FOUNDATION OF CIVILIZATION
My most precious knowledge has come
from walking with bared feet upon the Earth.
The establishment of any civilization, the manifestation of Evolution of culture, the entire delineation of power, is built upon the foundation of agricultural fecundity, whether directly upon it or distantly through the medium of trade. The application of continuous exertion to the soil in combination with resources, knowledges, tools, and past laboring, does achieve measures of subsistence far in excess of consumptive needs of those laboring, and is the production of the first and still foremost capital of humankind, the opportunity of those freed from immediate direct procurement of food to concentrate upon other pursuits. Rise of civilization thus depends upon an inducing of production of this capital, and, by exchanging for it as little as possible, upon subsequent appropriation of the surplus portion of that capital. The relation between those who are bound to the soil, supporting society, yet always subservient to the direction chosen by the establishment, and those who are released from this bondage, distinguishes the character of a particular civilization, as do the creations wrought upon that foundation, whether they be fabrication of a pyramid to monumentalize a pharaoh or existing nation states.
Real Capital of the world is the totality of resources of the world: land and substances thereupon, air and water and sun, and it is the remainder of past laboring and accumulations of knowledges, and it is the individuals upon the planet and their ability to work together, or alone, to whatever creativity or efficiency they might attain. Modern money, of paper and computer entry, is representation of power to command and to acquire that may be created, enumerated, and accumulated, ad infinitum; it only approximates and strives to be the tool by which is managed the portion of Real Capital that is representable —the appropriable as it is intermediated with laboring. If the entire quantity of this money were suddenly, magically, to become no longer in existence, the totality of Real Capital would be diminished by no more than the tinder value of the paper, but the sudden transformation, the disruption of existing organization, would be a chaos beyond contemplation.
The building block of Way that is the transcending of money is true community, but it does not exist to us. Nor can it become but through money, or extend into Way but through the massive movement of money. The direction of Evolution must turn away from the megalopolis, the construction and necessity of the pyramid and the state, toward transformation of the foundation. Humankind must be willing to share in the harvest of the field, to know the baring of the feet upon the moist and fertile soil, for the laboring upon which civilization is founded should be beneath the conceit of no one, at least a portion of the experience of all who claim wisdom — the lack of relation to the soil has generated a vicious mindlessness, a spiritual separation between humanity and the Earth of foreboding consequence; the momentum of culture must become a turning toward the soil that it has ever been the fleeing from. The pyramid will dissolve, if it does not collapse precipitously, only with the gradual subsidence of the supported population into the dimension of the foundation, the design of which must broaden and change toward the encompassment of the entirety of society, integrating in relation to it the entirety of social production: the ineludible concomitance of the transcending. There must become an expanding social impetus of cohesion and transformation able to profit in relation to the unincorporated remainder of the world, turning that profit toward the expansion of the transcending, substituting for the extravagance of materialism the fulfillment of communion of being, excelling at the management of representative capital and Real Capital, developing an internal economic functioning based upon comprehensive integration of human effort and energy utilization, creating increasing social wealth with ever augmenting conservation of petroleum, anticipating the changes to become rather than waiting to be driven by them, coordinating cooperation into an incomparable efficiency through assistance of computer technology, seeking ever the extension of degree of self-sufficiency through vertical and horizontal consolidation, realizing that our task might be one of generations, designing that which can globally prevail. Any collective task now performed could be done within the adequate realization of Way, but the process of achievement through free willfulness rather than the immediate compulsion of self-serving need, or greed, would cause to perish the superfluous and the evil that are now created or done only for monetary gain, the cause of increasingly inexcusable social inefficiency. Way cares not if proud cities do become deserted monuments, or if feet once clad in silk do toil in the field.
This existing culture utterly reflects the perception of consciousness as ego, the mortality of the flesh as opposed to the immortality of the selfness, the agedness of the stars. There is no rivaling wisdom than that man and woman aspire to live as if their lives were a veiled immortality, as if we are to be born again and again as the descendants of our sons and daughters, as if the entirety of humankind were bound eternally together unto realization of love pursued and immortality unraveled, for such is the revelation that is the Knowledge. There will be no becoming for humankind that is not created through its own endeavor, out of its own suffering and yearning; there is no place of the becoming but this endangered sphere and no course that will succeed if it be blind to the Many.
No need would there be for Great Change of Way if capitalism promised to evolve of its own impetus into an intelligence capable of sustaining well the entirety of the world. By its structural dimension the pyramid is contrary to the globalness of the world, seeking to forcefully maintain its consciousness of a center upon the remainder through an economic tyranny that is inextricably linked to military tyranny: this decaying center is the extreme exhaustion of Real Capital that is unwisely misaccounted for in the continuing expansion of money that it cannot function without: the apex of privilege, the plutocratic oligarchy, the establishment, by the nature of its own seeking, will fanatically try to drive the system in an unchanging direction into whatever immensity of chaos and suffering may become, and cannot accept limits to growth even when its participation within Evolution has been fulfilled. As the hardships mount and the alienation worsens for those of us who are unable to shield our spirit, the Way will yet beckon, to be pursued, to be born —for there is no motion of the Divine that does not become through our reaching toward It, to be then wrought upon Earth through our heart and by our hand.
--Morningthunder