The Beggar King

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We may consider ourselves ‘modern’ but most social scientists today will agree that we operate as members of a tribe. Class distinction is an example. In each class we accept difference of ‘rank’ with alarming credulity. We know that those ‘above us’ may not deserve automatic respect and yet that is the way it is.

Many of the politicians in power today are people who you would think twice to employ to clean the windows of your house, and yet they are tribal ‘chiefs’. So who are these people and why did we hand over our power to them?

The Beggar’s Opera: picture credit The British Libary

There has been a lineage of ‘royal families’ since prehistoric times. In Mesopotamia there was discovered a ‘King’s list’; a long line of Kings stretching back in time. In Ancient Egypt, hieroglyphs name a chronology of the Pharaoh’s who were the mid-point between man and the gods. Power was handed down as a birthright and royal families, including the Roman Caesar’s, accepted incest as a means to maintain the ‘blue blood’.

The problem with monarchs was always that there are good monarchs and bad ones. The self indulgences of dynasties such as the Bourbons in France, were persuasive catalysts to republican revolutionaries.

But what is interesting is the way in which since then, some Republics have morphed back into Monarchy’s. The United States of America is an interesting example. The Pilgrim Fathers were intent on leaving behind the absolute power of the royal families of Great Britain. The original Constitution of the United States of America handed power to the individual. The Freemasons who wrote this, including such figures as Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln, did not anticipate how power would slowly return to the president. Today, the President of the United States is given the freedom from prosecution and pomp once only afforded to Kings. If they have an idea they make it law. They are free to write ‘executive orders’ with as much alacrity as Popes write bulls and Monarch’s, decrees.

My point is that however far you try to strip an individual of absolute power, it doesn’t work. The present Presidents of China and Russia are examples of how to ‘eliminate the opposition’, in the same brutal manner as various Caesar’s in Ancient Rome. Today, there are more people living under dictators than democracies.

The only power that ‘the people’ retain is protesting on the streets. Today, many countries ruled by dictators, such as Iran, Myanmar, China, Russia, have had to deal with popular public demonstrations demanding basic rights for the individual. Often their pleas go unheard and their banners are without words.

picture credit: frank-ramspott

In all of these affairs, both of state and in business, there rises to the surface, persons whose suitability as figures of respect, is doubtful at best. Those who seek power over others are almost by definition the least worthy. In democracies, there is no election of those who wish to be even considered as candidates. ‘Running for office’ is left to self promotion and lambasting the opposition; characteristics generally found in the most narcissistic and least worthy personalities.

You may be wondering where this sad description of human self organisation is leading. Well, there has to be a solution to the problem.

In the many native tribes of North America, there was also a system of leadership which was known as ‘Goose Leadership’. A group would sit in a circle and a goose feather would be produced. The rule for the meeting was that only those who held this feather were able to speak.

The result was a collective assurance that if someone had some poor ideas, their influence would not hinder the others for long! Similarly, the inspired suggestions would be recognised and adopted.

The significance of the goose feather is of course, from the instinct of geese to share the lead role in their familiar V-shape flying formation.

What arises here is a noble social structure that is neither strong nor weak, rich nor poor. This is contrary to the binary ideal within other systems of social organisation where only wealth and power gain respect. Between absolute wealth and absolute poverty, there is always a more balanced, middle path.

The Prince Siddhartha Guatama was born in a palace and lived in northern India, with a life of luxury beyond imagination. But he was aware enough to realise that he was unfulfilled by this lifestyle.

He left his life of total sensory satisfaction to become a wandering ascetic and teacher. At one stage this left his body in a most withdrawn and malnourished state and statues sometimes depict him with his rib cage exposed and thin limbs. Aestheticism also did not satisfy him and he finally gave up the search for the right path, by sitting under a tree.

Here he attained enlightenment and the name Budh was applied to him as a form of respect which in it’s masculine form is Buddha, in the same way that Jesus was the Christ.

Buddha, “Awakened One” or “Enlightened One,” is the masculine form of budh (बुध् ), “to wake, be awake, observe, heed, attend, learn, become aware of, to know, be conscious again,” “to awaken” “”to open up” (as does a flower),””one who has awakened from the deep sleep of ignorance and opened his consciousness to encompass all objects of knowledge.”It is not a personal name, but a title for those who have attained bodhi (awakening, enlightenment).Buddhi, the power to “form and retain concepts, reason, discern, judge, comprehend, understand,”is the faculty which discerns truth (satya) from falsehood.

source: Wikipedia

A benign leader is not then, an individual concerned with status and personal wealth. Such a leader will discard these ‘trappings’ as of no value.

Most importantly, I am optimistic enough to believe that the leaders who will emerge for humanity in the near and far future, will have benign, spiritual qualities. They will not live in palaces but be content with a humble dwelling amongst the common people. They will own little, in the manner of the native American people, and be perfectly content.

‘Living by need and not greed’ as Manhatma Ghandi once advised, will become the norm. Many god-less people, used to unsustainable European materialist lifestyles, will have had their day. Their lives will become like those of Kings and Queens of the past who had to be beheaded before they understood their arrogance!

To give up riches and power requires considerable humility, the type present in those who we find begging on the streets. They may not have sought humility, but life – either fairly or unfairly – has brought them to the depths of despair.

We are all capable of beings King’s, as in the goose leadership model. We are also all capable of being beggars. Neither is a sustainable position however, either socially or spiritually. If we are to learn anything from the history of mankind, it is to realise that the ideal place for the individual to be is somewhere in the middle, without pride or greed and with the desire towards the common good for all.

Such a psychological transformation is contained in the concept of the ‘Beggar King’; the one who was once powerful and once the lowest, but has now found a ‘happy medium’; what the Buddha called, ‘The Middle Way’.

Matter Over Mind

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When is a weather balloon not a weather balloon?

We live in a physical reality. From birth we engage with this moving and static universe and learn how it works; how to manipulate it and survive.

Then someone comes along who does ‘magic’. Perhaps it was at a children’s party when you first encountered a conjurer who made objects appear and disappear. Rows of coloured flags explode from her hat and little red balls pop out of her mouth.

Suddenly, rules that govern physicality are turned upside down, so like innocent children, we just laugh.

Later on in life, we understand that magicians are illusionists. They have studied the techniques of deception and taught themselves how to use them. Here are some;

Speed; prestidigitation, dexterity e.g. playing card tricks.

Misdirection; directing the audience so that they assume the contrary e.g. which ball the cup is in. Focusing the audience on one thing whilst doing another unnoticed, such as stage ‘banter’ and ‘slight of hand’.

Concealment; classic ‘smoke and mirrors’ such as using a curtain to hide a deceit.

Props; devices which appear to be not what they are; they have hidden doors, mirrors and compartments that reveal previously hidden objects.

Psychology; hypnotism, mentalism e.g. reading unconscious signalling in facial expressions to determine personal facts.

This list is not exhaustive but the main point is, magicians do not use obvious cheating. They know that they can be accused of using ‘stooges’ to perform pre-rehearsed actions. To counter this challenge, magicians use methods such as throwing a Frisbee randomly into the audience to choose who to invite to take part in the trick. Illusionists may be tricksters, but they will need to leave the audience without any explanation of what they have just observed, or lose credulity and reputation.

picture credit: EarthSky.org

Very recently an ‘air balloon’ was shot down over North America by the USA. The official story was that this balloon carried instruments used by China to spy on America. Questions were naturally asked as to how this and many other such balloons were not monitored or even known to exist, by those in charge of defending the nation. After some ‘re-calibration’ of America’s air space, surveillance and monitoring equipment, three new objects were found. Most significantly these were never ‘rationalised’ as balloons. One was described as ‘hexagonal’ and an ‘unidentified object with no obvious means of propulsion’ and the others of different shapes, equally unidentifiable. After several days, during which wreckage was recovered, it was announced that these three objects were in fact ‘weather balloons’. Do you get the feeling that matter is being described to make you form an opinion that the government want you to have?

The initials U.F.O were avoided quite deliberately for understandable reasons. Further obfuscation (misdirection) has been created because UFO’s are now called Unidentified Aerial Phenomena or UAP’s and there is an equivalent Unidentified Submersible Phenomena or USP’s. For those in the know, and as described by Dr. Steven Greer on You Tube for decades, there are clandestined (‘black ops’) projects outside of the military and government control which have built anti-gravity craft using alien reverse engineering obtained in the 1950’s. The other three UAP’s in question, were almost certainly examples of anti-gravity, human engineering. The cover-up to their undeniable discovery (prompted but not connected to the ‘weather balloon’ incident) is what the counter intelligence community term ‘stage craft’. This is a simile from our familiar family entertainment shows where illusionists make things appear and disappear at will.

