incoming energy

Cosmic forces at play bring in new energies, apparently ... heralding a 26,000 year era of the divine feminine ... such timescales put our electoral cycles into perspective .... and Theresa May is in no danger of being confused with the goddesses bringing in the light ...

Friday's goddess was great value .... with three names, all held lightly ... a local woman who took up healing through sound and incorporates Kundalini Yoga into that now ... maybe a player in the Stanhope Retreat Centre, let's see .... the 17th century cellars should provide a wonderful setting for the gongs .... and chanting ... later on Friday a chance encounter with a long-lost goddess from the first week of APtB in Stanhope ...

The summer temperatures zoom up ten degrees, whether from cosmic forces or just normal climatic variations, and raise the expectations of wage slaves as the public holiday weekend approaches ... normal service resumes later on Saturday, with thunderstorms and falling temperatures ... a good day for a long walk over the fell on disused railway paths, 12 miles, for bread at the farm shop, another 3 miles to a bus for Durham ... which is busy with a cycle event and an outdoor market .. lots of folks enjoying the ambience in sunshine and showers ... later information reveals a fear inducing headline suggesting Durham city centre in lockdown as armed police investigate suspicious vehicle ... which turned out to belong to a very embarrassed dodgy parker ... highlighting the disparity between media obsession with propagating fear and the normal reality ...

Sunday is another sunshine and showers day ... perfect for a short ride up the Dale on the community bus, and a long stroll back down, delivering the programmes for June's Wheels to Meals and chatting to customers along the way ... meanwhile, it's the annual tractor run, when farmers get to meet other farmers, share tractor related tales and drive around the dale in convoys ... challenging the patience of the car borne and the born again bikers, much in evidence, visually and aurally as they open the throttles to add their own special sound effects to the peace and tranquillity ... bikers in the old days had their own goddesses riding pillion in mini-skirts .... Bank Holiday weekends well known for pre-arranged skirmishes with the scootering Mods ... these days it's mostly solo middle aged blokes comparing equipment and risking their lives on the narrow dales roads ... no casualties reported so far, though sadly a young farmer died when his tractor left the road and rolled ....

Monday, the extra day of freedom, reverts to grey and drizzly for damp campers to pack up and join the traffic jams, ready for a return to slavery ...  how will this be re-imagined as the old world decays and new forms arise ... feeding our hearts instead of nurturing fear, want, insecurity, greed?

And, as patriarchy recedes and the divine feminine arrives, what role is there for the blokes, so used to playing the alpha? Well, if alpha activity has brought us war, competition, warped religions and all that, we will have to adjust to a world of kindness, compassion, sharing .... ironically currently led by an old bloke ... the Dalai Lama ... perhaps proving that seeking enlightenment will show us all the new forms needed, based on the ancient wisdom traditions ... though maybe without the need for hierarchical structures and power games ...

horror

After the last post on the political panto, the polarisation is ramped up exponentially with the slaughter of children outside a pop concert in Manchester ... the genre moving from farce to horror and whilst it may still be told as a story, an ancient and ongoing one, the awful reality for suffering families, friends and all those drawn into opinions on the carnage is tangible ....

Mass media has been avoided, though one assumes wall to wall commentary to heighten the fear factor ... aided by the government deployment of troops on the streets .... in social media, Islamophobes notwithstanding, the horror is so extreme that most folks appear to be pleading for peace rather than revenge ... though a UKIP spokesperson  apparently demanded the return of capital punishment for suicide bombers .... the leader of this not so smart wing of the Tory party has the name of Nuttall .... an earlier chief landed a foreign surname as unintended irony ... along with an echo of "a confused mixture" if you like the clues ... current Strong and Stable Prime Minister got a provisional name inferring she was not so sure ... and the current President of the USA shares his first name with a cartoon duck, the second with a slang word for fart .... his role maybe to hold a mirror up to the electorate of this once great nation and see how degenerate it has become ... similarly in the DUK our elected leaders reflect the narrow-minded, selfish country we find ourselves in ... though, as noted above, such extreme dramas may help folks to transcend the destructive cycles of violence

