Random Toughts while on a Journey

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[thoughtjourneydiary]

Sacrificial

Ones who are ready to sacrifice their lives for a cause are likely to be prepared to sacrifice yours too.

[thoughtjourneydiary]

Localism

remind me of a small scale fascism. People prefer to deal with locals even if it proves to be very inefficient. But inefficiency makes people waste their time, effort, live on smaller wages, get depressed and apathetic, and even can kill. Localists don’t care.

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What makes cooperation fair?

I’ve been involved in a bunch of charity-community-coop-social projects during last few years. It makes me enormously happy to say that I am finally out. All this years I had a gut feeling of something fishy but was working hard to suppress it. All good deeds... Are they?

If cooperation is to be beneficial for both sides it has to be measured. Otherwise, say, I do something - put never get anything back, or I get a reward I don’t want. If you work for somebody without any reward you enslave yourself. If you coerce anybody to do anything without a reward you are committing an immoral act. If you are trying to persuade anybody that their reward should be a good feeling for contributing to your cause, you are still a monster. Take for example the ugly “volunteer management” I observed here in Powys, done by “social enterprises”.

Money is an easiest tool of exchange. One agrees to sell, another agrees to buy - voluntarily. This trade is the only fair “cooperation” known to man. 

I sort of known this deep inside but thank to Ayn Rand I can articulate the feeling. I hope now I will have the strength to say NO when they came after me again, they always do.

[thoughtjourneydiary]

Laissez-faire

Sometimes I feel like I have to hold the world by hand, just as I did when my kids were little. I am an overprotective parent. But the world doesn't need me dragging it. I wanted to build a unique place, an intentional community working to make human life better. But it is already getting better by means of us experimenting, living, evolving anyway. Even if I found 100 like minded people to help me, we only could do a drop in the ocean of human endeavour. Maybe it is the time to let the world go?...

[thoughtjourneydiary]

If the word eco-village is too loaded with images of low tech and countryside to be used for a nature- and future- friendly intentional community also in towns and cities, what could it be called? There is a therm for a nuclear family. Maybe there should be one for a Nuclear Community, as an alternative building block of any society? [...]

If the word eco-village is too loaded with images of low tech and countryside to be used for a nature- and future- friendly intentional community also in towns and cities, what could it be called? There is a therm for a nuclear family. Maybe there should be one for a Nuclear Community, as an alternative building block of any society? To put everything on the shoulders of a small present day family is being too harsh on people. Wait… Then if you say “I plan to build a Nuclear Community here” the residents will suspect you are planning to install a small nuclear power plant in their neighborhood…

Maybe it just has to be a “Good New Town“. I live in Newtown, Powys. Newtown is small yet it is the biggest town in Mid Wales. It is old. We all heard about “Good Old Days”, “Brave New World” and “The Good Life”… Some may also know about “Good Life Project” and “Good Sense Foundation”. – those are my influences for the name.

Whatever the name, I think for true happiness and healthy development this community should not be dogmatic. In his “What’s Left”

Nick Cohen paints a good picture of a political cult. In a way we could try to reverse engineer the good community based on his observations.

The cult leaders “blacken” the word outside their group. We should support honesty and optimism in our perception. If you cry “Doom and gloom!” – that is what you’ll get.

Cult members are not allowed to conduct an open minded inquiry into other points of view, especially critical ones. We should encourage this in ourselves and the people around us.

Cults try to separate people from their friends and families, so they won’t change their mind. We should encourage warms and trust between people, and not just inside the community.

Cults exhaust people so they have no time and strength to think for themselves. We should make sure everybody has plenty of time for reflection and solitude. Community building activities are no good if the people feel like loosing themselves and their way.

That’s a tricky one. Cults make people to invest physically (labor) and emotionally in the cause, so it is just heartbreaking to walk out. The question is whether it is possible to built a stable community without any attachment? I think there should be some balance. It wan’t be e good community if people who feel they don’t belong any more can’t easily pack up and leave. This is why, I think, renting a place to live (potentially indefinitely with a right for inheritance) is better than owning. And a just mechanism for the community to terminate that renting agreement if a tenant completely refuses to cooperate.

Another interesting therm I came across is “Sacred Naturalism“: “a special respect and care for the scientific approach to understanding the natural world, and to the natural world generally”. “Sacred Naturalism honors and serves that part of human nature that seeks transcendence and longs for sacred community and ritual. It answers the real human need to feel a part of something greater than the self and the longing some feel for a connection (oneness) with community/nature/the cosmos. Reverence and awe of the natural world is enough for sacred naturalists who do not believe in a traditional, anthropomorphic god, but nonetheless view science and mystery as both valuable and compatible”. And there also is Sacred Ecology: “Contemplative practices, rituals, ceremonies, and other activities in the world that bring people into a closer relationship with the natural environment and other beings engenders deep caring. Indeed, many sacred naturalists share a desire to protect and nurture ecological wisdom, the rights of nature, a sustainable future, as well as human flourishing and well being”.

