The imaginal world is emerging into post modern consciousness. We are becoming more generally aware that the biophysical world and our mental-symbolic world are different things. This emergence is due to the increasing dysjunction between the two.

   The symbolic world is our map of reality. The better our map, the more real our projection seems to be. Poor mapping is a poor grip on reality.

   Gripping reality with a map is one way to go. And if you want companions on the road, an agreed upon map of the way, like rules of the road, improves the chances of success.   The locations on the map are notional, like the jhanas of buddhism or the states and stages of sufism. Descriptions are lyrical rather than precise. Even if you mechanically maximize alpha waves or whatever, alpha waves are not enlightenment, not salvation. It’s like playing solitaire on a super computer. You win, game over, play again, until you tire of this round of samsara. 

  This is mappo, the reduction of the dharma to mechanical practices and individual self improvement schemes detached from general social life. Buddhists no longer dress in rags and go begging for food door to door.  

   There is another way to grasp reality, through non dualism, but it is incommunicable. Though the source of all - call it “nature”- it can’t be “used” as we think because we are a part of it. As chief seattle said, “The earth was not made for man, man was made for the earth.”

   Yet our psycho-social maps tend to leave nature out, as though it were an endless resource of “goods” for us to exploit and squander. Rome is burning and we are fiddling.

   Though we see “happiness” as our goal individually and collectively the dysjunction between the biophysical world and the mental and emotional framework we use for living in it  has eroded our abilities to achieve it. 

  Buddhism originated in a reframing of the human project. It was a reaction to the growing realization that wealth and comfort did not make for human happiness, a repudiation of materialism. It involved an acknowledgement that at least some segments of society needed to embrace a wholesome, non destructive lifestyle, free of violence and excess. One characterized by compassion for all sentient being.  

  The buddhism of the day predicted the dharma would decline. Ny contention here is that the climate catastrophe now occurring needs to be mapped symbolically and dealt with as reality. By any means possible. Including buddhism, including “pragmatic dharma,”


   The buddha says, “wake up.” That is, map us a way to sentience surviving. Call it salvation.


(aside -

I’ve been thinking about the collapse of civilization and a return of the surviving few to a neo neolithic age.
​​​​​​​​​​​​​​
We find ourselves not only in a climate hostile world, but a world in which all of the readily available resources - copper, tin, gold, coal, sulfur, mega fauna etc etc have been exhausted and dissipated, even fresh water and wood.The most abundant source of fresh meat other humans. And no way to cook them. We file our teeth to make them sharper. )


   

"The names of the bodhisattvas were Bodhisattva Viewing Equality, Bodhisattva Viewing Inequality, Bodhisattva Viewing Equality and Inequality, Bodhisattva Meditation Freedom King, Bodhisattva Dharma Freedom King, Bodhisattva Dharma Forms," - Chapter 1, Vimalakirti sutra

I wouldn't say Bodhisattva Dharma Forms is less than Bodhisattva Dharma Freedom King though, both are Bodhisattvas

Nope, Buddha taught the "Middle Way", between materialism and ascetism. Both "philosophies" (for the lack of a better term) were already fighting each other back then. 

A repudiation of excess, then. Yes, the world was already a burning house and the end apparent.

one potato, two potato, three potato, four

Yeah, I know what you mean, Climate Change + Russia & China threating a nuclear war is a whole new level of distress, yet we are living in the best time in History. At the time of the Buddha, Lao Tse or Jesus life was short and brutal for today's standards (~45 years, high infant mortality, starvation, epidemics, warfare and violence, etc). They too thought of an impending havoc. In India there was that idea of cyclical destruction, in China the never-ending warring states, in Judea the upcoming end of the world, etc. Much of these ideas derive from the transition from a rural to an urban civilizations 

   

   Living in the best time in history, eh. I assume you live in "the global north." A dickensian tale of two hemispheres; the best of times, the worst of times. As in the american antebellum south, life was good for the exploiters, bad for the exploited. And really, it was not so good for the wealthy either, their twisted values causing many pathologies.

   We have eliminated the negative feedbacks that limit population growth. This has enabled us to overshoot the carrying capacity of our environment, the ability of the environment to supply nutrients and assimilate waste, so rapidly that our population has grown to obviously unsustainable levels.

