To meet the Need of our Times

This is a comment into one of many articles on Eastleigh by election (British politics)
As I say below - I don't address that level - but while in the arena of an article about our political, social and economic society, I felt some thoughts arise and let them write.

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Do our opinions constitute a process of discernment of truth? Do we put their opinion aside in order to see more clearly or simply seek support and ammunition for what we have already decided /been induced to think is  own thinking? Maybe such conditioning is already voting for something else to think for us? Democracy needs to be more than mob, but do we know how to communicate in ways that are self revealing and inspire trust instead of trial by combat?

Yet underneath it all something tends to work - enough at least to get from one thing to another - because here we are! And yet a superficial self-seeking unconsciousness piles up unpaid debts of more kinds than money. But at least we can pass on something to our children and their children. Perhaps opening such a can of worms is part of a deeper need for renewal. One cant just rebrand with a makeover and expect to stay in touch with reality - whatever that may be.

An individual who wants conflicting things and becomes fearful, can react in ways that compound confusion and induce guilt and yet more fear until something really breaks down and then they can calm down and honestly question their own thinking - all of it - even at its roots.  Without listening, isn't our mind is simply a conditioned defence mechanism  that can readily be manipulated to reaction? But is that just a front or a mask to keep the unwanted at bay?

Can such as we are, find a unified perspective within ourselves that has something to gift rather than trying to get? Or will such essentially be forced on us by having to 'adjust' to a reality that no longer supports our vanities? The big tar barrel that shuts up Messrs Tweedledee-dum is usually overwhelming force. I like to think one day it could be the true silence of not knowing - and needing to be the desire for help that uncovers what we need to know.

To meet the need of our times, we need to wake up and embody the characteristics that are missing or lacking. Trust and honesty being chief among them. Ultimately I don't care what packaging it comes in, I feel we need to relate together in a different way.
Vested interests that have power to protect their part against needed change are the last to come on board, and the mind that thinks to sit on the fence and make opinionated entertainments of life is one such.

Perhaps Tolkien was prescient in seeing the little people as the ones who would relinquish power. It cannot come from the 'top' down.
As long as we try to work out our mental health in the problems outside of us - it wont work except to keep those aspects of our mind that we hide, from being healed or wholed.

Not especially about UKIP or Eastleigh - but the Movement of change pervades all such instances - often under our noses unnoticed.

Happiness Is?

True happiness is allowed by not letting the activity of thinking block the flow of a shared sense of life.

Happiness is innate to a direct experience of Being - a present directly felt living appreciation.

Humanly we associate external conditions with a conditional sense of our self - a learned sense of self - and this becomes a set of demands that traps the mind until it awakens to the 'currently running program' and reevaluates its own premise from a fresh perspective. This can never arise from manipulating data based on the old program, though of course such rebranding or reshuffle of the same old basis - can seem to buy a management solution - such as attempting to be rationally 'happy' within a fundamental unhappiness. But unhappiness is a hurt or pain of dissonant life and leaks out into every area of our lives. It becomes the WHITE ELEPHANT LIE that (almost) everyone normalises to invisibility. True happiness then becomes anathema to the mind that is intent on managing its unhappiness successfully.(Which associates happiness with a its control and security rather than as a direct emanation of being).

The learned sense of self can be temporarily happy if its conditions are met - except it will then shift to new expectations. So it is easily provable as to where happiness is not really found to anyone willing and honest enough to test out their own life.
Abiding happiness is an expression of a deeper honesty and acceptance. This doesn't come about without some process of recognising and releasing what 'does not work - and can not work'. And such process is necessarily conscious - not something that can be applied or achieved through any kind of manipulation.

But, we can learn to promote the conditions that serve such learning and awareness - and to unsubscribe or withdraw support from the conditions that undermine true happiness.

In terms of governmental considerations of happiness, we would do well to reevaluate the true economy - not in order to please economists - but one that accounts for our shared commonwealth of resources and abilities and talents - and the time available to appreciate and enjoy our way of life and work.

Of all the steps that I could summarize simply, there needs to be a valuing and honouring of the micro economy. And the seemingly unstoppable or ungovernable demands of the macro economy need to be checked. Corporate dominance asset strips everything and kills its own host if not held in check by law.

The personal scale economy - the actual community of interrelatedness that has been increasing undermined and controlled as mere consumers or workers - is the seedbed of our lives and the nets of regulation and interference need to have wide enough mesh so as not to deny people the opportunity to live out of their own inspiration and shared worth.

It isn't big society - but a community based approach - where communities are actual relationships of individual and collective trust embodied and not mere database-able subsets of information to be mouthed about or manipulated as if they were 'things'.

