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Gooood Morning SuperForest!
So much fun new news to relate!
We’ve moved the whole circus, all the people, the animals, the buildings, the tools, the odds and ends, to a new land. An unspoiled, undeveloped, sparkling little gem of a five acre parcel just down the road from our old haunts. The logistics of moving twenty plus people, plus all their stuff was daunting to say the least, but it happened with a minimum of fuss and a maximum of fun.
The land we’ve moved to is for sale, and I’m asking the Universe for help buying it. To have a piece of land, where me and my ohana could put down real roots, roots that couldn’t be uprooted for a while, is a thought that brings me much joy. If we had the land we could build a healing center, and help other folks heal their separated minds, healing ourselves in the process.
It’s funny, but I feel like I write these words out of obligation. To keep y’all in the loop. But less and less I feel like sharing electronically, and more and more I see the wisdom in silence and action. I’ve written so many words. To what end? I will wait and see. They say that the shaman awaits the ripples back from the shores of the pond. Throw the rock, watch the waves ripple outward. But it’s the ripples back that are the most telling.
I would much rather be silent and work the land and spin my plates, then try any longer to convince you, oh SuperForesters around the world, that the system is crashing and that drastic countermeasures must be hastily enacted. I’ve spent so much time and energy trying to focus awareness on our power and scope of our capabilities as human beings, and now I feel like I have arrived at a new shore; the shore of an unexplored land where words no longer work. A place where touch is the only true language, perhaps. But let’s indulge in a little text based communication. Who knows where it might lead?
They say that the first language we ever learn is touch. Meaningful, person to person touch. Touch soon devolves into verbal abstraction. The One is shattered into the many. I have learned a lot about language and about the language of language, etymology. Language as the source code for the mainframe of the mind. All codes have bugs. Some codes have deliberate bugs. English has deliberate coding that creates separation and supremacy. I have sought to examine this coding in me, see if it was to my liking, and remove and replace anything that didn’t serve my needs.
You see, I want peace. World peace at the end, but Jackson peace right now. I’m convinced that Jackson Peace, once attained, will result in world Peace. The shift from zero to one is the most important shift of all, and everything afterwards is merely trivia. There was nothing, then there was something. There was a world at war with itself, and suddenly, the fighting stopped, and sweet song filled the air. I have been encoded and conditioned to be at war with myself, and I am no longer willing to be a marionette at the ends of the strings of an unconscious puppeteer.
All of the givens of our society are wrong. Backwards. Unhealthy. Everything we take for granted as Capitalist Westerners is inherently and deeply flawed. You know this as well as I do, and to prove it you must look no further than out the nearest window. Go ahead, look outside. Tell me that you see something other than humans moving in boxes from box to box. That our entire life is not about the obtainment of shiny boxes and the filling of those boxes with more boxes, and finally, once all of this boxery has been assembled, the willful exclusion of a chosen group of others from our boxes. Look no further than the nearest homeless person and see the end result of an economy based on the idea of false scarcity.
First we are taught that sharing is right, and then we are taught that sharing is wrong. First we are taught that we must love thy neighbor and look out for each other, and then we are taught that it’s every man for himself. We are taught that to ask for help is weak, and that violence is strength. In short, we are taught that right is wrong, and wrong is right.
Why say this? You all know this.
Because there is a way OUT. You can indeed exit the matrix.
Here’s how:
The matrix is a system of control. A prison for your mind. It is self-imposed and self-regulated prison, and you can leave it at any time. To leave the matrix means to run the risk of ostracization from your friends and your family. It matters not. They are sick, and you are getting well. Once you are well, you can help heal them too.
The matrix, as I’m referring to it is that potent mixture of Capitalism, Western Thought, Violence, Status, Religion. All of these come together in one place, wherever it is that you spend your days. A job? In school? At home?
If you are sitting in a box all day, and using a rolling box to get from home box to work box, or school box to apartment box, then the matrix has you, and you must escape.
The answer is land. You must have land with soil that can be turned into gardens. I’ve heard it said that “the revolution is the garden,” but I think that more accurately the evolution is in the garden. Evolutions require no bloodshed, and there is a lot more laughing. (Wiki Yugoslavia’s Velvet Revolution for an interesting look at peaceful handover.)
You must be willing. The answer is in the willingness to look foolish. To try new things. To break taboos. The Eskimos have a saying: “In every taboo resides the holy.” We must be willing to crack open our societal taboos an extract the nut meat of holiness out from them.
INTERESTING TABOOS I’VE NOTICED IN MYSELF:
1. Classism. A big one. I had some severe classism in my OS. That money and skin color provide the metrics of judging another’s worth as a human being. You’ve got this too, homies. It’s just in there deep. Don’t think so? Answer this question: Is homelessness a necessary thing in our present society? If not, why? If so, why?
2. Cleanliness. Next to godliness, right? I remember adopting two kittens when I was in college, and the stench of the litter box making me gag the first few times I went to clean it. There I stood, plastic scoop in hand, feeling foolishly nauseous. Press on through. After all, if you want to be a parent, a lover, or have any sort of meaningful and intimate interaction with another human being, you must overcome squeamishness in all its forms. Everybody poops. Everybody has boogers. The concept of dignity is religious propaganda, and is strenuously anti-human. Humans are constantly leaking fluids and shedding layers of skin and hair. Constantly. “Cleanliness is next to anxiousness” is a more accurate trope.