This series of events is worthy of particular attention as they provide a clear example of how public perception can be manipulated to whatever the non-democratic departments of governments desire.

The illusionist techniques employed in such ‘minor’ incidents can of course be scaled up to gain public approval of serious government policy. Within the military known as ‘psychological operations’, there are ‘false flag operations’ where an innocent third party, such as a ‘hostile state’ is blamed using fabricated evidence.

picture credit: Wikipedia

For instance, the ‘Gulf of Tomkin’ incident was probably the tipping point that committed the USA to war in Vietnam in 1964. North Vietnamese motor torpedo boats are meant to have engaged American ships in the Gulf of Tomkin whereas there are other claims that these were not NVA’s craft but American. A more mainstream explanation to the illusion is that there was a ‘communication error’ by the Americans which stands out as being vague at best and unforgiveable at worst. In all cases, unforgiveable.

picture credit: Pinterest

That is not the only war needlessly started. In 2003 the USA and an allied co-coalition, invaded Iraq on the grounds that there were ‘weapons of mass destruction’ in Iraq. This despite the fact that UN observers had been searching for such weapons for months and found nothing. The war was justified as being intended to;

“disarm Iraq of weapons of mass destruction, to end Saddam Hussein’s support for terrorism, and to free the Iraqi people”. (source Wikipedia.com)

History or ‘hind sight’ now enables most people to see than none of these three objectives were justified or effective. There were no WMD’s. Hussein did not support Al Quaida and the Iraqi people did not necessarily find foreign invasion a better option to living under a cruel but stable dictator. Iraq was destroyed, leaving little working infrastructure and services, and the regional and tribal ‘commanders’ were left to fight each other in the power vacuum…so called ‘freedom’.

Similar examples of ‘illusion’ by politicians, industrialists, pharmaceuticals and clandestined world actors, are to be found almost everyday in current news reports.

My overall point is that a scientist is not a person who understands things, but one who questions things. In the material ‘reality’ that most people believe is ‘all and everything’, everyone needs to be scientifically sceptical about how world events are reported. The techniques of the illusionist are frequently applied in a manner that appears to be without motive. Discovering the motive is the final and most hard to find piece of the puzzle.

This subject is extremely complex and the ‘stage craft’ of the actors confirms we are watching an act, but this is not a kid’s party. Most people chuckle and sit back in their seats, rather than refuse to leave until what has really been going on, is explained. There is after all, always an explanation, it’s just that, with the serious problems of today, we get the feeling that we are never intended to find out what it is.

picture credit: AZ Quotes

All of this may be rather bleak. However, mankind was never sent here to change the world, just to learn to be a better human being. Perhaps we have to look at this problem from a completely different perspective and that is to consider why there even is matter at all. Perhaps the knowledge that matter is interchangeable with energy casts some understanding. If mind / Universal Mind was seeking to know itself it could not do this in a vacuum. It has to create a very dense version of energy, which is what we call matter. In this material universe we are able to perceive how energy works because the two are the interchangable; it’s just that matter goes slowly enough for us to interact with it intelligently.

Those lessons, which the material Universe with all it’s entanglements and complexity, are directly transferable to the energetic or spiritual universes and when applied, give the greatest understanding of this highest spiritual truths.

You want to know what is spiritual?

Don’t approach spirituality.

To know what is spiritual,

Figure out what is physical.

Master Shi Heng Li Shaolin Monk

A Gender Agenda

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In this essay, sex is a verb and gender is a noun.

For the last two thousand years or so, homosexuality has generally been ‘brushed under the carpet’ in an effort for societies to be ‘respectable’ and ‘moral’. But in present times suppression does not work. The technological ‘information revolution’ has lifted the lid of this particular Pandora’s box as it has many others.

The Church of England is presently debating the male / female duality with regard to marriage, and whether same gender marriages, should be sanctioned by the Church. The best the Church can suggest is to give a ‘blessing in church’ to gay couples. But such a lame offering, satisfies neither the lawyers nor the couples in question. A better solution, it seems to me, is to invent a word. After all, words cost nothing and there are plenty out there ready to fit new ideas. I would therefore humbly suggest that gay couples are ‘parried’ and straight couples are ‘married’. In these words I am using the Latin stem words ‘pater’ and ‘mater’. Parried will mean a legal contract with partner, with all the rights, privileges and duties, contained in marriage.

The net result of the adoption of this word, would give the dignity, equality and legal status that gay couples demand and enable church leaders and lawyers to sit back and stop trying to fit an egg into match box.

The issue interestingly raises the question; how are Western societies adapting to issues around gender and sexuality? Clearly they have risen above the hypocrisy, secrecy, guilt and shame, that was prevalent in say, Victorian England. We find in societies around the world, condemnation has been applied to homosexuality and most religions have not always embraced the question to the satisfaction of all parties.

In modern western societies, the sexual freedoms of the 1960’s contributed to the general demand for acceptance of consensual sexual behaviour with few boundaries. Whilst LGBT rights have been slowly engaged by law makers in liberal democracies, certain more conservative institutions and governments have resisted the change.

It is most likely however that eventually, however hard they try, ‘the truth will out’ and it is to this truth that I shall now turn.

Humans, in common with animals, insects and plants, have two general body forms; male and female. Carl G. Jung proposed that the mind of a male had a feminine aspect (the anima) and the mind of a female had a male aspect (the animus). Just as different gender bodies are simultaneously the same and different, the mind is also. In the Eastern traditions, in which Jung was well versed, the mind is completely integrated with the body so this idea is obvious, and today is accepted more generally by western physicians.

A homosexual male may express his femininity in a manner crudely described as ‘camp’; others may not to the same degree. But expression of feminitiy by a male, such as the use of facial make up and brightly coloured clothing, are a fun and harmless expression of self.

In some cases a feeling of disfunctional gender identity, in both males and female, can become so overpowering that the person wishes to change gender. Even very young children, who are totally unaware of what sex is but not gender, can feel they were born into the wrong body and become very unhappy.

What I am building up to is asking the question of those with spiritual authority, such as the Church of England Synod, ‘where have you been?‘ Do these ‘councillors’ and ‘shepherds’ really have so little knowledge of the complexity of human feelings, including in their own. Celibacy in church leaders has been another harmful mechanism merely to ‘brush sex under the carpet’ with the result of sexual expression that has caused harm to others.

Celibacy is a gnostic practice in the East and West, based on raising the life force within the human body for spiritual enlightenment. Ignorantly copying the practice at a superficial level, is like sitting on the back of a Tiger.

Christian clerics and scholars today are having to grapple with the question; ‘what gender is God?’ Once again, language and a lack of the ability to think outside the existing lexicon, made religious scholars and law makers, recourse to dogma and literal interpretation of ‘scripture’.

But a little research into the history of Christianity will reveal that the original Trinity consisted of the Divine Masculine, the Divine Feminine and the Child. This was translated or became for unknown reasons, the Father, the Holy Spirit and the Son respectively. Once again, thoughts were perverted by miss translations at best and the denial of truth at worst. Surely religious truth should provide answers not questions and the words of mystics and gnostics have been repeatedly twisted and misunderstood. The dialogues between Jesus the Christ and his disciples illustrate this process perfectly.

Past religions had in fact, given Christianity the complete concept of the Trinity only with different gods. In Babylon the ‘holy family’ were Semiramis and Nimrod, who gave birth to the Holy Child, Tammuz.

The Abrahamic faiths, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, worship one God, indeed (logically) the same God. So, if God is One, then there can be no question as to what gender God is. God cannot have a gender so does not need a pronoun any more than the sky or moon do. The English language wisely dropped gendered nouns during it’s early development as ‘old English’. The Romantic languages did not do this and curiously these countries where these languages are spoken remained Catholic whilst the Anglo / Germanic countries became Protestant. Perhaps a book has been written about this?!

The ‘Divine Androgynous Unity’ has been expressed in many ways through history most notably by the Alchemists of the middle ages, who represented the two genders as the sun and moon. Human beings had bodies of both genders; somewhat comically being visually split in two, right down the middle. But the message was clear. At a non-physical, non-body, level (that is spirit or life energy) humans become complete and transform when their spiritual gender becomes as-God; neutral…Unified.

The Ancient Greeks and Romans, sometimes produced statues of gods and works of art where it is almost impossible to tell which gender the body represents. Indeed the ancient Greeks gave us the word ‘hermaphrodite’ to describe this union of opposite genders in one being and lifted the debate about gender from the physical to the spiritual.

Perhaps you agree that in modern times, there seems to be a general trend towards androgynous beings? Contemporary men have less sperm and testosterone and their voices, in my view, are becoming higher pitched. Artists such as Jason Perry express their own gender ambiguity in appropriate outrageousness and some boys going to school have questioned why they cannot wear skirts. Girls similarly dress in trousers and ties and feel perfectly comfortable. A similar trend is occurring in woman, whose dulcet tones can be heard reading the news or even on the parade ground.

