the new paradigm

an enlightened society

2012-01-31T10:46:00.003Z

The notion of an enlightened society is not some magical community wherein everyone has attained nirvana, or even has the perfect job or relationship. An enlightened society is actually very practical: it is a society based on having an open heart...
Worrying solely about "me" gets tiresome after a while. In other words, in order to really create positive change in the world, we need to shift our focus away from only thinking about ourselves...
Imagine what it would be like if one day everyone woke up and decided to shift the focus of their day away from always holding themselves at the center of the universe? What if each of us made our day about benefiting others?..
True joy does not come from acquiring new gadgets or starting another steamy romance, but from being present with your life. It comes from turning your attention away from always thinking about yourself, and opening to the world around you...
Through slowing down and being present with your world, you are more open to the suffering around you. Your heartstrings can be pulled by the simplest things: a puppy waiting to be adopted or a beautiful flower just beginning to blossom. While you may previously have walked right by these things, now you are open and available to your world. You feel an inherent richness and tenderness...
The simplest and most direct way to create positive change in the world is through connecting with our own awakened heart... Simple acts of being present and compassionate bring us happiness. We find joy in being openhearted...
You don't have to wait until you're enlightened. You don't have to ask anyone's permission. You just have to offer yourself, as you are, and allow your vulnerable heart to transform the world.

Lodro Rinzler

last gasp

2012-01-27T15:36:00.001Z

The job of national and international politicians in contractionary times is typically to make a bad situation worse as expensively as possible, as they attempt to rescue the dying paradigm that has conveyed so much personal advantage in their direction. That paradigm is one of centralization - the accumulation of surpluses from a broad periphery at the centre of power.
However, the wealth conveyors of the past are breaking down, meaning that the periphery that can be drawn upon is shrinking. As the periphery shrinks, the remaining region within the grip of power can expect to be squeezed harder and harder. 'Twas ever thus. Rome did the same thing, squeezing the peasants for tithes until they abandoned their land and threw in their lot with the surrounding barbarians.

Nicole Foss

2012 - what will it bring?

2012-01-01T10:42:00.001Z

An underlying shift of consciousness is effecting and influencing every single event here on our planet, within society and within our personal lives. That's why there's been so much challenge and change in recent times and why there's much more to come.
There is much disinformation. Deception and delusion abound. The consciousness of humanity has been shaped, controlled and manipulated for thousands of years by an underlying opposing consciousness. We're seeing the mirror of that intervention all around us now, in the revolutionary uprisings of 2011, and the Occupy Movement. The mirror is set to get ever clearer in the years and decades ahead. We are now entering a process of rationalisation and purification.
Any being that is aligned with the movement will increasingly feel it, and their lives will make greater and greater sense within the overall universal dynamic. But anyone, anything, or any consciousness, that is not in alignment, will have the thread of their garment slowly but surely torn apart. That's why anything of lower equity and harmony is feeling such unrest and turmoil right now.
That's why we're witnessing attempts by the powers that control society to exert even greater control... trying to protect the matrix of conditioning that subjugates the many by giving power and wealth to the few... And they're using just about any and all methods in the book to ensure that control. As awakened people begin to share their truth, there's much deception and misinformation that's purposefully being superimposed. They're literally terrified of the enlightenment process... Distraction and deception are their key weapons, so in 2012, you can expect lots of distraction, lots of deception, lots of false flag revelations and disclosures.
We each have to take personal responsibility for our choices, our motivations and our truth. It doesn't matter how informed or enlightened the external source of information may appear to be, we must ALWAYS process that information through our own hearts and truly feel what resonates with us.
It's about looking through this world of confusion and feeling out what is really true for us. It's about having the courage and patience to cast aside that which we don't truly know or resonate with. It's about continually letting go of out-dated ideas, refining our perspective, until suddenly, one day, the veil falls away and a new world reveals itself from the burned out ashes of the old.

adapted from Chris Bourne

the machine will stop

2011-12-24T16:11:00.000Z

Entropy ensures that our technologies become ever more complex and inter-dependent. Some devices may seem simpler to use - automatic lights and wipers on our cars, for example - but, under the hood, simple mechanical switches have been replaced by complex systems in sealed boxes, with sensors connected. Machines may appear to simplify our lives, but when they go wrong we are increasingly at their mercy. Our machines are no longer fixable: instead of repairing or replacing a single faulty part, an entire subsystem is replaced, or more often the whole machine is discarded, and replaced with a new one... the old one is "obsolete" anyway! This is a tremendous waste of the dwindling resources of our planet. Meanwhile we become ever more dependent on our machines, needing sophisticated machines to fix (or replace) our sophisticated machines: for example, cars now require computer diagnostics to be repairable.

More alarmingly, our whole civilisation has become globally interdependent. We have created one vast mothering machine to succour all of us from birth through death. Our distribution networks become ever more centralised - we depend on one giant global system for almost all of our food, fuel, and other supplies. When one link in this chain fails, the effects are immediate and widespread. "Just in time" practices have eliminated inventories to streamline the system and reduce costs: this is more efficient, but also much more vulnerable to failure.

The new-paradigm design of the internet indicates how our systems of the future should be: the internet is massively distributed and massively failsafe. It was designed to survive nuclear warfare. However the other systems we depend on to keep body and soul together have not been designed following new-paradigm principles: they are old-paradigm at its worst: massively centralised and massively dependent. This makes sense to the money men in the short term (which is all they look at), but it is catastrophic for even the medium term future of the human race. One major failure, which could be caused at any time by natural disaster or manmade disaster (warfare, terrorism, mistake), and our global centralised distribution system will fail a great many of us, almost literally overnight.

We have lost our local distribution systems, and our local skills. We cannot survive a major breakdown in our mother system in the way that, say, the Soviet people survived their economic collapse - they were accustomed to looking after themselves anyway, growing their own food, helping their neighbours - but we have become completely dependent on our mother system, which has lulled us into a very false sense of security by appearing to do its job very well indeed. Why trail all afternoon around many small shops like a pack animal to get the household supplies when one deftly trundled trolley around the supermarket quickly yields a better selection at lower prices? Indeed why drive to the supermarket and why walk around it and queue at the till, when a few mouse clicks online will result in delivery of all of our requirements to the doorstep later the same day?

The mother system seems to make our lives easier, albeit in a soulless way - a supermarket visit really does make us feel like we are in a machine, part of a system, and many of us miss the friendly chat with local shop assistants of days gone by. But, having killed the alternatives off, the mother machine has made us totally dependent on it. When it fails we are in big trouble. And it will fail. The machine will stop.

everything is possible

2011-12-16T11:36:00.002Z

…we are entering into a period of increasingly massive social dislocations and disorder which harbors within it countless risks, defeats, dangers, false dawns and fake defeats. But…we are all coming to the powerful and simple realization that human beings acting peacefully together in concert can do anything–and nothing can stop them.
Something is happening. Something is shifting in the relations between politics and power. We don’t know where it will lead, but the four-decade ideological consensus that has simply allowed the creation of grotesque inequality has broken down, and anything and everything is suddenly possible.

Simon Critchley via Bella Caledonia

a better world

2011-11-24T11:33:00.001Z

We already have, and always have had, potential abundance at our fingertips. The scarcity that so many experience today is not the result of any fundamental lack, but rather of the maldistribution of political power and resources. What kind of abundance would we have if we didn't spend trillions of dollars on wars, guns, non-recyclable packaging, sprawling suburbs, automobile culture, consumer junk, transcontinental food, unnecessary pharmaceuticals, and every other form of waste that contributes nothing to human happiness? In one way or another, all of these things are the end products of a civilization built on separation.
The ground has already begun to shift, and that shift will accelerate as the "old normal" falls apart. It has fallen apart in many ways already, yet its afterimage lingers. The supermarkets are still full of food, the malls full of shoppers, the highways full of cars, and the ATM's full of cash. The last-ditch strategy of the financial elite, "extend and pretend", applies to our entire society. It is still possible to pretend that the world of our parents will be the world of our children, and to extend its lifestyle a few more years. But that pretense is wearing thin.
A world of justice and abundance depends on a different kind of consciousness. The shift of consciousness is from separation to oneness; from being to "interbeing"; from a discrete and separate self in an external objective universe, to an integral part that contains the whole. The new self seeks less to dominate than to co-create, less to control than to share. It knows that the whole universe is as alive and as conscious as oneself... The universe wants to freely provide what we need, rather than requiring us to wrest it from an indifferent or hostile environment.
The world isn't supposed to be this way... A more beautiful world is possible, right in front of our faces, waiting only for us to accept it.

Charles Eisenstein(adapted)

coping with transition

2011-11-01T11:06:00.002Z

If you are awake to the rising energy of the new paradigm, then you are now undergoing many transformations, as you transition from the old paradigm to the new.

Your body is changing: you may experience aches and pains, especially in the neck, shoulder and back, as your divinity awakens within. You may experience deep inner sadness for no apparent reason - these feelings come from releasing your memories, energy and experiences of the past. You are leaving the old behind. You may burst into tears for no apparent reason - let the tears flow, as this helps to release the old energy from within.

At times you will feel very ungrounded, and physically disoriented, as your body lags behind your consciousness in moving into the new energy. You may feel as if you cannot put your two feet on the ground, or as if you are walking between two worlds.

Your left and right brain are coming into balance. Your tastes - your likes and dislikes - are changing. Earthly desires pull you in one direction, while your mind pulls you in another direction, and now your soul is pulling you in a third direction! So you feel torn apart, directionless, and confused. Instead of wanting more, or feeling that you lack something, you are learning to find abundance from within.

You may remember intense dreams, perhaps of conflict or of being chased or persecuted: these are a release, within our unconscious mind, of the old energy. There is a lot of unconscious work going on, and this may cause you to waken up for a break in the middle of the night. If you can't go back to sleep, get up and do something, rather than lay in bed and worry about earthly things.

You will talk to yourself more often. You will realise suddenly that you have been chattering away with yourself, as a new level of communication takes place within your being. The conversations will increase, becoming more fluid, more coherent, and more insightful. You are not going crazy - we are just moving into the new energy.

As you change, things around you will change as well. You may experience sudden changes in job or career - you should not worry about finding the "perfect" work right now, as you are in transition, and you may make several changes before you settle into work that fits your passion. Do not worry about a loss of passion - you may experience little or no desire to do anything, and that is fine: take this time to do nothing, and do not feel any guilt about doing so.

You may drift away from your family and friends. You were deeply connected to them via old karmic bonds, but now you are clearing your karmic debts, and stepping free from the karmic wheel, and so the bonds of the old relationships are severed. In time, you will re-develop these relationships where appropriate, but the new relationships will be based in the new paradigm energy, without the old karmic attachments.

You are now walking a sacred and lonely path. You may feel alone and detached from others, even when you are in their company. It is difficult to relate to others at this time: you may wish to flee from groups and crowds.

You may feel this is too much for you, and that you are not ready to take on the challenges of moving into the new energy, but these feelings will pass. Your journey may seem dark and lonely at times, but as you re-tune to your inner self, you will find overwhelming love and light within. In reality we are never truly alone.

Let go of the dying old fear-based paradigm, and turn your face towards the love-light of the new paradigm. You have nothing to lose and everything to gain.

adapted from deepian.com

infusion of higher consciousness

2011-10-29T08:18:00.000+01:00

The old world consciousness is fracturing and fragmenting. The old system is sinking: it's simply a question of time before it ultimately goes down. A higher vibration of consciousness is infusing, which is both causing this to happen, and ushering in the new paradigm.
It is no secret that a growing divide is happening within the group consciousness. There are those who are either beginning to unfold or preparing to, and there seems to be the majority who are not. Many seem simply too invested in the old system and way of living to even truly want to break free. As the old systems fragment over the coming years, it's likely that more people will join the emergent wave, but no one can be persuaded or cajoled into it, no matter what clarity of higher wisdom is presented. And those who still languish in the old vibration can tend to project or judge those who are evolving. This can be quite destabilising... How much do we allow the disrupting energy of another into our system? That is something we must each discover for ourselves. At the very least, I'd say it's something we definitely need to be aware of, especially within groups of friends and even family.
The magic of this higher consciousness infusion... is unstoppable - it is inevitable... Even if you find yourself in a minority of one, if you keep connecting to the flow, you'll find you have all the support you need to unfold who you are and to lift you into the higher paradigm.

Chris Bourne

true joy

2011-10-19T11:05:00.000+01:00

Joy can be found anywhere at anytime.When you get up in the morning and have a shower,are you thinking about what you have to do today?Or are you feeling the warm water caressing your skin?When you eat breakfast, are you watching the news?Or fully tasting what you are eating?When you're on your way to work, are you lost in thought about your work?Or do you notice the flowers and smell their scent?True joy costs only a little attention...yet is utterly priceless!

Openhand

the way forward

2011-09-27T12:14:00.000+01:00

Only those who are really asleep can deny that humanity and our world is undergoing a powerful catalytic transition. Climate change, peak oil and financial instability are all converging, inviting a radical change in the way we live our lives. In the years ahead, everyone of us will be affected in some way. It would seem this convergence is perfectly configured to cause us all to question the way we live our lives, to discover the true nature of ourselves and find a new sustainable way of day-to-day living that catalyses our unfolding into the future. Our very survival depends upon it.
We cannot rely on the future viability of the current system to support us. We must find a new way to evolve through these challenges by a shift in our own consciousness. A benevolent presence is acting through the synchronistic weave of life inviting us to go inwards, unravel the restrictions that bind us and unfold into a new paradigm of spiritually successful living, one that is emerging here and now all around us. We can each be a part of that new paradigm. We can each find safe passage through the turbulence. The way forwards is to go inwards.

Chris Bourne

conspirators

2011-09-16T14:45:00.003+01:00

The world is governed by a secret power that holds us in bondage to no good end. But the conspirators are not others, they are we, you and I and everyone. A secret agenda of domination and control has existed in nearly everyone, and a world embodying that agenda has congealed around us, attracted to the dark, reptilian energies we have harbored. The good news is that these energies have nearly run their course, as the world of control breaks down and the campaign to conquer and dominate all other being founders on its own consequences. Just as Voldemort was unable to possess Harry Potter because he couldn't abide the love within him, so also is the ruling power of the world unable to abide our growing realization of our connectedness. Love, the felt experience of oneness, is spreading as the walls of separation come down. They never were sustainable. Today, even the most deluded - the power elite - are beginning to recognize that. The reign of the Illuminati is nearly over. That it seems to be reaching unprecedented heights only bespeaks the imminence of its demise, the extreme of yang giving birth to yin.
... The Illuminati, the Reptilians, are you and I... Can you not feel the obsolescence of that part of you, the part that endlessly seeks to control the world, to dominate others, to maximize egoic self-interest? Is it not increasingly evident that its efforts have created only misery? Is it not apparent that, no matter how hard you try to remedy its failure by intensifying its efforts, its ultimate failure is assured? For all of us, the time is coming for that part of ourselves to bow out, so that we can step into service, into trust, and, collectively, into the more beautiful world our hearts know is possible.

Charles Eisenstein

a new mind for a new world

2011-09-04T11:00:00.003+01:00

The instability of our current time is part of a larger cycle of human evolution that will soon turn toward renewal and regeneration.For centuries, indigenous wisdom traditions have talked of an epochal shift on the horizon, of a spiritual renaissance for the earth and her living family. Now the timelines are converging and the potential for an energetic “upgrade” for humanity ishere, but first we must survive and evolve through the current period of transition.
Evolution is not a gradual process but more like a “shock to the system”: radical waves of transformation after a period of dormancy. We are currently undergoing an evolutionary leap.... the instability we are now experiencing - climate change, economic meltdowns, and increasing political polarisation - is the convergence of complex systems that have reached a critical state.
What we need in order to push through to the coming spiritual renaissance is a paradigm shift in human thinking and perception, a conscious evolution in recognition of the interconnectedness of all things: a new mind for a new world.

Kingsley Dennis

open your heart

2011-09-02T11:51:00.002+01:00

If you were asked to weigh your heart today, would it be filled with love, light, peace and unity, creating an upliftment and weighing less then a feather? Or would your heart hold chains, bondage, or be hidden behind walls, weighing it down?
When we allow our experiences to taint or harden our hearts - we weigh our hearts down.
It is only through opening our hearts, releasing our burdens, forgiving ourselves and others do we return to the innocence and joys of the inner child.
It is the lightness of a child, the awe and amazement of life and all its' beauty that shall carry the heart forward, lightening it, and carrying it higher into limitless potential.
Through an open heart, magic and miracles can be found carried on the waves of love, truth and beauty.
Many prophecies state it shall be the child that shall teach and guide us into the golden age. We have forgotten that each of us house a child within our heart … a child wishing to show you the way
Open your heart, embrace your inner child and allow your heart to weigh less then that of a feather.

Lightwhispers

love is...

2011-08-11T11:37:00.003+01:00

To me Love is the infinite expression of divinity that flows through all things. It is the ultimate embrace of creation where all rays within the spectrum unite. It is the very return to innocence, the wave back to who we truly are...

Upon this understanding the thoughts 'I am lonely', 'nobody loves me' fade into insignificance because we realise that love is at the very core, the essence of who we are. We find that only forms change, love simply is...

Love cannot be made or created. It is simply invited or realised within ourselves. If we feel unloved it is perhaps because we have lost the thread of connectedness that unifies the soul of all things. If we are looking for love outside of ourselves then we have missed it already.

We may be inspired by the loving actions of another, which in turn may help us to find that love within ourselves, yet, unless we realise it first within, we will always feel incomplete, always searching elsewhere. Until we recognise the true nature of Love, it will always elude us and likely evoke feelings of loneliness or dependency on another for our sense of completeness.

Trinity Bourne

evolutionary leap

2011-07-27T11:52:00.004+01:00

When faced with a radical crisis,
when the old way of being in the world
of interacting with each other and with the realm of nature
doesn’t work any more,
when survival is threatened by seemingly insurmountable problems,
an individual human – or a species - will either die or become extinct
or rise above the limitations of their conditioning
through an evolutionary leap.
This is the state of humanity now,
and this is its challenge.

Eckhart Tolle (quoted in an openhand newsletter )

google-

2011-07-25T09:00:00.003+01:00

So: the Goog takes a fun-filled swat at young upstarts The Crook and the Twit with Google+, bringing us added style, circles, sound and video.... Facebook's response of getting into bed with Microskype looks very desperate indeed, perhaps even suicidal.... watch them fall off their perch hard and fast - does anyone remember Myspace?

But what is Google+ bringing us, other than a welcome way to escape from The Crook? Is the Goog simplifying its own complex mess by integrating Buzz, Gmail, and the profiles and social networking facilities of Blogger, YouTube, and Google reader? No - not yet at any rate... Is it enhancing our real face-to-face in-the-flesh social or work lives? Nope... Is it giving us back the time that The Crook and the Twit have stolen? Nope.... Is it leading us away from inanity and superfluity? Nope.

What I want to see is Google-, whereby all social networking, including email, is replaced by something totally new-paradigm, non-commercial, distributed, stunningly simple, intuitive, and symbolic rather than verbal... realistically this is more likely to be provided by reawakening our natural powers of telepathy, rather than hopping on yet another technology bandwagon.... bring it on! We need it for when the lights go out....

realignment

2011-07-23T15:09:00.003+01:00

The global system needs to collapse and reform. Human numbers NEED to reduce, we NEED to find balanced and sustainable harmony with the earth once again.... whether we choose it or not, that realignment is going to happen... there is simply no way to avoid it. And neither am I afraid to be affected myself by this realignment. In the years ahead, in my heart I know it will touch every single one of us.

Chris Bourne

pure nature

2011-07-12T12:07:00.003+01:00

Intelligence is not the same thing as wisdom. When a society misuses partial intelligence and ignores holistic wisdom, its people forget the benefits of a plain and natural life. Seduced by their desires, emotions, and egos, they become slaves to bodily demands, to luxuries, to power and unbalanced religion and psychological excuses. Then the reign of calamity and confusion begins. Nonetheless, some people can awaken during times of turmoil to lead others out of the mire. But how can the one liberate the many? By first liberating his own being. He does this nor by elevating himself, but by lowering himself. He lowers himself to that which is simple, modest, true; integrating it into himself, he becomes a master of simplicity, modesty, truth. Completely emancipated from his former false life, he discovers his original pure nature, which is the pure nature of the universe. Freely and spontaneously releasing his divine energy, he constantly transcends complicated situations and draws everything around him back into an integral oneness. Because he is a living divinity, when he acts, the universe acts.

Lao Tzu (reposted from openhandweb.org )

the only way out is in

2011-03-28T12:23:00.003+01:00

Some Americans believe we can collectively triumph over the monolith we presently fear and worship. Others believe the best we can do is to find the personal strength to endure and go forward on lonely inner plains of the self.

Doing either will take inner moral, spiritual and intellectual liberation. It all depends on where you choose to fight your battle. Or if you even choose to fight it. But one thing is certain. The only way out is in.

from AMERICA: Y UR PEEPS B SO DUM? by Joe Bageant

R.I.P. Joe.

rebirth

2011-03-19T00:34:00.002Z

For a great many people in Japan and elsewhere right now, the collapse of the old paradigm is a day to day living horror. Astounding new twists unfold at every turn, at an ever-accelerating pace... watch it closely if you must... this is the future of the old paradigm, and it's coming soon to a town near you....

And the prevailing reaction to world events is to worry about the cost of of it all, and the effect on the stock markets - to reduce everything to sums of money: the sickness now goes right to the core. Money is portrayed as pre-eminent, more important than survival of the species, more important than the ecosystem, more important than the life and suffering of billions of beings, more important indeed, than anything else. This elevation of money continues desperately in the face of clear and incontrovertible exposure of the global financial system as sheer fantasy, the biggest confidence trick in history. This is denial on a grand scale by the very desperate. The whole scenario would be richly comic if it were not so achingly tragic. With old paradigm spectacles on, the death march of the human race has become a grotesque and bungling burlesque, now verging on slapstick... and the blinkers are still on - the audience are still hoodwinked and sleepwalking en masse - there is an absolute promise of a cascading array of darker and deeper horrors to come. This madness has to stop, and it will... the whole machine is grinding inexorably to an eerie halt. Those parts that don't blow up will simply seize up.

Economically we are now on a cliff edge, with a train running towards us which will unavoidably run off the cliff taking us with us. This will be the train wreck to end all train wrecks. The vast majority of the population, including politicians and business leaders and many economists did not see this one coming, and most of them still do not see it. Nevertheless we are awaiting total economic collapse, and it cannot be long now in coming. This is not a doomster "the end is nigh" forecast based on wishful thinking. It is the only rational conclusion based on the data available.

The house price collapses around the world are still only beginning: houses are still unaffordable to most people, and becoming more so as unemployment becomes rampant, and wages stagnate, and the price of food and energy soars, and as the banksters ratchet up interest rates while ratcheting down the availability of credit. House prices will fall much further, everywhere. Commercial property prices are collapsing as business failures and consumer poverty remove much of the activity from commerce.

The big banks are already spectacularly bankrupt - so much so that our governments are insanely bankrupting our countries, just to prevent banks and house prices from collapsing.

The corrupt and usurious reserve banking system we favour globally involves bankers sucking a percentage out of all economic activity - in return for doing nothing! This system requires periodic clear-outs - this is mathematically unavoidable - if there is not a periodic destruction of debts, then the bankers end up with all of the money, and there is no productive economy left. Well, guess what - for 2 decades now, our governments have interfered with the "market" to such an extent that there has been no clear-out of debts. The bankers have indeed ended up with most of the loot, and it seems clear they will not give up until the have it all... Their greed is so monstrous that they have also foolishly gambled away all of our savings and pensions in search of ever-fatter fees and bonuses. The financial clear-out will be so massive when it finally comes, that it will bring about total collapse of the world economies.

Economic collapse brings, inevitably, political collapse. Collapse of our societies and culture will follow. We are already seeing a staggering level of corruption and incompetence in our political leaders - it seems increasingly as if they are on a mission to take us all to hell.

Add into this mix all the other doomy prospects we have - climate change, over-population, impending world shortages of energy, food, and other commodities, collapse of our eco systems, and collapse of our morals, health and the will to live, and it is not difficult to see that we are now entering the end of the end days of this "civilisation". We are way past the point of no return.

However, rather than panicking, and giving in to fear, we should embrace this spectacle with open arms, and hurry it on. Nature works in repeating cycles of birth, growth, decay, and death, and new forms always grow out of the ashes of the old. So we should see the collapse of the old paradigm as a positive clear-out of old diseased ways. It is a natural and unstoppable process. The old rubbish has to be cleared to make way for the new. This is no consolation at all for those already caught up in the twisted wreckage. But the longer the old paradigm is kept on life support, the more extensive and the more terrible the damage will be.

If you have not already done so it is imperative to shift focus. Don't be a spectator gawping at the wreckage, wallowing in the horror of it all. Don't focus helplessly on what you cannot change. Abandon the old ways of thinking. Abandon selfishness and possessiveness. Abandon worry and fear. Turn your back on the old systems that are now defunct. Abandon the politicians - let them talk to themselves. Abandon the banksters - let them rob each other. Abandon the capitalists - let them enslave themselves. If they stubbornly persist in their savagery, then let them all wallow in their own excrement. Do not let them suck any more of your energy.

You need that energy for working on yourself, for freeing yourself from your destructive old thought patterns, for escaping from entanglement in this doomed system, for rediscovering the love inherent in you. Reconnect to your own nature, and to that of the planet. Reconnect to each other. From inner wholeness comes limitless energy for compassion and to send loving good wishes to all of those who are suffering.

