Marriage, Society and Consciousness

The Three Senses of Marriage
By Philippe Gastonne



I do not regard any externally imposed religious idea of marriage for the intimacy, trust and honesty of a shared willingness that is what such constructs may have originally intended to honour. The true meaning of anything is never contained or defined it its concept, symbol or image.
However the meanings that are accepted and lived out as real or true of us become the currency whereby we structure our self, our society and our model of the world and our place in it.
The Spirit is inherently and forever free from or beyond a manipulative intent, but the idea of an autonomy of mind - disconnected from Spirit (direct intimacy of living) IS the idea of manipulating meanings to coerce outcomes. Thus meanings themselves become meaningless - for they can mean whatever anyone want or asserts them to mean in any shifting context, rather than integral to the wholeness of being in which and as which all that is true communicates itself without distortion AS one's total consciousness. This substitution and adulteration of a true currency of thought operates a reversal in local consciousness whereby a sense of disconnection and separation masks and defends itself against wholeness. However, the breaking through of a true intimacy of being between those who otherwise identified themselves as separate is a transcendent experience of a greater unity - and this can and often does serve as a foundation for social structure that is not merely the shifting alliance and transactional bargains of sacrifice for personal gain, by which two or more make an identity of relative joining over and against a perceived hostile world. All versions of such extended 'ego' operate likewise as a sacrifice via which a personal advantage or gain is believed to be had. And which then persists as a pattern of inheritance if not re-evaluated.
The alloy of the integrative and segregative movements makes a confusion of self conflicted identities. The coercive mind operates to try to make a unity of what does not and can not join or belong together - and is a futility upon which to sacrifice one's life until, the identification within the segregative movement falls away to allow a re-awakening of an integrative perspective.
Until such clarity emerges, everything is tending to serve conflicting purpose and within the mentality of deceit and coercion implicit in masking such conflict, will every kind of manipulative attempt to engineer society or personal outcomes - disregarding the whole or the truth of the other and oneself, persist.
My view is that the fear-mind of manipulative intent cannot know of or see what anything truly is, but can only perceive the forms that seem to equate with meanings. There is nothing transcendent or truly human being extended or shared or received in that kind of mental sleep. The giving away of our power begins with the accepting of definitions, beliefs and meanings that are NOT true of us and which therefore undermine and conflict or divide our true presence of participation in every moment of our living, by the substitution of an image of our selves, that 'thinks' and uses its thinking to assert and defend its 'self'.
"Let the dead bury the dead" is the corollary to attending the living. For to become engaged with what cannot know or see or value you, is an unholy marriage that consummates itself in conflict and loss. Union is not achieved by sacrifice or war.
The ideal or idol of marriage may fall to state or corporately provided 'identities', but the capacity to uncover a truly joined purpose with another and embody it is not threatened. Indeed as the idols by which our world seemed to stand, fall, are we called to discern the truly living from an awakened humility. For what is society but the sharing of, and embodiment of, idea?

The Three Senses of Marriage

By Philippe Gastonne

Who looks after the asylum?

Today’s Court Ruling, Though Expected, is Still Shocking — Especially for Those Who Grew Up LGBT in the U.S. By Glenn Greenwald

Quite apart from issues of what marriage is and whether it is ANY business of the state, insofar as it embodies a shared value and harms no one, and apart from the practice of manipulating and feeding off of identity confusion - I have a question; WHO exactly decided that same sex marriage was to be fast-tracked and implemented internationally in a very short time frame? Are they the same ones pushing the legalizing of marijuana? The promotion of 'terror' as a consolidation of state power? The forced vaccination agenda? The so called 'trade agreements'.
I am not saying that there are not grass roots movements for change - but that these can be subverted or used as proxy pawns in a larger strategy is evident.
But the ability to incept top-down memes into the populations of many regions at once is not an evolution of communication and relationship.
Of course if the change suits, then one blind-eyes that it is imposed.
Why are some ideas fast tracked for implementation - and are token freedoms used to distract from larger fait accomplis?
In the UK I cannot obtain a civil partnership with my partner unless one of us changes our sex.
It feels to me that there have always been those who have rightly or wrongly sought to 'shepherd' humanity through the ages. There is a difference between guiding and dictating. Coercive agenda hides itself very cleverly within anything we are inclined to trust and accept. Particularly if subjected to multiple stresses or fears in such a way and at such a rate that wishfulness gives its power away quite blind-willingly to manipulative intent.
One thing I notice, is that controversy and dissension operate division and indeed diversion, while the coercive agenda rules amidst a distracted mind.
Perhaps there is no deceit in feeding distraction to a mind that WANTS to remain unconscious in order to protect and persist its 'identity'. Perhaps Humanity is one mind in schizophrenic role play? Who looks after the asylum?

