The Flight of the Iguana by David Quammen

• Xenophobia – fear or hatred of what is foreign or strange.

Earthworms

• Earthworms therefore were not only creating the planet’s thin layer of fertile oil; they were also constantly turning it inside out.
• On sloping land, where rainwater and wind would sweep their castings away and down into valleys, they were making huge contribution to erosion.
• Think about the formation of vegetable mould, and the relentless swallowing, digesting, burrowing, and casting off of waste by which earthworms topple and bury the monuments of defunct civilizations while freshening the soil for new growth. Think about how sometimes it’s the little things that turn the world inside out.

Amazon Fishes and Trees

• Remove the trees, and you can expect the fish to disappear. Kill off the fish, and likewise some of those tree species (the ones that depend on fish for dispersing their seeds) may not survive. Contrary to common misconception, the soils from which grow the Amazon jungle are very poor, and the river draining those soils are also therefore infertile. So the fish that spend half their lives in those rivers depend utterly on the manna that falls in the forest, and on the floods that carry them to it.

Scorpion

• According to Brownell, the scorpion orients itself toward the focus of any such disturbance by gauging the minuscule differences in the time at which the shock wave reaches each of its eight spraddled legs. Spaced apart, those legs serve as stereoscopic receptors. Take away the sensory input from one or two pairs of legs, or from all four legs along one side of the body, and the scorpion becomes confused. Disoriented…functionally blind.

Carnivorous Plants

• Carnivorous plants have been driven to this extremity not by boldness and gluttony, but by shyness and starvation.
  • Meat-eating is the last resort of the shy, uncompetitive plant. Those carnivorous species have removed themselves evolutionarily from the ruthless competition of the thicket, the forest, from all those fecund and clamorous places where plants flourish in wild vigor and variety, battling each other upon nutritious substrata for position and water and sunlight. The Venus’s flytrap and those few others have taken a more gentle path.
• They have developed strategies for collecting animal protein because, in the nutrient-poor habitats to which they are exiled, on soils so inhospitable that few other plants deign to invade, without some dietary supplement they could scarcely survive.

Sex Determination

• Genetic Sex Determination (GSD) is just a contingent fact, not a logical or biological necessity.
  • Selection may favor Environmental Sex Determination (Temperature-dependent Sex Determination).
  • The developmental environment differentially influences male versus female fitness.
• Females have a greater need than males do to reach breeding size quickly, because their allotted span of breeding years is much shorter.

Street Trees

• They not only add their small touch of shade and beauty to the starkest troughs of the city; they also cut winds, absorb noise, reduce glare, mitigate the extremes of temperature, and help appreciable to filter the city air. But how do they themselves fare? What sort of existence is it, living sealed off from the recycling flow of every soil nutrient, robbed of direct sunlight by skyscrapers, poisoned with road salt and poodle piss, deprived each autumn of even their own  leaf mulch, choking on those various elaborate toxins of automobile exhaust?

Cryptozoology

• Reality isn’t everything. Truth and certainty are fine, as far as they go, but truth and certainty don’t supply all the nourishment that the soul of our species seems to require.

We soon learn that there is nothing mysterious or supernatural in the case, but that all proceeds from the usual propensity of mankind toward the marvelous, and that, though this inclination may at intervals receive a check from sense and learning, it can never be thoroughly extirpated from human nature. – David Hume

Islands

• Malay Archipelago, Guam
• The history of life on islands reflects – in a heightened and simplified way – the entire evolutionary process.

Luck’s a chance, but trouble’s sure. – A.E. Houseman

• Speciation proceeds more rapidly under island conditions.
• Hard to reach but still harder to escape, an island is generally the last stop. Once a species has landed, and settled in, and transformed itself in response to the local requirement, it has nowhere to go but extinct.
• Saying no to the inevitable is one of the few precious ways our own species redeems itself from oblivion – or at least tries to. For mortal creatures, on a slow-dying planet, in the ocean of space, there’s really no other option.

Galápagos

• It is no accident that these anomalies are all native to islands, where necessity and opportunity can be so exceptional.
• In truth, humanity’s role in destroying island species only accelerates (grossly and cataclysmically, yes) what is otherwise in some sense inevitable.
  • Island species come to an end, almost invariably, without ever rejoining the mainstream of evolution.
• But then in the long run we are all goners, and the Earth itself is just another doomed biological island. It’s a truism that death and entropy await everybody, everything.

Whale

• Hearing is the dominant sense among whales, far more important than sight or smell, for the very good reason that sound travel much better through water than do either light or chemical signals.

It blesseth him that gives. – Shakespeare

• An act of mercy can unite strong beings and helpless being with a bond like no other: by making the very life of the helpless being into a shining emblem of the strong being’s decency, wisdom, restraint. In some cases it might even be habit-forming.

Ecosystem

• The stability of an ecosystem is directly related to its complexity. The greater number of species coexisting in one community, and the greater the number of relationships linking different species, so much greater will be the natural resistance to change, perturbation, catastrophe. From diversity comes strengths; from variety, steadiness.
• Most of all, one shouldn’t intervene in these natural cycles, on the ever-precarious basis of good intention and incomplete knowledge.
• No ecosystem is invulnerable. And no ecosystem is immune to disturbances of the magnitude that humankind often inflicts.

A strong exploitation of very mature ecosystems, like tropical forests or coral reefs, may produce total collapse of a rich organization. In such stable biotopes, nature is not prepared for a step backward. Man has to be very careful in dealing with systems of high maturity. – Ramon Margalef

Fossil

• The history of life on our planet is not only intriguing but beautiful, a miracle that belongs to everyone.
• The past is not dead, is not gone, cannot ever be completely escaped or erased or forgotten; the past is.

Beauty

• Insufficient genetic options equals insufficient adaptability.
• Greedy human impulse: the impulse, not only to admire the embodiment of beauty, but to capture and possess it.

Gaia

• The Earth’s living matter, air, oceans, and land surface form a complex system which can be seen as a single organism and which has the capacity to keep our planet a fit place for life.

Desert

• Scenery is what you look at. Landscape is where you live and die.
• People go off alone into wilderness (often a desert wilderness) for some stretch of time, to strip away those aspects of misguided worldly concern – “the social busyness”.

Wild Geese

• They embody liberty, grace, and devotion, combining those three contradictory virtues with a seamless elegance that leaves us shamed and inspired.
• Geese’ digestive system is damnably inefficient. Unlike other grazing herbivores, geese have no capacity to digest cellulose, which accounts for a large portion of plant tissue and holds the cellular juices (rich in sugar and protein) locked within cell walls.
  • Much of the potential nutriment consumed passes straight through the bird without being utilized.
• Choosing one mate for life and remaining (with rare exception) faithful, geese have no need for such fancy displays or flashy dimorphic costumes. They put their resources to other uses. They spurn narcissism and fickleness and that annual flirtatious skirmishing, in favor of economy and a dignified singlemindedness.

The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollen

• American paradox – unhealthy people obsessed by the idea of eating healthy.
• Our culture codifies the rules of wise eating in an elaborate structure of taboos, rituals, recipes, manners, and culinary traditions that keep us from having to reenact the omnivore’s dilemma at every meal.
  • The lack of a steadying culture of food leaves us especially vulnerable to the blandishments of the food scientists and the marketer, for whom the omnivore’s dilemma is not so much a dilemma as an opportunity.
• Some philosophers have argued that the very open-endedness of human appetite is responsible for both our savagery and civility, since a creature that could conceive of eating anything (including, other humans) stands in particular need of ethical rules, manners, and rituals. We are not only what we eat, we are how we eat, too.
• A great many of the health and environmental problems created by our food system owe to our attempts to oversimplify nature’s complexities at both the growing and the eating ends of our food chain.
  • In fact, the whole history of agriculture is a progressive history of simplification, as humans reduced the biodiversity of their landscapes to a small handful of chosen species.
  • By contrast, the efficiencies of natural systems flow from complexity and interdependence – by definition the very opposite of simplification.
• Daily, our eating turns nature into culture, transforming the body of the world into our bodies and minds.
  • The anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss described the work of civilization as the process of transforming the raw into the cooked – nature into culture.
  • Agriculture has done more to reshape the natural world than anything else we humans do, both its landscapes and the composition of its flora and fauna.
  • Instead of eating exclusively from the sun, humanity now began to sip petroleum.
    • The food industry burns nearly a fifth of all the petroleum consumed in the U.S. (about as much as automobiles do).
    • As in so many other realms, nature’s logic has proven no match for the logic of capitalism, one in which cheap energy has always been a given.
  • By fertilizing the world, we alter the planet’s composition of species and shrink its biodiversity.
• Omnivores are torn between two conflicting emotions, each with its own biological rationale:
  • Neophobia – a sensible fear of ingesting anything new – the comfort of the familiar
  • Neophilia – a risky but necessary openness to new tastes – the pleasure of variety
  • Evolutionary trade-off between big brains (human) and big guts (koala) – two very different evolutionary strategies for dealing with the question of food selection.

