Daniel Pinchbeck

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The great tragedy of Science - the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact. ~ Thomas H. Huxley

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[Jana]

Daniel Pinchbeck at Boulder Bookstore 7/13/07


I had to go see Daniel Pinchbeck for what I anticipated to be healing dose of sardonic lateral social commentary. I got everything I went for, as he capped off a lot of the stuff I had been working on.

John mentioned that there was no such thing as “bad faith,” but I do want to make a distinction between the two essential modes of being…fear mongering on the one hand, and positivism on the other. Daniel Pinchbeck is definitely a positivist.

He is using the 2012 phenomena as a nexus point to crystallize our current human history and to be midwife to the birth to a more right-brained, holistic mode of thinking and being. As such he is perhaps one of the most important philosophers out there, not so much for his conclusions, but for the “way” he thinks. Bringing an objective rationality to non ordinary phenomena and ideas, without the normal “literalism” and emphatic dogmatism that most often accompanies the paranormal and spiritual conversation.

Basically he is saying that we are at a cusp of transition (McKenna) to a new mode of time, from the left-brain linear, secular, material realm of information, into the right-brain, psychic, spiritual realm of wisdom. And that this move into a wisdom culture requires an integration of the shadow. He associates our life-destructive modes of behavior and technology with our negative shadow that we project out there. We now see how such an investment of negative psychic energy pays out—for we “get” what we ARE. Thus we learn by chaos and default to turn our psychic energy toward intentional transformation. To not merely succumb to the nihilism and ennui of accepting what appears to be the “given.” But to consciously participate and be proactive in our positivistic perception and creation of our world.

He also stressed that novelty is increasing exponentially and that now with the internet there is a chance for a global democracy without government. As the lifting of the veils proceeds (apocalypse) we feel the tension of the crisis—heating of psychic energies  constitutes a alchemical crucible of change, generating psychic evolution and speeding the realization of Spirit or “quality” of consciousness, above and beyond our present diversions in time. We are experiencing what amounts to a collective reactive seizure, in the form of the death throws of the old mind that identified itself as a cog in the machine of the information age. The wisdom age is yet to reveal its full nature, we have only glimpses.

However we need not fear retribution or persecution to be leaving what was behind. We need not fear punishment for being who we are to become. For guilt over higher consciousness is itself a thing of the past dogmatic information age. We do not have to apologize for fully showing up, because more and more of us will be brave enough to admit it. The psychic heat of self-realization creates an a priori subliminal activism that works to dissolve the fear culture from the interiors of man. Thus the structures of the Beast and enslavement will voluntarily dismantle. And a flowering of freedoms will erupt from the fertile luminal soil without the anticipated cataclysm.

The layers of the psyche grow in cyclic patterns of polarity-synthesis—I see the progression as being a grieving process. Where our grief turns to anger and then when the anger lets go there is an opening into vulnerability and feminine receptivity. Allowing for more expansive right-brained “depth” to be integrated. Thus the path from the information age to the wisdom age proceeds through periods of grief and illumination. The more we make this process conscious, the less blowback need occur. Knowing that we are all in this together and have a responsibility in the outcome makes incarnation a whole lot easier.

What is the symbolic meaning of aligning with the Dark Mother (Hathor) on the winter equinox of 2012; that is passing the ecliptic of the equatorial line of the black hole at the galactic center. It is a reorientation away from myopic slavery to materialism, an invitation to look out in awe at the depths of the universe and participate in the galactic orgasm/organism. And through his shift in focus, to move from the rigid formalism of the information age, and into the spaceous expansive, depths and luminal embrace of the wisdom age. Effortlessly in-corporating multiple layers and modes of consciousness without denial, resistence or hesitation. (Horus)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JDA-qPweHLk&mode=related&search=  Daniel Pinchbeck
http://postmoderntimes.com/
http://realitysandwich.com/
   
Multitude by Michael Hardt

[Jana]

I don't focus on the plant teachers, the 2012, Mayan calender, crop circles or any of the superfluous stuff he brings to the equation, those are minor symbols. You will see with his next couple of books where he is going with it. He is a little more hooked in than most to the underground swelling, he is hopeful. It is good to be reminded that crisis does not mean eternal breakdown, but breakthrough.

The speel is the same as his conversations on the web, but the important stuff came thru from the Boulderites questions. He was going to be working on the sex issue of male-female relationship and flesh out some ideas on social organization based on the Elfan system. Producing a more exanded model and language of love in order to reduce the aggression/tension/sickness resulting from trying to fit a polygamous species into the conventional monogamous mode. He said the majority of human shadow results from this false social impositioni over our true nature.

But due to current critical dangers he is going to be addressing the nature of politics and governing systems first then sex later.

Like I say it was the "way" he thinks that is important. Passing through the thresholds of conventional programming, into this new luminal flow which integrates the layers/modes of consciousness. You see the "specific" leftbrain (digital) mode will drive us to insanity and sickness if we try to maintain the old mode of consciousness within the increase complexity and higher energy modes that are to come. The stress of trying to maintain our anal hold on the "known" will be too great. Thus if we make this transition process conscious, we do not have to breakdown in a cathartic fashion with resultant metabolic regression—but can learn to cultivate and exercise these new modes of being in a conscious fashion.

You see Darth Vader has arisen throughout the fabric of culture and has turned aggressive in his mad drive for power. The systems of this culture are no longer supporting, but are destroying the people. Humanity must develop new systems which are not malignant and which are life affirming. The current civilization has an imbalance of hypermasculine, power-over energy, which is reflected in all aspects of our culture—from our denaturing use of land and resources, anti-geomantic architecture, explosive energy generation systems and war-like medical, political. legal and economic systems.

