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THE TRANSFORMATIONAL POWERS OF TRUTH by andrew hennessey [educators for peace - transformation studies group - edinburgh - scotland] The world as we know it today can be a hostile and unpleasant place. Social issues of uncaring ignorance at both top and bottom of the social hierarchy contribute to the status quo we know as the Human Condition. From the selfish profit-oriented deeds of multinational corporations to the selfish instinct of a rush hour bus queue the current state of the planet is often unfairly laid at the doorsteps of the average human being. Having said that, the average human being on this planet is lucky to have a mud hut and a loaf of bread - so where do we look for the new beginning ? Governments, Corporations or ourselves ?? However it is more than a bit irresponsible to suggest that any individual can change the world even if their hearts are in the right place as 4 or 5.5 billion people on this planet are pretty powerless and unifluential - their time taken up by the mere process of survival. So perhaps it is to the half billion or so rich and fairly articulate western/eastern middle classes, with specialist jobs, skills, free incomes and relatively secure lives we must take our pleas. The great global task therefore is to win their allegiance, for once we have that, once the hearts and minds of the skilled and educated and affluent and therefore propolitical, economic elite are on board - the great struggle for spiritual autonomy of the masses on planet earth can really begin. But there are diversions for our [relatively] elite target group; popular culture, the culture of feeling good, the filtration of bad things that intrude on our comfort zone, fears projected by hysterical media, the harnessing and dissipation of the reproductive instincts by cheap market values, and, the blindness that can come to a spirit bombarded and shocked by a million nihilistic messages of horror. Simple basic education for this target group begins with the rehabilitation of the spirit and can be engaged in with music, explanations, fraternity, and by encouraging the formation of the most basic and archetypal of all questions in the company of a nucleus of like minds, the question why ? By then encouraging comparisons of; philosophies, religious, social and scientific achievements we can start to notice differences - and so we begin to analyse - and the skills of analysis will help our shocked psyches to heal quicker and so make us more useful in the Great Work and once we have a structure and mechanics, a strategy for coping with the world in place - we can begin to take the time to recognise the powers latent within ourselves and in that recognition, the immediate perception that such possibilities also exist in the world and nature. But for many of us, the personal journey may not be enough - and there we may ask the questions of ourselves: are we actors or spectators ? For if we are actors, then we must act and physically clean up the canal of the waters of life, to pull the weeds and empty the trash, purify the poisons - and if we are spectators; then we must sit on our mountaintop and connect. People who choose to spectate, for whatever reason or motivation are often misled enough to tell us that we can think-create our reality - that if we want or wish the world to be better then it magically will be. Which is a fairly passive and innocuous statement in itself, if we want to see the bad in the polluted canal, we will see the bad in the polluted canal, if we want to see the beautiful golden light reflecting on the waters and the swans- we will see the swans. Think-creating and positive thinking is good - but take a closer look at the swans, they suffer from the misery of chemical pollution, the canal is full of waste and I challenge anybody to take a glass of canal water and think create it clean and drinkable. We have to directly deal with reality sometime. The idea is that if we ignore the bad things - they will not exist - This alas, is the kind of hedonism that disables many useful people from playing their part on the stage of the world. This affluent western middle class target group have access to media, skills, technology and disposable wealth, but if the world is to change, billions of people must have access to the basic rights of incarnation; food, shelter, medicine, education, love - rights currently denied them by desolate regimes and cynical industrial exploitation. The World worker must set some realistic targets - and the heightening of the awareness of ones peers must be adopted as one of those priorities. Yet in a world of disposable wealth and planned obsolescence - perhaps not everyone really wants to be king or queen of the hill, that perhaps there is a far greater nobility buried or chained within, and whereas the wealthy are harnessed to their debts of capital and mortgage, billions of poor are harnessed to the drought and famine, the flood and disaster. In all these