Industrial: Corn

• Few plants can manufacture quite as much organic matter (and calories) from the same quantities of sunlight and water and basic elements as corn. (97% of what a corn plant is comes from the air, 3% from the ground.)
  • Corn is a C-4 plant.
  • Corn is the most efficient way to produce energy, soybeans the most efficient way to produce protein.
• Corn’s dual identity, as food and commodity, has allowed many of the peasant communities that have embraced it to make the leap from a subsistence to a market economy.
• Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs) – “They are messing with three billion years of evolution.”
• Hybridization represents a far swifter and more efficient means of communication, or feedback loop, between plant and human; by allowing humans to arrange its marriages, corn can discover in a single generation precisely what qualities it needs to prosper.
  • Basically, modern hybrids can tolerate the corn equivalent of city life, growing amid the multitudes without succumbing to urban stress.
• All life depends on nitrogen; it is the building block from which nature assembles amino acids, proteins, and nucleic acid; the genetic information that orders and perpetuates life is written in nitrogen ink.
  • Nitrogen as supplying life’s quality, while carbon provides the quantity.
• These days the price of a bushel of corn is about a dollar beneath the true cost of growing it, a boon for everyone but the corn farmer.
• The invention of commodity grain severed any link between the producer of a foodstuff and its ultimate consumer.

The Feedlot

• CAFOs – Confined Animal Feeding Operations
• When animals live on farms the very idea of waste ceases to exist…One of the most striking thing animal feedlots do is to take this elegant solution and neatly divide it into two new problems: a fertility problem on the farm (which must be remedied with chemical fertilizers) and a pollution problem on the feedlot (which seldom is remedied at all).
  • CAFOs transform what at the proper scale would be a precious source of fertility – cow manure – into toxic waste.
  • For half a century now the industry has devoted itself to shortening a beef animal’s allotted span on earth.
  • Its chief advantage is that cows fed corn, a compact source of caloric energy, get fat quickly; their flesh also marbles well, giving it a taste and texture American consumers have come to like. Yet this corn-fed meat is demonstrably less healthy for us, since it contains more saturated fat and less omega-3 fatty acids than the meat of animals fed grass.
  • The contemporary beef cow is being selected for the ability to eat large quantities of corn and efficiently convert it to protein without getting too sick.
  • Much like modern humans, modern cattle are susceptible to a set of relatively new diseases of civilization.
    • What keeps the feedlot animal healthy – or healthy enough – are antibiotics.
    • Here the drugs are plainly being used to treat sick animals, yet the animals probably wouldn’t be sick if not for the diet of grain we feed them.
• Growing meat on grass makes superb ecological sense: It is a sustainable, solar-powered food chain that produces food by transforming sunlight into protein.
• As cannibal tribes have discovered, eating the flesh of one’s own species carries special risks of infection.
• Ratio of feed to gain determines efficiency.
  • Chicken, the most efficient animal by this measure, is two pounds of corn to one of meat; cow 8 to 1 – thus chicken costs less than beef.
• We inhabit the same microbial ecosystem as the animals we eat, and whatever happens in it also happens to us.
  • The unnaturally rich diet of corn that undermines a steer’s health fattens his flesh in a way that undermines the health of the humans who will eat it.
  • The species of animal you eat may matter less than what the animal you are eating has itself eaten.
• Eating industrial meat takes an almost heroic act of not knowing, or, now, forgetting.

The Processing Plant

• Wet milling – an industrial version of digestion – a good is broken down through a series of steps that includes the application of physical pressure, acids, and enzymes.
  • A complex food is reduced to simple molecules, mostly sugars.
  • Wet milling is an energy-intensive way to make food; for every calories of processed food it produces, another ten calories of fossil fuel energy are burned.
  • Processed food has become largely supply-driven business – the business of figuring out clever ways to package and market the glut of commodities coming off the farm and out of the wet mills.
• The dream of liberating food from nature is as old as eating. People began processing food to keep nature from taking it back.
  • Corn has done more than any other species to help the food industry realize the dream of freeing food from nature’s limitations and seducing the omnivore into eating more of a single plant than anyone would ever have thought possible.
• If the industry hope to grow faster than the population, it has to figure out how to get people to spend more money for the same 1,500lb of food (our annual consumption), or entice them to actually eat more (creating while new eating occasions i.e. protein bar or Pop-Tart) than that.

There is money to be made in food, unless you are trying to grow it. – Food Industry Executive

• The further a product’s identity moves from a specific raw material – that is, the more processing steps involved – the less vulnerable is its processor to the variability of nature.
  • As Tyson understood, you want to be selling something more than a commodity, something more like a service: novelty, convenience, status, fortification, lately even medicine.
  • Evidently we are moving into the fourth age of food processing, in which the processed food will be infinitely better (i.e. contain more of whatever science has determined to be the good stuff) than the whole foods on which they are based.
  • Due to our current reductionist premise – that food is nothing more than the sum of its nutrients…We breakdown plants and animals into their component parts and then reassemble them into high-value-added food systems.

The Consumers

• The United Nations reported that in 2000 the number of people suffering from overnutrition – a billion – had officially surpassed the number suffering from malnutrition – 800 million.
• Thrifty gene – our hunter-gatherer ancestors feast whenever the opportunity presented itself, allowing them to buildup reserves of fat against future famine.
  • Useful adaptation in an environment of food scarcity and unpredictability; disaster in an environment of fast food abundance – our bodies are reserves of fat against a famine that never comes.
• Like most warm blooded creatures, humans have inherited a preference for energy-dense foods, a preference reflected in the sweet tooth shared by most mammals.
  • A sweet tooth represents an excellent adaptation for an omnivore whose big brain demands a tremendous amount of glucose (the only type of energy the brain can use).
  • The adult human brain accounts for 2% of our body weight but consumes 18% of our energy, all of which must come from a carbohydrate.
• The power of food science lied in its ability t break foods down into their nutrient parts and then reassemble them in specific ways that, in effect, push our evolutionary buttons, fooling the omnivore’s inherited food selection system.

The Meal: Fast Food

• Like other comfort foods, fast food supplies (besides nostalgia) a jolt of carbohydrates and fat, which, some scientists now believe, relieve stress and bathe the brain in chemicals that make it feel good.
• Vegetarians advocate eating “low on the food chain” – every step up the chain reduces the amount of food energy by a factor of ten, which is why in any ecosystem there are only a fraction as many predators as there are prey.

Pastoral: Grass

• Polyface Farm
• Healthy soil digests the dead to nourish the living – earth’s stomach.

It is impossible to take a decidedly Eastern, connected, holistic product, and sell it through a decidedly Western, disconnected, reductionist Wall Streetified marketing system. – Joel Salatin

We are going to have to refight the battle to preserve the right to opt out, or your grandchildren and mine will have no choice but to eat amalgamated, irradiated, genetically prostituted, barcoded, adulterated fecal spam from the centralized processing conglomerate. – Joel Salatin

• The Whole Foods shopper feels that buy buying organic he is engaging in authentic experiences and imaginatively enacting a return to a utopian past with the positive aspects of modernity intact.
  

  Enjoy the best of both worlds – the sophisticated order of art and the simple spontaneity of nature. – Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden

• The short-term boosts in yield fertilizers delivered could not be sustained; since the chemicals would eventually destroy the soil’s fertility, today’s high yields were robbing the future.

Artificial Manures lead inevitably to artificial nutrition, artificial food, artificial animals and finally artificial men and women. – Sir Albert Howard

• The notion of imitating the whole natural system stands in stark opposition to reductionist science, which works by breaking such systems down into their component parts in order to understand how they work and then manipulating them – one variable at a time.
• But in an agricultural system dedicated to quantity rather than quality, the fiction that all foods are created equal is essential.
• Management-intensive grazing aka rotational grazing
  • Grazing the optimal number of cattle at the optimal moment to exploit the blaze of growth – yields tremendous amounts of grass, all the while improving the quality of the land.
• Grass farmers grow animals – for meat, egg, milk and wool – but regard them as part of a food chain in which grass is the keystone species, the nexus between the solar energy that powers every food chain and the animals we eat.
  • A polyculture of grass, with its wide diversity of photosynthesizes exploiting every inch of land as well as every moment of growing season, captures more solar energy and therefore produces more biomass than a cornfield; also, only the kernels are harvested from a cornfield, whereas virtually all the grass grown in a pasture find its way into the rumen.

All agriculture is at its heart a business of capturing free solar energy in a good product that can then be turned into high-value human energy. – Allan Nation

• Our civilization and, increasingly, our food system are strictly organized on industrial lines. It prizes consistency, mechanization, predictability, interchangeability, and economies of scale.
  • Grain is the closest thing in nature to an industrial commodity: storable, portable, fungible, ever the same today as it was yesterday and will be tomorrow. Since it can be accumulated and traded, grain is a form of wealth. It is a weapon too – the nature with the biggest surpluses of grain have always exerted power over the ones in short supply.
• Attributes of a wonderful tent dweller – always living on less than you have and more lightly than you need to.
• A symbiotic relationship – in each case the birds dine on the insects that would otherwise bother the herbivore; they also pick insect larvae and parasites out of the animal’s droppings, breaking the cycle of infestation and disease.
  • Left to their own devices, a confined flock of chickens will  eventually destroy any patch of land, by pecking the grass down to its roots and poisoning the soil with their extremely “hot”, or nitrogenous, manure.

