Ishmael Community Guestbook

Has anyone here read Daniel Quinn's "Ishmael"? Discussion within the most recent week: reddit discuss

This book seems to have somethings in common with Hindu cosmology:

1. The old days about 5,000 years ago was better for the world. The period which started 5110 or so years ago marks the bad era for the world and the tedencies of people of this era will end up with a calamitous end to the world as we know it.

2. The world does not belong to us, we belong to the world. The thread that runs trhough all of us is the same that runs through all living beings.

A more knowledgeable person than me can probably find more items of similarities in the percpective.

Please watch the movie on youtube called "Home". It's 90 minutes of the most beautiful filming I've ever seen. And it fits right in with what DQ writes about.

I sincerely hope DQ sees this.

[continued] ... [mismatch between coevolved humans-as-we-are] and the sort of idealized humans our institutions expect us to be does lead to overdiagnosing and overmedicating, and overlooking the needs kids have to be outside, to play group games where they can argue over the rules without adult supervision, to develop their decision skills, and to spin their own yarns.

"indigo children"? Dan Quinn speaks of a culture-in-decline neediness: "we Takers are a desperately lost and needy people. It was this neediness, I think, that first made us yearn to be loved by God (an idea completely foreign to the animist mentality) and that made us dream of eternities of bliss after lifetimes of emptiness... we nowadays need to ... bend spoons with our minds, ... to have a soul reading, to visit a sacred energy vortex--and this hardly scratches the surface." Those fantasies, and another projected onto kids, rather than restructure our group relations. Todd, i do think that a mismatch between coevolved humans-as-we-are and ...

[continued]... it [Happy Feet} lumps all humans together as industrialized exploiters, and blames us all, in our nature as a species, with no helpful delineation identifying some practices and structures. i find that to be a crucial difference. We did not create human nature, nor can we recreate it; so if that's where the problem is claimed, it says we can do nothing, which is the same old Mother Culture lullaby excuse. We did create the harmful practices and structures, we CAN recreate or alter or abandon them; so since that's where the problem lies, we can do something useful, which is the helpful opening Quinn points to. Hooray!

Destry, i am grateful you edited the entry for Daniel Quinn. i made a few edits myself, and encourage others here to edit it towards clarity and fairness (i was unable to include a link to Rethinking The World; perhaps one of you can). As for Happy Feet, i don't find much in common with Quinn there, except for storytelling and a willingness to at least look at difficult global problems, both worthwhile qualities. i do see in Happy Feet something very different from the writings of Daniel Quinn: it lumps ...

i wish energy and success to all who can meet in person! i hope it's going well in Lincoln, NE.

Anybody watching the skewed coverage of the massacre of tribal opponents by corporations and their servants? indigenous-vs-industrial Utcubamba-indigenous-die

Russ Decker, i second all three of your thoughts. May we each succeed.

Brigitte, that trailer of a documentary called "Life Inc." looks great, and i hope the movie has those stark innovative qualities. http://www.lifeincorporated.net/ i also like the related "dispatches" on YouTube.

An excellent tool for showing the central truth that population obeys food availability: carrying capacity slideshow

Albert Bartlett shows us how to bring the simple but rarely-understood arithmetic behind exponential growth into the public realm: Access to Albert Bartlett Direct to video

John Kurmann, i invite you to repost your pamphlet post with its wealth of resources.

Interesting genetic results indicate only one tribe left the african continent. Note the other guesses about the timing of human events: One tribe left Africa

I read 'Ishmael', 'My Ishmael', and 'The Story of B' in high school. These books inspired me to become a philosophy professor, and after years of hard work I finally made it. Now I have a chance to help students think critically. Thank you Mr. Quinn. I look forward to making your books part of my courses.

do you think that when people talk about "indigo children" they're just being reactionary? that when people want to escape mother culture's box they often start by simply thinking what they perceive to be the opposite of what she says? do you think all the talk about human evolution might our current lack-of-a-better-term for cultural evolution? especially since we think all humans belong to our culture? do you think the "metaphore," as i'll call it, of A.D.H.D. kids as "hunters" in a very conformist world of farmers holds any weight or makes any....sense?

still reading , still learning, . trying not to walk into a lake

Congratulations, Russ Hopfenberg, for providing us with outstanding scientific research.

Life awakening and clearing. I know we need not go back, except to view how we got to this point in the way Quinn reveals. Once the way is cleared we are to BE the new vibrational experience.