   This is indeed the most remarkable time in history, the human empire at its greatest extent, on the brink of starving and choking on its own waste. Human population of eight billion was three billion in 1950. We've used half of the fossil fuel ever burnt in the last thirty years, and made half of the plastic; the next thirty years are set to double these numbers again. Our world economy is based on continuous growth. This is obviously unsustainable but with technology we have maintained it for a few generations, extracting ever more difficult to reach minerals, substituting as we go and keeping an exponential growth curve reflected by hockey stick graphs. When growth ends society will have collapsed. There is literally no path to sustainability for the bulk of earth's population.

   So we as humans have lived entirely through this period of exceptional unprecedented unsustainable growth. Children of summer. Winter is coming.

   The buddha turned his back on the comfortable convenient lies of his father the king and experienced hunger and thirst and exposure. He advocated a correct, sustainable path, advocating values that could be practiced independently of wealth and economic status.

   How about green buddhism? We could plant a trillion upaya trees.

bill rees outlines the problem and advises religions...


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U3GB191UDiI

https://youtu.be/LT3cERVRoQo?si=u5cq05AyndQIxZJm

Nope. I live in "the poor south", with a mean of 12% of monthly inflation rate, 40% of poverty, 10% of indigence, mean salaries below USD 500, pensions of USD 150, etc. My country sucks, but our poor neighbours have constantly done better and reduce poverty consistently over the last couple of decades. That also happened in India, China and some African countries as well.
​​​​​​​

​​​​​​​Yeah!! Love that!

Seagrass is better for carbon sequestration because it the carbon is eventually buried under sediment in an anoxic regime. Trees are just temporary as when they die they either get burnt for fuel or fungi decompose then and the carbon returns to the atmosphere.

Only feasible way to sequester carbon derived from fossil fuel is to leave it in the ground.  Needless to say, we haven't been taking that option. Imagine huge pipelines putting carbon back into the ground at the rate we are taking it out and you may appreciate the scale of the problem.

Since altering the gaseous composition of the atmosphere is a done deal, it is almost inevitable that an increasingly desperate world will attempt geoengineering, such as injecting aerosols into the stratosphere. What could possibly go wrong? Best outcome it works and masks global warming, in which case we will have to keep injecting more and more as the planet tries to heat up. When the injection system inevitably fails the resulting warming will be toasty.

There are more people living in poverty now than existed in 1950.

And the trends are going down due to climate change. Poverty and hunger and displacement are increasing.

Tourism is one of the industries we need to stop. Ground all the planes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7t5RrUt3nrY

Actually a nuclear war would probably be better for the biosphere than continuing to pump co2 into the atmosphere. Runaway gloabal warming - setting off the clathrate bomb - could take the biosphere fifty million years to recover, versus only tens or hundreds of thousands of years for nuclear war. Assuming runaway global warming doesn't turn earth into another venus, also a possibility.

best mapping of a near future transition which deals with climate change on many levels

(drum roll please)


kim stanley robinson's recent masterwork of science fiction, "ministry for the future"...

   One of he attractions of “pragmatic dharma” is that it doesn’t sneer at science or religion. It rides the interface between the biophysical world and the “mind.” Mainstream science consensus is valued and solicited.

   So even more reason to include overshoot slash climate change slash resulting social upheaval as mappable elements in our spiritual journeys. “Interesting times” inspired the taoists and the sufis to challenge the religious institutions of their times with the mystic power of transcendent love to change ideology and facilitate spiritual (r)evolution.

   For one thing the world is closer together than ever, the internet and travel and rubbing elbows with eight billion souls bring us closer together. Now the shared experience of climate change is beginning to wake us up to our collective nature as a super-organism. There is nowhere on the planet that is safe, no resorts, no latitudes, no islands of stability. We are all in the same boat.

   It is becoming increasingly obvious that human world culture must change due to environmental pressure. Continued exponential growth has always been unsustainable but now it appears it must come to a stop within a few years or sooner.

   Conservatives traditionally want to maintain the status quo and progressives want to change things for the better, but both approaches are irrelevant when it’s all hands on deck to bail and reduce sail. Yet the same thinking prevails. No one has a workable plan the honestly addresses the real situation. People who understand the problem best are the most deeply pessinistic. Perhaps grief counseling is all we have left. But pascal's wager encourages us to bet on whatever path might enable sentience to survive.

   Waking up to this reality might happen much faster than we might think. We responded to covid deaths with massive spending and when millions die from heat waves and grid failures similar expenditures will likely be forthcoming. The people who have been thinking and talking about these things for decades will start to be listened to. The prospect of artifical intelligence may end up being our savior by enabling effective degrowth decentralized economic planning.

