Perceptual Intelligence
Perceptual Intelligence
Let’s imagine it’s a few months after you were born. You can’t yet walk or speak, but you’re getting to know your world. You’re mapping your home in your mind. You’re learning to recognise the faces of your family members and some of their friends: the people who will love and care for you during these fragile early years, some of them for the whole of your life. Sensing the world around you – seeing it, touching it, listening to it, tasting it – is a way of being in relation to it. Yet here it is not enough to say that everyone is in relation with everything they see. The relation to the earth via the marvel of sentience requires consistency, familiarity. The possibility of surprise is not ruled out; indeed, never ruled out. Yet a place must be familiar enough that you can make some predictions about it. For instance, you can make some broad decisions about what to do in and with that place, decisions that benefit from knowledge of what has happened there in the past and what is most likely to happen again in the future. And that knowledge requires time. In that sense getting to know a place is like getting to know a person. As you observe and interact with someone new over weeks and months, you get a general image of how they move and speak, what their habits and wants and aversions are, how they might respond to your choices, whether it’s safe or dangerous to be near them, and so on. So it is with places.
One cannot know a forest by walking it only once. It takes several full cycles of the seasons, and regular explorations during that time, preferably daily, to even begin to know a place. Where are its berry trees and when are the berries ripe? Where are its meltwater ponds in the spring? Where is the nearest raccoon den, and how often do you normally see them out and about? When do the maple trees change colour for autumn? When will there be a mast year for acorns? Such are the habits of landscapes. It takes many years to get to know them. Some people may get a head-start in this process, benefitting from the guidance of grandparents, local elders, and other community leaders; though as observed earlier, the climate crisis can disrupt the old familiar cycles of nature, rendering this kind of ancestral knowledge less helpful.
This kind of relationship with the earth rests upon what I call perceptual intelligence: a highly complex and subtle form of reasoning in which:
- Almost every cell in the body gathers, records, and transmits information about the state of the surrounding environment. The information covers a wide variety of factors including temperature, the shapes and colours of clouds and water waves and sunlight, the sounds of birds and rustling leaves and creaking tree trunks; the sense of air pressure building up or ebbing away, the smells and tastes in the air, the sense of cardinal direction, and (very possibly) magnetic fields and electric charges.
- Deep in the subconscious mind, the current state of all that information is compared to memories of other occasions when the state of the environment was similar.
- That comparison allows you to make broad predictions about what is happening just out of sight and/or how things might change over the next few hours.
- Predictions are communicated to the conscious mind in the form of feelings, hunches, aversions, and attractions.115
Rupert Ross, an attorney who served various First Nations communities across Canada, learned from his Indigenous friends and associates that this kind of intelligence was an essential part of their way of life, both historically and today. As he described it:
The hunter-gatherer did [their] shopping in the natural world…Success depended upon the ability to accurately read the innumerable variables which each season, day and hour presented. Those variables, however, presented patterns which, over time and with great attention, one could learn to recognize. Reading those patterns to determine when “the time was right” was the essential life skill, and it constituted, in my view, a very specialized form of thought.116
Anyone who takes the time and who has the patience can do it. Ross himself learned to do it, while working as a fishing guide in Northern Ontario. Early in the morning of each day, he would stand by the dock for half an hour to get a “feel” for the day, which would tell him which part of the lake to take his clients, so they had a better chance to make good catches:
I made mental notes about such things as wind speed and direction, cloud cover, temperature…the quality of the light, the humidity, the sense of disturbance – building or disturbance-waning…In truth I simply cannot list all of the things that were finally incorporated into this “feel” for the day. I don’t believe that they ever came to my conscious attention, but they were noticed all the same…What I look for, of course, is correspondence between what I anticipate and what I recall.117
It’s worth noting that although this activity might look and feel like mysticism, there is nothing supernatural about it. As Ross said, it is “without doubt, a very complex and compacted form of reasoning.”118 Ross and his community learned this in a boreal forest, but perceptual intelligence can work in any kind of environment. Even in the ocean, there is information enough for the body to gather and process, to tell a navigator how far they are from land, which direction to the nearest or largest chain of islands, which direction the deepest ocean currents are moving, whether a storm is coming and how heavy it will be. Canadian anthropologist Wade Davis recorded how perceptual intelligence allowed the Polynesian people to explore and colonize the entire Pacific Ocean, maintaining political alliances and trade routes, and navigating with accuracy, beyond the sight of land, without using a compass or a sextant or a satellite GPS network:
The truly great navigators…can identify the presence of distant atolls of islands beyond the visible horizon simply by watching the reverberation of waves across the hull of the canoe, knowing full well that every island group in the Pacific has its own refractive pattern that can be read with the same ease with which a forensic scientist would read a fingerprint.119
The human being dwells in a system of ecological conditions; the human being is always and necessarily an organic, embodied, biological being, embedded in food webs and ecological processes; the human organism is “a transformation-station for energy” (to use Aldo Leopold’s words). This dimension of the human being depends upon the surrounding ecology for air, water, food, warmth, and other means of life. Its foundation both lies in the earth and flows from the sun. The ethical, epistemic, and metaphysical significance of humanity’s being ecological, as I shall call it from here on, is precisely what environmental philosophy aims to understand.
It might be controversial for me to say it, but I think the logic points me this way: perceptual intelligence is the root of humanity’s being-ecological, more so than the fact that we must eat, drink, and breathe from the biosphere. We human beings are “already ecological” because our perceptual intelligence grants us the ability to gather deep knowledge of our surroundings. This is likely the root of many forms of symbiosis between animals, too. This knowledge is deep in the sense that it requires years of patience and consistent attendance to gather, and requires the sentience of your whole body to process and to reason toward conclusions. This, I think, is a deeper form of being-ecological than eating and breathing because it configures and informs our lives, not only in the physical dimension of continued bodily survival, but also in the intimate and subtle dimension of consciousness. We think and feel the ways that we do because of the work of perceptual intelligence, constantly feeding our bodies and minds with information about the habits and the ways of the places where we spend the most time. To put it loosely, but in a way that surely gets the point across: the more you get to know a landscape, the more the landscape rubs off on your mind, massaging it, working it over, planting seeds in it, pushing its footprints into it. Eventually the landscape becomes so much a feature of your mind that it also becomes a feature of your identity. It gets that far when a complete account of who you are must necessarily include a few statements about the places where you possess this kind of deep knowledge, the time you spent acquiring it, and the things you’ve done in your life because of it.
Of course, it follows from this argument that you can have this kind of deep knowledge of human worlds, too. The ways and habits of families, colleagues from work, neighbours, friends, congregants at your place of worship if you are religious, and so on, can also massage your mind no less than landscapes and climates can do.
And, furthermore, it also follows that you cannot have deep knowledge of a landscape if your encounter with it is only occasional and superficial. I have to say it again: it takes time – years, many years – to gather the kind of deep knowledge I speak of here. But if it’s any consolation: those years can be remarkably pleasurable. Bird song, for example, reduces stress and lifts emotions. Researchers in Germany found that “the individual enjoyment of life is correlated to the number of bird species in one’s surroundings. An additional ten percent of bird species in the vicinity therefore increases the life satisfaction of Europeans at least as much as a comparable increase in income.”120
Researchers from UCSF found that older adults who took fifteen-minute walks in a forest for eight consecutive weeks reported less stress, more calm, and more awe, in their lives. The researchers asked participants to post selfie photos during their walks, and they found that over time the selfies had more emphasis on landscapes and surroundings, and brighter smiles.121 It is probably not the case that nature has an intrinsic power to calm us. Rather, as the researchers in the study of older adults noted, it’s more likely that the positive emotional affects come about from “shifting our energy and attention outward instead of inward.”122
Let me sum up this meditation with an answer to the root question. What human reality emerges from the encounter with the earth? A state of being-ecological, informed by perceptual intelligence and deep knowledge, which in turn informs selfhood and identity.
From the forthcoming book: The Circle Of Life Is Broken
Visit: http://brendanmyers.net
FOOTNOTES:
115. I first introduced the concept of perceptual intelligence in Circles of Meaning, Labyrinths of Fear (Moon Books, 2010)
116. R. Ross, Dancing with a Ghost: Exploring Indian Reality (Markham, Ontario, Canada: Octopus Publishing Group, 1992) pg. 70.
117. Ross, Ibid., pg. 72-3.
118. Ross, ibid, pg. 74.
119. Davis, The Wayfinders, pg. 59
120. Sabine Wendler, “Biological diversity evokes happiness: More bird species in their vicinity increase life satisfaction of Europeans as much as higher income” Press release, Senckenberg Biodiversität und Klima Forschungszentrum, Gothe-Universität Frankfurt and Helmut-Schmidt Universität Hamburg, 4th December 2020; Methorst, Rehdanz, Mueller, et.al., “The importance of species diversity for human well-being in Europe” Ecological Economics, Vol.181, 106917 (March 2021).
