8
February
2011
Recently I said to someone, “People self-confront to the level they’re able.”
Well, get ready, because A Question of Values is a confrontational book—question is, can you handle it?
Dr. Berman is a shrink/shaman diagnosing contemporary societies. And just as the most damaged individuals will not likely admit they have a problem, the most atrocious societies aren’t exactly lining up to get themselves deconstructed and straightened out.
Page one of Berman’s Preface portrays the home of the brave as “a callous place with a death instinct hanging over it like a dark cloud.”
Through this worldview, shaped by vast erudition and a rare integration of intellect, embodied life, and sage consideration, we see the United States in the process of dying stupid, irritated and depressed. It is seen as a social organization that has nowhere to go but to crumble on down, because it lacks, and has lacked from its early days, societal value structures that foster cohesive communities engaged in their own genuine welfare.
“Our contemporary political life of hysteria plus inertia,” as Berman puts it, is the inevitable outcome of underlying structural values governing the country since Jeffersonian democracy was adopted as a way of life, values that favor individual “success” and competition, at the expense of the common good.
“From Milton Friedman to Condoleezza Rice, drowning in crap is regarded as 'freedom,' with virtually no dissent on the subject from the American people,” he tells us. You sense that Berman has exhaustively researched the terrain of how we’ve gone wrong, pointing to whatever and whomever can help make his case, share his vision. For instance, he excised a quote from Richard Easterlin’s Growth Triumphant, “In the end, the triumph of economic growth is not a triumph of humanity over material wants; rather, it is the triumph of material wants over humanity.”
History, psychology, literature, personal experience, and pop culture weave in and out of these essays, in service to his teaching, that indicts all that is ugly, shallow, false and narcissistic, whether he’s looking at foreign policy, film, the Seinfeld show, or domestic trends. The book is sprinkled and laced with warnings about how close we are to ruin, telling us that “Tocqueville made it clear that democracy ultimately wouldn’t work if the population wasn’t too bright” and after Hobbes, after Shakespeare, warns that “hell is truth seen too late.” And yet his very last words hold out that it is perhaps not quite too late.
In spite of the secular nature of this book with its photo of pillars, like those before our state houses and courts, on the cover, the court we enter when opening A Question of Values is a court of heart, soul and conscience, a moral and spiritual court, if you will.
Berman’s eloquent voice is booming and echoing in there, as he argues against ignorance, immaturity and hubris, suggesting that we, the people, are getting away with murder. But, I’m afraid that the courtroom is scantily attended. A few people are out in the halls, filing their nails, ordering fast-food take-out and playing games on their cell phones. The judge is you, whoever you are. The case is you too and even if you close the book, the case is not closed, just as when someone elects not to enter or stay with therapy for their ills, that does not cure them.
About our endless expansionism, Berman says, “We don’t get it, that when you fight the ecology of a system, you lose, especially when you ‘win’.” You lose when you win, people: now that’s one tough double-bind to confront and unravel.
©2011 Jari Chevalier
jari 
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27
November
2010
Liberal/progressive uprising is a fantasy. I've written a response here to Living Hero Morris Berman’s November 23 blog article "Taking It Up a Notch." Berman speaks truth about American cluelessness, but there’s even deeper cluelessness to consider.
I heard Ted Rall speak about his new book, The Anti-American Manifesto, at Revolution Books the other night. I was just walking by after an art gallery opening and stepped up to the bookstore and saw there was an event in progress. Rall’s talk was well underway by that point.
During the Q & A I asked/commented, “So, we’re talking about a shootin’ revolution here? I have wanted to see revolutionary change in the world since I was 14 years old, but, seriously, how are we going to change things? How? We are well-educated, yoga-meditation-latte types.” (Rall had said something to this effect about himself, being someone who lives in a nice place and drinks lattes). I said, “I am a peace-loving person. You won't see me picking up a gun to shoot anybody.”
Rall said, with a bit of a laugh, that he’s actually been doing target practice and that maybe we should be taking up arms now. The bookstore owner, who was also up there on the dais, said I should come around more often to talk about this. Meanwhile, this tiny independent book shop is trying to raise enough money via donations to stay in business. You see the paper thermometer chart on the wall by the cash register showing how much they’ve raised so far and what the stay-alive goal is and I can tell you there was a long way to go.
