Hierarchy Without Tears

Buddha Monkey Chicken Crocodile

Buddha

Our spirit-life exists in timelessness - our core values, purpose, truth, and leadership.

Ahierarchial - is based in truths that are real. Each individual in the hierarchy recognises them as true and goes about their actions accordingly. There is no law. There are options and considerations. Those who can do, those who can't let those who can do - they learn how, or they do something else.

Monkey

Our natural-life exists in natural cycles - our rhythms, learning style, action, pleasures, and personality.

Role based and flexible. Feelings motivate toward exploration of the world and each other. Play is emphasised and seen as crucial to productivity.

Chicken

Our social-life exists in clock time - our tribe, favour, alliance, duty, position consciousness, self-consciousness, and worry.

The hierarchical being is a worried being.

Everything they touch, no matter how benign, they apply the Illich principle and make it a counterproductive institution. They weaponise it. Their basic point of view is paranoid.

Crocodile

Our economic-life exists in the now - our provisioning, sustainability, survival.

Everyman for himself. Anarchist in the worst sense. Capitalist in the worst sense. All about ourselves and devil take the hindmost. It is the absence of civilisation. Crocodilic mentality's presence in a civilisation is a cancer. It lives off the structures that can only be held in place by higher forms of consciousness, while maintaining that it has a right to pursue its agenda of freedom. This freedom is undermined by its actions.

Mr. Kingfisher

Mutualist Economics

Just what you thought I'd be writing about come the new year. A big title for a simple thought with interesting implications. Symbiosis means living together, and I believe that we must first be able to live with ourselves as a basis for our interconnections with others.

Consider all your desires, they need to live together. No amount of your not wanting a desire will make it not exist. Sure you can hide it. That's called repression. It leads to neurosis. If that's what you want. You can cannibalise your heart to push through your brain's agenda. That's called uptight WASP values. You can do that too if you want.

The great thing about symbiotic systems is they can at their best be mutualist, meaning you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours. It is the classic win/win scenario. So instead of our differences being something to be tolerated, or succeeded despite, they are the keys to mutual strength. The best couples are made of people with complementary strengths; their weaknesses give them appreciation for the mate's ability. It is also true of our interior selves.

Now on to the economic part: these systems, whether intrapsychic or social or ecological or possession oriented are feedback loops. It is to the advantage of one in a mutualist relation to add value to the process from which one receives, for higher value's sake. Put another way: if you bring champagne yeast to the loop, you eventually get to drink champagne. It needs to be understood that you don't have what it takes to make it all for yourself. Your supply line doesn't contain enough of what it takes to make a superior product. So like on Sesame Street, you learn to 'cooperate.'

"Ahhh... this is one of those, 'be nice to everyone and we'll all get along,' speeches," you say. Not exactly. A mutualist system is still based in the demand/supply=effort equation. If you have a great need for something and small supply, you will have to exert great effort (cost). Lots of need, but with an even greater supply leads to low effort. What is important about mutualist economics is that they are self enhancing feedback systems - they grow, they increase their supply through their use. Which means that the effort necessary for a mutualist system decreases over time. The supply becomes larger and larger.

This, you might think leads to decrease in effort, and it can, if one is content. Funny thing about humans is their not being very content. So as supply increases so does demand. Like the way the blindingly fast computer bought a few months ago is now an accursed and sluggish behemoth. It is unwise to stop up the supply, this can cause a backward feedback loop called 'sour grapes.' People want to feel relief, adn happiness. Make it so the supply doesn't advance quickly enough and they will frustrate, which leads to the playing of board games, and learning to knit. So called 'slackers' are customers who could not be satisfied, and so leave the economic loop to seek their desires. They are not 'low desire' individuals; they are frustrated. For everyone else who likes the products of this civilisation, let the supply roll full tilt and acclimatization will pull the demand forward.

Ahhh... this is one of those, 'just let the free market do whatever it feels like, damned the environment,' speeches, you say. Not exactly. In the practicing of mutualist psychology, relationships, and economics, it begins to dawn on people that the ecological welfare of the planet is also part of this. Increasing the soil's fertility is to our advantage. Preta terra, a self regenerating soil, has added to it charcoal, made from the leftover bio mass we don't eat. Plant the corn, pick the corn, char the stalks, stir it in, better soil for better corn. It wins, we win. And as we pursue more mutualist systems things get easier and easier, it is like the improvements earn compound interest. As to those who say we need to conserve, I disagree: we need to expand. Years ago I wrote a piece called ecocracy, I now see it is a word. Nature is not conservative, nature is expansive and proliferates in every imaginable way. The question is about how.

So it is with our lives. The Pareto 80-20 rule, that 80% of the value comes from 20% of the work, is not a formula to slack, or for second rate products. It is instead the result of mutualist systems that already exist and are being utilised, often without realising they are, and most often without adding anything to the system (parasitic businesses). Rather the 80-20 rule expressed the best feedback state: one in which our efforts of 20% will yield an 80% return. Mutualism is good for the soul, good for each other, good for the planet, and good business.

