The Bucky-Gandhi Design Institution

My life makes even less sense than usual. Remember when I was settled in Cloughjordan Ecovillage in Ireland, putting my feet up and hunkering down for the apocalypse? Yeah, me neither. I was offered a role at Hub Westminster to “do something amazing with nights and weekends” and so I did. So I’m now back in London, in culture shock, trying to design a lifestyle that works for me including such mundanities as finding a place to live. Ah, the drama!

Truth and Beauty (#truthandbeauty) is a regular Tuesday and Thursday night events which curates a collection of the most interesting things we can find, mainly discursive on Tuesdays and mainly performative on Thursdays. We have dinner together (by the fab Munch Food, or you can bring your own), talk, get to know each other, have our horizons broadened, then have a cup of tea afterwards.

We have an intimidatingly good schedule for November: Richard Stallman, Jamais Cascio and (TBA) Pat Kane. On a lesser note, I’m doing three talks on The Future We Deserve, too, at Indy Johar’s behest.

Some details about the first talk, which is on economic geography – how the world’s money is really divided, what the real relationship is between the 1% and the rest of us, the 99%, and so on. It’s big, solid heavy-hitting stuff, and sets the stage for the next talk on Tuesday the 8th of November on governance and globalism, and the final talk on November 15th on where the real levers to solve these problems are.

Here are the slides.

There’s a write-up with notes from Ethin

The archival writeup is here, and this is a direct link to the high quality audio file.

So come on down to Truth and Beauty. There’s always going to be something fascinating and amazing going on, and we very much hope to see you at an event soon.

Once in a while, life gets complicated. That’s not usually good news, but this time is an exception. I’ll try and keep the near-infinite complexity of the situation down to a few key core facts.

* I left Ireland for a quick trip to visit the KaosPilots with Dougald (of Dark Mountain) and Barbora (of Magnificent Revolution, the bicycle power lab). It was an incredibly tough mission about challenging people’s core intellectual, personal and cultural assumptions about how the world worked, and I was left wondering about how to do that kind of education before people’s optimism has been tested against the dense stuff of life in the world. Perhaps it is perspective better learned late than early.

* On the way back to Ireland, I visited one of the launch events at Hub Westminster, a night sure to live in Infamy. Suffice it to say, after several days of intense discssion with the team there, I moved back to London to contribute something to the effort. I am now curating a series of intellectual and cultural events in the evenings at the Hub, which start tomorrow night with the first of the TRUTH AND BEAUTY lecture series.

This leaves some major personal issues unresolved for me: do I still live in Ireland? Am I less focussed on downside management, and more on creation and preservation of cultural capital? But these questions are subsidiary to the action taken – talking with Ansuman Biswas about what we might do in the space together brought me to a simple conclusion: if I do not do this, these things will not happen.

The rest is details.

We are going to start my event cycle at Hub Westminster fairly gently.

TRUTH AND BEAUTY

On Tuesday nights, at 6:45PM, there will be dinner. For the first few weeks this will be a “bring Chinese food” type event, but we anticipate having catering very soon. Of course, you will still be able to bring your own food to eat and share, we can’t suit all tastes!

At 8PM, there will be one hour of rigourous and inspiring intellectual exercise. We have a lot of smart friends, and they demand quality input, so we will try and find challenging and stimulating speakers on pertinent topics. We will keep the talks to one hour including questions, and expect to often have two or three shorter talks on a theme, debates, and other such formats. We are friendly and open to all suggested speakers, and please feel free to recommend yourself, particlarly if you bring an audience.

At 9PM, we will adjourn for tea and discussions. There may be cocktails at some future point, if we can arrange them. Around 9:30PM there will be general exodus, because those with busy lives, early starts or children need to get home and cannot fully participate in an event which goes on all night. In fairness to them, we end early. This is important for our diversity, inclusivity and sustainability. Next week, we do it all again!

Now, there is more.

BEAUTY AND TRUTH

On Thursdays, we will have a second event. While T&B is of the mind, B&T is of the senses. We will start with music, acoustic and unplugged in all probability, and likely by candle light, health and safety permitting. At first we will try for the “one hour then tea and home!” format, but Thursday is followed by Friday, a day we can face a little worn, so it may be that we will go later by degrees. But we will certainly start with an hour, and go from there.

