∴ Spirals and Ridge Poles ∴

In Time’s Progress:
Agriculture, Globalization Theory, Spiral Dynamics
and the History of the Serpentine Primordial


1
Hoop cultures have been so named, because they are cultures, which look at the time concept as cyclical. From North America to India, the peoples of these systems see the world as revolving not only in space, but also in time. The concept of Samsara in the Buddhist tradition is one of a life that is constantly repeating, spinning like a record, which, upon finishing, begins again from the beginning. In these Hoop cultures the elder, the wise, sit the youth down, and, having gone through many cycles in their own life, can impart to the student what has been revealed to them through their practice over the years. The later development of Pole cultures would refute all of this. This younger tradition’s participants view time as linear, progressive, always changing on into an uncertain future; they are reluctant to believe in fate or destiny and if they do will be labeled ‘romantic.’ They see themselves as self-made, rather than a product of their environment and all of its multiplicitous factors. This will sound rather familiar to the modernized person.
It may have seemed as though the later had replaced the former in recent years, however as we have seen the Communist experiment fail and digress back to a feudal state, and so too as we see Capitalism begin to falter and rather than progress forward, curl back on itself, as a rolling tide, into what is being now called Neo-Feudalism, we hear not rejoicing at the graces of linear supremacy, but more and more a call of question. Calls to simplify back to sanity, the call of the Hoop, beckoning us.
Socially, Darwin’s observations of evolution have been implemented from an echelon of thinking, which theorizes that the strongest will survives. Righteousness is defined by power and the accumulation of wealth is a demarcation of divine favoritism. Really this is not Darwin’s thinking but more that of a Calvinistic theology. In this way people have believed Capitalism to be ‘The Best,’ often making, when faced with descent, the argument, “Well would you rather be living in Guatemala making 19 cents an hour making shoes?” as if the situation in South America were divergent from our own sneaky, high-top system of patrolled boarders and exported-import cultural conquest. John Cavanagh and Jerry Mander of the International Forum on Globalization demonstrate:

"The claim of economic globalization advocates that those who accumulate great wealth take nothing away from those less fortunate is at best disingenuous. When those who have the money to enjoy meat-rich diets cause the market to redirect available supplies of grain away from the tables of people who cannot pay in order to feed livestock to provide meat to those who can, they contribute to the dynamics of hunger. When the banks foreclose mortgages on family farms and put them up for sale to corporations to grow crops for export, they are depriving the displaced families of their means of livelihood and often condemning them to a marginal, dependent existence as landless laborers or sweatshop workers producing products for export that they cannot afford themselves."

We may have thought that some sort of process of ‘natural selection’ was also why those Native to the Americas experienced genocide, why, in essence, Hoop culture has receded globally. However, at it’s highest, evolution is driven by diversity not combat, dispute not destruction. The most comes of a dialogue when it is left open, the longer a question lingers in the rich, rhythmic air of discussion, the more learning arises. It is when we solidify and say, “Ah, here is found the truth” that crusades and confusion manifest in a din. We see it with the weakening of social systems at the hands of homogeny.
One of the tenets of the recently arising model of economic globalization is “to integrate and merge the economic activity of all countries into a homogenous model of development—a single, centralized supersystem…a global monoculture. This trend is already visible to any traveler. Every place is becoming more and more like every other place. Cultural Diversity is going the way of biodiversity.”
This reference to biodiversity is comment on the results of what is called "comparative advantage theory," in which we see entire countries encouraged by the export-oriented global market (institutionally embodied by the World Trade Organization [WTO] and pressured by the World Bank and International Monetary Fund [IMF]) to channel their energies from an assortment of crops to very particular, seemingly economically stronger crops, “over which it has a relative advantage; thus some countries now specialize in single crops like coffee, sugarcane, forest products, or high-tech assembly. Theoretically, they can meet their other needs by using the earnings from these specialized exports to buy goods and services over which others have an advantage.
“Comparative advantage is a crucial component of globalization theory. It facilitates the replacement of diverse local or regional economic systems, including systems that may currently emphasize successful diversified [modalities]…[with] large-scale monocultural export systems.” The country in question accordingly becomes dependent and vulnerable to famine, and economic instability. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the world has already lost up to 75 percent of its crop diversity because of the globalization of industrialized agriculture. Such is the product of operating under false universals, over-simplified structures, designed for successes, which bewilderingly collapse on themselves. It was thus that in the mid-twentieth century, “many countries of the world actively tried to do the opposite of specialization: they diversified their industrial and agricultural systems precisely in order to recover from a colonial period during which huge monocultural systems, such as pineapple plantations, coffee plantations, or more recently, industrial assembly work were imposed on them.”
One United Nations Environmental Program (UNEP) report observed, “In India, peasants grow over forty different crops on localities that have been cultivated for more than two thousand years without a drop in yields, yet have remained free of pests ” (quoted in Darrell Posey’s Cultural and Spiritual Values of Biodiversity).”
In this way we see that the highest form of evolution may be symbiotic. Birds that clean alligator’s teeth, ferns and moss growing from trees, receiving quarters and giving greater fortification to the bark, this sort of relational existence, exhibited by the Earth with the Moon, demonstrates a relationship which not only rocks the cradle of all life, the oceans, but also keeps all life, aquatic or pedestrian, growing toward higher and higher potential as flowers toward the Sun. Diversity, as opposed to homogony, relationship rather than dependence, these are the organizing principles of homeostasis.
Thus we may see the symbiotic joining of the Hoop with the Pole, a coupling which will form a spiral. Most clearly demonstrated in western thought with the development of Spiral Dynamics, which conceives of human nature not as a fixed principle or state. “We have the capacities in the nature of the mind/brain itself, to construct new conceptual worlds,” says Don Beck predecessor of Clare Graves in the work of applying this model of thinking in our world. “So what we’re trying to describe [with Spiral Dynamics] is simply how humans are able, when things get bad enough, to adapt to their situation by creating greater complexities of thinking to handle new problems.” In this model there are not competing modes of thought as in the conquer/be conquered paradigm. Rather every manifestation of human existence from the way of the Australian Aborigines to the life styles of the rich and famous in New York, New York, to the mendicant and the monk and back all the way to Pre-Sapien-ism, we see that each and every one links with the others in a flow of consciousness toward greater and greater complexity, fluxing as it does through periods of chaos.
The Mayan Calendar ceases in the year 2012. Similarly we pass from the age of Aquarius to the age of Pisces, from an age of second childhood, to an age of that greatest transition, death. Still this may not be manifest as many Fundamentalist Christians see it in an end of days, with fire raining from the sky and the seas and rivers boiling, but more an end of “days,” the death of the concept.





