"Right-Wing" is an American Post-War nonsense

If you think about it "far right" makes no sense. It is just another name for "Nationalism" the exact same argument we brainwash the military with to get them to fight "for their country." Our military is "far right"?? In America the Patriot is "far right"? It makes no sense. The very real charge of Treason punishable by death in the UK until 1998 means exactly this not support your country. Is Treason "far right"? Are spies who undermine their country Liberal or Left? It is nonsense. This whole nonsense come from America who won WW2 in the West (Russia won WW2 in the East). When America made the USWE (United States of Western Europe aka Europe ruled from Washington as opposed to USSR which was the Eastern version ruled from Moscow) it had a problem. It needed the subsumed states to be loyal to Washington but needed to distance itself from so called "Totalitarian" Moscow. So it invented this "far right" designation to suppress local rejection of Europe and Washington, while keeping Moscow on the Far Left. Leaving Washington "in the middle." But it's a huge brainwash cos it is nonsense. America like Moscow are both on the Right where that means Totalitarian. Any Imperial system is Right. Meanwhile Nationalism is actually on the Left because it rejects Imperialism and asks for local representative government. Beware the Mind Control! especially where the Americans are involved!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Now is it actually so wrong for a National government to uphold the history, culture and identity of a country? And that means suppressing influence from abroad. This should not be associated with violence against minorities. This should be associated with respect for the indigenous people. America's infamous lack of respect for indigenous people led to the world's worst genocide of American Indians. But instead the Americans point at the Nazis to illustrate the dangers of respecting indigenous populations. If a country cannot protect its own indigenous populations then who will? Now this is complex as no country is homogenous but complexity is where we need to be and a National government is by far the best informed to manage the complex needs of its diverse communities. A far cry from American Imperial Right-Wing propaganda.

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So apparently according to Wikipedia the origins of the term Right-Wing come from France where the aristocracy sat on the Right and the rest sat on the Left. So in fact the origins of the term are exactly as described above. The Left are "The People" and the Right are the Autocratic Aristocracy. Empires then by definition are Right-Wing and America fighting wars and establishing its influence overseas is Right-Wing. Resistance to the US Empires and struggles to remain independent from the West to hand power to The People are Left Wing. What is interesting is that "Freedom" (for The People) is Left Wing. SO the Americans really have got themselves very confused. Lots of Americans join the State Army to fight for growth of the American Empire with apparently little solidarity for the countries they are invading. This is like the Roman Empire and it is Right-Wing. Ironically the jar-heads recruited by the US army tend to be from impoverished backgrounds and will never see the benefits of what they are fighting for because inequality means that the spoils of war in America go to the rich. America really is one of the most Right-Wing countries in Earth and the people in America actually know very little about freedom.

The Left by contrast are a bit of a no-brainer. This political movement opposes the aristocracy and seeks to establish power for the people. It is pretty obvious that brainwashers in the US have done everything they can to turn Americans away from the Left so that they remain safely ruled over by the US aristocracy.

Austerity and Ego

Monks dressed in sack cloth remembering the suffering of Jesus in the cross. It is an enduring image and the path of the spiritual is often seen as a mortification of the mortal flesh in search of higher pleasures.

Well this is correct in a way. Once we have stopped trying to grasp permanently at physical entities especially our self and realise our grasp of things is only supposed to be temporary then the hardships of life just pass by and we remain unaffected.

By contrast stuck with the idea of a need to grasp this world permanently the best we can do is lie to ourselves and pretend to ignore the affects of suffering. We wear the sack cloth but we do so with effort to resist the discomfort and suffering. This is Ego. It is like a challenge to see how long we can resist the discomfort of sack cloth. The discomfort does not go we simply take up resistance to it. What an exhausting process! We may even magnify the suffering to see how much we can endure and string we are. This is nothing more than a circus trick. We are not progressing on the spiritual path. Buddha realised that austerity and self imposed suffering by itself achieves nothing. It will actually make things worse as it comes from the Ego which is the actual thing we are supposed to be putting under scrutiny. In the very act of enduring suffering we are strengthening the problem!

Enlightenment takes a long time, and such wisdom is no use to those who have not yet decided to let go of the need to hold on to the world with a permanent grip. This incidentally is even more exhausting. Unenlightened we try to take grasp of the world in a permanent way, feeling in our heart that if we let go then we will disappear. And in such a state the enduring of suffering is a necessary thing. Psychology says that people ensure suffering much better if they do so as a Hero on a quest turning the suffering into a challenge that they can win again.

The lesson here is that in the very long term the quest is different. It is to gradually realise that constantly resisting and trying to become victorious over suffering is not the path. The path is no longer needing to struggle to attain anything or defend anything from suffering. If we just stop acting under the conviction that the things that happen do so according to some fixed centre or unchanging self then they just happen and suffering is replaced with humble acceptance. Tolerance is also replaced  with humble acceptance. There is no effort anymore and no energy is expended when things happen.

Buddha found Middle Path. In the same way as austerity for its own sake is Ego. Indulgence is the same.  Winning, accumulating, succeeding, owning, keeping all these things can be just the opposite of resisting hardship in austerity. "Can be" in that when it is done with respect to the centre of Ego. Middle Path is anything other than this. If we are expending energy enduring hard things or ignoring good things then this is not middle path.

Buddha is not expending energy here to stay away from Mara's daughters and tolerate Mara's demons. Buddha has no fixed centre to move in one direction or the other. Against the daughters a centre appears that is attracted in that moment, and against the demons a centre appears that is repelled in that moment. But each centre only belongs in its moment and evaporates afterwards. None of those centres is Buddha for there is no fixed centre.

Where is the "Me"?

In previous post said this:

"This is a very old Indian meditation. Look at our hand and see if there is anything in there that is "me." Proof is cut that hand off and see if "me" is any less"

It's actually more subtle than this.

Imagine picking up an apple with the left hand. You can feel the apple. Now do the same with the right hand. You can feel the apple. Now cut off the left hand and give it an apple. We cannot feel it. But we can still feel the right hand. This leads to the idea that "I" am in the body side of the hand, and it being cut off takes the feeling away from "me".

But actually the cut off hand doesn't feel anything! It's not that the feeling has been "bottled" in the hand that is now separated from us. There is no feeling any more! By cutting it off you have stopped the feeling.

To get a feeling you need the nerves attached to the brain. You need the whole thing.

Now it is true that there is the phenomenon of "phantom limb" where someone who has had their limb removed can still feel like it's there. Again this leads to the idea that "we" are in the body not the hand. But this suggests that feelings exist in the body regardless of the presence of the hand or not. So why do we need a body at all to feel anything. Can't we just make it up? And then we're in real trouble because where do we make it up if we don't even need a body to create the feelings.

Well we kind of say something like "data" comes from the bodily feeling receptors and this is turned into the experience of "feeling" in the brain. But we're cheating slightly because the brain is the body. It is there on the mortuary slab during autopsy. If we have decided that feelings are mot in the body and that is just "data" then where are the "feelings" now?

So we dump material existence all together and create a Mind where the feeling and consciousness  occurs. But then we're in Descartes territory with 2 completely separate worlds. How does the data come into consciousness. One idea is that the data IS the consciousness. What looks like electrical signals for the researcher is feelings for the "subject." But where is the subject hiding? where for that matter is the researcher hiding? We already said that body is not "me" so the bodies of the research and study subject are not where these people are hiding. Somehow there are two minds hiding in the room somewhere.

Well this obviously doesn't make any sense.

The whole problem is trying to "hide" things in these pictures. Why are we doing this? Why can't things just be what they are?

So starting again.