I was asked to put something together late Thursday night. Tuesday – today, because this is after midnight! – will be our first event, under-publicised and virgin. But we will be there, with our friends, and hopefully with you.

I’d like to thank the team at Hub Westminster from the depths of my being for their hard work, to manifest such an awe-inspiring space, and for their ambition to do things of significance in the world at a time when most people’s thoughts run to preservation, rather than audacious creation.

There are two more notes.

Firstly, this is just the beginning. TRUTH AND BEAUTY is a place to settle in to the new space, to meet friends, to think and plan. It is designed to be a sustainable anchor, a common ground, a familiar, friendly face. If we enjoy each-other’s company in such space enough to wish to work together to go further, events and conferences and other lecture series and film viewings and workshops and making of things and all manner of other engagement may result. But it all starts with getting the basics right, a cycle of gatherings and friendship, from which all else may grow.

Secondly, in November, I will be finishing my work on The Future We Deserve with three lectures and three brief Unconferences on the topics raised in my talks. I will post full details tomorrow, but the dates are the first three Tuesdays and Thursdays in November.

I hope you will be able to attend.

Thank you so much for your care and support,

Vinay

Apocalypse

I have reached for the sword.

I can’t or won’t tell you how or when.

Let me then make the argument.

1) We are at seven billion humans now, expected to rise to at least nine billion.

2) If everybody lived like an American, we would need about eight planets. For Europeans the number is about four.

3) Voluntary (individual and community) efforts to reduce environmental impact by changing behavior have been ineffective.

4) Coercive (government) efforts to reduce environmental impact have been effective in some instances (ozone, dioxins) but not on other big environmental threats.

5) Therefore, as consumption continues to increase as the rich continue to find new ways to consume, poor people cease being peasant farmers and get jobs, and population continues to rise, we are going to damage the planet extremely severely, perhaps even kill it.

6) Furthermore, we are giving rise to entirely new classes of threat, including biotechnology and nanotechnology, either one of which could result in massive permanent damage, including completely annihilation, of the world. Our willingness to retain our nuclear capacity speaks volumes about our ability to handle such technologies.

In the long run, if we are going to survive, there are two unambiguous options.

A) A peaceful and sane technological breakthrough, such as ultra-cheap solar panels or safe molecular manufacturing, which allows humans to consume at these rates or higher without killing nature by degrees.

or

B) Global enforcement of planet-saving environmental policies at the expense of human comfort, at least for those consuming most at the moment.

I still believe A) is partially possible, in that we may get the technological breakthroughs. However, most of the advanced novel technologies are used for war, and you are likely to see a Terminator from nanotechnology long before a Cornucopia Machine.

However, B) is much more plausible. The utter destructive, homicidal madness of human beings, as seen in the age of Pol Pot, could arise and turn on hyperconsumers at any time. The bloodshed would be immense, but a planetary interregnum while concerned humans simply tore down the technical foundations of over-consumption to protect the planet is entirely plausible to me – far more so than a simple renunciation of war, and an acceptance of a peaceful high-technology future for humanity.

This is, fundamentally, what has been kicking my ass. This is the crisis.

However I roll the dice, I wind up back here, and I can’t find a way out that gels with what I know. The ultratech solution is fine – apart from the nanowar. The peasant revolution is fine, apart from the machete war.

But all we are doing right now is winching a roller-coaster up and up and up, and the tracks it will roll down go over a cliff, into planetary extinction.

Why are we doing this? Because the dominant cultures on this planet have believed for thousands of years that the way to a better world lies on the other side of a planetary catastrophe called The Apocalypse, in which various horrors from the divine world are unleashed upon the earth, culminating in a global fascism under a single just ruler.

The secret impulse in all hearts to destroy the world is a perverted desire to see the face of god, or some similarly benign condition, upon the face of the earth.

It is bad theology which underlies every belching smoke stack and every abattoir. Nature is not sacred, it is simply the growth medium for humanity, one part to be judged, one part to be saved, to live under unipolar divine law forever more.

