Now, then and the pain

Belief in reincarnation, seeking for a purpose in life, formulating and pursuing an intention, working with family constellations or identifying childhood damages as causes of present behavior belong to the historical dimension and take away our attention for the here-and-now. If we strictly apply the here-and-now approach we have to give up such techniques. Although this may be quite scary and difficult to handle, it can result in experiencing the inner void that leads to enlightenment.

Moreover, we cannot change the past and self-victimization or the blaiming of parents work out negatively. We better focus on techniques that help dissolving emotions or tensions, of whatever origin, in the present.

On the other hand, if the here-and-now approach rejects historical cause-and-effect relations that are scientifically, emotionally or spiritually to be experienced or known, such rejection can lead to superficially focusing on symptoms and ignoring deeper lying causes. Causes do not always vanish by treatment of the symptoms. Morever, for some types of intelligence it works benificially to understand cause-and-effect. Thinking is not only a diversion from feeling but can speed up integrated growth.

Finally, the here-and-now approach bears the risk, though not necessarily intended by it, of derailed 
neglecting practical affairs in the wider world and the near or further future.

Avoidance of both the here-and-now approach and the cause-and-effect approach can result from fear of feeling deeper pain. The core challenge remains to deal with this pain, be it through digging up and digesting subconscious childhood pain, verbally guided imaginations, intelligent explanation, the help of bodyworkers, or personally digesting the pain that manifests itself in dreams or in the body.

Not Jesus but evolution created Christianity

Jezus did not create Christianity. Evolution did.

First, the human evolution arrived at a stage of agrarian technology in West Asia and elsewhere in Asia, while agriculture required a culture of discipline in order to preserve enough of the harvest to ensure consumption throughout the year and keep enough of the harvest as seeds for next season.

As this need of discipline developed faster than genetic evolution could keep up with, it had to come from the ouside, by violent policing guided by leaders. Cruel dictatorships followed due and mass wars raged on in Asia.

In reaction, quite some agrarian societies saw pacifist counter-movements arise that, as a matter of fact, brought foward some outspoken leaders. We now know of such movements and leaders mainly through scriptures. Siddhārtha Gautama, or simply the Buddha, in India was one of the recorded ones.

Buddha is supposed to have lived between 560 and 480 years before Jezus was born. Jezus himself had similar purposes and we know of him also because he has been recorded.

To rephrase, pacifists like Buddha and Jezus are products of the growing gap between technological and genetic evolution.

Multi-force methodology to explain Nazism or capitalism

The rise of Hitler and Nazism in Germany has been explained in many different ways, by pointing at many different forces. Perhaps the best way is not to get bogged down in trench wars about the unique importance of this or that force, but to acknowledge all forces that are put forward and see their unique combination in that part of the world at that particular moment in history.

Forces that combined in Germany of the 1930s include the militaristic orientation in Prussia, the authoritarian kinship system and the lack of tropical colonies that existed already, the traumas left after Germany’s defeat in WWI, as well as the political vacuum and the economic poverty that arose after WWI.

The same methodology of acknowledging all forces that are put forward and seeing their unique combination in time and place has been adopted in explaining the rise of capitalism in western Europe.

Jihadists Avant la Lettre

Are you curious how the recruitment and training of Muslim ‘Jihadists’ came about? Have a look at their model that has been developed since World War Two by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) of the United States of America, called the American Gestapo by President Truman back in 1963 already.

https://ascendingstarseed.wordpress.com/2013/01/31/the-farm-inside-the-cia/

https://www.popularresistance.org/president-truman-was-right-in-1963-need-to-limit-cia/

CIA ‘Jihadists’ arrested in Cuba, 1961

The Sigh of my Egyptian Shopkeeper

Each time this so friendly man

Always asking how I am

Peacefully bringing grandkids

From the school door to their house

Looks so shaky and aghast

Avoiding my searching eyes

Heaving a sigh of relief

When I hold his trembling hand

My Egyptian shopkeeper

Proud that his Dutch gets better

When a fellow believer

Derailed and took to murder

The Other Paris Agreements

If promises are kept, the Paris Agreement is a nice step forward. 

But it can also run the risk of generating so much well-intended euforia or bad-intended distraction leading to ignoring mounting effects of global warming, depletion of ocean fish, depletion of groundwater stock, deforestation with disastrous local effects, increased meat production, and the local poisening of humans, cattle, water, soil and air. 

Those problems each deserve their Paris Agreements even more than CO2 emissions.

Americans expect social change by replacing leaders

The tragedy of American goverments is not that they keep thinking they can end organizations such as Al Qaida, the Taliban and a Somalian tribe, or change societies such as Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Libya by killing or replacing their leaders.

The tragedy of American goverments is that they have the power to do all that and still don’t learn that social systems have their own power and that this power is not changed by the removal of certain leaders.

Gadaffi, Former leader of Libya

VINCENT'S LIGHT AND DARKNESS

Vincent van Gogh wanted to escape from the gloomy, Dutch winter darkness and fled to sunny France to glorify and paint the light of the south that he so dearly craved for. He found that light and expressed it. 

But the northern darkness did not vanish from his soul, much as he wished for. He had denied for himself that this darkness was still there, while looking at the light and painting it.

