A Ramble Through the Sexes...

Prologue

So, today we're talking gender. Sex. Duality. Polarities. Roles. Stereotypes. That sort of thing. But before that, a word about language. I have a certain word in mind:

'Mindfuck'. This is a word that Pale Green Vortex has shied away from using, despite it being uniquely descriptive of one of the recurrent themes on this fantastic blog. You see, we are fully tuned into the modern zeitgeist and, above all else, do not wish to offend or upset anybody. However, we have noted with a degree of surprise that Maria Sharapova, in her autobiography 'Unstoppable', uses the word. If it works for Maria, it's good enough for us as well. Be ready for it to appear with gay abandon from now on.

At this juncture, you may be wondering what Pale Green Vortex is doing reading about the life of a famous tennis player anyway, when surely we should be studying conspiracies, multi-dimensional consciousness, and all the other stuff that turns up on this site. Well folks, it goes back to the 'Russian girls take drugs' theme, which was explored some time back. What was Maria's take on the 'naughty meldonium girl' story? This was the curiosity which fuelled our rare amble into sporting autobiography.

We are left in no doubt that our favourite rich blonde considers the meldonium incident a bit of a put-up job, by people who don't like her very much. Her description of the affair is clear, her reasoning impeccable. 'They' knew she was taking this supplement, as she had been doing so for years, and it was a monitored substance for a year before the ban. 'Not a day went by when I did not wonder if someone was trying to do me in.' And again: 'The world Anti-Doping Authority grew concerned about meldonium not because it improves performance but because it was being taken by so many athletes from eastern Europe and Russia.' Thanks, Maria, we love you. Despite your screeching. And as an autobio of a certain intelligence, we recommend your book to our readers.

Part One

Anyhow, we were going to talk about gender, that kind of stuff. Let's go back to my childhood, when genderish things were, generally speaking, remarkably simple. Men were men, and women were women. Men did what men do, while women did what women did.

Men, in general, got a job and went out to work. Their task was to provide for the family. They made the big decisions, like where to live, what colour the walls should be, where to go on holiday. In the evening they went home to the meal which their devoted wife had prepared. For this, and for other services provided by his wife, the man probably expressed minimal gratitude. After dinner, he would set about 'relaxing'. Typical relaxation pursuits might include reading the newspaper, watching the black-and-white television, and maybe spending a bit of fun time with the children.

The woman, meanwhile, stayed at home. She bought groceries, cooked meals, cleaned and tidied the house, and looked after the children. In any spare time, she might visit a neighbour, for a chat and a cup of tea. She quite likely felt insufficiently appreciated by her husband, and many women from this time died quite young, having led tragically submissive and unfulfilled lives. Others, meanwhile, though appearing to be passive, really ran the roost. Those with the confidence and guile to do it and get away with it.

Even as a child, I was deeply unimpressed with this state of affairs. People tied tightly into rigidly stereotyped behaviour. No room for manoeuvre, no room for independence, individuality - or anything, really. Thus was created a society with uniformity and conformity its watchwords; a society with spirit, soul, and life-blood effectively wrung dry. Not exactly my cup of tea.

Change was required, that was it: change. Here we are, sixty years on. And all's changed! In our so-called modern western democracies, at least, the rigid stereotypes based upon gender have been in the process of crumbling for a while. In some quarters (cue: mainstream media, the main driver of cultural and social fashions and programmes) the rigid stereotypes are being replaced by - not just no gender stereotypes, but no gender roles at all. In particular, anything that men can do, women can do as well, whether it's becoming a builder or getting drunk and noisy on the train. It works the other way round a bit as well, but not so smoothly or completely.

It's a game of ping-pong, taking place within an arena of opposites. This is what mainstream programming does - all that it's capable of - bouncing trends between one pole and another. I suppose that it's a law of sorts: bounce from one unhealthy, or unbalanced, pole - that of rigid gender stereotypes - and you will inevitably end up in another unhealthy place. It is not possible to react from unhealth to health. Health requires a recalibration, a kind of transcendence of the duality of sickness altogether.

What I see being pushed is actually a form of non-sexuality. Or asexuality, more like. It is as if that strict gender stereotyping of the 1940s and 50s is seen as the only form that differentiation on the basis of sex can take. Gender, sexual duality, is therefore regarded as sick, something to be eradicated. Thus we arrive at a point where gender differentiation is considered unimportant, a mere detail. It's all fluid, man. There is no distinction between man and woman, really. We're all one. We're all the same.

Removing the tension between male and female cleans things up. There is a great collective sigh of relief. All those deep, complex, sometimes painful, emotions can be cast aside. People can relax, safe in the knowledge that nothing disturbing is going to happen, that nobody is going to upset them. No man is going to approach in the bar, say 'hello gorgeous', and get too close. The world is an increasingly sanitised place. It's sexuality for the facebook age: keep things on the surface, please.

Only one problem. There is a difference between men and women. It's quite a big difference; such a big difference that a certain tension, a felt frisson, is inevitable. While it's not quite the same as the primal dualism of masculine and feminine, it makes a reasonable proximation. It's the basis of creation, of how the universe is made up, of how it works. Remove that, and...….??!!

Part Two

I recently caught a minute or so of a woman on a screen. The topic she was talking about was consent between adults. She wished to define it. What constitutes 'consenting adults' and what constitutes violation and rape. She was not going to take any prisoners, this was immediately apparent. She was the type who would have a man lose his job and his reputation for daring to tell a female work colleague that she was looking good today.

I wondered what would make a woman devote a large chunk of her life to all this. Was it overflowing love and compassion for her sisters? I didn't think so. I didn't pay much attention to what she was saying: instead, I looked closely at her - who she was, or might be. I sensed no great compassion emanating from her being. She was hard, brusque, sharp. Aggressive in the way that people sometimes are who present themselves as rational beings. So what was it that was getting her mojo working?

It was later that it hit me. Surrender; fear; hatred; self-hatred. These were the words that unbidden came to me. How to weave them into a whole?

Surrender. I never gave much attention to surrender. And then kundalini turned up, and it became key. The books will tell you: to negotiate the influx of kundalini, the only realistic strategy is surrender. Give in to that force, that power, and you stand a chance of coming through it a better person. Resist, fight, attack, and there'll only ever be one winner.

For months I found surrender impossible. Clenching, clinching, flinching: these were my typical reactions as the energy tried to find its way up and through my body. Despite my years and decades of Buddhist meditation and other spiritual practices, I was unable to 'give up my ego' and allow kundalini her way. I was shocked at how little I was able to surrender. Things have improved somewhat since then.

'Surrender' is also an integral part of the fulfilled sexual response of a woman. So much so, that several authors I have read suggest that kundalini awakening is less problematic for female than for male, due to her biological and instinctive acquaintance with surrender. And, in another place, somebody muses whether a woman's kundalini awakening might be more complete than a man's, precisely because of this distinction: a man just can't do it in quite the same way.

'Surrender' is altogether different to submissiveness, which is the characteristic quality of the female stereotyping of decades past. Submissiveness is the fallen, distorted version of surrender, in the way that it is intended here. Submission leads to diminution of the individual, whereas surrender is an act of sublime creation, leading to the opposite.

Shiva and Shakti: the divine masculine and feminine 'principles'; the creators of the universe through their union, their sacred dance of unutterable joy. Shakti, paradoxically, both surrenders completely, and is the divine lady of creation, the creative, 'principle'. Through their sacred interplay does the world come into being.

Surrender: it's inbuilt to the physiology, and consequently the psychology, of the female. Check out how sex between woman and man works. And so we come full circle, to the lady on the screen...…

Part Three

We're not talking rape, real abuse and violation. Neither are we talking about the behaviour of some men, who are really bad news when it comes to dealings with women. We're talking cultural and social norms; a culture where touching a girl on the arm, saying anything about her appearance, making a suggestion that she finds surprising, is viewed as offensive, criminal, the perpetrator to be taken to task. We're talking the fear of touch,maybe. Where 'consent' is something agreed over dinner, or jotted down in an appointments diary.