As for the ancient story, still hanging around in the collective consciousness(es), it is from the Crusades, with the three great Abrahamic religions, with their one powerful creator God, vying for control of the energetic centre around Jerusalem .... given contemporary expression in Oil ... strange alliances form around ancient myths and following threads of cause and effect takes forever ... however the deranged suicide bomber of Manchester this week was descended from a Libyan family and Libya was reduced to ruin and led to fundamental Islam by military intervention from NATO in 2011 .... 100 years on from the Italian occupation of its territory, then part of the Ottoman Empire ...

Back in Stanhope, summer arrives, along with the goddesses ... one for a lovely lunch and walk on Sunday, another for lunch on Tuesday, more on the Wheels to Meals trip yesterday, another today for lunch and wander ... tomorrow a new friend, found on FB, living locally, working with resonance for healing and enlightenment ... more later on her ...

The balance between solitude and no-self, and recreating roles in this human incarnation, by definition through relationship, is a delicate task ... not least since the restless seeker is off again in a few weeks, with no place or time of return ... and the Retreat House in Stanhope still calls, quietly, insistently ...

pass the chalice

Election fever mounts in the easily distracted DUK, as mass, mostly mogul-owned, media and more distributed social media develop the plots and sub-plots of the unfolding drama ...

Almost all seem very keen to ensure we register to vote - and today is the deadline. Like any public entertainment, it only works if we turn up ... young people are often castigated for declining the opportunity ... the sacrifices of suffragettes wheeled out as guilt fodder ... on one level the story never held water .. Lenin suggested that: The British bourgeoisie lets go of Power with one hand, only to catch it with the other ...  maybe he had a point and maybe the parliamentary democracy which has served capitalism so well is finally unravelling ...its credibility exposed by apathy ... not to mention corruption .... the emergence of a professional political class, schooled in PPE, experiencing little of life outside politics ... some say: Anyone wanting to be a paid politician should not be one ...

Social media, being to a large extent composed of commentators of our choosing may give an even more distorted view than the Newspapers - subject to the cruel jibe that: Freedom of the Press is for those that own one ... and it is true that the majority of incoming FB opinion on my feed is in favour of the new messiah, whose initials are, coincidentally, the same as the other one who challenged injustice and was crucified ... the metaphorical fate awaiting Jeremy if the groundswell of popular opinion, aided by seeming suicidal statements by the incumbent, translates into an unlikely win ... and the transfer of the poison chalice from May, who has probably realised the scale of the coming chaos, what with untangling the DUK from the EU and the world financial system teetering on the brink ...

Engaging with FB friends (some of whom are real friends too) is generally declined ... the polarisation this time is rather extreme and passions are running high ... anyway, maybe they are right and we have a genuine chance of bringing peace and prosperity with the amiable, if rather uncharismatic, Corbyn ... although it seems unlikely from this perspective ... which has changed from the Leninist view of youth to a transcendent one of approaching senility and decrepitude ... imagining that the caterpillar can be revived and reinvented as a less rapacious creature is missing the point that the butterfly now gestating is of a different order altogether ...

Intriguingly, some of the FB friends posting inspirationally on the Beautiful New World, nevertheless are drawn into the old stories again, as the scripts ramp up the "you couldn't make it up" factor ... and whether it is the passing of the poison chalice and subsequent crucifixion or ignominious defeat (and subsequent crucifixion) with a triumphant Tory empowered to rampage across the realm .... who knows?

This commentator is not convinced that either option represents the transformational changes the times demand ...

shelter, house, home ...

This question of the basic need of humans (and other animals) for shelter has been pondered before in these ramblings and wandering the pilgrim trails has enabled experiential examination of the concept ... in the context of another concept; What is Enough?

"Enough is enough" is commonly spoken, along with "Enough is as good as a feast" ... but what does it really mean?

