Good news…she’s dead!

MARGARET THATCHER – MESSIAH OR MONSTER?

There can’t be many events that more accurately reflect the divided state of global consciousness than Margaret Thatcher’s funeral.

Not elections – voting for political leaders tends to reveal what we THINK about things.

But we’re at a stage in evolution where thinking no longer serves us.

We have some of the best minds at our disposal.  Since the age of enlightenment, we’ve banished ignorance and harnessed the power of rational THINKING. We have unprecedented access to more and better information and knowledge.

Nothing much is changing.

Because change happens when there is sufficient energy to make it happen and for this we need some way of collectively harnessing FEELING.

This presents a great big huge problem.

Because we don’t know how we FEEL about anything. 

We’re divided.

Margaret Thatcher’s rise to power coincided with the global rise of narcissism – the rise of the individual.

“There is no society” she famously quipped – just individuals striving to make a better life; climbing the ladder of success by whatever means possible.  Selfishness is good.

“He’s one of us” was another of her sayings – thus galvanizing the “Us and Them” debate:

Us – hardworking, focused, goal oriented

Them – lazy, idle scroungers.

We now live in the culmination of these two themes – i.e. we live in a deeply divided, narcissistic society.

Obscene wealth and Debt slavery.

The news is full of the devastation caused by welfare cuts yet there’s a waiting list for five star restaurants and $200 theatre tickets.

Free and Not so free

Children can download pornography but Bradley Manning is still incarcerated for revealing truths about the military.

Obese and Skinny

The celebrity culture of ‘thin’ has led to an increasing crisis of Anorexia and Bulimia; while obesity has reached epidemic proportions.

Good food and Bad food

Vegetables that are grown organically in mineral rich soil and animals that live a normal life and are VERY EXPENSIVE.  Frankenstein foods – pumped full of pesticides, antibiotics and growth enhancers while chained in cramped conditions on a floor of sewage, which are VERY PROFITABLE.

We’re pretty much at the end of the road of this dual existence. 

Most of us will never ‘WIN’ and get to the other side where we are wealthy, healthy, free and thin.

So if Margaret’s rise to power mirrored the rise of narcissism, could her death signal the end of it?

Narcissists are very attractive people.

Being focused, they are able to achieve anything.  They are decisive and don’t waver – whether taking on Hunger strikers, Miners or Argentinians.  They don’t let any pesky FEELINGS get in the way of a good idea.

We love this because we hate indecisiveness.  And because we think ‘nice people’ are hopeless at achieving goals.

But there’s a secret about Narcissists!!

Their grandiosity is driven by shame.  They cling to the notion of themselves as ‘special’ people in order to wall off the FEELING of inadequacy.

Because they are walled off, they can’t receive REAL LOVE, so they live on admiration and applause (which they can hear through the wall.)

They can’t bear criticism because it triggers the shame, so they surround themselves with ‘Yes” men. (Thatcher’s cabinet).

Having no connection to their REAL SELF with their own inner values, they align themselves to the personalities of others – describing themselves as a bit of a Churchill or a Steve Jobs, a John Wayne or a Mother Theresa.

They use fantasy to distance themselves from the monster behind the wall, and in so doing create a monster of their own devising – the self-serving Narcissist.

Hmmm… so that’s me then.  A recovering narcissist.

The narcissist reflects the deep division or our times – they look at people who are losing in order feel better about themselves or they look at people who are winning and feel envious.

They think that if everyone was equal there would be no fun in life because winning and losing is the only game in town.

But we have to invent a new game if we’re going to survive as a species.

Margaret was a Grand Master of the game… for a time.  In the end (as portrayed so brilliantly by Meryl Streep) she lost the ultimate game – which is to love and be loved.

The sadness of the narcissist is the fact that they never know what it is to be loved and appreciated for who they really are.

With no real sense of self and no real inner values, they have to ‘wear’ their adopted values by attending the funerals of people who seemed to possess them in spades.

Why else go to a funeral of someone you don’t know personally – duh!

There is a lot of hoopla around Margaret Thatcher’s funeral. 

This isn’t just the death of an old woman – it is the death of an archetype.

The last big state funeral was that of Diana – another archetype.

People didn’t know her personally, so the mass outpouring of grief was another hoopla.  It was the death of the Princess.  The death of Glinda, the Good Witch.

