Fuzzy logic is an approach to computing based on “degrees of truth” rather than the usual “true or false” (1 or 0) Boolean logic on which the modern computer is based. The idea of fuzzy logic was first advanced by Dr. Lotfi Zadeh of the University of California at Berkeley in the 1960s.

Yacana

“If you look at zero you see nothing; but look through it and you will see the world.” Robert Kaplan

“The Space Llama or Black Llama is one of the most important animals in the Andean cosmology. Her silhoutte appears in the dark areas between the stars. She is associated with giving life, nourishment, prosperity as well as providing rain.

For this reason Llamas with black fur are very important in Andean cosmology.

Two very bright stars in the constellation of Centauri (alpha and beta) represent the Black Llama’s eyes.

The Andean cosmology legends tell us that Yacana (the Llama) was wandering with her baby along a river that crossed the entire sky (the Milky Way). The more she walked, the blacker she got. Her baby accompanied her throughout the sky. When the baby became hungry, Yacana fed it. When Yacana woke up, it became daytime. It is said that the person who finds herself in a place where Yacana has fed her baby will have good luck for the rest of her days.

But Yacana is just and treated everyone equally. She would not give happiness merely to one man or one woman. At night, when nobody was looking, she used to go and drink water from the oceans. She drank of the water of pain, the water of sadness, the water of thirst and hunger.

She drank the water of the tragedy of humankind and prevented the seas from overflowing and flooding the earth.”

Based on the Inca stories of the sky – Antonio Claret.

2.THE LEGEND OF YACANA-01

Did you know?

“Llama’s gentle temperament and naturally inquisitive character make them the perfect companion or therapy animal. Llamas are used in nursing homes, hospices and hospitals to provide the residents with some interaction and to stimulate the sensory process. A visit from a llama can provide an emotional lift for patients and residents. The therapy can help heal or just provide some enjoyment and entertainment.” (Desert USA)

When we encounter llamas, they evoke kama muta, which makes us experience a sudden and brief love or kindness, warm fuzzy feelings and sometimes even sense of devotion and compassion to communal sharing.

Goethe’s Theory of Colors

How the study of color could change everything about our modern world view.

“Its the light and the dark together that renders colours recognizable.” Goethe

Re-Wild Crafting: Regaining our innate human capabilities

“The root of the word wild, which comes from the Old English and Germanic  languages, is self-determining.

So the word itself refers to the freedom you have just described: the life of the world, which we humans can never completely control.

And when you feel the freedom in yourself, your senses awaken, and you come alive in a new way.

My own contacts with the wild have given me the freedom to find something deeper within myself.” from the article: A Conversation with Steffan Wildstrand, by Eleanor O’Hanlon

To know about humanity, you first have to learn to be human.

As our inner and outer worlds experience accelerated techno-forming, we are at risk of forgetting how to appreciate and cultivate our innate human capabilities, such as living in healthy communities, complex decision making and our 54 senses and sensibilities.

Current technology design favours quick fix and simple solutions to scale for exponential shareholder growth. The unintended consequence is a global phenomena where entire living eco-systems are coralled into profitable algorithmic and possibly bio-engineered data points designed for precision prediction markets and behavioural re-engineering.

Add to this a worldview that life is in essence just autonomous algorithms, and we start to believe that, to evolve, we need continuous updates to our human operating systems, prescribed by machines that are smarter than us.

With human comfort at the centre of design, the side-effects can now be seen as we experience loss of social connection, physical fitness and creative movement, reduced emotional diversity and flexibility, technology mediation instead of natural connection and contact, reduction of critical thinking skills and other cognitive abilities.

User attentions are aimed at measurable clicks, often linked to unpleasant, high energy emotional, short term problems, replicated within a mono-cultural imagination and social networks.

This degeneration in all aspects of our lives – on a personal as well as family and collective level – has the possibility of creating a vicious cycle feedback loop where we believe this to be the only trajectory of our collective digital future.

Unlike this bleak view, most people also realize we have many unexplored windows of opportunities to use technologies. We have the freedom to opt-out and establish better foundational principles for standards and ethics for these man-made designs and codes that shape our future.

Fortunately we also have access to ecosystems within natural environments not yet fully mediated by our machine consciousness.

Here we can re-experience what it truly means to be human: Not what our mainstream experts tell us, but our own body’s experience of our primordial being.

