--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
A contributor on another forum wrote the following:
[I really think that it's better to focus on ourselves and become super egoistic rather than think about others.
So often, focusing on the society and/or other people is the way to avoid seeing our own tendencies which we don't like and which we don't consider good/right.
I do not see self-realization the same way. I responded thus:
Conventional wisdom states that charity begins at home. As Plato said - the first ethic is to Know Thyself
The answer to why that injunction from a much revered classical philospher has never taken root in western society over the past twenty five centuries lies the core of my theory on Psyche-Genetics.
The self cannot be known in isolation.
The self can only be known in relation to another.
The larger "another" is the manifest universe. Science is doing a marvelous job getting us to know it. Nuclear theory has brought us very close to the ultimate understanding.
The more immediate other is our own social structures. Who each of us are is the result of the genetic inprints of 100,000 generations of ancestral evolution. Plato and all philopsophers since, only understood the evolution of our collective self going back a mere 250 generations to the beginning of the Iron Age. The other 99,750 generations invested in the Stone and Bronze Ages remained a mystery. It is in those primitive formative generations that the foundations of the human character was established. By going back to those Stone Age roots, studying social structures still rooted in oral traditions, I gained a more profund respect for the whole cosmic process of conscious evolution.
I found my Self, not just inside my own skin, but also among my culture, my race, my specie, my planet, my galaxy and the Cosmic source from which my consciousness originated.
We can take consciousness to the highest levels of eternally expanding degrees of self-awarness. By including all planes of existence, not just this one, this conforms to some extent with astrophysicists Big Bang/Big Crunch theory. Hindus see Cosmic Consciousness experiencing Itself via the evolving illusions of materaial manifestation. All is maya. In Greek mythology it is Narcissis staring into the mirror of his own reflection. Each Cosmic cycle spirals into ever higher degrees of self realization. God seeking to know Himself through the phantom image of Creation, born and dying and reborn eternally.
__________________
Wednesday, December 31, 2008
Monday, December 29, 2008
Home School the HeartStart Way
HeartStart
Preamble
Nearly forty years ago, Roger W. Sperry., Cal. Tech, Professor of Psychobiology, writing on Lateral Specialization of Cerebral Function in Surgically Separated Hemispheres, had the following statement to make:
“The main theme to emerge…is that there appear to be two modes of thinking, verbal and non-verbal, represented rather separately in left and right hemispheres of the brain, respectively, and that our educational system, as well as science in general, tends to neglect the non-verbal form of intellect. What it comes down to is that modern society discriminates against the right hemisphere. The verbal half of the brain, the left half, dominates most of the time in individuals with intact brains as well as in split-brain patients.”
-----------------------------------
Despite this observation, by an eminant Nobel Prize winner, made more than a generation ago, warning us that we are educating only one side of the child brain and therefore only evoking half of its creative potential, neither the government nor private education institutions have paid much attention to it. The same public school policy that was implemented nationally more than a century ago continues unaltered today. That same one-sided textbook school curriculum has been foisted on home-school parents.
There has been no attempt by any government or private research institute evaluating whether the intensive child indoctrination system that has been accepted as an international standard of education, might be short-circuiting human intelligence and gradually destabilizing the collective psyche of the entire specie. The fact that only 1% of students achieve excellence in tests, most are mediocre, 40% drop out entirely and God alone knbows how many cheat at examinations, seems not to have been cause for a call for a mass change of direction
Looked at objectively, what does the international education system boil down to?
For six hours each weekday, children are bundled off to school and incarcerated inside crowded classrooms. There, for the next twelve years and more, the left side of their brains are systematically imprinted with a purely analytical evaluation of reality.
Socially, students are instructed that their national political ideologies, whether it be administered via capitalism, communism or socialism, is the only moral foundation on which to govern people and give them the freedom to pursue happiness
From an economic contractual perspective, the national education goal is to place as many literate workers as possible on the mass production lines, with little attention paid to the personal cultivation of individual ethics or the artistic development of their full creative potential.
Scientifically the entire specie is instructed that reality can only be measured empirically.
This one-sided analytical focus on political, economic and scientific evaluations leaves the intuitive right side of the brain to more or less atrophy. Its infinite inspirational potential, and its ability to question the validity of all analytical rationales and seek a more profound sense of balance is left out of the developmental equation,
As a net result of all existing state-sponsored child indoctrination systems of education, apparently sane graduates can be easily persuaded to passionately dislike and partition their own populations via divisive political arguments over how to govern the nation. It allows them to unevenly divide the wealth produced by the gross work effort of the nation; exploit the labor of their workers to the fullest extent of the law; gouge excessive profits out of the market place; gamble with commodities without moral care; empirically deny the existence of spiritual influences, without providing a stitch of evidence to support this claim. And, worse than all the above; in the extreme, tap into the emotional bank of mass indoctrination and easily excite tens of millions to wage international wars and murder the populations of any other culture that does not conform to its own standards. All of this is done, without ever evoking the inner moral guide specifically evolved by Nature, able to question and find self-determined balance to all of it.
What has never been holistically analyzed in terms of evaluating the mass psychology of what happens when entire populations have been systematically drilled from early childhood in artificial evaluations, with all trained to obey technical instructions from superiors. graduates tend to remain in a pre-adult stage, relying on supervision from cradle to grave. Very few mature with self-assurance and a self-policed sense of personal responsibility. There is very little creative assertion.
Thus the nation becomes mired in bureaucratic administration, requiring the endless legislation of laws, legal interpretation and the massive expense of policing a more or less robotic citizenry that can be easily manipulated to the left or the right by any person or system of government that pretends to be fully knowledgeable.
