In case you are in Copenhagen/have friends who go, sense that it is about more than the climate, and want to use the opportunity to share+connect:
www.culturalrevolutionaries.org / Declaration of Cultural Revolutionaries -
Find it in 10 languages, post it, email it, but a button on your blog/campaign – Declare Interdependence…

Let it grow….

DECLARATION OF CULTURAL REVOLUTIONARIES 2009

Cultural revolutionaries in 2009…

_live, act, work with and not against nature
_know that life is too complex to understand it intellectually
_build and support local, self-governed economies
_value and safe-guard diversity of all kind
_value interdependence, since they know that nothing is separate
_regard themselves as equal to all life forms
_protect and support life
_love and support children unconditionally
_work on themselves towards greater awareness
_know about ecological principles and integrate them into their lifes
_see music and dance as an integral part of their expression and communication
_live on an animate earth and regard it as sacred
_know how to grow their own food
_appreciate their sensory awareness
_celebrate life
_cooperate
_make the shift from thinking ‘either, or’ to thinking ‘as well, as’
_share their knowledge
_understand and integrate process as a way of being
_are not identified with their body, thoughts or emotions
_see the mind as a tool
_realize that there is no right or wrong
_are not identified with any social tag, their past or their future
_are aware that the very essence of who they are is life itself
_take responsibility for their emotions
_are aware of and value their relationships to their living and seemingly non-living surroundings
_value and integrate the wisdom of women
_value and integrate the wisdom of indigenous cultures
_value generalist knowledge
_are aware of change as one of the core principles of evolution
_work towards diversification and decentralization
_engage in and create bonds to the place where they live
_turn from dependent consumers to responsible producers
_are looking for ways so that their interests and talents may unfold
_have the courage to resist and disobey laws that render self-rule, self-provisioning, and self-sustenance illegal
_are informed about the current money system and identify it as a contemporary form of enslavement
_identify and boycott biological, cultural, social and philosophical monocultures
_boycott monopolies of any kind
_question everyone who promotes one solution
_value environmental and human ethics over profit maximization
_boycott corporations and banks operating for profit maximization
_reclaim land and forests as common good
_reclaim water as common good
_reclaim biodiversity and knowledge as common good
_are aware that they participate in the process of co-creation at all time
_allow life to unfold through them

Berlin, 03/2009

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=523bXlK5t34[/youtube]

This is from Chapter 2 Knowing and Seeing:

…The natural world, on the other hand, is one of infinite varieties and complexities, a multidimensional world which contains no straight lines or completely regular shapes, where things do not happen in sequences, but all together; a world where—as modern physics tells us—even empty space is curved. It is clear that our abstract system of conceptual thinking can never describe or understand this reality completely. In thinking about the world we are faced with the same kind of problem as the cartographer who tries to cover the curved face of the Earth with a sequence of plane maps. We can only expect an approximate representation of reality from such a procedure, and all rational knowledge is therefore necessarily limited.

The realm of rational knowledge is, of course, the realm of science which measures and quantifies, classifies and analyses. The limitations of any knowledge obtained by these methods have become increasingly apparent in modern science, and in particular in modern physics which has taught us, in the words of Werner Heisenberg, ‘that every word or concept, clear as it may seem to be, has only a limited range of applicability.’

For most of us it is very difficult to be constantly aware of the limitations and of the relativity of conceptual knowledge. Because our representation of reality is so much easier to grasp than reality itself, we tend to confuse the two and to take our concepts and symbols for reality. It is one of the main aims of Eastern mysticism to rid us of this confusion. Zen Buddhists say that a finger is needed to point at the moon, but that we should not trouble ourselves with the finger once the moon is recognized; the Taoist sage Chuang Tzu wrote:

Fishing baskets are employed to catch fish; but when the fish are got, the men forget the baskets; snares are employed to catch hares; but when the hares are got, men forget the snares. Words are employed to convey ideas; but when the ideas are grasped, men forget the words.

In the West, the semanticist Alfred Korzybski made exactly the same point with his powerful slogan, ‘The map is not the territory.’

What the Eastern mystics are concerned with is a direct experience of reality which transcends not only intellectual thinking but also sensory perception. In the words of the Upanishads,

What is soundless, touchless, formless, imperishable,
Likewise tasteless, constant, odourless,
Without beginning, without end, higher than the great, stable—
By discerning That, one is liberated from the mouth of death.

Knowledge which comes from such an experience is called ‘absolute knowledge’ by Buddhists because it does not rely on the discriminations, abstractions and classifications of the intellect which, as we have seen, are always relative and approximate. It is, so we are told by Buddhists, the direct experience of undifferentiated, undivided, indeterminate ‘such-ness’. Complete apprehension of this suchness is not only the core of Eastern mysticism, but is the central characteristic of all mystical experience.

The Eastern mystics repeatedly insist on the fact that the ultimate reality can never be an object of reasoning or of demonstrable knowledge. It can never be adequately described by words, because it lies beyond the realms of the senses and of the intellect from which our words and concepts are derived. The Upanishads say about it:

There the eye goes not,
Speech goes not, nor the mind.
We know not, we understand not
How one would teach it.

