Shaking The Mulberry Tree
It has been said that “modern man never asks himself what he will have to pay for his power.” We are a species that celebrates efficiency in its two forms; maximum production wedded to maximum consumption. Cutting down a forest, sectioning it off into squares, plowing it and growings thousands and thousands of corn plants is efficient. The amount of corn that a field can produce is incredible, and the amount of people it can feed is equally incredible. And yet, because we have chosen efficiency and distanced ourselves from the slow gathering of food, it has become necessary to seek out distant specialist who must be paid to do this for us. Who among us really knows how our food is selected, produced, stored and transported?
"The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom."
We have walked into a dangerous era where technology must constantly increase in efficiency. An amazing philosopher by the name of Jaques Ellul called this the law of Technique and it is this law that will continue to push more and more tasteless and uniform foods that can handle the demands of transport and storage. It is this law that will continue to squeeze more and more corn out of each acre, with more fertilizer, more fungicides and pesticides. It is this law that will continue to separate ourselves from nature's rhythms, cycles, and lessons, no longer able to see that food is all around us. As a result of our own actions, we have set loose a terrible fire that requires us all to feed it. It only knows more and is consuming everything in its path.
"No longer is it necessary to look within oneself to know truth—it is all laid out in black and white. We are no longer divine creators of our world, only receivers, only consumers."
But what do we do? Shall we rise up and overthrow the prevailing systems? Shall we wage war against the cult of efficiency? Shall we replace our old masters with new ones? Cyclical illusions and more illusions. Overthrow the system and it will keep overthrowing you? Struggle to reform Technique and it will create a technique to reform you. Fight the cult of efficiency and the efficient will fight for a new cult. The mind is a mirror and what matters is the repeating stories that runs through our head. For it is these stories that keeps us from ever experiencing the shaking of a Mulberry tree. In this, there is no overthrowing, no struggle and no fight, just the experience of something truly wonderful.
"The force that is forced is not a growing force."
Seriously, try it sometime. Put a tarp or sheet down under a Mulberry tree in the middle of June and just start shaking it. Like manna from heaven, little berries of nutritional wonder will begin to rain down. And amazingly, these gifts require no money, nor the system that money gives birth to, providing an abundance of some of the finest fruit for your eating pleasure that can literally last you throughout the entire year.
"Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unobtainable dollars! Children screaming under the stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men weeping in the parks! Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch! Moloch the loveless! Mental Moloch! Moloch the heavy judger of men! Moloch the incomprehensible prison! Moloch the crossbone soulless jailhouse and Congress of sorrows! Moloch whose buildings are judgment! Moloch the vast stone of war! Moloch the stunned governments! Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers are ten armies! Moloch whose breast is a cannibal dynamo! Moloch whose ear is a smoking tomb! Moloch whose eyes are a thousand blind windows! Moloch whose skyscrapers stand in the long streets like endless Jehovahs! Moloch whose factories dream and croak in the fog! Moloch whose smoke-stacks and antennae crown the cities! Moloch whose love is endless oil and stone! Moloch whose soul is electricity and banks! Moloch whose poverty is the specter of genius! Moloch whose fate is a cloud of sexless hydrogen! Moloch whose name is the Mind! "
