steelweaver

There Now Follows An Election Broadcast:

A farmer had only one horse, and one day the horse ran away. The neighbours came to comfort him over his terrible loss. The farmer replied, “Maybe, maybe not.” A month later, the horse came home bringing with her two beautiful wild horses. The neighbors came to congratulate him for his good fortune. “Such lovely strong horses!” The farmer replied, “Maybe. Maybe not.” The farmer’s son was thrown from a horse and broke his leg. All the neighbors came to console. Such bad luck! The farmer replied, “Maybe. Maybe not.” A war broke out and every able-bodied young man was recruited except the farmer’s son because of his broken leg. The neighbours came to congratulate the farmer. “Maybe. Maybe not.” he replied.

Acupuncture as Permaculture

A process as described is not the process as it exists;
The terms used to describe it are not the things they describe.
That which evades description is the wholeness of the system;
The act of description is merely a listing of its parts.
Without intentionality, you can experience the whole system;
With intentionality, you can comprehend its effects.
These two approach the same reality in different ways,
And the result appears confusing;
But accepting the apparent confusion
Gives access to the whole system.

Dao De Jing, Chapter 1, trans. John Michael Greer

The term “permaculture”, a contraction of “permanent agriculture”, was coined by Bill Mollison and David Holmgren to describe the ecological design philosophy they began developing in the 1970s. Permaculture has since grown to become a worldwide movement, with many thousands training in and applying its design principles.

Informed though it is by modern ecology and systems theory, Mollison has also specifically noted the influence of Daoism on its core philosophy; faced with the converging crises of ecological destruction, topsoil erosion, fossil fuel depletion and the unsustainable growth of population and industry on the planet, he sought to develop a form of resilient agriculture that would work “with rather than against nature,” one of “protracted and thoughtful observation rather than protracted and thoughtless action; of looking at systems and people in all their functions, rather than asking only one yield of them; and of allowing systems to demonstrate their own evolutions.”

Like the permaculturist, the traditional acupuncturist works with a complex ecological system – the human body. And, like the permaculturist, the acupuncturist tries to interact with that ecosystem in a way that is more holistic, more responsive and less crudely forceful than is common practice in the industrial world.

Indeed, many of the insights of systems theory – the interdependence of multiple functions and elements, for example, or the importance of recognising emergent whole-system patterns – are already embedded in traditional medical practices, and are second nature to the acupuncturist versed in zang-fu theory and the five phases. Given the shared core of Daoist philosophy at the heart of the two systems, it is not surprising that a comparison of the philosophy and practice of permaculture with that of Traditional East Asian Medicine reveals both familiar patterns and unexpected insights:

Observe and Interact:

In the spirit of Wu Wei, the first job of the permaculturist is to do nothing. By refraining from premature intervention, they gain the opportunity to observe the landscape and learn how it works – where rainfall flows, where the sun and shade fall, what grows well where, and how these factors change through the seasons.

The acupuncturist too makes themself quiet and passive in the initial encounter, trying not to impose their own ideas on the patient, but waiting for the truth of their being to reveal itself – and though they can’t wait for a year to pass before treating, a sensitivity to the temporal is indispensable: the patient will not be treated in the same way in the depths of winter as during a summer heatwave; one seen on a Friday evening not the same as on a Monday morning.

The permaculture principle, of course, is “observe and interact”, for it is in the small initial interactions that the permaculturist learns how the land will respond to larger interventions. In the same way, it is in the first handshake, the greeting, how the patient seats themselves, that the acupuncturist begins to intuit their patterns of flow and stasis; in the microcosm of the pulse-taking that they begin to build up a picture of the macrocosm of the patient’s health.

The Problem is the Solution:

In a complex system, problems do not arise independently, or from a single cause; rather they are the product of multi-factorial imbalances. Responses that simply attempt to suppress the surface manifestation of the imbalance rarely result in whole-system health. The permaculture approach is to recognise that what is seen as a ‘problem’ can be reinterpreted as a valuable source of information about excess and deficient resources in the system – and that the solution is to re-route and repurpose those resources to where they can achieve a productive yield.

This might mean turning ‘weeds’ into dandelion salad and nettle soup, or finding creative outlets for ‘excess’ Wood; recycling food waste by feeding it to the pigs, or encouraging surface heat symptoms to go inwards and nourish the core of the body. As my favourite permaculture aphorism puts it: “There’s no such thing as too many slugs; only not enough ducks.”

