Since I don't know when I'll next have a chance to blog, and I'm feeling inspired, I'm writing a pretty long post here, reviewing principles I've been writing and talking about the past few years, all crystallizing together here.
But before I get started philosophizing, here's what's happening in my life now, an update on the "moneyless tribe" and possibilities of meeting up with us, and a re-cap of what's been happening the past few weeks.
The "moneyless tribe,"
meeting at the Rainbow Gathering again
Right now it's just me, Steph, and Jake camping in the canyon, as well as Freebird (who is camping near us and hanging with us a lot, but using money). Steph, Jake, Freebird, and I plan to leave for the Rainbow Gathering here in Utah sometime this week, and maybe others around Moab will join us.
Brandon left to visit his family with plans of hooking back up with us at the Gathering. Govinda left for good back to Australia. And Jake is the newest newcomer. He didn't know about me or this 'tribe' and just randomly bumped into us while hiking a couple weeks ago. Then he decided to bike back down here from Salt Lake City and hook up with us.
I kind of gave up on the "moneyless tribe" last Fall, and decided no more planning for it. I figured it will happen organically if it's meant to be, or it won't. When I let go, it started arising again on its own, though fluctuating.
Since folks ask how to find us, we'll have a "moneyless tribe" camp again, with a sign and directions posted at the gathering, like last year, so people can find us. And I really don't know what's going on after the Gathering. We might head to Oregon or we might stay around this area, or who knows. Depends on the consensus of our group. See consensus here if you're not sure what it is.
I put "moneyless tribe" in quotes because I don't like the idea of us having an official label. We're not really called anything. Just people who love each other and don't use money.
Any of you who hooks up with us must have zero expectations. Randomness and zero expectations are the ultimate driving force of this lifestyle, and the seeming lack of direction can be frustrating when you've been programmed by Babylon to have every minute of your life planned and scheduled and filled with incessant talking and "doing something." Incessant talking seems to be the biggest epidemic among especially white people. If you can't be content with doing nothing or randomness or silence, then don't come. What appears as lack of discipline (defined by Babylon) is our discipline. The discipline is living in the moment, accepting what is, and loving each other unconditionally. And it's a time of healing for us who need healing. Some folks come and leave because they think they might be a burden on us with their "hangups," and that makes me sad, because healing hangups is what this is about. Don't be so absorbed in yourself to think you're the only one with hang-ups. We all have our hang-ups. Also, expectations can be shattered realizing we do have hang-ups too. Boosting each other through thick and thin is called life.
The link between money, agriculture, conventional religion,
and our violation of nature
Last night I did my last radio show at KZMU Moab Community Radio for a while, maybe for good. I've enjoyed DJ'ing there so much, it's hard to let it go.
Between Cullen and me, we got about 2/3 of my shows recorded. I'm hoping to get them available on the internet when there's a chance to work on it.
My topic last night was "THE LINK BETWEEN MONEY, AGRICULTURE, AND OUR VIOLATION OF NATURE". My talk was an attempt to illustrate that our money, agriculture, religion, and their violation of nature, is not a lack of knowledge or proper programs or systems, but a simple manifestation of our not being authentic, a simple manifestation of having impure hearts. Here I'm going to expound on what I talked about last night.
First, I referred to Jared Diamond's The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race, Lierre Keith's The Vegetarian Myth, and Michael Quinn's Ishmael. In bringing up Lierre Keith's The Vegetarian Myth, I don't necessarily knock vegetarianism or vegan-ism, but I want to point out that if you do it for the purpose of avoiding killing, you're mistaken. If you're doing it for the purpose of not supporting factory farms, that's a good reason. But if you're eating from conventional agriculture, you're supporting just as much destruction as if you were eating factory farm meat.
What we must realize is there isn't a single life form that exists without the death of another. We cannot eliminate death any more than we can eliminate negative-charge particles. It's about finding the beautiful balance between life and death, not eliminating death. And, as Diamond, Keith, and Quinn point out, the evidence is overwhelming that mass extinctions, environmental devastation, chronic disease, malnutrition, class-ism, sexual inequality, and overpopulation came with the advent of agriculture.
Agriculture and money arose from the same mindset
My point is to take this deeper to show that agriculture and money arose from the same mindset. I have a hunch that money and agriculture arose simultaneously as a direct manifestation of our spiritual mindset, our lack of faith in the very most basic law of nature. Again, I call it thought of credit and debt, or "knowledge of good and evil", our fall from Grace, in our Judeo-Christian tradition, and "stealing fire from heaven" found in countless other traditions all over the world. The stealing fire from heaven is a way of describing our attempt to control the flow of energy and to possess it. It is our lack of faith in the current of energy, the currency of nature, trying to control and possess it. Our currency, our money, is not energy, nor the flow of energy, but simply our attempt to control that flow.
