'Brighter than a full moon': The biggest star of 2013

'Brighter than a full moon': The biggest star of 2013... could be Ison - the comet of the century

A comet discovered by two Russian astronomers will be visible from Earth next year. Get ready for a  once-in-a lifetime light show, says David Whitehouse

Comments on the above article in the Independent soon took on a science vs Religion flavour. My comment might offer a unifying basis for both views.

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It is easy to see that a naked wonder of being is lost to interpretations backed by personal investments. The experience of awe is not due unto any interpretations nor the mind that can make such interpretations - but is entirely due unto the Fact of Being Itself - which is absolutely beyond any capacity of any mind to map or define or effect or control.

The mind accords orders of significance and magnitude to elements of its experience and 'creates' structures of 'meaning' for itself amidst what is essentially timeless and infinite.

Scientists tend to map and measure, define and control the world considered to be outside the self or outside the realm of a direct capacity to control. This activity is a specialized version of what the separating mind attempts upon its experience - which it takes for reality.

What is significant about our experience apart from what the rules of our own mind establish? Significance is unalloyed in any experience of true existence -That you Are, or That anything Is. This is thoughtless and direct experience - not of things outside us - but of a wholeness of which we are one with - and not apart from.

The appearance of a new light in the night sky cannot but pause the mind of its routines, and this allows in alternate possibilities that the routine mind blocks by definition.

Wonder opens a different source than anything our thinking can create. One can make religion out of this, but be careful it doesn't cover our eyes instead of opening them!

Computer interface, cultural values and conditioning?

I responded to Wired.com's article:
Why Apple (and You) Might Miss Scott Forstall
I see it as an opportunity to talk about the almost invisible layer of architecture and conditioning that communicates and inculcates cultural values - or indeed the lack thereof! So this isn't just about Mac - but a perspective on the extension of our mind - into virtual digital realities.


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Without making this a personality thing, I feel this article is missing the trend in computing that has largely abandoned an educated responsible user interface and opted for a dumber, entertaining, utility front end. There are all sorts of issues in this that are very worthy of discussion and acknowledgement but 'news' itself has also succumbed to the same template approach of dumbed and entertaining fodder.

Issues of control and communication are fundamental to a user interface.
There is a lot more at stake and involved than consumer edification in all of this for it is symptomatic of the prevailing culture or mentality of our times.
Computing has in a very short time, become a layer of both environment and an enabler and a lens of communication and function.
There are lots of things about the mind that are 'invisible' to those who simply 'use' or identify at the front end or surface. This is also true of the digital network - which is an extension of our lower mind.
I say lower because, the conscious qualities of a living presence - such as insight, discernment, recognition, honour and gratitude,  transcend and precede the programmed and programming mind.

We collectively have drifted into identifying ever more deeply with 'control mind' - and are losing the call and the culture of our truly Conscious being.
That which identifies control as safety, order and a self justified specialness of self, is blind to the truly Conscious and only sees it insofar as it can exploit it.
Meeting in shared purpose is very different from forcing outcomes. The quality of trust is extended and embodied.

Our architecture reflects our values - as does all that we embody. But it also inculcates those values as a subliminal conditioning.

Billions of us are spending a lot of time in this new 'environment' (regardless of the particular brand). I call for a conscious discernment as to the choices that collectively we are each and all making - because what we make tends to make us in its own image.

To sell a virtual world as a distraction for a desecration of our living relationship, (the Life), may provide meds against despair and chaos - but it takes another step away and ultimately only delays addressing and correcting the core issues that set up the experience of conflict, distrust, dissonance and dis-ease.

I was drawn to the Mac in the 90s in part because I felt a machine being fitted to Man rather than man being fitted to the machine. And in a way that made the machine more 'human-friendly' and creatively fun and less clunky, ugly and conformed to corporate business edicts. But that core principle was abandoned with Mac OSX - or at least adulterated and compromised to a marketing mentality. (And there are historical reasons which account for why).

The blindness leading up to the financial collapse is as nothing to the blindness of our passive acceptance of the cultural developments of our time. It is not as a conspiracy theorist or doomsdayer that I write - but simply in witness for a Conscious appreciation of the Life that we share (whether we like it or know it or not), and in a desire to wake up (from a dead end) to a life more abundant.

Its not just a product, its not just an operating system. It is mind expressing itself - consciously or unconsciously; wisely or chaotically.
Much that seems wise for the short term reaps a bitter harvest. We have to do more than think-react. (Or should I say less? Yes we have to calm down a bit, connect with our being and feel more).

The stripper pops her balloons one by one

The provocatively - or stupidly - titled Guardian article:

Strip clubs are the new normal – and that's a good thing

That young men are able to explore their sexuality safely and consensually is progress, not the downfall of the modern male

...came to my attention and after reading a few of the page comments I started writing...

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I write not as wit or repartee, entertainment or to have or voice an opinion so much as to embody a listening to the meanings and feeling of idea that is beneath the world we so easily and readily engage. In this way I would undress (deconstruct) the mind of its story - and if that appeals to you, you'll read a bit more and if not, you'll enjoy your story.

Fantasy, sexual or otherwise, is a private affair. A separating affair - that seems to be something it is not - otherwise it would be freely alive rather than using YOUR aliveness for ITS enactment. ITS fulfilment is like a drug, that hits but doesnt really fulfil and only needs repeating. The process of which hollows out or depletes joy and desensitizes feeling to ever shallower conditioned reaction regardless of the self-justifying mentality of the fantasy self that is being 'explored'. (This is different where the fantasy is in no way confused with reality - but the appetite for fantasy dissipates in true presence).

To use another for fantasy purposes who is in some sense willing to be used in exchange for using you sets up a mutual agreement that runs in place of honouring the true relational reality. (In context of a truly loving relational sense, all things - including fantasy - serve a different purpose of an awakening intimacy of being. Intimacy is not bodies - but oneness. To have the form without the Spirit is hollow show - but to have the Spirit will always have tangible effect - though the effect is not where the focus is.

Mutually using each other as consensual relationships isnt as innocent as it likes to think it is - for as soon as the Life in the other is not honoured, they are seen as a means to an end - and in that purpose, the mind is actually at war with the other so as to manipulate an outcome to its own personal agenda and will use the forms of kindness as a mask as much as it will use an overtly coercive intent such as instilling guilt or fear and taking advantage of the traction that that gives the mind of control.

Normal can be anything - deception, slavery and war and appalling inhumanity can be normal in that they can be pervasive and unchallenged.

If an addiction can be normalised, then the addict doesnt have to meet the dissonance of finding their perspective dictated by a coercive or tyrannous intent.

Ultimately, the exploring of a fantasy must realize that it costs Reality - and the Reality is infinitelty fulfilling in ways that are ever new and this Alive - and of which the little mind in its little private show cannot even imagine.

Everything is permissable to Reality - in that there is no limit on thought and action and effect spring from thought. God doesnt censor your freedom to think. But not everything is helpful to you and you (as we all) learn there are consequences implicit in every thought.

It isnt that there is a you with a free will perfecting your self (or not!) - but that the thought you accept and validate as yours by living out from it is actively filtering and defining your identification and in a sense, creates your experience out of a mutuality of thinking.

This deception or fantasy is dancing for you now as a sense of a reality that fascinates and distracts as if to become something or indeed escape something.

I watched a woman walking her dog along a beach once. the dog chased every single pebble thrown out to sea in utter futility - and yet avidly, with glee! The woman herself was bored - it went on out of sight without let-up.

Boredom must be one of the wonders of the Universe. Do you thing Angels queue to see? The power of thought is not as we think it - but as it thinks us. To put power aside like an old toy is to let love come out to play. Was there all along but I just didn't notice, recognize or feel able to allow.

So difficult for women to achieve equality?

The Global Conversation asked in

Question of the Week

Why do you think it has been so difficult for women to achieve equal status with men, even after thousands of years of humanity looking at this issue?


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The neglect of and disregard for the honoring of Life as the root of our personal and relational culture allows every kind of false or faithless thinking to enter and grow in our mind. With every loveless wish, a false promise of personal power becomes the forgetting of the power that is truly shared.

Our status or worth then becomes a matter of contest rather than revealed in true relationship and shared purpose. And relationships become a means to get from rather than awaken through.

The perspective that one views with, delivers the results that are experienced.
Such perspectives are largely invisible, in that we do not realize our mind and culture is creating the 'world as we experience it'.

The desire to achieve can indicate tares and wheat, for the desire to know and be known truly, is the Purpose of Being Itself - for such is the nature of love. In this desire we stand in and join with the Movement of Being - even if apparently outnumbered. But in reactive and vengeful search for justice, our personal status becomes justified and identified in victimhood, which gives its power to the aspects of its mind which it disowns and projects upon the world - and sees in others.

Status can be like wealth. If we agree to define wealth in material terms alone, then we can identify with poverty and feel victim amidst a great abundance of Life.

