"To phrase the I Ching differently, the man has placed himself beneath the woman, supporting her, and so their powers unite in deep harmony. The man is not competing for who is on top—the empire-thinking of hierarchy—but instead lifts up the woman who, in turn, gives life and abundance. Then peace and blessing descend upon all living things."
This is very much like Prakriti and Purusha; the inward facing power is the masculine supporting and acknowledging of the movement supreme, but the most important of the two is the feminine power that is outgoing and is the immutable true character of creation. Bringer of life.
This is a brilliant exploration You and Guy are doing. ------ Blessings to both of you.
Oh I'm so glad you're enjoying it Nefahotep. Guy includes another interpretation by David Hinton that might be even closer to the Prakriti and Purusha:
"In devotion, heaven and earth weave together, earth settling into heaven's rising, and so the ten thousand hinges open through one another. Lofty and lowly weave together, and so they share the same purpose.
"In devotion, yang abides within, yin without. Steadfast and strong abide within, yielding and devoted without. The noble-minded abide within, the small-minded without.
"The Way endures in the noble-minded, bleeds away in the small-minded."
What a great way to put that. I've often thought the fast way to 'unity' is through a common enemy or common superiority over others, which is the same thing. And in this quote I almost didn't include the ending because I thought it was doing the same by calling others small-minded. But now I see it's talking about small-mindedness in ourSelf. And unless knowledge unites, it's not true knowledge. Beautiful!
"In devotion, heaven and earth weave together, earth settling into heaven's rising, and so the ten thousand hinges open through one another. Lofty and lowly weave together, and so they share the same purpose."
They are both part of the same movement.
This is also shown symbolically in "As above, so below." Ancient Celtic and Norse way of seeing it....
Great discussion. Love it. Extant inside Adam dreaming of the apple of his eye, and we're there too. Hmmmm. I've heard stranger things. Did you ever read this:
*Ultimate Problems*
In the Aztec design God crowds
into the little pea that is rolling
out of the picture.
All the rest extends bleaker
because God has gone away.
In the White Man design, though,
no pea is there.
God is everywhere,
but hard to see.
The Aztecs frown at this.
How do you know he is everywhere?
And how did he get out of the pea?
Stafford, William. "Ultimate Problems", cited in *News of the Universe: Poems of Two-Fold Consciousness* ed. Robert Bly. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1980, p. 182.
Through an odd set of synchronicities what began as a toe dip into Krishnamurti is becoming a deeper dive. (My next essay will be about him and the possibility that he was an agent of sleep.)
Synchronicity? As I was writing this reply a YouTube mix pick gave this, new to me, song that begins ‘Everybody in this place is dreaming”:
And the link to Étienne De La Boétie*2 and James Corbett created a bit of cognitive dissonance and pleasant surprise. Someone is referencing the once famous friend of Montaigne? And that could only mean De La Boétie’s (once) famous and inflammatory essay “The Politics of Obedience: Discourse on Voluntary Servitude” published ~1552. (Our ‘problem’ today, has been around for a long time and noted by the few for just as long. De La Boétie died a few years after writing that of the plague.)
We often find ourselves in a position of weakness, with no option but to yield to force. We do not always have the upper hand, and we may have to play for time. We must not be surprised, then, when a nation which is at war finds itself compelled to serve one ruler (as the city of Athens served the thirty tyrants) — though we must deplore that servitude. Or rather, we must neither be surprised at the situation nor deplore it, but endure the misfortune patiently, and look forward to better fortune in the future.
Human nature is such that the way we live is largely influenced by the common duties of friendship. It is reasonable that we should love virtue, that we should have a high regard for noble deeds, that when someone does us a favor we should acknowledge the fact, and that we should be prepared to accept some reduction in our own comfort in order to enhance the standing of one whom we love and who had deserved our love. And in the same way, citizens of a whole nation will acknowledge that a particular individual has protected them by displaying great foresight, or had defended them with great bravery, or governed them with great care, and they may thus accept that it is reasonable to be obedient towards him, and they may go so far as to entrust him with power over them. I am not sure that this is wise, for they are removing him from a position in which he was doing good and putting him in a position in which he can do harm. But there is no doubt that there is something commendable about the fact that they fear no harm from someone who has done them nothing but good.
But — oh good God! — what is this? What words can describe this vice, this misfortune (or rather, vice and misfortune!) Whereby the obedience of an infinite number of people degenerates into servitude, government turns to tyranny, and people have nothing they can call their own, not even their parents, their wives, their children, their own lives! And they become prey to the pillage, lusts and cruelty not of some army, not of a barbarian horde which they could only resist by shedding their blood and laying down their lives, but of a single man! And is he a Hercules or a Samson? No, he is a solitary weakling, and usually the most cowardly and effeminate in the land, who is unaccustomed to the dust of battle and has hardly even set eyes on the sand of the jousting arena, and who has no authority to issue orders to men since he is an abject slave of some pitiful little woman! Are we to say that the people are cowards? Shall we call them pusillanimous and faint-hearted? Supposing you have two people, or three or four, who fail to defend themselves against one man: that is a strange situation, but still within the bounds of possibility, and we can rightly say that these people are lacking in courage. But if a hundred or a thousand people are willing to tolerate one man, surely we have to conclude not that they dare not defy him, but that they do not want to, and that their attitude is not one of cowardice but rather of apathy and disdain? If what we see is not a hundred or a thousand men, but a hundred nations and a thousand cities and a million men failing to challenge one man (who, however well he treats any individual, is still treating him as a serf and a slave), what are we to call that? Is it cowardice? Now all vices have natural limits: two people may fear one man, ten people may fear him. But if a thousand men, a million men, a thousand cities do not defend themselves against one man, that cannot be cowardice, for cowardice cannot go that far, just as valor cannot go so far as to lead one man to scale a fortress, to attack an army, to conquer a kingdom. So what prodigious vice is this for which the term ‘cowardice’ is too flattering, for which there is no name vile enough, which nature herself will not admit to having created and which the tongue can find no name for?
