Posts tagged panpsychism
Time to Speak out
Apr 23rd
Time to Speak Out
“During those same 50 years, populations of vertebrates (animals with backbones) declined by 60 percent on average. It’s been estimated that humans—along with our cattle, pigs, and other domesticates—now make up 96 percent of all terrestrial vertebrate biomass. The other four percent include all the songbirds, deer, foxes, elephants and on and on—all the world’s remaining wild land animals. We inherited a planet of astounding beauty, which we share with millions of amazing creatures—and, one by one, we’re crowding them out.” Richard Heinberg Post Carbon Institute
<newsletter@postcarbon.org> 22 April, 2020
We don’t actually have a resource shortage. We have a population problem. With other living things, when they eat out their environment, many die until balance is achieved. But no, not homo sapiens sapiens. We have become the most voracious and dangerous predator Earth has ever encountered. We maintain our over population by enslaving other animals, penning them up in miserable conditions and chopping them up for Sunday lunch.
Who gave us the right to breed in such an out-of-control manner? I cannot imagine a deity that would condone our actions. Certainly not a God of love such as many of us have been taught.
For those of us who don’t do sky Gods, we realize that we don’t have the wisdom to manage a planet so must watch, study and learn to work in cooperation with Nature. Why?
Because the Earth is not out there; we ARE the Earth. We live in an Earth provided body. It is not OUR body to do as we choose with which goes for every other living body large or small.
Our hubris has dropped us presently into a cultural and economic decline, albiet one of many in our short history on the planet.
Now, every day must be an Earth day for our days are numbered.
We must “ring the bell that still can ring” and look for the “crack in everything.”
Incarnational Opportunity and Creativity
Sep 27th
Incarnational Opportunity and Creativity
27 September, 2016
Sky McCain
“It is the testimony of the wisdom bearers that we come here from the realm of the unconditional in order to experience the conditional. Our original spirit nature is unconditional love, but apparently we set that aside temporarily in order to fully participate in the human experience. We are typically attracted to such an incarnational opportunity because it represents something so different than our actual state as light being souls, and hence is intriguing to us in our natural curiosity and trajectory towards infinitely expanding Self-awareness.”
From Bob O’Hearn “Self and Other”
The clarity of the description above has stimulated me to inflate my ego enough to offer an idea that has resided within me for many years. Firstly, I suggest that we are, among many other attributes, “reality structurers.” Reading Seth from Jane Roberts and in later years Vadim Zeland about Transurfing has supported my view that we not only in great part “make” our reality but actually can “choose” our reality in the sense of the life-path we are following. From Lynn Margolis I learned about the symbiotic theory of evolution that points to a basis of love and cooperation rather than random chance and deadly competition. From here, sprinkled with other bits and pieces of pertinent information my vision manifested as follows:
Creative development is a fundamental attribute of Consciousness. All of what we call “things” shine with some amount of this Consciousness and all things express Consciousness to the extent of their abilities. Parallel to the realm of what modern science calls aliveness has come a renewal of the Panpsychism or minds in a world of mind. I can now proceed to my hypothesis. Large organisms, such as a planet, contain almost unlimited potential and are largely limited by the level of consciousness they are expressed through. Lower order levels of consciousness strive, through what we call creativity, to expand their awareness and consciousness channels. To cut to the chase, we may desire to be a planet, our next higher holon in the holarchy of our known existence. Our experience must be immense and our ability to channel love greatly deepened. Our power is in the present, the dance, and it is dance all the way up and down.
Looking for Consciousness
Jun 21st
“Looking for consciousness in the world is a bit like studying a movie, looking for the source of its light. Nowhere would we find it. The light is not in the movie. The movie is made of light.”
The Reality of Consciousness by Peter Russell http://www.peterrussell.com/Odds/RealityConsc.pdf
Similarly, one cannot find “the self” because what we are is not a thing “out there” to be found. We are what we are looking for. Also, there is nobody doing the looking for again there is only “the seeing, the hearing, the sensing, etc.” and nobody doing it. Many call this unity consciousness. I call it being lived by Earth or Gaia. All we can detect is the consciousness of Gaia. Cosmic consciousness is too far removed and may be set aside as pure speculation and most probably unknowable. Gaia consciousness can be known and realised because it is we; there is no other.
What is Planetary Psychology?
