The Living Giants from Atlantis

14/07/2020 / Matters Blog - Things that Matter to Me / Leave a comment

‘On those vast shady hills between America and Albion’s shore,

Now barr’d out by the Atlantic sea, call’d Atlantean hills,

Because from their bright summits you may pass to the Golden world,’

Excerpt from the poem ‘America’ by William Blake

From east to west and north to south there is evidence of a lost continent in the Atlantic Ocean named ‘Atlantis’.

I shall not go deeply into proving or disproving such a continent in this essay, as it is not the main focus. I shall only briefly consider the existence of a ‘Golden world’ in the remants in the landscapes that we see today.

In 1972-3, just as the ‘sleeping prophet’ Edgar Cayce predicted, archaeological evidence of an advanced civilisation was discovered off the coast of Bimini. Huge blocks of stone formed wide pavements stretching up to 1600 feet.

Map of Atlantis by William Scott-Elliott 1910; picture credit Wikipedia

In July and August 1973 an expedition from Pepperdine University in California, discovered paved roads and broken columns in the Bay of Cadiz off the Spanish mainland at a depth of 120 feet.

Plato is perhaps the best known written source of a description of the lost continent situated beyond the Pillars of Hercules which were at the entrance to the Mediterranean sea.

When Atlantis collapsed into the sea amidst earthquakes and catastrophic seismic and volcanic activity, the survivors were those who were able to take to their boats; just as at Pompeii. If the Atlantean s fled in every direction we would expect their ‘footprints’ to appear around the globe and so we do. There are few other good explanations for the existence of pyramids on all of the continents unless they were inspired by one race of people with their own sophisticated knowledge of why and how to build them.

Less obvious, but still meaningful, is the existence of menhirs, dolmens, stone circles running along the western edge of Europe. One example is ‘chambered cairns’ which are large mounds covering narrow passages leading to a central circular room. These are found from southern Spain (Antequera) to the Orkney Islands (Maes Howe) and are identical in design, purpose and function.

The anthropologists identify ‘unknown’ ancestry to some peoples of the western Atlantic coast. One such group are the Guanche from the western Canary Islands. Sadly they are now extinct but records from the 15^th Century describe them as tall, massively built with pale brown to white skin.

The people of the Basque country in northern Spain are equally out of place genetically, culturally, linguistically and even by having a rare blood group.

I shall leave this subject here leaving the reader to satisfy their curiosity further about Atlantis.

If we propose that much of the post apocalypse Atlantean knowledge was spread in each direction, in doing so it ‘flavoured’ existing cultures and we should be able to ‘taste’ that ancestry today.

In support of this supposition I shall present two ‘enigmatic hill figures in Southern England. I shall propose that the Atlantean knowledge came indirectly through the civilisation of Ancient Egypt. We know that there was trade in tin, gold, iron and flint between the British Isles and the Mediterranean in the ancient past and that the cultures such as the Phoenicians were expert mariners.

So should it be a surprise to find two ‘giant’ figures scraped into the turf of the chalk hills of Sussex and Dorset?

Giant Number One – The Long Man of Wilmington

The Long Man of Wilmington faces north on the escarpment of the chalk hills known as the Downs, near the village of the same name in E. Sussex, England.

The illustration shows the size of this figure and this should not be overlooked. The Ancient Egyptians also built statues of pharaohs which could only be described as ‘giant’ such as those of Abu Simnel and his Queen, near Karnak.

It is also interesting that the figure is stretched in proportion from head to toe, so that when viewed from below, the foreshortening effect reduces the figure to correct proportions. A similar graphic technique is used in the centre of football pitches for advertising today. The effect leaves the arms appearing too long like an ape but there was a reason for that.

This tells us that the figure was designed to be viewed from the ground in front and below the giant near where the village stands today and possibly where the Priory and Church are. This would have been a place where ceremony and rituals took place within the influence and power of the giant figure.

The other obvious feature is the two ‘staves’ or ‘staffs’ that the figure holds vertically in each hand. The staff is a symbol of office and power and a version of it as a crook was held by Ancient Pharoahs and Christian Bishops today. Aaron held a staff which had ‘magical properties’ for finding water and Moses famously turned his staff into a snake.

These Biblical stories describe a connection with the energy associated with underground and overground water. The nearby River Cuck presents a snaking path to the sea through a series of wide curves and ‘ox bow lakes’ often featured in academic books on Geomorphology.

As a young man I myself have used a divining rod to determine the directions and paths of the underground ‘water lines’ under the Long Man of Wilmington. The ‘water lines’ clearly describe the figure in a manner normally unseen. This opens the question, does the figure attract the water lines or the water lines attract the figure? As a dowser myself I will answer this by saying that the figure is attracting the water lines. Large ancient stones when moved, bring with them the water lines to their new position.

The hill figure is therefore a form of engineering using an as yet, force unexplained by modern science. Clearly though, this figure was designed to empower a community to bring it health and prosperity via a ‘deity’ or ‘god’ or ‘giant’ or ‘angel’ or ‘genii’.

It was only in Victorian times that ‘fairies’ were reduced in size to fit into butter cups without creasing dresses. In reality, nature spirits can be any size, from the size of an atom (from which bombs are made) to that of a planet.

The staffs may symbolise balance, as there are two held identically and remind us of the two pillars at the entrance to King Solomon’s Temple and the symbolism of these valued so much in Freemasonry. They represent the sun and moon or male and female qualities of nature.

An inference to the tools of the acupuncturist is appropriate, since the penetration of the earth by staffs and stakes, stones and monuments is analogous to acupuncture and it’s aim of harmonising energy imbalances and stopping energy leakages.

The earliest dating of the figure accepted by modern archaeologists, is Roman, on account of a similar figure being found on Roman coins. Having said that, the figure of a person holding two staffs or snakes in a similar manner is common throughout the Ancient World.

It is clear that the figure contains few other clues except one important one which is easy to miss and has been the subject of some academic controversy. The question relates to the direction in which the figure of the feet point. A paper entitled ‘The Long Man of Wilmington‘ by E.W. Holden from the Sussex Archaeological Collections Volume 109, 1971 comes down on the side of those who believe the feet correctly both face in one direction.

A whimsical thought came into my mind which is the song title ‘Walk Like and Egyptian‘ from the 1930’s when Prince Tutankhamun had made a reappearance and was influencing taste and design in popular culture. It is noteworthy that perspective was not used in representation and art until the Renaissance in Europe.

Almost all Ancient Egyptian representations of figures are two dimensional and show feet both pointing in one direction. This is clearly no proof of a link to Ancient Egypt but it suggests a connection that may be corroborated by other facts. The first such suggestion is that we see the same depiction of feet in the next figure, the Cerne Abbas Giant.

Giant Number Two – Cerne Abbas, Dorset, England

The ancient Cerne Giant at Cerne Abbas, Dorset is having a make-over. Dozens of volunteers and local families have been invited by the National Trust to help reinstate it on the steep hillside. The edges are trimmed and fresh loads of ground up chalk pounded into the markings. It is famous for having its manhood on full display.

All along the chalk hills that stretch from west to east in the south east of England, hill figures are found. The most notable example is the Giant named after the village of Cerne Abbas. He faces west, measures 180 feet (60m) from head to toe and like his Wilmington cousin carries a staff, which he waves this time above his head in a war like manner.

Guy Underwood dated this figure as about 4000 B.C. As can be seen in the diagrams from his book The Patterns of the Past p150, the shape of the figure corresponds with the hidden ‘aquastats’ or energy lines associated with underground water. Above the figure is a rectangular enclosure formed by ditches and mounds. This was possibly used as the meeting place for pagan communal worship and celebration at sacred times of the year. (Contrary to negative propaganda, Pagans are great believers in the family and communal living to produce a harmonious life style respectful of the energy and forms of the great mother, nature.)