It is my new years resolution to engage, to the best of my ability, in only mutualist systems.

Mr. Kingfisher

Should I?

Long time since my last posting, and Ms. Sparrow hasn't written anything for a while. Granted she is traveling, perhaps there will be a summation of her trip.

In the mean time Charles Tart is asking for submissions for his YouTube series about his consciousness research. I was saying to a friend that it would be interesting to know the origins of the idea of 'should,' the feeling that one 'must,' 'has to.' She echoed the Buddha: 'let go.' Yes, of course, it is about letting go. That isn't the question.

My question was stimulated by that one of Ms. Sparrow's: 'Why can't people fully let go?' So my question about 'shoulds' is explicitly about expectations. Just telling one not to have them is redundant: don't have expectations, let go, don't should, etc., -- all the same thing.
Let me rephrase it so as to be absolutely clear.

What is the mechanism of sticky, expecting, shouldy, non let go-itivness?!

Why does it happen? Saying shouldy non let go-itiveness happens because of expectation, is like saying that rain is caused by precipitation. If you say 'desire,' as a blanket cause, what about hunger, and needing sleep? Ah, but those are natural, it is just the sticky desires, you say: ergo 'stickiness.' See above question.

Anyway, I have an answer to this. The chakras are ways to 'see' the world. I put 'see' in quotes because each chakra is rather more like its own unique sense, as sight is to smell or hearing. Now if you hear a tiger from a recording, you have trained yourself to not need the congruity of having to see a tiger as well. Think of each sense as an opinion about what is happening. A sense of what is happening, we say. So it is with the chakras. You have seven different opinions about everything you experience. Because they all channel through the feeling-mind we think they are the same. Our brain makes the experience seamless, just as with our other senses, giving us a 'whole.'

Just like the physical senses, the energy senses can encounter circumstances which are not coherent. So while your first chakra may enjoy the hollywood blockbuster, your third-eye sees it as boring. So was the film exciting or boring? It was both, and five other senses of it as well.

Where 'shoulds' come from is the chakras trying to get each other to agree with them, or the attempt to sum these into a coherent picture. Why can't the world be bittersweet, full of love-hate, and dangerous-opportunity? Agree to disagree with yourself. You contain different worlds of experience.

In ecology, the greater the number of 'ways' that different species of plants and animals can co-exist is the system's strength. In economics, having greater numbers of producers allows for choice, without discrimination. The strength of democracy is having many people see an issue from many sides, its weakness is that it leads to arguing instead of agreeing to disagree and a celebration of our differences.

This ecocracy starts with our own inner arguments. Each chakra has an equal say about any experience. Even in the most horrific there can be the beautiful, even in the most beautiful there can be darkness. If we can't agree to disagree with ourselves who can we?

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

Walt Whitman

Yet there is something beyond tolerating our own difference from ourselves. I do not contradict myself, I contain a divergence of valid opinions. Multivalent cohesiveness requires more than tolerance, more than putting up with what you don't like. It is easy if we all agree; if we disagree then there is tension so long as I think that you are misguided.

Reiss would suggest 'self hugging,' as the problem. Our motivations, what we want, are the right ones. In other words, "What I like is erotica; what you like is pornography." Remember I am talking about ourselves' desires, the desires that become 'sticky' when they are trying to implicate that another way of our loving is getting it wrong.

Walk on Walt Whitman, walk on.

Mr. Kingfisher

You are what you own.

Do you own it?

Most people don't - some examples:

1.  The gaping hole.
    All you need is some duct tape... and there! I fixed it.

2. The prepackaged fix (or Get someone else to do it for you).
    Sure they bill you lots of money, but hell you can put it on your credit card.

3. Working for that pension in thirty years.
     Just keep your head down, somewhere between your knees is probably good.

They don't own it. They don't have the guts to try. Try what?
Whatever it is. You know... "It."
You've been wanting to do it since you figured out what it was. Usually in your teen years.
Some people as soon as they realise it, hide it from themselves. They know they won't do anything about it, so why torture themselves about being a failure? That they never went for it. They didn't even try to do it.

And you want to know why I think that is? It's because you need to own it. Other people have expectations of you: shoulds and should'nts. It's just easier, or rather lazier, to do what they want -- what we think it is that they want. When you own it, any of it, you are responsible. Not in the good boy/girl, pat on the head, way. In the existential, acting without a net, totally adrift in autonomous individuality, way. It is yours. It isn't like everyone else's.

It is unique. And we are too afraid to be that -- What would the neighbours think?

And if you can't admit that "it" is yours, how will you ever admit that "it" is you?

Mr. Kingfisher

Shadow passes away

At five, at the end of the hour of the dog,
she wagged her tail, and was gone.

On El Dia de los Muertos, and Samhain
summer's end, and the year's beginning

our beautiful girl, died at home
with her loving parents attending.

Light a candle if you knew her.

Shadow
(May 1997 - November 1st, 2009)