Babel in Ur
Posted: May 29, 2026 Filed under: Child Centered Activities, consciousness, Money & Banking 1 Comment
My son comes of age at the dawn of the post literate age, when seven fictive persons with valuation exceeding $23 Trillion USD own artificial intelligence and employ robots at scale, developing plans to colonize Mars while enjoying unrestricted freedom of speech. These fictive persons’ capitalization exceeds the EU’s entire economic output, is roughly 123% of China’s nominal GDP and is greater than the market valuation of every other nation on planet earth, except for the United States.
To put into perspective this 21st century tech vanguard, my son and I looked back to the 27th century BCE. The Epic of Gilgamesh, carved in stone during the third dynasty of Ur, is one of the earliest stories in literature, the first epic poem. The story is cautionary; technology, literacy and centralization tend to consolidate power and over millennia, the more things change, they may, in fact, stay the same.
I will proclaim to the world the deeds of Gilgamesh. This was the man to whom all things were known; this was the king who knew the countries of the world. He was wise, he saw mysteries and knew secret things, he brought us a tale of the days before the flood. He went on a long journey, as weary, worn-out with labor, returning he rested, he engraved on a stone the whole story.
In Uruk he built walls, a great rampart, and the temple of blessed Eanna for the god of the firmament Anu, and for Ishtar the goddess of love. Look at it still today: the outer wall where the cornice runs, it shines with the brilliance of copper; and the inner wall, it has no equal. Touch the threshold, it is ancient. …Climb up the wall of Uruk; walk along it, I say; regard the foundation terrace and examine the masonry: is it not burnt brick and good? The seven sages laid the foundations.
Uruk was a city in Mesopotamia, the “cradle of civilization” between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. Agriculture and irrigation were introduced there, around 5000 BCE. The world’s first writing system – cuneiform – emerged by 3200 BCE and was used to record the Epic of Gilgamesh. The Sumerian Kingdom developed the state-of-the-art technology for “burnt brick” as building material.
Southern Mesopotamia (present day Iraq) lacked stone quarries or forests, but mud and clay were abundant, and when they learned to control high-temperature kiln firing, they created durable, water-resistant “burnt brick.” Secured with bitumen “tar” mortar, the bricks became waterproof allowing larger, taller, more complex structures to be built.
By 2100 BCE, in the neighboring city Ur, the oldest existing legal code, the Code of Ur-Nammu was developed, and the King began massive building campaigns. The stepped temple towers he built, known as Ziggurats, became monuments to his centralized power; “built by Ur-Nammu” stamped on every brick.
The temple and palace as centralized control, using one language – cuneiform, an intelligence not available to the common person – to manage ever expanding economic power, by means of an algorithmic governance with slave labor, bears relevance to the dilemma of my son’s generation: the Magnificent Seven fictive persons own and control AI using chips made of sand and silicon by robots at scale, their massive data centers our modern day Ziggurat.
The First Patriarch of the Hebrew people, Abraham, was born in Ur, and would have grown up in the shadow of the Great Ziggurat, pondering the King’s divine right and his shrine to the moon god Nanna: collective monumental religion. Called to a different path, Abraham wandered in the desert, seeking the divine in a covenant of personal conscience and individual responsibility: monotheism.
Centuries later, when Abraham’s story was written down, very likely during the Jewish exile in Babylon, the Hebrew scribes wrote the story like this:
1 And the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech…. 3 And they said one to another, Go to, let us make brick, and burn them thoroughly. And they had brick for stone, and slime had they for morter. 4 And they said, Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.
The story of the Tower of Babel was certainly inspired by the Ziggurats of the Sumerian Kings whose temples were a highly organized center of commerce and religion, a holy staircase built to invite the gods down, an act of supplication, as though upon “bended knee”. The Jewish scribes, however, saw it as an act of arrogant pride – hubris – humans empowered to climb up, as well as the dangers of empire and lock-step uniformity; “confounding their language” forced diversity.
5 And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of men builded. 6 And the Lord said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do. 7 Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech. 8 So the Lord scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth: and they left off to build the city.
The power of empire or the sin of hubris? A God of judgement and wrath or one who gently “confounded their language”? Our homeschool assiduously avoids the either/or as we seek the both/and multi-dimensional reality. We reached out to our Soul Brother to inquire of the Buddhist perspective. His reply: Dogen Zenji’s Genjō-kōan.
Dogen Zenji was a Zen monk, poet, philosopher who introduced the practice of zazen – seated meditation – to Japan. As a young monk, he travelled to China to study Chan Buddhism, the paradox-heavy, oxymoronic strain that challenges the rational mind. “What is the sound of one hand clapping,” Chan’s classic aphorism, applies surprisingly well to our AI era.
Chan Buddhism teaches that reality is nothing more than direct physical experience, not a conceptual framework defined by words, letters, or logic; information is not realization. Information is a tool – like the hammer and nail in my carpenter’s tool belt – and the real person must command their tools. AI unchecked can become a barrier stopping us from experiencing the physical world. My son should learn to use AI, but more importantly, to see the limits both of AI and of words. “A finger pointing at the moon is not the moon itself,” says the koan, so my son will soon confront the paradox; I have no answers, only questions, which he must resolve from his own direct experience.
In the Tower of Babel story, the perfection and harmony of one language was a conceptual trap, an imperial uniformity; reality is neither single nor rigid as the autocrat desires but is the diverse, varied “ten thousand things.” Written as a story of divine punishment, people “scattered…upon the face of all the earth,” Chan sees the Tower of Babel’s fall as liberation from delusion, a return to the earth where life unfolds with the friction of physical experience. Shame has no place in reality.
The act of building a tower to reach heaven is the delusion of separation, heaven as a destination attained via material accumulation. About reality Dogen Zenji wrote: “When ancestors gave expression to it, they did not search for it as something outside.” The ego may be chagrined, but clay and slime, the material used to make the bricks, is reality itself and the path to realization is to be wholly present in this current moment. There is wisdom in quiet receptivity, allowing reality to meet you as it is, on its terms.
Emperors, tyrants and the wealthy build monuments to themselves – “built by Ur-Nammu” stamped on every brick – such is their delusion, but so too deluded are the people who aggrandize and support same. The ego desires a permanent unchanging self, separate from others, but Dogen taught the self is fundamentally empty and interconnected with everything else: “To study the Buddha Way is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self.”
In the end, after the people had been scattered, the decaying monument of mud and slime would have fulfilled its unintended symbolism, showing the impermanence of human constructs. For Dogen Zenji, reality is never something finished but rather a continuous dynamic process, the entropy of physics, real persons becoming, not being, which is the magnificence of humanity, even in its varied confused uncertainty.
