Excellent lecture, and I’m gonna have to take some time to digest it. Just wanted to throw out there — you mean Cassandra, not Pandora, right? The prophet forecasting doom as opposed to the person who opens a box of new ills for the world?

Duh, yeah. You’re right. I’ll change it above, but I’m leaving your comment, for the record!

Hi Doug,
Enslaved and belimboed as i am in this empty unsold house makes for a painful, but appreciative listen to your GS Podcast. Most striking for me were those two renaissance figures of the merchant class and the monarchical/feudal class which combined interests in the chartered corporation. Locking the gains and the currency and “securitising” the risk became the model for the new self, a self which, in order to even exist, had to subscribe to the new rules. A very wicked covenant.

As events have made clear, we lost touch with the construct and the benefits of terra firma: agency & value as defined in, by, of and for local community. But now we are occupied with the prospect of losing all the misplaced value we poured into the new construct, illusory as it is.

The only essence that remains, it seems to me, is twofold. 1) We have (or certainly should have) learned much from these failures. 2) The only principle or model (other than what we are able to garner from understanding our mistakes) is the value of Covenant.

It seems to me there re thousands of covenental facts and relationships in nature and in the species. It is the job of science to probe the bonds, the essence and the realities of these bonds. It is the shared pleasure of us all to regard these covenants with respect and love and dedicate ourselves to perfecting our engagement in our covenants with each other.

Every serious person (especially one with children) knows we must “change the world.” It seems to me it is much easier to get over self and all the other questionable constructs when one is involved with bottom up covenental doing, being and thinking.

I would hate to see these primary human energies and desires manipulated to prop up or save failed constructs.
At this ironic moment in our history, what i find interesting about the Tower of Babel (a sort of renaissance project, if you will) is that we don’t need bridges or towers to prosperity, G-d, “nowhere” or “patriotism”, but to the planet.

The new covenant must be be based upon what abundance can be developed without breaking or damaging certain natural and human bonds. The enslavement or exploitation of any person or thing can not be countenanced, for that entails a destruction of a piece.

All we may appear to be sacrificing in a formal commitment to the new covenant are the various attachments and demands of an old self invested in failed constructs. This removes the husk and chaff from real value and original unmediated agency.

Agency is still very much confused with self and self interest, whereas it’s real affect is the harmonious relations of the parts.

Can’t wait for the book. There has been a natural progression from Cyberia to Get Back in the Box to the ideas of this one.

Glad to see that your book is so well timed. Congratulations.

Congratulations!

Great post Douglas. Looking forward to listening to this.

It really is fun to get to follow along w/ your theoretical narrative as it develops, rather than most of my other favorites whom have completed theirs and moved on to realities otherwise. GREAT WORK!

Also just to throw this out in the mediasphere, I have so much more use for audio content than any other sort. I don’t have very much eyeball time to spare during any given day, but my ears remain wide open and rather hungry for quality information.

Very good talk. Though, I wasn’t completely diggin on the slight poo-pooing of NLP. Many have used it in dumb or coercive ways, but I think cats like RAW used it for Intelligence Increase purposes. GS and NLP were and can be used in complementary ways.
I think you were using some form of NLP during your masterful talk. PAcing and Leading, like as Jah Furry remarked, a jazz performer to keep the audience and attentive for the duration.
Also, I am very much into the message of getting over oneself to help each other. But I think the statement, ‘There is no Self’ is a bit off course.
You mentioned MAslow’s pyramid of self-actualization as if it was possibly a bad thing. If that was your intention, then I disagree.
Along the spectrum of development, One’s Self motivations, I think, eventually coincide with that of the Collective.
If one does enough work on the self, then the group becomes a major priority. That’s the way it has worked in my life, as well as some others that I know.
The work on self pertaining to one’s search and aspirations towards something more than what the corporatized society offers.
PErhaps, this is just a semantic disagreement, but I feel compelled to voice it.
Besides that man, I’m super psyched to read the new book, and very much agree with the great Bobby Campbell
on truly enjoying the development of your philosophy.
PEACE Doug
PRop!

I agree with you Bobby. I’ve listened to Doug’s talk three times now, on my back with my eyes closed.

I am not familiar with the NLP technology or construct, PA, but i have found Doug’s talk very musical, very well structured and powerful.

Personally, i am persuaded by myself, Douglas and Krishnamurti et al that certain cultures seem to have over-complicated the construct of the self. I observe this in our culture as a means of control. The real questions about self are quite simple. Moreover, as Doug suggests, even if we were to follow Maslow strictly, not only have we lifted ourselves from terra firma, but we have not seen to the basic needs of the many. Lastly, we may appear to have seen to our own basic needs, but this is not true. We have only managed to follow the rules and serve the demands of our social and economic construct. Moreover, having done this, we are still rather deficient in our emotional and social development.

All of this is implied in Douglas’ talk.

