, "us-or-them" or "me-or-them"-perception that is the norm, though this terminology might be refined in the future). What I am discovering while walking about downtown Phildelphia, sitting in coffie houses, doing tai chi or playing clarinet in the park (as well as applying for jobs that seem suitable) is that there is an inner "us-perception" as well as an outer one, and that these depend on each other mutually.

The inner "us" is the "us" that comprises the "Individual" aspect of Individual-Personhood and of which I have already written on this blog: the inner animal, inner child, inner adult,and inner elder. These aspects of our individuality have corresponding places on or in the body, and it is possible to use this understanding to assess the degree to which the corresponding aspect of the individual is being repressed or inclusively integrated into the wholeness of the personality in that moment. Specifically, the area of the lower belly is the area of the inner animal, the area of the heart is that of the inner child, the area roughly from the neck to eyes is the area of the inner adult and the area about that trancending the top of the head is the area of the intuition or inner elder.

Now, what I what to share here is that simply Breathing, considered as a ritual (and remember by "ritual" I mean any repeated action that reinforces a cosmology, identity-politics, and infrastructure) is potentially one of the most basic and expressions of being, of participation in togetherness, of welcome and thanks. What I am discovering is that it is possible to breath in a way that "feeds" the animal, child, adult and elder inclusively, and that such breathing means breathing as a whole "individual" and by implication, as a whole Individual-person. Just a little practice of such breathing, (which begins with welcoming inhalation of animal "belly-breathing, and continues with the visualized sense of the air and light feeding the heart, mind, and soul respectively, reversing this order on the exhalation of gratitude), is enough to lead one to diagnose ones own and others degree of alienation from their individual-personhood just in terms of the way they are breathing and standing or sitting (posture is very much inextricably involved with the whole thing and it is impossible to breath like an Individual in certain postures).

Most people seem to alternate (it seems more like a struggle is going on really) between "child" (chest) breathing and "adult" (throat) breathing and never seem to feed there inner animals and elders at all. I imagine that the chronic hurry and bustle of city life together with the fact that the qualtity of air in cities does not exactly inspire whole-hearted indulgence, account for this tendency even in many of the poor and idle. I suppose in some rural places one might expect more animal breathing, though I can't recall this from my recent experience in the country. What seems obvious after a little bit of looking around from this point of view is that people are as factional and inhospitable toward their whole selves as individuals as they are towards each other, and that they suffer from this inwardly as unconscious individuals as well as outwardly, as unconscious Persons...

Anyway, the point of cultivating this form of inclusive breathing as an expression of my full Individuality and "inner us"-perception, (besides the paradox that "breathing like an Individual" is itself both an individual and a "general", sharable thing) is that it is also an expression of my "personhood" and so of my outer "us-perception" as well; Feeding the Inner Animal means awakening more to the familial wherever I am; Feeding the Inner Child means keeping alive my sense of my neighborhood; Feeding the adult helps me remain awake to strangers and to my civil responcibilities, and a well feed elder (and here I should say that, in breathing, the elder is fed more at the "cusp" of the in-breath and the out-breath, and that this is more of a psychic thing), keeps alive my sense of ultimate things and of the responcibilty of coming to terms about such things with others. I know that the details of this are not obvious yet but it must suffice for now to say that, In general, as I inwardly affirm inclusivity and togetherness in my very breathing, then outwardly inclusive perception in also affirmed and enabled so that the true Mutuality of inner/outer "us-perception becomes manifest, and the threshold of a consciously shared Individual-Personhood is really reached.

There are subleties about breathing and attention, both in myself and others that I am discovering and that I may add to this post later, but the fact of the situation is that I am writing this in an internet cafe and others are waiting so I will have to take a deep, (inclusive) breath and let this stand for now, but not before challenging myself to keep up this renewed default (a "default only, since life-logically, it must also integrate its opposite) of Individual-personal breathing, and being, for the forseeable future....

Just a quick correction to a word I used in the above post - I meant to use the word "Non-Impartial" not "Impartial".

"Inexperience"

This I-P - Tusti - is in no way "inexperienced" in the ways and wherefores of our sick culture being as I live and work in the "heart" of it. Having studied, researched and worked/ work within the underbelly of our sick culture, I consider myself extremely "street" in every respect. This profound turn of events could not have been foreseen by even the most "experienced" of I-Ps - at least not those I-Ps with a cleansed but "street" soul. What this was was an accumulation of "isms" all cooked together and stirred with a power tripped, judgemental and impartial immigration officer who had been given unjust laws to use at this I-P's will. Her actions where a culmination of all this - nothing more, nothing less. What this demonstrates is an accumulation of many components of sick culture all rolled into one which played out into deportation with no right of appeal. Even our Immigration advisor was uncomfortable at what he saw before him with our case and this I-P is used to working with asylum seekers and refugees who have less rights than anyone in our global village yet Piankhy had no rights at all. Not one. I-P was judged and found guilty in a heartbeat based upon one Immigration Officers lifelong sucking in of filthy sick culture from every corner of our society and is just a symptom of what both Piankhy and I are choosing to help heal (or die trying) within our world.

Citizen of the World Post

Soul Post

{note: I think my friend Tusti is willing make posts (as opposed to comments) on this blog in i-p's own right only after i-p and I meet and consense more on various things about it. I am not sure we have worked out the technical details of just how that works anyway as yet. As its stands, I will continue to post here as usual but with the implicit invitation that i-p comment in the space provided--or not--as i-p sees fit. --p}

I still have not really found a regular in-person venue in which practice coming-together with people in terms of ultimate things, though it is true that any conversation with me of any real length is going to involve me sharing something about healthy culture and its cosmology or togetherness. There was some healthy culture talk between me and two of my co-managers on a fencing project recently, for example. I was somewhat indirect and I was speaking mostly of other world views and trying to explain them in terms of the assumptions that they seem to share with those of Integral Science, but it felt like a good gesture non-the-less. As I said in a previous post, I am also reading a book of channeled information that has been very influential in the spirituality of my friend Tusti, as a preparation for our further coming-together as souls once we meet. Most recently I have shared some of my world view with a Korean person who is visiting twin oaks with the result of the person wanting me to sponsor I-P in a vision quest before I leave for England. I am looking forward to it. The fact that such conversations and encounters often happen makes me a little less worried about my degree of Life in this "Soul" venue of my Personhood, but I know that ultimately things need to manifest on a much grander scale and a with challenge to—perhaps even a confrontation—with the collective conscious and unconscious loom in the future in this regard. There is a sense that all that I am doing now (especially in the way of reading and research) is preparation for this. Listening…

I do think that I have found a pretty good venue of on-line explorations in this area, and that is “Crossroads of Religion”, which is a “tribe” on the networking site “tribe.net”. It is a pretty no holds barred venue for the discussion of various speculations, beliefs, and practices regarding ultimate things, that includes not only religion, but science and philosophy, whether theistic or atheistic or agnostic. Civility is not always to be expected in these “discussions” but I often find it interesting reading and have even ventured a post or two myself.

The last post of mine was a copy of the post on “Life-Logic” that you can find on the partner blog to this one. The ensuing exchange lasted for about 50 posts and in places felt pretty tedious, but I am very glad I did it because of the realization (or perhaps it was just more of a strong reminder) of how the assumptions behind logic mirror the assumptions behind the purpose of discourse itself. In other words, it soon became clear how the “either/or”, “true/false” dichotomies assumed in logic are themselves manifestations of the “Zero/Sum”, “Win/Lose”, competitive motive and framing of public conversation itself (which of course just reflects the “competition-crazy” culture of ancient Greece in which such our formal logic has its roots). What got clarified along with this of course, is that the relatively non-competitive and exclusion-transcending assumptions of Life-Logic also imply and involve a default intention and attitude regarding discourse (a different kind of discourse really) that is equally non-competitive; one in which the guiding intention is “win/win” mutual insight and the joint manifestation and experience of Living Truth, rather than the “win/lose” result of the normal public debate.

This of course put me at a distinct disadvantage in the ensuing discussion of my post since at many points I, and at least one of my interlocutors, were writing at cross purposes and (at the beginning of the discussion anyway) this was not really as clear as it should have been to any of us. It is not that I felt participating in “debate” was some sort betrayal on my part, since Life-logic certainly allows this kind of thing when appropriate, but the lack of clarity about the differences between life-logical discussion and debate meant that my departure from the normal rules of such debate (when they did not seem appropriate) seemed like inconsistencies or “cheating”. If I had started with the distinctions between life-logical discourse and normal discourse so far as underlying intentions and assumptions go, and formally invited the others to experiment with the such intentions in the ensuing discussion (or at least to acknowledge my right to do so), then the discussion (at least with my main interlocutor) might have culminated in more of the win-win experience that I was intending. Still I think that the whole thing resulted in some mutual growth and understanding even with that person (though this was not really acknowledged on I-P’s part).

I noticed that those who met my essay with more openness, and more of the intention of mutual learning seemed inspire me to greater clarity than the I-P’s that were more immediately critical. The following post of mine, for example was a belated response to a side exchange between two other participants regarding the “idea” of shared or sharable understanding. I think I ventured my response mostly because I felt receptivity on the part of the person I was posting to. In retrospect I am not so sure it is a clearer explanation of this aspect of integral science than I have posted elsewhere (for example, in my very earliest post of the partner blog to this one), but I think it takes it a little further. Here is the post:

“Hi Loki, Thanks for your comments and support. I had the Idea of trying to share some of the following during your discussion with Swarm about understanding but didn’t. I think I’ll do it here even though it sort of means opening up a whole can of worms. Tell be what you think:

In Integral Science there is are relative distinctions made between Information (which is relatively abstract hearsay, presumably abstracted from someone’s memory: I have only "information" about Tibet if I've never been there), Knowledge (by which is meant remembered experience of something: I have relative Knowledge of Tibet if I have been there in the past but am not there now), Understanding (by which is meant Actual experience: I have relative Understanding of Tibet if I am actually there now), and Faith (by which is meant various assumptions of the ultimate meaning of my Understanding, Knowledge, and Information: now that I am here in Tibet Faith in the meaning of my being here guides my actions).

Life-Logically it can be just as relevant that each of these four aspects of Living Truth can be relatively distinguished as that they overlap, imply, and grade into each other.

At the level of Cosmology and Logic and other fundamental assumptions, Faith feeds Understanding (because Faith when acted on leads to a present experience in terms of the Faith). At the same time Understanding feeds Knowledge (because present experience becomes remembered experience in time) and Knowledge feeds Information (because Information is the “result” of memory that is abstracted and translated into agreed upon communicable signs). And closing the cycle, Information in turn feeds Faith (in the sense that the Information provides the terms in which Faith (in the cosmology, logic etc…) is affirmed, expressed and justified.

So in terms of Life-Logic, Faith in Togetherness is going to feed the experience (Understanding) of Togetherness, which will in turn awaken past memories of (Knowledge of) of Togetherness. Information about Togetherness will develop from this in the form of terms in which primary Togetherness can be affirmed and explained as Faith etc. The same is true of Faith in primary Apartness: it will feed the experience of primary Apartness (which, life-logically, is always there as Alienation and Fear—just as that of Primary Togetherness is also always there as Belonging and Love) and awaken past memories (Knowledge) of Apartness. This will lead to Information in terms that affirm, express and justify Faith in Primary Apartness. The difference here is that Faith in Primary (paradoxical) Togetherness includes Apartness in a dynamic and integrative way and so allows for a full Understanding (experience) of reality, a fuller Knowledge of it and a more diverse palette of terms (Information) in terms of which it can be expressed, than is the case when Primary Apartness is affirmed.

Anyway, all of this seems to relate to you guys disagreement in that, the only way we can really share Understanding is if we also share Knowledge, Information and Faith to some extent. The good news is that people do all share these things to some extent and that is what makes shared understanding possible. The bad news is the extent to which our own individual and collective cultures of apartness deny this essential common ground in such a way as to accent the non-sharable aspects of Understanding (and Faith, and Information, and Knowledge) and ignore or fail to cultivate the sharable aspects. Paradoxically of course, when this as happening between two people or groups they ARE sharing in a way: they are sharing the culture of Apartness, sharing a Faith in Apartness, Sharing and experience (understanding) of Apartness as alienation, and its associated kinds of memories and resulting kind of vocabulary. But this is sharing on behalf of not-sharing; it is togetherness on behalf of apartness, and as such it is a sign of cultural erosion.

Coming together with a Faith in primary Paradoxical Togetherness on the other hand, leads to a result in which differences are seen to imply (as they do imply) similarities as well (and visa versa: similarities are seen to always imply differences). In this way false and rigid solidarities and inner and outer factions can be dissolved and dissolved in such a way as to reveal and further the experience (Understanding), Knowledge of, and vocabulary for, our true solidarity as Individual-Persons with in the living dance of mutuality and Paradoxical Togetherness that we began by affirming as Faith. When this is happening “Cultural Composting” (that is Healthy Culture) is what is happening and healthy Understanding between Individuals and Cultures can be not only shared but cultivated.

Take Care,

All in All I think that “The Crossroads of Religion” (It should really be called “The Crossroads of Religion, Science, and Philosophy”), is a pretty appropriate place for Integral Science and its Life-Logical assumptions to be shared online. I think I’ll keep reading, making posts, and starting the occasional Topic, and see what comes of it. At the vary least I helps me feel a little more alive and “Soulful” in this venue of my Life-Dance. I don’t however, intend to become complacent with it and so cease to be working my way toward ever more vital (and very likely more risky) gestures in this area.

Well, however it will ultimately work out, this blog experiment has reached a pretty momentous point right now in that I am finally being joined on-line by someone who is committed to entering with me into the experiment of Healthy Culture and the Identity-Politics of Individual-Personhood that this blog constitutes.

Tusti (this is the name i-p chooses to be known by on this blog) is the Friend and Life-Dance partner who I am going to meet and probably live with in Liverpool England in May or early June of this year. We have corresponded and sort of “fell in love” with each other on-line and over the phone, and I am going to England so that we can begin the process of consensing on the details of our Living Friendship and Life-Dance together as whole individual-persons (rather then as primarily citizens-of-the world as has been the case so far).

On the one hand, the whole thing is an experiment in healthy culture, and its probably good that we have had so much distance between us since it helps us to stay out of habitual ways of relating in terms of (Gender, Race, Nationality etc..) which, no matter how much we may theoretically agree on the need to transcend them, are nevertheless going to be the Default tendency in that we are both born into the dominant culture of apartness. One the other hand, it’s clear that nothing can really begin until we actually are physically together.

It would be misleading for me to try to present us as some kind of monolithic “united front”. That would be starting off in the spirit of the very “Public/Private” culture of phoniness that I think we both seek to replace with a culture of truthfulness and Individual-Personhood. The fact is that there are a number of pretty big issues between us even at this stage in our relationship and even with the considerable degree of understanding and consensus we have been able to come to about things by phone and computer; I think we both know that there are going to be serious challenges to us sustainably coming-together in a healing way, not only because of outside pressures but because of our own issues.

One of the issues, which (like all of them) is both a great opportunity and a great challenge, is issue of veganism and in general the issue eating, killing and dying: Tusti is the vegan with whom I had the discussion I quoted from in the previous post, while I am still more or less confirmed in my own leaning toward raw instinctive/intuitive omnivorous-ness.

There is another main issue so far, but that I will leave to Tusti to introduce here if i-p chooses.

The biggest issue for me how ever is that of us coming to terms in relation to our Integrative.

For what has yet to be fully consensed to and worked out between us is the Integrative of our relationship. Although we have both, in the course of our friendship so far, cursorily acknowledged our understanding of our own “piece of the Lie”, mutual insight into the details of what this is, just how it manifests, and how our friendship will be structured so as to challenge that in each other, is not as clear as it needs to be. Without such insight and such a conscious plan, the Integrative intention of the coordination our own healing with that of each other and the world can't happen because healing itself cannot happen unless sickness itself has been both fully acknowledged, understood, and taken into account. In certain traditions, this sickness, this “piece of the Lie” that we all have is called "the Shadow", and in others I am familiar with it is called the Chief Obstacle. In addition to calling it a persons “piece of the lie”, I also just think of it as ones own sick culture. By whatever name, if it is not consciously acknowledged and addressed in the dynamics of a relationship, than it itself will be what is running the relationship, which will then no longer be a Living Friendship at all but the everyday collusion, mutual distraction and mutual exploitation that passes for friendship in a sick culture.

As I say, Tusti and I have not fully done this work which we both think will be somewhat easier to do in person, at least in some ways. In other ways, physically coming together has its own difficulties, especially in an urban situation in which busy-ness is the order of the day and time and energy for such patient and somewhat delicate exploration, presumably scarce. I am not sure what we will do about this. I am beginning to think that our original plan of me staying at an intentional community in the countryside and her coming out to visit and rest from city life makes more sense than any more immediate form of living together, since there is likely to be more time in the slower pace of country life to give such matters the attention that they deserve. On the other hand, decisions and understandings reached in such relative calm might not reasonably be expected to stand up against the adverse environment of city life. Perhaps things can be arranged so as to alternate between deciding things in the country and testing them in the city.

At any rate the challenge of coming to an Integrative shared understanding is hopefully being helped even now by my formally discussing of it in this introduction.

It occurs to me that our integrative challenge as Individuals could be understood both individually as well as personally. Individually it could be understood as a dynamically healthy and flexible coming-together of Inner Animals, Inner Children and Inner Adults, and Inner Elder, keeping in mind that distinctions of this kind are only relative and that “dysmutuality” between us in any one area will inevitably involve dysmutuality in each of the others as well. Personally, it could be understood in terms of our roles as Family-members (the province of the inner animal), Neighbors (the province of the inner child), citizens-of-the-world (the province of the inner adult) and “Souls”, (the province of the inner elder). I think I will chose to use the language of the Individual before using that of the Person in the what follows, as this entire blog is usually presented more from the personal/horizontal rather than the Individual/vertical point of view and that point of view is as relevant to this development as the horizontal/Personal one.

