Paranormal experiences & Dreams
POSTED BY: piratejenny
UPDATED: Thursday, September 1, 2005 22:52
VIEWED: 14949
PAGE 10 of 10
Yeah, behind that hyper-realist facade beats the heart of a dreamer. But don't tell anyone. 
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Here is my 'just enough' dream, with a little bit of sheer writing at the end.
She stood on open short-grass prairie, facing west on the crest of a shallow rise, with the bright sun warming her head and shoulder, a fresh cool breeze sifting through her hair, there was a deep blue sky above. A few puffy white clouds cheerfully sailed across the sky. The grasses and forbes that came to her knees were wiry and deep green with scattered blooms. This was early summer, green and brisk, with the smell of dirt and the pungent resin of sun-warmed plants. On the exposed crest of the rise, patches of bare dirt showed sunnily. In front of her the ground dropped to form a long low cliff that ran south to north. Two hundred meters or so to the west a narrow paved road ran south to north, parallel to the cliff. On the far side of the road slightly to the south a man drove a green tractor back and forth, tilling a small plot of fertile earth. Directly across the road, two young children, a girl of six or seven and a smaller boy of three or four played around a square of green corn, chasing and tagging each other, laughing. Their house stood behind them where their mother worked preparing food for winter storage. Beyond that the prairie ran an unbroken green to the far horizon, and on the horizon, unassuming blue foothills lay at the north-west, and a few white topped peaks peered out from behind them.
In this world, great herds of bison roamed, passenger pigeons flew, deep mysterious forests covered the mountainsides, and the rivers flowed clean. The world was un-owned, open, and abundant. And that was her destination, the vast fresh land that called her forward.
It was that way because of the people. They knew that they owed their friendly society, the security of abundance, and their limitless futures to the knowledge that the time to stop taking was when they had - just enough.
Science was precious and technology made life easier and more certain, but the most important thing was to know when you had just enough food, just enough shelter, just enough children, and then stop.
As long as they all remembered that, everyone would look on the world through lighthearted eyes.
The most respected people were the ones who seemed to have the keenest sense of ‘just enough’, especially in their dealings with other people, while inklings of greed in anyone were feared as a malignant insanity. If enough people started grabbing, then everyone else would need to grab too, to try secure an insecure future. And life would be mean and hostile, focused on grabbing first, hoarding and guarding, a ceaseless war of all against all, toward the ultimate end of a future of depleted resources and wasted lives. It would be a barren, hopeless life.
But as long as they did not succumb to the insanity of power, greed and fear life would be plentiful and secure in the present and for all the generations to come.
That wonderful land of just enough existed in the place without the serpent. It was serpent in the garden who had told others that they were only cheating themselves if they settled for plenty, and that, really, they should want more.
In the beginning was all, present, past, and future. And the all was without form. And it laughed to hear the sound of one hand clapping and unclapping, and never having clapped. And from the formlessness god created matter and energy, space and time, and the daemons of heaven were cast out to rule over the impotent domains of that which remained. And the universe crystallized, but the matter did not grow to fill it, thus was time given direction, and energy flowed downhill as a river.
And gods created the heavens and the earth, and it was good.
And from the mud it made life between the formless energy of the sun and the perfect still crystal of cold, in the dreamtime. And god created all the plants and animals thereof, and gods created man to live in delight in the garden of eden.
Desert and sea bounded the garden. Man ate of the riches of the sea and the earth. And the garden was peaceable for predators
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Wow. The malignancy of greed and fear. We should fear it, but instead we revere it. No wonder our planet is f*cked.
In strictly pedestrian terms, game theory says that a cooperative society is possible. The key to sustaining cooperation is that it must remain a fairly large portion of the population, so that the uncooperative remain deviants and not become the norm. Your description of the "greed dynamic" is crystal clear. There is threshold, or "tipping point", beyond which greed/ noncooperation will take over a previously cooperative society if left to its own dynmaic. In order to keep greed from establishing its own dynamic, there must be a negative feeback loop that controls it. One of the interesting things is that people is horizontal societies are in fact quite capable of nipping greed in the bud as long as the greedy can be confronted face to face. Apparently that feedback loop doesn't work well in vertical socieites, or that it CAN work but we just haven't figured out how to do it. I'm neither a game theorist nor a sociologist so I don't have even an inkling of an answer for that one.
Archaelogy tells us that it is possible to have a large, horizontal society that is apparently not driven by greed or fear. The ancient cities around Mohenjo-Daro are engimas to us, begin large and technologically developed (for the time), well-planned and equitable habitations without temples, ramparts, armories, city goverment buildings etc.
Sorry to hijack the thread, but your dream sparked a LOT of thoughts. It's interesting to wonder where dreams like this come from when they are so far out of anything that one has ever experienced. I've enjoyed reading your dreams, I hope you post more.
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In the dream, the main reason greed, power and fear were not supported by society at large was b/c people lived socially secure, peaceful lives; & they understood that to be the direct result of the 'just enough' ethic.
It's not like they didn't feel anxiety (how much extra should I plant to be secure in the face of a bad season or two?), or that they didn't understand the drive to have more than others, or to exert power over others. It's that they understood if those ethics took root and became the driving social dynamic, then all their lives would be ruined.
Once something like that happens, I'm not sure how it can be reversed. I liken it to the toxic cold-war evolution in Australia's animals. While that path looks (ultimately) self-defeating, there doesn't seem to be a mechanism to reverse it.
Anyway, I'm glad you thought my dream was interesting.
PSQuote:
I don't think I made it clear, but in this dream, people followed the philosophy not b/c it was the right thing to do, or b/c god told them so, or b/c they figured it might help out someday, or even b/c they didn't feel the seductions of otherwise. They followed it b/c the great quality of their life, and their heirs, was a direct consequence of it.
. In order to keep greed from establishing its own dynamic, there must be a negative feeback loop that controls it.
Nearly everything I know I learned by the grace of others.
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