121. Sturm, Datta, Roy, et.al., “Big smile, small self: Awe walks promote positive emotions in older adults” Emotion, 21 September 2020.
122. Virginia Sturm, PhD, professor of neuroscience at UCSF, cited in Nicholas Weiler, “‘Awe Walks’ Boost Emotional Well-Being” UCSF Research, 21 September 2020
23 Million Trees Planted!
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Deep Winter
Deep Winter
“It is the life of the crystal, the architect of the flake, the fire of the frost, the soul of the sunbeam. This crisp winter air is full of it.” – John Burroughs
“Winter passes and one remembers one’s perseverance.” – Yoko Ono
“I prefer winter and fall, when you feel the bone structure of the landscape—the loneliness of it, the dead feeling of winter. Something waits beneath it, the whole story doesn’t show.” – Andrew Wyeth
“I pray this winter be gentle and kind—a season of rest from the wheel of the mind.” – John Geddes
“Snow falling soundlessly in the middle of the night will always fill my heart with sweet clarity.” – Novala Takemoto
“O, wind, if winter comes, can spring be far behind?” – Percy Bysshe Shelley
'Great Turning' Visionaries | Part 1
‘Great Turning’ Visionaries | Part 1
You can watch the full video of this conversation HERE.
Mattie Porte | Hello everyone. We are greeting you today from Findhorn Ecovillage in the North-East of Scotland. Our focus is the Great Turning and to help us explore this important and relevant topic we’ve invited an esteemed panel of guests, visionaries who have dedicated their lives to the Great Turning and to the evolution of human consciousness.
We are honored to have with us Craig Schindler who coined the term the Great Turning in his book of the same name co-authored with Gary Lapid in 1989, Joanna Macy who expanded and popularized the term through The Work That Reconnects and also through her book, Active Hope. We also have Chris Johnstone with us who co-authored Active Hope with Joanna Macy and developed a series of companion workshops on that same topic. We have David Korten who wrote The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community. We have Pat McCabe, Woman Stands Shining of the Diné nation who brings a unique Indigenous perspective. Her work centers around thriving life and the Great Reunion. We also have Duane Elgin who recently wrote about the Turning in his book, Choosing Life: Humanity’s Great Transition to a Mature Planetary Civilization.
So thank you all for being with us. It is a pleasure and an honor. So I’d like to start by asking our panel, what is the Great Turning? What inspired you to this great work and how are you seeing it manifesting in the world right now? What is its significance at this moment in time? And Craig, let’s start with you as you first coined The Great Turning.
Craig Schindler | Thank you, Mattie. I think I’m going to begin with what motivated me and then go to the Great Turning. As a youth, I had the privilege of hearing Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. I watched him take us up to the mountaintop where 2000 people in the auditorium leaned forward and had a glimpse that it’s possible for us to create the conditions for justice and peace on our planet. Dr. King of course was echoing the great souls across time who’ve been to the mountaintop, and told us that an evolutionary shift is possible.
Then, when my first born child, a son, was born on Hiroshima Day in 1981 in the midst of the Cold War, I juxtaposed holding this baby in my arm with weapons of mass destruction and the beginning of climate change, which we were aware of then, and the juxtaposition overwhelmed me in such a way that I made a commitment to go to Los Alamos and begin the process of creating a national dialogue on reducing the risk nuclear of war.
And there at Bandelier National Monument and the ancient cave dwellings where people lived a thousand years ago, Indigenous inhabitants of this continent had a vision of the Turning, of the Great Turning and that future generations we are connected to will give thanks and blessing to us for making the choice to create a more just, sustainable and compassionate world. From then on, it’s just been a matter of one foot after another trying to do our best.
So what is the Great Turning? It’s the turning away from our self-destruction toward a new era of human dignity, racial justice, environmental restoration, and peace within and peace without. It’s the end, after 5,000 years of our war weary adolescence, into our conscious adulthood. It is a shift that is both personal in terms of awakening to the inner-outer connection of interdependence and oneness and our kinship with all life, and it is the spiritual emergence of humanity to take responsibility, to steward this beautiful planet and to treat each other, as all the great traditions say, with love and respect.
How’s it emerging now? I would say that this is the most pivotal time in human history, that many generations have looked at the future and known that their decisions would affect the future, but that we are the first, those of us who are living now, to look and see that the decisions we’re going to make are going to determine whether there is a future or not. And I would tell you that the Great Turning is already happening, it’s been happening now for about 30 years, that there are millions of people who are committed to love and compassion and dignity and stewardship, and that we are working towards a tipping point. Scientists tell us that when 10% of a population adopts an innovative idea that it becomes exponential. We’re shifting from about 5% of us who have a loyalty to all humanity, to 10% – when the message will become exponential.
Joanna Macy | Well, first, I try to make a definition of it because I’ve come so used to it with the folks around me using it. So I guess I define it as a perceptual behavioral paradigm shift or revolution that focuses on the emergence of a life sustaining planetary culture and economy. The term of course was among us with Craig and it’s so wonderful to be sitting here with him and I also use it in The Work that Reconnects around the world. It was an expression coming out of Buddhism and so many Buddhist practices were borrowed in our work to represent the teachings. When the Buddha taught or set forth a worldview, that was called a ‘turning’, he was turning the Wheel of the Dharma, the dharmachakra. And there were various turnings of it.
This, the Great Turning, we express as having the scope and magnitude of the agricultural revolution and the industrial revolution – a change which touches everything: the way we think, the way we act, the way we see.
And this Great Turning, we’ve seen it as having three dimensions, a dimension of holding actions that is slowing the destruction, building a new society in every respect, and a deep inner revolution as well as a shift in consciousness. So I’m very grateful to be alive at this time and I give this my life.
Chris Johnstone | Well, one of the questions you asked was what inspired you? And I think I like the question who inspired you and there are many people here. I first heard about the Great Turning from Joanna, I can’t quite remember when it was. We started working together back in the 1980s at Findhorn. And what really landed with me was an inspiring story. And I love the Great Turning because when I’m sunk by what I see happening, and there’s so much that can leave you feeling sunk, I think of the Great Turning as a way that things can go, and I love the way you were talking, Craig, about how people in the future might look back at how things have gone, people turning up, making a difference.
Also, I love the question, “What would it look like if the Great Turning were to happen through us right now?” If we think of it as a process that can happen for all of us in any moment, one is turning up, turning up to play one’s part. And then there’s a turning away from that which causes harm and a turning towards that which supports the flourishing of life.
And I think of that as an organizing framework, whenever I’m stuck and confused or sunk or feeling devastated, I just think, “Okay, what would the Great Turning look like if it was happening through me right now?” It would involve me turning up! We’re turning up here now. And if you are reading this, you are turning up and you are listening to this and you’ll have conversations where you turn up in that conversation. And there might be things that you turn away from, and there might be things that you turn towards.
And there’s a thought like, how does it happen? How do we see it being manifested? I love the idea ‘if you live it, then you’ll find out’. If you live the Great Turning, you’ll actually see what it looks like.
So anyway, that’s what I take. It feels like it’s an organizing story that I find deeply inspiring. And I’m really grateful for all of those I’ve seen living it. I want to go that way so that’s what I want to turn towards. And I’m so pleased to be alongside you here, I see what you’re doing, and I want to head that way, I want to turn towards that way.
Pat McCabe | So, [speaks in Diné Bizaad] I’m introducing myself as a Diné woman to you on this morning from my mother’s house here in Albuquerque, New Mexico. So that’s where I find myself on Mother Earth this morning. I was adopted into the Lakota spiritual way of life and I was given the name Weyakpa Najin Win which translates roughly to “Woman Is Standing Shining”. So I wanted to greet you that way.
So here I am, an Indigenous person on this panel, and it might be surprising and it might not be to know that I’ve been rooting for collapse for a long time! I think most Indigenous people on the planet have been rooting for collapse for a long time. So that’s a very different orientation, right? Why have I been rooting for a collapse? Well, because, one thing I say is I have this privilege of walking in two different paradigms, completely different paradigms. What do I mean by paradigm? Different ways that human beings perceive of being human on this Mother Earth in the exact same circumstances under the exact same sky, same sun, same water, but radically different views of how that is to be done.
And there may be more than these two, right? This is something I feel like is really important at this time for us to consider, that paradigm is a choice. Paradigm is a choice. So I present Indigenous paradigm in circumstances like the one we find ourselves here on this panel, to say it’s not something that we can only imagine, or it’s not a fantasy world or a pipe dream, so to speak, there are people doing it already, okay? So humans can absolutely do this, and we can witness them.
And so I think there’s a longing in most Indigenous peoples that I meet for a return to what was before. And so this Turning, I would say is, in some ways, a turning backward to another understanding and to an awakening or witnessing. I guess I’ll say the return of original instructions or the understanding of, how exactly this Earth construct is made and what is our place in it? I talk often about who we are, where we are, how it is. And so as Thich Nhat Hanh has pointed out, (and he gives us a great Indigenous word through the English language), he calls us, interbeing. We are so interrelated, so deeply interrelated.
