Replies

Hi Tim, good to see you here, we met briefly at the recent CPS event in Claremont. (I’m the guy with the shaved head and red scarf!)

Hi Zhenbao, I very much share your enquiry into and thoughts about consciousness and matter (notably, the important issue of ‘what matter is’). In fact, these things turn out to be key to doing economics property, because on the one hand, ‘matter’ is obviously a key factor in producing economic goods (the ones that are made of matter, anyway!), and consciousness is the ‘thing’ that is experiencing well-being (or not!), from the various production, consumption, and distribution activities of the economy.

Hi Rolla, thanks for introducing yourself. I look forward to hearing more of your stimulating contributions as we journey together. I’ll definitely be taking a look at ‘Organic Marxism’!

Hi Thomas. Thanks for posting an intro! I look forward to exploring with you!

[Nicholas Rosseinsky]

PS re ‘God so Loved the World’ and Earthism: in ACIM (at least my interpretation hahaha) we distinguish between ‘the World’ and ‘the Earth’.

‘The World’ is the entirety of real-Reality (including a version of this Universe, but definitely not limited *to* it), and God so Loved it that he gave it TO his Creations, as a playground. ‘The Earth’ is a planet within this Universe (or sub-reality); it too (in a certain form) IS Loved by God (and all the Living Beings – plants, animals, humans, ‘other’ – are also Loved).

Why might these kinds of nuanced distinction (e.g. Earth/World) be important?

There are two possibilities.

One, we will get out of our current predicaments with sloppy reality-theories, loose use of language, rough-and-ready transformational vehicles …

The other (more likely in my view, FWIW): humanity needs to go far deeper, and with far more precision, than we have to date – to *simultaneously* address crises of climate/ecology, social fabric, economy, AI/automation, meaning/purpose etc.

At least from a risk-management viewpoint, it seems worthwhile to explore both possibilities …

• This reply was modified 3 years, 1 month ago by Nicholas Rosseinsky.

Thanks, Charles! Excellent and articulate answers!!! 🙂

I think you and I are going to have mutually-expansive fun in this class!
Really tight for time rn, but maybe a marker for a later conversation:

We could contextualize the use/*definition* of the word ‘capitalism’ (and the declaration or meaning-instantiation of terms) in a different setting. (I hear you using to label or point to pretty much the whole mess we have rn!)

Maybe we can disambiguate ways of using words by adding ‘conceptual’ to a more abstract/theoretical framing?! For example:
– ‘conceptual-capitalism is an approach that emphasizes property-rights, markets …’
– ‘conceptual-communism is an approach the emphasizes collective-ownership, central planning …’
– ‘conceptual-human-relational-economics is an approach that …’ [I’m hoping to be able to fill in the dots here after this course!]

One of the reasons I *sometimes* take this conceptual-definition approach is I find it useful, at least in my own internal discourse, as a way to tease out parts of the problem that are due to ‘system’, and parts due to ‘system-user’. (This kind of ‘teasing out’ has its dangers, of course. But it’s maybe OK if we recognize risks of analytic fragmentation, etc., and take steps to manage/mitigate them?!)

Anyhoo. One thought I have had at many times: ‘ALMOST any economic conceptual-“system” would work perfectly well, if all the Beings “using” the system were awakened/Christ-realized/… to a SUFFICIENT degree’. (‘Sufficient’ being undefined here; maybe the requisite ‘levels’ and kinds of sufficiency are conceptual-system determined!)

How does this help?! (IF it’s true …’Almost’ above, of course, excludes things like feeding the populus by eating the children, etc.) I find it does rather rebalance the over-blaming of CONCEPTUAL-system, complementarily pointing to ‘what is it about me/us, that finds this system so hard?’.

(OF course, that rebalancing can itself be overdone, so that it becomes victim-blaming; not intending that here – I do firmly hold that both evolutions are necessary – my own, and most of the rest of humankind’s, into awakening/Christ-realization; AND, synergistically, systemic economy-scale shifts in institutions, norms, and – importantly! – theories.)

AND: I’m not saying ‘capitalism-as-Charles-uses-the-word “would work, if everyone were awakened etc.'” That’s because I see you using the word to describe the WHOLE complex of system PLUS realizations-of-different-states/levels-of-consciousness … Again, I see nothing wrong with that specific use, with the approach of labelling-whole-rather-than-teasing-apart-parts, etc. To the contrary: super-stimulated by your approach and passion!!!

THANK YOU!

Lots of passion there, Charles! Very well articulated.

One of the things I hope we will be able to do in this class is step outside each of our own viewpoints, and examine them (or the way we are advancing in them in the world), particularly with a view to further empowering their transformational efficacy and impact. A specific observation I have, moving from ‘room’ to ‘room’ in human activity, is that in this silo everyone agrees, and and in that one everyone agrees … but both silos vehemently disagree with each other. That’s OK, of course – but how is change going to occur, in disconnected stand-off? (There are answers, of course, and ones that don’t necessarily depend on 4D inter-subjective interaction; here I’m just raising the question!)

If you’re up for this kind of enquiry, Charles, I have a few questions for you that various other ‘silos’ might raise:

1. What is your definition of ‘capitalism’? One commonly-accepted one involves things like property rights, a market structure supported by law etc. It might be hard for many to see that the deficiencies you point to *necessarily* follow from this, more neutral, capitalism-definition.

2. If the neutrally-defined capitalist-context isn’t the deep origin of the problems (ie if the deficiencies don’t necessarily follow from the context), what are the additional factors? For example, you seem to attribute ‘greed’ to capitalism. In another account, greed is part of the tragedy of the current human condition, and capitalism is ‘merely’ a structure in which it plays out. (Certainly, we could talk about structures more and less prone to dysfunctional out-playing!)

3. You argue cogently for a humanistic/relational paradigm change. What do you think are the key transformational leverage points for the shift you desire? For example, if ‘capitalism’ is the problem, we would need to gain traction on that. If it’s the human condition, then (as Krishnamurti might have said) the outer revolution is strictly dependent on the inner. If – as seems more likely to me – it’s a complex interplay of individual-processes and the institutional/power-relational contexts they find themselves in, then … it’s complicated! (But let’s appreciate that it is, and try and meet it!)

Thank you for your high-energy and thought-provoking contribution!

Thanks Charles – appreciate the looking-out for us relative process-beginners!