Okraalom (Subtitles "The Eagle and the Dove")

Okraalom (Subtitles "The Eagle and the Dove") is a published book that harks back in the Syai world to when it was at about the stage of development  as our earth civilization was toward the end of the seventeenth century, that is, at the beginning of the post-medieval, modern era. It is adapted to illustrate, by means of close attention to detail, the state of civilization at that time in our world. It does this despite that the main events and background (even some of the themes) of the novel refer only to the very different world of the Syai. It can therefore be put in to a category such as fantasy-fiction, based on genuine historical records. One "collective character" in the book - the natives of the main island featured in the story - bear some resemblance to the Maori - I trust not unsympathetically. 

World and human species in jeopardy. What's to be done?

There could be one hundred billion trillion Earth-like planets in space, making it "inevitable" that extraterrestrial life exists, according to a  leading astronomer. (The Telegraph science correspondent).

A brief observation like this blog of the present state of the planet and human civilization as if "from outside" (possibly by such as the Syai?) may seem too sweeping to be taken seriously. Ignore it? No. It may be a tiresome cliche to refer to "elephants in the room", but "elephants" there are, and I dare to name them (as I think T. and the Syai would). 

(1) The retentive-come-expansive expectaions of the rich are the main cause of the plundering of the planet reaching unsustainable intensities.  
(2) Human fertility with its relatively recent explosion of numbers. Notwithstanding that the pace of that expansion appears to have slowed for the time being, there's no sign that increase in numbers will not continue - not without radical changes in global cultures.

Valiant efforts are indeed being made to lift some of the world's most crowded and climate-affected areas out of poverty, as well as to oblige the well-to-do to accept more transparency and less corruption, but the "elephants" remain. Rather, the world should unmask the "elephants" as dragons, biding their time to break out eventually, in full fury. Well-meaning reformers can damp down small fires started here and there by the dragons' breaths, but the dragons themselves have very thick skins.

What would "outsiders' like the Syai advise us to do?  Well, we can act on the expectation that the rich will continue to have all they need for a comfortable, interesting life, even after they have been sheared of their source-assets and their power monopolies and (in many cases) their obscene salaries and perks. Sources of prosperity must be taken into 'commonwealth' and managed accordingly by dedicated servants of 'commonwealth'; persons of good education and ethical integrity. Those who have established themselves to become very wealthy, often allow their offspring to live in a fools' paradise; 'princes' and 'princesses', with no need to exert themselves and contribute anything to 'commonwealth'. Let's put an end to that.

The line must be crossed (especially for men) over the present non-regulation of fertility. Except in extraordinary circumstances, every adult person should be licensed to have one, two or three children and no more. There might well be some encouragement to reduce even that quota. China with its experience of population-growth limitation might well take a leading role in global enforcement of this regulatory program.  Nations that refuse to follow should face ostracism and blockade. Proselytizing religious leaders who seek "tribal-style" population increases in their followers to overwhelm non-believers and take theocratic power, should be exposed as dangerous enemies of peace and prosperity.

It's a survival agenda, and hardly likely to happen. But with reference to the opening of this blog: only one acorn in hundreds of thousands from a single oak ever puts down roots and lasts long enough to become a mighty tree.

What do you think the Syai would think of this world?

T. explanations of humans behaving in typical ways and organizing things on their planet would have shocked and intrigued the Syai people. They would have expressed fears for the survival of our species. According to T., in comparing their civilization to ours, they picked up on the following points:

1.  The rich are concerned with making and keeping the planet as their exclusive playground.
2.  The poor are left free to churn out babies knowing that these babies as children and adults have little or no prospect of a decent life.
3.  The governments are happy (mostly) to be only partially free of corruption, and almost all are inclined to be tolerant of corruption in their most wealthy or influential supporters.
4.  Religions cannot disguise the fact, though they desperately try, that they have a historic and present role in fermenting bloody conflict; partly because they are extraordinarily stupid in getting their ethical priorities into a humanist non-supernatural perspective.
5. Scientists ... too easily bought.

6. The healthy don't find it easy to accept that sport is not reality - only play!
7.  The sick too easily excuse themselves for not having controlled their appetites for things that made them sick; also, don't make much effort to moderate their demands for consumption of financial and other kinds of resources. (That is not to imply that an empathetic social system shouldn't do its best to take care of them.)

The wisdom men and women are capable of, doesn't show up much in conservative traditions of religion of 21st Century

Says the witch in Game of Thrones, "The night is dark and full of terrors."  Strong beliefs (easily corrupted) are the launching platforms of action. That explains a lot of the mayhem around the human planet of today, especially in regions rich with oil (and oil money), of strategic importance to ex-colonial powers and riven by religious conflict.  

But the source of the terrors and the darkness of ignorance are not what we hear or see on screen somewhere far away out there. They are deep - or not-so-deep - inside us!  Because traditional organized religion and its off-shoots are "out there", they can't help us much in saving our sanity, procuring for us a sustainable biosphere, and providing us with ethical standards of behavior. In fact they seem inclined instead to drag us into the "dark and full of terrors" regions. The religious founders and pious ancients are not really as helpful in making us intelligently moral beings as the philosophers of ancient Greece and China with their love of natural beauty, elevation of Reason, and penchant for critical social- and self-examination.                        (Picture by Severen, 6 y. o.)

The language & culture connection

The diagram (from 'Spirituality and Aging' conf. 2009' - c.o. Dr Richard Egan) struck a chord with me when revising material about the connection between the religio-mythological side of Syai culture and its language. In the three outer areas of the 'map' of the psyche are the Physical, Social and Mental. They are centered by Spirituality. These designations come close to what the Syai call the Gods of the Minor Quaternary and how Syai linguists introduce a crucial part of their language structure. At the center is the Heart-goddess (spirituality); on the outer are the "Worldly-deeds" god (physical), and the Emotive/Motivational goddess (social) and the Intellectual god (mental). Each Syai verb-form can be divided into four variants according to which of the god-realms it most suitably seems to belong in. This provides a pattern of meaning-associations that facilitates the learning and use of the language.

Naturally, each of the deities mentioned has its own Syai name, and all four are major protagonists in the dramatic creation story that is used by Syai adults to explain the world to their children.

Main points in Syai democratic constitution

Iperial Syai system of government ... just a sketch, no details as my focus here is on the democratic principles. Center (Q)  (metaphorically) reflects the Minor Quaternary of Syai gods, the Empress/ Emperor and the three 'elders' of the Imperial Council.They are the source of validation of power, but in themselves have almost no power. The three 'Elders' are go-betweens, advisers and guardians, informing the imperial personage and organizing everything around her/ him. (If the two real powers can't come to agreement on something, then 'Q' might have to play an important, even deciding role.) The real powers are the Villages' Assembly and the Walkers' Council. The Walkers are not so concerned with steering the course of government as with environmental and social well-being and justice.