Decapitalizing :
a low-context essay on Dadaism


1
The Dadaist statement “Art is dead” is not complete unless we are aware of its capitalization. The art that has been found dead is in fact Art, capitalized, high art, while art as an expression of human love is as living as human hearts; this is nothing new. Thus we may also look to the word ‘dead.’ It may be interpreted the same as not ‘Death,’ the sort associated with the ending of life, but as ‘dead,’ a little death, le petite mort. Thus art is actually in a state where so much is propagating it, that it may be seen as orgasmic, while its capitalized counterpart is passing out of time with a gentle moan.

2
We see here too a clear delineation between the death of Art and the death of God. By allowing the formal Capitalized, hierarchical form to dissipate, we make room for the more common place, that which is the magical mundane, to manifest in full ecstasy. By killing Art, art is uncovered everywhere, by killing God we may all be divinely expressed, the numinous noeticaly experiencing one and other in all. By letting the hierarchy to slip into the opacity of autumn, we make space for the orgiastics of spring.



Perhaps the Mayans in creating their scheduling system had the foresight to recognize their may come a day when people are prepared for a new, higher manifestation of order than that which they could provide, thus allowing their calendar to end, their way of working with the time concept to retreat, as would their temples, back into the forested mystery of the all-reclaiming. We may see the decease of what it means to be alive, the view of time, the experience of space; consciousness itself may evolve within and upon this planet as never before.

In her book Spiral Dance, Starhawk says that, not only does 'Witchcraft' receive its teachings from nature, but, “According to our legends, Witchcraft began more than 35 thousand years ago, when the temperature of Europe began to drop and the great sheets of ice crept slowly south in their last advance.” Long before agriculture, through the process of hunting migratory game, individuals became able to “call” the herd, and “gifted shamans could attune themselves to spirits of the herds, and in so doing they became aware of the pulsating rhythm that infuses all life, the dance of the double spiral, of whirling into being, and whirling out again. They did not phrase this insight intellectually, but in images: the Mother Goddess, the birthgiver, which brings into existence all life; and the Horned God, hunter and hunted, who eternally passes through gates of death that new life may go on…The spiral dance was seen also in the sky: in the moon, who monthly dies and is reborn; in the sun, whose waxing light brings summer’s warmth and whose waning brings the chill of winter.” Starhawk does not fail to point out that “The covens, who preserved the knowledge of the subtle forces, were called Wicca or Wicce, from the Anglo-Saxon root word meaning ‘to bend or shape.’ They were those who could shape the unseen to their will. Healers, teachers, poets, and midwives, they were central figures in every community.” Similarly, the Taoist practice of Tai Chi Chuan was developed by a man in ancient China named Chang San-feng who observed a snake struggling with a crane. Through this he discovered similar “unseen” principles of the universe, which human beings could tap into at an intimate level.
In his omnibus The Masks of God, Joseph Campbell commences his examination of mythology with comment that, “Throughout the material in the Primitive, Oriental and Occidental…myths and rites of the serpent frequently appear, and in a remarkably consistent symbolic sense. Wherever nature is revered as self moving, and so inherently divine, the serpent is revered as symbolic of its divine life.” “Christianity, at first brought little change,” says Starhawk. “Peasants saw in the story of Christ only a new version of their own ancient tales of Mother Goddess and her Divine Child who is sacrificed and reborn.”
Jeremy Narby, an anthropologist by name, was to find himself delving the depths of understanding of the Ashaninca people in Peru whose shamans have used ayahuasca, a hallucinogenic plant, for generations, in order to communicate directly with what they call, the mother, of the mother, of the plants. Their view is spiritual, though we may wish to reevaluate by saying that they enter into dialogue with the core essence of the pants around them, learning in this state of consciousness, from the plant, how it may be used for human healing, nourishment, etc. The medium through which the information comes, the mother of the mother of plant life, is none other than a snake, as might be found in the Garden of Eden. All over the world the snake and the spiral are conjoined. In the Hindu system of chakras, each energy center represents a point at which the caduceus , two snakes, coiling up the spine, meet before separating again to cross at a higher level. To return to South America, the Aztecs symbolized the “sacred energy of life” in Quetzalcoatl. Coatl meaning both “serpent” and “twin,” the meaning of the name can either be interpreted as “Plumed Serpent” or “Magnificent Twin.” Also the Oroborus, symbol of infinity, a snake eating its own tail. Then there is the image from the Northwest coastal people of what is now the United States and Canada, the Kwagiutl, the image of Sisuitl, a supernatural two-headed serpent of the sea, who transforms people with its magical powers while it searches for truth.
In Mircea Eliade’s book Shamanism: Archaic techniques of ecstacy, one finds innumerable examples of “shamanic ladders on all five continents, here a ‘spiral ladder,’ there a ‘stairway’ or ‘braided ropes.’ In Australia, Tibet, Nepal, Ancient Egypt, Africa, North and South America, ‘the symbolism of the rope, like that of the ladder, necessarily implies communication between sky and earth. It is by means of a rope or ladder (as, too, by a vine, a bridge, a chain of arrows, etc.) that the gods descend to earth and men go up to the sky.’ According to Eliade, the shamanic ladder is the earliest version of the idea of an axis of the world, which connects the different levels of the cosmos, and is found in numerous creation myths in the form of a tree.” Finally, from the beginning of, The Inner Teachings of the Taoist Chuang Tzu, we are told, “In the Northern Deep there is a great fish, thousands of miles long. It turns into a giant bird whose back is thousands of miles in size. When it gets aroused and takes flight, its wings are like clouds covering the sky.
“When the ocean rolls, this bird sets off for the Southern Deep, which is the Pond of Heaven.” In his translation, Thomas Cleary comments that “The giant fish symbolizes the potential for higher development; the giant bird symbolizes this potential in action.” It is interesting to note here, that the same cells which form feathers form scales.
The shift away from this imagery has a dual origin in the eyes of Joseph Campbell. One pivot of this shift was in Greece around 500 B.C., when the mythology changed radically, and Zeus shape shifted from the image of a serpent, to the killer of Typhon, the enormous serpentine monster, child of the earth goddess Gaia, from whom the new humanoid Zeus must secure the patriarchal reign of the gods of Mount Olympus. In this myth Zeus’ only aid is Athene, god of Reason, since all others have fled to Egypt.
The second turning point occurred in “the context of the patriarchy of the Iron Age Hebrews of the first millennium B.C., [where] the mythology adopted from the earlier Neolithic and Bronze Age civilizations…became inverted, to render an argument just the opposite of its origin.” In the Judeo-Christian creation story found in Genesis, one clearly sees those elements common to so many other of the world’s creation myths: the serpent, tree, and twin beings; however here, unprecedented the serpent is villain. Campbell continues his critique saying, “the legend of the rib is clearly a patriarchal inversion,” since the male begets the female, an act which opposes not only all previous myth, but biological reality. Similarly the damnation of the snake he says is none-sensical since the serpent delivered Eve to the tree which allows one to understand the difference between good and evil, a faculty with out which the Ten Commandments would be gibberish. Campbell believes that these patriarchal inversions, “address a pictorial message to the heart that exactly reverses the verbal message addressed to the brain; and this nervous discord inhabits both Christianity and Islam as well as Judaism, since they all share in the legacy of the Old Testament.” Thus we have here, two examples of digression from the past view of the world as enlivened with serpentine androgyny, which seem to choose instead a path guided by reason, but which in their (super-masculine) course go counter to it, taking the entire unfolding of the western mind with them.
The Copernican Revolution, which rocked the Catholic world view to its very foundation, indeed from its foundation, explaining that in fact the Sun and not the Earth (and thus not man and not man’s church) was the center of the Universe, this revolution in thinking allowed, from its chaos, for a new view in which the Modern mind could realize that the Sun does not rise and set, but rather we revolve. Night and day are not separate, the dusk of dawn and the dusk of night are the same light. It will be an Earth shaking (r)evolution in thinking, such as this, which must occur for the millennium ahead to be not a vision of Hell upon it. In this way the end may be the beginning.
Already in our world, if we pay the least attention, we see truth in the model of Belgian physicist and Nobel Laureate chemist Ilya Prigogine, which proposes that as systems evolve, they enter a stage of chaos, before reemerging in a higher state of convolution, of organization [of poetry]. Our question is only how much of the damage from chaos will we, our world, sustain before making the shifts in daily life necessary to abate it.