   We need to be designing new ways of global cooperation in a post growth world. How to handle declining populations and declining harvests and decreasing use of material goods with grace and fairness. The opportunity to create more social equity is the silver lining to the whole project.

 Map this!

   

"The major problems in the world are  the result of the difference between how nature works and the way people think."
​​​​​​​
~gregory bateson

Nate hagens, one of our new noahs, has a pod cast. I think of his sort of work as “arkology” which I might define as studying ways we may engineer a soft transition to a post fossil fuel civilization.

In this episode, which just came out a couple of days ago, he interviews stanford professor and primate researcher doctor robert sapolsky (“call me robert”) about his new not yet published book  determined; a science of life without free will. 

The interview is lengthy and by the end robert is pretty convincing that everything anyone does is mediated by neurotransmitters rather mechanistnically. He manages to do this without being reductionistic.

His mechanism is much like karma, just cause and effect and no magical thinking.

Nothing is free, least of all will. 


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xhobcj2K9v4


If you watch the interview you might appreciate why I think the following quote is apropos. I thought it quite funny.



from spinoza, ethics, part one


APPENDIX:

In the foregoing I have explained the nature and properties of God. I have shown that he necessarily exists, that he is one: that he is, and acts solely by the necessity of his own nature; that he is the free cause of all things, and how he is so; that all things are in God, and so depend on him, that without him they could neither exist nor be conceived; lastly, that all things are predetermined by God, not through his free will or absolute fiat, but from the very nature of God or infinite power. I have further, where occasion afforded, taken care to remove the prejudices, which might impede the comprehension of my demonstrations. Yet there still remain misconceptions not a few, which might and may prove very grave hindrances to the understanding of the concatenation of things, as I have explained it above. I have therefore thought it worth while to bring these misconceptions before the bar of reason.

All such opinions spring from the notion commonly entertained, that all things in nature act as men themselves act, namely, with an end in view. It is accepted as certain, that God himself directs all things to a definite goal (for it is said that God made all things for man, and man that he might worship him). I will, therefore, consider this opinion, asking first, why it obtains general credence, and why all men are naturally so prone to adopt it? secondly, I will point out its falsity; and, lastly, I will show how it has given rise to prejudices about good and bad, right and wrong, praise and blame, order and confusion, beauty and ugliness, and the like. However, this is not the place to deduce these misconceptions from the nature of the human mind: it will be sufficient here, if I assume as a starting point, what ought to be universally admitted, namely, that all men are born ignorant of the causes of things, that all have the desire to seek for what is useful to them, and that they are conscious of such desire. Herefrom it follows, first, that men think themselves free inasmuch as they are conscious of their volitions and desires, and never even dream, in their ignorance, of the causes which have disposed them so to wish and desire. Secondly, that men do all things for an end, namely, for that which is useful to them, and which they seek. Thus it comes to pass that they only look for a knowledge of the final causes of events, and when these are learned, they are content, as having no cause for further doubt. If they cannot learn such causes from external sources, they are compelled to turn to considering themselves, and reflecting what end would have induced them personally to bring about the given event, and thus they necessarily judge other natures by their own. Further, as they find in themselves and outside themselves many means which assist them not a little in the search for what is useful, for instance, eyes for seeing, teeth for chewing, herbs and animals for yielding food, the sun for giving light, the sea for breeding fish, &c., they come to look on the whole of nature as a means for obtaining such conveniences. Now as they are aware, that they found these conveniences and did not make them, they think they have cause for believing, that some other being has made them for their use. As they look upon things as means, they cannot believe them to be self—created; but, judging from the means which they are accustomed to prepare for themselves, they are bound to believe in some ruler or rulers of the universe endowed with human freedom, who have arranged and adapted everything for human use. They are bound to estimate the nature of such rulers (having no information on the subject) in accordance with their own nature, and therefore they assert that the gods ordained everything for the use of man, in order to bind man to themselves and obtain from him the highest honor. Hence also it follows, that everyone thought out for himself, according to his abilities, a different way of worshipping God, so that God might love him more than his fellows, and direct the whole course of nature for the satisfaction of his blind cupidity and insatiable avarice. Thus the prejudice developed into superstition, and took deep root in the human mind; and for this reason everyone strove most zealously to understand and explain the final causes of things; but in their endeavor to show that nature does nothing in vain, i.e. nothing which is useless to man, they only seem to have demonstrated that nature, the gods, and men are all mad together. Consider, I pray you, the result: among the many helps of nature they were bound to find some hindrances, such as storms, earthquakes, diseases, &c.: so they declared that such things happen, because the gods are angry at some wrong done to them by men, or at some fault committed in their worship. Experience day by day protested and showed by infinite examples, that good and evil fortunes fall to the lot of pious and impious alike; still they would not abandon their inveterate prejudice, for it was more easy for them to class such contradictions among other unknown things of whose use they were ignorant, and thus to retain their actual and innate condition of ignorance, than to destroy the whole fabric of their reasoning and start afresh. They therefore laid down as an axiom, that God's judgments far transcend human understanding. Such a doctrine might well have sufficed to conceal the truth from the human race for all eternity, if mathematics had not furnished another standard of verity in considering solely the essence and properties of figures without regard to their final causes. There are other reasons (which I need not mention here) besides mathematics, which might have caused men's minds to be directed to these general prejudices, and have led them to the knowledge of the truth.