To the extent that we both suffer from sick culture as Individuals, Tusti and I are both in various states of “inner apartness” and dysmutuality, between and within our own Elders, Adults, Animals, and children. In order to come together in a healing way it is important for us both to get some Idea of how the culture of Apartness manifests in each of those aspects of our Individuality specifically, and also as a whole

The Idea that the voice of the inner elder (which is the Intuition) could be wrong may sound odd to some, but it is clear to me that reliable access to our higher selves is erratic at best and that intuition can be distorted by beliefs and fears of apartness, if not at its point of ultimate origin, then at its point of reception into our consciousness.

Fear based intuitions, imaginings, and metaphysical positions can be expected to periodically emerge between myself and Tusti and in fact already have to some extent…The process of coming together about what parts of our own and each others belief systems may be more reflections of “our piece of the Lie” is beginning with a mutual listening to each others world-views and beliefs that is taking place in various ways; Tusti has read my blogs for example, and I am currently reading a book that she has found to be very influential for her spiritually called “Bringers of the Dawn”. This example is just one part of what will be an ongoing conversation between us regarding ultimate things and issues of “Faith”.

Ultimately it will be our sharing a Primary Faith in Togetherness that will enable us to persist and grow (though friendly discussion of whatever disagreements we may have in these areas) into a shared expression of Living Truth. I do not think that this will happen solely because of what we are doing together (or even alone) as elders only but as a result of our inner and outer dance as Adult, Children, and Animals as well…

As Adults, I think that the culture of apartness often manifests in the kind of "Us and Them" Identity politics which is for me a kind of junk food people feed their inner Adult in lieu of practicing healthy Culture. Although we both seem to agree in principle on the idea of “Taking off ones Uniforms” there are ways in which we can both fall into this kind of thinking and I have a sense that Tusti's social situation discourages the kind of “coming out” as an individual-person that would be a sign of growing out of such factional childishness. Like, sports and like war, the temptations of being involved in any kind of sally of an “US” against a “Them” (and it doesn’t matter what groups play those roles), is extremely tempting, if only because the experience of the more meaningful adventures of Healthy Culture are relatively absent for comparison. For the ordinary “foot soldier” in such social or political movements, the temptation is mostly the false sense of solidarity and outer belonging that comes at the expense of the ability to be really in touch with and so express, oneself; at the level of the “leaders” and “war-mongers” in whatever area, that temptation is of course augmented by the attention and ego gratification of having followers etc…

Besides dealing with the familiar political manifestations of this sort of factional Identity-Politics, Tusti and I will have to deal with it in terms of gender, but I want to treat of how I see this challenge separately later since my views of it have changed somewhat.

Like everyone else born into the dominant culture, both Tusti and I have our emotional wounds and longings which are entangled in various kinds of dysmutuality and unfriendly relationships with other aspects of our selves. Sometimes the inner adult uses a certain kind of anesthesia or distraction to numb itself to the existence of the child’s pain and longing for wholeness, sometimes the child itself is numbed with drugs, sweets, or sex in ways that, besides being only temporary in there effects, also do damage to the animal of the body as well. Often the inner Elder is involved in this through adherence to some conscious or unconscious fear-based belief (whether in religion or science) in terms of which such inner apart-ness is rationalized.

For Tusti and I, coming together in a healthy way emotionally means listening to each others stories and memories as they relate of our emotional wounds and supporting and challenging each other to move past the need for the anesthesia that numbs our own full experience of them. Again, as Individuals actually work as a whole, the progress we make in the culture of living friendship on the level of emotion will both depend on and itself have effects on, the other levels as well; for example, religious as well as political dogmas of apart-ness are to a great extent reinforced by and founded on emotional wounds that fester from neglect of attention and friendship.

The Inner animal is of course involved in all the rest of the individual’s existence and typically suffers most directly from the effects of the various forms of anesthesia which, as sufferers from sick culture, we use to maintain a regime of Apart-ness within ourselves. Often we cannot even be properly aware of our bodies or of the life-energy (chi) that flows through and informs them until the inner animal is detoxed to some extent at least.

This is part of the reason for fasting in general and in particular the fast that is involved in the Vision Quest (which is more comprehensive in that it is a fast from artificial distractions of all kinds, not just food). Such detoxing and de-numbing of the body also happens positively through the ingestion of good and minimally processed (callesthetic) food via things like instinctive nutrition. The door of awareness opened by such practices can be widened or narrowed by the practice or non-practice such things as Chi Gung and Taoist/Tantric Sexuality, when practiced in the light of healthy Culture. In non-Tantric culture of sexuality for example, (and I don’t mean just the sexual act) the body and its potential energies of evolution (both in terms of the individual and of the Species) is typically wasted in vain and temporary glory of the ego and its alienated assumptions.

So far as challenges between my self and Tusti go as Animals, the main thing seems to be the reality of the extent to which a relatively apartness-ruled and anesthetic modern medicine has already injured our bodies and taken them hostage through regimes of drugs and fear-based and addictive therapies.

Tusti’s and my practice in befriending our bodies will likely be some combination of taking in more that is healthy in terms of substances, energies, practices, and—as our bodies grow stronger—weaning ourselves away from any dependency on the relatively mal-esthetic substances and treatments of most modern medicine.

So far I have shared some of the challenges to the healthy coming together that Tusti and I, by our willingness to become Life-Dance partners, are committing to face as individuals (as I said, I have done this here mostly because the “Individual” meaning of coming-together in a healthy way as "The Individual" per se, has not been gone into so much on this blog). Of course we exist as Persons as much as we do as Individuals, and this Blog is about part of how we will try to integrate that more horizontal aspect of our life-dance to the more vertical one of our dance with each other as individuals.

Since the concern of the inner adult is usually manifesting outwardly in terms of the role of Citizen-of-the -world, the main point of our sharing some of our life-dance through this blogs is not only to learn and teach the kind of culture and practices through which our (Tusti’s and my) individual culture of Apartness can be transcended and even turned into account in the service of the Healthy Culture of Togetherness between us, but it is how this can happen as well on the macro level, between political and social factions on all levels of scale.

This is one of the reasons why our differences and seeming contractions of character are so valuable. The more we find ways of transcending those differences through the practice of healthy culture, the more relevant our discoveries and practices will be to others beside ourselves. The experiment of this blog in particular (as opposed to our Life-Dance in general) then becomes one of having a structure that can be meaningful and useful in the largest possible context.

Specifically, what I am proposing for this blog at this stage in its evolution is the following:

Tusti will begin (when and if she has inner consensus to) posting about i-p's life and i-p’s own individual-personhood in the 5 venues. Then the listening, supporting and challenging part of the experiment will come in the comments, which will be a record of our attempts to respond to each other in a way that is an appropriate mix of these three attitudes under the circumstances, and in a way that feeds and nourishes as much of the individual (elder, adult, child, and animal) as is possible and appropriate online.

The comments part of this blog will then become a running dialog about the issues in the venue of the post to which the comment responds.

For example After I post this Tusti might respond with comments of Listening, comment of support, or comments of challenge:

(These would be questions of clarification, or summaries of part or all of what someone has written so as to be clear that i-p understands. This will also reassure me that the Tusti listening. Of course I will respond to such questions and summaries.

These would we statements that support to some degree what I have written that would further it and/or complement it in some way.

These would be comments that challenge, to the point of expressing out right disagreement with, what I am saying.

I don’t really propose that our comments and responses need to be so rigidly classified in practice. It might make more sense just to respond naturally and to use the 3-fold model of a friendly response that appropriately balances Listening, Support, and Challenge, to temper, for example a response that would otherwise be too one-dimensionally challenging (and thereby fail to express and cultivate Living Friendship even if ones point is legitimate). At the same time a reply that expresses a degree of support that is not really felt is in the long run unfriendly to both ones-self and the other. And of course a neglect of proper listening takes away the foundation for any healthy form of agreement or disagreement.

The point is that whether or not we end up using the fully formal structure that I have outlined here, the conversation that is going on between Tusti and I in the comments will hopefully involve listening, supporting and challenging, both as content and as subject matter.

I think it’s necessary to add here that, listening, supporting and challenging, where they only take place outwardly, would just be another form of one-sidedness and apartness. So comments on the posts of this blog are also susceptible of analysis from the subjective point of view as well, which implies the understanding that a truly friendly post will come out of a concern for appropriate inner Friendship; inner listening, supporting and challenging as well as that which goes on outwardly between us. A liberal use of “I” language (even broken down into “my elder, my child, my adult, my animal”, speaking for each in turn) is a welcome way of expressing that this inner friendship is going on even while the outward statement is being made). Other forms of language are also invited of course, when they seem appropriate.

Finally, all of the above is just MY vision of what this experiment is to be online, and it remains to be seen how much Tusti will agree with what I have written. As I have already said, I have no interest in presenting us as some kind of United Front and this very post is itself susceptible to modifications deriving from the Living Friendship process of Inner and outer consensus between Tusti and myself, so take all of this as just a conversation starter about what things will be like on this blog. Look for her comments and the ensuing conversation here as well.

I have said that I don’t want to present a of phony “public” united front as existing between Tusti and I, but I am certainly gambling on the idea that we are a least united strongly enough in a common faith in, and will toward, inner and outer Togetherness, so as to be able to pull this whole thing off at all. I must be honest enough with my self to admit that even this is something that remains to be seen. Motives are often mixed; outer circumstance might triumph; catastrophe could loom; I could find myself homeless and heart broken on the streets of Liverpool trying to stay alive and stave off suicidal depression until my miserable return flight to Twin Oaks etc...etc…anything is possible, but I feel that the whole thing is worth the risk and that, like any good experiment; something valuable, something worthy of thanks and gratitude can be learned no matter what the result…

And of course, in the best case scenario, what we are doing will become a model for Healthy Culture and part of a Cultural Singularity that will make a better future for our own and succeeding generations of beings on this planet…Its Living that we are doing; Living is trying really, really trying, and that is what we are doing. With Audacity, Truthfulness, with Trust and Faith and good humor to spare; how can that fail to be more worthwhile than the alternative of miserable surviving...and what a great and good story it is to be in…!

So with that I will end my take on this new development in my experiment and welcome unconditionally, and with much Love, my Friend Tusti, both into my Life-Dance and into this Life-Dance Log…

{note: just a reminder that I am trying out or “I-p” or “I-P” ( which is pronounced "eye-pee" and of course stands for “Individual-Person”) as the a gender-transcending and trans-species substitute of He or She etc. I know it sounds funny, but all such innovations sound funny until you get used to them.}

Individual-Post

As an individual I don’t really feel I have been coming-together or “coming-apart” to any great extreme, though I do have certain problems in this area that I have yet of “confess to” on this blog (challenge). These days though, the prospects seem pretty good for the former on one area at least, as I have met someone who very much wants to come together outwardly (as Individal-Persons in the context of Healthy Culture), but also in such a way that we come together inwardly and Intimately as individual minds (inner adults), Hearts (Inner Children), Bodies (inner Animals) and Intuition (Inner Elders) involved in experiment in healing sexuality. Of course we both know that coming together as "Persons" is part of that as well, but the point for this part of my post is focusing on the Individual per se, and that means experiments in healing sexuality, and energy work (chi gung) among other things. As I said in a previous post, the prospect of meeting this person (which is much more certain now than before) has got me recommitted to the Chi Gung, Tai Chi, and Taoist sexual practices and also to experiments with them that would integrate (and to some extent transform them) into more of an expression of Healthy Culture.

But I also include eating as part of individual healthy culture as what we eat (as well as our attitudes toward eating) can bring us into togetherness with our "inner animals" or into a greater state of apartness from that part of ourselves, and so from our wholeness as individuals. I am a little worried about what the future holds so far as this goes, because I will be living with this person in the city for a good while and I don’t know how I will really be able to eat as well there as here, where I am also sure the air is much better). Ironically, food wise, some part of me seems to want to prepare for my time in Liverpool by becoming a bit of a vegan, since I’ll probably not be able to get organic, free-range, and as-local-as-possible animal foods in the city (perhaps with the exception of fish).

The reason this is so ironic is because of the following discussion with my present and future Life-Dance partner (who wants to be called Tusti and who I will introduce more in another post. Tusti is a “Vegan” (as its understood in the common parlance of identity-diets) and shortly after we began our correspondence this February, we had a email discussion of our differing views about eating that almost ended our incipient Life-Dance together. Sharing that whole episode in our friendship (which was pretty dramatic) would mean posting much more of our correspondence than I include here, but it seems more appropriate right now just to share my part in the main substance of it (which I have previously excepted and posted in various places as part of a citizen-of-the-world sort of gesture). Here is a copy of that post:

Discussion With a Vegan

“(I recently had a e-mail discussion with a vegan. (I tend toward mostly raw paleo-diets, instinctive nutrition, and Weston Price type stuff, which are not exclusive of meat as long as its not factory farmed). I thought I'd share some of our exchanges (or rather, mostly my part in them, since I don't really have her permission to include her words.)

The email she sent me was entitled "Speciesim" and in it this percent explained why she was a vegan and sent as an attachment various articles and the like about Deforestation, Desertification, Water Pollution, as well as an article making an analogy of Speciesim with Racism and of farms with Slavery (In what follows I do not comment on this analogy, which i think is valid in many ways but which does not really seem relevant to the eating of meat, since this is perfectly possible, (as is a certain kinds of farming) with out being speciesist in the least.) anyway, here is my reply to her:

"This is an interesting issue for me. I hope I can address in a way that is helpful. I have read, among other things, Beyond Beef" and "Mad Cowboy" (not the exact title) Fast Food Nation, among various other things and I share your concern and disgust with factory farming and If I lived in the city and/or could not get free range organic meat and eggs, or hunt, I would not eat meat at all. As it is I live on a farm where we raise our own organic, free ranging and I think (relatively) happy animals.

My experience of life on such farms and in the wilderness has given me a perspective on death, pain and other beings that is pretty similar to that of those indigenous peoples who have long since come to sustainable and non destructive terms with there environment. From such a point of view dying, killing, and eating are pretty much all part of the same phenomenon as living and we are all equals in this regard; I will die and be eaten one day just as I myself kill and eat. this is basically good since dying and feeding other life is just part of the normal "etiquette" and responsibility of beings in the natural world and is involved with, among other things, the need to make room for others beings to have their chance to Live. If, for example the "lions" every really "lay down with the lambs", than the population of lambs would just skyrocket and they would end up eating all the grass, bushes and tree bark, and this would eventually make things bad, even for they themselves, who would end up starving to death .

This realization and acceptance of the meaning of death helps to inspire real Life which for me involves another responsibility we all share; namely every creatures responsibility to really Live and not just survive; to find out what it came into the world to do and to try to do it before it dies. I seems to me that only when this other responsibility (which I think only humans have trouble with) is not fulfilled that eating, killing, and dying become fundamentally ugly and meaningless because living itself has become so. This situation is the norm in the modern world these days, which to me accounts for the whole existence of factory farming, as well as pesticides and many other things.

People in the city tend to be dissociated from real Life and real ecology in general and often give me the impression that they think that this "killing and eating/being killed and eaten" business, as well as nature itself, is not only disgusting but is well...avoidable or something. (I think many people unconsciously feel the same about their bodies--that they are disgusting and somehow avoidable). I think that the only reason some are happier eating carrots or soybeans (and soybean farms, by the way have surpassed cattle ranches as the reason for the destruction of the rain forests of South America) is because a carrot or soybean plant is suffering in a way that they would need special instruments to be aware of (such instruments exist--see the book the Secret Life of Plants) and so does not remind them of their own inevitable death. I don't think that this is the only factor involved of course and as i said, i would be a raw vegan myself--or as much of one as I could be--under certain circumstances.

I also think that the average persons body (a persons "inner animal"; the part of nature that we are most directly), is abused constantly by everything from chairs, to processed food (vegan or not) to a neglect and waste of its sexual energies and their evolutional potential. This everyday abuse and repression of the inner animal translates ineluctably in to similar abuse of outer animals and outer nature in general and it needs to be discussed as much as the latter.

As for farming, I see progressive farming as a kind of halfway house between our alienated city-life and the wilderness. Hunting and Gathering seems to me vary much more healthy than most forms of agriculture yet if domesticated animals (including ourselves) are ever going to get back to something like that, we will all have to be "bred" or "unbred" back to Wildness, probably over generations. Such a conception of farming would have the opposite intention as farms do today and such a farm would be run in a fundamentally different way, I intend to post something about this in my blog sooner or later.

To recapitulate, the real problem seems to me to be the culture of Apart-ness and the fear and alienation from the natural world (which also involves alienation from the spiritual world) and its cycles of birth and death that seem to be part and parcel of at least some so called civilizations, including ours.

I don't feel the need for righteousness about this whole thing though, or the need to condemn people who eat factory farmed meat, or pesticide grown food, our who abuse their inner animals (or inner adults, or inner elder, or inner children) in various other ways. Its all just part of sick culture and EVERYONE suffers from, is imprinted by, and is involved in, sick culture in one way or another--either by "crimes of omission" or " crimes of commission" and usually by both. Self-righteousness is itself an aspect of sick culture and only serves to polarize and divide people along lines of this or that one sided and one-dimensional claim to (ones own pet) virtues over against the others corresponding vises (the others virtues as well as ones own vises being ignored--or worse--denied completely, in the process). Such one-sidedness is the stuff of which Wars are made.

