Right Relationship

..and of course, what I totally forgot to say last week, in expounding the virtues of plant medicines, was that it's always important to ask the plant.

Here's Stephan Beyer and Christina Pratt reminding us of why it is important for us as humans to be in right relationship with the world in general and the plants as allies specifically.

One picture which Dr Beyer painted, of healing plants being administered only in hospital settings by authorised medical personnel, was particularly chilling. Is this what we want? And what is it the plants want?

Rather than grasping at possible miracle cures, I suggest that we all take the time to alter our worldview.

Get out there. Sit with the plant, or the spirit of the plant. Ask it what it desires of us. Enough of this casual, anthropocentric disrespecting of other corporeal and non corporeal life forms already. It's a contributing factor in the wetiko disease, after all.

Back To Work

Am I looking forward to going back to work tomorrow?

You bet I am.

The last 3 months have been very productive, in terms of getting house, garden and bakkie sorted out, but more important was the opportunity to rest and refresh my soul.

For the last few years at Osiris traumatised me more than I was aware of. It was not so much that I suffered from bad management in the Fraud department - indeed, I was treated relatively very well - but more the everyday abuse of my colleagues at the hands of one immature and control-ridden Wetiko manager which bit deep and left me tired and angry.

I've never, in 30 years in the workplace, seen such abuse and I don't expect to ever witness it firsthand again. I have learnt much from that close contact with mundane evil - which is, I believe, the point of everything we experience on this plane.

Duality. Good and Evil. Hierarchical forms in action. Materialism, lack of consciousness and the workings of the Wetiko culture.The reasons we keep on showing up down here, eon in, eon out. And the way Love, of course, includes and transcends it all.

On Monday I'm starting at NetCare as a Data Analyst and I'm happy about it, although since it has been over 11 years since I last started as the new girl, it's going to be an interesting day, I'll be bound.

And all the while, I haven't given up hope that my erstwhile colleagues will -each and every one - find their own way out of that particular living hell.

Pic: from Peoples Drawing People

Fish And Water

It's International Women's Day and here in South Africa, a woman is killed by her intimate partner every 8 hours. 

It's International Women's Day, and female scientists are still earning considerably less than their male peers.

It's International Women's Day, and women are being killed as "Witches" in higher numbers than ever before. Never mind the "Burning Times". We have a real, present holocaust on our hands here.

The reasons? Doubtless they are many, or could be presented as many by people far more qualified than I in social science matters. But, for my own curiosity, I have a one-word catchall answer to the why of it: the Patriarchy. You're stewing in it, and have been for thousands of years, so that you often don't see it for what it is.

The patriarchy: that ignoble structure which has its roots deep in the big monotheistic religions of today, as well as in agriculture, civilization and city-building, and of course the Wetiko disease.

The patriarchy: whose reign degrades and hurts men as well as simply killing women.

It's not going away any time soon. Not so long as most of us are as unaware of it as a fish is of water.

You Might Be A Wetiko If..

I've noted, and will continue to note, much on the Wetiko and the Wetiko culture we appear to be living within. But what, when we use that term, do we really mean by it?

In Columbus and Other Cannibals, Jack Forbes describes the central characteristic of the Wetiko to be “that he consumes other human beings for profit, that is, he is a cannibal”.

I note the masculine pronoun used by Forbes, and heaven knows I've also gone on about how this culture is essentially patriarchal; but really, Wetiko knows no gender. Nor race, nor class nor religion or lack-of-religion. Much like HIV/AIDS, Wetiko is a disease, as well as a shortened form by which we describe all that is worst in humanity for around the last 6-10 thousand years.

I suppose, then, that the one thing we can say about Wetiko disease is that it does not appear to infect any forms of life apart from humankind. It's just possible that there exist non-3D life forms who are also carriers - we would call them demons, evil spirits, or dark forces I suppose.
I don't know, not having had much to do with those beings. And for today, I'd like to look at what some of the distinguishing marks of Wetiko are in humans.

Pstonie has offered his opinion that "..it all stems from unchecked fear" and I think that he's correct. But what is this all we speak of?

So, in the spirit of those ghastly internet memes we all love to groan over, I'm putting together a list of:

"You Might Be A Wetiko If.."

1) Humans, and only the right kind of humans at that, are the only forms of life you consider worthy of the description "living beings".

2) You believe - consciously or semi-consciously - that the amount of money an individual has access to is a direct measure of their worth.

3) Your actions show that you think the planet is here primarily to support human kind.

4) When it comes right down to it, preservation and/or advantage of yourself (or your kind) trumps those rights in every other living being.

5) You engage in retail therapy.

6) You are a firm believer in physical/mental evolution...for human beings only.

7) You propagate those tiresome dog-eat-dog, survival-of-the-fittest and it's-a-jungle-out-there memes as justification for your behaviour.

