NOTE FROM JEFF: This posting consists of an outline and notes for my "Up Over 'n Down Under' radio interview last week.
http://www.newrevradio.com/Chat_Room.html
"We travel together, passengers on a little spaceship, dependent upon its vulnerable reserves of air and soil, all committed for our safety to its security and peace; preserved from annihilation only by the care, the work, and, I will say, the love we give our fragile craft. We cannot maintain it half fortunate, half miserable, half confident, half despairing, half slave to the ancient enemies of man, half free in a liberation of resources undreamed of until this day. No craft, no crew can travel safely with such vast contradictions. On their resolution depends the survival of us all."
ADLAI STEVENSON, 1964
“We are blinded by the delusions that rise from our hollow and rotting social order. It is vain pomposity to believe that humanity can advance while the Earth and its native peoples, plants and animals are enslaved, desecrated and destroyed.”
ROBERT LAWLOR, 1992, Voices of the First Day: Awakening in the Aboriginal Dream-time
“I think our whole society tries to stabilize itself by starting out to destroy sensitivity to incoherence starting with very young children. If people could see the vast incoherence that is going on in society they would be disturbed and they would feel the need to do something. If you're not sensitive to it you don't feel disturbed and you don't feel you need to do anything.
I remember an instance, a daughter was telling her mother, ‘this school is terrible, the teacher is terrible, very inconsistent, doing all sorts of crazy things,’ and so on. Finally the mother was saying, ‘You'd better stop this…in this house the teacher is always right.’ Now she understood that the teacher was wrong obviously, but the message was, it was no use. Even the message may have been right in some sense, but still it illustrates that the predicament is that in order to avoid this sort of trouble, starting with very young children, we are trained to become insensitive to incoherence. If there is incoherence in our own behavior, we thereby also become insensitive to it.”
DAVID BOHM, seminar on Thought and Dialogue in Ojai, November 4, 1989
TWO EXCELLENT FILMS that will help you become vegetarian!
A DELICATE BALANCE
http://adelicatebalance.com.au/#
FOOD, INC.
http://www.takepart.com/foodinc/film
RESOLVING THE PARADOX OF INCOHERENCE
WAKING UP: “Where am I?” Getting oriented/a bearing in space, time, purpose and “all my relations”
Coming to and seeing that you’re behind the wheel of a speeding vehicle that’s gone off the road, or waking to find that your bed and house are in flames, or to seeing that the ship you are on is sinking rapidly, or that the airplane you are on is in a steep nose-dive. WHAT DO YOU DO?
SLOW DOWN, GET BACK ON TRACK; GET OUT OF BED AND PUT OUT THE FIRE; BAIL OUT THE WATER AND PATCH THE LEAK; GIVE YOURSELF A QUICK FLYING LESSON AND TAKE THE HELM, PULL OUT OF THE NOSE-DIVE
KEY COMPONENTS of BEING AWAKE:
NAVIGATION: creativity/decision-making at all levels movement purpose intent learning uncharted territory self-awareness of inner processes NOT having been here before (vuja-de) [future]
PRESENCE: ‘being here now’ JANUS of now looking around to expand your horizons of identity and to recognize many fellow “I”’s and mitakuye oyasin
Walking in beauty without contradiction, living with coherence
REMEMBRANCE: wisdom/knowledge honouring ancestors, human and non-human, “we are the sum of all that has ever been.” Calling on ourselves to do our best in every way because we are here now. HAVING been here before (deja-vu) [past]
We are the axis and centre of all dimensions known to us, just as our vantage point places us at the centre of the electromagnetic spectrum, inter-galactic space, and the continuum of linear time.
We like to speak of the existence of various ‘dimensions’ but the sacredness and ‘reality’ of this world is indisputable…’as above, so below’…’as within, so without.’
Delusions about the ‘next life’ or ‘other dimensions’ have contributed significantly to our willing participation in the destruction of THIS world.