Personally, I believe societies would benefit greatly from observing dispassionately and embracing, this gender neutral transition in all it’s manifestations, whether as sexual preference, gender transformation, religious doctrine or tolerance of gender neutrality.

It is beneficial to remember that gender neutrality in Christianity, produced the ‘immaculate conception of the child’. At a literal and physical level, this concept makes no sense and has to be adopted by the faithful as true only because it is written in a holy book. A more rational approach, ( which the Essenes who instructed Jesus in gnosticism at one time knew), is to interpret ‘the child’ as ‘Divine energy’. They taught gnostic methods of using this energy principally for inner transformation. But in a time when doctors and healers were generally ineffective, natural compassion must have caused Jesus to learn methods to use spiritual energy to heal and even return spirit to bodies that were in the early stages of dying.

The superior nature of ‘the child’ energy over matter, is represented in sacred geometry and architecture. The two smaller doors, openings, towers, flank an identical but scaled up feature which generally, is the practical and symbolic place of entry. In the case of the sacred pillars of Boaz (sun) and Joachim (moon) in Freemasonry imagery and architecture, the space between the pillars is the reality of the sacred energy or ‘light’. The Ancient Egyptian obelisks performed the same purpose in their Temples both metaphorically, and literally. They were power generators, as were the pillars and pyramids.

This is why the ‘holy child’ or ‘holy spirit’ is so significant. The ‘father’ and ‘mother’ are not central in the whole picture. They are depicted in Early Renaissance art in particular, as servants of the child, looking on and holding it with devotion and obedience. The holy child is not wearing a pink or blue outfit as happens in modern times, because children and the spiritual dimension that they represent, are gender neutral.

The ‘sexual’ energy that causes humans so much pleasure and grief is that given by the serpent or dragon. It is a realisation of mortality and a ‘fall’, as depicted in the biblical story of Adam and Eve, where physicality takes over from the Divine and perfect spiritual realm.

They started life naked and sans-gender and on realisation of their gender difference, were ashamed.

Gender in it’s many manifestations has a lot to be responsible for in human life, both through the ages and today. But perhaps at this time of rapid changes, the eye of truth is taking over from the eye of denial. It is a great blessing for humans to express the ‘freewill’ that was given to them, the freedom to love each other, without judgement.

Hive Mind

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This essay will explore the philosophical implications of this idea from the insect kingdom, a ‘hive mind’. In a very special way it might enable us to explore the mystery of our own ‘consciousness’ as an individual, in a group, and in spirit. The ‘hive mind’ concept has been more widely understood, since the eponymous non-fiction book by Garett Jones published in 2015.

Today, scientists are exploring the question of how sentient, animals are. They define this as ‘having a sense of self’. Animals, seeing their reflection in a mirror, react as if another animal was present; a being which is non-self. But there are some life forms that move ‘as one’; such as a flock of birds. Their sense of ‘self’ or ‘being conscious of self’ , becomes subservient to their social group’s consciousness. Picture credit below of a bird shape murmuration, to Country Living Magazine;

I would argue that this capacity to act either as a group or individually, is found in nature on a graded scale, that is; solely, partially or totally and every grade between these. In other words, some (if not all living beings) are able to act both individually and collectively at different times depending on the objective.

Let us examine this idea in more detail. I would like to start with the mineral kingdom, as the understanding that minerals in their many forms is conscious, is not so odd. Indeed, most indigenous people’s live comfortably with this concept. However, as this idea may seem ‘odd’ to city living humans, let us start with the vegetable kingdom. This image from the National Forest Foundation shows a map of tree connections.

Certainly trees have a historical place in the line of sentient beings in the cultures of indigenous communities. Modern Japanese today venture into mature forests to absorb the energetic ‘atmosphere’ which they term, ‘tree bathing’. Scientists have discovered that trees communicate with each other through their roots and associated connecting fungi. One tree may tell another, for instance, of a disease or insect infestation, which is attacking it. The other trees then initiate chemicals into their own sap that will protect against this attack to themselves and collectively; a form of viral inoculation and lock down.

J.R.R. Tolkien in his book The Lord of the Rings, imagined a race of giant trees called ‘Ents’ who were as alive as humans. Today the film ‘Avatar’, features a civilisation of other worldly beings whose lives centre on a magnificent sentient tree with enormous spiritual significance to their society.

The insect world is clearly where the idea of a ‘hive mind’ originated. The queen, workers and drones each have their own specialisation which is hard wired into their DNA. As a group, bees communicate on matters of hive survival using dance to express information. Their consciousness could be defined as ‘collective’ for this reason and there is a limited sense of self in each bee; at least enough to ‘speak’ to others.

Ants and termites (above) operate in the same way as specialised entities with specific functions to act for the benefit of the community. The structures they can build are extraordinary in their size and complexity. Surely, only a sense of communal consciousness could maintain this level of concentration on the task and produce something far greater than the individuals power to do so.

Interestingly, some insects are more individualistic. A spider, for instance, generally works alone as it needs space to create it’s webs. Without anthropomorphising, such a creature must surely feel that it is separate from the reality it senses, otherwise it could not ‘plan to catch another life’.

In animals we find a similar spectrum of ‘degrees of self awareness’. The birds are the most well known for acting in flight as if they were one organism in some species. Scientists who have study these ‘murmurations’ have proposed that each bird acts a micro-second after it’s neighbour. This may be the case but it does not rule out a collective consciousness governing their behaviour.

Penguins survive in extreme climates by acting in favour of the community and the individual. Those on the outside of a large formation of birds standing in a blizzard, will be allowed to edge to the centre of the huddle and then start moving towards the perimeter again. This flow gives and even chance to each bird of enjoying the collective heat of their bodies.

At the other end of the spectrum of animals acting individually, is the wild and domestic cat. It appears to have a high degree of sense of ‘self consciousness’ and will act according to it’s own rules and commands. The Lion as the ‘King of the Jungle’ indicates this propensity to act according it’s own survival needs and a sense of ‘self’ compliments the demands of the pride.

The mysterious process of the evolution of the domestication of wild animals gives reason to consider how wild and domesticated animals differ. In what ways are they different mentally, as well as physically? Personally, I believe that domesticated animals have a higher degree of sense of self than their wild relatives. This is because their consciousness is less centred on survival and is able to focus more on itself. It feels both individual and aware of it’s relations with other sentient beings, such as humans and other domesticated animals.

With humans these matters become more complex. I would suggest that we are at the high end of the sliding scale of individuality; that is we are distinctly individual both in appearance and a sense of self or self consciousness. We might identify collective behaviour such as tribal dance or even military tattoos as a ‘hive mind’ ability. But personally, I believe this is merely ‘mimicking’ the hive mind consciousness through repetition. This is to rule out the spontaneous consciousness of the group as a whole but this effect only happens in special moments, as most dancers would assert.

Humans differ also in that we have access to another dimension of consciousness. Professor G.J. Jung called this the ‘collective unconscious’. This concept of a hidden process of motivation in human activity, is at first difficult to understand – which it is by definition of being ‘unconscious’. Humans can not only manipulate consciously, as in politics and advertising, but confuse personal identity with the collective. In other words, our sense of ‘self’ is easily confused. We believe that everything in our mind, is us. For instance, supporters of a team watching a football match become identified at an individual and collective level with the game they are watching. They may have dressed in colours of their team to create this illusion of identification, and will certainly feel to their core the associated feelings of success or failure with the (their) team and it’s individual members.

In other words, humans become confused at a most fundamental level, with what is ‘the hive mind’ and what is their own. There is a comfort and protection in this illusion and it is hard to break. At it’s most malign manifestation, a group of humans will riot and cause damage and injury to others that as individuals, they would never do. In some cases, whole nations can be caused to commit acts to harm other nations, known as war.

The few humans who have leapt out of this illusion are the prophets, saints and mystics. At a spiritual level, such persons have separated their individual sense of ‘self’ and entered what is called the ‘Universal Consciousness’. Such figures are revered in all religions and an example in modern western societies would be Jesus the Christ. He is revered for having ‘died for others’, in other words, to have completely surrendered to the hive mind both in the physical dimension and spiritually.

I would argue that the mineral, vegetable and animal kingdoms also have access to this spiritual / universal dimension of consciousness but not in a sentient way. In other words, they are so limited by their DNA , instincts and highly specialised physical bodies, that they cannot gain discernment of the ‘Universal Mind’ as humans may. We are uniquely able to enter higher dimensions outside of our own bodies. Humans who have physically died and then come back into their bodies recount remarkably similar spiritual experiences, ( including the most ‘hard headed’ scientists ) and their stories abound on social media.