What do we think the gouging of the middle class is all about? Nighty night!
Since that night I have actually inquired about a bullet-proof vest, helmet with face shield, hand-held body shield. What do you mean the best offense isn’t a good defense? Where are my comrades anyway? We gots to get a hold of some police and military equipment without joining any forces or spending time or money to learn how to use them--but maybe after some yoga and deep breathing we can meet up in a community room somewhere to learn how to twirl a police stick and administer CPR? Who’s bringing the cappuccino machine and the organic milk?
"Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of happy." (Ted Zatlyn, my dear friend and editor of the L.A. Free Press in its heyday.)
Well, it certainly has been a lot of talk, talk, talk, hasn’t it? -- panel discussions, books, blogs, conferences, articles, interviews, speeches, media opps, videos, drafting and crafting new manifestos, charters and constitutions, articulating where it hurts, naming names and identifying the slew of betrayals, shackles and daggers of man's inhumanity, most of which never touch the radical underlying causes in child-rearing practices and false human concepts of what life's all about.
Not to mention we actually seek some cashola to pay the bills (and from each other?!—right?) for all this valuable research and cultivated eloquence. Ivy grads with a personal brand who likely had their own rooms as teenagers and never knew hunger or got their hands roughened by any heave-ho work, who smoked their share of weed and kicked back to songs of resistance, are real good with the insights and outrage. But aren’t we also highly sensitive people who would not hold up too well to enhanced interrogation techniques in military detention centers nor keep a steady hand on the trigger to shoot molded, pointed chunks of metal into those we call idiot and asshole and who, in truth, are just confused and bullied children who know not what they do?
Speaking here is one who takes a spider out of the house rather than crush it and one who doesn’t smack mosquitoes between her palms. I could not become a psychologist because I could not stand to read about rat and monkey experiments. This one is not in the habit of eating animals or dairy products. These are all creatures that look around, smell and feel the rain, bristle, fly, fight or freeze at danger, tuck their tails, feel life energy, feel fear, peace, pain and satisfaction; they are expressions of the great all and deserve our reverence, gentleness and respect.
Well, count on both the predicable and the improbable. What is going on here is what we can’t think about because we don’t have the capacity.
It’s really the ecological collapse that is the big-picture game-changer. We are becoming collectively overwhelmed, dazed, dismayed and daunted globally, as a species. The end of the American way is exactly what is required for species survival and it must not only come down or have its foundations dug out from under it: it needs revolutionary realizations, you know, as when we realize something, as in we had it all wrong, we were clueless.
This is the real common ground of the real WE to which we need to pay credence. Right here is the truth we share and have shared all along, one and all: we exist without knowing why we exist. And if one retreats into saying “we exist for the glory of god” or “there is no why about it,” then one needs to explain why is it we even think in terms of why. Who is up to the task of meeting existence on its own terms?
We vigilantly protect our existence without understanding what we are. Bring me someone who really knows the first thing about what the basic elements like chromium, calcium, selenium, iron actually are, what matter is, what energy is, how they flow one to another, how electrons got to spinning around protons, and how things blink in and out of existence.
We tremble. We hunger. We must obey our bodies and their endless demands. Opinions, philosophies, theories, speculations, fall-back positions, self-concepts--and nobody knows!
The great, obvious leveling fact is that we are all just exactly as mortal and clueless about the big things to which we are all, also, reverently or irreverently bound. And so we busy and bolster ourselves with mutable details.
The best shot that I see for peace, love, freedom and happiness is not a bullet-shot between the eyes of our enemies. It’s not enumerating superficial truths of who’s done what to whom and who is situated where on the arc of history or the IQ bell curve. It’s not proving who’s got the stoniest heart of hearts.
The only real threat to “power” is revelatory truth, the tree of the mind with its synaptic branches suddenly lights up a whole new shape and the old, in that brain, is thereby fried, obsolete, over: a more compelling set of pathways has been forged.
We, the big collective we; we, as in the presently living human beings, could at any time experience and witness a profound change in view. May or may not happen.
The mind is a fertile place, when we can be made expectant of the unexpected. This is the perennial attitude of the creative artist and the contemplative. It doesn’t take more than one mind, really, to experience a new synaptic tree of lightning, to electrify and exemplify fresh perception.