Sacred cow becomes sacred hamburger.

Bad myths make bad people.

People like Dick Cheney are demonized. They may, indeed, act like demons, but the special power we afford them, and Hitler, and Mao, and Stalin is the reflected darkness of the Antichrist, the Sum of All Fears, the Adversary, the thing set against God which controls some aspect of the fate of man. We imbue the darker facets of power with a metaphysical horror, an elemental Evil which owes nothing to the pre-Monotheist conceptions of power. A bad king is no longer a bad man, but a facet of The Power Which Opposes, the Heart of Darkness, and eventually, dare we say it, Satan. Our cultural mythology is full of Good Guys, leading us up, and Bad Guys, leading us down. People expect these Agents of Evil to triumph, some literally, creating the need for a just ruler who will reward the innocent and punish the guilty and non-believers. But first the world must die.

If a Hindu fundamentalist had not killed Gandhi in 1948, at 78, Gandhi would have lead the global campaign against nuclear weapons, for world peace. If he had lived to 100, he would have lived all the way through the 1960s, and perhaps provided us with the spiritual leadership we needed to slip the yoke of these evil dreams, and find happiness and freedom on this earth. Imagine the 1960s with Gandhi at its head.

Instead, there was no effective force to oppose the settlement we have with the nuclear issue, Mutually Assured Destruction, which lasts to this very day.

You expect goodness and sanity in a world where we are never more than minutes from complete annihilation if one power group or another presses the red button? The very fact of those weapons is the proof of our madness.

As it is, I fear a dark path is upon us. The cleansing of the world by fire is a deep, deep myth in India culture – the Kalki Avatar, the incarnation of Vishnu who comes “when Thieves dress as Kings” and puts the lot to the sword to make way for a new age. This may be the mythology which killed Gandhi – a man who wished for Gandhi to make war with the Muslims, or at least maintain the sacred barriers of Caste, rather than ushering in peace and egalitarian freedom for all. I wonder if, perhaps, he was killed because he was not Kalki enough. But now I must ask you something.

Do you really believe we’re going to turn this thing around?

Look at the world. We’ve gone crazy. We plod on through our days, and each one of the seven billion of us, or at least the two billion rich, carries a little share of the death of the world and the massacre of the poor within us. One two-billionth share of the death of the world does not seem very much – a hamburger, a six pack and a decent car and house will do it. Our individual shares of the damage seem so small, and so necessary. None of us are responsible because all of us are.

That sword cuts both ways. We, whose over-consumption is killing the world, bear collective responsibilities for our actions.

The polluter pays. We say qui bono, “to who’s advantage” and the answer is, “ours.”

It’s going to get settled by coercive force. It’s probably not going to be governments, because they’re causing most of these problems.

If the world is to live, it’s going to come down to one of two things, and the interaction between them.

i) Hail-Mary pass benign technologies, like Nanosolar, arriving without God Help Us technologies like nanowar.

ii) Effective coercion of polluters and over-consumers from non-state actors. Think Sea Shepherd on steroids.

Both of these, frankly, call for use of coercive force by people who take the survival of the planet a hell of a lot more seriously than governments, who are the number one threat to it right now, given their nuclear stockpiles and sponsorship of insanely destructive technologies on all sides.

Corporations are not the problem. Governments which allow them to run amok are the problem. Voters allow governments to run amuck, voters are the problem. Voters = buyers = consumers = We The People are The Problem.

Because right at the bottom of it, in some narrow little Freudian place, you don’t care what we’re doing to the planet, because when it dies, Jesus comes back.

Now I don’t know if this analysis is correct. I am going through a dark patch here, and I’m putting this out here for discussion. Perhaps there’s a different explanation.

But I cannot see, for the life of me, that this doesn’t all root back into the desire to end the world in pursuit of something better than life. That’s what we’re buying at the mall: little unitized packets of the death of the world, packaged into products, and enjoyed not in spite of, but because of, the worldeath they represent.

Bad myths make bad people.

When the time comes, as it might, we may all be forced to consider the role of violence and bad mythology at the roots of our culture.

The world is not guaranteed a future, and neither are we. It may, or may not, all just work out this time, as it has for humanity every other time.

