for - webcast - youtube - Amrit - Sandhu - Ex-Buddhist Monk reveals secret Tibetan Prophecy happening right now! Dr John Churchill Psy.D - adjacency - bodhisattva's universal vow of compassion - Deep Humanity individual / collective gestalt - Ernest Becker - Book - The birth and death of meaning - This adjacency is discussed more in the annotations

summary - A very good interview - Interdiscplinary presentation of psychology and Buddhist ideas - When he spoke about the relationship between the individual and the group, an epiphany of my own work on the Deep Humanity idea of the individual / collective gestalt suddenly took on a greater depth - An adjacency revealed itself upon his words, between - the universal compassion of the bodhisattva - Deep humanity idea of the individual / collective gestalt - the Deep Humanity Common Human Denominators (CHD) as pointing to the self / other fundamental identity - Freud, Winnicott, Kline's idea of the self formed by relationship with the other, in particular the mOTHER (Deep Humanity), the Most significant OTHER

source - referral from @Gyuri

to - Karuna Mandala - - https://hyp.is/Ghid4JwcEe-PK7OOKz5Vig/www.karunamandala.org/directors-advisors

for - questions - collaboration literacy - Donna Nelham - to - book - The Birth and Death of Meaning - Ernest Becker -

questions - collaboration - Donna Nelham - These three questions are all related - To get to the root of collaboration, it is helpful to examine the roots of human psychology to understand the fundamental relationship between - the individual and - the group - In his work "The Birth ad Death of Meaning, Ernest Becker argues, citing other peers, that - the self concept needs to emerge for effective group collaboration to develop and - the self concept requires others in order to construct it - Hence, other is already implicated in the construction of our own self - In Deep Humanity terminology, we call this intertwingledness of the self and other the "individual / collective gestalt"

to - book - The Birth and Death of Meaning - Ernest Becker - https://hyp.is/40fZHv9CEe6bTovrYzF92A/www.themortalatheist.com/blog/the-birth-and-death-of-meaning-ernest-becker

adjacency - between - Ernest Becker - book - The Birth and Death of Meaning - Eastern meditation to interrogate sense of self - adjacency statement - Becker writes and speculates about the anthropology and cultural history of the origin of the self construct - It is a fascinating question to compare Becker's ideas with Eastern ideas of dissolving the constructed psychological self

existential isolation - evocative description - See David Loy's description of the same thing as the fear of our own inherent emptiness

quote - existential isolation - Nic Higham

• .But this other kind of anxiety was more like
  • a quiet, unintelligible terror,
  • a distant alarm bell,
  • an uncaused danger.
• It seemed more real and fundamental than any passing concern.
• Apparently arising from my innermost core,
  • existential anxiety was a lurking, menacing mythical figure.
• It hid in the shadows of my very Being,
  • coming at me from
    • everywhere and
    • nowhere.
• It wasn’t an entity but an inescapable mood
  • that cunningly evaded -reason and
    • remedy.
• It was
  • a constant undercurrent,
  • an impending nothingness and hollowness,
  • a strange intimacy with an enticing void,
• the cost of having a thumping heart and a free spirit.

reference - Ernest Becker - Denial of Death - https://jonudell.info/h/facet/?max=100&expanded=true&user=stopresetgo&exactTagSearch=true&any=denial+of+death - The Birth and Death of Meaning - https://jonudell.info/h/facet/?max=100&expanded=true&user=stopresetgo&exactTagSearch=true&any=the+birth+and+death+of+meaning - David Loy - https://jonudell.info/h/facet/?max=100&expanded=true&user=stopresetgo&exactTagSearch=true&any=david%2Bloy

for - stories - salience of adjacency- imagination - stories - futures - Ernest Becker - self - timebinding - symbolosphere - quote - Brian Eno - book - Citizens - Jon Alexander - Arian Conrad - citizens - not consumers

quote - Brian Eno

• The stories we tell
  • shape how we see ourselves, and
  • how we see the world.
• When we see the world differently,
  • we begin behaving differently,
  • living into the new story.
• When Martin Luther King said
  • “I have a dream,”
• he was
  • inviting others to dream it with him,
  • inviting them to step into his story.
• Once a story becomes shared in that way,
  • current reality gets measured against it and
  • then modified towards it.
• As soon as we sense the possibility of a more desirable world,
  • we begin behaving differently,
    • as though that world is starting to come into existence,
    • as though, in our minds at least, we’re already there.
• The new story becomes an invisible force which pulls us forward.
• By this process it starts to come true.