In developmental psychology, it can be stated that the current mass mentality of the most technologically advanced nations remains locked into their teens.
In direct contrast, for the past twenty years the Heartstart program has taken a dual-brain approach to child education. The graduation results have been phenomenal. The ethical behavioral results even more so. We have produced self-tutored, self-policed graduates endowed with a profound sense of personal ethical constraints and a deep reverence for Nature and the technological excellence of the master Consciousness She has evolved. They are all excellent scholars and creative workers. There moral compass is solidly set on Truth is Love. The oldest are now in their twenties. The behavior of each and every one of them has not given their parents a single moment of consern.
Preamble
Nearly forty years ago, Roger W. Sperry., Cal. Tech, Professor of Psychobiology, writing on Lateral Specialization of Cerebral Function in Surgically Separated Hemispheres, had the following statement to make:
“The main theme to emerge…is that there appear to be two modes of thinking, verbal and non-verbal, represented rather separately in left and right hemispheres of the brain, respectively, and that our educational system, as well as science in general, tends to neglect the non-verbal form of intellect. What it comes down to is that modern society discriminates against the right hemisphere. The verbal half of the brain, the left half, dominates most of the time in individuals with intact brains as well as in split-brain patients.”
-----------------------------------
Despite this observation, by an eminant Nobel Prize winner, made more than a generation ago, warning us that we are educating only one side of the child brain and therefore only evoking half of its creative potential, neither the government nor private education institutions have paid much attention to it. The same public school policy that was implemented nationally more than a century ago continues unaltered today. That same one-sided textbook school curriculum has been foisted on home-school parents.
There has been no attempt by any government or private research institute evaluating whether the intensive child indoctrination system that has been accepted as an international standard of education, might be short-circuiting human intelligence and gradually destabilizing the collective psyche of the entire specie. The fact that only 1% of students achieve excellence in tests, most are mediocre, 40% drop out entirely and God alone knbows how many cheat at examinations, seems not to have been cause for a call for a mass change of direction
Looked at objectively, what does the international education system boil down to?
For six hours each weekday, children are bundled off to school and incarcerated inside crowded classrooms. There, for the next twelve years and more, the left side of their brains are systematically imprinted with a purely analytical evaluation of reality.
Socially, students are instructed that their national political ideologies, whether it be administered via capitalism, communism or socialism, is the only moral foundation on which to govern people and give them the freedom to pursue happiness
From an economic contractual perspective, the national education goal is to place as many literate workers as possible on the mass production lines, with little attention paid to the personal cultivation of individual ethics or the artistic development of their full creative potential.
Scientifically the entire specie is instructed that reality can only be measured empirically.
This one-sided analytical focus on political, economic and scientific evaluations leaves the intuitive right side of the brain to more or less atrophy. Its infinite inspirational potential, and its ability to question the validity of all analytical rationales and seek a more profound sense of balance is left out of the developmental equation,
As a net result of all existing state-sponsored child indoctrination systems of education, apparently sane graduates can be easily persuaded to passionately dislike and partition their own populations via divisive political arguments over how to govern the nation. It allows them to unevenly divide the wealth produced by the gross work effort of the nation; exploit the labor of their workers to the fullest extent of the law; gouge excessive profits out of the market place; gamble with commodities without moral care; empirically deny the existence of spiritual influences, without providing a stitch of evidence to support this claim. And, worse than all the above; in the extreme, tap into the emotional bank of mass indoctrination and easily excite tens of millions to wage international wars and murder the populations of any other culture that does not conform to its own standards. All of this is done, without ever evoking the inner moral guide specifically evolved by Nature, able to question and find self-determined balance to all of it.
What has never been holistically analyzed in terms of evaluating the mass psychology of what happens when entire populations have been systematically drilled from early childhood in artificial evaluations, with all trained to obey technical instructions from superiors. graduates tend to remain in a pre-adult stage, relying on supervision from cradle to grave. Very few mature with self-assurance and a self-policed sense of personal responsibility. There is very little creative assertion.
Thus the nation becomes mired in bureaucratic administration, requiring the endless legislation of laws, legal interpretation and the massive expense of policing a more or less robotic citizenry that can be easily manipulated to the left or the right by any person or system of government that pretends to be fully knowledgeable.
In developmental psychology, it can be stated that the current mass mentality of the most technologically advanced nations remains locked into their teens.
In direct contrast, for the past twenty years the Heartstart program has taken a dual-brain approach to child education. The graduation results have been phenomenal. The ethical behavioral results even more so. We have produced self-tutored, self-policed graduates endowed with a profound sense of personal ethical constraints and a deep reverence for Nature and the technological excellence of the master Consciousness She has evolved. They are all excellent scholars and creative workers. There moral compass is solidly set on Truth is Love. The oldest are now in their twenties. The behavior of each and every one of them has not given their parents a single moment of consern.
Saturday, December 27, 2008
PROPHECY
The Parable of Sodom and Gomorrah
Twenty years ago, for no particular reason, while living in Hollywood, my consciousness was invaded by the biblical parable of Sodom and Gomorrah. In a strange way I felt as though I was Lot, and that God was warning me to get out of the life I was living , take my family and go and find a more wholesome life far away from the maddening crowd. And, just like Lot, I argued with God that people are intrinsically good and that abandoning them was tantamount to admitting that humankind was more evil than godly. Despite my objections the sense of impending disaster would not go away and the feeling that I must leave remained. We had four small children at that time and the periodic reminders of the earth shuddering beneath us that we lived right on top of the San Andreas fault line did little to relieve me of concern.