It is different now, because we ourselves are in charge.

Nearly everything about cars and houses is controlled by the State, and as a result, they completely suck from an energy and environment perspective. All innovation is crushed flat. Most of heavy industry likewise – subsidies for what is old and dirty, disincentives for what is new and clean. Consider nuclear vs. renewable subsidies, when all costs are taken into account. Are we really so stupid we can’t make a green car and a green house? No! But the aggregated will-to-destroy in people, bad myths, leads us to accept this fate as our own. We will ruin the global economy for futile religious wars in the middle east, but not tax carbon slightly to encourage the move towards a sustainable world – a world with a future.

I don’t know how you dig 6,000 years plus of bad software out of something without a reformat.

Maybe Kalki was right.

My Templars of Earth statement seems to have ruffled quite a lot of feathers. These feathers seem to be in three general categories.

• People who don’t like the militarism.
• People who think its a secret society
• People who don’t get the esotericism

It’s Templar because it deals with life-and-death struggles, albeit not armed ones, and in such terrain you have two choices: doctors and soldiers. Most other professional cultures don’t touch life and death directly. Doctors witness it. Soldiers live in it. Therefore the soldier metaphor is closer to the consciousness of those engaged in the struggles of the world in which they live than the doctor metaphor.

It’s not a secret society, and even if it was, so what? But I’ll get to that in a minute. Public group, open to all at least for the moment. Nothing up my sleeves.

Finally, the esotericism. There’s only a couple of ways to put this, so I’m going to use all of them.

• People openly believe, in large numbers, that a 2000-year-dead dead rabbi is going to return to life to judge the human race, and that’s normal.
• Most of the people I know who are able to handle the load of being single individual self-started agents of global change meditate. Most of them meditated for years before becoming socially engaged. Some are probably enlightened, whether they know or care varies.
• I learned damn near everything I know about life from ancient wisdom traditions, some western, some eastern, some public, some secretive, and some simply beyond comprehension. And the dominant culture has tried to kill those sacred threads from time to time for a thousand years or more. Inquisitions, crusades, jihads. Burn the witches, behead the sufis, you know the drill.

It is not coincidence that so many of the people out here making real change in the world did some kind of heavy inner work first. It’s where we get the fortitude to stand up to the slow sliding of the world off the cliff in a consumerist waking nightmare.

However, as I’ve noted elsewhere, I don’t teach. My own lineage did not complete the training required for me to teach, and I’m unsuited to it by character. People looking for an actual teacher of this stuff should talk to Alan Chapman who’s excellently positioned to teach, and has been through broadly similar territory to me, in that he’s done both the sitting-on-your-ass thing, and the esoteric tradition thing. Can’t promise you he’ll be the right guy for you, but I trust him enough to tell people to talk to Alan first if they’re serious about Learning This Stuff.

These are the books that I’d recommend, if you’re a reader.

• Gestalt Therapy, by Fritz Perls – a firm foundation for understanding personal psychology
• Prometheus Rising, by Robert Anton Wilson – a very broad map of society, politics and consciousness
• Trauma and Recovery, by Judith Lewis Herman – the definitive academic psychology work on trauma, including post-traumatic stress disorder; essential grounding
• Promethea, by Alan Moore – a comic book about initiation from a thelemic perspective
• The Invisibles, by Grant Morrison – a comic book about initiation from a siddha / Vajrayana perspective

That, right there, is the psychological foundation and the modern retellings of the myths and stories of the Heros. I’d note that it’s very, very worthwhile reading The Invisibles and Promethea in the same year; either one alone doesn’t quite capture some essence of the thing. Alan Moore has the God’s Eye View and Grant Morrison was right in the thick of it. They are good compliments.

In terms of practice manuals, I’m hesitant to recommend, but must.