As a man or woman thinketh in their heart - so are they. To wake up to the power of this is to awaken to a joined or communioned being - whose nature is of a unified perspective and whose willingness is to see the presence of love in others (and the world) and to be the presence of love for others (and for the world).

The attempt to substitute for love with personal power has both feminine and masculine liability! And the wreckage of the attempt to use power or love as coercive intent has reflected a breakdown of heart and mind.

The willingness to extend a presently felt movement of relational honesty that arises only from being undefended to our own awareness -which is beyond our control - is the extension of trust and the foundation of true sanity. Such a quality guides and supports more than an equality of status, it reveals a oneness of Source, nature and condition.

The attempt to think 'answers' is only helpful if it brings us to a greater honesty of listening beyond thinking. For the thinking of a self-strategic protection has become disconnected from Truth and is merely expressing fear - whether with force or with guile.

Thousands of years might ripen the insanely complex deceptions of the mind to bring its foundations up to the surface to be reevaluated instead of hidden.

Why is it so difficult to question or inquire as to the true nature of the experience of a human life and world? Because the distractions of the human experience are compelling, complex and designed to keep unwanted awareness at bay!

Now I might have asked the question the other way round; " why has it been so difficult for men to achieve equal status with women? - etc".
Because there is in the feminine, that capacity to yield and embrace, that the masculine is lost without. For the power of extension is not independent except in fantasy. Unless we yield to Life, then the Movement of the Qualities of Life will not be embodied in our thought or relationships.

To see the Life in each other takes a real willingness to disinvest of the games of power that we are all unconsciously inheritors and co-creators of.

Any attempt to fix the problem in terms of the problem will tend to reinforce the reality of the problem. Ultimately the problem is always a failure of communication; first within ourselves and then reflecting in our relationships and world.

To be restored to full communication is to be restored to a shared innocence and creativity of being that harmonizes without using power. This is a practical guidance within the entangled and complex web of conditioning and triggers that so easily shuts down any real communication from even beginning.

We are called to be still of our own thinking and listen in trust and desire for the movement of awareness that rises beneath the machinations of a mind of defense.

In Peace
Brian

Art and artifice

This writing was prompted by reading an article at
http://www.nationofchange.org - How to tell good art from bad

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I feel to start with a root statement that may or may not communicate a tone:
Our Father, Who Art (in) Heaven.
Clearly in this statement, art is the verb to be; the movement or embodiment of that which is felt arising from a wholeness of being is a desire, inspiration, or project that is not other than our life.
The nature of what IS cannot be defined, but the Movement and Quality of its being can be honoured as it reveals itself as ... the embodiment of intuition, thought and feeling as the tangibility of life. If we are beholding of this then our lives express it.

Artifice is like the fig leaves in the Adam and Eve story. It is that capacity of mind to imagine its own reality or self along the lines of thought it wants to be true - and which it gives preference to, over and above the Current Flow of Being Itself. This sort of self-will seems to overlay a personal signature of achievement and possession on the Original and the True and subverts it innate meaning to its own self defined meanings. In the attempt to make itself real it seeks any and every kind of self validation at the level of form and appearance, and becomes forgetful and defended against the realm of the presence of life in which the tangibility and visibility is but the revealing and identifying of the communion and communication of Life Itself.

There is another thing I'd add; the self in its own illusion can only make copies of what is already real. There isn't a fake 11 dollar bill in circulation anywhere - though such could of course be a project for a conceptual artist to undertake!

The imitation of life necessarily uses something of life because there is nothing else to use. In this sense ,there is often something that can be felt as wheat among the tares in the attempts of man to make or communicate the good, the beautiful or the true. (To want to communicate the ugly or the dispiriting or the meaningless is an indicator that the mind involved has implicitly called such 'good' by the act of valuing it with his or her attention and intention).

The idea of a separate identity - endowing some kind of string-less puppet with autonomy - is itself the artifice of a thinking to which humankind has been asserting possession of and becoming possessed by. Yet this is act and not fact, and so there are all sorts of moments in its experience of itself that transcend its narrow self limitation as it stirs or is re-membered in a presence of being of which it is often hardly aware and yet IS the only Thing Going On - despite the overlay of imaginations which suggest otherwise.

To awaken to that life is moving all things one - in any moment or degree, is to be stirred by qualities of being that inspire, heal and harmonize, this naturally communicates or extends itself through  the agency of its recognition. Such expression my yet be distorted and filtered by the mind of that one - and by our expressions, we become aware of such obstacle or block. This provides the life of inspiration and expression as a process of releasing 'self will' as a willingness to be as an instrument to the movement of being itself.
That life often communicates in ways that do not fit the old wine bottles is testimony to that we become blinkered and stuck in our thinking and our masks of artificial presentation.
It may be that to awaken and honour the movement of life draws us out of the apparent comforts and connection of the group that would (often unknowingly) stifle it - but that is not about being special so much as being alive and willing.

Every one of us is a special kind of artist. Our lives brush out from pallets of experience and desire that are both unique in expression and yet universal in nature. Art as something outside and separate from the Artist is the notion of a mind that has tried to separate itself from the Life that lives it!

"The seeing that it is good" is the recognition of God in the 'Creation'. That is of being moved or feeling stirred… of a shift from thinking to feeling.

Communication and communion are shared by their very nature and guided by the very intelligence that they express. The forms of our communication can be usurped as an attempt at coercion or manipulation of life - but then the channel of true communication is lost while the mind engages self-wilfulness. (Until it neglects or forgets to do so - perhaps as a result of being stirred and troubled or transported by an experience for which it could not account nor control).

Is there a savant inside all of us?

An article in the Telegraph in which the brain is revealed to have vastly more capacity or ability than in most of us is apparent.

Start out with God - or if you prefer, with Unlimited and Indivisible Mind.
Then imagine and invest in limiting and divisive or self conflicting thought - which cannot actually divide the Indivisible, but can serve as a lens and provide an overlay of experience in which to explore the experience itself and become defined and identified within it as a self-existing entity.
Everything in one's experience reflects faithfully the program of thought and desire that is essentially running in the background - while on the surface the 'user' mentality believes it is this self existing self and that all else is its dominion - to prevail over in judgement if not in act (though it may seek such control as it can get it!).

This may be asking too much of the reader to consider, but like the comment after this one, I am suggesting that our thinking - at least at the level of definitions, beliefs, identifications and judgements is a distorting filter of limitation.

We are (generally) addicted to our thinking and to the experience it engenders as our very (and only) life - as we are to the desire to be special and to use power over the 'other' or indeed over the whole, in  attempt to make our thinking (self) real.

The actual power of Mind (capitalized to indicate Universal and all pervading), is terrifying to the 'little mind' - and is effectively denied awareness by a complex of denial, dissociation and distraction that serves to protect it while it plays in limitation. But this 'ego' structure is not fact but action - not unlike an unimaginably powerful supercomputer fully active in presenting you with a virtual existence - within your own Being - that becomes unaware of anything beyond its own program - a program that feeds back on itself as a loop - such that the past re enacts itself over and over again.

The desire and defence that maintains continuity of experience of self can be interrupted or shocked such as to reveal anomalies of all kinds and on all levels. Usually there is a tidy away function that sweeps these out of sight asap or denigrates them as - 'must have imagined it' and etc - but many leaks occur in which more of the totality of what you Are - is revealed.

Some aspects of this are apparently random, as in accidents that leave someone with a changed ability that may not have much apparent consequence beyond not being able to account for it.

Other aspects are of a communication or communion of the mind / Mind. These are not always so visible in external terms but are key to a true functionality of life whether we become Self-Aware or not.

The faculty of discernment is lost amidst the insistence that it serve a personal power of advantage and yet it is a direct 'link' with Mind as the sense of the wholeness and root nature of all things. As such it is also one with inspiration and true answer because there is no inspiration or answer in programmed thinking - no matter how well it is presented.

I write this as a sketch for consideration. That our self definitions are in fact limitation and our world definitions are not different from that.

If one only seeks answer for the beliefs and conditionings of the 'organic' sense of self as separate entity - and substitutes meat-brain for mind then death is the starting point and not life - whatever powers may be added to its fleeting span!

Patients starve and die of thirst on hospital wards

This highly emotive headline and story appeared in the Daily Telegraph

Step aside from the 'story' that grabs emotional reaction, the urge to judge and to blame and to add yet more layers of control in the name of merely 'DOING SOMETHING!". Feel or discern the template nature of what is being shared as our 'culture'. This lack of real involvement or relationship is not merely true in the care of the sick and the elderly but in almost every aspect of our relationships, only in this case it shows up in such blatantly unacceptable forms that cannot be glossed over, or massaged with spin and statistics.

Look beyond the characters in the story and see the ideas that make the script. Ideas are not Manna - but insofar as they were ever truly inspired they are derived from a heartfelt and passionate involvement in life, in relationship and in a spirit of discovery.

The mentality of control has appeal to the unwary, because it promises security and extension of power, but what it delivers is so far from the real safety of our true being that it beggars belief.