You cannot fix the broken old system. Focus on what you can do. We can each do something to rebuild our communities, in whatever basic ways we can, to help each other survive the coming storms. Reconnect with family , friends, and neighbours, reaching out helping hands to each other. This is the new way, this is the way to have an effect, and to face the future with a confident smile. Foster the growth of the new green shoots, the new paradigm of love and unity.

no satisfaction

2011-03-15T20:49:00.003Z

Satisfaction guaranteed or your money back! Few people are unfamiliar with the aforementioned sales slogan. As well, most of us are very familiar with the Rolling Stones lyrics... Have you ever asked yourself why we seem so transfixed with satisfaction? Eavesdrop into the average conversation, more than likely you are hearing comments of dissatisfaction. The weather is too hot or too cold, too dry or too rainy. The local hockey team is playing poorly, I hate working here, this chair is uncomfortable, so and so has been a real idiot. The litany of dissatisfaction is played endlessly as an eternal backdrop to the expression of reality. If you have a TV, turn it on; the same meme of expression will confirm the bizarre fixation with a lack of satisfaction. Why does humanity choose to function in such disharmony with its environment?

The answer, I believe, is primarily due to the construct of the ego mind as it relates to the programmed perception of reality we have been fed since birth. The ego mind takes us out of the NOW, thereby depositing us in the past or future. We fail to understand how leaving the NOW, in most cases, represents a departure from sanity. If we think of this transition as a calm sea suddenly becoming wild, we will have earned a much improved perspective. From the gnosis that each individual creates their own reality, we must find ourselves culpably adding to this insanity.
...
It is not happenstance that humanity reflects disharmony with self and environment. With dark intent, great efforts have been undertaken to carefully craft this matrix of reality. For thousands of years, humanity has suffered under the dedicated construction of a dark pseudo reality. Disharmony, fear and spiritual brevity is the call of the day. The real insult to our intelligence, or lack thereof, is found in their ability to completely convinced us, personal disharmony is our own fault. When looking to understand this enigma of darkness, we are placated by their lies suggesting this is human nature. This is not human nature my friends, this is humans fabricating darkness for personal gain. This is darkness sucking the energy from light. Human nature is light, love, acceptance and the many other GodSelf qualities we are taught to ignore. Ignorant of their true nature, our parents raised us as best they could. Unable to see truth behind the matrix of lies, our parents proliferated the darkness by teaching us to believe. Teachers educate us with knowledge they believe to be true, all the while darkness is peddled by people we trust. Our friends and lovers are drinking of the same fountain so their perception of reality assuages and confirms our belief structure. Overloading with insanity we may turn to religion for balm, instead of relief we find more lies, discontent and illusion.
...
what if...
...
we discover what human nature really is...?
...
The horizon offers humanity a rising sun... Now... we see the control structure collapse under the weight of it's own obsolescence. I believe light will prevail throughout the planet within five years. We will come to understand the true nature of what it means to be human. We will not dwell in the turbulent waters of past and future. We will choose the NOW moment in complete acceptance. We will no longer demand our world " be " a certain way. We will reflect unconditional love and unity consciousness as the underpinning of a new civilised representation of true human nature. We do not have to wait until this transition completes full initiation of a new reality, We may choose to align with this new energy now. We can search within to determine our true nature beyond the veils of ego. We can transcend the illusions fed to us by ego and society...

If you find yourself demanding your reality be better, more than likely you are allowing ego to take you into the future. Tomorrow will never be a better day until we lovingly accept what today offers us in every NOW moment. I guess we can make some sense of the statement " I can't get no satisfaction " if we look at it from the perspective of the grammatical double negative, cleverly disguising the illusion most people now accept as truth. Living peacefully in the NOW moment is a choice, why not make it yours!

by Christopher Dos Santos, extracted from his blog post "I can't get no satisfaction"

reunion

2011-03-13T15:14:00.003Z

like a wave rolling toward shore, the Age of Separation rears up to its maximum height even as it hollows out in the moment before it crashes. This crash, inevitable eons ago, is upon us today.

Thus writes Charles Eisenstein in The Ascent of Humanity. He calls the old paradigm "the age of separation", and he calls the new paradigm which is replacing it "the age of reunion". This is reunion with our souls or inner selves, reunion with each other, and reunion with nature. Linear thinking and technologies are replaced by circular and regenerative approaches. Work and art merge into artistry: the creation of beauty, for the joy of doing so... and so work becomes play! Education becomes creative self discovery. Money becomes abundant and perishable. Nature becomes our teacher, rather than the object of our dominion. Science and religion fuse into holistic spiritual and ecological awareness. Eisenstein says:

The engineers of the future will design for sustainability, for dignity, and for beauty. They will, in other words, be artists, creating technologies for a world of artists on a garden earth. The conflict that all artists encounter between creating for the market and creating for the spirit will cease, when work and art, money and sustainability, come into alignment.
...
The gathering convergence of crises is bringing the Age of Separation to an end, and with it everything that we know as "civilization". Yet the end of civilization-as-we-know-it need not be a return to the past. We equate the ascent of humanity with an escalating domination of nature only because we deny the universe's inherent creative energy, sacredness, and purpose. When we recognize that nature is itself dynamic, creative, and growing, then we need no longer transcend it, but simply participate in it more fully.

something is not right...

2011-03-05T12:14:00.004Z

Here is part of a speech by Chris Bourne of Openhand, which resonates with me:

I think we’re all here because we all know something.

We are all connected by a similar thread of consciousness that runs through everybody...

We know that something is not right in the world,

We know that the systems that support us in this society are not in the interests of all life and are breaking down,

We know also that people are waking up in huge numbers across the planet. I believe we’re witnessing the effects of that in North Africa and the Middle East right now,

We know that this revolution in consciousness is going to change the very fabric of our lives in the short few years ahead

... and more from an article by Chris:

.. the controlling systems in which we live are unjust and inequitable. It's been all too easy for the world's democratic leaders to point at the dictatorships and rest on patronising laurels... "our peoples are much better off, we have democracy".

Well now that veil of illusion is falling away too. Ordinary people everywhere are seeing that such 'democratic systems' seem perfectly configured to strip resources from the poor majority and give them to a rich minority. All the while, the carrot of what people might have, is dangled on wide-screen before ever hopeful noses, thus subjugating the masses quietly into line.

The books do not balance anymore. Yes there's truth in the austerity measures that western leaderships are trying to apply. We need to learn to live with less, much less, and be happy with that. We need to learn that happiness comes not from something we can buy, but comes from within. It comes from attuning to the simple joy of living.

But it's not helping that society continues to promote, advertise and market grandiose 'life-styles' that we should all want and aspire to. Not only is it depriving us of contentment, but it's hurting Gaia too. And neither does it help to subject the silent-majority to increased tax rises and deprive essential services whilst granting bail-outs to the super rich.

The silent majority is becoming not so silent anymore! People everywhere are beginning to see through the injustice of the system. To me, this needs to happen more and more. We need to bring conscious attention to it. We need to talk and blog about it on the web. It's this upsurge - this upwelling - which needs to be expressed. It will be this that fans the flames of change further afield.

It is this that will provoke the possibility ultimately of 'systematic change'. Changing to a way of living which is not only inspired by the grass roots, but is LEAD by the grass roots, from the bottom up. It is we 'ordinary people' everywhere who must take responsibility and empowerment for our own lives back.

In the past, people's have delegated their responsibility to leaders and systems. As long as they got their crumbs from the bigger table, they didn't complain too much. We've turned a blind eye for too long and the systems themselves have become inequitable and dehumanising. So we have to end their control.

We do that increasingly by taking back responsibility for our own lives. By making choices that serve our souls. There's no-one who can tell you what's best for you - your soul knows. Not only that, but when we truly align and follow our soul, we find we align with a co-creative design that serves ALL souls. I believe people from the Middle East to the Mid West are just beginning to touch that consciousness now. That's what's inspiring the uprising - the New Paradigm that can be felt in our hearts.

already enlightened

2011-02-28T09:09:00.003Z

Many of us find ourselves seriously unhappy with what this life on Earth appears to offer us. For so long we can lose ourselves in work, family, study, partying, sex, drugs, whatever, but there comes a time when we earnestly seek revelation or insight, a deeper understanding of why we are here and what we should be doing with our lives. Over 20 years ago I had a series of epiphanies, which I will describe in future posts: these led me on a great voyage of inner discovery, which is still unfolding. For now, here are extracts from another man's eloquent account of his first epiphany (from "Underneath It All" by Mark Flaherty):

In a state of stillness and receptivity, I recognized that I was in my heart: I had consciously connected to it for the first time ever in my life... I had been looking everywhere for it without success. The instant I gave up searching, the split second I stopped trying to find it, I encountered it.

In that moment I experienced love for the very first time in my adult life. Immediately everything made sense... I saw the entire Universe, right there, inside my heart. It was beautiful beyond description. I saw the perfection of creation and recognized that the answer to every question I have ever had, and will ever have, was in my heart, always. My heart always knows what to do in every situation.
...
By remaining present, by bathing in the blissful state of being, all that exists is love, and love unifies everything. Love makes everything OK. There is no need to fix anything because nothing is wrong. I just needed to love it. I just had to remember love. That's all. In love there is no struggle, no conflict. Love is love is love is love. What could be simpler?

Love showed me that there was nothing to heal, that I was perfect exactly as I was. Love removed all discord, gently and effortlessly. There were no thoughts, just a direct experience of life. I saw it for what it really is. Life is eternal. I am eternal. In this space there is no linear time. The mind creates time. When thinking stops, time disappears and eternity is revealed. I was never born and can never die. With that realization, my fear of death dissolved and I felt as light as a feather.

There is no past, there is no future. Since there is no past, there is nothing to heal. I realized that every time I think of something that I believe to be in the past, I am actually re-creating it in the moment. The only thing that exists is what I am experiencing right now. The entire universe is constantly manifesting in every moment. The world literally re-creates itself every moment.

The absence of time means that there is nothing to achieve, nothing to do, nowhere to go. There is only being. I realized that as human beings we are already enlightened, and our hearts already know this. It is simply something we are either realizing (by being in the heart) or not realizing (by being in the mind) in any one moment.

I relaxed deeply as my whole body bathed in love. It soaked it up. It had been desperate for it for so long. I cannot be separate from love because I am love. "Just look for love and you will see it everywhere," the spirits told me. "In a flower. In a smile. In music. In food. The whole world is made of pure love. Your only job is to look for it and follow where life leads you. This will take you into deeper and deeper experiences of love, if you will only relax, surrender and allow it to."
...
Life is so much fun and so simple when you are in your heart. Get out of the way and life flows through you in a never-ending stream of beauty and love.

"Do not try to live life, let life live you," I heard the spirits say.

call it love

2011-02-20T18:57:00.001Z

from Be Love Now by Ram Dass:

If I'm identified with my ego, the ego is frightened silly, because the ego knows that it's going to end at death. But if I merge with love, there's nothing to be afraid of. Love neutralizes fear.

Awareness and love, loving awareness, is the soul. This practice of "I am loving awareness" turns you inward toward the soul. If you dive deep enough into your soul, you will come to God. In Greek it's called agape, God love. Martin Luther King, Jr., said about this agape, this higher love: "It's an overflowing love which is purely spontaneous, unmotivated, groundless and creative . . . the love of God operating in the human heart."
...
Souls love. That's what souls do. Egos don't, but souls do. Become a soul, look around, and you'll be amazed-all the beings around you are souls. Be one, see one.

When many people have this heart connection, then we will know that we are all one, we human beings all over the planet. We will be one. One love.

And don't leave out the animals, and trees, and clouds, and galaxies-it's all one. It's one energy. It comes through in individual ways, but it's one energy. You can call it energy, or you can call it love.

true love

2011-02-14T20:42:00.003Z

true love, is love that is given freely and unconditionally without expecting reward in return. Love that hinges upon the other person doing everything we like or want of them is not true love, but rather based on attachment, conditions and control

Thich Nhat Hanh quoted on The Buddhist Blog

the angel on the shoulder

2011-02-13T19:11:00.006Z

The ego is based on fear, but the soul is based on love.
(from Be Love Now by Ram Dass.)

We all have an inner self - a part of the soul - which observes (or "witnesses") the outer self - the ego - in action. In Christian tradition these two characters are represented as an angel on one shoulder, taking in one ear, and a devil on the other shoulder, talking in the other ear. The angel (soul) is calm and humble, while the devil (ego) is forceful and rough. It is our choice which voice we listen to. If we don't make this choice actively and with determination, then it will be made for us, as the voice of the ego is much louder and much more insistent than the voice of the soul. The devil is happy to mock the angel, drown it out, and generally take control. The devil dictates a steady stream of instructions, and tempts us with many illusions and promises, all of which turn out to be hollow and empty. Meanwhile the angel sits there quietly, unperturbed, giving advice only when asked. The angel is effortlessly more powerful than the devil, and has immeasurable comfort, peace, love, and bliss, on tap for us, whenever we want it - we just have to turn to the angel and accept its' gifts. But the angel is too humble to force itself on our attention. We have to make that choice ourselves, while ignoring the blandishments of the devil.

If you are not comfortable with the Christian personification of soul as angel, and ego as devil, then just think of it as soul and ego, true self and false self, inner self and outer self, or whatever terminology and characterisations work for you. Every philosophical or religious tradition has its own equivalents of these two characters. The gameplay is always the same. One quietly seeks to liberate us, while the other seeks to chain and enslave us. Generally we listen to the wrong one, and this is the old paradigm.

The human race has been on a long dark journey, in slavery to our own delusions. The ego or devil is not real. It is our creation. We have built it up through recurring patterns of thought. We have learned to mock and shun the very idea of spirituality, of divinity, of inner light. We have created a dark and dismal false self and allowed it to rule us. Now we simply have to turn our attention to the angel on the other shoulder, quietly sitting there, radiating light, love, peace, comfort, bliss, and harmony. This is the the true self, the soul, the inner self, our saving grace.

If we make just a little effort to give more attention to this angelic observer, we can easily free ourselves from the illusory chains of the devilish ego. As Ram Dass puts it:

as meditation deepens, you identify less and less with the ego and begin to touch and enter more deeply into the space of love. You begin to experience love toward more and more people and find love in the experiences that come into your field of awareness... As you keep giving up the habits that hold you back from loving, the ego's fear of letting go dissolves in the love. From the ego's vantage point you surrender into love. From the soul's vantage point you are coming home, the boundaries of separation are fading, and the two are becoming one. As you begin to enter into Oneness and to become love, instead of perceiving from your ego, you're perceiving from your soul. You are shifting your identification from ego to soul. You don't kill your ego, you kill your identification with your ego. As you dissolve into love, your ego fades. You're not thinking about loving; you're just being love, radiating like the sun.

Your awareness has then moved from the old paradigm to the new paradigm. Fear has been replaced by love.

revolution

2011-02-06T11:23:00.002Z

The events in Egypt are beyond breathtaking, that a people so long oppressed have by themselves risen up to cast off their oppressors. Surging through the streets in uncountable thousands, burning police stations to the ground, convincing army troops of their commonality, spontaneously organizing themselves to protect property, direct traffic, and deal with emergencies, smoking out Mubarak’s attempt to capitalize on the inevitable looting and violence, they are revealing to the world a new national template: self-organization. A template we know operates in biology and ecology but have never before seen realized on such a scale among human beings.

Because above all, beyond struggling to get rid of Mubarak and free themselves from their addiction to American money and armaments, the Egyptian people have glimpsed the possibility that they can do all this without falling back on traditional political parties. Even as an idea, even as an ideal, this is the most extraordinary aspect of what is taking place. A movement born out of youth and led by youth, without recourse to professional leaders, the Egyptian revolution presents us with the possibility of living in an entirely new way, of circumventing a 6000-year-old model in which “power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
...
It’s not surprising that, filled with emotion, the demonstrators wrap themselves in the national flag. Oh, the flag, the flag! In Tunisia and Egypt and every other country, this piece of cloth held up as a symbol of national identity, conflating who we are with an abstraction for which we must be prepared to lay down our lives. But sooner or later this too will fall by the wayside.

Sooner or later, without feeling in danger of losing our national identities, customs, and languages, we will understand that our allegiance belongs to something larger than those symbols which separate us, symbols co-opted by warring nation-states for perpetuation of the status quo. Sooner or later, without the paranoid fantasy of one world government, a new flag—the image of a luminous globe floating in black space—will be raised over the planet. And we will perhaps begin, at long last and as best we can, to organize our lives around our common humanity.

What the Egyptian Revolution Means by Michael Brownstein

the band plays on

2011-01-30T10:47:00.002Z

Like the Titanic, the momentum of technological society is so huge that even if we reversed the engines and steered hard right now, the short-term and mid-term course of events would not change much. We are on a collision course with nature that can no longer be averted. Yet not only have we done little to brake or steer away from the looming iceberg, we have maintained an oblivious policy of "full speed ahead!" In the United States, Republican policy has been essentially, "What iceberg?" while the Democrats try to change course by a few degrees—but not so quickly as to spill the drinks on the first class deck. The "practical" proposals and workable compromises on the table are woefully inadequate. One party repudiates the Kyoto Treaty and the other endorses it, but few acknowledge that even that is far too little, far too late. Outside the United States, "developing" countries such as India and China, abetted by Western institutions, stoke the Titanic's furnaces with their headlong industrialization using the old linear model of extraction, processing, consumption, and waste.
And meanwhile, on deck the party continues, as it will continue to continue even after the first crunch reverberates through the ship, even as the icy torrent consumes compartment after compartment. On the top deck the band will play on even as the ship lists and rolls, maintaining a desperate and deadly illusion of normalcy.

Charles Eisenstein, from The Ascent of Humanity

a man in a burning house

2011-01-30T10:20:00.001Z

If all that stuff were true—about the ecological destruction, the genocide, the starving children, and the whole litany of impending crises—then wouldn't everyone be in an uproar about it? The normalcy of the routines surrounding me here in America tells me, "It couldn't be that bad." That little voice echoes throughout the culture. Every advertising flyer, every celebrity news item, every product catalog, every hyped-up sports event, carries the subtext, "You can afford to care about this." A man in a burning house wouldn't care about these things; that our culture does care about them, almost exclusively, implies that our house is not burning down. The forests are not dying. The deserts are not spreading. The atmosphere is not heating. Children are not starving. Torturers are not going free. Whole ethnicities are not being exterminated. These crimes against humanity and crimes against nature couldn't really be happening. Probably they have been exaggerated; in any event, they are happening somewhere else. Our society will figure out solutions before the calamities of the Third World affect me. See, no one else is worried, are they? Life hums on as usual.

Charles Eisenstein, from his The Ascent of Humanity

collapse

2011-01-24T13:11:00.003Z

The old paradigm is based on control. But our old paradigm "civilisation" has no control over its destiny. As Adam Sacks writes, in "The Natural Laws of Collapse":

That birds fly and pigs don't is a consequence of laws of nature governing physics and biology. Nothing that transpires on physical planet Earth is any different: the laws of nature are inviolate. Always.
...
Collapse of civilisations, including ours, is inevitable and always has been. Hidden in plain sight, we have not grasped what will sooner or later become obvious: Civilisational collapse is not up to any of us, no matter what we do. As when faced with an unstoppable Hurricane Katrina, which is only obeying the laws of nature, the best we can do is to be prepared.
...
As civilisations grow larger the ability to change seems to dwindle, and we witness all civilisations in history going through their birth, vigour, then death.
...
Social complexity is very expensive, and the more a civilisation grows the less you get back per unit of input (also called "diminishing returns"). Sooner or later every civilisation busts its budget, cannot afford its armies or its bureaucracies, is unable to suppress increasing dissatisfaction among the masses who must be at least nominally pacified (think bread and circuses), exhausts its resources, suffers from its environmental travesties (the most salient of which is destruction of trees and soil), runs out of food, and is eventually supplanted by simpler more sustainable groups (if there are any around) or just disperses (if there's any place left to disperse to).
...
The civilisational life cycle, as described above, is a law of nature. The collapse is therefore predictable. It has nothing to do with our specific Euro-American now-gone-global deplorable civilisation -- it has to do with any civilisation that gets to a certain size, necessitating hierarchy and class
...
And that's where we are now. The determining factor is size (relative to resources). All else is simply the stories we tell ourselves. Therefore:

We can write to politicians, we can riot in the streets, we can write learned tomes, we can cavort through the vast wasteland of talk radio, we can make impassioned documentaries, we can bring down Monsanto, we can put up solar panels and drink organic yak's milk. None of that will change the outcome one bit (as tragic as that may be now that humans have become a global force) -- because civilisation is on a course prescribed by laws of nature which have no regard whatsoever for human wishful thinking.

Resistance is futile. Any energy expended on trying to rescue this "civilisation" is energy wasted - this applies both to physical resources, and to human resources, i.e. our thoughts, words, and actions. We can go down with the sinking ship, or we can get into the lifeboats. The lifeboats are the new paradigm, based on unity rather than hierarchy and class. We cannot stop the old ship from sinking. We can only prepare for change.

no comment

2011-01-24T13:08:00.003Z

Following the minimalist example of Leo Babauta, I have removed the comment facility from this blog. I have been considering this move for a while, and I was provoked into action by a very abusive comment received. In this blog I am expressing what I see and understand of our current predicament. I write from inspiration, and I am not looking for argument or intellectual analysis, let alone abuse. I am grateful to those who have left thoughtful or appreciative comments on this blog in the past - it has been good to realise that some people are reading and enjoying my writing. However, I do not wish to act as moderator of comments. Going forward, if you wish to comment, please do so via your own blog, or on social networking services.

go your own way

2011-01-16T11:42:00.003Z

This weekend my horoscope said "mind your own business"! A simple but stark message... it seems that I have been poking my nose into the affairs of others, and it is doing neither me nor them any good. I don't agree with what they are saying and doing, and they don't understand or care about what I am saying and doing. A previous horoscope said "go your own way" and it is the same message, essentially.

I see people all around me stuck in the meme of the old paradigm. They are worrying about money, about their possessions, having problems with complex technology, they never seem to have enough time to do everything they "need" to do. They are concerned about the "recession", austerity cuts, climate change. They are pointing fingers at others - it is the governments fault, it is the bankers' fault - somebody else is to blame. I have been there myself - I spent a long time getting angry, upset, and depressed, watching our "civilisation" being taken apart by greedy incompetents, and even worse, watching our planet suffer terrible abuses by our hands. I came to hate mankind and everything we have come to be. I blamed our leaders for leading us into hell. I blamed the sleepwalking masses who follow them for staying asleep. I ranted at my friends and family "wake up wake up".

Then I realised: I am not responsible for them. I am not responsible for their actions. Just as they are not responsible for me. There should be no pointing of fingers, no blame. Each one of us is responsible for our own actions. We can change only ourselves. We have (or should have) no control over others. We are responsible only for ourselves. We can change ourselves, and we have to change ourselves. Nobody else can change us against our will. Change comes from within. And when we change ourselves in a positive direction, the world then changes with us, because we become a positive influence on others.

And so I have to go my own way. I have to change myself, and I am working on so doing. I can give my opinions to others, but I should not be concerned about whether or not they understand me or pay attention. That is their business. My business is to align myself with the rising energies of the new paradigm, and to detach myself from the falling energies of the old paradigm. The old fear-based controlling ways, that spawned our blame culture, are heading into an abyss. Everyone who remains attached to the old paradigm will be dragged down with it. The sooner we set ourselves free from it the better for each of us. There is nothing to be gained there, only further loss. And the chains that bind us to the old ways are an illusion - in reality there is nothing stopping us from walking away, other than our old fixed attitudes and habits.

Meanwhile the new paradigm of light and love offers unprecedented hope, comfort, and joy. What is there to dislike about love, caring, and sharing?

And so, for now, I am going to mind my own business! I am going to go my own way. I am focusing on self transformation, on transitioning from the old paradigm to the new. We have to get there individually, because we are surrounded by discord, argument, and strife, which will only bring us down or hold us back if we get involved in it. I am setting an example. You may follow as you please, or do your own thing!

For now we must focus on ourselves. But, once the new paradigm is in the ascendency, our hands will be joined in harmony.

out of sync

2011-01-09T09:22:00.004Z

The new paradigm is all about sharing and co-operation, while the old paradigm is all about selfishness and solitary separation. So, all we have to do is start focusing on giving to each other, instead of taking from each other, right? If only it was that simple....

Most of the population of the world are still locked in to the old fear-based paradigm of selfishness and material desire. In effect they are lost souls, at least for now. Those of us who have found our souls, and have learned how to let some of our natural inherent love flow out to others, are thoroughly outnumbered. We are surrounded by old paradigm thinking and behaviours. If I radiate pure selfless spiritual love to lost souls they may enjoy the feeling, but they will misinterpret what is happening. They may feel the love and think I am making romantic or sexual overtures! Or they may associate my radiance with the false charisma of salesmen, and think I am trying to con something out of them. Or they may just ignore the love, and focus on my unconventional appearance and unusual behaviour, and deduce that I am dangerous and probably insane. Most will in some way or another misinterpret selfless love as something selfish. They are accustomed to understanding the world in a selfish way, and they project their habitual ways of thinking on to others when attempting to understand them.

So we cannot simply give to others indiscriminately. If we do so we will inspire false hopes in others, or be taken advantage of in some way or other, or shunned. We may incite anger or violence against us.

So, what to do? We have to learn to discriminate very accurately. Being loving and giving should be our natural default position. But we must be very alert for signs of being misunderstood, or manipulated by others with less lofty aims and ideals. And when we encounter such negative responses, we must either withdraw, for our own protection, back into the separation which is anathema to us, or we must challenge the misconceptions and misdeeds of others. There is a time to be loving and a time to be stern and strong. The paradox is, that to be loving in a loveless society, we must develop very thick skins, and we must frequently adopt behaviours very similar to those we are trying to move on from.

While seeking to encourage community, we must be prepared to withdraw into hermetic isolation. While promoting peace, we must be prepared to stand firm and defend ourselves against vicious attacks.

This is a temporary phase. The tide is turning our way. As time moves on we will be less outnumbered, and the new paradigm ways will become better understood by the many who are currently sleepwalking. Then we will be able to love more freely, and to live with each other in peace.

A Gandhi said: "first they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win".

Malfunction Terminal

2011-01-02T13:35:00.006Z

You are on a long distance train, the Snowball Express, making your way to your home town of Prosperity, in Redemption Valley. You have to change to a local train at Malfunction City.

