The Master does nothing,
yet he leaves nothing undone.
The ordinary man is always doing things,
yet many more are left to be done.

The kind man does something,
yet something remains undone.
The just man does something,
and leaves many things to be done.
The moral man does something,
and when no one responds
he rolls up his sleeves and uses force.

When the Tao is lost, there is goodness.
When goodness is lost, there is morality.
When morality is lost, there is ritual.
Ritual is the husk of true faith,
the beginning of chaos.

Therefore the Master concerns himself
with the depths and not the surface,
with the fruit and not the flower.
He has no will of his own.
He dwells in reality,
and lets all illusions go.

It is maybe the greatest thing I have heard of in an industrialized country in my whole life. While kolonis are often near loud roads, trains, and electrical stations, there are nice places, too. It’s actually how people should live: in small houses surrounded by gardens, other people who are basically there to relax, no cars, minimal fencing, compost toilets, little or no electricity.

Of course, as a way of life, it is a big secret, because Swedes seem conditioned to see kolonis as vacation/summer/second homes, not primary residences. Some places are fairly closed down in the winter, and some places are not legal to live in in the winter due to insufficient insulation. But there are others where no one cares if people stay all the time. Houses can be properly insulated. Rainwater can be harvested. Power can be had from the sun and wind. Composting toilets are practically free to build.

Again, I can’t believe this is right under peoples’ noses, and the government allows it. You pay 500-1500 yearly fees for basic services, keep your garden nice, your noise level down, and you’re in. One could grow a tall hedge over time, I think, for pleasant privacy. It is instant freedom from the slavery of school/work/rent/distraction.

There are deals like this everywhere in the third world, of course. But, boy. What a miracle to find it in the first. It makes me think of developing a whole koloni with curved paths, round stugas, permaculture, etc. It would be a real village over time, with its own economy, etc.

Hmm. Except when the children are 6, they are all confiscated by the state for brainwashing and family destruction. Bummer.

Various spiritual traditions have posited this for ages. Gurdjieff, a sufi, said, “Man is a three-brained being.” He also called these brains “centers of intelligence.” In addition to the thinking center of intelligence, there are the feeling and moving centers of intelligence.

A very useful and easy to learn typology is based on the three ways that injured people go through life psychologically defending themselves. Some people live in their heads. Others are really emotional. Others go with their guts. It’s right here in our language. Intellectuals. Sensitive artists. Athletes and fighters (stereotypically dumb but nonetheless able to do amazing things with their bodies, obviously a form of intelligence).

Now, large amounts of neural tissue, comparable to the amount in the cerebrum, have been found in the heart and the alimentary canal.

So psychological illness and psychic trauma must be seen not just in the mind or intellect, to be worked out in an intellectual way, but also in the heart and gut, to be worked out in a whole, vital way, by an organic process. We have more than one brain, and they are damaged. We are brainsdamaged.

• Three new retreat reports under “four darkness retreats”
• Updates to “make darkness” and “retreat manual” based on my latest findings
• Categories for both posts and pages

More to come.

Dear…,

I have news about the gift economy that should blow your mind. It has blown mine, anyway. I’m hoping you’ve heard of David Graeber by now, the author of Debt: The First 5000 Years. If not, it is an amazing anthropological study of money. Haven’t read it, just the basics online.

Here’s the gist: the gift economy is not made up of people just giving things to each other without expectation of return. This is a completely mistaken notion spread by a few lucky people who somehow pull that nonsense off (or pretend to). The gift economy is simply letting people you know and trust have things of yours when they need them, with the mutual understanding that when you call on them, they’ll do the same. You say, “You like it? Take it!” and understand, “You owe me one.”

It is because this understanding among traditional people is unstated, deeply engrained, even obscene to verbalize that modern civilized observers didn’t notice it and assumed theirs was the same as our system of unconditional gifts. Which, you’ll notice, often has a strange charge of propriety around it, a stale remnant of our past decency.

So the gift economy consists of an endless series of:

1. delayed exchanges of
2. unequal values
3. according to customs of evolving complexity.

Some cultures actively discouraged equal exchanges to help people stay on good terms with each other. (Thanks to Eli Gothill, aka webisteme, creator of #PunkMoney for points 2 & 3.)

Graeber also exposes the barter system as a myth. There are no examples of it among established people. Spot trades of equal values are only found between:

1. strangers
2. people who have temporarily lost their currency system (and haven’t developed a gift economy yet due to conditioning)

Graeber’s more general discovery about money is that before there was gold or clams or whatever people are said to have used as money, people had mutual credit systems. For example, tally sticks. Money was a *unit of account*, not a commodity-based *medium of exchange*. These credit systems were just formalizations of the old gift economies. Commodity-based money like gold or wheat came much later. And it came by force, too, like our current central bank-issued monopoly monies.

