FDR, Stalin and an Icarian Crash

Economists are scratching their heads over the dawning of 2016 about as vigorously as a kindergarten class with an outbreak of lice.  2015 went off like a damp squib with official estimates for economic growth at a globally imperceptible 1.9 percent or so.  The wizards at Goldman Sachs have revised their estimates for growth down nearly 20% from just a year ago – not very heartening when you consider the numerator in this equation.  Commodity dependent economies ranging from Australia to Venezuela are looking at the most bleak economic forecasts in recent times courtesy of the lower demand for oil, copper and other extractive industry resources.  Profits are shrinking in most major sectors; costs of capital are at their subsidized nadirs, and the ability for the great capitalist hegemonic illusion to remain propped up is about as resolute as a drunken reveler the morning after Mardi Gras. 

Seventy-one years since the Bretton Woods grand imperial utopian experiment and it looks like the unconsidered assumptions of this Icarian dream have finally been melted by the sun.  Next stop – a watery grave marked by melted wax and feathers.  Allow me to broaden the metaphor.

Leading up to Bretton Woods, the United States and its allies were fighting a motivated, technologically unified foe led by Germany and a ruthlessly ideologically emboldened Japan.  In the ideological morass oozing from the Great War a few decades earlier, the world was in the labyrinth of faux socialism that would make the most astute minotaur pine for a sudden death.  Franklin D Roosevelt and his vice-president Harry Truman were busily placating a largely impoverished populace with grand projects that would forever prove the beneficence of big government.  Marx and Engels had been sufficiently long dead and forgotten so as to make the Soviet Union a festering ground for the metastasis of communism – a lovely extreme but for the autocratic tyranny of those who determine what is in the best interest for all “others” while they themselves live in cloistered opulence.  Germany knew that the solution rested in the elimination of the “others” while Japan, with its centuries of bigotry and classism, knew that they were more German exclusionists than Great Experiment capitalists or communists.  So, in or around 1945, the world decided to set itself on a collision course with 2017. 

Now before you go off trying to decipher the significance of 72 years (which may be a wonderful diversion for some of you), let me simply offer the following comment.  The life expectancy of humans on Earth right now is 71 years.  It is merely informative to realize that the social and political experiments that were constructed to institutionalize capitalist socialism (pensions, social securities, and the like) are likely not going to survive the generation for which they were designed.  But allow me to return to the Icarus metaphor. 

When We The People were advised that governments were going to care for what communities once saw as their purview, we were giddy and strapped on the wings fashioned in the shop of a master craftsman (Daedalus in our story).  Being the designer of said wings our paternalistic overlords knew that wings of wax are best not used in proximity to the sun.  But unlike Daedalus, not only did our patrons not advise the risks of solar approximation, they encouraged it.  Using the cunning wax of central bank manipulation and the seemingly innocent feathers of industrialized consumption, they created the thermals that were euphemistically called “economic growth”.  And away their charges (literally, in each sense of the word) flew.  Daedalus had King Minos – both patron and prison warden – to escape.  FDR’s great experiment had the petro-dollar as both patron and prison warden.  Both end in heartbreak when the children fly too close to the sun. 

The melting wax in our metaphor is the growing illiquidity of the great promises that were made a generation ago.  In the past few years, we’ve seen Portugal, Italy, Greece, Syria, Spain, Venezuela, Japan and Brazil struggle with the fact that social promises unkept lead to social and political upheaval.  To date, these countries have had incremental albeit inconsequential impact on the global stage courtesy of Central Bank manipulation.  However, as the U.S. social security illiquidity comes due in 2017 (first hitting the elderly and the indigent) and as other economies follow suit in close proximity, the reduction in “growth” will rapidly accelerate into a paroxysm far more destabilizing than 2008.  Not to worry, we could have Donald Trump as President so we should be just fine… ummm…. maybe I should consider moving now! 

Now these impending challenges are just that.  Challenges.  We created them and we can resolve them.  But it takes a healthy dose of optical physics and courage to get a view of the solutions. 

First: parallax.  Parallax is the optical illusion in which objects closer seem to be larger and more mobile than objects seen at a distance.  Bretton Woods was a great example of the error in reality created by confusing parallax for objective reality.  Just because the “other” was further away didn’t mean that we could ignore “them”.  And now that “they” – countries like India, China, Brazil, and much of the African nations – have become increasingly economically engaged – “they” are closer meaning that their size and movement appears more consequential.  China, for example, always mattered.  But now that they appear to be larger and move more nimbly, they’re suddenly deemed important.  “They” were always important.  And when “they” was a euphemism for “cheap” and “enslavable” “we” didn’t care.  But know that “they” are “we”, we have to care. 

Second: aperture.  Aperture is the process of selective narrowing and collimating of a reflected field of view to achieve depth of view and focus.  When one limits one’s perspective, it’s easy to find monolithic solutions.  When one opens perspective to include a wider range of inputs, pluralistic reality becomes much more evident and requires more actors to be fully informed and engaged.