“Firewood becomes ash, and it does not become firewood again… life is a period of itself, and death is a period of itself,” the Dogen wrote. My son is the firewood, now. My role to fuel his fire, to kindle his flame, to teach him to go, forward bearing his light.
To Have and to Hold
Posted: May 15, 2026 Filed under: Child Centered Activities, consciousness, Money & Banking | Tags: abraham-lincoln 2 Comments
Our pursuit of personhood continues. Plato’s plucked chicken and Aristotle’s “thought bearing animal” both centered on materiality, to which Aristotle added the rational mind. There should be no surprise with that, given materiality and the rational mind were absolutely central to Classical Greek civilization. The birthplace of philosophy and science, the “life of reason” was considered their highest calling. Their art and architecture, such as the Parthenon, the perfect embodiment of geometric harmony expressed in material form.
Our homeschool emphasizes not the mono-rational mind but instead the multi-dimensional self; a person is more than a mind in locomotion. The Greek definitions, foundational to western Civilization, seemed too narrow and so my son and I travelled to the other side of the globe, to Asia, to see what thoughts would emerge.
Pudgala is a Sanskrit term (पुद्गल) that can mean “physical matter” or “person.” At its root, pud means “combine” and gala means to “separate,” so the core understanding is that change is the constant, clusters of indivisible atoms forming and breaking apart, all of which create matter, the building block of life. The term originated in Sanskrit around the 5th century BCE.
In Greece at that time, Heraclitus, the pre-Socratic philosopher, understood the universe as the “unity of opposites” constantly in flux, always becoming, never being. His writings remain only in fragments, sayings like “everything flows” and “no man ever steps in the same river twice.”
Known as the “weeping philosopher,” Heraclitus was followed in the 4th century BCE by Democritus, known as the “Laughing Scholar.” He reasoned the universe was composed of atoms (indivisible units) and the void (empty space); atoms, the building blocks of matter, never break or perish, but combine and separate to form clusters, differing forms of matter, by moving through the void. The co-founder of Atomic Theory, Democritus described the essence of fusion and fission, which is the foundation of modern atomic physics.
So whether from the Greek or Sanskrit, physical matter is clearly one trait of a person. Aristotle added in “reason” while Asian philosophers went further. To the Jain Dharma path pudgala was the non-living physical matter that makes up our bodies, breath and the physical brain, ever changing, both supporting and restraining consciousness and the soul. Within Buddhism pudgala usually refers to a mere person as the suffering self – the burden bearer – experiencing birth, death and rebirth. The Shaiva tradition of Hinduism went further, with pudgala as the person, bound in material form, whose path was to overcome physical impurities in their return to universal consciousness, the “man seeking to know divinity [śivatva].”
Such was the “Great Conversation” between these schools of thought, with multiple varying meanings hotly debated, but which seems remarkably similar to the “body-mind-spirit” concept of holism, popular today. Our pursuit here is to define a person including the dynamic of constant change. Maslov’s hierarchy of needs comes to mind; physiological, safety, love and belongingness, esteem, and self-actualization are all parts of a whole person.
After much discussion, we settled on our definition of a person as “a thought bearing biped mammal with consciousness of purpose, meaning, intuition and connection.” We are, after all, in pursuit of the multi-dimensional self, and how that compares and contrasts with the “fictional person.”
At the most basic level, consider the body. Corpus verum (real body) struggles with mortality, while the corpus fictum can exist in perpetuity. Kongo Gumi, a Japanese construction company building Buddhist temples, was founded in 578 and is the world’s oldest continuously operating company. The Hudson’s Bay Company, founded in 1670, was the oldest surviving joint-stock company until it was forced into liquidation last year. The fictional person is a superb entity to amass power and wealth over the very long haul.
Civil society is necessary for the fictional person to function, which requires real persons for that task. Real persons can be remarkably clever, to a fault. Consider that artificial intelligence is owned by the fictional persons, who have a combined market capitalization surpassing $30 trillion United States Dollars. As fictional persons employ robots at scale, will freedom of speech and personhood be extended further? Mind-boggling how creative we the real people can be, for better or worse. Caveat emptor.
But about that physical body, the corpus verum, a noteworthy thing happened long ago in England. Charles II, the King, convinced of his Divine Right, was unaccountable to Parliament. He raised taxes arbitrarily by decree and desired to send prisoners to remote overseas jails, beyond legal recourse. He was a rake and libertine, and the reaction was swift and complete. The Habeas Corpus Act 1679 was approved by the Parliament of England, taking power away from the King replacing it with a legal process preventing unlawful, arbitrary imprisonment. Habeas in Latin means “you have” and when the King would hold any body in prison, that body, the person, was assured their day in court. This became a cornerstone of democratic rule of law.
Our homeschool operates on the “friends and family” plan, and so for socialization I recruit help from Uncles, Cousins, and friends. My son’s Cousin happens to be an expert in Habeas Corpus, having clerked on the 2nd and 9th United States Circuit Court of Appeals and published, in the Stanford Law Review, the following:
“American habeas corpus, long conventionally known as the Great Writ of Liberty, is more properly understood as the Great Writ of Popular Sovereignty—a tool for We the People to insist that when our agents in government exercise our delegated penal powers, they remain faithful to our sovereign will. Once we grasp this conceptual shift, the implications for the law of habeas are profound.”
A noble argument, and yet in the history of the United States, American Presidents have suspended that Writ four times – most notably the “Great Emancipator” during the Civil War – plus one attempt concerning detainees at Guantanamo Bay, and the current occupant desiring to do so to immigrants. Last year the Cousin joined us by teleconference to chat about the Great Writ and why the corpus fictum (the government) would suspend the rights of a corpus verum (the person). A transcript follows here (edited for clarity and brevity).
Cousin: The basic theory of US government is: “we the people are in charge.” Habeas is a way to enforce the principle of law. If an Executive (President, Governor, etc) locks someone up, then that person is entitled to go to court. But in war, you can’t follow an ordinary process. [Discussion of Abraham Lincoln suspending the Writ during the Civil War, holding 12,000 civilians without due process.]
My son: It seems good and bad. I can understand Abe’s thought process but you should have a fair trial.
Cousin: [a discussion of prerogative writs, court orders restraining government officials from exceeding their authority] …In summary, these are regulating the question of who has power. “Prerogative writs” concern the royal prerogative, the privilege or powers specific to the King. In the USA this is the sovereign people, as exercised by the agents of the people.
