I know I blindsided some people with the whole oil situation, so I thought it might be fair to share this, which is a good overview of the fundamentals. Just ignore the subtitles.  I’ll have the next thing before too long.

I keep wanting to say something about ‘current events’, or perhaps to be more clear, the ever accelerating deterioration of current events. But it’s a very difficult subject for me now.

But in practical fact, it may simply be too late to change anyone’s mind about anything, and even if they do, it may be too late for them to understand what needs to be done. And even if they do, if may be too late to actually do any of it. And even if it isn’t, what little can be done, may not matter much.

One of the hard truths of being a healer, no matter what kind of a healer you happen to be, is that you don’t fix problems without the cooperation of the involved party. It just doesn’t happen, and trying only drains and damages you, emotionally, spiritually and physically.

Too much of the world is simply not involved in fixing what is going on. They have opted out of that possibility and like I say, it may be too late for some people to opt back in. So trying to fix something beyond what little sphere of consent you happen to operate in, is probably a tragic mistake.

This is not fatalism, or pessimism or cynicism. It simply is what it is. There will be more than enough exceptions to prove the rule. Unless something dramatically changes the established pattern of human behavior in extremely short order, much of the world is simply going to die.

How much of our existing food supply is inextricably tied to our fossil energy outputs? Let’s be charitable and say 70%. It’s probably closer to 80 or 90 actually, at this point, but let’s just err on the side of optimism.

The most absolutely conservative estimates in terms of decline in oil fields that have passed peak say a 3% loss of output, year on year is what we can expect. We already have examples of super giant fields that are closer to 5-10% a year. But again, let’s just say 3%. And we’ll just forget about demand increase altogether, which would probably yield a year on year net-shortfall of more like 6%.

Again, the most wildly optimistic estimates have it that if we had a working alternative liquid fuel source today, and we committed to retrofitting our infrastructure completely to this new source, it would take about 20 years to ramp up to anything like today’s production levels.

And finally, let’s be really optimistic and say that we haven’t actually hit the back of the oil production curve yet, and we still have a couple years before we go over the decline cliff. This would be ignoring basically all the evidence since 2005 that indicates we have already peaked, but I’ll be generous.

So starting in a couple years time, we would have our 3% energy shortfall, and let us again say that optimistically, this shortfall is allocated evenly across all regions and all sectors of use. There’s not the slightest fucking chance of that, my friends, but let’s all try and sleep tonight, what do you say?

So that’s a 3% loss of energy inputs to all food production and distribution, everywhere, in the first year. And let’s pretend that this will be a totally linear impact and that supply chains will not simply collapse, that farmers will not simply go bankrupt and abandon their plots, that economic instability will not close borders, or any number of things. I think we’ve already seen how in a hyper connected global system that you cannot contain chaos, and indeed, it infects everything around it at the speed of light.

The relation of energy inputs to caloric production is a bit nebulous, but again, I think I’m being quite optimistic here: let’s just imagine in a perfect world that everyone simply reduces their net caloric intake by 3%. I know for myself, that I’ve probably done that in the last year already, just in terms of certain foods that are getting beyond the price range I’m comfortable with. It’s a trivial, and probably healthy, loss, which I could replace, if I felt like spending the extra money, but the bottom line is, I need to spend more ‘energy’ to stay in the same place. And if this effect is steady and cumulative, sooner or later I couldn’t. Imagine what those people rioting over tortillas or soybeans are thinking. same line, different points.

I’ll be fine. You’ll be fine. For awhile. But how many people in the world are living on the edge of starvation already? How many people die when you slice their caloric intake by just 3% ( and let’s just remember that it’s probably more like 6%, if you spread it evenly, and upwards of 20% if we admit that it will be concentrated in certain areas, at least at first ) ? We’ve got around 40 000 starvation deaths per day already.

Now let’s compound it. Because every year if we’re lucky, for the next ten-twenty years at least, those energy inputs will continue to fall. After ten years, you and everyone else has had your caloric intake reduced by upwards of 30%, and after 20 years, 60%. The average westerner/european can still live on this but much of the rest of the world is simply gone.

The world average caloric intake is currently about 2700 calories per day. 1500 is pushing it and 1200 is in starvation mode. This is not complex math. the best case is that hundreds of millions of marginally-fed people are wiped out, year on year, for about 15-20 years. the worst case is the population gets cut by about half in 6-7 years, and we bottom out some where around pre-green revolution levels.

I may be overestimating this, but I’m not completely wrong. Like I say, I’ve fudged all these numbers wildly in the positive direction. If I am just missing something, I’d sure like to hear how and why. please, be my guest…

I’m noticing a resurgence of interest these days in the whole counter-initiatory, gnostic paranoia, school of analysis out on the internets these days, and I suppose that’s natural when all the bleakest wet dreams of malthusians, libertarian psychotics and primitivists all appear to unfolding on schedule.

