Money, $

[_Avatar_]

Thank you for reading, if you did.

Great post, thanks for writing. Sort of like a condensed version of Zeitgeist and a couple of other documentaries I've seen.
Will write more later, I want to read the other posts in this thread now.

 

[IJesusChrist]

@Avatar, no problem - I am trying to keep a level head, yet express my emotion for the subject.

@Magick, your posts are always too good to be true you seem to have too much wisdom friend

@Mescaline,

... I hate the system as much as you do. I also would gladly support local (individual) crops etc:

If i conducted research into depression, in fair trade to get food from helping people with depression, that would be great. I would benefit myself by treating depression, trade my knowledge for sustenance, and benefit others with the same problem. This would be great!! But what if I need many subjects? What if I need expensive equipment? How do I get that in the first place? What if I need an MRI?! Where does a single researcher get one of these without first presenting something else of worth?? Who would make the MRI machine?

This would work in an ideal environment, but at the moment - thats what it is: ideal. We aren't going to get there by going on welfare and consuming psilocybin on a monthly basis and recording what happens. We're going to have to use the system we're in.

I would like to be slightly mean here and ask what the hell have you done to accelerate the changes needed to transition over to this type of system?

@everyone.

These are the changes I can give you to do, and these, when added up by everyone will have an affect, and are VERY easy to do. It angers me how easy these ideas are to utilize, yet few do it:

Become aware of energy. By simply becomeing aware of energy, you will reduce your use. Be aware that leaving your computer on (even on screensaver) is a display of ignorance. This goes along with water use also.

Do not use credit cards. Ever. I don't care, no excuses, don't do it. I'm sure most of you are good about this rule.

Avoid interest fees at all cost. Absolutely take higher payments for less interest paid - this undermines banking systems.

Think about walking/biking/driving/taking an elevator vrs stairs etc. I personally made a pledge to myself to never use an elevator again. (unless we're looking at 20+ stories.)

Recycle, reuse, grow your own, build your own, etc.

My main two points:
Money should be equivalent to energy. Money should represent an amount of energy.

Becoming aware is the key to overcoming this system. It's not as bad as you think - it's society that amplifies the systems short comings, not the system itself. Tell your neighbors.

~~!@#R I'm building a solar panel. It's super easy.

 

[buffachino]

Power may corrupt people. but without power there is very little you can do.

That’s true, but power stems from within, not from without.
We only have the power to know who we are.

I do not advise giving away your power rights and freedoms.

Amen.

It's easy to always point the finger at the people in powerful position. When you walk away from power and responsibility yourself.

Indeed.
People confer power to others, to concepts and institutions, because it creates comfort in irresponsibility and a sense of belonging to an entity greater than oneself. it gives meaning and purpose; direction for peoples lives.
There's something alluring in having the power to choose ones own powerlessness.

 

[Jeniger]

however i don't believe that being on welfare and doing nothing is the best solution for change. I think being self sufficient is a better way to go.We need to educate ourselves and come up with ideas and projects for change.

We aren't going to get there by going on welfare and consuming psilocybin on a monthly basis and recording what happens.

Exactly taking distance from all consumerism and being as much self sufficient is a better way to go. For some people welfare automaticly means doing nothing, but then u are still stuck in duality... u can spend more time in being self sufficent when u have more time. To educate yourself you need time and energy.

 

[Brugmansia]

So what's the substitute for the current system without its harmonious proportions of power? How do we deal with individuals incapable of having integral responsibility for themselve? How do we ''wake them up" without them falling into amnesia after a while? How do we prevent the human mind from developing its greed again in the long-term? (Including the small intelligent groups with its powerful charismatic speakers).

To be honest I think that one can perfectly make the decision to live with the still existing tribes. I suppose we'll be amazed about our addiction to the luxury of the internet, health care as well as an house with a lock and safety. It's due to the internet (remember the raw materials that are used for your computer, Africa suffers for it) that we could taught ourselve the footnotes and philosophy for a discussion like this. As well as spreading "the message" on a much bigger global scale than ever before.

We should keep our mastication rate at a low level as individuals, and meditate on every ordinary ambition whether it really contributes to our happyness and connection with the ecological system. But a rough system change?

Mister Andersson merely destroyed Smith out of his consciousness by learning how to speak to his mind with his full subjectivity and breaking the connection with the object-oriented world (he hung up that phone), living dreams as the ultimate desire and passing that technique on, instead of carrying ambition to become a 1.