In this spiritual kingdom, there is another, similar hierarchy of self awareness and communal awareness, on this planet.

If one can accept the idea that ‘mentality’ can exist in the ether without physical form, then it becomes easier to understand, if not experience, the other entities or beings, described historically and universally in the spiritual dimension.

These start with the identification of ‘spirits’ which are either of a natural or human origin, move through ‘jinn’ to higher intelligences such as angels and arch angels, and summit in the concept of ‘God’ – or to the non-believers, ‘Universal Mind’.

The concept of hive mind, enables one to grasp the idea of a universal consciousness. All of this, that we see as individuals, is an illusion. It is not ‘us’. Self is merely a manifestation of the infinite consciousness, the great Mind ‘who art in heaven’. It is expressed more perfectly in mathematics than attempts in words, however, geometry is traditionally the closest expression of the Creator’s Mind.

How apt it is then, that when the Great Bee Keeper in the Sky, lifts up the frame containing the honey of heaven, what have our little bees made? – why, a maze of perfect hexagons.

Imagination Theory

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If we shadows have offended,

think but this and all is mended,

that you have but slumbered here,

While these visions did appear.

The Faerie ‘Puck’ in William Shakespeare’s ‘Midsummer Nights Dream’

The greatest mistake a human can make, in my view, is to not treat imagination as real. This does not mean that what we call ‘reality’, is unreal. Reality and imagination both have a vital role to play in our lives.

The character of Ebenezer Scrooge in Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, had to learn this lesson three times in order to understand himself better. Three ‘spirits’ took him on three journeys into his own past, present and future. From objectively viewing his own character weaknesses, his false pride was beaten into submission and he learnt the most valuable life lesson of all – unconditional love. These ‘imaginary’ journeys and the lessons overpowered the lonely ‘refority’ he had built for himself.

All of us encounter these three ‘spirits’ in our lives, if we can make a leap of faith and objectify our ‘imaginary’ selves as ‘real’.

The first such spirit we encounter is in our childhood when we understand very little about the real workings of life. Rather, we ‘act out’ roles that our imaginary selves would like to be in the future…our ‘Christmas yet to come.’ The dressing up box is a most useful item, enabling children to assume wildly fanciful roles as magicians, dentists, racing drivers, astronauts and so on. The most ordinary prop fulfils the need for an exact semblance of physical reality in their imaginary world. Watching children at play is a most rewarding way to understand our own susceptibility to imaginary states of mind. When we are children, fantasy often overwhelms what we feel is our ‘objective self’ and teases us with pleasures and torments, in a safe way. But, like Peter Pan, some children refuse to ‘grow up’ into an adult. The world of frigates, flying and fairies is far too much fun to frizzle away.

The character of Walter Mitty is a literary example of how there can be a child in an adult’s body. Mitty lived in an absorbing ‘dream world’ with flights of fancy that would replay dreams with himself in the lead role. He would encounter a situation the real Walter Mitty would be completely unable to deal with, and compensate with his imagination; such as flying a plane or conducting an orchestra. This is the ‘ghost of Christmas present’ where as individuals we have moved on the adulthood, but in a failed way. Unlike Walter Mitty, most people engage with the ‘hum drum real world’ and it’s seemingly endless burdens and chores, punctuated by few delights. Remember the character played by Tom Hanks; Forest Gump? For this character, a string of exciting situations were both wild and implausible enough to be fantasy and yet were firmly, real. Forest, in contrast to Walter Mitty, had mastered the most important challenge of all; to successfully merge imagination with reality.

Our most important decision is to find what people call our ‘destiny’, but this often sounds rather a vague destination. Even the decision to find a career is an extremely difficult one for a young person. From the view of an elder, I would define ‘destiny’ as simply following the people and things that you love. Although this sounds simple it is of course much harder that it sounds, as there are often obstacles to our dreams. As a child my dream was to be an Admiral but when the time came, my eyesight was not good enough. Watching Lionel Andres Messi play football for Argentina in the 2022 World Cup, is to see a man fulfill his destiny as a footballer. Those who purchased his No.10 shirt and wore it to the match were merely living the dream of a third partie’s achievements, a dead end path to their own destiny.

When we follow and act out an overwhelming excitement to do something, this is our own dream becoming true. Unfortunately, it is a sad fact that less than 4% of Western Europeans are in what they would call ‘their dream job’. The rest find themselves working in order to earn money and have no dream. The servers in the restaurants in Hollywood are often ‘wannabe’ film stars. The lucky minority who are ‘successful’, appear on our television screens.

As well as finding the employment that makes us fulfilled, we must find a partner who fits our ‘imaginary ideal’ of a partner. This again is a huge challenge as the ‘ideal’ man or woman is rarely found and if found; is available and inclined to reciprocate those feelings. If the latter does happen, as in the fairy story of the prince and princess falling in love for ever and ever, then blue birds will sing among the pink clouds and the castle turrets will tower over the cheering crowds at their wedding. Walt Disney has relived this imaginary moment for millions of children and adults and I would argue it is not wrong to dream. Through all these types of stories, whether in ancient myths and legends or on soap TV and radio, we learn to match objectively, our imaginations with reality. It is like two QR codes marked on two sheets of glass. When they slide over each other, the two appear to be identical. The worlds of imagination and physicality are just as unique and, when blue birds start flying around your head for real, they are in perfect harmony.

To return to our Christmas Carol theme, we enter the final stage of life. The woman or man lose their beauty as their body withers with age but their mind is usually disproportionately active and many older people will give you their ‘feeling age’ as their early twenties. When you engage them in conversation, they will recount their times of ‘Christmas past’ when significant moments fulfilled them. These will be substantially real but also coloured by imagination. Like old black and white films that have been digitally ‘colourised’, life becomes a series of memories which are a mixture of physical reality and imagination. The best are of course, those moments when our ‘dreams come true’.

Memories are valuable, but we should not forget that our true self is always in the present.

For this reason we cannot compare ourselves with others and form judgements.

We can only use the ‘guiding spirit’ (who taps on the frozen window pane of our own self pity one night) to remind us of who we might be and that we are not that person yet. The Dickens story recounts how it is never too late to learn how to become better. It is never too late to live the dream that you always wished for. It is never too late, unless you are one of those people who refuses to be motivated by your own imagination; to follow your own ‘yellow brick road’ that leads to the encounter with the Wizard of Oz or purchase the ‘giant Christmas turkey’ that with unconditional love, fills the bellies of all, including Tiny Tim.

What Mr. Scrooge had learnt was that living the present moment is the ultimate present to oneself and those around you.

What Seems to be the Problem?

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Many media outlets provide harrowing examples of problems in the National Health Service in the UK today, so here are my ideas for attempting to solve them.

Firstly, I would determine what the government strategy for the National Health Service is. Cynics would say that based on the previous ten years, the aim of government has been to make the NHS fail. To define ‘failure’ quasi-scientifically, the first step is to introduce targets so that hospitals can fail to meet them. But logically, if targets were removed then failure would also. Successes would be highlighted instead, so staff are allowed to feel valued rather than judged negatively. Keeping staff moral high has numerous beneficial effects for the whole system including the patients.

However, if the government wants private hospitals for all, as in the USA, then that should be their stated aim and the public allowed to vote on that idea, either in a general election manifesto or two third majority referendum.

