Virtue and the Way

The Te-Tao Ching (Tao-Te Ching, Te is virtue and Tao is the way) talks about becoming the complete man, the virtuous man, the sage.  It directly confronts the contradictions and paradoxes that living the life ‘of the way’ leads to in the world of cultural man.  It is an underlying assumption that humans are naturally ‘of the way’, but, in their present relations, have lost it.  The book is not a prescription for the society, but for the individual (though it does prescribe for a proper politics assuming that proper personal action would lead to proper public action).

By the time of the thinking that forms the basis of the Te-Tao Ching (about 3000 years ago), the “natural” forms were already going and The Madness was taking over -- belief and action had become self-referencing and were therefore unguided and without limit.  It was the study of and the immersion in the paradoxes that would lead the thoughtful back into the way, the one way, the unnamable way.  As they became resolved, so the way was attained: action without action, attainment without effort, to attempt virtue was to deny virtue and so on.

Consciousness order generates paradoxes, paradoxes that when fully integrated into a community in a natural truth relation with the environment disappear (it is itself a paradox).  These are not trivial paradoxes, but formed of the very bedrock of our belief and action.

When the community has moved into self-referencing and away from a truth relation with reality, the paradoxes fall most heavily on individuals as they struggle to establish personal truth relations in a world in which the very design of their societies have adopted madness over sanity.

This began thousands of years ago in earnest.  Any agriculturally based community must be rooted in the real, but can be quite mad in its “loftier” parts.  The early civilizations began to pop the kernels of the community-based paradoxes into full-blown madness. The early beliefs were (as described elsewhere) stories, cultural mnemonics, that, when functioning in the originating environment, produced very detailed and adaptable action based in the realities of sustaining the people and the culture. (A new ethic, that of “progress” and “improving” the culture, began with self-referencing.) When the stories were removed from the originating environment, the content detail became ‘real’ rather than only a vehicle for the message.

The stories were no longer environmentally referenced and actions grew out of them based on story details, often of only mnemonic significance, attached to accidental (coincidental) conditions of the social environment.  This could even be driven by the thought of subgroups or single individuals seeking immediate advantage.

((Hypothetical example: A prohibition against cutting a certain type of tree in the rainy season -- an adapted response to the tree’s biology and function in the ecosystem -- sustained in a culture based story that required the sacrifice to the tree before cutting of a minor dry season animal.  As the tree becomes more rare (for whatever reason -- not necessarily related to human action) detail can be added to the requirements for the collecting, say, of  the winged stage of a termite as additoinal offering. 

After a time the tree is either gone or no longer used in the same ways, populations have shifted or grown, yet the story and its power may still serve as a social device, but becomes attached to sacrificing to a leader who could be called “the tree of the people” and the winged termites are grain or a seasonal fruit with an association to termites (color, shape, sound of name, location --in self-referencing systems the associations are almost unlimited).  The very word for termite could come to be taken for certain kinds of tribute. – we can look to many examples of such self-referenced sequences.))

You see how it goes; each change references a previous cultural/social condition rather than reaching back to an environmental condition --social reality is split off from Reality.  And in its wake are trains of trivial paradoxes and a few major ones.

The individual who “feels” these disconnections is largely at sea: the original stories have no connection to reality; the social reality has little or no connection to Reality and yet, for some, the body and the mind form a conspiracy that points into an evocative mist of ideas that stand at odds with the social reality of the time.

It is never so simple as to say that The Real is within us if we will only “listen” to it.  It is more like: certain rough measures of certain parts of the Real are still within us to varying degrees (genetically based biological references).  We are a construction in which some parts are provided by biology and some parts are provided by environment.  The environment provides the biology with guides and the biology selects from the environment.  This is true and more easily understood in the physical development of the organism, but is also true -- even more true! -- in the development of consciousness order.  But we cannot make a list of what is genetic and what is environmental; these are completely interpenetrating in any functional product.

For example: a body is made of materials from the environment on a pattern supplied by the genes (even this pattern is interpenetrating). The amount and timing of various environmental materials and events influence the genes turning on and turning off as well as other behaviors.  The genes acting through the growing forms contact with different aspects of environment in selective ways -- genes “expect” the environment to present in particular ways based on long standing environmental stabilities (this is a key concept).