To weather the coming economic storm and achieve more of a dive than a cataclysmic fall into the watery abyss, we need to bring ourselves into closer proximity to each other and we need to expand our informed engagement!  That requires a commitment to learn, stretch our awareness, and lessen our dependence on paternalistic systems that were built not to care for us but to disintermediate our care for our neighbor.  As we enter 2016, make a commitment to share your wealth, compassion, and industry with someone you didn’t include in your circle in 2015.  And, with any luck, we’ll find a more reliable way to fly.

x

Kyrie Elesion: 2015

Colleen Martin, Erik and Johanna Josefsson, me and about 150 others gathered at Veritas Vineyard & Winery for a masked ball 365 days ago.  The night was brisk but warm enough that the backless gowns were far more comfortable than the suits which a night of dancing gradually shed.  An expansive feast was set before the revelers accompanied by opulent pairings of the fruit of the vine.  Celebrating my 29^th New Years with Colleen and my first with Erik and Johanna was a lovely diversion from the melancholy that marked so many New Years before.  For with the passing of each year, I find myself quite often reflecting on that which was in need of improvement in my own life and in the experience of lives with whom I intersect.  My New Year’s tradition has been more requiem than magnificat.  And as I donned my mask – a beautiful Venetian gesso and gold leaf homage to the contrast of light and darkness – I realized that the party marking the end of the year was as much façade as the ornament on my face.

In a timeless ritual, I have constructed a discipline to officially end my siege of lugubrious introspection with the passing of the year.  Having reflected on all my omissions and commissions that represented my unrefined ideal, I turn my thoughts on this day, the last of 2015, towards those who have lit the constellation of lights in my blackest of nights so that, through every passage, I arrived safely at this moment.  Now, for the third year of blogosphered modernity, I wanted to share with you some of my Litany of the Saints of 2015.

Kyrie Elesion

On January 6, 2015 I left the freezing snow of Washington DC for the balmy sun of Gold Coast Australia where Colleen, Christine McDougall, me and beautiful group of about 30 Aussies got together to share an amazing several days deepening our knowledge and practical implementation of Integral Accounting.  Among the gathered was my dear friend and colleague Robert Prinable, together with his lovely wife Bernadette, who would become some of the most valued and trusted friends across the year.  Peter Hojgaard-Olsen and his amazing family, Martin Blake, Jason Andrew and several others were to be not only 2015’s earliest but also most valued compatriots for the coming year.  Without question, one of most cherished acquaintances from the gathering was artist extraordinaire Devon Bunce who opened my eyes to the power of aesthetic story-telling in a way I had never contemplated.  I was to learn that her perspective was to punctuate much of my year. 

My longtime colleague Rodney Woods and I shared the stage at Rev. Jesse Jackson’s RAINBOW PUSH conference in New York before I headed to the Middle East and India to round out the first month of the year celebrating the life, vision, and later legacy of the passion of the late Hon. President A.P.J. Kalam with my dear friends at the Indian Institute for Management – Ahmedabad.  And just in case I didn’t have enough frequent flyer miles in the first month of the year, on January 23 I joined Julio De Laffitte and about 100 amazing, intrepid Aussies and Kiwis on what was to become an Unstoppable experience of life beginning in Chile and then blossoming in Antarctica.  During this trip, I was to meet a host of amazing people who have become of inestimable value in my life.  Matheos Venetis who taught me new depths of gallant vulnerability and tenacity of spirit.  Robin McClellan, the personification of dignified grace in service to purpose.  Lorraine Mill who opened the aperture on my willingness to be seen and perceived.  Kaya Finlayson, the most capable of story-tellers who choreographed the first media artifact in which I saw the best of me exceed my wildest expectations in our celebrated film Future Dreaming.  And Kim Phillips.  On a Deception Island ridge formed by volcanism in the year of my birth, 1967, I came face-to-face with an ancient future guide and accomplice who has fanned the bellows of my life’s refining fire to allow my pure essence to emerge. 

The Spring included the amazing collaboration with Michael Lythcott and Jennifer Carter-Scott at the University of Miami’s MBA for Artists and Athletes where Pam Cole, Bob Kendall, John Kendall and my collaboration with Chris Redman, Russell Okung, Derrick Morgan, Lee Evans, Tommie Harris, Jack Brewer and many others took root; Mak Khan and USHA; more awards for our documentary Patent Wars; Charlottesville living with Katie in streams and vineyards; and long bike rides in the rolling hills of Virginia.  Summer warmed my media credentials with the launch of Kaya’s masterpiece, Future Dreaming; my first animated appearance at the Cannes Lions Festival courtesy of Will Sansom and Dan Goldstein; and the launch of our growing relationship with CNBC courtesy of Adam Tepper’s introduction.  And then came the fall and winter…

In Terra Pax

I’ve spent years feeling like I’ve been observed and not SEEN.  This year, Kaya, Kim, Lorraine, Katie and Robert helped chisel away the veneer I’ve hardened around this perception.  Years ago, when I was writing my unpublished love letter to Katie and Zachary, Sometimes Out of the Clear Blue Sky, I made the following observation:

In business, as with the rest of life, having an innovative idea is more often a curse than a blessing.  For while people may marvel at a complexity or concept, it often becomes a thing to amuse and contemplate – much like the consumption of a Dali painting.  When one gazes at “The Persistence of Memory” the mastery of detail and the surreal are evident however few walk away inspired to bend pocket watches over dead tree branches.  Most of us do not have friends like Dali on the “A” list for Super Bowl parties.  Oh, yes, we’ll have them around at gallery openings or charity events but not in the intimacy of everyday life.  Our society cloisters innovators in ivory towers and gives them titles that both command respect and create distance.  While we crave the creation, we seldom want anything to do with the creator. 

