Chaotic Self Organisation

I've written a lot about chaotic harmony, or the conscious balance inherent in everything for a while now, and apart from about a million different stories from our market experience and from living near Nimbin, there's a really good explanation of how it works in 'Seven Life Lessons of Chaos - Timeless Wisdom from the Science of Change', by John Briggs and F. David Peat.  And I've been telling it to people for ages now, so I thought it was time to share it with you.  I'm just gonna quote verbatim from the 3rd Chapter, which is called 'Going with the Flow - Lesson about collective creativity and renewal'........

Wilfred Pelletier, a Native American from an Ojibway community north of Lake huron, says his people aren't into organisation, there's no need for it "because that community is organic."  Pelletier gives an illustration of how his unorganised people nevertheless get things done.  

"Let's say the council hall in an Indian community needs a new roof.....It's been leaking here and there for quite a while and it's getting worse.  And people have been talking about it.  Nobody organises a committee or appoints a project leader." Nothing happens, in fact, until "one morning here's a guy up on the roof, tearing off the old shingles, and down on the ground there's several bundles of new, hand-split shakes - probably not enough to do the whole job, but enough to make a good start.  Then, after a while, another guy comes along and sees the first guy on the roof.  So he comes over an he doesn't say, 'What are you doing up there?' because that's obvious, but he may say, 'How's she look?  Pretty rotten, I guess.' Something like that.  Then he takes off, and pretty soon he's back with a hammer or a shingle hatchet and maybe some shingle nails or a couple of rolls of tarpaper.  By afternoon, there's a whole crew working on that roof, a pile of materials building up down there on the ground, kids taking the old shingles away - taking them home for kindling - dogs barking, women bringing cold lemonade and sandwiches.  The whole community is involved and there's a lot of fun and laughter.  Maybe the next day another guy arrives with more bundles of shakes.  In two or three days that whole job is finished, and they all end up having a big party in the 'new' council hall."

Who was responsible for deciding to put a new roof on the hall?  Was it that first guy on the roof, a single isolated individual, or was it the whole community?  "How can you tell?  No meeting was called, no committees formed, no funds raised.  There were no arguments about whether the roof should be covered with aluminium or duroid or tin or shakes and which was the cheapest and which would last the longest and all that.  There was no foreman and no one was hired and nobody questioned that guy's right to rip off the old roof.  But there must have been some kind of 'organisation' going on in all that because the job got done.  It got done a lot quicker than if you hired professionals.  And it wasn't work, it was fun."

Chaos theory would answer that the "organisation" in Pellerier's roofing project was self-organisation.  It began with chaos - all that disorganised talk beforehand about the leak.  The first guy on the roof was a bifurcation point that became amplified.  The feedback between the first fellow and the next one who came along started a cascade that coupled the community together around the project, and then the system got the job done.  

Clearly, Pelletier's Ojibway community is an open, creative, chaotic, nonlinear system.  As he put it, the people in this group "aren't into competition.  But they aren't into cooperation either - never heard of either of those words.  What they do just happens, just flows along."  Within the community's creative open system, micro self-organised systems spring up from time to time, such as the community's action to repair the roof.  Such short-term self-organisation renews the community and keeps it alive, as testified to by the big party held in the new council hall.  

Social self-organisation and collective creativity doesn't only happen in Native American communities, it happens in rural communities around the world and in informal organisations of all kinds.  In many different circumstances, people start coming together, helping out, lending a hand, throwing in their two cents.  Nobody's leading particularly, but things get done.

A high-tech example of social self-organisation is the Internet.  The Net was started back in the 1960's by the U.S. military looking for a distributed command system in the event of nuclear war so that no single centre could be knocked out.  The idea was similar to the one that conceived of the U.S. highway system as a distributed airport of landing and takeoff strips.  It occurred to the planners that computers all over the country could be linked together to create a giant system that shared its information.  But once the Net was set up, academic scientists began to use it and it was eventually made available to the public all over the world.  Relatively quickly, more and more individuals and groups joined, until by the mid-1990's an estimated 25 million people were on-line and the number was doubling every eigthteen months. 

