Ramblings of a well intentioned fool.....

Hey folks!

So I'm thinking about some deep stuff this morning and my ramblings may be a bit disjointed, but I want to get my thoughts out there before they fade into another day of routine and prosaic activities.

Forgive me please if what I am about to say is in any way upsetting, or lacks the kind of polished cohesion you prefer from the stuff you devote your time to reading.

So here at the Leicester Peace and Love Collective we experience all kinds of conflict. Personality clashes abound in a house full of strong willed and dynamic people with busy lives and different priorities. We are, for the most part, a happy bunch of folk who have become genuine friends over the time we have spent together, but it is not always smiles and hugs and hippie ideals being realised. Often it is squabbbles over who has or has not washed the dishes, who has moved somebodies laundry, who hasn't put the hoover back in the office, who has paid what and who hasnt, whose turn it is to do this job or that chore and why hasn't it been done and oh for fucks sake why can't you just clean up your shit! We are all lovely folk who live here but we are not saints, or anything special. We are just people, and sometimes peoples needs, expectations and desires clash, and there is conflict.

How we go about resolving that conflict is the mark of how strong and cohesive we are as a community, as well as a mark of how mature and evolved we are as individuals.

Some of us are more passive than others. Some of us are more direct. Some of us are more confrontational. We can all, at times, be very judgmental of each other.

Yet the key to a successful and forward thinking community lies in the strength of it's relationships and that means our ability to appreciate each other, and respect each other.

I often feel that I get off very light and receive far more respect and appreciation that I probably deserve when I weigh up all the factors of my role and place here.

So friendship then is the key. Honest, emotionally involved, and appreciative relationships.

I posted recently (when feeling a little down with one thing and another) about the concept of tribe and within that post I made some comments about the failure of the family unit within western culture.

Please do not misunderstand me and think that I am dismissive of the importance of family. Although it is true that my own relationship with my blood family is somewhat disfunctional, yet I love them and am grateful to them for the start in life that they gave me, and I know that they also have great love for me in spite of the difficulties we have faced in communicating with, and appreciating, each other over the years.

I met this wonderful man last year in a muddy field, living in a tent, who had made the arduous journey all the way from war torn Syria. This man changed my life and shall always retain a very special place in my heart.

He asked me a question one day before I left for the UK, using the privilege of my passport and British citizenship to escape the mud drenched and fearful uncertainty his life had become. He asked me why it is in our culture that people do not look after their elders. How it is that we feel justified to abandon their care in their old age to strangers, employees of private companies or the state on minimum wage. From his perspective our attitude and relationship with the concept and reality of family was indicative of a profound moral bankruptcy within our culture, and I feel he was absolutely right to say so. His words struck deep into the core of my heart and have settled there very uncomfortably as I continued on my way in life, building community, building relationships and failing miserably to maintain any meaningful connection with the very people to whom I owe my existence.

I am working on it now, and have resolved to make far more effort in this regard, but it has given me much to think about as to why and how this decline of the significance of the family unit has developed within our culture, and if his cultural attitude to family, tribe and people is in fact more or less enlightened.

When I, and everyone of my generation and the one that preceded it, were growing up we had a terrible doom hanging over our heads. We lived in constant fear of the sudden reality breaking out of nuclear armageddon. We were shown films in school, as children, as to what we should do if and when the infamous "three minute warning" should sound. It was absurd, especially where I grew up which was so rural that I doubt very much that we would have heard any such warning in the first place, and the instructions were equally absurd. In the face of nuclear war we were in effect told to hide under the table, or in a cupboard under the stairs and not go out until it was declared safe to do so. Great. Nothing like being prepared for the worst eh?

I remember in 1989 when the Berlin wall that divided the two super powers came down, and the collective sigh of relief was tangible. Everyone had been holding their breath, some of us for the extent of our short lives, and some for the forty years since the end of world war two.

The spectre of global extermination was no more, and now it was time to party. Some of us, myself included, partied hard and long.

But we failed to grasp the true nature of our existential threat, and we failed to realise that it had not passed at all. The true nature of that threat was our moral decline as a culture and our unwillingness to address the very real and very visceral results world wide of that decline. Deep in the core of ourselves we all saw the writing on the wall. We all watched Bob Geldof swear on national TV "just give us your fucking money!" as images of starving children filled our screen and rent our hearts. We all learned in our science classes the very real and very fact based folly of the environmental destruction we, as a species, were inflicting on our world.

