Friday Reflection: A Force for Healing

I read Time's excerpt from Al Gore's new book, The Assault on Reason, and my eyes filled with tears of fury, so lucid and wise is his voice. He was supposed to be our President: we elected him. So I say to every one of those Supreme Court justices who voted Bush into office against the will of the American people, and to every mass media pundit and faux-journalist who cheerleaded for Bush (you'll find them listed here): history will condemn you far more than I can here. You have the blood of countless human lives and the stench of a corrupted democracy on your hands. Simply because you refused to do your jobs.

Here's a small slice of the excerpt from Gore's book:

Our Founders' faith in the viability of representative democracy rested on their trust in the wisdom of a well-informed citizenry, their ingenious design for checks and balances, and their belief that the rule of reason is the natural sovereign of a free people. The Founders took great care to protect the openness of the marketplace of ideas so that knowledge could flow freely. Thus they not only protected freedom of assembly, they made a special point—in the First Amendment—of protecting the freedom of the printing press. And yet today, almost 45 years have passed since the majority of Americans received their news and information from the printed word. Newspapers are hemorrhaging readers. Reading itself is in decline. The Republic of Letters has been invaded and occupied by the empire of television.

Radio, the Internet, movies, cell phones, iPods, computers, instant messaging, video games and personal digital assistants all now vie for our attention—but it is television that still dominates the flow of information. According to an authoritative global study, Americans now watch television an average of 4 hours and 35 minutes every day—90 minutes more than the world average. When you assume eight hours of work a day, six to eight hours of sleep and a couple of hours to bathe, dress, eat and commute, that is almost three-quarters of all the discretionary time the average American has.

In the world of television, the massive flows of information are largely in only one direction, which makes it virtually impossible for individuals to take part in what passes for a national conversation. Individuals receive, but they cannot send. They hear, but they do not speak. The "well-informed citizenry" is in danger of becoming the "well-amused audience." Moreover, the high capital investment required for the ownership and operation of a television station and the centralized nature of broadcast, cable and satellite networks have led to the increasing concentration of ownership by an ever smaller number of larger corporations that now effectively control the majority of television programming in America.

Friday Reflection: A Force for Healing

The source of this week's banner quote would be completely opaque to all but a few specialists, so it may have been a bit unfair to put it up there. The writer is Cheng Yi, an 11th century commentator on the ancient Chinese oracle book, the I Ching. It's proof again that, millennium to millennium, human folly is so constant as to be thoroughly predictable.

The quote in our banner is from Cheng Yi's commentary to Hexagram 7, "The Army":

The course pursued by the army basically should be correct; if you raise an army and mobilize troops in a cause that is not right but just causes the country trouble, the people do not really obey, they are just coerced. Therefore, the guiding principle of the army should be uprightness. But even if the army acts in the right way, the leaders must be mature to obtain good results...If those who are to lead a group are not respected, trusted...how can they get the people to follow willingly? (from Cheng Yi, The Tao of Organization, translated by Thomas Cleary).

The reason that such a message resonates today goes beyond the obvious reference to the misuse of military force. Cheng Yi's warning is a call to every kind of leader--corporate leaders, heads of government, mass media pundits, and of course, military officers. It is a reminder to each of these that, as a leader—whether of people, institutions, or opinion—you are responsible for more than your in-group--your staff, your squad, your stockholders, your advertisers, or your political base or party. You are responsible to a whole that includes and surpasses you, your group, and its mission, however expansive and noble that mission may appear.

There is also a message within the I Ching about a personal use of its insight. The army, for example, can be conceived and felt as a principle of protection within the living personality, distinct to each individual. The best leaders are able to inspire such a personal meaning of their vision, a meaning that is unique to every person who hears it. This, indeed, is how true unity and real motivation are achieved in an organization: through the freedom that is given to the individual to respond to a group message with his unique understanding, and thus add vibrancy and energy to the whole. In my book, Drinking From the Darkness: Living Completely in a Time of Estrangement, I offered two examples of such a message--one from the I Ching, and another from one of the great teachers of modern times.