The Mindful Brain: Reflection and Attunement in the Cultivation of Well-Being
by Daniel J. Siegel
Siegel, co-director of the UCLA Mindful Awareness Center, blends personal experience with scientific research, attempting to capture the spiritual as well as the physiological phenomenon of "mindfulness"-or, in Siegel's acronym-speak, COAL: the state of simultaneous Curiosity, Openness, Acceptance and Love. Siegel's endeavor is timely and well-intentioned, but his is an elusive subject, and his text is peppered with confusing, semi-technical descriptions of mind-states (like meditation) and processes (like egocentric and allocentric circuitry) that frequently frustrate. Despite this, Siegel does introduce persuasive scientific evidence that meditation and the mindful state not only produce improvement in well-being, but also detectable physical changes in the brain, such as a thickening of the middle prefrontal lobes. He also introduces exotic new vocabulary, such as "ipseity," "the core sense of self beneath the usual personal identity." If the result of Siegel's marriage of medicine and mysticism is something of a muddle, he is to be commended for the effort, and his attitude toward science is unique in a medical doctor (tellingly, Siegal took a sabbatical from med school after being reprimanded for empathizing with his patients, rather than objectifying them, and used the time to pursue drawing and dancing). Though uneven and weighed down with too many acronyms, this is a notable science title that smartly combines the personal, the clinical and the spiritual. Amazon

I just thought that the Gulf wars might interfer with human evolution because the frankincense and myrrh we need for our lightbody formula will be destroyed by contamination with DU...the majority of these resins come from Oman at the bottom of the Sinai. That whole area must be "hot" by now. So if you have a piece of desert start growing frankinscense, myrrh, jajoba, chaparral and aloe etc...

The Chaos Point: The World at the Crossroads by Ervin Laszlo
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GFyJYNqQtIc&mode=related&search= —Integral consciousness

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0X_HDSQXMI0 —Starlab

[Jana]

To proceed I think we need to create some new language that seeks to unite poles rather than divide them.
I think where we are now is in a divine schizophrenia between the two halves of reality, flipping from one to the other without really creating a synthesis.
This is the digital mind at work, it needs to focus on the specific at any point in time in order to feel that it exists.
With nothing in the viewfinder the id tends to get nervous and rapidly finds a pole to identify with.
Then with our modern savy we can see both sides of things, so we flip from one to the other.

Thats ok, but it kind of leads to an existential stalemate

Now I hate to admit this because I too enjoy the differentiation and polarization aspect of mind—I get energy from lining up my ducks—but I also know that this is missing something.
It is missing an embrace of the whole, a kind of amoeboid plenium acceptance which allows for effortless movement, without knowing, in tune with the Universe or rather As the Universe.
This critical dissection of reality is really about sitting around on the sidelines and not really doing anything—because we want to "work things out" prior to embracing reality, rather than simply embracing reality.
As such we are perpetual "students" of reality without really being Real!

Now Garwin gets into the noself thing. But the way I am starting to see it, is that the more you embrace the noself, the more Self you become—because the boundaries of ones id and identifying process ultimately become infinite. Thus he says that happenstance is an "unfoldment" rather than a creation. The individual is no longer acting "on" the universe from their particular polarized position—flipping from one pole to the other as the humor of positionality makes its appearance; instead from this new form of being the individual is acting "as" the universe.

Now this new movement back to feminine consciousness (right brain) requires the embrace of shadow, it requires heart-intelligence, for it takes compassion to embrace shadow (unconsciousness). Because the polarization into the narrow separate me creates a cellular and psychosomatic automatic defense system which prevents "intimacy" with the macrocosm. We remain prisoners of the microcosm interiors. This kneejerk self-survival mechanism that has existed since we were amoebas, needs to be penetrated.

Thus we have to turn our pleasure mechanism over from the lust of polarization and differentiation (masculine) into a merger, defuse and indescript kind of luminal consciousness and get our pleasure from this lack of definition in our identifying process. From the outside I don't know whether we will look equanimous and broadminded or simply wishwashy.

I suspect this new threshold from the KW sex dream I had where there was autonomic shock from intimacy. This is why the title of Robert A. Masters book Freedom Through Intimacy urks me, because as a separate self I get my Freedom from avoiding Intimacy not embracing it. And yet theoretically we know that the transcendent is reached "through" things, not by avoidance. Avoidance of shadow, feeling-sensation, holistic mind and our psychic nonlocal abilities is why humanity is currently in deep shit.

We have been trying to manufacture reality from the limited brain damaged force of the masculine left-brain. Now we see that this false material flatland is not really worth living in anyway.

I see the plant-teacher users like Pinchbeck, McKenna, Burhner, Narby, Metzner not as defining "The" way, but as a counterbalance to the painful nihilistic confines of the left-brained survival machine. These thinkers help to solidify expansionary impulses in the human amoeba and remind us that it is "ok" to incorporate a more sensitive, imaginary and playful eros into our machinelike program.

Thus if Pinchbeck thinks Ken is too simplistic in his masculine polarization and dismissal of the many spirits as lower down and more primitive...that is not to say we have to "side" with either, but we can embrace "both." Ken is rather an enigma in that he is both the most extreme differentiator, while at the same time he prophets a sensibility of integration...this duality is too much for most to grasp and they will see Ken either as specific or unified depending on where their own chemistry lies and the internal thresholds yet to be broached.

"The liminal state is characterized by ambiguity, openness, and indeterminacy. One's sense of identity dissolves to some extent, bringing about disorientation. Liminality is a period of transition where normal limits to thought, self-understanding, and behavior are relaxed - a situation which can lead to new perspectives." Wiki

The luminal experience involves a "distance" from polarization and positionality…”Spiritual domain of understanding...is an understanding free of the dichotomy of mind that in its automaticity presents arising contradictions for every premise of thought.” Garwin
http://www.bewideawake.com/

One can only assume that the spiritually integrated "decision making process" happens from beyond the linear mind and self-identity. Thus there is a higher order of discernment that arises subliminally from soul and universal connection itself. It is this what Garwin refers to as noself I think...thus the noself is really the Self.