The things is - it's not quite as easy as that. As I intimated earlier, sex cannot be reduced to calendars, carefully-phrased agreements. Sex and sexuality emanate, in good part, from the world of Dionysus, not that of Apollo. Dionysus the wild one, the spontaneous, the sometimes dirty, the 'can't control me'. It is as if a certain element in modern culture desperately wants to discard Dionysus, with his touch of danger and non rationality. Instead, sexuality is to be claimed as part of Apollo's world. Clear, rational, predictable, even. Safe. We can breathe a sigh of relief and get on with our lives.

It's a move which can only lead to trouble. In Greek mythology, each god or goddess has their own domain. Should this principle be followed, then matters go not too badly. But if someone messes with the natural order of things, or a goddess or god tries to usurp what is not rightfully theirs, then there is trouble. Big trouble.

This 'land grab' by Apollo denotes a fear, I suspect. A deep fear of the nonrational forces. An attempt to tame the wild, the deep, the unfathomable. This is the shadow of #MeToo. Not the real abuse, which does happen. But the shadow is the fear of surrender, of part of what is the innately feminine. It would appear to be based upon hatred of ones female self, ones female body and its female functioning. It's a sad realisation, how so much modern, right-on, women's rights stuff, while superficially lauding a woman's freedom, is in fact self-hatred, a rejection of the core of ones being, no less, the expression of a wound.

The lady on the screen. Showing her wound. Showing it to the masses. Showing it through 'reason', through apparent concern. Her wound. How much is socially-engineered, who knows? For sure, many women walk around with wounds that have been socially engineered, manufactured, viciously so, the victim oblivious to the real source of her anger and indignation. Terrible, really, this manipulation of women. Turning them against themselves, while they believe the opposite to be true. And so it goes.....

Images:   Top: Marital bliss, 1950s style
              Centre: Tantric Buddhist Yab Yum
              Bottom: Shiva and Shakti Yab Yum  

 

           

Tardis News....

Jus a little thing connected with a topic that took a paragraph or two on Pale Green Vortex a while back....


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uhWtvktarbw

How to Shut People Up......

I watched some footage recently of protests and demos in the late 1960s and early 1970s, in Britain and the USA. It doesn't make for edifying viewing: police and military brutality, often in the face of minimal provocation. Throwing protesters to the ground, beating them with a variety of hard, vicious objects.

Vietnam, Biafra (in Britain, at least), repression of freedom of speech and various groups of people. Such were the objects of protest. I recall the police action in breaking up the final Free Festival in Windsor Great Park, 1974. Along with my friends, I was lucky: we sensed trouble in the air, and left the festival the day before the 'pigs' moved in. What happened was truly awful. Women, - including those pregnant -, children: nobody was spared the brutality unleashed upon the freak alternative youth on that dark morning just down the road from one of the Queen's prime residences.

In a sense, this action by the forces of law and order was successful: young people stopped protesting in such numbers on the street about wars; there were no more free festivals in Windsor Great Park. At the same time, it did the reputation of 'the Establishment' no good at all. It showed its own vicious colours all too vividly, and its real disrespect for anybody who dissented their programmes. 'Normal' citizens were left feeling uneasy. So another strategy of shutting people up was needed. Eventually someone had a brainwave. And political correctness was born.

'Self-policing' was the stroke of genius which arose in response to this conundrum, of how to shut people up in a socially acceptable fashion. And political correctness was the ideology that emerged as fit for purpose. It's brilliant, really. You don't need police out on the street, when you have the general public doing the job for you. People who would have been on the streets protesting now serve as prime trolls for the Establishment without even realising it. Plenty of folk considering themselves as right-on, fighting the fight against evil, in favour of noble and ephemeral notions like justice and equality. While, in reality, they are doing the dirty work of the dark forces who they profess to despise. Unwitting slaves, really.

Freedom of speech is a big one. The freedom to communicate, or at least express, your feelings, your ideas, your inspirations, no matter how weird and wacky, how unorthodox and unconventional, they may be. Freedom of speech is closely related to freedom of mind: if things cannot be expressed, they are likely to wither away, or be dismissed by the individual as aberrant, unhealthy, pathological, and so on, leading to all manner of personal difficulties. Obvious example: the effects on some truly gay people of outlawing homosexuality in the west in the first part of the 20th century.

This freedom of speech is a most unwelcome freedom in the eyes of 'Establishment'. It creates all kind of problems, as people question, poke, and prod, sometimes even digging up unpleasant truths about the nature and activities of Establishment. With the advent of the internet, the problem has become still more acute, with information and ideas zipping around the globe with ease. It is a situation which clearly needed to be dealt with.

Self-policing through the totalitarian lens of political correctness is a genius solution. Coming from a generation which campaigned ceaselessly for freedom of speech, I find it galling when idiotic students in places of 'learning' (read 'brain correction') protest against anybody lecturing or speaking in public whose ideological or political colours do not match theirs. These students, of course, are proud of how absolutely right-on they are, and how they make sure nobody gets offended by a viewpoint that falls outside the norm. People believing they are making a new and better world, when they are in reality doing the dirty work of the Establishment. This is society policing itself to perfection. Studenst creating a nightmare world. The 'education' of these young people obviously doesn't run to seriously reading 'Animal Farm' and '1984'.

It is the same story with other totems of modern ideology: racism, sexism, anthropogenic climate change, and the rest. The original freedom-affirming meanings of racism and sexism have become warped, to enable shutting up of dissenting voices. Any doubts about the official climate change story are met with Holocaust parallelism, the questioner being dubbed a 'climate change denier'. There. That vicious accusation should shut them up. It is the shadow of the MeToo# movement, as well. I'm all for being able to jump up and down if you have been abused - by anyone -, but their programme comes laden with fear and manipulation, having the effect of closing down, or inhibiting, any kind of passionate or sexual response from the heterosexual male. Damping down feelings, shutting people up, especially heterosexual male people.

And with that I shall, for now, of my own accord, my own free will, shut up - until the next time.

Images: - Free speech, 1960s-style
             - The police seize a stage at Windsor. Photo: Steve Austin, from the excellent ukrockfestivals website
             - Student protests 2015
           

The Corrie

Summit of Corrie Etchachan

But in the climbing ecstasy of thought,
Ere consummation, ere the final peak,
Come hours like this. Behind, the long defile,
The steep rock-path, alongside which, from under
Snow-caves, sharp-corniced, tumble the ice-cold waters.
And now, here, at the corrie's summit, no peak,
No vision of the blue world, far, unattainable,
But this grey plateau, rock-strewn, vast, silent,
The dark loch, the toiling crags, the snow;
A mountain shut within itself, yet a world,
Immensity. So may the mind achieve,
Toiling, no vision of the infinite,
But a vast, dark, inscrutable sense
Of its own terror, its own glory and power.

From: In the Cairngorms, by Nan Shepherd

I once wild-camped in Coire Etchachan. It was July 2013. I count it among my most pleasant and 'successful' wild camps. The weather was settled and warm, the location astounding, the ground level, and running water was close to hand. This was in stark contrast to some of my wild camps, which have been battered by wind, tentpegs plunged into a midge-infested peat bog before darkness completely enfolds the world. And what I considered to be level ground proves to actually be a slight incline, resulting in an entire night spent rolling down a hill in a sleeping bag, then hauling it back up again.

There have been no wild camps the past two summers. First came the 'heating' pre-kundalini phase, when my being seemed to be softened, sweetened, and averse to long rough walks in the mountains. Then came full-on kundalini emergence, during which period the tenderising process continued, while accompanied by explosions of hitherto unknown energies, which rendered mountain heroics still less appropriate. And the hernia, which first appeared almost a year ago. The last thing this abdominal bulge wanted, or indeed permitted, was vigorous physical activity.

