Encyclopædia Jonnica

into the category of *Bad Mythology. Many of our fellow citizens are positively eager for the world to end. Another classic dystopia is Dante’s Inferno. What are all these visions for? Are they helpful in some way? Do we need more of them? There are already plenty of dystopias in progress: slums of Sao Paulo, Mumbai, Chicago, refugee camps, war zones. See The Future, Positive Futures, Positive Present.

E

Ecology. I didn’t hear the word “ecology” before I was 17. It is a science of the interconnectedness of everything. Donald Worster’s book Nature’s Economy gives a history of two kinds of Ecology. One is scientific, concerned with measurement, and how nature can best serve humankind. The other kind came to be known as “deep ecology” and refers to cultivating a different attitude toward the natural world and all that lives here, perhaps best described as a sense of the sacredness of everything. *Thich Nhat Hanh speaks of a Buddhist idea that he translates as *Interbeing, which captures the spirit of deep ecology. Around *Nineteen Seventy we received the bad news that, from an ecological standpoint, there are too many humans and the way we are living is destroying the ecological health of the planet. Industrial manufacture poisons the earth, air and water. *Capitalism depends upon unlimited growth in a finite system. This is bad news for us and for everyone else. The biggest challenge to humans is to learn and relearn how to live in ways that do not destroy the health of the living Earth and then to live in those ways. Gary Snyder, *Jerry Mander and many indigenous peoples have suggested that we look toward the ways of life of traditional cultures and indigenous peoples for clues to how to do this. The transition from the way we live now to ways that are not so destructive will certainly be difficult, but the best way to face it is as a positive challenge which will lead to a way of life that is more deeply satisfying and good. See Anthropocene, Nineteen Seventy, Positive Futures, Sustainability.

Ecology of Peace. There is an ecology of peace and an *Ecology of Violence. Ways of thinking and living that make us more peaceful, loving, happy and free create an ecology of peace. It’s mind-boggling to contemplate what good could be done with the money spent on the military, if it went to things which benefited human beings and Mother Earth. The foundation of an ecology of peace is loving families. If children were loved more and brutalized less, the world would be utterly transformed. Economics should be a just sharing, rather than a ruthless competition to maximize individual financial wealth. We need to learn and re-learn how to live in ways that do not destroy the health of the planet. This is quite a tall order, given our current ways of life. It seems likely that more ecological ways of living will come about via collapse of existing systems, but to the extent that people could plan and begin the process of transitioning to a better way of life, there will be less suffering. *Community and bonds of human affection are foundations of an ecology of peace. Universal disarmament would be good, starting with nuclear, chemical and biological weapons, and continuing with aircraft carriers, fighter planes, machine guns, et cetera. We don’t need guns—they are only good for killing living beings. Beating women and children should fall under the same laws that govern other *Assault. Egalitarian structures are preferable to authoritarian ones. All people can be seen as belonging to one human family. The children of Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria and South Sudan are not like our children, they are our children. Our sympathies can and must extend beyond humans to other beings and to the living Earth. As love and justice increase, crime and violence will decrease, along with any supposed need for a massive police-surveillance state. International diplomacy and law can easily replace warfare as a means of settling disputes. There is no need to wait for “the powers that be” to “see the light.” We don’t need anyone’s permission to live in love and peace. We have the same innate rights as the goldfinch, which are not conferred by governments. Paradise now! See Community, Interbeing, David Fleming, Golden World, David Korten, Frances Moore Lappé, Local Agriculture, Local Economy, Positive Futures, Positive Present.

Ecology of Violence. Just as “love casteth out fear,” so the opposite is probably true. Social and economic injustice, along with anger, hatred, violence help to create an ecology of violence. A sense of “the other,” and of having “enemies” are prerequisites to warfare. If you were to chain up a dog, not feed it enough, and kick it regularly, you would get a mean dog. The same basic idea applies to humans. A lot of our mythology, in the form of “entertainment,” is ultra-violent. Lots of video games are “first person shooter” games. This can’t be a good thing. A basic pathology of our society is that the accumulation of financial wealth and conspicuous consumption are held up as the measure of success in life—without any regard for the health of nature or of human community. Unregulated *Capitalism creates massive poverty, not inadvertently, but by design. It is pitiless toward the “losers.” Overpopulation contributes to stresses for food and land and water that lead to bloodshed. We are at *War With Nature. Let’s hope we don’t win! See Child Abuse, Violence, War.

Economic Justice. This is a term that Martin Luther King was using shortly before he was assassinated. It might sound “way out there,” since, as *Jerry Mander points out in his book The Capitalism Papers, any criticism or questioning of *Capitalism is strictly taboo—especially in the mainstream media. Oddly, the word “Capitalism” is hardly ever mentioned. There is some talk now about “wealth inequality,” which we can clearly see is a product of “Free Market” Capitalism. Just how radical would the alternatives have to be? If you factor in *Ecology, probably quite radical. See David Korten, David Fleming, Naomi Klein, Jerry Mander.

Economics. Two big problems: unequal distribution of wealth, and attempting to have unlimited growth in a finite system. *Wendell Berry says that economy should be people being useful to each other. All the ways that our current economy is not that, is an indication of how sick it is. Rather than competing ruthlessly with each other to acquire money and expensive toys, we could work to eliminate poverty and injustice in ways that do not destroy the natural world. No one should be outside our sympathy. See Capitalism, Naomi Klein, David Korten, David Fleming, Jerry Mander.

Education. From second grade on, I hated school. It felt like a prison. I’m not sure why we require children to do things they don’t want to do. Once I dropped out of college my education began in earnest. I love books. I have followed my curiosity and read widely. Living a human life on earth is an education in itself.  Long ago I enjoyed reading Summerhill by A. S. Neill and Emile by Jean Jaques Rousseau. *Krishnamurti started what we now call “alternative schools” in India , England and California. Some of his books are transcribed from talks he gave to teachers and students at his schools, including Education and the Significance of Life, On Education and Think on These Things.  More recently, I have enjoyed An Underground History of American Education by John Taylor Gatto and The Happy Child by Steven Harrison. *Thich Nhat Hanh and Katherine Weare have written a book with the lovely title: Happy Teachers Change the World. See Childrearing, Culture That Nurtures.

Charles Eisenstein. Charles Eisenstein is a writer and speaker, the author of The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know is Possible. The title gives a pretty good idea of where he’s coming from. He has also written an excellent book called Sacred Economics. He has thought deeply about how the stories we tell shape the world in which we live. He says that the story of separation has created many of our most serious problems and cannot solve them. See Culture That Nurtures, David Flemng, David Korten, Frances Moore Lappé, Positive Futures, Positive Present.

Enlightenment. In the East, for at least two and-a-half thousand years a goal of life has been perfect freedom, or liberation. People have practiced meditation and yoga with this goal in mind. The most famous Indian yogi is Gautama Siddhartha, the *Buddha. The story of his enlightenment, or nirvana, is central to Buddhism. “Perfect” enlightenment is an impossibility, though no doubt some folks are less plagued by doubts, fears, cravings, insecurities and other kinds of mental suffering than some other folks. Inner silence can be practiced, cultivated, strengthened and the resulting tranquility feels good. When one experiences *Silence, or a feeling of boundless being, all categories like “enlightened” and “unenlightened” fall away, along with other verbal categories. These perfect moments come and go. They can be relatively more frequent and of longer duration, but cannot be permanent. The Buddha’s enlightenment is a myth, a story. As a story, it might inspire a person to seek deeper peace, happiness and freedom, but, ironically, it could also serve as an obstacle to freedom. The desire for freedom can be a form of craving. See Ultimate Dimension.

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David Fleming. His two books, Surviving the Future and Lean Logic are important contributions to the subject of *Positive Futures.

Four Pillars of War: Propaganda,  Fear,  Violence,  Greed. War is different from a bar fight, in that it doesn’t just “happen’’—it involves a lot of planning.  

