There are loads of little, and not-so little, videos out there demonstrating the realities of the climate emergency mindfuck. Be afraid, brothers and sisters, be very afraid. The longer things go on, the more extreme and ridiculous the claims. In tandem, the less credible they become. Anyhow, this is just a little filler until I write the next post, which should be soon. In the meantime, keep on trembling in your boots. The climate emergency is real and upon us. Corbyn and Sturgeon have told us, so it must be true....
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l3Ve84pPs6o
Tuesday, 16 July 2019
Friday, 28 June 2019
Paradigm Shift....
Part One
'I think the true agenda of the old is the agenda of the left: more fairness and less profit; more restoration and less development; community care, not more prescriptions; restoration of nature, not more harvesting from it; ……. investment in schools to teach the young, not prisons that let them languish; more friendliness rather than user-friendly electronics; and peace, not guns.'
This is a quotation from James Hillman's book 'The Force of Character', focussing on aspects of what happens as we age. It was written as Hillman was an ageing citizen himself, and was published in 1999.
When I first came across this quote recently, 'by accident', I thought that it would well serve to illustrate the point of 'the paradigm shift'. As I've read it over and over, I've started to feel that it's just not a very good piece of thinking by Hillman. Anyhow, let's see how we go...…
We can ask what 'the left' is in the first place nowadays, and probably enter a period of dumbfounded silence. In Britain at least. But I shall suggest that 'left' and 'centre left' are the meat of the majority of mainstream politicians in positions of power, along with most of the mainstream media. Their lead comes from the more 'radical left', which core is a small minority of the total population, but whose influence is highly disproportionate. Having clarified, slightly, what we are talking about, now let's check out Hillman's characteristics of 'the left' from twenty years ago.
More fairness, less profit: today's 'left' are in large part middle-class, affluent people, typical of those who appear on BBC Breakfast programmes. They have done pretty well for themselves, but like to make snide comments about others. They are scathing about and dismissive of the people formerly represented by the left, ie more traditionally working class folk, people who do useful jobs like plumbing. Especially scathing if the proles do things like vote for Brexit.
More restoration, less development: our modern 'left' is as keen as anyone else on advancing 'development' such as plastering wild places with windfarms, destroying countryside with housing estates, and the rest. More profoundly, they seem to have a disdain for western civilisation in general, despite being products of it themselves. 'Restoration' is counter to their game. The same goes for 'restoration of nature, not more harvesting from it'. Much leftist environmental thinking is shallow, sometimes misguided, based on abstraction, ideology and hysteria rather than cool reflection.
Investment in schools to teach the young: education, under the rule of new left principles, has little to do with true education. Instead, it is largely indoctrination. It does not teach children to think and feel for themselves. It aims to churn out good, obedient, 'responsible' citizens. Children who are immune from the perils of 'wrongthink' 1984-style. Children who know all about their rights, about LGBT, who feel guilty about destroying the Amazon rainforest. They are not taught to be aspiring individual miracles, but to be little social justice warriors.
More friendliness rather than user-friendly electronics. Wrong again, Mr Hillman. 'Leftist' ideas spread like viruses through electronics. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube. They work, not through saying anything constructive or intelligent, since they have little constructive or intelligent to say. No. Their main game is attempting to destroy the reputations and careers of anybody who is bold enough to disagree with them. Name-calling, insulting, accusations of being this '-ist' or that '-phobe' are their stock-in-trade. 'Hate speech' is their catch-all meaningless favourite. Nothing is too low for them to try and discredit their opponents. It's started with Boris Johnson now. So predictable, so tiresome, so poisonous.
Part Two
The past twenty years or so has seen a vast paradigm shift. I tend to date the time when it really took off to the coronation of Dark Lord Tony Blair back in the late 1990s. There was a time when 'the left' did indeed stand for fairness, and for that most precious quality, freedom of speech. No more. The opposite is true. It seeks to smother dissent by calling out its catalogue of vague, mis-used categories of political correctness. Just call someone a far-right racist Islamophobe. Call them out for 'hate speech', when you are the one doing the hatred. That's all you need to do, almost regardless of what the object of your tirades might really be saying.
There is nothing very novel or clever about what I have just written. As far as Tony Blair goes, even Wicked-pedia concurs. "Blair declared support for a new conception that he referred to as 'social-ism', involving politics that recognised individuals as socially interdependent, and advocated social justice, cohesion, the equal worth of each citizen, and equal opportunity."
Social justice = constant pitting of different groups of people against each other, fuelling endless and unnecessary tensions. Cohesion = enforced conformity, apart from for the 'liberal elite, who do whatever they want. The equal worth of every citizen = all are equal, except that some are more equal than others. Equal opportunity = equal outcome, manipulated by law if need be.
So this is what is meant by the paradigm shift. It's glaringly obvious, but it's a trick still missed by a good many folk, of my generation in particular. Think 'socialism', 'left-wing', and they still think good old Uncle Michael Foot, looking after the working classes. No more. When people addicted to labels use the expressions 'right-wing' and 'left-wing', I no longer have any idea what they are talking about. The terms no longer fit.
And this is, maybe, one of the reasons why I am going on about this stuff again - and again, and again. There is this element, of calling out those deceiving bearers of darkness, who clothe ignorance and the wish to control others in the language of acceptability. Just call yourself a guardian of social justice and all will be well. But it is also a lament. A lament for so many of my generation. People who supported, fought for, even, the end to discriminations when such an end was needed. Who like to think they helped to usher in freedom of speech, who played their part in overturning a good deal of censorship. But these are people who have now got lost, who are stuck in the old paradigm, and have been easy meat for a new and very different kind of social shaping under the umbrella of 'left wing'. A new paradigm, where overcoming -isms and -phobias is no longer a pragmatic move in the direction of a more humane society. Where these have become something else: dogmas, ideologies, capable of never-ending exploitation in the service of nefarious ends.
There was a time when those championing the freedom of the individual looked to the left. No more. The 'radical left', the social justice warriors, are singularly intolerant, hell-bent on silencing anybody who happens to disagree with them. They are the vanguard of the society portrayed in Orwell's '1984'. The parallels are chilling. So I lament those of decent heart and good intent, who have been duped. I should not feel overmuch sympathy: it is blindness and laziness that permit such deception. But once more I find myself walking alone, my past reconsidered, let go of, drifting away into mists of personal antiquity. So be it. Like the magic phoenix, we may always arise afresh, anew.
Postscript: OK. This morning I discovered that I have an ally in all this; there is a like mind. Vladimir Putin. He gave an interview in the Kremlin just before heading off to the meeting of big boys and girls, in which he said that western-style liberalism is obsolete. 'Obsolete' is the perfect word, and I think he is talking about the same things as in this blog piece. In fact he articulates things extremely clearly in this interview. So, thanks Vlad.
Photos: The British working class.
Morrissey, a modern working class hero, that most rare of species.
'I think the true agenda of the old is the agenda of the left: more fairness and less profit; more restoration and less development; community care, not more prescriptions; restoration of nature, not more harvesting from it; ……. investment in schools to teach the young, not prisons that let them languish; more friendliness rather than user-friendly electronics; and peace, not guns.'
This is a quotation from James Hillman's book 'The Force of Character', focussing on aspects of what happens as we age. It was written as Hillman was an ageing citizen himself, and was published in 1999.
When I first came across this quote recently, 'by accident', I thought that it would well serve to illustrate the point of 'the paradigm shift'. As I've read it over and over, I've started to feel that it's just not a very good piece of thinking by Hillman. Anyhow, let's see how we go...…
We can ask what 'the left' is in the first place nowadays, and probably enter a period of dumbfounded silence. In Britain at least. But I shall suggest that 'left' and 'centre left' are the meat of the majority of mainstream politicians in positions of power, along with most of the mainstream media. Their lead comes from the more 'radical left', which core is a small minority of the total population, but whose influence is highly disproportionate. Having clarified, slightly, what we are talking about, now let's check out Hillman's characteristics of 'the left' from twenty years ago.
