“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…
In the last post I overviewed stupidity that causes socio-cultural harm and if left unchecked can lead to totalitarian systems of manipulation and control. According to the Cipolla quadrant scheme, I interpret the world being run by a small group of the Bandits with lots of stupid people supporting them. Read more…
“Wisdom and knowledge is everywhere, but so is stupidity” Trudi Canavan Strange times we live in. Someone I know well recently called me stupid because I disagreed with her (she ardently trusts the MSM). I was merely asking her to consider a different perspective that countered her well entrenched beliefs. Read more…
I was again looking over The Patterning Instinct by Jeremy Lent who really does have fascinating insights into how humanity has historically created our worldviews and the cultural norms we take for granted (see earlier post Cultivating a Flourishing Future 3 – Manifested New Perspectives {November 2018}). Lent shines a Read more…
We live on an amazing planet full of teeming and diverse life forms with replenishable resources we can use to give us wonderful lives. Being spiritual means to care for the planet, because if we do, it will nurture us as well. But we cannot go on as we have Read more…
I have talked how our reality is shaped by the stories we tell ourselves. This is also about how we use specific words to describe our reality. “The way we see the world shapes the way we treat it. If a mountain is a deity, not a pile of ore; Read more…
“We must be careful not to believe things simply because we want them to be true. No one can fool you as easily as you can fool yourself.” Richard Feynman. A question I have asked often of my readers is, “do you want to thrive or simply survive?” And if Read more…
One of the questions I always got from new students in my Sustainability Studies program was, “Why can’t everyone see the obvious need to work towards sustainability?” That’s a question I have spent many years and much of this blog talking about. I was, by training and many years of Read more…
I find that wherever I look in the media at this time, there are so many people moaning and complaining about the state of the world. Yet, a large number resist doing anything to create change that would begin the transformation from an oligarchy to a world that works better Read more…
In my Sustainable Living textbook, I have a chapter on economics. Recently, I was looking at it and pondering on how many years I have been trying to get people to see that money and more ‘stuff’ does not make us happy over the long term. I went through my Read more…