Wow, what a reply! Loved the William Stafford, that's a great story.
And the Flynns are so Brit, just the way he says au-TUM-nal.
On the video, I forgot to say the 'squared' after Etienne's name and now I realize why that's important! It makes sense that he'd name himself after a great anarchist (are we allowed to say an anarchist is great, or does that imply hierarchy?)
This quote is quite interesting. What a concept. I'm not sure why he needed to put in that 'he is the abject slave of some pitiful little woman.' Would it be better to be subservient to a wife-beater, to keep to the theme? But this is very key to our time: 'a hundred nations and a thousand cities and a million men failing to challenge one man'. And we don't even know who that one man is.
Thanks for sending me on this journey, Guy. It was very fun to put my thoughts in the order of the song, and bring in your insights and the encouraging I Ching reading. Very hopeful!
And I didn't mention that how you wove the Blood of Eden through your essay was so masterfully done it was absolutely seamless while being so strong. So excellent.
(The song synchronicities were great, for me. And continues what has been a life-long experience of synchronicity with song.)
As to "he is the abject slave of some pitiful little woman." Unfortunately we don't know the context of the time and the language to understand if he was being ironical. I suspect that he was. I checked and he was married, to a widow with two children. From vague memory from reading Montaigne's essays I think he was happily married. You may find De La Boétie interesting. Short bio here: https://philosophynow.org/issues/136/Etienne_de_la_Boetie_1530-1563
"Great anarchist' seems okay to me. Otherwise we fall into the woke trap of failure to differentiate. Although De La Boétie lived a bourgeoisie life as a man of law and letters in the parliament of France. So... perhaps flattens the great part. Although if he had been busy anarchising, then he wouldn't have written what is certainly a powerful piece of writing about anarchy! Oy vey!
And I've forgotten if you said or not: are you familiar with the I Ching? That particular casting could not have been more perfect. I have had astonishing results with the I Ching. Jung and Marie-Louise von Franz describe it as a synchronicity detection device, to paraphrase. And since my change in understanding of both 'karma' and 'synchronicity' I am better able to appreciate the depth of what they mean by that.
Thank you for that, Guy. The gift of that song made this such a pleasure to write. It's been running through my head now for days and kept offering me a phrase I loved to bounce my ideas off of (back to the ball analogy).
I'll check out de la Boetie. Was Montaigne then an anarchist? See how much I trust you, Guy, I dare to reveal the depth of my ignorance ;-) If I were to parse it, I might differentiate between true anarchist, going back to the etymology of the word as I define it: community self-rule without rulers vs. false anarchists like Chomsky.
And I don't know the I Ching at all and was worried I was mispronouncing it. But this certainly seemed like it couldn't be more perfect. And I love that description as a 'synchronicity detection device.' Excellent!
I also pulled a Tarot card from my Crow deck for our journey, I'll describe it in my reply to your next reply.
Hola, Tereza. A slow reply, as I'm deep in Krishnamurti as a basis for my next essay.
"Was Montaigne an anarchist?" In perhaps the most complex of ways he was, sort-of, under your definition. Except that he held political office — he was appointed to it and was unable to safely refuse it and left it as soon as was reasonable. While in office he did an exceptionally fine job of, by all reports, at a horrifically difficult time when the Catholics and Protestants had decided to kill each other gruesomely, frequently, and mercilessly, man, woman and child.
So how does that make him a 'true' anarchist? Because he was a living example of someone completely at ease as a thinking/feeling/spiritual human being who honoured all those aspects of himself and expressed himself honestly and saw the world very clearly. He looked at the church and government as being an expression of people who by temperament required to be guided, not ruled and that ultimately they were an impediment to free thinking and collaboration.
I'll rephrase your question about Montaigne from 'Was he an anarchist?' to 'Who was Montaigne?' Difficult. I will suggest that he was one of the very few humans largely, perhaps even completely, indifferent to the opinions of others and went his own way entirely. What I call 'appropriate eccentric action', acting from the empty centre of someone whose ego is sleeping quietly in the house until needed.
For a couple of hundred years the church honoured him for his eloquent arguments about the existence of God and God's expression in nature. For a couple of hundred years he was a excoriated by the church and his books stricken from all libraries because he argued that animals have souls.
I am hesitating to recommend yet another book, and yet... see how your intuition reacts to my recommending a truly fabulous and fascinating read, that as well as being a biography, is a great look at largely forgotten history, with an amazing look at Montaigne's philosophy of how to live a life with integrity, power, and beauty. It is a book that does actually help us to live 'better.'
Two interesting side story-synchronicities: Yoshiko had a great synchronicity on the el with this book, when a young biker type male with big muscles and lots of tattoos recognised Montaigne and so they had a conversation about him. Wow! Don't judge a book by its cover, (even if that is often why we buy them!). The second was that one time, when Yoshiko and I were in a restaurant, we had our copy of the book with us. The young waitress was curious about it. We shared some of it and it really inspired her. A bit later, she came back to our table, looked at us, and said, crying with tears, 'You have given me hope!'
You can find pithy quotations from him on-line. I am in the slow process of reading his 1300 pg complete works - essays and letters. Delightful read!
Here are a couple:
“When I dance, I dance; when I sleep, I sleep; yes, and when I walk alone in a beautiful orchard, if my thoughts drift to far-off matters for some part of the time for some other part I lead them back again to the walk, the orchard, to the sweetness of this solitude, to myself.” (Wow! Mindfulness of walking meditation in the 16th century France!)
