Protection, regulation and the State

Cycling to work without a helmet? Please think again
FT article by Charles Wallace


Culture is a complex relational interaction. It has been noted in a study I have read but haven't a link to, that the appearance of a cyclist affects the attention and cautions accorded them. While we may all think we are mindfully present, most of the time we are reactively conditioned by past experience.

So the lycra-sporting helmeted cyclist LOOKS like they know what they are doing and is automatically accorded less space and timing than one who is not appearing so proficient, professional or indeed armoured or indeed at times, aggressive in their assertion of taking their right of way.

A relationship can be codified and rulebound - but then that is no longer a relationship but a subconscious routine in which rights of entitlement can blind the actual negotiation of communication occurring.

The urge to replace living relationship with mechanism is often a desire to persist in an out of true sense of self-specialness (that embodies relational ignorance and arrogance), and seek a technological or external 'answer' to an internal 'problem' of communication breakdown

This results in layers of externalised rules and socially enforced agreements that serve to lock us into communication breakdown as the redefined 'reality' so as then to have to 'engineer' and impose a coercion upon life that is no longer trusted to know or find its way.

So deeply and pervasively is this cultural breakdown substituting for a Living Culture - in which a true and positive sense of worth and value is extended and shared - that the negative risk avoidance thinking has come to believe it is the only rational voice and that any other is a quackery or heresy or 'dangerous' and therefore threatening and therefore to be defended, against by protective regulations.

As for how to live your live - recognize it is not yours ALONE but that you are always in relation to something - and in human terms to each other. How to be true to yourself within relationship is the journey AND the destination. A false thinking may wish for power to make the world or others fit your unresolved emotional demands - but sooner or later one has to own one's own and bring it into a willingness of communication and integration.

Risk is part of life. Everyone negotiates their risk level according to their sense of their relationship to conditions. When life is subordinated to a risk averse sense of socially agreed limitations, fear is worshipped above life, and a suppressed will to live results in lack of creative engagement in society. It may find other avenues of expression, it may become morbid, dissociative and dysfunctional in social terms.

An opening and embrace of life is not a mental act, under mental supervision, to adhere to rigid mental rules backed by fearful disincentive. However, we live in such a society and have to negotiate our path with everything that is present - that is prescencing itself as our unfolding life experience. Risk aversion - in terms of codified and worshipped fear, is far and away the greatest threat to Planet Earth at this time. For under such deceit is every fearful script blindly re-enacted to protect the 'devil we know'. Risk assessment needs to reintegrate to knowing who you truly are and what you desire. This is a process of discovery that will always meet challenges by which to learn and grow in ways perhaps one did not expect - for what the past-conditioned mind expects is not a truly living relationship and in many ways is armoured and defended against such a revelation.

The belief that one is made safe by any external condition is the most dangerous state - because one no longer pays attention. Trust in God - but tether your camel comes to mind. Give to God what is God's due and give to Caesar what is Caesar's. The discernment is your own to freely accept but if you give to fear what is due unto love of Life - you sacrifice your Life to a god of fear and diminish capacity to even recognize Life - so as to only 'see' in terms of disconnected thinking and yet worship such thinking as if it is your salvation and your Self. Take off that VR helmet of 'thinking' a moment to see from a greater perspective and then honour your fears without sucumbing to them, and do what you will - as the relational balance point within your experience.


 @Mike It is often the case that changes intended to answer problems merely suppress them and they sprout out in several new heads that are not always seen as related - and so focussing on problems magnifies problems and keeps us tied up in problem - which is great for say - the pharmaceutical industry, or any other problem seeding and management industry.

Or to put it in reverse, the seeming problem is often a more complex displacement of simpler but fearfully associated relational problem.

When a paradigm shift occurs it is because the multiplicity of problems or anomalies starts to become unworkable. The model is not serving and one has to go back to the template at its foundations - accept a fresh take that resolves or doesn't call up the problems that the old model proliferated but was unable or unwilling to recognize as messengers of something the old model rejected that is integral and wont be denied.


 Another point I notice is that attempts to SHOUT and grab ATTENTION in lights, signs, hi-vis paints and clothes are all upping the noise level so that the mind HAS to learn to set a new level.

Now in this paragraph above, the all CAPS are three distinct words - but if every word was in some way emboldened, italicized, flashing on and off, capitalized - moving about on the page - you would have to develop a new level of skill to actually ready it.

There is a point where the attempt to manipulate attention are counter productive and result in an automatically defensive ignorance of such intrusions. When I surf the web, I have no problem focussing ONLY on what I choose to give attention to and disregarding anything that is not resonant or relevant to my purpose. But then I have a clear sense of purpose and familiarity with the Web. As one who once lived around London but now out in a much quieter and slower paced environment I note how much less spacious and denser and more over stimulating the nature of using roads is in areas such as the south east - while also noting the impositions of taxing, penalising and invalidating the car user that came perhaps from the Green movement but then becomes a trojan horse by which to assert the power of the State within the mob that are induced to deny a voice to any other view than has been sanctified by divine threat. But I DO recognize car drivers SHARE the road with all others be that cyclists or pedestrians, and being bubbled off in isolated environments coupled with ego-centricity of ignorance and arrogance is a dangerous combination - as well as that so many now have and use a car that it all clogs up almost all the time, every day, in so many parts of our country.

I would look at the ego-centricity as the common element in most kinds of problem. It is 'sold' to us as freedom and protection by ads, media, educators, politicians and any other kind of manipulative intent, and is so in use as currency that it is hard to even talk about. But when we are out of true, we are not in the flow or appreciation of our presence - of our life - whatever we may be doing. Un-resolved or unrecognized fears are what ultimately deprive us of our true or natural inheritance - because they are not perceived excepting as points of leverage, and not owned but pushed away or hidden from. Thus so many demand to be managed while complaining about the management.