Santa Cruz Passages

09/02/2024

Once there were Queens who said
"Off with his head!"
And Kings who said the same
Then spake the Founders of this Dream,
Ours is a different Game,
Where sovereign is as sovereign does
In Each & Every One
Where—We the People—reign supreme
{Out of the Many, One}

03/30/2024

Crucifixion Resurrection
Easter Weekend



Depression and spiritual awakening -- two sides of one door | Lisa Mille...

This talk was given at a local TEDx event, produced independently of the TED Conferences. Is depression, as most of us experience it, meaningless suffering? ...

03/19/2024

Beautiful parent Comment to wit's end Mother post:

"I've been having very honest conversations with my daughter about screen addiction and how it makes her feel like she wants more, even after getting some screen time. A few weeks ago, as she was nearing her 9th birthday, she was talking to a friend on the computer who moved away and I heard her explaining to her friend, who's a couple years younger, about how the filters can lead them to think they need to look like the filters and they can get addicted to watching cartoons, so it's best to just hang out together and play and craft together. It was such an amazing thing to have the wisdom I've been trying to give to her replayed from her own lips to another young friend. These are different times and we need different types of boundaries and explanations to our kids about why we're setting those boundaries. I think it's also important to keep talking with our kids about how they feel in their bodies with all this new tech as we navigate this new landscape. While I am tired of always having to hold strong boundaries, I'm also heartened to know my daughter is indeed taking it in, hearing me, and I think feel loved more than frustrated overall with the boundaries I will continue to hold, while we work as a team to help her become responsible for taking good care of her own mind, body, and soul. This is my great hope, that love is more powerful in the end."

02/17/2024

Having a teen working on her costume for this year's at The Rio Theatre [April 19] brings everything to the fore. as of course it is fully intended to do.

Celebrating Rich "Sundance" Owens

12/13/2022

Theory U, Otto Scharmer, Chapter 11, Presencing [excerpt]: "..We sat, this circle of friends, in the gentle outdoor light that harbors spring. I asked the woman operating the grill what she thought of the forum the day before. “I was touched by it.”
“Touched by what?” I asked.
“Well, in a way, I experienced the day like a wedding. In the end there was a solemnity in the room, like in a cathedral, and an intimacy, like you only have when you know one another as well as you do in a family.” She had found the perfect words to describe a subtle level of experience that we had all felt. The day had truly been about joining two separate fields or bodies in a way that made each stronger and enlarged the possibilities for each.
I turned around and looked at our little “wedding constellation,” a circle of friends that united physicians, patients, and students. We had become a community and were totally present to one another. Time slowed down; loving energy radiated through the entire group.."

08/15/2022

I own no rights to this clip, just a fan wanting to share this amazing clip. All rights go to Starz entertainment and author of Outlander SeriesUploaded by U...

05/04/2022

over

03/19/2022

"Yes, anyone can sing." 🌑🌕🌍🌀🌊🐬✨💫🌹

02/03/2022

Transforming History A Curriculum for Cultural Evolution [2001]
William Irwin Thompson
Excerpt [pg 5-8]

"The movement from Heidegger to Nish*tani was a Pacific Shift in philosophy, but these Pacific Shifts are not limited to philosophy. The movement from Warren McCullough to Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela was a Pacific Shift in neuro-physiology; in one the doctrine of materialism is negated and in the other the doctrine of representationism in the nervous system was negated, but in both cases it was the worldview of Atlantic civilization that was being set aside...

One of the most pioneering thinkers in the Pacific Shift was Gregory Bateson. As an anthropologist doing research among schizophrenics who lived outside normal reality, Bateson made the phrase "double bind" a household word. As a participant in the post-war Macy Conferences in New York, which brought the pioneers of cybernetics together, Bateson was part of the creation of a new science. Bateson is important not only because of his contributions, but also because his own journey in the ecology of Mind also embodied Western culture's odyssey from Europe to California. He began his career at St John's College, Cambridge, did his early field work in Melanesia, but ended his days as the philosopher as the furthest edges of the European mentality. In the last years of his life, Governor Jerry Brown appointed him to the Board of Regents of the University of California, but Bateson continued to live with the counterculture both at Lindisfarne in New York and Esalen Institute in Big Sur. He died at the Zen Center in San Francisco in 1980, but Bateson was neither a leader of encounter groups nor zazen sessions; he simply liked to haunt edges to observe the movement across thresholds flash into "the difference that became information."

The pattern that connects Bateson to Varela, and both to Buddhism, was a personal pattern of friendship, as well as the larger cultural pattern of transformation. Both of these theoreticians of the biology of knowledge shared a fascination with the groundlessness of Buddhism and the intellectual openness of the Pacific world. Both saw the mental habit of the West as one in which Being is posited as a being and called "God"; in which process is arrested in substance and called "material reality"; and in which Mind is made into an organism without an environment and called "the self." For both Bateson and Varela, all three of these cultural activities are part of the same process of reification that isolates God from nature, mind from matter, and organism from the environment; and each ends up giving us a system of abstractions that we mistake for reality, to the destruction of both culture and nature.

In Bateson's now-classic analysis "The Effects of Conscious Purpose on Human Adaptation," these three mistake of thinking are seen to be part of the maladaptation of civilization to nature:

"If consciousness has feedback upon the remainder of the mind, and if consciousness deals only with a skewed sample of the events of the total mind, then there must exist a systematic (i.e., non-random) difference between the conscious views of self and the world, and the true nature of self and the world. Such a difference must distort the process of adaptation."

