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Living within a living, loving planet
Incarnational Opportunity and Creativity
3 days
Incarnational Opportunity and Creativity
27 September, 2016
Sky McCain
“It is the testimony of the wisdom bearers that we come here from the realm of the unconditional in order to experience the conditional. Our original spirit nature is unconditional love, but apparently we set that aside temporarily in order to fully participate in the human experience. We are typically attracted to such an incarnational opportunity because it represents something so different than our actual state as light being souls, and hence is intriguing to us in our natural curiosity and trajectory towards infinitely expanding Self-awareness.”
From Bob O’Hearn “Self and Other”
The clarity of the description above has stimulated me to inflate my ego enough to offer an idea that has resided within me for many years. Firstly, I suggest that we are, among many other attributes, “reality structurers.” Reading Seth from Jane Roberts and in later years Vadim Zeland about Transurfing has supported my view that we not only in great part “make” our reality but actually can “choose” our reality in the sense of the life-path we are following. From Lynn Margolis I learned about the symbiotic theory of evolution that points to a basis of love and cooperation rather than random chance and deadly competition. From here, sprinkled with other bits and pieces of pertinent information my vision manifested as follows:
Creative development is a fundamental attribute of Consciousness. All of what we call “things” shine with some amount of this Consciousness and all things express Consciousness to the extent of their abilities. Parallel to the realm of what modern science calls aliveness has come a renewal of the Panpsychism or minds in a world of mind. I can now proceed to my hypothesis. Large organisms, such as a planet, contain almost unlimited potential and are largely limited by the level of consciousness they are expressed through. Lower order levels of consciousness strive, through what we call creativity, to expand their awareness and consciousness channels. To cut to the chase, we may desire to be a planet, our next higher holon in the holarchy of our known existence. Our experience must be immense and our ability to channel love greatly deepened. Our power is in the present, the dance, and it is dance all the way up and down.
“That was the thing that twisted like a knife.”
2 weeks
by sky
in The Archdruid Report
“People knew long before I was born that the things we were doing were going to end really, really badly, and yet everyone just kept on marching ahead, making the same dumb decisions over and over again, convinced that if they just did the same thing one more time it would undo the bad results they’d gotten every other time they’d done it. If you discover that you’re in a hole, the saying is, the first thing to do is stop digging—but that’s exactly what nobody was willing to do, because they’d convinced themselves that digging the hole deeper was the only way to get out of it.
That was the thing that twisted like a knife.”
WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 14, 2016
Retrotopia: The Cloud that Hides the Future
http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.it/
Life on Earth is not all about Humans
1 month
by sky
in Environmental Protection
No, this you will not do!
“We have become great because of the lavish use of our resources,” Roosevelt acknowledged in 1908, before adding, rather presciently: “But the time has come to inquire seriously what will happen when our forests are gone, when the coal, the iron, the oil, and the gas are exhausted, when the soils have still further impoverished and washed into the streams, polluting the rivers, denuding the fields and obstructing navigation.” Theodore Roosevelt
I’ve known for years that it was just a matter of time before the government set about pillaging citizen assets in the name of the God of profits for the few. I’m deeply saddened to realise that this is truly an eventuality. Even sadder is the knowing that this eventuality will become reality. When will the hundreds of thousands of people who love Nature speak out and proclaim “No, this you will not do!”
An analysis by the Center for American Progress (CAP) https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/green/report/2016/04/11/135044/the-rise-to-power-of-the-congressional-anti-parks-caucus/
has found that between January 2013 and March 2016, rightwing members of Congress filed at least 44 bills or amendments designed to undermine or water down protections for national parks.
A core group of 20 members of Congress, many of them Tea Party members, are part of what CAP calls an “anti-parks caucus” gripped by an implacable hostility to public lands.
The wider Republican party is receptive to this position – its official 2016 platform states: “Congress should reconsider whether parts of the federal government’s enormous landholdings and control of water in the west could be better used for ranching, mining or forestry through private ownership.”
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/aug/23/national-parks-100th-birthday-political-threats
Warding off Despair
2 months
by sky
in Earthenspirituality
Warding off Despair
“The Power That Preserves” Book Three of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever by
Stephen R. Donaldson October, 1978
“Further, I tell you that there is no blame for us in the wisdom or folly, victory or defeat, of the way we have elected to defend the Land. We are not the Creators of the Earth. Its final end is not on our heads. We are creations, like the Land itself. We are accountable for nothing but the purity of our service. When we have given our best wisdom and our utterest strength to the defence of the Land, then no voice can raise accusation against us. Life or death, good or ill – victory or destruction – we are not required to solve these riddles. Let the Creator answer for the doom of his creation.”