This coming year may well be different; I currently feel that it might be. But, until the time arrives, who knows?

Images: The wild camp, Coire Etchachan
             Evening stroll from camp onto Beinn Mheadhoin summit

It's Time to Meditate

'Shut up and listen!' This simple directive contains the essence of what 'meditation' means to me these days. Forget everything you think you know. Forget who you think you are, what you think you are. Forget your friends, your family, foes, everybody else. Forget the past, the future, the present. Your hopes, your dreams, your fears. Your identity - yes, above all, your identity. Forget the lot. Just shut up and listen. Then, and only then; then, just maybe, something very interesting, something beautiful yet more than a bit disturbing and scary, something completely unexpected, may begin to emerge.

It wasn't always like this. I have been 'doing meditation' for over forty years. At times it's been very sporadic, at other times it's been hours a day. But it's only in the past six years or so that I've kind-of stumbled into what now seems so blindingly obvious: just shut up and listen.

I used to practice, as one of my little bundle of meditations, something sometimes called 'just sitting'. It's not the same as shutting up and listening, though. The emphasis nowadays is on listening - on developing an attitude of alert yet soft receptivity. The 'outside world' is as important as what is going on in the interior. Listening to the sounds of traffic or vacuum cleaner opens up the world more than 'watching the movements of my mind.'

Closer to the spirit is Castaneda, when Don Juan exhorts him to 'stop the internal dialogue.' This is more like it. The problem is that 'you' will never stop the internal dialogue, since 'you' depends on the internal dialogue for its own phantom existence. It needs, somehow, to be tricked.

'Shut up and listen' is a phrase that I've pinched from Georgia Lambert. She describes four stages or levels of meditation. First up is 'relaxation': calming down, releasing stress, we've all been there. Next is 'visualisation', by which I take her to mean realising that you can create your own reality through working on, in, through, your mind. You begin to take your life into your own hands. Then there is 'concentration', which she warns can be very boring. It might be, but can be the contrary, in my experience. And finally, we get to 'shut up and listen'. This, according to Georgia, is real meditation.

I dedicate this modest wee piece to a recently sadly deceased buddie of mine. He would probably have liked the general drift, though would most likely have come up with a list of doubts, queries, and rejoinders of a philosophical kind. Such was his way. He might have also liked the picture. I shall miss him: I already do. Fly, friend, fly...

Image: One of the Five Faces of Hecate, one of Luis Royo's finest creations, in my view. It doubles as Four of Pentacles in the Royo Dark Tarot. Solid, earthed, watchful, watching, waiting. Secure, steadfast, confident in oneself. Such is the Four of Pentacles as manifesting here.    

Conditionings of Race and of Culture

(Warning: There is nothing, in my view, the least bit offensive about anything in this article. Its overarching theme is how all of us can easily become unconscious slaves to our racial and cultural conditioning - something to be avoided whenever possible. Nevertheless, there are those who might beg to differ. So, should you go ahead and read, you have been warned).

Part One

Englishness. I am English. Can't get away from it. It's had its effect. In some respects I am probably not too typically English. In other ways I am quintessentially so.

Fair play. A level playing field. These have, as far back as I can remember, been of importance to me. There is an element of natural 'rightness' about this feeling, but also an unmistakeable Englishness. If I sense that someone is getting special treatment, has an unfair advantage, then I don't like it.

As a child, I took to playing the game of cricket. In my mind, at least, cricket was just that. A sport in which the ideals of fair play, a level playing field, were held in highest esteem. A little corner of a nasty corrupt world where honesty, fair play ruled; where excellence was king, and nobody threw tantrums in order to try and gain an advantage.

I was reasonably proficient, and played and practiced a lot, mostly in the back garden in evenings, and in the local park with a few friends, when I should have been doing homework. At secondary school, I was picked for the house under-thirteens cricket team (it was a state school, but had pretensions, so all pupils were allotted to one of four 'houses' for sports and other activities). I was only eleven at the time, and excited to be chosen.

I was to be opening bat. This is a particularly challenging role: you bat first, normally to face the most ferocious bowlers that the opposition can throw at you. You need to be a bit of a hero, or a mug. I went in, apprehensive but prepared, for the first ball of the innings. As opening bat, you are prepared for a small but extremely hard ball to come hurtling very quickly in your direction. The object is to avoid all temptation to run away, to erase fantasies of ending up in hospital, and take on the challenge; give as good as you receive.

The bowler was Trev Chandler; the umpire was history teacher 'Ted' Taylor. First ball: straight, accurate. I defend stoutly. Not very fast at all, really. Maybe things aren't going to be too bad. Second ball: short, down the leg side. I hook it hard and high, two runs. No problems. At this moment, I begin to fantasise about a real run-feast. The bowling's a piece of cake.

Third ball: slightly short, straight. I hit hard, snicking it loud onto my pads and out onto the off-side. To my surprise, Trev Chandler is appealing. To my even greater surprise, that is to say my disbelief, Taylor is raising his finger. Out! Out? No way! You cannot be out leg before wicket if you hit the ball with the bat first. That's the rules, Basic. Out?

Had I developed the inner Serena Williams, I would have approached that pathetic umpire, screamed at him, called him a thief, and threatened to smash up his history room with my cricket bat. As it is, I was far too timid, and far too English. I walked slowly and dejectedly off the pitch, with pure contempt in my heart for that umpire, who didn't even know the basic rules of the game.

A great innings might have altered the trajectory of my life. Afterwards, I played school cricket with a degree of success for a number of years. Then, aged sixteen, I decided that the game was a bourgeois aberration, and went off to research trepanning and the burgeoning counter-culture instead.

Part Two

Fair play. Level playing field. No unfair advantages. It's been axiomatic to my philosophy of life. In this respect, I am a true egalitarian.

Related to this is my attitude to what I shall term double standards. One law for me, another law for others. I don't like it. All other things being equal, I'm all for everybody having the same chances, being treated the same way (according to their own aptitude, skill, intelligence, etc).

So when a group of people appear on the world stage putting themselves forward as 'God's Chosen People', with the conferred status implied, I am not going to be very impressed. I am aware that there will be an underlying conditioning that goes with that belief, and it is one that will remain within the individual, regardless of conscious beliefs, unless they have undertaken rigorous personal deconstruction and purification through self awareness and deconditioning. Otherwise they stay rather like my father, who was a professed atheist, yet continued to display many characteristics typical of the Protestant environment in which he grew up.

I received a bit of 'feedback' after my piece on the taboo against discussing the Jewish situation (27/07/2018), including some extensive criticism. Nevertheless, I stand by what I wrote. Of course I am not condoning any crude facebook-like insulting or name-calling. I simply call for the freedom to discuss freely and to air ones point of view.

God's Chosen People: by implication, they will wish for special treatment. And judging by the kid gloves applied by our 'western democracies', our leaders all implicitly agree with the special status of the self-appointed special ones.

I was, rightly or wrongly, strongly affected by events during the 'migrant crisis' of 2015. Masses of people streaming into eastern and central European countries from the Near East, along with a few African nations. Nobody in authority seemed to be very concerned at all: just let them all in, whoever they are.

Those photos, of crowds snaking across east European countrysides. Surreal. It was obvious to me from the outset that these were not all bona fide refugees. A cursory glance at these photos showed a preponderance of working age males, not families with women and children (of which there were some, but that's all). We didn't need the United Nations to come along and tell us that, well after the horse had bolted.

It was the open acceptance of this bizarre situation, an invasion, really, by most authorities, the lack of serious questioning of what was really happening, that finally brought me round to a degree of sympathy with the 'forced multiculturalism as aimed at the death of Europe' point of view. It was a notion that I had found so abhorrent, I had resisted it for a long time as far-right paranoia, Surely nobody could have such a vicious aim. But now the evidence was there, staring me in the face.

