2011 – Most Important Year in History

March 28, 2011 Commentary

2011 – Most Important Year in History

Over the years, I’ve noticed that the last few weeks in January frequently have some astrological earth shattering news or entrepreneurial opportunity smack me in the face like when I discovered you can use now services from http://elitist-gaming.com for your video games. This year was no different: “The year 2011will be one of the most important in human history“, says ASTROLOGY TODAY (Jan 2011) ….accelerated time of change….incorporate new views…. be willing to innovate…be an agent of change…leap in collective consciousness ….no separation between spiritual and physical …as we help others we help ourselves.” What a positive mouthful, hold on to your hats.

Then the news started.

New York Times Mon 1/17 Front Page:

“Data Overload Can Be Deadly” – The Army has figured out that “multitasking” doesn’t work and might actually have negative effects, like the wrong people getting killed because a soldier has too much information to deal with and can’t make an intelligent decision. The Army is using MINDFULLNESS training to help soldiers focus. They are teaching soldiers to concentrate on a FEELING in their body, while sitting still. Unbelievable, they’ll be sending soldiers to Spirit Rock pretty soon. Wait long enough and everything changes.

Tuesday 1/25

“Cold Jumps Arctic Fence”… the world seems to have “flipped upside down”, as stalactites hang from a subway in Brooklyn, a deep freeze spreads across Europe and there’s no snow in the Arctic. It’s always good when mainstream media gets anything right.

Wed 1/26

“Financial Crisis Was Avoidable, Inquire Finds” … greed, ineptitude, corruption, heedless risk-taking, failure in regulation and corporate mismanagement are all highlighted as the actual cause of the financial meltdown, which was brought to us by Alan Greenspan, Bernanke, Paulson, Geitner and the Bush’ies, who are all signaled out by Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission chairman Phil Angelides and chided in Shakespearean language, “The fault lies not in the stars, but in us.” Real news two days in a row.

Thursday 1/27

“Pitcher Spurns $12Million, to Keep Self Respect” … for the first time ever, a professional baseball player Gil Meche turns down a $12 million dollar salary because he doesn’t want to sit on the bench and collect money he wasn’t earning. What a concept! Integrity over money, and in the same spot, on the front page below the fold, as yesterday’s Financial Meltdown story. Wall Street Greed caused the problem, and a Main Street individual can solve the problem

Friday 1/28, Business Page

“US Approves Planting of Modified Alfalfa” – Agricultural Secretary Tom Vilsack authorizes the unrestricted commercial planting of genetically modified alfalfa. This could potentially contaminate the entire feedlot of the country within a year. Alfalfa is what the milking cows and the cattle eat. This is insane.

In summary, the Army figured out that multitasking doesn’t work and is using Mindfulness Meditation Techniques. The world has been turned on its head. Greed and corruption is the cause of the financial meltdown, and we know who is responsible. A superstar turns down $12M to keep his self-respect. The Department of Agriculture declares war on the organic food movement.

All this in the same week that the uprising in Tunisia and Cairo started. Think there’s something in the air??????

The year started out so hopeful

March 22, 2011 Commentary

The year started out so hopeful

The year started out so hopeful. ADBUSTERS published an article by my old Political Economy professor, Robert Heilbroner, Final Reflections on the Human Prospect and PARABOLA published A Reverence for the Divine, by Peter Kingsley. Both articles flipped conventional thinking on its head and both articles offered HOPE for the future. Hope has sure come into abuse and misuse over the past year, but for a brief few weeks, I felt like it was reemerging as a real prospect.

Heilbroner, your typical elbow-patch-pipe-smoking-liberal-tweedy professor, wrote Final Reflections in 1975, as I, with his encouragement, was dropping out of graduate school and heading to California. He updated it in 1990 and ADBUSTERS, the most anti-capitalistic publication in the mainstream market, published his thoughts twenty years later in 2010, wow. He talks about the end of capitalism and the dangerous mentality of industrial civilization itself. He sees us moving into a postindustrial era where characteristics of many pre-industrial societies, such as the exploration of inner states of consciousness and a more communal social organization, rather than material accomplishments and individual achievement, become the norm.

Peter Kingsley essay is from his new book, REALITIES. He asserts that 6th Century BC Greek philosopher Parmenides, the father of Logic, developed his thesis from a previously unknown Shamanistic practice called Incubation, not from some head tripping dry abstract thinking. Incubation meant going deep inside, shutting down the body, going into the darkness of a cave, for anywhere from a week to a month, and finding the still point of deep mediation, visiting the underworld or the otherworld.

Heilbroner, author of the most famous Political Economy book of the 20th Century, THE WORLDLY PHILOSOPHERS, and Kingsley, well-respected theologian and philosopher, have both turned western philosophy on their head. As one of my long-term projects has been writing a “Spiritual Political Economy”, both these publications gave me much food for thought, fit into my own philosophy and gave me what I needed.

That was then, a time of hope. This is now, a time of unprecedented disasters, one after another. I’ll continue catching up to the present with my next post, which will start with the events at the end of January.