Pg. 48
The feeling of helplessness, reinforced by almost daily reports of another ecological disaster, can easily result in despair. Despair can also be the result of suppressed rage against those who cruelly and wantonly destroy our Earthly life support systems. A lot of us suppress rage over the knowledge and helplessness as we encounter more and more exploitation, especially economic. All too often, this suppressed rage descends into a deep despair and we find ourselves just adding power to the very dark spirits that we rage against. These dark forces, Vadim Zeland calls them “pendulums”, suck up our anguish and feed on it making the pendulum even stronger.
I think the quote above can assist us in realizing that we do not need to take on the blame and responsibility for saving the Earth. The burden is too heavy and will sink us into oblivion or what Christians call hell. Earth, as a living, loving and intelligent being needs our support and loving energy but does not and cannot expect us to carry the weight of guilt in not “fixing” the damaging attitudes arrayed against her. We cannot and need not take on the responsibility of a planet being.
Being Understanding
2 months
by sky
in Advaita Vedanta
Being Understanding
“We have come together to find out what we mean by truth, or our real nature, globality. This inquiry calls for a certain quality of attention, an attention free from any expectation. It is really a state of not-knowing, where we are simply open. It should also be clear that what we are looking for, we already are. It is completely objectless. Truth cannot be known by the mind and requires a different kind of perceiving than the mind uses. It is not a functional perceiving which is in duality—“I perceive this”—but a being the perceiving, where there is only perceiving without any perceiver or thing perceived. In other words, where we are the perceiving.
All that can be obtained, perceived, thought, is an object, but we are the subject of all objects. So if we remain in a state of trying to achieve understanding, we will only find an object and not the objectless truth. This object may be a subtle state, but what we are fundamentally is not a state. In trying to obtain ourselves, we go away from ourselves. When this is understood, our mind is automatically brought to a stop where all the energy used in projecting and attaining is no longer directed, and we find ourselves in non-directionless openness, waiting without waiting. This is really the most profoundly relaxed state of the body and the mind. We are simply open, open to the all-possible, open to the unknown. We can never go to it, because there is no one to go and nowhere to go. We can never take it. We can only be taken by it. So we must allow it.
We are accustomed to using the mind to understand, so we must go until the end of the mind, until it comes to the point of being completely exhausted. In other words, the mind must know its limits. This brings an absolutely relaxed state. The mind functions in space and time, but what we are, profoundly, is out of time. So time, the mind, can never understand what is beyond time. When the mind is exhausted, we are at the threshold of our real being. This threshold is a global feeling, free from any conceptualization. What is important is that when we say, “I have understood,” we feel how the understanding has acted on us. Intellectual understanding dissolves in silence, and this silence is our real being. We may have a clear geometrical understanding in our mind, but this understanding is still objective; the geometrical understanding must dissolve in being understanding, which is a global feeling. It is really this global feeling that is meant when we speak of being the understanding.
– Jean Klein”
Why do organic farmers have to pay for certification
Why do organic farmers have to pay for certification rather than farmers who use toxic chemicals?
BLOG HOME 3 Posted Jul 10 2016 by Simon Fairlie of The Land Magazine
“So if you’re a farmer and you want to produce food without using chemical fertilisers or pesticides, you have to pay to be certified, putting you at an immediate disadvantage compared to farmers who do use chemicals.”
Phil Chandler and I made this point 17 years ago through the Wholesome Food Association. Still today mega farms collect mega subsidies for poisoning the soil whilst organic growers pay large yearly fees to nourish the soil.
http://www.lowimpact.org/organic-farmers-pay-certification-rather-farmers-use-toxic-chemicals/
Black Lives Matter
3 months
by sky
in Black Lives Matter
Black Lives Matter: The Baton Rouge photo hailed as ‘legendary’
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-36759711
In 1958, I opened the bundles and distributed the Indianapolis Star morning newspaper for our local news agent. There on the front page was a photo of a white man kicking a fallen black news reporter on a street in Indiana. A few years earlier when I delivered on a paper route, my black good friend and neighbour and I entered a restaurant in Peru, Indiana where I chose to buy two cartons of chocolate milk for us. The proprietor said to me. “You can drink yours in here but he will have to drink his outside.” I walked out in a blind rage. My friend calmed me down and said don’t worry about it, I’m used to that. Indiana is not a Southern state.
