2
February
2012
Fated for failure “from the get-go,” “a nation of hustlers” blinded from birth by mercenary ambition; from its title to its last words Morris Berman’s new book, Why America Failed: The Roots of Imperial Decline, depicts a country finished.
The whole social order was structured on false premises, he argues; premises that say happiness and virtue can be had through industry, business and money, hustling for advancement. It was about making a financial killing and the pervasive denial of consequences. The America celebrated every 4th of July was about its own tenuous and soul-destroying identity, akin to Moby Dick’s captain Ahab, hell-bent on hunting to the death.
It was about cut-throat competing to be first to market with novel tech-devices sold to a public slavering for them with every new ping and ding, like Pavlovian dogs, conditioned by a media machine brought to you by primo hustlers.
Drawing on the words and careers of Lewis Mumford, Thoreau, John Ruskin, Jimmy Carter, Neil Postman and many others who have opposed the amoral life of hustle, Berman documents the ever-presence of these powerful voices of wisdom published time and again; and lays bare the fact that the American masses never could muster any interest in wisdom or reality, the heart of America was not concerned, as it were.
While most of those who Berman cites would (perhaps with modest expectancy of actually selling books to Americans) tend to end their books on notes of hope and faith in their fellow Americans (though their brethren did not read them or, if they did, merely yawned and hit psychological snooze buttons again), Berman, an expatriate living in Mexico, proclaims that there is no such hope and there never was; that “we’ll carry on hustling until we literally collapse from it (2008 being only a mild preview).”
And “progress,” he makes clear, has actually been a colossal tragedy fraught with irony; the American model of empire gave us an information glut and an ignorant populace, convenience culture with less free time than ever, and all the while, technocratic toys claim your earnings and let you multitask the deep sea of life into a puddle, rewiring your brain so that you “can’t think deeply or creatively” and therefore will no longer be equipped to even sense what you’re missing. “The world of creativity, of imagination, of depth of the self, is closing down,” Berman writes, giving us “a nation of buffoons” with dull sensibilities, who “want slogans not nuance and sophistication.” Most Americans are psychologically equipped now only for a pseudo-bliss of denial and ignorance about themselves and everything else, especially their own history and its meaning.
A full chapter is devoted to making clear that the Civil War was actually far less about slavery than we’ve been led to believe, that it was, instead, an epic clash of social ideologies concerning what constitutes “the good life;” two irreconcilable economic models and modes of existence, industrial/modern/dynamic versus agricultural/traditional/steady-state, “two expansionist systems,” capitalist and neofeudal.
These two modes could not coexist in a Union of states. And the South simply had to be plowed under, incompatible as it was with Yankee industrial hustle and the march of “progress.” Slavery was used as a catch-all justification for eliminating the Southern way of life, because, in essence, it was antithetical to centralized control, mechanization, unmitigated greed, and growth unto death à la globalization.
He explains that the South’s formidable attempt to secede from the Union to preserve its way of life, rather than to “succeed” via the encroaching inroads of the North, was in honor of a gentile worldview in which slavery was but one factor (albeit, admittedly, a morally abhorrent one).
Berman cites the work of Raimondo Luraghi, remarking that the conflict of North and South was the “American version of the globalization process through industrial colonialism.” The North was characterized as “wired,” “competitive,” “impersonal,” “bureaucratic,” “commercial,” “rootless,” and all about “capital accumulation,” and the South was “leisurely,” “local,” “organic,” “rural,” “folk,” “hierarchical,” “traditional” and reliant upon a strong honor code.
Here Berman seems to suggest that the agrarian way of the South was more civilized because it offered a pastoral and rural life of leisure and honor. But the argument loses power and validity as one reflects upon the many concessions we must make about the South’s dark side, it’s anti-intellectualism and white supremacy, its punitive nature: tarring and feathering, lynching, duels, and the use of physical force on slaves.
If this gentile leisure was afforded by enforced slave labor, it was an immoral leisure; it belonged only to “gentlemen” slave owners and their heirs (and what is gentle about men with slaves?) — playing lords of the manor just like European aristocrats.
While Berman certainly presents and acknowledges this dark side of the South, he does so while maintaining that the South has been the only counterculture holding forth with any muscle against the hustling life since the nation’s birth. Other movements and alternative communities had no real countervailing power, zealous as their proponents may have been.