8) You hold up Richard Dawkins/the President of the United States/the super-successful athlete/the thrusting, confident business (wo)man as people to admire; just because of their worldly "achievements".

9) Television programs and Hollywood offerings have meaning in your life.

10) You believe that advertising in the last 50 years is not an unmitigated heap of shit designed to scare you into being a better consumer.

11) You don't see anything wrong with being labelled a consumer.

I'd like to add to this list, but these are just some ideas off the top of my head, for now.

Anyone got some more? Please feel free to append in the comments!

Pic: Wendigo, another name for Wetiko, by hellsama.

See How It Works?

I love synchronicity.

Having been attracted to The Sync Book originally because of its inclusion of Neil Kramer as one of its contributors, I found myself hooked, in a mild fashion, by Synchromysticism  and went on to purchase The Sync Book 2.

I only managed to start volume 2 yesterday, having been held up by finishing my twelve billionth re-reading of ChapterHouse: Dune , the last in the Dune Series actually written by Frank Herbert.

The opening essay in Sync 2 is a beautiful exposition on the nature of synchronicity by Paul Levy - author of Dispelling Wetiko. I read last night in that wondrous state where the author's words bore like little rotifer torches into your soul, igniting  fierce blazes of comprehension which lift you from the page even as you cannot tear your eyes from it.

This morning, I followed a link in my morning news to Reality Sandwich; an essay by Richard Smoley titled Does Prophecy Work? . Smoley delves into Jungian synchronicity here, so I found myself seriously considering the nature of the Sync once again; and was thereby encouraged (a trait of a good sync) to revisit Levy's Wetiko work.

I shall definitely have to get hold of a copy of this book. And meanwhile, I'm thinking about what the exact characteristics of a Wetiko are. I'm not quite ready to list them here, yet - maybe tomorrow.

The second contribution in Sync 2 is by Robert Perry and puts forward his theory of CMPEs - Conjunctions of Meaningfully Parallel Events - as being those syncs with multiple correspondences, which support the idea that the stream we-are-currently-testing-the-water-of is correct for this time and place. Good syncs affirm us spiritually, in other words.

Perry is the author of An Introduction to A Course In Miracles, which I freely admit I've been avoiding like the plague on account of its title and my perception of it being too similar in content to that awful  The Secret nonsense. I may have to change my opinion. On Perry, not The Secret.

So really, just by reading the first 2 chapters of a particular book, I've been led into a commitment to buy 2 others. I wonder how long my to-read list will have become by the time I've finished Sync 2?

And as an aside, I can really recommend  Alan Abbadessa-Green and anything his new press puts out.

See how it works? Well, sometimes.

Update: Followed a tweet a few minutes ago to an article on personality types. Main modern foundations layed by Jung. As I'm reading, a pop-up announces that I might also like to read Carl Jung's Archetypes.Right, right, I think I've got it, dammit.

Awaken In The Dream

Having taken a firm resolve to let the professionals fix our Legendary Car , Warren and I took it down to Safety Brake and Clutch this morning for the fitting of a new master brake cylinder.

We hiked up to the Sandwich Baron and bought a breakfast of cheese and bacon on French rolls, then walked back down to where we had left the car.

The wait was over four hours long - but damn, those people did the job properly!

While waiting I parked myself on a stone storm drain cover under a tree whose species I have yet to pin down - despite it being a pretty common planting in the new North of Joburg - and read chapters out of Tara Sanchez' The Temple of Hekate off my phone. When my eyes tired, I gazed at the people in the streets below me; coming and going and lounging around, people on foot and people behind the wheels of tons of fast-moving metal; people going to work and people hoping to find work. Human people being, in short, human people on a warm and windy Monday morning in Joburg.

I visually followed a couple of clean, neat guys who may - I thought at first - have been looking for work in this area of light industrial businesses. One was dressed in freshly laundered blue overalls, the other looked more like a pirate in his jailing jeans and bandanna. They stopped to hail a passing stranger, which was what drew my attention to them - but what kept my attention on them was my growing suspicion that they were fairly slick criminals casing various joints. I'm not sure even now why I thought this. But they must have felt my gimlet gaze upon them at some stage, for they turned around several times and looked around for the source of their discomfort.

Next I decided to play with the owner of a humongous Hummer vehicle parked in the Absa Bank lot. I waited, wondering what someone who would drive such a gas-guzzling, earth-destroying monster would look like. When he walked out of the bank and flashed his remote unlock, I saw a young-ish man in long shorts and baggy T shirt, his fish white arms and legs proclaiming him to be some kind of software programmer - just like me. I hated him on sight, of course. What did he need that much metal to be driving around in? Where was his consciousness that he apparently needed so many tons of metal alloy and large amounts of petroleum to take him to his local bank? What a tosser.

