Tag: collapse

Posted on

Pondering Courage and More

Just pondering a recent Facebook post….


Some people hate. I’ve had people tell me to hate some one, some group, or some thing. I can’t muster up the energy to do that. Some people lash out with toxic aggression (seems to be a trait of the United States “mindset.” And, then there are people who can remain calm in the midst of turmoil and act with no fear for themselves. Neerja Bhanot was one of those people. 


I think there are many people who have these attributes, but who fortunately are never put to the test. There were a plane full of people on United Airlines flight 93 headed to Washington on 9/11/2001. We see many such people during the big disasters that becoming more frequent. We see it among teachers, doctors, nurses, firefighters, policeman….. We see these qualities among mothers and fathers. We also see it among dogs, who will put themselves at risk to help or protect others without any training or request. 


But, here in the U.S. and in many other places around the world, aggression and violence are valued and promoted. The toxicity of anger, hatred, and violence is a pandemic in the U.S. that is a greater threat than the pandemic of Covid-19. In fact, this pandemic of aggression-hate-violence is so threatening that it is likely to bring down this country along with a huge death toll. We find ourselves in a pandemic of delusional psychosis (a) on the “right” of the political spectrum (I don’t know what to call it) and (b) on the left, which seems to be stuck in another kind of delusion of normalcy and self-absorption. 


If only we had a vaccine for this pandemic….

FACEBOOK POST:

Gregory Hilton —- Snietpstemebeiir 10, otedrne2019  · 

33rd Anniversary: Flight Attendant Who Saved American Lives Shot Dead By Terrorists.

She was the youngest person and first civilian to posthumously receive India’s highest award for gallantry. 


This week in September 1986, Flight Attendant Neerja Bhanot, 23, of Chandigarh, India was shot dead while shielding three children on the hijacked Pan Am Flight 73. 


She is credited with saving the lives of 360 passengers when radical Islamist terrorists hijacked her aircraft in Karachi, Pakistan. She informed the pilots who used their escape hatch to get away. When the terrorists demanded to know who the Americans were on the flight so they could execute them, Bhanot gathered all passports and hid those belonging to Americans under seat cushions.


The terrorists confused and unable to determine the national origins of the passengers didn’t execute anyone. When Pakistani police raided the plane she was able to nearly singlehandedly evacuate all the passengers as the firefight ensued.


She was one of the last people on board and found three children still hiding. As she led the children to safety the surviving terrorists spotted the children and opened fire on them. Neerja jumped in the way of the bullets and was mortally wounded.


She was able to evacuate the children to safety before dying from her wounds. She also posthumously received a “Special Courage” award from the government of Pakistan and recognition from the U.S. Department of Justice. The 2016 Indian Hindi-language biographical thriller drama, Neerja, is about her life.

Posted on

The Poison That Will Destroy Humanity… & What We Need to Do About It

From the Merriam Webster Dictionary:

definition of poison

1 a : a substance that through its chemical action usually kills, injures, or impairs an organism
b (1) : something destructive or harmful
(2) : an object of aversion or abhorrence
2 : a substance that inhibits the activity of another substance or the course of a reaction or process
a catalyst poison

It eats away at our hearts
It erodes our minds
It clouds our vision
It destroys our relationships
It poisons the depth of our humanity
And, it poisons everything and everyone we touch.

The more we indulge, the more addictive it becomes
The more we indulge, the stronger we rationalize
The stronger it becomes, the more isolated we become.

It crushes the essence of our humanity
It’s the master of disconnection
It eliminates our conscience.
This poison spreads like the plague
We can no longer love or be loved
And, as social contagion, it can extinguish all human life.

This poison is hate… hatred. It’s being promoted by our leaders, notably Donald Trump, Boris Johnson, Vladimir Putin, Jair Bolsonaro, Giuseppe Conte, and far too many more. They are barely human. And, the poisonous hatred they spread will do no more than destroy our societies and undermine any hope of surviving the impending disastrous convergence of over-population, ecosystem collapse, collapsing biogeochemical cycles, disappearing resources, water shortages, food shortages, rising sea levels, desertification, massive immigrations to and from all corners of Earth, and probably extinction-level human deaths.

