Friday 31 December 2010

Inheriting the New

At the end of another year, and slipping quietly into the new, I take note of a couple of news items in particular:

* The Gulf Stream seems to be in shambles, caused by the lack of dealing with the Gulf oil spill in a proper, earth-aware manner. We could be on the verge of an ice age. Global Warming and Global Cooling are converging. We are being asked to raise our game on our lovely planet Earth - considerably.

* The corporate-government complex continue to have things their way in many areas.

On the latter note: I submitted this comment to an article, at a website called Truthout, on the continued gap growing in the U.S. between the Haves and the Have Nots; the article entitled 'Serfing the USA: Corporate America is Robbing American Workers,' by one Dave Lindorff (published 29/12; my comment early a.m. of 31/12):

"Unfortunately it would appear that things have to get worse before they can get better. Worse, as in the PTB wanting to eliminate a strong middle class in order to recreate a subservient feudal system; called, in this day and age, the 20:80 society, whereby 20% of the people will be handsomely paid for their services & loyalty to The System, and 80% will be 'useless eaters', deprived of any power, for thinking that they have no choice but to take the scraps thrown to them from the table of the privileged few. But that's only if they continue to buy the idea that The System as is is the only one possible.

"Enter the game changer: the understanding of the higher motivating factor than the human concept of 'profit'. That being the providing of goods and services to one another, and the giving of our best to one another in the process, out of gratitude to our Creator for life with meaning - the motive, in a word, of Love. And thus we don't even have to slash through the Gordian knot, as the answer to the riddle. All we have to do is slip out the piece that it is tied to from its moorings; in this case, in the two cogs of interest-bearing money and fractional-reserve banking. And away we go, into the new era, just waiting for us to inherit it. To, in other words, look neither Left nor Right but Up.

"It's time, in other words, for a change, all right. Real change. Fundamental change. Not just more of the same, on the same level as the problem. Been there. Done that. Next stage of life on Earth coming up. And with thanks to the PTB for playing their role so well, in helping us to get to it. For we are all involved; all have karma to complete, to inherit our next step. As I say: Coming up."

Happy New Year, everybody. And may it help ferry us to the truly New.

Saturday 18 December 2010

Calling All Souls

As the American dollar heads for collapse - on purpose; for the American Dream to collapse, on purpose, in order to meld the United States into a larger, regional entity, tentatively titled the North American Union, to be run of, by and for the corporations, in a neo-feudal New World Order - and I look in the daily papers (two; one national - UK - and one Scottish) to see what is occupying the people's attention, I see banality. Oh, the latest leaks from Wikileaks; but they seem to be curiously pedestrian, like the controlled opposition that the corporate world likes to throw up to itself in order to give the public the semblance of counterbalance. (Think, eg, the Valdez spill, and the environmental groups that sprang up in its wake that turned out to be funded by the oil industry; etc.) And then there's the rest of it. The continued, quiet privatisation of the NHS and the school system by the coalition government (and the continued widespread inability of Johnny to Read)1; the random killings, by sexual predators and drunken teenage females alike; etc etc ad nauseam.

Blah, blah, blah.

And I retreat to my cave, after walking out of a silly old movie, a 'comedy' with Eddie Murphy called Holy Man (bor-ing), and before it, sitting through an up-teched showing of the first movie made about my community, up here in the north of Scotland - made back in 1974-5 - and realising that if it hadn't been for an afterthought of one of its founders at its first public showing, in southern California, which I attended, I wouldn't be here today; for it seemed, on the surface, really to be a waste of everyone's time involved in the project, of tending a garden, in a caravan park (trailer park to Americans), in 'harmony' with something called 'devas', and growing a community up around that concept.2 Shoveling horseshit and seaweed into compost heaps; laughing at 'in' jokes in community get-togethers; dressed up against the cold: What A Way To Look at Life! - not.3

Fortunately the reality of the place has turned out to be very compatible to my spirit. But my spirits were, for whatever all reasons, low this evening; and got lower when, deciding to go through some DVDs on my recently-bought portable DVD player, I sat through one that had segments involved in the corporate takeover of my home country, and through that doorway, the world (according to 'their' best-laid plans). The first was a preview of Aaron Russo's 'Freedom to Fascism', a no-holds-barred critique of both the Federal Reserve System and the legislative and executive-order moves put in place by the Bush administration to declare Martial Law and take over the country when the proverbial hits the fan. The next was a short 'take' on 9/11, and how that caper really didn't hold up under scrutiny; turned out to be a godsend, you should excuse the expression, for the Bush administration and the Neocons to do what they obviously long wanted to do, which was to go into the Middle East and secure the oil for the U.S. Empire. And the next was a longer take on that obscenity, by David Ray Griffin, who has written a number of books systematically shining a light on the serious discrepancies in its official version. Which brought it all back up for me: my anger at how the PTB have such a control over the mainstream media that it doesn't even matter if some individuals uncover holes in their scenario, and even share it with audiences, live and in books: they run the dog and pony show.

