the "indigenous self"

Carolyn Baker And Keith Farnish Dialog About The Great Transition

Civilization has robbed us of our intimate connection with our own humanity--something that I sometimes call our "indigenous self", and like indigenous people revolting against colonization, collapse is offering us the opportunity to uncolonize and reclaim the indigenous self within us.

emergence, LA style

Santa Muerte in L.A.: A gentler vision of 'Holy Death' - Page 4 - Los Angeles Times

The sect's emergence here may not be especially surprising.

Los Angeles has been an incubator for all manner of fringe religions since the 19th century, a tradition fanned equally by rich Hollywood seekers and storefront-church disciples.

Mexico, too, has an enthusiastic tradition of tarot card reading and other forms of divination and also of healing herbs and potions.

Rick Nahmais, a photographer who has documented immigrants' Santa Muerte worship, said the practice fills serious needs among the marginalized, citing a group of transgender prostitutes he photographed in San Francisco. They sought Santa Muerte's protection from AIDS and even conducted marriages in her name, he said.

Southern California's version of the practice may contain "a little shtick," as is typical of L.A.'s New Age dabblings, he said. But the creed's striking imagery sets it apart. Nahmais called it genuine spiritual questing by people trapped in highly dangerous lives whose poverty, need or underworld occupations leave them feeling exiled from conventional faith.

"What I love about Santa Muerte worship is that it deals with the shadow very openly -- the Jungian shadow, the archetype of darkness in all of us," he said. "It embraces that."

Tribal Revival: by Erik Davis

The anthropologist Victor Turner famously used the word liminal to describe the passageway between the known and the unknown, the path that takes you to a nomadic territory that lies in-betwixt and in-between. Turner was interested in traditional rites of passage, those tribal ceremonies that guide participants through the process of social transformation—from childhood to adulthood, say, or from novice to shaman. Such rites are important inspirations for today’s neotribalists as well, both consciously and not. For though the festival rarely marks its participants with the obvious cuts and tattoos of a puberty rite, it does hold out the potential for real change, and this potential lies in the liminal: the deeply felt sense that the normal rules are suspended or warped, that a possible world is emerging, and that a new self can rise to greet it.

[....]

At that moment I knew, with almost unbearable conviction, that this exact moment had occurred before, that it echoed back through a thousand years of a thousand dusty stomps, and that all festivals were really just one festival, eternally recurring.

This feeling itself, I would come to learn, is an ancient one, and in it lies the seed of renewal. In his book The Eternal Return, the historian of religion Mircea Eliade described how certain rituals allow mythic time to erupt inside mundane history. In particular, Eliade talked about annual tribal ceremonies that stage the recreation of the cosmos. The idea, which is found throughout primal societies, is that by ritually returning to the chaos at the beginning of things, and then reenacting the emergence of our ordered world, the cosmos itself is renewed. Such ceremonies give us an insight into the deep impulses of the festival, within whose electronic noise and psychedelic chaos stir new forms of living and being together on this planet.

A heavy dose of....propaganda?

How to Save the World

Derrick Jensen suggests (in A Language Older Than Words) that we listen to the land, and in time it will tell us just what we need to do.

I am trying to believe this, but I'm not sure I do. As Quinn says, you need to be ready to listen, to reconnect. Although I don't much like the analogy, it's a lot like being ready for a religious conversion. I understand that most people are indoctrinated into their religious beliefs from a very early age, but many still need some event to trigger a true realization of that belief. And others who come to religion later in their lives do so because they're ready -- some combination of events and support from other believers is sufficient to take them past a tipping point, and bring about a major worldview change. A heavy dose of propaganda needs to be applied at just the right time, by more than one person, in the context of the convert's own community and situation. This is not easy stuff.

Organized religions do this very effectively. They provide the tools for evangelism, and the infrastructure to keep the flock in the fold. Whereas some of them are con-men and criminals, others are generous and sincere. Gladwell has described the "cellular" organization that enables many evangelical churches to convert and retain members, using a bottom-up outreach and support process coordinated by a top-down hierarchy that supplies the tools of conversion and retention.