There is a “standard result and a range of variability” that defines the biological/consciousness product, but no part of the result can be said to be exactly genetic or environmental in origin.  How much of a house is the plan and how much is the lumber and how much is the labor (we can for a very selective purpose put money values on them, but that is not their actual contribution)?  Put this way it is clear that we can talk about optimum contributions and qualities, but that we really can’t trade off one against the other.  We can’t add a carpenter to make up for not having enough lumber!

Consciousness order and its products (consciousness, thinking, language, story, the whole host of “concepts” and words that we have created to indicated the nuances and expressions of awareness and its consequences) have a very similar relation:  Genetics carries the pattern to generate the form and the form interacts with the environment to generate and manifest consciousness order.  Consciousness order, once it is manifest, has its own information selection, storage and implementation designs which use environmental pattern, process and event as its substrate.  So, genetic design, biophysical design and environmental order all contribute in a completely interpenetrating way to consciousness order.

And so, the biological components, when they do not develop in the “expected” situation, may express in modified ways.  In a world that is dominated by consciousness order and is self-referencing, the biological origins cannot be fully satisfied and organized into the functioning organism -- specific omissions or commissions would have recognizable consequences.

Some people “feel” these states and try to adjust to them.  One such effort is to regain as much of specieshood as possible for them in their situation.  It is a motive that has underlain past and present religions (the pantheistic religions are another matter) and it is the lack of completeness of function and the self-referencing of consciousness order that turns such efforts into political rather than spiritual directions for the greatest number.  Such efforts are made part of the self-referencing story and thus lose their connection to reality which originally motivated them.

This is then, when successful, a lonely quest, and thereby limited in its potential accomplishment.  One person can develop a relationship with the originating natural world, but two (or more) are almost certain to have to combine on a self-referencing model -- almost!

However, ultimately the associations that one makes embedded in self-referencing are even more alone than being alone within one’s own specieshood; though the possibility, always there, of combining in community within the referencing of specieshood (and thus reality) is so powerful that it is always worth remaining receptive.

Most people do not “quest”, but apply directly their human ways (the human biological/consciousness adaptation) to the environment in which they are born and grow.  Since this environment is now, thorough the long process and history of the accumulations of the consciousness system of order, in large part social self-referenced ‘environment’, it is in no particular relationship to the native designs of the human species.  The ‘successful adaptation’ to the social designs that lack truth relation is Madness -- even (especially) when fully accepted within the social order as normal.

What is gained by recognizing the madness of the society and attempting to find ways (the Tao) to non-madness (sanity)?  It is fairly obvious that the rejection by society often follows any open “defiance” of social rules and values.  It is also obvious that it is the defiance of such rules and values that will be the eventual outcome of any truly successful coming to peace and accommodation with specieshood and with ecologically functioning consciousness order. The question then hinges on a single idea, a single word: openness.  At what point in the process does the assumption of specieshood require an open recognition and action in the social environment?  I believe it to be different for different people and situation, but early in the process is best, if not essential.

Values: (values that I have come to as being most directly appropriate to specieshood or important to adopt in our present situation to allow specieshood to manifest)

(1) Live simply: use little material resource, accumulate only the necessary.

(2) Live richly in relationship and learning:  Don’t just recognize the biophysical events, processes and entities that are the world of existence and experience, but have relationships with the most enduring (“plants”, “animals”, sky, earth -- health, for example, is a relationship).  Value the process of living and the special contribution of the consciousness system of order as part of the measure of life.  Value all of life as a special system of order in the universe and value the physical universe as the source.  Spend time, give attention, learn these things with direct experience.

(3) Let life dominate the material: Life’s events and action should interact with and use the material and should not be “owned” by the material. Life is in its processes and events and not its accumulations.

(4) The single most destructive act is the LIE: The only protection from the madness that distorts societies and trivializes life is the truth relation between belief and The Real.  Lying at any level damages this vital relationship and finds its way into the very substance of the primary informing basis of consciousness order.

Errors in the truth relation regardless of the source are damaging, but errors as part of the honest pursuit of the valid truth relation are naturally correcting, i.e., errors of result are traced to errors of initiation.  Lies, on the other hand, attempt to create unaddressable connections, attempt to hide relations that are real and place in front of them images of relationships that are not real.  Eventually these deceptions fail, but damage is always done to the designs of good order. 

