Leeds City Council Exec Board Meeting Video Blog 19 June 2013

Tonight I talk about today's Leeds City Council Exec Board meeting which I attended and deconstruct the tactics which they are taking to persuade, coax or perhaps gently coerce the people of Leeds that it is in their interests to have a trainwreck tsunami of road development sweep through their communities.

What with the Exec Board members talking about consultation as a means to the end of getting the people on board the truth is exposed that this is no more than a propaganda exercise, confirmed by the neuro-linguistic programming used by the NGT lobby.  And I forgot to mention that one of the Councillors actually said 'We have got to do a better selling job!'  Condemned out of their own mouths...

Occupy Reality!

It seems quite fortuitous that I have started posting my video blogs here on my blogspot page as I am currently having a problem adding text to my YouTube upload.

In support of the Occupy Monsanto demonstrations around the world today a I suggest we all occupy our own realities with autonomous thought and action rather than allow corporate entities to take over and monopolise our existences.

We need to regain a sense of our own agency which has been depleted by the social brainwashing of popular culture as well as sociological theories which try to persuade us that there is no ‘doer’, only an intersection of social variables, the ultimate argument of despair and nihilism.

It is a clash of worldviews as those who operate under a paradigm of hierarchical dominance continue to try and establish and maintain control of systems that had evolved with inner adaptive control measures that are flexible and resilient.  Each monad of consciousness acts autonomously and responds to the whole in order to remain in equilibrium rather than to always direct the responses of others.

We are Doers, and we are Agents, as each of us follows a unique path of experience which gives us the opportunity to grow.  We define ourselves by the choices we make.  The quality of the space we create, the reality we occupy is the manifestation of who we really are.  ‘Know thyself’.  ‘To thine own self be true’.  If we allow others to occupy that space with their domination then we are abdicating our sovereignty.  This has been going on for a very long time, we have sleepwalked into this for generations.

The answer lies within us as we become aware of ourselves and begin to take responsibility for how we deal with the challenges which face us, but the mettle of the inner person is only brought forth by the facing of the external events.  Those that deny the importance of what happens in the world are missing the point.  We cannot wholly control what arises from external situations, but we can control our own responses to them.  The hero need not be undefeated, only undaunted.  This is what the monopolists cannot abide.  Material domination is only the lesser half of what they seek ~ the greater half is the domination and subjugation of the will.  Occupy the space within yourself, within your consciousness and your heart and you will be part of that great wave which is spreading around the world and becoming ever stronger as we all reinforce its field.

Spirits In The Material World

Reflecting on things that I have experienced over the last week I am reminded of how things that come into our worlds change us.

If we have some spiritual practice then we aim to develop that core within us which is beyond the material conditioning we have all received through our incarnation and external life influences.

Finding a place within ourselves which seeks to balance and stabilise how we relate to the troubling events outside is the first step towards having a more benign effect in the world than if we simply respond from a level of information and material control based on desires and the effort to fulfill them.

Becoming more ourselves is to bring spirit into matter.  Matter is a good servant, but a tyrant of a master.  In Tolkien's 'The Children of Hurin' which I am currently reading it is stated that Melkor the Morgoth, the fallen angel to whom Sauron was merely a vassal in the First Age of Middle-Earth which is recounted in the Silmarillion, has become so attached to domination of the world that he has become trapped in incarnation.

To submit that spirit entirely to matter not only in the unavoidable reality of our own incarnation, but to seek to live only through that, and not in some higher meta level of reality that brings more to matter than its own substance is to lose oneself.  Although I do not mention it in the video blog, it is of course the case that consciousness actually creates reality, the appearance of matter and so on as demonstrated by quantum physics and the observer effect.  So for consciousness to seek a complete fulfillment in matter alone is to get trapped in the mirror rather than to see the meaning of the image.

