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anarcho-shamanism, mountain spirits; sacred wilderness, sacred sites, sacred everything; psychonautics, entheogens, pushing the envelope of consciousness; dominator culture and undermining its activities; Jung, Hillman, archetypes; Buddhism, multidimensional realities, and the ever-present satori at the centre of the brain; a few cosmic laughs; and much much more....


all delivered from the beautiful Highlands of Scotland!






Monday 27 May 2019

Borderless

It was Paris that really did it for me. I had occasion to visit that city a number of times three, four, five years ago. Short trips, several days, staying with relatives of a very good friend of my wife near Metro Dupleix, fifteen minutes' stroll from the Seine. An opportunity to spend a little time with a certain excellent friend before he parted this world.

Ah, Paris. City of dreams, of romance in the spring. What a mess. It was horrible. The thing is that nobody, but nobody, seemed happy. Actually, that is not quite true. We ate once in a Turkish restaurant where the staff were pretty chirpy. But for the rest....

Paris seemed to be a city of uptight: in the streets, on the trains, everywhere. White Parisians all on edge. 'Les noirs', both immigrants and indigenous French, looked either suicidal (the introverts) or like they wanted to kill someone (the extraverts). North African and Near Eastern folk either worked to the bone and exhausted, or sulky and hostile-looking. Romanians hanging around in groups on street corners, or trying to swindle money from gullible tourists near the Eiffel Tower. They'd have been better off back in Bucharest.

What, oh what, had happened to this city? In London, things can appear passable, provided you are in that kind of mood. Maybe the outlook there is, and always has been, a little more genuinely cosmopolitan. But this? This mess? As I perceived it, nothing less than something of a human tragedy.

And amongst it all arose the question: what about the French politicians? The EU? Here we were, at the heart of the European dream; the European dream which is so convinced of its rightness that it sees fit to control, rule, regulate, interfere, in every nook and cranny of human life. Yet here, just where they are, maybe for once, actually needed, and they just stand back and do nothing. Let it all happen; let this mess simply unfold, or rather spill messily all over the floor. Something is up, though what exactly...… And that meagre portion of my soul which actually extends its reach beyond the narrow confines of my own petty interests into those of others' hearts and souls wept. Something very bad, very inhuman, was going on somewhere. The official narrative was just crap, or lies.

'Borderless' turned up just a couple of days ago. It already has over half a million views on YouTube, and this despite YouTube apparently trying to delete it. In fact, this attempt at censorship of inconvenient points of view backfired, as the 'censored' tag immediately got all kind of people interested who otherwise would never have heard of the film. Don't you just love it when 'silencing' people backfires?

'Borderless' is that rarity of rarities, a documentary which is actually based on direct, on-the-ground investigative work. Unlike the normal nonsensical collage of suspect press releases and Facebook posts from dodgy sources.

The film is Lauren Southern's documentary about immigration of the unofficial kind into Europe. It is, I submit, a courageous enterprise, and she is to be lauded. Lauren bends over backwards to simply present what she discovered to be happening on the ground, carefully avoiding theories about how and why this has all unfolded, thereby not leaving herself open to accusations of being a conspiracy nut by highly-invested parties (a caution that is not always observed here on Pale G.V.).

We all recommend this film highly - something which happens rarely hereabouts. Put aside ninety minutes and watch. It is, in the end, a documentary of compassion. And a note for those who still cling onto the 'payback time' justification for Europe taking unlimited oceans of people from other cultures: see some of the countries featured in the film which are deeply affected by the phenomenon. Turkey, Bulgaria, Greece, and a particularly poignant section on Ireland near the end of the film. These are not the big bad white European baddies of anti-Europe ideology. I never learned about the wicked Bulgarian Empire in school. I suppose you could make a case for Greece, but you need to go back to Alexander the Great, which is stretching things, even for ideological fanatics.

I include a link to Bitchute as well as YouTube, just in case the self-righteous ones have another go…..
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZQ_fz9EW5lw

https://www.bitchute.com/video/ZQ_fz9EW5lw/

And if you find, as I've just done, that neither of the links work (probably my fault...), go to either YouTube or Bitchute and put in 'Lauren Southern Borderless'. No problem. Fred Flintstone-style always gets you there in the end.... I trust you will find it worth doing.

