This interview was conducted by Benton Rooks and Kurt
Hardesty of Single Eye Movement.
You can watch a video of the interview here.
Who are you for the
people who don't know, and what is it that you do, and your broad goal? I found
you from the book "The Ascent of
Humanity" and it's so much material it's really hard to summarize. What is it
that you are working on and doing as far as culture?
Yeah well, its hard
to answer that question in less then 600 pages. I think like most people in our
generation — we grew up with this feeling that there is something wrong with
the world, or to phrase it more positively, that a beautiful world is possible
or that things should be more beautiful. You guys are probably younger than I
am so maybe this process was abbreviated for you, but at least in my generation
many of us went through this stage of conflict between our inner knowing that
it's not supposed to be this way, and the messages that came from all around us
saying, "Oh yes it is, this is the project of ascent, humanity is ascending and
improving and progressing, and sure we have some problems, but we will take
care of those. Human thought is advancing, science is advancing and things are
fundamentally OK. So participate, devote your talents toward the furtherance of
this project."
So there is a conflict between
everything that we are told and everything that we knew inside. So a lot of us
became slackers, we participated half-heartedly, we sabotaged ourselves, we became addicted to things.
Everyone had a different way of refusing to go along, or of going along
half-heartedly. And, that was kind of my story for a while too. Until
eventually it just became intolerable to participate even half-heartedly. And
so I began to think, I just began to investigate, what is this ambient
wrongness? Why are we destroying the planet and destroying all that's
beautiful? So I began to dig and dig and dig, uncovering one level of
explanation after another, and then becoming dissatisfied with it, and going deeper and deeper, until I found
something that satisfied me. And it really turned everything on its head for me
because if a mistake — well now I am summarizing the whole book — for a while I
thought we must have made some big mistake.
Like Derrick Jensen type
stuff?
Yeah, right, like
agriculture is a big mistake, symbolic culture is a big mistake, naming and
distancing ourselves, but you know you can take it back even farther then that,
to fire which created the distinction between the domestic and the wild, and
that was the beginning of taming nature. And so now your going back 300,000
years. Or even to stone tools, 3 million years ago. But then you have to say,
what is the difference between a stone tool and a bird's nest? I mean all
animals modify their environment. So what started out in being this terrible
mistake, this Fall, became something that just built on previous degrees of
separation going back you know, to the first cell. And you know, you take it
that far back you start to think maybe this isn't a mistake, maybe it's part of
a process, and this tide of separation, this extreme of separation is happening
for a reason.
Yeah I think that
perspective is what makes your work so much different from just about anything
else I have run into is that, it's a continuous grey scale, in your book there
is a continuous grey blurring from the first phospholipic membrane where there
was an inside and an outside and its like well, there was no singular mistake
so we can't go backwards so what are we going to do?
Right.
Well people can you read
your book so I would love to get your ideas on : What can people do? It seems
like there is a boiling point or there is obviously a lot of energy of change
going on and you might be unsure on what will happen but what are people
supposed to do when there seems to be this momentum? Is it just a personal
change or do you believe in any political groups or organizations? Are you
involved in any movements that you would put your weight behind as far as
correcting this wrongness?
There are thousands of
movements that I would endorse. It's both a personal change in consciousness
and an effort, action to change the outside world. This whole thing about
"Well, you have to transform your own consciousness before you can really
make a positive difference in the world" — that I think is another
variation of this theme of separation. Yeah, you have to change your own
consciousness but how do you do that? You do that through relating to the
world, through your relationships and stuff. So the world is actually — if you
want to talk about it from a spiritual perspective you could say the world is
here as an agent for the transformation of our consciousness. So this whole
thing about, you know, let's go to a cave, and in the dark we are going to
figure out just the right solution to everything and then when we finally
figure out everything we are gonna trot it out from the cave and unveil it then
the next step is to persuade everyone that this is the right solution. That's
what Descarte basically said. He said the way to find truth is you go to a
really dark room and you think. And that's a kind of separation. And I don't
have a whole lot of patience with that.
So I guess one of the
questions that we wanted to ask you as well is what is your own personal
practice? Is there something that you do or engage in a form of Yoga maybe? And
then how to take that contemplative discipline, and make it more active and
involved or engaged in these kind of crises that were facing it.
I don't really have a contemplative
practice that I would separate from the rest of my life, you know? There are
times when I will be out in nature and I will just stand there for a while. I
do some yoga maybe 15 or 20 minutes a day.