I spent many months waking up every morning with the sense of impending dread, trying to analyzing and shake off the oppressive feeling. I worked hard on deciphering the inner meaning of the parable. I eventually concluded that Sodom represented the glut of our fleshy appetites and that Gomorrah represented our national preoccupation with gambling with money and trying to get rich quick by gouging a profit out of every transaction. The inference of the warning was that if these two social addictions consumed us to the exclusion of allowing the cautionary hand of God into our lives, mass dysfunction would set in and they would eventually spell the destruction of our modern culture.
In effect my own consciousness was warning me and asking me to stand back from the mass indoctrination and try to deprogram myself and my family from their insidious influences. Having thus satisfied myself as to what was causing the inner sense of unease, the larger question of Lot remained. What was the purpose of saving myself if the rest of humanity was to be left behind? A life without extended social interaction was no life at all.. Surely the rest of humanity could be made to see the danger in the same way that I did. So, like Lot, with great earnestness, I made a deal with God to find ten good family men. I began warning friends, family and strangers alike that if we did not make significant alterations in the way we lived our lives, our civilization would crumble to dust. I suggested that we begin to wean ourselves off a money-based capitalistic economic system and start cleaning up our act by paying more attention to our spirituality. My urging, just as the parable predicted, was laughed at and derided. I could not find a single person to agree with me.
So I packed up my family, left Hollywood and settled on a farm far away in a lonely desert. I knew my wife was not totally happy with my decision. I warned her that the parable predicted that Lot’s wife would look back and turn into a pillar of salt. She laughed at that and vehemently denied that she would ever leave her children. Her chuckles at my silliness were stilled when the apartment we had left just two weeks earlier, collapsed on its foundations during the North Ridge Earthquake.
Over the next few years I wrote and published a book that outlined the gradual evolution of human consciousness all the way from Stone Age family values to the Present international tensions. The book provided a graphic illustration of the logical progression of social and spiritual survival imperatives that have taken place over four past Ages of human development and how that has led us to our present condition. I argued that we were at the end of a Technological Age of over-intensive mass production and environmental exploitation and that the exponential pressures of our populations on an over-burdened planet demanded a far more ethical attitude as regards the meaning of life and purpose of mankind’s lethal domination of the home planet. Once again I naively expected that the progressive logic of the argument would immediately influence readers and make them find ways and means to change their life style. It never happened. Psyche-Genetics became an instant non-seller. Not a soul responded to it. No book in the history of publication has sold less.
That failure succeeded in shutting down my objections against God. I could not find one person in either Sodom or Gomorrah to listen, let alone the ten God had agreed to in the parable. The failure to communicate allowed my wife’s grumbling to resume. Her discontent was once again stilled temporally when she saw the eerie sight of the twin towers of World Trade crumbled to dust. I then got on a dozen internet forums, (just like this one) and began broadcasting thousands of posts related to the need for a mass change of consciousness. And again got back nothing but derision from all. God had been right all along.
Three years ago my wife found the desert solitude oppressive. She left a loving husband and loving children in preference for a life back Sodom and Gomorrah and has subsequently turned into a pillar of salt.
In September of this year, the whole edifice of Sodom and Gomorrah, as predicted in the ancient parable, has begun to collapse. The walls are falling across the length and breadth of the planet.
Twenty years ago, for no particular reason, while living in Hollywood, my consciousness was invaded by the biblical parable of Sodom and Gomorrah. In a strange way I felt as though I was Lot, and that God was warning me to get out of the life I was living , take my family and go and find a more wholesome life far away from the maddening crowd. And, just like Lot, I argued with God that people are intrinsically good and that abandoning them was tantamount to admitting that humankind was more evil than godly. Despite my objections the sense of impending disaster would not go away and the feeling that I must leave remained. We had four small children at that time and the periodic reminders of the earth shuddering beneath us that we lived right on top of the San Andreas fault line did little to relieve me of concern.
I spent many months waking up every morning with the sense of impending dread, trying to analyzing and shake off the oppressive feeling. I worked hard on deciphering the inner meaning of the parable. I eventually concluded that Sodom represented the glut of our fleshy appetites and that Gomorrah represented our national preoccupation with gambling with money and trying to get rich quick by gouging a profit out of every transaction. The inference of the warning was that if these two social addictions consumed us to the exclusion of allowing the cautionary hand of God into our lives, mass dysfunction would set in and they would eventually spell the destruction of our modern culture.
In effect my own consciousness was warning me and asking me to stand back from the mass indoctrination and try to deprogram myself and my family from their insidious influences. Having thus satisfied myself as to what was causing the inner sense of unease, the larger question of Lot remained. What was the purpose of saving myself if the rest of humanity was to be left behind? A life without extended social interaction was no life at all.. Surely the rest of humanity could be made to see the danger in the same way that I did. So, like Lot, with great earnestness, I made a deal with God to find ten good family men. I began warning friends, family and strangers alike that if we did not make significant alterations in the way we lived our lives, our civilization would crumble to dust. I suggested that we begin to wean ourselves off a money-based capitalistic economic system and start cleaning up our act by paying more attention to our spirituality. My urging, just as the parable predicted, was laughed at and derided. I could not find a single person to agree with me.
So I packed up my family, left Hollywood and settled on a farm far away in a lonely desert. I knew my wife was not totally happy with my decision. I warned her that the parable predicted that Lot’s wife would look back and turn into a pillar of salt. She laughed at that and vehemently denied that she would ever leave her children. Her chuckles at my silliness were stilled when the apartment we had left just two weeks earlier, collapsed on its foundations during the North Ridge Earthquake.
