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This is the Red Terror Anti-news show. I've been doing this effort to stretch the form of media, verbal expression, and possibilities within this society.
I have been becoming more and more fascinating by the power of multiple meanings, which is often what someone call non-sense but my theory is that really is has far too much sense for some peoples' liking. For me, everything is continuing on just fine on that account.
I plan to eventually talk about Julia Butterfly Hill but I plan to distract you in every imaginable way to the point where when I finally star talking about it, you won't recognize what your opinions were, were they?
And the thing also is that a lot about today's world really doesn't make much sense and people don't enjoy it. Now, a lot of people enjoy some nonsense so if we can use the force of nonsense to really look deeply at what isn't happen yet, we may ourselves living now instead of some other time. Because the Red Queen said jam yesterday and jam tomorrow but never jam today.
And that describes this world better than forty acres and mule ever did.
Indeed, if we really are to overcome the current epidemic of seriousness, and start living now, we'll have to learn to laugh really well.
What words mean things that you haven't experienced yet? Imagine if the future was bright, angled to your right and expanding wide above you.
Language is a really dangerous thing. Now don't ask what did the acrobat say to the hyena? This is much too serious for that. You see you listen to language. It makes you think. And when you start think, you start to imagine and when you imagine you start to change. And usually when a person changes, they become different.
And who is deciding that, the old you or the new you or How many skeet shooters it take to cross an a French poodle with inflatable dart board.
If you look really closely, you'll see that all the problem we have come from seriousness. Because we really do have jam yesterday and tomorrow but never jam today. You know that voice that says you just have be reason-ball and chain tying you to a job and house for the life. And every five minutes would look at your watch what's really happening now.
Essentially, what we have is a present that mortgaged to a future that's tied another future until your saving now to buy a wonderful funeral arrangement for when you die young working for all that.
You sometime you might thinking to yourself, "is he really serious" or "is this just some dada joke." And that's perfect. The state everyone should aim for is skepticism towards everything, which is exactly the same as openness towards everything.
We have to curve our linear thinking because Time flies like an arrow but Fruit flies like a banana.
Anyway, there's a lot of humor that really disappoints me when becomes just humor. I'd say that Monty Python's Flying Circus or the best parts of Saturday Night Live or The Simpson all have some really profound stuff, it's stuff that's well beyond the ideas of many radicals.
But what's sad is that all that just gets put into a box marked humor where we can forget about it.
We have to rip that box open. It's like this radio thingy here that might be making a buzzing sound that you hallucinate means there a human being somewhere creating sounds that you hallucinate into ideas deep inside of your mind.
And even more, asking yourself how do we make things really different from watching TV at cheers.
So really everything is a lot looser than a person experiences it as. I mean, you conscious mind can't even notice how many impossible things you do before breakfast yet alone the important stuff.
You know when you think about the things you used to believe, those ideals and stuff, it's important to see how things that mix up the levels are really important. Because mixing up levels is that the key to finding out what really important.
Have you ever experienced an activity that seemed very hard when you began doing it until you got a single piece of advice or information, maybe a simple sentence or fact, something that just showed you exactly how to do it easily and naturally, so you were then able to instantly really understand it, for the first time?
Now imagine a challenge in your life.
What would it be like, if just suppose you just happened to find one detail you could add that would make all the details of that that challenge, from beginning to end, all the attitudes and systems fall into line, come into focus. It would be the last piece of the puzzle that would let you do all the parts easily, totally simply with a serious commitment. It would allow you to feel liberated to make that sense of power, assertion and creativity totally yours as something so familiar you could just say 'oh yeah, that's it'. How would that be, seriously. Would it be some special information or just your hard work finally adding up to what you really needed - how curious are you which aspect will it be.
Now if you approach something with a sense your own deserving, a sense that this must happen, then if that happens to be a human being, then that person often give what you want. If that that thing is an engine with cracked block, it won't give you anymore than it would otherwise.
I don't how many people have painted or drawn or used any artistic medium. I don't know if anyone has become really aware of the very subtle differences of these different medium - the different blues or reds of oil paints and citachrome. The different textures of charcoal or pencil.
Now it's really beautiful to have whole pallet possibilities, of descriptions for thought, spread out in the most enticing way imaginable, for describing life now.
Ah, but the challenging is creating, stepping out of imagination. Making those pictures real Now.
Anyway, I wrote a script for the show. And it's an interesting experience, because I usually wind-up writing the script at the last minute.
And while maybe it is just me, I tend to think it isn't. Even the greatest writers, often the greatest, writers experience writers block. Not that I'm necessarily that. Actually, the main writers who didn't experience it. like Isaac Asimov, tended to write an assembly fashion - they weren't doing things new.
Because I tend to think that really creating something new, really experiencing something new, take effort, takes energy.
It has been found that the brain will expend more calories just walking down a road you haven't been on than walking down a road you have been on before. So thought really is work. And Intend to give out quite a work out.