Have you noticed that it
seems like more people now are just being and doing these spiritual things
without having to say "I'm doing chi gong, yoga, I'm doing shamanism, I'm doing
zen" I've just noticed a lot of people seem to be integrating all of it, and
not to a fault. Is that something that you have seen in your experience?
Yeah. I think so cuz, at least 20 years
ago people would say Yoga or Chi Gong or meditation or whatever, that's my
spiritual practice. But they wouldn't say reading classic novels, or playing
the guitar is their spiritual practice. But now as Yoga and Chi Gong and
shamanic journeying become more normalized, they stop being this special
category "this is spirituality and that isn't". So yeah I think so.
So do you remain
optimistic generally speaking? It seems that one of your themes in your work is
that this process of separation that we have had to undergo with the evolution
of civilization and everything — the external processes of evolution of
cultures and things like this — that those are necessary to push us towards an
even greater activism or spirituality that doesn't just separate itself or
confine itself like you were saying.
I think that all
transformational processes have some things in common and what humanity
collectively is going through is no different, you know? And as these
collective crises converge upon us they make "normal" unlivable. So whether we
intend to or not we're pushed to a different way of being. So yeah I think it's inevitable and
it's normal — it's supposed to be like this. Transformation is messy: your old
world doesn't work anymore, it falls apart, and then perhaps you wander for a
while and explore this new larger space that your born into and then you begin
to build something in that larger space too. In a way I could say I am really
pessimistic in the sense that the world as we've known it is falling apart and
it's unstoppable. But that would be like saying a fetus is pessimistic because
the womb is just not gonna last.
Right. I was meaning to
ask you because I'm also generally optimistic as a whole but I go back and
forth between moments of despair as far as ego or working on an individual level.
Do you think that we are in the darkest hour now possibly, or do you think that
is that yet to come? Do you get any inkling or is this just up in the air as
far as like will there be a smooth transition period or a horribly painful
birth or do you have a sort of a feel as to us surviving at this point?
It's still up to us.
We could still have a soft but bumpy landing, or we could have a pretty bad
crash landing. It's really kind of up in the air right now. The longer we hold
on, the worse it will be.
We should probably get
into the financial thing then. I know you're working on a book that deals with
possible solutions to the financial problems we are facing on the economic
scale. I really want you to speak about how the gift economy that you're
pushing could be an alternative to the federal system that we have today, and
not only the philosophy behind it but the practical ways in which that might
manifest, if you could speak on that.
Yeah I mean that's big
topic, and probably various people who will see this will know this and that
about the Federal Reserve, but I will say a couple things. As I've done
research for this book I've become aware that every institution of our culture
today has the germ of something beautiful and necessary in it. The transition
that we are going through right now, it's not like one of these revolutions
where we sweep away the old and create something new out of whole cloth. I
think that pretty much every institution that we have today is going to still
exist, in this more beautiful world, like the same note at the higher octave,
including the Federal Reserve, and including banks. Because at the most basic
level, or maybe like the Platonic Ideal of banking — it's a really beautiful
thing. It says: I have more money than I know what to do with, and I'd like to
lend it to someone who really needs it but I don't know anyone who really needs
it and I don't want to spend the time to do that, my talent is in making
widgets, you know, so I am going to give it to you Mr. Banker, and you will
help me find somebody who can put this money to beautiful use. That's a worthy
role.
Do you see that kind of
attitude coming from some sort of weird consciousness shift from a multitude of
factors or do you think something like redefining how money works will
naturally bring about that attitude?
I think its actually
going in that direction already. There are a few barriers in the way of that
happening, and those barriers will crumble when the system as it is stops
working. One of the proposals that I play with a lot is to have negative
interest on currency, depreciating currency, also known as demurge. And part of
that would be to have a carry tax or negative interest on bank reserves and on
currency. And it's interesting that in the recent crisis, we got close to it,
the risk free interest rate on short term securities which are pretty much
equivalent to bank reserves, you know short term governement securities t-bills
and stuff, they went almost to zero.
Yeah but then they went
around and then loaned that money at interest so it was kind of…
The problem was
that they didn't loan it out and interest, they didn't, they just kept
it. All this equity that got pumped into the system just stayed as bank
reserves, and wasn't being lent. Well I am oversimplifying the story a little
but, you know, there wasn't a lot of lending going on. So then some actual
mainstream economists proposed this, resurrecting these ideas of Silvio Gesell
— what if we reduced the interest rate on reserves into negative territory?