Nobody's controlling the Net (at least not yet).  It's maintained by an open flow of users passing information around.  Within the global self-organisation of the Net and its subset, the World Wide Web, are countless mini self-organisations springing up all the time.  People come together to do creative work - everything from photographers displaying their pictures of lightning strikes to underground musicians converging on Web sites to create an audience for their work to interest groups discussing the Vietnam War or Brazilian cuisine.  For those who have access, the Net is a daily example of collective creative exuberance.  Most of the activity is carried out by people who are making things, looking for information, and exchanging ideas that simply interest them as part of who they are.  The giant, hierarchically structured, power-driven commercial organisations have so far been largely frustrated in their efforts to harness the Net to their mechanical engines of profit.  Anyone who has surfed the Net knows he has entered a chaotic, dynamic open system where "what they do just happens, just flows along."  Clearly there's order here, but it's chaotic. 

Taken together, the traditional Ojibway community and the new cyber community suggest a radically different approach to social organisation that the one currently taken by postindustrial society.

So what do you reckon?  Pretty groovy eh.  And a concept and phenomena that I can report as being incredibly easy to be part of, flow along with, and surrender to, whenever we enter the company of other sovereign humanimals, led by our natural interests and passions, in a way that acknowledges and accepts each other as equals and valid, and do anything together in a non-heirarchical kinda way.  And stuff really does have the darndest way of showing up when it's needed, and when we surrender to the greater focus and don't sweat the details.  

Really wanted to share that with you, and hope you enjoyed it.

A note to the humans........

Say what you like about the nature of humans, for my money we’re absolutely spectacular.  Just sit for a moment and let your mind range over the many manifestations of our creativity, will, spontaneous urges, thoughts, theories, and mind sets that you can think of.  And consider our human nature’s……….our excessive capacity for beauty and our extreme depths of horror.  All the wonderful and terrible things we’ve done together, and on our own, and to the planet, and our homes and gardens, and to our pets and domestic animals, and our wild landscapes, and our sexuality, and our birthing, and our dying, and our collective human spirit. 

And we’ve done the most incredible thing, all of us together, that has never been done by any other species on the planet.  The scope and magnitude of which is absolutely mind boggling.  We’ve pitched our wills against the compelling force and energy of the synergy and symbiosis of the entire universe.  Against the tidal flows of the natural world that cycle constantly and eternally all around us.  We’ve gritted our teeth and dug in our heels and refused the pull of all the natural eddies that shiver around us, and we’ve suppressed our animal self and free born inner purpose based on ideals, and belief systems, and hierarchies, that demand trustworthiness of us.  And routines, and schedules, and rule following, and standardised time, and stability, and settling down, and dream repression, and personality shaping, and a character and nature that stay…….one……..way.  Otherwise you’d be having your cake and eating it too, and sitting on the fence, and confusing people, and too potentially dangerous and flexible and adaptable and changeable and that’s just too damn scary. 

We’ve known for a very long time now how to shape and control the human nature, how to encourage our young to put on their own blinkers, segregate and divide, and become consumers or warriors for the great monoculture in the sky.  The Spartans used to throw a baby to the ground after it was born to create warriors, the Mayan’s would bury the placenta on the battlefield, and we circumcise our baby boys and separate baby’s from families as soon as possible.  And mothers from fathers, and brothers from sisters, and divide into age groups, and abilities, and likes and dislikes and the scene is set for a rollicking good old war drama, as we play out on the world stage all the inadequacies and fears we hide inside.   Fear of death and mortality becomes a war on terrorism, evolution, and drugs.  Fear of sex and birth becomes a war on homebirth and honest, trusting, relationships.  Fear of sickness becomes a war on cancer and a multibillion dollar industry in medicine and insurance.  Fear of our essential human natures becomes an open slather war on the entire natural world.  

So we buy our beliefs, and our basic characters that all our choices refer to, and our sexuality and our birthing capacity, and our fear of death, and all our little labels and belief systems and uniforms and badges and find the right groups that represent who we are, and then we insure everything we have to prevent mishap or grief, and if we just follow all the rules and party lines, then everything will be all right, everyone will be easily identified and catalogued, and grief, death and great illness will all happen to someone else, but if they do happen to us, it’s all right cause there’s someone else to blame and someone else to pay for it, and thanks to those greater and wiser than us, all will be looked after.  And we all send in postal votes when it comes to the big decisions in our worlds and environments, because we need our energy for the little human worlds we’re creating, and trust the biggies to those that we agree are responsible for it. 

