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Excerpts From The Incompleat Folksinger

I guess in modern life you have to plan. But there’s such a thing as planning too much. There’s such a thing as planning too early. Here’s what jazz musicians can teach the politicians of the world: we must plan for improvisation.

New Age Politics: Healing Self And Society

Social action that is not based on a firm sense of self can only be based on guilt or rage — and guilt or rage do not allow us to see clearly; they render us, in fact, extremely susceptible to manipulation by demagogues.

An Interview With William Irwin Thompson

My feeling is that we’re headed into a discontinuous transition. But anybody living inside one has to try to work for a continuous transition. You go ahead, knowing better, even though the enormous probability is that it will be highly catastrophic.

Laughing At Ourselves

There’s something about a “New Age Cultural Event” that asks you to put your brain on hold, a flavor of contrived holiness and assumed agreement that makes you twitch all over.

MANAS

Magazine Review

Rather than telling us how to live, MANAS gives us the reasons for living.

Californicated, Santa Crucified

I don’t think I’ve ever lived in a place that hasn’t been identified as a psychic window, and that includes 16 different cities and towns. Which means either that my very presence bestows some sort of divine grace, or else that some of these places are faking.

Drug Experiences

Dogwood blooms scattered along the path looking like unreal party decorations; wonderfully visible auras of soft neon; hearing the one note that we and all we sense are merely harmonics of

March 1979

The Sun Also Changes

I’d always been interested in journalism, in writing and in self-expression. The magazine actually grew out of a conversation with Mike Mathers, who then ran the Community Bookstore. That’s when I was running the juice bar and I used to bring him juice drinks for lunch every day. Then one day we got to talking about how it would be nice if Chapel Hill had a newsletter or a magazine.

All In Common

What Gets Shared (And What Doesn’t) In Small Communities

Most communal groups in the United States today (of which by far the largest number are urban) are expense-sharing groups, at least as far as such things as groceries, mortgage or rent, taxes, utilities and vehicles used in common are concerned.

The Whole Earth Jamboree

Don’t tap your foot. Listen to the words. If I was to be marooned on a South Sea Island with a half dozen metaphors, that would be one. It’s as elastic as a new pair of underwear, and snugly fits the times. Marooned last month in California, at the Whole Earth Jamboree, I listened. In California, the beat is compelling. It’s a state, and a state of mind, where everything seems possible, where the dreams of an age sink down roots, and grow, as dramatically as Findhorn’s 40-pound cabbages, yet may die before their seeds are carried “in from the coast.” Reflecting the best and worst in ourselves, it’s still the frontier, ever receding; the deeper we go into ourselves, the more there is to discover.