It’s all connected. This farm is more like an organism than a machine, and like any organism it has its proper scale. Farming is not adapted to large scale operations because of the following reasons: farming is concerned with plants and animals that live, grow, and die. – Joel Salatin

• The idea is not the slavishly imitate nature, but to model a natural ecosystem in all its diversity and interdependence, one where all the species “fully express their psychological distinctiveness.”
  • What distinguishes Salatin’s system is that it is designed around the natural predilections of the pig rather than around the requirements of a production system to which the pigs are then conformed (as a protein machine with flaws).
  • When chickens get to live like chickens, they’ll taste like chickens too.

• When a livestock farmer is willing to practice complexity – to choreograph the symbiosis of several different animals, each of which has been allowed to behave and eat as they evolved to – he will find he has little need for machinery, fertilizer, and chemicals. He finds he has no sanitation problem or any of the diseases that result from raising a single animal in a crowded monoculture and then feeding it things it wasn’t designed to eat.
  • Most of the time pests and disease are just nature’s way of telling the farmer he’s doing something wrong.
  • A diversified farm will produce much of its own fertility and its own pest control.
  • Indeed, that’s why these chemicals were invented in the first place, to keep shaky monocultures from collapsing.

• A holon (Arthur Koestler, The Ghost in the Machine) is an entity that from one perspective appears a self-contained while, and from another a dependent part.
• Horrible as it is to contemplate, it’s not hard to see how the road to such a hog hell is smoothly paved with the logic of industrial efficiency.
• There’s been a tremendous brain drain in rural America – Wall Street is always trying to extract brainpower and capital from the countryside.
• The USDA is being used by the global corporate complex to impede the clean-food movement. They aim to close down all but the biggest meat processors, and to do it in the name of biosecurity. Every government study to date has shown that the reasons we’re having an epidemic of food-borne illness in this country is centralized production, centralized processing, and long-distance transportation of food.
• Americans today spend less on food (10%, down from 20% in the 1950s), as a percentage of disposable income, than any other industrialized nation, and probably less than any people in the history of the world.
  • When you think about it, it is odd that something as important to our health and general well-being as food is sold strictly on the basis of price.
  • Our food system depends on consumers’ not knowing much about it beyond the price disclosed by the checkout scanner. Cheapness and ignorance are mutually reinforcing.
• …an increasingly globalized economy that turns anything it touches into a commodity, reaching its tentacles wherever in the world a food can be produced most cheaply, and then transporting it wherever it can be sold most dearly.
• Allan Nation: Artisanal Economics in Stockman Grass Farmer
  • The classic way any industrial producer lower the costs of his product is by substituting capital – new technologies and fossil-fuel energy – for skilled labor and then stepping up production, exploiting the economies of scale to compensate for shrinking profit margins. In a commodity business a producer must sell ever more cheaply and grow ever bigger or be crushed by a competitor who does.
  • Artisanal production’s competitive strategy is based on selling something special than being the least-cost producer of a commodity.
    • Productivity and profits are two entirely different concepts.
• A global food market…has smudged the bright colors of the seasonal food calendar we all once knew by heart.
• The promise of global capitalism, much like the promise of communism before it, ultimately demands an act of faith: that if we permit the destruction of certain things we value here and now we will achieve a greater happiness and prosperity at some unspecified future time. As Lenin put it, in a sentiment the WTO endorses its ruling every day, you have to break a few eggs to make an omelet.
• A successful local food economy implies not only a new kind of food producer, but a new kind of eater as well, one who regards finding, preparing, and preserving food as one of the pleasures of life rather than a chore.
• …we ask for too much salvation by legislation. All we need to do is empower individuals with the right philosophy and the right information to opt out en masse.
• Nature never puts all her eggs in one basket – the great virtue of a diversified food economy, like a diverse pasture or farm, is its ability to withstand any shock.
• Too high ratio of omega-6 to omega-3 can contribute to heart disease, probably because omega-6 helps blood clot, while omega-3 helps it flow.
  • Omega-6 is an inflammatory; omega-3 an anti-inflammatory.
• Spirit – the word comes from breath, as in the breath of life.

Personal: The Forest

• Agriculture brought humans a great many blessings, but it also brought infectious disease (from living in close quarters with one another and our animals) and malnutrition (from eating too much of the same thing when crops were good, and not enough of anything when they weren’t).
• Like other important forms of play, hunting and gathering promises to teach us (didactic) something about who we are beneath the crust of our civilized, practical, grown-up lives.
• Disgust – the fear of incorporating offending substances into one’s body – largely culturally determined
  • Disgust is intuitive microbiology.
• Corn and beans each lack an essential amino acid (lysine and methionine, respectively); eat them together and the proper balance is restored.
  

  Cuisines embody some of a culture’s accumulated wisdom about food. – Paul Rozin

• If nature won’t draw a line around human appetite, then human culture must step in, as indeed it has done, bringing the omnivore’s eating habits under the government of all various taboos (foremost the one against cannibalism), customs, rituals, table manners, and culinary conventions found in every culture.

Nature does everything in the operations of a beast, whereas man contributes to his operations by being a free agent. The former chooses or rejects by instinct and the latter by an act of freedom, so that a beast cannot deviate from the rule that is prescribed to it even when it would be advantageous to do so, and a man deviates from it often to his detriment. Thus a pigeon would die of hunger near a basin filled with the best meats, and a cat upon heaps of fruit or grain, although each could very well nourish itself on the food it disdains if it made up its mind to try some. Thus dissolute men abandon themselves to the excesses which cause them fever and death, because the mind depraves the senses and because the will still speaks when nature is silent.– Rousseau

Without virtue, man of all the animal is most unholy and savage, and worst in regard to sex and eating. – Aristotle

• The more anxious we are about eating, the more vulnerable we are to the seductions of the marketer and the expert’s advice.
  • The success of food marketers in exploiting shifting eating patterns and nutritional fashions undermine the various social structures that surround and steady our eating, institutions like the family dinner.
  • We find ourselves as a species almost back where we started: anxious omnivores struggling once again to figure out what it is wise to eat. Instead of relying on the accumulated wisdom of cuisine, or even on the wisdom of our senses, we rely on expert opinion, advertising, government food pyramids, and diet books, and we place our faith in science to sort out for us what culture once did with rather more success.
• It may be that as a civilization we’re groping toward a higher plane of consciousness. It may be that our moral enlightenment has advanced to the point where the practice of eating animals – like our former practices of keeping slaves or treating women as inferior beings – can now be seen for the barbarity it is, a relic of an ignorant past that very soon will fill us with shame.

Equality is a moral idea, not an assertion of fact…The moral idea is that everyone’s interests ought to receive equal consideration, regardless of what they are like or what abilities they have…If possessing a higher degree of intelligence does not entitle one human to use another for his or her own ends, how can it entitle humans to exploit non-humans for the same purpose? – Peter Singer

• Equality is based on interests rather than characteristics.
  • The one all-important interest humans share with pigs, as with all sentient creatures, is an interest in avoiding pain.

The great advantage of being a reasonable creature is that you can find a reason for whatever you want to do. – Ben Franklin

• Most domesticated animals cannot survive in the wild; in fact, without us eating them they wouldn’t exist at all!

The pig has a stronger interest than anyone in the demand for bacon. If all the world were Jewish, there would be no pigs at all. – One 19th Century Political Philosopher

• Domestication is an evolutionary, rather than a political, development – coevolution
  • Before the arrival of sophisticated predators, the bison did not live in big herds and had much larger, more outstretched horns.

The bison is a human artifact, or it was shaped by the Indians. – Tim Flannery

• A tension has always existed between the capitalist imperative to maximize efficiency at any cost and the moral imperatives of culture, which historically have served as a counterweight to the moral blindness of the market. This is another example of the cultural contradictions of capitalism – the tendency over time for the economic impulse to erode the moral underpinnings of society. Mercy toward the animals in our care is one such casualty.
• The proper measure of their suffering is not their prior experiences but the unremitting daily frustration of their instincts.
  • For any animal, happiness seems to consist in the opportunity to its creaturely character – its essential pigness or wolfness or chickeness – characteristic form of life.

• What happens when the choice is, as Singer writes, between “a lifetime of suffering for a non-human animal and the gastronomic preferences of a human being?”
  • One has to stop eating meat before one can in good conscience decide if one can continue eating meat.

No one in the habit of eating an animal can be completely without bias in judging whether the conditions in which that animal is reared cause suffering. – Peter Singer

• The odder ironies of animal rights: It asks us to acknowledge all we share with animals, and then to act toward them in a most unanimalistic way (i.e. morals and rights).
• Human pain differs from animal pain by an order of magnitude. This qualitative difference is largely the result of our possession of language and, by virtue of language, our ability to have thoughts about thoughts and to imagine what is not.
• Morality is an artifact of human culture devised to help humans negotiate human social relations. It is very good for that. But just as we recognize that nature doesn’t provide a very good guide for human social conduct, isn’t it anthropocentric of us to assume that our moral system offers an adequate guide for what should happen in nature?
• What’s wrong with eating animal is the practice, not the principle.
  • If our concern is for the health of nature – rather than, say, the internal consistency of our coral code or the condition of our souls – then eating animals may sometimes be the most ethical thing to do.