Positive maverick leaders make a conscious decision to engage in rewilding: “practices which allow the human nervous system to develop to its full capability, including the sensitivity and awareness of our undomesticated hunter-gatherer ancestors” (definition by Wild Open).

They are able to discern natural consciousness and machine consciousness within themselves and their environments. Cultivating digital intelligence, they apply practical wisdom in how to allow autonomous code to mediate our experience of life using life’s principles towards vitality and ecosystem virtuous cycles.

Re-wilding ourselves enables us to build novel foundations to face ourselves and the world around us. It empowers us to research, design and adopt alternative technological solutions that restore our human capacities for new forms of ethical cooperation, reciprocity, the prosperity game (as contrasted to the monopoly game).

Photo: Mauna Kea, Hawaii, January 2016

Salka according to the Andean Cosmovision

“Salka is a Quecha word for natural or undomesticated energy.

The wolf is salka, while the dog is domesticated.

The condor is salka, while the chicken is domesticated.

The deer is salka while the sheep is domesticated.

It is not quite accurate to say that some beings are more salka than others. It might be better to say that some beings are more domesticated than others.

In domesticated beings, however, domestication is like a veneer through which the light of salka must shine.

Salka is the natural, free, energy of life and so all beings have salka.

We members of Western Society have to be domesticated in order to survive the environment that our society has created. What time we get up, how we dress, how we make a living, what we do for entertainment, what we eat and drink, the various roles we play as friend, spouse, parent, coworker, consumer, and citizen are all drawn from the list of options provided by our society.

Even more important than the domestication of our time and energy, however, is the domestication of our concepts of self, our understanding of who we are as Beings in this Cosmos.”

“Salka is another part of our heritage as Beings in this Cosmos. We are alive, we exist, we are expressions of Nature and the Cosmos, our essence is salka.

Salka is beyond definition, beyond comprehension, it is vastly mysterious.

As we are, in our essence, salka, the same can be said of us. We are beyond definition, we are beyond comprehension, we are vastly more mysterious beings than our society led us to believe.

To reach the full expression of being human we need to know both our salka and our domesticated selves. The Andean meditations get us in touch with salka.”

– Oakley E. Gordon – The Andean Cosmovision: A Path for Exploring Profound Aspects of Ourselves, Nature and the Cosmos

Fire in the Brain:  Imaginationis theessenceofbeinghuman – the highest means known to the human psyche of getting into contact with theultimatereality.

While the possible objects for an imaginativearchaeologyof information are vast – ranging from trickster tales tomysticalconceptions of theLogosto divination – the first steps are the garnering of one’spersonalcapacity to see, imagine, and visualize in atranceordreamstate, or ultimately, a technognostic state (Davis: 1998), where everything becomes but a ‘dream within a dream’, that the boundaries of reality fade and the world of the shaman, of new reality-making becomes possible.

Thepowerto evoke images in one’smind– to see and believe something that is very different from what one normally sees and believes, or what one thinks one should see and believe – is aprocessof coming to newknowledge. When one’s view of how things happen is temporarily challenged and suspended, a doorway opens – a doorway where anything seems possible. The shaman is someone who lives permanently in a state ofwonder, and tries to understand thesethingswithout fear. With understanding comes knowledge, and with knowledge, power.”  Manie Eagar, from his paper: The Shaman Reborn in Cyberspace,

Reuniting human creative capacity with with the craft and the art of life will restore natural imagination as a wisdom skill.

Dr Tina Seelig, Stanford Creativity Expert, writes that “without imaginers who engage with the world and envision alternatives, there won’t be compelling opportunities to address.

Nurturing imagination is a practical wisdom skill. Did you know that the majority of tech leaders send their children to Waldorf schools and limit their time using machine technologies?

Here is how Proust applied his imagination: “The document [timetable for trains] was not consulted for practical advice; the departure time of the Saint-Lazare train was of no immediate importance to a man who found no reason to leave Paris in the last eight years of his life. Rather, this timetable was read and enjoyed as though it were a gripping novel about country life, because the mere names of provincial train stations provided Proust’s imagination with enough material to elaborate entire worlds, to picture domestic dramas in rural villages, shenanigans in local government, and life out in the fields.” How Proust Can Change Your Life (Vintage International)

“It became clear that play in the high Andes involves a learning process that is more creative and profound than it is in a society where prefabricated toys are readily available. Most importantly, play activities lead directly to an understanding of the tasks that must be mastered in adult life.”

