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Dearest Cooperative Ego

When Oliver dropped out of high school, after his sophomore year, he went to UConn. We never understood why, other than the obvious, that the main campus was our back yard, and he didn’t like to drive, or use toilets outside our home.

He thought the whole academic degree industry was suspiciously rooted in Win-Lose Game Theory assumptions, which didn’t necessarily have to be true if we would all just wake up some morning and decide to go with Win-Win instead. Even so, he sailed through his GED exams and then spent over a year deciding whether to take some classes at UConn, or just continue writing prose and lyrics and gaming on-line with his intercontinental team, with a representative from each populated continent except Africa–an exception that he found not just irritating but actually embarrassing.

About the time he was deciding not to go back for his junior year, Oliver shared his “Dear Ego” letter with me. We were both surprised, I think, because he almost never wanted me to read his work, or play, as he preferred to think of it. But, this one he correctly thought I would find helpful:

Dear Ego

Please notice that “evil” is not only “live” spelled backwards, but it also is backward, or the reverse of, healthy living.

You do your evil, not-live, acts to test me, to learn justice, when you are wise enough to listen to our eco-logical response.

You evil out of ignoring y/our larger interdependent identity, to discover your individual and collective responsibilities, potential integrity, how and when and whom both live and not-live choices coalesce and differentiate.

Evil is about what and whom we don’t do and become that we could do, we could become, with sufficient power, individually and collectively.

You do not do evil to learn the causes and effects of generosity, to uncover our individual v. collective accountability for gratitude, for mutual redemption.

You both do and do not evil to mutually mentor fair balance of redemptive generosity, mercy, kindness, giving care, nurturing; to evolve Us, your SuperEco Co-Intelligence, to proactively practice peaceful resolutions, love’s fully inclusive resonance through time’s healing, synergy’s revolution.

You and I deliver this not-live evil of climatic competitive transactions, relationships,to spring loose love’s cooperative Boddhisatva Occupation of Earth’s eco-logically harmonious co-arising habitat.

Namaste my Beloved Sub-Climaxing Community.

Your Left-Hand Dominant Right Brain,

SuperEco Elder

 

I don’t know if this was a suicide note, or why I found this copy in front of his cold not-living, but still generously beautiful, body. It’s not even clear to me that Oliver’s death was a suicide, at least not as we usually understand this violence and sadness and despair against one’s future.

The medical examiner said he had never seen anything like it, although he had read an account of a chronically depressed dolphin living in captivity, who signed farewell to a favorite caregiver and then simply stopped inhaling air. Apparently that’s what Oliver did, or chose to not do anymore.

I miss Oliver’s deep beauty, his humor, brilliant integrity, even his profound sadness about our climatic disarray, our chronic insufficiency of loving the cooperative juice of eco-logical health flowing through his veins and neural system.

How I wish that I could redeem his not-live lack of healthy loving environment enough to persuade him to take in one more breath. But, Oliver was always like that. Not confidant that he deserved to breathe the polluted air he inherited from me, from us, from our choices.

I wish we had planted trees together. It was lonely planting that weeping willow in the ashes of his cooperative evil choice.

 

 

 

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My Perfect President

Open letter to President Obama:

9/17/2015

Two things. A thank you, and a suggestion for our shared global future, confronting increasingly rapid climatic, with concomitant cultural and economic, transitions.

First, thank you for the pleasure of watching and listening to your comparative political and economic sanity for the past eight years. Enthusiastically voting for you twice, although you are not my “perfect” candidate, was such a relief and pleasure. And, your performance in what appears to be a largely thankless and hopeless position, has been graceful and sometimes even respectful of honest differences in priority. When comparing our financial investment in your presidential campaigns, and the cost to your personal integrity, to any positive health and well-being return, I see where this may have made sense for the rest of us, but I find it miraculous that you so generously accept your losses, along with your wins.

Second, my suggestion moves toward optimizing political and economic potential for addressing what we have labeled “climate warming,” but is actually the multisystemic problem of over-heated climate change. You seem to see the difference, and recognize the awesome scale of this challenge, especially during the already-shrinking projected normal life spans of our children, and grandchildren. So the requisite motivation to recognize and accept climate change as our most profoundly significant “well-being” global rights issue, as well as a national issue, you already have in your pocket.

