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Spirals Work in Concert & The Belief in Words Disease

Spirals Work in Concert & The Belief in Words Dis-ease 

written sometime ago 

by John Kendall Graham

It remains my Life Purpose to be in educational relationship with my fellow human beings so that all of us can know more of the ways that we are all connected with energy and that it is through a knowing about its primary manifestation in the form of DNA, and an adaptation of that knowledge to our attitude formation, that we can, as a species, put an end to the chaos and strife with which we afflict ourselves in our everyday life, especially in our conversations.

The Great Enemy to this educational relationship has been what I call ‘The Belief in Words Disease, called this to at once describe a major cause for human division and the ways it manifests itself. The cause is the deliberate and systematic instruction by Establishment systems to accept as true what only exists because we believe it does. The manifestation is the words in phrases, clauses, entire sentences which many of us speak everyday and will not have crossed, contradicted or corrected without producing a feeling of dis-ease in  our body/mind.

‘Spirals Work in Concert’ (SWiC) is the antidote to ‘The Belief in Words Disease’. Developed from understandings of the ways DNA/RNA function as a message or language system, and much rehearsed when encouraging students in universities to be meaning-makers, promoting ecologically based businesses, youth focused projects and personal transformative coaching in a failed business of mine called ‘Living Advice for YOUR actions and reasons,  SWiC provides us with a choice to model our own communication in accord with Nature, and so free us from a necessary dependence on those culturally produced concepts, ideas and opinions, many of which are in themselves either false or obsolete, and either way can be clearly shown to have been among the most potent sources for our ecologically ruinous behaviors.

Perhaps the most blatant indicator of the ways human culture has invaded human nature is the condition of Civil War, where families divide against each other on account of the emotional and intellectual attachments members have to contesting ideologies. The Civil War in England during the 1640’s was the time/space chosen to investigate this phenomenon, to which I gave the appellation ‘the Politics of Words’.

A history of ideas from the perspective of a history of language events only heightened my awareness of the ways human living, including human death and misery, occurred in the context of words and the presuppositions imbuing their linguistic practice. Thought processes were manipulated to create internecine conflict by those trained in language systems who selected words which would produce the effect they desired in their readers and hearers. A society where people were emotionally vulnerable to the content and manner of speech could be easily aroused by words to atrocious actions, such as the killing of babies, the raping of women and the murder of boys and men. Torture, destruction of property, wholesale ruin of crops was part of the wicked mix of this politics of words.

Of course, as you would know from your own studies and professional work, this evil politics of words had been fashioned before the Seventeenth Century and has functioned since, and so it will forever if human life continues to be controlled by the Belief in Words Disease. It is that contagion which spreads as truths such lies as that there is ‘a ladder of success’, ‘a level playing field’, that ‘money makes the world go round’, that ‘biggest is best’, and that there are people who are born to rule and others who are born to serve.

The widespread acceptance of such notions and their adoption by people at  the cellular level of their being perpetuate the Rule by the Emperors of Language. It is the predisposition of people to believe IN such words that disallows their liberation from the system oppressing them. It is the ‘abyss’ from which Erich Maria Remarque, author of All Quiet on the Western Front, recoiled in fear with loathing:

I am often on guard over the Russians. In the darkness one sees their forms move like sick storks…They close up to the wire fence and lean their faces against it; their fingers hook around the mesh…. I see their dark forms , their beards move in the wind. I know nothing of them except that they are prisoners; and that is exactly what troubles me. Their life is obscure and guiltless; - if I could know more of them, what their names are, how they live, what they are waiting for, what are their burdens then my emotion would have an object and might become sympathy. But as it is I perceive behind them only the suffering of the creature, the awful melancholy of life and the pitilessness of men.

A word of command has made these silent figures our enemies; a word of command might transform them into our friends. At some table a document is signed by some person whom none of us knows, and then for years together that very crime on which formerly the world’s condemnation and

severest penalty fall, becomes our highest aim. But who can draw such a distinction when he looks at these quiet men with their childlike faces and apostle’s beards. Any non-commissioned officer is more of an enemy to a recruit, any schoolmaster to a pupil, than they are to us. And yet we would shoot at them again and they at us if they were free.

I am frightened; I dare think this way no more. This way lies the abyss.(128)

SWiC enters this abyss with a truth accessible to all and beyond refutation by ANY belief, that  ‘the abyss’, and its variants - ‘chaos’, ‘the void’ - are actually filled, replete, dense with a materially manifesting motion called ‘energy’ by some, ‘God’ by others, and ‘Spirit’ by others.‘Nature that hateth emptinesseAllows of penetration lessAnd therefore must make roomeWhen greater spirits come’ (Andrew Marvell, Horation Ode)

I consider SWiC to be one of those ¨greater spirits”, although, given that it is based on microscopic DNA/RNA, “greater” does not refer to size, rather to a closer approximation to a truth of nature.