At more or less that moment, another customer of the brake centre ambled over to what I was rapidly considering to be my tree and sat down upon the stone drain cover. Much too close, I felt - but then I tend to wield a personal space about the size of a European country. I sidled away down the embankment, and then got very irritated when I had to climb past him to get to Warren when the car was ready.

I remember this flood of indignation, irritation and self righteousness. I remember thinking very clearly that all these monkeys were nothing like me. That I was so much better than them that I was practically another species, and that the reason I disliked them so much was that they were demonstrably not like me.

Uh-oh. Wetiko Disease attack.

When we start drawing out the perceived evil in everyone around us - everyone but ourselves, of course - then we are surely caught fast in the Wetiko Disease.

Those hateful ways of those people I'd just been other-ing were my own shadow, evoked and visible and appalling. It took a couple of hours before I could admit that truth to myself.

A couple of hours and a listen to Paul Levy on Red Ice Radio , talking about his new work, Dispelling Wetiko. 

Well, well, well. And are we finally ready to admit that we have a disease of insanity?

Yourself especially, Terri , as you are no different from any of those other humans out there.

This is very important for us all to remember. We are the only people to be actively crafting our suicide, and taking the rest of the living world with us. When Wetiko Disease has us pinned, we certainly do not see it, do not acknowledge it. And this is the pernicious nature of this sickness - we'll be feeling that Everything Is OK as we slide down into extinction, despite what the trees and the birds and our own domestic animal companions have been trying to tell us for the last 6000 years.

Please. Can we not awaken in the dream?

The Machine In Action

I sometimes wonder why I even open up the page at News 24.
The standard of original journalism - when it occurs at all - is low, sometimes only being beaten in the godsawful stakes by the comments section.

But seriously, people - what have we come to?
Over 34000 applicants for 90 trainee posts at the Traffic Department.

Of those, over 15000 got through to the next qualifying round - where 6 died of heat and exhaustion and one committed suicide following a physical fitness test.

I speak from experience when I say that being penniless, homeless, and hungry messes with your mind all right.

When you're in such a place, the need for survival is the over riding one. And you don’t really stop to think how you could be doing anything differently - you just play by the rules embedded in the culture.

Get a job. Earn some money. Buy the food/shelter/happiness you are being denied.

But there's something very, very screwed up with that when thousands apply for the most menial of jobs - and some of them die trying for that golden ring, which in the end doesn't even deliver on its nebulous promise.

There's a whole lot wrong when we don't even question how this system came to be the life-destroying, soul-shredding monster that it is.

The machinery of Wetiko culture, stomping, chewing up and spitting out the species which brought it into existence.

Free Again

My weird-ometer has been unusually sensitive these last couple of days: in common, I would guess, with most peoples' sense of the unusual at this time.

I went through a short period yesterday where it seemed I was stuck in a matrix glitch. I would pick up a shiny pebble - fallen off my beautifully wrapped leaving present - and put it away, only to return to the spot ten minutes later and find another pebble lying there. I would eat up half a biscuit laying forlorn on a plate, only to come back a little later to the same half-biscuit confronting me accusingly.

I stepped out into the back yard last night just in time to witness two great flaming orbs of orange-red sailing north-to-south in the eastern quadrant of the overcast sky. I'd never seen anything even faintly like them before, and I stood with my mouth hanging open, too stunned to get a camera. Although I did call Warren to see them.

Just before bed, I came over extremely dizzy.

So that appears to be that for the end-of-the-world-consciousness-shift for this baktun, anyway.

There's nothing here that cannot be explained in rational, 3D terms.

But this morning, preparing the ritual space for new grass seed, I trundled up the driveway hefting a rake, following Scylla and Taranis, in Indian file also walking the car-wheel rut of nine years' usage, who were in turn following Warren who was pushing a wheelbarrow.

And I snapped that picture in my mind, preserved forever. The beings I love, tending the land, in a time-between-times, free at last of the self-imposed shackles of Wetiko bondage.

Pic: Thanks to dreammclelland "Time Between Times"

Closure

On New Year's Eve of 2008, RSS Security shot and killed three of our canine companions - Charybdys, Chippie and Bart - under what we considered to be highly suspicious circumstances, and then proceeded to treat our concerns as if they were entirely inconsequential.

Warren and I set out to provide them with some consequences, and yesterday that road seemed to have come to an end at last.

We were taking them to the High Court, aided by an attorney and an advocate.
Our last attendance in Pretoria was just over a year ago, when the case was postponed as the defendants needed to change their defense. Our legal team told us there would be another date in about a year.

So we waited, and, hearing nothing from either Stef Guldenpfennig the advocate or Ferdi the attorney, assumed that everything was chugging along just as it should.