“Everything’s foreseeable. Everything has already
been foreseen. What has been fated cannot be
avoided. Even this boiled potato. This fork. This
chunk of dark bread. This thought too…
My grandmother sweeping the sidewalk knows
that. She says there’s no god, only an eye here and
there that sees clearly. The neighbors are too busy
watching TV to burn her as a witch.” -Charles Simic,
The World Doesn’t End





















Introduction to Polarity and the Iterative:
Self-similarity, Bioenergetics of the Chinese and Hindu,
and a Return to Samsara

2
In ancient China people of wisdom evolved a system of healing which operates at a deeper level than does the Modern Western Medical Model (MWMM), which deals with symptoms and their abatement. Rather than treat a symptom of a sickness, the Chinese devised ways to treat the person-whole who is imbalanced, working with body, mind, [and] spirit. The Chinese were able to see that in the womb, many energies united. In that primordial soup, inseminally ignited, they define five energies (Earth, Metal, Water, Wood, and Fire), which our physical, mental, emotional and spiritual selves work through/with throughout life. Each energy is linked not only to a different element found in nature, but to a color, quality of voice, season, smell, mental process and emotion. For example Wood is the color green, it is springtime, anger, smelling rancid, Liver and Gall Bladder, our ability to plan and make decisions. What I have described here are the different levels this energy manifests at. At its finest, highest vibration it appears as green, slower than that it is the mental/emotional process, clear-seeing action, slower yet is the emotion anger and its vibration slowed down enough it is the physical matter of a Liver, and a Gall Bladder in a human body. In this system the Earth Element is posited at the beginning of the energy cycle, and sometimes at its center, around which the other four are centric (Central to this system, but not necessarily to the universe beyond it, since without earth there is no metal ore, with no metal, water is not fortified, with no water there is no wood, no wood and there is no fire, though the fire's ashes do become the earth). The Earth being so pivotal it may be understood why we have taken so much time considering agriculture and the corporate model in relation to the environment.
It is important to note that the organ is of the energy, rather than the energy being a product of the organ. Or if you will “No ideas but in things,” says the poet William Carlos Williams, and “All things are symbols,” as has stated Gerta. Your liver is a symbol of springtime and springtime is a symbol of something else, which is a variant of something beyond that. Williams and Gerta have identified, similar to Plato in his Cave analogy, and Lao Tzu’s first line of the Toa Te Ching, that there is our physical plane of existence, but it is only a product of something more ‘etheric.’ Just as people are a product of the elements of nature, so too are corporations a product of people and thus subject to all the imbalances accruing in those manifestations superior to it.
Starhawk’s use of the image of the Mother Goddess, naked, and the Horned God correlates directly with the Chinese images of Yin and Yang. This thinking however is not dualism, for the Chinese view Numerology as totally relational. One represents unity and gives birth to two; two is the idea of ‘us’ and creates three; three is the dance, and action and gives birth to four, which is correspondent to “the ten thousand things,” of all creation. Thus there is not only yin and yang, there is the yin of yang and the yang of yin; from there the striations only ripple outo the incomprehensible, which is approached in the I Ching. If one multiplies two (duality) by itself we get four (infinity) and it should be noted that all DNA is made up of four letters, A, G, C, T. If indeed the human body has the estimated average of 100 thousand cells, then that body contains approximately 125 billion miles of DNA, this is possible because all cells, whether animal, vegetal, or bacterial are “filled with salt water, in which the concentration of salt is similar to that of the worldwide ocean…[this] plays a crucial role in the establishing of the double helix. As DNA’s four bases (adrenine, guanine, cytosine, and thymine) are insoluble in water, they tuck themselves into the center of the molecule where they associate in pairs to form the rungs of a ladder; then they twist up into a spiraled stack to avoid contact with the surrounding water molecules.” Thus here we see that the title of Jeremy Narby’s book, The Cosmic Serpent, DNA, and the Origins of Knowlede, is reiterative, saying the same thing three times over in different language.
We return then to the Indian view of the chakra energy system with new insight. In the human form there are seven charkas: four in the body, one at the throat level, one at the level of the brow/third eye and one at the crown/head-top. This system of understanding bioenergetics correlates directly to the Spiral Dynamics we have visited earlier, with each chakra center relating to a different cultural/personal meme. However when a person speaks of the crown chakra they are actually speaking of compression. There is not one crown chakra, but rather another set of six from brow point to hairline, and yet another set of six from hairline to head top, the one set being a finer mirror reverberance of that set which came before it. Just as the organ mirrors the energy at a slower molecular vibration, these energy centers mirror one another, slowing down more and more as they approach the Earth’s plane under foot.
Spirals arise from a property of growth called self-similarity or scaling - the tendency to grow in size but to maintain the same shape. Not all organisms grow in this self-similar manner. We have seen that adult people, for example, are not just scaled up babies: babies have larger heads, shorter legs, and a longer torso relative to their size. But if we look for example at the shell of the chambered nautilus we see a different growth pattern. As the nautilus outgrows each chamber, it builds new chambers for itself, always the same shape - if you imagine a very long-lived nautilus, its shell would spiral around and around, growing ever larger but always looking exactly the same at every scale.
Thus if we return to the idea of cyclical existence in Samsara as a record which begins again at its completion, the needle of the record player would not stop, lift up and return to the physical beginning of the record, but rather the record’s entirety would be reprinted in the cosmic vinyl, in the length of single track, a much finer spiraling thumb print of code producing music, and so again the entirety, now including this track would be reproduced even more finely within that, and again more finely, including these tracks within that so that the record had no end, just as one could take a whole and make it half, and make that half and make that half, there would be no end to the process or the specimen, so there is no end to this fractal, though the universe is not as static as a record, but rather with the edition of each new track the entire play list changes, a ripple is sent out, which alters the content in minute ways as the space time continuum perpetuates and thus the idea that “History repeats” is not as literal as the nautilus shell.