[Daniel Pinchbeck]

DP has written a fine article here

Part 1:

When the Other Shoe Drops

Daniel Pinchbeck

Recently, I have been putting myself through a crash refresher course on political philosophy and social theory, reviewing Macchiavelli, Rousseau, Marx, Herbert Marcuse, Hannah Arendt, Murray Bookchin, and others. The most satisfying analysis of the contemporary situation that I have found is Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's Multitude (Penguin, 2005), which was a follow-up to their best-selling Empire (Princeton, 2000). Hardt is a political philosopher at Duke University, while Negri is Italian, and spent four years in prison for conspiring with the Red Brigade, an Italian revolutionary group (though the charges were highly dubious). Negri and Hardt aspire to be the Marx and Engels of our time; like Marx and Engels, their collaboration meshes the theoretical depth of Continental philosophy and the pragmatic tendencies of the Anglo tradition.

Today, the entire stream of radical Communist and revolutionary thought has been marginalized and forgotten in the US, outside of abstruse academic circles where it is employed in a distanced and theoretical fashion, and in shrill coteries that produce newspapers and protests but lack any meaningful influence on mainstream debate. Communism is associated with the grey, bureaucratic, murderous totalitarianisms that developed under that name in the 20th Century. What is forgotten is why Communist and socialist ideology once posed such a dangerous threat to Capitalism as an alternative to the oppression of oligarchic rule. Because of this history, the very notion of ideology or social theory continues to be shunned in mainstream progressive circles, which focus on reformist initiatives.

In Empire and Multitude, Negri and Hardt do a heroic job of revisiting and revising Marxist philosophy in the light of recent developments. Negri and Hardt argue that the main or "hegemonic" form of production in our world is no longer material production, as it was in Marx's time, but "immaterial production," the production of concepts, images, communications systems, and affective relationships. If industrial capitalism created "surplus value" by hoarding the excess productive capacity of labor, our post-industrial capitalism creates value in a different way, by "expropriating" the "commons," in other words, putting tolls and privatized barriers around areas that could be freely available to humanity, such as intellectual property, the electromagnetic spectrum, or genetic material. The authors of Multitude see tremendous potential for human emancipation in the new collaborative networks of late-stage capitalism. They point out that the development of collaborative networks, such as those that produce open-source software, reveals there is no longer a need for a boss, or for any hierarchical form of organization. As an alternative, they present the possibility (though without providing any tangible models) of an emergent direct democracy that would function on a global level.

Negri and Hardt barely mention the ecological crisis in their work, and do not address the psychic and shamanic elements involved in transforming human consciousness. However, their work addresses one very real question that must now be explored, as we face the accelerating cataclysms of species extinction, resource depletion, militarism, and climate change: Whether the current political system -- with its compromises, corruptions, and multi-year cycles -- can be reformed, and transformed, to deal with these challenges to the continued survival of the human species. If not, then an alternative must be found -- and quickly.

As I learned while writing my books, certain areas and discourses are subject to extreme taboo and repression – repression not only of the ideas themselves, but even of the original intent behind the repression. In these arenas, the repressed material, when it is brought up to consciousness again, is greeted with ridicule, resistance, contempt, or utter blankness. I found this to be the case with psychedelics and psychic phenomena, along with other subjects. This knee-jerk dismissal is currently our attitude toward a straightforward reevaluation of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Rosa Luxembourg, and so on. On the other hand, items of "revolutionary chic" – such as Che Guevara t-shirts – are mass-produced as commodities, made ironic, and in this way emptied of significance or threat. The extreme blankness produced by repression can be a positive thing, as it opens the possibility for a quite sudden and powerful "return of the repressed," and a reassessment without preconceptions. The prospect that an egalitarian planetary culture - where, instead of being free to own private property, we are free from private property, as Marx once quipped -- would be preferable to this one now seems so impossible that it might catch on.

The absence of social theory from mainstream discourse is underscored by the lack of class consciousness in the US today. Recently, labor conflicts are becoming more visible and virulent again – the writer's guild strike in Hollywood and the stage hands strike on Broadway are just two of the most publicized examples. Yet these particular disputes are not analyzed – as far as I know – in a larger framework that looks at the development of class relationships as a whole. This is the case even though the disparity between average workers' income and the income of CEOs has grown to grotesque proportions, becoming a form of economic apartheid.

There are good reasons to propose that, in the very near future, a post-Marxist analysis of current class relations and social consciousness could become extremely relevant. Right now, we appear to be approaching a severe breakdown of the US financial system, with deep repercussions for the global economy. The ongoing meltdown of the subprime mortgage market is, according to this hypothesis, stage one of this process, and a crisis in personal debt will be the second stage - the dropping of the other shoe. Below, I have enclosed a summary of the economist David Martin's recent speech to The Arlington Institute, a futurist think tank in Virginia. Two years ago, Martin made a speech at Arlington where he foresaw the subprime mortgage market meltdown with impressive acuity (a transcript is available on the Arlington's website). His analysis of the credit landscape suggests that mass defaults on personal debt, starting in December, are going to overwhelm the capacity of banks and insurers, who will not be able to find bailouts. Bank insolvencies would lead to the failure of the privately held Federal Reserve. Currently, OPEC and China are shifting their holdings out of US currency, and the Euro is becoming the reserve currency around the world.

Martin proposes that by March we will be entering an entirely transfigured economic landscape. The logic of his argument seems compelling to me. As bank failures and mass defaults begin to mount up, people are going to need interpretive tools to understand their new situation, in order to react to it practically and deal with it psychologically. During a crisis, there is the potential for a major opening of awareness and compassionate understanding, or for a large-scale retraction into fear-based belief systems and Fundamentalisms. Sometimes you have both at the same time.

The imminent economic plunge, if it happens, cannot help but act as a multi-generational wake up call. These days, when I talk to people – especially people in their twenties – I often find myself stunned by their ignorance of the economic and social situation that surrounds them. And yet, I grew up with the same attitude of jaded indifference and the senseless assurance that nothing about politics, economics, or the environment had any real meaning, or would ever affect me in any tangible way.