An alloy of Ideals and hidden agendas

On www.opednews.com article titled: "It's Finally Official - Pope Francis Demotes Highest-Ranking US Cardinal Over LGBT Issues"



The judging of good and evil is the false mind that seems split off from Intimacy with God. Any individual is free to discern what is true or false with regard to their own core being and live from that as their true extension of presence into the world. Not that it will be agreed with, accepted or tolerated by others, but that the joy of an unconflicted presence extends peace through whatever it does because it is not at war with itself.
The idea that humanity's function is to determine truth for or impose it upon OTHERS, arises from the fear of a sinful nature that must be fought against, overcome, controlled and conformed to a coercive idea that may seek to represent ideals or may be hijacked by agendas seeking private power and gain through the trojan horse of protection and guidance.
Insofar as identity and sexual orientation have been increasingly politicized, these also exhibit an alloy of Ideal and hidden agenda. But love seeks not to GET from.
Indeed all kinds of Ideals are now corrupted with such manipulative deceits.
While attention is diverted and distracted with polarising conflicts the deceiver sets all things to serve a joyless or Soul-sacrificing agenda of manipulating... but manipulated egos who worship beliefs or definitions of themselves and Life, that effectively deny or indeed crucify the Innocence and Intimacy of being for persona-power.
Difference of unique qualities is to be celebrated. The attempt to differentiate from Life, from one's true nature, so as to 'get something' for oneself at the expense of others, is to identify falsely - regardless what form it may take. That is to say, one can make an identity out of anything and use it as a mask, a manipulation, and an illusion of vanity and arrogance.

Indeed we all have this mentality within us and while we do not own our own - and attend to our own integrity - we are likely to focus somewhat exclusively 'away from home' in the world of conflict and diversion.

contd...

What we believe in our hearts manifests as we stand in it and give it witness. The convoluted rules of the head that tries to usurp the heart are not loving and operate coercively in the name of the heart's symbols.
Symbols, images and Ideals cannot define or replace G-d. This is a Fundamental error in which a mind thinks it can judge good and evil WITHOUT Intimacy with God  - with Soul, with the Guidance and listening of the heart surrendered in willingness for truth.

The Second Coming can be accepted as the Awakening of the same mind that was in Jesus - in Humanity, starting with oneself, now. Jesus was not a Christian, nor was he constrained by his own Law and tradition. But he demonstrated love's will in place of a masked or personal agenda of self-apart interest.
Symbols CAN be used within awakening Life rather than substituting for it, and indeed the Holy Spirit is the innate capacity to communicate on all levels - including symbol and archetype.
The mentality of war operates exclusively as 'either/or'. The mind of peace operates 'both/and' But without peace is contradiction - which is war. The only peace is to discern and be the truth you are. The endless war is to attempt to be what you are not and defend it against 'what Is'. When humanity loves its own identifications more than the light by which it lives, it 'knows not what it does'.

Something fishy in media promotion of sexual politics

The media is used to promote 'gender and sexual politics' in ways that are often divisive and manipulative. This article is an example.

- - -

People with vaginas?
Baby cannons?
"Make" them smell?
You do have fun with words!