Feb 13th
A planetary psychologist is one who studies the psyche of our planet Earth. Understood is the necessity of investigating Earth’s psyche in a wholistic manner. Just as in humans, Earth’s psyche must not be separated in a dualistic manner. Wholistic study is only relevant from a “oneness” structure that sees the physical and the spiritual as two sides of the one coin. Planetary psychology must be closely knit with ecology, and the physics and chemistry of Earth.
An updated worldview is called for that places life as we know it as in, among and inseparable from Earth itself. Humans, for instance, do not live “on” the planet, they are the planet. The terms animate and inanimate no longer serve when we view earth as a living entity. Following on, planetary psychology accepts that earth as a living planet is conscious and accepts the responsibility to investigate just how human and other than human beings share in that one consciousness.
There is an ancient and on-going human tradition of non-duality. A form reminiscent of Advaita Vedanta teaches that to view ourselves as having a separate consciousness within that looks out on a world without is an illusion. There is only the looking and no looker. There is only one consciousness. This consciousness permeates the Universe. Planetary psychology limits itself to the study of how humans relate spiritually to universal consciousness as it has been expressed by the planet. All physicality expresses the one consciousness limited only by the number and variety of sensory apparatus that has evolved.
See Panpsychism and Panprotopsychism by David J. Chalmers
http://consc.net/papers/panpsychism.pdf
See Planet as Self by Sky McCain http://www.earthenspirituality.com
Are We Guardians of the Planet?
Jan 18th
Are we Guardians of the Planet?
guardian
n
1. one who looks after, protects, or defends: the guardian of public morals.
Darkening of the Light
Witnessing the End of an Era
by Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee
In the Introduction to Darkening of the Light by Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee, we find:
“But this gift of light was also a test for humanity…and has forgotten our ancient purpose as guardians of the planet.”
Not only do I have no idea who or what religion, spirituality or movement decided that we have this ancient purpose. It certainly was not Jewish or Christian. According to Genesis, God has given us the planet to have dominion over. I am aware of my ignorance and will try to find out.
We just cannot have it both ways. Either we see the oneness, the non-dual in our beingness as the Earth, or we see the duality as we, creatures of the Earth protecting the other that we choose to call Earth. The bark is the tree, there is not the bark and the tree as a duality. Yes, our language allows us to split and divide, carve up things so that we can speak of the tree roots, the tree bark, tree limbs, tree leaves, but still without these what we call parts, what we observe wouldn’t be a tree. It is our thinking function that gets hung up on dichotomys. Our science rips living things apart and then pronounces on what “it is.”
Guardianship may have ancient beginnings, but our science supports a non-dual understanding of how we are in the world. Even to see ourselves as IN a world out there is to err.
There is no duality, no “out there” and “in here.” As Vadim Zeland has said, the world is a mirror of your attitude towards it. The Gnostic text The Gospel of St. Thomas that didn’t make the cut by the early “holy” fathers of the church, remarks something like: When the inner becomes as the outer, there is the Kingdom of God. Another biblical source says that the Kingdom of God is within you. [Luke 17:21] So, we may see that actually, the world is also within you, not “out there.” So, if there is no “out there” and “out there” is really within us and we are “within” the planet both physically and spirituality, then what we have is oneness, true oneness. From the perspective of planets, stars and galaxies, they are not “out there” either, so they are a oneness. From here it is not too far out for those who speak of oneness with the Universe.
Now this is my thinking function rattling on. How do I feel? Can I sense oneness in my everyday interaction with what I think of as out there? Well, since I cannot and do not want to part with my mate and buddy, the thinking function, I’ll just call it a both/and and leave it for now as I set forth for my daily bread walking among the birds, insects, grass, trees, bushes, clouds and feeling joyful knowing that I know and I am known.
Promissory Materialism
Dec 14th
Promissory Materialism
http://www.integralworld.net/sheldrake.html
“chains of parallel and successive operations that build complexity” will eventually explain the diversity of forms (Carroll, S.B. 2005. Endless Forms Most Beautiful, Quercus Books, London, p. 105)
Just what are chains of operations that build complexity? I can detect the vague promise and recognise the materiality context; the kind of materiality that describes what happens with the presumed hope that this mysteriously satisfies our desire to “know” something substantial about the phenomenon. I am not kind and considerate like Rupert. This is just the same old blabber materialists have been dishing out since they began pulling stuff to pieces in order to gain useful knowledge.