Some points of the constitution as far as T. could remember them.
(1)  Freedom of access to readily-available truth.
(2)  A holistic education founded on the humanities, on children learning about their biological/ natural surroundings to start with; with science and technology built on that foundation.
(3) Stimulating but fair competition, with emphasis on individuals or groups competing against their past selves, not blocking or undermining efforts of 'rivals'. 
(4) In an open society where everyone has personal aims that can be better pursued in co-operation rather than cut-throat competition, there is no place for secrecy and transactional privacy. Acts of  personal and consensual privacy are assured and protected, so long as they have no direct harmful effect on persons unknowing and uninvolved.
(5) To have unity among diverse communities there must be a grand symbol of unity, and to be effective a-ffectively that symbol needs a face - that is, some degree of personification. The gods of Syai cultural mythology serve this purpose without fueling a demand for theocracy to take precedence over democracy.

Considering what is needed for a well-functioning democracy

Using what 'T.' reveals of the Syai Empire as a model of democracy, I have been thinking of our Western so-called democracies and what would be the revolutionary reforms needed to change them from oligarchic semi-democracies to what would satisfy the Syai to call them real democracies. I have worked out five or six principles which I will subsequently present (in some form) on this blog. My fear is that if any country on this globe under present conditions dared to come near to implementing these principles, that country would be trashed. If not armed agression, practical reasons and even moral considerations would be dreamed up and given full air-time by the Western media for why it was a bad experiment that was being justifiable undermined in the interests of growth, international co-operation, freer trade and so forth. Even if the "experiment" proved popular, the discontent of a power-hungry few would be worked upon both in and out of the country to bring about a reactionary reversal. But there is no credible historic evidence that a real democracy experiment could never succeed in a country or region, provided it was

left free of outside interference.

Preparing a seminar on matters of faith, the spiritual dimension an reality

As planned next year I should have a seminar prepared on some of the negative aspects of religion and how they might be overcome. My contention is that a greater understanding of the spiritual dimension of our lives can potentially overcome the conflicts and violence that these days seems to rage around religious issues. I fully approve of suspending disbelief - there's a lot to be gained from it in entertainment and even in wisdom. But to think it doesn't matter if people believe whatever they like or suits them to believe, is simply to "feed into" the aforementioned conflict, violence and rage. The picture above might well be taken as symbolic of the beauty of 'Gaia' or the natural sciences. However, without the spiritual dimension and openness to philosophical criticism, scientists themselves can fall into belief-systems that cause conflict and environmental harm, often in bowing to the self-interest of their human, emotional selves, or to the greed and ambitions of their financial backers.

This picture is T.'s impression of a Syai caravan-cottage (drawn from memory and T. is no artist). Each Syai adult has such a private dwelling to him or her self although much of their daily activity is usually spent in the communal buildings of the village. Villages are situated in well-forested regions and have cultivated fields and meadow-like surroundings with well-protected water-ways and wet-lands.

The adult individual can live and work in solitude using his or her caravan-cottage, pretty well as he or she sees fit. Food is stored just adjacent to the door, as needed. If there is reason for the individual to move and work in a different village, the home goes as well. The letters (picture) indicate some of the utility of the parts of the home, while the base (yellow, 'F.') is where the wheels are a little below the surface and where electricity supply and drainage are taken care of.
A :  skylight- can be opened or made opaque. 
B :  raised organic toilet, to facilitate the composting process.
C:   access trap through which the compost can be retrieved, used.
D:   auxiliary unit for storage and temperature regulation.
E :  Attachment for when 'tractor' needs to pull home to new place.
F ;   As already described above.
G :   Paved pathway to main communal building (cover not shown).

Intelligent Design (/Creationism)

Donald Duck ponders: "Maybe your design wasn't intelligent enough!"

I've been seeing on Google that there seems to be a lot of academic stuff written in defense of (evolutionary) Intelligent Design. In the next philosophy-discussion meeting I attend, a member is going to give us supposed evidence to justify belief in this. 

Unfortunately, the idea behind Intelligent Design  can be linked to the Rev. Paisley's "Proof of God's Existence". A primitive wandering along a beach finds a working watch on the sand and marvels at the intricacy of it - then looks around at all the wonderful examples of nature and says to himself, "This thing in my hand could not have come-to-be by accident or from nothing. It must surely have had a creator. But when I look about me at the marvels of nature, surely I am obliged to conclude - just as with this object - there must be the intelligence of a divine designer and creator behind it.

Of course he is not obliged at all to think that.  The primitive fellow would be more inclined to use his common sense and put the thing he has found into the category of his stone ax, but assume that its maker would be a being very strange and powerful - a spirit or god. If he did so, he would be making a correct distinction between the made or manufactured creation of things and the things that are self-created or appear in the natural formations of the environment, The fact that we need to and easily make this distinction between what is 'manufactured' and what has evolved to "grow like Topsy" does rather make nonsense of the very idea of Intelligent Design. For making that distinction is at the very basis of our understanding of reality. Without it, confusion would reign and accumulation of knowledge, or science, would be impossible. (Apol. to Disney for taking picture out of context)

Spirituality

I’ve been speaking to several groups on the subject of Spirituality. The idea that spirits live in the world (or in some place linked to the world) has been around from ancient times and persists in some quarters today. We draw on experience of things, animals, unfamiliar persons and natural features or processes. Out of that mix we fashion spirits. Many of us endow them with a reality they don’t deserve. However, different tribal or “super-tribal” cultures with their religions are largely dependent for their continued separateness on the formation and maintenance of their notions of dynamic spirits (or “Spirit”). Although this human phenomenon has to do with the rich diversity of cultures, it tends to alienate us from unification when it is needed world-wide, tending instead to foster ideology and conflict between different groupings under different “flags” or symbols. Despite this, there’s no doubt as to the value of it so long as it is recognized as belonging in the realm of mythology and symbolism. It would then be possible to dig deeper and analyse the underlying significance of “spirituality” as opposed to spirits. Spirituality would be clearly seen as beneficial to the theorizing and mind-experiments that stir the imagination of scientist in looking into the unknown and making advances in our understandings of  micro- and macro- cosmos. The unity of religious groups would be made more possible and their buildings would be open to all as“church" community centers. . 

Science, the arts and philosophy must be integrated before science can help with the answers

This gloomy picture (Chirico) is titled 'Philosopher and Poet' - why choose that title is not obvious, but to me it could represent the frozen condition of a lack of positive underlying progress in both general science ("philosopher") and culture in general ("poet"). The blankness of the screen confronted by a rigid figure and a weird, detached something beside it, the figure with no arms to challenge the blankness and create something new on the screen ... It could be interpreted as our present global civilization in its reluctance to get moving and examining in any depth the future for our planet and its inhabitants; science having no answers and the humanities mired in repetitiveness, trivia and nostalgia.

Sitting and meditating doesn't change anything. Nor does science per se. Nor our playing around with the remarkable capacities of present-day technology. Do we want change or are we content to concentrate on trying to make life better for our individual selves and those selves that are alike to us?

