A Split Decision

A Split Decision

On the 23rd of June 2016 the UK was asked to make a decision on its future. I wrote a blog about it just a few days before in my usual optimistic frame of mind. I voted remain because I believe a united world is where we should be headed. I do, however, understand that although I sense that is where we shall end up, humanity has to go through many teething issues before we choose the simple road. The answer is always simple but when humanity has gone through thousands of years oppression and pain, clarity is not an attribute we would be expected to have gained as a whole. I remain, as I said, optimistic.

When I was able to clear my mind, a few days after the disbelief of what happened had passed, I realised that far more than a simple yes/no vote had occurred. I soon recognised that a huge amount of anger had been unveiled. Having been given the chance to make their feelings known, those that voted as a protest, made it obvious that their anger had always been there. The country was no different to how it was before the referendum but now everyone was aware of it. Bringing this anger out in the open is important as I have been feeling too long that repressed emotions lie at the heart of our country’s issues. 

For the last few decades we have, as a nation, been working to remove sexism and racism from our way of being. However, if this only done by passing a few laws and changing the way people speak and behave in public, although many people will choose to change the way they feel towards others, many will just be changing their actions only. If we do not change the way we feel, these negative emotions that are kept repressed and not dealt with or voiced will eventually rise up like the ugly monster we are seeing today. Now it is open season to voice racist remarks. I feel the result of the referendum has now given those who feel they have ‘won’ but who have always felt oppressed - and so naturally transfer that feeling to the other - a sense of righteousness in oppressing those who they feel are outside their sense of 'family'. How long is it going to take before we all realise that we all brothers and sisters and that this understanding is our only way forward to peace?

My first reaction was that this has undone all the years of trying to make this country a more tolerant and open-hearted country. Then I realised that we obviously had never succeeded as this feeling of intolerance has never gone away it has just been covered with a veneer of improved behaviour. So where can we go from here. The small majority of people are speaking out but, however painful it is hear to these remarks, I do not for a moment believe that all those who voted to leave are racist, just as not all those who voted to remain are completely tolerant. No one is immune from feelings of arrogance, intolerance or lack of self-worth to name a few of the emotions that are at play here. There is much work to be done and much to learn. Sadly I feel our country is now going to have to learn the hard way. I find it hard to believe that there is not an option of simply not pressing the Brexit button, as many other countries have done. (Pulling out the ‘but that would be undemocratic’ phrase at this point I find laughable with our Government’s history). But as banks and businesses are already preparing to move out the country and our politicians are still more concerned about their own face than the country’s needs we are all going to have take the brunt in some way or another.

I see every crossroads as an opportunity and although I feel the referendum was perhaps one of the most divisive political moments in our history (other than being taken to war countless times) I also believe we can see this as a real chance to look at our country in a whole new light. Building walls, I believe is the easy way out. There are much better choices to be made, however hard they may seem. This is something for 'the people' to work towards as I can’t see the politicians making any changes. While they still work within their own laws of self-interest and bandy around words such as democracy and transparency we know there is no hope there. We live in a country where democracy has been twisted so that it is meaningless and where lies are a way of life. The combined efforts of the Government, media and the city have left the people so much in the dark as to the real truth I don’t think anyone knows what is true anymore

Sadly, I wonder that perhaps the only way that we can lift our country up to a new way of living is to sink so far into the obscurity a post Brexit world will put us in - a world where all the ‘Great’-ness will be shaken out of the mindset of the British - that the only way forward will be to throw away all the lies and fears, hatred and choose to come together in a way that serves us all, However, contrived that might sound, that is the only right way forward and I am doing everything I can to make that a reality in my world right now. 

Got to start somewhere, one step at a time.

A Vote For Life

A Vote for Life

 

            I’m not sure if you were aware but there is about to be a referendum in our country? No, I’m not joking, there are some people who are not aware. Something inside me wants to say good on them. If you can remain that oblivious to the political world that takes some doing. I have been trying to keep my head out of the papers and news channels for so long now but it’s impossible to ignore if you are concerned about the world, the country you live in and the people you share it with. And, of course, voting is so important.

            I am concerned with all these things but I try to keep my view point as wide as possible. I am very much part of the ‘in’ campaign because everything that I am working and living for is about love and connection. It is true that the EU is far from perfect but I believe it is easier to make positive changes from within. I know that many feel that because things are not good in the UK, it would be better to leave. But, when you consider all the information we are being fed, whether it is true or not, I don’t believe leaving is the answer. Our issues are of a more internal nature.

