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In the thirteenth century, England was obliged to suffer the rule of one of its most forceful monarchs – Edward I. A ruthless ruler who managed his kingdom with a firm mailed gauntlet and finally met his nemesis in the Scots whose obstinacy, perfidy and savagery were equal to his own. Edward was named affectionately by the English as ‘Hammer of the Scots’ but in reality Scotland killed him; the strain of running repeated campaigns to subdue a country that wouldn’t be subdued, and the numerous set-backs involved finally broke him physically and, though he was an old man at the time of his death, it is quite plausible that without the difficulties presented by the Scottish war, he may well have lived a good while longer.

But the reason I choose to write about Edward is more related to his domestic policies, albeit policies that were motivated by a need to furnish his military adventures. The policies that interest me here are his sporadic attacks on the Jewish community in England. This was an age when the persecution of Jews had become something of a political past-time across Europe and, if anything, England was behind more severe regimes on the continent in this respect. This was probably due to less emotive currents running through the English psyche (with regard to Jews) than the more extremist tendencies which ran high in say Spain, for example. Also the Jews furnished Christendom with what was becoming a most essential link in the economic chain that held European political power structures in place, that of money-lending. Usury was an activity that was condemned by the Vatican (though Popes were notorious borrowers of money throughout the middle-ages) and no Christian could officially set up business as a loan-shark. This left the business of loaning money to the Jews and they profited hugely from this monopoly. Kings, aristocrats, merchants, even peasants would use this service and Edward himself, who kept an extraordinarily expensive court and financed his expenditure by borrowing from Italian banking families, was constantly at war and thus his finances were consistently over-burdened. Consequently he was always on the hunt for more money and for this he was often challenged by the English aristocracy who, more than once, refused to levy the taxes he was demanding. He was thus left to search out other areas where wealth could be appropriated, and his roving eye fell upon the Jews.

It is worth pausing to understand how vulnerable the Jews were. They were a successful minority community of money-lenders and must have had to resort to sometimes ruthless methods to ensure the continued success of the business they were engaged in. Few people like money-lenders at the best of times and combine this with a propensity for aggressive prosecution of a trade considered ungodly (in an extremely Godly, if hypocritical, society) by a people who are easily identifiable and perceived as different (and possibly demonic), and you have a recipe for intense social injustice. If a king could find a way of exploiting such attitudes he surely had a sitting duck in the palm of his grasping hands. And Edward was nothing if not a consummate exploiter.

Edward never enacted a consistent policy of persecution against the Jews, his attacks were erratic and unpredictable and all the more devastating for that. His reasons for initiating these harsh incursions on Jewish society had little to do with anti-Semitism on his part (though, like every good Christian of that age, he was almost certainly anti-semitic) but were motivated by a need for cash, either from the Jews themselves or, when he had rendered them destitute, from his Parliament. His last act against the Jews was to expel them from the kingdom; there were not many of them left at this point, they were mainly impoverished women and children; most of the men had been executed as a result of earlier legislation targeting Jews. Edward had nothing to gain from the Jews themselves at this late stage, but the move was so overwhelmingly popular amongst his Parliament that he was immediately granted freedom to levy a tax which he had been lobbying desperately for to continue his unprovoked war against the Scots.

What fascinates me about the expulsion of the Jews is that, of all Edwards’ actions and achievements (and by medieval standards he achieved much) this was the most unanimously approved of by his subjects; in fact, during his reign it was possibly his most popular act. This highlights for us, in a typically medieval way that is nothing if not blatant, the relationship that exists between the governed and the governing. It’s a beautiful illustration of the dynamics of this relationship as what met with such unanimous approval 800 years ago, seems outrageous to us now and it thus begs the question – ‘What prejudices do we harbour today, as a human community, that provide unscrupulous leadership with the means by which it can implement  inhumane policy?’

Anti-semitism, though still very much alive, has become politically unacceptable due to the depredations inflicted on Jews during the 2^nd world war, but prejudice itself is surprisingly active in all levels of politics toward other races, religions and anything, or anyone, that can be perceived as different. This is particularly prevalent in the Christian political context apparent in America, and at a more subtle level, in Europe.

We are, at least some of us, descendants of that community which took such grim delight in the awful atrocities perpetrated on 13^th century Jewry and, generally speaking, most of us would be horrified by our ancestors’ attitudes and the consequences they unleashed. Yet what shadows do we throw up on the social/political landscape of the 21^st century that will shame our descendants in turn?

Many, I think; our continued assault upon the earth, our wanton abuse of human and material resources, our ongoing proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, the readiness that we show to launch ourselves into wars for the flimsiest of reasons. And we don’t have the excuse of ignorance that our ancestors could arguably file in their defense – we know we’re engaged in massive self-destruction and yet we carry on regardless, fuming and pontificating self-righteously about terrorists, drug cartels (and people who take drugs), Muslims, militants and, in general, ‘People Who Hate Us’ – what an ironic and fundamentally stupid question that was!

The real question for us to ask ourselves is ‘How do we open ourselves up for manipulation by others?’ Governments are governments, they reflect the attitudes of those who give them power (the people), and it is the business of government to survive in an environment dominated by suspicion, lies, cunning and chronic instability; the easiest way for a government to gain support for its policies, its presence and its demands, is to whip up public opinion within some kind of negative context – it’s much more challenging to whip people into a positive mindset. Edward knew this 800 years ago and politicians know it now, and use this knowledge today. I think we can take it for granted that governments will continue to exploit our prejudices shamelessly until we free ourselves of prejudice itself.

It matters little who takes power, whoever it is, they will work with the material they have to hand, and the material is us, the people. Our greed, insecurity, hatred and corruption will be amplified in our governments – it is, if you like, to a certain extent, a natural law; leadership sits atop a pyramid that represents the mass of humanity, all the qualities embodied by the human pyramid coalesce at the apex in proportion to the negative/positive aspect of those qualities held. By which I mean that whatever quality predominates in the general human psyche (be it positive or negative) will be precipitated most intensely at the level of leadership. Our governments, in fact, are a visible gauge of where we are ourselves; this is why the critical mass principle is so crucial to our evolution; for governments, though they act as a reflection of our state of consciousness, also carry the potential of creating and directing us toward more enlightened society.

Observation of the effects of new legislation can help us to draw some curious conclusions. For example, in the late Roman Empire, after Christianity became the official religion, Christian scholars and intellectuals began to push for certain changes in domestic policy; the practice of animal sacrifice for instance (or the staging of gladiatorial shows in which, effectively, humans were sacrificed) began to be discredited by the new faith and this intolerance gradually inveigled itself into the legal system to the degree that by the time Rome fell, sacrifice and blood sports of this nature were, by and large, a thing of the past. It could be argued thus, that legislation was used to create an environment of greater compassion for life and this was a direct result of an awareness of the sanctity of life emerging from a population who had embodied new understandings. At some point a critical mass was reached in Roman society which determined the direction of government policy. In the same way, the transmutation of negative attitudes in our present society will create inevitable shifts in our own government-directed policy. The responsibility for change rests squarely upon our own shoulders and our work is heart- work. I am reminded here of the story of the two wolves, which I’ll reproduce below in case you’ve not come across it

Two Wolves

One evening an old Cherokee told his grandson about a battle that goes on inside people. He said ‘My son, the battle is between two wolves inside us all. One is destructive – It is anger, envy, jealousy, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority and ego.’

‘The other is healing – It is Joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion and faith.’

The grandson thought about it for a minute and then asked his grandfather, ‘Which wolf wins?’

‘The one you feed’ replied the old man.

As more and more of us make the conscious decision to feed the wolf of joy and compassion, so the over-arching environment will become infused with our collective illumination and the balance in our leadership will shift from negative to positive, leading to enlightened governance which will become, in stark contrast to what we experience today, a guiding light for humanity. At that point the wolf of destruction is in serious trouble.

This is one of the most empowering concepts in a world in which it is so easy, and so tempting, to feel powerless to change the cynical mindscape of the political arenas we operate within. The ultimate power to change our politics lies with us; governments will be unable to promote unscrupulous policy if it is not tolerated; indeed, men and women who would be so inclined, will simply not be part of government – the climate of politics will change in such a way that they will either have to change themselves, or they will be left isolated with their cynicism, thankfully unable to perpetrate it, wholesale, any more on their fellow humans, or life in general.

This is the world that we are dreaming into being; these are the dreams that will be given life as we continue our transformation and thus, so long as we can open the paper and find within it evidence of war, cruelty and oppression, we know our own personal work is not yet done.

Jonathan

We have, for so long, lived under the aegis of a central government that it’s hard to imagine how we could live without one. There is perhaps a sense that centralised authority has emerged from a natural coalescing of shared interests and values, into a unified political body which holds sway over the interests and gives voice to the values. But there are plenty of examples of societies that existed in relative autonomy and their political and economic structure appears to have been, if anything, more stable than the structures of centralised government contemporary to them.