Most of the inhabitants of our present global civilization live in the present 'dream-world' of unlimited growth with the excitement of ill-regulated competition, the available escapes into fantasy and the comforts of procrastination. All that gives to some - but not all - zest and meaning to life. They would prefer to leave change to chance, to 'Nature' or to 'God'. It is easier to bury misgivings about the future in the minutiae of living and to let the demon of environmental degradation do its worst.

Of course the Syai vision that this blog is basically about is not the only vision of a future life-sustainable world under the governance of (supposedly) intelligent beings. Even with our biosphere burdened with such a large human population as we now have, such a world is still possible. It would require spreading that population out over a changed landscape, integrating human needs and talents with the requirements of the natural environment to flourish and to heal itself from the cancerous imbalances already inflicted upon it by such as weeds, pests and depletions of our supportive flora and fauna.

The Syai vision of home-villages is a plausible possibility. At least some of our scientific theorists are also on to such a possibility: two of them are mentioned in 'New Scientist' (July, 1914), namely Porrit and Sanderson. Unlimited growth and urban congestion would become gradual, measured growth, taking humanity in a new direction with probably slower, more prudential technological advances (one would hope not longer associated with weaponry development).

Most of us ardently desire something like this rather that continuing on a path to extinction or at least to the total destruction of anything resembling a civilization worth living in for most of us. What, then,is the key to real progress and sustainability?  In a sense, it is meditation and appropriate concentration on what matters, because it is from the mind that individual and collective decisions originate.

The scientist deals directly with what I would call base-reality - the world as revealed to us in unemotional observation, discovery and prediction. So long as base-reality has its rightful place in our thinking, a path of change is opened to a level of well-being that is sustainable. Science cannot give us reasons on philosophical, ethical grounds why we should take this path, It is up to all the faculties of our consciousness to fashion a human future grounded in a species-survival ethic. Science can only give us valuable clues as to how to achieve this. And it does so mainly due to its predictive power. The "Why do it" has to come from other reaches of the mind, namely, culture, values-prioritization (morals), the creative imagination (the arts) and religion (spirituality). But with respect to religion, we cannot any longer afford the indulgence of not aligning these broader reaches of the mind with base-reality. Fantasy and escape into dream-world can enrich our lives, but it must be "put in its place"!  We cannot go on ordering our lives according false-to-fact constructions of 'reality', at odds with base-reality. Much of tradition and much of religion has to be re-interpreted or abandoned. A great deal of simplification will be required in the spirit of 'Occam's Razor'. As in the Syai world, religion would harmlessly "simplify" into culture, wisdom-myths and seasonal festivity.

How the mind-realm of creative imagination best-serves the child

This is a western child in an eastern posture. He probably has his head full of stories and not the thought-chatter emptiness that his meditation teacher hopes for him. Stories legends and myths are a proxy source of experiential wisdom, providing simple ethical lessons that give due recognition to individual freedoms and self-assertion as tempered by reason and consideration for others.

Why, then, do we so cling to the need for religious interpretation of some of them?

All the value of the above-outlined is lost as soon as a religious or quasi-religious body - a collective in competition with other collectives - elevates one story only, tending to disparage others, thus giving that story the imprimatur of what I might refer to as "base-reality" (rightly more the province of science).

If the humanities, the poetry of life, symbol, myth, legend and story can be focused more on the future, which is the child's near-present - a focus that seems to be a crying need in this present age - then it's all doing proper service to the child. If it continues to be wrapped up in the past and tradition too much, it will only serve an established body-politic to subject the child to its service.

If the beneficial re-adjustment of the humanities is to be achieved, we can respect the grandeur of the religious achievements of the past (for example architecturally) without being held by them in thrall. At the same time we can re-adjust our minds to insist that the humanities and sciences complement each other in "non-religious" but soulful harmony, no more treading disdainfully on each other's ground.

Because imaginative stories are only "fun", Syai mythology enters harmlessly into the culture and year-round of festivals without the dangerous solemnity of religion.

Was religion ever anything much better than a dragon feeding on its own tail?

In answering "probably not" to the title question, I don't want to downplay the genius that has gone into architecture, music and other arts that have had such cultural influence throughout the ages. Religion, of course, has been historically where much of the opportunity, time and money was on offer for the creative person. Like the (fictional) Syai, we, in the present day world with its pressing socio-political and material problems, need to grow out of religion per se, while we retain and continue with the arts, symbols and stories. These include works that can delight and teach us something, despite that it was normal in the past for their creators and communicators to make serious reference to superstition-promoting, supernatural pronouncements, images and myths masquerading as "Truths".

No devised system can self-asses its aptness for what is is designed to do in action and/ or persuasion. 

(Natural systems, such as the ecological, are naturally excluded, here) That is the Archilles heel of religion, but not only religion. It is also why we cannot dismiss the reality of the mind or mindfulness ( See, previous blog). The "axiom" of reality above explodes all religious claims to truth-absolutism, but also the scientific claim that reality is best understood by materialistic behaviourist determinism. Our mind - our capacity to observe and think rationally - is either "talking" to the real world or it is "talking" to itself in a manner lacking a faith-to-fact basis in the real world.

My blogs have already dealt with the ideology fanatic. Despite that, my feeling here is that the comparative sanity of a pragmatic person's "matter-of-fact"-ness   and acceptance of things as they are (as if they could never have come-to-be or needed-to-be otherwise) is not good enough. Awakening to reality requires imagination; and one of the underlying purposes of this blog-site is to try to support the imaginative envisioning of possible positive progress for our species on this planet.

Probing the brain? A "Syai" perspective on the old mind/ body controversy.

Before birth there are only the rudiments of connections between the brain-cells with each other and the rest of the body. At the time of a viable birth, when the organism begins to breath the outside air,  an explosion occurs that could be likened to "the Big Bang". It could also be regarded as the beginning of the entrance of the mind into brain, body, that locality of the living environment - even properly into the Universe itself.

Our present bio-science would (I think) have to go along with the above, despite the difficulty of defining in scientific terms what is meant by the mind.  For reasons that are easily understood - mostly to do with emotions - the prospective parent often finds it hard to understand what kind of an organism the "unborn child" is. Bio-science has to be more objective about this. Scientist's job is also to look into a wider context of social health and humanity's future, and not be swayed by falling foul of popular sentiment and the views of religious propagandists.

Nevertheless, philosophers and theologians need to correct the tendency in science to down-play or even dismiss the concept of the mind. The mind is not just a spiritual concept. It is necessary to make sense of knowledge.  Like (but unlike) the brain, the mind has a structure; a structure which psychologists like Freud have from long ago been trying to probe into and map. What is the special difficulty of this? It is that the mind is, as it were, a meta-structured unstable non-material thing, produced from the physically examinable structure of the brain and body and the whole hard-to-fathom, life-enabling environment. As such, it produces the abstract, but dynamic structures of our ways of thinking and shifting emotions.