We hold the apple in our left hand and we get a feeling. We hold the apple in our right hand and we get a feeling. We let go of the apple in our right hand and we no longer get a feeling. Equally we cut that hand off and the same result of no feeling. Perhaps we get a "hallucination" and we get the feeling of the apple even while touching nothing. That is just what it is: a feeling. And so on, and so on. There is nothing more to do here. There is no need to slot a "person" into any of these situations. Feeling happen by themselves without anyone being present!

Feelings being present without anyone being present is obvious really. If we need to put someone inside us to make us feel, then who is inside them to make them feel!

The point about feelings is that they are simple happenings like any other happening. They happen. They don't need any more scaffolding to exist.

Now in the heart of this is the pervasive idea of a "centre." The world revolves around a centre that is "me." Having this assumed centre means that we even end up trying to enforce it. Things that don't conform to this assumed idea of a centre put us off centre and we feel uncomfortable. We end up trying to restore the centre again. This is what is called "Ego" and the behaviour stemming from this leads in Buddha's analysis to suffering: that feeling that nothing is ever quite right, because nothing ever quite gets to the centre. The reason is because the centre is not real, its just a presumption that we grip onto very strongly.

My current belief is that the bliss that people report on Enlightenment is really the absence of the stress of constantly holding on to this centre. Everything we do more of less involves us grasping this centre. "I am hungry" is not just there hunger of wanting food, its the bringing of food toward this centre. When the centre does not get the food, its not the hunger that really matters, that can make us a bit scratchy and bad tempered, what really matters is that food has not made this centre their centre. Especially if the food goes to someone else we see that another centre is present and that challenges our centre. We can still make this all about ourselves by having ideas like "I'm generous I'll give them the food" or "I'm better than this, I'll not make a big deal over this" thus establishing the whole situation as being around our centre. Spiritual practice can actually make us worse because the broader and wider philosophy can put is ever more in the centre. In Hinduism there is the Atman which is ultimately identified as the Universe (Brahman) which if you do it wrong leads you to see your personal centre as the universal centre which is even worse than when you started! What should happen is you realise your personal centre is a mortal illusion and the actual centre--that previously you hung the idea of The World upon--is the same as your own. But this still places reality around a centre. This is the same as Newton trying to make all motion happen against a true stationary point. Motion is always measured between things the actual motion of which is unknown. The same with the whole of existence: it does not happen according to a fixed centre, but the centre arises between things which themselves have no fixed centre.

So the key manoeuvre we need for freedom from being a slave to this fixed centre is to let go and not need to grasp it. This does not evaporate all centre, but the centre is adrift now occurring only momentarily as things happen and then evaporating again. Most importantly being free from this expectation we no longer struggle to look for and establish this centre. For example we get humiliated and this feels bad because our centre is being challenged. If we build our perspective around something like we are "cool" anything that challenges this moves us from this centre. The struggle between what is emerging and the fixed centre is suffering. We can just ignore it and save ourselves a load of grief, and just get on with things.

 

 

Restore Nature Now - Unifying the Conservation Movement

#RestoreNatureNow Really heart warming rally in London yesterday. 350 separate conservation, ecology and direct action groups brought together to promote the simple message that life itself is under threat.

It is interesting that this blog ultimately is motivated by the same issue. But perhaps a deeper question underpins it of where do we exist in Nature in our own lives as well as collectively as humans. This I believe is called #DeepEcology

Perhaps it is personal taste or OCD, but I always wanted to get to the bottom of things and have a clear and solid foundation. Which gives rise to this blog. The corollary of that however is that anything less than "complete and solid" is insufficient. Reading banners and hearing everyone speak there is no question the passion driving people and wonderful to see that for 61,000 people at very least they do not need to be persuaded that "Life is Important" in and of itself.

But it is obvious that "Life is Important" is not an obvious thing for most people. Particular lives are important like family and friends and the pet dog, but generally its "taken for granted."

 Even after the publishing of the "Blue Marble" photo taken from Apollo 17 on December 7, 1972 it is still hard to grasp that what we have on Earth is all of life there is no other and no backup. As some banners said yesterday "There is no Earth II." 

 Yet somehow this makes little sense in our busy lives.

As Chris Packham and Megan McCubbin reminded us one of the most important mantras is "think globally, act locally." But it is very hard to get that Global Vision. At best it is guess work using statistics and research but who can really get their mind about the fact that "Life" whatever it is is a phenomenon unique the Planet Earth.

Now typically we will go beyond known boundaries and think, it can't be true. The Universe is massive there must be other life out there. We are so used under Capitalist training to the mantra of "use something, throw it away and buy a new one" but this becomes progressively less workable as the scale grows. This mantra is not scalable and how we live our lives locally cannot be expanded to globally. This would be the first indication that Capitalism is false.

This debate can go on. But I wanted to go straight into "Deep Ecology." There seems to be a deeply felt passion, but inability to articulate why we need to save or Restore Nature?

Why does it matter if we wipe Life on Earth out and create a barren desert of a planet. Why does it matter if all human life is extinguished. We will all die one day anyway why does it matter? How would you explain that life matters to a psychopathic politicians hell bent on destroying the planet with nuclear war?

This is possibly a scary thought. What if we can't answer it? What if everything is meaningless and everything we do is pointless. This is a desperately depressing thought, it is an existential threat that we fear will wipe us away. But no panic needed. There is a simple answer. See later.

Now I don't accept emotions as a valid argument here. When Chris Packham plays us the dawn chorus loud across Parliament Square in the heart of the one of busiest cities on Earth drowning out the sounds of the city it is a wonderful moment reminding us the remarkable gifts that nature gives us that are not replicated anywhere in the known universe, precious gifts that everyone there and beyond can relate to in some way. But how can you put that into words for those that do not instinctively understand or have forgotten?

There was a beautiful model Marsh Fritillary on the march. How moving that something so small could arouse so much emotion and speak so well about what we were marching for and what the whole world is missing. But again how to put into words for those who do not see this?  

Perhaps a bit unfair but when we get down deep there seems to be a lack of unity of ideas. Why? Seems to boil down to "we depend on nature, so if we lose it we damage our self."  

I would call these Utility Arguments. I do not agree with Utility as a justification. This places the value of Nature on ourselves. The moment something is of no use to us then we can destroy it. That is obviously not what people mean. That butterfly above is beautiful and value in itself. Not value to a particular human who thinks it is beautiful, but in itself. Once we allow such Anthropomorphic arguments to fill the space we are back to placing Nature on human shoulders. We are looking at Nature from a Human perspective.

One argument that was made in banners is that "We are Nature." This I will call the Ontological Argument not to be confused with the same which is used to prove the existence of God. I mean here arguments about Nature that are based on the Nature of Existence itself (and notice the use of the word Nature there). These I will argue are the valuable argument to Deep Ecology and Conservation.

Let us return to the questions above: Why save anything, why not destroy the planet? These questions come from an Human perspective. We are saying as a human what shall I do? I could destroy everything. Why not? The kind of issues that Sartre called Existential Anxiety. These all stem from an Ego Based view of reality. We are saying "I" have power and what shall I do. The Ontology here is one of Self. All such arguments fit into the Utility Type above. when we ask "why not destroy Nature" we are secretly basing the question on our self.

Once we realise that we realise the question is only valid within that Ontology. What if "I" is not so important? What if "I" actually do not have any such power at all! We shall see in a moment that Humans are not responsible for destroying the planet because this is not what is happening. We do not need to save the planet because we cannot!

The reason that the Planet is Dying is not because we have done the wrong thing, it is because we have acted from a belief in Me. That slogan "We are Nature" says exactly this: it says that what we really are is the same thing as Nature. The key point there is that in place of "me" we really find "nature."

Okay admittedly that is such a shift in thinking, literally swapping places with our mirror reflection that it may not happen properly for a long time.