Among all this I was conscious of a number of prominent Jewish and/or Israeli diplomats, politicians, commentators. They seemed to be all for this absorption of non-Europeans into countries like Hungary and Germany: 'open borders'. But all the while Israel was to be exempt from taking in any of these 'refugees'. It's a nation to remain 'pure'. Sorry, guys and gals, but such things make me suspicious. Double standards.

Part Three

Then there is a little matter concerning war. The Second World War. Let's visit Wikipedia for some numbers. According to this source, 60 million people died as a result of that event. I find all this difficult to read, let alone write. It makes me feel sick to the pit of the stomach just to consider it, whether it's folk killed by Germans, Americans, Japanese, British, or anyone else. That's my problem, I suppose. That such loss of life could take place is beyond personal belief. It is also beyond personal belief that such devastation was in any way 'necessary' or 'unavoidable'. I don't buy that.

We'll take a look at the breakdown of the deaths of civilians. Jews in the Holocaust: six million. The number is well-known, and the effects reverberate to this day. The Holocaust has been a factor in shaping many events and attitudes since 1945, probably more so now than when I was a child in the 1960s. We all know of it, and television continues to remind us on a regular basis.

Looking  further at the statistics, however, I was surprised at what else I found. Russian civilian deaths: 4.5-10 million (a figure fraught with great complications, it seems). Chinese civilian deaths: 7-8 million. That's a whole load of people. Comparable to the Holocaust; yet their effects on world events thereafter seem to have been, well, roughly zero. It's as if they never happened: those people never lived and perished. Their importance is nothing compared to those victims of the Holocaust. Dead Russians and Chinese: nobody gives a monkeys, really.

Differing western attitudes are also reflected in the different ways that the leaders of aggressor nations are generally viewed. Hitler is the devil incarnate. While Stalin? Well, he had his faults, but not such a bad guy really. Uncle Joe. You can wear a Stalin t-shirt and it's cool (in fairness, Hitler t-shirts are also available to buy, not all of them obviously ironic). There is a restaurant in Inverness named 'Revolution'. On the wall there hangs a cartoon entitled 'Bolshevik Tea Party'. There we see Leon Trotsky and Uncle Joe Stalin sitting together laughing over a nice cup of tea.
       
Double standards on the global front. Suspicions aroused.

Part Four

There is, I suggest, another element at work in how events are viewed, attitudes towards them, in the mainstream west. It emanates from the depths of what I shall term, in a generalisation more sweeping than any I have ever made, the western consciousness.

Western thought, western culture and civilisation: all have been increasingly characterised by the development and glorification of 'the individual'. This is what it's all been based upon: differentiation and identification of the individual as a unique and precious living entity. It is from this that we gain our sense of worth. We can see it already in Augustine, talking about the personal, private, interior heart as the real thing. We had 'ego theory', history as the lives of great men, and the rest, until we reach the modern day. Personal growth, self development, personal coaches. Who am I? Find your self, your own deep, true self. What do I really want? You are special, you are unique. Self confidence, self esteem. Because you're worth it. This is what so much of modern culture is built on. And I put my hands up and submit that it's the way that I have largely looked at the world, and my own life, until now.

This culture of the west has seen many invaluable contributions from Jewish people to its development. Practically, psychologically, financially, in terms of personally driven human beings, Hollywood today, and many other walks of life. In truth, western culture and outstanding Jewish individuals are inextricably interwoven. So if we imagine Holocaust victims, we imagine the unimaginable: six million fully differentiated individuals, with individual aspirations, personal hopes, fears, wishes, and the rest. Six million special, valuable people fated to an early death.

Think of those Russians from the 1930s and 1940s, and the imagination may come up with something a bit different. Lots of men with weather-beaten faces and cloth caps, out in the cold and the potato fields. Women with headscarves and stern expressions. Undernourished skinny children, running around in clothes that didn't make it into the fashion magazines. People less defined, less distinct, less emergent from the group, from the collective.

As for those Chinese, well the imagination probably comes up with nothing much at all. An enormous undifferentiated mass. A sea of anonymity, of non-differences. An ocean of homogeneity.

The unconscious kneejerk response of conditioning deems our Jewish victims to be more unique, more special, more significant, than their Russian and Chinese counterparts. As people, they are simply more important.

I am passing no judgment here; no rights and wrongs, no good guys and bad guys. My primary aim  is simply to try and root out some conditioning which goes towards attitude, perception, bias, all perfectly unconsciously. The effects of conditioning will always be there: I shall always be English, Freud will always be a Jew, Gorbachev a Russian. But the light of awareness may make us less a helpless slave of those conditioning forces; and, by the way, thereby less likely to fall prey to the manipulations of those whose motives are far from universally benevolent.

'I do not agree with what you have to say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.' Voltaire.

Images:

Top: David Gower, English cricketing elegance
Middle: Bodyline bowling. Fair play or not?
Bottom: Stalin t-shirt
         
         

Intestine

It's a remote, windswept, little-visited corner of the universe. Viking country. I've never been there before. Guidebooks often give it a bad press, but I find it fascinating, beguiled by its many atmospheres.

I'm here for the hernia. It's the only place that I can get the surgery done, without waiting for months or paying thousands of pounds. The hernia's been around for almost a year now. To begin with, I fancied it to be a strange outgrowth of fat, but then realised it was more than that. Reluctantly I came to accept that surgery was going to be the only viable course of action. The hernia wasn't very sexy, and was getting bigger all the time. Time to go to Viking country.

I'm in the ante-room before the operating theatre. "Any tattoos or piercings?" I am asked for the twentieth time, this time by a young lady in those green hospital overall things. "No. I suppose they must be an issue these days." "We had a woman in for gyno.She had a piercing that she didn't tell us about." The expression on the hospital worker's face suggests it was not a good experience.

The anaesthetist arrives. He is tall, rangy, well-spoken, rather old-school English. His eyes bulge out almost as much as a hernia, and I fancy him to have a serious interest in real-deal strong drugs and their effects, not the Sunday picnic psychedelics that folk like me have had a leaning towards.

"First we give you a happy drug. Makes you relaxed." He punctures the skin on the back of my hand. "Just like a wee dram." Then a little needle goes in, almost painless. The next thing I know I am in the recovery room.

I was fortunate to be first on the list for the day. I am coming round, and it's only just gone midday. Not much pain at all. Don't feel very disoriented either. Just lots of belching and burping: anaesthetic on migraine tummy, I suppose.

Strength begins to return. My wife comes to visit. "You can leave after you've had a pee" the nurse tells me. Only trouble is, I can't pee. Just vague stinging sensations where peeing habitually takes place.

"Drink water, drink" the nurses urge me. It goes on a long time. I continue to drink water.

There are two of us in the same situation. The other man is in for bilateral hernia - two for the price of one-, and the nurses start mumbling about catheters. This freaks the other guy out completely, so much so that he goes to the loo and comes back immediately with a slightly filled pot and an enormous grin on his face. Now it's just me.

"We'll have to keep you in overnight," a nurse eventually tells me at about 8pm. My wife gallantly sticks around for a while longer, before being sent off to our accommodation and a late dinner.

By now I have drunk the equivalent of half Loch Ness. "We'll do a bladder scan" pipes up another nurse. "Look. It's half empty. Drink more water, drink, drink."

I recall the fates of those occasional victims of ecstasy consumption, a grisly death normally brought on by drinking so much water to avoid the dreaded dehydration that their brain turns to sponge. I give up on the drinking, and lie back to muse on the resting place of all that liquid.

A short while later I am up again, vomiting the equivalent of half Loch Ness down the pan. My migraine years have provided good training for such occurrences, and I am not fazed. In these circumstances, my stomach won't digest water, even. I know the ropes.

Around midnight a nurse comes round and inquires. "How are you feeling?" "A bit nauseous." "I'll fetch you a pill for that." I haven't the will to tell her. Ten minutes later the tablet is thrown up, along with loads more liquid, rejected by a body in full protest.

