Seeking Well-being in authentic concert
It should now be clear that something is fundamentally wrong with the world we live in. Economic calamity, increasing anxiety and declining levels of happiness, continuous war, intractable and growing poverty, and the inability to address the growing threat of climate change all signal that the development path we have pursued is the wrong path. We must look at these problems directly and ask, why? What is the common structural frame in which these problems have persisted and grown? Is this framework found in nature or has someone picked and assembled elements to construct it?
The Tecumseh Project hopes to help you wade into these questions, to wonder about the world we live in and to dream deeply about the world you would truly love to live in. Yes, love to live in. Truly each of us has such a short time to live it makes no sense whatsoever to waste a minute treading on roads that lead to nowhere, that are in fact roads of suffering and destruction for ourselves, our families and our ecosystem on which we depend.
We have to aim high. * Through our work we hope to reveal that we are trapped in a competitive economic system that consumes our lives by proscribing narrow conceptual frames through which the world must be understood, and therefore dictates our daily individual and collective habits. These conceptual frames are not reflective of human nature in the main, and have no necessary existence. We are subjects in a narrative of artificial construction, created by the least human among us who have employed capitalism as their tool towards their pleonexic ends. We are merely fuel and fodder for their profits and power--that is, but for us, they would have nothing. These powerful few have discarded much of their humanity to enable them to take advantage of ours. The Tecumseh Project calls for the peaceful overthrow of these malignant interests by enabling people, us, to see the wisdom in dropping out of their system, repudiating its underlying values thereby strengthening ourselves, our neighbors and our planet. We can, and must, tell ourselves and each other a better, more human story. * Another world is possible -World Social Forum * To the ideologues: We don’t want what you’re selling, we don’t want to borrow from you, we don’t want to work for you and we don’t want to study what you think is important. We don’t aspire to be you. We repudiate you. May the house you built fall and may we welcome you into the house built by humanity flourishing as a garden among the ruins. This is what Timothy Leary meant by "turn on, tune in and drop out." We must stop in order to see. It is a vision quest of a Native American, the mindfulness of a monk and the meditative reflections found in all religious and philosophical traditions. Because the world is deeply interconnected and completely interdependent, your simple awareness begins a better world. * We aim for a better understanding to foment a revolution in values--a revolution that overthrows competition as the single arbiter--thereby enabling us to create a new human narrative in which contest is contained within co-existence, cohabitation and co-operation. A new human narrative of authentic concert. "The only real revolution is in the enlightenment of the mind and the improvement of character, the only real emancipation is individual, and the only real revolutionists are philosophers and saints." Will and Ariel Durant The Lessons of History 1968 "In everyone there is the capacity to wake up, to understand, and to love. Understanding and love aren't two separate things, they're just one." Thich Nhat Hanh, Being Peace * We have constructed our site under several headings, each of which overlaps the other—indeed they are all intimately connected. We don’t claim to cover everything, nor certainly to “know it all.” We are in a process of discovery, just like you. Thus our site will change as we learn. This is something humans love to do. Learning, you will see, is not something that supports the malignant frame, but instead weakens it, and enables new frames to be built. That is our goal: to enable new frames to be built on values we truly hold dear. We hope to write and catalog material to enable your understanding, to help you build a new world from a solid foundation of your discovery. "Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world." --Nelson Mandela * We believe that only an authentic steadfast pursuit of true happiness and well-being will enable both true democracy and sustainability. Very often answers are found through doorways one least suspects. * Importantly we don’t ascribe to any ideology--quite the opposite: we seek emancipation from all ideology. We do not proffer any ism, nor add the suffix ist to our names. We prefer “putting out on the sea of thought,” as the economist John Kenneth Galbraith said. We avoid steadfastly the comfort of being moored to an ideological pier and therefore recognize the multitudes of inhabitable islands, places of succor and prosperity to be found by the multitudes of cultures whose social and economic systems can vary widely—which will surely clash, but nevertheless are always bound together by the sea. Indeed such diversity is an imperative for life on earth. If such a deconstruction of the present dogma can be achieved it must be done using the best of our humanity, and if so, what rises in its place will be built on what’s best in humanity. And so our ends and means are closely allied. This is no quixotic utopian quest; as we recognize there is no heaven on earth, so too we recognize our present acts are our future existence. We aim to aim high. I dream of a world in which all people flourish being who they are, a multifarious and complex economy built and replenished by its interdependent constituents, both human and natural. I dream of a world in which people are free to live meaningful lives of purpose—each of these joining seamlessly with others, with every other, in authentic concert, to become a pulsing life-filled organism. We must do what needs to be done, not what is possible. What is possible is not up to us. Faith is stronger than hope. tecumseh ©EJT 2011 STOP: Purposeful "recession" is the best way to take power away from the 1% and place it in our (your) hands; their wealth and power depends on our work, consumption, compliance with, and belief in their system, e.g.: In the first year of the recovery, 93 percent of all income gains went to the top 1 percent.