The only limits to linguistic practice are those we set upon it. Language is a tool, an instrument with which we make meanings of the world. Language is ours to use and to guide us in the use of it there is a ‘language’ in nature, a ‘message’ that we are, each of us, unique and made so by the working of energy through the form of DNA/RNA. It’s the simple truth of being alive, it’s being unafraid of our own formulation, accepting of the natural beauty of it, saved from embarrassment and the charge of immodesty through knowingly acknowledging the elegantly simple working of the DNA/RNA, which made us as perfect as a rose.

Spirals Work in Concert offers a ’normal’ educational process by and through which this fear can be taken away through self-correction in the light of information which has passed both the tests any truth must pass to be accepted as true, that of feeling and that of thought, the ‘pre-literate savages’ in their formulation of certain Creation Myths and Objective Scientific Proof in the Control Cultivator that fills Fury in the Faculty Farms. In both places evidence of the energetic principle of nature can be gathered to be shown bearing traces of the spiral motion in their making.

That is why spiral shapes are prominent in much of these representations in all continents of Earth. That is why the many appearances of spiral shapes in so-called ‘Primitive Cultures’ are  ‘coincidental’ (qv), that is, did happen in the same time of illiteracy because the making of spiral shapes – lines with openness – are the closest our Culture/arts/ artefactual life can come to the motioning shape of Nature…and we were much closer to Nature in our consciousness when The Great Serpent came into life to explain Creation than when Watson and Crick published their paper in ‘Nature’ in 1953. For one thing it was at Kings College where the custom was not to engage in semi-naked ‘dreaming’ as has been the practice of the researchers/teachers/elders of anyone of the 250 language groups and 600 dialects spoken in the Australian continent before its European invasion. At Cambridge, even Cambridge, they did their version of this sort of ‘dreaming’ work… with clothes on.

The event of the ‘discovery’ of DNA got quickly caught up in the cloak and gown world of Trans-Atlantic academic rivalry before entering with the White Coats of laboratory bound geneticists to be made into formulas, like Pythagoras’s Theorem, on the basis of replicable experiment, to be patented so that they individually or their Corporate Funding Bodies, like Monsanto, could lay ownership to the entire food chain. The thinking supporting this appropriation seems to be that if you find out how the spiral works then what it makes belongs to you. A scary proposal, especially when DNA research has been given the legal cover of ‘intellectual property’.

In Pythagoras’ time it was different, which is good for us who have come to rely on it in the construction of anything requiring a reliable, as in true, measure of what is and what is not a right- angled triangle. If Pythagoras behaved the way DNA science does, then he would own every building with corners ever built. The ‘Pythagoras Patent’, had an enterprising Greek thought to take one out, would surpass ‘Microsoft’ in acquisitive amplitude, and have less justification than Bill Gate’s has for monopolizing Information Technology.

After all, right-angled buildings had gone up for centuries before Pythagoras gave the right -angle geometrical prescription. He just put it down on paper. The workings Pythagoras described was done by other men and women.

So how much more audacious is it to see claims being made to own information about the ways spiral works by those ‘mapping the genetic code of Life’? These are people with a known track record for forgetting the Human Context (Nuclear Bomb/Einstein) when they are deeply immersed in the parochial, self-centered absorption of their experimental work. Having ’mastered’ the Force of Fission without any single or collective nation or corporation securing sole ownership of it, successful attempts have been made to take possession of information which, if only figuratively, can put the world into a paper cup. We can actually map out what makes Life happen, this being the Force of FUsion .

Guided by this map we involve ourselves in experiments of making new life out of existing living things in a test tube. In the Wrong Hands this could very well launch humans into the Entropy, held as true in some Philosophy and certainly underlying a lot of New Age Healing/Teaching, that the universe only exists because we think it does, that the tree over there isn’t really there if I don’t see it. We believe entities into existence (e.g. “In the Beginning was the Word, the Word was made Flesh and dwelt amongst us”) and ignore to extinction what’s already here, and so the Amazon disappears while books from the distribution publishing house also called ‘Amazon’ supplies orders for books on Ecology ordered by people in front of computer screens ‘inter-facing’ over the Internet, caring enough about the environment to buy books by Sir David Attenborough or Professor Suzuki. Neither of these good men have advanced on Gregory Bateson whose Mind and Nature, especially its post-script challenge to Academe, has been left for Insignificant Senior Lecturers in History to bring against those who’d straiten the idea of ‘Education’ enough for its spiral implication to be hidden, perhaps forever.