Over the next few years I wrote and published a book that outlined the gradual evolution of human consciousness all the way from Stone Age family values to the Present international tensions. The book provided a graphic illustration of the logical progression of social and spiritual survival imperatives that have taken place over four past Ages of human development and how that has led us to our present condition. I argued that we were at the end of a Technological Age of over-intensive mass production and environmental exploitation and that the exponential pressures of our populations on an over-burdened planet demanded a far more ethical attitude as regards the meaning of life and purpose of mankind’s lethal domination of the home planet. Once again I naively expected that the progressive logic of the argument would immediately influence readers and make them find ways and means to change their life style. It never happened. Psyche-Genetics became an instant non-seller. Not a soul responded to it. No book in the history of publication has sold less.
That failure succeeded in shutting down my objections against God. I could not find one person in either Sodom or Gomorrah to listen, let alone the ten God had agreed to in the parable. The failure to communicate allowed my wife’s grumbling to resume. Her discontent was once again stilled temporally when she saw the eerie sight of the twin towers of World Trade crumbled to dust. I then got on a dozen internet forums, (just like this one) and began broadcasting thousands of posts related to the need for a mass change of consciousness. And again got back nothing but derision from all. God had been right all along.
Three years ago my wife found the desert solitude oppressive. She left a loving husband and loving children in preference for a life back Sodom and Gomorrah and has subsequently turned into a pillar of salt.
In September of this year, the whole edifice of Sodom and Gomorrah, as predicted in the ancient parable, has begun to collapse. The walls are falling across the length and breadth of the planet.
Tuesday, December 23, 2008
ESP
Originally Posted by gordon
Mr MagnetMan, I was wondering what kind of "psychic-soul powers" do you, and your children have? I was also wondering, is there a psychic skill able to "see" and to notice in other timelines?
It is my conviction that extra sensory perception represents the untapped potential of all human beings. I believe that it is related to uninhibited communicatioin between the two hemispheres of the cerebral cortex. Some few people are born with a clear pathway between the two brains and consequently enjoy a high level of intuive insights. Domineering parents, siblings, text-book schooling, governments, police, etc. intimidate the child psyche. Adults redicule their natural tendency to fantatize and as a consequence gradually block natural access to the intuitive side of the psyche.
During the education of my kids I made sure they were not incarcerated inside a classroom or forced to prematurely analyze text books for six hours a day. I let them run and play throughout childhood. The only disciplines imposed on them where personal ethics, hygiene, chores, gardening etc. I encouraged arts and crafts, and regular yoga and meditation classes. They only hit the text books at puberty. All scored straight A in all subjects in final exams. Though none have as yet turned out to be especially clair-sentient, their intuitive powers are far superior to most people. I devised a telecommuncation test, transmitting random alphabetic letters to each other. Their "hits" were phenomenal - on 50% of the occassions getting six out of six right. Never less than 60%. The odds each transmission are of course 26 to 1.
Quote:
If the future is forward and the past is the past, then the timelines are sideways?
Time is relative to consciousness. In the Absolute state, past, present and future co-exist. Everything is potentially in the present moment. The eerieness of deja vu happens when, for a timeless instant, consciousness breaks the light-speed barrier. Your consciousness is equally split between two space/time continuims at the same moment.
Some of my own ESP experiences are recorded in my book Psyche-Genetics.
What is clair-sentient?
The psychic ability to hear sounds and see entities or other-dimensional scenes vibrating at frequencies beyond the normal range of perception. The most common is to see auras radiating from people or objects.Clinical psychologists provide more prosaic explanations.
And what are the other "ranks". *Inrespect* I was hoping you could explain about timelines. As I am sure that timelines work on adifferent set of laws? I could be wrong. Thanks MagnetMan, for viewing and answering. Peace. Blessed Be.
I am not sure what you mean by "time lines".
At a very basic level time is relative to states of consciousness.
An infant, for instance has no concept of past or future. Everything takes place in the here and now.
As we age the survival demand to master technologies force us to artificially divide time into increasingly minute segments. The analytical side of the brain becomes a time-keeper. When you are young you live with your psyche focused on future ambitions and expectations. When old you dwell on past triumphs and mistakes. It is almost impossible for us to break the hypnotic time constrictions and try to live in the here and now. We rarely exprience the totality of the moment. When we do, the experience seems like a meeting with the Divine. It is as though you are directly connected to everything in the cosmos. You do not feel alone or separated.
Dream time has no relation to waking time and is in fact closer to "no time" and therefore is less artificially manufactured.
Many clair-sentients have "premonitions" about events that in our "normal" frame of time reference, have not yet happened. I have had a numbver of these premonitions about future events in my life. I have at least ten events which took place exactly as predicted. I was taking a casula look at new set of post cards I had just bought, when I had the eery feeling that I was looking at my future life. Its a long fascinating story about the power of premonition which I have related elsewhere.
The fleeting nature of time is regularly experiencied when one is deeply engrossed in a creative mode of expression. I can remember writing my first novel. My wife would bring me a cup of coffee in the morning and leave for work. She would come back in the evening eight hours later and I would ask her, "Why haven't you gone to work yet? Aren't you a bit late?" This time-loss happened repeatedly during the months I spent in creative writing. This clearly suggests that the right side of the brain, when in the creative mode, has no consciousness of time and is disconnected from the analyical side during that period Smoking marijuana also distorted "time" for me.