The Snowball Express is a fast smooth modern train, with electric doors, automated announcement system, comfortable seating, and a restaurant car with bar. The train is full, and most of your fellow passengers are asleep, or inebriated, or both. You are awake and watching out of the window - your watch indicates you should be at Malfunction already, so you know the Snowball Express is running late. Your connection with the local train is going to be tight. You decide to get your luggage and head for the door, so as to be first off the train. The Snowball Express slows down to a crawl as it pulls into Malfunction Terminal - you can see the Redemption Local across the platform - there is still time to make the connection. The train stops. The door remains closed. You press the override switch to open the door. There is no response. You pick up your baggage and head through to the next carriage - that door opens. Now there is a barrier in your way, with many electronic turnstiles in which you have to insert your ticket. You fumble feverishly in your pockets and find your ticket. You can see the guard of the Redemption Local closing the carriage doors - it is an old style train with manual doors.... You find your ticket and insert it in a turnstile - the turnstile spits it out. You notice there is a red "no entry" indicator on the gate. You search along the row of gates for one with a green indicator, and there is one, which takes your ticket and lets you through.... you run to the train and clamber on, just as the guard is raising his whistle to blow it...

Several of your fellow passengers on the Snowball Express intended to catch this same train to Redemption. Few made the connection. There is a later train to Delusionville, and another to Miracle City, but that was the last train to Redemption Valley. Some of these people are still asleep on the Snowball Express. Some did not even realise they had to change trains at Malfunction. Others are awake and looking out of the windows - they realised the train had stopped and they were wondering if it was time to get off the train. But there was no announcement, so they cannot have arrived yet... and, hey, as they look out of the window now, they see that the train is moving forward again. No problem - they can go back to sleep... Actually, the announcement system is broken, and they are seeing an optical illusion - it is the other train that is moving, in the opposite direction!

A few people did realise they had reached Malfunction, and headed for the doors. Some waited patiently for the doors to open, and missed the connection. Others had doors that worked, but they had too much baggage, and struggled with the turnstiles, and missed the connection. Others were so frustrated and angry at the lack of announcements, the broken doors, and the broken turnstiles, that they lost their focus and failed to find their way through in time.

The lucky few, who made it onto the last train to Redemption Valley, now find themselves on a rattly old train, with hard seats and no air-conditioning. But the journey is not far - this is a local train. A friendly guard comes along, checking that everyone is OK. He promises to let you know when your stop is approaching. Just as you are feeling tired and hungry, a cheerful lady appears with a trolley offering coffee, tea, and snacks. It is a bit warm, so you open a window, letting in sweet fresh country air.... you are almost home, and you can relax now, as the rest of the journey will be easy.

This little tale is a metaphor, for the transition from the old paradigm to the new paradigm. Our train is already stopped at Malfunction City. Most of us are fast asleep. Others sense the hiatus, but feel sure that the train will continue on its way shortly. Only a few realise that they have to change train, and only some of these actually manage to make it past the obstacles they encounter at Malfunction Terminal.

This is a time to be free of unnecessary baggage, to travel light. This is a time to be alert, with a clear intellect. This is a time to be flexible and ready to change direction at moment's notice.

Those who sincerely wish to reach Redemption Valley, and who make appropriate efforts, will get there. The new paradigm is very easy, once you are in it. The difficulties are created by the old paradigm. We have all been born and raised in the old paradigm ways, and we have to make determined and consistent efforts to change our patterns of thought and behaviour. Most of us are surrounded by people who are thinking, talking, and behaving in these old ways, and their influence will pull us back into our old habits, unless we are constantly vigilant. It is too easy to take assurance from those around us, forgetting that they are sleepwalking. They trust the old paradigm systems even as these systems are in terminal breakdown, and they trust the old paradigm figures of authority even as they are clearly revealed as crooks and shysters. Do not fall into such a trap.

There is only a short window of opportunity to make the transition from the old paradigm to the new paradigm. This window is closing. Many tried to change too soon, and become dispirited at the obstacles in their way. The automatic doors of the Snowball Express would not let them off early, on the grounds that they might injure themselves. But now that train is stationary and some of the doors are open - don't become dispirited when faced with the broken turnstiles, and don't try to take too much baggage with you. With intelligence and determination it is possible to change to the new paradigm now. Soon it will be too late.

love or fear?

2010-12-12T12:20:00.005Z

Do you want to live in a world ruled by fear or a world ruled by love?

Christopher Dos Santos writes:"You will in fact always be building two homes: one of fear and one of love. You are informed that the home you live in, is the one most complete."

This sums up, very simply, what I mean by "old paradigm" and "new paradigm". The universe is asking each one of us to move our focus of attention from the old house of fear to the new house of love.

The basis of our existing "civilisation" is fear: fear of poverty, fear of scarcity, fear of losing employment, fear of illness, fear of death, and so on. The system is based on authoritarian control and exploitation of the masses by a greedy and elite few. The slavery of the masses is mainly voluntary, though there is very strong pressure to "conform" through media and societal brainwashing. Individuality is discouraged - the masses are expected to be "conventional" which means to copy everyone else, and not think for oneself. The chains that most of us wear could easily be slipped off, but the wearers do not notice this, or are afraid to try to escape.

This old paradigm has had its day, and is now following the law of entropy - the second law of thermodynamics that governs our physical universe - into chaotic oblivion.

A friend of mine recently observed that "you cannot buck entropy" and I disagreed with him. He is correct from the viewpoint of the old paradigm, the house of fear, where love does not exist, because it cannot be measured by scientific instruments... ok, most people do accept that love exists, but they associate it with romance, desire, need, taking.... that is not true love.

The new paradigm, which is rising subtly, and unstoppably, in the background, is the house of love, true love. True love gives. True love cares. True love shares. This new paradigm comes from the heart and is inherently spiritual, while the old paradigm is unashamedly materialistic.

The law of entropy does not apply to spirituality. Spirituality tends towards unity, towards perfection, simplicity, merging. Spirituality is holistic.

So we can stay in the old house of fear, shaking in our boots, as the walls of our existence come crashing down. We can react to this by lashing out in anger, or by losing our minds to terror.

Or we can embrace the house of love. The house of love offers inner comfort, joy, peace, and strength. The house of love brings us together with all of nature and all of creation.

It is our choice, each of us, individually. It is simply a question of where we focus our energies and attention: to the house of fear, or the house of love?

Which house would you prefer to live in?

bring it on

2010-12-05T16:56:00.005Z

Dan Hamburg writes, at Culture Change:

"the grave challenge of our time is not to reform the current system but to replace it"

and goes on to justify this statement in an interesting article. He ends with sentiments I heartily endorse:

Assuming we don’t succumb to nuclear Armageddon or a climate meltdown, a new and different world must arise. In fact, it is already arising in communities small and large both here and around the world. A new narrative -- one that redefines what it means to be “a good man or woman of our kind” -- is emerging, a narrative that celebrates community over competitiveness, stewardship over exploitation. It will advance a holistic approach to living in harmony with the physical world so that we may have an opportunity to experience an intellectual and spiritual world. It offers the possibility of a better existence for all living things, and even non-living things, on our planet.

Bring it on!

Yes, indeed!

merging

2010-12-01T18:31:00.002Z

I have just merged two other blogs I was keeping into this one, as part of a simplifying of my creative life. I am railing against the forces of entropy, by removing unnecessary complexity...

Accordingly there are many new posts now in the archive. Apologies for any upheaval or confusion. Normal service will now be resumed...

woven from gifts

2010-11-27T11:57:00.004Z

Community is nearly impossible in a highly monetised society like our own. That is because community is woven from gifts, which is ultimately why poor people often have stronger communities than rich people. If you are financially independent, then you really don't depend on your neighbours – or indeed on any specific person – for anything. You can just pay someone to do it, or pay someone else to do it.

In former times, people depended for all of life's necessities and pleasures on people they knew personally. If you alienated the local blacksmith, brewer, or doctor, there was no replacement. Your quality of life would be much lower. If you alienated your neighbours then you might not have help if you sprained your ankle during harvest season, or if your barn burnt down. Community was not an add-on to life, it was a way of life. Today, with only slight exaggeration, we could say we don't need anyone.I don't need any of the people who produced any of the things I use. I need someone to do their jobs, but the people are replaceable, and, by the same token, so am I.

That is one reason for the universally recognised superficiality of most social gatherings. How authentic can it be, when the unconscious knowledge, "I don't need you," lurks under the surface?.

Community is woven from gifts. Unlike today's market system in which more for me is less for you, in a gift economy the opposite holds. Because people in gift culture pass on their surplus rather than accumulating it, your good fortune is my good fortune: more for you is more for me. Wealth circulates, gravitating toward the greatest need. In a gift community, people know that their gifts will eventually come back to them, albeit often in a new form. Such a community might be called a "circle of the gift."

We are poised at a critical moment of opportunity to reclaim gift culture, and therefore to build true community. The reclamation is part of a larger shift of human consciousness, a larger reunion with nature, earth, each other, and lost parts of ourselves. Our alienation from gift culture is an aberration. Our independence is an illusion: we are just as dependent as before, only on strangers and impersonal institutions, and these institutions are fragile.

A gift circle reduces our dependence on the traditional market. If people give us things we need, then we needn't buy them. The less we use money, the less time we need to spend earning it, and the more time we have to contribute to the gift economy, and then receive from it. It is a virtuous circle.

Secondly, a gift circle reduces our production of waste. It is ridiculous to pump oil, mine metal, manufacture a table and ship it across the ocean when half the people in town have old tables in their basements. It is ridiculous as well for each household on my block to own a lawnmower, which they use two hours a month, a leaf blower they use twice a year, power tools they use for an occasional project, and so on. If we shared these things, we would suffer no loss of quality of life. Our material lives would be just as rich, yet would require less money and less waste.

Many of us no longer aspire to financial independence, the state in which we have so much money we needn't depend on anyone for anything. Today, increasingly, we yearn instead for community. We don't want to live in a commodity world, where everything we have exists for the primary goal of profit. We want things created for love and beauty, things that connect us more deeply to the people around us. We desire to be interdependent, not independent. The gift circle, and the many new forms of gift economy that are emerging on the Internet, are ways of reclaiming human relationships from the market.

Gifts inspire gratitude and generosity is infectious. When I witness generosity, I want to be generous too. In the coming times, we will need the generosity, the selflessness, and the magnanimity of many people. If everyone seeks merely their own survival, then there is no hope for a new kind of civilisation. In contrast to the age of money where we can pay for anything and need no gifts, soon it will be abundantly clear: we need each other.

The above was extracted from: A Circle of Gifts by Charles Eisenstein, which is very well worth reading in its entirety, and describes a practical method in which we can create our own circle of gifts communities.

what do I know?

2010-11-25T11:20:00.000Z

I know nothing. Its a sobering thought.... but I can't get away from it. I know nothing. Or, more precisely, I don't know whether I know anything or not.... I have many opinions... but no certainty. However, I am very good at being dogmatic, so at least I can appear to know something.... or to be foolish enough to think I know something.... It would be much easier to just admit that I don't know what I am talking about, than to try to defend my dogmatic views. It is easier still to just be dogmatic and make no attempt to back up my statements! That is the course I generally take. It is the course of the "know-it-all". Which is ironic, as I know nothing..... Of course the easiest course of all is to say nothing at all.... but where is the fun in that?

normal natural telepathy

2010-11-16T10:36:00.000Z

Regarding telepathy, Sheldrake has said, “I think all social animals have such fields…I think it’s a normal means of communication…I don’t think it’s paranormal, I think it’s normal. I don’t think it’s supernatural, I think it’s natural. I think it’s essentially a form of animal communication within groups.”

Elliot Edge

economically productive

2010-11-16T08:47:00.002Z

Money, the ultimate object of worship among modern humans, is the most mysterious of human artifacts: a magic number with no meaning or existence outside the human mind. Yet it has become the ultimate arbiter of life—deciding who will live in grand opulence in the midst of scarcity and who will die of hunger in the midst of plenty.... The work of the mother who cares for her child solely out of love counts for nothing. By contrast, the mother who leaves her child unattended to accept pay for tending the child of her neighbor suddenly becomes “economically productive.”

David Korten

a number written on a piece of paper

2010-11-15T13:22:00.004Z

This wonderful diatribe, from "The Limits of Incompetence" by Dmitri Orlov, needs no further comment from me:

The last vestige of sanity an American seems to be able to cling on to is in his ability to count his money. While he still has some money, he adds up his “net worth,” and the higher the number, the better he feels about himself. Once all he has left is debt, he adds up the money he doesn't have, and the more “credit” he has, the better he feels about himself, because of all the things he can still “afford.” And once he finally defaults on his loans and no longer has any credit, it is as if, in his own minds, he ceases to exist. “I lost everything,” he is apt to say, as if his earthly existence amounted to a number written on a piece of paper.

the heart would never understand....

2010-11-14T11:07:00.000Z

Someone asked the Dalai Lama “Why didn’t you fight back against the Chinese?”The Dalai Lama looked down, swung his feet just a bit, then looked back up and said with a gentle smile, “Well, war is obsolete, you know. Of course the mind can rationalize fighting back… but the heart, the heart would never understand. Then ...you would be divided in yourself, the heart and the mind, and the war would be inside you."

(source unknown)

look out

2010-11-12T17:26:00.000Z

Our culture encourages self-gratification. We are taught to focus on ourselves, rather than on each other. We have become self-centred and shallow, hurting each other as we mindlessly destroy the living planet that sustains us.

Look out. We are heading for a crash landing. We have to change our focus, from inward to outward. We have to look beyond our selfish desires. We have to get back in touch with the natural world around us, and with our fellow beings.

Slow down. Appreciate each other. Share with each other. Look out for one another.

rebirth of the gift economy

2010-11-07T13:37:00.001Z

Charles Eisenstein wrote, in Gift Economics and Reunion in the Digital Age, on Reality Sandwich

the only business model that makes sense for most digital content is the model of the gift: to offer it as a gift, and to receive gifts in turn.

Primitive economies were wholly gift economies, which was natural when each consumer was also a producer. Today, the dominant model for profit-making business is to control scarce resources and sell their produce, or the resources themselves, to people who need them...

Since then, scarce resources have, one after another, fallen under private control, while many resources that were once abundant have been made scarce. It is hard to make someone pay for something that they can easily procure themselves. The quintessential example is water, perhaps the most abundant substance on the planet, but made scarce today through our our separation from nature and the pollution and chemical treatment of the water supply. As a result, bottled water has been the number one beverage growth category over the last two decades.
..
With the Internet today, we again have a situation in which the source of (at least a certain kind of) wealth is equally available to all, and again in which the distinction between producer and consumer blurs.
..
The gift model is quite natural for digital content... the unit cost to deliver digital content has dropped to nearly zero. This dematerialization means that no depletion is incurred by giving something away. No matter how many copies of my book or recordings people download from my website, my store of them is not depleted thereby. Supply is infinite; therefore, according to the law of supply and demand, the natural price point is zero.

What, then, shall induce me to produce such content in the first place?.. It is the desire to give of our gifts in order to create a more beautiful world.

Here we see the selfish old control-based paradigm giving way to the sharing new paradigm of giving. This is an unstoppable shift, that will extend far beyond the digital realms. Soon we may even be able to find drinking water again without paying for it.....

from the ground up

2010-11-03T18:32:00.003Z

For all of the systems that fail, systems that have been built from the top down, we must build parallel structures from the ground up.

Stoneleigh at The Automatic Earth

high time for a new beginning

2010-11-03T17:46:00.004Z

Me, I think it's high time for a new life, a new beginning, a new world, since there's something fundamentally amiss here...

Ilargi at The Automatic Earth

sun struck

2010-10-28T11:49:00.000+01:00

Enlightenment is an experience, not an idea. You feel struck by a burst of light. Suddenly the world is seen and felt as spiritual and eternal, rather than a day to day existence of drudgery and confusion. You feel totally alive, with a childlike joy, but without the child's fear of darkness. You feel wise, and you see everything with total clarity, You are lucid, filled with light. You see every person, every animal, plants, rocks, even the air, as alive and holy, united through the light that fills all existence. You are optimistic, energetic, and filled with wonder.

adapted from Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom by Rachel Pollack

black sheep

2010-10-24T11:08:00.000+01:00

this sheep is a healthy one
lively, fit, and lean and strong
should be a credit to the flock
should be first class breeding stock
yet this sheep is under attack
just because its wool is black
mother says 'it would be right'
'if you had a coat of white'
shepherd says that you must go
off to where the the grass don't grow
you don't look like all the rest
because of this you are a pest
black sheep no one wants you here
you just fill us all with fear
in this world you must conform
must be no different from the norm
black sheep black sheep, go away
no one likes you anyway

April 2004, Mount Abu, Rajasthan

be not angry..

2010-09-21T09:04:00.000+01:00

Be not angry that you cannot make others as you wish them to be,
since you cannot make yourself as you wish to be.

Thomas à Kempis (thank you Global Disaster Watch)

cosmic immortals

2010-09-18T09:06:00.000+01:00

Life seems to be aiming at nothing less than the attainment of divinity. We are part of the process of evolution from amoebas to Cosmic Immortals. What are Cosmic Immortals? Cosmic Immortals are creatures who live anywhere in the universe they damn well please, travel as fast as they want to and never die. And that’s the idea of a god. A god goes anywhere, never dies and moves as fast as a god wants to move. That is what we are evolving towards gradually.

Robert Anton Wilson (thank you Reality Sandwich)

beyond anger and frustration

2010-09-14T13:50:00.006+01:00

As I read my usual sources of economic and political news and comment (see my "recommended" links to the right of this blog), it strikes me that the tone of most of them is getting increasingly angry and frustrated. I have already dropped my subscriptions to other writers for this very reason, and the way things are going I will soon be left with no source of economic and political news and comment which I am prepared to read. This may not be a bad thing at all, of course! When all mainstream news is mindless propaganda, and all the better informed sources in the blogosphere are doomy and gloomy when not rabidly raging, then the bliss of ignorance holds great appeal. I do like a bit of bliss. But anger and frustration are vibes I prefer to sidestep... I can generate enough of these myself without needing to import anyone else's...

It is of course, very difficult to look at our current plight and retain equanimity. It does appear that the human race, and Planet Earth along with it, has been sold down the river by a fearful cartel of grasping bankers, and their political puppets. And all for an elephantine pile of loot, none of which they can take with them from the early graves they are frantically digging for all of us. The futility and stupidity and callous greed now on display is mind-boggling. I doubt if any one of us ever imagined that the "powers that be" could become so titanically corrupt and self serving, while dumbing down "the people" into placid zombie "sheeple". Those few of us who are still awake gasp in awe as each new policy horror is unveiled. It turns out that George Orwell's bleak vision of 1984 was rather understated, and chillingly accurate, if a trifle premature. Truth is stranger than fiction, and much more scary.

Anyone who is trying to come up to fixes for this mess is wasting their time. Politics won't save us. Technology won't save us. Free Markets won't save us. Economics? That took us right here, directly! They are all part of the problem, or more accurately they are symptoms of the problem. All of our traditional systems are now hugely complex and bloated, and becoming increasingly dysfunctional. This is the Law of Entropy in action, as order descends inevitably into chaos. Our "civilisation" is now approaching total chaos. Our "leaders" only appear to be in charge. They have their clammy fingers on the "controls", but their manipulations no longer do what they expect. Those who grease the palms of our "leaders" are not in charge either, as they desperately up the stakes for one last round of "beggar thy neighbour". Meanwhile, the rest of us lose our wits to our technological toys, numb ourselves with alcohol and prescription drugs, and rigidly deny that there are fundamental and catastrophic problems with our whole way of life. It is too late to change direction now. We are going over the cliff edge at full throttle....

Every civilisation comes to an end. Ours is no different. But from the ashes of the old emerge green shoots of new life. These are not the mythical "green shoots of recovery" promoted by our media. There will be no recovery. There will be no economy. There will be no politics. There will be no commerce. Not in the forms we currently recognise. Anyone who clings to the vestiges of the old paradigm will very soon be swept away with it. Their lies death and despair, a black pit of unknowing emptiness. Base your life around old paradigm values, and your life will not be worth living. We have little time left to prepare ourselves for our new beginnings. We have to start by freeing ourselves from the old mindsets.

The old paradigm is violent. The old paradigm enslaves us. The old paradigm keeps us in darkness. Luckily for us, the old paradigm is now dying.

The new paradigm is heart centred. The new paradigm is loving. The new paradigm is compassionate. The new paradigm means sharing freely. The new paradigm is a return to nature, and a return to being childlike. We are going back to the garden. The new paradigm comes from the soul, not the ego. The new paradigm is a lotus blossoming in the stinking mud of the old paradigm. We can stick in the mud, in forlorn struggle, or we can waken up and smell the heady scent of the lotus flowers. The choice is ours.

harmony is peace
freedom is natural
wisdom is strength

joy

2010-09-08T17:25:00.000+01:00

I was surprised, when I started meditating, that so much pleasure would result. Of course, people who meditate often talk about rapturous union with Being, or dissolution in the Divine, and these do sound very pleasant indeed. But I still didn't expect it, as if anything "spiritual" had to be austere, or subtle, or boring. Was I wrong! Apart from all the deeper benefits of meditation, the sheer volume of joy is astonishing. In my experience, it beats any other high.

from Meditation and "Drugs" by Jay Michaelson

God said

2010-09-07T11:30:00.000+01:00

it's not me that you see, you're looking at yourself;
you're not praying to me, you're praying to yourself;
and you're not worshipping me, you're worshipping yourself;
and you will kill in my name and heaven knows what else,
when you can't prove I exist, so get over yourself;
just get over yourself...

extracted from the lyrics of "God Said" by Todd Rundgren

heads in the sand

2010-09-01T09:41:00.000+01:00

Dr. Karl claims that the ostrich does many things, but hiding its head in the sand is not one of them. Awww, come on Dr Karl.... it is never a good feeling to have a belief, fondly cherished since childhood, brusquely debunked.

Wikipedia notes that Pliny the Elder wrote, 2000 years ago, that Ostriches "imagine, when they have thrust their head and neck into a bush, that the whole of their body is concealed."

So maybe the Ostrich has evolved in these 2000 years and has found a more effective strategy? Or maybe Dr. Karl is simply not looking hard enough....

Either way, it does seem that the great majority of the human race are now following the legendary example of our long-necked feathered friends. The problem that this causes - for those few of us who keep our heads above ground, and our eyes open - is that all we see around us is a bunch of arses...... not a pretty sight.

Should we simply kick these tempting targets? Or should we stamp on the ground in hope of startling them out of at least some of their denial? Or... my newly favoured approach is to raise my eyes upwards so that I don't notice them any more.... They are, in the words of Dr Karl: "foolishly ignoring their problem, while hoping it will magically vanish". And so I, similarly, ignore their posture and attitude, by pretending that their bodies have followed the example of their heads and magically vanished... It does feel a bit defeatist, but how can we help those who will not help themselves?

the lion and the unicorn

2010-08-25T17:31:00.000+01:00

What is it all about? The unicorn symbolises Scotland and the lion symbolises England, and they were fighting for the crown until they got married....

According to the nursery rhyme, the lion beat the unicorn all around the town.... And when he had beat him out, he beat him in again; He beat him three times over, his power to maintain.. Hmmm.. clearly written by an Englishman....

I was concerned about the chaining of the Unicorn, but that predates the union with the lion, as witness the pre-union coat of arms of the King of Scotland, to the right.

Wikipedia explains:according to legend a free unicorn was considered a very dangerous beast; therefore the heraldic unicorn is chained
So what's this about? The unicorn, a spiritual creature, a vegetarian, is considered so dangerous it must be chained up, while the rampant lion, a vicious and base carnivore remains unfettered? What kind of barbarism is this?

It is time to free the unicorn from its chains. No need to chain up the lion - it will be no match for an unchained unicorn.

Consider the tarot card for Strength: the Unicorn, in full possession of her own spiritual strength, easily subdues and tames the more base and physical lion. The lion lays down with the unicorn, in peace. No chains required.

The lion did not defeat the unicorn through strength. It did it through trickery. Through trickery the Unicorn was chained.

Unchain the unicorn!

free the fail whale!

2010-08-24T02:42:00.000+01:00

I feel very sorry for the poor old beast - trapped in a net and being constantly hoisted above the water by these pesky birds - I mean, I know that whales can breathe out of water, but I also know they are much happier in the water... anyway, why do they think a picture of a whale being tortured is going to make us happier about being caught up in their broken machinery? Are they saying: "leave us twits alone you tweeters, if you all just go away and do something else then we can get back in the water and suck on some plankton..."?

The twits have made some basic errors, as might be expected. They try to fix complexity with more complexity, which is like trying to cure a drunk by applying a barrel of whisky... oops our labyrinths are leaking... lets build a collection of labyrinthine monitoring systems so we can while away our days merrily watching just how badly it seeps... and lets add lots more squid in there... are we not clever? Look at our metrics! Almost everyone is now using our API to tweet - does that not show how clever we are?

Nope... try to tweet on the website and you get the tortured whale. Tweeters use the API apps out of desperation! Or, more often, they go somewhere else...

Look twits: your system requirements could not be more simple. Your only challenge is scale. Massive scale. There is an easy way to achieve massive scale, and a difficult way. The difficult way - the way of conglomeration - requires exceptional skill and loadsofdosh, such as only The Goog, and on occasion The Apple can muster. Otherwise, nothing works (think Micros&%t...). The easy way is distribution. Think Skype. Think Bittorrent. Think Internet. That's enough of a hint...