Well, the feast story is for another post ... this one is about shelter and how human beings in 2017 England (and other similar countries and cultures) have moved so far from simple shelter, which is to say dry, warm, safe ... plus the taken for granted wonders of clean water from the tap, foul water piped away, electricity at the flick of a switch, gas on tap (or in bottles) ...

Of course the needs of humans change from time to time ... as babies and children we need a nest, like the birds, with some assistance to flourish from parents or surrogate parents ... as fledglings we may fly the nest ... perhaps human parents might learn from the birds and shove us out at the appropriate time ... as young adults all sorts of rudimentary shelter may suffice .... tents, hostels and depending on the weather, the open air ... then, with children of our own, if we have the luck of that, a new nest is needed to nurture them ... and when they have flown, a return to simplicity is possible .... though more likely an attachment to comfort has shifted our level of need/want ... towards the end, the need for shelter includes, perhaps, care or nursing ... this evolved from a family responsibility to a government one ... believe it or not, in contemporary DUK, an elder coming to the attention of agencies of the state, typically going to hospital and assessed as incapable of safely living at home, is offered options of residential or nursing "homes" ... institutions once run by local authorities as well as charities and private business, have mostly taken over the family role ... for obvious reasons, such as geographical dispersal, busy adult children and maybe a shift in personal and family attitudes as a result of the otherwise laudable Welfare State ... which, having performed heroically in health and social care since its inception over 50 years ago, has degenerated as all things tend to do ... having struggled to keep up with the demographics of the baby boom, rising expectations, technical possibilities (new hips, knees etc) .... all of which has diverted us from the shelter theme, since, of course, everything is interconnected and a whole systems approach would integrate housing, health, social care and everything else ... hard to do in our reductionist reality!

Housing in DUK has moved a long way from its initial role as shelter, of course ... on the idyllic terrace in Stanhope only one is owner occupied .... that's nonagenarian Tommy at no.6 ... no.7, sometime base for A Place to Be and shelter for the blogger, is for sale, as Sunderland based owners seek to decrease their debts to the Bank; nos.5, 2 and one are owned by the landlady who very occasionally stays at the otherwise empty detached house nearby, and rents them out; no.3, first abode and vacated after financial shortfall in 2006, now second home to Hartlepool based family; no.4, current dwelling, owned by friends pondering relocation to Spain or Portugal and currently renting in Valencia ... houses as business, separated from primary purpose and great driver of Great Crash of 2008 .... new models required .... co-housing ....

Bringing all this conceptual rambling to the experience of the writer: this life, having begun in a cottage hospital (that's a much loved kind of local hospital, where the high tech and very clever consultants, typical of the huge illness factories favoured by privateers are less important than compassion ...) continued in a tied cottage on the country estate where Dad worked as a carpenter, earning just enough to feed four children without Mum going out to work (as if she didn't have enough to do) ... aged 5 we moved to a smallholding, financed by gifts and loans from family and a mortgage from the previous owner (if memory is correct) ... and Dad's workload increased to setting up his own business as a builder and looking after cows, pigs, chicken and a large vegetable garden ... no wonder he was occasionally irascible, as well as embracing the ethic of hard work as a good thing in itself ... a concept absent from this writer who has somehow survived by doing just enough to earn a crust, whilst opening space and time for relaxation .... flying from the nest aged 17, the next shelter was a staff hotel room in Aberfeldy, where food was also provided in return for serving the guests, who were not so many in the winter period ... then, before the work got busy, taking off on a road trip round Spain, Morocco, France and Germany ... sleeping in small hotels, hostels and sometimes alfresco ... before other live-in jobs in Andorra and London ... then student accommodation ... hostels and digs .... shared flats, squats, co-habitation with various lovers, house co-ownership (an illusion, since the "co" included the Bank, who really owned it and, as later optimistic mortgage slaves discovered, is quick to evict if payments slacken off .... ) let go with little sense of attachment (twice) ... renting small cottages .... house-sitting a grand and crumbling villa in Spain ...

