Noetica

What constitutes best spiritual practice?

Occasionally we feel the call to actively engage spiritually, to join our personal energies with the universal quest for positive outcomes … but we are blinded and confused by a torrent of choices. What are the best spiritual practices for individual enlightenment, sustainable civilization and a more beautiful and humane society?

International Society for the Study of Subtle Energies and Energy Medicine
Esoteric Science

Because consciousness, agriculture and community are three essential pillars of civilization, the Noetic Order of Jedi postulates that meditation, gardening and acts of kindness are ideal spiritual practices for stabilizing and perpetuating civilization in the past, present and future.

I. Meditation. Meditation is the principal spiritual practice of Buddhism, among other ancient wisdom traditions, primarily because it leads one on a path of self-discovery toward mindfulness, which might be described as mental, emotional and spiritual alignment with the Universe. In the West, many of us are engaged in noisy transmission in the form of prayer. Yet we discount the clinically proven benefits of meditation, including reduced stress hormones, reduced blood pressure, the development of a more peaceful and mindful disposition, enhanced potential for creative breakthrough and an overall more positive outlook on life. Meditation has more active variant forms, including mind-body practices such as tai chi, yoga and qigong.

http://stress.about.com/od/tensiontamers/p/profilemeditati.htm
http://www.aboutmeditation.org/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meditation

II. Gardening. It’s easy to forget that all of our civilized progress and scientific knowledge ultimately derives from an intimate relationship with, and observation of, Nature. Yet the artifice and arbitrary, mechanized nature of our faster-stronger-cheaper civilization separates us as individuals from the essential wellspring of human experience. A best approach is to re-engage the process that began civilization by planting some heirloom (non-genetically modified) seeds into the ground. This process will teach us and our family all sorts of things about Nature experientially, through direct hands-on experience. As a form of meditation, it will return health benefits such as reduced stress, reduced blood pressure and a more positive outlook. Further, it will allow us to derive some of our own food from our back yard, taking some power away from the mechanized system of exploitation manifest worldwide as monoculture farms sprayed with poison, not to mention the fossil fuels necessary to transport foods. Edible plants can be beautiful, and ornamental plants can be edible!

http://organicgardening.about.com/
http://www.backyardgardener.com/veg/
http://www.permaculture.org/nm/index.php/site/index/

III. Acts of Kindness. Be an anti-criminal, and resolve to commit one premeditated random act of kindness per day. Just one. We are surrounded by lost, lonely and hurting individuals. Foster enlightened community by acting daily to alleviate some of that suffering. Invite an unpopular friend to do something social together. Host a movie night for out-of-town transplants or singles with minimal family ties. Bring some of those seedlings you germinated over to a neighbor: infect your entire neighborhood with organic victory gardens! Call an elder or a younger who you expect might be lonely. On the next holiday, make sure you save at least one spot at the table for a friendless or homeless person. If you’re running short of ideas, then consider the following resources:

http://www.actsofkindness.org/community
http://www.helpothers.org/ideas.php

Is time running out for humanity?

“Once people withdraw from the normal everyday experience of building, and lose their pattern languages, they are literally no longer able to make good decisions about their surroundings, because they no longer know what really matters, and what doesn’t. People lose touch with their most elementary intuitions. …”

Alexander, the Zen architect to end all architecture, determined that the disharmonious, tense, pathological lives that we live today are the result of a loss of a timeless history of pattern language. He communicates his lessons eloquently in his book The Timeless Way of Building. Essentially, we have been impoverished by our own inabilities to visualize and manifest our own environments: our homes, our towns, our furniture and our food.

Megacorporations have profited greatly by facilitating this spiritual impoverishment, and inserting themselves as convenience-manufacturing intermediaries between us and Nature. We need them exactly as much as we have sold our individual sovereignty to them, as much as we decide that we enjoy the dependency of buying and using products mass-produced by Chinese slaves, infused with poisons and designed obsolescence, and shipped around the planet at great expense to environmental health—rather than the independence of making lasting things ourselves with our own minds and hands.