Now we have the funeral of Margaret – the death of the despotic Queen, the Bad Witch.

Neither of them is true… or real.

But to transcend them we have to go Beyond Duality

Beyond either/or to both/and

Beyond the Narcissist…

To what is real.

Now THAT would be WICKED…

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April 12, 2013

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The Bible – still literal after all these years.

So the biggest U.S. cable TV blockbuster of the year is… The Bible.  Five two hour programs that cover the story of the world from Genesis to Revelation.  Eleven million viewers per episode.  Satan looks distinctly Muslim.  The fundamentalists are vindicated.

Stories, myths, fables, allegories are wonderful vehicles for understanding the world we live in.  How sad therefore that one of the biggest stories of all time remains firmly in the literal one.  At a time in history when we could really do with some wisdom from the higher realms, all we hear is a rousing chorus of “Gimmy that old time religion”.

One of the most interesting developments of recent times is the coming together of science and spirituality.  As we evolve, we go from a literal to a symbolic interpretation of events.  Here is the story so far…

1.  Literal 1.0

God made the world in 6 days.

God looks very much like a human male – extra large version.  He has big emotions (mainly restricted to extreme wrath).  He has big thoughts (there is a grand plan but we are too small to understand it, so we have to trust).

Scientists are crazy people with threatening ideas.  We can’t have evolved from bacteria, via apes because we are made in God’s LITERAL image.  (Any non physical interpretation of ‘image’ is just too much for Version 1.0 consciousness to cope with).

2.  Literal 2.o

God had a son who came down to show the world how things should be – peace, harmony and unconditional love.

Methods for acquiring this new operating platform are forgiveness of others (remove the wood from your own eye before you try to extract the splinter in your brother’s) and prayer (praise God and love your neighbour.)

Exceptions to this rule – any people who disagree, in which case it’s ok to kill them. (Version 2.0 consciousness does not cope well with irony or paradox).

Scientists are tolerated (we love the medical advances) but need to be kept in check in case they attempt to ‘play God’ (stem cell research/abortion) in which case it’s ok to kill them.

3.  Pre-symbolic 

Two big themes emerge.

1.  ’We create our own reality’.  

Scientists discover that the world is made of vibrating atoms.  Visual sight is deceptive (warning things in the mirror appear solid!).

If things are not solid, then everything is connected to everything else energetically. Waves become particles, particles disappear into waves.  Thoughts (energy) become things (particles).

If a prayer is a thought (hint your lips don’t have to move) then we are ‘praying’ whenever we are thinking – ie ALL THE TIME.

If the things we create match the vibration of our thoughts, then it’s the quality of our vibration that’s most important.  In other words if we pray for world peace but we are angry we create world anger.  If we pray for abundance but we feel mean, we create scarcity.

When we look around us to the state of the world, we can see that most of our prayers have in fact been answered!

2.  ’All is One’

Pre the Big Bang we were all one, then we split into millions of particles (expansion) and eventually there will be a coming together again (contraction.)

The principle of Projection is the key to understanding our world. We see people not as they are but as we are (hence the meaning of the splinter and the wood).  Forgiveness is not about ‘being the better person’, it’s a method for healing the unconscious aspects of our own selves.

When Jesus was hauled before Pilate and asked mockingly if he was ‘King of the Jews’ he didn’t say yes or no, he said “It is as you say it is”.

This is a CLUE people.

4.  Symbolic

So here we are at the cutting edge of the new paradigm, with our two big themes… only this is how Literal 1.0 consciousness seems to be interpreting them.

‘We create our own reality’ 

We were happy in the Garden of Eden, creating Jack shit. Everything was provided for us. Then we ate from the Tree of Knowledge. This was a VERY BAD IDEA and should not have happened.  God knows best.  Don’t think… and stay away from Apple products.

‘All is One’

The ‘expansion’ was the separation from God in the Garden of Eden, from which point on we had to prove ourselves worthy of being taken back to heaven.

The ‘contraction’ is Judgement Day. Not a happy reunion, but a time when we come before the court of God to see how well we did on earth, and are subsequently consigned to an eternity in hell or heaven.

We create hell or heaven in every moment… with our collective thoughts.

Sometimes I fear we’re going backwards, not forwards in the story of evolution. If everything is energy and  we’re going in two different directions what happens next?We’ve seen what happens when we split the atom, what happens when we split the world?