Then, three weeks ago, we get an email from another attorney, saying that our previous guy had left the company, and that the trial date was set for 2nd October. This was  Thipe Mothle, of Mothle, Jooma, Sabdia who seems to be leading a bit of a double life - which I commented on earlier. (He appears to be both Thipe Mothle and Peter Nyane.)

( I must add that the email correspondence, coming as it did from a presumably expensively educated attorney, left so much to be desired in the usage of English grammar and spelling that I wondered at the legitimacy of the correspondence.)

The email also inquired about payment. No problem. I have to do large money transfers through my bank branch, so, being busy at work, we asked them to wait until Saturday, two days from then.

The next day we received another email telling us that Stef the advocate had withdrawn from the case, after (quote) "you made numerous promises to pay". The attorneys were thus withdrawing as well.

Well I'll be damned, I thought. We go for almost a year hearing nothing and therefore trusting everything is OK, then out of the blue up pop these ill-educated people claiming we were not honouring our promises.
I did see red, briefly.

This left us not enough time to secure another attorney and advocate.So yesterday Warren and I went along to the offices of the attorney for the defense, and we settled.

Let me just say here that I have never, in a relatively long life so far, been the recipient of quite such dishonourable behaviour. Advocate Guldenpfennig and Thipe Mothle should be thoroughly ashamed of themselves.

Yet I doubt that they are. Hard as it is to realise, there are people in this world who fit the bill of conscienceless parasites pretty damned well. After this little demonstration of bare-faced lying, I wondered for a while how either of them could actually sleep at night. And then I realised that they probably slept pretty well, thank you. For they seem to have lost their moral compass entirely when they contracted this disease called Wetiko syndrome.

But on the closure front, although Warren has been enjoined not to discuss the matter, no such stricture is binding upon me. So I can say that we did succeed in hitting RSS Security where it hurt; their market-share in this neck of the woods has noticeably dwindled (to just about nothing in our suburb), plus they were forced to spend money on advocates and attorneys - just as we were, conceded - something which I guarantee has hurt them more than it has hurt us.

 This was never about money. And, if I had the choice, I would certainly do it all - extravagant expenditure included - over again.

Rest well, my beloved friends.You have been avenged.

Pic: Chippy and Charybdys, Lughnasadh Eve 2008

Acknowledging Ownership

As much as I dislike the idea that humans must "control" and "manage" their environments - this being a distinguishing mark of the Wetiko culture we all live in - I have found that a certain amount of regency over one's own life is,well, desireable.

The night before last I dreamt, as I have before, of a yellow motorcycle whicih was my means of transport.
This seems to be my imagery for control over my self - or rather, over the 3D projection of my Self which lives and breathes on this plane. So, I dreamt of riding the yellow motorcycle (hey, it's an Enduro machine with a fairly large engine, don't knock it) and that I was also wearing a yellow helmet.
That last detail was true in "real" life also - I wore a yellow full face helmet for most of my motorcycling life.

Now, when I dream of travelling about in cars, I'm never the one driving the machine.
This is largely because, in real life, I do not drive a car. I never have - no car driver's licence.
The car I am presently transported around in is, technically, "mine", in that I bought it, but it is Warren who occupies the driver's seat.

So I was rather surprised to dream, last night, that I climbed into the car which I "own" but do not own, and started to drive it.
At first, I was a little fearful. All these pedals and levers and stuff! How would I ever manage? I was likely to crash the damned thing into the nearest kerb.
When riding a bike, one's body has a great influence on the control of the machine. After many years of riding it becomes like an extension of your flesh. I'm not so sure that this is true of driving a car, but I might be wrong.

Anyway, in this dream I quickly became more confident of my ability to drive the car. I realised that I had known all along how to do this, but had just never tried. Driving the car was soon as simple and smooth as riding a bike.

I guess I need to look at things I "own" but do not own in my life. it could be that I have always owned these things, but never acknowledged that ownership. ..On reflection, I'm starting to tie last night's dream in with the activity I undertook earlier that evening.

I was death-walking a colleague's beloved feline companion of 20 years, so I invoked my Shadow Totem - a black panther - to aid me.

The invocation was powerful indeed, and seems to have had fallout in my immediate environment.

Fermentation

I first took this Alchemical quiz about four years ago.

The result, according to that quiz, was that I was then at the stage of Conjunction.
It was, I thought,a fairly accurate representation of the place I stood in at that time.

Rediscovering the Alchemy Lab last week, I re-took the test, and obtained the result of Fermentation, which is the next step in the Alchemical process.

According to the Emerald Tablet, during Fermentation, we raise consciousness from the darkness of the animal body through personal meditation and planetary evolution. "Separate the Earth from Fire," it tells us, "the subtle from the gross, gently and with great Ingenuity."

I find this to be a very accurate representation of my situation in Time and Space right now - for the last couple of months, in fact.

