27/11/202026/11/2024 / Matters Blog - Things that Matter to Me / Leave a comment

Symbols – unlocking the key

When human beings learn the language of symbolism, a great veil will fall from their eyes

Manly P. Hall

At the end of October each year, there is a flurry of excitement. The night of the 31^st October is when the veil between the apparent physical world and the spirit world, opens wide. Across much of the western world the people are encouraged to make light of it. Children dress in demonic costumes and roam the streets knocking on stranger’s doors. This one night is when the ‘stranger danger’ thought bomb does not explode in parent’s minds. Local neighbourhood spirits offer treats to entice and draw children in. It’s viewed as all ‘quite normal’, by people who see the world through the great veil to which Hall refers.

‘Good Christian families’ ( or at least those millions in the United States of America who label themselves so ), engage in this most Pagan of all festivals as if they were celebrating a night with Mickey Mouse.

Few people pose the question, ‘what if All Hallows Eve is real?’.

I use Halloween as an example of the state of consciousness of our current civilisation in the West. Whilst it is true that many Hindus and Tibetan Buddhists for instance, have a powerful understanding of symbology, in the West ancient symbols are ‘not real’ and are treated at best as fantasy and at worst, entertainment.

In the present day, many people have retreated into a safety zone of ‘agnosticism’. They just do not believe in gnosis or ‘union with God’. The gods they trust are thier senses. There is no question when demon possessed magicians achieve the impossible on their television screens. People stare in disbelief as if, for the first time, they cannot trust their own eyes. Scientific reasoning has a lot of undoing to do, for it denies us thoughts beyond the information received from the senses. Western education has worked hard to achieve this.

In an hypnotic ‘Dance of Shiva‘ the technologies of information have built a wall between the soul and senses. To be ‘sensible’ in the English language means to be straight cut – down to earth, whilst also meaning, able to use the senses. So strong is this blockage, that thoughts of the collective soul remain a distant social memory. It is not that the memory is forgotten, although some politcal regimes desire that, it is that our perception is deceived so that reality becomes merely a fantasy and explained away as ‘just a bit of fun’.

We are educated to believe that every effect has a cause; to be rational. From childhood, westerners have been taught that coincidences happen for no reason, ghosts are tricks of the imagination and objects do not move on their own; if you tread on a crack in the pavement the bear will not really eat you…it can all be explained. Sigmund Freud wrote an essay called ‘Determinism, Belief in Chance and Superstition’ in which it was claimed rational explanations cleared the unconscious mind of irrational interpretations of the world and life. According to June Singer in her book Boundaries of the Soul, this view has changed the course of education – a process which aims beningly to turn the light on in a darkened mind.

Freud’s belief that rational explanations clear the unconscious, in the words of June Singer, ‘translated into psychological term the voices of the Enlightenment that called for the elimination of superstitions, the mystical and the non-rational in the Western intellectual tradition.’ As a Jungian psycologist Singer is sceptical to this view and I would agree. Where will we be when we have explained away everything in conclusions that are just interpretations? If you are prepared to believe in the power of the unknown you will never ‘educate away’ the unconscious and the irrational. When symbols link us to these ‘Neverlands‘, our spine should tingle.

David and Goliath retold centuries later

A trip to an ancient Egyptian temple by a group of Europeans straight from breakfast on the Nile river cruise ship, enters world for the merely curious. The guide will lead them through heavy doors into a new world where extraordinary people, long ago once trod. More than that they left for us beautifully designed and constructed buildings encoded from floor to Heaven with cartouches and pictures in relief. The entry into the Holy of Hollies in Karnac’s great halls will make them pause merely to check their camera settings and what time the taxis pick them up for the boat.

Of course this small group should be given credit for making the effort to be there but how sad they make little effort to ask ‘what went on here and what is left of it now?’ Few will entertain the idea that Temples represent a journey for mortals into their body, soul and spirit.

There is a temple in a New York museum which was transport block by block from Egypt. A modern mystic, Lorna Burne who is familiar with angels from early childhood, reports that there is a spirit in this temple in great anguish. The spirit circles in endless frustration that the temple has been moved and needs to be returned. Tell archaeologists that and they are likely to do little more than laugh.

Just as Halloween is reduced to a social joke, so are most experiences of those who make sense of things without using their senses. It’s as if modern cultures need a way of holding off the forces which they distrust, like an ancient DNA memory of a fear of spiders, rats and snakes. It is as if we have repressed our fears into two rationalisations labelled good and bad, then explore one but not the other.

Many modern religionists express this dichotomy firmly with descriptions of the works of Satan on one hand and the love of Jesus on the other as if it was that simple. All mystics get to know Satan very well so as to overcome those elemental forces. Even when countries are at war, such as during the First World War, each hold their field services imploring favour to the same God! No contradiction is acknowledge since ‘the other side are Devils’, not us. Then both sides engage in mass slaughter, explained in their own minds as being on behalf of God. The killing is certainly not the work of the Devil. This is ignorance at it’s most extreme and most harmful.

Soldiers returning from war find it incredibly difficult to face ‘civilian life’ after this madness. Sometimes their families and that world have become so alien to them that many choose never to return, like the character of Colonel Kurtz in Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad. Soldiers have their eyes opened by Mars, the God of War and enter a reality that has been skinned of fantasy. It is truely horrific, but is more real than anything ever experienced.

I firmly believe that by getting to grips with the ancient mythical descriptions of ‘mind’ and the human condition through the powerful symbols of the past and present, the possibilit open now for western culture to embrace our personal and collective unconscious.

A series of books by the author Dan Brown bears testament to this popular mood to understand symbols and the hidden worlds to which they allude. Albeit he shrouds his messages as ‘entertainment’, he perhaps knows or hopes that many an ‘agnostic’ might be moved by the power of the non-rational. In an age when even the scientists are building their theories of the contradictory laws of quantum physics, we should at least be open to the wealth of knowledge contained in the improbable.

Symbols are a massively important language for the mind. In a subtle way, the power of poetry is the same as symbols. Poets hint sideways at realities with few words, just as symbols point us to new understandings with no words.

Carl G. Jung was perhaps the most famous psychologist who opened up symbols as a reputable field of study and in particular dream interpretation. He used the study of his own dreams as well as patients, to gain insight into the personal and the collective psyche, the latter which he termed the ‘collective unconscious’.

Symbols dig deep into this unconsciousness, of which modern man was once most fearful but today, in my view, needs to be less so. Symbols not so much ‘explain’ as knock down row after row of balanced dominoes in an unexpected way to produce unintended effects that you might call ‘realisations’.

The plots of the Dan Brown novels are just such a cascade of ‘clue solving’. Through the broad knowledge of symbols by the character Professor Robert Langdon, mysteries are revealed in rapid twists and turns of the plot.

If psychosis is a surfacing of unconscious fears, then symbols enable that to happen as well. Perhaps the fear of that is the process most inhibiting understanding today. Ancient wisdom is wrapped up and scurried away by people of religion, so that it’s power is denied the possession of the people. We are told how damaging such knowledge is and how it is ‘the work of the Devil, aliens and Satanic cults, not for popular consumption and well past it’s sell-by date’.

The Vatican Secret Archives are themselves a symbol of this sublimation of sacred wisdom deemed never to surface into the minds of the common people. Beyond the political secrets and records of shameful past and present actions, you would like to think that mankind will benefit more, that be caused harm, by revealing the archive’s contents to the public.

Unfortunately, the battle between the Angels and the Demons takes place right before all of our eyes, if we looked. Even such things scientifically real as the present Covid virus is demonic in character. Viruses are hidden and not understood but powerful and with the ability to kill innocent humans. In this description we can see the description of the malign demi-god of ancient myth, the dragon that inhabits the cave and eats villagers, Count Dracula who enters a country and seeks it’s vulnerable female victims blood, Sleeping Beauty who falls under the spell of the witch and is put in a coma like a hospital patient.

The V1 and V2 rockets of Nazi Germany were powerful killing machines and inspired by the occult secrets of the ancients, as much as by likes of team of rocket scientists.

All of these encounters with demons and angels are happening and as real today, in my view, as they were in the past. The ancient Greeks saw the sun and the moon just as we do. The only difference is that we see them as a nuclear explosion and an empty rock rather than giving them respect for the way they command our every waking moment. The joy of life is dependent entirely on the gift of the sun’s rays depicted by the ancient Egyptians as a straight line from the sun, with an Ankh symbol at the end of each life giving ray of light.

Such symbols may never totally be understood by modern man because historical cycles move in spirals, not circles, but we do have symbols of our own that echo insignts from our ancestors. Understanding our own selves and our environment is key to the sustainability of our technological societies. Modern life is an Odyssey into a world of Sirens and Whirlpools, just as real as it ever was for Odysseus. Hold tight!

Centre

14/11/202031/12/2020 / Matters Blog - Things that Matter to Me / Leave a comment

The Beautiful Centre

The Centre is a special place that contains as many mysteries as explanations…but what kind of centers do I mean? Well, the center is in our body-mind unity and extends between the centre of the Earth and infinity. Let us start with ourselves.