No doubt you have noticed by now that even the President of the United States and the General Secretary of the United Nations, perhaps those two positions even more so than for all of us regular folks, daily confront a huge gap between what you are motivated to do and what you are powerful enough to accomplish. With political empowerment comes greater global and cultural and socioeconomic responsibilities, and aspirations. If you are any good as a person at all, I think you step into this larger-scale of consciousness, and you and your family do appear to be very good people indeed.

Perhaps helpful, with regard to our political “stuckness”, I am also noticing a considerable growth and refinement of two paradigms that appear to be co-arising toward nonduality, which, if you are familiar with Buddhist and/or Taoist philosophy, is the kind of evolution that has a way of becoming revolutionary, in a positive way. These two paradigms are Permaculture Design (and Development) and New (Feminist) Economics.

Each of these paradigms analyzes Business As Usual to point toward our urgent need for cultural and economic local-scaled cooperative-nurturing systems (including healthier ecosystems) to replace our current messiness. Business As Usual includes Win-Lose Game Theory, Left-brain dominant deduction, competition, economic and evolutionary cultural dynamics of entropic-trending dysfunction and over-specialization.

Since retiring from grant and program development for Connecticut human service agencies, I have been reading economics as presented by Riane Eisler (The Real Wealth of Nations), John Michael Greer (The Wealth of Nature), and Charles Eisenstein (Sacred Economics). Each is brilliant and together they shape an economic dipolar pattern contrasting Received View financial growth as economic wealth with a newer, more cooperative-centric economics of health, positive nutrition:

  • healthy production balancing consumption, and
  • polycultural health as root-value measure of wealth regeneration within eco-logically cooperative systems that today emerge from our current exponentially-growing global consensus that well-being has already begun trending toward decomposition.

Permaculturists, from Laotse through Buckminster Fuller and on to today’s booming industry of healing Earth and residents thereof, take as much interest in the ecological balance of regeneration and decomposition as economists invest in expanding v. contracting economic health of production/consumption systems.

Eisenstein (2011) calls the New Economics “sacred” economics, but, boiled down into natural system language, his sacred might be translated with Buckminster Fuller’s synergy; a positive-trending cooperatively-evolving dynamic integrity of health trend systems design and development. Further, Eisenstein seems to interpret “divine,” as contrasted to profane, as integrity v. deductive-reductive-redactive competing identities and independently eisegetical understanding. It is a profane Business As Usual culture assuming oppositional either-or Win-Lose evolutionary strategies and logistics, when it is more ectosymbiotically integrative to heuristically hold both-and Win-Win appositional challenges and comparisons and tipping-points, leading toward nondual co-arising strategies and more comprehensive polycultural consciousness.

What are Win-Win cooperative political, economic, and ecological outcomes that are achievable given the current climate in Washington, the U.S., and Earth?

I think we already do agree on, and are united within, one primary concern: How can I (and we)

  • invest in optimizing my health and well-being,
  • assure the right of full healthy development of my dependents, and all I love,
  • continue learning and mentoring wise and natural-systemic discernment, rather than merely learning to produce and consume more efficiently,
  • prudently invest my life exclusively within long-term just-right maturation, by avoiding short-term high risk gains in a sense of wealth that has become divorced from health of life’s intrinsically regenerative value.

We could each and all choose to invest our balancing budgets in cooperative economic industry, vocations, residences, communities, local ecosystems and polyculturally inclusive transformations of monoculturally silo-entropic decomposition, or Win-Lose Business As Usual. This choice of cooperative polycultural development over competitively self-isolating monocultures reflects the permaculturist’s approach to each site for redesign, but also our approach to each day, each life, each word and communication choice, each food and recreation choice. It seems possible to recognize that Martin Luther King’s Beloved Community is equivalent to the permaculturist’s Climax Community and the cooperative economist’s 7-Generation planning for optimal life-sustaining cooperative health-investment networks; where health is interpreted as broadly as Thich Nhat Hanh’s positive nutrition for all the senses, most definitely including aesthetic health, proportion, rhythm, patterns of form, function, and frequency.

