What is Existence? Level 3
Existence is a role-playing game that serves to educate people in the art of developing sustenance. It is a viable education system that could be useful as a replacement for the current failed public school system. The earth changes that are coming will alter the frame of reference for life, such that we may have to rebuild our civilization from scratch. The sets of practical skills learned by playing the game are applications of community development. Each person tracks his or her hours spent on task as a form of currency, which are banked in the community energy bank.
This focus on time exchange allows each person to contribute time in an equivalent fashion, no matter what his or her current skill level. The value of the time spent changes as a function of the significance of the work. Everyone works on developing personal survival skills and knowledge in context of continuing existence, which is applied to building a central resonance structure. The game Existence builds harmonic community learning centers, where application to life is the featured task.
What is it that we expect of our schools? Schools have traditionally taught a way of thinking, having the obligation of training youth into adult society. The mission is one of transference of knowledge, based on the accumulation that has gone on before us. Our obligation is to bring the status of thought into the 21st century.
Current schools do not provide youth with this type of training. Instead we get conditioning to the way that it is, a society of consumers that make non-essential choices to promote an ever-expanding economy. In the legal system, corporations have the rights of people, without the obligation for compassion that most people carry. We have learned secular humanity; people have their own personal spheres of interest and everything external doesn’t really matter. Technology has become the end all and people today live in fictional worlds of their own construction, battling artificial demons and turning their backs on most other people.
Recent discussions suggest that the fall of the house of democracy is in short order. The current system has built winners and losers based on political power and deception. Schools have been ‘dumbed down’ such that individuals are trained as cogs to be ground by the wheels of the society – each has a niche where passage from cubicle to video screen is interrupted only by a fast food stop on the drive home. Drugs are readily available; legal prescription drugs pack a lot more psychological wallop than illegal street drugs. Pharmaceutical companies take advantage of the federal food and drug administration and patent law to indoctrinate the masses.
In this regard, intelligent people have begun looking for alternatives. Public schools have an agenda that does not allow for the type of freethinking that is necessary for building new civilizations from the corpse of prior ones. Basic skills that have taken the populace through centuries are passé. Current schools of agriculture teach a high tech form that requires designer seeds of genetically modified organisms that demand pesticides and chemicals that impact environmental security. The media hypes this as an advance. When corporations patent seed stock and remove free use, this does not encourage the ability of local communities to feed us.
If the current transit system were to stop tomorrow, how long would it take for grocery shelves to be empty? How many people are prepared to cope with growing enough foods to feed their own family, none-the-less their local community? In what manner would we house ourselves, clothe ourselves, ensure access to clean water and fresh air? These are questions that need to be dealt with on a local basis, by people that consider their own survival seriously.
There is a need to change mechanisms of thought, to prepare for a future that is not provided. People are not meant to be cogs in a wheel of corporate bluster – but unless we teach ourselves to think through situations and look at alternatives to the current way it is, we are doomed to a collapse that will set back humanity for several ages. We simply could not get there from here, at the current level of applied knowledge and distribution of resource.
To this end, the Universal Sovereigns of the Living Earth have formed a small collective in Southern Oregon. Our goal is to introduce a hands-on method for keeping people involved in creating their own infrastructures. The focus is on harmonic living – providing group knowledge of agriculture, animal husbandry, cloth making and food production that will sustain us in the event of a systems crash. The more time we allow for getting started, the better off we will be in the long run, although we are well past the time that we should have launched this effort. We hope that other freethinking groups in other areas have also made this discovery and that thousands of people are creating their own ways of coping – a built in redundancy that nature tends to provide in forest ecosystems.
In fact, the forest ecosystem provides the current model for the Existence game. Each forest has quite a bit more going on than we think. When we bother to sit down and notice the happenings, we are always fascinated by the way that the right materials happen to get to the right places, where they are required on a timely basis. There is more to the forest than the trees. There are lichens, mosses, fungi, critters, forbs, brush; each has their specific roles in the distribution of life through the others. Every species plays a part in the transport of matter and energy – the four elements of air, earth, fire and water dance through the game of life, providing structure and guidance.
Our goal as sovereigns is to provide stewardship as a normal facet of everyday life. We hope to settle into an intentional community, a tribe where people can be together living and working, rather than divided into individual cubby holes as modern nuclear families. We plan to revive spiritual community through the concept of service learning, where each member of the group serves as both a mentor and a student, providing different values into the group based on their perspective and knowledge.