Women's genitals have an odour. Everyone is unique and yet a vagina is recognizably vagina. All kinds of conditions affect the smell.
A disposition to embrace and appreciate and honour will align an integrated joyful health. Imposing a disconnected personal set of fearful self definitions, demands, struggles and stresses does not help the body in its function of serving you.
So much of what anyone tries to sell you is fear-based. That doesn't mean it cannot serve your loving - but make it your positive act and don't be tricked into trying to be someone you are not - or fearing that who you are is not worthy of love - right here right now - just because!
'Men' -  Idon't know about 'men' - such a sweeping generalisation! Being true to yourself is the gift from which everything else can line up truly. What does that mean but a deep self acceptance of that you are - and that how you are thinking and feeling about yourself is very likely to contain a lot of baggage that you are better off without. But one cannot let go of what is not first owned.
Love is sometimes already like peaches. No need to paint the roses red - but you can; if you want to.
Love has no needs but to share itself. Fear operates a need to withhold and hide itself. Love communicates through the body and the mind and beyond. Fear uses the body to break communication and separate in a masked presentation that then seeks to get from rather than be be with.
Because 'men' can withhold their presence, women can wonder if it is something they 'did wrong'. No. But we can only relate from an honesty and feel good about ourselves. Which simply means not trying to be what you are not. When its ok to say one feels awkward it often suddenly frees up the whole situation. Love is so much more than vaginas - But they are also embraced and embracing as an integral aspect of your being. Even if you are one of the people without one of their own.
What is the purpose behind such 'articles' - what do you think the powers that lobby and guide and decide Guardian policy intend it to serve?
Perhaps a 'media cannon' to insinuate its ideas into your mind? Or promoting sexual identity politics as a divisive agenda whilst pretending to smell of peaches? Or feeding ideas of feminine identity that do not actually embrace, honour and appreciate what it is to be a whole Souled woman, regardless the particular challenges that may not affirm or extend that recognition to you.
Needs are both simple and complex in that the discernment of what exactly is called for or not called for in a given relationship or situation is not rocket science, but that once the mind gets involved along with emotional triggers and confusions the complexity can be like an impenetrable thicket.
If people beat about the bush and wont come through, they simply are not coming to share the love of life with You. Often we discover who we truly are only after trying out who we are not. It's good to fail at being who you are not! Now you can live more consciously on purpose - just being you. Joy to the world!

"Coming Out" as Consciousness, agenda politics and identity conflict

The Tim Cook coming out news brought out a banal comment on a Mac forum.


What you are, is truly beyond definition - but humanity 'plays the game' of definitions very very SERIOUSLY! So if who and what you truly feel you are - (or are NOT) - does not fit in the current CONSENSUAL dictate - then you have a 'path' in life of finding the willingness to accept and embrace what you truly align in as You, and let go of what you are not - without presuming to decide for anyone else. That's their life.

To open and join in real relationship is perhaps the richest and most rewarding aspect OF being human. Perhaps anything less than that, is not yet come into truly human cognisance. But relationship is also deeply challenging because fear comes up from within us in relating to others. Society operates the rituals of navigating and masking or mitigating such fear. Moving through fear uncovers a basis in which we are released of a deeply onerous burden of beliefs or self-definitions that effectively deny our joy in living. Yet most of us feed our fear with compound interest as if a greater indebtedness can become true wealth.

To me the issue of sexual orientation is not the point. The point is a life truly embraced and lived. By their fruits ye shall know them. (And they shall know themselves).
So rather than judge a book by its cover, I feel the qualities that someone brings forth as a presence and communication of life - or the presentation of attempting to pass off as genuine currency that simply isn't.

Gender politicking is something else. I generally feel such a movement is subverted, funded and directed by agendas that care less for people and more for the power interests of a few. As I do with health politics and climate politics - because politics itself has become corrupted.

I appreciated a recent HuffPo conversation opened by gay UKIP MEP David Coburn that touches on various issues - albeit in deliberately provocative terms.

One of the primary ways a deceptive or masked power operates is to make it almost impossible to talk or debate about it's real nature. So it can effectively become illegal or open to vilification to even talk about something in a way that challenges the official version.

In THAT sense I am willing to be 'politically incorrect'. But my interest is in reintegrating the warring polarities of a split personality, so as to be free to more gladly live and share and unfold the lives that we ARE blessed with - howsoever we might account for our circumstance.

Why is Tim Cooks 'coming out' placed in the 'technology section' of various 'news' media? Because are not NEWS media but operate an agenda that tends to align in negative common self interest of fearfully defended masked agenda pretending to be what they are not, in order to get something or to escape something.

Being - existence Itself - is the greatest gift anyone can receive or share in - for all else is OF that and in that. That awareness of existence expresses itself in infinitely rich diversity does not mean it is at war with itself. It simply means that each is true unto its own Movement.

When we are true to ourself we are no longer making choices or accepting self-beliefs that are not! And this has a very different perspective than self-judgement - or the projection of such hatred onto others.