Then even if you made a loan at zero interest, it would still be worth your
while. Now I don't want to go too much into the mechanics of that, but I just
keep discovering these ways in which these proposals are all happening already.
Another one is this idea of a leisure economy and economic degrowth, but
instead of everyone working a little less, well instead of that, we have
unemployment where 20% of the people work not at all, and 80% of the people
more then they want to, all to produce more stuff then we need. It's crazy. And
they keep developing more and more labor saving devices, which exacerbates the
problem of overcapacity and make it necessary to work even less. And that is a
problem when the way that money gets distributed through the economy depends on
having a job. So that could all change if there was some kind of social wage,
or some way to get money to people who are not doing the things that will
create even more money, but maybe who are doing things that restore the
ecosystem and stuff like that. I don't want to get to much into it though
because I want to also get a little bit more practical about gift economy and
what we can do right now as individuals.
Yeah if you could go into
— what are the best ways for people to act now to bring about the nature of
the gift while were still working in a non gift culture?
On a psychological
level we can orient ourselves toward the gift. Were trained to think of work in
terms of how can I make a living. And that training runs pretty deep. But if we
reorient all of our thinking toward how can I best contribute to the world that
I want to create, then that's a gift mentality. I've found that when I do work
that is in the spirit of the gift, I don't want to charge money for it, it
feels almost like sacrilegious. And a lot of healers and musicians and artists
have the same feeling. It's like, what I am offering is sacred to me, so it
feels wrong to charge for it. "I am only giving the world this sacred gift
if I get money first". That feels wrong. On the other hand though, to
charge money, any amount of money, feels like I am charging too little, I am
reducing something infinite and sacred into something that is finite and profane,
to change it into money. So, I should charge more! So any amount I charge is at
once too little and too much. The model that I've been working with, and
finding a lot of other people who are doing the same thing now, is to say I am
not going to charge at all, I am going to offer it as a gift and if that gift
inspires gratitude, then you can gift me in return. But I won't specify the
gift and the return. I will let that be up to you and trust gratitude to guide
you. And really, think about it, someone might read something of mine or listen
to one of my recordings or whatever, and one person might not be a bit
grateful: "can't believe I am wasting my time on this crap", and the
other person might say "wow this changed my life" and why should each
person pay $15? That's ridiculous. One of them should pay nothing and the other
should pay $1000. Or perhaps that gratitude will prompt that person to give in
some other way. Maybe the gratitude isn't toward me but maybe it is toward the
universe, for making this available.
It sort of reminds me
of what Radiohead did with their last album and maybe we could get into what
your thoughts on that were and what the role of file sharing is and how you see
that whole play, that maybe file sharing is a kind of jump start to that gift
consciousness or what your take on that is?
Radiohead is a perfect
example. That's one of the examples that inspired me. And there are a lot of
people doing that now. Gift economics is especially natural with digital
content, such as music, video, text. Anything that you can download, because
the marginal cost of production is zero, or very close to zero. Like, you're
going to put this interview online and whether one person views it or a million
people view it, the costs aren't going to be that much higher. If the cost to
you for an additional copy is essentially zero, then according to economic
theory, which in this case is true, the natural price point is zero also. And
it just doesn't make sense, intuitively you know, "I could give you this
at no cost to myself but I'm going to charge you anyway" — that kinda rubs
me the wrong way. So with music and with anything that you can put online, I
think that the gift model is natural. The gift model for other things is a little
bit more tricky but it works also.
So the counter argument
to that though is that Radiohead is a well established band, they've already
made a living selling records and they are financially stable enough to be able
to do that. So its going to be hard to maintain that kind of gift consciousness
if the whole entire system isn't already there with it. Because otherwise you
have struggling musicians who need to work really crappy jobs, and if they're
putting out their music and hard work and artwork out there for free, they
won't be able to continue doing what they like and to only do that as a living.
Well Radiohead, it's
not like they didn't make any money off that album. People voluntarily gave
them money. They didn't have to give them anything but they gave them huge
amounts of money. And so like on a practical level the counter argument to what
you just said is that "Sure they make less from sales of music but you
know if it goes viral then they eventually do benefit — people sometimes will buy the album you
know, or they will go to the concerts more." So even from that practical
point there's a counter argument to that. But to me the really telling thing is
that OK, how did the old model work for the vast vast majority of bands? It was
almost impossible, almost impossible to make it as a band in the era of content
that was controlled through intellectual property. I remember reading some
essay by some band how this much of the money goes to the promoter, this goes
to the record company, then theres the t-shirt sales of which they get 50 cents
per t-shirts and they end up touring and having this exhausting schedule and
making almost nothing even if they are pretty popular. The old model wasn't
working, so I think that there is really nothing to lose.