And so here’s the spiritual dilemma. Here we are in a free will construct where everybody gets to do whatever the heck they dream up to do and it’s not only human species that are involved in this free will business, it’s all species, I would say. But here we are, human beings with the power and choice to do anything we can dream up. And I love this meme that I’ve seen lately, that we choose white supremacy and credit scores of all the possibilities! But we can make other choices, right?
The Great Turning is the recognition of the laws of this construct. And so the spiritual dilemma is we can choose anything we want to do and every action that we commit affects every other being on the planet. So what is your choice to be?
I’ll say one other piece – we say that we’ve already passed through many worlds. This isn’t the first time we’ve lost a world, or that we’ve been on the brink of losing a world. So that gives us a different understanding spiritually, philosophically, about what is called for at this moment.
Duane Elgin | To me, the Great Turning is a turn from death to life, from death to life. It’s choosing life. Choosing earth is choosing life. And in the West, the modern world has been living out of a paradigm of death, a dead universe, mostly dead matter and empty space there for us to exploit from a place of separation. And now we’re seeing ruin emerging from that mindset. And so we’re turning from a dead universe to a living universe.
As Pat suggested, this in many ways is a return to our most ancient understanding of the nature of reality, of the universe in which we live. It is a line. And as we turn towards life, we’re coming home. We’re coming home to our original sense of being in understanding, of living in a living universe. And I came to this decades ago. Early on in my life I wanted to be a doctor, I wanted to be a healer, but in the early 1960s, I began to see the deep wounding of humanity and the Earth in the Vietnam era. And that is when I turned from being a healer of bodies and people to a healer of our wounded Earth and our wounded future.
So here we are, in my estimation, as people have said, this is the most pivotal time in the last 10,000 years, since the end of the last ice age. We are making a turn back to our original nature, our original understanding of the universe, where we are and where we’re going. And where we’re going is from separation and exploitation in a dead universe, to connection, communion and healing in a living universe. And in that in turn, we’re turning towards care for the wellbeing of all life.
David Korten | It’s interesting as you frame the question that way, “What is the Great Turning?” The first thought that comes to my mind, is it is a great turning of humanity from a course that leads to a world that will not work for anyone to a world that works for everyone. And of course, it has to be a world that recognizes it is not just about people, but it is about a living Earth that births and nurtures us and our existence, as well as our wellbeing. Our wellbeing depends on the health and wellbeing of the Earth in terms of the way we structure the economy and the way we define its purpose, which is essentially to make lots of money for rich people so that they can own everything on Earth, that is leading us in the action of self-extinction.
Now here’s a simple truth. There are no winners on a dead earth. Wow. We don’t need a lot of scientific research and data, it is a self-evident truth. And yet it is the most fundamental truth that almost everything in the way we manage the global economy ignores and violates.
So it’s very interesting. I grew up in a small town, my family owned a family business and I grew up assuming I was going to go back and run that business. I didn’t know if I’d ever leave my hometown. And to end up with a life in which I’ve lived all over the world – I could not have imagined as a child.
I was a very, very conservative young Republican at that point. And I was terribly concerned about these communist revolutions, born of poverty that were a threat to our American way of life. As I think about that now my venture out into the world on a mission to end global poverty was kind of an early recognition that if we don’t create a world that works for everyone, we will have a world that literally will not work for anyone. And the rest of it has simply been a process of pushing my understanding of what that means to an ever deeper level.
So what is the Great Turning? It is the transformation of humanity from our current misdirection toward the world that most humans have dreamed of since the beginning of time, a world of peace and love and generosity and caring. But it has to be a world on our finite Earth, our finite living Earth. It has to be a world that is organized around material sufficiency and spiritual abundance. Rather than this insanity that we’re all better off if we are all focusing our attention on making more and more money so we can each increase our consumption in more and more ridiculous and ultimately self-defeating ways.
Mattie Porte | Thank you. So the word awakening was mentioned, and when I’ve been researching the work of all of our panelists, I’ve noticed that everything points to this evolutionary leap of consciousness, this awakening, if you will. And I wonder if you can tell us a little bit about how we achieve that? What does it mean to awaken particularly for those who may be reading this discussion later and may be new to the spiritual path? How is that awakening manifesting on the planet right now? And I’d like to start with Joanna.
Joanna Macy | We’re waking up to our true identity to who we really are. That’s what I experience. And that’s what I find this time is inviting us to do – wake up that identity that we are part of Earth. We are being Earth, and choosing to come home to that identity as Earth is what we long for. We have been separated for so long.
What’s wonderful here is that at this point, these two great rivers that have been separated for so long – science and spirituality – are flowing together to teach us, each their different ways, spiritual practice and traditions. As well as systems thinking, Gaia theory, and bringing us to experience that we are our Earth becoming conscious of itself, our true selves.
So this is not a creed, and this is not something that’s a required belief, but it just is beginning to emerge, a waking up, and that changes everything. And as that happens, we are beginning to experience that other people are speaking our minds with us, that there’s a collective dimension to our intelligence and our creativity that we are coming home from a long, long time. And it feels good.
Chris Johnstone | I think there’s a different word I prefer and it’s belonging. And I suppose awakening is a sense there was something that I was asleep to that I’m now becoming more aware of or conscious of, or living. But in terms of what I’m becoming more aware of, what I’m feeling stronger inside me, it’s belonging. And as Joanna was saying, it’s like recognizing that we are part of Earth. But it’s more than that because I think with belonging also comes a sense of direction and purpose. Like, if I feel I belong to a family, I belong to a community, I belong to a team, that shapes the whole story of my life, what I’m about, what I’m aiming to do, and when I feel strength of belonging, from that comes loyalty. I want to show up and act for the team that I’m part of. I feel I’m part of a team here today with all of you. Some I’ve met and some I’ve met through the work that you’ve been doing.
And I come across people sometimes who have such a sense of not belonging, that they feel a sense of alienation that they’ve lost the plot. And I know that I felt like that in the past too, but when I do feel belonging, it’s like I know what I’m here to do because I know what I’m here to act for.
Duane Elgin | I really appreciated what Chris was just saying about belonging. And to me, the awakening is coming home. It’s coming home to our original home, which is the aliveness of a living universe. And we have been living in this place of what we thought was dead matter and empty space without meaning or purpose. And now through the lens of physics, as well as the ancient wisdom traditions we’re seeing, no, we are living in a place of great and profound aliveness. And we’re coming home, not only to the aliveness of the Earth but the aliveness of the universe itself. And so when our aliveness within meets the extraordinary aliveness without, we’re coming home. Life is meeting life – and in that meeting, we feel belonging, we feel finally we can relax, we’re at rest. We’re where we should be, want to be and that’s at home in the greater aliveness of the Earth and the universe and within ourselves. So the awakening is a return to belonging.
David Korten | To me, the foundation of our awakening is an awakening to the actual nature of life and its complexity, and its interdependence. What we’re discovering now, truths that were long denied or ignored by science, we’re coming back actually to fundamental insights of our earliest ancestors. One of my very close colleagues from South Africa talks about the traditional South African word ubuntu, which means ‘I am because you are’. Wow. That is a very simple statement of it. But in the bigger sense, I am because all of life is. And if the interactions between all these living beings stop, we are dead.
The way science describes it, we started out with this burst of an energy cloud or the unitary consciousness or whatever you want to call it. But it’s like it burst forth on a journey to discover its possibilities.
The way we understand the unfolding of creation through our new scientific understanding, it’s not the winding down of entropy toward energy death, it is the whole of creation as we know it as a winding-up toward ever-growing complexity. It’s an unfolding and we are a part of that process.
And part of what we have to wake up to is all the ways we currently organize in terms of our cultural beliefs, which are so polluted and distorted by the economics that we teach our children that I call egonomics, not economics. And it is that promotion of the ego and the individual wealth and the individual consumption, the focus on competition rather than the recognition of our interdependence and the essential importance of cooperation. And if we can imagine the world we want, we can create the world we want.
Craig Schindler | I’ve been privileged several times to watch the Dalai Lama come into a room. Sometimes in a small group, sometimes in a large group and he comes in laughing and bowing, laughing and bowing probably 20 times before he gets up to the stage. And I like to think that he’s laughing and bowing because he gets the joke. Because he sees from his perspective that everyone in the room has the light of consciousness within them, and he gets to play the role of the one who’s reflecting that. And he knows that if he were to stop and say, “Yo, I’m the Dalai Lama”, at that moment, he wouldn’t be the Dalai Lama, because each one of us has that light of consciousness in us and we share it with all sentient beings. Right now, we’re going into a kind of trance state culturally, the trance of the ego, the trance of small self that objectifies self and others and creates that sense of isolation, of alienation, and really destruction.