A philosophically apparent absurdity is the attempt to by-pass the mind. That dead-end was pursued by some in the behaviourist school. Our brain certainly has a vital part to play in our human curiosity to examine and understand the brain, the body, and all that surrounds it.  However, without the mind's abstractive development of pattern, picture and explanation, the activity of the brain (and body) in probing the secrets of the brain would be as vacuous as one mirror confronting another.The mind is not centred in the physical brain despite the fact that the brain is its "starting engine", playing a primary role. The secondary role is played by the rest of the body. But there is still a tertiary role that is of the utmost importance. It is the whole surrounding biosphere of our life-home, the Earth.

Home-sickness? To get the feeling of just how real  the h(r)uman mind-and-soul is, you might try a stint of living in a physically life-sustaining bubble on Mars.

(3) How fanatics (and persons of not-well-self-examined faith) break the triangle and lose touch with reality

The evangelical who sings something like "Will the circle not be broken?" has already broken the triangle.  Nevertheless, most evangelicals tend to be less than consistent in maintaining that break, unlike the fanatic.

With the fanatic, direct interactive lines of contact  between the intellectual centre and the world-embracing centre are broken, leaving the triangle of the healthy psyche partially destroyed.  There is in the healthy psyche's triangle what might be called the halo (the seat of the supreme goddess) of conscious-generation and mediation around the unconscious centre.  That part is meant to have the job of filtering and modifying the unconsciously generated turmoil of feelings and images. In the broken triangle it no longer works as it should.

It might be said that the goddess (a personifying of the active ring, as shown in yellow, around the unconscious, linking it to the whole) no longer  operates effectively. However, the flow of interactive information between the intellectual centre and the world-embracing centre is still maintained. The trouble is, it has to take the round-about rout, passing through the emotional centre, which - as it allows it through - inappropriately tries to modify and filter it but instead largely distorts it. Thus the individual has only an indirect relationship of intellect with reality. This damaging compromise, doing away with the direct connection of  the two outer centres, intellect and world-embracing, has nothing to do with the power of intellect, the passion of emotion or the apparent material successes the individual enjoys in life. That person is no longer a whole person, and, usually, sooner or later, that fact is almost bound to be realized, either by himself, by others or both, even if the general realisation comes only later through re-examination in historical context. Even a compassionate genius can be - essentially - crazy, his life's work leaving the world and humanity worse off.

The direct lines affected are those (in the unbroken triangle) between intellectual centre and world-embracing centre. In the broken triangle, these lines do not disappear but are shifted subjectively inwards, as it were.  They then link the intellect (the thinking, believing mind) directly to the main centre which is the unconscious centre. This link is made, without the world-embracing centre's involvement. The triangle is thereupon a broken one. This frees up the intellect from coping directly (and in the long run, effectively) with the often harsh (sometimes pleasant) impacts of the material world.. It compromises the individual's capacity to rationally respond to the real world's uncompromising buffeting. The round-about nature of the residual connective lines via the emotional centre, have, in many cases (especially the religious ones), a cushioning benefit to the weakened, deformed psyche in dealing with the real world.

(2) A simple symbolic shape of the normal mature well-functioning psyche

The grey is the background of unknowing: we have no grasp of reality beyond the reach of our senses.  At the centre of the triangle is the animal-body unconscious, but with a radiating influence, supporting not only the outer centres but the three double-lines of interconnections from one to the other. The channels (shown in brown) are the basic developmental force generated from the unconscious centre that allows the other centres and triangle to take form and generate consciousness. Thus the supreme goddess Sunchild, as child of the rude, atavistic titans, takes her place in or around the unconscious center. The heart-symbol here does not represent her, but the overt urges and emotional workings of the individual's nature, thus Redbelly's. The head, of course, is the seat if the intellect, Bluehead's. The Chinese pictogram for 'earth' is the world-embracing center, where the individual has his (/her) impact on the physical and biological environment, and has to use his outer senses, limbs and so forth, to deal with the harsh - if sometimes very pleasant - impacts that the real world has on him - thus, Moonbeast's.

The integrity of the triangle enables the thrust of  forces of the unconscious to be -as it were - steered and modified into a well-balanced consciousness. Aesthetics and imagination well-directed to enhancement of life beyond just that of the individual, play a big part in this. The unconscious centre is a seething cauldron of dream-like memory-generated and imaged ideas that the consciousness draws upon constantly. This inspirational function of the unconscious centre has to pass through the centre's outer filter (personified in by the earth-sun-goddess Sunchild) if it is not to disrupt the balance and unbroken interconnecting lines of the psychic triangle. If  the steering through the holistic filtering does not take place , one might say it means that Sunchild has retreated to the emotional centre and cannot steer the course of the individual appropriately. She is no longer in the driver's seat, which sooner or later is taken over by the blindingly ruthless, more-or-less maniacal titans with their dream-machine. An example of this malfunction (fanaticism) will be presented as a break in the triangle (of sanity) in my next posting.

Introducing three posts: the first one dealing with the (Syai) ;psyche in terms of symbol, archetype and myth

How does one describe a sound mind as differing from an unsound? It may not have so much to do with "higher" abilities nor with ethical notions of emotional sensitivity and empathy, as with connectedness.

There are many images of the four deities of the Minor Quaternary in the Syai world. The above cartoon-like representation of the gods, sketched from Teress's memory, show Sunchild, Moonbeast, Redbelly and Bluehead as if before their mythical incorporation into the Syai Psyche. In the background are the ghostly images of the "terrible" titans, the progenitors and opponents of the gods. At the heart-center is Sunchild, represented as benevolent and in revolt against the violent brutal self-interest of the individual (and groups-of)  whose empathy does not extend outside itself. However, she is also - in a deeper sense - the archetype of the unconscious and rooted in raw nature, being the daughter of the titans. Moonbeast, with his extendible rope-snake and sack, represents our body's active interface with the physical world; the outer senses and muscles with which we manipulate the world. Moonbeast was not born but initially created, like a robot, to serve the titans.

The other two deities are the children of Sunchild. Redbelly represents our visceral nature and is sometimes represented (as here) with two stomachs. She is the goddess of our motivational urges and emotions but not so much our more complex inmost feelings. In her excited state she devours creatures and regurgitates them in an altered state, morphed into an appearance closer to their real natures (from the ethical point of view).. Bluehead, the last-born, represents the "higher" brain or intellectual functions of the body: inquiring, calculating and reasoning (Mr Spock type).

The well-balanced mind may be represented (according to Syai psychology) as a centred triangle, Sunchild at the centre and the sub-centres of the other three at the angle-points. As far as the h(r)uman individual is concerned, the inner strength of each center varies, but their workings in interaction with each other determine the degree of well-being and sound functioning, more so than whether that person is intellectually bright or a sensitive tendency to strong passions. In my postings 2 &3, I go from the gods themselves to the way they may help us understand the positive norm of our nature and what happens when that norm becomes abnormal or pathological, as in the case of fanaticism, which the Syai would see as a form of insanity.  

