The Ascent of Humanity

http://www.ascentofhumanity.com

Great (but loooong) ebook I'm currently working my way through, but have already benefitted from enough to recommend. It does possibly the best job of reconciling individuality and personal sovereignty with oneness and interconnectedness that I've come across yet.

The parts about profit and commoditization of all things, treating everything as being valuable only in terms of resources to exploit for personal profit, has struck some major chords with me. Long story short I realized that while I've tried to get away from that tendency in a lot of areas -- I was still treating parts of myself like employees in a corporation, who are given their objectives to meet, as well as an impersonal machine whose parts need constant attention and maintenance to function. When I started with metaphysics I found that basically every part of myself was doing something other than what it's designed and needed for, and the only thing I knew to do about that was to find a way to remove outside interference, force them to do their jobs, and then constantly, and consciously, manage them to make sure that 1. they stayed that way, and 2. nothing was sabotaging their ability to function.

In practice the result was that I substituted one form of interference for another -- mine, and while that got me out of a mess, improved things to a point and brought a lot of understanding on how various parts of myself work, it eventually hit a wall and could go no further. Once I came to a more animistic understanding though, that everything is conscious in its own way, rather than machine-like, and will find new and better ways to express itself within context without so much interference, my system started behaving less like a machine in need of an operator, and more like a team whose members are all conscious, passionate about their roles and willing to help each other. The mind went from feeling like it had to manage all systems, within and without in order to accomplish anything, to doing what *it* does best. That is, to interface with the world and provide immediate feedback and context to the other parts, identify problems as well as positive developments, and define a chosen direction, which the other parts can then take and decide how to incorporate into their approach.

I've been seeing a whole lot of good effects from this, and am excited to continue seeing what this means for the whole of myself within its broader context, as well as the context of the changing paradigm talked about in this book. The book has put into words a lot of things I needed to find a way to spell out at this time, so it gets the three thumbs up. :D