From: Ron Anastasia (rjon@vzavenue.net)
Subject: Re: "terminator tech.": Focus on positive indicators?
Date: Tue, 9 Aug 2005 07:05:50 -0400
To: scienceandspirit@sriaurobindocenter-la.com

Hi Rich,

You said:

> ... In one's interpretations one may choose to look for positive
> signs, or one may be pre-disposed tolook critically atworld events
> and from such a vantage try todetermine where actions are required in
> the world, which ultimately aspire tofacilitate environmental
> conditions for the work of yoga in the world. ...

> ... That one internally should keep a positive attitude in ones
> practice is not being argued here. It is quite clear from the Sunlit
> path that one should. However, does that mean we stop looking
> critically at circumstances shaping world events which could
> impact human evolution itself?

Rich,
I hope you didn't take personally my comments re focusing on the
positive. My perspective is that if you are passionate and inspired
about informing people about the dark sides of capitalism and
technology to "facilitate ... the work of yoga in the world," then I
totally support you doing that. (And Vandana Shiva is a hero of mine
too!)

> ... Perhaps at best one may do both.

Agreed re doing both.

> But once again this is an interpretive matter and we all tend
> to evolve perspective-toa greater or lesser degree- withinour own
> hermeneutic circle.

To
get a little more into the background of my personal bias, I would say
I've been intensively involved in four or so hermeneutic circles:

1) highly educated groups with decidedly liberal/radical political perspectives
2) spiritual groups, some with a focus on individual development, other trying to integrate both personal and collective.
3)
intentional communities, most recently Arcosanti, Damanhur, and now
Auroville, usually with a spiritual orientation, all with social change
agendas
4) and for the past ~ two years, the SA/M community/sadhana,
especially the LA Center & Debashish, and of course AUM05 &
this forum.

> My own reading tells me that no, that to remain inwardly optimistic
> does not necessarily mean that this translates into an attitude
> towards world events which must take on the character of a naive
> optimism with a view toward the world of I'm OK, Your OK ...

Re
possible pollyannish views, and without getting into an autobiography,
during my undergraduate years at UC, Berkeley in the mid-late 60's, I
was a pretty well known student political activist. I was on the
Steering Committee of the Free Speech Movement (arrested during Sproul
Hall sit-in with Mario Savio, etc., monitored by FBI), one of 4
students featured on a CBS nationally broadcast hour-long special on
the New Left, laid down on the tracks to stop the Vietnam supply trains
on way to Oakland Naval Terminal, gassed from National Guard
helicopters during People's Park demos on the Berkeley campus, etc.

One
thing I learned through all this was that political action focused on
local issues (getting rid of a right-wing Chancellor, increased student
representation on local campus, student influence on state-wide Board
of Regents) could indeed be successful. On the other hand, I watched in
dismay as Ronald Reagan recontextualized our sincere and life-risking
political activity as the "communist infiltration of our campuses," a
bunch of clever lies that gained most of the headlines. He used a vow
to "clean up our campuses of out-of-state infiltrators," as the high
visibility issue that helped win him the California governorship over
the liberal Pat Brown (Jerry Brown's dad). The rest is history; Reagan
used his CA governor position to leverage himself into national
politics, became President, and began the almost uninterrupted reign of
right-wing Presidents. -- I began to realize that making a positive
difference on big political issues was a serious game that brought us
up against expert and well-connected power players with lots of
corporate, etc., money behind them.

So, in graduate school, I
spent half my time becoming a policy wonk at MIT, in Jay Forrester's
System Dynamics Group, learning to build non-linear simulation models
of the national economy and the global 'World Problematique.' I spent
the other half of my time at Harvard doing EEG studies of meditators,
yogis, and zen monks, and did my PhD thesis (1979) by including in the
global simulation model the ecological value changes in the growing
numbers of Western spiritual practitioners. The value changes had been
measured by other researchers and when I put them into the model,
assuming that ecological values would lead to more ecological life
styles and making some numerical guesses, it all extrapolated to a nice
smooth shift in Western lifestyles that would hopefully leak over to
the developing world. I felt like I was on to something and became a
sustainability consultant professionally to try to assist the process.

The
rude awakening came a few years later. Other researchers had been
tracking the actual lifestyle changes of these spiritual people with
increased ecological values. Surprise, the changes were in the wrong
direction! On the average, they were actually increasing their per
capita pollution generation. Apparently the increasing life competency
and focus brought about by their spiritual practices enabled them
advance more quickly in their careers and therefore increase their
income compared to the control group. And being Americans, they of
course moved to the suburbs, bought second homes, second cars, more
computers and TVs, etc., with the concomitant increase in pollution
creation. -- As you point out Rich, we are all deeply embedded in our
culture.

The other thing I discovered doing all that computer
simulation work was that we almost never actually understand what
specific policy changes will make the differences we intend. We had
10,000 different variables we were tracking in the World Model and
found that most of the seemingly obvious changes we made would usually
make little difference (the system would compensate in unexpected
ways), or would sometimes produce changes different from what we
intended. Forrester called this the "counterintuitive behavior of
social systems," which became a famous phrase among systems modelers.
(He used the word "intuitive" in a different sense than SA does.)
Forrester meant that the thousands of nonlinear feedback loops involved
in todays complex national and especially global systems allow them to
behave in unexpected ways compared to the simple mental ('intuitive')
models we've constructed based on our everyday experience.

To put it bluntly, we basically don't know what we're talking about! (Usually.)

This
is one of the reasons SA/M's work appeals to me. Their warnings against
an overly mental approach to the world make complete sense to me.
Today's policy and economic experts use computer models with hundreds
of thousands of interacting nonlinear variables which still can only
accurately predict for a couple of years what a given policy
intervention would actually do (& that's assuming no exogenous
changes). I've come to the conclusion that the only hope is to somehow
connect with a deeper wisdom than merely mental processes can achieve,
and the only way I know how to do that is through a serious sadhana
based on a long-term well-tested spiritual tradition. After
experiencing a few such traditions, my personal choice is that IY is
the most effective way to accomplish this, though of course it's not a
guaranteed result.

I still believe in the effectiveness of local
political work, where one is familiar with the relevant variables and
the nonlinearity of the system itself is far less complex than national
or international politics.

I also believe that people who are
passionately inspired to do national and international political work,
like Vandana Shiva (and you?), should by all means go for it. For sure
some of them will be acting with Divine inspiration and in my opinion
that's what the world needs more of.

So that's why my personal
preference in this forum is to focus on the more positive indicators
that are hopefully evidence of the descent of the Supramental. I'm
concerned that if we get into the politics of change, we could get
mired into a fruitless exchange of individual opinions and
interpretations. I think there was a good reason why the Mother
prohibited politics at the Ashram.

Namaste,

~ ron