If we examine the figure from the top down, the club has the appearance of being made of wood and it’s purpose warring. The arms are outstretched horizontally much in the manner of the Long Man of Wilmington.

The most notable feature of the figure is the erect phallus and perhaps the club is an echo of this also. Local traditions celebrate this overt sexuality such as that if a girl sleeps on the Giant she will have many children. Also it is said, that if a girl walks around the Giant at night she will have a happy marriage. The figure is therefore representing energy and power in a very demonstrative way that country people through time would have understood and respected.

If we accept the premise of a force of nature as yet unmeasured by modern science but recorded in structures for thousands of years across the world, then the Cerne Giant expresses the sexual designs of nature that literally makes the world go round. The feature known as ‘the Mound’ at the same level as the phallus in the figure is to me an erect phallus viewed sideways, giving another sacred feature and area for this power to express itself and interact with humans. It is important to note briefly that this sexual energy, (celebrated as Tantra in the East and the Karma Sutra it’s most famous reference book) can be directly converted to sacred energy within the human body.

As we move down to the feet, again we have the clue that they are two dimensional and both point to the figure’s right, in the manner of the ancients such as the Egyptian figurative artists. Giving a side view of the phallus also shows a need to express a three dimensional form on a flat plane.

The arrival of Christianity came in the form of St. Augustine with missionaries to convert the pagan inhabitants of Cerne in about 700 A.D. Their hill figure we might expect would have shocked the saint as a demonstration of the natural forces that the local people engaged with. He was mocked by them and they tied cow’s tails to the missionaries garments and sent them away. In return the saint put a curse on them to the effect that their children should be born with tails in the future. As he did this a fountain of crystal water appeared and he started to baptize the people and eventually founded Cerne Abbey.

Such an important figure as a saint who practised a form a magic as curses and water divination brought the pagan god into the modern world where profane images are forbidden. Was there a general fear of the unknown and the forces of nature within the landscape? The Christianisation of the sacred landscape by the imposition of Christian buildings declared a new world view based on the crystal clarity of love rather than lust.

What do they Mean?

Both figures describe quite literally the underground energy of the two places they inhabit. They are both local minor ‘gods’ or ‘spirits’ that inhabit a sacred place. They share their powers of fecundity and healing with the local people proven by the reproductive cycles of animals, crops and humanity.

To the sensitive this energy comes as both male and feminine, in the manner that electricity is describe today. The two forces can be kept apart to create a potential difference but ultimately they strive to be drawn together in balance and harmony.

The Long Man of Wilmington describes both of these aspects with the two staffs stretched equally apart of the vertical form of the body. This is most common stance in ancient times and is recorded by many civilisations across the world. It is not proven but a possibility that the Ancient Atlantean race were either familiar with or originated this stance. Their ‘golden world’ of Blake’s vision would have been built of matter and energy in a way that these simple hill figures resemble.

The Cerne Giant is in my view representing the male or positive aspect of this power and is a minor god of considerable power – so much so that the Church had to intervene to contain it. The presence of ribs in the figure, the reference to the spine and the extension of the tail in the human body, could be an occult pagan reference. The Pagan Tree of Life is central to their belief and worship and the human upright form is a representation of itself as a tree. Energy flows through the human body from the base of the spine to the top of the head, connecting earth to heaven through the human form as a kind of ‘fuse’ or cut out.

Alchemical depiction of the Divine feminine balancing the energies of the sun and moon.

At their inception both figures represent the minor god or spirit who inhabits the place. The god or spirit is attracted to the pervasive energy of the place to fulfil it’s own spirit and in turn, the spirit of the natural world and it’s inhabitants.

In Ancient Egypt, one of the principle gods, Osiris was murdered by his son Seth and his body parts scattered. His wife Isis set about reconstructing the body and found all the parts but for Osiris’s penis.

A Roman depiction circa 400 A.D. of Seth with the head of a donkey and staffs.

In a metaphoric way, we might surmise that the ancient language of form and energy mastered by our ancient ancestors, lives on in the remains scattered across the world’s landscapes today.

Many are still energised, some are being re-energised by mystics and seers, and some remain undiscovered.

We live in a time when the power of these ancient gods or spirits are re-emerging. Both the natural male or positive power that brings about change – sometimes through war and conflict as in the Cerne Giant – and the natural feminine power that brings about nurturing, renewal and growth.

At few other times in history has mankind needed the intervention of the natural forces that it has shunned and even destroyed, through exploitation of the natural resources of the planet.

The people of Atlantis reached a similar apotheosis as our own. In the end of their civilisation they were at war with each other and perverted the natural forces to their own self centred ends and pleasure seeking.

In the manner of the Old Testament, they were overwhelmed and destroyed by the angry and vengeful forces of nature. Their continent sank into the ocean and their vane projects destroyed just as could happen in the twenty first century.

There are places for us to visit and pay homage now. To find the ancient power of nature in the sacred places of the landscape and to bring it into our lives through prayer and worship, much as the ancient people of southern England were able to do – perhaps as a memory of our common ancestors – not only the Atlanteans but the whole human family.

And as all glimpses of the past teach us, these are not our times. The two hill figures described are both male and reflect the creative male energy that was forming the societies and consciousness of that time. Further away on the other side of the Atlantic the Navajo Indians had another figure to revere, Changing Woman.

One of the primary characters of Navajo mythology
and religion is Changing Woman who grows old and
young again with the seasons. She represents the
power of the earth and of women to create and
sustain life. Other Holy Women stand at the four
directions: in the East is Earth Woman, in the South
is Mountain Woman, in the West is Water Woman, and in the North is Corn Woman.

Source www.nativeamerican-art.com

The present time is in need of this feminine energy to rebalance the eons of cultures in which the masculine principle of war, metal work and Kings were supreme.

The energy coming from Ancient times now is the Divine feminine that embodies rivers and seas and soft landscapes, water meadows, calling birds and the gentle people for whom love of nature and mankind is supreme.

We can learn from the Atlanteans, who by their mistakes of tampering with the masculine Divine, created an imbalance and brought about their own destruction. The energy of the feminine Changing Woman is calling us now and our ability to respond will be the measure of our success as a species.

The Darker Side of You

01/07/202025/06/2020 / Matters Blog - Things that Matter to Me / Leave a comment

This month, on 4-5th July 2020, there will be a lunar eclipse. The shadow of the earth will trace a dark path across the moon. Whilst the moon does not have a dark side it does act as a projector screen for the earth’s shadow. Normally, the moon enables light to be reflected from the sun to lighten our nights, as well as help mankind reflect on it’s shadow nature.

picture credit: curlytales.com

On 21 June 2020 there was a solar eclipse which curved around the earth from the Horn of Africa to China. Being only about 53 miles across the umbra shadow cut a relatively narrow road. To the people in it’s path, it was almost certainly an awesome experience.

To lose the light of the sun during the day when it would normally be a reassuring, continual presence, can be frightening. Humans are not naturally nocturnal creatures. We avoid the darkness and emerge from our sleep when the sun’s fingers cross our bedsheets and tickle our chins.

How comfortable our existence becomes! We are always guided by the light, warmed by the infra red or cooled in the shade. We become creatures of the light and self styled spiritual gurus in the west have adopted the title, ‘light workers’. A more balanced approach would be to examine shadows as well as light. Only in this way can the whole be understood. In reality there is no such thing as dark, only an abscence or reduction on light intensity which we call ‘dark’.