Agenda:
A plan of things to be done or problems to be addressed.
The underlying intentions or motives of a particular person or group.

Gender:
 based on Latin genus 'birth, family, nation'. The earliest meanings were  'kind, sort, genus' and 'type or class of noun, etc.' (which was also a sense of Latin genus).

The 'doings' automatically generate from foundations of template or core definitions. These are NOT personality choices - but the choices that template the personality and its Life themes.

Any corruption or modification of the template must lead to corrupted outcomes. However the original file is 'read only' to users, though sudo embodies unified creative change at all levels simultaneously as 'behold I make all things new'.

So if an agenda seems to be operating that is out of true with who you feel and know yourself to be - then look to the copy of the template that is generating such experience.

If something seems to upset or offend me - why am I choosing to see it in such a way? What motive or payoff do I get from choosing to see it this way and does it make sense or belong as my choice when I see it clearly?
The very act of seeing truy is already the transformation occurred.
Once the snake on the carpet is revealed as a the dressing gown cord, one cant really believe the 'snake' again - but you can insist against your own knowing if you WANT to enough!

If you feel you have benefited from sharing such a consideration, you are welcome to buy me an iPhone 6 - though I would much prefer an ipad for reading on. ;-)
But I don't write for payment - its in the nature of a gift.

I pause and feel and consider issues that come up for me in a particular communication or situation - and take a journey that shares itself as an unfolding of willingness - for no one is persuaded or required to read or follow or accept anything that is not already their own choosing.

That last sentence in itself is a very powerful statement. If we are 'led' astray then in some sense at some level we choose it by where we choose to give our attention. Strangely, what we fear to look upon, always then seems to possess or direct us until we can look on it and look past it to what we love to alight in.

Every day [sex]-ism

Everyday sexism

Sex-fantasy objectivism operates as private association (or mutual reinforcement of fantasy associations) which is inherently at the expense of and in fear and withdrawal from, an actual intimacy of relation-ship or communication.

Disassociated and split persona operate as if they were 'free' to fulfil a sense of inadequacy and lack by getting from others what their fantasy symbolizes to them.

Paradise seeking stems from the sense of an Innocence of true embrace lost, but in negatively defined self MUST seek outside itself - for a fearfully defined sense of self proceeds on the basis of being NOT love, of NOT deserving love, or NOT being safe to open to love. And all of its attempts to regain a sense of connection externally via masked and wishful strategies of persuasion and coercion bring about the failure to love or communicate or be adequate to a situation or relationship and thus reinforce the foundational belief of unworthiness to love.

Likewise the negatively defined self wants and seeks to be validated by others and moulds itself in social adaptation to fit in with what it hopes or believes will win approval and acceptance ... or at least protect against being judged against and rejected. In focusing and identifying in the persona as if this was one's self and life, one interprets the actions of others so as to support and reinforce one's script - even when the experiences themselves are negative.

Other-ism can take any and every form because it is the choice to see the form based meanings that our personal and social definitions accepts as reality, INSTEAD of living the relationship that is actually present. INSTEAD of living from the integrity of a positively defined sense of self. The willingness to reintegrate from the masked or split self-sense shifts from an exclusive focus on the 'me' of one's personality structure, to the revealed relationship that is energetically unfolding.

Whereas the persona-based self operates within a surface reality dictated by thoughts, the actual relationship includes the observation of one's thoughts and the capacity to accept or not accept thought that otherwise runs like a programme of conditioned reactions. A negatively defined sense of self works as a hidden agenda; a covert operation, a fear-protected sense of specialness that inherently blanks or judges others and uses then strategically and presumes the same mind at work in others. There is no love in the kill or be killed mentality and universe - but there is the cultivation of coercive masks and behaviours that pass off as love and thus provide advantage or protection not only for secret sense of a persona under threat, but for a society that hides together in darkness.

To be true to oneself is to align with the love that you are - regardless that one may not feel or perceive this way while still entangled in the masking persona of attempt to substitute love - as if what Innocence once freely shared now must be manually applied or maintained or protected.

Innocence is lost to our awareness when we shift into the protective and socially adapting mask of our personae. But it is only covered over and distracted from by the addictive engagement with the private thinking beneath the mask.

