"ko.yaa.nis.katsi (from the Hopi language), n. 1. crazy life. 2. life in turmoil. 3. life disintegrating. 4. life out of balance. 5. ..a state of life that calls for another way of living..."
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among men, deriving their powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any form of Government becomes destructive of those ends, it is the right of the People to alter or abolish it, and to institute new Government or realize that Government has been the enslaver of man since the beginning of civilization and abolish it once and for all and return to a communal way of life. Where all men and women are truly equal and represent each other and each others survival and well-being. Where the laws of nature govern. Where we put life above material. Free individuals in free communities in harmony with one another and with the biosphere. Where our lives are not in the hands of a few powerful men, but rather in the hands of the gods... Anarchy is not chaos, but order through cooperation not control. We are all bound to the laws of nature, no matter how far we try to separate ourselves from it, no matter how deep within the city you live, your life is still governed by natural laws. Civilization makes you believe you are separate from those laws, makes you believe that through cleanliness, control, and technology that you are somehow better than and not subject to the forces and laws of nature..... As long as you live on earth, you live by the rules of the earth, not the rules of civilization or government, or the economy, or any unearthly forms of control. Those are illusions that obscure your reality and bring you this sense of ego that you feel when you deny the earth, when you wish to further this industrial machine that devours the planet every day. It is you that makes its veins pump and hunger greater each day as you contribute to that status quo. Cogs in a killing machine.... killing the planet and everything on it. Technology will not save you, but in fact is the murder weapon itself.....
This can change, we are not fundamentally flawed creatures, but we must accept that that is what we are, creatures. Animals. As long as we hold on to this megalomania, this belief we are greater then other animals, and the earth, then we will continue to live against life itself.... but if we loose the ego before it's too late, if we regain that relationship with all of life... then a sustainable world is possible. ..::ANARCHO-PRIMITIVISM::..
Definition of Civilization
By Derrick Jensen
"I suddenly remembered that all writers, including writers of dictionaries, are propagandists, and I realized that these definitions are, in fact, bite-sized chunks of propaganda, concise articulations of the arrogance that has led those who believe they are living in the most advanced—and best—culture to attempt to impose by force this way of being on all others.
"I would define civilization much more precisely,and I believe more usefully, as a culture—that is, a complex of stories, institutions, and artifacts—that both leads to and emerges from the growth of cities (civilization, see civil: from civis, meaning citizen, from Latin civitatis, meaning city-state), with cities being defined—so as to distinguish them from camps, villages, and so on—as people living more or less permanently in one place in densities high enough to require the routine importation of food and other necessities of life." Endgame vol. 1, p. 17
Derrick's PREMISES from Endgame
Premise One: Civilization is not and can never be sustainable. This is especially true for industrial civilization.
Premise Two: Traditional communities do not often voluntarily give up or sell the resources on which their communities are based until their communities have been destroyed. They also do not willingly allow their landbases to be damaged so that other resources—gold, oil, and so on—can be extracted. It follows that those who want the resources will do what they can to destroy traditional communities.
Premise Three: Our way of living—industrial civilization—is based on, requires, and would collapse very quickly without persistent and widespread violence.
Premise Four: Civilization is based on a clearly defined and widely accepted yet often unarticulated hierarchy. Violence done by those higher on the hierarchy to those lower is nearly always invisible, that is, unnoticed. When it is noticed, it is fully rationalized. Violence done by those lower on the hierarchy to those higher is unthinkable, and when it does occur is regarded with shock, horror, and the fetishization of the victims.
Premise Five: The property of those higher on the hierarchy is more valuable than the lives of those below. It is acceptable for those above to increase the amount of property they control—in everyday language, to make money—by destroying or taking the lives of those below. This is called production. If those below damage the property of those above, those above may kill or otherwise destroy the lives of those below. This is called justice.
Premise Six: Civilization is not redeemable. This culture will not undergo any sort of voluntary transformation to a sane and sustainable way of living. If we do not put a halt to it, civilization will continue to immiserate the vast majority of humans and to degrade the planet until it (civilization, and probably the planet) collapses. The effects of this degradation will continue to harm humans and nonhumans for a very long time.
Premise Seven: The longer we wait for civilization to crash—or the longer we wait before we ourselves bring it down—the messier will be the crash, and the worse things will be for those humans and nonhumans who live during it, and for those who come after.
Premise Eight: The needs of the natural world are more important than the needs of the economic system.
Another way to put premise Eight: Any economic or social system that does not benefit the natural communities on which it is based is unsustainable, immoral, and stupid. Sustainability, morality, and intelligence (as well as justice) requires the dismantling of any such economic or social system, or at the very least disallowing it from damaging your landbase.
Premise Nine: Although there will clearly some day be far fewer humans than there are at present, there are many ways this reduction in population could occur (or be achieved, depending on the passivity or activity with which we choose to approach this transformation). Some of these ways would be characterized by extreme violence and privation: nuclear armageddon, for example, would reduce both population and consumption, yet do so horrifically; the same would be true for a continuation of overshoot, followed by crash. Other ways could be characterized by less violence. Given the current levels of violence by this culture against both humans and the natural world, however, it’s not possible to speak of reductions in population and consumption that do not involve violence and privation, not because the reductions themselves would necessarily involve violence, but because violence and privation have become the default. Yet some ways of reducing population and consumption, while still violent, would consist of decreasing the current levels of violence required, and caused by, the (often forced) movement of resources from the poor to the rich, and would of course be marked by a reduction in current violence against the natural world. Personally and collectively we may be able to both reduce the amount and soften the character of violence that occurs during this ongoing and perhaps longterm shift. Or we may not. But this much is certain: if we do not approach it actively—if we do not talk about our predicament and what we are going to do about it—the violence will almost undoubtedly be far more severe, the privation more extreme.
Premise Ten: The culture as a whole and most of its members are insane. The culture is driven by a death urge, an urge to destroy life.