We need to awaken from that space in the now, right now, to the big self, to the soul, to the witnessing consciousness that sees and experiences our interbeing, as Joanna said, quoting Thich Nhat Hanh, our interrelatedness, our ecological connection, our spiritual oneness with all life.
The Great Turning has four levels: the recognition that we are one Earth and all life is interdependent. The recognition that we are one family evolved from one archetypal mother, about 200,000 years ago. The recognition that we have one abiding vision in all our traditions, and that is to create the conditions for peace within and with the earth. And the recognition that there is one shared global ethic, which is the ethic of reciprocity to treat the other, all life, with the love and respect that you want for yourself.
Mattie Porte | Thank you.
Pat McCabe | And so one thing that I’m really noticing in this awakening is that there’s a lot of co-witnessing going on that is unprecedented, or it’s certainly been a long time… And I’m going to say with the murder of George Floyd here in the United States, it’s not that black communities didn’t know that this was going on. This has been going on for them for a long time. And suddenly all these other communities, are saying “What? a policeman can kneel down on a person’s neck in broad daylight and be filmed? How did this happen? What?” With the discovery of the mass graves of the children in the residential boarding schools in Canada, which was actually a carryover from the UK. And they’re finding mass graves in Ireland and Scotland as well. So that practice was carried to the United States and imposed on Indigenous peoples here.
But this discovery of these mass graves of the children at the catholic schools, the residential boarding schools, where the children were forcibly kidnapped and taken away from their families as a methodology of subduing and bringing them into alignment with a modern world paradigm. Suddenly, again, it’s not that Indigenous people didn’t know that was happening. My parents and grandparents went to those residential boarding schools. I’m the first generation out in my family who didn’t go. So it didn’t happen a long time ago – it’s recent. And so this co-witnessing and this outcry and this outrage and this collective mourning of what we have been capable of doing to each other, it is like we’re waking out of a trance and seeing what has happened.
So I was actually at Findhorn during the New Story Summit. When I got overwhelmed at one point and I went out and sat on the dunes to just collect myself, the Holy People came to me and they said, rather than try to tell a new story from this point forward, you would be better off retelling the old story. And if you went back and retold the old story, you would automatically change the trajectory into the future. Wow. So I’ve been working with that a great deal and so in many ways, I feel like this co-witnessing is the retelling of the old story on one level. So I’m learning, I’m asking, I’m in spiritual inquiry, asking, ‘what does it mean to retell the old story?’ But I have this sense of this co-witnessing, because these stories have been running without witness, without the necessary witnesses to bring healing and to bring reckoning.
PART TWO of this Conversation can be found HERE.
Earthjustice | Working at the Brink
Earthjustice | Working at the Brink
The Endangered Species Act is wildlife’s best friend in an age of extinction. This visionary law protects and restores the species most at risk of extinction — 99% of the species it protects have survived.
Earthjustice, born in the same era as the Endangered Species Act, has been at the forefront of efforts to ensure this critical statute realizes its promise.
Meet eight of the hundreds of species Earthjustice has gone to court to protect.
Palila
Earthjustice’s pioneering work to stem the tide of extinction began in 1976, when a relatively new law known as the Endangered Species Act was used by Earthjustice attorney Mike Sherwood to save the endangered Hawaiian palila. Living exclusively between the elevations of 7,000 and 10,000 feet on Mauna Kea on the Big Island of Hawaiʻi, the palila dines only on the seeds of the mamane tree, which is endemic to the same habitat. However, feral sheep and goats, brought to Hawaiʻi for sport hunting, were destroying the trees.
The judge in Sherwood’s case ruled that the state must remove the animals that were pushing the palila to extinction. This decision set the important legal precedent that damaging the habitat of a listed species is illegal. In the following years, until he retired in 2013, the legal work of Sherwood and his colleagues had a hand in protecting around 700 species, and much more.
Southern Resident Orcas
Living in tight-knit matrilineal family units called “pods,” orcas (Orcinus orca), also known as killer whales, have one of the most complex social systems of all marine mammals. The Southern Resident orcas — the J, K, and L pods — were decimated in the 1960s and 1970s when they were targeted for live capture for the Sea Worlds.
Earthjustice’s legal work secured Endangered Species Act protections for the orcas in 2005.
Wild Salmon
Earthjustice has worked for decades to protect three endangered and threatened wild salmon species: king salmon, coho, and sockeye.
In the Pacific Northwest, the Columbia River Basin was once among the greatest salmon-producing river systems in the world. But all remaining Snake River salmon are facing extinction because four aging dams stand in their way to reaching their pristine, natal cold water streams in central Idaho and beyond.
Scientists say taking out the dams and restoring the river is the single best thing we can do to save the salmon. Earthjustice has worked for years to remove the dams.
Wolverine
The continued existence of wolverines give hope that there’s still a chance for our wild world to thrive, not merely survive, into future generations. Earthjustice works to establish protections not only for wolverines, but also for the integrated ecosystems that sustain their prey and habitat.
California Sea Otters
As with the wolverine, the fur trade nearly turned every last otter into luxury winter wear. Once found in abundance, sea otters were thought to be extinct until a small colony was discovered in 1938 near Big Sur. Since then, it’s been a slow, uncertain recovery.
Sea otters are a keystone species — the lynchpin of ecosystems. When otters feed on shellfish, particularly sea urchins, they control the population of these species. Otherwise, urchins could consume all of the kelp in the otter’s coastal habitat.
Earthjustice successfully defended the end of the ill-advised “No Otter Zone,” which excluded otters from parts of their habitat. The case went to the U.S. Supreme Court, which allowed the decision to stand by declining to review the appeal.
Yellowstone Grizzly Bear
During Lewis and Clark’s famous expedition across America’s vast western wilderness in the early 1800s, there were approximately 50,000 grizzly bears. Today, grizzly bears in the lower-48 states are reduced to 1% of their historic range and 1–2% of their historic numbers due to persecution, poisoning, sport hunting, and habitat destruction.
One of the last strongholds for grizzlies is Yellowstone National Park and its surrounding public land. This unique region is one of the few remaining great ecosystems of the world.
Earthjustice attorneys have worked for decades to safeguard the bears.
Gray Wolf
The gray wolf is one of North America’s most iconic native predators. The incredible comeback of the gray wolf in the Northern Rockies signaled the resolve of a society strong enough to embrace a world ensured not just for us, but for all species.
Decimated by decades of unregulated slaughter and persecution, gray wolves were pushed to the brink of extinction. In 1973, gray wolves became one of the first animals to appear on the Endangered Species list.
Today, the future of wolves remains under threat — from hostile state management plans to anti-wildlife politicians.
Earthjustice has gone to court and advocated on behalf of wolf populations throughout the country, alongside our partners and clients, for more than a decade. The Trump administration removed protections for wolves across the entire contiguous United States. Earthjustice is challenging the decision in court.
ʻUaʻu (Hawaiian Petrel)
The mysterious, rarely seen ʻuaʻu, also known as the Hawaiian petrel (Pterodroma sandwichensis), are true seafarers, living nearly all of their lives over the open ocean.
Earthjustice has been working for years in the Aloha State on behalf of these endangered birds. Once plentiful throughout the islands, they are colliding — literally — with human development, killed when they fly into power lines and become disoriented from bright streetlights.
In March 2020, a court ruling in a lawsuit brought by Earthjustice found that Maui County violated state law by failing to conduct environmental review for a streetlights project that threatens harm to Maui’s imperiled sea turtles and seabirds, including Hawaiian petrels.
Take Action
As officials hear from Earthjustice attorneys in court, outside the courtroom, they’re hearing from you. Visit the Earthjustice Action Center.
Are You Sure?
Are You Sure?
The test of truth is time, because truth must be played out in the context of daily living, through our experiences and relationships, filtered by our culture and conditioning. In this sense, conventional truths can only ever be partial, until they are refined or replaced by new ones. By conventional truth, I mean the stories we mostly agree upon to explain how things work or what is happening. All conventional truths are temporary or at best incomplete. Even so, it is difficult for most of us to question our own truths, even if what we ‘know’ is mostly a collection of ideas and opinions colored by bias.
Modern life increasingly funnels us into boxes where our bias is confirmed and reinforced. That is why one of the most powerful, radical questions we can ask ourselves in any situation is “am I sure?” The revered Buddhist teacher, Thích Nhất Hạnh says that If we ask this sincerely, we often find a deeper truth waiting to be revealed. By failing to ask this simple question, we risk making the situation worse.
The consequences of our faulty thinking can clearly be witnessed in the condition of our planet and the trauma experienced by those we ‘other’. Franco Santoro, a facilitator at the Findhorn Foundation said:
Every time we make assumptions about what other people feel, do or think, we imprison them and us in a separate reality.