I have now sufficiently explained my first point. There is no need to show at length, that nature has no particular goal in view, and that final causes are mere human figments. This, I think, is already evident enough, both from the causes and foundations on which I have shown such prejudice to be based, and also from Prop. xvi., and the Corollary of Prop. xxxii., and, in fact, all those propositions in which I have shown, that everything in nature proceeds from a sort of necessity, and with the utmost perfection. However, I will add a few remarks, in order to overthrow this doctrine of a final cause utterly. That which is really a cause it considers as an effect, and vice versâ: it makes that which is by nature first to be last, and that which is highest and most perfect to be most imperfect. Passing over the questions of cause and priority as self—evident, it is plain from Props. xxi., xxii., xxiii. that the effect is most perfect which is produced immediately by God; the effect which requires for its production several intermediate causes is, in that respect, more imperfect. But if those things which were made immediately by God were made to enable him to attain his end, then the things which come after, for the sake of which the first were made, are necessarily the most excellent of all.

Further, this doctrine does away with the perfection of God: for, if God acts for an object, he necessarily desires something which he lacks. Certainly, theologians and metaphysicians draw a distinction between the object of want and the object of assimilation; still they confess that God made all things for the sake of himself, not for the sake of creation. They are unable to point to anything prior to creation, except God himself, as an object for which God should act, and are therefore driven to admit (as they clearly must), that God lacked those things for whose attainment he created means, and further that he desired them.

We must not omit to notice that the followers of this doctrine, anxious to display their talent in assigning final causes, have imported a new method of argument in proof of their theory—namely, a reduction, not to the impossible, but to ignorance; thus showing that they have no other method of exhibiting their doctrine. For example, if a stone falls from a roof on to someone's head, and kills him, they will demonstrate by their new method, that the stone fell in order to kill the man; for, if it had not by God's will fallen with that object, how could so many circumstances (and there are often many concurrent circumstances) have all happened together by chance? Perhaps you will answer that the event is due to the facts that the wind was blowing, and the man was walking that way. "But why," they will insist, "was the wind blowing, and why was the man at that very time walking that way?" If you again answer, that the wind had then sprung up because the sea had begun to be agitated the day before, the weather being previously calm, and that the man had been invited by a friend, they will again insist: "But why was the sea agitated, and why was the man invited at that time?" So they will pursue their questions from cause to cause, till at last you take refuge in the will of God—in other words, the sanctuary of ignorance. So, again, when they survey the frame of the human body, they are amazed; and being ignorant of the causes of so great a work of art, conclude that it has been fashioned, not mechanically, but by divine and supernatural skill, and has been so put together that one part shall not hurt another.

Hence anyone who seeks for the true causes of miracles, and strives to understand natural phenomena as an intelligent being, and not to gaze at them like a fool, is set down and denounced as an impious heretic by those, whom the masses adore as the interpreters of nature and the gods. Such persons know that, with the removal of ignorance, the wonder which forms their only available means for proving and preserving their authority would vanish also. But I now quit this subject, and pass on to my third point.

After men persuaded themselves, that everything which is created is created for their sake, they were bound to consider as the chief quality in everything that which is most useful to themselves, and to account those things the best of all which have the most beneficial effect on mankind. Further, they were bound to form abstract notions for the explanation of the nature of things, such as goodness, badness, order, confusion, warmth, cold, beauty, deformity, and so on; and from the belief that they are free agents arose the further notions of praise and blame, sin and merit.

I will speak of these latter hereafter, when I treat of human nature; the former I will briefly explain here.