“To compose our character is our duty, not to compose books, and to win, not battles and provinces, but order and tranquility in our conduct. Our great and glorious masterpiece is to live appropriately. All other things, ruling, hoarding, building, are only little appendages and props, at most.”
“To begin depriving death of its greatest advantage over us, let us adopt a way clean contrary to that common one; let us deprive death of its strangeness, let us frequent it, let us get used to it; let us have nothing more often in mind than death... We do not know where death awaits us: so let us wait for it everywhere.
"To practice death is to practice freedom. A man who has learned how to die has unlearned how to be a slave.”
The range of his thinking is immense, and he cites many Greek thinkers. At one time no philosophy school would be without him. Now, with the downgrading of school, most people who graduate school have never heard of him. Planned or accident, the downgrading of knowledge and awareness? Hmmmm.
I'm happy to be the beneficiary of your wide reading, Guy. And I had clicked the link before reading the rest and thought, "What a compelling cover." So the judgment was favorable, and the quotes are quite interesting. He seems to be stoic, in the sense of Epictetus.
I also had mentioned the Crow Tarot I'd done on our journey which gave me the Knight of Pentacles who "sits upon his workhorse ready to take on the next task. He has seen the Page's dream of focused visualization and now, through hard work and determination, he will set the vision into motion as it enters the path to fruition. The Knight of Pentacles is slow-moving and methodical. He is a hard worker who will ensure that each task is completed successfully before starting a new one."
I've always taken heart from this card. Since you know my work on the feminine and masculine, vision and logic, as two sides of the brain, I wouldn't differentiate the Page and Knight as me vs. you (emphasis on the versus) but as two sides of both of us, who are both visionary and methodically thorough. Another Jungian means of scoping out the synchronicities.
Montaigne was indeed a stoic of the highest calibre, which likely saved his life on two separate occasions. And he had a NDE that had a strong effect on him and suffered bad kidney stones his whole life - and they eventually contributed to his death. He hasn't mentioned Epictetus once, so far! (Mild disappointment on the one hand, and confirmation that the deep real truths are shared out of the collective.)
Knight of Pentacles? I did study Tarot a little 30 years(?) ago! OMG!
For some reason the image that came to mind was Parsifal, the knight of the Holy Grail.
And if there is an equivalency between me and the Knight, I am very happy that tasks are to be completed! Something that I was not historically good at. Severe perfectionism, even with years of awareness and working on it, kept completion of most things distant. The one thing that has very very slowly and steadily and with pure intention moved towards some kind of completion has been to become a yogic warrior of truth! Wow! l hadn't thought of that until now.
And I was gifted with a fantastic Rumi quotation and associated art I'll put up in my next essay. OMG, now that essay has taken a, nay, multiple strange turns. I wrote all night. I've been awake about 28hrs. Still quite a bit to go with a new discovery this morning.
I do not see any versus! At least not consciously and not unconsciously, either, even though seeing the unconscious is an inferential process with eyes that are easily self-deceived. I see us dancing, even if we step on each other's toes occasionally. And leading is likewise, a movement between yin and yang, receptive and outgoing, outward and inward, movement and stillness in the most beautiful of taoist sensibilities. 🙏☯️☯️🙏
Such a great post. And I love Peter Gabriel too, always have - what an astonishing artist. I wanted so much to be his featured female vocalist. Unfortunately those auditions were in the UK and I'm a contralto... I had to settle for being FFV for Sparks. My favorite Gabriel song "in Your Eyes" moves me...
I adore 'In Your Eyes.' It's one of my all-time favorite songs. You would have been magnificent in that role.
Mercy Street always chokes me up. My dance teacher often does her cool-downs to Book of Love, which touches something deep for her. Games Without Frontiers was an iconic classic that always brings me back to dancing at Dragon Moon, the gay club I used to bike to every Thurs for New Wave night.
But maybe the most evocative for me is Don't Give Up. I mean, listen to this:
"Though I saw it all around
Never thought that I could be affected
Thought that we'd be last to go
It is so strange the way things turn
Drove the night toward my home
The place that I was born, on the lakeside
As daylight broke, I saw the earth
The trees had burned down to the ground"
And this phrase often haunts me, "For every job, so many men, So many men no-one needs."
For some reason 'Big Time' had a huge appeal. It made me both laugh and reflect on the nature of the inappropriate way we have been enculturated to live. For me, a reminder to be humble, something that was a great help to me over time.
One of the guidelines for Essence entering the cycle of physical manifestation is a minimum of 3 distinct physical focuses: one male, one female, and one "other."
As we enter the culmination of eons of physical expression with our primary explorations being emotion and sexuality, this is a new phase of exploration in which the coupling of male and female for the purpose of procreation is being diminished. Thus the rise of many of the noticeable changes in gender and behavior which you have detailed here. Coupling will still take place as a natural movement of consciousness in physical but the terms will be changing considerably.
The emergence of the third gender or "other" or "Zee" is also related to the changes which are happening as a result of the Shift that humanity is engaged in.
These being just some of the changes in store for us as the Shift in Consciousness begins to take root. Over the next few decades it is likely that our world is going to become unrecognizable from what we are used to. This is not to be feared, but welcomed.
Thank you, Philip, for that restack and thoughtful reply. As I wrote on your Note, Yes, it seems like everything that’s an expression of our love—for nature, for community, for the ‘other’ and each other—is being turned against us for the purpose of the oligarchs. It’s a valuable reminder you’re giving, not to throw away the love along with the deception.
I'm glad you're seeing this Shift as a positive, even if it's being brought about by negative means. I agree with you. I think the destruction is preparing the way for something we would have taken millenia to come to otherwise. "not to be feared, but welcomed." I'll seek to keep that in mind, as something I re-mind mySelf throughout this process.
Right - the pendulum has swung out far in this extreme before it moves back towards equilibrium. Humanity, once again, showing ourselves what we ARE NOT in order to discover what we are.