(5) Support low growth, no growth and negative growth of population and economies:  A new economics is desperately needed that allows and supports a reduction in the use of material and productive biophysical space.  Until there is such a paradigm shift, individuals, for their own benefit, need to live in a sustaining model.

(6) Value community over the private: This is tricky since the consideration of these issues is typically done from a position firmly in the madness, a madness obsessed with “private property” and “ownership” as the primary definitions of human value.  Also, the notion of community is demonized by a sort of institutional immaturity that doesn’t want “to share.”  This is really central to much of the human difficulty: personal psychological distortions given importance and justification by framing them in societal terms, supporting social designs not for their efficiency, but for their usefulness to one’s distortions.

(In general madness cannot speak to sanity and madness talking to madness is only the appearance of communication.  One “system” ungrounded in reality can’t communicate with the system grounded in Reality, and two “systems” both ungrounded in Reality, but different, even if they seem to use the same language, can only seem to communicate.  This is even more destructive to forming a truth relation.) 

(7) Value diversity:  An immediate problem with this simple and obvious value is that madness is the most “diverse system” of all -- it has only one fixed rule (and thus can be of any form that does not violate it) and that is to be disconnected from Reality.  It is therefore the very ‘poster child’ of diversity.

But madness is not what is valued here.  A more accurate statement is that diversity is valued within the truth relation.  Thus is created the issue: what is to be done with madness?

A specific species of Madness, generally, rejects challenges.  Since madness is also inherently baseless (that is, the particular form of madness exists only by accident; a different set of events would produce different details of madness), then it must reject variety to remain itself.  Non-madness or sanity is enhanced by variety; it is recognized as unfinished, still in formation from the touches of Reality that valuing diversity makes it ready to receive.

Madness does not carry a sign.  In our society much that is madness is seen as the essential roots of normalcy. (more on this elsewhere)

(8) Support Reality based contact with the world: Contact with people, other living things and the physical world is best done “in person.”  Our various “communication” devices and methods need to be seen as isolating and discommunicators; their proper function is to facilitate direct contact rather than substitute for it.  This is particularly an issue for those devices and methods that directly support “story” (cultural ‘DNA’): books, movies, radio, TV and increasingly Internet connections have become the repository of story, replacing community and the mutualizing process of story creation, interpretation and implementation.

Another related part of this value in to confront and deal with both the sane world and the mad world on the same (non-mad) terms.  Those parts of the mad world with which one must have relationships must be honestly, directly and immediately acted on, not in the terms of the mad world (which will have great force to design the form of action), but in terms of this overall value system.

(9) Living in specieshood as a practice:  In the simplest terms this is living within the biological designs of the species.  A beaver acts like a beaver.  A Wasp acts like a wasp.  A human might best act like a human.  But the information how to and the functional capacities to act like a human have been drowned out by the self-referencing Madness (even as we feel the tugging); it must be rediscovered by effort and practice.  Even avoiding the most oppressive forms of madness is not enough, is only a necessary beginning.  This is the life-long personal quest that is practiced by spending time in The Real every day.

(10) Establishing a truth relation with the madness:  The madness, if one is not absorbed into it, can be seen as a local reality the way one might look at the behavior and rules of a club or, physically, at the surf at the beach.  We have no trouble being in a truth relation with the waves at the beach.  We fight against them to a measured extent; we give up to them also in a measured way.  We do not demand to breathe when we are knocked down and held against the bottom.  We do not rail against their uncertainty or their power.  We use them for our pleasure even as we are occasionally tossed and scraped.  We avoid them when they are more powerful than our own strength. This is the way to live with the madness.

A New Way of Understanding Our Situation, Part two

Continued from “A New Way of Understanding Our Situation” 

After many years of thinking about and writing about this way of understanding experience, the three systems of order that I postulate in the first part of this essay as the primary order giving principles in our world seem to me not only acceptable, but essential for making sense of where we are, where we are going and, when it is different, where we need to be going. I realize that someone coming on these ideas afresh may not be so confident of their efficacy or importance.  I would like to explain my confidence in them. 

