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.

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.

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?

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.

A New Kingdom

17/03/202017/03/2020 / Matters Blog - Things that Matter to Me / Leave a comment

Prejudice is to have an opinion based on false feelings and, or false information. It is to be so fixed in opinion that even when new facts are presented, prejudices are not eradicated.

Prejudice manifests as both positive and negative opinions and feelings. We can praise those who are not worthy of praise and hate those who do not deserve hatred.

Prejudice requires a process of discriminating judgments based on casual classifications such as gender, social class, age, disability, religion, sexuality, race, ethnicity, nationality. The classifications are in themselves chosen irrationally. This is commonly through received opinion either within a group of mutually minded and self selected people, or through inherited ideas and opinions which are accepted and shared uncritically.

Prejudice has been a problem for social groups across time and the world. It has created wars, injustice, repression and hatred between individuals and groups since the beginning of time.

‘He hears but half who hears one part only.’

These are the words of Aeschylus the ancient Greek playwright, written around 500 BC when a new form of clear thinking was heard, if not always respected.

Failure to listen to previously excluded or new facts because they do not support a belief based on opposing facts, is a form of false thinking.

Such a weakness is what temporal law and it’s practitioners aim to rise above, but even and sometimes especially in a Court of Law, arguments present opinions based on a version of the facts, rather than the facts themselves.

There are few who are not a product of their own prejudices and the opinions that reveal them. There is always something that will make a person ‘turn away’.

Throughout history, those who have refused to adopt the prejudices of their peer groups, have been murdered or imprisoned. Rarely are they respected and given the respect they deserve. When this respect is given, their moral authority raises them to a respected position in society, or post death, to sainthood.

picture credit: en.holyorderofststephen.org

Such a clear view and the ability to speak it, is commonly found in those with a highly spiritual understanding. The word ‘mystic’ is unfortunate in English for its similarity to ‘mist’. In a mist we cannot see and are lost, which is a good metaphor for humans who do not possess clarity of thought. That is the precise opposite of mystical ‘vision’.

A mystic is a person who has achieved perfection at all levels of being, including thought. They do not necessarily express ideas that conform to social, religious or cultural norms.

This has lead to their persecution throughout history as they do not say what people expect and require them to say in order to support shared prejudices. The very presence of a clear thinker, such as Socrates, is an affront to the uninitiated.

The initiation that humans are better for acquiring is the ability to train their observations to override what they have not observed. With this ability, people are able to act with complete compassion and love of others, whatever these people may believe or represent.

God blesses those who love and are without judgment towards others.

Such people are needed today and yet how many ‘saints’ are presented in the media? Certainly there is a long line up of ‘sinners’ and the ‘misguided’ – some in positions of authority that they do not deserve, and some on their way to the prisons in shame.

This process is continuing and the present time will create opportunity for men and women of high moral authority to be heard and respected. You will know them for they are without prejudice and pride.

They have walked on the earth before and are here now. Times of tumult and disruption of the norm, herald their recognition and the beginning of the enrichment of societies.

The enrichment is not the type that has lead previous and present generations i.e. wealth and fortune.

‘Jesus said that we could not serve both God and wealth, and it is obvious that Western society is organised in the service of wealth.’

John B Cobb ‘Eastern View of Economics’

To have one’s treasure stored in a parallel dimension, is not a common aim in modern Western Society. And yet, a literal and metaphorical polar shift is already happening and this will bring about a complete change of society.

Black shall be white and white shall be black.

Only when all men and women have abandoned their prejudices will they be able to see their own society and those who make up society, that they had not seen before.

The truth, as someone once said, is stranger than you think.

Don’t Fence Me In

12/03/202012/03/2020 / Matters Blog - Things that Matter to Me / Leave a comment

This the title of a wonderful old song sung, I think by Bing Crosby. It’s all about the exploration of the west in nineteenth century North America. After millennia of humans and animals roaming free, cattle ranching introduced ‘ownership’. The Native American Indians didn’t understand it and gave away their lands before they realised they would have to fight and ultimately die for the ‘reservations’ that were left for them.

picture credit; WallpaperWeb.com

It is an paradox that man craves freedom but loves boundaries. Astronauts report on viewing earth from space, that it appears as one planet. There are no political boundaries that we are so used to see on global maps. Boundaries are ultimately arbitrary. They serve only the tribal mentality of ‘them and us’ present in early man and persisting, almost unconsciously, to the present day.