While all these considerations are fruitful in seeking the roots of wrong, Berman does not go far enough to reach those roots. What has transpired in America has its roots sunk much deeper than the Revolutionary War, which was not so long ago, and which did only its small part in withering the psychological dendrites of empire. What was absent from Berman’s account of “why” America is a failed enterprise is that North and South both represent dominator models; in a word (shhhh . . . ): patriarchy.
Stating that the South was “bent to the social good” and tradition, as if a tradition of patriarchy of any kind could be a good thing, is to miss the opportunity to make a vital point about where we stand now, crucial to the understanding of all imperial pasts and would-be futures, North, South, East and West.
Berman quotes The Unabomber’s manifesto and points to fundamentalist Islam as examples of those vehemently and violently opposed to the American way of life. Yet all of these also fall under the rubric of the dominator model of existence.
At the meta-level we can see the whole planet steeping in the toxic build-up of domination, the residues of patriarchy and its 5000+-year legacy, systemically perpetuated by both males and females. Monocultures, monarchies, monotheists, dynasties, lords, captains, chieftains—none of these can serve the human family or the human psyche. What is failing? the ideals of industrial hustle or the underlying ignorance and approaches to life? Is it America or a mind-set that migrated to America to flower into prime exemplar status here for a time?
Berman’s examples of opposition to industrialization cannot rightly focus our minds at the requisite level of reexamination and reckoning. To establish holistic, nurturing and fulfilling societies that truly meet the needs of the living will require a complete transcendence of patriarchal values and modes of operation.
In looking back on the limited record, we see only Neolithic goddess cultures, hunter-gatherer societies and some native cultures as ones presenting viable alternative models, countercultures that lead us to closely examine the roots of where societies go wrong.
But even more so, we have the ever-fertile imagination, the cultivation of free minds, healthy bodies and joyful hearts as means to understanding that human beings have not always been crippled by oppression and repression and need not be in the future. The arc of time is eons long and the old and dying roots of empire and patriarchy have been exhaling rotten breath for centuries already, long before the white man set foot on American soil.
So Berman comes close to the heart of the matter when he points out that the Europeans decimated the native peoples of the Americas. The tribal peoples of this land and their ways of life were surely those that have always held up the greatest contrast to European imperialism, exceptionalism, militarism, materialism and narcissism; and yet even they were, in many aspects, patriarchal.
Why America Failed is a well-curated weave of compelling quotations and references, culled to present Berman’s views, which, as a long-time fan of Berman I attest do extend to the hunter-gatherers and do radiate to a greater scope.
Yet, I could not help noticing that his sources for Why America Failed are predominantly privileged white males and their privileged white male predecessors, contemporaries, and heirs. Thus, the entirety here, both the social problems and the social criticism springs from masculine logic and method, which has, in its imbalanced state, hurt boys and girls, men and women.
It is not traditions and manners, but making obsolete accepted views of realty that counterculture is all about. And it is our nascent understandings of a potential holistic meta-view that have time on their side. We are in a dying age; the masculine age is nearly exhausted in terms of history’s long arc; exhausted everywhere on Earth. And yet, for the present, it is not nearly extinguished and likely will not go gentle.
Why America Failed concludes with a discussion of post-collapse scenarios and coping strategies. These deserve your consideration, as your understanding and participation could save your life in the coming decades. “Character is destiny,” Berman states, and “there is such a thing as karma.” Reality comes with comeuppance.
©2012 Jari Chevalier
Why America Failed: The Roots of Imperial Decline
Morris Berman
ISBN: 978-1-1180-6181-7
Hardcover
256 pages
November 2011
jari 
future, feminine values, culture, wisdom, books, self-destructive, global forces, values, vision, power, reality, Native American, America, societal health, civilization, patriarchy, dysfunction, capitalism, counterculture 
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28
February
2011
There is tremendous hypocrisy among people who claim they want fundamental change. If able people who consider themselves progressive would use the time they currently spend on complaining or entertaining themselves or drinking or smoking pot and doing other drugs; if they would work diligently to get themselves healthy in body and mind; if they would refuse all but simple, wholesome, unprocessed foods they cook at home; if they exercised hard; and if they would have nothing to do with banks and investment firms, which are the very torsos of the behemoths they claim to abhor; we’d be off to a pretty good start.
If people who claim they want fundamental change would clear the smoke and mirrors of their own minds and lives and look reality squarely in the eye, would stop buying products that come in packages, which are hyped through advertising (you’re paying for that hype!), would put all their TVs into their cars and drive their cars to their nearest state house or public square, lock them up and walk away, never to return for them; we’d be getting somewhere.