This year, in exceptionally precise ways, I had the blessing of individuals who were willing to directly tackle this source of turmoil in my life.  My dear friend Dustin DiPerna persisted in that role but it was some of the new Saints that had the courage to meet my complacent assuredness with ruthless, meticulous criticism.  Bypassing friendship and empathy and relentlessly demanding accountability and integrity like those who give accounts for souls was the greatest offering made to me this year.  Ironic that this came at the same time as Future Dreaming was unveiled.  It was as though my long-held view that celebrity is a social toxin was being inoculated with a vaccine of truth so as to insure that I couldn’t be seen as being anything other than completely, fully, gratefully human.  My deepest gratitude for this generosity of spirit and intrepid love goes to Kim who navigated with me what has been until now too daunting an undertaking.

Kaya’s beautiful gift in film did more, in one act or artifact, to disseminate a message about which I have relentless passion than anything I’ve collaborated on to date.  Future Dreaming is a defining moment in the present and served to propagate a clarion call to humanity to remember the purpose of living like nothing else I’ve done.  I’ve often stated that I may have offered the canvas and the paint in my words but it was Kaya (and Robert, Colleen, and Lorraine) that crafted the masterpiece.  Working with Robert, Peter, Nadya Peshevska, Kim, Colleen and others in the coming year, Kaya and I look forward to building more depth to this important opus.  In so doing, we all can stop praying for peace on earth and start living it on a daily basis.

Magnificat anima mea Dominum

Being seen as the vessel of purpose gave rise to Mary’s proclamation that we know as the Magnificat.  In all of life, be it personal or professional, it is this that in the final analysis, is the gift of inestimable value.  When one goes from being appreciated to being genuinely seen and valued, the desert of vanity and aspiration melts into the verdant Eden of magnanimous abundance.  This year’s canonization of those who have been my saints is unlike years past.  My year began with a mask and ends with all being revealed.  My gratitude pours out to hundreds unnamed save by inference in this last of the year’s writings.  If you’re reading this, I am grateful to YOU!

Meet each sunrise with gratitude;

Abandon that which restrains your joy;

Reverence those who share your path; and be,

Tenacious in integrity

Indomitable in resolve, and

Noble in thought, word and deed.

Happy New Year!

Happy Birthday Dad!

Inspired by Lincoln's Gettysburg Address

Four score years ago my grandfather and grandmother brought forth on this continent, a new incarnation, conceived in Mennonite austerity, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are equally fallen.

Now we are engaged in a great ecclesiastical contest, testing whether this incarnation so conceived and so constrained, can long endure.  We are met on a great testing ground of that contest.  We dedicate a portion of our honor as a final resting place for those who have given life, will, and purpose so that this epic question can be resolved.  It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate – we cannot consecrate – we cannot hallow this inquiry.  My brave father who was thus conceived, went far from his home and his community and modeled inclusion and the cause of Civil Rights in the Intercollegiate Peace Fellowship; offered his life and his fortunes for the service, education and wonderment of others; embraced the stranger and the Vietnam-era counter-culture casualties inviting them into our family; raised four sons who were taught the respect and dignity of Creation in all its wonder; and, inquired into the boundaries of beliefs that were thought beyond inquiry.  This world may little note, nor long remember, the great deeds of my father’s past 80 years but it will never forget the effect of his living.  It is for us, the living, rather to be dedicated here to the unfinished intrepid inquiry which he has so nobly advanced.    It is for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us – that from these honored pasts we take increased devotion to that timeless inquiry into the meaning and purpose of living; living which for so many was cut short in previous inquisitions; that we resolve that those who are passed have not lived in vain.

On this day, December 18, 1935 a 6.0 earthquake hit the Sichuan Province of China, President Franklin D. Roosevelt met with his Cabinet to discuss the economic condition of the U.S. economy and the conflict brewing in Europe, and my Dad, Aaron E. Martin was born.  He has lived a life that has welcomed the stranger, clothed and fed the needy, taught the love of the universe to thousands of students of Astronomy, and modeled grace beyond that which he was shown.

Happy birthday Dad!  You are, truly one of the greats and I’m honored to be your son!

Watering Down Intelligence

I checked into a hotel room last night – the same days as the kick-off of the UN’s COP21 in Paris.  As billionaires and their political puppets convened in a city that is now known more martial law than the light of Liberty to discuss throwing trillions of dollars at the mythical beast of CO₂ reduction, I encountered a series paradoxical profundities.  Next to my neatly rolled stack of three wash cloths (I seldom use any) was a sign that invited me to care about the environment by placing my used towels on the floor if they needed to be replaced and informing me that in so doing, I was making a “Green” choice.  Opposite on the counter in the bathroom were two bottles of $7.50 water offering me “crisp taste from the Tuscan countryside”.  The water was conveniently bottled in a single use, plastic container with a lovely accessorized necklace hang-tag promoting its effervescent quality.  And here’s the problem with this picture.  The hotel in which I was staying was the Omni Hotel in San Francisco California, not in, say Florence Italy.  And the unconsidered cost of shipping Acqua Panna water thousands of miles so that I could imbibe Roman goodness while contemplating my green towel choice seemed to be prima facie evidence that we live in a society that doesn’t give a shit about the environment. 