But it is easy to see that instead of basing our arguments on collectively "ourselves" and individually "me" we realise the answers lie in placing everything in Nature.

Instead of saying that we should preserve nature because humans depend on it, really the truth is that we should preserve mankind because nature depends on it.

Now for people committed to basing everything on themselves and by extension Mankind this will sound odd. But sit that with that odd because the truth is odd when you first see it.

So how am "I" really Nature?

We can take time over this last bit because everything points to it, but it again will take a very long time to full soak in. Meditation is basically the most useful tool to fast track this. But we can take it slowly if we like.

I often mention "mysterious origins." Where did I come from? Well I was born. I have parents. Where did they come from? Well they were born. And so we go back in time. At the moment the belief if that we descend from ape like creatures. And so we can go back to some mysterious soup where basic organic molecules formed and somehow started life. Or perhaps those molecules came from meteorites. But however we think about it we came from inanimate chemicals on Planet Earth. Life came from inanimate chemicals from the air and rocks. Quite literally at some point there was no life just minerals and rocks and then somehow they came together to make life and eventually humans and myself. Inanimate Planet Earth literally birthed all life and humans including myself. That means when we look at the rocks and air of the planet we are looking at our true mother! There is nothing else needed to make us! Now some believe in God creating humans, but God also made Nature so in this version we still all have the same common parent. However you spin this our body comes from Nature (or at least the same creator as nature). There is nothing in us that does not come from the Planet (or God). There is literally no distinction between Myself and the Planet. Habitually we put a division in between life and non-living, and between animals and man, and between our-self and other people. But, these divisions are just convention, they are not real or fundamental.

Another way to see this is possibly easier. This is a very old Indian meditation. Look at our hand and see if there is anything in there that is "me." Proof is cut that hand off and see if "me" is any less. So we keep cutting and then end up with just our head on life support. I imagine we still think "me" exists in tact. So lets be clear at this point the whole body but the head is not any part of "me." Now it gets a bit more complicated. But it is possible to cut the brain in half. Experiments reveal that this results in two people who think they are separate. The mouth is controlled by the Left Brain while the left hand is controlled by the Right Brain. By asking questions and asking the patient to speak and draw the two sides of the brain can be interrogated and they are completely separate and don't understand each other. They start to make up stories to try to make sense of what is going on and try to make it "normal." So where is the "me" now? Well it seems to have split into two separate people each with there own "me." I imagine this process has no end. Now normally psychologists conclude that in reality we are made of multiple selves that all compete for control of the body, like a parliament voting on action. What we do is really the result of many different selves. But--and here is the crux--this makes the same mistake as the "utility" arguments above thinking that a "human" of some description lies at the heart of things and the reason and justification for things. This is a literally an Homunculus Argument. Just as we thought a "self" lives in our head when everything is cut off, that just evolves into multiple "selves" occupying the bits as we cut the core brain functions like talking and drawing. There must be a self talking and another self drawing. The "drop the mic" moment here is realising that there is no self in any of these bits. It is not that multiple selves vote to make a coherent final self, it is that there was no self anyway. At end of day you can't explain a human in terms of smaller humans inside (that is SRH). To explain a human you change from thinking about humans to Nature. We already established above that Planet is sufficient to birth all of life, why should be we surprised to find that the activity of Nature is not enough to create what we call a human, and ultimate "me." [I handle this again in the next blog it is still not completely clear]

Okay scary moment perhaps. Does this means "I" am a natural machine operating not through the decision of a little human inside (that I called "me") but due to physical forces and chemistry? Well is it enough to realise that even that question was generated by a brain working "due to physical forces and chemistry"? The very thoughts we have are created by Nature. Now we are in really Deep Ecology!

This is obvious right? If I fail to drink water then very quickly I get dehydrated and my thoughts start to get messed up, I hallucinate see mirages, and eventually I fall into a coma and don't think at all! How does this "me" inside need water so much? It can only be that it is really based on chemistry!

That is perhaps a "category mistake" does the character in a film depend on the light of the projector? But in a way yes. If the bulb blows then the character's escapades end in a truly profound way! In the same way our "Thoughts" think of themselves that they are so profound, but if the body dies then so do they. So why do we write like I am doing here? Well true once this is written I can die and the words live on. But its another Ontology Argument because I learned the art of writing English from the community that lives on after I am dead. In a way the Community is writing this, and I am just the vessel that physically carries out the acts. Is anything I write here relevant or original? Throughout I make reference to ideas from my community and explore ideas that are brought to me by that community. But communities are just made up of humans and like lost languages they eventually die and not just me who writes this, but the very language, relevance and meaning of this will be lost one day. We should not give so much credence to Thoughts! What lies behind those thoughts is the biology, chemistry and physics that really makes all this happen! But care now as we have taken a really deep dive: "biology, chemistry and physics" are just thoughts themselves: I am now referring to Nature! and that means perhaps "phenomena". Just the simplest manifestations of reality like heart beats, birds singing, sun rises, anger, thoughts occurring to us, remembering something, getting an answer, thinking of a question, realising something, love, the feeling of a carrot crunch in our mouth, feeling of a rain drop on our hand, a breath of wind against our face... the list is endless: these are the most basic elements of reality. Every single one of them is Nature.

It is from this base level that everything comes.

So returning to the top. Why conserve? Is so far from the issue its almost pointless asking it. How could you even think this without Nature providing you with a brain to think it?

As a result we see that there is nothing to conserve. Nature underpins everything already. Even the logging company destroying trees is Nature. The desires of the investor sin the logging company to make money are just Nature. The people shopping for wood is just Nature. The farmers wanting the land for cattle ranching is just Nature. The animals whose homes are being destroyed is just Nature.

We are Nature.

But we think so is that it. Do we just let the planet get destroyed?

Okay now here the issue becomes clear. Why are they cutting down trees?

It is because they have something "better" to do with the land than trees. We see the Utility Argument already. The trees are already being viewed from a Human Perspective.

Didn't we just write 1000 words showing that really everything is from a Nature perspective.

The reason that the planet is being destroyed is because people are not looking at things from the Nature Perspective that underpins everything whether they notice that or not.

There is a deep darkness across the world as people become ever more Human and Self centred and base their lives ever more on the superficial basis of Humanity and Self.

Our lives are becoming ever more trivial. And as we value our own lives less then everything else becomes devalued. We live just for ourselves which is such a small way to live. Even living for the benefit of Mankind is a small existence. Putting any limits on things is to make our lives more trivial.

So the sickness of the Planet is actually a sickness that includes ourselves. Everything is sick. Planet Earth is sick.

The answer is to let the Nature Perspective shine again and stop covering it over with Human and Self view.

It's a simple as just letting and appreciating the sunrise all by itself; being for a while no more busy and planet saving than that. If we all did that then the problem evaporates like the night with the first glow of dawn.

An easy way to solve the problem of Capitalism...

Usual news that the UK health service is facing huge problems, this time heart disease.

Well it is the Capitalists that have defined the "modern life style" that causes heart disease with endless adverts for cars, TV shows and junk food so basically we end up driving to the supermarket and coming home to consume our over processed food in the front of the TV. IF you wanted to kill off a population you'd be hard pressed to find a better way.

Really it is time the governments applied massive taxes to these industries and a law needs to be passed to allow government to raid the bank balances of Capitalists who have creamed off profits while creating wide ranging damage to society and the world.

Now obviously such a law would cause the rats to flee the sinking ship and that really underpins the parasitic and unwholesome way that Capitalists rots your country. So good riddance, take your ill begotten gains with you.

In its place the UK Treasury needs to start lending at no interest. Why would a treasury need to make a profit from loans when the whole point of loans is to grow the economy and create jobs: that is the profit!