I think it is very important to have the feeling of sacred, mystery and communion among people, and there is no additional need for any supernatural beliefs to cultivate those feelings. The world and its people are beautiful and mysterious enough already. That said, you can not and should not force this point of view to anybody.

[thoughtjourneydiary]

“We’re all mad here.” ― Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland All in our different ways… We understand that people differ from each other, not just by the way we look, but by many ways in which our brains work. This is good. I think a great strength of Humanity lays here. And I think for [...]

I think for the communities of the future to be happier and more resilient, we need to study those differences and any dynamics they case in the relationships between people. This is something to use proactively in community building on many levels.

At the moment I am into the book “Make Your Sensitivity Work for You” by Alice Muir.

The book gives some practical advise on being a highly sensitive person – like many people are, me included. It is great that the book says there is nothing wrong with being sensitive and sensitivity comes as a part of a package of useful traits, often including also being intuitive, very perceptive, empathic, good listener, understanding, enthusiastic, interested in people, sympathetic, committed, a deep thinker, creative, imaginative, intelligent, reliable, trustworthy, good at seeing others point of view, aware of subtleties, different scenarios and consequences…

Time to pat yourself on the head if you are sensitive – except that (I think) there are many shades and varieties of sensitivity with different traits and the traits themselves could be on different stages of development. But, I guess, it is a trait of modern psychology – even if nowadays they acknowledge that there is big variety within “normal”, they still fail to sort the details. I wish there would be a chapter on Jungian cognitive functions here – they are an approximation of course, but better to have one than no analysis at all.

There’s however a chapter on what could make somebody sensitive which, on the level of gut feeling, seems wrong to me. This is big profound rewiring of the brain by events, some of which are not even very traumatic. Can this really happen, especially later in life?

As far as I can understand here is an ongoing debate about nature versus nurture in us humans.  Steven Pinker fights the notion of the “blank slate” human in his book with the same name:

People are born a bit different to each other and, again, here lies our strength, not weakness.

An interesting perspective on the differences is in one in the Johnathan Fields’ podcast: the split betweenhelpers and makers among us. I think it is a great observation. The source of so much struggle and guilt: “I should be helping someone, when I just want to create!” or “I should be making something while I just want to help! ”.

We all should stop beating ourselves for what we are and concentrate on how can we work together for everyone’s benefit.

[thoughtjourneydiary]

The difference between a helper and a creator - towards the end. Great observation. The source of so much struggle and guilt ("I should be helping someone! /I should be creating something! ")

[thoughtjourneydiary]

Wishing humans were dead

We are humans. All our friends, mentors and family are. And we are here, dominating this planet. If we never developed, would other intelligent species took over the planet one day? Could dolphins, elephants, crows, chimps, dogs or perhaps rats give rise to a new civilization? Would they be “gentler” with the Nature and each other than we have been? We can not know at the moment.

For all our sins, we are the only force so far which could potentially save life from a global disaster like an asteroid strike.

Wishing for our civilization to disappear, I think, is an immature way of thinking happening sometime withing environmentally aware community. I too might have been like this – when I was ten.

In the book “Ecovillage at Ithaca” (a useful record of an ecovillage development and a part of my ever growinglist of potentially useful books for creating new ways of living)

Liz Walker starts with describing her young son’s attitude, his wish for humans to “just die of” because of species disappearing at an incredible rate. She herself, although shocked, could see his point, as “at the beginning of the 21st century, we face a world that is falling apart at the seams“…

Is it? Or we humans just intrinsically like tragedy, our media picks up on this and paint us a, alas, desirable picture of “our world … drenched in the blood of seemingly endless warfare” and “miserable living conditions for much of the world’s population“.

If we wont to build a real better future, we have to deal with facts, not the ever-changing media theater. Violence, disease and poverty are the enemies of our future. What has been happening to them?

First, I would recommend the well known Steven Pinker’s book

where he meticulously proves the diminishing of violence through the history and talks about the reasons for this.

Here you can find the data on the global decrease of poverty.

“Historical data shows that global life expectancy has increased drastically over the last couple of centuries, with substantial long-run improvements in all countries around the world” – according to Esteban Ortiz-Ospina and Max Roser. Is this data good? Let me know if you find otherwise.

