Glimpses of Highland Spring

                                               
For those who don't like the one they've got......
                                     

Whose Story? A Trilogy (Part Three)

The theme of 'Whose Story?' is one that, to my knowledge, has not really featured in the multitude of strands going to make up Buddhism in the modern west.  This I find curious, though this is unfair of me, since in my twenty five-plus years as an ordained Buddhist I had no notion of the topic either.  The point, however, is this. Focal to Buddhism, as I have always understood it, is the notion of mind and consciousness.  The Dhammapada, a central text from what is generally regarded as early Buddhism, begins with the celebrated statement variously translated as 'Mind precedes all mental states', 'Phenomena are preceded by the heart', or 'What we are today comes from our thoughts of yesterday' (with such divergent translations, what chance do we have of really understanding.....?).  Different schools of Buddhism talk of 'Absolute Mind' and 'Mind Only doctrine'.  Yet the world 'out there' is as much a manifestation of mind and consciousness as is the world 'in here'.  Or, to take Buddhist philosophy to a more advanced level, the distinction between 'inside' and 'outside' is illusory anyhow.  Shamanic traditions recognise this: for them, the outer world is unashamedly ensouled, alive, animate, conscious, and full of meaning. But Buddhism, in its more popular and exoteric forms at least, and as it has come down to us, seems overly personalistic, taking 'the individual' and his/her development too literally and seriously.  The idea of 'working on my mind' can be uplifting, yet is yuk-inducing in equal measure.

Buddhist analyses of the world tend to vex as much as inspire me nowadays.  The Buddhist Wheel of Life purports to depict the world and its workings.  In the centre of this wheel, the engine making the entire show go round, are a cock, a snake, and a pig going round in an endless circle, biting one another's tails.  The three animals are normally said to represent greed (lobha), hatred (dvesa), and delusion (moha), the driving forces of the samsaric (non-enlightened) world.  This is all very well, as far as it goes.  The problem, in my experience, is that it is so generalised and abstracted as to be totally inadequate as a tool for real analysis and understanding of the dynamics of worldly existence.  At worst, this branding of non-enlightened existence as 'all greed, hatred, and delusion' amounts to a dismissal, an escape from doing the hard work of truly understanding what consciousness is and how it works.  In order to do this, we need to be courageous enough to go into the heart of the beast - or to the entrails, more like.

You don't have to be a conspiracy theorist (whatever that is, apart from an ad hominem dismissal) to see that our modern world of politics, finance, media, legal institutions, and, sadly, much mainstream science and academia, along with many large 'charitable' and other non-elected organisations, comprise an interrelated and mutually supporting network of interest.  And one of their prime interests is to further a particular version of reality, to broadcast a certain type of consciousness as the one and only one; but a consciousness that is limited to say the least.

Within the aforementioned 'network of interest', many people now realise something of the nefarious nature of politics and global finance.  But it can be more difficult to see the essential part that media, academia, and non-elected organisations play as part of the same web. While the notion of the personal shadow is well recognised nowadays, there exists a corresponding and equally significant, yet curiously less celebrated, 'shadow of the world'. This is just as much a function of consciousness. And just like the personal dark side, this needs to be owned, worked on, and incorporated into our wider experience of consciousness and mind.  A similar point is being made in 'Love, Reality, and the Time of Transition' (readily available through youtube), a film I personally find rather uneven but well worth watching and taking seriously.  I submit that Buddhism needs to examine, in specifics and in some detail, how the world is put together as a construct of consciousness, and the kind of consciousness that is being continually created; how and why.  Only then can it truly claim to understand how 'mind precedes all mental states.'

And remember: Maya is not a democracy.....

            
      

Whose Story? - A Trilogy (Part Two)

                                           Ah yes, Truth 24/7!

James Lovelock it was who, in the 1970s, elucidated the self-regulating mechanism of the planetary Earth system, thereby formulating Gaia theory and becoming one of the founding fathers of modern ecology and environmentalism.  More recently, he was a major voice in promoting the theory of runaway global warming, principally through his book 'The Revenge of Gaia'.  As such, he is a darling and icon of modern environmentalism.  At least, he was until a couple of weeks ago.....

In an interview with msnbc, Lovelock dropped a bombshell.  He had made a mistake, he said.  This catastrophic global warming he had so direly predicted just wasn't happening - for now, at least. Planet Earth hasn't got any hotter over the last twelve years, he admitted.  We don't fully understand climate mechanics; 'the climate is doing its usual tricks.'

This, you would have thought, was momentous news indeed.  And fantastically good tidings, straight from the mouth of the guru.  We might not burn to a frazzle after all.  New York, London, and half of Bangla Desh might not disappear under the floodwaters.  Strangely, though, Lovelock's message of hope failed to make it onto the BBC.  Or into most of the apparently respectable newspapers, either.  It fell to a Daily Telegraph blogger to announce the news to the British public.  Shamefully, as a result of his honest admission, Lovelock himself became the target for nasty words from severely-miffed 'environmentalists': he's past it, etc etc. It was reminiscent of the tirade of viciousness unleashed upon former Greenpeace campaigner Peter Taylor when he questioned the orthodoxy on global warming.  Streams of truly nasty ad hominem attacks.

In similar vein, hardly a day passes without some further revelation on the great windfarm scam.  Three 'environmental' charities (World Wildlife Fund Scotland, Friends of the Earth Scotland, and RSPB Scotland)  were recently outed for accepting donations from windfarm builders (Pale Green Vortex had mentioned WWF funding a couple of years back).  But once again the BBC and those same 'liberal' and impartial newspapers, while expressing a tiresome obsession with integrity in the case of the Murdochs, seem to be oblivious to the same questions of integrity and objectivity when it comes to global warming scaremongering from these severely compromised, yet inordinately influential, organisations.  The last fortnight also saw fears for aeroplane radar interference from windfarms; global warming from windfarms (I jest not; at least the Guardian mentioned this one).  And probably much more that has escaped the eyes of the PGV staff, who actually devote little time to what's being presented in the mainstream media.