Removing the bottomless pits of insatiable private greedy would basically solve the whole problem of national health and many other problems in one simple move.

The only problem with that is those Capitalist pits of criminal money are what pay our political parities at the moment so you can only vote for Capitalist backed candidates. The voting system is itself corrupted by Capitalism.

Long way to go for us to get out of this mess that primarily Thatcher unleashed.

British waterways have experienced 6000 illegal spills in 1 year, but how was Capitalism ever supposed to be different?

BBC uncovers 6,000 possible illegal sewage spills in one year

What I want to know from literally anyone is how was privatisation supposed to work? Since privatisation, £65.9 billion has been paid out in water company dividends. In a public system nothing is paid out to anyone except employees, as all money is allocated simply for the job and none goes into enriching superfluous non-working wealthy investors.

The first responsibility in any listed company is to provide these dividends for investors. That is what listed companies primarily exist for. Secondary is the actual business and at the bottom the customers and the actual product they provide. No one has ever explained how the Capitalist model was ever supposed to work. There is some stuff about "competition" weeding out unsuccessful companies, but competition means 2 people doing the same job, so under Capitalism the one built in corrective mechanism to stop investors stealing everything is built on inefficiency and wasting our money (Fascism is not what Churchill says - it was designed to solve exactly this issue of waste). Capitalism simply does not work (for customers anyway). Which I suspect is why Capitalist countries spend their whole time sanctioning and blowing up other countries to spread capitalism and ironically remove "competition".

Anyway bottom line Privatisation has not, and I can't see how it was ever going to work. However I wonder if it's a coincidence that the people who edit the press, pay for the politicians and political parties, pay for education and persuaded us that Privatisation was a good idea are strangely all Capitalists. Hmm coincidence? If it turns out that Capitalism does not work... wow the last few centuries of killing hundreds of millions of people to promote it and knock out other systems like Feudalism, Fascism and Communism what were they actually for? ... By coincidence it was the Capitalists who told us it was worth fighting for... really a big hmm.

And how did the arch Capitalist country viz America get so powerful? They like to think it was Capitalism, but strange they also needed to kill off 10 million weak people who rejected Capitalism, mass steal their land and turn it to commercial farming (no other country has ever annihilated all the people on its land to start profit making), and then imported another 10.7 million slaves to build the country and run industry at no salary to make massive profits and an absurdly wealthy country which then set about stock piling weapons to expand and take over the world. What I love about American Jews is while they bang on about Holocaust they don't realise that everywhere they stand in America is on the bodies of the largest genocide in human history: they are fully complicit in the biggest Holocaust in history. Irony is always very ironic and all because of Capitalism. Wasn't there a Jewish prophet who said something like, let the one without sin cast the first stone: Jews do a lot of stone hurling.

So remind me how it was ever supposed to work, and why did anyone ever get fooled by its pure evil? And I've not even mentioned the strange coincidence that while humans have lived quite happily on this planet for 1/4 million years since Capitalism arose 300 years ago the Planet is now virtually destroyed and we face ecological catastrophe that threatens all life on earth. It is not just British water ways that Capitalism threatens but all Life. It is firmly and provably the economy of Death.

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So Pro-Capitalists will probably turn to the rise of modern medicine and farming techniques and how many billions of people have been saved by Capitalism.

This is slightly disingenuous. As argued in a previous post if you plot British population the key moment when it goes from flat to growth is the year that Lister implemented the Germ Theory of Disease. Literally the moment people understood that disease was caused by in particular bacteria they started to sterilise and instantly solved the issue of bacteria based mortality especially in child birth. It was literally an over night sensation. 1000s of years of gradual insights came together with Pasteur, Koch and Lister.

All of them were funded by royal patronage and donation. None of them was working for profit or to create returns on investment for investors. None of them was part of a Capitalist system. While donations may well have come from Capitalists, it was not "Capitalist Investment" which would require a return and dividend.

We can see in other systems like Soviet Russia and Fascist Germany how enormous progress can be made by systems other then Capitalism. You could even go so far as to say that Capitalism is the very worst system as it limits funding to just those things where a provable return can be demonstrated. "Blue Skies" research is famously hard to get funding for. I have insider evidence of this from a person working within Pharmaceutical research.

On one occasion "blue skies" funding into oral vaccines which would have literally saved the lives of billions was snowballed and redirected into Viagra research. Viagra a product for the 1st world was the better economic choice with better returns than something for poor 3rd world people. Worse a legal team patented and protected all the research so it could not be developed by anyone else. This is Capitalism!

On another occasion when a paper was published demonstrating that Helicobacter pylori was the cause of most stomach ulcers a legal team was dispatched by a here unnamed Pharma giant to attempt to discredit and shut down the research. The reason obviously: Capitalist economics. An ulcer treatment from said giant was a hugely profitable cash cow. Being able to cure stomach ulcers with a single application of antibiotics would destroy profits. As a capitalist company with investors its first priority was to protect profits and return for those investors and so was committed to protecting that product and obstructing any challengers. How is such a mechanism ever suppose to promote progress? This is the unfortunate truth of Capitalism that it puts the wealthy and investors above the customer (who is never-the-less the real provides of labour, wealth and money). Capitalism is just another way that wealthy elites have learned to exploit the poor.

So in fact the world has progressed and life expectancy has increased not because of Capitalism but seemingly in spite of Capitalism. And this is most clear when you consider that all the huge gains in life expectancy of the last decade are all due to China. Obviously diminishing returns in the West that there is not much more life left to extend, but just pointing out that a system that the West constantly criticises and says is inferior has done exactly the same as the West. Being able to increase life expectancy thus seems to be achievable by anyone which rather undermines the initial claim of Capitalism that it is responsible for increasing life expectancy. What is left in defence of Capitalism and its supposed successes?

Railway Tracks as Wildlife Corridors

It's well established fact amongst naturalists that disused railway tracks are nature havens in particular for reptiles.

Why is this?

• It could be that while disused, railway tracks remain out of public access so wildlife benefits from low disturbance
• It could be that the gravel laid along railway tracks provides good sunning spots for reptiles to warm up in mormning and evening - especially important for maturing eggs especially in viviparous species like Zootoca vivipara and Vipera berus.
• Railways provide joined up corridors between populations enabling spreading, inter-breeding and resilience to local fluctuations in environmental and population. This is the hypothesis of interest here.

If you want to destroy an army the best approach is to somehow break the army up into parts and then tackle each part separately. At its extreme if your army could fight each soldier one at a time then you would win the battle.

The reason for this is obvious if you take 2 soldiers. With a pair of soldiers if you trip soldier A, you cannot just go in for the kill as soldier B will defend A. While you attack B, A gets up and then you are back to fighting 2 soldiers. The group often (not always as we see at the Battle of Agincourt in 1415 where a crush destroyed the French army) sums to a force greater than the parts.

Likewise isolated animal populations become vulnerable. A weaker population might be heavily affected by a year of bad weather. With no support from stronger populations it may never recover. But once it is gone, then the stronger populations are weaker too. A simple wildlife corridor allowing mixing or populations allows "fallen" populations to be repopulated and recover, and in turn the mixing provides support for stronger populations. Genetic diversity is another important under current here.

You can see this very obviously with butterflies and birds that start to colonise Britain as the climate warms. The first few colonisers try and fail but presumably their arrival starts to change the ecology and set up the necessary interconnected niche. Perhaps they eat a food plant before a native species and so have the start of an negative impact on native species. Eventually you start to get populations doing a successful breed. But a bad winter kills them off. However as populations rise the chances of someone surviving winter increases and that has a knock on effect on future populations. Eventually when the population is large enough there is resilience to environmental fluctuations. This is not just a matter of rising temperature which is crucial. but also the benefits of having a large diverse population with wider genetic variability for evolution, and enough individuals to increase the "luck" and chance of someone surviving. If populations can be joined then these luck and genetic factors are increased. In a joined population if anyone survives a bad winter in any of the groups then they can spread to repopulate all the groups. If they remain isolated then a bad winter could knock out all the population but one which then becomes very isolated and vulnerable.