This jaded indifference is the result of intensive conditioning by the media – the phenomenon of the "flattered self" brilliantly described in Thomas De Zengotita's book Mediated – and an alienated education system which "produces subjectivities" that fit the status quo. These manufactured subjectivities are cut off from any sense of responsibility for the social reality or the life-world that sustains them, and they are carefully conditioned to identify with this alienation as a mark of pride -- celebrities like Mick Jagger and Jack Nicholson, or their younger iterations, are patron saints of cynical hipness and smug narcissism. The concept of the "production of subjectivity" is a major one for Negri and Hardt, who see it as the most important form of production in post-industrial civilization. I will discuss this in greater detail in a future piece.

In our contemporary context, Negri and Hardt posit a global "multitude" of working people, rather than the Marxist proletariat of the past. Class distinctions do not hold in the same way -- as Negri notes in an interview, it is the total organization of society that is the "enemy," not a particular class. They argue that the dynamics of capitalist development have been shaped, primarily, by the desires of the laboring multitude, and the antagonism between the working many and the ruling few. The New Deal, for instance, arose out of the worker's movements here and abroad, above all the Russian Revolution, which sent shock waves through the Capitalist system.

Over the last decades, the US system has been increasingly based on debt. Where the media encouraged comatose consumerism, politicians succeeded by offering happy-faced visions of a world without sacrifice while they supported policies leading to increasing economic apartheid. In an atmosphere of extraordinary plenty and overt overproduction of comforts and goods, where huge fortunes are controlled by the elite few, where enormous waste is built into the system and encouraged by it, it seems only natural to be profligate, to assume that the hard limits defined by the shrinking realities of income are actually the delusion, and the media displays of endless bounty are the reality. The delusional and self-destructive profligacy of the populace is, possibly, also an act of subliminal aggression against the system’s false promises and betrayals (the deepest betrayal being the delusion that material success leads to sustained happiness).

[Michael]

Part 2:

The profligate spending of the masses is also a natural – almost biological – reaction to the corruptions of Empire. When the populace sees CEOs, politicians, and millionaires routinely escaping from their crimes, fleecings, and defraudings, they subliminally identify with them, accepting that this is proper behavior within the society, and will be rewarded rather than punished. Of course, the assumption of massive personal debt was not a conscious and calculated strategy of the populace to dismantle the capitalist system, but it could be seen as an unconscious strategy of sabotage. This could be the case, even though the financial system developed predatory, invasive, and deceptive tactics to reach the consumer base with constant inducements to accept more credit cards, loans, and mortgage refinancings. Psychosis and hypnosis work together to reinforce consensus trance.

In his book The Politics of Subversion, Negri argues that the ultimate discovery of the 20th Century was that “Capitalism is impossible,” and this was proved by the failure of the two major attempts to reform the capitalist system, the New Deal of the 1930s and the Great Society of the 1960s. This failure of reformist efforts was ultimately linked to the integration of the world market, which defined a limit of capitalist expansion. These limits were reinforced by the many forms of resistance that developed in response to the extensions of capital, from guerrilla wars to Green Parties. According to political philosophers of the past, Capitalism cannot exist without new markets to exploit, in order to create surplus value. Marx wrote that Capitalism “is the first mode of economy which is unable to exist on itself, which needs other economic systems as a medium and support.” Without a new outside to absorb and digest, Capitalism confronts “devaluation resulting from overproduction.”

Naomi Klein’s new book, The Shock Doctrine, analyzes how contemporary neo-conservative practice is based on utilizing natural or manmade disaster as a tool for leveraging increased privatization. Internal landscapes of the Empire can in this way be re-colonized by capital, after a catastrophe, and transformed. This is another symptom of the evaporation of any outside realm for capitalism to penetrate and absorb. The mass psychology of Capitalism centers on this continual aggression, this need to grasp hold of the Other and make use of it, to convert difference to sameness. When the entire planet has been converted to sameness, as is now the case, this aggressive psychology goes into regression, seeking to defend itself at all costs. This entrenched psychology -- given iconic form by football games and right wing "shock jocks" -- must be properly understood so it can be addressed and its violent tendencies defused.

After the 1960s, the main engine of the US financial system shifted from the production of finished goods to financial speculations and transactions. This shift was symbolized by the iconic construction of The World Trade Centers in the early 1970s, “tuning forks” for the new frequency of predatory finance capitalism that developed through the 1990s. Unlike factory production, financial speculation does not require a large working class. In the United States over the last decades, we have witnessed an astonishing degradation. As Capital moved its factories overseas, the US dismantled its productive infrastructure and converted a population of trained technicians to unskilled “surplus labor,” filling service jobs. In some ways, the US has reverse-engineered itself into a Third World country, with its nomadic elite no longer tied to nationalist obligations - the financial meltdown should make this clear. Today, our primary export to China is soy beans, a raw material, while we receive electronic devices and finished goods from them.

During this process, the US rulers were confronted with the difficult question of what to do with the huge pool of nonspecialist surplus labor no longer required for the functioning of the system. One solution was to warehouse them in prisons (the US is 5% of the world population with 25% of the world’s prison population), another was to put them in the military (but popular resistance to the draft has made this difficult); another option was to create new bureaucracies and expand unnecessary aspects of the service sector. Another idea – a short-term solution but one that created the temporary illusion of abundance – was to encourage the amassing of personal debt, and then to turn that debt into a financial product, through securities, and sell those bundled debts up the financial pyramid.

With the end of any ideological effort to reform capitalism, the oligarchic elite began to shift increasing amounts of wealth to the top of the financial pyramid, crushing the middle class and the working class in the process. As Negri and Hardt point out, this shift was accompanied by a change in paradigm. Instead of classes with different interests, we now have a dualistic divide between the “included” and the “excluded”. Politicians incite and manipulate the fear of being part of the ever-expanding group of the excluded. For this reason, to take one recent example, Bush vetoed the child health care bill. To keep the fearful populace in line, the ruling regime offers "Neo-Malthusian" policies, and enforces a divide between respectability and misery.