In a country where we invest billions of dollars on public utilities to insure potable water from a tap – a tap, mind you that had no water saving features about it – what are we saying when we offer “green” linens and towels but carelessly place over-priced plastic bottled water in the decision theater?  It seems to me that we’re not only stating our callous negligence but possibly something far more insidious.  I think we’re euthanizing the seed of consciousness that may deign to sprout in our lives to actually select a life that doesn’t require oil-based resin containers, multi-thousand mile logistics, and excessive consumption of cotton-based products.  During the choreographed Parisian hubris-fest, the UN and its illusionists speak of carbon reduction while the following headlines blast across the world:

ISIS Funds Terror Through Sale of Oil

Norway Seeks EU Confirmation of Arctic Energy Commitment

Dealers Cannot Stock Enough SUVs

Auto Sales Set All Time Record in 2015

Industry Giants Offer Billions for Environment

We are not serious about the environment and we’re willfully negligent in our reflexive response to the non-issue.  It is CONSUMPTION, not CARBON that is destroying us.  Communities of persistence around the world – particularly my dear friends across the Pacific – are living in a carbon balance and don’t toxify the earth because they don’t over produce nor do they over-consume.  They live in verdant abundance because they understand how to dance with the ecosystem – not lord over it.

And the deeper reality remains that our economic illusion of unfunded pensions – that ominous Depression-level event in 2017 – that will destroy nearly 23% of the discretionary spending of American seniors in 5-6 fiscal quarters poses a far greater threat to our actual living than does the U.S. and Chinese reckless fossil fuel emissions.  In a violent society in which guns settle disputes, economic hopelessness born of meaningless existence will bomb, shoot, and terrorize humanity way before the sea gets a chance to rise much more.

The leadership that is required is not the gathering of lords of land and industry.  It is the leadership from We the People who can immediately reduce our consumption and increase the utilization of all things for their ACTUAL life cycle.  And that can start with the Christmas season.  Give the gift of presence, not presents.  Imagine someone else using what you have and give it to them.  Make the Commons flow with what’s already in it rather than adding more trinkets to the excess in which we’re already drowning.  Unwrap yourself for those you love and in so doing, you may find a warming that doesn’t kill polar bears but actually gets closer to the humanity that we all still carry.

Elusive Desert Moose and Other Lies

I went for a bike ride in Southern Albemarle County yesterday afternoon.  As I headed onto Old Lynchburg Road, the chill of the late fall air sent a shock through my lungs reminding me again that riding in Virginia in the Winter is as much a test of will as it is exercise.  Before long, legs and heart pumping, I thawed myself into a steady state that drove out the cold.  By the time I turned to head east on 708, I had long forgotten the cold and was relishing the fact that I was back on my bike after weeks of travel.  And then, after cresting the third long climb I saw them.  Two zebras and a mule standing in the middle of a field on the north side of the road.  Zebras!  In a region of the country where one expects to see ostentatious horse farms, manicured vineyards, and sweeping estates, zebras are certainly unexpected.  In an instant, I pulled off the road, hopped off my bike and walked over to the pasture fence to take a photo.  As I did that, I realized my motivation for the photo was an echo across over 40 years.

On one family trip across the desert Southwest in the early 1970s, my parents got a bag of M&Ms (still the official road trip snack of champions!).  The four of us boys were told that we would receive M&Ms for being the first to spot any wild animals during our drive.  Long before iPods, iPads, and all digital manners of diversion, a great idea was to get sons distracted by a little competition that would have them focusing out the window rather than on the fact that Dan liked the seatbelt too tight or that someone was in someone else’s space.  While on the road and at rest areas, various ones saw all manner of birds, reptiles and the occasional dog in another car.  For each first, M&Ms were dispensed.  The behaviorist B.F. Skinner would have been having a heyday with this Pavlovian environmental conditioning experiment.

Late into dusk, still suffering from my M&M deficient hypoglycemia, I announced that I saw a moose.  And before I could get through with the surprise sighting, I clarified that I had been certain it was a moose because I saw its ears!  I was told that I was “lying” and was not rewarded with M&Ms.  And so, yesterday, when I saw the zebras, the little boy in me wanted to be damn sure that I had a picture to prove that, indeed, I had seen the zebra.  What I didn’t know when I was 4 or 5 was that objective truth was not objective at all – it was consensus experience.  Sure, the objective fact was that I probably saw a misshapen saguaro cactus with wide sweeping arms and little flower bud nubs (filling in for ears on my moose).  But in the shadowy silhouette, the geometry was that of a moose standing in the night air of the Sonoran Desert. 

As I reflect on this lesson – “lying” about seeing what others didn’t see – I marveled at the hypocrisy of my “truth” conditioning.  Most impactful in my childhood were stories from the Bible, a daily companion to my upbringing.  As a boy who saw and heard things that others didn’t, I often marveled at how giants could exist, how bushes could talk, how dreams could fracture ribs, how fantastical miracles could be revered if they were told in a book that I was supposed to “believe” but the same dimensions were “lies” if they were experienced by a little boy.  And as I grew older, I was supposed to accept other consensus “truths” – faith, hope, love, justice, honesty – only to see in their consensus practice evident hypocrisy and contradiction.  The same boy who saw a moose was able to decipher covert operations by the U.S. government in Central America which later became known as the Iran Contra affair.  The same boy found and helped close the second largest white collar criminal tax fraud in U.S. history; developed a mechanism to render visible assets that were off balance sheet to stabilize and grow economies; went into conflict regions around the world where corrupt corporations were bribing governments to rob wealth from countries and their people and brought light and justice to places where no one else would go; and, continues to find the elusive desert moose that others don’t see.