To try to communicate here in this comment is also to invite or reach past the mentality of control, because it is so deeply entrenched as our default identity that it is not open to question or re evaluation and is perfectly defended in its own thinking and its own personal interpretive experience. It believes it already knows and it seeks to answer the experience of breakdown with yet more control - or failing that with a sort of passive aggressive disengagement; withdrawing to fight another day.

Without the context of a culture of ideas that support it, the heart or wholeness of being in action, has to work like a double agent, not only to extend true service to the need but to 'survive' or cope within a system that does not see it, honour it, value it or support it.
 A little understanding is a dangerous thing in that a desire to 'save the world' can and does open only enough to the source of inspiration to get the answers that it then tries to personally impose upon the whole. These constant 'revolutions' or rebranding with 'new thinking' often disrupt what was already naturally working and introduce new layers of complexity and control that often embody the appeasement of anxieties.

What is going on is not so different from the self justifying thinking that we all tend to employ to justify our withdrawal or lack of true presence, in that we present the 'doings' of caring, the forms of 'love' or the rights of entitlement and protection.

The consumer society is not really about products and economy but about being herded, managed, medicated and CONTROLLED in return for a substitute life. This mentality of control does not impose itself on another, so much as grow from a passivity of caring and attention amidst a surface tension of chatter, busyness and distraction.

Like a spambot, we are each compromised in our liability to be hijacked unawares and this goes much deeper than our thinking itself can uncover because the basis of our thinking is part of the 'problem'.

As long as we see the 'problem' primarily outside our own mind, intent and involvement, we actually feed it by validating the terms in which it is set.

The problem of loving  - and all the fruits thereof - is one of resistance or refusal to involvement - which take the form of self-justifying fictions. The mindset of blame is chief among such fictions. Guilt appeals as a means of control but it absolutely undermines the functionality of all that is love from being honoured and embodied - and it makes its own counterfeit ideas of love as a sweetener for a bitter poison.

Common sense cries out at the story of this article - for anyone with no training at all  - but with a grain of compassion - could extend the basic humanity that would make such stories imossible.

There is a capacity for compassion - the compass of identification that includes others as our self - in all of us, but it is never the result of coercive controls founded in distrust fear and 'the need to be seen to be doing something' so as to avoid blame or litigation.

The extension of trust is our most primary creative response. It is not without discernment and is not giving in order to get but is the very Movement of Being Itself - which expresses as relating in shared purpose.

This may be corrupted in our thought but it remains uncoverable to our feeling and that direct experience is the guidance for our thought.
The arrogance of our thinking is laughable if nipped at the bud, but it is tragic in time as the misery of our human experience



And to one of a plethora of comments urging punitive response I wrote:

 Yes ! Stone them!

Nothing like fear of vilification, litigation and criminal punishment to bring out the best in all of us! Our God is a Holy Righteousness that will purge all the scum and filth from our minds and cast it out into darkness!

Please understand, the above is a dramatic device to illustrate a point.

 Opinions are cheap - and emotionally inflamed opinions are reactive and ill considered. I do not say this to anyone personally or single this comment as specially so - but that the answers will come from a true process of communication and not from imposing rules and penalties. We already have the law, and if a situation calls for the law then use it.

Communication is so difficult that psychiatric or psychological attempts to facilitate it often fail. The mind is very complex and mimics the forms of communication in a manipulative intent.
We herd together in collusions of shared definitions - in the name of covering our arse/ass. That is to say a kind of emotional and psychological self protective impulse (automatically) shuts down real communication unless such impulse can be seen to be causing or reinforcing distress rather than healing it.

Is moral outrage is an attempt to push away the unthinkable and the unfaceable in our own mind? I say that until we have found healing in our own mind, we seek to effect it by acting it out on the world - on our relationships.

Of course there is a call for correction, but in order to see the true nature of the situation we must first make sure we are corrected of a distorted vision - and act and speak from the heart that listens and discerns moment by moment - rather than embody a mechanism of conditioned reaction.

Identity, trust and communication in a digital age?

Underneath the 'shock horror' of reactions here (to an article about Government using social network and other logins as  proof of identity'), I wonder what the basis is, or can be, to ensure that identity is in fact what it pertains to be and that information is in fact trustworthy - in an increasing reliance upon digital communication.

The nature of scams, hacks and control is very complex, and without safeguarding, the desires of the moneyed and powerful  (along with opportunists who also find ways to exploit the system), will inevitably prevail.

What IS the basis for trust among us? The 'modern' answer offered was of competing and balancing self interest aka 'market forces'. Lets us all be selfish, but limit its expression with 'incentives'. This purports to be a 'balance' but is manipulated in secret by the most powerful - who control the very financial and legal frameworks within which we operate.

To my appreciation, the basis of our thinking is corrupt - that is - founded in error. This becomes evident in the collapse of functionality in confusion and a paralysis of fragmentation and conflict. We have to listen deeper than anything we think we know.

Who Are You? (or I or We?)
And what is our True Purpose or intent?

I don't feel it is for our tricksy thinking to provide or assert its own answers, but an experience of a greater integrity experienced and embodied. We have to surrender our thinking to know in our heart, and this is a way of life and not a trick to get back on the old track.

The program of human identity that is running, has been running for a very long time, and in an instant and interpenetrating global digital world, is culminating in crisis of awakening - because identity loss or confusion IS such opportunity.

To thinking it would seem that either we establish a system that grows trust and open declared identity, or we allow a system of coercion, manipulation in which to hide, defend against and play out our own part.

Clearly there is that which does not recognize trust or honour life and this needs to be contained whether it is an individual of a corporation - but the means to do that has to embody a culture that does honour life and does NOT war on life with a deceptive intent.

Honesty allows communication to be shared rather than used as a war of one-upmanship, assertion of 'identity' or propaganda and spin.

I don't feel to wait for the world but start now. It may be that a movement for honesty of being would meet persecution, because honesty costs too much for those who set their treasure in the world. But if the choice is to live in fear or truly live what is here to be shared, then what really will be the reward of mere survival in a machine?

Perhaps the time is not quite yet. But it is very near.

Give only as you would in your right mind receive!

Be discerning. Fear absolutely blocks discernment. Fear distorts and manipulates thought.
That which recognizes the extension of trust is worthy in all of us.
Systems or templates of the mind cannot substitute for this quality of relationship - but they can at least be aligned with it.

Cultural renewal comes from the breakdown of the basis of our thinking - which CANNOT control the complexity of life and need not. The attempt to control or coerce creates the dissonance that feeds the mind of control with a self-validation to persist.

Its 'answer' to the threat of exposure is war and death -  because it cares not for anything but its 'self'. This is not a true self but a madness that has a seed in all of us. That is what it doesn't want you to know. That you are hosting its payload not unlike a compromised computer in a spambot. (network of infected PCs that can at any time be activated to perform attacks on the integrity of the system).

Thanks for your attention. Nothing I say has truth in itself - but in a recognition of truth within - is a quality of true communication established within yourself. Well here's a last question: is this quality of felt truth really within your self - or is all that you truly are within and yet one with the truth revealed?

In Peace

Brian

You Are Welcome

I came across one of many religious controversy blogs and its comments in searching out some information on the Archangel Michael - which I have not yet found externally - though perhaps this writing embodies the sword that cuts away the false.

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Arguments with yourself can be pictured in the world - as the world. As the experience of self over and against a world - over and against an other.
But you cannot argue with yourself - a fiction can only argue with a fiction.
What is it to awaken from the arguments of a two-ness that is not in fact true?
No longer identifying with point of view?

This invitation is not the invitation to construct or to assert or to think, though the mind will persist as the construct of a polarized experience for as long as it is given your attention.

That which Is you, Is That which Knows itself in All Things One.
The ways in which the fictional self gives way to the truth are innumerable. Enjoy your experience as experience, but do not confuse it with truth.

Truth is not defined or determined by a mind or minds in agreement. That is a kind of game in which and by which truth is temporarily forgotten amidst the engagement and distraction of an identification with one's own thinking.

The identification with one's own thinking is the 'self' that wars. What is it to release all such thinking and let truth be known in its own terms, as its own unadulterated 'knowing'?

It is what the mind will refuse to do as long as it can maintain a condition of unconsciousness or darkness in which to 'operate'. None of which is evil in its original curiosity, but which allows a dissonance of evil or 'anti-life' to express as the wilful sacrifice of truth in order that illusion prevail in its stead.

Ultimately, to do what we do not want, hurts. Waking to realize we are hurting ourself, releases the defences against knowing what it is that we do. Defences against love are of our own thinking.

Our own thinking creates a personal experience of a coercive or assertive nature. This seems to meet opposition, because for every such action, there is an opposite reaction. To focus upon the surfaces of forms and the meanings you give them, is to set attention away from the awareness of the choice you are making. But it is running as your choice, in your name and giving you your experience, whether you know it or not.