I am with you tho, PA, in feeling there is a value to the proper foundation, development (praxis) and peak of Maslow’s thought. The sooner we identify and properly name foundational elements, the sooner we can re engineer the development of resources and self. All of this is our collective work.

Actualisation results from needing, developing, satisfying, managing, teaching and or providing. It is finding the core attribute of one’s special connection to the creator/rule-giver, the special gift that made self and all the actions of that self manifest in the world. Then that refracts understanding, knowledge and wisdom back through all the other attributes and roots in all the other created things, ending with unity. The true unity with self is unity with the world

Quick brainfart re:how do we achieve agency to change the world:

We realize that this world is not *the* world, but *a* world, just like many different levels of many different games on many different platforms. The idea that this is *the* world, that life started just here and should propagate into space from here into an until-then dead universe, is causing us way too much performance anxiety.

I’ve read some really good esoteric stuff lately (mostly tinyurl.com/dwbooks), and time after time it confirms the validity of the life-is-a-game model.

Huizinga FTW!!!

Actually the best summary I’ve seen on Life is a Cosmic Game, with special regard to Earth is tinyurl.com/supermarioearth.

Right on Steven,

All the worlds share attributes and roots, that is how they work together. Well said!

Keep on playing those

MIND GAMES
By
John Lennon

C G6/B Am C/G
We’re playing these mind games together
Fmaj7 C/E D D/C
pushing the barriers planting seeds.
playing the mind guerrilla
chanting the mantra peace on earth.
We all been playing those mind games forever
some kinda druid dudes lifting the veil.
Doing the mind guerrilla
some call it magic the search for the grail.

C D G G/F Em G/D D
Love is the answer and you know that for sure.
Love is a flower you gotta let it you gotta let it grow

So keep on playing those mind games together
faith in the future outta the now.
You just can’t beat on those mind guerrillas
Absolute elsewhere in the stones of your mind.
Yeah we’re playing those mind games forever
projecting our images in space and in time.

Love is the answer and you know that for sure..
Love is surrender you gotta let it you gotta let it go.

So keep on playing those mind games together
doing the ritual dance in the sun.
Millions of mind guerrillas
putting their soul power to the Karmic wheel.
Keep on playing those mind games forever
raising the spirits of peace and love.

C G6/B Am C/G Fmaj 7 C/E D D/C
Love
I want you to make love , not war,
i know you’ve heard it before.

NOTE: As you can see this Lennon song ain’t as hard as it looks. First of all there are two chord progressions:
the one for the verse:( C G6/B Am C/G Fmaj7 C/E D D/C),
and the one for the chorus:( C D G G/F Em G/D D).I suggest
to listen to the song so that you can get the chord changes
and the timing.By the way the song it’s in the key of C.
If anyone gets confuse with this transcription send me a mail
to :

Z10CC {at} CUNNYVM(.)EDU

P.S. Check out my first posted song LOVE by John Lennon.

hope you enjoy it ;

Victor Perez

I quit smoking using NLP, so that seems to appearas a benefit not just to me but anyone else around me, right? I can think of my daughter and wife as benefitting as well, plus I am able to afford a computer and upgrade it regularly rather than spend thousands on cigarettes every year, makes me think that has a social effect as well. Good talk you did for GS, look forward to your symbolic representations on pieces of paper or electrons in the stream.

I really enjoyed the lecture at the Korzybski Memorial. A lot of thoughts that I have had from similar experiences seem to overlap with yours. I miss the alternate economies and diy quality of life of the late eighties/early nineties New York City.

It is a shame that GS is tied in with NLP as they have very little to do with each other in purpose and design. GS is a way to be aware and let go of doctrines and patterns so you can look at things from a more objective perspective. Books by Hayakawa, for example are more about society and have very little to do with self-help. Even books by Albert Ellis and Wendel Johnson which take a psychological perspective are more about letting go of abstractions and vagueness and looking at things as objectively as possible.

While NLP is full of vague ideas and doctrine and is about creating new abstractions in the mind. It replaces observation and listening with ‘rapport’ and ‘anchoring.’ While GS is about removing as much delusion as one can, NLP is about replacing one delusion with another. That is because NLP is about self-help rather than about improving society. It could be argued that improving the self will over time improve society, but history has shown this does not appear to be the case. The concept ‘improvement’ is itself an abstraction. How do you define an improvement anyway?

Some ideas like ‘modalities’ are really ridiculous. It defines people as ‘ear’ people and ‘eye’ people, etc. This is actually the opposite of GS which tries to let go of the ‘is’ of identification. If you are trying to find a persons modality, you are filtering your observation of them and not really seeing them as they actually might be. You are fitting them into a construct, a little box while real people are very complex, multi-modal human beings.

Now, when you look up GS in Wikipedia, you get NLP books in the suggested reading list. This tends to redirect people because the ’self,’ being interested in the ’self-survival’ will be naturally drawn to ’self-help’ and will completely miss out on the more society oriented General Semantics ideas and concepts. That’s what I call ’self-defeating.’

Yeah. You’re right.