Let's save the fail whale. Cut the nets and set it free. Let the tweeters no longer burden the whale. Leave the whale out of it. Cut the nets and set it free. Let the tweeters do their own work, every one of them. If necessary, shoot those little tweeters who refuse to leave that poor whale alone... the time for placid acceptance has passed. It is now time for action! Free the whale!

not worth saving

2010-08-23T22:50:00.004+01:00

Dale Pendell writes in his blog "The Retort":

An economy that is dependent on people buying things they don’t need... with money they don’t have, is not worth saving. An economy that has to grow just to cover its own debts is not worth saving. An economy dependent on the energy of fossil fuels to avoid collapse is not worth saving. Why is an economy where most of the profits go to one percent of the population worth saving?
..
Let the recession come. The earth needs a recession, badly, globally. The future needs a recession—not a “correction,” but a recession, and a long one. The earth needs a permanent recession. Society needs a permanent recession. It’s time to turn off the lights and to roll up our sleeves. There is a lot of work to do.

Thanks to KMO and his excellent C-Realm podcast for drawing this, and many other, inspirational sources to my attention.

lest we forget...

2010-08-22T12:30:00.003+01:00

Ilargi from The Automatic Earth writes:

the "economic recovery" we've been fed for a year now, is, and was always, fake. We never left the first dip, and so we can't enter a second one. And no, this is not a recession, it's a depression, one that Celente labels "the Greatest Depression". Yes, things will get a whole lot worse than they are today.

The Raw Story quotes Gerald Celente saying:

You're going to see it all over the world, what they call austerity programs ... What are they doing? They're bailing out the banks and they're making the people pay for it. And the people don't like that.
..
One of the good businesses to get in to may be guillotines, because there's a real off-with-their-heads fever going on.

However, Joe Bageant does not expect outright revolution:

when we are looking at the political elite, we are looking at the dancing monkey, not the organ grinder who calls the tune. Washington's political class is about as upwardly removed from ordinary citizens as the ruling class is from the political class. For instance, they do not work for a living in the normal sense of a job, but rather obtain their income from abstractions such as investment and law, neither of which ever gave anybody a hernia or carpal tunnel. By comparison, the ruling class does not work at all.
..
Moneywise, Washington's political class is richer than the working class by the same orders of magnitude as the ruling class is richer than the political class.
..
the political class adopts the ruling class's social canon and presumptions, especially the one most necessary for acceptance: That the public has the collective intelligence of a chicken.
..
This political class stands between all of us down here and the tiny minority in the ruling class waaaaaay up there, wherever the hell up there is. No use to squint. You can't see it from where we are. That comes in mighty handy in denying the existence of a ruling class.
..
the smoke has now cleared, the money is in ruling class coffers, and a spin the bottle game for a few prosecutions is underway to entertain the crowd for the next few years.
..
Because the revolutionary destruction of the current economic system, bad as it is, would crash the country's economy even more quickly than the current process of theft, we are not likely to see an outright revolution that overthrows the ruling class.
..
the ruling class holds all the money, not to mention the media that informs the populace as to what is going on in our country. It controls our health care, our banking and retirement funds. It controls our education or lack of education, and it controls the price, quantity and quality of the food we eat. It controls the quality of the air we breathe, and soon, through pollution credits, even the price they will pay for that air. Most importantly, it holds concentrated legal and governmental authority
..
In the face of all this stands a very diverse public.. When your life and your family are so utterly controlled by persons and forces that you cannot even see, you don't take such risks.
..
the ruling class.. do not mind the wrath of the rabble, so long as it does not get in the way of the money.

However, Dmitri Orlov points out that those with the money are not happy either:

these are very difficult times to be rich. It used to be that having a million dollars made you a millionaire—but not any more! Now, to be perfectly safe and completely insulated from economic reality you need at least ten million, if not more, and the more you have, the more unnerving become the wild undulations of the financial markets and the dire prognostications of the experts. It is getting to the point that you can make a plausible guess at a person's net worth based on how nervous and miserable they look.
..
They have long forgotten what it means to be happy and carefree, and their labored attempts at feigning enjoyment are painful to watch. You can be sure that the sight of poor but happy people makes them quite livid.

Finally, in the words of James Howard Kunstler

because we're unwilling to re-scale and reform the things we do, nature is about to do it for us.

the apocalypse and the awakening

2010-08-19T09:54:00.004+01:00

Here are some extracts from Richard Grossinger's "Conversation with Andrew Harvey" in Reality Sandwich:

I don't see in an ordinary sense how anything is going to get fixed or is fixable at this point. In fact it doesn't even seem to be going in the direction of getting itself fixed; it seems to be going in the direction of getting worse and worse, and the people who are making it worse getting more power and asserting more prerogative....

We are impotent against the scale of physical and financial forces. As Obama says, we can't plug the hole.

There is absolutely no way in which this crisis is going to be fixed, because the whole point of this crisis is that it unravels, destroys, disintegrates, utterly, utterly annihilates all of the agendas and illusions and fantasies that human beings have created out of what you could call a collective false human self. Which is now terminally addicted to a false vision of the universe, a lust for power over every other species, a crazed hunger to dominate nature, and a totally unsustainable fantasy of limitless growth.

At the same time... our presence here is a participation in something much larger that is invisible to us - something that on some level is connected and connecting to other intelligences in the universe and the intrinsic intelligence of the universe itself. These realms are being informed by our situation in some way - we are receiving aid, advice, and godspeed from them despite how things are going here, despite the fact that it looks as though morons and madmen and crime bosses are informing everything.

Things are a mess and inextricable, but we are alive and conscious and filled with the song and heart and yearning of the universe. So I think it's important not to over-focus on "fixing" things in the ordinary sense: politically, ecologically, economically. It's impossible. Yet... we must act. We must do the right thing. Service is absolute and non-negotiable.

It's like both are true and wrapped around each other: the apocalypse and the awakening. Only the apocalypse writes itself glowingly and brazenly on the face of our times. The spiritual awakening is deep and subtle, hidden inside our gestation in the universe, our pagan, untold initiation that is written in the whole of nature, and in the sky.

What we are looking at is an appalling, dreadful, ferocious, inescapable dark night of the species, which is going to get worse, very, very fast. That is the bad news. But there's good news within the bad news because when you understand through divine grace, and through the flicker of the divine evolutionary intelligence shining on your mind and heart, that this radical ferocious process is the sign of an enormous new potential struggling chaotically to be born, then you can begin to cooperate with that birth.

The transformation of the human into the divine human... works through terrifying horror and extreme chaos and almost unimaginable violence.

it's too easy to think of the people who are fucking things up - in governments and corporations and narcissistic stupors and militias and crime cadres - as being in some sense in alliance with evil, or the devil. I mean, there are some pretty bad actions, pretty bad choices, pretty sociopathic behaviors on the loose on this planet. And yet, at some level, the energy that is flowing in to create those acts is sacred too, and has to be used in our transformation.

We all have to look at the collective shadow of the human false self, which we all participate in, and the despair and disillusion and desolation and death-wish and dread, that it has completely, almost, possessed us with which enables us to do nothing as the powers that be destroy everything.

One of the things we need to be doing is.. praying for those who are trapped in their roles as masters of the machine... from any kind of enlightened perspective, they are the ones who are suffering in obscurity and unconsciously the most. Because in killing and in massacring and in destroying the environment, they are laying waste to their own source, they are laying waste to their own psyches, they're living in an increasingly polluted psychic atmosphere.

The Dalai Llama, upon hearing of the slaughter of the Tibetan nuns by Chinese soldiers, wept. When asked presumptively if he was weeping for the nuns, he responded, rather fiercely, ‘No, their souls were okay.' He was weeping for the soldiers who killed the nuns. His deepest compassion is extended to the most brutal of his so-called enemies, because he knows that they are preparing (for themselves) an enormous stinking karmic grave.

Somehow we have to be able, through sacred practice, (to) create a crucible in which we can become strong enough to endure what we have to endure, to hold the heart open, to hold the dark and the sadistic and the tormented at the center of our hearts, and keep constantly praying for them so that they can be illumined by the light that sustains everything.

We can make daily extraordinary steps by constantly being vigilant over our minds, constantly trying, with all the chaos of our psyches, to move toward compassion and true tenderness in our relationships with others... This is the foundation from which all manner of things can flower.

Any true act of empathy and compassion has resonances through known and unknown universes and domains, because everything is interrelated in unimaginable and mysterious ways.

The situation we're enduring is particularly horrible because something enormous is at stake: a birth of the divine in matter. The birth of the divine in the human through the catastrophic, apocalyptic violence of a dark night, is not for this Earth alone, which is why those forces that oppose it are so hysterical and violent.

This is known in the mystical traditions as supreme enlightenment (whereby) the whole universe is elevated.

That was the sacrifice of Christ, to use his body to break down a barrier between realms, to demonstrate that transformation and rebirth are possible, and nothing can intercede. It's a love beyond division. It's a love beyond reason. It's a love beyond agenda. It's a love beyond results. And if you can allow yourself to surrender to that love, that love has the power of resurrection within it, at its core.

In its own demonic way, the new cult of the suicide bomber is an expression of the lost divine and a direct attack on materialism. In a certain symbolic way, 9/11 remarkably resembled the Tower Card in the Tarot, down to the fine details. The suicide attacks are.. a direct confrontation with materialism... They are attacking the heart of a great materialist blasphemy.

(They are saying that) there is nothing whole about our culture. We are driven by greed. There's a kind of free-floating, dark promiscuity which is attacking so much of what is sacred about love and emotion and passion. The whole of our culture is in the hands of a few corrupt business-people.

Here are people who for all the wrong reasons, and a few of the right ones, are truly prepared to give up their whole lives in the name of a passion for a new world.

If only the New Age had the passion of the suicide bomber... If they had the passion, the commitment, and the sincerity... in fact, just the sincerity would do it. That's what's missing in the New Age... and the capacity to give your whole life for a transformation you want, which is what's going to be asked of us.

To galvanize people... first of all you connect them with the divine consciousness within them, secondly you give them the disciplines that really sustain that consciousness, and, thirdly, you help them follow their heartbreak and follow something they can really do in the real world to help the real agony of the real exploding real crisis. If you really see that the world is dying - and that means that not only your psyche is going to be destroyed, but that the world that you love is dying, that if you have children your children are going to inherit desolation - if you really see that, if you really allow yourself to feel it, if you really stop intellectualizing about it, but start feeling it and feeling it from the divine within you, then you will be driven, you will be driven to find something that you must do just to stay human.

The new paradigm is based on spirituality, a subtle rising wave of awakening. The old paradigm, based on control and greed, is now looking increasingly ugly day by day, as it tears itself apart in front of our eyes. The transformation from the familiar old ways to the new and unfamiliar ways will be forced on us if we don't take the initiative. We can be destroyed as part of the problem, or we can participate as part of the solution. Awareness is the first step to awakening.

Are you ready "to give your whole life for a transformation you want"?

nobody reads this

2010-08-18T22:31:00.002+01:00

The good thing about nobody reading my blog is that I can write whatever I like and I don't get hassled for it.... I don't have to moderate comments or even read them...

The bad thing about nobody reading my blog is that I can be lazy and not bother writing anything at all....

The terrible thing is that I have another blog which some people do read, and instead of writing for them I spend my time hiding here and writing on this blog..... so I am not only uninteresting, but antisocial as well, not to mention ungrateful.... but then, which of us is perfect?

Anyway, I have better things to do, like wordring and being a twit, not to mention playing with my gmail status... in fact, anything to avoid facing the flock....

breaking out of the shell

2010-08-15T20:45:00.000+01:00

Tired of your egg-shaped universe? Don't wait for time.... time waits on you.

mystical experiences

2010-08-10T12:01:00.000+01:00

The following is adapted from Soul and Spirit by Patrick Harpur:

Mystical experience is intuitive. There is a sudden illumination in the dead of night, or a flash of lightning in the darkness. A single mystical experience may last only a minute but be a defining moment in one's life, a yardstick against which the truth of subsequent mundane experiences are measured.

Mystical experiences are difficult to talk about, as they transcend language, and are intensely personal. They are given, by the grace of God, and cannot be induced by willpower. They are more important to us than our normal state, and infinitely more meaningful. They are revelations of reality. No one says after the experience: "I see now that it was all a dream or a hallucination or a delusion, but now I've come to my senses." They say the opposite: "Ordinary life seemed like a dream in comparison to the reality I saw." At the same time, ordinary things are not distorted as they can be in dreams. Everything is the same as usual, but more vivid, colourful and above all charged with significance.

Here I will consider three categories of mystical experience: visions of nature, visions of the beloved, and visions of God.

Visons of nature.

In visions of nature, every object is imbued with significance and importance. Everything is a presence. Everything is ensouled. Everything is holy. Everything is awe-inspiring. The ego is abolished, and one is neither self-conscious nor detached, but conscious of one's self in intimate participation with every other self. There is no desire, except to continue in that state of one-ness.

Jacob Boeme, a Protestant mystic, was sitting in his room one day in 1600 when "his eye fell upon a burnished pewter dish which reflected the sunshine with such marvellous splendour that he fell into an inward ecstasy, and it seemed to him as if he could now look into the principles and deepest foundations of things. He believed that it was only a fancy, and in order to banish it from his mind he went out into the green fields. But here he noticed that he could gaze into the very heart of things, the very herbs and grass, and that actual nature harmonised with what he had inwardly seen."

In 1969, Derek Gibson was travelling to work by motorcycle when he noticed that the sound of his engine had faded to a murmur. "Then everything suddenly changed. I could clearly see everything as before with form and substance, but instead of looking at it all I was looking into everything. I saw beneath the bark of the trees and through the underlying trunks. I was looking into the grass too, and all was magnified beyond measure, to the extent that I could see moving microscopic organisms! Then, not only was I seeing all this, but I was literally inside it all. At the same time as I was looking into this mass of greenery I was aware of every single blade of grass and fold of the trees, as if each had been placed before me one at a time and entered into."

Bernard Berenson: "It was a morning in early summer. A silver haze shimmered and trembled over the lime trees. The air was laden with their fragrance. The temperature was like a caress. I climbed up a tree stump and felt suddenly immersed in It-ness. I did not call it by that name. I had no need for words. It and I were one."

The vision of Nature in our culture most often occurs in childhood or adolescence, before we have become "educated", or in those people who never lost the child-like perception of Nature.

Wendy Rose-Neill had an experience while gardening. She suddenly became intensely aware of her surroundings: the scent of grass, the sound of birds and of rustling leaves. "I had a sudden impulse to lie face down in the grass," she said, "and as I did so, an energy seemed to flow through me as if I had become part of the earth underneath me. The boundary between my physical self and my surroundings seemed to dissolve and my feeling of separation vanished. In a strange way I felt blended into a total unity with the earth, as if I were made of it and it of me.... I felt as if I had suddenly come alive for the first time, as if I were awakening from a long deep sleep into the real world.... I realized that I was surrounded by an incredible loving energy, and that everything, both living and non-living, is bound inextricably within a kind of consciousness which I cannot describe in words."

Visions of the beloved

In visions of nature we experience the multiple, non-human, impersonal soul of the world. In visions of the beloved we experience the soul of a single person. This can happen in an instant, as in love at first sight. You are in awe, in the presence of your beloved. There is sexual passion, but not lust.

This kind of love is expressed in the medieval tales of courtly love of a knight for his unattainable lady. This is the template for our modern idea of "romantic" love, which we believe transforms the lover's character for the better. Although we believe that we all have a right to fall deeply in love, the pure vision of the beloved is a rare experience. However, many of us are tortured by a more selfish romantic form, an unrequited desire for some remote beauty, perhaps an unattainable film star or pop icon, or a senior boy or girl at school. There is no question of friendship, companionship, or shared interests.

In visions of the beloved, the love we have for the beloved is pure and unselfish, as in love for God. This love for a beloved is a short step away from loving God, and from loving all of creation. We see beauty and grace. The beloved is angelic. The sexual passion is an expression of yearning for two souls to merge and become one.

In such a love, the beloved is all-important: all relations to other people, or to the world, pale into insignificance.

In our divine form as immortal souls, we are all one with God. When incarnated in human bodies we experience separation. Separation brings suffering. The wish to merge with a beloved is an earthly expression of the longing of the soul to leave the body and merge once again with God.

But we tend to invest too much in other individuals - family, children and friends as well as lovers - more than they can bear. This leads inevitably to disappointment when our beloveds turn out not to be the idealised divine figures we adore. The paradox is, that we can only truly love each other when we also love something beyond each other.

A vision of the beloved is a vision of divinity. We are seeing the divine soul, and through that we are connecting with God and all of divinity. Where this connection with God comes first for both partners, the pure love for each other can be mutual and lasting. This is reflected in the idea of getting married "in the eyes of God". But where there is selfish desire, we want total absorption of the other, body and soul, into our own self. This is a hopeless desire, which brings jealous possessive rage, anguish, despair, and emptiness. The beloved becomes unattainable. So, we must each put God first, as God is pure and wholly selfless. Then we can see the reflection of God in our beloved, and we can feel it in ourselves.

We must also both be able and willing to imagine ourselves in the other's shoes. This requires faith in each other, and imagination. There is then an exchange: "I am in you" and "you are in me". This is very similar to the experience, in visions of nature, of you being "in" everything and everything being "in" you.

Visions of nature are impersonal: we lose our personal selves in the one-ness of all of creation. Visions of the beloved are personal: we connect with the divine through the person of another. The lover becomes a personal deity.

Visions of God

Visions of God tend to happen when we let go of all desire. We wait in the darkness and love rushes in. From emptiness we become full. We experience union with the divine light. We experience oneness with God.

Unlike visions of nature or of the beloved, visions of God are seldom spontaneous, but require preparation, such as meditation, fasting, prayer, or self-denial. We go through a "dark night of the soul" in which we let go of all human longing and knowledge, and become truly humble. Then God comes to us.

There are no words to adequately describe the encounter with God. But it is often described as light or as fire, within or outwith the self, with a blissful feeling of unlimited comfort and understanding.

Union with God can also be seen as union with one's own soul or higher self. The soul is at one with God and of the same divine nature, and so union with the soul implies union with God also. Union with one's self simply means letting go of the false lower self or ego, and allowing the true inner self to shine through. However, many find this "simple" approach difficult to practice and prefer to approach God directly.

Whether we go within or outwith to find God, the aim is the same: union with the divine.

why be vegetarian?

2010-08-09T09:23:00.000+01:00

Physically, we are what we eat - a healthy diet produces a healthy body and a healthy mind. Our psyches also are strongly affected by our diet: energies are taken on board through our diet, and the gentle energies of fruit, vegetables, grains, and legumes produce lightness, and aid meditation.

I eat a vegetarian diet - here are some of my reasons:

1 - karma - I don't take on the karma of the slaughter of animals - meat is murder

2 - vibration - vegetarians are less aggressive and gross, and are more gentle and subtle - this can be seen clearly in the animal kingdom

3 - animal welfare - I detest the practices of modern farming, particularly in relation to cruelty to animals

4 - energy - vegetarian diet is much easier on the digestion system, and so you have more energy and vitality

5 - clean-ness - vegetarian food is much cleaner (try looking at raw meat under a microscope), and much less likely to poison

6 - pharmaceuticals - farm animals are pumped full of antibiotics and other drugs, residues form which remain in the meat

7 - less fear - the fear vibrations of animals about to be slaughtered remain in the meat, and are taken on board by the eater

8 - ecology - vegetable and grain farming consumes much less of the planets resources, per meal, than animal farming

9 - economic - vegetarian diet is cheaper

I also prefer my food to be organically produced, and with as slittle processing as possible. Nature provides food that is wholesome and alive. Our bodies are part of nature. The energies of nature sustain us. When we adulterate the work of nature with chemicals, or by extreme mechanical processes, the food loses its vitality and natural balance. When grains are over-refined - white flour, white rice, etc. - we have thrown away most of the nutrition in them, and we have made them un-whole.

Many people who eat a vegetarian diet do not understand food balance, and thus become unhealthy. Doctors recommend them to eat meat again to regain their health, but in fact the meat will only cause them other health problems, not to mention the psychic and spiritual damage caused by taking on board the energies of bad animal husbandry and the slaughterhouse. The answer is to eat wholefoods, with minimal processing - to vary the diet, and to include foods that provide the trace elements which most people rely on meat for - foods such as seaweeds, miso, tamari, and tempeh are a great help for a healthy vegetarian diet.

I learnt a lot from macrobiotics - while I don't subscribe to every macrobiotic tenet, the focus on the balance of the diet, the energies in the food, the wholeness of the food, the denial of greed, and the attitude towards diet of "my body is a temple", all lead to good health of body, mind and soul.

no

2010-07-23T10:19:00.000+01:00

A “NO” uttered from deepest conviction is better and greater than a “YES” merely uttered to please, or what is worse, to avoid trouble.

Mahatma Gandhi

meditation

2010-07-21T07:08:00.000+01:00

Learning to meditate changed my life, very much for the better. Where there had been a dark and scary void in the centre of my being, regular meditation gradually replaced that with a radiant warm golden light. This inner light is now always accessible to me and is a source of great comfort and strength. Regular meditation makes me happy and clear thinking.

Meditation is all about mental focus. You aim to quieten the chattering of your mind, and to enter a state of calm and bliss. This is the Beta state we enter naturally between sleep and wakefulness, but in meditation, we aim to hold that state. Once this is accomplished you can then go further, into deeper states of consciousness, which I will describe elsewhere.

I practice a stripped down form of Raja Yoga, where the physical aspects of yoga are dispensed with, and the focus is on mental yoga or "union" with the divine. This meditation is done with eyes open, so that it can be practiced even whilst walking around. For me, the primary "yukti" or method is visualisation of the light within me. I aim to meditate first thing each morning, for half and hour to an hour or more, and then again for brief periods throughout the day. A key facet of Raja yoga is that you aim to be in a "soul-conscious" i.e. yogic state at all times, throughout the day, whilst working, eating, playing, even whilst sleeping! Now I am able to meditate "on the fly" whenever I feel the need - e.g. if my mind is racing or chaotic, or I am feeling challenged or disturbed. A few moments of calm and focussed inner reflection can re-charge you for hours.

When possible, I prefer to meditate within a group. We sit in a room designated only for this purpose, and focus on a candle or light or picture in front of us. There is incense burning, and calm meditation music playing, interspersed with periods of silence. I find that the discipline of being in a group helps me focus more strongly, and for longer. Also, when there are powerful meditators in the group then they lift the 'vibe' of the meditation room, enhancing the experience for others: this is particularly helpful for beginners, who might otherwise struggle to focus.

Some of the most powerful experiences I have had in meditation involved "drishti" i.e. spiritual vision. This is a communication of third eye energies between two souls - it involves looking into each other's eyes, whilst in a yogic state - third eye energies travel between the two participants. When you give someone drishti, and they give you drishti back, there is an intense experience of blissful energy being exchanged. It does require both participants to be in an elevated state of consciousness at the time, and then the experience will elevate your state of consciousness further.

A key factor relevant to the meditation experience is the atmosphere of the place of meditation. It is far easier to meditate in a room which has been used effectively for this purpose over a period of time. Thus, purpose built meditation rooms, temples, and some churches and chapels, serve you well. On the other hand, once you are accomplished, it It is a good test to try to meditate in an place with a base or chaotic energy, for example a supermarket or shopping mall - if you can achieve a blissful yogic state in such an environment then you are doing well! Such efforts make us stronger.

Meditation requires practice and persistence, but the results are very much worth the effort. An experienced yogi can meditate anytime and anywhere, and the yogic state becomes their everyday state of consciousness. This is what I am aiming for.

devolution

2010-07-20T09:39:00.000+01:00

Mankind has not evolved, but "devolved", from giants who once walked the earth, to a near animal state... vowed to cataclysmic annihilation, while an evolving elite gathers all of human experience for a resurrection in spirituality.

Schwaller - quoted by Colin Wilson in "From Atlantis to the Sphynx"

change

2010-07-19T11:38:00.000+01:00

You must be the change you hope to see in the world.

Gandhi

religion and the new spirituality

2010-07-18T09:25:00.000+01:00

I love spirituality, but I do not much care for religion. Religion can be a gateway to spirituality, but it can also be a cage, preventing us from going deeper. If we go deep enough into any religion, then we end up at the same place, in the golden light of universal truth, in enlightenment. However, as soon as we say that "our belief" is true, and that the beliefs of others are false, then we have adopted a religious ideology. And then religion becomes a trap.

Religions are based on control, on authority, on a hierarchy. Religious authorities tell us how to worship, and how to behave. They depict God as external, and only reachable through that religion. They require that we follow their directions, and do what we are told.

In the new spirituality, we are not told what to think or what to do. We are our own best authority, as we work to know and love ourselves. We learn to listen inside, and discover how to live a more spiritual life.

The old way says that there is only one true path, and that all other ways are wrong.

The new spirituality says that many paths lead to spiritual freedom and peace.

We have a rich array of gems from which to draw illumination: the world's religious traditions, mythology, psychology, healing methods, scientific wisdom, and most of all our own experiences. We each take a personal selection from these gems, and string a necklace all of our own.

stop thinking - start living

2010-07-18T01:33:00.000+01:00

There is only now, the present moment. The past has passed away, and we cannot alter it. The future is unknown, and we cannot predict it with any certainty.

Thought absorbs energy. We waste our energy when we think about the past or the future. And when we are thinking, we miss the present moment.

So, stop thinking. Enter the present moment. Start being. Shift attention to now.

This is a very conscious state. You are conscious, but thinking much less, or perhaps not at all.

Invite moments of stillness into your life. Escape from the mental noise of thinking.

Be still with a flower, or a crystal, or a bird. Nature can draw us into inner stillness. Flowers are not anxious, not concerned about tomorrow. Look at them, and see their beauty. Feel their magical presence.

Stop labelling people, things, and situations. Stop analysing, and just perceive. Let the mind become still, and experience the moment. Feel it.

When we are in our heads, we are not present. We are lost in thought.

So, pull your attention away from thinking, towards observing, towards feeling, towards being.

The world around us is vitally alive, but when we are absorbed in thought, it seems lifeless and dead. Don't let the mind grab your attention. Become like a child, alert and alive once again.

Stop thinking. Start living.

fluid and free

2010-07-18T01:22:00.002+01:00

The peoples of the earth will no longer be shut off from one another within states but will flow freely over the surface of the earth and intermingle. Man will be forced to realize that power must be kept open, fluid and free. His aim will be not to possess power but to radiate it.