Thoughts that are accepted and believed without the consciousness of the heart's discernment do not know You; do not extend You, or share You.
Lonely is pain of an unshared heart.

Beneath the overlay of thought and its experience in time, You are all that You are - and have not become something 'else', separated or conflicted.
Our identification with guilt and fear makes a very tricky mind that cannot be beaten, but can be disregarded.

What we appreciate or give attention to, appreciates. By following the true desire of the heart, conflict is starved of support. It fades and its perspective fades as a condition of unconsciousness in which to dream endless re enactments of loss and vengeance.

You are welcome.

You have never been unwelcome to your true heart. Discern the nature of the thought that says you are unworthy of love's awareness now. Is it the freedom that it suggests it gives to you? Or is it the freedom to think alone and apart as a 'power' all by yourself.

There are more fulfilling expressions of your true nature!

In Peace

Brian

Movement for Change

This is a feedback letter to 'Nation of Change'.

~ ~ ~

I welcome the influx of light and a greater perspective that comes of a willingness to look with innocent eyes. That is, of a willingness to look always anew from a guidance of a presence of being rather than from suggestive thoughts of whatever currency.

I do not join with the deception of 'fighting' evil - for this is how the mind feeds its habit.
Obviously there is a language that can belie the truth here - for to stand with and for the integrity of true communication may seem to be in opposition to the attempt to coerce and manipulate - whether that mind be in the corporatocacy or our own everyday thinking.

But to witness to truth and refuse to 'die' is not to then get our identity and power from the evils that we refuse or repent of.

This is my personal testimony as to why I haven't extended financial support, but it is also a point of feedback that transcends personal points of view.

The addiction of the mind to its own thinking is generally invisible - just as any addiction is invisible in a culture of its own making. The defence of the addict against anything that threatens its supply is maximal!

But when the conditions are so appallingly desperate as to question Everything, there grows a willingness to listen beyond or outside the dictates that thinking set.

Unless the Movement for Change is the expression and embodiment of the Movement of the heart, it has no authority. Illegitimate authorities assert and impose themselves upon our thought, our lives, our world. But True authority comes from true Listening.

One of the first and last defences of a mind in denial is confusion. The information itself is not the message. The way and the feel and the tone of the information is the message - and the information fits the need.
The capacity of the mind to assimilate and interpret is already overloaded.

Therefore we need to speak from discernment to a discerning attention - or we merely increase the noise to signal ration against a genuine communication occurring.

A Basis or Grounding from which discernment can be accessed is called for.
The suggestion of emergency and alarm always operates to negate that Call and insist that one must act first. This is how the contagion of the mind of fear and guilt operates. False promises that entice ever more deep entanglement.

'Stop the world, I want to get off' - is not without a message. But the thinking that makes the world of mutual definition and agreement is what has to be paused, rested of. In the space that this active willingness opens up, Life is revealed. As Movement, as a unified wholeness of being. We have forgotten what we are and our true Source Awareness, in engaging our power of will over the wholeness of being. This error is absolutely not attainable, but is altogether correctable.

There are qualities of Life that are unchanging and which are reflected in the experience of change. They have been conceptualized and abused in self serving ends - yet love, peace and joy remain absolutely shareable - regardless of any languages or systems of thought or teaching that we may personally use.

Communication rests on trust and trust rests on truth. In trying to manipulate truth, we undermine our own sanity and starve ourselves of our inherent Nature.

When a seeming death approaches, or a fundamental change such as our times, rises to awareness despite all or any attempts of control, we are available to an opportunity of awakening from the habitual repetitive reenactment of our past guilt and fear thinking.

I encourage you and your team to reach past the temptations of a polarised mentality and align with the embodiment of a fresh Perspective.

You find it is already active within you - but is tending to be usurped by the old patterns of thought and reaction. It may be that if we each as individuals cannot rise past our own thinking, then what hope for the world? But I would suggest that what I am inviting is healing even of that framework of thought.
One Movement is Alive and it looks like it looks like to a polarized mentality - which then seeks to 'survive' or prevail as a separate entity.
Without wanting to underestimate the attraction of this mind to the dynamics of conflict, I do want to suggest that our thinking, at an almost unconscious level, is creating an interpretive experience that we are mis-taking for our Truth.

Without the inner realisations of awakened responsibility, changing the world is largely a psychic redistribution in which everything is repackaged so as to seem better than before - without any of the causes being uncovered and corrected.

Thank you for your attention. I have included aspects that are 'deep' in that they are not casually available to a skimming mentality.

Life's fulfilment lies not in skimming the surface, but in being - and sharing - the depth.
Whatever we present of ourselves, love is our first and ultimate language of being.
When we think we can 'do' love, we leave our being behind and become indentured to debt!
But if you ARE love (beneath whatever judgements may be in place), then the inheritance you set out with was a false currency, and you are freedom itself. Freedom cannot be mere reaction of programmed conditioning. Freedom cannot be lost to the freedom to wish or believe itself lost!
There is always a greater perspective than what my thinking is allowing or defining and the curiosity to uncover that is the movement of the innocence of Being.

In Peace

Brian

Money, wealth and wisdom

Financial Times: Investing for the future
Kick-starting the flow of ideas

The article focusses on certain details - but I felt to comment on the underlying mentality:

~ ~ ~

Money is taken - accepted and agreed as value. But when that value drifts away from what is truly of value it becomes a bubble that cannot maintain its structural integrity - no matter how ingenious the soap mixture becomes.

If wealth grows, there is a win win situation in that there is a shared benefit. But if money-wealth grows in ways that actually undermines health and integrity. Then dysfunction and eventual breakdown is inevitable, because it is not truly wealth, but sickness disguised as wealth, as illustrated in the term 'toxic debt'. There are other 'hidden' toxic aspects to a lot of what is reckoned to be wealth.

Such error is at such a fundamental level of our identity from which our thinking comes forth, that very few can bring it into a greater perspective but are defined and dictated by its perspective.

In simplest terms, we need to re evaluate everything in terms of the whole and not engage in mutual 'fremnity' definitions which seek to use everything and everyone for a personal or private intent.

This is no more than an honesty or true congruency of being, yet from a freshly uncovered perspective that is NOT an expression of our own thought, so much as of a desire to listen, discern and notice, what truly fits, or works, as a larger fulfilment of our conscious desire.

This is not an appeal to thinking - which doesn't not listen because it thinks it knows. But to the heart - which is the wholeness of being and its unified expression.

Intuitive sense plays a much larger role in our lives than is usually acknowledged, but usually within very specific problems and goals. In the world that is unfolding in our day by day, I feel a much greater calling to a true accounting, not merely of balance sheets, but of a perspective of wholeness, that cannot be defined by parts taken out of context.

Jesus is not special - or love is yet crucified unknowing

An article on whether evidence found indicates Jesus was married



Comment:

I feel that the mentality that tries to use whatever is considered authority (in its day) as its own base from which to prevail, is a usurper; a phony or psuedo self deceit. It is not hard to find in our own thinking or in the world because it is the play of the sense of ego-self in its own self-creating. Mistaking it for reality is losing a real participation in Life for a false promise.
The story of Jesus - regardless of anything beyond the story - serves as an awakening archetype in the mind. All of what is in the story is about You.
All of the characters in the story speak of You.

This Movement - of awakening, finds its way into the human experience or the 'human condition'. It is the penetration of ignorance from within - yet the very nature of ignorance insists that reality is without and sin is within. (Effectively a dissonance of being that has become confused with a sense of self and triggered  dissociation, denial and displacement that is automatically defended as real - as for our very survival.

Making Jesus special, 'saves' us from everything he teaches. To make special is to separate. There is a perspective that can appreciate his teaching which does not use the mind that makes special to sacrifice love so that a separateness can 'live' in its place.

The rigidities of mind in polarity about what and whether Jesus was are smoke screens. But the opening of the mind from rigidity to simply feel anew - allows thoughts that would previously been rejected.
The process of undoing the thoughts of guilt, of hate, of fear, is going on all the time in all of time. It is the purpose of the Holy Spirit; the Voice for Love's Recognition and Remembrance. It doesn't need to be called anything to be Called.
Jesus put his own thinking aside and listened for the 'Father's Will" - for the feeling and the guidance of our Unified Being.
This is as available to all as to him. Jesus may have had a head start in living out from a faith in the Innocence of Being and a love of truth, but that could be seen as preparing a way rather than proving us guilty, evil-minded and weak.
The ignorance of our perspective will always distort or limit what we can receive.
Therefore beware of taking literally, that which was the best that could be understood at the time. Jesus himself was seen as a breaker and defiler of the law - though he came to fulfil it; for the law was made for Man and not the other way round. What he shared as the Son of Man - as humanity - was not a house divided or an hypocrite.
Unless Jesus is taken down from the cross of a specialness of person, then his message is effectively blocked. That Jesus is one with the Holy Spirit is to say that within you is a Guide and Movement for Love's awakening amidst a mind and a world of wilful struggle.
In Peace

Brian

Why sex is not what we think

An article on why sex evolved? doesn't mean a lot to me because I don't see evolution as the god it is worshipped to be by a mentality that hasn't truly observed and owned its own foundation.