Propaganda:

Of course we are capable of violence, but in order to have a war, we need stories that tell us who the “enemy” is. Hermann Göring said:

“Why, of course, the people don’t want war. Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally, the common people don’t want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship….Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.”

In books like Manufacturing Consent, Noam Chomsky talks about how propaganda works in our own time and place. Warlike societies, going all the way back to Homer’s Iliad, create a *Mythos where dying in battle is noble and glorious, sometimes even a passport to heaven. Modern TV commercials for the military don’t mention dying or killing, but talk of pride, duty, honor, courage, adventure, education, money for signing up, etc. Sam Keen’s book Faces of the Enemy explores the propaganda of “the other,” the enemy, and how we should hate and fear this enemy. When I was a kid it was the “Communists.” Now it is the “terrorists.”  

Fear:

In addition to commercials for the military, TV and movies endlessly promote fear: fear of aging, balding, impotence, financial insecurity, bad weather, heavy traffic, criminals, terrorists, black men, et cetera, et cetera. When people are afraid, they tend to accept authoritarian controls, surveillance, restriction of civil liberties, harsher punishments for crimes, and collective violence as a form of revenge. According to the official story, the 9/11 attacks were carried out by 19 Saudi Arabians with box cutters. The perpetrators of the crime were dead and could not be killed or brought to trial, so the U.S. invaded and overthrew the governments of Afghanistan and then Iraq. It is not surprising that there were people in the Middle East who did not like us—we had been bombing the Middle East continually since the first Gulf War—but our response was like pouring gasoline on a fire to put it out.

Violence:  

Violence begets more violence. The more powerful side wins, in an endless escalation whose endpoint is nuclear annihilation. Every human being experiences anger and hatred and can be violent. Violence is exciting and many people enjoy it. It certainly features prominently in movies. There are “sports,” like boxing and mixed martial arts that consist of people publicly beating each other unconscious for money while everyone cheers. It is the job of family and culture to create *Culture That Nurtures. See Alice Miller.

Greed:

War is extremely profitable financially. In *Capitalism, anything that produces a financial profit is good, whatever the human or ecological cost. Gambling, drugs and war are all extremely profitable. In my lifetime, the United States has spent most of its money on the military. At present, the main driving force of war is financial profit. This was demonstrated when the Soviet Union collapsed. The military budget did not get smaller, although we had no “enemy.” At last we were rescued by an endless War on Terror. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have been “privatized” and represent war profiteering on a scale that the world has never seen. See Capitalism, Nonviolence, Violence, War.

R. Buckminster Fuller. Buckminster Fuller invented the geodesic dome, along with many other things. He is sometimes dismissed as a “technological utopian,” that is, someone who thinks that technology will solve all our problems. He was a brilliant thinker, well worthy of study. He said that we could solve the problems of poverty and hunger by redesigning the way we do things, and that if everyone’s physical needs were met a lot of other problems would solve themselves. He said that population growth goes down in prosperous countries, so taking care of people’s material needs would solve that urgent problem as well. He said that ideas of scarcity are at the root of a lot of conflict and that technological innovation “does more with less.” As an example, compare the early computers, which filled whole rooms, with your smart phone—which does thousands of things those computers couldn’t do. He said that *Capitalism has unfairly taken credit for many things that are the result of our ever-increasing store of scientific knowledge and technical know-how. Three recommended books by him are Critical Path, Utopia or Oblivion and Grunch of Giants. See Positive Futures.

The Future. Will the future be better or worse? Maybe it will be the same—that is, everything-at-once. It is hard enough to imagine the present. At this moment, millions of really bad things are happening and millions—maybe billions—of really beautiful things are happening. There is no time or place in the past that this was not so. The world is incredibly beautiful and human beings are amazing! And yet we lovely humans seem to be wrecking our wonderful planet. In the big picture, things will come into balance, because what is unsustainable cannot be sustained. The ecosphere has its own vast, unsentimental wisdom. As the bumper sticker says: Nature Bats Last. The best strategy for the present and the future is to live in love. It is always good to promote *Peace, *Love, *Happiness and understanding, to work for social and *Economic Justice, to find ways to live more harmoniously with Mother Earth. See Collapse, Culture That Nurtures, Dystopias, Myth of Progress, Nineteen Seventy, Positive Futures.

G

God. “God” can mean “God of the Bible” or something like “Supreme Being.” For Jews, God created the heavens and the earth and made them his chosen people. For Christians, “God” refers to both the creator, who is like a father, and Jesus, who is the son of that God and who incarnated as a human and sacrificed his life to save us from sin and death. The Christian God is also “three-in-one” and includes the Holy Spirit. For Muslims, God is the “God of Abraham,” who is compassionate and merciful. Many people can’t imagine that the world could exist without a creator-of-the-world. Many people pray to God. Three kinds of prayers are: thanksgiving, praise and supplication. Many people believe that God speaks to them and answers their prayers, either verbally or by making things happen. Many people feel that there is something big, mysterious, sacred, divine. In Alcoholics Anonymous, they speak of a “Higher Power.” There is a kind of theology called “apophatic,” which posits that God cannot be adequately described or understood. My favorite definition of God comes from the First Epistle of John (Chapter 4, verse 8): “He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love.” Western Civilization has promoted monotheism. Since the Enlightenment there have been many rationalists, humanists and atheists, but also many believers-in-God have remained. Both monotheists and atheists disparage *Polytheism and *Pantheism. See Ultimate Dimension.

Golden World. When we have a warm feeling of well-being within us and all around us, we are in The Golden World. This world is The Golden World. Sometimes we feel it, and sometimes we don’t. See Blessed State.

Gratitude. Antidote to *Complaining. When we practice gratitude, it helps us to appreciate what a blessing it is to live a human life on earth.

Green Party. The four pillars of the German Green Party are: Ecological Wisdom, Social Justice, Grass Roots Democracy, Nonviolence. This is a pretty good starting point for progressive change. I think I would amend it slightly to say “Social and Economic Justice.”

Susan Griffin. Susan Griffin is a wise woman. She wrote the great book Woman and Nature. Everyone should read it at least once. The first part of the book gives an unforgettable picture of the way that “great men” have talked about women. The last part of the book is an inspired vision. Her long essay “The Eros of Everyday Life” is the most important philosophical writing of the past 50 years.

Gurus. In my twenties, I studied under two Indian gurus: Nataraja Guru and Nitya Chaitanya Yati, who was his disciple. I learned a lot from them. I’m glad I did that. This kind of “spiritual master” has a long history in the East. It comes into conflict with the egalitarian and democratic spirit of the West. There is an evolution in progress away from religion and from spiritual authorities, including gurus. *Krishnamurti was an extraordinary teacher who railed against authority figures of all kinds, including gurus, but, paradoxically, was one. One of the great modern spiritual teachers, *Thich Nhat Hanh, predicts that sanghas, or spiritual communities, will take the place of individual spiritual authorities. Personally, I look for “companions on the way,” wherever I can find them—in the past or the present.

H

Happiness. I agree with the Dalai Lama that everyone desires happiness. In 2004, a friend asked for my thoughts on happiness. I wrote the following:

Some mornings when I wake from sleep, I am already in the Golden World. It helps to wake up carefully, quietly—coming into the day as an observer, a listener, to allow this day to be a brand new one. Not connected to the days that have gone before. Not burdened with plans, worries, thoughts of any kind. Sometimes in the morning’s first quiet, I’m in it—the Blessed State.

    And sometimes not. Ferocious dreams can leave a kind of aftertaste. It doesn’t help at all if I am wakened by an alarm and must fight my desire to go back to sleep in order to get up and go to work. Although work is a necessary part of our lives, the tyrannies of the clock and rigid schedules are enemies of happiness.

    To find happiness, follow your heart. Your desire. Sometimes even just your whim. Stillness is a good place to listen for the heart’s desire.

