beauty is authenticity authenticity beauty

RE-EVOLUTION

…as at the beginning of each day…

…as a world a RE_EVOLUTION is necessary,

new myths are needed to put an end to the repetitive cycles of stuckness, be it:

war, poverty, pollution, race-relations, human relations, house economic, sacredness, relation to nature,…etc (lots of ghosts in-there, in the human mental closet).

…a RE_EVOLUTION of CONCIOUSNESS…

GUESS WHAT?!…NO need to go very far…

IT BEGINS AT HOME!  Wow!………………..

…fatalistic or not…

-yes i have heard that it is written. “mektoub”…god’s plan is in place…god’s will…there has to be possibilities in god’s will. What we see happening is so vast and complex, thus it is easy to let a true captain take charge and pilot the boat.  

Yet i am made of beliefs some good and some not so good. These either keep us in balance or not.  If i already know what an outcome will be, no need to open wider to the wind of possibilities.  Telling my mind what to expect and see, there you have it- destiny, “i told you so!”.   

There has to be a level of trust in life that opens more doors all the times. If one is open to this wind of possibilities, without any presets of the mind, new solutions are born, there is freshness all the time, and we are open to the unknown as possible.  

It is when we give up searching that we find.  If the God’s we create resemble us, why would we want a God that is in control of everything?  Out of fear we want to control. Why would God not do such a wise thing as letting go!  ”Let go and let God” could read… “me let go and me be in God”. Being outside of being is not living.  Separation kills… yet we need to experience separation in order to return to the circle.  Oneness is diversity

TO BE HAPPY in LIFE:

1. show up
2. pay attention 
3. let go of expectations

The Tyranny of Entitlement

The Tyranny of Entitlement

A lesson in limits

BY DERRICK JENSEN

Published in the January/February 2011 issue of Orion magazine

I’M CONTINUALLY stunned by how many seemingly sane people believe you can have infinite economic growth on a finite planet. Perpetual economic growth and its cousin, limitless technological expansion, are beliefs so deeply held by so many in this culture that they often go entirely unquestioned. Even more disturbing is the fact that these beliefs are somehow seen as the ultimate definition of what it is to be human: perpetual economic growth and limitless technological expansion are what we do.

Some of those who believe in perpetual growth are out-and-out nut jobs, like the economist and former White House advisor Julian Simon, who said, “We have in our hands now—actually in our libraries-—the technology to feed, clothe, and supply energy to an ever-growing population for the next 7 billion years.” And showing that, when it comes to U.S. economic policies, insanity is never out of season, are yet more nut jobs, like Lawrence Summers, who has served as chief economist at the World Bank, U.S. secretary of the treasury, president of Harvard, and as President Obama’s director of the National Economic Council, and who said, “There are no … limits to the carrying capacity of the earth that are likely to bind at any time in the foreseeable future… . The idea that we should put limits on growth because of some natural limit is a profound error.”

Others are a bit more nuanced in their nut-jobbery. They may acknowledge that, yes, physical limits might possibly exist, but they also believe that if you just slap the word sustainable in front of the phrase “economic growth,” then you can still somehow have continued growth on a finite planet, perhaps through so-called “soft” or “service” or “high-tech” economies, or through nifty “green” innovations like a really neat nanotech gizmo that can be woven into your clothes and when you dance it generates enough electricity to power your iPod, ignoring the facts that people still need to eat, that humans have overshot carrying capacity and are systematically destroying the natural world, and that even something as groovy as an iPod requires mining, industrial, and energy infrastructures, all of which are functionally unsustainable.

Alongside the nut jobs, there are an awful lot of people who probably just don’t think about it: they simply absorb the perspective of the newscasters who say, “Economic growth, good; economic stagnation, bad.” And of course if you care more about the economic system than life on the planet, this is true. If, however, you care more about life than the economic system, it is not quite so true, because this economic system must constantly increase production to grow, and what, after all, is production? It is the conversion of the living to the dead, the conversion of living forests into two-by-fours, living rivers into stagnant pools for generating hydroelectricity, living fish into fish sticks, and ultimately all of these into money. And what, then, is gross national product? It is a measure of this conversion of the living to the dead. The more quickly the living world is converted into dead products, the higher the GNP. These simple equations are complicated by the fact that when GNP goes down, people often lose jobs. No wonder the world is getting killed.

