the ideological platform (gasp!):
1. market hijack media attention - be creative!
2. promote the debtor's union - crash the stock market
3. circulate local currency - legalize hemp
4. practice sacred groundskeeping - subsidize natural building
5. provide logistical support - soup kitchens, music festivals, permaculture schools,
and interfaith worship ceremonies
6. grow food, not lawns
7. celebrate the victory with a Jubilee year
8. endorse the Witch Doctor's guild
9. everybody hyphae-Haj
10. take deep breaths! its a wild ride... no, really. take some deep breaths. Go ahead, meditate.
The dictatorship of the Bodhisattva is the end of History...
Tuesday, December 30, 2008
Monday, December 29, 2008
Dictatorship of the Bodhisattva
The world's most assertive buddhists gathered in a small mythological space. They were sick of the mess the world was in, and they were going to do something about it.
The dictatorship of the proletariat wasn't enough. These buddhists weren't placated with simple communism. They were anarchists, working for the overthrow of Empire. They were committed to realizing the dictatorship of the Bodhisattva, where compassion rules against all logic. This is the essence of the Asylum Project.
How? This was the strategic question, the crux of the campaign. How could a small group of committed dharma anarchists take over the world? In this age, a good campaign strategy needed to read like a solid business plan.
This is what they set out to do:
1.) hijack media attention. Audio clips, video clips, blogs, emails, text messages, graffiti, underground social networks. get everybody looking in the same direction at once.
2.) spread the message: Rome falls. Empire rots from the inside out, and we, the barbarians howling at the gates, are the new guides.
3.) reframe nonviolent direct action: Does anyone remember how to celebrate? transformation as a practice, not a theory
4.)build consensus: inter-generational, multi-cultural, casteless
5.) market sacred groundskeeping as a sustainable business and viable future
They smiled amongst themselves. Warriors become salesmen, who'd have thought?
Truly, they were writing the new book on the Art of War...
The dictatorship of the proletariat wasn't enough. These buddhists weren't placated with simple communism. They were anarchists, working for the overthrow of Empire. They were committed to realizing the dictatorship of the Bodhisattva, where compassion rules against all logic. This is the essence of the Asylum Project.
How? This was the strategic question, the crux of the campaign. How could a small group of committed dharma anarchists take over the world? In this age, a good campaign strategy needed to read like a solid business plan.
This is what they set out to do:
1.) hijack media attention. Audio clips, video clips, blogs, emails, text messages, graffiti, underground social networks. get everybody looking in the same direction at once.
2.) spread the message: Rome falls. Empire rots from the inside out, and we, the barbarians howling at the gates, are the new guides.
3.) reframe nonviolent direct action: Does anyone remember how to celebrate? transformation as a practice, not a theory
4.)build consensus: inter-generational, multi-cultural, casteless
5.) market sacred groundskeeping as a sustainable business and viable future
They smiled amongst themselves. Warriors become salesmen, who'd have thought?
Truly, they were writing the new book on the Art of War...
Tuesday, December 2, 2008
attention harvesting
Ultimately, it seems that a successful permaculture movement will evolve online into a successful ecotourism movement. Attention is once again in vogue as a currency, and any successful permaculture movement will get paid a lot of attention. While that attention may start off as virtual attention, its a virtual guarantee that sooner or later someone curious will want to drop by physically. The attention will focus on global ecologies, traveling to them, living in them, sharing with them, learning from them. Ecotourism will support permaculture, and replace ecologically degrading tourism with ecologically healing permaculture. Another way of looking at it is that the tourists of the future won't just visit an exotic place: they'll live locally while there, growing their own food, helping with livestock, learning about climate and soil and wild things, finding their own natural selves.
...and it will start from a website. Permaculture fosters sustainability, and sustainability means more than merely growing one's own food. Sustainable culture is not self-reliant but interdependent, not merely ecological but also economical, spiritual, transpersonal, conceptual, and viral. That is, sustainability is a positive feedback loop: by optimizing any aspect of an organism, more energy is freed up to benefit all other aspects of the organism.
a successful permaculture movement will have a competitive advantage over industrial capitalism, in that it will be sustainable. Thus, in the competitive marketplace, it will thrive where industrial capitalism fails. Consequently, it will attract positive attention. It will breed. It will harvest attention, in a sustainable and profitable way. The attention that it harvests will be used to breed better permaculture, in a positive feedback loop that grows exponentially.