    Sometimes when I wake, there is a little beat of silence and then I can see a frenzied army of thoughts, worries, plans, problems, coming down the hill ready for battle. I try to be like Krishna at the opening of the Bhagavad Gita and push the “pause” button—freezing all those troubles in mid-stride. “No thank you,” I say. “I want to enjoy my morning cup of coffee, have a little peace and quiet, before doing battle.” Sometimes, by the time I have finished drinking my coffee and watching the birds hopping around in the birdseed, the army has vanished. Calmly then I can, if I like, invite one thought or one problem to have a seat and together we can have a friendly conversation.

    There is no door to the Golden World. It is everywhere around us. At times we fail to appreciate this. This world is wall-to-wall miracle. The beating of our hearts, our hands, our ability to think, feel, imagine—these are all miraculous! And these are just a few items on a list that has no end.

When I am out of sorts, I remind myself that Happiness is not far away. I could have it in the blink of an eye. It’s who I am.

    For me, when thoughts fall away, I often find the stillness that ensues to have a numinous quality. There is a sense of being that is without limit. A quiet joy. This joy comes unbidden. It suggests to me that Happiness is our true nature. Sometimes it’s covered up, seemingly lost to us. But it is not something we have to acquire or achieve. It is waiting for us. Waiting for us to stop chasing around after other things and come home.

Heresy. One of the worst ideas ever. Basically, thought crime punishable by death. The idea of heresy still casts its shadow. People are prone to thinking that views which differ from their own are wrong in some absolute way. I have found the works of *Don Beck and Clare Graves, and of *Ken Wilber and *Joseph Campbell helpful in understanding how and why other people see and understand the world differently from the ways that I do.

Hero’s Journey.  Joseph Campbell noticed that there was a story found in many cultures. He wrote about it in The Hero with a Thousand Faces. The story goes something like this: A young man gets a call to adventure. Answering the call, he sets out on his journey and gets aid of some kind from a magical helper. He goes into a dark, unknown and perilous place. After some ordeals, he comes to where a treasure is guarded by a dangerous dragon or giant or other fierce creature.  He outwits or slays the guardian and returns home with the treasure. According to Campbell, this is the story of Odysseus and Parsifal, but also *Buddha and Jesus. We have such episodes in our own lives and our whole life can be seen as our hero’s journey. We can fail to answer the call to adventure and live a safe life in conformity to our society. This is sometimes called “the unlived life.” The difficulties and dangers we face on our life journey can defeat us. A spirit of courage is required. If we “follow our bliss,” if we are true to our heart’s desire, we will get the treasure and bring it back to share with everyone. I haven’t achieved much, because of laziness and lack of ambition, but I still hope to be a *Bodhisattva—a kind, loving and happy person.

Hippie Library. Some *Hippies like to read. I am that kind of hippie. I graduated from high school in 1969. Over the next few years, I read a lot of the books that other “seekers” of my generation read. We pored over the Whole Earth Catalog and the Coevolution Quarterly, which became the Whole Earth Review. The Whole Earth Catalog championed R. Buckminster Fuller, so we read books by him. We read books by Hermann Hesse, Carlos Castaneda, Richard Brautigan, Nikos Kazantzakis and Kurt Vonnegut. We read Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind by Shunryu Suzuki. We read books by Krishnamurti and Alan Watts. We read Be Here Now by Baba Ram Dass and The Miracle of Mindfulness by Thich Nhat Hanh. We were supposed to read all the books of Tolkien. I only managed to read The Hobbit. I read On the Road and The Dharma Bums by Jack Kerouac the summer after I graduated from high school. The following summer I read Autobiography of a Yogi by Paramahamsa Yogananda. Those last three books had a big influence on the way my life has gone. Many of us read The Politics of Experience by R. D. Laing, Toward a Psychology of Being by Abraham Maslow and Memories, Dreams, Reflections by Carl Jung. Summerhill by A. S. Neill and Growing Up Absurd by Paul Goodman were very popular among the hippie folk. Many of us read the Dhammapada and Bhagavad Gita. We immersed ourselves in Richard Wilhelm’s translation of the I Ching and consulted it as an oracle. We read and re-read the Tao Te Ching, translated by Gia Fu Feng and Jane English. It had beautiful Chinese calligraphy and black-and-white photographs. I was, and am, very fond of the poems of Han Shan. One version was Cold Mountain, translated by Burton Watson. Another was Cold Mountain Poems, translated by Gary Snyder. I was very fond of Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself.” I hope some other hippies were too. Walden by Henry David Thoreau seems tailor made for hippies. Hippies sometimes built beautiful funky homes out of scrap lumber on their communes. In those homes you would be most likely to find the Whole Earth Catalog, the I Ching, Back to Eden by Jethro Kloss, Be Here Now and some books by Gary Snyder, Carlos Castaneda and Richard Brautigan. And there would be some practical, how-to-do-stuff books along the lines of Living on the Earth by Alicia Bay Laurel, who, from the look of the book, was herself a hippie. All the books mentioned so far were available in the late Sixties and early Seventies. That was the heydey of the *Hippies. Some of the books that came out since then that I think would appeal to the hippie sensibility are: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig, Ishmael and its sequels by Daniel Quinn, The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle and The Red Book by C. G. Jung. You can make your own list.

Hippies. Hippies, like the beatniks before them and the punks after them, co-created a new “tribe” or “subculture.” There are still hippies around—young ones and old ones. I was a hippie, and probably still am. I wrote an email to a woman in Lebanon a few years back and she knew that I was a hippie because I ended it: “peace & love, Johnny”. *Peace and *Love seem normal to me, but maybe that’s a hippie thing. As a hippie I strive to do my thing. Some of us are still against *War and consider Mother Earth sacred. Like many hippies, I am a vegetarian, and have been since 1971. When I was young I wore my hair long. At the time, many “normal” people considered that weird. Sex among the hippies was a friendly way to make someone’s acquaintance. It seemed at the time that birth control pills had bestowed upon humankind the greatest blessing imaginable. I was especially fond of the music of Jimi Hendrix, Cream, The Doors and Led Zeppelin. Smoking “grass” was a quite common social ritual among the hippies. My own drug use was quite modest. I “dropped acid” once and took peyote and psilocybin a couple of times. I read The Whole Earth Catalog, the I Ching, Be Here Now, and the works of Carlos Castaneda, among other offerings from the standard *Hippie Library. I went to India and studied with yogis. For me the most important part of hippie culture is the love part. We wanted *Peace and *Love! We wanted to love everyone and we wanted everyone to love each other. We had a feeling that the world would magically transform into a Paradise, an Ecotopia. I still believe that it is possible for anyone to live in *Peace and *Love—and desirable to do so. See Nonstop Love-In.

History of the United States. This is a big subject! The point I would like to make here is that the standard version that I got in school—Columbus, the Founding Fathers, et cetera—was from a particular perspective and that if you change the perspective you get a very different story. As a thought experiment, try this: What does the history of North America look like from a Native American perspective?

Human Potential. Each of us has vast potential for understanding, loving, imagining, enjoying. As we live our life, it should be opening out to deeper peace and greater freedom—becoming more and more wonderful and amazing! We should be getting kinder and wiser as we go along. One of the tragic dimensions of life is the unfairness of it. Human potential is thwarted and laid waste. In some places food is scarce and machine guns are plentiful. Ruthless economic policies make life so difficult for some societies that people don’t have leisure for the project of personal growth and transformation. One’s family of origin can be a place of misery and abuse, rather than of love and happiness. Social and *Economic Justice are urgently needed, along with a *Culture That Nurtures waiting to welcome every new arrival to our planet. See R. Buckminster Fuller, Martin Luther King, David Korten, J. Krishnamurti, Frances Moore Lappé, Alice Miller, Joseph Chilton Pearce, Positive Futures, Thich Nhat Hanh, Ken Wilber.

