garden-enough
[image by corita kent – love – enough]
thinkings on garden of eden enough ness and the possibility to get back/to:
an undisturbed ecosystem (‘in undisturbed ecosystems ..the average individual, species, or population, left to its own devices, behaves in ways that serve and stabilize the whole..’ –Dana Meadows) ..
on why the conditions of the garden weren’t fail proof.. why it didn’t work.. perhaps: *1\ to show we had a choice 2\ weren’t enough anothers .. to love one another 3/ to learn what enough was/is.. we don’t need more to have enough
also.. thinking about the tree of knowledge (of good and evil).. ‘for when you eat of it you will surely die’.. makes me think of carhart harris entropy law.. that we are dying from an excess of order/measuring/accounting/knowledge/intellect ness.. and until we let go of that control issue.. that hard won order.. we’ll keep on dying
ie: literacy and numeracy both elements of colonialism/control/enclosure.. we need to calculate differently and stop measuring things
*update/restate on this thinking – while reading crabb’s understanding people:
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to sum up.. god is an independent person w capacity to long, think, choose, and feel.. a human being is a dependent person w same 4 capacities..
each of us is a personal being who longs deeply; a rational being who things; a *volitional being who chooses; an emotional being who feels..
*via own will
i still thinking rational ness and choosing ness unmoor us from our fittingness (authentically living out god’s image in the unique shell of us)
so i wouldn’t say they are the image..
and when i’ve said.. ‘god trusted us w choice.. because he didn’t want robots’ .. thinking now it was more that he trusted our wandering.. longing to explore.. curiosity.. listening to our itch.. et al..
the choice/goal ness gets us to robot ness – just as much as no choice/will.. i’m thinking that assuming some finite set of choices for either (choice/goal) is what compromises in-the-image ness.. compromises the longingness.. the fittingness
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from sh – bread of life.. enough ness
In the garden there is perfect unity. However, sin entered the world and broke that unity. Throughout the rest of the story God beckons His creation back. He does this by giving them glimpses, like Manna in the wilderness, of the abundant life that is to come. Then God sends His Son, the bread of life, into the world. .. Whereas God provided for the Israelites physically, Jesus provides for humanity spiritually as well as physically. ..Ultimately this story culminates in the restoration of all creation. Like in Eden, God declares a day when all creation will be restored in the new Eden
The original sin of humanity is that they desired to be self-sufficient. By their actions, they acknowledged they did not have faith in God as their provider. A barrier is placed between relationships. This includes the relationship between humanity and the way that God provides for them. The man and woman had all that they could need, but they wanted more.
Humankind is thus expelled from the garden, the representation of the environment of God’s provision. Wenham says, “The toil that now lies behind the preparation of every meal is a reminder of the fall and is made the more painful by the memory of the ready supply of food within the garden.” Whereas the garden has a “ready supply of food,” humankind will now have to toil for food..
No longer is all of creation in the wholeness that it was in the garden.
There are other passages in the book of Revelation that point to the theme of bread. That there will be no more hunger and no more thirst (Rev. 7:15-17). However, it seems clear that this passage depicts the restoration in the fullest sense. John is speaking of a new Eden that is to come. A place of restored relationship with His creation.
This is the restoration in the new Eden that has been longed for throughout the narrative (Isaiah 25:6-8, Luke 22:18, John 17:23, etc.). This marriage is the final restored state. That God, humanity, and creation will live in complete harmony, the way that it was intended in the garden.
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impossible is irrelevant
not ridiculous ..(1/ in his image 2/ waiting 3/ gave us choice)
listen to your hear\t
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[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=udD-F7yqTKw]
i shall not want for anything..
what if we have what we need..
there is manna/mercy
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have/need ness and getting back/to enough ness..
Jason Hickel (@jasonhickel) tweeted at 3:50 AM on Wed, Jun 03, 2020:
Capitalism structurally compels us to work and produce beyond society’s actual needs. And the more we produce, the more we have to consume, to mop up overproduction. Consumption becomes a structural imperative – a form of labour in itself. The consumer is not sovereign, but serf.
(https://twitter.com/jasonhickel/status/1268117727979454464?s=03)
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graeber stop at enough law
maté enough law
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from murray bookchin‘s ecology of freedom:
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how easily we can slip into a conventional historical stance can be seen from recent fervent controversies around the meaning given to the concept of scarcity.. it has become rather fashionable to describe scarcity simply as a function of needs so that the fewer our needs and the smaller our tool kit the more ‘abundant’ even ‘affluent’ nature becomes.. by emphasizing material affluence per se in terms of needs and resources, this functional approach to scarcity subtly capitulates to the very economistic stance it is meant to correct..t it merely recreates from hunter gatherer viewpoint a calculus of resources and wants that bourgeois viewpoint imparts to social theory during the last century..
huge to graeber stop at enough law.. garden-enough ness.. have\need ness..
we need to org around legit needs
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a society that has enlarged the cultural goals of human life may generate material scarcity even when the technical conditions exist for achieving out right superfluity in the means of life..
the issue of scarcity is not merely a matter of quantity or even of kind; it can also be a socially contradictory hypostatization of need as such.. so wants are no longer related to humanity’s sense of its real needs.. t
the issue of scarcity is not merely a matter of quantity or even of kind; it can also be a socially contradictory hypostatization of need as such.. so wants are no longer related to humanity’s sense of its real needs..
huge huge huge
full stop
imagine if we just focused on that.. getting back/to that grokability of legit needs
and even more huge ness – from pp 100-103:
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the legacy of domination thus culminates in the growing together of the state and society – and with it a *dissolution of the family, community, **mutual aid, and social commitment.. the ***superego is no longer formed by the father or even by domineering social institutions; it is formed by the faceless people who preside over the records of birth/death of religious affiliation and ed pedigree of ‘mental health’ and psych proclivities, of vocational training and job acquisition, of marriage and divorce certificates, of credit ratings and bank accounts; in short, of the endless array of licensees, test, contacts, grades, and personality traits that define the status of the individual in society..
