Well of course the difference was just that it was the next day, a different day to the shot before!
Ha-ha, I’d never insult your sense of humour like that.
Actually the difference wast here was no wake in that shot, because we had stopped! The engine had a ‘problem’ and so we wallowed in the big blue going nowhere for 3 hours! The ship’s power was taken away and Nature decided to show how vulnerable we could become: The current took us sideways over the ocean floor, but the ship ‘wandered around’ in an 80 degree to 80 degree, sleepwalk swagger going nowhere relative to the ocean surface. The reduced noise brought up dreams of the ‘sound of sail’, but with two big generators still running the natural silence of sail reminded me we don’t have the silent luxury of Zero Point Zero, solar power!
It took 1 hour for us to ‘glide’ from engine off to the zero knots you see on the control panel picture.
Here are the guys working at flat out, ‘Time is Money’, speed on No 7 cylinder’s leaking injector. Of course no more money for them, but also importantly, no less! And this ‘time’ giving no more for ‘the boss’! Their time urgency just focused on minimising his downtime ‘time’ losses! There’s the capitalism system for ya, hey:
The ‘workers’ have no risk the boss has ‘it all’.
Sometimes ‘he’ wins, but in taking the risk ‘he’ can also lose. In trying to minimising his loss, and having a stable wage in line with their mastery, the workers ‘should’ only be motivated by their journey to increasing their mastery. To be the best at what they do.
The right ‘bosses’ will eventually provide ‘them’ with the extrinsic rewards for their valuable mastery, but the real prize for them is their personal power in their journey of ever increasing mastery.
This is how it should work, but with the gaps between ‘Management’ and ‘worker’ salaries, and the elite and the non-elite at unprecedented levels this risk reward system seems to have lost its once magical balance.
On the surface this may seem like an alignment with Nature’s system, which works on ruthless ‘natural selection’, where the strongest ‘wins’. However like slavery, apartheid and colonialism as one looks deeper, it has a fundamental difference, a human dark side that cannot reconcile Humanity with Nature: ‘Our’ inability to restrain ‘our’ never satiable Greed. Greed for Power, Wealth, Consumption, Novelty, etc, etc in the context of our increasingly unnatural world! Seemingly all aimed at a goal of ‘happiness’, or finding the illusive gate to the ‘path to happiness’?
In all my wanderings on the surface of this planet, I have never seen one example of Greed in Nature or any of its huge number of ‘pieces’. (Taking an anthropocentric perspective, I’m partitioning humans from Nature for this)
I have seen moments of what appears like a greedy feeding frenzies, territory takeover conflicts, etc,: However on reflection these were always temporary, and at most seasonal or a bit longer but not spanning generations like humans are exhibiting. It is only in humans too that the evidence of greed and our inability to restrain ourselves is pervasively self-evident. Over the years, to my utter dismay, I have had many people literally say to me:
“To be greedy is to be Human, that’s what differentiates us Humans from Nature’s others”! Wow, man!!!
I have never seen another ‘creature of nature’ which is not fully and pristinely presented in all its nature given capabilities, and being capable of intensity over all these capabilities. Those that aren’t don’t last long….. The law of Nature! In this consistent presentation they almost seem to know that greed will bring an imbalance: An imbalance that would seemingly take them off their purpose of intensity, and intimate belonging to ‘their system’.
I have never seen evidence of a striving for happiness in Nature? All I have ‘seen’ is rather just vibrancy in living intensely in its Grand Adventure. An adventure that requires each to resist the temptation to nurture some capabilities at the expense of others in pursuit of an ‘outside-team’ goal like happiness or whatever. That would lose their place in Nature’s System and the purpose linked to ‘adventuring’ in its Grand Adventure.
We aren’t fish, elephants, trees, insects etc, we are humans, so yeah maybe we can or were supposed to be different. My sense is we are only as different as a human’s capabilities are specific to our humanness, but our belonging requires us like all other creatures to ‘just’ live intensely and across ALL those capabilities. (The pursuit of Intensity vs Happiness is something that will be the subject of Posts in the future, so if you have comments please fire them off…)
Finally!!
I can tell you that as I write this I have huge emotions coming up, from huge inspiration, excitement, hope to anger and despair. Knowing ‘we are all’ to blame, because greed is so endemic in society, I challenged myself to all my own ‘Greed interfaces’ and how I’m using them, or they are using me? I realised that sometimes that greed is as simple as taking something not because I really need it but because it’s for free! The internet is full of this, almost a new freebie culture: Maybe the next level of moving us towards less conspicuous and more socially acceptable type of greed. I’ll explore this in another post, in my use of the free offerings of Facebook, Google etc.
Knowing there is a capitalist motive behind the free service I sense it will confirm there is a price to pay for this freebie greed. Maybe we as the ‘greedy members’ of The Crowd’ of these big sites are paying a huge One Point Zero price in unknowingly being channelled towards new and newer anthropocentric novelty. Yet further and further away from the real intensity of full human participation creature in Nature’s Grand adventure!
‘Quote’ for The Day
“The proposal has been that no effective restoration of a viable mode of human presence on the planet will take place until such intimate human rapport with the Earth community and the entire functioning of the universe is re-established on an extensive scale. Until this is done the alienation of the human will continue despite the heroic efforts being made towards a nigh benign mode of human activity in relationship to the earth.”
This excerpt from Thomas Berry’s book, ‘The Great Work’ is hugely inspiring.
Howard, interesting stuff. But surely, if we have to wait till people are completely transformed, before the earth can be saved, then is not earth doomed? Is it possible to convert people on such a grand scale as to make them free of greed? There must be another way than the one proposed by Berry. We will talk about this.
Yeah Imi, as you know there are quick un-selective traumatic interventions, but these result in broken societies. Maybe this is inevitable and is the prophecy of many religions. I have met many religious followers who say their faith even predicts the Apocalypse, and sadly their way of dealing with it is to ensure they get everlasting life, and the rest of us are destroyed in its destruction. This type of belief doesn’t help humans deal with a human belonging with the planet. Lastly Imi, you are one of the few people I know who in going blind had an almost instant and very radical transformation, and have come through it with a new success. I’m hoping you can teach us your lessons….