If we really want to start dealing with our survival, we have to start working together. Hatred will tear us apart and prevent any kind of meaningful action. We must work despite our differences. In fact, an appreciation of the variation and diversity among us can and should be the very antidote to the poison that permeating all parts of the world.

Hatred has taken over societies in the past. And, they did poison societies. But, the stakes are much higher now. The issues listed in a previous paragraph are going to reach a peak, while the hatred grows. We have no time to bicker and waste.

When a forest faces a crisis, competing species of trees and other plants, animals, fungi, and bacteria work together to help the survival of the ecosystem. There’s no individual survival. They all must survive to maintain the system. But, people seem dead set on individual survival. And, that is not possible.

Posted on

Disconnection, Collapse, Complex Systems, and Working Now in the Liminal Spaces

Over the span of my life so far, I’ve been noticing some disturbing trends, which may very well be contributing to our current situation on the brink of disaster, if not extinction. Some of these trends probably have been in existence for hundreds, if not, thousands of years, while others are more recent. And, some seem to be more characteristic of one country (or a few countries) or region.

  • An increase in aggression becoming our default response to uncertain situations or more intense situations..
  • An increase in our emotions driving our decision-making in almost all contexts…. From fear to desire, from joy to repulsion….
  • Tending towards a complete loss of empathy (not to mention compassion) towards fellow human being
  • Tending towards a complete loss of empathy and disconnect from other living beings, from pets to wildlife and our critically important invertebrate cousins.
  • The development of a total disregard for the environments and ecosystems in which we live and upon which we depend
  • An increase in mind-less buy-in to the myths of capitalism
  • An increase in the mind-less buy-in to religious dogma and a loss of the connection to the core meanings of different religions
  • An increase in intolerance, if not hate, of those who are “different”
  • An increase in racism
  • An increase in addiction to our devices (phones, TV’s, cars, etc.), to our foods, to careers, to substances of all kinds, and to our own neuroses and habitual patterns of thinking and behaving
  • An increase in the loss of integrity – decreases in trustworthiness, dependability, reliability, responsibility, honesty, forthrightness, and so forth.

These tendencies are just a few of the more “ig-notable” ones. I’m sure we can add many more to the list. At the same time, all of these tendencies intertwine with one another. There really are no distinct borders between one and another.

I am sure there are multiple factors that have contributed to the increases in these tendencies. Technology has certainly played a big role in disconnecting people in various ways. The concerted effort of the “institution of education” to dumb down the population has had major effects on these tendencies. Political and corporate brainwashing has been a major factor. “Religious leaders” – who do not have deep and extensive training in their spiritual disciplines and in their religious teachings and who edit what teachings they know to conform to their own egotism and biases – have contributed to many of these tendencies.

The corporate world and its greed and disregard for social and environmental responsibility has had huge effects.

And, again, there are many other contexts that have had and continue to have effects on how we relate to the world.

Our complete buy-in to Objectivist, Positivist, Reductionist, Mechanistic thinking (from Rene Descartes, Isaac Newton, and others) has been a core contributor to our disconnects to one another, to other life forms, to society, and to the ecosystems and environment upon which we depend.

At the same time, human beings have so much potential. We can love. We can care for others. We can create amazing powerful, thought-provoking, and/or beautiful music, dance, works of art, novels, stories, film, and poetry. We can develop incredible technologies and structures. We can explore and develop incredible scientific understandings of our world.

Yet, we have brought ourselves to the brink of destruction. Ecosystems are collapsing, Rates of extinction are skyrocketing. Resources are being depleted. And, climate patterns are changing so radically and so quickly that the weather-related disasters that were once rare and becoming common events, which in turn is creating havoc in some parts of the world. And, what is happening in a few areas now will become commonplace everywhere else in the world over the next decade or so.

Our global situation is absolutely beyond grim. However, governments and other institutions will not be “the answer” to the “wicked” problems we’re facing. But, they can make a difference in providing a more workable context for change. And, that change has to come from between the institutions (in the liminal spaces)…. In other words, change needs to arise from as many people as possible working together to address the very complex, transcontextual, and very slippery interacting systems and the pathologies that are plaguing these systems.

