the chance to really matter in the world, to put their lives on the line to shape the future in a situation where it seemed to genuinely hang in the balance. They did so in a context where the everyday world around them offered nothing more than stasis and passivity.
Both Malik and Burke have other axes to grind that don't interest me. But last week Anne sent this interview transcript, Can We Construct A Counter-Narrative To ISIS's End Goal? The interviewee, Scott Atran, has surprising strategic advice:
So far, the counter-narratives proposed in our societies have been pathetic. First, they preach things like moderation. I tell them, don't any of you have teenage children? When did moderation do anything? ... We've got to provide young people the possibility for some other mode of life that's hopeful, adventurous, glorious and provides significance.
And in an email about this essay, The Fire Is Here, Anne writes, "it will be fascinating and beautiful to see what we now think of as the left flying banners of irrational mysticism, danger, adventure and attractive madness."
I hope I live to see this, but it might take a while. Consider music: it's easy to make a raw and intense song with negative emotions, and it's easy to make a bland and polished happy song, but a raw and intense happy song is difficult and rare. For similar reasons, it's easier to build an exciting popular movement around destruction than creation -- especially when there's so little room for creation. I think the best ethic for this movement would be negligent creation: focusing on what you're building but indifferent to what gets accidentally destroyed. This is how
nature works and humans need to get better at it. I think it will take a deep economic collapse, and a new generation with nothing to lose, rebelling against their Anxiety Generation parents.
Humans have been extremely successful at hacking the external world, and it's strange, given how well we have mastered nature, that we have failed to master ourselves. This implies that God, the Tao, the metaphysical frontier, is not out there in the universe, but inside us.
According to modern western metaphysics: 1) The Self is the stream of words and pictures and stories and desires inside your head; 2) the Mystery is the physical world on the outside; and 3) you explore it through your senses. But try thinking this way: 1) The Self is your stream of sense experience, which is already grounded in the physical world; 2) the Mystery is toward the inside; and 3) you explore it by pausing your internal narrative, like holding open a curtain or stilling the ripples on a pond.
You can find that last idea in any book about meditation, but putting it together with the other stuff, suddenly I'm meditating a lot better. Framing the practice as fully outside-in works better than framing it as inside to more inside; and I don't know why they always tell you to come back to your breath, because it feels much more powerful to refocus with my entire body.
Brahman is full of all perfections. And to say that Brahman has some purpose in creating the world will mean that it wants to attain through the process of creation something which it has not. And that is impossible. Hence, there can be no purpose of Brahman in creating the world. The world is a mere spontaneous creation of Brahman. It is a Lila, or sport, of Brahman. It is created out of Bliss, by Bliss and for Bliss. Lila indicates a spontaneous sportive activity of Brahman as distinguished from a self-conscious volitional effort. The concept of Lila signifies freedom as distinguished from necessity.
This leads to the big question of all religion: if the root of this world is something good, how did this world get so bad? My speculative answer is that it happened through misunderstanding around play and abuse. Someone thinks they're having fun and causes someone else to feel pain, and if they're friends they work it out; but as we live in bigger systems where our actions ripple farther, these play-pain links remain unresolved and become normal, and finally we all feel like we're just trying to have a good time in a world that's senseless and cruel. Or worse, we suffer so much pain that we can no longer generate actions from playfulness, only from seriousness, which is more dangerous.
Related: a few days ago there was a good reddit comment about how buildings got shitty:
Check out old commercial buildings, and you will notice that many of them have the name of the original owner ornately displayed, often beneath the cornice. The manner in which the ego of upper class individuals manifests itself has changed throughout history, and in the past century it appears that the ego of developers took the form of building something beautiful and slapping your name on it. Developers these days just want the payout so they can spend their money on other things, presumably boats, cars, clothing, etc.
Cars and clothing are middle class goals. I think very rich people see increasing wealth as an end in itself. They're in basically the same mental state that you can experience yourself by playing a good computer strategy game -- I recommend Lords of the Realm II or Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri. But even in those games you get to build castles and city improvements, so maybe real estate developers are in an even narrower mental state, more like a slot machine addict.
I'm also thinking about the deeper cultural changes that are leading everyone's values away from the physical world and toward abstractions. This must be an effect of the information age: that when we seek improvement, we seek it in ways that are increasingly unreal.
]]>Before the advent of industrial agriculture, Americans enjoyed a wide range of regional flours milled from equally diverse wheats, which in turn could be used to make breads that were astonishÂingly flavorful and nutritious. For nearly a century, however, America has grown wheat tailored to an industrial system designed to produce nutrient-poor flour and insipid, spongy breads soaked in preservatives. For the sake of profit and expediency, we forfeited pleasure and health. The Bread Lab's mission is to make regional grain farming viable once more, by creating entirely new kinds of wheat that unite the taste and wholesomeness of their ancestors with the robustness of their modern counterparts.