The Heart as an Organ of Perception

The Heart as an Organ of Perception
Source: Spirituality & Health Magazine
Issue: March/April 2006
Author: Stephen Harrod Buhner

Remember what it’s like to see a puppy walking slowly along, sniffing the ground, tail wagging, small body slightly askew? Something pulls you toward the puppy, so you say, “Here, boy, over here,” and the puppy looks up, sees you, and bounds over. In that moment, it’s as if something leaves the puppy and enters you and something in you leaves your body and touches the puppy. You want nothing more than to hold each other and enjoy the warmth of your closeness.

We have this experience almost daily, with our dear friends, our children, and our mates. If we’re lucky, we may feel it with a special piece of land, an old-growth tree, or a great ancient stone. It is one of the most real experiences we have, a particular kind of intimacy, yet we have no word for it in our language.

It is this moment of intangible touch that I’ve been exploring for the past 36 years as a psychotherapist, herbalist, and teacher. What would it be like to feel this every day, with everything, I wondered? What exactly is it and how could I create and sustain it?

It took me decades to find the answers to these questions. The ancient Greeks knew it well. They called it aesthesis, which means “to breathe in.” They recognized that the moment of touch was accompanied by a gasp, a particular kind of inspiration. They considered it the moment when the soul essence inside us, and the soul essence from something outside us, met and mingled. It is the root of our word “aesthetic.”

Years into my studies, I also began to connect something else to this experience. Indigenous peoples who still live close to the earth experience life very differently than we do in the West; they seem to perceive things that we cannot see, things that they are surprised we do not perceive. The explanation for this is simple, but profound: when you ask them where in the body they live, they gesture to the region of their hearts, while modern Westerners typically point to their heads. Perhaps the great lyrical writer Antoine de Saint-Exupéry had some insight into this phenomenon when he wrote, “And now here is my secret, a very simple secret. It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.”

Meaning Is in the Molecules
Consciousness studies in the late sixties focused almost entirely on the brain, in part because conventional wisdom held that it is our brain that distinguishes us from Earth’s other inhabitants. In the decades that followed, however, a few researchers worked without this preconception. Rollin McCraty at the HeartMath Institute is one; he began to look at the heart and its role in cognition and awareness. He and others suspected that consciousness might be mobile and that it might inhabit different locations in the body other than the brain.

One of the most important findings that emerged from these studies was the concept that our organs and bodies are highly complex “nonlinear” organisms in which the whole is far more than the sum of the parts. As Ary L. Goldberger, M.D., director of the Rey Laboratory and professor of medicine at Harvard University, put it: “The body is a complicated symphonic system, much like nature itself . . . onlinear systems composed of multiple subunits [such as the body] cannot be understood by analyzing these components individually.”

To understand such nonlinear systems, it’s helpful to look at the behavior of molecules. Researchers have found that when billions of molecules are enclosed in a container, their movements are at first random. But at some moment that can never be predicted, all the molecules spontaneously synchronize and begin to move and vibrate together as one coordinated whole, or system. In that moment of synchronicity, something comes into being that is more than the sum of its parts. And that something — call it the soul of the thing — cannot be found in any of the parts.

At that moment of synchronicity, the new system also begins to display what are called emergent behaviors as it acts on the parts, or subunits, to stimulate further, more complex synchronizations. A continuous stream of very rapid information — in the form of temperature fluctuations, velocity, pressure, chemical, electric, magnetic — begins to flow from the parts to whole and from the whole back to the parts in order to stabilize the system, according to Stanford University biologist Jan Walleczek. The meanings within the molecules, called the electromagnetic (EM) signature, tell the receiving organisms how these inputs affect its state of being. These meanings are analyzed and integrated into the organism, and a response is initiated.

All living systems work this way, retaining an exquisite sensitivity to disturbances of their equilibrium. They remember this equilibrium because they are highly intelligent and possess a soul force, this thing that comes into being that is more than the sum of the parts.

The heart is such a nonlinear, self-balancing system. It possesses self-organization and emergent behaviors. It functions not only as a powerful endocrine gland, but also as a unique kind of brain — a cognitive and perceptual organ, and a powerful electromagnetic generator and receiver.

The Field of the Heart
The heart contains pacemaker cells that set its beat. At the moment of self-organization, the first pacemaker cell begins pulsating and oscillating at a regular rhythm. Every new cell “hooks” itself to this one and begins beating in time with the first. This is called entrainment. As individual pacemaker cells couple by the millions, new and unique perceptual capacities come into being. As Goldberger notes, “Nonlinear coupling generates behaviors that defy explanation using traditional (linear) models.”

When the heart is fully online, it produces an electromagnetic field much larger than that which is created by the aggregate of the individual cells. The field is 5,000 times stronger than the brain’s and can be detected by sensitive scientific instruments up to 10 feet away. It is strongest from the body’s surface to 18 inches away, but continues indefinitely into space, like radio waves, according to biologists like Mae-Wan Ho at the Institute of Science in Society.

Not only do heart cells entrain with each other; the heart also entrains with other electromagnetic fields it encounters. When two heart fields oscillate in unison, there is a rapid exchange of information, resulting in alterations in heart function, hormonal cascade, and physiology generally. A kind of dialogue begins.

When the heart field of a healer and a patient meet, for example, the electrocardiograph (ECG) or heart pattern of the healer can be found in both the ECG and electroencephalograph or brain patterns of the patient, according to research by Rollin McCraty. The heart field of the healer literally paces the patient into new patterns of health.

Heart entrainment is natural to us, occurring at the earliest stage of life. In the womb, the infant’s heart entrains with the mother’s and continues to do so after birth, writes Joseph Chilton Pearce in his book The Biology of Transcendence. The mother’s electromagnetic field is filled with information and meaning, including how she feels about her infant. In fact, our feelings always affect the information encoded in our hearts’ wave patterns. Babies, like all living systems, take in and decode this information. We remain sensitive to these fields after birth because we have gestated in the midst of this kind of language. Once born we routinely, often unconsciously, scan encountered fields for information. The way we as humans encounter these fields is unique: we experience them as emotions.

In essence, the heart is an extremely sensitive organ whose domain, we instinctively know, is feeling. Recent research reveals why: our heart processes a particular and unique EM bandwidth with complex signals that we experience as unique emotional complexes. These EM signals, taken in through the heart, are processed in the brain in the same manner as our conventional senses such as sight and smell. Unfortunately, this kind of emotional perception of the world starts to atrophy in most of us when we begin locating consciousness in the brain, rather than in the heart.

The Heart-Mind Information Superhighway
Living organisms possess extremely complex electromagnetic fields that encode everything about the organism: its health, history, potential, and more. When the EM field passes into and through the heart, the information is then routed to the brain, which analyzes the information and extracts the meaning from the EM signature.

The heart can act as a “mind” or an organ of perception because approximately 60 percent of heart cells are neural cells, which function similarly to those in the brain. They cluster in ganglia and connect to the neural network of the body through axon-dendrites. This is not an accident. The heart has direct connections to specific centers of the brain and these connections create a direct, unmediated flow of information from the heart, according to research by Gary Schwartz, professor of psychology at the University of Arizona, and Linda Russek of the Heart Science Foundation. The heart, in fact, is hard-wired into the amygdala, thalamus, hippocampus, and cortex — brain centers involved with emotional memories, sensory experience, the extraction of meaning from sensory inputs, problem solving, reasoning, and learning. To enhance communication with the brain and central nervous system, the heart also makes and releases its own neurotransmitters as it needs them.

The mind-heart connection is further enhanced by a state called “heart coherence,” according to McCraty. During coherence, the heart’s rhythm sets the beat for the entire body and the heart waves increase in amplitude, giving the heart field greater depth and power. Coherence also brings an immediate change in brain function. Large populations of cells in the forebrain begin to oscillate to the heart’s rhythm, and the brain waves ride on top of the heart waves. The perception of those brain cells — the kinds of information they process — is very different than when consciousness is located in the heart.

As brain function changes, so does what we see and learn. What people perceive when they live from the heart is quite different from what they perceive when they live in the head. In coherence, a whole new world opens, and things not normally perceived become commonplace.

When someone in a state of heart coherence allows his or her heart field to entrain or merge with another EM field, the rapid download of information between the organisms happens naturally. While this information download occurs in a language of its own, it rarely happens in words. In one sense, it can be thought of as a direct conveyance of meaning without language. Information flows through the heart first and is then routed to the brain where it is translated, much as radio receivers convert radio waves into music. But in humans, the process is more complex, as the brain translates sensory data, memories, experiences, and knowledge into sound, image, touch, taste, odor.

From these translations of sensory forms, which are shaped by the culture in which we are raised, come meaning.

The Shape of the Heart Field
We all live immersed in meaning-filled fields of information. These fields flow into us from the moment of our birth. We experience these fields not as a stream of words on a page but as emotions, the touch of life upon us. This interchange, rooted in our hearts, alters our lives, shapes its quality, reminds us that we are never alone. It reconnects us to the ground of being from which we come and nurtures in us a natural empathy with the world around us. We are one intelligent organism among many, one ensouled form amid a multitude.

Heart cognition moves us from a rational orientation in a dead, mechanized universe to one in which the unique perceptions and emotions are noticed and strengthened. It allows us to deeply experience the living soulfulness of the world, constantly reweaving us back into the fabric of life. We may be out of practice, but our capacity to perceive from the heart comes naturally to us, and it never disappears. As I’ve explained, we are made for the unique nature of each thing to pass into us through our hearts, which store memories of this thing, and engage it in dialogue.

With practice, it is possible to learn the shape of your heart field as well as you know your own hands, and use your heart as you do your hands to touch the world around you. It is also possible to entrain with other EM fields intentionally, allowing the information in these fields to pass into you in the form of information you can use. It is, after all, as natural to us as the beating of our hearts. Ancient and indigenous peoples, locating consciousness in the heart, commonly experience aesthesis as a regular part of life. They know those moments when there is a blending in the soul essence of two living things, when the human begins to know the nonhuman directly from itself.

Why We Can Talk to Plants
This ancient knowing explains how these people learn direct depth healing of human disease and the use of medicinal plants: a blending of the EM fields between human and plant occurs of its own accord, a moment of synchronicity when information is directly exchanged. Often, this blending is experienced as a visionary or dream state. Manuel Cordova-Rios, the great Amazonian healer from Peru, describes one such moment: “In infinite detail her internal organs appeared on the screen of my vision. As the liver came into my sight, it was obvious from its black color that it had ceased to function and I knew that it was no longer serving to purify the blood. As this became clear to me I turned my attention to the remedy and the appropriate plants appeared in my vision — flowers from the retama tree and roots from the retamilla shrub. As the visions faded off into more general dreams, I knew it was possible for her to recover.”

This direct exchange is how the German poet and botanist Goethe discovered the “pregnant point” and, cultivating it, came to his understanding of plant metamorphosis: that all parts of a plant — pistils, stamens, stems — are merely leaf morphed into different shapes. “He who sees into the secret inner life of the plant, into the stirring of its powers, and observes how the flower gradually unfolds itself, sees the matter with quite different eyes — he knows what he sees,” wrote Goethe.

This is how the great agriculturalist Luther Burbank was able to coax new food plants into existence in two or three years and, trotting down rows of 20,000 seedlings, could pick the seven that would breed true. From him came many of the domesticated plants that we take for granted as food. It was sensitivity, he explained, that “partly accounts for my unusual success in selecting between two apparently identical plants or flowers or trees or fruits.”

