How to begin to extricate yourself

John Michael Greer’s Archdruid post for Wednesday October 19, 2011

WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 19, 2011

A Lesson in Practical Magic

Up to this point in our discussion of the intersection between peak oil and magic, we’ve mostly talked about what doesn’t work. That couldn’t be avoided, since the misunderstandings of magic that run barefoot through contemporary culture have to be dealt with before it’s possible to make sense of anything more substantive.

Still, I hope that by this time my readers have grasped that magic is not a substitute for technology, a way of making an end run around environmental limits and the laws of physics, or for that matter a means of forcing society as a whole to deal constructively with the rising spiral of crises that dominates the emergent history of our time. It’s an old and subtle craft that deals with the interface between consciousness and the universe of our experience, using the buttons and levers of the nonrational mind; it has remarkable potentials for good and ill; and some of those potentials have quite a bit to offer in the face of peak oil. Now that the misconceptions have been more or less cleared away, we can get down to the details of practical magic.

First Noosphere World Forum

A friend  sent  me to this website: http://www.noosphereforum.org/

It took a while for me to get beyond the artwork. Unfortunately their presentation is in reversed type (white over a background) so I took this text from this page http://www.noosphereforum.org/drupal/?q=node/6 and reformatted it so I could read it. Now, I haven’t yet read the other pages, but this seems to me an important initiative. The analysis feels real. It ties in with what I have felt in my bones for most of my lifetime: We are in a once-in-a-species-lifetime transition and it’s a good and hopeful thing!

Arguing about whether climate change is manmade or natural seems to me somewhat beside the point. (It’s clear enough that it’s happening, and, more to the point for me personally, I have “known” since the 1970s that we would live long enough to see Antarctica, or a large part of it, come out from under the ice. That tells me that it isn’t some catastrophic anomaly, but part of a larger picture that I, and of course countless others unknown to me, sensed decades ago.) How much of it is being caused or aggravated by human activities is a matter of debate. The fact that people on all sides of the issue are using it to advance their own agendas is also beside the point. If people could find a way to make hay out of the fact that the sun shines and then, suspiciously enough, doesn’t shine, every 24 hours, they would. The facts the scientists or researchers on one side of an issue are cooking the books doesn’t mean (a) that those on the other side aren’t doing it too, or (b) that the book-cookers may not be correct regardless. (After all, even if cheating is all-pervasive, somebody still has to be more right than others.) Ad hominem arguments are irrelevant, though I notice that the dirty bastards on the other side of the issue use them all the time.

(If that last sentence didn’t make you smile, re-read it. If, re-reading it, you take it as a statement of fact, you’ve gotten too deeply enmeshed in your ideology.)

The importance of addressing the issue as part of the larger noosphere issue is that things seen in context are less likely to be seen distorted; less likely to giver rise to accusation and counter-accusation, and far more likely to lead us off into new, even exciting, mental vistas.

This is another case of my commentary being as long as the piece I’m passing on! Okay, here it is.

Ventura – One word

Michael Ventura’s column, “LETTERS AT 3AM,” from the Austin Chronicle – Aug. 26, 2011

AMBER’S QUESTION

Three travelers in their 20s: Molly, my student in 10^th-grade poetry some years back; Shaina, friend of m’lady Jazmin; and Amber, of whom I knew nothing. On their cross-country drive they stopped for an overnight (not the first traveling threesome to share my spare room). Dinner was on me at Rockfish (best restaurant in Lubbock, in case you’re passing through). We sat in a booth and entertained one another. The old coot told stories. The young travelers were appreciative and sharp.