Vincent's tragedy was not that he could not find the light but that he could not digest his darkness. Enjoying, glorifying and painting the sunny paradise of France was not enough to digest the pain of having had an imperfect mother during his childhood.

In the end the undigested darkness in his soul took hold of him again and caused his madness. He died at 37.

To acquire inner peace

The search for inner peace starts with the realization that we miss it. We can do yoga and meditation, work hard, quarrel with partners and bosses, lay on the beach, walk in the mountains, give in to addictions, declare the violent jihad, invite people to love each other, fight injustice and many other things for thirty or fourty years and still not find inner peace. What is more, a lack of inner peace can very well be an extra motivation to do all those things while they do not automatically lead to the realization that we lack inner peace.

Only when we have learned what we miss, we can deal with it. The absence is what humans experience when having to leave the paradisiacal early fantasies of fetuses and infants. As aging infants we learn to see those fantasies as unrealistic and leave them behind.

But hardly any child has the conditions perfect enough to smoothly overcome those fantasies. Nearly everybody suffers damages during this transition. The more we subconsciously suppress such type of trauma, the harder we will find it to realize that type of pain and as yet learn to overcome the paradisiacal childhood fantasies we still carry deep inside our brain.

For many of us, feeling our trauma and digest it, as we could not fully do when we were children, is hard work, very hard work. Acquiring inner peace does not depend on thirty years of just meditation, amassing money or laying on the beach, but on successful trauma healing in whatever form.

Apple-orange instruments help exposing false government policies.

SOUND POLICY COMPARES APPLES AND ORANGES

Responsible policy makers avoid primary emotions and media hypes and question established behavioral patterns. For a proper allocation of resources they weigh the relative importance of needs in society. For that purpose they have to compare forces that some see as incomparable but, in fact, are not.

For apple-orange comparisons policy advisors have instruments to express needs or dangers in comparable ways. Such instruments include cost-benefit analysis, multi-criteria analysis, decision support systems, policy workshops, expert interviews and future scenario structuring. These instruments are not perfect but sophisticated enough to generate priorities and certain quantifications in terms of money or numbers of people and degrees of their being positively or negatively affected. On the basis of the results it is possible to reallocate more realistically the available resources to different interests or solutions of problems.

With the help of these instruments relative importance can be established of such widely different subjects as the risk of being territorially or culturally conquered by outsiders, saving lives by better prevention in health care, improved quality of life by introducing advanced school didactics, distribute work and free time equally in society, create more satisfying jobs for the employed, calculate future costs of global warming or enhance the efficiency of civil servants.

These exercises can also lead to, for instance, a redistribution of available resources so far allocated to different government ministries and departments or to energy generating facilities based on non-renewable and renewable resources.

Can we also compare deaths resulting from murder with other causes of death? Of course, there is a difference but there is also a similarity, just like other causes of death have a difference and a similarity with each other. There is a difference between people who die young and those who die old. There is a difference between slow onset and sudden death. There are differences between degrees or periods of suffering. And there are difference between bereaved such as poor and rich widows or between young and adult children. 

If we want to assess qualitative gaps between different types of death, using apple-orange instruments can be of help to specify and compare such differences.

Such exercises are also excellent ways to broaden the mind and train us in searching for balanced opinion making and behavioral adjustments. They help us to put things in perspective and combine things that we otherwise treat separately.

Of course, society will have its resistances. Outcomes of policy exercises are not always easily brought in line with differences in social power, interests and opinions, but at least create more clarity about such differences and can lead to more balance than trench war debates, confusion, inertia or over-excitement.

And especially, such exercises prove that apples and oranges are most certainly comparable. If, after learning about such exercises, the argument that apples and oranges are incomparable is still maintained, it is perhaps more the result of unhealthy emotions than of sound policy thinking.

Trump As Product

Leaders do not make societies. Societies make their leaders. Leaders are functions of their societies.

Therefore, Donald Trump is not changing America. Changing America is making Donald Trump.

Meditation turns infant bliss into conscious bliss

Meditation is a deliberate attempt to turn our longing back to the bliss that we unconsciously knew as a fetus and infant into a merger of such bliss with our consciousness.

Capitalism does nothing

Not capitalism but people exploit, cheat and oppress others, using ruthlessness, education, national governments, international manoeuvring and the like. Nearly everybody in the world benefits and suffers from those practices.

Religion does nothing

Not religion but people divide, control or delude others, using religions, ideologies, morality, social power and the like.

Cunning or naïve politicians

In their public presentations, politicians are either cunning or naïve. The choice is up to them.

How warfare shifts over the planet

Do you wonder why warfare goes on, while shifting from one region to another over the planet? 

Don’t follow mainstream media. Better have a look at what happens behind the screen, such as described by novelist Upton Sinclair already in the 1950s.

Notably Sinclair’s fictive book series Lanny Budd, traveling son of a wealthy arms producer and in close touch with both Nazi-leader Göring and US President Roosevelt, is revealing and still very valid.

http://www.uptonsinclair-lannybudd-completenewhardboundseries.com/LannyBuddSeries.html

OUTER AND INNER EMANCIPATION

The emancipation of women depends on their inner growth.