‘Education’ qv.educare ‘to lead forth’, educere ‘to lead out’, a spiral line, has now become a process to get a diploma for jobs which exist or don’t exist in an increasingly close connection with movements of money which doesn't exist on the Futures Market..

The Entropic principle to which I return has now data to demonstrate its truth. Can’t we make Tomatoes? Can’t we make Sheep? We only don’t publicize the making of Human Beings because it has not yet passed enough Ethics Committees, although as they do allow hot-branding of Sea Lions in Antarctica, it won’t be long before our consumption based economic rationalism will accept the idea that the natural procreative activity can be substituted for the artificial one.  The outcome – now called ‘the product’- is the same. A Human Being, human life itself getting assimilated by Rampant Capitalism, with the fetus and born dead babies selling in shops for between $70 and $80: bottled, they are, in screw top jars, bought for cooking with a fried egg for breakfast.

Sea-lions, humans - God’s Creatures are these, Humans Notably, made notably so by those who speak this way and in the speaking make ‘God’ exist as the ’Creator’, a line of thought leading on to the entropic principle that things only exist because we think so, and not otherwise. Philosophers, New Age Mendicants of the Re-incarnation Order, who argue this way often are in the forefront of the movement which deconstructed ‘God’ to be an extension of human thought into a universe without a god.

So if ‘God’ can be shown not to exist, or to exist only in our thought form and as shaped into languages, all of which are context specific, all of which can be shown to be serving contemporary needs (many of which were very other than ‘godly’ in the sense of ‘goodly’), like getting the Corinthians to accept Christianity by asking them “to believe ALL things” and then, when Christianity got Established as the Orthodoxy, changing that bit of  Scripture, taking it out so the infiltration and subvert policy Paul was following when using it in Christianity’s Struggle to join in what we might call today ’the Belief Making Industry’. Then the call was ‘to believe all things”. Later on, as its Stocks improved and their Market Share expanded, the Church made the shift from Greek Promiscuity to Roman Monogamy – the one true and universal Church, worshipping the one true almighty God. In this altered circumstance “Believe all things” had to go. So it did. But the idea of God being the Creator of The Earth and all that therein dwells did not and has not died.

Nor should it either – the idea of God, I mean, the feeling that there is an order to all of the universe and that in discovering what it is and how it works we can extend and expand our chances for happiness; this idea does belong with us. It is a true idea. It is just that by using ‘God’ as the descriptor of it leads to a confusion of tongues, a hopelessly disparate array of fundamentalisms all asking the single favor from us, to believe and so to never get to understand the God ‘who’ (never ‘what’) made it all happen.

The personal pronoun indicates that we imagine there’s a Person out there tucked away in all the appearances of ‘God’. If that is so, and there actually be a God who is He and a Goddess who is She, then whenever they do get discovered I bet they will be the collectivity of the people who believe and their feelings, thoughts and actions.  I’d just rather worship the real thing living with me, giving praise to the principle of Life she unfolds as I unfold mine – a consanguinity of purpose, a marriage, an Eternity Relationship and a description of humanity as ‘a cellular family in molecular motion’. For this I’m asking that ‘God’ be understood as Energy, and to agree that ‘energy’ describes something existing whether or not we believe it, and that this cannot be said of ‘God’. For ‘God’ to exist we must believe.

In English there is a ‘lie’ in the middle of’ believe’. The same disclosure cannot happen in other languages, such as the Spanish “creer”, yet “creo” is often put to the same deceiving purpose.

If a conclusion to this writing can be given, then it would go something like this: Don’t Believe in Anything unless in Everything. Why? Because we have put the world into words, some of them being words about words, others being words about things. The first sort require belief in them to give them an existence. The second sort don’t because the things to which the words refer exist whatever word we choose to name them.

ZONE ZERO ZERO

Zone Zero Zero

by

John Graham

Permaculture Conference

Roseworthy Agricultural College

Adelaide

1995

I

Zone Zero Zero is a description of the place where all living things make their meanings, which is upon their surfaces and within.

This place is where all that is known (and knowable) about the idea of life can be discovered. That discovery will include the knowledge that nothing living can be ever fully known and that the reason for this is that everything living is always changing.

Zone Zero Zero is the place where this understanding is achieved and which Permaculture expresses on the outside of the human body in Zones 0,1,2,3 ,4 - perhaps more. And always - work.... and then infinity - more work, endless work – this being the characteristic of the universe where everything is always at work changing.