More fairness, less profit: today's 'left' are in large part middle-class, affluent people, typical of those who appear on BBC Breakfast programmes. They have done pretty well for themselves, but like to make snide comments about others. They are scathing about and dismissive of the people formerly represented by the left, ie more traditionally working class folk, people who do useful jobs like plumbing. Especially scathing if the proles do things like vote for Brexit.
More restoration, less development: our modern 'left' is as keen as anyone else on advancing 'development' such as plastering wild places with windfarms, destroying countryside with housing estates, and the rest. More profoundly, they seem to have a disdain for western civilisation in general, despite being products of it themselves. 'Restoration' is counter to their game. The same goes for 'restoration of nature, not more harvesting from it'. Much leftist environmental thinking is shallow, sometimes misguided, based on abstraction, ideology and hysteria rather than cool reflection.
Investment in schools to teach the young: education, under the rule of new left principles, has little to do with true education. Instead, it is largely indoctrination. It does not teach children to think and feel for themselves. It aims to churn out good, obedient, 'responsible' citizens. Children who are immune from the perils of 'wrongthink' 1984-style. Children who know all about their rights, about LGBT, who feel guilty about destroying the Amazon rainforest. They are not taught to be aspiring individual miracles, but to be little social justice warriors.
More friendliness rather than user-friendly electronics. Wrong again, Mr Hillman. 'Leftist' ideas spread like viruses through electronics. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube. They work, not through saying anything constructive or intelligent, since they have little constructive or intelligent to say. No. Their main game is attempting to destroy the reputations and careers of anybody who is bold enough to disagree with them. Name-calling, insulting, accusations of being this '-ist' or that '-phobe' are their stock-in-trade. 'Hate speech' is their catch-all meaningless favourite. Nothing is too low for them to try and discredit their opponents. It's started with Boris Johnson now. So predictable, so tiresome, so poisonous.
Part Two
The past twenty years or so has seen a vast paradigm shift. I tend to date the time when it really took off to the coronation of Dark Lord Tony Blair back in the late 1990s. There was a time when 'the left' did indeed stand for fairness, and for that most precious quality, freedom of speech. No more. The opposite is true. It seeks to smother dissent by calling out its catalogue of vague, mis-used categories of political correctness. Just call someone a far-right racist Islamophobe. Call them out for 'hate speech', when you are the one doing the hatred. That's all you need to do, almost regardless of what the object of your tirades might really be saying.
There is nothing very novel or clever about what I have just written. As far as Tony Blair goes, even Wicked-pedia concurs. "Blair declared support for a new conception that he referred to as 'social-ism', involving politics that recognised individuals as socially interdependent, and advocated social justice, cohesion, the equal worth of each citizen, and equal opportunity."
Social justice = constant pitting of different groups of people against each other, fuelling endless and unnecessary tensions. Cohesion = enforced conformity, apart from for the 'liberal elite, who do whatever they want. The equal worth of every citizen = all are equal, except that some are more equal than others. Equal opportunity = equal outcome, manipulated by law if need be.
So this is what is meant by the paradigm shift. It's glaringly obvious, but it's a trick still missed by a good many folk, of my generation in particular. Think 'socialism', 'left-wing', and they still think good old Uncle Michael Foot, looking after the working classes. No more. When people addicted to labels use the expressions 'right-wing' and 'left-wing', I no longer have any idea what they are talking about. The terms no longer fit.
And this is, maybe, one of the reasons why I am going on about this stuff again - and again, and again. There is this element, of calling out those deceiving bearers of darkness, who clothe ignorance and the wish to control others in the language of acceptability. Just call yourself a guardian of social justice and all will be well. But it is also a lament. A lament for so many of my generation. People who supported, fought for, even, the end to discriminations when such an end was needed. Who like to think they helped to usher in freedom of speech, who played their part in overturning a good deal of censorship. But these are people who have now got lost, who are stuck in the old paradigm, and have been easy meat for a new and very different kind of social shaping under the umbrella of 'left wing'. A new paradigm, where overcoming -isms and -phobias is no longer a pragmatic move in the direction of a more humane society. Where these have become something else: dogmas, ideologies, capable of never-ending exploitation in the service of nefarious ends.
There was a time when those championing the freedom of the individual looked to the left. No more. The 'radical left', the social justice warriors, are singularly intolerant, hell-bent on silencing anybody who happens to disagree with them. They are the vanguard of the society portrayed in Orwell's '1984'. The parallels are chilling. So I lament those of decent heart and good intent, who have been duped. I should not feel overmuch sympathy: it is blindness and laziness that permit such deception. But once more I find myself walking alone, my past reconsidered, let go of, drifting away into mists of personal antiquity. So be it. Like the magic phoenix, we may always arise afresh, anew.
Postscript: OK. This morning I discovered that I have an ally in all this; there is a like mind. Vladimir Putin. He gave an interview in the Kremlin just before heading off to the meeting of big boys and girls, in which he said that western-style liberalism is obsolete. 'Obsolete' is the perfect word, and I think he is talking about the same things as in this blog piece. In fact he articulates things extremely clearly in this interview. So, thanks Vlad.
Photos: The British working class.
Morrissey, a modern working class hero, that most rare of species.
Saturday, 15 June 2019
Western Civilisation and the Ivory Towers
It's been a sporadic yet persistent theme on Pale Green Vortex over the years: how western civilisation has, in my mind at least, often fallen short. Specifically:
- The prevailing scientific materialistic view of modern times. This is an extremely partial view of the universe, effectively disconnecting humanity from much of what it requires in order to discover its own deeper nature and purpose. To become properly human, we could say.
- The suppression and persecution of those who have stood up against the dominant paradigms of the time. Persecution of Gnostics, Cathars, 'pagans', witches, and any other type of heretic in the eyes of Christian authorities. In more recent times, orthodoxy has passed from mainstream Christianity onto a certain political elite, and our modern heretics are more likely to be those at odds with the whims of these ruling elites. We see the attempted silencing of certain individuals who dare to think outside the box of pseudo-liberal globalism with its various dogmas and creeds (climate change emergency, multiculturalism, etc).
- The way in which notions such as democracy, freedom of speech, freedom of the individual, have all too often proven to be a sham, a cosmetic veneer on a darker agenda. A dominant programme through the ages has been that of 'Empire'.
All of this still stands. The history of western civilisation is frequently messy, sometimes awful and painful to investigate. It is a deeply imperfect thing. I feel that the moment has come, however, to look at the other side of the coin. To emphasise the unique and most precious aspects to this imperfect thing. Qualities which it is well worth making the effort to cherish and preserve.
A most obvious example. Were it not for this 'western civilisation', I would not be sitting here writing this; and you wouldn't be sitting there reading it. Enterprise, ingenuity; freedom of the individual. OK, we all know about exploitation, colonialism, etc, in fact I'm sick and tired of hearing about them. As if no group of people ever behaved badly towards another group before. But amidst all this has run this thread of democracy and freedom, this other aspect to western culture.
It is within the context of this particular culture that I have been able to lead my own rather unorthodox life, sometimes not without some difficulty, but nevertheless fairly much as I have wanted. I haven't been locked away for it as yet. I have been able to research and investigate an entire range of subjects which have assisted me no end, thanks to printing and modern internet technology. All of this is the fruit of this western spirit; I am deeply grateful.
Yet these freedoms which, though battered and bruised, are characteristic of one side of western civilisation, are fragile. Over the past decade or so, I have seen them attacked and eroded again and again; it's a process which I see accelerating and growing more vicious as the days pass. It is as if we are fast approaching some kind of Armageddon, and power-mongers are desperate to close down our hard-won and precious freedoms. They are freedoms which some take for granted, and others simply do not appreciate. Other cultures extant today do not enshrine these values to the same extent, to my knowledge at least. Our freedoms are worth cherishing, and fighting for if need be.