So the gift thing seems
to work very well for generating what I have started to call spacious things or
empty things, like art. Stuff that is generated from form but its form. They
are using music to create something intangible that doesn't really have a set
value. One of the other groups out there that is becoming slightly more popular
is that Venus project thing have you heard of that? Where they promote: lets
just make things as abundant as possible. So maybe if we combined the two
ideals where, how does a struggling artist start with just gift, they still
have to eat. Do you see a culture where we've got some areas that are just
provided for as much as possible like food, housing, nobody is on the street,
you know the very dredges of society will be living at 25,000 a year, they are
taken care of, and the wealthy people would be the ones that are truly
participating in this gift thing? Is there room for slackers in the new world?
Another idea that I
like is the idea of a social dividend. The idea is that the bounty of nature,
and the accumulated wealth of thousands of years of technological advance and
innovation, that should be the property of everybody. Everybody should benefit,
just by being born as a human being everyone should have an equal right to
benefit from this enormous accumulation of technology which allows us to meet
our wants very easily with very little labor. And so reflecting this, everybody
should get an annual income that represents their share of this bounty. Kind of
like in Alaska where every citizen gets like $3,000 a year as a share of their
oil revenues. Because Alaska keeps control of the oil, I don't fully understand
it but it doesn't give concessions to oil companies. It says, "You can
pump the oil and we will let you have a nice profit but no windfall profits,
and the essential profit from owning this resource will go to the public."
And this idea goes way back, you can read it in science fiction stories in the
1930s. It was promoted by a monetary visionary, also known as a monetary crank,
in the 20's by the name of Major Douglas. But it keeps coming up. And when
there's a stimulus check, and everyone gets some money just for no reason –
that's kind of an example of that to. I think just to meet our basic human
needs we shouldn't have to work that hard for that. Hunter gatherers didn't
have to work that hard for that and their most advanced technology was a
digging stick and they only had to work like 20 hours a week to meet their
needs. Why should we have to work any more than that?
So you're picturing a
sort of thing where we use our technology maybe not as an infinitely driving
thing but use it to make a very nice foundation for everyone as their
inheritance for being a human and then stacking a gift economy on top of that?
And some peoples gift would be maintaining this bottom system for everyone no
matter what?
Some people would love
to grow food.
Right. Or design hyper
fast electric trains or something like that where everyone has some form of
housing, some food of food, some form of transportation, and then stack some
kind of — that would obviously be a gift but…
I don't think they
necessarily have to be distinguished like that, its just natural for those
needs to be very easily met. And today what we have is a condition of
artificial scarcity that forces people to work more then is necessary to
maintain human needs and human happiness. Most of the stuff we're producing
doesn't contribute to human happiness. When you look at the biggest growth
industries in the last 20 years you know — housing, you know building houses
that are bigger then anyone needs. you know the average size of the house as
doubled or more since the 1950s, and people live in these huge houses that they
can barely even inhabit. The piles of plastic junk, the armaments industry and
all that supports it. The incredible redundancy. Everyone in my neighborhood
has a lawn mower which they use 20 hours a year. Would we be any poorer with
1/10th the lawn mowers? Every other house has their own complete set of power
tools which they use 1 hour a year. Would we be any poorer if the whole
neighborhood had just two sets? It would be much nicer actually because we'd be
sharing, we'd be interacting. Basically because we're cut off from sharing and
we're cut off from gift culture, we're artificially poor. That's good for the
economy because everyone has to buy their own set of power tools and everyone
has to buy everything. And that's essentially why — even though our needs can
theoretically be met way more easily then they could 10,000 years ago — that
we still work harder today.
So we really are pretty
much already there on every front its just a matter of redefining the magic of
money.
We're there and we've
always been there and at every juncture, with every labor saving device, we've
faced a choice: Should we work less or consume more? And every single time we
have chosen to consume more. The Venus Project has a really beautiful spirit to
it, but to me there is still a little bit of a flavor of technological
utopianism. It says that the next wave of technology, nanotechnology or
whatever, all these other technologies we're talking about — that's going to
finally usher the age of abundance. But like you said, we're already there.
