Following our meeting, Laurence produced these
excellent notes:
What keeps drawing me to these meetings is the unexpected turns our conversations take. Yesterday was no different. Five of us met up at Culmstock. Topics veered and careered round any idea of an agenda.
A recurring theme was the need to wake up to what's
around us. Chris talked about the uniformity of thinking and seeing. 'We live a great deal in a semi-conscious
state,' he said. 'Are we really ready
to get up when the alarm bell rings?' I think he was talking
metaphorically. 'We're no longer seeing
living things, but objects,' he added. I shouted, 'Did the rest of you hear what he just said?' In an easy-come,
easy-go world, wise words slip by.
Chris paraphrased Krishnamurti: 'In order to learn you have to return to a
state of unknowing.' We all need to change our outlook but, on so many
fronts, people don't see the need for change. Chris, a one-time probation
officer, recalled offenders who said, 'I'll
end up in prison again. So what?' They used to slot criminals into 3
categories: sad, mad and bad, though bad could also masquerade as sad and mad!
He offered the view that there are people so bad that they have no conscience,
no redeeming features and no possibility of redemption. Patrick, whose work
involves him in dealing with mentally disturbed people said he couldn't write
off anyone but went on to say that one psychopath could take up as much of his
time as 1600 others. It came down to priorities.
How do you change attitudes? Frivolously I asked
Phil whether he'd ever 'converted' anyone. Chris countered that 'we're destroying the planet at such a rate
that we don't have time for conversions.’ It may take a cataclysm to change
thinking but Mozz stated it was unlikely we'd have a global cataclysm big enough
to affect humanity at all levels for about 20-30 years.
Where does that take us? I hoped that a summary
of the 3 dimensions identified in 'The Great Turning' initiative might
help.
The first dimension is 'Holding Actions': campaigns, petitions, boycotts, rallies, legal
proceedings and all forms of direct action against practices that threaten our
world and its support systems.
The second, 'Life-sustaining
Systems and Practices', buttresses the first: rethinking the way we do
things, redesigning structures and systems that govern our society and
influencing change by our choices about how we travel, where we shop, what we
buy, how we save, etc, helping to shape the development of a new economy.
The third dimension, 'Shift in Consciousness' underpins the first two.
The 'Great Turning' people, Joanna Macy and Chris
Johnstone, believe the key to inspiring people to embark on projects is a
wellspring of caring and compassion that follows from the connected self and
anything that deepens our sense of belonging in and to this world. This might
involve insights from spiritual traditions as well as understandings from
science.
Essentially we're back to attitudes and, I believe,
Dark Mountain's potential sphere of influence, if only the new stories we are
supposed to be telling are engaging and potent enough. The big question is how:
how
to reconnect with ourselves and the planet we so easily forget is home.
There were other strands to our conversation. We
bit the bone of whether the world has a meaning. Phil felt there was a purpose
behind it. Chris didn't agree. Mozz said you can guess at a meaning but thought
it was pointless looking. Phil said you have to believe there's something
bigger than us. Patrick subscribed to a deeper meaning. Perverse as ever, I
toyed with the idea that everything is random.
We tossed around the business of labelling and
naming. Chris said that from his experience the naming of a condition meant he
could deal with it. But someone else (?Goethe – see note below) said that
naming is the first distancing. Patrick said there used to be 11 diagnoses of
mental illness. Now there are 550+. It's easy to medicalise behaviour. Chris
said, “If we talk to God, it's praying.
if you hear God, you're a schizophrenic.”
It was much easier dealing with the agenda which
came down to the Last Festival and
(1) What are the plans for 2014? Do we want to
organise a Devon DM Fete (?Fate) to cover the gap. Phil suggested Dulverton
Camping Barn and Site as a venue (minimum 15 people) Phil to enquire about
available weekends in August.
(2) How are we to communicate with the wider DM
world when the website offers no contact details?
(3) Where does DM go from here? I suggested that,
with the rather autocratic decision to make this the Last Festival, the
founders of DM had relinquished control over its future direction. Wasn't it up
to us now?!
Laurence
Mozz's note on words
and distancing: John Zerzan said “As soon
as a human spoke, he or she was separated”, and Lao-Tzu said “The Tao that can be spoken is not the true
Tao; the name that can be named is not the true name”. And finally Charles Eisenstein said “Our entire civilization is built on a story,
a story of self. The separate human realm is not in fact separate—just look at
how it has altered the planet. In the future we will wield the world-creating
power of word consciously, to tell a new story, and thus usher in a consciously
creative phase of human development.”
