Leveling Up by Rita King (3rd in a series of 3)

Rita King, innovator-in-residence at IBM's Analytics Virtual Center and security futurist at the Aspen Institute, has made a very positive contribution at least in theory with a web site she has started, called, Levelingup.com. I recently caught a vid of her in which she described her vision of the future and how virutual reality was capable of enhancing our experience of creativity in the virtual world in order to improve and enhance our experience of being in the real world. And in conclusion she shared this new site of hers with the audience and basically said that if you give us the challenge we will make it happen ... LOL, right? So, I went to the site and all she has is a box to state your challenge with the promise that when the site opens, or perhaps when she gets finished being worked over by her legal department, she will get to you with a solution, hmmmmm ... well, this couldn't have come at a better time for me and my current little exposition and exploration of dance as an art form, shifting the focus from that rather classical paradigm of physical movement with all its bells and whistles to the paradigm of thought, more tapered to that small but leading section we call politics and which is the arena in which our collective self is attended to for the good of the many ... Well, if you're still reading, I highly insist that you visit the site and engage it with a challenge, and absorb the experience of this site as deeply as you can. Here's a copy of what I submitted and represents something a third section or revision to the original writing titled Who Speaks For You? This one is titled, The Rita Suggestion

The Challenge I face is observing a certain defect in humanity's social collective consciousness. For instance, at some point in the history of USA, our leaders determined that the cost in establishing a federal agency which regulated and supervised the quality of food and drugs sold to the public was not so great as the cost of innocent people being harmed by either their own ignorance or the greedy dishonesty of people who made promises about effects which often times targeted the weakest of us the most defenseless and most desperate. Yeah, that's a tragedy but when the volume of incidents reached such a noticeable daily increasing rate ... our leaders decided to man up.

The first part of this challenge is simply how to word the analogous question as it pertains to a different dimension or paradigm of being, that of our intellect. Everyday, it seems like the volume of corruption, in which marketing equates to manipulating the mind to consume, increases. This condition represents for me what used to be unconscionable sellers of sub quality food and drugs before the FDA was created to insure that money spent by those without enough, at least wouldn't be lost on food that was unhealthy.

There are certain boundaries which are better left clear and intact, unblurred as Rita might say. One of them is between commerce and relationship. When you piggy back commerce onto relationship then you have corrupted the possiblities of that relationship by limiting them to profitable exchange. However, the true serendipity of relationship occurs in the moments between and during what we normally think of as tragic or nonsensical and foolish. It is only then, supported by the nature of intimate relationship itself that we have the ability to pay attention and learn something new outside of our own programming, and even that occurs rarely and only in the most ideal types of intimacy unbounded by egoism.

The plain version of this challenge looks to me like my ability to simply be in the real world unfettered and unthreatened as I move and breathe, by consumerismistic information (advertising). Junk mail, and spam, come to mind as indicative of the LEVEL OF cost associated with this problem. I don't know the exact numbers, but were talking astronomically perverse, which is NOTHING BUT WASTE.

So, is there a way to lead the world that separates consumerism from the everyday world of being?

Who Speaks for You? (1st in a series of 3)

A friend of mine is a professional ballet coach. There is no denying her genius for dance and movement. In a written statement she shared with me which although not written by her was something she felt compelling for how it brought a certain complete and balanced mental perspective on what her daily activity is so passionate about, at least in general terms. The eloquence of this statement for me was founded on the idea that what the author (a professional ballet dancer) is "doing" on stage is seen as something co-created, a deeper experience of being.

If only reason and thought were so easily judged and assessed by the rest of humanity as an audience of world class ballet attends. Where are we to begin this process of focusing our attention with respect to words and ideas.

And what does the overload of info and the glut of facimile (or mentation, reason, and thought which doesn't produce depth in the reader or listener only frustration and dissatisfaction) mean, and when and where will it stop growing in mass and volume? Is there a limit to how much noise and distraction a mind can withstand and remain healthy and balanced nevertheless? The difference in listening seems yet to genuinely be appreciated for what it is - as social pressure adheres us to conform and accept false images and copies of copies of copies, including pure garbage and nonsense.

It seems to me that even a freshman whose study includes logic and heuristic thought would understand that society lacks a certain intellectual integrity which for instance, at least in principle and authorized by law, a suitable agency exists whose mission is to maintain and safeguard certain standards of healthy food production, known as the FDA in the USA. Such institutions in society just don't manifest without tremendous public pressure, which is nothing more than a collective agreement demanding societal change as 'good' in the collective sense of the word. And by good, I also mean implicitly necessary in the sense that to continue the status quo has been demonstrated to be completely negative and destructive of the public welfare and good. Often, inertia can be directly traced to a certain ambivalence of need collectively IE too many pros and cons. Rational sober debate is a starting point and ending point for the mind in that arena, but what about issues which have little support simply due to their being for lack of a better term, revolutionary?

There are speaks of brilliance, conscious efforts of men in support of a saner deeper intelligently relevant mentality to be somehow benchmarked at least by our communities and countries leadership. Jon Stewart is a favorite, but it doesn't take too much thinking to understand his comedy is really armor against the system which he is trying to reveal for all of its corruption, idiocy, mechanicalness, hypocricy, and every other notion of mediocrity you can think of ... its all here, running our lives and minds, and there is yet NO ground swell of protest, nobody with "a dream."

Don't you find that simply becoming all too wrong? What will it take for us to organize against the insanity of conformity, the corruption of economies, the pollution of ecologies, all in all, phenomenon which reflect a certain missing integrity to the humanity's intelligent recognition of the balance and value of silence in the realization of mental integrity.

The first mistake is to think that truth is a commodity for sale, or that it can be purchased. There is no pitch, no argument, no credential nor membership or club, which can provide your mind with the truth. There is a world however, devoid of any order, thus; one merely has to look at the next step their mind's about to take to find their own grist to grind.