The Shift is forcing us to examine our belief systems, to heal our collective traumas, and move back into the Remembrance of our true nature as Essence, which we will express in physical form.
This is an extremely important time-frame in our collective experience. It's a great time to be an observer, and shine our own lights for others to see. Not in defeat, but in empowerment.
The point which too few wish to acknowledge is, western medicine relies on a pathological model that it uses with impunity to create (and profit from) drugs and devices.
But as long as that model is outta sight outta mind it is perfectly OK with most first-world citizens. No different than environmentalism. As long industries aren’t belching filth in our country we feel pretty good about ourselves.
The first world reaps the benefits and sleeps well pretending they’re virtuous. When they get pangs of guilt they make up for it by banning plastic straws and gas stoves while simultaneously flooding the oceans with billions of polypropylene masks. Shhhhh. We don’t talk about that. It’s the oil dontcha know?
Meanwhile, we expect miracle medicine and fantastic devices. So, we outsource the dirty work. If we can’t see what it actually takes to create the things we cannot live without (and deserve) life is good. We’re doing great ain’t we?
But, surprise! The Plandemic democratized Big Pharma’s previously outsourced human experimentation. Now that the inevitable suffering has ensued in the first-world cries of NO FAIR! echo across the land. How could they? Such monsters!!
Nowadays there’s an entire industry that sprang up to point fingers at the medical malfeasance that five minutes ago was SOP and perfectly fine as long as we pretended we didn’t know about it and it didn’t take place in our backyard.
On the flipside we’ve got those that still believe, Them Dang Germs Is After Us, Martha! Hermetically Seal the Children! Full Speed Ahead, Damn the Torpedoes! Gimme Dem Shots! Gimme More Masks!! Hide!!!
Conclude from that what you will. Humanity’s long-standing selfish hypocrisy knows no bounds. Some call it, Original Sin. Look up, it’s real, it’s everywhere. It can only be minimized if we recognize it exists in each and every one of us and deal with it.
When you say, "I have seen the enemy and he is us," you never seem to mean yourself, GLK. It's always other people who are the hypocrites. I agree with you about the pathological model but if you've figured out how to live a perfectly virtuous life and not go along with it, do share. Otherwise, stop blaming other people.
Nope. I think you’re well aware that’s not what I mean at all. You know who the most dangerous people are, Tereza? They’re the ones that believe people are inherently good.
Ever talk to a FEMA volunteer at a catastrophe site? They’ll tell you what happens to “nice” people when their basic necessities are cut off. People are nice when times are easy.
How many so-called “friends” did you and I lose because they couldn’t hack the reality over the scamdemic we dished out?
The best people on this flawed earth are the ones that are willing to admit everyone, including, themselves acknowledge and recognize they’re several unavailable meals away from potentially murdering their neighbors.
Those people I trust. Because their honesty is reliable and holds them back from doing those things. The ones that say, naaaw, not me! Not my little sweeties, I’d never do that, are the latent murdering bastards.
I think the most dangerous people are those who think they're better than everyone else. I don't think a single one of the oligarchs suffers from the belief that people are inherently good.
Do you mean those FEMA workers staying at $1000/ night hotels in Maui? The ones keeping people from bringing in food and supples? The ones who prevented people from helping after Katrina? I've been in the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake and those CZU lightning complex fires where some of my friends lost homes, others evacuated and lived with my neighbors, and kept their evacuated chickens in my coop. What I've seen is generosity even when people didn't know if they'd get another meal.
I would think that a belief that I'd murder my neighbors or my neighbors would murder me under desperate circumstances would lead me to hoard and buy a gun. That's not what I've seen. Trust who you will. I'm not hunkering down with those who are calculating how many lost meals before they kill me or I kill them (a belief they'd probably use to justify killing me first).
Another thing we have in common, along with both being in HR. My dad was definitely a gentle soul by the time he died at 94. For me, I think it made me determined to think for myself and a BIG reader. But I'd like to think that every generation is passing on less and less of that violence. My dad struggled with his anger but mostly kept it bottled up. That was definitely better than his dad did.
You clearly know the dynamics. I can't tell you how many managers would show up in my office saying, "I want this #*^% fired!" It was how I developed my principle (not say rule of thumb) that responsibility and authority should always go together. And the more responsibility I gave managers for writing reviews, etc, the more they appreciated my help.
BTW I think that 'rule of thumb' has been maligned. There was the British judge who made the ruling, and we can surmise it was because women were being whipped by husbands, but I think the original and common use was the thumb as a makeshift ruler to measure by. So I'm going back to using the phrase.
But how many end up in prison? A legal system that leaves women no protection other than killing their abuser isn't going to be sympathetic when she takes justice into her own hands.
I just love this, you wrote:
"To phrase the I Ching differently, the man has placed himself beneath the woman, supporting her, and so their powers unite in deep harmony. The man is not competing for who is on top—the empire-thinking of hierarchy—but instead lifts up the woman who, in turn, gives life and abundance. Then peace and blessing descend upon all living things."
This is very much like Prakriti and Purusha; the inward facing power is the masculine supporting and acknowledging of the movement supreme, but the most important of the two is the feminine power that is outgoing and is the immutable true character of creation. Bringer of life.
This is a brilliant exploration You and Guy are doing. ------ Blessings to both of you.
Oh I'm so glad you're enjoying it Nefahotep. Guy includes another interpretation by David Hinton that might be even closer to the Prakriti and Purusha:
"In devotion, heaven and earth weave together, earth settling into heaven's rising, and so the ten thousand hinges open through one another. Lofty and lowly weave together, and so they share the same purpose.
"In devotion, yang abides within, yin without. Steadfast and strong abide within, yielding and devoted without. The noble-minded abide within, the small-minded without.