[There followed a long discussion of “writ” and its derivation. I used example of “to write” which my son understood. The question arose of the phrase “the great writ of popular sovereignty” concerning whether, per use of the definite article, habeas is the one or are there others?]
The Great Writ of Liberty is the traditional name. Habeas was a mechanism through which all other liberties could be protected. Habeas was the vehicle for asserting other rights we have. The jailer must be held to account. [Discussion turned to Stephen Miller’s proposal to suspend habeas corpus.]
My son: Because (1) he likes DJT he would say this, and (2) he wants it to be really simple, any immigrant gets picked up, and gets locked up.
Cousin: A logistical simplicity. Yes. But why would many people think this is a good idea?
My son: Probably just a similar thought, just get rid of them.
Cousin: There are 11 to 22 Million people here illegally. There is a political will to change that. But what is the argument on the other side?
My son: There are many immigrants, and some are illegal, but this is not like Abe Lincoln at the Civil War. Now it is not really necessary. Everyone should have a trial. If Stephen Miller was being deported he would want a trial. If Donald Trump was being deported he would want a trial.
Cousin: At a basic intuitive level, it feels the crisis facing our nation is not as critical as Civil War. Was Lincoln’s suspending good or bad? If suspended, it is really important to guard our liberties, but all lofty ideals matter nothing if the country ceases to exist. How do you weight that?
Milo: Suspending habeas corpus should be a last resort. I don’t know what problems – people’s free will – but on a large level, it would fill up the jails.
In closing, the Cousin brought up Aristotle’s concept of the good as it relates to government; the state exists not only for economic survival, but to cultivate virtue, promote justice and to provide a forum for citizens to engage in rational, virtuous political activity; the “thought bearing political animal” oriented to the virtuous, not only the capitalist, life.
In Jay, a Person
Posted: May 8, 2026 Filed under: Child Centered Activities, consciousness 1 Comment
Chapter 1 verse 1 of the Gospel of John states, “In the beginning was the word.”
1 U.S. Code § 1 begins “Words denoting number, gender, and so forth…”
Words, at the core of our homeschool curriculum, define the sacred and profane. As my son learns the sacred Ἐν ἀρχῇ ἦν ὁ λόγος, καὶ ὁ λόγος ἦν πρὸς τὸν θεόν, καὶ θεὸς ἦν ὁ λόγος so I study the profane.
1 U.S. Code § 1 continues “…the words “person” and “whoever” include corporations, companies, associations, firms, partnerships, societies, and joint stock companies, as well as individuals”. Corporate personhood is a fictional person, “corpus fictum” is the Latin term, and so, this being May, it becomes clear our year end project shall ask: ”What is a person?” and, “what are the rights and responsibilities, thereof ?”
We begin with a chicken plucked of all its feathers. In his dialogue “The Statesman,” Plato defined human beings – persons – as “featherless bipeds.” A clever definition, in response to which Diogenes the Cynic threw over the walls of Plato’s Academy a plucked chicken to emphasize the difference between abstract theory and practical reality. Duly noted, our homeschool needs to be practical.
Aristotle, more pragmatically, defined humans both as a “political animal” (ζῶον πολιτικόν) inclined to form societies and as the “thought bearer animal” (ζῶον λόγον ἔχον). Of note, the word λόγον is the same as John’s λόγος, a word fundamental and rich with multiple meanings. “Word” is the common definition, but also “reason,” “logic” or “principle;” λόγος represents a divine ordering intelligence, a structural coherence. The German philosopher Heidegger would later argue “rational” is far too narrow as the defining human trait; “having” speech, discourse, and the capacity to articulate the meaning of our world is our defining trait. In the beginning, indeed, is the word.
All of this talk about persons and words brought to mind the landmark case Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (2010) in which the Supreme Court granted to the fictional person unlimited freedom of speech. For better or worse unrestricted corporate spending is free speech, supporting or opposing political candidates; persons real and fictive do articulate the meaning of our world.
All of this was becoming too abstract, so I hopped into my truck and drove north to Jay, Maine to see first hand what happens when the fictional person and the political animal come into conflict. We all know the rights, but what are the responsibilities?
Jay is a town of 4,620 people nestled in the foothills of Western Maine, on the banks of the mighty Androscoggin River. 178 miles long, the river flows from Errol, New Hampshire down across western Maine to Merrymeeting Bay before it empties into the Gulf of Maine. The river drains 3,530 square miles as it drops an average eight feet per mile, making it a prime location for hydro-powered mills and factories. The history of the fictional person making paper by the toil of many “thought bearer animals” largely began in Jay, on that river.
Hugh Chisholm, a baron industrialist of Portland, Maine, made his first fortune selling picture postcards. A shrewd capitalist, he decided to vertically integrate and control pulp and paper making. He opened the Otis Falls Pulp Company in Jay in 1888. It was among the most modern facilities of its time and, by 1898, Chisholm had merged 20 paper and pulp mills to create the International Paper Company, controlling over 60% of the newsprint industry.
History is rich with irony, bitterly so for Jay. Chisholm formed his paper trust, just before the “Rough Rider” President began busting the trusts. International Paper survived, thrived, and expanded but when the B-movie actor, who had served eight terms as President of the Screen Actors Guild, a 45,000 member Union, became the union-busting USA President, then International Paper Company turned its sights on Jay and decided to bust Local 14.
In 1987 International Paper Company was thriving. For more than twenty years it had been a component of the Dow Jones Industrial Index, and its profits that year increased 33% while net sales rose 42% to $7.8 Billion. Despite near-record profitability, the company demanded concessions in the form of wage cuts and givebacks (increases previously won), high monthly payments for health insurance, an end to double-time pay on Sundays, and the elimination of all holidays (including Christmas). Jay Local 14 went on strike.
The fictional person locked out the living breathing persons. The fictional person is responsible legally to its shareholders while the living breathing persons who toil in the mill are but a fungible means to that end. For the living breathing person responsible to family, friends and community the day is long, those are ties that bind, many of those families having lived in Western Maine for generations. The people of Jay stood tall. Those “political animals” inclined to form societies became a beacon to the world.
Solidarity is a noun, meaning “unity that produces or is based on community of interests, objectives, and standards.” Since 1915, the word has been the anthem and rallying cry amongst union workers. August 1980, workers at the Lenin Shipyard in Gdansk, Poland used that noun in naming their Independent Self-Governing Trade Union “Solidarity.” That union’s membership peaked at 10 million and played a central role in the end of communist rule in Poland. 1987, in Jay, Maine, solidarity was key as the strikers, community and people from away all came together in support of real persons fighting the fictional person.