• Imagining the future makes it more possible.

• Sometimes this work of imagination and storytelling is about the future,

  • as in Dr King’s story.
• Art can play this role:
  • what is possible in art becomes thinkable in life.
• We become our new selves first in simulacrum, through
  • style and
  • fashion and
  • art,
• our deliberate immersions in virtual worlds.
• Through them we sense what it would like
  • to be another kind of person
  • with other kinds of values.
• We rehearse new
  • feelings and
  • sensitivities.
• We imagine other ways of thinking about
  • our world and
  • its future.
• We use art to model new worlds so that
  • we can see how we might feel about them.

comment - This is a really powerful writing from Brian Eno. - Storytelling is an exercise in - the imagination of alternative possibilities to our own reality. - Stories can become both - inspirational and - aspirational - They can paint a picture in our mind of - a fantasy - a world that does not yet exist - but that nonexistent but desirable reality can then serve as the goal for which we strive - Mapping Futures interventions is then, essentially an act of desirable, inspirational make believe, and mustering the resources to turn the fantasy into reality - Progress relies on design, the imagination of unrealities in vivid detail, - in order to turn them into realities - In doing this, it is not an act carried out in ivory towers, - but in the everyday life of every one of us - We are all engaged in desirable fantasies daily whenever - we decide what meal we will prepare or restaurant to dine at - which clothing outfit to wear today - what we plan to write or say next to another - Every decision we make as a choice between different future alternatives - When it comes to planning major future decisions, - we need to have as much detail as possible of the imagined future - The Town Anywhere project conceived by Ruth Ben-Tovin and employed in the Transition Town movement for many years fis an example of such a simulacrum - https://hyp.is/mqeCtAE_Ee-Yxleqg7GFww/docdrop.org/video/cRvhY4S94ic/ - It provides an artistic space for citizens to imagine a desirable fantasy that can be embodied, enacted and deeply remembered through the participatory and collective citizen act of creating a proxy of their future local habitat in the present, and exploring and momentarily inhabiting their simulacrum. - In this way, this compelling experience is like a branding iron, searing the memory deep into our memory, where it can help guide our actions to realize the desirable fantasy. - Couched within a citizen's FREEligion and FREElosophy we generically call Deep Humanity, an open source, open knowledge approach to universal raison d'etre for what it deeply means to be human, Town Anywhere can scale to fire up the imagination of citizens to co-create our collective future. - Town Anywhere, along with other citizen initiatives which I belong to that advocate healthy citizen power such as SONEC, Stop Reset Go, Deep Humanity, the Indyweb, Living Cities Earth and many, many others can emerge a human murmuration to drive the transition - https://hyp.is/go?url=https%3A%2F%2Fleemor.medium.com%2Fmesmerized-by-the-murmuration-on-human-potential-f4c9ffe06ffa&group=world - As Jon Alexander and Arian Conrad write here, we have to find the narratives that matter to us, where WE is the citizens. Other thinkers like Jose Ramos write along the same line: - https://hyp.is/go?url=https%3A%2F%2Foff-planet.medium.com%2Fdiscovering-the-narratives-that-matter-to-us-327958a2daec&group=world

for - earth species project - ESP - Earth Species Project - Aza Raskin - Ernest Becker - Book - The Birth and Death of Meaning

comment - what is it like to be that other organism? - Earth Species Project is trying to shed some light on that using machine learning processes to decode the communication signals of non-human species - https://jonudell.info/h/facet/?max=100&expanded=true&user=stopresetgo&exactTagSearch=true&any=earth++species+project - https://hyp.is/go?url=http%3A%2F%2Fdocdrop.org%2Fvideo%2FH9SvPs1cCds%2F&group=world