At 2.30am I pee. Just a little, and painfully. But it's all that's needed. I can go now.

Around 9am my wife comes to collect me. We go to the river for a therapeutic hobble. We move slowly along its banks, then on alongside misty pastures. I imagine those Norse folk of the past here. Catching fish from the slow-moving river; tending their animals - sheep? goats? what animals did Norse folk keep? - beside the river, cultivating a little grain. It's a funny place here, but I quite like it. I am unexpectedly free of bodily pain. And, to my relief, kundalini appears to have come through the ordeal unscathed. Soon time to go home......

   
     

Kundalini Report

It is now over a year since the energy, or force, sometimes called kundalini first made itself known within the battered temple of my physical body. At first it appeared fitfully, but for most of the past year it has been a constant companion, manifesting in one way or another 24/7.

It is not something I feel inclined to write about very much. The time may come when I have greater perspective, and fuller communication in a relatively public medium I deem suitable. At the moment I remain in the throes of a process which will continue for an indefinite period, quite possibly until I drop dead; and whose goal, should there be one, and direction are out of my control and beyond my current perceptual limits.

It is, for me, an enormously significant element in my life. Sometimes it seems as if my entire life until then had been geared towards the eventual appearance of the kundalini. In contrast to various non-dual groups and individuals who adopt an evangelical stance, I have no appetite to proselytise whatsoever. The opposite, in fact. The effects are personal, intimate we could say. It is more like a love affair than an election campaign.

Once it had established itself as a newly-installed aspect of my being, the kundalini energy worked mainly through my abdominal regions, on the areas related to the muladhara, svadhistana, and manipura chakras. This involved a lot of breaking through energetic and emotional blockages. In more recent times, the energy has moved upwards, more into my head. This has catalysed an enforced assault course on different aspects of personal conditioning, a factor influencing the subject matter of some of my more recent posts. I am beginning to experience more clearly how conditioning acts as an overlay on direct experience. It has to be shed, elegantly put aside, and kundalini insists that this does indeed take place.

Kundalini and sexual energy: there's a definite connection. This in itself is enough to put it outside the self-created walls of most spiritual schools and traditions. Sex and the spiritual are adversaries in most people' book. Traditions emanating from Asia appear to, generally speaking, underplay the sexual aspect to kundalini. There are various individuals in the modern west who tend to the other extreme, equating kundalini with sexual energy. The relationship is rarely expressed very clearly, probably because it's a bit oblique and subtle.

Kundalini, nested at the base of the spine, is not 'sexual energy' as such, my limited experience suggests to me. Nevertheless, a subtle form of sexual energy seems to act as the fuel necessary for kundalini to really be effective. It is as if energy is activated, located around my genitals and the two lower body chakras, and worked backwards, to eventually meet the base of the spine and ignite the kundalini, which then flows upwards.

To begin with, this was often an energetic struggle taking place inside my body. It was as if very basic energy was being re-routed. With time, the process takes place more smoothly, though it still varies.

Union of opposites: the key to kundalini, I think. Especially masculine and feminine, within the individual being and within the universe at large. If we seek an image which says something about the essential dynamic of kundalini, the yab-yum of Buddhist and Hindu tantra probably best fits the bill.

It is as if the Undifferentiated splits into two; that's its first act. Conversely, that pairs of opposites is only one small step away from the All, the Godhead, call it what you will. Don't tell anyone, especially organised religion in any form. It's taboo, its secret getting out meaning the end of all priest-and-power based religious systems.

Libido, for want of a better word: an essential prerequisite for Kundalini movement. At the same time, that libido is a bit different to what is the normal experience. In the male, instead of wanting to go forwards and out, it seeks to reroute to inwards, back, and up - to put things crudely. It's a pretty basic change.

Which brings me to a reflection on Darwin. Good old Charles Darwin. The one who came up with a most convenient theory for our materialistic linear modern world. In the world of Darwin, and pretty much everything you will read or come across on television, sex has its place and its purposes. To create babies, to catalyse and cement companionship, a partner, and to provide fun and entertainment. If kundalini turns up in your body, another purpose to sex begins to appear. And it has nothing to do with the other functions, the Darwin ones. In fact it doesn't seem to fit into the Darwin view of life and death at all.

The use of sexual energy at the service of 'the spiritual' is nevertheless hard-wired into the human body. This is what I have been able to experience. It seems inherent to the human: you don't reroute sexual energy, the process appears to be natural, spontaneous, and inbuilt. It just begins to happen, like being hungry or being tired. And the point is that this does not fit into Darwinian 'survival' theory at all. Nevertheless, to repeat myself, it is there, coded into the possibilities of the human body. Darwin, modern worldview, has no answer. It deals with the situation the way that the modern medical world does, by denying the existence of kundalini altogether, rendering its symptoms fit for tranquillisers and the psychiatric ward only. Which is funny, since an increasing number of people are coming to experience kundalini, as real as wanting a pee.

So it's not exactly 'bye bye Darwin'. I suppose there is some reality in Darwinian musings. But as a description, or even more, explanation, of life, it is profoundly wanting. There is, I feel from my own experience - which is all I have to go on - a lot more going on, which today's Darwinians refuse to acknowledge as existing at all.      

       

Dark Nights and a Bus

Dark Night of the Soul: a term first associated with the sixteenth century Christian mystic St. John of the Cross. Nowadays, it is almost a commonplace within certain psychological and spiritual circles. It denotes a period of questioning and uncertainty on the spiritual path, and is typically accompanied by feelings of apprehension, fear, confusion, helplessness, depression, and even despair. It amounts to a great challenge, a black room which it is required to walk through to eventually find the door on the other side. To accomplish the feat requires courage, persistence, patience, faith, and real intelligence.

In 'The Spiritual Awakening Guide', Mary Shutan includes a section on 'Dark Nights' while discussing what she calls the Layer of Societal and Collective Conditioning, one of the layers it behoves one to see into and through on the journey to proper awakening. Its nub is that uncomfortable, maybe even devastating, realisation that society, the collective, is not what you have been told it is, and what you have believed it to be. Things are not as they appear. Not at all. To follow Terence McKenna: society is not your friend. Culture (mainstream) is not your friend. To look in their direction for help, support, understanding - to believe that they exist to benefit all on their way through life -, is a big mistake.

A few quotes from Mary Shutan will serve better than anything I can cobble together to make a few salient points:
'Many of us stay in the societal awakening stage for lengthy periods of time. We become angry and disillusioned, realizing that the government, societal norms and rules, and the whole construct of society is patently false.'
'When we experience a Dark Night ….. the sense of depression and feelings of being in a fog or black hole can be overwhelming …….. everyone but ourselves appears to be asleep ….. There is a conviction that the rest of the world is going to hell and nobody else understands what is going on but us that is pervasive in this stage.'

And so it goes on. Needless to say, this is a stage to work through, to see through, and not get stuck in, difficult though this may seem at the time. It's one part of a bigger process. As a layer of conditioning it is to be seen as such, to be shed like an unwanted skin.

The degree to which one permits oneself to be affected by, identified with, even, this layer of conditioning profoundly influences ones mood, overall feeling, about life. This is what I have discovered in myself, at least. To the extent that I am influenced by those societal and collective notions and sentiments, to that extent I have the tendency towards feelings of hopelessness, helplessness, pessimism. To the extent that I can eschew this way of perceiving the world, and focus instead on individuals and my own individuality, to that extent I feel the magic, wonder, and miraculous quality of the universe I inhabit.

Societal and collective conditioning - disseminated mainly through mainstream media and 'education' - instils a certain outlook on life. The world is an awful place, full of awful things and awful people. I am helpless in the midst of this awfulness, and I should furthermore hand my power over to 'experts' and 'authorities' who will handle the situation for me. This is the prime purpose of this layer of conditioning in the modern world, to help perpetuate a mass of passive, helpless-feeling folk, who are readily manipulated, regulated, and controlled. The task befalling the individual is to see through all this, see it as a construct, and be free, internally at least, of the whole goddamn shithouse.