I wrote two comments below:

~ ~ ~

Comment 1:

There is a two way aspect to all things in this world.
Looked at with the lens of separation, sex is all the things that a mechanical survival based view, measures and observes it as being; a transaction or communication dictated by 'prevail and survive'. The very nature of the survival urge is of response to threat and the very nature of the urge to prevail sets up the action by which opposing reaction gives rise to a sense of threat. The whole business is covered over with a self-protective fantasy in which the forms of Life are used to enact fantasy upon. Such is not only pertaining to sex - but the world! Living in our story rather than observing and responding to actuality as an integral participant.

Looked at with the implicit awareness of a pure participance, sexual love is one integral aspect of a reflection of a merging or Unified essence. An undefendedness of being to its own Source and Nature. To love God perfectly (holding nothing back as one's own 'take') IS to love your brother as your self. (Brother here is not a sexual term but an indicator of a common Source and Nature).

The commandments made famous by Jesus are not something one can 'do' but are something one can let into and realize to be true - by releasing all the self-regarding 'doings' that obstruct the natural flow of our being.

The inter-penetrating nature and communication that is also 'sex' is not a special state of breaking siege in order to go out and get something; but is the Way everything already be's.

The lens of separation or 'thinking' uses Life to get something - and that it how it gets to feel deprived. Repeated getting hollows out and depletes the relationship of any residual Blessing. The forms of sex are ritually enacted in order to get things from relationship and often by mutual agreement have no real intent to actually relate directly at all.

Sex is thus one of the simplest ways of experiencing shared being - and 'making' love is not so much making it as making love welcome and tangible.

Sex is thus one of the most guilt ridden and convoluted complexities of the human mind.

Another angle is simply to say that everything is only what you bring of yourself to it. The purpose that we hold in our heart and mind determines everything of our experience - starting with the very sense of self from which all else proceeds.

Thankyou for your attention


Comment 2:

Love's delight is in infinite variety of unique expression.
This extends in a world of form as a playful exploration of forms - but is also the capacity of love to be ever new. Heraclitus never made love to the same woman twice - for she is not as she was before and nor is he. This is the Secret within form that chasing after and identifying with form has forgotten.
Back to organic perspectives:
That there is a communication between apparently conflicting interests at a deeper level is itself enough to suggest Tweedledee and Tweedledum - who SEEMS to effect a polarity of conflicting forces or interests but dissolve before the awareness of the Big Black Crow.
Not a very nice word for God - but there's no way that the mind in addiction to conflict is going to recognize or  welcome love.
But the capacity of the mind to put truth (now!) on hold while pursuing an idea is not to be underestimated. Nor is it in itself sinful. But a wilfulness to lock reality (now!) out so as to prevail in one's own thought will bring with it all the baggage of sin, (dissonance or 'wrongness' of being), sickness and struggle and isolation and loss.
Because the mind can make itself sort of temporarily comfortable within such a hell, it can protect its own suffering against its own joy. Nothing one says to it will get through. But tolerance for pain is not infinite. Mind is not FIXED or LOCKED.
Letting life in and growing trust are one step at a time willingness for letting Life Move You as one-with instead of trying to leverage it from a presumed separateness.

Thankyou for your attention

Mystery of Human Consciousness

 Reading the article and some of the comments of:
The Top Ten Mysteries of the First Humans
prompted this sketch of an article.

~ ~ ~

The surface mind attempts to conceive or imagine a construct that 'justifies' and makes sense of the thinker, to itself. Such a thinker believes (and experiences) that they are as the preposition of that construct defines. This is an overlay of consciousness-experience upon what might be called Mind or pure awareness.
Creation in its pure sense didn't 'happen' in the past because it is an Eternal Is. That is, it is the Always and Only Condition. Our Father, Who Art (in) Heaven. Not 'Other' and 'than which nothing truly can be 'other'.

Thought in its original movement, IS the Movement of Being within itself in which Awareness Knows it is aware, through the shared or unified nature of being - which is love. The 'I think therefore I am' is not the proof of a separate self from the process of thought or being but a realization of Life as Movement of Being Itself.

BUT, to use the sense and image of I, as a focal point from which to stand as it were 'outside' or separate from the Movement of Being, is to introduce a lens of separative thought as a filtering and distorting experience - whose sense of 'self' substitutes for the unified awareness of being - IN ITS OWN focal experience. This is so because what IS cannot actually Be as it is not, and so remains true even through the experiences of a thought that seems to have splintered Wholeness and become a mind alone and all by itself - with other similar 'minds'. Whose separateness seems survival itself and is protected by a body - that is an aspect of Mind associated with tangibility of identification over which some degree of control can be temporarily effected.

The surface mind cannot and will not look within at its own underpinnings but looks fixedly without - at a world of form in space and time - that is to its perspective … life.
It does not see that it is looking at Self because it is not looking with Self or as Self.
Everything about it is programmed or mechanical, yet it believes it has 'free will' - which is to say free to think or do according to its own 'choice'.
Choice was introduced in the separation thought as a sense of being able to choose to be in the experience of separateness or to rest in Unified Being and let the experience dissolve. It is not a real choice because a choice between Everything and nothing cannot really have but one outcome if you ARE One with Everything. But choice became a substitute for true Freedom - which is simply the Movement of Being that Is love.

That Thought can say "Let there be light" - and there Is light, ought hardly to be surprising. But in the orphaned surface consciousness that we take to be reality, thought is made weak and material force and form seems overwhelming - but not quite... This is by design of a mind that became afraid of its own power and nature, that hides its confusion in unconsciousness - from which only those thoughts which protect its survival are allowed consciousness.

But the construct of a separateness that is not true is like an eddy in a flowing river. The forces that gave rise to its pattern are not themselves Eternal - and change and disintegration are inherent to what seemed a centre around which all else moved.

Thoughts can reflect the Eternal as well as the temporal. The difference is the focus.
As long as the focus is fixed on the surface reality, this is given your life because your attention is the movement of your awareness. But to put aside or suspend this exclusive focus - that is to relax the mind of identity, differentiation and judgement or desire - allows the Natural Focus of Unified Being to register to your awareness - as You.

If this is given welcome and not rejected, it grows and restores your mind to a naturally aligned perception - that is as the expression and extension of the Movement of Being that it never has not been. In such awakened intelligence is the nowness of form seen truly in its living context - and recognized as of One Mind and not seen as a conflicted and polarized reflection of a mind at war with itself.

Talking to the crowd or the footballers, while a game is on, as to the true nature of the game, is a futile gesture! But a willingness to write this here may meet with those whose attention or allegiance has waned for the game and who are therefore available to notice.

It is only sketches that point within - where our own words and concepts cannot go - but only cast shadows.

Thank you for your attention

The New Testament Revealed in a truly new light

The Holy Spirit's Interpretation of the New Testament: A Course in Understanding and Acceptance or NTI" ( "New Testament Interpretations") 

(Blurb): ... is a metaphysical interpretation of the "New Testament", which teaches oneness as the only truth, and surrender (or letting go) as the practice that leads to spiritual enlightenment. "NTI" stresses the importance of willingness, acceptance, gratitude, mind-watching and trust on the path of enlightenment while teaching the reader to let go of unworthiness, fear, guilt and false (or separation-based) thinking. "NTI" is unique as the entire course is delivered by the voice of the Holy Spirit, which the reader recognizes as a personal and loving guide."NTI" has been described as a love letter and as a loving approach to letting go of the ego. Following on from the strength of A Course in Miracles, "NTI" teaches us how to experience the oneness of God here and now by showing us exactly how to release the obstacles that prevent us from having that experience.

~ ~ ~
My review:(Amazon UK) See below for Guardian review



Is it possible to be looking in the world at a book or text and find it speaks your heart's light - talking to you through a book - while simultaneously recognising this is your own voice?

Such is my appreciation for this book.

If I step back a little I can say that such truth as I find opening with this book, has the capacity to calm, restore and awaken me to an altogether present perspective.

I find it truly revelatory at a level the intellect cannot reach. Yet the book is an intimate conversation with you that holds you in deepest reverence. It could not be more gentle or honouring of the truth of all.

The story of Jesus, his teaching and demonstration, may be disputed by the world - but its coming into our mind carries more than any 'religion' can own when its truth begins to speak directly to our own life.

When we are willing to open to a true understanding, we put our own judgement aside and listen in true desire of life. We are led by the movement of Spirit within to recognise and release the mentality by which we have deceived ourselves and lost our soul as we gained a world. And by this we are restored to what we thought lost.

Many will experience resistance to some of what this book reveals - but also many will come to a deep and abiding gratitude for being gently and clearly guided through it!

I find nothing coercive here, no sales pitch, and no judgement against or condemnation of. It is as direct and profound as human language can be - yet it is as nothing outside of a willingness for and love of truth. You cannot be made to drink!