Our Galaxy, the Milky Way, spins clockwise around a black hole called Sagittarius A. Black holes are, as originally imaged by British geologist and natural philosopher John Michell, “stars so massive, and with such intense gravitational fields, their escape velocities (the minimum speed necessary for matter not to be trapped by the star’s gravity) would exceed the speed of light. These objects would remain invisible, with their light trapped forever inside, swallowing any matter and radiation that venture too close.” This remained wild conjecture from its conception in 1783, until the advent of Albert Einstein’s Theory of Relativity provided theoretical boost and today most astrophysicists believe black holes exist.
“The movement of the Dao is like a great whirlpool, rising and falling like a bellows, giving birth to all things at its periphery and receiving them back at its center.” With this thought we might suppose that the black hole is not just a random statement. Just as easily as Michell we could theorize that the black hole does not just suck in matter and hold it, but that in fact it might redistribute that energy out, in a “wormhole,” to the suns of a galaxy. In the Taoist practice of Tai Chi Chuan, students train in understanding that “Ultimate yin is yang.” This may be displayed by this example of the ultimate receptive, the black hole, manifesting the ultimate creative, the sun. If not this then its opposite, where by “Ultimate Yang is Yin,” for the black hole is a sun that was made so huge, it emits no light, but rather devours all energy within its reach. How may we apply this to the corporation we see today globalizing?




