WE ARE THE SEEDS OF THE ‘NEW CREATION’ but we don’t want to be “GE” seeds by accidentally bringing along unresolved karma
To resolve the contradictions and paradoxes which are our real problems, we have to begin by taking a serious look at our own inner psychological processes. This has to be done at the level of the individual, and it has to be done ourselves; no one else can do it for you.
We have a very powerful tendency to LIVE IN THE PAST. We can’t deny the importance of who and what has come before us; if it weren’t for who and what has come before, we’d have to start out from ground zero every time someone was born. The dark side of this, however, is the imbalance or incoherence that has come into being between the rates of change of how we tend to live our lives versus the speed of technological development. The world of today is VASTLY different than the world of even 20 years ago, yet psychologically we live in the dark ages.
One of the greatest incoherencies of modern life is the discrepancy between how much our lives are affected by science and technology and the level of basic scientific knowledge the average person has. Few people can explain how or why ionising radiation is dangerous to biological life; fewer still understand how radio-frequency weapons like HAARP work, what they can do, or even believe that they exist at all.
To resolve these contradictions requires WORK. Simply acknowledging that gaps exist doesn’t help anything. “That’s a shame, isn’t it.” We have to DO SOMETHING about it. Start by resolving the contradictions within your own life. If you realize that you are woefully ignorant about ionising radiation, for example…DO SOME HOMEWORK and bring yourself up to date.
Make a habit of discerning incoherencies and paying attention to them. There’s no shortage. You might even find yourself becoming a comedian, as contradictions are often the source of humour…as well as self-destruction.
In a sense we are a society of OXYMORONS. “Environmental mining.” “Safe radiation.” The list goes on…
We also have a tremendous amount of incoherence in how we view ourselves. Many ‘Americans’ for example, believe that ‘their country’ is the global good guy and is under attack by ‘evil foreigners’ who ‘hate us for our freedom.’ As most of us know, nothing could be further from the truth.
A fine line exists between contradiction and incoherence, moving into hypocrisy, delusion and schizophrenia. It’s just a matter of the difference in ‘voltage’ of the conflicting polarities. “Environmental mining” and “safe radiation” have huge differentials…they could prove to have a lot of “shock” value.
We’ve got A LOT OF WORK TO DO before we can honestly refer to ourselves as “people of peace.” Would genuine “people of peace” insist on eating meat?
THIS is one of the most salient examples of a practice that used to make sense, maybe even for a very long time for many cultures of humanity; but in the world of today, for most people in ‘civilized’ societies, as I see it there is absolutely no need to continue to eat meat, and MANY sound reasons NOT to eat meat.
I dwell on this because it’s a prime example of what I’m talking about: how many people live in the past, refuse to change, and find ways to rationalize this behaviour. They agree that eating meat might not be good, but it’s somehow ok for THEM to keep doing it. I’ve heard this dozens of times. Even people telling us about the dangers of radiation and genetic engineering like Anthony Gucciardi admit that they still eat meat…for ‘protein.’
In this mentality, the only concern seems to be whether or not the ‘meat’ is ‘organic’, whether or not it might be contaminated with pesticides, heavy metals or growth hormones. This perspective is totally anthropocentric and still looks at the animals as ‘products’ or ‘resources’ rather than as fellow beings on this planet.
To me, the reality is very different: ALL animals are fellow beings and NO ANIMAL deserves to be raised in a concentration camp, or even in a huge green paddock, only to be mercilessly slaughtered for its meat. It’s obvious the animals don’t WANT to be killed…if they did, they wouldn’t be afraid and try to escape! Think about it…HOW ‘contradictory’ can we possibly be?
Part of it is that few people kill the animals themselves; they just buy a product from a grocery store. But surely we have the cognitive capacity to make the connection that meat comes from dead animals? In George Orwell’s book Animal Farm, the first thing the animals did when they got control of the farm was to bury all the hams that were hanging around! It was the remains of their friends. Maybe genetically-engineered ‘meat’ is the solution for people who won’t give it up…this doesn’t even require the existence of the whole animal, just some stem cells and a vat to grow it in. It was never ‘alive’ so it can’t be ‘killed’…just eaten.