The changing is a process of work differently expressed through every species of living thing. It is the recurrences of those expressions that allows for the uniqueness of every living thing to be classified into types and species. Thus we know there to be 'birds', 'insects', 'plants', 'animals', 'wind', 'fire', 'water' and 'land'. And through this naming, or classification, we can easily move away from Zone Zero Zero, where all is energy in different forms and none of those forms have a name.

The activity of naming can lead us away from knowing this and so from knowing that the reason why everything cannot be known is because everything is changing. And this can happen because of the reasons we have for using names, including the idea that by naming something we know it. The act of naming certainly includes the well developed thought that to name something gives it meaning. 

This thought is true if we are clear that the meanings we make by using names belong with us and the names we use and not to the things we make meanings of by using names. The thing we call 'a gum tree' has meaning however we name it and whether or not we name it. This is true because that thing and all other living things obtain their meaning through the process of nature which made them, not through the names we give to them or the words we say about them. Their meaning is life. Life is their meaning. And life came before language obtained its life.

The life of language began in the human desire to make meanings of themselves in relation with  nature. In the beginning was not the word. This idea is simply false and was made up by people - some kind, some cruel - who wanted us to accept their view of the world as true. The view that in the beginning was the word is not true and can only be true through believing it to be. There are many truths like this and most of the ones I can think of have been actively detrimental to human living for at least three reasons: (i) because they were practiced (such as the truth that God made us to subdue the earth and to have mastery over His creation),  or (ii) because they weren't practiced (such as to love one another) , or (iii) because the people who questioned / challenged / or contradicted the basis from which such truths derived were punished often unto death.

It is the third of these reasons which points to the difficulty of organizing human living on the basis of words in which people are asked to believe. People will not always do what they are asked to do, they will disobey, and sometimes have better reasons for disobeying than for obeying orders that derive from a system of belief in words.

Given the deplorable waste of human life and ecological damage which has resulted directly from the practice of fideistic word-based systems and from attempts to enforce them, and given the existence in nature of a system specifically designed to secure self-interested co-operation between its component parts, including humans, then it is simply inefficient not to have such a system replace the other. When it is pointed out that the transition from one system to the other is in fact a transition from something cultural to something natural, from something haphazardly developed by human intelligence in ignorance of and/or in defiance to recently acquired knowledge about DNA, then when an idea derived from DNA is presented to people they will have a choice that they do not currently have.

II

I hope that all this is obvious to the reader who might be wondering why it should be stated. The reason for stating the obvious in such an obvious way is to obtain assent that it is obvious before proceeding. For once agreement is given to what has been written, then we are all positioned to agree with what flows from it, which is that through the use of language humans have allowed the names they have given to things to obtain a reality equivalent to the things they have named. It is as if the medium has become the message, that so entwined have the relations between words and things become that it is impossible for some people to distinguish one from the other.  

This has happened inside people's heads, in their mental worlds and they have let that world replace the other world, the world of things, living things with sap in them like the thing we name 'a gum tree', the world where things have no names - Zone Zero Zero.

This is the way humans got to imagine themselves as "masters of creation in the sense of being above it" (Mollison, 1991, 6) and it is also the way humans imagined that being 'masters of ' or being 'above'  anything was a true description of their actual relations with nature. It is no doubt a true description of the relation with nature that they desired to be somehow or another 'in control' of their living in the world which began in circumstances so far distant from the ones allowing for literary activity that it is only when we go into the bush or face the fire, drought or flood, that we get to experience again what it would have felt like back then before language when life was in the main as Hobbes described it - "nasty, brutish, pernicious and short", a time when humanoid was animal and had yet to formulate life-support systems which made a Permaculture possible.

This was the time when what we now call speech was a grunt and was not a suppressed activity. This was the time when air moved in and out of the body as water through the gills of a fish - a natural flow: breath in to feed the body with oxygen; breath out for other uses which were thought convenient, like the exchange of information through a code called language. This was a time so long ago that the idea of a written system of laws was in the distant future, and when the concerns for survival were so pressing that there was no need to insist upon the distinction between names and things.

It would have been known then, as a matter of course, as something so obvious that it actually did not require speaking about, that the meanings of nature are always other than the names we give to its living things.

III

Forgetting this difference between words and things has produced errors in human thinking about our relations with nature that have in turn produced human actions that threaten to sever forever our connection with nature.

One such error, perhaps the greatest of all blunders in human history, was to believe in something without believing in everything. As Bill Mollison is at pains to show, this is an error that implicates Permaculture. For is it not against 'the idea of superiority over nature' that Permaculture has set itself? And did not this idea of superiority get promoted and sustained through a belief in a God who made the world and inhabited it with humans - specifically males - to be "masters of creation"? Is not then the philosophy of Permaculture in opposition to systems of belief in words many of which name things that have no existence beyond a belief that they do and for which reason remain hidden from the "protracted and thoughtful observation" Mollison recommends for Permaculture practice? To all these questions the answer is 'yes'.