It is increasingly obvious that the short-term thinking behind these arrangements has created a fragile and unsustainable situation. Something, or, more likely, many things all at once are soon going to break. At that point, the US political system's drift toward authoritarianism (as documented in Naomi Wolf's The End of America) may be given another strong push. However, as we have seen in Iraq and New Orleans, the control apparatus that is emerging is nothing at all like the efficient organization of European mid-century Fascism, driven by a mythological teleology and collective fantasies of racial purity. Instead, the postmodern form of authoritarian control involves a crude application of force and a general sloppiness, an almost uncaring attitude even toward its own intentions. For this reason, it is possible that a new level of authoritarianism and an intensified, nonviolent movement for positive change, orchestrated by civil society, could exist at the same time, at least for a while. But any significant change would require a serious raising of social awareness and consciousness of oppression among the populace, along with a deeper collaboration among progressive groups.

An imminent meltdown of the US financial system, if it is indeed on the way, should be welcomed, despite the hardship it may cause to many of us, our friends and relations. The system of globalized post-industrial capitalism is quickly destroying the planetary ecology, and if it is allowed to run unchecked for much longer, we will forfeit our future on this planet. Historically, crisis is the crucible for transformation. If the illusion of US prosperity disappears, the world may be receptive to alternative development models. After all, China and India are seeking to achieve the "American Dream" promised to them by decades of our pop culture propaganda.

With the approaching economic collapse, the Left has one more opportunity to emerge from dormancy and build a social program and a transformative plan of action. Negri and Hardt suggest that a revolutionary shift might not emerge in successive stages over time, as in previous insurrections, but in one sudden unfolding: "It may be that insurrectional activity is no longer divided into ... stages but develops simultaneously. As we will argue in the course of this book, resistance, exodus, the emptying out of the enemy’s power, and the multitude’s construction of a new society are one and the same process."

This possibility is based on Negri’s fascinating view of the nonlinear dynamics of historical transformation. He suggests, essentially, that events lie on a spiral, and an entire complex of concepts and organizations can reassemble itself all of a sudden, based on patterns of the past that are lost to conscious awareness. The long history of humanity’s struggle against oppression is available to all of us, encoded within us. Negri’s rhizomatic view of transformative processes calls to mind Rupert Sheldrake’s concept of “morphogenetic fields” as well as the Jungian archetypes, defined as clusters of psychic energy that can spontaneously appear within the psyche of the individual or society. It also fits the alternative model of time and development that some visionary scholars find encoded in the Mayan Calendar. According to this hypothesis, the entire complex and rich history of radical thought and praxis could suddenly emerge once again, in a new iteration, when conditions are prepared for it.

The immediate need for the progressive community is to articulate a positive agenda, along with tactics and strategies for bringing this agenda to fruition in the shortest time possible. The main thrust of the “Left” in the last decades has been criticism and complaint. This has failed to create a powerful attractor or an organizational infrastructure for social transformation. As the Dalai Lama put it, everyone wants a better life. If you can show them how to get there, they will follow. The Left has failed to achieve this simple task. Regeneration of the movement requires a new visionary paradigm that integrates the spiritual shift made by the counterculture since the 1960s with a compassionate and egalitarian program that has tangible solutions to offer to a broad spectrum of the populace.

Considering the preponderance of military force, there is no hope for violence as a tool of social transformation. Any radicalized program should focus on an absorptive strategy that neutralizes its potential opponents by engaging and transforming them - a Tantric approach, that sees no dualities nor enemies. If we are going to save the world situation from pitching over into the abyss, the media – especially the mass media – has to be intensively repurposed to beam out a new paradigm that integrates sustainable practices with inner transformation. The mass media could be used for the “production of subjectivities” focused not on the toxic "American Dream" of omnipotent ego, competitive greed, and endless material abundance, but on sustainability, interconnectivity, community, and psychic development. By my reckoning, this unlikely reversal has to happen in the next few years.

[jimtzu]

real good piece... here's another of DP's
http://www.realitysandwich.com/almighty_amero

This article originally appeared in Conscious Choice magazine.

These days I feel lost in the immense suffering and madness of our world. Something has snapped in the spirit of the time; events have gone beyond human capacity to control, predict or even conceptualize. Those who insist they know what is happening are merely pretending, or dissembling. When novelty arises, when old structures disintegrate before new patterns reveal themselves, there are no experts.

Perhaps the best oracles we can consult are systems analysts like Erwin Laszlo. Laszlo studies chaos theory and believes global civilization is a few years away from what he calls "the chaos point." According to Laszlo, we are at a "crucial decision-window" of instability. "When we reach the point of chaos," Laszlo tells us, "the stable 'point' and 'periodic' attractors of our systems will be joined by 'chaotic' or 'strange' attractors." These "strange attractors" will propel us, like booster rockets, to evolutionary development or entropic debauch. In other words, we should prepare ourselves for the unknown and inexplicable.

The current economic crisis provides an intriguing case in point. For those of us with an interest in spirituality and a background in the arts, the conceptual concoctions of modern finance – derivatives, futures, quants, margin calls and whatnot – can seem as occult as sorcerers' spells. All of these entities are inextricably intertwined in the subprime mortgage market fiasco, which continues to unfold.

Apparently, after stocks dropped in the wake of 9/11, the government stimulated the sluggish U.S. economy by pumping up the housing market. In earlier and more reticent eras, banks and mortgage brokers required collateral before making loans. After 2001, these restrictions were relaxed, bringing the "American Dream" of home ownership – or mortgage debt refinancing – to a wider populace. Loans that began at low interest (only to balloon to high interest later), got handed out to all and sundry. Based on Pollyanna-ish projections that these high-interest loans disconnected from any tangible assets would be paid back, the sub-prime mortgages were packaged into "securities" and traded up the financial markets. Several million holders of sub-prime mortgages are now defaulting on their payments, with more to follow.