I am not talking of tribal societies, whose relative autonomy we can take for granted, but of peasant societies that bear witness to the ability of localised political units to govern themselves.

In the first centuries following the demise of the Roman west, for instance, there was a massive de-centralisation of governmental control across the face of Europe. Various political entities, such as the Goths and the Lombards stepped in to fill the power vacuum created, but the general movement from centralised to de-centralised government continued in most areas of the continent until, by the 8^th and 9^th centuries, one can find evidence of peasant-based autonomy, such as was the case in areas of Brittany which managed to police themselves and provide their own judicial system independent of any higher authority. Though peasant societies in Brittany enjoyed greater freedom of action than many parts of Europe during this period, they nonetheless provide a measurement for the relative ease with which a local society could take care of its own political and economic structures. So how do we explain the gradual but steady erosion of localised power into a more centralised, and more distant, government? It can be seen that through a process of external manipulation, whether by deceit, force or coercive threat, these peasant societies eventually came within the reach of the emerging predatory dynasties that were staking out their claims in the European political climate of the time. Military power was being accumulated at the royal seats of the various kingdoms and the rulers of these kingdoms were using this greatly to their material advantage – usurping the rights of the general populace to the land and claiming it for themselves.

As an aside, it is worth noting that the word ‘usurper’ has always been used in the context of an individual who successfully prosecutes an illegal/illegitimate claim to the throne of any given kingdom, yet the greatest usurpation of history has been the process by which kings and their elites strip whole peoples of the right to live freely in the landscape they were born into benefitting from their own labour.

So kings, dukes, emperors, their cronies and their paid henchmen set about disenfranchising first their own people and then, if they were successful, others. This is an old story and I don’t wish to labour it, but it is, I think, of some import for us now to open ourselves to the possibility that we don’t need governing – and if we do find it easier to organise ourselves with some form of over-arching structure, it certainly doesn’t need to be of the centralised design which is born from the desire of the very few to wrest power and wealth from the many.

Such dismantling of the current political model would effect radical change within our society and, if it were not to be accompanied by the kind of chaos that characterised the fall of Rome, would have to be carefully considered and executed – but this doesn’t mean that it should not be attempted; if we return to the title of this essay we can begin to appreciate the vicious political loop we have deluded ourselves into. The foundations of our political culture rest upon ancient greed, the need to control and the total disregard for the sanctity of life; the principles by which it operates contain a closed circuit in which those who are most in a position to enact some kind of positive change are the least inclined to do so. Every so often a personality will emerge from the dross of career politics who can rise above the self-serving need to feather their own nest and they might achieve much in their lifetime, but they are only flashes in the pan and their examples (though enduring in the overall consciousness of humanity) are seldom followed for any length of time after they are gone.

What must be becoming clearer and clearer to an awakening humanity is that the political systems by which we organise ourselves must undergo fundamental change, and we must accustom ourselves to the possibilities that this change will throw up for us in order for us to facilitate its birth.

True autonomy comes from within, external authority, by its very nature, tampers with the individual’s ability and desire to discover, and be, themselves. But any movement towards authentic individual autonomy, or even communal autonomy, is fiercely resisted by the same elements of society that so successfully crushed its localised political manifestation all those centuries ago, the elites. And there’s been some pretty crazy stuff lately which points to how the ‘elite mentality’ reacts to the (both consciously and unconsciously) perceived threat to its political/economic hegemony.

I came across a report on some research conducted during the 1960s by two professors who concluded, from their findings, that one possible way of guaranteeing financial security for all might be for everyone to sign themselves up to the welfare system. Their premise ran that such a move from a sufficient proportion of the population would overwhelm the existing system and force radical change. The kind of change they were envisaging was toward a system that would guarantee basic food security for every member of society. How this would play out and what the mitigating factors would be, I cannot say? Whether such a ploy would actually work is, in my mind, uncertain; what attracted me to the article was that these researchers were working on the understanding that a) there is plenty of food to go around and b) that resource scarcity is a human created situation – either by deliberate design or by negligence and ignorance. I would see both premises as most important in our appraisal of what kind of socio-economic processes we are caught up in.

The other illuminating factor about this news is that it’s not ‘news’; the report was released in 1966 and has long since been forgotten until it was raked up by a right-wing sensationalist agitator (Glenn Beck) who broadcasts on Fox News. He, or at least the Fox script-writers that he would be parroting, highlighted this report to indicate the kind of ideas that are currently threatening American fiscal stability; the report, and its authors, were accused of provoking mass irresponsible action that would lead to national economic collapse. This particular show evidently appeals to extremist elements in the American body politic and, typically enough, the only surviving author of the report, 77 year old Frances Fox Piven (her colleague and co-author has already passed on) has received numerous death threats, made all the more potent with the publication of her contact details and residential address on the above named show. Despite a public outcry Fox news has refused to acknowledge, or apologise for the fact that they have put this woman’s life in very real danger.

Coupling events like this with incidences such as the recent Tucson shooting of a Democratic congresswoman, whose face had been displayed on the public domain by Sarah Palin with the cross-hairs of a gun-sight over it, does make you wonder just how far right wing America is willing to go to prosecute their on-going bid for power. Or perhaps I should say, how blatant they feel they can be. For it seems clear to me that the right-wing corporate take-over of America is executed with a fine disregard for the sanctity of life, human or otherwise.

When a corrupted political framework begins to undergo stress (as the American political system undeniably is) its protagonists, that is those that benefit from the corruption, begin to employ methods of misuse, mismanagement, manipulation and (sometimes extreme) violence in less and less disguised ways. The gloves come off and so do the masks.

The difficulty with the kind of political environment we operate within lies in the availability of resources to the elite elements of society who advocate and employ violence to achieve their ends and have the material means to do so. Those of us who dream of a world in which love, understanding, compassion and community values are of paramount significance, are often hampered by very limited resources, an imbalance which has generally led to armed conflict, and yet we must meet violence with peaceful action, lest we become that which we abhor. In short, if humanity is going to evolve past the self-serving (but ultimately self-destructive) level of consciousness demonstrated by the political right-wing of American extremism (spear-headed very much by many Republican political actors who walk the ‘corridors of power’), a large percentage of the population need to be prepared to die for the dream. (This may seem overly dramatic, but we are witnessing this kind of commitment in Tunisia and Egypt at this very moment). It’s too easy to resort to fighting, and it always back-fires on the high-minded principles which the ‘revolution’ is initially inspired by; we all like to fight for our ideas, but to die for them without using violence (in thought or deed) takes a quality and a skill, which transcends the human experience. Gandhi understood this and employed it with phenomenal political success against the British empire; Christ understood it and wove it into his spiritual teachings providing an alternative pathway in a time, and amongst a nation, habituated to achieving ends through martial force.

Both paid the ultimate earthly price for their efforts, but their lives and their deaths planted seeds in the global human consciousness which have taken root and, contrary to what may appear to be the case, continue to grow within each and every one of us.

It seems never before has our very survival been so dependent upon our ability to wake up and cleanse ourselves from the potent toxins that course through society’s veins. And perhaps the greatest trap that will prevent us from self-realisation is the desire to combat extremism. Once we enter combat of course, we’ve already lost ourselves to that compulsive and vengeful energy that will never want to let us free of its addictive grip. This is a very real danger; extremism tends to proliferate most potently during moments of crisis, and it naturally provokes polarisation, thus it breeds itself; it needs that polar opposite to remain in existence itself. Fighting extremism will simply reinforce it, and yet, as our society becomes more deeply subject to extreme tendencies, so we will be more compulsively tempted to fight against them.

The American right (indeed much of the political elite society world-wide) is like a twisted child that usually gets its way and employs deceitful, manipulative and violent means to ensure its perceived needs are met. This is an easy image to hate, to project all of our toxic thoughts onto, but it’s essential that we continue to take responsibility for our own shadows and leave extremism to work its own way out.

Perhaps more focus on what we can do collectively to promote positive social change would be a more effective way of harnessing our energy. An individual commitment to clearing our own house and a collective commitment to acting upon initiatives that will bring about the kind of shifts in global consciousness and organisation we wish to see.

I see this process emerging from the joyous heart; whatever action we take, if we take it with joy and for joy we will find that kernel of deep love for ourselves and this extraordinary world we have inherited, and can knead it into every moment, every action, every relationship in our lives. To trust the process of life within us, to allow a blissful awareness to act through us, radiating into our own personal world. To touch each other daily with a smile, a moment of soulful acknowledgement, a heart-felt prayer – these are the essential ingredients that give life meaning and purpose.