I’ve watched over the years as those who have been the arbiters of public “truth” – the consensus keepers – have manipulated propaganda to hypnotize the population into being fearful of their own observations.  When governments manipulate and abuse their governed selling predatory intrusion and industrial warfare in the name of security; when churches and clergy demand their tithes but build their own wealth rather than feeding and clothing the needy; when families cling to the illusion of what loving relationships could be rather than acknowledging the pain of isolation in their midst; when disease management is sold as “healthcare”; and, when financial security is built on digital records that can be eradicated in a single magnetic burst, we’ve long abandoned integrity to our own observations and we’ve long left any realm of truth.  Over the past few weeks, while terror has marched across every media feed again, weapon makers have seen their fortunes soar (Defense Sector stocks up over 5.4% while the market has been up 0.47%).  The Brookings Institute along with many others have reported that those wonderful Toyota trucks driven by mercenary forces flying black flags are financed by oil sales (that’s right, someone is buying the oil) and “venture capital” style investments from Kuwait, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia. 

Purveyors of fear are most often the most vocal proclaimers of “truth”.  Why is that?  Well, for one, it’s terribly unacceptable to question “truth”.  In the past, it’s led to being outcast, stigmatized, or even killed – all significant aversion re-enforcements to insure consensus thinking and acting.  Additionally, as Gregory Bateson pointed out in his work on psychological disorders, if you can get someone to doubt their own observations of reality, you can rapidly convince them that they cannot trust themselves and therefore force them into situations where they “trust” others.  The more subtle the subterfuge, the more effective the coercion.  And behind every “truth” and “fear” purveyor stands someone who benefits.  Convince people they’re in danger – no worries, the government will keep you “safe”.  Convince people that they’re sinful – no worries, the church will take your time, focus, and money in exchange for an eternal peace.  Convince people that they’re incapable of understanding money – no worries, advisors will sell you no-downside guarantees in the form of pensions and insurance which “can never go down” never telling you what they do with the “ups” they make. 

I’m going through an amazing journey in life.  Each one of the consensus illusions in my world has been held up for examination in 2015.  And each one, on close examination have crumbled into bits.  Not a little bit – entirely!  And what I’ve chosen to do is find the motivation behind each – find out who was the beneficiary of my distraction – and elected to learn from these experiences rather than judge or despise them.  I’ve chosen to live in transparency – sharing what others would see as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ without any sense of concern.  I’ve chosen to live in complete and emanating love – insuring that those who are in my life receive the best from me and that I receive the best from them.  I’ve reaffirmed my commitment to give no quarter to the illusion of fear in myself or others.  Why?  Because I’ve always seen a world that includes imagination, wonder, and conscious living.  I’ve always seen the elusive desert moose.  And I choose to live in a world where I’m measured by the quality of my actions, not by my resonance with consensus.  In so doing, I’m inverting alchemy – taking gold and turning it back into humanity.  I think I’ll have a few M&Ms now cuz there’s a Little Guy who just saw a zebra!

South China Sea

Several years ago I was asked to offer my input to a scenario planning workshop for a large family office in the U.S.  During the presentation, I suggested that geopolitical risk had a few flashpoints that would be worth watching.  I referred to these as the “Archduke Ferdinand’s Bullet” referring to the assassination which certainly contributed to the violence that escalated into World War I.  The one that I said had the highest consequential risk was the shipping lines stretching from the Straits of Malacca to the South China Sea.  This region, unlike any other, is responsible for much of the energy and container traffic for the world’s largest trading partners.  An LNG tanker explosion, a “friendly fire” salvo gone wrong, and the Asia Pacific powder keg could ignite due to the absence of regional resilience. 

Several days ago, a U.S. naval vessel passed within 12 nautical miles of an innocuous island claimed by China and situated in the South China Sea.  To be sure, the U.S. Navy did NOT need to be there.  There’s a big ocean and passage into and through territorial distributes is not the exercise of a maritime right, it’s a provocation.  And with all of the conflicts raging across the world, a logical presumption would be that we might do well to minimize our willingness to inflame relatively pacified situations.  Do Vietnam, Japan and others have legitimate concerns regarding China’s interpretation of maps?  Quite possibly as maps are capricious in the first place and no entity has the universally recognized map of the world’s land masses and jurisdictional boundaries.  Which made me pause and ask the question:  given the abject stupidity of the Navy’s choice of passage, what else is going on for which this event would serve as a distraction? 

We have religious factions unraveling the delicate, war-torn communities of Afghanistan and Iraq.  We have massive food, water and conflict refugees desperately seeking respite from carnage in Syria.  We’re watching as Venezuela may be about to implode under that persistent economic challenges from the depressed petro-dollar based economy it’s built.  We know that the Arabian Peninsula is teetering on the brink of massive social inequality-fueled regime change – more French revolution than French enlightenment if you get my drift.  A few days ago, I had the good fortune of meeting with representatives of the government of Papua New Guinea and heard the futility in voices who have long sought just participation in the resource extraction from their country only to know that a select few officials are willfully or ignorantly mismanaging these assets.  Consumption is down in the minerals sector.  Companies are shifting headquarters to tax havens as they continue to extract infrastructure value from their actual home country.  We’re looking just over the horizon to Christmas season which will, in its muted performance, give us the opportunity to see exactly how bad consumer confidence is.