Diverse forms of spiritual practice enable us to get beyond this limitation by allowing us to experience altered states of consciousness which can then lead us to understand that we are not the contents of our consciousness, but that we are some continuum beyond that which evolves through assimilating and interpreting what passes through it.  The discipline of practice, whether in ritual form or simple mindfulness leads us beyond slavery to the external world and leads us into service through a recognition that we are all eyes of the same consciousness ~ In Lak'ech

The transhumanist movement, which only sees humanity as something to be improved, made more efficient and productive fails to see that it would remove us from the very process of learning and evolution which informs our ascending metaview of reality and how it unifies all thing.  If all we were to become was a machine which could not help but to love its servitude, then we would have lost who we are and become more and more separated from the sea of universal consciousness and existence.

Better to evolve organically, spiritually and in our consciousness and this will allow us the perfect freedom of choice through discipline and respect for higher laws rather than slavery to lower ones.  The more we choose to do that which is good for all, then the greater freedom we create for all, contrasted with the agendas whereby all would serve the intent of a few in which even those who are served become ever more limited in their own slavery to self.  The sterility of the latter eventually limits itself out of existence while the former is the basis of life, ecology and limitless inner and outer growth.

The Nature of the Game

Tonight I try to address the accusations I have received that I am fear mongering.  Either I have need of refining what I am trying to say about dealing with the spiritual challenges we each face daily, or my critic has misunderstood me when I talk about the existence of the darker side of our world.

Or perhaps a bit of both.

To me the challenges are about accepting them without getting trapped in predetermined responses or apprehensions about the future based on past experience.  Consciousness is fluid and we can mold it into any shape.  We can face our difficulties with courage or we can face them with fear.  This is why I begin the talk with the Bene Gesserit Litany Against Fear.

Like mediaeval alchemists transforming themselves we must look our demons in the eye, we must face them, not deny their existence and turn our backs on them because then they will haunt our footsteps and we will always have them at our heals.  They are only a denied and discarded part of us anyway.  This is the Trickster side of the Ego which plays tricks on us, confusing and puzzling us, to either trap us or encourage us to evolve and is at the core of the game of existence and consciousness that we are engaged in ~ it is the Nature of the Game, as Jagger and Richards put it so many years ago in the controversial 'Sympathy for the Devil'.

The spiritual warrior faces the responses in themselves evoked by external experiences and so grows.  It is not promoting fear to look at the evil about us, it takes courage to face these things rather than ignore them and deny them.  By seeing our own responses to facts and situations we can gain insight into our own natures.  This is the Jungian approach to uncovering the archetypes which hide within the unconscious, especially the Shadow ~ that part of ourselves that we are most ready to deny.

By this we learn to grow spiritually and become empowered.

When we have begun to transform our inner selves, then we are able to start effecting transformation in the outer world.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h_pf6MsQC-0

Disclosure is Happening, Gradually and Controlled

Palestine and the Fremen

And so begins the great battle of our time.

The military might of the Zionist machine has begun to pound the near defenceless people of Gaza and tanks roll into the West Bank.  Of the population of Gaza, half are children, something in excess of 600,000, another 300,000 are women, tens of thousands more are elderly, survivors of a life of exclusion and oppression.

The controlled Western media has been bought and sold by the interests whose only concern is to create an hegemony of fear in the Middle East.  The average Israeli citizen is mere cattle and cannon fodder to the elite.  An elite which transcends the boundaries of the Israeli state, and many of whom are not even Jewish. 

It’s not personal against the Palestinians.  They are just in the way, an inconvenient obstacle in one sense, but also a convenient example to the rest of the world of what is round the corner, what the elites have planned for us all.  We must all fear, and submit to the transnational fascist dictatorship which is rapidly spreading its tentacles around the globe.

This will fail.

In his epic tale, ‘Dune’, the best selling science fiction book of all time, Frank Herbert gives us the Fremen, the dispossessed inhabitants of the desert world Arrakis, the Dune of the title.  Driven into the deep desert for ten thousand years the Fremen have learnt to survive in the most extreme adversity.  In a world where every drop of water is precious beyond measure they have adapted to reclaim even the moisture from their breath.  ‘Water discipline’ is fundamental to their culture, to their survival.  And alongside this, absolute loyalty to their people.

