finding a way through

[temporaryreality]

(cross-posted on JMG's open Covid post)

 

In post #6 (https://ecosophia.dreamwidth.org/165100.html?thread=23918572#cmt23918572), erika talks about the decades of training individual members of our society/ies have been subjected to that have restructured not only our brains, our responses, and our ability to manage complexity, but also our subtle bodies as well as our collective reality. Leading to (and being continued by) what's going on now.

 

She mentions the numerical thinking, the quantification of juicy biological and spiritual/mental/astral/etheric life.

 

I assume that ultimately none of this comes as news to anyone here but I thought I'd still think out loud on and invite a continuation of erika's topic because of its relation to the ways we think, the ways we respond, and the ways we think we can respond to this digital mass hysteria clickbait age.

 

Here's this thread where it's also discussed: https://ecosophia.dreamwidth.org/165100.html?thread=23945196#cmt23945196

 

How do we find our "forest passage" when we've inherited a world we're told has no such passages? One in which the literal forests are themselves damaged and inaccessible to us?

 

This year I'm learning more German and in a moment of weakness the other day, I downloaded duolingo and watched how I interacted with it. The "placement test" was fun - I answered question after question, and was pleased at having retained some semblance of language proficiency after a few years of not really working on it... and then I got scored and plopped somewhere in the "learning track." At that point things went downhill and I was able to observe how.

 

But first a digression or two. Late in December I could feel my tension and frustration with all of this mess just rising - commensurate with reading these threads, clicking on their various links, watching the insurmountability of changing the groundswell toward unwholesome/unholy things. You know, just the ick, and the cloyingness of the ick, and how it FEELS, in spite of THIS SPACE being what it is.

 

And then, I found myself thinking once more (because I do think about this periodically) about my mindless-moments' scrolling through craft patterns online, or looking at pinterest images or whatnot.

 

And of course there's all sorts of info out there about how the online world triggers chemical reactions and dopamine rushes in our brains. Click...ahhh....click....ahhh - the rollercoaster of false gratification on some neurological unconscious level.

 

Yesterday I went to study German at my allotted time but instead of turning (as had been my wont in the month or two previous) to my books, and the text I'm learning by heart, I popped onto duolingo and found myself revisiting "Ja" and "Nein" and "Hallo" so that I could earn some sort of weird gem-reward and accompanying mocking praise from code dressed as animated characters who DO NOT CARE; and I jumped up the "leaderboard" for having learned nothing but only clicked and typed things I already know.

 

And I kept going. The room grew dark and I lulled myself into thinking "I'm doing my German."

 

I'm not even much of a TV or movie watcher (I'll sit down with my daughter to watch shows now and then, but more as a way to sit WITH her and share and discuss the thing). And I'm not really a social-media user (excepting one fake fb account with which I can stay apprised of mimeograph groups and users' projects). But the machine-world has infiltrated so much.

 

Yesterday, too, my daughter mentioned a conversation she'd had with a friend about children watching TV. She later went online to look up one that was mentioned and she found reports of toddlers becoming functionally addicted to one show in particular. Here are some quotes from the thread she found:

 

The most epic meltdown we had was while shutting off the show to get her ready for her bath, it was on another level. I said right there and then that the show is banned in the house. I wasn’t fully subscribed to what some of the other posters had said about the show before that but I got it after that.

 

My 16 month old quit [name of show] cold turkey 2 weeks ago, and has only had a few severe cravings since then.

We noticed she stopped playing and would just stare at the back tv screen waiting for [it] to come on.

Now she only watches [name of show]. Half the time she'll go play while the tv is on, or sit with me and play/try to eat a board book while watching.

 

I had to do this with my little guy too and I swear he had withdrawals like someone on crack. He would stare at the black screen and cry. He cried for probably 2 weeks straight before it got better. My pediatrician said he was delayed in speech and that’s when I cut out screen time. I knew that was it.

 

I was floored to read posts from so many parents commenting that [name of show] was addictive and terrible but then they let their tiny kid watch [name of other show] that is somehow better. These kids are plugged in and programmed.

 

We're all plugged in and programmed and we're continuing to do it on a society-wide level across all ages.

 

Here, today, I've been working (on the computer) and drafting up this post (on the computer). Of course later I'll get offline and do Real Things, but will it be enough? I don't know.

 

Every moment requires navigation through forest and machine-lined passages.

 

We have to create more forest (literal and otherwise).

 

I don't have a prescription or a list of options (still trying to figure out how to unchain my ways of thinking of what's possible) other than (for myself) to continue to cultivate awareness of machine-life within me, of the ways I fall back into it, of the small seeds and tiny germinating presences I'd like to carry forward instead. Of the soft duff of the path I prefer rather than the rhythmic tramp through paved-worlds in unison with all the other trained target-audience members.