Dystopian trajectories are epidemic all around us.  The models of human interaction that have been deployed over the past 400 years have born their blighted fruit and, in the main, this is the generation shouldering the indictment on the Occidental epistemological order.  There are, in my estimation, several generalizable factors of the entropic conclusion of this human experiment. 

As I state in my documentary Future Dreaming, one of these is the concept of dominion.  The idea that anything or anyone is “over” anything or anyone else is a fallacy that results in immeasurable harm.  The religious narrative that places a god “over” the created order is palatable only in the corollary illusion that “man” is entitled to have dominion over everything else.  From divine rights justifying autocracies to our most intimate interactions between men and women in which “my” serves to reify linear possession, our behavior indicts our abject failure to see the natural order as absolutely interdependent and covalently linked in energetic exchange.  And the immoral justification of patronage in which benevolence to the “lower” absolves the “higher” of their tyranny is not appropriate even if the benevolence is absolute.  For in it, the perspective of one forms the context for the other and the “lord’s” context and motivation is opaque.

An additional systemic failure is enclosure.  From the Adamic myth of naming all the flora and fauna in Eden to property laws to accounting, the presumption that life requires boundaries is anathema to all natural systems.  In classic Nordic folklore, the Milky Way or Linnunrata (the light path) was thought to guide bird migrations to and from nesting grounds.  The birds were not thought to “own” the Milky Way but simply use it as their guide.  Edges, boundaries, enclosures and the like – whether defined by fiat or consensus – create separation and separation reinforces scarcity.  We can see this cancer throughout our entire social order.  “My” or “mine” not only implies ownership or dominion of or over a thing but it too has an ugly corollary – digital choice.  Choice is heralded as a valued human ideal but within it is, all too often, the implication of a rejection of the other.  From which laundry detergent to use to which restaurant to select to how to vote, our social behavior sees choice of one person or one thing as an explicit rejection of all others.  Without enclosure in the illusion of time or space, choice could be seen as temporal selection in a moment or for a utility where all other expression, options, or opportunities preserve all attributes of availability in all other moments.  But we don’t live that way.  By selecting a house or a job, we have cut off other options for shelter and purposeful action.  By selecting a relationship, we are thought to deprioritize all others.  In a world that celebrates “choice”, we force the illusion that one dimension of value leading to prioritization is somehow predominant over all other dimensions. 

And finally, digital.  I was fortunate to be invited to speak at the International Day Traders Association conference in Gold Coast Australia a week ago and return for a speaking engagement for the Big Blue Sky Event a few days later.  I was amazed at the ubiquitous intrusion of “digital” in much of the discourse.  Once again, we can barely detect this memetic absolute.  When we don’t like something, we “change” it.  But unfortunately, we don’t specify with any precision that which we find revolting and the attributes of what better would be.  Things are “right” or “wrong”, “functional” or “dysfunctional” but the use of digital thinking (like choice referenced above) means that we can only see momentary state conditions in a macro sense without discerning the subtle nuance that makes all things a composition of all phases and states in subtle variation.  I spoke about the reflexive acceptance and rejection of models of behavior and planning which fail to fully understand the illusions within the stories we are told and used examples like the Third Reich’s contribution to Silicon Valley and the Occupy Wall Street response to Chicago’s CDS trading market to show that digital and causal reflexive response is NOT thinking.  It’s reacting.  And reacting is seldom, if ever, fully conscious.

Overlay these epistemologies on the growing conflicts in the Middle East, South America and the Asia Pacific region and there’s no surprise that the South China Sea is boiling.  We are a common humanity not only divided by our language but equally incapable of integrating and evidencing our capacity to live in a heterogeneous, infinitely orthogonal perspective that is isomorphic with Reality.  And while we may feel incompetent to deal with the geopolitical audacities of systemic failures, we can, in these moments, treat each other with greater grace and mercy.  We can seek to understand rather than judge.  We can seek to inquire rather than project.  We can triangulate perspectives and, in so doing, achieve a more considered existence.  And if we begin that journey in our immediate fields, we can foster an expanding dynamic that, like the Sun, warms the field around us and gradually illumines a path to a more complete human experience.  

On Source

An Essay from my new book

We can see that Light and Magnetism enjoy identical nature and essence.  Further, we can see that their union produces and sustains Life.  It is this last observation that serves as the root of Wisdom.  To co-emanatory and inter-reliant energies align in their union to provide the abundance upon which life, as we understand it, depends.  The impulse to place any delimitation around this purposeful unity by ascribing to it some human-derived name or principle diminishes the elegant completeness that it represents.  By understanding its true essence and observing its core nature, we can precisely see how our lives, our stories, our obscurations and our contrivances foster an illusion of separation from perfect coherence with Source.

I use the term “Source” for its precision.  Unlike “origin” which implies some Euclidean distance in time or space limited to linear projections, Source evokes the same essential nature as its first order expressions – Light and Magnetism: namely, persistence, generative, and infinitely orthogonal.  Mesopotamian cultures known to have a profound knowledge of these first order expressions used the cuneiform representation IDIGNA to represent the artesian source of the rivers around which much of civilization organized – the Tigris and Euphrates.  In the Indus, the might Himalayas gave rise to great rivers around which Indic and Sinic culture emerged and flourished.  The Andean cultures had some of their greatest temples at the artesian and mountain springs which fed the Pacific and created the alluvial Amazonia. 

