4 major projects, all relevant, are picking up pace. Delighted but it means my updates here will be thin on the ground.

First up: the All Ireland Permaculture Gathering. This is the big one. Venue is confirmed… but we cant tell you that just yet. Needless to say, if you are interested in hanging out in a community of realists, then this is the gig for you. Plenty of updates to follow shortly. I am also editing the Permaculture Wicklow website and Facebook page, and have invested in a 27″ iMac and HD Camera to document the process entire.

Second: www.crewger.com.  Long gestating / never ending / new design imminent. Ill talk about this more when we are live.

Third: Abbeyfest. I’m organising film and African drumming this year along with the usual logistical stuff. Looking forward to this year. Hopefully it wont be as hectic as the last 2 years? (Never gonna happen).

Finally: Glendalough Arts Network. The structure of our Fireside Sessions: Tapas and Tales evening is slowly coming together and we would hope we can build a model that can be copied in towns and villages around the country.

Anyway, point being, I’m a little miffed with myself as I havent time to develop ideas on this blog. Maybe after June it’ll settle down.

For a full list of this years Oscar hopefuls, check out Empire’s run down here or visit youtube for added American banter, preceded by crap adds.

You can watch the trailer below.

And I found this great interview with the director on Permaculture TV.

Indeed, our leaders (in the business, cultural and political worlds) are usually top of the list here. Often it seems pointless to complain. What can I possibly do? I do not contribute. I am not heard. The power of my betters is too big and all encompassing.

Not so for the New Realist.

The New Realist understands that in the wider scheme of things, the actions of these men and women, though they may seem epic in the current age, matter less when the ages of the earth are considered.

Yes, games being played at a global level may lead to system collapse in our time, but the earth has been through much worse in its time, and will recover, though we will certainly not live to appreciate the rebirth.

And we can take comfort in the fact that the earth is a resilient mother, and may have a few tricks up her sleeve “before the whole shit-house goes up in flames”, as big Jim Morrison once so elegantly put it.

The ordinary citizens of the earth, those more interested in providing for their families and prospering as they may, have more power as a collective than they have dared to wield to date, and their is hope that they will realise this in time, and use it for the benefit of themselves and the earth on which they rely.

Regardless of what the original intentions of Elbow’s song were, the song tells me of a people disaffected by the work of our leaders in providing the world we dreamt of all those years ago.

“I’m so easy to please, yeah
But I think we dropped the baton like the 60′s didn’t happen, oh no!

I need to see the commander in chief
And remind him what was passed onto me

Passing the gun from father to feckless son
We’re climbing a landslide where only the good die young”

Mixing these lyrics with images with images from ‘Watchmen’ is pretty ingenious, as anyone familiar with the original graphic novel’s writer, Alan Moore, will agree with.

You’ll have to watch it over on youtube.

I love how Richard Dawkins’ mind works. The guy is a rationalist. He doesn’t accept anything unless if can be reasoned or examined.

There is obviously a disgusting amount of content out there on the man, most of it relating to his bullish determination to ensure everyone understands the delusional nature of religion. I’ve read the ‘God Delusion’. It’s an amazing book. and a triumph of reason over institutionalised fantasy.

And his argument for the bullish nature of his attitude towards all religion in general is, well, reasonable.

Here I am merely interested in his concept of ‘Middle-World’ – “the realm between the microscopic world of quarks and atoms and the larger view of the universe at the galactic and universal level” as Wikipedia puts it.

“This term is used as an explanation of oddity at both extreme levels of existence. There is a lack of understanding of the quantum and molecular universes, because the human mind has evolved to understand best that which it routinely encounters.”

Middle World, according to Dawkin’s, “is the narrow range of reality which we judge to be normal as opposed to the queerness of the very small the very large and the very fast”.

Our brains have evolved a model of the world best suited to our survival. Does this mean that what we see around us is not wholly real? Not exactly. As with ultra violet, because of the necessities of our particular evolution, there are systems and elements in the universe that our mind did not need to, and therefore struggles to, understand and comprehend – such as the very small, the very large and the very fast. Hence their queerness.