In contrast, if you are engaged in a tedious chore, time "drags".
Time is completely unreal. Minutes and seconds ticking away on a clock is a manufacture of the human mind. No other life force experiences time the way we do. A dog waiting at the door for its master can do so all day without impatience - even remain unconscious of "feeding time". The entire life span of a microscopic organism from birth to death can take place in a single day.
I hope that is explicit enough.
__________________
Common Sense Revisited
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Last
Mr MagnetMan, I was wondering what kind of "psychic-soul powers" do you, and your children have? I was also wondering, is there a psychic skill able to "see" and to notice in other timelines?
It is my conviction that extra sensory perception represents the untapped potential of all human beings. I believe that it is related to uninhibited communicatioin between the two hemispheres of the cerebral cortex. Some few people are born with a clear pathway between the two brains and consequently enjoy a high level of intuive insights. Domineering parents, siblings, text-book schooling, governments, police, etc. intimidate the child psyche. Adults redicule their natural tendency to fantatize and as a consequence gradually block natural access to the intuitive side of the psyche.
During the education of my kids I made sure they were not incarcerated inside a classroom or forced to prematurely analyze text books for six hours a day. I let them run and play throughout childhood. The only disciplines imposed on them where personal ethics, hygiene, chores, gardening etc. I encouraged arts and crafts, and regular yoga and meditation classes. They only hit the text books at puberty. All scored straight A in all subjects in final exams. Though none have as yet turned out to be especially clair-sentient, their intuitive powers are far superior to most people. I devised a telecommuncation test, transmitting random alphabetic letters to each other. Their "hits" were phenomenal - on 50% of the occassions getting six out of six right. Never less than 60%. The odds each transmission are of course 26 to 1.
Quote:
If the future is forward and the past is the past, then the timelines are sideways?
Time is relative to consciousness. In the Absolute state, past, present and future co-exist. Everything is potentially in the present moment. The eerieness of deja vu happens when, for a timeless instant, consciousness breaks the light-speed barrier. Your consciousness is equally split between two space/time continuims at the same moment.
Some of my own ESP experiences are recorded in my book Psyche-Genetics.
What is clair-sentient?
The psychic ability to hear sounds and see entities or other-dimensional scenes vibrating at frequencies beyond the normal range of perception. The most common is to see auras radiating from people or objects.Clinical psychologists provide more prosaic explanations.
And what are the other "ranks". *Inrespect* I was hoping you could explain about timelines. As I am sure that timelines work on adifferent set of laws? I could be wrong. Thanks MagnetMan, for viewing and answering. Peace. Blessed Be.
I am not sure what you mean by "time lines".
At a very basic level time is relative to states of consciousness.
An infant, for instance has no concept of past or future. Everything takes place in the here and now.
As we age the survival demand to master technologies force us to artificially divide time into increasingly minute segments. The analytical side of the brain becomes a time-keeper. When you are young you live with your psyche focused on future ambitions and expectations. When old you dwell on past triumphs and mistakes. It is almost impossible for us to break the hypnotic time constrictions and try to live in the here and now. We rarely exprience the totality of the moment. When we do, the experience seems like a meeting with the Divine. It is as though you are directly connected to everything in the cosmos. You do not feel alone or separated.
Dream time has no relation to waking time and is in fact closer to "no time" and therefore is less artificially manufactured.
Many clair-sentients have "premonitions" about events that in our "normal" frame of time reference, have not yet happened. I have had a numbver of these premonitions about future events in my life. I have at least ten events which took place exactly as predicted. I was taking a casula look at new set of post cards I had just bought, when I had the eery feeling that I was looking at my future life. Its a long fascinating story about the power of premonition which I have related elsewhere.
The fleeting nature of time is regularly experiencied when one is deeply engrossed in a creative mode of expression. I can remember writing my first novel. My wife would bring me a cup of coffee in the morning and leave for work. She would come back in the evening eight hours later and I would ask her, "Why haven't you gone to work yet? Aren't you a bit late?" This time-loss happened repeatedly during the months I spent in creative writing. This clearly suggests that the right side of the brain, when in the creative mode, has no consciousness of time and is disconnected from the analyical side during that period Smoking marijuana also distorted "time" for me.
In contrast, if you are engaged in a tedious chore, time "drags".
Time is completely unreal. Minutes and seconds ticking away on a clock is a manufacture of the human mind. No other life force experiences time the way we do. A dog waiting at the door for its master can do so all day without impatience - even remain unconscious of "feeding time". The entire life span of a microscopic organism from birth to death can take place in a single day.
I hope that is explicit enough.
__________________
Common Sense Revisited
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Last
Sunday, December 21, 2008
African Pathos continued....
The newsmen in that room knew I would want the footage of that lone blackman begging for death broadcast to the world at large. What they did not appreciate and stubbornly never would, was why I wanted transparency on such damning action. They believed that strong police action was the only language Africans understood and that they world beyond had grasp of the difficulties in Africa. To them a step out of a mud hut onto a concrete floor, no matter how stark the new might be, was step up the evolutionary ladder which black Africa, owed to the whiteman and had to be eternally grateful for.
Not only Afrikaners, but white South Africans in general had no internal grasp of the depth of black consciousness. Few whites spoke a Bantu tongue. Even fewer read black literature. The cultural divide was one-sided. They lived and worked on our properties, spoke our languages reared our children; heard our conversations; listened to our music; saw our movies and television programs. They knew us intimately and we did not know them at all. We had no genuine feeling for the pathos of a third generation of African children who aspired to move out of their cramped locations, own a piece of the pie themselves and could find no way to do that short of rebellion. After a century of serfdom; laboring in the gold mines; sweeping streets; carrying shit buckets; washing clothes; scrubbing floors and nursing our children for almost no pay; blocked from economic advancement by job-reservation; forced to carry passbooks; continuously hassled by the police; all the while helping to build up South Africa's modern infrastructure, they were now seeking a stronger form of representation in the country's government than they had at present.
