Burn, Learn, Return

This is the slogan I use to explain the process of the Relational Being Project.

Burn –

We have to burn most of what Civilization has taught us down to the ground. All the unhealthy practices, beliefs, behaviors, and ideologies have to go. This includes what we learn in school, the workplace, all institutions really, and all too frequently what we learned from our families. This is because even loving parents can teach us to accept the “world the way it is,” or to “sacrifice,” follow the rules, and not confront the authorities.

Civilization is empowered when we do that—it wants us to be fragmented, overly competitive, selfish, to “mind our own business,” and too often to accept cruelty, violence, and injustice. This isn’t easy work because it is deeply embedded in the sociocultural sphere (SCS), which is politics, economics, culture, society, values, and what I call the ideasphere—the persuasive writings of intellectuals or just direct propaganda.

A major tool of Civilization is to get us to think we are powerful individuals who stand on our own two feet, freely make informed decisions, and essentially seek to come out on top in most situations. I will be showing in my essays, blogs, and other parts of this website (see the Protestant Individual under the Theory tab) that this has a long history, but around 1500 CE we were upgraded into highly separated entities to serve God, country, empire, the elites, and civilizational prerogatives. The deepest irony is that we think we are independent, act on our thoughts and beliefs, and are empowered as we seek to optimize results for ourselves, but we are actually largely determined by the SCS and highly compliant.

Learn –

We not only need to unlearn so much, but we have to start learning precisely how we are manipulated. While I realize most of the readers here already have a sophisticated understanding of this, my contribution is to show how the structures of relational being (RB) suppression developed over the past 6,000 years in ways that are not at all easy to see.

Indeed, one of my constructs, Thought Regimes, has been active to a varying extent since 2350 BCE not by telling us what to think but by limiting what is available to be thought. This is vastly different and occurs in two ways. First, by shaping thought into forms that are always favorable to Civilization and elites; and second, by reducing thought itself so that it barely makes any sense. For example, since 1500 CE, thought has been made dualistic, rationally instrumentalized, scientized, quantified and mathematized, discretized and unitized, and eventually became little more than binary code. And by now we are essentially inferior to the end product—thinking machines.

Then we learn that underneath all that, Civilization is actively working to suppress our relational being and what makes us fully human. Injustice thrives when we are fragmented and separated from each other and the cosmos and whenever meaning is destroyed. The latter is so important that we must learn to restore meaning as part of fostering justice and reclaiming our ontological heritage.

Finally, we learn about RB, what it is, how our hunter-gatherer ancestors thrived with it, and that it is fortunately still available to us today. Indeed, it is always available once we see through Civilization.

Return –

That is when we can actually begin to engage in relational being again. We make several returns at once: to the way of life of our honored ancestors, to how we once were as infants, and to what we still experience from time to time in just being with animals, or in dreams, sudden realizations, and, not surprisingly, through the deaths of loved ones. But without an active and informed effort, we soon return to the values and patterns of Civilization.

Returning to RB must be done fully and finally for it to succeed. And it can only truly occur when our internal and external lives are continuously interconnected. We simply cannot return to relational being while failing to recognize and confront the injustice embedded in the world around us.

This path is not easy, but I believe very strongly—and based on a great deal of evidence—that it is the only way we can keep our species from destroying itself and give ourselves a chance to thrive again. Even if we don’t find complete success in our lifetimes, we still owe it to our descendants to put our all into this project.