If people would put the energy they put into raging against the machine into ridding themselves of their bad habits of consumption; for example, consuming ridiculous quantities of sugar, which is poison for the human body . . . and would stop buying the next gadget, stop exposing themselves to advertisements, stop consuming all non-durable, disposable, mass-market items, in fact, stop all their self-destructive activities; we’d see marvelous moves in the right direction. In short, if people would give up their own bullshit, we’d have a very different picture before us.
Look, real progress now requires a healthy integration of intellectual, creative, psychological and spiritual progress, not mechanistic, technological progress, fueled by ignorance, narcissism and greed.
When people make it their jobs to break their own addictions and bad habits, and rid themselves of hypocrisy; when they strengthen and mature, when their minds are no longer puerile, we’ll be looking at progress. Because from that kind of personal authority, there is really no end to what can be overcome and achieved in changing the macro level. As J. Krishnamurti said, you are the world.
©2011 Jari Chevalier
jari future, human potential, human development, synthesis, wisdom, narcissism, body, mind-body, addiction, self-destructive, values, vision, health, reality, America, fitness, sustainability, civic engagement, radical Comments (0) » |
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 psychology, consciousness, maturity, human development, wisdom, philosophy, politics, books, narcissism, holistic, meaning, conscience, mind-body, self-destructive, environment, economy, global forces, mental health, values, vision, power, reality, America, policy, sustainability, societal health, civilization, radical, technology, patriarchy, dysfunction, capitalism Comments (0) » |
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 » |
1
October
2010
Several hundred people gathered for the 4th annual Horizons: Perspectives on Psychedelics conference at the Judson Memorial Church on Washington Square South on September 24-26.
This conference surveys the current research and social issues in the field of psychedelics. Readings by John Perry Barlow from Birth of a Psychedelic Culture and Don Lattin, author of The Harvard Psychedelic Club, provided historical context and Cosmo D set the atmosphere with a performance of textured cello improvisation over original electronic rhythms to open the weekend.
Why has psychedelic research been discriminated against in academia? Dr. Torsten Passie took us through the reasons. He showed slides of tribal people lying back all together with their eyes closed: not very productive! A Western capitalist worldview, which requires relations with nature to be utilitarian and depth of feeling to be kept private is not likely to embrace the potential value of trance states, the sharing of dreams, or the hallucinogenic experience.
Furthermore, ecstatic experience through psychedelics can engender direct, unmediated experience of the divine in oneself and in all of nature. This does not comport particularly well with the teachings of the Christian church, which holds forth that each and every one of us needs Jesus Christ to mediate our salvation.
Psychedelics deconceptualize and deconstruct entrenched value systems and, therefore, authority over truth is destabilized. So let's add that those who socially engineer and control populations don’t much care for that sort of thing. It becomes a real problem for those in power when people tap into a larger, more satisfying and holistic sense of reality, endemic to their own true natures, accessed intuitively.
Dr. Passie does not expect interest in psychedelics to spread beyond a small, secret society in the foreseeable future.
Dr. Jeffrey Guss, who heads up a current study at NYU on psychedelics in the reduction of cancer anxiety with very positive psychospiritual results, agrees with Dr. Passie that psychedelics will not become mainstream in society and he doesn’t believe that they should, that they are not for everyone.
But, standing in disagreement with these men on this point is independent Manhattan and Sag Harbor-based psychologist in private practice, Neal Goldsmith, PhD. Along with organizer Kevin Balktic, Dr. Goldsmith facilitates the conference. His sense is that to move into an age beyond post-modernism, one integrating the Cartesian split, psychedelics may play an important role.
He speaks of his own transformation through psychedelic experiences and how it altered his personality theory and views on personal growth and change. He describes a step-wise developmental process with dramatic growth to a new level of development after periods on a plateau. In essence, he says the issue is not to change a pathology, but to form genuine trusting relationships through which his clients can re-identify with their core selves. The person you were born, before you “punted” to a compensatory Plan B, personality, to get by in early childhood, is who you really are. Healing is getting back to that core self.
He's seen that transformative developmental change takes a long time and is very difficult to sustain in this culture. A combination of transcendent and cathartic approaches are most effective, and in this, psychedelics can be catalysts to insight, although insight alone, he says, only goes so far.
The large-scale collective process of what he calls psyche-ology, the study and healing of soul, is really concerned now with successfully joining mechanistic, scientific and technological knowledge with the realities of human psychosocial needs.