We've always already been there, and without making a different choice between
work less or consume more, it's always going to be just at the horizon. We're
never going to get there.
Do you think that on some
fronts, like energy production for instance — I feel like we do need to throw
a couple of hail Mary's technologically to support 7 billion people while we
maybe let the population die off or decide that we're good at this level —
energy wise as far as food and transportation and all that or is that really
already just good?
Our food system right
now is highly dependent on oil, but that's because it seeks to maximize yield
per human labor input. A truly sustainable agricultural system would be much more
labor intensive. Pretty much everyone would have a garden, and instead of 1% of
the population being farmers, maybe 5 or 10% would be farmers. We would have 5
or 10 times more farmers then we have today. It would be much more local, much
less energy intensive. You wouldn't have transcontinental trucking and all
that. We could easily use half — I will be conservative and say half — but I
really think we could use a tenth of the energy that we have today and be
richer in almost every way that's important. I mean France uses half the energy
the United States does per capita and the last time I noticed their quality of
life is pretty high.
The one thing I feel
like were not there is — I mean I wanted to ask you this Charles — Do you
think that there is a sort of Elite at the top of the pyramid that dictates and
control things, "the financial elite" and if there is, how do we
approach that problem of a very small amount of people controlling and making
ideological or philosophical decisions on how things are run. How do we
actually approach that sphere that 1% that owns 80% of the world's goods and
everything else? I mean how do we talk to them or address that issue?
I mean I might
be naive but I tend to think that the global conspiracy of the power elite is
unconscious. Its a conspiracy without actual conscious conspirators. These
elites are themselves pawns of an ideology that transcends every human being,
and that no human being is fully conscious of. So in a way they act as if they
were conspirators, and the effects are similar.
So the conspiracy stuff
is — I guess our culture causes these things that seem so organized and so
screwed up that for the average mind who starts to look into this they can't
fathom it not having a head to it — that its just an emergent property of us,
sort of?
Yes. And also the
conspiracy theories tempt us into the mindset of "the problem of the world
is evil, and if we could only conquer evil then everything would be fine."
This is the mindset of ascent, you know the ascent of humanity that I talk
about. It's this endless campaign to defeat evil, to overcome nature. That's
where evil got its start, evil didn't get its start until we began to
distinguish between weeds and useful plants. Sheep are good and wolves are bad.
And so then the wild is evil, that's the big bad wolf, and the inner reflection
of it is the inner wild that we also try to overcome. So that the ascended
person or the superior person is someone who can control the desires, who
doesn't succumb to pleasure, and who has conquered this inner wild. And so, its
really a very similar mentality to "lets pull out all the weeds, lets
destroy the weeds once and for all" just like the scientists in the 50's
who said "with DDT, we will someday eliminate all pests, and we will have
an agriculture that's completely scientific, without any random
variables." And this is the
same mentality as the Bolsheviks, and every revolutionary to this day that has
said the solution is to sweep out all the old, to sweep out all the evil and
have perfect control. And so I think that in a subtle way, the revolutionary
mindset that says, "Let's topple these evil elites, and end their
abominations" is insufficiently deep. It is an insufficiently deep
revolution. It's an attempt to use the master's tools to dismantle the master's
house. And even if it's successful it's only going to create a different
variation of what we have already. It's not really a revolution ya know? It's
just a different variation of separation.
Right and what
revolution hasn't resulted in another thing that just needs to be overthrown.
So maybe we can make a
small transition and talk about what the role of education is in all of this? I
was really inspired by your speaking on one of your youtube videos the origins
of education being basically industry metaphors. So you have classes and
grades, which are basically methods for categorizing objects in industry and
industrial times. And maybe speak about how we might be able to form an
alternative education system? One of things we're doing with this project is
we're putting online classes basically for free and we have older people like
John Ebert who has been studying mythology and for years and just putting out
free lectures and seeing who comes to them, and who wants to kind of join in on
the virtual classroom. So I think one of the ways that we could bring about
this conscious shift to a new thing like a gift economy is still to utilize the
tools that we have and create that virtual space — that virtual classroom
maybe.
I am thinking of a
school as another example of something in which there is the germ of something
beautiful, and what school is going to look like. And this is something I have
explored a lot because I have kids you know, and school hasn't worked very well
for them. And we have tried different things and some have been better then
others.