It must be painfully apparent to governors, that when the happy candy is withdrawn and the stick is used to keep the governed from making too much trouble, that they can do so legitimately only on the basis of serving the greater trust of the governed.

To be willing to happily pass through pain, we need to trust the purpose and the process by which we allow a deeper happiness to share from a true basis. That process is in us as individual members of a larger community - and cannot come from Government - but those in Government needs to nurture and discern the will for true happiness as their own support.

Manipulating minds has become a sophisticated art - but its practice arises only from a mind that is already attempting to manipulate itself. That is essentially fearful, and driven by an unhappiness of dissonance which it seeks to overcome EXTERNALLY. True Happiness is not living out from such a mind because it has felt the dissonance and resolved it where it actually is - and sees the world as the field of relations in which to express a fundamental harmony of life rather than as a resource to plunder for-getting its self.

Focussing on the difficult makes fear the master, but to share the experience of the easy, grows the courage to move through fear. But only they can share or inspire who are inspired to share life rather than manipulate it.

Governors or leasers can learn to provide role modes of willingness that do not use tricks to hide or score but risk allowing their true presence of intent to communicate itself - while in office - and become known for better or worse for what they demonstrate.
The ego liability of a false self sense is in all of us. The blame game is manipulative nonsense. We learn through making mistakes but not by gorging on blame ridden analysis - which but perpetuates the underlying mindset that gives rise to mistaken self interest.

Honesty is the extension of trust and without trust - we are nothing.

Thankyou for inviting comment and for your attention.

Moving to culture of rehabilitation?

 Rehabilitation cannot be applied like band aid - nor can it effectively coexist with a culture of vengeance and punishment.

To wake up to - and find alignment with - our true home - our true environment and our 'true family' or culture of relationship, cannot be mere continuance of the mind of a passively aggressive but generally sublimated reaction, that inevitably arises from lack of any genuinely consciously shared sense of life or identity.

Our most fundamental metaphysical or philosophical self and world beliefs are involved and expressed in all that we do  - but are generally invisible unless we compare and contrast cultures and epochs.

We have 'wanted' to explore the belief and indulge the experience of being 'self determining authoritative powers in our own right - and have an unconsciously communicated societal bedrock of presumption of a 'God given' free will which has then become 'self and other destructive' and has disqualified us of true love-worthiness.

We have then attempted to live in fear and to attempt to become successful - yet without a real basis of shared worthiness - all our self-becomings are vain illusion.

Such lack of any real substance is accompanied by more and more concern with image and presentation and coercive pressures to conform to increasingly meaningless criteria.

That this breaks down is a sign of a deeper sanity - But the symptoms are alarms to wake up to having strayed and thus accept a process of 'adjustment' to become currently connected anew..

Unless we live and grow such a culture, we continue in a madness of ever shifting and conflicting 'self-interests' - that serve apparent short term interests of the mood or power of the day without ever engaging or addressing reality.

I write into such a forum in the faith that a deeper awakening of heart is called for - and not a continuance of tricky thinking and self serving opinion.

We have become prisoners of our own mind. The mechanism of 'the scapegoat - the dumping of our personal hate and sin onto others so as to then exclude them - is a childish magic that not only doesn't heal - but perpetuates guilt, fear and distrust and division.

Economic catastrophe brings with it the intelligence of energy use - of what in truth we can afford. Not as a financial consideration - but at a much deeper level of alignment with true priority.

If we want something that truly works - we can not afford to indulge in and manipulate the mythology and mechanism of guilt for personal gain.
This means we have to become willing again to honestly feel again - yet NOT react out of the interpretations that first arise, but instead grow a culture of support to move through pain, fear and hate, in order to regain a greater sanity.

Practical outcomes will never arise from imposed or applied thinking - no matter how ingenious the thinking - or indeed how inspired it is - unless the context of its working out is a cooperative willingness.

If our behaviour is truly undermining of and threatening to ourselves or each other - it is altogether appropriate that we meet with proportionate restraint and a process of education appropriate to the nature of the situation.

True citizenship is being usurped by a mindless manipulative madness that is its own sin and punishment both. Life lived truly arises from the law of love - and it is this that must be our compass: love.

It is seemingly impossible to reach those who are prisoners of their own thought - for they create an exclusion zone and will not listen. Yet it is impossible to suffer such exclusion of one's own heart and know peace, joy or true fulfilment.

We are all in this - life - together - but not in the way our thinking sets up. A change of heart is a change of the basis of all our thought.

Your Country needs you!