Premise Eleven: From the beginning, this culture—civilization—has been a culture of occupation.
Premise Twelve: There are no rich people in the world, and there are no poor people. There are just people. The rich may have lots of pieces of green paper that many pretend are worth something—or their presumed riches may be even more abstract: numbers on hard drives at banks—and the poor may not. These “rich” claim they own land, and the “poor” are often denied the right to make that same claim. A primary purpose of the police is to enforce the delusions of those with lots of pieces of green paper. Those without the green papers generally buy into these delusions almost as quickly and completely as those with. These delusions carry with them extreme consequences in the real world.
Premise Thirteen: Those in power rule by force, and the sooner we break ourselves of illusions to the contrary, the sooner we can at least begin to make reasonable decisions about whether, when, and how we are going to resist.
Premise Fourteen: From birth on—and probably from conception, but I’m not sure how I’d make the case—we are individually and collectively enculturated to hate life, hate the natural world, hate the wild, hate wild animals, hate women, hate children, hate our bodies, hate and fear our emotions, hate ourselves. If we did not hate the world, we could not allow it to be destroyed before our eyes. If we did not hate ourselves, we could not allow our homes—and our bodies—to be poisoned.
Premise Fifteen: Love does not imply pacifism.
Premise Sixteen: The material world is primary. This does not mean that the spirit does not exist, nor that the material world is all there is. It means that spirit mixes with flesh. It means also that real world actions have real world consequences. It means we cannot rely on Jesus, Santa Claus, the Great Mother, or even the Easter Bunny to get us out of this mess. It means this mess really is a mess, and not just the movement of God’s eyebrows. It means we have to face this mess ourselves. It means that for the time we are here on Earth—whether or not we end up somewhere else after we die, and whether we are condemned or privileged to live here—the Earth is the point. It is primary. It is our home. It is everything. It is silly to think or act or be as though this world is not real and primary. It is silly and pathetic to not live our lives as though our lives are real.
Premise Seventeen: It is a mistake (or more likely, denial) to base our decisions on whether actions arising from these will or won’t frighten fence-sitters, or the mass of Americans.
Premise Eighteen: Our current sense of self is no more sustainable than our current use of energy or technology.
Premise Nineteen: The culture’s problem lies above all in the belief that controlling and abusing the natural world is justifiable.
Premise Twenty: Within this culture, economics—not community well-being, not morals, not ethics, not justice, not life itself—drives social decisions.
Modification of Premise Twenty: Social decisions are determined primarily (and often exclusively) on the basis of whether these decisions will increase the monetary fortunes of the decision-makers and those they serve.
Re-modification of Premise Twenty: Social decisions are determined primarily (and often exclusively) on the basis of whether these decisions will increase the power of the decision-makers and those they serve.
Re-modification of Premise Twenty: Social decisions are founded primarily (and often exclusively) on the almost entirely unexamined belief that the decision-makers and those they serve are entitled to magnify their power and/or financial fortunes at the expense of those below.
Re-modification of Premise Twenty: If you dig to the heart of it—if there were any heart left—you would find that social decisions are determined primarily on the basis of how well these decisions serve the ends of controlling or destroying wild nature.
Endgame vol. 1, pages IX-XII
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"I, I don't have a whole lot of time. Um, OK, I'm a former employee of Area 51. I, I was let go on a medical discharge about a week ago and, and... [chokes] I've kind of been running across the country. Damn, I don't know where to start, they're, they're gonna, um, they'll triangulate on this position really soon.
OK, um, um, OK, what we're thinking of as, as aliens, they're extradimensional beings, that, an earlier precursor of the, um, space program they made contact with. They are not what they claim to be. Uh, they've infiltrated a, a lot of aspects of, of, of the military establishment, particularly the Area 51.
The disasters that are coming, they, the military, I'm sorry, the government knows about them. And there's a lot of safe areas in this world that they could begin moving the population to now. They are not! They want those major population centers wiped out so that the few that are left will be more easily controllable."
Don't fret precious I'm here, step away from the window
Go back to sleep
Lay your head down child
I won't let the boogeyman come
Pay no mind what other voices say
They don't care about you, like I do
Safe from pain and truth and choice and other poison devils,
See, they don't give a fuck about you, like I do.
Just stay with me, safe and ignorant,
Go back to sleep
Go back to sleep
Lay your head down child
I won't let the boogeyman come
Count the bodies like sheep
To the rhythm of the war drums
Pay no mind to the rabble
Pay no mind to the rabble
Head down, go to sleep to the rhythm of the war drums
I'll be the one to protect you from
Your enemies and all your demons
I'll be the one to protect you from
A will to survive and a voice of reason
I'll be the one to protect you from
Your enemies and your choices son
They're one in the same
I must isolate you
Isolate and save you from yourself
Swayin to the rhythm of the new world order and
Count the bodies like sheep to the rhythm of the war drums
The boogeymans coming
The boogeymans coming
Keep your head down, go to sleep, to the rhythm of a war drums
THE CORPORATION explores the nature and spectacular rise of the dominant institution of our time. Footage from pop culture, advertising, TV news, and corporate propaganda, illuminates the corporation's grip on our lives. Taking its legal status as a "person" to its logical conclusion, the film puts the corporation on the psychiatrist's couch to ask "What kind of person is it?" Provoking, witty, sweepingly informative, The Corporation includes forty interviews with corporate insiders and critics - including Milton Friedman, Noam Chomsky, Naomi Klein, and Michael Moore - plus true confessions, case studies and strategies for change.
Zeitgeist, produced by Peter Joseph, was created as a nonprofit filmiac expression to
inspire people to start looking at the world from a more critical perspective and to understand that
very often things are not what the population at large think they are. The information in Zeitgeist
was established over a year long period of research and the current Source page on
this site lists the basic sources used / referenced and the Interactive Transcript includes
exact source references and further information.