Energy flows where attention goes. When attention goes to sustainable culture in this age of industrial capitalist collapse, we witness evolution in action. That which works, survives, and the Art of Love always gets attention...
...and it will start from a website. Permaculture fosters sustainability, and sustainability means more than merely growing one's own food. Sustainable culture is not self-reliant but interdependent, not merely ecological but also economical, spiritual, transpersonal, conceptual, and viral. That is, sustainability is a positive feedback loop: by optimizing any aspect of an organism, more energy is freed up to benefit all other aspects of the organism.
a successful permaculture movement will have a competitive advantage over industrial capitalism, in that it will be sustainable. Thus, in the competitive marketplace, it will thrive where industrial capitalism fails. Consequently, it will attract positive attention. It will breed. It will harvest attention, in a sustainable and profitable way. The attention that it harvests will be used to breed better permaculture, in a positive feedback loop that grows exponentially.
Energy flows where attention goes. When attention goes to sustainable culture in this age of industrial capitalist collapse, we witness evolution in action. That which works, survives, and the Art of Love always gets attention...
Saturday, November 22, 2008
The Asylum Project
The Asylum Project is a social business enterprise that focuses on community, sustainability, education, and celebration. Its aim is to propagate the vision of sacred groundskeeping as a viable means of reinventing community and renewing sustainable culture.
What is sacred groundskeeping? Starting with the premise that Mother Earth is alive, conscious, generous, loving, and in need of healing, we of the Asylum choose to serve our home planet by living in a sacred way and acting as stewards of the land. Specifically, we act as groundskeepers, caretakers of this planetary living system who pride ourselves on our skill sets, our work ethic, and our commitment to the next seven generations. No job is too big or too small, no payment is too much or too little. Asylum groundskeepers mow lawns, install solar panels, build composting toilets and strawbale homes, plant trees and permaculture gardens. We teach yoga, meditation, martial arts, massage and various modalities of movement therapy. We conduct sweat lodge ceremonies, perform shamanic healings, hold fire councils, and gather for ritual song and dance. We are Earth guides, designing and leading expeditions that involve rock climbing, kayaking, sailing, horseback riding, wilderness survival, hangliding, and visionquests. Drawing on religious and spiritual traditions from around the globe, combining them with the latest in permaculture design and green building, operating with the support of local indigenous communities, working in conjunction with grassroots nonprofits, we improve the productivity of your land, the efficiency of your home, the foundations of your health, and the nature of your relations.
Asylum Sacred Groundskeeping operates as a tax-deductible 501(3)c nonprofit, working with communities to recruit at-risk youth who participate in career training and reaching out to schools, that we might share wisdom and foster innovation. We operate on a donation basis, which means that if you want our help, all you have to do is ask. Remember, asking for help is just another way of finding out how you can serve...
Asylum Sacred Groundskeeping is a globally local service project, recruiting volunteers who provide services and contacts, building a worldwide network of communities who collectively share the task of meeting the needs of our planet and its inhabitants. You can help out, and you'll enjoy helping.
From high-end, green-roof metabolic architecture projects on 500 acres to grassroots treesitter nonviolent action camps, from research bases in the Antarctic to at-risk youth camps in the urban jungle, we cover the spectrum on learning how to live in harmony with Mother Nature, with one another, and with ourselves. When you reach out to us, you're reaching out to a new way of living, and a new way of being.
Community.
Sustainability.
Education.
Celebration.
Believe in the Asylum Project. Learn to share our planet's precious and bountiful resources in a loving and reciprocal way. This is our family, this is our home, and this is our dream.
Let's believe in ourselves. We've got a lot to accomplish!
What is sacred groundskeeping? Starting with the premise that Mother Earth is alive, conscious, generous, loving, and in need of healing, we of the Asylum choose to serve our home planet by living in a sacred way and acting as stewards of the land. Specifically, we act as groundskeepers, caretakers of this planetary living system who pride ourselves on our skill sets, our work ethic, and our commitment to the next seven generations. No job is too big or too small, no payment is too much or too little. Asylum groundskeepers mow lawns, install solar panels, build composting toilets and strawbale homes, plant trees and permaculture gardens. We teach yoga, meditation, martial arts, massage and various modalities of movement therapy. We conduct sweat lodge ceremonies, perform shamanic healings, hold fire councils, and gather for ritual song and dance. We are Earth guides, designing and leading expeditions that involve rock climbing, kayaking, sailing, horseback riding, wilderness survival, hangliding, and visionquests. Drawing on religious and spiritual traditions from around the globe, combining them with the latest in permaculture design and green building, operating with the support of local indigenous communities, working in conjunction with grassroots nonprofits, we improve the productivity of your land, the efficiency of your home, the foundations of your health, and the nature of your relations.