Events like solar and lunar eclipses and of course the night, underscore the ‘unwelcome’ reality that there is a dark side to everything. Sometimes the darkness creates fear, sometimes safety. A frightened child may run to the comfort of the wardrobe, only to find a Lion and a Witch and adventures therein. Even the internet has a ‘dark’ cavern where shady characters gather to share and enjoy the unmentionable.

We ignore the spiritual and psychological reality of ‘darkness’ at our peril. For, like all external phenomenon – the cycles of nature – we have shadows within. They contain aspects of ourselves which are not necessarily ‘bad’ by any natural comparison but are deemed ‘bad’ by the arbitrary rules and regulations of society.

Bad in this context naturally excludes causing harm to others. The ‘bad’ is simply that part of our own nature which we are told as children and adults, is wrong to express.

Cultural taboos, customs and norms, laws; all draw boundaries around us which we are forbidden to cross.

Such ‘bad’ behaviour might be a refusal by a child to ‘do you are told’. I was once made to sit in a chair all afternoon staring outside, because I had rebelled against my parents rule that I return for lunch everyday. That day, I was having too much fun riding on top trailers of hay on the local farm. (This was the 1960’s when children played outside all day. Other people were not then regarded as ‘dark strangers’ as they are today by many fearful parents. )

Today I remain an ‘outdoor’ person and ‘sun lover’ much to the amusement of others who tend not to expose their bodies to it’s health giving rays. As an adult I can see that this is their choice and I have mine. There are rational reasons for both standpoints. I stand by my choice as an expression of my own nature. Without this aspect of myself being expressed and experienced, I would not be a whole person.

All of the above is of course pure Jungian psychology, named after the great Carl Jung, one time pupil of Sigmund Freud.

Jung coined the termed ‘individuation’ as being the life time goal of an individual, in place of the less achievable ‘perfection’ in many more classical spiritual paths.

The distinction between the outer and inner nature is a product of dualistic or binary thought, where the two ‘opposites’ create each other.

The brighter the light, the darker the shadow

But we know from physical science that it is impossible to create a ‘dark’ box and it is impossible to create a light of maximum brightness. These two extremes merge into one another somewhere in the middle and that is a good metaphor for the goal of individuation. The light is not worshipped as the only thing that matters, as in the ancient sun god and to some extent modern new age thinkers, and the dark is not feared. The nature of reality is an infinite number of shades of grey.

Carl Jung realised that the repression of the expression of Self, puts away those aspects of consciousness that the individual cannot face and, or, comprehend.

This might be the experience of a trauma as an adult or a child. Whatever the strength of the repressed experience, Jung argued that if allowed to remain in the shadow side of the personality, it would have a negative influence on the personality which not only persists, but expands. This fear eventually becomes greater than the repressed thoughts and feelings and creates a blockage between the conscious and subconscious minds.

The story of Beauty and the Beast is a perfect example of this. The beast has become a completely horrific aspect in the mind of Beauty. She is used to the light and lightness of being and to have some aspect (her maleness ) of her mind shut away is not something she can approach easily. But in the story she over comes her fear of the beast within and eventually she falls in love. At this point the grip of the fear which once held her back from loving, has been broken. The beast turns into the handsome prince he always was.

We all need to discover the prince or princess within us and not shut him or her away in a dark or ivory tower. Sometimes society allows us to do this, sometimes not.

Loki the Trickster

At this moment in time we are reminded by the planets and their place in the spiralling heavens that we have nothing to fear. We need to take the advice from ‘the fool’ – another archetype who Jung termed ‘the Trickster’.

Imagine yourself as the tea pot in the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party in Alice in Wonderland. You are surrounded by rows of plates and cutlery and at each place sits a lunatic character each insistent on their own point of view. If you were that tea pot – sometimes with a dormouse inside and sometimes not – then your task is to remove your lid. Throw your hat into the crowd. Let the light into your dark interior, perhaps to let the dormouse in or out, perhaps just for your own satisfaction of feeling every permutation of what it is to be a tea pot.

There is a modern interviewing technique for candidates to an occupational post. It is to ask rather bizarre questions and record how the candidate responds. One such question is;

What is this? A tea pot is produced and placed on the table.

A conventional mind will answer ‘a tea pot’. An unconventional and open mind will suggest that it is a tool for catching tropical fish underwater, a rain catcher for a leaky log cabin, an echo chamber to aid singers practice as if in a cathedral, a device for pouring liquid concrete into unwanted mouse holes and so on. The obvious answer is obvious, everything else comes from the personal unconscious and sometimes, the shadow self as well.

There is no right answer just the endless horizon of possibilities. When we cross the unreal boundaries drawn by our own minds and, or, social human norms, we cross over into the world of imagination.

Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz experiences individuation by overcoming her fear of the physical world, represented by the characters of the Lion, Scarecrow and Tin Man. These are symbols of the animal, vegetable and mineral kingdoms / emotions, instincts, mind, within the parameters of which we each play out our lives. As humans we have a unique chance to travel the golden road. At the end of that road, if we ever reach it, we realise – that is, it becomes real – that the Wizard in the dark castle of our minds, is just a frail old man who holds no power over us at all.

If you wish to understand how the ‘fairy tales’ of our childhood are not fairy tales at all, it really is not necessary. They work like the ‘patches’ that we download into our computers. We do not need to understand how they work but by absorbing them the threat to your computer has gone. This is why children crave traditional ‘bedtime stories’ that come from the collective repair shop of mankind’s evolution. What are termed ‘fairy stories’ but are more real than anyone can imagine.

Hello yellow brick road.

picture credit: myHighPlains.com

White Lies Matter

23/06/2020 / Matters Blog - Things that Matter to Me / Leave a comment

When I was a boy I had an aunt who had been a Baptist missionary in, what was then, the Belgium Congo and is now the Democratic Republic of Congo.

This gives you a clue that this was the 1950’s and Africa was still largely in the hands of European countries. She and her husband were captured and managed to escape prison and return to England. I remember her telling me once, that ‘black people are not as intelligent as white people’. Fortunately I had never seen a black person at that age. But it was one of many ‘white lies’ I have heard.

I use this anecdote to show how the morality of generations evolve and change. After the second world war and the fight against fascism, opinions of others based on their race, religion, disability, sexuality were liberalised. The Nazis and to some extent Victorians, believed in eugenics and the creation of a ‘master race’ – completely opposite of what today we call ‘respect for diversity’.

My own skin colour I will not reveal here, as it changes with my exposure to the sun and is therefore of little relevance, and my race is – human.

The permission to abuse another human being, on account of their perceived inferiority must go back to ancient Sumer, Abyssinia, Egypt, Greece and Rome. Throughout the Middle East and the Classical world, people were either royal, free or slaves. This was a ‘perfectly normal’ set up and no doubt solved the problem of what to do with prisoners from conquered lands, as well as deciding who was going to do the washing up.

A Chain Gang in Ancient Rome

When Europe adopted Greek and Roman classicism in the Renaissance they stole and copied statues of gods and Emperors; more as decorative pieces of sculpture, rather than because they admired the shameful behaviour of minor gods and Emperors.

But this model undoubtedly had an effect on the human consciences. How else could slavery have remained legal until the eighteenth century? When Europe was exploiting the West Indies and needed slave labour, Africa was convenient for it’s ships to pick up more slaves, and yes, sometimes from Africans ready to sell their enemies.

In those times much of the riches of the Western cultures came from the sweat, blood and tears of slaves. We know this, so – have we changed?

I personally think that we have, but not totally. I see people from all over the world living and working in European cities. There are high achievers and low achievers in any society, depending on how you measure ‘achievement’. But more importantly, people all over the world today are better fed, more likely to survive birth, and more likely to be educated and have access to health care. There are obviously exceptions to all of these but I am describing a trend. There are graphs produced by physicians and social scientists like the late Swedish academic Hans Rosling, that tell us this.