Making the least effort for the greatest effect:

In Tai Chi they talk of “four ounces overcoming a thousand pounds”. When the subtle rhythms and interconnections of a complex system are understood, interventions at critical points and times can cause powerful and widespread alterations in the functioning of the whole system. In a sense, acupuncture is already a manifestation of this understanding – the use of a small needle to affect the functioning of entire sub-systems in the body. But we can deepen our understanding by considering how the same idea functions in permaculture.

Rather than trying to force agricultural components into a pre-ordained structure, the permaculturist focuses on directing existing flows of energy and growth in the most productive patterns possible. Often, this requires a recognition that the ecosystem has a will of its own, and that attempting to impose an idealised pattern onto it will be counter-productive.

In temperate climes, for example, the ‘climax ecosystem’ the land naturally moves towards is old-growth forest. Industrial agriculture, in many respects, consists of continual efforts at resisting this movement towards forest; permaculture gracefully accepts it and works to subtly guide and modulate it to the benefit of both forest and human co-habitants. The result is a ‘forest garden’, where the diversity, resilience and efficiency of the forest ecosystem are used to grow high yields of edible plants with the minimum of effort and intervention.

So too, as healers, we must acknowledge that the system we are working with has an evolutionary will of its own. The pattern of integral health towards which it is moving may not match the ideal we have in our head. But in recognising that the human is a part of nature just as much as the forest, and that the same patterns of complex balance and growth occur in the two, we can remind ourselves to trust in nature’s capacity for self-healing and self-organisation.

Our job, lest we forget, is not to chivvy the obstinate patient towards a fixed notion of ‘healthy’ functioning – it is to remove obstacles to the system’s own self-regulation and to assist it in regaining its natural balance, such that it can manifest its own natural pattern of sustainable being.

Use small and slow solutions:

In permaculture terms, increased size and speed require more energy and more intervention. When the whole of the system is considered holistically, it can be seen that conventional agriculture actually reduces the efficiency, productivity and longevity of the ecosystem in exchange for quick, short-term gain.

Large, sudden interventions – like dousing a field in pesticides, or clear-cutting a forest for cattle-grazing – cause disruption to the system as a whole, often producing secondary problems that necessitate further costly fixes. Conversely, reducing things to their smallest and slowest viable form enables an ecosystem to operate more efficiently, and to retain more energy within its nutritive and energetic cycles.

Attempts to scale up permaculture projects to match the size and yield of large agri-business ventures rarely work well. The larger the project, the more the cost of the administrative and technological requirements, and the less capable the permaculturist is of remaining in close and responsive relation with the land and its dynamics.

Equally, acupuncture practices that ‘process’ large numbers of patients often lose touch with each patient’s unique dynamics. The logic of Capitalism exhorts all businesses to seek after continual and unending growth – but when an acupuncture practice grows too big, not only do the treatments suffer, but the simplicity of our practice can easily become entangled in the distractions of data-management systems, ancilliary staff and social media marketing.

Patients are often impatient; used to the industrial medicine model, they expect a ‘quick fix’, and we can sometimes find ourselves apologising for the incremental nature of our treatment. But perhaps we should be embracing this aspect of our practice; just as growing nutritious vegetables or building a house that will last for generations necessarily require a slower, more intensive approach, so too does the acupuncturist seek to enable long-term, sustainable health by making small, slow changes to the system of the body.

Context:

As the philosopher Ken Wilber said: “Everything is contextual – and there is no end of contexts”. “Permaculture” started out meaning “permanent agriculture”, but was later re-coined as “permanent culture”, as its practitioners began to realise that their agricultural philosophy could not be separated out from the social, the cultural and the political. Many people have since applied permaculture principles (which can be seen, after all, as a restatement of the universal patterns of the Dao) to businesses, relationships, communities and societies.

In the same way, it is easy for an acupuncturist operating in the industrial West to allow themselves to be restricted to being a mere needle-technician, whose therapeutic intervention begins and ends at the clinic door. But the holistic systems-thinking at the core of our practice makes it impossible to ignore the fact that every part of a patient’s life is implicated in their ‘condition’, and that the changes we make in the clinic can easily be overridden by lifestyle, work, relationship problems or a pathogenic environment.

Clearly, we need to be careful about our professional boundaries – we are not (most of us) trained nutritionists, ergonomicists or psychotherapists, and we should not assert ourselves beyond the limits of our competence. But nor should we allow ourselves to be overly influenced by the ruling ideology of specialisation and segregation, which is a product of the same linear, fragmental thinking that resulted in the mechanistic excesses and chemical reliances of Western biomedicine and industrial agriculture. Under its influence, many of our patients have lost touch with their innate capacity for holistic, whole-system pattern-recognition – but permaculture principles can be applied to their lives just as effectively as to a farm or a forest.

