Posts

In March I participated in a retreat that is somewhat hard for me to describe. It’s hard because I fear being judged. So, to my more materialist friends I want to describe it as an experiment in developing the practices of collective intelligence and collective wisdom and stick to the intellectual content. To my more spiritually oriented friends I want to describe it as a re-inventing of the practices of Quaker corporate worship in the context of the post-post-modern, quantum/relativist, networked, Wilberized, self-conscious and what-else-have-you, world. But this splitting into the mental and the spritual to appease my imagined world view of this or that friend, is a mistake. A huge mistake. So now I declare: go ahead and judge me! Here’s a better description: I participated in a retreat where a small group of people together worked on integrating all levels of their awareness: physical, emotional, mental, and “soul,” into a single group awareness. I put soul in quotes because there is common agreement that parts of our conciousness are separately devoted to physical, emotional, mental awareness, and we have decent language to talk about those three types of perception, but we don’t have good language or terms to talk about “soul” perception, or even agreement that such a form of perception is even “real” (what ever that means!) and has a similar status as the other three. [And now I’m noticing that that last sentence is yet another caveat to try and prevent judgement.] For those of you with a scientific/materialist bent I recommend reading Jean-François Noubel’s paper on collective intelligence. This paper mentions only in passing at the very end the need for personal transformation. But it was that part that is what the retreat was all about. The practicing of that transformation to begin to make possible the potential for real collective intelligence. If you aren’t turned off by spiritual language, try the sacred circle web site. Some things I learned: I am generally very unaware of my body, and what it has to offer me. If I change the way I sit, I change the way I perceive. I can tell when people are speaking from a place of fear. If I take my glasses off, I can’t see detial, but detail is not all there is to see. The things that I am naturally good at, that come easily to me, are my gifts to the world. If I toss them out as if they don’t matter, I disempower myself and those gifts at the same time. One of the key structural benefits of the open source world is that it requires the formation of human relationships. Because it’s free, i.e. the value it generates has not been monitized, you can’t rely on money to get you what you want, instead you have to either rely on yourself, or, prefereably, rely on relationships with others. I am afraid of esoteric, new-agey, airy-fairy, “stuff” and I have a hard time just being with it when it shows up. Taking on and accepting as true things that people say is very different from being with them and actually listening to what they have to say. There are many levels of listening, at least four of which are: from the past (where we try and understand what we hear based on what we already know); with an open mind (where we try and learn new things that we don’t know); with an open heart (where we try and put ourselves empathically in the position of the speaker and really listen to where they are coming from); and with an open will (which is harder to describe, but it is deeper than the other three, and is similar to the experience of listening for the sense-of-the-meeting when clerking a Quaker meeting for worship with a concern for business, where not only are you listening from all the three other levels, but you’re basic will, i.e. your desires, are left open and subject to modification). Quakers already know a ton about collective intelligence and the practial stuff about what is needed to move foward in this realm, but they suck at integrating body and emotion into mental and “soul” practice. If you get into this work, it will have ramifications on your “personal” relationships. [tags]quakerism,collective intelligence,open source,FLOSS,Ken Wilber[/tags]

“Power properly understood is nothing but the ability to achieve purpose. And one of the great problems of history is that the concepts of love and power have usually been contrasted as opposites-polar opposites-so that love is identifiedwith the resignation of power, and power with the denial of love. We’ve got to get this thing right. What is needed is a realization that power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anaemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is power correcting everything that stands against love. It is precisely this collision of immoral power with powerless morality which constitutes the major crisis of our time.� –MartinLuther King Jr. [tags]love,power,MLK,quotes[/tags]

Recently it hit me that I knew of no generalized protocol for sharing the state of an abstract space among a group of computers. I did a quick google search to see if I could find anything, and after coming up dry (which doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist) I decided to slap one together to test out the many uses for this that were readily apparent to me (i.e. any application where multiple users must be able to collaboratively make changes, and become aware of changes made to that space in real time: chat, bulletin boards, network games, etc.) Of course there is similar stuff like Croquet that certainly does an even more complicated generalized version of this, and lots of single purpose applications, like Subethaedit which must also do thisbut I haven’t found other efforts that are quite as simplistic and generalized. So, I slapped together the beginings of a protocol as well as a ruby based server, and a RealBasic based clients for OS X and Win to test out the ideas, all of which are released under the GPL license. [tags]collaboration,FLOSS,sharing[/tags]