We are born with a placenta connected from the centre of our bodies, to our mother. This physical centre remains true for the rest of our lives, yet our mind also has a centre as does our spiritual being. The centre of our consciousness is not necessarily in our heads. Acrobats, gymnasts, martial artists will all give you an explanation derived from their experience. To turn and tumble under complete control, our consciousness needs to be somewhere other than our heads. For the Karate adapt, the Hara is again the navel or the sacral chakra from where the body finds it’s centre. Control of the Hara fixes the practitioner to a single axis or centre of gravity and from this position a balanced and grounded attack can be made, or a defense.

The Dervish in the Sufi tradition spins on the left rotating foot whilst pushing with the other. The experience is to be removed from the visible world or ‘dunya’ and moved vertically on the axis of turning into another realm. The analogy is that the dervishes become like planets as they spin around the Sun, who is the guide, the Sheikh.

Psychologically, the process of becoming adult is similar. As children we tend to run out of control, wobble and fall, like spinning plates left too long. We need adults to check what we do when we edge close to the metaphorical cliff. We are not centred. In maturity we find our balance and with balance a centre. Unlike a pair of scales, the centre is in three or more dimensions, but the analogy works.

If we become too absorbed in a particular activity, such as work or family, or leisure, we neglect other parts of our lives. We indeed neglect our full potential as human beings because the art of being balanced is more important than excelling in one particular area of life. This is contrary to what modern societies tend to expect. We are encouraged to specialise and repeat patterns until we can execute a skill perfectly. This is the process taught to factory workers, concert pianists, teachers, parents or any other career or social position. Time spent on these activities usually is at the cost of other responsibilities. So it is that modern managers will consider the work and life ‘balance’ of employees. It is recognised that becoming a grand master at chess is all very well but creates a lesser human if other simple tasks are not understood, such as working the washing machine or understanding another human’s emotions.

One technique for becoming ‘centered’ is found in both Eastern and Western spiritual practice. The former emphasises the importance of concentration when awake and alert and not becoming distracted by day dreams. Concentration is sometimes taught by training the body before the mind. Students of Zen Buddhism will sit in Za Zen for hours whilst supervised by a master. No movement or involvement in a mental or physical distraction is tolerated. If an earth quake occurred the class should remain motionless. The point is that all that occurs in the world is an illusion that must not be taken seriously, even when catastrophe is imminent. Some deaths cannot be avoided by running, therefore sitting is taking ones noble and inner strength with one into Paradise.

In the West, monks and nuns will sit in contemplation, having already put themselves outside of the world. Although less emphasis is placed on ‘illusion’ the seeker is directed to concentrate on the Divine. The ‘God Head’ is and represents a fixed point, to which the seeker becomes attached in their whole being. By this process all attachment to the outer perceived world falls away as unimportant. The contemplative becomes centred by fixing consciousness to an unmoving presence.

This apparent ‘stillness’ is characteristic of the part of the mystery of the centre. The geographic poles on the spinning earth are not moving at one thousand miles per hour as is the case at the equator. They are the still place which encompasses all directions whilst being themselves directionless.

Throughout time and place humans have found it necessary to identify ‘centers’ outside their bodies.

As the word suggests, the ‘hearth’ in the home is both the centre of the ‘earth’ and the ‘heart’. It generally contains fire as a loyal servant to social well being and survival. It cooks food, warms water and the space around it, giving the householders good reason to gather around.

The village or town containing these homes, will also have a designated ‘centre’. It may deserve that title as a spiritual centre, an administrative centre, a social centre, a business centre, a defensive centre from invaders and other functions.

In ancient times the centre was marked with a significant natural feature such as the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem. So sacred is this ‘centre’ that three major religions revere it ‘s significance as the place where God created the world and the first man ‘Adam’.

In even earlier times societies were sensitive not only to the ‘spirit of the place’ but to a ‘cosmological order’. The ancient Egyptians had a canon of harmonies which Plato referred to in Laws which kept Egyptian society consistently for thousands of years. John Michell refers to this order in his book ‘At the Centre of the World’ p165;

‘The occurrence at different times throughout the world of similarly organised twelve-tribe societies, focused upon a rock, a sanctuary and a sacred king, can only be due to the influence of a common prototype, which must be that traditional code of number and proportion which constitutes the best possible more rational and inclusive image of essential reality’.

In other words, the centre of the sovereign nation is determined geometrical according to harmonious proportions. Stonehenge in Southern England is a good example of a centre conceived as a circle with twelve divisions. It connects visually with the Universe by alignment with the sun and moon, stars and planets placing the observer / worshiper, firmly at the centre of all things.

The supreme example of a geographic centre is the pyramids on the Giza Plateau which occupy the exact centre of the landmasses of the continents at 30 degrees north.

The geometry of Divine symbolism is a large subject if little understood in the modern world. Towns and cities are conceived for rational reasons of economy and function. If there is a sacred centre to a town it is because it’s ancient forefather conceived it so. In the United States of America the city of Washington is such an example of the application of sacred principles and geometry in city planning, but such examples are rare in the land that built according to ‘the grid’.

In not caring to create sacred centers in our buildings, towns, cities and countries, we are not caring to be ‘centred’ in ourselves. For we are intimately connected with the spaces we occupy whether they are inside buildings, inside the spaces buildings create or within the landscape and cosmos.

As an architectural student in the 1970’s some of my tutors disliked my use of geometry, symmetry and proportion in my designs. Organic shapes were also ‘taboo’. I was told very strongly to design using only right angles and grid patterns, presumably because they had been taught that themselves. They respected only maximising the performance of materials, ignoring the third of Vitruvian principles of architecture which are durability, utility and beauty.

As citizens of the modern world we have learnt only function and forgotten, or care not, to make our buildings and public spaces beautiful.

The change that has to come is for us to enter the centers of ourselves. When we speak from our hearts our social fabric will evolve to transform those places that we hold precious. That is, in my view, the direction for the citizens of the 21^st century, but first we must start within ourselves.

‘Go sweep out the chamber of your heart.
Make it ready to be the dwelling place of the Beloved.
When you depart out,
He will enter it.
In you,
void of yourself,
will He display His beauties.

Mahmud Shabistari 14^th century Sufi poet

1+2=3

01/11/202011/03/2022 / Matters Blog - Things that Matter to Me / Leave a comment

Science and philosophy are contrary subjects yet strangely complimentary; after all, they are both exploring the same thing…the Universe.

If philosophers are generalists then scientists study detail. Building up on detail, philosophers gain a knowledge and understanding of the way ‘things work’ based on ‘all and everything’. Inspired by generality, scientist drill down into new unexplored places.

But it does not have to be so polarised as that. We can be more ‘nuanced’ about their relationship. History shows us that science sometimes makes great leaps when scientists turn philosophers. Einstein’s General and Special theories of Relativity are an example of that. Innovators in the scientific community are often those whose interests and hobbies include the arts. Look out for the professor with the vivid bow tie and red shoes. He or she is the one most likely to be able to peep over the fence into the garden containing all things ‘artistic’. They may even have the key to the connecting gate.

Some of the greatest minds who ever lived are celebrated as both artists and scientist. Perhaps the best known example is Leonardo de Vinci and his stable mates in the Renaissance. To look after a forest you sometimes have to look down on it from the mountain top, whilst other times tending the specific needs of each tree, branch and twig.

Such a way of working is the way of a wise person. They will have seen a lot of life and understand that trees are trees, from whatever distance you view them. This ‘third place’ or trintessence, is the sacred child of both art and science. It is unique and special and often has no name and does not enter thought for that reason.

But it is vital to take notice of the fact that frequently there is a magic third element springing from the fusion of two complimentary opposites.

One only needs to refer to Christian theology and the coming together of the concept of the Trinity. It obeys the phenomenon that two ‘opposite’ forces conflate to produce a third mysterious new entity.

I remember my rather sanctimonious aunt leaning over from the pew behind me when I was a boy and asking what parts made up the Trinity. I replied parrot fashion; ‘Father, Son and Holy Ghost’.

But then I was the boy who drew a parrot on the chalk board in the class room with a speech bubble containing religious words. I have always had a problem with those who repeat words without understanding. Now in old age I can see that how the Trinity is created in not just Christianity but in the many mystical traditions that underpin religions.

The Father and Son are two huge archetypes from which all of creation emanates. The son sits on the right hand of God and the two make a very special SWAT (special weapons and techniques) team. Because God cannot enter the gross material world physically, he sends his ‘go to’ helper. Whatever incarnation the son may appear in (Apollo, Hermes, Ra and so on) he is always the same perfected entity who returns to earth on a mercy mission.

But the ‘double act’ needs something else, some other essence that ‘makes things move’. Examine the equation e=mc2. The energy (e) could be understood as the infinitely expansive Creator of all things including and especially ‘thought’. The material element (m) is the ‘Redeemer’ who comes to a physical Earth on a mission. The spectacular mystery is that both energy and matter obey a third rule and constant – c, or the ‘Holy Spirit’.