Intelligent life almost certain on other planets, but could their evolution be similar to Earth's?

From the dinosaurs to "rat-dogs" and Syai h(r)umans ...
Recent advances in knowledge of our evolutionary past establishes that a 10 km wide rock that fell on Earth millions of years ago led to the end of dinosaur dominance. On the face of it, it seems that had this not happened, we would not be here today. Does this undermine the plausibility of intelligent life on other planets that are physically similar to Earth, like the Syai planet?

Syai "experts" on evolution (according to Terres) don't deny that outer-space rocks fell and damaged large regions of evolving life, but none seem to have been as big and devastating as our Yucatan one. Smallish dinosaurs have survived into the Syai present: Terres calls two of the varieties "lizard-eels" and "swamp-dwelling billled-waders". There were larger ones even in comparatively recent times, but as with almost all of the very large mammals on Earth, "intelligent life" in its more primitive state wiped them out. It's also worth noting in support of my argument that Earth's giant plant-eaters were apparently on the wane around the time of the Yucatan collision.

On the Syai planet, mammals evolved and grew larger where and when conditions such as volcanic eruptions left regions almost empty of larger creatures. A species that had originally more connections to rodents rather than apes, and which Terres calls "sea-beavers", began to build fishing platforms along coast-lines out of gnawed branches and natural flotsam and jetsam. Occasionally these would detach and drift with wind and current. The sea-beavers and other small animals that happened to be on these rafts - if they were lucky - would be washed up on distant lands suitable for their habitation. Along with the other factors mentioned, this facilitated the eventual evolution of the rodent-like yet human-like form of intelligent life, as well as the large rodent-like yet dog-like animal that Terres named "rat-dogs".

Ownership of land ... and money

In the Syai Empire land is not privately owned; nor should it be in our world. What would be the difference here if we as equal citizens of commonwealth elected how land and other natural assets were to be managed?  We would need a powerful agency, but as independent from politics as possible - an agency somewhat like the Dpt. of Conservation. Private households would lease their sections and have them renewed with a brief non-expensive inspection, say, every five years. Very little difference. For farms and the bigger more strategic holdings, the process would have to be more complex, but similar. A good farmer or land-holder would not need to be put through any radical change. But he/ she would need to accept that the requirements of protection for the ecology of the area would be more stringent. Perhaps the most radical change would be in inheritance and in passing on assets. In the Syai world, gifting is strictly limited, and inheritance doesn't exist. Again it's complex, but there's no god-given reason why a user of land and related assets should have the right to give over the use of it to another just because he or she is a descendent or associate of some kind. The would-be inheritor should have to compete with other interested parties, and put a convincing case for being allowed to take over the valuable asset and use it for the benefit of commonwealth as much as for his or her own benefit.

In a sense, money itself is not privately owned. You might say it should be owned (more as in the Syai world) by the commonwealth of land, sea, waterways, air and sunshine! Quantity of available money could be governed year by year by the seasons and yearly harvests. Money used to be anchored to gold, but in the Syai world it is anchored to nature and especially to what nature - in any given year - can produce without harming future productivity.

In our present world,  money  has come to be organized around the rich power-holders, who, by manipulating quantity, supply and to some degree circulation, are able to exploit the natural and human environment as suits them. They have achieved a growing domination over social change and have been able to draw to themselves a growing power to accumulate and maintain great "fortresses" of valuable assets and serviceable wealth around dynastic families (thus holding back real democratic change). They also have growing decision-making powers over the directions to be taken by science and technology.

Syai money loses value with passage of time - how that works cannot be briefly explained here. 'Tickets' of small value take the place of petty cash. On each ticket is the picture above (or something like it), of the mysterious Dark Flower of Syai legend, linking the mind-magic of money with the  mysteries of nature.

The four 'heads' heading us toward extinction

Civilization expands not only in space ("uncontrolled' population growth), but in its power to build on and change its environment to suit the agendas of those seeking to make life better for themselves and others and maybe for some fellow-creatures.

The founders of Syai, aware of the potential dangers to nature and society of so-called progress, determined from the start that civilization's expansion and progress would  never be allowed to be achieved at permanent loss to ecological diversity and damage to the 'commonwealth' of the planet's biosphere. To follow the Syai example, not only would many of our practices have to change, but to sustain the change would take a great deal of soul-searching. We can no longer dismiss the task as too hard on our human natures, with the cynical view that the only thing mankind ever learns from history is that mankind never learns from history.

I am at the stage of translating (with Terres's help) the part of the Syai myth-story where what I have just been outlining becomes particularly relevant. It deals mythologically with what brought death into the world on a grand scale. Of course we need to die, but not prematurely as individuals, nor prematurely as a species. Nor should be be, as individuals or as groups, enjoying long and luxurious lives with the consequence that many 'outsiders' are condemned to poor lives and premature deaths. It could be said that the Syai equivalent of the four horses are the four heads of the creature of Syai mythology that destroyed the Lesser Wheel of Creation. Terres calls that creature "the zombie-dragon".

The Story
Rescuing their child from a storm, the child's parents, "pre-humans", disobeyed orders, leaving it too late  to reach their hide-away cave. The fiercest of the Titans, the Lady of Light, appeared in a flash of lighting before them, and questioned them. She found out they had not been naturally born as divine children of the Goddess Sunchild, but  had been made by the gods on a magical machine - the Lesser Wheel of Creation. The titanic lady, in a rage, sent down one of her own creations on the Greater Wheel  to smash up the Lesser that the gods had constructed by stealing the 'blue-print' of the Greater. That ended all avenues of immortality to the pre-humans, and introduced the destructive forces that not only cause individuals to die but keep all of mankind-to-come under a permanent cloud of threatened self-extinction.

The negative, collectively self-defeating nature of mankind is symbolized in the four heads of the Zombie-dragon. Translated (as best Terres was able), these are:

• corruption
• greed
• trivia-fixation (/apathy)
• fanaticism

 

Change, fashion and mass production

The picture here (by Terres) is merely a suggestion of the kind of applique that a Syai individual might attach to his or her standard mass-produced robe. Everyone has their own design, and some like this one might use the insect-emblem of the Syai Empire, an insect most similar to our dragonfly.

"Fashion" and its rapid changes and the way it is exploited is part of our civilization's ills. We on Earth are in a period where everything is moving too fast!  That includes the pace of economic, technological and electronic change, while some "human" changes are not happening fast enough. It is not so much the lagging-behind old but the young that we should worry about. Children weren't designed to grow up in a whirling current of change, pushed from outside themselves to compete and keep up or outstrip "the Joneses" children. 