When president Obama was elected, I thought that finally the American racial illness is healed. How did I get it so wrong?
Emancipation Proclamation went into effect on January 1, 1863. Yet:
“Calling for a greater sense of urgency in addressing America’s “broader set of racial disparities,” U.S. President Barack Obama told reporters on Thursday that blacks were shot by police at more than twice the rate of whites last year.
The Guardian, however, pegged the 2015 rate of death for young black men, specifically, as five times higher than white men of the same age.”
http://www.cbc.ca/news/trending/number-of-black-people-killed-by-us-police-still-no-stats-1.3670513
The EU is dedicated to corporate interests and economic globalization
3 months
by sky
in Capitalism
“The EU is dedicated to corporate interests and economic globalization”
http://www.lowimpact.org/global-capital-fears-brexit/#more-58242
“In the aftermath of the Second World War, political elites and business leaders promoted the notion that economic integration was a path to peace and harmony.
But the result was a form of economic development – based on debt, global trade and consumerism – that systematically undermined democracy and favored corporate interests while hollowing out local economies worldwide. In country after country, transnational corporations (TNCs) have been able to evade taxes by ‘offshoring’ their activities, and to bargain for lower tax rates and higher subsidies by threatening to move where even less in taxes will be demanded, and more in subsidies provided.
Today, interlinked multinational banks and corporations constitute a de facto European government, determining economic activity through the ‘European market’. Their vast lobbying power has an overwhelming influence on the EU Commission and the secretive Council. In other words, corporations run Europe.”
Be that as it may, the UK lacks an alternative at this time. To leave now would be an economic disaster. Changes must be brought on gradually by design and implemented by the development of local small businesses. The downside is that the required infrastructure is lacking and the building of an alternative will be thwarted at every twist and turn by the vested interest in keeping the money moving up rather than around.
There can be no Peace nor Cessation of Planetary Destruction until this is Understood
3 months
The Best and Beautiful of Nisargadata
“Your love of others is the result of self-knowledge, not its cause.”
“Q: If I am free, why am I in a body?
M: You are not in the body, the body is in you! The mind is in you. They are there because you find them interesting. Your very nature has the infinite capacity to enjoy. It is full of zest and affection. It sheds its radiance on all that comes within its focus and awareness and nothing is excluded. It does not know evil or ugliness, it hopes, it trusts, it loves. You people do not know how much miss by not knowing your own true self. You are neither the body nor the mind, neither the fuel nor the fire. They appear and disappear according to their own laws.
That which you are, your true self, you love it and know it, and whatever you do, you do for your own happiness. To find it, to know it, to cherish it is your basic urge. Since time immemorial you loved yourself, but never wisely. Use your body and mind wisely in the service of the self, that is all. Be true to your own self, love yourself absolutely. Do not pretend that you love others as yourself. Unless you have realized them as one with yourself, you cannot love them. Don’t pretend to be what you are not. Don’t refuse to be what you are. Your love of others is the result of self-knowledge, not its cause. Without self-realization, no virtue is genuine. When you know beyond all doubting that the same life flows through all that is and you are that life, you will love all naturally and spontaneously. When you realize the depth and fullness of the love of yourself, you know that every living being and the entire universe are included in your affection. But when you look at anything as separate from you, you cannot love it for you are afraid of it. Alienation causes fear and fear deepens alienation. It is a vicious circle. Only self-realization can break it. Go for it resolutely.”
I Am That
Nisargadata Page 212
third edition revised and re-edited
New Study Links GMOS to Cancer, Liver/Kidney Damage & Severe Hormonal Disruption
4 months
New Study Links GMOS to Cancer, Liver/Kidney Damage & Severe Hormonal Disruption
ARJUN WALIA JULY 15, 2014
“The chronic toxicity study examined the health impacts on rats of eating commercialized genetically modified (GM) maize, alongside Monsanto’s NK603 glyphosate-based herbicide Roundup.
The study found severe liver and kidney damage as well as hormonal disturbances in rats fed with GM maize in conjunction with low levels of Roundup that were below those permitted in most drinking water across Europe. Results also indicated high rates of large tumors and mortality in most treatment groups.”
The republished study also has a section describing the lobbying efforts of GMO crop supporters to force the retraction of the original publication. This is scientific fraud at its best. The authors express how the previous retraction was “a historic example of conflicts of interest in the scientific assessments of products commercialized worldwide.”
Remember, some large and powerful corporations have spent a fortune on GMO technology. Thus, don’t underestimate or be surprised at the extent that they will go to protect that investment.