So, what we believe to be true is founded as much upon the sins of omission as what is actually being beamed into our living rooms on a daily basis.  I was recently discussing with a friend the subject of truth (or 'Truth'!).  While so doing, we stumbled upon a fantasy lodged in some cobweb-bedecked recess of the brain, that of the someone, somewhere, who really knows what truth is.  To discover that this omniscient being wasn't there, but was just a god fantasy, was a wee bit scary.  No cosmically impartial arbiter exists 'out there'; and the same is the case for 'the news'.  There is no infinitely wise greybeard sitting at the control desk of starship BBC, using a universal measure to evaluate what people should know about, how much, and why.  I suppose I find it strange when people cling onto every word issuing from the BBC, or any particular newspaper, while casting suspicion on everyone and everything else.  And here is where the situation begins to get a trifle vexing.....

When I started Pale Green Vortex, I was setting off on a journey of exploration, into some areas that were new to me, yet seemed extremely relevant to the overall theme of 'consciousness studies'.  It was an adventure but, like most adventures, it came with a certain degree of risk attached. In particular, I recognised that some of my new directions might appear a bit bizarre, and not especially edifying, to some of my old friends, colleagues, and assorted acquaintances.  As things have turned out, the area where a number of relationships have undergone a wobble has been in what I have written about aspects of the mainstream media.  More precisely, the BBC and various newspaper organs of the 'liberal left', all of which I have treated, not as superior arbiters of higher truths, but as just one part of the largely fake construct which is presented to us as 'normal' and 'reality'.

Today I shall go a step further, and in doing so risk more interpersonal alienation and wobbling. I shall venture to suggest that some of our 'green' friends, along with their media acolytes and buddies in the renewable energy business, are amongst the most dangerous people on the planet.  They are far more dangerous than the Anders Breiviks and Islamic fundamentalists of this world, who may be exceedingly nasty, but in the larger scheme of things are never going to win.  But the so-called greens I have periodically written about are in the process of actively shaping the world we inhabit. They are dangerous in part because they are based in ideology rather than pragmatic direct realities. Any ideology is dangerous, be it that of Hitler, Alex Salmond (a hardcore ideologue), or a Friends of the Earth stooge.  Ideology substitutes a ready-made, convenient, synthetic interpretation of reality for the real thing.  As such, it is rigid, alien from the mentality of learning from mistakes.  And this refusal to acknowledge error paves the way, as the Gnostics saw, for error to lurch out of control and morph into evil.

Furthermore, our green friends hold to their ideology in a manner fanatical enough to make even a Muslim extremist quake in his boots.  The evidence for this is abundant: the treatment of turncoats Lovelock and Peter Taylor; the refusal to countenance evidence that they might have got something a little wrong; the repeating of the same tired mantras in response to any questions or objections; their inflammatory language comparing global warming sceptics with holocaust deniers; this will do for now.  What's more, they are convinced they are right, and will implement their righteousness through control and regulation of the ignorant masses.  The climate change agenda - save the planet with carbon taxes and carbon trading; save the planet with windfarms that disfigure the landscape and work from time to time; and the rest - really has little to do with the environment, with Gaia-Sophia, but a lot to do with developing what is sometimes referred to as a kind of eco-socialism, a green 1984.  There are the naive, who still blindly believe in the guff put out by Greenpeace and the rest; and there are the control freaks, who see 'green' as a way of establishing a form of benevolent dictatorship. And the BBC, along with those 'respectable' newspapers, are very much part of this psycho-political complex.

The media play a pivotal role in creating what is generally considered 'normal' and 'reality'.  In the case of the mainstream, major ingredients of 'normal' include the generation of fear and insecurity, the depiction of 'reality' as routine killing with guns, bombs, and other explosive devices, lies, dishonesty, manipulative sex etc.  All this renders the shattered populace vulnerable to manipulation by those who will look after us and make the world safe and secure.  And as a palliative escape from this grim reality, we are offered mindnumbing entertainment, in which we can experience other people's mediocre celebrity in 'talent shows', thereby confirming our own status as half-dead passive consumers of the lives of others, those who are really living.

More profoundly, this all represents the constant generation of a particular form of consciousness, designed to keep us imprisoned in a small, fearful, 3-D world.  Politicians, parapoliticians, and others well up in the pyramid of control, know this full well: the media is one of their major tools in broadcasting a certain reality which they would like people to take as the only reality.  I'm not suggesting that Fiona Bruce and every Guardian journalist are evil - not at all, it doesn't work like that.  But unplugging to a large degree from the mainstream media, and taking it all in a spirit of sceptical discernment, is a very positive step in freeing our minds.


P.S. on Fiona Bruce, BBC newsreader!  She has been mentioned more than once on Pale Green Vortex.  Please don't think I have got anything against her.  On the contrary, we have something in common.  We attended the same college in Oxford University (me rather earlier than her...).  This college, it transpires, has quite a tradition of newreaders: Natasha Kaplinsky and Krishnan Guru-Murthy also attended.  Another college notable was one of my geography tutors (I was studying climate change in 1974, by the way....), one John Patten.  He went on to become a member of the Thatcher government, a minister for education, if I remember correctly.  He didn't do a lot to increase the popularity of that particular government, though, and was soon shunted off to the House of Lords as a life peer: Baron Patten.  A lot can be learnt from that.....