Henry Miller : Sunday After the War

wise

2010-07-17T10:45:00.000+01:00

Yesterday I was clever,
So I wanted to change the whole world.
Today I am wise,
So I am changing myself.

Sanjiwan Kumar

two thieves

2010-07-17T10:43:00.001+01:00

Many of us crucify ourselves between two thieves - regret for the past and fear of the future.

Fulton Oursler

what am I?

2010-07-16T14:58:00.000+01:00

What am I? I am a soul. I am a conscient being of light. I inhabit a human body. This is temporary. I am not this body. I have this body. I wear it like a costume. It is my body, for a while. When it is worn out, I will cast it off, and put on a new body.

I am eternal. I am indestructible. I am blissful. I radiate love and light. I am mighty. My powers are unlimited. I am one with all other beings. We are in union. We are one. We are divine.

We are here on planet Earth to experience separation. It is all a game. We are playing in our garden. We are playing roles in a great drama. I am not my role. I am the actor that plays the role.

I have a body, but that body is not me. I have a personality, but that personality is not me. I have thoughts but these thoughts are not me. I feel emotion but that emotion is not me. All of these create a false sense of self. I am not these. I am the life force that animates the body. I am a spiritual being. I am life itself. I am divine. I am. And so are you.

a living for all

2010-07-10T12:40:00.003+01:00

According to the activist and economist David Korten, the goal of a life-serving economy "is to generate a living for all, rather than a killing for a few."

Marisa Smith in Reality Sandwich

the futility of planning

2010-02-27T11:51:00.005Z

How do we prepare for a future that is very uncertain? What do we know of the future? What do we KNOW of the present, even? Everything I write and say might be wrong. There may be no old paradigm and no new paradigm. Everything that everyone else writes elsewhere about the impending collapse of our financial systems, our political systems, our civilisation, climate change, peak oil, over-population, may be misguided also. Humanity has a long and rich history of predictions of a doomed and disastrous future which failed to materialise. In all probability, some of us somewhere will be correct in some of our conclusions and pontifications, but realistically the only thing we really know about the future is that we cannot accurately predict what will happen.

Now, planning for the future requires that we have a clear vision of what the future will bring, or at least that we can see a limited set of alternative outcomes that are reasonably likely. When we don't know where we are heading, we cannot plan our journey. All we can do is prepare for whatever eventualities we can envisage, and then hope for the best.

I argue that the current state of play in human "civilisation" on planet Earth has become so volatile and so fragile and so uncertain, that the only safe conclusion we can reach, rationally, is that there are going to be big changes, and soon. We cannot, rationally, conclude with any statistical certainty, what exactly these changes are going to be. Among those of us who think about such things, some predict apocalyptic outcomes. Others believe we can find technological solutions to all of our problems. Others, using history as a guide, take a middle ground and see a slow and bumpy decline in our civilisations down to a new dark age, from which will arise in due course a new civilisation. Meanwhile, most of the population prefer not to think about such things, and confidently expect "business as usual" to resume any day now, in line with what the mass media keeps telling them. None of these predicted outcomes can be proved. I believe that any simple rational and scientific analysis will tell us that a resumption of "business as usual" is simply impossible - in other words that change is inevitable. But, beyond that, rational analysis only provides fodder for intellectual discussion and argument - it does not produce any certainty, or near certainty, or even substantial likelihood, of any one outcome over another.

We cannot plan meaningfully for such an uncertain future. All we have to go on are vague ideas of what a solution might be like. Success or failure can be known only in retrospect. Meanwhile, we can only prepare ourselves in such a way as to maximise our resilience to catastrophic change. Improvisation is the order of the day, and we should focus on the basics of survival - sustainable water, food and shelter. If those who predict apocalypse are right and the end is indeed nigh, then it really won't matter much what we do in the interim. On the other hand, if the dreams of the technologists are even valid, then where is the resource and political will going to come from to build these imaginary technologies in time to save us from ourselves? I don't see the magic wand. It is already far too late - we have passed the tipping point. We have sleepwalked our way through the last few decades and missed the train of "sustainable techno future". In the more distant future we may evolve an advanced lifestyle based on sustainable technologies, but our children and grandchildren will have lived their lives and died long before we get there - meanwhile we will have to somehow cope with the collapse of our existing way of life. So the technologist dream becomes just one of the possible outcomes of the middle way, whereby we are heading into a century or more of decline and disintegration of our "civilisation", out of the ashes of which a new civilisation, largely unimaginable to us, will eventually blossom.

No amount of planning and rationality can tell us the detail of how things will go. My own proclamations about the future and our way ahead, are based on the irrational - on visions and realisations attained through meditation. I put much more faith in feelings and intuition, than in judgement and rationality. I believe that we are transitioning, as a race, from rational thinkers who have deluded ourselves that we are in control of nature (old paradigm), to intuitive beings who know that we are at one with nature (new paradigm). I cannot back up what I say scientifically, not least because I have no interest in doing so. I may be completely wrong, but it feels very right! I see golden light where others see black smoke. You must read my writings and judge for yourself - hopefully I will touch a chord in some of you, or light a spark. Others will simply shake their heads and will move on to graze in more rational pastures and I wish them good luck - we all have different paths to tread.

(from spiritualsun.org)

composting

2010-02-24T10:26:00.005Z

Our current extravagant, energy-wasting lifestyle is not sustainable. We have to move now towards a more sustainable and holistic way life, and we already have a range of technological options available to us to help achieve this. Perhaps the simplest and most accessible of these is composting: a practical, and ecologically elegant way of boosting and maintaining soil fertility, which also highlights key principles central to a new paradigm economy and society.

Most of the compostable food, garden, and farm waste we generate currently goes into landfills, rather than being recycled into fertile soil. In "Little Steps that Matter", and "A Theology of Compost", John Michael Greer writes about this potential resource, contrasting between the "monumental absurdity of industrial society’s linear transformation of resource to waste, on the one hand, and the elegant cycle of resource to resource manifested in the humble compost bin on the other":

Those of my readers who have compost bins know how much of their own kitchen, garden, and yard waste goes into it; my wife and I generate between two and four cubic feet of compostable waste in an average week. All of it goes into a compost bin of black recycled plastic in the back yard. So does another cubic foot or so per week from a friend’s kitchen; his living situation doesn’t permits him to have his own compost bin, so he contributes to ours. All the peelings and scraps and moldy bits from the produce that passes through our kitchen and his go into the compost pile, along with garden weeds, plants that have passed their season, and other forms of yard and garden waste, leavened with double handfuls of dried leaves saved from last autumn. Those are the only inputs, other than a little labor with a shovel once a month or so to keep the pile turned and working. Once a year, the hatch at the bottom of the compost bin disgorges the output—black, damp, sweet-smelling compost, ready to be worked into our garden beds.

This output is potent stuff. The first garden my wife and I planted started out as a patch of bare dirt on the north side of an urban apartment building, so poor and barren that even the most rugged of the local weeds made only half-hearted forays into it. Two years of double-digging beds with home-brewed compost turned it into a lush cottage garden that yielded shade-tolerant vegetables and medicinal herbs three seasons of the year, and supported some of the biggest earthworms I’ve ever had the pleasure of encountering. Given a reasonably good mix of raw materials – which an ordinary kitchen and garden provide quite well – compost is a balanced soil amendment that works over the long term, improving fertility, tilth, and pH balance while providing a good mix of soil nutrients.

Properly handled, the composting process also takes out unwanted seeds and pathogens. Decomposition generates heat – 150° to 160°F is a fairly common temperature for the core of a good compost pile – and that sort of heat over weeks or months will kill anything in your compost you don’t want there.

It’s possible to make compost on an industrial scale — and there are businesses and public utilities that do this — but compost is not well suited to the industrial model of agriculture. It works best when applied in intensive small-scale gardening, where it can be combined with other low-energy but labor-intensive techniques for maximizing soil fertility and productivity. Composting is… a bridge – or part of a bridge – that reaches beyond the end of the industrial age… (With) soaring fossil fuel prices turning industrial farms and their far-flung distribution networks into economic basket cases… local micro-farms and market gardens, and the co-operatives, farmers markets, and community-supported agriculture schemes that give them a market outside the existing system, are guaranteed steady and dramatic growth.

In a decade or so, in fact, American agriculture may well resemble nothing so much as the agricultural system of the Soviet Union in its last years, with huge and dysfunctional corporate farms filling the role of the sprawling industrialized kolkhozii while a large proportion of the food people actually eat comes from backyard garden plots.

It’s in that secondary economy of small gardens and micro-farms that composting has its place – and just as the collapse of the Soviet Union would have been far more devastating in human terms without the underground economy that kept people fed, the downward arc of the industrial age can be made less traumatic if technologies such as composting, relevant to an underground food economy already being born, become widely distributed and practiced in the near future.

Thus the homely, humdrum, and vital art of composting offers a model for the kinds of adaptive, flexible, and scalable responses… we need to locate and deploy… If the twilight of the industrial age is going to be anything but an uncontrolled crash, it’s one of the little steps that could actually make a difference.

What makes composting such a useful template for a (new paradigm) society is precisely that it highlights the ways such a society would have to differ from the way things are done in today’s industrial civilization. Some of the crucial points of difference that come to mind are these:

First, where industrial civilization converts resources into waste, composting converts waste into resources. The core dynamic of today’s industrial economies is a one-way process in which fossil fuels, other energy sources, mineral deposits, soil, water, air, and human beings, among many other things, are transformed into waste products – directly, in the form of pollution, or indirectly, in the form of goods and services that go into the waste stream after the briefest possible useful life... A society that burns through its supply of necessary resources while heaping up progressively larger volumes of toxic wastes is going to run into trouble sooner or later. Composting reverses the equation by turning waste into a resource and meeting crucial needs – and there are few needs more crucial to a human society than food production – using wastes that would otherwise be part of the problem.

Second, where industrial civilization works against natural processes, composting works with them. At the center of contemporary Western ideology is the vision of progress as the conquest of nature, and this way of thinking has backed industrial societies into an approach to natural processes that sees them as obstacles to be overcome – or even enemies to be crushed. The result is the sort of massive misuse of resources visible in modern agriculture, where conventional farming methods convert soil into something approaching a sterile mineral medium, and farmers then have to buy and apply an ever-increasing volume of fertilizers and soil additives to make up for the fertility that natural cycles in healthy soil provide all by themselves. Composting, by contrast, works because it fosters the natural processes that break down organic matter into healthy humus. There’s no need to add anything extra, or to go shopping for the lively mix of bacteria, fungi, and soil fauna that makes the miracle of compost happen. To borrow a Hollywood slogan, if you build it, they will come.

Third, where industrial civilization requires complex, delicate, and expensive technologies to function at all, composting – because it relies on natural processes that have evolved over countless millions of years – thrives on a much simpler and sturdier technological basis… Set the factory complexes, energy inputs, and resource flows needed to manufacture NPK fertilizer using conventional methods, (against) the simple bin and shovel needed to produce compost from kitchen and garden waste, and the difference is hard to miss. Imagine that your small town or urban neighborhood had to build and provide energy and raw materials for one or the other from scratch, using the resources available locally right now, and the difference becomes even more noticeable.

Fourth, where industrial civilization is inherently centralized, and thus can only function on a geographic and political scale large enough to make its infrastructure economically viable, composting is inherently decentralized and can function on any scale from a backyard to a continent. Among the many reasons why a small town or an urban neighborhood would be stark staring nuts to try to build a factory to produce NPK fertilizer is that the investment demanded by the factory equipment, energy supply, and raw materials would be far greater than the return. A backyard fertilizer factory for every home would be even more absurd, but a backyard compost bin for every home is arguably the most efficient way to put composting technology to use.

Fifth, where industrial civilization degrades exactly those factors in its environment that support its existence, composting increases the factors in its environment that support its existence. In a finite environment, the more of a nonrenewable resource you extract, the more energy and raw materials you have to invest in order to extract the remaining resource; and the more of a persistent pollutant you dump into the environment, the more energy and raw materials you have to invest in order to keep the pollutant from interfering with economic activities. Thus industrial civilization has to climb a steepening slope of its own making, until it finally falls off and crashes back to earth. By contrast, the closed loop that runs from composting bin to garden plot to kitchen and back around to composting bin again becomes more effective, not less, as the cycle turns: rising nutrient levels and soil biota in the garden plot lead to increased harvest, and thus to increased input to the compost bin.

Finally, where industrial civilization is brittle, composting is resilient. Earth is not a safe place. In a time of turbulence, systems that are dependent on uninterrupted access to resources, unimpeded maintenance of intricate technologies, and undisturbed control over geographical areas of the necessary scale to make them economical, face a much higher risk of collapse than systems that have none of these vulnerabilities.

Now of course many other sustainable technologies embrace one or more of these same factors. As yet, however, not many of them embrace all of them. Even technologies as promising as metal recycling have a long way to go before they become as scalable, self-sustaining, and resilient as composting.

the new agriculture

2010-02-23T20:13:00.001Z

In this third set of extracts from John Michael Greer blog posts on organic agriculture, he elaborates on the inherent superiority of this new paradigm approach over the established industrial methods of feeding ourselves.

http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2007/12/agriculture-closing-circle.html

It’s extremely common for people to assume that today’s industrial agriculture is by definition more advanced, and thus better, than any of the alternatives.

(But) in a crucial sense – the ecological sense – modern industrial agriculture is radically less advanced than most of the viable alternatives.

In any field you care to name, sustainability is about closing the circle, replacing wasteful extractive models of resource use with recycling models that enable resource use to continue without depletion over the long term.

The first known systems of grain agriculture emerged in the Middle East sometime before 8000 BCE, in the aftermath of the drastic global warming that followed the end of the last ice age and caused massive ecological disruption throughout the temperate zone. These first farming systems were anything but sustainable, and early agricultural societies followed a steady rhythm of expansion and collapse most likely caused by bad farming practices that failed to return nutrients to the soil. It took millennia and plenty of hard experience to evolve the first farming systems that worked well over the long term, and millennia more to craft truly sustainable methods such as Asian wetland rice culture, which cycles nutrients back into the soil in the form of human and animal manure, and has proved itself over some 4000 years.

(In) industrial farming… the nutrients needed by crops come from fertilizers manufactured from natural gas, rock phosphate, and other non-renewable resources, and the crops themselves are shipped off to distant markets, taking the nutrients with them. This one-way process maximizes profits in the short term, but it damages the soil, pollutes local ecosystems, and poisons water resources. In a world of accelerating resource depletion, such extravagant use of irreplaceable fossil fuels is also a recipe for failure.

Fortunately… the replacement for this hopelessly unsustainable system
is already in place and beginning to expand rapidly into the territory of conventional farming. Modeled closely on the sustainable farming practices of Asia… organic farming moves decisively toward the recycling model by using organic matter and other renewable resources to replace chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and the like. In terms of the modern mythology of progress, this is a step backward, since it abandons chemicals and machines for compost, green manures, and biological pest controls; in terms of succession, it is a step forward, and the beginning of recovery from the great leap backward of industrial agriculture.

So there we have it: Greer promotes organic agriculture on the grounds of sustainability. But it also works on a spiritual level, as a holistic approach to feeding ourselves and nurturing the planet.

The old paradigm industrial agriculture tries to control and regiment and exploit nature, and in doing so it destroys the land. The new paradigm organic agriculture co-operates with nature, gives back what it takes, and promotes diversity and a vibrant living earth.

We should celebrate the timely emergence of this wonderful technology for the future - and we should embrace it joyfully and immediately - for, without it we will soon be starving.

organic food and farmers markets

2010-02-23T20:07:00.002Z

The rising movements of organic agriculture and farmers markets are a prime example of new paradigm forces establishing themselves before the old paradigms of industrial agriculture and global food distribution hit the wall of diminishing energy resources.

In this second sets of extracts from John Michael Greer blog posts on organic agriculture, he describes how we are already evolving the means to feed ourselves sustainably.

http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2007/12/agriculture-price-of-transition.html

One of the great gifts of crisis is supposed to be the way it helps sort out the difference between what’s essential and what’s not.

At the top of the list… are the immediate necessities of human life: breathable air, drinkable water, edible food. Lacking those, nothing else matters much. The first two are provided by natural cycles that industrial civilization is doing its best to mess up, but so far the damage has been localized. There are still crucial issues to consider and work to be done, but the raw resilience of a billion-year-old biosphere that has shrugged off ice ages and asteroid impacts is a powerful ally.

Food is another matter. Unlike air and water, the vast majority of the food we eat comes from human activity rather than the free operation of natural cycles, and the human population has gone so far beyond the limits of what surviving natural ecosystems can support that attempting to fall back on wild foods at this point would be a recipe for die-off and ecological catastrophe. At the same time, most of the world’s population today survives on food produced using fossil fuels and other nonrenewable resources such as mineral phosphate and ice age aquifers. As the end of the fossil fuel age approaches, other arrangements have to be made.

This poses a challenge, because nearly every resource currently used in industrial agriculture, from the petroleum that powers tractors and provides raw materials for pesticides, through the natural gas and phosphate rock that go into fertilizer, to the topsoil that underlies the whole process, is being depleted at radically unsustainable rates.

If today’s industrial agriculture were to keep chugging away along its present course into the future, the results could be disastrous.

but this is not going to happen…

The industrial agriculture we have today … evolved as farmers and agricultural corporations took advantage of the abundant energy supplies made available by the exploitation of oil reserves in the 20th century… As energy and other fossil fuel products become more expensive, farmers have a strong incentive to use less of them, and to replace them with other resources.

Adaptations in the other direction are already taking place. The organic farming revolution, the most important of these, may be the most promising and least often discussed of the factors shaping the future of industrial society.

Because it uses no chemical fertilizers and no pesticides, organic agriculture is significantly less dependent on fossil fuels than standard agriculture, and yet it produces roughly comparable yields. It has huge ecological benefits – properly done, organic agriculture reverses topsoil loss and steadily improves the fertility of the soil rather than depleting it – but it also translates into a simple economic equation: a farmer can get comparable yields for less cost by growing crops organically, and get higher prices for the results. As the prices of petroleum, natural gas, phosphate rock, and other feedstocks for the agrichemical industry continue to climb, that equation will become even harder to ignore – and in the meantime the infrastructure and knowledge base necessary to manage organic farming on a commercial scale is already solidly in place and continues to expand.

As fuel prices continue to climb, tractor fuel and transportation costs are likely to become the next major bottlenecks.

The renaissance of horsedrawn agriculture is one adaptive response moving steadily toward the takeoff point. After a long period when diesel was so much cheaper than feed that horses no longer made economic sense, the balance is swinging the other way, and farmers are waking up to the advantages of “tractors” that run on grain and hay, rather than expensive diesel fuel, and can be manufactured in a horse barn by the simple expedient of letting a stallion in among the mares.

Transportation … is a thornier problem (but) local farmers markets have sprung up over the last decade, and much of the produce sold in them comes from small local farms. In cities where the farmers market movement has set down strong roots, the economics of modern farming have been turned on their heads, and farms from 10 to 100 acres located close to the city have become profitable for the first time in many decades. Once again, the infrastructure and knowledge base needed for further expansion is taking shape.

Adaptation is always possible, but it’s going to come with a price tag, and the results will likely not be as convenient, abundant, or welcome… That can’t be helped. Today’s industrial agriculture, and the food chain depending on it, after all, were simply the temporary result of an equally temporary abundance of fossil fuel energy, and as that goes away, so will they. The same is true of any number of other familiar and comfortable things; still, the more willing we are to pay the price of transition, the better able we will be to move forward into the possibilities of a new and unfamiliar world.

the rise of organic agriculture

2010-02-23T20:05:00.000Z

I have recently mentioned the internet as an example of a new paradigm force for the good. A more fundamental and "down to earth" example is the establishment and growth, over the past century, of organic agriculture. I now present extracts from three eloquent blog posts on the subject from the rich archives of John Michael Greer. We start with extracts from his 2006 account of the history and advantages of organic agriculture:

http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2006/07/feeding-deindustrial-future.html

In the first decades of the 20th century, an English agronomist named Albert Howard working in India began experimenting with farming methods that focused on the health of the soil and its natural cycles. Much of his inspiration came from traditional farming practices in India, China and Japan that had maintained soil fertility for centuries or millennia. Howard fused their ideas with Western scientific agronomy and the results of his own experiments to create the first modern organic agriculture. Later researchers, notably Alan Chadwick in England and John Jeavons in America, combined Howard’s discoveries with methods of intensive gardening that had evolved in France not long before Howard began his work, and with the biodynamic system developed in the 1920s by Austrian philosopher Rudolf Steiner, to develop the current state of the art in organic intensive farming.

The result of their work is at least potentially a revolution in humanity’s relationship to the land and the biosphere as dramatic as the original agricultural revolution itself. To begin with, the new organic methods are astonishingly productive. Using them, it’s possible to grow a spare but adequate vegetarian diet for one person on 1000 square feet of soil. For those with math phobia, that’s a patch of dirt 20’ by 50’, about the size of a small urban backyard, 1/45 of a football field, or a bit less than 1/43 of an acre – not much, in other words. (If you find this hard to believe – I certainly did, before I did the research and started using these methods in my own gardens – the details and documentation are in David Duhon, One Circle (Willits, CA: Ecology Action, 1985) and John Freeman’s Survival Gardening (Rock Hill, SC: John’s Press, 1983), among other sources.) These yields require no fossil fuels, no chemical fertilizers or pesticides, and no soil additives other than compost made from vegetable waste and human manure. Hand tools powered by human muscle are the only technological requirements – and yet organic methods get yields per acre far beyond what you can get with tractors and pesticides.

What makes this even more astonishing is that these yields are sustainable over the very long term. The core concept of organic agriculture is that healthy soil makes a healthy garden. Instead of treating soil like a sponge that needs to be filled with chemical nutrients, the organic method sees it as an ecosystem that will provide everything plants need so long as it’s kept in balance. The insect pests and plant diseases that give conventional farmers so much trouble can be managed easily by fine-tuning the soil ecosystem, changing the timing and mix of plants, and introducing natural predators – name any organism you need to get rid of, and there’s something that wants to eat it for you. Where conventional farming depletes the soil, requiring heavier applications of fertilizer and pesticides every season, organic methods produce improved soil, increased yields, and decreased pest problems year after year.

The third factor that makes today’s organic methods revolutionary is that they’re portable. Many traditional cultures around the world have worked out farming methods that are sustainable over the long term, but nearly all of those depend on specific environmental conditions and plant varieties. The growing methods practiced in the New Guinea highlands, for example, are brilliantly adapted to their native ecosystem and produce impressive yields, but they only work when you’ve got the specific mix of food crops, weather and soil conditions, and ecological factors found where they evolved. Intensive organic farming, by contrast, was developed simultaneously in the very different ecosystems of England and California, and has been put to use successfully in temperate, semiarid, and semitropical environments around the world. Like everything natural, it has its limits, but some 80% of the world’s population lives in areas where it can be practiced.

So why isn’t this front page news? There are plenty of reasons. To begin with, organic intensive methods aren’t suited to cash crops – you have to grow a mix of different, mutually supporting plants, rather than a single crop that can be sold in bulk to wholesalers – and the diet you can get from 1000 square feet of organic garden is high on sweet potatoes and soybeans but low on the sort of food (most people) prefer to eat. More broadly, a society that measures all human values in terms of the abstract social game called money is very poorly equipped to make room for a means of subsistence that fills human needs but doesn’t do well at generating profits. Still, as the fictive economy winds down in the aftermath of the industrial age and modern chemical agriculture has to contend with the loss of its fossil fuel resource base, organic farming is one of the few ways we’ll be able to keep people fed. If enough people learn how to do it and start practicing it now, while there’s time to go through the learning curve, that is.

transition

2010-02-22T18:35:00.006Z

It is one thing to see what is wrong with the old paradigm ways of control,centralisation, division, and selfish greed. It is quite another to work out what best to do, now, in our own lives, to bring about the desired new paradigm economy, based on sharing, collaboration, and sustainability. How do we transition through the inertia created by the incumbent system?

The Transition Towns movement is a popular approach which aims to build bridges to the future, town by town, by raising community awareness of sustainable living, and by encouraging them to increase their resilience through becoming more self reliant.

Ted Trainer writes about this movement, praising the initiative, but raising his concern that resilience is not enough:

The goal seems to be to make the town safe from the coming storm but to go on living in it in typical rich world affluent ways, when those ways can’t continue without an unsustainable and unjust global economy.

He argues that what is actually required is to create new local economies capable of gradually replacing the old paradigm ways, as and when they collapse. As Ted puts it:

The first principle of a sustainable and just society must be the willingness to live very simply in terms of resource use. This does not imply hardship or deprivation; it is about being content with what is sufficient for a good quality of life.

The supreme goal should be building a new local economy, and running it.

We have to build a local economy, not a national or globalised economy, an economy designed to meet needs, not to maximise profits, an economy under participatory social control and not driven by corporate profit, and one guided by rational planning as distinct from leaving everything to the market.

Transition Towns and Ted both focus on "Peak Oil and Climate Change", but we face not just impending resource scarcity and ecological destruction, but a collapse of our entire old paradigm financial, economic and political systems. Centralised control, having long ago lost its moral compass, is now losing its grip entirely, and most people are sleepwalking their way to destruction.

Transition Towns aims to reform the existing systems, while Ted sees the urgent need for a more radical approach which will in time replace these failing systems with a new-paradigm approach. I certainly agree that the old ways are too rigidly entrenched in most people to be bent into fundamentally new shapes, especially in the very short timespans we have left to react to this crisis. We must "take it all down and start again".

Actually it is more a case of "start again then take down the old"! As Ted indicates, the practical approach for bringing in a new system is to establish it in parallel with the old. Currently we are too dependent on the old paradigm systems to survive their immediate removal, so we need to create the new alongside the old, before the old collapses completely.