The individual human being, conversely, is infinitely fascinating. OK, sometimes a bit silly, but frequently friendly and well-wishing. I end with a little story from my wee corner of the woods, which is kind-of relevant. It concerns our local bus.

Once upon a time, the neighbourhood where I live boasted a pretty good local bus service. Moving to the Scottish Highlands from south London, I was particularly impressed by two features: firstly, the bus service ran more-or-less according to the timetable, rather than at random times; and secondly, the children said 'Thank you' to the driver when getting off the bus.

A few years after my move north, things improved further when many of the old buses were replaced by new electric ones. These were quiet, nimble, and clean. Happy days indeed.

One day, however, the electric buses were removed from our route. In their stead came an army of dirty old vehicles, including a number of grimy double-deckers, which looked as if they had been bought at a second-hand auction in Streatham. They lurched clumsily from stop to stop, eminently unsuitable for the windy roads that characterise parts of our locality.

The once-reliable timetable was no more. Buses were frequently late, or failed to turn up at all. The drivers were either dead grumpy, bad-tempered, anxious, or depressed. The peak hour buses, in particular, would regularly not arrive, and office workers, worried about losing their jobs because of repeated lateness, abandoned the service in their tiny Highland droves.

It was then that the bus company announced it would be discontinuing the service. 'Not enough passengers' they said. 'Only 22% take-up of capacity.' Hardly surprising, given the quality of service. Plus all those unnecessary double deckers with understandably empty seats.

There was a local stink, as there invariably is about such matters. The bus company was adamant. At the last minute, though, a smaller, more local, company stepped into the breach. 'We will run it. No subsidies? No problem. We can make it work.'

And making it work they appear to be. To begin with, the disgruntled locals' lack of faith was reflected in nearly empty buses. Slowly, though, they began to cotton on. Neat little vehicles, running punctually - well, most of the time. Maybe most important of all, though, was the drivers. Gone were the misery-guts of the big national company. Now there were drivers who were actually friendly, welcoming you on board with a smile and a cheery 'hello'. Two, in particular, really stood out with their amiable manner. Most miraculously, people waiting at the bus stops now did so with a smile on their faces, too.

A trip into town on the bus had actually become a pleasure, rather than a necessary evil. I suspect that there are folk who go into town just for the hell of it, just to be on the bus. A bit of positivity breeds positivity. That's a sentence straight out of one of those self-help books that I despise, I know. But, in this case at least, it is true. A touch of authentic human spirit works wonders.
             

Smashing Rackets for the Collective

It's New York. Tennis. The big day. Mega superstar, American Idol, defender of rights of blacks, women, and the downtrodden everywhere. She's got the record in her sights: America expects. A big day indeed.

Her opponent. A young whippersnapper. Slight-looking, quiet, reserved. From Japan, we think. No probs. Who is she anyway?

Soon in, though, things begin to get complicated. It's not going to plan. Not at all. Precise, powerful, tenacious, the opponent is tearing to pieces the megastar. Soon, the unthinkable is looming: our Idol is heading towards defeat.

Things unravel further. Shouting, screaming. Smashing the racket. Crying, complaining, accusing the umpire of severe wrongdoing. Throwing the mother of all tantrums: nothing is too low for our great idol in her bid to get her own way. Sexist, racist, unfair, injustice, equality, what about me?: she is skilled in the buzzwords, the triggers, the buttons to push, in order to gain attention, garner sympathy, get her own way. She has a new one now: mother.

The feminine, all fallen down. The feminine, gone horribly wrong.

And there's the man. Law and order is his game. He runs the balance sheet, knows the rule book by heart. That's his job, and he does it impeccably. Blow by blow, he counts her out. Her rage inflates by the minute. He is man-cool on the outside; inside, he's probably shitting himself.

And there's the crowd. The pawns, the robots, the unthinking mass, the world. She knows how to work them, the machine idiots, and does it magnificently. They are baying for blood.

It's kind-of awful. At the same time, it has its own reality. It's drama to knock the socks off any television soap, theatre to have the ancient Greeks on their feet. Unconscious archetypes let loose, running riot, creating havoc, on the big stage.

What's truly awful, in my view, is the collective. The herd mentality. The pathetic followers with their group think. The fawning commentators, the 'experts', the analysts, all poisoned by the ideological flavour of the day. Wetting their pants at the mere mention of the Great American Idol. There are a few, a paltry few, with the courage and personal integrity to just say it: Big Girl Behaving Badly. Maybe most of them are just too blinkered by their ideologies to actually see it, I don't know. More concerned with appearing right-on than to entertain the notion that maybe it does not befit an international superstar to behave like that, with the whole world watching. Instead, all we get is the collective nightmare. Sexist: yeah! Racist: yeah! Unfair: yeah! Poor little rich girl can't get her own way: yeah, yeah, yeah!

I'm beginning to actually see it, experience it. There are two things. There's real life, direct, naked: sometimes beautiful, sometimes ugly, sometimes great, sometimes crazy, sometimes just throwing a tantrum. Then there is the overlay. That's how I experience it: as an overlay, or a kind of mesh which places upon the bare bones of direct reality. Neil Kramer used to talk of the Construct, which is another fair description. Or it's like a dream, which envelopes what is real in a blanket of fog, or candy floss. It's what Mary Shutan refers to as the layer of societal and collective conditioning.

It is this overlay which, from the viewpoint of spirit, of soul, of authentic living, of the mystical and magical, does the real harm. It sets up a separation from who we are as unique individuals drinking in the miracle of moment-by-moment existence. Instead, it substitutes collective conditioning, especially in the form of beliefs and ideologies, knee-jerk reactions that feign to tell us what is right and what is wrong; what is acceptable, what is unacceptable. Their aim is, primarily, to delude and deceive; to prevent our self-discovery, if you will.

'Politicising', imposing political agendas on tantrums, is one of their prime strategies. It's the stock-in-trade of the media, whose main aim appears to be the imposition of the overlay on real life. This is why it is so poisonous, so detrimental to making something decent of your own life, and why it is to be shunned as much as possible. It is the poisoned chalice containing the toxic liquid of the collective nightmare. The BBC should come with a 'danger to health' warning, the Telegraph and Guardian with skull and cross bones on the front page. Agents of the collective nightmare, avoid whenever you can.

Meanwhile, in chapter five of Maria Sharapova's autobiography, we find the following: "I do not bitch. I do not throw my racket. I do not threaten the line judge....." Just so, Maria, just so.

Image: Men can do it as well.                

The Layers of Conditioned Reality: Nature

Part One

Animism. Pantheism. Deep Ecology. All three have much in common, in terms of outlook upon life. All is alive, all has worth. They move the focus from 'me' to the world; they see 'me' as one tiny piece of a living marvellous place. Let's follow them for a minute or two. Let's throw Descartes into a soul-filled ocean, and see where it leads us.....

No longer is the world dead, but it scintillates with vitality. It is a place of infinite magic. Wherever you look; you just can't escape it. Two distinct truths paradoxically co-exist, indeed interdepend. Firstly, there is interconnection - of everything with everything else. It is the great kaleidoscope. And secondly, there is the individual unit. Interconnected, yet discrete, recognizeable as a separate entity.

Take this co-existence to the nth level, and you find true gnosis. In Hindu terms, there is the simultaneous manifestation of samadhi and kaivalya, of union and individuation. Swing into Buddhism, and it is the non-difference, the cosmic dance, of Maya and Tathagatagarbha. The final embrace of Samsara and Nirvana, maybe. Non-differentiation of Self and Other. Heady stuff indeed.

