The Man Watching

I can tell by the way the trees beat, after
so many dull days, on my worried windowpanes
that a storm is coming,
and I hear the far-off fields say things
I can't bear without a friend,
I can't love without a sister

The storm, the shifter of shapes, drives on
across the woods and across time,
and the world looks as if it had no age:
the landscape like a line in the psalm book,
is seriousness and weight and eternity.

What we choose to fight is so tiny!
What fights us is so great!
If only we would let ourselves be dominated
as things do by some immense storm,
we would become strong too, and not need names.

When we win it's with small things,
and the triumph itself makes us small.
What is extraordinary and eternal
does not want to be bent by us.
I mean the Angel who appeared
to the wrestlers of the Old Testament:
when the wrestler's sinews
grew long like metal strings,
he felt them under his fingers
like chords of deep music.

Whoever was beaten by this Angel
(who often simply declined the fight)
went away proud and strengthened
and great from that harsh hand,
that kneaded him as if to change his shape.
Winning does not tempt that man.
This is how he grows: by being defeated, decisively,
by constantly greater beings.

[Rainer Maria Rilke]
The Man Watching

We're in this together

As you have by now surely noticed, I don’t know enough about politics to ponder a solution and my hands are sticky with blood money from representing corporate interests through film, television and commercials, venerating, through my endorsements and celebrity, products and a lifestyle that contributes to the alienation of an increasingly dissatisfied underclass. But I know, as we all intuitively know that the solution is all around us and it isn’t political, it is spiritual. Gandhi said “Be the change you want to see in the world.”

In this simple sentiment we can find hope, as we can in the efforts of those cleaning up the debris and ash in bonhomous, broom-wielding posse’s. If we want to live in a society where people feel included, we must include them, where they feel represented, we must represent them and where they feel love and compassion for their communities then we, the members of that community, must find love and compassion for them.

[Russell Brand]

................................................................................................................................................................................

[...] It is not self-defense but self-mastery that the adepts have learned. To maintain and assert the illusory sense of a separate, contending self, to encourage and nourish a preoccupation with adversity and defensiveness - this is precisely what martial arts is not. Self-mastery involves developing a concept of self quite different from the contemporary meaning implied when using the English words "self" and "defense." Self-mastery involves overcoming the illusion of the isolated self.

This basic principle of self-mastery must be what Aki's karate master had in mind when he told his new students, "Do not get hit." Aki's style and philosophy seemed to suggest a sense of collective self - of an interplay between mutual and individual will and intent. Because of the interrelatedness of all things, each "self" is a responsible participant in the collective will of all of life. One way of saying this is that both "hitter" and "hittee" are co-creators of the scenario in which someone hits someone.

Such a thought threatens those who prefer to hold onto a we-they, victim-consciousness point of view. But a we-they point of view is threatening in itself. It will be a co-creation philosophy, rather than a self-defense philosophy, that will provide workable solutions for our contemporary social problems.

[Doug Boyd]
Mystics, Magicians and Medicine People: Tales of a Wanderer, p. 59-63, 65-6

................................................................................................................................................................................

Related posts:-
Giving and Receiving

Sentencing Circles

In traditional court procedures, the accused is brought before a judge, possibly a jury, and legal counsel seeks to establish guilt or innocence and the appropriate remedy.

More recently, the victim or the victim's family has been allowed to offer "victim impact statements", describing the ways in which the crime has affected the individual and his or her relatives.

Traditional courts maintain distance and hierarchy. In a sentencing circle, the offender, his or her victims, the victim's family, peers, elders and other community members sit down together in a circle and work together to understand what has led to the crime and to negotiate appropriate redress. Rather than being purely punitive, the circle promotes healing.

Instead of removing the offender from the community and isolating him or her, the circle affirms the essential goodness of the offender, attempting to restore and re-build the offender, the victim, and the community to which they all belong.

Circles: It's about Justice. It's about Healing.

................................................................................................................................................................................

[...] The sentencing circle is about “community building,” he says; it is about “healing” those affected by crime, and those who committed it. It is repairing relations; making victims and perpetrators “feel better” with the outcome of a criminal incident.

[...] “What social scientist in the last 100 years has said, ‘Gee, punishment changes behaviour’?” Mr. Stuart asks. Much better, he says, is for criminals to feel their community’s “love.”