I do not know if surveys have been done on working railways but I've anecdotally noticed that land adjacent to railways has a higher than expected population of reptiles. I'm in the middle of plotting my own observations in my local patch and collecting more data but it could well be that railway lines provide essential wildlife corridors that link wildlife populations across the country providing better flow of genetics and reducing the risk incurred by local population disasters.

I notice a lot of work done on railways to provide animal shelters along the lines in the South Eastern lines so it looks like railways are already maintained in connection with environmental advisers. If this is true it is an amazing achievement and provides (at least as far as I can see) an extremely under reported and under acknowledged part of UK conservation.

Whether funding for this comes from government or is accounted for by the rail network the general population should be made aware of this as I think there would be wide support and go a long way to increase the "green" credentials of rail transport.

Obviously road networks provide a similar resource of corridors and along motorways there is equal clear wildlife management with road verges allowed to develop naturally. Everyone on UK motorways will have seen Kestrels hunting small mammals in the road verges. This is in addition to raptors and carnivores benefitting from road kills which provide a ready source of carrion meat.

However it seems that roads are far more busy and cars make contact with the road leading to the hiuge amounts of road-kill that can be seen on roads. Driving through Somerset for example there seems to be a dead badger every 100m in some places. Meanwhile a train can run over the heads of animals and perhaps runs only every 10 minutes. Obviously the existence of the 3rd rail on the ground poses a huge danger to animals as any contact is instant death. But in diesel and overhead tracks this is not a risk. Certainly foxes use our local track with 3rd-rail without apparent issue so its not a deciding factor on the value of railways.

So its a complex issue to get a clear view of. But anecdotally responding here to the observation that disused railways are wildlife havens, and there appears to be a higher than expected population of reptiles in land adjacent to railway lines.

To be developed...

Sky says "Stigma attached to going to work" well of course how else could it be?

https://news.sky.com/story/quite-often-there-is-a-stigma-attached-to-going-to-work-inside-britains-labour-market-crisis-13150687

One of the most messed up things about #Capitalism is the contradiction over work.

What do the rich aristocracy do? Well they don't work, cos that is why they need money to hire other people to do the work for them.

Indeed the whole point of money is to limit resources to the poor so they have to work, and give the rich the ability to offload work onto the poor.

No one likes work, or if they did you wouldn't need a salary. It's not like they pay you to eat ice cream.

Obviously more complex than that, but Capitalism simply has no idea what it is doing here apart from imposing a class system of non-owners who have to go to work, and owners who don't.

There was this TV interview with a girl on a new Thatcher created Under-Class council estate who was asked if she worked "piss off I'm not working class." That says everything about the nonsense of Capitalism.

Don't pretend for a minute Capitalism makes any sense or provides a blue print for the future, it's just an unfortunate hangover from the days of Empire. #EndCapitalism

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Now this line is worth some extra thought "It's not like they pay you to eat ice cream." Salary arises when you do something for someone else in a monetary system. Obviously in service sector and charity sector where "need" governs then volunteering is quite normal, and generosity and helpfulness provide a much more profound mode of behaviour than in a monetary system. As mentioned through this blog everything important (sunlight, rain, air, our conception, growth and birth**, etc is free) so why should we charge? But in a monetary system if someone gives us what we want, then we compensate monetarily. "They pay you to eat ice cream" because it is what you want. Unless it's in a movie, or perhaps you are hired as a fake customer to promote a ice-cream brand or shop. Then whether you like ice-cream or not is not the issue, its that you are delivering what someone else wants. Then you get cash. The idea of doing a job you like then is irrelevant to the cash. So the key is the find something you like doing that also give other people something they too like, then you get cash as well. So that was a basic analysis that probably wasn't needed its so basic.

** interesting SRH there in the form of Anthropic Principle. When you say your "conception was free" this presupposes your conception. If you died then was it free? There is an implicit assumption that someone is the beneficiary when we speak of "free". So this supports the monetary argument above that "free" is desire based. Getting "what you want" without compensation is "free." So the Sun rising and providing morning light is "free" if we want day light. Of course someone due to be hung at sunrise may not want it and consider it free at all. A kick in the head is "free!"

Relativity and D-Day 80

One of the greatest theories is Einstein's theories of relativity that did away with Newton's Absolute Inertial Frame which places everything relative to absolute space, and instead said that all frames of inertia are relative.

It's quite intuitive. As mentioned in a recent blog sitting on a chair we are stationary relative to the floor, but we can see the shadows move and the position of the Sun move so we know either the Sun is moving or we are moving. It turns out that having us move solves a load of problem. So relative to the centre of the Earth we are moving, at about 1000mph--on the equator--as the Earth revolves. So we have two answers for how fast we are going: 0 relative to the floor, and 1000mph relative to the axis of the Earth. But pick anything and you have a new speed. There is no actual speed! This sounds weird. But how fast we are going is purely relative and we have no baseline fundamental speed. To ask how fast am I going without a point of reference is meaningless.

What probably confuses us is there is an absolute and that is change of motion. When we speed up and slow down we can feel that and that change is absolute to all our speed. If we get in a plane and fly away from the rising Sun at 1000mph (on the equator) we can stop the Sun and stay stationary relative to the axis of the Earth. But to do this we need to feel the force in our seat as the plane accelerates and changes our speed, in this case slowing us down by 1000mph!

Now getting used to the idea that we have no absolute speed is really quite hard. But if we have no absolute speed then we have no absolute position either. This seems really hard to grasp. If I am in this room relative to the Earth surface but both room and me are travelling at 1000mph then our position is really changing all the time. And we are in a solar system moving at 100,000mph and a galaxy adding 800,000mph and who knows what else outside this. We have no absolute position! Position is relative to something else. This takes some REAL getting used to.

But it is worth it because in fact all things are relative. I'm just getting my head around the "self" being relative. You know how some people like us, and others don't like us, or sometimes people think we are really good at our job, and sometimes other don't. And sometimes even we like ourselves or don't like ourselves, and sometime we think we are good at things and sometime bad. It is like we are full of different selves, or can be one person in one location and another person in another location.

Is this not the same as the consideration above about having no absolute root location.

In here is an extremely tough thing to grasp so don't let it go and think oh that is easy, or what-ever. 

Having no "absolute" root is the essence of existence.

Once we get used to having no fixed location then we can accept that we are stationary relative to the floor, but travelling at 800,000mph relative to galactic centre.

Likewise when we get used to the fact we have no fixed self, then we can accept that at this time people think this of me, or I am this, and at another time people think something difference. It is not that we "change" it is that we only get a foxed value relative to something. Change that something and the fixed value changes. There is no rocking chair called "self" that we can retreat to and call that the "real" me, and more than we can retreat to a place of absolute stop and stationary.

Ooo hectic busy busy. I am always moving and I am never my true self... exhausting.

Well actually the opposite. When you realise that the sense of movement only comes about relative to something else, then you realise you have no true motion at all! When the train next to you pulls away and you feel like you are moving, well relative to them you are. And when you pull away exactly the same experience. The difference is just the acceleration in the second case as your rate of motion actually changes. We are not being nihilistic here and not saying that we cannot move or denying anything. We are simply pointing out that there is no situation where we find a true stationary because it does not exist. And if it does not exist then we have no absolute motion. Nothing hectic at all about that: motion and our bodies do not go together without something else in the mix.