Life is wonderful. One of its miracles is the ability to recover. There have been a series of devastating mass extinctions throughout the geologic history of our planet.  In some cases up to 60 percent of species were gone. Of course, it took Nature from 20 to 100 million years to recover the biodiversity (see

for more information). We may argue, that the life would never evolve to be so inventive and resilient if not for those extinction events, but we don’t need another one. According to WWF at the moment we might be loosing between 0.01 and 0.1 percent of all species per year which is 1,000 and 10,000 times higher than the natural extinction rate. We took over the planet, this changed all the ecosystems… Bit since we realised what is happening we ought to change. It could be that the knowledge itself makes it impossible for humanity to avoid the coming change.

Living this change, this is the purpose of the Good New Town project. It has to have solid foundation: verifiable data. Doom and gloom might induce some people to act – for a while. Only complete honesty can sustain the movement.

So let’s question every piece of information coming to us, examine the evidence and try to accept the world as it is.

Originally posted at http://goodnewtown.uk/wishing-humans-dead/

[thoughtjourneydiary]

The future of agriculture in Wales

Here’s my contribution to the debate

Many small scale experiments for a more resilient future

Now that we have an opportunity to rethink the future of agriculture, land management and the life of rural communities in Wales, let people to experiment and to find out what will work. There is no need to play havoc with all of the rural economy at once but please allow innovation and initiative on a small scale, as long as there is no clear and obvious risk to people, animals and the environment. There must be people willing to experiment, creating all sorts of new businesses, eco-villages, homesteads and seasteads, various intentional communities. Give them a good fighting chance then take evidence-based decisions, not affected by fads or overrated opinions of the most vocal of lobbies. Even then, no government should ever place all eggs in the same basket (be this sheep farming or timber). Diversity in business models and lifestyles improves the resilience of any economy just like biodiversity helps ecosystems to survive changes and hard times.

Why the contribution is important

Presently there are lots of things going wrong with our lives. Our towns are surrounded by countryside but people may feel very distant from it. The farmland creates backdrop to their lives but is inaccessible due to lack of footpaths, public transport and human connection to the farming community, lack of internet – and lack of interest too. This is not a healthy relationship. The people are suffering, stuck to cities and towns with ridiculously small gardens and manicured parks. People need real nature and countryside for mental and physical health. People need fresh quality food, need connection to the land and to the community. So, we need our intelligence to develop a way of living in harmony with nature, surrounded by nature everywhere where we are. I am thinking in the direction of sustainable small scale farming, food forests, “garden cities”, decentralisation, edible landscapes, living roofs and walls, passive houses, forest farming, green burial sites, silvopasture, permaculture, aquaponics, real community gardens serving real communities, etc. – whatever works. I believe human activity and flourishing could be conducted within a healthy ecosystem made of us, our stuff, wide variety of plants and animals.

I am an artist and a geographer interested in creating a prototype semi-rural intentional community (an eco-village, an eco-block or an eco-neighborhood), an ongoing experiment for a better way of living, more sufficient and efficient, closer to Nature, working with the help from newest technology. An open lab of an honest, creative and compassionate life, strong friendly community, better health and well-being. Doing research into reintroducing wildlife, into more efficient food production and waste recycling systems, into automation, working on the new ways to get energy, new building methods, new educational systems, restoring useful agricultural and building practices from the past, and so on. People of various interests and abilities creating better lives for themselves, their friends, neighbours and families, ultimately, for the whole Earth. In the world obsessed with divisions this should be a place of honest enquiry, free of prejudices and any party rhetoric.

What we need is relaxing of planing permissions and other regulations for experimental / alternative communities, eco-villages, or self-built houses; we need land and we need grants. It is vitally important that public money won’t go to some smoke screen / green wash projects for clever bureaucrats but to real people building real future. There also should not be any exploitation of vulnerable and gullible “volunteers”, like in some modern social enterprises. People who will be living and working in those future communities are also the best candidates for building them.

The wast green spaces of Wales are treasures. We have a chance to make them also different to all other rural parts of the world in being a magnet for innovation and future-friendly experiment, brain-and skill- gain rather than drain, place for openness and cooperation, honest work for common good.

If you are interested in participating, please join the New Good Town project athttp://goodnewtown.uk/ and our Facebook page athttps://www.facebook.com/groups/goodnewtown/

by AlexandraCook on October 04, 2016 at 11:27AM

[thoughtjourneydiary]

Starting small… or not?

When you dream big it is so difficult to find a way to start small. Is it really necessary? Is it just shortchanging yourself? Is it fooling yourself with false business?

If in you mind you see something which can change the whole world for better, how do you design the baby steps?