Experience comes to us from a wide variety of sources; cacophony is a good metaphor.  It is deep in the human process to create order from these perceptions.  There must be corollaries to this deep process: one is that organizing perceptions into patterns and operating principles allows for organized responses; another is that the process, as it formed in humans, has been largely veridical.  The question that begins to agitate under the covers of the obvious is: how is the world organized so that these conditions can be met? 

First, it is obvious that the physical world is a system of order.  The ordering principles are the laws that relate one matter/energy form/process to another, whether these are the hard and fast deterministic laws of Newtonian physics, the statistical world of Quantum mechanics or the more “real life” combination of the two conceptual forms seen in chemistry.  Flowing from these ordering principles are probabilities of occurrence: given certain sets of initial conditions some outcomes have very high probabilities and some have very low probabilities; most physical processes are either almost 1 or almost 0.  The physical world is a world of certainties and near certainties. 

But functioning on this physical world is another system of order with very different qualities.  It can only come into existence by meeting the conditions of the Physical System of Order, but when it does, it is its own thing within the prescribed domain. It is the Living System of Order (LSO) and it is not just a special form of the physical system though it is dependent on and must function in the physical system’s consistencies. 

What is the probability in the PSO of an elephant?  If we apply all the laws of physics and chemistry, we would have to conclude that it is vanishingly small.  If we look for elephants in the universe, realizing the conditions required for their existence, we would have to conclude that again the probability is vanishingly small; in the total volume of the universe there are effectively no elephants at all!  Even if we were to calculate the probability for the surface of the earth producing an elephant if every condition were as it is now except that life did not exist, then the probability is still vanishingly small.  But, when life exists in a place the probability of producing nearly infinite varieties of life forms becomes 1.  What is the key understanding? 

Life is a system of order.  It is a design that puts matter and energy into specific patterns by using the laws of the PSO.  The center piece of a system of order is a process of storing the information of and for its functioning.  Life is a process of change in the organizing principles for matter/energy; its central information process has to represent change as well as consistency.  It must respond to events, select what is to be stored as change and it must have methods to implement the information that it contains.  This is a fundamentally different set of processes compared to the PSO.  It functions by its own rules so long as sufficient stability is delivered by the surrounding physical conditions. 

The key to recognizing a full-fledged system of order is that it creates its own probability structure.  In the physical order conservation of momentum has a high probability, as does the response of hydrogen clouds to gamma radiation.  Stars are a certain occurrence is the PSO; a mouse has a probability approaching zero.  In a place where the living order has formed, billions of living things are expected and expected to change over the time that the physical conditions allow the living order to function: “mice” are a certainty. 

What about pottery?  What about rope?  What about toothpaste and space shuttles?  What is the probability of a horse drawn wagon in the LSO?  The millions and millions of objects littering the earth, that have an almost zero probability of occurrence from the PSO and the LSO, strongly suggest that there is an other system of order creating a new probability structure for existence.  I am calling it the Consciousness System of Order (CSO). 

I came to this notion in my attempts to understand consciousness.  Such an attempt is a bit like the stresses created by constipation… until the idea invades the consciousness that just as understanding life has come with our understanding the functioning of the parts seen as a whole, so something similar might work with consciousness.  Then it hit me; it is its own system of order, a new system of order that uses information in totally new ways. 

Of course, there is nothing new in the details; everything that we have to deal with is still the same.  Again, just as life has been being lived for billions of years without a theory of it, having a theory of consciousness doesn’t have to change things.  But, also like the increasing understanding of life, options for good and evil are generated; though in the case of consciousness, we must begin to have a better understanding of ourselves and our processes if we are going to get out of the present and growing dilemmas with our skins. 

The CSO requires its own book or books, but the argument here gives enough to suggest that such a way of seeing the human adaptation could be important, I think essential.  A major conclusion is that the CSO is a new, forming way of organizing information.  Like any new adaptation in the early stages there is no telling if it will be successful or how it will change and develop.  We, who are of it and in it, just know that, as of now, its unfettered manifestation, for all of its wonders, has led us to the brink of the collapse of the human cultural, political and economic systems precipitated by ecological perturbation and potential collapse. 