[...] “If the judge were to effectively ignore the circle that would be sending a message that we don’t want your opinion on justice matters or that somehow punishment is more important than building community,”

[...] “There’s a basic philosophical question that has to be engaged before you even get involved in sentencing circles and that is what are your primary goals or objectives in sentencing,” says David Paciocco, a law professor at the university of Ottawa. “It all depends on your perspective on what we’re trying to accomplish when we sentence.” Sentencing circles appeal to those wanting primarily to reintegrate criminals into their offended community, he says. “If on the other hand you believe that sentencing is a principled exercise designed to express societal revulsion at criminal conduct, or if you believe that proportionality is the underlying consideration in sentencing, then you’re probably going to feel uncomfortable with a regime that’s designed to see how we can move forward rather than respond to what’s happened in the past.”

[...] Supporters of the circles say their strength is that the process reflects a more time-honoured form of justice; It is, Mr. Stuart points out, a community choosing to “roll up its sleeves” in the grandest traditions of civil society, to solve its own problems. “We’re living now in this la-la land where nobody really participates,” he says. “It’s all done by professionals . . . we’ve outsourced everything.”

'Sentencing circles for aboriginals: Good justice?'

Related posts:-
Carry Each Other
Evil and Us
Taking Back the Projection
Cast No Shadow?

Life Support

"David is a spokesman. That's his identity. If a person can't do what he or she's s'posed to do - well, they die. Everybody has to follow his purpose. David is a storyteller and if a storyteller stops telling stories, he stops having his life. Then he dies.

These days, people have stopped paying attention to the old ones. That's not the way it's s'posed to be. As long as people can keep on doin' what they're s'posed to be doin', they can keep on living.

People are s'posed to be supported so they can do their thing. Without the help of others, no people can carry out their identity - I don't care who they are or what they're s'posed to be doin'. And if it doesn't need others, then it's not their true identity - not for this world - and they might as well not even be here. People keep each other alive with support. So if someone is a musician, we ought to listen. If they're a cook, why, you go ahead and eat and tell 'em how that hit the spot, how you needed that.

[...] How people can be so thoughtless, they don't even let a man carry on his life-" He took a loud sip from his coffee cup. "How in the world people could have got so much into their own selves that they don't think they need each other - I sure can't understand it. If people stop listen' to David, now how can he be a storyteller? You tell me. And if he can't be a storyteller, he'll die. That's the way it works."

[Rolling Thunder, quoted by Doug Boyd]
Mystics, Magicians and Medicine People: Tales of a Wanderer, p. 190-1

The Four Laws

The four laws have been given [...]: Love your God, love your neighbor, give, and forgive.

The problems are based on fear. People want this and that, to get so many things, more than they need. You call it greed, but it's based on fear. It grows steadily worse because others don't have their basic needs, and this makes your world unsafe. If people can be free of this fear, they can take care of each other.

So these four laws are related. Love your neighbor means do not violate your fellow human being in any way. Love your God means see your God as your own self within you. Don't think that God is outside of you - up in the sky somewhere, frowning at you. If you think God is looking down from above, pointing a finger in judgement and anger, you cannot love your neighbor. You cannot be giving, and you will not believe in forgiving. Forgiving means you don't violate in return one who has violated you. No God would do that. Never, never desire revenge.

So this is the people's business.

["Henry," quoted by Doug Boyd]
Mystics, Magicians and Medicine People: Tales of a Wanderer, p. 170

Closing The Book

The innermost kernel of every genuine and actual piece of knowledge is a perception; every new truth is also the fruit of such a perception.

Even writing and speaking, whether didactic or poetical, have as their ultimate aim the guidance of the reader to that knowledge of perception from which the author started; if they do not have this aim, they are bad.

For this reason, the contemplation and observation of everything actual, as soon as it presents something new to the observer, is more instructive than all reading and hearing about it.

For indeed, if we go to the bottom of the matter, all truth and wisdom, in fact the ultimate secret of things, is contained in everything actual, yet certainly only in concreto and like gold hidden in ore. The question is how to extract it. From a book, on the other hand, we obtain the truth only second-hand at best, and often not at all.

[...] Therefore, as a rule, the man of the world cannot impart his accumulated truth and wisdom, but only practice it. He rightly comprehends everything that occurs, and decides what is conformable thereto. That books do not take the place of experience, and that learning is no substitute for genius, are two kindred phenomena; their common ground is that the abstract can never take the place of the perceptive.

Therefore books do not take the place of experience, because concepts always remain universal, and so do not reach down to the particular; yet it is precisely the particular that has to be dealt with in life.