The same goes for self. We have all these situations. Some make us feel great and we are a great self, others don't work so well and we think ouch not a great self. Perhaps we think we are good at jogging, but there will always be someone faster than us. Or we think we are a nice person but then we lose our temper and decide we are not nice any more, or we meet someone amazing and realise we have a lot of work to do. The mistake is to think we are a single changing self. But in fact--like with motion--we are having a self fixed each time. It becomes permanent just in relation to that other thing. This is vaguely analogous to the "wave collapse" in Quantum Physics where things exist as a possibility and then only become an actual value on observation. Except here it is more radical as there is no prior model that collapses when it is measured, we have no numerical position, not even a probability, without a measurement point, and likewise we have no form of self without a situation in life. And because of this there is no time when we are a "true" self. "Self" by itself is nonsense.

I hear that people go mad in isolation. I wonder whether the evaporation of self is not a welcome event when you are brought up to believe it is a solid fixed thing inside you. You think "you "is like a pilot moving around through life like Dr. Sam Beckett in "Quantum Leap" and while situations change there is still a fixed entity at root.

This is wrong. This is like saying that we have a fixed position that is suddenly sped up and slowed down as we measure our self. So this stationary position we think we are in is somehow sped up to 1000mph when we think about the Earth rotating, or 800,000mph when we think about the Milky Way rotating. This makes no sense, and the idea of a Fixed Self passing through time and taking up a position in all our situations in life is basically wrong and something 100% for the bin.

If we use film as an analogy, we see the "same" actors taking on different roles and behaving in different situations. Some actors do indeed do the same kinds of things, but others dazzle us by appearing to be different people really adapted to their role and situation. The latter type are more revealing about the truth, in reality there is no "fixed person" moving through all these roles. If there was we end up with the strange question of wondering whether an actor ever stops acting even when they return to "themselves." How do we know they are not acting even when they are introduced by the birth name. What is the difference between playing a made up character and playing themselves? And then we ask what is the character of the person who is playing all these roles? We get stuck in a kind of Platonic quandary. If we have a fixed self, what is it's character? It needs no character in order to take on other characters? But what is a self without character? This seems like the Indian question of whether God has a personality. This creates quite a division in theology. Burrowing into this we see the problem arises because of a persistent idea of a "fixed self" like a Dr. Sam Beckett sitting behind everything. When we get to questions of death of course this becomes even more perplexing. What happens to our Dr. Sam Beckett when the host body dies? Can't remember how Quantum Leap dealt with that. But if there is no Dr. Sam Beckett then no problem.

I'm sure for more realised beings who have begun the journey of relativity, they would expect the self to evaporate without there being anything to be relative to.

Very early days for me, but I suspect the experiences of those like Buddha and Eckhart Tolle are not that self disappears when they enlighten, but that they see it as something that turns up and then leaves again.

That seems crazy to us westerners who believe in Souls and Selves that are so fixed that they might survive death, but if they do not they are certainly a pebble we carry our whole lives. The idea we can put that pebble down seems nonsense. "Who puts the pebble down?" we think. "Who just thought that?" we think again.

Central to the idea of the Pebble Self is that things come from the Pebble. The Pebble thought this, and another Pebble is writing this blog.

Well someone is definitely writing this, and I hope (with some embarrassment) someone may read it and see flaws in it and realise what an idiot I am. Perhaps that person will be the same pebble that wrote it some year later. This is all true, but the problem is trying to put a "centre" into that pebble, just as we try to put a nail into space to locate a centre and true stationary place for us to rest.

We already worked out above that we have as many speeds as we have things to measure again, and there is no fundamental speed for us to have. We simply do not have a fixed "speed." It all depends upon being relative to other things.

In exactly the same way we have as many selves as we have situations and people to be relative against. But none of them is a fixed true self, somehow hidden away like a pebble that has a fixed location and fixed identity.

This sense of there being nothing fixed in there, of it being free to become whatever it becomes in relation to something else, they call that Sunyata.

This may seem like nihilism and throwing everything away. But just because we have no pure fixed stationary speed, when did that ever stop us from moving? Sitting at this chair stationary regarding the computer, does not stop the Sun moving across the sky as we also move around the Earth. Both at the same time. So which speed are we 0mph relative to the computer or 1000mpg relative to the Earth axis? They are both real. In the same way the many selves we have are all real to. Perhaps sitting at the computer is the speed we want to focus on, but note the sun still moves even while we ignore that speed. Likewise there are selves we like and want to hold on to. But this does not make them fixed, we are just holding them for a bit like a pebble.

Having no actual speed and having no actual self are actually profoundly relaxing in fact. Both these things are not really me.

So where does D-Day come into this. Well certain people (not quite sure who) are very keen that we hold onto a particular self or version of D-Day. We are told again and again about what D-Day was and how we are to think about it. Those people want it fixed.

Well no question it is all these things. But like speed, it only looks like this relative to something else. Change that something else and it all looks different.

I have always like to look at war from the perspective of another species or perhaps an alien. They look upon Humans and see them beating each other up and they must think how odd. Why did those humans killing 80 million of those humans? And WW2 was by far the greatest avoidable loss of life in human history. Plagues and natural disasters we still struggle to stop, but war is decided by nothing but humans and carried out by nothing but humans so is completely avoidable.

Obviously the other perspective in any war is the "enemy." The Allies who remember D-Day today were the amalgamation of the British and American Empires looking to defeat the German and Italian Empires. They also wanted the Russian Empire but decided to take a break. From the perspective of  people outside the Allies it was just the same old Imperial warfare of the last 400 years. Just like Allied Soldiers Axis soldiers fought for their countries and in the case of Axis a chance to define themselves free rom the British and American Empire. What I find unusual today is that the Axis offer a very attractive option, the idea of countries being free to share international power and collaborate on multiple axes seems a very advanced modern idea. But the US have decided that they do not want Axis and we must all march to the beat of a single drum in Washington. Given this I don't understand the desire if countries to join NATO or any Washington led organisation and lose their own freedom. Russia for example is only fighting for its own freedom after all and does it really represent a lesser freedom than Washington?

Anyway that paragraph expresses the "speed" and "direction" of the whole situation relative to a different train going at a different speed and direction. Miraculously D-Day looks different.

So we discover that in fact all things are relative. This does not make them less real, but it reminds us that that reality only last as long as we are in relation to some other thing. Change that thing and the reality changes. And this teaches us the fundamental truth that there is no fixed reality.

Woah wait "fixed truth that there is no fixed truth" kind of. "there is no fixed truth" is not necessarily a fixed truth, it's a remark that when you start with the idea that reality is fixed, you discover that really its relative. Once you have let go of the original idea of fixed then none of this is relevant anymore.

Sacred Landscapes. What are Song-Lines?

There is something about a journey that leads to the same line structure that you get in a sentence or a story. You start somewhere, you go somewhere else and eventually you get to the stop point. You can't be in two places at the same time and so you trace a line from start to finish.

We all know bus maps that show the various places we visit on the buses journey from its starting point to its end stop.

Sentences are exactly the same. And while there is a lot going on in our brains, when it comes to thinking it through or telling a story we are forced to start somewhere and go through various stages and then we get to the end.

Now this linear nature of a journey is rather lost since the invention of paper to draw 2D maps and recent mathematics to store graphs as 2D matrices. Now a whole landscape of destinations can be stored in X/Y space and all possible journeys can be seen as when we call up Google Maps. However when we actually select a journey we are back to a line and when we do that journey the step by step nature of it returns powerfully.

But before the existence of writing and paper to draw maps however people recorded everything in language and so in lines--both lines of words but also the line of a path. For the vast majority of human existence all things were recorded in language and that took the memorable form of verse, chants or songs.

