Originally published at TomDispatch.com
The Greeks had it right.  When you live on Mount Olympus, your view of humanity is qualitatively different.  The Greek gods, after all, lied to, stole from, lusted for, and punished humanity without mercy, while taking the planet for a spin in a manner that we mortals would consider amoral, if not immoral.  And it didn’t bother them a bit.  They felt -- so Greek mythology tells us -- remarkably free to intervene from the heights in the affairs of whichever mortals caught their attention and, in the process, to do whatever took their fancy without thinking much about the nature of human lives.  If they sometimes felt sympathy for the mortals whose lives they repeatedly threw into havoc, they were incapable of real empathy.  Such is the nature of the world when your view is the Olympian one and what you see from the heights are so many barely distinguishable mammals scurrying below.  The details of their petty lives naturally blur and seem less than important.

In the last week, we’ve seen -- literally viewed -- a modern example of what it means in our day to act from the heights, and we’ve read about another striking example of the same.  The website WikiLeaks released a decrypted July 2007 video of two U.S. Apache helicopters attacking Iraqis on a street in Baghdad.  At least 12 Iraqis, including two employees of the news agency Reuters, a photographer and his driver, were killed in the incident, and two children in the vehicle of a good Samaritan who stopped to pick up casualties and died in the process, were also wounded.

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[R]eality, or the world we all know, is only a description that has been pounded into you from the moment you were born.

The reality of our day-to-day life, then, consists of an endless flow of perceptual interpretations which we have learned to make in common.

I am teaching you how to see as opposed to merely looking, and stopping the world is the first step to seeing.

The sorcerer's description of the world is perceivable. But our insistence on holding on to our standard version of reality renders us almost deaf and blind to it.

When you begin this teaching, there is another reality, that is to say, there is a sorcery description of the world, which you do not know. As a sorcerer and a teacher, I am teaching you that description. What I am doing with you consists, therefore, in setting up that unknown reality by unfolding its description, adding increasingly more complex parts as you go along.

In order to arrive at seeing one first has to stop the world. Stopping the world is indeed an appropriate rendition of certain states of awareness in which the reality of everyday life is altered because the flow of interpretation, which ordinarily runs uninterruptedly, has been stopped by a set of circumstances alien to that flow. In this case the set of circumstances alien to our normal flow of interpretations is the sorcery description of the world.

The precondition for stopping the world is that one has to be convinced; in other words, one has to learn the new description in a total sense, for the purpose of pitting it against the old one, and in that way break the dogmatic certainty, which we all share, that the validity of our perceptions, or our reality of the world, is not to be questioned.

After stopping the world the next step is seeing. By that I mean what could be categorized as responding to the perceptual solicitations of a world outside the description we have learned to call reality.

The Teachings of Don Juan
by Carlos Castaneda

The ongoing and rapid collapse of the US and Global economy, far from being an abstract series of events, is being brought home forcefully and concretely to millions of people on a personal level with the loss of their jobs and consequent drastic reduction in their ability to not only purchase things they want for themselves and their families but even to purchase the basic necessities of life and obtain things they need.

A cycle pushing us into a self reinforcing deflationary spiral in which less and less people are able to support the dwindling economy with their purchases which causes even more job loss and less economic activity, and so on, as we saw highlighted in very sharp focus in How Bad? This Bad with the graph from Swampland compiled using Bureau of Labor Statistics numbers that:

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Cross posted at Blazing Indiscretions and The Peace Tree.

As Americans pursue Happiness today - on this most sacred of holidays - reveling in American exceptionalism, eating hot dogs, potato salad and ice cream, they also rage war to foster "democracy" in an occupied Iraq and Afghanistan:

When will they ever learn?

I first heard Where have all the flowers gone? in 1964 (remember Vietnam?) in my high school German class. Yeah, PP&M, Baez, Kingston Trio, they've all sung it, but Dietrich's extraordinary rendition is the best IMNSHO! Ausgezeignet! Pete Seeger preferred the German version rather than his English version; especially the lyrics. Seeger said often that the German version sings better.

Wann wird man je verstehn?

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