I See Peace
I look into the immediate future and see peace among all people. No more Trumps, Putin’s or Netanyahus. No more of their misguided following, whatever form that might take. No more systemic neoliberal or ideological control of economic and political activity.
I see people care for each other, no matter where they are from, no matter how different they seem. I see people complement each other‘s strengths and minimise human weaknesses. I see us reach as far as we can see with our combined knowledge, experience and goodness towards finding the solutions that make us, all life and our planet live in harmony. I see old notions of violence, greed and threatening behaviour and their counterparts of unquestioning submissiveness and admiration of authority being despised and exposed for the cruelty and weakness they represent.
I see emotional forgiveness become the practice esteemed as the highest form of civilisation, untainted by false religion. I see people who are free to live by their own most cherished values without judgment from others and I see us all master the art of debating these values free from notions of interference, authority and control.
I see us reconsider our needs honestly and humbly and share fairly our available resources, confronting realities about the sustainability of our activities.
I see us focus on finding equitable and effective ways of choosing a deep matrix of leaders and decision makers, using diverse talent and resource wisely and crucially avoiding that creeping sense of entitlement and privilege that develops in place of the gratification of being of service to others.
I see all those that seek conflict and have the instinctive desire to abuse and degrade others go live exclusively in likeminded company and not bother peacefully minded folk in their chosen lifestyle. A mindset of exploitation usurps higher notions of generosity, kindness and openness and needs to be constantly exposed to the light lest we forget how it degrades us.
The world we live in:
My nice accountant tells me I am in deficit on my annual tax return because I have sold my herd of Highland cattle below « stock value ». In the real world, the value of things is determined by what people are willing to pay in the given circumstances, not by a book price. I sold my entire herd as a family (a « going concern ») not one by one with grandmothers and great grandmothers, who have borne generations of offspring for 15 years, many still part of the same herd with their role to play. I sold them to the only bidder that could be persuaded to take them all, knowing they would go to a good home, staying in the same region, making the buyer pay for the best quality cattle transport available for their welfare. There was goodwill on all sides.
But what would accountants and a financial system know about the price of a good conscience ?
State of Grace
In an interview Leonard Cohen said that when he wakes up in the morning the only thing he is really concerned to establish before he gets out of bed is whether he is in a “state of grace”. He is asked to describe what he means by that. He says it is “the kind of balance with which you ride the chaos all around you”. It is “not a question of resolving the chaos because there is something arrogant and war like about putting the world in order”.
I know just what he means. Like him, I ask myself all the time, every day now “is it there?” and then I instantly know whether I am or not. If the answer is “no”, I ask myself « why? ». More often than not it is just an encounter that hasn’t been quite right, or a niggly little problem I need to solve. I don’t need to go back to bed for that. Awareness puts me on the mend.
But this state of grace doesn’t just inhabit people, it inhabits animals, plants, objects, things we do, things we say, things we create. Projects. Sometimes it is there, sometimes it is absent. It accompanies authenticity, attention, creativity, skill…it avoids stress, repetition, routine, shallowness, commercialism.
The recent L. Cohen docudrama “So Long, Marianne” was entertaining, even compelling but inherently lacked this grace. This, despite the meticulously researched and graphically replayed storyline, the attractiveness of the actors, the authentic locations (Hydra and the Chelsea Hotel), the multi national interest and collaboration of the Canadian/Norwegian/Greek production team. Had the subject not been Leonard Cohen, their effort might have passed muster.
I felt compelled time and again, to dip into real Cohen coverage to remind myself quite how absent this fundamental element of grace was in the production. Cohen himself is gritty, raw, intense. He has edge. He has monumental presence. He makes you hang on to his next words as he utters them. His interactions with others are electric and at the same time painfully awkward. He is unashamedly human.
The contrast with the actor could not be starker. Already, the actor’s flashing white teeth stood in the way of identifying with Cohen. He mastered the sombre meaningful looks and gestures, the walk, the sullenness but grace failed him. Nor did it inhabit the Ihlen actress who let the project down with her all too contemporary speech and body language. There was no 1960ies feel despite the fleet of classic cars and gadgets, just gloss.
Perhaps this is the greatest sign of our decline, that we are in an age where the absence of grace is no longer missed or even noticed.
Looking through a Glass darkly…
Nirmala’s extraordinary birthday present: Zach Bush talking about universal patterns, energy flows, birth, death and “evolution” …
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eiJKboGH-6k
Some of the gems he touches on:
“We cannot think our way into understanding the universe, but we can feel our way there.”
We are made of nothing but energy (light).
The Unique aspects of our biology are created by its entanglement with our individual souls at a subatomic level. Identity is not in the genes but in the energy field.
Our Life is an opportunity to experience creation through separation from unity.
Frequency: We are created as a keystone species, perhaps the greatest keystone species nature ever created. We have the capacity to amplify (raise the vibration of) other species because we can recognise our/their separateness by admiring/appreciating/loving the other species. We have to recognise our separateness to recognise the beauty in other species .us seeing and recognising nature’s beauty in a new and different way makes nature more vigorous and more beautiful. This strength is also our very weakness is the fear and shame resulting from our separateness and the low vibrations that produces.