Television is scary.  

But people are scarier still.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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March 30, 2013

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An Indian farmer commits suicide every 30 minutes

And no-one gives a rat’s ass.

There are a lot of things to get angry about – death by malaria carrying mosquitos, the Aids virus or the crazy new weather.  These are pretty much out of our hands or “Acts of God” if you’re a warped fundamentalist.  But there’s a new killer on the block – one entirely of our own making.  And we can do something about this one.

The shocking statistic above is brought to you courtesy of Monsanto, who are giving the Old Testament God a run for his money – they’ve notched up a death toll of over a quarter of a million farmers in the last sixteen years.

If you’re not familiar with capitalism, it goes like this. 

Monsanto, purveyors of genetically modified seed, did a deal with the Indian government.  In exchange for being allowed to sell their Frankenstein seed creations to the Indian farmers, the Indian government received International Monetary Fund loans, hence allowing the huge economic expansion of the nineties.

Monsanto cosied up to the farmers in the manner of a drug dealer at the school date, extolling the virtues of the new seeds – better yields, parasite resistant, a golden egg laying goose at the end of the giant beanstalk.  I made up the last one but metaphorically speaking it still holds.

Given that the farmers were largely illiterate, this selling bonanza didn’t constitute a particularly hard day at the office for the Monsanto employees.

Once the seeds were planted the farmers discovered a few less wholesome side effects – reading the small print not being a speciality of theirs.  Or reading any print for that matter…

Reasons to be suicidal 1-2-3

First of all the seeds were BARREN.  For centuries, farmers in India would plant crops, then save the seeds for replanting the following year.  With genetically modified seeds this isn’t possible – they have to go back to the dealer every year to buy new seeds.

This marketing technique works great when you’re dealing in say ink cartridges – sell a useless piece of crap Hewlett Packard printer for less than the cost of the box it came in, then charge an exorbitant amount for the ink cartridges.

But at least nobody is dying in Office Supplies.

Second – the farmers found that they had to buy tons of Monsanto pesticides to help the seeds grow.  This is like an After Sales Package that you find is compulsory but not included in the original price – again no problem in the cynical, suspicious Western world.  Most of us go looking for that kind of shit before buying anything.  Besides we have Google, Amazon reviews and Twitter to help us navigate the muddy waters of “salespeak”.

Not so the illiterate farmers.

Lastly, the farmers discovered that many of these seeds (in particular the cotton seed) needed excessive irrigation in order to thrive.  Remember this is India we’re talking about, not Seattle.  India is known for many things, but an abundance of water is not one of them.

The crops fail, loans are taken out – high risk so at exorbitant interest rates – debt and destitution follows.  In a fitting “fuck you” tribute to Monsanto, the preferred form of suicide is death by drinking Monsanto pesticides.

Over a quarter of a million deaths – the largest recorded suicide rate in history.

Meanwhile back in base camp, what’s going on with the friendly folk at Monsanto, who’ve been getting a bit of bad press lately.

Reasons to get angry 1-2-3

First, by spending vast amounts of money, they have successfully fended off legislation that would require them to put “genetically modified” on food labels.  They said this would be “befuddling” to consumers.  But let’s not forget the $45m dollar campaign that helped them sway the vote (versus the $8m from the organic food companies).

Even if the jury’s out about the health consequences of eating GMOs, at least labeling would allow us to support the farmers by NOT BUYING stuff from a morally bankrupt corporation.

Second, Monsanto won’t allow independent research on the grounds that their seeds are patented.  Non-independent research isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on.  Remember the scene in Mad Men when the guys from Lucky Strike were ridiculing the evidence that cigarettes were harmful to health.  That wasn’t fiction.

Many of the ads in the sixties actually stated the health benefits of smoking.  Camel came out with an ad “More Doctors smoke Camels”.  They maintained to the bitter end, that cigarettes were non addictive by conducting their own research and skewing the results in their favour.

Lastly Monsanto have the funds to recruit a powerful team of lobbyists working on their behalf, to clean up their image.  One of them is a very vocal environmentalist – Mark Lynas – who once was anti GM but has now converted to the other side, presumably after some damascene moment whereby huge amounts of cash knocked him from his donkey.