Perhaps the Transition movement and the Permaculture movement, both community-based networks, are the analogue of the local cells of religious groups. Perhaps these are the networks that we can use, instead of debates, conferences and books, to do the same thing to organize those who are, as Quinn and Jensen say, ready to listen, to reconnect, and to start to do the much more radical work that will be needed to:

* learn a better way to live and make a living,
* disrupt and bring down our industrial growth economy and the civilization that depends on it, and
* create new models to replace them that are healthy and sustainable.

Yet I'm troubled by this. If we create cellular networks to organize the work of reconnection, learning, action and creation needed to enable a better world, could these not easily become, as so many religious networks are, vehicles for indoctrination and exploitation? Will we end up with sects who think that better world can and should be built now, in the shadow of our teetering civilization, and others who think we should focus on undermining existing civilization and that nothing very useful can be accomplished until that work is done? I can see myself agreeing with both viewpoints.

Embracing the darkness..

Transition Times » Article » Transition Towns or Bright Green Cities? The Color of Movements or the Color of Life?

Since the beginning of human history, the wisdom of ancient traditions has reiterated that life is not always as it seems. That which appears dazzling is not always desirable, and that which appears dark is not always wisely averted. Sometimes that which we fear most is our redemption. The greatest minds of human history: Socrates, Plato, Shakespeare, Jung, Einstein—to name a few, were not repelled by dark realities, but rather embraced them, however reluctantly, as conduits to deeper truth and more exquisite creativity.

Spin it as we will, the human race is precariously poised on the cliff’s edge, hanging by its fingernails. Our challenge is not to try to prevent the collapse of the larger systems, but to respond with resilience and self-sufficiency and to ask the kinds of questions that wisdom traditions and the greatest minds in human history have always asked: Why is this happening? What meaning can I and my community find in this unfolding of events? What do I and my loved ones and my community need to do to prepare? And perhaps most importantly, what is my purpose in being here at this time? What have I come here to do? What can I contribute?

atmos sphere

The Air Aware | Orion Magazine

Indeed, whenever indigenous, tribal persons speak, often matter-of-factly, about “the spirits,” we moderns mistakenly assume, in keeping with our own impoverished sense of matter, that they’re alluding to a supernatural set of powers unrelated to the material world. We come much closer to the shadowed savvy of our indigenous sisters and brothers, however, when we recognize that the spirits they speak of have more in common with the myriad gusts, breezes, and winds that influence life in any locale—like the wind that barrels along the river at dusk, chattering the cottonwood leaves, or the mist-laden breeze that flows down from the foothills on certain mornings, and those multiple whirlwinds that swirl and rise the dust on hot summer days, and the gentle zephyr that lingers above the night grasses, and the various messenger-winds that bring us knowledge of what the neighbors are cooking this evening. Or even the small but significant gusts that slip in and out of our nostrils as we lie sleeping. We moderns pay little heed to these subtle invisibles, these elementals—indeed we tend not to notice them at all, convinced that a breeze is nothing other than a mindless jostling of molecules. Our breathing bodies know otherwise. But we will keep our bodies out of play; we will keep our thoughts aligned solely with what our complex instruments can measure. Until we have indisputable evidence to the contrary, we will assume that matter itself is utterly devoid of felt experience. In this manner we hoard and hold tight to our own awareness—like a frightened whirlwind spinning ever faster, trying to convince itself of its own autonomy, struggling to hold itself aloof from the ocean of air that surrounds it.

It has always been so...

integral praxis: Intersubjectivity and Interobjectivity in the Kosmos

In "An Integral Age at the Leading Edge", we summarized the evidence suggesting that a cultural elite, representing less that 2% of the adult population, was entering psychosocial waves of development that could best be described as integral, and that this 2% might very well be the harbinger of integral waves of consciousness to follow in the culture at large. It is a paradoxical situation, in a sense, in that this "elite" is the first to actually embrace a radical inclusiveness, an inclusive not shared by the other 98% of the population at this time (although they, too, might develop into this inclusive and integral orientation).