Lao Tzu, who calls this reality the Tao, states the same fact in the opening line of the Tao Te Ching: ‘The Tao that can be expressed is not the eternal Tao.’ The fact—obvious from any reading of the newspapers—that humanity has not become much wiser over the past two thousand years, in spite of a prodigious increase in rational knowledge, is ample evidence of the impossibility of communicating absolute knowledge by words. As Chuang Tzu said, ‘If it could be talked about, everybody would have told their brother.’

Absolute knowledge is thus an entirely non-intellectual experience of reality, an experience arising in a non-ordinary state of consciousness which may be called a ‘meditative’ or mystical state. That such a state exists has not only been testified by numerous mystics in the East and West but is also indicated by psychological research. In the words of William James:

Our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different.

Although physicists are mainly concerned with rational knowledge and mystics with intuitive knowledge, both types of knowledge occur in both fields. This becomes apparent when we examine how knowledge is obtained and how it is expressed, both in physics and Eastern mysticism. …

Sadly, this is no joke. ‘In the name of science’ this friday (tomorrow) Nasa will intentionally crash a satellite onto the moon.

How do you feel about that? Is this what should be done? What is your connection to the moon? Do you know how intimately we are linked to its rhythms and dynamics? And so now human genuity will destroy its surface purposefully…How disconnected do you have to be?

At the same time: That seems to be the nature of things right now. That seems to be where it’s at. Curious what it will do. – It hurts, though. Pobre luna…

On Friday, however, the Earth’s nearest neighbour is set to stage one of the strangest moments in space exploration, as Nasa prepares to send a 2.3 tonne satellite smashing into the lunar surface.

If all goes to plan, officials at the space agency say the strike will take place at around 12.30pm UK time, with a booster rocket and $79m satellite slamming into a huge crater near the moon’s south pole.

full article at the Guardian

What if the world embodied our highest potential? What would it look like? As the structures of modern society crumble, is it enough to respond with the same tired solutions? Or are we being called to question a set of unexamined assumptions that form the very basis of our civilization?

For more videos, visit www.globalonenessproject.org

Do you believe that this culture is going to undergo a voluntary transformation to a sane and sustainable way of living?
What if you live in the most destructive culture ever to exist?
What if that culture refuses to change?
What do you do about it?

‘When he was on trial for his life in Jerusalem part of Adolf Eichmanns defense was that nobody had ever told him that what he was doing is wrong…’

So let’s have a look at The Cove….

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4KRD8e20fBo[/youtube]

‘The Cove is a documentary that tells the story of an elite team of activists, filmmakers and free-divers who embark on a covert mission to penetrate a specific cove in Taiji, Japan, where approximately 23,000 dolphins are killed every year. Former dolphin trainer Ric O’ Barry, the man who captured and trained the first five dolphins who played Flipper in the international television sensation, attempts to stop the deadly cycle he helped create.

Throughout the movie O’ Barry seeks redemption and tries to take down the multi-billion dollar dolphin entertainment industry with the help of filmmaker Louis Psihoyos (read interview) and the Oceanic Preservation Society.’ (from review by Mali Elfman for www.screencrave.com)

The Cove opened in theaters in NY and Los Angeles on July 31st 2009.

[googlevideo]http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8649250863235826256[/googlevideo]

‘When he was on trial for his life in Jerusalem part of Adolf Eichmanns defense was that nobody had ever told him that what he was doing is wrong…’

These are questions and a statement by Derrick Jensen, author of Endgame, The Culture of Make Believe, and A Language Older than Words.
Personally I suggest: Read Endgame II – it will clarify your point of view or make you realize that you had none.

http://www.derrickjensen.org – info, his books…
http://www.endgame.org – great research site

for the german readers who made it up to here:
Sein letztes Buch (Endgame II) heisst: Das Ökomanifest und ihr findet es hier.

…Europe plans to hunt more whales than Japan for the first time in many years, dividing EU countries and dismaying conservationists who say that whaling is escalating in response to the worldwide recession.

Figures seen by the Guardian before a meeting of more than 80 countries next week, show that Norway, Denmark and Iceland propose to hunt 1,478 whales compared to Japan’s 1,280 in 2009. This would be an increase of nearly 20% by Europe on last year….

read the whole article

The Peruvian government has pushed through legislation that could allow extractive and large-scale farming companies to rapidly destroy their Amazon rainforest.

Indigenous peoples have peacefully protested for two months demanding their lawful say in decrees that will contribute to the devastation of the Amazon’s ecology and peoples, and be disastrous for the global climate. But last weekend President Garcia responded: sending in special forces to suppress protests in violent clashes, and labelling the protesters as terrorists.

These indigenous groups are on the frontline of the struggle to protect our earth — Let’s stand with them and call on President Alan Garcia (who is widely known to be sensitive to his international reputation) to immediately stop the violence and open up dialogue. Click below to sign the urgent global petition and a prominent and well-respected Latin-American politician will deliver it to the government on our behalf.

http://www.avaaz.org/en/peru_stop_violence/?cl=250252519&v=3461