We’ve been convinced that if we just keep on heading towards the sky, and father gods, and off world aliens, and science, and our relentless march towards total separation from each other and our universe………..that we’ll come up with answers, or saviours, or other planets, or solutions, or final solutions that will prove us all right, that we were never one of the dusty earthy animals afterall, but a superior being sent here to safeguard, mine, farm, domesticate, tame, order, organise, shepherd, control, shape, and dominate. 

And now the far reaching tendrils of science have squeezed themselves into impossible spaces, and witnessed events on unimaginable scales that are leading us on a great cosmic fool’s journey right back to our roots, to where we all came from, and the symbiosis that’s been spinning along quite nicely out of our reach.   And as I stand all drop jawed and awestruck at the magnificence of the universe……….I realise that all roads really don’t lead to Rome, they lead to the understanding that everything is truly connected.  The sun has a heart beat and sings it’s sweet song to the universe, and our land is in a state of constant convection from the lava deep roots of our world to the dry and crusty surface.  Which reflects the convection of subterranean sea to the beaches and shores, and the convection of our air and biosphere.  The earth has about as much water on it as there is water in our individual bodies.  And when I started learning about all the fine tuned balances on which all the multitudinous forms of life on our planet rely on to survive, like the Biosphere, and distance from the sun, and formation of weather patterns, and all the pests and weeds without whom we’d perish…………it’s impossible not to realise that there’s an inherent balance and connection between everything we know how to observe.  Reflections upon reflections upon reflections show us time and again that what we do to the world around us, we do to ourselves.  Quantum Physics has measured and danced with mind numbingly minute particles and energies that show time and again that thought creates reality, everything is intrinsically connected, and reshuffles itself through infinity and back with every thought we think and movement we propel.  

And all that stability and those routines and our static belief systems haven’t been serving us afterall, in the chance filled magic of the universe that favours flexibility and adaptation.  We collectively decided to pull away parts of the whole on which to experiment, destroy, probe and explore, hoping that in understanding all the different parts of the creature that is everything we are connected to, we’d ultimately come to understand ourselves.  In endlessly dissecting the alien life form of the natural world all around us, we’ve understood the lifeless parts, but not the connecting web between it all that animates it.  Till now.  And it was what the indigenous folk and spiritual belief systems were trying to say all along – that it’s all connected, like the massive mallee scrubs that are at their roots the same tree.  Like the ocean that is vast and made up of billions upon billions of tiny drops.  Like snowflakes that are infinitely unique at the same time as being indistinguishable.  What we’ve done to the world ‘out there’ we’ve done to ourselves.

And now we’re the most domesticated animals on the planet.  We’ve learnt to suppress our natural urges, and be as polite as every other caricature in the cartoons we create, where animals trot around gaily in clothes having cups of tea…..  Following our road rules and our council rules and our government rules and our church rules and our school rules and our fire season rules and and our self imposed rules, and any other rules we can find.  We neatly tuck away our grottier more animalesque rituals of birth, sex and death, and we don’t like to talk about great love, grief or illness in polite company.  We cover over our signature animal scent with designer perfumes and keep our naked born bodies nicely clad and covered.  We build pretty houses in neat rows in a standardised way that would do any factory farmer proud. We’ve replaced our reverence for life with the love of money.  We’ve used our collective creative energy that used to grow food and make and learn, and build homes, to create media that focuses on our dysfunction instead, while we perform our seemingly innocuous button pushing jobs that destroy our world from afar.  We’ve built machines and weapons that could annhialate us over and over, in desperate search of the enemy without, when it’s within us all along.  We’ve separated ourselves so far from each other that we treat other cultures and belief systems as different species, which justifies our numerous genocides.   Yet the earth and all it’s inhabitants are literally our bodies…….what would you like on your skin?  In your air?  In your veins? Under your skin?  Going into your body?  As your thoughts and relationships?