The four or five years preceding this have been characterised by a growing rapport with Death, to the point where I was wholly comfortable with my own passing; so much so, that I twice (once about 18 months ago, and once just last week) was aware of an imminent arrival of Death Herself (the Ultimate Woman) for the collection of...me, myself.

The intimation of my own death was so strong last week that I felt sure I was ready to go. But that was not how it fell out. Instead, it was a transition from the Dark Night that I was feeling, up ahead.

Held fast in the Earth for the last couple of years, slumbering lightly yet tossing and turning in the nightmare of the fight against the Wetiko culture, the product of my Conjunction was laid in the soil, thrashing out and raking it in fury every so often.
When the Death transition came, it was not a mortal passing, but a spiritual one - possibly because I have already experienced the Shamanic Dismemberment - and the start of the enlightenment of the Fermentation process has begun.

 It's still just a glimmer, but it ties into my feelings of having travelled backwards to a place of greater simplicity, of cleaner joy.

 It is the re-admission of the Above into the putrefied vessel of the Below which produces the golden seepage from the corpse.

 It is a wonderous scent from heaven and a flaming of many colours and varied visions. It is a re-establishment of healthier sleeping patterns (which had gone badly awry the last few years) and a re-awakening of appreciation of beauty above as well as below.

It is the Change which I felt coming and which I misinterpreted as my own personal End.
It is a re-imagining of the aspects of Soul.
It is a re-appreciation of the human, here among the animals of the Earth.

It is, in short, the bubbling, fizzing Fermentation of my Self.
Gently.

Special

Well, that was special.

Yesterday, the car having been fixed of its oil leak by Warren - which necessitated the timing belt being taken off and put back on, never an easy job - wouldn't start. Warren called in our friend Hennie, who's very good with machines, and between them they had the problem sorted within a few hours.
Apart from the oil leak, which had reappeared during the fixing.
Off to the spares shop we go, in Hennie's car, to purchase a new oil meter. Installed, sorted. Waved goodbye and thanks to Hennie, who has problems of his own to sort out.
By now it was after midday, and we were just getting started on our usual work days. We took the normal route along Leslie to William Nicol, where the car stalled on an uphill and refused to budge.
We reversed free-wheeling back down Leslie, as we were seriously blocking traffic and really annoying some daft types in very expensive cars, who overtook us with roars of their engines.
We backed eventually into the broad car-entrance to a couple of complexes built side-by-side, and called Hennie.
We'd probably flooded the engine, in his opinion. So we took a walk down the road a way to the Douglasdale Shopping Centre, to buy bread and cigarettes and look for a spark plug spanner, which we had neglected to pack into the car.
 Two hours later, the car is still sitting outside the complexes, the spark plugs have all been examined and cleaned, the presumably flooded engine now viable once more. We should have been able to start out again.
Only we couldn't, as by now you'll have guessed. There was spark and we had a quarter tank of fuel, but no running engine.
Back to the shopping centre, where a petrol attendant at one of the garages gave us the number of a mechanic who lived nearby. (No, don't ask me why petrol stations have no mechanics or workshops - that's so yesterday, and unproductive in the Wetiko scheme of things).
When he examined the engine, the local mechanic pronounced our fuel pump inoperative - which explained a lot of things that morning.
By now it was mid afternoon, and a new petrol pump could be purchased at the spares shop - about ten kilometres away. Hennie was involved in his own problems, and we had no recourse but to walk.
The going was rough, particularly considering the recent rains had washed huge amounts of suburban debris onto what we laughingly call our pavements. Actually, pavements don't exist in suburbia more often than not : if you're so lower-class as to be walking, you can bloody well walk in the road much of the time.
The last couple of kilometres of our journey were short-cut by our arrival at a major road, where we opted for a taxi ride, to get to the spares shop before it closed.
Surprisingly, I'd never ridden a 'common' taxi before - most of them are extremely scary, from the outside anyway, and - well - white folks don't often make use of them. Good excuse,huh?
We found a small knot of people standing by the road, ascertained from them that they were also headed in our direction, and caught the appropriate taxi with them. This, if you're not a South African, is more complicated than it sounds. It requires a knowledge that middle-class office workers just don't have, often.
So we arrived at the spares shop before closing, after a really pleasant ride in a clean and quiet taxi, squashed among many other people, who all politely made room for the mlungus aboard their commute.
Petrol pump purchased. And a couple of Cokes, for the walk home.
Arriving home just before seven, the dogs were really glad, although puzzled, to see us arriving on foot. But you know, your non-human animal companions never question how you got there or where you've been - they just make a huge fuss of you when you are there.
Warren calls his manager, who is surprised that he didn't ask one of the mobile supervisors for a tow. Well, I wouldn't have known to ask that, either. So a couple of hours later still, car is towed back home,and we get some sleep.
The walk, though, was an opportunity to see things easily missed as we whizz about in this car culture. A Glossy Starling who sits still long enough for me to enter its birdy mind; several mafioso Sparrows struggling in the dust and refuse; a real, live Quercus Alba where one would least expect to see one. And the humans of course - this is Africa - full of good cheer and greetings....