Part Two

It's a while since windfarms appeared on Pale Green Vortex. They haven't gone away, though. In England, I believe their construction onshore has stopped. Here in Scotland, however, with its more enlightened regime, their building continues. The pace has slowed down, due to less giveaway subsidies nowadays, but still they turn up. Sometimes projects that have been in the pipeline for years, going through wrangles, objections, overturning of objections by the enlightened lackeys of Holyrood. And so on.

The latest one hereabouts to be finally built, after refusals by Highland Council, only to be steamrollered by central government (great upholders of local democracy), is Tom na Clach, on Dava Moor. It is located between Inverness and Aviemore, roughly, on windswept upland hills. In the middle of nowhere, you will be told. 'In the middle of nowhere' is an anthropocentric, rather than animistic, concept. It means that there are no pubs, supermarkets, or housing estates to be found there.

Go to the Isle of Lewis, in the Outer Hebrides, a far-flung place ('far-flung': another anthropocentric expression. Flung far from where? Oh, the nearest motorway). There, on that island jewel, you will find poets, painters, photographers. All of them delight in the play of sunlight upon a little pool of water nestled among the heather; the dance of the long grass in the wind; the drunken movements of an insect as it bumbles across the peat. These are our priests and priestesses of the natural world, embracing the sacred in even the smallest thing. It is they who lay their talents down in the service of the gods, the goddesses, the Source, speak as you will.

On Dava Moor, the contrary is encountered. Wanton destruction, as blankets of peat are trashed, birds flee or face an inelegant end at the hands of the turbine choppers, the wind butchers' blades.

All of this is totally unnecessary, even from the viewpoint of human survival and well-being. From our animistic perspective, we could regard it as a crime. It is wanton, heartless, needless. We know about 'war criminals', those deemed to have acted outside the bounds of 'acceptable behaviour'(!) during the course of armed conflict. To the animistic mind, there are, alongside war criminals, 'moor criminals', those who have brutalised the Earth beyond the limits of 'necessity'.

Today, in my present mood, I write this quite literally. I would like to see these perpetrators of crime against nature, the moor criminals, tried and punished accordingly. I am thinking primarily of those in central government who have shaped policy whereby such creations as Tom na Clach windfarm are encouraged; and those appointees of central government who grant consent, flying in the face of local government even, and thereby also demonstrating utter contempt for local feeling.

There are those who live close to 'God'; and there are those who have fallen far......

Part Three

When windfarms, especially 'upland' windfarms, turn up on the agenda, a variety of emotional responses are triggered in me. Sadness often appears, particularly in the light of a newly-constructed windfarm. Feelings associated with how things once were, a hill or moorland as it used to be. When 'work is in progress', as in Tom na Clach, or when trouble is brewing, I invariably experience anger, wrath, rage.

This rage is a different feeling to that which appears when the computer malfunctions in the middle of a 'very important project'; or the feeling which breaks through on the bus failing to turn up when I'm at the bus stop laden with shopping. Or when the peanut butter drips off my knife onto the tablecloth before reaching my breakfast slice of bread. No. The windfarm nature rage seems less personal. OK, there is the 'poor little Ian losing his nice quiet landscape' element; but it is predominantly of a different order. The screaming wrath is not really 'mine', at least not in the way that we usually experience 'me'. It is more like something being funnelled through me. As experienced, it comes from outside of me. It is connected with nature. I fancy it to be feminine.

This kind of rage, alongside its counterpart lust, I cherish as most valuable. It comes as a warning sign, or a sign that something's up, or that I'm bolting the door on something which I need to be courageous to let in or let through. I do not seek to eliminate all anger and lust. In this way, I'm a crap Buddhist. Similarly, I do not align myself with those New Agey lightworkers who disown their primal lusts and rages. And the same goes for those smiley-smiley self-professed enlightened beings, normally non-dualists, who can be found in abundance on the internet. Some of them claim to have eradicated lust and anger completely, in true Theravada Buddhist fashion. Others may experience anger, but  do not identify with it: it is not 'mine', not 'me'. I do not consider this attitude very satisfactory. Rather, the rage and its object will be embraced, examined in its fullness and uniqueness, investigated, to find its deeper nature, and appropriate action taken as required.

My rage is like a precious jewel; or it can be. It is a gateway to the infinite. In this way, should I choose to align myself with anything from the Buddhist traditions, it will be more with traditions of Tantra. Not all rage and lust emanate from the neuroses of a deluded sense of separate ego-ness. I feel increasingly for the figures of the Dharmapalas, rageful characters who protect truth, reality. They know the sacred nature of energy; they do not seek to eradicate. They see the Buddha nature tucked away in all manner of feeling. In them is to be found the heroic.    

   
Images: -Hummingbird - Oscar Magallanes
              -Tom na Clach (photo: Press and Journal)
              -Wrathful Tara (thefemalebuddha.wordpress)
              -The Dharmapala Rahula


   

The Layers of Conditioned Reality: Bulldog

Part One

It's something particular about being British. English, especially, though it applies to an extent to all varieties of the British species. It is the belief that British people, above all English people, are never really bad. Bad people come from other places: Russia, Germany, Balkan places; China, Japan, South America, Africa. While English people can be a little bit naughty, but never really bad.

This is one of the humbling elements I have discovered while becoming more aware of what it means to be born English. I wrote previously about how I grew up with the sense subtly instilled that Britain was just slightly superior to the rest of the world. There is a corollary in degrees of beastliness. While the rest of humanity may indulge in all manner of horror, genocide, and the rest, the English, in particular, don't go in for that. We are just too decent, too rational, for that kind of thing.  

It's a blind spot inculcated from early on, and very convenient for certain types of folk. It gives a psychological carte blanche to all manner of horribleness to pass unscrutinised. We go around in a collective unconscious fug. Come from Colombia, as does my wife, and it's a different story. Colombians can do unspeakable horrors to other Colombians. It's known; everybody knows it; and at least the place runs its shaky course under the umbrella of a degree of honesty.

The assumptions leak into considerations of 'general health of society'. Whilst other nations suffer tyrants, oppression, and so on, we Brits live in a free, open, transparent world. Not really true. I have thus far been able to write this blog without censure, and I suppose it's preferable to find your website unceremoniously closed down or your facebook account stopped rather than having Joseph Stalin's henchmen come knocking at the door. Nevertheless, the topics and points of view considered unacceptable or unspeakable at the bus stop has increased enormously over recent decades. Much of the comedy created in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s which is actually funny would not be made today. Could not be made today. Forbidden. So when I mutter about 1984 and Animal Farm when it comes to Britain and much western Europe, I mean it seriously. We do not live in free and open times. Not really. The genius lies in creating a censored society without many of its inhabitants even realising it.

Part Two

On the home front at least ('foreign affairs' are another thing) overt viciousness is a little out of fashion. In the long run it doesn't get you many votes. Instead, and what could sadden me the most, we are confronted with a public British display of abject stupidity.

Being abjectly stupid in your own home is, I suppose, your prerogative. However, there are folk a-plenty who actually make a living out of being crass and idiotic in public. They can be found within the 'mainstream media', often beneath the banner of 'Comment' or 'Opinion'.

I go to mainstream media occasionally. I never go for long - never. Should I spend three minutes in its largely toxic company, it will normally be the most negative three minutes of the day. In the event that I should indulge in vestigial masochism and go there, what do I find?

Abject stupidity number one:

In the Telegraph online of 21/8/18, there was the following article, written by one Tom Fordy: 'Tom Daley becoming the new face of Pampers is a baby step in the right direction for equality.'

For anyone who knows even less about babies than me, 'Pampers' are nappies for babies.

Now, if Pampers wish to choose a 'gay dad' as their face of the moment, that is their prerogative. Tom Daley is not a father, though. My dictionary defines 'parent' as 'The material or source from which something is derived.' We could get metaphorical, and refer to Tom as 'father' the same way that I could talk about fathering this article. But, in general terms, while he may turn out to be an excellent looker-after of a baby, he is not its father.