            I began to feel that everything was getting very confused. It seemed that every day brought a new viewpoint and the possibility of a change of direction. I felt like I was looking with a magnifying glass to begin with and with each step I took away from the starting point a different image would come into view. I did hear someone give some compelling evidence about some political issue about TTIP and how leaving would help in that case. However, I soon came to the realisation that the minutia, irrespective of how important their place in this huge issue is, cannot take precedence over the whole big picture we are about to paint.

            I feel when it comes down to it there are only two ways of looking at it; those that have love in their hearts and want to make a world that can carry everyone and those that live in a state of fear. These are the people that put out hate campaigns and it is very easy, in these times, to be drawn in. It is important to keep our heads and remember what kind of world we want to create around us. For a hundred years our fore fathers have been fighting against an England that was built for the aristocracy. The Britain that was great trampled all over the world and oppressed its people with our, apparently, better ways of living. As our kingdom shrank, our karma was to receive all these peoples, whose lives we altered in many ways back to their ‘homeland’. In return we have offered a place of refuge with increasing better standards of living. We have improved our racist attitudes our homophobia and most important created an amazing welfare state for all.

            This has all been aided by joining our European neighbours in an attempt to increase the awareness of a greater community that we all can share. We had a huge part in making this happen and it seems madness to think that in such a short time we could be unravelling all the good that we have been building. This unravelling goes back to Thatcher and is still on course but I feel that this referendum is highlighting the whole story in one crazy microcosmic moment.

            Getting caught up in the details, I believe, just increases the stress levels. I do think we can accept this whole experience as a gift. I was told when I had an awakening that we would be asked to choose between the light and the shadow. It was also explained that the world would only reach this point when the shadow and the light were equally matched, for it’s only when the scales are perfectly balanced that we can evolve to a better way of living. We seemed to be at that point, as though we are being offered a practice run,  where the polls were neck and neck, that we experienced, nationally, a great tragedy. The death of Jo Cox and the loss of the amazing work she did and had yet to do, was a defining moment and I hope in time when the grieving has been worked through that it will be seen that she didn’t die in vain. The bigger story offers the view that at that state of balance we had to step back from the campaigning and now it is up to us to vote from the heart as that is the only place we can really know how to feel. Without the lies and statistics it is here that we can rely on a deeper understanding of the whole. It is time to stop thinking about a world as made up of individuals but as a community that has enough to embrace all its inhabitants and then we can start creating a governing state that reflects that. This is our chance to vote for life.

New Vision

 New Vision

My journey to the heart, for those who have been following my blogs and journeys, has been a long one. That, however, is not a bad thing as far as I am concerned. A slow comfortable ride is, for me, always the best way to travel because you get to take in the scenery and really enjoy the whole process in a relaxed and contemplative manner. Anything I can do that brings me in to my body rather than into my head, or out of my body, I see as a step in the right direction.

As a musician, I have always been more interested in the aural responses in life rather than the visual. This, I feel, has kind of put me at odds with the rest of the world. Technology has highlighted this very clearly. If we look at our mobile phones every aspect involving the eye has got higher and higher in its specifications. Our cameras have more and more pixels, more than my ageing eyes would be able to notice as things become ever more blurry for me. On the other side, our music has become more and more squashed and the bandwidth narrower and narrower so the quality is hardly worth bothering with unless you’re prepared to use high-quality streaming in exchange for storage. I would go for that every time. If we look at our meeting places, in our bars, cafes etc., the decor has slowly been changing. Before we had comfortable soft furnishings that soak up the sound and make the room relaxed and easy to talk and hear what is going on. Now the carpets have been replaced with bare floors the furniture has lost the cushioning and every surface is a hard one. The sound clatters around like a ping pong ball and everyone has to speak louder and louder to be heard, creating a stressful and very unrelaxing atmosphere.

Why is this? About ten years ago I read two books by Joachim- Ernst Berendt called The World is Sound Nada Brahma and The Third Ear, on Listening to the World that explained this for me. Berebndt explains that the eye works with the masculine energy. It is the creative light that travels in a straight line from the eye out to the exterior world. From this we have created television and computers etc which takes ourselves out of our own ability to create and imagine and replaces it with outside images. As our journey into the left, masculine part of our brain pushes us to an out of kilter state, the separation from ourselves and each other grows year on year. The ear, conversely is the least understood part of the body. The cochlea is spiral in shape and reflects the life force that is all around us. It works with the fibonacci series, a mathematical formula, from which all life grows from leaves to trees to our bodies to galaxies. This is the feminine aspect of ourselves and brings us into our inner world. The spiral energy takes us from the third dimension in which we reside and spirals up through the sound, through the harmonics which are held within each note and raises our energy into the higher dimensions. 