Tuesday 21 May 2019

White Trash

Part One

Sadly, we inhabit a world where the version of life pumped out in the mainstream is institutionally prejudiced, chronically so. Racism, sexism, and the rest are rife. This can be amply demonstrated by the simple application of the call-and-response test:

'Proud to be black!' 'Right on, brother.'
'Proud to be woman!' 'All power to you, sister!'
'Proud to be gay!' 'So you should be. Go for it!'
'Proud to be white!' 'Racist! Supremacist! Nazi! And you're banned from Facebook from today.'

From the outset, we should note that all of this has little to do with the vast majority of people, be they black, white, purple, female, male, both, neither, or anything else. It is all to do with a certain ideological view of the world, pushed relentlessly like a drug by politicians and their partners-in-crime in the mainstream media. It is a bunch of bullshit, to quote Jim Morrison, but is aimed to befuddle and stupefy. It is a bad-smelling veil placed over the magical spontaneity of natural existence.

Two particularly curious facts stand out concerning this phenomenon. Firstly, although the hymn book states that it is all about promoting peace, harmony, equality everywhere, its effects are the opposite. It fuels resentments, stirs up strife, bad feeling, by constantly appealing to the baser sides of people's group identities, then pitting them against one another in the mould of victims and perpetrators. And secondly, this white-loathing doctrine is largely promoted by …. white people.

For myself, all this nonsense has had little effect personally; though it would be naïve to assume that will continue to be the case indefinitely. As a white English-born male who, for those keen on such labelling, comes with a middle-class background, I have my feet firmly planted at the bottom of the pile. Frankly, who cares? I get up in the morning, look at the sky and give thanks, before getting on with being who I am and doing what I do. On a social level, however, especially in the high-density urban environments which I have done my level-best to escape, it is toxic, creating social strife and doing great harm.

Having said that, there was one moment when the 'trashy white male' motif did get to me. It was back in the 1980s - the 'white European culture is bad' notion is not new - and ironically involves my time as a 'this is my passport to freedom' Buddhist. It was a meeting with a considerable number of fellow Buddhists, on a grim, grey January (?) Sunday. In Bethnal Green, East London. As well as our centres in Europe and other 'white culture' places, we had a growing number in India. Now, some of we British Buddhists didn't always come up to the mark. We - me included - tended to get despondent, ask lots of questions, have lots of doubts, take our highly complex personal psychology very seriously, and generally act miserably. We were a source of frustration for those few who really wanted to build a great Buddhist movement quickly and efficiently. A few of we western Buddhists would make the journey to India to help out. Those who went east would return with tales to tell.

So it was the thing at the time. At this particular meeting, one recent returner was regaling us all with details of his experiences. Of how, unlike we spoilt children of the western world, our Indian counterparts were always smiling, always friendly, always helpful, never getting tied up in their personal psychology. 'We' had everything while 'they' had nothing, but look at their positivity. What nobody mentioned (in fairness because they probably didn't know) was that, after a hard day's work smiling and being positive, half these Indians went home in the evening and beat up their wives.

Part Two

After you've had your centuries of exploiting us, it's our turn now. It's payback time, white boy. Such are the excuses sometimes put forward for putting the European white male at the bottom of the pile. I have heard these sentiments on many occasions. It's like a socially-fashioned karma (it's the universe that sees to karma, not humans, dummy. Whatever....). And it's not exactly white skin that's being got at - it's a particular culture, western culture, western civilisation. The root of all evil.

This is all mendacious nonsense from a number of angles. It's group identitarianism at its grossest. The idea of group karma is dodgy, reducing everybody to robotic units. I never exploited people in far-off countries, neither did my parents or anybody else on my family tree, from what I can tell.

In the USA reparation is the thing, I believe. Compensation to black people for the wrongs afforded by slavery (it might be rude to point this out, but slavery was abolished quite a long time ago). This continues to today, as a section of white American population's misplaced and irrational guilt complex seems to know no bounds. As a matter of fact, roughly 2% of white Americans of the time owned slaves. Which means a healthy 98% were stuck in the same boat as everyone else regardless of race, colour, favourite vegetable, or anything else.

Meanwhile, back here in Europe; in the UK; in Scotland. It's pretty much the same story.