If  all life, and future human quality of life in all its diversity of colors and cultures, matters, this new economic permacultural paradigm could be the basis of

  • deep learning theories in public education,
  • taught to every politician entering elected office,
  • every military strategy leader and teacher,
  • every policy analyst and designer,
  • every government employee and volunteer and intern training program, including the Peace Corp and AmeriCorp/VISTA.

Turning public education and public financial investment away from supporting further monoculturally-trending competition, and toward healthy polyculturally-trending cooperative systems and networks, could work for both sides of the nation’s partisan aisle.

This would be an impressive way to both exit as President, and enter as what Laotse would call a sagacious ruler; a permaculturally proficient polyculturist of cooperative economics, natural evolutionary relationships, and ecological well-being. That is what I would wish for you and your family, as I wish for mine.

If you are looking for a permaculturist with systems design and development expertise, I strongly recommend Joanna Macy, in California, sometimes, teaching in the Berkeley area.

Thank you for your response to our still-emerging climate change issue.

Namaste,

Gerald Dillenbeck, MPA, M. Div., PDC

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Becoming Climate March

Ground of Being,
Climate of All Becoming
horizon’s now moment of Earth meets Sky,

EcoSpirit bound solar fire heating air
warming crystal ice floating water
soaking absorbent soul of soil
rusting fractal minerals

decomposing eviL-ing flesh
regenerating Live-ing organic systems,

open sets inform researching rhythms
percuss prehensile patterns
of octave colored sounds in songs
reconnecting mythic culture stories
reweaving co-grounded horizon long becoming,
Be longing Nondual-Now.

 

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Walking Baby’s Journey

Taking baby steps these days,

they hurt less than leaps and bounds.

 

An unusually negative way of saying:

small steps feel more contenting right now,

than larger plans for different memories.

 

What are these larger plans for different memories

you back away from right now?

How might you hang onto this dream

or avoid this nightmare

while continuing with your contented smallish steps?

 

Could you write and story-tell yourself through both messages,

perhaps nesting one within the other,

usually the smaller steps within the larger praxis and storyline

like a personal journal entry,

nested within each Earth Day headline.

 

Of which hopes and dreams is your life iconic,

as it is,

and becomes obvious by simply unweaving your story backward,

back through Earth’s spacetime enculturing history.

How you are different and the same as your grandmother

is the most recent episode in your epic

of how you are different and the same as Grandmother Moon,

is the most recent episode

in the universal epic

of how you are different and the same as  your Elder cousins,

Sun and Earth,

Yang on Yin, yet again,

Fire’s dynamic effect on Water’s self-absorptive evaporation.

 

Let’s Spring those Baby Steps, girl!

Read more at: http://www.poetrysoup.com/member_area/soup_mail.aspx?PoetID=21797&subject=Re–Dear+Gerald%2c+&MID=265395

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ReGenesis Project

It does appear we are all agreed that Earth and all inhabitants thereof are in a critical climatic and/or cultural transition. 
Within this transition, I see both degenerative and regenerative trends. These seem to ecologically and economically align along competitive v. cooperative optimization strategies, as these might appear in Systems Theory, Information Processing Theory and Praxis, and Ecological Sciences including Evolutionary Theories within NeuroSciences, Theoretical Physics, Positive Psychology, Multisystemic and Integral Therapy, Game Theory, and Mathematics–Group Theory.
Our optimal diapraxis as a Species would notice our currently emerging positive deviant paradigms; subcultures such as New Economics, cooperative politics, cooperative healthcare, cooperative vocations, intentional cooperative communities, cooperative residences, green-culture, Permaculture, Occupier, Gaia University, Food and Economic and Climate, Cultural, Earth Justice Advocacy and Investment/Divestment Policy Design.
It seems prudent to understand these shared core values as richly therapeutic seeds to plant strategically, within our more persistently dissonant and nihilistic, perhaps increasingly autistic-trending, culture.
Current pathological cultural, political, and economic trends:
  • continue under-investing in long-term lowest risk cooperative investments,
  • actively resist positive pro-life momentum, thereby turning away from Positive Deviant stories [because they are too dissonant, distant, frightening, dark, dismal to be believed while continuing to rest comfortably at night about our great-grand-children’s future prospects] with themes like Loss of Living Populations Diversity, trending toward flat-line, and, my personal favorite, Yes, Martha, The Sky Really is Failing.
So, we might respond to cooperatively positive opportunities presented by this Transitional Point/Era and Generation by mentoring cooperative investment in each other and those around us, culturally, politically, and economically.
And, we might sing and dance, share, design, develop, grow, fertilize, feed, harvest, regenerate more positive and polycultured narratives and gaming strategies within ourselves, our families, our communities, our ecosystems, cousin species, nations, and Earth.
A possible name that has been on my mind is ReGenesis Project.
Euler argued that our shared cognitive metrics evolve out of the primal dust of function, that a vector, a point, functions as a primal crossroad of two or more lines. In a tree’s primal architecture, and according to Julian Jaynes’ view of the relationship between our Left and Right hemispheres, the lower reverse-hierarchical root system provides the neural nutrients for what we productively deduce in our “above-ground” branches, and leaves, and flowers, pollinating regenerative potential for sustaining future generations.
 