"The Way endures in the noble-minded, bleeds away in the small-minded."
That's perfect. The knowledge that unites is the true knowledge.
What a great way to put that. I've often thought the fast way to 'unity' is through a common enemy or common superiority over others, which is the same thing. And in this quote I almost didn't include the ending because I thought it was doing the same by calling others small-minded. But now I see it's talking about small-mindedness in ourSelf. And unless knowledge unites, it's not true knowledge. Beautiful!
Yes, All is One.
"In devotion, heaven and earth weave together, earth settling into heaven's rising, and so the ten thousand hinges open through one another. Lofty and lowly weave together, and so they share the same purpose."
They are both part of the same movement.
This is also shown symbolically in "As above, so below." Ancient Celtic and Norse way of seeing it....
Earth in it's sorrow, dreams of perfect Heaven.
Heaven in it's rapture, dreams of Perfect Earth.
When we see One, Being boldly stands.
I love that!
Hola, Tereza.
Great discussion. Love it. Extant inside Adam dreaming of the apple of his eye, and we're there too. Hmmmm. I've heard stranger things. Did you ever read this:
*Ultimate Problems*
In the Aztec design God crowds
into the little pea that is rolling
out of the picture.
All the rest extends bleaker
because God has gone away.
In the White Man design, though,
no pea is there.
God is everywhere,
but hard to see.
The Aztecs frown at this.
How do you know he is everywhere?
And how did he get out of the pea?
Stafford, William. "Ultimate Problems", cited in *News of the Universe: Poems of Two-Fold Consciousness* ed. Robert Bly. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1980, p. 182.
Through an odd set of synchronicities what began as a toe dip into Krishnamurti is becoming a deeper dive. (My next essay will be about him and the possibility that he was an agent of sleep.)
Synchronicity? As I was writing this reply a YouTube mix pick gave this, new to me, song that begins ‘Everybody in this place is dreaming”:
Johnny Flynn feat Lillie Flynn - Amazon Love
https://youtu.be/qOszeh8huyU
Everybody in this place is dreaming
It's been that way forever
They're all gonna wake up soon, they'll all be hell
For leather
…
Now, quick to the cut are we waking
And seeing it all as the dream
The pillars that raised us are shaking, and Samson's wheel
Is the fiend
That one minute we see and the next we don't
In our minds, in the devil's long tail
Slapping sense to its peak and a hard, strung-out week
And sold back to the love in our sails
(And I found this song, too: begins with a dream and ‘living my whole life in your basement’ which is a curious metaphor to your essay.
Leona Naess - Basement
https://youtu.be/ObeijICrXi0)
And the link to Étienne De La Boétie*2 and James Corbett created a bit of cognitive dissonance and pleasant surprise. Someone is referencing the once famous friend of Montaigne? And that could only mean De La Boétie’s (once) famous and inflammatory essay “The Politics of Obedience: Discourse on Voluntary Servitude” published ~1552. (Our ‘problem’ today, has been around for a long time and noted by the few for just as long. De La Boétie died a few years after writing that of the plague.)
https://cdn.mises.org/Politics%20of%20Obedience.pdf
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/etienne-de-la-boetie-discourse-on-voluntary-servitude or
From the second translation from the link above:
We often find ourselves in a position of weakness, with no option but to yield to force. We do not always have the upper hand, and we may have to play for time. We must not be surprised, then, when a nation which is at war finds itself compelled to serve one ruler (as the city of Athens served the thirty tyrants) — though we must deplore that servitude. Or rather, we must neither be surprised at the situation nor deplore it, but endure the misfortune patiently, and look forward to better fortune in the future.
Human nature is such that the way we live is largely influenced by the common duties of friendship. It is reasonable that we should love virtue, that we should have a high regard for noble deeds, that when someone does us a favor we should acknowledge the fact, and that we should be prepared to accept some reduction in our own comfort in order to enhance the standing of one whom we love and who had deserved our love. And in the same way, citizens of a whole nation will acknowledge that a particular individual has protected them by displaying great foresight, or had defended them with great bravery, or governed them with great care, and they may thus accept that it is reasonable to be obedient towards him, and they may go so far as to entrust him with power over them. I am not sure that this is wise, for they are removing him from a position in which he was doing good and putting him in a position in which he can do harm. But there is no doubt that there is something commendable about the fact that they fear no harm from someone who has done them nothing but good.
But — oh good God! — what is this? What words can describe this vice, this misfortune (or rather, vice and misfortune!) Whereby the obedience of an infinite number of people degenerates into servitude, government turns to tyranny, and people have nothing they can call their own, not even their parents, their wives, their children, their own lives! And they become prey to the pillage, lusts and cruelty not of some army, not of a barbarian horde which they could only resist by shedding their blood and laying down their lives, but of a single man! And is he a Hercules or a Samson? No, he is a solitary weakling, and usually the most cowardly and effeminate in the land, who is unaccustomed to the dust of battle and has hardly even set eyes on the sand of the jousting arena, and who has no authority to issue orders to men since he is an abject slave of some pitiful little woman! Are we to say that the people are cowards? Shall we call them pusillanimous and faint-hearted? Supposing you have two people, or three or four, who fail to defend themselves against one man: that is a strange situation, but still within the bounds of possibility, and we can rightly say that these people are lacking in courage. But if a hundred or a thousand people are willing to tolerate one man, surely we have to conclude not that they dare not defy him, but that they do not want to, and that their attitude is not one of cowardice but rather of apathy and disdain? If what we see is not a hundred or a thousand men, but a hundred nations and a thousand cities and a million men failing to challenge one man (who, however well he treats any individual, is still treating him as a serf and a slave), what are we to call that? Is it cowardice? Now all vices have natural limits: two people may fear one man, ten people may fear him. But if a thousand men, a million men, a thousand cities do not defend themselves against one man, that cannot be cowardice, for cowardice cannot go that far, just as valor cannot go so far as to lead one man to scale a fortress, to attack an army, to conquer a kingdom. So what prodigious vice is this for which the term ‘cowardice’ is too flattering, for which there is no name vile enough, which nature herself will not admit to having created and which the tongue can find no name for?