The poet Robert Frost wrote a poem which included the line, good fences make good neighbours. This concept, at one end of the spectrum of possible combinations of freedom and enclosure, works – but only temporarily. Eventually, because of tribalism and greed, a fight breaks out.

When the British realised the rule of India by a distant Queen of England was over, they were faced with the problem of handing over a sub-continent to self rule. A problem because the Muslims and Hindus were at each others’ throats. If the British left there would be a blood bath. So they drew an arbitrary border on a map and created a new country, Pakistan. Like the creation of the Berlin walls, it divided families, created mass migration, a loss of homes and livelihoods and riots and slaughter. Tribalism, whether under religious or any other banner, is never good for all. Today India and Pakistan face each other with tolerant hostility, with a hundred nuclear missiles each, ready to wipe out each other and the rest of us. As an afterthought little Kashmir remains a flashpoint where this could happen. When you draw political maps, you had better know what you are doing for now and the next thousand years.

When the UK made the minority vote decision (only a quarter of the population voted in favour of Brexit ) to leave it’s partners in Europe, it had not considered the effects this would have on Northern Ireland and Scotland. The border in Eire was created centuries before to create a ‘non catholic’ portion of Ireland that could be controlled from England. The political reasons for it’s connection with United Kingdom are changing, and a likely consequence of the UK seeking ‘independence’ is losing Northern Ireland to the Irish and Scotland to the Scots.

Virus’s, and all the malign forces that nature unleashes on humanity; virus’s do not respect political boundaries. It takes two weeks for a virus to travel around the globe. The only way to extinguish a virus is for each person to crawl into their own cave and stay there. They may die or they may survive. In this situation one is not even aware that one’s neighbours, also potentially dying, are on the other side of the wall.

When this current Covid-19 pandemic is over, as it will be, the nations of the world should take stock. They need to seek to understand the lessons that come from such a pandemic, for virus’s are a greater problem than terrorism and extremism and wars and all our man made horrors. In 1919 the second wave of Spanish Flu killed everyone who caught it.

Surely, world leaders must learn that humanity has more to gain from co-operation and tolerance towards all living beings, whether animal or human. There are no boundaries in nature except those created by habitat and when there is enough habitat to go around, everyone is happy. When large populations move to escape political or natural upheavals, these people are ourselves coming in the other direction.

In Europe, the European Parliament and non-governmental organisations like the WHO, have failed to create a strategy to cope with immigration. Countries on the edges of Europe such as Greece and outside such as Lebanon are full to bursting point. Now Greece is shooting warning shots into the sea at immigrant boats.

In the United States, the solution to immigration from Southern American failing states, is of course ‘a wall’. As if we had not learnt from history how the Berlin wall was pulled down and how Palestine was shrunk into walls – good walls rarely make good neighbours.

Mankind craves to be free and this moment in history is a time for humans to come out of their caves and obeyance to tribal rules. Instead of hating and fighting each other, we are in a position to see the greater picture from above, where barriers do not exist. There is only humanity, and the sooner we treat the planet and each other with humanity, the sooner we will lose the feeling of being ‘fenced in’.

The Good Life

02/03/2020 / Matters Blog - Things that Matter to Me / Leave a comment

There is a remarkable pair of photographs on the BBC website today. They show satellite images of eastern China, Hong Kong and Japan. The images are filtered to show the intensity of air pollution. The January 2020 image shows ‘business as usual’ and the principal cities and urban conurbations are highly coloured from yellow to high risk, red. The February 2020 image shows no coloured areas at all! The air is clean because production in the factories has stopped. Ironic that such a gift to the populations, of sunshine and clean air occurs when millions are in quarantine.

The message we can draw is not how contagious viruses are – we know that. No, the message so plain to see is ‘slow down and stop!’