That this book has appeared is surely witness to a hunger and readiness for truth.
But don't put the value or authority onto the book - but be the extension of that which is in your heart revealed.

There is much that Jesus shared that could not be received then by minds fitted only to the terms the world sets. I feel this book opens this anew in terms that can speak to anyone from any background.

What might this book bring in terms of you and your life?
A revealed basis - that is opened within You - for peace, joy and freedom in capacity to share love as the basis of life.

Does such enlightenment come from a book - No!
It comes because in some way you are ready for to accept.

The Holy Spirit authorship can be an issue for some who either dont believe in divine guidance or others who cant believe such grace could actually have anything directly to do with themselves and all others.
If you read the various books within you will find different voices - yet one purpose.

If you share this purpose you will find yourself as you do not expect - for awakening is prior to the mind we engage in the world - and by which we are ignorant of truth.
There is a grace that reveals what is always true, to a mind that believes it has lost its original nature, one step at a time, as you are willing to accept. 



My Book Review: (posted to the Guardian website)

Only willingness can read it

Anyone who is actually called or stirred in awakening from the mental sleep of a taken-for-granted identity of self and world will have experienced a living synchronicity or concurrence between the outer and the inner. The outer form of which may well be helpful, but the inner recognition is of a different order of experience than anything 'in-the-world has or could ever be.
This is a book of awakening and for awakening from a perspective that is itself awakened and which speaks to the same in you.
It is not a book that will offer any relevance for the mind that wants to think that it is who it thinks it is - and that the world is as it believes and judges it to be.
If the title were not already taken, I would call this 'New Testament Revelations' - not because of 'truths' that are given to use in the world as we believe it, but that truth is uncovered to the reader, right where you are - and offered to you to in a gentle and honouring spirit of invitation.
Each 'Book' of the New Testament has a particular voice and approach in NTI (New Testament Interpretations) and all share one purpose; awakening.
Not an idea of awakening others or society or in some future time, but of awakening and opening to the same truth that Jesus lived and shares - of an Intimacy of being the mind-in-the-world cannot know - that waits but on your welcome and acceptance, to immediately heal the mind of a false association by which all things are seen in a new light, and yet this unfolds step by step as free desire and willingness allow.
The basic ego or self sense would start out from a presumption of separateness from everything and seek to get for itself what it thinks best. If that is still what you want you wouldn't still be reading now. Yet our present appreciation and intuition of the truth of Life, Light and Love is constantly being blocked, filtered or distorted by a 'mind' of thoughts of which we are largely unaware and which we allow to essentially control our experience by use of guilt, fear and the illusion of escaping these while yet using them.
But NTI speaks clearer than I on all such things. My essential witness to this work is of its capacity to awaken not just interest or intention, but actually of speaking directly to our present condition, again and again and yet again.
What is it to be brought out from complex and delaying patterns of denial and self justifying habit into a clarity of unified joy? It is to awaken to the true foundation of one's being from which therefore to live out from.
Jesus's demonstration and teaching and the Christed message that is offered through the the New Testament is largely interpreted by minds that do not live as Jesus, see as Jesus or love as Jesus, and this indeed means that much that is given was not understood and has not been understood - because the mind was not ready to accept. Fear always distorts.
This book has appeared in response to a willingness, and in that willingness it is not a book, but a Message of Light to a mind ready to open to the Light of its own true Understanding. Not that there is not also resistance to such an opening - but that there is a conscious willingness to take a step with their Living Spirit, now.
A search online will soon reveal excerpts by which to test the waters - but gently watch where you put your attention - and the purpose in your mind that is guiding it. Peace knows, because it does nothing to block or deceive knowing all that it is.

Cultures in Collision - or a Call for Renewal?

Rushdie Describes Years In Hiding Under Fatwa

As the amateur film Innocence Of Muslims causes widespread anger, Sir Salman Rushdie discusses the fatwa Iran issued against him.

~ ~ ~

One might get ridicule or vitriolic hate for espousing a view that others find offensive - whether they understand it or not! but until Mr Rushdie's experience, no one (in this country or in any other liberal democracy) had received a religiously backed and nation backed death threat along with a willingness to carry it out as if it were not murder but duty to God.

The shock waves are still present as a sense of a sword hanging over our heads if we should be believed to speak of Islam or the Prophet Mohammed in a way that is felt to be offensive. There are cultural tectonic plates that are irreconcilable. The tendency has been an appeasement policy along with a similar mirror mentality arising in the west called; 'war on terror'.

Mr Rushdie was doing similarly to what anyone else in creative writing does, and in a culture that was felt to be finally becoming free of medieval religious dictates. His protection is not a personal favour so much as protecting the values of our culture - such as it has grown them.
But the mind is not as it thinks itself to be and there are many levels and strands to our consciousness, our culture and the world. If your death hangs in the balance of what you say, then make sure that what you say is in the truth of your heart!

Threat of death doesn't invite or command respect for God, but only a veiled obedience to cover a disdain beneath! Power in the world can dictate a form but cannot truly inspire or share or love.
The ones who made the hate video are the same mind as the ones who want to kill 'insulter's of Islam'. They thrive on hating 'evil' as they define it.
Globalisation has many aspects, one of which is that our local mythology no longer stays effectively private and our words can be taken as malevolent attack by those already nursing grievance or hatred within, who have the active willingness and capacity to retaliate.

War is the failure of communication, and is often the way tectonic shifts occur. A willingness to communicate is a great treasure, because we have to put our own self aside to hear and feel the other. Opinions are cheap and voicing the opinions of one's social group as if to be bigger than we are, is also cheap.
Mr Rushdie didn't know that his book would have such a result on his life - and on all of our lives. But if he hadn't wrote it, someone else would have effectively triggered the same response and with similar effect.

For better and for worse we are having to be more conscious with our communication. But if 'correctness' is imposed by threat rather than expressing a shared sense of worth from within, it will all be sterile - that is, devoid of any real communication at all!

The insult of the powerful over the powerless rides roughshod over them, but to those in defiance of such earthly power, retaliation seems a blow against evil.
I feel a Call for a true Cultural renewal - that is - to put our self construct aside and listen and feel for truth that is not of our own thinking, (adopted or otherwise). Within that context, we can give form to what is felt in a way that can find, one step at a time in a true willingness to communicate.

PS:
The subjugation of the dominant global market culture - as personified in the US and Western Europe, has nation states with arsenals of weaponry both financial and hardware of war. No one can realistically 'fight' this and much about it seeks domination and control regardless of the consequences to other peoples including their own! While this pervasive power has tentacles all around the world, it justifies itself by being a better system than what would otherwise prevail - and it gets self validation from seeing the evil in the 'other'.
This imposition of power doesn't justify issuing fatwa, but it does create a broad feeling of antipathy and distrust of the cultures that talk freedom and deal otherwise. Whenever there is a broad feeling or undercurrent of discontent, it becomes a soil in which extremism finds tolerance or support at some level rather than rejection.
All attempts to control life create reaction. The answer is to become conscious of such action and reaction so as to put that script aside and listen in simple trust for a communication of Wholeness. This may sound crazy to those who are addicted to their own thinking - but it is natural to our being.

Blessed indeed is the Messenger of God (by all names and any Name or without name), for Wholeness restores a perspective in which guilt, fear, pain, grievance and loss - are healed. The habit of a mind of reaction persists and is undone one step at a time - as it rises to awareness to be released. This is the crucial part; when it rises in our mind, we take it as our own and act out of accord with the wholeness of our being. This reflects as our experience of life in the world - which is always interpretation. Experience of dissonance is a call to our mind to wake - and not a call to put it on the other and deny or kill it. That kind of old magic does not eradicate guilt - but feeds it in the dark for a brief feeling of alleviation.

To look within is to observe our own mind and see directly - in place of living out the stories and spin that we have constructed in attempt to control our own mind.The baggage of fear and guilt is much more deeply embedded than the surface mind would imagine - and yet is baggage associated directly with the very urge to control.
Growing or restoring trust does not begin with making demand, but with a willingness to listen and a capacity to trust the embodiment of what is felt as a result of truly listening.

Jumping into Life

Pregnant Base Jumper Dies On Her Last Leap

An extreme sports fan who decided to make one final leap before having a baby dies after her parachute fails to open.

~ ~ ~

On a personal level, Wioletta Roslan died in the course of doing things she enjoyed - knowing that there were risks. We all pitch our lives at a level of risk and then take the life we get as our measure. It is easy to see the risk of a parachute jump. Less easy to see the risks of a mentality of security that suffocates the spirit and limits everything to a managed grey - even with many shades of it.

Going for the thrill is one of the threads of a human consciousness and it expresses in all sorts of ways through every walk of life at one level or another - and increasing in pseudo experience of film and game playing.

"I feel alive when I jump. I find normal life boring," Miss Roslan said.