This separate reality is what some of our Indigenous teachers have called wetiko, a kind of mental and spiritual starvation. (Read Healing Wetiko, by Paul Levy in this edition of Kosmos.) This feeling is also expressed in our featured painting, by Kelcey Loomer. A beautiful stag symbolizes truth imprisoned within our collective mind. Our elaborate illusions have helped to desecrate nature and blind us to the ultimate truth.
Ultimate truth, according to many wisdom teachings, is empty of definition or self-nature. It comes directly from reality. One way we experience ultimate truth is the wordless awe we feel when we wake up to the beauty of the Earth, a delicate flower, or the sun on our face. (Read the keynote, Watching River Otters, by Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee and Perceptual Intelligence, by Brendan Myers.) We need both kinds of truth – conventional and ultimate – in order to face the suffering of the world and to know how to respond.
Unfortunately, in our so-called post-truth era, facts can easily be misrepresented and even weaponized in order to control beliefs and behaviors. The kind of uncertainty this produces sows the seeds for conspiracy theories, degradation of trust in institutions, and most importantly trust in our own knowledge and intuition. Two articles in this edition of Kosmos explore these ideas: Post-truth Politics and Collective Gaslighting, and Marching Orders, Covid’s Attention War by Natascha Reitdijk and Sarah Hartman-Caverly respectively.
Where does truth come from? Is truth “out there” to be discovered? Or is it “inside” to be revealed? A very hopeful answer is that truth presents itself in response to our individual and collective need, our yearning for its light.
Many believe we have begun the process of a Great Turning, prophesied in many traditions, a time of breaking down and breaking through to new insights, a time of convulsion and transformation. I imagine it as the Earth’s soil being churned over in preparation for fresh truths to sprout on the horizon of human understanding, indeed at the edges of the Universe as we increase our view of the cosmos and our place in it. I am grateful to Findhorn Foundation for sharing with Kosmos a special conversation with Great Turning Visionaries, among them: Joanna Macy, David Korten, Pat McCabe and Craig Schindler.
Perhaps we recognize truth best by how it makes us feel. As Jesus said, truth sets us free, even when it is painful or causes us personal risk. When we stand in the light of ultimate truth, we feel calm and alive, despite the chaos that might surround us. That is because we stand on the side of all Life. If our truth makes us feel intolerant and defensive, we may need to look more deeply. If we want to stop injustice and suffering, we can’t do it by going to war with ourselves. Our intolerance does nothing to alleviate intolerance in the world. The one thing we have power to change is our thinking. It takes courage to keep our compassion and our love alive.
Thank you for the many ways you support Kosmos, especially your energetic spiritual support of our founder, Nancy Roof as she prepares to transition from this life. It is my privilege to be with her as often as I can, and an honor to advance her legacy and Kosmos. Like all great wisdom teachers, Nancy embodies what is beautiful and true. With your help, I vow to always hold Kosmos in the light of her vision, transformation in harmony with all Life.
Love and gratitude,
RF
Marching Orders | Covid's Attention War
Marching Orders | Covid’s Attention War
Covid-19 is a disease of the body, but infected and uninfected alike are equally susceptible to its comorbidity of the mind: the “infodemic.”
Declared by the World Health Organization, academia, libraries, and governments worldwide, symptoms of the Covid infodemic include compulsive doom scrolling, the despondency of information overload, and false beliefs fed by online misinformation (often attributed to snake-oil hustlers, social media opportunists, and average citizens)1. Effects of the infodemic linger, leaving its victims feeling overwhelmed, confused, and distrustful. Once afflicted, many people turned to established medical authorities, government agencies, and news sources in response—and away from friends and family. 2 Then, the second-wave infodemic hit—the flip-flops, walk-backs, retractions, corrections, and other information variants incubating in officialdom. The modest trust bump benefitting many institutions during the first year of the pandemic receded.3 Once reflexively smeared as conspiracy theories, questions about the pandemic’s origin—and about the risk-benefit of various public-health responses—were now resurfaced as legitimate lines of inquiry. Such developments leave many to wonder: What did our officials know, and when did they know it?
Surely, not all of the misinformation disseminated from authority sources was disinformation (intentionally misleading information)—they may have relayed what they thought was true at the time. Such is the nature of transparency and real-time information sharing in the face of a complex, novel, globalized threat. Our officials are only human, after all.
But the infodemic presents additional, subtler symptoms. Contact tracing, a useful public health technique for identifying and containing early outbreaks, also enhanced the state’s capacity for physical surveillance of individuals’ movements and real-world interactions; it’s a capability many governments outsourced to private corporations. In Pennsylvania, members of the public were urged by Governor Tom Wolf to enforce statewide lockdowns and mask mandates on each other, effectively encouraging public health vigilantism and putting further strains on social trust.4 Social media platforms insert intrusive pandemic notifications and warnings in their content streams, and coordinate with state agencies, academics, and legacy media to determine which content and users to censor; now independent journalists such as Glenn Greenwald have testified before the House Subcommittee on Antitrust, Commercial, and Administrative Law about the role of corporate media in advocating for censorship on social media platforms. Government agencies hire celebrities and social media influencers to promote state rhetoric about public health during the pandemic.5 Parsing what is happening in our information landscape requires continued debate and questioning.
The last time I wrote about surveillance, trust decline, censorship, and propaganda, I was writing for the Office for Intellectual Freedom of the American Library Association about information warfare.6
The first casualty of war: truth or algorithmically controlled attention?
Information warfare targets we, the people.
Bombarded by partial truths, monitoring of our speech and interactions, emotional manipulation, and “lies, damned lies, and statistics,” we can be unwittingly employed in the “psyops” or “psychological warfare operations” created by all kinds of agents. As we increasingly seek and share information online, clandestine networks of behavioral trackers and recommender systems observe, shape, and nudge our concerns, questions, opinions, and engagements; the more these algorithms know about us, the softer of a target we are for those who wish to alter our thoughts, emotions, and actions.
The Covid-19 pandemic is not just an epidemiological event—it is also another front in a simmering information war, the contours of which encompass the 2013-14 Euromaidan unrest in Ukraine, the 2016 Brexit referendum, the presidential election of Donald Trump, and Russiagate (and its spinoffs). It encompasses 2020’s “mostly peaceful protests”—the phrase used in an infamous CNN broadcast in front of a burning car lot—and at least 25 politically motivated deaths as well as record-setting property destruction exceeding $1 billion; 2021’s January 6th riot; and numerous skirmishes in-between. 7
One of the defining characteristics shared by these occurrences is the unmistakable alignment of state, media, academia, think tanks, and megacorporations force feeding a hermetically sealed hegemony on an increasingly distrustful and frenzied citizenry. When the truth is inevitably outed, the powers that be brazenly forge on, smearing the truth-bearers, denying their prior knowledge, claiming the emergent truth as their party line all along. Some simply shrug it off to the tune of, “Who could have known?”
“…the more these algorithms know about us, the softer of a target we are for those who wish to alter our thoughts, emotions, and actions.”
The Onslaught of Information
Not yet a public health emergency of international concern.9
“No evidence of human-to-human transmission outside China.”10
“There is no need to avoid public spaces.”11
“Precautions have been taken by our city.”12
New York will run out of ventilators in six days.13
Two weeks to flatten the curve. 14
Gyms closed15; liquor stores open.16
The curve is off by an order of magnitude.17
“The typical mask you buy at the drug store is not really effective.” 18
“Seriously people, stop buying masks.” 19
Wear a mask in public. 20
Wear a mask in your own home. 21
Wear two masks. 22
Wear goggles.23
Covid-19 has natural, zoonotic origins.24
Covid-19 definitely did not come from a lab.25
Covid-19 might have come from a lab.26
The National Institutes of Health “has not ever and does not now fund gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.”27
Here’s a receipt for what appears to be NIH funding of gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.28
Public health guidelines are issued based on case data. 29
Tests can generate false-positives. 30
Tests can generate false-negatives.31
We’re not tracking all cases in more than half the population.32
Vaccines work, but wear your mask.33
Masks work, but get your vaccine.34
Vaccines work, but will require boosters.35
Masks work, but society requires vaccine passports.36
Masks and vaccines work, but prepare for more lockdowns.37
Twentieth-century state-sponsored information warfare tactics were crude, one-size-fits-all affairs. Mass communication occurred at population scale: pamphlet drops by weather balloon over a targeted region, forgeries and leaks disseminated to state officials to provoke an overreaction, stories planted in the foreign press in the hopes that domestic media would report on them, staged conferences featuring journalists, scholars, writers, and artists acting as witting or unwitting agents. Psychological operations were carried out as covert actions through front organizations so that connections to state sponsors could remain obscured.
The advent of digital communications and social media turned this paradigm on its head. Mass communication can now be micro-targeted, not just to individuals, but to individuals at the precise moment that they are psychologically and physiologically primed to be most receptive to the message. The distinction between inauthentic, witting agents and authentic, unwitting messengers has collapsed, as social media users reshare posts and relay content which might have originated as disinformation but which they nevertheless earnestly think to be true.