This is how Masanobu Fukuoka, the great Japanese farmer, equals the yields of technological farming without fertilizers, weeding, or tilling the soil. He taught himself to understand the true nature of barley from within itself, to grow it under the unique conditions of his own field, and to see the human from the barley’s point of view. “Only to him who stands where the barley stands and listens well, will it speak and tell, for his sake, what man is,” said Fukuoka.

Reductionist approaches are like concrete sidewalks. They suppress the wild, but the power of the green — veriditas as Hildegard of Bingen called it — always breaks through. When we locate consciousness in the brain, we reduce the breadth of full perception and thought to a narrow band. Everything else is relegated to the realm of superstition or heresy. But when we reclaim the heart as an organ of perception and cognition, we feel first and then know — the oldest way of being human.

Sensing Your Heart Field
Have a friend stand six feet away. Walk up to him or her slowly. When you’re 12 to 18 inches away, you will suddenly experience being in this person’s “space.” Your two heart fields are touching. Once you get to know the feel of your field, you can learn to extend it out from yourself and use it like sensitive fingers to touch the world around you.

Learning to Think with Your Heart in Four Steps

1. Focus on a natural object, such as a plant or a flower or a piece of fruit. Notice its appearance, its colors and shadings. Immerse yourself in its sensory aspects (or, put another way, come to your senses). This is the first step in getting out of your head.

2. Continue to look at the object before you and ask yourself, “What does it feel like?” This activates the heart as an organ of perception and helps naturally to shift your attention to the object’s electromagnetic field. You will then experience a unique feeling complex, which you probably can’t name, as the object’s electromagnetic signature moves through your heart.

3. Allow the feeling to fill you. Breathe through and with the feeling while continuing to focus on the object in front of you. Notice how your breathing has slowed, your vision slips into softer focus, colors seem to brighten, and your body relaxes. These physiological shifts always accompany the movement into heart-centered perception.

4. Reach out with your heart field and hold the thing in front of you. Allow yourself to feel a sense of caring for it (this creates specific alterations in the EM field of the heart). As you do this, the two fields will entrain, and you will feel a flow of energy between you and it.

If you do this with a plant, you might at this point ask it to tell you about itself. George Washington Carver used this process to deepen his understanding of food plants such as the peanut. “Anything will give up its secrets,” he said, “if you love it enough.”

Stephen Harrod Buhner is an herbalist, psychotherapist, and teacher. He is the author of many books, including The Secret Teachings of Plants: The Intelligence of the Heart in the Direct Perception of Nature and Sacred Plant Medicine.

ISH Report 2

Integrating ‘Coming To Meet’ Below I will put the reading I Was assigned to read everyday this week, and after that is my report on how I used this as a tool.

Coming to Meet:

Advice from the “I Ching”

Carol Anthony

From “The Challenge of the Heart” Love, sex and intimacy in Changing Times edited by John Wellwood (Shambhala 1985)

Anyone who works with the I Ching, whether for purposes of self-development or for the most mundane-seeming things, is being taught “the way of the Sage,”1 for no matter what our concern, to achieve prog­ress requires a realignment in our attitude to the cosmic point of view This realignment moves us toward understanding the higher realities. Ultimately we are working on our spiritual nature.

If we are already involved in defective relationships, these become the means by which we learn the “way of the Sage ” In correcting them we learn the true power of modesty as a shield and sword. Modesty alone arouses the Creative Power.² Through modesty, that is, through doing nothing at all, we achieve everything.

In using the I Ching for guidance in difficult situations over a period of years, we come to understand not only how modesty brings about our defense and furtherance, but how it also acts as a tool for rectifying our relationships.

Modesty in the I Ching has several meanings. First, it is the humility of knowing we need help from the Sage, and asking for it. Second, it is will-power as reticence, restraining our clamoring inferiors.³ Third, it is patience, holding firm when the pressures of the moment are intense, and when yielding to them in the slightest degree would cause us to lose our path. Fourth, it is conscientiousness, reflecting to see if we have overlooked any evil in ourselves, and keeping on guard against the en­trance of any doubt. This conscientiousness amounts to an unflagging awareness so that one is not deceived by self-flattery or false enthusiasm brought on by the pressure to find “solutions.” Fifth, modesty is enduring firmly through perseverance. Sixth, it is the will to accept things as they come, ever seeking clarity through acceptance and docility; for one realizes that clarity gives one the strength to see things through to completion. Finally, modesty is expressed as devotion to the path of the good for its own sake, for one sees clearly that staying on the path is the goal, and that everything good comes out of that. For a long time we must be content to wait and work without expectation. Then support comes. We need to realize that it can come only when we prove reliable—devoted to being led. Much of the work of self-development is to correct our rela­tionship with the Sage by allowing ourselves to be led.

“Coming to Meet” (Hexagram 44) describes a correct relationship as one in which two people come to meet each other halfway. Halfway means that both are open and receptive to each other. Coming to meet halfway also must be mutually voluntary, based on the principle of spon­taneous attraction described in “The Marrying Maiden” (54) as the “es­sential principle of relatedness.” We must maintain reserve in our relation­ships until the coming to meet is mutual. Maintaining reserve is the correct action (or non action). Coming to meet halfway is possible only between people who are mutually honest and sincere in their way of life. It is the great joy of such relationships that they are full of mutual trust and sensitivity.

We understand “coming to meet” better if we compare it to a con­tract made between two people. If one is indolent in performing his part, or has mental reservations about what he is willing to do, the contract may fail. Although such a person may have entered the contract without any immediate objections, his attitude may contain objections which arise only at the time his obligations are to be performed. Such a person may secretly feel that contracts are not to be taken seriously, or, on seeing how difficult it is to fulfill his part, he may hedge on doing it because of some idea that all contracts are subject to fitting into his concept of what is reasonable.” In any case, it is impossible to come to meet such a person halfway, and the I Ching repeatedly advises us that it is better for us to go on our way alone and to wait until the fundamentals of unity are firmly established before we commit ourselves to other people. When we cater to another person’s ego because it is uncomfortable to go on our way alone, we choose the high road of comfort rather than the low road of modesty and loneliness. Withdrawal from the high road is the action often counseled by the I Ching.

If a person is treating us presumptuously, and if we remind him of this, he may correct his habits for a few days, but gradually revert to the same pattern of neglect. This he does from egotistical indolence—some­thing in his point of view makes him feel he has the right to be indifferent. Likewise, we must withdraw from the indolent person, “cutting our inner strings” of attachment to him, and no longer look at his wrong-doings with our inner eye. This enables the person to see what he is doing in the mirror created by the void. By dispersing any alienation we may feel, we also lend strength to his superior self. Momentarily, his ego is overcome. We need to realize that this change is short-lived, but it is an essential beginning. The change does not last because it is only founded on his response to feeling the void. It becomes a permanent change when he sees clearly that unity with others depends upon his devoting himself to correcting his mistakes. Only then can we abandon a more formal way of relating to him.

The sense of loss, loneliness, or poverty of self a person feels on our withdrawing from him is what, in “Biting Through” (21), is called “pun­ishment.” The punishment works only if it is applied in the way described in the lines of this hexagram. These lines make clear that on encountering the ego of another person, we must consistently and immediately with­draw, neither contending with him nor trying to force progress by lever­age. We withdraw, accepting his state of mind, letting him go. We must take care not to withdraw with any other attitude than that required to maintain inner serenity, and to keep from giving up on him. If we with­draw with feelings of alienation, or of self-righteousness, our ego is in­volved as the punisher. The ego, as the third line of this hexagram says, “lacks the power and authority” to punish. The culprits not only do not submit, but “by taking up the problem the punisher arouses poisonous hatred against himself.” One person’s ego may not punish another per­son’s ego.

When a person returns to the path of responding correctly, we like­wise go to meet him halfway, rather than tell him he is doing things correctly. In this way he comes to relating correctly from his own need to relate correctly and we do not force it on him. Our consistency and discipline in feeling out each moment and responding to it does the work. It is unnecessary to watch a person’s behavior to see if he is becoming worse or better; we need only be in tune with ourselves. Our inner voice warns us precisely when to withdraw and when to relate. We need only listen within.

It is an important I Ching principle to work with a situation only so long as the other person is receptive and open, and to retreat the instant this receptivity wanes. When we understand that this represents a natural cycle of influence, we learn to “let go” when the moment of influence passes, and not to press our views. This gives other people the space they need to move away from us and return of their own accord. The Sage relates to us in precisely this manner, and the hexagram comments that the Sage is never sad, in view of our coming and going, but is always like the sun at midday. In the same way we must avoid egotistical enthusiasm when we think we are making progress, or discouragement when the dark period ensues. Throughout the cycle we learn to remain detached, holding steadily to the light within us and within others. The instant we strive to influence, we “push upward blindly.” If we insist on accomplish­ing the goal at all costs, our inner light is darkened and our will to see things through is damaged.

The strength of a person’s ego corresponds to the amount of atten­tion it can attract. On the most simple level this recognition is by eye-to-eye contact; on the more basic inner level we strengthen other people’s egos by watching them with our inner eye. If we are annoyed with some­one, we are watching him with our inner eye. Only when we withdraw both our eye-to-eye contact and our inner gaze do we deprive his ego of its power. An I Ching line says, “We cannot lead those whom we follow.” By following others with our inner eye we do not walk our own path but attend to theirs. This gratifies their ego. It is as if we are attached to them by hidden underground cables which must be cut. It is as if we are acting as a lifeguard who is watching to save them from themselves. As long as they recognize that someone is going to save them, they carelessly begin to swim with the sharks. They do this not only because they feel a false sense of security, but because it guarantees that we pay attention to them. As long as we play the role of lifeguard, the others we care about will not save themselves; for their own good it is necessary to withdraw, cut our inner strings and leave matters up to them; this is also to cease doubting them.

Inner withdrawal is an action of perseverance that has its own reward, but only when it is modest perseverance, not an attempt to impress others by getting them to notice our withdrawal. In many situations the problem is resolved, not through any external action that arises spontaneously on our part, but by simply “letting it happen,” through letting go of the problem. Our “action” is to “let go”

In practicing disengagement from negative images and their off­spring emotions, we train ourselves not to brand adverse situations as “bad.” By not deciding the situation is “unfavorable,” we remain open to learning something from it, and allow the hidden force to resolve the difficulties in a favorable way. From the I Ching point of view, adversity provides the opportunity for inner growth and development as we over­come the doubts, anxieties anti judgments that block our access to the Creative Power. It is also its view that all evil, either in us or in other people, arises from doubts and misunderstandings. Doubting that we, in and of ourselves, are sufficiently equipped to succeed in life, we develop a false self-image, or ego. Doubting that we have help from the Creative, we fear what life has to offer, therefore build defenses against the un­known. All these doubts and misunderstandings are at the root of how people relate incorrectly to each other.

