Tag: community

Content

The first step toward living honestly with the human predicament is recognizing that all conscious beliefs, all scientific theories and religious revelations, all thoughts and concepts as well as the words that express them, are symbols. This blog post is a symbol. And as C.S. Peirce wrote, “Symbols are particularly remote from the Truth itself.” They are a means of directing attention, but since they do not contain the reality they direct attention to, they can also misdirect it (intentionally or not).

Beyond this recognition, there are many ways of living honestly. A symbol expressing one way was written by Shohaku Okumura in his book Living by Vow (2012). Its immediate context is a chapter about this triad of vows taken by Buddhist practitioners:

I take refuge in the Buddha, vowing with all sentient beings, acquiring the Great Way, awakening the unsurpassable mind.
I take refuge in the Dharma, vowing with all sentient beings, deeply entering the teaching, wisdom like the sea.
I take refuge in the Sangha, vowing with all sentient beings, bringing harmony to all, completely, without hindrance.

(Okumura explains: “Shakyamuni Buddha, born in India about twenty-five hundred years ago, is our original teacher. He awakened to the reality of our life. Both his teachings about this reality and the reality itself are called Dharma. Sangha is the community of people who study the Buddha’s teaching and follow his way of life.”)

Here is the text:

We must wake up to the reality of the impermanence of our lives. Because of impermanence, our death is inevitable. We must find the best and most peaceful way of life. Success, wealth, and fame are not significant in the final stage of our lives. The important point is to return to the matter of life and death, to wake up to the reality of this body and mind, and on that basis create a way of life. This, I think, is the meaning of taking refuge in the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Sangha.

You don’t have to become a Buddhist and take refuge. Buddhism is only one of many paths, one way to wake to the reality of our life. When we become a Buddhist due to various causes and conditions, we follow the path of the Buddha. We seek to manifest the universal life force which we have been given. We live on this earth with everything we need as a gift from nature. It seems that our society doesn’t live in accordance with nature. It acts like a cancer, independently, in its own way. When a cancer becomes too strong, the body dies. When the body dies, the cancer also must die. Cancer is paradoxical. Modern civilization is similar. We have no direction. We just try to live in an ever more convenient way. We chase after prosperity. We live separate from nature and build an artificial world around us. As we get stronger and stronger, we destroy more of the environment. When nature dies, we die.

How can we go back to nature, to the vital life force? This is the essential koan for us, the question we have to work on. In a sense this whole universe is like a hospital. We are all sick. How can we recover from this human sickness? The Buddha’s teaching and the Buddhist Way can be one of the paths to recovery. The Buddha is the doctor who guides the healing process; dharma practice is the medicine he prescribes; the sangha, and all living beings in this universe, are nurses to aid our recovery. This is what the text [an old Buddhist scripture titled Daijō-gi-shō] means by “These three treasures are the final place to return.” They release us from the suffering of a life based on egocentricity and return us to the original, wholesome way of life.

—Shohaku Okumura, Living by Vow (pp. 76-77).

Summer solstice edition

Today is the summer solstice here in the Northern hemisphere. The sun is “standing still,” as the name of the day says. It has climbed as high into the sky at midday as it ever gets at this latitude, and that meridian height appears to stay the same for a few days, along with the places where it rises and sets. Of course this is an illusion: nothing is standing still. The only permanent “thing” in the universe is the flow of time. When we try to measure the “length” of time, what we actually measure is the rate of change of observable “things.” Time itself eludes our measurements.

I’ve been blogging about “the transition” in recent years, because many of us have noticed that the rate of change of things and systems in our world has itself changed, relative to the scale of a human lifetime. But in recent months my rate of posting has dropped off, as i’ve seen the folly of trying to keep up with the Great Acceleration, and have devoted more of “my” time to other follies. Turning Signs is one of them.

With the help of my colleagues in our weekly Study Circle (over Zoom), i’m revising some parts of the netbook to make (i hope) better sense of semiosis. Version 2.2.3 is now available for download, for those who want to read it offline.

There are other distractions these spring/summer days. We’ve just taken delivery of a trailerload of composted goat manure from our neighbour up the road. Moving it (by shovel and wheelbarrow) to the places in the gardens where it’s most needed will take a few days, using an hour or two in the morning and another in the evening when it’s not too hot to work. Such physical tasks make up the meditative part of my day, when i keep eyes and ears open while “opening the hand of thought” (as Uchiyama Roshi puts it). We’re also “spending” more time conversing with our neighbours and other networks. That leaves little time for writing things down, remarkable as life is these days.