Which is to say: Not really convinced of any model with a sense of permanence and, anticipating the resources to secure some shelter, thanks to the childhood smallholding finally harvesting houses, some options .... hence the Retreat House, as a service to others and maybe offering a small room for the writer/walker/social-entrepreneur/other role yet to be revealed ... let's see!

Meanwhile, having found shelter at three of the seven cottages on Wear Terrace, by the river in Stanhope (which feels more like home than anywhere else at present), the third bid for the free and homeless life starts on the 10th June, with a trip to Totnes and some market research, a month in Torreguadiaro helping Susie with her six dogs, as she helps her friend with the 80 in the rescue centre at Ronda .... back to Brockwood in July for a working week ... then ... who knows? Perhaps a walk ... as the Retreat House in Stanhope bears fruit in Autumn .... maybe ... if "Home is where the Heart is", Stanhope has as much chance as anywhere ....

Positive thinking, negative thinking ...

Positive psychology has had a good run lately and is certainly worth considering .... regular reader and occasional commentator, James of Scotland, is a fan and may be tempted to add to this post ...

Clearly, persistent positive thoughts produce a happier person/reality than persistent negative ones ... and beware also of over optimism, which has a wonderful word of its own: Panglossian ... the link explains more ... Dr Pangloss in Voltaire's version represents extreme optimism in the face of misery and suffering .... some suggest that a more balanced view may be more realistic .... depending to what degree we accept that each of us creates our own reality with our thoughts ... and there is a trap in accepting this view, then finding it is not operating as expected .... commonly experienced, for example, by folks with life threatening conditions, reading that we may think ourselves well and suffering even more when it does not turn out so ... who knows what's going on ... past life karma? the residual tiny bit of doubt? Deepak Chopra tells a tale of a patient diagnosed with gall stones .... at surgery, no stones were found, but secondary cancer and a prognosis of weeks of life left ... relatives proposed leaving the patient ignorant of the discovery, to die in peace .... after a year the patient reappeared, perfectly well, and announcing she had previously worried that she had .... cancer ... hmmm ...

As one who tends towards the Panglossian approach and finding a benign universe, the question of negation proved another interesting aspect of the weekend at Brockwood. Although negation is not to be confused with negative thinking ... rather it is suggesting that thoughts and ideas are constructed or corrupted or affected by our conditioning, which is previous thoughts, whether ours or from the culture or collective consciousness.... the technique of negation looks at each question, not so much to find an answer, but to open better questions, by a process of stripping away what, upon close examination, turns out to be false ... bearing in mind that what is true in one domain, is not so in another ... for example, common sense perception may produce a consensus reality that an object we call "table" is solid, while under much closer examination, at sub-atomic level, it is mostly empty space ... which doesn't stop it hurting if we bash our head on it ... so, by this process, in dialogue, we might expose what was previously held true, leaving a new reality .... itself subject to similar scrutiny ... maybe coming to the void, the ground of being, or love, where all is energy vibrating, awaiting our thoughts for creating something out of nothing ... preferably without naming or describing that which is beyond thought ...

Anyway, all is well in this positive view of the world, Panglossian or not ....

Friends of Brockwood ...

Interesting to attend the Krishnamurti Centre for a Friends weekend ... some structure, dialogues and group viewings of talks by K ... even more interesting to spend time there without any structure and see who turns up ... Rod, from Kent, who turned up on a previous visit, with his dear wife Anne, now passed on, spoke for many when he said how hard he finds it to have deep conversations where he lives ... of course he could put a sign on his door "Knock here for deep conversations", and indeed there were regular seekers after deep conversations turning up at the cottage in Stanhope, though mostly only when an invitation had been issued .... it seems one of the roles of the Retreat House on Front Street is to have an open door for the purpose ... lets see ...