Just as life ‘rides’ on the physical order, it may well be that the consciousness order ‘rides’ on the living order in an analogous way, though there are humans hell-bent-for-leather pushing to see if it could also be manifest in the PSO.  Just as we need to slow down and take stock of what we doing on the mundane level of just being vast in numbers and consumption of planetary resources, we should also begin to be a bit careful about attempting to manifest CSO qualities in machines – science fiction has long made that prescient suggestion. 

But, it is understanding how the Consciousness Order arose, how its functioning has changed, how it is functioning now and especially the dangers associated with this adaptation that we need in this time.  Don’t get me wrong.  We are all experts in the CSO and many have a pretty good idea what is needed, but as with all things psychological and sociological it is the counter intuitive that tricks us.  Having a working model, even if inadequate, focuses the understanding in ways that gives a better chance of discovering error. 

For the moment it is enough to say that the CSO has become a loose cannon, a powerful adaptation no longer attached to Reality, but remains the tool that humans must use to act in the world. The whole system of order, the design gives pattern and meaning to our experiences, has become self-referencing rather than being limited or guided by any consistent source of reality-based information. 

We tend to have the idea that conscious awareness is a guiding principle, that somehow logic and reason are superior, transcendent qualities.  Our attempts at understanding have so very often sought to discover how a “consciousness” might be the source of order and guidance – and there we stop, satisfied that we have solved the problem: the universe, created by the God consciousness; intelligent design; the discovery of motive in a crime; the ‘reason’ that something went right or went wrong.  

Such a way of thinking will always turn back on itself and, like a snake swallowing its own tail, be self-destructive.  It is very difficult to grasp, but the consciousness order is just as unguided by ‘consciousness’ as the ordered structure of an atom or the physical processes that have sculpted the surface of the earth.  The clear implication of the CSO model is that it is an evolved adaptation with all the limitations inherent in other systems.  The CSO is a very special way of doing life’s business, not a way of avoiding or superceding the biophysical Realities of the PSO and the LSO 

The CSO cannot input the information of reality through its own agency, but must be acted on by Reality and so must be embedded in Reality.  This is a great error that we are making and have been for some considerable time: the idea that what seems real to us is reality.   

The CSO is an incredibly powerful tool that forms experiences into patterns of action; imagines possibilities and then seeks to manifest the imaginings; stores its summations of experience as stories, spreading them in space and time to be used as new experiences from which new patterns and imaginings are formed; creates past and future, mapping the ‘world’ in time and space. And yet the capacity that is claimed as its highest calling, a critical facility, it has not at all.  The consciousness order is as completely at the mercy of the simple dictum, “garbage in, garbage out” as the simplest computer. 

When the experiences that form our patterns of belief and action come only from our previous beliefs and actions, when the Realities rising out of the PSO and the LSO are avoided by failing to include them in experience, then the produced patterns and actions of the CSO processes are absolutely certain to fail. 

Reality is that the earth is a summary of innumerable coincidences creating conditions of stability upon which life formed and now rides.  The variations of life have had sufficient opportunity to produce an adaptation manifesting the most minutely possible principles of a new system of order riding on (or in if you like) a single species.  The magnificence of this occurrence is beyond beyond.  The functioning of this adaptation is problematic given the nature of its origin, and now it is a toss up as to whether the carrier species will discover how to manage such a powerful adaptation before its more dangerous expressions destabilize the conditions that allow it to exist.

Consciousness Order and Belief

Everyone has to act.  We all have to do things.  And since we are not simply directed in our every move by omnipotent outside agencies, our actions are generated by processes within us. Where does what we do come from and how are we to judge the quality of our actions? 

My concerns here are for the behaviors that we normally think of as involving judgment, that contain elements of the correct and incorrect or right and wrong, and not the most basic things we do arising out of reflex or primary biological need – though what we accept of our biological needs is certainly part of my concern. 

I propose a relatively simple model: a motive makes a demand, some information based intermediary forms the possible actions, a valuing system measures and we create an action in the world. Or to put it even more simply for social, political and economic actions: motive appeals to belief and belief generates behavior. 

Motive is very complex as it integrates biological drives from the purely hormonal, through instinctual to the instinct-like propensities that are biologically almost formless, awaiting specific learning to give direction.  While these are all important, for this little exercise motive will not be worked to the bone. 