And yet, if the whole living humanity cannot outgrow our toxicities, it’s really okay, you know.
Sad for those who perceive and feel what could and might be, but essentially it is all right if our species is just not up to the task of self-actualizing en masse before self-destructing—
—all right because the universe has forever and we, as mere temporary conglomerations of waves and particles fluxing in the immortal transmutations of matter and energy, combining and recombining, membering and remembering—we come and go as this and that. And we are that endless process. We have forever too and chance after chance.
As I see it, there may very well be a tumbling out of new integrations in the short time ahead, neuro-bio-psycho-social-cosmological-aesthetic . . . integrations that will be startlingly revelatory, that will bring holistic vision that makes obsolete a great deal of what we have taken for reality and spoken of as the ground of our shared existence.
No one should be so sure of himself/herself. The worldview that people take for reality now certainly does not make the Earth spin on its axis and that worldview has already been superceded in many of us; it’s already over, gone, finished, vanquished.
So, let’s see what oozes and seeps from the interstices as things crack open, as the pressure continues. The public eye is useless. Give mind a place to rest and challenging leaps to make in silence. The fragmented, dissociated mind may yet come together, in some few, and that is no small endeavor.
Neuro-bio-psycho-social-political-cosmological-aesthetic . . .
it’s all in the hyphens above.
©2010 Jari Chevalier
jari consciousness, integrate, meditation, future, human potential, human development, books, holistic, mind-body, self-destructive, vision, power, reality, America, early childhood, peace, civic engagement, introspection, radical, activism, capitalism 3 Comments » |
2
November
2010
Living Hero Suzi Gablik is composing a new blog post and asking friends and fellow writers this question, which I received yesterday:
Last night, instead of trick or treating at the neighbor's house up the road, I watched 60 Minutes instead, a program of interviews in towns and with people who have tragically lost businesses and jobs. It was very painful to watch. I have seen quite a bit of this kind of media coverage done across the country. The people being interviewed can't stop crying, including even the men. Parents who can't send their kids to college. The bleakness in people's eyes is excruciating. And then $3 billion dollars (repeat, 3 billion) just spent on election attack ads. Has the human race always been this way? What do you think? How do you suppose Tutu and the Dalai Lama manage to chuckle over human foibles and frailty? Do you believe the human spirit will ultimately prevail? Or are we, as Derrick Jensen says, f-ed? (Sent on the eve of the invasion of the body snatchers.)
Quote by Desmond Tutu from my blog:
Now 79 years old and ever cheery, another world-renowned black leader, the Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu, recently told Time magazine that the chief lesson he has learned is that "the texture of our universe is one where there is no question at all but that good and laughter and justice will prevail...In the end, the perpetrators of injustice or oppression, the ones who strut the stage of the world often seemingly unbeatable--there's no doubt at all that they will bite the dust." And then he roars with laughter: "Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha. Wonderful!" So what do you think? Has the Archbishop Tutu discovered the culminating secret of the universe, or is he just singin' in the rain?
Full blog post containing Tutu's quotation, 10-30-10 http://virgilspeaks.blogspot.com/2010/10/waiting-on-big-flip.html
Here is my response to Suzi:
In truth, everybody’s is right and nobody knows anything.
Derrick Jensen is right that we’re f-ed, Tutu is right that goodness will prevail. You are right to worry. And I am right to see things in the context of very vast pictures. For instance, this very second people are being tortured somewhere(s) and elsewhere(s) people are having fantastic orgasms looking into each others eyes. Right this second planets are being born and stars are blowing apart: end of an eon.
In our own lifetimes on Earth, in the 20th-21st centuries, extraordinary, beautiful, and heartwarming happenings of many kinds have taken place; some people have behaved in magnificent ways to one another. And at the same time horrible, sick, twisted, maniacal and catastrophic events have taken place and people have been cold, punitive, destructive to one another. Tears of sorrow and tears of joy flowing, flowing all the time. At some point there will be no more humans here. There will be something else going on. This universe cannot and will not be otherwise.
We don’t know much about the nature of our existence; for example, if there is anything more to luck than blind luck, or if we can have any influence whatsoever on whether or not we could miraculously survive a carpet bombing, running through with mind serene and coming out unscathed by heavy shrapnel.