Interesting also to observe, even in the most intense dialogues, a tendency for those steeped in K's teachings, to back up their words by referring to K ....whose main teaching was not to refer to any guru, but to discover the Truth for oneself ... hmmm .... a paradox since the teachings, whether K, Buddha, Nisargatta, Jeff Foster, Alan Watts or whoever are helpful and universal ... though only transformative when embodied, experiential ...

Interesting folks for chats, some of whom envy the home-free life, two others practising it ... and all of the Friends, and other guests without that formal distinction, indeed seeking and creating their paths ... two only obliquely referring to K, being involved in a group of "ponderers" studying Alice Bailey, an associate of the Theosophists, with whom K began his "career", having been hailed as the long awaited World Teacher and showing remarkable strength of character to walk away from all the status and wealth showered upon him, declaring "Truth is a Pathless Land" and "Leaders destroy followers, followers destroy leaders" .... which, of course, only made him even more popular and persuasive, having embodied his own message ...

The Grove is delightful in May ... a riot of colour, heady fragrance and the huge redwood trees, strong and stable as always ... the photo illustrates the visual aspect, though unfortunately cannot capture the olfactory ...perhaps someone is working on this one somewhere?

The three bus, one train, one ten minute walk journey, covering quite a distance across England, is seamless both ways and rewarded with interesting companions in both directions, the last of whom, a friend from the Dale, returning from a Mindfulness Taster session in Crook, receives Freedom from the Known, one of the three K books added to the third version of the Library ... which has some interesting material for anyone passing the little cottage by the river in Stanhope, current base for this wandering blogger ...

Brockwood Park ...

May is a fine time to visit Brockwood ... the Grove in full flower, nearby woods carpeted with bluebells ... monoculture crops on chalk down land fields around offering a rather sinister contrast ... looking pretty but weed free fields infer chemical assistance ...

Thursday's trip was fun ... early bus from Stanhope, onward from Crook by bus to Durham ... 40 minutes to spare and a visit to Ciao Ciao to say hello to Andreas, envious of the retreat and clear in his intention to change direction after his forthcoming break in Crete ...

The reserved seat on the train produced three different victims for my attention ... the first declined the invitation and spent the time to York reading the Daily Mail ... no reflection on readers of that particular propaganda, my mum was a regular reader and she was very compassionate, whilst an old friend, Dave, was a red, yet read it every day ...

Pauline, from York to Derby, was happy to talk and listen, after adjusting her expectations about random train companions ... and seemed to enjoy the experience ... asked how she might describe the philosophy to her husband, which was not easy, since there is not a convenient label for it ... indeed any label is resisted as counter productive ...

Sapphire, from Derby to Winchester was on her way to a girl's weekend with a best friend found on the internet ... a young mother having a break from the attentions of two small children and starting early with the three for a tenner offer on red wine ... though she only drank one small bottle along the way ...

And so to Winchester. .. ten minutes to wait for the double decker bus along improbably narrow lanes past very affluent properties sporting two varieties of political posters ... big blue ones, announcing "We have lots of money and we are keeping it", and smaller orange ones suggesting " We have lots of money and we feel a bit guilty about it" ... reds, greens and purples noticeably absent ... looks like there is an election coming up ...

Brockwood feels like home again ... soon settled into the simple room looking out on the trees ... a walk before supper and conversation with Jeanne and Laurent from Paris, relieved that Macron has seen off Le Pen in the French pantomime ... a subsequent chat with other French folks suggested that the lesser of two evils was not really a choice ...

Friday free until tea, when other folks gather for the Friends of Brockwood ... meaning a long morning wander with Rob from Brighton, formerly from Australia and a student of K for 30 years ... a late afternoon walk with Keith, a gardener at Kensington Palace, and Peter, retired physics teacher, determined to find out what's going on in the quantum world before he dies ...

The Friends gather for introductions, then a video of a dialogue between K and New York psychiatrist David Shainberg ...

hierarchies and holarchies

In the olde worlde story hierarchy described the structure of society ... replacing the prelapsarian rural idyll ... and ripe for its own replacing with holarchy ... most likely not the ultimate structure, but a necessary reshaping for current times ...