So thinking a physical activity.
Back in the time when Benjamin Franklin produced electricity by rubbing cats backwards, the thirteen colonies were real Hell holes. Franklin also produced magnets by finding them crawling all over dead cats and he said "a stitch in time costs double" and "crime is mummy."
It often said that "Opinions are like assholes." And it's both. Both things people fear and repress. Human beings are talking animals. There's definite point where people are afraid of living as animals in the world and just as much a point where we are afraid of thinking about how we are going to live.
How many things that you didn't want yesterday are still clouding your tomorrow's?
I think everyone, at one time or another, has experienced a moment when they felt really strongly, organically connected with the world. It might have been at a time of great love, it might have been at time when you were part of a community that was accomplishing something really worthwhile, it might have been as child feeling what really was possible. Now, I don't know if you can focus your attention inward, and imagination a space place, a place where everything is possible, a place close to the essence of who you are.
Now what would it be like to have that feeling of a powerful connection to the world just sitting in that place, just available at any point.
Durutti, I believe, during the Spanish Civil War, was once confronted by someone who said, "you anarchists just want to destroy everything."
And he said "What does it matter if we destroy this world, we anarchists carry a new world in our hearts"
So what would it be like to have an idea of a life worth living compares with the life that people are living now.
If we lived the way we should live, the rhythm of our lives would be in harmony with the seasons, the animals, the change of days and nights and our own internal rhythm. How can be so rich and be out of tune with this.
If you could imagine looking back on a life worth living, you could mark seasons by the beauty of sky, wind, of the touch of friends and lovers. You imagine challenges met, expanding circles of interests. Can we look backwards or forwards to anything like that Now? Really?
The most anyone has every bragged to me about is living a life where they were always responsi-ball and chain around their ankles.
In a world of impossibilities, we can mark time by possibilities unfulfilled, by strangers unmet, lovers uncommunicated with,.
So it's time to get going folks.
I will admit that when I notice an energy in stranger, I do approach and comment on exactly what I find fascinating.
Now how can we be living a life now and imagining these possibilities?
Having studied hypnotist, I can take a person back to past lives, if that is where your unconscious wants to go.
But what if everything you knew was wrong?
No, actually. Now some people believe in all sorts of magical stuff, astral projection and past lives. Other people don't believe any of it, believe that science has answered everything instead.
But it's funny. I think that believing everything and believing nothing are both easy. I've seen people go from one to the other just like that [snap].
What is a limiting belief?
I friend of mine me told about two mathematicians riding on a train. I said to the other "Look, those sheep are sheared." The other looks and say "Yes, on this side." I don't know if anyone could imagine being that skeptical. Now, what's interesting, when at things is how some things a person might have once have seen as obstacles can become a resource.
I don't know if anyone has experienced a time when their views or their world view just shifted radically. It might have been a time where the relation they had with someone shifted or your job or school situation changed suddenly. I think it's a common experience so that everyone had it to some degree or another.
Now there's an interesting thing about what call beliefs. I'm talking something really useless called basic beliefs.
And what's interesting about this is how a really basic belief is a filter. Have you ever seen a mirage somewhere. So that maybe for a split second, made for longer, you looked at something that seemed totally real and then it disintegrated in the next moment.
You see a belief, in this sense, is just a filter. It just allows you to put some sense on what you see.
Before you start out your attitude can open whole range of possibilities depending on the filters you have created for yourself.
You see, in a lot of ways, the less you believe, the more you know. Each filter is just something you have. You should be able to put them and take them off.
Oh, it is very interesting for people talk about the power of positive emotion. But everything I'm demonstrating is the power of negative thinking, the ecstasy of contradiction.
Bagwan Shree Rajneesh said enlightenment is easy to get. What's hard is having the state of mind to remember it, to get something out of it and attain it when you wish.
Everyone that consciousness expands, it needs something to fill it. That is the principle of religion, hypnosis, advertising and political cults.
I was reading a discussion of cults. And the power of Christian fundamentalism, of the US Marines, of the moonies and motivational seminars comes from building the fear, the tension, and the anger of a person until that person snaps and then can have new ideas and processes put in - with lot good feelings added at the end of course. The author described this as brainwashing. The thing is that the subject he described got wider and until it was just about anything that creates strong feeling.
Anger, tension, Adrenaline, these are all factors that allow a person to go from a state of inaction to a state of action. All of these turn us into animals - we stop being vegetables.
And this is consciousness expansion. The question is what goes into the expanded consciousness?
And we really have no choice about expanding our consciousness. Human beings are eternally incomplete, Each person, in a different way and to a different degree, seeks surrender to a higher thing as well as advance their own personal self.
This shouldn't surprising. Humans are social creatures. It is only the present that sees the ideal of a person's complete, rational free choice is being the ideal.
Most people through most of history have seen themselves as being part of the
The experience of most people throughout human existence seems to have been an organic wholeness with the world, mystical or close to mystical.