- In Ernest Becker's book, The Birth and Death of Meaning, Becker provides a summary of the ego from a Freudian perspective that is salient to Nagel's work
    - The ego creates time and humans, occupying a symbolosphere are timebound creatures that create the sense of time to order sensations and perceptions
    - The ego becomes the central reference point for the construct of time
- If the anthropocene is a problem
- and we wish to migrate towards an ecological civilization in which there is greater respect for other species, 
    - a symbiocene
- this means we need to empathize with other species 
- If our species is timebound but the majority of other species are not, 
    - then we must bridge that large gap by somehow experiencing what it's like to be an X ( where X can be a bat or many other species)

reference - interesting adjacencies emerging from reading a review of Ernest Becker's book: The Birth and Death of Meaning - https://hyp.is/go?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.themortalatheist.com%2Fblog%2Fthe-birth-and-death-of-meaning-ernest-becker&group=world

• Epoche
  • https://jonudell.info/h/facet/?max=100&expanded=true&user=stopresetgo&exactTagSearch=true&any=Epoche

for - quote - self esteem - self - adjacency - enlightenment - epoche - self-esteem - Ernest Becker

quote - The social environment is the only way we derive and validate our identities. The question may be “Who am I?” but the real question is “How are others supposed to feel about me?”

adjacency - between - Ernest Becker - epoche - self-esteem - enlightenment - Epoche - Epoche - phenomenological reduction - Symbiocene - Thomas Hagel - What's it like to be a Bat? - Deep Humanity - individual / collective gestalt - adjacency statement - It is fascinating intersection of adjacent ideas that the equivalency of these two questions brings up - These moments are as Gyuri talks about - having a dialogue with my old self - revisiting old ideas from a new perspective in which - more water has flowed under the bridge - The chain of discussions with my old selves began with a reading and physical annotation of Ernest Becker's physical book - The Birth ad Death of Meaning - It triggered a connection with Thomas Hagel's famous book - What's it like to be a bat? - But this connect-the-dot journey was kicked off by this morning's response to a Linked In discussion thread on the Anthropocene I've been having with Glenn Sankatsing of Rescue our Future: - https://www.linkedin.com/posts/glenn-sankatsing-7977711b8_anthropocentrism-paradox-or-theroot-of-activity-7185709152386654208-4E5t?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop - There the discussion focused on whether the Anthropocene is a term that is inherently biased since it is anthropomorphic. - Glenn used the example of a Rabbit's perspective of reality. This begged the question asked by Thomas Nagel. - Reading Becker's book and especially his discussion of human's cultural evolution of the ego construct being responsible for timebinding - creating a framework of time which we are all bound to, - it made me wonder about my perspective of reality vs my cat's perspective. Am I timebound and there are forever living in the present and always have a sense of timelessness? - If so, what are the implications? How do timebound organisms create an equitable symbiocene with other species that live in the eternal now? - What's also interesting is Husserl's phenomenological reductionism - the Epoche that suspends judgment - It raises these questions: - Does the Epoche also break timebinding? - Does it allow us to have a dreamlike experience during waking consciousness? - Does it allow us to enter timelessness and therefore share a similiar state to many other species?. - If we are able to enter such a timeless state, does it increase our empathy towards others fellow species?

reference - Phenomenological reduction - Epoche - https://jonudell.info/h/facet/?max=100&expanded=true&user=stopresetgo&exactTagSearch=true&any=Epoche

claim - Self is a social construct - Ernest Becker

for - book review - The Birth and Death of Meaning - Ernest Becker

Die New York Times illustriert ihren Bericht zu der Copernicus-Zusammenfassung der Klimaentwicklung 2023 mit zwei Infografiken zu den Monatstemperaturen der vergangenen Jahre und zu Temperaturen in den verschiedenen Regionen der Erde. Noch ist unklar, ob die trotz El Niño unerwartet hohen Temperaturen Signal einer Beschleunigung der globalen Erhitzung sind. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/09/climate/2023-warmest-year-record.html