Asylum Sacred Groundskeeping operates as a tax-deductible 501(3)c nonprofit, working with communities to recruit at-risk youth who participate in career training and reaching out to schools, that we might share wisdom and foster innovation. We operate on a donation basis, which means that if you want our help, all you have to do is ask. Remember, asking for help is just another way of finding out how you can serve...
Asylum Sacred Groundskeeping is a globally local service project, recruiting volunteers who provide services and contacts, building a worldwide network of communities who collectively share the task of meeting the needs of our planet and its inhabitants. You can help out, and you'll enjoy helping.
From high-end, green-roof metabolic architecture projects on 500 acres to grassroots treesitter nonviolent action camps, from research bases in the Antarctic to at-risk youth camps in the urban jungle, we cover the spectrum on learning how to live in harmony with Mother Nature, with one another, and with ourselves. When you reach out to us, you're reaching out to a new way of living, and a new way of being.
Community.
Sustainability.
Education.
Celebration.
Believe in the Asylum Project. Learn to share our planet's precious and bountiful resources in a loving and reciprocal way. This is our family, this is our home, and this is our dream.
Let's believe in ourselves. We've got a lot to accomplish!
Tuesday, November 11, 2008
The End of History
History is written by the winners.
Before writing, then, did anyone win?
Perhaps preliterate history wasn't competitive. Perhaps, preliterate history was cooperative. Certainly, recorded history is the history of conflict.
Before history was written, it was ritually danced and sung. History has been written down only recently; it has been ceremonially performed for countless millenia.
Literate culture has accomplished a great deal, and regards pre-literate culture with no small amount of condescension. It needs to be acknowledged that pre-literate cultures managed to live sustainably and harmoniously with Mother Earth for many generations. It's no secret how this knowledge, so critically important to the present age, got passed down: It wasn't written, but performed. The understanding of how to abundantly live on a planet without depleting its resources was memorized and transmitted not via the thinking mind but via the feeling body. The ceremony, the song and dance of history was somatically embedded in cultures at the cellular level, far deeper than any philosophical argument, psychological theory, or religious belief.
It was the advent of writing that ushered in what moderns refer to as History, which from its very origins has been the history of conflict. Literacy - conceptual awareness as an alternative to spatial awareness - requires the duality of concept and conceptualizer, and this duality, this perception of separation, led to an age of conflict, an age of thought disassociated from feeling.
We will not cease from exploration, and the end of our exploring will be to return to where we started, and know the place for the first time...
(but don't worry, you'll never have to read about it)
Before writing, then, did anyone win?
Perhaps preliterate history wasn't competitive. Perhaps, preliterate history was cooperative. Certainly, recorded history is the history of conflict.
Before history was written, it was ritually danced and sung. History has been written down only recently; it has been ceremonially performed for countless millenia.
Literate culture has accomplished a great deal, and regards pre-literate culture with no small amount of condescension. It needs to be acknowledged that pre-literate cultures managed to live sustainably and harmoniously with Mother Earth for many generations. It's no secret how this knowledge, so critically important to the present age, got passed down: It wasn't written, but performed. The understanding of how to abundantly live on a planet without depleting its resources was memorized and transmitted not via the thinking mind but via the feeling body. The ceremony, the song and dance of history was somatically embedded in cultures at the cellular level, far deeper than any philosophical argument, psychological theory, or religious belief.
It was the advent of writing that ushered in what moderns refer to as History, which from its very origins has been the history of conflict. Literacy - conceptual awareness as an alternative to spatial awareness - requires the duality of concept and conceptualizer, and this duality, this perception of separation, led to an age of conflict, an age of thought disassociated from feeling.
We will not cease from exploration, and the end of our exploring will be to return to where we started, and know the place for the first time...
(but don't worry, you'll never have to read about it)
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