Have you looked into
Waldorf stuff? I am just starting that teacher training and I was wondering. It
seems like its very in line with all of this stuff.
I think Waldorf's got
a piece of it. The democratic free schools have a piece of it. The original
philosophy of Montessori has a piece of it. There is a lot, it's coming
together.
Do you see a national
adoption of some sort or do you think we'll just start these localize things
that have their own individual flavor?
I think obviously the
standard education system is in a deeper and deeper state of crisis, and I
think what will happen is eventually that when it really falls apart all of
these other models of school that are being developed and tried out by
activists and parents everywhere will serve as pilots, as templates for a new
system. As far as the online stuff, I'm thinking what is the purpose of a
classroom, what is the purpose of school? Certainly one purpose is an
interchange of ideas, real dialogue. Otherwise if it is just an online lecture
how is that different from television, how is that even a classroom? Everyone
is at home by themselves, why not just read a book? But if there's some kind of
personal dynamic going on… I mean a lot of university classes have become like
television. Everyone goes and sits in this giant theater, and the star, the
professor is up front lecturing, and everyone takes notes and then he goes away
and they have exams and stuff. They could have a video monitor up there, for
all practical purposes.
It kind of gets into
what the Greeks were doing in the Platonic academy. They would basically hold
classes, outside and be walking and talking amongst each other from what we
know about it. And to be interacting and dialoguing, in that sense. But how do
we revitalize the platonic dialogue or reshape it for the 21st century world?
And what kind of practical physical manifestations of an alternative school —
what would it be to actually manifest that on a wide scale?
I don't know. I think
online stuff can be adjunct to physical meetings but I think physical
interactions are indispensable.
I definitely think so
too. Do you think
interactions like this could serve as an approximate? Or should we try and–
Yeah I don't know, I
mean this could be good.
Especially if we got
internet 2 up and the bandwith is all of the sudden amazing you've got 12
people in real time — or would that be a sort of seductive illusion of what we
are actually looking for?
I have done tech
conferences and things like that that were sometimes good, usually kind of not
satisfying. Um, this is pretty good and I'm imagining if there were 10, 15 or
20 of us instead of 3 of us.
We've tried the upper
limits of that and it starts to get pretty laggy. But it would seem pretty cool
if we got an upgrade on bandwith.
Yeah I mean because
everyone can't necessarily be in the same physical space and not everyone has
an attraction to this kind of thing, or even wants to put themselves out on the
internet, so its a kind of bridge to what might eventually develop in a
physical space. But it does work to bring people together who can't necessarily
be in physical space with each other.
I think it definitely
has a place. I mean I am glad were doing this now.
But I agree I think we
can't be complacent with it. We can't just be satisfied with this. We really
have to take it as far as we can and keep it evolving you know. How to do that
and how to start to disrupt what we would normally think of as education.
I wanted to actually get some
of your thoughts on mythology. And how mythology and your idea of separation
relates to this concept that a lot of mythologies and a lot of cultures have of
the four ages. So you start with the golden age, and you go to the silver age,
and bronze, and then you're in the iron age. And according to Hindu mythology,
we're now in the Iron Age, Kali Yuga, where spirituality is very difficult to
attain — our hearts are hard and our minds are very narrow, and there's this
idea that a golden age maybe existed somehow in the distant past and that
towards the end of the iron age, that golden age makes itself known again, that
the Iron age cycles back into this circle, back into the edge of the golden
age. And its also sort of a spiritual devolution too rather then an evolution,
so to maybe get your thoughts on that and how it relates to separation.
There are a lot of
traditions that have this idea of a devolution or a fall. It's certainly in the
Bible. It's in Taoism too: Taoism is always talking about the sages of old,
enlightened kings of old and how people in general were more enlightened in the
past. And I wonder if part of it also doesn't come from psychology — the lost
golden age of childhood. And our progression into the development of ego, and
eventually though the age of ego reaches its own extreme, and morphs into a new
golden age and expanded sense of self that harks to the openness of the child
— but integrates the entire experience of separation.
And I think that there is real
wisdom in these traditions. In these myths, in these stories. I think it really
is like that, that we are in the extreme of separation. And then there's all
the 2012 stuff you know.
Yeah what's your take
on that?