We can be aware of the extremist hatreds which continue to pollute our world, indeed we must be aware of them; for we must meet the degree of hatred in the world today with at least the same degree of love, the kind of love that renders hatred impotent and irrelevant.

We must both understand the ways of the world, with all of its dysfunctional aspects, and focus our consciousness on tending the wild and beautiful landscape within us.

It is love for ourselves, more than anything else, that will save the world.

Jonathan

Two words that so aptly capture the nature of the current human condition; like pawns being bounced back and forth in the schemes of some evil genius, we have swung between these two modes of operation without giving ourselves the chance to experience some other existence. Did we always have this struggle to survive, or have we created it through our tendency to predate on each other?

Entering now a political/economic climate which bodes ill for the dreams of security that many hold dear, the one question which is so prominent in our minds is ‘Is this necessary?’ And the answer which comes forth from our intuitive awareness is an irrefutable ‘No!’ There is a sense amongst many of us, particularly in the west, that our current troubles were avoidable and have been generated purely through greed, corruption and cynicism, on the part of our governments and our governing financial institutions. This may have elements of truth about it but the reality of our situation has much broader causes of which our governing institutions play only a reflective role. That is, we perceive that governing institutions are responsible for navigating us into our varying predicaments, but, ultimately, they are not, it is ourselves who are responsible for the place we have come to. We have spawned both the governing institutions that perform so pathetically in the face of crisis and the attitudes that drive that performance. The bulk of humanity is caught up in the cycle of survival and predation and until we can collectively clear this evolutionary stumbling block we’ll continue to promote institutions of authority that operate from this conscious level. And it should be clear now, after witnessing almost 10,000 years of recorded history, that operating from this place leads to slavery, wholesale death, outrageous disrespect for life and wasteful squandering of resources. These have, after all, been the consistent themes that run through our historical narrative, without exception, or at least, where exceptions have occurred (such as many North American Indian tribes who refused to involve themselves in war) they have been systematically wiped out so thoroughly that they don’t even register in that narrative.

If we are thus to change the human story, we must come to terms with our own participation in the survival/predation game and, with an understanding of how this undermines our ability to live life as the magical spiritual experience it is, we will give ourselves an opportunity to re-source our centre of operation so that we can access life and all the vibrancy it offers rather than ‘surviving’ on the meager rations we allow ourselves to open to.

How can we describe this modus operandi we appear so enmeshed within, and how do we perpetrate it?

It is the consciousness which forms some kind of barrier between itself and other life; this other life could be anything, animals, the environment, other people, it matters little in principle; what is so destructive about this consciousness is that it creates the illusion of separation between ‘Me (and what is mine)’ and ‘the other’; and by default ‘the other’ becomes less important than ‘Me’ and ultimately expendable in ‘My’ pursuit of (primarily) survival, then, security and happiness. Oh – that old pursuit of happiness, so entrenched within our consciousness as a worthy occupation for the human being is, in fact, nothing less (or more) than another way of describing the shift from survival to predation, for ‘the pursuit of My happiness’ is going to be at the expense of some other form of life.

I’d best clarify how I’m using these words; survival is the attitude in which the focus is on staying alive, literally or symbolically. All other factors pertaining to all life outside of ‘Me’ are relegated to a secondary level of importance against the back-drop of ‘My Survival’. Survival thinking is quick and reactive, lacks ethical consideration and is entirely myopic; meaning that it’s an approach which can only take in a tiny part of the picture and thus it lends a disproportionate importance to this fraction of reality that it’s concerned with.

Predation is the place humanity consistently arrives at once it has gained a certain assurance of survival. It is the attitude which focuses on maintaining security and ensuring that one is not reduced to the survival mode – with all its accompanying stresses and insecurities – again. It is the natural consequence of successful survival; once survival has been comparatively ‘guaranteed’, the predatorial nature steps in to ensure that this guarantee remains firmly in place. This is one reason why the victim often becomes the perpetrator; predation is a behavioural response to the desire to avoid being a victim again.

These two attitudes generate each other, they are the Yin and Yang of the current human condition, for as survival leads to predation, so predation creates an environment of insecurity around it, which provokes a response amongst the ‘other’ to employ survival strategies to survive, and these strategies will, in turn, lead inevitably to predation. Thus today’s victim is tomorrow’s predator that will become victim again in the due course of time.

It seems clear to me, that once self-consciousness is obtained (and humanity has obtained this), there is no inherent requirement for such operational responses to the challenges of life; a certain level of basic maintenance is required to preserve life, but with a socially interactive species such as humans, this should not pose any major obstacle to survival (or indeed to an ability to thrive); the whole being infinitely more viable than the sum of the parts, this should give the tribal/communal body plenty of scope for effortless survival. At this stage we are, of course, talking of a global community which has, at its fingertips, the means to ensure that all members of the human tribe have access to resources that will ensure such an effortless existence; this is no pipe-dream, it is a reality, but there is so little will or vision amongst the political elites (or evidently humanity in general) to convert this potential into a manifest reality, that it simply has not become part of the human story – yet.

Many would argue that the global elites have deliberately created an environment that suffers from a scarcity of resources in order to maintain their own political power and wealth; though these arguments have more than a grain of truth within them, they still don’t point to the core of the issue which is that the general mass of humanity are still operating from a survival or a preditorial approach to life, and these approaches contain within them the need for some to be winners whilst others are losers.

A clear measurement of where group consciousness lies is always sharply defined in the observation of shared attitudes towards ‘others’; this need for a separation between ‘me’ and ‘other’ is manufactured wholesale by humanity in such activities as war, ethnic subjugation, economic stratification and competitive sports. Because we tend to view sports as healthy activity promoting fraternity and community it might be worth examining exactly what we do when we buy into the competitive model. The global human consciousness has created a massive political, economic and religious (if you follow the line of thinking that deification of human beings has a distinctly religious flavour to it) framework around the area of competitive sports, particularly soccer; which is really a form of collective insanity when you consider that all we are talking about is a few men going out on to a field to kick a ball around. But what seems like a kind of harmless (if senseless suspension of intelligence) obsession, becomes more insidious when one takes into account the cruelty inherent in the nature of competitive games. For our sports are generally based upon an outcome in which someone wins and someone loses – we tend not to like draws, there’s a sense of a lack of resolution in that. The predatorial tendency is so strongly entrenched in our consciousness that we give the most fanatical attention to activities in which someone has to lose (preferably). This has reached such proportions in our mindset that I don’t think we can imagine team sports in which there is no allowance for someone to lose. It can happen however, and is demonstrated by a lovely story re-told by Wade Davis about two south American tribes who engage in an annual event which involves what we would instinctively see as a kind of race, but I think is more of a journey.

For this event, the two tribes provide a team of young men whose task is to enter the forest, find a log the size of a small tree, pick it up and carry it around a designated route until they reach an agreed destination. The first anomaly that would puzzle us is that there are no parameters governing the size of the log thus appropriated and nobody seems to pay any attention to the fact that one team inevitably picks up a log much heavier than the other team’s. The teams then haul their log, and themselves, through the various obstacles that the forest throws up against them, fallen trees, fast running streams, slippery rocks and a host of other challenging terrains. Finally, after some time, the first team to reach the end of the journey will arrive, and if they are alone, they will put their log down some distance before the finishing line and plunge back into the forest to search out the other group. When they find them, they all ‘row in’ together and help their fellow log-haulers with their burden until they reach the place where the first log had been left. Then they separate again, pick up their own log, and together the two teams cross the finishing line at the same time.

It’s worth taking a moment to feel into how this story impacts you. I remember one reaction when I first heard it was, ‘What’s the point of that?’ As if a game without a winner and loser couldn’t carry any meaningful purpose. Over the years, having had the opportunity to return to the story and reflect upon its significance, I have come to appreciate what a truly magical ritual this must be in its ability to bring together communities that are naturally (geographically) separated from one another. The ‘log game’ has a warmth and humour integral to it that leaves competitive sport in the cold, rather heartless light which is its true aspect.

I don’t advocate abandoning competitive sport, I’m simply using the global fascination for it as an indicator of how we operate in the world. Playing (or watching) a game is one thing, ardently praying for one side to lose is quite another.

Most of us are caught in the game of predation or survival, both in our work and our leisure activities, we instill the competitive ethos into our children so they grow up aspiring to be the best, rather than finding the natural joy of being themselves. And as long as we remain caught here, our front-line news will focus on wealth, power and fame, set against poverty, subjugation and marginalization. Our governmental extensions of our communal consciousness will continue to act primarily in their own myopic interests and we will continue to swing between the poles of survival (victimhood) and predation (perpetration).