A Cry in the Wilderness: Ancient and Modern

[The healing of our society] cannot be done all at once—to even entertain such an expectation would be to open the door to despair. Our generation must begin the work of recovery with a resolute cry in the wilderness—the kind of firm and clarion call that induces the sanity of silence. The ancient Chinese oracle, the I Ching, contains a description of such a cry for the freezing of ignorance in its 43rd hexagram, titled “Resoluteness/Breakthrough”:

BREAKTHROUGH. One must resolutely make the matter known
At the court of the king.
It must be announced truthfully. Danger.
It is necessary to notify one’s own city.
It does not further to resort to arms.
It furthers one to undertake something.
(from the Richard Wilhem/Carey Baynes translation)

There is a beautiful sense of urgency in this poem, written some five thousand years ago, which can be read at both the societal and the personal level. At the societal level, the cry of “Danger!” and the need for truthfulness in “notifying one’s own city” while avoiding the impulse to opposition or violence (“it does not further to resort to arms”) remind me of the message of another eloquent writer of more recent times:

Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. Never again can we afford to live with the narrow, provincial “outside agitator” idea. Anyone who lives inside the United States can never be considered an outsider anywhere within its bounds.

These are the words of Martin Luther King, Jr., written from a jail cell in Birmingham, Alabama in 1963. He and his ancient counterpart, King Wu of China (the man traditionally credited with having written the I Ching), both endured personal danger and frequent imprisonment for their resolute cries of truth “at the court of the king.” Both were men of spiritual insight and teachers of mindfulness in living; both believed that violence was a resort that “does not further”—as Dr. King said in accepting his 1964 Nobel Peace Prize, “nonviolence is the answer to the crucial political and moral questions of our time: the need for man to overcome oppression and violence without resorting to violence and oppression.”

Less than five years after writing the Letter from the Birmingham Jail, Martin Luther King, Jr. was murdered—perhaps, it must be said, executed—and his voice was stilled. But not silenced: others have, and will, “resolutely make the matter known” before the court of Institutional Authority—in the presence of the world and to all the people who are awake enough to hear and respond. Dr. King’s life and message will enduringly have the deepest, most resonant meaning to people living amid estrangement, because he chose to speak and to act from his heart—his true and undying spark from the fire of the Universe—with the force of insight and clarity, rather than of weaponry and oppression. This, too, is where we can begin, where we must begin.

Friday Reflection: On the Delusion of Evil

We have a quote of the week (well, I think it's funny)—from the head of the World Wildlife Fund, a Super Bowl prediction:

"Bears would likely win any encounter in the wild, but that's only if they could catch the colts," said WWF's president and CEO Carter Roberts. "And there's always a chance that a bear wouldn't come out of hibernation, which would cause them to forfeit any match."

______________________

Friday Reflection: Evil, Spelled Backward

The other day, in what I thought at the time was a very cleverly written piece, I declared that Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld are "black-hearted, soul-dead, bloodsucking evil." This, I now feel, was a woeful error on my part.

Well, are they? If we asked their children or their wives, what answer would we get? And when we say they are evil, what power does that give them that they do not by nature have? What is the effect of such a statement?

When I turn within and answer these questions honestly, I realize how foolish I am. For to impute evil on another is not merely inaccurate, it is impractical. It gives him power that, superadded to the power he imagines that he has, forces him completely outside the realm of humanity; it makes him into a symbol rather than a man. Presidents can be impeached; their cronies can also be forced out of office; but a symbol, an idea, can only be brought down within the individual self. When we call another evil, we descend to the same image-making that makes a tyranny work. George Bush turned Osama and al Qaeda into symbols of Evil Incarnate, and thus justified one of the more hideous and misbegotten wars of our generation.

But it seems such a relentlessly inevitable conclusion, that these old and weak white men who are responsible for the needless death and disfigurement of hundreds of thousands of innocents, should be called Evil. Can there be any other reasonable conclusion? Yes: that they are sick—desperately ill, drained of feeling and of simple animal awareness. They are not living Satans, but merely failures, a few small and regressive steps in the evolutionary sphere. Great as their crimes may be, they are themselves just a few diseased men who need to be released from the bonds of power and given psychological treatment.

