Declining tolerance of minorities and our own dark side

28 January 2012 By

Last night I saw a new version of Michael Flatley’s Lord of the Dance. It was the second time and on this occasion I was much more aware of the light/dark struggle theme. The dark forces of Don Dorcha were extremely menacing and threatening, and their dance was very militaristic. It had me thinking of fascist murder squads in the 1920′s and 1930′s and more recently in post-war oppressive regimes around the world, where certain forces believed in using para-military, organised brute force to quell and keep subdued their opponents.

I was reading recently about the rising level of intolerance towards ethnic minority groups in Europe, unsuccessful attempts to get Mein Kampf published in Germany, hostile attitudes towards Muslims, hostility towards the long-term unemployed and “benefit cheats”, the background of international tension in the Middle East, and the still-present threat of economic upheaval and recession despite some recent easing. It seems, not surprisingly, that the anti-minority prejudices increase with recession. No doubt someone has devised a chart to measure it.

As times get more difficult, the them-and-us mentality can grow, an intolerance of people different from “us”. Thus did 19th Century liberalism get swept away by the trauma of the First World War and then economic dislocation in the 1920′s. Of course “us” can be very varied too, but that gets missed. What is particularly sad, in my  view, is how some of us sink to this after decades of increased integration and globalisation in cultural attitudes. However it serves as a reminder to those of us who care about fundamental principles like respect and love for our fellow humans not to let such attitudes get entrenched in our society but to persist in challenging them.

However, for the self-reflective there’s another thought too. What goes on “out there” is at some level a reminder of what goes on “in here”, and it is always worth pausing to reflect on how much such developments mirror our internal process, or at least a little disowned bit of it. We should ask, what part of me am I being reminded of in what occurs “out there”?

Also, ethnic attitudes are another manifestation of separateness and isolation, our ego tendency to be split off from the One. Such is the human experience at the ego level. Then the challenge is to see God in the person whom we experience as so different from us.

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What we do to others we do to ourselves

13 January 2012 By

One of the saddest things I read this week in the news was this report about parents in Greece giving up their children because they can’t afford to look after them.  In a very family-orientated society this must be felt deeply, but it is also a testimony to the economic privations now being visited on that country.

As each piece of fresh news comes out about the philosophy of austerity as the prevailing “norm” of economic consensus in the “surplus” countries who seem to be dictating the terms, we hear too of more and more hardships now being experienced in Southern Europe. It is worth remembering that it doesn’t have to be this way, that “austerity” is not the only way to manage an economy,and that this approach is being fiercely debated amongst economists. The last time this theory was visited upon us in a big way was the 1930′s, when many major and many smaller countries became stuck in a cycle of cuts and tariff barriers and declining trade. Then too, the “orthodoxy” was that of the balanced budget. Then too “nothing could be done”, it was said, for the unfortunate caught up in the slump. We paid the price in the form of the Second World War, after which governments behaved differently as regards for example the unemployed and the foundations of the modern welfare state was laid. It now seems that we need an international equivalent.

There must surely be another way in which our international economy be run. And it is international. One person’s debt is another person’s credit. One is related to the other; both have contributed to the situation. We seem unable or unwilling as an international so-called community to address these simple economic so-called realities, despite the emergence of globalisation which has helped spawn this situation. Moreover, one person’s hardship is a well-off person’s concern. To think otherwise is to ignore the basic interdependency of life.

I am reminded of how well-off people respond when challenged about such things. “Why should I?” (do something) or “What’s wrong with…?” (actions they do or do not take), which is a form of denial of responsibility, whilst expecting it of others. The same applies at a national level, which is how it is being acted out. Both ignore interdependency.

What we should be doing is rather thinking that that person’s problem is also my problem, at some level, since we are all connected. We should be working as humans to support those less able to do that, whilst also encouraging self-responsibility. This is one of our urgent needs as humans today, and one of our biggest challenges, particularly as food supplies get more vulnerable, and climate change, water supply shortages and population growth as basic trends weigh down upon us.