Wow, what a reply! Loved the William Stafford, that's a great story.
And the Flynns are so Brit, just the way he says au-TUM-nal.
On the video, I forgot to say the 'squared' after Etienne's name and now I realize why that's important! It makes sense that he'd name himself after a great anarchist (are we allowed to say an anarchist is great, or does that imply hierarchy?)
This quote is quite interesting. What a concept. I'm not sure why he needed to put in that 'he is the abject slave of some pitiful little woman.' Would it be better to be subservient to a wife-beater, to keep to the theme? But this is very key to our time: 'a hundred nations and a thousand cities and a million men failing to challenge one man'. And we don't even know who that one man is.
Thanks for sending me on this journey, Guy. It was very fun to put my thoughts in the order of the song, and bring in your insights and the encouraging I Ching reading. Very hopeful!
Great.
And I didn't mention that how you wove the Blood of Eden through your essay was so masterfully done it was absolutely seamless while being so strong. So excellent.
(The song synchronicities were great, for me. And continues what has been a life-long experience of synchronicity with song.)
As to "he is the abject slave of some pitiful little woman." Unfortunately we don't know the context of the time and the language to understand if he was being ironical. I suspect that he was. I checked and he was married, to a widow with two children. From vague memory from reading Montaigne's essays I think he was happily married. You may find De La Boétie interesting. Short bio here: https://philosophynow.org/issues/136/Etienne_de_la_Boetie_1530-1563
"Great anarchist' seems okay to me. Otherwise we fall into the woke trap of failure to differentiate. Although De La Boétie lived a bourgeoisie life as a man of law and letters in the parliament of France. So... perhaps flattens the great part. Although if he had been busy anarchising, then he wouldn't have written what is certainly a powerful piece of writing about anarchy! Oy vey!
And I've forgotten if you said or not: are you familiar with the I Ching? That particular casting could not have been more perfect. I have had astonishing results with the I Ching. Jung and Marie-Louise von Franz describe it as a synchronicity detection device, to paraphrase. And since my change in understanding of both 'karma' and 'synchronicity' I am better able to appreciate the depth of what they mean by that.
Thank you for that, Guy. The gift of that song made this such a pleasure to write. It's been running through my head now for days and kept offering me a phrase I loved to bounce my ideas off of (back to the ball analogy).
I'll check out de la Boetie. Was Montaigne then an anarchist? See how much I trust you, Guy, I dare to reveal the depth of my ignorance ;-) If I were to parse it, I might differentiate between true anarchist, going back to the etymology of the word as I define it: community self-rule without rulers vs. false anarchists like Chomsky.
And I don't know the I Ching at all and was worried I was mispronouncing it. But this certainly seemed like it couldn't be more perfect. And I love that description as a 'synchronicity detection device.' Excellent!
I also pulled a Tarot card from my Crow deck for our journey, I'll describe it in my reply to your next reply.
Hola, Tereza. A slow reply, as I'm deep in Krishnamurti as a basis for my next essay.
"Was Montaigne an anarchist?" In perhaps the most complex of ways he was, sort-of, under your definition. Except that he held political office — he was appointed to it and was unable to safely refuse it and left it as soon as was reasonable. While in office he did an exceptionally fine job of, by all reports, at a horrifically difficult time when the Catholics and Protestants had decided to kill each other gruesomely, frequently, and mercilessly, man, woman and child.
So how does that make him a 'true' anarchist? Because he was a living example of someone completely at ease as a thinking/feeling/spiritual human being who honoured all those aspects of himself and expressed himself honestly and saw the world very clearly. He looked at the church and government as being an expression of people who by temperament required to be guided, not ruled and that ultimately they were an impediment to free thinking and collaboration.
I'll rephrase your question about Montaigne from 'Was he an anarchist?' to 'Who was Montaigne?' Difficult. I will suggest that he was one of the very few humans largely, perhaps even completely, indifferent to the opinions of others and went his own way entirely. What I call 'appropriate eccentric action', acting from the empty centre of someone whose ego is sleeping quietly in the house until needed.
For a couple of hundred years the church honoured him for his eloquent arguments about the existence of God and God's expression in nature. For a couple of hundred years he was a excoriated by the church and his books stricken from all libraries because he argued that animals have souls.
I am hesitating to recommend yet another book, and yet... see how your intuition reacts to my recommending a truly fabulous and fascinating read, that as well as being a biography, is a great look at largely forgotten history, with an amazing look at Montaigne's philosophy of how to live a life with integrity, power, and beauty. It is a book that does actually help us to live 'better.'
*How to Live: A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer* by Sarah Bakewell. https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/7624457
Two interesting side story-synchronicities: Yoshiko had a great synchronicity on the el with this book, when a young biker type male with big muscles and lots of tattoos recognised Montaigne and so they had a conversation about him. Wow! Don't judge a book by its cover, (even if that is often why we buy them!). The second was that one time, when Yoshiko and I were in a restaurant, we had our copy of the book with us. The young waitress was curious about it. We shared some of it and it really inspired her. A bit later, she came back to our table, looked at us, and said, crying with tears, 'You have given me hope!'
You can find pithy quotations from him on-line. I am in the slow process of reading his 1300 pg complete works - essays and letters. Delightful read!