Much of our thought runs unconscious and is part of what aligns our experiences and colours and patterns our relationships and communications.

Willingness to uncover the core curiosity of our being is of that spark of Innocence that can be covered over but never truly lost. Guilt, fear, blame and shame all conspire to 'protect' what seems to be a residual relative innocence amidst an otherwise overwhelming chaos of conflicted self-sense - or experience.

Responsibility is not about blame - at all - but is uncovering the grounding truth that OF ITSELF embraces and supports you in being and doing and relating and communicating what and who you are as a living presence.

One CAN call for correction from a sense of self that is itself willing to allign truly - and this is entirely different in feel and in frequency and in effect from the call for vengeance - no matter how disguised it may be in the strategies and mores of the social masks of self-righteousness.

Bringing one's experience into the light of a present awareness, and into the arena of a shared sense of value, will serve to heal it of distortions and misperceptions unless the revealed insights are simply repurposed to reinforce a subtler and more sophisticated mask OF self-righteousness.

'Self-wrongteousness' used to be called sin; a sense of lack, inadequacy, powerlessness, self-conflicting division and dis-ease that operates as meanspirited and loveless thinking that seems like an 'evil will' which not only cares nothing for others - it cares not for anything except its self - as it defines itself to be, and in your name.

The sense of dissonance from which all such self-conflicting confusion arises is not escaped by such strategies - but only disguised. When one's experience no longer serves as the hiding place from which to wield power or shield from those wielding power, there can be the noticing of qualities present that are not actually part of the drama. A light can stir in the mind that was dark. True questions and answers flow in place of a managed confusion spinnning ever more deceit and inevitable defeat.

Trying to be and do what we alone are never conceived or designed to be and do is a futility. The key is the word alone - for one is never alone in the way fear-thinking has come to assert and experience. Relationship and communication are the very core nature of our awareness, our existence, our consciousness, feeling, thought, word and deed. Learning to listen instead of reacting, allows a capacity of choosing to grow in place of a sense of victimhood. Use everything without exception as a means to realign and reintegrate you with You... or persist in a sense of self-exceptionalism that seesaws in futile attempts to deny, fight, overcome or eradicate a negative that does not manifest without serving You in some way on some level, known or unknown.

What we resist, persists. Hanging in there with your integrity - and therefore with Life's Integrity is not a fight against evil, but a persistent sense of faithfulness to what you know or have the faith of willingness to know, as the truth of your desire.

Is sexual orientation a choice?

Is sexual orientation a choice?

Is life a choice or 'something predestined'?
At some level this is utterly irrelevant - because life IS - and anything one attempts to define or interpret WHAT it is - is a choice that brings its experience of point of view. Within that point of view any following 'choices' will extend and support that point of view - until one shifts perspective by releasing the self-definition for another.
Popular conversation is so weighted to the idea of an independent personal ego - as if THAT is the creative agent or 'doer' - but within a world of matter and flesh that  effectively control it - that one cannot communicate about the Creative Template that embodies a deeper level of choice within which the personality extension operates.
BUt CHOICE in the sense of Creative Expression is the Movement of Being - whether this is operating unconsciously, in collective agreements or deliberately on purpose as an alignment with one's core vibrational signature.

So what does one GET out of believing this… or that? Every situation is unique and yet no one believes anything that doesn't give them a pay off at some level.

I decide that my life is Choice - not by asserting a coercive will, but by accepting and aligning with the current choice - so as to then be restored to the awareness of having choice. All else is conditioned reaction masquerading as choice - just as one can choose to forget or hide awareness of certain choices by rendering them unconscious and operating as if one is externally defined.
So why not embrace both - whilst recognising that however you define your relation to anything or anyone, your Existence is FACT that embraces all your choices. All identification confusion arises from covering over the felt quality of Existence Itself with mutual definitions . When this is uncovered, you know. You are not then compelled to seek outside yourself for validations or differentiations. Truly, choice is creative expression - but within a victim mentality becomes a defensive ingenuity of masking its lack of foundation.