As I turn away from my neighbour, so I turn away from myself. What I do to others I also do to myself. Each person is a part of me and love is the very bond that connects us. Until we get that, we’ll continue to fight each other, often in the name of some form of nationalism, and fear and hatred will stalk our lands and we’ll continue to experience perceived separation as a basic ego behaviour.

Let’s really hope that, like Bretton Woods in 1944,  the UN Charter in 1945, the NHS in the UK in 1946, and other major changes, a new, international and positive orthodoxy of humanitarianism will emerge from all this.

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Looking beyond the culture of pessimism

21 December 2011 By

It’s now a much discussed theme, the prevailing climate of pessimism. In organisations, they talk about “resilience”, your ability to “bounce back” after setbacks, but for ordinary people it seems more like a matter of coping in adversity. We’ve even had politicians talking about the “wartime spirit”. There is the continuing interest in doom-laden programmes and articles in the media. We have had a lot happening this year in the news, even to the extent that the BBC has posted about it on their website. News has been very alarmist, even it seems more than usual. I’m aware that a lot of my blog posts have been about fear and how to manage it and re-connect with who you are. However I wonder if many are losing their sense of the last-mentioned and wondering if they’ve undergone a character change.

For a very long time people have been accustomed to prosperous times and to the sense that living standards would get better overall. The post-war era was built on the idea of full employment and although that received a big knock in the 1980’s there has been a sense of rising living standards in the west since the war and since the 1930’s depression. Yet in the last few years that has been going into reverse, with falling living standards. Witness politicians’ comments about the “squeezed middle”. This shift in economic conditions can have a profound effect.

So it isn’t surprising to read of the increase in Armageddon thinking, as referred to in the article link at the beginning of this post. In history, there is a recurrent pattern of such thinking in times of upheaval. One such pattern was that of millenarianism, as seen in the belief in the second coming of Christ. In the 17th Century in England, such was the upheaval over the execution of Charles I that a group of people, the Fifth Monarchists, attempted unsuccessfully to take power and prepare for His arrival.

As we get to the end of a year of what has surely been a testing time for people, it is perhaps wise to reflect not only on the pattern in these things but also of what we have to learn and how we can positively respond to possibly further challenges next year and create something better than what isn’t working now.

It’s an easy cop-out perhaps to blame the economy as the latest manifestation of why our lives aren’t working as we would like. However, that is what is occurring “out there”. For those who are working with Awareness, it can pay to look within. What in us is being mirrored back to us in what is apparently happening “out there”? What have we ourselves to learn, what new Self are we each stepping into and can express in the times that, it is being said, are coming? As Eckhart Tolle has said, we are living through the crisis of Ego, not who we are. Here perhaps is our challenge, to make the shift to a higher level of awareness.

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Economic hardship breeds division when we really need unity

9 December 2011 By

It seems to be a sad characteristic of human relations that when hard times come, rather than pull together and support each other people fall out. However, while it seems as though one wins and the other loses, what tends to happen is that nobody really wins.

Within the UK, as the recession has gone on, tolerance is being replaced by intolerance. While huge swathes of our society are being hit by the downturn, it seems that particular groups are bearing the brunt of popular disfavour. There’s a rising hostility to “immigrants” and a rising prejudice towards disabled people. The poor are being seen as lazy and “benefit-scroungers”. People are now less willing to pay taxes to help others. It is an unfortunate message at the traditional time for thinking of others, Christmas. Intolerance often goes hand in hand with a narrow nationalism.

Today the UK sounded very self-righteous in refusing to join its European colleagues in support of the single currency, the Euro. It was not, we are being told, in the “national interest”, a lot of which was really to do with defending the City against EU regulation. It would seem that behind all this is the inability of the UK PM to carry his “Eurosceptic” backbenchers in Parliament, who would much rather leave the EU, egged on it seems by a 50% opinion poll support for withdrawal in any referendum. In doing so, they appear to be abandoning their opportunity to combine with others to balance or limit the rising hegemony of Germany in Europe and allowing their particular version of economic policy, austerity, to be the order of the day. It’s like a classic case of not being able to see beyond the end of their noses, a policy they will probably in the long term live to regret, as too probably will the champions of austerity in Europe. You are more likely to influence the team if you are a part of it rather than walking away from it. The financial regulation will probably happen anyway, through taxation on eurozone-related dealings, and the UK won’t be able to stop it. There’s no real winner, unless you look to the superpowers-to-be waiting in the wings.