What about me? Liesbet and I both became vegetarians over-night four years ago after watching a powerful documentary called A Delicate Balance. I recommend it. The producers are Al Gore fans and are somewhat misguided on the ‘global warming’ thing, for example, but the information and chain of reasoning is excellent.
According to this film, even cheese is just as bad as meat. And most cheese is made from animals who are enslaved and physiologically engineered. Still a horror story. Despite this knowledge, we still eat small amounts of cheese here and there, but not much. But we stopped eating meat over-night and not once have we even thought of eating it again, not even sea-food…another ‘incoherence’ in that many people somehow don’t think of sea-food as ‘meat.’ What else could it be?
It all gets a bit grisly. It’s like we pay way too much attention to eating and we eat way too much. A conscious effort at renavigating this process would consist of examining what ‘eating’ is all about: getting the nutrition that we need to be healthy but not at the expense of the Earth and our fellow beings.
The meat thing is a good example of a VAST REGION of incoherence in our reality. When you actually think about it, it makes NO SENSE WHATSOEVER to continue to eat meat…ecologically, bio-medically, spiritually.
I personally still consume small amounts of cheese but not much. I am aware of what it is and of what I am doing. We are moving towards eliminating all animal products from our diet; but continuing to consume animal products is part of the WASHICHU MOE that I’m still a part of. I wear leather hiking boots and eat honey. But we had no trouble whatsoever giving up meat. In the past four years, not only have we not lost weight or ‘wasted away’ as some might think, our levels of health and vitality have actually increased significantly. It’s definitely a step in the right direction.
Food and nutrition is really all about the energy of light, but that’s another topic.
I used meat as an example of a major human incoherency, an example of how a practice that perhaps used to make sense makes NO sense in the world of today. A lot of people would beg to differ, and traditionally most cultures have no problem with killing animals for food. But just because it’s been accepted as ‘normal’ for thousands of years doesn’t make it right, or right in the world of today, where we KNOW that it’s possible to have optimum health with no animal products in your diet, where we KNOW the ecological and spiritual reasons that it’s not good. The whole thing with meat could be one of the biggest incoherencies that humanity must resolve if we are to avoid total self-destruction, one of the biggest challenges to our ability to GO TO THE NEXT LEVEL AND REVISUALIZE/REPROGRAM A CENTRAL ASPECT OF OUR ‘WAY OF LIFE’ THAT HAS BECOME HIGHLY DESTRUCTIVE.
THE KARMA OF MEAT
WE HAVE TO STOP ‘BACKING OVER THE RARE SPECIES’ and HONOUR OUR EXISTENCE WITHIN THE WEB OF LIFE by STOPPING OUR HABITS OF ‘LIVING’ WHICH ARE DESTROYING OURSELVES AND THE WORLD THAT GIVES US LIFE.
Only when we’ve stopped actively destroying our own health and the life around us can we possibly embark on a spiritual path of healing and awakening.
REDUCTION IN THE AMOUNT OF THESE: consider the number of people engaging in these activities each day and estimate the total daily summation of the effects and impacts…then the total yearly summation.
REDUCING OUR ECOLOGICAL IMPACT: not too many people, it’s too many affluent people living really stupidly
BATTLING against massive industries/lobbies built on doing more and more of these
MEAT: 60+ billions animals per year
Rationalization: source of ‘protein’, as long as it’s organic maybe it used to make sense but not today…it’s not only possible to live without it, it’s even healthier…
Delusion of “seafood” as not being meat
HEALTH
* dangerous substances in/formed from cooking (animal fat, pesticides, ED’s, metals, radiation) free radicals GE animals, foods
* bio-accumulation of toxins; fear, anger, sadness hormones
READ PARAGRAPH FROM SECRET LIFE OF PLANTS ON ‘KOSHER’ MEAT
* heart disease/cardio-vascular, cancer
* obesity epidemic
atom: ion = molecule: free radical has an electrical charge = active
all molecular and chemical reactions are essentially electrical
ECOLOGICAL
* land, water, food used up to produce meat
* pollution of land and water from abbatoirs, rendering plants, hog farms, etc.