...This morning, Warren is installing the new petrol pump. We'll see from here.
It's certainly never boring in this life. Frustrating, painful, horrific even. Never boring.

Pic: Quercus Alba - the White Oak

No Gods, No Masters

Now there's a concept which makes me wrinkle my nose in distaste - mastery.

It's very much a part of the Wetiko culture - a core concept, perhaps.
Mastery over the planet, 'nature', women, children, workers, fields of study, animals,instruments, feelings, thoughts, ideas...yourself. Somehow this culture has embedded in it the principle that a true human exhibits, or at the very least aspires to domination over some subject. Which turns everything into objects.

The only real sin may be thought of as just this - treating others as objects. And that's precisely what thousands of years of patriarchally-driven culture has inculcated into us all - the need to master, to control. To subjugate something or someone else to yourself is, I submit, to miss in large part the point of being Here.

For standing in the flow is not to block it. And Being in the Tao is not to oppose it. it all flows, and you with it. Unless you have bought into the Wetiko culture completely, you need to swim with Life rather than try to command the tides. To allow your entire soul to enter into participation with the mystery and ecstasy of the rush of water, the swirl of waves, the swell and fall of gravity.

Even our gods are not our masters. Hecate Herself is not in charge, even when She overshadows me: She merely has access to more dimensions than this human does at present. But She and I are co-Being. Together, making and shaping and creating and destroying...For all Time.

So no, my fellows. No gods, no masters. No gurus, no saints-in-charge, no over-demons and no control. Just Being, now and always, to the very ends of the Cosmos.

Never Mind The Reasons

Hey, how many of us remember growing crystals in a saucer in school?

You would be given a bunch of copper sulphate, or something, and if you made up a solution of this with a little water - and made the solution up just right - you could stick a piece of string into it and grow crystals all along it. Magic.
The key of course was the solution. It had to be super saturated. And then, anything of large enough dimension which was placed into it would act as a flash-point for all those copper sulphate molecules hanging around.

I guess we have something like that in many, if not most, places in the civilized world today.

Take a population of humans, and divide them so that some - a very small number - are super rich and the rest either dirt poor or just getting by. Increase this division so that the super rich get even richer, and end up controlling most of the resources that the entire human race needs to live. The pool of poor people increases, and those who were just getting by become poor, too.

Subject all humans to the machinations of a marketing and media organism which has as its one objective hypnotising people into believing that owning material goods equals power and worth, while at the same time making sure that the poor do not ever have enough nutritious food to eat - substitute junk food made from real junk, and watch those minds fail to grow and thrive.

Make sure that your media/marketing machine keeps the carrot of aspiration dangling- allow the people to fixate on the possibility of becoming themselves one of the elite.
Add to this mix a class drawn almost exclusively from the non-elite whose function is to protect the power, wealth and property of the elite. They may not think this is what they're doing - after all, they're humans just like us, trying to stay afloat - but that's what it comes down to: the police in every nation are the guard dogs for the property and privilege of the rich. No wonder police men and women everywhere are so stressed and conflicted that they often end up shooting someone. And so provide the catalyst for the crystals.

Watching the world catch fire one city at a time is not fun. My son is living in England, but I feel no fear for him. I'm wondering why he isn't out on the streets himself actually. And moaning about criminals who try to rob my loved ones is not helpful to anyone.

I feel no fear for myself, either. It's happening, as it was bound to happen, and my chief feeling is that yes, it's past time that this Wetiko civilization was put to the flames. It won't stop the destruction of the Earth and much of its biological life, however.

The people rioting in Egypt and Lybia and London and Athens are huge allies to the planet.
Never mind the reasons.

And I - and you, too - are incredibly powerful, with the sort of power never dreamed of in such trash as The Secret and only envisioned by the elite themselves in their darkest nightmares.
Go, humans.

Archaic/Tribal Consciousness

When Anders Behring Breivik set the bomb in Oslo and when he opened fire upon a group of youths at a camp, what was he thinking?

His statement that he wanted to save Norway from a Muslim invasion has a ring of truth to it - or at least a ring of one truth, perhaps the top layer of truth in his mind.
I've never been good at psychoanalysing people, but by gods I do want to fit myself into their minds from time to time, if only to gain further insight into what this Wetiko culture has become, and is becoming.

That Breivik's 'level' was firmly set at Tribal is a bit of a help. The integrity and purity of the tribe is so important to some humans that they will not hesitate to think along the lines of violence against the Outsiders.