Copernicus-Bericht: https://climate.copernicus.eu/global-climate-highlights-2023

Infografik: https://static01.nytimes.com/newsgraphics/2024-01-08-year-in-heat/395771e2-3b2c-4c16-a6a6-360735130222/_assets/chart-Artboard_2.png

Infografik: https://static01.nytimes.com/newsgraphics/2024-01-08-year-in-heat/395771e2-3b2c-4c16-a6a6-360735130222/_assets/map-Artboard_2.jpg

• for: adjacency - Thomas Homer-Dixon - Ernest Becker, terror management theory, immortality project

Die New York Times hat mehrere Klimawissenschaftlerinnen nach den Gründen für die außergewöhnlichen Temperaturen im Juni und Juli befragt. Zu den möglichen Ursachen gehört eine Schwächung des Jeststreams durch die globale Erhitzung. Diese Hypothese ist noch nicht bestätigt.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/27/climate/july-heat-hottest-month.html

• translation error

  • should be
    • ape-brained meat sack, taken from Elise's book

• comment

  • comparable to Ernest Becker's description of the human condition
  • in his book The Denial of Death
    • quote:
      • "Man is literally split in two: he has an awareness of his own splendid uniqueness in that he sticks out of nature with a towering majesty, and yet he goes back into the ground a few feet in order to blindly and dumbly rot and disappear forever."

• comment

  • the comparison is apt as one of the goals of transhumanism is to use technology to conquer death
  • From this perspective, we might argue that transhumanist aspirations have been with humanity for as long as medicine has intervened to extend life and human wellbeing

• This is a very broad and sweeping statement.
  • While I agree with it,
    • what does "learning how to die" exactly mean?
    • unless we know in details, we won't have an actionable strategy

// - This article provides an intersectional study of: - climate change, - collective action research - terror management theory / mortality salience - it explains the beneficial impacts of non-rational relational ontology and recommends the use of ritual practices based on this as a way to promote pro-environmental behavior

//

!- intrinsic fear of death : strong role in creation of a self illusion -Ernest Becker, David Hume, Shanti Devi all regard death as a major reason we create the self illusion - Becker cliams we reify the self as a bulwark against the terror of death - the fear of death is deeply wired in us - the story of a self allows it to posit a symbolic form of eternal life, hence resulting in immortality projects - we know we have fallen under the spell of the illusion of self when we can be insulted, when we get angry, when we feel shame - it is these affects which establish a self, hence why the self imputation is so strong and difficult to dislodge

!- similiar to : Mortality Salience - grieving of the loss of a loved one - grieving the future loss of one's own life - Ernest Becker is relevant - Denial of Death, Death Terror !- aligned : Deep Humanity

• Social system currently dictate the overall direction of the Anthropocene.
• Voting, as a collective process within social systems enables the majority of votes to determine the collective action outcome of members of a social system.
• The final vote can be determined by a number of factors such as power, access and knowledge.
• In societies with large inequalities and political power assymetries, voting does not always lead to collectively beneficial results.
• Further, some social institutions can be harmful to individual and collective wellbeing.
• For example, authoritarian regimes are a prime example.
• Terror management theory (TMT) holds that there is a preponderance of social institutions that encourage psychological death denialism, an action that can lead to chronic psychological damage that can manifest in pathological social behavior.
• https://hyp.is/go?url=https%3A%2F%2Fernestbecker.org%2Flecture-6-denial%2F&group=world

Adam Smith thought that there were two sides to us, one side is our concern for SELF, that gets what it needs to survive but the other side is our empathic side for OTHERS, we cares for the welfare of others. His economic design theory distilled into THE WEALTH OF NATIONS was based on the assumption that these two would act in a balanced way.

