Four Changes
(Page 4 of 4)
Our own heads: It is hard to even begin to gauge how much a
complication of possessions, the habits of "ownership" and
"use" stand between us and a true, clear, liberated way of
seeing the world. To live lightly on the earth, to be aware
and alive, to be free of egotism, starts with concrete
acts, but the inner principle is the insight that we are
interdependent energy fields of great potential wisdom and
compassion - expressed in each person as a superb mind, a
beautiful and complex body, and the almost magical capacity
of language. To these potentials and capacities, "owning
things" can add nothing of authenticity. "Clad in the sky
with the earth for a pillow."
RELATED CONTENT
IV. TRANSFORMATION
The Condition
Position: The unbalance in man's relation to nature &
his selves is partly an inherent existential question with
biological and ultimate roots - birth, suffering, old age
and death; and partly a cultural problem. In approaching
questions of Being and Emptiness we have the wisdom
traditions and some emerging sciences to help us. In
transforming culture, we must augment the philosophical
perceptions with a deep study of history and
anthropology.
Situation: Our civilized - and probably most other -
societies of the last three millenia have functioned well
enough up to this point. But they no longer have survival
value. They are now anti-survival.
Goal: Nothing short of total transformation will work. What
we envision is a planet on which the human population lives
harmoniously and dynamically by employing a sophisticated
and unobtrusive technology in a world environment which is
"left natural." Specific points in this vision:
A healthy and spacious population of all races, much less
in number than today.
Cultural and individual pluralism, unified by a type of
world tribal council. Division by natural and cultural
areas rather than arbitrary political boundaries.
A Technology of communication and quiet transportation:
land use being sensitive to the properties of each region.
Allowing, thus, the bison to return to much of the high
plains. Careful but intensive agriculture in the great
alluvial valleys. Computer technicians who run the plant
part of the year and walk along with the Elk in their
migration during the rest
A basic cultural outlook and social organization that
inhibits power and property-seeking while encouraging
exploration and challenge in things like healing songs,
flute-playing, meditation, mathmatics, mountaineering, and
all the other possible ways of authentic
being-in-the-world. Women totally free and equal. A new
kind of family - responsible, but more festive and relaxed
- is implicit.
Action
Social/political: It seems evident that there are
throughout the world certain social and religious forces
that have worked throughout history toward an
ecologically/culturally enlightened state of affairs. Let
these be encouraged: Alchemists, hip Marxists, Anarchists,
Third Worlds, Teilhard and cryptoGnostic Catholics, Druids,
Witches, Taoists, Biologists, Yogins, Quakers, Tibetans,
Zens, Shamans, Sufis, Amish and Mennonite, American
Indians, Polynesians - all primitive cultures, all communal
and ashram movements of all persuasions, &c. The list
is long. Since it doesn't seem practical or even desirable
th think that direct bloody force will achieve anything, it
would be best to consider this a continuing "revolution of
consciousness" which will be won not by guns but by siezing
the key images, myths, archetypes, eschatologies, and
ecstasies so that life won't seem worth living unless one's
on the transforming energy's side.
Our community: Without falling into a facile McLuhanism, we
can hope to use the media. New schools, new classes, -
walking in the woods and cleaning up the streets. Let no
one be ignorant of the facts of biology and related
disciplines; bring up our children with natural things and
a taste of the wild. Let some groups establish themselves
in backwater rural areas and flourish, let others maintain
themselves in the urban centers, and let them work
together, a two-way flow of experience, people, money and
home-grown vegetables. Investigating new lifestyles is our
work - as is the exploration of Ways to change one's
innerworld - with the known dangers of crashing that go
with such. We should work where it helps with political
people, hoping to enlarge their vision. And with people of
all varieties of politics or ideologies at whatever point
they become aware of environmental urgencies. Master the
archaic and the primitive, as models of basic
nature-related cultural styles, as well as the most
imaginative future possibilities of science and technology,
and build a community where these two vectors cross.
Our own heads: Is where it starts. Knowing that we are the
first human beings in history to have all of man's culture
and previous experience available to our study, and being
free enough of the weight of traditional cultures to seek
out a larger identity. - The first members of a civilized
society since the early Neolithic to wish to look clearly
into the eyes of the wild and see our selfhood, our family,
there. We have these advantages to set off the obvious
disadvantages of being as screwed up as we are - which
gives us a fair chance to penetrate into some of the
riddles of ourselves & the universe, and to go beyond
the idea of "man's survival" or "the survival of the
biosphere" and to draw our strength from the realization
that at the heart of things is some kind of serene and
ecstatic process which is actually beyond qualities and
beyond birth-and-death. "No need to survive!" "In the fires
that destroy the universe at the end of the kalpa, what
survives?" - 'The iron tree blooms in the void!"
Knowing that nothing need be done, is where we begin to
move from.
13. VIII. 40069
from
WHOLE EARTH CATALOG
SUPPLEMENT
September, 1969 † Usually aging in concrete
vats or cisterns sunk in the earth adjoining the field is
the only processing. After @ 2 months the material is a
consistent fluid which can be ladled or pumped into the
soil between rows of plants. Problems of worms and disease
in Japan are negligible.
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