Now, it's important to point out that there is a tendency to simply disbelieve things that are
counter to our understanding, without the necessary research performed.
For example, some information contained in Part 1 and Part 3, specifically, is not obtained
by simple keyword searches on the Internet. You have to dig deeper. For instance,
very often people who look up "Horus" or "The Federal Reserve" on the Internet
draw their conclusions from very general or biased sources. Online encyclopedias or text book
Encyclopedias often do not contain the information contained in Zeitgeist. However, if one takes
the time to read the sources provided, they will find that what is being presented is
based on documented evidence. Any corrections, clarifications & further points regarding the film
are found on the Clarifications page. Non-Profit DVDs / Free Video Downloads are
available through the Downloads page.
That being said, It is my hope that people will not take what is said
in the film as the truth, but find out for themselves, for truth is not told, it is realized.
This 48-page ebook contains a scientific investigation of some of the facts from Part 1 of the ZEITGEIST movie, dealing with the comparisons of ancient religions and Christianity.
A middle class white guy comes to grips with Peak Oil, Climate
Change, Mass Extinction, Population Overshoot and the demise of the
American Lifestyle.
“Hundreds of my readers have told me that my novel Ishmael should be read in every high school classroom in the world. Naturally I’d be delighted to see this happen, but I really think it would be more to the point to have What a Way to Go: Life at the End of Empire seen in every high school classroom in the world! The two hours of this documentary are two hours that bring hope for the future of humanity by awakening and informing in the most profound yet lucid way imaginable.”
Daniel Quinn, author of Ishmael and Tales of Adam
“Heart-felt and poignant, this documentary will touch you as very few things can. It will scare, and it will make you think. Though it will give you hope, it will leave you with no easy answers. This documentary does a thorough job of presenting the pending mega-crisis in all of its aspects, and then goes even deeper to probe all of the causes, both technological and social. A careful viewing will leave you stunned, informed, and ready to step off the train and begin dismantling the tracks. Watch it yourself, and then present it to as many people as you can. Your life, and your children’s lives, depend on it.”
What is it doing to us as thoughtful human beings as we face the overwhelming challenges of:
• Peaking fossil fuel flow rates?
• Critically degraded ecosystems?
• A changing climate?
• An exploding global population?
• Teetering global economies?
• An unstable political climate?
And what is it doing to the rest of the life on this planet?
Featuring interviews with Daniel Quinn, Derrick Jensen, Jerry Mander, Chellis Glendinning, Richard Heinberg, Thomas Berry, William Catton, Ran Prieur and Richard Manning, What a Way to Go looks at the current global situation and asks the most important questions of all:
• How did we get here?
• Why do we keep destroying the planet?
• What do we truly want?
• Can we find a vision that will empower us to do what is
necessary to survive, and even thrive, in the coming decades?
Writer/Director
Timothy S. Bennett
Producer
Sally C. Erickson “This movie lifts the veil from civilization to show us the hollowness of what we once thought hallowed.”
-“A New Beginning”, a Permaculture Activist Review by John Wages
“A two-hour poem of great power and beauty… I have never seen a film quite like this before.”
“What a Way to Go”, a Dry Dipstick Movie Review by Mick Winter
“What a Way to Go offers both a reflective indictment of our collective folly for the uninitiated, and gives that smalll attentive minority who are looking at the same facts and evidence and reaching the same conclusions the reassurance that we are not crazy.”
- a review by John Ludi
“ …the best movie on the big picture (peak oil, climate change, rate of extinctions, and population overshoot) a person can make.”
- posted by JMG on Grist.org
“What a Way to Go is the advanced course for those who are intellectually and emotionally prepared to examine critically our way of life - the viewer takes away ideas, even subversive ones.”
- a comparison with The 11th Hour by Keith Thomas at the Nature and Society Forum
“A gripping documentary about the American Endgame.”
-a review by Thomas Naylor at the Second Vermont Republic
Masaru Emoto: Messages from Water: Water has a very important message for us. Water is telling us to take a much deeper look at our selves. When we do look at our selves through the mirror of water, the message becomes amazingly, crystal, clear. We know that human life is directly connected to the quality of our water, both within and all around us.
Books
Anything By George Orwell
Anything by Derrick Jensen
At once a beautifully poetic memoir and an exploration of the various ways we live in the world, A Language Older than Words explains violence as a pathology that touches every aspect of our lives, and indeed affects all aspects of life on earth. This chronicle of a young man's drive to transcend domestic abuse offers a challenging look at our worldwide sense of community, and how we can make things better.
This narrative moves elegantly between the microcosm of the author's dysfunctional family and the macrocosm of History. Readers are initiated into the stifling world of child and spousal abuse, and then beyond, where Jensen finds the same dynamics tricked out on the grand stage of Western civilization. The prose is as lyrical and cogent as it is convincing.
Jensen's vast experiences as an environmentalist, high-jumper, student, teacher, beekeeper, and most importantly, as a human being give rise to the wealth of examples and anecdotes that further illustrate this cry for community. The masterful intertwining of all these elements elevates A Language Older than Words above and beyond an engrossing book, giving readers what might even be described as a curative outlook on life.
Derrick Jensen takes no prisoners in The Culture of Make Believe, his brilliant and eagerly awaited follow-up to his powerful and lyrical A Language Older Than Words. What begins as an exploration of the lines of thought and experience that run between the massive lynchings in early twentieth-century America to today’s death squads in South America soon explodes into an examination of the very heart of our civilization. Readers of Jensen’s earlier work will recognize his deft and startling interweaving of the deeply personal, the political, the historical, and the philosophical, as he attempts to understand the atrocities that characterize so much of our culture, from the 8,000 dead at Bhopal to the more than twenty million people enslaved today (more than came over on the dreaded Middle Passage), to the destruction of the natural world. The book makes clear that it is only through understanding these atrocities, and by feeling the sorrow and despair caused by them, then moving through that despair, that we will be able to make significant movement toward halting them. With The Culture of Make Believe, Jensen has written a book that is as impeccably researched as it is moving, with conclusions as far-reaching as they are shocking. After A Language Older Than Words, readers began calling Jensen the philosopher poet of the deep ecological movement. This new book, The Culture of Make Believe, will introduce a new wave of readers to this important writer and thinker.