If the government want the NHS to protect the health of UK citizens then these are my ideas;

  1. Engage in preventative health as keenly as reactive health. This is difficult since ill people are more vocal than those who have no problems. However, if hospitals and doctors surgeries were paid when people were well, rather than for health interventions, then they would be incentivised to prevent illness. One example of this would be to include diet and nutrition and exercise regimes more fully in a medical doctor’s training.
  2. Presently resources are wasted on treating patients with imaginary and or minor ailments. The high street pharmacies are presently under-used as places for diagnosis and intervention of such complaints. Pharmacists are highly trained and if allowed to view patients records on line, would relived doctors from such complaints. Also, patients can be empowered to self help through information online to a far greater extent than has already been achieved. This is not to promote Doctor Google but to provide interactive consultation with a health consultant rather than an algorithm.
  3. Presently local doctor’s surgeries are often understaffed and GP’s overworked. One of the effects of this is for patients to be diverted to the Accident and Emergency Department at the local hospital. The first remedy I suggest is to change the name of this department to simply ‘Emergency Department’. People with minor cuts and bruises from ‘accidents’ are not ’emergencies’ and again could be treated in a local pharmacy ‘treatment room’ when the GP is not available.
  4. Training more doctors and health workers of all kinds is so basic that it should hardly need mentioning but sadly, it has been been neglected by politicians who did not write this intention into their manifestos.
  5. Presently A and E Departments are often unable to cope with demand in peak periods such as during winter flu season. This is partly due to ‘bed blocking’ where vital hospital beds are occupied by patients who are well but have no safe place to be discharged to. The other reason is a lack of staff as already mentioned. In response to the problem of ambulances queuing for long periods when they are needed to respond to emergencies, one hospital has set up a dedicated room for patients to wait for treatment. There are paramedics in the room who take over monitoring and keeping waiting patients comfortable and safe with the same equipment that is available in the back of an ambulance. The effect is to reduce ambulance waiting times at hospitals.
  6. The pay and conditions for health workers has been allowed to decline over the last ten years or so. The present strike by health workers is as a result of this as much as the general decline in their effectiveness to treat patients. During the recent ‘pandemic’ there was an ‘unlimited budget’ to ‘protect the NHS’. Getting back the money which was subject to fraud during this time would be a good start to begin to protect the NHS by paying living wages to health workers. The presence of food banks for staff in hospitals is unforgivable, as they are in high streets and goes back to staying healthy with a good diet, let alone suffering malnutrition. Planning for the next pandemic is also imperative.
  7. Most public services have become burdened with the demand for recording information on computers. Doctors, nurses, police, fire personnel, social workers, teachers and many others have a general feeling that they spend to much time recording information on computers rather than dealing with people. These services all functioned before the invention of computers and they would benefit from a study into how to reduce the time spent recording information today by asking the question, why? One probable reason would be as a tool to supervise staff by managers and at it’s worse to be able to prove negligence and or malpractice by staff in a court of law. I would suggest that whilst public liability and duty of care is a vital ethical stance, the large financial pay outs is inappropriate. Private services have a contractual responsibility as money changes hands but in public service the ethics are different. You would like to think that most NHS patients merely wish to point out negligence so that mistakes ‘do not happen again’. If there has been a life altering error for a NHS patient then the same services will intervene at no cost to the patient for any extra home care. For instance patients might be offered insurance policies before operations with an element of risk and be asked to sign a document that they will not sue if something goes wrong with the operations due to this risk. People will take out insurance to go on holiday so this is not so absurd as it may seem. The effect will enable staff to operate under less stress about mistakes and as a consequence be more competent.

picture credit: BBC

This list is not exhaustive nor are all the ideas practical or good ones as the writer is not an expert in these matters, just an observer. But when there is an obvious problem, then problem solving must surely be attempted head on. Usually, rather than expensive professional ‘management consultants’ the best people to ask for problem definition possible solutions are the staff on the wards.

Managers often overlook the vital details that only staff will necessarily know about and be able relate to why things are not working.

There is also a case for different services and specialities within those services to share information about patients. A very simplified on line system as easy to use as a Facebook account could be used to function in a way the social media presently shares information to the benefit of those who need to know.

Thus mental health workers, pharmacists, care workers, mental health teams, police, social workers, teachers and many others, would be part of an overarching system of protection and service provision for each citizen. The more old fashioned ‘silo system’ of public service provision has begun to be dismantled but needs to speed up and widen.

Public expectation also needs serious consideration and the present promise of a ‘blank cheque’ for treatment and compensation when mistakes are made, needs comparing to the original aims and promises in the Beveridge Report of 1942 entitled ‘Social Insurance and Allied Services.’ The lesson is not to promise what cannot be delivered and if it can’t, explain why before, not after, being elected.

The World Spinning out of Control

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To everything there is an overview and to help understand the drama being played out in Ukraine at the moment, read on;

Tomas Schuman is an Soviet-era secret service agent and has spilled the beans on how the Soviet era strategy to undermine the West. He now describes the Soviet techniques of international subversion openly on You Tube.

He says there are four stages, extended over several decades.

Stage 1: Demoralisation

This takes at least one generation, maybe 15 to 20 years. During this time various completely fake replacements take over established religion, education, law and order and social life in general.

These institutions are replaced with un-elected ‘influencers’ such as the media, secret societies, wealthy individuals and clandestine branches of government.

Labour relations are undermined by taking away the power of trade unions.

Stage 2: Destabilisation

This process is aimed at institutions. ‘Sleepers’ who have been installed in societies institutions such as local government, law, military, industry and commerce and educational hubs, are activated. They move into positions of authority through the perceived lack of law and order e.g. military coup, ‘fake’ election results, single issue protest groups lobbying government and on the streets (Black Lives Matter)(‘statue toppling’)(‘defund the police’). At the same time various antagonistic single issue parties move into power vacuums created by the effects of stage 1. (the Brexit Party in the UK).

Stage 3: Crisis

This process starts when social functions cease to work such as the effects on the free movements of goods and people within the UK and the EU. This includes the issues around the Good Friday Agreement and possibly leading to nationalist politics breaking up the United Kingdom. Poverty and homelessness (e.g. California) forces large numbers of people to seek food aid and other handouts to simply exist. Fake information is fed at an industrial scale to social media sites at carefully selected times e.g. elections and referendums. This and weak government, leads to discontent which can spiral out of control leading to the call for more authoritarian rule and a ‘strong man’ ruler such as seen in the United States when Trump was elected. The result is civil war or invasion of another country e.g. Afghanistan, Lebanon, Syria and now Ukraine.

Stage 4: Normalisation

As a pretence of solving the problems (real and fake) of the first three stages,

it is now possible to justify extreme action to ‘normalise’ society and bring ‘peace’. The tanks move in to a desired country, however ‘normal’ the citizens feel, with the aim of physically taking over the seat of government (e.g. the protesters at the Washington rally who disputed the election results or now Ukraine). Once the leaders of the former government have fled or been jailed, a new ‘puppet’ government can be installed with the aim of ‘restoring law and order’ which of course comes at the price of loss of democratic freedom and human rights.

The USSR may have imploded in on itself but the ‘vision’ of it’s leaders is still deeply ingrained in it’s institutions and leaders. Mr. Putin was after all a KGB officer and would have expertise in and taken part in the above process. Transfer these four stages to ‘predator’ and ‘predated’ countries in Asia (Myanmar now in military rule) Africa (Somalia) the Far East (North Korea) the Middle East (Iran, Iraq, Yemen, Israel) in addition to Europe and the Americas and elements of this Soviet-era method of insurrection ‘government toppling’ are alarmingly aparrent.

Vladimir the Impaler – picture credit National Geographic

All of the above was my blog written and published at the begining of 2022. Events have moved on and the symptons of this subversion process of natural law and order, remain and gather momentum.

Storms are not catastrophes except when they happen simultaneously and then they are called ‘perfect storms’. On they Oceans they appear as ‘rogue waves’ which can sweep over huge ocean going liners such as the Queen Elizabeth II at great risk to passengers and crew of capsize and sinking.

To sustain this metaphor 2022 has witnessed the sad loss of the real Queen Elizabeth through natural causes and with her passing the end of an era. Her reign included the Second World War of which she was one of the last veterans. In my view that experience raised the social ownership of responsibility, in Britain and around the world. Out of harm usually comes a realisation of the need for change and significantly a socialist prime minister in the UK succeded the Tory Winston Churchill. People realised the need for good housing, food and education and in particular the provision of health care for all.

What has happened today is the disappearance of a generation who cherished those social values as being of primary importance to a peaceful and good life for all, not just the rich and privileged. The stabilising influence of high ethical standards was sanctified in the creation of the European Commission in which what were called ‘human rights’ were enshrined not just in religious values but in law. Many who voted for Brexit are surprised and disappointed that the European Union (also created with an eye on peaceful coexistence in Europe) is a seperate organisation to the EC. They now wish to send asylum seekers (80% who are genuine) back home or to a third world country against their wishes and chances of even staying alive.

Should we be surprised that this division amongst left and right in many European countries and the weakening of the ‘centre ground’ has played right into the hands of the ghosts of the USSR – Vladimir Putin.

Was Brexit not only partly engineered by the Russia and her allies, but a green light to start a war in Europe?

Your enemy will always tell you where you are weak.

The rise of autocratic countries as being now a majority of governments in the world, should make us more than worried. When we watch the government clamp downs on free speech and the right to protest in China, Russia and Iran, are we watching European countries in the next decade?

In my view we should be extremely concerned. In summary we can identifiy two storms; the subversion of democracy by Russia and various rogue states such as Iran and North Korea, combined with weakened social values in divided democratic countries such as the UK and the USA.

Into this gathering tsunami is added a third wave which travels around the world largely unseen. It is generated by those who have huge political power through extreme wealth and social privilege. They work in the background by buying media organisations, pharmaceutical companies, industrial conglomerates and arms and municians amongst other diverse service and product providers. No one votes for them and their influence is being swelled by the rising tide enabled by new technology and biological sciences.