The only thing to do that is really healthy it seems to me to practice the culture of togetherness (which means to me to be addressing the root of the problem in a positive way) while at the same time acknowledging--yet minimizing as much as possible ones unavoidable involvement with sick culture Both inwardly And outwardly. Healthy Culture as, i see it, is a kind of cultural 12 step program, a process of healing rather than a static state of being healed (and so presumably "holy", and so presumably "holier-than-thou"). Its like going up an endless mountain in which the main difference between people is not how high up they are (every finite number is essentially the same distance from infinity) but whether or not they are going up hill, standing still (an only temporary option in this case) or going down. you know what I mean?"

The person next wanted to know how I feel when I kill an animal. This was my reply:

"Your question makes me think back on an experience of killing a goat in Hawaii at the Permaculture homestead I lived at there. The animal was old, blind, and had lost its partner a few weeks previous. I spent a lot of time identifying with the animal knowing that my own life is really suspended on the same fragile thread that its is, and that I have no more importance, nor really any more control over when and how I die than it does. I affirmed this to the animal itself many times and blessed and thanked it for its life affirming to myself and to it, the literal truth that I would "pay it forward" as the saying goes.

When I wasn't thinking about that, I was thinking about how to kill the animal as well and as quickly as possible. Sorry if I get graphic here but its pertinent to your question. I killed the animal with one stroke of a very sharp machete which took off its head completely except for a little skin. Immediately up to that moment all of my concentration was on doing the thing well--when the moment came--or a millisecond after, I felt relieved and glad that I had done it well.

What happened then was interesting in that I actually felt (or imagined) something like a light finger moving across my own neck, as if to promise or inform me that with this killing I had moved made it likely that my own death would come in a similar way. This, was--and is--fine with me, and I would much rather die in the way that I killed that animal than spending months and years in some miserable hospital hooked on drugs hating life and fearing death, or worse completely unconscious and unaware...(and also using up resources that are maintained at the expense of the murder of whole landscapes in the search for fuel to run power plants to keep my EEG machine going..)

I also felt, as I watched the animals last reflexive death throes, a feeling of responsibility and resolve to use the energy that I got for the animal well, for Life, in a way that had real meaning and heart. And also I wanted to use as much as possible of the animal and waste as little as possible. I helped skin and butcher the animal and I helped tan its hide among other things,

I feel the need to say for completion--even though it might gross you out even more--that we were all into primal diets and instinctive nutrition in that place and so we ate the animal raw, though letting some of the flesh age and dry at room temperature. Like many indigenous peoples, we considered it best to eat the organs as soon as possible. To this day the idea of cooking "meat" (or otherwise processing it and so disguising what it is and was, as well as the whole meaning of how it got to be on ones plate, is as disgusting to me as I imagine the idea of eating raw meat is to others.

As I say i my essay about health and nutrition, whatever the "health benefits" of eating like this (which you can learn about from googling "instinctive nutrition", or "primal diets", for me the reason to eat raw and intuitive/instinctively is not that it will help one live longer, but that it helps one stay close to Life itself, and that in inspires one to really Live at all. processing food and disguising it in various ways just perpetuates a regime of denial and alienation regarding some of the most essential aspects of our being in this world.

Anyway, since then I have killed or been involved in the killing of other animals, and the experience has been similar. When we kill a steer at Twin-oaks, I am usually there and help as I tend the steers as well (which just means checking on them once a week and giving them mineral salt). I am also usually the only one who feels the need to make gestures and affirmations of gratitude, equality, and well wishing for the soul of the animal as it continues on its journey.

That bit about the journey reflects my metaphysical beliefs about reincarnation, which I won't go into now as my feelings about living, killing, and dying relate to them, but do not really depend on me holding them.

Having shared this, I wish I could say that I always engage in the same feelings and gestures every time I accidentally kill a bug or intentionally pull up a carrot (or eat one that someone else pulled up). Its essentially the same situation and deserves the same respect in my opinion, but i have not yet reached the level where I always give these events--which only Seem less dramatic or important, or meaningful--there due respect. I am very much working on that--its one of the reasons I eat by myself and am always trying to make eating a more mindful and contemplative act.

Hope this was helpful in some way.

--Piankhy"

Anyway, one can see here the irony that (unless I can get some really good free-range, local etc..meat connection, I will be being as much of a raw, organic vegan as I can in liverpool.

I worry a little about all of this though, because I don’t want to lose my perspective about the meaning of eating and become dissociated and in denial about it the way I feel many city (and even “country”) people are. Listening…Support

I also worry a little about not exactly being on the same page about this with Tusti (who very much understands where I am coming from and respects me about it, but still—for emotional reasons—seems pretty disturbed by the whole thing. Listening…

Tusti (like everyone) has her own issues regarding coming-together as an Individual especially I think as regards the “Inner Animal” of the Body, but I will let Tusti introduce these as part of I-P’s own Life-Dance Posts on this Blog.

{note: I am trying out or “I-p” or “I-P” ( which is pronounced "eye-pee" and of course stands for “Individual-Person”) as the as a gender-transcending and trans-species substitute of He or She etc. I know it sounds funny, but all such innovations sound funny until you get used to them.}

Welcome and Thanks

Life-Dance Post

Well I have been somewhat remiss about this part of my blog experiment. I have a few posts in progress but I can’t seem to finish any of them. Today is my Death Day Eve preceding my annual Vision Dance (see posts from a year or so ago) though, and since I traditionally do some kind of check-in, as well as a life-dance party and life-dance walk on the day before my death day, I thought I would do my check-in online.

Individual: A Living-Friendship beckons from

England (I hope)

. Maybe we have a rendezvous, a Life-Dance date. It is challenging; we are very different in many ways; we haven't met in person; we correspond and plan to meet. There is love, (some kind of love) and very much affection. She has read my blogs; I don't think there is much in the way of big secrets between us. It seems fortuitous as I have just given myself a refresher course of the practice of Taoist Sacred Sexuality (I intend to post something about my ups and downs with this soon) and she is game for this kind of thing; She seems game for the whole adventure of these blogs describe and point to. Amazing. We will see. I am not being so credulous about it as I sound but at a certain point, I would be willing to take the chance. Even if it's not too good to me true, it will certainly be a real (possibly even harrowing) adventure. Heroic just to think about it really (comic-heroic—which is good) considering the odds that are against us. Listening.

As I said, Vision Dance tomorrow. We’ve been having lovely weather and I am looking forward to it. Besides the DVD’s about healing love, I have been collecting and practicing from lot of Mantak Chia Taoist chi gung DVDS. They are very helpful.

Neighbor: A week or so ago, at a community meeting called "What are we doing Here", I felt moved to question whether we have the right to be here at all. I mentioned the Monacan Indians who originally lived on this land, some 1400 of whom still "live" near Lynchburg Virginia. I conjectured out loud how, from their point of view the history of this land would be a story in which one bunch of arrogant white people chased them from their land, taking the land for themselves and making up a bunch of (mostly self serving) rules, and then much later, another bunch of arrogant white people, (more or less piggy backing on the violence, theft, and systems of coercion of the 1st group) claimed the land (with just as little Right) and made up a different set of mostly self-serving rules (this latter group being the founders and most of the subsequent members of Twin Oaks). At no point did anyone call the original inhabitants back to ask them anything about anything even though they, (more because they lived more lightly and wisely on the land than because they were here first) have more of a right to be here than anyone who has lived here since.

I suppose I was bordering on Factional Identity politics (my inner Malcolm might have surfaced a little), but factional identity was involved in the whole thing anyway by implication (us "Twin Oakers", vs. the world) and it seemed to me that even in those kind of terms, we were not thinking very clearly. I actually wanted to add outright, rather then just imply, that, unless might is right, (in which case rapists have the right to rape their victims, child abusers has the right to abuse etc...) we really have no right be here. Certainly a "might is right" justification for our being here would be more than a little problematic for a non-violent community to hold, even if it wasn't obviously bullshit any other point of view as well. Of course once objecting voices are forcibly excluded by the membership process (or just ignored if, as in my case, one happens to get pass that) it is relatively easy to come up with a bunch of rationalizations, justifications, and excuses for our being here--even to the point of smug complacency-- which, though essentially fallacious, are certainly not going to be challenged by most of the members of the very in-group that benefits (or rather; that thinks it benefits) from the very status quo in question. All so called power is like that and can almost be defined by the ability to not have to listen to or respect, or come to any kind of terms of mutuality with, someone else (whether they be indigenous people, the poor, or any other group) usually because they are being forcibly excluded (whether directly or indirectly) from any conversation that matters.

I suppose the remarks I did make were probably inspired by my feeling about "our" (in my opinion basically irresponsible) decision to expand our Tofu Business when, among other equally important things, we don't even take enough care of the waste produced by our present level of production. For many reasons, I think it will we bad for both the land and the culture here even if (and in part even because) it will lead to us making more money (as it probably will). That issue was probably some part of my motivation for saying what I did, but mostly it was a general and ongoing frustration with what seems peoples determination to make the world safe for there own neuroses, and avoid the challenge of even trying to Twin Oaks to actually live up to even one of the adjectives it uses to describe itself.

Anyway, I don't want to just rant and I really don't (usually) indulge in negative feelings towards people here; they don't suffer from sick culture any more (or less) than the average person, and I know that I am just suffering from my own sick culture when I judge them/us more harshly than anyone else. They/We aren't really "Twin Oakers" anyway, or even people of this or that race, or class (although I am sure most of them would not agree with this--which is part of the problem), just Individual-Persons suffering from sick culture like everybody else. Besides, judging and frowning at people all the time just feels too bad and takes up too much energy for which I have better uses. Its just really sad and lame situation that’s all.

Having said what I did say, I doubt my comments will have any more lasting effect on the course of events here than your average political protest in the world outside of here. I have gotten a few negative looks and even some positive affirmation but I'd be crazy to think it will lead to anything. Still, as long as this is my neighborhood (I am never sure how much longer that will be) it feels good to at least be able to make, even a slightly distorted gesture at the truth of what’s happening in it; It makes me feel more alive being here...listening...support...

Citizen of the World: I have been going into town weekly but since BtTV Closed I haven’t been moved to volunteer for anything and so haven't really been having many interactions with folks, still, things are happening just on the energetic level of dealing with and not succumbing to the pervasive alienation and vanity of this kind of environment. Now that it's spring I would like to start back doing more formal rather than less formal life-dance parties and Music Liberation Front stuff there. I have also been trying to get Healthy Culture Groups started on MySpace and Tribe.net, but not really very hard. Those groups are pretty much languishing...support. I have already told a little about my encounter and incipient life-dance with the person from England, we seem to be pretty much on the same page as citizens of the world but--I am tying to establish a habit or willingness to express and explore disagreements on this, (and every other) score--even if this threatens to provoke a change, re-assessment and even a reconsideration of what we plan to do together. I think I could to this more tactfully, and considering the great hopes, longing and affection I feel for this person as a Life-Dance partner, it may seem crazy to do it at all, but, the increased willingness to take such risks in the name of an Authentic Living Friendship is one of the only things that make such friendship really alive, and different from the collusive and fear-maintained and relatively stagnant state of affairs usually called a "relationship". I am learning to be less unnecessarily intense, concentrated and blunt about such things though. Listening...

Soul: Still just doing research exploring different religions, finding differences and similarities with the cosmology and ritual of Integral Science. I'm learning a lot but I need to challenge my self to more in this area experientially. It occurs to me to try to correspond with people, perhaps relatively open-minded people in the main religions and also minor ones and in science, (probably best in sequence rather than concurrently! Haven't made a post to an interfaith group in a while...

Family-Member: Nothing really new here except slacking on my part so far as Life-dance Parties go. I intend to do one here after this post because of Death Day and just to see how it feels and if I might want to try some other kind of ritual here) We've had another house meeting here since my last familial post about where I live now but I didn't see fit to go to it, not really knowing what I would say about the state of familial culture here and not wanting to just discuss peripheral things and not central ones. I regret not going a little and for the next meeting I intend to put Healthy Culture on the list of agenda items and attend and say...something...support. As for my family of birth, my older sister got in touch with me briefly about sending me something in the mail, but only by e-mail, and I didn't take the opportunity to pursue anything else or deeper online. I still intend to call or write my younger sister and my mom sometime this spring...

Familial/Civil Post

I write this with a portable phone in front of me contemplating calling various members of my family of birth.

A few weeks ago my sister got in touch with me in order to tell me that our baby sister is getting married and that my mother wants to hear from me. It’s been a good four years since I have talked to either of them over the phone and at least 20 since I have seen either of them.

For a long time I was in a quandary as to what is a healthy attitude towards ones family of birth in the context of healthy culture. I have since come to the tentative conclusion that the idea is to try to cultivate a living friendship as individual persons in the same way as I would with any body else.

Well, not quite in the same way. Birth family relations can be very coercive, non-egalitarian, and inwardly and outwardly factional in ways that have a greater psychic leverage than other kinds of relationships. I’m anticipating having trouble even bringing up the idea of healthy culture or living friendship with my mother (somewhat less so with my youngest sister). The recent conversation I had with my older sister pretty much left me feeling that she really didn’t want to actually know me at all, or have any kind of authentic two way communication with me about things that matter. I felt more that she was just trying to fulfill some role she conceives for herself as daughter to my mother and sister to me. I have felt the same thing when talking to my parents and other siblings in the past.

I know that feeling, but to act on it, in the light of my general understanding, feels phony and for most of my adult life I have avoided much contact with my family of birth. I guess my silence was a kind of protest against what I felt would be phoniness—often motivated in many people, more by the desire for a kind of “social security” or economic insurance than, from even any nobler feelings of duty or responsibility. But this avoidance has not felt quite right and about 5 year ago a made an effort to get in touch with my family. I think it was becoming clear to me that, though my role and responsibility is not obedience to some fear-based social imprinting, I do know and remember these people and the possibility exists to challenge both myself and them with the necessity and possibility of transcending all of the sick culture between us and of co-creating a new kind of culture as friends and equals.

In my previous conversations so far though, I have not even been able to really even set this as a conscious intention. What happens is that who ever I am talking to just goes on and on about who is doing what in the family and what they themselves are doing, avoiding any real inquiry about me except for more or less material and social-economic superficialities. After an hour or so of this, one of us has to go, and that’s it for communication of the next half-decade or so. I suppose doing this once every five years is enough of a relationship to satisfy them, but it makes me want to give up on the business altogether, since going along with such a charade is friendly neither to myself nor my family of birth. Most of me feels that it would be better to be honestly estranged from them then connected in so lame and superficial a way.

On the other hand, there is always the hope of upgrading the culture between us in the next communication. Moreover, if estrangement is going to happen, it should at least happen after an authentic argument and there has never really been time for even that so far. This is partly because of me and a kind of timidity and sentimentality that usually afflicts me when talking to members of my family…actually I have a hard time being severe with anybody right off the bat, though I get around to it when necessary. With my family though there is some added energy which, come to think of it, is probably related more to the fact that, unlike people still sharing a real familial venue, we don’t really have to relate to each other at all and that to succumb to the easy estrangement that is possible in such a situation would be tragic. For them I guess it would be tragic because of the guilt of failed duty and familial piety but, for me, I realize that it would be tragic because of a missed opportunity to transform our relationship in the light of healthy culture.

I want to plant the seed of healthy culture and living friendship between myself and the family of birth, just because I know them—or did know them, and so have an ongoing connection with them that makes this a possibility. If they are mostly strangers, still they are strangers of a special kind, so that coming to terms of real friendship with them—which will probably be more difficult than with normal strangers—would nevertheless be something very worth while for all involved. Keeping in touch with them is a way of continuing my experiments in how best to effect this thing.

Still, I am not sure if this way of doing so is not just fueling some coercive familial dynamic. I don’t know how much progress I’ll be able to make in today’s long distance phone call, which besides probably being rather brief, is really just a reactionary response to my sisters response to the event of a marriage in the family. It occurs to me to begin being more deliberate and proactive this kind of communication. I think I’ll try starting a course of letter-writing to some members of my family soon. Maybe this call will just serve to keep the door open for those letters, and so for the possibility of a healthier connection between myself and my family of birth. If so it will still have been a good thing to do.

Postscript:

Well I called my mom just now. Not home. No answering machine. I called my little sister and she was also not home, so I left a message. Just my luck, get my intention all sharpened up to challenge the status quo and it goes into hiding.
Any way, certainly I will keep trying.

Post postscript:

It's now probably more than a month since I wrote the above. I meant to post it immediately but my own computer is only for word processing and for various reasons its taken me this long to get the floppy into an internet computer.

Anyway, I finally got in touch with my folks (my mother over the phone and the sister who is getting married via email). I told them both a lot of what I mention in this post and tried to set an intention of real listening supporting and challenging friendship between us and both of them agreed to this in principle.

The reality though is that nothing has really happened since those conversations. Things are basically back to where they were before then. I think that it is more or less up to me to get things rolling and yet I feel the same old inhibition about it. In part I guess its a realistic sense that, without some non-virtual experience to inspire the sustained commitment necessarily to begin to cultivate--or even understand--the kind of healthy friendship I want to create, there is nothing really to work with. Its not that I don't care whether or not they understand or experience healthy culture, its just that I don't see how this can effectively be transmitted long distance in their case. At the same time, I don't see how, short of moving into the neighborhood (in some relatively autonomous situation), I could even keep their attention about it.