The United Paperworkers International Union local 14 organized a focused community-based pro-Labor campaign: 24/7 picketing plus food and clothing banks, letter writing and a media campaign to broadcast the news. Massive rallies were held, including a 10,000 person march, and caravans sent across New England – one demonstration at the Bank of Boston – and even to Alabama to build support. Presidential candidate Jesse Jackson, in October 1987, visited Jay and spoke to 3,500 people. Support was widespread. The Chinese Progressive Association Workers’ Center in Boston mailed checks weekly to Local 14 to stay the course. A young woman, age 28 who happened to be studying art in Maine, created a mural showing the solidarity.
In the end, International Paper broke Local 14. The strikers were permanently replaced. In 2006 the mill was sold. Like a bad neighbor, the fictional person moved on. Its waste remains.
The Androscoggin River is known as “Cancer Valley.” From Rumford downstream incidences of cancer and illness are high, well above average, both from the chemicals discharged into the river and the mountains trapping pollutants in the air. The Androscoggin was named in the 1970s as one of the most polluted rivers in America, so polluted that it would lose all of the oxygen in its waters. Edmund Muskie, who authored the Clean Water Act, grew up on the Androscoggin River, and that legislation made a difference. The river has significantly recovered, but toxic chemicals remain in the fish while untreated sewage overflows during heavy rains. The river is still the most polluted in Maine. No one drinks its water. Except for animals.
The fictional person has the right to move off shore to find cheaper labor, while living-breathing persons, with homes and families, remain settled in the river valley. We the people – or, our elected representatives – have granted to the fictional persons extensive rights, with minimal responsibilities, it would seem.
“The company has gone, but the union lives on” is the motto of Local 14. On International Workers Day, I drove north to attend a rededication ceremony for the Local 14 Strike Mural in Jay. Standing room only, the event was robust with speakers and memories, including the artist who painted the mural, 40-years ago. The Local 14 chorus sang and we all joined in. A toast of sparkling cider was made, a meal was served. Solidarity and civility were shared in Jay, on 1 May.
Words and relationships are central to our homeschool. “Person” and “solidarity” are words to be discussed, with the crux of the matter: ”What is a person?” and “What are the rights and responsibilities, thereof?” And so begins our end of year summative, which will include an art-making mural project. Mark-making is meaning making, and the difference between fictive and real is an essential truth.
Karma
Posted: May 1, 2026 Filed under: Chronicles of a First Time Parent, consciousness 2 Comments
Spring Break 2026 was, for me, no vacation but a grueling gauntlet, repairing wrongs, like a cat on a hot tin roof. The Quaker school where I work has its ongoing lawsuit, and the roofer – whom I shall call the Industrialist – had offered to provide an in-kind repair, at no cost. The quid pro quo was a release from all future claims. The lawyers worked hard on that language of release, and once done the work was allowed to proceed.
We agreed to make the repair when the school was on break, no children around. I hired carpenters to handle the non-roof repairs, plus a structural engineer to opine on the condition of the framing lumber, and a Forensics Expert to advise overall. My role is to oversee everything, and give final approval; redundancy was built into the plan.
The school was built to passivhaus standards – the highest voluntary standard of energy efficiency – and was the first passivhaus commercial building in the State of Maine, and the third passivhaus school in the nation. Built in 2015, the school was a model of hope for the future, but now the roof leaks; “The Audacity of Hope” once was a bestseller but today the “Art of the Deal” reigns, and when it rains water pours into the building.
The roof is covered in metal, beneath which is 6” of foam insulation. The roof should be dry, but 80% moisture content has saturated the foam insulation. Passivhaus construction is air tight, so once water gets in, it has no means to dry out; in other words, the building slowly rots from within, which will lead to black mold.
For the spring break, the Goddess and our daughter had gone to New Orleans, leaving my son and me at home, alone. On Monday morning, while my son slept, I was at work early when the Industrialist and his crew showed up.
Our agreement was to open four panels of the metal roofing – about 6 feet wide – and replace all wet insulation. But that section was so thoroughly saturated that when the foam was removed the wood sheathing was slick with water. It glistened in the sunlight. In stunned silence, we stood.
The Industrialist curtly told his crew to remove the entire roof. On the ground below, the carpenters waited at their trucks, nothing to do until their turn to remove the wet sheathing and see what lay beneath. And there was I, leading the charge, alone on behalf of the school. Neither a Quaker nor an employee, I am a part-time independent contractor and could have quit long ago. This task so far exceeds the basic maintenance I was hired to do, but when work and life are viewed not as transactional but relational, I chose to stay the course. Such is my karma.
I speak of karma not in the yoga-centric sense where present actions cause future results but from the Sanskrit root “kr” which means a movement (r) within space (k). “Kr” ‘does’ ‘works’ and is ‘action’ itself. Thus, karma ‘makes.’ Karma ‘creates.’ I came into the job as a carpenter, which is one who moves, while making, creating the built space.
This root definition of karma was entirely new to me, shared by my soul brother, after he saw photos from the work. His “Kr” lead me back to the Bhagavad Gita, which, over 5,000 years old, is an epic work of moral science, ethical duty and balance. Ghandi said, “Gita is not only my Bible or my Koran, it is mother…my ETERNAL MOTHER.”
Gita verse 3.19 states, तस्मादसक्तः सततं कार्यं कर्म समाचर।असक्तो ह्याचरन्कर्म परमाप्नोति पूरुषः।। १९ ।। which translates as, “Therefore, without being attached to fruits of activities, one should act as a matter of duty, for working without attachment, one attains the Supreme.”
That private school has been a source of tremendous experience, powerful relationships. Early in my tenure I arranged a donation of Peter the Polar Bear to the Pre-K class. I had helped build Peter, one of seven sea monsters from a Public Art exhibit. When the exhibit ended, the maker sought new homes for the sea monsters. The Quaker school welcomed Peter, gathered in circle for an assembly, after which the Pre-K cherubs lead Peter out of the Meeting Room, down the hall to his new forever home. I lead that march.
Another time I sat in circle among the 7-8 grade students with an elder, who, in 1965 for the Committee for Non-Violent Action, helped coordinate the Selma to Montgomery Marches. The elder gave voice, in the first person, to Martin Luther King’s presence and the enduring role of civility and non-violent civil disobedience.