We watched our political leaders become corrupted plutocrats, actors, liars and thieves. We watched the military become the rogue and unaccountable bully of the global school yard and we watched the law enforcement and intelligence community become gangsters and drug smugglers on a global scale.

And still the children starved, the jungles became deserts, the seas became ever more poisonous and bereft of life and we clung on to the hope that this time, this election, this man or this woman would turn out to be honest, and live up to the promises of making things right again.

For some of us, like myself and many of my peers, it was all too much and after trying naively and immaturely to shout at the world, warning it of it's imminent danger, we too took the stance of the ostrich and I for one buried my head deep in the sand of hedonism and the comfortable emotional oblivion of heroin.

I woke up from that heroin trance in 2012 and what I woke up to was inspiring. People were realising the danger. People were catching onto a new way and model for living. People were focusing on solutions, rather than problems. A cultural and spiritual revival and re-awakening was going on and I happily jumped on board.


I know it is a cliche to say the "the children are the future", but it is no less true for that, and it is for the children of today that I strive for a better tomorrow.

The times I have spent in the refugee camps of northern France have given me much to consider with regard the future we are now building.

The conditions are being set for a whole generation of traumatised and disillusioned children to become traumatised and disillusioned adults with no reason to have anything but contempt for the institutions and peoples of the western world. They have been bombed out of their homes and lives, forced to flee the imposed wastelands of their homes, driven by need onto the shores of our glorious fortress continent that purports to stand proud in the defense of freedom, dignity and respect for all life.

And yet, the response of these self appointed defenders of freedom is to let freedom drown in the ocean, while fencing themselves in and handing over their essential liberties to the same warlords and gangsters we have watched lie and cheat and manipulate the people all of our lives.

So we have come full circle and now we face the consequences of the true threat to our existence within the infinite mystery of time and space that we always faced. Moral decline. Yours, mine, ours, everyones.

I am privileged to know a few very young people, one of whom lives here among us in this community. When I look at her, as when I gazed in sadness at the children in Dunkirk, I cannot help but wonder what her future reality will be, and I cannot help but accept a moral obligation to give her, and her peers both near and far, the best chance for happiness and meaningful joyous life that I can.

For me this has taken the form of trying to build community again. Attempting, some may think naively, to help formulate and create a wider sense of family and a deeper connection of relationship with the "others" around me. I want for her, and for all the kids of today, a way and means of weathering the coming storm. I want to give them the tools to explore the best of all the cultures now being forced together by the injustices and inhumanities of those institutional forces of war, law, and so-called intelligence.

I want to help build something real that they can hold onto and believe in as the future becomes their now.

I have been inspired by a wider vision. A realisation that we are indeed not alone in this universe and that there are watchers among us, eager to see us mature and to welcome us into their sense of community.

However, there will always be conflict among us people. As we seek to balance the imperatives of different needs, different priorities, different ways of relating to and understanding what life and reality actually are and what it means to be a living, thinking, feeling thing within it.

I have come to the conclusion that the death of ego is the pre-requisite for effective community to flourish and true bonds of genuine friendship, appreciation and respect to be formed. For here in our western world we have pursued the ideal of individualism to the point where we no longer seem to notice the significance or sacred nature of the "Other" at all, be that "Other" in the form of the animals we enslave and torture for our convenience, the people we demonize and condemn to hell for our own sense of saftey or the world we live within and depend upon that we inflict ever greater levels of suffering upon in the deluded notion that it is our right and our freedom that we are defending, often in the "name of God".

And we destroy ourselves. And we do well to remember that to everyone else we are the "Other" too. How we relate to the other is ultimately exactly how the other shall relate to us.

Love Courage and Strength to you all.

Re-realisations and reflections on the nature of self

Hi.

So as you have probably gathered from my last few posts the trip to Dunkirk had a very profound effect on me this time.

I think it is fair to say that it is impossible to do any kind of work in the humanitarian context without it having a profound effect on you unless your heart is made of stone, and if it was you most probably wouldn't be doing it in the first place.

Since getting home to this lovely, beautiful community of artists, anarchists, activists and rebels we call the Leicester Peace and Love Collective I have had time and opportunity to reflect deeply on life, both in the personal and abstract sense of the word, and I have re-realised a simple truth that I had lost sight of about my nature and my being.

All of my recent mental, emotional and physical angst is primarily down to one thing.

Distance.

The distance I have allowed to develop between me and people in my life who I love and care about.

The distance I have allowed to develop between my internal and external selves.