This is very telling. We are born as beings of Wonder, but the light that is our in our presence and nature is increasingly covered over by a defined sense of self and world. The sense of self that we grow tends to be heavily masked by the persona that becomes our identity and our strategy of coping and communicating in life  - as we each see it, from our particular personal and cultural perspective.

Many of us at some stage in life come to realize we are not - never have been - the mask - but are a real presence that is beneath the radar of the world and generally kept under a bushel - except in special circumstances.

For it is only when we 'take the jump' of living out from our heart's knowing, that we experience the world differently. Rather than make this an addiction to a particular form - as if to self-stimulate, I would bring this insight into whatever apparent situation I am in. A culture of a 'control' mentality blots out the light and joy in life - as well as the inspiration and promise of all that comes forth from sharing it.

The thinking that sees life before death as a short moment to exploit for our self alone until the 'sun goes down' is common. But untrue. Because we are not our self alone, but an Expression of Life Itself. This is something that can awaken from beneath any mask, because what we make ourselves, doesnt actually create or change the truth of what we are. There is Something Eternal that we have forgotten that has not forgotten us - or we could not Be.

I sense that this knowing is part of a capacity to take the jump into human experience at all. It is as scary and dark a rollercoaster ride as you can imagine.

But regardless of our mutual definitions or agreements - and the hopes and disappointments these create in our experience; we ARE love's sharing. So much more than our surface mind realizes.

If it is time to go - then a transition occurs. Our True Safety is in Remembering who we truly Are, which is never absent from any truly shared relationship. Wioletta has her own reasons and lessons, and our views reflect ours and not hers.
There are many things that are equivalent to a parachute not opening. Things that become invisible to us while they are just there, or just work. Until they don't. Gratitude opens appreciation in Wonder!

Pondering (Cyber) security in the Real World

The article to which I am responding is
http://tidbits.com/article/13257

It speaks from as a technical journalist's - and yet simply human - perspective on a speech on cybersecurity to business and government-linked professionals by the US secretary of Homeland Security.

~ ~ ~

I am very glad to read this article. Thankyou.

I feel the mentality which the article points toward, is much more pervasive than might seem so - just as those who unconditionally trust that all the security policies and measures that are being implemented are in FACT serving their true interests.

The story of Chicken Licken whose fears escalate in the telling, leads to the manipulation of those caught up in fearful perceptions by Foxy Loxy. This is so much the case that fear and false hopes that can be used to generate fear, are at the root of the psychology of our economy (sic).

Education is more than information. It is expressing a wisdom and discernment that has a sense of the needs of the part in relation to the whole.

Programming the mind is a war that is largely invisible in our world, and we open to a world of information believing we can discern the chaff from the wheat. But a selfish or uneducated intent, using ingenuity and backed by power of wealth and influence implicity seeks to catch the identity and herd it where it is programmed to 'want' to go.
This gives rise to a completely different kind of system than one of educated responsibility - and the rate of technological expansion and dependency means this is happenning now and not in some near future. I am sounding alarm - not as a call to fear, but to simply bring attention present.

It is not enough to personalize the situation in terms of individuals and corporations or alliances of such - but to identify the program or mind that is at work as it is - and not as it presents itself. This is like undrawing the curtains around the Wizard of Oz. He could no longer pretend to be the Great Wizard of Oz - once innocently exposed.

Some willingness for education as to the nature of mind itself is needed to wake up from the fearful and conflicted loops in which our minds get tangled up in when allowed to run on 'auto pilot' - that is when old programs run unchecked and without true foundation.


Thank you for your attention.

Mechanical enforcement of a man in a mechanism

An article in the Telegraph on a growth of (a new generation of much more efficient) speed cameras:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/motoring/news/9536358/Speed-cameras-are-coming-back.html


Perhaps, this is a last moment before technology with GPS automatically enforces a maximum speed and all cars have to be fitted with it. And then it will drive the car - which wont be needed much because we'll all be plugged into a 'Matrix'-like existence that essentially medicates us with 'safe' pseudo experience; a managed 'reality'.

Meanwhile... the letter of the law can always be smugly and vociferously defended by the self-righteous.

The casting of the motorist as an easy and legitimate target to attack, tax or limit comes out of a 'health and safety' mentality that has grown disproportionately to functionality. It also comes out of the guilt mentality of the global warming consciousness in which the car is cast as a scapegoat.

The application of a tick box mentality that is supposed to 'fulfil' duty of care or protection. Being 'seen' to support targets that are the blinkers of self delusion.

An imposition of rule enforcement that is mechanically enforced without any process of relationship, education or communication.

All these things speak of a blindness of the heart; a lack of wisdom.

On the other side of the coin, an idolization of independent mobility as a purely personal freedom - as personified particularly in the car - is also an emotional blindness to that it is - or WAS - much more of a danger than so much else that gets blown up out of all proportion. (As manipulators of a feeble media love to do).

What is missing in our society, in this as in all else - is a true presence of a heartfelt relationship. This is diminished and enfeebled in almost every social context, and in its place a mechanical template runs that runs as a system without heart or soul.

To drive with due care and attention, relative to all the factors present in the external conditions, and the internal conditions, is not defined or supported by such blunt measures as speed limits - unless and except as they are intelligently set and proportionately enforced with discretion.

To make an ass of the law doesn't serve to grow respect for the law. To make a tyranny of being watched, tracked and punished for even small misdemeanours is something almost everyone can recognize in their workplace today as a manipulative guile by which trust and communication are replaced with being controlled.

Reaction and opinion are cheap and easy. Laws made out of such emotional partiality appeal to the surface realities of our mind without discerning what the issues really are.

If we want a culture of a generosity of spirit, an abundance of good will and imaginative and heartfelt vision for a world and a way of life that grows a true commonwealth rather than hollowing out to debt and depletion, then there has to be a sense of the context of everything and not just the forms it presents. What comes from a meanspirited and joyless mind can only grow such a mind. The attempt to control life is anathema to life.

And yes the attempt to make special exception of our personal self from the rules of the house by which unacceptable behaviour is met with limitation, education and rehabilitation.

How exactly, do human beings wake up to their true nature and relationships? We are not machines.

Thankyou for your attention.

The future of the Net?

An FT article of an interview with Tim Berners-Lee prompted this somewhat drafted article on the underlying human issues that are expressing in the rapidly developing Net - in its larger sense of digitally connected infrastructure. In attending the symptoms we miss the causes. Yet the forms ARE giving feedback to the Movement that is current - not only of the world - but of our personal participation as a subscriber and investor in such a world.

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To be fair, Facebook requires membership for access whereas Apple do not - as yet - lock anyone into their App Store. It remains an option. The 'lock-in' of Apple is the 'ecosystem of hardware and software that are both essentially under their control for better and for worse.

The open technology approach serves those of good will but falls down with regard for security against abuse and corruptions - as well as the issues of fragmentation into ever more complex variations. A position of control can implement protections and a degree of stability but the trust of being served and protected that is extended by members of that system can itself be neglected and abused - and usually is!

These are inherent human problems or aspects of a conflicted mentality and the root issues lie beneath technological expressions of their symptoms in the very dynamic of what we tend to simply accept as 'our mind' or indeed the human condition - which might be better called the human conditioning.

Integrity and trust, are fundamental to true sanity and communication, privacy and control tend to effect a private intent to dominate without checks of accountability or transparency. Reaction or resistance to being controlled can itself set itself up as the very thing it hates. There is a call for honest and open discernment and communication that can own our own investments and opinions without polarising against different interests.

It seems that Corporate forces drive the development of the Net, as with most else, and that the care for the integrity of the whole is only active when those interests are threatened. This is 'market forces', which is another name for war - albeit mostly managed without bloodshed - on the surface at least.

The appetite for virtual identity - on or offline - is deeply embedded in our human psyche, and drives the development of business that serves and also exploits its desires and fears.
The impulse toward honesty or congruency of being is apparently small and seemingly ineffectual - excepting to be used as a face of self justification or when asserting 'moral high ground' in a perceived conflict.

But the disintegration of a global system or indeed the corruption of the basis of the system itself, is of such an order of magnitude that it calls to mind Lewis Carroll:

Tweedledum and Tweedledee
Agreed to have a battle;
For Tweedledum said Tweedledee
Had spoiled his nice new rattle.

Just then flew down a monstrous crow,
As black as a tar-barrel;
Which frightened both the heroes so,
They quite forgot their quarrel

To my mind the fictional characters are aspects of one mind playing out conflicting parts and enjoying the struggle. But the monstrous crow represents an order of fear and undoing such that the competitive urge to prevail can be subsumed to a willingness to serve the whole. That is to discern and trust a unified Consciousness.

To serve the whole could also be likened to the willingness of the Prodigal son's return to True Source. In the expression of this is the 'restoration of abundance and union'.

The attempt to control by imposition of power over, will in my view lead to collapse or disintegration. This is being fleshed out on a Big Canvas - and so becomes an opportunity to awaken to an entirely fresh perspective.