Once a people have committed (or enslaved) themselves to a growth economy, they’ve pretty much committed themselves to a perpetual war economy, because in order to maintain this growth, they will have to continue to colonize an ever-wider swath of the planet and exploit its inhabitants. I’m sure you can see the problem this presents on a finite planet. But in the short run, there is good news for those committed to a growth economy (and bad news for everyone else), which is that by converting your landbase into weapons (for example, cutting down trees to build warships), you gain a short-term competitive advantage over those peoples who live sustainably, and you can steal their land and overuse it to fuel your perpetual-growth economy. As for those whose land you’ve stolen, well, you can either massacre these newly conquered peoples, enslave them, or (most often forcibly) assimilate them into your growth economy. Usually it’s some combination of all three. The massacre of the bison, to present just one example, was necessary to destroy the Plains Indians’ traditional way of life and force them to at least somewhat assimilate (and become dependent upon the growth economy instead of the land for their very lives). The bad news for those committed to a growth economy is that it’s essentially a dead-end street: once you’ve overshot your home’s carrying capacity, you have only two choices: keep living beyond the means of the planet until your culture collapses; or proactively elect to give up the benefits you gained from the conquest in order to save your culture.

A perpetual-growth economy is not only insane (and impossible), it is also by its very essence abusive, by which I mean that it’s based on the same conceit as more personal forms of abuse. It is, in fact, the macroeconomic enshrinement of abusive behavior. The guiding principle of abusive behavior is that the abuser refuses to respect or abide by limits or boundaries put up by the victim. As Lundy Bancroft, former codirector of Emerge, the nation’s first therapeutic program for abusive men, writes, “Entitlement is the abuser’s belief that he has a special status and that it provides him with exclusive rights and privileges that do not apply to his partner. The attitudes that drive abuse can largely be summarized by this one word.”

The relevance of this word applies on the larger social scale. Of course humans are a special species to whom a wise and omnipotent God has granted the exclusive rights and privileges of dominion over this planet that is here for us to use. And of course even if you subscribe to the religion of Science instead of Christianity, humans possess special intelligence and abilities that grant us exclusive rights and privileges to work our will on the world that is still here for us to use. Growth economies are essentially unchecked and will push past any boundaries set up by anyone other than the perpetrators: certainly the fact that indigenous cultures already are living on this or that piece of ground has never stopped those in power from expanding their economy; nor is the death of the oceans stopping their exploitation; nor is the heating of the planet stopping the exploitation; nor is the grinding poverty of the dispossessed.

And the truth is, you cannot talk abusers out of their behavior. Perpetrators of domestic violence are among the most intractable of all who commit violence, so intractable, in fact, that in 2000 the United Kingdom removed funding for therapy sessions designed to treat men guilty of domestic violence (putting the money instead into shelters and other means of keeping women safe from their attackers). Lundy Bancroft also says this: “An abuser doesn’t change because he feels guilty or gets sober or finds God. He doesn’t change after seeing the fear in his children’s eyes or feeling them drift away from him. It doesn’t suddenly dawn on him that his partner deserves better treatment. Because of his self-focus, combined with the many rewards he gets from controlling you, an abuser changes only when he feels he has to, so the most important element in creating a context for change in an abuser is placing him in a situation where he has no other choice.”

How do we stop the abusers who perpetrate a perpetual-growth economy? Seeing oiled pelicans and burned sea turtles won’t move them to stop. Nor will hundred-degree days in Moscow. We can’t stop them by making them feel guilty. We can’t stop them by appealing to them to do the right thing. The only way to stop them is to make it so they have no other choice. 

la nymphose : période pendant laquelle la chenille se transforme en papillon

…Andrée was an active person, she climbed daily to the forth floor of a Paris apartment [these apartments were built without elevators]. 4 flights of stairs is like leaping on a high cliff to nest. I feel like i live in a swallow’s nest. Remember the mud nests you see on the walls of canyons as you take a walk along the arroyos. Paris is after all made of canyons. Mostly the façades of the building reach a height of 8 stories.