In the 1930’s, as the depression deepened, racism and racial persecution mounted. Nationalism became strident and aggressive. Democracy weakened or collapsed. International collaboration to protect world trade collapsed too, and the world succumbed to a downward spiral of protectionism. Dole queues mounted and it took a major world war for people to start to think differently about how we are with each other. On the ruins of Europe and East Asia a new collaborative world order was built and welfare states introduced in many countries. It took a war for people to see the benefit of pulling together in a crisis.

When we feel hurt by others and antagonistic towards them, that is the most powerful time to reach out, rather than succumb to separation and division.

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How corruption in journalistic values feeds into a wider crisis in democracy”

30 November 2011 By

A fascinating series of comments is emerging in the Leveson Enquiry into press ethics about the decline in the moral standards in UK journalism. Today Alastair Campbell, the PR supremo in the Blair years, describes the press as being “frankly putrid in many of its elements”. This is on top of already damming evidence.

Yesterday the journalist who did much to publicise the hacking scandal within News International said there was a culture of bullying, in which editorial policy was to pursue the news potential in a story at the expense of truth and God help any journalist who challenged that. Journalists have been standing up to testify how stories were falsified, as of course many in the public already know but unless they are wealthy are unable to challenge them. A range of celebrities and ordinary people have described their experiences at the hands of reporters and paparazzi.

One sad thing about this, among many, is that the one thing a free press ought to be championing is the truth. The press is supposed to be the 4th branch of government, to borrow a US term, one of the checks and balances in our system of government. Yet it seems to be dominated by small cliques with their own interests and their own inter-penetration into political circles such that politicians too connived at this behaviour because they were afraid of them, witness the kow-towing to Rupert Murdoch of both sides of the House of Commons. This whole enquiry is another reminder of the corruption of public life that so many people are commenting upon, following on from such exposures as the MP expenses scandal . Unfortunately this corruption is not just in the UK but elsewhere in Western democracies, as small groups have been able to assume massive behind-the-scenes power. For example, for a number of years in Italy people have been trying to bring the now-former Prime Minister to justice for the numerous instances of illegality, but he not only controlled a majority in Parliament but 60% of the media and was able to change the law to protect himself from his accusers.

So where is truth in all this? Many in politics when they hear that word will laugh cynically and say things like the first casualty in politics is truth or “politics is the art of the possible”, ie what you can get away with. Truth is an allegation you can make stick on your opponent.

Meanwhile the mass of the population watch on in disbelief. But it is a dangerous disbelief. It is dangerous in that if people believe the system is corrupt they are less likely to support it in a crisis. And we have one now, in the euro crisis. In the 1920’s and 1930’s, it was easy to destroy democracy in countries like Germany or Italy because it had already collapsed from within in the feebleness of the Weimar republic or the divisions amongst politicians in Italy as the squadristi beat up their left-wing opponents. In a crisis, people turn to more authoritarian leaders who have less scruples with the principles people wish to see in public life, including the truth.

This is very much a time when public values that sustain open and participative government need to be affirmed, even though it may seem hard to see the undercurrents that can sweep them away.

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Are bankers’ values so very different from the rest of us?

11 November 2011 By

For me a very interesting development has been the emergence of the Occupy movement in the US, the UK and other countries, with its critique of the underpinning values of those in the so-called 1%, those deemed the most wealthy in our society. Yet again bankers are having to defend themselves, as the Barclays Bank CEO did this week. A survey has also shown a feeling among city workers that things aren’t right. At the same time, we have an ongoing Euro area crisis around the debt issue which is threatening the banking system once again, and in particular Greece is being hauled across the coals by its partners, many much larger and much better off, for its alleged past economic misbehaviour, with Italy seemingly next in the firing line. Meantime we’re most of us wondering what this means for us. One important aspect to seismic crises, perhaps like this one, is that they eventually result in the emergence of new ideas and a shift forward in our society and its politics, now not just nationally but globally.