There is room for everyone on the planet according to the Professor

But the devil is, as always, in the detail. Racism endures in the minds of people of all races. There is a saying ‘birds of a feather stick together’ and as a description of human social behaviour, this remains largely, true.

The European collective unconscious has a lot of skeletons in it’s museum vaults and these continue to rattle to the present day.

Clearly, national institutions continue to exert power that is prejudicial towards it’s citizens on account of race, religion, gender, sexuality, disability – despite the introduction of many laws, certainly in Europe, to correct this.

Personally I do not think new laws change societies of themselves, there has to be more. Even after the late Martin Luther King Jnr. gave his inspirational speeches in the 1960’s; sixty years later there are still statues of slave traders in European cities and military bases in the southern states of the USA named after confederate generals.

Head of Martin Luther King Junior in MLK Park, Buffalo, New York State

Whilst it is correct to record and preserve the facts of history and heritage, much of what our forefathers thought was ‘acceptable’ is nothing to be proud of today. Museums and history books must be trusted and treasured so that they enable future generations to learn from the past. This will, at best, inspire an imperative to practice compassion towards one another today, because we got it wrong in past.

Therefore it is clearly the responsibility of those with the power to do so, to make regular assessments of local and national institutions and weed out any ‘honouring’ of the past, of which we should be ashamed, without hiding truth.

The African Americans and many allies, are presently leading the charge against their prejudicial treatment, but the lesson has global implications.

There is not a single human being on the planet including myself, who would not benefit from keeping a constant check on personal behaviours towards others that reveals some irrational prejudice, and immediately correct it.

Some argue that doing nothing is also acting with prejudice and perhaps they are right. Laws can be broken by act or omission, so can our personal integrity. The saying goes something like; ‘evil thrives when the good guys do nothing’.

And it is a fact that people of all colours, creed, tribe and what ever distinction you choose, have done nothing for a very long time. The history of post colonial Africa contains many shameful periods of genocide.

For example, in the Democratic Republic of Congo between 1997 and 2003, five million people were killed. If you read an article in the Guardian Newspaper website entitled ‘Wars Will Never Stop’ it quotes a young fighter who was dying in hospital of his shocking injuries from a local skirmish with a rival faction of his rebel group;

“I was just a foot soldier so I don’t really know why we were fighting,” he said. “There are lots of reasons I think …. I don’t think the wars here will ever stop. They will probably get worse.”

The question has to be asked, where were the protests of outrage from people of African heritage in their adopted countries all over the world?

Who did nothing when 800,000 people were slaughtered in Rwanda in just one hundred days in 1994?

Rwandan Genocide

We all have to be careful that they are not being stirred up and manipulated for political reasons. In Rwanda the principle tool for the stirring up of hatred was the public radio.

All societies have to guard against the publication of false information or the abscence of true information. For instance, it is curious that the size of the problem of ‘deaths in police custody’ is not published, despite a law in the United States of America requiring them to be so. The Death in Custody Reporting Act of 2013 went into effect in December 2014, but official figures have never been made public. The reason is either that these figures will prompt national outrage and shame, or lead to a conclusion that the problem is much smaller than it is being made to seem.

Clearly, one death is too many, but national figures covering 500,000,000 people have to be published openly, especially when feelings are running high as they are now.

The core problem is contained in the hearts of those who nurture hatred towards other human beings, for whatever reason. It does not matter if the hatred is black against black or white against black or black against white or white against white. The issue, in my view, is not an identification with a race or class, or creed, but the level of willingness of each human being to allow their love for all of humanity, to rise above everything else.

‘Hate cannot drive out hate, only love can do that.’ Dr. Martin Luther King Junior

Life in the Soup

12/06/202004/06/2020 / Matters Blog - Things that Matter to Me / Leave a comment

For us simple human beings, working our way through our lives like fish in a kind of information soup, we long for the soup to become clear. We long to see the other side of the dish and to travel in every direction. It can be done, because we are super computers. We just need to know the process and that is what life in soup can do. That is why, we are – in the soup with not a clue what to do but go round and round! Even religions offer little advice or explanation to why we cannot see what is right in front of us. Why is human behaviour so repetitive – throughout history and the history of histories. Surely there is a process to move us into the next dimension? Well here it is; read on.

It is a well known phenomenon that radio waves have been leaving this planet since the first Marconi, Bell and Tesla radio transmissions. Like some giant expanding onion, information has been hurtling ever outward at the speed of light. If you could catch everything up in a warp speed craft, you would overtake the history of broadcasting, second by second.

Aldebaran residents are about to listen to WW II – if the baseball didn’t put them off.

So it is not so hard to understand the idea that electromagnetic energy can be used to carry information. Just as we compress and release air in our vocal chords to make sounds that carry words, so em wave energy can be compressed into ones and noughts in infinite combinations.

Can you imagine yourselves, contained apparently in a physical body, with the memory of your many lives, expanding in an ever increasing bubble of information? Perhaps you have to grow old to realise this. When you are very young, your universe is proportionately small and memories are being made, like a new formed galaxy.

Recently I was trying remember the names of a couple who I knew almost fifty years ago. I could see their faces, but my memory was blank. So I left it for a while and sure enough, the librarians in my head approached me triumphantly with just what I had been looking for. Wow! The names themselves then become memory triggers for more information; incidents, happy days.

Any hypnotists will tell you that their science of the mind is premised on the fact that every piece of information that has even entered the human brain is still there. As an organic super computer; the brain can store and retrieve information without or without instructions from the conscious mind. A hypnotist uses suggestion to the unconscious mind, to travel in these memories of events and people both in this and past lives*. They take what useful lessons can be learnt from the highs and lows of someone’s life. As conscious beings we have a habit of remembering highs and forgetting lows, which is why we see the world and ourselves, with rose tinted spectacles.

*look up the late Dolores Canon on You Tube for a complete life’s work on this subject

This great bubble of information that is contained within and without of our bodies, becomes what we believe ourselves to be. We are the sum of the books we have read, the films we have seen, the computer programmes and television programmes, the motor skills of the body, the languages of the mind, the poetry of inner space and countless other forms of perception.

The secondary process that the brain undertakes with time, is to bring together strands of information which can be classified in complementary ways. These are the patterns we use to help ‘understanding’ take over from the fear of the unknown that we experience as children. When we know what has happened we get a general idea of what will happen when the ducks line up in a particular way. Brains love patterns, and much of mankind’s classic architecture, sculpture, mosaics, art, puzzles work on this particular hunger. And patterns are important because they become what we term ‘knowledge’.

Knowledge is a higher form of information because knowing is the bare facts spun and woven into a useable cloth. It has a practical function similar to cloth and performs well for as long as it remains without tears and holes. Even computer programmes need ‘patches’ every now and again and human knowledge is the same. We have to edit and update skills that we have learnt and maybe need refreshing. We have to make space for new cloth to be woven and hung where we can see it. The advantage knowledge has over information is that it is faster to retrieve and read.

Iron Man sits in his palace with a wall of transparent computer screens in front of him. The images and words present a pattern that only he is comfortable with.

Neo in the Matrix films, moves in and out of an information soup which is a green cascade of numbers and letters, bytes.

Neither view of information is a particularly accurate representation of how complexity compresses into simple strands of knowledge. One example would be a Japanese chef who spends hours creating a dish. On the plate looks like it has taken minutes to prepare. Simplicity is one of the hardest things to get right because it is made from complexity with exactness.

Then, to extend this metaphor to it’s extreme, one day the weft is separate from warp. The warp stretches out as a single, perfectly aligned, strand of knowledge.