We seem to be caught in a loop, where we’ve largely forgotten with our short memories that we’ve created it all ourselves.  Literally.  A few weeks before 9/11, I watched a movie where some Muslim terrorists flew a plane into the twin towers.  We’ve become so entranced, enthralled, and horrified by what we’ve created that we’ve become stuck in a repeating cycle of showing ourselves to ourselves, showing our horrors and our fears and our hatreds to each other in television programs and movies and books and music and computer games and ideas.  Created a self perpetuating war with ourselves that we project out to the screen of the world.  Most of it based on our long ago creation of our gods, and our morals, and our life purposes.  Somewhere along the line we forgot that we created them, and instead have allowed them to morph into the great one god of greed, power, hierarchies and control, using money and dogma as it’s figurehead, and like the Great Wizard in the Wizard of Oz, a huge and smoke belching machine has been ordering us about, with a few sleepy old men behind the curtain at the back, who have probably forgotten why they’re doing it anymore anyway.  And we’ve let them preach to us and lead us into a future that no-one is consciously caretaking anymore………

We’re the only species ever on the planet, that has thought that it has to be something other than it is.  Something other than living, breathing, birthing, dying, creating, destroying, procreating, surviving, suffering, laughing.  When we talk to each other about ‘who we are’ we mention jobs and possessions and groups and ideals and belief systems……barely ever the tick tick tick that keeps us alive and our spirits enriched.  Barely ever the deep cycles within our lives that link us to every other living thing. 

Which brings me back to my original point.  We’ve separated ourselves so far from our natures, our planet, our creative potency, and ultimately ourselves, that it comes as a earth shattering shock to us, that we did it to ourselves all along, and that our scout that we sent out to make sense  of it all in the form of Physics, has returned with the answer and solution of Quantum weirdness, where everything is connected, is created by our thoughts, and a reflection of the ageless spinning cycles of the universe.  We got so far away from our source, that our method of separation – our sciences –have found that they were eating their own tails all along.  And now have to teach us how we can reintegrate.  We can take our star stuff to the ball now, no-one needs to miss out, and re-create ourselves and our world in a vision of community, love, respect, peace, and freedom.  This is the point in our collective evolutions where we step up to the plate, pick up our minds, use those frontal lobes that we traded easy births for, and start spinning an encompassing web of beauty and growth, lessons learned deeply, and a respectful and creative enhancement of all life.

Now Currawong and I have talked much about this subject over the years, and we both agree that there needs to be a Human Animal Liberation Foundation or the HALF movement….cause you’re only half alive unless you acknowledge you’re an animal.  Or a soul in a human’s body.  However you choose to look at it.  ( Incidentally, if we are spirit in body form, truly massive and omnipotent sparks of the universe, chosen to trip a lifetime or two in a human body, wouldn’t the point of our journey be to truly experience the human capacity?  Wouldn’t it be anti-sense to try and spend that human life attempting to transcend and overcome the very body of our lessons? )  And we decided we needed to set up Human Animal Wildlife Santuaries.  Or HAWS.   Where humans could release themselves into the wild.  If Osho could get rolls royces gifted to him, we could get land donated to everyone. And along the lines of understanding that the earth is our skin, we’d disassemble the buildings, put on some composting toilets, fruit and nut trees, a big tin roof with no floor and walls to collect water and be shelter in the open, and gardens.  Maybe a few gypsy vans with computers and scientific equipment so the human animals drawn to technical creation can keep playing with alchemy to create environmentally friendly technology.  Maybe some beautiful temples built on rock and caves to combine a new spirituality to include everything, and help us to keep adventuring into the unknown depth of our world and the far off reaches of space. People could come and stay in whatever they wanted, as long as it was moveable so the earth could get sunlight.  Respectful trespassers would always be welcome.  Few rules, no dogma, no organisation, no evictions, no money involved – just folk wanting to honestly release themselves into the wild, or as wild as we could create on our domesticated planet, as we tried to discover our true human natures.  What would David Attenborough’s documentary about the Human Animal look like?  What are our rituals, habits, environments, survival techniques?  How would we survive if all the tools and materials of our separation were taken away?  How would we survive as another respectful species on the planet?  How much are we really capable of if we decide to use our monumental powers for good?  What amazing things could we tickle out of our combined creative powers?

There’s a fella called L. Robert Keck who wrote a book called ‘sacred eyes’, in which he compares the evolution of our modern culture to that of an individual.  In our infancy we were held close in the arms of a mother goddess and close to the cycles of the earth.  And then we hit our teenage hood and our era of bachelor father gods.   In which we threw our focus on a heavenly future and an off world solution to our worldly woes.  And now we’ve all collectively reached Saturn Return, where we study our past to remember our forgiving and destructive mama earth, and our present where we’re tumbling towards unimaginable destruction that we’ve wrought while focused on our father god, and bring the two together.    Which you could read as bringing the genders together, bringing the polarities together, bringing us and our universe together, bringing science and religion together……  Bringing our evolution and our spiritual natures together. 