Then Amber, sitting to my left, asked a question:

30 days

The speaker asks an unanswerable question: If there’s something you’ve always wanted to do, why not give it a try? And he convincingly says just how to go about doing it. Another in the remarkable series of TED videos.

http://www.ted.com/talks/matt_cutts_try_something_new_for_30_days.html

Schizophrenic Computer Points to New Theory of Disease

Nothing definitive here, but every interesting and suggestive. Via a friend, from “Ieee Spectrum: http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/software/schizophrenic-computer-points-to-new-theory-of-disease/?utm_source=techalert&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=060911

Schizophrenic Computer Points to New Theory of Disease

Software pays undue attention. Does a diseased mind do the same?

By MORGEN E. PECK  /  JUNE 2011

6 June 2011—We know what schizophrenia looks like in humans. We think we know what schizophrenia looks like in mice. Now we may know what it looks like in a computer.

Three things he learned while his plane was crashing

Three realizations in not very long a time. Spoken to a TED conference in just five minutes. I think you’ll remember them. Can you embody them, too?

http://www.ted.com/talks/ric_elias.html

 

Who’s in charge here?

That’s the title of my June column for the online magazine The Meta Arts. You can read it by clicking here: http://www.themetaarts.com/pages/frankdemarco.html

 

TED and Hans Rosling – educational and entertaining

I’ll tell you, the combination of high-speed internet, and TED talks (http://www.ted.com/), and especially Hans Rosling, is a time-absorber of major proportions. Not a time-waster, at all, because it’s highly educational (and entertaining) — but it’s so addictive!

Then there is Rosling’s own site, www.gapminder.org. Try these.

http://www.gapminder.org/videos/ted-and-reddits-10-questions-to-hans-rosling/
http://www.gapminder.org/videos/hans-rosling-asias-rise-ted-india/

http://www.gapminder.org/videos/hans-rosling-ted-talk-2007-seemingly-impossible-is-possible/

Coast to Coast AM radio, Tuesday night

I’m very pleased to announce that I’m going to be talking about my latest book,  The Cosmic Internet, on “Coast to Coast AM”  with George Noory. This should introduce a lot of people to the ideas behind the book, and, assuming that I don’t make a total fool of myself, should provide us with the fast start that is so helpful in making a book a success. Let’s hope it is only the first piece of good news in a long string.

Air time is

Pacific time: 11 p.m. May 31 to 2 a.m. June 1.

Eastern time: 2-5 a.m. June 1.

Not prime commuting time, but this show is very popular, and has been since back when it was the Art Bell show.

I am well aware that I owe this to the efficient efforts and widespread professional contacts of  Sara Sgarlat of Sgarlat Publicity. If you’ve got a book to publicize, she’s the one to go to. (She’s also a former Hampton Roads Publishing company employee; what other endorsement do you need?)

The Cosmic Internet

Proud papa with baby number six.

The Cosmic Internet joins three other non-fiction explorations of  human abilities and understandings. First came Muddy Tracks, in 2001,  which sketched my attempts to see if psychic abilities really existed and could be honed. In the process of exploration, I discovered The Monroe Institute, and found what I had scarcely dared hope for.

Then, in 2001 and 2oo2, Rita Warren and I conducted 22 altered-state conversations with what I call “The Guys Upstairs” (TGU) on subjects as diverse as cosmology, health and healing, psychology, UFOs, etc.  The Sphere and the Hologram (2009) consists of cleaned-up transcripts of  those sessions.

Chasing Smallwood (also 2009), my third non-fiction book, was  my account of my attempts to verify my  communications with a “past life” named Joseph Smallwood, who went West in the 1840s and fought in the Civil War.  By giving  readers the blow-by-blow of my perplexities and frustrations as well as the deep satisfaction some of the material provided, I hoped to convey some of the promise and limitations of such exploration.

The Cosmic Internet is my distillation of years  of material from TGU describing who and what we are, as well as what our place in the scheme of things is. (Turns out it is more than just an accident that we’re here! ) The bottom line of this book is, “how is our life meaningful, and how can we live so as to make the most of it?”

These four books build upon each other, and there’s more to come. Somebody once said that the secret of a long life is a great task to accomplish. By that standard, I sometimes think I’m going to be around for a while.