BootsnAll Travel Community

Just a hope and a prayer...

Im new to this site...loving it so far!

Just looking for like minds to meet and learn from...

A book called, Ishmael changed my life. And by change, I mean totally rearrange. Take everything you beleive as truth and then turn it upside down, and rip it to shreds...thats what i did...

I am no on my journy to not "finding myself" by creating myself...

To do that I want to start off with a nomadic adventure...

Just hoping someone here has read Ishmael so they know where I am comming from!

If not...its cool...I can still learn from everyone!

Take care,

Erich

What specifically about Ishmael resonated with you?

Quinn's written several books since then that expand on his theme. There are a lot of books out there by a number of authors in a similar vein that you may like..

Erich...Do share some more. What insights did you gain?

What changes did you make?

Do a book report on it! [Kinda sounds like school, aye mate?]

keep it simple...but tell us what the book is about and what you got from it!

By the way...How do Canuks spill aye...is it 'eh?

Haha ya Oldhippie...go with the latter...we spell it "eh"...

And Ramble! I'm glad you are familiar with Dan Quinn's works! And yes, I have read two of his other works! I'm working on finding a copie of beyond civilization and will check out his new one, Tales of Adam...

Anywaz oldhippy, I assume you have not read the book? If not it is terribly difficult too explain all in one sitting...Heck its impossible!

But I can try and share the basics...

The book starts off with the main character (practically the only character) who reads an add in the paper that read "Seeking Pupil - Must have an earnest desire to save the world"

Being curiuos he goes to the adress listed and is in for the ride of his life. A talking gorilla awaits him and begins teaching him a totally different perspective to or way of life. The gorilla may sound cheesy but thats just the medium the author chooses, its the message that rocks!

Basically the rest of the book is just recordings of the different session the Teacher (Gorilla) and pupil have..

Some basic ideas presented are:

- We are trapped in a civilization that is compelled to go on destroying the world...In a way were are captives of the world and the world has become a captive of us...

- If we don't open our eyes and change the way we are living and stop exploiting the earth's resources, we will crash...Our civilization will end, just like all others...

- In the big picture, the world can be devided into two cultures...(dont think from country to country) but actually by HOW people live. How the food gets onto our plate...The two types that exist are Takers and Leavers. Guess which one we are? Takers! Since the birth of totlitarian agriculture we have stripped the earth bare, and began to be "in control" of nature...The Leavers, are few and far between as we have wiped them out...The Natives that lived peacfully and closer to nature...Yes they took what they needed but the left the rest...aware that they are apart of a bigger system that they need to survive...

I dunno if this is a good way to try and describe this book...Its really hard to do...and there is no substitute for taking the journey and reading it...

How did it impact my life? It opened my eyes to see that there is no ONE right way to live...yet we're told from birth that this was it. This is the best its been and we're going to make life better! AN interesting topic in the book that is coveredis called "Mother Culture.." I guess you could sort of compare that to the man, or Uncle Sam...That underlying voice that tells you how everything is supposed to be...

I am almost ashamed to be white...But i am who I am...

So I've read books with the ideas in them...I am only 18...now what? I can't stand up and tell society to shut off its machines and stop being a materialistic selfish machine...all I really have control over is my life...

I could easily go to University on a Scholarship...Highschool is so easy and brutal! I could go to school, get a degree and make 100's of thousands in a business career...I could play that game...I really could, and I'd be damn good at it...

But I'd rather not, and can no longer join the rat race knowing the things I know...Yeah I have to find money somehow, I understand that...but...a career?

In short I am now a young adult, ready to venture out into the WORLD instead of just take my place in society...

I still might go to college or university (YUCK) but if i do, i want to be learning skills outside...maybe a two year deal...I need freedom...don't want extend my schooling...dont get me wrong...I have a desire to learn...but school? Ha! Brutal...they teach us WHAT to learn not HOW...

SO I like to consider myself a neo-hippie...an activist, an envriomentalist...it really doesnt matter, labels don't concern me...I just want to LIVE!

People ask me what I want to be when I'm older...I simply say, "Me!" :-)

Sorry if this was long or a rambler...oh ya, I hate book reports! haha

Hope to hear from ya soon!

Erich

Hi Erich,
Thanks for the "book report". I haven't read the book, but will check it out.