Sorry, no time today to insert links as i usually do. Maybe i’ll post again when the equinox rolls around. Anyway, where there’s life, there’s semiosis, and some of its depths remain unexplored …

Community Connections part 4

The Great Work now, as we move into a new millennium, is to carry out the transition from a period of human devastation of the Earth to a period when humans would be present to the planet in a mutually beneficial manner.

Thomas Berry (1999, p.3)

This series of blog posts has been mostly about humans connecting with other humans. But Turning Signs (both the book and the blog) has an equally important focus on connecting with planet Earth (biosphere, lithosphere, atmosphere and all). Instead of repeating anything i’ve already said here, i’d like to direct you to an article just published in Yes! Magazine, “An Indigenous Perspective on Reconnecting With the Land” by Chevaun Toulouse of Sagamok First Nation, which is just across the North Channel from where i live on Manitoulin Island. That should be a good way to wrap up this series on community connections.

Community Connections part 3

In the winter of 2020, the Covid pandemic was making it hard for people to get together in person. I figured that Zoom meetings could be a worthwhile substitute: People can meet and talk face to face without having to leave home, and “share their screen” with the other (to show everybody the meeting agenda, for instance). So I opened a “Zoom Pro” account and put out a message on Resilient Manitoulin offering to host group Zoom meetings using my account. Some local groups took me up on that.

After the group told me when they wanted to meet, I scheduled the Zoom meeting and emailed the members invitations. These include links which the member can click on at the scheduled time to join the meeting, after downloading the free Zoom app that runs on their computer (or their phone). When the person chairing the meeting joined it, i could then hand over the “host” role to them, and leave the meeting. The group could then continue the meeting until they decided to end it.

I also connected with Mary Yett, a permaculture/gardening expert who lives near Tehkummah (southeastern part of the Island), and we held some free Zoom sessions where she could answer live gardening questions from participants. We sent notices to Resilient Manitoulin for those too.

My Zoom “Pro” account costs $200 a year, but a Zoom Basic account is free and allows you to hold meetings with up to 100 people, although they are limited to 40 minutes. So there are ways to meet with people without leaving home that don’t cost anything. Zoom is not the only one, but it’s the one I’m personally familiar with. All kinds of groups and organizations use it now to hold face-to-face meetings without having to be together in one place.

I’ll wrap up this series after the Six Foot Festival at Debajehmujig Creation Center ends tomorrow. This blog is another example of an inexpensive way to connect with people, and if anybody wants to try it (or be a guest writer here), contact me and i’ll try to help.

Community Connections part 2

Social media such as Facebook give you access to their services for free. How can they afford to do this? By keeping track of every click and every “like,” down to minute details of your online behavior. If you have an account on Facebook, for example, it has a secret profile on you. Its algorithms use this profile to target you with information or advertising that you are likely to like, or respond to in some way.

You may be using the free services of Big Tech to make personal connections with family and friends, or your quilting group, or whatever – no problem there. But the hidden system of algorithms can do a lot of damage to community connections, because they foster the growth of all kinds of social bubbles. Some of these bubble-groups connect people who share a hatred or distrust of other groups. They might be white supremacist or male supremacist or anti-immigrant or anti-government groups, and they include members who get their identity from the exclusion of other groups.

Big Tech systems don’t do this intentionally, but they can’t prevent the rise of hate groups on their platforms either, because they have a vested interest in the targeted advertising which depends on the automatic algorithms that grow these bubbles. Those algorithms can turn online communities into “echo chambers” where people reinforce each other’s distrust of “mainstream media,” or the public health system, or the scientific consensus on climate, and amplify each other’s hatred of others.

These groups are held together not only by shared beliefs (often conspiracy theories), but also by their refusal to connect with outsiders. They don’t trust information or opinions coming from outside the bubble, and where there’s no trust, there’s no genuine connection. This leads to polarization and fragmentation of communities. I’ve written about this before in my online book and blog, drawing on a wide range of sources, so i won’t go on about it here.