But wait! There are at least three storms producing this hurricane, now made even more worrying by the no longer deniable catastrophe of, climate change.

At the risk of having mixed my metaphors it is apparent now to most observers that the ‘minor details’ produced by this storm of all storms such as inflation, migration, poverty, hunger, war, homelessness are not only problems in themselves but indicate a far larger and uncontrolled pattern towards global catastrophe and harm to each and every individual alive today.

The old saying ‘there is no smoke without fire’ has never been more true. The challenge today is to find the fire and put it out. And when that is done, look around and see what is left and work out if those who stepped forward to ‘save us’ were our friends or our enemies.

“AI You Can Drive My Car”

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(with apologies to Simon and Garfunkel)

There is a revolution happening spearheaded by self-driving electric cars but have the majority of people considered the destination? In the UK there is a target to only sell electric vehicles in car showrooms by 2030. The government’s stated aim is to reduce carbon emissions into the atmosphere and thereby the risk of climate change and global warming. But is stopping killing the planet really their main concern or is there another plan? After all, there have been decades to save the lungs of the world; the Amazon rainforest…

I recently applied for a quotation for a household electricity supply from photovoltaic cells. One of the questions I was asked was, ‘are you going to have an electric car in the future?’ to which I replied ‘no’; which surprised me. I didn’t know I thought that, so I have spent some time to find out why.

I am certainly not convinced by ‘hybrid cars’. Hybrids are by definition, neither likely to be good at one thing or another. I have heard of companies who bought fleets of hybrid cars and then discovered their employees ran them solely on the petrol engines.

We know that one third of the energy a car uses in it’s lifetime, is in it’s construction. This means that converting to electric motors will only ever have an effect on reducing the other two thirds of the energy the car will consume in it’s life. And when electric cars stop for a recharge, how much of the electricity they use has been created without carbon emissions?

A fifty year guarantee and free disposal, would be an interesting strategy for car makers. Owners of ten year old cars in Spain, were written to by the police suggesting that they scrap the car and get a newer ‘more efficient’ model. Demonising petrol and now diesel cars has been government policy in many countries and yet driving more slowly to save fuel and carbon emissions has not.

For instance, when one drives on most European roads at the maximum legal speed you will acquire a line of vehicles behind you waiting to overtake. This despite the increasing costs of fuel and the protests of drivers protesting that they cannot afford it. Perhaps they do not realise that cars travelling substantially over 60mph are consuming up to third more fuel. In the United States of America there a maximum legal speed on highways of 55mph to preserve fuel and increase safety.

There are many options for greener personal transport. This may include driving at reduced speeds, retro fitting emission filters, regular testing and maintenance. My fifteen year old 2.2 litre diesel estate gives me 65mpg. This is better than many ‘state of the art’ hybrid cars. There are diesel engined black cabs built by the London Taxi Company, that have completed one million miles.

It is possible to retro-fit carbon less engines into pre-used cars as a greener option to producing new cars. It’s not something economists will support as making cars makes money, but the pressing immediate need is for reducing global carbon emissions, a direction only governments and the COP meetings have the power to steer our future towards.

The Charge of the Electric Cars

Let us examine the EV (electric vehicle) options currently available and there relative pros and cons.

The first point is that all these vehicles have tyres made of rubber and rubber polymers. These tyres obviously wear out at the same rate as all other tyres. They produce more airborne particulate matter (PM) than either diesel or petrol powered cars according to academic experts on air pollution. We should consider reducing the harmful effects of cars on clean air as well as a cause of climate change. Respiratory problems such as asthma are becoming more common in children in western countries.

Even the plastic used in the construction of a car is a considerable consumer of oil based polymers and not necessarily designed with longevity and ease of re-cycling as benefits in the list of the car’s worth.

When considering emissions we should also note that electricity supplied in national grids is only partly produced by renewable sources (including nuclear) Electricity is still produced by fossil fuel burning power stations. This will gradually improve but the vital question is ‘how quickly?’ The sanctions introduced by both sides in Russian War against Ukraine, is halting the move to stop using fossil fuelled power stations and even more are being built.

Thinking of the causes and effects of this war we should consider rare earth minerals. Ukraine has a significant proportion of these in Europe and China has the greater part of the world’s. The need to set up factories making batteries for EV’s is inevitably contributing to the political uncertainty in the region. After all history shows us that the shortage of resources is one of the most common causes of war.

There are low carbon using and emitting vehicles other than EV’s. Hydrogen fuel cells are a source currently being developed for lorries and trains ( but not domestic cars ) and perhaps this will change in the future.

Compressed gas slowly released into the cylinders of internal combustion engines is a little known option. Buses and taxis in inner cities are ideally suited to this form of power as the emissions from vehicles are just clean air. With local renewable electricity generation powering the pumps that compress the gas, the costs and harmful effects of public transport vehicles could be significantly reduced.

Certainly, all governments need to look more closely at generating electricity locally using photovoltaic (PV) cells. There are existing schemes and proposals which cover such large ‘neutral use’ areas such as car parks, canals, roads and railways with PV cells. Car parks in hot countries require shade as do house roofs and local generation on a large scale could potentially replace the ‘national grid’ concept which is inefficient and subject to damage by storms and strategic security issues.

Also, national grids require sub-stations to reduce the high voltages for domestic use, and lose substantial amounts of electricity during transmission.

Wherever the electricity comes from, it will eventually connect with your electric car at a re-charging point. There are presently two ways to do this. The most practical is in a private garage or driveway at home. Here charging can take place overnight at lower tariffs and ensuring a full charge for the next day. With a range of say, 300 miles per charge, this is the most economic and convenient way to use an EV daily. It can even temporarily power the house in the case of power cuts!

Unfortunately, the majority of householders do not have private parking and private charging. People who live in cities, often have problems parking near to their homes, before even considering parking at a re-charging point. It has been suggested that lamp post might be able to perform this function. However successful a solution is found, the electrical consumption (thousands of watts per vehicle) by used cars overnight, is a demand for which the supply infrastructure is not designed.

Once another tangent. can we expect governments to absorb the loss of tax revenue as fossil fuels become fossils themselves? It seems unlikely and national bureaucrats will refocus their tax collecting efforts to other means, such as taxation by road tolls, replacement tyres and car purchase.

We should always factor in revolutionary and new technology. It is likely that battery technology will produce smaller batteries that charge instantly and require no rare earth minerals; such as ‘capacitor batteries’ that already exist. Or perhaps fuel cells or similar green technologies will take over? What is regrettable is that it has taken this long for battery technology to improve exponentially instead of in small steps. This remembering that electric cars preceded the internal combustion engine and declined as the first choice of motive power at the same time that oil fields were being discovered in California.

Open Your Mouth and Say ‘AI’

(picture credit BBC News)

We live at a similar cross roads today to the car designers of the nineteenth century. Today it is not so much in material but computer technology leading the way forward. The self drive or robot driven vehicle is slowly metaphorically nudging itself onto the highway out of the acceleration lane. Electric vehicles and self drive technology are a marriage made in the AI equivalent to heaven. We can expect the price of such vehicles to decline rapidly as production is switched from heavy ‘gas guzzler’ to lightweight ‘data driver’. We will be sold self drive cars using the golden words and phrases such as ‘safer’, ‘quieter’, ‘cleaner’, ‘cheaper’, ‘easy maintenance’. Gold lame suited sales personnel will persuade you how almost impossible the self drive car will be to steal and or be used in crime by car thieves. ‘Even you husband will not be able to take it madam!’

The dreaded speeding ticket will be a thing of the past. No one will be going anywhere fast; not unless robot drivers are programmed to leap from their vehicles and fight out disputes with laser guns. Could be fun to watch?

And the price of this revolution is; well, most people accept loss of privacy because they reason that they are not criminals and have nothing to hide. This is indeed true, however AI technology is not really for our generation. It is for our children and our children’s children who may well find themselves governed by criminal governments. Such a suggestion may shock the reader but reflect on the fact that there are governments in over half of the world today who are authoritarian. In other words, the lunatics have taken over the asylum. Much of what they do violates the human right to privacy, family life, fair trial etc. and so called ‘free countries’ are powerless to interfere in the rights of completely bonkers sovereign states to abuse completely sane citizens, in extremis.

For the People’s Republic of China the pandemic panic enabled finding out exactly how far compliant populations can be pressed to submit to severe restrictions in freedom and more sinisterly, how to control those who resist and ultimately rebel.

Now look into the future and imagine your gleaming self drive car parked at the front of your house. Yours partly that is as you probably won’t own it. It will be shared because your government tells you there are not enough resources in the world to make and operate cars for everybody. You don’t mind as you like ‘helping others and the planet’ – the latest government windscreen hologram to appear with your annual mechanical test.