Everyone wants to express their individuality and uniqueness, even if it is very much within a tight group or culture. But they don't necessarily want to do it through being fashionable or famous. One does not need to be successful. It often seems that parents, teachers and students are desperate for success!  The simple truth, however, is that success and achievement (within the present socio-economic, political and educational system) is weightedly relative. By that I mean, that the person striving for success only reaches that state at the disadvantage and weighty mass of the many other persons who do not reach any such state, not matter how hard they strive. G&S in light opera says: "When everybody's somebody, nobody's anybody."  For the maximization of general happiness, I would propose that first of all we all just work on finding ourselves as a "somebody" according to our own lights 

How Syai society looks at all this has something to do with how the Syai people dress. 'Fancy fashion' is shown in the applique that is the size of one's hand sewn on the front of the mass-produced robe (sized for the individual). One has a robe for the wind and cold, and apart from that one wears close-fitting comfortable stretchy clothes to suit various purposes in various locations.  

Almost everything in the Syai civilization is mass-produced, excluding what nature produces from soil, water and sunshine. The caravan-cottage that every adult has is the same design for everyone, with its components mass-produced and put together the same way. This has enormous benefits in eliminating waste and inefficiency caused by duplication of effort and constant change to keep up with fashion and fancy demands. Nevertheless, it means that change in the Syai world is very slow.  Innovation is not hastened by war. But if research indicates that a change would be beneficial to all, a big change and adjustment can happen, expensive though it might be in energies and resources to bring it about. Engines that run on liquid fuel have a long-term life in the Syai world, because it is hard to beat the convenience of that kind of fuel. Our Earth society may have appeared to change that kind of motor vehicle frequently, but really it is mostly fashion changes and very gradual slight improvements in engine efficiency. The internal combustion engine still pollutes our environment and causes wars over "black gold".

The Syai "culturally modified" version of The Lord's Prayer.

Overshadowing the Maori language are the anglo-european language and culture. Maori was better than the English language for description and function in Aotea NZ before the country became drastically changed by anglo-european mass-settlement (added to now by settlers from Asian cultures). To survive, a language's culture must assume dominance and success. It could well be that a fictional culture that has the luxury of assuming success, and has a well-defined separate purpose, is in a better position to last than some of the "real" languages and cultures that are today so submerged in the globally prevailing languages and cultures.

Placing Syai alongside Maori would be a false comparison, but there's a point to emphasise about the mention of both together. Any language, real or imaginary, derives its authenticity and vigour from the culture it belongs to. If you were able to go to Feishoafeis or any other planet with a human-like civilization, you would hardly be likely to find anything that much resembled our Western and Middle-Eastern culture of Christendom and its related God-religions. Some similarities, perhaps, would be found in basic moral precepts, but the claim that Christianity is a universally valid bulwark of good social behaviour is bogus, well disproved by  history. Christianity and related religions "inform" our culture and language because of their long traditional monopoly of symbol and myth.  There is no high moral ground for one established religion over another. Everything depends on how it is interpreted and modified through historic changes, and subsequently practised by its adherents.

A direct translation of The Lord's Prayer, therefore, would make little sense to the Syai world of listeners or readers. What I present here is The Lord's Prayer modified to give it affinity with the Syai culture. It then has correspondence while at the same time expressing something very different at its spiritual foundation. It is a little like the Chinese on being pressed to convert to Christianity having no suitable word in their language for 'God'. You may have the material and missionary power to impose a faith-system that suits you, but it only ends up damaging the psyches of those you impose it on.

To make the point and to allow visitors to this blog to view a page of 'native' Syai writing, I have pictured such a page at the top of this blog, and will now translate this "Lord's Prayer" as it would be appreciated in the Syai world of myth-religious ceremony and seasonal festivals:

" Divine First, sacred beginning of everything.
Let-be that the sign of the divine One shows ever in our skies.
Let-be that the holy grand-children of the divine One bless the lives of us all, and let-be that our small planet-world simulates the great twilight-land of The Sacred Mountain.
Let-not-be that there would be destitution and hunger; but let-be that we, children of the Great Quaternary, always give and receive the bounty of the world with generosity and forgiveness.
Being-as-thankful we should be, that the the Great Quaternary sacrificed easy return to Its sacred homeland for-to make a worldly home in our bodies."

Be-blessed

The price that has to be paid for the re-construction of society to be just and fair.

I don't know where I got this picture from, but one might imagine it as of First Empress Fahraa, founder of the Syai movement established over most regions of the planet Feishoafeis (formerly known as Okraalom). The man behind her in the shadow might be her general, the commander of the forces that had to use minimal violence to impose the New Order that created the just society and banished war forever. (Fahraa herself was very distressed that any military action at all had to be used.)

Why would a 'Utopia' need a government and a legal system - let alone a military general - to start with? Wouldn\t a 'utopia' be just full of happy well-behaved people? Not what you might call a real utopia that takes account of evolution and our basic animal nature. Utopian realism is only an aspiration of balance: a lessening of fateful blows whether by natural or h(r)uman antagonists; coupled with fair governance based on experience and reason. It offers no cure for existential angst - distress such as in facing old age and death.

The leaders in wealth, power and influence in our Earth-societies have managed to maintain, even increase, influence and control over the ordinary citizen under their various jurisdictions. The resources and energies of those they are supposed to protect are used in their jockeying for power between themselves, dragging the ordinary citizenry into their quarrels and providing what they take to be justification for military power and expansion. The power-elite protect ownership rights and freedoms of individuals and groups, but in such a way that genuine justice is not served; the 'fruits' of the protective legal and financial system are progressively captured by a smaller and smaller percentage of the population. How does this happen?  Not because the rising super-wealthy are more ambitious, industrious and smart than the rest of us. Many of them, of course, are indeed well-educated in working their way through the arcane, tortuous maze of the global financial system. The rest of aspiring citizens must struggle against the inherent advantages of the better-off few at the top.

What makes the basic injustice or out present system happen, is that most of the very rich and super-rich are served by opinion-leaders and the media to uphold a system that has two 'mechanisms' to put, and keep, them there, well on-top. Secrecy is one of these, often misguidedly defended under the guise of protection of privacy. Secrecy drags us into leadership quarrels between groups and nations that are constantly eyeing what resources are left out there in the wider world. The other 'mechanism' is basically the right that the legal systems in general gives to semi-monopolizing giant corporations to behave as if they were individuals, with the rights that individuals normally have, or should have, to satisfy a genuine flesh-and-blood individual's modest needs. But the corporate individual does not have comparative modest needs. They have gigantic, voracious needs and voracious cravings to try to satisfy an ever-expanding catalogue of  'needs' dictated to them by their stake-holders and overpaid chiefs, with their demands to exploit for maximum profit  a 'consumerist' market driven by viciously competitive and misleading advertising.

To be as personally private as you please when you please is freely granted under the Syai system as described by Terres. But, beyond that, there is no transactional and public-affecting secrecy. You have the right to know all about the other person or group, and they have the right to know all about you, apart from the really important aspect of privacy just mentioned. That is the pre-requisite of a genuine justice system. If the "less important" privacy-come-secrecy is not sacrificed to justice, the system will evolve toward what we presently have on Earth. It will become more and more depressingly unjust, not just to ourselves but to our descendants and all persons and fellow-creatures that do and will in the near future inhabit this planet.

