Pale Green Vortex has always prided itself in its position (or non-position) of non-alignment. We live in troubled times, and words of wisdom will be readily welcomed whatever their source. Should Ed Miliband, David Cameron, or Nicola Sturgeon communicate words of intelligence, compassion, insight, and integrity, they will be happily embraced. We are, however, still waiting.
Labels and political -isms and -ologies are irrelevant to the style of this blog. Socialism, liberalism, communism; Conservative, Labour, Lib Dem; left-wing, right-wing. None of them work. If someone comes to me and says 'Hey, Mister Pale Green Vortex, some of your ideas seem a bit left-wing to me', I shall reply 'That's your personal take on it. Those are your own pigeon holes, which I do not personally accept. I simply say what seems at the moment to be getting nearer to the reality of things.'
Ideology is a worn-out, dangerous mask. Ideologies are products of insecurity, egos searching for an identity. I crave to know who I am, what I am, what I believe, and how it all fits together. So I go in search of my belief system. Then I can stop having to think for myself, and I can relax. I have my own Bible of choice, which I can refer to for my views and opinions.
This desperate search for certainty in the shifting sands of being has to go, if we want to seriously get closer to the reality of things, both in terms of consciousness and of the 'outside world'. We don't need heavy sackful of beliefs to carry round with us, blinkering us to what is really going on. Any beliefs we do decide to hold, we can hold lightly, pragmatically.
So we're not playing this game of unreality, of one-size-fits-all. One aim of Pale Green Vortex is to tear asunder the constructed veils obscuring our direct vision of reality.
Bearing all this in mind, I include below a quotation from Tom Sunic (from nonalignedmedia.com), in which he succintly expresses some ideas similar to what have been occasionally put forward on Pale Green Vortex. Tom's father and sister were both sentenced to jail in the former communist Yugoslavia in 1984 (!) for communicating 'hostile propaganda'. Tom himself was granted political asylum in the USA. So he probably doesn't suffer from an anti-western bias! Nevertheless, he has been astounded at the curtailment of free speech in the west, through 'political correctness' and 'hate speech laws'. In this quote, he is talking about Canada; but he could be talking about many countries in western Europe, I feel. Including the UK.
'This is very scary stuff..... the privilege of living in the Communist Yugoslavia and the Communist Soviet Union was very simple: you could, even a person without a university degree, tell right away that this was a brutal system, that it punished people savagely..... and this was a privilege. Why? Because everybody could detect this system; it was physical, it was palpable, it was tangible. Even for a Joe Six-Pack in Communist Yugoslavia.....
Now the problem with the Canadian legislation and specifically the criminal code, or for that matter the criminal code in Germany, is that it is far better veiled in this Mickey Mouse - excuse my language - in this Mickey Mouse language full of euphemisms, full of coverage with human rights, tolerance, diversity, and you really have to be a master of the language first and a master of the psychology of the people who wrote those paragraphs in order to detect the omnipresence of this surveillance state.'
In actual fact, a lot of the time it's not even about law. The most successful form of policing is self-policing by society, and the relentless messages given out by the mainstream media.
Maybe you don't know what I'm talking about. Then you could usefully do a bit of homework. For starters, you could take the words 'racist' and 'sexist'. To be labelled a racist or sexist is one of the worst things in modern society; nobody wants it on their CV. Check out the way that these words are often used nowadays by certain sections of the media and the political/power classes. The use of these words has been severely distorted, away from the original laudable goals of providing unprejudiced, equal opportunities in life for folk regardless of their race or sex. They are more normally employed as tools of thought repression these days. You need to do your own thinking and homework, though, reader. I can't do it for you.