Most interestingly, the government’s role is no longer concealed; intelligence agents appear as regular commentators on news programs, state agencies openly recruit social media influencers to convey their messaging,8 and the government coordinates with academia and corporate and social media to profile, censor, and suppress counterinformation and contrary views.
It’s been said that the first casualty of war is truth, but that’s not always the case in information warfare: Truth, tactically crafted, is often the most powerful weapon available. Instead, the first casualty of information war is attention. Herbert Simon recognized early that the information economy is actually an attention economy; information is virtually infinite and becomes ever cheaper to generate, acquire, and exchange, while attention remains stubbornly finite and increasingly expensive to capture, maintain, and monetize. Neurobiologically speaking, a person can process only so many stimuli at any given time, and can consciously consider a mere one. Information warfare tactically relies on attention engineering, manipulating the conditions that compose our sense of what’s real, of which information itself is only one factor.
The 21st century is a golden age of attention engineering, enabled by the intertwining strands of knowledge, capability, and culture. Disciplines such as psychology, sociology, mass communication, and neuroscience reveal the functions of attention, both physical and metaphysical, and the mechanisms by which it can be shaped. This knowledge is actively applied to the development of consumer technology, incorporating elements of persuasive design to grab hold of our attention and influence the ways in which we process information. The adoption of such technologies into daily life engenders a culture which is not merely tolerant of, but encourages and rewards, a state of constant distraction and attention overload. We are alerted, notified, nudged, recommended, and reminded into intellectual and behavioral cattle chutes by the bevy of devices accompanying our every waking moment (and logging our sleeping ones).
The fundamental strategy of information warfare is to sever you from your reality, to intercede in the intimacy between your senses and your sense of the world. The objective will shift along any number of spectra, from inciting action to instilling inaction, inspiring loyalty to inducing hatred, integrating unity to incising division. Likewise, the tactics deployed vary according to the population targeted and the means available, and the aggressors may range from multinational corporations to policy institutes to state actors to media personalities to unwitting acquaintances to botnets. But the fundamental strategy remains: Supplant your authentic reality with an artificial one.
Farewell to harms: maintaining peace of mind in an information war
I won’t—indeed, can’t—tell you what to think about Covid-19, or the multiplicity of public-health measures implemented to combat it, or the mutating narratives which claim to explain it. But I can tell you how an observer of information warfare prepares to venture headlong into the fray:
Surrender your weapons. The surest way to avoid enlistment as an unwitting agent in the information war is to desist resharing content on social media or in other communications. Observe, but don’t report.
Embrace uncertainty. As Marcus Aurelius observed, “It is in our power to have no opinion about a thing.” To be certain is to be captive—both to the defense of your stance, and to other third parties espousing it. Reserve the right to change your mind.
Adopt watchful waiting. The precautionary principle preserves the possibility for future action, while taking a partially (mis)informed action now may preclude the possibility of better options down the line.
Demand more of authorities. If you’re in the habit of asking for evidence to verify claims made by your loved ones and random internet strangers, good! Apply this same standard to institutions. Credentials and offices alone should carry little more weight than royal pedigree or sovereign titles when it comes to information. Trust is earned.
Suspend disbelief. Look for the Three C’s: narratives that are censored, dismissed as conspiracy theories, or the subject of citizen journalism are often worth further consideration. Seek out nuance.
Maintain readiness. Fear makes you an easy mark, susceptible to manipulation, divisive rhetoric, and polarization. Sustain your inner self by attending to your privacy and nurturing intimate relationships. Pursue self-reliance and community resilience to lessen your vulnerability to systemic shocks. Immerse yourself in something that allows you to forget that Covid-19 even exists.
If history is any indication, we might have to wait a generation or more before learning the truth about Covid-19, and its symbiont infodemic. Writing in Human Events, Jeremy Carl reminds us that “progressive pieties” about what the AIDS virus was, how it spread, and who was most affected led many into certain death, and that there is no way to know right now everything that we will eventually know about our current pandemic.
Until such time, may we act in such a way so as to ensure the integrity of the information record—and of ourselves.
This article originally appeared in Root Quarterly
Root Quarterly is a print-only, subscription-based quarterly journal rooted in Philadelphia, but celebrating content from Pennsylvania and beyond. Root Quarterly celebrates artists, writers, social entrepreneurs, and neighborhoods, and looks at critical analyses of larger ideas, and criticism and appreciation of nationally relevant cultural touchstones. “Expect to hold something in your hand that you might want to curl up with on a Sunday afternoon that may by turns delight, challenge, and inspire you.”
1 “Managing the COVID-19 Infodemic” is a joint statement released Sept. 23, 2020, by WHO, UN, UNICEF, UNDP, UNESCO, UNAIDS, ITU, UN Global Pulse, and IFRC.
2 Public polling data reveals how “Americans struggle to navigate COVID-19 ‘infodemic’” as reported May 11, 2020, by Gallup.
3 Public polling data shows that Americans’ trust in institutions declined in 2021, following a modest increase at the outset of the pandemic, as reported July 14, 2021 by Gallup.
4 A spokesperson for Gov. Wolf’s office stated that, “In unprecedented circumstances like these we expect compliance to protect customers, employees, and the community” and that the governor did not want to allocate law enforcement or national guard resources to enforcement unless needed, as reported March 16, 2020, by The Philadelphia Inquirer.
5 White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki described how the administration is flagging Facebook posts as Covid-19 misinformation for censorship, as reported July 15, 2021, by the New York Post. The U.S. Surgeon General’s report on “building a healthy information environment” for 2021 outlines what educators, researchers, and research institutions can do.
6 The author, who researches information warfare, suggests survival tips for the American Library Association’s Intellectual Freedom Blog in a post dated October 26, 2020.
7 A September 2014 article in Eurozine explores political divisions over the Euromaidan demonstrations and subsequent violence in Odessa, Ukraine; A June 27, 2016, opinion piece in The Guardian explains why the populist outcome of the Brexit referendum was not a surprise, followed by a Nov. 9, 2016, piece republished by Scientific American providing similar analysis on Donald Trump’s presidential election; independent journalist and social commentator Matt Taibbi likens Russiagate to the claim of “weapons of mass destruction” in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in a March 23, 2019, piece; the Foundation for Economic Education questions the rhetoric that 2020’s demonstrations were “mostly peaceful protests” on Sept. 1, 2020. The Guardian reports on Oct. 31, 2020, that at least 25 Americans died of politically motivated violence associated with demonstrations in 2020; Axios reports on Sept. 16, 2020, that demonstrations following the police-involved killing of George Floyd were the costliest civil disorders in U.S. history; Glenn Greenwald questions the potential role of the FBI in inciting the Jan. 6th riot in a June 18, 2021, piece on his Substack newsletter.
8 The Biden administration has been recruiting celebrities and social media influencers for a public relations campaign regarding vaccination, as reported April 22, 2021, by The Hill, and Aug. 1, 2021, by The New York Times.
9 Comments by Tedros Ghebreyesus, director general of WHO, as the coronavirus spread within China and to Japan, Singapore, and the United States, as reported Jan. 23, 2020, by UN News.
10 Comments by Director General Ghebreyesus, as reported Jan. 23, 2020, by The New York Times.
11 Comments by New York City Council Speaker Corey Johnson at an event encouraging New Yorkers to patronize businesses in Flushing, Queens, reported on Feb. 13, 2020, by the City of New York.
12 Comments by Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi while encouraging San Franciscans to patronize businesses in Chinatown, reported on Feb. 24, 2020, by San Francisco CBS Local.
13 Comments by New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo on April 2, 2020, as reported by Yahoo! News.
14 Commentary by Pennsylvania State Senator Judy Ward on Gov. Wolf’s statewide emergency declaration, published March 18, 2021, in Morrisons Cove Herald.
15 “Inside the Illegal Underground Gyms of the Covid-19 Pandemic,” CNET, Nov. 4, 2020.
16 Explanation of why liquor stores remained open during state lockdowns published by journalism students at Arizona State University on April 6, 2020, syndicated by The Arizona Republic.
17 Neil Ferguson, creator of the Imperial College model that informed extreme public health measures but was later found to be “wildly inaccurate,” as described on May 6, 2020, in National Review.
18 A Feb. 5, 2020, email from Dr. Anthony Fauci, NIAID director, obtained by FOIA request, belies his skepticism that store-bought masks will be effective in preventing infection with Covid-19, as reported in Newsweek on June 2, 2021.
19 Jerome Adams, then the U.S. Surgeon General, was forced to walk back a February 2020 tweet discouraging people from buying masks, as reported by Axios on July 12, 2020.
20 Universal masking guidelines were announced on April 2, 2020, as reported by The Washington Post.
21 Eventually, some local policies—such as one at the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources, reported in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel on Aug. 10, 2020—required masking when alone in the privacy of one’s own home.