In the foregoing examples we have seen that action tends to be ex­pressed in terms of applying limits to our thoughts and actions. Accepting such self-imposed limits is the message of “Limitation” (60). One neces­sary limitation we must place on ourselves is that of restraining ourselves, through self-discipline, from expecting quick results. Our inferiors impa­tiently measure the other person’s behavior to see if we are having an effect. The I Ching explains that we must learn to work with time as the vehicle of the Creative Force. Working with time, adapting to the fact that slow progress is the only progress that endures, is part of the process of non-action. We need to withdraw from impatience and “flow,” as with water that only runs downhill. We need to prohibit our inferiors from “watching the team horse,” and from putting images of gloom and doom before our inner eye. Sometimes doing these things requires what can only be called “galling limitation,” and “sublime perseverance,” but it is only by such means that we can gain superiority over our recalcitrant inferiors. We also find that during such times we can overcome the assaults of our inferiors if we mount a resolute determination to withstand them. It is important to remember that they are but paper dragons and they do not have the invincible power they make us think they have. It is also important to remember that when we cling steadfastly to our path, we also get help from the Creative, but even more readily if we remember to ask for help.

Perfecting our inner nature in the ways described develops the power of inner truth. The hexagram “Revolution” (49) stresses that what we ask of people must “correspond with a higher truth and not spring from arbitrary or petty motives.” What we think of as justice may not be so from the cosmic point of view. We may have imagined, for example, that a person who has been unfair with us ought to go through a series of steps to re-establish their credibility and good will. In effect, we are saying that we require them to meet conditions of our specifications, otherwise the injustice cannot be erased. Such demands are the work of our self-righteous pride and ego. The way in which a person returns to the path is not properly our business; furthermore, when they have returned, we must meet them halfway We also need to avoid using the moment to gain the recognition that we were “right.”

The action described thus far—that of non action, of keeping our inner attitude correct, works through the power of inner truth. Inner truth has to mount to great strength before it can break through obdurate situations. It mounts in strength in direct proportion to our inner perse­verance to hold to the correct path, and it acts on the principle of gentle penetration described in “The Gentle” (“The Penetrating,” Wind) (57). Just as roots penetrate rocks and break them apart, perseverance in the correct attitude breaks through closed minds.

A second type of action arises spontaneously out of a correct attitude. This action manifests as a response to what is happening. Although we realize we are acting, we do so with such detachment that the action happens through us, rather than by us. We are conduits for what arises in the hidden world. Sometimes this action is very forceful and abrupt, and takes us completely by surprise. It had the correct effect and was appro­priate, and we could not have planned it. Sometimes the action taken is a very quiet, calming action, but again, we are detached. Such moments do not come often, but usually happen in difficult situations in which the help of the Creative is greatly needed.

Such spontaneous action can only occur when we are in a receptive and open state of mind. It may take place after we have been misunder­stood and challenged by other people’s inferiors, and have strictly held to our limits. Suddenly we say or do the correct thing. Steadfastness has aroused the Creative Power to act through us. The state of mind in which such action can take place is that of emptiness. We have mentally disen­gaged from any intentions or plans, any feelings of urgency or alienation, of wanting to do or dreading to do anything about the situation at hand. We have also become free of any discouraging feelings of helplessness, and have allowed ourselves to rely on the cosmos to let things work out as they will. In arriving at this “empty place,” the place of no thought, or what in Zen is called “no mind,” we are in tune with the Creative.

Inner correctness also activates what the I Ching calls “the helpers”— those hidden and often suppressed great and good elements in other people that, once aroused, provide the necessary inner assent to accom­plish needed changes. The lines in the I Ching that call for “seeing the great man”⁴ and “holding to the great man” mean that we need to hold to the possibility of these elements in others, even though the most unpleasant elements are visible. If it is impossible to conceive of the great man in others, it is sufficient to disengage from our negative feelings about them: to be neutral in attitude is to automatically remain open to their potential goodness.

Similar to this spontaneous action is a slow-building action that steadily mounts in intensity to a denouement that just happens by itself. Complex, unseen movements are taking place. During this time the external situation seems to demand our taking some action, but we don’t know what action. As “Preponderance of the Small” (62) tells us, it is necessary to wait in the “ambiguous spot,” doing nothing. Doing nothing and waiting is the correct attitude results in a build-up of inner power. The taming and holding onto this power is the subject of “The Taming Power of the Great” (26), which speaks of daily self-renewal through keeping still as the only means of remaining at the peak of our inner powers. In “taming” this power by resisting the urge to act, we experience a sense of discomfort. Waiting in the ambiguous spot is galling to our inferiors who point to the “threatening dangers of non action.” The rush of desire to do something, pictured as a bull’s horns and a rhinoceros’s tusk, may be controlled through seeing with clarity that it is not yet time to act. Finally, with our being hardly aware of it, the inner power has its effect and the obstacles are overcome. When this happens we get the top line, which says, “He attains the way of heaven, success.” Through waiting and controlling our energy, inner power grew and the victory was won. It was as if the root inside the boulder swelled and split the boulder apart. At this final moment those who were hostile or unreceptive change and become open to us. This change is dramatic and inexplicable, outside the boundaries of any logical process.

Waiting in the ambiguous spot involves risks and dangers which must be overcome if we are to succeed. This sort of patience described in the I Ching is a unique focusing of will to hold to what is good in our­selves, in other people, and in the life process, so that the inferior man, wherever he exists, is overthrown. First we retreat from any inferior impulses we have; then we disengage our attention from the other person, leaving it truly up to him to do or not do the right thing. This kind of humble acceptance, in which we “cling to the power of truth,” arouses the Creative Power. We do not need to like the person, or to believe in him, or to believe in our own power. Quite the opposite: truly, we are power­less. Without going from the extreme of disbelief to the extreme of belief, we simply relinquish, or sacrifice, our disbelief. In sacrificing it, we return to the empty place, the neutral place, the place of the Creative. In so doing we retain our inner dignity and we preserve his; by recognizing and accepting our own powerlessness we give him the space to find him­self. This space acts as a kind of cosmic mirror in which the other person perceives and apprehends his inferior man. In this manner we make it possible for another person’s superior man to regain control.

The build-up of inner power depends upon the self-limitation de­scribed. Inner power is maintained through daily self-renewal—letting go of everything and keeping still every day At the same time, it is impos­sible to free ourselves from entrenched habits of mind all at once. We need to forgive ourselves for not always living up to our standards, and for frequently failing. It is unreasonable to expect too much, too soon, therefore the I Ching says we must put “limitation, even upon limitation?’

NOTES

[1] [i]‘The Sage” refers to the unnamed universal teacher whose wisdom is expressed in the I Ching. This term could also be understood here as referring to our own native intelligence or place of inner wisdom.

2 The Creative Power is the subject of the first hexagram of the I Ching, and is associated with the light, regenerative, centrifugal power of yang. This creative power of the universe is activated by its opposite, the dark, womb-like, cohesive power of yin. Being receptive to the needs of the moment allows the creative power of the universe to act through us.

³ ”The inferiors” is a term referring to lesser elements in our character which often clamor to take over and guide our acts. They often want short-term, immediate results, and lack the patience to persevere through difficult times. These are the parts of us that operate out of fear and distrust, having little faith in the creative power of die universe.

4The “great man” or “superior man” in the I Ching is a term referring to our innate wisdom, which operates in accord with the Creative.

---

Report Starts Here:

Well, I have been applying the wisdom of this passage to a recent ‘break-up’ with a woman that I ahve been seeing over the last few weeks.  We met online.  She was very physically attractive and it was mutual…but we both sort of understood that we were two very different people in a lot of ways.

So last week, after four days of not talking to her…the thoughts that ’she’s not that into me’  began to get louder and louder.  I had basically been trying to withdraw from her, but not in my heart.  I was beginning to resent her silence and in my head rang the voices ‘no, this time its really her that needs to call me’…I had been calling a lot and was getting that I was spinning my tires somewhat.

Anyways, finally, I needed to see her.  I texted her and she, as always was open to seeing me. She was always open to seeing me, just she never really showed much real interest in me.  Anyways…long story short, I went over and she annouced that there wasn’t any real feelings for me, that in some way, she had been exploring with me but got a point where there just wasnt that ’something’ that she needed to continue seeing me.  She was open to being friends etc. but basically I got that she was no longer open to me..It was a neat experience for me, as I allowed to feel the fullness of the rejection/longing feelings that the moment stirred in me.  I cried a little in her presence, and she said ‘don’t cry’ , then corrected herself, appreciating my openness and said ‘no , cry all you want’.  I felt like it was the first real connection we had made, so feeling the feelings led me to a place of gratitude for her, bestowing me the foil to experience life fully in this way…I honestly felt grateful for her answer.

Fairly quickly, I had this thought…’I should go, she doesn’t really want me, so why would I stick around any longer’…this rationalizing turned quickly into a ‘claiming’ of my ‘openness’ to express my feelings…and then swiftly I was identifying with thoughts that said ‘well, I’ll show her, she can’t have me…na na na..and I was off’

I ended up leaving in a resentful place with her, feeling very pissed off that this person did not want me.  Good cue to leave…but this is a pattern of mine that comes up whenever I get involved with a woman…the good news was…I was through it within 24hours…and able to let go, move on, and be open again.  I get that sometimes these episodes of resenting a woman for a percieved rejection would sometimes last for months…and really cloud my vision and ability to be open and meet someone else.  Its still a work in progress.

The Advice I took from the above reading, has been to help presence myself during this time of withdrawl from somebody.  Frequently, over the past week, I have found the resentful guy coming back up…he is usually coupled the voices that are telling me ‘there is still a chance, if I only I could A B C or D…’. Let it go, but do so with love.  So this past week I have been flipping between ‘Letting Go’ the fuck you way, and ‘Letting Go’ the sagely way…I get that is important for me, as it directly affects how well and quickly I am able to regroup and re-open myself to all the other beautiful, mystifying, and humbling women of the universe.

The I Ching is telling me so much this week, and have carried it in my pocket for the subways rides…and have been good to pick it up whenever I notice the forlorn feelings coming up…I Still notice the flip flopping going on…and am with wanting to call her again and share her all this, but I have not been able to be these thoughts and be free from the ‘I will win you back’ part of my ego…so, back to the I Ching…and back and forth I have gone all week in this way.

Fritjof Capra

Well, I’m not sure how this author eluded me for so long (perhaps an indication of the extent of the muddle), but I think I found my mentor.

Check out the new links: Eco-Literacy, and Foodshare (where I am work)

The Invitation

The Invitation

It doesn’t matter what you do for a living
I want to know what you ache for and if you dream of meeting your
heart’s longing.
It doesn’t interest me how old you are
I want to know if you will risk looking like a fool
for love
for your dream
for the adventure of being alive.
It doesn’t interest me what planets are squaring your moon…
I want to know if you have touched the centre of your own sorrow
if you have been opened by life’s betrayals
or have become shrivelled and closed
from fear of further pain.
I want to know if you can sit with pain
mine or your own
without moving to hide it
or fade it
or fix it.
I want to know if you can be with joy
mine or your own
if you can dance with wilderness
and let the ecstasy fill you to the tops of your fingers and toes
without cautioning us to
be careful
be realistic
to remember the limitations of being human
It doesn’t interest me if the story you are telling me
is true.
I want to know if you can
disappoint another
to be true to yourself.
If you can bear the accusation of betrayal and not betray your soul
If you can be faithless and therefore trustworthy.
I want to know if you can see beauty
even when it’s not pretty
everyday.
And if your can source your own life
from its presence.
I want to know if you can live with failure
yours and mine and still stand on the edge
of the lake and shout to the silver moon,
“Yes!”
It doesn’t interest me
to know where you live or how much money you have.
I want to know if you can get up
after the night of grief and despair
weary and bruised to the bone
to do what needs to be done
to feed the children.
It doesn’t interest me who you know
or how you came to be here.
I want to know if you will stand
in the centre of the fire
with me
and not shrink back.
It doesn’t interest me where or what or with whom
you have studied.
I want to know what sustains you
from the inside
when all else falls away.
I want to know if you can be alone
with yourself
and if you truly like the company you keep
in the empty moments.