Zoning:

To take just one example of this: many patients need to do more exercise, or perhaps just some stretching in the morning; but the gym is on the far side of town, or their bedroom floor too cluttered to lie on, and so more often than not they end up just skipping it. Permaculture organises agricultural land into 5 concentric zones centred around the core living space, and advises that the jobs that need doing most frequently be located closest to the core; if the patients can be encouraged to organise their lives along these lines, so that distance and inconvenience no longer sabotage their plans, they might just manage to jog round the garden, or to roll out of bed onto that clear patch of floor and do their stretches.

In a more abstract sense, zoning is about efficient energy-management. Perhaps there is a particular relationship that is only marginally important to a person, but uses up a lot of their time and energy. Perhaps there are resources in a person’s life – people, activities, opportunities – that are ‘right under their nose’; easily accessible, but largely overlooked. If we are serious about helping a patient organise their energy in the most productive patterns they can, it makes no sense to just needle ST-36 every week while ignoring the energy-sinks in their wider life that are draining them on a daily basis.

Edges:

Finally, one of the most intriguing ideas in permaculture is the maximisation of edges. Recognising that diversity and fertility are highest in ecological transition zones like coastlines, tidal estuaries and the borders of forest and grassland, permaculture looks for opportunities to maximise these edge-areas on their own land.

This can be as simple as giving a pond a scalloped rather than a straight edge, or interspersing orchard trees with pasture land instead of keeping them in separate blocks; it can also mean valuing the fuzzy boundaries between concepts – between ‘crop’ and ‘weed’, for example – or seeking to retain the ‘edgy’ creativity of rundown neighbourhoods on the margins of cities.

There are many edges in the therapeutic encounter – how the patient enters and leaves the treatment space, the beginning and end of the treatment, the first contact of pulse diagnosis, the moment when the needle makes contact with the skin. Beyond the treatment room, there are the boundaries of how our practice interacts with other practitioners, with our local community, with the wider world, and how our professional role interacts with our ‘off-duty’ lives.

All too often we ignore these transitional spaces and focus on the more obvious blocks of space and activity. But by paying more attention to the edges of our practice, we might begin to see hidden opportunities, or allow our treatments to become more alive and responsive; we might enable our careers to support and be nourished by the rest of our lives, and our clinics to become more connected to the wider world.

(For more information on permaculture principles, see: http://permacultureprinciples.com/)

Genetic Hedonics

News is coming through that MPs have voted to authorise the creation of 3-person embryos.

You might be expecting me to comment on the science - how our knowledge of genetics is partial at best, how we can never fully predict the consequences of a move such as this, and how, once such genetic relations are present in the populace, they can never be recalled.

But plenty of people have pointed all that out already. Something else interests me:

There have been a number of people pushing for legalisation of these techniques on the basis that it would “stop the needless suffering of many children” (Polly Toynbee has already weighed in, claiming “this isn’t about three-parent babies; it’s about saving families needless misery” while this Rachel Kean person seemed ubiquitous on BBC news making similar claims). They often cite examples of families who have had children with mitochondrial disease and the stress and suffering it has caused.

But this is completely disingenuous. This technique will not help anyone already living - it applies only to newly created individuals. And no-one will be using the technique unless they already know that their child is likely (certain?) to suffer mitochondrial disease.

So what this is actually about is whether carriers of mitochondrial disease should be enabled, through artificial means, to have - surmisedly - healthy children, rather than abstaining from having children because they know they will suffer.

Keep reading

Some Saltire pun? Something about thistles? I don’t know.

Couple of quick thoughts on the Scotland thing. Looking over them, they mostly seem to be to do with canards and Failures of Think of the (media-reported) pro-independencers, but as the Yes campaign is actually doing a reasonable job of pointing out the equivalent idiocies on the other side, I’m sure it all balances out in the end:

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Exposure Levels

I really tried to ignore the whole thing. I did, honestly. But it’s just the plain weirdness of the phenomenon that got to me.

Let’s start from the beginning. As you may have heard, purported photos of lots of (female) ‘celebrities’ without their clothes on were posted on the controversial online community 4chan. Some of the individuals have denied the photos’ authenticity, some confirmed it but stated that they were private pictures that could not have been leaked, and that some form of active hacking must therefore have taken place.