Some would use this to justify all manner of possibilities – ghosts, gods, and Telekinesis, but it is arrogant to think that the queerness would reveal itself in some human form or ability. I think it shows more that, at a scientific level (i.e. the study of the relationship between physical elements) things are possible that we cannot possibly comprehend, and this at once daunting and exciting.

It also, in my personal opinion, adds weight to the idea that hallucinogenic substances can help us better understand the real world around us as they take us out of our evolved mindset and allow us to experience the universe in a different light.

So where does this leave the concept of ‘New Realism’, the idea that we should prosper in respect of the real world around us? Have we got our reality (i.e. the earth system) wrong? Are we only fooling ourselves, worshipping a false God like so many communities before us?

Not really. What our eyes see, our minds think and our bodies feel is real,  as real as it gets, and we should act and react accordingly to that. And now that we understand the evolved nature of our interpretations and our feelings, we can be aware and curious of the elements and systems that circumscribes our experience of the universe.

Hopefully this is making some kind of sense to you. In any case, Dawkins’ speech is below. The debates attached to it are disappointing as they flick around the idea of God and Jesus again.

You should probably watch it first before I sound off.

The core line for me is “It’s not space we need, it’s balance’. But then, worryingly, it highlights two points that address only the imbalance among human communities. It mentions nothing about the increasingly dangerous imbalance in the earth system entire and our part in the overall story of earth’s eternal move towards a state of stasis.

We are elements in a system. We are not separate from the earth. We are not her master. We are not her doom or her saviour. We are the earth. Why? The earth is a system and, as before,  we are elements within that system.

We play our game, as all living beings do, and over time these games can, through various highly complex processes, lead to a state of overall stasis or balance within the boundaries of the earth system. Luckily, we evolved in a time of great prosperity in earth’s history.

With our current game, we will be lucky if our species does not bring about a temporary collapse of the system entire.

The above video, colourful as it may be, proves that this game is an unstoppable train and there is little real leadership or popular support for a proper solution. The market will not come to the rescue (it is there to tell us what it wants us to need and then convince us that it can provide) and our political system is completely unfocused.

What is required is a change in the thinking among citizens about their place in the world. Citizens are the marketplace and the electorate. If they are focused, then the political and economic systems will have to fall in.

The earth system and the processes that work within it are balance, are sustainability, are prosperity. We need first and foremost to see ourselves as elements within this grand living system. This is truth. All the logistics of our way of life must be inspired by and directed by this reality.

The beauty of this idea is that it works above and beyond all of our traditional prejudices. We are not, first and foremost, Spanish, Christian, Gay, accountants or tennis players. We are, each of us, an element, equal to and as important as any other element.

The question then becomes, how do we work these elements to build a prosperous system overall?

In real terms, the question becomes, how can we as individuals and communities work together to engineer a way of life that works as part of the earth system? Even better, how do we prosper as part of that system? Better still, how do we benefit the processes of balance and stasis on a global scale?

As the above video states categorically, the key is balance. Balance at a macro, not just human, level.

As the global population heads towards 7 Billion later this year, expect this to become a major talking point in the media, and I hope you will keep the above idea in mind as you are bombarded with facts, causes, problems and potential solutions. Some believe it to be the biggest story of the year, but I am sure there will be plenty of distractions.

You can read more about the National Geographic story on Andrew Revkin’s excellent New York Times page, Dot Earth, and on the National Geographic site itself.

Also, Roger Harribon, writing for the BBC, recently examined “whether our planet’s looming population growth challenge can be tackled with engineering solutions”. He is referencing a recent study by the Institute of Mechanical Engineers called ‘Population=One Planet, Too Many People?’. The answer, apparently, is no.

Happy reading.

A friend shared a you-tube video with me last night from a Tantra School in South Africa on the ‘unbounded nature of tantric practice’. You can view the video below.

I am always amazed by the ability of Tantric teachers to make absolute sense when speaking of issues of the heart, love and sex.

We are, at our core, energy – a life force moving through one evolved living being. This is truth, base, core reality and scientific fact. Those living beings naturally evolve complex ways of life and ways of dealing with the world around them for the sake of survival, and though the roots of these practices or thought processes are initiated and inspired by the core, they can deviate and dilute its presence in our minds and in our bodies.

