On religion…
Someone asked me about my religion the other day. Heard once that this is one of the topics you should always avoid when talking to people you don’t know – worse, I guess, to take a stance in public and put it on your blog… hmmm….
I am a big fan of religion. In Latin, religio means anything from “Religion” (in the sense it’s typically used), to superstition, all the way to – neutrally – belief system (BS). It is related to re-ligare and re-ligens.
Now what are those words about?
Launching consciouscreatives.net
We have several groups on the site for c3 already and will be constantly adding more. Feel free to join, participate or create your own groups around topics you are interested in!
c3: Center for Conscious Creativity has been one of my favorite projects for the last few years. One of the core beliefs of c3 is that we would not have a lot of the current issues in our world if people just did what they are here to do instead of buying into other people’s stories. We are about supporting individuals in their authentic self-expression through community, events, content and consulting services. c3 is an open source organization. We built our executive team around the eight chakra system and created groups on the site so that each member of the community can actively participate in shaping this organization.
It’s a project dear to my heart and it has been absolutely amazing so far. We received all kinds of wonderful responses already and I am psyched to see people signing up on the site and starting to collaborate already.
Hopefully, we will see you there, soon, too!
From Economy to Ecology
Fortunately, I have a pretty good information diet. 
Don’t read the news, don’t watch TV, don’t even listen to NPR. Do have google reader for RSS feeds that I am actually interested in (RSS feed for stuff I am sharing), but hardly any of them have anything to do with “news”. Now, strictly speaking “news” would only be something that is actually “new”. Perusing “news”-papers occasionally, it seems that there is a serious lack of real information provided. Given, names and dates change, but the games that are being played out and described have not changed much in many years.
The same old stories…
Just a couple of months ago my friend from Germany sent me a poem about the economy. I gave it the half-interested read and thought how “cute” it was that people were making poems about the mortgage crisis and how that will lead to more war machinery. Laughed out loud when I realized the poem was from the 1930s and written in Germany. Same old story – a bunch of people creating junk money and ripping off the “little man”. Back then it happened in Germany, this time it’s happening in the US.
What our world really needs are completely new stories. We know how to wage war, kill each other, rape each other, screw each other over. Super. Boring. Let’s do something new. Completely new. Let’s not even address our current global challenges. Let’s invent a future in which they don’t even exist.
Shift happens…
One big piece of that is the necessary shift from Economics to Ecology. Economics is the science of scarcity. It is a collection of games and rules around how to distribute a limited amount of resources. It is about how to split up the pie… From the getgo there is an assumption of scarcity and a bias toward anaylysis (from Greek cutting into pieces) vs. integration. There are limited resources, only one pie, and we need to figure out how to must “justly” cut it into pieces.
This is not what is really happening in nature. There is no pie. There is a beautiful fruit tree which needs watering, light, some love, and will provide plenty of fruit for everyone. There is human creativity which has solutions to problems we haven’t even encountered yet. There is abundance in all kinds of ingenuity, of which we have at best scratched the surface.
In an Ecology based model, there is no waste. Every single output becomes nutrient for another process. There is no lack. No need. No conflict. No unhealthy competition. It is a system based on each individual part doing what they came here to do and sharing that with each other.
Into the 21st century we go…
As we progress into the 21st century, we have a shot at shifting into an ecology based model – especially as the economics based world is collapsing (which seems like an appropriate teleological end-game for scarcity). The interesting part will be to see how the shift happens. For now, the assumption I am banking on is that we can begin to build ecological models, prototype them, and hence make economics-based thinking obsolete altogether.
“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” – as Bucky Fuller put it…
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Twitter- Great advice on using your time rather than spending it - http://t.co/NsuxFB99
- Get some sleep. Your brain needs to defragment http://t.co/FT6j6yes
- Like #TED talks? Here's a list: http://t.co/hppq21xw
- It's not hard to be happy http://t.co/FdFLztX7
- Disney and Vaginas. Who would have thought? http://t.co/SZrFVE9n
- I'm going to "Meet the Angels" Rooftop Lounge Mixer presented by TCA. http://t.co/N0DQrHKB via @goplanana.
- RT @museumofrobots: Museum of Robots Daily is out! http://t.co/612LqpIq ▸ robots, robots, robots!
- Finding time to innovate http://t.co/jhZNXDSr
- Slice of brain anyone? Google maps for brains... delicious brains... http://t.co/MIVFcffq
- Scanning in 3D http://t.co/3ujHHDEO
- Posts by others I enjoyed reading
- The Silliness of Busyness
- Remaining human: A Buddhist perspective on Occupy Wall Street
- The Fringes Disagree But Science And Religion Do Mix
- Five Tips to Break Through Your Filter(s)
- Reminders from the world
- Tattoo 2.0
- Violin made with a 3D printer
- Realtime Face Substitution softwear
- On The Creating And Sharing Of Awe
- Unautomate Your Money
- 5 Ways To Turn Fear Into Fuel
- Become a God of Learning Your Trade
- A Young Artist's Guide to Playing for Keeps, Pt. 15
- Twelfth century orgasmic brain heat
- Projecting meaning
- AGI and the Emerging Peer-to-Peer Economy: Ben Goertzel Interviews AI Researcher Mohamad Tarifi
- The Future of Brain Workouts
- Breaking Free From Consumerist Chains
- Data is the new Oil: must-read PDF by the World Economic Forum
- TED: JR's TED Prize wish: Use art to turn the world inside out - JR (2011)