Everything which conduces to health and the worship of God they have called good, everything which hinders these objects they have styled bad; and inasmuch as those who do not understand the nature of things do not verify phenomena in any way, but merely imagine them after a fashion, and mistake their imagination for understanding, such persons firmly believe that there is an order in things, being really ignorant both of things and their own nature. When phenomena are of such a kind, that the impression they make on our senses requires little effort of imagination, and can consequently be easily remembered, we say that they are well—ordered; if the contrary, that they are ill—ordered or confused. Further, as things which are easily imagined are more pleasing to us, men prefer order to confusion—as though there were any order in nature, except in relation to our imagination—and say that God has created all things in order; thus, without knowing it, attributing imagination to God, unless, indeed, they would have it that God foresaw human imagination, and arranged everything, so that it should be most easily imagined. If this be their theory, they would not, perhaps, be daunted by the fact that we find an infinite number of phenomena, far surpassing our imagination, and very many others which confound its weakness. But enough has been said on this subject. The other abstract notions are nothing but modes of imagining, in which the imagination is differently affected: though they are considered by the ignorant as the chief attributes of things, inasmuch as they believe that everything was created for the sake of themselves; and, according as they are affected by it, style it good or bad, healthy or rotten and corrupt. For instance, if the motion which objects we see communicate to our nerves be conducive to health, the objects causing it are styled beautiful; if a contrary motion be excited, they are styled ugly.

Things which are perceived through our sense of smell are styled fragrant or fetid; if through our taste, sweet or bitter, full—flavored or insipid; if through our touch, hard or soft, rough or smooth, &c.

Whatsoever affects our ears is said to give rise to noise, sound, or harmony. In this last case, there are men lunatic enough to believe, that even God himself takes pleasure in harmony; and philosophers are not lacking who have persuaded themselves, that the motion of the heavenly bodies gives rise to harmony—all of which instances sufficiently show that everyone judges of things according to the state of his brain, or rather mistakes for things the forms of his imagination. We need no longer wonder that there have arisen all the controversies we have witnessed, and finally skepticism: for, although human bodies in many respects agree, yet in very many others they differ; so that what seems good to one seems bad to another; what seems well ordered to one seems confused to another; what is pleasing to one displeases another, and so on. I need not further enumerate, because this is not the place to treat the subject at length, and also because the fact is sufficiently well known. It is commonly said: "So many men, so many minds; everyone is wise in his own way; brains differ as completely as palates." All of which proverbs show, that men judge of things according to their mental disposition, and rather imagine than understand: for, if they understood phenomena, they would, as mathematicians attest, be convinced, if not attracted, by what I have urged.

We have now perceived, that all the explanations commonly given of nature are mere modes of imagining, and do not indicate the true nature of anything, but only the constitution of the imagination; and, although they have names, as though they were entities, existing externally to the imagination, I call them entities imaginary rather than real; and, therefore, all arguments against us drawn from such abstractions are easily rebutted.

Many argue in this way. If all things follow from a necessity of the absolutely perfect nature of God, why are there so many imperfections in nature? such, for instance, as things corrupt to the point of putridity, loathsome deformity, confusion, evil, sin, &c. But these reasoners are, as I have said, easily confuted, for the perfection of things is to be reckoned only from their own nature and power; things are not more or less perfect, according as they delight or offend human senses, or according as they are serviceable or repugnant to mankind. To those who ask why God did not so create all men, that they should be governed only by reason, I give no answer but this: because matter was not lacking to him for the creation of every degree of perfection from highest to lowest; or, more strictly, because the laws of his nature are so vast, as to suffice for the production of everything conceivable by an infinite intelligence, as I have shown in Prop. xvi.

Such are the misconceptions I have undertaken to note; if there are any more of the same sort, everyone may easily dissipate them for himself with the aid of a little reflection.

the elephant and the clam


One of the fundamental contradictions of buddhist metaphysics I often return to is the two ways of mapping the dynamic biophysical world, and the hermeneutics of interpreting the world between these poles.

Namely, karma and paticcasamuppada; the law of causation and the law of dependent origination. These laws reveal the mechanics of the way things work and the nature of the system in which they interact.

The narrow scientific disciplines study mechanics and ecologists, futurists and visionaries try to understand the way it all fits together. We have lots of data but the narrowness of our focus tends to bring out another law, the law of unintended consequences.