Victim and victimising mentality operate as one choice within what could be called a power game. Who wants to play the game has no attention for what runs beneath the drama. Those within the game that try to impose rule upon others or indeed to undermine the rule of others are not changing the nature of consciousness, but only their perceptions and identification within the experience they are choosing.
One cannot HAVE an experience but that one chooses to define oneself in relation to what Consciousness or Existence Is. Most of such choice is unconscious to most human beings because they/we live what we call our conscious waking life within such a narrow surface focus.
When the definitions and meanings that had been accepted as 'Reality' become so shifting and complex as to break the rules of orthodoxy, there is a sort of 'anything goes' that allows an opportunistic and destructive appetite for power to play out. It also invites the re-evaluation of the nature of consciousness from beneath or beyond the 'power-game' of a conflicted and segregative consciousness.
In other words we are brought to a time of Choice as to whether to persist in the struggle of warring factions or reintegrate to a perspective that embraces all that we are.
Clearly choice as a concept can be used within a conflicted identity as a way of differentiating and asserting identity. But to truly embody a choice is to rest as one with it and not be offended or undermined by the persecutions of those who can not even see you.
A particular strand of political will seeks to introduce confusion as both a weakening and a distraction of its target. When one falls for a scam is it a choice - or is one truly a victim?
So many of the rules we make to keep us safe become a false sense of safety in which we are blindly herded in the direction of someone else's private agenda.
Perhaps it is truer and wiser to notice that one does not know who or what one is (in any conventional sense) - and so be free to uncover this in this very moment of existence - instead of running a template that has become corrupted by money lenders!

PS

The theme or template for a human lifetime might be a 'predestined choice' at a higher level - but the way one participates and expresses this remains a personal experience of free will within that lifetime.

There are as many ways to live your life as can be imagined and acted upon with conviction. But if imagination is subordinated to an external set of past conditionings called material reality - then choices will be somewhat limited.

Fantasy relationships and fear

Are all men sexual deviants really?

Jesse Bering, author of Perv: The Sexual Deviant in All of Us, says we should break taboos around zoophilia, incest and child porn. But where do we draw the line, asks Theo Merz

Commentary:

There are consequences to an act - even to an act of ongoing imaginative curiosity.

The capacity to make false associations and enact fantasy relationships runs deeper and includes more than those activities that stand out as socially deviant.

The nature of consciousness is not actually fixed - one can explore, learn and be transformed as a result of choices and directions taken.

But the attempt to control consciousness coercively rather than through innate responsibility, has set up guilt and self-righteousness as warring polarities within an unnatural deviation from our true or original nature. So much so, that it has replaced our sense of nature and is termed 'human nature' as meaning 'fallen' nature.

The fear is that without guilt and fear as controls one would be a ravening beast or heartless fiend. All would be chaos! But is that not simply the fear of what we fear because we fear to find out?

Fear becomes a deviance in our thinking that disconnects us from our nature and makes evil seem powerful and attractive. That associates the forbidden with life and freedom, and that cripples our capacity to grow and learn in love in order that fear usurp it.

The core desire to relate, to know, to experience, is a movement of innocence. But the perversion or corruption of this desire is turned from Life into fantasies that become substitutes for life. There IS no substitute for life but a desperate attempt to make a false association real.

The choice to hurt our self and the choice to hide it in victimhood and powerlessness

Telegraph Article:
Raunch culture isn’t harmless – it hurts us all
So one in every three strip club dancers in Britain is an undergraduate. Well, girls, you may be having a bit of a laugh, but you are promoting a tawdry, amoral climate

Commentary:
We hurt our self or not by our decision. If we unknowingly decide to hurt ourself then we learn to be more honest and vigilant on behalf of our own Good.

The INTENT to hurt self and others is a blind projection of hurt, hate and vengeance and takes innumerable forms - both passively and more overtly.

This operates deviously and deceptively as a way to keep the power of divide and rule whilst mitigating its apparent effects externally.

Everything that we experience is feedback that can be used to become more consciousness responsible, or it can simply run along its pattern and reinforce decisions and beliefs that define one's self negatively.

Your moral well being is your true peace. Codes of conduct serve as place holders and limits upon lawlessness, but nothing can substitute for You but will cost your peace.

The deceptions of a negative self definition work to undermine anything that would expose them, because they are accepted as your 'self' - and you love your self image because you made it, but it does not love or know you - for it is a kind of idol or 'avatar' for your identification.

