for - adjacency - ecology of communication - progress traps - intentionality - language

adjacency - between - ecology of communications - progress traps - intentionally - language - emptiness - adjacency relationship - human intentionally focuses it attention on only a few select aspects of the entire gestalt of any moment of our phenomenological reality - It creates our salience landscape - What we choose to focus on and know more about it always coupled with and complimented by a vast ignorance of what we choose NOT to know - Indeed, the use language itself is the telling of a very specific story - Of all the stories we can tell, - Of the infinite stories we can construct now, -we settle on one - So the use of language already betrays the complexity inherent in each and every one of our ecological moments - We plant the seeds for progress traps as soon as we - manifest an intention - attempt to communicate - Hence, it is not avoidable and the best we can do is - recognize our situation - manage it - It is the relationship between - human nature (perceived as limited) - nature nature (infinite) - What springs to mind if the Zen koan - The elbow does not bend backwards

• for: emptiness
• comment
  • emptiness
  • reality is empty (shunyata)
  • the visible is the tip of the iceberg
    • past lineage and future events of the localized appearance are hidden from view, as are other past forms associated with its history

• for: ecological civilization, degrowth, futures, deep ecology, emptiness, polycrisis, human exceptionalism, planned descent
• source
  • The Great Simplifcation
  • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GE39xfNRRyw

• Description

  • Nate hosts this discussion on what constitutes an ecological civilization with guests
    • William Rees
    • Rex Weyler
    • Nora Bateson

• Reflections Overall,

  • an insightful discussion on the polycrisis and
  • reflections on what is in store for civilization.
• There is consensus that
  • what we are experiencing has been decades in the making and
  • the solutions-oriented approach to solving problems has only treated the symptoms and indeed has made things worse.
• There is a strong undercurrent of the emptiness in nature

• Rex

  • emphasized the folly of human exceptionalism that has been socially normalized and which
  • continues to create the major separation that fuels the polycrisis.
  • Not recognizing that we are nature, not recognizing our animal nature
  • we look upon nature with an attitude of controlling nature, rather than flowing with her.
  • advocated Taoism as a more consistent way to frame nature rather than the reductionist, control methodology that separates us from nature.

• Nora's perspective is the folly of abstraction that generates fixed preconceptions of aspects of nature that we then reify.

  • The fixed preconceptions are solidified but they are an oversimplified version of reality,
  • and that oversimplification leads to actualizing the cliche"a little knowledge is dangerous" into civilization
  • in other words, the continuous manufacture of progress traps.

• William sees our impending crash as not only inevitable, but natural.

  • In this, he concurs with Rex's perspective.
  • Human beings are simply another species and like them,
    • we are susceptible to population explosions when negative feedbacks are removed,
    • which can lead to nature self-correcting with mass dieoff when resources are overconsumed.

• for: emptiness, human interbeing, human interbecoming
• example
  • BEing journey
    • I think this is also part of our sense of who we are as humans, as ourselves,
    • and the idea of the self, the individual, and even the humans as this individual species,
    • these divisions are arbitrary.
    • I don't stop at my skin.
    • I'm breathing air.
    • I'm drinking the water.
    • I'm eating food.
    • I'm eating an apple.
    • When I eat an apple, when do the molecules of the apple become me? -When I'm chewing it in my mouth?
      • when it's in my stomach?
      • when my system has broken down the nutrients?
      • when is that point that nitrogen molecule becomes me versus the apple?
    • I would propose that apple is me when it's growing on the tree.
    • I think of the blossoms of the tree and the bees.
      • The blossoms of the tree,
      • the tree can't reproduce without the bees.
      • So is the bee part of the tree?
      • The bee is part of the reproductive system of the tree.
      • So the bee is part of the tree,
      • the tree is part of the bee.
      • The bee needs the tree.
      • The tree needs the bee.
    • This is just one simple relationship,
      • but it's not simple at all because
        • the bee needs a lot of other things,
        • and the tree needs a lot of other things.
        • And the mycelium and the soil.
    • We talk about a tree and the soil and the atmosphere and the bee as if they're all separate things.
    • And that's convenient because our language has nouns that mean certain things.
    • So we want to talk about trees.
    • It's nice to have a word for tree,
      • but we get it in our head that the tree is separate from the soil,
      • which is separate from the atmosphere,
      • which is separate from the bee.
    • And I'm saying no, those divisions are indeed somewhat arbitrary,
    • but we use them for convenience.
    • But the soil's not the soil without the relationship with the tree
      • and the tree's not the tree without the relationship with the soil and the atmosphere.
      • And the atmosphere is not the atmosphere without the relationshi to the tree, to the bee, to me and the soil.
    • So to me that's the essence of ecology.
    • And that we have to expand this sense of self,
      • individual self as well as
      • the species of humans.
  • And this isolated self, I think is a socially reinforced construct, - but we get sucked into it.
    • And we talk about relationships in ecology and we talk about the value of all living things,
    • but in our actions we come back to the individual self.

• for: emptiness, ecology and emptiness, ecology and Taoism

• Quote

• Title
  • Zen and deep evolution: The optical delusion of separation
• Author
  • Fred W. Allendorf
• Date
  • 2018

• Source

  • https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6099813/

• Abstract

  • The Buddha taught that everything is connected and constantly changing.
• These fundamental observations of the world are shared by ecology and evolution.
  • We are living in a time of unprecedented rates of extinction.
• Science provides us with the information that we need to address this extinction crisis.
  • However, the problems underlying extinction generally do not result from a lack of scientific understanding, -but they rather result from an unwillingness to take the needed action.
  • I present mindfulness and meditative aspects of Zen practice
    • that provide the deeper “knowing,” or awareness that we need to inspire action on these problems.