That othering of the great majority of the rest of us is, I admit, pretty offensive. I've run up against this kind of thinking among the White Pride bozos. But what, really, are they thinking? What convinces them that their cause is so righteous that the cold blooded murder of scores of people is justified and heroic?

I fear that the heroic aspect is the key here. This man, like many men and a few women in this careening vessel of deepening sickness, have not evolved beyond the Red level. Their tribe, their people, their volk are the be all and end all. It is a cause to which they can give their passion and their lives. It is a pathetic place to be, but how much hope is there that this level of evolution will die out before the end of the century? Looking around me-and remember, I'm in Africa-I see very little light on the upward turn of the spiral.

This kind of being is partly what gives the Wetikos-in-Chief their tremendous power. Pandering to fear-based reactionism gives them a great and violent support base.
Do we have to just sit back, then, observe it all and sigh for the lack of evolutionary mobility among large parts of the human species? I hate to say this, but maybe, yes.
The bottom end of the spiral is heavily weighted against us in numbers and sheer ferocity of emotion. Can we afford to wait it out until these atavisms are dead or ineffective?

I don't know the answers at this time. I would dearly love someone to shed some light on the questions, though.

Pic: Found on this blog

Adrift in an Insane Culture

Warning - what follows is not going to sound good.

I feel I must say it, however, if only as a record for the future, perhaps helping to explain when and how I finally started to lose it with the civilised people around me.
I've never been particularly good at fitting in to the society I found myself born into, but that was mostly explained to me by the adults in charge of my education and conditioning as an unavoidable by-product of being so highly intelligent.

At a measured IQ of over 150 - later in my young adulthood it hit 170-175 quite regularly - I've normally had a problem understanding why something which was quite obvious to me wasn't even on the radar of most folks around me.

For a while I pandered to this sense of superiority by studying Physics, Mathematics and Astronomy - the 'hardest' sciences I could find, which seemed to give me some kind of pleasure and even more of an explanation for being different. Eventually, however, as I became sensitised to the actual, real world in which I found myself - the world of Life everywhere, and much of it nonhuman - and as I finally began to grow up a bit, I noticed that this feeling of not fitting in had not gone away. It was more pronounced than ever.

And so I find myself resident in a country with an average IQ of just 70, surrounded front and back and on all sides with humans who seem to me the epitome of insanity - if insanity can be imagined as that quality of not giving a shit about the future, the matrix which sustains you, and the nonhuman intelligences all around one.

I'm having a pity party right now, yes. I'll snap out of it in due time, I know. But right now I feel my strangeness very keenly, and the only explanation I can put upon it is that I'm still diverging widely from the culture of my birth.
The Wetiko culture, the culture of the dangerously insane, the culture of the zombie.

Release Henry Okah

Yes, I'm on this topic again.

Recently, Henry Okah was moved to a maximum security prison in Joburg - presumably the locally-named Sun City - after a raid on his cell produced eight cellphones, with chargers and airtime, and a map.

The tip off was given by one Colonel Zeeman who, interestingly, is also one of the investigating officers in Okah's case, and is a member of the Hawks. This is pretty damed fishy, in my opinion.

However, suppose Henry Okah did have those cellphones in his possession. This is certainly against the law as applied to awaiting-trial prisoners. Yet I would submit that Okah is detained at the State's leisure for maybe being the leader of the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta who maybe committed the Abujah bombings last year. That last point, by the way, is far from being a proven fact.

I refer the reader to the recent raid by the police on the offices of the Public Protector, and the incarceration without trial of journalist Mzilikazi wa Afrika in August last year, apparently for being a bloody nuisance to the criminals in power, and you can easily see that the regime change in South Africa has been more of a changing of the guard from the old bastards to the new ones. Not much else.

There is talk that maybe MEND wish to shut down oil production in the Niger Delta, and I don't have to tell you what a happy occasion that would be, both for the human and the non-human residents of that area.

Release Henry Okah, you Wetiko dogs.

We Are The Shadow

"The culture as a whole and most of its members are insane. The culture is driven by a death urge, an urge to destroy life"

Dear Derrick Jensen. Premise Ten is my absolute favourite.

The moment that the eyes of your spirit start to open -or, to put it another way, the moment Ajna awakens in your energy body - you start to become aware that culture is not your friend.

I am disengaging daily from this culture: this toxic mimic of what it is to be alive in a living system, this Wetiko charade that passes for life at this time in this place.

And yet - I am not unhappy. I support Anarchists all over the globe, those who have felt the rage of trying to be a human animal within a decidedly inhuman system, those whose only answer is to fight back, to try to smash the machine, to monkeywrench the systems of control. I understand their pure anger.

But I don't see myself out in the streets in black hoodie wielding a half brick excoriating the pigs and agitating to be locked up - does this make me a hypocrite? From some perspectives, maybe.