I

Identity. Thanks to thought and language, and with the help of our family and our *Culture, we create an identity, a “constructed self,” as we grow up. It is a collection of stories, images, ideas and descriptions of who we are. We also create a *Mythos—a collection of stories about the world and our place in it. We get stuck with our identity: woman, man, Republican, fat, depressed, Japanese, beatnik, Johnny—whatever. It is necessary to have an identity to function in the world, but it becomes a kind of prison. We tend to imagine that it is who we are. *Alan Watts spoke and wrote a lot about the error of imagining ourselves to be a “skin-encapsulated ego,” separate from and at war with each other and with Nature. It is good to practice seeing through these fictions, to spend some time in *Silence. See Meditation and Mindfulness, Mythos, Johnny Stallings, Stillness, Ultimate Dimension, Alan Watts.

Interbeing. A beautiful word, coined by *Thich Nhat Hanh to describe the way things are. He gives the example of the pages of a book. They come from trees, which are nourished by soil and water and sunshine. A flower, he says, is made entirely of “non-flower elements.” So, too, with us. Each breath of air sustains our life.

K

Martin Luther King. The greatest American of the Twentieth Century. A *Bodhisattva. He believed in the power of love to change the world. And changed the world. Recommended reading: A Knock at Midnight, and A Call to Conscience. They are also available as audio books. Listening to his sermons and speeches makes me cry. Before he was murdered, in addition to racial equality, he was speaking out against the *Vietnam War and agitating for *Economic Justice.

Naomi Klein. Naomi Klein is the author of three important books: The Shock Doctrine, This Changes Everything and No is Not Enough. One of the public intellectuals who is willing to face our problems clearly and honestly. Some other people I would mention in this regard are: *Wendell Berry, Russell Brand, *Noam Chomsky, Chris Hedges, *David Fleming, *Susan Griffin, *David Korten, *Frances Moore Lappé, Joanna Macy, *Jerry Mander, Bill McKibben and Arundhati Roy.

David Korten. David Korten is a leading thinker in the field of *Positive Futures. He publishes Yes! Magazine and has written a number of books, including, The Great Turning, Agenda for a New Economy and Change the Story, Change the Future—all highly recommended. Many of his talks are on YouTube. See Community, Culture That Nurtures, Ecology of Peace, Positive Futures.

J. Krishnamurti. I have great respect for Krishnamurti. I heard him speak a few times, in India and in California. I read a lot of his books. He was very earnest in his desire to wake people up. His talks are an interesting form of inquiry-as-meditation. He felt that most religion and spiritual practices created conformity, rather than freedom. He took an extreme position against knowledge and books and traditions of all kinds. He encouraged people to live in the present, without ideologies, opinions, beliefs. He pointed toward *Silence and inner *Stillness as a way of liberation from the prisons of thought and language. He said: “Thought is always old. Thought is never new. Thought can never be free.” He said that when we named something “maple tree,” we stopped seeing the tree and substituted a concept for the actual tree. We do this with each other, too—which prevents real relationship. He said that we make plans to change, rather than actually changing. He felt that trying to change was useless, and that seeing things as they are and seeing ourselves as we are naturally brings about transformation. He recommended living in love, rather than fear. He really hoped that we would wake up and stop oppressing and killing each other. He devoted his life to helping us do that.

L

Frances Moore Lappé. Her most famous book is Diet for a Small Planet, in which she showed that we could feed a lot more hungry people with soybeans than by using our precious agricultural land to grow soybeans to feed “beef cattle.” Her early book, Food First, written with Joseph Collins, is an important analysis of how economic policies bring about hunger, famine and starvation. She has continued to write and lecture about Democracy and *Positive Futures and about how we get there from here. Many of the things we need to do to prevent tragic suffering are already being done all over the world by relatively small groups of people. See Community, Culture That Nurtures, Ecology of Peace, Positive Futures.

Limited Repertoire. I am acutely conscious that I have a very limited repertoire. I keep circling round and round to the same ideas. Even very imaginative and brilliant people, people I admire, have limited repertoires. Picasso’s artwork all looks like it was made by Picasso. Same with other artists, musicians, thinkers, human beings. I don’t know what to make of this. Maybe it gives us coherence. Each one of us imagines the world in our own peculiar way, has a unique understanding, and an idiosyncratic way of expressing ourself. I find my own views and opinions tiresome, as I’ve “heard” them so many times. Still, each of us is engaged in the project of trying to better understand *What’s Going On Here. The writings of others have enriched my life. It is my hope that some readers will find this book valuable in a variety of ways.

Local Agriculture. One hundred years from now we won’t be eating tomatoes from Chile in the winter. A resilient local, small-scale, sustainable organic agriculture is the most sane and secure way for humans to live on Earth.

Local Economy. A “global economy” puts everyone at the mercy of large, precarious forces beyond our control. Economies periodically collapse. Small-scale local economies, combined with *Local Agriculture would be wonderful things to bequeath to our children and their children.

Love. All we need. If we live in love everything else will fall into place.

M

Jerry Mander. Jerry Mander’s book Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television makes a strong case that we are experimenting on the human nervous system in a way that has negative consequences. Among other things, television has changed us from people into “consumers,” dumbed-down morons who will buy whatever the television tells us to buy and believe whatever version of the “news” that its corporate owners can profit from. His more recent book, The Capitalism Papers critiques *Capitalism from an ecological standpoint.

Map of Oregon. In order for a map of Oregon to contain everything in Oregon, it would have to be Oregon. Another problem with representing Oregon is that things are constantly changing. Plants are growing, birds are flying from place to place. It’s very hard to keep track of all the ants. The width of Oregon changes as the tide ebbs and flows. This illustrates how all descriptions and explanations are partial. They simplify what is. They leave things out. The world cannot be known. It is beyond our ken. We need maps as aids to navigation on our life journey. Some maps are better than other maps. A map of Oregon shaped like a pineapple would not be very helpful.

Meditation and Mindfulness. Meditation is inner stillness. Mindfulness is the practice of living in meditation. Of paying attention. Lack of mindfulness would be something like: Ate my sandwich. Forgot to taste it.

Alice Miller. Alice Miller is an Austrian psychiatrist who made a valuable contribution to our understanding of violence. Her most important work, For Your Own Good, is subtitled “Hidden Cruelty in Childrearing and the Roots of Violence.” She makes a strong case that physical, sexual, psychological and emotional abuse is at the root of personal and collective violence. She says that we compulsively pass the abuse we received on to our own children, spouses, et cetera. Her theory contrasts with the idea that we are violent “by nature,” and, hence, doomed to cruelty and war. What she says lines up with the commonsense idea that if we are kind and loving to our children, rather than cruel and abusive, we will get a better result—happier, more loving adults. Makes sense to me. See Childrearing, Ecology of Violence, Violence.

Miracles. Everything, without exception, is miraculous.

My Mythos. This book is an elaboration of my *Mythos, my *Worldview, but in this section I am going to try to boil it down, to present what is most essential to me. In the first part of life, a lively exploration, following your curiosity, your inspiration, your desires. During this first phase, we create an *Identity, a constructed self—stories about who we are. We also create a *Mythos—stories about the world and our place in it. The next step is to find moksha, freedom, through spiritual practices, like *Meditation and Mindfulness, and through philosophical inquiry. The idea here is to come to a clear understanding that one’s constructed self and worldviews are fictions. Last phase (maybe) is to embrace our humanness, our idiosyncratic life on earth, our emotions, personality and unique life journey. My aspiration is to *Love everyone, to live in *Peace, to continually improve my understanding of *What’s Going On Here, to be happy, to be free, to be kind.

My World vs. The World. In the Tractatus, Ludwig Wittgenstein talks about this. “My world” is the world as I experience and imagine it, from moment to moment. “The world” is an abstraction. All descriptions of “the world” are partial, as “the world” is too big to be described. Such descriptions are distorted and lopsided, in spite of their pretense of accuracy. Some descriptions and explanations are more adequate than others—our planet is more like a ball than a pancake. We get some of our pictures of “the world” from The New York Times, and from television. Yikes! “The world” is everything-at-once. Beyond our ken. As for “my world”: a happy man lives in a friendly world. An angry man lives in a world of assholes. See Map of Oregon, Gratitude.

