be not angry..

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

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

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

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

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

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

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!

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

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...

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

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

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....