The Palestinian people are the Fremen of our world today.  In the bombed out ruins of the largest concentration camp in the world, Gaza, social cohesion remains, is strengthened by absolute loyalty to their own people.  I have been moved to tears by the first hand reports from, amongst others, Max Igan,  www.thecrowhouse.com    http://www.youtube.com/user/aodscarecrow    the Australian peace and truth broadcaster who found his way into the Gaza strip and made rooftop webcasts about the conditions the people of that place are forced to endure.  He described the fortitude of the people in this place forgotten by the ‘free’ peoples of the West, and how they live with constant power outages, salt water showers and closed borders, even to neighbouring Arab Egypt.

In ‘Dune’, the corrupt and decadent House Harkonnen usurp control of the planet from House Atreides, and drive its heir, Paul, into the hands of the Fremen.  Dune is the only source in the galaxy of spice melange, a priceless commodity which enables interstellar travel, and without which galactic trade would cease.  For spice, read oil.  Palestine has no oil, but Palestine is only the tip of the iceberg of the Arab world, rich in oil.  Over the last decade we have seen how the insatiable greed of the West has made war on the Arab world for, amongst other things, its oil.  Iraq, Libya and of course Iran is in the sights.

Palestine is the continuing example, in the event that anyone forgets the million dead in Iraq, the mutant babies born out of depleted uranium pollution in Falluja, the ruins of Tripoli, the Afghan villagers strafed by drones, the paid mercenaries undermining the Syrian regime, and the military hegemony of Israel, paid for by America tax dollars.

But the fascist dictatorship fails to understand a critical fact of the human spirit. 

In the Second World War, both sides attempted to break the will of the opponents by bombing civilian populations.  It failed. 

We here in the West live in a culture of complacency, lulled into a sleepwalk of tv gameshows and soap operas, illusions, sugar coated candyfloss which has no substance but which rots the mind like sugar to the teeth.

The Palestinian people are the true, forgotten heroes of our world, surviving the tyranny, building their inner strength like the Fremen.  They are the example the world needs to wake up to what is going on.  Even should they be genocidally wiped from the planet it will only serve to awaken the conscience of humanity, to show us all the mettle which is required to live in dignity.

Remember this.  It is better to die Free, than to live in chains in a gilded cage of the mind.  The hero need not be undefeated, only undaunted, and his cause will never be lost.

The dignity of the Palestinian people puts to shame a world of MTV pop culture and self absorbed consumerism.  They have built a meme vital to the future of the human race, and one which we must learn if we are to survive and overcome the tyranny which threatens to destroy not only freedom, but eventually the whole planetary ecosystem with its deforestation and poisons.

They are building, have already built, the meme of courage, of integrity, of social cohesion in the face of apparently overwhelming oppression.

The diamond is created under the greatest extremes of temperature and pressure to become the strongest known substance.  In Buddhism, the enlightened being is said to have built the ‘Diamond Body’, resistant to all attack because it has been built through experience from which comes a sort of psychic immune system.

The Palestinians are the example of the Diamond Body of the human race.  The morphic field of this is going out and setting a new resonance in the planet, even to those who are unaware of what is going on in Gaza or the West Bank.  We see it everywhere, even in the West.  Continuing massive demonstrations against the corrupt Corporatocracy which has stolen our freedoms and our pensions, rising awareness of the corruption which has been purposely hidden from us for decades, even centuries.  The Hillsborough cover up, the Savile affair, Libor, the massive law suit against the greatest financial houses, the largest in history, which when courageously reported on CNBC led within hours to the brutal murder of the chief executives children, and the murder of the child’s nanny who was transparently framed for the act.

And yet the tyrants and dictators, who hold their positions in fiduciary trust to the people, exercise more and more surveillance upon us, working to make us mistrust our fellows, when it is they who are untrustworthy, it is they who have sold us down the river to bloated banks and the military industrial complex who see war as not only the most profitable business, but the ideal means of psychological control of a weakened and submissive population.

In Dune, the Fremen rise under the leadership of Paul Atreides, Muad’Dib, more ferocious and fearless even than the Emperor’s Sardaukar, the SS of their time.  If the great battle of our time is not to be fought on such terms of violence and bloodshed we must learn the lessons of the Palestinians, of the Fremen.  We must learn to stand shoulder to shoulder with our fellows, to stand up and be counted, to call out the corruption of governments, politicians and bankers who are stealing our world and our freedoms from under our very noses.  This great battle is one of the mind, the heart, of the human spirit.