The industrial tenets of, ‘more and faster’ for profit and a promise of prosperity for all, are also familiar to us. Humans deserve a good life so the growth of benefits from industrialisation, cannot be denied. Over one hundred and fifty years ago people started to leave the land and live in cities. This process means that now about half the populations of most countries live in cities.

In response industrial production is speeding up, as robots and AI are literally taking over from humans. The only question is; at what point is ‘a good life’ reached?

A casual observer in a modern metropolis, might perceive a collective sadness in the faces of passers by – anxious to reach their individual destinations. If asked if their life is a ‘good life’ – I wonder how they would reply?

picture credit: WithPause.com

When I was a student in London in the mid-70’s, I took part in a ‘slow walk’. A collection of willing volunteers met at the north end of Hammersmith Bridge and lined up across the wide pavement. We set of in a bunch like marathon runners, only it took us three or four hours to reach the south side of the bridge – a distance of maybe three hundred metres.

Slow walking took discipline at first, but soon became strangely normal. My mind felt completely relaxed. I might as well have been in meditation – in fact, I was.

picture credit: Londr.com

That was part of my ‘good life’ when I had time to be fast or slow and chose the latter. There are in the present day, many experiences of ‘slow living’ available as an alternative to the human ‘race’. There is slow food, slow travel, slow cities, slow schools, slow books, slow living and slow money. See www.slowmovement.com and tell your friends!

In 2020 humanity is crossing the threshold where too much – too fast – too wrong – is damaging the planet and as a consequence, ourselves. Whether it is air pollution, sea level rising, food shortages, water shortages – industrialisation is ‘biting back’ the hands that turn the handle.

This latest virus Covid 19, is amongst other things, a firm message for humans to ‘slow down and stop!’ Perhaps those confined to a room for two weeks, will draw a positive from the experience. ‘Not doing’ can alter expectations significantly. If ones normal expectations are unrealistic then the distress that comes from failure to satisfy those expectations, will never be encountered. Success or shall we say, contentment, comes from watching a spider cross a floor or a raindrop slide down the window; experiences usually never observed and enjoyed.

We will inevitably all discover that less and slower is more!

Somewhere between the extremes of fast and slow, is where humans can find the ‘good life’ they seek. How close to ‘slow’ do you dare to go?

Jesus Loves Computers

18/01/202018/01/2020 / Matters Blog - Things that Matter to Me / Leave a comment

The following events are entirely fictional and set in modern Palestine where an enlightned Spanish chap called Jesus, is giving a group of his friends and followers a piece of his wisdom.

An early computer

And it came to pass that some of the disciples were mystified by the whole thing around ‘computers’, for much of Palestine was then buzzing about them and their unique qualities.

So they said unto Jesus, one Sunday afternoon when it had begun to rain and all around had gathered together in someone’s house,

‘What about computers?’

And Jesus replied, ‘Oh, ye of little understanding. Don’t you know nothing?’

And those who heard this looked at each other in a quizzical fashion and were confused by the double negative in the question which believe me makes no sense in Spanish any more than in English.

John, who considered himself a bit of a computer expert, stood up amongst them and cried, ‘please tell these ignoramuses Lord, so that I no longer have to ‘fix things up’ for them for I am weary of their attention seeking and quizzing.

And Jesus was compassionate towards John for he was also ‘up to here’ with quizzingness but knew it was just his Father having a bit of a joke so he asked those who were then gathered together and enjoying a round of hot drinks,

‘What is it you want to know?’

And one man who was a shepherd from the hills all his life asked, ‘tell us how a computer has a RAM, for I have a Ram and am confused.’

Jesus thought for a minute or so, making a pattern of little dots in the sand with his finger and then looked up. ‘The RAM is like unto a Juggler who stands in the market place. He has in his pockets sixteen sponge balls whose colour is red.’

Jesus eyed his audience and saw that so far they understood.

‘And he starteth juggling with three balls and the crowd is amazed that he can keep them all in the air at once, until he picketh another from his pocket and continues with four balls.’

‘And so the juggler keeps his concentration sufficient that soon he has extracted all sixteen balls from his pocket and is keeping them in the air by throwing them higher and moving as fast as he possibly can.’

