Blog

Details

Published: 30 June 2014

Hits: 18926

Back to school and college for many of us now that we get to the end of the holiday season, you can almost feel the psychic groan, not that we have had much of a summer in the UK, mainly cool and wet due to the climate disruption methinks.

The global financial mess will hopefully depress some of the excess economic activity which gives rise to this

I’ve spent a lot of time walking and surfing and reading in Wales and composing more poetry (it will appear here after Eisteddfod use).

Gaddhafi still isn’t dead; some considered it a bit extreme to call for that, but after what we have now seen of the inside of his regime it seems like an even better idea, and the sooner the better.

Arcanorium College now tools up for Semester 1 of its 6^th glorious year.

As I explained long ago I didn’t set up the PJ Carroll facebook page, nor do I know who did, nor can I anymore interact with it because I’m refusing to give them a mobile number to confirm my existence.

Nevertheless I’ve transferred a couple of questions from it to here as they caught my interest: -

Xara Allen

peter can i ask what your thoughts are on kundalini and chakras. ive resisted that belief system so far having discounted it as just another model and not one that im asthetically or culturally attracted to so why bother with it... but ive been reading a fair bit of S Mace as he seems to ascribe some objective physiological basis to it....wondered wat your thoughts were tis all....?

The various oriental systems of chackras and meridians contradict each other in detail and you won’t find much corresponding to any of them on dissection. ‘Fake’ acupuncture, where the therapist puts the needles in at arbitrary points has equally beneficial effects to ‘real’ acupuncture apparently.

 Some modern methods of sports training urge the trainee to put all their mental attention into the muscle groups used in their particular event. Similar practices occur in martial arts where the practitioner visualizes ‘chi’ flowing to the striking or defending parts, or even outside the body entirely.

I tend to take the view that all such systems depend on simply drawing the attention of the practitioner or recipient to the areas of the body requiring attention and that the attention itself has a real and sometimes magical effect. Thus any system of representing the body in the mind by some sort of analogy will probably work, including such patently novel systems such as the kabbalistic middle pillar exercises. For simplicities sake I tend to prefer the Gnostic Pentagram or Gnostic Chaosphere practices which use just 5 ‘chackras’ with a simple vowel sound vibrated to each

Baron Feather

I've a question regarding Apophenion, p. 82. You write in the first paragraph "This strongly suggests that when enchanting a future perception on 'memory' of it having occured, rather than visualising a chain of events leading to its occurence." - Isn't this contradictory to what you write in the first chapters about "being" and "doing" (pp. 18-). I understand on p. 82 the suggestion to put a state into your spell rather than a process. I know, here it isn't the point, but in the whole of your book, especially when regarding the first chapters with this passage, it seems contradictory. Would you be so kind to explain?

Firstly let me say that I find no evidence of ‘being’ anywhere in reality except in our imaginations. Everything moves, everything changes from moment to moment even if our sluggish perception suggests otherwise.

If we assume from the quantum perspective that many possible futures exist in some sort of shadowy wavelike form then forming an image of one future favored version now may well encourage the future to manifest in that form eventually. You might merely call that making a plan or a wish, however some experiments indicate that the observer’s choice of what to observe has a tendency to make reality follow suit.

 Pete.

Details

Published: 30 June 2014

Hits: 18584

The British riots have come and gone for the moment, and at last the politicians and the media have tired of punditry and explanationism and blame assignment. Finally now that the punitive sentencing process has gone into well publicized overdrive we get the one statistic they dared not release in the immediate aftermath of the event and which I’ve eagerly awaited, - an estimate of the numbers involved.

Scotland Yard puts it at 30,000. One must balance that figure against the natural tendency of the police to want to both understate the extent of a breakdown of the law and order they get paid to maintain and perhaps a tendency to overstate it in the face of proposed police spending cuts. Nevertheless in the context of several thousand arrests it sounds like a reasonable lower estimate. I had guessed about 50,000, although I saw nothing of it directly whilst on holiday in Wales.

Compared to the poll tax riot which seems to have involved about 250,000 this seems like peanuts, yet its effect seems to have disturbed the national psyche far more, and I think it has done so because of the lack any easily understandable political motive for the riots.

However, as someone once said of the French Revolution, ‘there’s nothing more political than the price of a loaf of bread’, and to pretend that anything that happens in society lacks a political dimension or a power relationship of some sort seems naïve.

I suspect that a great many people fairly well understand the causes of these riots but keep the guilty secret to themselves because they would personally rather remain enmeshed in the problem rather than consider the alternatives.

The crisis in the financial systems and the riots share a common cause, the failure of the policy of economic growth and consumerism.

Yes, I have just committed the ultimate blasphemy, I don’t think our society should strive for more economic growth or more consumption, despite what just about all politicians say.