Myth of Progress. Are things getting better or worse? Most people have an opinion, or at least a hunch, about this. The question is too broad. Some things are getting worse, some better. Martin Luther King said: “The arc of history is long, but it bends toward justice.” Two things on the positive side of the ledger are the Multnomah County Library and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Advances in medical science save thousands (or millions) of lives every day. The myth of progress was central to the rational and scientific Enlightenment. It seemed to pick up steam—pardon the industrial metaphor—after World War II. The myth, or story, goes something like this: “Things are going to get better and better until they are perfect.” There are ongoing fantasies about going to live on other planets and about immortality. Sigmund Freud put a dent in the myth by asserting that we are not the rational creatures, acting in our own self-interest, that we pretend to be. Most economic theories assume that we are. But the rug really got pulled out from under this story—to use a pre-industrial metaphor—around *Nineteen Seventy, when we got a clear picture, for the first time, of the relationship of humans to planet. Some things are getting a lot worse, in ways that could not have been imagined—a hole in the ozone layer, species extinction, dying oceans, global warming, et cetera. Human life on earth could end quite quickly with a *Nuclear War, or take a little longer by making the planet uninhabitable by us in other ways. Ecologists have calculated that the present human population is unsustainable, which means that one way or another it will decrease dramatically. It will be quite a challenge to preserve as much as we can of our positive intellectual, scientific and cultural achievements and to minimize the suffering that this transition will no doubt entail. Our real progress would look more like Ernest Callenbach’s Ecotopia and less like the Jetsons. See Ecology, The Future, Nineteen Seventy, Positive Futures.

Mythos. I use the word “mythos” to mean “the stories we tell ourselves about the world and our place in it.” Our mythos might be patriotic, progressive, compassionate, fearful, optimistic. It may include religious beliefs, strong political views, et cetera. Our stories change over time. From moment to moment, we live in the world we imagine. It can be a paradise or a hell realm. See Don Beck and Clare Graves, Identity, Map of Oregon, My Mythology, My World vs. The World, Stillness, Ultimate Dimension.

N

Nineteen Seventy. Nineteen seventy represents a pivot point in history. Right around that time, curious people who were willing to read books, could get a picture of the relationship of human beings to the planet on which we live. We could see how many people were living on the Earth and at what rate the human population is growing. What is happening to all the different species of animals and plants? Of the land mass of planet earth, how much represents arable soil, upon which crops can be grown? How much topsoil is there? When you convert forests to croplands, what happens to the animals who live there? How big are the oceans? What is happening to them and the beings who live in the oceans? How much fresh water is there on planet Earth? Where is it located? Where are the mineral reserves located, including oil, and in what quantities? How polluted is the air, the soil, the water? What does this mean for the health of humans and other beings? What is the overall impact of the growing human population on the health of the Earth and of other species of plants and animals? How many languages, each representing a precious human culture, are spoken here? What are the effects of industrialization and its toxic byproducts on the health of the earth, water and air? How does *Capitalism effect the ecosphere? Before 1970, many of these questions were rarely asked. Since that time we have learned a lot about the answers to these questions. The news is not good. We are destroying our home. The mass extinction of plant and animal species precipitated by us and by the ways we live can be construed as the onset of a new geologic age: the *Anthropocene. Elizabeth Kolbert’s book *The Sixth Extinction gives a clear account of the tragedy of species extinction. Born in 1951, I don’t think I heard the word “ecology” until I was 17 or 18 years old. As a science, *Ecology had been around since the late 19th Century, but around 1970 it became clear that our way of living on this planet is unsustainable and that ecology is something we have to pay attention to. Because this new *Worldview is antithetical to our *Myth of Progress and to our industrial way of life and to *Capitalism there is a massive resistance to facing our situation honestly, especially by entrenched economic and political interests. The biggest challenge for human beings, going forward, is to learn how we can live on the Earth in ways that do not destroy the ecological health of our world—and to begin living in those ways. Much is known about how we can become better planetary citizens. It is also quite clear that if we continue on the trajectory set by global industrial Capitalism that economic, social and ecological collapse will ensue. See Ecology, Myth of Progress, Positive Futures.

Nonstop Love-In. What our human life on Earth can be. Or is.

Nonviolence. The Sanskrit word ahimsa, which Gandhi took from the Bhagavad Gita, means “not-hurting.” Since it is impossible to live in the world without hurting anyone, some people speak of the ethical goal of “doing the least harm.” Gene Sharp is the foremost scholar of nonviolence as a tactic to bring about social and political change—even Democracy! Some people think that nonviolence “won’t work.” One might ask: How well is violence working? Buddha said: 

“In this world hate never yet dispelled hate.  

Only love dispels hate.  

This is the law, ancient and inexhaustible.”  

I am a pacifist for the simple reason that I don’t want to kill anyone. I admire people like *Martin Luther King and *Thich Nhat Hanh. I enjoy being in that tribe. If you don’t eat meat, you will find that your relationship to all living beings is friendlier. See Ecology of Peace, Peace, Violence, What’s Wrong With War?

Nuclear Power. Nuclear power is insane. There is not now and will never be anywhere to safely store the radioactive waste, which remains toxic for up to 250,000 years—longer than there have been humans on our planet.

Nuclear “War”. Nuclear “war” is insane. It’s not really *War, just a quick and easy way to annihilate the human race. Watch the short academy award winning film “If You Love This Planet” on YouTube, which features Helen Caldicott. Read Fate of the Earth by Jonathan Schell and The Cold and the Dark by Paul Ehrlich and Carl Sagan. It’s good to understand how nuclear “wars” differ from regular wars.

O

Our Town. This play by Thornton Wilder is one of our *Sacred Stories. In the first act, we observe the goings on in Grovers Corners. It’s a normal American town filled with regular people doing ordinary things. In the second act some time has passed and two of the young people we met in the first act are getting married. In the third act, Emily, the bride, has just died in childbirth. She is taken to the cemetery, where the dead are sitting in chairs. She has the ability to go back in time and revisits her home on the day of her twelfth birthday. She sees that everything and everyone—each moment of human life—is beautiful and miraculous, but the living don’t seem to notice. See Golden World, Miracles.

Overpopulation. A very serious problem, from an ecological perspective. See The Population Explosion and other writings by Paul and Anne Ehrlich. There are too many of us large omnivores for the carrying capacity of Planet Earth. We should make efforts to reduce the human population through rational planning, without violence. The simplest starting point would be to make birth control free and easily available to everyone. If further steps are required, there could be a kind of lottery for having children. This may not sound good, but the massive suffering that is the alternative, is worse. It’s nobody’s fault that the world got overpopulated. We were just doing what comes naturally. Nevertheless, current human population is unsustainable. In the future there will be less people. War, famine, pestilence, et cetera, are not the best routes. See Ecology, Nineteen Seventy, Sustainability.

P

Pantheism. The crazy idea that everything is sacred.

Paradise. There are stories that Paradise existed long ago. Some people dream of a Paradise yet to come on earth or in heaven. This beautiful planet is already a Paradise. We humans often create suffering for ourselves and each other, but at any moment you or I can feel perfect peace, love, joy—Paradise!

Peace. Inner peace and peace on earth need each other. Peace now!

Peak Everything. This is the title of a book by Richard Heinberg. In Limits to Growth, published in 1972, the authors used computers to demonstrate the now-obvious fact that resources like oil, topsoil, trees and fresh water are finite, and that as the population grows we are going to run out of stuff. *Capitalism is predicated on continual growth. This won’t work very long in a finite system. The toxic byproducts of industrial manufacture systematically poison earth, air and water. Yikes! See Ecology, Nineteen Seventy, Peak Oil.