So perhaps it's weird now but maps used to be a wealth of songs, and like a London taxi driver learning "The Knowledge" people learned all these songs to know their way around.

But Song-Lines are much, much more than this. The modern world is obsessed with building and laying roads, pavements and putting up signs and statues of famous people to remember the Past.

But in the Past the world was already here. People lived in the world and did not need to make new things or big changes. Why change what is already perfect. Rain falls from the sky, forms rivers; the deer breed and run through the woods by themselves, plants grow and put out fruit all by themselves: the world is already here and perfect. Before very recently people only needed to know and respect how the world worked to live. All this knowledge was embedded in the song-lines. And instead of man made sign-posts, natural features like mountains, rivers, rocks, even plants and animals became the notable points in the land that were captured in the songs.

But furthermore to follow a Song-Line is not even just a walk through the knowledge and the culture of a people it is also a walk through History. The names of places and features, and the stories around how those features even came to exist are all embedded in the songs. It sounds odd today in our modern world dominated by scientific factual narratives, but stories existed to envelop and embed in people's minds the important features of the landscape. I saw recently a double peaked mountain that local legend said had been cleaved by a giant throwing a boulder. That story immortalises this feature so people will always recognise it and never forget it, passing it on through the generations: known as the mountain cleaved by the giant. One day lost in the mist we see the cleaved mountain we were told about and suddenly we know where we are. This is not just pointless leisure fantasy but encoding the fundamental parts of the world for survival.

This is not an unfamiliar idea even today. We have inherited the Greek constellations which include important heroes immortalised in myths that we still tell today. And while it is usually thought today that it is romantic to put things in the stars, more importantly an already existing part of the world was being appropriated and brought into the culture and history of the people. Today we are more likely to make a statue of Perseus and the land just supplies the raw rock for this work. But this underlines the subordination of land by more modern culture. The bringing of existing parts of the land into the culture unchanged reveals a prior respect for these features. This is being exponentially rapidly lost now. And did Perseus really exist? It does not matter. He makes the night skies familiar and meaningful, ties the story to reality and upholds and preserves the important elements of the culture just like a Song-Line. It is amazing how Ancient Greek modern America is. For all its "modernity" it still recalls profoundly the story of Perseus in the 21st Century just as we still use that constellation.

None of this is actually unfamiliar to the modern mobile phone hosting Google Maps equipped person. We can go on day trips (and people do) to see things like the "Giant's Causeway" in Ireland. This is part of an odd not very attractive song-line now: but you drive to the car park and then follow the foot paths and signs to the coast where you will see a place immortalised by a story of a fight between two giants and a causeway built between Ireland and Scotland.

 

Now we part dismiss this today because we have other more respected songs to sing which tie in vast amounts of knowledge of geology. They say the hexagonal pillars are the result of the way basalt from an ancient volcano cooled. However which would you rather have if lost: a geologist singing his song of plate tectonics, volcanos and eruptions or a song-line with a story of giants which explains that the causeway links to Scotland if you cross the sea, and will have knowledge of what fish are good to eat in the sea there and where to find water, and which direction to travel home. Plus it will be a song from your community and like an immortal pop song will remind you of your home and youth, and it is a song that was sung to you by your parents and was sung to them by their grand-parents and was sung all the way back to the time the causeway was created and even before to the creation of the world. The song is as real and solid as what it talks about.

This intimate way in which the language, songs, culture, community, history and land all interlink is a Song-Line. It lets us know not only where we are in a physical landscape but also where we are culturally and in time. It tells us everything about who we are. It makes the land a living part of us.

These are fiercely guarded by Aboriginal communities in Australia and I think quite rightly. The problem with song-lines is that modern westerners will just plot them on 2D maps, digitise them and perhaps have concerts where people sing them. But this is all as worthless as planning a walk in the Lake District say up Sca Fell and then not actually walking it. Who goes to an art gallery to see this:

There is a short route. It has all the information needed for the route but it is missing one central thing: the actual land. Without the land it is of no worth at all. And a song-line is worthless without the land, and the people and the communities and the history. They all go together. It could even be said the song-lines are of no value to outsiders and so it is quite right to protect them. They are irreplaceable and unique and virtually unteachable without belonging to the community. To think they are no more than Wainwright walks in the countryside is missing the whole point.

And it is this way that modern humans dip into landscapes for holidays and day trips which underlines the poverty of our culture and the way we are divorced from the land. As argued before such vast divorce feeds ultimately into divorce from everything including our bodies and our whole planet. This is the root of the ecological crisis and the recent destruction of the planet by Western humans. We killed our songs and now everything is dying.

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Now one thing I don't understand is what do people with song-lines make of parts of the land that are not part of a song. If you are "lost" and cannot think of a song for the area then where are you? I wonder what this experience is like for people with song-lines.

I wonder whether there is any insight in the book "Walkabout" by James Vance Marshall. Was the boy on a song-line? Long time since read. TBC.

Motion is Relative (and so is Self)

This started as a foot note to a previous post but decided to give it its own post. It concerns the simple physical journey we might make to a grave stone (but obviously there is the metaphorical journey of life which is also very similar).

If we try to think about how far a grave stone moves in a year we get an interesting result.

We drive the same route as we did last year and so we think it has not moved. Perhaps a little bit of subsidence due to the soil settling.

And it is the same time of day and year which means the Earth is in the same place around the Sun. So it has not moved locally and it has not moved in the solar system.

But then we find that the solar system itself rotates around the galaxy. Relative to galactic centre the grave stone has actually moved almost a billion kilometres in a year. This is utterly bonkers and we kind of ignore it. But it is true.

But it gets even more crazy because the while Milky-Way galaxy is itself moving relative to the galactic cluster centre.

This is all completely bewildering. But there is just one thing to grasp here:

Motion is relative. Which means there is no, and can never be, just one answer.

That is to say that we can only know our state of motion by measuring it against something else and depending upon what we chose we get a different answer.

From this we can say we have no definitive state of motion. So we cannot actually answer the question of how far the grave stone has moved in a year in an absolute way. It can only be answered relative to something else.

Sitting there reading this how fast are you moving? There is no one answer. Relative to the the seat then no motion, but relative to the Earth 1000 miles per hour due to rotation, and then also 30km/s due to the orbit of the Sun. But which does it feel like? Well both are true. This is why you cannot sense state of motion because how then could you have different answers. (Technically it is acceleration which is absolute and that you can sense and measure absolutely.)

This seems really odd. We have always (probably) assumed that movement and "going places" was something that was definable and under our control. But actually there is no absolute state of rest or motion. It actually makes no sense to say--in an absolute way--what out position or state of motion is.

Now this is a window into a completely fundamental truth that in fact everything is like this and has no absolute foundation. It is all relative to something else. Homework is figuring out how we can make what seems to be an absolute statement like that which says that all things are relative and stand in relation to something else.

This was written in the context of sacred landscapes. The reason why we feel some solidity to our location and motion is because we implicitly (even today in the post Star Trek generation) assume things relative to the land, or more generally the surface of the Earth. Land, all these 100s of 1000s of years after the start of humanity, is still fundamental to our whole concept of place and motion.

Calling up Google Maps and getting directions we will be told it will take so long to cover some distance. But how far will we have moved? Google Maps is just showing us the distance and movement relative to the start point on the land, but the land itself is moving. Actually we can never know how much we move, because such a value does not even exist. Belief in absolute "motion" is exactly like belief in fixed "self" they are always only relative, there is no absolute thing there. And yet we are here even with no fixed position or speed!

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Rehash that in another way:

Someone once said to me ages ago if we could understand motion we would understand everything. Perhaps he was right.

So we have a state of motion right? What is it?