Thus, it is time for me to clearly admit my mistake, while it is still small. Yet there is another lesson in this, I feel, which may reach beyond my own personal weakness. As this year progresses and the election season heats up, we may wish to recall this lesson.

Be very careful how you choose your leaders: just one bad choice can be disastrous. One walking dead can open many graves. Leave the door to darkness ajar, and the light will waver. One diseased mind can spread much contagion, if it is allowed power or privilege. Anyone who tells you—no matter his party affiliation or national allegiance—that to lead is to hold power is not a leader, but an infestation.

What must we demand of a true leader? Above all, humility. Not humility before wealth or power or an external God of vengeance; but humility before Nature and before the people.

Another thing to seek in your leaders is clarity. This is the sense for truth that feels past the apparent and sees beyond the present. This is not the myopic vision of a corporate CEO and his five-year plan. No: clarity is the perspective that draws upon the insight of each part within the whole, and allows that synergy to become the lantern that guides the nation or the organization, rather than the distorted glare from a book of doctrine or a boardroom obsession.

This message will, of course, go unheeded in the mass media and the various institutions that aggrandize the superficial. But today it's just us, a few individuals meeting over an online connection in a remote corner of the blogosphere. We can scratch the surface, we can gaze past the spin.

To that end, it is my own personal practice to rely on the old Chinese oracle, the I Ching, to see what insight it may have for the moment. Here is the message I received on this very point of evil, leadership, and power:

PREPONDERANCE OF THE SMALL. Success.
Perseverance furthers.
Small things may be done; great things should not be done.
The flying bird brings the message:
It is not well to strive upward,
It is well to remain below.
Great good fortune.

Line 2: Six in the second place means:
She passes by her ancestor
And meets her ancestress.
He does not reach his prince
And meets the official.
No blame.

Line 4: Nine in the fourth place means:
No blame. He meets him without passing by.
Going brings danger. One must be on guard.
Do not act. Be constantly persevering.

"To strive upward" is to fall into the trap of power and the obsession with its symbols. The second line shows us how, when we run from belief to belief, from one figurehead to the next, we always fall short of what is truly a leader ("the prince") and are stuck again and again with "the official," the vapid institutional figurehead of power. Going thus, as the fourth line states, "brings danger."

The oracle's message on this point concludes with a ringing reminder to the voter, the citizen, to each unique individual whose inner leader is alive and intact: be on your guard; do not act with the crowd; persevere within yourself to reach a broader understanding that surpasses what you are told by a group pundit or an institutional lackey.

The true leader, both within the self and among the people, recognizes that it "is not well to strive upward, but to remain below." This is the same message that Lao Tzu offered leaders of his time, two and a half millennia past:

Like water is the Cosmic Consciousness:
It nourishes the depths of everything that lives.
It flows, it settles, it abides in low places.

Keep your home close to the earth,
Keep your thoughts direct and simple,
Keep judgment fair, and fluid in conflict,
Keep your government free of power,
And your personal affairs in harmony
With the life of Nature.

Drop the struggle, silence the demons,
And your natural self will be free.

___________________________________

Bet you thought I missed it, eh? Six and a half months to go, give or take a week....According to Mugglenet, it's already the top seller at B&N online and Amazon. Click the graphic to pre-order it...it's an affiliate link, which means you'll also be helping us to pay the rent with our host.

The Time To Be "Firm As A Rock"

Here amid the Karl Rove parallel reality, we have been trained to detest truth. Or at least to genetically modify it, which to my mind is saying the same thing. Remember, for example, that ABC "docu-drama" about 9/11? Or any of the swift-boating campaigns against John Kerry, Max Cleland, and various others? Or the Pentagon's docu-drama on the death of Pat Tillman?

Well, John Rolfe of SI, one of those extraordinary sportswriters with a gravel-tipped pen, as it were, has exposed the sports version of this surreal trend in journalism. Rolfe has written a bristling article on a piece of "reality fiction" about Mickey Mantle, which is to be published by none other than Judy Regan of recent FOX / OJ infamy. It gets really fun when Rolfe offers a selection from his own "reality novel" on the late Yankees manager, Billy Martin. This scene is from a conversation the author has with #1 as the latter arrives back from Limbo:

Martin settled into a chair by the window and fished a cigar from his jacket pocket. "Mind if I smoke? I love a good cheroot, but St. Pete won't let you light up unless you go outside. Damned cosmic winds keep blowing your match out. I tried going down to the Other Place and your matches sure stay lit, but you can't hear yourself think from all the hammering and electric saws. Halliburton's building an extension on the place..."