Btw: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulacra_and_Simulation

 

[buffachino]

So what's the substitute for the current system without its harmonious proportions of power? How do we deal with individuals incapable of having integral responsibility for themselve? How do we ''wake them up" without them falling into amnesia after a while? How do we prevent the human mind from developing its greed again in the long-term? (Including the small intelligent groups with its powerful charismatic speakers).

I think it entails sensitivity to sensation, to feeling, to experience.

The problem seems to be desensitisation.
Overstimulation with the trivial; total cognitive saturation beyond the point where we can feel the consequences of our actions toward each other and the world.

It’s the direct connection with the experience of existence which we need to empower.

To be honest I think that one can perfectly make the decision to live with the still existing tribes. I suppose we'll be amazed about our addiction to the luxury of the internet, health care as well as an house with a lock and safety. It's due to the internet (remember the raw materials that are used for your computer, Africa suffers for it) that we could taught ourselve the footnotes and philosophy for a discussion like this. As well as spreading "the message" on a much bigger global scale than ever before.

As magickmumu said, with power (privilege) comes responsibility, but also the great potential for abuse.
If we can wipe away the veil that shields the privileged mind from the felt presence of his connection with the universe and all things within, then I think we are at least one step closer to a more humane global village.

We who have the means and the knowledge have the responsibility to reforge that connection, in ourselves and in others.

 

[Brugmansia]

We're on the same wavelength then. The idea about a global village is very tasteful. Altogether established on a peer level maintained through the straight penetration of every collective sensation rather than a self oriented corpus.

 

[Echoes]

Some quotes from this book of essays that I'm reading: "Mindfulness in the Marketplace: compassionate responses to consumerism"

(Maybe this is not the appropriate place to post all these quotes but I don't care, it maybe sheds some light, although I'm sure many of you are aware of these problems)

"(…)money, ultimately, represents a thought or idea that may have little to do with real value or worth. Money can represent real needs, like food or shelter, but more often it measures the strength of an abstract desire.(…) The value is a kind of collective visualization, a made-up creation that has become real because we have all agreed to make it real (…) Money is to deeply a part of who we all are. None of us can avoid money, but we can be much more conscious of how it functions in our lives." Lewis Richmond

"(…)Western view of work has spread throughout the world and has been responsible of the idea of working to consume more and more things or, as Rostow suggests, an ideal of a mass consumption society.(…) Work, he suggests, must lead to the kind of consumption, not of the mass consumption variety, that can ensure the happiness of others in the community. This approach to work and consumption is based on the consideration of others including nature, and can be the basis of a stable and sustainable economy" Shinichi Inoue

“Craving, whether for wealth, sex, power, or fame, can lead you to suffering. But if you have a healthy desire- like the desire to protect life, to protect the environment, or to help people, while still taking the time to take care of yourself , and to love and take care of loved ones- this is the kind of desire that will bring you to happiness.” Thich Nhat Hanh

A modern expression of this view is given by Sulak Sivaraksa, who describes the necessity for a more compassionate and simple way of living: "We can only save ourselves when all humanity recognizes that every problem on earth is our own personal problem and our personal responsibility.... Unless the rich change their lifestyle considerably, there is no hope of solving the problem of famine in the world."

"Current economic production with its worship of 'growth' is simply unsustainable for the future, a view globally accepted at the Rio and Rio+5 conferences. The easiest way to substantiate that claim is to project western consumption levels onto the whole world (which is the 'hidden' aim of the current world economy and the worship of 'growth'): the biosphere can't cope. It is estimated that we would need three additional planet Earth's to do it."

"In contemporary capitalist society, the central value of moneymaking goes hand in hand with the glorification of material consumption. A never ending stream of advertising messages reinforces people's delusion that the accumulation of material goods is the royal road to happiness, the very purpose of our lives. The United States projects its tremendous power around the world to maintain optimal conditions for the perpetuation and expansion of production. The central goal of its vast empire, its overwhelming military might, impressive range of intelligence agencies, and dominant positions in science, technology, media, and entertainment is not to expand its territory, nor to promote freedom and democracy, but to make sure that it has global access to natural resources and that markets around the world remain open to its products. Accordingly, political rhetoric in America moves swiftly from "freedom" to "free trade" and "free markets." The free flow of capital and goods is equated with the lofty ideal of human freedom, and material acquisition is portrayed as a basic human right, increasingly even as an obligation." Fritz Capra