And later, when those 7-8 grade students studied the Holocaust, I sat in circle again to share the story of my son’s Great-Grandfather and Great-Great-Grandmother, Jewish in Austria 1939; he, the Great-Grandfather, was persecuted but escaped on the last flight out, while she, the Great-Great-Grandmother, was exterminated. The official letter from the Ministry of Social Welfare, Repatriation Department – Tracing Section states she was deported “to Terezin (Theresienstadt) on June 20th, 1942, and from there to: Auschwitz (Poland) on December 15th, 1943.” The number of her transport was Dr – 1490, the official correspondence signed “For the Minister” with a counter signature vouching “For the Correctness.” Age 74 at the time of her transport, below the signatures, the certificate states, “Notice: Persons more than 50 years of age did not return.”
Dark is the cauldron of hate; our duty is to bear the light, without attachment. Having borne witness, my relation with the school grew profoundly deep, and so I stayed to fight on their behalf, to do battle over a roof and its design, even on Spring Break, when everyone else was on vacation.
The work last week was grueling. By Friday it was clear to a man, that all of us wanted to be anywhere else but there. One of the carpenters looked me in the eye and said, “The next time you need to remove plywood, don’t call me.” Forearmed, I replied swiftly, “You know I was thinking I never want to see you again!” Laughter broke the tension. We got back to work.
Ours is a testosterone-driven age of dominance, where the transactional drives pursuit of rational self-interest. The relational is different, a compassionate path which is the core both of the Homeschool Academy and my karma, which is how I teach my son.
__________________________________________
Meanwhile, Gaia pushes up and starts go down, into the ground. We weed the beds. The growing season begins.
The Path Not Taken
Posted: April 24, 2026 Filed under: Chronicles of a First Time Parent, consciousness | Tags: John Dewey 2 Comments
The local school that my son does not attend is $8.4 Million in debt, needs to cut 70 positions (including 30 teachers), plans to close and possibly to sell one of the Elementary schools, all just to hold the property tax increase to 6%. Two years ago, the School Department opened a new state-of-the-art $70 Million Middle School.
Going from state-of-the-art to layoffs in two years is a frightening whiplash, and you might wonder if the local public school is a nurturing work or learning environment these days. No longer in that school system, my son’s path not taken, it is edifying to compare our curriculum to the public school system; what are the “pros” and what are the “cons?”
One hallmark of the public school system is the “No Child Left Behind” Act, signed into law in 2001 by the Second Patrician of Kennebunkport, Maine. “We’re gonna spend more money, more resources, but they’ll be directed at methods that work,” he growled, “Not feel-good methods. Not sound-good methods. But methods that actually work.” Throwing money at the problem proved a futile waste.
The No Child Act was reviled and despised by teachers and parents for its emphasis upon standardized tests. “Teaching to the test” brought draconian penalties for schools that fell behind. The focus on math and reading left less time for science, history, music and the arts. Recess was cut back. To avoid sanctions, some states lowered their definition of “proficiency.” The Act drove the expansion of charter schools, further draining money from public schools, especially those carrying a debt load for buildings and infrastructure.
“The skinny kid with a funny name” President changed the law in 2015 – the Every Student Succeeds Act – that reduced testing time and gave the States more control over accountability. But regardless of the metric, math and reading levels continue to drop; as of 2024 “The Nation’s Report Card” shows only 22% of high school seniors demonstrate “proficiency” in math and 35% in reading. The system seems flailing.
Homeschooling once seemed out of the question, but when COVID struck during my son’s 1st grade, we were forced to homeschool. He returned to the public school for years 3 and 4, but then abruptly began Middle School in the 5th grade. Nationwide, COVID brought increased rates of inattention, anxiety, depression, and behavioral changes such as opposition and aggression. For my son, the classroom situation became unbearable by the 6th grade and so – at his request – we launched this holy experiment.
Our great unknown is “compared to what?” Am I preparing my son to succeed in life? And “What is success? What is our standard of proficiency?” Here at an art farm we value emotional intelligence more than sheer mental horsepower. Too many are the stories of brilliant minds – MENSA even – who struggle with mental health issues, left unaddressed. The IV league is not for us. I value honesty more than politeness; I prefer to live close to the ground. I believe, in fact, the purpose of life is healing, not the acquisition of assets, honors, or accolades. I may be in the minority, but not silent.
We are required to submit an annual assessment, which is handled by Our Aristotle, a State of Maine Certified Teacher, who works in the public school system, while pursuing a double Masters in Education and Social Work. A remarkably perceptive young man, he was the student teacher for my son’s 5th grade class. They have worked together in a classroom, as well as via the internet. His insights are invaluable. He speaks clearly with my son. One of his gifts is that he is ADHD.
His students are of the “Anxious Generation” and the data are chilling: 20% of US adults ages 18 – 25 report high levels of anxiety; for the period 2010 through 2022 Emergency Room visits for nonfatal self-harm among teens ages 10 – 14 spiked 311% for girls and 171% for boys, while suicide rates for the same age group increased 117.4% for girls and 66.5% for boys. The system is failing, horrifically.
Our Aristotle, who works on the front lines of the Public School System, explained to me, “Relationships are key. The system gets in the way of relationships because it is focused on output, on tests, on metrics. That does not mean you cannot get a good education in the System, but anxiety makes it harder to learn in the System; to thrive there you need to ignore the influence of the negative teachers. Individual teachers do care about education but the system values output.”
The relational approach is based upon the attachment theory of how infants and children form relationships. Developed in the 1960s, the idea is that infants need a strong and secure relationship with at least one caregiver to provide the security and protection for normal emotional development. Absent a secure nurturing environment, children develop as Anxious-Preoccupied, Dismissive-Avoidant or Fearful-Avoidant. Our Aristotle explains, “Attachment is the blueprint for how you relate to others. It can change over time but change is hard fought. Public school becomes a matter of survival if there is a strong attachment to the parents.” The antithesis of the Tiger Mom; attachment bolsters the sense of self to provide deep rooted courage and self-reliance to push back against social norms, opening to the vulnerability of a different path.
STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics), our Aristotle argues, is about output, training for high income jobs producing more output in pursuit of the ever expanding Gross Domestic Product. The Second Patriarch of Kennebunkport admitted as much, shortly after the trauma of September 11, telling the country, “Fly and enjoy America’s great destination spots. Get down to Disney World in Florida. Take your families and enjoy life, the way we want it to be enjoyed.”
“The goal of education,” Our Aristotle continues, “is for kids to transcend us, not to focus on output. They need to learn what good and bad is; the purpose of education is to create a society in which ‘we the people’ can think critically to fight back against oppression. Public education is for all, not for the royals.”
The key to this goal is reading and writing. STEM topics are helpful, but, to Our Aristotle, are meaningless without a solid grounding in words, an understanding of language and how the mind frames thoughts, in order to comprehend what is virtue. The ability to think critically is, he says, the key to the fulfilling life.