I can’t really point the finger, because I arguably played a major role in taking this stuff to another level. At least among left wing occultists, and spiritually minded social liberals. Let’s just call it the Jeff Wells school.

To me it’s just a bit of fun. Adds some color to the otherwise gut-wrenching parade of daily tragedies and cycling through the dukkha nanas of insight practice, so let us dance around a bit.

It’s important to remember that the core feature of gnosticism, at least the branch that concerns us here, is the predominance of dualistic themes of ignorance, and knowledge, evil and good, light and darkness, etc. The more modern re constructionist tendencies in the gnostic community tend more towards something that resembles mahayanna buddhism for Christians, only without the clear practice instructions, but that’s neither here nor there.

Historically gnosticism is absolutely and unequivocally an offshoot of the hellenistic philosophies. All you have to do is look at their terminology. “demiurgos” is straight out of platonism, for example. Their cosmology is likewise straight up neo-platonism, like most early Christianity. Modern scholarship leads us to believe that jesus himself was a hellenistic philosopher, not a judaic rabbi, or an independent flowering of some kind, so there’s no reason to think gnosticism is anything but another side branch of greek thought.

Where these derivations stray is that platonism doesn’t invest in dualism, which is basically a recipe for ideological trench warfare that goes nowhere. There is only the One, also known as the Good, and anything else is only absence of the good, or of oneness. There is no opposing force. Full stop.

So really the gnostic paranoid notion of evil, or the neo-traditionalist pattern of degeneration is only a perceptual phenomenon, not an actuality. Which is a safer and saner way of dealing with this stuff: as a perceptual filter, not an ontological reality.

To me, whether or not the most wildly depraved thing in the universe actually happens or not, is an open question. What isn’t open is whether or not people think that they happen, which in and of itself opens up some rather disturbing and interesting areas of inquiry. For instance: whether or not aliens actually exist, you have a profound number of people who really do think that aliens exist and interact with them, physically. That’s not a curiosity, it’s a psychic epidemic.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. I thought I’d spend a little time on a more top-down view of this then you usually get, and march it down through a few layers until we get to the ground level.

So we start with the one, also known as the good.  What makes things one unto themselves, and thus provides for their existence. What provides for existence is the highest good and hence the two terms are considered the same. And because it is “The One”, not “A One”, when you talk about it in this way, there is no other, and hence the one encompasses everything. Hence, everything is good. Period. It is the principle of absolute unity and non-duality.

Now, here’s where we get into gnostic territory: at some point the One decides to make something. Because it is the only thing that exists, and because it is good, it can only make something good, and can only use itself as a model for that making. It thus generates a copy of itself that will be the ‘idea in the mind of god’ that will serve as the model for creation itself, also known as the Logos, or the Word. In every case  of a rational principle at work there must be intent, which requires a model for actions, or the ideal goal, thus the model must precede the copy, which in this case means the One must precede the logos, and the logos must precede the creation of the material universe.

But a funny thing happens when the one does this: because it possesses the quality known as Ousia, it is fully transparent to itself, it can turn on itself and know itself in all ways ( this is the analogous principle to mindfulness in humans) and thus can lend all of it’s features to the model, with a major and profound exception: Because as soon as there are two things, the creator and the creation, there is no longer “The One”, but rather two things that are “ones-unto-themselves”, so to that extent, neither one of them is any longer the perfect one, or likewise, the perfect good, at least when regarded in this way.

From the first perspective, nothing has actually changed, and “The One” is still the same, and indeed, the one lacks any qualities that would allow it to change in any way, as any change can only deviate from perfection. Complex eh?

So from our second perspective, there are now two things: the transcendant maker, also known as the demiurge, and the first creation, also known as the logos. Both are subordinate to the one, and can thus both be regarded as creations of the one.

So even here, at this early stage, there is no dualism, but a trinity. The One, the demiurge, and the logos. And every further step from the perfect one, no matter how perfect of a copy it is, can only be less and less a perfect good, because each new thing only introduces new division and new disunity. Just as when the one tries to reproduce itself and loses the quality of perfect oneness, because every copy can theoretically reproduce everything except that which makes a thing what is it is unto itself, every copy is slightly distorted from its model. Thus, the farther you go down this chain of perception, the less good there is.

This is where we get the illusion of evil.

to be continued…

here’s another page out of the neoplatonist playbook:

in the works of Proclus, and psuedo-Dionysus, who was evidently a student of proclus, (and did us all the favor of injecting platonism into early christianity, thus preventing the collapse of christian metaphysics into incoherent gibberish for about a thousand years) there’s a lot of concern with correct naming.

What kind of naming? Divine naming. The names one ascribes to god. Both proclus and dionysus give a tremendous amount of effort to making sure that people know how to correctly name and conceive of the creator.

