I just wanted to thank you for your work on all this, having followed some of the early developments (as a lurker for the time being…) on the rewild site. I find all the territory opened up by this angle fascinating, although I had the usual (for me) initial ‘oh come on, you can’t be serious’ reaction that seems prevalent in the comment thread over on Anthropik currently. Interestingly I had the same reaction on first hearing about fox walking, but managed to get past that after a month-or-so’s resistance, and have been reaping the postural and sensual rewards ever since. I now take these bouts of indignant outrage as my first clue for interesting new avenues to explore.

Having had a few bad experiences with quasi Stalinist purges of words from my vocabulary in the past (largely through post-adolescent attempts to distance myself from previous religious persuasion - no more talk of ‘wrong or right’, ‘good or evil’ etc) - a potential pitfall I’m sure I don’t need to warn you about - I will mostly be following advice I heard from Dan, namely of installing programming-type ‘break points’ on the various forms of ‘to be’ in my speech and thought patterns, so that I trip and stumble, slowly getting better on all fronts at re-formulating my bald assertions of changeless essence.

Important IMO generally to keep an eye on the motive for these changes and watching out for the insidious influence of puritan thought police. So I like the lack of shame you exhibit in using ‘to be’ in speech, although I confess to a guilty pleasure in spotting when those little inconsistencies creep in

Only discovered the site recently, but like what I’ve read/seen/heard so far.
Ian

Dan Moonhawk Alford’s web page, http://www.enformy.com/alford.htm

Alfred Korzybski, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Korzybski

General Semantics, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Semantics