Perhaps seated it is zero relative to the floor. But relative to the Sun it is 100,000km/h with orbital speed on top of that. Relative to the Galactic Centre it is more like 828,000 km/h. So while we sit here our "state of motion" has many values and a different value depending on how we look at it. But it has no definitive fixed value.

What we are more aware of it acceleration. Sitting at rest relative to the ground we have only the acceleration of gravity and so know that our state of motion is not changing. When we accelerate we know exactly how much our state of motion changes, even while we do not know what it is absolutely.

All this is because: State of motion is relative.

Now in fact all "things" are relative especially the self.

By analogy then self is the same as our state of motion. As we sit here our self depends on how or who measures or looks at it, it has no definitive fixed state.

Furiosa and D-Day

Another thing that's interesting about Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga is the normalising of war.

In the pre-ample to the 40-day Wasteland War the narrator sets it in the context of what looks like a continual history of war. But actually if you think about it the vast majority of humans have never fought and it's only a few who do this crazy thing.

Now it seems the leaders of these crazy people are the ones who write a lot (I'm hoping to turn tables on that) but it also seems that the winners of wars promote their works more than others.

Churchill is the epitome of this. He wrote a 6-volume book which he called "The Second World War" and promoted it obsessively. It remains the "definitive" version of events and even today historians shy away from challenging it.

Yet it is pure fantasy and has nothing to do with the real war. For instance 3 million Britons served in the armed forces which is 7.5% of the population. That means 92.5% did not fight. If you threw a dart during WW2 you would more than likely hit someone just getting on with life and that is the history of the world.

Now Churchill and other leaders say "never have so many owed so much to so few" but we owe nothing. Fighters chose to do whatever they do, no one tells them to do this. and they never ask if other people want them to do it. Certainly the enemy does not want them to fight, and they do not want the enemy to fight to really even soldiers do not want to fight.

To underline that no one owes soldiers anything, the leaders who set them at war have to explicitly make up that we own them (because in fact we don't).

So the vast majority of humanity have never had anything to with war, and we can happily ignore the fighters and their insane leaders. Particularly pertinent on #DDay80 where the Britons was co-opted into a war that was not even our own and was designed by a foreign power namely US for its own imperial aggrandisement.

What is a spiritual land?

Our mind is cluttered on this subject by a load of other ideas so lets just clear those.

We are taught that the Earth is just a planet orbiting a star called the Sun in just one of 100s of billions of galaxies. There is nothing special about this planet. Science fiction films which are invariably based around "space travel" give up the significance of lands in order to pack in large universes. Perhaps Arrakis in Dune or Tatooine in Star Wars are planets that have some special meaning. We are also taught that planets are rock, and rock is made of minerals and elements which are inanimate and of no use except for mining and raw materials for industry or building. These are some thoughts we are given by our society and culture.

But these ideas sit rather uneasily with other ideas we have. How about this type of land?

 

Probably in the West we don't make much of a big deal about this. Yet never-the-less we will find ourselves at some stage visiting a place where someone was buried to remember them. How does that work? After a few years there is nothing left of them physically, and the planet has moved millions of miles in space away from the actual point where they were buried (relative to galactic centre) and the grave stone marks essentially nothing. Why not take the stone home so we can remember them all the time? No: somehow this plot of land takes their place somehow. The land itself has become spiritualised. This is probably the only thing left in most people's sterile lives in the West that indicates some semblance of "spiritual land."

Here's another example: the tree at the end of the film Shawshank Redemption.

Now this tree marks a special moment in Andy's life as it is where he proposed to his wife. But this becomes a special place to everyone watching the film. Its a real place, you can visit it and the meaning of this is now a scene in a film. The tree has now been cut down so there is little marking to spot, but we can still visit that point where the fictional Andy proposed to his wife. There is meaning in the spot even if very tenuous.

Another type of sacred land we will be familiar with is the church. This is a formally consecrated land which is set aside for God and the worship of God. We privately set such land aside all the time like Andy, but the religion does this formally for the whole community too. 

Here is another more subtle example. In the UK--at least, don't know the rest of the world--a marriage traditionally is held where the bride comes from. Traditionally--and very unfashionably now--a bride was guarded by her father who ensured that she remain childless until she was handed over to her husband. This way the husband was sure that any future children were definitely his and this encouraged him to take the bride seriously and commit to her. I imagine a bride travelling long distances in the Past would have been a recipe for her to run into trouble--and there again is the issue of travel and land being inversely connected. But whatever the reasons for the way things came about, it was the land from which a bride was born and raised, that provides the literal bedrock to a traditional marriage.

These are just some basic examples of how land is more than rocks on a planet's surface in space. But it becomes very much deeper.

When they find ancient skulls they can analyse the teeth to find ratios of elements that they can use to determine quite accurately the probably land on which the person lived. Our bodies are actually made from the food we eat which is in turn made from the plants that are grown from the nutrients in the soil where we live. The land actually becomes our bodies. Now if land is just inanimate rock, this cannot be said for our bodies and brains. Suddenly the bold distinction been land and person is completely blurred. If we ever doubt this consider how much of us would be left if we stopped being able to grow plants and were unable to source the minerals that we get from soil and rocks. We are fundamentally linked at the most basic level.

Now this fundamental link between humans and the land was identified all the way back at the start of humanity. Humans know they are intricately intertwined with the land. Where people were born, where they died, where they lived their lives and did things all come from and go back into the land. We call it history now but its marked on the land. Our militarised and aggressive culture of conquest means that our maps are covered in the sites of battles. The land bears witness to our troubled and unhappy culture and minds. The bodies get buried where they are fallen and forever stain the land.

 SO to try and get into the mindset of people before the age of materialism, capitalism and mechanised transport where people lived in one place and really called that home we need to understand that history and even souls are connected to the land. It is a living and breathing thing that takes part as intimately in our community, culture and lives as any other human or living thing. The spirits of the dead and ancestors live in this land, the spirits of other non-human creatures also inhabit this land and along side all this are the living who feel they grow from the land and belong to it. This is all summarised by a relationship with the Earth Mother which is a common sense for all people, that we are birthed and owe our lives to a miraculous event which is the creation of mankind both as a species but as each one of us. No one knows how this happened and it will remain a marvel for ever that it did. But somehow the inanimate world of rocks gave birth to humans. It never asks for any payment for this greatest gift of life and humankind exist in a state of grace and bewilderment at their existence. Modern humans would rather bury this miracle in text books and science and pretend it did not happen, but it did and they are here to ignore it and not be grateful and amazed by it. This is the greatest spiritual force in the land one that sadly more and more people are closed to.

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Now there is a darker side to this. Connection to land work both ways. If I am connected then you are not. What the inhabitants of a land gain, the foreigner loses. Normally because we all realise that life was given to us by the land for free, we do not covet the land. But as the modern world has progressed and especially trade and transport people have been uprooted from the lands. It means that linos to the land have become fractured and damaged. On one hand this had led to the destruction of the planet, and on the other it has led to Nationalism as people fight to preserve their connections to land. It is important for immigrants to realise that they have made a grave choice to leave their land. In some cases immigrants try to bring the land with them in some identity but this is a mistake. When you move to new land you belong to new lands. To suggest any thing else is to break the very idea of a connection to the land. Once the connections are broken then you start to end up with people who belong no where. They are lost people. Thus unfortunately more and more is what Capitalism is creating. Lost people without connection land are cutting the very life blood and source of their existence. Physically they may be sustained by a supply of food but it is just a life support system: there is no spirituality or meaning.

This is only true to a level. There is a more advanced level of spirituality that places all phenomena together. At this level then everything above becomes just sensations and thoughts. So the above is not absolute. It is however an important part of human life.