Yes, people have confused the names they give to make meanings of things with the meanings belonging to the things they named. Yes, these meanings - the meanings of things and the meanings we make of them through words - have always been different and so they will be forever. Yes, 'CAT' is not a cat. Yes, the world is not a 'text' we're here to read. It's dirt we're here to weed, when weeding is appropriate. And isn't that all the time in some gardens usually where there is premium worship to the god or goddess of neatness?

This is not so in the gardens of knowing gardeners. They know about what makes plants grow and what to call a 'weed' without letting the word  'weed' take-over as the reason for the choice to take out or leave in what is growing there in the soil, including, so we say, 'weeds'.

Q.V. WEED: a herbaceous plant not valued for use of beauty, growing wild and rank, and regarded as cumbering the ground or hindering the growth of superior vegetation; an unprofitable, troublesome, or noxious growth; a poor, leggy, loosely-built horse; a lank, delicate person without muscle or stamina.

The ways we allow all, some or any of these meanings of 'weed' to influence our choices to weed and what to weed and what we do with what we weed out of the soil will depend on what we know about the meanings belonging to it - to the soil, I mean, which is not where the word 'weed' comes from.

This word 'weed' comes from us - as does all language and other symbolic forms into which many of us have tried to stuff the living planet, the universe itself.

IV

The ‘stuffers’, the ones who have put the world into words and got us to believe in the words, are fussers about words, and who do what they can to confine us within their linguistically defined imaginations. These are usually the ones working with dictionary definitions of 'weed' in their heads.  Such people will be allowing the culture of 'weed', it's so-called ‘life in the language’, to determine the feelings and thoughts people have for actions that actively intrude upon a natural process.

Weeding is such an action. And that action can get tied to particular species of plants in such a way that weeding becomes the action of removing plants not conforming to an idea of beauty or ecological function much too much influenced by the considerations of the intending weeder who, even as I write and even as you read, is setting out to weed, usually armed with an implement, so that their gardens may be seen to be in line with the prevailing horticultural fashion, and so that they - the gardeners or, even more so, the ones paying others to do it - can consolidate and improve their status in the social pecking order, being an order that puts a premium on neatness and being rid of 'weeds'.

This is the order that thinks of weeds as rank and noxious without knowing the weed to be an indicator of soil health, soil values. The values operating in the body of the person in the act of weeding often come from mental spaces populated by entities derived from language and not from anything that grows in the soil or from the soil it grows from.

In these ways language can disconnect us from Zone Zero Zero. Our culture can split us from our nature. Our cultural selves can be at odds with our natural selves, and will be whenever the former is out of kilter with the latter. And whenever that discontinuity happens, it is our culture (values, beliefs, practices, etc) that needs adjustment. Nature is the only Permaculture that is permanent and this is so because it is permanently changing. And this can't be known without learning about energy and so recognizing, as both stupid and ecologically disastrous, the idea some of us hold dear that by naming something we obtain some power over it, that we can control it. Such ideas confuse the truth that there is a difference between names and things and that there will be always something else to learn, another meaning to be made of the energy of our making.

V

The energy of our making I've called 'Spirals Work in Concert' (SWiC), which is Permaculture on the inside of ourselves working in relation with whatever is going on outside of ourselves. This is Zone Zero Zero; well it's what I mean when I use it. 

That zone is energy in its material form when in its truly energetic state. We'd call this state "raw", "primitive", "open", "active", "involved" to distinguish it from the state of living we'd call "cooked", "mannered”, "closed", "passive", "I couldn't really be bothered". This disengaged, indifferent, covered state is not the truly energetic state functioning all the time in Zone Zero Zero. In this Zone living is "exposed" - like the writhing turnings you will see whenever forking over a well-prepared worm culture.

Those knowing of the originating meaning of 'culture' will know that worm culture is worms at work. Those knowing of the motion of energy will know that worms at work is an example of energy at work and so will also know that 'culture' and 'work' are in a tautological relationship - saying the same thing, producing nothing (see, Gregory Bateson, Mind and Nature ). It is our observings of the worm doing the work that we get to describe by using words, words like 'culture' and 'work'. These words, in and of themselves, add nothing at all to the activity they describe. 