Also, at such long distance of time and space I feel I can only make a civil appeal to them, the same appeal to good will that I would make to anybody (and that I am implicitly making to you the reader). And my memories and my recent conversations don't really lead me to believe there is much to "invest in" there. For example, my mother spent much of our phone call recapitulating her version of Baptist Christianity in a way that leaves me with the impression that , for her, goodwill is more about saving strangers souls before God comes back than figuring out how to catalyze ones own healing together with that of our society. Neither the prospect of showing her otherwise, nor of some more creative comming-to-terms, nor of being convinced of her views in preference to mine (which I tend think should never be excluded out of hand) seem at all likely over the phone. The prospect of attempting it is somewhat exhausting to even think about. It seems much more realistic to just continue for look for those few "co conspirators' who are already relatively predisposed and motivated in this direction, create a living healthy culture between us that can be amplified and that hopefully, grow as a kind of "cultural singularity" both arithmetically and exponentially. At some point we life-dancers can expose our families of birth to this living possibility in a way that is likely to be both more helpful both to ourselves and them.

Still, there is probably more to my reluctance than what I've said so far and, though I am not sure what it is, its possible that that some lingering faith in apart-ness on my part is behind it. I want to challenge myself at any rate to initiate contact with both my sister and my mother at least once before my next familial post.

life-dance post

{I posted this a while back but accidentally erased it. I repost it now--piankhy}

Family-member: Doing Life-dance parties almost every day, and at Tupelo more than once a week (probably too many familial-venue parties). The dances are often not as formally complete as they use to be. Not sure how much of this is slacking and how much a sign that the life-dance party has just entered seamlessly into the form of my everyday life. Some of each I think. Of course the culture of the household as a household hasn’t changed. Time passes rituals of apart-ness (rehearsals for various collective and individual tragedies) go on every day. All I do try to avoid being cast in that kind of play and keep busy with my own rehearsals for the comedy and the comic happy ending. Not sure what else to do under the circumstances. Listening.
Neighbor: Wrote and posted a two-part o and I paper called “for Utopia” (see next post). Have neglected my weekly Local Life-dance party in the courtyard for maybe 3 weeks in a row. Not sure what’s up with that. Need to Challenge myself to do it this Saturday. I would be good also to do a weekly Life-dance walk as well. Could use some Support for that (who could I ask to walk with me?). Work wise (I mean “survival work”), I seem to be moving toward more autonomy. Maybe I’ll start doing more outside work…Beginning to have more of a detailed vision of the role and functions of a farm and or farm life in the context of the Tree of Life project. Perhaps an essay soon…
Individual: Eating fairly poorly these days considering that its summer and there is so much good fresh food around. What’s up with that? Could use more green juices, salads, and raw foods of all kinds… I do feel a change in this state of affairs coming on. Listening… Intend to do either a vision quest or a 4 day retreat and fast for my birthday in Sept. Spending too much time sitting in front of computers…practicing Tan Tien Chung (from a book by Mantak Chia) and am reading another book by him on esoteric Taoism.
Citizen-of-the-World: Regular trips to C-ville every week. Irregular Life-Dance Parties there. Thomas Jefferson’s “serpentine wall” gardens at the University of Virginia seem like almost perfect places for a Life-Dance Party. That's usually where I go. Played clarinet, did chi gung. Even read aloud some (poetry I think), but maybe also “The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight” by Thom Hartmann. (Good book so far). Keep forgetting to bring my flyers incase I am joined by some curious soul. Other than that, so far as strangers go, there are my blogs, my myspace activity and the fact that I finally got to do the workshop “Practicing Utopia” at this years Twin Oaks Communities Conference. It “seemed”: to go over well but its hard to expect much from one-time-only affairs…Listening …
Soul: Other than myspace interfaith group exchanges, and the regular activity of sharing my worldview with whoever is interested, the venue has been sort of dead. It would probably be good to be a part of a non-virtual interfaith group, though such groups are usually frustratingly assiduous in avoiding just the kind of discussions that could be the most healing. Read a book about the Dalai Lama recently, listened to Lectures on the history of the Papacy, ordered on the history of Buddhism. Other than keeping the issue or religion alive in me in this way, I don’t know how else to proceed. Perhaps I should be more concerned with this than I am right now…Listening...

Neigbor Post

{Note: I posted these two papers, minus some minor corrections, on the O and I (Opinions and Ideas) board at Twin Oaks recently. I post it here not to shame Twin Oaks--which has this problem no more or less than every other community or neighborhood that have been in, but, among other things, to point out a tendency that must be addressed and a problem that must be solved if healthy culture and real democracy is ever to exist, whether in a neighborhood, a family, or any larger civil collectivity. I also feel that there is special relavence here to the communities movement as a whole.}

For Utopia (part one)
By Piankhy 8/10/2006

It feels somewhat daunting trying to write this. I feel like I am trying to heal the many-headed hydra of corruption at Twin Oaks by going at the heart of the thing. That is good so far as it goes, since that would be the only way to do this sustainably anyway. What feels so daunting and potentially futile is that I have come to feel that people do not want the actual hydra healed at all, only want those heads removed that most offend them as individuals. This kind of one-sided factionalism of conception and feeling---in fact the whole culture of apart-ness that it is a part of--seems just as hopelessly entrenched here, as it is in the culture outside twin oaks. Trying to counter it sometimes feels more hopeless than trying to go uphill in an avalanche. Challenging that feeling of futility, and the tendency toward rejection, giving up, and apathy that I feel in myself is part of why I am writing this. Such tendencies in me are the result of my own conceit of knowledge, and of some kind of misguided fear of failure or perhaps even more, of success. Writing this is part of trying to challenge these things in myself and so catalyze my own healing while doing the same thing for my neighborhood.

To begin, I want to notice out loud that people seem determined to avoid or just ignore any analyses of our situation that implicates themselves in what in wrong with our community. This is possible by avoiding the topic of having a healthy community as a whole and focusing (usually with some degree of self-righteousness) on this or that particular short coming of others in some aspect of community life in which the complainer happens not to have a problem. In doing this they seem to have convinced themselves that that if this or that short-coming disappeared then the community would be fine or at least better, when in fact it would just be “better” for them and those like them. Though such gestures seem to be attempts to help the community, these one-sided critiques usually just intensify faction and competition between those who like there own vices better, (or ignore them more effectively) than those of others. If the complainers got their way, all that would have happened is that the less commonly acknowledged vices would have succeeded in making the world safer for themselves through means of coercion and the complainers who have those vices would have acquired even more of the kind of power that in an egalitarian community, shouldn’t even exist.

The tendency I have just described is actually a big part of the source of the desire to compete with and coerce others. It is a part equally of the corruption of national, international politics as well as that of Twin Oaks. And really there is no future in it worth having.

For its clear to me that where there is no real agreement (the unpopular word for which is consensus), or at least a real and ongoing attempt at it, then there can be no real cooperation in any positive sense of the word. And In order for people to truly agree, and to renew agreement when individuals or circumstances change, they must come together for discussion, clarification, argument etc, in an on-going way.

When this coming-together for living agreement and real cooperation is not happening then there is going to be subtle or unsubtle coercion (which is a kind of violence) and direct or indirect competition as to who can most effectively coerce who. This is because there are always people who have more influence in any static system, either because they happen to like, and/or be more of the temperament and disposition to learn and work, that system (such people will usually equate intelligence or some other virtue with just this temperament rather than question the fairness or health of the system itself), or because they are on good terms with influential people in it, or for any number of other reasons. The bottom line is that inertia is more or less on their side and at the inevitable decision point’s things are more than likely to go their way. This ability to indirectly coerce others compromises any claim to egalitarianism even when, if the ability were not used, it would not compromise the claim of cooperative non-violence.

Moreover, if we see thing in perspective, we would acknowledge the coercion inherent in our general situation. There is coercion (the threat of force, the motivation of fear) involved in any kind of private or ownership, whether collective or individual. We hold the land ultimately by violence and the threat of violence of the national and local government and we take unfair advantage of this; no matter how much more simply, lightly, wisely, and sustainably than ourselves others who come here might be prepared to live in this land, they can be kept away or forced to leave if they don’t follow our more or less self-serving rules or even if we just don’t like them personally. If we don’t actively work against the dominant, coercive cleptocratic, exploitative, and intrinsically sick state of affairs both directly and by trying to show a really different way of living, then we are just using it to maintain little pseudo-utopias in which we, rather than some other group are the most comfortable and in which others, seeking real fairness can “love it or leave it” or just resign themselves apathy or cynicism.

Even if it were the case that everyone, either at Twin Oaks or in the Country outside it, was comfortable with the status quo, (an extremely unlikely situation), without some active, ongoing, and inclusive venue for airing and addressing emergent complaints, and difficulties, this would only make both America and Twin Oaks, essentially gated communities in which even those “insiders” who grow to feel oppressed are simply coerced into silence or “made to leave” in one way or another, while “outsiders” aware of the corruption are going to be even more summarily excluded.

Neither real cooperation, nor equality, non-violence nor sustainability can be solely internal, exclusive, in-group things. Exclusive cooperation means a willingness to coerce those excluded from attempts at agreement that make real cooperation possible. Exclusive equality is just elitism. Exclusive non-violence abandons outsiders to repression and coercion that the insiders, must tacitly support to keep from being victims themselves. And exclusive sustainability is only possible in a community inhabiting their own separate planet (and maybe not for long even then).

At present Twin Oaks is “utopia enough” for some people (maybe even for most people) in the same way the America is “democracy enough” for the privileged and those in control. In both cases the experiment of real equality, real democracy, real cooperation, and real “utopia” has been abandoned, not because it has been actually realized, but so as not to disturb those who are relatively comfortable with the status quo. Often people try to justify this “utopia enough” attitude by what I call the fallacy of “invidious comparison”, so before I conclude this part of my paper I want to say something about this.

There is always going to be some group that seems further down the hillside of corruption and disintegration than ones own, and that group(if it actually is more unhealthy) is itself likely to have slid so far itself because those in that group have likewise been complacently comparing themselves with someone else even further down rather than actively pursuing their ideals. If there is a difference it is likely only to be that that group has had a longer time to fall or happened to be on more "difficult terrain" than ones own and these are trivial differences. The only relevant difference is not how high up one happens to be on the mountainside but whether one has turned around and is actually trying to go up hill or not. Wallowing in complacency by comparing oneself with others would actually be impossible in a healthy community and when ones attention was turned toward others in such a place, it would not be for purposes of invidious comparison but to offer whatever help one could. To be going uphill against the inertia and entropy of a disintegrating status quo is really what it means to be Living at all in any conscious and intentional way, whether as a community or as an individual. To do other wise is really just to be a another part of the avalanche itself, part of the same passive and essentially dead “debris” sliding, however slowly or quickly, in the wrong direction.

All of that was in the way of diagnosis. Please see Part two for my prescription and proposal as to what to do about this.

For Utopia (part two)
By Piankhy 8/10/2006

Is there a way out of the difficulties that seem to be implied in the statements of part one of this post? My feeling is that If a community claims to be about the equality, cooperation, and sustainability, then it must at least be actively working towards those things (both internally and externally), and have some way of translating this into a quota of real measurable work. Since non-equalitarian regimes of coercion are ultimately not sustainable, and since, as I explained in part one, where there is no positive agreement (and discussion pursuant of this) as a basis of real cooperation there can only be such regimes, it all comes down to our collective willingness to put our labor where our mouth is, and do the hard work of coming to real understanding, agreement, and yes consensus, inwardly and outwardly, both within the community and outside it. Surely work towards this goal is work “for Utopia”. I imagine those willing to accept such work will self select as those who are here because they are really interested in those things. Those who don’t believe in these things and are here for other reasons will exclude themselves in most cases by being unwilling to do even the work of discussing how best to proceed.

This, for the time being, is all that I am proposing: I propose that we simply accept for starters the obligation to come together to experiment in how to come together for Utopia; that we do this regularly and that we keep experimenting until everybody is tentatively happy with the how the, (say, two hour) weekly meeting is structured (It say “tentatively” because even an agreed to structure must remain contingent on the input of new participants and also the growth and change of old ones and cant ever become a permanently closed topic). The main thing is a regular a meeting (perhaps a weekly one of say 2 hours) in the spirit of “for Utopia” and a quota (perhaps a monthly one of say 4 hours) for attendance. The meetings would be an ongoing experiment, guided by consensus process, as regards both the ideal meeting process itself and as to what structural changes would be needed to move the community and ultimately the world more into alignment with our highest values and best hopes. Finally I want to include the provision that if ever consensus is reached (by all members of the community) on any issue, than that official policy be changed to reflect this for as long as that consensus holds unchallenged.

Before going further I want to bring up and deal with certain objections that I have anticipated:

Objection 1:

“A healing community”

People tend to say in response to what I am describing, that we are not “a healing community” so it doesn’t make sense to strive in the direction I am proposing. This is just a linguistic dodge really; A way of getting around admitting that this is not a healthy Community, and the so of getting around the logical obligation to move toward being one that which would follow from such an admission. How could a healthy community fail to be a healing community for those who came to it?

Objection 2:

“Power Grab”

A third, and very good and reasonable objection to what I propose is the “power grab” objection. This it the reasonable fear that any substantial change in the status quo will not amount to any improvement but will just amount to a shift in the identities of the relatively complacent and the relatively disgruntled and/or effectively excluded.

Since the process I am proposing requires consensus of All members to have any official policy changing power, and since all members all are extremely unlikely to be at any one meeting at a given time, what I am proposing is conservative and even someone possessed of incredible and incredibly misused powers of intimidation or persuasion is not likely to “make the worse appear the better course” and provoke some kind of precipitous folly.

It is true that our culture will change so as to encourage more face to face communication and those who are more persuasive at that might occasionally seem more influential (especially in cases where the facilitator is slacking), but this circumstance will just balance out the biases in having only the o and I board to air ones views and to hear those of others. And as I said, nothing official would change (barring an over-ridable planner decision) without full community consensus.

Objection 3: “Isn’t a labor quota for such meetings itself a kind of coercion?”

There is a difference between coercion and the Challenging, Listening, and Support that is part of the dynamic of friendship with oneself and ones community. Outer coercion produces inner coercion rather than encouraging allowing oneself the time to practice the inner friendship, the inner listening, supporting and challenging that leads to inner consensus. Outer coercion thrives on the dynamic of inner repression and numbing through which we force ourselves to do what doesn’t feel right. The way that this proposal is designed is flexible enough to allow us to listen to whether we really need to be in a meeting at a certain time. Yet it supports our better nature and inclinations to acknowledge and affirm our inherent relationships and responsibilities. And it contains an inherent values-based challenge for us to live up to the best of our hopes for ourselves and the world. Coercion has none of these qualities and simply boils down to a fear-based and ego-based motivation.

Proposal:

Since coming-together, regularly, in a face-to-face, equitable way, to try to reach agreements, to acknowledge and work through disagreements, and just affirm that we are in fact together, is a basic necessity that to some extent is always going to be work; Since such work is a duty, much more of a real duty than most of the things we force on ourselves to make money; Since such work is in fact and extremely basic and fundamental human responsibly without which true cooperation, equality, and sustainability are impossible; Since The future of the world literally depends on people like us figuring how to do this well and then sharing this information with everyone else; Since, if the issue is “getting things done”, there is nothing more important to get done (though it we allow that there are things that are as important); Since, in the absence of this, experiments like ours have no meaning and offer no hope:

We the undersigned,

Commit to the work of actively and in an on-going manner, experimenting with ways of coming-together that are truly and progressively healthy, egalitarian, inclusive, cooperative and sustainable, both inwardly and outwardly, both as means and as end, for ourselves our community and for the world. And as a token of this commitment we agree to have the labor assigner assign on our labor sheet two hours each week for meetings dedicated to the discussion and pursuit and practice of Utopia in the sense. We agree also to an official (or if there are not enough of us to enable the planners to do this, an unofficial) quota of attendance hours for such meetings adding up to a minimum of 4 hours a month.

(note: if you don't sigh below, please take advantage of the blank pages after this one to explain your objections and concerns make suggestions etc. It would probably be better to do this after reading part one of this post).

Signatures: (I put my signature)

end of post.

Well, one other person signed their name to my paper (which was up for a little more than two weeks i think) though another signed dittoing the first persons approving comment on it. Another person wrote something to the effect of objecting to labor credits for meetings as somehow ignoble and not enough in the spirit of true volunteerism. (I replied to the effect that I thought it was realistic volunteerism and that there was nothing wrong with giving structural encouragement to our better natures in this way.) another person pointed out a kind of catch twenty-two in getting people together for long enough for them to collectively decide to make this a official "duty". this person seemed to me to be writing from a behaviorist assumption that i don't share. In my reply to this person I didn't mention this, but shared my growing feeling that people were not signing by paper (at least in some cases) because of the kind of meetings they were imagining as resulting from doing so, and that what I needed to do was be more detailed about the kind of meeting I had in mind; how it could be structured so as to be fair and helpful and even really enjoyable at times. I do have Ideas about this, which I promised to share in yet another O and I paper in the future. Hopefully through the communities critiques and suggested modifications of that future paper, we will end up with a first experiment that we are collectively willing to try and which seems relatively safe from really unpleasant surprises. But that paper has yet to be written and posted. stay tuned if you're interested.

Citizen of the World post.

{note: sorry for the probable lyrical format of this post; can't seem to get the end product to look like what I'm typing in. will try to fix later--p}

Myspace and BtTV

Myspace

As I’ve already posted, I have certainly been communicating with a lot of

strangers on Myspace. As I wrote in a previous post I have joined a lot of groups

there. I am not sure if this is a really healthy thing for me since it means so much

sitting in front of the computer and, as in the case of this blog, my invitations for

deeper involvement and collaboration seem to be being met with heroic

resistance. Still, I find it to be at least good practice in succinctness if sharing my

views and I like being pressed and challenged both as to the content and the

style of what I write. I find I often come up with better ways to explain aspects of

healthy culture through responding to these challenges. What follows is a bunch

of quotations from various posts of mine; some of which might be expanded into

essays on the other Blog. (I feel the need to say that, in some cases I have made

slight changes to the post as they appear in Myspace for the sake of spelling and

clarity.)