Ocean scientist peter ward talks about sam wasser, who has developed a method whereby he can study the dna of elephants from a tiny sliver of ivory. Using this technique he can determine within a few kilometers the source of the ivory. Application of this method has led to the stoppage of most of the illegal trade in elephant tusks. The elephants themselves have been rapidly evolving a tuskless elephant.

Much of the ivory had been going to china for the production of little trinkets sold all over the world. Filipinos have discovered that the inner surface of the giant clam has a substance that mimics ivory perfectly and so a big trade in giant clams has ensued. These magnificent animals live 200-300 years and are cemented into the already endangered coral reefs such that great destruction to the reef is caused by their removal. The clams are now functionally extinct throughout most of their range in southeast asia, according to ward.

"I want you to act as if the house is on fire, because it is."
​​​​​​​
~the buddha (greta thunberg)

I emailed robert some comments and the quote from spinoza. My thinking was that his argument is basically spinozistic and philosophical rather than scientific.

He replied the following:

quote

Thanks for this -- Spinoza is great, one of my heroes, at least since I found out that he got excommunicated (or whatever the Jewish equivalent is) for asking some skeptical questions about God...

​​​​​​​unquote

Nice. 

There's a pot of gold at the end of the mechanical practices rainbow if we allow for it. But to get that you have to get out beyond the mechanical part and deep into the mysterious, chaotic, and wonderfully unmappable part.

The mysterious, chaotic, wonderful, terrifying and as yet unmapped future.

Blazing trails on trackless ocean.


I wonder if people taste like chicken? Probably pork. The other other white meat.

In some literature, I believe human flesh is called "long pork." We could ask the Donner Party what the taste is like but they're all dead.

By the time we get to long pig we'll be quite familiar with dog, cat and rat.

There was a book about a soccer team whose plane was lost in the andes and who resorted to human flesh, the dead bodies presrved in snow. They went into graphic detail about the tastier parts and howto prepare them, and of course they ate their special friends last.

from

​​​​​​​THIS CIVILISATION IS FINISHED
Conversations on the end of Empire—and what lies
beyond
Rupert Read and Samuel Alexander


SA: How do you conceive of your role
as a ‘teacher’ in a civilisation that is in decline?


RR: In answer, let me go back for a second to much earlier in the
educational process. We are beings born in a state of extreme
vulnerability and unformedness. When we are really young, there are
some truths (such as mortality) that we need to be led into only
slowly: to confront an infant mind with them immediately might break
that mind, or break the spirit, break the heart. It’s not right to
translate one’s spirit of honesty and truthfulness—a spirit that is
foundational for everything I aspire to do and be—into a dogma of
absolute frankness always about everything to everyone at all times.

But the terrible mistake that our civilisation has made, I believe, is to
turn the truth about our dying civilisation into an excuse for lying
systematically to our children. We lie to our children every time we
pretend that they can expect an ordinary career of their choice in an
endlessly growing economy. We lie to them every time we present
them with an image of a ‘typical’ farm full of happy outdoor pigs,
cows, and hens. We lie to them every time we tell them we love
them while giving them a new piece of plastic crap before turning our
attention swiftly back to our mobile phones. We lie to them, and
ourselves, if we think or declare that we love them and yet the
actions we take, rather than being directed with determination toward
the aim of seeking to transform this civilisation for the better, actually
hasten its likely collapse.

We lie to them because much of the time we lie to ourselves, of
course. But also because we are pierced by the thought that their
innocence shouldn’t be swept away instantly before it has had any
time to give them some feeling of safety within which they can
become sanely ‘attached’ and sanely individuated. And, as I started
by saying, there is a grain of rightness and truth in that approach.
But I think that we have got the balance badly wrong. There is no
excuse for lying systematically, and with each year older a child gets,
there is ever less of an excuse for not being truthful. By the time
children have reached 18 or so, and maybe gone to university, there
is absolutely no excuse.

It is abominable—although understandable, given peer-pressure and
institutional pressures—that most academics are concealing from
their students the dire realities and probabilities and possibilities that
now hang over them. We ought to be frankly teaching our students
at every opportunity about the extremity of the ecological crisis,
about the out-datedness of their economics curriculum (and in fact,
arguably, of most curricula), about how unmoored our species has
become from reality. We ought to be teaching them, too, things like
how to grow their own food, rather than pretending that they are all
going to have ‘wonderful’ digital jobs and the like.

Hey Terry!