To this end, we have a grid of sixty-four game board based on sacred geometry concepts that arise in many different facets of current life. Both Vastu and the I-Ching have found basis in this grid system. Vertical themes are paired with horizontal skills, so that each square on the grid combines a skill/theme set into a single picture. Each square represents an interest area within the group focus; folks that wish to learn this area would negotiate into a time exchange. The medium of this exchange is barter with an hour card. Your hour of learning is compensated for by several hours of application to the tasks you are learning. The community energy bank would collect the time information and make the value available in several different exchangeable forms.
To internalize the process, each community has its own community energy bank. Hour cards provide a portion of total value. Other forms of value include direct barter of good and services, in-kind donations of equipment and tools, elements and materials in practical forms, art and artifacts. When metals are available, we plan to coin our own geodesic currency based on sacred geometry. The five unique shapes would be tetragonal, cubic, octahedral, dodecahedral and icosahedral. The concept of banking would have to be limited to a non-profit arrangement, as compound interest would slowly created a vortex where the bankers own all the money.
In order to join the collective, a person with interest defines their current abilities, in terms of what they know from experience and the formal study that they have undertaken to get to this point in their life. The interest level in applying what they already have learned to the group orientation will be taken in perspective by the other sovereigns and applied to a specific task that is currently underway. Once the stable circumstance of keeping alive is covered, each group would be able to diversify its task. Several working groups within the grid structure might combine to co-create a more substantial working effort. There are many different spins on the types of projects and learning endeavors – the more diverse the approach, the more likely that the results will produce significant new value to the entire community.
The current basis of knowledge involves the application of science to answering the questions of life, the universe and everything. Recent history has discovered a pattern of ideas that build upon themselves. These ideas undergo significant changes as they are applied in a practical sense. Society has deemed that one set of rules is more efficient for everyone to use; alternatives pathways are discouraged. The burden of proof for a new idea requires a demonstration of result prior acceptance to a hierarchy that is vested in the current ideas and closes the system to new ideas.
The volume of people has exceeded the capacity of the system; the result has been to shift the burdens of life to slavery of humanity. The result is a society that favors economy over ecology and social structure. This three-legged stool does not function well with legs of different lengths. The current distribution of wealth is skewed based on modern industrial age history – the world no longer works by the science models of Newton and Copernicus.
What we picture is a shift in the basis to a fiber-based local economy. A hemp and flax economy would provide raw materials for food and clothing. People have different interests that can be combined in a format that allows for options in the approach. Learning systems that are based on one person of knowledge telling other people how and what to do are destined to failure, generating the individual frustration of not being able to produce the expected results. Mathematics provides a basis set for the direction of ability; a portion of the populace that doesn’t count still understands much of math intrinsically. Just think of how music works in the harmony of the spheres.
One of the first areas to approach is the topic of individual contests. If the group has a location where the games can take place, then the objective of each competition would be to build an item or device that would remain at the site to provide the community with a good or service. This would initially focus on creating matter or energy.
Alternative energy approaches that currently get people self-sufficient and off the electric grid are extremely important in this sense, as each community wishes to be independently functional after system collapse. Acquiring solar panels, water wheels, windmill designs and hardware that allow grids of batteries to be charged for use should be a primary concern.
For agriculture, the idea would be to get started building seed stock immediately. Since growth is climate dependant and climate change is occurring rapidly, it is imperative to grow things that thrive under the current conditions in the location chosen. It is also important to consider the storage of those materials through the following winter. If there are crops that have exchange value, then having a place where they can be traded for materials that are not local can be arranged. Initially, it is important to assess the capabilities accurately to be able to support the infrastructure with as few outside inputs as possible.
The initial starting conditions will be limiting to the ability of each group. We will be able to acquire materials under the current consumptive system only as long as this system holds. There are so many people that will be unprepared for the devolution of society, that security might be a key concern. Choosing roles within the group will help allow the group to function; people with significant roles need to train replacements for themselves as a primary course of action. This would not be a duplication of effort, just a fallback such that there are no gaps in the structure that are dependent on individual rather than collective efforts.
This is not a communist collective. Each person is expected to pull his or her own weight in some aspect that adds value to the sum of the community effort. The thought process is only a single aspect of the learning system; each person has to provide goods or services to others in the group. This is cataloged through the hour card concept. One model for the system would be that of Galt’s Gulch from Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. Persons doing the best for themselves within the group organization contribute full effort and are rewarded based on the fruition of those efforts.
To play this game, come visit Discord, come to the radio room with your mic off - at 10 am EST on any weekday. The theme is developing the game in a live action role play radio show environment. Please leave reality at the door.
Highly rEsteemed!
Barbara Marx Hubbard passed away this week at the age of 89, a fibonacci number.