But when we lift ourselves out of this vicious cycle and appreciate what life offers us, when we can learn to test ourselves against one another without needing to ‘win’, when we have arrived at that place in which our activities are joyful in themselves and don’t require an outcome, when we can rest within ourselves happy to be alive and a part of the unfolding miracle of all life, then we can add our voice to the infinite song that is inspired by life and by love; that’s when the lion will lie down beside the lamb.

With all my heart, I call for this!

Jonathan

In the Autumn of 376 AD, 2 Gothic tribes gathered on the North bank of the Danube river and petitioned the Eastern Roman Empire for permission to enter. There must have been upwards of 50,000 refugees fleeing from the Hunnic menace moving in from the north-east Black Sea region, and their entry onto Roman soil began in earnest the collapse of the Western Roman Empire’s long established frontier; the consequences of this period were to throw the existing world order into chaos and the next thousand years would be witness to violent convulsions as Europe attempted to find some kind of political balance from the melting pot of peoples, languages and cultures that were thrown together after the collapse of an empire that had ruled so extensively and so long.

Why Rome fell at all has long bee an open question – there is no obvious reason for it and at the time, Romans could not have predicted their demise, no matter how far sighted they might have been; what happened from the first Gothic incursion onto Roman soil onwards, was unprecedented and relentless and instigated a century of bloodshed and migration during which the fabric of the Western Roman Empire was torn apart and the face of Europe was transformed permanently.

That Rome had created the environment for its own downfall is, in my mind, beyond question, but this was an environment created not so much through Roman policy as it was from the very nature of empire itself and as such, the `Fall of Rome’ acts as sentinel of the gate through which we must pass to discover the traits of the human psyche and where they lead us.

Rome did not fall due to decadence, bad leadership or short-sighted policy making, though these aspects of Roman life certainly contributed to, and often hastened, its end; Rome fell primarily because it became prey to some of the most basic universal laws, laws that we are bound by today, as much as Romans were 2,000 years ago, laws which we ignore at our own peril.

To explain these laws, it’s necessary to back-track a little and establish what Rome achieved and why it came to define its limits where it did. Over a period of 1,000 years Rome had come to dominate, politically and culturally, the entire Mediterranean basin, this much, most of us know; what is less known is how Rome dealt with its neighbours. To the south of the Empire lay the Sahara desert, to the West, the Atlantic ocean; so far so good, there would have been little enough in the way of neighbourly relations in either of those arenas. To the East lay the Parthian empire, which later morphed itself into a 2^nd Persian empire; in this later form it would come to acquire super-power status and proved more than a match for the Eastern Romans. The sparring process that occurred, however, between the two was relatively predictable; both sides clashed frequently with one or the other clinching victory at different stages of the long struggle – but both Empires were operating at their limits and there was never any practical likelihood of one subjugating the other.

Rome’s `dagger in the night’ came from the North, that area east of the Rhine and north of the Danube that was home to a host of politically, economically, culturally and linguistically disparate elements of  `Barbarian’ societies that did not stand a chance, militarily, against the disciplined and united might of Rome. What happened in the hundred years following 376 happened because of what had been happening for the past 3-4 hundred years previously.

Since the first century AD Rome’s borders had undergone very little change, a couple of costly expeditions by glory hunting emperors had extended Roman territory across the borders of the Rhine and Danube but the benefits from such expensive acquisitions did not justify the initial outlay and indeed, these enclaves were the first to be jettisoned when frontier trouble began as they were so difficult to defend.

As such, the Roman frontier was the arena of both low-level warfare and intense trade. Client states were created from the wealth thereby generated and the relatively egalitarian Germanic society became steadily more economically layered until, by the 4^th century there were established Germanic elites running states benefitting enormously from trade with Rome. Apart from the occasional flare-up of tensions, such as the Marcromannic wars in the second century, this status quo remained, by and large, stable, since everyone benefitted – everyone that is, save those who were being exploited in the process and those (more importantly) who lived beyond the frontier region in the hinterlands of modern day Germany and Poland, (more on that in a minute). But despite this relative stability a pattern is already emerging of unequal wealth distribution which was creating ruling elites who were able to field armies that were capable of testing Rome’s hegemony in the region. The Macromannic wars are a perfect example of this tendency; though ultimately the Emperor Marcus Aurelius succeeded in subjugating the German tribes that had risen in revolt, it was a close run, and both he and his army were only saved from annihilation by the so-called `Rain Miracle’ during which, his parched forces were able to replenish their water supplies, without which, they would never have fought their way out of the trap the German tribes had them in.

Thus, even at this early stage, some 200 years before the final debacle, Rome’s presence on the Danube and Rhine had created confederations which had the man-power to challenge Rome’s domination. A pattern emerges of a coalescing of energy on Rome’s frontier for which Rome is directly responsible. In effect, despite its policies to counter this phenomenon, Rome is creating on its periphery, political structures which are becoming more and more capable of threatening its own security. Add to this scenario the impact of frontier wealth on those who are not being given access to it, i.e. those tribes who lived beyond the immediate periphery of the empire, and you have the final ingredients with which to brew Rome’s fatal tonic.

Rome was like a great fattened bull in a valley of wolves; the ferocity and invincibility of the Roman military machine which protected this glittering prize, provoked a growth in Germanic military capacity which forever strained to reach a level of parity; at the same time, Roman exploitation and trade with Barbarian leaderships (who evolved into state elites), provided the structure, the wealth and the ideological means with which future leaderships would undermine and topple, not only Roman hegemony, but the very existence of Rome itself.

By the late 4^th century then, all that was needed to complete Rome’s funerary pyre was the spark, and this arrived in the shape of the Huns. One of the most mysterious of all people’s to adorn the pages of history, not least for the enormous impact they have on those pages; the Hunnic story is as incredible in their lightening rise to political predominance in Europe as it is for their total disappearance from the European arena after a presence of less that a hundred years. Like `agents provocateur’ of change, they came and they went, leaving little trace of where they had hailed from and vanishing into the European panacea of people’s as if they had never existed, yet the world they had entered underwent such a cataclysmic change owing to their direct and indirect involvement, that it was, in parts, barely recognizable when they left.

What meaning does all this have for us now? We have been brought to where we are today through the events of the past; would we have any concept of democracy if the Persians had crushed the very birth of democratic thought in 5^th century Greece? If 15^th Century China had pushed on with their initial attempts at colonization of the world rather than retreating back into seclusion behind their own borders, would Europe have gained anything like the pre-eminence it did in the next 400 years of world politics and trade? And would America not now be an old Chinese dependency, tied more closely to the interests of the East rather than with the west, speaking a dialect of Chinese rather than English? We live in a world shaped by our past as much as we share the responsibility for shaping its future, and it is in this light that we may discover from history where we have come from and where we might be headed.

The parallels running through the fall of Rome and the events unfolding about us now are striking in their similarities. Rome had created a form of deficit in its budget in that it was fed by North Africa, this was to be the fatal flaw in its economy when North Africa was taken by the Vandals – Rome thus faced a resource crisis which would resemble what Europe and America will experience if there is any long term interruption in the flow of food imports from the rest of the world – say from a reduction in the flow of accessible oil. But in terms of observing the desires and presumed needs of the human psyche and behaviours resulting from them, the rise to political dominance of the barbarians is eminently revealing since it is in this arena that we can watch a process unfold of enrichment, encroachment and enslavement.

The enrichment process was that in which the Germanic leaders began to understand how they could access the wealth of Rome, and how they could do so whilst preventing their peers from accessing the same wealth. This enrichment process was thus a partial process in that it impacted different elements of tribal society in different ways, creating a much wider gap between the haves and the have-nots than had ever existed before. The encroachment process followed on from this in that, as economical parity was being altered so was political freedom and the families and clans who most benefitted from Roman wealth also witnessed an unprecedented rise in their political status, and as they rose so their ability to muster armies increased. Thus the basic political rights of the bulk of the Freemen in Germanic society were steadily eroded until, by the 5^th century, they had become subjects of Kings, their political freedom of speech had all but vanished and they would have had to attach themselves to one of the major families if they wished to exert any political influence. This was in dramatic contrast to the more egalitarian society that Rome first met, and transformed, in the years around the birth of Christ. Yet there was a further step this process had to take. After the tribes ventured on to Roman soil, they had to amalgamate to survive. Tribes that failed to do this were wiped out by the Roman army or incorporated in the Roman social system (often in ways not to their advantage). The tribal Freeman thus took a further step down the social ladder as he became one of tens of thousands, instead of one of thousands. The process of transforming a society  from one with a strongly political and numerous Freeman class into one which drew sharp definition between a King and his ruling class elite served by virtually enslaved subjects was almost complete, all it needed was for one of these ruling aristocracies to take over what was left of the Empire itself, which was accomplished first by an Ostrogoth – Odovacar, and then, more permanently, by Theoderic the Goth. Rome had finally succumbed to the Barbarians it had always feared and despised.