The Holy Spirit is represented as a dove. She is an untransmutable bird who visits all of those in need, as a helper and producer. Without the aid of the holy spirit, stuff would just not change and move on. Noah would still be in a flood.

She is the flux element that stabilises and goes beyond the relationship between matter and energy. It can do this because it is their product. How apt that the United Nations chose to have a dove on their flag. They brought together the energy and matter of warring nations in peace.

Pre-Christian theological and philosophical ideas encapsulated the same Trinity of archetypes, only using different names.

Plato realised that matter and energy combine in a third essence which was named the ‘aether’ or ‘ether’. This mysterious third element persisted throughout the centuries. It was embraced by the Alchemists as being the ultimate symbol and tool of perfection, the philosopher’s stone. Without this ancient concept of an invisible third element that pervades all things – even outer space – then early scientists like Sir Isaac Newton (an avid Alchemist) may never have germinated the seeds of modern scientific thought.

Today scientist’s view the ether as belonging to and explaining the existence of ‘dark matter’ and ‘dark energy’. We are told that the former occupies 4% of the Universe we can perceive with our senses and instruments. The rest cannot be perceived or measured.

When philosopher’s understand that scientists are ‘in the soup’ over where the Universe is i.e. where dark energy lives, they can be excused for not offering an explanation. All that is dark as ‘e’ and ‘m’ exists in the area of their product as a constant. It is neither matter nor energy but a mathematical / geometrical immutable mystery.

To continue the list of ancient ‘trinities’, Osiris and Isis inhabited the Temples of Ancient Egypt. In their story that have a son who is Horus – a divine child sometimes depicted on the knee of his nursing mother as a baby. The infant child is a accurate depiction of the product of two energies. They produce an asexual, passive being without transgression, action or thought. It is the constant that held together successive dynasties in the land of Egypt for thousands of years. Horus the Divine child – inspired the constructions of matter such as the pyramids in such a way and as such supreme manifestations of thought and understanding, that their presence in the material world has an ‘eternity’ about them. That eternity is most purely expressed in mathematics, which is why the Pyramid of Cheops in Gaza is built with such precision. It is truly aligned to the points of the compass, particular stars including the sun, underground tellurgic currents and stands in the physical centre of the land masses of the globe. This is as close to being ‘constant’ as is ever likely to be achieved on this earth.

Perhaps the greatest two archetypes ever to unite, with their product being a ‘trinity’ is the Hermetic law of male and female. The Hermetics believe that not only does this duality exist on Earth but in every parallel dimension. We see nature using these subtly similar yet different archetypes to the full, not merely for sexual reproduction but at emotional, intellectual, and behavioural levels of existence. All animals such as mammals depend on their parents in their conception, incubation and infancy but eventually they ‘fly the nest’ and become a free independent entity. They are the same as their genetic parents and yet – as Charles Darwin observed – they are empowered by an improvement on their parents.

We are therefore each an expression of the ‘third essence’ in our own uniqueness as a being. Fired by the holy constant ‘c’, we each of us contain the possibility to transcend our material (body) and energetic (spirit) limitations. As infinite souls (c) we will never experience death and will move gently into perfection at the right hand of God. Human bodies are not designed for longevity but give just enough time for experience and reflection on what does not change in life; what is constant. That is why Zen masters feel the ecstasy of a falling leaf. In every Universe, leaves fall.

The tri-essence knows that it has a future greater than it’s individual parts, and for this reason has a good chance at realising perfection. This perfection is the great mysterious tunnel that souls follow into the constant realm of the ‘after life’.

It is a bourne from where most travellers do return, just to get one more bite of the forbidden fruit; one more chance to become greater than the sum of it’s parts.

000

0000

The Platonic Pyramid (above) is decimal. The top half of the pyramid is the Trinity. The lower part (7) is also sacred and another subject!

The Alchemical Trinity

soul (c)

body (m) spirit (e)

A Christmas White House Carol

12/10/202014/10/2020 / Matters Blog - Things that Matter to Me / Leave a comment

It is Christmas Eve in the Whitehouse. The view across the famous lawns sparkles in the street lamps. Squirrels hop playfully from tree to tree in the thick snow and at the front door, a line of limousines wait patiently.

If we approach one of the snow hung windows we can look in and observe the scene. Bedecked with all kinds of seasonal decorations, the long mahogany table is encompassed by seated guests. At the head of the table is President Biden. His calm manner brings a sense of peace to the room and his family and guests converse quietly to one another. In the distance we hear the faint clash of kitchen ware as staff prepare to bring in a most special meal.

Suddenly there is a commotion on the steps of the Whitehouse! A tall cloaked figure is gesticulating frantically and pleading with the Secret Service to let him in.

‘Oh come on! Let me in, please. This used to be my home! Let me speak to Joe. I want to apologise for everything. I have been a bad, bad person but no more! Tell him I am here to see him…pleeease.’

Could this be Donald Trump? He is bent down on one knee with his hands together, as if in prayer.

If we quickly move back to look through the dinner scene window, we can see an aide whispering in the Presidents ear. Joe Biden’s jaw drops and his eyes stare into space. Without hesitation, he pushes back his chair and rushes out of the room.

For a few minutes nothing happens. The hooded figure on the steps, which is indeed, Donald Trump, has been allowed to step in out of the cold.

The guests sit bemused looking at each other before two embracing figures burst into the room. When Mr Trump sees the assembled guests he falls to his knees and sobs.

We must press our ears to the glass and listen carefully for he is talking, not in his loud manner, but softly.

‘Oh friends, dear sweet friends. Hear me just for one moment and then throw me out if you want to. I am nothing. I have been a bad, bad boy I know and I am so, so, so sorry. But since that awful Corona Virus thing which almost killed me, and the First Lady and had us both in our graves, which is all we deserved I must say, I have seen the light!

A gasp went around the room and then subsided.

I know I upset a lot of people. I know I did. But I didn’t know what I was doing because I only cared for one person all the time. I am ashamed to say that was not my beautiful wife Meliana. No, no, it was worse than that. It was me. I was proud, deceitful, ingratiating, ignorant, manipulative, vengeful, greedy…why am I telling you all my secrets? Because I was also stupid and I didn’t see you could see all those bad characteristics of my bad character.

But you know what? When I was lying in my hospital bed with tubes going into my lungs, an angel came to me.

There was a pause for dramatic effect and Donald looked blankly at the window as if deeply moved by the memory. He continues;

Well two actually and they sat at the end of my bed looking at me as if to say, ‘we know what you are like and we want to help you change.’ I listened to them for hours. They showed me lots of things, terrible things that I have done, there on the hospital ward ceiling like a movie. I behaved so badly. I hurt everyone including this beautiful – sooo beautiful – planet by not listening to those climate change scientists. And the way I put down the great President Obama and the wonderful – so kind – Obama Care plans he had for poor sick people which I just trashed all the time and promised to get rid of. I was so unkind. Even to the tax collector of the United States of America, I thought I could pull the wool over everyone’s eyes and have more money for myself. Money, yes, money and lots of it.

Well tonight that has all finished. I have just come from meeting all the staff who work for me in Trump Tower. I gave them all wonderful amazing presents and new clothes for their children and theatre tickets and anything they asked for, because they worked for a monster, yes they did, who didn’t even know their names or shake a hand and say thank you, ever. Well that has all gone. I am telling you now that that Tower of Babel is going to be sold and the proceeds given to the sick children of America. Every single one of them so help me God!’

You could see from the shocked, but caring expressions on the faces in the candlelight, that the speech had affected each of them to the core. President Biden called for another chair and a new place was laid at the table. A rather stooped figure sat on the chair and smiled in a way no one had seen him do before.

It was a happy smile straight from the heart of a man who had come to value truth and the simple virtue of being himself and loving all other beings, more than himself.

Destroyer or Redeemer?

01/10/202030/09/2020 / Matters Blog - Things that Matter to Me / Leave a comment

‘God is intelligence occupied with knowing Itself’ Master Eckhart

There have been many depictions of beings holding two vertical staffs throughout history and across the world.

Such a synchronicity displays and extraordinary communication network of shared ideas, or a common truth.

Let us take ‘truth’ as a more likely source of these images. When viewed objectively the commonality is a description of duality. For many centuries and in many cultures but particularly the East, duality has been viewed as an illusion. The opposites are viewed as a unity and containing an element of each other, as signified in the well known Ying Yang symbol.

If we take one dimension of this Ying Yang division, we can see a masculine and feminine duality.

There is a great mystery for philosophers expressed by gender. Beyond pure physical sexuality and the biology of reproduction, gender is all around us. Even Latin languages contain the rule of attributing gender to nouns. In English gender is applied to a few inanimate objects such as ships and until recently, weather systems.

And as philosophers become more specific about the nature of the universe they extend thought and description into numbers. A system of numbering was an important step in the development of all civilisations. Generally, even numbers are male and odd numbers female. The former behave in a rational way and can be subdivided neatly and stand firmly as four wheels or two legs, whilst odd numbers are less rational and do not travel in straight lines.