The mind can be all defended or all relaxed or very nimble and flexible. What difference does it make? I have seen that it can make a lot of difference, so I cultivate my mind and body to be healthy, strong, resilient. And still, I could be hit by a truck later today or ravaged by microbes two months from now.
We can reliably cultivate ourselves so we could be wise, helpful, comforting, even when others are in panic, rage, or icy authoritarian rigor. We can help soothe those whose luck has run out. We can share what we have that is good. We can expand our minds and hearts to have many choices of apertures and ways of looking that we can access to stay wise, helpful, and comforting. It’s worthwhile doing that.
For some singing in the rain is only natural, for others it is very annoying to watch.
This world, the big picture world is forever in states of flux of dark and light, forever turning itself inside out through both creation and destruction. Sometimes we find ourselves in the midst of the destruction: it’s in the nature of things. Why shouldn’t we? Who are we to escape that part of the universe forever? Every polarity we can think of love-hate, light-darkness, good-evil, miraculous-impossible, is always simultaneous in the whole. It’s all flickering and flowing and moving as one and we are part of that. It’s all congruent and necessary. There is always peace somewhere; don’t forget that. And depending how you look at things 3.141592 . . . is a numeric linearity that just will not stop: and this could frustrate a person’s desire to see an end to it. But to someone else it is a marvelous expression of how every single simple circle that ever was has an outline that you can continue to follow around and around without end. Or not. Ugh, big deal. Or yes, a very big deal.
William Blake said that “a fool sees not the same tree a wise man sees.” To my reckoning, it is wholesome for our souls to see things in vast terms, to be expansive, and also to be very humble.
Nobody knows what a tree is. Can anybody tell me how the seed of a tree knows how to unfurl and grow up out of itself and form wood and bark and self-organize systems that circulate water and sap, that can draw nutrients up from the soil and turn light into energy for itself to carry on and thrive? Does anyone know what all this stuff is growing up out of the stuff? It’s all a giant mystery and here we are in that mystery together, some snatching and fighting, some giving and holding hands.
What do you think about these things?
Leave comments here:
Thank you for sharing your thoughts.
©2010 Jari Chevalier
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18
August
2010
"My sister and I will be with the Sisters of Earth, the radical nuns, in New York in July," Vandana Shiva told me, before she and I hung up the phone, just after recording our Living Hero interview this past winter.
Radical nuns, hmm, I was intrigued and also excited about the prospect of meeting Vandana in person and spending a few days with her and Mira Shiva.
A short time later, I was a newly minted member of the Sisters of Earth and was signed up to attend the 9th biennial Sisters of Earth conference on a press pass.
The conference was held at The Passionist Retreat Center in Riverdale, New York, along the East bank of the Hudson River. Listen, if you've never been in a room with 160 powerful, educated, purposeful, spiritually mature, and actively engaged women, you have missed the effect of an incomparable force-field. Not your average crowd!
This special report on the Sisters of Earth conference will give a hint at the depth and breadth of conversation and ceremony, and hopefully, too, a taste of the uplifting energy and heartfelt concern we experienced as a group. This vital network of women religious and lay women is working to foster widespread adoption of eco-spiritual values in the United States and around the world.
Click on The Power of Wisdom under Recent Posts on the sidebar to get to a Comments box and Submit button. Let us know your thoughts!
Thanks for listening!
--Jari Chevalier
Enjoy the show! You may download the mp3 file, which will play in iTunes, RealPlayer, Windows Media Player and other media players or you may listen to it right here by clicking on the purple media player below. (The interview is about 25 minutes.)
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28
June
2010
“We need a new imagination for how we are going to live together, how we’re going to do business, what we’re going to permit in the body politic, as well as the human body. It is that failure of imagination that I think is the biggest roadblock that I’ve encountered.”
--Carolyn Raffensperger
It's time to connect the dots to see what we're looking at! Listen now to our first episode in the new Living Hero Synthesis Series, audio essays meant draw together the core thematic elements of the Living Hero interviews.
We seek to clarify, reframe, and invite you to join in articulating our worldview, so we may better consider our own part in the geopolitical reality.
Our aim is to create contexts for insight and a place where real tough questions get asked. After listening to the podcast, please comment with your thoughts and feelings about these questions, posed at the end of the audio program. Thanks for your participation!
1. How is it that some rare people do break out, transform themselves, become liberated from their conditioning? What are the precursors to that; what does it take to transform oneself?