"Derrick Jensen is a man driven to stare without flinching at the baleful design of our culture, which encourages us to honor those who wreak the most havoc on the world (and on human lives) and to scorn those who protest against the havoc as opponents of decency and good order. In fact, The Culture of Make Believe so explicitly reveals the intimacy between the murder of the world and "decency and good order" that I'm surprised any author would dare write it and any publisher would dare bring it to print. His analysis of our culture's predilection for hatred and destruction will rattle your bones." -Daniel Quinn, author of Ishmael
Accepting the increasingly widespread belief that industrialized culture inevitably erodes the natural world, Endgame sets out to explore how this relationship impels us towards a revolutionary and as-yet undiscovered shift in strategy. Building on a series of simple but increasingly provocative premises, Jensen leaves us hoping for what may be inevitable: a return to agrarian communal life via the disintegration of civilization itself.
Derrick Jensen is: activist, author, small farmer, beekeeper, teacher, and philosopher.
Whereas Volume 1 of Endgame presents the problem of civilization, Volume 2 of this pivotal work illustrates our means of resistance. Incensed and hopeful, impassioned and lucid, Endgame leapfrogs the environmental movement’s deadlock over our willingness to change our conduct, focusing instead on our ability to adapt to the impending ecological revolution.
At 292 heavily illustrated pages, our flagship book is the perfect size for any knapsack and the perfect reference manual for anyone seeking a life of passion and revolt. AK Press calls it "an underground bestseller," but as it says in the preface:
"This book isn't designed to be used in the way a 'normal' book is. Rather than reading it from one cover to the other, casting perfunctory votes of disapproval or agreement along the way, and then putting it on the shelf as another inert possession, we hope you will use this as a tool in your own efforts—not just to think about the world, but also to change it. This book is composed of ideas and images we've remorselessly stolen and adjusted to our purposes, and we hope you'll do exactly the same with its contents.
"As for the contents themselves: we've limited ourselves for the most part to criticism of the established order, because we trust you to do the rest. Heaven is a different place for everyone; hell, at least this particular one, we inhabit in common. This book is supposed to help you analyze and disassemble this world—what you build for yourself in it's place is in your hands, although we've offered some general ideas of where to start. Remember: the destructive impulse is also a creative one . . . happy smashing! "
Your ticket to a world free of charge.
Anything By Daniel Quinn
It is a general rule that any particular culture can only be understood by someone outside of it - a neutral observer, unaffected by prejudice or indoctrination. This is the reasoning behind Quinn's choice of a gorilla named Ishmael as the main character of this novel, who conducts a series of dialogues analyzing the whole of civilization itself.
But what is the civilization that Quinn looks at? Instead of muttering about monumental building and written language, Quinn treats civilization in a method that is becoming increasingly popular: as the result of a critical mass of humanity that makes possible rapid advances in knowledge and science. For this to be possible, intensive agriculture must be used to raise the population density to such a point that civilization occurs.
So Quinn uses a gorilla as an outsider looking in and perceiving the reality of civilization - of cultures using intensive agriculture to dominate the world. His conclusions are for the most part negative: he concludes that civilization is not sustainable in the long term.
The observations used to come to this conclusion are relatively well-known; that civilization is the greatest disaster to befall earth in the past 65 million years. In terms of pollution, deforestation, extinction, and overall negative impact to the web of life itself, humanity is supreme among all the species. What Quinn does not share with the others who know these facts is a belief that civilization will overcome any difficulties it encounters. Civilization, to Quinn, is the problem, not the solution.
_Ishmael_ is the presentation of these ideas in a Socratic method from a gorilla to a man "with an earnest desire to save the world." There isn't really any plot to this book, nor does Quinn intend there to be. The disappearance of Ishmael at the end of book is the only story-like element in _Ishmael_, and it is really an attempt by Quinn to set the reader free - to encourage him/her to think about civilization for himself rather than be told about it by a telepathic gorilla. I've always had the feeling that this should be considered nonfiction, rather than a story.
The problem presented by _Ishmael_ is simple: civilization is the problem. The solution is both simple and complex: in order to preserve a human niche in the ecosystem, we must go beyond civilization. Working to figure out just what this means is one of the great joys of reading _Ishmael_, whether or not you agree with Quinn's assessment of the situation. _Ishmael_ is a book that will make you look around and think, and perhaps reach some conclusions that you may find surprising. Highly recommended.
The Story of B acts as a halfway point between the novels Ishmael and My Ishmael, also by Daniel Quinn. While referring to (but not based upon) the gorilla Ishmael, Quinn's novel takes readers along side Jared Osborne, a Laurentian priest. Jared is sent by his superiors to Europe to investigate an itinerant preacher who has been stirring up trouble. The preacher is known to his followers as "B", but his enemies say he's the "Antichrist". Pressed for a judgment, Osborne is driven to penetrate B's inner circle where he soon finds himself an anguished collaborator in the dismantling of his own religious foundations.
The fictional teachings of B are documented in full at the end of the book. Although the book is written in first person point of view from Jared’s naïve perspective, the author's real-life perspective echoes that of B. The following teachings are therefore Daniel Quinn’s historically-based ideas of the descent of man and the future of human history.
