Property Is Theft

                 It's all mine! Mine! Mine! Ha! Ha! Ha!

'Property is theft': first given voice by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon in 1840, the slogan became one of the clarion calls of the nineteenth-century anarchists. This rallying cry has come to mind recently while I've been (once more) considering the fate of the wild places of Highland Scotland. It's property rights that call the tune. Windfarms (or Wind Cities, as the John Muir Trust has begun to call the bigger ones) are built largely on the estates of mega-rich landowners, who stand to make a mega-buck that they don't need in the first place by leasing out their land to multinational energy companies. They can make a few more scraps by permitting small hydro schemes to be constructed on their estates, another costly and inefficient scheme involving lots of pipes and benefitting nobody other than - oh, the estate owners, along with the poisoned portfolios of a bunch of bandit politicians.

There's also the issue of new tracks on these enormous estates, bulldozed across the hillsides in increasing numbers. These are horrible scars on the landscape, disfiguring the hills for miles around without a thought for ecology or beauty. What a contrast they make to the stalkers' paths of yore, many of which still thread their way neatly through the heather, blending unobtrusively with the landscape; indeed, becoming part of the landscape.

Google 'Ledgowan Estate' to discover what a particularly bad example of an estate thinks of people who dare to walk on 'its' estate (and this despite the excellent Right to Roam legislation existing in Scotland). And over recent times the estate has torn an ugly line across kilometres of hillside near Achnasheen, slap bang in the north-west Highlands - all in the name of agriculture, of course. Very recently I have seen (I couldn't have avoided it if I'd tried) the scar of another track freshly gouged into the heather and peat climbing up beside the stream that leads up local Munro Fionn Bheinn (whether this is part of Ledgowan or a neighbouring estate I have been unable to ascertain). It all looks almost like a deliberate trashing of the landscape.

All of this, of course, is given tacit approval by the Scottish misgovernment. It's all a cartel, really - landowners, politicians, multinationals, in a symbiotic yet poisonous world of their own, and a law unto themselves. To me, this is the grave error of those who enthuse about the possibility of Scottish independence. Despite all the evidence to the contrary, our independence flag-wavers persist in the blind belief that it's actually got something to do with anybody or anything outside the confines of the local cabal. Naive, naive, and just what the Empire wants us to believe. A  nice piece of diversionary theatre.

Property is theft. Actually, I disagree. 'Theft' implies that there is somebody to steal from, and something to steal. In the case of land - most clearly with wild land, nature - this is a ludicrous notion. How can anyone 'own' a hill, a mountain, a forest, a desert? Of course they can't; it's impossible. Property, in this case, is not so much theft as a deluded and hubristic fantasy. If we look deeper, we find that it's a concept of mind control, designed to foster the falsehood of a separate self which erroneously believes it can appropriate bits of the outside world to increase its sense of personal importance. On a personal level, I am fortunate enough to live in a house that I no longer need to pay for; but I don't consider that it is literally 'mine'. It is a shelter and a launchpad for my current various projects. It is a place that I endeavour to treat with care and respect, and I live mindful of the fact that one day my material being will return to the wider elemental world, as will the house where I live. That 'landowners' behave as if they really do own hills, fields etc, viewing them purely as a means for personal gain and sod the rest of us, is an expression of a fundamental lie that has been driven into us from an early age. Property is not theft: it is a notion based on a fundamentally and deliberately flawed view of the universe.



        

In Therapy

It was a few weeks ago now; but it can happen to any of us, at any time. The doings of life had become too much to handle. Anguish and turmoil had become my daily companions. No question: disentanglement was the order of the day. It was time for therapy.

I awoke early and, having pulled on clothes and eaten a quick but hearty breakfast, was on the train soon after the sun had come up. The massive winter snows were in evidence as we coasted past the hills of the east, peaks coming and going beneath a blanket of grey above.