What is instructive in this model for contemporary readers is the patterns of human desire and the Universal Laws it reveals at work, which are as prominent today as they were then. Human desires, manifesting themselves as greed, ambition and the need to destroy competition follow a pre-determined  trajectory charting the accumulation of wealth, the securing of political power and the destruction first of the competitors, and finally the winners as new competitors enter the field. In the process, lives are sacrificed, environment is laid waste and resources are squandered. Not a pretty picture though one which was to play itself out intensely in Europe for the next millennia, and slightly less intensely for the next half a millennium right up to the present day. The basic rules which governed humanity’s conduct 1500 years ago are still fully operational today; the aggrandizement of personal wealth at the expense of other humans, the environment and available resources remains one of the bulwarks of our legal system. Though we undoubtedly live profoundly easier lives today, this is only a by-product of general advancement. The elements of human society that hold the wealth and power are no more interested in the welfare of their fellow humans than the Germanic leadership of the 5^th century; the fact that in both cases, people were experiencing and increase in general living standards had, and has, nothing to do with philanthropy on the part of the ruling elites. As we enter an era of political and economical collapse this is worth bearing in mind.

The issue of the Universal Laws at work during the fall of Rome is more complex and less malleable; in its simplest form, it can be seen that over the centuries Rome created and fed its own nemesis in the form of a political and economic energy on their northern frontier which was forced to become ever more powerful in order to gain access to a wealth that was being disproportionately distributed from the empire; this political power then coalesced over the years until it had the capacity to over-throw Rome completely.

We certainly court the same danger; Europe and America, using their dependent Israeli representative in the middle east, have gradually created a massive reprisal potential in the form of the entire Muslim world in the Arab states. Much like 3^rd and 4^th century Germany, the middle east is currently controlled by client states such as Saudi Arabia and Egypt, and, again like the final 2 centuries of Roman rule, client states that rebel are subdued by force and a more compliant regime change is effected (Iraq). These client states however are intrinsically unstable and capable of maintaining the status quo only so long as wealth and resources, which are channeled direct to the ruling elites, continue to flow. Interrupt the flow of these resources and the political face of these areas will be transformed beyond our current imaginings. And we are facing global resource decline, an issue which becomes more critical daily.

The proliferation of Nuclear Arms adds perhaps the most deadly element to this poisoned chalice that the West is preparing for itself. European and American governments have signally failed to arrest this process, obviously, since they drive it. The arms industry is simply too lucrative for our leaders to gather the courage required to neutralize the most potent threat to humanity (and all life) that we have ever known. Thus, like the Romans, we have sown the seeds of discontent amongst our brothers and sisters (in the middle east) and at the same time continue to drive forward a technological arms race that would have unprecedented catastrophic results if it ever reaches its natural conclusion – that being, if the billions of dollars that we divert from human welfare into the production of weapons of mass destruction actually bear their intended fruit in the form of being used.

I imagine that there were enlightened souls 2,000 – 1500 years ago, not the least of them being Christ himself, who taught brotherhood, compassion, proportionate political representation and equitable resource distribution; who offered a way that would have taken humanity through the crisis of Rome’s fall in an essentially peaceful and constructive manner – but these voices were in the pitiful minority and become hopelessly lost in the chaos and violence that was to convulse Europe for a thousand years.

Perhaps our best hope today is that enough of us will respond to these voices to tip the balance toward sustainable re-construction of the human story, rather than having to undergo another period of utter chaos and apocalyptic violence.

One thing seems certain, our governments and leaders are still operating from the old paradigm (wealth aggrandizement for themselves and their immediate supporters at the expense of humanity, environment and resources) and it will not be these people who lead us through our coming crisis, anymore than the Roman elite were able to take their society through their own crisis; the future prosperity of the human race, the environment and the greater part of life on earth lies in the hands of the likes of you and me.

Jonathan

The latest leaks revealing government complicity in illegal activities, come at the end of a long line of revelations of this nature; nor is it the end, it’s only the last yet.

This particular situation pertains to the Russian government’s involvement in Mafia style operations, leading to the central character of Putin himself. With the birth of the internet, a phenomenon that Terence McKenna equates with the `Second Coming’, we have begun to witness an exponential increase in the information we have access to , and secrets are becoming proportionately more and more difficult to keep. In that respect, the internet is surely providing the frame-work for the kind of uncompromising truth we might expect of a second coming. It is worth noting, that the conduit through which these revelations are coming, Wikileaks, is under attack from the governments of the world who are attempting to crack down on anything which threatens their hold on the channels of wealth and power, it is very much in our interests as citizens of the countries these governments represent, to resist this crack-down.

But what of these incidences of blatant corruption in government? There tends to be an energy of isolating revelations, treating them as unconnected aberrations of the normal business of government. I think this is naïve, though understandable; it equates with our psychology surrounding areas in which we have a vested interest; most of us feel some kind of vested interest toward the existing structure of our civilization and this creates a resistance to any threat to the status quo – revelations such as these which implicate government in Mafia style activities, constitute just such a threat .

Yet the reality is that these revelations are not sensational events of an unique nature, they are windows into the day to day business of state and national government. Government is, by its nature, a coalescing of resources into the hands of the few. Such an accumulation of power and influence without rigorous checks and balances, illumined by clear transparency, creates a breeding ground for corruption and misuse. If governments and the institutions that support them, were the product of grass-roots political and social thinking and practice, then the business of leadership would be an altogether different concern; elements of this can be found in Marxist ideology but the application of the ideology ran along the same lines of `hidden government agendas’ and `state secret operations’ which allowed the very energy Marx was surely attempting to prevent, to creep in. The business of government, and the rules that underlay its function, has been handed down from one elite sector of society to the next; even revolutions, if successful, generally replace one elite group with another.

We humans are, by our nature, `wealth accumulators’. The question has always been what kind of wealth are we attempting to accumulate? Generally, human consciousness has been taken up with the business of accumulating material wealth and/or psychological influence over its fellow humans. This serves 2 needs in the human psyche, that of physical comfort and that of belonging. Since the same impulse draws nearly everyone into its web – that is, the impulse to accumulate wealth or to maintain psychological influence over ones’ peers – certain activities are accepted by society in general if they can be understood to be in pursuit of these aims. Thus a medieval prince would have been considered less than a man if he didn’t prosecute his claim to an inherited title, despite the fact that such a prosecution might result in the deaths of thousands of his and his enemies’ retainers. The preponderance, in our psychology, for the pursuit of certain aims, which we might call `happiness’, is what allows us to accept and expect senseless violence. It’s what allows us to set up men and women as figures of historical greatness, when they’re greatest achievements were arguably how many people they killed and under what difficult odds they did it.

So long as there is accumulation of wealth and power in concentrated areas, elite groups will emerge as the natural predators of such opportunity. Our crisis of leadership lies not so much in the people who pretend to it, so much as in the design of our political and economic structures which encourage and preserve disproportionate distribution of wealth and power. This reflects the human pyche’s current level of consciousness; we are caught within a belief system that equates individual wealth and power with success and prioritises it over communal well-being.

We have quite the task to transcend this dead-end path in conscious evolution, and in a sense, it needs to occur globally; though we can, and must, only focus on our own movement from toxic to healthy consciousness, we will not witness the dismantling of our flawed political systems until humanity as a whole responds to the wake-up call. As individuals begin to work through their personal entanglements and vibrate at ever higher levels, they will act as beacons of light for the rest of humanity, both providing inspiration for the possibility of divine consciousness and casting the light by which others can find and release the shackles that bind them. We are all a potential second coming to each other.

Thus in the light of continued political corruption, we can keep in mind that the structure which provides for such activity is of our own creation and will begin to dissolve as we begin the work of liberating ourselves from such confines. This surely means living with love, abandoning judgement of ourselves and others, allowing the heart to guide our thoughts and actions, accepting the world as it is and becoming `the change you wish to see’.

I think the first impulse when one discovers corruption at such levels of leadership is anger, perhaps even outrage – we have similar experiences here in Ireland over the collapse of our fragile economy due the deliberate neglect shown by the government in past years with respect to speculative bankers. This anger is a great energy for precipitating change if it’s channeled maturely. If it’s used violently (either in thought or action) the anger only serves to strengthen the chaotic energy which threatens to consume our conscious awareness. We can use the anger to clarify our thoughts around toleration of what is not truth, and draw from that our visions for our future. We can let go of the fight with what is, and dream of what can be.

Jonathan

What I’m saying is that if we reach down to our hearts, if we take the time to touch ourselves to become aware of what it is that is contained within us, then we will find that dark well of rich mystery that we waste so much time searching for outside of ourselves.