In the UK, I predict a concerted attack over the coming months on UKIP from certain sections of the media. Much of this will focus on trying to demonstrate that UKIP is awash with racists and sexists. Now, I have no doubt that there are plenty of slightly dodgy dudes among the UKIP people. But the whole thing is a sick joke, a piece of Orwellian thought control. Suddenly the racist UKIPpers are being pitted against the decent folk: Cameron's Tories, Miliband's Labour dudes, Clegg and his Lib Dems. To repeat, this is indeed a sick joke. These are largely people of little honour, who steadfastly come out with their own matchbox version of reality and shove it down people's throats until they will hopefully believe that is all there is to life. Disgusting people in the main, really, killers of dreams, purveyors of a crappy vision of life with a blatant disregard for truth, acting in wilful ignorance of what many people are concerned about.
Don't be deceived! Turn off your television if need be, tear up the newspapers, spend a maximum of ten minutes daily checking the 'headlines' on the internet. spend an equal amount of time with 'alternative media' - not that it's always any better than the Guardian, but at least to get a different perspective on things.
Kill an idea and it's gone. Make a viewpoint unacceptable enough and it will wither away - that's the hope, anyway. Empires and control freaks have been familiar with the tactic for centuries. The libraries at Carthage were burned, removing the accumulated wisdom, ideas and discoveries of the 'pagan' cultures forever. What did they know? We have no idea. A treasure of wisdom was lost. Similarly with the witch hunts and burnings in Europe. taking out those with special knowledge that was inconvenient to the ruling tyrants of the time. What angle on life did these non-Christians of Europe have? We don't really know. Take out the knowledge. Take out the ideas, the viewpoints, that are antithetical to the mainstream endgame. It's continuing today. 1984, over and over and over again.
Friday 30 January 2015
Tuesday 27 January 2015
Notes From a Sick Room
During the final years of her life, my mother was chronically ill physically, in a whole number of ways. I was known to refer to her as a walking medical dictionary - until she was no longer able to walk. When people asked me what was wrong with her, I would reply 'Everything.'
During this period, my mother endured an amount of physical pain that I can only wonder at. Despite periods of intense physical suffering, she remained remarkably - miraculously - cheerful. Then one day, after yet another angina attack, breathing crisis, or whatever, she turned to my sister and said 'I've had enough.' Within a matter of weeks, we were sitting at her bedside as she breathed her final few heaving breaths in this life. I've always wondered about all that.......
During December gone I felt unhappy about the way the winter had begun. The weather was hostile, the sky uniformly threatening, and there were hardly any more benign days. I counted the days to the solstice, and felt relief when it arrived.
At the same time, I felt a quiet contentment about affairs, and how I was getting on with matters practical. Work, as usual at this time of year, was more than I wanted - but I felt relatively contented with it at the time. I was feeling some satisfaction in preparing for the festive season, something I often don't do. And I was delighted to see my sister and her husband over New Year, for the first time in a decade.
During December, there was this background hum to everything. It felt warm, soothing. In part it concerned death. For me at the time, death had lost its terror, its sting. This seemed not a bad space to be in at all. What's more, I felt that there were no great ambitions still to be achieved in this life. I had more or less done what I needed to do.
On January 2nd, at 9.30 am, I was walking to work. It was still half dark, Inverness was silent and empty. There seemed something deeply wrong about the situation. Nearly the whole of Inverness was still in bed, save one or two intrepid runners and dog walkers. And here was I, pacing the darkened streets in order to go and make a few pennies (not much more).
When I arrived at work, the mild head cold that I had been nursing for a few days exploded into a deadly rainbow of sneezes and splutters. I finished my shift with difficulty, then went home.
For years, I had wondered what it would be like to have a migraine while already ill. I was about to find out. The following day the sharp migraine pain focussed on the right sinus area, and the vomiting of copious bile from deep retching gave me an experience I hope never to repeat. In the late afternoon my sister, her husband and dog came round on their last day in the Highlands. I could barely speak a word.
The following day I slowly began to feel better. Then, in the evening, a vice-like grip caught the bottom of my chest. There followed one of the most viciously painful nights of coughing in all my life. I've never known such symptoms turn up so quickly.