Well south of  where I live is found Glencoe, a great mountain cleft famed for things both light and dark. The glen eventually disgorges onto Rannoch Moor, a wide expanse of peat, bog, lochans which sparkle when the suns deigns to shine, and which ripple in the almost omnipresent wind. At the far side you encounter the enormous expanse of water that is Blackwater Reservoir. Like a long finger it extends eastwards, held in perilous check by the Blackwater dam.

The building of this astonishing piece dates to 1899 - 1900. Huge numbers of navvies were enlisted from all over, but Scotland and Ireland mainly, to carry out the work. Conditions were by all accounts appalling, with rude lodgings in the worst weather that Scotland could throw at you, and work undertaken for wages that amounted to next-to nothing. Such was the unremitting cruelty of life at the dam that a goodly number of workers perished under the conditions. There is even a graveyard to those who died, each individual marked with a rude headstone comprising a piece of local stone, which was opened up next to the reservoir to deal with the number of dead.

Follow the river flowing into the reservoir east for another short while and you arrive at the West Highland railway line. This was constructed a few years before the reservoir, in the early 1890s. It is a triumph of engineering, cutting its way through a variety of hostile environments as it snakes its way north then westwards. To cross Rannoch Moor, it is essentially floated. Like the dam, the railway was built under conditions which are, for me, unimaginable. Another hefty tally of deaths as a result of accident or mere extremeness of conditions. Further south, in Arrochar, is a graveyard to those 37 navvies who died during construction.

All of which I relate to make a simple point. All kinds of people have been treated badly - terribly - by other people at all times and all over the place. It is not a case of nasty white men having a go at nice black people, with some compensatory mechanism required. No. This is a political weapon, no more. If a generalisation is to be made, it concerns a minority of human beings behaving badly towards others in pursuit of their own ends. Whether those misused ones are black, white, or striped, is a matter of little concern.

In the dark corners of Highland history there is also the little matter of the Clearances with their forced emigration in the eighteenth century. Another example of white people behaving badly towards other white people.

Part Three

Well, it's been a bit of a rollercoaster over recent blog pieces, up hill and down dale. The pulse of energy which has connected these writings may be in the process of exhausting itself - or maybe not. Over recent times I have found myself increasingly guided by intuition. I have learnt to listen to this aspect of my being, and it invariably knows better than 'I' do what to do and what not to do. Or, more accurately, I have learnt to trust this faculty: it has always been at work, but I have been insufficiently aware of its presence, or viewed it with suspicion. It has been foremost in the writing of these bits and pieces. An inner voice has instructed me to dip into a certain pot, and here we are...

It all kicked off with freedom of speech, freedom of action, freedom to say what you think and feel. How this is the social atmosphere most conducive to spiritual gnosis, to discovering ones own uniqueness and its own unique connection with 'the divine'. Not to mention the basis of a positive human society (don't ask me to define what I mean by that...). This in turn led to the topic of censoring and shutting people up on social media, a phenomenon that has  been rampant and accelerating no end over recent times. I avoid Facebook, Twitter, and similar like the plague, but many people do not. It is clear that a certain type of person is being targeted for silencing, and that a certain type of person is most zealous in this ignoble activity. Who the good guys are and who the bad has required a certain personal revision.

One element in all this is my difficulty in absorbing that some people really are nasty, and they are not necessarily the people who are portrayed as such in mainstream. To try and silence another person because you disagree with them and you think they might steal some votes which you'd like to have in upcoming elections is simply in my book downright nasty. Not acceptable in a properly human world, and one which likes to throw around words like 'democracy' and 'freedom'.

Most people who I know are decent folk, who value honesty, have a certain respect for individual differences, and are in possession of a certain integrity. So it comes as a bit of a shock that there are others who are not like that at all. Top of the list come most mainstream media, some politicians of a 'socialist' bent (noticeable in the UK: certain Labour Party members are at the forefront of this selective silencing, and they aren't even in government! Heaven help us if they win an election), some people who attract the tag 'far left', and some who consider themselves as 'social justice warriors' (SJWs to those in the know).

Somewhere in among all this I began to look into the phenomenon of Tommy Robinson, as the most reviled Britain of all by mainstream media. He and Trump are the twin horns of the mainstream media. 'Far-right racist thug' is the typical label. Nasty guy, it seems. So I decided to check him out a bit. I watched his address to the Oxford Union. I checked out his news website. I read his autobiography, 'Enemy of the State' (well, most  of it). And you know what? He's not like that at all. Not really.