2. Can our global society overcome its long history of patriarchy, its painful cycles of thwarted love, distorted thinking, and ruthless acts?
3. Should we break the taboo on this and talk about a societal obligation for people to break the cycle of abuse in themselves and to come to wholeness in themselves and with their parenting partners before having a child?
4. Are we talking impossible idealism here when we speak of ending child disrespect and abuse or are we, in fact, at last, calling for merely the ABCs and the 1-2-3s of human decency and the foundations of a sane and healthy society?
5. Anything else in this essay you'd like to contribute thoughts, opinions, or further explorations on . . .
What do you think? And, more importantly, what do you imagine? And what do you suggest?
The specific Living Hero interviews to tap for segments quoted in this essay, in order of appearance, are:
Carolyn Raffensperger, Dan Pink, Jonah Lehrer, Terry Riley, Scott Baum, Gabor Mate, Anne Wilson Schaef, Marcy Axness, John Taylor Gatto, Jim Merkel, Derrick Jensen, and Riane Eisler. Use the Quick List in the left sidebar for a clickable list in alphabetical order.
Download this episode (right click and save)
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3
May
2010
"We used to have wisdom without science; now . . . we have science without wisdom."
—Dr. Gabor Maté
Physician, activist, author, educator and public speaker, Gabor Maté, MD, is widely recognized for his contributions to the field of mind-body medicine. He has eloquently and persuasively called for a reevaluation of our most pervasive and debilitating ills in light of whole-systems stressors so often borne in utero, infancy and early childhood and the attendant, recurrent patterns of suppressing emotions of hurt and anger into adulthood. Gabor Maté is a compassionate doctor whose 20-year career as a family physician and his current work with HIV-positive addicts in Vancouver, BC, equips him with direct knowledge and empathic experience. He is the author of In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters With Addiction, When the Body Says No: Understanding The Stress-Disease Connection and Scattered: How Attention Deficit Disorder Originates And What You Can Do About It.
We talked about:
Whole person nourishment and attunement ● Why early life quality is so critical to society ● Stressed parents, emotional repression and disease ● What is the role of addiction? ● The mind-body supersystem and why modern medicine won’t recognize it ● Maté’s definition of addiction ● Free will and free won’t ● Denial and our addicted society ● Consciousness-raising and the miracle of a healing path ● The divine feminine and gut feelings ● Sensitivity and resilience or hardening and rigidity ● The Bully Syndrome and the truth about bullies ● Stuck where our needs were not met ● Ayahuasca and the swift road to healing and liberation ●
Enjoy the show! You may download the mp3 file, which will play in iTunes, RealPlayer, Windows Media Player and other media players or you may listen to it right here by clicking on the purple media player below. (The interview is about 46 minutes.)
Listen at your convenience! Use this link for download, not the one below the player. Download this episode (right click and save)
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Click through to buy Gabor Maté's books right from this site in the Amazon sidebar widget to the left.
Visit:
Dr. Maté's website.
jari psychology, holistic health, consciousness, interviews, insight, maturity, human potential, human development, feminine values, wisdom, holistic, parenting, mind-body, addiction, self-destructive, environment, empathy, self-esteem, power, health, childhood development, early childhood, neurobiology, science, societal health, civilization, abuse, recovery 2 Comments » |
12
May
2008
In our movement toward wholeness and maturity, perhaps the most fundamental challenge—and our goal—is the acceptance and embrace of our freedom. To live as sovereign individuals, so that our highest authority is our own sense of what is right, and knowing that we hold the wisdom to assess for ourselves the particulars of a situation, means that we fully trust ourselves and are willing to stand alone, if and when necessary.
Since creative people are so often ahead of their time, we must really know, as an experience deep in our bodies, that our assessments of relationships are right; and this deep, inner knowledge gives us the courage to be harbingers of what may one day also be discovered by the masses. Galileo knew he was right; Blake knew; Einstein knew; Walt Whitman . . . the great ones knew.
This type of innate knowledge comes through the experiences of intuition, inspiration, epiphany, and insight. These are spiritual experiences: understanding moves through you energetically, so that you see something and feel the rightness of it at the same time. This spirituality is fresh and personal; it exists apart from any particular theology or ideology.