To the “Lets start a commune Group”:

I think though, that if we wait for certain unsustainable things to stop of

themselves than in many cases we court a kind of social chaos that will just

increase misery. On the other hand, I don’t believe in arguing against this or that

form of consumption in isolation...The point to me is to create an intrinsically

meaningful and healing way of life as an alternative to the dominant

“consumptive” lifestyle as a whole (a real alternative not just the same thing

stripped down and on a smaller scale) and find some way to introduce this to the

collective consciousness. A real “Life boat” for a sinking ship. Most such “boats”

are not “Life” boats at all but just “survival boats” that have the same hole in them

that sunk the Ship in the first place (though it might be a smaller hole at present).

It is important that this “hole” (I call it sick culture) is named and sustainably dealt

with, in any intentional community worth being in.

To a group on Prison Reform:

I think the problem is cultural essentially. A crime is an act of alienation. It is a

denial, stemming from unconsciousness, of the relationships and responsibilities

inherent in existing at all. The dominant culture of competition, addiction,

abstraction, and greed is based on such denial and unconsciousness, and, on

the whole, the laws generated by this alienated culture, ( a culture which is itself

transmitted, like any culture, across generations through formal and informal

education), produce criminality (both legal and illegal). Most crimes are legal.

Many laws are criminal. Most crimes are crimes of omission rather than

commission. Criminality as I define it is inherent in the culture and the system

that culture produces. There are many people (Scott peck calls them “people of

the Lie”) who are so alienated that they don’t even see that they are alienated,

and so effect a self-righteous myth of decent respectability that involves

projecting their own shadow onto others via a “justice” system that limits the label

“crime” only to certain crimes of commission (and certain other acts that really

are not “crimes” at all in my sense). This amounts to a denial of the criminality

(sickness) of the whole system and the culture that produces it and leads to a

penal system which it’s itself a criminal expression of, as well as a factory for,

alienation and unconsciousness.

A healthy culture would produce a healthy system and a healthy conception of

(and treatment for) alienation/crime. The best way to end crime (both legal and

illegal) is to end alienation and the culture of alienation. How might this be done?

Well I have my Ideas, which I will go into if asked.

To an Interfaith Group (the issue had to do with the idea of a Finite world and an

Infinite God);

I think that both the “finite” and “the infinite” are more relative categories of our

experience than absolute attributes. To be finite means to be distinct; things that

have relative beginnings and ends are relatively distinct from other things,

Something completely infinite (not finite) could not be distinguished from anything

else sense it would have no limits, no way to even recognize it (if you recognize it

by distinguishing it from the finite then it is bounded on that side and so is itself

partially finite and not wholly infinite). So something totally infinite is also totally

indistinct and totally unrecognizable. Moreover both the finite and the infinite can

also be distinguished from what is relatively Definite. Subjectively, our experience

of the finite is on a continuum with and culminates in, our experience of the here

and now of our own being. You could say that the finite is a kind of “thatness” as

distinct from our own definite “thisness” (the relatively infinite, which could also

be described as the relatively “indefinite”, would then be a kind of abstract

“itness”. These categories of experience are not rigidly separate but grade into

each other as when you see an (indefinite) “point” in the distance” that, as it gets

closer becomes “finite”, and so can now be recognized and distinguished as your

friend Sue. As Sue continues to approach and you sit down together and talk

your knowledge and experience of each other becomes relatively Definite. And

there is more than that; if you and sue would sit and meditate together, perhaps

gazing into each others eyes, after a while you both would find that your definite

experience of each other (and of yourselves as well) would itself pass over into

something mysterious, something Transdefinite (what IS existence anyway?). So

we have the relatively Infinite (“itness”), the relatively Finite (“thatness”) the

relatively Definite (“thisness”) and the relatively Transdefinite (“whatness”). These

are the first four of the seven cognitive categories of integral science (also called

Matrix Categories) they are apart of the cosmology of Healthy Culture and I think

our cultures having lost the kind of discernment implied in these relative

distinctions has lead to a lot of confusion and disagreement about religion as

about many other things, including mathematics.

Explaining Integral Science to someone on the Holographic Paradigm Group:

...To call it science at all is a bit risky since, being consciously both subjective

and objective; it has a more human quality. When you assume the fundamental

togetherness of subject and object, for example, then you must understand that

the experiments you perform on the world are also experiments you perform on yourself, and the “data” deriving from such experiments is necessarily both

subjective and objective.

All of this, being understood before hand, changes, not only the nature of the

experiments, but the intention behind them. Instead of being aimed at primarily

predicting and controlling some hyper objectified and disenchanted version of

“the world”, the intention becomes more like catalyzing ones own healing

together with that of others and that of the world. Experiments based on this

assumption have the effect of cultivating the togetherness that is assumed by the

cosmology and culture of the science. (In the same way, the assumptions of

apart-ness of our current science lead to experiments-and “data”- that reinforce

the sense of estrangement and alienation from self and world that was assumed

in conceiving the experiments). I have taken to calling the intention and motive

deriving from assumptions of primary togetherness “the integrative”, in the sense

of asking “what is your integrative” rather than “what is your objective?” and

meaning “what is your subjective And objective goal or rationale”...for a given

experiment; how could this experiment catalyze your own healing together with

that of others and the world?” Such an integral experiment requires at least some

degree of subjective “mapping” and self-knowledge just as much as it requires

some degree objective knowledge. And yet both kinds of knowledge are loosely

and non-dogmatically held and both are expected to change as the science

progresses.

None of this means that the integral scientist boycotts the language, technology

and data of normal science anymore than a doctor boycotts a patient because

the patience is sick. Integral Science explores sick science from its own

assumptions and method as an aspect of the cosmology of apartness which is

itself an aspect of the culture of apartness generally. My engagement with

modern science has been an attempt at moving both it and myself further in the

direction of healing as much as my engagement with everything else in the

dominant culture.

Finally, I posted these song lyrics on a World Peace group and also a Feminism

group. (In the World Peace group the topic was “U.S. soldiers as “Pawns of Evil” and in the Feminism group the Topic was about the invalidity of Gender). Imagine a kind of up-beat ragtime blues:

Uniforms (a song)

By horus/piankhy

You wear a uniform of a woman

You wear a uniform of a man

You wear a uniform of an employee

Or a Jew or a Mexican

You wear a uniform of a soldier boy

A uniform of a civilian too

And when you play the game of “me or them”

You wear a uniform of you:

Chorus:

Ohh, my friends, take off those uniforms!

You wear a uniform of a bourgeoisie

A uniform of a working class

You wear a uniform of Humanity

When the Martians come at last

You wear a uniform of your politics,

Your race and your religion too,

But if you want peace in the world my friend

This is my advice to you:

Ohh, my friends, take off those uniforms!

Well I’m talkin’ about your identity

I’m talkin bout your foolish pride

And the fear and insecurity

That scares you into takin’ those sides

“cause everybody is the same and different,

Butt-ugly and beautiful as any star,

And if you take off all of them uniforms

Maybe you’ll find out who the hell you are!

Ohh, my friends, take off those uniforms!

You wear a uniform of an anarchist

You wear a uniform of a wife

You wear a uniform for every thing you do

And for every part of your life

But there’s no uniform for Personhood

Or for authenticity

So if you're uptight and uncomfortable

Take this advice from me:

Ohh, my friends, take off those uniforms!

‘Cause it’s us it’s us it all of us (so please come off of it)

It’s us is us it’s all of us; this is “Themless” politics

It’s us it’s us it’s all of us good-and-evil, healthy-and-sick

It’s us it’s us it’s all of us: this is “Themless Politics”!

Ohh, my friends, take off those uniforms!

Anyway, many other groups, many posts. Sometimes interesting reactions,

sometimes no reaction. I don’t know how much longer I’ll be at it, but it seems

pretty harmless so far. Who knows, maybe something will come of it.

BtTV and MLF

I have been leaving the farm and going into town at least once a week since

before I started this blog. For a little more than a year I was volunteering in the

“radical” library of an info shop in Charlottesville called Better Than Television. It

was a pretty cool place underneath the Jefferson Theater on the downtown mall

with cafe space as well as space for a gallery, for performance and for books and

zines. Recently the whole project is in a kind of questionable transition since

having to leave the building that they were in because of its sale and renovation.

(any one interested in helping out with this transition can e-mail be and I try to get

you in touch with someone sill actively involved).

I supposed I volunteered mostly because I liked the place and its library even

though I don’t identify as an anarchist like most of the people involved. I guess I

also hoped to find folks interested in Healthy Culture and perhaps do some

cultural activism from the place itself. Also the place was talked about as a kind

of community center as well as in strinckly anarchist terms and there seemed to

be others besides myself who would have liked it to be more inclusive and less

factional in intent and feeling. We, the people in the collective of volunteers,

never managed to consense to any formal vision of the place. Ultimately i ended

up leaving, mostly to have more time to do cultural activism downtown that was

more directly related to my vision.

Anyway, the place had a house guitar and some other instruments and, while

working there I had the idea that we could make some money for rent (BtTV is all

donated time and money) by busking on the Charlottesville pedestrian mall just

outside. The actual busking never came off but what I most enjoyed during my

whole time volunteering there was “rehearsals” for our eventual “performances”

with the one of the main people behind the place and sometimes with others. We

would sometimes actually sit out on the mall and play but nobody ever felt the

desire to put out a hat or anything. We were not “performing” we were just living

and unselfconsciously expressing our lives though the music of our being

together in a friendly way . At some point I saw in the whole thing the potential to

become something so languidly sublime and yet ordinary as to amount to a kind

of cultural activism that could be an effective gateway/introduction to Healthy

Culture as a whole. I went home and wrote up the following flyer:

Music Liberation Front (MLF)

By Piankhy(horus)

The purpose of Music Liberation Front is to liberate music from the sway and

dominance of sick culture (the culture ofApart-ness). MLF is technically just one

aspect of the bigger project of Healthy Culture in general (which could be-but

isn’t- described as a Cultural Liberation Front). In part MLF is just a way of

focusing, when necessary, on how music and song can both express and

encourage Healthy Culture rather than the culture ofApart-ness and alienation.

Without an understanding of, and participation in Healthy Culture (the Culture of

Togetherness) in general, it could be very frustrating to get involved in MLF. Yet

MLF can itself serve as a door to that understanding. This is its chief purpose.

The participants in MLF are not musicians primarily or even at all, but Individual-

Persons who love music (probably more than many musicians do) and so hate to

see its healing potential lost in its forced enslavement to the sick culture

imperatives of competition, specialization, commodification, professionalism,

rigidity, image, ego, and performer/audience dichotomies among other things.

What do we do? People involved in MLF get together to experiment with ways to

do music in healing and egalitarian, consensual and life-logical ways. Anything

can happen from jams, improvised “commercials” for healthy culture, to relative

silence, to just hanging out. Even an impromptu “concert” in possible (though

nothing in the pandering or alienated, competitive or “spectacular” spirit of what

is often called “performance”). Musical specialists or professionals are not

excluded from MLF unless they prove to be unwilling or unable to bracket that

Identity at least during the MLF experimental gatherings, and to have all that they

have learned about music challenged and at times just ignored. People who

know nothing about music per se are equally, or even especially encouraged to

participate to any degree they feel comfortable with.

All MLF experiments are done in the spirit of the Life-Dance, which is the spirit of

Mutuality, and of both outer and inner Consensus. The goal of such experiments

is never Mastery, either of music, of our instruments, of ourselves, or of each

other but rather, the goal is true and living Friendship with Music, with our

Instruments (if we have any), with ourselves, and with each other and the world

at large, as Individual-Persons.

Those involved in the healthy cultural activism of MLF do not accept that Beauty,

in music or in anything else, is separable from Goodness or Truth or true Life.

Beautiful Music for us, consists of words, notes, sounds, and/or silences that are

friendly, uncoerced, truthful, appropriate, and inwardly and outwardly healing in

both the short and long term. Such Beauty-Truth-Goodness-Life as expressed in

beautiful music, and in the Life-Logic that goes along with it as words to tune,

constitute a major expression of Healthy Culture and of the Life-Dance, which is

its ritual aspect that culture.

For more information about MLF, or to get involved, contact Piankhy Thompson

at Piankhy9@hotmail. For more info about Piankhy and about Healthy Culture

generally check out the two blogs integralscience.motime.com and

Lifedancelog.motime.com as well.

Thanks and Welcome,

Piankhy

I showed it this flyer to some folks at BtTv and left some copies there. My fellow

“rehearsers” didn’t really get into it. They hadn’t gotten into Healthy Culture either

so I wasn’t surprised or even discouraged. I was just excited by the idea and I

still am; both because of what it is so far and because of what it might become.

The ritual basically amounts to a Life-Dance party among strangers in which the

Heart-dance (my heart-dances are usually musical or poetic) is getting more

attention, but in which the rest of that whole ritual is really equally there under the

surface, I see it as a broader kind of bridge from healthy culture to sick culture

that might be more accessible to the average person and that engages many of

my own aesthetic preoccupations in a potentially healing way.

I do see a danger though, that the easily-dissociated conception of “music” or

even “art” might not function, as I am intending, as a bridge to healthy culture for

others, so much as as a bridge away from it for myself. So far, the elusive and

unpredictable (because inner-consensus based) nature of the time and place of

these gestures keeps me too much of a moving target for the dominant cultures

co-opting and corrupting attentions to much affect me no matter how “good” (or

“bad”) my playing or singing happen to be on a certain occasion. Such “guerilla-

like” protective spontaneity might be more difficult if I were to be joined by others

on a regular basis, unless those others were already committed to Healthy

Culture. Still, so far, just having a clearer and more worked out vision for my own

musical expression makes me feel that that aspect of my creativity is more in the

service of my whole life and of healing in general then it has was before. I’m very

happy for this and, as for any sign of the other, unhealthy possibility, I remain

awake and Listening...

experiment (metapost)

An Individual-Personal History

I thought I would try to make the experiment of reviewing my own past through the lens of Individual-Personhood and of relating this to the reader. Of course the goal in doing this is to help in coordinating my own healing with that of others (the reader in this case) and the world as a whole. I am still very conscious of the almost inherent phoniness and treacherousness of the act of “publishing” anything really, in a prevailing culture in which one-sidedness is the norm. Such a culture of apartness cannot really deal with the paradoxes of a real human life but must always take either the “decent person” or the “shadow”, for the whole person. Moreover I am still unfortunately, struggling to find reasons to think that any of my readers are capable of being a real friend either to me or to themselves, or of understanding or appreciating the living, paradoxical equality that alone makes friendship possible. (I say this because Its hard not to suspect that the lack of any direct personal engagement with me by the majority of those who read my blogs means that that majority remains in the passive, anonymous alienated-spectator mode from which praise or blame might ultimately be expected --cheering and booing-- but certainly no help at all.)

Since the simple fact that there is “good and evil” (health and sickness) in everyone, and that these exist in relative proportions that are always changing from moment of moment, still seems to be something people want to deny in favor of simplistic “good guy”/”bad guy”, “inferior/superior” narratives, I imagine that I am getting myself into trouble with what I write in this Blog in general and with this post in particular. Moreover, this trouble comes as much from those who “cheer” as from those who “boo” since both are equally responding from a place of apart-ness and alienation (maybe even more trouble can be expected ultimately from the cheering section). The point however, is not to avoid the trouble but how to make it “good trouble”; how to make it trouble that potentially leads to healing both inwardly and outwardly. I am not really sure how best to make it so, but I know it wouldn’t do for me to help the inevitable one-sidedness by either pretending to being either especially “good” and “strong” or especially “evil” and “weak” (relative to my situation), at any greater frequency than anybody else is relative to theirs.

So far, I think I might have tended to err (because of the details of my own sick culture) on the self-deprecating side. I suffer from “arrogance” (by which I mean a fear of vulnerability to the judgments of others which tends to lead to verbalized or unverbalized “preemptive strikes”) and when people who suffer from this try to be honest about themselves it usually comes off as an exaggerated “mea culpa” about things that a person who didn’t have this particular problem would just take in stride as relatively innocuous evidence that they are human like everybody else. Such tedious “confessions” are of course not any less one-sided than a lot of uncritical bragging, and I want to take the opportunity of writing this to strive for some kind of balanced account that doesn’t go off the deep end one way or another.

Just in case I haven’t succeeded in what follows (I’m not sure if in most of it I’ve not just been “confessing” again), I want to assure the reader that I am quite aware that in many ways, and most of the time, I am an extremely strong, intelligent (in some ways even brilliant), courageous, creative, discerning, and good natured person and that what is behind my life is Love much more often than it is fear.

As an Individual (mind/hear/body/soul)

The culture of apart-ness first manifested in my body in an inguinal hernia at birth and a subsequent longer than usual stay in the hospital. I was given, I suppose, whatever the standard treatment was, in 1965 for such an eventuality. I recall being told about having been placed in some kind of artificial environment (an oxygen tent?) and I imagine I was given some kind of anesthesia when I was operated on. I relate this event to my later relative introversion and a general compensatory reliance on heart, mind, and intuition over body despite some very sensual and practical aspects of my nature. Perhaps also, the anesthesia I received in such a traumatic context had the subconscious homeopathic effect of making me less attracted to or curious about anesthetic substances later.