Peak Oil. In the nineteen fifties, the geologist M. King Hubbert made fairly accurate predictions about when oil production in the United States would peak. The basic idea is that more oil is “produced” every year, until, at some point, oil production begins to decline. Globally, it has been difficult to predict the exact year that this will happen (or has happened), because of new discoveries of oil, and technologies like fracking, but this is not worth quibbling over. The main point is that the oil which was of the highest quality and easiest to extract is gone. Now the wells have to be deeper, or out at sea, or in very remote regions. It becomes more and more difficult to get oil. The environmental costs are greater. It costs more money and more oil has to be burned in order to get it. Past the peak, with growing global consumption increasing, supply cannot keep up with demand, and so oil becomes much more expensive. Also, if you have to burn more than a gallon of oil to get a gallon of oil, it is not worth it. All this applies to natural gas and coal as well. In addition to this, the crisis of global warming calls into question our use of fossil fuels. We should be burning less, not more. This is easier said than done, since all the products of industrial manufacture with which we are surrounded, and the roads, and electrical grid, et cetera, are all epiphenomenal of cheap and abundant fossil fuels. When fossil fuels are no longer cheap or abundant, we won’t be able to continue to live in the ways we have become accustomed to. Even wind turbines and solar collectors require fossil fuels for their manufacture. A good book on the subject is The Long Emergency by James Howard Kunstler. Awareness of the peak oil problem inspired the *Transition Towns movement. See Positive Futures.

Joseph Chilton Pearce. Joseph Chilton Pearce wrote a book that many of us hippies enjoyed reading called The Crack in the Cosmic Egg, but his greatest contribution comes from Magical Child and various sequels, including Evolution’s End. Those are books you should read! In Magical Child, he talks about prenatal development, birth and early childhood. His basic thesis is that we are amazing beings who have been damaged and thwarted at every turn. Like *Ken Wilber, his theory of human development, goes beyond the “normal, well-adjusted adult,” which is the goal of most Western psychology and psychotherapy, to “higher” states of knowing and being, exemplified by yogis and creative geniuses. Our precious human birth is a passport to a life more beautiful than we are able to imagine.

Philosophy. The way that Philosophy is taught in universities is as a history of what the official philosophers—Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, et cetera—have said. In the past century, it has grown increasingly fussy and narrow and unreadable. Philosophy that is a true “love of wisdom” would be much broader. Why not include wisdom from the East, like Buddhism and Advaita Vedanta? To better understand *What’s Going On Here, wouldn’t you want to read some Psychology and Anthropology? What about Shakespeare? William Blake? Walt Whitman? You might want to read Moby Dick and Don Quixote and the novels of Charles Dickens, and Fyodor Dostoevsky. What about writing by women and “people of color” and indigenous and non-European people? Darwin and other scientists have changed the way we see the world. Love of wisdom would necessitate a great curiosity into all kinds of things! And don’t forget to cultivate the heart as well as the head! See Wisdom.

Daniel Pinkwater. A magnificent author of children’s books. Among his masterpieces, my favorites are: *Borgel, Slaves of Spiegel, The Education of Robert Nifkin, The Big Orange Splot and Bongo Larry. I have a young friend who is very fond of the Irving and Muktuk stories, especially Bad Bears and a Bunny.

Polytheism. In his book Revisioning Psychology, James Hillman posits that we are in a monotheistic rut and that a polytheistic approach to life would be helpful.

Positive Futures. The problem is that the way we are living is destroying the health of the planet on which we live. There is even something wrong with the phrase “the planet on which we live.” We human beings are one of the things that Life is doing here. We are not just the observers of the natural world, we are an expression of the natural world. The project of attempting to kill everything that lives does not bode well for our own future. There are many things we can do to make the world a “better place”—more peace, more justice, more freedom, more happiness, more love—but our biggest challenge as humans is to learn or re-learn to live in ways that are not destructive of the web of life. Our current industrial-capitalist civilization relentlessly wrecks our home and causes suffering and destruction beyond our ability to comprehend. This may sound like a radical idea to some people today, but looking back a hundred years from now, people will marvel at how stubbornly humans refused to acknowledge what we are doing and to change the way we live. Once you get the bleak picture, the question naturally arises: “What can we do?” First of all, we are already doing some things. Examples of local agriculture (farmers markets) and local economies are important preludes to sustainable, resilient futures. *Wendell Berry is a thoughtful and eloquent writer on subjects like agriculture, community and local economics. The transition from the way we are living now to a more ecologically sustainable way of life could be fairly sudden and will probably involve a great deal of human suffering. The word “collapse” comes to mind. We should strive to face the wrongness of our current ways of living and do our best to make the transition as smooth as possible. I asked a wise friend what he thought *The Future would be like and he said: “Like the present.” We have seen many dystopian visions in movies and hopefully we are busy envisioning and working toward ecotopian, utopian futures. But *The Future will be better for some people and worse for others. We should strive for maximum justice and fairness, but human life on earth will never be just or fair. *Capitalism, as an economic system, is based on individual acquisitiveness—one could use the harsher words “selfishness” and “greed.” It is possible for *Economics to be based more on sharing than on hoarding. That would be friendlier. In an eco-friendlier future we will have less stuff, less consumer goods, but we have the potential for greater community, more love and friendship and cohesiveness. Our hospitals probably won’t be filled with as much of the shiny technology that currently makes it possible for some people to survive heart attacks and other health crises and to live longer, but there could be a lot of positive trade-offs to the lifestyles that many of the people of my generation have come to take for granted. Cell phones have only been around a few years, but we have a feeling that we can’t live without them. Of course we can. A lot of amazing things happened before the industrial revolution and the advent of the electrical grid and the computer: The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, for example; the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel; Chartres Cathedral; Grand Kabuki; Hagia Sofia; the Taj Mahal; Borobudur. Traditional societies have riches that money can’t buy. Mainly they have each other and their shared culture. Positive futures are about more than just solving technical problems of food and transportation, there is also the very exciting project of creating *Culture That Nurtures. We can begin to do that now. It’s not just a matter of lifestyles. It also includes ways of thinking and being. For the present or the future to be positive, we must live in love. See David Fleming, R. Buckminster Fuller, David Korten, Frances Moore Lappé, Local Agriculture, Local Economy, Positive Present, Thich Nhat Hanh, Transition Towns.

Positive Present. There is something not quite right about hoping, or waiting, or even working toward a *Positive Future. There is no time like the present. Paradise Now! See My World vs. The World.

Prison. For thirteen years I facilitated a weekly 3-hour-long dialogue circle in Oregon prisons. What I learned by doing this is that people in prison are not different from people who are not in prison. Everyone, without exception, has something perfect and beautiful at the core of who they are.  

Puritanism. This entry is not about historical Puritanism, but about the puritanical thread in the tapestry of my *Worldview. One puritanical idea is that people should be good instead of bad—maybe even “nice.” If everyone was nice to each other, wouldn’t that be nice? In a world where so many people are suffering from so many kinds of problems, is a movie like “Texas Chainsaw Massacre” helpful? I haven’t seen the movie, but I gather from the title that people get killed with a chainsaw. From what I understand, the extremely profitable world of computer games features a lot of “first-person shooter” games, where animated people and monsters come running at the “gamer,” who proceeds to shoot them or blow them up, or whatever. Is this helpful? Watching a graphic rape scene in a movie is a little bit like raping and being raped at the same time. I am not advocating state censorship of ideas or artistic expression, but I would like to urge storytellers and culture-makers to ask themselves if the fantasy that they are bringing to life promotes *Peace, *Love and *Happiness—(the basic *Hippie values)—or fear, anger, hatred, violence, despair, et cetera. I know that the violence in a James Bond movie is “all in fun”—it’s just a bunch of actors pretending to murder other actors—but there is just too much of this “simulated” violence on TV and in the movies. We have overdone it. This glut of violent images cannot be good for our children or good for us. See Cultural Junk Food, Ecology of Peace.