One of the nagging problems I've had with Wilber's Integral development model is the presumption that those of "lesser" development might one day claw their way up into the "elite" realms of Integral consciousness, if only they.... what? meditate more? buy more of Wilber's books? It's never terribly clear.

It seems to me there have been "radically inclusive" thinkers throughout history, as well as less inclusive masses (who aren't always terribly receptive to the thinkers' notions). There have been some changes in the "midpoint" of that mass, but that sort of change has always been very slow, with a long, thick trail (tail?), and tied to generational cycles much like paradigm shift. I would think the likelihood of creating some sudden large-scale developmental shift to activate Integral consciousness in more than a handful of people at any time is infinitesimal, so long as nothing else in the historic context of human consciousness is pushing or catalyzing that change.

There's quite a number of potentially catalyzing forces emerging at this moment in time, though: Climate change, the collapse of global capitalism in the wake of peak oil, hyperconnectivity, etc. so the possibility of sudden radical transformational shifts can't be ruled out completely, I suppose. However, it would seem much more pragmatic to contemplate how our societies might navigate these tricky waters of change with individuals spread across the "bell curve of consciousness." Should we focus on individual growth and development, a world of "I"s rising one by one? or on mass cultural change driven by systems-theory type interventions in the cognitive field-flow of mental existence, now being accelerated and hyper-networked by the spread of ubiquitous webtech?

I propose the Integral shaman would say both, neither, and something else.

Christian deQuincy on conscious evolution

Since humans are natural products of evolution, then whatever attributes we have (including our self-reflexive consciousness) are automatically natural expressions of evolution, too. Yes we are a “living face” of evolution today—but we are not alone. We have very good reasons to believe that other species (such as cetaceans and some of the other great apes) also possess forms of self-reflexive consciousness.
[...]
As always, I’m interested in shifting our attention (or expanding our attention) from a self-serving, self-absorbed focus on human consciousness or evolution. We share this ecosystem (and consciousness) with a host of other sentient beings, without whom we would not be who we are or be able to survive. The evolution of human culture/society will always take place within a larger context and network of other sentient beings who are also evolving.

Like most indigenous cultures do, we need to see our species as just one “nation” sharing this beautiful planet and awesome cosmos with a more-than-human world. 

The “intelligent design” at work in evolution is not something new that came on the scene with human consciousness. It has always been there—in all species, in all matter—as a natural ingredient of the sentient energy that pervades the cosmos, and underlies all of reality.

Creation is at work in evolution—the natural creative capacity that matter/energy itself possesses.

Collapse Spirituality / our connection to the earth

Protecting our families and future in a time of crisis | Energy Bulletin

Repeatedly, she admonishes us to be deeply involved with our food which forces us to be involved with seasonality and our food supply's link with nature. Additionally, she tells us that growing and preserving our food is everyday work. If we intend to eat, we must constantly be involved with these two tasks.

If one is not engaged in these tasks and is still dependent on others for obtaining ones' food supply, one will always be at the mercy of the power of corporations which care nothing about nutrition or food security. The challenges Depletion and Abundance toss in our laps are daunting: "Food preservation and food production are keys to democracy....As long as we depend on large corporations to meet our basic needs, we'll never be able to judge them fairly or eliminate their power in our society. That is, we cannot simultaneously call for an end to multinational monoliths and also pay them to do something as basic as feed us.....We should not owe our lives to entities we deplore." (page 206)

That "ouch", however, isn't as painful as the chapter on health care. I've heard many ideas about health care from experts consciously preparing for the complete collapse of that system, and I haven't heard any options for home-based healthcare that don't leave me shaking in my boots. Although I hoped not to mention it in this review, the paltry options that will exist when the system doesn't are grim reminders that many people will not survive collapse for any number of reasons. This is the elephant in the room that we tend to avoid when discussing collapse.

However, nothing could be more real or more poignant. And if the planet, according to many experts, needs to shed 4 or 5 billion people in order to survive, then survival may be the exception, rather than the rule. When we finally recognize this reality, then we are immediately in the territory of something greater and more momentous than our physical existence, namely issues of meaning, purpose, and mystery. Depletion and Abundance does not address these topics, but I do in my forthcoming online book, The Spirituality Of Collapse.