Sadly, living without a personal spiritual connection to life and the freedom it supports is the grim lot of most people. Lives lacking a genuine, experiential spiritual foundation tend to oscillate between controlling others and being controlled. Without the spiritual ground of experience which is the very will of freedom, the prospect of freedom is just too much for people, and power is the woeful tether by which they aim to feel secure.
Erich Fromm's Escape from Freedom explores the widespread aversion to freedom and persuades us that sadomasochistic tendencies underpin it. "It is always the inability to stand the aloneness of one’s individual self that leads to the drive to enter into a symbiotic relationship with someone else. It is evident from this why masochistic and sadistic trends are always blended with each other. Although on the surface they seem contradictions, they are essentially rooted in the same basic need. People are not sadistic or masochistic, but there is a constant oscillation between the active and the passive side of the symbiotic complex, so that it is often difficult to determine which side of it is operating at a given moment. In both cases individuality and freedom are lost."
Later in his book, Fromm relates that these destructive tendencies to escape from freedom result from the thwarting of the individual’s sensuous, emotional, and intellectual expansiveness in childhood. These perversions are the torque our spirits take from the suppression of our exuberance, curiosity, and creative will in childhood and, which can continue all our lives. By continuing to suppress our natural tendencies to explore, move and stretch our bodies, imagine, try things out and invent, we perpetuate our pain and give rise to yet another generation of frustrated human beings stuck on a see-saw of power relations.
Here's the remedy: reactivation of our creative and expressive pleasures goes straight to the root of perversions of spirit that we witness in our lives and our societies. Encouraging our children and each other to spend more time puttering and tinkering with things out of curiosity, creativity, and imaginative play, fostering our spiritual connection to life through observation, meditation, and the many means that help us to do this, and providing ourselves with the conditions for the experience of intuition, inspiration, epiphany and insight will all feed the hope of a new humanity that has the courage for real freedom.
©Jari Chevalier, 2008
jari psychology, insight, future, maturity, human potential, human development, culture, wisdom, philosophy, holistic, creativity, feeling, values, vision, freedom, power 5 Comments » |
1
May
2008
To live your life as a creative artist, everything you do and experience is invested into vision, meaning and insight; and in this, there cannot be a separation between self, work and life.
Successful creation is a distillation of many hours of time alone just sponging things in and then processing them with the light of solitude on. Solitude, a word that comes from the Latin "solus," is akin to the Greek word "holos," signifying whole, entire. An artist comes to wholeness in and through solitude.
You'd be hard pressed to find an artist who isn't poignantly aware of her existential aloneness, and yet, like anyone else, she lives in relationship. However, often, instead of social relationships, she relies upon deep, abiding relationships with the ineffable intimations of her gift. There's a sense of partnership with the unseen--the muse, the unconscious, the universe--to get her work done.
And so the artist working in solitude is not really "alone." She is having intense affairs with aspects of the self and with the numinous. Henry James once told the journalist Morton Fullerton that the "essential loneliness" of his life constituted his "deepest" aspect.
The quality of relationship with one’s own inner dynamics, which are nurtured in solitude, provide the conditions for creation. The feeling arises, when you are creating, that you are doing what you are meant to do and it is sustained by the experience of being touched by something larger-- a communion experience that one simply cannot explain, but instead must honor and serve.
But there is a big difference between solitude and isolation. To balance long stretches of unbroken solitude, an artist, especially a developing one, needs like-minded others, people who understand the passion and process of a creative person and who support him in his efforts, who welcome him when he finally does come out from behind the closed door. It helps to have a peer group or, at the very least, one trusted fellow artist with whom to share both the work and one’s life.
Solidarity means unity among people, a shared sense of purpose and understanding of what matters--values, feelings, sensitivities about things, qualities of life. Solidarity is every bit as crucial to the health, balance and survival of the artist as is solitude.
Some artists must or perhaps choose to find their solidarity without real-time contact with peer artists, but instead, through the works of more distant artists. In the words of painter and art teacher Robert Henri, "If the artist is alive in you, you may meet Greco nearer than many people, also Plato, Shakespeare, the Greeks. In certain books--some way in the first few paragraphs you know that you have met a brother."
T.S. Eliot states something similar about our solidarity: "A common inheritance and a common cause unite artists consciously or unconsciously: it must be admitted that the union is mostly unconscious. Between the true artists of any time there is, I believe, an unconscious community."