R

Ramana Maharshi. The archetypal yogi. He died in 1950. Fortunately, we have reliable accounts of his life and an extensive record of things he said in conversation in one of the great spiritual books of all time: Talks with Ramana Maharshi. At a quite young age, without any special training, Ramana sat down and asked himself the question “Who am I?” His penetrating inquiry might have lasted not longer than a half hour, but he attained moksha—freedom from an *Identity with the constructed self. He spent some years that followed in *Silence and deep *Meditation. Throughout the rest of his life, people made pilgrimages to see him. Many of them wanted him to tell them how they, too, could attain to his state of *Enlightenment. He said that there was nothing to attain, since there is nothing other than the ātman, the universal Self of all. All that is required is to give up the wrong identification with the body and with the constructed self. This is easier said than done. In silence, meditation and mindfulness, everyone touches the *Ultimate Dimension with greater or lesser frequency. Advanced yogis, like Ramana Maharshi, may spend most of their time in *Samādhi, a state of inner stillness. According to him, the objects of waking experience, and the constructed self which we defend so fiercely, are like a dream, or like images projected onto a movie screen.

Religion. Religion is too baroque for my taste. “Oneness with *God” is something that anyone can have right now. It is not possible to be separate from or “other than” what might be called “ultimate reality.” It can’t be described, but can be known in *Silence. Many people believe in impossible things, like talking snakes and a Judgement Day. Some of these things give comfort, like the idea of Heaven. Some terrify people, like the idea of eternal damnation. Shared beliefs bring people together in *Community. They help people to feel that they are part of something larger than their constructed self, or ego, or *Identity. A *Shadow Side of this feeling is that people who are not in the group are seen as “other,” or even as dangerous “enemies.” In the modern world, maintaining your religious beliefs can involve making an effort to remain ignorant of, or prejudiced against, the beliefs of others and even of scientific knowledge. Maybe one reason that many people consider themselves “spiritual, but not religious” is because they feel more comfortable with a *Worldview that is more universal and inclusive of everyone. My sangha, or spiritual community, includes all people, plants, animals, rivers, stones, clouds, the sun, moon and stars.

S

Sacred Stories. Sometimes we think of sacred stories as belonging only to indigenous peoples and traditional cultures, but we have sacred stories, too. I would nominate *A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens and *Dream of a Ridiculous Man by Fyodor Dostoevsky and *Our Town by Thornton Wilder and *The Tenth of December by George Saunders and *Borgel by Daniel Pinkwater. All the stories in the world belong to us in ways that they didn’t in earlier times. We can delve deeply into the I Ching and the Bhagavad Gita and Don Quixote. We can read the poems of Rumi and Hafiz and Han Shan. There are all kinds of great poems that can enrich our lives. *Song of Myself”! The plays of *William Shakespeare! “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”! Films like “The Wizard of Oz,” “It’s a Wonderful Life,” “Children of Paradise,” “Amarcord,” “Wings of Desire,” The Big Lebowski”! You get the idea. Make your own list.

Samādhi. I first read about samādhi in The Autobiography of a Yogi. Yogananda said that with the practice of meditation one could attain a profound state of inner stillness, which he called samādhi. I was about nineteen at the time. I wondered how I had managed to live so long and no one had told me about the possibility of experiencing deep peace. Yogananda’s Self-Realization Fellowship offered weekly lessons in meditation by mail and I signed up and began my meditation practice. Another Sanskrit word, shāntih, refers to “the peace which passeth understanding.” Our society emphasizes action and achievement—especially the acquisition of monetary wealth and conspicuous consumption. More recently, people have begun to talk more about “the present moment,” thanks in large part to teachers from the East. When our noisy mind falls silent, we are in the *Blessed State. See Enlightenment, Golden World, Meditation and Mindfulness, Ultimate Dimension, Wu Wei.

The Shadow Side. Unintended consequences of new technologies and of activities that are supposed to be “positive.” The people who invented the automobile weren’t thinking about air pollution. It seemed wonderful: a new method of transportation! Wait a minute. What’s that coming out the back? Poisonous gasses? After a while, it is disingenuous to pretend—the way they do on TV commercials—that cars are wonderful, magical things that have no shadow side. When we send young people off to war to “serve our country,” we know that many of them will come back with PTSD and experience night terrors for the rest of their lives. Aerial bombardment kills civilians. It is not “collateral damage.” Smoking makes you look cool, and tends to cause cancer. Industrial civilization is changing the climate and poisoning the earth, air and water. See Myth of Progress, Nineteen Seventy.

William Shakespeare. The greatest poet in the English language and the greatest playwright in any language. As an actor and director, I have had the good fortune to delve deeply into some of Shakespeare’s works. The best book on Shakespeare is Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being by Ted Hughes. The best way to first experience a Shakespeare play is at a live performance. After that, read it again and again if you like.

The Shock Doctrine. An important book by Naomi Klein about the suffering caused by unregulated *Capitalism.

Silence. Inner stillness and perfect happiness are the same thing.

Sixth Extinction. Well written book by Elizabeth Kolbert, but not fun to read. Bad news. One of those books that everyone should read to get a better idea of *What’s Going On Here. It’s about the *Anthropocene and the alarming rate of plant and animal extinction. We humans and the things we do are methodically killing everything that lives. It’s worse than you might think. She tells you things about the extinction of frogs and the death of the Great Barrier Reef that you probably don’t already know. It doesn’t end on a hopeful note. It gives a picture of something that is happening that is very important.

Socrates. A lovable old Athenian philosopher, who enjoyed sitting in the public square and getting into deep conversations with passersby. A boon companion for one’s life journey. Socrates enjoyed dialogue and had a great sense of humor. Maybe one reason I am so fond of Socrates is that dialogue features prominently in my life. I have had a deep dialogue with men in prison on a weekly basis for the past 11 years, and all my adult life I have enjoyed getting together with friends in tea shops and coffee shops to talk about “big things.” Socrates was concerned with understanding what virtue is and in living virtuously. I had the good fortune to attend the great scholar Gregory Vlastos’ lectures on Socrates at the University of California in Berkeley. In the book he published based on those lectures, Socrates: Ironist and Moral Philosopher, Vlastos says that the authentic personality and ideas of Socrates are best seen in the early dialogues of Plato. Throughout his life, Plato kept writing “Socratic” dialogues which became more and more “Platonic”—that is, he put words into the mouth of his fictional Socrates which were his own. Vlastos says that Socrates is exclusively a moral philosopher, has no metaphysical theory of “Forms,” disavows having knowledge, has no theory of the tripartite model of the soul, has no interest in mathematics or science, has a populist rather than elitist conception of philosophy, has no elaborate political theory, does not consider that homoerotic attachment “stands for” love for the transcendent Form of beauty, believes that deities must be ethical. His religion is practical, not mystical. His philosophy is not didactic, but adversarial: he refutes theses defended by other people. 

Song of Myself. A poem by Walt Whitman that changed the way I see, experience and understand the world. The greatest utterance to be produced in America. He says wonderful things like:

“I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journeywork of the stars”

and

“All truths wait in all things”

and

“My embryo has never been torpid, nothing could overlay it.

For it the nebula cohered to an orb”

and 

“In the faces of men and women I see God,

And in my own face in the glass”

and

“To glance with an eye or show a bean in its pod confounds the learning of all times”

and 

“A mouse is miracle enough to stagger sextillions of infidels.”

Because it is written in the first person, if you read it aloud, read it often, and, as you read it, mean it and feel it and even believe it—it will change you.

Spirituality. Like *Religion, in a way, but broader. A sense of the sacredness of all life, without creeds. The spiritual dimension of life can be equated with depth and with meaning.

Johnny Stallings. A fictional character. As Shakespeare said: “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.” I spend a certain amount of time pretending to be Johnny Stallings. If I don’t, who will? A lot of the time, though, I feel no such responsibility or obligation.

Stillness. Awake and alert, when thought and language fall away, a lovely state of serenity ensues, to which there is no boundary. Indescribable.  

Stories. As we grow up, we hear stories. We tell ourselves stories. We tell stories to each other. These include the kind of stories that are found in storybooks and novels, as well as stories about who we are and *What’s Going On Here. All stories are fictions—including scientific ones. That is not a bad thing. Imagination is one of our most wonderful gifts! Still, it’s good to remind oneself with some frequency that all stories are stories. Some stories are toxic, like the ones about “inferior races.” Other stories are beneficial, like the ones which tend to promote peace, love, happiness and understanding. See Identity, My Mythology, Mythos, Puritanism, Sacred Stories.