Of course these things need not be reductively understood. Certain metaphysical teachings would say that I chose this birth experience just because it would help engender tendencies that would weaken my socialization and so help me attain the perspective necessary to achieve my life task. Such an explanation appeals to me for various reasons, some of which have to do with things I remember feeling/knowing at from a very young age.

Whatever the causes, my introversion did lead to a need for glasses at an early age as a result of much too much reading in bad postures. Previous to needing and getting glasses I can remember an intensely and utterly vivid experience of the visual material world—of the whole of sensual existence really-- and an equally intense and joyful appreciation of this, which is hard to relate. I don’t know how unusual or not it was but just being in the world would just sort of knock me out. I don’t think that temporarily losing contact with this childlike joy was solely a function of getting glasses, but it always seemed related somehow and ultimately, after unconsciously losing and then having to replace innumerable pairs, I rejected glasses altogether as just a bad idea and started doing eye exercises which, however I have always had trouble continuing with. Nevertheless, I have never gone back to glasses my and eye-sight varies to this day but the majority of the time in which it is substandard is more than counter balanced by the occasions when that unmediated and intensely vivid beauty of the visual world returns for a while.

Still, neither the glasses nor the going without them did much to diminish a growing self-consciousness and disaffection from society that, on retrospect, has turned out to be something of a blessing.

Notwithstanding my hernia at birth, I always had—and have always had—a very strong constitution and can remember few times (none really—though I’m sure there were some in early childhood) when I was ever sick to the point of having to take to bed. Although I was addicted to my share of junk food as a child I remember always liking the meals my mother made for us—a lot of it from our garden--much better. The only problem was that that stuff took so long to make relatively speaking. It actually seemed good to me to have to take caster oil—which I somehow both liked and didn’t like. I was always aware that junk food was junk food, and some part of me liked the justice and the aesthetic readjustment that the anti-junk food of the castor oil seemed to be. Its like I never really identified with the part of myself (the part of me that likes junk food) that it tasted so bad to. This is still true today, not only with food but with all the various kinds of sick culture I still periodically suffer from. I still much prefer things that are good for me and tend to get addicted to other things only because the good things are not available for various reasons.

I suppose I’ve dwelled a little disproportionately on the physical part of my individuality in this account. Perhaps the emotional, mental, intuitive aspects will be better revealed as they immerge in the context of the other venues of Individual-Personhood.

As a Family-member

If a detached perspective was what I needed to accomplish my purpose, then I think I also chose the right Familial venue. With me being the youngest of four kids the others being 7 (my brother) 4 (my sister) and 2 (my other sister) at my birth, saved me from what I imagine would be the intense socialization of an only child. Of course I craved attention, affection and appreciation like any child (much more from my mother than from my father) but at some point (perhaps it was around three or four) realized that this was not forth coming in any form or to any degree that mattered, from either parent. My parents (who stayed together until my father died long after I had left home) seemed to think that they had done enough for me just by feeding me and keeping me physically safe. I have thought since that, in a traditional African village, where the whole tribe raises the kids, this would have been more or less true and I would have likely found the attention, encouragement and affection I “needed” from any number of other people and the elders would have taken care of my initiation/socialization with only a little help from them. At any rate, considering how much they themselves were suffering from sick culture (my father was an alcoholic and my mother had suffered from some problems growing up that I'm not sure she'd want me to go into here), they did the best they could.

Recently I have began to see something symbolic about the house we lived in during my childhood—or at least about the placement of our apartment in it (it was an apartment house). We lived with 2 other families and what was the front door to the house was the door to the apartment on the 1st floor. To get to our apartment you had to go around back and up 2 flights of stars. It was kind of a disconnected, inward-turning setting, and the room I shared with my brother was even further removed from the street on the 3rd floor. The best things about the house itself were probably my mother’s vegetable garden, the big side yard with its pine and hemlock trees, where kids from the neighborhood would come to play softball or touch football, and the big mulberry tree that hung over from a neighbors side of the fence.

I had a “best friend” Johnny, who lived on the ground floor of my apartment house, from around the age of 8 or so until I left home at 18. Maybe hanging out with him saved me from being a totally alienated misanthrope. He was two years younger than me so I was more often than not the leader of the playing we did together. He was the more aggressively friendly of us and I think it must have helped my self-esteem to have him coming to the door so often wanting me to come and hang out. This friendship was set only at home really since we never went to the same schools and would have been in different grades if we did. Consequently I am sure we had great times lying to each other about our various exploits.

As a Neighbor

The house was a pretty old one in an old Jewish suburb called Madisonville in Hamilton County, Cincinnati Ohio. Of course it wasn’t a Jewish community when I lived there—“white flight” had long since occurred—accept for this cool old guy named Mr. Grocery who used to cut his grass with an old-fashioned mower and was quite friendly and talkative. Since it was a somewhat old suburb it wasn’t so bad, for example, we still had sidewalks and corner stores and my grade school, junior high and, as it turned out even my high school, were in walking distance. There was even a little bit of undeveloped woods around my junior high which I latter spent a lot of time in.

Still my neighborhood was far from being a place that nurtures real neighborliness. How could it be? For one thing it was, like most American “neighborhoods” are, totally disconnected from any agricultural base or any real sense of place, inhabited by car-addicted and alienated consumers suffering from sick culture. Outside of frequent visits to the library and the woods, I never explored my neighborhood socially or even physically much. I never got a car or even used a bicycle much when I was too young to drive. I think that deep down I had already rejected most of the infrastructure of my culture and what it was doing to the world, by the age of say, 4. I was not impressed, to say the least, by the human-made world around me (accept for books) and was already taking refuge in them and in solitude at a very early age.

The most important event in my childhood I think was the a vow I made one day to the woods near what was going to be my junior high school. I remember standing in the woods that were struggling under the weight of discarded tires, rusting refrigerators and other garbage, and essentially taking its side against my whole crazy species vowing—in the really solemn way that children are sometimes capable of—to be on its side to the death. I spoke this vow aloud to nature, to the green leaves, to the light, to the spirit of the woods, of wildness, of mystery of Life really,,, and it was like some part of me that wasn’t a boy at all had recognized itself and was saying it with me …The whole thing felt obviously momentous and even somewhat supernatural since I really felt that something was listening when I spoke and accepted what I had said. I have since experienced what I think is that same "Spirit" or mood--always comforting and healing--in various forms and in greater and lesser degrees of intensity, on "vision dances" (life-dance vision quests), in many wild and natural places, and even once in the middle of a city. It is like with that vow I started, or just acknowledged, a life-long (or longer than lifelong) relationship...

As Citizen-of-the-world

Of course as a kid most strangers I saw were white people on TV. For a few years also the apartment next to ours was rented by a white family from—I think it was West Virginia but they weren’t strangers after a while. As I grew older I guess the alienated part of me had its choice between race, gender, religion, and class, as to which identity uniform to wear in the social game of “us vs. them”. I never had much of a sense of being part of a “nation”, and although my family was poor (my father was a taxi driver) I never really cared about money much and had opted out of social competition at an early age. I also stopped calling myself a Christian at about the age of 11 or 12.

What kept me from feeling like an Individual-person so far as the outer world went, was mostly race followed by gender. Through adolescence and early adulthood I was pretty much tormented by what I began to think of much later (with no intended offence to the real persons behind the names) as my “inner Malcolm X” (my reactionary race-pride and, at least theoretical, hatred of “white people”), and my “Inner Marvin Gaye” (a precocious tendency toward romantic and increasingly erotic, sentimentality). Even then I knew that these were archetypal perils that I was susceptible to, identity-traps that I could enter, but that would only lead me further away from my real self and my real purpose for coming into the world. I was so aware of this purpose (though on a completely emotional/intuitive rather than intellectual level) and of this danger to its realization, that I unconsciously performed the following example of cultural and psychic aikido in self-defense:

What I did was choose to go to the almost all white high school to which I had received a scholarship as a result of my scores on one of the routine tests of the time. Since, as I recall, my family did not at all encourage me in going to this private, almost all white, school, some part of me must have known that my own true identity would not have survived my being bussed to the big, mostly black high school that others from my neighborhood were going to. I seemed to know intuitively that, if I had done that my inner “Malcolm x” and my inner “Marvin Gaye” would have been able to double-team me in a way that, at the time, I felt unable to resist. I felt sure that if I had gone to such a school I would have betrayed myself by acting on the hand-me-down, default, identity-uniform of anyone with my culturally defined physical and social characteristics. Instead of becoming my own Individual-Person I would have “lived” a short confused and miserable life as a figment of other peoples stereotyped imaginations.

Instead, I put Malcolm and Marvin at loggerheads by going to this white private school. All during high school lust battled hatred (well probably it was just extreme anger and frustration—with most of that as much because the people I went to school with were likely to become parts of “the machine” as that they were “white” per se) while I endeavored to hide both of these contradictory feelings behind a façade of wit and intellect. I had a few white friends even a few white women friends. Even a few attractive and attracted white women friends. I remained a virgin (Actually, my female friends were virgins too for the most part, but we didn’t really talk about sex so much as hint and joke about it. Unlike them however, I remained a virgin until the age of 38, when I and another experimented for a time with Taoist/Tantric forms of sexual healing in the context of Healthy Culture). These high school “friendships” were by no means “Living Friendships” (and maybe they would not have existed at all it weren’t for Marvin’s persistent struggles against the prohibitions of Malcolm), but at times there was really a kind of freedom there, when factional identities of both race and gender fell away and real gestures of Friendship and compassion as something like Individual-Persons could happen.

That of course did not keep the stress of the whole, barely tenable, situation from nearly killing me. As I recall, the year after my graduation was the year of my suicide attempts. I guess the stress of actively having to disguise the struggle that was going on in me, while at the same time actually trying to figure out who I really was and what was really going on (so that, among other things I could keep the promise of my childhood) was almost fatal. Some part of me had just become intolerably numb—it was “a Bell Jar” kind of thing. There was probably also a submerged despondency as to my extremely uncertain future since I had refused to actually go to college (I am probably the only person in the history of that school to do this) and had no Idea what I was going to do.

I am not sure if I was ever in any real danger though. The attempts were both of them pretty lame, though somewhat poetic.

As a Soul

   I announced I was no longer a Christian to my family at around the age of twelve and began refusing to go to church (I am still pretty amazed at how my parents more or less accepted both this and the sort of moral intensity which made me announce it at all rather then just play along). I had been a sincere Christian and had read the gospels (as I recall, the whole bible) by that time and had become so mad at Christians that dropping out of the church was actually much less than I wanted to do. If I had been a more assertive (courageous?) person I would have probably told off both my parents and the congregation. As it was, I was still under my parent’s psychological thumb so far as out and out mutiny went. Besides we really didn’t have many really two-way conversations about much by this time.

    Though I had stopped being a Christian because of digging the Christ of the Gospels and in protest against the lameness of the Church rather than out of some atheistic or even agnostic skepticism, I was always also interested in science and in other religions as well, so I suppose that from the age of 12 till about the age of 24 I was on some kind of philosophic and spiritual quest. I suppose the first big influence besides the Tao Te Ching, was Krishnamurti. Or maybe Allen Watts came first. Chang Tzu. Buddhist studies. Hindu stuff like “Patanjali and “Autobiography of a Yogi”, The Cloud of Unknowing, The Divine Horsemen, The story of Quetzalquatl, The book “Black Elk Speaks” made an absolutely indelible impression on me as did the works of Carlos Casteneda. Western Philosophers never impressed me much although I enjoyed reading the works of Plato and even Aristotle. Gurdjieff. Wendell Berry. Masenobu Fukuoka. Spenglers, “The Decline of the West”. Rene Dubos’ the “Mirage of Health”. Pretty much everything by Ivan Illich. Victor Hugo. Louis Mumford. Blake and various other Poets, Musicians and Songwriters (I have always been into Poetry and Song). Mantak and Maneewan Chia. Rupert Sheldrake. “Democracy in America”. R.A. Schwaller De Lubicz. Carl Jung. Stanley Diamond. David Bohm. Christopher Alexander. Tolstoy. Thoreau. Credo Mutwa. Anne Wilson Schaef. There are a few others, like Severen Shaeffer, Malidoma and Sobonfu Some, Weston Price, Derek Jensen, Susan Campbell who I have since encountered and been encouraged by to varying degrees.

Some of this “research” was happening through high school, some was during the time I was bumming around the country, visiting intentional communities, being “homeless” or living in garrets. By then I had given up the whole Idea of “trying to survive”, and in fact, without saying it even to myself in so many words, I had given up even the meager security of membership in my family of birth, and was pretty much obsessed by this time with "Truth". But I wasn’t obsessed with the prospect of finding out any real answers in books even though it may seem like that. What I wanted was the kind of answers that I could Live and that would actually begin diagnosing and treating our collective situation in real, practical and useful ways, and I had no reason to think that that was going to come from books. What I was really obsessed with was the necessity of doing something that would keep me occupied and out of the system until I could give birth to the answers I felt somehow already pregnant with.

All of this time I had felt strong intuitive a inarticulable “certainties”. I had felt that this intuitive part of me was alone “unconditioned”, as Krishnamurti would have put it, by my culture and that I could trust neither ready-made answers nor even the language they came in (after, all—said the Malcolm part of me--, as a “black person”, my language as well as my whole culture was some ersatz travesty forced on me and my ancestors by crazy white people and not my real language and culture at all). Anyway, however mixed were my reasons for clinging to it, I felt that this pre and post-verbal, intuitive part of me was pregnant with not only the appropriate diagnosis but also the appropriate prescription. You could say that it was the only part of me I really identified with as actually being me. The rest was more or less an act, a halfhearted improvisation of a bad role in a bad play that I despised and knew I had to eventually rewrite. Until then all I had to do was sort of filibuster or stall and not do anything to kill this real part of me, such as acting with “common sense” and getting myself initiated into the culture in certain key ways such as having sex, trying to make money, or spending too much time with…well anybody. I suppose I also had to learn how to be a good midwife and help birth these brainchildren and prepare them to survive in this culture. For that I had to be able to dress them up in words and concepts that others could understand and so effectively “get to” modern culture before it “got to” me. So maybe that was what all the reading was about in addition to being something to do to keep me out of trouble.

As an Individual-Person

Anyway, at the age of 24, in a garret in Portland Oregon, the first of these “brainchildren” (they are equally “heart” and “soul” children) was born in the form of what eventually became the essay “Good Sense and the Meaning of Life” among other things. Later (that was 16 years ago) other children were born and the whole of the Idea and Practice of Healthy Culture and the Life-dance (such as it currently is) came together. These ideas are still being born and growing and changing, but it was only since that first birth that I have been (at least consciously) like a kind of single-parent trying to keep them healthy, to find a good home for them and, even trying to “marry off’ the more mature ones to suitably healthy aspects of whatever else good is trying to happen in the world. But such a metaphor wears thin really. What I am basically giving birth to is myself as healing Individual-Person and so to whatever of healthy culture that I can manifest though my best attempts at the dance of Life and Togetherness that is its practice.

That Practice and the various experiments and gestures that constitute it has continued though periods of homelessness, living in garrets, and various attempts to find a home for Healthy Culture in various intentional communities of which Twin Oaks is the most recent. And of course these blogs themselves are part of that practice…

Though this has all been imminently worthwhile, it is also more difficult and precarious even than it may sound, and my life has more than its share of the reversals, the embarrassing failures that come from trying at all, and the resulting despondency. Everything is still very up in the air; I still have not found any “Life-Dance partners”, any real friends in the sense that I mean. Perhaps I will end up leaving Twin Oaks to continue drifting. I suppose I could still end up betraying myself, either though literal suicide of by selling out in some way. Things are still devolving in the same way there were when I first showed up in the world. Healthy Culture is still, so far as I know, the pathetically small cultural pilot project---the stubborn obsession really--of a somewhat comical person with a weird name in the boondocks of Virginia whom nobody’s ever heard of. Well, like Gandalf says in the movie “there never was very much hope” anyway. There’s more than enough meaning though, more than enough Life, more than enough to be grateful for in just being able to really recognize and fight the good fight, however things turn out. If nothing else, it’s a good story…

Thanks and Welcome,

Piankhy

Ps: The seeming success story of my individuation does not mean “Malcolm” and “Marvin” are extinguished in me (and, I want to repeat that by choosing those names for certain of my shadow aspects I mean no disrespect to their original holders since I have a great deal of affection for “them” in whatever sense I can be said to even know anything about “them” at all). They—or more accurately my own tendencies toward factional identity around race and gender/sexual lines---are still a part of me just as is the tendency to occasionally succumb to the temptation of junk food. I have not been “cured” so much as I have invented and entered into a kind of “twelve-step” program.

“Cure” in some one-sided absolute and final sense is really in this case, not only unnecessary but even un-desirable. All it would do is make friendship, equality, and the healthy culture between myself and the reader, that much more difficult, since I would then be a “superior” rather then a sometimes alienated Individual-Person just like you. You would cease to have real and equal responsibility with me for Healthy Culture and its good sense, Life-logical ways and could hide in exaggerated and childish passivity, behind the “uniform” implied by your lesser “rank”. That would only mean that we would then just have recreated the same rigid intolerable phoniness of sick culture all over again. Since I am not interested in “followers” but in Friends and “collaborators” (Life-Dance partners) I don’t have to cover up the extent to which I am still a dope (though I still do cover up some extent of it, which is dopey in itself, but I trust that my friends will help me with this). As it stands, I’m sure I’ll give you more than enough chance to show some Life-Logical Goodsense, responsible Good Will and critical Good faith (not to mention creative Good Taste) toward me…that way you’ll feel more justified in showing them toward yourself… All of this takes a good deal of unnecessary and counter productive pressure off what already amounts in some ways to a raid on the impossible as it is. Of course I’ll still be consciously working on my Dance, (I’ll certainly keep trying not to “fall off the wagon” of Healthy Culture altogether) but this will not be happening out of the need to keep up some kind of image, but for its own sake and for the sake of the Living Friendship that by then have been born between us.