Most people believe themselves incompetent to design anything
and believe that it can only be done properly by architects and
planners. This has gone so far that most people shrink, in fear,
from the task of designing their surroundings. They are afraid
that they will make foolish mistakes, afraid that people will laugh
at them … and the fear is justified. Once people withdraw from
the normal everyday experience of building, and lose their pattern
languages, they are literally no longer able to make good decisions
about their surroundings, because they no longer know what really
matters, and what doesn’t. People lose touch with their most
elementary intuitions.

And since we no longer know, we have become culturally impoverished, and trapped in our own comfortable but uninspiring homes, behind our poison-perfect lawns and the long miles of asphalt that separate our families from our remote, prosthetic workspaces under the thumbs of various bureaucrats and elites. Happiness has become a mirage on the far horizon, something that Unicorp baits us to believe that might be achieved if we just put in enough time and effort while spending most of our lives on the corporate treadmill.

The fact is, a person is so far formed by his surroundings
that his state of harmony depends entirely on his harmony with his
surroundings. Some kinds of physical and social circumstances help
a person come to life. Others make it very difficult.

For instance, in some towns, the pattern of relationships between
workplaces and families helps us to come to life. Workshops mix with
houses, children run around the places where the work is going on,
the members of the family help in the work, the family may possibly
eat lunch together, or eat lunch together with the people who are
working there.

The fact that family and play are part of one continuous stream,
helps nourish everyone. Children see how adult work happens, they
learn what it is that makes the adult world function, they get an
overall coherent view of things; men are able to connect the
possibility of play and laughter, and attention to children, without
having to separate them sharply in their minds, from work. Men
and women are able to work, and to pay attention to their families
more or less equally, as they wish to; love and work are
connected, able to be one, understood and felt as coherent by
the people who are living there.

In other towns where work and family life are physically separate,
people are harassed by inner conflicts which they can’t escape.
A woman wants to be a loving woman, sustaining to her children;
and also to take part in the outer business of the world. But, in
a town where work and family are completely separate, she is
forced to make another impossible choice. She either has to
become a stereotyped “housewife” or a stereotyped masculine
“working woman”. The possibility of both realizing her feminine
nature, and also having a place in the world beyond her family,
is all but lost to her.

We must begin to visualize and manifest our own lives without placating forces that profit from our spiritual poverty. We must begin to use our own minds and our own hands to engage and make our own environments and communities, and to relearn the forgotten pattern languages of the timeless way. This is not to say that we should immediately quit our day jobs and start making our own candles and chairs—rather, we can start cultivating skills that match our interests (whether this is knitting, gardening or pottery), and start making things with the objective of bringing our life patterns back into balance so that not everything we see and touch is manufactured by Chinese slaves. Complicity with centripetal control forces for the sake of illusions of comfort, security and convenience leads only to more impoverishment and a sense of eking out a Matrix-like existence without full control over or connection with our lives as sovereign individuals. This does not have to be our reality. We have the means to wisely, responsibly and cooperatively return to natural life patterns right now.

Fleur de Nous

If we stop to smell the roses,
is there something we can learn?
“Good order results spontaneously when things are let alone” ~Zhuangzi, 4th Century BCE

Recently I had an interesting online discussion with some fellow nascent Jedi. The thread had turned to something about law, which made me think about law in universalized terms.

Law is a Mesopotamian invention, and like many things Mesopotamian, it constrains, controls and leads to both polarization of superiors and inferiors, and to pathological intensification.

Is there another way? Is there such a thing as maturing beyond the need for laws? Perhaps never completely, while we are human. It is certainly true that we very much need the guidelines and provisions of law right now, due to the aggressive shapes of our cultures and our intense, crowded patterns of living. But here is a key. Can we shape our culture and patterns of living so that we need law less? How can we turn from the strictures of law and pathological intensification toward naturalization? There are intelligent creatures living on Earth that don’t need fences and laws. Granted, they cannibalize their young now and then and practice rape to enforce their social pecking orders … but aggression, and in fact any behavioral set, is largely the product of natural selection over time. Natural selection is imposed on gene pools by the environment. Therefore, by shaping environment with an eye toward outcomes, we can shape natural selection. Consider this not only in light of biological evolution, but also cultural evolution. According to Dawkins and Wilson, both eminent biologists of our time, cultural memes operate much like biological genes.