Part Two
That I not only spent three years studying at Oxford University, but came out with a high grade degree, is news which receives a variety of reactions from the unprepared, all of them inappropriate, and reflecting more the assumptions of the individuals concerned than anything about this type of university.
I occasionally receive bulletins, magazines, newsletters, by post and online, from the university and from the particular college I attended, Hertford. I frequently wonder about cancelling the whole lot; but then I consider some more, and continue. It's called 'what's the enemy getting up to now?'.
Oxford has long given up any pretence at being a centre of higher learning. Such status was always a little doubtful, but now it's transparent. Instead, the university is devoted almost entirely to cultural programming and social engineering. Brainwashing on behalf of the elites, mind-control of the plebs. Some readers of this blog would, I suspect, find it a real eye-opener to see what bilge is put forth in the name of 'edyookayshun'. It reads like a leaflet for the globalist paradigm, hating things like Trump and Brexit with the same insistent venom as does the BBC.
My most recent post discussed the magic twins of dorje and bell, and the mess which can ensue if one or the other goes missing. But what happens if both of them go absent at the same time? This is the moment when we need to creep along the corridors of academia, climb the dark winding stairway to the top of the ivory tower, to discover who and what are lurking there.
The May edition of 'Oxford Alumni' magazine contained an article written by one Amanda Power, Professor in Medieval History at this august centre of learning. It was entitled 'Should Notre Dame be restored?' "Most people have assumed that the cathedral should be lovingly restored" the article gurgles on, "but should we let it stand as a symbol of the damage that our climate denial and environmental entitlement have already caused the planet?"
And so it drones on. And on. And on. Is there no end to the expiation of guilt that certain elite sections of society require from its western inhabitants; a guilt that is unique to this particular culture, I suggest, and is its Achilles heel. The majority of academics are oblivious to what they bring to their 'academic studies', the monsters that lurk in their own swamp. In this state of ignorance they are easy meat for promoting agendas, all the while thinking they are being brainy and 'objective'. And doesn't our Professor in Medieval History get the irony of her wailing and bemoaning the awfulness of western culture as it has rolled down the centuries? That, without this particular culture, she wouldn't be doing what she's doing, sitting smug and righteous in her academic privilege. She would be nowhere.
Note the not-very academic and objective language used by our medieval historian: 'climate denial'; 'environmental entitlement'. The comparing of climate change sceptics to holocaust deniers is a topic gone into so frequently, I'm not going there now. But this is the great one, really. Climate change science is not done and dusted. It isn't. It isn't! It's only the lamestream media, ideologically invested politicians, and idiotic one-eyed academics who say so. You don't have to be a bloody conspiracy theorist to see that, either. The info is all out there, not difficult to find, but folk dependent on their BBC/Guardian world won't go there, it's too threatening.
I was at least pleased to see that the article received a goodly number of robust rebuttals from less blinkered alumni in the 'Comments' section.
Part Three
I hadn't intended to do this; in truth, it's a bit of a rant, and I am not proud of that. Nevertheless, if it succeeds in pointing out how most academia should not be revered, or taken very seriously at all, then it might be worth it. This is actually the subtext of my years at Oxford. I witnessed first-hand how academia is, in general, populated by people who are not to be hugely respected. Lots of active, clever brains, but working within a small, pre-organised box. I needed to come out of university and into the alternative culture of the 1970s before I encountered people who I could take seriously. So I have this advantage: academics can't pull the wool over my eyes.
This month, June 2019, I received another missive from Oxford, my online 'Hertford College News'. In this, we were encouraged to watch the TED talk delivered by a college alumnus, one Carole Cadwalladr. In this talk, apparently (I'm not intending to actually watch it...), 'She digs into one of the most perplexing events in recent times: the UK's super-close 2016 vote to leave the EU.'
It's not perplexing! It's only perplexing because you've got your over-sized academic brain stuck in the sand. Anyhow, it seems that Carole has it all sorted. 'A barrage of misleading Facebook ads' placed by pro-Brexiteers is the culprit, we are informed.
It was a vote, the majority elected to leave the EU, end of story, get over it. If it were the other way round, such a theory would be ridiculed as a 'conspiracy theory'. It is the reaction to the Brexit vote, with so many people showing up as bad losers, that is the real threat to this country, not leaving the EU. It is here that our hard-won and shaky freedoms are endangered. People unwilling to accept the democratic process when it doesn't go their own way. It's as simple and as childish as that.
Also this month turned up 'Oxford Alumni' again. There is some very important research being carried out, I am informed. "A group of Oxford researchers have seized on the divisive nature of Donald Trump and his inauguration ceremony to examine how different emotional responses to public rituals can effect group bonds."
Don't forget, folks, this I one of the planet's top universities. And that there are people out there getting good money for doing this stuff....
'Divisive': it's one of those words, really. Its meaning in the dictionary in front of me is 'tending to cause disunity and dissension.' Neutral, really: a statement of an objective reality. Some things just cause disunity, it's part of how the universe works. Its connotation over time, however, has become negative: 'intending to cause disunity and dissension.' Trouble-making; perverse enjoyment of creating schism; polar opposition to new age-y harmony and light.
'Trump' and 'divisive'. How often do those two words turn up in the same breath? The guy's just that, apparently, a cosmic troublemaker. And in the hands of a Jeremy Corbyn, the word 'divisive' reaches its nadir. As part of Corbyn's own divisive behaviour during Trump's recent visit to the UK, he recently complained about Trump's 'divisive views on trade, immigration, human rights, and climate change.' In the hands of a Jeremy Corbyn, the word takes on its vulgar modern meaning: 'divisive' simply means something or somebody I disagree with. Discussion, debate, difference of opinion, become divisive. Thus we arrive at the state of 'forced consensus' and modern totalitarianism.
Trump's views on 'climate change' are fluid, but not divisive. He just happens to disagree with the orthodox views which, as mentioned above, are lies. That 'the science is decided', and that there is 'scientific consensus'. This is all untrue, and you don't need to be a master detective to find that out. But disagree with this piece of charlatanism, and you will be called 'divisive' and worse.
A blog friend recently commented that I should propose a few solutions to some of the ills I write about. In truth, I feel no obligation to do so; a difficulty is a difficulty, and the first step is facing up to that possibly unpalatable reality. In this case, however, there is a simple solution: academics should begin to be proper academics, not lackeys to a toxic socio-political programme. And academic institutions should do the same. Piece of cake, problem solved. The only thing is that it most likely ain't gonna happen. Academia, journalists, establishment politicians, 'far-left activists', legacy media 'newspapers' and television channels: they are all the same thing, really. Fully paid-up members of the same club, the same international mafia. Part of the One Real Conspiracy. Just remember that the next time you read that 'research has shown…..' or 'scientists have discovered.....' Don't be impressed, don't be impressed.
Monday, 3 June 2019
Dorje Chang and Idiot Compassion
Dorje Chang - or Vajradhara in Sanskrit, though I always prefer the sound of the Tibetan. He is the Adi-Buddha, the Primordial Buddha. Dharmakaya. He is everything and nothing at all. In his being all dualities are resolved, all paradoxes swallowed into a single form of beauty. Neither Oneness nor Multiplicity can get a hold, both turning out to be simultaneously phantoms and mirror-image aspects of reality.
The bell and the vajra: these are Dorje Chang's twin symbols, the magical implements that he wields, his weapons of gnosis. One in each hand, typically crossed in front of his heart, just to emphasise their centrality to all that he is.
The primordial consciousness of Dorje Chang splits into these twin aspects, these two arms, bearing the bell and the vajra. The one becomes two, and the two becomes one. The eternal dance of reality, the inseparability of spirit and world, of heart and mind, each a mirror of the other.
The primordial consciousness, the godhead if you will, split and sundered into two. Between them, the vajra and bell encompass everything. They are the great divide, into duality, but just one small step from Buddha.