Disgusted with them, and with mankind in general - Folks! How can you live as if there were no God? Either there is or there is not. If there is not, then nothing really matters anyway, and you might as well live the way you are. But if there is - and there is plenty of evidence that there is indeed something more than Man - then you should be living as if there WERE 'something more than Man'. WE should be living as if there were, since I am - at this point in time, at least - one of you. And I am trying my damnedest to do so. But you are making it very hard on me; on all of us who are trying to live up to that potential4 - I took a break from the drama, and put on a CD of some soothing classical music. And finally, at a rendition of Albinoni's Adagio from Oboe Concerto in D Minor, I calmed down.5 But I beseech you, people:

We can do better than this.

We MUST do better than this.

In order to prove that the Plan, of free will - of freely returning to Source - is superior to the involutionary plan of control. Of forcing people to be a certain way.

Because that way is the way of tyrants ruling the Earth; stalking it like Rex of old.

And I for one will not let that happen.

But I - and We, so conceived, and so dedicated - need your help.

Please rise to the occasion.

Now.

A new world awaits.

And NOT the New World Order of those who are under the control of those dark forces that give opposition to the working out of our Creator's superior plan for 'his' children. 'His' sparks of the Divine. Separate unto themselves only for a time, and a season.

And the season has come to bring that new world about.

Before the old collapses to the point that it takes longer to achieve Synthesis. Transition. Ascension.

Awaiting us.

Now.


---


1 A subject in itself; and involving both the 'right' and the 'left' sides of the political aisle. The Right may be in charge of educational issues at this time, but it was not ever thus. In the '30s and '40s especially, in the U.S (to my knowledge; it may have been true as well in the UK, home of the Fabian Society, pioneers of the philosophy and technique), socialists commanded the heights of educational philosophy, and instituted a method of teaching reading designed to control the child's exposure to information. Rather than teaching Johnny merely to read, they desired to 'educate' him to read 'with comprehension' - comprehension of what they wanted him to be raised with. Which was a brainwashed exposure to leftist propaganda, in keeping with the thinking of such 'educational' philosophers as John Dewey. How to do that. Eureka: Bring the child up with controlled material, slowly fed to him/her over the critical, early years. (As pioneered by such as the Catholic Church, whose propagandists asserted 'Give me a child to the age of six and I will have him for life' or words to that effect. Also used by the Nazis, and the Soviets.) Instead of learning how to sound out words for himself, by being taught to understand the alphabet, Johnny was 'taught' to recognize words by their shape, and association with visual cues. Thus, 'cat' with a cat; and 'monkey' with a picture of a monkey hanging off the tail of the 'y'. (I have actually seen this, in a primer I perused when starting to investigate this matter, of Johnny's difficulty in learning how to read; which subject I first came across at my university, in the mid-'50s, when I browsed the campus bookstore for interesting material before early-departure from those hallowed halls of ivy for my 'learning' in the world at large, and then revisited over a decade later, when I was having my eyes opened to left-wing shenanigans by right-wing literature. Which included seeing an early-years reading primer telling the story of how one squirrel informs his mate that he doesn't have to save his nuts over the winter because "the little boy in the White House" - pictured - will provide him with all he needs.) It is the old Egyptian system of hieroglyphics, "in which pictures or symbols are used to represent objects, concepts, or sounds" (similar to Chinese pictographs). This requires the child to have to memorize the forms, a far harder task than simply learning how to sound out words for herself. And so the child in such a system is patiently brought up in/with a controlled vocabulary, and stories.

The 'Right' part of the Faustian bargain happened when the corporate world of the medical-pharmaceutical-government complex instituted mandatory vaccination in elementary schools, without sufficient regard for the potential side effects of this wondrous new medical modality. It came into being in the U.S. starting in the late '40s, and by the '50s signs of brain damage were already surfacing, in the forms of what has come to be known as ADD and ADHD, dyslexia, dyspraxia, and full-blown autism (aka the euphemistically lump-summed 'Learning Disabilities') - let alone other iatrogenically-induced conditions, like a whole range of autoimmune 'diseases', and other neurological disorders, like epilepsy/seizures, and 'social violence and criminality'. (The latter phrase part of the title of a book on this subject by one Harris L. Coulter, Ph.D., arguably the U.S.'s foremost medical historian. The whole phenomenon obscured because of the time lag between the child's shots and his formal education years.) Thus, our children - and through them, our societal conditions as a whole - have been seesawed between the machinations of both the Left and the Right for over half a century.

It's time, and past, for a change.

(N.B. Are vaccinations the only cause of the brain damage that has been afflicting humanity for the past half a century in particular? No. Another cause is fluoridation of our water supplies - which started at roughly the same time. Another cause of the unclarity around causation. And another is the widespread use of pesticides. Altogether: A perfect storm. Which needs to be sorted out. Now. Before we can take less hesitant steps into our future, on this hurting planet. Hurting, because of our abuse of it. Reflecting our own inner abuse.)