In order to make this event more significant Mark has upped his status from “anti GM” to “Co-founder of the anti GM movement in the UK” – before his conversion that is.  Rather hilariously, Sue Mayer of Gene Watch refuted his credentials thus “I find it strange that though we spoke on the phone once in the late 90s and never met, that I missed the fact that you helped start the anti GM movement.”

I suspect that the going price for “turning” an environmentalist wouldn’t even make a dent in the petty cash tin of a corporation the size of Monsanto.

We need to insist on labeling so we can vote with our cash.  The rural poor in India don’t have that luxury.  In many places the only food they have access to is Genetically Modified.

There’s even a price on a rat’s ass.

 

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February 21, 2013

13 Comments

Geometricity – the new shape of power

21^st December 2012 left a few hippies on mountains looking a little confused.  The world didn’t end.  No spaceships arrived to whisk away the faithful.

As usual, it was our interpretation of data that got skewed.  We always take everything so damned literally.  It’s not the world, but the world as we know it that’s come to an end.

I doubt if people living in 1450 woke up one morning and said “things feel a little different.  Perhaps it’s the Renaissance.”  There were tell tale signs.  People who’d worn beige, sack like tunics for years discovered the joy in color and a few strategically placed darts.   It was the end of the road for flat two-dimensional paintings.  “Hey guys there’s this really cool thing – it’s called PERSPECTIVE!”

It was a great time to be a bohemian artist.

It happened again between 1760 and 1820 when the Industrial Revolution changed the world for ever.  It was all about machine power.  Machines could do the work of a hundred men, and the invention of electricity ensured the work could be carried out both day and night.  We built and engineered the shit out of everything – then we started on the third world.  Roads, railways, bridges, factories.  Our buzz word was PRODUCTIVITY.

It was a great time to be a scientist.

It’s happening now…

But this time, the hippies and the scientists are both in agreement.   We are leaving behind the world of matter and we are entering the world of energy.

Scientists have discovered that 96% of the universe is missing – they know it’s there but it’s INVISIBLE STUFF!

And the invisible stuff contains an awful lot of power.

The beginning of this movement started in 1945 when we split the atom.  It was difficult for the common folk to get their head around this creative leap in science, so the US were happy to demonstrate what it meant, by dropping bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  They took the smallest thing known on the planet – an atom – split it in half and created enough power to wipe out half of Japan!

That’s a lot of power in something very small.

Shortly after this, in the sixties, the hippies started their own exploration into the invisible stuff.  Though they liked to travel to festivals in brightly colored VW camper vans, their journey was an internal rather than an external one.  LSD helped them through the doors of perception to alternative reality.

When they came back, they struggled to describe this reality with any words that made sense.  In the end they resorted to “It’s just all about the love, man.  There’s like this energy and it’s just love.  It’s like all there is, Dude.”

The scientists meanwhile got even bigger microscopes and discovered that the new “smallest thing known on the planet” could be simultaneously both a particle AND a wave – it could be either matter or energy.

And the thing that determined which it was going to be?…  OUR MIND!

Now the creative output from the new world of energy speeded up big time.

Doctors discovered that 80% of placebos worked just as well as chemical medicines – the power of mind over matter, being the same as the power of energy over particles.

Scientists created the Internet – instant communication across space and time via E mail.  Think a thought and POW…  it’s half way across the world at the click of a button.  We don’t need a physical anything any more.  WE LAUGH IN THE FACE OF PARTICLES.

The hippies birthed the new age spirituality movement, whereby prayers (thought intentions) could do everything from healing physical disease, to manifesting a brand new BMW.  “You create your own reality… live the life of your dreams. Sign up, send money, start new life today”.

It’s time for a reality check.

So far in the energy age, we are not doing too well.  People are sicker than ever and the only people living the life of their dreams are the people telling other people how to live the life of their dreams.

It’s always been the case that we are only as effective as the tools we have at our disposal.

Our tool in this energy age is the mind. 

Our thinking needs an upgrade. 

After all if 96% of the universe is missing, and we’re part of the universe, that means 96% of our mind is missing.  Scary huh?

No wonder we’re so ineffective.  I always suspected something was amiss.  If positive thoughts (prayers) can change someone’s reality then negative thoughts must be capable of the same thing right?  This being the case, how come George Bush and all the Wall Street bankers are still alive and kicking?  With all those negative thoughts coming their way, they should at least have some incurable disease by now.