Money and agriculture, as well as conventional religion, represent not doing for the sake of doing, but for the sake of future reward, future fruit. Sow for the purpose of reaping in the future. Work for the sake of a future salary. Be good for the sake of a future reward in heaven or because of fear of punishment of hell.
Pay Myself vs Pay-It-Forward
In true hunter-gatherer culture, as well as in all wild ecology, there is a pay-it-forward system. One sows, another reaps. A bird eats a berry with no sense of payback to the berry tree. She reaps what others have sown. Then she poops out the digested matter as well as the berry seeds, planting and feeding and fertilizing other creatures, who reap what she has sown. And they continue this perfect pay-it-forward economy, all with no thought of barter or prices or economics. When you are authentically yourself, you are nature, and you have no attachment to the fruit of your actions. You have no ulterior motivation. This means you do for the sake of doing, not for future reward. Your reward is in doing.
On the other hand,
every interaction of nature is a perfect, simultaneous barter
At another level, the level of the present moment, you are participating in a perfect, unconscious simultaneous barter. Every interaction in all of the universe is a perfect barter, simultaneously in the present moment. Everything is paid for, everything runs on perfect justice.
I am talking the law of physics. For every force, there is an equal and opposite force, simultaneously in the moment. For every action, there is an equal simultaneous reaction. For every positive, there is an equal negative. For every wave crest, there is an equal wave trough. This is the most basic and simple law of all the universe, the law behind all laws, the simplest to grasp. Yet we somehow lost faith in it and cannot grasp it! This law of physics is also the law of biology and of social interaction.
If I cannot see that your giving to me is my giving to you simultaneously, if I cannot see that your doing a service to me is simultaneously my doing an exactly equal service to you, then I am living in delusion! The only possible impetus for inventing money and conventional agriculture is delusion, the delusion of not seeing this most basic law of the universe.
Vengeance is mine, I repay right now, says the Law of the Universe.
So, what do we do?
So, what do we do? The simple answer is, be authentic, be yourself, and all will fall into place. If I am myself, I won't do what I'm paid to do but will do what I know is natural for me to do. If I am myself, I well not give in to anybody or any system telling me to go against my own nature. That might mean quitting my job, quitting my religion, quitting my bank. Simple, but daunting to do. It might mean I get crucified.
On a larger scale, what could happen? Right now in the world we have a massive agricultural and money system and out-of-control overpopulation. Do we, must we, go back to hunter-gatherer living?
Permaculture
Let's refer back to a blog post I wrote here on November 15, 2011, To Be Yourself Is To Be Perfect
I'm feeling in my bones that permaculture is a key to bring in gift economy, for whole populations to live moneyless. I've never honestly cared for traditional agriculture, which I'm sure arose with money and barter, and was the beginning of our imbalance. My ideal has been the hunter-gatherer model, which obviously wouldn't work today without a major die-off of people. That leaves us permaculture, which is about creating a self-regenerating system, not only of agriculture, but of everything connected to it.
Machinery is generation. Life is regeneration.
This got me super excited, taking the principles of permaculture into social interaction:
Generation is generosity (which we see as a virtue). Regeneration is re-generosity - Gifts that keep giving. Generosity is a thing of artificial institutions. Re-generosity is a thing of living communities!
Generosity has a sense of self-righteousness, self-credit. "I did my good deed for the day", stacking up credit points.
Re-generosity is perpetual giving, such as breathing, having no thought of credits or debt. You don't expect praise for every lungful of carbon dioxide you freely give to the world, you just egolessly do it. And you don't feel guilty about every lungful of oxygen you take. Generosity comes from stores of excess, from possession. In re-generosity, there is no possession, only perpetual flow.
It makes no sense to "own" air in your lungs.
When you own nothing, there is no effort in giving, no sense of self-righteousness.
Life is not a charity, it is constant giving.
Permaculture is allowing everything to be its natural self, for greater efficiency and productivity with minimal effort, as all of nature works.
Re-Genesis
As I was re-reading what I'd written above, another epiphany hit me:
Regeneration is re-generosity is re-genesis!
We are in a culture, an agriculture culture, an agri-culture, a money culture, and a religious culture that thinks linearly, not cyclically. We are in a culture that sees a genesis and an end, with no regeneration. And it cannot recycle its own waste. We are in a culture that sees a linear scripture of Genesis and a Revelation, a creation and a final apocalypse. Nothing regenerates, nothing evolves, nothing recycles, everything has one beginning, regresses, then ends, capoot.
We sow a seed, it grows, we wait for its fruit, we harvest it, and it is over. Unlike a wild plant, it does not regenerate itself. It is not self-sustaining. It does not recycle. Its driving force, its motivation, is extrinsic. It needs an outward force to keep it alive. It does not have the wherewithal to live on its own. It is weak, and it imparts its weakness to us. We are a weak and immature culture.