"So why have you've come to tell me all your darkest secrets?"

"Good deed. Earn some brownie points. Figured you could use a hand, put the 'truth' in a novel, make heap big scratch. You got kids. I hear tuition's a killer these days."

"So is the price of a red Ferrari. Fess up."

"My brawlin' tough-guy stuff was just an act. It got out of control after the fight at my birthday party at the Copacabana in 1957. Hank Bauer just had to have that last goody bag and I stuck my nose in to stay tight with the team. After that, I had to keep fighting to save my jobs. Heck, I'm a sensitive guy at heart. I liked poetry, puppies, decorating cookies, barbershop quartets. Sheez. I even cried easy. Managed to keep a lid on it until I broke down in K.C. in '78...."

Read the rest of it here.

_________________________

I was thinking today about how difficult it is to avoid becoming an asshole when you work in corporate America. You know, when you swim in a toxic pool, the poison inevitably becomes a part of you. I am honestly more afraid of that than I am of losing my job and being materially impoverished. What is there left to lose after you lose your self, after you are assimilated?

Right there, in the Wintergarden of the World Financial Center in New York City, that fear took hold of me. So I did what I often do in such moments: I threw some coins. I used to worry about people watching and what they'd think, but I'm too old to care anymore.

I tossed Hexagram 16, "Enthusiasm" from the I Ching, with the second line changing. It taught me what I needed to know about holding to my true self amid corporate America, and I'm also hoping it may serve to teach all of us what we must do to help our country at a time when it is threatened to the core by a maniacal set of tyrants who are dragging us further into distant wars and global death.

Firm as a rock. Not a whole day. Perseverance brings good fortune.

Here's the commentary to that line, from Carol Anthony and Hanna Moog, in I Ching: The Oracle of the Cosmic Way:

"Firm as a rock" refers to the inner No that needs to be said to displays of ego...This line warns the person who is tempted to tolerate ego-behavior...[that] it is a form of magnificence (a false enthusiasm)..."Not a whole day" refers to saying the inner No at the first sign of ego's appearance. Depending on the circumstances, the No can also be an outer No...It is "No" to the other's transgression against oneself, or to his false expectations...If the person does not say the inner No when ideas are false, they enter the unconscious by default and become part of his inner program.

Perhaps you have occasionally had the feeling that someone is attacking you, though there is no obvious physical or even verbal threat in the vicinity. That's your true self with its radar fully extended, catching poisonous airwaves from someone or something. It happens in our work, family, and personal lives; I suspect it happens in a nation's life, as in right now.

But if you haven't ever experienced such moments, I won't try and convince you that the sensation is both as natural and as genuine as hunger or sexual desire. Nevertheless, I think that six weeks ago, the people of this nation had such a moment, and they are seeing the actualization of the deeply-felt threat that guided them to vote the way they did. "Troop surge" is an attack on every American who voted with his and her heart last month, and chose a candidate who promised an end to troop surges and continued sacrifice and precision bombing campaigns.

Troop surge is a casting of more poison into the pool in which we all swim; sacrifice is a Roveian marketing term for the death by impoverishment of a once-great nation; and there is no such thing as precision bombing. It is all a lie, an oxymoron. You can target a bomb to hit a particular building, perhaps, but you can't tell the bomb, "kill the bad guys inside but spare the lady walking past the building with her young children." Bombs are designed to cause collateral damage; that is their purpose. In other words, they are made to kill indiscriminately, just as Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld have designed themselves to lie indiscriminately.

Now we know—most of us, anyway; and now something can be done. Be firm as a rock: don't let any corporation steal your true being; don't let any government steal your true nation, and sell it into a slavery of death. Be firm as a rock.