We don’t know how to use the instrument of our mind. 

Our minds are lazy and ineffective, engaged in constant re-runs of old thinking programs.  Sure they were sharp enough for the world we used to live in but times have changed.  In this new energy world, they’re about as useful as a steam engine in a software factory.

We have no idea what the mind is, what it does, what it’s capable of doing and how to use it.

It’s not enough to live in the superficial La La Land of the 4 per cent.  We need to dig deeper and reach higher.  Greater consciousness requires a bit more rigour than kicking back with a latte and sending light and love on Facebook.  And anyway, what does that mean exactly?

Our old thinking programs are directly linked to the energy of our emotions, and we hide them under a sophisticated exterior.  It’s our emotions that created the flight or flight mechanism, so useful in the jungle.  But now that we live in urban “thinking” jungles, this fight or flight response has morphed into a “punish or withdraw” one.

It’s all about the management of energy.  Fear, anger, heartbreak, betrayal and jealousy all create a tendency to punish others with our thoughts or withdraw from them with our energy.

In a way, the universe is perfectly engineered to allow us just enough power to create, without allowing us access to the kind of power that (given our level of consciousness) could cause mass destruction.

However, one of the outcomes of the energy age is our increasing connectedness.  We are now a global community with very different levels of consciousness.  This is slightly scary when we know there are people out there, who think the consequence of hitting the button on the nuclear warhead is an eternity of sex with female virgins and handsome boys.  Oh… and untold wealth.

Perhaps, on reflection, we might have entered the energy age too soon.

We now have two options.

A.  Kill them all.

1. Not possible.
2. Like space invaders, crazy people come back multiplied.
3. How would you recognize them?  There are lots of seriously crazy people masquerading as normal people.  Some of them are running countries.  Some of them are in charge of the global banking system.

B.  Get smarter so we can create better patterns.

1. 96% is a very big number – that’s a lot of untapped resource.
2. It just makes more sense.

One day in the future we will look back and it will all seem so obvious.

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January 9, 2013

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So this is Christmas…

And not just any old Christmas but the last Christmas of the Mayan calendar.

So much has been written about the significance of 21^st December 2012 – from the literal “It’s the end of the world” to the metaphorical – “It’s the end of the world as we know it” and everything in between.

Most people fall into the “everything in between” category.  They remember all the doomsday prophecies around 1^st January 2000 when it was rumored that all the computers in the world would stop working, that peoples’ entire medical records would cease to exist and planes would drop out of the sky. A lot of companies bought the hype and spent an enormous amount of money on “Year 2000 solutions.”  And of course many other people got hugely wealthy selling these solutions to them.

This is how we operate as a species.  Our modus operandi is fear, therefore the vision for our future is built around defence. 

In the Western world, most of us don’t have a daily struggle to find clean water, shelter and something to eat that won’t kill us, yet we are consumed with anxiety and because we are enterprising, entire industries have sprung up to capitalize on our fear driven emotions…

Insurance companies – What if we fall sick, get injured, can’t pay our mortgage, have our house broken into, leave a bag on the bus, drop coca cola on the computer?

Financial services – How will we protect our money and keep it from the taxman?  How will we know if interest rates are going to go up or down?  What if the Dow Jones wobbles?  Can we even get our head around the pension thing?

Pro-Life companies (forget the anti abortion brigade – we’re the ones who want to live… and we want to live forever).  Cosmetic surgeons, health spas, collagen implants, oxygen tents, nanobots. Because the only fear greater than death is the fear that we might age!!

Expensive food – food that is whole, raw, organic, sprouted, hand rolled, loved, free from GMOs, E numbers and the various interventions of big business.  The kind of food that will guarantee we stay young for ever.

Fast food – because we’re so busy earning enough money to pay for all of the above, it’s the only thing we have time to eat.

Eets crazy.

And that’s just the fears we personally preside over.  On top of these are the government sponsored fear based industries –  corporations that make BILLIONS OF DOLLARS from the sale of increasingly absurd airport scanning equipment; cyber security, anti terrorism procedures, weapons grade weapons, genetically modified dogs… it’s endless.

On the other hand, this has to signal a high five for the “end of the world as we know it” brigade.  We can’t go on like this.  At some point we have to bring in some better intelligence.

It’s time for the quiet, reasonable voices of science and spirituality to be heard.