:and preserving the reflected wavelength and essence of the observed Sun was used to adorn the head of the kings and priests.  Was this because it was known to amplify reception and the transmission of energies to and from the head of its wearer?  Was it known to be a conductor of the wisdom afforded by a deep understanding of Light and Magnetism throughout the cosmos?  While we can only speculate, its universality would point to purpose and knowledge over some coincidence.  Why did many cultures find copper to be an important symbol of power and health – two highly correlated expressions in a functioning society?  Like gold, it enjoys high conductivity and luminosity.

The essential nature of Source must be clearly articulated to recognize its coherence or the capricious introduction of willful dissonance.  I will attempt to add precision to the tripartite nature of Source and its First Order manifestations:  Light and Magnetism.

Persistence:  This is the nature of that which has the capacity to emanate and engages the same in complete manifestation unaltered by any exogenous condition.  Rather than relying on an external stimulus to spring into action, persistence self-activates and does not concern itself with reflexive responses and patterns in the field.  It has perfect awareness knowing that the activity engaged is fully provisioned at the pace, intensity, and frequency suitable for the action.  It exists with total ecosystem awareness conscripting that which is required not for its consumption but for its energetic emancipation from a potentiated state into an actualized purpose.

Generative: This is the nature of that which, at its essence is wholly aligned for the emanation of that which can be experienced by and benefit other matter an energy.  Beyond the notion of creation or destruction – a duality that is the product of a constricted perception – generation is that which organizes cycles of perpetual transformation.  Generative processes in and of themselves neither define nor delimit themselves.  Rather, the perpetually align matter and energy in such a way that other systems flourish.

Infinitely Orthogonal:  This is the principle of absolute perspectival equanimity.  Regardless of the point of view of the observer/participant/beneficiary, the capacity for equivalent observation or us is complete.  The elegance of orthogonality is that, as each perspective is entirely uncorrelated to each other perspective, perfect symmetry independent of perspective is achieved through dimensional indifference.

When we consider the Sun’s expression of Light or the bar magnet’s expression of magnetism, we see that Source in situ has an effect on, but does not require a response from, that which it encounters.   When Source is animated or in approximation, sensitive respondents consciously engage and animate.  The heliotropic dance of the flower is evidence of conscious recognition of the essentiality of Source awareness.  The iron filings that align to the infinite sweeps of the magnetic field are evidencing Source awareness. 

Source Awareness has a few essential attributes.  First, Proximity.  The more coherent and unimpeded the path between Source and respondent, the more effortless the interaction and the more identical the effect in evidence.  Second, Purity.  The less interference between Source and respondent, the more effective the transmission and empowerment.  And finally, Proven.  This is the certitude of performance where there can exist no other explanation or attribution because the complete validation is evident and incontrovertible.  In contrast, Source defilement also has three attributes:  Remote, anonymous, and unverifiable.  Every harm done to this planet and to each other is directly dependent on one or more of these defiling impulses.  And most insidious of all, the defiling attributes are frequently cloaked in the deception of terms like “Trust” (remote from actual experience), “Faith” (reliance on an anonymous actor or energy beyond perception), and “Belief” (the requirement to dissociate discernment and perception in order to acquiesce to illusion).  None of these words nor the energies they represent have coherence with Source regardless of their profligate use and their apparent resonant proximity. 

While I’ve used as examples the Sun and a bar magnet to describe First Order expressions of Source, these are quite grand in scale and may be too mysterious to engage.  So let’s examine some examples of Source much closer in.  Inside your chest at this precise moment is an agent of Source. And while we can rush emotionally to the heart, that’s close but not spot on.  Inside the heart wall are a series of cells that self-activate.  We call them the pacemaker.  Now these cells, when functioning in absolute coherence are what literally keeps us alive and our heart beating.  However, when these same highly differentiated myocardial cells elect to function in resonance or dissonance they can stimulate all manners of arrhythmias and can cause death.  The small coordinated node is Source and Life.  The cells either behave like photons and fields in coherence or, when going it alone, act like manipulators and agents of death.  These cells, when properly functioning – as the sun activates pure photonic animation – activate nerve fibers which transmit the impulse to the rest of the heart and the muscle pumps.

I recently experienced another evidence of embodied Source.  On an early morning hike on an overcast morning, I hiked up Ekajati Peak for what I knew was my last time during a sojourn in Southern Colorado at the Tara Mandala retreat.  As I approach the stupa marking the life of the retreat’s co-founder David Petit, I chose to read aloud the tribute written about him by his beloved partner Lama Tsultrim Allione.  I had read the plaque on a previous occasion and had done so in silence.  The moment I started vocalizing the tribute to David, Source emanated from within me.  While tears came to my eyes and my voice started to quiver, I felt a heat in my chest – not my heart, not my lungs – but rather some middle space just below my sternum.  I had no temporal or spatial association with David or Lama Tsultrim but, in that moment the Source emanation in the form of a lover’s tribute, connected their literal energy and lives to mine in an undifferentiated simultaneity.  I was weeping at the end – no sadness, no sense of loss or sympathy.  Just profound reverence for an expression of pure love written years ago.