"This religion of consumerism is based on two unexamined tenets or beliefs:
1) growth and enhanced world trade will benefit everyone, and
2) growth will not be constrained by the inherent limits of a finite planet"

"The question is not to consume or not to consume, but whether or not our choices lead to sell-development. (...) In this light, non-production can be a useful economic activity. A person who produces very little in materialistic terms may, at the same time, consume much less of the world's resources and lead a life that is beneficial to the world around him. Such a person is of more value than one who diligently consumes large amounts of the world's resources while manufacturing goods that are harmful to society. But modern economics could never make such a distinction; it would praise a person who produces and consumes (that is, destroys) vast amounts more than one who produces and consumes (destroys) little."
Ven. P.A. Payutto

"Arnold Toynbee looked at the rise and fall of over 20 civilizations and summarized civilizational growth with his Law of Progressive Simplification. In accord with this law, Toynbee said that the essence of civilizational growth is not power over land, or power over people (and I think now he would also say it's not how much we consume.) The essence of a civilization's growth is its ability to transfer increasing increments of energy and attention from the material side of life to the psychological, spiritual, cultural, and aesthetic."

-Helena Norberg:

"What does the globalized economy really mean? The president of Nabisco once defined it as "a world of homogeneous consumption"--a world in which people everywhere eat the same food, wear the same clothing and live in houses built from the same materials. It is a world in which every society employs the same technologies, depends on the same centrally managed economy, offers the same Western education for its children, speaks the same language, consumes the same media images, holds the same values, and even thinks the same thoughts. In effect, globalization means the destruction of cultural diversity. It means monoculture."

"An important aspect of moving toward smaller-scale human institutions is reaffirming a sense of place. Each community is unique in its environment, its people, its culture. Human scale minimizes the need for rigid legislation and allows for more flexible decision making; it gives rise to action in harmony with the laws of nature, based on the needs of the particular context.(...) Despite the many environmental, social, and even ethical benefits that decentralized economic activity could provide, governments are blindly promoting exactly the opposite: massive centralization on a global scale. Since economic centralization is promoted in the name of "oneness" and "interdependence"."

-Paul Hawken interview:

"There are 100 million businesses in the world; ten thousand of them are big companies, and about a thousand are huge corporations that control the destiny of humankind. Those thousand need to be dealt with in every possible way. You can't speak truth to power if you are sitting in Starbucks fulminating about what's wrong. And you certainly can't educate people that way. It is also critical to make a distinction between corporations and the people inside them. Those people are us: our sisters, uncles, daughters, fathers, and neighbors. The corporation is a strange hybrid organism - neither human nor institution - that we don't fully understand, because it's very different than anything seen before on earth. "

"Today, people's survival depends on abstractions contained in stock-market data, on professional skills that are independent of place, on monetary flows, and on kinships that are scattered geographically"

"The irony is that we have the means to completely transform every sector of the economy, from agriculture, to healthcare, to energy, but our efforts are being blocked by a corporate oligarchy that holds the power in this country and around the world. We are so numb in this country, so anesthetized, that most Americans don't realize that, in the last presidential election, we witnessed a palace coup complete with puppet dictator backed by a rich cabal. "

"When, for the first time, a nine-year-old barefoot boy and a wild crawfish encounter each other by surprise in a cold spring creek, there is nothing like it in the world. The boy's life is changed. And if he explores this watery world and the woods that surround it for the length of a long summer, he will have taken the whole ancient biosphere into his soul, never to be forgotten. The imprint is for a lifetime.
But if those imprintable years are allowed to pass for a boy or girl with only vicarious, mediated experience of nature, it is likely that as adults they will never be able to understand why a mountain forest is anything more than a pretty scene for a postcard or potential boardfeet or pulpwood for the commodities market." Tyrone Cashman

You vote with your $$$, buy smart and work meaningfully!

Alan watts "Music and life"

 

[buffachino]

Thanks for that Echos, it was really refreshing.

 

[Jeniger]

Fantastic post indeed!! :!:

"The question is not to consume or not to consume, but whether or not our choices lead to sell-development. (...) In this light, non-production can be a useful economic activity. A person who produces very little in materialistic terms may, at the same time, consume much less of the world's resources and lead a life that is beneficial to the world around him. Such a person is of more value than one who diligently consumes large amounts of the world's resources while manufacturing goods that are harmful to society.

Exactly!!!!!!

 

[Brugmansia]

Damn nice post echoes. :mrgreen: Converts a whole intuitive aspect of the entheogenic experience to an intelligible text.