Ben Godwin from the awesome website: JustLive.us joins us for a chat. Ben talks about the sites origin, design and goals. We discuss agorism, mutual aid, self-sufficiency, Direct Action, diverse groups moving into agoric activity, the building of alternate systems to replace the Failed States and the Snake Oil they have been peddling, people looking for and building systems to solve their real world problems – now.

Check it out, and listen to the other episodes while you’re there — it’s a great show. Topics covered so far have ranged from Bitcoin, to Loom, to Hawala, just to name a few.

In it, she discusses the trials experienced by a group of people attempting to keep their focus in the midst of economic and natural upheaval; and the ways in which their positive outlook was integral to the continued survival of their community.

Our community’s land near the Hood Canal in Washington State is called Sahale. Out at Sahale, when it rains, it pours. The metal roofs are pounded by rain that comes straight down from the low clouds. When the sun comes out, it is brighter and hotter than in Seattle. The sky is crystal clear or perhaps dotted with white puffy clouds. When the trees grow here, they grow really tall, and wherever blackberry vines get started, there is no end to them. We can grow fruit about which city-dwellers say, “Really? You can’t grow that here.”

We found this abundant land in 2001 and created our learning and retreat center, a budding ecovillage on 70 acres. Sahale is the Chinook word for “heaven on earth” and it has felt like that for us.

Yet we have also found ourselves tempted by perceptions of scarcity. At the same time that we acquired this land, we also began developing an urban housing cooperative for 19 individuals, families, and couples. This project included a community center and café for us and for the broader neighborhood and community of Seattle. Sahale has succeeded, while the in-town development failed.

We paid all accounts to outside vendors, leaving a loss of about $500,000 to members in loans and deposits on their shares in the cooperative. Even more than the loss of money, we grieved the loss of the dream of our community in service through this center. Some members left, and we lost our way for awhile. At the same time, many of us were working to develop the buildings and rejuvenate the land out at Sahale. We fell in love with her wonderful energy. Sahale sustained us through the difficult times of healing from our loss of an in-town center for our community-building work. Now, when we talk together we realize we still hold our dream dear to us, and plans are beginning for another way to create an “in-town” living and community center.

This is a picture of an experience of abundance and scarcity, woven together—loss and gain. In Richard’s words, “Our community believes in the power of learning together. In fact, as we engaged the development of these two properties, we stated that our first goal was learning about facilities development. In retrospect during our evaluation we realized that we had actually lost learning as our first priority and had been caught up in an “edifice complex”—caring more about building external facilities than about developing our inner facilities and abilities. Thus, one aspect of our learning is that our experience of scarcity and abundance starts inside of us.”

Read the rest at Communities magazine »

Means also talks about the high numbers of American Indian children in foster care, and the plight of the poor in America.

Via the Republic of Lakotah blog.

This is the fifth chapter from Les’ online novel titled, Spiritual Survival In A Temporal World for our companion site JustGetThere. This chapter addresses the “reactive mind”, and why controlling emotional responses to triggers from situations or people, is mentally and spiritually beneficial.

Spiritual Survival in a Temporal World

Chapter 5

Let’s talk about the reactive mind today. I see that in the process of writing this book that there are a number of approaches. Thinking about it, it occurred to me that I should intersperse related topics between the topics. That way we can creep up on things like diet, which is coming soon to a justgetthere blog near you and other subjects that won’t be injured by appearing a little later in the game. I like the idea of digressing and bobbing and weaving- more of which will appear when we talk about the martial arts- and stinging like a disappearing honeybee, floating like a butterfly and moon-walking across the stage to the beat of the auctioneers hammer at Neverland.

I can assure you that progress toward real independence and spiritual as well as temporal survival and security, not to mention general, overall well being, are highly dependent upon your control of the ‘reactive mind’. You know what that is right? That’s the part of your mental makeup that reacts to thoughts and words and situations. It triggers emotions and it can wind you up tighter than a Republican’s sphincter without anything more than your getting caught up inside the thoughts inside your head. I realize that using imagery like tight Republican sphincters is a bit of a misnomer given their predilections as viewed in news bites over recent years but you can go ahead and think of it in terms of the personality type instead of otherwise… whatever that might imply.