We don’t have to live `the long loneliness of the human species’; life is clamouring to let us know we are connected, we are cared for, that our gentle love is adored. That life’s greatest desire is to open the channel of love-making between us and it. ‘Ever since happiness heard your name, it has been running through the streets trying to find you’ (Hafiz) Don’t run away from it, there is so much to lose, so much deep comfort that will never be felt if you run.

We fear life’s sweet offering, we fear even more our own, yet we are tearing ourselves apart trying to grasp that sweetness. It can’t be grasped, only the open hand can receive it. We cannot enjoy when our enjoyment denies another. Our path lies in the way of finding this deep contentment with ourselves, with all life – we must strike out on this path if we are to discover our life, our love.

We have to believe that we have it within us, we have to embody the search within. We all have meaning in our life – that about which we care – this is where to start, start with our loves, our hatreds, know them, live from them, test them, dig deeper – use them to weave into our lives the delicate web of luminous consciousness that is our natural state.

Most importantly, we must drop our clinging to what we believe has to be true in order for us to exist, to have worth and purpose, all those culturally inherited myths about our place in the `human scheme’. We still suffer from the feudal mentality that society is the ultimate decider of our place and our destiny, I don’t think we’ve moved all that far from the peasant consciousness of the medieval era, it’s just been more refined, but effectively we’re locked into the cultural paradigm that tells us who and what we are. Truth is we are truth, our bodies express truth every moment; we all share that essential quality of life that so many of us are struggling to find elsewhere. We are alive and we are truth – nothing we can do can change this – we can only try to deny it.

Life is choice, and we are prompted to choose lifelessness every day; every day our culture threatens us with ridicule or violence, or isolation if we choose life – and so, from fear, from ignorance, from compliance we opt for the unlived existence.

How do we do this? We continue to blame others for who we are, as if there is some intrinsic fault within us and as if someone else could interfere in our primal design in some way. Blaming others for our reality dis-empowers us, we abdicate responsibility for our life and in doing so, we deny that we have created it. No attitude brings us so swiftly to the unlived existence as `the blame of the other’.

We judge others (and ourselves) for our actions, but our actions are an expression of our consciousness and its relationship to the story of our lives. We understand little enough of our own motivations for action without presuming to understand another’s. What is it to us what another does? How can we truly measure their actions? They are what they are, what you would be if you were them. Of all the culturally endorsed states of consciousness that are played out in our minds and within our systems of controlling the population, that of Judging is possibly the most absurd!

Nothing changes over-night – save a total and permanent visitation from divine consciousness, and I wouldn’t count on that happening on a global (political, social and legal) level, though I’m open to it; most change is gradual but real change, though slow to morph itself into its new form, nonetheless emerges from an absolute and radical change of direction. And this `altered course’ can be immediate and constitutes a total departure from the old. Thus I may still find myself judging tomorrow, but I now have awareness that it is simply clouding my sight, whereas before I might have told myself that it was perfectly right to judge, or maybe not considered it at all – allowed myself to be the judgment.

Thus, the form remains. I judge today just as I judged yesterday; but the context of that judgment has radically changed; before, the judgment constituted a means of perceiving reality, now, I can see it is not only not a means of perceiving reality, it is a positive barrier between myself and the truth. So long as we judge ourselves and others, we will be veiled both as individuals and as society, the critical eye will never perceive luminous spirit in humanity, it cannot catch that glimpse of shimmering light in the eyes of another – this requires empathy and the judge will not, by it’s nature, make empathic connection with the judged.

So we neither live life, nor perceive aliveness – everything is rendered `a waste of breath’ in its comparison to self-serving (often commercialized) social institutional structure and dictate.

The question is, do we want to live? Because the evidence surely points to the contrary! If we do want to live, we must break-down our social, political and economic structures (I think the Gods may be doing this for us already). These structures, created with a view to preserving imbalance, scarcity and ignorance, anchor our society in the dysfunctional paradigm they were designed to maintain – I’m talking about the `Human Power Pyramid’, the concentration of all the bare essentials for material control in the hands of an elite, supported by a civilian `population control’ organisation (the police), a national armed force, a legal system and a commercial network, all of which draw from, and provide for, the apex of the pyramid.

This whole structure needs to be dismantled if the human spirit is to be liberated from its ancient prison. Is this an irresponsible suggestion in light of the chaos such a dismantling could cause? It is not so much irresponsible as factual; the system contains all those elements which have imprisoned and will continue to imprison sprit – you can’t separate blame or judgment from the legal system, it is an integral part of its purpose, you can’t operate a police force without advocating control, you can’t run a monetary system without creating a reality of scarcity and an inherent denial of abundance. All these systems/institutions deny the reality of spirit in our lives and, as such, if we want to live, they have to go!

And herein lies the dilemma; they cannot be dismantled before humanity awakens due to the destructive force so evident, if generally latent, in the human psyche; yet these systems are designed to keep humanity asleep; thus it seems we lie between a rock and a hard place. The only way through the paradox is for humanity (that’s us) to awaken and, like a child rubbing sleep from their eyes, allow the constraining bonds, so sacred to our culture, to fade from our reality as the wisps of bad dreams gradually dissolve in the light and excitement of life’s prospects that might fill the child’s mind when they begin to draw the new day into their awareness.

When we step from the dark dream to the golden light of a new dawn, our choice to remain in the clutches of the dream depends upon our willingness to awaken fully and, without forgetting the insights that the dream-world has offered us, leave the toxic feelings, elicited by it, behind.

I’m reminded of that moment that some South American shamans experience when they meet the sun for the first time. In certain traditions initiates (marked/recognised from birth) live in a dark cave for the first 18 years of their lives. They see no light, they’re needs are supplied by one or two people designated to instruct them through this cocooned period of initiation. Then finally, after 18 years of darkness they are led to the entrance of the cave for the first time and behold before them an undreamt of landscape spilling out toward them, enlightened by the first rays of the dawning sun. A moment of metamorphosis, an irrevocable and radical shift in conscious awareness as stunning and as shattering as a super-nova exploding across our own internal landscape. Can we believe in ourselves enough to witness this moment? What if we can? For it’s surely there and we are surely arriving at the entrance of our dark cave – can we hold that vision? What if we can?

Jonathan

The only true experience of life is that of touching your essence – all else is nothing more than chaff in the wind. We straddle two worlds, that of essence and that of illusion – and it is in the illusiory world that we have formed our cultural identity.

‘Caught in that sensual music all neglect

Monuments of intellect’ – W.B. Yeats

When I was younger, an aspiring, if naïve, writer, I would wonder about the purpose of the arts in general. Whilst people around me were studying medicine, engineering or mathematics, profoundly practical subjects with easily discerned purposes in later life, the study of literature seemed a rather whimsical excuse for an education. It was only later that I realized what some doctors, engineers and mathematicians (indeed some writers) never do; that the poet and mystic within us is the bridge to our essence. Thus it is the artist, throughout the story of humanity, who has kept society in touch with the divine spark that ignites within us the passion to live. Without the mystic, we would have fallen prey to hopeless insanity thousands of years ago; without art, life would have been a meaningless series of random events, as lifeless and purposeless as many scientists would have us believe it is.

But it’s not!

Life is pregnant with meaning, even mathematics knows that, just pick up a treatise on sacred geometry if you need convincing. Every moment is saturated with the deep essence of its own self-love.

‘Every moment is made glorious, by the light of his love’ – Rumi

And we can feel this in our bones – if we choose to – we can also choose not to.

Because our culture has placed its focus on the outer manifestations of reality, the forms and the material substance of it, and denies the existence of the inner light that governs these forms, all our cultural observations of the fabric of existence are misguided. That is to say, we always look in the wrong place; we’re using the evidence of Socrates’s shadows and attempting to understand the nature of the universe from it.

‘It is only when we are aware of the earth and of the earth as poetry that we truly live. Ages and people which sever the earth from the poetic spirit, or do not care, or stop their ears with knowledge as with dust, find their veins grown hollow and their hearts an emptiness echoing to questioning.’ – Author unknown

This is why mainstream science cannot unravel the mystery of life, mainstream science refuses to accept the existence of that mystery and throws all its resources into validating this rather bizarre hypothesis. I say ‘bizarre’ since the rest of us, the uneducated ‘grunts’, ignorant of the complexities of scientific thinking, can perceive quite clearly that life is a total mystery – therein lies its beauty, its majesty, its unfathomable grace.

