Annares Dhamma

Overview

My friend Bregman had just finished his first Vipassana course. I drove out to the desert to see him and hear his tales of surviving what can be a harrowing encounter with one's own mind. He told me the usual: pains, sadness, wanting to quit, moments of elation, intensely personal stuff. But after the 4 hour download, as I was driving away in the parking lot, he hollered to me a final exhortation: "You have to read The Dispossessed!"

Now I'm not normally one for science fiction. But something about this rang true for me. So I bought a copy from Amazon soon after. I was gobsmacked right from the first chapter, when Shevek enters a 10-day quarantine, just like a 10-day Vipassana course, a quarantine for the mind.

I raced through it and upon conclusion, I thought to myself:

"I have to write the soundtrack to this book!"

It's certainly not a pure chapter-for-chapter audio match to the writing. A lot of the music is just my own subjective personal connection to the bits that I liked in the book. The opening scene, the quanrantine, the feeling of the desert and making do with little, the idea of the inherent goodness in men. The most important connection I made reading it was how similar the politics on Annares were to those that run the various volunteer organizations I am a part of here in the US, and discovering that this pattern is called "anarchism" - meaning there are indeed examples of real-world applications of this philosophy, regardless of whether the participants are conscious of it or not. Anarchism is an organic, natural, inherrent system of human organizaion and the more people recognize what it can be, the possibility of "Annares Dhamma" can be realized.

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