I think what the mutual credit systems I have found are really good for is reorienting people to this way of seeing a local economy while maintaining the familiarity of accounting and limited debt exposure. Once a basic reorientation occurs, the system can become informal. In other words, not written down with arithmetic.

When I was learning a new diet that had me counting calories (to make sure I got *enough* of the right kinds), I got into it for a couple weeks, then I just knew. It was like a skill. Once acquired, there was no need to keep exact record anymore.

Here is the interview that finally got it through to me:
An Interview with Economic Anthropologist David Graeber

I’m telling you because you and I have both struggled with money and with the gifting idea for a long time, and we ought to have a solution to it finally. I think we were basically right. We have been broke because we didn’t really want to have anything to do with regular money. It’s got blood all over it. It’s a tool of enslavement. To hell with it. Better to eat out of dumpsters.

But in 24/7 unconditional gifting, we were offered a false alternative. Historically, it is bizarre. It is a purely civilized invention. We wage-slaves evolved it to get a break from the cold, even exchanges we have to make most of the time. The real gift economies kept people obliged to each other, preserving relationships and work—peace and prosperity at a reasonable level.

Like I said, the exemplars of the unconditional gifting lifestyle whom we have met are just lucky. It’s not learnable. It’s unnatural and unnecessary. It’s a sham.

Hope this helps.

Best regards…

http://www.webisteme.com/blog/?cat=40

If I Could Only Live at the Pitch That is Near Madness

Richard Eberhart

If I could only live at the pitch that is near madness
When everything is as it was in my childhood
Violent, vivid, and if infinite possibility:
That the sun and the moon broke over my head.

Then I cast time out of the trees and fields.
Then I stood immaculate in the Ego;
Then I eyed the world with all delight,
Reality was the perfection of my sight.

And time has big handles on the hands,
Fields and trees a way of being themselves.
I saw battalions of the race of mankind
Standing solid, demanding a moral answer.

I gave the moral answer and I died
And into a realm of complexity came
Where nothing is possible but necessity
And the truth wailing there like a red babe.

• the issue:
• was addressed before
• is so basic I should already know about it
• is easy enough in their minds for me to work out on my own
• they don’t know
• they would like to but can’t
• they aren’t interested
• the answer is no

As long as my message contained no interesting requests or instructions, why would they respond? It’s like a logic circuit. Or, at least, my idea of one.

I have read forums. There is simply too much data to respond to. One must not suffer fools or welcome the cloying “friendship” of a zillion strangers.

It took me awhile, but I’d like to think I get it. Here’s to the techs. I’m on your side. Thank you for making computers happen.

My idea takes off from there.

~~~
Dear Mr Tabarrok,

Thanks for your idea of the Dominant Assurance Contract. I thought of a way to extend it to further open up opportunities in investment and value creation and possibly make crowdfunding more interesting than gambling. Maybe your students have already come up with all this and more, but what the heck.

I call it the Open Dominant Assurance Contract. Basically, it allows supporters of a proposal to:

• help fund the bonus pot
• adjust their positions throughout the game.

Here are the rules:

1. The proposer:
   • sets the monetary goal and deadline
   • seeds the bonus pot, which counts toward the goal. (hmm: increasible? for how long?)
   • sets the maximum bonus rate between 0% and infinity in case of failure
   • sets the maximum profit rate in case of success
   • and can increase both these rates until the campaign’s deadline
2. A supporter sets her bonus rate from –100% to infinity. She can increase her contribution and decrease her rate until the proposal’s deadline.
3. In case of failure, the pot is divided amongst supporters in proportion to their contributions and according to their final bonus rates.
4. In case of success, a supporter with an average bonus rates of less than 0% is treated as an investor who can eventually profit from the proposal in proportion to her average rate (–bonus rate x maximum profit rate).
5. Supporters can make multiple contributions with different bonus rates.

Thus someone with an idea but little seed money could still create a Dominant Assurance Contract. Whole-hearted supporters (those with <0% rates) could profit from the risk of enticing the half-hearted (>0% rates). The higher the maximum bonus rate, the wilder the game gets. It could be a spectacle of brinkmanship between the whole-hearts and half-hearts more compelling than a good craps game. Half-hearts would help attract attention to the proposal initially. Whole-hearts would help continue to attract half-hearts as the deadline approached. Just as in webisteme‘s #PunkMoney, participants could tweet changes in their positions, and a program could track variables, calculate totals, display graphs, and keep accounts in real time.

Examples

• Due to Rule 3, a sole supporter of $1 with an infinite bonus rate toward a failed proposal with an infinite maximum bonus rate would win the entire pot.
• A second such supporter of $99 would take away 99% of the pot.
• If the proposer set the maximum bonus rate to 10%, then the first would only get back $1.10 and the second $108.90, regardless of pot size.
• Due to Rule 4, in a successful proposal with a 20% profit rate, a supporter whose bonus rate was –40% for 10 days and –80% for 10 days would have an average rate of –60%, earning her 12% on her contribution (to be paid when the project actually profits).
• Due to Rule 5, a supporter can try playing the game all three ways: whole-hearted,  half-hearted, and neutral (0%, the same as in an Assurance Contract)

What do you think?

The game theory in your paper was stimulating but over my head. So I thought, How about letting the participants decide the variables? Coming up with it was fun and exciting.

Which is ironic because I came across your uber-cool dealio while looking for ways to finance my recovery from exhaustion-depression. (Take something worse than chronic fatigue syndrome but better than death and combine it with clinical depression. A real kick in the pants!) I have less-than-zero confidence in medicine or its common alternatives. So I spent 21 years looking for a way to deal with it before hitting upon darkness retreating. It’s relatively cheap ($2500), but money-making is not my strong suit. So thanks for the ideas and,

Cheers,
Andrew Durham

