Green, Green, or............ Green?

Skim the posts in Pale Green Vortex and a fair whack will reveal themselves as being demonstrably 'green', 'environmental' or 'ecological'. Why, then, do I baulk at so much that is presented under these terms; indeed, consider some 'green people' to be among the most dangerous of humans? The topic has already been broached (eg in 'Coming Out' in October 2010, and 'Manna From a Hot Heaven' in June), but for further amplification I shall now bring to my aid a few personal sources of inspiration.

First off, I am not alone in feeling at odds with some of these 'green folk'. In the 'Gaia-Sophia' section of the Metahistory website, John Lash issues this disclaimer: 'The Gaian orientation of this site does not imply that the earth needs to be saved from the human species by an elite programme of social engineering, eugenics, and depopulation...... Site author John Lash does not approve the theory of human-made global warming..... In the Gnostic perspective of this site, Sophia, the embodied wisdom of the earth, is the saviour of humanity, not vice-versa. The earth will take care of herself no matter where divine paternalism and the global psychosis lead the human species.'

For further elucidation, I returned to the first ever episode I listened to of Shamanic Freedom Radio. It's in the archives for October 2009: Christina Oakley-Harrington talks at the October Gallery in London about the three 'sub-communities' she distinguishes under the broad banner of 'environmental'. She refers to the 'psychedelic/consciousness community', the pagan folk, and the 'practical/ecology movement'. She states that, despite superficially having much in common, these three groupings seem not quite at ease with each other. As a practising wicca priestess, Christina identifies firmly with the second of these, and describes through a series of amusing anecdotes how she is unable to explain her beliefs and practices to her chamomile-drinking, organic veg-growing, fervently-recycling mother, who clearly fits into the 'practical ecology' mould. For the record, the spirit of Pale Green Vortex finds great affinity with some of the 'psychedelic/consciousness' people; feels reasonably at home with the pagan folk; but is increasingly at odds with the third bunch.

The history and perversion of the 'practical environmental movement' is related by Peter Taylor on Red Ice Radio, 13/2/10. He talks about how environmental groups such as Greenpeace and the RSPB (bird protection, for any who are unsure) took up climate change as a great danger, and have resolutely refused to reconsider the dodgy evidence for this purported peril; how Greenpeace 'jumped into bed' with UN committee IPCC, despite UN committees always having been 'the bad guys'; how, over time, environmental organisations have got bigger and wealthier, therefore recruiting people with good organisational skills rather than necessarily a real love for the environment; and how they nowadays demonstrate classic corporate behaviour, being primarily interested in performance targets over and above other concerns eg the true environmental impact of large-scale windfarms.

Thus, the mass environmental movement has embedded itself successfully into the cultural and political mainstream. It has become part of the dominator culture. This is nowhere clearer than in its specific support for multinational energy corporations pushing windfarms onto beleaguered local communities, and its general espousing of global socialist-totalitarian agendas as 'solutions' to perceived environmental problems. The erosion of personal, local and national freedoms seems to mean nothing in relation to the greater good of 'fighting the enemy'. Recent happenings through the aegis of the UN at Cancun are one recent example, in the name of 'saving the planet' and 'fighting global warming'. This is all hogwash that many environmental groups are actively colluding with. The real aim appears to be the creation of a creeping global authoritarian governance over a planetary species of guilt-ridden, low carbon, sheeple. In a telling aside, and in the same vein, in her talk Ms Oakley-Harrington mentions the 'practical/environmental movement' seeing as 'the Other' 'the hideous rest' (that's you and me, by the way). Enough said.

To return to 'Metahistory'. In the section entitled 'Planetary Vision Perverted', John Lash writes 'To claim that humanity can or must save the planet is the delusional arrogance of people suffering from the global psychosis, including New Age visionaries who support that claim.' This is indeed the hubris that infects the environmental movement. In reality 'we', the human species, are wonderful but tiny in relation to the total grandeur of the Earth, and greater splendour still of the Sun and the wider universe. To contemplate this prospect is far more discomforting, and just a wee bit scary, compared to the hubristic philosophies of our environmental groups. The solution? Or should we say the corrective? According to Metahistory, it consists of 'egoless and rapturous bonding with the earth, irrespective of human purposes.....this saves us, and nothing else.' More prosaically, but on the same lines, Christina Oakley-Harrington says the pagans would exhort the practical environmentalists to talk to the sea, not just sort the rubbish.