Now, at first glance, it’s hard to imagine why this might be important. Especially for jaded post-moderns like us who instinctively recoil from arbitrary labeling and controlling of definitions on the part of ‘authorities’. But there’s more to this than one might realise.

Now let’s remember that in the platonic schema, intelligibility is the bridge between soul and god. That reason and intellect in the highest sense is how the individual personality can come to know true being. So having incorrect, incoherent, or contradictory ideas can be a real problem. And the higher the station that these incorrect ideas occupy, the worse the problem gets.

For that reason, according to plato, in the republic, the worst possible thing that a person can do is hold false ideas about god. Because when you’re talking about god, you’re talking about the nature of ultimate reality, and thus whatever ideas happen to occupy this position will influence all the others. If you have an idea of god as cruel, capricious, arbitrary, as having contradictory qualities, as embodying principles that diminish the good, or the one, this can only reverberate down through one’s whole being.

In a lesser way, having incomplete or inaccurate notions of the one ( the preferred platonic term for god) can also cause confusion. So proclus and dionsysus both describe a descending chain of titles and attributes, down from the most perfect one-in-itself, to the transcendent maker, the logos, the holy trinity and whatnot. Each of these has appropriate uses and implications that follow from those uses, and all subordinate in their correct order to the one-in-itself. Treating them as interchangeable, or worse, identical, is asking for trouble. Just like any other sophisiticated technical field, theology requires a precise language and terminology and that terminology has to be used in the correct way. Just as scientific jargon cannot be thrown around arbitrarily, so too with theology. If, that is, you want to get the correct result.

Not doing so can only result in the kind of muddled mess that we experience now where you have every kind of half baked theology and wrong headed conception of ultimate reality imaginable. What do you suppose the implications are for all these fundamentalist christians, who think of their god as an immanent, vengeful all knowing father figure who observes and judges them at all times, and is gearing up to scourge the world with fire? Or daft neo-pagans, who somehow equate spirit with nature, which even real old time ‘pagans’ didn’t do, so far as we know. If that’s your understanding of ultimate reality, or the highest creative principle, then how does that affect your self image, your sense or purpose or responsibility, your use of reason, your emotional and spiritual maturity? It’s serious. This is the kind of sickness proclus and dionysus in particular, saw latent in religion, and hoped to avert. Neo-platonic notions of god were adopted by the early christian church, judaism/ kabbalah, and down through islam, bahaism, and even the more exotic branches of esoterism like hermeticism, which all together spawned what we think of as the western occult traditions. In one form or another they’ve all adopted the idea of god as the infinite unmanifest principle that provides for all existence, in the same manner as the platonic good.

You can find the analogous theological principle in buddhism, which has the noble eightfold path, as the road to liberation. What’s the first one…? Skillful views. Holding correct beliefs, because what you believe will determine everything you do, or think that you can do. So again, what you believe are the highest truths of reality, or not, make all the difference.

Some times the structure of my ideas gets a bit stifling, which is usually a sign that I’m getting off track, so let’s just do a little bit of stream of consciousness kinda thing to loosen up a bit.

I’ve been enjoying the work of pierre grimes rather a lot lately, and one of the cornerstones of his method, derived, one presumes, from the platonists and neoplatonists, is an involved process of dream interpretation, ( also, likewise, of daydreams, with a similar method).

It’s hard to distinguish too clearly between what he does and how, and what someone like like jung or freud was doing, except maybe that grimes is resolute in the conviction that the working of the mind are intelligible, and that there is an intelligible order to everything the mind does. The themes and motifs of the dream are always relevant to one’s present circumstances, and indicate where one might be blocked. Identifying these blockages, and the false beliefs that underpin them, are the ideal goal of the practice.

I know for myself that I’ve had several themes reoccur in my dreams for quite a few years now.  Some of them quite insistant, such as finding myself back in high school, while knowing full well that I had graduated. I had mostly presumed that these dreams reflected the resentment I had towards high school and the people in it ( especially the teachers), but I now find myself making plans to go to college, and needing to actually take some high school courses I didn’t bother with at the time to meet the entrance requirements. I could theoretically take them for free at the college itself, but it would conflict with my work schedule, so it seems I’ll be taking them in the evening at an actual local high school…and wouldn’t you know it, but the dream hasn’t reoccurred since then.

It’s odd to imagine that there’s a part of your mind that is constantly trying to feed you personally relevant information, and yet you keep ignoring it, for the most part, all of the time. This is no secret to hypnotists, occultists, or psychotherapists, but to actually realise that on some level you’re making plans, formulating goals, and steering yourself towards them, in a state of ignorance is a pretty amazing thing to experience, and not just think about.