~~~

EDIT: I removed this sentence from the third to last paragraph: “And I could not decide what to call this variant of DAC: Self-Funding, Autonomous, Automatic, Inclusive, Cooperative, or Viral DAC? DA Orgy?” I decided on “Cooperative”. If you think of a better name, please let me know.

EDIT: I renamed the contract again to Open DAC and heavily edited the letter, including removing one extra-complicated rule about reimbursing the proposer.

EDIT: added bit about #PunkMoney

[BEGIN new section]
The retreat began Friday about noon local time, two days late due to technical difficulties, which is typical. Then I must have slept 16 hours a day for 2-3 days until I started feeling better.

Strangely, it was not deep sleep. I had a lot of dreams, and only a few vivid ones. I was so tired, I barely noticed at first. But by Thursday, when I woke up from a noisy, nonsensical dream, I started feeling angry and frustrated that I was not resting deeply as I always have in retreats, that yet again I was failing due to foreseeable factors. My instant sense was that in this 17-unit, 4-story modern apartment building, the disturbances were caused—not sonically as expected—but electromagnetically by tons of steel and electrical wiring in the building and psychically by the 30 other crazy people in the building. All of which fairly doomed the retreat for my purposes.

I calmed down after taking three naps and eating. It occurred to me that feeling angry and frustrated were a step up from depressed and resigned, as I would have felt a week before. It was a sign of significantly increased vitality. By that night, however, continuing the retreat seemed pointless. I could not do all I wanted in the room, I had done what was possible with what was available, and it had helped me enough to carry on in the light. So I exited the darkroom after 5.5 days of lots of rest, a few good epiphanies, good frugivorous food (raw fruits and greens) carefully prepared by Sanna, and lots of new ideas for proceeding.

The main thing I gained from this retreat was seeing how I have kept so many things out of my life as a result of my shame about my illness: health, love, money, a home, etc. Nothing good could possibly be for me (thank god some got in anyway). Because I could not accept much for myself, I presented the darkness conjecture itself as a idea to be tested for worldwide salvation rather than something I needed personally. Therefore, for example, I could not accept two offers in Guatemala to build a 6-unit retreat center because I was not sure of the idea and did not want to mislead anyone.

The truth is, darkness retreats have helped and interested me and others a lot, and this is sufficient grounds for making a retreat center. It’s that simple. Should it prove as wildly beneficial as I project in my writings, groovy, but that is not necessary to proceed.
[END new section]

The lesson: approaching darkness as something I needed personally worked a whole hell of a lot better than approaching it as a world-saving idea in need of testing. Shame about my own psychosis, based on early bad experiences with expressing my suffering, had led to this charade. People, it turned out, care a lot more about me than my big ideas.

The major thing I learned this time about retreating itself is that scheduling sufficient time afterward to absorb its value and readjust to light is critical to a retreat’s overall success. So while I did not complete a 14-day retreat as planned, neither did I waste one learning about this, either. Instead, we spent only $285 discovering this final big piece of the puzzle.

Along with with this major lesson, I learned some useful minor things to be carefully applied in future retreats:

• having warm fresh air is a lot more comfortable than cold air combined with a powerful heater
• even a small amount of exercise really helps the whole process
• audible and psychic noise from the building’s 35 other occupants, and electromagnetic distortion from the building’s steel and wiring have a huge, negative effect on the quality of rest possible in a darkroom.