Extrinsic or Intrinsic Motivation
And we are what we eat. We cannot find our motivation from within. Our motivation has become extrinsic. This principle is the theme of this speech I gave last May, on video here (You are your own diploma, you are your own currency). Yes, our motivation has become ulterior. Ulterior means further, future. Ulterior is something far away in space and time. Our reward is no longer in doing. Our reward has become far away in space in time.
Created in the Image of Reality
When our motivation is ulterior, we are not authentic, we are not real, we are not ourselves, we are not the Image of Reality. The Image of Reality is Reality. Reality creates us in Reality's own Image. Anything else is an idol. Idol is illusion. What motivates us is what we worship. We are what we worship, an idol, ulterior motivation, fake, illusion. What we worship is what gives us energy, our driving force, our food. This is my body, take, eat. We are what we eat. We are our agriculture. We are our money. We are our deluded religions.
Our agriculture does not regenerate itself. It is not permaculture. It is in battle with nature. It violates nature.
Myth of the Eternal Return:
Regeneration
And our conventional myth does not regenerate itself. It is linear, like our agriculture and our everyday thinking. Mircea Eliade pointed out how "primitive" cultures worldwide, unlike modern western culture, have a Myth of the Eternal Return. The Creation is ever repeating, yet Ever Now, and people enter into this Creation in religious ritual.
Our Suicidal Myth of Self-fulfilling Prophecy
Our world does not regenerate itself. It is artificial. It is not a Re-genesis, but began with a one-time Genesis. And, after linear time, like our agriculture, it will end in an Apocalypse-Armageddon. We have made our world such a prison, such a living hell, we rub our hands together in awaiting our Apocalypse Armageddon. We are making this Apocalyptic Armageddon happen in self-fulfilling prophecy. Except that we cannot recognize that our Armageddon is subject to the cycle of nature, thus we live in a perpetual Armageddon, a prison of hell, making us futily desire even more that it would end. Look around.
Take note that hunting and gathering cultures have never had a concept of an end of the world. This is a concept invented by agricultural cultures. If they have made the world such a better place, why oh why do they hope for its end?
We love our Savior in the past and we love our Savior in the future, but we call blasphemy any idea of our Savior within, here and now. We love our Eden, our Paradise, our Kingdom of heaven, in the past, and we love our Kingdom of Heaven in the future, but we call heresy any idea of the Kingdom of Heaven within, the Kingdom of Heaven at hand, here and now.
Uncovering Our True Myth Right Under Our Noses
You don't need any book to show you that Creation as well as the Apocalypse is happening now. Just look around you.
Light is coming to being right now,
as well as division between light and dark.
Water is accumulating into bodies
and atmosphere is forming right now.
The earth is bringing forth plants, right now.
And stars are being born, right now.
And animals and humans are being formed from the soil, right now.
And we are being conformed to the Image of Reality, right now.
And all is being destroyed, right now.
Apocalypse Now.
Genesis Now.
Even so, it's fun to look deeper at our old religious texts and uncover their covered truth.
Our myth (by myth I don't mean lie, I mean deep spiritual truths imparted through stories) was originally the Myth of the Eternal Return, and this deeply true Myth was lost, covered. Uncover the truth. Apocalypse means uncovering what already is. Yeah, it's funny we have to refer to books, like the Bible, to tell us what we already know. I get a kick out of telling folks I take the biblical Genesis creation literally, that the "fundamentalists" don't take it literally enough! If you take Genesis literally, you see that it is Re-Genesis. It is happening now. The Hebrew text is literally present tense!
Check out Young's Literal Translation of the Bible. The Hebrew scholar, Robert Young, found that,
Bereshith bara elohim, the RSV's "In the beginning God created...", is in the construct state (bereshith), not the absolute (barishona), meaning it refers to an action in progress, not to a completed act.and
Young's usage of English present tense rather than past tense has been supported by scholars ranging from the medieval Jewish rabbi Rashi... to Richard Elliott Friedman in his translation of the Five Books ...Until we get out of our delusion of linear thinking, of credit-and-debt mentality, of running on ulterior motivation, otherwise called greed and idolatry, yes, until we uncover the truth, until we realize that the Beginning is the End, ever Now, the same yesterday, today, and forever, until we see that Genesis is Ever Now, and the Apocalypse is Ever Now, we will not escape our violation of wild nature, violation of our own true natures, violation of our very own souls. Until we find our true Myth, the Myth of Re-Genesis, we will not live, we will not regenerate, we will not recycle, we will be fake and pathetic just like the characters we see on our televisions and in our offices of politics and business.
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