Soul Post

I publish the following email correspondence by way of a soul check-in. Not too long ago I joined “Myspace” and various groups it hosts (an interfaith group among them) relating to ultimate things with the idea of involving myself in a venue of people trying to come together as souls. I haven’t much engaged in the interfaith group yet but I posted the following on a group called the “Holographic Universe”. The following was my first posted Topic which was called: "Science, Culture, Legitimacy and Wholeness"

I suppose I could have been more diplomatic or something about expressing my point of view. I guess I assume less attachment to ones own presumptions on the part of others than it’s realistic to assume. I haven’t received any responses in the forum to my statements but the following “private” correspondence ensued as a result. I print it both as a clarification of my ideas and as an example of the kind of conversations I hope to have—and to proceed with, about such issues.

So far Mike has not responded to my last e-mail. I am hoping he will but I suspect that, as in most cases of Belief, disagreement is being avoided and that a lack of openness to persuasion on his part is experienced on his part or assumed on my part, or both. I sometimes find it hard to communicate, before acting on it, my assumption of a mutual critical enquiry that is not the same as competitive debate (this assumption is essential to what I call “Good Faith”). Disagreement, when it is genuine and not just competitive, is exciting to me because I believe in a primarily shared reality (not just a primarily shared objective reality but a primarily shared subjective one too). Disagreement to me then means the possibility of my, the other person, or perhaps both of us learning something and in this case learning something important. Therefore I don’t hesitate to disagree with people or require agreement on much as a condition of association. But I am learning, from the results so far, of the following exchange, that I need to be more explicit about this. Perhaps my first post to the interfaith group will be on the topic of this “good Faith itself”. Anyway Here is the exchange with a very little self-editing on my part. Mikes words are in quotes:

"I just skimmed over your post in the holographic universe group, and I was intrigued so I read some of your page. You definitely have some really unique and interesting ideas. I am a student of psychology, and my interest is primarily in consciousness. How does consciousness play into your theory(s)?

What first occurred to me when I read this question was two other questions; "Who's consciousness or "Who is it that is being aware?"(If I could, I would italicize thee "who's") In other words, the issue of Identity (italicized again) as a part of culture came up for me as some kind of necessary priority to, or corollary with, the consideration of "conscious". The other question was "consciousness of What?” Integral Science assumes that the subject-object dichotomy is not primary, so to me these two questions are mutually dependent on each other.

"I ask this especially because I recently read that one of the accepted definitions of consciousness is awareness of awareness. The example I read was that when one is sleep-walking, he is aware of his environment, but he doesn't know he's aware, so he is yet unconscious. But the funny thing is that, how often are most people really aware that they are aware? I would guess not often. This would mean that most people are not fully conscious most of the time! So for the last few days I have been trying to make a point to be more aware of my own being aware, and it seems to be changing my perspective ever so slowly, and in a very subtle way."

I would not say that consciousness is awareness of awareness. It might be useful to say that consciousness is awareness of Togetherness--including the fundamental togetherness of subject and object I just affirmed. Such awareness leads to an Identity that is not so one-sidedly located in the dissociated subject (or in the equally dissociated "object" which co-arises with this).

The awareness you describe seems one-sidedly subjective to me--an awareness of the awareness of self (or perhaps even of "Self")--that falls short of what I would like to call "consciousness" because it seems grounded in dualistic cosmological and identity assumptions of apart-ness (reinforced of course, by the repeated Rituals and the alienation-supporting Infrastructure modern "civilization" which are the other part of relatively sick culture).

The awareness of fundamental Togetherness makes the awareness of Self (subjective) also the awareness of Nature" (objective). Or to be less confusing, it makes for the awareness of "Self-Nature" as the affirmation and experience of fundamental "Togetherness" as an Individual-Person.

"I tend to believe in many religions to some extent, although I identify as Christian for several reasons which I can explain later if you're interested. The main thing I believe, though, is that God is pure consciousness, and that after we die we merge with this ultimate consciousness."

I see, in most cases, the dissociation of God from Nature as the analogous to the dissociation of Self From Nature, of humanity from nature, of Humanity from God, of Mind from body, of ego from id and even of "x" from "not-x". Faith in such dissociations as fundamental is a kind of faith in a cosmology of fundamental Apart-ness grounded in a felt experience of primary alienation induced by sick culture. It is sourced also in unconsciousness in the sense I am using. But don’t misunderstand me and think that I am denying this apartness as real with a small "r"; I am denying it as Fundamental--as Real with a capital "r". The logic of togetherness is paradoxical in that it includes the logic of apart-ness as well (see my essay on "Life-Logic" in the integral science blog)

I think you are definitely on to something with your idea of a 'culture of togetherness', and I’m very curious how you view consciousness and God. I look forward to hearing from you!

Well I don’t really see the point in being a pantheist like Spinoza even though I affirm Self-Nature" rather then a one-sided God-as-Self. I see Self-Nature as the essence of the "Matrix of Being" that expresses itself in Identity as Individual-Personhood. This "Matrix of Being" is a "Womb" that is "inseminated" by "Spirit" or "Freedom" and so conceives and engenders new forms of Being. I would not call "Spirit", "God" though, since that would be extremely misleading. Spirit is Freedom. Freedom is Spirit. The best you can say is that it Transcends Identity. But even that must be understood in a Life-Logical sense...

"I have another essay in my blog called "good sense and the meaning of Life" which seems relevant to some of the above though it’s a little out of date now and I should rewrite it."

Having said all of that about "consciousness" I still want to mention the book I am reading called "plastic words" by Uwe Poerksen, an associate of the late Ivan Illich. Plastic words are one-time vernacular words like "development" or "progress" or "sexuality" that used to mean one thing but that, as a result of being co-opted by science and then reintroduced into the vernacular, have lost their authentic rootedness in real experience. Such words become "square pegs" (the authoress originally called them "Leggo words") which those trying to be “in the know" eagerly begin to force into the round holes of there actual experience of themselves and the world.

I think that if the science that these words were co-opted by (and re-issued from) were an Integral Science that was a part of a healthy culture, then such words would be more meaningful than the vernacular originals and not less. They would not be plastic at all (perhaps they would be different words altogether). As it stands though, such sterilized Leggo words all fit together to make a plastic gateway into a plastic, and dissociated brave new world in which we are all reducible to externally manageable bundles of socio-economic abstractions.

I mention all this in order to wonder aloud whether or not "consciousness" and "awareness" are not sort of New Age plastic words".

Anyway, thanks for your questions and interest. Hope we can keep up the conversation.

P.s. I am thinking of posting this letter and another on another topic as part of my citizen of the world post in my Life-Dance Log blog. would you mind that?

“wow, by reading your response to my message, I realize that I have certain assumptions about things that I didn't realize I had! What those assumptions are, I’m still not sure. If you would, tell me more about the awareness of togetherness - that is something I definitely need to think more about.

And no, I would not mind at all if you used that letter in your blog. In fact I would be honored to be in any way connected to what seems to me to be bordering on the long sought-after theory of everything!”

I thank you for your enthusiasm, but what you write here makes me want to try to transform the sense of our association more in the direction of healthy culture and head off certain manifestations of apart-ness inherent in us communicating only through this Public/Private rather than really Individual-Personal medium. What I mean is that I am interested in egalitarian relationships of what I call “Living Friendship” between individual-persons as such. We are all equal in the relationships/responsibilities of Individual-Personhood since such relationships/responsibilities are inherent in existing at all. Also, having all been born into a culture of apart-ness, we are all more or less estranged, alienated and fucked up to some degree (which degree itself changes from minute to minute.) What interests me is the possibility of us entering into a kind “conspiracy of Healthy Culture” where we can affirm the equality that allows for friendship and “mutual aid” in real learning of healthy culture. I am probably being over sensitive, but certain kinds of praise tend to make me suspect a kind of public/private gloss emerging in which the point becomes some kind of competitive “Greatness” rather than simply the sharing and comparing of understandings as a prelude to some kind of cooperation around actions intended to further healing in both ourselves and the world. In saying all of this I am trying head off any kind of Primary one-sidedness in our relation to each other, so as to make room for the possibility of healthy culture and real, Living-Friendship between us.

“Tell me more, also, about this matrix that is a womb. I agree that Spirit is Freedom and so forth, but why can't we worship it and call it God? What I mean to say is, what is "worship" and what is "God"?”

Worship in a culture of Apart-ness is a ritual of apart-ness that tends to reinforce alienation from the thing worshiped. Master and servant relationships are not relationships among equals and it is only as equals that real healing friendship is possible—this applies as much to externalized projections of this relationship (in which God is the master) as internalized ones in which the mind or ego is usually (though not always) the master. Moreover, since the word God is a projection of the inwardly and outwardly dissociated individual in most cases, the implied righteous father in a divorce with Nature, talk about God (Self), as opposed to “Nature” is just going to reinforce those dissociations and lead away from, rather than toward faith in and progress towards Self-Nature. I know that to talk of Spirit as “inseminating the matrix of Self-Nature” necessarily makes “Spirit” seem like a traditional masculine “God” so maybe I should use another metaphor (I can't really think of a better one so far), but to confuse “God” or “Self” with “Spirit” is I think a terrible confusion.

It is only possible to approach Spirit through Self-Nature (I suppose you could also call it “God-Nature” or even “Nature-God”) and that means cultivating ones own Self-Nature as an Individual-Person. This is done through the Practice of Healthy Culture, through rituals (and cosmologies and identities and infrastructures) of inner and outer Togetherness. Worshiping a one-sided “God” (or a one-sided, Feminine “Nature" for that matter) involves the opposite of this really; it is really the worship of Apart-ness (of divorce) and the cultivation of Apart-ness. Of course I am using the word “worship” in the usual traditional sense. I’d be curious as to the etymological meaning of the word. Maybe some other definition and use of the word can be justified…

It occurs to me to say rather that Real Freedom finds You, and that it is more likely to be attracted (in a positive sense) to a You dancing the Life-Dance of Togetherness as a practice of Healthy Culture than to any kind of “worship” as ordinarily conceived. But that is probably already saying much too much about Freedom which is after all, Free to be even self-contradictory…

There is more about the matrix in the integralscience blog. It’s in the archives.

Familial Post

It shouldn’t really seem strange that after a house meeting I would feel so discouraged about the familial culture here at Tupelo, the household I live in. If just having any kind of meeting were healthy culture then there would be a fair amount of healthy culture in the world. The fact is that most meetings, tonight’s included, end up being distractions from, both what is most essential in what is happening in the world and what is most essential in what is happening with-in ourselves. The worst thing is that having such meetings actually gives one the totally false sense that one is really “taking care of things”. This is really worse than not having a meeting at all. Getting through the agenda, when the agenda includes nothing that really matters just feels…lame.

Yet I might have—if only briefly—been able to tell myself that the meeting went fairly well if I could have kept myself from mentioning the Life-Dance Party that I do in my household at least once a week. I felt the need, for the benefit of the new people there, to bring it up as a thing I do here and, describe it (a very little) and invite further discussion as some other time. What I said took probably less than a minute to say and yet what followed was I think a pretty uncomfortable and slightly ominous silence. Certainly the most ominous of the meeting, which had been fairly lively before. After which silence the meeting was, it seemed to me somewhat hastily, ended.

It’s been a few weeks since I wrote the above. And though I still feel the need not attend another house meeting until I get inner consensus to literally put “Healthy Culture” on the meeting agenda, I feel pretty withdrawn about the whole thing at the moment, somewhat astonished at my own audacity at even considering that real change is possible in the situation. Such a mood of withdrawal is not at all unfamiliar to me. It’s not good for me to feel this way though and I need to keep reminding myself that imagined—or even real—hopelessness is no reason not to keep doing what makes sense. Bringing up the obvious thing, the elephant in the middle of the room that nobody wants to talk about is, like doing Life-dance parties here, necessary and helpful for the sake of my own sanity if in no other way. This is something I usually don’t hesitate to do in one-to-one conversations with people in my household so I’m not sure why my intuition protests so much at it sometimes in groups. Perhaps it’s telling me that I am myself too weak in healthy culture, to withstand concertedly willful misunderstanding or overt or deliberately covert hostility.

Generally speaking, being “on the wagon” my self about sick culture means that encountering other in groups for me is something like a recovering alcoholic entering a bar alone at happy hour. The thickness of collusion and denial are too intimidating and overwhelming in a group setting. It becomes too difficult not to either succumb or overreact in some way that would almost be just as bad. In the case of the above meeting I did a little of both, though the overreacting (if that is what it was) was delayed and private.

I can be “passing through” such a situation and the decision not to stop and name what is going on in it is easy to make in the name of goodsense in the light of exigencies of the moment, but deliberate attendance at such a pseudo-coming-together without some real preparation and readiness to challenge what is happening is a misjudgment that is just weakening. Mentioning the life-dance party at the end of the meeting was a saving grace even though my announcement lacked all together the tone of indomitable self-confidence that might have pleased my vanity or of the unconditionally compassionate hospitality that I would have liked to have actually felt, and even though the immediate results were so unpleasant.

The longer term results (a least I imagine that what I said at that meeting had something to do with this), is that a few new household members have on occasion joined me in life-dancing. Actually sometimes I have felt joined much more in body than in spirit, but at other times at least some of the spirit seems to have been there as well and just yesterday some one actually asked for a formal introduction to and experience of, the ritual of conscious hanging out that the Life-dance party is. I got some needed practice teaching the Facilitation breath that opens (and sometimes closes) the ritual and that alone was very worthwhile even if nothing else comes of it.

And yet I still feel that, since those willing to sample a part of my cultural “twelve-step program” have nevertheless declined to abstain or even fully admit to “addiction”, whatever bond results from our association might just as easily serve to “pull me off the wagon” as to help them to get on it. After all, most of the world is on their end of the rope and I am the only one on my end so far as I know. Still, the danger and precariousness of the situation—of my situation in general as well as at Tupelo and Twin Oaks-- is part of what makes it interesting, of what makes it Living and not just surviving. Success for me is not avoiding trouble so much as getting myself in the right kind of trouble. “Healing trouble”, “Healthy Culture trouble” is trouble that has the likely outcome of being a healing crisis both inwardly and outwardly, of making both my self and the world more whole. I can’t take for granted that what is going on in my Familial venue is really that now, or, if it is, that it will remain so, but it feels alright for the time being.

Anyway, I seem to have written my way out of the mood I was in when I began finishing this post.

Listening…

Individual

Vision Dance
A vision of Names

In addition to the Death Day ritual that I usually do this time of year, I did a "Vision Dance". A vision dance is really very similar to a Vision Quest, and the main reason I'm calling it that is because the differences between the two might strike individuals from native traditions as enough to disqualify what I do for the title Vision Quest. I feel sensitive to this right now because I was going to do this "quest" in pensylvania, with another person who rather closely follows a certain native tradition and realized certain differences which, combined with a miscommunication between my friend and me about what was actually going to happen once I got there, led to us finally (but ultimatly amicably) decide just to do our own seperate things.

Also, Calling it a Vision Dance brings out for me the way that the experience is really like a four-day Life-dance Party without food (or in this case, even water) to prevent or dilute the full quorum of mind, heart, body, and intuition necessesary for real inner consensus (which can take the form of a "Vision") about where one is at and should go as an individual person. I can also imagine doing such a dance with other people.

So after doing my Life-Dance walk (see a previous individual entry Death Day), my stay at the chosen place of my symbolic death lasted, not until sunrise, like last year, but for 4 days and nights. Besides a beat up tent (for if the weather got really bad), a sleeping bag, a quart of water in case I realized that not drinking the whole time was impossible, and some symbolic objects, there was just me out there in Monaccan Land, which is just this parcel of uninhabited land south of our main property.

My Individual Name

For me the doing of vision dances is cumulative, and this being the seventh one for me, it took me back to all the ones I have done previously including the first one, which was on a deserted black-sand beach in Hawaii. I always have a kind of vulnerable, teary-eyed, apologetic moment when I first set up the circle, a kind of "here i am again as stupid and forgetful as ever" type feeling. I feel grateful that the woods are willing to even have me there and I feel despondent at what always seems like the lack of sufficient progess I have made over the intervening years or moths, in the direction of both my own and especially of the worlds Healthy Culture. I express all of this aloud, usually through tears, to the the trees and Spirit and who ever else is listening.

This time also, entering the circle, I asked aloud for for a new name, if that was a good thing for me to have in this fortieth year of my life. I imagined that it might come to me in dreams or that I might hear it in the cry of some animal or in other sounds. I wanted a name that, unlike "Piankhy", did not have such gendered, racial, and class historical conotations. Of all the factional identifications that make up identity-politics in the present culture of Apart-ness, I think that that of race is even stronger in me than that of gender,(although a little less strong perhaps, than that of species) and i wanted to challenge myself with a name that trancended at least that if not both race and species.

But I want to stop here to say some thing parenthetically about individual-personhood, the factional indentity-politics of "Humanity", and the Vision Dance.