Will soon commence 12th attempt at a long darkness retreat, somehow, somewhere.

[EDIT: new section added Mar 5]

Other worthy systems I’ve come across in the last couple days:
payswarm.com web technology-based, multiple-scenario payment system. Big vision.
opentransact.org similar goals as payswarm, different architecture
picomoney.com clever, based on opentransact
cyclos.org open source software to run your own bank, complete with free hosting; soul boggling!
villages.cc**is the best implementation of ripplepay.com, a compelling solution to LETS accountability concerns.
e-flux.com/timebank hip and simple
friendlyfavors.org 2nd largest after CES, social, clever, but aging and a bit complicated
johnturmel.com/uniset.htm very simple, start alone now. Improved by showing account as a ledger using a web-based spreadsheet
JEU/GAME paper system (compatible with CES), very elegant, semi-private, decentralized accounting, best for when the lights go out.

CES is (NOT*) the most accessible, practical, and mature, though some of these systems, especially payswarm, have much greater potential. Open source money has finally gotten legs, wings… and teeth.

*EDIT: I gave up on CES because of issues with its design and management. So I am exploring two other systems now: Community Forge, based on Drupal Community Accounting/mutual credit module, and Villages. It’s Ripple base is better, but CF is much more developed. The insides of it look great so far.  Open source, delegated authority and responsibility. Kind of a weak social network, but it is there.

Greco says a proper system needs:

1. a marketplace
2. a social network
3. a means of payment
4. a measure of value or pricing unit

Both have all four criteria. So it’s a toss up for me. I hope Villages works out.

complementaire-economie.startpagina.nl huge list of currencies, systems, and software, some defunct
Open Transactions open source digital cash, transmittable through tons of media, needing no third-party record keeper.

Two cool sites about money ideas:
MetaCurrency
Webisteme inventor of #PunkMoney, a twitter-based currency. fricking brilliant.

Watch him type on the Nook Simple Touch on youtube:
Nook Simple Touch usb host support

Development thread with instructions:
(Nook Touch Android Development) [WIP] USB Host support (working)

There are still some bugs, and the instructions are over my head at this point. But the basics are there now for people who know how to use them. Once the bugs are worked out, I plan to simplify the instructions for everyone’s use. Maybe even offer microSD cards with everything pre-installed.

Here we go.

1. (Status on Thursday night:)
Dear Family and Friends: I am very sick. For the first time, I feel
that I am slipping, that I might not make it. Please help me realize
the solution I found. Not because it could be a solution for you, too. But simply because you care about me. This is what I have been trying to say for three years. Andrew.

2. (Friday, in response to 20 people who wrote in support of me:)
I am relieved to hear from each one of you. I also got supportive emails.

What I need is help in arranging and paying for a long darkness retreat.

It needs an empty, functional house and people to bring food and say
hello to me each day. And I need to not return to the US, where I feel very unsafe, to do it. There are places to rent here (Sweden) and new friends who could help.

The thing is, my 25 years of studying the absolute depths of both my
condition and the world’s made me good at solving extremely complex
problems, but not good at making money or simple arrangements like
this. I cannot overstate how much shame and embarrassment I have felt
about this. But I can state the truth about it.

Please do not let my articulateness fool you into thinking that I am
ok. No matter what, it seems, I am able to talk.

3. (Sunday)
Thanks to everyone who wrote. My immediate problem is solved. Nearly
undetectable poor air quality where I have been staying wore me down
over the last month. I am making arrangements to move into a proper
apartment tonight.

The wider issue of why I ended up in that situation in the first place is also getting addressed by rekindled support for the darkroom and other unforeseen means.

4. (Yesterday, in response to a Swedish friend who asked how I was doing:) I’m basically okay now, Maria. Still edgy, but not as bad as
yesterday. It was nice to be able to walk with you the other day. I
had been slowly suffocating (literally), and then I suddenly crashed.
It felt like I’d been run over by a train.

5. By the way, I never identified my sickness here, so I will now.

I view it as functional psychosis manifesting as a rigid dependence on my mind. This has numerous ill effects on my life, some of which some of you know all too well. For example, unconsciously setting myself up for periodic breakdowns like the one this weekend.

At 16, I had only a vague sense of my sickness. But it was strong, and it motivated my long search for the root cause of rapture: sanity. My discovery of darkness as an irreplaceable condition of psychological health ensued. This is why I have confidence only in darkness retreats as a means of healing from my sickness and why my wish to do one has finally found its way to the top of my priorities.