John Dewey, a foundational American philosopher known as the “father of progressive education,” advocated against the rigid rote memorization of the Gilded Age in favor of child-centered experiential learning. He viewed schools as vital democratic communities preparing children to live well and gain skills to contribute to the greater good.
In My Pedagogic Creed, written in 1897, Dewey notes that “to prepare [students] for the future life means to give him (sic) command of himself; it means so to train him that he will have the full and ready use of all his capacities….education is a regulation of the process of coming to share in the social consciousness; and that the adjustment of individual activity on the basis of this social consciousness is the only sure method of social reconstruction.” Our Aristotle explains, “School should be about helping people to become critical thinkers who can create their own knowledge of the world. Because we are all inherently good, if we are able to direct our own learning, we’ll naturally come to see the world through a pro-social way. I think that kids go down the “wrong” path because they feel totally disengaged with their learning, and they feel disengaged from their learning because school is mainly about compliance.”
In The Child and the Curriculum, published in 1902, Dewey advocated for the child’s relationship to the subject matter because the relational allows the student to link the information to prior experiences, deepening the connection with new knowledge. Dewey opposed a curriculum focused on data and facts with the student as passive recipient, where “the child is simply the immature being who is to be matured; he is the superficial being who is to be deepened.”
Our Aristotle challenges the authoritative model where educators are the experts, “An educator should be a coach for the students’ own journey in teaching themselves… connecting current learning to previous learning makes it relevant rather than [some] nebulous piece of information that they need to learn because we said so…. many times in school I was forced to learn something in order to perform well on an exam, but I didn’t retain any of it because it seemed like “school” stuff…[the goal is] to meaningfully engage in my world which, in adulthood, becomes bridged with the broader social world.”
Ever deeper we go, our meditation on the purpose and process of education.
https://www.anxiousgeneration.com/research/the-evidence
Copernican Moment
Posted: April 3, 2026 Filed under: consciousness, Farming off the Farm, What is an Art Farm | Tags: artificial-intelligence, consciousness, philosophy, science, spirituality 1 Comment
“The earth is flat” held firm for tens of thousands of years, until Aristotle, during a lunar eclipse, noticed circular shadows and thought differently: the Earth must be round. But still, all thought, the Earth must be at the center of the universe: “geocentrism” was a given.
And then, in 1543, a Renaissance polymath spoke truth to power, publishing De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres), the defining and pioneering moment in the Scientific Revolution. Nicolaus Copernicus changed the world.
Johannes Kepler, the German mathematician and musical theorist, followed suit, between 1608 and 1621, with the three laws of planetary motion, a much needed defense of Copernicanism. Rene Descartes, in 1641, sealed the deal with his Meditations on First Philosophy; “Cogito, ergo sum” and Cartesian coordinates became the law of the rational mind.
From Copernicus to Descartes, in 98 years, the modern world was conceived, a conceptual shift so profound that life on planet Earth irrevocably changed. Rational science is so central to our age that it is hard to fathom how bold and pioneering were these men who challenged the Pope, Emperors and Kings, the entrenched orthodoxy, and the learned guardians of Medieval culture.
Martin Luther, no wallflower, reportedly said, “This fool wishes to reverse the entire science of astronomy; but sacred Scripture tells us that Joshua commanded the Sun to stand still, and not the Earth.” Calvin wrote, “Who will venture to place the authority of Copernicus above that of the Holy Spirit?”
Descartes, in fact, replaced the God-centered with the human-centered universe, and then separated the mind from the physical body and world, a duality that reigns still. But now, we are at a “Copernican moment of redefinition” of what it means to be human, argues Michael Pollan, the widely read author, journalist and professor, in his new book “A World Appears.”
The science of consciousness emerged in the 1960s as a niche fringe among eccentrics, then became mainstream by the 1990s, as Nobel-laureates Francis Crick (the DNA double-helix) and Gerald Edelman (unlocking antibody structures) published papers on neuroscience and consciousness. With the advent of AI, consciousness has become a high priority scientific field. Science empirically proves the physical world has stunning and myriad examples of intelligence, consciousness even, so the question pertains: what if the world is not the cartesian 2 or 3-dimensions, but multi-dimensional, not either-or but both-and?
Darwin, Pollan writes, “suggested that we think of the plant as a kind of upside down animal, with its main sensory organs and ‘brain’ on the bottom, underground, and its sexual organs on top, aboveground.” Man was the measure of all things, but in 2012, at Cambridge University, esteemed scientists gathered to issue the Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness, “the weight of evidence indicates that humans are not unique in possessing the neurological substrates that generate consciousness.”
Pollan describes Mimosa pudica, a tropical plant that can be taught to ignore a stressor, and remember what it has learned for more than twenty-eight days. “Plants can send and receive signals from other plants and alter their behavior in response to those signals. They can distinguish kin from competitors and both from their own selves.”
Intelligence is basically “the ability to solve problems,” so Stefano Mancuso, a plant scientist at the University of Florence, developed an experiment in which the root of a corn plant navigates its way through a maze, to locate and feast upon a quantity of ammonium nitrate – a cheese equivalent – which is to say, a great reward to a plant. The experiment has been repeated many times, with the exact same results.
Pollan continues, “In addition to sensing gravity, moisture, light, pressure, and hardness, root tips can also sense volume, nitrogen, phosphorus, salt, microbes, various toxins, and chemical signals from neighboring plants and fungi. Roots about to encounter an impenetrable obstacle or a toxic substance change course before they make contact with it.”
The intelligence of plants leads to the work of Suzanne Simard, the forest ecologist, whose work on the Mother Trees is empirically proven: fungi and roots facilitate communication and interaction between trees and plants, by exchanging carbon, water, nutrients and defense signals. Rather than competition, nature is cooperative. Which changes forever the Darwinian model of rational self interest.
In the “year of our lord 2026” artificial intelligence is being used to decode the communication among whales, crows, dolphins, elephants, primates and rodents. And so it might be that not “we the people” but all life “is created equal,” which means this “Copernican moment” brings the realization that intelligence – perhaps consciousness – is empirically found to be widespread, neither narrow nor limited to humankind.
So let’s revisit Descartes’ duality, the mind body split, in a world where men, since the advent of agriculture, have held the dominant role. Antonio Damasio, a Professor of Psychology, Philosophy, and Neurology, at the University of Southern California, and, additionally, an adjunct professor at the Salk Institute, believes that male scientists long considered feeling too “feminine” to seriously study. “It is one of the paradoxes of computer science,” he writes, “that the ‘higher’ capabilities we once thought of as uniquely human—reason, language, intelligence—have proved easier for machines to master than the more elemental capabilities we share with animals, including feelings and emotions.”