Just as a metamorphic rock is opaque and it’s associated minerals like quartz are clear. A mineral is compressed and heated before it cools into perfect molecular alignment. Light travels through it in the same way that the rising sun’s rays can travel through an orchard, of perfectly aligned trees.

The childhood negative memories of the bee string and the choking in water and the hot coals and the unexpected negative emotions and abuse from other humans. Well these can potentially become realised and placed in a perfect pattern in the later years of life.

What was opaque has become clear. This is wisdom. Wisdom is no more than knowing intuitively and rationally every aspect of everything. Light travels in all directions through the mind and the person has become ‘enlightened’.

It is not a learning process. It is not a remembering process. It is not a staring into space process. There are no wishes and no regrets. There is no instructed and no instructor. There is no god and no devil. There are no special words and no special clothes.

Everything that made your information bubble has collapsed into it’s centre, because it was able to. The process is no more than returning everything to a single point; the place where you were when you were born.

And if you don’t believe this, then consider the Universe because the transient human, is a working, scale model of the same. The Universe is currently expanding in all directions. It is even speeding up, which baffles astronomers but because we have only a fraction of a nano-second in astronomical time, to view the subject, it is possible only to surmise what is going on and the present Big Bang theory is only partly correct. It does not explain what caused the Big Bang – there is a chicken and egg logic puzzle that is avoided. If I look into the future, then I see the universe will slowly stop expanding just as a ball thrown into the air vertically, finds a still point before falling.

The universe will then contract into a single point over unimaginable aeons of time and at that single moment the concentration of power that started the last ‘big bang’ will start a new universe. As Isaac Newton observed; to every action there is an equal and opposite, reaction.

Our own lives are made up of a similar expansion and contraction process which can work through in one life time, but because it is complex, usually not. It is called Transfiguration and is the spiritualisation of the human body. When the process is completed, such happened to prophets like, Moses, Elijah, Jesus of Nazareth and the Prophet Mohammed (SAS), the body becomes light. When the Universe is also begins the process of Transfiguration or ‘big bang’, it also is light.

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters. And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. And God saw that the light was good. Genesis 1.1-31

which is complementary to John (not contradictory as light is both a wave and a particle )

In the beginning there was the word and the word was with God and the word was God. John 1.1

And from this expanding light /energy / information; tiny droplets of matter are formed – star dust – because matter can become light / energy and visa versa ( e = mc2 ).

And as we are told our bodies are made of ‘star dust’:

We Are Stardust—Literally. In this infrared image, stellar winds from a giant star cause interstellar dust to form ripples. There’s a whole lot of dust—which contains oxygen, carbon, iron, nickel, and all the other elements—out there, and eventually some of it finds its way into our bodies.

National Geographic Jan 28, 2015

– then are we not fortunate to live in a time when science is viewing the world in the same way as the mystics? Is not the soup becoming more, a consommé?

The Tunnel at the End of the Light

31/05/202031/05/2020 / Matters Blog - Things that Matter to Me / Leave a comment

There used to be a car, in the 1950’s called the Ford Popular, endearingly known as the ‘Ford Pop’.

If the model T industrialised the manufacture or cars, it was still only affordable for the middle classes of America.

But the Ford ‘Pop’ bridged that class divide and provided a ‘people’s car’. Germany had done this in the 1940’s with the Volks Wagon Beetle, but Britain took a while to catch up due to a short ‘intermission’ called the second World War.

The greatest car ever built – Ford Popular 1954

picture credit: carandclassic.co.uk

What do you expect from a people’s car? Certainly it is not going to have a chilled drinks cabinet and cigar lighter. Everything was basic, functional and appealing to the common denominator of public taste, availalbe in black, black or black. It was, naturally, very popular and it transported families in comfort from city to beauty spot in large numbers. If you wanted anything other than a can of baked beans, you had to get a pay rise.

Fast forward to today and you can draw a parallel between the dumbing down from ‘the good life ‘ for a few, to ‘dull and ordinary’ for all. The middle classes in both the UK and USA lost their grip on political dominance, because the workers have come out in larger numbers to vote.

In the last decades of the 20^th century, politics was complicated. Whilst you didn’t need a degree in political science to understand what was going on – it helped. The whole process of electing representatives on multiple – often contradictory – manifestos, parliamentary debate, Sovereignty, national priorities, international relationships and above all, law amending and making – was baffling to most. So it was left to the ‘Toffs’ from elite universities to speak down to voters in election campaigns to make promises everyone could understand – even if they were expected to forget them later.

Enter the internet in the 21^st Century. Whilst you could write the equivalent length of Nelson’s Column on how this availability of information has changed societies across the world, there must be changes.

The most obvious of these is, in my view, the ‘citizen scientist’. In a stealth move worthy of the Great Harry Houdini, ordinary people who never understood science at school, are suddenly ‘on to it’.

If we regard science as a way of thinking logically about anything – using the ‘scientific method’ to prove or disprove propositions – then everything is up for change and challenge.

Call a friend?

Suddenly people were empowered to not believe their medical Doctors. You look up your symptoms on the internet and then go and tell your Doctor what the problem is how you want to be cured providing it does not involve vaccination. The UK National Health Service even encourages this by creating NHS call centres. The staff follow algorithms in the same way G.P.’s do – perhaps even quicker and certainly without having to catch another disease in the Waiting Room.

The same process has crept into most other areas of professional expertise; people design their own houses, people cook and bake, people make art, play musical instruments, make astrological predictions, indulge in puppy care and kitten care – you name it people do it – and the walls of Jericho surrounding the professional classes have fallen.

Great, you might think. This is democracy at it’s best. People power!

The problem is the obvious one and why even Socrates, warned against empowering the masses.

The problem is that people do not access and use information, knowledge and wisdom in the way that professionals have been painstakingly trained to do. As always it remains true that, things are more complicated than they seem.

It is easy to reduce areas of knowledge to ten ‘top tips’ – how to build your own house- and make it look easy. Speak to anyone who has built their own house and they will describe the most stressful time of their lives, going over time and over budget and still the roof leaks.

Socrates warned that ordinary people did not have the education to be trusted in such things as – voting. Perhaps this is one reason why women in the UK at the turn of the 19^th century were still denied a university education and a vote – why this particular prejudice was suffered for so long.

Even with a university education, young men and women in the twenty first century are finding it hard to get a job. When the Blair government in the UK declared an aim to give a top class education to fifty per cent of young people, the ideal appeared noble. But the reality was that ‘degrees’ became so common that they were no longer the doorway into top jobs.

Worse still, with the introduction of University fees in the UK, young people were enslaved into a life time of paying off a high interest debt – all on the promise of ‘earning more’. And governments too are unlikely to get their ‘pound of flesh’ from the deal. Grants to the few worked better in my view.

In primary schools the children of the first decade of the twenty first century were told how clever they are and one day they might be Prime Minister. It was of course a lie told be people who had only become teachers who took holidays at home.

Only a few people ever become Prime Minister- as if we need telling.

The president of the United States for instance, has been described by psychologists as ‘adolescent’. Although he boasts of a ‘very, very, good education indeed’ – he didn’t listen in school and learnt very little. Add to being academically dumb, other short comings which doubters love to list, then you have a candidate appealing to those who are fed up with being talked down to because they are ‘very, very good people indeed’. Fortunately in America there are plenty of these in the southern states.

Trump uses short phrases to plug home a message easy to understand and remember for the masses;

‘Make America Great!’ ‘America First!’

Johnson does the same; ‘No Deal Brexit!’ ‘Project Fear!’