Vajra: masculine, head, thought; sun, day, wisdom. Being, Siva.
Bell: feminine, heart, body, feeling; moon, night, love. Becoming, Shakti.
The sounding of the bell, the wielding of the diamond-hard vajra: this is also the call, the invitation, for kundalini. It is her wake-up call, for her to arouse from her slumber and uncoil herself. She, sacred serpent of the one-in-two and the two-in-one.
Wisdom and compassion entwined is how the Buddhist texts put it. Sounds a bit abstract and heady, that's all. Maybe better to think of it as Siva and Shakti, in ecstatic embrace, simultaneously in eternal union and everlasting separation.
Part Two
As above, so below. As in the figure of Dorje Chang, so in the affairs of human beings. This is the essence of mystical perception and experience. It is a trickle-down, and a trickle up, I suppose. Sacred correspondence. The individual needs to align sufficiently with 'higher reality' in order for that higher reality to begin to flow into, within, and through their being.
In this case, the task is to mirror the totality of Dorje Chang, along with the great union of vajra and bell, in the lives of human beings, both individually and collectively. To aspire to see the diamond wisdom of vajra and the great love of bell in tandem is a worthy road map for human endeavour.
"Compassion without understanding is not compassion." The words jumped at me the moment I heard them spoken. It is a quotation steeped in wisdom. It speaks of Dorje Chang, of the inseparable nature of the bell and vajra. For they are inseparable, two mirror reflections of the singularity of Dorje Chang and of each other. One without the other is useless, or worse, destructive, quite possibly disastrous. Incompleteness imagining itself as whole: tragedy.
"Compassion without understanding is not compassion." These were not the words of a great Buddhist sage, a Nying-ma lama in rich attire addressing an audience of devout followers. Nor of any other wise teacher or guru with a woolly beard. They were spoken, during her 'prelude talk' to 'Borderless' entitled 'Changing my mind on immigration' by Lauren Southern. A talk, by the by, during which she possesses the dignity and humility to do what many-a so-called great guru is incapable of doing: to admit that maybe she got things a little bit wrong.
"Compassion without understanding is not compassion." Rather less charitably, I refer to it as 'idiot compassion'. It is an insight reflected similarly in the old proverb 'The road to hell is paved with good intentions.'
How so? How can it be? Surely 'compassion' is a good, great, and wonderful thing. Depends. As once noted, you can use a knife to spread peanut butter on a slice of bread, or you can use it to stab someone and kill them.
Scattered across the posts on Pale G.V. are references to the obverse: understanding, or at least thought, without heart or feeling is not wisdom. Much of the academic world is filled with people of this type, who end up creating all manner of ridiculous proposal. That gender is a purely social construct, for example. This is 'idea' totally devoid of heart, soul, intuition, common sense, decent eyesight. Try the simple 'clothes-off' test for starters. Or, if that's not your cup of tea, watch a top tennis match between two women, followed by one between two men.
Yet because, oh wow!, they happen to have got a job at some university or other, these academics are well placed to have their stupid theories and theorems taken seriously. Dragon's head, snake's body (with due respect to all snakes out there).
But it's the same with compassion that lacks understanding. In the context of 'Borderless', it's a matter of good-hearted but blind sentiment driving a European immigrant situation which all too often benefits neither immigrant nor indigene. Promoted enthusiastically by people carried away by words and sentiment, without a serious care for the complex and sometimes heart-breaking consequences of their proposed actions.
Who 'open borders' immigration does benefit are folk who singularly lack compassion, but who have a well-developed 'understanding' of what will help their own dark, self-serving ends. But heart without understanding can be applied to other circumstances typical of western cultures as well, where the enthusiasts for political correctness in its various forms, victim culture, are doing less of a favour to society than they delude themselves they are doing.
Compassion without understanding provides the fuel for the wolf in sheep's clothing who stalks the corridors of politics and power. If there are dark forces at work behind the scenes, nefarious beings rolling out programmes intended to disempower, then 'compassion without understanding' provides the perfect fuel for such endeavours. Entire populations will unwarily sign up to attitudes which they believe are for the great benefit and betterment of humanity, while nothing could be further from the truth.
A little picture of Dorje Chang on the bedroom wall, and a daily check that both vajra and bell are intact, polished and gleaming brightly together, might go a long way...…
Monday, 27 May 2019
Borderless
It was Paris that really did it for me. I had occasion to visit that city a number of times three, four, five years ago. Short trips, several days, staying with relatives of a very good friend of my wife near Metro Dupleix, fifteen minutes' stroll from the Seine. An opportunity to spend a little time with a certain excellent friend before he parted this world.
Ah, Paris. City of dreams, of romance in the spring. What a mess. It was horrible. The thing is that nobody, but nobody, seemed happy. Actually, that is not quite true. We ate once in a Turkish restaurant where the staff were pretty chirpy. But for the rest....
Paris seemed to be a city of uptight: in the streets, on the trains, everywhere. White Parisians all on edge. 'Les noirs', both immigrants and indigenous French, looked either suicidal (the introverts) or like they wanted to kill someone (the extraverts). North African and Near Eastern folk either worked to the bone and exhausted, or sulky and hostile-looking. Romanians hanging around in groups on street corners, or trying to swindle money from gullible tourists near the Eiffel Tower. They'd have been better off back in Bucharest.
What, oh what, had happened to this city? In London, things can appear passable, provided you are in that kind of mood. Maybe the outlook there is, and always has been, a little more genuinely cosmopolitan. But this? This mess? As I perceived it, nothing less than something of a human tragedy.
And amongst it all arose the question: what about the French politicians? The EU? Here we were, at the heart of the European dream; the European dream which is so convinced of its rightness that it sees fit to control, rule, regulate, interfere, in every nook and cranny of human life. Yet here, just where they are, maybe for once, actually needed, and they just stand back and do nothing. Let it all happen; let this mess simply unfold, or rather spill messily all over the floor. Something is up, though what exactly...… And that meagre portion of my soul which actually extends its reach beyond the narrow confines of my own petty interests into those of others' hearts and souls wept. Something very bad, very inhuman, was going on somewhere. The official narrative was just crap, or lies.
'Borderless' turned up just a couple of days ago. It already has over half a million views on YouTube, and this despite YouTube apparently trying to delete it. In fact, this attempt at censorship of inconvenient points of view backfired, as the 'censored' tag immediately got all kind of people interested who otherwise would never have heard of the film. Don't you just love it when 'silencing' people backfires?
'Borderless' is that rarity of rarities, a documentary which is actually based on direct, on-the-ground investigative work. Unlike the normal nonsensical collage of suspect press releases and Facebook posts from dodgy sources.
The film is Lauren Southern's documentary about immigration of the unofficial kind into Europe. It is, I submit, a courageous enterprise, and she is to be lauded. Lauren bends over backwards to simply present what she discovered to be happening on the ground, carefully avoiding theories about how and why this has all unfolded, thereby not leaving herself open to accusations of being a conspiracy nut by highly-invested parties (a caution that is not always observed here on Pale G.V.).
We all recommend this film highly - something which happens rarely hereabouts. Put aside ninety minutes and watch. It is, in the end, a documentary of compassion. And a note for those who still cling onto the 'payback time' justification for Europe taking unlimited oceans of people from other cultures: see some of the countries featured in the film which are deeply affected by the phenomenon. Turkey, Bulgaria, Greece, and a particularly poignant section on Ireland near the end of the film. These are not the big bad white European baddies of anti-Europe ideology. I never learned about the wicked Bulgarian Empire in school. I suppose you could make a case for Greece, but you need to go back to Alexander the Great, which is stretching things, even for ideological fanatics.
I include a link to Bitchute as well as YouTube, just in case the self-righteous ones have another go…..
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZQ_fz9EW5lw
https://www.bitchute.com/video/ZQ_fz9EW5lw/
And if you find, as I've just done, that neither of the links work (probably my fault...), go to either YouTube or Bitchute and put in 'Lauren Southern Borderless'. No problem. Fred Flintstone-style always gets you there in the end.... I trust you will find it worth doing.