So where does this leave the question of values in our society today? And we need to bear in mind that our planet is very varied and these values will therefore also vary.

At one level shared values is part of the glue that holds our society together: “This is how we do things here.” “This is what we believe”. It can have the implication, “This is what we expect of you”, which might not be shared by the other party. I have had first-hand experience of the culture in banking, having initially worked with bankers changing or losing their jobs, or choosing to leave, in the early-mid ‘90’s, where there was it seemed an old-style banking of service orientation and loyalty, prudence and a steady hand, as against a new-style sales and bonus orientation. Not surprisingly it was the old-style people who were leaving. However I’m tempted to suggest that this is not unique to banking but a shift in business and in the wider society that supported it, since it goes on in other businesses, bonuses being a widely-used device for reward, including government.

It is a bit of a knee-jerk response in a crisis to find someone to blame, which people are finding rather difficult, as no one person or group were responsible. So bankers make an easy target. What we perhaps could be doing is looking more to ourselves too. After all, we took out the mortgages. We participated in the seeming free-for-all fuelled by low interest rates and foreign money looking for a home to invest. We voted for the politicians, both Labour and Conservative, who took a light touch to regulation in a belief in “the markets”, which seemed at the time to be delivering prosperity, and from Mrs Thatcher onwards had moved further away from state control.

The same could be said about Greece, although many might debate this. Banks in countries like France and Germany leant Greece the money. As Martin Wolf pointed out in the Financial Times last week, debtors need creditors, but also creditors need debtors, for example to buy their exports. The system is mutually inter-dependent, and the solution is too. It is easy to point the blame. It is less easy to see that we are involved as creditors. Like a relationship, it takes two (or more) for a quarrel. For example, surely there is a more compassionate and supportive approach to Greece than what we are seeing at the moment, which seems likely to create abject poverty. Are these our values?

The difficulty about an argument based on values is that it can be as much prone to disagreement as the political arena. Perhaps it is more useful to see public life as where disagreements about matters of public choice can and do occur. This is politics, and what perhaps the Occupy movement are doing is beginning to articulate a new politics.

This is where it gets interesting, for me at any rate. Coaches, facilitators and the rest in this field tend to not comment on politics, and I don’t want to be the exception, except to say that after the sterility of the Thatcher and post-Thatcher years, and after the end of the Cold War, when a free market ideology has dominated and politics has become very elitist and isolated from the mainstream, dangerously so, perhaps new grass-roots movements are emerging which offer something new for us all. And that something is not only challenging prevailing norms but doing in the name of democracy, and in doing that is also articulating something trans-national. Not international, note, since the nation state is another device for keeping us divided, but where we reach out across the national dimension and find common cause, in the name of humanity as a whole. It is this, latter aspect, that so badly needs to be developed today, for the planet as a whole and all who live upon it.

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It’s time to start acknowledging our Oneness with others

21 October 2011 By

A rapidly growing global awareness has arguably been one of the major formative changes of at least the last few decades, what concerns all of us right across the world. This makes sense in terms of the process of awakening that many feel is taking place, an awakening to who we are. So, here’s a recommendation to do something to support this process by signing the Global Oneness Day petition to the UN.

So what’s is this process, this growing sense of being connected with one another right around the world?

One way of thinking about it can be at a personal level. As you or I undergo our own personal transformation, we become aware of ourselves in much more subtle ways. So we may become more conscious of what goes on inside us, our sensing and feeling self. This awareness then extends to our awareness of others, our sense of interconnectedness. So we might think we “pick up” on what’s happening for others, although as I’ve pointed out before in this blog, in personal development terms it is also important to make accurate distinctions in our awareness of our own shadow, what we project on to others. Being more acutely aware of others can show up as a much greater compassion or empathy. It’s as though others’ pain or joy is ours too in some way. We feel more ready to listen to others and hear their story. There’s a greater readiness to share and offer support. Barriers come down and we feel more able to communicate naturally and authentically, perhaps in part because we know more of who we are and that feels easier to share.

So it’s not surprising to find people who are intentionally growing, expanding their awareness, to want to connect with others.