It makes me wonder how far that principle can be extended. alchemy is really about the reconciliation of opposites, with various symbols standing in for mind, soul, god, male, female, living and dead, past and future etc etc… and really that reconciliation is just a recognition that the barriers you put up between those things were provisional constructions that you were always meant to grow out of.  And that all the pain and suffering of life is your unwillingness to endure a natural growth process.

But it’s not really surprising that so few people endure a healthy natural ongoing growth process, because there are rather few examples of it actually happening in the world today. Our fantasy lives are telling: they oscillate between the infantile and the adolescent for the most part: power, sex, self importance, oral gratification, comfort and nesting, dominance, rampant egotism. These are natural at certain stages, for the child, for the young  adult, but after awhile it mutates into pathology.

For instance, the ever growing sexual obsession with barely pubescent girls? It’s not an explosive growth of predatory paedophilia; it’s more likely a sign of more and more people failing to achieve a sexual maturity beyond an early adolescent stage. Prolonged long enough, that could certainly mature into a predatory pathology, which I suppose expresses in our proxy sacrifice of the likes of Brittany Spears.

And why the failure to mature? As we said, a lack of role models, and a lack of clear transitional events. If society lacks the pressure to cross the death-rebirth threshold of initiation ( of any kind ), then the only possible outcome is eventually there are too many children and not enough adults. The children will, by nature, thrust all the responsibility on to those they perceive to be adults, or at least, a passable facsimile.

So naturally the power in such a society devolves to those who can best imitate adults without  actually being one themselves, in whatever context. So the whole thing turns into a stasis. The correct word is neotany. A bunch of emotional and intellectual children ruled by faux adults, all trying desperately to avoid a real test that would necessitate real growth. The epidemic of cynicism, disaffection, fantasy projection, escapism, drug use…mostly just a way to avoid a real ego death that would cause you to grow as a person. Also it makes sense that such a society would be heavily controlled, manipulated and rigged from every angle. That’s the only way to make sure nothing shows up to challenge the false ideas of psychologically stunted  people: stage manage the so-called challenges as best as possible or make sure they are so trivial that there’s no chance of failure.

Of course, when you’re talking about people whose picture of reality is severely stunted, their ability to recognize reality well enough to even avoid it is doubtful. Rather than a life full of minor experiences of ego death that would naturally lead to a full shedding of the ego -identification, you get a persistent pattern of completely avoiding it in any way whatsoever.  So it’s pretty likely the apparent situation will oscillate wildly from stage managed absurdity to abject horror with little rhyme or reason. The whole thing would be colored by an exaggerated shadow projection of the ego death experience, to the point of paralysis and abject infantilism.

Does any of this sound familiar?

     this one’s gift-wrapped for all my fundamentalist friends out there…

  a slightly out of sequence podcast, but it took me a couple weeks to edit down to something reasonable, wherein we examine the mania for true facts and the mistaken belief that this is always a good thing.

 And by way of illustration we bump that up against some recent research I’ve been doing into christian scholarship, and we can look forward to delighting our dispensationalist friends with a bunch of things that they probably won’t understand, but it’s probably better that they don’t, anyway. That’s how we got into this mess.

 and therein lies the point…

podcast page here

Direct download: TME2.7-its_just_a_myth.mp3

A few false starts, and some distractions, but here we are again, such as it is…

   we diagnose a certain cultural condition where people embrace apocalyptic thinking, but shy away from any action. In so doing, we reference various cults and fads such as peak oil, evangelical christianity and the singularity, pulp fiction and the simpsons, and then tie it up with my main man, the marshall mcluhan.

A meandering podcast that maybe doesn’t get anywhere that talks about how culture meanders and never quite goes anywhere. oh the irony…

podcast page here

Direct download: TME2.6-nothing_ever_happens.mp3

     This one goes every which way, as we continue variations on our theme, and discuss the human desire for stability and predictability from many angles.

 We touch on nassim nicholas taleb and black swan events,  the buddhist marks of existance, james lovelock and the three legged stool of gaia, metastability vs equilibrium,  the futility of prediction, and the dangers of waking up out of the swarm.

podcast page here

 Direct download: TME2.5-The_illusion_of_safety.mp3

     I put on my cultural imperialist, racist and reactionary progressive hat, in order to talk about why nobody can seem to resist our toxic way of life.

  In so doing we touch on memetics, guns, germs and steel, the myth of the noble primitive, and how the monoculture is exterminating a whole new round of vulnerable people, and why it might be a good thing.

 podcast page here

TME2.4-choose_your_poison.mp3

It’s a good thing I don’t do this to make friends…

  What do Richard Branson, Howard Bloom and ‘the Elders’ all have in common? and how does it portent the disintegration of the global human superorganism?

  I’m sure you’ve all laid awake at night wondering what the answer to that one might be…

podcast page here

Direct download: TME2.3-chaos_theory.mp3