The simple fact that I have allowed my ego - i.e. my sense of being, my personality, emotions, desires and sense of self importance - to become more real to me and more important than the "Other".

This "Other" that I mention comes in many forms from abstract symbols, personifications and archetypes of the Divine Principle or Prime Mind (There are so many, you pick one, Jesus, Allah, Shiva, Kali, Krishna, Odin, Thor, Morrigan,...the list is endless!). Through every expression and manifestation of consciousness and awareness that has over the years manifested itself to me on some level, be it extra-terrestrial, angelic/demonic, human or animal.To every source and repository of life like our Earth for example, and eventually all the way down to the smallest knowable particles of manifest things like atoms, electrons etc.

Clearly we cannot in this life have a personal connected relationship with reality on all of these levels (unless you consider your self in a permanent state of Oneness and Full Attainment, which I don't!). However we can relate to the other in so many forms, most of them as people in our lives, people we meet, get to know, are born connected to or hear about from far away places.

When I go through the kind of emotional difficulties I have been going through my default response is to insist upon distance from others, and for sure I am of a personality type that craves and needs solitude from time to time. Solitude gives me time to reflect, time to train my mind, clearing it of thoughts and learning to observe objectively the emotional states within my being. I am also someone who benefits from time alone in natural environments, and I think we all do. Time to feel a part of the natural world, to observe it, appreciate it's beauty and it's cruelty, and learn from the actions of it's systems.

However there comes a point when solitude becomes an indulgence that creates an unhealthy distance from the "Other", and it is not really distance from others that I need or crave. In fact it is the opposite. It is greater closeness that I need. Better connection with everyone and everything around me. To achieve that closeness and have those connections requires emotional and intellectual honesty, with myself and with others. The times I take in solitude allows me to connect with and identify my own feelings, so that I am then able to be honest about them. Rather than be an indulgent or defensive  means of distancing myself it should be an opportunity to learn genuine closeness with my feelings, thoughts, desires, fears, hopes and sense of relationship with the wider objective reality of which "I" am but one point in the quantum fields of time, space, eternity and infinity.

I have recently allowed my ego to get carried away with itself, caught up in its own sense of self importance, and as a result I have failed very often to form the kind of genuine emotional, intellectual, spiritual and physical intimate relationships with "Other" that my being, like every sentient be-ing, longs for.

I have become distant from the true nature of my own thoughts and my own feelings.

I have become distant from the people in my life, near or far, that I care about and love, and who care about and love me.

And I have become distant from the realisations of the unmanifest, or partially manifest "Others" that have brought me to this place, position and opportunity in life.

It is time for me to start closing these gaps, and once again bringing my internal and external realities closer together, until hopefully one fine day they become truly and inseparably one.

For any community to be successful and sustainable requires genuine honest relationships between it's members, and for me to be an effective member of any community means I need to fully embrace my own state of be-ing - without pretenses, defenses or the egos tendency to project itself onto reality and onto others.

It is challenging, and at times an uncomfortable journey, but I am looking forward to it.

Love, Courage and Strength to you all.

The inevitable toxicity of tribalism and the responsibility of the individual

Hi everyone.

So I've had a few more thoughts after posting my last post about the nature of tribe and the self justification it gives us to hate on the "other".

I see tribalism in all areas of our lives. Religious tribalism, racial tribalism, cultural, social and political tribalism. All of these group identities are being used against us all as tools for division and vehicles for hate.

If we in the west don't wise up to it soon then we also will be sucked headlong into the ongoing conflict that threatens to engulf our entire world in flames.

I see people on facebook who have been friends for a long time falling out and condemning each other because of differences of opinion or perspective without any recourse to consideration or contemplation on the other point of view.

I see the "hard left" hating the "alt right" and the "hard right" hating everyone else, the climate change deniers hating the eco-warriors and the greens hating the deniers and everyone hating on the chem trails protesters.

We have Corbyn supporters hating the tories while conservative and labour mps all rally together to hate on Corbyn.

Those who voted "remain" hating those who voted "brexit" and vice versa.

The rich hate the poor while the poor hate the rich.

And Donald Trump just seems to hate everyone while glorying in his role as everyones favoutite figure of hate.


This is all so absurd, and essentially no more reasonable or enlightened than Muslims hating Christians or Christians hating Jews. It's the same dynamic but without "god" being the cause for self justification, just a strong sense of "being right" and those who disagree with us "being wrong".