And behavior is an essential element in this circle of process.  It can be almost anything; it can ‘mean’ almost anything.  It is behavior that moves this wheel along and vast studies can be made of it.  But I will leave the behavior itself largely unexamined. 

It is the bridge between motive and behavior that interests me.  Belief: the process that organizes the motive into possibilities using information in such a way that an action is produced [1].  Belief is a fruit of the Consciousness System of Order (CSO).  It is the new thing in the universe.  Its function is to fill a space that did not exist before the human brain allowed it to exist: the direct link between motive and behavior can be broken in the human brain and left formless for a time to be compared with tens, even hundreds, of related options.  But such a process is slow, too slow and too exhausting for much of our behavior [2]. 

Other animals solve the problem of speed of action by directly linking the motive with the action and accepting the evolutionary time scale of adaptation to make changes – “belief” for them is an evolution-tested part of their genetics.  The acceptance of the rigidity of genetically driven behavior is easy since there is no other option in the Living System of Order (LSO). 

The new system of order, that developed out of the increasing success of hominid learning “experiments”, gradually removed the limitations of genetic control, replacing these controls with environmental consistency as the limiting and controlling agency.  Eventually the confluence of neural development, social communication complexity and language began to form a super-organismic structure of Story that existed outside of the brain, that lasted in time and did not die with the individual, that could be spread with the speed of a running man. Belief had entered the world.  Belief could now intervene between motive and behavior.  And belief could be changed at any point in the cycle of life with a change of Story. 

When Story was immediately and intimately connected to and drawn from the environment it was naturally veridical regardless of the details of its content; there needed to be no “rules” about how Story was created. The dominating forces of the environment controlled the substantive effects of Story.  Ghosts could prowl the lake margins at night with the result that people approached them (the margins and the ghosts) with great care.  It was not the ghosts that mattered, but the motivating and organizing power of the story to effect adaptive behavior. 

The environment did not lie; there was no such concept.  Specific organisms might attempt to deceive, but their deceptions were no more than a minor additional complexity to the human mind. Belief formed in a veridical world.  There was no force to press for powers of discernment for truth; for detail, yes, but not for truth.  We are still much like that today, though the recognition of truth has become a most vital skill. 

With such a history it is natural that we still take what we believe to be essentially the same as what is true.  Of course, this never was so.  Many different beliefs could guide us to behaviors that were adaptively functional and successful.  What mattered was behavioral success, not what was believed to accomplish it.  The truth relationship was between the environment and the behavior, belief was only a tool. 

Today the world of information that we have formed around ourselves is not veridical.  It is a better assumption today that everything that one takes in as information and, therefore that one believes, is false.  But, of course, that is impossible.  Motive, belief, behavior!  If all information is false, if everything believed is wrong, then there can be no action.  However, such a desperate annihilation of present belief is a necessary first step. 

We must discover and institute new sources of veridical information, and this time with veridicality of Story also.  In the past there was no way to accomplish informationally accurate stories even as the consequences of the Stories was to adapt behavior to Reality: the parts that had to be accurate in detail were, but those parts that functioned better with exaggeration or wholesale manufacture of powerful mythic forms did so.  But today we grow our stories without a base in Reality.  They grow one from another: the distortion in the first becomes the absolute truth of the second, the misperception and mistranslation of the third is the whole strength and basis of the fourth.  Reality only intrudes in the terrible moments of pandemic or natural and manmade disaster and then only long enough to provide a new source for baseless beliefs. 

The point is that we will not find a basis for veridical belief thrust upon us by the environment, not without the complete destruction of our present world – and then it would only be a return to the veridicality of environmental force on a marginal human presence.  No, we must use the powers of imagination and adaptation conferred on us by the mighty Consciousness System of Order to find our way. 

This means that we must begin with the tools presently in our experience that are specifically designed and proven effective at most closely approximating Reality.  These would be the processes of scientific discovery and the studies of logic and reason that make up epistemology.  I say ‘begin’ with these tools because they, in their present form, are severely limited in appropriate application.  But we must pull back toward the limits of understanding that veridical information would support and work out from there. 

We have a hundred thousand years of history ‘going along to get along’ with our habits of adapting beliefs as the intermediary structure between motive force and behavior; it has gotten us to our present quandary.  It has run its course. 