So far, so tawdry, sleazy and immoral. Human beings like seeing pictures other human beings without their clothes on, particularly if they are human beings they have previously found attractive with some or all of their clothes on. But it’s good manners not to steal such pictures and share them indiscriminately against the individual’s wishes. On this much we can agree.

And then someone opened a new pack of gender-cards to play with. Step forward The Guardian:

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Faith Fool

Many people are allergic to the word ‘faith’; in skeptic circles it tends to be used in the sense of “believing in something in the absence of any evidence or rational basis for believing in it.” When non-skeptics say “ah, but everyone has a faith of some kind – yours is just in 'skepticism’ and 'rationality’,” they often respond with anger, vitriol and Richard Dawkins quotes.

I think there is a more useful definition, however:

We all accrue various fragmentary models of reality in relation to aspects of our lives as we go along. We may well think that we have good reasons for using these models, such that they become the default interpretive frameworks in their appropriate contexts – in which case, they can fairly be called 'beliefs’: I believe that the Earth revolves around the Sun (because I find the scientific reasoning behind that supposition convincing), and that societies work better when people better understand one another’s perspective (because many people have observed this throughout history, and because I’m a big old hippy), and that the best remedy for having put too much lemon in a dish is soy sauce (I worked that one out myself); but none of these beliefs impacts greatly on the others - they are, essentially, fragmentary and isolated.

Faith occurs when enough of these fragments of experience, perception and belief coalesce that they form an integrated ontology, a stable and unified way of relating to the world.* Such gestalt perspectives can still be examined and analysed using the same tools of reason, experimentation and contemplation that we often use to determine the validity of our fragmentary beliefs. However, the experience of developing such a gestalt feels very different to the individual – it is an experience of being immersed in a pool, rather than gauging the amount of water left in the kettle, or of being carried along by a strong tidal current, rather than judging the strength of flow from a showerhead.

The defining characteristic of a faith, then, is the sense of surrendering oneself to it; of accepting it not as just an owned fragment of knowledge but as a context that is fundamentally constitutive of one’s being and personality. This is, in essence, to say 'I do not intend to spend much more time questioning the validity of this overall approach – it has come to seem self-evident to me that it is helpful, meaningful and profound, such that I wish to live my whole life, and to engage the world, on the basis of it’.

Such a description can be applied to religious faiths of course (and I believe the above is a more accurate description of the way in which most people come to religious faith than the skeptics’ common assumption that people have somehow been tricked or brainwashed into accepting every dogmatic proposition of the religion in question) – but it is also an appropriate description of the place ideas such as 'rationality’ and 'skepticism’ can play in the lives of the non-religious.

*As we point out in the comments, we actually start out with this kind of integrated ontology, also known as 'just being’, before we start to develop conscious thoughts (and awareness of those thoughts). But we don’t really think of it as an integrated ontology, because we’re too busy sleeping and crying and stuffing our faces with rusks. Some people retain a sense of unified being into adulthood, which forms the basis of their religious faith. But for those of us who discover the joys of existential angst, it’s only after we’ve lost this kind of integration - and then rediscovered it - that we are consciously aware of the presence and significance of it, and are thus drawn to try to rehabilitate the term 'faith’ as something meaningful and valid.

Proverbial Cake Rant

“You can’t have your cake and eat it” has always annoyed me. You can’t eat a cake if you don’t have it in the first place, so presumably the phrase means “You can’t eat your cake and still have it afterwards.”

But why would you want to? It’s not like a wedge of cake can be usefully repurposed as a functional doorstop. There’s icing and that, but compared to chandeliers and Kandinsky prints, cakes don’t have any great ornamental value. It’s not like we look at photos of past cakes in our lives and say “I wish I still had that cake, to remind me of the good times”. The only viable function of a cake is to be consumed.

But if by “You can’t have your cake and eat it”, or even the marginally preferable “You can’t eat your cake and have it”, we simply mean “I wish I could eat this cake and still have it afterwards so I could eat it again”, we could have just started with more cake in the first place. Or just made another cake. We aren’t alotted a cake quota at birth allowing us to consume but a single cake once in our entire lives, such that the eating of it is a bitter-sweet moment of meditation on the mutability of all things. It’s a fucking cake.

In summary, this phrase is dumb.

Top environmental problems

greenknowing:

A quote from Gus Speth in the latest Common Cause newsletter: “I used to think that top environmental problems were biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse and climate change. I thought that thirty years of good science could address these problems. I was wrong. The top environmental problems are selfishness, greed and apathy, and to deal with these we need a cultural and spiritual transformation. And we scientists don’t know how to do that.”