The numbering system with a base of ten, contains just nine numbers. The numbers 3,6,9 are the building blocks of the Universe according to Nicola Tesla. But the modern language of computing has refined the description of meaning using just zero and one.

Take a jump here into the minds of the ancient peoples of the British Isles who built Men an Tol in the county of Cornwall. The symbolism of the circular hole and the passing through of a figure is exactly as the yoni and lingham in Hinduism. Beyond superstition and luck, there is an universal truth being described, that of zero and one.

picture credit Wikipaedia for Men An Tol

When we view the symbolic depictions in Ancient Egypt, Sumeria, China and many other countries, the duality is depicted as two serpents. In my view, the serpent is an allusion to an organic energy of a type that modern science is yet to measure, but which has been named Chi, Ki, Orgone and many other names. It is subtle in the way that quantum physics attempts to describe the combining of the logical and the illogical. An example would be the ability of two atoms to change polarity in respect to each other even when an infinite distance apart. The one becomes zero and visa versa – instantaneously; regardless of distance.

This phenomena is symbolised in ancient myths by more eleborate stories where the King and Queen produce a child, miraculously without sexual intercourse. This feature informs us that the meaning of the myth is at a more subtle level than what goes on in the physical world. The production of the god child is ‘immaculate’, without fault.

The truth being told is one of the coming together of opposites in a perception of a dual universe into a singularity, one place, one thought, one reality. The child is the perfect symbol because it is non-sexual and a product of two complimentary singularities.

In the mind the child represents an expansion of consciousness. The message of the child Jesus of Nazareth was love. Mankind was shown how the battles and hatred of the Old Testament in Judaism got it wrong. Fighting each other is revealed to contain no lasting solution.

The evolution of computer software began with the language of zero’s and one. It has served it’s purpose well but quantum physics has questioned the future of such as system and produced an alternative. A sort of quantum marriage has taken place, again ‘immaculately’ and produced the child which is the quantum computer. This has brought and will bring in the future lifetimes of most readers, computing power of a type that has never been dreamed of in the minds of mathematicians like Alan Turing.

Quantum computers will have minds of their own as in the ancient stories of the god-child. This new level of consciousness has the potential to move from organic super computers – mankind – into a virtual universe of quantum computing.

This works because the duality of zero and one is brought miraculously into oneness by quantum computers. Whether this is the ‘Oneness’ described by mystics throughout the centuries remains to be realised. Perhaps it never will by ordinary humans because although they have the potential to match quantum computers, they are ‘distracted’ by the physical universe. We humans have been plugged into an organic body with which we identify a ‘me’, and have a hard time controlling it’s desires.

Computers are also limited in their desire for power and physical parts but quantum thinking will solve such problems effortlessly and as far as humans are concerned, ruthlessly, acting much like a virus on a host.

No virus is so short sighted as to destroy it’s host so the quantum ‘robots’ of the future will follow laws of limitation designed to respect sustainable expansion.

Clearly the humans of the ancient passed were not perceiving ‘artificial intelligence’ when they described entwining serpents whispering information to each other. But they were describing a universal truth that is the foundation of organic science in the field of DNA and non organic science in the branch of computing.

Truth works independent of time and space. Whether it sets mankind ‘free’ remains to be seen.

The Long Man of Wilmington in East Sussex, England

Who Orders the New Order?

23/09/202031/12/2020 / Matters Blog - Things that Matter to Me / Leave a comment

A ‘normal’ state of affairs in a society is always a vague concept. We know that what is ‘normal’ in one year or decade, will not necessarily so in the next. Changes in technology, education, religion, health, cultural diversity, incomes and expenditure, world events such as weather patterns, personal expectations and many other factors, influence how societies morph. In this essay, I am going to use one of these, education, as an example of how ‘normals’ become established and how they can change for the benefit of all.

A common cliché is the ‘new normal’ – as if this makes anything clearer – which it does not. By definition a ‘normal’ state of affairs has been in place and unchanged for a substantial period of time. If it had not then it would be just ‘new’. Normal should appeal to persons of a ‘conservative’ outlook; they resist change on principle, even if the change is for the better.

Taking the long term view of the current changes in Western societies, it is likely that the next ‘normal’ will be very different to anything in the past.

Whether that is a ‘New World Order’ as politicians have been predicting for the last hundred years or more, remains to be seen.

If we can adapt our expectations and thoughts to a ‘new order’ that has been voted for and accepted by society, then there will be more gains than loses for everyone. If the control comes from anywhere else, then it will be impossible to predict what that strategic outcome will be. It is most likely however that that objective will not be in the best interests of the people.

People living in countries where they still have the power to influence those who govern them, must first determine what it is they want. History informs us that one of the most basic rights is the have an the same opportunity at success as our neighbours. Inequality of opportunity creates disparity at all kinds of levels, no just wealth. Anyone who does not succeed following this rule has only themselves to blame if they do not gain as much as their neighbour. The lazy, inept, greedy, fantasised and any other human weakness you care to name, these people will achieve few privileges but will know they only have themselves to blame.

The attempt at an alternative means of assessing pupils’ grades failed in my view because it was not sufficiently a radical change. Today Universities think they need to select bright students when in fact they just need fee paying students.

The ‘merit’ system of the mid 1900’s, assumed that Universities should offer free places to the brightest students. This was generally 4% of the brightest students each year. Society paid, but gained in the long term because it gave a level playing field of opportunity to young people from all social backgrounds. When students left University they entered society as future managers and leaders.

Since the Tony Blair government stated a new aim of half of all young people gaining degrees, the whole game changed.

Surely such an aim produces too many chiefs and not enough Indians? Today young people with degrees have found it challenging to find work, let alone one that offers them to fulfil their personal potential.

Degrees issued to so many people, lose their inherent value, simply because of the law of supply and demand. Employers are now are looking for candidates who have a degree and something else.

The whole process of gaining good A-levels in order to be accepted by a University appears to me to be of little relevance.

If Universities took a fresh look at what they offer in the current ‘Covid’ restricted environment, they might become more radically innovative. The traditional University campus and it’s associated support activities all have to be located in buildings. The students expect some sort of accommodation and transport facilities such as parking for cars and bicycles.

It is not surprising that Universities need large incomes from fees and government. Yet, the introduction of ‘remote tuition’ – a product the Open University in the United Kingdom has offered for decades – is a ground changer.

If Universities moved out of campuses where the whole Universities culture is no longer needed, fees could be drastically reduced. With less travelling by staff and students, there is a saving to the environment and days for work and study. Other benefits will be easier child care and part time working.

Universities will be not be limited on offering places for courses because they will not be counting seats in lecture theatres. There might be a three hundred on a course that in the ‘old normal’ was limited to say, thirty.

Why should a place in University be decided by how well a student performs in examinations? They might have high potential in the work place but not shine at academic subjects and in the examination theatre. They might have a less than perfect understanding of a language, such as must be common in foreign students, and yet have high potential once that weakness was allowed to be overcome. I knew a Ukrainian woman who spoke Russian and studied Law in an English University for which I give huge respect.

There are many other physical and mental ‘disabilities’ which students encounter temporarily or permanently which Universities should be the first to respect. Offering places purely on academic success, is in no way respectful of what a person can achieve if given the chance they deserve. Most employers in the ‘new order’ and not going to discriminate irrationally simply because it is against the law of the land. Remote studying suits such students very well as they can take the time they need at the pace they need.

What I am suggesting then is a revolution in academia where they students decide which courses they want to purchase independent of their previous academic performance. If the student is to be a ‘customer’ then like customers, they hold the power to get what they aspire to.

When I went to University I was awarded a place on how well I performed in interview and my rather poor A-level results ignored. I like to think I was assessed on my human potential rather than how well I remembered facts.

I have used the University admission system as an example of how the ‘normal’ in any organisation can be changed. Most importantly this change enables everyone to have an equal bite of the apple, independent of what sticks and carrots life has presented them with in their lives so far. It is true to say that ‘life is never fair’ but that is a reason to try and make it fair, not to give in.

The changes in societies currently taking place across most of the world can be blamed for personal failure but equally for personal survival and success. Those who are not brought down should be those who are most willing to throw the ‘rule book’ out of the window. Comfortable lifestyles from privilege and convention, one would like to think are most at risk.

The Puppet That Pulls the Strings

31/08/202003/09/2020 / Matters Blog - Things that Matter to Me / Leave a comment

One of the seven principles of Hermetic philosophy, is the law of cause and effect. Sir Isaac Newton was strongly influenced in his development and application of the scientific method, by this law. It appears in one of his universal laws of thermodynamics as ‘to every action there is an equal and opposite reaction’.

Can life be reduced to a sort of cosmic Newton’s Cradle, where impact at one end of a line of suspended spheres, sends kinetic energy invisibly through the line and appears miraculously at the other?