This is the modern way, and it's very 1984. Manipulating language and the meanings of words in order to shape the public perception of  reality. Call Tom Daley a father frequently enough, in the hope that folk eventually see no difference between him and anybody else in the parenthood stakes. We're all the same. Exactly the same. This is the trick which is being attempted. And this is what is meant by 'equality' in the article heading. It is another manipulation of meaning. 'Equality' in this case doesn't really mean equality. It has been subtly morphed into 'sameness'. Or, following Neil Kramer, into anonymous, uniform blob-hood.

There is just one little problem here. My studies of biology have revealed an inconvenient truth. You see, men and women are different, in quite fundamental ways. They are built differently. Relevantly to Tom Daley and Pampers, women are able to become pregnant, carry a tiny human being within their own body for nine months, providing it shelter and nourishment, until finally giving birth. A man, however, does none of these things. He does his initial bit - which might last an embarrassingly short length of time - and then has done. He might support the pregnant woman excellently, but his function is not the same. Not at all.

All of which goes to suggest that a mother's relationship to her baby might typically be a little different to that of the father. Hers might be, most naturally, a bit more physical, bodily, flesh and blood, er, Pamperish.

Anyhow, you'll be relieved to hear that I've taken on this equality (read 'sameness') of the sexes on board. I am setting out to demonstrate solidarity with my sisters across the globe. One inconvenient difference between the sexes is how, once a month roughly, the female of the species, at least if she is of child-bearing age, undergoes the messy and sometimes painful process of menstruating. The fact that men fail to do similarly is surely an affront to our noble quest for equality and blobby-hood. We males should undergo something similar. So, for four days every month, I shall be sporting sanitary towels inside my underpants. Sticky-side up. Not very sexy, but these things must be done. Don't be surprised if I am adopted as the new face of Bodyform.

And as if that's not enough...…

Abject stupidity number two.

Part Three

There's going to be a new Doctor Who. This October. On television. And the new Doctor is going to take on the form of woman.

You can make Doctor Who a woman if you want. You can make the good doctor an armadillo for all I care. But these things always have to be topped by some abject stupidity. Here we go.....

The new Doctor Who is going to be played by Jodie Whittaker. Here she is, speaking about her new role: 'The thing about this role …. is that essentially gender is irrelevant and that's completely liberating.'

I watched Doctor Who avidly in the 1960s. Since then, it's been pretty cursory. That said, it doesn't take a lot to keep track of the different manifestations.

Over the decades, Doctor Who seems to have maintained a certain style beneath the changes. An approach, an attitude, which marks him out as the Doctor. A way of seeing the world which combines reason, intuition, matter-of-factness, sometimes grumpiness, and a splash of genius that comes from somewhere else altogether. It's a package which I can't help but identify as, well, rather masculine. Eccentrically so, but masculine nevertheless.

A good deal of the magic surrounding the Doctor issues from his communication with his various companions. Especially his female companions. In its best moments, it is like the alchemist with his soror mystica, creating magic in the laboratory. There's a kind of sexual chemistry. It's quite subtle: not a 'Shall we do it in the Tardis?' type of sexual rapport. But a spark between male and female - a spark which, I suspect, comes with the interplay between two different ways of experiencing the world. That's really what we mean by 'sexual chemistry'. And, Jodie's pronouncements notwithstanding, that's all gonna change.

I'm not saying that it won't work. There is the female alchemist, after all, who has her frater mystico. Maybe it will be great in a different way.  But it's just that 'gender is irrelevant' is stupid. Abjectly so.

That's more than enough. Clearly, three minutes a day in the company of the mainstream is three minutes too much for me.....      
            

We're Doomed.....

Part One

A little over a year ago, I wrote a piece that touched upon the theme of 'hope' ('Five Hours in Barcelona', July 23rd 2017). Hope - yes, Hope - is one of those big words, which take up a lot of space, and can be looked at from many different angles and perspectives. As the months have passed, so have I become conscious of how I simply skimmed the surface of one single aspect of that big word during that article.

Several friends and acquaintances have recently put forth the idea that 'They have no hope.' Or 'There is little hope for the world.' These are not necessarily pessimistic people. They have simply surveyed the landscape of current humanity - its politics, culture, ethics, general affairs - as they see it, and come to this conclusion. Those who have reached a certain age are able to look back over decades of events and sense that, in terms of creating a decent world for the mass of humanity, no progress has been made. None at all. Instead, they look at May, Johnson, Corbin, Trump, the EU, Merkel, Syria, climate change, fake news, environmental catastrophe, the current inability to trust or believe anybody of influence - and just give up all hope.

I notice how those people of today who harbour little hope express their belief with the minimum of panic, horror, or despair. 'I can't see much hope for the future': it's a phrase that's stated almost cheerfully. Matter-of-fact, a self-evident truth.

This is very different to the moments when hope for the future was in the balance in earlier periods of my life. There was the time of the Cuban missile crisis, when our family went to bed in genuine fear of the possibility of planetary annihilation before sunrise on the morrow. The height of the Cold War similarly induced a sense that the future of humanity was in dire peril. At these times, though, the overall sense was that the destruction of humanity would be a real tragedy, a disaster of unprecedented proportions. Human life, human civilisation, was extremely precious; something worth holding on to, worth surviving and fighting for. Today, however, the absence of hope for the human venture is greeted with a shrug of the shoulders. People are beyond deeply caring. We're doomed, and we'll get what we deserve for our sins.

Part Two

Let's consider this passage about C.G.Jung. It is written by a friend of his, having met Jung in the final few years of his life.

"Jung had observed in the eyes of animals giving birth to their young an enormous suffering which seemed to represent a fear of the dark unknown. And he believed that these animals need us, that they are waiting for us to reveal to them the nature of the world and the mystery of their painful existence. We are needed because we alone can project them into the light. Thus in a word, we will become the mirror of all creation, of animal, tree, river, stone and, perhaps, of God himself, for in the end, we are the consciousness of the world...… Nature has created us  ……. so that we may in turn contemplate it in all its evanescence and reveal it in its totality....."

It is possible to consider Jung's notion of the place of humanity in the overall scheme of things as ridiculous and laughable. That's not the point. The issue at stake is how we view things, and what we focus on. On Pale Green Vortex, a similar story to that of our no-hopers has at times been rolled out: how a glance at the past two thousand years of  the history of 'western civilisation' reveals that, details aside, nothing much has changed. Technology has developed, we may live longer, but the structural pattern through which people live their lives has remained pretty much the same. Political, social, and economic affairs take place beneath the umbrella of 'Empire', as Neil Kramer has been known to describe it. The name of the game is containment rather than true betterment. The prime aim of law is not to promote big concepts such as truth, justice, fairness, moral excellence; it exists above all to manage and support a system.

To the extent that we permit Empire to shape our view of what human life is, to that extent will we most likely experience hopelessness. Hope is not part of the agenda of Empire. It never has been, and never will be. Instead, it fosters a sense of futility, an disposition of passive dependence, an attitude of servile disempowerment, where authenticity and real individuality are frowned upon. And it behoves us to remember that it takes two to tango. The game of containment continues with such effect because it is allowed to, through the silent consent of the mass of folk. It is not enough to simply blame Trump or the EU or the local council for our lack of hope. It is an attitude to develop individually, by moving beyond the limits which these petty views of human potential encourage.

Rather than conclude with a wave of the 'no hope' banner, Pale Green Vortex has a different take on the soul-destroying nature of life under Empire. There is no solution within its strangulating parameters. That is the nature of the beast, arguably consciously developed as such. Solutions - hope - come from somewhere else altogether. As a start, there presents itself the task of elegantly removing ourselves from the entire set-up, as best we can. Take our identity out of its poisoned embrace, in whatever ways we feel suitable and find possible.

Hope comes with a change of perspective on the purpose and destiny of humanity, such as the change outlined by Jung. And that's it.