The train was quiet and nearly empty; I was the only person alighting at the countryside station. The sun of the mid-morning put in a wan appearance as I set off up the track. Past the holiday cottages and fields the home of healthy-looking bovine beasts, I crossed the bridge and began to follow the long serpentine curve of the track as it ascended below the line of trees glowering darkly to my right. With height, I found the knots of tension, the inner turmoil spun tightly into a ball, begin to unfold. Leaving behind the world of forest, I entered open land. Even here on the west coast, the snows had hung around for long, with large deep patches down to low levels. At once, the path climbed more steeply in long curves, and then I was at the top of the track. I know these hills, and they know me. My consciousness unfurled, and they took me in their embrace. Once more I was connected and alive, a lone and mysterious inhabitant of a living and infinitely mysterious universe. A minute later the magnificent vista of the ancient yet familiar mountains revealed itself. The outer world and its inner reflection  took on a vibrancy that had disappeared beneath the weight of daily things, stuff, doings. Two hours of walking and I sat to eat lunch, to breathe in the space, the purifying quality of the mountain air, the blessings of the place. Not so much a speaking therapy as one involving direct transmission from the human consciousness to the natural wild world, and back again. I was, for now, transformed.

In the chapter entitled 'A Warrior's Last Stand' from 'Journey to Ixtlan', Carlos Castaneda relates a story from the desert. In his early books, he spends a lot of time walking in the desert, principally with Don Juan. On this occasion, they have been walking for a particularly long time; through a succession of shamanic moves, Carlos has ended up on top of a hill. 'A very quiet ebullience filled me...... It was a strange state of being that had no parallel in my busy and dislocated life....... I wanted to stay in that spot forever and I may have, had Don Juan not come and yanked me out of the place.'

Carlos marvels in the magnificence of the wild expanses and the mountains. Don Juan goes on to explain. 'Fix all this in your memory,' Don Juan whispers in Carlos's ear...... 'You're going to hunt power whether you like it or not. It is not a human decision, not yours or mine.' 'Now, properly speaking, this hilltop is your place, your beloved place; all that is around you is under your care. You must look after everything here and everything will in turn look after you.'

This place, continues Don Juan a little later, is the most important spot in Carlos's life. 'This is the place where you will die,' he says in a soft voice. It is a place to which Carlos will always return, either by walking or through dreaming. Here he will store his resources of power. And when it is his time to die, he will return to the place of his predilection and dance to his death.

It is one of these passages in Castaneda that stops me in my tracks. I have places of predilection, and I also know places I can visit should I want to bring difficulty and turmoil descending upon me. They are all places in the wild, mainly in the mountains, where the signal is clear. Look out for your places of power, of predilection, if you are so inclined. Who knows how significant this may turn out one day to be.







              

Cycles, Circles, Endless Renewals

The wheel turns full circle. When I was a very young, small person I exhibited, in my own infant way, untrammelled authenticity. Running around the garden, splashing in puddles and falling in mud, I was lord of my own domain. By the midpoint between my infancy and today, in the early/mid 1980s, I had firmly and substantially (though, with the benefit of hindsight, I can state never totally) fallen in with organised religion in my quest for self knowledge and realisation. Presented as an alternative to the tired and crusty authoritarian Christianities of western orthodoxy, my chosen Buddhist vehicle was, nevertheless, pretty organised and religious.

Today, the people who catch my attention are those who walk their own path. They wander - to transform Wordsworth's cliched poetic fragment into inner metaphor - lonely as clouds across the vast sky of phenomena. The muse comes personally - the still, small, inner voice, the calling - and nobody can give them instructions or guidebooks on how to conduct their own life. The people who emphasise personal authenticity, individual uniqueness; prepared to look in all directions for advice when needed, inspiration when called for, rather then identify with any one singular path. The people who call up the courage to confront their life in all its marvellous complexities, its heights and depths, its light and its shadow, its own extraordinary richness and variety.

Neil Kramer is one such person. Another is Niall/Opaque Lens from Shamanic Freedom Radio, a man whose sacred path climbs many a dizzying hill and drops down many a dark dale; but a man with the courage to face whatever demons may leap out on the way. In a recent episode, Opaque Lens interviewed Shonagh Home. I had never come across this lady before, but she immediately reveals herself as another of these souls courageous enough to embrace the individual, sovereign path. Do not be afraid to be different. 'Be a rebel, be a misfit' she encourages at one point. 'I'm a misfit - say this with love.' Be happy to be an anomaly, she suggests to Mr Lens.

Of late, I have been listening more carefully to the voices of women. My discovery that the timing of my migraines bears relation to the phases of the moon was the first step in this direction. I figured that I should get to know a bit more about the moon: while the presence and influence of the sun is more obvious, the moon works her magic primarily at night, her influence unnoticed and unheeded while we are all indoors behind windows, walls, and thick curtains. Sister moon relates to that elusive notion, the sacred feminine. And through this to the voices of women.