And, we need to start NOW!

Posted on

A Short Discussion on “Senate Adopts Resolution Declaring ‘The Press Is Not the Enemy of the People'”

“Senate Unanimously Passes Resolution Declaring the press Is Not the Enemy of the People”

View Video Here

It would be nice if Congress would take more stands like this, but I think this action is superficial and all too politically safe.

I’m getting to the point where I think the whole system has become pathological (and Democrats are equally responsible for what’s happening). And, by the “whole system,” I really mean multiple systems (political, economic, educational, social, etc.). And, electing new people isn’t going to fix it. There might be a temporary shift, but we are collapsing (along with most other societies).

We (almost all people) have been “trained” to think in linear ways, where cause and effect are simplistic and blame is easy to assign. But, living systems are complex (they don’t operate according to simplistic linear rules and processes). Thinking that blames Trump or even the Republicans for our ills is way too simplistic. The current situation has arisen and continues due to a multiplicity of interacting systems. Capitalism and the rise of neoliberalism are big contributing factors. The systemic dumbing down of children through public schooling since the mid/late 1800’s is another factor, along with the mechanistic approaches to education that have prevented the learning of flexible, creative, and critical thinking. And, we can see how the social system has been created to respond to fear and anger, while maintaining an animal realm nose-to-the-ground existence. We can go on talking about how all of these systems interact and reinforce one another, but it’s too much to cover here.

The big characteristic of complex systems is that they are self-maintaining. At this point, the cluster of interacting systems has “learned” to maintain itself in generally the way we are seeing them manifest. Let’s say we elect a great Democratic president and Congress, we may notice a shift in certain characteristics, but the underlying patterns of money, power, and control will remain, just as they have for many decades. And, then as global warming continues to increase exponentially, the population continues to grow beyond the limits of resources that can maintain the population, and people (including millions of North Americans) are driven from their homes from these previously mentioned conditions, the deeply embedded patterns of reacting with fear and aggression comes storming back into the social-political-educational-economic-etc. contexts, and we get politicians who will be even worse than the ones we have now. And then, I suspect everything starts to collapse… and this is probably within the next decade or two.

It seems to me that the only things we can do to prevent a total collapse involve:

  • not creating divisions between people, but getting everyone to begin caring for and supporting one another and working together;
  • changing the way we think by moving from the linear and simplistic cause and effect ways of thinking to complex systems thinking; and
  • not depending on politicians and governments to “solve” the problems, but working with others in the liminal spaces between institutions to explore ways of dealing with the big issues we’re facing.
Posted on

Children’s Learning for the 21st Century: It May Not Be What You Think

In various contexts in which education is discussed or promoted, invariably there is going to be a new initiative that sounds something like “21st Century Schools” or “21st Century Skills” and so forth. But, in reality, not much has changed over the past century and not much is likely to change in the near future. Probably for the first time in human history we are facing a clear possibility for extinction. At the very least, we will be facing uncertain and extremely difficult times over the next few decades. At this point, we are not talking about in 50 or 100 years. We are talking about the next 10 to 20 years.

However, the difficulty with the above statements is that we really don’t have any sense of impending doom. We get up and go about our daily routines in much the same way we’ve done for many years. Nothing seems all that different, despite what we may hear or read. Even though we may know that the future looks grim, our everyday experiences communicate a very different message about the future. We’re being screwed with by our very own experiences. And, this situation of contradictory information is dangerous. It’s a bit like driving down a highway in cruise control and not believing the signs warning that the bridge over the ravine has collapsed. “How could these signs be true? It’s a beautiful day and a beautiful highway!”

So, back to what children should be learning. We’re on this highway, but the systems involved in education, including the education system itself, the political system, the economic system, and the social system, are not particularly known for being able to adapt or change quickly. In fact, these systems are resistant to change. All of these systems are deeply intertwined and interdependent that any attempt to change in one will require massive changes in all of the others. And, with the present situation in the U.S. and many other countries, the political and economic systems are working diligently to undermine any attempts to address the monumental issues we are facing. Such tendencies and actions are serving to hasten the collapse of everything we take for granted.