The Great Forgetting is the term B uses to describe an occurrence during the formative millennia of our civilization. What was forgotten is that there was a time when people lived without civilization and were sustained by hunting and gathering rather than by animal husbandry and agriculture. By the time history began to be written down, thousands of years had passed since abandoning the hunter-gatherer lifestyle and it had been assumed that people had come into existence farming. Quinn argues that our knowledge and worldview today would be greatly altered had the foundation thinkers of our culture known there was history beyond the beginning of civilization. When Paleontology uncovered 3 million years worth of human generations, making it untenable that humanity, agriculture, and civilization all began at roughly the same time, our worldview was still not affected. Instead, humanity used terms like “pre-history” and “The Agricultural Revolution” to label these events, rather than grafting their ramifications into our societal fabric.
"My Ishmael isn't just a sequel to the original. Instead, the original must be seen as a springboard for this new penetrating look into the machinery of our own culture, with all the drama and intrigue that a culture's history has to offer. If you're not changed after reading My Ishmael, you're dead."
Lance Pierce, Editor, Illusions Magazine
"Enthralling, shocking, hope-filled, and utterly fearless, Quinn leads us deeper and deeper into human heart, history, and spirit. Thank God the Gorilla is Back! In My Ishmael, Quinn strikes out into entirely new territory, posing questions that will rock you on your heels, and providing tantalizing possibilities for a truly new world vision."
-Susan Chernak McElroy, Author of Animals as Teachers & Healers
http://www.ishmael.com/welcome.cfm
Consistently lauded for its lively, readable prose, this revised and updated edition of A People's History of the United States turns traditional textbook history on its head. Howard Zinn infuses the often-submerged voices of blacks, women, American Indians, war resisters, and poor laborers of all nationalities into this thorough narrative that spans American history from Christopher Columbus's arrival to an afterword on the Clinton presidency.
Addressing his trademark reversals of perspective, Zinn--a teacher, historian, and social activist for more than 20 years--explains, "My point is not that we must, in telling history, accuse, judge, condemn Columbus in absentia. It is too late for that; it would be a useless scholarly exercise in morality. But the easy acceptance of atrocities as a deplorable but necessary price to pay for progress (Hiroshima and Vietnam, to save Western civilization; Kronstadt and Hungary, to save socialism; nuclear proliferation, to save us all)--that is still with us. One reason these atrocities are still with us is that we have learned to bury them in a mass of other facts, as radioactive wastes are buried in containers in the earth."
If your last experience of American history was brought to you by junior high school textbooks--or even if you're a specialist--get ready for the other side of stories you may not even have heard. With its vivid descriptions of rarely noted events, A People's History of the United States is required reading for anyone who wants to take a fresh look at the rich, rocky history of America.
David Abram's writing casts a spell of its own as he weaves the reader through a meticulously researched work that gently addresses such seemingly daunting topics as where the past and future exist, the relationship between space and time, and how the written word serves to sever humans from their primordial source of sustenance: the earth.
"Only as the written text began to speak would the voices of the forest, and of the river, begin to fade. And only then would language loosen its ancient associations with the invisible breath, the spirit sever itself from the wind, the psyche dissociate itself from the environing air," writes Abram of the separation caused by the proliferation of the written word.
"In writing The Spell of the Sensuous, Abram consulted an engaging collection of peoples and works. He uses aboriginal song lines, stories from the Koyukon people of northwestern Alaska, the philosophy of phenomenology, and the speeches of Socrates to paint a poetic landscape that explains how we became separated from the earth in the first place. With minimal environmental doomsaying, Abram discusses how we can begin to recover a sustainable relationship with the earth and the nonhuman beings who live among us--in the more-than-human world." --Kathryn True
From Publishers Weekly
How did Western civilization become so estranged from nonhuman nature that we condone the ongoing destruction of forests, rivers, valleys, species and ecosystems? Santa Fe ecologist/philosopher Abram's search for an answer to this dilemma led him to mingle with shamans in Nepal and sorcerers in Indonesia, where he studied how traditional healers monitor relations between the human community and the animate environment. In this stimulating inquiry, he also delves into the philosophy of phenomenologists Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who replaced the conventional view of a single, wholly determinable reality with a fluid picture of the mind/body as a participatory organism that reciprocally interacts with its surroundings. Abram blames the invention of the phonetic alphabet for triggering a trend toward increasing abstraction and alienation from nature. He gleans insights into how to heal the rift from Australian aborigines' concept of the Dreamtime (the perpetual emerging of the world from chaos), the Navajo concept of a Holy Wind and the importance of breath in Jewish mysticism.
In his 1978 bestseller, Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television, Jerry Mander argued that television is, by its very nature, a harmful technology. The trouble with television is not a matter of content, as the current debate suggests, it goes deeper than that. Whether one watches children's programming on public television or violent, late-night crime dramas, the effects are essentially the same, Mander said: the medium itself acts a visual intoxicant, entrancing the viewer and thereby replacing other forms of knowledge with the imagery of its programmers. Television's effects on young children are especially deleterious, Mander insisted, since it infuses them with high-tech, high-speed expectations of life and separates them from their natural environments. We cannot hope to understand television, Mander concluded, without looking at the totality of its effects.
In the Absence of the Sacred takes this argument a step further by examining our relationship to technology as a whole. Mander takes issue with the widespread notion that technology is neutral and that only people determine whether its effects are good or bad. "This idea would be merely preposterous if it were not so widely accepted, and so dangerous," he writes. Because technologies contain certain inherent qualities, they are not neutral. In the case of nuclear energy, for example, it doesn't matter who is in charge because the dangers inherent in the process are the same: the long- term effects of waste, the safety hazards, the lack of local controls, etc.
The belief that technology is neutral is only one aspect of what Mander calls "the pro-technology paradigm" — "a system of perceptions that make us blind and passive when it comes to technology." It's a cultural mindset that has emerged over time as we've become more and more accustomed to living with technology. It's also a product of the optimistic, even utopian, claims that invariably accompany the introduction of new technology. Another factor contributing to our passivity in the face of technology, Mander contends, is the habit of evaluating it in strictly personal terms. By stressing the benefits of technology in our personal lives — the machine vacuums our carpets, the television keeps us informed, the car gets us around, the computer allows us to work from home, etc. — we make little attempt to understand its larger societal and ecological consequences.