Stepping back for a moment, we might see larger historical dynamics at work. Over the last decades, much of U.S. industry was relocated and outsourced to the developing world, leaving a large populace that had little to produce but was still committed to a credit-based, cushy and consumptive lifestyle. Our financial sector – following the old adage, "if you got lemons, make lemonade" – cunningly repackaged the increasing burden of U.S. personal debt, turning it into a shiny product for the financial markets. Over the last years, these questionable loans, bundled into securities, became one of our major exports to the world. With nothing tangible left to sell, the U.S. turned individual debt into its chief export.

It seems inconceivable that the financial institutions and speculators didn't anticipate large-scale defaults. Perhaps they were counting on the Federal Reserve to bail them out. During the last months, in fact, the Fed, along with its European counterpart, has poured hundreds of billions of newly invented dollars into the financial markets, temporarily stabilizing the system and rewarding the speculators while doing nothing for the masses of people facing eviction from their homes and creating the prospect of hyperinflation.

The Fed, a private institution, "injects liquidity," quips the New York Times, without needle or syringe. As a Lehman Brothers economist notes, "All they do is write down a number and credit that amount of cash to the bank. It's a bookkeeping entry." The Fed's miraculous capacity to create instant cash brings up deeper questions about the nature of money today – what is it? De-linked from the gold standard, money is based on little more than our collective belief in it.

In Third World countries, currency crises – often brought about by predatory speculation - frequently lead to frozen bank accounts and long breadlines, followed by a change of currency that creates immense profit for the banks and the government. Of course, many believe that such a thing could never happen here. Recently, there have been rumors of a plan to form an American version of the European Federation, uniting Mexico, the U.S. and Canada under a new currency, the "Amero," and a new constitution, devised by the bankers.

In his essay in the new anthology, The Mystery of 2012 (Sounds True Press), Peter Russell notes that transformations of human culture are built upon each other, with each new revolution requiring exponentially less time to manifest. The Agricultural Age developed over thousands of years, the Industrial Age required a few hundred years, and the Information Age – built upon the manufacturing technologies developed by industrialization - only took twenty years. Russell suggests that the next revolution would be from the Information Age to what he calls "the Wisdom Age." In just a few years, we could shift from a system based on data analysis rewarding corporate and individual greed to one that utilized human knowledge and foresight to institute a compassionate and equitable planetary culture. The overt irrationality revealed by the current financial crisis might act as a necessary awakening, leading to a large-scale shift in values.

 

[Nickeson]

Phase One: The Nazarite Vow   

There is a time in every child’s life when circumstances prompt the question: “Why did Grandma (or Fido, or whoever) die?”
Followed by the parental answer, “Well, it was just time for Grandma Fido to go. We are all going to go someday. Everybody (sigh) dies when their time has come.” Or words to that general effect.
To which there is a small interior and very fierce response in the child, “I’m not going to die!”
And that becomes that child’s Nazarite Vow. The ferocity of intent, no matter how naive, permanently fuses certain neural pathways and burns away certain others so that a deep psychological pattern is formed that makes for its little owner a perspective where perpetual longevity for them is inevitable and death is totally outside the sphere of possibility. And if they survive their 19th birthday, it looks pretty much like their destiny as the world’s first immortal is certainly secure.

Phase Two: The leak in the Dam   

Maybe it starts at their 20th College Class reunion. Certain people they had grown accustomed to seeing in this setting are missing and these ones haven’t written in with a good excuse for their absence and that is because, as someone in the know says, “Ol Eric just bit the big one last year…had a heart attack waiting in line at Starbucks. And did you hear that Kimberly got cervical cancer from her guru’s case of HPV and was gone inside of two months? And Whatstheirname, remember the one who was always smoking dope behind the…”
Then, not too long after, Mom’s time arrives and Fido the Fourth has to be put down. And (gulp) the Nazarite Vow starts to feel the incoming inundations though it still holds against the force of truth. But now there seems to be two minds: 1) the conscious assurance of inestimable longevity; 2) the unconscious realization of how the universe really works.

Phase Three: It is I…Chicken Little   

So what is the effect when one side of the mind says I will live forever and the other side disagrees, then there is a projection that everything in sight has suddenly become of very, very limited duration.
When in worry, when in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout—”The sky is falling! The sky is falling! The forces of evil and ignorance and greed and evil and more evil are close at hand and civilization as we know it is bound to perish and it will all be the fault of ____. (Fill in the blank). But, if only we can all work together _______ (fill in the blank) will save us because It, unlike anything that ever came before It in the history of our species, is good and peaceful and learned and beneficent and healing and good and more good, thoroughly and 100 % virginal and immaculately conceived good and here we are four steps short of our New Jerusalem and three steps ahead of the apocalypse and the sky is falling, the sky is falling and maybe I’m going to die…”

Phase Four: The Thermadorian Reaction   

“Well…Social Security is still paying out.  I have Mildred’s survivor benefits and still a little left from her life insurance. They say this colon thing is in remission for awhile at least….so, what’s the fuss? What is it that someone said….sufficient unto the day are the evils thereof…?” 

Phase Five: The Inevitable

                                                                                                               

                                                                                   

* * * * *

[Jana]

  Revolution from Within
Visionary and Cosmo-politan thought and praxis could suddenly emerge at a new level of substantiation, when conditions are prepared for it. Bringing into existence the new paradigm that integrates regenerative and sustainable practices with inner transformation of consciousness. The multitude’s construction of a new society requires a new vision that integrates the spiritual growth of the human nervous system with compassionate and egalitarian programs and practical “hands on” educational institutions that provide tangible solutions that are “inclusive” of the varied spectrum of the polis. With a visionary plan to empower the true creativity and productivity of all individuals in support of this collective effort to build a culture that truly feeds human potential and cares for the earth for the most distant future.