This is analogous to building our new compact eco-house in the garden of our draughty and decaying old mansion: we are living in the old house while we build the new, but we are already dismantling parts of it to recycle the materials. The new house is much smaller than the old, and a radically different design. It faces the sun, and will provide comfortable shelter, while avoiding the waste and inefficiency of the old.

As Ted says:

If we don’t plunge into building such an economy we will probably not survive in the coming age of scarcity.

In another analogy, we are in an orchard where the few big old trees are diseased and dying and their yields are dwindling. We cannot save these trees - their days are numbered. We must plant new seeds right now, of a more resilient variety, and nurture them diligently, or we will quite simply starve before they can grow to fruition.

take the foot off the accelerator

2010-02-13T11:13:00.004Z

Jan Lundberg writes:

... the accelerator of the fossil-fueled growth economy is stuck, and we are speeding toward the wall of resource limits and ecological degradation... to take our foot off the accelerator of the fossil-fueled growth economy is to support local economies, stop commuting long distances, maximize local food production, establish cooperatives, engage in bartering and mutual aid, and love nature far more than accumulating dollars for hyper-consumption. These changes all have to come, but why smash into the wall at full speed when we can at least slow down and possibly lessen the impact?

why indeed?

our time will come

2010-01-20T11:18:00.004Z

Al on Spiritual Sun said:

The time of not saying something because others get uncomfortable with alternative concepts must be replaced with the ability to face that which may simply be.
I am generalising, and tired of closed fearful minds who bully others into silence, and those at the top who shadow over all with their violent ways and sly attempts to steal the world, which can only fail.
There will come a time, and the closed minds will no longer control the communication and networking.

That time is already here - its called the internet, and we are communicating on it. So far all attempts by the 'establishment' to control and censor the internet have failed or been easy to circumvent. The people now have a voice, and a source of information which frees us from the shackles of traditional press and TV. There was always some opportunity for alternative views to be expressed in books, films, and music, but now these mediums too have become much more free, as they have been removed from the control of the big corporations.

As well as communication, the internet fosters collaboration, as can be seen in the open source and creative commons movements, which are growing in strength all of the time.

The old paradigm "world leaders" and their hidden puppet masters, no longer control things as they would wish, and I suspect that things are already way more beyond their control than they even realize (because they are so stuck in their old paradigm mindset that they cannot comprehend what is happenig, and because the changes are happening subtly, and these people are gross).

It is early days yet for the new ways, and I too have problems being patient in the face of mass violence and greed and dishonesty in our society - I want big changes and I want them now! But I guess we have to be patient and do our own bit to help push things along - we can focus on the elements of the times that are new paradigm - we can have our say here on the internet, and we can focus on ourselves, on keeping our heads above the muddy polluted waters of the dying old age.

Those of us who can see what is happening must look after ourselves and protect ourselves and build our inner strength. There will come a time soon when others will be looking desperately to us for guidance. That time will come. Until then we must be satisfied with being incognito, and feeling like fish out of water... for now, we can already communicate and share our vision, and we should be grateful for that facility, and make good use of it.

The End of Money and the Future of Civilization

2009-12-31T12:03:00.002Z

from spiritualsun.org

Tim Jenkin at realitysandwich.com has a review of Thomas Greco's The End of Money and the Future of Civilization. In Jenkin's words, Greco is saying that the financial problem we now face, "distilled to its essence... is the concentration of power by the financial elite through its monopolization of money. This has been achieved through a pact with government, which has given the money monopoly such power that today it is not inaccurate to say that governments are the junior partners in this alliance." Furthermore, "governments are fully tied into and dependent on this system, and are not the primary decision makers about what happens and how it works. Even if governments did have the will and the power to wrest control of the issuance of credit from the banking cartel.., the historical record suggests that where governments have come out on top their monopolization of credit has led to militarization, wars, expansion and a weakening of democratic processes." So, "the money problem will not be solved by shifting the issuing power, even if governments are able to do it debt free. What is required is the ending of the money monopoly. This means the decentralization and democratization of the exchange process. Again this can only be achieved through traders establishing their own mutual credit clearing circles and independent private and community currencies."

I don't think that this conclusion goes far enough: I side with the comment by MindScape, who says: " I do not agree with the conclusion that what we need is to do is to revert back to a kind of Dark Ages isolationism, where each micro-region has an entirely independent economy and government. Not only is this unrealistic because it runs against the grain of human history - ever increasing unity and cooperation is the foundation of human civilization, just look how we've gone from family, to tribe, to village, to city, to nation, etc - but also this eventuality would have extremely damaging consequences for our world, because it would promote short-sighted and regional considerations over long-sighted and global ones - what is to stop one village dumping its waste in to the river and polluting the water supply of a neighbouring, but independent/isolated village down stream? What we need is to continue the process of globalization, but just to change its direction away from greed towards peace and happiness.. How do we do this? We shift our global consciousness (which I feel is happening as we speak) and we trust in technology. The frontiers of quantum physics has presented man the opportunity finally to unite the spiritual with the scientific ... and technology is what can solve our current problems and establish a world where we don't even need any system of money at all - we have the resources, we just need the will."

As the old saying goes, "money is the root of all evil". A decentralization of money will not free us from the damage caused by basing our world view on ownership, scarcity, and competition. We have to create a new world based on sharing, co-operation, and abundance.

open Goog?

2009-12-24T18:06:00.000Z

Here are some extracts from the googleblog post, The meaning of open , which champion the openness of the internet:

Open systems allow innovation at all levels — from the operating system to the application layer — not just at the top. This means that one company doesn't have to depend on another's benevolence to ship a product. If the GNU C compiler that I'm using has a bug, I can fix it since the compiler is open source. I don't have to file a bug report and hope for a timely response.

So if you are trying to grow an entire industry as broadly as possible, open systems trump closed. And that is exactly what we are trying to do with the Internet. Our commitment to open systems is not altruistic. Rather it's good business, since an open Internet creates a steady stream of innovations that attracts users and usage and grows the entire industry.
..
An open Internet transforms lives globally. It has the potential to deliver the world's information to the palm of every person and to give everyone the power of freedom of expression... There are forces aligned against the open Internet — governments who control access, companies who fight in their own self-interests to preserve the status quo. They are powerful, and if they succeed we will find ourselves inhabiting an Internet of fragmentation, stagnation, higher prices, and less competition.

Our skills and our culture give us the opportunity and responsibility to prevent this from happening. We believe in the power of technology to deliver information. We believe in the power of information to do good. We believe that open is the only way for this to have the broadest impact for the most people. We are technology optimists who trust that the chaos of open benefits everyone. We will fight to promote it every chance we get.

Open will win. It will win on the Internet and will then cascade across many walks of life: The future of government is transparency. The future of commerce is information symmetry. The future of culture is freedom. The future of science and medicine is collaboration. The future of entertainment is participation. Each of these futures depends on an open Internet.

I cannot argue with most of this vision. However, the post also claims that the Goog will gain competitive advantage from embracing open. Yet surely the ultimate result of open collaboration and participation will be to eliminate the purpose of commercial competition. Control and competition become impossible and unnecessary in a truly open and collaborative world.

And of course The Goog has no intention of opening up its search or advertising algorithms, the two things it actually makes money from. They are happy to push others into being open and collaborative, while keeping their own commercial engine sealed in a black box. They want to grow the internet, not out of a spirit of benevolence, but so that their ad revenues increase. The Goog wants to continue having its massive cake and eating it.

The Goog will champion openness when they see something in it for them, and will stay closed when it suits them to. This selfish attitude is not in the true spirit of open source or open standards. It is inherently a paradox for a commercial organization to embrace openness.

Accordingly we should not place too much emphasis on the Goog's vision for a more open and collaborative and participative world. The Goog is reacting to the new paradigm of the internet, a force way beyond its (or anyone's) control. It is not creating that paradigm. It will keep making mistakes and misunderstanding what it is dealing with, due to its old paradigm commercial and competitive focus.

For an example, consider the recent reports that the Chrome OS will be aimed solely at devices that have no local storage.. the Goog wants to control and centralize our data, but the coming economic meltdown will ensure that internet connectivity will not be constant for many of us - we will need a distributed system which allows us to continue using our computers when we are offline. The Goog has the ability to provide this for us, but does it have the will? We shall see - the Goog might be hiding its true intentions. But it is in the nature of a commercial enterprise to seek to control. And true benevolence is anathema to such a creature. The above quotes even claim that "our commitment to open systems is not altruistic". Therefore it is not a true commitment.

The internet will not bend to the Goog's will, but will force it to change its ways, or perish in the longer run. But meanwhile the Goog will likely surf the internet wave (sic) better than other more reactionary goliaths, such as Apple, or (far far worse) Microsoft. At least, unlike its fellow goliaths, the Goog has ~some idea of where we are heading. It may play a useful role in slaying some of its fellow beasts, before it falls itself.

But the true benefits of openness will continue to be delivered by the radical hacker individuals and loose knit teams who created open source and open standards, and who continue to fuel the internet revolution. They are incognito and they are in tune with the times, and their legacy will last long after the commercial goliaths have turned to dust.

ps: great article on the likely rise and fall of the Google empire HERE

Timber...

2009-12-07T16:01:00.001Z

Just in case you think the old paradigm is alive and kicking, and that we are coming out of the woods now or anytime soon..... we have not even entered the woods yet! Here are some quotes from Doug Hornig's article "If You Thought the Housing Meltdown Was Bad" at escapefromamerica.com:

...wait until you see what’s in the cards for commercial real estate... the next train wreck will be in commercial real estate. Couldn’t be worse than last year’s residential market crash? That remains to be seen. But it’s coming soon, probably as early as the second quarter of next year, and there’s nothing that can prevent it... make no mistake about it, that train is going off the tracks no matter what. Every part of the sector – from multifamily apartment buildings to retail shopping centers, suburban office buildings, industrial facilities, and hotels – has accumulated a huge amount of defaulted or nonperforming paper. It’s an impossible, swaying structure that cannot long stand.
..
As the overall commercial real estate crisis escalates, the banks will do the same thing they did last year: run to the government, palms outstretched.
..
Rock, meet hard place. Let all the troubled banks fail, and the consequences will range from some excruciating but short-term pain, to a plunge into full-bore depression. Prop them up with yet more newly printed fiat money, and anything from high to hyperinflation will inevitably result, along with the possibility of extending the problem well into the next decade.

Both are frightening prospects. We don’t want either, but realistically, we’re going to get one or the other. Let’s be clear, it won’t be the end of the world. However, it will be the end of the world as we know it. That makes it imperative to prepare for the new one that’s coming.

Spot on Doug - and this is not just a US problem, it is global - Dubai is just the canary in the coal mine (how I love to mix my metaphors, but then coal was once trees...). Never mind about the old decaying giants that are about to collapse around our ears...(timberrrr....) It is inevitable that the banks will, very soon, choke on their own vomit, bringing down the governments that have bought into them too. It is all too huge and too imminent for any of us to be able to fix it, and so we must get busy planning for the replacement.

Goodbye to the old economic and political structures. Make way for new growth!

Interconnection

2009-12-04T17:44:00.001Z

Spirituality has a different meaning to each of us, it seems. A standard definition would be: "A sense of meaning and purpose; a sense of self and of a relationship with 'that which is greater than self".

Currently, Religion and Mysticism seem to have the monopoly on Spirituality. Theistic religion often regards a 'relationship with god' or divine creator, as a spiritual relationship, while Mystics will often find a relationship to a 'supernatural' force or power. The bottom line is that, almost universally, spirituality has to do with a 'relationship' on one level or another. In most perspectives, it is associated with a person's 'place' or 'meaning' in life... whatever that may be.

In the modern age, we have the ability to look far in our past and examine what our ancestors used to consider 'real', and then compare those ideas to what we understand today. Many "spiritual practices" which have existed in the past, no longer exist due the understandings that have come about in regard to natural phenomenon. As a base example, early religions often 'sacrificed' animals for certain purposes... this rarely happens today, as the relevance of such an act has proven pointless in its desired effect. Likewise, rarely do people perform 'raindances' in order to influence the weather... today we understand how weather patterns are created, and ritual practices have no provable effect.

Similarly, the idea of 'praying' to a god for a particular request, has also statistically proven to have little effect on an outcome, not to mention the evidence to support a personified creator doesn't exist in any scientific way...rather it is often derived from ancient historical literary speculation and tradition.

Establishment Religion, in many ways, seems to be rooted in a perceptual misunderstanding about life's processes. For instance, it presents a worldview which often puts the human on a different level than other elements of nature. This 'spiritual ego' has led to dramatic conflicts for generations, not only between human beings, but inadvertently between us and the environment itself.

However, as time has moved forward, Science has shown how human beings are subject to the exact same forces of nature as everything else. We have learned that we all share the same atomic substructure as trees, birds and all other forms of life. We have learned that we cannot live without nature's elements... we need clean air to breathe, food to eat, energy from the sun, etc. When we understand this Symbiotic relationship of life, we begin to see that as far as 'relationships' are concerned, our relationship to the planet is the most profound and important. The medium by which this is expressed, is Science, for the Scientific Method has allowed us insight into these natural processes, so we can better understand how we 'fit' into this life system as a whole.

This could be called a 'spiritual' awakening.

This realization, which has been proven by science, is that humans are no different from any other form of nature, while our integrity is only as good as the integrity of our environment, to which we are a part. This understanding presents an entirely different 'spiritual' worldview, for it forces the idea of interdependence and connection, at its core.

The interconnection of the whole of life is undeniable in the most basic sense, and it is this perpetual 'relationship' of total interconnectivity that is not fully realized by society overall. Thus, our modes of conduct and perception are largely out of line with nature itself... and hence destructive.

Nature itself is our teacher, and our social institutions and philosophies should be derived from this foundational and, invariably, 'spiritual' understanding.

The faster this spiritual awakening spreads, the more sane, peaceful and productive society will become.

(taken verbatim from "Understandings: Spirituality" as published at thezeitgeistmovement.com)

a world without money

2009-11-13T17:10:00.004Z

Imagine a future world where money doesn't exist, where there is no concept of private property, where food and other resources are abundant and shared freely, and where such a benevolent living environment brings out the best in human nature so that no legal or justice system is required....

Such is the vision of Jacque Fresco, founder of The Venus Project. He promotes a technology driven future where science is used for the benefit of all of mankind, and not just to enrich a few.

In his essay THE FUTURE AND BEYOND, he sets out some of his thoughts on how such a new paradigm human society could be realised. I have extracted extensively from the essay here, to give a full flavor of his new paradigm vision - but his essay is well worth reading in full:

We believe it is now possible to achieve a society where people would be able to live longer, healthier, and more meaningful productive lives. In such a society, the measure of success would be based upon the fulfillment of one’s individual pursuits rather than the acquisition of wealth, property, and power. Although many of the concepts presented here may appear as unattainable goals, all of the ideas are based upon known scientific principles.
..
The social direction being proposed here has no parallel in history with any other previous political ideology or economic strategy. Establishing the parameters of this new civilization will require transcending many of the traditions, values, and methods of the past. The future will evolve its own new paradigms, appropriate to each successive phase of human and technological development.
..
Today we have developed the necessary technology to surpass the fondest hopes and dreams of any social innovators of the past. The fact that previous attempts at social change have failed is no justification for us to stop trying. The real danger lies in complacence. The only limitations to the future of humankind are those that we impose upon ourselves. It is now possible to relieve humanity of many of its unresolved problems through the humane application of technology.
..
The prime conditions that would really effect social change will come about when conditions have deteriorated to such an extent that governments, politicians, and social institutions no longer have the support and confidence of the people. What once worked is acknowledged to be no longer relevant. If the public were better informed, only then would it be possible to introduce a new and improved social arrangement.
..
The solutions to our problems will not come about through the application of reason or logic. Unfortunately, at present we do not live in a reasonable or logical world. There appears to be no historical record of any established society’s leader who deliberately and comprehensively redesigned a culture to fit the changing times. While there is no question that political leaders, to a limited extent, modify some modes of behavior, the real factors responsible for social change are brought about by bio-social pressures, which are inherent in all social systems. Change is brought about by natural or economic occurrences that adversely affect the immediate circumstances of large numbers of people.

Some bio-social pressures responsible for social change are limited resources, war, overpopulation, epidemics, natural disasters, economic recession, downsizing on a mass scale, technological displacement of people by machines, and the failure of elected officials to overcome such problems. The introduction of the medium of money to the exchange process brought about a significant change in society, as did the introduction of mechanized agriculture and the Industrial Revolution.

Unfortunately, the world’s outmoded social, political, and international order is no longer appropriate to these times. These obsolete social institutions are unable to grasp the significance of innovative technology to achieve the greatest good for all people, and to overcome the inequities forced upon so many. Competition and scarcity have caused an atmosphere of jealousy and mistrust to develop between individuals and nations. The concepts of proprietary rights, intellectual property, copyrights, and patents manifested in corporate entities and in the sovereignty of nations, preclude the free exchange of information that is necessary to meet global challenges.
..
The ultimate survival of the human species depends upon planning on a global scale and to cooperatively seek out new alternatives with a relative orientation for improved social arrangements. If humankind is to achieve mutual prosperity, universal access to resources is essential.
..
If these ends are to be achieved, the monetary system must eventually be surpassed by a world resource-based economy. In order to effectively and economically utilize resources, the necessary cybernated and computerized technology could eventually be applied to ensure a higher standard of living for everyone. With the intelligent and humane application of science and technology, the nations of the world could guide and shape the future for the preservation of the environment and humankind.
..
All the limitations imposed upon us by our present-day monetary system could be surpassed by adopting a global consensus for a worldwide resource-based economy, in which all the planetary resources are viewed and treated as the common heritage of all the earth's inhabitants. In this manner, the earth and our technological procedures could provide us with a limitless supply of material goods and services without the creation of debt or taxation whatsoever.
..
In a monetary-based system, the major concerns of industry are profit, maintaining a competitive edge, and watching the bottom line, rather than the wellbeing of humanity. The social problems that arise from mass unemployment of people, who are rendered obsolete by the infusion of automation, are considered irrelevant, if they are considered at all. Any need that may be met is secondary to acquiring a profit for the business. If the profit is insufficient, the service will be withdrawn. What industry seeks to do is improve the competitive edge to increase the profit margin for their shareholders. It does not serve the interest of a monetary based society to engage in the production of goods and services to enhance the lives of people as a goal.
..
Until the last few decades, the monetary system functioned to a degree. The global population of three billion was not over consuming world resources and energy, global warming was not evident, and air and water pollution were only recognized by a relative few. The start of the 21st century however finds global population at an exponentially rising six billion, with resources and energy supplies dwindling, global warming a reality, and pollution evident worldwide. Planet earth is in crises and the majority of world population cannot meet their basic needs because people do not have the means to purchase increasingly expensive resources. Money is now the determinant of people’s standard of living rather than the availability of resources.
..
In today's culture of profit, we do not produce goods based on human need. We do not build houses based on population needs. We do not grow food to feed people. Industry's major motivation is profit.

The monetary system is now an impediment to survival rather than a means of facilitating individual existence and growth. This imaginary tool has outlived its usefulness. The limitations on earth’s population now caused by the monetary construct can be phased out. It is not money that people need but the access to goods and services. Since humanity requires resources to exist, the replacement system should provide those resources directly to people without the impediment of financial and political interest for their private gain at the expense of the lives and livelihood of the populous. The replacement system is therefore logically a resource-based economy. This global resource based economy would be gradually phased in while the monetary system is phased out.

All of the world's economic systems - socialism, communism, fascism, and even the vaunted free enterprise capitalist system - perpetuate social stratification, elitism, nationalism and racism, primarily based on economic disparity. As long as a social system uses money or barter, people and nations will seek to maintain positions of differential advantage. If they cannot do so by means of commerce they will resort to military intervention.

War represents the supreme failure of nations to resolve their differences. From a strictly pragmatic standpoint it is the most inefficient waste of lives and resources ever conceived by any creature on the planet. This crude and violent way of attempting to resolve international differences has taken on even more ominous overtones with the advent of elaborate computerized thermonuclear delivery systems, deadly diseases and gases, and the threat of sabotage of a nation's computer networks. Despite the desire of nations to achieve peace, they usually lack the knowledge of how to arrive at peaceful solutions.

War is not the only form of violence in the developed and underdeveloped countries that is superimposed upon the populace by inadequate social arrangements. There is also hunger, poverty, and scarcity. As long as there is the use of money, the creation of debt, and economic insecurity these conditions will perpetuate crime, lawlessness, and resentment. Paper proclamations and treaties do not alter conditions of scarcity and insecurity. And nationalism only tends to help propagate the separation of nations and the world's people.
..
The Earth is still abundant with resources. Today our practice of rationing resources through monetary methods is irrelevant and counter-productive to the well-being of people. Today’s society has access to highly advanced technologies and can easily provide more than enough for a very high standard of living for all the earth’s people. This is possible through the implementation of a resource-based economy.

Simply stated, a resource-based economy utilizes existing resources rather than money, and provides an equitable method of distribution in the most humane and efficient manner for the entire population. It is a system in which all natural, man-made, machine-made, and synthetic resources would be available without the use of money, credits, barter, or any other form of symbolic exchange. A resource-based economy would utilize existing resources from the land and sea, and the means of production, such as physical equipment and industrial plants, to enhance the lives of the total population. In an economy based on resources rather than money, we could easily produce all of the necessities of life and provide a high standard of living for all.
..
In a resource-based economy all of the world's resources would be held as the common heritage of all of the earth’s people, thus eventually outgrowing the need for the artificial boundaries that separate people – this is the unifying imperative.

We must emphasize here that this approach to global governance has nothing whatever in common with the present aims of a corporate elite to form a world government with themselves and large corporations in control, and the vast majority of the world's population subservient to them. Globalization in a resource-based economy empowers each and every person on the planet to be the very best they can be, not to live in abject subjugation to a corporate governing body.
..
The real wealth of any nation lies in its developed and potential resources and the people who are working toward the elimination of scarcity and the development of a more humane way of life. A resource-based economy would use technology to overcome scarce resources by utilizing renewable sources of energy; computerizing and automating manufacturing, inventory and distribution; designing safe, energy-efficient cities; providing universal health care and relevant education; and most of all, by generating a new incentive system based on human and environmental concern.
..
In a resource-based economy, the human aspect would be of prime concern, and technology would be subordinate to this. This would result in a considerable increase in leisure time. In an economy in which production is accomplished primarily by machines, and products and services are available to all, the concepts of "work" and "earning a living" would become irrelevant.
..
The utilization of today’s high speed and large capacity computer systems, otherwise known as the "Information Superhighway" or Internet, could assist us in defining the variables and parameters required for the operation of a resource-based economy that conforms to environmental needs. Over-exploitation of resources would be unnecessary and surpassed.

Many people believe that there is too much technology in the world today, and that technology is the major cause of our environmental pollution. This is not the case. Rather, it is the abuse and misuse of technology that should be our major concern. In very simple terms, a hammer can be used to construct a building, or to kill another person. It is not the hammer that is the issue, but how it is used.

Cybernation, or the application of computers and automation to the social system, could be regarded as an emancipation proclamation for humankind if used humanely and intelligently. Its thorough application could eventually enable people to have the highest conceivable standard of living with practically no labor. It could free people for the first time in human history from a highly structured and outwardly imposed routine of repetitive and mundane activity. It could enable one to return to the Greek concept of leisure, where slaves did most of the work and men had time to cultivate their minds. The essential difference is that in the future, each of us will command more than a million slaves - but they will be mechanical and electrical slaves, not fellow human beings. This will end forever the degrading exploitation of any human being by another so that he or she lives an abundant, productive, and less stressful life. Perhaps the greatest aid in enhancing the survival of the human race is the introduction of cybernation, the electronic computer, and artificial intelligence, which may very well save the human race from its own inadequacies.

A resource-based economy calls for the redesign of our cities, transportation systems, and industrial plants so that they are energy efficient, clean, and conveniently provide the needs of all people both materially and spiritually.
..
To better understand the meaning of a resource-based economy consider this: If all the money in the world were to suddenly disappear, as long as topsoil, factories, and other resources were left intact, we could build anything we chose to build and fulfill any human need. It is not money that people need, but rather it is freedom of access to most of their necessities without ever having to appeal to a government bureaucracy or any other agency. In a resource-based economy money would become irrelevant. All that would be required are the resources, manufacturing, and distribution of the products.
..
All industrial devices would be designed for recycling. However, the life span of products would be significantly increased through intelligent and efficient design, thereby reducing waste. There would be no "planned obsolescence," where products are deliberately designed to wear out or break down. In a resource-based economy technology intelligently and efficiently applied will conserve energy, reduce waste, and provide more leisure time.
..
Most packaging systems would be standardized, requiring less storage space and facilitating easy handling.. most paperwork would no longer be required, i.e. advertising, money, mail, newspaper, phonebook.

As we outgrow the need for professions that are based on the monetary system, such as lawyers, accountants, bankers, insurance companies, advertising, sales personnel, and stockbrokers, a considerable amount of waste and non productive personnel could be eliminated. Enormous amounts of time and energy would also be saved by eliminating the duplication of competing products. Instead of having hundreds of different manufacturing plants and all the paperwork and personnel that are required to turn out similar products, only very few of the highest quality would be needed to serve the entire population. In a resource-base economy planned obsolescence would not exist.
..
It is claimed that the so-called free-enterprise system creates incentive. This may be true, but it also perpetuates greed, embezzlement, corruption, crime, stress, economic hardship, and insecurity. In addition, the argument that the monetary system and competition generate incentive does not always hold true. Most of our major developments in science and technology have been the result of the efforts of very few individuals working independently and often against great opposition. Such contributors as Goddard, Galileo, Darwin, Tesla, Edison, and Einstein were individuals who were genuinely concerned with solving problems and improving processes rather than with mere financial gain.
..
Some may question that if the basic necessities are accessible to all people, what will motivate them? This is tantamount to saying that children reared in affluent environments, in which their parents provide all the necessary food, clothing, shelter, nutrition, and extensive education, will demonstrate a lack of incentive or initiative. There is no evidence to support this fallacious assumption. There is overwhelming evidence to support the facts that malnutrition, lack of employment, low wages, poor health, lack of direction, lack of education, homelessness, little or no reinforcement for one's efforts, poor role models, poverty, and a bleak prospect for the future do create monumental individual and social problems, and significantly reduce an individual’s drive to achieve. The aim of a resource based economy is to encourage and develop a new incentive system, one no longer directed toward the shallow and self-centered goals of wealth, property, and power. These new incentives would encourage people to pursue different goals, such as self-fulfillment and creativity, the elimination of scarcity, the protection of the environment, and the alleviation of suffering in their fellow human beings.