They can kill our bodies, but they cannot kill the human spirit.  That is why the want to drug us to sleep with chemical additives and genetically modified food, aspartame, fluoride, hypnotic television shows and consumerism.  In a way the global fascist dictatorship will cause the awakening to its tyranny because of its insatiable greed and impatience.  They could have kept on slowly bleeding us dry like they have done for so many generations.  But now, for some reason, they have become impatient, they can wait no longer, it is not enough to contain the Palestinians, they must be eradicated.  This is their fatal mistake.  Like a predator which moves too soon in the long grass they have begun to show their hand.  An illusion once perceived can never be unseen again.

Dr Martin Luther King Jr. once said ‘I have a dream, that the people will rise up….’  We have now reached that time, when we must rise up, we must find that diamond body of absolute determination within ourselves, and say No More!  If we all found that courage, if the people of Israel who have been so led into this through the deception of their leaders refused to allow the oppression and genocide of their neighbours, then the great tyranny would be brought down, for it stands only on our compliance.

The Palestinians know, as the Fremen knew, what is important.  Standing in truth and honour with your fellows against the jackboot of tyranny, against the boot that Orwell described as grinding in the face of humanity for ever.  The alternative is to give way into compliance with the bombing and murder of innocent civilians, and to do so is to abandon all humanity.  Work in your sphere of influence, however small, and it will build.

Speak your truth, walk the talk, stand up in non compliance with the global fascist tyranny which every day shows its face more clearly.  Comply and say nothing, do nothing and while today it is merely the lost and forgotten Palestinians, tomorrow it will be the world, it will be you and me, it has already begun and too many are blind, hypnotised by the glamours of illusion.

We must learn integrity, compassion, courage.  We must reclaim our humanity and see what we share with the Palestinians, the Fremen.  Awake!

Brave New World

Before  I begin this latest blog, may I just post links to my other blog Waking The Monkey! the online version of my book of the same title about my experiences at the Hundredth Monkey world healing camp

Introduction to Waking The Monkey!

Contents

Chapter 0: The Fool

Chapter 1: Arrival

Chapter 2: And So It Begins… 

Chapter 3: Mururoa Allting

 And so to my thoughts on one of the most important books of the twentieth century...

Brave New World

I’ve just finished reading Brave New World, written by Aldous Huxley in 1931.  As many people know, it is a famous and highly influential seminal book that has given immense insight into the present and ongoing state of the developed world today.

It could almost be taken as a textbook for the implementation of the ‘dumbed down’ culture which has so taken hold of the mass mind.

Clearly a great deal has already been written about this over many years, and it is not my intention to simply repeat all that.  However I would urge anyone who has not read it to find a copy and read it.  I found a nice old orange and white 1950s Penguin edition in my local Oxfam bookshop, readers of this blog will know of the pleasure I take from old editions.  At a mere 200 pages it is a very easy read, only taking me two days.  It is a curious mix between the description of the banal culture which has become endemic throughout the world and the deep philosophical insight of John Savage who has grown up in an ‘uncivilised’ reservation with only a technical handbook from his mother, and the complete works of Shakespeare for his literary education.

This device is used to allow the immortal bard to speak through John Savage, quoting mostly from the Tempest (Miranda’s comment about the ‘brave new world’ which comes to her in the form of the drunken sailors used for the title), but also, Hamlet, Othello and other plays.

While brilliant in his usage of this poetic language to critique the emotionally vacuous values of the society conditioned to only seek pleasure and consumption, while avoiding all conflict, it is also the keyhole view into the essential flaw of the philosophy espoused by the world state, but which Huxley barely touches upon in this work.  It is intriguing that he later explored the spiritual dimension and his other most famous work ‘The Doors of Perception’ engages with this to a degree.

The key feature of the Brave New World is the control of everyone from conception, first by chemical manipulation of the foetus and then through childhood conditioning, in order to suit them perfectly to their economic function in society.  Even the deliberately retarded lower castes are happy with their lot because they have been built to be so.  And as the Controller for Western Europe explains to the rebels near the end of the book, when Cyprus was cleared and repopulated exclusively with Alphas, the intellectual and administrative class, they soon came to civil war since they all wanted the ‘high grade’ jobs and rebelled against ‘a spell of low grade work’, and shortly begged the World Government to reassume control.