What I’ve done here- writing this the way I have and using provocative graphics in what is supposed to be a spiritual groove; all high-minded and like that… what I’ve done is to give you an example of the reactive mind inside your head as you read these words and wonder why I said this and that. This is something to keep in mind no matter what you read or feel or see or think or any part of the perceptions you have and the way you manage their interpretations. It’s always good to put yourself inside the mind of the writer and it is possible to get right there too. Just as there is a great deal going on behind the scenes in the world outside, there is also a lot going on behind the scenes of the world inside. Smoke and mirrors work in both directions.

It is my belief that control of the reactive mind is one of the most important issues you can address. Imagine what it would be like to not have your mind automatically react. Imagine what it would be like not to have your buttons pushed by your own thoughts and feelings or the words and actions of others. Imagine what it would be like to be so centered that nothing threw you off balance. It’s not impossible. In fact, it is quite possible. I’m no friend of Scientology and I can assure you they have been no friend to me but I would like to point out that everything they do is about controlling the reactive mind. Unfortunately… it looks more like their controlling it than you controlling it.

The military does this with you. Religions do this with you. Cultures do this with you. Your parents did this to you. Your schools did this to you. Doesn’t it make sense that you should do this to you to offset all the bad programming you ran into? Of course, all of the influences previously mentioned did not leave you with only bad programming. Some of the programming was good. We want to remove the bad programming.

How do you decide which programming is good and which bad? First you must come to some understanding of who you are? Who are you? Based on that you can determine if what you are is an effective representation of who you are. All of the battles you are fighting outside of yourself are based on inner conflicts. We know very little about ourselves and what lies beneath. There are things going on beneath the surface of your mind of which you are completely unaware. There are tangles and pressures and all manner of forces which work their way up into thoughts and words and actions.

You have to put on your tool belt and dive into the deep. Meditation is one way to do this. In the esoteric tarot, card number 17 is “The Star”. It is the card of meditation. Its name is Tzaddi which means ‘fish-hook’. The 12th card is called “The Hanged Man” its name is Mem and it means water or more specifically a body of water, like the sea. The 13th card is called “Death” and its name is Nun and it means a fish. Think about this.

You can take the fish-hook of Meditation and drop it into the great sea of the subconscious and catch and pull out the fish of death. I am not recommending nor discouraging this path. I wish merely to show you that there is a lot more to some things than might appear from cursory examination and the same applies across the board. You can take all of the tenants of Yoga and find them to be resident in the system of Hermetic Science and Alchemy. All of these sciences cross-reference. All of the real systems are complete, comprehensive and perfect. The only thing that is not is you and I and that is because the reactive mind of the personality is making you less than you could be and certainly less than you are.

Remember as we go along that the whole purpose of this book is to introduce you to a community of kindred souls and to provide certain tools that will grant you some protection from the dangers that consume everyone all around and which you can witness and hear about every single day. I’m not telling you anything you don’t know. The reactive mind makes it nearly impossible to concentrate… to see time for what it is… to gain maximum enjoyment from life and to live and grow infinitely beyond anywhere you may be at the moment.

Treating with the reactive mind is best left for the next chapter. It’s enough for now to know that it exists and to begin to watch how it works. If you make it a point to be observant about how you react through your day, you will see and perceive some interesting occurrences that will cause your mind to point some things out to you that you might not have been paying attention to before.

It is important to realize that life is a magic show in all of the best and worst ways. Life is brimming to overflow with magic and we don’t see it because of the reactive mind. We don’t see the beauty of existence because we are in a continuous reflex mode. Something happens between puberty and adulthood that closes certain doors and the closest we ever get to the spontaneity and openness of our childhood is when senility sets in. We’re supposed to lose our innocence and we are supposed to regain it but…

This book is going to weave in and out of a great many areas. We’re slated for about 35 chapters and we are only on chapter 5. There’s a point to the manner of presentation and a point to the pointing at and to. I’ve nothing against Republicans or anyone unless my reactive mind tells me I do. We have allowed ourselves to become very confused about what is going on and this can be proven to be true just by looking at the dissatisfactions in our lives and the fact that we don’t change the conditions we are in.

This book isn’t for everyone. This book is only for those who want to find a way out of the hamster cage and into the clear living reality of a free human being. The tools to achieve this are available. Few people realize the power in imagination and faith as well as so many qualities we hear about every day and don’t think about. Opportunity abounds and life itself wants you to be prosperous and well. Something is concealing this from the popular mind.

Thank you for the supportive letters. We’ve only just started here and I think you will like where we wind up further along the road.