The government could not or would not accept that the urban blacks were a detribalized society of self-determined individuals who had moved away from the security of their tribal customs and deliberately sought a life in the white man's world. They had seen the survival advantages of superior technology and wanted their children to learn how to master them. They desired to move forward in time - not be relocated back in the tribal homelands. In response, the Afrikaner psyche remained fixed on the conflicts of the past - focused on their historical fears of numbers. The black/white ratio inside the country was six to one. Another six hundred millions loomed beyond our borders, ready to pounce on any sign of weakness. Die Swart Gevaar. Keep the blackman down. "Give a kaffir a finger and he will take the whole hand"
Every white born in Africa was fully conscious of the racial divide. Very few, myself included, wanted majority rule by blacks. Most were blind to the reality that it was inevitable. I had lived and worked elsewhere in Africa and knew that the winds of change would not an could die out on the Limpopo. Africa was for Africans. I accepted that. But to me, black rule remained generations too premature. They were not ready to run highly industrialized nations. We needed to keep our focus on improving the quality of their technological education, not be politically afraid of their electoral numbers. The entire international out-cry against Apartheid was centered on the demand for democracy. The demand was naïve in the extreme. If after eighty generations of civilized development in Europe, two white cultures in South Africa could not find it within themselves to transcend their own language and custom barriers and vote along purely ideological lines, how in the world where thirteen inimical tribal cultures in South Africa supposed to accomplish that feat? The international demand for democratic rule throughout tribal Africa was so utterly pseudo-intellectually out of touch with reality it made me question whether there was anyone outside of Africa left with any base of common sense.
The practical reality that had to be faced on the ground was that the vast majority of blacks inside South Africa were still only semi-educated. Only a primary school education was compulsory. This was not a deliberate educational policy of racial subjugation. The general education level of the country was poor for both races. There was simply not enough teachers and classroom in the country to do more than what was already being done. White students were crowded forty or more to the classroom. Most entered the trades at age sixteen. Less then 10% of them made it to university. As it stood, the industrial know-how of less then four million Europeans was not only educating the primary education of thirty million blacks, it also formed the bread-basket for a hundred million Africans surrounding South Africa's borders. A collapse of the white government had enormous ramifications, all of them potentially disastrous.
I was one of the few English-speakers to realize that the Apartheid master plan of creating thirteen separate self-governing Bantustans within the traditional tribal homelands was the only logical social and spiritual developmental policy to pursue. Leap-froging from a Bronze Age of agricultural traditions and tribal lore into a sophisticated Steel Age of high technology, without experiencing an Iron Age of basic industrial craftsmanship and orthodox religious observances, would leave a black-ruled nation in a confused evolutionary time warp. One simply cannot go from primary school to university. This hard fact of life was already apparent in the chaos of the rest of black-ruled post-colonial Africa. If, say, something as simple as a windowpane gets broken in the middle of Africa today, it cannot be replaced without an import from Europe six thousand miles away. The entire infrastructures of post-colonial Africa is on its last legs and nobody is repairing it. In 1976 the genocide in Ruanda, the Congo, Sudan, Somalia and Dafar had yet to erupt. But the signs of Africa's post-colonial degeneration into her own medieval Dark Age were already clearly apparent.
The whole notion of Uhuru in Africa was a pseudo-intellectual pipe dream smoked up by lawyers with no practical training in civil management and as such was clearly premature. The European powers who abandoned their colonies in Africa, did so mainly because of the immense drain of maintaining existing infrastructures. Their Imperial ambitions in Africa had turned out to be a net loss, state burdens that they were only too happy to relinquish. For the new leaders of black Africa, the governing reality was that none of them - to a man - were equipped to realize and come to grips with, was that at least a generation or two of conscientious craftsmanship was needed throughout the continent in order to establish a large enough base of technical training able to manage and maintain industrialized infrastructures. This same fact of live was relevant in South Africa, the most advanced of all the colonial nations on the continent. That same anti-colonial notion that the thirteen dispirit tribal groups in South Africa could govern the country democratically and run its nuclear powered national infrastructure as efficiently as the whites was patently preposterous.
The major problem facing the creation of viable self-governing Bantustans inside South Africa was in finding ways and means to create sustainable economic systems in each of them. Without the ability to gainfully employ their own populations and train them to bridge the transition period until they were capable of running the machinery of an industrialized nation, the Bantustan program was untenable. To this end, the Apartheid master plan encouraged, via tax incentives, for large international corporations like General Motors and Ford to establish their manufacturing plants on the borders of the Bantustans. This economic stimulus may well have worked if the rest of the investing world had joined in to support it. But the pseudo-intellectual cries of the anti-Apartheid movement drowned out and quashed the practical applications of the Bantustan master plan. Nelson Mandella remained the revolutionary hero locked up in prison and the Apartheid government the evil Empire.