There are also two other important and related variables at play that combine with Whybrow's findings:

1. Death Denialism (Ernest Becker) A growing meaning crisis in the world due to the waning influence of Christianity and significant misinterpretation of most religions as an immortality project emerging from the psychological denial of death

John Vervaeke's Meaning Crisis: https://www.meaningcrisis.co/all-transcripts/

Glenn Hughes writes about Becker and Denial of Death: https://hyp.is/go?url=https%3A%2F%2Fernestbecker.org%2Flecture-6-denial%2F&group=world

1. Illusion of Immediacy of Experience Jay L. Garfield explains how philosophers such as Nagarjuna, Chandrakurti and Dogen have taught us to beware of the illusion of the immediacy of experience that consists of two major ways in which we mistaken conventional, relative reality for intrinsic reality: perceptual faculty illusions and cognitive faculty illusions. https://hyp.is/go?url=http%3A%2F%2Fdocdrop.org%2Fvideo%2FHRuOEfnqV6g%2F&group=world

The essay closes with a critique of the subject / object mind / body framework that now dominates modernity. Socrates, Kierkigaard and Becker's claims, when seen through the lens of Cartesian modernity, are relegated to the margins. materialism denies any legitimacy to such claims. Recent 4E cognition is an attempt to push back on this. Hughes notes that:

"In his last book, Escape from Evil, Becker wrote: “Hubris means forgetting where the real source of power lies and imagining that it is in oneself (37).” "

Here we find Kierkegaard, Becker and Socrates all in agreement. Both types of inauthentic existence involves running away from death and disallowing the fact of our own death from penetrating into consciousness, and avoiding our human existential condition.

This also prevents us from reaching the next stage of moral catharsis. Denial of death lay at the center of human inauthenticity.

Hughes closes by saying that an open embrace of life structured by death is embraced when perishing and non-perishing meaning co-constitute our conscious existence. This is similar to the Buddhist principle of the middle way and the Stop Reset Go maxim:

To be or not to be, that is the question To be AND not to be that is the answer

This is a good summary of Becker's findings concerning denial of death. * Mortality is an existential, perennial and persistent threat; * It generates a persistent anxiety, even terror; * We devise both individual and cultural ways to escape awareness of it as a means to deal with it; * Death denial is one of the basic drives of individual behavior; * One of culture's principal roles is to help individuals avoid awareness of mortality; * Suppressing awareness plays a crucial role in keeping us sane and functioning; * These cultural methods Becker calls "immortality projects" and they are powerful narratives that keep the fear and terror at bay; * This self-deceit comes with a high price, however, as we may not be truly convinced of the narrative and it can cause hatred, ingroup/outgroup and conflict;

• Title:THE DENIAL OF DEATH AND THE PRACTICE OF DYING
• Author: Huges, Glenn
• Date:?

Yes, long overdue!

Coming to terms with potential near term extinction of our species, and many others along with it, is a macro-level reflection of the personal and inescapable, existential crisis that all human, and other living beings have to contend with, our own personal, individual mortality. Our personal death can also be interpreted as an extinction event - all appearances are extinguished.

The self-created eco-crisis, with accelerating degradation of nature cannot help but touch a nerve because it is now becoming a daily reminder of our collective vulnerability, Mortality salience of this scale can create enormous amounts of anxiety. We can no longer hide from our mortality when the news is blaring large scale changes every few weeks. It leaves us feeling helpless...just like we are at the time of our own personal death.

In a world that is in denial of death, as pointed out by Ernest Becker in his 1973 Pulitzer-prize winning book of the same title, the signs of a climate system and biosphere in collapse is a frightening reminder of our own death.

Straying from the natural wonderment each human being is born with, we already condition ourselves to live with an existential dread as Becker pointed out:

"Man is literally split in two: he has an awareness of his own splendid uniqueness in that he sticks out of nature with a towering majesty, and yet he goes back into the ground a few feet in order to blindly and dumbly rot and disappear forever."