I use the term `mainstream science’ in reference to the science whose adherents’ beliefs are rooted in the cultural structures of the age. There is another kind of science, what I would call mystic science, whose adherents are not working laboriously to prove forgone conclusions which would be culturally acceptable. They study reality in order to penetrate the mystery and, if they understand the limitations of the human mind, they make no attempt to reduce the mystery to a model of material parts, instead they seek to open up the horizon, plumb the depths of consciousness, motivated by nothing more, or less, than the spirit of exploration. Life is not a series of questions to be answered, it is a host of simultaneous quests to be lived – and loved. If you want to study reality through science, and to truly study reality you must use science, use the work of the mystic scientists – Rupert Sheldrake, Stuart Hameroff, Terence McKenna (to name a few) – and you will be taken to new landscapes of reality. Who needs dry dead-end conclusions? The Human Spirit needs inspiration!

And you know, it doesn’t really matter if the scientist is wrong, the rightness or wrongness of scientific enquiry is not nearly as significant as the line of enquiry itself. All the most profound discoveries of the last 5 centuries have been driven by one person’s burning desire to investigate the universe – not so they could reduce it into a collection of functioning parts, they were driven by the spiritual desire to open themselves to the mystery of the universe. The subtle difference in scientific lines of enquiry creates incomparable impacts on the consciousness of the enquirer; attempt to reduce mystery into meaningless, random events and material, and the impact will be dry, dull and as dead as the hypothesis it’s drawn upon; but if there is a genuine desire to invite the universe into the mind, the impact is shattering and the enquirer is brought upon that ocean of dark secrets that never truly explains itself but always promises more – always draws the enquirer deeper and deeper. But no end will ever be found, no final conclusion will ever be drawn, and in that voyage the enquirer will find the transcendent beauty of life manifesting itself in the most delicate lattices of scientific equation – equations that exist forever, provide infinite possibilities and breathe life into the enquirer and the enquired. When the voyage is thus, why concern yourself with what’s right and what’s wrong?

Johannes Kepler, that famous 17^th century astronomer whose observations provided the foundations for Newton’s construction of cosmological theory, was driven to explore the nature of harmony in the fabric of reality; his discovery of the laws he is so well known for were more footnotes to his passionate exploration of the `Harmony of the Worlds’; this was his great life’s work, in this he placed the greatest value and to it, devoted his time, energy and resources. If he had been told that he would be remembered primarily for his laws on planetary motion, he may well have laughed at the absurdity of it. This is his introduction to his great work, remember, whilst reading this, that it’s written by a scientist about the nature of a scientific discovery.

‘ . . . a very few days after the pure Sun of that most wonderful study began to shine, nothing restrains me; it is my pleasure to taunt mortal men with the candid acknowledgment that I am stealing the golden vessels of the Egyptians to build a tabernacle to my God from them, far, far away from the boundaries of Egypt. If you forgive me, I shall rejoice; if you are enraged with me, I shall bear it. See, I cast the die, and I write the book. Whether it is to be read by the people of the present or of the future makes no difference: let it await its reader for a hundred years, if God Himself has stood ready for six thousand years for one to study Him.’ – Johannes Kepler

The ‘Harmony of the Worlds’, as a scientific explanation of the relationship between the planets of our solar system was soon to be discredited and itself became a footnote in the history of science, despite the geometrical accuracy upon which the theory was based. Yet time was to bear Kepler’s ideas out, for centuries after his life was done (as he somewhat prophetically predicted), data was collected from probes sent out to investigate the possibility that the planets emitted some kind of acoustic signature. And guess what? They do! Each planet radiates sound, each planet has its song and, together, our solar system is, at this very moment, conducting the most extraordinary concert – a performance that has been played out without interruption, for billions of years.

What drove Kepler to these unusual and outstanding conclusions that have been born out so gracefully? Certainly his love of mathematics and its time honoured relationship with musical notes and scales must have played its part, but more causal than this was surely his deep longing to see, embrace and express the intoxicating mystery of the universe.

And that desire, though it caused him to construct a theory which (as a model of the universe) could not be used by science to equate with the solar system as we now know it, yet fulfils that human need for an expression of the essential qualities of the cosmos, the most profound explanation of universal truth, that, in essence, the universe is an ancient, mystical song.

So what does it matter whether what he presented was right or wrong? What matters is that some great longing within the man, coaxed him to reach out and touch an essential truth, and in doing this, he made contact, for himself and for all humanity, with divine beauty. Can there be any more soul-fulfilling experience of life than this?

The message to us from stories such as Kepler’s, or even Copoernicus’, is simple; we can throw away the need to be right or wrong, we can play with the physical `facts’ of reality if we so choose, but most significantly we can allow ourselves to be drawn into the wonder of universal consciousness, and within that cosmic union of individual and omniscient mind, we can taste the essence of spirit as it sings its sweet melody of harmonious and infinite love.

We must strive for our essence; our lives are designed to enable us to experience the pure ecstacy of this moment, it is the quintessential human experience, that for which our soul yearns. It is independent of the cultural dictates of our human inheritance, and requires us to release all those attitudes which demand that we remain obedient to the received wisdom of the institutionalised beliefs of humanity. That system of beliefs is what stands between us and our divinity, lose them and we’ll find God. And spirit will have reached its resting place, that place from which the true voyage begins.

Jonathan

We are not random biological mutations – how can we be and feel what we feel? Certainly science has brought us along in leaps and bounds; our understanding of the workings of nature, of the intricate processes involved in the physical make-up of the universe is phenomenal. Science, with its objective analyses and its attempt to view reality from an unbiased perspective has propelled us out of a brutal and superstitious medieval age in which the minds of humans were ruthlessly controlled by religious and political institutions that viciously repressed the very spirit of humanity that science, ironically, denies; collectively, humanity can often operate from the most obtuse perspectives.

One of the great gifts of scientific thought is that it can offer an individual a method for drawing their own conclusions. We do not have to adhere to the beliefs of others, we have centuries of scientific process from which we can draw, to liberate ourselves from inherited cultural forms which have dictated the rules to us for so long.

Obviously the scientific community’s ability to wrench itself away from medieval power structures was witness to a long and often painful, sometimes fatal, journey; and one can understand the vehemence of science’s rejection of religion, a vehemence of such intensity that the baby was truly thrown out with the bath water. So, though I, an individual, can empathise with current scientific thought as to why it denies spirit, that doesn’t bring me any closer to accepting that I am just a random biological mutation.

The issue here is at the very core of our understanding, of our way of life; for whether we agree with the mainstream scientific view of reality or not, we have been born and raised in a society that does; not only that but a society that actively represses individual experiences of life that fail to conform to this reductionist viewpoint – diagnoses, such as `schizophrenic’ being effective ways to quell the insistent rising of spirit within the person.

Thus we have been cut off from our own essence. Osho once said, you cannot blame man for the way he is, he has been sown on barren soil. Howard Fast once wrote a short story describing an experiment in which children were removed, as babies, from our culture and raised in an environment free of cultural limitations in which they could grow into their full potential, creating a kind of `super-human’ group. Whether any experiment of this nature has ever been attempted or not (and such an attempt would be severely hampered by the cultural influences that would surely filter through from the organizers of the experiment in the first place), the point it clear, allow humans to create their own reality and there is no predicting the outcome; but closet them in a culture which denies their imagination, their vision and their mysticism and they will shut-down, become sick and the spirit within them will go to sleep. This is pretty much where we have been for the last 2 centuries; shut-down, sick and asleep.

Science has become the new religion and toleration of anything `unscientific’ is so deeply lacking that we have emerged into adult-hood without having developed the tools to access our essential being. We have been hood-winked by our own cultural framework and find ourselves living the scientist’s view of reality.

Part of the transition process that we have been witnessing over the last couple of decades, has much to do with people beginning to be able to access themselves in a way which is positively discouraged by society. Spirit is emerging from the tired cracks of conventional wisdom and bursting forth from the well-spring of our hearts – soon there will be a flood, millions of fountains of light, totally uncontained by the cultural prison we have grown up in. The year 2012, I suspect, is the turning point, the moment when the tide turns and begins its unassailable progression in the opposite direction. We may not know it has happened, the much vaunted date may come and go without a murmur, but some time around now, we will have reached that moment of `singularity’ where everything will begin to shift in unforeseen ways. The tide of human consciousness has been receding for as long as we have record of our own existence. I don’t mean by this that we have been becoming less conscious, but our consciousness has been developing within the constraints of a receding rather than a progressing tide.

Because it is low tide,

A very low tide in this age

And around most hearts.

We are exquisite coral reefs,

Dying when exposed to strange elements

God is the wine-ocean we crave

We miss

Flowing in and out of our pores

Hafiz

As we have approached the moment of singularity so we have been able to witness wondrous change and fearful destruction, and now we are there, give or take a couple of years, and the changes we have so far witnessed will pale in significance when compared to the change we are about to experience; for all reality (including time) is about to begin operating in a radically different way. We can have no idea what to expect – I don’t think this has happened before in our collective memory.

And all the limitations of `scientific’ thought (which, by the way, is generally very unscientific when confronting accepted paradigms of scientific belief) are going to drop away, leaving us with free access to ourselves. The potential in this coming process (The Second Coming?) is no less than the most rapturous experience any of us have ever had.

