Consciousness

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David Foster Wallace has some interesting things to say about operating with consciousness in community.

I love the concept of "default settings" - it's so easy to have these without even realizing it - all sorts of habits of thought and action that we have been influenced by and bought into without really looking at it - it sometimes seems a never ending process to strip them all away, but quite an interesting and rewarding game....

David Foster Wallace - Commencement Speech at Kenyon College (last paragraphs):

...Because here's something else that's weird but true: in the day-to day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship.

And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship - be it JC or Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan mother-goddess or the Four Noble Truths or some intangible set of ethical principles - is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive.

If you worship money and things - if they are where you tap real meaning in life - then you will never have enough. Never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you.

On one level, we all know this stuff already - it's been codified as myths, proverbs, cliches, bromides, epigrams, parables: the skeleton of every great story. The trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.

Worship power - you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart - you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out.

The insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they're evil or sinful; it is that they are unconscious. They are default settings. They're the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that's what you're doing.

And the world will not discourage you from operating on your default settings, because the world of men and money and power hums along quite nicely on the fuel of fear and contempt and frustration and craving and the worship of self.

Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom to be lords of our own tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation.

This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talked about in the great outside world of winning and achieving and displaying. The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom.

The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the "rat race" - the constant gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing.

I know that this stuff probably doesn't sound fun and breezy or grandly inspirational the way a commencement speech is supposed to sound. What it is, as far as I can see, is the capital-T Truth, with a whole lot of rhetorical niceties stripped away.

You are, of course, free to think of it whatever you wish. But please don't just dismiss it as just some finger-wagging Dr. Laura sermon. None of this stuff is really about morality or religion or dogma or big fancy questions of life after death.

The capital-T Truth is about life BEFORE death.

It is about the real value of a real education, which has almost nothing to do with knowledge, and everything to do with simple awareness; awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, all the time, that we have to keep reminding ourselves over and over:

"This is water."

"This is water."

It is unimaginably hard to do this, to stay conscious and alive in the adult world day in and day out. Which means yet another grand cliché turns out to be true: your education really IS the job of a lifetime. And it commences: now.



David Foster Wallace - Commencement Speech at Kenyon College

http://www.marginalia.org/dfw_kenyon_commencement.html
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The nature of money

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The below article resonates with how we, via our volunteer group Create Clearwater, are attempting to respond to the economic, environmental and social mess this country is facing- with joy, aesthetics and community, not fear and desperation. I find the current economic crisis (or whatever label one wants to put on it) a huge opportunity to return to a more sane way of life - an open door to freedom if we only can cooperate with one another. It has brought people to a need of change in many cases and is getting them to question the way we do things which is always an opportunity.


The author brings up an important point: We have lost sight of the whole purpose of money - to facilitate our quality of life, not to enslave us within its out of control machinations which have taken on a life of their own. What would it take to bring money back under our control and have it serve us and our truest needs, instead of us serving it?


I found parts of this article beautiful and profound.


http://www.realitysandwich.com/money_and_crisis_civilization


Excerpt: In the face of the impending crisis, people often ask what they can do to protect themselves. "Buy gold? Stockpile canned goods? Build a fortified compound in a remote area? What should I do?" I would like to suggest a different kind of question: "What is the most beautiful thing I can do?" You see, the gathering crisis presents a tremendous opportunity. Deflation, the destruction of money, is only a categorical evil if the creation of money is a categorical good. However, you can see from the examples I have given that the creation of money has in many ways impoverished us all. Conversely, the destruction of money has the potential to enrich us. It offers the opportunity to reclaim parts of the lost commonwealth from the realm of money and property.

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