I wonder, are these qualities, which are so obviously critical to the life of the artist, not important to the health, balance, development and well-being of everyone? What do you think?
I have been traveling alone since the end of March, and also living among artists with long days of solitude in my studio and cherished connections at shared meals and walks through the Illinois prairie. I have now relocated temporarily to Austin, TX and I have been exposed to a great deal of art and culture along the way!
Since that last week of March I have seen:
The Homer and Hopper exhibitions at The Art Institute of Chicago;
Laurie Anderson speak at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago;
The collections and current shows at The Milwaukee Art Museum;
The current shows at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center in Sheboygan, Wisconsin;
The Kohler factory tour;
Columbia College Book & Paper Arts facilities and the M.F.A. show there;
A lecture by G. Edward Griffin at the University of Texas;
The On the Road show at the Harry Ranson Humanities Research Center in Austin;
I was also invited to spend an overnight as an all-expenses-paid guest at one of the exclusive private Kohler clubs.
©Jari Chevalier, 2008
jari psychology, creative arts, integrate, culture, holistic, creativity, values, art, solitude, solidarity, vision 1 Comment » |
11
March
2008
The question, where is your money invested? is experienced by many as a violation, a pointed finger jabbing at them. Well, this gets our backs up precisely because this is where we have compromised our hearts, where we really don’t want to look and listen, where the worm of hypocrisy squirms. It’s what we really don’t want to feel, talk about, and possibly be moved to address. Why?
Because it is still, generally speaking, more financially profitable (higher returns, less risk) in the short term to put money into the coffers of established companies and profiteers, engaged as they may be in disregard of land, people, health and wisdom, and every creature of the Earth.
And so we think we have our money working for us?! We give over our money, which, along with our work, is our most powerful instrument, voice and vote, to this portfolio of doom and Armageddon. And, the game is set up so that the players rationalize and justify detrimental business practices on the basis of having to satisfy their stockholders with high returns. This is a game where profit is the highest value in consideration. So, there you have it.
I was at the Whitney Biennial contemporary art show on preview day and it was a spiritual wasteland, very disappointing. The show mirrors a society that is imbalanced, disgusting, disordered, epically ugly, mad, stupid, broken, mean-spirited and sick. On the audio tour, Ellen Harvey, one of the artists whose work stood out to me, said: “You can’t win, so let’s just start off by failing as extravagantly as possible,” in speaking of her art process. A fitting line for our times. There was hardly a hint of transcendence or visionary attitude in that entire show; instead, despair and hurt and self-indulgence. Is this the best we can do? One wonders about the selection of this uninspired psychic display and what the mindset is there, the agenda.
The proverb “money is the root of all evil” in these materialistically driven times might just as well be “money is the root of all good”. Our money is what we get for the life energy we have expended and both our energy and our money can be put to good, evil or neutral work in the world.
Our money actually does invest us in that which we have invested, even though we are not always willing to look at it that way or to do the real math from a holistic perspective. So then, are we living behind our own backs? Are we content to be strangers to ourselves and each other? Are we actually saying: yes, here, do more of this with our world, kill it, destroy and decimate it, kill it all, just give me another cushion, don’t take away my addictions, and throw in the health insurance.
We have the power, if we have the will, to reform our civilization very quickly, and we can do it with our energy and our money, much more effectively than with our political votes.
If you haven't seen the movie Zeitgeist yet, you can get to it through these links. It's screening at non-mainstream theaters across the country this Saturday. The second link displays those theaters. Part three of this movie gives a historical view of the financial world that you might want to have a look at. I invite your comments on this.
Streaming Zeitgeist movie
Big Screenings on March 15th
Article by Javier Sierra, Sierra Club, "How to Tell Greenwashing from Real Corporate Responsibility"
©Jari Chevalier, 2008
jari culture, wisdom, financial reward, holistic, conscience, economy, mental health, values 2 Comments » |
13
February
2008
For the sake of this exploration, let’s just agree to use the word holic for an addicted, compulsive, obsessed individual. In spite of knowledge (a holic knows what is healthy, reasonable and good) she “loves” stuff that is ultimately self-destructive and cannot forsake indulgences for health or well-being, cannot manage, even through force of love or will to stop repeating damaging behaviors.