SPIRITUAL
* animals have feelings, they love their babies, they don’t WANT to be killed, the collective suffering and agony of 60+ billions animals per year, part of our family
* ASSIMILATING THE ENERGY OF KILLING
* Supporting the ‘business with disease’ medical establishment
* Number of starving people in the world vs our obsession with over-eating
* Soylent Green scenario: not impossible
* What kinds and amounts of foods do we actually need for optimum health?
Autotrophism vs. heterotrophism sunlight
ALTERNATIVES
* vegetarian/vegan plant kingdom attention to diet education
* ‘nutrient synergy’ focus on maximizing health & vitality levels
KARMA is an example of ‘ancient wisdom’ that we’ve known for a long long time. Our problem, however, is not having the wisdom, it’s actually understanding what it means and applying or using this wisdom in ways that matter. When it comes to talking about what kinds of changes would be good to make in our lives to reflect a higher consciousness, most people have many positive suggestions and recommendations; but when it comes down actually to MAKING these changes, well, it’s a little different. THIS is the root of MAJOR INCOHERENCE.
IS THERE ANY ‘ANCIENT WISDOM’ THAT CAN HELP US TO OVERCOME THIS PROBLEM…OUR REFUSAL TO USE THE BEST KNOWLEDGE WE ALREADY HAVE? HOW ABOUT ‘PRESENT WISDOM’ THAT EDUCATES US ABOUT THE REALITY OF TODAY’S WORLD…about the dangers, for example, of ionising and electromagnetic radiation, of endocrine disrupting chemicals, of genetic engineering and nano-technology.
Balancing your WASICHU MOE with your POOH-ACTIVES MOE…
None of these are the result of the planning or actions of individual people…they are processes created and maintained over time by mentalities operating on the basis of fundamental beliefs and goals.
WASICHU vs POOH-ACTIVES
These are not ‘categories’ or labels for individual people, groups or organizations, but are acronyms describing the salient characteristics and qualities of fundamental attitudes towards existing as human beings now on this planet. These are outlines of ‘mental operating environments’ or paradigms of reality that influence decision-making and action.
W White/Western
A American/Anglo/Aryan
S Saxon/Supremacist/Strategic/Selfish/Sub-human
I Invasive/Israeli/Industrial/Isolated/Investment/Insidious
C Consumer/Capitalist/Criminal/Corrupt/Corporate/Command/Control/Complex
H Hubris/Hegemony/Hadean
U Ubiquity/Under-taking
P People/Presence/Proximity/Perceptive
O Of
O One/Omniversal/Orientation
H Heart/Humility/Health/Healing
A Actualizing/Assisting/Amplifying
C Creativity/Common-sense/Coordinates/Community/Communicating
T Towards/True/Total/Timeless/Together
I Inner/Implementing/Intelligence
V Vast/Vision/Voluntary
E Energies/Everywhere/Earth
S Synergic/Systems/Sound/Solidarity/Sharing/Spaceship/Simplification
“It is madness to be part of a merciless competition, running amok straight into a fatal illusion, into the deadlock of economic growth. Our technical achievement must match our creative responsibility. We are far behind, unfortunately. We cannot think as fast as we use more and more dangerous tools. Genetic engineering violates the laws of nature in complete ignorance of the function of beauty in all manifestation of creation. This short-sighted contempt of the beauty and the inter-woven variety of creation triggers the suicide of humanity. Because the so-called unnecessary beauty is essential for the survival of this earth. Little to nothing is done to counteract the visual pollution which is the most dangerous of all pollutions because it kills the soul. As we are now reaching the limits of growth, only decentralization, reflection and slowing down in harmony with nature can save us. If you reach an abyss, only a step back can save you.”
Friedrich Hundertwasser, 1999