Comments

[sdi]

We have to create more forest (literal and otherwise).

"Only God can make a tree." :)

On the upside, the forest is still there. It always was! You just have to go outside!

Let me put it another way: the world isn't disenchanted, but we're under a spell! But the way to break a spell is to stop feeding it, right? You can't simply oppose it, since that keeps you locked into its frame of reference: in the terms of The Art of War, it's letting your opponent pick the battlefield. But that's how you lose the battle! Instead, you have to go in a completely different direction. I think this is what JMG talks about when he says "the way to dissolve a binary is by resolving it into a ternary:" if you want to experience the world as it is, you can't go with the mainstream, and you can't oppose the mainstream—you have to ignore it entirely and go your own way. After a while you'll wander past the edges of the spell, and you'll wonder what the heck you were thinking.

So I think that the feeling that "we have to create more forest" is a trap. The forest can create more forest! Maybe you should focus, instead, on finding a nice shady spot to rest in?

[temporaryreality]

hmmm. RE: "the feeling that "we have to create more forest" is a trap." - I'm not saying the world is or isn't disenchanted, but that when we become accustomed to certain things, we might lose connection with certain others.

Ugh, I don't feel particularly coherent about what I mean. Let me try again.

Think of environmental changes. Humans' short memories mean that whatever environmental state each of us grew up in is perceived of as normal. Get someone to jump through time, though - from the 1200s or from 6,000BCE to now and they'd be shocked and appalled by what we consider a normal environment in which to live. Where are the trees or grasslands, where are the streams and migratory paths? So the world's not "disenchanted," it's qualitatively different.

The same is true of the inner world --- when I say "we have to create more forest" I mean in ourselves as much as, if not more than "out there." Not create organizations to get funding and access land on which to plant more trees.

"Create more forest" is exactly "you have to ignore it and go your own way."

This means, though, that you have to be aware of the state of your forest and when it's "endangered." That looking beyond the state-of-your-forest as you've been conditioned to conceive of it is important. If you don't know how the inner ecosystem might've looked for other peoples of different times, or if you don't know what to ignore in this day and age, and you don't know what "your own way" is, you're kind of at an impasse.

[sdi]

Think of environmental changes. Humans' short memories mean that whatever environmental state each of us grew up in is perceived of as normal. Get someone to jump through time, though - from the 1200s or from 6,000BCE to now and they'd be shocked and appalled by what we consider a normal environment in which to live. Where are the trees or grasslands, where are the streams and migratory paths? So the world's not "disenchanted," it's qualitatively different.

Yes, but it works both ways, right? We'd also be shocked and appalled by what they consider a normal environment in which to live! So what I'm trying to say is—by what metric is our time "better" or "worse?" By what metric is your internal forest "endangered?" Why do you think you need to replant it?

Let me give you an example from my own experience. Seven years ago—yeesh, was it only seven years ago? Feels like another lifetime—my wife and I bought a little house on some old and tortured farmland with the intent of reforesting the land. So we worked heroically over the course of a year or two and managed to plant more than a thousand trees, perhaps covering an acre or so. And in that same time, the land itself regrew maybe five acres of forest on it's own. The trees we planted we cute and all, but they had barely managed to grow at all in the few years we were there—but in that time, the fields turned to meadow all on their own, and animals of all kinds moved in. I don't remember any fireflies at all the first summer we were there, but a few years later, no thanks to us, there were fireflies everywhere, outshining the stars in the sky by far.

The reality was, even though we had all these plans, the land didn't need our help. It just needed people to leave it alone. The only reason the land wasn't healthy when we moved in is because the prior owners hayed the fields every year to get a few hundred bucks off their taxes.

I suspect—(more than expect, since I've experienced it :) )—the exact same principle holds for our internal forests. It's there! It'll grow on it's own, whether we push it to or not! We just need to let it—give it space to flourish. And trust that it will. And accept that it takes time. (I'm bad at those latter two...)

The idea that we are the actors, the ones who do things... I think it's part of the spell that entraps us. So to go back to your original question: what do we do about being plugged in and programmed and trapped in these machine-lined passageways? And I am reminded of Basho's way out:

sitting quietly, doing nothing
Spring comes and the grass grows
all by itself

[temporaryreality]

Fair enough.

I do find, though, when I "do nothing and wait" and if I'm not aware of what's happening, I can easily get online and piddle about until the dopamine pathways are flush.

I tend to think it's problematic that my generation recalls backwoods lots being bulldozed for strip malls and my kids' generation thinks "backwoods" is by definition an hour's drive away. The next generation doesn't think much of backwoods at all unless it becomes a tiktok meme.

And the inner backwoods?

Does it matter?
Not in the deep time sense of things I guess, but I can't help but think it matters - probably because I remember what got bulldozed. Two generations out, who cares?