For a woman, it's impossible not to read and listen to men big time: the majority of stuff out there has been produced by males. But for a man it can easily come to pass that the voices of women can be overlooked, if for no other reason than force of numbers. The subtly different viewpoints and experiences related by the women I've had the pleasure to listen to and read of late have enabled me to expand my own perceptions. Maybe this is part of what Jung and his followers refer to as 'anima integration'. Jung on the Shadow is brilliant, but when it comes to anima, I've always found him confusing - possibly because he was a bit confused himself, I suspect. Be that as it may, my female sources are often more at ease with expressing and exploring their emotional responses to events without prematurely short-circuiting the process by being judgemental or theorising too much. And when they do theorise, they remain in their body and in touch with the earth, instead of disappearing into a totally abstract world where cold logic and tyranny can take over.

The women I have listened to of late do not come into things through the doorway of academia, bristling with a portfolio of PhDs and smart-ass ivory tower superiority complexes. They are more likely to come through poetry, art, story, and song; through love and broken marriages; through tending to the sick and the dying; through listening to the oceans and the trees.

Another remarkable woman of this ilk is Penny Sartori. She came into her own unique calling through her time as a nurse in Intensive Therapy Units. The many years spent in this environment led her to have contact with large numbers of people undergoing the process of dying. The fruits of her experience and subsequent research are distilled into 'The Wisdom of Near-Death Experiences', a book which immediately goes onto the Pale Green Vortex highly recommended list.

Once more, a woman of great courage and humanity, prepared to face the relentless scepticism and worse of much of the mainstream. To go where many fear to tread, exploring patiently yet relentlessly the experiences of dying people in the hope of helping them come to terms with this most critical moment. But the book is more than that. Subtitled 'How understanding NDEs can help us live more fully', it is as much for those with many years ahead of them as for anybody else. Books of the dead and the dying are invariably books for the living too, and Penny Sartori's lovingly-written publication is just that: a book about how all of our lives might be lived better. It doesn't come much better than that.

Coming Home

In terms of practising the art of thinking for myself, I nowadays regard my years in organised Buddhism with ambivalence. On the one hand, there was the notion of 'developing as an individual', plus the sense that things were not to be taken on blind faith, but on the basis of personal experience. This was one of the things that initially attracted me to Buddhist practice: it did not present a bundle of dogmas that had to be swallowed before you could move on. Compared to orthodox Christianity, this was liberation indeed, a deep breath of fresh air. Just get on with your meditation practice, your Buddhist texts, your sense of ethics. At least, that's what I thought.....

As time passed, I became increasingly aware that I had aligned myself with a particular tradition which arrived, as many traditions do, with a whole package of notions and attitudes, sort-of beliefs, really, which one was expected to sagely nod the head to. Some were genuinely spiritual, others more historical and cultural; sorting the wheat from the chaff proved exceedingly problematic. There was also the idea that there were other people around, more experienced and advanced than myself, and that these lofty beings should be listened to very carefully indeed, on a whole range of topics. On several occasions I was exhorted to give these wise folk 'the benefit of the doubt', a crafty approach which had the effect of discouraging serious personal evaluation. Needless to say, the benefit of the doubt was granted by myself more frequently than I sit comfortably with nowadays.

Moving out of this eventually constricting atmosphere into the wider alternative/independent culture of today was another breath of fresh air, to rival the one I had taken thirty years beforehand on first coming across Buddhism. I finally gave myself full and free rein to explore whatever I wanted to, believe whatever I felt to be true, without any reference point other than my own sense of what is 'growthful'. A real sense of personal empowerment and self-confidence has been the result. Over the past five or six years, not to beat about the bush, I have flourished.

Nowhere is this spirit of confidence in the discerning intelligence of the listener/reader exemplified better than on Red Ice Creations. 'We present, you decide' is the key phrase of Henrik Palmgren, Lana Lokteff, and the others at Red Ice. What balm! What liberation! 'We're going to give you all sorts of stuff to consider, and we have confidence in you to make up your own mind.'

So it is in this spirit that I include links to a couple of articles relevant to the topics of weather and climate. One concerns the fraudulent, underhand nature of human-made global warming panic-mongering. Similar articles appear somewhere or other nearly every day, but this one is particularly clear and concise. The second presents a particular take on the flooding of the Somerset Levels in England this winter.