Osiah Mountain Dreamer, May 1994

Chapter II

Alright people’s, I’m back. I know it been a long time since I’ve fired up the lewblog. I have been very busy with many new exciting things going on, revelations, opportunities, and projects that are concurrent with my own journey into the void.

First off, would like to extend the warmest appreciation to all the men and women who have been supporting me in my life, but in particular the two men’s circles that I am part of who have helped to hold my life in focus for me.

Specifically, over the last few weeks I really used the power of the group to help land me a new job. It is great to have this community in my life, who are there to back me and challenge me al the time. I got a lot of support and reflections over the last few weeks, as I presented myself to each group around this new job opportunity at FoodShare.

Last wedesday I went to sign the contract. I was early, and I saw some volunteers working in the garden so I decided to introduce myself. A nice girl showed me what a ‘Lasagna’ garden was, which is a process of planting that does not involve tilling the soil whatsoever. Cardoboard on the grass, and then a series of layers of stuff…wood chips, humums, coconut hair, more wood chips, maybe some tomato sauce….you get the idea.

Unfortunately, the same volunteer had also applied for the same job as me…she congratulated me and I felt a little bit unworthy, having not that much experience gardening or with the organization.

So I am starting work there today. When I signed the contract I had this tremendous feeling of global appreciation and good fortune in the universe. I also was witness to a host of voices in my head (the clamouring inferiors) who were whispering ‘you don’t deserve this’, ‘you’ll screw it up, etc’…and really I was speechless by the level of clarity and forthrightness provided to me by Debbie Fields, the visionary head honcho at Foodshare.

So thats good news, to get my career on track finally. Next.

The groups are going well. I am now in the process of designing a children’s camp for the August ten day intensive retreat. It is a unique dynamic to think about a camp up at The Mill, in that, all of the parents will be present with their kids. The issue is, during a typical day at an intensive, there are two three-four hour ‘circles’, where everyone sits and listens and processes. It is deep stuff, and usually, the children have been in and out of the circle, not really a part of the dialogue, but sort of hovering around, struggling to stay quiet. It has been a bit of an issue, especially when there is a need for a single focus in the circle and a tight container.

With this in mind, I have taken on the responsibility of ‘child-care’ during the intensive. My time in circle is now a lot more limited and I am welcoming the shift to a role of service and stewardship of the whole. It is a win-win, as I get back into the flow of working with children, and as well get to create and design a program, which is my new career. It all feels very good, and the few moments where I do come in to the circle, are quality times…

So the camp is a go, I am working on an activity that is exactly like one described in the Forget Your Botany article. At the Mill, the question was asked: “What Flourishes Life?”, and it was asked to be mindful of the question whenever we had a thought, or action, or choice to make about something. There was also a dialogue about “What is a true culture?”…and in north america, despite many images of culture all around us…we don’t really have a true culture. Hockey and maple syrup doesn’t count as culture. As per any weekend at the Mill, we are looking deeper, at the basic molecules of what makes a culture…which are the principle that guide every day interactions.

The Mill at that point became clear to me as a culture generating machine, where langauge, and developing an absolute relationship to feelings and thoughts, as well holding space for god, or a great spirit or what have you is all part of creating the environment for culture to cultivate itself. It is an amazing process, to see one man hold focus for developing an entirely, new, and brand new culture …and actually be a part of it.

The massive sculptures around the property are impressive. Huge 200 year old logs, suspended over boulders, balanced perfectly, evoke images of dinosaur legs, whales, or other pieces of other ancestral giants that seem to sit exactly where the should be. The architect and artist, the miller as he is called…likes to go big. The immense tri-pods of old telephone poles, and beautifully carved wood…old machinery bits, create a garden of infinite form and shape. This is the Mill’s aesthetic.

So, the camp. Basically, I was given a whole bunch of old canvasses, some 20 or so of various sizes from 12×12 inch to 30×40 inch. The activity idea would be to ask each child to go out with a pad of paper, and draw whatever shapes they see in the mill. As many langauges were in fact drawn from images in the natural world(glyphs), than the images that the children see can be gathered to form a langauge of the Mill…based exactly on what The Mill’s physicality speaks to each person. The shapes would be converted into a selection of stencils, and then we could stencil the language of The Mill onto all of the canvasses..at end, the canvasses would be hung to decorate for the final campfire, with the children and hopefully all of the circle together. In the fall, I would hold a silent auction/fundraiser celebration for the Mill Fund(a modest savings account for renovations), and these canvasses would go up for the community to come and by, to actually come up to support the Mill financially(doesn’t happen to much).

Okay, enough…next paragraphs will talk of the Toronto Institute of Self Healing. and how I am busy establishing a formally recognized and legitimate psychotherapy school…

Forget Your Botany

I found my calling…

FORGET YOUR BOTANY

Developing children’s sensibility to nature through arts-based environmental education.

 

MANY PEOPLE DEPLORE the loss of direct contact with nature. Moreover, this absence might be one of the root causes for the ecological crisis we are experiencing today, and for the mood of indifference that many people feel for it. It is hard to care for something that we no longer perceive as being constitutive to what makes us human. To counter this development, an increasing group of educators thinks that education should facilitate a form of learning that enhances children’s sensibility to nature and place, to what Gregory Bateson so aptly described as ‘the pattern which connects’.

 

One effort in this direction has been the advance of what is called ‘environmental education’. It is one of the challenges for environmental education to get children enthusiastic beyond the limited perspective that the natural sciences offer. On top of that it runs the risk of unintentionally conveying an ethics of ‘guilt’. A one-sided focus on the scope and magnitude of today’s environmental crises can cause feelings of personal inadequacy and even despair. The result can paradoxically be an even further detachment from nature, and a mindset that considers the act of reflection on the relation between humans and nature as a limiting endeavour, rather than something that can enrich one’s life. If an ecological lifestyle is seen only as restriction and austerity, it will only be accepted as a last resort.

Beautiful actions

 

This is one of the underlying reasons that the Norwegian eco-philosopher Arne Naess called attention to an interesting element in the writings of Immanuel Kant. Kant makes a distinction between what he calls a ‘beautiful act’ and a ‘moral act’. An act is moral if it is in accordance with your ethical duty: you have an obligation to do something. More often than not, this may go against your inclinations, against that what you want to do. For Kant, a beautiful act is an act where we act with our inclinations, so that it is what we want to do. Naess believes that through spiritual or psychological development we can learn to identify with other humans, with animals and plants and even ecosystems. We can learn to see ourselves in these other creatures, and in that way they become part of our being. By identifying with the more-than-human world, we want to protect it; we are not acting against our inclinations.

 

The desire to act beautifully is something that can be learned at an early age. According to Naess, we might have to relearn the way children appreciate the things around them: “Children are more spontaneous in the sense that reflection and conventional views of things do not yet play such enormous role. If we were able to see a little bit more like children, we would gain very much. That’s a very difficult re-development, to get into this state of children’s inner life.”

 

Nearly a quarter century ago, Edith Cobb argued in The Ecology of Imagination in Childhood that children have a certain age period at which they are more predisposed to be open for the natural world: “There is a special period, the little-understood, prepuberal, halcyon, middle age of childhood, approximately from five or six to eleven or twelve…when the natural world is experienced in some highly evocative way, producing in the child a sense of some profound continuity, a renewal of relationship with nature as process … [This original childhood experience may be] extended through memory into a lifelong renewal of the early power to learn and to evolve.”

 

Since Cobb wrote these words, however, the environment for children has become more and more an environment permeated by technology. For many children in Western society, the prevailing childhood experience is that of being engaged in watching TV and playing computer and video games. TV and electronic games present to a child a world of constantly changing pictures. A child is brought into a reality where there is a direct and observable cause-effect relationship between all of his or her actions and the images on the screen. Culture critic Jerry Mander describes the consequences as follows: “When that whirling-spinning-exploding world is turned off, he or she is left in real life, the room, the house, a much slower world. Boring by comparison. If he or she then goes outside into nature – well, nature is really slow. It barely moves at all. It takes an extreme degree of calm to perceive things in nature, and I suspect we may be producing a generation of people too sped-up to attune themselves to slower natural rhythms. Children of the computer generation grow up with their nervous systems attuned to televisions, video games, and computers. Like the techno-centred adult, they are out of touch with the speed of natural life, and are easily annoyed and bored by what they perceive as human slowness and inefficiency.”

 

So when we try to establish a bond between children and nature, we are stuck with two major problems. One, that conventional environmental education runs the risk of leading to despair and indifference, and two, the fact that many children have lost interest in nature because it is less exciting than the world of electronic illusions. We are badly in need of innovative ways to awaken and nourish the supposed innate sensibility of children to the natural world.

Arts-based environmental education

 

It is here that exciting developments in the Nordic European countries can be of inspiration. Art is the key here. In the beginning of the 1990’s, a group of art educators in Finland, aware of the worsening ecological crisis in the society around them, began to ask if art could help in the development of a more profound form of environmental education. According to Meri-Helga Mantere, who first coined the term ‘arts-based environmental education’ in 1992, it is a method that “supports fresh perception, the nearby, personal enjoyment and pleasure (and sometimes agony) of perceiving the world from the heart.” It aims at “an openness to sensitivity, new and personal ways to articulate and share one’s environmental experiences, which might be beautiful but also disgusting, peaceful but also threatening.” In short, aesthetic environmental education is grounded on the belief that sensitivity to the environment can be developed by artistic activities. Motivation to act for the good of the environment is based above all on positive and valued experiences which are often of an aesthetic nature. In the view of Mantere, these experiences can be generated by open and immediate contact with nature and the often new and fresh view of such phenomena that art provides. Arts subjects can develop a positive image for a way of life that conserves nature. This requires a great deal of inventiveness, joy and dignity. To Meri-Helga the connections are obvious: “The early experiences of nature in childhood, the ability as an adult to enjoy these experiences, comprehending the value of the richness and diversity of nature, and the need and energy to act on behalf of nature and a better environment are all interdependent.”

 

One way of defining art is that it can offer a person – both as a ‘producer’ and as a ‘consumer’ of art – unique, often non-cognitive ways of interpreting and signifying experiences in the world. Art can feed and guide our sensibility for reality and life. Art activities have a tendency (or at least potential) to reach, in different degrees of intensity, the sensory, perceptual, emotional, cognitive, symbolic and creative levels of human beings. They can sharpen and refine our perception and make us sensitive for the mystery of the things around us. Through that we may experience the world, nature and people in such a way as if we see them for the first time. In the context of learning about nature, art thus has a potential that conventional approaches lack.

 

Henri David Thoreau in the mid-nineteenth century, wrote in his Journals that he was continuously struggling to meet nature in its elementary directness, unmediated by conventions, categories, concepts, and scientific knowledge. To really understand something, he believed one continuously had to approach it as if it were completely strange. “If you want to learn of the ferns, you have to forget your botany. You have to get free from what commonly is regarded as knowledge of them.” In its essence, ecological perception is about perceiving the dynamic relationships between distinctions such as the self and the other, and spirit and matter. By orienting one’s personal artistic responses to the sensuous natural environment, one has an opening to embrace our living connection to the world. Through art we can see and approach the outside world afresh.