Here are a couple:
“When I dance, I dance; when I sleep, I sleep; yes, and when I walk alone in a beautiful orchard, if my thoughts drift to far-off matters for some part of the time for some other part I lead them back again to the walk, the orchard, to the sweetness of this solitude, to myself.” (Wow! Mindfulness of walking meditation in the 16th century France!)
“To compose our character is our duty, not to compose books, and to win, not battles and provinces, but order and tranquility in our conduct. Our great and glorious masterpiece is to live appropriately. All other things, ruling, hoarding, building, are only little appendages and props, at most.”
“To begin depriving death of its greatest advantage over us, let us adopt a way clean contrary to that common one; let us deprive death of its strangeness, let us frequent it, let us get used to it; let us have nothing more often in mind than death... We do not know where death awaits us: so let us wait for it everywhere.
"To practice death is to practice freedom. A man who has learned how to die has unlearned how to be a slave.”
The range of his thinking is immense, and he cites many Greek thinkers. At one time no philosophy school would be without him. Now, with the downgrading of school, most people who graduate school have never heard of him. Planned or accident, the downgrading of knowledge and awareness? Hmmmm.
I'm happy to be the beneficiary of your wide reading, Guy. And I had clicked the link before reading the rest and thought, "What a compelling cover." So the judgment was favorable, and the quotes are quite interesting. He seems to be stoic, in the sense of Epictetus.
I also had mentioned the Crow Tarot I'd done on our journey which gave me the Knight of Pentacles who "sits upon his workhorse ready to take on the next task. He has seen the Page's dream of focused visualization and now, through hard work and determination, he will set the vision into motion as it enters the path to fruition. The Knight of Pentacles is slow-moving and methodical. He is a hard worker who will ensure that each task is completed successfully before starting a new one."
I've always taken heart from this card. Since you know my work on the feminine and masculine, vision and logic, as two sides of the brain, I wouldn't differentiate the Page and Knight as me vs. you (emphasis on the versus) but as two sides of both of us, who are both visionary and methodically thorough. Another Jungian means of scoping out the synchronicities.
Montaigne was indeed a stoic of the highest calibre, which likely saved his life on two separate occasions. And he had a NDE that had a strong effect on him and suffered bad kidney stones his whole life - and they eventually contributed to his death. He hasn't mentioned Epictetus once, so far! (Mild disappointment on the one hand, and confirmation that the deep real truths are shared out of the collective.)
Knight of Pentacles? I did study Tarot a little 30 years(?) ago! OMG!
For some reason the image that came to mind was Parsifal, the knight of the Holy Grail.
And if there is an equivalency between me and the Knight, I am very happy that tasks are to be completed! Something that I was not historically good at. Severe perfectionism, even with years of awareness and working on it, kept completion of most things distant. The one thing that has very very slowly and steadily and with pure intention moved towards some kind of completion has been to become a yogic warrior of truth! Wow! l hadn't thought of that until now.
And I was gifted with a fantastic Rumi quotation and associated art I'll put up in my next essay. OMG, now that essay has taken a, nay, multiple strange turns. I wrote all night. I've been awake about 28hrs. Still quite a bit to go with a new discovery this morning.
I do not see any versus! At least not consciously and not unconsciously, either, even though seeing the unconscious is an inferential process with eyes that are easily self-deceived. I see us dancing, even if we step on each other's toes occasionally. And leading is likewise, a movement between yin and yang, receptive and outgoing, outward and inward, movement and stillness in the most beautiful of taoist sensibilities. 🙏☯️☯️🙏
✍️🎵✍️
Are you familiar at all with Krishnamurti?
Now back to my next essay.
Such a great post. And I love Peter Gabriel too, always have - what an astonishing artist. I wanted so much to be his featured female vocalist. Unfortunately those auditions were in the UK and I'm a contralto... I had to settle for being FFV for Sparks. My favorite Gabriel song "in Your Eyes" moves me...
Thanks again...
I adore 'In Your Eyes.' It's one of my all-time favorite songs. You would have been magnificent in that role.
Mercy Street always chokes me up. My dance teacher often does her cool-downs to Book of Love, which touches something deep for her. Games Without Frontiers was an iconic classic that always brings me back to dancing at Dragon Moon, the gay club I used to bike to every Thurs for New Wave night.
But maybe the most evocative for me is Don't Give Up. I mean, listen to this:
"Though I saw it all around
Never thought that I could be affected
Thought that we'd be last to go
It is so strange the way things turn
Drove the night toward my home
The place that I was born, on the lakeside
As daylight broke, I saw the earth
The trees had burned down to the ground"
And this phrase often haunts me, "For every job, so many men, So many men no-one needs."
Yup, love this one too!
For some reason 'Big Time' had a huge appeal. It made me both laugh and reflect on the nature of the inappropriate way we have been enculturated to live. For me, a reminder to be humble, something that was a great help to me over time.
Yes, just the thought of it makes me laugh. Real genius, that guy (and this Guy!)
One of the guidelines for Essence entering the cycle of physical manifestation is a minimum of 3 distinct physical focuses: one male, one female, and one "other."
As we enter the culmination of eons of physical expression with our primary explorations being emotion and sexuality, this is a new phase of exploration in which the coupling of male and female for the purpose of procreation is being diminished. Thus the rise of many of the noticeable changes in gender and behavior which you have detailed here. Coupling will still take place as a natural movement of consciousness in physical but the terms will be changing considerably.
The emergence of the third gender or "other" or "Zee" is also related to the changes which are happening as a result of the Shift that humanity is engaged in.
These being just some of the changes in store for us as the Shift in Consciousness begins to take root. Over the next few decades it is likely that our world is going to become unrecognizable from what we are used to. This is not to be feared, but welcomed.
Thank you, Philip, for that restack and thoughtful reply. As I wrote on your Note, Yes, it seems like everything that’s an expression of our love—for nature, for community, for the ‘other’ and each other—is being turned against us for the purpose of the oligarchs. It’s a valuable reminder you’re giving, not to throw away the love along with the deception.