Ah, Paris. City of dreams, of romance in the spring. What a mess. It was horrible. The thing is that nobody, but nobody, seemed happy. Actually, that is not quite true. We ate once in a Turkish restaurant where the staff were pretty chirpy. But for the rest....
Paris seemed to be a city of uptight: in the streets, on the trains, everywhere. White Parisians all on edge. 'Les noirs', both immigrants and indigenous French, looked either suicidal (the introverts) or like they wanted to kill someone (the extraverts). North African and Near Eastern folk either worked to the bone and exhausted, or sulky and hostile-looking. Romanians hanging around in groups on street corners, or trying to swindle money from gullible tourists near the Eiffel Tower. They'd have been better off back in Bucharest.
What, oh what, had happened to this city? In London, things can appear passable, provided you are in that kind of mood. Maybe the outlook there is, and always has been, a little more genuinely cosmopolitan. But this? This mess? As I perceived it, nothing less than something of a human tragedy.
And amongst it all arose the question: what about the French politicians? The EU? Here we were, at the heart of the European dream; the European dream which is so convinced of its rightness that it sees fit to control, rule, regulate, interfere, in every nook and cranny of human life. Yet here, just where they are, maybe for once, actually needed, and they just stand back and do nothing. Let it all happen; let this mess simply unfold, or rather spill messily all over the floor. Something is up, though what exactly...… And that meagre portion of my soul which actually extends its reach beyond the narrow confines of my own petty interests into those of others' hearts and souls wept. Something very bad, very inhuman, was going on somewhere. The official narrative was just crap, or lies.
'Borderless' turned up just a couple of days ago. It already has over half a million views on YouTube, and this despite YouTube apparently trying to delete it. In fact, this attempt at censorship of inconvenient points of view backfired, as the 'censored' tag immediately got all kind of people interested who otherwise would never have heard of the film. Don't you just love it when 'silencing' people backfires?
'Borderless' is that rarity of rarities, a documentary which is actually based on direct, on-the-ground investigative work. Unlike the normal nonsensical collage of suspect press releases and Facebook posts from dodgy sources.
The film is Lauren Southern's documentary about immigration of the unofficial kind into Europe. It is, I submit, a courageous enterprise, and she is to be lauded. Lauren bends over backwards to simply present what she discovered to be happening on the ground, carefully avoiding theories about how and why this has all unfolded, thereby not leaving herself open to accusations of being a conspiracy nut by highly-invested parties (a caution that is not always observed here on Pale G.V.).
We all recommend this film highly - something which happens rarely hereabouts. Put aside ninety minutes and watch. It is, in the end, a documentary of compassion. And a note for those who still cling onto the 'payback time' justification for Europe taking unlimited oceans of people from other cultures: see some of the countries featured in the film which are deeply affected by the phenomenon. Turkey, Bulgaria, Greece, and a particularly poignant section on Ireland near the end of the film. These are not the big bad white European baddies of anti-Europe ideology. I never learned about the wicked Bulgarian Empire in school. I suppose you could make a case for Greece, but you need to go back to Alexander the Great, which is stretching things, even for ideological fanatics.
I include a link to Bitchute as well as YouTube, just in case the self-righteous ones have another go…..
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZQ_fz9EW5lw
https://www.bitchute.com/video/ZQ_fz9EW5lw/
And if you find, as I've just done, that neither of the links work (probably my fault...), go to either YouTube or Bitchute and put in 'Lauren Southern Borderless'. No problem. Fred Flintstone-style always gets you there in the end.... I trust you will find it worth doing.
Tuesday, 21 May 2019
White Trash
Part One
Sadly, we inhabit a world where the version of life pumped out in the mainstream is institutionally prejudiced, chronically so. Racism, sexism, and the rest are rife. This can be amply demonstrated by the simple application of the call-and-response test:
'Proud to be black!' 'Right on, brother.'
'Proud to be woman!' 'All power to you, sister!'
'Proud to be gay!' 'So you should be. Go for it!'
'Proud to be white!' 'Racist! Supremacist! Nazi! And you're banned from Facebook from today.'
From the outset, we should note that all of this has little to do with the vast majority of people, be they black, white, purple, female, male, both, neither, or anything else. It is all to do with a certain ideological view of the world, pushed relentlessly like a drug by politicians and their partners-in-crime in the mainstream media. It is a bunch of bullshit, to quote Jim Morrison, but is aimed to befuddle and stupefy. It is a bad-smelling veil placed over the magical spontaneity of natural existence.
Two particularly curious facts stand out concerning this phenomenon. Firstly, although the hymn book states that it is all about promoting peace, harmony, equality everywhere, its effects are the opposite. It fuels resentments, stirs up strife, bad feeling, by constantly appealing to the baser sides of people's group identities, then pitting them against one another in the mould of victims and perpetrators. And secondly, this white-loathing doctrine is largely promoted by …. white people.
For myself, all this nonsense has had little effect personally; though it would be naïve to assume that will continue to be the case indefinitely. As a white English-born male who, for those keen on such labelling, comes with a middle-class background, I have my feet firmly planted at the bottom of the pile. Frankly, who cares? I get up in the morning, look at the sky and give thanks, before getting on with being who I am and doing what I do. On a social level, however, especially in the high-density urban environments which I have done my level-best to escape, it is toxic, creating social strife and doing great harm.
Having said that, there was one moment when the 'trashy white male' motif did get to me. It was back in the 1980s - the 'white European culture is bad' notion is not new - and ironically involves my time as a 'this is my passport to freedom' Buddhist. It was a meeting with a considerable number of fellow Buddhists, on a grim, grey January (?) Sunday. In Bethnal Green, East London. As well as our centres in Europe and other 'white culture' places, we had a growing number in India. Now, some of we British Buddhists didn't always come up to the mark. We - me included - tended to get despondent, ask lots of questions, have lots of doubts, take our highly complex personal psychology very seriously, and generally act miserably. We were a source of frustration for those few who really wanted to build a great Buddhist movement quickly and efficiently. A few of we western Buddhists would make the journey to India to help out. Those who went east would return with tales to tell.
So it was the thing at the time. At this particular meeting, one recent returner was regaling us all with details of his experiences. Of how, unlike we spoilt children of the western world, our Indian counterparts were always smiling, always friendly, always helpful, never getting tied up in their personal psychology. 'We' had everything while 'they' had nothing, but look at their positivity. What nobody mentioned (in fairness because they probably didn't know) was that, after a hard day's work smiling and being positive, half these Indians went home in the evening and beat up their wives.
Part Two
After you've had your centuries of exploiting us, it's our turn now. It's payback time, white boy. Such are the excuses sometimes put forward for putting the European white male at the bottom of the pile. I have heard these sentiments on many occasions. It's like a socially-fashioned karma (it's the universe that sees to karma, not humans, dummy. Whatever....). And it's not exactly white skin that's being got at - it's a particular culture, western culture, western civilisation. The root of all evil.
This is all mendacious nonsense from a number of angles. It's group identitarianism at its grossest. The idea of group karma is dodgy, reducing everybody to robotic units. I never exploited people in far-off countries, neither did my parents or anybody else on my family tree, from what I can tell.
In the USA reparation is the thing, I believe. Compensation to black people for the wrongs afforded by slavery (it might be rude to point this out, but slavery was abolished quite a long time ago). This continues to today, as a section of white American population's misplaced and irrational guilt complex seems to know no bounds. As a matter of fact, roughly 2% of white Americans of the time owned slaves. Which means a healthy 98% were stuck in the same boat as everyone else regardless of race, colour, favourite vegetable, or anything else.
Meanwhile, back here in Europe; in the UK; in Scotland. It's pretty much the same story.