 

Art also has a capacity “to stop us in our tracks”. An important function of art is estrangement or de-familiarisation. It helps us to review and renew our understandings of everyday things and events which are so familiar to us that our perception of them has become routine. Furthermore, art can open us up to the presence of ambiguity. In all these meanings, art has the potential to offer new ways of coming to terms with the present human condition, which includes coming to terms with living and surviving in the technosphere.

Dealing with pessimism

 

Some educators argue that a clear distinction between different age groups of children should be made when engaging in environmental education. The assumption being that teachers can only take up the subject of the ecological crisis with children of a certain age. According to this view, education should begin with stressing the positive aspects of nature, rather than the disempowering news of ecological decline. As a teacher of horticulture and biology with many years of experience, Linda Jolly has had ample opportunity to learn from the pupils themselves what they associate with the word ‘ecology’. To them, she says, ecology means information about environmental problems, e.g. the pollution of air and water, etc.: “There is certainly no lack of awareness of this kind of ‘ecology’ among the pupils and one could easily be tempted to contribute even more to this type of information and awareness in the school context. Yet the multitude of catastrophic news items pouring out over our children today is apt to engender discouragement and pessimism – a fact acknowledged by many educators today. Young people long for real experiences of nature and what they want to feel is that they can do something towards saving nature. So the question must be: What can schools do to enable children to experience positive ecological actions of humanity in nature as a counterweight to all the disaster reports? How can we help the children to experience nature at a deeper level and attain a better understanding of the relationships between all living beings?”

 

There is a considerable difference between living in an environment without being conscious of it, and, in contrast, having one’s roots in a biological and cultural area and also having an idea of where one comes from, where one is at present, and where one may be going. In a similar vein, according to Meri-Helga Mantere, there is a great difference between seeing the future as only an ominous and vaguely defined threat or void, and seeing it as something one can outline, imagine and influence. She believes that educators have not paid enough attention to the pessimistic idea of the future that is common among many young people, and to the understanding of life that follows from it. Rather than ignoring or suppressing them, she suggests that these fears and feelings of pessimism and hopelessness should be discussed with adults in a spirit of sufficient confidentiality. In that way, previously unexpressed mental images and sources of anxiety would lose at least some of their debilitating power.

 

One of the main meanings of art through the ages has indeed been its ability to reach the deeper levels of the psyche and to act as a channel and possibility for giving shape to feelings that are often unconscious. This means, says Mantere, that also the ‘dark’ side of the mind can be integrated into the totality of the psyche, and thus be made relative. If an art teacher is willing to give the pupils and students art exercises in which they can break down their possible fears, life-negating visions and hopelessness in a sufficiently secure context, he or she can act therapeutically: “It is a therapeutic practice to receive these pictures with respect for the students’ views and their world of mental images, while at the same time trying to pass on a positive attitude towards life and hope for the future.”

Seeing

 

Judith Belzer is an environmental artist who strongly believes in the importance of learning new ways to approach the world around us: “If you can learn to immerse yourself in the ordinary things that are very close by, you start to understand what it means to exist in nature. By establishing a relationship with nature based on particulars – the way leaves move in space, say, or attach to a branch – you begin to break our habit of generalising about nature from a distance. This is the first step towards changing our approach to the land and that starts with seeing.” In arts-based environmental education, much emphasis is given to clarifying the ’seeing process’ and developing skills to express this enhanced vision. Artistic-aesthetic learning, according to Finnish environmental artist Timo Jokela, involves observation, experience and increasing awareness in a holistic way. “Observation is a core issue in interpreting and evaluating the environment. …Our observations are based on the sum of our previous experiences and our expectations of the future.” Jokela argues that many of the phenomena that are brought to our consciousness through art can be understood as the sharpening of schemes of observation and activity: “The romantic artist climbed a mountain and created an aerial perspective model of observation, teaching us to see the beauty of the dim shades of blue in the distance.

 

The impressionists led us to observe the colour of light determined by weather, and the beauty in the changes of natural phenomena. Art creates new ways of observing, and examining art can act as a model for seeing one’s own everyday surroundings in a new way, enriching one’s knowledge, experience and understanding. Observational schemes can also stiffen and become confining conventions. In this case there is great educational significance in enriching them. Re-examined aesthetic models lead to new models to observe, classify, understand and construct one’s own relationship with the environment.”

 

Environmental art is art that is defined by a place: the form, material and even the birth process of the work takes the location into account. Jokela remarks: “The surrounding space itself may act as an artistic element. This requires that the birth process begins with a close orientation to the location: sitting, watching, smelling, walking – in other words a holistic exploration of the place.” Usually the process also includes orienting to the history of a place, the stories it tells, and the meanings given to it by its users.

 

Many works of environmental art can be seen as environmental processes which aim to change environmental attitudes on an individual or community level. Jokela gives the example of European environmental art by artists like Andy Goldsworthy and Richard Long, whose connection to nature is respectful, almost sacral: “It is as if the work refers to nature’s own beauty or significance. The work of art opens one’s eyes to see something ordinary and everyday in a new way. This way of work refines one’s perceptions and makes one more sensitive to the environment. Here the borderlines between art and philosophy are disappearing, environmental art and environmental philosophy merge together.”

 

Another example is the work of American eco-artist Erica Fielder, who wants to encourage deeply personal relationships with the wild. “Science and technology have given us all the tools and know-how we need to halt environmental destruction today”, she says. “But what’s missing is a feeling of kinship and empathy that motivates us to include the health of our watershed in our everyday decisions.” One way to bring us closer to nature is the Bird Feeder Hat that Fielder created: a wide-brimmed, brushy hat covered with seeds. He or she who wears the hat must sit silent and still in order to feel the movement of birds on the hat. The experience is vivid and sensory, and provides an opportunity to begin experiencing a deeper kinship with a wild creature up close.

Art exercises in nature

 

Timo Jokela has a clear view on how environmental art can be applied as a method of environmental education. According to Jokela, forms of environmental art are remarkably suitable to fieldwork and research practised in the environment by learners of all ages. Based on didactic planning models that have been developed in art education, exercises are developed in which the pupil’s phase of development and previous knowledge of the subject are taken into consideration. In the process, the art world and the learner’s world are combined into a project in which experiencing, searching for information, and structuring all merge together. All of them aim to increase one’s sensitivity towards the environment. Jokela distinguishes four categories of exercises that can be adapted as methods of arts-based environmental education:

 

    * exercises focusing one’s observations;

    * exercises which bring forward the processes happening in nature and help us to perceive them more sensitively: growth and decay, the flow of water, the turning of day and night, the changes of light, the wind, etc.;

    * exercises which aim to alter set ways of viewing the environment, and finally:

    * exercises which test the scale of the environment and human ‘limits’.

 

In the exercises, the ‘chaos’ of the environment can be organised according to certain chosen variables. The choice can be based on visual observations such as colour, form, size, or on tactile sensations such as soft or hard. Other choices could be based on cognitive concepts such as living, lifeless, belonging to nature, left behind by a human. An exercise could start by making observations and could continue with methods of comparison, classification and organisation. To Jokela, especially well-suited starting points are archetypal symbols such as a circle, square, triangle, point, line, cross or spiral. When the exercise is more process-focused, it could involve paths of movement and rituals in which the participant or viewer takes part.

 

Such exercises lead to works that create a moment of change; movement and time create new spaces and environments. One assignment to a group may be that they have to go outside and select a tree. Two members of the group then mention eight adjectives about the tree. After that, two other members write a poem together using those adjectives. Then the pupils come back and read the poem to the whole group. Another exercise might be that the group goes outside and each pupil picks up an object from nature without harming it. This could be a stone, a piece of dry wood, etc. They select the pieces according to how the object is felt to resemble themselves. After finding those objects, they come back and each tells in front of the group why they selected just that object.

 

When the goal of the exercises is to change the way in which one is common to see the environment, an exercise could be as follows: roughly sketch a line or circle on a map. Walk the distance of the line in nature. Stop every hundred metres and document and gather samples. Afterwards, analyse the differences between the experiences you gain this way and the preconceived impressions you had. Exercises that aim to test the human limits vis-à-vis the scale of the environment often have a communal, cooperative nature. The starting point is a large amount of material and the aim is to bring about a clear change in the environment. Suitable places are places where nature brings the material back into its cycle such as a beaches. An example could be an exercise where the task is to arrange the flotsam on a shore in a mathematical order.

 

Three concrete examples of promising and ongoing practices of arts-based environmental education in the Nordic countries are given below: one from Norway, one from Finland, and the last one from Sweden.

Arts-inspired botanical excursion

 

Each summer, when the flowering period is at its peak, teacher Linda Jolly takes a group of children with a boat to the island Fjelberg, a little way off the west coast of the Norway harbour town Bergen. They embark on a botanical excursion in which they are to work with nature experiences artistically and to cultivate the perceptive faculties of the senses in a systematic manner. Along come watercolour paper and sketchbooks as well as plant identification books and magnifying glasses. The aim is that the children not just become familiar with individual plants but also with an ancient landscape developed and cultivated by man, some of which is still preserved.

 

On arrival at the old vicarage the group starts with painting exercises on the theme of the meeting of light and dark (yellow and blue) on a sheet of paper. On the basis of the imaginary landscape that now arises on the painted sheets of paper, the children go out into the open and paint a picture of what they see. For example how the light of the skies meets upon the heaviness of the earth, producing many shades of green on the horizon. A further step could be accomplished by practising with tones of green alone. How many nuances of green can be created in such a composition of colour? How much red is there in the green of nature? How far does green extend towards blue, red and yellow without losing its green? Afterwards the children take their sheet of paper outside and paint the nuances of colour observable at the transition between woodland and meadow or between the many different types of plant that make up a hedge. In all these places they might experience “seeing green for the first time”.

 

All of a sudden, even the monotonous green of a commercial pine forest may speak a different language from the richly varied green of the neighbouring forest of leafed trees. Linda explains: “A blossom might stand out from the veritable sea of shades of green formed by the rounded roof of a deciduous wood. It will strike the observer as a foreign element, as something of a revelation. We came closer to that kind of experience through a painting exercise where certain areas were left blank in a ’sea’ of green. Applying clear colours to these blank bits brought to light the blossoms in a flowery meadow or a rhododendron hedge or even a rose bush! After all, the blossom was so different from the rest of the plant that its connection to it was not taken for granted. It was Goethe who first recognised that the entire plant is formed out of the elements of stem and leaf. He saw that the calyx and petals represented metamorphosed forms of the leaf element. In the case of yellow and blue blossoms this can be understood without undue difficulty through colour exercises.

 

In the case of red, it is helpful to occasionally examine individual petals or single reddish tinted leaves of the remaining plant. And whoever tries to capture plants in painting will invariably find, whilst mixing his green from the basic colours, that every plant green has an admixture of red besides yellow and blue in it. In other words, the red blossom is already contained in the green of the rest of the plant in a hidden form.”