Sustainability. That which is unsustainable cannot be sustained. See Collapse, Ecology, Nineteen Seventy, Overpopulation.

T

Tenth of December. “Tenth of December” is a short story by George Saunders, collected in a book of short stories with the same title. It is one of the two best short stories I have read in my life. The other is “The Dream of a Ridiculous Man” by Fyodor Dostoevsky. I recommend that you read them both.

Thich Nhat Hanh. I have read quite a bit of what might be called “wisdom literature” of the East and West, ancient and modern. At the moment, the person I find most helpful in my effort to live a life full of peace, love and happiness is Thich Nhat Hanh. These days, I read several selections from his book Your True Home every day. It is a kind of tool kit of things that it is good to know, to remember, to practice. If I was going to recommend one book to any of my fellow mortals, this would be it.

Thomas Traherne. Thomas Traherne was a 17th Century Christian mystic whose joyous exuberant poetry was rediscovered in the late 19th Century. He says: “Your enjoyment of the world is never right, till every morning you awake in Heaven.”

Transition Towns. Rob Hopkins is the energetic young ecologist who started a global “transition town” movement in Totnes, England. When fossil fuels are no longer cheap or abundant, the industrial society within which we have lived our lives will no longer be possible. It’s a good idea to begin making the transition to the post-industrial era now, since it is inevitable, rather than just waiting for the *Collapse to happen. Farmers markets are a hopeful sign. They are in every town and city in America. Everyone intuitively knows that we need local farms and farmers. See Collapse: Three Thought Experiments, David Fleming, David Korten, Local Agriculture, Local Economics, Peak Everything, Peak Oil, Positive Futures, Positive Present.

U

Ultimate Dimension. In the first two chapters of The Perennial Philosophy, Aldous Huxley talks about the mystic’s direct intuition of “the divine Ground of all existence.” According to the legend, *Buddha achieved nirvana. There is a long tradition in India of a state of deep peace, called *Samādhi, and of perfect inner freedom, for which the Sanskrit word is moksha. In the East there are various traditions of *Enlightenment. In *Meditation, awake and alert, when thought and language fall away, one experiences a profound *Silence or inner *Stillness that has no boundary, no beginning or end. Though it is indescribable, it is very real. Try it and see. This *Blessed State has no name, but can be referred to as the “ultimate dimension.” When I was young, I had a teacher named Nitya, who told me: “It’s difficult to silence the mind. But worth the effort.” What I am calling the “ultimate dimension” is not something reserved for a small group of advanced spiritual adepts, but is something very ordinary that is part of everyone’s everyday life, but which we can nurture and strengthen through *Meditation and Mindfulness. See Blessed State, Enlightenment, Golden World, Samādhi, Silence, Stillness.

United States of America. A fiction. Like the dollar bill. If I had been born 50 miles due north, I would have been “Canadian.” For those who say “the United States is the greatest country in the world,” the question arises: “Greatest in what way(s)?” There are some cool things about the good ol’ U.S.A., but there are some things that we have done and that we do that are so terrible that it is hard for us Americans to face them. *Noam Chomsky can be quite helpful, to use a phrase from Robert Burns, “to see ourselves as others see us.” A good place to start is The Political Economy of Human Rights, Volume I: The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism. There are a lot of talks by and dialogues with Chomsky on YouTube. There is quite a bit of talk about “terrorism” these days, but if the bumper sticker is right and War Is Terrorism, then we are the worst terrorists. I’m in favor of freedom of speech and freedom of religion and many other things about America, but the version of American History that I got in school managed to minimize, or completely leave out, the attempted genocide of the indigenous peoples and the unimaginably cruel practice of slavery, followed by lynchings, Jim Crow, et cetera. We dropped nuclear bombs on the people who lived in the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We routinely refer to the United States as a Democracy, but it would be more accurately described as a Plutocracy or Oligarchy. My harsh view of the United States is not unrelated to the fact that I came to adulthood during the *Vietnam War.

V

Vietnam War. I graduated from high school when the Vietnam War was going on. I was required by law to register for the draft, and, if drafted, could have been sent to Vietnam to kill people. When I looked into it deeply, I couldn’t comprehend why people would want to kill other people. I knew for sure that I didn’t want to kill anyone. The Vietnam War was one of the things, along with slavery and the attempted genocide of indigenous peoples, that destroyed for me the illusion that we were somehow the “good guys.” The Vietnamese never threatened our country in any way, and yet we dropped more bombs on Vietnam than all the bombs dropped by both sides in World War II. We have yet to admit that what we did was wrong, to make an apology, or make any of the war reparations that we promised to make in Geneva. See Four Pillars of War, War, What’s Wrong With War?

Violence. Some people say that we are violent “by nature,” implying that there will always be wars, because we are violent animals. This fails to account for individuals and societies that are more loving and friendly. For a start, there is more to the brain than the brain stem, sometimes referred to as the “reptilian brain,” which signals “fight or flight.” We mammals have a limbic area in our brains which makes it possible for mother and infant to create a loving bond. Families and societies which, on the whole, provide love and nurture, rather than fear and pain tend to create, happier, more loving, less violent people. Even the aggressive aspect of our nature doesn’t fully explain war. Freud thought that repression is the price of civilization, but maybe repression is the price of this kind of civilization. What kind of civilization would we have if we based it on love and delight, rather than on duty and fear? Let’s try that experiment and find out! See Culture That Nurtures, Ecology of Peace, Ecology of Violence, Four Pillars of War, Alice Miller, Nonviolence, Joseph Chilton Pearce, War.

W

War. Since I was eligible for the draft during the *Vietnam War era, I had to think about whether or not I wanted to kill anybody. I decided that I didn’t want to. I had grown up watching war movies and Westerns, like every other American kid in the Fifties, but after I thought it through for myself, I realized that I didn’t want to kill anyone. And I don’t want other people to do the killing for me. I’m against all present and future wars. The past is past. War is now obsolete. We could solve our international problems through diplomacy and world law. The main thing driving it at this point is the profit motive. The American wars in Afghanistan and Iraq represent the largest scale war profiteering in human history. See Four Pillars of War.

War Against Nature. Of all the wars, maybe the dumbest.

Alan Watts. When I was young, I didn’t appreciate Alan Watts’ great knowledge, insight and wisdom, maybe because he wasn’t from India or Japan. He is one of the foremost interpreters of Eastern Philosophy and Religion to Westerners, especially Zen Buddhism and Taoism. Since his death in 1973, many of his talks have been published and are available as CD’s and on YouTube. Recommended books include: The Book, Cloud-Hidden, Whereabouts Unknown and Out of Your Mind. And another thing: he’s funny!

Rosemary Wells. A great children’s author and illustrator. Her illustrations are beautiful, her lovingkindness is in evidence throughout her books. Max’s Chocolate Chicken is the favorite of a young friend of mine, and also my favorite. Moss Pillows and Stella’s Starliner are also masterpieces.

What’s Going On Here? The world is beyond our ken. And we can’t help trying to better understand it, and our own place in the scheme of things. Recently we gained a better picture of the relationship of human beings to Planet Earth. The news is so bad that many people are in denial. They do not want to know. Large corporations have spent vast sums to misinform everyone, because ecological reality contradicts capitalist mythology. The biggest challenge of our time is to learn, or re-learn, how we can live on the earth without destroying it. Meanwhile, there are lots of other problems to be solved: war, poverty, social and economic injustice—to name a few. One paradox is that though the universe is so vast, and our lives are so short and we are so tiny in comparison, an unkind word is important. The world is everything at once: beautiful and terrible. Humans especially are capable of expressing the tenderest emotions and also of committing unimaginable cruelties. The world will never conform to our utopian fantasies, but each one of us can live in love. We can be more peaceful and generous and kind and happy and free. No matter what the outward circumstance, this is a good trajectory. See My Mythos, Mythos, Nineteen Seventy, Worldviews.

What’s Wrong With War?