It is so that politicians refer to truths.
Your society - your larger culture - your country DOES need you.
Because without your sense of value manifested among your fellowman - there is a vacuum that is filled by whatever happens to take its place.
This remains true always - because a society where everyone drifts into automatic tramlines of habitual reaction is not creative, nor inspirational or even wisely practical.
Crisis are opportunities to wake up and rededicate or realign ourselves with a current sense of value.
Even though there is a long history of difference, distrust and even enmity between many strands of society, there is a need or a call to not indulge ouselves of our personal reactions and pause and look for willingness to find ways together.
Regaining trust is not about placing trust in others - so much as finding it in our own hearts and extending it to others in a way that is an ongoing communication.

If this coalition fails to answer the need of our times then it will fail altogether - but the need remains to be addressed. It is much deeper and bigger than the slavery that the deficit debt MUST entail.
The ideas of the last century belong there. The new ideas are not going to arise from the old mind. What is a new mind? One that comes from a shift or change of heart.
There are seeds of truth in all sorts of things we reject because we are so attached to being right - and then 'loving to hate' that which we see as enemy or use as scapegoat.
Blame is the shit everyone tries to put on someone else - but only when they stand in the same shit. We ALL were party to the near bankruptcy of our culture in some measure. Rather than try to deal in blame - which always recycles itself when given attention - lets shift to response - ability.
What if no one else does? - Then so what!  A world in which your presence is felt and known is one in which we can meet and share appreciation for who and what we are.
But my sense of becoming active is not from an ideological mask - but from the heart. Take walks in nature. Get out of the routine headspace. Let stillness and wonder into your life. Find new eyes to meet the moment. Its a wake up call.

Corporate Disaster poisons the world we share

Look carefully at the way 'creative' obfuscation is employed in all our relationships. It isn't just the corporate accounts or government budgets or the PR and manipulative deception so as to maintain the illusions that we assert to others and OURSELVES. Sanity and honesty are inextricably facets of each other. There are 'games' being played that cost the Earth - and cost the appreciation, well being and wealth of what would we would be living - in an integrated willingness of purpose and worth. Corporate selfishness NEEDS to be constrained within the community interest or its simply exploits, undermines and destroys, in the wake of blind short term interests. There's no profit in such loss. Governments and official regulatory bodies NEED to hold their service as a duty of trust and beware of inducements to cosy up to the 'rich and powerful' when those lobbies attempt to use their leverage for mean and callous ends. It isn't that bad people need to become good - but that we need to stop and reevaluate what the Good truly means. Unless we stop and start from a fresh perspective, we are always trying to force life to fit our self illusion. Our whole way of life will change from a rediscovery of what life truly is. Or of course one can insist on persisting from a basis that has never worked, is not working, and will never work. Of course it seems to work - thus the protection of the status quo by those who are in power. But the real cost is becoming increasingly more difficult to deny - and many are less willing to be controlled by loveless thinking. The emotional 'body' of the American people is feeling hurt, confused and outraged. The feeling needs to be acknowledged - but it does not need to become a basis for satisfying the urge for vengeance under the disguise of justice. Educate. Feel for the truth that can be received. We are oil addicts because we have used it to empower a way of life that exploits rather than shares. We can change our way of life, set a fresh direction, and get off the addiction, one step at a time. The risk factors at Macro level need to come right down. It isn't ok to make these kind of tradeoffs at the cost of a commonwealth that hardly appears on balance sheets. At the microlevel they need to come up. We as individuals need to dare to explore, discover and grow the ways of a true peace amidst the lessons that we experience as symptoms of ignorances past. There is nothing compulsive about ignorance apart from a desire to stay in the dark, play out the games of division and blame and shame and love the sense of our own image, judgement and opinion as if these offer safety, fulfillment or sanity.

The Good news about the economy

Here is the good news:

We are being brought to a willingness and opportunity for a fresh perspective that will genuinely express spiritual and cultural renewal.

This is an individual shift that becomes a social movement because it is the individual that actually connects, discerns and communicates, and yet find that others are likewise becoming receptive to the same relevant insights.

To give the focus to what is wrong is disempowering. It is helpful to use the experience of fear, conflict, confusion and loss as am alarm to listen more deeply - with a greater honesty than our superficial strategies would allow.

True spiritual discernment has nothing to do with promoting personal belief systems or manipulating the world or others into the likeness of any kind of god - spiritual or material. It is simply the willingness to listen in the silence of our being - even amidst the chatter or drama of the world - with the trust and desire to let truth be revealed.

Ingenious thinking is not the way to truth but can be clearly seen in our times as a deception. And truth is not ever an object of our thought - nor can it be used as a shield or weapon in the play of human conflict.

The real culprit is not the shadowy super rich or their bankers - nor the politicians who operate within the confines dictated to them by the 'economics' that are espoused and shared as if meaningful and desirable.

We cannot 'think or spin our way out' of the conditions we have generated for ourselves but we can uncover a fresh appreciation of truth - of reality. And then we will see from a different perspective and live from a new basis - even amidst the seeming mess and chaos of human relationships.