Eric Davis, a current PhD candidate, author, speaker and radio host discussed inner and outer Cartesian dualities by way of a metaphor, a mobius strip on which the material at some point turns over into the spiritual, the secular into the sacred and vice versa, in a flow.
There is a hunger in our culture (with its resistance to all things mystical) for the ritual and ceremonial context in which the hallucinogen Ayahuasca is taken by tribal peoples from the rain forests of South America; and this is likely why Ayahuasca has become so popular in North America in recent years.
Davis also pointed to Roland Griffiths’ 2008 Johns Hopkins study which proved that the use of psychedelics gives rise to religious experience (“No shit, Sherlock,” he said, “we knew that!”) And so the open question is: what does a secular, materialistic research model do with this scientific confirmation? And does moving the psychedelic experience into the psychopharmaceutical, clinical environment of the lab, perhaps diminish its potential for healing self and society?
The scientific approach is valuable, Davis upholds, because of the nagging questions it prompts us to ask about the brain. For instance, if you’re going to coin terms like “neurotheology” as a way to account for the experience of God, then you must also account for déjà vu, clairvoyance, and many other experiences of the mind.
For scientists to be seriously engaged in psychedelic research they eventually must take the psychedelics themselves. And that could just stimulate changes in the scientific approach itself. We may find ourselves up against our culture’s addictions to limiting ideas.
Psychedelic use for the treatment of addiction was reported on by researchers Matthew Johnson and Mary Cosimano of Johns Hopkins University who are currently investigating psilocybin in the treatment of nicotine dependence.
Most striking was the presentation by Clare Wilkins, director of Pangea Biomedics in Tijuana, Mexico on the remarkable properties of Ibogaine, a hallucinogenic root from Gabon, Africa that reverses addictions to opiates; such as heroine and methadone, as well as to cocaine, methamphetamine, alcohol, nicotine, and all manner of addictive behaviors and neurotic thoughts.
Ninety-two percent of clients who enter the clinic leave free of their chemical dependency, and without any withdrawal symptoms. Eighteen percent are still living without their drug of choice after six months, and this is a remarkable liberation rate. The hallucinogen gives addicts a real chance at choice. While exactly how ibogaine works is still unknown, there is clearly repair to brain receptors and an adjustment in neurochemistry.
She describes Ibogaine as a “relationship interrupter,” accomplishing “shame washing, empowerment, and the reawakening of the body’s intelligence.” Ibogaine “enables you to look at your life and eliminate anything that is not serving you.” Self-harm becomes self-care. “You fall back in love with yourself, with others and with life. It brings love back into the equation.”
Several of the non-academic speakers praised visionary experience and its influence on art, music, fashion, film, eco-consciousness and the integration of Eastern and Western mysticism. Annie Oak spoke about her grant-making organization, the Women’s Visionary Congress, and how this multigenerational community of “psychedelic women” support one another in their ongoing catalytic work as artists, healers, activists and visionaries.
But some brought up the dark side and limitations of psychedelics. Associate producer of the annual Bioneers conference, J.P. Harpignies, reminded us that in the 60s many a psych-ward and hospital was packed with LSD casualties. And poet, Dale Pendell, while acknowledging that we have yet to complete the psychedelic revolution, that the Earth is in need of a deep and radical cure, also cautioned us to consider that psychedelics are not effective on narcissism. In fact, with their tendency to stimulate messianic fantasies in some people, psychedelics may have contributed to the rapid rise of Me-ism in society.
Jill Harris of the Drug Policy Alliance urged the Horizons audience to come out about their psychedelic experiences, to break the taboo and share stories. “They have been important to us; they have mattered.” Let’s be vocal about how transformative these drugs can be and about the fact that prohibition doesn’t work. At the 40th anniversary of the War on Drugs, “it’s time to set the exit strategy.”
Heading home through Washington Square park at twilight, the great stone arch with its bold, engraved quotation was all lit up:
“Let us raise a standard to which the wise and honest can repair. The event is in the hand of God.”
Washington spoke those words to inspire his delegates to aim high in the writing of the Constitution of the United States. It was crafted, in this spirit, over the next 17 weeks.
And I thought, yes, here it is, the time Washington expected for the wise and honest to repair to those standards. And it will be, indeed, up to the wise and the honest to do the job.
“There are methods for changing social policies,” Neal Goldsmith tells us, “and we’ve got to power through, shoulder to the wheel, and do the work.”