I am reminded of a poem by William Blake:

"O for a voice like thunder, and a tongue
 To Drown the throat of war! When the senses
 Are shaken, and the soul is driven to madness,
 Who can stand? When the souls of the oppressed
 Fight in the troubled air that rages, who can stand?
 When the whirlwind of fury comes from the
 Throne of God, when the frowns of his countenance
 Drive the nations together, who can stand?
 When Sin claps his broad wings over the battle,
 And sails rejoicing in the flood of death;
 When souls are torn to everlasting fire,
 And fiends of hell rejoice upon the slain,
 O who can stand?
 O who hath caused this?
 O who can answer at the throne of God?
 The kings and nobles of the land have done it!
 Hear it not, Heaven, thy ministers have done it!"

For this is indeed the truth we face, being manipulated and maneuvered into the madness and horror of war against our brothers and sisters in this world, and others, by those who assume a privileged place of safety from which to conduct their mind games of control, and seek to ever quench their unquenchable thirst for yet greater levels of domination, control and power.

Typical bloody addicts!

So then this concept of tribe, and tribalism has resulted in the reality of the nation state. And the nation state has been the engine and vehicles of all of the horrors of abuse, conflict and exploitation that we have seen in our world over the last few thousand years. From this sense of belonging to a national tribe has come the ever encroaching, ever striving, ever fighting force of imperialism. The idea that one tribe is superior over all others and can demonstrate it's superiority through violence. This is the essence of Empire and is the ideology behind Fascism and the concept of "manifest destiny", and it is the face of pure evil.

There are no chosen people. There are just people. To think otherwise is to be mistaken.

These forces are not alien, they are human constructs. The impulses that conceive and drive them are human impulses. If we are looking for the true enemy, the true villain of this drama, then we need only to look in the mirror for it is all there to be seen in our own being.

These forces use religious concepts and symbols of divine endorsement as justification for their crimes against life Itself, either in an open vocal manner or in an occluded secretive manner, but make no mistake - religious concepts and the sense of self righteousness they endow upon us are at the heart and root of all that is horrific, cruel and destructive in this world.

It is always so with people.

We excuse ourselves of our crimes, our moral compromises, our deceptions and our inconsistencies while at the same time condemning others for having the same faults of character.

We construct notions and ideologies that place our selves in the front line and centre of the "heroic crusade", and by virtue of that constructed reality and self appointed role we develop and nurture a sense of entitlement that allows "me" to break every rule or code, even my own, as the ends justify the means.

Some are addicted to power, some are addicted to a sense of self righteous indignation, but both are addicts and both addictions are destructive forces that drive us all to the brink of madness.

With regard to the current so-called "refugee crisis" (which as any intelligent person knows is really simply a consequence of the moral crisis of global inequality that has existed for a very long time); in the face of the magnitude of this tragedy of our times, in the face of the horror of a world where bodies young and old wash up on beaches like so much flotsam only to be ignored by tourists and argued about by politicians, in a world where people are so driven by desperation, conflict and inequality that they would risk themselves and their children to the meaningless and undignified fate of becoming human garbage washed up on a foreign shore, I have felt sure and justified that it matters no more what happens to me on a personal level, or what personal choices I make or methods I choose so long as I am responding to that situation, to that horrific reality.

And yet now I feel unsure again.

As I realise how far and how deep I have fallen from my own highest ideals, how corrupted I have allowed myself to become for the sake of expediency and how distant and irrelevant the most meaningful epiphanies of my life have become to me, I wonder have I too fallen foul of the egos trap of placing itself front and centre of the heroic crusade and allowing itself the entitlement of whatever is required of it to maintain that role?

How do I move forward from here?

How do I best serve the cause of Life from this point on?

How do I now go about regaining mastery over, and respect for, myself?

How do I continue the quest for meaning in the face of all these monstrous absurdities?

"The kings and nobles of the land have done it!" - for sure this is a truth. However, as I wrestle here with the physical and existential pain of my own being I know a harsher truth, a truth I do not wish to face.

I have done to my own physical being what humanity has done to the world it exists within.

I have reveled at my own destruction in the name of pleasure and sensation. I have laughed at or dismissed every warning sign that things may not be altogether ok with me.

For the sake of my addictions I have failed, quite goriously, to act on the truths and revelations that life has presented to me.

I wonder if for myself, and for humanity as a whole, the situation is ever hopeless.

If we act now, will it be enough?

Or a case of too little, too late?

Love, Courage and Strength to you all.