Turtle Island, including this Island (M’nidoo), has been colonized by invaders from Europe for over 500 years now, and Indigenous people are well aware of the effect of colonialism on them, up to and including genocide. The settlers who are descendants of those invaders, and of other immigrants like my own ancestors, are slowly becoming aware of that shameful history of colonialism. But we don’t yet see clearly how the Internet has been colonized by Big Tech and its algorithms. The effects of that are more subtle and less visible than the 500-year invasion, but they affect billions of people today. We know that they can be used to misdirect our attention and interfere with democratic elections, and that will continue as long as they are profitable for the owners and their wealthy advertisers. That’s the hidden cost of using the “free” services of Big Tech.

In order to make healthier and deeper connections within and between our communities, we need to decolonize the Internet by the way we use it. That’s not always easy. You can quit social media platforms such as Facebook if you want, and use email instead to make connections with people beyond your local neighbourhood. But it may be harder to avoid Microsoft or Apple or Google. Resilient Manitoulin itself is a Google group, because Google groups are free and convenient and easy to create. Likewise you can put your amateur video online for free using YouTube, which is owned by Google. I did that myself two years ago, trying to connect with Northern Ontario people interested in owning an EV (electric car).

But there are other ways of using the Internet for community connections without depending on Big Tech, and without spending a lot of money. My next post will look into some of those.

Mnidoo

21 years ago my wife Pam and i settled on M’nidoo M’nissing, better known to settlers as Manitoulin Island. The Anishinaabe word manitou is often rendered in English as “spirit.” But what does that mean? Anishinaabe scholar Dolleen Tisawii’ashii Manning relates what she learned about mnidoo from her mother:

This concept mnidoo derives from the word Gizhemnidoo, from my mothers’ dialect …. She translated Gizhemnidoo in several ways; primary among these was Great Spirit (the most common translation in our area). Gizhe (great) is similar to chi (big). We can separate gizhe from mnidoo, which she called spirit, potency, potential— dynamic energy. She said that the word spirit is the anglicized interpretation, but mnidoo is something that is happening, and is about to happen at the same time. Gizhemnidoo is the Great Mystery/Spirit, mind boggling, because it is beyond human comprehension. But virtually everything is mnidoo, little spirits. Everything has a little spirit that is propelled by, and exists, due to this energy.

Mnidoo-Worlding: Merleau-Ponty and Anishinaabe Philosophical Translations, p. 3
The big and little spirits correspond more or less to the Big and Little Currents in Turning Signs (Chapter 9). The mnidoo which is ‘something that is happening and is about to happen at the same time’ also corresponds to Dogen’s being-time, and with the Buddhist Heart Sutra:

the Heart Sutra mantra — Gaté, gaté, paragaté, parasamgaté, Bodhi! Svaha! — can be interpreted as “Arriving, arriving, arriving all the way, arriving all the way together: awakening. Joy!” This is a marvelous reminder for our meditation practice that each moment of our practice is, as Dogen suggests, not separate from awakening or enlightenment. Each moment of our practice and of our life is blessed.

Tanahashi 2014, 44-45

The languages are many, but as far as we call tell, the meaning is one. Now is the time we need to hear it, especially from the First Peoples of the Earth.

A simple way to understand what’s happening … and what to do

We are living in transformative times. The title of this blog post is the title of an essay by Richard Heinberg which is exactly what the title says. I can’t think of anything else i’ve read that says so much that is so important right now in so few words. This is truly essential reading.

Inkling of the day, and Richard Heinberg’s

final point: life is about more than survival.

Communion

Inkling of the day: The time has come to lower our voices, to cease imposing our mechanistic patterns on the biological processes of the earth, to resist the impulse to control, to command, to force, to oppress, and to begin quite humbly to follow the guidance of the larger community on which all life depends.
That was written 32 years ago. Is it too late now?

Outlink of the day: David Bollier has for many years been researching the commons, and the practice of commoning in many places around the world. His recent book with Silke Helfrich, Free, Fair and Alive, presents it as an alternative to the extractive capitalism which has turned out to be ecocidal and pushed global civilization to the brink of self-destruction. The book includes a glossary of terms we will need in order to shift our understanding and think like commoners. One of them is communion, an old word redefined with the help of some other key terms (rendered here in all caps):

Communion is the process through which COMMONERS participate in interdependent relationships with the more-than-human world. COMMUNION shifts a person’s understanding of human/nature relations out of the economistic framework (e.g., “resource management,” or the commodification and financialization of “nature’s services”) into one that respects the intrinsic value of the nonhuman world. This fundamental self-awareness leads to feelings of gratitude, respect, and reverence for the sacred dimensions of life in the ways that human PROVISIONING is organized.

— Bollier and Helfrich (2019, 76)