But, but, but..... I can hear the protests already. One article is gleaned from a website that could be characterised as right-wing, heaven forbid. And the other is written by a former mainstream journalist who now does shamanism. So what? I say. In these dodgy times, we are in no position to allow personal preconceptions to obscure the voice of authenticity, whatever its source. Such personal prejudices are a luxury that we can ill afford to hang onto. Our mainstream sources of information are themselves unreliable and untrustworthy, underpinned by programmes and unspoken agendas. I have railed on Pale Green Vortex particularly loudly against the BBC and the Guardian, especially because of the unthinking belief that too many people still cling onto with regard to these sources of 'news'. Treat them as Henrik encourages us to view Red Ice; they present, we decide. That's all. Believe not a word without doing some background research of your own, without listening to the voice of intuition, without picking up a clear signal from your unique antennae of authenticity.

www.redicecreations.com/article.php?id=29071

www.redicecreations.com/article.php?id=29060


               

Hammer a Witch Modern-Style

I have long contended that the persecution of witches never really ended; it is just the form of persecution that changed. Burning women and torturing people in unimaginable ways in the name of the Inquisition was not a very clever long-term strategy. After a while, people begin to raise their eyebrows, complain quietly, stop being your friend. So a change of tactic is required: something more subtle, more softly-softly maybe.

The force that led to the persecution of witches shows itself in many ways today. There is the demonisation of so-called psychedelic-type plants and substances, a theme explored in various posts on Pale Green Vortex already. Then there is the matter of our physical health, a topic close to the heart of any bona fide witch. The draconian measures quietly implemented in the EU against plant and herbal remedies can be easily researched, should you be unfamiliar with the subject. The explicit aim: to protect the general public from exploitation by unscrupulous herbal people (read 'witches') with their unproven remedies. The real aims: to maintain a monopoly for Big Pharma in human health, and to eradicate any opposition to the materialist philosophy underpinning that monopoly.    

'Cancer: the Forbidden Cures' by Massimo Mazzucco is a film readily available through You Tube, and well worth watching (catch the complete, 92-minute version). The effectiveness or otherwise of the 'forbidden cures' covered in the film is not the main point here, and I am in no position to say much about them anyway. Most revealing is the manner (described in the first part of the film) in which the pharmaceutical giants took control of health care at the beginning of the twentieth century, establishing the paradigm that has remained in place ever since. They remain as jealous of their monopoly as ever - check out, using discernment and the ability to read between the lines, the aggressive dismissal of all the 'forbidden cures' on Wikipedia, for example. In the UK there exists the Cancer Act, which makes advertising anything outside the holy trinity of surgery, radiotherapy, and chemotherapy a criminal act. Again, the general public needs to be protected from manipulation, and from being given hope where none exists. Bloody hell, this general public seems so hopeless and stupid that it should all be lined up against the wall and shot, to put it out of its collective misery. Fortunately, there are some all-loving bodhisattvas around to take care of the interests of this idiotic general public. They utilise their undoubted superiority to great effect. You can find them in government, sitting as experts on panels, pocketing academic grants in universities, looking after the general public by compassionately sitting on boards of directors. Meanwhile, the fact remains that our modern drug producers don't have a clue as to what cancer really is, and can only repeat ad nauseam their holy trinity of crude solutions: chop it out, blast it out, or poison it.

At the end of the day, witch hunts, witch persecutions, are about our minds; the battle for our minds. Anything that challenges the mainstream paradigm of personal disempowerment is fair game. Any dissenting voice is the siren call of an evil witch, threatening to expose the Great Lie that underpins the mainstream. So I was interested to come across this article recently. Persecution of the witch extends across the entire board of our health: spiritual and psychological health (sacred plants, alternative therapies), physical health (forbidden and ridiculed cures) and mental health (defining the norm and removing whatever does not conform to that definition as being 'sick'. The Cuckoo's Nest is alive and well.....)

Yes, catch this:

www.redicecreations.com/article.php?id=28584


          

Thinly Coated With Dishonour?

The quoting of well-known people is a common device of writing across the board. It happens on Pale Green Vortex, and it happens almost everywhere else. A good quote can be invaluable: it may encapsulate in a few fine words what the writer has been struggling to put across in paragraph after tortured paragraph. It may wake up the reader with the concentrated power of a single sentence, or illumine a tricky subject with the use of humour, irony, or paradox. This is all just tickety-boo. But maybe - just maybe - another element can creep in from the shadows.....