As you place your palm on the car window the door magically slides open. You sit down and watch your favourite magazine programme whilst the car’s computer drives you to the government approved shopping centre. The cost of this journey will be instantly deducted from your phone as you step out of the car. You watch it drive away, safe in the knowledge you have booked for it to return to collect you, at it’s convenience, not yours.

When you paid in advance you also agree to download the latest ‘safety’ patches to make you car work more ‘efficiently’ – in other words to avoid problems from recent traffic collisions caused by hackers. Your magazine subscription will appear on the bill too, as will the subscription to use the car heater in the coming months, and the subscription to use the ‘economy’ settings in the car’s computer. You are trying to save money as the running costs are mounting up but , you reason, all these ‘subscriptions’ were previously just part of owning a car. Who would have thought?

Heaven forbid you criticise these subscriptions on social media and AI picks you out up as ‘anti-government’. For the next time you hail ‘your car’ it will refuse to obey your commands such as ‘let me out!’ You will be told that some ‘correction time’ is required. ‘Proceed to the nearest GECC (Government Education and Correction Centre)’ will be your only option to select on the onboard computer screen.

This collection of absurd and completely fictitious scenarios is written purely ‘for entertainment purposes only’ and ‘bears no resemblance to any future use of artificial intelligence by government or proxy government agencies’.

However, it is obvious that governments around the world today are already using the coercive control enabled by AI in such programmes as high quality data gathering and biometric / facial recognition in particular. Why would the Metaverse pay 19 billion dollars for Watts app? Why did Elon buy Twitter?

If populations embrace the new AI lead technologies in everything from cars to toothbrushes without question; citizen’s freedoms will find their place in the city land fill, beside the rusting pile of internal combustion engines.

Happy motoring!

Fifty Shades of Love

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If the Inuit have multiple words for ‘snow’ then you might think that there are many words in English for ‘love’. Language has the ability to enable mutual understaning, even for the most mundane thing;

qanuk: ‘snowflake’kaneq: ‘frost’kanevvluk: ‘fine snow’qanikcaq: ‘snow on ground’muruaneq: ‘soft deep snow’nutaryuk: ‘fresh snow’pirta: ‘blizzard’qengaruk: ‘snow bank

So why does the word ‘love’, in all languages, fail to identify the spectrum of feelings it could and should represent?

Before we start, let us agree that the word ‘feeling’ affirms love is an emotion. It is not the instinct ‘lust’ although the two may often be confused! As it can with the love of beauty and attraction that is only ‘skin deep’. Perhaps these errors once ‘launched a thousand ships’ to enable Paris to seduce Helen of Troy, or was an epic love story?

Lust has been crystallised in the English language by the phrase ‘to make love’. But clearly, animals ‘make love’; if all that is meant is to have sexual intercourse. When looking up ‘roll in the hay’ in a thesaurus, there are twenty seven synonyms for this expression. Clearly, westerners are as interested in sex as the Inuits are snow.

But we are going to pass over lust and concentrate on it’s more sublime incarnation and affirm that love is one of the most sublime emotions that humans ever experience. Although not easy to find, It too has many shades if we can find words to ‘nuance’ it into sub-categories.

So if we think of how we ‘love’ in our daily lives we can identify several ‘objects’ for our love to directed.

Romantic love should be our first choice as here we find the core of the word and it’s associated feeling. Romance sends humans into true and false expectations that are sometimes completely out of character. In youth this feeling is unknown and untested. But we are already on a collision course with that special person who will come into our lives. The emotional ‘volcano’ that erupts can leave one without thought and speech so paralysing is the impact of the explosive force. And just as in the making of volcanic mountains, the results of the experience last forever; impermeable to all later hurricanes and earthquakes.

The greatest romantic love involves a kind of electronic circuit, where both ends of the battery connect in what is called ‘requited love’. It’s corollary, unrequited love has spawned many an ancient Saga such as Sir Lancelot’s love for King Arthur’s wife, Guinevere.

Then there is love which has a different character; more calm and assured. When we think of how we love members of our family, we use the same word ‘love’ although there is no sudden ‘falling in love’. We learn to love our parents and siblings from birth to grave, a process that is not one necessarily of our own making. It is like a cosmic ‘arranged marriage’ where a soul is placed into the intimate company of strangers, it’s family. What we call ‘paternal’ and ‘maternal’ feelings of love are curiously blended with their equivalent instincts of unconditional parental protection; in the same way that ‘romantic love’ depends, in subtle ways, upon instinctual drives.

When children are old enough to leave the ‘love nest’ they call home and go on their own way, their connection with ‘family members’ falls more to a purely emotional attachment instead of one based on physical dependence. But when parents have bad characters and the process of childhood has involved abuse by parents towards their children, the detachment of a child to the family home becomes a ‘release’.

In that situation we have moved to the opposite end of the scale of the ‘fifty shades of love’ and discover the word ‘hate’. Hate after all, is the same as love only destructive in it’s effects rather than constructive. But the emotions come from the same source.

Romantic lovers and family members sometimes find themselves in the space of mutual emotional hate at the beginning and or end of relationships. In Shakespeare’s play ‘Much Ado About Nothing‘ the principal characters of Benedict and Beatrice cannot stand the sight of each other. Through the play their characters develop towards a deeper understanding of their similarities rather than their differences. The English language deserves a word for the ‘love / hate’ relationship!

We find the same scarcity of words when we describe ‘love’ in the context of religion and the concept of ‘loving God’. Those religions founded on monotheism, place intermediaries between the Divine and ourselves such as the prophets and the saints, their disciples and the self elected clergy who claim to be able to understand what was going on in the lives of the characters in the holy books.

There are those who have a direct relationship with the Divine with no intermediaries. Their relationship with God is greater than any love for any human and many retreat to monasteries and nunneries to play out and understand these feelings. Is such a feeling irrational? Again we need another word for ‘love of God’ because without it, we can cancel without due consideration the possibility that prophets and mystics can unconditionally love God.

As we scan these ‘shades of love’ we find next a rather prosaic category of ‘love of places, activities and things’. These I place together as they are generally dismissed by the aforementioned mystics as being ‘illusions’ at worst and ‘not of benefit to the soul’ at best.

And yet ninety nine percent of human activity is centered on the places, activities and things that we love. People who express in exceptional and imaginative ways are the artists in society. They choose things that inspire a love, such as nature in it’s many forms and people in their many activities, that they wish to share with others.

Certainly artists are able to observe and understand their feelings of love and passion in a focused and controlled way. Just as the person smelling blends of tea in a tea factory, artists are able to savor their deepest emotions, such as love, and present their inspiration in a way that is agreeable to others.

An example might be the Moghul mausoleum, the Taj Mahal in Agra (picture credit Smarthistory). It was famously built by the Shah Jahan to express his eternal love for his favourite wife Mumtaz Mahal. This leads us into the idea that love between human beings can be regarded as limited by society (monogamy) or plural (bigamy). With such dilemmas we can observe how ‘uncontrolled’ our emotions can become in the eyes of ‘society’ and again many great works of literature and art have been inspired to explore how this plays out among the humble and the great.

We should not overlook one of the most extraordinary aspects of love between humans; that we have an infinite capacity for love. Our hearts are wells that do not run dry, circulating love as effeciently as blood. Which is why many religions extorty Universal love for all things. As Jesus the Christ said, ‘love thy neighbour’.

The subject of love is indeed an immensely contradictory and complex; partly because of a lack of words to describe it’s many faces and flavours but also because of what today is identified as ’emotional intelligence’. If the ‘e’ in emotion represents the ‘energy’ that causes feelings to erupt as if from nowhere, the ‘motion’ part of the word describes how feelings are constantly changing. If we form fixed beliefs in our minds and accomplish specific skills in our bodies that do not change, can we extrapolate this to the idea that emotions are the same?

It would be good to believe this and allow our emotions, thoughts and bodies to constantly learn ‘new tricks’ throughout our lives. Our minds may wish to give the appearance that they are ‘in control’ but our emotions can overrule mind and the decisions it makes.

‘Don’t believe a thing just because you thought it.’ Groucho Marx.

What differentiates love from mind and body, in my view, is that emotions can understand what we might term, ‘truths’. A woman for instance may take a dislike for a person who her husband admires for no explainable reason, just a feeling. And years later the husband arrives at the same conclusion using the circuitous route of logic and deduction.

At the most sublime level the words of the prophets and saints express eternal truths when they experience a direct and immutable Divine command. Since such commands are always based on love and light, all who follow these words will benefit.