It would be cool if
it kind of all actually did happen in 2012. But I think that it's tapping into
the same intuition that the Armegeddon folks are tapping into. "Our days
are numbered, this cannot last." There's all kind of neat stuff. Earlier I
was talking about the Age of Stone starting millions of years of ago. Fire
started hundred of thousands of years ago. And then you can keep doing that,
you know. Symbolic culture started tens of thousands of years ago, agriculture,
thousands of years ago, the machine age hundreds of years ago, the information
age, decades ago. And so these ages are telescoping, toward a singularity. And
the change that comes after that is qualitatively greater then any of these
other transitions have been. Which is pretty exciting to me.
Yeah and that's
basically what the four ages myth is, its like a winding down of a big clock
and so as it gets closer to the winding down there's also a sort of pinching,
or a fastness in a sense as well. Everything compresses, everything sort of
happens a lot quicker. And I think many of us on a personal and intuitive level
can relate to a speeding up of things, in general. Just our relationship to
time.
Yeah. An older guy
asked me when I thought that things changed, when things speeded up or there
was this shift. And I said, 1980. Because that was the year that — everything
just felt kind of different that year. It was when Ronald Regan was elected.
And that was the year, even though I was only 13 years old, that was the year I
gave up hope. That was the year that I knew that the project of civilization is
doomed. The 70's were an extension of the 60's. "Were gonna create this
beautiful world of the flower children" and we've been ascending to it for
all human history and now were gonna complete it." That became impossible
to believe when the 80's hit. And everyone in that spiritual movement kind of
turned inward. So my friend Bill said that was interesting because that was the
year that the Schumann resonance sped up.
Whats that?
That's the
electromagnetic pulse of the earth itself. Some people say the heartbeat of the
earth. I haven't actually looked into the science of it so I don't know, but it
is said that it has been the same for thousands of years and that all of a
sudden it speeded up significantly in 1980.
I have been noticing
that even on a personal level it seems like everyone is speeding up. It doesn't
matter how old you are it seems like we are all arriving at — like the younger
people — I have friends that are 16 and they are where I was when I was 25.
Yeah that happens to
me all the time.
Yeah and I'm not even
like jealous I am just really impressed.
Yeah I totally get
that! I constantly meet people in their 20's who are where I am at now, and
they've been through like a one or two year process to get there, whereas I
went through a 20 year process. They have done in 2 years what took me 20.
Right and I went through
like a 7 year one.
And so its like —
you're right, we are all kind of compressing, you know. Kind of like a sonic
boom. yeah that's cool.
One of the fans on
youtube wanted to ask "What are your thoughts on the nonlinear evolution
theory, seeing as how some indigenous cultures have somehow avoided the
separation process entirely, or the process that most other humans are in the
midst of.
There's this indigenous
culture in Mexico where they — if you base the culture around Zen it would be
them. Their main form of exercise is to run for 3 days with a soccer ball so
they can't even zone out. They are having to kick this ball through the
canyons. And their main activity is sort of meditation, and they just run away
from all trouble. They live in the hardest places ever — no cancer, everyone
is happy, they have a gift economy, and they just kind of missed the boat as
far as our ascension.
I am going to give you
a kind of mythical explanation for this, OK? So basically the human race got
together X thousand years ago and said we're going to go on this adventure. And
we're going to lose ourselves as completely as possible in this world of
separation, because we're going to have all of these experiences, we're going
to develop new things, we're going to discover wonders, and then we're going to
take all of that and come back to wholeness, and recollect and remember who we
are.
And so we're going to go on
this journey of separation. And in order that we not get lost we're going to
plant some seeds that preserve the knowledge that we need to bring us back.
Some of these seeds took the form of wisdom stories, myths that people carried
with them, that have the power to bring us back to our origins and our true
nature. Another form that these seeds took was spiritual lineages, where the
truth is passed on in secret from master to disciple over many generations
until the time comes for it to blossom forth and infect the consciousness of
all people. And another form that these seeds, these time capsules took, were
certain people around the earth who foreswore, who forewent this journey of
separation so that they could preserve the mindsets and ways of being of
connection and reunion. So today all of these things are coming together at
once as we near the end of this journey, and we need kinds of help to pull us
into the age of reunion. So now all of these obscure scattered tribes who have
preserved the old ways, preserved the sacred ways, are being discovered and
received. We're receiving their wisdom now, and we're only able to receive it
and ready to receive it now because the journey of separation is over, we're
done with it. It's over and we're done with it, but we need help to enter the
new story. And so they have kept it safe for us. They've preserved it. And the
wisdom lineages have preserved it, and our sacred stories have preserved it. So
all of these things call into awakening that little spark that never died out
in any human being, that's always been there, but it needs a catalyst to make
it blossom into flame again.
