By and large it started with a car whose time seemed to have come,

but didn't make it for some reason, not being the batteries (as I indicated in a previous posting)

Then the manufacturer seemed to have pulled off sort like tricks, like

which seemed not that odd for corporations in general (here)

OK, so politics and business seem to mix well. What would have happened if this would have happened over time? A firmly embedded and effective way of serving each others interests. Which coincides with my experiences in decision making processes regarding 'a transition towards a sustainable energy regime' (subject of my research)?

What are competing explanatory lines of thinking? I consulted the yes men, but they too were rather sceptical

With Jared Daimond it became even more fascinating with his case studies on how societies disappear. For reasons that seem stupid now.

Easter Islanders chopping down all trees, mainly to move around big sculptures to keep up with the their Jonesses. Knowing those trees represented their boats to catch fish. Finito.

Scandinavians in Greenland finding the Inuit ways of survival not chique, as they took life styles of Scandinavia (or whatever the appropriate names were then) as worthy to emulate. Sending young men hunting for tusks to trade for church ornaments. And when the staple food ran out, the last young cows and sheep ware on the menu, the fish in the sea and the rivers were left untouched. For that was Inuit food. Schluss.

The list goes on and in the last chapter, the author draws parallels with us now. Good night and good luck.

Since I, as mankind in general, look for tools / ideas to make sense to the extend senselessness is about to get the better of me, I looked further.

And came across:

Although many of us speak freely of living in a post-peak or post-industrial or post-petroleum world, we have no clear picture of what that world will look like. What we do know, however, is that navigating the transition to that world and surviving in it is not for the faint of heart. To accomplish either or both will require something beyond a five years' supply of food. In fact, it will demand that we perceive the crisis as an evolutionary threshold-a crossroads in the odyssey of our species that I believe is most accurately understood as an initiation.

Only collapse as initiation can illumine, at the deepest levels of our being, the choices we make as we attempt to transform a devastated civilization. The transition is utterly dependent on inner transformation. Otherwise, we are unlikely to create anything but a mirror image of industrial civilization.

So what might a world forged by initiated adults look like?

Surely it will be a world in which every aspect of human functioning will be carefully designed and lived in intimate connection with the non-human world. (A specific design system, permaculture, is ideal, and it behooves anyone contemplating life after civilization to become familiar with its principles.) It will be a society in which relationships have been transformed and honed by collective suffering and mutual support. The most anxiety-producing events will not be about being stuck in traffic gridlock, being forced to change one's weekly hair styling appointment, or discovering that one's internet server is down. Rather, world views and values will be dictated by having or not having food, water, shelter, personal safety, clothing, physical health, and supportive friends and neighbors.

The world to which I am alluding is a world in which every moment, every encounter, every experience is an initiatory exercise challenging its inhabitants to practice gratitude, compassion, kindness, alertness, discernment, and be present in the body and emotions. These realities will be doorways, not merely to a new society, but most importantly, to a new strain of humanity-a planet protected and nurtured by initiated elders.

No one needs to wait for the dire repercussions of collapse in order to begin the initiatory journey. One need only open the eyes and heart to a deeper level of perception so that "a thousand explanations" will not be necessary.

Havel was clear about this in 1994:

Planetary democracy does not yet exist, but our global civilization is already preparing a place for it: It is the very Earth we inhabit, linked with Heaven above us. Only in this setting can the mutuality and the commonality of the human race be newly created, with reverence and gratitude for that which transcends each of us, and all of us together. The authority of a world democratic order simply cannot be built on anything else but the revitalized authority of the universe.

Being a student of Integral Theory and being sensitive to ever larger pictures, inside and out (actually inside = outside, but that would take us too far for now) I came across Tarnas' 'Is the Western psyche undergoing a rite of passage' (here)

"We need to draw on--to use a single encompassing term--the wider epistemologies of the heart. We need ways of knowing that integrate the imagination, imaginal and archetypal insight, the intuition, the aesthetic sensibility, the revelatory orepiphanic capacity, the capacity for kinesthetic knowing, the capacity for empathic understanding, the capacity to open to the other, to listen.

Indeed, a highly developed sense of empathy is critical if we are to overcome the subject-object barrier. We need to be able to enter into that which we seek to know, and not keep it ultimately distanced as an object. We need, to use biologist Barbara McClintock's phrase, "a feeling for the organism." "

for now, I'm off to Perpignan for a rebirth (here)

ps: for an interesting interaction with the editorial staff on taking some arguments a step further, contact me