Hunting: The Meat

Only the hunter, imitating the perpetual alertness of the wild animal, for whom everything is danger, sees everything and sees each thing functioning as facility or difficulty, as risk or protection. – Jose Ortega y. Gasset

• Hunting is the genetic way of being a man and because the animal we are stalking summons the animal still in us.
• Since the successful hunter often ends up with more meat than he or his family could eat before it spoiled, it makes good sense for him to, in effect, bank the surplus in the bodies of other people, trading meat for obligations and future favors.

Every good hunter is uneasy in the depths of his conscience when faced with the death he is about to inflict on the enchanting animal. –  Jose Ortega y. Gasset

• So much of the human project is concerned with distinguishing ourselves from beasts that we seem strenuously to avoid things that remind us that we are beasts too – animals that urinate, defecate, copulate, bleed, die, stink, and decompose – the incompleteness of our transcendence of our animal nature.

Humanity sees itself as something emerging from animality, but it cannot be sure of having transcended that state completely. The animal remains too close for us not to feel mysterious communication with it. – John Berger

• It’s not as though the rest of us don’t countenance the killing of tens of millions of animals every year. Yet for some reason we feel more comfortable with the mechanical killing practice, out of view and without emotion, by industrial agriculture.

For one creature to mourn the death of another is a new thing under the sun. – Aldo Leopold

The preoccupation with what should be is estimable only when the respect for what is has been exhausted. – Jose Ortega y. Gasset

Gathering: The Fungi

• Our ability to identify plants and fungi with confidence, which after all is one of the most critical tools of our survival, involves for more sensory information than can ever be printed on a page; it is, truly, a form of “body knowledge” not easily reduced or conveyed over distance.
• Some of their toxins may simply be fungal tools for doing what fungi do: breaking down complicated organic compounds.
• Mushrooms have little to do with the sun (explanation for the lack of calories). They emerge at night and wither in the light of day.
• Pop-out effect – when we fix in our mind some visual quality of the object we are hoping to spot – whether its color or pattern or shape (narrow visual filter) – it will pop out of the visual field, almost as if on command.

The Perfect Meal

• Slow Food vs. fast food
  • The pleasures of the one are based on a nearly perfect knowledge; the pleasures of the other on an equally perfect ignorance.
  • The diversity of one the one mirrors the diversity of nature, especially the forest; the variety of the other more accurately reflects the ingenuity of industry; especially its ability to teases a passing resemblance of diversity from a single species growing in a single landscape: a monoculture of corn.
  • The first of the first meal is steep, yet it is acknowledged and paid for; by comparison the price of the second seems a bargain but fails to cover its true cost, charging it instead to nature, to the public health and purse, and to the future.
    • Society is not bearing the cost of water pollution, of antibiotic resistance, of food-borne illnesses, of crop subsidies, of subsidized oil and water – of all the hidden costs to the environment and the taxpayer that make cheap food seem cheap.

Natural Grace by Matthew Fox & Rupert Sheldrake

• Our Western models of education, being Cartesian or Enlightenment orientated are only about the left brain.Our education doesn’t get to the heart that is in the body.
• Bede Griffiths’s ashram in southern India
• Now more than ever we have to strip down religions to their essence, which is not religion but spirituality. Spiritual experience must include worship that awakens people instead of bores them, that empowers them, that brings out the gifts of the community, that heals and brings the healers back to the center of the community, healers such as artists, justice-makers, and others.
• Orthodox, mechanistic biology which essentially denies the life of organisms but instead treats them as machines.
• Goethe at the end of the 18^th century and the beginning of the 19^th century had a vision of a different kind of science, a holistic science that integrated direct experience and understanding.
• Book: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn
• Paradigm – a collectively held model of reality, a belief system, habits of thinking.
• In the US, university students are treated like children – told exactly what to read and then tested to make sure they have read it.
• Epiphany Philosophers – connected with an Anglican monastery called Community of the Epiphany

Living Nature and Creation Spirituality

• The old view was not that the soul is in the body, but that the body is in the soul. Now the soul survived only inside human heads.
• Mother Nature as now regarded as dead matter, subject only to mechanical forces and governed by mathematical laws.
  • The imaginative disembodying was essential to the scientific revolution.
• Mechanistic Universe vs. Living Cosmos [video]
• Souls motivated organisms by attraction.
• What is being looked for, and the way it is looked for, affects what is found. Moreover, the expectations of the experimenter affect what is observed, as in the placebo effect in medicine or the experimenter effect in psychology.
• I prefer the idea of Nature as governed by habits.
• The idea of Nature as alive has been preserved by the romantic poets and is in accordance with many people’s direct, intuitive experience of the natural world.
• It takes the mystic inside every one of us, it take the child, the vulnerable child wanting to play in the Universe to respond playfully and pleasurably to life.

Every Creature is a word of God and a book about God. – Meister Eckhart

• We must have the heart to open up and the willingness to be silent, to take in the wisdom of creatures and the wisdom of this Universe.
• Panentheism is the mystic tradition – it teaches that all things are in God, God is in all things, and God works through all things.

God became human in order that human beings might become divine. – Thomas Aquinas

• Being images of God means we are capable of a godlike kind of creativity and a godlike kind of compassion.
• Divinity is in creation. When creation flourishes and is radiant, divinity flourishes. When creation is crucified, the Christ dies all over again.
• Three articles of faith – creation, redemption (liberalization), divinization or sanctification.
• Authentic action comes out of nonaction. It comes out of respect for mystery and wonder and the gift and the glorious surprise of our being here.
• Mysticism is about trusting your experience.
• A field is where we are called to be rooted. Back to the sense of roots and radical again, being capable of rootedness.
• Paul Ricoeur, the French philosopher, says that psyche and cosmos are the same thing. In other words, the world we live in, is our soul.

The Kingdom of God is among us. – Jesus

• Bede Griffiths said that for many people despair is a yoga. Despair is a spiritual path and they do not come to spiritual experience until they enter the path of despair and disillusionment.
• Life begins anew after the sinking and the letting go.
• Whales have been here 56 million years longer than we have and do not find it necessary to invent nuclear weapons or tear down the rainforest.
• The sin of Satan is essentially the sin of pride, and the fall of Satan has to do with pride.
  • So did the fall of the angels and the origin of evil in some sense parallel the development of human consciousness? Are we the source of evil, sin, and fallen angels?
• The Big Bang itself, the cosmic explosion that separates everything from a primal unity into outward expansion. This is literally a diabolical force, in that diabolical means throwing apart. Then there is the unifying force of gravitation that is always pulling things.

Grace and Praise

• The creation spirituality tradition has been an effort to bring Nature and grace together.

If the only prayer you say in your whole life is thank you, that would suffice. – Meister Eckhart

• Gratitude is an intricate part of grace.

When you praise, hold nothing back. – Onye Onyemici, Afican Spiritual Drummer

• Grace – a sense of connection, openness, blessedness.
  • There is a fullness to grace.
  • Creation is grace. Nature is grace. Redemption is the return of grace.
  • Being awake is everything. It’s pretty hard to be joyless in the context of grace.
  • Until we can feel graced – a psychological word for that might be high self-esteem – we are not in a position to deal with our wounds or anyone else’s wounds.
  • We are never totally empty of grace but we are the species that can prefer our egos over grace, our agendas over the agenda of the Universe.
  • When everything is speeded up, it doesn’t leave much time for grace.
• The nonhumans are all full of grace and the humans are perhaps like a gas tank that gets full and empty, and we lose grace, we can fall in gracelessness, which may another word for sin.

Sin is the human’s refusal to become who we are. – Rabbi Heschel

• Praise is a response, an utterance, an expression of the joy that’s inside that you can’t keep down, because joy has to make itself known to the community.

Who is a good person? A good person is one who praises good people. – Meister Eckhart

• Good person is looking for goodness.
• It is important to recognize good living people.
  • A lot of the great men and women of history were vilified in their lives and sanctified after they’re dead.
• Almost everything taken for granted until it is threatened.
• Lack of curiosity and wonder – these are sins of omission.
• The idea is that praise is not just anthropocentric, it is us joining the cosmological praise that is going on.
  • Praise is going on all the time; humans have just opted out most of the time.

Every being is praising God.  The fire has its flame and praises God,; the wind blows a flame and praises God; in the voice we hear the word which praises God; the word when heard praises God, so all creation is a song of praise to God. – Hildegard

• Relationships with pets are regarded as an inferior substitute for proper human relationships.
• If you acknowledge any kind of community or relationship with animals, then it is difficult to exploit them or to eat them.

The Soul

• The soul is the animating principle, that which makes living things alive.
  • Latin word for soul is anima, the source of our word animal.
• Science was concerned with the objective realm of facts, religion and the arts with the subjective realm of values, aesthetics, morality, and belief.
• The soul is not in the body but the body is in the soul.
  • Our body is in our souls means that our souls are as large as the world in which we live, as the fields in which our minds play, as the fields in which our hearts roam.
  • We are body and soul, but spirits is greater than our bodies and souls. It blows where it wills (John 3:8).
• Spirit requires receptivity, an open heart, a letting go.