As Above so Below:
Applications to Economics and Global Politics

3
What Starhawk may in part have pointed to with her historic perspective of her tradition, is the theory that Homosapien-sapien, or “[Hu]man that knows it knows,” evolved the abilities of higher cognition we see today, as a result of a time of full tilt turbulence. The ice age which killed off the Thunder Lizard did not end abruptly, nor did it peater out smoothly, rather what the ancients of our human lineage saw was a time when there would be years of winter followed by years of spring/summer, followed by mere months of cold—a totally sporadic shifting climate that was completely unpredictable. There were no set seasons to become accustomed to, no way of knowing what to count on as food source. The human race, with no claws or fangs or even thick hide was challenged to survive by being clever enough to. The mind, not the muscle became our saving grace. In this period, the words of Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche rang true, that “Chaos should be regarded as extremely good news.” I say this because I believe there was purpose to the extinction of the dinosaur. It has been said that “Everything that evolves, evolves towards beauty, and everything that is alive now is beautiful,” what could be more beautifully poetic than a Thunder Lizard taking flight, evolving into a parakeet, a puffin, or a crane, as some archaeologists suggest. A beast that has a brain the size of a walnut, and a body weighing two to fifty tons, is not the sort of poetry that the earth sustains. It seems that beauty evolves towards forms, or vibrations that are higher and higher in frequency. In terms of physics, solid matter is slowest, above which is light. Just as all plants grow upward toward the sun, all organics move toward ‘heaven.’ It has been found that flowers, compared with leaves and other plant matter, have, on a molecular level a higher light to matter ratio. What is more interesting is that botanist who study pre-ice age fauna, do not study anything that blooms, it was not until the catastrophe that wiped out the Dinosaur, that flowers would develop on earth. Perhaps the two are connected, for while a deer may dine on rose buds, a Brachiosaurus could never have lived off of chrysanthemums.
The flower and the dinosaur is as the chicken and the egg, what may be of greater import to contemplate is our view of chaos, and, in terms of global politics/modern living, our modes of transport and sources of electricity. Just as the body of a bird is more beautiful than the form of a hundred-ton lizard, at the least in so far as the aesthetics of the sustainable are concerned, so too must we make our examination and let die those modes that are so doomed.
I have often, while traveling through a progressing city and coming upon a bull-dozer or other such giant yellow machine of construction, been reminded of the triceratops or brontosaurus, oddly posed as they may be in this modern world. Odd too, do I find it, that the minds which evolved out of the Ice Age would find a way to use the dead and long decayed bodies of those animals which that age killed, for no other purpose than to fuel their own lives. The roads they are paved, and the cars they do run and the lights they do burn, all by virtue of the doomed to extinction. Those same cars, which each year grow in size and grow in size, nearing the two-ton body of the Anchisaurus, (a dinosaur with a bone armor shell for a back, a crown helmet of the same for a skull and a tail like a giant mace) still are viewed as very modern and evolved of us to produce and own. In greater assonance we see that this mode of travel may throw us into the manic conditions of Global Warming, by which, already we see four years of draught in Africa resulting in the potential of thirty to forty million deaths by starvation; floods in Germany in 2002 causing an estimated 10 billion euros in damage; crops in northern Italy destroyed by tennis-ball sized hail that same year; and then there was El Nino, the hurricane Katrina, among others which are still being labeled ‘freak’ storms despite their growing regularity. “All this is the recent result of no more than a 0.7 degree centigrade increase in global temperatures,” says the ecologist Edward Goldsmith, who sights The International Governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) who currently predict a temperature change of up to 5.8 degrees centigrade in the twenty-first century. Not only have the minds that evolved out of the greatest ecological destruction the world has known found a way to power their world off of those beings which that catastrophe destroyed, we may duplicate the catastrophe by our clever means and bring about our own destruction through it. “Even if we stopped burning fossil fuels tomorrow, our planet would continue to heat up for at least 150 years, which is the residence time of carbon dioxide, the most important green house gas in the atmosphere, while the oceans will continue to warm for a thousand years. Our only choice is to take measures—and very dramatic ones at that—that can slow down the warming process so our planet remains partly habitable. This includes minimizing export-oriented products, with their commensurate fossil fuel use, and making drastic changes in agriculture production.”
We must move away from petroleum-based living. It has become so invasive that it is even in our cosmetic products. This may not sound odd at first, but neither did lining cups with lead sound odd to the Romans. We, standing here, now can look back at that time and place in the world and say, “My god didn’t they know they would get lead poisoning.” In fact no. There was no awareness available to say that by drinking wine from a lead cup, the acidity of the fermented grape would leach enough of the lead off the cup, and deliver it to the body to cause serious mental illness with prolonged use. The Romans just knew that it made the wine taste better. Similarly if the children and records of those alive today survive, then surely we will be looked back upon and it will be said, “My god didn’t they know that they would get petroleum poisoning from lathering it all over their bodies on a daily basis?” Indeed though we’re not yet directly ingesting the stuff (though teething on plastic rings as babies seems a less than favorable way to wean off of mother’s milk), the skin is a porous membrane, and just as one gets pruney sitting in the tub too long, as the skin has absorbed more water, it may only be inferred that less savory of elements are also seeping into the pores. Basically as we are bathing ourselves we are steeping our selves in poisons, just as we are so saturating the globe.
It is important to understand this kind of thinking when trying to answer issues of the global sort. We are the world. The world is us. What we do on the microcosmic level of our day-to-day lives reverberates, or is in harmony, in resonance that is, with what happens at a larger level. Einstein said that we would not be able to solve the significant problems of our time from within the same mind frame that created them. This is why that is so. We are not only indoctrinated from birth by millions of factors that come at us through the culture in which we are saturated, we are so interconnected that we are the culture. This is why Gandhi’s invitation to be the change you want to see in the world is so apt. If we cannot recognize this level of reality, we cannot solve our problems. Still we must stay creative and not simply contemplative and so I have decided to attempt to apply the principles of T’ai Chi Ch’uan to our Globalizing world and its economic and environmental plight.
T’ai Chi is not a religion. It has spiritual implications, however at its most basic it is a series of exercises designed to align ones body to health and what the Chinese called the Tao. The Tao or Way is simply a symbol used to identify that, which is at the root of all movement of energy. Physicists are beginning to touch this level of understanding in their practice. As far as the human body is concerned T’ai Chi practitioners have been touching it for generations. By embodying principles of movement they can find doorways to balance, health and longevity. T’ai Chi is sometimes translated as the Supreme Ultimate, however a more accurate view seems to be Great Ridgepole. The ridgepole is an image of that cross beam at the pinnacle of a house, which connects two polarities. There is the aspect of an axis too. In T’ai Chi the spine becomes an axis, like that of a spinning globe, around which all else is centric. Thus principles of keeping the legs steady under the body and the body upright are most important. However another key is relaxation. In the Taoist cosmology the two principles of Heaven and Earth are guiding forces, which give rise to the rest of creation. Yin and Yang are often used, though they were originally terms of geography, defining the play of shadow and light on mountain faces. The side of the mountain that received more sunlight, and was thus warmer, dryer, was Yang and that side which resided more in shadow, was wetter, and cooler was Yin. Later this became metaphorical for other polarities, with more attributes being added; Yin became feminine, soft, The Earth, receptive, open space and Yang became masculine, hard, The Heavenly (as in sky), creative, that which fills space. Like two slopes of a roof, T’ai Chi rests between them, a Great Ridgepole, keeping balance and unifying. It is this balance, which is lacking from the modern corporate world.