I seem to be sitting firmly on a surf’s edge fence. On one side I am exhausted and want to retire to build a small eco-balanced forested habitat for myself and my diversely challenged, medically complex family, where we can grow each other’s therapy, as removed as feasible from competitive social and economic pathologies indigenous to weakened and limp ecological rationality within our not-so-humane natural culture.
 
On the other hand, I feel inspired to find out if NCDD, Tellus Institute, Gaia University, Work That Reconnects, Naropa University, BigBrothers-BigSisters, Kittering, Schumacher Foundation, Americorps/VISTA, Salvation Army, and/or the burgeoning U.S. cooperative network of technical assistance and loan providers might like to combine their wisdom in a council platform called Interhelp.com, that might allow us to prepare an interactive cooperative investment plan, including a mutual assets report and expense budget, to help reforest our habitat with a rich polycultural global ecosystem of diversely composted wealth for sustaining life with mutual gratitude, with grassroots leadership from those who are most marginalized, and at greatest risk of living without satisfactory fulfillment.
 
This surf’s edge fence sitting feels co-respondent to this Winter Solstice season. Maybe that’s why I feel inclined to hibernate my way through this particular crossroad.

Regenerative Systems indigenously share a Positive Teleological strategic assumption, which could also be framed as Reverse-Positive Tree-ological.

An obstacle, regarding hierarchical binary and ecological analogical tree design, to producing Win-Win cooperative strategic incentives, could be resolved by imaging the tree’s root system, rather than the above-ground branches and production end of a business that starts as the increasingly diastolically condensing of nutrients from diverse individual root “strings” if you will.

At the lowest level of our digital universal population are all the individual people, or individual households, which might be better if we want this game to include positive family values, which might include the value of working together so that everybody in the family feels heard, understood, and included.

At the next level might be neighborhoods or smaller community deliberation processes which cannot achieve at least (0)-sum positive/negative ecological value balance until every constituent household has achieved at least (0)-sum positive/negative ecological value balance.

And so it goes, to the level of larger urban area or bioregion, also not able to “Win” (0)-sum positive/negative ecological value balance until each constituent community has done so.

We might next have a letter for nations, and then for all nations, no one of which will ever achieve (0)-sum positive/negative ecological nutrient well-being value balance until every nation has done so.

Competitive, egocentric characters and corporations have no place to hide in this strategy; we will all recognize each other in our desire to do our part to help us win, together.

“Ecological” refers both to economic and natural-systemic environmental “ground of all being” positive teleological values.

“Teleological values” are those that hold together Original Meaning of global historic evolution, ethologically translated through the multisystemic analogies of future purpose, Buckminster Fuller’s (0) Core Vector Synergetics, David Bohms’ Implicating Physical Frequency Order, Gregori Perelman’s (and friends) (0) soul universal theorem in Group Theory.

In other words, we tend to find our therapeutic future abundance by minimizing pathological cultural trends; which I think is probably true of any good conversation at any level of this reverse-hierarchical Win-Win Tree Game we are already playing through Co-Intelligence found in the plasmatic ground of our Being.

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