For years, I taught field engineers how to isolate problems with first main frames, then minicomputers and finally micros. I assure you that the only useful knowledge that pulling any of the above to pieces in order to find out how it works will give you is just the number of pieces on the bench. You will never, ever find out “how it works” this way.
Thinking Like a Planet
Mar 1st
This Category, *Pagan Ethics, contains a series of posts that are a commentary on a book – Living with Honour – written by Emma Restall Orr. My interest in Pagan ethics emerges out of a need to capture in words the attitudes and behaviour that might manifest out of a person’s love of Gaia and dedication to an Earthen Spirituality. Emma’s beautiful book, which I at first eagerly skimmed, then read slowly and carefully and now enjoy re-reading has stimulated my thinking and inspired the comments in these posts. I obviously highly recommend the book and hope that my commentary serves the spirit of *Pagan Ethics and challenges the reader to examine their attitudes and world view toward a greater reverence for our place within and among the life of Gaia. As my one-time friend Wolf says, may Gaia bless.
Thinking Like a Planet
“I think we tap a tremendous reservoir of power and strength when we allow that we’re entirely born of this breathing planet and that we really are nothing other than parts of Earth. That our real flesh is this immense spherical metabolism that envelopes us, that the deep, dense energy of the Earth is pulsing into us all the time. When we think of ourselves as not just earthly beings, but as Earth then we have all that wildness and all that power surging through us to meet whatever challenges come up. It doesn’t make it easy by any means. But it alters the way we feel.”
David Abram
Last post, [Post5] I talked about fear; fear of the unknown and the fear kindled by some religions over who does and who does not get to go to heaven. In addition to fear, there seems to have been a general discontent that’s settled over the western world. Many would ascribe it to a separation and alienation from Nature. There is a lot of evidence that in the Neolithic period [in the Eastern Mediterranean, from about 10,000 to 3300 B.C.] the Goddess religion was most prevalent. At first glance, one might just assume that people worshipped a female rather than a male God such as Ahura Mazda the lord of light and wisdom in Zoroasterism from Persia. However, the Goddess may have been an expression of Earth energy. Thankfully, the Goddess beliefs have survived. As Starhawk says:
“Goddess religion is not based on belief, in history, in archaeology, in any Great Goddess past or present. Our spirituality is based on experience, on a direct relationship with the cycles of birth, growth, death and regeneration in nature and in human lives. We see the complex interwoven web of life as sacred, which is to say, real and important, worth protecting, worth taking a stand for. At a time when every major ecosystem on the planet is under assault, calling nature sacred is a radical act because it threatens the overriding value of profit that allows us to despoil the basic life support systems of the earth. And at a time when women still live with the daily threat of violence and the realities of inequality and abuse, it is an equally radical act to envision deity as female and assert the sacred nature of female (and male) sexuality and bodies.”
http://www.starhawk.org/pagan/religion-from-nature.html
Moving on to my point, sky god religions over the last 5,000 years have all preached love; love of the God firstly, [remember the 1st commandment] then love of others. They have failed. They have failed to provide a story that [1] Provides an inalienable, experiential, bonding to our undeniable source, the living Earth. [2] It is the Earth, as mother, that binds humans and all living things to her bosom. Now, this may sound too far out for many. But please, hold on a second. It sounds farfetched mainly because even though our recent scientific discoveries allow us to appreciate the creative genius of Earth, our traditional, culturally blessed world view is anchored in reductionism and materialism. Many of us feel the love of the earth, but that spirit has been attributed as coming from out there somewhere and being intangible, out there somewhere becomes a concept. Somehow many people accept this story without evidence allowing their wishful thinking to be known as faith. Our major religious educators are well aware of the effects of early childhood conditioning plus have become adept at preying on the inner fears of people estranged from Earth energy.