22 A study released by the CDC in February 2021 indicated that double-masking was effective in blocking more than 90% of virus particles, as reported on Feb. 10, 2021, by NBC News.
23 Dr. Fauci advocated wearing a face shield or goggles to prevent Covid-19 infection via the eyes, as reported July 29, 2020, by ABC News.
24 Scientists, including EcoHealth Alliance principal Peter Daszak, who was later found to relay funds to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, signed a Feb. 19, 2020, letter in medical journal The Lancet advocating the zoonotic origin hypothesis and to “strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that Covid-19 does not have a natural origin.”
25 An Oct. 12, 2020, Scientific American article characterizes the hypothesis that Covid-19 was engineered in a lab as a conspiratorial myth.
26 Politifact updated its fact-checking on the origins of Covid-19 on May 17, 2021, after archiving a September 2020 fact-check that “included researchers who asserted the SARS-CoV-2 virus could not have been manipulated. That assertion is now more widely disputed.”
27 Dr. Fauci categorically denies financial support for gain-of-function research on infectious diseases from the National Institutes of Health in testimony to Congress on May 11, 2021, as reported by Yahoo! News.
28 A November 2017 article published in PLOS Pathogens describing research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology demonstrating “three newly identified SARSr-CoVs with different S protein sequences are all able to use human ACE2 as the receptor” discloses funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIAID R01AI110964), the USAID Emerging Pandemic Threats (EPT) PREDICT program.
29 The CDC issues masking and other Covid-19 mitigation guidelines based on case transmission rates, as reported by NPR on Aug. 6, 2021.
30 The New York Times explains the high false-positive rate of Covid-19 PCR tests in an Aug. 29, 2020, article, “Your Coronavirus Test Is Positive. Maybe It Shouldn’t Be.”
31 The Washington Post explains why Covid-19 tests could return false-negative results in a Jan. 13, 2021, article, “Three Reasons a Negative Coronavirus Test Doesn’t Necessarily Mean You’re Not Infected.”
32 The CDC decided in May to stop tracking breakthrough Covid-19 infections that do not result in hospitalization or death, as reported by Politico on July 30, 2021. At time of writing, 50.2% of the total U.S. population is fully vaccinated, and 58.8% of the population has received at least one vaccine dose, as reported by the CDC.
33 The CDC recommends that vaccinated people continue to mask in regions with low vaccination rates, as reported by NBC News on July 27, 2021.
34 The Biden administration is evaluating the legal rights of employers to mandate vaccination, as reported by Reuters on Aug. 6, 2021.
35 The FDA is developing a plan to make Covid-19 vaccine boosters available by September, as reported in The Wall Street Journal on Aug. 5, 2021.
36 States began preparing vaccine passport roll-outs in early 2021, as reported in the New York Post on April 7, 2021.
37 Principal Deputy Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre indicates that the Biden administration will follow CDC guidance, including the possible imposition of mandatory lockdowns, in a press briefing reported by MSN Money on July 30, 2021.
Composer, David Crowe
Composer, David Crowe
David Crowe is a classical music composer, conductor, percussionist and teaching artist. He honed his musical education at SUNY Binghamton and the New England Conservatory of Music and was Associate Conductor of the Fort Wayne Philharmonic for several years before turning to composing full-time. In addition, he worked for over a decade with the Charlotte Symphony as a guest conductor and teaching artist.
Artist’s Statement
I feel very fortunate to have been able to make music for so many years and in so many different ways: as a composer, conductor, percussionist and teacher.
People often ask me what kind of music I write, and I never know what to say. Many of my compositions have come out of collaborations, either with other artists or as part of larger educational projects, so they seem to encompass a wide range of styles. Yet, I believe they all speak with the same musical voice.
I am very grateful to the Charlotte Symphony Orchestra and its visionary Educational Director Susan Miville for providing me with the opportunities to explore and develop some truly innovative and exciting programs. Our most successful venture, “Mill Village, A Piedmont Rhapsody” has been widely performed throughout the region and has received a national award from MetLife for excellence in community engagement.
Spring is from one of my earliest projects with children, a suite based on the four seasons, each one influenced by a different Asian culture or tradition. Spring is Japanese inspired and uses the traditional folk song “Sakura,” or cherry blossom, an annual Japanese celebration.
It didn’t have any special significance when it was written 25+ years ago, but as we seem to be going through a dark period, the gentle meditative act of viewing cherry blossoms, reflecting on the passage of time and the changing of seasons feels comforting and rejuvenating.
How the Birds Came into the World
“How Birds Came Into The World” was composed for my friend David Holt. It’s a beautiful Cherokee legend that describes the changing of the seasons as experienced by the trees, and the special relationship that birds have to the trees. Many of the musical themes were actually composed by fourth-grade students who participated in a Young Composer Project several years ago. I used their themes and ideas to create this musical composition. So when people ask me where I get my ideas for composing, I say “I steal them from children!”
Four-time Grammy Award winner David Holt is a musician, storyteller, artist, and historian. For more than forty years, he has collected and performed the songs and stories of the Blue Ridge Mountains. He learned this treasure trove of music directly from musical greats including Doc Watson, Roy Acuff, Tommy Jarrell, Etta Baker and Grandpa Jones.He was featured in the film O Brother, Where Art Thou.
Without Borders
The musicians of the eclectic ensemble Without Borders first performed together in 2002, playing music I composed for the Moving Poets Theater of Dance production of The Echo, based on the prison writings of Nigerian author and Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka.
…art and truth
When I think about the relationship of art to truth, the first word that comes to mind is authenticity. Any expression of words, sounds, gestures, rhythms, images, etc. that comes from one’s authentic self is both truth and art. So when I compose I try, as often as I can remember, to check in with my authentic, higher, self and will usually get a sense of what is true and correct and what is not.
Several pieces have been added to the Without Borders repertoire which bring together the diverse combination of classical flute, guitar and cello with Middle-Eastern and ethnic percussion and electric bass. Their music is often inspired by world events and a search for human understanding. Their musical ideas are drawn from all world cultures and traditions.
I don’t have a specific process when I work with children, since so much depends on the age group and the nature of the project. One thing I always try to bring to any project is my own inner child-like sense of playfulness, experimentation, improvisation, discovery: “let’s try this and see what happens.” Once that is established among the class, they generally take it from there.
There is no better way to encourage a peaceful world community than to instill a love of art, beauty and culture in young people.
“When a person learns music, he need not necessarily learn to be a musician or to become a source of pleasure and joy to his fellow man; no, but by playing, loving and hearing music, he must develop music in his personality. The true use of music is to become musical in one’s thoughts, words and actions. We must be able to give the harmony for which the soul yearns and longs every moment. All the tragedy in the world, in the individual and in the multitude, comes from lack of harmony. And harmony is best given by producing harmony in one’s own life.”
—Hazrat Inayat Khan
Being Brave
Being Brave
It is unfortunate, yet undeniable that we often question our firmly-held beliefs only when confronted by vexing circumstances—the kind that present us with opportunity to either clamp down and become more rigid or to open vulnerably to inquiry, unraveling, and the expansion of our worldviews.
If truth must be safely limited to what we already know—and we are too fragile to consider the “more”—our realities are stunted and inert. Contemplation leads to profound acknowledgement: whatever can be comfortably grasped cannot also likely be absolute.
Looking through the eyes of compassion, we understand how a species with great capacity for flexibility might be especially prone to living within a restricted range of motion. Our self-protective tendencies make the process of loosening immensely tender for us…To say, “My interpretation might be wrong…my worldview, biased and blinding…I might not be seeing everything there is to see,” requires courage.
Although it should always be a noble aim to cultivate something as vibrant, wild, and worthy as truth—within and between us—we are conditioned to feel and endorse shame and fear. We have an aversion toward messy practice and stumbling through the stages of not knowing that precede higher consciousness. So, it seems, both individually and as part of larger systems, we frequently get stuck; unless, perhaps, grace allows into our lives enough compounding, catalytic moments to make growth a favored course.
Through my initiation into motherhood, it was as if the Mystery was shaking me awake. Becoming a parent is world-altering for many; for me, the quake was magnified by the gift of a child with disabilities.
Coming to hold my sweet girl—intimate with the drawn-out suspension of other my pursuits, questions without answers, and the exhaustive rooting down to offer a bottomless depth of care—fractured and shifted all the pieces of me. My existing identities and purposes suddenly measured far too stiff to bear emerging ambiguities. I yearned to become more limber.
Paradoxically, we must tell ourselves “the truth”—and exact our subjective forms upon it—while still being malleable to its transforming revelations. In this reciprocity, reality assumes the dynamic qualities of a verb—co-creative and unfolding through symbols, postures, and movements which invite our synchrony. As we approach knowledge and more consciously participate, embodying the solidness of self and society, we must remain open to experience’s bent to challenge and implicate us. We must embrace our duty to respond as a fractal part of the whole, as ones whose inner lives—for better or worse—golden spiral out into the world and have impact.