When we identify with the forms, and with the meanings we give the forms, to the exclusion of the Meaning that our true presence always illuminates, we abandon the Living to dally among the 'dead'. Within the darkness of fear, and confusions as to what and who we are, we choose what holds the most pleasure or the least pain - according to the situation as we each define it.

Reclaiming your power is not adding to yourself yet more conflict, but opening your mind to your consciousness in the midst of whatever is going on. When we choose to manipulate and coerce our own consciousness we become active and available to a world of coercive ill-intent.

Guilt and fear are the signs of an invalidating will. Joy and inclusion are signs of an extension of what life is being - right where you are.

I write to open beneath the 'same old' war-polarities that effectively block communication. It is not just what you do - but the way that you do it. If you cannot do it as an expression of truly valuing yourself, Life and others - do not hurt yourself. If you seem stuck in a bad habit, become curious instead of guilty and powerless, in the desire to uncover the core beliefs and self definitions that simply are NOT true of you or belonging to you.

Trying to get out of a trap only tightens the net.
The deceptions that offer 'freedom' or to extend or add to your 'power' are tricky seductions to keep deeper fears covered up.

This is where the true wealth is hidden - beneath such fears. For you are priceless, and would remember this if you let them fall away and stood naked within your true being.


 tomjones2012b commented to the article:

The only people who make raunch culture sleazy, are people like Judith Woods, who slut-shames a culture she doesn't like. Raunch culture beats working for a supermarket that sells alcohol and tobacco, vices that kill hundreds of thousands (I hope Woods does neither), or sells junk food that harms more people that raunch culture ever will


my reply to tomjones2012b:

Lovelessness is pervasive to the mind that values it as a special kind of self-love. Most of us have some investment and identification in lovelessness that finds us throwing the stone of hurt and hate at another - as if we stood cleaner thereby.
Lovelessness seeks and finds the evidence for its justification in the errors of others - and gives it priority over the capacity to open and embrace communication.
There are innumerable examples of sins or loveless, coercive acts that seek for self while denying Life and others. As long as we focus outside on all the symptoms, we succeed in NOT looking within at the cause.

The context makes all the difference at an individual level. And what we see is the measure of our own self-acceptance. Any rejection of our self brings the play of its reintegration in the circumstances of our life, yet while we persist in rejection, we do not recognize our Life - and seek control from a disconnected sense of distrust and chaos.

It is part of life that we can play out persona and use that to access experience, but we can get lost in such play when dreams turn to nightmare. The world (human conditioning) is expertly designed for forgetting who you are in the play of persona. Until we stop playing such games.

Sex is in the spotlight, so let's talk about it properly

Actually it isn't sex that is in the spotlight but sexually inappropriate or or abusive behaviour. I appreciated this article in the Guardian - and my comment is below.
Further down is two other responses to other commenters of the same article.

Thankyou for your article. The mind is full of tricks and is no more interested in honesty and transparency than is any other mode of control, for it can only achieve its trick in the dark. In an unconsciousness.

Manipulative intent is trying to gain power from another - and is an aspect of our mind that can be seen as sinful or perhaps as genetically honest - at least if it succeeds! (That is to say human nature can be believed to be fundamentally predatory. Or that beneath our veneer of pseudo-morality is a BEAST! - that must be forever whipped back under the lid of a 'sanity' forever at war with itself.

I feel that any urge to get from - rather than give and receive in true value - manifests as a distorted conception and perception of what Life truly Is. Of what we truly are as its expression. These cannot really be two distinct things.

The distortion is of a self perpetuating identification with guilt - (which includes worthlessness and inadequacy), and fear, (which includes false presentations, and uses guilt as a means of getting leverage).

We all can easily observe that impulse which seeks to get and have its own experience and uses Life - (others and the natural world) to get it. So we make alliances of mutual agreements and embody tacit conspiracies of a personal self interest. Some of it is conscious and some of that is socially acceptable, but most of it is unconscious programming or conditioning that arises from an experience of a lack of identity.

Power over another, like market forces, tends to balance out in a sort of mutual stalemate. Yet wherever there is opportunity, the seeds of a latent urge to GET, usurp the thinking so as to make justification within itself for what in open and shared awareness, it would find to be without foundation - and self (and other) destructive.

Everybody engages it nearly all the time, but it is invisible. Some kinds of such are openly indulged and others vilified.