But from where I sit, detached to a large degree from the social norms and societal urges, I can see what's maybe only obvious to someone like me, hanging out on the edges of the system. That is, it is all our Stuff.

Every mind-warping atrocity, every dazzling act of Grace. Each gulp of swallowed bile and every moment of transcendental ecstasy - all Us, all Ours.

The blinding light is the fact that we All - rocks, humans, sparrows, coltsfoot, spin-up quarks, colossal regions of inter-galactic dark matter, PitBulls and quartz crystals - are responsible for All This. It is our Making and Shaping, our Creation , whether of Frankensteinian provenance or Angelic manufacture... all, All Ours.

And it's maybe time we woke up a little more to this fact. That there's no sinister human-hating force controlling the world from Davos; no subterranean culture lords rubbing their secret hands in glee at the next bit of greedy perfidy launched upon an ailing world- or if there is, they're Us.
McKenna again: "The real truth that dare not speak itself is that no one is in control, absolutely no one..."

No One but Us, that is. And we need to own up to that.

Last word I leave to Neil Kramer - that somewhat mad, wholly authentic, English gentleman of words:
"The antidote to the poisonous odium is to fundamentally acknowledge that we are the shadow. No-one else is to blame. The responsibility lies with us. With you."

Take, Eat...

Yes, the dominant culture really does turn the living world into dead things.

And yes, I eat living things, too.

But there is, you know, a difference between a living being eating other living beings as part of being a living being, and a culture taking living beings and turning them into dead objects for nothing more essential than bodily adornment, or a means of getting somewhere really fast, or plastic goodies to keep cutlery in.

And, in that vein, I really don't care very much what another living being eats to sustain hir status as a living being, as long as that's what the eating is for, and not to address some shadow issue s/he had with hir parents twenty years ago.

And so, considering the pie-ing of Lierre Keith by a bunch of vegans, apparently in a fit of revenge for her having written  The Vegetarian Myth , last year at an Anarchist Book Fair, I am deeply saddened to have come across this website.

Not because it critises Lierre's book - that's a legitimate part of open and honest dialogue - but because of some of the stances it takes on the plant realm.

In the section Plant Sentience we read that "While it is true that plants have fascinating, complex stimulus feedback systems, modern science knows that these are not sufficient to give rise to consciousness.."  That makes me very, very sad, as you can imagine if you've been following along in my plant communication series.
 
Even if you haven't been following my particular adventures, how hard is it to accept that the whole darned world is engaged in sacred communion with itself - eating and being eaten, killing and dying, absorbing food and being food?

This arbitrary drawing of a line in the sand, and declaring one side of it to be populated by conscious beings, and the other not, is appropriate only to the science of the Wetiko culture - which sees life not as a self-sustaining web, circle or sphere, but as a domain to be dominated and dissected, and turned into gold and diamond rings and toy guns for little boys.

"Witch" Does Not Translate As "Murderer"

Shaman, WiseWo/man, Sorcerer....Witch.

In the deadly Wetiko culture which we call civilisation, there are words whose meaning we have forgotten, or conveniently altered to fit the cannibal mindset. Shaman seems to get a pass, mostly - and I wonder if that's because, by now, most Shamans are perceived as male? - but the epithet Witch is still, in many places and in many minds, one of the worst you can apply to a human being.

A Witch is not a person who kills others for the use of their body parts. Neither is s/he a sinker of ships and a blighter of crops. Necessarily, that is. There are other more accurate descriptors for such people - but we apply the W-word almost indiscriminately, especially in Africa, where its use has been drummed into the populace by a colonising, crusading, domineering subset of Wetikos; namely European missionaries.

Well, and many thanks to SAPRA for all the thankless work they do, trying to fight the ignorance, the racism and the inherent evil of the dominant culture's nomenclature. It's a fight with many legs on it, and a long way to go yet.


This morning my attention has been drawn to another Witch hunt which has been ongoing for decades now - and that is the demonisation of the American Pitbull Terrier. A fight , that is, between the ignorant Press on one side, and lovers and friends of the Pitbull on the other.

You see, journalists and reporters of the mass media: the name Pitbull does not translate as killer dog.


Killer domesticated animals are created by their domesticators - us - when we turn our beloved companions into stressed, traumatised, bad tempered paragons of violence. Just like ourselves. And a dog can be of any breed at all, or none, when it snaps and takes a bite out of its oppressors.

I would invite the popular press to stop thinking of the shock value of their puff-pieces on the front page (and I'm looking at you, The Star,  and one Aurelia Chapman in particular) and start considering what it is they are really saying when they unthinkingly refer to any dog which has had a go at a human as a Pitbull.

Witch does not translate as murderer. Pitbull doesn't, either.


Pic: Pitbull Federation of South Africa