In any event, the Bantustan policy did nothing to address the growing problem of three generations of detribalized people crammed into the urban locations and ghettos that surrounded every town and city in the country. The reality the government could not face and did not know how to deal with, other than mass relocation, was that some six million of South Africa's black population were no longer culturally connected to or interested in being sent back to their tribal lands. The urban blacks and the generations of sophisticated cultural reorientation that they had undergone needed to hear and experience their own voice travel beyond the jazz of location music and protest slogans. Exactly how far and how loud their political voice could be heard, needed to be urgently negotiated. The growing pressure of millions of school graduates seeking something more than just sweating in the mines, sweeping the streets and washing colonial clothes had to be met with a realistic policy of gradated economic and political advancement. Persecuting and jailing their leaders and enforcing petty Apartheid laws only emphasized and exacerbated the emotions of racial discrimination.
On the other hand the arguments of their black leaders like Nelson Mandella, trained to be lawyers and not civil engineers, crying against injustice were one-sided in the extreme. Zero credit was being given to the advances in black consciousness already achieved and how difficult it had been to do so. As far as I was concerned the resentment against white privileges needed to be addressed more holistically and nobody was doing that effectively. Blacks and the anti-apartheid movement in general needed to be reminded that Europeans had served for eighty long generations as unpaid serfs and minions in Europe, living in hovels beneath the castle-walls of our overlords. They had sweated blood and tears and suffered torture on the rack for our privileged position. No pain, no gain. All cultures and races had to serve a degree of allotted time. Certainly not for another two thousand years like Europe did, but at least one or two more generations.
To me the conflict between the races was a matter of semantics. If, instead, the current attitude of master/servant, could be changed to a mutual dialogue between teacher/student, that more realistic approach would encourage a kinder, more enlightened domestic atmosphere. Pressure would be relieved if every black child believed in a future of graduated advance, of hope and promise - not one of stagnancy, of perpetual servitude, of military confrontation and hopeless pleas for on honorable death rather than a disgraceful life. This mass change had to be initiated in improved technical educational and job opportunities, not at the polls. Freedom to vote, without the skill to be gainfully employed was a Christmas wrapping without a present inside.
As a television producer directly involved with modern mass communication, I believed that only through transparency, admission of mistakes on both sides, could we achieve racial understanding, prolong benevolent white administration and make South Africa strong for all its people. But I also knew that all of my hopes were seen by others as too naïve - too idealistic, that given the opportunity, black power leaders would not wait another generation - that it could and would be even more ruthless, more savage than white power. The political chaos and acts of genocide in rest of independent Africa bore witness to that. With the fall of colonial rule, as with the fall of Rome, Africa was entering her own Dark Ages and would remain there for centuries.
The weight of all I have mentioned above, bore down on all of the public communicators caught in the time-warp inside that editing room. There was no question that they would suppress the news. There was nothing I could do about it. I knew then that would leave Africa soon and find a more hospitable home elsewhere on the planet. But I wanted confirmation that I was doing the right thing. I needed to know exactly what had happened in Soweto that morning. I owed that young black man, begging hopelessly for death, at least that.
I left the editing room, went down to my car and drove six miles out of town to the giant location. I had a fully loaded 16mm movie camera lying on the seat beside me. I wanted to investigate and report on what had happened for myself. The road out to the location was strangely deserted. I had been going into Soweto every morning for the past three months, documenting urban shamanism. Over a thousand witchdoctors, mostly women, still found enough customers in the shadow of the giant Baragwanath hospital, to practice the ancient Bronze Age art of psychic healing.
The focus of the documentary was; who in black society became a witchdoctor? What made anyone decide to become one? How were they trained? Via public television I hoped to dispel among white South African viewers the prevalent superstition, fostered initially by the Christian Church, that witchcraft was the Devil's work. During the months spent documenting the forty shamans (sangomas) who participated in the program. I could not help but be impressed, not only by the uncanny nature of their psychic powers, but also by their down-to-earth grasp of basic human psychology.
Instead of just mystical hocus-pocus, I found myself among forty of the most intelligent and analytically insightful Africans I had ever met. The finished documentary revealed to some extent the subtle nature of the spiritual empathy that exists between psychic healers and their patients. I saw that African witchdoctors were duplicates of the ancient alchemists of Europe, the forerunners of modern science. The spiritual message I got was that the true art of human kindness is to empathize so deeply with the spirit of another pilgrim in life, as to actually feel the pains of fellow human being. It made me realize that if sensitive mediums were able. with a little training, to care enough to feel the pain of another and could reach out a healing hand, mankind in general had the capacity for the same degree of empathy and compassion. Potentially we had the internal power to heal our nations of all our ailments.
During the final days of filming one of the female shamans I was working with warned me that she sensed danger ahead and that I should stay out of Soweto. A few days later, Credo Mutwa, a Zulu witchdoctor made famous by the well-received publication of a book on African mythology: Indaba My Children had told me that he had a dream about blood flowing in the streets. In genuine distress he had naively asked me to warn the government that some awful disaster lay ahead.
In the weeks after, while editing the film inside the huge broadcasting complex, knowing that I had the power to talk to the whole nation, I wrestled with his plea. How was I to transmit psychic premonitions through a modern news medium and get a white audience who viewed African superstitions with general disgust, to take the warnings seriously? Without denigrating my source, I cautiously tried to warn top administration officials within the SABC that I had been given information about violence brewing in Soweto. My reluctance to provide the source of my information was taken the wrong way.
A previous documentary of mine, which featured the early life of Mohandes Ghandi in South Africa and his fight against race discrimination, had included anti-Apartheid interviews with Dr Alan Paton and Professor Fatima Meer. It had been banned from public broadcast. This, among other attempts of mine to bring black consciousness to the fore, had placed me on the lists of BOSS, the Bureau of State Security, as a potential anti-Apartheid activist. So my warning that something was brewing inside Soweto was interpreted that I had some form of contact with the banned ANC movement and had inside information on an up-coming subversive demonstration. When I eventually confessed that my source was the intuition of witchdoctors, one can imagine the derisive response.
