About the possibility of a "Dark Age."

(This post is an excerpt from an ongoing discussion about such books as "The Long Emergency" and "The Comming Dark Age" as it appears in a forum called JUSTCOZ at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/justcoz. It is a site dedicated to the promotion of self sufficiency in local communities.)

Yes, Jacob's thesis (in "Dark Age Comming") appears pessimistic, but she states clearly that it is the description of a tendency, not a fate. She has great faith in our ability to change our course and the book is meant as a lens to focus our energies on specific leverage points.

In this regard I certainly agree with the simile of wealth as energy. Money is a symbol of work done, therefore can represent energy and its governance. Faith based and politically based systems are inadequate to deal with money as they are, to various degrees, adversarial systems, and though possibly valid within themselves,
ultimatley not accurate as models distributed wholley over the Universe. Being that they are localized, they are parochial attempts to get by in and explain "Life," and are, as we know them, at the root of the failure of Western society to cope with the world as it actually IS in an epistemological or ontological sense. That is why
societies that percieve Mankind as a function of Nature as distinct from a controler of Nature have a more one-to-one accuracy in their experience of existence, and a more accurate psychological map of our relationship with the World. Anyone as a physcist might appreciate the importance of this perspective as it is outlined in
Bohm's "Wholenesss and the Implicate Order" or Talbot's "The Holographic Universe."

Herein lies the link between personal maturity and responsibility. I am personally convinced that the founders of the great religions had the insight that we (I) and the Universe IS One in Essence, and based their ethic on that premise. This was dogmatized into faith systems, corrupted, naturally, into that by lesser souls who sold it to well meaning folk of lesser insight who were ready to recieve whatever
leadership would help their emotional nature cope. This is the human way. The "highest" path described in religious literature that I am aware of is known by its practitioners, among other names, as "The Path of Ultimate Responsibility."

That Path is at the root of the desired success of the bumper sticker that says "Do No Harm." Why would one harm what or who is Essentialy themselves, or their Self? The vastly immature understanding and practice of the concept of "Self" contributes to the afformentioned adversarial relationships in the most destructive ways. It is why the "Golden Rule" in either form lacks practice. I suspect that if translators had a more accurate grasp of the implications and referents of the the word idea translated as "I" from Aramaic and other languages, we might have a far different face on our dogmatized faiths, whether religious, political, or scientific. The idea of discreet individuals in competition with Nature and each other is an egoic invention punctured by the demonstrations of cooperation based on Love. That sees only Itself growing in maturity and wisdom, incapable of not bringing all its manifestations as people and their world with it. Such a standpoint also enables the perception of dissolution to be experienced as a function of creativity, where the
falling apart of a system is only the necessary step required for the enabling of a more encompassing functional understanding. But again, that requires the impersonal maturity and responsibility of the participents, eh?

Grammar Geeks

response to someone who was concerned about being perceived as a grammar geek because of her going to a copy editor's seminar:

"Personally I find nothing odd about this, and actually wish that the world was filled with grammar nerds. We do, to a large extent, perceive our world through our grammar. Musicians are a special lot, because they also have at their disposal the tonal scales and their infinities with which to feel the world. However, those with only verbal tools are limited by the structure of their tongue. That is why I hold correct grammar, epistemology, general semantics, NLP, and the Philosophy of Consciousnes w/out an object as being so vital. English, despite the ethereal beauty that it can be used to express, is a pathetic language for thinking about Reality. Its very structure and assumptions blind one to the obvious."

Anyone who has two or more languages, especially if they are, in our case, non Indo-European languages, perceives quite clearly that the structure and feel of experience is different through a different filter of grammar and vocabulary. One case comes to mind where a friend saw her sister, back from a mission assignment of a few years duration, speaking Portugese. She said "I was shocked: she was a different person altogether!"

Further to this, I was delighted to read in a story by Robert Heinlein that in English "'I' is the only form of the verb 'to be' that is true to fact." This is so, and is at the root of HUGE misunderstandings and mistranslations of sacred texts from the East and Middle East in particular. The sense of personal responsibility as confessed in the article on Ho'oponopono farther down the page is more like what I (lol) would consider accurate.

In fact, entire systems of experience, understanding, and expression are based on this different understanding of the word "I." The renowned Canadian Philosopher/Poet/Rennaisance man Kenneth G. Mills prefaced each of his books with an explicatory note regarding his use of the words "I," "me," and "you." Such a note is worth reading, especially if you are a musician.

Overburden

In the English language we care so much for and hold in high esteem, the word "love" has been burdened with far too much weight of meaning to bear in its simplicity. We have all these words for so many things, and for one of the most trans-dimensional, deep, subtle, variable in kind, depth, and degree of emotive feelings, we have one word and its paltry goup of emaciated handmaidens. Surley the word is much like the caryatid fallen under her stone. It makes me weep. No wonder we are such an imature race; we have no discernment of multi directional variables in the most power laden field of our experience.