In the Brave New World there is no social mobility, no unexpected chance, no variation that is not planned for.  A stifling and stultifying stagnation has descended upon human society allowing for no change, development or evolution of any kind.  Even most technical innovations are dead ended since they are considered a threat to stability.  John Savage himself is a similar threat since he refuses to engage in free sex or the pleasure drug soma and is a potential social contaminant of discontent.

Huxley, writing as he was in the aftermath of the Great War, the Russian Revolution and at the time of the Great Depression, appears to be posing a dilemma between the chaos of the nationalist, class and economic struggles of his time and the stability of total control.  Perhaps I should not disclose the final denouement for those who have yet to read this great work, but suffice it to say that Huxley, through his hero Savage, appears to see no way out.

Not that he is advocating the totalitarian behaviourist state:  his sympathies appear to be with the philosophical insight and existential plight of the stranger in the strange land who is Savage, yet poses in opposition to this the crushing weight of the Controller’s argument that too much freedom inevitably leads to conflict.  Thus only the elite of elites should have the power to make real choices, relieving the mass of the population, even most of the Alpha class, of this burden.

So far so bad.  But Huxley has himself presented the crack in the armour which potentially offers a way out, though whether he saw it himself or not at the time is open to debate.

It is the exclusive reliance on intellectual and academic development as the criteria of class position.  He himself was a product of the British class system which itself was founded on such an assumption, at least for those who had to work rather than being born to the aristocracy.  This was the product of centuries of social Darwinism whereby power and control had become the sole deciding value.  All other values are seen as either subsidiary, subservient to it, or else irrelevant and either to be discarded or destroyed as a potential threat.

What might be termed the ‘yin’ values of the native peoples (on whom he based his savage reservation of Native Americans) of lands overtaken by the Empire of Western Dominance, or within our own culture as ‘feminine values’ are seen as of no economic value, and therefore have no place within the Brave New World.  When shall we see womanly times?

It is in ‘the spell of low grade work’ that the key lies.  All the Alphas on Cyprus wanted to be the Administrator who tells everyone else what to do.  None are willing to sweep or sow or cook.  But these things in themselves have value, it is only that the value assigned to them by the Alphas is small, though they benefit from them as much as anyone.  It is no coincidence that the term ‘Alpha’ is often associated with ‘Male’.  The Alpha Male is the leader of the tribe in so called ‘primitive’ cultures or animal herds.  But even in such cases the Alpha has earned that position by taking risks and showing better leadership or greater strength than his rivals.

In modern society apparently too many people think that they deserve this status while it actually becomes less and less useful.  A popular song tells us that ‘Everybody wants to rule the world’.  At least too many do.  While in actual fact we need to take responsibility for what is in our own purview, and not seek to dominate others.  Such domination is an avoidance of things we might think to be beneath our dignity, while actual dignity is found in engaging with these things.  An unwillingness to get our hands dirty is a sign of alienation from the real world.  Role models such as ‘royalty’ as seen today are a perversion.  The ancient kings would stand at the front of their army in battle, would lead by example, were servants of their people, would die for them if required, and so earned the right to be the Alpha.  They did not inherit wealth and status and power simply through the accident of their ancestry.

I believe it was Martin Luther King who said (though I am willing to stand corrected) that should life put us in the position of sweeping streets for a living, then we should sweep the street as if we were Michelangelo painting the Sistine Chapel.  When a mother washes her soiled infant she does not see it as low status work, but does it with love and treats her child as though he were the infant Jesus.  This is the highest status work that can be imagined, a labour of love and service.

If we all gave that devotion to whatever tasks life presents to us, and equally, if we all valued such tasks when performed for us by others then there would be no ‘low grade work’ or ‘high grade work’, but only devotional service to the whole community.  We would not need people to be bred and conditioned to ‘love their servitude’.  It would not be servitude ~ servitude is a relationship to a person or a system which is in domination and command over one.  Service is the correct nature of work when carried out in freedom rather than coercion.