I'm getting old. You said 18 and I thought, "So YOUNG!!" I know how you feel about school. I hated high school, and was completely lost when it came to looking for a college or university. I think it's a matter of finding one that fits. I visited a dozen before I found one that fit. I stepped foot on campus and knew right then that this was the place for me. It wasn't fancy or anything, just home. The people really made the difference for me. They were completly genuine. And they cared about my opinion. That was the biggest revelation. High school sucked because no one really cared about the opinions of other people. But in college, people cared (at least where I went, Adrian College).

Have you read the book "The Golden Spruce"? That is a book that changed my life. Amazing true story of myth, madness and greed. Good book.

Jet

Ok. This whole post is

Hey Jetgirl, thanks so much for the reply..I will take note of that book!

I'm not even sure if University/College is down my line anymore...I don't want to be a slave to society...and going through another institution for 2, 3, 4 or more years...just so I can survive? I can survive with out it. I know I could.

I desire independence...School is too over rated...I kind of want to prove to myself that I can survive with out it...
I love education...but not in a conformed indoctrinated way! So if I do go to school, I think it will be a 2 year college course...something outdoors...so that i can learn practicle outdoor rec skills and use them in my travels!

I've got a lot of big choices that I have to make this year...This year and next year are two huge years that are going help shape who I will become and where my path is going to go...

I hope its a path that has been less traveled...Robbert Frost said it best:

"Two roads diverged in a wood, and I-
I took the one less travelled by,
And that has made all the difference"

I dont want this to sound like I know what I am doing...or that I have answers

Because I am so lost right now...So re-arranged...and I am going out to tackle the world...

But I almost want to be okay with being lost...

The only thing I know for sure is that the world is my home, and that I am going to die. Thats the only thing you can be garunteed in this awful beautiful place...

Sorry If im ranting...I'm just searching right now...

I'm sure you will be fine out in the world. The key is finding your own path. Search your heart and find your path. I wish you all the best, of course.


Jet

Ishmael was a great book, and also resonated with me as well. I think it's pretty awesome how the strokes of a pen (or keys of a computor) putting together different words/ideas/concepts can change someones entire perception of reality and stir them on a more beneficial path. Have a great adventure fellow canucker, I imagine the next book will be along shortly!

Ishmael was an amazing book and a lot of the ideas resonated with me too. Kind of too big a topic to go into in my post, but just thought I'd add my opinion. The whole thing with the gorilla is kind of odd, but I guess there has to be some vehicle for putting the message across. I definitely recommend this book.

I actually came across it when it was listed as being what the movie ?? with Cuba Gooding Jr. and Anthony Hopkins was based on...kind of a stretch. How did you find this book?

Welcome to BnA!


I've read Ishmael and the Story of B too. That's enough Quinn for me. I enjoyed both books.....but I believe they do not get at the real source of all of man's problems in the world.

It ain't the food overproduction (Though this has accelerated things) -- it's the brain. A misunderstanding of the brain - which is only recently coming to light formally via neuroscience and evolutionary biology.

As for agriculture - there is an interesting DVD series called the Origins of Civilization. 3 DVDs. I've seen the first one - THE FIRST FARMERS. This documentary describes theories on how man went from Hunter-Gatherer to farmers.

Two more will be at my library soon - END OF THE STONE AGE culture...and THE FIRST TOWNS and VILLAGES.

For an even better perspective...I enjoyed Ronald Wright's A Short History of Progress - only 132 pages! published just this year. Written by a Canadian too! (I see your in Ontario)

Also worth watching is NOVA: America's Stone Age eXplorers. You get to learn about clovis-point theory and the Solutreans - 'stone age' peoples essentially...BBC's Walking with Cavemen is insightful too.

The problem goes back much further than when agriculture was invented I believe...one only learn more about the Head Smashed in Buffalo jump in Canada...I think that's what it is called.

Cheers.

Wow...thanks for your responses...

Circusofflife, thanks for the suggestions and the other soruces to study up!

However, I beleive (as presented in Dan Quinn's works) That there is nothing fundamentally wrong with humans...So when you were stating that "the problem goes beyond agriculture" I beg too differ!

The world was fine as it was, when we lived on the law of life...there was nothing WRONG with it...and nothing wrong with humans...humans survived for over 2 million years hunting and gathering...and in this short shot while of 10,000 years we've managed to wipe out species, eventually ourselves...

Mis understanding of the brain? maybe...But its more a miss understading of how things came to be this way...

I read Ishmael earlier this year. Great book! Reading your post makes me wanna go back and read it again.