And so that's essentially why I
think that there are some people who never went on the journey of separation.
That's very beautiful
and it disrupts that idea that we have of this straight line of human progress
of human progress and evolution mostly based on those kind of techno-utopian
myths of Francis Bacon, and the New Jerusalem and the New Atlantis which he
liked to call it. Which would be this techno utopian that you have exposed. And
you've called it tower building as well, and I think that's an important thing
to speak on. Because that's the primary myth of our culture is : we are going
to better through technology, and this is going to make everything better. And
I think that we can use technology in the correct way, and we have sort of
touched on this earlier but, maybe we could get into how we started to build
the tower of babel, and why that myth is still with us and why its so embedded
and in 21st century America why it is just everywhere.
Yeah "just a few
more improvements, a few more discoveries, and then we'll be in paradise, we
will have reached heaven." A lot of this is in The Ascent of Humanity
book, that you know, "We've conquered smallpox and now we're tackling
cancer, and next it will be heart disease and finally the common cold, and then
finally we'll be in health paradise. Life spans have been increasing and soon
were going to cancel the genetic causes of aging and control the telomeres so
our cells don't stop reproducing and perhaps we'll even preserve our
consciousness on computers and meld with indestructible machines! Onward and
upward, we're going to have to make a few sacrifices now though. To reach the
age of computerized ease, first you have to input all the data which is tedious
work, but it's going to be worth it." To reach the paradise of the machine
age, you're going to have to dig a lot of coal but it's going to be worth it.
Sacrifices now to reach heaven in the future. It's in religion too. You have to
sacrifice now for heaven later. You have to suppress your desires now for
rewards in the future. That's the mentality of agriculture too, you have to sow
now, that ye shall reap later. And you know in the story they built the Tower
higher and higher and higher. And then you can imagine from the top of the
tower they looked up and said "are we any closer to the sky" ?
"No but let's keep building. Maybe if we build it twice as high we will be
closer to the sky." And then it begins to crumble everywhere and you end
up spending as much time fixing it as you do building it higher, and that's
where we are today. We're devoting tremendous energy to even maintaining the
edifice of civilization where it is. Life expectancies aren't going up any
more. New diseases aren't being conquered anymore. In fact new ones are coming
into being. Old ones are coming back. Human life isn't improving. We're not
becoming more leisurely. The Tower is no longer rising toward heaven, and
eventually at some point people get sick of it and they abandon the project.
And when they do that they realize that the sky starts an inch off the ground.
Its just a shift of perception away, it's already there potentially.
So do you think that
these myths that seem to have so much application to our current state — Do
you think that there were really ever cycles, or were these more
prophetic? Like they saw where we
were headed and wrote these myths of the past to give us a reference point.
Since we use the past as a reference point they inserted sort of false past to
help us in the future? Or has this maybe happened and it was lost as some
people seem to think?
In a way I think that
this is a true story, there really was a tower of Babel, we really did try to
build it to heaven but I also think that this really truly existed outside of
linear time.
Yeah, John Ebert one
of the people who write with us talks about this idea of a "truth
effect", that even if mythology does not necessarily recount a historical
or factual event that it can still teach us fundamentally about either
spiritual things that maybe existed outside of time or outside of mind even,
and that they can teach us this archetypal story, or truth, that's always been
there in the collective consciousness so to speak if we want to talk about it
in Jungian terms. So its that idea that idea that's the reason why mythology is
important because it can revitalize that sense of timelessness, timeless truth.
Yeah absolutely. And
it can communicate things to us on an unconscious level. We can listen to a
story like that and not understand the metaphors, not be able to parse it the
way I just did with that story. But it still has an effect on consciousness.
And that's why these stories are recognized as sacred. And many of them are
passed down — traditionally some of these teaching stories were passed down
verbatim. It would be considered sacrilegious to alter them.
This July 4th, please join me,
Adam Elenbaas, the Green Bus Tour, and Reality Sandwich's Ken Jordan and
Jennifer Palmer for "The More Beautiful
World Our
Hearts Tell Us Is Possible," a weekend of storytelling, bodywork,
dancing, and great healthy food. It takes
place at the beautiful Waterfall House, two hours north of New York. I
hope to
see you there!
Image by saturnism courtesy of Creative Commons license.