What one can know about the soul must be supernatural. It must be from grace, for the soul is where God works compassion. – Meister Eckhart

Secretly we spoke, that wise one and me. I said, “Tell me the secrets of the world.” He said, “Ssssh, let silence tell you the secrets of the world.” – Rumi

• Our soul was not confined to our head. It not only permeated the whole body but was involved in all experience and perception.
• Soul is seen as an expression of a person’s total state of being alive. The soul is a totality filled with power. This power lets the soul grow and prosper so it can maintain itself and do its work in the world. This vital power without which no living being can exist. The Israelites called their berakah blessing.

The first effect of love is melting. – Aquinas

• Melting is always movement. That’s a way to look for forgiveness, as melting.
• We are responsible for our presence in the world.
• Part of the accomplishment of the last three hundred years in the West has been to develop the sense of the individual. Unfortunately, we’ve done it at the expense of the community, at every level: the human community and the Earth community.

Prayer

• Four paths of creation spirituality:
  • Positiva. Prayer – render ourselves vulnerable to awe, wonder, gratitude.
  • Negativa. Way of darkness, suffering, silence, letting go, and even nothingness. Emptying.
  • Creativa. Entering into the creative process not to produce a product but to honor our images by paying attention to them and giving birth to them. Honor our deepest experiences – passion, joy, sorrow.
  • Transformativa. Path of compassion which is about realization of our interdependence and the action that results from it.

God is at home, it’s we who’ve gone out for a walk. – Meister Eckhart.

• Meditation is this return home to our origins, to our unborn selves.
• Poem: What a blessing by Rumi
• We search for him the beloved, here and there while looking right at him.

Enough with such questions, let silence take you to the core of life. All your talk is worthless when compared to one whisper of the beloved. – Rumi

Without looking, I can see everything within myself. – Eckhart

• All the names we give to God come from our experience of ourselves.

Why should I bother with eyes any more now that I see the whole world with God’s eye. The eye with which I see God is the same eye with which God sees me. – Rumi

Do not look for God, look for the one looking for God. But why look at all, God is not lost, God is right here, closer than your own breath. – Rumi

• Without the mystic coming alive we are not going to have imagination or the courage or the energy to be instruments for compassion and for the environmental revolution.

Our soul grows by subtraction, not by addition. – Meister Eckhart

• Suffering teaches us to let go.

Darkness

• Sound has silence within it, just as light has darkness within it.
• The light in us increases as we go more deeply into the darkness, as we sink.
  • Illumination comes at the end of the bottoming out in the darkness experience.
• Our culture is constantly feeding us light and sound…We are so overdeveloped at the top level when walking around our culture that you have to ask, how can we develop the bottom?…We are not giving darkness its due.
• We have a need to experience nothingness and learn to be at home with it.
  • Meditation is one such avenue and suffering is another.
• In the darkness unity, not differentiation, is what is experienced.
  • That is why get worn out at the end of the day – we are seeing all these differences. We need the darkness to reexperience the unity.
  • Unity is primal – underneath all differentiation it’s the unity of being that’s most radical, most basic.
• Insomnia might be related to the modern world being saturated with light. It is not a big problem in Third World countries.
• Maybe we sleep at night to experience some sensory deprivation from all the sensory input we receive for two-thirds of the day.
  • We have to be empty in order to be full.

Life dies but being goes on. – Eckhart

Morphic Resonance and Ritual

• Regularities in Nature are more like habits than laws, that they are not fixed for all time from the beginning. They are habits which have grown up within Nature.
  • Nature has a kind of inherent memory rather than an eternal mathematical mind.
• Carl Jung – all human being draw upon a collective memory, the collective unconscious. He thought of these habitual patterns as archetypes in the collective unconscious.
• Rituals have a very strong conservative tendency.
  • People believe they should do the ritual the way it has been done before. They believe that by doing so they connect in some way with the people who have done it before.
  • The purpose of ritual is to connect the present participants with the original event that the ritual commemorates and also to link them with all those who participated in the ritual in the past.

Without curiosity there is no wisdom. – Thomas Aquinas

• We now think rapid change is both desirable and necessary, but this is abnormal, even pathological, in term so of human history.
• Most scientists got into science because of a mystical experience they had when they were children, looking at the stars or worms or something else.
  • But scientists lose the wonder like theologians and priests and everyone else, because they go through academia where it’s beaten out of you and you are rewarded for many other things, but not for wonder.

Revitalizing Education

• Our Western models of education, being Cartesian or Enlightenment orientated are only about the left brain.
  • Our education doesn’t get to the heart that is in the body.

Avarice tends to infinity and knows no limit. – Aquinas

• The human mind can potentially know all things. The human heart is infinite in its capacity for love but it depends on the mind to feed it daily with lovable objects. The human hands connected to human imagination produce an infinite variety of artifacts: creativity.
• Science has become, in essence, a monotheistic system. There’s only one kind of science worldwide whereas there are many kinds of culture and religion, reflecting the foibles of human nature, of human subjectivity.
• Pride (arrogance), greed, and envy (resentment) are the engines that drive our modern economy.
  • Envy is the very basis of consumer society.
• Good fortune is not an opportunity to make more money, but to do less work and to enjoy life more.
• The modern mentality is that more means better; quantity prevails over quality.

We can argue about the reason of the Universe and we can argue about the meaning of the Universe – but we cannot argue about the beauty of the Universe. – Ernesto Cardinale

• You begin with beauty, which is to say with awe and praise.
• What we create ourselves, what we make ourselves we remember.
• Hope is built on what is possible, despair on what is impossible.