It was to describe this activity - the activity not requiring words - in a way that made sense to me, that I invented 'Spirals Works in Concert' and explicated or unfolded meanings from it. In this way I could show through words the ways these thoughts about words and their use belonged with what we have done with words and how what we have done with them has separated us from our life source - energy.

By design and by accident we have let words stop the free flow of energy through our bodies so that we experience difficulty having our tongues operate naturally as writhing worms or having language seen as vermicast  - shit - the shit we say and not the shit which makes worms writhe in what we could describe as an ecstatic dance of joy or as a disgusting morass of blind stupidity and, in the saying of such words, make no difference at all to what the worms are doing.

From this distinction, between what living things do and the words we use to describe them and their doings, there is a learning to be had that needs to be learned if humans have any reasonable possibility of lasting as a species.

The learning available to us is that the world we live in is designed by nature and not by language. However unpopular it may sound (as it has sounded to many other people with whom I've sought to share this learning) we will be hard-pressed to ever retrieve our natural relationship with energy.

if we do not attend to the relationship we have with language and associated symbolic forms (flags, statues, etc.) and make the appropriate alterations to that relationship

.

We can and have brought human consciousness close to such a relationship through language. Indeed, until 1953 and the discovery of DNA, there was only language or other symbolic forms to convey the sense of connection with energy for which we are seeking.

We will have our favorite language or other symbolic form. One of my favorites is John Lennon's 'Imagine'.   

Repeated playing of his song and interpretations of its words would move human consciousness to the brink of the limits that are set by our allegiance to linguistically constructed realities.

 "Imagine there's no Heaven.

It's easy if you try.

No Hell below us

Above us only sky".

Without "Heaven" and  "Hell" and all the other imagined entities we have put into words and other symbolic forms, what would be left for us to make meanings of except the naturally produced realities of energy? Grass, roots, trees, the earth to which we could “get down”, and the forests where, as the Gnat told an uncomprehending Alice, "things have no names".

This and other linguistically deserted places is Zone Zero Zero. It's where living is done in its energetic state, in the molecule - the DNA/RNA. To bring language into relation with that has been the purpose for developing the theory and practice called “Spirals Work in Concert” (SWiC). Through SWiC what John Lennon imagined and could only sustain through faith, hope and courage, can be actually implemented knowingly, peacefully, and without heroics.

VI

SWiC is an educational process. The SWiC educational process will allow every human to learn, as a matter of fact, that the relation between each of them and all living things is energy, that energy moves in a spiral formation and made everything in what we call the universe. Thus this educational process will unavoidably present people with the knowledge that the spiral works in concert within and between all living things, and so that the relation between humans and all living things is one of equivalence - that all living things are alike.

People who choose to learn this idea will get to know early in their lives how they are made, what language is and the relations between their bodies and their language. They would get to see how the world has been put into words through an attitude toward language that privileges it above what it claims to describe. From this learning would develop the ways we need to liberate ourselves from those parts of our languaging that are factually wrong and ecologically disastrous when acted out. Through this educational process we would get to know the physiological requirement for there ever to be something real to call 'the winds of change'.

This physiological requirement is for us humans to use the wind that passes out of our bodies to express through language the feelings being experienced within those bodies. It is also required that we hear what we say and to change the words we use either when the feelings are not expressed truly or when the feelings truly expressed are not ecologically appropriate. A discipline is entailed here. We must willingly undergo this discipline if we are ever to retrieve the truth that freedom is a natural habit obtained from energy and not a right derived from language.

The freedom of energy made the forms to express the energy which made the forms ...and so on in an infinity loop that spirals on to what we call eternity, to that space where energy does its thing.

VII

As we know energy is everywhere. We might also know that energy is NOT eternal.

David Holmgren stresses the finite nature of energy in his Permaculture papers and applies this knowledge to many aspects of living where he abides with his partner Sue and Oliver too, their child. Their home in Hepburn Springs is itself a Permaculture Design Course. As artificial to the landscape as a plastic bag, with its glass and steel, Holmgren's Design Course home is as indebted to technology, mineral exploration and mining and all that there is now available for us to access energy, as Boeing, the makers of B52 Bombers.

The relations between Holmgren's Design Course home and Boeing is made to heighten the importance of attitude/ purpose/ ethics/ intentionality as a discriminator of human action. The spirit at Hepburn Springs is to regenerate not to incinerate, as to incinerate was the spirit when napalm was dropped from large planes over Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. At Holmgren's Design Course use is made of wind, the sun and productive uses are made of water as well. The gardens and dams form a site for a near self-sufficient food supply. And their disciplined life-style is cleanly focused on work. Zones 0123 and 4 have different meanings there and in the Permaculture movement generally than they have had here in this writing. So does Zone Zero Zero, which, in Permaculture, as in most of human effort, is the least, examined, the least nurtured, the most neglected dimension of living.