I’m Coming Back

___

By Les Visible | JustGetThere Featured Author

Letters from the Devic Realm

Les Visible is a writer and recording artist. He has had a lifelong love affair with the Hermetic Sciences and the Martial Arts. He is a seasoned traveler in psychedelic realms and prefers the Devic Kingdom over the suffocating confinements of the Sub-Matrix. Along the way he has matriculated from the military to prisons and the maximum security wards for the criminally insane.

He has owned a metaphysical bookstore and some restaurants and worked in construction, as a cook, a club bouncer, a newspaper editor, a resort manager, a radio announcer, a standup comedian, as a lead singer in a rock and roll band and whatever he had to do to get by.

He lives somewhere in Europe with his wife Susanne and his memories. The truth has not been injured in the writing of this blurb. A collection of his works in various media can be found at www.lesvisible.com

Synchronicity can be defined as a non-causal but meaningful relationship between events or states of mind within the human psyche and events in the outside world. More simply, we could call it the experiences of “meaningful coincidence”. We have all had experiences that we intuitively recognize as meaningful, though we would be hard pressed to explain them in rational terms. In fact, these “meaningful coincidences” are not coincidences at all but spontaneous realizations of the underlying interconnectedness of all things within the Universe.

Laurence Boldt ~ Tao of Abundance

A great article from Paul Levy on Reality Sandwich, had me thinking about the importance of living life through synchronistic events. By acknowledging and embracing synchronicities, I acquired what I was seeking without effort. Focusing on what you want with positive intention, will attract others on your wavelength to your cause through synchronistic events.

One of the key concepts of synchronicity is your active participation, in turn, you receive a response that proves you are right where you are suppose to be.

Paul Levy further explains:

Subjectively, synchronistic phenomena evoke in us the feeling that we are not alone, that there is a silent partner that we share our lives with who is dreaming with us. It is as if there is an autonomous factor deep within us arranging our experiences so as to help us to wake up. Part and parcel of a synchronistic event’s numinosity is its sense of meeting the “wholly other,” whether it be within ourselves or through the medium of the outside world. Paradoxically, through synchronicities we connect with ourselves by becoming introduced to the part of ourselves which is other than who we imagine ourselves to be.

Recognizing the synchronistic matrix which patterns our experience empowers us to be creative, co-operative and active partners in our own awakening process. The more we are open for synchronicities to happen, the more they happen, for synchronicities, just like symbols in a dream, are not separate from the dreamer, which in this case is us. To the extent we recognize the dreamlike nature of our waking universe is the degree to which our life is experienced as synchronistic. Once we become lucid in our waking dream and recognize that we live in a synchronistic universe by our very nature, the universe has no choice but to shape-shift and reflect back our realization by materializing itself synchronistically.

Each of us has an unique expression that we can share with the agora. Unconnected to corporate or state systems, your gift can help you lead a self-sufficient life, reaping the fruits of your manifestation.

The video below ,Seeing the Field, has a short segment of Carl Jung speaking about the metaphysical aspect of man, and the ability to shape our reality. There is also a clip from The Legend of Bagger Vance, illustrating the journey to find the authentic self. This is done in golf terms by finding our ideal swing. The key focus is about finding the right relationship with the ball, which opens up access to a new dimension of existence.

“The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect
but by the play instinct acting from inner necessity.
The creative mind plays with the objects it loves.”
~Carl Jung

Being playful while creating, helps us to express our ideas without limitation, allowing us to be open to unique situations when and where we need it. The synchronistic way of life, is a natural way for the individual to operate and thrive within the agora.

While I don’t agree with every technique he offers, this is nevertheless a good resource to have at hand if you find yourself living out this scenario:

…I had a few relatives who would wait for a family gathering (a holiday, usually), then take a few others that hated me, wait till the whole group was together, and pull out their worst insults and red herring attacks — loudly. So, I understand how difficult and infuriating this can be. In the extreme, you may have to tell someone that they are vile, then walk away forever.

Paul discusses methods for dealing with these — and less extreme — types of relationship situations; often referring back to core issues of self-esteem and the reasons behind psychological brick-walls often encountered in this arena. Though, not all methods involve walking away…

Remember that these are people that are close to you, and quite possibly for good reason. They may be more similar to you in deep ways than you suppose; give them time and they may come along nicely.

For a very thorough overview and discussion of this article (as well as some other topics), be sure to check out Complete Liberty Podcast episode 82.

(post photo by Ralaenin at sxc.hu)