The disciples and a few other goat herders who had heard about the hot drinks and had slipped in to get dry and warmed up, looked at each other and saw that no one knew what Jesus was on about. So one of them stood up and said,

‘Eh?’

Then John, seeing the vexation on the face of his Lord, and the gnashing of his teeth and clenched fists and all the signs of high blood pressure, did turn to this ignoramus and said, ‘Look, it’s simple, the computer has to make many tasks work at the same time and that is the Random Access Memory which is limited but can be expanded simply with a larger RAM card in the RAM card slot or an additional card if there is space, making the users computing experience faster and smoother.’

Looking into the heart of a computer does not need to be confusing;

Jesus looked around at the glazed-over eyes in the room and implored John to not confuse the situation further, and John sat down mumbling to himself and grabbing his hot chocolate that someone else had been holding for him.

The Lord continued, ‘And if you are in pain to understand about other parts of a computer fear not, for all shall be explained unto you.’

‘What about CPU’s then?’ came a voice from the back of the room and prompting a sustained mumbling of approval at the question and some nodding of heads.

‘Mine’s 1.6 Ghz dual core. What does that mean?’

Jesus looked like he knew the answer to this question and rubbed his hands together.

‘The CPU is like unto the heart and lungs of a camel.’

‘Mine isn’t!’ came a shout of surprise from amongst them. ‘A camel? Bloody ridiculous. Why’s he on about juggling and cam…’

‘Look, it’s a parable you numbskull. Jesus is explaining using an extended metaphor to help dispel the mystery of something which defies understanding in ordinary language.’ John was always quick to defend Jesus’s teaching technique.

‘Creep!’ came a muffled response but it was not heard by all, for they were anxious to learn more. Jesus continued, ‘And if a camel has a small heart and lungs, when it is asked to carry a heavy load at a high speed, it creates much heat. This heat might be dispelled by a camel rider holding a large palm leaf acting as a fan or perhaps throwing a bucket of water over the camel…’

‘Where do you get a bucket of water in a desert!’ heckled a disbeliever.

Quoth John instantly ‘It’s a parable donkey brain!’

Jesus lifted his arms up and continued, ‘and if that camel had a larger heart and lungs, like if it had a better central processing unit, it would be able to run up sand dunes at great speed with heavy loads and be only slightly overheated and out of breath at the top of the dune.’

The next course of sweet things made of pastries and dates was passed around and Jesus sat down for a while, for he was in need of a sugar boost.

At length, when the final course of wine and cheese had been enjoyed and all assembled were nicely relaxed and leaning against, on, or in improvised pieces of furniture and things scattered in the room like storage urns and camel saddles…someone asked, ‘What about Operating Systems?’

Jesus stood up and looked down amongst them as if the room was circling around his head, although it was not.

‘I’ll tell you about Operating Systems, for they are like unto a system of rules and beliefs that form a religion. These rules are given by Divine command, from someone like William Pearly Gates who started in a mates garage and now owns most of Palestine. He looked out of the window and saw a Window and called his inspiration, Windows 4AD. And he formed a series of commands and programmes that were readily understood by the computer and made an interface between the Father, William and ordinary people like yourselves gathered in this room.’

‘What, all of us?’ came a gasp.

‘Yes, even the most humble amongst you, who has had little education past nursery level, and perhaps is unable to even read or write due to some incurable incapacity like dyslexia or ADHD leading to anxiety and behavioural problems…Ye are those who will be first to understand exactly how to open documents and save them properly.’

And all in the room were moved because they thought computing was for the educated and rich who sat around in Palaces and hobnobbed with the senior military ranks in their secluded villas with pools and fine Sea of Galilee views that turned out to be rather too distant to truly impressed but looked good in the sales literature and sold houses quickly…they realised that such people would be the last to understand how to use computers because their heads were all in a muddle…whereas, the most stupid members of society like themselves were in line to be first to enter the Pearly Bill Gates because of their humility and frankly, lack of fear, and understanding of how computers could change their lives from simple peasants to men and women of wisdom and high ethical standing.

And the angels stood around in the room and applauded those now gathered there asleep, for their fear and anxieties about computers had been destroyed once and for all eternity.

Matters Blog

Original thoughts on a variety of subjects that matter to me

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