• Fifty Secrets of Magic Craftsmanship, by Salvador Dali
• The Calm Technique, by Paul Wilson – I did this for six years
• Light on the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, by BKS Iyengar – do not expect to understand all of it, this book will be with you for 20 years
• Condensed Chaos, by Phil Hine – little baby steps in thaumaturgy
• Angel Tech, by Antero Alli – deep, subtle and substantial, in my early twenties I relied on this more than anything else

What’s missing here is any decent guide to unmodified Western-style bell, book and candle ritual. That’s because, right now, I can’t think of one that I can recommend. That should be interpreted as a warning. Everything that comes off the Golden Dawn line, even orthodox Thelema, seems to be tainted. You also have to watch out for the more totalitarian streams of Buddhism, too. In general, “we have the Only Way” is a symptom of people who have only partial realization. If the truth is embodied in single teachers who are dead you’re looking at a museum, not a path. If, on the other hand, the truth is seen as continually rediscovered by each generation of practitioners then, even if they’re working from ancient discoveries, you’re probably fine. I’ve met realized masters from every path, they’re just further from the center in more dogmatic environments. The Truth will out! Oh, and watch out for drugs: you get about five years of good times, sometimes less, then they become a rut. Start meditating regularly at least a year before you plan to stop taking them, or you may find the world very rigid and static when you stop.

There are three very simple phases to spiritual development.

• Slowly realizing that everything is inside your head. Most “objective reality” is mere social convention.
• Slowly realizing that other people are real. You can’t change the mind of a four year old, never mind a world.
• Slowly realizing that you are just like them. At the seat of being, we’re all just alike!

At the end of it, you might know how the world works, you might have seen fundamental truth, you might know yourself to be a reincarnate buddha, a wizard, a god, a dragon or just some guy with a taste for beer and curry. But if you got it right, you’ll also know that you were always that mythic self, even as a child, and everybody is also profoundly great and magnificent at that same level of spiritual truth.

There are a bunch of identifiable phases, some well documented, some not – pretty much everybody goes through depth psychology, meets archetypal forces. Some go through a phase of extreme synchronicity – Jung himself did, that’s why we have a word for it. If that period coincides with magical practice, one can wind up with very strange ideas about the world indeed. Various occult capacities which normally slumber in the self can surface, but pretty soon you realize that children are doing all that stuff because nobody told them not to, and it’s just normal human capacities that our culture suppresses, just like like our sense of smell. If you’re persistent, you might hit evolutionary forces and start talking about Destiny and the Good of the Human Species, or even All Life. All of that stuff is steps on the way to being ordinary.

I’m not doing a very good job of being ordinary because the world is a mess and I’ve been called to do something about it by virtue of being in the right place at the right time to help, and no reasonable being can turn their back on those in need.

But if you want a settled, nice, normal life, you don’t need to touch the spiritual world. Everything which is there, is there now. Things are fine, just as they are. All that you would discover is already true and within you, whether you know it consciously or not.

If you set your foot on the path at a time like this, you risk being shanghaied into trying to solve the world’s problems, and whatever expanded durability or capability you discover within yourself can be taxed to the full by the challenges we face as a species and as a world.

The dominant species should not be killing the world it lives on. Something has gone wrong.

The dividing line is that, regardless of what anybody tells you, that is a temporal problem. It might have mythic or shamanic overtones, but real spirituality is about the discovery of the nature of being, not about worrying too much about the insanity of a particular culture, place and time.

So, 1400 words into a post I did not have the time to write, let me make the point.

1. We have a dreadful problem which has clear mythopoetic overtones.
2. That problem has nothing at all to do with the fundamental spiritual nature of being.

It is very, very hard as an early-stage practitioner, or as an adult who’s had glimpses, which is most of us, to distinguish between “we seem to be killing the world” and “god or man is inherently evil.” But it’s a distinction you must hold true to, or you’re going to get fifteen feet up the path and wind up as cannon fodder.

You have the right to come to spiritual understanding without picking up the burdens of the world.

You have the right to pick up the burdens of the world without without mandatory additional spiritual learning or indoctrination.

Nobody should be applying any metaphysical technique to try and fix the problems of the world without clear technical guidance from an enlightened (or equivalent) master, or (much better) being enlightened themselves.

Even in the midst of the darkness, what is fundamentally true and real remains so, regardless of all temporal circumstances.

This division is an Indian cultural framework, and has ties to things like renunciation and, yes, caste. But I’m stating it as “these are the rules as I understand them.” Other people may have other opinions, but these are mine, and I can explain them in Hindu theological terms if people prefer.

