Rebirthing Eden

Originally posted March 13, 2007

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- Greil Marcus, The Shape of Things To Come, Prophecy and the American Voice, FSG, 2003.

America’s prophets prophesy one thing: as God once judged the Children of Israel, America has to judge itself…”I tremble for my country,” Jefferson famously said in Notes on the State of Virginia in 1781, in words chiseled on the walls of the Jefferson Memorial, “when I reflect that God is just, that his justice cannot sleep forever.” George Mason wrote the Virginia Declaration of Rights, which Jefferson drew on for the Declaration of Independence. “The laws of impartial Providence,” Mason wrote in 1774 to the Virginia legislature on the question of slavery, “may avenge our injustice upon our posterity.”

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- Karen Armstrong, in The Great Transformation: The Beginning of Our Religious Traditions, Alfred A. Knoph, 2006

In our current predicament, I believe that we can find inspiration in the period that the German philosopher Karl Jaspers called the Axial Age because it was pivotal to the spiritual development of humanity. From about 900 to 200 BCE, in four distinct regions, the great world traditions that have continued to nourish humanity came into being: Confucianism and Daoism in China; Hinduism and Buddhism in India; monotheism in Israel; and philosophical rationalism in Greece.

…The prophets, mystics, philosophers and poets of the Axial Age were so advanced and their vision was so radical that later generations tended to dilute it. In the process, they often produced exactly the type of religiosity that the Axial reformers wanted to get rid of. That, I believe, is what has happened in the modern world. The Axial sages have an important message for our time, but their insights will be surprising - even shocking - to many who consider themselves religious today. It is frequently assumed, for example, that faith is a matter of believing certain creedal propositions. Indeed, it is common to call religious people “believers,” as though assenting to the articles of faith were their chief activity. But most of the Axial philosophers had no interest whatever in doctrine or metaphysics. A person’s theological beliefs were a matter of total indifference to somebody like the Buddha. Some sages steadfastly refused even to discuss theology, claiming that it was distracting and damaging. Others argued that it was immature, unrealistic, and perverse to look for the kind of absolute certainty that many people expect religion to provide.

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When the organizers of a September 2008 peace conference in Eugene sent out an RFP earlier in the year, not one of the 14 recommended workshop themes referred to the earth. I responded with suggestions for an earth-inclusive track.
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1. Peace-in-Earth. What shape is that peace which embraces a co-creative dialog with the patterns and forces native to local landscapes? Indeed, can any authentic covenant between people exist if it does not integrate an active, harmonious partnership with the larger ecology of which we are but a part? What is the deep ecology of non-violence? Where do the needs of people and landscape meet? How might we each move individually toward the genuine manifestation of Sanctuary?

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Here’s a recent posting I made to local listservs around an event I am helping co-orchestrate this forthcoming weekend. The link it contains, points to a description of a similar event I attended back in ‘03 - worth a looksee, perhaps.

Event: “Fall Giveway - in the spirit of the potlatch”
When: Sunday, September 30, 12.00 p.m. - 3.00 p.m.
Venue: Many Nations Longhouse, 1630 Columbia Street, U of O Campus.

A sense of deep well-being escaping you? Having trouble experiencing life as abundant? Needing a fresh take? Try a fix. Head on down to the Many Nations Longhouse for the Eugene Permaculture Guild’s “Fall Giveaway: in the spirit of the potlatch”, an evolving local effort to explore a cultural ‘therapy of abundance’. Taking its inspiration from the ‘potlatch’ - a PNW First Nations gift-giving tradition outlawed by european settlers - this Giveaway offers up a rare opportunity for individuals to participate directly in a thought-changing experience of natural bounty. Bring a heartfelt gift to give away, a lunch dish to share, and any seasonal plenty you care to pass along. All ages are welcome. The event is free. Sunday, September 30, 12.00p.m. - 3.00p.m., Many Nations Longhouse, U of O Campus.
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I happened across the following quotes in my database today. I have no recollection where I collected them:

In Nature, there is fundamental unity running through all diversity we see about us. Religions are no exception to the natural law. - Gandhi

And the world cannot be discovered by a journey of miles, no matter how long but only by a spiritual journey, a journey of one inch, very arduous and humbling and joyful, by which we arrive at the ground at our feet, and learn to be at home. - Wendell Berry

There is no place to hide, and so we are found. - Terry Tempest Williams

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Whenever I attend to the public narrative about the state of the world, its troubles and ‘what is needed’ to correct them, I am struck by the almost complete absence of voices asserting the paramount role and place of the inner life of individuals in these matters. The oversight is surreal in its immensity. It is as though the dance of experience and influence between us and the world, the essential locus of what it is to be alive, is simply invisible or, at best, discounted as irrelevant to the ecology of being.

