The thing which unites the people who hold all these extremely different views of the world is their commitment to a certain ideology or worldview through which they see all things. Thus, they tend to gather any piece of evidence which will support their particular worldview and dismiss any piece of evidence which will go counter to it –creating a customized, highly particularized view of the world to suit their own predispositions.” I find this last paragraph especially important because in reality we are top predators that use and have used throughout our history the tactics characteristic of other predators in nature. For instance a lion sneaks up using stealth and deception in the high grass until it is close enough to the unwary distracted prey to mount a direct attack. As in the rest of nature, we as predators have used and still use secrecy, stealth, lies, subterfuges, distraction etc. to capture prey. Unfortunately our relations among ourselves are dominated by these same predator-prey relationships where we use these same predator tactics against each other individually and in groups. We even go so far as to lie to ourselves in the name of politics and religion that the harm we do to others is for their own good. What we really need is less inter-species predation and competition and more cooperation to develop win-win relationships rather than win-lose relationships. But before we can do that we have to understand that we are constantly creating and maintaining, “a customized, highly particularized view (model) of the world to suit our own predispositions.” If we observe ourselves, others and our and their internal and external dialogue, we can see that through selective use of both truth and lies we model our world in a very defective way. So the first step is to stop lying to ourselves and others so as to develop a better more realistic model on both a personal and collective level. Then we can begin to improve our predatory relationships and even turn them into cooperative relationships where everybody wins and nobody loses. If we don’t do this then our personal model degraded by lies and deceptions, not only destroys our lives individually but also compounds into extremely damaging politics and religious extremism leading to war, poverty, disease, mass murder and the death of millions of people. For example because of our own individual flawed models of reality we resonate and go off to war to die and bleed for those top predators among us fighting for control over land, resources and people. We believe the propaganda of nations that we are heroes not fools to give up our lives and cripple our bodies to fight in regional and global wars centered on competition between the psychopathic leaders. We are vulnerable because our own internal and external propaganda resonates to the greater culture because our individualized propaganda is in itself riddled with flawed thinking, emotion, and action based on using others to our own advantage with little regard to the well-being of the others. We can develop a personal discipline where we transform our personal space and that of others around us through disciplines like yoga and meditation. This may mean we might have to drop out of the overall culture for a while to get our bearings and find a physical and spiritual center. Then once we have our center we can begin to integrate back into society in a careful limited way avoiding the destructive aspects of culture and supporting the constructive aspects of culture. We need a simple lifestyle that gives us time and space for this “self-definition” that does not require us to give too much time to gathering, protecting and maintaining resources allowing us to divert our attention to the enlightenment process. We retreat into our retreat to sort out our thinking and our emotions, so retreat can be a beneficial process toward later moving back into culture and society in a mutually beneficial manner. Lifestyle Altering and transforming our lifestyle is one important way to begin the enlightenment process because we use it to escape the detrimental, obsessive, destructive demands of a unenlightened cultural matrix. This cultural unenlightened matrix drags up down where we end up as swimmers drowning in a turbulent ocean. It’s everything we can do just to keep our heads above water as we suffer immensely having no time or strength to escape to higher ground. One way to think about this is that few people live their lives in the calm peaceful center of the hurricane that surround them but rather in the turbulent eye-wall being blown here and there by the force of cultural impacts and their own turbulent internal state. If we live out our lives centered in the center of the cultural hurricane then we are unmoved and unshaken by events as they transpire all around us. The way to begin to actualize this state of being centered and at peace even while surrounded by suffering and conflict is to create a physical space, a retreat often away from cities and in nature. In addition this retreat should be simple and take little time for maintenance and if our needs are few it will little in the way of money to subsist. It’s important to understand that what we own also owns us in that we have to maintain what we own. I large house is expensive to not only own but to maintain while a small cabin takes little maintenance. Many people who dropped out of mainstream culture by moving to Alaska bought a piece of land in the spring, pitched a tent or brought in a small RV to live in while they built their cabin during the summer. By winter time the cabin was finished at least on the outside and well insulted for the winter. In winter folks would finish up on the interior of the cabin. It really does not take that long to build a 15 by 15 foot structure especially if you are young and healthy with a strong back. Such a structure can be built between two weeks and a month depending just how hard one is working. This leaves plenty of time if one gets started early in the spring for a garden and landscaping around a birdfeeder outside of a plate glass window. This window rather than a TV can focus ones attention on nature helping to free the mind rather than a TV that just maintains destructive cultural ties. It’s nice to have water close to the cabin as well as this will bring in more diverse types of wildlife like herons, turtles, fishes, otter, ducks and dragonflies. I learned that this can be as simple as digging out a small pond in a wet spot the size of three swimming pools with an excavator at little cost. So one can bring the water to the cabin rather than have to buy an expensive piece of land on water. For myself I have a cabin that is 14 by 30 feet with a loft for sleeping. I have a 6 by 6 foot glass window looking out on a bird and butterfly garden on one end and a small screened porch looking down a few feet away to the pond. So depending on the weather I move back and forth from sitting in front of the bird window or the porch. I have also planted fruit trees and a vegetable garden and cleaned up the rest of the large lot that has a pine overstory so that I can maintain the land with a rake, machete, fire and a push mower. A person working hard can clean out the brush under trees and open up land first by chopping down the brush low to the grown then going over it all with a small cheap push-mower. This way one can easily keep the land open once it has been cleared and no longer is a fire hazard as well. It’s easy to walk around and enjoy the property when understory is cleaned out, free of ticks and chiggers. As far as building the cabin if one has not learned basic carpenter skills as a child like I have one can get a book and start building more simple structures on the land first like a pole shed for storing lumber for the future cabin and general storage after the cabin is built. Some people even close in part of the pole shed creating a barn in which they live while they build their cabin or home. It’s often best to just buy land and move to it right away using what one had been spending on rent to pay for the land and structures being built on the land. Paying rent is throwing money down a rat-hole mortgaging one’s future. I have seen so many people that after 10 years of paying rent would have owned their own land and home mortgage free if they had been willing to sacrifice and put their money into property rather than rent and utilities. Also folks can waste a lot of money day to day of frivolous stuff when they don’t have something important to be putting the money into. Okay so now we have our retreat to serve as out physical center and can now develop the disciplines necessary to create a personal and sub-cultural environment insulating us from the larger general dysfunctional culture and supporting better ways of feeling and thinking. In time we can take this understanding and travel to and from the greater culture involving ourselves in political action, religious activities, healing and other pursuits that benefit the greater over-culture.
Posted on: Sun, 31 Aug 2014 14:15:00 +0000
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