Now, let’s consider, in contrast, a holistic person. This person’s actions, whether they be in the realms of buying, eating, traveling, pleasure or work, are an integral part of a conscious life, borne out from the person they wish to be, the contribution they wish to make, and the world in which they wish to live. Such a person is capable of self-soothing and self-regard and lives with a genuine love of life. Such a person feels responsible.
People generally either soothe their existential angst and cope with life through a healthy selfhood (holistic) or through a set of defenses and fixes (holic).
Since I'm posting this on Valentine's Day eve, I have some love questions for us:
Is it love to buy someone chocolate, if sugar decays internal organs like it does teeth? Is it love to send dozens of cut roses here and there, if tons of hydrocarbons are thus released into our shared strained atmosphere? How about diamonds and that whole business? How about greeting cards, the paper industry pollution involved, the shipping and trucking of all that? Fine dining on fois gras—does this force-feeding of geese to fatten their livers deliver a culinary treat for our true love?
A holistic person thinks of these things. A holistic person sees the inseparable connections among all things in reality.
The phrase Just Do It made famous by Nike, a corporation notorious for sweatshop labor practices and all manner of exploitation, has perhaps provided us with an apt mantra for our times: Just Don’t Do It!
If we have told ourselves to change our habits and yet haven’t—guess what?—we’re holic and the waters are rising, the world is heating up—and how are we going to stop ourselves from doing the self-destructive things we’re in the habit of doing?
Join me as I take this on and share what I'm doing on these posts from time to time. I am upping the ante on myself to be ever more holistic.
Please click through to this article and then write to me and let me know what you think—could this environmental nightmare really be true or is it some mistake, a gross exaggeration?
©Jari Chevalier, 2008
jari psychology, holistic health, maturity, human potential, human development, culture, wisdom, philosophy, holistic, meaning, conscience, love, mind-body, addiction, self-destructive, environment 2 Comments » |
20
January
2008
The detrimental effects of cell phone radiation on sleep were reported today in the British paper The Independent. Here's the ARTICLE
The Integrative HealthCare Symposium took place this past week (1/17-1/19) in Manhattan, which I attended on Friday. Bernie Siegel, MD (Love, Medicine and Miracles) shared the stage with Julie Silver, MD (After Cancer Treatment: Heal Faster, Better, Stronger) to deliver a Keynote entitled Physical and Emotional Healing: How They Intersect in Cancer Recovery.
Dr. Silver, a breast cancer survivor herself, delivered a message of hope for healing through a holistic mind-body approach. She also cautioned us all to be aware that there is long list of herbal remedies and foods that can interfere with the intended dosages and actions of many prescription medications. Her page at Revolution Health
Then, the highly entertaining and humorous Dr. Siegel demonstrated his warm, humanistic and holistic approach to treatment while showing us slides of his patients’ drawings and discussing how the story of their illness was depicted there, often signaling the prognosis, as well.
My notes from Dr. Siegel’s talk:
If a hillbilly woman divorces her husband, is he still her brother?
We must re-parent each other. Parents, teachers, clergy and doctors are the biggest problems in the world!
You don’t treat a diagnosis, you treat an experience.
Heal your life and it effects your physiology.
Find your rhythm and live it.
Keep your minds open—consciousness is not local.
The question he asks himself in a quandary: WWLD—What would Lassie do?
Self-induced healing: a clear conscience.
Parenting is the #1 problem everywhere.
Patients do not need information; they need inspiration.
We know the future.
Find your way of making people happy; give a tissue, not a stethoscope.
Life is a series of beginnings.
Keep the child in your patients alive.
You can’t be afraid when you’re laughing.
Nourish yourself and your life.
Ask: how may I help you?
If you’re cared for by your family, you’ll do much better.
I invite your comments on what I'm about to say: I am so often dismayed and left wondering why we rely on celebrated experts and costly scientific studies to tell us things that we ought to be prepared to readily discern via our own conscience, moral compass and compassion. Where is the common sense of our hearts?
We can all be lay physicians, healing ourselves and others. But this calls for a shift in priorities and values towards lives of greater meaning and deeper caring. This can be our future. Coping effectively with our own fear, anxiety, and stress is the rational first step.
jari holistic health, future, holistic, sleep, stress, meaning, parenting, conscience, love Comments (0) » |