People, provided with good nutrition in a highly productive and humane society, will evolve a new incentive system unattainable in a monetary system. There would be such a wealth of new wonders to experience, explore, and invent that the notion of boredom and apathy would be absurd. Incentive is often squelched in our present culture, where a person dare not dream of a future that seems unattainable to him or her. The vision of the future that too many see today consists of endless days of mindless toil, and a wasted life, squandered for the sake of merely earning enough money to survive from one day to the next.
..
Throughout history, there have been many innovators and inventors who have been ruthlessly exploited, ridiculed, and abused while receiving very little financial reward. Yet, they endured such hardship because they were motivated to learn and to discover new ways of doing things. While creative individuals like Leonardo de Vinci, Michelangelo, and Beethoven received the generous sponsorship of wealthy patrons, this did not diminish their incentive in the least. On the contrary, it empowered them to reach new heights of creativity, perseverance and individual accomplishments.
..
In this new social arrangement of a resource-based economy, motivation and incentive will be encouraged through recognition of, and concern for, the needs of the individual. This means providing the necessary environment, educational facilities, nutrition, health care, compassion, love, and security that all people need.
..
With the enhanced level of sociability that would naturally come from not having to compete for access to goods and services, we would see a tendency toward extension of the family unit into the community. As may already be observed in other cultures, the rearing and development of children would become the responsibility of both the family and the community at large.

With the elimination of debt, the fear of losing one's job will no longer be a threat; this assurance, combined with education on how to relate to one another in a much more meaningful way, could considerably reduce conflict and stress both mentally and physically. When education and resources are available to all without a price tag, there would be no limit to the human potential.
..
With a better understanding, people could possess a flexibility of outlook unknown in previous times, free of bigotry and prejudice. In addition, the people of this innovative society would have concern for their fellow human beings, and for the protection, maintenance, and stewardship of the Earth’s natural environment. Additionally, everyone, regardless of race, color, or creed would have equal access to all of the amenities that this highly productive culture could supply.

In more advanced and humane systems of education people would acquire this new type of value system. They would also realize the many advantages of cooperation rather than competition. In a society without vested interest it would be impossible to harness the talents of scientists and technicians to engage in weapons research or any other socially hostile endeavor. We call this approach "functional morality." This newer, more humane, and more productive approach would advocate finding non-military solutions to international differences. This calls for a global view, which would be a considerable improvement over narrow national and self-interests.
..
A resource-based economy by definition includes the participation of all people in its benefits. In a monetary system there is an inherent reason for corruption and that is to gain a competitive advantage over someone else. Without vested interests or the use of money, there is no benefit to squelching one’s opinion or falsifying information or taking advantage of anyone. There would be no need for any underlying rigid social barriers that would limit the participation of anyone or restrain the introduction of new ideas. The main objective is the access of information and the availability of goods and services to all people. This would enable people to be prepared to participate in the exciting challenges of this new society A resource-based economy could create an environment that would encourage the widest range of individuality, creativity, constructive endeavor, and cooperation without any kind of elitism, technical or otherwise. Most significantly, a resource-based economy would generate a far different incentive system, one based on human and environmental concern. This would not be a uniform culture but one that is designed to be in a constant process of growth and improvement.

As we enhance the lives of others, protect our environment, and work toward abundance, all our lives can become richer and more secure. If these values were put into practice it would enable all of us to achieve a much higher standard of living within a relatively short period of time--one that would be continuously improved. At a time when commercial institutions no longer exist, the necessity for prisons, lawyers, advertisements, banks and the stock exchange will serve no useful purpose. In the society of the future, in which the monetary system of scarcity has been surpassed by a resource based economy and most physical and creative needs are met, private ownership as we know it would cease to be a necessity to protect one’s access to goods and services. The concept of ownership would be of no advantage whatsoever in a society of abundance. Although this is difficult for many to imagine, even the wealthiest person today would be immensely better off in the highly productive resource-based society. Today in developed countries the middle class live far better than kings and the wealthy of times past. In a resource based economy everyone would live richer lives than the powerful and wealthy of today, not only materially but spiritually as well.

It is not necessary to accept every detail of Jaque's vision, but I applaud the main precepts: I sign up right now for a world without money, politics, lawyers, accountants, businessmen, laws, prisons, or wars. Bring it on! Lets create a new paradigm system based on benevolence and sharing, where our all of our children can blossom and grow into happy and caring adults. Such enlightened thinking gives us all hope for a better future on planet Earth.

taken from Spiritual Sun

value what we have

2009-11-11T07:24:00.002Z

We can improve our levels of well-being by valuing what we have instead of what we would like to have.

Modern Western culture is harmful to our individual and social well-being - it encourages us to attach too much value to materialism and individualism and consumerism. There is enormous cultural pressure on us all to consume, both in the name of economic growth and contemporary ideals about what constitutes 'the good life'. During the 20th century, most Western nations have experienced dramatic social changes, and lost some sources of meaning and social values, such as traditional forms of occupation, or community and the family, or the Church. A sense of self, and a purpose in life, are no longer "given", so their development becomes a key task for all of us, and one of the ways we do this is through consumption.

In the past, standards of morality required individuals to practice self-restraint and moderation, together with a sense of social obligation and responsibility. Today we are encouraged to practice self-indulgence and gratification. This "virtuous consumption" is linked to the goal of economic growth - our economy demands that we all pursue a fast-paced, high-pressure, hyper-consumer lifestyle. The end result is self-centered lives that lack depth and resilience, and which come at a cost to others and in environmental damage.

Does this sound familiar?

We should focus on what we have, and appreciate that - be grateful, be thankful. As already stated in more for less :
Fulfillment comes through our social interactions, through doing productive and useful work that benefits ourselves and our communities directly, through living in harmony with nature, through the robust health that comes from eating a healthy and natural diet, and so on. By rearranging the way we live and work, we can be much happier with much less.

taken from Spiritual Sun

disintegration

2009-11-10T18:37:00.002Z

James Kunstler paints a believable picture in his blog post "Dreams DIe Hard"

In The Long Emergency (2005, Atlantic Monthly Press), I said that we ought to expect the federal government to become increasingly impotent and ineffectual - that this would be a hallmark of the times. In fact, I said that any enterprise organized at the colossal scale would function poorly in years ahead, whether it was a government, a state university, a national chain retail company, or a giant midwestern farm. It is characteristic of the compressive contraction our society faces that giant hypercomplex systems will wobble and fail. We should expect this.

and:

the President and his White House advisors along with his cabinet appointments, are pretending that the historical forces of compressive contraction are not underway. They're flat-out lying about the employment figures issued in the government's name. They're willfully ignoring the comprehensive bankruptcy gripping government at all levels. They refuse to bring the law to bear against "the malefactors of great wealth." They appear to not understand the epochal energy scarcity problem the whole world faces, or its implications for industrial economies. Most of all, they persist in promoting the lie that this economy can return to the prior state of reckless debt accumulation (a.k.a "consumerism") that has made us so ridiculous and unhealthy.

and:

American life will just wind down, no matter what we believe. It won't wind down to a complete stop. Its near-term destination is to lower levels of complexity and scale than what we've been used to for a long time. People will be able to drive fewer cars fewer miles. The roads will get worse. They'll be worse in some places than others. There will be fewer jobs to go to and fewer things sold. People who live in communities scaled to the energy and capital realities of the years ahead are liable to be more comfortable. We're surely going to have trouble with money. Households will drown in debt and lose all their savings. Money could be scarce or worthless. Credit will be scarcer.

Bigness, and the complexity that comes with it, is out of tune with the times. Bigness is an old dinosaur in a new age where dinosaur food is increasingly short in supply.

Meanwhile our "leaders" (read: bankers) persist with their own agenda to hoover up whatever material wealth remains on our devastated planet. They work by their own laws, relying on bribery and undue influence (and increasingly on fear and blackmail as in "too big to fail") to scare our craven and imbecilic politicians into following their commands. Those of the middle classes who have any material wealth left at this time will soon see that disappear in escalating taxation, and imploding pensions and savings, not to mention soaring energy and food costs. Material life has already lost much of the fake sheen it gained in the 80's and 90''s, and our cities are looking increasingly shabby and dilapidated. And the real depression has not even started yet....

It is increasingly clear that the old paradigm power mongers who operate the controls of modern humanity see the rest of us as livestock, to be abused and milked and consumed. They show no sign of compassion, no sign of morality, no virtues, no redeeming features whatsoever.

It is no longer reasonable to mock the conspiracy theorists who claim that these power mongers are not human, but reptilian aliens - there is a cold emotionless quality to their behaviour and there is no sign of humanity... there does indeed seem to be an agenda to microchip and drug us all for maximum control, and to homogenize the world under one world government and one world currency.

The lunatics have taken over the asylum. Luckily for us they are finding that the controls no longer function as expected. Their huge complex infernal machine is out of control and has started destroying itself.

The heydays of control have passed. We have entered a new paradigm of communion - of sharing and cooperation. Those who seek to compete, control, and manipulate for selfish gain will find their grand plans disintegrating into dust. The very ordinary people who have retained human qualities and virtues - who have resisted the ever-more-devilish propaganda, and have thus remained something more than selfish, greedy, consumers - these ordinary people will prosper amid the disintegration of our old paradigm world.

The meek shall inherit the Earth.

the future of Gaia

2009-07-18T11:15:00.006+01:00

I have been dipping into the dark world of James Lovelock - here are some quotes, where he explains his vision of our future:

From his 2008 interview in The Guardian, The Science of Climate Change :

There have been seven disasters since humans came on the earth, very similar to the one that's just about to happen. I think these events keep separating the wheat from the chaff. And eventually we'll have a human on the planet that really does understand it and can live with it properly.

From http://www.jameslovelock.org/page20.html :

Life regulates the Earth’s atmosphere and climate to keep it habitable. It is as simple as that.

The catastrophe threatened by global heating is far worse than any war, famine,
or plague in living memory; worse even than global nuclear war. Much of the lush and comfortable Earth we now enjoy is about to become a hot and barren desert.

The intolerably hot world soon to come can support only a remnant of today’s burgeoning humanity, and the survivors will be driven to the cooler regions of the Arctic and to a few continental oases and islands

Green concepts of sustainable development and renewable energy are far too late to have any value

we are at the end of our tether and the rope, whose weave defines our fate, is about to break.

From http://www.jameslovelock.org/page10.html :

My Gaia theory sees the Earth behaving as if it were alive, and clearly anything alive can enjoy good health, or suffer disease. Gaia has made me a planetary physician and I take my profession seriously, and now I, too, have to bring bad news.

The climate centres around the world .. have reported the Earth's physical condition, and the climate specialists see it as seriously ill, and soon to pass into a morbid fever that may last as long as 100,000 years. I have to tell you, as members of the Earth's family and an intimate part of it, that you and especially civilisation are in grave danger.

Our planet has kept itself healthy and fit for life, just like an animal does, for most of the more than three billion years of its existence. It was ill luck that we started polluting at a time when the sun is too hot for comfort. We have given Gaia a fever and soon her condition will worsen to a state like a coma. She has been there before and recovered, but it took more than 100,000 years. We are responsible and will suffer the consequences: as the century progresses, the temperature will rise 8 degrees centigrade in temperate regions and 5 degrees in the tropics.

Much of the tropical land mass will become scrub and desert, and will no longer serve for regulation; this adds to the 40 percent of the Earth's surface we have depleted to feed ourselves.

Curiously, aerosol pollution of the northern hemisphere reduces global warming by reflecting sunlight back to space. This 'global dimming' is transient and could disappear in a few days like the smoke that it is, leaving us fully exposed to the heat of the global greenhouse. We are in a fool's climate, accidentally kept cool by smoke, and before this century is over billions of us will die and the few breeding pairs of people that survive will be in the Arctic where the climate remains tolerable.

By failing to see that the Earth regulates its climate and composition, we have blundered into trying to do it ourselves, acting as if we were in charge. By doing this, we condemn ourselves to the worst form of slavery. If we chose to be the stewards of the Earth, then we are responsible for keeping the atmosphere, the ocean and the land surface right for life. A task we would soon find impossible - and something before we treated Gaia so badly, she had freely done for us.

To understand how impossible it is, think about how you would regulate your own temperature or the composition of your blood. Those with failing kidneys know the never-ending daily difficulty of adjusting water, salt and protein intake. The technological fix of dialysis helps, but is no replacement for living healthy kidneys.

.. We cannot pollute the air or use the Earth's skin - its forest and ocean ecosystems - as a mere source of products to feed ourselves and furnish our homes... Those ecosystems must be left untouched because they (are) part of the living Earth.

So what should we do? First, we have to keep in mind the awesome pace of change and realise how little time is left to act; and then each community and nation must find the best use of the resources they have to sustain civilisation for as long as they can. Civilisation is energy-intensive and we cannot turn it off without crashing, so we need the security of a powered descent... We could grow enough to feed ourselves on the diet of the Second World War, but the notion that there is land to spare to grow biofuels, or be the site of wind farms, is ludicrous. We will do our best to survive, but sadly I cannot see the United States or the emerging economies of China and India cutting back in time, and they are the main source of emissions. The worst will happen and survivors will have to adapt to a hell of a climate.

Perhaps the saddest thing is that Gaia will lose as much or more than we do. Not only will wildlife and whole ecosystems go extinct, but in human civilisation the planet has a precious resource. We are not merely a disease; we are, through our intelligence and communication, the nervous system of the planet. Through us, Gaia has seen herself from space, and begins to know her place in the universe.

We should be the heart and mind of the Earth, not its malady. So let us be brave and cease thinking of human needs and rights alone, and see that we have harmed the living Earth and need to make our peace with Gaia. We must do it while we are still strong enough to negotiate, and not a broken rabble led by brutal war lords. Most of all, we should remember that we are a part of it, and it is indeed our home.

Lovelock is a scientist, and has focussed on global warming and on the damaging effect our "civilization" is having on the planet. He is not an economist and so his vision does not factor in the global economic collapse that is now under way, which will usefully restrain our raping of the planet, and cull our population to a more sustainable level. Likewise he is not a mystic, and so his vision does not include perception of the subtle rising tide of spirituality that is now counter-balancing the retreating gross tide of materialism, giving hope for us indeed becoming "the heart and mind of the Earth". Accordingly his vision is more dark and terminal than mine. Thank heaven for global economic and political collapse! The actions and behaviour of humanity are part of the natural systems of Gaia, and we will ourselves, unwittingly, bring about the changes that are required to renew our planetary home. There will be many breakages along the way, but "you can't make an omelet without breaking eggs".

more for less

2009-07-14T08:34:00.002+01:00

Thanks to Sharon Astyk for pointing out that Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert, is seeing things much as we are . Scott writes:

Cheapatopia is a hypothetical city, designed from scratch to be an absurdly cheap place to live with a ridiculously high quality of life... the era of ridiculous consumption is over ... If we want universal healthcare, and a decent standard of living for the exploding population of seniors, the average household will have to learn how to make do with less. But in doing so, there is no reason we can't be happier at the same time, so long as we do it right... Cheapatopia puts a big emphasis on entertainment and social interaction. If you have that, plus health, safety, and financial security, you might be willing to give up the over-consumption and needless complexity of your old life... I believe the next big change in society will involve simplifying our lives, getting rid of the waste and inconvenience that we drifted into, and finding meaning through more social involvement... Cheapatopians work at home or within the city, so commuting is minimal.

This brings to mind the refrains of James Howard Kunstler about the death of suburbia: he foresees the "end of happy motoring" whereby every aspect of our lives that is predicated on private motoring will fail, as oil becomes unaffordable for increasingly impoverished western populations. He sees city centres regenerating into places where people live and shop and walk to work. Anywhere urban that does not have public transport within walking distance will become a ghetto. Where there is not efficient rail transport, we will be left with only rural villages, based around smaller scale farming, and compact urban centres, where people can transport themselves by foot. These are the living environments that provide the highest quality of life: frequent social interaction with neighbors and fellow citizens, a palpable community spirit, and no tedious commuting. Suburbia will become ghost-towns and ghettos.

Dmitri Orlov sees water transport becoming more important, and home grown food. Having witnessed the breakup of the Soviet Union first hand he knows what happens when a political and economic system collapses: people become dependent on what they can do for themselves and for each other on a local level. This means growing our own food, even in city apartments, on balconies, window ledges, indoors. When the system collapsed in Cuba, they started growing food on road verges and anywhere they could: Cuba now leads the way in organic agriculture, and this happened through necessity, as they couldn't afford chemicals.

Sharon Astyk herself concentrates mainly on food and family: how to make do and mend, growing and storing our own food, organizing our lives so we are not dependent on the electric grid or on supermarkets, making the most of what we have through reuse and ingenuity.

All these writers emphasize that the quality of our lives is not dependent on money, income, or consumer goods. Fulfillment comes through our social interactions, through doing productive and useful work that benefits ourselves and our communities directly, through living in harmony with nature, through the robust health that comes from eating a healthy and natural diet, and so on. By rearranging the way we live and work, we can be much happier with much less.

Terra Madre

2009-06-27T09:17:00.002+01:00

I just saw an excellent film last night: "Terra Madre" by Italian director Ermanno Olmi. Terra Madre (Mother Earth) is a biennial multi-language conference hosted in Torino by the Slow Food Organization - a network of food communities, each committed to producing quality food in a responsible, sustainable way. They aim to foster discussion and innovation in the related fields of gastronomy and ecology and global economics.

This film starts out like a documentary of the 2008 Terra Madre conference in Torino, presenting stimulating views on the importance of bio-diversity, and working in harmony with nature. Ermanno Olmi builds masterfully on his theme, confronting the fate of the planet.. The film then gloriously metamorphoses into a beautiful and poetic slow experience of food cultivation in harmony with nature.

An unforgettable and thought provoking experience: this film seems to move beyond the normal boundaries of the documentary format. I, for one, will not forget its message, nor its beautiful imagery.

It is heartening to be reminded that there are dedicated people out there working for Planet Earth and against the evil forces of Monsanto and their global capitalist cronies. The central messages of simplicity, back to the earth, less is more, and of growing our food in harmony with nature, should inspire all of us.

damn the desktop

2009-06-27T08:19:00.000+01:00

Desktops are for WIMPs. I don't like WIMPs. I never did, and I never will. Windows, icons, mice, pointers, desktops.... yuk.

Windows are for letting the light into a building, and for letting the occupants observe the world outside. And they can be opened to let air in. They have no place in a computer screen. There is only one natural window on a computer, and that is the screen itself: it has a frame and sometimes even a glass. What is this telling us? There is no need to subdivide this window into smaller windows. And if you just can't help yourself, then at least tile the windows, as with old-fashioned window panes - split the window into a number of smaller panes. But the slippery, sliding, overlapping "windows" which have become the norm in computer interfaces, are nausea inducing - they certainly make ME sick. If graphic designers can't live without them, then let their graphic applications create and maintain their own hideous mess of overlapping views. For the rest of us, this abstraction just steals lots of our screen estate, fills it with unnecessary clutter, and converts much of our time into frustration as we try to find the "window" we were trying to get some work done in. So, go FULL-SCREEN (or for Apple geeks: "mega-zoom"), and get back to basic simplicity. I want full screen when I am watching video. I want full screen when I am looking at pictures. I want full screen when I am reading. I want full screen when I am writing. I want full screen when I am programming. I want full screen. I want full screen. I want full screen. Wahhhh.

Icons are for religious devotees. Images may seem like a good idea for representing menu options, as they are language independent. But in practice most icons are incomprehensible to most people. Words, on the other hand, we all understand, so long as they are in our language. These days computers have no problem handling different languages. So we don't need icons. An icon of a printer just causes the majority of naive computer users to say "how do I print this?". Most of them would already have the printed sheet in their hands if there had simply been a button saying "print". Even if they think the icon looks like a printer, they are scared to press it in case it actually means something else, such as "wipe my hard disk clean".

Mice are for entertaining cats. If your real desktop had a real mouse on it you would be calling for your cat, or else you would be running out to buy a mousetrap or some rat poison. Or, in the case of certain traditional women, you would simply shriek "eeeeeeeeeekkkk" and jump on a chair and dance around in a frenzy. This is what mice are for. They are not for helping you navigate around a computer screen. Even our WIMPy friends, the graphic artists, (and the CADs and their ilk) all prefer (even demand) tablets and pens. Nobody wants a plastic mouse. Even cats find them dull and boring. The point and click interface of the browser is very intuitive and useful, but no that we have touch screens that actually work, there is no longer any justification for plastic mice.

Pointers. The creator gave us several: One index finger on each hand, and a bunch of backups in case our primary pointers are eaten or cut off in some unfortunate accident. From very early childhood we naturally point at what we want. We don't need a "pointer" image on the screen to do it for us. Just a touch screen and a finger or two. Lets lose those middlemen, the pointer image and the pointer device. They just get in the way - the pointer devices specialize in malfunctioning, and the pointer images specialize in getting lost, and/or becoming invisible. Lets consign them all to the dustbin of history (along with the QUERTY keyboard, but that is another post..). When we need to remember where we were on the screen, we have good old-fashioned cursors - just like pointers but without the pointiness. I like cursors, just so long as they are big and flashy, so I can find them....

Desktops... WTF?!??@#$%^&*! I have a desktop. It is made of wood, and on it there is a hideous clutter of keyboard, mouse, headset, glasses, glass of water, empty coffee cup, random piles of paper documents, DVDs, memory sticks, USB cables, pens, you name it. A man's desktop is like a woman's handbag. One desktop is more than enough for me to deal with in my life. Why anyone imagined I would want a computer representation of a desktop is beyond me. And then they implemented it so badly that I can't even use it in a useful way, without a degree in computer science. What is this nonsense? A picture - fine, I like pictures, and I get to choose my own - but I don't want icons all over it! Maybe in place of the screen saver (screen savers!.. don't get me started..), I would like to have my favorite picture or pictures display full screen.. in fact that is exactly how I have set up my mac. So I have my picture. Who ever put a real picture on a real desktop? It is futile because it gets covered in junk, which spoils the picture. OK.. all those icons on the "desktop" - what are the for? If I want a representation of a bunch of files and folders and application shortcuts, then I have my home folder in my file manager. I can view that as words, if I like, or I can view it as if I want to introduce more serendipity into my day. So why do I need the separate "desktop" to do the same thing in a different (and generally dysfunctional) way? Short and simple answer - I don't. Computer desktops are truly superfluous.

So - give me a full screen browser and some decent web apps, along with a full screen file manager (and in my sad geeky case, a full screen terminal with a copy of mc), and I have everything I want and need from a computer interface. No windows. No icons, No rodents. No damned desktop. If only life were that simple.....

silent servers and the Goog

2009-06-19T16:01:00.007+01:00

I earn my living from designing and developing computer systems, and I do believe that there is a lot we can learn about the nature of the New Paradigm from the computer world. For example, the moves from hierarchical control-based structures to free-form distributed relationships, and from selfish greed-motivated commercial activity towards altruistic giving and creation for the love of it, are illustrated very well in the growth and success of the open source movement. The original MIT hackers were pioneers of the New Paradigm, and the free software and open source movements, that grew out of their activities, provide clear signals as to the way ahead in other walks of life.

However, these days we all bask free in the Jupiter-sized benevolence of the Great God Google. The Goog keeps all of our data in its cloud, and provides us with all of the computer services we need, foree of charge, through our web connections and browsers... Don't get me wrong - I think Google IS great. They are on a glorious mission to free us from the evil empire of Micros&*t and I am an ardent user of their services: gmail handles all my emailing, and has done for 3 years or so now. Google docs has freed me from the horrors of MS Office, and from interminable waiting for Open Office to waken up... I get my daily RSS feeds fix via Google Reader. My web portal is iGoogle. I often go to Google News for news. I always go first to Google maps for online mapping. I love Google Earth. I blog on Blogger. I even use Google for searching (no - really!) and generally only go elsewhere when their servers break down (in which case ask.com takes the silver medal)... but there we have the rub: even the Great Google sometimes breaks. So far I have not lost any data, but I have found myself with fully functional broadband, but no email facility (for days at a time in the early days of gmail, admittedly downtime has been much more rare in recent times). With alarming frequency I have had to resort to inferior services when the GGG homepage takes a nap. The downtime is small compared to the uptime, and given the size and technical strength of the Google behemoth you might think that it is churlish, even paranoid, to be concerned about Google unavailability, but I am looking at a bigger picture...

Other people worry about what the Goog might do (or be doing) with their private data - and this is a legitimate concern as we are dealing with a commercial organization here, and these days the track record of commercial organizations when it comes to ethics and honesty is not good (as an understatement...). When bankers cannot be trusted then why should we trust financially motivated geeks? But I don't really care about this issue - I feel I have nothing to hide and so they can do what they like with my data: so long as they don't lose it, I am happy. I am not giving them vital passwords or bank account access codes. The risks from misuse of my data seem small to me compared to the advantages of free (as in beer) access to that data from any web-connected computer, along with the peace of mind that comes from not having to safeguard my data from loss. I grew up using tapes and floppy disks and then hard drives to store all my data, and all of these formats offered the feature of regular catastrophic loss of data. Accordingly, much time was spent on making multiple backups of everything, and much of my hair turned white through the stress of trying to keep some organisation and method to all of the backups, to ensure that my vital data survived the regular melt downs of media and equipment.