I'm not a very good reader. I tend to get distracted and give up pretty easily but this book held my attention very well and gave me a lot to think about.

quote:

Originally posted by Outonalimb:
However, I beleive (as presented in Dan Quinn's works) That there is nothing fundamentally wrong with humans...So when you were stating that "the problem goes beyond agriculture" I beg too differ!

The world was fine as it was, when we lived on the law of life...there was nothing WRONG with it...and nothing wrong with humans...humans survived for over 2 million years hunting and gathering...and in this short shot while of 10,000 years we've managed to wipe out species, eventually ourselves...

Mis understanding of the brain? maybe...But its more a miss understading of how things came to be this way...

You're welcome. I'm glad you find them useful. Check the Look,Learn forum for the RTW BY DVD thread I've been posting to.

I can't re-emphasize enough the Short History of Progress. (I just finished Collapse - How Socities Choose to Fail or Succeed by Jared Diamond - Pulitzer Prize winner for his last book Guns, Germs, and Steel today too - the unabridged 22 CD audiobook!! Taking notes too!! With hindsight - I think I would recommend the abridged audio version) I just watched Quest for Fire yesterday. It's a 1981 film that was re-released on DVD in 2003.

Another DVD to add to your list --- Atomic Cafe.

I'll note...I saw this one AFTER I had stared down at a 100 foot nuclear missile still in its silo...the warhead it used to contain was 9 Megatons. That is 600 times more powerful than EACH bomb dropped on Japan. I also saw the entire underground infrastructure and the buttons that would have been pressed to start the next world war.

The Russians tested up to 50 Megatons. Meditate on this destructive power and what would possess people to build something so powerful. You can see it too if you visit Tucson, AZ area. $6 that's it. Or there is a Minuteman site opening soon in the Dakotas. Smaller warheads, but more of them.

Looking at the missile face to face...made me re-evaluate the nature of man. The video only sealed the deal. (I saw this after 7 months traveling on the road too...where I gained many insights by comparing people and cultures constantly) Also visited Hiroshima and the museum there...

Another pair --

Why We Lie - Self-deception and the Unconscious Mind by David Livingstone Smith
Roots of the Self - Robert Ornstein

questions to meditate on - what pulls the trigger of a gun? What makes someone decide to build such powerful nuclear weapons? What makes someone engage in beyond despicable factory farming practices to make a few extra dollars? How can members in the same family with the same parents be so different? Why are you interested in travel, and others you might know - not at all.

The hands don't pull the trigger, push buttons, and build "dark things" or plant crops on their own....

While Quinn won $500,000 award from Ted Turner...that is notable, but as I like to say:
Beware the men and women in fancy dress, much less so - those in tattered clothing.

Pride, in its many different forms - many are very subtle, are the downfall -- nearly every single time. There is a reason for that euphemism - Pride before the fall.

oh well...just me thoughts. Glad you posted this thread. Need a drink now to support me alcohol habit.

Looks like they have an opening date with tours - April 2006.

US Minuteman Missile site in South Dakota

http://www.nps.gov/mimi/index.htm

Here's the Titan -
http://www.roadsideamerica.com/attract/AZGREtitan.html
http://www2.nuclearwinter.com:8080/titan/

there's an official website too...but it has some annoying Java code on it...so I won't link it here.

I wrote a detailed review on my website too way back when I saw it in early 2003. I'll fish it out if you want to read it and see the photos. My thinking on things has advanced since then.

And no...seeing a picture is nowhere near the same as seeing it in person. It's one thing to know...quite another to feel (Which is a major problem in the world. Lots of people know stuff...far fewer feel them. This is a brain problem too....)

As I was saying...beware the men and women in fancy dress.

Crops don't make people say shit like this. (Though you gotta wonder about all the chemical residue...)

http://www.cnn.com/2005/US/12/08/coulter.row.ap/index.html

I would like to hear what she would say if we compared life experiences. Not knowledge or status, experiences.

Which doesn't mean I know much at all. In fact, I know very little at all. In fact, I don't hesitate to call myself stupid the more I think about it. The day I ever say something like what she is claimed to have said - in public or private - I demand that somebody punch me in the face.

Only a truly arrogant mind says stuff like Ms. Coulter and many others like her (conservative - liberal - blue - green-orange-pink, or whatever fucking color in the rainbow) in the gleam of the spotlight these days.

What did I say about pride?