Well south of where I live is found Glencoe, a great mountain cleft famed for things both light and dark. The glen eventually disgorges onto Rannoch Moor, a wide expanse of peat, bog, lochans which sparkle when the suns deigns to shine, and which ripple in the almost omnipresent wind. At the far side you encounter the enormous expanse of water that is Blackwater Reservoir. Like a long finger it extends eastwards, held in perilous check by the Blackwater dam.
The building of this astonishing piece dates to 1899 - 1900. Huge numbers of navvies were enlisted from all over, but Scotland and Ireland mainly, to carry out the work. Conditions were by all accounts appalling, with rude lodgings in the worst weather that Scotland could throw at you, and work undertaken for wages that amounted to next-to nothing. Such was the unremitting cruelty of life at the dam that a goodly number of workers perished under the conditions. There is even a graveyard to those who died, each individual marked with a rude headstone comprising a piece of local stone, which was opened up next to the reservoir to deal with the number of dead.
Follow the river flowing into the reservoir east for another short while and you arrive at the West Highland railway line. This was constructed a few years before the reservoir, in the early 1890s. It is a triumph of engineering, cutting its way through a variety of hostile environments as it snakes its way north then westwards. To cross Rannoch Moor, it is essentially floated. Like the dam, the railway was built under conditions which are, for me, unimaginable. Another hefty tally of deaths as a result of accident or mere extremeness of conditions. Further south, in Arrochar, is a graveyard to those 37 navvies who died during construction.
All of which I relate to make a simple point. All kinds of people have been treated badly - terribly - by other people at all times and all over the place. It is not a case of nasty white men having a go at nice black people, with some compensatory mechanism required. No. This is a political weapon, no more. If a generalisation is to be made, it concerns a minority of human beings behaving badly towards others in pursuit of their own ends. Whether those misused ones are black, white, or striped, is a matter of little concern.
In the dark corners of Highland history there is also the little matter of the Clearances with their forced emigration in the eighteenth century. Another example of white people behaving badly towards other white people.
Part Three
Well, it's been a bit of a rollercoaster over recent blog pieces, up hill and down dale. The pulse of energy which has connected these writings may be in the process of exhausting itself - or maybe not. Over recent times I have found myself increasingly guided by intuition. I have learnt to listen to this aspect of my being, and it invariably knows better than 'I' do what to do and what not to do. Or, more accurately, I have learnt to trust this faculty: it has always been at work, but I have been insufficiently aware of its presence, or viewed it with suspicion. It has been foremost in the writing of these bits and pieces. An inner voice has instructed me to dip into a certain pot, and here we are...
It all kicked off with freedom of speech, freedom of action, freedom to say what you think and feel. How this is the social atmosphere most conducive to spiritual gnosis, to discovering ones own uniqueness and its own unique connection with 'the divine'. Not to mention the basis of a positive human society (don't ask me to define what I mean by that...). This in turn led to the topic of censoring and shutting people up on social media, a phenomenon that has been rampant and accelerating no end over recent times. I avoid Facebook, Twitter, and similar like the plague, but many people do not. It is clear that a certain type of person is being targeted for silencing, and that a certain type of person is most zealous in this ignoble activity. Who the good guys are and who the bad has required a certain personal revision.
One element in all this is my difficulty in absorbing that some people really are nasty, and they are not necessarily the people who are portrayed as such in mainstream. To try and silence another person because you disagree with them and you think they might steal some votes which you'd like to have in upcoming elections is simply in my book downright nasty. Not acceptable in a properly human world, and one which likes to throw around words like 'democracy' and 'freedom'.
Most people who I know are decent folk, who value honesty, have a certain respect for individual differences, and are in possession of a certain integrity. So it comes as a bit of a shock that there are others who are not like that at all. Top of the list come most mainstream media, some politicians of a 'socialist' bent (noticeable in the UK: certain Labour Party members are at the forefront of this selective silencing, and they aren't even in government! Heaven help us if they win an election), some people who attract the tag 'far left', and some who consider themselves as 'social justice warriors' (SJWs to those in the know).
Somewhere in among all this I began to look into the phenomenon of Tommy Robinson, as the most reviled Britain of all by mainstream media. He and Trump are the twin horns of the mainstream media. 'Far-right racist thug' is the typical label. Nasty guy, it seems. So I decided to check him out a bit. I watched his address to the Oxford Union. I checked out his news website. I read his autobiography, 'Enemy of the State' (well, most of it). And you know what? He's not like that at all. Not really.
'Racist?' Seeing as how loads of his friends seem to be black, and he has fans and followers across the globe, not exactly. Thug? Well, by his own admission, he was a bit of a football hooligan in his day, and remains a feisty and sometimes provocative character. Yet he generally appears to act with restraint in the face of provocation on a daily basis these days. He is currently running for MEP, and is the subject of continual unpleasant harassment and attack. His condition is made worse by the people who should be protecting him, the British forces of law and disorder, who often seem to encourage rather than deter attacks on him and his supporters.
And 'far right?' I'm not sure what it means. But he has always dismissed anybody with a racist agenda from anything he has been involved with, including self-professed neo-Nazis and BNP members, who get short shrift.
More than anything, Tommy appears to be a patriot in a way that is almost quaint and old-fashioned nowadays. He thinks St Georges Day should be a public holiday, and that traditional British values are worth standing up for. Like Trump, he is not a globalist, and is prepared to put his head above the parapet to protest against things, particularly things Islamic, which he feels threaten traditional British values. It is the anti-globalist stance, along with his persistence in asking uncomfortable questions, which makes him such a reviled figure by the Establishment.
My own take on Tommy Robinson is irrelevant here. The important point is how he is portrayed and how he is 'dealt with' by a certain influential element within the edifice of power. For years, and ad nauseam, I have harped on about the mainstream media. But maybe a little aspect of me has continued to resist the inevitable: the complete and absolute discrediting of our time-honoured channels of communication. Maybe it's been too much to believe.
All this has, I suspect and hope, finally been changed. The last nail driven into the coffin of 'mainstream credibility'.
How much I may agree or disagree with what Tommy Robinson says and does is not the topic of discussion here. What is relevant is the extent to which I have seen Tommy Robinson misrepresented (a polite word for 'lied about') in the mainstream media - not just partly or a little bit, but pretty much relentlessly and absolutely in creating an image, a severely distorted image, of the guy. The lesson may have finally got through the defences of my own thick skull. It is the lesson that I have resisted learning, resisted absorbing into the core of my being: how nasty people can be, how dismissive of truth in the pursuit of their own (normally ideological) ends. And this, not in Stalin's Russia of the 1940s, but in Britain in 2019.
No more prior credibility for anything issuing from mainstream sources. Not a jot (apart from sports scores, which they probably won't get wrong). I should stop using this expression 'mainstream media' anyhow. They are on their way out, so I am told. 'Legacy media' is the more appropriate term. Or, as Styx has referred to them, 'lamestream media'. I like that.
Images: Top: A book you may or may not decide to read.
Centre: Blackwater Dam
Below: Train crosses Rannoch Moor
Sadly, we inhabit a world where the version of life pumped out in the mainstream is institutionally prejudiced, chronically so. Racism, sexism, and the rest are rife. This can be amply demonstrated by the simple application of the call-and-response test:
'Proud to be black!' 'Right on, brother.'
'Proud to be woman!' 'All power to you, sister!'
'Proud to be gay!' 'So you should be. Go for it!'
'Proud to be white!' 'Racist! Supremacist! Nazi! And you're banned from Facebook from today.'
From the outset, we should note that all of this has little to do with the vast majority of people, be they black, white, purple, female, male, both, neither, or anything else. It is all to do with a certain ideological view of the world, pushed relentlessly like a drug by politicians and their partners-in-crime in the mainstream media. It is a bunch of bullshit, to quote Jim Morrison, but is aimed to befuddle and stupefy. It is a bad-smelling veil placed over the magical spontaneity of natural existence.
