Slave to Fear

The history of British slave ownership has been buried: now its scale can be revealed

Comment:

Is guilt appropriate for a past before our own time? For guilt operates an invalidation of Life while attempting to coerce rather than communicate.
Is a variant form of slavery operating under different guises today? The financial and corporate sectors have captured the regulators. A new era of slavery awaits us - at least such is the logical outcome of TTIP and similar moves to bring corporate governance out of the shadows now that societies are utterly indebted and wealth so unevenly redistributed.
Are we slaves to our own thinking? Merely reacting without capacity or inclination to challenge it for fear of penalty or threat?
Exploiting others starts with invaliding true value in oneself - for only those who hate or fear themself look out hatefully and seek power to get from others so as to seem more.
The use of evil as a leverage of such power seeking is one of its primary deceits.
However, the question at hand is always a responsibility to your honest sense of what is true of you now. We inherit all kinds of thinking, all kinds of behaviours, all kinds of institutional structures and identities. The desire to possess, to control and to exploit Life, Others and our World is often disguised under the false flag of self-righteous reaction.
Big Pharma, among others, operates a different kind of slavery. Can you actually see it - or are you presuming it is founded in defacto realities?
People have actually been conditioned to CHOOSE to trade their freedom for a scam by which they are then further denied. But one still has to persist in such choice for it to operate - albeit 'subconsciously'.
"...but whosoever hath not, from him shall be taken away even that he hath.

Charity begins at home - naked truth

Warwick women rowers strip off for charity. But is that okay?

What does 'exploited' mean?

Are the women exploiting the known trigger points of cultural ideas of attractiveness in order to sell more calendars and attract more money to an un-unrelated (to naked women) charity?
Is not the idea of 'raising money for charity' a device that is exploited for its own reasons?
Perhaps the term exploited is more associated with coercive force, or of being manipulated such as to be unaware of the choices one is taking or of other choices available.
Exploiting is an aspect of 'getting'. One might say we all exploit ourselves, each other and our world, in that we will all seek to get something for ourselves - unless we are already happy, whole and connected, in which case we share rather than 'get'.

A key issue is whether we receive and give in a sense of honour and trust, rather than 'get' at another's expense without any real relation.
But the key issue to the women's project might be 'how do we raise money for xyz?' - and feel for their comfort zones and sense of adventure both. Because 'charity' is the remaining avenue of 'justification' for behaviours outside social conformity.

The 'getting' mode, is seemingly innocuous and harmless - but it cannot be employed without a psycho-emotional disconnect, and the 'justification' mentality rises as one with it - as is symbolized by fig leaves in the myth of the Fall.

"Ye have not because ye ask not" - is a reference to a direct self revealing extension of trust and communication. A true intimacy shared. We sacrifice the power of love in a darkness of forgetting, in order to 'enjoy' the private sense of power in 'getting' - except we then suffer experience of being 'gotten from' and loss and fear of loss replaces trust, and a mask replaces our true presence, in which praise and blame war - so as to deny a clear and heartfelt acceptance of our naked living being.

Moral coercion feeds a libertarian reaction. Guilt is the driving force of morality - for the innocence of our being does not seek to justify or validate itself. But nor is it defined in reaction against such cultural impositions.

To do something because it is the true desire and movement of our being, does not bring with it the associated overhead of conflicted self - or its reflection as a conflicted experience of our world.

This is true charity - because this is the gift of our true presence into our relations. When our presence is witheld we deprive ourselves and others - and yet look out as if it is denied us by others and our world.

Charity begins at home. If we do not truly let love into our lives - we will not have it and be it in our relations. A deep self acceptance is not a justification slip for doing what you do not really want! This issue is the most important in all else that ever occurs because it is foundation for what comes next. Self-rejection - no matter how disguised - will not bring a better world for 'others' or ourselves. Love knows what thinking alone can only hide.

Controversy is a sport. But one doesn't have to play it.