Friday Reflection: Life Beyond Belief

Before we get to our usual Friday fare, a brief update on the outcome of the effort to ban the Harry Potter literature in Georgia schools. Fortunately, the Georgia Board of Education has ruled out such a ban. That is, the books are staying in the school's library. There's an interesting footnote to that story:

J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter books, published by London-based Bloomsbury Publishing PLC, have been challenged 115 times since 2000, making them the most challenged texts of the 21st Century, according to the American Library Association.

Now this is the kind of ass-backwards, topsy-turvy morality that we live amid in the 21st century. Too often, it seems as if all that's light is made darkness; all that's right is made wrong. It is what very commonly happens with morality: when we carve the rules of belief and behavior into stone, then anything different or difficult to fit into the iron frame of morality must be deemed the work of the Demon. Fundamentalism operates on a false principle of division; its morality actually tends to bury our natural moral senses under a shroud of belief.

This, in fact, is one of the salient messages of our banner quote author for this week: she is a teacher of the I Ching, who (like J.K. Rowling) has written a series of books that contain a wealth of insight. Her name is Carol Anthony, and the quote in the banner comes from her first book, A Guide to the I Ching.

Anthony is one of my own teachers; much of what I write down in this space is drawn from my experiences in her workshops, seminars, and publications. In the same section of the Guide's text where our quote may be found, the following observations appear—think of the "Mission Accomplished" moment of the Bush presidency:

Good luck is the result of a humble and unassuming attitude toward the Unknown. The minute we congratulate ourselves on having good luck, it disappears. We may not presume on God, so to speak...When we depend on a situation in a presuming way, we may expect it to fail.

Anthony's work is loaded to the brim with acumen of this sort; my own copies of her works are scrawled throughout with underlining, notes, and exclamations. Her work will be found valuable to anyone with an interest in self-growth and the development of a lively inner life—no experience or even any particular interest in the I Ching or Taoist philosophy is required. Here's a list of her titles, all of which may be found here:

A Guide to the I Ching
Philosophy of the I Ching
Love, An Inner Connection
I Ching: The Oracle of the Cosmic Way (with Hanna Moog)

One of Anthony's most helpful teachings can also be found in the Guide, where she discusses the psychological basis of successful relationships of any kind. Here is an excerpt:

Conflict with others can generally be avoided at the beginning if we carefully determine fair and just terms. In business relationships the written contract serves this purpose, but contracts are reliable only if they correspond with what everyone, in his heart, would consider to be just.

As just contracts prove helpful in business relationships, thus do they also in marriage. To put that relationship on a firm footing one must take the time to allow an understanding of fair and just principles to develop. However, before we can successfully marry another, we must first marry ourself, for being true to ourself is the only basis for loyalty to others. Marrying oneself does not mean we rigidly hold to dogma or to belief systems; it means that it is our responsibility to be true to our inner feelings, and to our personal experiences of truth.

It is true love which gives space, which waits patiently, which perseveres without regard to self and reward, and which has nothing to do with surface manifestations, displays of affection, statements of love, or possession. Selfless love invisibly sustains another and pulls him toward the good within himself. It is a love whose only reward is privately to oneself; in maintaining it, we are at peace.

Carol Anthony and her teaching partner, Hanna Moog, still give regular seminars and workshops in the I Ching; if you're in New England or can travel to the Boston area anytime during the year, you may wish to see their teaching schedule for 2007—just visit their website. Their new book Healing Yourself the Cosmic Way is to be released next month.

The Courage of Retreat (and Geek Wednesday)

Before we get to Geek Wednesday, a few notes on the war and the maniacs running it from the safe distance of half a world away (I recall the Roger Waters song, "The Bravery of Being Out of Range").

First, click the graphic to watch Stewart and Oliver in another gut-busting moment of insight. Stewart reveals Rumsfeld in the same corporate-speak that we were discussing yesterday; and Oliver beautifully tilts the rhetoric onto its tail, thereby exposing the depravity of the delusion that has fueled this insanity.