Pundits would have us believe the scepter of AI hangs overhead, but prudence urges that we remember AI has been modeled by and upon the narrow confines of logic, algorithms and statistical probability, not the elemental array of emotions that make up the extraordinary depth and breadth of life, among all species. I am not downplaying the serious risks of AI but pointing to emotional vitality as a largely under explored and resilient domain. AI is a tool, and every tradesperson knows we need be smarter than our tools. Once we accept that intelligence is pervasive far beyond mere humans, even gender fluidity seems but one small step for humankind. It is a wild time in which my children come of age.
Rumors of social decay are not exaggerated, but they may be an early indicator of a more fundamental flowering that begs to emerge. Multi-dimensional consciousness may be to the mono-rational what monotheism is to panentheism; an expanded consciousness neither makes science moot, nor does it push God aside, but expands dynamically the potential for understanding and embracing all of life, which could bring new solutions to today’s ever increasing problems.
Annaka Harris, author of “Conscious: A Brief Guide to the Fundamental Mystery of the Mind,” explains why consciousness is foundational and ubiquitous:
We’ve done all our science with the assumption that consciousness emerges at a certain level of information processing. But what if we started from the opposite assumption — that consciousness is fundamental and everywhere? Instead of treating conscious experience as a byproduct, we’d treat it as the foundation. That might help us understand phenomena we’ve struggled with.
There’s something exciting about realizing that something you felt 99% sure about wasn’t quite right — or was entirely wrong. It paves the way for new questions and better understanding. If we’re willing to admit we have made incorrect assumptions and apply our tools more creatively, we might finally get somewhere. We might start seeing the Universe for what it is — maybe even as conscious.
Love Languages
Posted: February 20, 2026 Filed under: Art & Healing, Child Centered Activities, consciousness | Tags: mental health 1 Comment
Greek has 8 distinct words for love. Sanskrit has 96. English, 1.
In South Portland Public Schools over 35 different languages are spoken, with the primary languages being Arabic, French, Kinyarwanda/Kirundi, Lingala, Portuguese, Somali, Spanish and English. Love here is most frequently spoken as Amour, حب, Urukundo, Bolingo, Amor, Jacayl, Amor and αγάπη. Adding in Sanskrit and Hindi we have प्रेम, प्यार, Mohabbat, and स्नेह. All saying the same, merely different vowels and consonants.
Valentines Day presented an opportunity to underscore the many languages of love through a “Postcards from the Heart” art-making experiential held at the South Portland Public Library. The curly haired Goddess with whom I live developed the idea with colleagues and then served as the leader for this life-affirming response to the masked jackals rampaging our communities locally and nationally. Love is an antidote to fear, or as the Governor of Illinois said this week, “love is the light that gets you through a long night.”
The small minded Christian Nationalists argue that English is the one and only “pure” language of these United States. But we “the tired, the poor, the huddled masses, yearning to breathe free” know the truth is far more varied, nuanced and beautifully complex. The Postcards quietly acknowledged this, and gave people a chance to express themselves in a non-violent and compassionate way.
When authoritarian anger rips our communities asunder, when protests rightfully organize, and food drives bring meals to those unable to go to work or school, art-making might seem a trivial pursuit, but its healing power is unquestioned and clinically proven. The process of non-verbal expression creates a safe space to explore feelings, especially for trauma survivors. The act of creation triggers the release of “feel good” chemical messengers – dopamine and serotonin – which are uplifting and promote resilience. Externalizing our emotions offers perspective and empowers the maker.
Open to the public, 27 people participated with ages ranging from elementary school age children to elderly. One group of 15 from a women’s shelter wanted to attend but that would have overwhelmed the space.
I participated in one 45-minute session, gluing images of the Moon cycle, cutouts from old picture books, and “love” from 10 different languages. 7 other women participated, one of whom was older and wore delightfully eccentric glasses, while the other 6 were young women from a “sober house.” Everyone was engaged, focused silently on their work. At the end we walked about looking at each others’ creations, all of which were as varied and diverse as the forms and expressions of love. There was a deep sense of connection in a non-verbal form.
A friend, who works with immigrant women, strongly wanted to invite those women but feared they would not want to risk coming out in public. The idea has been raised about creating art-making kits that can be delivered to homebound people so that they also might give voice to their love, in any language. A local group, Maine Needs, appears to be doing something along these lines.
The City of South Portland has a wellness program for its staff, and a librarian pondered whether art-therapy could be engaged for them. The idea is scalable and replicable, and the need for healing only grows in these times of Mammon and the cult of personality.
Manifesto #1
Posted: January 16, 2026 Filed under: Art & Healing, consciousness | Tags: McSweeneys, Zoe Leonard 1 Comment
The history of the 20th century was declared largely by manifesto: The Manifesto of Futurism 1909; Dada Manifesto 1918; Manifesto of Surrealism 1924; John Cage’s Manifesto 1952; The Russell-Einstein Manifesto 1955; Second Declaration of Havana by Fidel Castro 1962; The Ten-Point Program of Huey Newton (Black Panthers) 1966; The Gay Manifesto 1970.
Derived from the Latin manifestus which means “plainly apprehensible, clear, evident” by the 1640s in the Italian it had come to mean “public declaration explaining reasons or motives.” At its root it is derived from manus which means “hand” and a manifesto arguably is a physical object – words on paper – easily grasped or held, say, nailed upon the doors of a 16th century church or plastered on store fronts or tenement homes of 20th century inner cities.
McSweeney is a nonprofit publishing house founded in 1998 by Dave Eggers. To honor its 25th anniversary, the house published Manifesto, a hard bound compendium of the 20th century as declared by bold forward-thinking authors. The book was given to me over the holidays, a cherished gift, which I am devouring slowly.
The Introduction states, “[Manifestos] are often strange, ill-considered, and regrettable. They are just as often brilliant and pivotal in changing government, art, and the direction of the human animal. But always manifestos are passionate, always they command attention and use language for perhaps its most urgent purpose – the rattling of complacent minds.”
The books presents twenty-five manifestos. “I want a president,” written in 1992 by Zoe Leonard, is strikingly powerful and refreshing, especially in these times where power is exercised as domination, in a culture increasingly split between the Have Much and the Have Nots.