There's the matter of having confidence in ones own voice. It should stand alone, its own justification, without requiring the rubber stamp of approval of the rich and/or the famous. Take Pale Green Vortex a couple of weeks back. Let's really make an oft-repeated point about the pernicious power of the media by rolling out a Pale Green Vortex hero in all his flawed magnificence, Jim Morrison. OK, but he has his detractors. Now let's bring on Naom Chomsky, who surely gets the nod from a goodly portion of Pale G. V. readers. And to round it all off, we'll bring out one of the really big guns - hey, it's Adolf Hitler!

So, quotes can be great but, as with everything, they are best received with an attitude of discernment.

Following this proviso, Pale Green Vortex happily presents a bit more from the lesser-known side of Jim Morrison....

'Death makes angels of us all, and gives us wings
where we had shoulders round as raven's claws.'

'People are afraid of themselves, of their own reality; their feelings most of all. People talk about how great love is, but that's bullshit. Love hurts. Feelings are disturbing.... Pain is meant to wake us up. People try to hide their pain. But they're wrong. Pain is something to carry, like a radio. You feel your strength in the experience of pain. It's all in how you carry it.... If you feel ashamed of (your feelings), and hide them, you're letting society destroy your reality.'         

'The most important kind of freedom is to be what you really are. You trade in your reality for a role. You trade in your sense for an act.... There can't be any large-scale revolution until there's a personal revolution, on an individual level. It's got to happen inside first.'

Thanks Jim.

Too Much Thought

Occasionally, the universe screams a message relentlessly in your ear. It could be during full-on conversation, or maybe just a chance remark or aside from a friend. Every book casually opened has the same story to tell. It's as if around every corner there's a packet of wisdom waiting to come and smack you in the face. 'Oi, you. Yes, you! Listen!'

This has been the case for me just recently. The refrain ringing in my inner ear has been this: 'Too much thought'. By 'thought' I here mean something quite precise. Thinking can take many forms, but in this instance it's the kind of thought that aims to sort things out, understand things so they all make sense and fit into a nice, neat package. You know where you stand, you know what you're doing, you're in control, and you can get on with life.

I have been aware for decades of the limits to thought in its purely linear cause-and-effect manifestation. It has its place, but no more. You can't think your way to enlightenment, and for this reason I consider the mystical approach, which emphasises direct personal experience, to be more relevant - we could almost say 'superior' - than the philosophical way; though philosophy also has its necessary place.

The 'sorting out' kind of thinking appears in different guises and levels of subtlety. It is, I observe, more prevalent among men than women. I have long since abandoned the hopeless and impossible task of trying to sort out the universe into a nice, neat, logically coherent whole. Got it, understand it, control it, have exorcised the demons of uncertainty. The chimera-like nature of this pursuit is hinted at by, however many of the western philosophers you may read, looking for 'the meaning of life', you will inevitably come away disappointed. Many have interesting, illuminating even, bits and pieces to say, but beyond that, no...  The thing is, the universe, reality, don't work like that. But I note that the question I posed recently, in the 'Gorillas and humans' post, about 'The demonstration or Zen?' as the approach to effective change in the world smacks of the same mentality. Looking for a blueprint; an over-arching principle that I can lay down onto the variegated multitude of events that present themselves in daily life. Maybe I can live without that; maybe it's not needed. It's something to experiment with. at least....

For an aspiring mystic, a major task is identifying and removing the 'veils of obscuration', as certain Buddhist traditions call them. Veils that obscure direct apprehension and experience. Beliefs are one such veil - they need to go, or at least be put to one side from time to time. 'Sorting out the universe' and 'blueprints for action' are another. All interpretation is something we lay on top of the infinite diversity of the universe. While we hold onto these interpretations, bound as they normally are by a linear, cause-and-effect way of seeing the world, we are merely boxing ourselves in. Confining ourselves to the shell of three dimensional material existence, while cutting off entries into other aspects of the universe, where synchronicity, for example, may be the norm. Put another way: if you believe that linear cause-and-affect is the only way the universe works, that's all you're likely to see.

Synchronicity - a mode of happening that is acausal in the normal sense, based on connectivity and outside linear time and space. You can put away the dominoes. It's actually there all the time. But you need to pull aside the veils first, before the wider universe can come shining in......

For myself, I shall attempt to stride boldly and courageously into every day afresh, free from blueprints, agendas, preconceptions. Face each new challenge in its uniqueness with fascination and intelligence. Let's see.....