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Living within a living, loving planet
Archive for May, 2016
The Biology of Wonder Quotes I
May 13th
Andreas Weber
“There is no objective reality that could have an effect on an organism, or which organisms (or humans) could be able to perceive as it is. What reaches the organism is something, a stimulus, an encounter , a push which gathers meaning only in the light of the organism’s needs. Living beings only react to what is important to their existence to continue, regardless of what this really is. Or, perhaps more accurately, what really exists is something which grows together with the ways organisms imagine their relationships with the remainder of the world. They are not predetermined by compulsive physical laws of an external environment but rather by their own inner urges to realize themselves as a feeling body, as a center of experience and concern.
Every being in this manner becomes a sort of creative epicentre of its own world. It imagines its reality by feeling what is meaningful for it to thrive. An organism interprets any influence – whether through the genes or the environment – in the light of its desire to preserve itself.” Page 51.
Here Weber is explaining ideas from Kalevi Kull, a native Estonian and founder of a movement called “biosemiotics”, which is the theory of nature as a sphere of meaning and experience. This sounds to me like a partial description of a living planetary organism. Also, “A sphere of meaning and experience” may share meaning with a philosophy of existential phenomenology as expressed by Martin Heidegger and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. It is certainly not physicalism.
Putting meaning back into the words Conservative and Liberal
May 13th
“In today’s America, conservatives who actually want to conserve are as rare as liberals who actually want to liberate. The once-significant language of an earlier era has had the meaning sucked right out of it, the better to serve as camouflage for a kleptocratic feeding frenzy in which both establishment parties participate with equal abandon. Putting meaning back into the words can be a risky proposition, in turn, because so many Americans are used to waving them about as arbitrary noises linked to an assortment of vague emotions, the common currency of what passes for thought in so much of modern American life.”
John Michael Greer
WEDNESDAY, MAY 11, 2016 http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.co.uk/
Why not Jack the Price?
May 13th
“Many airlines introduced baggage fees in 2008 to cope with soaring fuel costs.
Despite historically low oil prices and record airline profits, the fees have not been revoked.”
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-36283233
Prevalent pricing policies bear no resemblance to market forces anymore. Prices go up simply because they can. In most cases where prices have not gone up, amounts in the package have been trimmed. We are feeling the effect of a significant change in Capitalism as we have known it. Scrap the terminology you learned in economics classes. The only surviving and meaningful word is exploitation.
The Best and Beautiful of Nisargadata
May 12th
“Your love of others is the result of self-knowledge, not its cause.”
“Q: If I am free, why am I in a body?
M: You are not in the body, the body is in you! The mind is in you. They are there because you find them interesting. Your very nature has the infinite capacity to enjoy. It is full of zest and affection. It sheds its radiance on all that comes within its focus and awareness and nothing is excluded. It does not know evil or ugliness, it hopes, it trusts, it loves. You people do not know how much miss by not knowing your own true self. You are neither the body nor the mind, neither the fuel nor the fire. They appear and disappear according to their own laws.
That which you are, your true self, you love it and know it, and whatever you do, you do for your own happiness. To find it, to know it, to cherish it is your basic urge. Since time immemorial you loved yourself, but never wisely. Use your body and mind wisely in the service of the self, that is all. Be true to your own self, love yourself absolutely. Do not pretend that you love others as yourself. Unless you have realized them as one with yourself, you cannot love them. Don’t pretend to be what you are not. Don’t refuse to be what you are. Your love of others is the result of self-knowledge, not its cause. Without self-realization, no virtue is genuine. When you know beyond all doubting that the same life flows through all that is and you are that life, you will love all naturally and spontaneously. When you realize the depth and fullness of the love of yourself, you know that every living being and the entire universe are included in your affection. But when you look at anything as separate from you, you cannot love it for you are afraid of it. Alienation causes fear and fear deepens alienation. It is a vicious circle. Only self-realization can break it. Go for it resolutely.”
I Am That
Nisargadata Page 212
third edition revised and re-edited
There can be no peace nor cessation of planetary destruction until this is understood.
The Grand Old Party in the USA
May 8th
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/election-us-2016-36232280
“’I think what a lot of Republicans want to see is that we have a standard bearer that bears our standards.’ House Speaker Paul Ryan said on Thursday,”
Perhaps “Republican Standards” are the standards of the rich and elite. American wealth is moving toward the few (.8% now) at an unprecedented rate of flow (up). American wage earners have experienced their standard of living dropping whilst Congress spends such a lot of time bickering and fighting each other. Perhaps the other 99.2% are just fed up.
For example: “For most workers, real wages have barely budged for decades”
http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/10/09/for-most-workers-real-wages-have-barely-budged-for-decades/ and yet; there are now more than twice as many millionaire households than there were in 1996. http://www.cnbc.com/2015/03/09/more-millionaires-than-ever-are-living-in-the-us.html
48.00% of Americans earn less than $25k a year.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_income_in_the_United_States
“In 2011, the majority of low-income working families (61 percent) spent more than one-third of their income on housing, exceeding an accepted guideline for what constitutes affordable housing.” http://www.prb.org/Publications/Articles/2013/us-working-poor-families.aspx
A low-income family is: “those earning less than twice the federal poverty line. In 2011, the low-income threshold for a family of four with two children was $45,622.” That means the poverty level is $22,811. So nearly ½ of American families (2 adults and 2 children) are living in or very near poverty. “In 2011, the top 20 percent of working families received 10.1 times the total income received by the bottom 20 percent of working families, up from 9.5 in 2007.” I’m sure that in 2016 at least 50% of American families are earning below the poverty line.
For quite a while I’ve heard the over-ripe saying that “The rich get richer and the poor get poorer.” I always thought it was just an over exaggeration. Not anymore.
As I posted on Facebook Friday, “Fanaticism is bred by hopelessness and despair”
I think it is safe to say that almost half the American population despair of ever rising above the poverty line. Then along comes Trump! But Trump is a millionaire.
Does this really make any sense?