A few sources in literature speak of the “still small voice” that guides the mind, if one can just listen. At this point, Jediism is still rife with fiction and fumbling about for its voice. Many of us want to be lauded as heroes and knights, in order to satisfy our own egos—but isn’t that a carry-over of conventional culture pressing on Jediism, rather than the converse? The fiction does give Jediism a nucleation point, and some personality and color, which is very necessary in order to captivate human imagination. But reality and fiction are different. It is better to capture the essential realities behind another man’s fiction than his fictions alone, and then to come up with representations that are compelling in our own lives. This reminds me of the saying of Taoist masters that they cannot teach the Tao; they can only point to the moon.

Part of the attraction of Jediism is that it is big, very big. It is the vessel containing all consciousness concerned about the fate of the Universe. It may be best described as the Manifold Way: collectively, the paths between each individual and the Universe. It is already there; we just need to realize that we can fall into it. And since it lives with us, paralleling our lives as a silent partner, it is a living, changing thing. Living things defy law, and can neither be adequately described nor contained by them. Laws are imposed within certain reference frames in much the same way that fences are erected on properties. They serve their purpose and provide boundaries for patterns of life in their day … but over time, they are mended and replaced, and eventually abandoned, left to be renaturalized.

Jediism and law do not resemble each other. But perhaps Jediism could be the naturalization process around, behind and through law, resembling Nature and inevitability. I can put this another way. Without environment, there would be no law. Without the law, there would still be environment. Maybe Jediism is discovered when a culture reaches the point of grappling with the consequences of shaping its own environment. We’re arriving at that point.

As the new unreligion we can think less about what the Joneses are doing, and the ephemeral laws and the imaginings of other men, and more about how we as living beings and individuals best fit the natural world. Once we start making strides toward naturalization, we will have less need for the strictures, boundaries and impositions of law and conventionality. When the sheep become shepherds, there will be no need for fenced pastures.

The Timeless Way of Growing

Agriculture is central to human civilization.

From Wikipedia: “A civilization is a society or culture group normally defined as a complex society characterized by the practice of agriculture and settlement in towns and cities. Compared with other cultures, members of a civilization are commonly organized into a diverse division of labor and an intricate social hierarchy.”

And: “All human civilizations have depended on agriculture for subsistence.”

Civilization as we know it does not exist separately from agriculture. And yet most of us, as individuals in civilization, are far removed from agriculture. Why? Why is it that most of us agree that fresh-off-the-vine tomatoes and fresh eggs taste better, and yet so very few of us plant our own gardens or raise a couple of hens? We’ll spend hundreds of dollars per year to beat down our lawns into poison-perfect turf, but we can’t be bothered to spend a few dozen dollars and a little time cultivating our own food.

Why is it that we choose to enfranchise corporate farms that cram dozens of chickens into one tiny cage, or hundreds of thousands of pigs into one disease-prone concentration camp, or thousands of cattle into a standing-room only feed lot where they must stand hip-deep in their own filth, suffering in cruel confines until they’re slaughtered? In truth, these practices are unsustainable and they could not go on indefinitely, even if we lacked sufficient ethics and imagination to find them sadistic and to seek better ways.

Our agricultural system doesn’t make any sense. Very little of what modern civilization does actually agrees with common sense. Even the way we make most of our bread involves extracting monoculture grains from corporate farms with fossil fuels, then processing almost all of the nutrition out of them with bleach in vats, and then “re-enriching” them with industrially produced vitamins, baking them and sealing them in plastic bags hundreds or thousands of miles from our local grocery stores, and then shipping them across the country in diesel trucks. We’re all aware of this insanity, and yet something makes us averse to becoming aware of how we can bring a meaningful relationship with the Earth back into our lives, and common sense back to civilization, so that we don’t have to buy all of our food from poisoned monoculture fields or animal concentration camps run by Unicorp.

Let’s rethink this. Consider, for instance, permaculture. Wikipedia states, “permaculture is an approach to designing human settlements and perennial agricultural systems that mimic the relationships found in the natural ecologies.” This ties in with sustainability, and a Natural World Order (timelessness) in lieu of a New World Order (centripetal control, more of the same). Mollison, one of the insightful Australian men who coined the term permaculture, identifies industrial systems of production and distribution as fundamentally destructive to Earth’s ecosystems.