At times of crisis, matters that have been denied are forced into the open, and nothing can remain as it was (believed and experienced to have been). Amidst fundamental change, a fundamental trust may be regained).

If every digital event was available to being searched and found - but that such search itself was no less open, then would we attend to our legitimate business and only seek out that which we have a need or business to know - and then openly - because furtively is not available?
Would we have to be willing to be seen to be watching pornography by those who are willing to be seen to make it their business to know - and of whom all else about them was visible?

This scenario reminds me of a sense of another level of existence - if you will permit me to put it so - where every thought has immediate effect and no thought is hidden. What then would you create? It is clear that what we can think has no limit apart form the limits that our own thought sets on itself.

Our technology is bringing us to an underlying truth of which we have successfully forgotten for a very long time. The notional entity of person, nation or corporation, is in fact an expression of an interdependence in which the self is largely a virtual construct overlay upon an actual Movement that is not really ours to control so much as to embody and share.

Yet the struggle of 'virtual and notional' allegiances and identities persists even as the ground is moving out from under them.

I don't pretend to understand what is going on in the usual sense of the word, but I do feel that there are perspectives beyond those masks and identities to which we have fitted - and I write as an invitation to be innocently curious rather than defined.

Meeting in shared values, or private deceits? The marketplace

BBC News article :
10 charges that make consumers scratch their heads, relates to the use of confusion as part of a war of business upon the mind of so called consumers. (I feel the term consumer itself is part of that same war, as we are participants in a relationship and are not defined by imposed analysis)

I don't feel to focus on symptoms so much as look at the underlying causes.

~ ~ ~

The marketplace embodies a relationship expressing a sense of value shared, but true value been lost to a state of war waged with deception and a manipulative intent; A desire for personal or private gain that disregards real relationships, is lawless, undermining of trust, and blindly destructive, as it hollows out our culture, and promotes fear and guilt as the motivators and guides of both identity and action.

Living human beings are consenting to being conditioned or programmed into domesticated passive consumers so as to be milked, in exchange for a sense of temporary security that has to be constantly maintained against an increasingly fearful sense of life.

The mentality of both corporate and consumer, as the to intent to control and prevail as a separate entity, pervades modern life as an attempt to 'get' without any relational sense of giving and receiving - that is - without honouring life at all. Instead it manually enacts the processing of material and emotional transactions, by the ticking of check boxes in templates designed to meet targets that substitute for a tangible fulfilment. Humanity acting in the image and likeness of our own machines.

Standards and rights that have become legally quantified and defined as part of protecting health and safety have also become another raft of weapons in war of self-interest or part of the blind machinery of law that cannot be implemented with proportionate discernment and discretion because, as law, its bluntness must be suffered by all. The soulless nature of modern society and business is both a cause and an effect of a pernicious selfishness that is blindly unaware of its lack of true basis, or the pattern of short term high followed by long term pain, in joylessness of being entangled in attempt to manage loss, rather than share life.

Milking 'the system', is made normal by all kinds of spin of self justification or tacit collusions but the system is not a merely system of mechanical processes so much as serving needs that are tangible and felt and an inherent expression of a relational dependency that we share as an inherent aspect of our nature and being.

In the imaginative attempt to be ourself separate, autonomous and worthy or powerful in our own right, we cut ourselves off from the wisdom, love and connected peace of our true being, and substitute a mutually defined sense of ourselves and the world, that we experience and suffer as real; to be manipulated or overcome or perfected according to our own judgements.

The 'way out' from a falsely framed situation is firstly to identify or recognize it, and then to refuse to act out from it as a foundation. In the lack of a manipulative or personal reaction, there is the space of awareness to feel the wholeness and presence of life rather than think apart. From this comes a capacity to listen and communicate that actually communicates shared value, rather than enacting war or grievance. That can address a failure of communication with a restoration of communication, rather than with blame and hatred and righteousness of self.
Sharing a sense of value is the nature of our being, and yet if we give that value to what is itself unreal, we multiply nothing at the expense of sharing something real.

The marketplace as a meeting place and upholder of culture is being lost to mechanism. Life to logistics and processing of data. This calls for waking up at a fundamental level, for our thinking itself is being conformed to a souless, joyless and manipulative - but false - foundation.
There is infinitely more to life than such thinking allows or experiences. Abundance arises of a freedom and generosity of spirit. Our collective bankruptcy is but a reflection of the mind by which we are deceived. See it and drop it! Be renewed of a different foundation and serve a truly heart-felt purpose. Shift from problem based thinking to love based thinking; the love that is simply a unified expression through being ourselves, together.

Thank you for your attention.

Democracy in America

Democracy in America is a blog at the economist.com. I commented this in an article about Michelle Obama's speech - but it is the nature of the political relationship and communication that I felt to address.

~ ~ ~

Democracy in America... has become a naked attempt to manipulate rather than communicate.
The mimicry of communication by good (or poor) acting is perhaps best extolled by the USA - but is by no means particular to them.
The tribal nature that is drummed up in party conventions is a subset of the worship of one's nation - often equated with "God bless America".

The USA along with most other nations is not really a nation so much as a host in which corporate entities operate under the cover of whatever brand of dreams are particular to that region. Are not all governments puppets to the financial system that owns them and tells them what they are not allowed if they exceed their remit?
Meanwhile the assets are stripped and culture hollowed out.

It may be true that to tell it like it is, would be to be unelectable at best. But it may also be that in the era of a sophisticated manipulation of perception, no one - or almost no one would be able to hear.

God bless us all! - meaning, let no one be excluded from the worthiness of love's awareness.

The tea party and the occupy movement are symptoms of a break in the trust that held the American dream in place - but reaction is not itself going to uncover a fresh inspiration.

Democracy anywhere, is a fuzzy idea that COULD indicate a cultural willingness to communicate rather than use the forms of communication in order to prevail.

Competition has its own mentality; winning. The American Dream is like the lottery - everyone can be a Winner!
Getting things at the expense of others is not the same as living clearly and vigorously from a sense of shared integrity and value.

This wont come from politicians, but of an individual's desire for sanity. Dreams turn to nightmares, but sanity is waking up from a misperception.

Being human remains a particular kind of schoolroom. We're all in it together, playing apart, because that is the idol of independent identity. Love's awareness sees that for what it is, a story spun to play out a sense of specialness that cannot work even when it temporarily succeeds.

I look forward to the fertility that the collapse of the old thinking will bring but I don't expect it to go while it offers the illusion of control.

Information, media, perception, manipulation and discernment

An apparently inconsequential article on Bloomberg.com led to this writing on the issues around perception and sharing information, along with the distortions that a manipulative intent bring into play.
~~~


Perception is thought and can be manipulated, but the medium by which that is effected can and does turn against the manipulator.

Perceptions and thoughts can naturally share as expressing a sense of value or truth of an undistorted experience of life.

Whereas the payload of a manipulation is hollow once the halo wears off, and has to be repeated and maintained as a promise of value in order to 'survive', true communication expresses a tangibly shared sense of worth and connection that is already present but is illuminated through the sharing.

These issues are at the core of our own self or mind, which is conflicted in the attempt to have both, and so loses the capacity to tell the difference and suffers its own illusions.

The 'Information age' will be short, because its foundation is divorced from wisdom and discernment. However, it's failure will provide the conditions for their advent.

This isn't about Apple - (or any corporate entity) - and the media, (which is now fragmented and yet in mainstream sense is a corporate entity with its own agenda).

The issues of privacy and control, trust and integrity are implicit in all that we do - but in the rapidly changing world of today, they can no longer be templated and enforced in the way that worked before.

Learning to discern is not a 'better handle on the world' but an awareness and wisdom in which to transcend and harmonize - and even heal - the divisions of self. It isn't just for dealing with crisis or applications of rebranding our identity with 'out of the box' ideas - but a living framework that holds and extends a true sanity and abundance of being.

Big promises! - but really its simply that the foundation determines all that comes forth from it - and a false foundation cannot be gotten to work even if one spends the whole world in trying. Even our best thinking tends to substitute for an actual checking in. Running on a template identity is already a loss of the immediacy and vitality of living.

I don't write to set up a right and wrong mind and then position myself as its owner, so much as desire a world in which communication and manipulation are discernedly not the same.

Another word for manipulation - in the sense I am using it - is war. This is the personal sense of prevailing over or suffering attempts to be prevailed upon. Backstage, it is a collusion in which truth is ignored in order to play the part and take the ride.

Truth is not a weapon. When we attempt to use truth or manipulate, we are used by deception and suckered into dancing its tune.

"Truth is the first casualty of war" should read, "of the war-mind". Because it remains true regardless of our subscription. But once we take the bait we tend to run with it until we wake up some time later.

Thanks for hanging in with an opportunity to reflect if you feel moved to. Concepts are crude tools for sketching the qualities of life that can never fit in the database template of which concepts are. But that is also where our attention is accustomed to seeking information and answer, so I try to open a perspective that hasn't got a voice in the accepted thinking or culture or our times.