In the decades since Bateson delivered that lecture in Austria in 1968, the distortion in the process of adaptation has progressed to the point of a disruption about to become a catastrophe. As this catastrophe has already begun to become visible in the death of the forests in Europe and in global warming, this visibility of process is already changing the way we see history in the rearview mirror. Now it seems inappropriate to mark time with monuments to ego, such as Nelson's Column in Trafalgar Square, now a description of civilization is more truly read in the sequence of infrared photographs from space that show the Mediterranean's progress toward becoming an industrial sewer...

When we look down from on high with the eye of an astronaut, we cannot see the celebrated effects of egos with names and monuments; we can only see an action analogous to the presence of bacteria in a compost heap or of a mold in a Petri dish: the changes of color for the seas and the forests tell us of the deadly presence of highly toxic human institutions. Where in this collective action is the individual human will?"

01/28/2022

Reflections from

RE Professor William Irwin Thompson, founder of Lindisfarne Association

The Evolution of
William Irwin Thompson
Cultural Historian

by Joy E. Stocke

"I can’t remember the exact date of the phone call nor the time it came, but it must have been evening for my friend James and I both had jobs. When I look over my journals, I’m shocked to realize that the year was 1992. The previous spring James and I had met at the Ragdale Foundation, a writers’ colony in Lake Forest, Illinois, and had become friends.

James had worked as a translator in Berlin’s East Zone before the wall fell, and had finally moved to New York where by a stroke of good fortune, or good karma, as he might say, he discovered the Lindisfarne Symposium, led by cultural historian William Irwin Thompson at the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine on the Upper West Side of New York.

“Just get here,” James said. “You’ve never heard anyone synthesize ideas and concepts like Bill Thompson.”

The title of the symposium was a lofty one: “Literature and the Evolution of Consciousness.” Blood raced through my veins. Hadn’t James and I danced around this topic during late night conversations at Ragdale?

I made arrangements to drive to New York. By seven a.m. on Saturday morning, I was on the Pennsylvania Turnpike to the New Jersey Turnpike over the Meadowlands and through the Midtown tunnel to 112th Street and Amsterdam Avenue.

I had no inkling of the breadth and depth of Bill Thompson’s intellect. Nor that the Lindisfarne Fellowship, which he founded in 1972, had gathered some of the greatest minds of the twentieth century in dialogue and conversation: Chilean biologist Francisco Varela who coined the term autopoiesis; microbiologist Lynn Margulis, co-creator with James Lovelock of the Gaia hypothesis; mathematician Ralph Abraham, one of the pioneers of chaos theory; Gregory Bateson, anthropologist and husband of Margaret Mead.

About fifty people would gather in the Parish House of the Cathedral. Over the course of two years we read and discussed such works as: The Epic of Gilgamesh, The Upanishads, The Rg Veda, The Bhagavad Gita, The Tao Te Ching, even Stanislav Lem’s science fiction gem, Solaris. And then Bill would begin his riff, mind jazz he called it. Mind jazz it was.

Thompson’s talks at the Cathedral are refined in his book Coming Into Being: Artifacts and Texts in the Evolution of Consciousness.

In the last chapter, he says:

Throughout this study of literature and the evolution of consciousness, I have used the metaphor of the catastrophe of bifurcation and said that humanity is experiencing a catastrophe bifurcation in the emergence of the new global civilization. “Catastrophe” is a word that English has taken from Greek; it means, “to turn over.” When we turn over material in a compost heap, we create a catastrophe for the anaerobic bacteria in the rotting garbage as we suddenly flood them with oxygen and sunlight. The chaos dynamists say that there are three kinds of catastrophes: subtle, explosive, and “out of the blue.” The mathematicians’ use of these poetic metaphors makes me feel as if it is quite all right for me to return the favor and use their idea of a catastrophe bifurcation as a poetic metaphor for a cultural transformation of history. Since I have been arguing all along that literature and mathematics have been inseparably linked throughout history in the arithmetic, geometric, dynamical, and now chaos dynamic mentalities, this collaboration between metaphor and math is quite appropriate. Since I am a cultural historian and not a prophet, I have no idea whether this catastrophe will be subtle, explosive or out of the blue. I tend to think that our process of global cultural transformation is so complex a dynamic that it will be all three at once. The economic shift is subtle, the cultural shift is explosive, and the spiritual one is out of the blue.

And he ends his chapter with this admonition:

All the ancient texts that I have used to explore our modern world are once and future poems of possibility. Once they are seen all together in the imagination of the reader, then they can become a hypertext description of our contemporary evolution of consciousness…The new culture involves the recovery of the feminine; the deconstruction of the patriarchy; and the deconstruction of the capital-intensive economies of scale run by the military-athletic-entertainment-industrial complexes with their shadow economies of drugs, arms, traffic, and crime…Over two thousand years ago, humanity chose the militaristic and hierarchical path at the fork in the road. Now here we are again, and I, of course, hope that the road not taken 2,000 years ago will be the road we take this time for the axial shift..."

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06/04/2021

Santa Cruz Passages is all about rites of passage, large and small.

Lately I have encountered two kinds of applications of Jim Rough’s dynamic facilitation. In one framework it  is mistakenly applied as a method of deliberation. When you look at the outcomes it seems to be a good application for it. You get pretty darn good solutions for the problem statement the...