Their close advisers are no longer civil servants or even elected politicians. They are media savvy individuals who know how to change how voters and party members think. In the UK now there is not even a deputy Prime Minister the PM can discuss strategy with. Instead their is an unelected ‘close adviser’ to whom the PM remains loyal – at least until Brexit is over – despite protests from his own party back benchers.

But the patients have not completely taken over the Mental Health Institution. There is today a swing back towards trusting the middle class professionals. Self build houses leak, Mr Kipling’s cakes taste better, art is not easy. But particularly at this time of crisis, people have seen the highly trained men and women in the health services, battling away for little personal reward and realise, ‘I could not do that’.

Suddenly, the science of Virology is laid out like a patient etherised upon a table, and no one except the professionals understands.

picture credit newseu.cgtn.com

Because it’s difficult to ‘do the right thing’, science is emerging as a wise advisor to governments. When Boris Johnson gives press briefings he is flanked by non-elected scientists who give ‘advice’. This appears to be a correct and ethical process until you realise that there as many views on a subject as there are scientists. Scientists often disagree with each other’s ‘version of the facts’. They will say that more studies are needed, larger samples, more vigorous methodologies, new measuring instruments and technologies – innovation and discovery!

(A particularly cynical pundit will suggest that governments are setting up someone to blame, when the strategy is seen to have killed thousands because the government policy was late and or wrong.)

This dark secret of science is not so dark and we should demand to know it. Should President Harry Truman have been persuaded to build the Atomic bomb – ending one war and starting a cold one that sits like a dripping glacier, to the present day?

picture credit: atomicheritage.org

Is that a nuclear weapon or are you just pleased to see me?

Who voted for the Atomic bomb? Certainly plenty of people protested against it in hindsight but knowledge, once out of Pandora’s Box, never wants to get back in.

Suddenly ‘the people’ see the scientists as doubtful holders of solutions to problems. Science has mucked things up just as often as it has created a better world.

And if you can’t trust the scientists surely you have to trust the politicians? Unfortunately there are as many political view points are there are sea gulls behind a fishing boat and the only thing you can be sure about is the direction of the boat.

So societies trundle into the twentieth century lead on by TV and radio personalities with regional accents – commoners who you can understand. Everything has been reduced to guessing games that requires no skill because the people tried science and it was even more difficult than at school.

If our politicians are also guessing their way along – without scripts, experience and the wrong pick of scientific views – is this the end of the light?

picture credit: author – unfortunately God moved.

Cuckoo Cats

16/05/202016/05/2020 / Matters Blog - Things that Matter to Me / Leave a comment

There is something very strange about cats. Now don’t get me wrong, I am one of the half of the population who adores furry felines – the other half giving allegiance to cuddly canines. Like Brexit, this is disunity within the United Kingdom, is unlikely to ever go away.

However, let me explore the enigma of cats. I am going to express an opinion that some may find absurd, but I crave their indulgence as I describe the facts as I choose them to be.

Firstly, isn’t it odd that cats turn up in large numbers in Ancient Egypt – getting on for 5000 years ago?

‘Get in you basket – Bastet’

So many were mummified, that their swathed remains were once used as a form of domestic heating. There was even a minor god who was a cat – see above. Being a cat in Egypt in those days was probably a pleasant incarnation – provided you kept away from the embalming and mummification factory.

But it is odd that prior to the rule of the pharaohs, domestic cats even existed. Some how the ‘big cats’ of Africa, had been genetically engineered to become ‘small cats’ or ‘pussy cats’. Were lions somehow persuaded to model for the famous Sphinx ( a lion before it was repurposed as a blokes head ) ?

Did big lions take up sitting around the camp fire at night with the nomadic tribes? Were these lions engineered through unnatural selection to become – small, domesticated lions?

What is also interesting is how small they did not become. There are no mouse size cats. Such a creature would have to put up with a fair fight with the mice – rather than the easy kills the cats enjoy today. Yes, cats were decided to be the size of a human baby – almost exactly – a small mature cat weighing in at around eleven pounds. Picking up a cat and supporting the hind legs by cradling the arms, is exactly how human babies are carried. Cats and babies look up at you and then around the room from a this new view, in exactly the same way.

Warning to cat owners how cats explode if on the wrong diet

It gets more odd. Cats and human babies make the same high pitched screaming sound when requiring attention. Any one who has been accompanied by a cat in a car, on the way to the vets or next ‘forever home’, will know how deeply unsettling the cat will make the car occupants. The whining will be near enough constant and totally disproportionate to the level of comfort the cat is being afforded by the air conditioned, smooth, silent ride. ‘What is your problem!’ you will hear people say both to their babies and their cats. Ultimately, both species get their way, whatever the time of day or night.

Then I realised what was going on with cats. All of this ‘babyishness’ is a deliberate ploy to make humans think, unconsciously, that they are not cats, but babies. It’s a brilliant stroke of unnatural selection, to force humans to ‘take in’ cats – whether welcome or not.

My own experience of cats is that there is no system of choice or purchase when becoming a cat owner. A cat, somehow – from somewhere – turns up and demands entry into your home. Very soon the game starts where it explains to the besotted human that the price of stroking it’s fur is food – regularly and plenty of it.

And in this way, I extend the parallel between cats and babies (who also want food regularly and in vast quantities) to birds. Not just all avians but one species in particular. Can you guess?

‘Doesn’t he look just like his Mum?’

Yes, it’s the cuckoo. Well the clue was in the title I know but you might have forgotten it by now. Yes, cats operate in the same way as cuckoos. The name for this technique of seeking foster parents for spare eggs is an ‘obligate brood parasite’. And the cuculos canorus is not the only one playing this game-for-the-innately lazy.

Mother cats push their brood out at some point; into the big wide world. Kittens on Facebook have unaturaly selected to look both frail and fanciable – a kind of Marilyn Monroe come hither look. ‘You want to prrrrrrrrotect me – Mr. Prrrrrrrrrresident’ delivered in husky tones before the high screaming begins in the kitchen post coitus.

No, I am not saying MM was a cat – although ‘pussy cat’ might be the right badge of honour – no, I am saying the kittens / ergo cats, are full on con-merchants, checking out every nook and cranny before calmly adopting a pre-dinner sleeping position in what was once, your private home.

I have four cats whom I adore, and every one of them – I now realise – has obligated itself into my home with the natural charm of a film star come used car salesperson. Thanks to the Ancient Egyptians or whoever first thought up ‘baby sized lions’ – half of the human race has become cat crazed.

The other half of humans? Well they have to own up to the fact that they have adopted a baby sized wolf-monster, that uses every trick in the book -like ‘undying loyalty’ to get the human to obligate as well.

Woof! woof!

The Fishdemic of 2020

05/05/2020 / Matters Blog - Things that Matter to Me / Leave a comment

Once upon a time – like now – there was an Ocean full of fish. Over the years some fish grew bigger than others. Eventually there were seven large fish and millions of small ones. The big fish consumed most of the food and lived in the warmest and sunniest parts of the Ocean, leaving the small fish to live in holes in the coral and sea bed. Here they made as much of their lives as they could, but there was constant quarrelling and fighting for territory because they had so little.

The big fish were not happy with this ‘chaos’ amongst the masses so they thought up a plan to keep the little fish in their control. They decided to spread a story that the water was poisoned and the little fish had to stay in their holes and in the sand, to keep themselves and their families safe. To make the story realistic they showed the little fish pictures of hospitals full of little fish dying of poisoned water. This was something that happens all the time in the Oceans but little fish have no idea of how big the problem is and whether they should worry. So the big fish exploited this ignorance and employed scientist fish to show how plastic particles were in the water and little fish were dying. Each day the counter was displayed on their televisions of how many little fish had died that day. Up and up and up went the numbers and the scientists drew graphs to make the problem easier to understand.

