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To survive the 21st century, everything must be reborn—our politics, our culture, our values, our very selves. The West’s altar of ego is crumbling, and in its place we need something greater—not some feel-good slogan or half-baked sentiment, but a grounded, gut-level belief.
Call it a universal humanism.
So are you ready to be born again?
Stir up your soul with these firebrand notes from the mental environment . . . see how you feel.
T


The easy thing to do right now is pick a side. To let darkness get me all stirred up, convince me I know who’s right, put up my dukes and deny the humanity of the wrongdoer. But isn’t this line of thinking what leads to all bloodshed?
I’ve done too much wrong myself to be playing this game. How can I make these kind of judgments without weighing my own actions on the same scales?
I am trying to live a different way. One where, even if I find it difficult, I don’t just love my neighbors, I love my enemies, too.
Love is the ultimate revolutionary act — a beautiful paradox. Though it always protects, it does not dishonor others. Though it keeps no record of wrong, it also doesn’t delight in evil. Though it delights in truth, it is also slow to anger. Love is not the feeling TV, movies, or romance novels are selling. That’s just passion, and passion doesn’t last.



Mindbomb



There are secrets to be revealed. Epiphanies to be had. Ways to opt out of corpo-capitalist mindfuck.
But to do it, you'll have to understand what Friedensreich Hunderwasser meant when he said,
"The straight line is godless and immoral."
Wait, what? Which straight line? Why immoral? And what's with the "g word" dropped in there like a dog on the dinner table.
Yet for some reason it sticks. It gnaws at your belly. It keeps popping up in your mind. When you reach for your phone in the morning. While brewing coffee. Chatting. Walking. Shopping. Eating. Canoodling.
And one day it hits home. You. Us. This. What you've come to.
The straight line is godless and immoral.
You have become a slave to your head.
The Modernist Project introduced logic, certitude and stability. Capitalism added layer upon layer of false consciousness. And then your smart phone rammed it all home.
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Now your neurons are fried. You've lost your empathy. You realize how cold, calculating and unfeeling you've become. Your humanity is buried under the numbing glow of a screen, the crushing weight of your credit card debt, the foreboding gloom of a heat dome.
You realize how prophetic Hundertwasser really was.
So you pivot.
You shut off the phone.
Every morning, you go to the mirror, take off your clothes, stare at yourself for five minutes.
You let the collars on your shirts fray, share your space with spiders. You learn to eat and drink and shop and live and love and think in down-to-earth new ways. You revel in the messiness of everyday life.
You step off the godless and immoral straight line and learn how to wobble again.
— Kalle Lasn
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It's been said that if you want to become truly wise, you have to make yourself a fool to the world's wisdom.
Everyone's born with an innate understanding of this. But then we grow up and get tangled in the straitjacket of what you might call conventional wisdom: The world is a big, ugly, dangerous place, with serious problems that require a serious mind to navigate. So we learn to fear mistakes and stop trusting our gut. We become prisoners to dogma and reason — jaded enemies of naiveté — and before we know it, we die long before we're buried.
To a kid, such sense is nonsense. They haven't yet forgotten what being alive is actually all about: Curiosity, wonder, and awe. Effortless play and ticklish joy. Radical trust and unconditional love. The deliciousness of watermelon on a hot summer's day. The thrill of an evening firefly hunt. Daydreams and finger-painting. I think in our rush to grow up and take on the world, we rob ourselves of seeing what a profound and holy thing life really is.
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That's probably why Jesus taught us that if we want to see Heaven here on Earth, we have to make ourselves like little children. Why the Eastern philosophies echo his words: Taoists point to the Uncarved Block as the way and Zen masters see children as "little Buddhas".
It almost seems too easy, but living isn't about becoming, it's about being.
Maybe there's no such thing as "ready for kindergarten". Maybe the real problem isn't how well or quickly our kids develop, but our insistence that everything should develop linearly. My gut tells me we've got things backwards, and when it comes to cultivating true wisdom, instead of teaching our kids, we should be learning from them.
— Daniel Younger
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