"If you build it, they will come" is the primary principle any visionary has to operate from, or "farsight" simply becomes day dreaming. Thus we have to take our visionary capacity seriously and have it be immune to apathy, neysaying and scorn. If we remain true to our vision, slowly things start changing of their own accord as the future decends on the present.

[marianthi]

Maestro Steven,

  for that post.

Biographical reasons had me take the opposite Nazarite vow as an infant: ´I´m gonna get out of this painful world a.s.p.!´.  But  teen years, Elvis and chocolate ecklairs postponed the ´soon´ clause.  

Now that the calendar has placed the´soon´ within conversational distance, Elvis is long gone and the ecklairs out of the diet,  I love listening to the the chicken littles warnings, especially from my neighbour who half an hour ago told me that  the borders with Colombia will be closed down and we will be left without our main imports from that direction: food and sexy underwear.  

So, skinny and deliciously underclad I´ll be waiting for the inevitable - in the best of company.  Do you mind?

M

[Nickeson]

Revolution from Within
 Bringing into existence the new paradigm that integrates...

If I remember correctly it was Nietzsche who said, in effect, that any belief system that denigrates any part of the Here and Now while venerating the picture of an idealized future is the pure embodiment of nihilism. If so, then I am a nihilist because here in my strangely varied spectrum of the polis the alpha and omega of the new paradigm focuses on being beamed up with the other 143,999 righteous entities. Commander Ashtar once came to me in a dream with the glad tidings that because I served on the security staff 20 years ago at Harmonic Convergence (We were known as the Harmonica Virgins) at Chaco Canyon, New Mexico, USA, Earth, Sol System, there was a window seat on the Mother Ship with my name on it. Bodi Svaha!   

(P.S. and he said I could bring a friend if and only if they were skinny and deliciously underclad.)

[Denis]

Little message I received from above this weekend.

When in doubt create beauty...of any kind...your choice.

[Denis]

Allow me to ride the fence with this five minute video.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KrPDQeNo52M

[Michael]

More from Chicken Little:

Sub-Prime Mortgage Debt - Tip Of The Iceberg
The Financial Tsunami
By F. William Engdahl
11-22-7

Part 1: Deutsche Bank's painful lesson

Even experienced banker friends tell me that they think the worst of the US banking troubles are over and that things are slowly getting back to normal. What is lacking in their rosy optimism is the realization of the scale of the ongoing deterioration in credit markets globally, centered in the American asset-backed securities market, and especially in the market for CDO's-Collateralized Debt Obligations and CMO's-Collateralized Mortgage Obligations. By now every serious reader has heard the term "It's a crisis in Sub-Prime US home mortgage debt." What almost no one I know understands is that the Sub-Prime problem is but the tip of a colossal iceberg that is in a slow meltdown. I offer one recent example to illustrate my point that the "Financial Tsunami" is only beginning.

Deutsche Bank got a hard shock a few days ago when a judge in the state of Ohio in the USA made a ruling that the bank had no legal right to foreclose on 14 homes whose owners had failed to keep current in their monthly mortgage payments. Now this might sound like small beer for Deutsche Bank, one of the world's largest banks with over ¤1.1 trillion (Billionen) in assets worldwide. As Hilmar Kopper used to say, "peanuts." It's not at all peanuts, however, for the Anglo-Saxon banking world and its European allies like Deutsche Bank, BNP Paribas, Barclays Bank, HSBC or others. Why?

A US Federal Judge, C.A. Boyko in Federal District Court in Cleveland Ohio ruled to dismiss a claim by Deutsche Bank National Trust Company. DB's US subsidiary was seeking to take possession of 14 homes from Cleveland residents living in them, in order to claim the assets.

Here comes the hair in the soup. The Judge asked DB to show documents proving legal title to the 14 homes. DB could not. All DB attorneys could show was a document showing only an "intent to convey the rights in the mortgages." They could not produce the actual mortgage, the heart of Western property rights since the Magna Charta of not longer.

Again why could Deutsche Bank not show the 14 mortgages on the 14 homes? Because they live in the exotic new world of "global securitization", where banks like DB or Citigroup buy tens of thousands of mortgages from small local lending banks, "bundle" them into Jumbo new securities which then are rated by Moody's or Standard & Poors or Fitch, and sell them as bonds to pension funds or other banks or private investors who naively believed they were buying bonds rated AAA, the highest, and never realized that their "bundle" of say 1,000 different home mortgages, contained maybe 20% or 200 mortgages rated "sub-prime," i.e. of dubious credit quality.

Indeed the profits being earned in the past seven years by the world's largest financial players from Goldman Sachs to Morgan Stanley to HSBC, Chase, and yes, Deutsche Bank, were so staggering, few bothered to open the risk models used by the professionals who bundled the mortgages. Certainly not the Big Three rating companies who had a criminal conflict of interest in giving top debt ratings. That changed abruptly last August and since then the major banks have issued one after another report of disastrous "sub-prime" losses.

A new unexpected factor

The Ohio ruling that dismissed DB's claim to foreclose and take back the 14 homes for non-payment, is far more than bad luck for the bank of Josef Ackermann. It is an earth-shaking precedent for all banks holding what they had thought were collateral in form of real estate property.

How this? Because of the complex structure of asset-backed securities and the widely dispersed ownership of mortgage securities (not actual mortgages but the securities based on same) no one is yet able to identify who precisely holds the physical mortgage document. Oops! A tiny legal detail our Wall Street Rocket Scientist derivatives experts ignored when they were bundling and issuing hundreds of billions of dollars worth of CMO's in the past six or seven years. As of January 2007 some $6.5 trillion of securitized mortgage debt was outstanding in the United States. That's a lot by any measure!