Is the situation ever hopeless?

I seem to have properly fucked myself up again. I went to Dunkirk Human Being Camp to help the rebuild crew for the women's centre. It was truly an honour to meet and work with all of those men and women, as well as the long term volunteers working valiantly and relentlessly on shelter maintenance. I shan't bore my readers with a list of strangers names, they know who they are and I love each and every one of them. The teams of volunteers at L'Auberge des Migrants warehouse as committed as ever have my total admiration for the work they have done and are continuing to do. Truly these are the unsung heroes of our age in the struggle against the rise of Fascism in Europe. An army of peaceful warriors and compassionate souls whose devotion to the cause of protecting the lives, rights and well being of people from distant lands who have nothing to offer them in return except friendship is an example to us all of humanity at its best. Yes, there are casualties, and although my involvement in  life at Dunkirk Human Being Camp has been minimal compared to most I think it is fair to say I am temporarily out of action on any level. Not quite two weeks of hard graft has left me a bit of a wreck, physically and emotionally. But that's my own fault. I drank heavily while I was there, smoked almost constantly and relied on strong painkillers to get me out and mobile each day. Altogether a stupid set of coping mechanisms indicative of my having failed to learn or apply my life's lessons in such circumstances.

Coming home to the Leicester Peace and Love Collective has been bittersweet and it seems evident that I need to reflect on my role and my future in such a communal setting. Am I truly evolved or mature enough to live effectively in a community? It is very clear to me that I could manage and overcome my addictions far easier when I lived alone and that my spiritual aspirations where easier to reach for and practice towards also, although to be fair, I was being looked after by the welfare state back then which goes a long way towards removing other life pressures from ones shoulders.

And yet I love this community of souls that live here, and I see very clearly how what we have is a microcosm of what needs to exist in the world.

A community of unity through diversity. A people united by bonds of affection and genuine emotional engagement with each others well being. Not joined together by any common goal, common belief structure, shared political viewpoint or world view, but strong because of the personal bonds of sincere affection and respect we have for each other.

I could write much more about life on the camp at Dunkirk, and I will at some point. Even though some may feel I've said too much already and yet observe, reflect and write is what I do best. However coming home to the kind of conflicts, misunderstandings, power struggles and relationship dynamics I've come home too has caused me to realise the greatest tragedy and greatest hope the camp at Dunkirk has to offer us all. The saddest thing to me is the peoples inability to put aside their racial and cultural differences and learn to recognise each other as brothers and sisters on the same journey. Some have and do, many in fact, but not all and as is usually the case in human affairs a tiny bit of hate can undo the work of a lot of love.

Then there are the power games, the struggle for control. Games being played out by organised gangs, French police and the government's of both France & the UK.

It saddens me to see this constant manipulation game being played with people by people and I see it both there and here all of the time. People manipulate others into a position of disempowered dependence just to get what they want from them, playing folk off against folk, spreading lies and rumours and treating each other as either opportunities for gain (be that gain influential, financial or sexual), or threats to their sense of dominance that must be eliminated.

Someone asked me recently what the concept of "tribe" means to me. Well I will tell you that I think it is a curse and plague on humanity. It is a reflection of the constant need of the insecure and disconnected self to achieve a sense of belonging through the exclusion of those who "don't belong". The creation of tribe allows us to view those outside the tribe as "not our people" and thus allows us to fear them, hate them and hurt them while feeling justified in doing so.

I tell you now that if you are a conscious being that can feel fear, pain, rejection, joy, hope, wonderment, despair, isolation or happiness then you are in my tribe and you are of my people.

It matters not to me what you believe or how you express it.

I may well not agree with you, and in that disagreement we may struggle to respect each others point of view but that does not mean that we cannot respect each other.

The traditional place where that respect and sense of belonging exists is the family unit, but it seems self evident that in our western and individualist world the family unit no longer functions as it should and is sadly the place where most of the crimes of physical, sexual and emotional abuse take place. It seems in fact to have become one of our biggest threats to the well being of the individual.

So for us to survive the coming storm, and be sure that no political isolationism will prevent it or protect us from it, it seems that new forms of community must be formed. New bonds of affection and trust need to exist between us as communities and we need to learn how to rely on each other and be reliable to each other.

For me this begins with rigourous honesty, even if it hurts to hear it. Even if it hurts to think it and know it about ourselves.

You are all my tribe, all 7 or 8 billion of you, and there are no exceptions.

Love courage and strength to you all.