He also wrote a paper about how he didn’t buy that humans had always been violent, and that it was a fundamental part of our natures.  He stretched back to a time when we did indeed reflect the cycles and symbiosis of the planet, and lived in harmony with it.  And there’s plenty of examples of indigenous tribes that lived and live in equality, peace, harmony, and freedom.  And I know this is possible too from personal experience.  Currawong and I have 5 years co-creating a market back in SA that was a home to fringe dwellers, and helped create manifestly unique possibilities of being, in a totally sovereign and anarchistically harmonious way, under our belt.  As well as our experience of life together, of introspection, dealing and healing.   

And I believe now with every fibre of my being, that the very best, most revolutionary and world changing thing I can do with my life, the most fundamentally healing mission I can begin to restore our planet to it’s majestic perfection……..is to be who I am, to love my family and my man with all my heart, to treat every person and creature I come across with respect and as an equal, and to use my vast creative energy to envision, write, sound out about and manifest a future for us all.  To tell my stories.  To be as honest as I know how.  To contemplate every action I make and assess whether it will move me and the planet towards love or not.  To explore and tease out the great learnings from my true life experiences. 

And I call on every single one of you reading this………to be true to your inner nature.  If you’re slaving away in a job that’s soul destroying, while a hidden dream keeps whispering in you ear, dream it.  Find a way to pave a path for your passion and purpose inside.  If you’re an artist, create with all your heart the things that you want to create.  If you’re a poet, craft words that will inspire, and create a path forward into a future you want to inhabit.  If you’re a musician, compose the soundtrack for the triumphant return to ourselves.  If you’re a craftsperson, bend your will to crafting your dreams, no matter how impractical they may be.  Never leash your passion to money.  Never create something because it will make you money.  If you’re a gardener, tend your gardens like you’d tend your hair and body.  If you’re a wordsmith, flesh out the possibilities of returning to sense and harmony with the worlds around us.  If you’re a builder, search for ways to build homes that reflect the synergy of our embracing world surrounded by a protective atmosphere…..and spare a thought for what you’d like on your skin.  If you’re a hunter, strive to remember how to work within safe parameters to ensure survival and thriving of species.  If you’re a networker, create networks where people can use their only power in a money based society – their money – to support local artisans, food growers, builders, animal caretakers.  If you’re a recycler, invest your energy in creating from rubbish, and turning everything we make and then throw away into usefull reincarnations.  If you’re a mother or father, think about what skills are going to best help your children survive in the world as it is NOW, and do your best to show them, learn with them, and honour their unique ways of walking through the world.  If you work with other animals as a shepherd, work out how you can honour both your own and their natures, and pay due homage for the gifts they bring.   If you’re a scientist, explore the amazing places on our planet and in the universe that we don’t understand yet, and help the rest of us understand the intricate interconnections between us all.

Let’s all use our magnificent energy to craft a future that will be inhabitable for our children.  Let’s step to the side of the madness we’ve created whilst taking no personal responsibility, and take the ultimate responsibility of creating societies based on who we really are, rather than our fantasies. Let’s simply outcompete the rabid beast of our modern and senseless civilisations by making more sense, stepping back into the flow of natural cycles, and adding the weight of the universal attraction to life and creation to our cause.  Let’s tell each other our stories, our lives, our experiences, and talk much and earnestly about our taboos of birth, sex and death, and how we can respect them and learn from them better.  Let’s learn to respect and heal our ecosystems, our food, our water, our shelter, our deaths, our births, our sexuality, our sovereignty.

Let’s craft ourselves a new world, where being true to our deep natures is our only imperative, where diversity is celebrated, and where the humans can roam with equal freedom, love, peace and respect as all the other beings. 

Are you in?

