Vandana Shiva is visiting in Iceland and I’d very, very, very much like to meet her to discuss things like the Global Swadeshi Network.
Can anybody who’s reading this make the connection to let that happen? hexayurt@gmail.com you know where to call…
Iceland’s currency has completely collapsed threatening things like an IMF bailout. Which, as you know, worked great for Argentina in 1999.
I’m wondering about setting up a local exchange and trading system for Iceland to help people through what’s going on. I could use some technical resources inside of Iceland (for obvious reasons the servers need to be onshore) and some programming help. Aim would be to launch a beta by Friday of next week. Who’s with me?
Aura Capital Partners Global and Nordic News Feed
My friend David sits on the news, picks out the most useful bits, and pops them into a feed. What’s particularly interesting is which bits are significant to David - not necessarily the things you’d immediately think of as being key features, but if you follow the feed for a while, you’ll see the patterns.
Financial news that matters.
It’s a bit interesting. The question is, given my perspective, why? There’s a ton of sources out there, written, books, tapes and so on that are perfectly adequate. I’m not qualified to teach advanced practices (being trained in a thing is not the same as being trained to teach people a thing, as anybody who drives will tell you) so it’s not about absolute availability of the tech. Some of it is lineage and current membership - making this particular body of material available in Iceland, although (of course) Ananda Marga has a significant following here, and what they are doing is not a million light years from the tradition of my own teachers.
I think I have two things to put on the table. Firstly, a fluid discourse about the scientific method and the mystical traditions of India involving pretty seriously thought out material on the nature of the scientific insight on the nature of truth, the yogic nature of truth, and a point-by-point comparison that lets people easily understand how the nature of observed truth is changed by the precise axioms of the modes of rational enquiry picked. The crucial axiom from my perspective is that disciplined observation starts at the objects visible to the five senses for science, vs. in meditation and yoga where it starts at the horizon of consciousness, cataloging and observing inner experiences, thoughts and feelings as if they were birds or plants or physical phenomena.
That distinction - where do you start observing the universe - critically affects one’s conclusions about the nature of reality. It also critically changes the degree to which physical objectivity is a product of the work - for good and perhaps ill.
So, anyway, that’s one thing - I can discuss the scientific method and the yogic method as modes of enquiry into reality with defined principles for discovering truth which have many similarities and a few key well-defined differences, particularly in areas like access to instrumentation.
The second thing is that I think a few of my friends could do to see me in serious mode. It’s not real obvious seeing me noodling around Reykjavik that if I was in India odds-are people would expect me to be in robes and giving out public blessings on special occasions - and if I was in India, I’d have to learn a ton of the local conventions to be able to play the role!!! - but none the less, it’s true. I spent pretty much 15 years with my personal spiritual enquiry as the primary product of my life, and that time was not wasted - when I turned back out to the world, it was with a new eye. So I’ve got a few buddies who’ve expressed an interest in meditation, and it’s a lot easier to hear that stuff from somebody who’s in a consecrated space and is laying it down old school, rather than discussing generalities in bars.
Fundamentally, I’m a meditation teacher who’s been choosing not to teach to focus on other things. But now I sense that it’s time to rebalance that, and that the actual primary lifesaving work would benefit from me actually assuming the role once in a while, and making the systems that bring things to light available for the (surprisingly few!) people who want them.
Meditation in these traditions is not for sissies or mugs. It’s difficult, painful work because it means examining the fundamental limits of being human: what the buddha discussed as old age, sickness, death and “dukkha” as well as our old friend impermanence. But we see the suffering that comes from those processes as avidya, false knowledge, caused by mistaking tailor’s dummies for real people in a car crash, for example. When you actually see birth and death clearly, with a kingfisher’s eye (see “finite and infinite games”) much becomes simplified. When suffering, pain, violence and torture are understood - and I’m not saying this is fun - one can break out of the frozen horror which we so often feel when confronted by those unpleasant aspects of human nature and do what needs to be done if anything can be.