To illustrate, I draw upon the example of hydroelectric energy. Hydroelectric dams are in essence huge walls constructed in front of rivers in order to harness their energy. By flooding a section of valley and creating a body of water where none existed by nature, one manifests great pressure to force the water of the river through turbine converters, from which electric energy can be distributed to societal uses. This has been viewed as a modern wonder of human inventiveness, however it is not in harmony with the Tao. The river formed over hundreds if not thousands of years, following the path of least resistance that brought water from the top of the mountain to the ocean floor, flowing the way it did precisely because there was no wall. The Hydroelectric dam thus is in direct opposition not only to the river, but the principle guiding the river, a principle whose wonder is experienced at the Grand Canyon and which is exemplify by Tai Chi as ‘relax.’ Relaxation is the best way to allow the weight of a body to rest on its spinal axis and it is the same for the Earth. What we are finding is that rivers don’t flow in accordance with the mountain alone, but with the globe entire. For as we have erected the dams, huge bodies of water have been created where naturally there are none and this misdistribution of weight may send the globe off of its axis. You could imagine if huge deposits of the fluid flowing through your veins was suddenly stopped up in random places on your body. It is the same for money.
Money, blood, water, these things should behave in the same fashion. Without water, no life sustains, without blood, no part of the body can receive nutrience, oxygen, no part can live. In the capitalist worldview without money no human project can survive. If blood clots too much the stagnation can cause death. If water stagnates a stinking swamp emerges. If money stagnates it corrupts absolutely. If there is too much water in a place, more than it can receive, flooding, destruction follows. If more blood than is needed gushes to an area, such as the head, one passes out, or if one arm were to fill with half the blood meant for the other arm, the arm lacking blood flow would begin to suffer while its pair needlessly bloated. If too much money floods a community or individual, it must be at the sacrifice of others, and it will only result in bloating if not destruction of the flooded area.
We are all familiar with the idea of the body politic. Visioning the institution as a human body. In this form the CEO might be the head or brain, along with a few other intellectual elites. The arms are those who carry out the functions ascribed by the top brass. All the guts, digestive system, lungs, is ussualy pretty abstract, who knows whose really doing what at that level. And in this day and age the legs and feet are made up of relatively few people locally, most of that sort of work being “out sourced.” For instance a clothing company might have retailers for arms, and sweat shop workers in South America for legs. Its actually rooting in another location, completely dissociated from the rest of the body and especially head. Perhaps one leg is the sweatshop working force and the other is the consumer base. For without production and consumption there can be no vigor. The arms would just flail about and the head would be churning around in all its great ideas, talking to itself. This model would be virtually identical for most any corporation, a food corporation for instance would only need the limb of sweatshop workers replaced with farmers, but the only real difference there typically is being in a field instead of an assembly line.
If we apply the model of money as blood, both being seen as life force, then the typical corporation would appear as a person with obsessively styled hair, plastic surgery, always smiling through fat, red faced cheeks, quite delirious from an over-oxygenated, blood flooded brain. Their arms would be muscular, chunky, veins streaking across the ever moving hands, joints giving out all the time, fingernails not needing trimming because they are always breaking off with over aggressive work. The guts would be just that. Confused piles of internal processing, creating a lot of gassiness, lungs tired and weak, hardly able to take in oxygen, to inspire, the kidneys all but dried out prunes from over work and the heart really just a pace maker. One leg would be full, but having no real influence would be full of fat, having just enough blood to keep it hanging on, the other would be totally emaciated, bruised, and really useless in as much as it would always be getting replaced—not only the joints, but all of it. This is the way with sweatshop labor in which the human is worked to/near death and then replaced—as though their life force were sucked out like collagen to be squirted into the lips. Strangely enough, besides a few poetic devices, this sounds very much like many of America’s elderly .
Contrast this with the image given by Master Chang San-feng in his Treatise on T’ai Chi Ch’uan, “The internal Energy, chi, roots at the feet, then transfers through the legs and is controlled from the waist, moving eventually through the back to the arms and fingertips.” The term chi coming into play here should be addressed. The Chinese cosmology out of which arose the practices of both T’ai Chi and Classical Five Element Acupuncture recognizes energy in the body called chi. This energy is what makes the blood flow and inert matter animate. As far as our corporate model may be concerned if blood is relative to money, then chi may be relative to an ideal. Currently corporations have no ideal. The ideal of making more and more money is the ideal of a vampire. In order to help this process we need a strong reformist movement among those conscious about globalization. To advocate abolition is useful at a level, however, given our current environmental situation and economic entanglement, it will likely be too little too late. What we need is for the massive energy accrued by corporations redirected. Thus I propose working with Corporate Charters. First with the abolitionist heart I would recommend not battling against the person hood that corporations have adopted, but going more fully with them in that direction. Through personhood corporations have attained the rights of individuals, however within the Constitution of which that bill of rights is a part, Amendment IX states, that “The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.” In effect I cannot impede the rights of another individual with the exercise of my rights. This we must hold corporations to at a national level, especially in regard to the environment and at a global level foremost as concerns labor. This requires that we the people be conscious about environmental legislation and make push for further restrictions on pollution and reward not for clean up efforts only, but good practices in the first.
Also as far as corporate humanity is concerned, I think they would be of much higher moral fiber if they were conscious of their own mortality. “Rewriting corporate charters is a step toward changing the nature of the corporate institution. Revoking a charter—the corporate equivalent of a death sentence—begins to put some teeth into the idea of accountability. Eliot Spitzer, attorney general of New York State, declared in 1998: ‘When a corporation has been convicted of repeated felonies that harm or endanger the lives of human beings or destroy the environment, the corporation should be put to death, its corporate existence ended, and its assets taken and sold at a public auction.’” Even if not revoked, Charters should have universal time lines, like presidencies, and people. The aquatic principle of easy-come, easy go must apply here. Given how much CEOs make and how much they work, disparity is apparent. JP Morgan, no staunch moralist himself said that it is unreasonable to think that any CEO is worth more than 20 times what the lowest paid person makes. However on average CEOs make around 400 times the lowest paid (not considering the sweatshop enslaved). Having an institutional base of immortal blood sucking, self-involved “people” is impossible to sustain as we have been shown with the Enron incident. Just like the dinosaur, we must make corporations smaller. “Our research shows that small farmers are more productive and more efficient, and contribute more to broad-based regional development than do the larger corporate farmers,” report Miguel Altieri and former Food First codirector Peter Rosset. “Given secure tenure, small farmers can also be much better stewards of natural resources, protecting long-term productivity of their soils and conserving functional biodiversity.”
Transporting goods around the world, we are seeing is too great a demand on ecosystems. “Industrial agriculture is also a major contributor to climate change because it depends on shipping to long-distance markets…Shortening the distance between producers and consumers has to be one of the crucial reform goals of any transition away from industrial agriculture.” To this I would add shortening the distance between CEOs and all other workers. By dividing the power of that individual among a group (preferably a diverse one), by making restrictions on long-distance labor and by making ceilings for CEO wages.
In this same vein, if we are to be true about seeking an egalitarian way, and exemplifying, or helping bring that democracy to the world, we must accept that “Reducing the growing gap between rich and poor nations [must be a goal of those who have had good fortune in the recent economic experiment and it is a goal that] requires first the cancellation of the illegitimate debts of poor countries. It also requires the replacement of the current institutions of global governance with new ones that include global fairness among their operating principles.” As Andrew Carnegie put it, we must provide “ladders within reach upon which the aspiring can rise.” However it is not only what we do, but how we do them. “The founder of the Domino’s pizza chain, Tom Monaghan, is devoting almost his entire $1 billion fortune to a nationwide school-building program in the United States, and has also paid for a hydroelectric damn in Honduras.”
There is a new field of study called Bio-Mimicry whereby scientists attempt to replicate the ways of nature for our modern world. One example of this we have seen in solar power. Amazing new technology to us, it is what plant life has managed to do since primordia. Nonetheless we should honor this development for it is truly great, being that it is in accordance with greatness.



