Next, Code Pink delivers this firm and clear message on the vapid reality of the Iraq Study Group (click the link to add your voice to theirs):

In the 1968 presidential campaign Richard Nixon promised to end the war in Vietnam, but would not tell anyone exactly he would do it. In as many words this came to be known as his "secret plan." Yet, after his election the war still dragged on for another five years with 20,000 more American deaths and 100,000 wounded.

Now along comes the Iraq Study Group supposedly with a plan for extricating ourselves from the strategic disaster in Iraq, if not the moral one. And let us be not deceived, their proposals will make no meaningful difference whatsoever in really bringing the troops home. John Murtha, who so far has only spoken out for redeployment (something short of immediate withdrawal), has said he believes they represent no actual change of policy. They are just kicking the can of casualties down the road and trying to fool us into thinking they might in fact leave.

Every military historian and tactician worth his salt knows that retreat takes more courage than does attack. Think of those moments in your own life where you had to step back rather than move aggressively forward: didn't it test every ounce of energy and resolve that you had? The ancient Chinese knew this very well—just read Sun Tzu, or the 33rd Hexagram of the I Ching:

RETREAT. Success. In what is small, perseverance furthers.

Conditions are such that the hostile forces favored by the time are advancing. In this case retreat is the right course, and it is not to be confused with flight. Flight means saving oneself under any circumstances, whereas retreat is a sign of strength.

____________________________

Geek Wednesday

Before we get to the goofy, meaningless stuff, our thoughts go out to the family of C-Net editor James Kim, and our hopes that he is found alive and safe. I have had abundant praise for the geek press in general, and the quality of C-Net's and Kim's work is what distinguishes the geek media and places it so far above the network MSM for the quality of its journalism and its unflinching adherence to the search for truth (if you'd like an example, just read their story on Bush's privacy oversight commission). Let's all hope that Mr. Kim is returned safe and sound to his family.


Can anyone tell me what exactly is wrong with Google these days? Have Page and Brin been spending time at Redmond, or is this what happens when your stock price goes over $500 per share? Whatever, Blogger Beta is a piece of Microsoft-style ordure: I've been struggling with failed uploads, vapid error messages, image corruption, and generally batty, turgid behavior on Blogger's part since I moved to the new beta version. We are currently working on a migration to Movable Type, which isn't as easy as you might think. We've got our own Nearly Redmond Nick on the case, so I am confident of a good result.

But I had kind of gotten used to Google beta that worked as well or better than Microsoft production releases, so I'm a little confused at the performance of Blogger these days. If you've had any wacky experiences with Blogger Beta, post them in the comments, and maybe the boys from Stanford will take note and shake a leg.

Ars Technica has a roundup of system upgrades and purchase possibilities, just in time for the holiday (oops, sorry BillO—I mean, Xmas) shopping season.
But it all may have been changed by the release of AMD's new 65nm chip. Keep an eye out in the next few weeks for PCs sporting this new processor. And as always, the thing to do in buying expensive tech gear is to wait until after the New Year for the best deals on the greatest gadgets.

Why does Apple shrink from surveys that show its products appeal to us older folks? Could it be that we live in a culture so obsessed with youth and its imitation that to be merely statistically associated with the over-50 set is an abomination? Get real, Steve: the baby-boomers constitute the prime market of the decade, and the one to come. Of course us oldsters favor Apple hardware and Mac OS X: we've lived long enough to tell the soil from the shit.

And let's not leave out our buddy Gates (no, not the one the Senate confirmed today for the post-Rummy Defense job): Vista is out and no one cares. One of the last things I did at my AIG desktop before I got booted out of there was to run the Vista upgrade advisor on a Dell 2.4 GHz P4 with 1GB of RAM and onboard Intel video, and I found out that Vista wouldn't play nicely. For one thing, I didn't have enough disk space on the box: Vista needs 15GB (compare that to 3 GB for Mac OS X Tiger), and Vista demands a video card with 128MB of VRAM and a dedicated sound card.

But surely the upgrade to Office 2007 is worth a play? Um...no—not according to geeks who know better.

Finally, I'm back in the saddle reviewing sites for the next Webby Awards. I'll be offering some impressions of this year's batch of sites in the coming weeks. The early returns are telling me that some things just don't change: Flash media continues to be overused, abused, and played into the ground on the web. Maybe they should have a category for "worst web design". There would be lots of candidates: PC World found 25 of them. I'll be picking some out of my Webby pile, and you're welcome to add your suggestions to the comments.