As David Abram and others attest, we are the Earth and are sustained by Earth energy. We can experience this in many ways. For instance, look at what we call beauty. The beauty of sunrise and sunset, mountains, forest, the seas and the manifest fecundity of thousands of beautiful plants, animals and insects. Gaia has a vast, sustaining circulation system which transports warmth and food through the oceans, moisture through winds, cycles such as the carbon cycle that over time sequesters carbon from airborne CO2. Also, as Gaia Theory reveals, Gaia maintains a stable, until lately, average temperature of 12C that sustains life. Vast numbers of people love Nature and many can convincingly describe how these loving feelings came about as they describe their experience of Nature. Tragically, many, especially those encapsulated in huge monstrous cities where Earth energy is diminished by concrete, bitumen and smog, are unable to sense beauty I speak of. I must look to others to speak where I do not have the talent. We have among us today those who can and do speak poetically and lovingly of the Earth.
In the words of a native Sioux, Ohiyesa:
“There were no temples or shrines among us save those of nature. Being a natural man, the Indian was intensely poetical. He would deem it sacrilege to build a house for Him who may be met face to face in the mysterious, shadowy aisles of the primeval forest, or on the sunlit bosom of virgin prairies, upon dizzy spires and pinnacles of naked rock, and yonder in the jeweled vault of the night sky! He who enrobes Himself in filmy veils of cloud, there on the rim of the visible world where our Great-Grandfather Sun kindles his evening camp-fire, He who rides upon the rigorous wind of the north, or breathes forth His spirit upon aromatic southern airs, whose war-canoe is launched upon majestic rivers and inland seas – He needs no lesser cathedral!”
Paula Gunn Allen speaks profoundly:
“We are the land. To the best of my understanding, that is the fundamental idea that permeates American Indian life; the land (Mother) and the people (mothers) are the same. As Luther Standing Bear has said of his Lakota people, “We are of the soil and the soil is of us.” The Earth is the source and being of the people and we are equally the being of the Earth. The land is not really a place separate from ourselves, where we act out the drama of our isolate destinies… The Earth is not merely a source of survival, distant from the creatures it nourishes and from the spirit that breathes in us, nor is it to be considered an inert resource on which we draw in order to keep our ideological self-functioning… Rather for the American Indians… the Earth is being, as all creatures are also being: aware, palpable, intelligent, and alive… Many non-Indians believe that human beings possess the only form of intelligence in phenomenal existence (often in any form of existence). The more abstractionist and less intellectually vain Indian sees human intelligence as rising out of the very nature of being, which is of necessity intelligent in and of itself.”
“The earth is a living, conscious being. In company with cultures of many different times and places, we name these things as sacred: air, fire, water, and earth. They live in the four directions, north, east, south, and west.
Whether we see them as the breath, energy, blood, and body of the Mother, or as blessed gifts of a Creator, or as symbols of the interconnected systems that sustain life, we know that nothing can live without them.
To call these things sacred is to say that they have a value beyond their usefulness for human ends, that they themselves become the standards by which our acts, our economics, our laws, and our purposes must be judged. No one has the right to appropriate them or profit from them at the expense of others. Any government that fails to protect them forfeits its legitimacy.
All people, all living things, are part of the earth life, and so are sacred. No one of us stands higher or lower than any other. Only justice can insure balance: only ecological balance can sustain freedom. Only in freedom can that fifth sacred thing we call Spirit flourish in its full diversity.
To honour the sacred is to create conditions in which nourishment, sustenance, habitat, knowledge, freedom, and beauty can thrive. To honour the sacred is to make love possible.
To this we dedicate our curiosity, our will, our courage, our silences, and our voices. To this we dedicate our lives.”
From: Starhawk. The Fifth Sacred Thing (Bantam, 1993)
We can only begin to understand who we are and our purpose in life from the perspective of our place within the earth. When we see ourselves, as David Abram says – “When we think of ourselves as not just earthly beings, but as Earth then we have all that wildness and all that power surging through us to meet whatever challenges come up.” – we will find the immense joy of being. We must learn to think like a planet.
Death and Consciousness
Feb 10th
This Category, *Pagan Ethics, contains a series of posts that are a commentary on a book – Living with Honour – written by Emma Restall Orr. My interest in Pagan ethics emerges out of a need to capture in words the attitudes and behaviour that might manifest out of a person’s love of Gaia and dedication to an Earthen Spirituality. Emma’s beautiful book, which I at first eagerly skimmed, then read slowly and carefully and now enjoy re-reading has stimulated my thinking and inspired the comments in these posts. I obviously highly recommend the book and hope that my commentary serves the spirit of *Pagan Ethics and challenges the reader to examine their attitudes and world view toward a greater reverence for our place within and among the life of Gaia. As my one-time friend Wolf says, may Gaia bless.