“I want a dyke for president. I want a person with aids for president and I want a fag for vice president and I want someone with no health insurance and I want someone who grew up in a place where the earth is so saturated with toxic waste that they didn’t have a choice about getting leukemia. I want a president that had an abortion at sixteen and I want a candidate who isn’t the lesser of two evils and I want a president who lost their last lover to aids, who still sees that in their eyes every time they lay down to rest, who held their lover in their arms and knew they were dying. I want a president with no air conditioning, a president who has stood on line at the clinic, at the dmv, at the welfare office and has been unemployed and laid off and sexually harrassed and gaybashed and deported. I want someone who spent the night in the tombs and had a cross burned on their lawn and survived rape. I want someone who has been in love and been hurt, who respects sex, who has made mistakes and learned from them. I want a Black woman for president. I want someone with bad teeth and an attitude, someone who has eaten that nasty hospital food, someone who crossdresses and has done drugs and been in therapy. I want someone who has committed civil disobedience. And I want to know why this isn’t possible. I want to know why we started learning somewhere down the line that a president is always a clown: always a John and never a hooker. Always a boss and never a worker, always a liar, always a thief and never caught.”
In Memoriam
Posted: January 9, 2026 Filed under: Art & Healing, consciousness 3 Comments
Remembering and honoring Douglas Lee Woodhouse
July 9, 1964 born, died January 6, 2025
rest in peace, Brother.
Oneness
Posted: January 1, 2026 Filed under: Art & Healing, Chronicles of a First Time Parent, consciousness, What is an Art Farm | Tags: anagarika govinda, consciousness, philosophy, science, spirituality, Thomas berry 2 Comments
Having built a whale, we decided to make a movie on the topic “all life is one.”
Having finished the short film, I sought funds from the Maine Arts Commission.
Having to substantiate my body of work as an artist, I referenced “An Art Farm.”
Whereupon, I realized our art farm had been mostly inactive since 2015 and so on 31 March 2024 I wrote “Crossing the Rubicon” about delivering the Whale north to the Wabanaki nation. I did not win the grant, but I did continue to write, and for 94 continuous weeks now I have posted short essays.
In a sense these are weekly postcards to my Mother, a chance to share thoughts that otherwise would not come up in our occasional phone conversations. More importantly, they allow me to mine thoughts that arise at 2am, to chase down loose threads and weave them, as if into tapestries, at best like those of the Renaissance rich in detail and color, telling stories of this strange and troubling moment in time.
An overarching theme seems to be Spiritual Ecology, a field of inquiry of which I only recently became aware. Rudolf Steiner is considered a visionary, having described a “co-evolution of spirituality and nature.” I learned of Steiner back in my Chicago days from a Gaia-centric friend at the vanguard. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, also considered a founder, almost one century ago, wrote of a ”consciousness of the divinity within every particle of life, even the most dense material.” In “The Phenomenon of Man” he foresaw that “Science, philosophy and religion are bound to converge as they draw nearer to the whole.”
My Mother actively discussed de Chardin in her college days, and within the social circle of her childhood in Clifton of the Queen City, Cincinnati, Ohio, as well as at our dinner table. Father Sullivan, elder of Holy Cross Parish, once described my Mother as a “pantheist;” I suspect he meant that as a criticism but which she rightly took as a compliment! Perhaps, what the Father actually meant was panentheist (God in all things) not pantheist (God is all things), but regardless, since my childhood the tenets of Spiritual Ecology have been laid down as plain common sense.
On a family road trip west to the Grand Tetons, my Mother handed me a copy of John Muir’s biography. I was enthralled, in the backseat, while crossing the endless great plains. Decades ago I read Thomas Berry, also considered at the vanguard, who emphasized “returning to a sense of wonder and reverence for the natural world.” More than my share of Thoreau and Wendell Berry have I read, as well as David Abrams’ “The Spell of the Sensuous.” Joanna Macy has been celebrated among the Wise Women here at the art farm, while Emergence magazine is on my subscription list, the product of Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee, a Sufi trained multi-media maven on topics of a collective evolutionary expansion toward oneness.
But what would be this consciousness of oneness? The Renaissance is an historic example of a shift in consciousness, the “awakening” or “rebirth” of Europe, away from the Church-dominated Medieval era to embrace humanism, scientific inquiry, individualism, a flourishing of arts and culture. Rene Descartes, living at the end of the Renaissance, is considered foundational to modernity, his “cogito, ergo sum” defining the thinking rational self. But “cogito” is only one part of the whole self, and it can easily fall into the binary, mono-dimensional thinking of either-or, rather than both-and.
Newton’s Laws of Physics state an object is either at rest or in motion, but quantum mechanics allows an object to inhabit two states at once. Our logic has lead to AI which is a massive accomplishment, but it might either destroy us or bring far-reaching benefits. The “us versus them” is endlessly argued by politicians, the strongman’s lever using fear to divide and conquer. A spiritual ecology pursued only through the rational seems destined to failure. An expansive and inclusive approach is needed to embrace the breadth, depth and interconnectedness of both the natural world and ourselves.
“Creative Meditation and Multi-Dimensional Consciousness,” by Lama Anagarika Govinda, is insightful toward this life-affirming goal. He describes the “one-dimensional logic which…cuts the world apart with the knife of its ‘Either-Or,’” and then introduces “…a new way of thinking, an extended multi-dimensional logic which is as different from the classical Aristotelian logic as Euclidian geometry is from Einstein’s theory of relativity.” He presents this using the coordinates of an x-y axis. “If we regard the horizontal as the direction of our time-space development (unfolding), then the vertical is the direction of our going within, toward the universal center of our being and thus the realization of the timeless presence of all potentialities of existence in the organic structure of the whole of the living universe. This is what the poets call the ‘eternity of the moment’ which can be experienced in the state of complete inwardness…such as happens during meditation and creative inspiration.”
It is no small undertaking, a 21st century renaissance awakening to multi-dimensional consciousness not among the few, but ultimately we, the people, of the planet. Small-minded politicians and capitalists will pursue their goals of domination, and so this seems a necessary path out of the madness, deeper within. It is beyond the scope of one short essay to speak to such fullness, but this seems a direction for our art farm to pursue in the new year.
…and here is a link to the short film on the topic that we are part of the ecosystem, that all life is one, which set this ship – which is an art farm – to sail on this oceanic odyssey:
https://www.picdrop.com/claytonsimoncic/C39UK57ncx
The short film was produced with Anna Dibble. Clayton Simoncic was the photographer and editor.
_________________________________
Since it is written “the last shall be first,” I shall end this post and honor the Benham Family tradition, that good things come to those who begin a new month, on the first day with the first words: “Rabbit, Rabbit.”
May good things come to all people in the new year.
an Art Farm 