And yet Zone Zero Zero, wherein that inner purpose or spirit is sited, when understood as matter in its most energetic state - at its 'most basic', as some might be inclined to put it - is unquestionably the most energetic zone of all.

It is there within and upon the surfaces of the skin that meanings are made to be expressed. As humans, we have to decide the meanings we are to make and the best form to express them, by which is meant the most ecological form humans have for expressing the energy that made them, by which is also meant the least energy depleting form of expression available to humans.

VIII

I ‘ve been thinking about such things in a focused way for only six years and will always have something else to learn. In this provisional sense it is my conclusion that of the expressive repertoire currently available to humans speaking is the most energy efficient. Talk is cheap. What we say and what we don't say and the reasons we have for choosing either way might well have something to do with energy - just too buggered to make a sound, apart from a snore. Yet, short of total exhaustion, it's always possible to speak. We have energy enough for a word or two... even when we're dying.

So, the choice to say or not to say what we are feeling to think has less to do with our natural capacity to do so and much more to do with our desire to do so.

Desire comes first. Desire is in the beginning  - if there ever was A beginning and not if it was that everything there was was always changing. After desire comes fear and it is in the state of being between desire and fear that most human living occurs. This 'in between' state of living is confusion, 'chaos' as we've Englished it from the Greek kaos, or 'yawn'. 'Kaos' is also the sound made by crows and if you make that sound repeatedly you will yawn. 'Kaos' is one of those onomatopoeic words, closely connected with the human body and obedient to the laws of nature; in this case the laws governing the effect of sound. One of these effects is to yawn when making the sound of 'kaos'.

Such an understanding of the physics of sound would make it easier for people to assess their language use (being what they said and the words they chose to say it) in relation with an understanding of energy, as energy has been invested in linguistic practice. They could be informed about what we might describe as 'the permaculture of speak', that is, it's energy efficient applications to the preservation of human life on this planet.

This would be helped enormously by knowing that when we do speak we can know that it is energy coming through our bodies and we can ask if what we do say is true to the feeling of that body.

We can also ask if that feeling is the one we would like to have forever. If it isn't we can bring about an alteration to that feeling by changing the way we speak. And we can do that without phony optimism if we know enough about the motion of energy to know that it does form into black holes (disillusion, despondency, despair) and that it emerges out of them.

Permaculture is part of the movement through the black hole. For it and other ecologically kosher activities to be successful there is a need to deliberately extend its modus operandi- its ways of working - to the deep ecology of Zone Zero Zero - the area which is left alone, relatively speaking. To achieve a Permaculture within ourselves it is imperative that we become conscious of our feelings, thoughts, interactions, communications and collaboration with others. Otherwise, no matter how well intentioned, we will continually make a mess of the practice.

IX

Here the attempt has been to share a truth that can be comfortably known to be what we already knew at Zone Zero Zero but did not at that time of knowing have the words to describe.

Language was there waiting for us when we left Zone Zero Zero, as was the understanding of 'culture' as something distinct from the idea of work to which it was originally connected, as in the root of the Latin 'to cultivate' and before then at work in a worm culture. Released from this connection 'culture' has become something done with clean hands, pre-eminently by those who speak well with the correct accent.

X

The move being made here as we, usually, headfirst our way out into the world is from Zone Zero Zero to all the other zones - Zones 1,2,3,4 and sometimes more, depending into which particular place and time your spiraling out of the womb was done: China, Japan, Russia, New York, Africa, Australia, 40,000 years ago or yesterday, top of the pile or at the bottom of the heap… or rising and falling in the middle. Wherever, whenever we found ourselves when we were born (what gets called 'the circumstances' of our birth) would have to have a lot to do with our chances of ever being able to do such a thing as find ourselves, and so to get to know what we already knew as forms of energy when we were at Zone Zero Zero. Of these circumstances the one that only humans can determine is the freedom we allow ourselves and others to express the feelings we get to think to express through language. Any limitation to this freedom is an interference with the natural process that takes feeling to thought to expression. 

For this reason, there is a need to investigate the reasons (the feelings thought) we have for talking and for not talking with an equivalent interest that we might show toward worms, or else we'll not be here to turn over the worm culture with a fork and talk about what we see. The worms will make a better fist of surviving than we will because they are genetically more attuned to survival than we are and because they do not tell lies or make fists.

Worms make shit out of our shit to make more shit happen. We make more shit happen (now using 'shit' disparagingly) because we make fists at each other in actual life outside our bodies. And when we're not doing that we will 'make fists' happen inside our bodies when we express those words by either saying them or writing them. Either way 'making fists' will be words. And words are different to things - things like a fist.