Make it a Blue Friday

Why is it called Black Friday, and what's the harm, after all, in getting something on the cheap and saving a little hard-earned cash? I offered some explanation on these points in last year's post on this topic. So instead of repeating myself, here are a few alternatives for action or observance on Black Friday.

◊ Adbusters is suggesting a "Buy Nothing Day" for this weekend. I'm personally not in favor of this sort of token restraint, because it tends to make the responding activity of catch-up acquisition so much the more feverish—like dieters who starve themselves for a day or two and then gorge the next, accomplishing nothing in all. But if this kind of a demonstration feels natural to you, the way walking in a protest march instead of going to a baseball game would, then go for it, and never mind what anyone else has to say about it. Generally, I'd be more in favor of recommending a life-review of sorts that encompasses a policy of reflection ahead of gathering. Life, after all, is not meant to be lived hermetically or ascetically; just practically. True prosperity is to life as health is to the body: a well-being that extends outward, and benefits the whole through the enrichment of the individual. Your material life is not separate from its cosmic source. Before you buy, remember the planet, the next generation, and most of all, your true self. You will consistently make good decisions when you do that.

◊ Watch this film (yes, you can buy it on "Buy Nothing Day" if you don't already have the dvd). It's called "The Corporation", and is worth viewing. It's entertaining, informative, a little scary, but nonetheless inspiring. It will also put a lot of things in perspective for you about Black Friday and the great grab in general.

◊ Buy the way you vote. If you read this blog regularly, it's a fair assumption that you generally voted along with the majority of the American people a few weeks back. Consider every purchase you make a vote on the future of democracy, our nation, and the planet we live on. This message is very thoroughly delivered at Buy Blue, a website that can show you which companies and products deserve (or not) your business, based on their level of social commitment as measured by such things as PAC contributions, affiliations, and community programs. They have a very good directory of companies and product categories, which can help you make purchasing decisions that accord with your social values while also accomplishing the other objective of shopping.

◊ Change the form of government within yourself. You know the government in Washington needs changing; what about the governance of your self? Corporations and their media and advertising arms too easily sway us, too smoothly govern us. As the film I recommended above points out, this is the result of billions of dollars of research, technology, and marketing. Make it your job to resist that attempt at an insidious psychological tyranny. This is one of the messages of our banner quote of the week, which was written somewhere between three and five thousand years ago. It's from the I Ching, the ancient Chinese oracle and insight guide that I rely on in my private counseling practice and my personal life as well. The translation in our quote is from the traditional Wilhelm rendering, which is beginning to show its age (it was done in German in 1923; in English in 1950). I'd suggest something like the following, which I think may deliver a more contemporary meaning of the text:

Revolution. At the right time, your true self leads, and is trusted. Persevere in this, and success arrives and grows. Guilt is thus dispersed...Changing the form of the government within brings good and lasting fortune.

The people who wrote the I Ching lived through times of turmoil, oppression, and gross violence and inequality not unlike our own. They knew that the social order could never be transformed without a corresponding change within enough free individuals to truly make a difference. So they recommended a trust in oneself rather than a belief in some new system of politics, religion, or societal conditioning. Throughout its text, the book urges perseverance, and with good reason. They knew that a successful life—one in accord with Nature and with truly human values—requires consistent effort and regular self-examination. This is the point of a personal oracle: you ask questions of it, and in doing so you make a connection with a broader, more encompassing perspective than you would get from focusing solely on parochial interests or the dictates of advertisers and media pundits. That connection is not separate from you, nor does it comprise an appeal to an external authority or a distant deity. It is rather a connection made between the person you truly are and the universe whose breath is your own being. To understand this and to create this connection within your daily life is to turn away from the corporate delusion and toward reality—to open the pathway to a "daily revolution", if you will.

And now you know how the name of this little blog came to be.

_____________________________________

If you'd like to learn more about the I Ching, you can have a look at the various resources at my Learning the Basics page, or check out some of the sites noted at the top of my Links page.