This speaking with the fact most of human existence took before what we know as civilization came into existence.
So anyway, the question becomes, what
Some folks were talking about Julia Butterfly and about the fact that some wrote something about her. And naturally I got involved in the conversation. Because I think that debates between people are the soul of our ability to relate.
To put people up to speed, Julia Butterfly is a woman who lived in a old-grow redwood for two years and finally came down when her supporter gave Pacific Lumber about $50K for the tree and Pacific Lumber donated it to a University for biological research (where it could into bioengineering or animal experimentation, say). At the point when she came down, she made a statement indicating something about how PL had made a giant step toward ending the timber wars.
As far as saving her tree for $50K, I know some people are pissed off about that but by itself that doesn't seem super bad to me. Not really great either,
The statement about the timber wars seems to have quite a few problems to it also.
A lot of the discussion involves what effect criticism will have on "The Movement." And that's a wonderful wide topic, since we have to start thinking about what is the movement, where are our emotions goings, what does getting involved mean and so-forth.
Aside from having talked about most of these before, so I'll just weave all these question through the rest of my show.
Now, as far as what was going on with Julia Butterfly, the main thing I do have a problem with is the focus on stars. This isn't really a matter of how extremely seeming an action is. This is matter of when an action starts to take on the logic of stars and spectators, leaders and follows, experts and workers. Because if we look carefully, all of that can reproduce the logic of this society.
One of the principles of stars and specialists is their tendency to fuse completely with the roles they play. Where many worker have only a so-so commitment to their jobs, the managers and specialists have extreme commitment and the star performer becomes completely the role they play on stage. By this, Julia Butterfly was a star activist, fusing her life with the role of activist by living continuously in a tree.
And it's not surprising that she became an object for media contemplation by that very token. The logic of media is the logic of those who do little sitting an contemplating those who do much.
But you don't really need mass media. The technology of mass media only really makes it easier. You just need a certain hierarchical/specialist order.
And the leader-follower relationship often only makes it easier for this to happen.
I was at the headwaters encampment a few years during one of the Redwood summer actions. I even got non-violently trained and it didn't turn me into a pacifist.
- Essentially, a huge number of people came to get token arrests to kick-off the season for small, more hard-core groups of folks to got into the woods and play a more extreme cat-and-mouse with Palco security and Humbolt county sheriff's deputies.
Aside from the tree people, there were support groups which dealt with first the large number of people for the rally and the smaller number of token-arrestees hanging around - mostly people arrested in the mass demo who chose to not give their name - so they were somewhere in the middle of protester-rank.
And basically, there were a fair number of pure parasitical hippie-types which irritated the shit out of the organizers. Indeed, the entire event was understandably annoying since it involved a lot of baby sitting.
So the organizers gradually became a fairly distinct group who refused to talk to anyone about anything.
Things were made especially bad by the wash of consensus democracy, which involved the idea that every decision should be made by meetings where anyone who wanted to could show up. This resulted in situation where you have say six people who have put six months of their lives into the thing having ostensible equal say to six people who just showed up that day and will go back next week.
So anyway, it's not too surprising that the organizers weren't happy. It's not too surprising that in a couple of summers, the organizers made the decision to cancel the mass event and just do cat-and-mouse in the woods.
This particular summer-fall season wasn't a good one either - that was the season where David "Gypsy" Chain was essentially murder and other activists were seriously injured by folks egged on by Palco. See, the mass demos, pathetic and annoying as they were, also did provide a shield for a lot of the quote "more serious" activists.
- I can't even say what an ideal solution for good protests would be - if the world ran well, we wouldn't have to protest anyway.
I would say that an elite attitude is very understandable and very dangerous.
And this is something that cuts across the violent and non-violent spectrum. The recent India Air hijackers certainly formed an elite group of violence specialists. And it's not surprising that the folks who do tactics like hijack an airliner are general a group supporting some different country.
Ah, if George Washington were alive today, instead of massacring and rapping Indians, he'd be blowing up airliners and disco, he'd be knee capping women who offended Christian modesty by wearing short skirts and murdering shop clerks to fund his dream of a new country. So remember that the next time you here about the founding fathers.
So the star is someone who fuses completely with their role.
And this is something very similar to we, who want to cast off all roles, want to do.
So it's important to be really exact about the way we do this. Because so much of what we live in is second-hand meaning inherited from other people.
How newness has an incredibly high value today.
Not just inventors but things which just reorder the way life is without really changing it.
Each person adds a certain value to simply doing something new.
Thesaurus poetry
Now this is something that everyone has noticed on one level or another.
I have read that in certain tribes, the only duties of the chief was to give gifts to people and to make a long speech at the beginning of each day. Now with that, It's quite possible me to appoint myself chief - and so can anyone else.
Newness is something that's interesting - it's a two edged sword and would be a three edged sword if they had those