Beckerian writer Glenn Hughes explores a way to authentically confront this dread, citing Socrates as an example. Three paragraphs from Hughes article point this out, citing Socrates as exemplary:

"Now Becker doesn’t always emphasize this second possibility of authentic faith. One can get the impression from much of his work that any affirmation of enduring meaning is simply a denial of death and the embrace of a lie. But I believe the view expressed in the fifth chapter of The Denial of Death is his more nuanced and genuine position. And I think it will be worthwhile to develop his idea of a courageous breaking away from culturally-supported immortality systems by looking back in history to a character who many people have thought of as an epitome of a self-realized person, someone who neither accepts his culture’s standardized hero-systems, nor fears death: the philosopher Socrates."

"Death is a mystery. Maybe it is annihilation. One simply can’t know otherwise. Socrates is psychologically open to his physical death and possible utter annihilation. But still this does not unnerve him. And if we pursue the question: why not?–we do not have to look far in Plato’s portrait of Socrates for some answers. Plato understood, and captured in his Dialogues, a crucial element in the shaping of Socrates’ character: his willingness to let the fact of death fully penetrate his consciousness. This experience of being fully open to death is so important to Socrates that he makes a point of using it to define his way of life, the life of a philosophos–a “lover of wisdom.” " "So we have come to the crucial point. The Socratic catharsis is a matter of letting death penetrate the self. It is the acceptance of the perishing of everything that will perish. In this acceptance a person imaginatively experiences the death of the body and the possibility of complete annihilation. This is “to ‘taste” death with the lips of your living body [so] that you … know emotionally that you are a creature who will die; “it is the passage into nothing” in which “a corner is turned within one.” And it is this very experience, and no other, that enables a person to act with genuine moral freedom and autonomy, guided by morals and not just attraction and impulses."

https://ernestbecker.org/lecture-6-denial/

Mortality salience for the masses - operationalizing terror management theory (TMT) and Deep Humanity BEing Journeys that take individuals to explore the depths of their humanity to make sense of the times we are in will play a critical role in contextualizing fear of death triggered by unstable circumstances and ameliorating these fears with the wisdom that comes from a living comprehension of the sacredness of our life and eventual death.

It is clear that through such a massive and unprecedented transition, a whole being approach must be adopted. This means dealing with the inner transformation of the individual in addition to the outer transformation. The hyperthreat increases the attention to each individual's mortality salience, their awareness of their own death. As cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker noted in his "Denial of Death", our fear of death is normatively suppressed as a compromised coping mechanism. When extreme weather, food shortage, war, pandemic become an unrelenting onslaught, however, we have no escape from mortality as the threat to our lives will be broadcast relentlessly through mass media. Inner transformation must accompany the outer transformation in order for the general population to emotionally cope with the enormous stress. Deep Humanity (DH) is conceived as an open praxis to assist with the inner transformation that will be needed for mental and emotional well being during these trying times to come.

This is a profound observation that shows how our collective species death over deep history shapes the universe. From a first person experience of reality, however, does it makes us feel that the universe is intimate? The universe is a grand dance and we are part of that dance. Ernest Becker's Mortality Salience looms large. How do we feel meaningful in the face of our mortality? How do we alleviate the perennial meaning crisis?

This underscores the critical nature of dealing with the cultural shift of luxury lifestyle. It is recognized as a "hot potato" issue, which implies policy change may be slow and difficult.

Policy changes and new legal tools are ways to force an unwilling individual or group into a behavior change.

A more difficult but potentially more effective way to achieve this cultural shift is based on Donella Meadows' leverage points: https://donellameadows.org/archives/leverage-points-places-to-intervene-in-a-system/ which identifies the top leverage point as: The mindset or paradigm out of which the system — its goals, power structure, rules, its culture — arises.

The Stop Reset Go (SRG) open collective project applies the Deep Humanity (DH) Human Inner Transformation (HIT) process to effect impactful Social Outer Transformation (SOT). This is based on the inner-to-outer flow: The heart feels, the mind thinks, the body acts and a social impact manifests in our shared, public collective human reality.

Meadows top leverage point identifies narratives, stories and value systems that are inner maps to our outer behavior as critical causal agents to transform.

We need to take a much deeper look at the pysche of the luxury lifestyle. Philospher David Loy has done extensive research on this already. https://www.davidloy.org/media.html

Loy is a Buddhist scholar, but Buddhist philosophy can be understood secularly and across all religions.