3. Pacifism. It’s funny to think of pacifism as taboo, but in our society it very much is. The willingness to turn the other cheek is derided and scorned in favor of violent retribution every single time. How many movies end with the “Good Guy” letting the “Bad Guy” live, showing him true mercy. Or better yet, how many action movies end with the good guy actively working to rehabilitate the bad guy so that both could grow and evolve as people? None. Peace = weakness is taken as a given. Violence = strength is unquestioned.
Our society is based on punishment and cruelty, little catros. Had you noticed? In school, did you notice that teachers were quick to point out all that you had done wrong, but seldom commented on what you’d done right? Our prison system is based on punishment and not rehabilitation. Our foreign policy is based on threat of violence and not on diplomacy. Our entire lives are based in violence.
It’s none of our faults. The violence, degradation, and destruction are not side effects of the system; they are the system. Our culture and economy are based on scarcity and hierarchy and everything about our lives revolves around those twin poles. To be born into the matrix is to be unaware of the matrix. Does the fish know he floats in water? The violence around us is so loud and so pervasive that we’ve all become deaf and blind to it.
Count the number of guns you see on billboards and advertisements and television today. Is the number more than one hundred?
That you as an educated and privileged person are better than and thus less likely to have violence enacted against you than the average homeless person in Downtown Los Angeles’ skid row is unquestioned. They are homeless, uneducated, poor, and thus they deserve to be harassed, searched and groped by police, put in jail, starved, and even murdered. Is this not the message underlying our culture?
And so the matrix is revealed as a giant prison for your mind, where to question the behaviors it demands is to risk being ejected by the system and thus subject to the violence that afflicts those who have been othered.
If you don’t rock the boat, you can rest assured that you can look forward to a nice rest home, pills, fat, disease, and death. Huzzah! If you do rock the boat, then you are scum. And I don’t mean rock the boat like protest in a demonstration, or grow dreadlocks, or ingest psychedelic plant medicines and free your mind up a bit. I mean really rock the boat.
Get some land. Share your land with your friends. Grow your own food and produce as many of your own goods as you are able. Trade for what you cannot make yourself. Above all, try your best to exit the job system. The monetary system. Capitalism. Exit it now. Beyond Amish, or Mennonite, or Kalahari Bushman, or Aboriginal, we must explore self and group reliance on a large scale. To end Capitalism’s death grip on our lives and our ecosystem, we must withdraw our support from the system.
So go on craigslist and start looking at land. You will have to leave the major cities. Major cities are not currently set up to support the number of humans dwelling within them. They could be, but they currently are not. Leave the cities, go back to the country. Google permaculture and take some lessons. Buy some used books, or better yet, trade for them. Steal them.
Where did you spend the first eight years of your life? Are your services needed there? Think about going home to see the old haunts. Help grandma and grandpa take care of the ranch. If the thought of venturing to where you spent the first eight years of your life inspires fear, nausea, or revulsion in you, take it as a sure sign that growth and evolution lie on that track. If you are repelled by an idea of something, but cannot logically explain why, that is a surefire sign of conditioning at work. Explore your conditioning, within it are the answers to your questions.
Ask for help. We are trained not to do this. At this very moment there are a number of people that I could be calling to ask them to help me with the purchase of the land, but I’m not calling them. I’m writing this instead. When I get done with this post, I will make some calls. I promise. Ask for help and ask for it like a child. Ask it of everyone and everything and eventually you shall have the help you’ve requested.
I need your help, SuperForesters. You see, Melissa and I are cooking up a little SuperForester, and I want to fluff the nest and get things ready on this end for when the little critter pops out this coming September. What I’d like is a world at peace for my child to be born into. I can achieve that peace for myself, and Melissa can too, and we can help the people around us find that peace inside them. If you decide right here and now to do the same, to put your oxygen mask on and then help the ones around you, we can set off a chain reaction of peace.
How to do this?
1.) Your peace is inside you now, are you willing to accept that?
2.) If your peace is inside you now, then you can stop searching for it.
3.) When you stop searching for peace because you already have it, then you have achieved inner peace.
To be willing to grow past all judgment and all preconceived ideas of right and wrong is all I’m asking. If we do this we will have the peace that we have for so long denied ourselves.
Remove all the distractions. For god’s sake, stop watching television and reading newspapers and magazines. The very world view that they communicate is violent and destructive, but it’s nearly impossible to see this with your nose pressed against it. Step back a moment and take a deep breath, and the truth of the messages that bombard us daily will stand out clearly. These messages speak directly to the ego, telling it lies and encouraging separation and further violence. Remember that six media companies control nearly every piece of media you will see today. Six companies are controlling what is “normal” for the three hundred plus million Americans and untold others. That’s bonkers. Hence: media is bonkers. Solution: avoid any media that you did not choose to ingest.
All my love from Paradise,
-Jackson
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