And here's some chapters of Balthazar and Nimue to continue on the serialisation of the book.  To start from the beginning and the first two chapters, go here http://spunoutpost.blogspot.com.au/2012/02/love-story.html then for chapters 3 + 4 go here http://spunoutpost.blogspot.com.au/2012/02/chapters-three-and-four.html for chapters 5 - 8 here http://spunoutpost.blogspot.com.au/2012/03/last-installment.html for chapters 9 + 10 here http://spunoutpost.blogspot.com.au/2012/03/law-of-repulsion-and-more-book.html for chapters 11 + 12 http://spunoutpost.blogspot.com.au/2012/04/yes-you-read-right.html and now you can read on........

Chapter 13 -  She Spreads Wings

She took to eating ripe watermelon and kiwi fruit, peeled apples and carrots, steamed potatoes and snow peas, and wooded herbs.  As she walked she felt tall and light, nobly stepping like a horse.  People started to watch her as she walked.  Noticed her energy enfold them like a warm caress and drift on by.  Men, the brasher of the breed, began to talk to her in public places, inviting her for drinks and fine chats.  Then other people started commenting on how she looked and the figure she cut, tried hard to word the glow that shone round her.  She dealt calmly with life tasks, and rode the gentle swell of whole.

She started being asked advice and knowledge, to bring her calmness and rational thought.  People looked to her for strength and her leading role, as they danced down the path of self knowledge.  When away from their gaze, she sculpted figures and crafted talismans, wrote her soul out and wove webs.  Her time with Balthazar was a daily respite from the strength and the clarity she kept at her side.  They kept talking their future, and early one morning as the sun crept the hillside, they planted a thought.  The thought of a new one, a small one, a wise one, to come to their circle and marry their clan.  She felt that a new soul would give them some lessons to share from their world. 

Chance meetings and serendipity breezed through her story, dripping bright jewels of lore.  She began writing snippets of the life she was living, loosely based on her new found love.  The webs started weaving, and she slowly realised she was writing herself in a new born light.  Then somehow, someway, a tale that she’d thought of years gone came to mind.  It dreamed and it twined it’s way through her head, and she knew it was time to begin.

And the ancestors grinned their approval.

Chapter 14  -  He Starts To Fly.....

He started waking in dimlit hours of the morning, to play music with his instruments.  Played and relayed lilting melodies, that transposed and transformed and opened.  Tunes that travelled on feelings and dust motes, coffee and sex, played through his earholes and pulsed through his hands.  He was caught up in the trance of his dance to the world, to his woman, his lifeblood, his magic, his worth.  He moved down the path of this fragile reality, and started to open to a soft new world.

One asked him to play at the local pub, mixed with beer smells, smoke, and drunken despair.  One asked him to play in a cool wooden studio, with techies and gadgets to cut a cd.  One asked him to sign with his international company, and make his music exclusive for them.  The monies rolled in like the patter of jaffa’s hurled down the carpet of passion and life.  He could dredge up his soul from his demon to demigod, and pulsate it out in a weaving cord.  He spent his time with her trancing and talking, wishing and dreaming, and planning their babe.  And his new child, her girl child, her heart’s soft caress, went on gleaming and loving and spinning in light. 

He thought that his life couldn’t get any better, but still it did.  Thought he surely wouldn’t know deeper, yet it still became.  He worked with the men round him, and opened their eyes to the wound within.  He talked with Nimue, and discussed all the aspects of who they were now, and where to from here.

And the ancestors took notes.





Home

My dream for the world is simple. Along with the right to clean water, clean food, and a purposeful occupation that inspires a person to follow their destiny, I believe it should be a human right to have a home.  

A home, a sanctuary, a private place where we can choose who enters the sanctum, where we can let down our guard, and just be.

A home where we belong to the land more than the land belongs to us.  Where our attraction to it is more important than pieces of paper.

A home where our choices and lifestyle are respected.  Where we feel sovereign and autonomous and free. 

  

A home, where children are free to roam safely, exploring their surroundings and developing their unique relationship with the land and it's inhabitants.

A home where we don’t have to mortgage our souls and our lives, and compromise our existence to be. 

A home that reflects the individuality and character of the home dweller.  With objects of inspiration and beauty all around.

A home in co-existence with the animals and plants that surround it. 

A home that we never have to leave unless we want to. 

A home where both parents or any combination of care givers can choose to stay at home to bring up their children, without having to sacrifice one of them to the bondage of banks.  

Join with me if you feel so inclined

to wish a home like this 

for us all

......