I am talking here about conditioning – the evolved practices and thought processes we learn as we grow, important for individual and communal survival, but too often than not, ignorant of the core for various historical reasons. Hence the evolved Western attitude towards sex in general.

Tantra is about accessing that core in our minds and bodies and learning to ‘be’ that core in our daily practices and relationships. Remove the conditioning, feel, express, create, experience – be the true avatar of the Life Force that is flowing through each and every one of us.

More than anything, and this comes across brilliantly in the below set of interviews, Tantra is about being real and true. Fascinating, powerful and true.

It struck me how linked the concepts of New Realism and Tantra are.

New Realism comes from the understanding that we are natural beings borne from the earth, and that to truly prosper, personally and communally, we must respect and celebrate the reality of who and what we are at our core, and what we are apart of. We do this by building ways of life that implement these understandings at their very core, allowing them to inspire and direct all aspects of those systems, their culture, their politics and their economics.

Tantra speaks to the individuals’ implementation of that core philosophy in their own lives. It is a personal journey, the ‘New Realist’ looking inwards.

The limitations of the Tantric method in terms of the New Realist philosophy is that it does not address the problem of how we relate to the world around us in a practical way.

We can be as connected to our personal core as one can possibly be, but as long as we remain dependent on systems (specifically political and economic ones) that do not respect the New Realist philosophy, then we will be left wanting.

I am speaking here about people who follow the tantric path but who live a way of life that does not respect the earth in any practical way. It is a tough ask considering that every action we take is done within the context of the mass industrial way of life we find ourselves apart. Nevertheless, that is the journey.

New Realism is about building whole ways of life. Once the Tantric journey has begun, for it never really finishes, the questions the true New Realist must ask is ‘How can I implement that philosophy in my daily practise to create, collaborate, express, relate, provide and, ultimately, prosper?’

Enjoy the video below and click on this link to view more.

You can also visit http://tantraschool.co.za/ for more information on this specific school of tantra.

For years we have witnessed the disastrous attempt by certain powerful individuals to superimpose a monetary industrial system over the grand natural system of the earth.

The systems that these individuals have built, and to which we are all now reliant on for our most basic needs, continues to treat the earth as nothing more than a sewer and a pantry.

Despite what we are led to believe, when you consider the reality of the situation facing the global population today, you have to come to the conclusion that this system simply does not work. It is a global system, the global population is in crisis, and the current system does not have the realism or the impetus to face up to the basic cause of all of this.

The economic systems we are a part of, and the political systems that bolsters them, are not working within the parameters of the reality on which they depend for their very existence, namely, the earth system. The system that has been superimposed over the natural world does not recognise that it is part of, and completely dependent on, a larger system.

Humanity is ignoring how the world around it works. Worse even, we are picking away at every element that keeps the system in a state of balance.

The atmosphere, plant and animal life, the carbon cycle – these are issues that need to be debated at the highest levels of power, because in the end, these are the things which will ensure the survival of our way of life, and yet it is here that they are being continuously ignored.

This is the problem. There is no balance. Our way of life is out of control. This is the debate we should be having.  And yet we have reduced the whole debate down to whether or not the science of global warming is 100% accurate or not. The issue has played beautifully into the socio-political make up of global society. Republicans vs Democrats. Conservative v Liberal. Indigenous vs Industrialists.

The potential, and potentially catastrophic, change in weather (global warming) is but one outcome of our ignorance of the reality of how our world works and our attempts to build a system that ignores its needs and its greatness. Even if every bit of science behind global warming turns out to be false, no-one can argue that we are realistic in terms of how we relate to the world around us.

We have an opportunity to prosper as part of this grand natural system from which we have evolved, or to bring the whole thing crashing down around us.

‘The Global Warming Debate’ is the greatest, and most dangerous, filibuster in the history of the Human Experience because its consequences are epic and potentially terminal. It is an important part of a much larger debate, and if we don’t push the larger debate then we risk getting bogged down in political manoeuvring while the earth, and the living populations that make her and depend on her, continue to plunge into crisis.

HOW CAN WE PROSPER AS A GLOBAL COMMUNITY WITHIN THE CONTEXT OF THE WORLD AROUND US?

———————————————————————————–

Even if you don’t have all the answers, it is never good enough to sit back and just accept that this is the way the world works and I am powerless to affect it, especially when it is you who is getting f$ckd over.