 

With this new experience in mind, the group goes out again to capture impressions in paint – for instance of a natural meadow in the midst of mountainous terrain or of a strip of vegetation along a path. This can then be compared to an artificially fertilised piece of grassland. At another time the group goes out into an oak wood with dark paper and white pastels. The gnarled trunk of the oak tree and its branches, contrasted with the lighter leafy sections, or with the sky above, could then become an ideal motif for reflecting the form and character of the oak. Hatching the light areas of the motif gave prominence to the peculiar, heavy dark form of the oak. In other places the light trunks and leaves of birch trees would be shining out against the darker background of the oaks. In this case the children work with the motif by hatching the dark background and leaving blanks for the white slender stems and the tender veil of leaves. Linda Jolly: “Such exercises are an opportunity to work with the relationships between the different elements of a landscape, with the relationship between colours, between light and dark. This gave a sense of something as a whole, as opposed to being fixated on an isolated object. Thus this method is appropriate to the ecological way of looking we desire to attain. In the exercise with oak and birch a familiar form engendered a new discovery through the work with the spaces in-between. After an exercise of this kind the pupils have a wholly new basis for understanding the essential being of different plants.”

 

After a few days of working systematically, the pupils usually feel more free to find their own motifs in the surrounding landscape. What Linda considers is important on such occasions is that children learn to perceive with the eyes and colour sense of others. For this reason they pin up their paintings every day and look at them together. The pupils are also expected to notice details and become familiar with individual plant species. Every pupil is supposed to draw up to twelve different plants. This also involves detailed drawings of different leaf shapes as well as sketches of petal configurations.

 

A leaf metamorphosis is a subject of separate study. The leaf shapes emerge best when painted black on white paper, says Linda. The spectrum of variation resulting from each pupil’s series of leaves provides a good basis for discussing common themes such as relationships between the plants. Through drawing, the children find a common expression of the characteristics of related plants. Jolly: “This is preferable to concentrating on outer features which are often misleading. The pupils discover that rhythm, balance and harmony inherent in the world of plants can speak as evocatively as poetry. Auguste Rodin expressed it like this: ‘It is the artist who is truly familiar with Nature. The blossom engages him in a dialogue through the graceful curve of its stems and the harmonious play of its colours. Each blossom has an inner word bestowed upon it by Nature.’”

 

Linda reports that many pupils at first display a certain amount of anxiety and scepticism when faced with the task of practising a natural discipline in this manner. But the joy of discovery, as well as the feedback provided by artistic activity, invariably resulted in a positive working mood. The workday is frequently a lot longer here than an ordinary school day, but the pupils take this for granted. On returning to school the children arrange all their work in an exhibition which enables the younger pupils to share in what the older ones have been engaged in.

Finnish forest in art education

 

The Vantaa Art School is a private, extra-curricular school in southern Finland, which provides art education for children aged 5 to 20. Here, a few years ago, a special arts-based environmental education project was carried out. The aim of this project, Finnish Forest – “Silva” in Art Education, was to enrich the students’ creativity and widen the aesthetic visions and cognition of the Finnish forest through art education. During the project the students visited forests and produced works of art through perception, sensual impressions and experiences. The works were also influenced by the Finnish folk heritage, myths and legends. Excursions to exhibitions and museums were used to widen and deepen the knowledge of the relation of art and nature throughout art history. The forest-project also included happenings in shopping centres and at market places. Here, the students could cooperate with professional performance artists.

 

In late summer and early autumn, the classes visited the forests near to the school and made sketches and took photographs on the locations where the sketches were made. They also collected lots of loose nature materials to be taken into the classrooms for further studies and as working materials: dry branches, leaves, pine needles, moss, lichens and even whole trees, which they surveyed and drew in the classes afterwards. The children read stories and fairy tales, discussed the myths of animals and beasts still living in the Finnish forests and made pictures describing the animals and events. They also visited the forest in winter, in March, when there was enough light in the afternoons, and made landscape paintings in the open air. Afterwards the art works that the children made were shown at the Myyrmäki exhibition hall in Vantaa.

Utterances in the language of branches

 

A third Nordic example of an arts-based environmental education project can be found in Sweden, in an exhibition called Palaver på grenesiska, which can freely be translated as “Utterances in the language of branches.” This exhibition about “language in nature, and nature in language” of artists Magnus Lönn and Björn Ed has been touring around through Sweden for several years. Each time, school classes in the visited community are invited to come and visit. Lönn and Ed have searched for ways in which images in nature remind us of language. Which pictorial language does nature have? Are there any messages in all the fantastic forms, colours and sculptures that nature presents to us? What happens when one tries to see nature as it really is? Can we translate nature’s messages into our own language?

 

When Lönn and Ed reflected on these questions, they were inspired by the “natural history” of the letters of the alphabet. Take the letter “A” for example: upside down it has some resemblance to the head of an ox. Similarly, many letters in classic written languages have a concrete, physical origin in nature. Lönn and Ed have taken the fact that the systems of languages and nature belong together one step further and generated a host of different written languages, sprouted from natural forms that are all around us. Out there, they say, there is a form and signal world which still has a lot to teach us, but we have separated ourselves from it more and more. The exhibition aims to ignite the fantasy of children; its pedagogical set-up offers a means to enter a metaphorical border zone between nature and humans. Children can partake in workshops and be challenged to create their own language and alphabets. The basic idea is to engage children in the joy of translating.

 

The exhibition is developed in such a way that it becomes a means to enter a metaphorical border zone between nature and humans, ‘there where experiences of wonder and surprise seem to ask for a formulation in language’. Magnus Lönn explains: “This exhibition came into being from our desire to investigate what nature possibly has to say to us. Filled as it is by sounds, leaves, tracks, buts and so on, it is easy for us to envisage that it has something to tell to us, as human beings. We are all part of her and constantly in need of being reminded that we belong to all that grows. …What often happens when we look at nature is that we ‘project’ our own feelings on it. We see the autumn as ‘murky’ for example. But autumn really is neither grim nor gleeful. It is only we human beings who have a language in which we read it like that. Through play, which can involve a strong identification with a tree or with a grass-covered hill, or through something that is part of this exhibition, we can translate nature’s messages into our own mother tongue.”

 

In the often very humorous exhibition, questions are asked like: What does the bark of a tree talk about; what does “Barkish” sound like? What do trees tell us? One of the aims of the exhibition is to inspire children to fantasise and to translate what is written down when something is for example written in Barkish. Here, needles and branches also have their own language: “Needlish” and “Branchish”. Björn Ed and Magnus Lönn try to establish communication processes through use of nature’s own materials, using natural forms such as pine needles, branches, leaves and roots. It leads to such diverse results as a poem in needle language, an ant’s cubical imagery, the movement of a worm spelling out curly structures on top of a piece of paper, and the croaking conversation of two frogs translated into mimicking forms. Palaver på grenesiska offers a liberating upside-down perspective, a sense of moving out of the ‘language cage’ of humans.

 

Jan van Boeckel is a Dutch anthropologist, filmmaker and art teacher. Currently he is engaged in a research project on arts-based environmental education at the University of Art and Design in Helsinki, Finland. He can be reached at: polarstarcentre@yahoo.com

Self-Deception in Leadership

As I clarify a vision for my individual and local life, here is what my country’s appointed “leaders” have visioned for Canada and our collective global life.

I will look to integrate this aspect into my life’s vision as the next step in my process after setting up a work/creative output space…

Pro-U.S. Panel Was Key in Extending Afghan Mission
By Jon Elmer

VANCOUVER, Mar 19 (IPS) – Buoyed by the recommendations of a
government-appointed blue-ribbon panel, Canada’s parliament last week
approved a motion to extend its combat mission in Afghanistan until the
end of 2011.

The outcome of the motion was effectively predetermined, as the two
largest parties in the House of Commons — the Liberals and the
governing Conservatives — agreed on the wording of the resolution in
the weeks leading up to the vote.

Conservative Defence Minister Peter MacKay called the vote “historic”
and applauded the “bipartisan consensus” it achieved. Liberal leader
Stephane Dion characterised the resolution as “basically the Liberal
motion on Afghanistan”.

The political debate about the motion to extend the mission was shaped
by the Independent Panel on Canada’s Future Role in Afghanistan, a study
group appointed by Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper and led by
former Liberal Foreign Affairs minister John Manley.

The Manley Panel, as it came to be known, was created by the prime
minister in October 2007 and foreshadowed the importance of the
parliamentary vote on Afghanistan, which took place within the context
of a Conservative minority government. Without approval from the Liberal
members of parliament, the Conservative confidence motion would not have
passed, thus bringing down the government and forcing a federal election.

For their part, the Liberals were hard-pressed to vote against the
Afghanistan intervention given that it was Liberal governments that
brought Canada into the mission in 2001 and into the heart of the
counterinsurgency war in Kandahar in 2005.

The motion passed 198-77, with the New Democratic Party and Bloc
Quebecois in opposition. NDP leader Jack Layton criticised a “carte
blanche” the motion afforded and urged Canadians to “remember this
during elections”.

During the vote, protestors in the House of Commons public gallery
chanted “end it, don’t extend it”, while demonstrations against the wars
in Iraq and Afghanistan took place in more than 20 cities across Canada
on Saturday.

While the Manley Panel was bipartisan in affiliation, its members shared
an essential vision of the importance of Canada’s integration with the
United States. Stephen Clarkson, a professor of political economy at the
University of Toronto, told IPS that the panel “was clearly selected on
the basis of reliably delivering a pro-U.S interpretation of the
Canadian interest”.

The panel included three senior officials from the era of conservative
Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, including Derek Burney, a key architect
of the controversial North American Free Trade Agreement; Jake Epp, a
former cabinet minister and oil executive; and Paul Tellier, former head
of the Canadian National Railway and Bombardier Inc.

The fifth panel member, former journalist Pamela Wallin, recently served
as the Canadian Consul General in New York. For his part, Manley’s
significant efforts to integrate Canada-U.S. security apparatuses with
Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge after the attacks on New York and
Washington on Sep. 11, 2001 earned him TIME Magazine Canada’s “Newsmaker
of the Year” in December 2001.

“They are all either conservative Liberals, or Conservatives who have an
involvement in the United States-Canada relationship,” said Clarkson,
who has written extensively on U.S.-Canadian political and economic
relations and is the author of “Uncle Sam and Us”.

“Since Canada’s role in Afghanistan is so obviously connected to
Ottawa’s desire to please Washington, it was very unlikely they would
recommend anything other than staying in Afghanistan,” he said.

Shortly after the publication of the panel’s report, the Manley
committee’s executive director, Elissa Goldberg, was appointed Canada’s
top civilian representative in Kandahar, where she said she will be
facilitating the “overall leadership and strategic direction” of
Canada’s mission.

The significance of the report on the outcome of the vote was clear.
Defence Minister Peter MacKay immediately pointed to the “important work
of the Manley Panel [which] formed the basis for members of parliament
to draw upon.” Foreign Minister Maxime Bernier called the report “key”
to the vote and said it was “appreciated internationally”.

Bernier told reporters on parliament hill that the motion allowed the
prime minister to go to the upcoming NATO summit in Bucharest “with a
strong mandate in his pocket”. The Bucharest meeting is considered an
important strategy session for NATO, as the security conditions continue
to deteriorate in Afghanistan.

The motion which passed in parliament stated that the “extension of
Canada’s military presence in Afghanistan is approved by this House
expressly on the condition that NATO secure a battle group of
approximately 1,000 to rotate into Kandahar, no later than February 2009.”

The parliamentary extension also calls for Canada to secure transport
helicopters and improved unmanned aerial surveillance drones, something
the Manley Panel also recommended to reduce the number of casualties of
Canadian soldiers. Since 2002, 82 Canadians have been killed in
Afghanistan; 31 of the last 33 combat fatalities resulting from roadside
bombs.

