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About me 1:“Truth is the First casualty of War. It is also the first condition of Peace”
“Everybody has a piece of the Truth and every body has a piece of the Lie.”
“Violence doesn’t work. Non-violence doesn’t work either. Maybe Healthy Culture will work”
—I-P
We all live in, are infected by, and suffer from, a sick Culture of Apart-ness, of Alienation. This culture, like all culture is comprised of Cosmology, Identity, Ritual, and Infrastructure. In the case of the dominant culture this means; a Cosmology of Apart-ness, an Identity-Politics of Apart-ness, Rituals of (inner and outer) Apart- ness, and Infrastructures of Apart-ness. Education (formal and informal) is the transmission of culture, and in our case it is the transmission of this sick culture. The factional political paradigms of our time (including those based on race, gender, class, political party, nationality, even species) are all symptoms of, rather than cures for, this condition of sick culture. As such, none of them have any potential at all for changing anything that matters in any sustainable way. We have no time for this.
Since sick culture is the problem, it follows that Healthy Culture is the solution. So what is Healthy Culture and how does it manifest on the collective, political Level? Glad you asked. This question is explored on my two motime blogs :integralscience.motime.com and lifedancelog.motime.com. There I write of an extremely small, but vital and replicable, Cultural Pilot Project that is currently going on in the cultural microclimate of Twin Oaks Intentional community in Virginia involving the practice of Healthy Culture; its cosmology of Togetherness (Integral Science), its Identity-Politics of Togetherness (Individual-Personhood), it’s Rituals of Togetherness (Life-Dance rituals) and its Infrastructure of Togetherness.
About Me 2:
I suppose the most salient thing I could say about me as an individual is the following: For me, being in this world has always been like coming into a restaurant and discovering gang rape happening in the middle of the room, looking around horrified, and discovering further that all the other customers still seem to be still trying to “make the best of things” and “enjoy their evening” (if this simile fails it is because what is happening in the world is more, rather than less criminally stupid and obscene than a gang rape).
Later on I realized that the "rape" only seems to me to be happening in the middle of the room. Evidently, for most people the scene is really going on off in a corner somewhere shielded both by a circle of Guards with sunglasses and prominently displayed weapons as well as by a screen put up by the restaurant owner to protect the sensibilities of his customers. I guess most people can barely hear the screams over the conversation and loud music. Nevertheless, this rape has always been for me the main and most obvious thing that was happening in the room and the whole idea of “making the best of it” and “enjoying my evening” has always seemed to me obscenely crass, even somewhat ghoulish, and at any rate basically impossible. There is no “best” to make of such a situation. The only decent and sensible thing has always seems to be to consider that ones evening is simply “ruined” for the purposes of “private enjoyment” and resolve to spend the time (the rest of ones life i mean) trying to figure out what is really going on and how to stop it.
Now this is not to say that I have not been (and continue to be) temporarily distracted. Its just that the various mechanisms of “distraction maintenance” (drugs, alcohol, entertainment, consumption,”art” competition,”work”, the soap opera of “relationships” etc) have never caught on with me in such a way as to keep my mind away from the main thing that is happening for very long at all. I suppose one or more of them might have done so if I'd “applied myself” but I have never been able to see the point in any of that, even from a purely selfish point of view. I mean to me, being fully alive means being fully responsive to what is really happening both inside and outside oneself, not being numb to it.
Anyway,the upshot of this quirk in my basic personality has been a long odyssey that began with an intuitive attempt to try to stay outside of the general situation myself and figure out what was going on before I just became a part of what was going on–-or more a part than I already was (I guess another rather unusual thing about me was that I was so clear that the confusion and stupidity going on outside of me was to some extent also going on inside of me as well). I therefor tried to stay more or less on the margins,politely ignoring the people who were winking at me, haling me from their tables and offering me martinis etc…, and trying, through all the smoke and noise, to get some useful insight into what was going on,
I was 24 or so before I began arrive at what seemed to me to be some useful and real answers. In the 20 years since then, I have gotten a lot more. These days, I have taken to calling this “main thing happening in thr room” (well not only the rape but the whole situation inclusive of and enabled by everybody present in it) “sick culture”, and my life is basically about the co-creation of what I call “Healthy Culture” as a kind of cultural twelve-step program that is meant to be, not only an alternative to complete capitulation to the prevailing inner and outer craziness and lose-lose stupidity, but a long term cure for it.
There is a great deal to Healthy Culture (it is as simple and as complicated as Sick Culture), but the gist of it is in the two paragraphs of “About me1”. Please contact me if you have and comments, questions, criticisms, and/or desire to participate in this experiment in inner and outer healing. I-P
integralscience.motime.com, lifedancelog.motime.com, healthyculture.gaia.com