And so it began. Ill, ill, ill. I am accustomed to the intense but fairly short-lived pain of a migraine, but not this. Day after day of almost constant coughing, all the energy poured out of me. I would get up, have a shower if I felt I could manage it, get a little unappetising food down me, check my emails, before going to sit in a chair for the rest of the day. The effort required to get up and close the curtains on the other side of the room was the same as that normally reserved for climbing a remote mountain peak. I hadn't experienced anything remotely approaching this level of seriousness since arriving in Inverness almost a decade ago.
All the time, the warm, fuzzy feeling was playing quietly in the background.
On Wednesday of the second week of the illness I made an appointment to see a doctor. However, I needed to cancel due to lack of energy. I sat in the chair by the window as the light was fading, about four o'clock. I felt myself sink down, down, down. All sorts of things began to fade away: my ideas and opinions about life, about who I am. Habits, preferences, identity. Everything that goes to make 'me'. Just slowly dropping into the warm, fuzzy, oceanic space.
I felt as if I was descending into a realm of the cthonic (netherworld/underworld) gods. And there they were. Clear at centre stage was Cernunnos, the antlered one. The one about whom so little is definitively written, yet about so much is said: Cernunnos Lord of Nature and of the Underworld. Cernunnos the psychopomp, guide of souls from one life to the next.
In this space, there is no striving for life. The matter of life or death bears little relevance, is of little concern. It is viewed with indifference. In this pain-ridden, god-inhabited space, with its peculiar peacefulness, certain qualities of mystical experience reared their head. There was the oceanic feeling in and of itself. And there was time. I closed my eyes, drifted off (I had no strength to do anything else), then looked up, hoping that time was passing quickly and this would all come to an end. Half an hour seemed to have passed, but when I looked at the clock, it was a mere five minutes! I tried again. Twenty minutes, please. No, three.
(Incidentally, the only other context in which I have come across anything bearing any relation to this oceanic fuzz is Stan Grof's Basic Perinatal Matrix One in the pre-birth drama).
Things continued to focus around stasis, stagnation, intermittent feelings of despair, pain. On Saturday morning I looked out of the bedroom window. For once the weather, though still cold, was more benign. It was bright, with the sun sparkling on the snowy hills beyond.
All of a sudden, a change came upon me. This was the world, and I wanted to be part of it. This was the medium for my soul's journey, and was where I belonged. This was where 'my' consciousness had turned up for this lifetime as a suitable place for it to do whatever it had to do. It's here that things happen, all manner of wondrous thing, and it befits me to be out there in this phenomenal world. This is still the place for me, not the fuzzy, quiescent world I had inadvertedly allowed myself to sink into over recent times.
I felt a bit of energy move. Recuperation was on its way. Slowly, fitfully, at times painfully, the road to recovery stretches out before me. I walk it with gratitude.
During this period, my mother endured an amount of physical pain that I can only wonder at. Despite periods of intense physical suffering, she remained remarkably - miraculously - cheerful. Then one day, after yet another angina attack, breathing crisis, or whatever, she turned to my sister and said 'I've had enough.' Within a matter of weeks, we were sitting at her bedside as she breathed her final few heaving breaths in this life. I've always wondered about all that.......
During December gone I felt unhappy about the way the winter had begun. The weather was hostile, the sky uniformly threatening, and there were hardly any more benign days. I counted the days to the solstice, and felt relief when it arrived.
At the same time, I felt a quiet contentment about affairs, and how I was getting on with matters practical. Work, as usual at this time of year, was more than I wanted - but I felt relatively contented with it at the time. I was feeling some satisfaction in preparing for the festive season, something I often don't do. And I was delighted to see my sister and her husband over New Year, for the first time in a decade.
During December, there was this background hum to everything. It felt warm, soothing. In part it concerned death. For me at the time, death had lost its terror, its sting. This seemed not a bad space to be in at all. What's more, I felt that there were no great ambitions still to be achieved in this life. I had more or less done what I needed to do.