*never had..
**part of the cancer..
***matters little if it’s inspectors of inspectors or fathers.. any form of people telling other people what to do kills us.. keeps us from us..
we keep trying to find beginnings.. things to point fingers at.. to justify ourselves..
reasoning-ness/knowledge-ness are the apple/myth/cancer keeping us from us.. graeber unpredictability/surprise law et al
this is so huge.. and goes with garden-enough ness..
it doesn’t matter who did/what first.. for one reason.. we have no idea.. patri or matri.. eve telling adam to eat could say matri.. god trusted us to choose (or is that thinking it as well.. because alive ness not about choice of spinach or rock et al.. but about curiosity/itch-in-the-soul).. but we didn’t trust each other.. we keep telling each other what to do for whatever reason..
but any form of people telling other people what to do is killing us.. keeping us from us
what to choose from is a from of that.. eve to adam is form of that.. so then adam seeks belonging .. some means to validate self.. (when legit belonging is being self ie: brown belonging law et al).. in some form of patri/contract/B/licence/market/capitalism/jihadi/white right.. et al
129
the oppressed believe the garden of eden was still on earth n not in heaven.. in the outrageously heretical medieval image of such a garden the ‘land of cokaygne”.. place of a bountiful maternal natural world.. not an austere paternal deity.. the utterly anarchic 14th cent version of this ‘some place’ broadly satirized the christian heaven…. like maternal love, gives freely of its fruits to a denied and deserving humanity.. by contrast, cokaygne has ‘rivers great and fine of oil, milk, honey and wines’.. food is bountiful; eternal day replaces night, peace replaces strife, and ‘all is common to young and old, ‘.. notable for lack of any tech means to achieve its bounty.. more importantly there is no toil.. no compulsory exertion, no need to master oneself or others for labor.. created not by humanity.. its arts or its institutions.. but by nature which gives freely.. hence no need exists for institutions and restrictions of any kind or for hierarchy and domination.. inhabitants may live w/o placing constraint on desires.. peace, harmony and freedom in most absolute sense are predicated on material superfluity..
sounds like garden-enough ness which i’m thinking is possible to get back/to
again .. findings:
1\ undisturbed ecosystem (common\ing) can happen
2\ if we create a way to ground the chaos of 8b legit free people
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(still in cokaygne vision) people require no protection or rule; .. no war conflict or violence.. pleasure and reality in perfect congruence.. hence no conceivable tensions need disturb the security and peace of cokaygne.. pleasure is the rule, abundance enables desire to replace mere need.. because *every wish can be fulfilled w/o exertion or technical strategies..
*bits sound like takes a lot of work ness.. but compromised.. because we have no idea what legit needs (wishes) are.. which perpetuates our obsession of and intoxication in myth of tragedy and lord et al
cokaygne further implies a view of human nature that is benign rather than conceive in sin.. humanity is afflicted not because it has eaten of the fruit but because it has eaten of the bitter root of scarcity.. *scarcity is not the penalty of sin but rather its cause.. given a level of abundance that removes this bitter root, individuals have no need to dominate, manipulate, or empower themselves at the expense of others..t.. the appetite for power and desire to inflict harm are removed by nature’s sheer fecundity
*sounds like m of care – dec 20 – from doe ch 7.. talking about our fears (of starvation) and need to focus on survival when conditions are dire.. make us not us.. scarcity of (to me) non legit (deepest) needs
*also like khan filling the gaps law.. scarcity of missing pieces
so.. hari rat park law
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from david graeber‘s foreword to stone age econ:
4
Sahlins has never been one to shirk from intellectual combat and most of the essays assembled in this volume were written, in one way or another, in response to such Formalist positions. *The “Original Affluent Society” was, of course, a direct challenge to the very notion of “scarce resources.” Scarcity, after all, exists only in relation to felt need. It is hard to find a snow-plow in Brazil, but you can’t really speak of a scarcity of them, any more than you can say public spaces in California suffer from a scarcity of spittoons or the International Space Station is lacking in fishing equipment. This might seem self-evident, but it’s the kind of self-evident truth whose implications most people never seriously consider. Sahlins has spent much of his intellectual life working out the implications. How, he has effectively asked, is it we come to define our world around what we think it lacks, around the degree to which we find it inadequate to the fulfillment of our material desires? Once framed that way there is only one possible answer: there is something wrong with our desires, or at least what we believe our desires to be. (This is actually a further complicating factor: in much of history, even when most people were convinced humans were incorrigible creatures, very few actually acted that way.) Why did we come to abandon Paleolithic affluence and actually create a world in which most of us actually do live lives of scarcity?
*need to org around legit needs.. so we grok graeber stop at enough law et al
have\need ness and the garden-enough ness of org-ing around legit needs
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be you. 