In the Ohio case Deutsche Bank is acting as "Trustee" for "securitization pools" or groups of disparate investors who may reside anywhere. But the Trustee never got the legal document known as the mortgage. Judge Boyko ordered DB to prove they were the owners of the mortgages or notes and they could not. DB could only argue that the banks had foreclosed on such cases for years without challenge. The Judge then declared that the banks "seem to adopt the attitude that since they have been doing this for so long, unchallenged, this practice equates with legal compliance. Finally put to the test," the Judge concluded, "their weak legal arguments compel the court to stop them at the gate." Deutsche Bank has refused comment.

What next?

As news of this legal precedent spreads across the USA like a California brushfire, hundreds of thousands of struggling homeowners who took the bait in times of historically low interest rates to buy a home with often, no money paid down, and the first 2 years with extremely low interest rate in what are known as "interest only" Adjustable Rate Mortgages (ARMs), now face exploding mortgage monthly payments at just the point the US economy is sinking into severe recession. (I regret the plethora of abbreviations used here but it is the fault of Wall Street bankers not this author).

The peak period of the US real estate bubble which began in about 2002 when Alan Greenspan began the most aggressive series of rate cuts in Federal Reserve history was 2005-2006. Greenspan's intent, as he admitted at the time, was to replace the Dot.com internet stock bubble with a real estate home investment and lending bubble. He argued that was the only way to keep the US economy from deep recession. In retrospect a recession in 2002 would have been far milder and less damaging than what we now face.

Of course, Greenspan has since safely retired, written his memoirs and handed the control (and blame) of the mess over to a young ex-Princeton professor, Ben Bernanke. As a Princeton graduate, I can say I would never trust monetary policy for the world's most powerful central bank in the hands of a Princeton economics professor. Keep them in their ivy-covered towers.

Now the last phase of every speculative bubble is the one where the animal juices get the most excited. This has been the case with every major speculative bubble since the Holland Tulip speculation of the 1630's to the South Sea Bubble of 1720 to the 1929 Wall Street crash. It was true as well with the US 2002-2007 Real Estate bubble. In the last two years of the boom in selling real estate loans, banks were convinced they could resell the mortgage loans to a Wall Street financial house who would bundle it with thousands of good better and worse quality mortgage loans and resell them as Collateralized Mortgage Obligation bonds. In the flush of greed, banks became increasingly reckless of the credit worthiness of the prospective home owners. In many cases they did not even bother to check if the person was employed. Who cares? It will be resold and securitized and the risk of mortgage default was historically low.

That was in 2005. The most Sub-prime mortgages written with Adjustable Rate Mortgage contracts were written between 2005-2006, the last and most furious phase of the US bubble. Now a whole new wave of mortgage defaults is about to explode onto the scene beginning January 2008. Between December 2007 and July 1, 2008 more than $690 Billion in mortgages will face an interest rate jump according to the contract terms of the ARMs written two years before. That means market interest rates for those mortgages will explode monthly payments just as recession drives incomes down. Hundreds of thousands of homeowners will be forced to do the last resort of any homeowner: stop monthly mortgage payments.

Here is where the Ohio court decision guarantees that the next phase of the US mortgage crisis will assume Tsunami dimension. If the Ohio Deutsche Bank precedent holds in the appeal to the Supreme Court, millions of homes will be in default but the banks prevented from seizing them as collateral assets to resell. Robert Shiller of Yale, the controversial and often correct author of the book, Irrational Exuberance, predicting the 2001-2 Dot.com stock crash, estimates US housing prices could fall as much as 50% in some areas given how home prices have diverged relative to rents.

The $690 billion worth of "interest only" ARMs due for interest rate hike between now and July 2008 are by and large not Sub-prime but a little higher quality, but only just. There are a total of $1.4 trillion in "interest only" ARMs according to the US research firm, First American Loan Performance. A recent study calculates that, as these ARMs face staggering higher interest costs in the next 9 months, more than $325 billion of the loans will default leaving 1 million property owners in technical mortgage default. But if banks are unable to reclaim the homes as assets to offset the non-performing mortgages, the US banking system and a chunk of the global banking system faces a financial gridlock that will make events to date truly "peanuts" by comparison. We will discuss the global geo-political implications of this in our next report, The Financial Tsunami: Part 2.

[Nickeson]

They could not produce the actual mortgage,   

This is kind of a slender thread on which to hang a tsunami. I am sure that someone in the financial world will soon find a solid and very expensive way to reconstruct the chain of evidence and retrieve the documents that bind the creditors like Deutsche Bank to the debtors. This will probably happen before the case makes its way to the Supremes.

When I read this, and other Chicken Little predictions of the sub-prime fiasco, I started trying to count the number of world finance dooms day scenarios I have heard in the past 20 years. None of which have come to pass. I was thinking that the world finance world would start finding ways to beat this problem and once again prove its amazing resilience and adaptability. Today I read that Citi Bank, one of the hardest hit institutions, just sold part of itself to the emirate of Abu Dhadi for 7.5 billion petro dollars, fresh cash to make up for the loss.

It is not going to solve the overall debt problem...from consumer credit card debt to bad mortgage loans to the U.S. debt to China. Every one will just keep playing along as best they can--doing their best to prevent the worst and they all know that the worst will result if everyone is forced to start calling in the notes all at once. The debtors are into the creditors for more than the creditors can afford to lose so the debtors have some measure of control which they wouldn't have if the creditors could afford to pull the plugs on them.

In line with C. Little, I recall an instance when in my teens my dad who was then in his 60s recounted all the general dooms day prophecies he had heard in his life time. Apparently he had had the same conversation with his dad because he then added to the list all the dooms day scenarios my grandfather had heard. (It was once generally conceded that the world could not sustain a population that was fractionally more than how many people were living here 107 years ago.) I can't recall much more then that but it was an astounding and hilarious list. And none of them have come to pass. To me it always sounds like meta-gossip and death-wish(ful) thinking.

[jimtzu]

a case of chicken little crying wolf too often?