What we need, in Mander's view, is a society-wide debate about the costs of technology — economically, socially, environmentally, and in terms of public health. "In a truly democratic society," he writes "any new technology would be subject to exhaustive debate. That a society must retain the option of declining a technology — if it deems it harmful — is basic. As it is now, our spectrum of choice is limited to mere acceptance. The real decisions about technological introduction are made only by one segment of society: the corporate, based strictly on considerations of profit."
Mander sees a close connection between the advances of modern technological society and the plight of indigenous peoples around the world. Since the dawn of the technological era, he says, the only consistent opposition has come from land-based native peoples. Rooted in an alternative view of the planet, Indians, islanders, and peoples of the North have not only warned of the dangers of technology, they have also been its most direct victims. Mander illustrates this point with numerous examples, from Hopi-Navajo territory, where the government is forcing people off their ancestral land to make room for coal strip-mining; to Hawaii, where Native Hawaiians are struggling to save their sacred Pele, the islands, from geothermal drilling and destruction caused by bombing by NATO ships; to Death Valley, where the Western Shoshone fight for a reservation even though they never ceded any of their land to the United States, where they struggle against military pressure to keep nuclear missiles from being placed near their homes; and to the Great Plains, where the Lakota people refuse to accept a $300 million federal offer for the Black Hills. "That technological society should ignore and suppress native voices is understandable, since to heed them would suggest we must fundamentally change our way of life. Instead, we say they must change. They decline to do so."
According to Mander, we are in the midst of "an epic worldwide struggle" between the forces of Western economic development and the remaining native peoples of the planet, whose presence obstructs their progress. The ultimate outcome of this conflict is not hard to predict given that the technological juggernaut inevitably chews up the societies that warn that this path will not work. "Worst of all," Mander concludes, "these are the very people who are best equipped to help us out of our fix, if only we'd let them be and listen to what they say."
Seven Stories Press is an independent book publisher based in New York City, with distribution throughout the United States, Canada, England, Australia, and New Zealand. Seven Stories books are translated into and published in virtually all languages around the globe. They believe publishers have a special responsibility to defend free speech and human rights wherever they can.
They publish works of the imagination by such writers as Nelson Algren, Kate Braverman, Octavia Butler, Harriet Scott Chessman, Assia Djebar, Ariel Dorfman, Martin Duberman, Alan Dugan, Annie Ernaux, Barry Gifford, Stanley Moss, Peter Plate,Charley Rosen, Ted Solotaroff, Lee Stringer, Martin Winckler and Kurt Vonnegut, among many others, together with political titles by voices of conscience, including Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, Tom Athanasiou, the Boston Women's Health Book Collective, The Center for Constitutional Rights, Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting, Noam Chomsky, Derrick Jensen, Angela Davis, Shere Hite,Robert McChesney, Phil Jackson, Ralph Nader, Gary Null, Benjamin Pogrund, Project Censored, Luis J. Rodriguez, Barbara Seaman, Vandana Shiva, Leora Tanenbaum, Koigi wa Wamwere, Gary Webb and Howard Zinn.
The Party claimed, of course, to have liberated the proles from bondage. . In reality very little was known about the proles. It was not necessary to know much. So long as they continued to work and breed, their other activities were without importance. Left to themselves, like cattle turned loose upon the plains of Argentina, they had reverted to a style of life that appeared to be natural to them, a sort of ancestral pattern. They were born, they grew up in the gutters, they went to work at twelve, they passed through a brief blossoming period of beauty and sexual desire, they married at twenty, they were middle-aged at thirty, they died, for the most part, at sixty. Heavy physical work, the care of home and children, petty quarrels with neighbors, films, football, beer, and, above all, gambling filled up the horizon of their minds. To keep them in control was not difficult.
George Orwell, 1984
was published in 1997. For many, The Four Agreements is a life-changing book, whose ideas come from the ancient Toltec wisdom of the native people of Southern Mexico. The Toltec were 'people of knowledge' - scientists and artists who created a society to explore and conserve the traditional spiritual knowledge and practices of their ancestors. The Toltec viewed science and spirit as part of the same entity, believing that all energy - material or ethereal - is derived from and governed by the universe. Don Miguel Ruiz, born and raised in rural Mexico, was brought up to follow his family's Toltec ways by his mother, a Toltec faith healer, and grandfather, a Toltec 'nagual', a shaman. Despite this, Don Miguel decided to pursue a conventional education, which led him to qualify and practice for several years as a surgeon. Following a car crash, Don Miguel Ruiz reverted to his Toltec roots during the late 1970's, first studying and learning in depth the Toltec ways, and then healing, teaching, lecturing and writing during the 1980's and 90's, when he wrote The Four Agreements (published in 1997), The Mastery of Love (1999), The Four Agreements Companion Book (2000), and Prayers (2001). Don Miguel Ruiz survived a serious heart attack 2002, since when his teachings have been largely channelled through seminars and classes run by his followers, notably his sons Don Jose Luis and Don Miguel Ruiz Junior. Like many gurus and philosophical pioneers, Ruiz has to an extent packaged, promoted and commercialised his work, nevertheless the simplicity and elegance of his thinking remains a source of great enlightenment and aspiration. The simple ideas of The Four Agreements provide an inspirational code for life; a personal development model, and a template for personal development, behaviour, communications and relationships. Here is how Don Miguel Ruiz summarises 'The Four Agreements':the four agreements - don miguel ruiz's code for life
Agreement 1
Be impeccable with your word - Speak with integrity. Say only what you mean. Avoid using the word to speak against yourself or to gossip about others. Use the power of your word in the direction of truth and love.
Agreement 2
Don’t take anything personally - Nothing others do is because of you. What others say and do is a projection of their own reality, their own dream. When you are immune to the opinions and actions of others, you won’t be the victim of needless suffering.