It is in this place that we find who we truly are and here we can find peace. To close down this aspect of ourselves goes against our nature and creates a society of angry and unhappy people. I keep coming back to the toad in the boiling water analogy but only because it is so true. (For those who haven’t heard it, it is the scenario where if you put a toad in boiling water it will immediately jump out. If you put it in cold water and slowly turn up the heat it will sit there slowly adjusting to the increase in temperature until it dies. So far I believe we are that toad still happy to adjust to the worsening circumstances in which we allow ourselves to be in.) So I ask at what point are we going to decide that the heat is unbearable and make the necessary changes to choose to leap out of the boiling water. I know we have the ability we just need the desire and the awareness that things need and can change. If we continue to buy into what we are continually being sold, things which truly do not serve us, that make our traumatised egos feel better but our souls weep, will we ever change? I believe so. 

While so many are blind to this story (and of course it is only my story, well not just mine) I am ever hopeful that the blindness will somehow shift to a state of inner vision. This is where the truth can be found and I find it fascinating how the irony is playing itself out here.

Just the other day I decided to turn on the television; a rare occurrence in my house and went to the Ted Talks channel. I was just looking for some inspiration and came across a talk by a scientist who was speaking on behalf of the people who found the gravity wave. Apparently a scientist, 40 years ago, had the foresight to believe this could be achieved and managed to get the project funded all that time ago. It took till last September for the machine to be turned on and within weeks, I believe, they got their first result. How amazing is that. 

What was more amazing for me, and for them of course, is that they realised that they would never be able to see this event, however amazing their technology was, as they understood that that the cameras and our eyes are too limited. Firstly there is simply too much in the way between us and the event and secondly they know that the eye is far inferior to the ear as we can only see about ten percentage compared to what we can hear. So when the result came through it was of course as in an aural not a visual form. It sounded much like a whoop! I found this very amusing and very beautiful as indeed did the scientist and it showed me that, I believe, we are on our way home. We’ve a long way yet to go but I feel these are the first signs of our scientists recognising the importance of the ear over the eye and therefore the heart over the head. 

I am doing my best to listen more and rely less on my sight. When my partner took this picture of me last month, neither of us knew why we took it and no one offered us any insight. But there was the answer right in front of me. I am proposing an enquiry into the world where our ears become king rather than our eyes; where we listen first and judge second. The eye has so much room for error, (optical illusions are a classic case here; we have no phases like this for our ears) yet our ears are far more accurate and sensitive. 

I am working on a year-long of course of meditations and today’s is based on the idea that everything we see is only a reflection, this is a known truth that when we look at something we are only seeing the light and colours in reflection. What I hadn’t thought of before today is that it is only a reflection of our own inner light. Could this help us to see more clearly?

I would like to leave you with that insight. Any reflections on that would be gratefully received.

The Time of Reckoning

The Time of Reckoning

2016, what a year it’s been and Spring is only just raising its head. I’m calling it the year of reckoning though we probably could have called any of the past few years by the same name. But this really is the one. If we haven’t sorted any outstanding issues already now is the time. 

I know I still have many skeletons in my closet, who can honestly say otherwise. Speaking and hearing my truth is probably the answer to most my issues though I know I can’t even get close until I start feeling my truth. Layer upon layer of life’s little challenges mean that there are many walls that I have put up between me and my real self to deal with my sense of separation with spirit. Neale Donald Walsh put it very clearly in his book ‘Communion With God’ where he explains the difference between our cultural understanding of a religious god and a spiritual one. As we are told through our religious stories that god is separate from us we deal with that in different ways. With the feeling of loss, fear and need to be able to return home, the possibility of failure leads to much judgement and pain. With these negative feelings we put up barriers between our selves and our heart as all feelings are too challenging and we gradually lose sense of our truth, who we really are. The painful illusion that we bring into being as we close down our powerful and beautiful being and replace it with a version of the ego completely detached from spirit, this dulled down lesser version ourselves, creates a world of lost souls.

So how to get back to where I know I want to be. A return to the heart means a journey back to the body, to the senses. I know I have been stuck in my head for so long and though I have talking about the journey to the heart for many years now, the journey is slow. I know also that that is not a bad thing. I have always said my journey is a slow steady incline whereas I see so many others having huge breakthroughs and epiphanies and try not to be envious of their huge leaps forward. 