This process goes useful in train with other changes well under way, the internet, ease of travel, common languages, education, migration, work patterns, global trading patterns (“Globalisation”), an awareness of planetary issues like climate change, population growth, economic issues, concern about social or health issues at a global level, an interest in development, etc. This blog has already alluded to political activity to not just include states but also popular and protest movements. People are just so much more in touch with each others across the world.

However, it is also useful to be aware of the awareness process I referred to just now but at a spiritual level too, as is being highlighted in the UN petition. As we awaken to ourselves, we become of a sense of Oneness with others, the feeling that you and I are One. The extent that you are aware of That is perhaps a measure of your spiritual journey. This is not just a belief, and belief can play a part. It is an experience, and this is such a crucial aspect of Awareness. You and I feel at One and we know at the essence of our Being that we are One. So, it is a matter of connecting, of tuning in, of getting more deeply in touch with our sensing and feeling self at deeper and deeper levels.

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At last people are thinking differently and globally about the Great Recession

17 October 2011 By

This weekend has seen a plethora of demonstrations around the world inspired by the movement in the US, Occupy Wall Street. Probably in many places not currently very big they do however potentially indicate something significant as regards different thinking about the Great Recession, as it is being dubbed, and about how people in many countries are thinking globally in their response rather than nationalistic.

In the 1930′s, in the last major slump, countries retreated behind tariff barriers and then began aggression against their neighbours, partly to divert attention from internal repression. There are some signs today of the first in currency manipluation and counter-measures by those affected. However, in the first obvious outburst of protest at the austerity policies in many countries, participants have interacted across national boundaries via the internet, as we previously saw with the Arab Spring, and have put forward globally-focused arguments.

It makes sense to think globally from a pragmatic perspective since the forces that helped create the current impasse are global and an international solution is very likely to do it in the end, if governments can think beyond their end of their electorally-focused nose, if democracies, or beyond age-old geopolitical rivalries.

Yet the protest is also about a challenge to the solutions advocated. However naive or simplistic, or excessively radical or “left-wing”, depending on your political perspective, they seem to be challenging the assumptions behind the austerity drives and on whom the burden of the cuts should fall. But it also challenges the idea that “there is no alternative”, that phrase known as TINA so beloved of Margaret Thatcher during a previous outburst of this thinking in the UK.

I would go a stage further and suggest that many are also reaching beyond the established practice of so many so-called “advanced” countries who have become stultified in their politics, with declining popular involvement in politics, a widespread distrust of politicians and a tendency to reach for extra-democratic methods. In a number of countries too, the squeeze has widened to include large sections of the middle class, as in the early 1930′s in some countries. It also suggests, in it’s young person involvement, a thinking about the nature of fairness and equality that embraces people across the world, and an awareness that established political groups that previously included this aspect of politics now fail to impress.

Interestingly, this movement has occured parallel in the UK to two political scandals, a phone-hacking scandal involving the media baron Rupert Murdoch’s empire and its interpenetration of UK politics, and now the question of the closeness of politicians in government to corporate lobby groups.

Who knows where this movement will go – they can fizzle out after a while or provoke a political backlash by the established order in some manifestation – but my bets will be on it becoming yet another indication that in order to move forward as a society we are finding ourselves thinking and acting globally – not before time.

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Are we facing disintegration or is there something new about to emerge?

7 October 2011 By

At a talk I was giving recently I was asked about the international situation and the approach of 2012. Times look very uncertain. What was the self-aware person to do?

Reading the news over the past few weeks, if not months, it is very hard not to escape the conclusion that our world is facing a gathering crisis. What do those that aspire to a higher level of Awareness do with all this? Does fear drive us back into ego survival thinking or is there something more behind all this?

One theme that stands out recently is that of disintegration. For example in Europe, there is a possible collapse of the euro, Greece descending into bankruptcy, a crisis of democracy as states try to impose steps towards fiscal union on reluctant Parliaments, a run on banks who might crumble if states go bankrupt, and a steady decline in trade and a rise in unemployment. However countries may succeed in collaborating and resolving the crisis. Internationally one could say there are potential seeds of a decline into protectionism and conflict. In developing countries, no longer supported by prosperous “advanced” economies existing conflicts could be exacerbated, such as in Pakistan which could collapse into civil war. In the Middle East the Arab Spring could be exacerbated by increased unemployment among the young. Governments might respond by increased and bloody repression. At home, we might fret about a relapse into recession if not depression, collapsing house prices, stock price decline and rising unemployment, with governments running out of policy options. In the background we have climate change, pressure on resources and population explosion.