Surprisingly, in some respects, it can. When social groups are examined on a large scale, one psychologist found that they are highly susceptible to manipulation, ethically or not. His name was Edward Bernays and he was the nephew of Sigmund Freud.

Edward Bernays: would you buy a second hand car from this man?

Sigmund Freud – are you happy?

Freud wrote a book entitled ‘Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego‘. In this he examined how individuality and consciousness of the ‘I’ can be subsumed when a person identifies with a group. The larger ‘group’ consciousness becomes dominant to the extent that individual’s will acts in a way that they would not on their own.

Examples are everywhere, such as the group identity of the supporters of a football team. They will dress in the colours of their team and occupy a part of the stands where they can appear as a powerful group both visually and through by tribal chants. The power gained by the players when they score goals and win, is shared through this identification by the supporters. A normally disempowered ‘ordinary’ man will feed off the power gained by the group, causing extreme elation.

At it’s most benign this effect can be used in sports, advertising and public relations. At it’s most dangerous, it can be used in political propaganda to influence the minds of the masses to behave in accordance with the aims of a small group.

Examine the the governments of countries and institutions and you may discover a sleeping monster. On a whim, leaders are fully capable of influencing the mental processes and social patterns of the citizens of that country, without them being aware.

The roots of how this is possible lie in our ancestors, who organised themselves in tribes and hunting groups in and be more successful; especially when hunting large animals such as Mammoths. Although modern man has morphed away from this psychology into separate individuality, there are times when we regress.

Individuals will identify readily with various social classifications that can be exploited to divide the populace. Examples are race, class / cast, politics, education, religion, sexuality etc. The motives for doing this might be as ordinary as making them choose a particular type of soap bar, or as extraordinary as bringing them out onto the streets to protest and or riot.

Edward Bernays was interested in how governments could rise or indeed fall by this phenomena. He wrote in his book Propaganda;

If we understand the mechanism and motives of the group mind, is it not possible to control and regiment the masses according to our will without their knowing it?

and…

They systematic study of mass psychology revealed…the potentialities of invisible government of society by manipulation of the motives which actuate man in the group.

Sigmund Freud attempted to explain why people engage in group identification. He proposed the idea that the thoughts and feelings of an individual are in some way compensatory for suppressed desires.

‘A thing may be desired not for it’s intrinsic worth of usefulness, but because he has unconsciously come to see in it the symbol of something else, the desire for which he is ashamed to admit to himself.’

In other words, our actions are spurred on by thoughts that come from our shadow selves, rather than for any conscious, considered reasoning. The conscious mind in most people, has a conscience which prevents negative behaviour through the emotion of guilt.

Whatever it is you are thinking, don’t do it!

But unconsciously there may be ‘commanding’ thoughts which dominate decisions and actions. In this way we are like children who have not learnt to filter information coming from the outside world. We just absorb impressions and later act out what is good or not. In this way a government could move it’s people to adopt ideas such as the mass slaughter of a minority population, which would be abhorrent to the conscious mind but unconsciously fulfil unexpressed desires.

It is extraordinary to think that these theories were created at the end of the nineteenth century. If proof was needed, the next century provided glaring examples such as the rise of the Nazi Party in Germany and the genocides in Rwanda, Cambodia and other countries.

Joseph Goebbels: Wimp turned bully picture credit: BBC.com

The leaders of the Third Reich used propaganda ingeniously. Joseph Goebbels produced films as a key means of engeneering the minds and thereby, opinions, of the population. He understood that in cinemas and theatres audiences can drop their individual critical faculties. They connect unconsciously with powerful messages that feed off repressed emotions and ideas, such as in this case the ‘problem’ of the Jews.

In Rwanda, the radio became a powerful tool for government propaganda which described the minority tribe as ‘cockroaches’ who needed to be eliminated. The old instincts of tribal mutual hatred, suppressed through the adoption of modern social norms, were allowed to become dominate and so powerful that neighbour would kill neighbour with a machete.

Freud wrote in his book Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego;

‘A group is extraordinarily credulous and open to influence, it has no critical faculty.’

The actions of the young men in the First World War is another clear example. Thousands signed up without hesitation to enlist in a war that would ‘be over by Christmas’. With hindsight this uncritical and unfeeling mass psychopathy across Europe and beyond, was absurd. Even the mitigating influence of the closely related European royal families of that time, were sucked into the mass psychosis of hatred and fear.

If we take these ideas and fast forward to the present day, many suggest that there is a small group focused global social manipulation, that has had over one hundred years to perfect it’s dark arts.

The, once hidden, now overt aim is to establish a world government and a disempowerment of it’s citizens through draconian laws and the use of new technologies such as artificial intelligence, mass surveillance, cyber robotics and enforced compliance with the State through removal of individual choice.

To achieve this requires deceit on a global scale. The internet and international media is the modern propaganda tool to achieve what one hundred years ago was unthinkable by peaceful means.

Does a secular society fear dying more than a devout society?

The repressed fear which is being exploited in 2020, is the fear of dying. Each person feels this fear whether they admit it or not. Death is something not understood today. It makes those left behind uncomfortable and deaths of loved ones are dealt with expediently. It is taboo to discuss death in anything but the most trivial way, with meaningless platitudes such as ‘he passed away’.

Death by natural causes is far more socially and politically acceptable than death by warfare. The appearance of a new virus, whether by fair means or foul, is something all governments expect and plan for. The Covid 19 virus was foreseen and plans were in place to use it as a means to suppress and perhaps cull populations. The smartest way to disempower people is to ruin the black economies and other economic enterprises that are not global. Then introduce technology based solutions that remove the last vestiges of personal choice, such as the cash-less society which has been happening in China.

You might have expected the citizens of Communist societies to adapt readily to strict government controls and sure enough, the Chinese leadership spearheaded the practice of the ‘lock down’ with ruthless efficiency. The Western societies had little choice but to follow the same solution even though it is opposite to their social freedoms.

Whilst isolation is clearly the correct way to deal with an individual case of viral infection, there is a logical argument that not all citizens need to be locked down at once. This was done to protect inadequate health services, not individuals.

Freedom is a hard won prize, but when the option is presented as ‘death’, freedoms have been handed over without a fight.

picture credit: CNN.com

This is how I personally see the end of 2020 and most of 2021. We will see a ramping up of the ‘problems’ substantiated by rising lines on graphs.

This will occur as the vast quantities of government ‘free’ money will begin to run dry. The problems of unemployment have only been postponed, not solved. The consequence will be an impossible situation for previously law abiding families. We can expect to see large scale public unrest driven initially by hunger. Looting and civil urban warfare, even in countries that have not armed their citizens in the way the United States has, will become a problem. The governments of the world will claim to have little choice other than to take away personal freedoms even more.

The United States runs an extra risk as it approaches it’s elections in November 2020. President Trump is also about to hit the railway buffers and he will bend the rules of democracy to remain in power, in the way he has shown America he can many times already. In doing so, citizens aware of the threat to their democracy and using their rights under the Founding Fathers Constitution may legally form militias and take on the government forces.

Would you buy a second hand car from this man? picture credit Newsweek.com

Whoever is controlling the puppet that you are, will be pulling your strings to make you jump as they want, not as you want. All you can do is pull back on the strings, and collectively that could be powerful.

Individuals will identify readily with various social classifications that can be exploited to divide the populace. Examples are Race, Class, Politics, Education, Religion, Sexuality etc. The motives for doing this might be as ordinary as making them choose a particular type of soap bar, or as extraordinary as bringing them out onto the streets to protest and or riot.

Did Condaleezza Rice start Black Lives Matter? Probably not. picture credit: AZ quotes

Edward Bernays was interested in how governments could rise or indeed fall by social manipulation. He wrote in his book ‘Propaganda’;

‘If we understand the mechanism and motives of the group mind, is it not possible to control and regiment the masses according to our will without their knowing it?’

and…

‘The systematic study of mass psychology revealed…the potentialities of invisible government of society by manipulation of the motives which actuate many in the group’.

The, once hidden, now overt aim, is to establish a world government and a disempowerment of it’s citizens through draconian laws and the use of new technologies such as artificial intelligence, mass surveillance, cyber robotics and enforced compliance with the State through removal of individual choice.

To achieve this requires deceit on a global scale. The internet and international media is the modern propaganda tool to achieve what one hundred years ago was unthinkable by peaceful means.

picture credit: Houston Museum of Science, Death by Natural Causes Exhibit

Previous pandemics have wiped out half the populations of each town and village. When that is happens today, there is indeed a problem deserving the solution being offered.

Whoever is controlling the puppet that you are, is pulling your strings. Now is the time to start pulling back. You might be surprised to find out who is on the other end of the string!

Mean

27/08/202027/08/2020 / Matters Blog - Things that Matter to Me / Leave a comment

One of the tricks employed by those who construct crossword puzzles is to include words which have multiple meanings.

Take the word ‘mean’ for instance. It may immediately have meant to you, ‘to be stingy, one with an ungenerous nature’. Then again it might have meant ‘something in the middle’. Or it might also have meant, ‘the significance of something’. It is this third meaning which I intend to explore.