The private—and collective or aggregate—practice of permaculture is a way of renaturalization, or Rewilding. Permaculture is indeed the path to manifesting a permanent human culture. And fittingly, it is fun, spiritually positive, it saves money and it improves the environment—not merely in the sense of reducing pollution, but also in the sense of beautifying one’s own property and community.

First and foremost, permaculture involves keen observation, and cultivating perception. One must listen and learn in order to discover the most fitting natural patterns—Alexander might call this a pattern language—for a particular set of environmental factors and complementary species at a particular location. This pattern language takes the following into account:

1. Observing the whole system or problem
2. Observing how the parts relate spatially and temporally
3. Understanding long-term sustainable, working and mature ecosystems in the area well enough to plan how to mend local sick systems
4. Seeing, cultivating and using connections between key parts

O’BREDIM is an acronym for a permaculture design methodology. From Wikipedia:

O’BREDIM is a mnemonic and acronym for observation, boundaries, resources, evaluation, design, implementation and maintenance.

* Observation allows you first to see how the site functions within itself, to gain an understanding of its initial relationships. Some people recommend a year-long observation of a site before anything is planted. During this period all factors, such as lay of the land, natural flora and so forth, can be brought into the design. A year allows the site to be observed through all seasons, although it must be realised that, particularly in temperate climates, there can be substantial variations between years.
* Boundaries refer to physical ones as well as to those your neighbours might place on you, for example.
* Resources include the people involved, funding, as well as what you can grow or produce in the future.
* Evaluation of the first three will then allow you to prepare for the next three. This is a careful phase of taking stock of what you have at hand to work with.
* Design is a creative and intensive process, and you must stretch your ability to see possible future synergetic relationships.
* Implementation is literally the ground-breaking part of the process when you carefully dig and shape the site.
* Maintenance is then required to keep your site at a healthy optimum, making minor adjustments as necessary. Good design will preclude the need for any major adjustment.

A recently updated book by Graham Bell, The Permaculture Way: Practical Steps to Create a Self-Sustaining World, details these concepts in a way that provides a rich context for how to get started in one’s own back yard. Now if you’re thinking that it’s too late or too early to start a garden due to seasonality, think again. If it’s late summer or fall, it’s the right time to begin plowing and conditioning the soil for next year’s planting. If it’s winter, it’s a perfect time to observe spaces, draw plans and plant seeds indoors in clay pots for transplantation in the spring. And if it’s spring, it’s time to plant.

Dare to take a complicated, layered, beautiful look at the world. Imagine proposing a relationship to Nature in your own backyard with a thorough, mutually respectful handshake that says, “I won’t depend on Unicorp for everything. I don’t want all of my food to be born in poison monoculture fields or concentration camps. I want to be closer to Nature, and indulge in the art and lore of gardening.” And consider the permaculture way; it’s what Nature intended.

Representing the mystic wilderness

Abolitionism is commonly understood as a movement against literal slavery, or against the holding of slaves. But bioethical abolitionism goes further than that.

Bioethical abolitionism holds that human beings are slaves to pain due to the nature of our biological evolution—but that this can change, and has been changing.  This school of thought seeks to abolish suffering in all sentient life purely through the advancement of biotechnology.

But technological advancement alone has proven to be only one aspect of civilization, an aspect that we have spent the last several hundred years driving to dangerously asymmetrical overdevelopment compared with our  spiritual advancement.  Technological advancement without spiritual advancement leads to what is exposed by Burke as pathological intensity in his ironically-titled work, “The Axemaker’s Gift”.  Today, most would agree that we live in a very pathologically intense world, with overconsumption of resources, relentless acceleration of demands on our time, productivity, efficiency and sanity … all of which conspire to leave our inner spiritual world—our intrinsic humanity—neglected, isolated, alienated, and inevitably, developmentally retarded.

Wild abolitionism offers an holistic counter-argument to bioethical abolitionism: in essence, yes, let’s abolish suffering—but the path of liberation is not through further technological intensification at the expense of spiritual development. Rather, it is through selection and preservation of technologies coupled with a collective return to the wilderness, to Nature, and to primitive individual sovereignty.

As a civilization, we have come a long, long way from home—collectively, we are weary—and like all great stories, ours cannot be complete until we finish the cycle by returning.