I'm glad you're seeing this Shift as a positive, even if it's being brought about by negative means. I agree with you. I think the destruction is preparing the way for something we would have taken millenia to come to otherwise. "not to be feared, but welcomed." I'll seek to keep that in mind, as something I re-mind mySelf throughout this process.
Right - the pendulum has swung out far in this extreme before it moves back towards equilibrium. Humanity, once again, showing ourselves what we ARE NOT in order to discover what we are.
The Shift is forcing us to examine our belief systems, to heal our collective traumas, and move back into the Remembrance of our true nature as Essence, which we will express in physical form.
This is an extremely important time-frame in our collective experience. It's a great time to be an observer, and shine our own lights for others to see. Not in defeat, but in empowerment.
Glad to be basking in your light, Philip.
And your's Tereza.
Thank you Tereza
Another evolution theory? angels: artificial selection
https://www.catholic365.com/article/14280/on-the-origin-of-species-by-means-of-artificial-selection.html
Now let's focus on the urgent:
16 laws we need to exit Prison Planet
https://scientificprogress.substack.com/p/laws-to-exit-planet-prison
The point which too few wish to acknowledge is, western medicine relies on a pathological model that it uses with impunity to create (and profit from) drugs and devices.
But as long as that model is outta sight outta mind it is perfectly OK with most first-world citizens. No different than environmentalism. As long industries aren’t belching filth in our country we feel pretty good about ourselves.
The first world reaps the benefits and sleeps well pretending they’re virtuous. When they get pangs of guilt they make up for it by banning plastic straws and gas stoves while simultaneously flooding the oceans with billions of polypropylene masks. Shhhhh. We don’t talk about that. It’s the oil dontcha know?
Meanwhile, we expect miracle medicine and fantastic devices. So, we outsource the dirty work. If we can’t see what it actually takes to create the things we cannot live without (and deserve) life is good. We’re doing great ain’t we?
But, surprise! The Plandemic democratized Big Pharma’s previously outsourced human experimentation. Now that the inevitable suffering has ensued in the first-world cries of NO FAIR! echo across the land. How could they? Such monsters!!
Nowadays there’s an entire industry that sprang up to point fingers at the medical malfeasance that five minutes ago was SOP and perfectly fine as long as we pretended we didn’t know about it and it didn’t take place in our backyard.
On the flipside we’ve got those that still believe, Them Dang Germs Is After Us, Martha! Hermetically Seal the Children! Full Speed Ahead, Damn the Torpedoes! Gimme Dem Shots! Gimme More Masks!! Hide!!!
Conclude from that what you will. Humanity’s long-standing selfish hypocrisy knows no bounds. Some call it, Original Sin. Look up, it’s real, it’s everywhere. It can only be minimized if we recognize it exists in each and every one of us and deal with it.
“I have seen the enemy and he is us.”
—Pogo
When you say, "I have seen the enemy and he is us," you never seem to mean yourself, GLK. It's always other people who are the hypocrites. I agree with you about the pathological model but if you've figured out how to live a perfectly virtuous life and not go along with it, do share. Otherwise, stop blaming other people.
Nope. I think you’re well aware that’s not what I mean at all. You know who the most dangerous people are, Tereza? They’re the ones that believe people are inherently good.
Ever talk to a FEMA volunteer at a catastrophe site? They’ll tell you what happens to “nice” people when their basic necessities are cut off. People are nice when times are easy.
How many so-called “friends” did you and I lose because they couldn’t hack the reality over the scamdemic we dished out?
The best people on this flawed earth are the ones that are willing to admit everyone, including, themselves acknowledge and recognize they’re several unavailable meals away from potentially murdering their neighbors.
Those people I trust. Because their honesty is reliable and holds them back from doing those things. The ones that say, naaaw, not me! Not my little sweeties, I’d never do that, are the latent murdering bastards.
I think the most dangerous people are those who think they're better than everyone else. I don't think a single one of the oligarchs suffers from the belief that people are inherently good.
Do you mean those FEMA workers staying at $1000/ night hotels in Maui? The ones keeping people from bringing in food and supples? The ones who prevented people from helping after Katrina? I've been in the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake and those CZU lightning complex fires where some of my friends lost homes, others evacuated and lived with my neighbors, and kept their evacuated chickens in my coop. What I've seen is generosity even when people didn't know if they'd get another meal.
I would think that a belief that I'd murder my neighbors or my neighbors would murder me under desperate circumstances would lead me to hoard and buy a gun. That's not what I've seen. Trust who you will. I'm not hunkering down with those who are calculating how many lost meals before they kill me or I kill them (a belief they'd probably use to justify killing me first).
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/washington-secrets/fbi-gun-sales-over-1-million-47-months-straight
Another thing we have in common, along with both being in HR. My dad was definitely a gentle soul by the time he died at 94. For me, I think it made me determined to think for myself and a BIG reader. But I'd like to think that every generation is passing on less and less of that violence. My dad struggled with his anger but mostly kept it bottled up. That was definitely better than his dad did.
Thanks for reading, Ratio!
You clearly know the dynamics. I can't tell you how many managers would show up in my office saying, "I want this #*^% fired!" It was how I developed my principle (not say rule of thumb) that responsibility and authority should always go together. And the more responsibility I gave managers for writing reviews, etc, the more they appreciated my help.
BTW I think that 'rule of thumb' has been maligned. There was the British judge who made the ruling, and we can surmise it was because women were being whipped by husbands, but I think the original and common use was the thumb as a makeshift ruler to measure by. So I'm going back to using the phrase.
But how many end up in prison? A legal system that leaves women no protection other than killing their abuser isn't going to be sympathetic when she takes justice into her own hands.