“Being engaged in some way for the good of the community, whatever that community, is a factor in a meaningful life. We long to belong, and belonging and caring anchors our sense of place in the universe” Patricia Churchland For many people, there is a cultural sense of place that Read more
“What you’re doing now, or have done in the past, need not determine what you can do next and in the future” Ken Robinson. I spent the last few posts discussing a probable history of our modern destructive ‘Taker’ worldview. I’ve had people come up and shake their heads after Read more
First, since globally we use the Gregorian civil calendar (despite many other types of calendars used locally around the world) a Happy New Year to all my readers. Secondly, my worldviews commentary was sidetracked for a few weeks with my Ishmael discussion to frame our modern problems from a historic Read more
Dreamers are those that can find their way by starlight and moonlight, and their joy is to see the dawn before the rest of the world. Adapted from an Oscar Wilde quote. Continuing the Taker-Leaver Discussion from the last three posts. To sum it up, the innovation of the Taker Read more
Continuing the Taker-Leaver Discussion from the last post. In his books, Daniel Quinn continues this dialogue much further, but the point being made is that the Taker mindset is now part of a society that produces excess food and of many kinds, so that no one has to be disappointed Read more
I am continuing my overview of an end of semester college lecture from a Worldviews course I taught using the Ishmael stories by Daniel Quinn as part of the explanation of our modern views on scarcity and abundance. It’s also a story of why we believe in scarcity and competition Read more
One individual apple seed creates a mature tree that can literally produces hundreds of apples each year. Abundance is normal in nature. Only we humans believe in scarcity. So how did we come to this belief? When I lectured in my worldviews class, I finished the class on a lecture Read more
What is the true meaning of abundance? Too often we mean it as affluence and monetary wealth, but that only something that traps us in a singular frame of mind about abundance being money. As I have said several times in this blog, money is merely a tool, and not Read more
“Most people are convinced that as long as they are not overtly forced to do something by an outside power, their decisions are theirs, and that if they want something, it is they who want it. But this is one of the great illusions we have about ourselves. A great Read more
Continuing on with my observations of Scandinavia and weaving my thoughts of worldviews together today. Much as I wanted to find the Scandinavian countries as models of a possible sustainable future, the biggest factor to their credit (Electrical energy) is only because they have so much current alternate energy technology Read more
I’m traveling with friends at this time. Some of our talks about worldviews. I decided to do a post today, with ideas excerpted from my still unpublished book about environmental worldviews. It a book first started by a wonderful colleague and mentor of mine, John Disinger, who passed away several Read more
“War itself, is of course, a form of madness. It’s hardly a civilized pursuit. It’s amazing how we spend so much time inventing devices to kill each other and so little time working on how to achieve peace” Walter Cronkite. Despite earlier centuries of a reputation for Viking brutality, the Read more
I have had visitors recently, and like myself, they are all supporters of a sustainable future. When we started discussing my ideas of why I believe we need a worldview change, they agreed with me, but could not easily see how a destructive humanity could change that readily. We talked Read more
I have read several articles over the last few months about how people everywhere seem to be less compassionate or empathic to humanity’s problems. We seem so ready to resort to violence, something I find disturbing, especially since I believe that this is a conditioned reaction and not the non-violent Read more
I have gone on at length in this blog about Spirituality and connectedness. I even wrote an 18-part series of posts in this blog starting June 2021 (Spirituality, service and Connectedness). I mentioned the Roseto effect briefly in an earlier Espe post (Pathways to a Better Future – Espe part Read more
“When a person can’t find a deep sense of meaning, they distract themselves with pleasure” Victor Frankl. The downfall for many indigenous peoples worldwide, when they met the outsiders (mostly European) roaming across the world’s oceans, was being seduced by technology. It’s human nature to want anything that makes life Read more
I have been traveling a lot recently (through Iceland, Denmark, and Norway – I’ll call them collectively Scandinavia for this post). Wherever I went, and got into a conversation about sustainability, the same problem arose that I observed during my sabbatical trip in 2010. Most people are oblivious to the Read more
“Living more [Sustainably] is not just where you come from. It’s also how you think, how you treat others and the world that surrounds you, and what you treasure” Scandinavisk. I saw this in a catalog for organic, earth-friendly products. What I liked about it was that it was a Read more
I have talked many times in the blog about indigenous wisdom (e.g. Wisdom of our ancestors 1, 2, and 3 {April 2018}; and Relocalization and Community {January 2018}; and Reframing and Visualizing a New Society 1{March 2018}). While I have used the works of Jared Diamond (The world into yesterday) Read more
I talk a lot about how our socio-cultural conditioning has created the myriad global problems we suffer from today. While I think I have been clear about this, recently, I got a question from a friend to explain more what I mean by this conditioning. Look at the image on Read more
I have talked about the corruption in our world quite a bit. I was asked the other day about this for our future in a sustainable society. Simply; we will eliminate corruption at the highest levels. And why? We cannot be sustainable if corruption runs the whole global economic system. Read more
I have talked a little about Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) as it is occurring now, and in my Espe stories of how it was avoided in that futuristic view. While the potentialities of a CBDC could be positive, the very fact that they are to be controlled by global Read more
“Humanity’s next great evolutionary leap will be the discovery that cooperating is better than competing” Pietro Ubaldi. The one thing that characterizes the birth of great civilizations, and also, the fall of them, is how they approached problem solving – thinking in general changed between the beginning and the downfalls. Read more
“The highest form of knowledge is empathy, for it requires us to suspend our ego and live in another’s world” Plato. “Her body tensed and quivered as she felt wave after wave surge through it. I should probably have told her about the new electric fence” Farmers writing romance novels. Read more
“Today, more than ever before, life must be characterized by a sense of universal responsibility, not only nation to nation, and human, but also human to all other life forms” The Dalai lama. We are all aware of the corruption, injustices and ugliness of a world run by fear, Read more
“The truth is incontrovertible. Malice may attack it and ignorance may deride it, but in the end, there it is” Winston Churchill. I have been told by a couple of close friends that if they ever saw fairies at the bottom of their garden, I would be the first person Read more
“The proper way to fix the world isn’t to fix the world. There’s no reason to assume that you are even up to such a task. But you can fix yourself. You’ll do no one any harm by doing so, and in that manner at least, you will make the Read more
Today’s post is from a set of ideas and musings I have stored up. Still pertinent to the Espe stories I have been posting this last six months. A couple of friends who read my blog comment that I don’t say enough about the sustainable technologies. Yes, there are a Read more
“Ultimately everything depends on the quality of the individual, but our fatally short-sighted age thinks only in terms of large numbers and mass organizations…” and “It is not the universal and the regular that characterize the individual, but rather the unique. He is not to be understood as a recurrent Read more
“Go easy on yourself. You are clearing thousands of years of outdated conditioning” Starlight Rose. What if the future turns out better than you could have imagined? “The caterpillar does all the work, but the butterfly gets all the publicity” George Carlin. The majority of humanity, spent several millennia living Read more