In this version of the story, hierarchy stemmed from the separation of homo-sapiens from Nature, the sense of separate selves ... the biblical Fall from Grace produced an all powerful God, to represent the transcendent element of humans, then the smarter types enlisted the stronger types to order the rest of us into cataegories, to organise society for their own benefit. The Divine Right to Rule of Kings, Queens and Popes follows from this arrangement, which has continued with different names for the Players ... Kings - Subjects, Landowners - Serfs, Capitalists - Proletarians ... and parallel hierarchies of Power, often slightly out of synch with the more transparent, much lauded illusion of pseudo-democracy ... this itself losing its power as voting numbers decline over time ... in many local elections in the DUK turnout is less than a third of eligible voters ... maybe the two thirds declining the democratic offer should prevail and have no representative ... perhaps a rebate on the cost saved ... anyway, the reality of Power beyond the periodic sham electoral process is becoming increasingly clear ... to engage with it is to validate it ... the anarchists say: Don't vote, it only encourages them! Whoever "they" are ... not "us" perhaps ... at least on this level of the game ...

The holarchy is a better description of hierarchy in the New Earth Story ... nestled holons, where each part contains the whole ... in social and political terms this removes the inherent inequality of existing hierarchies and reflects the peer to peer networks appearing as the possibilities of interactive internet make vertical models redundant ... and nation states or supra-nation states ... mirroring the illuminati vision of a New World Order ... similar seeming, but quite the opposite ... the location of Power the key indicator ...

So, an organic system, from the ground up and out ... new models trialled, connecting with each other ... attention fully focused on what we dream of ... the desperate power games held in broader awareness, but not energised by our attention ... all of it provisional, work in progress ... including this attempt to describe what may be going on ... not so much a bigger brain that's required, just collaboration from other hearts and minds on the same frequency ... maybe tomorrow and the weekend at Brockwood Park!

self: esteem, compassion ...

Astute readers may have noted a paradox in posts talking about self and no-self ... and the question is worth examining ... the concept of no-self holds true, yet a coherent identity of self, with high self-esteem is seen as an indicator of psychological health ... the paradox is transcended once a strong and stable (sic) self can hold itself lightly enough to enjoy the roles available in the 3D world, whilst embracing the deeper reality and liberation of no-self ... all the world being a stage ...

The theme arises from recent reading of the Dalai Lama's book proposing compassion as a unitive principle of all major religions, though the rather fundamental difference of a creator God does throw up some questions, not to mention the doctrinal differences within as well as between different faiths ... and the trend in the more sophisticated cultures is for a rejection of religion of any kind ... which does not deny the possibility of compassion of course ... meanwhile, the Dalai Lama's principal translator, Thupten Jinpa, turns out to be an excellent interpreter of Tibetan Buddhist wisdom for the western world in his own right, with A Fearless Heart ... proposing the conscious cultivation of compassion as therapy for individuals and from there to society ... self- compassion being an important part of the process, noting the condition of pathological altruism, which is the helper neglecting themselves and using the outward focus on other people's problems to resist addressing their own .... all stuff to sort before approaching the question of the actual existence of a separate self ...

So what's the point of all this? Well, a Retreat House in Stanhope wants to address current questions in a contemporary way ... accessible to folks of any faith tradition and none ... the request being open hearts and open minds ... spiritual inquiry with surplus baggage stripped away through examining our own conditioning and employing tried and tested techniques to create a version of our self which is congruent ... recognising that we are here in this human incarnation with a gift to share ... and skilfully weaving our gift with the complementary gifts of others ...

Sounds like the makings of a 6 day residential course on the Art of Living !?

Further weaving continues back in our mainstream communities, which may also be chosen ... service being a key component of compassion practice.

The joyful photo below shows Gillian with two elders on yesterday's trip to the coast ... much appreciated all round, since Stanhope is up in the hills and a long way from the sea  ...