“Within the home, children play with virtually everything they can find.”

“Outside the house, children’s playgrounds extend as fas as their eyes can see.”

“But children are not satisfied to merely detect interesting shapes within the cosmos. They need to touch and manipulate the products of their imagination. So from a young age they start the manufacture from the raw materials nature provides not only toys but miniature homesteads and irrigated fields within complex landscapes.” Inge Bolin: Growing up in a culture of Respect: Childrearing in Highland Peru.

In machine technology cultures, computer games stimulate the mind’s natural capacities to release the required medicine in the right way for the person.

When we nurture our imagination, we enhance the patterns and harmonies of complex responsive processes woven within inter-dependent action. This enables the spontaneous emergence of novel new mindsets and behaviours towards wholeness.

Immersive, creative participation based on our primordial sense of play-to-learn, helps us thrive, cooperate, strategize, work across teams and cultures, learn multiple states of living, and opportunities to identify and cultivate entire new networks of data – including those available in the natural worlds, such as oceans, soils and sky.

Learning and mastering games from other societies will become as important to us as investing in adventure bucket-list endeavours – becoming popular for iconic Digital-Self-Inspiration and understanding new types of economics, governance and skills for the future of work.

“Play is a voluntary activity or occupation executed within certain limits of time and space, according to rules freely accepted but absolutely binding, having its aim in itself and accompanied by a feeling of tension, joy and the consciousness that is “different” from “ordinary life”. Thus defined, the concept seemed capable of embracing everything we call “play” in animals, children and grown-ups: games of strength and skill, inventing games, guessing games, games of chance, exhibitions and performances of all kinds. We ventures to call the category “play” one of the most fundamental in life.” Johan Huizinga from his book: Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture 

“The word beauty is related to the Latin root, bells, connoting not just physical attractiveness, but also goodness. Bellus is also related to bene, meaning well, and beatus, meaning to bless.” (from the book Nature-based expressive arts therapy)

 

 

Beyond the Heroic…Guardians of Idun’s Garden

Enchantment is the oldest form of medicine.” – Carl Jung

Instead of lecturing, arguing or debating facts, instead of waiting for “leaders” to tackle the crucial challenges of our times….we can live and show the way.

Enchantivist = enchantment + activism

“Enchantivism describes the many ways we make lasting change by sharing reenchanting stories about our relations with ourselves, each other, or our ailing but still-beautiful planet; and then letting these stories lead us into creative and thoughtful responses to how things are.

Being an enchantivist requires no shouting or preaching, although at need it can supplement more conventional and confrontational forms of activism and reform. The quiet can use it so long as they possess a lively imagination, a deep care for life on Earth, and a willingness to plant stories in the space of fertile soil between real and ideal. An enchantivist by vocation is a transrevolutionary.”

In its own quiet way, enchantivism draws on the power of imaginative vision through telling and retelling of old myths, fairy tales, reborn legends, surfacing fantasies, and personal accounts.

Unlike lecturing or debating, storytelling invites us into a shared imaginal landscape, leaving its interpretation, if any, to the listener. It seeks common ground by collecting visions of times and places that can delight us. In story, the activist and corporatist, rebel and cop, artist and financier come together in a commons of image and language as fellow humans dwelling in more-than-human terrain.

The enchantivist approach recognizes the importance of stating facts but sees clearly that this will not suffice to change actions or worldviews, especially when the facts bounce off an entrenched story tenaciously held. Only a better story movingly told can overcome that. Not louder words or cleverer arguments. As Le Guin expresses it.

Craig S. Chalquist, PhD, founder of Worldrede Academy and its important World Soul Books and founding executive editor of Immanence Journal.

It is by such statements as, ‘Once upon a time there was a dragon,’ or ‘In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit’—it is by such beautiful non-facts that we fantastic human beings may arrive, in our peculiar fashion, at the truth. Ursula le Guin

 

Too much dharma and drama makes us forget Yacana. (MaRi Eagar)

A Company Safety Discussion overheard at Time Safari, Inc: Safaries to Any Year in the Past:

“All right,” Travis continued, “say we accidentally kill one mouse here. That means all the future families of this one particular mouse are destroyed, right?”

“Right” “

And all the families of the families of the families of that one mouse! With a stamp of your foot, you annihilate first one, then a dozen, then a thousand, a million, a billion possible mice!” “

So they’re dead,” said Eckels. “So what?”