It is an ant’s life. It feels so when you step underground into the metro. Living in quarters that give you across the wall of an other building can be brutal and a bit depressing, especially if it is the undecorated back side carrying all the mechanical elements and utilities.  But here the front of the apartment looks over a small plaza, the apartments across are over half a football field away. and trees are in the foreground. This makes it pleasant and spacious. 

History of the company we now call BP…

The history of the company we now call BP has, over the last 100 years, traced the arc of transnational capitalism.  Its roots lie in the early years of the twentieth century when a wealthy bon vivant named William Knox D’Arcy decided, with encouragement from the British government, to begin looking for oil in Iran.  He struck a concession agreement with the dissolute Iranian monarchy, using the proven expedient of bribing the three Iranians negotiating with him. Under this contract, which he designed, D’Arcy was to own whatever oil he found in Iran and pay the government just 16% of any profits he made — never allowing any Iranian to review his accounting.  After his first strike in 1908, he became sole owner of the entire ocean of oil that lies beneath Iran’s soil.  No one else was allowed to drill for, refine, extract, or sell “Iranian” oil. ”Fortune brought us a prize from fairyland beyond our wildest dreams,” Winston Churchill, who became First Lord of the Admiralty in 1911, wrote later. “Mastery itself was the prize of the venture.” Soon afterward, the British government bought the D’Arcy concession, which it named the Anglo-Persian Oil Company.  It then built the world’s biggest refinery at the port of Abadan on the Persian Gulf.  From the 1920s into the 1940s, Britain’s standard of living was supported by oil from Iran.  British cars, trucks, and buses ran on cheap Iranian oil. Factories throughout Britain were fueled by oil from Iran. The Royal Navy, which projected British power all over the world, powered its ships with Iranian oil. After World War II, the winds of nationalism and anti-colonialism blew through the developing world.  In Iran, nationalism meant one thing: we’ve got to take back our oil.  Driven by this passion, Parliament voted on April 28, 1951, to choose its most passionate champion of oil nationalization, Mohammad Mossadegh, as prime minister.  Days later, it unanimously approved his bill nationalizing the oil company.  Mossadegh promised that, henceforth, oil profits would be used to develop Iran, not enrich Britain.  This oil company was the most lucrative British enterprise anywhere on the planet.  To the British, nationalization seemed, at first, like some kind of immense joke, a step so absurdly contrary to the unwritten rules of the world that it could hardly be real.  Early in this confrontation, the directors of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company and their partners in Britain’s government settled on their strategy: no mediation, no compromise, no acceptance of nationalization in any form. The British took a series of steps meant to push Mossadegh off his nationalist path. They withdrew their technicians from Abadan, blockaded the port, cut off exports of vital goods to Iran, froze the country’s hard-currency accounts in British banks, and tried to win anti-Iran resolutions from the U.N. and the World Court.  This campaign only intensified Iranian determination.  Finally, the British turned to Washington and asked for a favor: please overthrow this madman for us so we can have our oil company back. American President Dwight D. Eisenhower, encouraged by his Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, a lifelong defender of transnational corporate power, agreed to send the Central Intelligence Agency in to depose Mossadegh.  The operation took less than a month in the summer of 1953.  It was the first time the CIA had ever overthrown a government. At first, this seemed like a remarkably successful covert operation.  The West had deposed a leader it didn’t like, and replaced him with someone who would perform as bidden — Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi. From the perspective of history, though, it is clear that Operation Ajax, as the operation was code-named, had devastating effects.  It not only brought down Mossadegh’s government, but ended democracy in Iran.  It returned the Shah to his Peacock Throne.  His increasing repression set off the explosion of the late 1970s, which brought to power Ayatollah Khomeini and the bitterly anti-Western regime that has been in control ever since. The oil company re-branded itself as British Petroleum, BP Amoco, and then, in 2000, BP.  During its decades in Iran, it had operated as it pleased, with little regard for the interests of local people.  This corporate tradition has evidently remained strong.   Many Americans are outraged by the relentless images of oil gushing into Gulf waters from the Deepwater Horizon well, and by the corporate recklessness that allowed this spill to happen.  Those who know Iranian history have been less surprised.