(This is probably my last blog for a while: Terres and I are at a fairly crucial stage in the study of the Syai language and the adjustment of it for presentation as a viable language for this planet.)

How Syai links ethics to how a society of well-being and sustainability can be maintained.

A happiness ethic requires a clean, pleasant natural environment (see picture).

Is there an ethical standard to all our variety of belief about what makes an action right or wrong (morally speaking)?  The founder of Syai (according to Terres, our visitor to the Syai world) formulated such a standard in a line of only a dozen symbols. Something like that line is set out here as best remembered:

I=g --<  K(t.S)=G.

Of course this won't mean anything without explanation. The symbol '--<', for instance, is only my made-up symbol for "if-and-only-if". What Fahraa, the founder, pointed out was that 'Good', writ large, was not to be derived from the same word with a missing 'o'. We are lost if we try to relate right action with our particular culture, religion of collective gut-feelings. We then start exchanging blows about what's good, what's bad, what's right and what's wrong. The law of the land guides us, but it can be an ass, as can some of the guidance given by the moral precepts that come from ancient traditions and individuals who have set themselves up as 'God's interpreters'. 

According to the Syai, the 'Good' which reliably guides our actions can only be established by what they call "The Naturalistic Axion".  It states that we, as a species, have the power to destroy our world and ourselves. Naturally, at the same time, we have within us the instinctual desire to continue to survive (as a species) for as long as the changing universe can allow us to, although we can subvert that desire by giving priority to other, more immediate ones. Furthermore, survival on that scale is only possible if we flourish. Furthermore, the condition of our flourishing is a care for ecological balances with consideration for the species we share the planet with. Given the appeal and rationality of this axiomatic approach, we can interpret the symbols as follows: I = the individual as active agent; g = what he needs (ethically) to consider good;  K = our state of collective knowledge based on everything that objective observation and the scientific method can reveal to us; S = 'Survival' but as a function of  't', time, which must be taken into account as we can make good predictions based on present knowledge but can only speculate as to the more long-term future on what it will take for us to survive. All these considerations a process that add up to the best notion possible of what is the good that we must strive for - 'G', the greater good for all.  Because of the 't' factor, there is a degree of uncertainty inevitable about 'G'. Unfortunately, we cannot invent a time machine to bring persons back from the far distant future, to test whether the ethical guidance that our formula gives us is absolutely reliable. But there are no absolutes in real life.

Picture by Severin, 6 y.o.

What's good and what's bad about religion.

The illustration is a rough impression of a Syai  temple-theatre.  The material world is the lower hemisphere, the spiritual is the invisible upper. On the far side is a stage and open-air tiered seating for 'sacred' dramas. Titans, gods and spirits perform on the flat roof, sometimes descending to the stage.

A human-like culture of a planet like Earth would hardly have a religion very similar to our main ones. (Read  'The Sparrow' and  'Children of God'.)  Giordano Bruno was executed for saying something similar. The Syai religion is really a mythological story performing the task of teaching basic ethics and psychological understandings. The object of the story is to guide us along the survival-path of empathy, conflict-solving and co-operation despite differences; but also to raise awareness of the potency of the dark side of our natures. The myth with its mysterious 'Prime Mover', its power-hungry egotistical titans and the creative, struggling gods that revolted against them - in the final analysis - is simply a 'picturing' of  archetypal personifications that in the end reside in our individual psyches.

No Syai person would fall to believing that these spirit-entities and the sacred mountain with its surrounding four spirit-lands are 'real'. Nevertheless the story has power just because it is not a stagnated faith in some past revelation by a pretender to a direct line to God. The painful past can be moved by spirit-mind into a better present, and that betterment can be maintained, improved upon with universal enhancement of our lives despite universal mortality. Suffering need not be so exaggerated as we find it in a world like ours. So it is that what's right about Religion is so well summed up in this paragraph written by Anthony de Mello:

A religious belief is not a statement about Reality, but a hint, a clue, about something that is a mystery, beyond the grasp of human thought. In short, a religious belief is just a finger pointing to the moon. Some religious people never get beyond the study of the finger. Others are engaged in sucking it. Others yet use the finger to gouge their eyes out. These are the bigots whom religion has made blind. Rare indeed is the religionist who is sufficiently detached from the finger to see what it is indicating - these are those who, having gone beyond belief, are taken for blasphemers.

Background to celebrations of Winter Solstace

Above (picture) is the sun imprisoned in darkness, beginning to escape and emerge into the world's sky where it can renew heat and light. Below is an imaginative picture of the Syai titans, who in the spiritual world represent light and darkness. In Syai mythology, the sun was torn out of the breast of the Titan Lady of Light (the 'light' of the Big Bang, one might imagine) to escape and give light to our worlds. The Lady was left with a hole in her breast, where the sun was imprisoned as her breast-heart. (She still has a smaller on in her tail.) Similarly to the ancient Greek mythology, the Syai titans are more-or-less parents of the Syai gods. The Syai story of creation has much influence in Syai culture and in the celebration of seasonal festivals.

The above is from Chapter 10 of the Syai 'Holy" Book, which Terres is translating from the Syai language in such a way that it demonstrates to anyone keen to learn the language how it works. He therefore uses a reasonably literal translation. At present Terres (that's 'me') is revising this from-memory Syai source.

Christianity (and others)
The seminal beliefs of Christians appear to have been grafted on to the myth-religions of the ancient world of the Middle Eastern 'crossroads' of trade and culture.  All historic evidence points to it: a Divine Child miraculously born; Mithra - known as "The Unconquered Sun" - his birthday on the 25 December.  The Babylonian goddess Astarte, "Queen of Heaven" gave birth to a divine child, and so on.  The Child of Light has many different names according to cultural variants: Horus, Osiris, Helios, Dionysus, Aeon   ...

For Christianity,  Jesus  was chosen, it seems, as a myth/legend version of a remarkable man of whom there's some conflicting evidence and reports about in history, but who really was more a 'man' of mystery, placed alongside the above-mentioned Divine Child gods. That spriit-person who supposedly walked the Earth was made a figure of  light sent be a god of gods. Although he was not of the 'Sun' he nevertheless follows the symbolic pattern of the 'Sun' in birth and resurrection. He was then connected for his enhancement to the holy writ tradition of the Hebrews as a kind of Pope-Francis re-interpretor of the Old Testament.

Features of the Syai language in relation to the 'alien' civilization but as possible 'Earth' language.

There's no reason to ignore the proven likelihood that other civilizations exist on other planets. The proof is there - not in any absolute sense, but in combining physics and cosmology with math. probability-analysis. Such a civilization as is 'imagined' under the name 'Syai', must be a development on a planet similar to ours if it is to have any real relevance to our human condition. It must have more meaning to us than just escapist entertainment. That Syai h(r)umans have a culture and language of their own is vital for this "thought-experiment".