Speaking at a conference of senior government officials and policymakers
in Brussels on Sunday, MacKay pushed his request for additional NATO
troops in Canada’s area of responsibility: “Come up with a thousand
troops and you get to keep 2,500,” he said, referring to the number of
Canadian troops stationed in Kandahar.

U.S. President George W. Bush said last week that he intends to use the
Bucharest summit to persuade allies to ramp-up the fight in the south.
“We’re mindful of their request, and we want to help them meet that
request,” President Bush said of the Canadian contingency.

Retired Canadian Major-General Terry Liston told IPS that the troop
request is simply a political gesture, far short of what NATO generals
on the ground say is required. “Just in Kandahar province, according to
American [counterinsurgency] doctrine you’d need about 16,000 soldiers,”
he said. “It’s a drop in the bucket, the 1,000.”

Meanwhile, in anticipation of the so-called fighting season in
Afghanistan, the United States has sent an additional 3,600 Marines on a
seven-month deployment to southern Afghanistan. The Marines, about half
of whom have already arrived in the country, will operate under Canadian
Major-General Marc Lessard and NATO’s Regional Command South, which
includes Helmand and Kandahar provinces — the heart of the Afghan
insurgency.

A report of the United Nations secretary-general earlier this month
detailed a sharp increase in insurgent activity in 2007, an average of
566 incidents a month compared with 425 a month in 2006. Data from the
United States Central Command indicates a concurrent rise in NATO and
U.S. airstrikes during that same period – 2,926 bombs dropped in 2007 up
from 1,770 in 2006. More than 8,000 people were killed last year,
including at least 1,500 civilians, the U.N. said.

Updated Vision For My Life’s True Purpose

Here is a general email I recently sent out to everyone in the self-healing community to which I am part.

I’m making this available to anyone out there who wants to know what I’ve got cooking these days…there is so much much more to follow.

Hello Everyone,

I would like to share with you a vision that has come to me in the past week, and stems from a connection I have made with Stacey Greaves regarding the possibility of setting up a t-shirt printing enterprise, this in order to add momentum to the Mill Development Project.

A little update on my commitment to uplift all of creation, my life’s true purpose, and my own healing process.

So, I have started my little bank account, and now have $210 dollars saved up for the structural needs of the Mill.

100-me 100-my dad, 10-Steven Lye

I would like this to become $1,000,000 by 2015 and to be honoured at the launch of the fully integrated, authentically sustainable, world-class, Mill-Spaceship liftoff ceremony and celebration. You all know what I am talking about.

It should be a great time, and I wouldn’t want to be one of those people too caught up in their own shit to get involved in something so magical, so this is why I am writing tonight.

I can see there is very much, inner, as well as outer work for me to do here in the city. To do this before I can effectively move up to the Mill and assist in the full time development and operation of Spaceship Mill.

So, I am looking at my own needs and coming back to this vision of myself to be in constant creative and effortless flow, as an artist, or some sort of creative designer…but I digress. It is not so much the vocation I seek so much as a vision of myself feeling this place of divine creativity with regularity in my life. Always is what I remember I put out before.

From my weekly art courses I have observed much resistance to this process. Despite how much I enjoy drawing in the moment…getting it started seems difficult. At times It was quite challenging to give myself the experience of drawing joyfully. Having attractive life-models certainly helped get me to class on time, but it was the other artists in the room that really set my mind at ease and helped the reconnection to my creative. I knew this going in. That I need to be around people in order to be in full flow. I have not drawn or painted anything at home in long while, partly because I am rarely inspired to art when I am physically alone.

My heart longs to have a space for my creativity to flourish and be supported in a loving environment, with other people. During my Hoffman process, I experienced tremendous joy and expression of tears during a moment where I was drawing my Mandala as if I were a child, and everyone in the room came to me to express their love for what my hand had drawn. It brings me to tears even recalling the memory at this moment, and I know some of you may recall me referring to this time in circle. The vision of myself is to be in that space always.

Space is the place.

So this vision I have is to be part of a creative studio space here in Toronto. I had this vision years ago during my Hoffman process, although at the time I was SURE it was in to be in vancouver.

A space where I (and any of you) can go with a certain reliability that there will be other people there, who are in heart connection, who are open, who wish to explore their creativity, to teach, to learn, to be part of, to hold focus for, and let go of the things that prevent creativity from flowing effortlessly..and support each other in this process. A space aslo to share knowledge , skills, expertise, capital, energy, and space.

I envision the studio as a crucible for creative projects that serve to grow the community in other ways.

It could be a place for Stacey and I to start printing our Mill Spaceship t-shirts, or holding community art auctions, showings, or setting up a Toronto office for the Mill Group, or giving Ross’ scupltures their long overdue showing in the city . The list goes on for how many amazing ways we could benefit from having such a space, and for my personal journey, I can see it as vital.

For the liftoff of the Mill Spaceship, I see it as a worthwhile stepping stone, or springboard for those community members who are really serious about stepping outside of the traditional, North American life-style box. Who need to be cultivating their vision for The Mill on a a regular basis in Toronto, who share the vision for a Mill Spaceship, or simply have the basic human need to be with other people in order to facilitate a creative process.

The studio could serve as a prototype for the Mill Spaceship, so that we can work on and/or develop whatever inter-relatedness we need in order to ensure the Mill Spaceship liftoff be stratospheric, no, cosmic. But I realize there is a certain doctor among us who might be the head engineer on this matter of ‘ensuring liftoff’…

So why should he get to have all of the fun?

Now I am thinking about how much creativity, and life energy has been thawed over the years by The Mill’s presence in our lives (please forward along to anyone else you know of who might like to read this). How many people have been touched by the Mill over the years? How much fear has been let go of at the Mill? How many dollars would this be worth? millions? tens of millions? How much value in this way has come from the Mill in sum TOTAL from everyone who has come through the Mill ?

You get where I am going…

Now look at the Mill.

Do you experience that sum total of the value it has generated for people over the years? Do you see that total value at The Spring?

Do you see all of that value on the walls in the outhouse?

How much do you see that has come back to The Mill itself..ie, The actual Mill building. 1%? …maybe 5% of that sum total price tag of all those saved souls?

Now if you take your mind’s eyes off of the outshouse, now I’m not sure, but outside of Howards’s contribuition, it doesn’t seem to me like there has really been a whole lot of giving back to the Mill.

My $100 dollars a month is merely symbolic for me. At the moment is not clear how much of that is ‘must be seen as’ giving back, and how much I really want to give back, but either way…it came from wanting to put my money where my mouth is…now I want my deeds to speak the things $100 dollars a month could never say.

This email is my response to get in touch with how I want to give back, after integrating certain aspect of myself that I need to work on. So this studio concept includes my own immediate needs, life vision, and understanding of what I need to do in order to become a fully functional human being and man, as well as contributiing myself the Mill’s evelopment…and so I am moving beyond my $100 dollar donation.

So, back for a moment. Can we all agree that, very little value has come back to uplift a place that has done so much uplifting over the years?

Do you agree giving is better than receiving? Certainly in the bedroom, but what about at the bank?

Do you ever think that maybe the Mill needs some love sent its way?

Simply put, this community operated studio in Toronto would open up a channel for people to give back to the Mill in ways that they want to, that serves as a win-win creative exchange center, so that people can get as much out of the Mill’s upliftment as they want to in ways that serve them in their life. Maybe you want to hold a gig, or have a showing, or need a space to rent out reasonably for a birthday or bake sale…I dont know how it will look, but I know that its a place to ensure our impulses to cultivate the Mill Project be honoured in real ways…a place for action…as oppose to these infrequent ‘Call To Action’ type emails, or eating valuable self-healing time in the circles for more or less appreciated discussions about the wonders of smalll-hydro power…anyways.

The studio would also help allow the creative energy of the community to be gathered, focussed and sent outwards to the world and channelled for The Mill’s upliftment. Or it could be a place to simply concentrate our individual creative energies, for our own needs as artists, and the studio doesn’t have to serve the Mill at all, although for me I will most certainly be using the space to do so, but for you could take a different meaning from the studio space.

‘m open to anything, but I know I need to find a space soon. I am looking on craigslist for people to share a space with, but I would really prefer the intimacy and dynamism of the group

Think of the studio like a community satellite dish that connects cosmic energy from the Universe, the heavens via Toronto, directly to the Mill and in turn is able to transmit the creative energy from the Mill back to Toronto and outwards.

So, this email is my response to the fleeting good feeling I had about putting $100 dollars away each month towards the Mill. It is fine and dandy for me to do this… and I look forward to doing this again in April… but I still don’t really feel like I’m doing anything meaningful when I make my deposit and it feels like a hollow gesture. I also definitely know that $100 a month alone will not make $1,000,000 by 2015 unless the money is periodically used to make more money.

I also don’t feel like asking people in the circle for money without any exchange of real value from my part. I can see that it won’t really be effective with the old canvassing-style approach to raising funds, guilt tripping and so forth….so I actually see how this will only produce more lack for the Mill project.

So this is where I am at with my inner dialogue, and taking Monday night to make it available to you all.

So other than supporting the image of being Ross’ favorite (Sorry Maurice, Dave) how does this tie in with my life vision. Well, aside from my creative potential operating at around what I feel to be %10 of its capacity…their is also the deep personal process of my needing to unfold the deep male within me. To qualify my potency to the rest of the world. To seek the highest honor among most honorable men. To attract my beloved on this journey. To fulfill my life’s true purpose in being %100 creative. To give back to the world. To do what I can to uplift all of creation. To risk it all for the glory.

Basically, instead of asking you guys for money to help with Mill, I would prefer to be(for instance) accepting your art submissions,(or people you know of) and holding a silent auction at the studio space here in Toronto ….maybe selling some t-shirts along the way…put some of that money towards paying an engineer or consultant to do a proper assesment of the Mill’s energy potential, put some money back to the studio…attract more energy, more finances, people, creativity… wash, rinse, repeat until we raise enough money to make a beautifully sustainable and comfortable retreat center/school/farm/generator…the Mill Spaceship… with so many by-products garnered along the way. I see this community as having very strong connections in some ways…but we are not especially connected in the outer realms…eg finances, career, property, social causes, local politics, whatever dimension. This studio project would provide anyone in the circle’s or outside an easy way for our lives to become more integrated with one another’s, and a meeting ground/market area for us to exchange energies outside of group.

So If anyone is interested in the Mill Spaceship idea and/or having a consciously shared studio space in Toronto or both, please send me an email. I would like to meet with you soon.

love

Michael

PS Michael Boulger says he needs a space for dancing…Stacey wants to bring his Silk Screen over, I know Yana would like to be part of something like this…and I have some large canvasses that do not fit in my room anymore. So thats four people…

PSS Please forward this message to the first person that pops into your head if and when you read it…thanks

Canada In Iraq (Harper: Cease and Desist)

It appears that since I pay taxes to Harper, and he collects them to spend some on new tanks, that some of my hard-earned green retrofit-your-house and save-the-earth dollars really are the ’sinews of war’ to quote my father quoting my grandfather.

Thanks Jon for your continued dedication to establishing clarity on matters of global importance. I’ll put my comment after your article to help my readers (I think just my brother at this point but that is fine by me…) along in the reading…

Canadian General Takes Senior Command Role in Iraq
Jon Elmer and Anthony Fenton

VANCOUVER, 23 Jan (IPS) – Despite the government’s official position
abstaining from combat in Iraq, Canada has dispatched yet another top
general to the command group overseeing day-to-day operations for the
U.S.-led occupation and counterinsurgency war.