A Brief History of Everything by Ken Wilber

• While male and female might indeed be given biologically, masculine and feminine are in large part the creation of culture.
• It appears that testosterone basically has two, and only two, major drives: fuck it or kill it.
• Oxytocin, a hormone that tends to flood the female even if her skin is simply stroked.
  • “The relationship drug” – it induces incredibly strong feelings of attachment, relationship, nurturing, holding, touching.
• Testosterone and oxytocin have their roots in biological evolution, the former for reproduction and survival and the latter for mothering.
• Evolution always transcends and includes, incorporates and goes beyond.
• Two types of spirituality:
  • The Ascending path is purely transcendental and otherworldly. It is usually puritanical, ascetic, yogic and it tends to devalue or even deny the body, the senses, sexuality, the Earth, the flesh. It seeks its salvation in a kingdom not of this world; it sees manifestation or samsara as evil or illusory; it seeks to get off the wheel entirely. And, in fact, for the Ascenders, any sort of Descent tends to be viewed as illusory or even evil. the Ascending path glorifies the One, not the Many; Emptiness, not Form; Heaven, not Earth.
  • The Descending path counsels just the opposite. It is this-worldly to the core, and it glorifies the Many, not the One. It celebrates the Earth, and the body, and the senses, and often sexuality. It even identifies Spirit with the sensory world, with Gaia, with manifestation, and sees in every sunrise, every moonrise, all the Spirit a person could ever want. It is purely immanent and is often suspicious of anything transcendental. In fact, for the Descenders, any form of Ascent is usually viewed as evil.
  • It is in the union of the Ascending and the Descending currents that harmony is found, and not in any way between the two.
• Three broad stages of human moral development: preconventional->conventional->postconventional
• Orienting generalization: they show us, with a great deal of agreement, where the important forests are located, even if we can’t agree on how many trees they contain.
• The Twenty Tenets - the patterns that connect, characteristics of evolution
  • This is a sequence of increasing wholeness, increasing holons, each of which transcends and includes its predecessor.
  • Greater depth chart
  • Spirit is the highest rung in the ladder, but it’s also the wood out of which the entire ladder is made.
  • Biosphere is literally internal to us, is a part of our very being, our compound individuality – harming the biosphere is internal suicide, not just some sort of external problem.
  • Evolution has a direction, yes, a principle of order out of chaos…a drive towards greater depth. Chance is defeated, depth emerges – the intrinsic value of the Kosmos increases with each unfolding (greater consciousness).
  • Consciousness is simply what depth looks like from the inside, from within. Depth is everywhere, consciousness is everywhere, Spirit is everywhere.
  • Because the universe has a direction, we ourselves have direction. There is meaning in the movement, intrinsic value in the embrace…There is a pattern written on the wall of Nothingness.
• Major stages of technological/economical development.
  • Foraging->horticultural->agrarian->industrial->informational
  • Agrarian societies have the most highly sexual polarized structure of any know societal type.
    • Under the technological form of their organization at the time, men began to be virtually the sole producers of foodstuffs.
    • Advanced farming created massive surplus in foodstuffs and this freed a great number of males – farming technology freed some men from production (i.e. to pursue cultural endeavors such as mathematics, writing, specialized warfare), but women were still largely tied to reproduction.
  • Within a century of industrialization – which removed the emphasis on male physical strength and replaced it with gender-neutral engines – the women’s movement emerged for the first time in history on any sort of large scale.
    • It is not that all of a sudden, women became smart, strong and determine after a million years of oppression, dupedom, and sheepdom. It is that social structure has evolved, for the first time in history, to a point that physical strength did not overwhelmingly determine power in culture.
  • Ignorance backed by primal or tribal technology is capable of inflicting limited damage. You can only do so much damage to the biosphere with a bow and arrow. An atomic bomb is something else. The same ignorance backed by industry is capable of killing the entire world.
• Evolution of worldviews.
  • Archaic->magic->mythic->rational->existential
  • It is not that the earlier worldview is totally wrong and the new worldview is totally right. The earlier one was adequate, the new one is more adequate.
  • Wherever there is the possibility of transcendence, there is, by the very same token, the possibility of repression. The higher might not just transcend and include, it might transcend and repress, exclude, alienate, dissociate.
• “Beyond modernity” – going “post-modern”
  • Transcend and include modernity (rational-industrialization)
    • Be open to modes of consciousness that move beyond mere rationality
    • Embed them in modes of techno-economic structures that move beyond industrialization
  • A change of consciousness embedded in a change of institutions.
• The Four Quadrants
  • “Cultural” refers to the shared collective worldview and “social” refers to the material base of that worldview.
  • My individual thoughts only exist against a vast background of cultural practices and languages and meanings, without which I could form virtually no individual thoughts at all. And this vast background is my culture.
  • The subjective world is situated in an intersubjective space, a cultural space, and it is this intersubjective space that allows the subjective space to arise in the first place. Without this cultural background, my own individual thoughts would have no meaning at all. I wouldn’t even have the tools to interpret my own thoughts to myself. In fact, I wouldn’t even have developed thoughts, I would be “wolf boy”.
  • Cultural fit – background of common meaning and appropriateness and justness; how we agree on rules and common meanings that allow us all to fit together.
• The mind is what your awareness looks like from within; your brain is simply what it looks like from without, from the outside.
  • And if he wants to know what is going on in my mind, there is one and only one way that he can find out: he must talk to me.
  • I can know your brain by objective study, but I can only know your mind by talking to you (dialogue).
    • Requires not just observation but interpretation.
  • Understand the cultural meanings is an interpretive affair…But the empirical social sciences mostly want to study the behavior of societies in detached fashions…statistics of exterior behaviors, not interior intentions…The Lower-Left approach studies the community by becoming a participant observer, and attempts to understand it from within.
• The primary rule of interpretation is that all meaning is context-bound. So all meaning is context dependent, and contexts are boundless.
  • The common worldspace provides the common context that allows the interpretation, the sharing. Therefore, because you and the dog share the emotional worldspace, you can interpret each other to some degree.
  • Many people today are having spiritual or transmental experiences – experiences from the higher or deeper stages of consciousness evolution. But they don’t know how to interpret them. They have these extraordinary intuitions, but they sometimes unpack the intuitions in an inadequate or incomplete fashion. And these inadequate interpretations tend to abort further transformation, derail it, sabotage it.
• Integrity – your depth match your behavior; your words and your actions match up. You have the sense that the person won’t lie to you, because they haven’t lie to themselves.
• When we return to environmental ethics, we want to arrive at a justness for all sentient beings: the deeper good for all of us.
• Validity claims chart
  • Most people take truth to mean representational truth – a proposition that can be proved valid or not by empirical representations.
• The Big Three
  • Objective (it) – The True – Objective Truth
  • Subjective (I) – The Beautiful – Subjective Truth
  • Cultural (we) – The Good – Intersubjective Truth
  • The good news: Differentiation of the Big Three
  • The bad news: Dissociation of the Big Three
    • The it-approaches began to colonize the I and the we domain.
    • Rise of the flatland.
      • “A dull affair, soundless, scentless, colorless; merely the hurrying of material, endlessly, meaninglessly.” – Whitehead
      • The modern lifeworld has been ruined. Once you go from Left to Right, from interior to exterior, from mind to brain, from compassion to serotonin, you go from value to valueless, from virtue to virtueless, from worth to worthless.
• The Evolution of Consciousness
  • Every society has a certain center of gravity, around which the culture’s ethics, norms, rules, and basic institutions are organized, and this center of gravity provides the basic cultural cohesion and social integration for that society.
    • This cultural center of gravity acts like a magnet on individual development. If you are below the average level, it tends to pull you up. If you try to go above it, it tends to pull you down.
  • Ladder, Climber, View
    • Basic level: the ladder – basic levels of consciousness
    • The Self: the climber
    • The view: fulcrum
      • A fulcrum simply describes the momentous process of differentiation and integration as it occurs in human growth and development.
      • At each fulcrum, a new world emerge – changing views
    • When you step off the ladder altogether, you are in free fall in Emptiness. Inside and outside, subject and object, lose all ultimate meaning. You are no longer “in here” looking at the world “out there”. You are not looking at the Kosmos, you are the Kosmos. The universe of One Taste announces itself, bright and obvious, radiant and clear, with nothing outside, nothing inside, an unending gesture of great perfection, spontaneously accomplished. The very Divine sparkles in every sight and sound, and you are simply that. The sun shines not on you but within you, and galaxies are born and die, all within your heart. Time and space dance as shimmering images on the face of radian Emptiness, and the entire universe loses its weight. You can swallow the Milky Way in a single gulp, and put Gaia in the palm of your hand and bless it, and it is all the most ordinary thing in the world, and so you think nothing of it.
  • Development is really a very fluid and flowing affair.
  • People can have spiritual experiences and peak experiences and all sorts of altered states, but they still have to carry those experiences in their own structure. They still have to grow and develop to the point that they can actually accommodate the depth offered by the peak experiences. “States” still must be converted to “traits.” You still have to go from acorn to oak if you are going to become one with the forest. SO while “states” are important, “stages” are even more important.
  • Many Americans don’t like the idea of stages of anything, because we in America don’t like the notion of degrees of depth. We are the living embodiment of flatland. The thought that somebody, somewhere, might be higher or deeper than me is simply intolerable. So we prefer a “spirituality” that takes whatever level we are at and gives us a “one-stop” process that will get us straight to God, instantly, like a microwave oven. We deny stages altogether and end up with a very flatland notion.
  • The point of uniting Freud and Buddha is that if you’ve got 40 units of your consciousness trapped in the basement, you’re not going to make it to the higher levels, as a general rule.
  • The 9 Fulcrums
    • The young child is totally egocentric – meaning not that he think selfishly only about himself, but to the contrary, that he is incapable of thinking about himself; unable to differentiate himself from the rest of the world.
    • Fulcrum 2 (emotional self) is still extremely egocentric and narcissistic.
      • Narcissism – cannot differentiate itself from the emotional and vital world around it, the infant self treats the world as an extension of itself
    • Memory is the last thing you can depend on to “report” childhood because this considerably distorts what was actually occurring in the earlier periods.
      • “Retro-reading” our entire life from the perspective of a recently emerged worldview
    • The archbattle in the universe is always: evolution versus egocentrism.
      • Evolution is a continual decline of egocentrism, a continual decentering.
    • With the emergence of the capacity to take the role of other – egocentric shifts to sociocentric.
      • But this sociocentric or conventional stance tends to be very ethnocentric. Care and concern are expanded from me to my group, and there it stops.
    • Fulcrum 4 – identity switches from egocentric to sociocentric. Your very awareness, your very identity, is based upon cultural roles and collective identities and shared value. It is no longer a body identity, it is a role identity.
    • Fulcrum 5 – the person can begin to imagine different possible worlds.
      • Adolescence is such a wild time, not just because of sexual blossoming, but because possible worlds open up to the mind’s eye – it’s the “age of reason and revolution.”
      • Because you can think about thinking, you can start to judge the roles and the rules which, at the previous state, you simply swallowed unreflexively.
      • Your moral stance moves from conventional to postconventional.
      • You can criticize your own conventional society…You are no longer merely identified with them, and so you have some critical distance from them. To some degree, you have transcended them.
      • Identity crisis – Once you start to go worldcentric, once you begin scrutinizing your culture, and perhaps distancing yourself from its sociocentric or ethnocentric prejudice, and you strike out on your own – then, who, exactly, are you? Without all the old and comfortable roles, who are you? How can you fashion your own identity?
      • From sociocentric to worldcentric. Another decline in narcissism. Another decentering, another transcendence. You want to know what is right and fair, not just for you and your people, but for all peoples.
      • The Nazis and the KKK are ethnocentric movements based on a particular mythology of race supremacy, and from a worldcentric perspective we judge them to be inferior stance.
    • Fulcrum 6 – the observing self is beginning to transcend both the mind and the body and thus can be aware of them as objects in awareness, as experiences.
    • The higher or deeper stages simply disclose more and more of this worldcentric freedom as it moves into deeper and genuinely spiritual domain.
    • The finite self is going to die – magic will not save it, mythic gods will not save it, rational science will not save it – and facing that cutting fact is part of becoming authentic.
    • Deep ecology – to find that deep Self that embraces all of nature, and thus to treat nature with the same reverence you would extend to your own being.
    • Fulcrum 7 – the psychic level is simply a broad space, a worldspace, within which a vast array of different phenomena can occur, a very rich and complex reality.
      • If you enter a lower state or even a defiled state with clear awareness, then that state will transform into its corresponding wisdom. E.g. passion->compassion, anger->clarity
    • Depth must be interpreted
    • Jungian archetypes tend to be repositories of basic, collective, typical encounters of the human race in general.
      • Just because something is collective does not mean it is transpersonal.
    • All those objects in your awareness are precisely not the observing Self. All those things that you know about yourself are precisely not the real Self. Those are not the Seer; those are simply things that can be seen.