Terres can use English to describe Syai culture, but the language is the window to the full envisaging and appreciation of it.

The twelve key consonants are the cornerstone of the building of Syai vocabulary. Each letter points to a picture-of-sorts as a hint of generalized meaning (but not a precise indication of connotation). With study of how the language expands from that, one can end up with any utterance (in ordinary conversation) able to be spoken and written down with ease. Spelling is phonetic and systematic and the grammar also follows regular patterns almost entirely. The grammar has important differences from English, but is not very different from most of the European and related languages. However, Syai grammar is expressive in itself of Syai culture and mythology to the extent that even the way each verbal root can be varied in meaning and application is pattern-integrated with the Syai pantheon.

A sentence that can be written and spoken in Syai  might be any picked out of a hat, but the ordinary typewriter just makes it look incomprehensible, as it would also be to any native Syai. I can write it correctly on my laptop with the Syai font. If you dont have that font, a sentence translated into Syai like "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog."  looks like this:

.  \srr |subjaf  cyq   uusad   yct||vc  reim   |sra   wdjaf   dpaim|tu.

Changes needed for a better 'Earth' economy

[Picture by courtesy of five-year-old grandson]
The Capitalist genie is out of the bottle; everyone and everything of natural value serving the almighty dollar instead of the other way round. And what is the (US)dollar based on? Nothing but tenuous trust! In contrast, the Syai unit of money - the "pawneis" is based on food, or rather, the seasonal production and availability of essential foodstuffs.

Most trade has to be done in the USdollar, or at least in close association with it. Other currencies are unreliable because they can be manipulated by means of the US dollar; for example by altering terms of trade in favor of the "big guys" - the US government and banks and indirectly most of the transnational companies. This manipulation can be done by printing money or leaning on weaker national economies to do deals that in the longer term enrich the "(young-and-)old-boy-network" of the super-rich in the interrelated circles of the US government and the six main banking houses (some of the six now amalgamated). Other super-rich may not live in the US but they tend to be closely linked to fortunes of the US monetary and power-elite. The whole of this 1-5% of Earth\s population are increasingly setting the agenda for most if not all national economies by having the power of large-scale investment, along with dominating the main determinants of culture through the media. Large-scale investment by the rich internationalists tends to absorb or knock out small-scale investment by the nationals of the smaller economies and marginalize the ordinary worker or middle-class citizen of those smaller economies. Hence, poverty in "advanced" countries.

A country prospers by preserving wilderness and giving its citizens sound infrastructure. Development financed by outside investment with out-flow of profits and a need to borrow from external rich international financiers  does not make for sound local economies or a good living environment. The citizens within a country need to pay taxes and invest. For that they need jobs that allow them to save resources. Taxes go toward good-for-all infrastructure and the savings go into local investment  providing capital for innovators and problem-solvers who live in the country and know it best. More internal jobs are thus created and expectations of a reasonable wage even for the less well trained and educated are fulfilled. Great to be a privileged, famed or supe-rskilled worker, but there's never any shortage of useful work if the money is spread evenly enough for it to be paid for. Money from outside from those that have too much? The old saying: "If you need to dine with the devil, take a long spoon with you!"

Principles of Social Reconstruction (Syai 'Affirmation 3)

Certain emotions (or motivations) tend to cause friction and suffering, but they arise naturally in us as in other socially interactive animals. One of these emotions is ENVY. Accepting and incorporating it at the same time as disarming it as one of the preoccupations of the Syai Founder's mind. The first six affirmations for social reconstruction and sustainability are in the orange frame above, but I write No.3 here as it is the subject of present attention, so needs to be easily read:

3.  Those who are secure in a state of well-being, enjoying freedom and privileges beyond the capacities of the majority to enjoy, must in future find justification in undertaking duties that contribute to the benefit of alll. Otherwise, envy becomes justifiable. The aim is to create social conditions in which envy - albeit part of our emotional natures - cannot be justified.      (Slightly changed in translation appropriately for the state we are in on this planet at present.)

Genuinely spiritual people only become part of religious communities for pragmatic  and/or protection-seeking reasons. Today, most of them step aside from "religious belongingness". The advances of science have enabled them to step down to earth from the "dizzy" height of institutionalized class-self-appointed dominance over the minds of the plebs.

Unfortunately most of religion still has a vested interest in ignorance. Some religious leaders are well-educated, but almost all seem to have retained some link to the toxic blend of myth, superstition and higher-power special-pleading appeal. (Myth and story, of course, are in themselves wonderful.)

Spirituality is really only to be trusted when it gives what's due to science and philosophy. 'God' is not a kind of glue than sticks together the members of super-tribes through their space-time journey. 'God' is to be better defined as the root-justification of the species-survival necessity of the ethical life; as well as being the Mystery of how it all began and how it all will end.

How a transport network might work without the private car.

Ready transport availability for all is important. It can be fast and easy or slow and leisurely. It should have minimal impact on the nature of the land it crosses. Fast transport from village to village and in-and-out of towns is achieved, according to Terres (Syai), by means of  propeller-driven miniplanes that run on bio-fuel but are sped along an overhead magnetized rail above the ground. This interferes with the visual environment, but the advantages over long-distance tunnelling are very considerable (e.g. for fixing faults). In fact a long-distance tunnel system would not be feasible economically, nor be done with sufficient safety. The Syai rapid-travel system provides privacy and comfort as well as tourist-satisfying views. Each miniplane takes only one adult (perhaps with a small child), but they run plentifully for groups to go in 'trains' of them. I have drawn  a sketchy diagram of a bottom-up view of a miniplane, but a request for details would take up so much space here that I must leave it for a reply I could supply specifically to any genuinely interested person. 

Sport and other potentially creative activities as mirroring of the state of a civilization

THE WING OF CORRUPTION

Basic human nature is good, but "civilized" human nature is a balance on a knife-edge, between "civilized" survival (which ultimately requires ethical thought and practice) and corruption.  Sportsmanship is great but sport in itself (as with religion) shows how easily corruption can take hold, fouling-up whatever is genuinely creative and wholesome.

What changed the path of social evolution for Syai civilization was the profound understanding that the cleverness of the brain can be used  to enhance the benignity of civilization (from most individuals' point of view) and the beauty and sustainability of the natural environment. But on the other hand the cleverness of the brain can alternatively be used to enhance environmental over-exploitation, and the advantages of individuals and 'in-groups' over non-connected individuals and 'out-groups'. Unlike my imagined Syai world (and other possible worlds out there that may have awakened to the potentialities of long-term survival of intelligent beings) our world is at a turning point! A dark uncertainty hangs over it. Economics, religion and (professional) sport are three societal areas in which the Syai civilization would strike many people on this planet as very revolutionary; but not totally out of reach. Syai sport, for instance, has great regulatory importance in both fostering general happiness and preventing all kinds of malfunctions and self-seeking temptations, but there is no such thing as professional sports players or teams.