I'm an actor inasmuch as I'm the one clicking on links, or doing German, or meditating in the morning.

Maybe I just had lazy wording because I don't think we're saying things so fundamentally different. For me, create forest could also be called "allow forest."

[sdi]

I think you're right, we're talking past each other: using the same words to mean different things. I apologize for misunderstanding!

It's also worth noting that I'm normally a very, very driven person—Mars on my ascendant, like a tiger chasing me—so the lesson to slow down and not do has been a critical one for me... but it's not everyone's lesson! So I mention it in case its helpful.

[temporaryreality]

You don't have to apologize! It's the writer's job to be clear! Also, I generally write to figure out what I think ... and then it may turn out that I ought to re-think!

To be fair, I agree - we need less "Do do do, Go go go!" given the kinds of problems that creates. This is my meditation on what happens, though, when from infancy children are given unnatural and addictive stimulus that isn't, you know, lying on the baby blanket watching light in leaves, or playing with mud and making a little animal village, or learning rhymes and rhythms from auntie. Even when we come to it late in life and with a modicum of self-awareness, it creeps in and sucks an evening of otherwise pleasant language learning out of the world in exchange for pixel-rewards.

So I hear your wu wei argument and understand why you made it.

I've long been solidly in the process-oriented rather than goal-oriented camp which makes for a different kind of drivenness if there's a drivenness at all. There's still the sense of "do," though, and it's good to give that some consideration.

[methylethyl]

Oh, yeah. We homeschool, and we have used both Rosetta Stone and Duolingo at various times, for foreign-language intro/practice stuff. We had to quit Duolingo, because we could see our eldest exhibiting some distinctly addictive behaviors around it. (Like seriously kid, *why* do you want to earn more lingots? What does it buy you that you actually want?)

At the time, he was upset, but we actually sat down, and found a relevant video on YouTube (of all places) about why we get sucked into stupid clickybaity games on the computer, which we keep playing long past the point where we actually enjoy them or get anything out of them. And then we had a really productive discussion about it, making the connections between dopamine hits, brain rewiring, reward pathways... and Duolingo.

And he understood, and was cool with it, and since then we have only used RS (which has some issues, but isn't nearly as bad as DL in that respect) and actual books. Of course, he was 9 at the time, not a preschooler, so... eh. Our general policy is that preschoolers have no business around screens, which saves us dealing with any particularly horrible shows.

[temporaryreality]

I'm relieved that at least I saw what was happening. I've seen it before (in myself), but this time it just seemed so much more vivid.

Meanwhile I'm flailing around a bit with a super dry grammar textbook that's a tad beyond my level and... I should probably just go back to listening to children's audiobooks - that's more like slow-release for the dopamine.

[methylethyl]

I heard a suggestion once-- from Andrew Pudewa I think-- that a great way to get a leg up on the language you're trying to learn, is to memorize a children's audiobook in the target language, so that you can recite it, with inflection, from memory. He did it with a Japanese version of "Jack and the Beanstalk" and said it catapulted him forward in speaking fluency, and just general confidence in the language, enough to try talking to people in it. And as a fallback, he could always tell kids the story of Jack...

I keep meaning to do it, and keep not getting around to it (shame!).

[temporaryreality]

That's exactly what I'm doing. I'm memorizing The Little Prince (on chapter 2 now) ... Just sometimes I want a little more to do.

[boccaderlupo]

"Unchain" is a good term, here. It brings to mind Giordano Bruno's use of the word "binding" when discussing the effects of magic and individuals' susceptibility to it. Most of what goes on these days, in whatever human created space, is binding magic, and its effects are magnified by the scaling of the channels that it traverses (social media, TV, et al.); we all participate in it, to some degree or another, although the way through, I suspect, is to recognize it. Once we have recognition, we can begin to use our reason to either resist or manipulate it, according to our wills, and to whatever degree we are capable of.

[temporaryreality]

Oh, that's fascinating.

It's like we have to get grubby paws off us to step out of the pre-decided set of options we've been trained to accept as the entirety of everything.

My 2020 divination definitely has something to say about viewing/realizing/recognizing deeper truths, so I'm doing my best to perceive what I can.

[boccaderlupo]

The older I get the more I suspect we cannot do much to get the paws off us so much as to recognize whose paws they are, and which way they are pulling us. Those paws, after all, are part of a chain that stretches up into celestial realms...in fact the most useful thing I perhaps learned from the esoteric path was to recognize the myriad influences and how they came to bear on my life, a sort of cosmic balancing that helps one accept and endure those influences and how they manifest themselves, both within and without.

All blessings to you.

[temporaryreality]

That's probably a useful way to approach this - I freely admit to being kind of a greenhorn in a lot of this. :D

Thank you boccaderlupo, for your thoughtful comment.