Restricting our Freedoms – Part 1

This is an incredibly clear and thoughtful presentation by Shawn Buckley. I like the fact that he stays clear of drama or unsubstantiated allegations. Ponder this and draw your own conclusions.

We need to ask ourselves: Do the people who run our Government care one bit about Canadians or their welfare?

Restricting our Freedoms – Part 2

Here’s part two. It’s worth watching both parts.

ED – the open-source TED

The premise is to create an open-source version of the popular TED talks. The basic principle is this: No matter who you are, or what your station in life, everyone has a story to tell. Everyone has something to teach.

To explain how ED (or FRED? or NED?) relates to TED, let’s have a brief look at the orginal:

The TED slogan is: Ideas worth spreading.

TED is an internet phenomenon. The organizers have created a community around a series of live presentations that become short (ten min) internet movies. Presentations are given by the most interesting people of our day – as decided by the creators of TED. Presentation at TED is by invitation only. Presenters are typically highly accomplished individuals (mostly intellectuals) and can always lay claim to being experts in their field. Consequently, there is a certain amount of prestige surrounding TED. It is an honour to present at a TED conference.

It is rare to see an absolute dud.

TED’s greatest strength may also be it’s greatest weakness. On the one hand, the quality of the presentations is undeniably high, but there’s also a sense of exclusivity about TED. Anyone may tune in, but you have to be a “TEDster” to get it. The subtle message is: TED is not for everyone.

“TEDsters” of course would deny this, but I would say that these “TEDsters” fit a certain profile. Most attendees are university educated “liberals”. A typical TEDster uses a Blackberry, drinks fair-trade latte, drives a hybrid and is concerned about global warming.

To see the profile of a TEDster defined, consider this somewhat self-referential talk:

Jonathan Haidt

The idea that intellectuals can, at times, sound a bit pompous or arrogant (I’m not talking about Jonathan Haidt) is not radical. On some level a “common man’s (or woman’s) TED has instant appeal. But our aim is greater because there are philosophical reasons to democratize TED.

Another TED slogan: “Remarkable people, unmissable talks, now free to the world”.

This is all well and good, but what is a “remarkable person”, and who gets to decide? In the case of a “Stephen Hawking” or a “Ray Kurzweil”, the answer is obvious. Other remarkable people are less well known. The best TED talks were given by people I had never heard of:

Willie Smits
Jill Bolte Taylor

In the case of Al Gore, Bill Clinton or Bill Gates, the answer is not so obvious. These people are certainly famous, but how “remarkable” are they really?

There are three reasons we need ED talks.

1.) Academia and by extension TED, is mired in orthodoxy. As such, there is a certain predictability to TED presentations (in the choice of speakers, as well as the treatment of the subject matter). For example, there are many speakers proposing interesting solutions to Global Warming, but there will never be a speaker questioning the science behind the theory. (Al Gore is featured, but his critics are deemed to be beneath contempt).

TED is pro-peace. TED speakers may well lament the war, but you will not anyone to question the prevailing paradigm as to our understanding of the series of events that precipitated the Iraq war.

To see an example of this bias:
Bruce Bueno de Mesquita
Deborah Scranton

Physics is represented by Stephen Hawking (mainstream respectability), not by Nassim Haramein (heretic theory). And so on.

2.) The second reason is political. One thing the “left gatekeeper” phenomenon has shown us, is that academia has let us down. The Noam Chomskys, Howard Zinns and George Monbiots have betrayed our trust by ignoring their own principles.

The “experts” and those who control them (follow the money) are trying to shape our reality for us. Ironically, they’re overplayed their cards and destroyed their credibility. Consequently, people no longer trust the experts.

3.) People want to participate. This means more than simply sucking in information. We all want to share, to give something back. Rather than being told what to think, we can participate in the creation of a stimulating dialogue.

Everyone has a story to tell.

Doga icin cal ! / Divane Asik Gibi

This is wonderful on so many levels. I hope that everything I create, whether it be a book, a film, or simply a clean kitchen floor, can be of this quality.

Playing for Change

Playing for Change on facebook

the end of money?

The red blood cells have had enough. The price of oxygen keeps going up and the profit margin is down. Also, there are no days off. There are talks of layoffs and possibly a general strike.

The white blood cells on the other hand get better compensation and rarely have to work. Mostly they just patrol the area and hang out in case any virus comes around. They are prone to abusing their power because they are secretly funded by the lungs.

The lungs control the oxygen supply and are in the business of gouging everybody. They keep getting richer while everyone else is barely scraping by. The heart is becoming weaker and the brain is getting stupid because there’s no funding for maintenance. All the money is being syphoned off by the lungs. Much of it goes into vaccines and other defense spending.

The idea of money is tied to the concept of separation – the feeling that Michael, Sandra and Kate are separate entities. This is an illusion. We are separate only in the sense that the lungs are separate from the heart.