The majority of people now have about twice as much stuff as they had 40 years ago, yet they seem no happier or more content at all, in fact one could argue that the relentless pursuit of ever more consumables has led to a drop in the quality of life. Some sociologists argue that quality of life peaked in the UK around the mid seventies.

For the last few decades we have imported debt and manufactures and labor from abroad to maintain a growth in consumerism. This has had the grim effects of creating an unsustainable debt mountain, an unwanted underclass of unskilled people with no work in basic manufacturing, and arguably a far less cohesive society riven by multicultural, multi-identity, and wealth ghetto-isation. What does it mean to be British these days? It seems to mean having a long and glorious past which we are increasingly taught to feel ashamed of; and no vision for the future beyond an even larger TV screen, at an ever cheaper price. Most of the people who stole televisions had access to at least one already; they merely obeyed social norms in obtaining another as cheaply as possible. The underclass may have started the riots but the middle classes seem to have joined in the looting, the rich have already got richer these last few decades by more subtle forms of looting.

The solution seems simple, cease striving for growth, stop working for consumables we don’t really need, put our own people back to work making the stuff we do need even if that makes it a bit more expensive. Share out what we do have a bit more equitably, and concentrate more on quality of life and leisure pursuits.

Hopefully this will also lead to less looting of this planet’s rapidly diminishing resources.

Details

Published: 30 June 2014

Hits: 17640

Well that stirred up a reply or two, herewith my response....

There are perhaps 100m people on this planet in various conflict zones who could reasonably claim asylum here, and there are perhaps 1bn who would like to move here as economic migrants given the chance.

 These small islands already have one of the highest population densities on the planet. We cannot feed ourselves from the available land and I see massive encroachment and building work in progress on much of our remaining green spaces and farmland. I also notice massive soil erosion in many of our heritage sites and we have apparently such insurmountable waste disposal problems now that we have to ship it abroad.

I cannot therefore support further immigration. I have no racist or ethnic agenda, I just don't think we should let anymore people in, from any category, on a permanent basis, although I'm not opposed to a certain amount of tourism and some short -term work permits, plus immigration of partners in the case of genuine marriage or civil partnership. It would seem humanitarian to let political refugees in, but we simply don't have the facilities, rather we should consider arming them and giving them all affordable possible fire support to democratise their homelands.

I do not agree with the principle that we may need some 'indespensible' specialists, surely we can fill any conceivable vacancy from our existing 67 odd million, if not we should adjust our education system and our ridiculous benefits system accordingly. We already have substantial unemployment. Plus imported labour tends to depress real wages, to the capitalist's delight.

Further importation of skilled people will only exacerbate skill shortages and inequalities in developing nations. Poland for example has in the last decade lost 1m of its most dynamic people, who are predicted never to return.

As a small scale entreprenneur let me assure you that the free movement of capital is largely illusory, no significant amount of capital ever moves internationally without political approval, the same applies to labour, try getting a job in France, friends of mine have tried and failed.
I think the current EU financial crisis demonstrates that you cannot 'Globalise' divergent systems sucessfully even on a European wide basis.

Details

Published: 30 June 2014

Hits: 18145

On returning from my weeks surfing trip and family holiday I note that the previous post on Knights of Chaos seems to have attracted a lot of attention, almost as much as the Designer Religion article of some time ago. I wonder if this has arisen partly because of the activities of that nutter in Norway who claimed alleigance to some sort of Knights Templar organisation?

I have to say that his actions seem insane to me. If you feel intensely about immigration or population growth elsewhere, why massacre your 'own' people to make your point known?

I met a  of facinating historian and a political scientists whilst away. The historian, with the crusades as her speciality, opined that the Templars almost certainly had no serious or interesting heresies, the Pope and the French king merely needed the wealth of an order which had ceased to have any real function after the failure of the crusading effort. It would seem that the mere innuendo of heresy has given them an attractive glamour for many anti-catholic groups including occultists and fringe freemasons. However it seems that the Templars themselves remained devout and pious dupes till the grim end.

The political scientist opined that in the UK and many other places immigration and population remain 'The Elephants in the Room' which no mainstream politicial will address. The centre left does not want to appear racist, the centre right continues to want to stimulate capitalism with cheap labour and population growth, and neither side wants to risk the unpopularity of saying to people limit your family because the planet cannot support a whole lot more people, or much more consumption and economic growth either.

Since debate on these subjects has become a concensus taboo for mainstream politicians, it comes as no surprise that extreem opinions ferment on the sidelines, unmoderated by engagement in mainstream debate.

Personally, I'd describe the UK as full to capacity already and I don't think we should allow any more permanent residents, whatever their creed, ethnicity, or supposedly indispensible skills. Sixty seven million seems more than enough for this pocket handkerchief sized little group of islands, another ten or twenty million will not make anything better in the long run, and sucking in capable people from elsewhere just denudes their country of origin of its skill base.