The little fish obeyed the strict rules not realising that these numbers of fish die every year and the situation was unfortunate but normal. They stopped doing their work amongst the coral reefs and lived on whatever food the big fish let them have. They felt terribly sorry for themselves. They watched graves of little fish being dug in front of their holes, which was actually a clever plan by the big fish to frighten them more.

The big fish knew that when fish are frightened they are more likely to die and the whole sorry business became self fulfilling.

Eventually, after several months, the big fish allowed the little fish to come out under very strict rules. They took away most of the freedom that the little fish used to enjoy. If there were complaints, the big fish reminded them of how they had solved the problem of the plastic in the water and how arguing and quarrelling amongst the little fish had now stopped.

The big fish kept the little fish alive on crumbs falling from the warm and sunny surface waters where they lived. The seven big fish lived happily ever after.

I am

04/05/202004/05/2020 / Matters Blog - Things that Matter to Me / Leave a comment

I am that, I am this, I am

There are three principle perceptions of the human mind. One is not ‘better’ than the other in moral terms, it is just useful to know how one works and experience mental and spiritual states objectively.

The first state of mind is the most common. It is the awareness of something other than self consciousness and is ‘I am that.’ It is the least real of all three and is summed up in the idea of ‘fantasy’. Like all human experience it can be positioned on a calibrated scale from weak to extreme. For example a person watching a narrative such as a film is fantasising, whilst also being aware of their own present mind and body. The fantasy is enjoyable. It fills the potential of unexplored human experience and is fulfilling in the regard of saving time, resources and often personal risk. Imagine watching a film in which the characters visit a wild life reserve in central Africa. There is an experience depicted by characters in the story; one or more of whom, the viewer will identify as being somewhere between ‘likeable’ and ‘I wish that was me’. They might sit in the evening around a camp fire and sing songs with the fire flies scattering in the flames and the crystal stars piercing the ocean black night sky. The roar of a hunting man-eating lion that has attacked several similar parties and is known in the area, sends them rushing to the safety of their vehicles.

This is a typical ‘I am that’ experience. Usually it is benign and is a willing and useful invigorating, promising stimulation to achieve such experiences ‘one time’ for real or just passing the time. It may add the ‘spice’ to an occupation such as those in ‘first responder’ roles experience. But in it’s harmful extreme, it is the illusion that drives a person to commit horrific crimes, such as mass shootings. The fantasy that they have nurtured for possibly most of their lives, finally overtakes their waking personality and they have to act out to achieve satisfaction. Acting out a fantasy is known as ‘psychosis’ and is so common that it is even a defence in law, though not a way of avoiding being withdrawn from society by the State. Humans acting out fantasy for real is not good and needs to be ‘enacted’ within an unreal place such as a modern gamer in ‘virtual reality’. The Ancient Greeks used the word ‘catharsis’ to describe the healing power of mentally exhausting the power of the fantasy over the rational mind, through theatre, songs and stories. Their stories such as Homer’s Odyssey remain powerful descriptions of the rudders, sails and oars of the human mind to this day.

The experience of such fantasy worlds is of course flawed in a very real and obvious way. The objection is ‘this is not you’ or ‘this is not me’ and that is clearly true. If the fantasy of being a world class athlete stimulates a person to become a world class athlete then the fantasy has worked as a transition tool, a stepping stone. But in modern society few get that chance. There is only one winner and one cup, one Oscar, one Nobel Prize. All the rest, in a competitive society, are left with unfulfilled dreams.

There is another state of mind which overcomes this. It is; ‘I am this’. This is a considerably more profound and rewarding attitude to personal experience. It gives no personal power to ‘the other’ whether these are other people or other activities or other places, times. The simple reward to being ‘I am this’, is realising that mind / personality has no real need to be other than itself. The reward is found in what one truly is. In this state of mind a Zen monk will relinquish identifying with possessions and social status, ‘cleverness’ in intellectual argument and most harmful of all, the allure of the other. Basho, the famous Japanese Zen poet and ascetic, was content with no worldly attachments;

The thief left it behind

The moon at the window

Because mind is realised as a totally personal experience independent of any other thing, the things that mind is not, are described as ‘illusion’ – or the dunna in Sufism, ‘samasara‘ in Hinduism.

The total clarity of ‘I am this’ can be achieved whilst wearing a pin striped suit, or two piece, driving a luxury car and living the a modern life style of ease. It is just that these objects and pleasures are not identified with as being any part of one’s higher self. They are as meaningless as the wind, because the person is continually aware and focused on ‘I am this’. Clearly having wealth and being detached from it, is more difficult than not having wealth and being detached from it. Ascetics have it easy and the Buddha realised this truth after nearly killing his body through starvation. He proposed a ‘middle way’ to truth without physical hardship.

This does not mean believing the fantasy of being a body. The sense of ‘this’ is so fundamental that it excludes one’s own body and body sensations. Buddhists argue quite rationally that if one loses a leg in an accident, one is still complete as a person – therefore we are not our bodies.

The was a song in the 1960’s by Donovan which included the lines;

‘First there is a mountain,

then there is no mountain,

then there is.’

This is a very clear summary of the states of mind being described. The perception of ‘that’ as being real, is seeing the mountain and all it’s mental and emotional associations. These associations are revealed as being mere ‘figments’ of imagination and not real; in which moment the mountain disappears. The relationship between viewer and viewed is realised as just a fantasy.

But of course, the mountain has done nothing through out all of this inner process. It has just done what it has been doing for millions of years – being a mountain.

This is the third state of mind summarised as; ‘I am’. The ‘I am this’ has been dissolved into the mist of the morning by the sun’s rays penetrating the dark night of the soul. The experience of life has become neither object nor subject. Things that were once held as real and true, never were and never will be. The only single experience is to become ‘I’ in the sense that the whole of created things and experience is identical and resonant to what human beings are.

We are not only created in the image of God, we are God and for suggesting this many a Sufi saint and Christian gnostic (Cathars, Templars), was flailed at the stake until death.

The irony was that such holy beings were never in their bodies in the first place and were laughing inwardly, no doubt, all the way to Heaven.

The Man in the Moon

15/04/202015/04/2020 / Matters Blog - Things that Matter to Me / Leave a comment

The Anthropomorphic Universe

Who believes in the man in the moon?

For centuries, so called sophisticated societies have continued traditions, superstitions, folk tales and festivals inherited from rural ancestors. Much will certainly have been lost, as modern man’s connections with nature have been severed. But mothers still point out the face in the moon to their children who stand open mouthed at the mystery. Our companion animals are named and loved as if they were our children who never grow up; Peter Pan style.

Even the star map itself is full of the figures of gods and animals, a continuous tradition going back to the Ancient Egyptians and Sumeria.

Many cultures across time and the world have seen animal and human faces in rock formations and considered the effect significant.

Modern urban man likes to think that these are all in the realm of ‘myth’ – that is, stories that have no meaning any longer.

When I was in Japan with my Japanese girlfriend many years ago, she took me to her grandmother’s beautiful traditional home. In one room was a Shinto shrine. Megumi knelt before this shrine to pray and invited me to join her. I politely declined thinking myself a monotheist and forbidden to worship idols. But I now realise that Shinto is a religion of worship of nature and not idols. Each tree, rock, flower; is seen as a manifestation of living spirit just as we are manifestations of living spirit.

In Pagan Britain before the Roman invasions, people lived by the cyclic laws of nature. Natural features, fauna and flora were also a living presence on the physical and spiritual planes. Such living things acquired names and often magical properties. To kill or take away was done with a blessing for the spirit which was being released.