A sand piper ran along the beach in front of us,
parrying with the tide, looking for food, looking very supple and confident
even as it scittered away from the lapping ocean.
Then a man with his kids threw a rock at it and it flew over my shoulder. I was struck by how different the two were.
Even before I saw the man I thought how incredible animals are and how that sand piper was so very powerful in its self.
It was there, looking for food, trying not to get too wet, no guilt underlying it all,
its head up, eyes out. I think we cripple ourselves. We fold up and hunch out as we subconsciously give in to our feelings of guilt
or failure or fear of death or longing.
rather than opening out to the world
we bow our heads and submit to these specters, we look at our feet, chins on chest, examine how thin or fat we have become,
our chest roll in, sink the lungs, spines hurt. No longer homo-sapiens, not erect columns of humanity,
no head top connected to heaven, no root in earth.
We are becoming a race of leaning towers of Pizza.
Works of desperate tragedy art, being continually refurbished and supported by crutches and addictions to painkillers.
They had to wipe the cigarette resin from the ceilings of the Sistine Chappell. Stop taking pictures, we are not tourists here,
we have been invited to stay in each moment:
feel honored, feel worthy, feel the jitters, feel grateful, but do not feel guilty for too long, do not give in to fear or failure
as the state of things. These things ebb and flow.
Stop sleeping in the fetal position;
expose your chest to dreams.






Bibliography



Campbell, Joseph. The Masks of God: Occidental Mythology. New York: Penguin Compass. 1964

Cavanagh, John & Mander, Jerry. Alternatives to Economic Globalization [A better World is Possible] A Report of the Intrnational Forum on Globalization. San Fancisco: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc. 2004

Christie, Anthony. Chinese Mythology. Verona: The Hamlyn Publishing Group Limited. 1968

Cleary, Thomas. The Essential Tao: An Initiation into the heart of Taoism through the Authentic Tao Te Ching and the Inner Teachings of Chuang Tzu. New York: Harper Collins. 1991

Hertz, Noreena. The Silent Takeover: Global Capitalism and the Death of Democracy. New York: Harper Collins. 2003

Liao, Waysun. T’ai Chi Classics: New Translations of three essential texts of T’ai Chi Ch’uan with commentary and practical instruction. Boston & London: Shambhala. 1990

Mitchell, James. The Craft of Modular Post & Beam: Building Log & Timber Homes Affordably. Vancouver: Hartley & Marks. 1984

Narby, Jeremy. The Cosmic Serpent, DNA and the Origins of Knowledge. New York: Jeremy P Tarcher/Putnam a member of Penguin Putnam Inc. 1998

Simic, Charles. The World Doesn’t End. San Diego, New York, London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Publishers. 1989

Starhawk. The Spiral Dance: Rebirth of the Ancient Religion of the Great Goddess. New York: Harper Collins. 1979

Wikipedia. Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. www.wikipedia.org

Rocks are Mountains without names

If We follow our Madness

If we follow our madness
our beauty will destroy us

In her book, Women Who Run With the Wolves, Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Ph.D., utilizes her work in the field of wildlife biology to broaden our understanding of the feminine travails in Moderna[*].

“Healthy wolves and healthy women share certain psychic characteristics: keen sensing, playful spirit, and a heightened capacity for devotion. Wolves and women are relational by nature, inquiring, possessed of great endurance and strength. They are deeply intuitive, intensely concerned with their young, their mates, and their pack. They are experienced in adapting to constantly changing circumstances; they are fiercely stalwart and very brave.
Yet both have been hounded, harassed and falsely imputed to be devouring and devious, overly aggressive, of less value than those who are their detractors. They have been the targets of those who would clean up the wilds as well as the wildish environs of the psyche, extincting the instinctual, and leaving no trace of it behind.”