©2010 Jari Chevalier
jari psychology, consciousness, insight, human potential, human development, wisdom, philosophy, mind, mind-body, feeling, addiction, self-destructive, environment, values, empathy, self-esteem, solidarity, vision, freedom, power, reality, neurobiology, neuroscience, ecology, science, societal health, civilization, radical, recovery, capitalism 1 Comment » |
18
July
2010
Living Hero Gabor Maté, M.D. appeared on July 7th at the Rubin Museum of Art in New York City to kick off a seven-part series of live events related to The Tibetan Book of the Dead.
Dr. Ramon Prats, curator of the contemporaneous Bardo exhibition, conversed with Dr. Maté on stage and then invited questions from the audience.
Dr. Maté is author of In The Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction. He explained that the hungry ghost realm is a symbol for a state of being, part of the Wheel of Life, described in The Tibetan Book of the Dead. This is a state of unquenchable longing and craving, a state well-known to the addicts Dr. Maté treats in Vancouver, British Columbia’s downtown eastside.
Maté began by stating that 2500 years ago Buddhism presaged almost every discovery of contemporary neuroscience. For example, it has been scientifically corroborated that neurologically there is no abiding self to be found in body or brain. This is one of the central teachings of the Buddha. What we perceive as a continuity of self is but a stream of micro-second mind-states, which can be remembered; electrical information that follows patterns conditioned by former mind-states.
These brain circuits were fundamentally conditioned by our earliest experiences. Maté says that the “anti-infant North American ethic,” which permits a parent to just let their infant cry and cry to exhaustion, conditions that infant to become a human being resigned to a world that “just doesn’t give a damn.”
The addicts he works with have all been severely abused, and without exception all the women have been sexually abused. These people’s minds and brains have been deeply conditioned to expect to live in a hostile, dangerous, uncaring world.
Gabor Maté says there are two fallacies currently operating in the treatment of addicts in our society and that both of these fallacies erroneously take society off the hook of responsibility. The first one is the fallacy of choice, the idea that addicts choose to be addicts. They don't, he says, and the whole legal structure, the systems that punish them would have to come apart if you correct this fallacy.
And the second fallacy is the genetic disease fallacy. Addiction is not a result of genetic potentiality, but of the combination of nature and nurture, of genetic potential and the conditioning forces of the environment.
All of Dr. Maté’s various books underscore the importance of early attachment relationships in the formation of human lives. A healthy attachment in early life brings about a self-regulated, satisfied, and socially connected adult. In the abused child, these circuits don’t form properly and the person is then likely to replace those necessary healthy attachments with self-destructive ones.
The Buddha taught that habit energies wrestle the untrained mind. And so, strengthening the mind with the training of concentration, of self-observation, gives people an opportunity to perceive their own thinking-and-feeling processes and thereby realize that there’s more to us than our conditioning.
The consistent observation of one’s own mind can have the power to create new neural circuits that can override the conditioned patterns established in early experience. Based upon actual self-awareness, such mindfulness helps to create emotional balance, spiritual ease, and an increased capacity for self-regulation.
Dr. Maté reminded the audience that Christ had said: you can do everything I can do; and that Buddha nature and Christ nature are actually human potentials. What makes these potentials realizable is getting the conditioned mind and false attachments out of the way.
One of the questions posed by an audience member was about free will. “Freedom of choice is relative and it’s conditioned,” Maté said. What promotes free will? What liberates people? When it comes to individuals working on their own, what promotes choice is awareness; among people it is compassion. Stress hormones, on the other hand, interfere with our power of choice.
In the spirit of compassion, Dr. Maté acknowledged the difficulties people, especially Westerners, have in cultivating mindfulness. He confessed that he, himself, has not sustained a meditation practice and admitted that he is actually terrified of his own mind because of the traumas he endured as an infant.
Speaking further of Western culture, he referenced Sogyal Rinpoche, who wrote The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, based on the traditional Tibetan Book of the Dead. Sogyal Rinpoche says that Westerners, in general, have an active form of laziness, one in which they cram their minds so full of stimuli that there’s no time at all to confront their relationships.
Maté turned things around a bit and asked the audience a question, “What would you think if someone in your life kept on boasting: ‘I’m the greatest; I’m the most creative; everyone wants to be like me’? You’d think this person is really insecure! At the heart of the American dream there’s a terrible insecurity.”
Can we get over our vain insecurity? Both Dr. Prats and Dr. Maté spoke of how the term “rebirth,” found in Buddhist literature, refers to a process of recreating ourselves (our patterns of thought and perception) moment by moment. The Buddha taught humanity how to not rebirth that same pattern of self; how to free our minds; how to die without dying, to let the painful conditioning of our minds die back as our bodies live on, so that we may realize a liberated state and live out of our deeper nature.