mortal prisons - a soul awaits the call to life. If there is a strange hope, it may be that the very window on capital and luxury that has served to detract from the spiritual sensitivities of the western rich will in its greed and willingness to consume bite off more than it can digest, and in a fit of uncontrollable regurgitation, present the raw truth to the masses. This electronic oracle, the Television has become global, and though partly blamed for the dissatisafaction of communist russia, the masses of the third world will begin to see a way of living they will one day come to expect by right - and say so - for they now have nothing lose. The lame dead-end science of the 20th century that teaches relativity is not unified [einstein], logic is not logical [goedel], bread may not be nutritious [hume], and who gave us 30 or so ridiculous paradoxes that prevented the evolution of interstellar travel, efficient energy, robotics and a cleaner world - has a lot to answer for. Plenty theories that completely satisfy the rigour of testable empirical science are passed over and ignored - and their promotion then becomes a futile exercise - as in the days when the flat earth was the only acceptable logic of respectable rational people. There is much work to do - there are choices - but I do not think that it is possible to educate what passes for the establishment - immutable often irrational, it defends its self interest and its funding schemes and wages as if life itself depended on it - and to many of the scientists who operate the stale and dead ideologies - it does - for many people have their careers and houses invested in operating the paradigm as they see it. It is ok for Stephen Hawking to say in Switzerland that in 20 years time, x,y,z will happen because in 20 years, Stephen and everybody he currently knows will be on permanent holiday. The world changes, cloning and DNA like the worst nightmares of Huxley become the property of the patent office and the materialists race to define the electrochemical soul or physical seat of consciouseness. A good thing if operated by theosophists, a bad thing if driven by corporate greed - the biotechnology industry threatens to overwhelm the earth with bizarre hybrids of new plants, animals and people, none of which are properly tested in any sensible, empirical context - such is the race for profits. Who knows, maybe the 19th century scottish philosopher Hume was a prophet - maybe one day, the levels of genetic pollution circulating in the ecosystem will cause us to again ask 'How can we know that the loaf of bread is nutritious' - for maybe we all face a biological catastrophe to parallel the effects of any asteroid impact. For unregulated competition by the biotechnology industry threatens to make this planet a barren desert filled with junk lifeforms that serve no real purpose as an ecosystem. Asking the question why - we may never get to the meaning of life, but we may suddenly realise just how shallow are the criteria with which we have been given to define ourselves - and then suddenly we can choose whether to accept or reject those conditions. In a world where the astronomers of SETI in their search for ET intelligence, appear to see right past and through fleets of visiting extra terrestrial craft, where they can see the videos, extract the implants, and still declare that no evolved lifeform exists because they have not yet heard the top10 from galaxy FM - is frankly an insult to our intelligence and integrity. In a world where it is planned to control seed stocks by the use of genetic clocks and self terminating seeds, where the control of water and foods and medication, and the non-management of pestilence such as HIV/AIDS, BSE/CJD, Cancer eg. Richard Nixon may have said a lot of things many of them untrue - but an entire presidential programme pledged to dedicate a budget the size of the Apollo Programme to find a cure for Cancer - it obviously never happened. In a world where the UK government avoids the introduction of an Industrial Carbon Tax by finding a user friendly think tank to pronounce that there is No such thing as Global Warming. The 'thousand natural shocks that the world is hier to' are these kinds of anti-human insanity - the very things which make us - inspire us to be, selfish - - the siege mentality that ends in spiritual dis ease. Yet whilst we faciliate our personal worldly shocks, we can begin to recognise that other people are also asking around too - making enquiries, choosing their best dietry intake, starting to actively discriminate against the bad and assembling the good. It is here that 'Theosophy' and the service of the provision of Truth can and do make a difference -for those much maligned ideas of; Liberty, Equality and Fraternity come to mean something more special, even elite, when we realise how very little of those commodities the planet actually possesses - yet above all - above all the ideologies which chain us - we know that the truth can set us free. |