You can think of these things as human rights. The temptation to mass produce half initiates as cannon fodder in the attempt to square what’s wrong with the world is very real, and any cult with a social change agenda, right down to the Hare Krishnas, does it. But to saddle people with the problems of the world in the process of their spiritual education is wrong, as wrong as government abuse of detainees, a draft, or any other State abuse of humans in their effort to meet the State’s goals. Likewise spiritual indoctrination of those who just want to help, and wind up being pushed into new belief systems by peer pressure in the process.

I’m writing this today to clear my own position, so that everybody understands where I’m at on Templars of Earth, and also why I do not teach. I’m vastly too encumbered to do it right, and the temptation to hand students slabs of trouble and say “here, you deal with this one” would be extremely strong, particularly in my more overloaded periods.

If, on the other hand, you’re already in the territory, and encumbered by the problems of the world, feel free to contact me. I don’t teach, that’s not the same thing as saying that I won’t help.

I’m extremely reluctant to talk metaphysics right now. I’m trying to keep it to the bare minimum which is consistent with honesty. I hope you’ll respect that.

V>

Right. Can’t sleep. Things needed done, and said.

Let me frame this clearly: the dominant species is killing the planet. We are obsessed with political trivia and the defense of fantastic constructs like banks, while ignoring the biological and human holocaust we are unleashing on every side. Children starve, nuclear weapons slumber in their silos, and the ultra-rich buy second yachts.

The wrongness, when you stop to think about it, is palpable. But the individualistic logic of material accumulation persuades us that all action outside of putting one foot in front of the other on the path to destruction is, in some sense, just not what people do. We continue to walk. We are enslaved by bad stories. And if you stop playing the game as it is framed, you will become homeless or broken, because the money must flow or there is no reason for you existing.

What the fuck are we doing?

Money is a unitized packet of violence. You can tell this because there are many actions you can perform if you have money, like taking an object from a shop, which will incite violence if you do not have money. The money itself comes from destructive and coercive practices almost without exception. The economy is murder.

“How can you expect fairness or decency on a planet of sleeping people?” (G.I. Gurdjieff). (see)

Now, all I can say is “watch the part of you that takes this in, but won’t act differently because of it.”

That’s Satan. I don’t mean that literally, but it’s as good a concept as any for that part of human nature which simply refuses to change even in the face of overwhelming evidence that we are destroying each-other and the world.

Just stop and look at it. You see it when you light a cigarette. You see it when you want to buy a nicer car. You see it when you make excuses, particularly for our political leadership. It’s every Catholic tithing money to an organization which makes NAMBLA look like amateurs. It’s every Democrat ignoring Guantanamo Bay now that Obama is in charge of it. It’s every Republican pretending that Obama made the national debt.

Everywhere around you is the Black Iron Prison. We just sort of keep on going.

I dug my heels in hard. I’ve tried to say “stop, this is insane.” I’ve packaged it as policy. I’ve built it as technology. I’ve tried to avoid any kind of mass movement. They never seem to achieve their goals.

I want you to consider the possibility that the culture you are living in is sick, literally mentally ill. We know it can happen to people. We know it can happen to groups, like cults.

Here we are, sane, free people in the Cult of Late State Nuclear Capitalism, watching as our insane culture destroys the planet that supports us all.

When you think of it as mass mental illness, perhaps built of many individual madnesses combined in a whole-more-than-the-sum-of-its-parts you can see it all with a horrific clarity.

We are killing the world we live on.

We will not stop, because doing so might make us poorer.

What you are seeing is a confluence of evolutionary ratchet behavior with complex systems, producing vast mass pathologies which don’t seem to have any origination point. Little things within us, magnified by social effects, turn our collective organizations like churches, markets and governments into monsters.

This is what we’re looking at, folks. Individual transformation to the point where we can have sane groups is Not Likely. Reforming the groups without changing the people seems equally hopeless.

All I’ve got for you is “classify it as madness, and stop participating as soon as possible.”

For me, that looked like abandoning ideas of “success” and working as hard as I could on the root problems, for free.

What’s your move?