Brigadier-General Nicolas Matern, a Special Forces officer and former
commander of Canada’s elite counter-terrorism unit, will serve as deputy
to Lt. Gen. Lloyd Austin III, incoming commander of the 170,000-strong
Multi National Corps-Iraq beginning in mid-February.

Matern is the third Canadian general to serve in the command group of
Operation Iraqi Freedom as part of an exchange programme that places
Canadian Forces officers in leadership positions in the U.S. military.
His deployment is part of a three-year post with the U.S. Army’s 18th
Airborne Corps, based out of Fort Bragg, North Carolina.

Officials at Fort Bragg confirmed that Matern has already been deployed
to Iraq, though no official statement has been made by Canadian officials.

Meanwhile, 42 Canadian tanks and armoured personnel carriers left
Edmonton last week destined for Fort Bliss, Texas to participate in
pre-deployment training exercises with the U.S. Army before a summer
rotation in Afghanistan. A Department of National Defence press release
characterised the training as ‘massive’, with more than 3,000 Canadian
soldiers taking part in Exercise Southern Bear.

Such joint exercises are commonplace throughout all branches of the
armed forces and beyond. A report from the U.S. Department of State’s
counterterrorism office described how ‘the governments of the United
States and Canada collaborated on a broad array of initiatives,
exercises, and joint operations that spanned virtually all agencies and
every level of government.’

During his first visit to Washington as Prime Minister in 2006, Stephen
Harper boasted that the North American alliance was the ’strongest
relationship of any two countries, not just on the planet, but in the
history of mankind.’ As much as 90 percent of Canadian trade is with the
U.S., with upwards of two billion dollars a day in goods and services
crossing the border.

There are also economic interests in Iraq itself. The April 2007 Iraq
Reconstruction Report lists Canada as the fourth largest importer of
Iraqi oil. Industry Canada records that total Canadian imports from Iraq
have risen from 1.06 billion dollars in 2002 to 1.61 billion dollars in
2006, making Iraq second only to Saudi Arabia as a Middle Eastern source
for Canadian imports.

According to Canada’s Defence Policy Statement, the increased
collaboration with the U.S. military will ‘not see the Canadian Forces
replicate every function of the world’s premier militaries,’ but rather
fill niche roles that allow Canada’s interventionist capabilities to be
relevant and credible.

To this end, Matern’s Special Forces background is seen as an asset. ‘He
comes in with a unique set of skills,’ Col. Bill Buckner of the 18th
Airborne told the Ottawa Citizen. ‘We’re the home of the airborne and
the special operating forces, so he fits in very nicely to this warrior
ethos we have here.’

Matern was a commander in the secretive commando unit, Joint Task
Force-2, before being promoted to deputy commander of the newly created
Canadian Special Operations Forces Command.

Canada’s most important foreign policy documents list Iraq, along with
Afghanistan, Haiti, Sudan, and Israel-Palestine, as areas of ’strategic
priority’.

Canada was an active participant in the 1991 Gulf War and helped enforce
the crippling blockade on Iraq throughout the 1990s, but declined to
join the so-called ‘coalition of the willing’ in March of 2003 when the
U.S. launched the invasion to overthrow Saddam Hussein without a final
U.N. resolution authorising the war.

Nevertheless, Canada’s contribution to the mission is notable. In 2003,
Canada pledged 300 million dollars in aid and reconstruction in Iraq.
The Royal Canadian Mounted Police has helped train more than 30,000
Iraqi security forces in neighbouring Jordan, and has had top level
advisors operating within the Iraqi interior ministry. As well, Canadian
frigates continue to operate alongside the U.S. aircraft carriers in the
Arabian Gulf that are a primary staging platform for bombing raids in Iraq.

Indeed, during the first week of the war in 2003, then-U.S. Ambassador
to Canada, Paul Cellucci, said that Canada had provided ‘more support
indirectly to this war in Iraq than most of the 46 countries that are
fully supporting our efforts there.’

Around the same time that Canada opted out of combat in Iraq, it
increased its combat role in Afghanistan, ultimately taking command of
the counterinsurgency war in southern Afghanistan.

Unlike the Canadian deployment in Afghanistan, which is subject to
relatively significant coverage domestically, Canada’s participation in
Iraq is handled much more carefully by Canadian officials.

Defence Minister Peter MacKay did not return a call seeking comment and
no official statement has accompanied Matern’s recent deployment.

Opposition New Democratic Party defense critic Dawn Black expressed
reservations about the implications of the special military
relationship: ‘We’re concerned about an overemphasis on interoperability
with the U.S,’ she told IPS from her British Columbia office. ‘It
affects whether we have an independent foreign policy and sovereignty as
a country.’

Though approximately 93 percent of the coalition troops in Iraq are
American, the U.S. has long been keen to emphasise the multinational
component of a war that former U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan
described as ‘illegal’.

Major General Peter Devlin, a Canadian Forces officer currently
operating as deputy commanding general in Iraq, recently told the
Washington Post that the effect of the multinational element is in
bringing ‘greater legitimacy to the effort here in Iraq’.

It is true that the machine continues to be wound ever tighter and more complex. All the easier to topple the house of cards with one intentional breath.

I trust that the machinations of these ancient and passe levels of human organization are well and truly on their way out…as the earth rounds into the Age of Aquarius, I have no doubt that the particular assemblage of cosmic light we are now recieving is only a small taste of what is to come, which is greater clarity and awareness…leaving the aryian age (Roman empire-war), to the Piscian Age (Jesus-sign of the fish, (after corrupted with the echo of the Aryian age into moral authority wars)…that these wars of moral authority we have today… that we are engaged in now are truly, the last echo of a corrupted piscian age…and that this US administration will be the last Roman-style empire for all of eternity, the remaining radiance of the piscian age can be restored to its essence, and a newer age, the turqoise, can usher in greater levels of self-reflection, introspection, newer and more connected levels of human consciousness and organisation…the global unit…the united states of planet earth can unfold. It is already happenning despite this kind of stuff still going on…

I find it calming in the face of such grand absurdity to know that we all share the same particular luminary shower that will, over time, illuminate the error to this kind of absurdity, and the latest guises of the old memes will be revelaed as the same reptilian levels of thinking that made bickering over who sleeps closest to the fire something worth setting our attention on. I know, that it will be in our lifetime, that this level of infantilism will be recognized for its heroic example of what happens when we learn, at a very young age, to betray our natural impulses to help another person and subsequently live our entire lives devoted to propogating this social program at immense costs. My heart goes out to those generals and politicians who are trapped in their world of make believe, unwittingly proliferating a destructive meme…and yet are possibly never going to have a truthful human experience for as long as they live.

I am inspired from your article, to continue to identify and cancel at least at the personal level, the operation of the very same memes which I inherited from generations past and present, media, which continues to play out in my life at time…despite the almost daily installation of new operating systems that can support ever more integration and enfoldment of organising ourselves, as ants do, as if we were one body with a single purpose. The ants use pheromones and, despite the visual individuality of the separate ‘ants’, the colony is more or less on being. Like and Aspen Grove, humans need to bind themselves, literally to one another by dropping the idea that seperateness is a reality. But also to find value in taking the perspective of the individual when it can serve and observe from its vantage point, possibilities that the affect the whole (aka yourself), and that the way we organize ourselves to action on these matters…is in love.

It is already well documented how people’s bodily reactions(physical and chemical) to sharing in the excitement of an new idea that both are party two. That both people find inspiring simultaneously…that what goes on in the body, is almost identical from one person to the next. How else could the infinite possibilities of physiological events somehow organize themselves momentarily into the same feeling, shared by two people, the same thinking…how else could it happen that a simple sharing of one inspired idea accompanied with a divine, creative feeling could illicit such dissolution of our personal boundaries and our contructs of separteness be washed away so quickly, despite having spent our whole lives building up their defenses? How else would that happen if it weren’t for the something else we’ll never understand, but that we all somehow all know it to be.

On Activism

I reconnected to an innner debate I always have.  That of how do we get active.  Ie.

The Social Cause Activist -vs- the New Age Innner Peace Seeker

Stereotypes aside, I think its important to link the two camps on matters of war.  I wrote this to a friend and want to share it here…

Thats awesome dude.  I think that at precisely the moment you sent your email, I was notified in my mind…I was driving home from training for a new job, and the discussion about the ’support our troops’ ribbons stickers being stuck on fire engines and squad cars came up, and we all agreed we could support our troops by bringing them home immediately…anyways, I thought of the troops, afghanistan, and you, and was wondering specifically how your book was coming along and I am looking forward to buying and reading it when it does.  I am almost certain that I had all these thoughts and feelings at around 3:27pm…anyways…Im not sure why these type of synchronicities continue to happen, but I am continually amazed at the degree we are interconnected and am very proud to have you shed light on the seemingly separate issue of war overseas. I am also quite clearly have gotten myself more clearly tuned in to life and things around me.  Things with the groupd are going great.  Old ways of thinking, programs, and automatic systems that prevented my effectiveness in life…have been peeling away like skins of an onion almost daily.  I am finding what I’ve been looking for.  I am also very much looking forward to becoming more politically active when the moment is right for me…when I know, without a shadow of a doubt, that I am being authentic, stable, heartfelt,  knowledgable, and effective…all things that I experience in you when you speak publicly about Palestine.
In many ways I have dropped off the map with regards to keeping up on world events, international politics etc…so in terms of reading activity on z-mag, or fromooccpied.. I have not been keeping up…especially since I moved back to T.O and you out there.  I miss your company in teedot, your clarity.

I do however feel more active than ever and more responsible for overcoming the internal forces that are at play in preventing the lasting changes that need to take place on this planet from occuring.  Namely, an entire re-boot of my internal operating systems…thus freeing myself from the very systems of thinking that create war on a person-person level, that when amplified through the group, community, country, and global levels of organisation…then permanent peace may be achieved.  In having this internal process firmly underway for myself, I can see clearly how it was my own internal world that routinely undermined my noblest dreams for my fellow persons…and as such the paradox of my going on a crusade against the crusaders, the smoking vegetarian, the paradox that was my image, my persona, needed to be shed in order to take part in the world effectively.  I am sincerely looking forward to re-connecting with you sometime, as I am still holding a space for my own response to the war in Afghanistan, that is personally authentic, and supported by your upcoming document.  I like how I am researching the other side of the coin, sure it is from the camp of the ‘new age’ guru, which has its downsides for sure…but there have been important discoveries that I think can lend themselves directly to the need for our country to cease and desist our invasion of Afghanistan…I look forward to collaborating with you sometime, when the moment feels right for the both of us…as there needs to be more linking and embracing of how we all becmoe active, and effective for the good of mankind…to include the individual in a collective movement, as jazz musicians improvise and radiate within the ensembles arching, and directional groove…you always knew me better than any of my other friends…I miss being out there with you guys…but I still got a west jet voucher and need to cash it within the year…so you’ll see me soon, either this winter, or in the spring…no planting.  There is too much for me to be doing outside of the working hours to justify another leasing of my physical body for 300 bucks a day…at the cost of my creative contribuitions as well…I would consider going for a week to capture the clearcut, integrally, onto a canvass…but thats about it.  Tell kevass I say hi, and miss him too…

love

Lewis