The open source movement is, I think, the tip of the iceberg of a fundamental sea change in human thought that is swirling all around us. I had been emailing with a friend about how Quakerism seemed to me to embody in a religion,the principles of open source software because (I wrote) “it handles the balance of the community and the individual in a precise way: 1) the individual is highly autonomous and assumed to have unique and direct access to the devine. I.e. everybody can write code. 2) because this is true of everyone, individual revelation must be checked with the group for further descernment, i.e. your code has to be checked in to the repository and actually work with the whole system! Thus there is no preacher/parishoner or consumer/producer relationship, we all minister to eachother (we are all prosumers).” My friend pointed me to various links on open source spirituality that are worth looking at. I was especially intruiged by yoism which at first seems like yet-another-newagey spirituality thingy, but on closer inspection is quite a bit more than that. [tags]spirit,FLOSS,yoism[/tags]

Another installment in the collective tech-support arena: Gnucash wasn’t working under OS X Tiger (10.4.5); whenever I tried to run a report I kept getting the following cryptic error message in my terminal: dyld: Symbol not found: _program_invocation_short_name Referenced from: /sw/lib/libgnome.32.dylib Expected in: flat namespace A google search didn’t reveal anything with those error messages as keywords, so it was up to me to find the answer. Fourtunately my first stab in the dark worked! I did a fink selfupdate and then fink update-all (I’m using FinkCommander so I did those fink commands from the Source menu). I’m guessing that when I reinstalled gnucash after updating to Tiger, there were still some bugs in several of the libraries that were fixed by the fink update. Be forewarned that this take a loooong time to complete (overnight for me on my G4 powerbook). [tags]gnucash,fink,FinkCommander[/tags]

I’ve found that numerous times when I type into google a technical question, be it an error message that I’m seeing when installing some software package or some feature about a programming language, that where I often end up is in some person’s blog where they describe how they coped with exactly the same problem. This phenomenon seems to me a generalized solution to tech support, and also a wonderfully comunal and gift economy approach to problem solving. So I’ve decided to play the game too by creating a category for this blog called solutions, and, as often as I can, post my minor little breakthroughs in hopes that they will be helpful to someone else. And here’s my first:

The City of Ember is a young adult novel that is a fantastic allegory for spiritual awakening, though I have no idea if it was intended as such. The story is of a girl who lives in an underground and completely self-contained city created by the “Builders.” The population of the city knows of nothing outside the city, in fact, though they speak English many of the words in it like “sky” are not understood in any terms but metaphorically. The problem is that the city is falling apart, the lights are going out, the vast stores of supplies of light bulbs, canned food, and vitamins are running out. The reader is in on a worse calamity, namely, that a secret message in a timed lock box that was left by the Builders, which was meant to be handed down from mayor to mayor and that would open just in time to explain to the city dwellers how to get out of the city, was lost many generations back. Well, being a young adult novel it’s pretty predictable in that the box is in our hero’s closet, but a nice turn of events it is found by our hero’s baby sister who chews on it for a while before our hero gets her hands on it leaving the message is only partially legible. So the bulk of the story is the deciphering of the message, followed by the experience of trying to communicate its contents to the adults, who of course don’t accept the message (where else is there but here?) which is the equivalent of all prophets experiences of rejection by the status-quo. And finally, there is the adventure of eventual escape. This book reworks the universal theme of Plato’s cave, and of all mysticism. What we think of as the whole universe is but shadow, and further, that to enter that “kingdom of heaven” you must be like a child. The insight that this version of that universal story led me to is part of the answer to why childishness is a necessary component of the transformation. Children haven’t yet become someone. Which means who they are is not yet at stake. For some reason our culture has this question “what are you going to be when you grow up?” Think about the hidden structures and assumptions in that question. Who are you? Have you figured it out yet? Is what you do, who you are? Is what you believe who you are? Is who you associate with who you are? I write these questions myself in shadow not in the condition of childishness, and with all of this, as Quaker’s say, “a notion,” i.e. not something that I have experienced, but rather something I think. But this thing that is mostly a notion for me, that the distinction between notional and experiential living is key to awakening, I am begining in small ways to actually experience. [tags]awakening,experience,cave,Plato,mystics[/tags]

Since mutual credit money is truly valueless, it cannot BE a unit of measure. It must USE a unit of measure. This means that there must be something with which to set the price of things. You could use chickens or bales of tobbacco or kilowats, or hours as your unit of measure in which the mutual credit money is denomitated, but you can’t really do this because the “value” of any of those things varys across and within communities. Instead, the proper unit of measure is a conventional money, which is determined by an arbitrage market. So in fact, I think what I’m claiming is that the true role of conventional money is to determine aggregate value of things, skills and time, to be a unit of measure. Once we have that (which we allready do), then we can do the bulk of our exchanging using mutual credit money. [tags]money,mutual credit,LETS,price,value[/tags]