Death, Dualism, Consciousness and Panexperientialism
Why the long word panexperientialism? Probably because narrowing down aspects of a previous long word often results in even longer words. This one is a refinement of panpsychism, a view that all matter has a mental aspect. I suspect a lot of Pagans would agree with this proposition and it may be closely related to what Emma has in mind when she says: “*Paganism is non-dual.” “Panexperientialism, as espoused by Alfred North Whitehead, is a less bold variation, which credits all entities with phenomenal consciousness but not with cognition, and therefore not necessarily with full-fledged minds.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panpsychism
Now, I don’t have the faintest idea of what a less than full-fledged mind looks like. However, I do have vast respect and stand in awe of Alfred North Whitehead. An aside, I’ll probably never forget a moment the first or second time I sat in the Depauw University library at the tender and seriously ignorant age of 18 and picked up a book by Whitehead. I couldn’t get through the first page! I thought, holy smoke, what have I got myself into here. Then a couple of three years ago I tried again and managed a few pages but oh my, what a mind.
I’ve introduced the subject of death in my first blog and promised to follow up with the next one. But first, let me talk a little about dualism. The *Pagan attitude towards dualism colours attitudes about death. The subjects dualism and consciousness have been analysed, rationalised and categorised such to make all but the most experienced philosophers swoon with a splitting headache. Simply and historically, dualism depicts reality as divided into two separate, fundamental aspects – mind and physicality or spirit and matter. *Paganism is non-dual. In a non-dual world there are only manifestations of energy, spirit, song or essence; whatever or however one chooses to name it. *Pagans don’t hold that a separate spirit leaves the body after death. To me, death is the start of a change of path and identity for all bodily materiality. Consciousness channelled by the organism stops coordinating a coherence of multiple parts the manifestation of which we term life. Transfiguration and changes that we call decay set in and materiality breaks down often into its constituent parts. Dust to dust so to speak.
Considered from a distance, so to speak, Earthly life is cyclical, tremendously diverse and the material constituents constantly recycled from organism to organism. Assuming, for a moment, that all life-forms are actually limbs and sensory faculties of Gaia expressing according to their ability Gaia’s consciousness, again I ask, who dies? Now, from a human being perspective, which is the only embodied perspective open to us, the above only makes sense is when we realise that we ARE the planet. Jean Klein, speaking from a Hindu Advaita Vedanta, non-dualistic viewpoint, might say that we can never observe our consciousness because we are what we are looking for. Our consciousness is not a separate object that we can perceive. One might as well expect the eye to be able to see itself seeing. Further, there is no separate “me” in here seeing something, there is only the seeing.
Let me follow on at this point with a perspective that is gaining acceptance. Our dualistic science and scientific method tends to trap us into an either/or research outcome. I expect many scientists continue to ignore the results of the famous Schrodinger’s cat thought paradox. The results of the experiment contradicts common sense. In case you are not familiar with it, “A cat, a flask of poison, and a radioactive source are placed in a sealed box. If an internal monitor detects radioactivity (i.e. a single atom decaying), the flask is shattered, releasing the poison that kills the cat. The Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics implies that after a while, the cat is simultaneously alive and dead. Yet, when one looks in the box, one sees the cat either alive or dead, not both alive and dead. This poses the question of when exactly quantum superposition ends and reality collapses into one possibility or the other.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schr%C3%B6dinger’s_cat
Situations such as the one above lead us to amend our either/or expectations to the realisation that many situations are actually both/ and. Now of course, in our everyday reality, a cat cannot be both dead and alive according to the instrument{s} observing reality at the time. However, at another level of consciousness and another type of observing instrument at an extremely smaller or larger physical size, such might be the case.