Agreement 3
Don’t make assumptions - Find the courage to ask questions and to express what you really want. Communicate with others as clearly as you can to avoid misunderstandings, sadness and drama. With just this one agreement, you can completely transform your life.
Agreement 4
Always do your best - Your best is going to change from moment to moment; it will be different when you are healthy as opposed to sick. Under any circumstance, simply do your best, and you will avoid self-judgment, self-abuse and regret.
The very word "secrecy" is repugnant in a free and open society; and we are as a people inherently and historically opposed to secret societies, to secret oaths and to secret proceedings. We decided long ago that the dangers of excessive and unwarranted concealment of pertinent facts far outweighed the dangers, which are cited to justify it.
-President John F. Kennedy
Address to newspaper publishers
April 27, 1961
"The Central Intelligence Agency owns everyone of any significance in the major media."
-William Colby (Former CIA Director)
Heroes
Andrea Was Murdered In January of 2003. Her mother Linda has been fighting to bring the suspected killer (a major drug dealer) to justice, but has recieved little to no help from the (corrupted) police dept. Please go to her page, and read the blogs. Help in anyway you can. This is Andrea, the picture is a link...
“As an irrigator guides water to his fields, as an archer aims an arrow, as a carpenter carves wood, the wise shape their lives.”
~ Buddha
“Believe nothing.
No matter where you read it,
Or who said it,
Even if I have said it,
Unless it agrees with your own reason
And your own common sense.”
~ Buddha
[Please feel free to use any and all images, links, information, etc. used within this profile, on all and any blogs, as well as any posted bulletins, in fact, I encourage it! Also, if you enjoy the page, you will more than likely benefit from the blog as well.]
"What is done to the earth is done to ourselves. It really is that simple. We cannot live without the earth. The earth can live without us. It is an open question at this point whether it can live with us. It certainly can not live with us as we are now."
- Derrick Jensen, "endgame: resistance" vol ii
ko.yaa.nis.katsi (from the Hopi language), n. 1. crazy life. 2. life in turmoil. 3. life disintegrating. 4. life out of balance. 5. a state of life that calls for another way of living.
I have created this profile, simply to share media I myself have found helpful on my journey to truth. I don't expect everyone to agree with all or even any of what I have here. The information is here simply for you to make your own conclusions about. All I ask is when viewing this profile, you do so with an open mind and an open heart. Its hard to disagree that this planet/society is not in some serious need of healing. So my intentions are to provide information about what I believe those problems are or may be and some links and suggested books (two authors I highly recommend are Derrick Jensen and Daniel Quinn) about how we may be able to help change that. I do not have all the answers, what I have to say or provide here is not the supreme and ultimate truth, nor do I necessarily subscribe to all of it as such. I hope that you can apply your own filter, like I have, and weed out what does not agree with your own common sense and feelings, and grow from what you accept to be truth. I do not subscribe to any political party, I prefer to not hold any label upon myself besides human being or more precisely an earthling or creature of this earth. The best description of my feelings or what “beliefs” I tend to subscribe to, you can find them here - Anarcho-Primitivism I believe in community over government -- which always is, has been, and will always be based on a hierarchy system where the rich thrive, and poor struggle -- I only trust in the authority and government of nature. We come from earth, we rely on earth and when we die, we return to the earth. That is the process of life and death on this planet. I do not believe that there is only one right way to live, contrary to what many and unfortunately most do believe about this way --industrial civilization-- and the dominant culture, is that it is the “One True Way”, which it is certainly not. This way of life is against, disconnected from, and destroying our home -earth-, each other, and the entire community of life. There are many ways that we can live, and anyway that is sustainable --that will not negatively effect generations to come, that is not destructive of the natural environment, and where all give support and get support (mutual aid)-- is certainly a “right way” to live.
I’ve currently been traveling, I've given up the boring, repetitive, and habitual life of sustaining a job in order to make someone else rich, in other words I no longer participate in wage slavery. I hope to eventually fall in love with the land somewhere and from there protect it from industrial civilization by whatever means. I am currently traveling via whatever means possible. i.e. hitchhiking, buses, trains, and simply walking. Right now I have been in the U.S. traveling. So far I have been listening mainly to the wind in hopes of finding the place where the earth needs me most. I have been considering temporarily becoming part of an organic farm – or – preferably learning skills in permaculture. I am very interested in self-sufficient and sustainable living. As well I am very interested in primitive living. I spend as much time in the forest as possible. I much prefer the natural world over any city. Cities are far to crowed and disconnected from the natural environment. Cities, by definition, are not sustainable, because they require the import of "resources", which means they rely on land outside it's local environment to provide for all their needs...
....So if you see someone hitchhiking, it may just be me, and I highly recommend picking up hitchhikers. Most of the hitchhikers I’ve met along the way are good people, and not psycho-killers like so many movies in hollywood would lead us to believe. Also If you have an open door for a weary traveler, please let me know. It's always nice to meet new, kind people, and to catch a shower and maybe a couch to sleep on. Here is my e-mail if you are willing extend an invite to your home, even if its just for a quick nights stay. The E-mail is: OneVitalMind@aim.com
Hope you enjoy the page.
Feel free to help me out on my journey. Being on the road the income can often me very low. And in a world based on money, it can often be difficult to get by without it.