All beings, Human and Non-human, have familial venues of some sort, they have "neighborhoods" of some sort, they share the world with "strangers", they have some soul or relationship with ultimate things, and they have a greater or lesser degree of individual integrity. All beings therefore are equal in the relationships, rights, responcibilities and destinies of individual-Personhood. Of course what comming together as an indivdual, or what comming together with others as a neighbor, might mean in the case of this particular fox or that particular fly larva is likely to be very different in detail from what it means for me or you, but so far as my identity-politics goes they are my equals as neighbors, family, or fellow citizens of the world (by which i mean more the "the planet") This means that any kind of "Humanism" that puts "us" againts the "them" of other beings is just as alienated and factional as racism or patriarchy. Of course "equality" doesnt mean inferiority any more than it means superiority. What it should mean is mutual respect and the possibiltiy of Friendship.

The Vision Dance, seems to me a good experience for transcending speciesism, occuring as it does in an environment in which the only other people are non human people and in which our common destinies and mysteries of Death and Life are not obscured by any artifical distractions.

Anyway, back to my name. As I said I thought it would come, if it came at all, in a dream or from outside sounds that I would hear. but this is how it happened. On the afternoon of the third day, after making my request again the second night, I was basically lying in the dirt--which, rather than grass, was what was under the dead leaves of my site. I had picked up a stick from somewhere and kind of just noticed after the fact, that i had begun to write out some letters...which I of course immediately assumed was going to be my new name. It was a somewhat odd name, not anything relevant to anything I know about myself or my heritage or anything. I was spelled differently but sounded somewhat like a common female name. I didn't really like it at first. It occured to me sudenly to grab the stick with my right hand, (i am more or less left-handed) and see what happen. I let myself write out another name, thinking I guess that it would be my last name. this was a little more problematic because I had to make sure while I was writing that i was not manipulating what was happening (for example I didnt like the sound of what i was getting so i had willed myself to keep going after the inspiration or whatever had really stopped, hoping the new syllable would redeem the sound. I immediately decided I should drop that syllable). Finally I took the stick lightly in both hands and wrote what I imagined would be my middle name. My heart immediatedly responded wholehearthedly to my whole name once my middle name was added, though just an instant later, i became critical again, finding problematic associations. All in all though I did accept it as my name, as my individual name. Later I began to feel that the first of the three names was my "Self"name, that the second was my "Nature" name and that the third, uniting the vertical "axis" of my individuality and connecting it with the nexus of more "horizontal" social relationships, was my "SelfNature" Name. I concieved that telling someone one or all of these names should probably be an act of Living Friendship inspired by mutual inner and outer consensus both between Life-dancers in the context of healthy culture. We would probably exchange names actually, since the other person would also have recieved an individual name in the same or a similar way.

A Vision of Names

Then I had a kind of "vision" of names, a vision of a process or a culture where in we would all ultimately have seven names, I my vision we would each recieve, at different stages in our lives, and through different rituals, a familial name, and neighborly name, a citizen-of-the-world name, a soul name, and a 3-fold individual name. I imagined that the individual name would be the only one that was arrived at solely though the complete (so far a other humans go) solitude of the visiondance and that the other names would be the product of inner and outer concensus between the individual and there famility, neighbors, strangers, and "soul-companions/fellow religionists-or-whatever. Perhaps to recieve a civil name for example, the indivual would, among other things, have to travel extensively and various strangers from around the world have to come to consensus with that indivual about that name in a process that would created binding international friendships. A kind of "international walkabout" I guess.

In my vision. there were many such supporting ideas and details about what would make a beautiful ritual in of naming, and so of initiation/socialization in each of the five venues. In a way I feel that I am still having the vision. I want someday to evoke the whole thing poetically, interwoven with various other rituals, perhaps in a kind of utopian novel about what Healthy Culture really would look like as the dominant culture. Of course it would all be actually doable, and the point of the novel, like the point of these blogs, would be too inspire help in doing it. I actually dont want to be--nor do i think I will really end up-imagining or visioning the whole thing myself. I am trying to share what I am sharing as an invitation to collaboration and co-creativity along these lines. It seems that this process in which new aspects and possibilities of healthy culture are concieved during the ritual/experiment in others, is pretty endless. I am of course inviting you the reader to join me in this. May be one day we will, in the spirit of Living friendship and as members of a growing and thriving Healthy Culture, have inner consense to share with each other one--or maybe even all three--or our Individual Names.

Experiment Post (meta-post)

I am noticing that , as I continue these entries, I find myself having to talk about other people in the various venus of my Life-Dance. A relatively new developement is that these blogs are listed on the website of the intentional community where I live, and so its probable that some people l live with will see the entries and so see whatever I may have written about them or those they know. I want to be as responcible as I can in such a situation and I want to clarify what I mean by that.

My sense of responcibily in this or any situation really , is never going to take the form of factional identity polics and onesided, dissociated loyalty to any factional group as such. My loyalty is to Individual-Persons as such (including non-human beings), to Life, to Living Truth, and to healing and Healthy Culture in general. I cannot see how, when I am True to these things, I can fail to be true in the deepest sense to everything else.

In the case of the previous post about my neighborhood of Twin Oaks, I do not see my neighborhood in a private (or even public) sense as primeraly seperated from rest of the world but rather in hopefully responcible relationship with it. I see it as an experiment, (not unlike that of "Democratic Government" itself) in establishing a good way of life. It is important--for the sake of learning, and for the sake of those wanting to make similar experiments or to help with this one, and also for the sake of the experiment, the experimenters themselves, to be as Truthful as possible about the results, so far, of what has been undertaken. This seems obvious to me.

What seems a little problematic is not that I have included others in these entries but the way that the way I have included them. I dont think I want to mention them by name (even just by first name as I have sometimes done) unless I have explicite premission to. More importantly I don't want to refer to others by gender any more since think this will help me and the reader to think of them more as Individual-Persons. I can't commit to any second person non-gendered substitures yet, I want to try out different ways of doing this and see how it goes.

Neighbor post

(Note: I recently posted the following paper on the Ideas and Opinions board in my neighborhood of Twin Oaks community.)

When I first came to Twin Oaks I wrote an O and I paper about healthy vs. unhealthy economies. I spoke about malproduction, malconsumption, maldistribution and mal-employment as all equally present and dominant in a sick economy. About malconsumption specifically I wrote, “When anesthesia is the primary commodity, pain is the primary reality” and tried to point out how it is the pain of a meaningless life (a fear-based, alienated “life” dedicated to distraction from the relationships, responsibilities and destinies inherent in existing at all) that makes so much anesthetic Malconsumption necessary. I also tried to describe what a healthy progressive economy of Good Consumption, Good Production, Good Employment, and Good Distribution might look like in general and here at T.O. in particular. I don’t remember getting much response to all this by anybody one way or the other.

Since then we have lost the ability to consume as much as we used to. The easiest response to such an event is to try to maintain the status quo by various means such as expanding Tofu etc. and that is what we have done. It seems though, that we are having trouble motivating ourselves to do the amounts and kinds of work that is implied in this response. I imagine that in part such a lack of enthusiastic response is due to the less-than-consensual way, that the decision was made to move in this direction. And I think that there are other reasons. But I think that on a deeper level such reluctance is based on the same impulse to lead a different and more meaningful kind of life that brings people into community at all—even to a community such as Twin Oaks.

I mean, the opportunity to live in fear, in addiction, and in denial of the inevitability of death and change, to trade Living for survival, to sacrifice the present moment as well as the long term future for short term illusory “security” and “comfort”, --all of this is available everywhere. It is the very “American Way of Life”, in defense of which our country is willing to kill or suppress anybody from anywhere. Needless to say, none of this is very inspiring and attempts to make it seem inspiring have very much the same vapid quality as those corporate managerial pep talks that are intended to make you feel guilty for not dedicating your soul with genuine enthusiasm to the efficient and impeccable production of electric toothbrushes, eyeliner, or any number of stupid things that don’t need to exist in the first place and that shouldn’t be produced in that way if they did.

What attracted me to the vision of Twin Oaks when I first came there, at least as it was expressed in the By Laws , was the stated commitment to moving toward a less competitive and more ecologically sustainable world. I felt that I could fit my own intention to Live and not just survive, and my own conceptions of healthy culture quite nicely into such a vision. I neither looked for, nor do I remember seeing any guarantee of some constant level of consumption. I understood myself to be agreeing to work, to do the work of surviving, not for the sake of survival and consumption itself, but for the sake of Living and the vision of responsible Living that I felt I shared—at least in part--with the writer of the bylaws and with the other people who were here.

I don’t believe that such a vision and such motivations are completely dead here and I think that some latent reluctance to participate in a moving even further away from that is in some part behind our so-called “labor problems”. To continue a metaphor alluded to earlier, we seem to be being exhorted to a kind of economic warfare for the protection of a “way of life” that no longer seems to reflect the ideals or spirit of the “original constitution”. Though some people seem to mistake the soldierly camaraderie of combat (competition, business) itself as real and meaningful community, regardless of what is being fought for, others have more conscience and more good will than that. We all do on some level and the tension between that level and the more superficial levels in us that are eager to pretend that courage and loyalty lie in defending rather than challenging a way of “life” that has in large part become a distraction from every thing that really matters, is I think the source of the problems.

At this point, it seems more likely than not that this deeper voice, the voice on behalf of which I am writing, will ultimately be drowned out by the distractions and phony problems of the response we have so far chosen to the “threat to our way of Life”, which Pier Ones’ dropping us constituted. It’s more than likely that people will scare and shame themselves into being ‘good soldiers” and the status quo will be regained and even strengthened. Still, I feel that its kind of my duty to express that this does not have to be our response to “Austerity” even now.

Even now we could decide to put surviving in its place (it makes a good servant but a terrible master) both by letting the choices that are being forced on us be guided by the spirit of the bylaws rather than by the spirit of fear and inertia, and by recommitting to the work of Living that I think is the essence of that sprit.

Of course I have my own ideas of what this means and of how it could be done; others have theirs. The point of this paper is just to share the concern and to start the conversation.

Since my posting of what you have just read, I have come to the understanding that Twin Oaks (which is close to 40 years old as a community) is on the verge of, or at the beginning of, some kind of communal Mid-life Crisis. I am hoping it will be a healing crisis and that we will come out on the other side of it as people having had the courage to affirm and act on the things that really matter in the face of inevitable change and dissolution. I think that in our case (and I have already broached this subject in a recent meeting) this affirmation may involve our becoming a different kind of non-profit (perhaps a hybrid of the 501d we are, some kind of educational 501c3, and a land trust) , as well as the re-evaluation and restructuring of our system in the light of our renewed commitment to egalitarianism, cooperation, and healthy ecological ways of life.

It seems clear to me that the present unhealthy economic system, having evolved out of the dominant culture of Apart-ness, Competition, Alienation, exploitation and the factional identity politics of patriarchy, racism, and nationalism etc, is in implicit and structural denial of all of the values we say we affirm as a community. I am thinking that a non-profit status for Twin-Oaks will not only reflect this truth to ourselves and to the world, but that it would also help in the restructuring by leading us to examine and correct the ways in which those values have been distorted and, in some cases, compromised all together, within our own institutions, by our accommodation to capitalist imperatives.

I would like to be at Twin Oaks to help all of this happen, but I think time is not on my side. My stay at the community is becoming more precarious as conflicts between myself and some of these very compromised institutions increase.

A particular example of this is me getting fired as a result of asserting my self in a conflict with someone who manages an area where I work. The Manager system at Twin Oaks is a somewhat dubious compromise of egalitarianism in the interests of competitive efficiency. Managers do not get any more allowance or any more credit for the work they do than anyone else here (though they can manage things so they do the more of the kind and amount of work they want in their area), but some compensate for this (at least some of the time) by misusing the power they have to bully or intimidate, or preemptively reject, members of their crews and otherwise feed neurotic preferences or egotistical urges. Such people are not necessarily bad people and often they are not even conscious of what they are doing. And since the only requirement for being a manager seems to be a willingness to be one, some managers simply don’t know how to deal with other people very well at all.

I personally don’t believe we need managers—various crews have gotten along fine for long periods without them—and so I have never tried to be one. I confess actually to a tendency to ignore hierarchies (which tend, after all to be non-egalitarian, factional identities) and relate to others equally as Individual-Persons, expecting the same from them. Such a way of behaving has more than once led to the kind of assertiveness (not aggressiveness, I don’t think, but just unthinking acts of self-respect) that is just not going to fit in with any kind of “command and control” managerial style. I want to say that it is also true to that, since I am always putting the work of Living over the work of surviving in my life, I don’t usually make for the most efficient employee. I am usually only “good enough” at jobs that are only about survival and the status quo and I don’t apologize for this. If being a responsible individual-person and a good capitalist worker are mutually exclusive identities—and very often they are—I will always end up choosing the former.

As a result of this I got in a verbal argument with one of my managers which I guess happened out of accumulative frustration about co’s preference for putting up nasty notes rather than even once talking face to face with her co-workers about any mistake or problem. The inciting incident seemed to be my own initiative (after some few written exchanges between us) in taking down some insulting “reminders”—all written yells, full of bold print multiple underlines and exclamation points, broadcast to all but usually only the result of one persons error, and replacing them with polite signs containing the same reminders but with “pleases” and “thank yous”. This got me another note which threatened me with being fired. On seeing my “boss” and being refused either a mediated or unmediated discussion about the issue, an argument ensued (I hadn’t meditated yet that day) and I ended up getting fired. Up to this point this particular manager had never once communicated with me about work (although I guess co talked about me a lot to others) either in writing or verbally, in two years.

Any way, at the moment I am short of enough work to make my labor quota, and am sort of discouraged about the likelihood of the whole thing repeating itself with whatever new manager I end up working with. Power corrupts and exploits, and the pressures of capitalism and competition in general all push even the best intentioned in that direction, even at a place like Twin Oaks. So maybe I should leave. The question of course, is not whether or not to fight this trend but whether or not there are other places where I would have more success in fighting it. How really likely is it that Twin Oaks’s mid-life crisis will be met with courage and honesty—even with my presence there? Is there enough tinder here to support the fire of healing that I want to start, or is it so soggy that I will end up having my own fire extinguished by trying? And can I become hot enough to light even such an increasingly soggy situation and still make quota? Is there better tender somewhere? Where is the best place for me to catalyze my own healing together with that of others and the world?

Or, rather than leave, should I try to become a manager myself? Or even a planner? Is it not better to have persons who really believe in the spirit of the bylaws and who don’t believe in hierarchy, in places of power than those who are likely to succumb to it? And yet would not such a compromise constitute a character weakening false position? Or is it just good sense under the circumstances?

I don’t know, but what I know about my self is that, in the long run, I am probably more prone to the trap of arrogant rejection of others than to that of ingratiating submission. Which I guess is an argument for staying on for the time being. The Idea though, is to meet the challenge in a positive, creative, and sophisticated way that falls into neither of those extremes and that is equally friendly and compassionate to my self and to this community, which in some ways is a really miraculous place. Right now I think the best thing to do is to do my best to keep up my practice of healthy culture here while applying my imagination and creativity to the problem, whether the problem ends up being how best to leave or how best to stay, in this neighborhood.

By way of an epilog, my “boss”, who was trying to hand over the manager job anyway before all this happened (she tried to justify her behavior to me as trying to turn over the job “worry free” to someone else), quit early and the new manager said she would start with a clean slate. So, so I have my “job” back and the situation is at least temporarily resolved, though I don’t like it that my ex-boss (who is not any more a “bad-person” than anyone else) is probably still mad at me. And of course the potential is just as present for the whole thing to repeat itself with this or some other manager.

Neighbor: Must success come as a healing crisis? Individual-Persons become“Men” and “Women (when that means more than genitals) out of weakness and fear more than anything else. Gender roles are unnecessary uniforms whose poor fit reveals itself in proportion to ones self-knowledge. “Coming-out” as an Individual-Person seems to mean renouncing them as more of the identity politics of faction. But to do this sustainably requires human courage of a very high degree. I have tries this “publicly” in my neighborhood requesting a second person references of “co” or “z’” or “P”). Will my community help me here? Even If they don’t it was a good and neighborly gesture. Citizen-of-the-world: Volunteering at a community center in c-ville. Mostly organized by anarchists. Again, the factional identity politics, the challenge of coming-out as an individual-person (I almost feel this must be without qualification now). I will try to give a workshop there soon which might do the trick in a way that individual conversation doesn’t seem to. Am I ready for this? Do I have inner consensus for this? Is it too Public? I am life-dancing a little with L At least we are still rubbing the sticks if healthy ritual together even if only at long distance. Still more smoke than fire. Support. And what of my Blogs? –My pamphlet? Listening…Soul: More clarity here but less practice. No longer going to UU church. Apart-ness and competition seem sometimes to be the very essence of creeds. Have yet to find a reliable venue especially suitable for the cultivation of Good Faith. Do I need one? I think the world needs one. Am I ready to create one? Listening... There must be many people who are non-dogmatic without being complacent. (I suppose complacency itself implies a kind of dogmatism even if it is unconscious). Is agnosticism different?Individual: Back and forth with eating. Still mostly raw I think. As with so many other things, sensitive to the one-sided projections of others in this regard. Still doing a good amount of Chi Gung. Could meditate more often. A vision quest this winter? Next one at old rag or white oak. The Facilitation Breath is a great invention/discovery and is still alive in me. Still doing Life-Dance parties alone and with others. Slacking a little on check-ins. Listening…more life-dance walks, more cleaning of my room, less reading perhaps…more writing perhaps…all the same something is happening to my energy…alternately feel strong, vulnerable, on the verge of transcendence and perpetually in healing crisis…Is this individuation?

Family: Sign-making project for tupelo. Opportunity for familial consensus? Strengthening a sense of the Familial as more just the human creatures I see every day. Trying out a “Language older than words” on the cat, on the pine tree and lavender bush in the yard I make tea from, the next mouse I see…Sometimes it’s difficult to fend off attempts at race-based factional “bonding”. Wish I had more practice with others…