On January 2nd, at 9.30 am, I was walking to work. It was still half dark, Inverness was silent and empty. There seemed something deeply wrong about the situation. Nearly the whole of Inverness was still in bed, save one or two intrepid runners and dog walkers. And here was I, pacing the darkened streets in order to go and make a few pennies (not much more).
When I arrived at work, the mild head cold that I had been nursing for a few days exploded into a deadly rainbow of sneezes and splutters. I finished my shift with difficulty, then went home.
For years, I had wondered what it would be like to have a migraine while already ill. I was about to find out. The following day the sharp migraine pain focussed on the right sinus area, and the vomiting of copious bile from deep retching gave me an experience I hope never to repeat. In the late afternoon my sister, her husband and dog came round on their last day in the Highlands. I could barely speak a word.
The following day I slowly began to feel better. Then, in the evening, a vice-like grip caught the bottom of my chest. There followed one of the most viciously painful nights of coughing in all my life. I've never known such symptoms turn up so quickly.
And so it began. Ill, ill, ill. I am accustomed to the intense but fairly short-lived pain of a migraine, but not this. Day after day of almost constant coughing, all the energy poured out of me. I would get up, have a shower if I felt I could manage it, get a little unappetising food down me, check my emails, before going to sit in a chair for the rest of the day. The effort required to get up and close the curtains on the other side of the room was the same as that normally reserved for climbing a remote mountain peak. I hadn't experienced anything remotely approaching this level of seriousness since arriving in Inverness almost a decade ago.
All the time, the warm, fuzzy feeling was playing quietly in the background.
On Wednesday of the second week of the illness I made an appointment to see a doctor. However, I needed to cancel due to lack of energy. I sat in the chair by the window as the light was fading, about four o'clock. I felt myself sink down, down, down. All sorts of things began to fade away: my ideas and opinions about life, about who I am. Habits, preferences, identity. Everything that goes to make 'me'. Just slowly dropping into the warm, fuzzy, oceanic space.
I felt as if I was descending into a realm of the cthonic (netherworld/underworld) gods. And there they were. Clear at centre stage was Cernunnos, the antlered one. The one about whom so little is definitively written, yet about so much is said: Cernunnos Lord of Nature and of the Underworld. Cernunnos the psychopomp, guide of souls from one life to the next.
In this space, there is no striving for life. The matter of life or death bears little relevance, is of little concern. It is viewed with indifference. In this pain-ridden, god-inhabited space, with its peculiar peacefulness, certain qualities of mystical experience reared their head. There was the oceanic feeling in and of itself. And there was time. I closed my eyes, drifted off (I had no strength to do anything else), then looked up, hoping that time was passing quickly and this would all come to an end. Half an hour seemed to have passed, but when I looked at the clock, it was a mere five minutes! I tried again. Twenty minutes, please. No, three.
(Incidentally, the only other context in which I have come across anything bearing any relation to this oceanic fuzz is Stan Grof's Basic Perinatal Matrix One in the pre-birth drama).
Things continued to focus around stasis, stagnation, intermittent feelings of despair, pain. On Saturday morning I looked out of the bedroom window. For once the weather, though still cold, was more benign. It was bright, with the sun sparkling on the snowy hills beyond.
All of a sudden, a change came upon me. This was the world, and I wanted to be part of it. This was the medium for my soul's journey, and was where I belonged. This was where 'my' consciousness had turned up for this lifetime as a suitable place for it to do whatever it had to do. It's here that things happen, all manner of wondrous thing, and it befits me to be out there in this phenomenal world. This is still the place for me, not the fuzzy, quiescent world I had inadvertedly allowed myself to sink into over recent times.
I felt a bit of energy move. Recuperation was on its way. Slowly, fitfully, at times painfully, the road to recovery stretches out before me. I walk it with gratitude.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
