Getting on with getting on
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I couldn’t do a better job of characterizing our current situation than Alexander Beiner does:
Politics, like culture, has become about the Spectacle…the Spectacle offers us chaos and the death of democracy on one side, or Davos-friendly globalism and technocracy on the other. There’s no invitation to anything new. No serious engagement with electoral reform, no experimentation with radically different economic structures, no re-evaluation of the metaphysical foundations that underlie our politics…we won’t find authentic hope in a culture built on a fantasy of endless progress, endless growth, and no real endings. Only by laying to rest our old assumptions and the systems they birthed can we open the way for the new…It is time to risk it all. Time to acknowledge that the world is broken and we can create something new. New visions can’t be held back forever. As the world becomes more complex, and the spectacle gets ever brighter, our optimism becomes ever more nauseous until we purge. What’s left then is the space for true hope. A space impossible to ignore, embedded as it is in our souls.
From True Hope vs Simulated Hope: Kamala, Kursk and Kits - The Bigger Picture.
That’s where Beiner stops. So does everyone else. You can’t find ideas in play for where-to-from-here. I wish I was as good at getting what I talk about to be seen as I am at presenting what should be seen, where, as of last week, I went from talking about possibilities that could be done to advocating for something specific to actually do.
Weird is a great word. I’ve touted Beiner before, and this is what I’ve gotten back from him:
“You’ve been quite pushy, regularly insinuating that because you bought my book I am obliged to promote your work on my Substack. If you want to establish collaborations with people in the future, my advice would be making an approach in which you explain how it is mutually beneficial to both parties - the way you went about it rubbed me the wrong way and I'm confident others would feel the same. You're doing interesting work and I wish you the best of luck with it, and I think you could gain solid collaborations with a different approach.”
I said:
“I recommended my subscribers subscribe to you, and I even did one of my weekly posts about you: Dealing with the bigger picture. Reciprocating would very much have been in the scheme of things. Please god your confidence – what a snotty thing to say – is misguided.”
With my basic advocacy being for savvy people to think together, it was disheartening to hit a wall instead of engaging an ally. AND, he is still so good. I loved his book, that’s about the experimental program he was in with high dose MDMA.
These are the comments I made on his pieces that led to his critique. If you have feedback that helps me understand why he called me pushy when I thought of us as collegial, please post a comment here.
I'm a pre-publication buyer of “The Bigger Picture,” appreciating your good mind and jealous of you being in a such a radical program, although I come from the days when there were no programs and I give thanks to psychedelics and ecstasy without enrollment in any supervised programs for them. You enter a realm that has its way! Check me out to see if you like what I'm saying about turning the world around. Love to be thinking with you. I've got a dossier of what we-the-people can do to get us operating from a higher state of consciousness and see if that's interesting to you.
The Ego Doesn't Die: Why Western spirituality is so confused, and what to do about it - The Bigger Picture.
Reading the questions here, I want to tell everyone the answers are in your wonderful book. It's special even to people who are familiar with the subject.
Well, that was a chock-full package and maybe everyone is still reeling trying to take it all in. Let me add to your idea of story: "For example, the Aboriginal Australian Dreamtime isn’t just a story, or a creation myth; it’s an access point to a truer reality that contextualizes and defines this reality." Love your links and here's one for you to add: "Everything will change if we adopt the Universe Story": Stories for Life.
Myth and Metrics: How social media robs us of ritual, and how to revive it - The Bigger Picture.
I come to your aid. This is my post today about my essay contest to come up with ideas for what to do. They were to be written as if it was 2050 when the world was working to tell how that came about, starting with something the writer did. I got 175 submissions and these are my picks for the best ones. Take heart: And the candidates are...here!
For an unqualified uplift, Brad Blanton, a subscriber whose of body of work is about big pictures, turned me on to his daughter, Carsie Blanton, who could be our official songbird: Rich People (Live at Red Rocks).
This week I did my third Zoom with veteran broadcaster, Richard Dugan. We talked some about what I wrote last week, advocating for the smartest people to think together and for Marianne Williamson to get millions of people signatory to the Beloved Community:
Here are things to pass on to people who aren’t planning on voting for Harris that could change their minds to help her, warts and all, get elected:
From Thom Hartmann: Jill Stein: The Grifter Who May Hand Trump the White House Again. How one woman’s ego Is endangering Democracy and destroying the Green Party…
From Daniel Drasin: The World's longest run-on sentence nails Trump
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