Human nature is made of unexamined assumptions. If you start seriously questioning how you got to be the way you are, you discover a lot of “memetic” (ideas, language) material that simply wound up in your head because it wound up in the head of your parents and teachers and they repeated. Questioning and reality testing that material results in fairly radical personal change against or at least away from cultural norms. Going further to examine our basis of biological instincts to see how much freedom our intelligence and rationality can win from the patterns of behavior that went straight from genetic storage to our minds constitutes a second degree of freedom. Past that, there is the level of pure philosophy where we examine how we know what we know, and what it means to believe that we know anything at all, right down into cogito ergo sum and the territory of being and nothingness.
I can cut through the crap, and teach the techniques which enable other people to cut through the crap. I just didn’t for a while because other things were more urgent, and also very much needed activities. But now it’s time for me to rebalance the material and spiritual work at something closer to 50/50 and that means making available the more serious side of what I do for the people who want it.
The things I work on in the real world are serious: 30 million deaths a year from poverty, losing 25% or more of the human race to a full-severity H5N1 pandemic flu, evacuating cities after nuclear bombs have been detonated in them. I deal with death, and more essentially, with the preservation of life day in, day out, every single day. And I smile, and laugh, and have hope for the world, for humanity, and for myself.
But every single thing on earth we have yet identified as life is dying. Even if everything I hoped for in terms of poverty and disease came to pass, old age would get us all. Even if transhumanism is fully realized, machines break down eventually. Death can be postponed a little by ordinary means, and perhaps a lot by extraordinary ones, but it is coming for everything which is.
The certainty of the immortality of consciousness, freed from all forms and constrains, as an absolute property of being is obtained by meditation. I can teach immortality, not the attainment of it, but the recognition of it as the current position of all that lives.
But what that means, and why I still spend all my time shoveling death into the ground and raising life from it is a mystery that has to be seen and not explained.
Basically, it’s this insanely great and very historic (134 years!) festival on the Westman Islands in Iceland.
Here’s a nighttime shot.
And here’s a daytime one.
Note all the white tents. They serve a very similar function to theme camps, but each one holds about a dozen people, so it’s lots of small microclimates with different cool things going on - lots of acoustic music, food, drink, and merriness.
There is also art.
About 10,000 people come, and the atmosphere is more like Burning Man than anything I can imagine - chaos, creativity, community. I think some cross-fertilization from Burners would really, really rock hard.
Next year - hexayurts for sure!!!
Click here for some short video clips of the bonfire, the amazing flare ceremony, and the sing-along. There are also a few more pictures. I can’t stress how cool this all was, and the videos really show it much more clearly than the pictures.
Next year, recommended!
If you want to know what my world looks like, what the hexayurt is **really** about, watch this video.
New album, opening concert thingee in a couple of weeks, and this long interview in the Reykjavik Grapevine
The iconography and the ideas… very familiar.
(above, a short movie, below, a still.)
This is why the Pentax Optio WPI was a good idea. Showerproof cameras make a lot of sense.
Set up.
Lights.
Camera
Action!
MP4 video of… well… they did say 90s.
I had a good time anyway!
Well, one things leads to another, and some new friends (Thor and Unnur of Cocktail Vomit and Smari McCarthy) went to see one Emilie Simon. It was an odd show - lots of extremely random midi gear and a fellow who looked a lot like Willy Wonka set around an impish french girl with a highly improbable range of expression. The flow from acoustic to electronic, and the integration of the genres was smoother than I’ve seen before and quite groundbreaking, although the show was in some way a bit high art and less a gig. The glitter of french conceptualism?
But the music was good!
is an audio clip (low res audio off my digital camera) that gives some flavor of what was going on,
is (excuse the black key frame) a video clip of one song (MP4, about four meg)
After which we collectively retired to Sirkus where Thor spun an extremely compelling set. It’s pretty remarkable to hear a set of that quality in what amounts to a tiny dive bar on a large, mostly empty island in the middle of nowhere. The musical culture here is incredible: tight knit community, high standards of both professionalism and presentation expected in even small venues… I think the Icelandic music phenomena is just starting and that set was pretty good evidence of it. Never mind that he’s a really nice man 