At least a few people appreciated this post. Is there some reason to believe we’re here just to cater for you alone? If so, please explain your reasoning. If not, then I’d suggest reading those you enjoy, and respect the rights of others who have different expectations/tastes/interests.

As editor, I’m fairly confident you’ve never been sent an invoice for our services in keeping you happily entertained. If you pay for a service and it doesn’t meet your particular, personal, subjective expectations, I could perhaps understand your expressing some dissatisfaction. But, as the case stands, there can be no grounds for complaint here. You don’t owe us anything, and, likewise, we don’t owe you anything. I could run posts solely covering the sex life of mushrooms, or on the inner workings of an accountant’s office, for the next five years, and you’d still have no grounds for complaint.

Submit the kind of articles you’d like to see in the world, and/or just read and respond positively on the posts you enjoy. That’s pretty much the way this works.

Huh?!? I get the impression that Craig’s post is all about “less demagoguery”…

It’s a pity this Qutb didn’t know about permaculture!

When I went to bed yesterday I came to think about that Permaculture is like the timeless way of living! Like a good building is made the timeless way, so is a good life, it cannot be made up, like ideologies. Just like a building that is not made the timeless way, it may seems spectacular, unique style, but in the end it has nothing to do with the quality without a name, it doesn’t respect the whole, it is not connected to true feeling for the whole. The same with a life not lived the timeless way.

This is what is unique with Permaculture; it is not made up like ideologies. No, Permaculture is a timeless way of living! And the strange thing is that when we live the timeless way, it not just makes our inner life whole, but it also makes our surroundings whole, the people and the nature around us.

Still, the timeless way of living is closely interacted with the timeless way of building. Because if our houses and our villages and our towns are not made the timeless way, there will be tensions in our environments that will force us to not live the timeless way, and hence our lives will not be whole.

The ideologies want to change the community from inside and out. The ingenious idea of Permaculture is just the contrary; Permaculture is to change the community from outside and in. This way the people will change the system, in contrary to ideologies where the system changes the people.

Permaculture, the timeless way of living!

Could this be a good slogan for the Permaculture movement? Maybe somebody should think this is living an old, primitive way of life? But, just like with the timeless way of building, this is not true! Any modern technology can be integrated in the timeless way of living, like it can in the timeless way of building, as long as it reflects the true nature of order. This quality of life is like the quality without a name. This quality has no trademark, it doesn’t make you rich, and it doesn’t make you famous. It just makes you whole.

I believe the ecovillage movement is a superior opportunity to unite the timeless way of living with the timeless way of building: http://www.squidoo.com/crystalwaters

Maybe there could be a chapter in the new “Sustainable (R)evolution” Book Project called “The Timeless Way of Living”? A chapter that explains Permaculture as the timeless way of living, and that shows the connection between the timeless way of living and the timeless way of building? This means the importance of introducing Permaculture in our environments to be able to introduce Permaculture in our lives, and vice versa.

See: http://permaculture.org.au/support-the-sustainable-revolution-book-project/

See the book “The Timeless Way of Building”: http://books.google.no/books?id=H6CE9hlbO8sC&printsec=frontcover&dq=christopher+alexander&lr=&cd=2#v=onepage&q&f=false

A living pattern language is even more. It shows each person his connection to the world in terms so powerful that he can re-affirm it daily by using it to create new life in all the places round about him.

And in this sense, finally, as we shall see, the living language is a gate. Once we have built the gate, we can pass through it to practice the timeless way.”

“The Timeless Way of Building” by Christopher Alexander, page 348-349.

All these ideologies, all these ideologists, all these illusions. Whether they call themselves liberals, communists, neo-conservative, Al-Qaida, The Muslim Brotherhood, it’s all the same, ideology. I’m so tired of it; I’m so tired of them. All they do is to destroy our world, every one of them. What matters is to make the world WHOLE, in balance with the nature of order, based on true feeling for the whole. We don’t need any elite for this, neither any kind of ideology. The only thing we need is a shared pattern language, a language in balance with our self and the natural world; hence it is a GENERATED language. Why ideologies are so terrible, terrible, and terrible dangerous, is because they are all FABRICATED, and every fabricated structure is lethal:

“And the fundamental answer is, that there is a fundamental law about the creation of complexity, which is visible and obvious to everyone – yet this law is, to all intents and purposes, ignored in 99 % of the daily fabrication process of society. The law states simply as this: ALL the well-ordered complex systems we know in the world, all those anyway that we review as highly successful, are GENERATED structures, not fabricated structures.”

From “The Process of Creating Life” by Christopher Alexander, page 180.

Still, the most lethal of all, even not purely to be named an ideology, is the rise of “the invisible hand”, this invention by Adam Smith:

”But, by contrast, in the early phases of industrial society which we have experienced recently, the pattern languages die.

Instead of being widely shared, the pattern languages which determine how a town gets made become specialized and private. Roads are built by highway engineers; buildings by architects; parks by planners; hospitals by hospital consultants; schools by educational specialists; gardens by gardeners; tract housing by developers.

The people of the town themselves know hardly any of the languages which these specialists use. And if they want to find out what these languages contain, they can’t, because it is considered professional expertise. The professionals guard their language jealously to make themselves indispensable.

Even within any profession, professional jealousy keeps people from sharing their pattern languages. Architects, like shefs, jealously guard their recipes, so that they can maintain unique style to sell.

The languages start out to being specialized and hidden from the people; and then within the specialties, the languages become more private still, and hidden from another, and fragmented.”

From the book “The Timeless Way of Building” by Christopher Alexander, page 231 – 232.

This is the work of “the invisible hand”, this is what happens when cooperation is replaced with competition, the beautiful pattern languages of our communities die.

What we must do now is to replace “the invisible hand” with “the visible hand”. The visible hand carries the name Permaculture, and this hand held a big pencil, a pencil which creates the most beautiful patterns upon the surface of our Earth, A BEAUTIFUL PATTERN LANGUAGE.

And, like everything that is GENERATED, this language must be made up from the TRUE freedom and discussions and works of the millions of individuals, NOT by any elite or ideology. Just like any other language throughout history, like English, or Norwegian.

A living pattern language is the true opposite of any illusions, because it is living nature, a reflection of the universe.

And, as I see it, Permaculture is the linguistic tool which through this language might become alive. Permaculture is THE GATE, and when we pass through this gate we shall experience the timeless way again:

“When we are as ordinary as that, with nothing left in any of our actions, except what is required – then we can make towns and buildings which are as infinitely various, and peaceful, and as wild and living, as the fields of windblown grass.

Almost everybody feels at peace with nature: listening to the ocean waves against the shore, by a still lake, in a field of grass, on a windblown heath. One day, when we have learned the timeless way again, we shall feel the same about our towns, and we shall feel as much at peace in them, as we do today walking by the ocean, or stretched out in the long grass of a meadow.”

“The Timeless Way of Building” by Christopher Alexander, page 549.

WHAT A WONDERFUL NEW WORLD, A WORLD OF PERMACULTURE!!!!

I’ll watch the others another time.
America – Home of the free, Land of the scared!

Why is this stuff not on mainstream TV…. ?

Ideologies does not exist, the only thing that exist is the true nature of order. This is what should concern our politicians!

http://www.daanspeak.com/TranscriptPowerOfNightmares1.html