So, we can’t rely on our institutions of education or whatever to address what our children need. They are still out for the quick profits and for keeping the populace dumbed down. And, if you’ve been reading any recent articles about the wealthy surviving the future, you’ve seen that the wealthy don’t care about the rest of us. They are already preparing to survive without us.

Of course, there are exceptions, but they are just that… exceptions. There may be the odd school bucking the system or the occasional teacher risking her or his job to really address children’s needs. But, the fundamental status for “the rest of us” is that we’ll be the first to die off, unless we do something about it.

Children’s relevant learning will have to happen somewhere in between the institutions and despite the conglomerate of systems. It’s up to us. But, what is worth learning? And, who decides what is worth learning? These have been two of the major critical questions asked among curriculum theorists. But, now they have to be asked by us and by our children. As much as we may hope that our children will grow up and get a good job and have a nice family, this may be a pipe dream. But, if you’ve ever played poker, you don’t want to throw away your ace in the hole. Maybe there is an outside chance of that kind of future happening… for a while. But, we need to play all our cards.

If all or most of the infrastructures (electrical grid, health, transportation, etc.) collapse, what will our children need to know? If everyone is scrambling for survival, what will our children need to know about working with diverse people? What else will we need to know? How will the way we think have to change?

…

The near future is likely to be a completely different ballgame. We have no experiences that will prepare us for what could happen. The ways in which we think, which may have been quite useful for us so far, will no longer work. This will not be “business as usual.”

Posted on

Meditation, Suffering, Aggression, and Taking Social-Environmental Action

I don’t want to diminish the critical importance of meditation experiences, insights, and realizations. From a Buddhist point of view (but any tradition with a contemplative practice), meditation is absolutely necessary, if we are to have any hope of taking any kind of compassionate or skillful action. However, I worry that we all can get caught up in our own (meditative and other) experiences and that we only practice compassion on the cushion. I’m quite guilty of that myself.

For the first time in the history of humanity, we face, at least during the lifetimes of our children and most certainly our grandchildren, massive global environmental, social, and population collapse. When hundreds of millions of people are dying monthly and suffering is beyond comprehension, I feel like I need to be reminded continuously of the immensity of suffering now, so that maybe I can take actions that may contribute to the survival of humanity in the future.

I started and help run a small meditation group here, but in my mind this is not enough. I have to help with the larger issues in whatever ways I can, at multiple levels of scale. If I don’t get my hands dirty helping in as many as possible small ways to create possibilities for human survival (including my own kids), I don’t really see the point in just staying in my small comfortably uncomfortable world. How can I die (hopefully sometime in the relatively distant future) knowing I haven’t tried to help with the big problems? What’s the point of practicing the Dharma, when no one will be alive to practice in the future?

Maybe I’m wrong, but constantly taking in the aggression and suffering of others helps keep me “honest.” There seems to be no shortage of aggression and suffering in what was once a friendly, laid-back college/tourist town (Flagstaff, AZ) in the mountains, not to mention the exponential increases globally. Part of this very basic level of suffering is being perpetuated by things we can change in fundamental ways. As Trungpa Rinpoche, suggested, one can’t practice the Dharma (or try to live with any joyfulness) if one is starving or struggling for survival. And, it’s at this level of fundamental survival that is going to increase and spread. We’re already peak everything (food, fertile soil, water, oil, you-name-it). How can I ignore this? And, how can I help? Maybe I’ve been inspired by the early years of Greenpeace. One book accompanied all of their early missions…Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism. And, all of their missions had protection cords and blessing from His Holiness the Karmapa. They pursued actions, but constantly tried to keep ego in check.

Now in my old age, I feel like I’ve blown many opportunities to help. Now, I’m trying to do what I can. But, it’s a tight-rope, where balance can be lost. It’s a path riddled, as Gregory Bateson would have said, with double binds (of seemingly no-win situations, Catch-22’s, etc.). But, I see no alternative to just jumping in. I’m too old to wait.