Two particularly curious facts stand out concerning this phenomenon. Firstly, although the hymn book states that it is all about promoting peace, harmony, equality everywhere, its effects are the opposite. It fuels resentments, stirs up strife, bad feeling, by constantly appealing to the baser sides of people's group identities, then pitting them against one another in the mould of victims and perpetrators. And secondly, this white-loathing doctrine is largely promoted by …. white people.
For myself, all this nonsense has had little effect personally; though it would be naïve to assume that will continue to be the case indefinitely. As a white English-born male who, for those keen on such labelling, comes with a middle-class background, I have my feet firmly planted at the bottom of the pile. Frankly, who cares? I get up in the morning, look at the sky and give thanks, before getting on with being who I am and doing what I do. On a social level, however, especially in the high-density urban environments which I have done my level-best to escape, it is toxic, creating social strife and doing great harm.
Having said that, there was one moment when the 'trashy white male' motif did get to me. It was back in the 1980s - the 'white European culture is bad' notion is not new - and ironically involves my time as a 'this is my passport to freedom' Buddhist. It was a meeting with a considerable number of fellow Buddhists, on a grim, grey January (?) Sunday. In Bethnal Green, East London. As well as our centres in Europe and other 'white culture' places, we had a growing number in India. Now, some of we British Buddhists didn't always come up to the mark. We - me included - tended to get despondent, ask lots of questions, have lots of doubts, take our highly complex personal psychology very seriously, and generally act miserably. We were a source of frustration for those few who really wanted to build a great Buddhist movement quickly and efficiently. A few of we western Buddhists would make the journey to India to help out. Those who went east would return with tales to tell.
So it was the thing at the time. At this particular meeting, one recent returner was regaling us all with details of his experiences. Of how, unlike we spoilt children of the western world, our Indian counterparts were always smiling, always friendly, always helpful, never getting tied up in their personal psychology. 'We' had everything while 'they' had nothing, but look at their positivity. What nobody mentioned (in fairness because they probably didn't know) was that, after a hard day's work smiling and being positive, half these Indians went home in the evening and beat up their wives.
Part Two
After you've had your centuries of exploiting us, it's our turn now. It's payback time, white boy. Such are the excuses sometimes put forward for putting the European white male at the bottom of the pile. I have heard these sentiments on many occasions. It's like a socially-fashioned karma (it's the universe that sees to karma, not humans, dummy. Whatever....). And it's not exactly white skin that's being got at - it's a particular culture, western culture, western civilisation. The root of all evil.
This is all mendacious nonsense from a number of angles. It's group identitarianism at its grossest. The idea of group karma is dodgy, reducing everybody to robotic units. I never exploited people in far-off countries, neither did my parents or anybody else on my family tree, from what I can tell.
In the USA reparation is the thing, I believe. Compensation to black people for the wrongs afforded by slavery (it might be rude to point this out, but slavery was abolished quite a long time ago). This continues to today, as a section of white American population's misplaced and irrational guilt complex seems to know no bounds. As a matter of fact, roughly 2% of white Americans of the time owned slaves. Which means a healthy 98% were stuck in the same boat as everyone else regardless of race, colour, favourite vegetable, or anything else.
Meanwhile, back here in Europe; in the UK; in Scotland. It's pretty much the same story.
Well south of where I live is found Glencoe, a great mountain cleft famed for things both light and dark. The glen eventually disgorges onto Rannoch Moor, a wide expanse of peat, bog, lochans which sparkle when the suns deigns to shine, and which ripple in the almost omnipresent wind. At the far side you encounter the enormous expanse of water that is Blackwater Reservoir. Like a long finger it extends eastwards, held in perilous check by the Blackwater dam.
The building of this astonishing piece dates to 1899 - 1900. Huge numbers of navvies were enlisted from all over, but Scotland and Ireland mainly, to carry out the work. Conditions were by all accounts appalling, with rude lodgings in the worst weather that Scotland could throw at you, and work undertaken for wages that amounted to next-to nothing. Such was the unremitting cruelty of life at the dam that a goodly number of workers perished under the conditions. There is even a graveyard to those who died, each individual marked with a rude headstone comprising a piece of local stone, which was opened up next to the reservoir to deal with the number of dead.
Follow the river flowing into the reservoir east for another short while and you arrive at the West Highland railway line. This was constructed a few years before the reservoir, in the early 1890s. It is a triumph of engineering, cutting its way through a variety of hostile environments as it snakes its way north then westwards. To cross Rannoch Moor, it is essentially floated. Like the dam, the railway was built under conditions which are, for me, unimaginable. Another hefty tally of deaths as a result of accident or mere extremeness of conditions. Further south, in Arrochar, is a graveyard to those 37 navvies who died during construction.
All of which I relate to make a simple point. All kinds of people have been treated badly - terribly - by other people at all times and all over the place. It is not a case of nasty white men having a go at nice black people, with some compensatory mechanism required. No. This is a political weapon, no more. If a generalisation is to be made, it concerns a minority of human beings behaving badly towards others in pursuit of their own ends. Whether those misused ones are black, white, or striped, is a matter of little concern.
In the dark corners of Highland history there is also the little matter of the Clearances with their forced emigration in the eighteenth century. Another example of white people behaving badly towards other white people.
Part Three
Well, it's been a bit of a rollercoaster over recent blog pieces, up hill and down dale. The pulse of energy which has connected these writings may be in the process of exhausting itself - or maybe not. Over recent times I have found myself increasingly guided by intuition. I have learnt to listen to this aspect of my being, and it invariably knows better than 'I' do what to do and what not to do. Or, more accurately, I have learnt to trust this faculty: it has always been at work, but I have been insufficiently aware of its presence, or viewed it with suspicion. It has been foremost in the writing of these bits and pieces. An inner voice has instructed me to dip into a certain pot, and here we are...
It all kicked off with freedom of speech, freedom of action, freedom to say what you think and feel. How this is the social atmosphere most conducive to spiritual gnosis, to discovering ones own uniqueness and its own unique connection with 'the divine'. Not to mention the basis of a positive human society (don't ask me to define what I mean by that...). This in turn led to the topic of censoring and shutting people up on social media, a phenomenon that has been rampant and accelerating no end over recent times. I avoid Facebook, Twitter, and similar like the plague, but many people do not. It is clear that a certain type of person is being targeted for silencing, and that a certain type of person is most zealous in this ignoble activity. Who the good guys are and who the bad has required a certain personal revision.
One element in all this is my difficulty in absorbing that some people really are nasty, and they are not necessarily the people who are portrayed as such in mainstream. To try and silence another person because you disagree with them and you think they might steal some votes which you'd like to have in upcoming elections is simply in my book downright nasty. Not acceptable in a properly human world, and one which likes to throw around words like 'democracy' and 'freedom'.
Most people who I know are decent folk, who value honesty, have a certain respect for individual differences, and are in possession of a certain integrity. So it comes as a bit of a shock that there are others who are not like that at all. Top of the list come most mainstream media, some politicians of a 'socialist' bent (noticeable in the UK: certain Labour Party members are at the forefront of this selective silencing, and they aren't even in government! Heaven help us if they win an election), some people who attract the tag 'far left', and some who consider themselves as 'social justice warriors' (SJWs to those in the know).
Somewhere in among all this I began to look into the phenomenon of Tommy Robinson, as the most reviled Britain of all by mainstream media. He and Trump are the twin horns of the mainstream media. 'Far-right racist thug' is the typical label. Nasty guy, it seems. So I decided to check him out a bit. I watched his address to the Oxford Union. I checked out his news website. I read his autobiography, 'Enemy of the State' (well, most of it). And you know what? He's not like that at all. Not really.
'Racist?' Seeing as how loads of his friends seem to be black, and he has fans and followers across the globe, not exactly. Thug? Well, by his own admission, he was a bit of a football hooligan in his day, and remains a feisty and sometimes provocative character. Yet he generally appears to act with restraint in the face of provocation on a daily basis these days. He is currently running for MEP, and is the subject of continual unpleasant harassment and attack. His condition is made worse by the people who should be protecting him, the British forces of law and disorder, who often seem to encourage rather than deter attacks on him and his supporters.