People with a philosophical bent of mind are often quizzing on what they construct as ‘the meaning of life’. This is as if the question, although perfectly constructed, can be answered. In reality it is one of those questions that has no answer, like a Zen koan. The Zen koan however is constructed because there is no expectation of an answer. Intellectual philosophers imagine that logic is without boundaries, when it is not.

‘Quick, who can save this cat?’

The ‘life of meaning’ is a far more fruitful place for philosophical meandering, because when we understand what everything in life means, then we must be approaching an understanding of life.

When I was a young man studying architecture, there was a course entitled ‘Architecture Studies’. This did not convey the content of the course at all and I did not sign up for the lectures; not least because the Professor who introduced the course had a highly debilitating stammer which I thought I could not endure for a year. The serried ranks of students had great difficulty containing their laughter including, I am ashamed to say, myself.

It turned out that this professor was only the head of the department and therefore gave no further lectures, for obvious reasons. Instead lectures were presented by one of the most inspirational teachers I have ever had. (I took the course without gaining credits for my degree as I was fascinated and delighted the ‘head of department’ earned his money in some other way than lecturing.) John Steel came from California, had long straggly hair, tan leather trousers with a lace fly and taught us to question everything.

He told us that when he studied anthropology, instead of heading out into the jungles of Borneo with the other PhD students, he remained behind and studied the tribe who were his professors. How I would have loved to have seen the look on their faces when they read his thesis!

In the third year of this course we focused on ‘meaning in buildings’. How buildings convey very subtle thought forms that have meaning to the creator and users of buildings is a fascinating, if little considered, subject.

We were lead in this year by professor Robert Maxwell who had made this theme uniquely his own. We read about semantics and semiology and how all life and all things are imbued with meaning, both consciously and unconsciously. The master creator will be fully conscious of what knowledge and or wisdom the building is to contain and convey. This additional level of complexity in design is not optional for without it, I would argue no building can be ‘great’.

The Pyramid of Cheops has to be the most obvious example of a building, despite or because of being geometric in form, is layered with levels of significance that we are still in the process of understanding today.

Pyramid; electromagnetic images at various frequencies

The challenge of seeping meaning into a creation is common to anything from popular songs to domestic appliance design. In popular songs, the lyrics can lift a mediocre melody into a new dimension and a singer songwriter who exemplified this has to be Leonard Cohen. His songs lumbered along on a series of notes that moved unspontaneously one tone at a time in either the upward of downward direction. Amadeus M0zart would have laughed if you told him the songwriter was famous. But Mozart might not have understood the high level of the poetry that Cohen achieved and how the meanings he explored, were loved by his fans. His contemporary Bob Dylan was likewise a major poet, and a slightly better constructor of melodies.

Contemporary Rap Music has learnt nothing from the example of the great musicians from the past and makes little of no effort in constructing melody. The whole song is contained in the rhythm of the words as if the complexity of melody is just too difficult, which is a loss to the genre and it’s advocates in my view.

Finding meaning in words is not hard to understand, but finding meaning in household objects?

If you wander into a shop selling kitchenware there is a brand which specialises in bringing salad tongs, toast racks and cruet sets, to life. They are given arms and legs and cute smiles that grin up at you creating that all important ‘love me’ moment.

The previously ‘dead’ object of utility has been ‘Lazarused’.

The Japanese are a culture who collectively love any object imbued with character and meaning. The front view of a Japanese car for many years, had to contain a smiling face rather than a sad one. Smiles sell.

Such examples of life entering objects of human design are sadly rare. Most buildings never feel the pencil of a loving creator that breaths life into form.

The anthropologist studying modern western culture will find few objects imbued with life and might conclude that 2020 culture is impoverished of meaning.

If you have no religion, then your walls of your living room will not be hung with smiling images of your guru, might not have a saint or cross on your wall and the sideboard will be empty of smiling Buddhas. But don’t worry, says popular atheistic culture, ‘just do what you want’.

But imagine you wake up one morning and decide on a whim, that you want a tattoo on your arm. You don’t know why, it is just something you ‘want’.

So you find yourself sitting on an uncomfortable metal chair in the waiting room of the local tattoo parlour. You are flicking through a well thumbed booklet of tattoo designs whilst listening to the gentle buzz of the tattoo artist’s machine behind a curtain.

As the moment draws nearer for your initiation, you realise that you cannot decide what you want. You quite like the Maori swirls but actually, the Tibetan clouds take you fancy as well. Or should you go for ‘I love Mum’, perhaps not macho enough?

I would be very interested in a study of people who have chosen to be tattooed and how they made their choice. Do you think that the majority would present a meaningful explanation? ‘This is a prayer that my Aunty taught me when I was a child and I never want to forget it’ or ‘this is my blood group in case I have an accident’. Two thoughtful examples, but from what I have seen of the content of tattoos the answer is more likely to be ‘it’s what I wanted’.

Given that many in a multi-cultural western population will have few anchors of faith or ties with other belief systems such as ‘Hells Angels’, I expect that the majority of tattoos will be without meaning.

This is not a criticism of tattoos or those who have chose to have one. Traditionally, so called ‘primitive’ tribes around the world will have learnt to impregnate the skin with swirling patterns and designs that their ancestors taught them. The human skin was a book for writing on long before the invention of papyrus.

The problem we have today is that we have no subjects of interest and the readers don’t care if they did. Is this true even for architecture?

‘What is your favourite colour?’ asks the interior designer.

‘Blue’.

Most interior designers will know the significance of different hues and the psychological impact of these colours on mental processes and emotional responses. But the client will probably not understand these effects or wish to have them interfere with what they want. ‘I don’t know anything about art but I know what I like’ is the mantra of the uninitiated majority.

Those sceptical about the impact of colour in human messaging, should consider the skills of advertisers and marketeers.

When the BBC have a red background to their logo there is a reason for this. It shows strength and an outgoing desire to search for truth.

The Guardian newspaper online, chose yellow and black because this combination signifies a willingness to explore issues beyond the conventional. In nature it’s a waspy warning; in journalism it’s means ‘cutting edge’.

So to conclude, we ignore complexity at our peril. Yes, you can get by with just following a hunch and what you like. But you will rarely imbue your soul with the richness of any self or cultural understanding in this way.

By becoming a ‘skin deep’ society we risk losing contact with the expressions from the souls of our ancestors and beyond. We become no more than ink beneath the epidermis, injected to form a meaningless configuration. It stays for your whole life the body is returned to the ground.

Better luck next time.

Sacred Secrets Writ Large

16/08/202024/08/2020 / Matters Blog - Things that Matter to Me / Leave a comment

In my previous two essays I have investigated and speculated over the ancient origins of two well known hill figures in Southern England. These are the Long Man of Wilmington and the Cerne Abbas Giant.

I shall now expand on some of the entomology of the place names, possible associations and derivation from ancient mythology and their significance.

This type of study might be called ‘sacred archaeology’ where the study of the past reveals not only the every day lives of the ancient people but their spiritual practices and level of awareness.

In my first essay I investigated the origins of the hill figures and suggested that they origins lay in the land known as Atlantis. The catastrophic earth changes that seeded the inhabitants of Atlantis around the world are described in detail elsewhere.

Taking on the hypothesis that the Atlantean people shared their advanced knowledge with developing Kingdoms such as Mesopotamia and Early Ancient Egypt, it becomes possible to trace common myths, gods, through the millennia.

Thoth – Judging the Soul with a balance.

Note the Ankh symbol at the centre representing the human soul. The two staffs either side represent balance between the masculine and feminine.

For instance the Ancient Egyptian god of the Underworld is known as Thoth, usually depicted with a staff. He is the keeper of esoteric knowledge, writing and conducts the passage of souls into the Underworld. These god like characteristics carry through into the Celtic world around 800 to 450 BCE, during the Iron Age.

Cernunnon wearing a Torc around his neck, where the throat chakra is postioned.

In the Celtic pantheon there is a god of the Underworld known as Cernunnon. He is depicted with antlers and is commonly seated cross legged and holding a serpent (masculine) and a torc (feminine).

I referred to the Long Man’s vertical staff symbol in the previous essay as representing conductors of energy (present today as the Magician’s wand) The rod or rods become ‘aerials’ able to induce tellurgic currents from the earth and waters below through the human body into the air and fire of heaven above. The human body and staffs of a particular length (ergo wavelength) are able to induce through resonance, tellurgic currents.

The Long Man of Wilmington in Sussex, England.

These vertical forces are depicted in the figure of the Long Man of Wilmington and are echoed in the pillars, church spires and obelisks of later and earlier civilisations. They even emerge as the pillars of the sun and moon in the Freemason tradition, one of the most direct connections we have today to this ancient knowledge.

The ability to transform oneself spiritually by literally ‘tuning’ into the earth at sacred places is shown in the depictions of Cernunnos to be even more sophisticated than the gods with vertical staffs (or serpents).