For that last 2 years I’ve begun a process of examining perhaps one of the most fundamental ways that I “participate in the consumer economy” and that is simply my use of money, specifically US dollars. Before this period money seemed primarily mundane. Money was just a practical thing about living life. It’s there, and I didn’t question it very much. In my mind, the connection between money and spiritual matters was mostly from biblical quotes, for example “the love of money is the root of all evil,” “render to Caesar what is Caesar’s,” “seek ye first the kingdom of the lord and his righteousness,” the kicking out of the money-changers from the temple, and perhaps the most influential for me is where Jesus says “look at how beautifully God as clothed the lilies of the field, not even Solomon in all his glory was arrayed such as they, how much more will he care for you?” All of these quotes set up the primacy of ones spiritual life and faith in the divine provider over what ever promise of security we might find in money. In a sense, these are all more about the disconnection between money and those higher spiritual aims.

Michael & Eric are walking down the road talking about what people will do for money. Michael sees a steaming pile of dog poop and says: “Eric, I’ll give you 20 grand if you eat some of that.” Eric thinks, wow good deal, and does. Michael says “ok, I owe you 20k.” A little while further down, there’s another dog pile, and Eric says to Michael, “I’ll give you 20,000 big smacker if you eat some of that.” And Michael thinks, that’s an easy way to cancel my debt, so he does. They walk for a few more minutes and Eric says: “whoa, we both just ate dog shit and none of us is a penny richer!” Michael says, “yeah, but the Gross National Product just went up by 40K!” [tags]joke,money,GNP[/tags]

The FLOSS movement has questioned (or at least provided an alternative to) private ownership of software. One can, on very similar grounds, question private ownership of land (and historically the followers of Henry George have). Recently the E. F. Schumacher Society has published its work on forming community land trusts including actual legal documents that have been used to set up these organizations. Private ownership of land is burned much deeper into our psyche’s than private ownership of software. Thus even though many of the exact same issues are at stake, we are much less likely to see these two realms of ownership in the same light. The Schumacher Societie’s approach, however, bears close study because it steers so far clear of communistic and centralized approaches that we might rightly fear. [tags]community,land,FLOSS,CLT[/tags]

This little book is very interesting in that it is a sandwich of extremely cogent and clear understanding of the relationship of money and economics to spirituality and human values, with a filling of a very problematic practical solution. He gets right the fact that our current money system is one design out of many possible, and that it’s based on scarcity, and what that means for our world. And he has some very surprising and insightfull things to say about surplus, i.e. more than just the usual “our whole economy is based our ability to produce surpluses and then redistribute them”, but onto what surplus is spiritually, and who should own surplus. He questions if surplus comes from human effort, or is bestowed on us by nature. He examines when surpluses have, historically, been at all time highs, and claims that it is when individual conciousness is expanding most quickly (i.e. the renesaince, and right now).

In hell you are sitting at a sumptuous banquet but your arms are broken and in a cast and though with your fork you can pick up food but you can’t bend your arms, so you can’t put it in your mouth! In heaven, everything is exactly the same, but you just feed the person next to you.

This sprawling work requiresmuch more than a small description here, which I will do some time (probably as so many others have), but I’ve gotta gripe about it. I wish Mr. Wilber were a better writer, or he would let an editor fix his incredibly repetitious prose. Many people have told me that Wilber is dense and hard to get through, but it’s not really that dense. The book is indeed a brilliant synthesis of a whole bucket load of ideas, but the each section is so over belabored that it gets tiresome. Well that’s the gripe, the things I like best about it are: holons, a synthetic world view which includes a social and individual component of the interior as well as exterior (the four quadrants), ascenders vs. descenders, Plotinus, and the necessary interrelatedness of macrocosmic and microcosmic evolution.

I have a real soft spot for a good graphic novel now and again, and this one really hit the spot. The story is interesting, the characters are amazingly engaging, and the art is just fantastic. What’s most amazing about Bone, is that it doesn’t takes an unusual position of litterary self-awarenes. It doesn’t take itself completely seriously, like so many of them do, but it’s also not all silly. So while the monsters are at some points just clearly silly and out of character, i.e. discussing whether to eat their next victims raw or in the form of a quiche, or calling eachother fat, they are also downright monster scary. It’s tough to pull this off, but I, for one, was willing to suspend disbelief and really get into the story, not despite the silliness, but because of it.