Only the person who intuitively knows the true nature of men as they generally are, and comprehends the individuality of the particular person before him, will understand how to deal with him correctly and with certainty. Another person may know by heart all the three hundred maxims of wisdom by Gracián, but this will not protect him from stupid blunders and mistakes, if he lacks that intuitive knowledge.

[...] This explains why the scholar, whose merit lies in abundance of abstract knowledge, is so inferior to the man of the world, whose merit consists in perfect intuitive knowledge, which an original disposition has conceded to him, and a rich experience has developed.

According to what has been said, we find among all classes of persons of intellectual superiority, often without any learning at all. For natural understanding can take the place of almost every degree of intellectual culture, but no culture can take the place of natural understanding.

The scholar certainly has the advantage of such people in an abundance of cases and facts (historical knowledge), and of causal determinations (natural science), everything in well arranged, easily surveyed sequence; but yet, with all this, he does not have a more accurate and profound insight into what is really essential in all those cases, facts, and causalities.

The unlearned man of acuteness and penetration knows how to dispense with that abundance; we are sparing of much, we make do with little. One case from his own experience teaches him more than many a scholar is taught by a thousand cases which he knows, but does not really understand.

For the little knowledge of that unlearned man is alive, since every fact known to him is verified by accurate and well-apprehended perception. Thus this fact is for him the representative of a thousand similar facts. On the other hand, much of the ordinary scholar's knowledge is dead, since, even if it does not consist of mere words, as often is the case, it nevertheless consists of nothing but abstract knowledge.

--

The constant influx of other people's ideas must certainly stop and stifle our own, and indeed, in the long run, paralyse the power of thought, unless it has a high degree of elasticity able to withstand that unnatural flow.

Therefore incessant reading and study positively ruin the mind; this, moreover, is caused by the fact that the system of our own ideas and knowledge loses its completeness and uninterrupted continuity, when we arbitrarily upset this so often in order to gain room for an entirely foreign range of ideas.

To banish my thoughts in order to make room for those of a book would seem to me to be just what Shakespeare censures in the travellers of his time, that they sell their own land in order to see those of others.

It is even risky to read about a subject before we ourselves have reflected on it. For with the new material, another person's view and treatment of it creep into the mind, all the more since laziness and apathy urge us to save ourselves the trouble of thinking, to accept what has already been thought, and to allow this to become current.

The mind certainly requires nourishment, namely material from outside. All that we eat, however, is not incorporated into the organism at once, but only in so far as it has been digested, whereby only a small part of it is actually assimilated, the remainder passing from the system, so that to eat more than we can assimilate is useless, and even injurious.

It is precisely the same as regards what we read; only in so far as it gives material for thinking does it increase our insight and our knowledge proper.

--

[...] the more they neglected practice, the more sharply did they bring theory to a fine point.

[Arthur Schopenhauer]
The World as Will and Representation, Volume II, p.72, 156

Related posts:-
Searching for Truth
Searching Without/ Searching Within

A Circle of Gifts

When we get together to consume – food, drink, or entertainment – do we really draw on the gifts of anyone present? Anyone can consume. Intimacy comes from co-creation, not co-consumption, as anyone in a band can tell you, and it is different from liking or disliking someone. But in a monetized society, our creativity happens in specialized domains, for money.

To forge community then, we must do more than simply get people together. While that is a start, soon we get tired of just talking, and we want to do something, to create something. It is a very tepid community indeed, when the only need being met is the need to air opinions and feel that we are right, that we get it, and isn't it too bad that other people don't ... hey, I know! Let's collect each others' email addresses and start a listserv!

Community is woven from gifts. Unlike today's market system, whose built-in scarcity compels competition in which more for me is less for you, in a gift economy the opposite holds. Because people in gift culture pass on their surplus rather than accumulating it, your good fortune is my good fortune: more for you is more for me. Wealth circulates, gravitating toward the greatest need. In a gift community, people know that their gifts will eventually come back to them, albeit often in a new form. Such a community might be called a "circle of the gift."

Fortunately, the monetization of life has reached its peak in our time, and is beginning a long and permanent receding (of which economic "recession" is an aspect). Both out of desire and necessity, we are poised at a critical moment of opportunity to reclaim gift culture, and therefore to build true community. The reclamation is part of a larger shift of human consciousness, a larger reunion with nature, earth, each other, and lost parts of ourselves. Our alienation from gift culture is an aberration and our independence an illusion. We are not actually independent or "financially secure" – we are just as dependent as before, only on strangers and impersonal institutions, and, as we are likely to soon discover, these institutions are quite fragile.

[Charles Eisenstein]
'A Circle of Gifts'