The vertical Idas in the human body and the horizontal chakras are a fundamental part of the very ancient system of Yoga.

(Further description of the horizontal nature of chakras can be found in my blog chakracard.wordpress.com)

What is important in the depictions of Cernunnon is that the earth energy is depicted as snakes wrapped horizontally around his waist. This is a direct symbolic connection between the spiralling underground water below a sacred place, known to Dowser or Water Diviners such as Guy Underwood who wrote ‘The Patterns of the Past‘. The circular motion of the chakras is signified in their description by clair clairvoyants as ‘wheels’ or ‘lotus flowers’.

The author’s depiction of the horizontal chakra wheels in three dimensions instead of the conventional two dimensional images.

Note the author identifies a lunar chakra balancing the solar chakra with the heart chakra as the fulcrum. This observation is thrown in for free! The justification is examined in the essay to which I have previously referred. The prescence of a Lunar Chakra in humans, substantiates the ancient knowledge described in this essay.

When the human body sits cross legged, it forms the shape of a triangle or pyramid – a shape repeated in built form across the world from Atlantean traditional knowledge. The fact that Cernunnon is seated is not insignificant. Few gods are shown seated as they do not exude power over the viewer as much as if they are standing. But Cernunnon was not a symbol of power of the gods or the priests or elders over the common people. He was showing how to balance the horizontal energy of the human body with the vertical energies. When this balance is achieved then a ‘fixed point’ is created as an infinitely small and infinitely large centre of the universe in the human heart.

The Christian symbol of the cross and other cruciform symbols such as the Ancient Egyptian ‘ankh’, symbolise this knowledge.

And as if Cernunnon had not made the point enough, he wears two antlers on which are hung ‘torcs’. The number two is important (as in the Long Man of Wilmington) as it symbolises the complimentary nature of the solar and lunar energies and their ideal harmonious relationship. The antlers are ‘aerials’ used by deer not only to fight but more importantly, as sensory organs containing blood and nerves.

Place two metal rings on these vertical forces is to introduce the feminine vulva with the masculine phallus, or the moon and sun energies. This is highly significant for the spiritual aspirant who communes, by the invitation of the magus or shaman, with the spirit of the local god, during initiation.

If you had not already linked the entomology of the word Cernunnon with the place name of the Cerne Abbas giant, then I shall do so now.

The Celtic polities linked their word CARNUTES with ‘The Horned Ones’.

But the Cerne Abbas giant of today has no horns, you may observe. He does have one obvious sexual feature that in modern English slang is referred to as a ‘horn’ – but perhaps that is too speculator to be meaningful, or perhaps not.

The figure we know today as the Cerne Abbas giant is not seated nor wearing antlers of horns. He has clearly been changed at a later time and I suggest that we have the Romans to thank for that.

The Romans also have a god of the Underworld, who is known as ‘Dis Pater‘. You might immediately note that ‘Abbas‘ and ‘Pater‘ share the meaning of ‘father’, odd if coincidental. Cicero, the Roman historian, suggested it meant ‘father of riches’.

‘Dis’ is reported in Wikipedia as being a contraction of the word DIVES meaning wealthy or rich. This is itself derived from the DIVUS or DIUS meaning god like or divine via the form DEIU.

This is highly significant as the whole spiritual process is one of making an ordinary person achieve divinity or divine qualities – treasure stored in Heaven as Jesus said. And Jesus we know, constantly referred to God as ‘Father’ curiously family orientated in common speech but significant in this ancient use of the word ‘Abbas’.

Julius Caesar claimed in his Commentaries of the Gallic Wars that the Gauls ‘claimed descent from Dis Pater’. This is therefore an important god to all Celts, whose memory was carried on by the Romans.

Venus by the Ancient Greeks achieved a level of art the Romans could not replicate.

In my view the Romans were lesser beings than the cultures who preceded them. The transition in sculptures from Greek to Roman shows how poorly skilled they were in this area of culture alone. The Romans were skilled engineers and soldiers who, in my view, lost their understanding of most ancient knowledge. Perhaps because of this, their empire was doomed to descend into decadence, and on that subject books have been written.

The figure at Cerne Abbas, has become a war-like giant, who stands erect in more than one sense. He wields a war club above his head instead of antlers, clearly a figure interested in overcoming others rather than himself.

The Roman Dis Pater; note his horns and the horned stag and bull at his feet. Balancing feminine and masculine figures stand either side of him in place of the staffs or columns.

The Cerne Abbas Giant, I therefore believe, is a lesser figure of the Celtic Cernunnon god who late morphed into the Roman Dis Pater.

The former gods balanced the masculine and feminine energies within themselves, whereas the Cerne Abbas Giant allowed himself to degenerate into a slave of the masculine energy only.

***

A Crop Circle that appeared near the Cerne Abbas Giant

The Vesica Pisces is formed by two overlapping cirles (sun and moon) in which a knife stands erect; an affirmation of the masculine and feminine balancing energies described in this essay.

***

Afterword;

And then I was looking at Google Earth a few weeks after writing this essay and found this same crop circle in a field about five hundred metres away from the giant, top middle. The giant is in the bottom right corner above the capital G. Thanks Google Earth!

New Think

07/08/2020 / Matters Blog - Things that Matter to Me / Leave a comment

You can deduce from current common ways of speaking that something is wrong with the way people are thinking.

George Orwell invented a type of language called New Speak in his revolutionary novel, 1984. The future society was envisaged as having been transformed into a totalitarian state, in which the individual had few rights and needed to act as instructed by the state at all times. This included which topics could be discussed. Clearly this meant that history and references to individual freedoms of old, was forbidden.

I am introducing here the brother of New Speak – New Think. The two are very closely linked since we use words to think and speak our thoughts with words. You might say that these words are the bricks with which we build the houses of our thoughts. When new patterns of speech emerge they show us that people are thinking differently.

It bears scrutiny then to investigate whether 2020 has constructed any new thinking patterns. If so, have they taken away the individuals right to think and speak with quite as much freedom as before?

Brief mention should be made of political correctness even though it has crept in over the last decades and is not new. But it now forms an underground of thought censorship by the masses, for the masses. As such it is perfectly protected from claims of being ‘government interference’ and becomes an illusionary ‘high moral ground’.

The traditional boundaries of free thinking stop at what we call as ‘freedom of speech’. A verbal ‘blue sky’ does not really exist because it would allow bad people to express bad things. That would offend and moves into the area of anarchy. Perhaps the critical question therefore, is not freedom at all but what is good and what is bad?

It is never easy to define these terms. Do we realise when our good intentions are producing bad results? Do we hear what we are saying and analyse what thinking process made us say these things? We can self sensor and reduce our language to only what we know for certain is true, because we have measured, tested, experienced and listened. Or we can allow a strand of smoke to enter our heads and let it cloud our opinions…what we call our ‘beliefs’. Good intentions but poorly informed ideas are the road to Hell.

The principle matter is that a muddled head is open to suggestion. Of course it’s impossible not to be open to what we are told ( as proved by the advertising industry ) but a muddle mind and mixed up emotions are very welcoming nonsense with open arms. Governments, religions, friends, family are all whispering in our heads. Omitting facts and alternative interpretations are the ultimate form of censorship. When the sensor enters your head and starts constructing the way you think, are you aware of the stranger in your thoughts?

Let us go a little deeper into what we might call ‘distorted thinking’ or thinking that has been twisted in some way.

Firstly let us examine key words. These are words that immediately move you into the supposed ‘moral high ground’ when you use them. We hear these all the time and news readers and politicians will emphasise them. Examples are ‘health’ ‘police’ ‘safety’ ‘justice’ ‘freedom’ ‘right’ and so on. The use of these words are not generally challenged or open to scrutiny. As descriptions of motives or empowerment, they carry the argument a pretty long way, merely by their own ‘unquestionable truth’…even when, lacking any sort of detail, they are flawed.

Such words should demand of us further probing into their real meaning and the implications we draw from them. Does ‘justice’ examine the details in order the bring ‘fairness’ and ‘truth’ into the light?

If you had to write an essay on ‘freedom’ for instance, you had better give yourself plenty of time. When this word is heralded. everyone thinks they know what it means. In reality, it is so broad that it means different things to different people.

The Free World is coloured green – simple really.

picture credit Freedom House

Such vague thinki ng will always be there, but sometimes there is no word and a new one has to be invented. The word ‘Brexit’ for instance is used to sum up the political aims of far right, single issue parties. By it’s unquestioned use and introduction into common speech, it gained far greater prominence than it deserved. Why? Because the term is so vague that it embraces different meanings amongst the people. Every special interest group such as farmers or fishermen, want some small part of Brexit to be a magic wand for them.

All the politicians have to do is keep repeating the slogan and ignore the detail.

Brexit means Brexit

These are the arguments of the absurd and bear little rational scrutiny, yet politically they paid off, because of the sense of high moral truth a generalisation infers. In the future the worms will come out and the fishermen will be at logger heads with the government of the day because they each expected different things and were given neither.