At the mundane level, we could respond to all this by a survival mentality, coping as best we can with whatever might be happening – or might not be happening, since all this is fear-based thinking. However, for the self-aware, we have choices. One is to be aware of the function of fear itself. It is so easy to get caught up in fear, as was written about in this blog last week. Nothing new. Fear is a classic function of the ego. Now is no different and it is if anything all the important to work to anchor oneself in practices that develop and sustain Awareness and the ability to centre oneself. Then we are not attached to ego responses when others around us are losing it. Then we can lead others.

If there is a lot of hardship and suffering around the corner – and there might not be – then we are needed to be able to be present for others and help them through what might arguably be a major transition for human kind. We can lose it, or – as has happened in the past – we find ways to come together to create something different and more enduring. Now is perhaps the time to start thinking differently. The old order is perhaps passing, no longer working. Today’s world needs people to step beyond national, ethnic, cultural and religious distinctions and find what truly connects us. Disintegration doesn’t serve us, and can’t since it would be more illusion as we are really all One. To do this, we need to become aware, to awaken.

So this section of this blog will in future weeks explore what new can replace the old that supports us in finding Oneness.

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A rant in favour of a collective global solution to our economic difficulties

26 September 2011 By

I’ve been writing this week about how we can sustain ourselves in the face of adversity. I referred at the start to the economic crisis, this seeming unending difficulty and challenge that so many are faced with. So, I thought it was time to write about that issue too.

And how difficult! I was particularly moved last weekend reading about the plight it seemed of people in Greece, who seem to have become the butt of the world’s current inability to address its collective challenges. I was reading about the seeming descent into abject poverty of so many people, while well-healed “experts” from the EU, IMF and the ECB strut around Athens tut-tutting about Greek “profligacy”. Having visited and worked in Greece, and loved it there, I felt very saddened by what is happening, but also can’t help feeling that we’re all in this together, but somehow don’t want to take responsibility and instead expect someone else to take the cut.

What has struck me is how we seem unable or unwilling to recognise that this world of ours is very interdependent, that what happens here has a direct bearing on the other side of the world and visa versa. People make financial decisions in a context, and people who borrowed presumably in the main thought it was OK to do so. The money that was the loan had come from money leant or invested by others, often from sovereign funds. The “surplus” countries like China, Germany and Saudi Arabia were among the major lenders, using money earned from the sale of their raw materials or manufactured goods, and the money was used to in effect enable more of their goods to be bought. In other words they benefitted from the debt cycle. One person’s profit is another person’s labour. Yet these “surplus” countries have seemed reluctant to help the debtor ones. What we seem unable or unwilling to do is look at the process as a whole, which we have all contributed to.

What happens in depressions is that people become very inwardly focused, and selfish. International collaboration gets harder and a division and a struggle sets in between various interests and social groups in the name of backward-looking and archaic beliefs.

When I think too of the background of population growth, the pressure on the world’s resources and climate change, then we get into another league of a neglect of much needed global thinking, against which the current crisis could pale in significance and render talk of renewed “growth” as meaningless.

The last Great Depression eventually caused people to think of radical solutions, initially of an extremist kind and eventually of a global collaborationist one, but not before a lot of suffering and a very destructive world war. What we need to be doing is thinking holistically and sustainably about our world’s future, for all our citizens and not those few political classes and vested interests represented in the main in our so-called “advanced” governments, and their restive voters bought off by materialism.

It means we need to step aside from the current paradigm of thinking, and embrace our own true potential as humans, where compassion, selfless service, holistic awareness, and mutual love and respect are values observed across the world regardless of a person’s background, and where we create a future where each can finally awaken and realise who and what they truly are. There’s already many people across the world arguing for this, in their various ways. Let’s give them our support.

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