Loy cites the work of cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker, especially his groundbreaking Pulitzer-prize-winning book: The Denial of Death. Becker wrote:

"Man is literally split in two: he has an awareness of his own splendid uniqueness in that he sticks out of nature with a towering majesty, and yet he goes back into the ground a few feet in order to blindly and dumbly rot and disappear forever. It is a terrifying dilemma to be in and to have to live with. The lower animals are, of course, spared this painful contradiction, as they lack a symbolic identity and the self-consciousness that goes with it. They merely act and move reflexively as they are driven by their instincts. If they pause at all, it is only a physical pause; inside they are anonymous, and even their faces have no name. They live in a world without time, pulsating, as it were, in a state of dumb being. This is what has made it so simple to shoot down whole herds of buffalo or elephants. The animals don't know that death is happening and continue grazing placidly while others drop alongside them. The knowledge of death is reflective and conceptual, and animals are spared it. They live and they disappear with the same thoughtlessness: a few minutes of fear, a few seconds of anguish, and it is over. But to live a whole lifetime with the fate of death haunting one's dreams and even the most sun-filled days—that's something else."

But Loy goes beyond mortality salience and strikes to the heart of our psychological construction of the Self that is the root of our consumption and materialism exasperated crisis.

To reach the wealthy in a compassionate manner, we must recognize that the degree of wealth and materialist accumulation may be in many cases proportional to the anxiety of dying, the anxiety of the groundlessness of the Self construction itself.

Helping all humans to liberate from this anxiety is monumental, and also applies to the wealthy. The release of this anxiety will naturally result in breaking through the illusion of materialism, seeing its false promises.

Those of the greatest material wealth are often also of the greatest spiritual poverty. As we near the end of our lives, materialism's promise may begin to lose its luster and our deepest unanswered questions begin to regain prominence.

At the end of the day, policy change may only effect so much change. What is really required is a reeducation campaign that results in voluntary behavior change that significantly reduces high impact luxury lifestyles. An exchange for something even more valued is a potential answer to this dilemma.

Colin and Raquel have both pointed this out already, but I think this line is worth adding to the conversation. The idea of transforming kids so they become "elements of the new aesthetic landscape". I want to make a direct (and maybe uncomfortable) reference here to schools. I think in a very similar way, schools work to mold students so they might become "elements of the school aesthetic". This not only edits some students out who they can't get to conform, but takes agency away from all students in deciding how school might best work for them.

Would Becker be a good citation here? Would Becker agree with this statement?

This seems to reflect Becker's discussion of evaluation in apprenticeships and work settings - progress is made as the learner is ready and success is immediately observable. Practice and evaluation occurs repeatedly and practically, includes human relations too

Connection with Becker - assembly line instruction teaches students what they need to learn to be the cogs in the machine, not necessarily the content the teacher is trying to teach.

Connecting to the idea of a "safe space" in Social Justice, museums are a safe space for learning - supportive and nonjudgemental

Reminds me of Becker's discussion on low-risk testing and evaluations

This reminded me of Becker's discussion of evaluations in apprenticeships: learners be evaluated repeatedly as they are ready, and that progress is immediately observable (pp. 99-101). It also relates to the larger discussion of the mentor/teacher's role in learning, that they cannot learn for the learner, it is up to the learner to be successful.

Thinking of stories like this made me think back to Becker's provocative use of the word "myth." By using the word he located schools within the long tradition of mythology and storytelling. Essentially, mythology can be understood as just a tool to interpret the past and make sense of the present. Mythology isn't dead or static but is still a really radical tool if used to reinterpret and reconceptualize learning and schools and their relationships - which is what Lave and Wenger are attempting to do with LPP.

Made me think of: "The curriculum necessarily differs substantially from what competent practitioners of the skill or art in question know how to do"

This is similar to Becker...a tradesman may not become a master but it doesn't mean he's not a worker in the trade. Lave and Wagner stress mastery as a goal.