With the Good New Town project as a way to redesign so many aspects of our lives I am thinking a calendar, blogging, social media, a simulation game (?), a book, and relatively small scale local projects which will raise awareness and draw in the like minded. Watch this space.

Any other suggestions?

[thoughtjourneydiary]

Why I am not “people”?

From time to time here in Wales I encounter an organization claiming to help people, including helping to find an income. And I think: “Great, that is what I need! Something I didn’t had for 16 years, despite having qualifications, skills and desires to do good. When I tried to create an independent business, I was hit so hard by rents and insurances, I had no hope to succeed. This must be different. ” I tell them how happy I am them I finally found something sounding friendly and helpful. They promise to help. One day. But before that time I have to volunteer, often alongside paid stuff (often much younger and less qualified than me), to help people... Some other people... I learned to dread the word volunteering... In the worst case, I wasted 4 years... I am starting to feel that all so called Social Enterprises, Community Benefit Societies, charities or whatever they call themselves are just smoke screens to support the “insiders” by using the naive and desperate ones like myself... I really hope I am wrong. Please, somebody, prove me wrong!

[thoughtjourneydiary]

The most important art

I have to learn it, there is no way round. The fine art of putting my feet down. Otherwise I’ll never accomplish what’s important to me and hopefully also is beneficial for many. 

[thoughtjourneydiary]

Intimidating?

I feel it. Possibly they mean it - even if just subconsciously. People intimidating others with puppies or babies. Bringing them everywhere, to parties, even to meetings. Then everybody HAS to talk about the “precious ones” or even to them, pretend to adore them, make faces... No chance for a serious honest conversation.

Deliberately “making rounds” with the baby, no chance for you to hide in a dark corner.

People behaving in this way are definitely on my “stay away” list.

Maybe because I never would dare to do anything like this when my kids were small. Maybe I was so isolated then and developed a baby-phobia? Maybe I am just jealous? Everything at once? Who knows...

[thoughtjourneydiary]

The world of true colour

only lives inside me...

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Whatever movement I will be involved with

should be apolitical & non-dogmatic.

[thoughtjourneydiary]

Personal Preferences

If a group starting to concentrate on agendas, minutes and constitutions, I feel like running away. I only want to participate in real meaningful work.

If a person is declaring that something is true because he or she wants this to be true or because it usually assumed as true in that persons circle - I feel like running away. It seems that I SO prefer the company of science nerds to any new age folks because of this.

[thoughtjourneydiary]

All the Other Worlds. Prologue

[One of those pieces of text found in an abandoned hermit’s cave]

Sometimes, half asleep or delirious, like from behind a paper wall, we hear in our minds strange words or see strange pictures. Shadows or glimpses of what didn’t happen, won't happen, wouldn't happen. Or did it, will it, would it? How could the impossible be possible? How could an ordinary being comprehend that and after... go back to live an ordinary life?   ...If the retreat at the Crossroads looked as a giant spaceship mostly buried underground, that’s because it really was. Like a metallic iceberg the very top of which was just above the surface. In the gaps between blossoming vines travelers could see dull bronze shine of an otherworldly contraption, all rivets and elegant curves.

Soon the hostess would come out, barefoot, ageless, long worn out dress with unearthly patterns,  messy hair. She would offer a cup of herbal tea at a wooden table in a wild lush garden. Her large mysterious blue eyes would carefully study you.  If you are lucky she would offer a room to stay.   Inside you'll find aged red damask fabric on the walls,  plenty of dull metal and other discolorated leftovers of once opulent alien interior.  The hostess will talk to you a bit.  Be honest because lying won't work.  Be honest and you might hear a story or two of traveling between worlds, of danger and laughter, of friendship and love. She will talk to you because she is waiting and had been waiting for a very long time.  She need to know when a right person will knock on her oval alien door...

... Adela was standing in the circle of men, all tall, dark hair, dark uniforms. They were almost clones, with only slight differences in their features. She realized that her old “friend” Lee Gallainus Ferrer was one of them, although now his hair was cut short and the face unshaven. The strange thing: none in the circle would look into her eyes. Not shy types, for sure!

- Please turn round, - said the voice behind her. She did, and this time the one who spoke was looking directly into her eyes.

She shivered. It was like starring into the heart of the Universe, cool blue light pouring out, stars forming and dying in blasts of energy... It was the light which could not be caught on camera. Living beings could see it, nevertheless.

- This strikes you every time, - she heard Lee’s voice in her head. - That is why being both his bodyguards and his prison guards, we are not allowed to look into others people’s eyes - when on duty.

She was standing in front of the last Iliodor himself, semi-ceremonial leader of the Galaxy, who would be the most powerful creature here would he be free. She felt paralyzed with fear and awe, still full of curiosity and... compassion...