As the end of the year brought a few emotional releases and that led to me damaging my back and causing an inch and a half pelvic drop, I knew that this was just the straw that broke the camel’s back. Consequently, I enjoyed a few bedridden weeks to contemplate my navel. Removing the tension that I was holding in my root chakra, or rather my ass, to be blunt, was necessary before I could get to the core of my issue. Two months later and a book falls into my hands whilst visiting the lovely town of Hay-on-Wye. The many books shops stuffed to bursting with books and how is it the right one just falls off the shelf? I bought it because I thought it would help me as I am at the point of trying to lay out my book and do as much pre-publishing work as I can before it goes to print. Little did I know it would offer far more than technical help.

It was Brandon Bays “The Journey”; even the title was similar. I was looking on the astrology shelf to see how broad that section would go and if my book would fit. To be honest I think it had been moved to the wrong section as it had no astrological connections at all. Funny how these things come about.

In the book she talks about healing her beachball sized tumour and then how she goes on to create a healing method for all. It is the most powerful journey and an extremely important healing tool and the sooner we learn to recognise its truth as a culture we will all benefit.

She goes on to teach people how to release their pain, pain that they have often been holding on to since childhood and release symptoms both physical and emotional in the most profound way.

This book became the subject of many conversations and one of the most profound was when discussing the decline of our National Health Service with my parents and how our government was intent on breaking it up. When my father asked if, in the future if our government has completely dismantled it, we were capable of recreating it in the same way we had brought it to life in the first place, I replied that I didn’t think we had the post-war blitz spirit necessary to want to spend that amount of money and also that medicines and operations are now so expensive it is almost impossible with the budget our government puts aside. This was my third dimensional head speaking.

Then I thought maybe this is the blessing. Maybe as we begin to lose the NHS we will, out of desperation, turn to alternatives such as Brandon Bays healing methods and realise that there is a better a way; a way that doesn’t involve going under the knife or filling our bodies with terrible poisons labelled ‘medicine’. I realised that we will soon look back at this era as a truly dark age and that the answer is actually already here if enough people are ready to trust themselves and stop putting their power into the those that wield it. 

We have dumbed down our energy for too long and now we are being asked to reawaken and shine and know that we are all self-healing beings and if we are willing to step into our feeling senses, into our bodies and get out of our heads, all the answers are there.

I know I need help getting there, into my body, so I can listen to it and hear its wisdom. But I also know that as I already know what I am hoping for and desire it, the end is in sight. I also know that as I journey through this work there are many way ahead of me and many following close behind. 