If you want to control a population, you cloud them with fear and a sense of powerlessness. Regardless of the fact that you do not hold a position of power, the best way to let your ‘betters’ know that you are still there and wont be letting them away with their plan is to just get MAD!

It is what the Irish people DID NOT DO during the recent take over of the country, and it proved essentially that we, the people who fought a foreign invader for generation after generation, have become a nation of administrators and consumers with no back bone.

So that is what we are going to do here at the New Realist. We are going to get MAD!

Jillian York, writing for Alazeera, considers it a ‘dubious honour’ for many valid reasons. There are the obvious and long running privacy concerns, and the problems that the ‘real name’ policy when signing up has for activists around the world.

And the obvious large large-trunked mammal in the room is Mr Julian Assange and his pesky Wikileaks crew, who continue to spoil the party for a lot of the ‘great’ institutions in the world with its inconvenient habit of leaking the truth.

“Assange is undoubtedly the man of the moment, and in a sense, the whole year; though WikiLeaks’ latest release of Embassy cables has attracted a swarm of media attention, earlier releases of the Iraqi Collateral Murder video and the Afghan war logs made a huge public impact.”

So onto Mr Zuckerberg. He received the accolade for

• “Connecting more than half a billion people” – Yes half a billion people do use his product. But this is not to suggest that 500 million people are communicating with each other in a meaningful way, working effectively or somehow joined symbiotically now that they have a Facebook account.
• “Mapping the social relations among them” - Is this such a big deal? Really?
• “Creating a new system of exchanging information ” – Members share photos. Send emails. Market their businesses. WordPress, MySpace and every other social networking, information exchange service out there do the same thing. Often better.
• “Changing how we live our lives” – This is a real stretch. You could argue the internet has changed the way we live our lives. Facebook is just another management tool that uses the true revolution that was the internet to build its own private marketplace. You could argue maybe that its addictive nature and social core has brought more people online, but then it is no different to online gaming and the way it has changed the lives of gaming enthusiasts.

TIME’s final word is a kicker – he has “changed the way human beings relate to one another on a species-wide scale”????? The idea that the ability to create a Facebook account defines a species today is disturbing to say the least.

All of the above is reminiscent of sound-bites Facebook might use to market itself rather than fair and balanced comments from an established and respected news magazine.

Let’s be honest here. Facebook has created a closed, controlled online network on the information superhighway, one that allows people to share their private information on a public notice board. Its genius from inception was that it plugged into people’s need to be popular, to be liked, to be talked about. “Add as Friend”, “Join Group”, “Like”, “Status updates” (‘the most traditionally uninteresting (yet disturbingly telling) moments in my life now have meaning’).

The one thing that Facebook has shown, the one thing that Google, Microsoft, Apple and all the other players never copped onto until Facebook’s meteoric rise, is that we are, at our core, social animals. Human societies are built on gossip, social climbing, being accepted and the never ending search for a sense of belonging.

That is not to be cynical about the process. But whatever system he designed to get himself laid and popular in Harvard plugged into something deep down in the core of our humanity. It was a fluke, but people went for it. ‘The Accidental Billionaires’ indeed.

So, on to TIME’s next claim. “We have entered the Facebook age, and Mark Zuckerberg is the man who brought us here”. If Facebook is a revolution, then how does the post-revolutionary world work?

Let’s start with the social aspect, and I think I can wrap this argument up with a brilliant quote from Tom Hodgkinson writing in the Guardian in 2008.

“This enormously successful American business describes itself as “a social utility that connects you with the people around you”. But hang on. Why on God’s earth would I need a computer to connect with the people around me? Why should my relationships be mediated through the imagination of a bunch of supergeeks in California? What was wrong with the pub?” Q.E.D.

The next question is ‘what are people using this revolutionary new tool for’? Aside from the social aspect, which is usually less than interesting in a global sense, Facebook has become an excellent marketing tool, and to understand this we need to understand the forum in a physical sense. It is a new heavily controlled and surveyed ‘virtual agora’. Everybody is here, dragged in by their desire to be social, and the marketplace needs to be visible here if it is to attract customers.