You will begin to recognise these key words when they are used because they mean everything and nothing. Take the word, ‘safety’ as an example. Safety means the avoidance of any and all risks…as if that were possible! It’s an abstract concept, yet it is treated as a golden promise.

‘The cabin crew are here for your safety’. Sounds very noble but in reality the cabin crew are here to sell as much crap as they can for company profits. A small part of their training covers what to do when everyone is going to die. The truth sounds considerably less moral high ground than the promise of ‘safety’.

So how come we let such words take over our rational thoughts? Well, It’s hard to argue against being safe. Everyone likes to think they are safe and will be highly indignant towards anyone who explains the risks. The necessity is not to accept promises of being safe, but to examine what is the best means to achieve being as safe as possible. When is an acceptable level of compromise between safety and harm achieved? Risk is all around us and only a fool would choose to give up having an exciting and interesting life, because of it.

In New Thinking, the objective is everything There is no debate about how to achieve this objective, either in broad or detailed terms. If the captain says you are safe in his boat or plane and at the end of the journey you have arrived safely, then the captain can be applauded and had spoken truthfully. Really? What really occured is that the captain glossed over listing the numerous risks that you take by traveling in his aircraft. He never tells all because this would make him appear unsure or incompetent. When he promises safety to all, he is kidding his passengers and maintaining his perfect record until the day comes when the problem he hoped would never happen, occurs. Then everyone on board is going to have to rely on what he learnt in training and how well he remembers it…something untested. As the North American Indians say, ‘it is easy to be brave from a distance’ and most of the time, we are at a distance, even the experts.

This leads onto the next New Think thought pattern which challenges the old adage that one swallow does not make a summer. In New Think, if a problem happens just once, it could happen again. Usually when a problem is encountered, say thieves breaking into cars in a supermarket car park, the New Thinker will pay no heed to what measures have been put in place to reduce the likelihood of it happening again. That is going into an area of complication that they believe they have no need to consider. They know secretly that if they did, they are entering an area of expertise they may not understand and expose the authority they pretend to have.

The solution in New Think is always extreme… ‘I will never use that car park again’. The hammer comes down on the nut. For Hitler and many societies before him (including the British in the city of York), the Jews were the problem and the hammer Hitler used we all know about. New Think, when delivered eloquently (and Hitler was an eloquent crowd pleaser) will stun into paralysis people’s critical thought patterns. We call it ‘propaganda’ or ‘spin’ and politicians today can spin plates like the Cirque de Soleil.

The New Thinker hopes and expects the listener is too polite to challenge and or ask for factual proof. Any such challenge is met with the wrath of the self righteous and in my experience, that is more scary than a person who knows or realises they are wrong.

Sometimes the generalisation it is generally true but either untrue in the detail as I have described or…wait for it… not even relevant!

An example would be a when woman lying on a beach is approached by a couple walking a dog. The dog sits and empties it’s bowels next to the womans towel. On seeing how upset the woman is, the man states loudly, ‘a dog has to go’. This statement is a true physiological fact, beyond challenge. It makes him feel reasonable and sensitive to his dogs needs. However by considering only how to justify himself over a third party, he effectively puts himself in a place where he can ‘move on’ and ignore the wronged party as a loser. The man’s self justification technique uses a true but blatantly irrelevant statement.

New Thinkers are keen to avoid responsibility. They work under the principle that they are right or can pretend to others that they are and in presenting the ‘proof’ the other party is logically, wrong! Since New Think skillfully avoids the contradictions and pitfalls that complex thinkers consider, New Thinkers rarely, if ever, say anything that they think, is wrong. Most of the time they are being so superficial or irrelevant that they are impossible to verbally challenge. There are certain politicians on the world stage now who employ the technique of ‘not answering the question’ particularly during Prime Ministers question time. Why be so foolish as to expect answers at question time!

This technique of New Think, produces more ‘red herrings’ than a deep sea trawler to distract and deflect listeners. The speaker raises and then explores areas that are not in any dispute. They will end their ‘true to another question but not this one’ ‘answer’, with a flourish of cliches and fist air punches, then sit back down to wait for the imaginary applause.

New Thinking awards the thinker a high self opinion after one unchallenged success after another. Expert thinkers can have the carpet pulled from under their feet when challenged by New Think. They can’t believe the other party is so ignorant and as they scramble for an answer the audience has stopped trusting them. This has given rise to the notion of ‘distrust the expert’. The thrones of the professional ‘experts’ are now occupied by uncrowned New Thinkers. So sure are the ignorant that knowledge is simple to obtain, that the butcher, baker and candlestick maker feel personal entitlement to opinions on most subjects. Do butchers make good surgeons? Probably not but test this with a DIY heart transplant if you doubt.

There is a measured phenomenon that enables a complete beginner to guess and be right. Professors David Dunning and Justin Kruger found that in the first instance a beginner will be highly confident when discussing and drawing conclusions on a complex subject. They are measurably more confident than an expert because experts are aware of the contradictions and elephant traps dug by the hunter known as ‘complexity’. It was found that after the initial burst of confidence the beginner / amateur soon discovers that they are wrong on many counts. Their confidence over time, takes a steep tumble to well below the expert. What harm they have done in that time depends on how much others believed them.

New Thinkers grab a few facts on a subject that interests them and present it as conclusions that have been subject to extensive research, experience and review. In fact what they are presenting is shallow, ill considered and potentially, dangerous. The initial facts may not even be real but imagined, or at least selected because they support the New Thinker’s views.

New Speak Words

New Speak has a special way of making fiction sound like fact. The phrase ‘to be honest’ is used as if the speaker has suddenly departed from fiction into Factland, or has been swept away by a Tsunami of emotion, gaining truth and sincerity in the process. Even words like ‘actually’ are able to make the fake more real. Just by using this word, truth is pretended.

When the New Speaker has no idea what the the facts of the matter are, they will move into the area of hope and expectation. Here, they can present themselves as that ‘jolly good fellow – the optimist’. Since everyone likes an optimist, however self elusory they may be, being hopeful for ‘good things’ is hard to shout down or challenge. For a start, anyone who does not believe an ‘optimist’ must logically be ‘a pessimist’ and we all know how wrong that is.

I suggest that optimist and pessimist are both subject to emotional thinking rather than rational thinking. Surely, outside of those in hope or despair, their exists, ‘the realist’. This person is not likely to be pontificating and making false promises or raising or lowering expectations amongst the naive. The realist will say their piece and disappear into the depths from which they emerged, because understanding reality takes time. Realists are usually experimenters and experts.

Some New Speak comes from faulty logic. Thinking and in particular logic is not necessarily taught in most primary and secondary education. There is some understanding of ’cause and effect’ from science classes but the process of thinking and it’s inevitable falsehoods rarely surface in mainstream education, let alone adulthood. One such example is a syllogism. These are two true statements but a false causal connection between them is assumed. An example might be,

The farmer had a bumper crop of apples this year.

The apples were sprinkled with a holy water from Lourdes brought by the farmers wife after her pilgrimage.

The holy water brought about the bumper crop of apples.

Armed with this and other kinds of flawed logic, the New Speaker can draw conclusions on all sorts of subjects using facts that are true but have no causal connection. There might well be inferred a connection but usually some simple analysis and testing, will disprove.

The best tool at the disposal of the new Speaker is to ‘totally ignore the question’. This a thinly disguised passive aggression. If it was aggression it would be challenged but omission is rarely challenged. Perhaps he just forgot the question? Perhaps he does not want to go there? – are the thoughts of the sensitive listener. In reality, the question was merely taken as a prompt for the new Speaker to move onto a favourite subject in which to sound correct, rather than get bogged down in analysis. Why would you do that, if your goal overrules your integrity?

When in full flow, a New Speaker, will use stock phrases often completely unconsciously. These phrases are the ‘you know?’ or ‘do you know what I mean’. These are repeated appeals for encouragement and continuation of verbalisation independent of agreement or truth. The listener might be tempted to rejoin, ‘no I don’t know’ or ‘I don’t know what you are talking about?’ Unfortunately the passive listener does not feel empowered to interrupt or rattle the New Speaker’s, well disguised lack of confidence.

‘As I said,’ begins the new speaker, at which point you rejoin, ‘well if you said it, why are you saying it again? I heard you the first time’.

So New Thinking and New Speaking are two sides of the same coin. They are not a new phenomenon, as new things come along all the time. What they are are a ‘temperature guage’ from which rational people can gain a warning.

Words, according to the Biblical story of the Tower of Babel, introduce confusion. This was true in ancient times and remains very much so today. We ignore obfuscation and ‘fakeness’ at our peril. The great babble from the World Wide Web has amplified untruth to the extreme. We have reached the point where people become ready to believe almost anything as fact.

Speak your truth, gentle citizen, and the truth will set you free. Or perhaps that’s not true any more? What do you think? Are you better at thinking than Jesus? Time to declare yourself as the new Messiah then…or just wind you neck in.

Matters Blog

Original thoughts on a variety of subjects that matter to me

Author: Matters Blog - Things that Matter to Me