Now that scientists have persuaded us from viewing the world as sentient, we are expected to consider industrial methods of rearing and killing animals and plants as a necessary evil. But if you want to know the truth, ask a cow in line to enter the red doors of the abortoir.

Such practices which many now view as abhorrent, are likely to become questioned more in the future because modern man is on the brink of extinction.

So brutally has the scientific materialism ethical view damaged the world and it’s creatures that ecosystems are being destroyed faster and in greater areas than ever before.

Already people in so called ‘civilised’ societies are realising that there is only one way to live with a rain forest and that is to live in it. The indigenous people of the Amazon basin have practised a closeness to nature that has retained the forest in it’s glory for many generations. This generation however is having to watch as loggers, farmers and prospectors rape the mother who has protected and fed them. Nature hits back by releasing viruses in the populations of city dwellers – but need it come to this? Perhaps mankind will come to realise that all nature is sentient, before it is too late.

Walt Disney hit on an idea to make cartoon stories using talking animals. As ludicrous as this may have seemed to his contemporaries, who were making films about humans, Walt Disney was digging into the gold mine of imagination.

Despite or perhaps because of being ‘sophisticated’ children in particular needed to view the world in the old way of our rural ancestors. Stories in which animal and magical characters could speak and interact with each other like humans – gripped the imagination. Science may not like it, but humans are complex and deep in their needs and this foaming ocean of stories such as the Cinderella and Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, are archetypal stories for thousands of years ago (Isis and Osiris if you are curious).

Modern men, women and children naturally engage with nature. We have a deep physical and psychological need to be nourished by nature and allowed to bloom, as flowers do.

There is a young gecko in my bathroom whom I have seen a couple of times now. He looks at me and does not move and I look at him. Yesterday I named him, BR, which stands for ‘bathroom’. We have a relationship – of sorts.

Humour aside, this is the direction that humans in the 21st century must go if they wish to maintain their present numbers. They have to understand the sanctity of all life, whether it is in rocks, vegetation or animals.

Practises such as ‘whaling for scientific purposes’ should be and will be seen as relics of a shameful past when scientific materialism ruled the brain waves.

There have been extraordinary studies between humans and primates already, from which lessons are still to be understood. Chimpanzees have been taught to use tokens to buy food in one study. This is remarkable in itself until it was found that they also understood many more principles of economics, like ‘best price’.

I predict that in the next twenty years man will be speaking with marine mammals as fluently as Google Translate serves us today. These steps are more important than interplanetary exploration at the moment in my view, because they will lead modern man into an honourable way of relating with nature, as did our forefathers.

Once this is accomplished, the further step will be to communicate with sentient beings who are not of this planet. If the E.T’s observe that humans are not responsible enough to inhabit a planet without damaging it, they may introduce themselves first.

And if that thought fills you with dread, then you have been the victim of a misrepresentation of alien beings through propaganda. Be assured that they will not use violence to persuade. Such methods for them and perhaps one day for us – are history.

A Light to Lighten the Gentiles

13/04/2020 / Matters Blog - Things that Matter to Me / Leave a comment

I personally think Christianity would be a better religion if it recognised itself as a clever patchwork of beautiful stories arranged in a questionable order.

When Jesus was alive, there were many self proclaimed prophets, any of whom might have been chosen to be the ‘true’ prophet; not least of whom was the also immaculately conceived, John the Baptist. He has a following even today who are known as the Johannites. It is said he was the secret prophet of the Knights Templar and such Renaissance notables as Leonardo de Vinci. So who made Jesus – the Christ?

The Roman Emperor Constantine became a follower of Christianity and through the Roman Empires in the East and West at that time, Christianity became the State religion.

Constantine the Great: picture credit Wikipedia

In the process of change and at the Council of Nicaea in 325 AD, various books, were not included in the New Testament. In modern journalistic parlance, a ‘hatchet job’ – but a clever one. Clever because it contained the best of the old and the best of the new. It had to be good to have survived to the present day.

This Council meeting also sought to agree on the principle of a universal date for Easter, although it stopped short of setting down a method for this date to be calculated. After much disagreement this date became established according to the lunisolar calendar. No need to go into detail on this complicated subject here, but bear in mind that it is related to the 21^st March in the Julian calendar; that is the vernal equinox.

Most religions are based on ancient ideas, but sometimes opportunities for improvements from new knowledge and reflection are missed.

If you asked a young child about the seasons, you would get a reply that spring is about birth and winter death. Despite this simple truth of natural cycles, Christians are given the story that Jesus died in the spring and was born in the winter. The Bible does not tell us this. Only copying other ancient religions have determined these dates. At the time, when Christianity was seeking dominance as a religion, resemblance to old ways was important in convincing people to adopt the new ways.

So, let us reflect on the story of the birth of Christ and see if it fits best into spring or winter.

picture credit: Pinterest

The Magi followed a star in the East. These astrologers would have known the difference between a star and a planet, but there are theories that in 7 BC in 4^th April the planet Venus appears to stop in one place at it’s brightest, due east. Alternatively, Venus is the brightest object in the sky and the three Kings may be an astronomical metaphor. What we do know is that the new prophet was the ‘sun of god’, a bringer of light and love, a new era, who later told us, ‘I am the light of the world.’

In Ancient Egypt the months were determined by the arrival of known stars on the horizon. There were twelve of them, from which our modern months are derived. We have kept the solar calendar of the ancients. When Herod interrogated the Magi, he ‘enquired of them diligently what time the star appeared.’ He wanted to know when the prophet was to be born and the answer they gave was only accurate to within two years (as Herod later ordered the killing of children under that age). Even these astrologers were unclear on when Jesus was to be born.

Joseph and Mary were responding to an edict to go to Bethlehem for a census and pay taxes. This was unlikely to have been arranged in the middle of winter when nights are cold and days shortest.

Mankind’s new spiritual era is symbolised by the birth of Jesus in a cave (not a stable as in some versions of the story). This cave was a well known symbol to the Ancient Greeks, such as Plato, of the human skull and therefore mind. The birth of a child of light in the brain represents a new level of consciousness and the opportunity for mankind to raise their understanding and experience of life. Historically, this is exactly what Christianity achieved, although it could be argued many other religions might have done the same equally well such as Buddhism in the Far East.

Should we ask, why were shepherds were in their fields at night? Any country person will tell you that the time of year when shepherds are working around the clock is in the lambing season – the spring.

Common to many solar and Pagan religions, there are four important landmarks in the calendar. These are the summer and winter solstices and the spring and autumn equinoxes. Most churches face the spring equinox, for the sun rises due east on 21st/22nd March. The Sphinx which turns it back to the pyramid of Cheops in Egypt (and faces all four of these points exactly) faces due east.

So fundamental are these seasons and the new consciousness of light and love to the message of Jesus, that he is even crucified on a form of compass; the cross. That remains his symbol, although many other symbols could have been chosen.

The goddess Ashtaroth or Ishtar of the Babylonians was a fertility goddess. The word ‘Easter’ is probably derived from her name. The conflation of the word ‘east’ into ‘Easter’ should not be overlooked. Her symbol was also a rabbit, on account of their love of procreation, – but Jesus had no connection with rabbits!

Easter is all about looking to the east, for it’s wisdom, it’s new light, new hope and it’s rising sun. It is clear to me that the birth of Christ in the spring of each year represents a message of the dawn of love.

Ressurection with Rising Sun: picture credit Raphael

If any of the above is likely to be true, then it would be more convincing if the death and rebirth of Christ fitted the narrative of the winter solstice. I have taken up enough of the reader’s time, so let me suggest that you explore this possibility with an open mind and form your own opinion. To compare the dying and re-birthing winter sun with the dying and re-birthing son of the Father, I found to be a light to enlighten the Gentiles.

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