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.
Thursday, 13 September 2012
Monday, 10 September 2012
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.
~ ~ ~
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.
~ ~ ~
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.
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.
Sunday, 9 September 2012
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.
~ ~ ~
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.
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