While in this living experience we cannot grasp truth except by “looking through a glass darkly” (Bible quote)
Only our connectedness with nature permits us to Devine the truth. Disconnection, science, modern ways of living are distractions. Returning to stillness in our lives reopens the channels through which energy can flow correctly.
Death is our willed choice (return to unity)
Our souls are permanently distinctive expressions of the “whole” (individual sovereignty of the soul as a fractal of the divine)
Death and extinction are an evolutionary step toward the next more complex phase of “evolution”
Parallell paths of extinction and ascension
There is a speeding up of the “metabolic system” constituted by the permanent cycle of life and death and re entering of souls, which is caused by the excessive trauma experienced over the last 100 years and recorded in the water in our cells.
Our Disconnection from nature is a blockage of correct energy flows but is part of a complex path of experiencing. This particular “detour” could lead to our extinction but will create an opportunity for the next evolutionary stepping stone.
“We have a learned capacity to forget everything. We have designed an education system to train children out of their knowingness because there is no control over sovereign beings that know everything”.
We are dimming the lights on humanity and its metabolic capacity, we are diminishing the life force of the planet.
We have entangled our economies in abstract value systems, we are on an extinction path.
“Awakening”?
Big changes of social consciousness in the new generation: Losing the framework of the egoic mind caused anxiety, fears and other mental health problems. Yet many souls of the new generation now know exactly who and what they are without questioning what they should be. Stop looking outside yourself! No more tribes to fit into….
My impressions:
It is a stab at a metaphysical blueprint that seems coherent and as close to a true description of the universe as any people have attempted over time. However, as with any other attempt to describe these universal patterns precisely in human language, there are elements in the afterthought that feel stale and manmade, gratuitously added to, insufficiently poetic, finally depressing rather than uplifting.
His is the ex scientist’s language. Lorraine’s version is coloured by her own unique perspective of things. We all see through our own glass darkly and describe what we see with our own “Wortschatz”. (What a beautiful notion of a personal treasure trove of words!) which is imbibed with our soul’s unique signature, our DNA and our life experience. Mathematical formulae are but another one of these languages for expressing what we see. Communication is imperfect as a recipe for delivering an unaltered message from A to B. Communication is perfection provided we factor in that the message will alter between the sender and the recipient. What we mean and what they hear are always different but this is where creativity (dynamic quality) is built into the transmission. It is what I make of Zach Bush’s message, how it seeds in my perception, that carries the value. He would say it is the energy in his words that changes between him sending and me receiving.
The vibrations of his words and meaning change as they land and work away in side me.
The perception that a large number of souls are lost and irretrievably disconnected while I (we) see the light, feels right and wrong at the same time. There is that battle between good and evil again. The relationship between them remains mysterious. I sense one cannot exist without the other. The idea of an imminent awakening suggests the opposite: a resolution. Waiting for a big bang when the lights go out and then come on again for just a few enlightened souls feels like the usual biblical bullshit. And yet…
Another impactful comment of his lingers, roughly about biology giving up its life voluntarily for the sake of raising the vibrations of others, such as a gazelle for a lion. It made me think of Paul and this curious idea in my head that resurfaces from time to time, that he was the sacrifice this land required to be « tamed » or freed from « bad spirits ». Kris used to refer to it as « something nasty lurking » in the bushes beyond. I used to feel it as an oppressive veil hanging over the place. It started to lift the year before Paul died but it was a progressive change that occurred around Paul’s death and resulted in the farm expressing its very own beauty from having been rather unattractive and dull.
Pas faire mal
…and again I’ve been through a prolonged period of self questioning, what to do with my 57 year old life, with my emptied farm, with this world on the point of self implosion. Lots of pointers towards…doing as little as possible! Could it be said that this is my form of protest ? I don’t know.
Despite brief flirtations with more active projects, my reasoning, again and again, is that the problem with humanity is it is doing too much. As a contrarian it makes me want to compensate in the opposite direction. I know I can’t ever make up for this manic overdoing and consuming because there is nowhere to go beyond the point of stopping dead. My inactivity or low-harm inspired sloth only has symbolic value. I will need to think about how this symbolic effect might be enhanced in some way so as to become contagious.
Soon we might all have to switch to survival mode anyway.
The most recent illustration of world crazy is an article about the modern dromedary trade and races in North African Arab cultures. LMD tells of the enormous local attraction, money power dynamics and curious modernist twist where robots ride the camel races by remote control (instead of children traditionally). I can’t imagine the dromedaries appreciate being hurried to extreme speeds in high temperatures but as usual no one asks their opinion. Group dynamics everywhere, in today’s “collective mentality”, are at least as abusive as our former incarnations.
All the while our planet earth and her universal forces are doing a far better job at active protest than I ever could. Climate change rampant, volcanic activity up, mega earthquakes and tsunamis calling in our debt.
Still we are too mesmerised by our own little squabbles to pay attention and reform as we should. The brink is approaching fast.
The Holy SEE
https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/encyclicals/documents/20260515-magnifica-humanitas.html
I find every bit of Pope Leo xIII encyclical “Rerum N ovarum” on capital and labor, specifically an overdue response to artificial intelligence and tech giant’s grab for control urgently and inspiring. Having had most of these thoughts myself but being unable to express them as eloquently to a large audience , i feel immense relief and gratitude that Pope Leo has grabbed the baton on behalf of the Catholic Church and other conscientious peoples expressing my sentiments entirely.