If you're interested in the collapse of civilization, look into the Bronze Age collage. I find it intriguing from a historical point of view, and it has a lot of parallels to what's happening today. But to provide a bit of a counterpoint - we focus on a lot of microphenomena, how the breath changes from moment to moment and stuff like that, but the idea of impermanence holds for "big things" too - like societies, life, nature, etc. I had the good chance to take a paleontology class in college, and I remember learning about the 5 massive extinction events, where basically almost all life got extinguished. The one that always struck me was the "great oxygenation event", where basically all life at that point didn't need oxygen, but produced tons of it, and so they essentially poisoned themselves, and while it killed all of them it prepared an atmosphere that would bring in what we think of as life these days. I remember our TA for the class said something as a response to climate change along the lines of "well humans might be fucked, but life on earth will survive". I bring this up just to mention that our lives, and humanity in general, will be like the appearance of a breath - it will appear, abide, and cease. Maybe soon, maybe not. Rome fell and so shall we, but may we have a rein as long as the dinosaurs!

So you should view this fleeting world --
A star at dawn, a bubble in a stream,
A flash of lightening in a summer cloud,
A flickering lamp, a phantom, and a dream.

   I have studied the bronze age collapse intently. Global supply chains collapsed, just couldn't get tin and copper to show up just in time. Once trade was disrupted, food distribution failed generally and hungry people did what they always do, steal from their neighbors. 

   One may face this recurring future with a certain sang froid, if not schadenfreude, except for the likelihood that it will occur quite soon, abruptly and with little warning. Babies now may not reach double digits. Societal collapse will result in a great deal of human suffering, not to mention the innocent animals caught up in the slaughter.

   How soon this will happen is not strictly relevant. It has been pointed out that if you are headed for a wall at 100 mph it hardly matters if you are ten feet away or two feet away. We're wile e coyote gone over the cliff but we haven't dropped yet.

   If you back up this thread some I have already agreed with you that the death of our species is unimportant in the grand scheme of things, even the destruction of the planet will happen eventually. But, seriously dude, this is a rather spectacular failure and we have front row seats. The vilest of contradictions are being performed before our eyes. The star of david the new swastika, gaza the new warsaw ghetto. The american flag a symbol of fascism. Police and borders militarized. The wall between india and bangladesh is truly horrifying and inhuman. Breadbasket ukraine has more landmines than anywhere in history. The ipcc reports are being proven to have been wildly optimistic. Plutocracy, oligopoly and gerontocracy are not providing leadership.

   Equanimity is not denial. Compassion is proactive. And with geologic changes we're pretty far behind the curve. According to james hansen's latest peer reviewed paper, ten degrees centigrade of gloabal warming is already baked in the pipeline. I'm thinking this is likely to lead to an end permian level extinction event, in which 90% of all species were wiped out, and many of them were down to a handful of individuals. Life survived but it very well might not survive us.

   Look at venus. A runaway greenhouse gas event and the planet is toast. Look at mars which also had watery oceans and was similarly in the goldilocks zone. It would not surprise me to learn that venus at least had evolved "intelligent" life who so altered their atmosphere's gaseous composition as to trigger irreversible permanent catastrophic climate change. 

   The dinosaurs had time to evolve and develop a web of life that sustained itself hundreds of millions of years. They're reign didn't involve destroying their environment irreparably and virtually instantly. Our "great carbonization event" is happening in a completely unprecedented eyeblink of geologic time. Our sixth great extinction has given species no time to adapt and evolve in response to our predation.

   There are many facing this reality who think that extinction level events are ok and inevitable in the long run, so why worry.  No species has hit the limits of growth gracefully and most crash hard when they run out of nutrients, having destroyed or damaged the resources on which they had depended. All logical and understandable. But not only is the collapse going to be horrendous for the entire planetary environment, we are complicit in the inevitability of the destruction.

   The least we can do is object, and say, not in our name. Better, we can try to live sustainably and develop ways of coping with the changes. 






hansen's pipeline paper:

http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/Documents/PipelinePaper.2023.05.19.pdf




THE TENT
(rumi, trans barks)
  
    Outside, the freezing desert night.
    This other night inside grows warm, kindling.
    Let the landscape be covered with thorny crust.
    We have a soft garden in here.
    The continents blasted,
    cities and little towns, everything
    become a scorched, blackened ball.

    The news we hear is full of grief for that future,
    but the real news inside here
    is there’s no news at all.

The only thing new about war, famine, disease, extinction, etc is our eyes to see it. The gears of climate change have been turning since the Industrial Revolution and those gears will turn after we both die. Welcome to samsara, sorry it doesn't meet your expectations. 