Now this is good in the sense that anyone potentially has an attractive marketing tool at their disposal as I am sure anyone with a news feed is aware of. This is a place where you can ‘hang out’ with your customers. But in order to be considered a revolution in human society, it needs to be more than just a cheap marketing tool.

To understand how useless, and potentially regressive, Facebook has become we need to remember what it was we all got excited about in the first place.

The lives of practically every single person on this grand earth of ours are dominated by large, self interested institutions and organisations. Banks, corporations, media outlets, political parties, lobbyists, religious orders – the list goes on and on. It is through these organisations that the average person organises his or her life. They tell us how and where to live, what to eat, who to socialise with, who to hate and why. They inform our everyday reality.

But they are not the truth. They are reactionary, the products of history. They are ideologies borne from circumstance. And our aforementioned ‘collective actions’ are leading faster than ever to the complete destruction of, well, everything.

The truth is that we are a great species, living as an integral part of a grand natural system that is Mother Earth. We are natural beings. We survive by working together. We can only truly prosper as a species when our lives are lived in harmony with the world around us. The accumulation of everything we have discovered over the entire Human Experience has confirmed this view point.

To date, the ideas that have inspired us to create, and the management tools we have had out our disposal have come from these institutions. Our knowledge has increased to the point where we now know better than our ancestors how and why the world ‘works’. The internet was to provide us with the open source, truly democratic, management tools we needed to achieve true prosperity. Wikipedia is a perfect example of this, and its rise is a showcase for all the internet can and should be.

The only potential problem was the colonisation of the World Wide Web by corporations and / or political interests.

And so to Mr Peter Thiel, venture capitalists, the NVCA, In-Q-Tel, neo-conservatism, “way”-libertarianism, Robert Mueller, the CIA, Jim Breyer, Accel Partners, Rene Girard, and an and on.

Because there is no point in me regurgitating information better presented elsewhere, I will point you once again in the direction of Tom Hodgkinson writing in the Guardian and insist that you Google and Wikipedia to your heart’s content every relevant noun he presents you with. It does not make for pretty reading. And that was over 2 years ago.

This sound-bite should pull you in. “You might reflect that you don’t really want to be part of this heavily-funded programme to create an arid global virtual republic, where your own self and your relationships with your friends are converted into commodites on sale to giant global brands.”

This is not a personal attack on Mark Zuckerberg. The guy got lucky and a lot of interesting people found his little tool useful. He can potter away with the code, talk about connecting people and pretend that the story of Facebook is one of the rise of the lonely geek, but he is merely a stooge, the simple face of a movement towards a more neo-conservative version of the status quo.

By awarding him the Person of the Year, TIME are playing to this idea of the ‘world that Zuckerberg built’ and it is untrue. It is not real. Furthermore, it solidifies in the mind of everyone that this is how the internet is supposed to work and you are un-cool and behind the times if you do not sign up.

It is telling that, as TIME visited the offices of Facebook for its recent cover story, Robert Mueller, director of the FBI, popped in to visit him. Lev Grossman, the TIME’s journalist, describes how everybody essentially geeked out. Our Mark is playing with the big boys now. This was actually part of Mueller’s recent visit to Silicon Valley in an ongoing campaign to expand the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA) – essentially they are trying to expand surveillance over all internet communication traffic.

The people of the world deserve better.

The positive thing is that, unlike the power that traditional institutions have over the populace, all one has to do is login, delete their account and the party is over. They won’t do it en masse out of solidarity. They will do it because something cooler or more useful comes along. All we can do is hope.

I was going to finish this with an ironic twist – that I realise the irony of publishing this article on Facebook. Instead I have decided delete my account. It’s scary. I might be left without any friends in the entire world. People will dislike me. And I will probably die alone. But it is a risk I am willing to take.

Surely it can’t be that difficult.

“You have deactivated your Facebook account. You can reactivate your account at any time by logging into Facebook using your old login email address and password. You will then be able to use the site as before”.

She is making a resources led society hip, and that is no mean feat. It is always better to build rather than to destroy. People, especially today, work better with encouragement and positivity than with criticism and negativity.

P.S. Anyone have a copy of this book to share with me?

Vimeo wont embed for some reason so check out this video first = WHAT’S MINE IS YOURS from rachel botsman on Vimeo.