--If all of us demand control over what we do and what goes on around us, if all of us do what we can to make life exciting and fair for everyone, things are bound to change. A lot of people know that we don't live in the best of all possible worlds, but persuade themselves that it's hopeless to try to improve things because they're afraid to commit themselves, to take any risks. But it's that lack of ambition that is the biggest risk of all—for what if you do nothing, and nothing happens, and we lose our chance to make this world the paradise it should be? Don't be shy or timid—there's nothing more exciting than taking an active role in the world around you, and there's nothing more worthwhile!--
To get this out of the way, I originally created this profile as a source for information about the “Illuminati”. My journey since has brought further than just blaming all the worlds problems on this small group of men. Whether they truly exist, to me, is irrelevant in the long run. What is for certain, is that there is a system in place, a hierarchy, that benefits the rich while being destructive to the planet and to the "poor" or those who do not hold enough material wealth . In a sense, we are all slaves. Slaves to a system, slaves to “production”, slaves to money, slaves to machines, slaves to this culture and to civilization and it’s destructive ends. A top this system does lie a select few who call many of the shots, and who hold most of the “wealth”. Regardless of the existence of these wealthy men, they, too, are slaves. They are slaves to the money, to the power, to the sacred production and progress, slaves to the machines, they are slaves because they need us. They are slaves to a system that has been growing strength over our humanity for 6,000 years. It was 10,000 years ago that we began a system of agriculture that was not sustainable. That lead to a way of living that was destructive of the environment. It has been since then that we have, in relationship to the greater time line, quickly formed controlling relationships, also know as domestication --over plants, over animals, and one another-- and become destructive towards the planet. We can not blame any singe person, or group for this mistake. Nor should we settle for simply believing that human animals are destructive "by nature" or that we are "fundamentally flawed". It is this way of life, this culture, and civilization itself that is flawed. We spent several million years on this planet with a gentle and sustainable relationship to the earth and the community of life as a whole (even during the last 250,000 yrs of which we are believed to of been homo-sapiens for). And even up until our civilization, reached the shores of the “new world” just 500 years ago, humans still lived with a great relationship to one another and their environment. And their still exist wild humans who have not yet been forced into living this way. It should be understood that no tribal cultures willingly have ever joined civilization, it has always been through some sort of force. I don’t suggest that tribal cultures did not have any forms of violence, either, or that they were somehow “perfect”, but they lived in closer, and healthier relationship within their communities and withing their local environments. They did not participate in ecocide, nor did they participate in genocidal wars. They did not allow anyone in their communities to live in poverty nor did they have crimes of the nature in which we see in our current society. There is much that can be learned from their ways. A new culture can be born, if we just step away from the dominant and destructive one in which most of us are participating everyday. And of course, we must also act and fight against industrial civilization, before it succeeds in killing the planet. Things don’t have to be this way!
Anyway, I know many of you came to this profile, to learn about the Illuminati, and although I no longer fully subscribe to this, I want to ease your curiosity as to who they are believed to be.
So Just Who are These "Illuminati"?
"A loose affiliation of millionaires and billionaires" (Paul Simon).
It seizes in its long and powerful tentacles over our executive officers, our legislative bodies, our schools, our courts, our newspapers, and every agency created for public protection -1922
-John Hylan Mayor of New York (1918-1925)
"The governments of the present day have to deal not merely with other governments, with emperors, kings and ministers, but also with the secret societies which everywhere their unscrupulous agents, and can at the last moment upset all the governments' plans." 1876
-Benjamin Disraeli, 1st British Prime Minister
"Give me control over a nation's currency, and I care not who makes the laws" (Mayer Rothschild).
Conspiracy theory is often the theory that most of the world is secretly governed by a small group of men who operate behind the scenes. Conspiracy theory is now an accepted turn of phrase but sometimes one hears the expression, sometimes whispered rather than spoken. "The Illuminati".
What does this mean? Who are the Illuminati? They are, in essence, a cartel of international bankers and industrialists based in Western Europe and North America. The names of certain families persist over long periods of time. Some of the most important names are Rothschild, Rockefeller, Morgan, Lazard, Warburg, Schroder and Schiff.
The pivotal family is probably the house of Rothschild, the descendants of Mayer Rothschild (1743 - 1812) of Frankfurt. The male descendants of this family, for at least two generations, generally married first cousins or even nieces. The family established banking institutions in Vienna, London, Naples and Paris as well as Frankfurt. Ever since the middle ages, these families have been building their power by lending money at rates of interest to the monarchies and governments of Europe who were forever in debt, particularly in times of war. Sooner than tax the population to raise funds, always an unpopular measure, they usually preferred to borrow money from the money-lenders. This was the birth of the concept "the national debt." The countries of the world are forever in debt but where there is a debtor there is a creditor - who is this money owed to? It is owed to this coterie of international bankers.
It is accepted that their original formation took place in 1776, in Ingolstadt, then known as the Bavarian Illuminati. Even so, it is speculated the bloodlines of many of it's members may date back to the Ancient Pharaohs of Egypt. Many Religions, including Christianity, are based on the Ancient Egyptian Beliefs and Texts. Secretly interwoven. What most don't realize is that many of our current religions use the term "Amen", at the end of their prayers. Amun was the name of a deity, in Egyptian mythology, who gradually rose to become one of the most important deities in Ancient Egypt. His name actually means "The Hidden(one)". The Sun God Was known as Amun Ra. The Eye of Ra is an ancient Egyptian symbol of protection and royal power from deities. We see this eye on the back of the U.S. Dollar bill. As well as the Pyramid. We see both of these symbols repeatedly throughout this culture.
The theory of an extraterrestrial influence comes from the belief that the Pharaohs of Egypt either bred with these extraterrestrial and/or received their powerful knowledge of "Illumination" from these extraterrestrials. Often they are depicted as reptilian. Either out of metaphor or more literally because many ancient stories speak of serpents, dragons, or other reptilian beings that had some influence over this culture long ago. These Reptilians are often known the Annunaki, from Babylonian Myth. Also Considered the the High Council of the Gods.
Ancient Sumerian cylinder seal impression depicting the Annunaki.
The Illuminati ultimately intend to establish a world government (New World Order) through assassination, bribery, blackmail, the control of banks and other financial powers, the infiltration of governments, mind control, and by causing wars and revolution to move their own people into higher positions in the political hierarchy... most are already there.
Buddha: “Believe nothing. No matter where you read it, Or who said it, Eve