So what?” Travis snorted quietly. “Well, what about the foxes that’ll need those mice to survive? For want of ten mice, a fox dies. For want of ten foxes a lion starves. For want of a lion, all manner of insects, vultures, infinite billions of life forms are thrown into chaos and destruction. Eventually it all boils down to this: fifty­nine million years later, a caveman, one of a dozen on the entire world, goes hunting wild boar or saber­toothed tiger for food. But you, friend, have stepped on all the tigers in that region. By stepping on one single mouse. So the caveman starves. And the caveman, please note, is not just any expendable man, no! He is an entire future nation. From his loins would have sprung ten sons. From their loins one hundred sons, and thus onward to a civilization. Destroy this one man, and you destroy a race, a people, an entire history of life. It is comparable to slaying some of Adam’s grandchildren. The stomp of your foot, on one mouse, could start an earthquake, the effects of which could shake our earth and destinies down through Time, to their very foundations. With the death of that one caveman, a billion others yet unborn are throttled in the womb. Perhaps Rome never rises on its seven hills. Perhaps Europe is forever a dark forest, and only Asia waxes healthy and teeming. Step on a mouse and you crush the Pyramids. Step on a mouse and you leave your print, like a Grand Canyon, across Eternity. Queen Elizabeth might never be born, Washington might not cross the Delaware, there might never be a United States at all. So be careful. Stay on the Path. Never step off!”

From the Short Science Fiction Story: A Sound of Thunder by Ray Bradbury

Chaotic dynamical systems:

“In the mathematical field of dynamic systems, an attractor is a set of numerial values toward which a system tends to evolve, for a wide variety of starting conditions of the system.

Describing the attractors of chaotic dynamical systems had been one of the achievements of chaos theory.” Attractor – Wikipedia, October 19, 2019.

Chaos Theory: Chaos is the science of surprises, of the nonlinear and the unpredictable. It teaches us to expect the unexpected. While most traditional science deals with supposedly predictable phenomena like gravity, electricity, or chemical reactions, Chaos Theory deals with nonlinear things that are effectively impossible to predict or control, like turbulence, weather, the stock market, our brain states, and so on.

These phenomena are often described by fractal mathematics, which captures the infinite complexity of nature. Many natural objects exhibit fractal properties, including landscapes, clouds, trees, organs, rivers etc, and many of the systems in which we live exhibit complex, chaotic behavior.

Recognizing the chaotic, fractal nature of our world can give us new insight, power, and wisdom. For example, by understanding the complex, chaotic dynamics of the atmosphere, a balloon pilot can “steer” a balloon to a desired location. By understanding that our ecosystems, our social systems, and our economic systems are interconnected, we can hope to avoid actions which may end up being detrimental to our long-term well-being.”  The Fractal Foundation

Photograph: Art in the Moco Museum, Amsterdam, April 2019

“A corporation is just a set of rules, and so is software. It’s all code, and doesn’t care about people, our priorities, our future unless we bother to program those concerns into it.

It is therefore useful, particularly in a rapidly changing media environment, to look at corporations as they were forms of media: programs written by people at a particular moment in history in order to accomplish specific goals.”

Douglas Rushkoff

“What is conversation?

The original word from Latin means: ‘To live with, to share with, to commune with.’

It’s a sharing of thought and an exploration of thought.

It’s unique in that it’s a shared undertaking. You cannot converse alone. It requires a group.

It is a cooperative venture.

The idea of a conversation is to cooperatively explore ideas, emotions and feelings and to arrive some place or to have realizations that you otherwise would not be able to. It actually requires other people to help build some or create something which on your own or the other participants would not arrive at.

It’s a way of externalizing cooperative skills.

It is a very tricky and difficult skill.”

“You learn by talking. You learn by seeing. You learn by interacting.”

The written component of that is always considered to be of secondary importance.”

“It’s a sharing. The true spirit of conversation consists of building on another person’s observation, not overturning it. (You can’t build together if you constantly knocking each other’s stuff.)

“Franklin on the great secret at succeeding in conversation:

To admire little but hear much.

Always to distrust our own reason, and sometimes that of our friends.

Never pretend to wit, but pretend that of others as much as we possibly can.

To harken to what is said and to answer to the purpose.”

“A good conversationalist helps you figure out your ideas.”

It is a form of self-expression that is reached co-operatively and would be impossible to achieve on your own.”

Wes Cecil (on the use of Philosophy for Living)