How common it is to live without living. But to die without dying is rare.
©Jari Chevalier
jari consciousness, insight, meditation, human potential, human development, stress, parenting, mind, mind-body, addiction, self-destructive, mental health, empathy, freedom, health, reality, America, childhood development, early childhood, neurobiology, neuroscience, human nature, societal health, civilization, abuse Comments (0) » |
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)
Download this episode (right click and save)
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 » |
17
April
2010
On March 9th, just two days after The Cove won the Oscar for best feature documentary, the plush theater at The Asia Society in New York was packed with eager New Yorkers waiting to see The Cove, followed by a discussion between the film’s director, Louie Psihoyos, and environmental journalist, Andrew Revkin.
The Cove opens with an extrasensory montage; infrared images of oil derricks, factories, and the heavy machinery of industry, a “Twilight Zone” world—contemporary industrial society—perhaps as perceived by special sensitivities; its underlying mechanisms and menacing absurdities; its inhumanity.
Suddenly, like a birth, we land in the technicolor world of the film’s primary crime scene, Taiji, Japan, as Louie Psihoyos, as narrator, introduces us to the film’s principle player, activist Ric O’Barry.
Psihoyos contacted O’Barry after attending a Reefs Conference where O’Barry was scheduled to speak, but was then pulled from the program by the conference’s sponsor, Sea World, an organization O’Barry opposes at every turn.
O’Barry sent Psihoyos a short video he’d made, entitled Welcome to Taiji, documenting the annual killing of over 23,000 dolphins in Taiji dolphin. Although O’Barry has been devoted to dolphin activism for over forty years, in his own words “I’m like a monomaniac about this one cove, the size of a football field, in Taiji.”
Days later, Psihoyos flew to Taiji to meet O’Barry and shoot footage for what would later become The Cove, nature photographer Psihoyos’ first film. “I was called do this,” he told me during the Asia Society reception. “I’m not that much of a spiritual type, but the universe had a hand in this. . . let’s just say I was not planning to get into film before this.”
Psihoyos has an enduring passion for the oceans and ocean creatures. He directs the Oceanic Preservation Society, a non-profit organization. He considers the moratorium on whaling “the greatest psychological achievement of the last century.”
The Cove received major funding from Jim Clark, Psihoyos’ long-time billionaire friend. Once they’d reviewed and discussed the initial footage, a feature-length production was underway. “I started to get creative in a way I never thought possible. . . . . I wanted this film to inspire a legion of activists. . . . We made this film to give the oceans a voice. All the oceans are in peril.”
Both Psihoyos and O’Barry are confident that the film and its associated campaigns will effectively end the slaughter in Taiji. They explain that it will not be stopped on an animal rights issue, nor an environmental issue, but on the human health issue, because human beings are consuming mercury laden dolphin meat, sometimes falsely labeled and sold as tuna or some other fish. Psihoyos said a doctor explained to him that Mercury poisoning erases what it means to be human. You lose your senses; you lose your memory. But, he explains, it seems too controversial a subject to report on in the press.
The Cove crew took great personal risks to bring the film’s messages to the world. Tenderness for dolphins and other creatures is behind this courage and the strategic persistence necessary in any activist struggle. “This movie is a love letter,” Psihoyos tells his audiences.
In winning the Oscar for The Cove, Psihoyos “hit a home run the first time up at bat,” in the words of Ric O'Barry. Revkin asked, “Do I sense a sequel?” Psihoyos is now at work on his next film, a documentary about the Holocene extinction, the massive planetary loss of species and biodiversity that is manmade and continually exacerbated by human behavior.
Psihoyos calls upon his audiences to act, “once you have this information, what are you going to do with it?” In an interview with Amy Kaufman of the L.A. Times on Oscar night, he said, “The Cove is a microcosm of this 5-alarm disaster that’s facing all marine life. Through pollution and plundering and acidication, we’re doing what no wild animal would do: we’re fouling our own nest. It’s a microcosm of this much bigger issue.”
I was reminded of a brief scene in The Cove in which it was said that O’Barry once rescued two dolphins from a small concrete pool filled with their own excrement. Perhaps this is an image for us to keep in mind.
©Jari Chevalier
Listen to the April 1 Living Hero podcast for our Interview with Ric O'Barry.
Watch the Asia Society video here.