'Racist?' Seeing as how loads of his friends seem to be black, and he has fans and followers across the globe, not exactly. Thug? Well, by his own admission, he was a bit of a football hooligan in his day, and remains a feisty and sometimes provocative character. Yet he generally appears to act with restraint in the face of provocation on a daily basis these days. He is currently running for MEP, and is the subject of continual unpleasant harassment and attack. His condition is made worse by the people who should be protecting him, the British forces of law and disorder, who often seem to encourage rather than deter attacks on him and his supporters.

And 'far right?' I'm not sure what it means. But he has always dismissed anybody with a racist agenda from anything he has been involved with, including self-professed neo-Nazis and BNP members, who get short shrift.

More than anything, Tommy appears to be a patriot in a way that is almost quaint and old-fashioned nowadays. He thinks St Georges Day should be a public holiday, and that traditional British values are worth standing up for. Like Trump, he is not a globalist, and is prepared to put his head above the parapet to protest against things, particularly things Islamic, which he feels threaten traditional British values. It is the anti-globalist stance, along with his persistence in asking uncomfortable questions, which makes him such a reviled figure by the Establishment.

My own take on Tommy Robinson is irrelevant here. The important point is how he is portrayed and how he is 'dealt with' by a certain influential element within the edifice of power. For years, and ad nauseam, I have harped on about the mainstream media. But maybe a little aspect of me has continued to resist the inevitable: the complete and absolute discrediting of our time-honoured channels of communication. Maybe it's been too much to believe.

All this has, I suspect and hope, finally been changed. The last nail driven into the coffin of 'mainstream credibility'.  

How much I may agree or disagree with what Tommy Robinson says and does is not the topic of discussion here. What is relevant is the extent to which I have seen Tommy Robinson misrepresented (a polite word for 'lied about') in the mainstream media - not just partly or a little bit, but pretty much relentlessly and absolutely in creating an image, a severely distorted image, of the guy. The lesson may have finally got through the defences of my own thick skull. It is the lesson that I have resisted learning, resisted absorbing into the core of my being: how nasty people can be, how dismissive of truth in the pursuit of their own (normally ideological) ends. And this, not in Stalin's Russia of the 1940s, but in Britain in 2019.

No more prior credibility for anything issuing from mainstream sources. Not a jot (apart from sports scores, which they probably won't get wrong). I should stop using this expression 'mainstream media' anyhow. They are on their way out, so I am told. 'Legacy media' is the more appropriate term. Or, as Styx has referred to them, 'lamestream media'. I like that.

Images:  Top: A book you may or may not decide to read.
              Centre: Blackwater Dam
              Below: Train crosses Rannoch Moor
       


 

 

Tuesday 7 May 2019

Identity

Part One

So, identity. What is identity? It's a label, I suppose. A badge that we wear. It tells us who and what we are, and who and what we are not. It comes as a source of security in a perilous world, a fixed point in a universe where the sands are ever-shifting. It is a reference point to which we can return in times of uncertainty. It describes what we like and dislike, approve of and disapprove; what we think and how we think, what we believe and stand for. In extreme cases, it may remove the need to think for ourselves altogether: just refer to the ready-made booklet of personal identity. Take on an ideology, even better.

With our identity recognised, we can sleep certain and secure in our bed at night. Which is all absolutely fine, apart from one little thing...….

Identity is an illusion.

There may be a time in our earlier years when exploring our identity is a significant, possibly necessary, step. The moment arrives, however, when, particularly for anyone aspiring to a life beyond the pig trough, identity has to be analysed, understood, then softened, unpicked, dissolved. We have to open up - in Buddhist terms, see the impermanent as just that -, and resist the temptation to load this fantasy fabrication with too much value, too much weight. We exit the castle to enter into direct communication with the rest of the universe.

Dissolving identity, by the way, is not the same as 'dissolving the ego'. The word 'ego' is one of those infinitely problematic ones. But to the extent that it denotes a sense of self, it needs to be firm yet flexible; confident, strong. Paradoxically, it requires a strong ego to be able to safely dissolve personal identity. You need a good sense of who you are in a natural, spontaneous way before you can throw away the badges.