Making fists is not a distinctively human activity. The use of words to describe it is. We are animals that speak and sing and write and type and keyboard. And we use language to do such things.

Language is not a gift God donated to Adam but a tool or instrument that can be used to make meanings of the world. We can and will always choose to make different meanings of different things and if we choose to do such things it will be us - you and me - who will be making the meanings.

XI

I mean, who are you? And do you want to know? Put the 'Doors' on and dance while you think about the question they ask:

Who are you, who, who, who, who.

And who do you love?

Who do you love?

And give your answers as the thoughts occur and find out what happens to you when you say what you first feel to think. That is, see if you can remember the first time you learnt not to say what you first felt to think. And try to remember if the feeling you had then was not fear.

In Zone Zero Zero desire comes first. Then comes fear. In the other zones, where language/culture rules, that order gets to be reversed. There we can get to be frightened first so often and for such actually pressing reasons - like not wanting to feel pain again from mum or dad or the teacher for saying something they didn't like to hear - that we can end up desiring to be frightened. A closure in our DNA will have occurred, a blockage to the free flow of energy that is enabled only through allowing each other to say what we first feel to think.

Any attempt to stop that flow will necessarily defeat the only good reason for making such an attempt. And this must be to prevent more damage to the body than would occur from a symbolic gesture made without bodily contact - without touch - such as a flaring of the nostrils, flash of eye heat, a pointing finger, an angry fist, and words.

XII

You may be able to think of a way to avoid the truth flowing from this, which is that sticks and stones can break your bones but names can never hurt you, and which is also that napalm can burn and wither an infants skin but being called a ‘bung’, a ‘Commie Bastard’, a ‘slope’ or ‘Asian peril’ can never hurt you. You might. I cannot. What hurts you are the sticks and the stones and the napalm which other people use to beat out and burn in the message they learn to hear as their own which is essentially that it is wisest to believe what the authoritatively placed people in your society tell you to believe, that it is often best to eliminate a threat than to investigate how it is threatening, to act out of a fear without getting to know what exactly we are being frightened by.

XIII

When, as happens in zones 1,2,3,4, or more, we experience irritation in relation with language (if not a more potent feeling, like hate) whenever we hear certain words expressed then we can know for sure that our physical system has contracted what I've called to at once identify its cause and contagion, 'the Belief in Words Disease'.

This disease has implicated our physical system in a metaphysical system because we humans have allowed semantic entities to enter our blood streams and consequently have let the expressed feelings - many of them linguistically conveyed - become attached to our DNA. Thereby does a piece of matter absorb into its own truth a knowledge that can never be known to be true and which is often actually false. So a person can, as it were, be born to hate someone they've never met and this operation is managed chiefly by getting people to believe in words. Not all of them. No, there were most definitely some words that you could, you should believe in. But not all.

And it's this lack of universality in methodology, the some - but- not -all haphazardry of all word-based systems, which is sufficient reason to doubt the value of any system that governs people in this way - through getting them to believe in words.

As all systems of government known to humankind - except anarchy - make a word into 'the cornerstone of their belief' then there is as yet no system of government that we've adapted to live with that does not rely for its existence upon a description given by humans. The description given will be in the form of language and center around a key word: God, King, Queen, President, Country are still among the favorite symbolic forms we get encouraged to idolize. Every attempt is made to make these words and others into living things. This will be the work of the wordsmiths, some of whom also become the strong - arm rulers under whose protection the wordsmiths do their work and receive physical back up. Their primary work is to put the world into words and to get people to believe in the words as things.

The work of putting the world into words and producing the confusion between words and things is the work being done in Zones 1234 or more - where language rules okay! And this is the work we need to undo - starting today - if we can ever reasonably expect to live naturally, in harmony with nature's energy. We must bring language back to the body and learn the language of our DNA which is the permanent resident of our haunted house, which is the core of our being, which is the essential material expression of the energy that made us, which is the primary entity of what we call Zone Zero Zero.

XIV

The 'we' meant here are those of us who are savvy with the language of Permaculture which, as I've already said, is among the most coherently devised theories for ecologically sustainable productive activity in relation with the elements of nature - wind, air, water and ground - dirt. If the important information collectively described as 'Permaculture' is to reach its target audience then the practice of Permaculture needs to be taken to the 'inside' - to where the feeling and the thinking of the human gets done, to Zone Zero Zero. It is work I think Permaculturalists should be doing with themselves and each other, that we ALL should be doing to clarify and strengthen the relations between ourselves and the planet we cohabit.