We can conclude then that love has multiple incarnations and pushes and pulls us simple humans, in the way that asteroids and meteors dance with solar systems. There are irresistible forces at work that can propel us further and faster as well as sometimes, cause us to crash.

What appears to be important and yet missing, is the ability to use language in subtle and, yes, exquisite ways, to direct our course of destiny. If nothing deserves better attention, I would contend that what, who, how, where and when we submit our very own ability to love; then we have learned the greatest trick of all.

Becoming the Rose

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Very few people have come up with a good answer to the question of the meaning of life, the universe and everything. Perhaps the least reliable is in Douglas Adam’s ‘The Hitchers Guide to the Galaxy‘ where the computer gives the answer of ’42’.

In my view, the query itself may be wrong. It may be an impossible question, like the Koans beloved of the Zen masters in ancient China such as;

Q: Without speaking, without silence, how can you express the truth?

R: I always remember springtime in southern China. The birds sing among innumerable kinds of fragrant flowers.

‘OK smart guy. So if the meaning of life is a dead question, what should it be?’

Smart Guy replies, ‘how about; what is the challenge of life?’

This is a little easier to attempt to answer.

There are four interlinked aspects of ourselves. When these are understood individually (which could take a lifetime) and balanced (which could take another lifetime ) then a flowering of the human soul occurs. A poet might call it ‘the becoming the rose’, but before that, let us start at where we are.

As human souls we manifest into a physical body; from energy to matter.

A baby comes as a complete package ready to grow in four main areas;

Intellect The human brain is considered the nerve centre of the human being and consciousness appears to be centred here; although there are examples of near death experiences and other practices that induce consciousness to leave the body and return. The ‘mind’ learns the language of those around it and uses play to practice thought and actions that it will experience for real in the future.

Emotion This ‘feeling’ is generally experienced in the centre of the chest and heart. The nerve plexuses here connect directly with parts of the brain and can generate overwhelming imperatives that can override thought. Feelings are often completely correct despite the more usual reliance on rational thought, certainly in Western societies.

Instinct The body is controlled by conscious thought and automatically by the parasympathetic nervous system. Some bodily functions such as breathing, can be both consciously controlled or automatic.

Intuition The quietest of the four ‘imperatives’ yet possibly the closest to the question of what the challenge of life is. Many psychics, saints and seers have developed this faculty to a high degree and share their insights through example and teachings contained in art and ‘holy books’.

None of these four aspects of the ‘being human, roller coaster’ is particularly new. What may be new to you is the following very important consideration. That humans may acquire one of more of these four aspects of themselves to a certain level. What this level is ( e.g. how good you are at languages or art or dancing or wisdom ) can be ignored. What is important is; ‘are each of these four aspects of a person balanced?’

Now get personal and ask this question of yourself. How well balanced am I in these four areas of the my human experience?

We have to be careful, as the ego will resist any sort of challenge to it’s dominating ideas about itself. Ego’s like to feed the false notion that we are balanced individuals and good at most things.

‘I am’

But clearly, when we examine ourselves closely, we realise that we have not reached our full potential by any means of measurement. The challenge we face of becoming strong in all aspects of ourselves, is daunting and most of us fall well short of the target.

A metaphor for this task is an internal combustion engine that has four cylinders; each fired by a spark plug. It doesn’t matter what the cubic capacity is of each cylinder or even how many cylinders there are. What is critical is whether all cylinders are being fired in equal strength.

Perhaps you have driven a car that only has three cylinders working. The speed of the car is reduced and it is difficult to accelerate. If only two cylinders are working the engine may just judder to a halt.

Humans are similar. With these four aspects of being human consider how there are many permutations of weakness and strength.

A person who has a highly developed intellect might be a university professor with little emotional intelligence, is hopeless at dancing and sports and considers intuitive insights to be ‘flights of fancy’. The characterture is an elderly man who keeps losing his glasses, trips over carpets and forgets his wife’s birthday.

…among contemporary European people, only one of the three independent data necessary for obtaining a sound human mind has developed – namely, their so-called thought, which tends to predominate in their individuality; whereas without feeling and instinct, as every man with normal reason must know, the understanding accessible to man cannot be formed.

-introduction to ‘Meetings With Remarkable Men’ by G. I. Gurdjieff

A poet or artist might be very good at expressing their feelings, but intellectually they cannot understand, or at least see the value, of logical hypothesis and experimentation. They will buy a car because of it’s colour.

An athlete might be exceptionally good at running (lean and large lungs) or jumping (good speed and long legs ) and yet they may not be able to fill in a form at the post office, tell someone they love them or understand mystery.

Empathic seers and psychics might find themselves at the subject of jokes and accusations of ‘fraud’ and yet be correct more times than chance. Similarly they might struggle in the other areas of their full potential.

Of course these examples are charactertures, but we see their similitude’s in the ‘celebrities’ of modern culture and those we know.

This, in my view, is the challenge of being human. We have not one purpose but four precise, aspects of ourselves to nurture and harmonise within us.

There is nothing new about this idea. If we look back in time we see it as part of many human cultural experiences and remains most prominently in symbols. The concept of a ‘balanced human being’ is the cross.

This symbol is older than Christianity, and represents the division of the whole into four equal parts. There may be different ideas as to the meaning but it is common to many interpretations that where the horizontal crosses the vertical the centre, is a special place.

The Rosicrucians placed a rose in this centre as a symbol of a ‘fifth element’ – a transcendence. Only by being ‘geometrically balanced’ – as a cross is – can the fourfold aspects of our nature integrate in equal measure. At that harmonious place, one is at the ‘centre of the universe’.

At this spot, miracles can come from the depths of the human soul. Various saints of all religions, have demonstrated extraordinary abilities such as being in two places at once, manifesting physical objects from nothing, miraculous healing and other miracles. We, the ‘unbalanced’ and ‘imperfect’, watch on in awe and have no explanation for what we see.

The challenge, in my view, is to concentrate on reaching your own potential. We are each capable of excellence but this is difficult because our weaknesses are pushed into the shadow areas of ourselves to be ignored.

As children, one of the first things we explore is the miraculous experience of being in a body. We watch this as we see children run, skip and jump. But we may take a long time to learn to control our bodies. Most martial arts contain the teaching of moving into the centre of gravity of one’s body, which in most people is in line with the navel or sacral chakra. In Karate it is called the Hara, from where the student is taught to move the whole body. It is a mini-brain with it’s own supply of Ki energy. Masters of Aikido, even in old age, can produce a pulse of Ki energy from this centre to push a much stronger opponent across a room without physical contact.

The body never forgets it’s skills. It can act independently of mind such as in the old adage; ‘as easy as getting on a bike’.

There are also ‘reflexes’ which are part of the autonomic system of the body such as respiration, cardiac regulation and many other functions vital to life. The enteric nervous system is the intrinsic nervous system of the gastrointestinal functions. It has been described as “the Second Brain of the Human Body”.

In exactly the same way as our bodies, our mind, emotions and intuition learn and then repeat lessons and skills that become autonomous. To some extent, younger members of our tribe can learn from elders through such things as stories and sage advice, but generally, learning and personal development cannot be taught. It has to be experienced and recorded viscerally.

I am a teacher without a pupil and a pupil without a teacher.

When we have nurtured and grown our instincts, emotions, mind and intuition equally, we become balanced; in the same way that a cross can balance on one finger in its centre. This is known as ‘centreing’ or in Jungian psychology, ‘individuation’. We are no longer a ‘push over’ either physically, emotionally, intellectually or intuitively. The hardest shocks of life bounce off us and sent on their way. We do not become ‘victims’ and demand reparation. We are beyond argueing, sulking, resenting, blaming and all the other traits found in the unbalanced personality.

A Zen master was sitting in a room when an earthquake started. The other people in the room immediately started to panic and run screaming for the door, pushing each other out of the way in order to get to safety. The Zen master remained seated and upright.

The act of centering places an imaginary rod of iron vertically from the stars, through the top the head, through the chakras and into the earth below.

Once planted we do not move, other than to nod our head; as a rose in the garden moves with the breezes.

picture credit; The English Garden

Further reading:

Biorhythms describe the idea that the strength each of the four aspects of ourselves; mind, body, instinct, intuition…varies cyclically over time. For instance our physicality is governed by a 28 day cycle and during this time it follows a sine wave form from high to low. It is activated at birth so by calculating how many days since you were born, you will know where you are on this cycle. When your status is high is a good time to run a marathon. When it crosses the centre line of the graph is a ‘critical’ day and you will feel discombobulated before entering the less energetic 14 days of the cycle. To complicate matters the other three aspects of yourself are on different length cycles and the four combined describe how you are feeling. Fortunately there are Apps available to do the maths for you. This may help in ‘working backwards’ to achieving balance by being more aware of your whole self and it’s rhythms.