To uncover or be restored to wholeness of being is not a goal - but is both a starting place and a way of traveling. To live 'outside' the heart results in greed for self in a disconnected sense of specialness. It despoils and exploits without knowing what it does for it sees its own 'needs' above all else - including truth. It is NOT a sound or sane basis for good housekeeping or a loving home.

It IS up to us individually to decide what is of value and to honour and align with it accordingly. If we give value to what cannot actually fulfill us we simply become possessed by our so called possessions.

We are afraid of our Spirit because we believe it calls for sacrifice, but in truth it is illusions that are released. Maintaining deceptions is an enormous burden and strain - that we are accustomed to as a slave to heavy chains.

To take a fresh look in an honesty of spirit is not in any way the same as to rebrand or redistribute presentations of realty so as to extend or maintain the status quo.

We feel fear, there is confusion, we seem to have lost, and yet face more loss - with a mounting tide of crises of which we have a diminishing capacity to respond to. The underlying models and mentalities that we have grown and relied on are part of the cause of the problems we face.

Is there not a better way of looking at this?
Do I want to find it?

Brave New World

I believe we need to re-evaluate much more than cutting costs and releasing an overbearing state. I believe we need to discover a saner basis for living together on this planet. Workability is not mere expediency - it is the hallmark of wisdom. To invite and support processes of trust and communication  - in a society that has eroded its own foundations - is a good start.

I envision a process of change and cultural renewal is underway that can not be the continuation of the politics of the last century. Economic constraints will be a constraining factor - but desire and joy for life must be the motive force. I believe this will become more obvious as it is seen that the old approaches simply can no longer work.

Everyone presumes that structure is fixed - but when the spirit goes out of structure it becomes a force against new life instead of serving it. Renewal is necessary - but it has to come out of a process of our own lives and cant just force 'good ideas' upon life.

There is much about our mentality writ large on western society - that is mean minded, self seeking and destructive or at least self undermining. Blaming others is a mechanism to let everyone else remain unchanged - but what we need is a true process of education.

Political changes can express and yet also nurture an organic process of change. There is a need for a deeper level of self honesty and responsibility than many may want. A true accounting must start from a better place than the distorted models that are not at all serving us well.
Nick Clegg has set a tone - now respond by joining - by engaging - not with the cynical politics of mere opinion or managed despair - but with desire to discover what our times are bringing forth.

Change can be creatively or gracefully cooperated with - or it can be like seismic shifts that undermine even our fundamental structural securities. Because of the debt funded spin bubble - we are still like the cartoon character who has run off the cliff - but has yet to look down.

I am optimistic because of the nature of the human spirit- not because I believe human selfishness has somehow disappeared. Fear is NOT the basis upon which to make decisions - especially concerning potentially fearful outcomes.

Keeping the Peace

In a national mood of potential renewal, I invite not only police to be tangibly present in our neighbourhoods as officers on the beat - but to be encouraged to learn more of what keeping the peace actually means.

For the presence and demeanour that we demonstrate communicates atmospherically. Everyone is part of keeping the peace to the degree that we share a presence of acknowledgement and respect. But like anemones - we communicate fear or threat by being drawbridged and evasive.

In focusing on the mindset of looking for trouble(makers) - the role of 'fighting crime' substitutes for keeping the peace. This role needs to be activated when appropriate and deactivated when no longer needed. A mind alert and at rest - in connected relationship founded in a genuinely felt shared purpose - NOTICES - and shares much more than the mind engaged in predatory mode.

To the mentality that only considers symptoms, my words may seem irrelevant or whimsy - but sooner or later it will be realized that fear based actions raise the level of fear. This could be called the level of distrust and a fragmentation of society into private egos - often without a real sense of community or belonging.

Of course policemen and women are to use proportionate means to uphold the law - but the way in which this is done often tends to an institutionalized lack of respect or disregard for actual members of the public they are supposed to serve.

Alas in our 'terrorized state' - and with civil unrest increasingly likely - our policemen are more and more felt as agents of the state rather than protectors of the community with powers accorded them by the state.

Law and order is a symptom of true social health - and this is not something that the police can 'do' - but a culture of trust and communication can replace a culture of blame and exclusion.

Adversarial politics results in the pursuing of selfish interests at the expense of the common good. But selfishness need not be reinforced as the truth of human beings - even if the consumer economy 'insinuates' a 'getting' mentality as fulfilment.
There is ALWAYS a deeper level than the symptoms suggest - and this is not dealt with by budgets but by the courage that can only come from valuing the presence peace above one's own private sense of self interest.

The only time that such a cultural renewal can 'take' - is when there is `an opportunity such as we are in - when a sense of inspiration and hope opens a greater sense of possibility than the old programs.