But a system of thought which sees only economic value and sees no spiritual value in people will only see their work in terms of economic value, human relationships become no more than commerce instead of love, respect and trust.

This is the grand conflict the world faces today.  The economic, financial and corporate elites, and those whose souls are stunted by generations of separation from what it truly means to be human such as the royalties and aristocrats who trace their ancestries into the mists of history are in danger of destroying the human race with their unsatiated lust to keep the billions of ‘proles’ as Orwell would put it, in perpetual servitude.  We see this in the debt enslavement and dispossession that has advanced apace in recent times.  Ancient nations in their entirety have been swallowed up into the servitude to the bloated coffers of these elites.  Human need has been discarded for the greed of these power elites, and the sleight of hand which leads to both Huxley’s Brave New World and Orwell’s 1984 is almost complete.

The only antidote to this is the assertion and practise of human value.  Service through willingness and love.  Revolution by force will only replace one power elite with another.  The Alpha Controllers of the world cannot see this because they are trapped in their own prison of intellectual domination, while they separate themselves from humanity and their own souls.  The challenge of the present time is not one of economics, intellect or how to ensure the people love their servitude, but one of soul, human feeling and service to one another through love and respect.

Afterword

My own background is one in which I was brought up with an Alpha education at schools which I am reliably informed are in the top class of the English establishment.

There is no question in my mind that academically speaking they were indeed very good.  But while I had seven years of Latin, science teachers who were the best in their field, an introduction to literature that I would probably not have had in the state system, and so forth, the regime brutalised me and left me so damaged that it took me many years to find a way out and heal myself.

Without delving into the idiosyncrasies of my personal psychological makeup suffice it to say that by my late teens I had embarked on a quest of personal spiritual discovery that has spanned the last forty years of my life.  I could perhaps have taken the opportunity to integrate myself into the system and had a more comfortable life in material terms; I remember how in my late twenties my father offered to pull some strings and find me a position in the Civil Service, but I couldn’t give up who I was.

It has been a lonely path in many ways, and for that I identify with the experience of John Savage.  Like him I was in part spat out by the class in which I was brought up, but also like him, I had spat it out too.  Rootless for some years I sought a place where I could give service only to find, even when such a place where I now abide presented itself, that I was a fish out of water in many respects.  It is a tragic irony that the community I have given service to often treats me with suspicion and it has been a hard realisation that this is a class mistrust.  I once had a working class friend who perpetually accused me of looking down on her because of her class, despite the fact that I never once said anything to give her cause, while she was almost obsessed by my class background.  Sadly a case of projection.

Like John Savage I seek a world beyond the class expectations and dominance that we find in our society today, but it has been a grim realisation, slow to dawn on me, that like the Deltas of Huxley’s world, too many people are wedded to the position they found themselves born into, though unlike those contented Deltas, they live in a state of class envy and resentment.

If we are truly to find a new way of being which can lead the world out of the parlous state into which it has fallen, we must first free ourselves from our conditioning, free ourselves from judging others by their class, their race, their education, their religion, their economic status and all the rest; we must see each other as unique souls worthy of respect, worthy of being served with love in humility, and dispense with this corrupt and perverse model of human relations as mere commerce for profit in which one party is bound in servitude to another, even to soulless corporate bodies, worse even than the ties of serf to mediaeval lord, in which at least some elements of loyalty and responsibility might show themselves.

To achieve this we must first see the dignity of the human soul, in oneself and in each other.  We must have compassion even for the lost soul of the dominator who seeks satiety in sucking us dry like the symbolic vampire, for in that symbol lies a profound truth.  We, though materially sucked dry, have that which the vampires seek, because they have lost contact with their souls.

We must renounce the servitude which repays us only with soma and circuses and reclaim our souls, give ourselves in service to our fellows and find that value in them shown in the washing of the disciples feet by Jesus.  To do so is not to submit, but in the recognition of our soul value we assert ourselves as more powerful than those who seek to exploit us.  It is better to die free than live in chains.

We must shine our light for others, though the darkness comprehend it not, neither can it overcome it.