STOP: Purposeful "recession" is the best most immediate way to reduce carbon emissions. People have the power to take this into their own hands--where governments have failed, people can succeed. STOP: Is the best way to become aware of one's own true happiness and well-being. You cannot see clearly on a roller coaster and as long as you remain on it you believe its tracks represent the one true world. They don't. Once off, even intermittently for moments at a time, you will become more aware of yourself and others, and the values you share. STOP: When you become aware of yourself and your neighbor, alternative relationships will arise, from economic to social and political. The meaning of work will change as you better understand the meaning of your life. We support no dogma; we can offer no script for rote repetition. We can only say, STOP, become aware of your true self and those around you and begin to dream... "We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them." --Einstein |
Occupy Wall Street
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History, materialism, monism, positivism, and all the "isms" of this world are old and rusty tools which I don't need or mind anymore. My principle is life, my end is death. I wish to live my life intensely for to embrace my life tragically.
You are waiting for the revolution? My own began a long time ago! When you will be ready (God, what an endless wait!) I won't mind going along with you for awhile. But when you'll stop, I shall continue on my insane and triumphal way toward the great and sublime conquest of the nothing! Any society that you build will have its limits. And outside the limits of any society the unruly and heroic tramps will wander, with their wild & virgin thoughts--they who cannot live without planning ever new and dreadful outbursts of rebellion!
I shall be among them!
And after me, as before me, there will be those saying to their fellows: "So turn to yourselves rather than to your Gods or to your idols. Find what hides in yourselves; bring it to light; show yourselves!"
Because every person; who, searching his own inwardness, extracts what was mysteriously hidden therein; is a shadow eclipsing any form of society which can exist under the sun! All societies tremble when the scornful aristocracy of the tramps, the inaccessibles, the uniques, the rulers over the ideal, and the conquerors of the nothing resolutely advances.
So, come on iconoclasts, forward!
"Already the foreboding sky grows dark and silent!"
--Renzo Novatore Arcola, January, 1920
from The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Hakim Bey 1991
You are waiting for the revolution? My own began a long time ago! When you will be ready (God, what an endless wait!) I won't mind going along with you for awhile. But when you'll stop, I shall continue on my insane and triumphal way toward the great and sublime conquest of the nothing! Any society that you build will have its limits. And outside the limits of any society the unruly and heroic tramps will wander, with their wild & virgin thoughts--they who cannot live without planning ever new and dreadful outbursts of rebellion!
I shall be among them!
And after me, as before me, there will be those saying to their fellows: "So turn to yourselves rather than to your Gods or to your idols. Find what hides in yourselves; bring it to light; show yourselves!"
Because every person; who, searching his own inwardness, extracts what was mysteriously hidden therein; is a shadow eclipsing any form of society which can exist under the sun! All societies tremble when the scornful aristocracy of the tramps, the inaccessibles, the uniques, the rulers over the ideal, and the conquerors of the nothing resolutely advances.
So, come on iconoclasts, forward!
"Already the foreboding sky grows dark and silent!"
--Renzo Novatore Arcola, January, 1920
from The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Hakim Bey 1991
Sacred Economics
"A story of separate selves has shaped our world. This story is no longer true. We are stepping into a new story of self, a new story of people...a coming of age when the old world falls apart and a new world is born..."
-Charles Eisenstein
"During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act"
- George Orwell
"We're rising up...together..."
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"We do not hate them; we fell sorry for them... We need cool heroes, a cool revolution, meaning non violent..." Robert Thurman, professor of Indo-Tibetan Buddhist Studies at Columbia University, addressing Occupy Wall Street. |