The Oceanic Preservation Society site.
jari wisdom, self-destructive, environment, values, expose, vision, ecology, sustainability, societal health, activism Comments (0) » |
1
April
2010
"We never heard of another wild animal coming out of the jungle and saving a life of a human. But there are many stories of dolphins doing that. That's communication. That is communication. That is altruism."
—Ric O'Barry
Ric has devoted the last 40 years of his life to freeing dolphins from captivity and to educating people throughout the world about these highly conscious, intelligent, and emotional creatures. Most recently his campaign to end the annual dolphin hunt and slaughter in Taiji, Japan, became the subject of The Cove, a brilliant film that won the Oscar for best feature documentary this year.
As a young man, O'Barry captured, trained, and lived with the dolphins who played Flipper in the popular TV series. He experienced a powerful epiphany when the lead dolphin died in his arms. Ever since that day in 1970, he has been arrested many times and risked his life in his quest to protect dolphins from hunters and to release captive dolphins back into the wild. He is author of To Save a Dolphin and Behind the Dolphin Smile. I urge you to listen to this amazing man!
We talked about:
Dolphins in the wild and in captivity ● A man in a tank and living with Flipper ● Communicating with dolphins ● Flipper's death and Ric's epiphany ● Going to jail for liberating dolphins ● The Big Lie and the Schizophrenic Cove ● Why the slaughter? ● Toxic dolphin meat and contaminated oceans ● Rehabilitating dolphins (or not) ● Dolphin trauma and madness ● Making The Cove documentary ● The Japanese cover-up and the power of "Gaiatsu" ● Activism: what works? ● How can we listeners help stop the slaughter? ●
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)
Click through to buy Ric O'Barry's books right from this site in the Amazon sidebar widget to the left.
Visit:
SaveJapanDolphins.org;
dolphinproject.org;
Earth Island Institute;
The Cove movie site;
The Oceanic Preservation Society
Read a great article on Ric here.
jari Uncategorized, consciousness, interviews, wisdom, self-destructive, environment, global forces, values, empathy, heroic, expose, ecology, sustainability, societal health, civilization Comments (0) » |
1
February
2010
Know anyone who keeps doing things everybody knows aren’t good for them, others, or the environment? Our guest for February, Anne Wilson Schaef, is an expert facilitator in overcoming multiple addictions. Anne takes an unconventional, whole systems approach to awakening and healing people in light of their familial heritage and societal context.
“I think that a part of our work as human beings in this life is to bring as much as we can of our unconscious into consciousness so that we know what we're dealing with and we have the opportunity to heal it . . . ” says Anne Wilson Schaef in this interview.
We talked about:
Leaving psychotherapy behind ● Process addictions and substance addictions ● Surprise! Our society is an addict ● Addiction and schizophrenia ● A progressive and fatal disease ● Can we recover? ● The elements of a successful intervention ● Wisdom and native humility ● The way of science and technology ● The pseudopodic ego ● Escape from Intimacy ● Political dimensions of dysfunction ● The crucial question on the planet ● The trouble with dualism ● The twelve steps and power ● Can billions of people heal?
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 an hour and 7 minutes.)
Listen at your convenience! Use this link for download, not the one below the player. Download this episode (right click and save)
Click through to buy some of Anne Wilson Schaef's books on Amazon right from this site in the sidebar to the left.
Visit:
Anne's Boulder Hot Springs Inn & Spa at Boulder, MT
And her website: LivingInProcess.com
jari psychology, interviews, insight, feminine values, culture, wisdom, addiction, self-destructive, mental health, values, power, Native American, America, childhood development, science, societal health, radical, technology, patriarchy, abuse, control, dysfunction, recovery 3 Comments » |
1
November
2009
She studied with Robert Motherwell, lived with the Magritte family, and hung out with Jasper Johns. In 1966, Suzi Gablik had a one-woman show of her collage paintings exhibited and catalogued in New York. She later brought a prodigious and caring voice to art criticism, as a respected reviewer of art in London for Art in America, and authored her engaging trilogy of scholarly writings on art and culture Has Modernism Failed?, The Reenchantment of Art, and Progress in Art. She also wrote Magritte, Conversations Before the End of Time, and her memoir Living the Magical Life. Currently, Suzi Gablik hosts a blog featuring her latest cultural and political essays at virgilspeaks.blogspot.com.