The Problem Of Time

The Problem of Time   

Weaving the classical physics and quantum world together 

On reading Greg Braden's amazing book 'Fractal Time' he states that scientists have reached a sticking point they are calling 'the problem of time'. It set me to thinking. 
As I understand it, if time is relative then our relationship with it is the imperative. The problem is that we can only view time from our perspective. We have to learn to look as if we are outside the box. 
In a talk I give I compare the Russian Doll model to the idea that all the beings in our universe exist like this within the Fibonacci mathematical model. This I know is not new. I express the idea that each body from an atom to the universe itself are all just mini dimensional versions of our Universe. I remember one gentleman afterwards being quite upset and tried to explain to me that a cell was not at all comparable to the solar system as I had implied. He told me that electrons do not travel around the nucleus in the same way the planets go round a sun. 
I wanted to question this but couldn't find the words. I needed to sleep on it as all Pisceans know (this talk had an astrological theme which always upsets scientifically orientated people). After some thought I began to query whether the random movement of the electrons around a nucleus were possibly only apparently random to us because being so small and so fast we couldn't actually track the movement of the electrons. Just as when we move something fast, like wagging a pencil between our fingers, our eyes only pick up a single image out of the blur. Maybe if we could slow the movement of an atom down and increase the size to that of a solar system then it would travel at a speed our eyes could handle because it's nearer to our own sphere of existence, now that we have computers that can track these large scale movements. Similarly if we sized down a solar system to mirror that of an atom then maybe the planets too would seem to appear in random places or in two at the same time. It is all relative and it is all relative to us. Surely that is the whole crux of the new science we are having to embrace: the new laws of relativity. 
I think this can also be seen on much closer sections of the dimensional spectrum, if we choose to see it as a spectrum, which works for me with most ideas I explore. If we contemplate the idea that as time is inseparable from space so that it should only be called 'spacetime' then objects of a slightly different size will also work within a slightly different time frame. When I read A T Mann's 'The Divine Life' He explains it as if we work on a varying spectrum of frames per second. So a moth that has a life span of one of our days would experience many more frames per second in the their body pulses, heart beat, cell rejuvenation and of course visually, literally, how many frames per second it would see, than us. The opposite would be true of an animal such as a tortoise. This is why when we see a bird fly past the bonnet of our car and we feel we have experienced a near miss situation, the bird, working on a much faster time frame than us, has sailed through the gap thinking it had as much time as if we were on a boat sailing through a swing bridge. It's all relative and the sooner we grasp this the quicker we can move on with our understanding of time and its so called problem. 
I find it funny that whenever we humans discuss great ideas we always forget to put ourselves in the middle of it. Surely this is the only place in the physical world we can see the world from. But whether it is ecology - I am still waiting for the term to become 'our environment' rather than 'the environment' so that people can start to understand the importance of our part in our responsibility here on this beautiful Earth - or science the lofty view of the Aquarian style average scientist always forgets that it is impossible to experience the world in any way except through themselves. 
So when we contemplate the weird bendiness of time surely we have to put ourselves in the centre again. 
When we watch our clock ticking away on our phones or in our cars it seems like it is a constant, an immoveable force that we have created out of own amazing logical, systematic calibration of time. 
However, when I get in a car and plan to arrive at a certain time, even though I know it is probably an impossibility, whether it be too long or too short, it all to often makes me turn into the drive or where ever I am arriving just as the clock ticks onto the time I'd set in my mind. How can this be? 
One classic time was when leaving London late after the theatre, with a group of friends, to return to Somerset I had said in my mind and possibly to my partner who was asking when he should expect me, that we should be home at 2am. I was probably over estimating it so he shouldn't worry if we were late and allowing for things that often crop up, late after show drinks, getting lost, you know the kind of things you don't plan for. Well, we actually left early and we should have been home by 1am as traffic through London was quiet at that time, which isn't always the way but this time it was. 
We were making good head way and the mood was light. We left the M25 and as we went to turn off to the M3 the exit was closed, the motorway was shut. This seemed bizarre. We somehow had to turn back on ourselves and make our way to the M4, not a terrible detour but not great either. We'd thought we'd turn off at Chippenham and not lose too much time. After half an hour down the motorway we saw a big sign 'M4 shut junctions 12-14'. This was getting outrageous why would two motorways be completely shut at certain points, well, more importantly the points we wanted to use. So we turned off at junction 14 and our poor driver who was tiring by now had to drive down a whole sequence of B roads to try and get back to the M3. We were hoping that this far down it would be open by now. Half an hour later and time is ticking on, we reach the M3. It is open, thank the Lord and on we go. By now, I Spy and any other silly games we can remember are brought out to keep our spirits up and our driver awake. As we begin the home stretch and turn to the A303 which was always our invented route the cones started to multiply, I've never seen so many and again we soon realised that this was because the entire road had been shut down. Our last leg was being denied us and another major road on our route was completely closed. Exasperated, we made our detours and after a while someone asked what the time was. I began to see a significance. It was 1.40 and we were about 20 minutes from home. My good old clock setting mechanism had pulled rank and the Universe had colluded to get me home at the time I had requested. 
Now I can hear you laugh and so did my passengers when I begged forgiveness that I had made all this happen (in a light-hearted funny way of course) but I cannot recount without completely boring you how many times things like this have happened to me. This was just one of the more outlandish. Well I mean, 3 major roads just to get my physical world and my world of intention to collide is quite a feat to manifest but isn't that what the quantum world is helping us to understand: that our thoughts create the world. The world is how it is because we are not the observers but the participators. 
So, does time move? Yes if course it does, it bends. That's nothing new. But what I'm trying to show is that we don't see the time bending because firstly we are part of the bending so can't see it. But also the increments of movement, like those of an atom, are too small for us to observe. We can watch the second hand tick we we can't feel the minute bending of time that we create because it's too small, literally, on a different dimension from us. 
The bottom line is of course that time doesn't exist. It exists only as part of our experience of life in the third dimension as we travel through spacetime in our projected expanding experience of the Big Bang. It's real to us because our experience of it makes it so and that is real enough. However, when we learn to expand our consciousness out of our limited physical realms, like our ancients did, then our conceptual understanding of the universe will grow many fold and start to resemble the understanding that our ancients had and many indigenous communities still hold. How else did we understand the layout of our Solar System to invent the ancient wisdom of Astrology. How else could we understand the deeper aspects and wisdoms of our universe, if man had not been able to go beyond the physical world and see the it from beyond the limits of our human perspective: understandings that our scientists are only just beginning to see themselves. 
I believe science is slowly realising the huge potential that we have at our fingertips if we go beyond the fear of the unknown and dive in. Then we will realise that there is no problem with time, because time will disappear as something to be tied down and will be allowed to move and change in much the same way we can change our whole world if we choose to. 
Our thought waves are the things that are really real and they shape and form our world and our movement within it. So let's decide to use those thoughts in a positive way and see what kind of reality we can truly create. I don't want to stress the urgency in this because, of course, there is no time to lose.