      • The Seer sees the ego, and sees the body, and sees the natural world. All of those parade by “in front” of this Seer. But the Seer itself cannot be seen. If you see anything, those are just more objects. Those objects are precisely what the Seer is not, what the Witness is not.
      • The observing Self is not the body, it is not the mind, it is not the ego.
      • The pure Witness is a pure Emptiness, a sense of vast freedom, because it is not itself anything that enter the objective world of time and objects and stress and strain.
      • We are actually this vast expanse of Freedom, but we identify with unfree and limited objects and subjects, all of which can be seen, all of which suffer, and none of which is what we are.
      • It is aware of time, and is thus free of time – it is utterly timeless. And because it is timeless, it is eternal – which doesn’t mean everlasting time, but free of time altogether.
      • The Witness itself, pure Consciousness itself, is not a thing, not a process, not a quality, not an entity – it is ultimately unqualifiable – it is ultimately pure Emptiness.
    • Formless mysticism – all objects, even God as perceived form vanish into cessation, and so deity mysticism gives way to formless mysticism.
    • Nonduality – the pure Emptiness of the Witness turns out to be one with every Form that is witnessed.
      • The problem is not solved, but rather dissolved, in the primordial state, which otherwise leaves the dualism just as they are, processing a certain conventional or relative reality, real enough in their own domain, but not absolute.
      • Nondual traditions do not necessarily abandon emotions, or thoughts, or desires, or inclinations. The task is simply to see the Emptiness of all Form, not to actually get rid of all Form.
        • Abide as Emptiness, embrace all Form.
        • Liberation is in the Emptiness, never in the Form, but Emptiness embraces all forms as a mirror all its objects.
• The downside of the Enlightenment was that it reduced all Left-Hand dimensions to their Right-Hand correlates, and it thought that a simple mapping of these empirical exteriors was all the knowledge that was worth knowing – the mirror of nature, the representation paradigm. This left out the mapmaker itself – the consciousness, the interiors, the Left-Hand dimensions – and resulted in nothing but the flat and faded surface of a brutally monochrome world.
• Wisdom sees that the Many is One, and Compassion sees that the One is the Many.
• Two Different Gods
  • Ascending - masculine Face of Spirit, God, Eros, transcendental, ever-striving to find greater wholeness and wider union, to break the limits and reach for the sky, to rise to unending revelations of greater Good and Glory, always rejecting the shallower in search of the deeper, rejecting the lower in search of the higher.
  • Descending – feminine Face of Spirit, Goddess, Agape (compassion), immanent and manifesting, the principle of embodiment, and bodily incarnation, and relationship, and relational and manifest embrace, touch each and every being with perfect and equal grace, rejecting nothing, embracing all.
  • Where Eros strives for the Good of the One in transcendental wisdom, Agape embraces of the many with Goodness and immanent care.
  • The God of the Ascenders – otherworldly to the core – my kingdom is not of this world. It was puritanical, usually monastic and ascetic, and it saw the body, the flesh, and especially sex, as archetypal sins. It sought always to flee the Many and find the One. It was purely transcendental, and was always pessimistic about finding happiness in this world. It shunned in favor of eternity, and hid its face in shame from the shadows of this world.
  • The God of the Descenders – fled the One into the embrace of the Many. It was in love with the visibles, sensible God, and sometimes Goddess. It was a God of pure embodiment, of pure immanence. It was fascinated with diversity and found its glory in the celebration of this diversity. Not greater oneness, but greater variety was the goal of this God. It celebrated the senses, and the body, and sexuality, and earth. And delighted in a creation-centered spirituality that saw each sunrise, each moonrise, as visible blessing of the Divine.
  • Due to the rise of agrarian structure, there was a selection for male-biased spirituality, which consequently centered on Eros, more than Agape, on Ascent more than Descent, on the one to the exclusion of, even hatred of, the Many.
• Evolution is a self-correcting agenda, and it is in the process of slowly righting itself.
• Modern democracies killed the gods and the Age of Reason (Age of Revolution) killed the myths. Because myths are precisely what divide and antagonize people, and set them against each other in ethnocentric ways, and inflict their cruelties on unbelievers in the name of a chosen god.
• Democratic vision of worldcentric tolerance and universal pluralism.
  • “I may disagree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”
• The Disaster of Modernity
  • Empirical science – rationality tied to empirical observables through a hypothetico-deductive procedure – blossomed for the first time on any sort of culture-wide scale.
  • Science became scientism, which means it didn’t just pursue its own truths, it aggressively denied that there were any other truth at all!
  • Industrialization is the cause of a mechanistic worldview; the destruction of organic culture; the cause of an analytic and fragmented world; the displacement of social cohesion; the cause of ecological catastrophe; the ruin of religious sensibilities.
    • Above are derivatives stemming from the central – the pressure this productive base placed on consciousness to select for the it-domain – a world where its alone are real.
  • The moral decisions of the culture were rapidly being handed over to science and technical solutions. Science would solve everything. All problem in the I and the we domain were converted to technical problems in the it-domain.
    • And thus science (theoretical and technical) would not only solve all problems, it would decide what was a problem in the first place – it would decide what was real and what was not.
  • Men and women became objects of information, never subjects in communication. – Foucault
• In order to have a truly integral view, we want to take the very best of the ancient wisdom (namely, it was “all-level”, stretching from body to mind to soul to spirit) and combine that with the very best of modernity (namely, it was “all-quadrant”, differentiating the Big Three), and thus arrive at an all-level, all-quadrant vision.
• The Ego and the Eco
  • The Ego-Enlightenment approached the flat and Descended world with rational and industrious calculation.
  • The Eco-Romantics approached it through feeling, sentiment, and emotion.
    • The nature Romantics didn’t want to control flatland, they wanted to become one with it.
  • The Ego was quite happy to continue mapping the world in an objective and monological fashion, which disenchanted the world in the process.
  • The Ego wanted to subdue the Eco, the Eco wanted to get rid of the Ego.
  • Do you transcend nature so as to find moral freedom and autonomy, or do you become one with nature so as to find unity and wholeness? Are you transcendental Ego or immanent Eco? Autonomy or wholeness?
  • How can you reconcile the necessity to rise above nature with a necessity to become one with it?
    • How can you reconcile Ego and Eco?
  • The Ego camps sarcastically asked, can you united with nature, become one with nature, act only on nature’s impulses, and yet still preserve the worldcentric and postconventional morality that we have all fought hard to secure?
  • “Back to nature”. Why not forward to nature?
    • Romantics thought the problem was the differentiation itself: we simply never should have differentiated the Big Three to begin with. Failing to see that differentiation is the necessary prelude to integration.
    • The Romantic solution was to simply head back to those days prior to differentiation. Not prior to dissociation – which would have been right. By going back to the original “pristine” state of nature, you have not integrated the differentiations, you have simply obliterated them by regressing to a point before they emerged at all.
    • The regressive slide – the only way to cure the problems of the oak is to go back to being an acorn.
    • In this regression from noosphere to biosphere, you are indeed released from the disasters of modernity, by releasing yourself from the dignity and the demands as well. You have cured the repression by regression.
    • The ecomasculinists (deep ecologists) have pushed yet one stage further back and arrived at foraging cultures as the “pure and pristine state”. And, in fact, according the ecomasculinists, the ecofeminists’ beloved horticulture is not truly close to nature in a pure way, because those societies depended upon farming, which is actually a rape of the land. Hunting and gathering, now that’s pure and pristine.
      • And I will now ignore every single unpleasant thing (slavery, bride price, frequent or intermittent warfare) about any of these societies, and they will be the noble savage, period.
  • The remedy is to go postconventional in spirit, not preconventional in nature. Spirit transcends and includes both culture and nature, and thus integrates and unifies both.
  • Nature is not the source of beauty, nature is its destination. The source is transcendental Spirit, of which nature is a radiant expression.
  • Stuck by the beauty of the World Soul that you have mistakenly reduced to sensory nature, you will recommend – not that we go from nature to culture to Spirit – but that we simply go back to nature. You will mistake the effect for the cause.
    • You will fail to see that you got to this World Soul intuition precisely by developing from sensory-biocentric to egocentric to sociocentric to worldcentric to World Soul, each of which transcends and includes.
  • “That which you can deviate from is not the true Tao.”
    • The Eco-Romantics’ downfall – they differentiated culture from nature.
• Schelling, “we have to go forward beyond reason in order to discover that mind and nature are both simply different movements of one absolute Spirit, a Spirit that manifests itself in its own successive stages of unfolding.”
  • Spirit expresses itself in the entire process of evolution.
  • Spirit is the only reality. But in order to create the manifested world, Spirit must go out of itself, empty itself, into manifestation. Spirit descends into manifestation, but this manifestation is nevertheless Spirit itself, a form or expression of Spirit itself.
  • With the emergence of mind, Spirit becomes self-conscious, which, among other things, introduces conscious morals into the world, morals found nowhere in nature.
    • Spirit is starting to awaken to itself. Spirit seeks to know itself through symbols and concepts, and the result is that the universe begin to think about the universe – which produces the world of reason and, in particular, the world of conscious morals. Thus says Schelling, where nature is objective Spirit, mind is subjective Spirit.
  • Spirit moves from slumber in nature to awakening in the mind to final realization as Spirit itself.
    • subconscious->self-conscious->superconscious
    • prepersonal->personal->transpersonal
    • prerational->rational->transrational
    • biosphere->noosphere->theosphere
  • Spirit knows itself objectively as nature; knows itself subjectively as mind; and knows itself absolutely as Spirit – the Source, the Summit, and the Eros of the entire sequence.
  • Schelling’s vision failed because there was no transpersonal practice to reproduce their insights (no way to reproduce transpersonal awareness in a practicing community). i.e. did not have yoga
    • “For thought cannot grasp the soul which forgetting itself plunges out of space and time into a presentiment of infinity, and now re-awakens. Whoever wanted to speak of this to others, though he spoke with the tongues of angel, would feel the poverty of words.” – Hegel
• The internet is simply part of the new techno-economic base (the Lower-Right quadrant), and as such, it is neutral with regard to the consciousness that uses it.
  • All Right-Hand structures are neutral, value-free.
  • The internet does not necessarily point to way to global consciousness.
    • Most people, alas,  are still at preconventional and conventional modes of awareness, egocentric and ethnocentric. And no system map, and no internet will automatically change this or in itself foster interior transformation.
    • What good is it if Nazis had the internet?
    • Hate group activity has dramatically skyrocketed, thanks to the internet, which allows these people to find one another.
• Gaia’s main problem are no industrialization, ozone depletion, overpopulation, or resource depletion. Gaia’s main problem is the lack of mutual understanding and mutual agreement in the noosphere about how to proceed with those problems.
  • The hatred of transcendence is the cunning of the Descended grid. This is how the Descended grid perpetuates its love affair with flatland. This is how it perpetuates the colonization of the I and the we by holistic chain of its.
• An Integral Vision
  • The original spiritual intuition carries a sense of wholeness, but if I interpret this intuition merely in terms of my favorite quadrant, then I try to reproduce the wholeness by making my favorite fragment cover all bases.
  • Profound spiritual intuitions, when interpreted ungracefully, lead to less than happy results.
    • The Romantic slide – the closer you get to preconventional nature, the more egocentric you become.
  • Central idea of great epoch of human evolution.
    • Foraging: Spirit is interwoven with earthbody.
    • Horticulture: But Spirit demands sacrifice.
    • Agrarian: These spiritual steps are in fact arrayed in a Great Chain of Being.
    • Modernity: The Great Chain unfolds in evolutionary time.
    • Postmodernity: Nothing is pregiven; the world is not just a perception but also an interpretation.
  • Even a person born into a grand and glorious and global vision-logic culture nevertheless begins development at the physiocentric, then biocentric, then egocentric levels, then moves to the sociocentric levels, then moves to the postconventional and worldcentric levels.
    • There is no way to avoid or circumvent this general process.
  • The greater the cultural depth, then the greater the possibility of the culture gap, the gap between the average depth offered by the culture and those who can actually unfold to that depth. And this likewise creates an internal tension that can drive the culture bonkers.
    • This is another reason cultures such as foraging had fewer internal problems.
  • Egocentric and ethonocentric couldn’t care less about the global commons – unless you scare them into seeing merely how it affects their own narcissistic  existence – whereupon you have simply reinforced exactly the self-centric survival motives that are the cause of the problem in the first place. You just reinforce all of that with ecological scare tactics.
  • Global problems demand global consciousness for their solution, and global consciousness is the product of at least a half-dozen interior stages of growth. Without interior growth, the problems remain.
  • It’s not that it would be nice if we met these responsibilities; it is a condition of existence.
    • We often seem to want to claim rights without owning the responsibilities. We want to be a whole without being part of anything. We want to do our own thing.
    • Everybody wants to be a separate whole and demand rights for their own agency, but nobody wants to be a part and assume the responsibilities of the corresponding communions.
  • The Basic Moral Intuition – protect and promote the greatest depth for the greatest span.
  • A new form of society will have to evolve that integrates consciousness, culture, and nature, and thus finds room for art, morals, and science – for personal values, for collective wisdom, and for technical knowhow.