Horsemeat is the least of what gets put round in place of value truly shared - but as you note, it is an indicator of a mentality.

The conditioned reaction is a thinking machine - not a man or a woman truly. It gives the notion of freedom to do and to get at cost of a true freedom to Be and to share.

Despite the masquerade of many layered defence mechanisms all firing off each other, Life and love happen here. How DO we actually MEET and grow in our capacity to be undefended in loving and caring with others who are also
exactly as we are, regardless of surface differences?

The new wine doesn't fit into old bottles - yet the mind tries to control - and sometimes callously and heartlessly, undermining or spoiling the very thing it thinks to 'love' or have. If instead of learning that its attempt is of a fundamental mistake in its own thinking, which can now change - it persists in interpreting itself as sinful and guilty - then it is split into the BEAST! and the Lid.

The 'lid' has to be maintained by sacrificing the BEAST! (in 'the other'), And especially blocking that which would expose the 'lid' as a lid.

The blame 'culture' (sic) becomes like the inquisition. Where anyone can call anyone into the process of Inquisition on even the tiniest or most spurious pretext. The the 'inquisitor' is certain of finding it in you because he/she believes it in himself and must put it on you to hide it - else he/she could not hate it so.
The wisdom and discernment that works to correct rather than take revenge, has to extend from a greater honesty than getting an outcome of merely personal satisfaction. The appeal for fanning and feeding the fires of outrage is a diabolic scam.
There is a way to bring the lie into the light, that is not itself a convoluted contagion of the same lie in different form and it starts with ourselves.
We can only grow the level of responsibility we have by accepting and embodying it. Blame is an entirely different dynamic - for it pretends to be what it is not. Real communication can address the fact without attacking the person. Blame justifies disrupting and denying communication by judging the guilty.
Ye have not, because you ask not, comes to mind. Being honest with our desire means being straight with ourselves and therefore with others. What we desire, we attract into our experience by wanting it.
When shit comes our way, we can either nurture grievance and recycle it or move through it. To move through triggered (de-lidded) fear and guilt is a profound journey because it release the surface compulsions and uncovers the conscious appreciation of a true integrity in life.
And I feel it altogether appropriate for honour to be restored to our sexual relations as part of honouring true communication and relationship as the context of our wellbeing.




@Discerning1 - Yes, when something occurs that doesn't fit our mind's continuity, it gets blanked = has no voice = shouldn't exist.

Social reality is adapted to - and adapts as a sort of mask. We learn to play and think we are solid - and then something happens that jolts us out of our sense of solidity.

It doesn't have to be traumatic. That's another layer that interprets it (in terms of a deeper unconscious script) and yet re-buries as too horrible to face.

I know your sense of not wanting to damage someone's reputation.
It is easy to be outside a moment and come up with what one should have done or not done. But life unfolds us as we are and not as we might fantasize ourselves to be. It is also easy to pretend one is without fault and be the first and the loudest to throw stones at others. But isn't that just another way to stay unconscious?

Events that threaten to undermine our integrity are those by which to awaken by standing in it. Our "No" whether verbal or by leaving the room, is a "Yes" to our being. When a lie meets a true  "No" it has to meet itself without supporting fantasy roles. The feeling of that is also the movement of integrity in the one holding themselves out of true. It's supposed to feel bad! But if we don't wake up to the alarm - then the mind can deliberately work to block the incoming honesty because it feels so bad - and so become addicted to whatever keeps blocking it out.
Which is just running away from the one thing that can truly help.
Sounds a bit like the human race!


@hoff1000 - Do you think it is possible that people in positions of power and trust haven't always fallen prey to this kind of thing - because it can happen both ways cant it? The aspirant can use whatever they can bring to bear to get advancement - which may use sex without actually offering it.

It might seem relatively harmless if its a 'win win' as you put it - but I leave the word 'seem' in there. If what you get is at the cost of your integrity - then you get to be hollow, false. Now not everyone cares about that in the short term because they want something more than they can afford but they're not thinking of payback time.

Those who complained by the way - are giving testimony that I don't know the details of, the context ,or any other evidence from anyone else that bears on the true nature of what occurred.

The thing about NOT communicating accurately about sex - or anything else that stirs the imagination - is that it titillates the imagination and millions start to populate an unfound case with their own fantasies - and react as if they are true!

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?


- - -

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