A carbon element, for example, has 6 electrons, 2 electrons in its inner shell and 4 in its outer shell. Carbon is very brittle, and cannot be rolled into wires or pounded into sheets. Yet, at nanometer sizes and a cylindrical shape, they become 10 times the tensil strength of graphite or coal. They also exhibit high conductivity and heat conductance properties. I cite this example of carbon to illustrate that carbon has both high and low tensil strength according to its size and shape. More and more we are finding that our differences of opinion and belief are subject to a both/and result due to different world views and levels of consciousness held by the contending parties. Further, concepts such as ultimate reality, absolute truth and perfect repeatability may be unobtainable when considering a living planet and a living Universe. The problem of convincing argumentation as to the anthropogenic responsibility for global warming is largely due to the limitations of the worldview of a majority of people. Instrumentation designed for machines just are NOT VALID for measuring the behaviour of a huge, intelligent, living being. I leave you with these quotes:
“No problem can be solved from the same consciousness that created it.” Albert Einstein
“The fundamental delusion of humanity is to suppose that I am here and you are out there” Roshi, Yasutani
A Political Process fit for Purpose
Apr 25th
“The growth of emissions can be slowed, relative to the growth rate of the economy. However, emissions cannot conceivably be stalled or reversed while the economy continues to expand, however great the carbon-saving technologies of the coming years.
If our political processes cannot conceive of a non-growth future, and yet a fundamental rethink of growth is the only honest starting point for the fight against climate change, then those political processes are clearly not fit for purpose.”
Oliver De Schutter at the Guardian. Tuesday 24 April 2012
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/apr/24/climate-change-human-rights-issue?INTCMP=SRCH
There are two points that I would like to make about the quote above.
[1]
Fighting against climate change is ridiculous. Just a slight glance at a graphic of temperature variations over a few hundred thousand years reveal that it is always changing. There is no or practically no long period of stability. Over the last million years, at least, we have been going from quick zips of warming squeezed into long periods of increased glaciation and decreased glaciation. Talk about fighting climate change just understandably fuels the skeptics and “deniers.”
I read a lot about the climbing anthropogenic CO2 and steadily rising temperature. The level of CO2 in the air is unquestionably higher than any of the last 4 interglacial periods. Since we as humans had no modern recording and measurement devices, we just don’t know how the CO2 will affect climate. The best we can do is run computer models and simulations. These help us to see into the future but just don’t impress a large segment of our population. Ironically, to make a side step, these same people don’t seem to mind listening to the results of simulations so long as they reveal a story that they agree with.
I’ve said before and continue to claim that we are barking up the wrong tree. Our scientists, driven of course by what governments and multinationals want to hear, focus on why we are still experiencing increasing temperatures, when after around 12,000 years of interglacial warming, compared to the last 4 periods, we should be into a downward dip.
I suggest that we should be concerned and be trying to discover what brought the temperature (and CO2) down in the past. We need to do this as precisely as possible and then when we understand which of the factors discovered are now missing, for instance, millions of trees and immense grasslands and savannah, and then how we can either get around the situation or if not, how we had best prepare for the unknown. Scientists do agree that there are triggers, tipping points, that appear to spearhead the change up and down. I suggest that we have a lot of adequate information about the causes of the upward climb of temperature and emergence into an interglacial period. Whether CO2 climbed first or temperature climbed first is a side issue – important but a mystery that we can live with – while we deal with the known. As I have just said, we spend little time and effort revealing and I argue, explaining to the public that we will most likely skip a whole glacial- interglacial cycle. [An Exceptionally Long Interglacial Ahead?
A. Berger and M. F. Loutre in 23 AUGUST 2002 VOL 297 SCIENCE www.sciencemag.org]
Another issue that bothers me is that of our worldview or how we look at our planet. As I’ve tried to suggest and support in my book, Planet as Self, we don’t understand how our planet “works” primarily because we see it as a large and intricate machine. We use the limited views within a pragmatic, physicalist, mindset, with instruments designed to measure machines, to understand a living being. We are IN a planet not on it. We have studied and know that a star, our sun, has a birth and death cycle of increasing heat output on its way to becoming a red giant then a white dwarf and finally a black dwarf. Gaia Theory explains how living beings on the outer skin, so to speak of Gaia, actually work together to counteract this heat increase and maintain Earth’s temperature to the benefit of said life-forms. That’s why we need to work with nature and honour the wisdom inherent in the life of Gaia. After all, we are all first and foremost Earthlings.
[2] Looking again at the quote above, I am extremely pleased to read a critique of the idea of unlimited growth. Out of control growth is known as cancer. Surely it is common sense to agree that a planet with finite resources cannot support unlimited growth. As the author points out, we need to adapt a political (economic) process that is fit for purpose. That purpose being, as a famous American document proposed, the purpose of maintaining a government of the people, by the people and for the people and not just the 1%.