2 The 'afterthought' involved the community's recent purchase of the hotel that the founders of the community had formerly managed before moving to a caravan park on a windswept section of a forlorn peninsula next door to a military airbase, from which big nasty birds continually took off in the background, overriding the quaint conversations taking place in the foreground. I remember sitting in the large audience at its first screening, at a week-long 'new age' convention in Santa Monica, and being rather unimpressed; touched by the sincerity of the people, but unmoved. Until the male of the couple who had founded the community, Peter Caddy - a former RAF catering officer, and manager of that four-star hotel, now reduced to penury, and making the most of it, with some gullible and idealistic young hippy types, mostly - stood back up at its completion, to polite applause, and announced that they had just bought said hotel, for the next stage of the community's development - to be its main educational base - and if anybody in the audience was interested in that aspect of the community, ie the running of the hotel as an educational centre, to come up and see him afterwards. And I got a tap on my figurative shoulder. That's your cue, it said.

'It' caused me to seek him out afterwards - as did a number of others from that audience. He quickly 'got' that some of them thought he was just talking about a congenial place to work for awhile - perhaps before heading off for India, as was the zeitgeist of that time for many young people - and he clarified that he had meant that he was interested in people who had some life experience to come and join the community, especially to help with that enterprise; and if anyone still felt drawn, after that clarification, to write something about themselves, and submit it to him later in the week. The next day I went up to him with my brief resume, which outlined my experience as a 'building maintenance foreman' of a crew with the cleaning contract at a holiday resort in Idaho (name of Sun Valley, where I had worked for a summer season and part of the following winter one, back a half-a-dozen years before, when I had had too much of the hustle and bustle of life in the L.A. area and needed a change). He read it, and handed it back, saying, "I agree; you should come," and walked away. And I thought: Great. Now how does one get to the north of Scotland, and stay awhile?

One gets here by getting here. And my stay has lasted me most of the past 34 years since that fortuitous encounter in southern California, at an event looking at something being called 'the new age'. Which I was to find out more about, after getting involved in it.

N.B. Only some years later did I find out that I was, in the eyes of the community members, one of 'Peter's boys'. he had a habit of keeping his eyes out, when he traveled in the world, for people whom he thought had something to give to the community, and then telling them there that so-and-so was coming to do such-and-such. It turned out that he had told them that he had found the person to hold the focus for the renovation of Cluny (Hill Hotel, hereinafter to be known as Cluny Hill College). When, during that renovation work, the winter of '75-'76, one of the leaders of the group came up to me and announced, "Well Stan, we're ready for you to take over now," I hadn't a clue what they were talking about. I had been a foreman of a crew that did basic maintenance of buildings, ie, sweeping, mopping, cleaning toilets, waxing dance floors, setting the fires in the bedroom fireplaces, etc etc - not the plumbing and electrics. The guy went away and reported this to his team, and I never heard anything more about that peculiar interaction, until some years later when I overheard that I was an example of how Peter could be wrong but also right - that someone would come there under the wrong impression, but be the right person after all.

That was some consolation, after realising I was there - here - under false pretences.



3 The title of one of the community's sing-along music tapes.



4 I have seen what you can do in the way you have developed, and though it has some merit, I am, overall, not impressed. I am not interested in a system that leaves so many people destitute. You can do better than this. WE can do better than this. Let's be about it. Dammit. Come out from under the control of the moneychangers, and CLAIM YOUR MATURITY.

And the next step after that: Release that which causes suffering: desire. Why would individuals keep going around and around on the wheel of rebirth, accruing karma, which by definition needs to be paid off, like an educational loan, once they realise - really grok - what is going on? what the purpose of the whole exercise is??

Come ON, people.

Show me your best, humanity. Not this ignoble business you are engaged in right now; involved in, to the extent that you can't see the forest for the trees.



5 And was briefly reminded of the last time I needed some classical music to soothe my soul. That was in university, during the time when I was still in ROTC - this was at the time of the Korean War, and we were being prepared, as dutiful university students, to be officers in that conflict - and one hot afternoon was sitting through a class on different kinds of machine guns. What?! I thought. Machine guns? This is insane. I'm not going to fire no stinking machine gun. What in blazes is going on in this world I have found myself in?? And I went home in a bit of a delirium, and locked my dormitory-room door, and put on some Wagner, and laid on my bed with my eyes closed to that outside world, and bathed in the music, to try to come back down to some sort of inner reality, that had nothing to do with air-cooled, x-millimeter, such-and-such caliber machine guns, for heaven's sakes. And that was it: I stopped going to ROTC class. Got in some trouble for it. But no matter. That wasn't my path. Somehow. Some way. There was more to life than this effing nonsense, of socially-constructed enemies, who you then treated as trading partners afterwards - all in order to make money. Get me OUT of this nonsensical reality, I thought. It doesn't compute. Even before computers came on the market...