The parts of our body seem to have found a way to cooperate quite nicely without the artificial burden of a financial system. This is not to say that our body is without governance. Government can loosely be said to reside in the mind (inaccurate but for the purpose of this metaphor we’ll run with it), though various parts of the body (the stomach, the penis etc.) can hijack the agenda from time to time.

In most bodies, this form of governance seems to work quite well, though this is not universally true. In some instances the parts do fall into dissonance. In such cases serious health issues result.

Money has no intrinsic value. Legal tender functions as a medium of exchange for as long as people are willing to honour it. One day, when all the world’s money is concentrated in the hands of a single individual, the people will collectively opt out of the game. Money will cease to exist.

Imagine the day we wake up to the realization that we are one. Our current reality will resemble a really confusing, vaguely disturbing dream. It seems to me that the changes are already all around us, but most of us are subconsciously resisting them. We are heading into the great unknown, and it’s a little bit scary. That’s why things keep getting uglier and darker (on some level), though they are getting much brighter on another.

As Janis Joplis sang: “Freedom’s just another word, for nothin’ left to lose…” We still have houses and cars and mutual funds – perhaps we have to lose everything before we are ready to let go of a a way of life that is coming to an end.

“But wait a minute”, someone is heard to exclaim. “We still need money to exchange goods and services”.

Explain that to the three trillion cells in your body. They exchange goods and services each and every millisecond without the need for financial instruments to do it.

Money exists in a world of scarcity. We have created no shortage of shortages. Not enough food. Not enough water. Peak oil and so on. In this kind of environment we need money to sort out who gets to feast, and who must starve. The system is barbaric and one day (soon) we will surely outgrow it.

The alternative is that we create a world of plenty, with enough food, enough clean water and enough energy for everyone. This is both possible and necessary for our continued survival.

It may be hard to imagine for a lot of people, but one day we will realize how superfluous money is.

Of course I can make no claims to know what the future will actually look like. As with anything I write, these are just rambling thoughts. However, if I had to place my bets, I would guess that in pondering the possibility of a brighter future, most of us vastly underestimate just how different that future will have to be, for life to continue on this planet.

Are we ready for change, or is fear of the unknown holding us back?

One

One recurring problem that people have with the idea of oneness is that we appear to live in a world of distinction and separation. We tend to think of ourselves as separate autonomous entities. Is there a way in which this apparent separation can be reconciled with the idea of interconnectedness?

I like the metaphor of organs in the body. The lung and the heart each have a unique identity, but ultimately, they are both part of a greater whole. So it depends on your perspective. Oneness and separation co-exist, but oneness is the deeper reality. Oneness encompasses separation – not the other way around.

To see why this is so, it is important to understand that there is no particular place in the body where the heart ends or the lung begins. If you want to pull an organ out of the body, you have to cut somewhere – but the exact points you choose to cut are arbitrary. There is no clear delineation in the body anywhere. In other words: The parts are so tightly integrated, that the sense of unity (the body) is stronger than the sense of uniqueness between each of the parts. That’s one thing.

More importantly though – neither the lung nor the heart can exist without the whole. So the whole is the greater reality. Any reference to either the lung or the heart makes it clear that we are not talking about an autonomous thing, but merely about an aspect of a greater whole.

It’s relatively easy to see that the heart and the lung are related this way, but harder (for some) to see that the relationship between the flower and the bee is identical the the relationship between the heart and the lung. Bees cannot exist without flowers anymore than flowers can exist without bees. They are both merely aspects of a greater whole that encompasses both flower and bee.

And so we can expand ever outward, from organ, to body, to biosphere, to galaxy, to universe and so on, to understand that nothing that exists in creation can be said to exist independently of any other thing. So oneness is always the “greater” reality, and separation is always an illusion of sorts.

The Drop and The Ocean Are One

“The drop and the ocean are one – even when the drop can be distinguished.”

I borrowed the follwing excerpt from page 270 of my copy of “Hidden Truth – Forbidden Knowledge” by Dr. Steven Greer:

“The question is: Is there interplay between oneness and duality?
They co-exist. They are not mutually exclusive. In other words, the relative and the changing, time and space and matter and the infinite silent absolute are one and the same. There’s no separation and therefore there’s no duality.

Now, that which is relative has differentiation. We have individual bodies, there is male and there is female, there are different energies, there are different elements. But at the same time, there is this perfect divine unity and awake-ness that co-exists with it, suffuses all of it, and permeates all of it.

There is a balance in being able to see the differentiation and the duality of things, and at the same time see the oneness that is permeating all duality.

So it isn’t an either-or question.

Everything is established and emanating from unbounded, absolute, undifferentiated, pure Mind. But it is perceived as one or the other. Our task is to evolve to a point where we see it not as either-or, but all as one, even while we see the distinctions.”