From the scientific point of view, it’s simple magnetics.  Defence calls forth attack.  From the spiritual perspective the answer is – and always has been – love.  Love, being the opposite of fear is the only thing that can change reality for the better.  Love is the only thing that can make someone feel safe – contrary to popular opinion, no amount of hand guns can do that.

This is a conundrum for the people who want to make fortunes out of our capacity for fear… they can’t make money out of love.  In order to get around this troublesome problem, they just changed the definition of love.  Hey presto!  Now love has financial value.  It was a clever and heinous branding exercise.

Which brings us to Christmas!

Every year, what should be a joyous celebration of the love we feel for each other, is turned into an anxiety ridden charade, for the benefit of… you guessed it corporations who want to feed on our fear.

The fear of buying the wrong present – spending too little (if they spend more on me, I’ll be embarrassed) or spending too much (if I buy this and they get me a cheese grater I’m going to be really pissed off).  The difficulty of spending EQUALLY.  If I buy one friend a gift of $50 and another a gift of $32 it will look like I care less for them so I need to find an extra present to even things up.

The inevitable outcome of the above dilemma – “Ask Dad what he wants, then you buy it, I’ll wrap it and we can all just act surprised on Christmas morning”.  (I did mention charades).

The absurd stress of rushing around aimlessly buying things that nobody needs.  In order to fulfil what exactly?  Some ancient tradition?  No, this has all been created in the past fifty years by corporations who want to make their end of year sales targets.  Since the invention of the credit card, the notion of being without something we need is a quaint memory.  If we need something we buy it… we don’t wait around for a few months in the vague hope that someone will pick up on the fact we really need something, so they can buy it for us at Christmas.  Ergo everything we receive is superfluous to our needs – further adding to the burden of “stuff” that we accumulate over time.

There is the blatant association of gifts and love – the more you love someone, the more expensive the gift should be.  Spending money ‘proves’ how much you love someone.  Just as people are struggling with one of the worst recessions in the western world they’re hit with the 24/7 anxiety producing advertising of luxury goods.  “If you really love her… “

Or even more disconcerting the association between the size of the gift and the size of the appreciation.  There is a hideous advert in the U.S. for Kay jewellery whose strapline is  “Every kiss begins with Kay.”  Subtext… buy this diamond pendant and there’s a good chance you’ll get laid.  It would be more honest to chuck a few hundred dollars on the bedside table.  Subtext… I haven’t got the brains or the poetry to make a meaningful connection with you.  You seem to be easily distracted by bright shiny objects, so get your kit off and we’ll call what happens love.

Lastly of course, there’s the piece de resistance… the all consuming fear of the credit card bill that lands ominously in early January, just as the fog of the New Year’s Eve hangover has cleared.  No wonder mid January has the highest suicide rate of the year.

Are we getting how insane this is yet?

Life has become very complex, but it isn’t complicated, it is in fact very simple.

1.  The force that drives all our actions and all our behaviours needs to change from fear to love.

2.  We need to reclaim love.

Instead of driving ourselves crazy trying to think of clever, creative gifts (then in frustration throwing down the plastic card again) we need to remember a simple fact.

Nothing we really need costs money.

We need to be loved, we need to be seen, we need to be appreciated, we need to be listened to, we need to be comforted, we need to be inspired.  We need to laugh, we need to cry, we need to talk past midnight, we need to love, we need to care, we need to connect, we need to gaze into each others eyes and feel the miracle of existence.

None of these things cost money.

The revolution doesn’t have to involve bloodshed and barricades.  We don’t have to figure a way to outwit the fat cat corporations and the million dollar bonus bankers, we could kill them more effectively by choosing to spend less and love more.

Could love finally trump fear?  Like Neo in the Matrix, could we wake up and stop buying the illusion we’ve been fed.

It’s the end of the world as we know it.  And not before time.

 

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December 17, 2012

4 Comments

Giving thanks…

It’s been a bit of a journey… 

Travel is indeed the best of times and the worst of times.

There’s the exhilaration of freedom and the deprivation caused by the absence of the familiar.  There’s the spontaneous joy in unexpected delights and the crashing disappointment when expectations aren’t met.

Because I’m writing a book about the transcendent experience, Mount Shasta just had to be on the itinerary. 