Waiting for Foucault, Still by Marshall Sahlins

• Materialism must be a form of idealism, since it’s wrong—too.
• In any case, it is obvious that identity is a relative construction, based on a selective valuation of similarities and differences.
• In speaking of culture as a superorganic order, in which individuals counted for next to nothing, A.L. Kroeber liked to use the metaphor of a coral reef: a vast edifice built by tiny microorganisms each of which, acting simply according to its own nature, secretes an imperceptible addition to this structure whose scale and organization by far transcends it.
• The punishment was the crime. By disobeying God to satisfy his own desires, by putting this love of self before the love of Him alone that could suffice, man was condemned to become the slave of insatiable bodily desires: a limited and ignorant creature abandoned in an intractable and merely material world to labor, to suffer, and then to die. Made up of “thorns and thistles,” resistant to our efforts, the world, said Augustine, “does not make good what it promises: it is a liar and deceiveth.” The deception consists in the impossibility of assuaging our libidinous desires for earthly goods, for domination and for carnal pleasures. So man is fated “to pursue one thing after another, and nothing remains permanently with him…his needs are so multiplied that he cannot find the one thing needful, a simple and unchanging nature.”
• In a famous essay setting out the field, Lionel Robbins explicitly recognized that the genesis of Economics was the economics of Genesis. “We have been turned out of Paradise,” he wrote, “we have neither eternal life nor unlimited means of satisfaction” — instead, a life of scarcity, wherein to choose one good thing is to deprive oneself of another. The real reason Economics is dismal is that it is the science of the post-lapsarian condition.
• As Cassierer says in another context, “an awareness of a difference is an awareness of a connection.”
• The Chinese Restaurant Syndrome - Why are well-meaning Westerners so concerned that the opening of a Colonel Sanders in Beijing means the end of Chinese culture? A fatal Americanization. Yet we have had Chinese restaurants in America for over a century, and it hasn’t made us Chinese. On the contrary, we obliged the Chinese to invent chop suey. What could be more American than that? French fries?
• Opposites are things alike in all significant respects but one.
• And there is always within each of us something that fights something else. – Foucault
• Fifth law of civilization: Failing corporate executives and politicians always resign to spend more time with their families.
• The person using the pronoun “I” thereby constitutes space, time and objects (reference) from his or her point of view—egotism, or even the will to power.
• Developing countries, with American help, never develop.
• Economic development is properly defined as the material enrichment of the people’s way of life.
• Hegemony is supposed to determine not only what one thinks but also what one cannot think.

My Ishmael by Daniel Quinn

• The people of your culture blame human nature for their troubles…It enables you to shift blame from yourselves to something that is beyond your control – human nature.
• Domesticated animals display a very human attitude toward territory…The very term “to domesticate” means “to attach or accustom to a home”.
• They are sure that there must be all sorts of things wrong with every tribal way of life, and of course they’re correct – if you mean by “wrong” something you don’t like.
• Erratic retaliation is fundamental self-controlling and fundamentally unsusceptible to outside management. And Takers don’t trust anything that’s self-controlling. They want to manage it all…
• Because the youngsters of your culture have no survival value on their own, they must get jobs. If they had survival skills, even locking up the food wouldn’t keep them in the prison. They’d be out. They’d be free.
• The onset of puberty signals the end of the child’s apprenticeship to its parents. It signals the end of childhood itself. Again, this isn’t cultural, it’s genetic…Mother Culture in effect has passed a law extending childhood for an indefinite period and have redefined adulthood as a moral privilege that ultimately can only be self-awarded, on grounds that are far from clear.
• Mother Culture’s whole function is to preserve the status quo. Mother Culture wants you to believe that what you have is perfection and any change is to be change for the worse.
• Tribal treasures:
  • A system of laws that actually helped people live instead of just punishing them for doing things that people have and always will do.
  • An eduction system that cost nothing, worked perfectly, and dew people together generationally.
• You must have a positive revolution, a revolution that brings people more of what they really want, not less of they don’t really want.

• The New Tribal Revolution:

1. The revolution won’t take place all at once.
2. It will be achieved incrementally. by people working off each other’s ideas.
3. It will be led by no one.
4. It will not be the initiative any political, governmental, or religious body.
5. It has no targeted end point.
6. It will proceed according to no plan.
7. It will reward those who further the revolution with the coin of the revolution.

• The Taker prison has no outside. The Takers long ago claimed the entire planet for themselves, so it’s all inside.
• Intentional communities almost always start out with the goal of being sanctioned by Taker law. This keeps them from being hassled by the police, but limits the amount importance they can achieve in their members’ lives. This is the difference between intentional communities on one hand and cults and gangs on the other…This explains how cults and gangs can come to have tribal importance in their members’ lives…Membership becomes worth dying for.

• There is no operational difference between a tribe and a cult.
• People want to be taken care of in the tribal way…The support-for-support paradigm is more than just a way of staying alive, it’s a profoundly satisfying human style.
• Open the prison gates and people will pour out. Build things people want and they’ll flock to them. And don’t flinch from looking with wide-open eyes at the things people show you they want. Don’t look away from them just because Mother Culture has given them bad names. Instead, understand why she’s given them bad names.