The CSO has the capacity to imagine new options and to implement them though not without pain and not as quickly as needed – or perhaps not even at all if the status quo crushes new ideas, communication and the ‘rights of assembly.’  Because, quite candidly, the changes required would demolish the mythic Story of elite superiority and privilege.  Radical changes in the economic and political orders would be complimented with similar changes in social arrangements and religious belief and practice. 

I have a list of some of the most important changes in the form and substance of our beliefs that would be required in another essay.  The list is reproduced here following this essay.  

The next one is devoted to attempting to the continuing effort to understand our situation and options should we make, or be presented with, the opportunity to begin the changes. 

[1] It needs to be noted that there are positive ‘in-actions’ that are equivalent to action, like waiting and meditating.  Think of a house cat poised at the hole of a pocket gopher, absolutely still save for the tip of its tail twitching to bleed off the spring tight energy of waiting.  There are also in-actions that are a paralysis of competing beliefs or incompatibility of motive, belief and possible action. 

[2] There is no question but that incipient forms of these processes can be seen in the big brained animals, animals that have replaced some instinctual limitations with instrumental learning allowing the organism to fit more exactly into specific environments.  This is still, in most cases, primarily an instinctual process; the learning is usually associated with defined periods of development.  It is just too dangerous (non-adaptive) for a species to give up the hard won and proven veridicality of evolutionary process.

Understandings and beliefs needed to stabilize the earthly living space: 

1) Humans are animals that must integrate their behaviors into ecological processes (even if they can get away with not paying attention to ecological reality for some extended period of time).  As animals we have behaviors characteristic of our species that, so long as we were sufficiently connected to the natural environment in which they evolved, took care for themselves, but which today take special attention to understand, support and mitigate as we confront the “unnatural” world we have created. 

2) Nothing can be owned by anything, all claims of property and ownership are relationships in which one party is arbitrarily devalued based on short-term power imbalances – always the result of the failures of full system integration (usually because we are driven by desire for ‘gain’ dependent on limited understanding).  This doesn’t mean that human political and economic systems don’t have to address the use of space and material, but our ways of thinking about them must change. 

3) Wealth accumulation is an aberrant behavior – a form of psychopathology. Emotionally healthy people strive for sufficient material wealth to be safe in Reality and realize the damaging effect that excess has on both environment and specieshood.  The concepts of property and wealth accumulation are among the most dangerous ideas and behaviors of humans. 

4) The measure of normal in the world must be from places and processes that are uninfluenced by human action (except where humans are fully integrated into the relevant ecologies).  Finding such places today is difficult, but they can be reasonably well modeled still. 

5) There are no normal or natural human behaviors, group or individual, of any scale remaining in the human repertoire.  I wish that you would read that statement a couple of times.  Normal, that is the behaviors and feelings of specieshood, has to be rediscovered with focused intention.  All references to “normal and natural” that depend on present behaviors are seriously suspect.  Since most of the information we receive from the world is created by some human with an agenda to influence us in some way, we must become careful of what we subject ourselves to, when and how.  Just as we are learning to eat with a mind to additives and nutrients, actively avoiding some and selecting other foods, so we must also be careful of our perceptual diet. 

6) Humans are a community-based organism.  We are individual only with the support of a community.  It is ironic that as we have come to depend on more and more others, some of us have taken to trying to see themselves as more and more individual and independent – to the point of proclaiming absolute ‘individualism.’  The absurdity of this is obvious if you simply imagine them without the millions of people that they depend on (yet deny and reject – see #2) as supporting cast. 

7) Our understandings of and relationships to health, illness and death have become terribly distorted.  A biological body is not evolved to continue functioning for much more that the average live expectancy of the species.  The devotion of individual people to their own ‘individualism’ gives the impression that there is something there to ‘live long and prosper.’  But that is only appropriate in a community design where living long and prospering supports the community.  Healing individuals and defeating death (for a time) to the detriment of the species is madness. 

8) Our spiritual understandings and habits are the distorted products of the pre-scientific forest life made to serve the interests of kings and other authoritarians.  We need to recognize the incredible creation that is the Consciousness System of Order, its immense power to support our relationship with reality and its devastatingly dangerous power to distort it.  Our connections to the universe are vital and, if given the opportunity to do so in Reality, can grow into forms and in ways of being that we cannot guess.