This is the epicenter of the metaphysical world where allegedly Lemurians and Pleiadians, roam the streets, though of course being extremely high vibrational beings they are invisible to dense, uninitiated people like myself.  They live inside the mountain.

The mountain is spectacular, so it’s easy to project magical wonderment onto its surface.  When we take ourselves out of our technological world for long enough we can’t fail to be astonished by the natural one.

But then humans get involved and turn a pretty logging town into Merlin’s back lot.  Now there are more crystals than groceries.  The high street is a hotch potch of pendulums, pentagles and pot – the pourri version, only infused with special powers.

Everything is imported.

It being freezing cold, I spent a lot of my time in the organic coffee shops meeting the locals. The question ‘What d’you do for a living?’ produced tarot readers, energy healers and light workers. The term ‘overfished pond’ came to mind.

One of the girls I questioned looked at me with disdain and said she didn’t DO anything as though that was the most absurd idea in the world – she was just BEING.  (The universe provides donchaknow).  She’d been just BEING for the past four years.  I wondered what her parents had to be DOING to support this lifestyle.

It didn’t help that I stayed in a horrible bed and breakfast with a cold lumpy single bed, where geriatric cats were treated as deities.  This meant they could pee wherever they decided while their owner fussed and fretted over them. She was obviously immune to the smell.

Needless to say I couldn’t wait to leave.  So much so that I managed to pick up not one but TWO speeding tickets.  I arrived in San Francisco to stay with my lovely friends John and Tony and immediately collapsed with a feverish virus.  It was as if my body said ‘You’re home, you can recover now.’

I slept for days, was fed soup, soaked my aching bones in the hot tub.  Friends are the most amazing thing in the world – they’re way better than mountains.  It was this thought that prompted me to recall the radio program on the long drive.  Because of the huge number of people who want to live alone, and can’t afford a normal sized flat, California are building micro housing units.

The times they are a changing.

In 1950 22% of Americans were single, today that number is over 50%.  That’s a lot of people unable to live with people.

Why is this?  The answer most single people give is that they need their space.  But people have always needed space.  In the old days they went off for a few days to the mountain, thought about stuff then came back down as happier, wiser people.  These days in an emotionally mature society it would look like this…

Person A  “I need some space”

Person B  “Great, that gives me a chance to go to the movies or learn to tango or drink a couple of vanilla lattes while reading the paper in Starbucks.”

Result – harmonious living together.

But at school all of us were taught to articulate our thoughts not our feelings.  We are perfectly happy talking about literature, politics, history and all the other subjects on the school curriculum, but we have no idea how to hold the more difficult conversations.  So the above scenario usually goes something like this…

Person A becomes silent (believing the other person will intuit the words ‘I need space’ without them actually being said.

Person B feels wounded (they don’t like me) or anxious (what have I done wrong).

Result – tears before bedtime.

Another reason for the great solo migration is the belief that there will be inevitable compromises and that these signify a great burden.  Parents live with compromise on a daily basis so have first hand knowledge of this myth.  After a long day at the office when they would prefer to collapse in front of the tv, they happily traipse off to see their offspring in school plays. The child’s joy becomes their joy.  If this is true for children surely we can extend the same principle to adults? Or are our hearts too small for that?

Friends keep us true. Without them we could easily become an isolated person who prefers the company of cats – or other creatures who don’t talk back, giving us the reality check we so desperately need.

The last reason for this new social trend is of course technology.  For many people the virtual world has become more real than the real one.  It’s a safe world as there are no difficult conversations, just buttons to push that say Delete or Unfriend.  Simples.  But it’s a very different sensory experience than the one experienced in ‘living’ environments.  Nature may not be as impressive but it’s alive in a whole different way.

I am as addicted to technology as the next person, but is this really the direction we want for evolution?  Will we become people with huge heads and tiny withered bodies like the aliens in science fiction movies.  Virtual information. Virtual friends. Virtual sex. Can’t we appreciate technology without becoming a slave to it?

The image of the San Franciscan micro climate makes me think of a beehive with thousands of worker bees in their individual cells – only they’ve lost their Queen.  In our masculine, left brain dominated world we’ve replaced her with the one true (masculine) God.  I am talking of course about iCloud.

Rant over.  It’s time for cooking and friends.  It’s my very first all American thanksgiving.

And for that I give untold amounts of gratitude.