The Mesopotamian city-state made us give up our primitive individual sovereignty, essentially our free will, in exchange for the illusions of security and comfort. But times have changed. Today, greater security and greater comfort lie outside the pathologically intensified, crowded, concrete environments of our inner cities. Today, giving up free will to breathe smog, sit in traffic and stand in line for provisions is not entirely sane. Collectively, the centralization and intensification of our civilization is precisely what accelerates pollution, global warming and most varieties of local and global misery. Why is it that we foresake waking up to songbirds, sunlight and the sweet smell of dew on leaves in order to engage in the violence and ugliness of our mechanistic and unimaginative modern cities?

Environment has so much to do with who we are. Immersed in noise and distraction, we forget that life is not a series of ego-driven battles, routine appointments and bills until death or retirement, whichever comes first. Humanity is ultimately dependent upon Nature, and upon relationships with other sentient beings. Cut off exposure to Nature and to genuine, loving discourse with other human beings and the result is the modern urbanite: a stressed, tired physical body awash in toxins and medical prosthetics, surrounded by a fortress of possessions that mean nothing but serve well to socially isolate, and a spirit that has no reference points of deeper meaning to plumb but the formulaic programming of television and nondescript walls of concrete and glass. It is truly a wonder that so many of us are sane. Or are we?

We have been sold a relentless industrial nightmare of centripetal control called modern civilization, and we feed it with our mindless conformity, with our votes and with our taxes. Only some of us are beginning to realize that this nightmare has a dark destiny … yet we are still afraid to wake up aliens in our own bodies, our world invaded by thousands of years of unquestioning complicity with the Mesopotamian model of centripetal control that has turned us into numbered puppets with our wills and individuality forfeited to a body of elite lawyers that we call “representatives”. We refuse to wake up, probably, because our capacity for imagination has been so eroded by centuries of bovine complicity that we cannot envision viable alternatives.

But despite illusions, prostheses and this Matrix-like system of deferred dreams and suspended individuality that we’ve built around ourselves, the simple truth remains: we are sovereign individuals. Each of us can legitimately claim our own destiny. We don’t need to be controlled by others; we have merely agreed to it, in the past.

The Mesopotamian god-kings offered their citizens reliable food and some security in exchange for taxation and obedience. Good news! Today, taxation and obedience to ever-more labyrinthine laws are required, but the god-kings haven’t figured out how to sweeten the deal for their underlings. Reliable food can be attained via local co-ops and the profusion of available agricultural and horticultural technologies, and security is looking pretty dubious in the face of terror and in the undiminished shadow of nuclear war. What better strategy for both of these threats than decentralizing to the point where we present no particularly juicy strategic targets?

Human civilization and technological advancement are ill-served by agencies of national and global centripetal control. Increasing concentration of power in the hands of fewer and fewer elite individuals will not foster the trickle-down of democracy and freedom to the low. Quite the contrary. If we continue to entertain this charade, we will sell our children into chains they cannot see forged and fastened by masters they cannot resist. The hierarchy needs to be flattened. Individuals need to be recognized, individually and collectively, as sovereign. The holistic view is simple but subtle, and promotes a shift in historically partisan, partitioned and partial reference frames.  We need to start seeing people as whole sovereign individuals, not owned by companies or states. We need to see ourselves as One Humanity, not as Palestinians and Israelis. The Earth can be healed only if we perceive our world as a whole, not as Australia, Asia and North America. Each of us needs to make a choice between two fates: a return to the One Wild, where civilization decentralizes, borders vanish, pathological intensification and all of its accompanying effects diminish and individual liberty and spiritual development take root … or, complicity with an exponentially growing, unimaginative, monolithic hierarchy powered by death (warfare, control mechanisms, fear) and taxes.

This is a perfect time to choose one’s own fate. Become one with your wild spirit, your own wild destiny, and look to our most honest teacher and tireless benefactor: Nature. Leave the cities; we can gather in eco-villages. Let us forget the industrial nightmare of centripetal control and all of its empty promises, for we know its logical conclusion is dark and terrible. It is time that we wake up to our own lives, dream our own dreams and find our own ways, in beauty, love and the sort of physical simplicity that will afford us time and occasion for spiritual complexity and the pursuit of joy.