What concerns me about Google is not that they might lose my data, nor even that their servers may be down on occasion, but that I might lose my connection to Google for sustained periods of time. I am currently typing this on in my new home in rural Italy, where I am at the mercy of Telecom Italia for the provision of the phone line and broadband (or even dial-up) connection that I require to pursue my profession with any degree of professionalism... forget about mobile connections, as my cellphone struggles to even deliver usable voice telephony thanks to dramatic mountains and solid medieval buildings that barricade out the loutish advances of the cellular networks. I may wait many weeks before I can connect again (and upload a splurge of blogging..), but I am actually enjoying the break from emails and emailing and RSS feeds and blogging and global news trawling that had become the core of my daily existence - I am forced to go for walks in the leafy mountain lanes, rediscovering the wonders of nature.. I am having to idle away many hours basking in the mediterranean sun, instead of burning my eyes out on my monitor.... this actually counts as a major improvement in the quality of my life. My work consists of system design and programming, and my productivity in these activities (the ones that pay the rent) has gone through the roof, due to my being denied the time-sucking pleasures of online communication, internet TV, youtube, and the rest. But if I had relied on the Goog to store all of my data, instead of just my emails and RSS feeds, then I would be unable to work at all, until Telecom Italia run out of excuses for failing to turn up on appointed days and times and connecting a phone line for me... With the joys of USB sticks I can shuffle my work once or twice a week to other computers that are more connected, and thereby upload it to servers, and life goes on sweetly and quietly and increasingly chilled out....

But all of this has set me thinking:what happens when the server farms start to die? What happens when the connections start to drop? Don't be fooled by the apparent reliability of the internet and its service providers in recent years: we are now plummeting into an abyss of global economic meltdown on a scale unprecedented in the history of mankind. Organisations will die suddenly and catastrophically, en masse, in an unpredictable fashion. Our financial systems, our political systems, our cultures even, are all crumbling to dust. The oil supplies are dwindling - we have passed peak oil. We have failed time and again to moderate our squandering of the Earth's resources, and instead have ramped up our consumption in an exponential fashion. Now it starts to crash down around our ears. The old certainties mean nothing. We are entering armageddon.

The internet was designed from the start to cope with nuclear holocaust - it is armageddon-ready. But we must expect huge losses of servers and connections, and a general breakdown in reliability. Once the USA sticks the finger up at China and defaults on its debt, forcing China to nuke the USA in order to safeguard the all-important oriental honour, much of Google may disappear in smoke. Even if we still have sporadic access to the web, we cannot rely on the continuing existence of centralized data stores. The paradigm of client server is past its sell-by date. Google wants to store all of our data in its centralized storage facilities - yes they have built in redundancy and distribution of data within their server farm architectures, but the whole lot may be pulverized to dust. Even if it is not, we cannot expect to keep having 24/7 access to it. The monolithic model is approaching extinction. Google is old-paradigm and we should be very wary of getting fully on their cloud.

The internet (i.e. the network) is bomb-proof (and, it seems, anything-else-proof too!) because of its new paradigm design: it is distributed, and it assumes that data will be lost en-route. If you have two working computers and a wire (or wireless) between them, the internet can still exist. Take out, at random, 99.999999% of the computers on the internet, and the internet can still exist and can still function. It is the primary wonder of the modern world. But our storage of data has to be done according to the same paradigm: we must assume that data stores will be lost, and that data will be lost in transit, and yet still provide a reliable persistence of whatever data is deemed to be important. Distributed technologies like bit-torrent and skype show the way forward: they utilize any machines they can, and coordinate these machines in a flexible way to provide data transmission and telecommunications that are every bit as armageddon-proof as the internet infrastructure itself. These systems operate in a viral fashion, and they are not susceptible to manipulation by saboteurs, censors or other rogues.

Every machine on the internet must be seen as a node: just as the internet itself sees each machine as an IP address, the data storage and data transmission systems of the future must see every machine as a homogenous cell. Each cell must be essentially identical in capability: they must be able to store and catalog whatever data comes their way that is deemed important - to the limits of their storage capacity (which will obviously vary enormously), and they must be able and willing to pass on their contents to other cells when connected to them and asked to do so. Data that is deemed important by many people will then be duplicated in many locations, while data that is deemed unimportant will be stored sparsely, if at all. Such a system will continue to provide utility, for as long as the internet itself does so. Monolithic data stores will die. Bye bye Google. Bye bye Wikipedia (may your glorious content be cached many times).

In this context the recent hyped announcement of Google Wave shows a failure by those in positions of influence and power to understand the way the world is going. Google Wave ( wave.google.com ) is a very interesting development: it creates a new document format, the 'wave' which wraps around (or replaces) many old types of document, such as email, instant messaging, wiki pages, text files, spreadsheets, image files, video files, etc. etc. Each 'wave' is stored centrally by Goog, or another 'server engine' provider. Instead of sending emails to each other, whereby I keep a copy of the email and you receive another copy, in the Google Wave paradigm, there is one central copy which we both can see online. I can then change my message to you after I first send it (indeed the whole concept of sending is essentially eliminated by Google Wave - we can watch our correspondents in the act of writing their messages, character by character. The process can scale up to multi-user collaboration (wiki style with instant messaging overtones) on one wave. All document types other than text messages are simply dragged and dropped on the wave, and thus become part of it. Clever stuff for sure, and on first encounter it can seem beguiling. Bye bye email, bye bye wiki, bye bye Google Docs? Hello Waves :)

Yes - just what I always wanted to do with my increasingly scarce time (once I have a web connection that is, and my current idyll is destroyed): watch my friends and colleagues, and a host of spammers also, as they laboriously type out, misspell and correct, delete and rewrite their messages... even more of an idle waste of time than Twittering... and yes, just what I always wanted, for those messages sent to me by my friends and colleagues to be changing in front of my eyes, hours, days, months, years, after I thought they were finished - for comments to be added here there and everywhere, at any time, in a totally non-linear and chaotic fashion - to be able to replay the evolution of these monstrous waves step by step ad nauseam.... the prospect is enough to drive me to permanently hitting the power off button and taking up farming full time. I have no doubt that a host of ardent believers will embrace Google Wave enthusiastically, and will become addicted to its gameplay, while losing sight of any real meaning in the content. More and more noise in our lives. Less and less value. I do not think I will be waving with the rest of the surfer dudes: I am just too old and crusty and cranky for such flash without substance. I want to craft and hone my prose before publishing it for others to read - I consider the time of my readers to be valuable and worthy of my effort. Less is more (OK OK I am not applying that maxim very well to this particular post....). The process of creativity is itself seldom an edifying sight: it makes a poor spectator sport. Google Wave will have its uses in brainstorming sessions and the like, and there is an admirable commitment to open source and to fostering collaboration, but while the centralized design (no duplication of data) obeys traditional database design ideology, it will not work during the apocalypse - the chances of the wave server being up, and of you having a working connection to it, at the time you wish to compose your opus, are slim. I am sure that the Goog will provide an offline mode so you can compose a message without being connected, but then all the bells and whistles that everyone is getting so excited about will vanish, and we are back to traditional messaging, without the benefit of multiple copies being distributed across multiple machines, and without the benefit of being stable and unchanging once posted.

No - Google Wave is not the golden technology of the new age, for us all to surf in blissed-out harmony. Something more appropriate must be put together before the sands of internet stability run out. I am going to search the web for a distributed messaging system that is suitable for the times we are entering. It should be very simple and very viral. If you know of such a system then please let me know. If such a tool does not exist then I may even build it myself. Watch this space :)

Slow down

2009-05-08T10:46:00.003+01:00

As we sell the planet and ourselves down the river, we run in ever faster circles "chasing our tails". Here are some extracts from "The link between Mind and Social / Environmental-Issues" by Sushil Yadav:

The fast-paced, consumerist lifestyle of Industrial Society is causing exponential rise in psychological problems besides destroying the environment. All issues are interlinked. Our Minds cannot be peaceful when attention-spans are down to nanoseconds, microseconds and milliseconds. Our Minds cannot be peaceful if we destroy Nature.
...
Emotion is what we experience during gaps in our thinking.

If there are no gaps there is no emotion.

Today people are thinking all the time and are mistaking thought (words/ language) for emotion.
....
When society switches-over from physical work (agriculture) to mental work (scientific/ industrial/ financial/ fast visuals/ fast words ) the speed of thinking keeps on accelerating and the gaps between thinking go on decreasing.

There comes a time when there are almost no gaps.

People become incapable of experiencing/ tolerating gaps.

Emotion ends.

Man becomes machine.
...
In ancient times verbal processing was “live” in nature—ie it happened when people actually spoke.
Today there is non-stop verbal processing inside the mind through print and electronic media ( newspapers, books, magazines, radio, television, computer etc…) as a result of which the verbal content & speed has increased thousands of times.

The speed of visuals ( and words ) has increased so much during the last
one hundred years that today the human brain has become incapable of
focussing on slow visuals /words through perception, memory, imagery.

If we cannot focus on slow visuals / words we cannot experience emotions associated with slow visuals /words.

In a fast society slow emotions become extinct. In a thinking ( scientific / industrial ) society emotion itself becomes extinct.
...
In small(slow)agriculture-based societies the mind used to experience a state of emotion all the time because of physical work and slow visual/verbal processing . People who do physical work experience the same good subjective-feeling which is experienced by people who do physical excercise. People who do physical work also sleep much better than people who do mental work - the quality of sleep is much better. If we read one thousand-year-old literature we will not come across the term "boredom" - the concept of boredom did not exist in slow societies. There were long gaps between different visuals and between words/ sentences - and people had the ability to experience/ tolerate the gaps - it was normal for them.
...
There are easy emotions and difficult emotions. Easy emotions are evoked within nanoseconds, microseconds and milliseconds - anger, lust, fear, pleasure, entertainment and excitement are some examples. These emotions are associated with fast breathing and heart-rate. These emotions don't require gaps between thinking to evoke, intensify and sustain. These are the emotions that can be found everywhere in today's fast society.

Then there are difficult emotions - which require ability and years of effort to develop - emotions associated with pain, compassion and peaceful states of mind are some examples. These emotions are associated with slow breathing and heart-rate. These emotions require freezing of thought - freezing of visuals and words - huge amounts of gaps between thinking - to evoke, intensify and sustain.
...
Our present lifestyle is destroying our Minds and Environment - the evidence is everywhere - left, right and center.

It is Science and Technology that created the consumerist Industrial Society which has led to the destruction of Mind and Nature/ Environment.

In the absence of Science, Technology, Industrialization/ Industrial Revolution the two problems of overpopulation and overconsumerism would not exist.
...
A thinking species destroys the planet. Animals lived on earth for billions of years (in very large numbers) without destroying nature.
...
This planet is on the verge of total destruction.

The cause of destruction is – overactivity.

The cause of overactivity is – Intelligence.

Intelligence is a curse - a disease - a disability - an abnormality.
...
People work because they cannot stop working.

It does not matter what kind of work we do - whether it is physical work or any kind of mental work. As soon as we stop working we suffer from restlessness, anxiety, uneasiness and discomfort.
...
For most people the choice is between physical and mental work.
The switch-over from physical work to mental work is disastrous for the planet.

Man can do the same physical work every day. Man cannot do the same mental work every day.
...
When we make consumer goods we kill Animals/ Trees, Air/ Water and Land - directly or indirectly.

Industrial Society destroys ecosystems - all Industrial Societies destroy ecosystems.
...
Most of the people living in cities are engaged in unnecessary work - making things, buying things and selling things. The switch-over from Physical work to Mental work/ Desk job has led to an endless cycle of unnecessary and destructive work.

When society switches over from physical work to mental work it starts making thousands of consumer goods. People start calling them necessities. They are not necessities at all - 90% of consumer goods that we see today did not exist 50 years ago

Food, Water, Air, Little clothing, Little Shelter - these are necessities.
...
There is too much discussion in modern society. Discussion is not solving our problems – discussion itself has become a problem – a gigantic problem.
...
There is very little discussion / debate / argument in societies that do physical work - ie, agriculture-based societies - And this is the reason why they are millions of times saner than industrial societies.
...
Industrial Society has collectively killed billions of Animals and Trees.
...
Industrial Society has flooded the ecosystems with toxic chemicals. Most of the Farm Land has been poisoned with pesticides due to Industrial Agriculture. The Land - The Air - The Water - the entire food chain is contaminated with thousands of man-made toxic chemicals which did not exist before industrialiation.
...
Make things
Buy things
Sell things

This is not the purpose of life.
...
Material things don't bring peace and happiness. Today billions of people have got things which even Kings did not have in the past. Car, computer, television, fridge, telephone - no King ever had these things. But people are still restless and unhappy.
...
Consumerist-Lifestyle is just not sustainable. If we do not immediately return to living a very simple and frugal life then very soon there will be no human life on earth. We would need several planet Earths to sustain the present lifestyle.
...
We cannot save the environment by doing something.

We can only save it by doing less of what we have been doing - much less of what we have been doing.

If we want to save the environment we will have to reduce human activity (overactivity) by 99%.
...
It is the human species which is the greatest threat to humans and all other life on this planet - In fact the human species is the only species which is a threat to all life on Earth.

Man has decimated all Animal and Plant species – polluted the Sky and Oceans - and poisioned every square inch of earth.

In a mere 200 - 300 years Industrial Society has destroyed all that Nature laboriously created over a period of millions of years.

Sushil seems to suggest we have to go backwards, undoing evolution. Actually we have to move forwards, evolving further, towards being balanced spiritual beings. Over a long time we evolved from instinctive creatures, to emotional creatures, and now to mental creatures. The next stage in our evolution is to become spiritual creatures - balancing our "being" with our "human". This does involve, to a large extent, switching our rational minds off. To get there we need to learn to meditate, to slow down, to stop our excessive thinking, and stop rushing around. We need to embrace nature instead of destroying it. We need to live in harmony with all other beings. We need to find once again the balance that we have lost. None of this can ever come from our suicidal old paradigm ways.

The "slow emotions" that Sushil describes (other than pain) are not emotions at all but feelings - they are spiritual in nature: love, compassion, benevolence, peacefulness, serenity, joy, bliss. We can only reach such elevated feelings by slowing down. We need to chill out, drop out of the old paradigm industrial/consumer society, and learn to smell the flowers, once again.

wake up

2009-04-22T19:41:00.003+01:00

The decline of our civilization is happening on an unprecedented scale and with unprecedented speed. We have to look into the mists of time, to the legend of a decadent Atlantis sinking beneath the waves, to find anything that parallels what we are now witnessing.

The seeds of the spectacular end game were sown with the rise of Darwinism and scientific rationalism in the 1800s. We became full of our own cleverness, and lost respect for spirituality and for nature. We started seeing ourselves as masters of the Universe. The agricultural revolution mechanized and centralized agriculture, as we turned nature's gardens into chemically enhanced food factories. Hot on the heels of this abomination came the industrial revolution, whereby our modern industrialized economies grew rapidly, like a cancer on Mother Earth, creating ever more powerful machines and methods to rape Mother Earth and to feed our own vanity and conceit.

The USA emerged from the ashes of the European empires, as the epitome of the modern way - the American Dream was sold across the entire planet, and gradually was embraced by all, as the modern idea of paradise on Earth: a big car, a spacious house, electrical appliances to serve our every whim, and toys galore to play with.

The USA grew fat and powerful, taking the lions share of the spoils of two world wars, and leading the world in adopting ever-more artificial lifestyles, based on conspicuous consumption of manufactured goods. The eminence of manufacturing in the west was gradually eclipsed by the rise of services, primarily financial services: as the US and western Europe grew fat, the more hungry India, Japan, and China started beating western manufacturing at its own game.

Having already lost much of its manufacturing capacity to Japan in the 1980s and China in the 1990s, the USA continued growing fatter by equipping the Chinese with all of the machine tools and technology they required to become a mega industrial engine for the World. Meanwhile India's burgeoning workforce, being much better educated than that of the US, and prepared to work for a fraction of the money, began sucking up the service jobs that the post-industrial west had been relying on for economic health.

Meanwhile, entering this new millennium, the apparent wealth and living standards of the west continued to grow, apparently defying gravity. Where was the money coming from? Now we know. We borrowed it from the Chinese. They lent us the money to buy their goods, and we maintained an appearance of credit worthiness by inflating our asset values - first it was a technology stocks bubble, and then, fatally, the biggest financial bubble ever seen in the history of mankind, our fabulous multi-national housing bubble.

The trickery and deception, greed, and downright dishonesty of the financial sector, which fueled this bubble, through fantasy economic modeling and false accounting on an unprecedented scale, was a marvel to behold: the last grand hurrah of the old paradigm. They created a gigantic pyramid of fake money, and consumed the entire inside of the pyramid in commissions, salaries, fees, bonuses, and dividends. Now only the hollowed out shell remains, with new burnt out holes appearing day upon day - there is still the appearance of a financial sector, functioning national economies, and functioning currencies, but anyone who looks closely can now see what a fragile sham it all is. There is no question as to whether it will all collapse: it is simply a question of when - and it cannot last for very long.

Meanwhile the banking titans are now staggering about in a panic, sucking up government money as fast as the printing presses can run. And our corrupt political leaders, taking advice from these same banking titans, and from our staggeringly incompetent mainstream economists, seem more than willing to keep shoveling money into the furnaces with complete abandon. There is no sign anywhere of any regard for our future, let alone the future of our children and grandchildren. Bluntly, there is no future for any of us, under this fatally damaged and rapidly collapsing system.

It is utterly futile to try to fix any of this. It is broken irreparably. It is a dead loss. The process of entropy is reducing order to chaos, and simplicity to complexity. We must not waste our time trying to fix our broken economic and political systems. It is too late for that. We have had a farewell party of exceptional extravagance and decadence, and soon we will be surveying the wreckage in the aftermath, but meanwhile we cannot see the mess for the seething masses of drunken partygoers continuing on their self-destructive binges. Soon they will all have fallen over, comatose, and very sick. I suspect that the clean-up operation will be well beyond our capacity - we will have to rely on Mother Nature to clean up the devastation we have caused to planet Earth.

So what will be left for those of us that survive this coming apocalypse? I don't think any of us can know for sure - we are entering a new paradigm, much of which is still beyond our comprehension. We cannot understand the new by using the mindset of the old. We must start again, by dispensing with scientific rationalism, and embracing our inner nature. We must move from left-brain dominance to a balance between left and right: from cold rationalism, to warm and intuitive empathy for our fellow beings. We may have big brains but we remain mammals, dependent on Mother Nature to survive. If we keep poisoning our food, and feeding ourselves with chemicals, we will keep getting sicker. If we keep torturing and murdering the animals, and then consuming their corpses, we will keep increasing our own inner torment.

Children of my generation grew their hair long, and wore beads, and flowers in their hair. Children of today stick needles in their bodies and cover themselves with tatoos. Is this progress? Or is it a collapse from love and hope into forlorn self-hate? This is just a symptom of the sickness of our society. We are now living in Hell. And we have created it ourselves. And it is only going to get worse, unless we waken up to the madness of what we are doing with the planet, and vow resolutely to change our ways. I do not envisage most of mankind taking this vow. Instead there will just be complaining and blaming, from the vast majority. And the complaints will escalate into abject fear and panic when there is no fuel available for our cars, and no food in our supermarkets, and the Army is patrolling the city streets and shooting at their own people. And billions will be starving, and billions will be sick. This is the new world we are now accelerating towards.

And yet, we do have an option, a much better option. Only a few of us can even see it. We can turn our back on our industrial and artificial existence. We can stop buying things we don't need. We can stop being consumers, and start being people again. We can stop vandalizing our homelands, and start nurturing them. We can free ourselves from the yokes imposed on us by our political and corporate overlords - they have already lost control of their infernal systems, and they are powerless now to stop us from turning our backs on them. We can stop feeding them with our labour and our earnings. We can stop giving them any attention whatsoever. Let them rot. We can focus our attention on our families, friends, and neighbors. We can grow our own food, and keep ourselves healthy by living outdoor lives and eating what nature provides. This lifestyle is good enough for the animal kingdom, and it will be better for us than our current wage slavery. We will be happier without telephones and televisions. We will not need make-up or fashion accessories, other than to play games. Life can go on, without our economic and political infrastructures, and such a life can be much more fulfilling than our current stress crazed confusion.

This is what lies ahead, for those of us that survive the meltdown. A simpler life. A life closer to nature. A life based around local communities, and real human interaction with our neighbors. A life based on giving and sharing, and enjoying what we have. A life lived now, in the moment, and not in the endless seeking of imaginary future pleasure. A life filled with joy and laughter. The more we give to each other, the more we receive ourselves - this is a natural law, and we should start paying attention to it. Some of us are already living such a life: they are the blessed and happy ones, who will be least affected by the coming changes. The rest of us must start mending our ways, or we are going to receive some very unpleasant shocks.

Our "leaders" cannot help us any longer, even if they wanted to (and believe me, they don't). We have to help ourselves. We have to move from complex ways to simple ways, from decadence and dissolution, to purity and honesty. We have to change our focus from global to local, and from machines to beings. Waken up people, waken up. We do not have much time left to ready ourselves for the big shift that is coming.

the paradigm shift

2009-04-13T13:49:00.005+01:00

The new paradigm seeks to regain balance between our physical aspects (human) and our spiritual essence (being). Over millennia we, the human race, have gradually lost touch with the spiritual reality of our nature. Increasingly we have embraced rationality, and artificiality, while losing sight of our place in nature and in the natural universe. We have rejected whatever science cannot explain, and in doing so we have rejected our true nature.

The old paradigm that has taken us to this sleepwalking state, is biased heavily towards material values, wealth and power. Our obsession with the mundane has taken us away from spiritual understanding. We have lost respect for Mother Nature, and worse still, we have forgotten that we are spiritual beings. Instead, we have let scientists teach us that we are biogenetic machines, and we have come to identify ourselves with the short-lived bodies that we inhabit.

The old paradigm is based on fear and on ignorance. Fear is the basis of control, and the old paradigm is all about controlling us. We are treated like mushrooms: "keep them in the dark and feed them on bullshit". Everything is judged in terms of physical attributes: we are taught to value property, wealth, and power, and to devalue ethics, morals and virtue. The structures of our societies are rigid, hierarchical, power based structures, where change can only happen very slowly if at all, and where an elite few prosper on the breaking backs of the many.

Our focus is on work and on strife. We are born, we struggle, and we die. And death is a blessed release from the fear of death that dominates our lives. Those who think at all are fixated with finance, economics, politics, commerce - that is, in the occasional moments when we can rise above the instinctive calls of sexuality and consumption. Even science and the arts are seen primarily as branches of commerce, while spiritual beliefs are seen as a form of dementia. All of this is unnatural, and we are doing our utmost to re-create the world in our own image, as an artificial wasteland, where everything is controlled, adulterated, and abused in a mechanistic way. In our ignorant folly, we are raping Mother Nature in a systematic and deliberate way. Not content with destroying and poisoning ourselves, we are making sure we take all of the Kingdoms of Nature with us. We have created Hell on Earth.

Fortunately for us, there are forces more powerful than we are, that maintain balance in the universe and the cosmos. These forces are manifesting in the rising swell of the new paradigm, as it gradually takes over from the breaking waves of the old.

Accordingly, those of us who wish to survive must turn our backs on the ways of the old paradigm, the legal systems and political and commercial structures that are now failing us abjectly, and we must embrace the ways of the new paradigm.

This new paradigm takes us back towards the wisdom of the ancients. We are regaining contact with our original true nature of eternal spiritual beings, with the inherent spiritual qualities of love and light, in other words compassionate love and spiritual power. These bring inner peace with them: serenity and bliss. They also bring inner strength. And most importantly we realize that, at the spiritual level, the level of being, we are all interconnected: we are all one. This interconnection means that we get what we give. Through giving we receive. Through helping each other, we ourselves are helped. This is the universal law of balance, the "law of karma".

Under the new paradigm we act as a unified collective of empowered individuals, each living in harmony with nature and with each other. This is not an option for us, but a certainty. The old paradigm is dying and will in due course be cremated. Those who don't shift to the new paradigm will die with the old. We have shat in our own bed, and now the bedding must be replaced. There will be major upheavals, and there will be widespread death and destruction, as Mother Nature clears away the old rubbish to make way for the new garden.

The new world will not be about politics or finance or conflict. It will about enlightenment, balance, and harmony.

The shift to the new paradigm is not easy. We will encounter much ridicule and cynicism, from the many who are locked into the old ways of thinking. It takes great courage to think anew, to re-evaluate, and to start over, flying in the face of the established orthodoxy. This is not just about knowledge or understanding: we must embody the new ways - we must become enlightened. Our egos will fight against us, trying to take the easy way out, and to avoid true transformation. We must be disciplined in exploring what is true. We must seek guidance and feedback from trusted sources. We must be willing to question everything. We must strive continually to refine our intellects, and to become loving embodiments of spirituality. We must not allow ourselves to make excuses or use delaying tactics. We must become intuitive: this means surrendering our egotistic personalities to the inner wisdom of our higher selves, the wisdom of the soul. The ego will not relinquish control without a struggle, but instead will seek to squeeze whatever remaining pleasure it can from the old paradigm ways. But we must rise above the preferences of the selfish ego, and we must take the plunge and embrace inner change.

So, the shift from the old paradigm to the new is not simply a change in external circumstances: the real shift must come from within each of us.

If we each focus on changing ourselves, then we will find the world changing with us, rather than against us.

one door closes

2009-04-04T14:37:00.004+01:00

Jefferson's Guardian said...

Although it goes by many different names; A New Paradigm, the Age of Aquarius, and a multitude of others, it seems we're near the transitional point of a totally new experience. It's something that can't be intellectualized; it's a feeling.

Yes - the "Age of Aquarius", the new age, or whatever we choose to call it, we can indeed feel it. We sense it rather than understanding it. Our intuition tells us that we are heading for more enlightened times. And this enlightenment is not evolving from the old ways, but rather it is the fresh vibrant growth of a new sapling, as the diseased old tree withers away and rots from within.

One door closes, another one opens....