 

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November 22, 2012

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Mirror Mirror on the wall…

Halloween tomorrow.  Though of course like most things on the calendar, Halloween’s been going on for a couple of weeks now.

I am currently attempting to get to New York in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, so in the meantime, here is a themed excerpt from 40 days 40 nights…

It’s Halloween.  A gaggle of girls stand at the bus stop, dressed to the nines.

There is a sexy witch with a huge hat and tiny skirt.  A fairy with clinging sparkly leotard and gossamer wings.  A vamp with plunging neckline emphasized by a trail of fake blood.

This is how the unconscious speaks – via an excuse.  It says “This is not me… Halloween demands that I dress up.” 

Of course the boys dress up too, but they can wear an old sheet or some bandages.  Dressing up for them is a lark.  Dressing up for the girls is an excuse to express their unconscious desires.  They can cavort as sexy minxes and then deny all responsibility for an aspect of their sexuality that they don’t want to own.

It’s difficult to see who has the short straw in the boys versus girls debate.  The girls struggle with the mirror that society holds up for them.  They have to be sexy to get the boy, innocent when they’ve got the boy (don’t make him jealous of other boys), nurturing when they’ve got the baby, then back to sexy again (don’t make Dad jealous of the baby.)

It’s a difficult and exhausting one-woman act to pull off. 

The boys always had it easier – get the girl, get the job.  But now things are becoming more difficult for them too.  They have to be alpha male to get the girl, funny to keep the girl (the macho stuff wears thin), new caring male when the baby comes along, while remaining alpha male in order to get laid occasionally.

The girls smile and say “Welcome to my world” or something equally unhelpful.

This whole “roles” thing that the ego has created is very flawed and in need of a complete overhaul.  If we stopped using roles to create our identity then it would be a lot easier to give them up when their time is over.

We fall in love with our roles.  Like Narcissus by the side of the pool, we fall in love with the identities we have created.  We fear that if we let them go, there will be no reflection in the mirror… and we will cease to be.

In fact the story of Narcissus is an apt metaphor for the times we live in, representing both the fears of parents and the indulgence of youth.

Narcissus was a beautiful boy whose mother was told he would live to an old age as long as he did not see his reflection.  She therefore took the obvious precaution of removing all mirrors from his vicinity.  One day while walking in the woods he stopped to drink water from a lake, saw his own reflection for the first time, and fell in love.  He could not move away from the object of his affection and so died at the waters edge.

Metaphors are brilliant because they create a bridge between the literal (lower consciousness) and the spiritual (higher consciousness).  On a literal level, this is a stupid boy, if he can’t tell the difference between a watery image and a real person.  On a metaphysical level, this is what we all do every day.

All form is energy.  It doesn’t look like energy, but now that we have magnifying glasses we know that everything is vibrating molecules.  We “see” this energy according to the lenses in our own eyes… and then we fall in love.

That’s why the phrase “I don’t know what she sees in him” is so unhelpful.  When we “see” things according to our projections, we become enchanted.  So how could Narcissus’s mother have changed the outcome of her son’s story?

As Einstein said, you can’t solve a problem with the same level of thinking that created it.  In other words you have to leave the literal world and go to a higher level of consciousness.

Narcissus needed to find his essence, not his ego identity or role.  He needed to recognize the creative spirit inside himself.  Having done this, he would have projected a different image onto the water but he would also have the inner sense to understand that he was connected to both the image and the water that contained it.

It is this inner sense or innocence that Jesus referred to when he advised “becoming like little children.”

He didn’t mean become angry, stubborn and naïve (the interpretation of some of his followers), he meant devoid of projections so that the reflection we see, is one we can live with.  One in which we can live. 

This would have been a better strategy to save Narcissus’s life.

We can’t stop children from playing out in the world.  We can only help them explore all the different dimensions of who they are.

We can’t expect them to have focus and clarity, we can only teach them how to be congruent – how to line up all the different forces of who they are behind one clear intention.

We like to skip this part, and just say “Get more focus.  Get more clarity.”

If it was this easy we’d be doing it ourselves!

I wonder how the girls will feel after their Halloween party.  As they sit on the school bus, they may be absolutely clear about their intention to pass their end of year exams.

Unfortunately, they also have to convince all the other girls – the ones in their head – some of whom are voting to have sex in a cat woman outfit.

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October 30, 2012

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