There is a point where even the identities which were long considered helpful and 'positive' have to go. Spiritual identity, for example. Being 'a Buddhist' was a good step (at least I think so) for quite a while, but eventually became an impediment. No such reference point needed any more.

There are people who seem extremely keen to stick an identity label on me. It is as if, without the badge, they find it difficult to know how to relate to another person at all (try - living direct, without veils). In recent times, I have been asked a number of times whether I am 'right wing'. It seems that believing in free speech and minimal government interference acts as an attractor to the 'right wing' label. No, I am not right-wing! I am not any wing. I haven't got wings at all, at least not in this dimension. I am who I am, full stop. Get over it.....

Identity, belief, ideology: three notions with much in common. All substitutes for real living. Jettison belief in order to communicate directly with Other. Chuck all ideology in the bin, and live instead from grace.    

Part Two

I have in front of me a publication so slim that it barely qualifies to be called a booklet. It was produced in 1978, and is authored by my former Buddhist teacher. It is titled 'The True Individual'.

My former teacher always insisted that whatever he said could be connected back to the core, the root principles of Buddhism. In this he may or may not have been correct. Yes or no, I invariably found his most interesting, indeed 'enlightening', words to be those emanating from the more maverick side of his being.

The spiritual aspirant he likened to this true individual. This, in turn, was contrasted with the person who was merely a member of 'a group', or 'the group'. The distinguishing factor of the true individual was the emergence and cultivation of self-awareness, by means of which he or she broke free of the unconscious conditioning which bound them to the herd mentality of the group. Like the Tarot Fool, the true individual wandered free of the mass mind; the Buddha was the truest of true individuals.

To complicate matters slightly, my teacher also posited the existence of the 'positive group' (a normal group was assumed to be largely negative in nature, being unconscious and full of people who were easily manipulated as a result). The positive group existed to further the aims of developing individuals, a kind of launchpad and support system. Traditionally, a wider community of people supporting a monastic bunch of Buddhist full-timers might fit this mould. Personally, I find it all a bit questionable, but there we go.

He also elucidated upon 'love mode', which characterised the actions of individuals; and 'power mode', which was the more typical dynamic among group members. Then some smart ass began hypothesising about using 'power at the service of love', at which point the whole thing started to fall apart.

At another point during this period of Buddhist maverick teachings, my former teacher likened the Buddha - or a highly self-aware individual - to a ghost and a madman. Good images. The Buddha, the fully realised Fool, is slippery, elusive, ungraspable. There is no fixed identity to grab hold of and 'understand' (thereby imagining control over the situation). And in their unorthodox unpredictability, their transcendence of identities, they appear mad to those who are label-obsessed, those transfixed by the values of the group.

Part Three

Identitarian politics sucks. It's as simple as that. It continually reinforces folks' group allegiances, then pits them against one another in an eternal war of badges. Muslims against Christians, women against men, blacks against whites, gays against straights, fixed gender people against gender fluids, Muslims against the rest of the world. The list goes on.

It's a recipe for unending strife. Which is a bit paradoxical, since the official message is that it's all about some kind of equality, about bringing peace and harmony by making us all the same. Blacks given the same 'rights' as whites, gays the same as straights, and so on. But the result is precisely the contrary of a society of peaceful equality. People are encouraged to discover their (group) identity, nurse it, then take it as a weapon against the rest of the world. Disaster - unless, of course, your aim is to quietly encourage ferment, giving you indefinite reasons to introduce yet more controls and regulations on the unruly masses. Not that anyone would dream of implementing such a nefarious plan.

One group pitted against another. And the soup becomes still more poison since the dynamic is that of victim and perpetrator. One group of bastards behaving badly against another group of poor helpless victims. Victims: women, gay people, immigrants, blacks, transgender folk; all 'minority' groups, so the narrative goes. Perpetrators: white people and their cultures, especially white males, the big baddies in a world of otherwise lovely people.

It goes without saying that a world conceived of in terms of victimhood is not exactly character building. It frames people within a picture of personal weakness, and of being wronged. Rather than getting out of bed in the morning and taking responsibility for their own life. So we need rules, regulations, bannings, censorships, to help right these horrible wrongs. This is the substance out of which modernity with its identitarianism is wrought. Yes indeed, it sucks.