And 'far right?' I'm not sure what it means. But he has always dismissed anybody with a racist agenda from anything he has been involved with, including self-professed neo-Nazis and BNP members, who get short shrift.
More than anything, Tommy appears to be a patriot in a way that is almost quaint and old-fashioned nowadays. He thinks St Georges Day should be a public holiday, and that traditional British values are worth standing up for. Like Trump, he is not a globalist, and is prepared to put his head above the parapet to protest against things, particularly things Islamic, which he feels threaten traditional British values. It is the anti-globalist stance, along with his persistence in asking uncomfortable questions, which makes him such a reviled figure by the Establishment.
My own take on Tommy Robinson is irrelevant here. The important point is how he is portrayed and how he is 'dealt with' by a certain influential element within the edifice of power. For years, and ad nauseam, I have harped on about the mainstream media. But maybe a little aspect of me has continued to resist the inevitable: the complete and absolute discrediting of our time-honoured channels of communication. Maybe it's been too much to believe.
All this has, I suspect and hope, finally been changed. The last nail driven into the coffin of 'mainstream credibility'.
How much I may agree or disagree with what Tommy Robinson says and does is not the topic of discussion here. What is relevant is the extent to which I have seen Tommy Robinson misrepresented (a polite word for 'lied about') in the mainstream media - not just partly or a little bit, but pretty much relentlessly and absolutely in creating an image, a severely distorted image, of the guy. The lesson may have finally got through the defences of my own thick skull. It is the lesson that I have resisted learning, resisted absorbing into the core of my being: how nasty people can be, how dismissive of truth in the pursuit of their own (normally ideological) ends. And this, not in Stalin's Russia of the 1940s, but in Britain in 2019.
No more prior credibility for anything issuing from mainstream sources. Not a jot (apart from sports scores, which they probably won't get wrong). I should stop using this expression 'mainstream media' anyhow. They are on their way out, so I am told. 'Legacy media' is the more appropriate term. Or, as Styx has referred to them, 'lamestream media'. I like that.
Images: Top: A book you may or may not decide to read.
Centre: Blackwater Dam
Below: Train crosses Rannoch Moor
Tuesday, 7 May 2019
Identity
So, identity. What is identity? It's a label, I suppose. A badge that we wear. It tells us who and what we are, and who and what we are not. It comes as a source of security in a perilous world, a fixed point in a universe where the sands are ever-shifting. It is a reference point to which we can return in times of uncertainty. It describes what we like and dislike, approve of and disapprove; what we think and how we think, what we believe and stand for. In extreme cases, it may remove the need to think for ourselves altogether: just refer to the ready-made booklet of personal identity. Take on an ideology, even better.
With our identity recognised, we can sleep certain and secure in our bed at night. Which is all absolutely fine, apart from one little thing...….
Identity is an illusion.
There may be a time in our earlier years when exploring our identity is a significant, possibly necessary, step. The moment arrives, however, when, particularly for anyone aspiring to a life beyond the pig trough, identity has to be analysed, understood, then softened, unpicked, dissolved. We have to open up - in Buddhist terms, see the impermanent as just that -, and resist the temptation to load this fantasy fabrication with too much value, too much weight. We exit the castle to enter into direct communication with the rest of the universe.
Dissolving identity, by the way, is not the same as 'dissolving the ego'. The word 'ego' is one of those infinitely problematic ones. But to the extent that it denotes a sense of self, it needs to be firm yet flexible; confident, strong. Paradoxically, it requires a strong ego to be able to safely dissolve personal identity. You need a good sense of who you are in a natural, spontaneous way before you can throw away the badges.
There is a point where even the identities which were long considered helpful and 'positive' have to go. Spiritual identity, for example. Being 'a Buddhist' was a good step (at least I think so) for quite a while, but eventually became an impediment. No such reference point needed any more.
There are people who seem extremely keen to stick an identity label on me. It is as if, without the badge, they find it difficult to know how to relate to another person at all (try - living direct, without veils). In recent times, I have been asked a number of times whether I am 'right wing'. It seems that believing in free speech and minimal government interference acts as an attractor to the 'right wing' label. No, I am not right-wing! I am not any wing. I haven't got wings at all, at least not in this dimension. I am who I am, full stop. Get over it.....
Identity, belief, ideology: three notions with much in common. All substitutes for real living. Jettison belief in order to communicate directly with Other. Chuck all ideology in the bin, and live instead from grace.
Part Two
I have in front of me a publication so slim that it barely qualifies to be called a booklet. It was produced in 1978, and is authored by my former Buddhist teacher. It is titled 'The True Individual'.
My former teacher always insisted that whatever he said could be connected back to the core, the root principles of Buddhism. In this he may or may not have been correct. Yes or no, I invariably found his most interesting, indeed 'enlightening', words to be those emanating from the more maverick side of his being.
The spiritual aspirant he likened to this true individual. This, in turn, was contrasted with the person who was merely a member of 'a group', or 'the group'. The distinguishing factor of the true individual was the emergence and cultivation of self-awareness, by means of which he or she broke free of the unconscious conditioning which bound them to the herd mentality of the group. Like the Tarot Fool, the true individual wandered free of the mass mind; the Buddha was the truest of true individuals.
To complicate matters slightly, my teacher also posited the existence of the 'positive group' (a normal group was assumed to be largely negative in nature, being unconscious and full of people who were easily manipulated as a result). The positive group existed to further the aims of developing individuals, a kind of launchpad and support system. Traditionally, a wider community of people supporting a monastic bunch of Buddhist full-timers might fit this mould. Personally, I find it all a bit questionable, but there we go.
He also elucidated upon 'love mode', which characterised the actions of individuals; and 'power mode', which was the more typical dynamic among group members. Then some smart ass began hypothesising about using 'power at the service of love', at which point the whole thing started to fall apart.
At another point during this period of Buddhist maverick teachings, my former teacher likened the Buddha - or a highly self-aware individual - to a ghost and a madman. Good images. The Buddha, the fully realised Fool, is slippery, elusive, ungraspable. There is no fixed identity to grab hold of and 'understand' (thereby imagining control over the situation). And in their unorthodox unpredictability, their transcendence of identities, they appear mad to those who are label-obsessed, those transfixed by the values of the group.
Part Three
Identitarian politics sucks. It's as simple as that. It continually reinforces folks' group allegiances, then pits them against one another in an eternal war of badges. Muslims against Christians, women against men, blacks against whites, gays against straights, fixed gender people against gender fluids, Muslims against the rest of the world. The list goes on.
It's a recipe for unending strife. Which is a bit paradoxical, since the official message is that it's all about some kind of equality, about bringing peace and harmony by making us all the same. Blacks given the same 'rights' as whites, gays the same as straights, and so on. But the result is precisely the contrary of a society of peaceful equality. People are encouraged to discover their (group) identity, nurse it, then take it as a weapon against the rest of the world. Disaster - unless, of course, your aim is to quietly encourage ferment, giving you indefinite reasons to introduce yet more controls and regulations on the unruly masses. Not that anyone would dream of implementing such a nefarious plan.
One group pitted against another. And the soup becomes still more poison since the dynamic is that of victim and perpetrator. One group of bastards behaving badly against another group of poor helpless victims. Victims: women, gay people, immigrants, blacks, transgender folk; all 'minority' groups, so the narrative goes. Perpetrators: white people and their cultures, especially white males, the big baddies in a world of otherwise lovely people.
It goes without saying that a world conceived of in terms of victimhood is not exactly character building. It frames people within a picture of personal weakness, and of being wronged. Rather than getting out of bed in the morning and taking responsibility for their own life. So we need rules, regulations, bannings, censorships, to help right these horrible wrongs. This is the substance out of which modernity with its identitarianism is wrought. Yes indeed, it sucks.
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