We can imagine what sort of detractors these would be. To place this dynamic within the context of healing, we see that what the author is proposing is not gender bias in any way, not an attack on men, but indeed a call to action.
It has already been brought to our attention that Medical Doctors may be the new priests, the new church being science, and while the religious power structures of the past have been offering connection to “God” in exchange for cutting off our connection to our body, and investing our trust in a male authority (a mediator with, or even monger of the divine), the Allopathic, or Western (more properly Modern) Medical Model has offered us a connection to “Health,” in exchange for our livelihood, expecting us to trust companies of insurance and believing that the body will be better if they can surgically remove all its bad parts. All the same pieces are in fashion, but rearanged to look different (see casting out satan, and the obsession with soaps which "kill 99.9% of germs").
In the Natural medicine world there is no reason to blame an outside force. The pop-scientist, Pasteur, who put forth the still used germ theory would, much the same as Richard Nixon, decades later indighted himself on his own crude tape recordings, dosumenting the true purpose for creating Insurance Companies, Pasteur admitted on his death bed that the theory he propogated was not a tool for the creation of health, but rather the accumulation of money. While there are germs and bacteria in our world, just as there are seeds of flowers and maggots, these things will not propagate in the human body if the body does not foster them—just as soil which too wet will create mold and dead flesh will find ways to decompose, so too will balanced soil give rise blossoms. In this model we are responsible for our health to a degree which may appear as radical as did the tactics of Mahatma Gandhi or Martin Luther King Jr., however this is simply the way things must be done, for it is in accord with the way things are.
This being a holistic model it applies not only to physical ailments, but also to mental-emotional traumas as well. We can no more blame the ground we walk on for our knee problems, than can we blame some one’s sneeze for our sickness, nor can we say that some one else is responsible for the state of our mind. “You make me angry,” has become a statement of a long outdated mode of being, if you angry, or happy, or depressed, it is your responsibility. There are environmental conditions to be accounted for, however if your life, your home, your body is making you sad, would you want some one else to impose changes upon your life, your home, or perhaps your body? Who is the expert who would know how to change your life?
When we take this view of our life, our health, and our connection to God, we challenge a lot inside of ourselves and we open our availability to greater clarity. All spiritual paths have their language for a “middle way,” a Goldilocks principle of not too little, not too much, neither self flagellation, nor excesses. Who is responsible for the death of a sheep? The wolf that ate it, or the rancher who locked it in a pen? Was it the hunger of the wolf or the excess of the rancher that was the crime?
So too we discover in this model of self responsibility that we do to others as we do to ourselves. A man is strong, not because he holds control over the woman he is with, but because he can be relaxed enough to let her fill her full strength and then meet her there. We would like to think a strong civilization has strong walls as big weapons. However if one observes a river, the “strong” rocks protruding from the water, one will see upon them the signs of time, the rock has worn away, after a spring flood, the rocks may have been tossed about. Though one can see the signs of time on the faces of the rock, what age is the water?
The beauty of the rock is not that it imposes its way on all other types. In mythology there is often the image of a demon or “bad guy” who can turn people and things to stone. The virtue of rock is not to create more rock, but to give context. Seeing the strength of rock, its solidity we are able to conceive the fluidity of water, the flux of the seasonal plants, etc. Still building walls to protect one self, only seems to beget the building of more walls. The rock has no concern for itself, it is simply strong and its strength simply wears away to the softness of sandy beaches. The moment the rock becomes concerned for its self, it gives rise to war fare.
What of the warrior who slays the demon, is not the warrior virtuous? Perhaps. Often these myths arise from cultures stuck in the paradigm I have been describing which is blame-centric and surrounded by walls. These images arise of monsters who only wish to destroy more and more, with out recognizing that such stories are all mirrors, we are doomed to live them out. We can only write about what we can conceive and we can only conceive what we can do. We may observe things doing what we can not, but what we see we will label incorrectly, if, refusing to remain still and observant longer, we jump to such construction. Thus, I say, perhaps the hero would be virtuous if the monster were really, but instead I see a single character chasing its tail with a knife, crying, “Get back here you!”
In the Taoist Practice of Tai Chi Chuan, duality is worked with through movement for the practitioner to find unity. The duality we all have likely seen in this information age is the Yin-Yang, the play of darkness and light upon mountain slopes, observed by geographers of ancient China gave first voice to this. It now represents also softness and strength, feminine and masculine, cool and warm, etc. It is said, “Ultimate yin is yang, thus if you invest in great gain you will suffer great loss, invest in little gain and you will suffer little loss. Therefore invest in loss.” To have ultimate strength is to be weak. We can see this in body building competitions where participants have built up so much muscle they can no longer access the full range of movement of their arms and legs. Their movements, though full of a potential strength, have become slow and cumbersome like that of turtles. The more walls we build around the worlds we create, the more that we have to defend, the more violence we will inevitably see in our lives. Conversely, the more we are able to open our eyes to the world around us, letting go of our creations, our fabrications and be naked, the more vitality and strength we allow to flow into us.
Jesus encouraged any who would listen to him to give away their belongings and live with him as an ascetic. By keeping nothing that could be taken from him, he was able to spend the rest of his life giving.
To return to the “detractors” of the wild woman spoken of by Estes, we see that first and foremost they are detractors of themselves. If women are “falsely imputed to be devouring and devious, overly aggressive, [and] of less value,” it is by others who cannot control their own appetites, who use their cleverness destructively, who attack first, and who do not know of their own value. The priest condemns all the qualities in his congregation which he can not come to terms with in himself, and the surgeon removes from his patients all that which he does not fully understand within his own body.
It has been proposed that male aggression has causal lines connected to having genitalia housed on the exterior of the body. The female reproductive organs are protected within, while the male has the most sensitive part of his body out in the open, subject to being more easily damaged, and with the loss of the foreskin, more quickly desensitized. From fear of such pain as this, the phallus becomes a correlate of a weapon. Swords, missiles, guns, these things all resemble penises, but it is not the other way round. The penis only becomes a symbolic tool for fighting when there is fear of ones own death; the organ itself is inherently life giving. In this we see the principal again, of ultimate strength becoming weakness. While the vagina may be related to yin, the receptive, deep within is the creative, the womb, able to manifest a new life from itself. The male body on the other hand is protruding, hard, and strong by nature. In this there is the weakness, the fear of breaking, fear of not being hard enough, fear of being hurt. From this yin comes again yang and the male strikes out, preemptively to try and secure some corner of safety for himself. This is the history of patriarchy we see spilled out behind us. We most go a step further into another step of yin, as species our masculine must not go again into weakness but gentleness, receptivity. Many a marriage has been the training ground for this, providing a huge back log of all degrees of success. We see with each generation passed, that, just as the river out lives the stone, on average, women have longer life spans than their mates. Men, rather than fixating on passing on some idea of legacy or project to their offspring must come to terms with the better half of their nature, and with their own vulnerability and the reality of death in life. Just like the myths we construct we create in our world that which we have the most difficulty facing, Just like Achilles, waging war has become a way of trying to hide from mortality. A true woman is not a woman who, through much effort and striving becomes a man, but a woman who is strong by virtue of her feminine qualities. Like wise I do not propose that men become more like women. I propose that we have built a world which is gender-centric and if women feel they need to become more like men to “make it in this world,” then we need to reexamine the world we are in the practice of creating. Perhaps from decades of building walls, clashing swords and fear of not being hard enough, there are other virtues that have been underdeveloped in the male vocabulary.
If you need to have sheep, have a flock of sheep, protect them, be their steward. But if your purpose in having sheep is to profit from them, then you have become a wolf in shepherd’s clothing. Indeed, because the wolf only takes as much as it needs to survive, we may have become worse than the monsters we created in myth.
With the back log of human experience through out the ages and the current faculties and capacities of the species, we could see our selves with such depth, that we have spun off into the polar opposite, religiously devoting huge quantities of time and energy to distractions, incising our experience to its most mundane. I do not know whether we are able to see our selves with much greater clarity than any animal, or whether animals remain in such a state of awareness and have never been able to make choices such as we, who have opted to dam up what we were born with and then fear its coming. However I do suspect that the greater fear which differentiates us from other animals is not in fact the fear stemming from consciousness of our own death, rather it is the fear of seeing ourselves as deeply as we are able.
[*] the present kingdom of time