And the beauty of it, we won’t have to prove anything, we’ll know with the wondrous certainty that only spirit can give, that we are not just biological mutations of random generation, but that we are spirit, awakened, alive and transcendent.

What a marvelous time to be alive – did you choose to be here for this, or is it just a random coincidence?

Jonathan

I’m going to draw from last week’s story which, I confess, I intended to write at more length on last week, but it just didn’t happen – infact, it’s a miracle I’ve managed it this week. If you need to re-read the story or read it for the first time, just return to the previous post and it’s all there.

To me, this is a beautiful depiction of how we banish aspects of our-self, the consequences of that banishment and the redemption that brings light to the whole process; for in his understanding of the need for light on the part of Ornias the Demon, Solomon receives the light himself.

The story works on both communal and individual levels; it’s the tale we are all too familiar with; the identification of something within that is perceived as `wrong’. Once the judgment is made the internal psyche sets about `throwing out the `offender’’ and a long process of repression begins, a process in which the outcast part of us is denied the light and in its desperate struggle for survival (and survive it will) it becomes more devious, more insidious, more unpredictable and, in direct response to its repressed existence, more powerful. This act of judgment is truly one of the greatest corruptors of our experience as humans, indeed it veils any real experience of life at all.

`When we cannot be who we are

Our divine senses become mute,

Mute and sick from the insanity

Of judging what He has made Immaculate’

Meister Eckhart

Primarily this is a story which describes the consequences of judgment. The driving underground of that which must have light creates a sickness in the human soul that overwhelms the ability of the mortal to effect any remedy.

Within this tale we find many motifs which demonstrate the essential vulnerability of human existence with the need for a higher or greater consciousness.

The biblical stories often relate this need to resort to a more universal authority, and though it might sometimes appear that this agency is only available to a chosen one – in this case Solomon, who conveniently happens to represent political leadership as well – this is part of an ancient tradition of using the mythic `hero’ to act out the varying stages of development and the manifest tasks that must be addressed before understanding and enlightenment are attained. It is the path we all must tread.

Like all great mythic tales, numbers play a vital role, and this narrative does not disappoint us in this respect, for we find Solomon’s wisdom measured against his ability to see through the 49 Gates of Wisdom. You can’t drop a number like that into a story without it creating tidal waves of meaning spanning out in all directions. 49 is seven times seven. Seven is the ancient number of the underworld, the seven moons that mark the passage of the sun through the dark wintry months; the seven worlds which the Babylonian goddess Inanna must pass through before coming to the light. It is the number which denotes what we need to experience in order to receive the life-giving benediction of universal consciousness itself.

We may question the importance of the mythic numbers, certainly in terms of how they can `practically’ effect our lives; but it must be remembered that these numbers are observations of universal truths which have emerged from the dream-world of humanity. The ancients deliberately used these numbers because they realized that the number was the key to unlocking the radiant tide of infinite conscious awareness.

I had a moment during a biology class some years back which confirmed this for me in a most telling way. We were learning about the self-arrangement of an oak tree, our teacher explaining how the tree organizes its leaves in such a way as to access thee maximum amount of sunlight; the trick, for the tree, is to spread its leaves both horizontally and vertically in a way in which each leaf offers up all its surface area to the sun. Horizontally, the process is simple, just spread out, but vertically there is the issue of the shadow of the leaf above. To overcome this hurdle, the tree calculates how much space is required beneath the upper leaf before its shadow is reduced, for light always meets again at some point beneath that which creates the shadow, owing to the relative size difference between the object and the sun. The shadow itself reduces in surface area proportionate to its distance from the object it’s drawn from, giving it an area of influence similar to a tapering cone. The question, for the tree, is where does this `shadow cone’ reach its zenith point. The answer, which all trees know, is 108 times the surface area of the object, i.e. if the leaf’s surface area is 1 cm squared, the distance required to reduce its shadow to nothing is 108cm. 108 is 12 x 9 – 9 being the solar number of completion – 3 x 3. But what particularly struck me was its correspondence with the Hindu faith, which places such acute emphasis upon this number and the fact that a mantra repeated 108 times constitutes completion of the prayer. Thus, in discovering the mysteries of the oak tree, I was brought to an awareness that this number, 108, is the number that quite literally brings us from the shadow and into the light.

What I mean to impart through this lengthy digression, is that these numbers are hugely significant in practical terms to our lives and how we utilize them to open ourselves to spiritual awakening. They are not just mathematical quantities that happen to fit intriguing formulae, they are the language of universal consciousness, and we can speak that language; we can use it to bring light, life, love and joy into our experience. We can consciously weave these numbers into our lives to draw into our existence, enlightening our awareness with them.

So to return, 7 x 7 is a highly potent number representing our journey through the shadow into the light, a journey we share with our sun, that great cosmic star which has been so deeply responsible for our creation. Solomon did not just receive the ring accidentally, he had journeyed to the place where he was worthy of it. He depicts, once again, the solar hero who has passed through the underworld of darkness and opened the gates therein, and having done so, he is able to understand the shadow of his own soul and of all soul and through his understanding comes compassion, and one imagines, though it is not part of the story, resolution, re-union and integration of the fractured psyche. At that moment Ornias is seen and heard and the question he has been asking the universe for millions of years `Do you love me?’ is finally answered with the ecstatic Truth of `Yes! You are part of me, we are bound together in the delicate embrace of Pure Love, we are One again.’

And in the light of this transcendent moment, Ornias’ dark and lonely path has become part of the mythic journey to the light.

In the end, nothing that ever caused pain will exist.

No one will begrudge me

The Absolute Innocence of all within my creation

Takes a while to understand’

Catherine of Siena

Jonathan

I give you here one of the old tales from the middle east, it is drawn from the timeless wisdom of our mythic tradition and perhaps encourages within us an understanding of what we do to ourselves when we abandon some intrinsic part of us.

Jonathan

The Seal of Solomon

At the time Solomon began building his temple he was approached by his Grand Vizier Assaf who complained that someone was stealing precious jewels from the courtiers. Even the royal treasury was not immune. Assaf was renowned for his wisdom and realized that this was no ordinary thief – `Some evil spirit causes this mischief’, he counseled.

So Solomon prayed fervently to God to deliver up the wicked spirit into his hands, a prayer that was answered when the Archangel Michael appeared and placed in his hand a small golden ring, inset with a seal of engraved stone. Michael bade him wear the ring `and all the demons of the earth thou wilt command.’

Armed with the ring, Solomon proceeded to the court with his courtiers gathered around and commanded the guilty spirit to come before him. A roaring column of flame instantly appeared, and then disappeared as quickly as it had come.

Whether the flame itself took shape or simply preceded him, none could tell, but where the flame had been, a demon stood, caught in his mischief, for he still clutched in his hands many jewels just stolen from the royal vaults. So great was his surprise he dropped the jewels which scattered like pebbles upon the marble floor, and his red eyes darted back and forth with wide wonder that some existed amongst mortal men that could overcome his will.

Twice the height of the king, this creature was of so dark and menacing a countenance that all (even Assaf himself) drew back in horror. Only Solomon stood firm and a light shone before him. Then the demon saw the face of the king and beheld the seal on the ring. His cruel, lidless eyes opened wide and he let out a woeful cry that shook the very stones of the building to its core. Oxen died of terror in the fields at the sound of this cry, and birds fell from the sky, for it was like the cry of a soul newly plunged into the flames of hell.

But the demon was helpless and fell to his knees prostrated before the king.

`Mercy Master’ cried the demon

`Name thyself demon’ commanded the kind.

`I am called Ornias’ he replied

`Why hast thou done such mischief to my household, speak truly!’

`Hunger, Lord of the World, hunger insatiable’ and he revealed himself as a vampire spirit who, with fangs harder than diamonds pierces the gems of the earth to drink their light.

Then Assaf asked `Why dost thou drink the light of earthly jewels, it is a thing unheard of among the wise?’        But the jinni was silent.

`Speak the answer’ said the king `I command it’

`Thou knowest my answer King of Wisdom’ said the demon.

Then Solomon looked into his heart for the 49 gates of wisdom were open to him, and he discerned there the answer, and it amazed him so that he regarded the creature with deep understanding and pity.

Know then the sorrow of the demon. For the gems of the earth were born at the dawn of the world, created by the death of ancient forests buried beneath mountains. It was a time of upheaval when both Jinn and Angel were cast out and the world was broken. The light of the sun was still in the green life of those forests as they slowly crystallized over the long years into the light that sparkles from the cut and polished jewels.

So Ornias, the demon, denied the light of heaven, drinks the light of the first morning, feeding his sorrow and his loss.