Confidence vs arrogance is a very fine line (One most everyone has surely crossed at one point or another about something)...and therein is a clue to the world's problems me believes.

well..i'm just irritable right now after reading this...where's my alkihol???

Pretty good book. I read it maybe two years ago but never got around to reading Story of B.

People seem to say that Ishmael was about the consequences of us taking more from the Earth than is sustainable, and how we can avoid disaster. This apparent crisis is reflected in the language of the gorilla's ad that seeks a pupil to "save" the planet and early conversations which raise some of the book's central questions: Is the planet really being destroyed and does it need saving; are we being destroyed; and if so, why are we doing it?

First question is easy and serves more to clarify the issues. Quinn recognizes that we are changing our planet- very rapidly thanks to technology- but not literally destroying it. The planet itself isn't going anywhere, and no matter what happens life will continue in some form. In that sense the planet itself does not need saving per se, we just need careful consideration as to what type of planet we want and whether we want to be a part of it. Which leads to...

Are we destroying ourselves? That's a matter of semantics that drives at what I believe Quinn's book is really about. It depends what one means by "ourselves" and what modes of self-identification are employed. If one investigated what "we" has meant over just the last two centuries, it would reveal a rather limited identification. Native Americans, Blacks, Asians, Women, Jews, Gays, Communists... they keep getting left out of discussions about "our" future. They were perceived to be something inferior. Nowadays, although many do act as if they are ultimately Americans or Christians or Muslims and unattached to any larger whole, it appears the more enlightened interpret "us" and "our future" to refer to that of all human beings. I bet that's what you've been doing the whole time reading this? Reading "our planet" or "our destruction" I'd bet the interpretation was "humanity's planet" and "humanity's fate". Busted. Didn't count gorillas, and this is what Quinn thinks is wrong.

I'd argue that what Daniel Quinn was saying is that "us" should mean more- it should encompass ALL life on the planet. We should consider ourselves to be not only part of a family, community, country, species... but somehow we should recognize that we are part of an even larger whole. Although many would agree with this in principle, practically nobody sees the world that way. We don't consider hunting for sport to be on par with murder (just like two hundred years ago killing a savage certainly wasn't murder) or consider burning rain forest to be as bad as genocide or more broadly see any inequity in taking far more than we receive. It's like two hundred years ago. Whether one was a slave owner or not was determined by economic necessity and means, not by moral grounding. And even if one agreed that blacks are people too and deserve equality, the economic necessity of slavery and the idea of a white/black division into "us" and "others" so permeated the thought of the time that very very few could see past it, much less change the status quo. Likewise, today we may agree in principle that pollution is bad or that human consumption is reckless but it's kinda tough to give up our cars and electronics or see past our own divisions into "us" and "others". Hopefully, two hundred years down the road, people will look back at our polluting habits and say "how could they?!?" the way we look back on owning slaves.

Now, Quinn talks a lot about technology's role in all this. Some would say technology is the problem. That's not true; technology is by definition an answer to problems. Our perception of our relation to the rest of the Earth is the problem, and as a result technology is used to solve only our problems, i.e. humanity's problems, without any regard for the rest of the planet. As technology gets more efficient at solving humanity's problems at the expense of the rest of the planet it underscores the fundamental problem with identification. If we wanted to (again, if "we" meant something different), technology could be used to solve Earth's problems and not those of any one country or species. We'd then achieve some sort of planetary harmony.

Bottom line: The problem really is just the way we think of ourselves, and that changing the way we think is the key to saving the rest of the planet. That's what Quinn recognizes and is trying to do. After all, the ad said "save the planet" and not "save humanity". His whole book is about trying to make the reader identify with the rest of the planet's life. Even his means of deliving the message through an anthropomorphic gorilla serves as a device for making us identify with other life.

There's definitely more to be said about the book, in particular about the title Ishmael and how the story relates to Moby Dick's theme of being at odds with nature and trying to conquer it while undoing ourselves in the process, but man.. I'm out of gas.

Good post GentlemenOfLeisure.

You might be interested in the book I am half way through right now.

It's called US AND THEM. Insights into the Tribal Mind. Just published October 2005.

Us and Them Book

It isn't an easy read, nor is it hard, but I can only read 20-30 pages at a time because I have to think carefully about what is being said.

This along with a few others I've just read (And DVDs watched) are quite insightful. The Lucifer Principle is interesting for the first 80% of it - then the author stumbles badly...as I write in the latest review on Amazon. My thoughts anyway.