A few years into my journey as a mother, I heard a radio segment discussing text that compared parenting to carpentry and gardening. The author described how well-intentioned carpenter-like parents might try to hammer their children into smooth-sanded objects with precise angles that would fit into certain schools and career paths. Gardener-like parents, on the other hand, moved away from this top-down philosophy and tended, instead, to the growing conditions that would enable their children to flourish from the ground up, developing their own definitions of success.
Where my achievement-orientation and performing-masculine energies lent more toward a woodworking approach—and the hope of getting parenting “right”—my daughter’s uniqueness led me outside, to the uneven ground and into a softer, more intuitive-feminine stance. It was evident, quite early on, that she would not triumph in the same ways I had; her offerings would be distinct. And, raising her up with fidelity necessitated striking a balance of guidance and receptivity.
Truth is a mediation. An integration between synapses, between brain hemispheres, and between your heart, mine, the heart of others and of the Earth. Truth grows out of the fertile ground between opposites, a valley that social media algorithms squelch to promote the addictive, outrage-inducing binary thoughts our brainstems crave. It cannot thrive in religious, political, and academic institutions that favor dichotomies over the immeasurable capacities of adaptability, creativity, and authentic discourse vital to a future.
Yet here we are. With ominous conditions and infinite potential. In need of a bridge.
In my experience, becoming an adult and mother-artist has been about learning to hold many things, seemly contradictory, at once. Feelings, interpretations, fears, hopes, questions, desires.
True spirituality embraces the juggling of all this, which takes faith. Like the body in mountain pose—when all appears effortless and still—every fiber is engaged and working hard.
Recently, a friend reminded me of Frog and Toad’s “The Garden,” which features Toad—wanting the harvest that Frog has—yelling at his seeds just after he’s placed them in the soil. When Frog says the seeds must be very afraid, Toad reads them candlelit stories by night and sings for them by day. Finally, when he exhausts himself and rests, his beautiful sprouts emerge.
Likewise, we habitually strive to have the realities in our lives propagate in a certain manner and time. We struggle to make peace with the restlessness in our nature. We wander farther from truth when we de-value the Earth and neglect invitations to apprentice with the native wisdom of land and spirit. In these gaps, we have nearly forgotten how to rest, praise, and pray.
The movement from rigidity is to turn away from our closed-off toiling and reach across. This is not easy. In fact, it’s risky to open ourselves to mystery, to influence, and the inner and outer ostracisms we may face by negating our own dogma.
Whatever truth challenges us—whatever reality is most difficult to face and integrate—also has the potential to nourish us, to mother us…so we can be fully alive—neither set in my ways or spineless.
My daughter is now six years old. She loves music, anticipating the stars all day, and holding toy phones to her ear. I feel sure that Truth is calling.
There are many times when, as her mother, I need to provide active guidance and love. There are also times when I need to soothe myself, regard her solitude, and witness her soul’s blossoming…that it may change me.
To nurture her, I am challenged to hold her loosely enough that I can realize my own flowering.
After all, we are all seeds, afraid of some truth, waiting for another’s sweet voice to sing:
“Be brave of it.”
A Quest for Truth as a Continuous Motion to Reconsider
A Quest for Truth as a Continuous Motion to Reconsider
“Imagination is more important than knowledge.
For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination encircles the world.” Albert Einstein
“Wisdom is a living stream, not an icon preserved in a museum. Only when we find the spring of wisdom in our own life can it flow to future generations.” Thich Nhat Hanh
For six years as a young adult, I served as a trial judge. While a naïve, idealistic public servant, I cultivated an affinity for truth within a variety of cases. My path to truth was my oath of office. I swore in witnesses to tell the “whole truth” and became devoted to identifying what it was. Looking back, I see truth-seeking as an acquired orientation to life. Truth is not an achievement in which to take pride but a gift for which to be grateful. Ready receptivity to truth is a practice that leads to mastery through unity with the Source of Truth. Reflection, meditation, contemplation and communion are ever-deepening phases of the unifying process.
Eventually I discovered my most intense devotion to truth within the emotional pressure cooker of contested child custody cases, where the standard “best interests of children” governs. What was the mysterious, elusive truth that would free me to make competent decisions on behalf of children? By what process was it discovered? Those questions mattered to me because the welfare of future generations matters to me.
My relationship to truth became not merely objective and intellectual. It became personal and passionate, a marriage of heart and mind. I had to set aside confining intellectualism to encounter truth on its freer terms. Through trials, risk-takings and errors, I mastered a process of listening deeply within myself for an inner voice that guides from a Source not “out there” but “in here.” Even now I write this essay with that voice’s guidance. What is in the “best interests” of my readers for me to write? How can I be most helpful in increasing our collective understanding of Truth and of the process of welcoming It to reveal Itself?
During my tenure as a judge, I learned not to judge but rather to discern. I learned that truth is not “mine” but “ours.” It is both objective and subjective, both in here and out there if we receive it fully and live it gracefully. It is rarely politically expedient or personally convenient.
Allowing truth to be revealed to us is a collaborative process akin to the sensitive receptivity to signals from the Universe achieved by the Allen Telescope Array for SETI research. In his own investigation of truth, I suspect that Einstein considered rationally presented input of colleagues in his field as it invigorated the intuitive nature of his inquiries just as I learned to consider the input of professional colleagues as well as lay witnesses in bench trials as it invigorated my inquiries. Since contested child custody cases are tried without juries, the ultimate decision in each was mine. In arriving at my decisions, I did my best to not allow assumptions and previously formed beliefs (my own and those of others) to filter out the possibilities of what truth might turn out to be.
In the process, I discovered that, if I were to consider my heart’s input helpful, I had to purify my heart of my own grievances and not allow issues from my past or concerns about my future to taint my intuitions. I had to be fully, innocently present in Truth’s eternal “now” and focus there for the children’s sake. Moreover, I had to risk announcing decisions publicly and later take into account feedback presented in motions to reconsider filed publicly by those who disagreed. To point out “truth,” I stuck my neck out.
These experiences taught me the vital importance of motivation and humility as qualities of truth-seeking. Were those offering input (memories, observations, opinions and arguments) motivated by self-interest or by service to others? Were we protecting our pride or protecting defenseless others? How humbling this grand quest turned out to be! Not necessarily what we expect it to be, Truth has a life of its own, gliding into our awareness on twin rails of honesty and tolerance resting on ties of trust. Truth is a continuous mystery towards which we can approach most nearly by setting aside our personal self-interests as we serve the interests of others.
If children were to experience justice, truth had to prevail. As resolutely as I could, I cultivated patience, listened attentively, took notes, heard all sides out fully, pondered and eventually, as the last one to speak, shared what I’d discerned as reasonedly as I could – while not necessarily being able to avoid wounding someone’s pride. Neither pride nor shame – mine or that of others – justified failing the children. Often my decisions did not make me popular – mostly because truth is not popular in our society, especially among those in power within the status quo.
Truth upsets competitive social dynamics by which winners are sorted from losers because its non-dualistic nature thrives amid developments that may offer other options. It alters things just as growth alters things. It cannot be boxed within fixed, conformist parameters because its paradoxical nature defies boxes. Truth knows it’s possible for all of us to flourish.
I discovered the theoretical and applied dynamic of Truth-receptivity by accident. Now I practice it intentionally. Because of my acquired taste for it, I enjoy it in solitude, often alone while yearning to share it. In solitude and Oneness with Truth’s Source, I sense within Nature (human nature, too!) evidence of its creativity, beauty, grace and love. I’ve come to trust Truth-receptivity as our most promising orientation, although currently it has the same unpopularity as other controversial orientations.
Truth can be tentatively identified and honored as beneficially nearby and yet remain in the main a mystery. It emerges shyly from the Dark Forest of the perennial unknown, wary of aggressive trophy hunters. Fears – of the unknown and others – can cloud our vision of it. To serve future generations with a clarifying vision, we must overcome our fears and set aside our fear-formed egos. We must become sensitive and vulnerable, opening both our hearts and our minds to Truth, receiving it as a benevolent stranger who becomes our generous benefactor.
In a conformist, dualistic culture, divergent orientations are resisted as intolerably aberrant. Humanity needs an alternative culture within which to root the societies and other networks of relationships we form. In that culture, Truth is our ally not our enemy. In that healthier culture, Truth is the soil amid which each Tree of Life draws nourishment, bears nutritious fruit and provides safe nesting places for all.
Although I followed a serious path to encounter It, Truth is also joyful. It dances to a wide variety of music while celebrating the eternal presence of composers and lyricists within their compositions. It comforts us while we grieve and ultimately relieves our grief. Trusting it sets us free to enjoy being ourselves. Someday we will play host to Truth together while through every tender heart – into every open mind – wisdom’s counsel freely flows.