If you’ve ever seen Michelangelo’s David in Florence, you can experience and watch in the eyes of other first time onlookers Source awareness.  Here, the genius in his art took simple marble and brought forth something far more transcendent than a nude statute of a young man.  Within the marble, he expressed the essence of a shepherd, warrior, lover, king standing in perfect elegance and capable of communicating to persons from every culture regardless of the familiarity with the Biblical account.  David’s elegant atemporal beauty is Source emanating from marble interacting with Michelangelo’s genius.

And David gives us another important path to ancient wisdom.  The marble is starting to crack in the ankles and many fear that one day, he will fall.  Like one day the Sun will supernova or burn out or like one day magnetized matter will compress in infinite density and give rise to the hyperpolarized nursery to birth the process all over again.  Abrahamic faiths have a universal prohibition on making graven images.  This was an important concession to the realization that humans tend to imbue in the artifact what they perceive to be the representation of the essence.  And if this goes on, the risk is that the artifact becomes the agent of reverence and, in so doing, supplants the consciousness of the essence.  Islam and Aztecs have their geometry; Inca and Egyptians have their architecture.  And the more the incarnate form or artifact is revered, the more distant the participant / supplicant is from Source.  The incarnation that is coherent with Source is but one photon transmitting the energy.  And the world would do well to realize that imitation and adherence are not aspirational ideals as to be an aspirant is to reify the illusion of separation.  And Source is coherently One – always and in every phase and state.  The evidence of incarnate and emanating Source is the basis for great inspiration but should not give rise to emulation or aspiration.  Rather it should serve as a reminder that we – the great cosmic union – are born of one and are perfectly inseparable from each other. 

While essential nature shows us that we are all inextricably united in our matter and energy and that any notion of separation is entirely dissonant with the evidentiary witness of Source, this has not stopped at least three millennia of corruptors from instituting cultural manipulations which seek to prey upon the fears which can only be perceived when the illusion of separation is imposed upon reality – notably promoted as Trust, Faith, and Belief.  Elaborate pantheons of gods, demons, dakinis, angels, prophets and saints have been contrived, largely through oral traditions, to obfuscate the ever present coherence of Source.  Esoteric symbols, geometric forms – all evidencing Source influence in their basic forms – have frequently been relegated to occult or mystery schools known by only a few and exclusively accessible to the “initiated”.  And while traditions like the Tibetan Dzogchen contain beautiful Source-inspired photonic practices such as “transmissions” and “empowerments” in which the guru and disciple literally share a common mind or realization, these practices are also restricted to approved practitioners.  When was the last time physics could show you an unqualified photon?  When did you hear of an oxygen refusing to pair with a hydrogen to flow as water because the hydrogen was having a bad hair day or came from the wrong side of the Periodic Table in a previous bonding relationship?  See, while we can make light of this on one hand, when it comes to suffering, injury and extinction, imposed qualifications are all too often the result of horrific and callous predation using the cunning reflex of fear rather than the simple endless mundane entropic states. 

And here may be the more insidious reason why we innovate ways to obscure Source wisdom.  As it is its own evidence and teacher, Source wisdom cannot be monetized because, thanks to its infinite orthogonality, it can be understood by all with absolute equivalence.  Now clearly this condition poses an existential threat to the scientist and the theologian alike.  No surprise that these two professions are the most robust in layering onto Source their own ontology and complexity so as to make the illusion of their exclusivity and remoteness their respective rice bowls.  Is there new literacy and new linguistics needed for the re-emergent Source awareness?  Absolutely.  But it should be as easy as taking off one’s clothes and walking naked in the garden in the blazing splendor of the Sun or as simple as playing with a bar magnet in the dirt. 

Source can be easily discerned as it is a persistent energy all around us.  But its evidence is accessed by First Order perceivable manifestations.  Light and Magnetism are, in our time, the most uncorruptible First Order expressions universally available to any observer.  Their interactions, like photosynthesis, oxidative phosphorylation, molecular formation, auspicious order are isomorphic with Source as they are in coherent proximity to and fully animated exclusively by Source.  These interactions can be considered Second Order expressions.  Now it’s important to note that, like electrons spinning around a nucleus, proximity to the center is neither better nor worse.  In fact, as we move to outer layers, we find a very special and critical function in the outer shells – the capacity to be the site for covalent bonding.  This is an exceptionally important and precise type of molecular formation as it is in the covalent bond that the electron models its indivisibility with Source.  In the bond, it’s neither one atom’s nor the others but rather occupies an egoless, identity-free middle reality. 

Consider the water molecule.  One oxygen and two hydrogen atoms bond to take these two gases and transition their states through liquid, solid, gas, or transitional crystalline structures and matter.  While unified, these atoms retain attributes of their discrete nature but in the shared electron environment, they also have the capacity to transit phases and states not accessible to themselves in isolation.  They didn’t “gain” or “lose” as some would describe.  Rather they elected union based on intent and purpose.  If any hierarchy was necessary in isomorphism, we wouldn’t have water.  The contribution of hydrogen to oxygen and vice versa are equivalently important and can only be separated with the application of exogenous energy. 

So it is that we can see that Source both emanates through and is the patron of Covalence.  It reminds us that Together is Our essential state and allows us to quickly discern that which and those who seek prey upon separation for their own destructive designs.  When there is an impulse to impose separation in any form, Source Covalence is being violated and another dissonant energy is being expressed.