"'I am subject to aging, have not gone beyond aging.' This is the first fact that one should reflect on often, whether one is a woman or a man, lay or ordained.
"'I am subject to illness, have not gone beyond illness.' ...
"'I am subject to death, have not gone beyond death.' ...
"'I will grow different, separate from all that is dear and appealing to me.' ...
​​​​​​​"'I am the owner of my actions, heir to my actions, born of my actions, related through my actions, and have my actions as my arbitrator. Whatever I do, for good or for evil, to that will I fall heir.' ...

The Upajjhatthana Sutta.

I think it's important to reflect on the last two points.

You are missing the point.

The arrow is in your body and you need a physician.

Welcome to mappo.

and I'm sorry it meets your expectations...

The Second Coming
William Butler Yeats

Turning and turning in the widening gyre   
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere   
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst   
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.   
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out   
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert   
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,   
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,   
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it   
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.   
The darkness drops again; but now I know   
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,   
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,   
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

from shunryu suzuki, branching streams flow in the darkness:


To accept things-as-it-is looks very difficult, but it is very easy. If you don’t find it easy, you should think about why it is difficult. “Maybe,” you may say, “it is because of the shallow, selfish understanding I have of myself.” And then you may ask, “Why do I have a selfish understanding of things?”

 But a selfish understanding of things is also necessary. Because we are selfish, we work hard. Without a selfish understanding, we cannot work. We always need some candy, and a selfish understanding is a kind of candy. It is not something to be rejected, but something that helps you. You should be grateful for your selfish understanding, which creates many questions. They are just questions and they don’t mean so much. You can enjoy your questions and answers; you can play games with them; you needn’t be so serious about it. That is the understanding of the Middle Way.

We can understand the Middle Way as ri, emptiness, and ji, somethingness. Both are necessary. Because we are human beings and our destiny is to live for possibly eighty or ninety years, we must have a selfish way of life. Because we have a selfish way of life, we will have difficulties that we should accept. When we accept difficulties, that itself is the Middle Way.

.   .   .


Without rejecting your selfish way of life, you must accept it—but don’t stick to it! Just enjoy your human life as long as you live. That is the Middle Way, the understanding of ri and ji. When there is ri, there is ji; when there is ji, there is ri. To understand difficulty in this way is to enjoy your life without rejecting problems or suffering.To find the oneness of ri and ji, the oneness of joy and suffering, the oneness of the joy of enlightenment within difficulty, is our practice. This is called the Middle Way. Do you understand? Where there is suffering, there is the joy of suffering, or nirvana. Even in nirvana, you cannot get out of suffering. We say nirvana is the complete extinction of desires, but what that means is to have this complete understanding and to live according to it. That is zazen. You are sitting upright. You are not leaning over to the side of nirvana or leaning over to the side of su¤ering. You are right here. 

Everyone can sit up and practice zazen.

this poem was written by a 20 year old palestinian american, a brilliant junior at brown university in mathematics and archeology, and a graduate of the friends school in ramallah (quaker)... along with two friends who are also brilliant college students and fellow friends school grads was shot in the spine in burlington vermont for wearing a kaffiya and speaking arabic in celebration of a holiday with relatives...

he wrote this poem while at the friends school in sixth grade...


this boy was centered



HOPE DWELLS IN MY HEART
by hisham awartani


Hope dwells in my heart

It shines like a light in darkness

This light cannot be smothered

It cannot be drowned out by tears and the screams of the wounded

It only grows in strength

This light can outshine hate

This light can outshine injustice

It outshines segregation and apartheid

As of Greek legend, Pandora opened a box

And when she did that, all the evil escaped

Luckily, Pandora closed the jar before hope could escape

And as long as hope stayed in that jar

Hope would never escape

So I ask you one thing, learn from that story

Learn never to give up hope

Learn to let hope give power

In the darkest of times

And let the light shine

stars, I have seen them fall
(a e housman)

​​​​​​​Stars, I have seen them fall,
But when they drop and die
No star is lost at all
From all the star-sown sky.
The toil of all that be
Helps not the primal fault;
It rains into the sea,
And still the sea is salt.

The present is embodied in Hexagram 12 - P'I (Stagnation): There is a lack of understanding between the different classes of men, and its indication is unfavorable to the firm and correct course of the superior man. We see in it greatness gone and the lesser come upon us.

There are no changing lines, and hence the situation is expected to remain the same in the immediate future.