We talked about:
Is the human species fit to survive? ● The downside of technology ● The divided United States ● Obama's moral authority ● A burning house, a bus careening off a cliff ● 9/11 as political instigation ● The unbearable places we must go to heal ● Negative capability and extreme sports ● Suzi's magical life of receptivity ● The patriarchy and the black madonna ● The karmic thread of who you are ● How to face the darkness without despair ● Preciousness and unviability ● The artist as role model ● The paradigm of dead objects and the egocentric art world or an alternative: an aesthetic response to the cries of the world ● An alligator named Virgil
Visit: virgilspeaks.com
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 55 minutes.)
Listen at your convenience! Use this link for download, not the one below the player. Download this episode (right click and save)
Click through to buy some of Suzi's books on Amazon right from this site in the sidebar to the left.
jari psychology, creative arts, future, culture, wisdom, philosophy, politics, books, addiction, self-destructive, global forces, values, art, America, human nature, ecology, sustainability, civic engagement, societal health, activism, technology, patriarchy 2 Comments » |
1
October
2009
"We need to bring down civilization, because it's killing the planet," says our guest, author and activist Derrick Jensen.
Formerly a college professor and a commercial beekeeper, Jensen's prolific career as an author has given us A Language Older Than Words, The Culture of Make Believe, Endgame, Listening to the Land, Strangely Like War and Walking on Water. He also co-authored Railroads & Clearcuts and Welcome to the Machine: Science, Surveillance, and the Culture of Control. He has written for The New York Times magazine, The Sun, Audubon, and many other publications.
In 2008 Derrick Jensen was named one of Utne Reader's "50 Visionaries Who Are Changing Your World."
We talked about:
Preparation for truth-telling ● Above ground and below ground activism ● The only language destroyers understand ● The essence of Derrick's philosophy and passion ● Normalizing insane behavior ● Reform or revolution? ● What do we need to do? ● Living in the culture of make-believe ● The relationship between eroticism and violence ● Collapse and the shape of things to come ● Hypocrisy in the environmental movement ● Owning prejudices and shifting alliances ● Do we need to harden our hearts or to open them? ● Discernment, compassion, compliance and fierce love
Visit: derrickjensen.org
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 52 minutes.)
Listen at your convenience! Use this link for download, not the one below the player. Download this episode (right click and save)
Click through to buy some of Derrick's books on Amazon right from this site in the sidebar to the left.
This podcast episode contains explicit language.
jari interviews, culture, politics, self-destructive, environment, values, heroic, expose, power, reality, America, policy, ecology, sustainability, civic engagement, societal health, civilization, radical, activism, abuse 10 Comments » |
28
March
2008
The celebrated psychiatrist and author, Alexander Lowen, says that “the loss of faith is the key problem of modern man.” Are we in a crisis of faith? If we are, what are we supposed to do about it?
The astonishing scientific discoveries of the late 19th and 20th centuries have repeatedly shattered the ideological and theological constructs that guided human life for centuries. There’s no solid world out there anymore, no objective world; we now know the world only as we engage it; and so, as a people, we are unsure of ourselves and cynical about trusting or accurately evaluating anything.
In this sense, faith is an absolutely essential part of the life of an artist, a creative person, if his or her work is to successfully address the needs of our culture. But what kind of faith are we talking about here?
Notice the network of relationships among the words etymologically related to faith (from the Latin fides): fidelity, fealty, fiancé, fiduciary, confidant, confidence, defiant, diffidence, infidel, infidelity, perfidy, Fido.
A consideration of these words reveals that the issue of faith is one of trust; and trust is essentially tied to truth. You will trust an idea, a mode of being, an activity, a person, or life itself, if you trust its underlying reality and believe it to be true.
So, what is true for you? And how do you know it to be true?
If we are upset, bored, depressed or self-destructive, it is perhaps because we don’t know where to begin with ourselves, what to do. You can discover what to do by knowing what is sacred to you. So, the first move is to allow for more enthusiasm in our lives (from the Greek “en theus,” infused by God). Through genuine enthusiasm we find ourselves reeentering a state of grace, and of faith. In that state we don’t have to question what and who is sacred to us.
Now is the time to place greater trust in the truth of your own enthusiasm and to follow it with greater faith. You must keep faith with yourself now, to do what you feel enthusiastic about: what you set out to do in those finest hours when you know the energy in your mind and body is right. Have faith in the creative process and in the life force that pulses in you. Nurture it and draw upon it continuously.
©Jari Chevalier, 2008
jari psychology, maturity, culture, wisdom, creativity, meaning, self-destructive, values, enthusiasm Comments (0) » |
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 » |