On Pale Green Vortex, real environmentalism is direct, sensate (and occasionally supra-sensate). It involves an immediate experience of contact, communication, connectedness, and non-difference with the world surrounding the subject; it will embrace whatever means are required to help effect such a change, and bring humans back to their true relationship with all else. It implies a radical alteration in consciousness, with an intimation of all-pervading sacredness (which is not the same as saying that everything is sacred). This is certainly not brought about by staring at cherry-picked statistics on a computer screen all day, or by saving the planet through destroying its beautiful contoured surfaces with mega-industrial windfarms. Jim Morrison's famous words, once an inspiration to environmental action, can now be used to protest against the actions of so-called environmentalists hell-bent on destroying the beauty of the Earth all around us: 'What have they done to the Earth/What have they done to our fair sister?/Ravaged and plundered and ripped her and bit her/stuck her with knives in the side of the dawn/tied her with fences and dragged her down.' Thanks, Jim.

Practising the Dark Arts

It was during the late 1970s, a period I may speak of as my Buddhist apprenticeship, that I was told about the Dragon's Head, Snake's Body. The term refers to a person with a highly-developed mental and rational faculty, but underformed emotional self and poor physical awareness. At the time that I came across it, the description was aimed primarily at certain Buddhist academics and scholars, whose fierce intellect was used to argue and defend all manner of dubious standpoint. The image is more apposite still today, however: we live daily under the constant spectre of the Dragon's Head, Snake's Body.

I am thinking primarily of the majority population of our current scientific and academic communities, a cartoon depiction of whom would portray a bulging brain wobbling atop a pimple-sized body. I have some first-hand experience of these malformed serpentine creatures, having passed some, in their fledgling form at least, in the darkened corridors of Oxford University during my undergraduate days. More recently, personal need has compelled me to delve into their dark world more deeply than I would normally wish to do, in the attempt to shed light on various shady goings-on that have been the subject of several previous blogs.

Various tools are available to analyse the reptilian hybrid - Jung's study of psychological types comes readily to mind - but, most simply, Dragon's Head, Snake's Body is not whole or complete. It takes one part of the human psycho-physical organism and treats it as the finished product. Unfortunately, this bloated rationality has no consciousness of anything else, particularly of what is often motivating it in the first place (unacknowledged emotional and physical drives and instincts, giving rise to unconscious initial standpoints and prejudices). As such, Dragon's Head, Snake's Body activity simply cannot be trusted.

These reflections come to mind as the carrion creatures gather in Cancun, Mexico, for another round of global warming scaremongering, along with 'let's see who we can screw for some more big bucks, and take away a bit more of their personal liberty in the process' in the name of the 'save the planet' chimera. A trawl of relevant blogs and websites shows a veritable plethora of statistics that finally give the lie to the fantasy of scientific objectivity. The endless to-ing and fro-ing of apparently contradictory data demonstrates mainly that you can prove anything you want; look long and hard enough, and the statistics will be there to back you up. The one clear fact shining through all of this is that global climate remains poorly and only partially understood. The people who we should be worried about are the scientific and political reptiles who would have us believe otherwise, claiming that anthropogenic global warming is an undisputed fact and an unprecedented danger, and that we should adopt all manner of drastic measure immediately or we'll all be doomed. This is dark sorcery indeed, the weaving of malefic spells.

And, because of our own predispositions, 'weaving a spell' is precisely what scientists, academics, and politicians are able to do. Science is the current religion, the means by which truth is apprehended; scientists are vessels for that truth, in the same way that priests and men of the church once were. Given our own faith in science as the means by which the world is to be understood, we modern folk are extremely vulnerable to the words, suggestions, and sometimes manipulations by the science-priests. Dress a notion in the cloak of data and statistics - any notion - and there will be people who will believe it. Given the already-discussed lack of self-knowledge of most of our reptilian friends, the danger increases twofold. And given the fatal conjunction of power (politicians, big business) and faith (scientists) in modern times, which replicates the conjoining of power (the State) and faith (the Church) in times gone by, we have a perilous and manipulation-prone condition indeed.

The general populace is fair game. How many times do newspaper articles and BBC Breakfast newsbites begin with the phrases: 'Scientists have found......','Academics have discovered....', 'In a report released today......', 'New research suggests....'? This is all magic, infecting the minds and hearts of people without their normally even realising it. Treat these magic incantations with the utmost caution, I beg you. The safest ways to avoid being a victim of these mind-warping dark arts is simply to turn off the television and stop buying the newspaper.

To repeat: science is a modern religion. It encompasses a belief system, a way of looking at the world. It is not infallible, and nowhere near a complete picture, especially in the stripped-down version, defined by the confines of rational materialism, that forms its mainstream. A cursory investigation of ancient and medeival western socieities, along with extant shamanic cultures, is all that is required to demonstrate that ways of looking at the world other than modern rational materialism can exist, and in their own ways serve a society quite well. Any modern believer who protests that our system is 'the truth, the whole truth, and the only truth' is repeating the same mantra that was used by the medeival priesthood. And, by the way, laying themselves open to the dark sorcery of the current age.

P.S. The photo is of Prof Phil 'Climategate' Jones, from the University of East Anglia, who has no connection whatsoever with the practice of the Dark Arts as described above.