What follows is an exploration of what my own experience is teaching me about how deeply our innermost selves and the events of the world are interrelated, the alchemy of metamorphosis which weaves the two worlds into one, and what these times may be asking us with regard to handholding ourselves as individuals, and the world around us, toward an integrated peacefulness.

I’m not sure where this piece is headed, but I begin with a testimonial to the transfigurative powers of struggle. Here, then, Part One, v. 1.3, evolving…

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An unfolding article, in segments, as time allows.

The dominant reductionist model of science, in which complex phenomena are reduced to their more elementary constituents to study them piece by piece, has allowed extraordinary progress in the fields of science and technology: every new tool for looking farther or deeper or smaller allows us to peer into our own ignorance. And yet, there is a now a growing body of evidence, much of it ’science-based’, to support claims that continuing to interpret reality through this lens is blinding us to the existence of higher orders of organization – dimensions of experience which function, literally, beyond the perceptual reach of mechanistic modes of enquiry. A higher integrative level of understanding escapes us.

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Here’s a tidied version of the posting I made to the Guardian’s Allotment Blog on June 10, in response to Allan’s blog entry which began:

“My Name is Allan and I am an allotment addict. At first, one fix a week was enough. I fought to hold it at that. It was my methadone maintenance level. I would sit at home restless, then start sweating, pacing, climbing the walls until it was time to score. I started mainlining seed catalogues, gardening books (Carol Klein’s Grow your Own, became my needle and spoon) every biodynamic book I could get my shaky hands on. I’d even watch Alan Titchmarsh on TV (the Afghan ‘brown sugar’ to Monty Don’s pure pharmaceutical hit)…”

S’raining hereabouts just now. A break from the garden afforded. Loved yer ‘spoon and needle’ motif, Allan, not least because running with such a metaphor in a gardening column Stateside would more than likely have you hauled up in front of a Humo(u)r Failure Committee. Here’s to transatlantic bio-cultural diversity and the space it affords for broadening hearts, minds and smiles, eh?

All that talk about addiction got me to thinking of the realpolitik of the endemic addiction scene this side of the Pond, and its relationship to deep gardening. A few years back I taught a free workshop on biodynamic permaculture to a group of marijuana growers. Though illegal to grow for yer average Joe, these were growers with legal dispensation provided by the State of Oregon’s Medical Marijuana Act. (Although the Feds will occasionally poke their heads through the door to rip out the plants of especially enthusiastic growers, for the most part, all goes smoothly for the State-sanctioned grower.)

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Defiant Gardens: Making Gardens in Wartime. Kenneth Helphand, Trinity University Press, 2006

Gardens are always defined by their context. Perhaps the more difficult the context, the more accentuated the meaning…If the Edenic ideal of paradise is found at one extreme, its opposite is found in the landscape of hell. The polar opposites, the dialectics of the garden are at a higher pitch, perhaps highest, when hell is hear.

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Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism, University of Chicago Press, 2006

On October 15, 1965, Kesey was invited to speak at a rally against the Vietnam War in Berkeley. Organizers expected a fiery speech and a joining of the New Left and the growing counterculture. But rather than orate, Kesey simply stood up and announced to the audience, “You know, you’re not gonna stop this war with this rally, by marching…That’s what they do.” He then pulled out his harmonica and played “Home on the Range.” In keeping with the psychedelic visions of transpersonal harmony (and with the cybernetic and Romantic visions of a world linked by invisible currents of energy and information), Kesey rejected as fundamentally false the dynamics of confrontation called for by the moment and by the logic of the cold war more generally. He simply stood up and demanded that the audience not confront their enemies, but instead turn away from them and come together elsewhere.

In America, the concept of an independent scholar is a null set.
- Peter Lamborn Wilson

This is the outward plane and everything we do is inner work.
- Barks

The love way is not religious. It is rather the origin and the longing inside religiousness.
- Barks

I did not want to live what was not life. Living is so dear.”
- Thoreau

We do not see things as they are.
We see things as we are.
- Talmud

The heart of vision is shaped by the state of the soul…When we walk on earth with reverence, beauty will decide to trust us…Ontologically, beauty is the secret sound of the deepest thereness of things. To recognize and celebrate beauty is to recognize the ultimate sacredness of experience, to glimpse the subtle embrace of belonging where we are wed to the divine, the beauty of every moment, of every thing.
- John O’Donohue

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