I had learned to take the premonitions of the shamans seriously. So I took a different tack. I held meetings with my fellow producers in the English documentary department, arguing that our programs should concentrate on the variety of unnecessary hardships blacks were experiencing inside Soweto. I pointed out that any genuine act of concern shown by the whites, especially if broadcast nation-wide, would go a long way towards ameliorating the growing sense of resentment inside the townships. Violent demonstrations in one form or another could be avoided if we worked together to appeal to public sympathy. My colleague's response was disheartening. That were convinced that I as over-reacting. They did not feel that even if they wanted to, a mass change of race relations in the country was not at all possible. The under-lying reality was that the government controlled the SABC and they did not want their careers jeopardized as black sympathizers. These thoughts were in my mind as I drove out of town to investigate for myself and find out why and how Credo's dream had come true.
There was a heavily armed police road block at the entrance into Soweto. The police were backed by army troops. They would not let me through. So I drove around the perimeter of the vast location, looking for another way in. It took me a while to realized that there was only one road leading in and out of that vast township. One throughway for a population of over one million! The strategic reason was now obvious. When the government bulldozed down Sophiatown the vast unsanitary shanty town that once crowded Johannesburg's city center, and built the huge location of Soweto (an acronym for South Western Area Township) six miles further out of Johannesburg, and then and relocated a million black workers inside it. they had made sure that any future mass unrest within it could be fully contained. With the road block in place, no one but the police could get in or out.
After an hour of circling the location and finding no other road in, I was about to turn around and go back to the station, when a young African man stepped out of some bushes on the road-side and waved me down. He was in obvious distress. Tears streamed down his face. I pulled over and picked him up, hoping for information. At that time I still had no idea that several hundred children had just been massacred. The man beside me smelled of kaffir beer. He continued for some time to sob beside me. Finally he spoke: "I left her there! My girl-friend! She was facing the police guns! She was brave. She would not leave! Children were dying right in front of me. I was frightened, so I ran!" We rode on in silence. After a while he stopped crying and spoke soberly. "You know Baas, Dingaan made a big mistake." His historical observation should not have surprised me. Africans in general have a vast oral tradition of their history and tribal lore. Most knew the names of tribal chiefs going back ten to fifteen generations. Dingaan, who had assassinated his step brother Shaka, the founder of the Zulu nation, was paramount chief in 1830's. He had invited seventy Boer pioneers seeking his permission to settle in Zululand, for a conference at his palace. The Boer leaders had entered his compound unarmed. At a signal from Dingaan, they were surrounded and butchered. A Zulu impi of five thousand warriors was dispatched to kill the four hundred voortrekkers waiting to hear if their petition had been granted. Luckily they were warned in time by the daughter of missionary and managed to defeat Zulu regiment. The Battle of Blood River that followed was a turning pint in Black/white relations. The Afrikaners decided that the whole country had to be taken over and held by force. It was that single act of Dingaan's treachery, determining the future course of black/white relations a century and a half earlier, that the young man beside me had put his finger on.
I sighed. There was nothing more to be said, by him or me. I gave him some money and let him off in Randsburg.
There was no way of suppressing the news of the massacre. Four hundred school children staging a peaceful protest march for their right to be taught in English rather than Afrikaans, had been ruthlessly gunned down by the police. The entire world was out-raged and the anti-Apartheid pressures of boycotts and sanctions against South Africa was tightened. I was left with three options. Do nothing, like the rest of my English-speaking compatriots. Keep having my work banned and possibly end up under house-arrest. Or leave the country and find a more welcome home some where else in the world. It was clear to me that Apartheid would eventually collapse and the country go under black rule. To me that was the worse of two evils. Much as it outraged the basic human right to a fair political system of government, white rule remained the only viable economic rationale. It was only a matter of time before thirteen generations of pioneering effort came to an end. I could do nothing about stopping it. Three months latter I sold my house and car, packed up, bought a round the world air ticket, and left the land of my birth for good.
My maternal grandfather was a Jew. My first stop would be Israel. I had some claim there. Maybe they would give me sanctuary. I had no idea that I would be stepping out of an Apartheid frying pan into an Apartheid fire.
To be continued.....
…..
Not only Afrikaners, but white South Africans in general had no internal grasp of the depth of black consciousness. Few whites spoke a Bantu tongue. Even fewer read black literature. The cultural divide was one-sided. They lived and worked on our properties, spoke our languages reared our children; heard our conversations; listened to our music; saw our movies and television programs. They knew us intimately and we did not know them at all. We had no genuine feeling for the pathos of a third generation of African children who aspired to move out of their cramped locations, own a piece of the pie themselves and could find no way to do that short of rebellion. After a century of serfdom; laboring in the gold mines; sweeping streets; carrying shit buckets; washing clothes; scrubbing floors and nursing our children for almost no pay; blocked from economic advancement by job-reservation; forced to carry passbooks; continuously hassled by the police; all the while helping to build up South Africa's modern infrastructure, they were now seeking a stronger form of representation in the country's government than they had at present.
The government could not or would not accept that the urban blacks were a detribalized society of self-determined individuals who had moved away from the security of their tribal customs and deliberately sought a life in the white man's world. They had seen the survival advantages of superior technology and wanted their children to learn how to master them. They desired to move forward in time - not be relocated back in the tribal homelands. In response, the Afrikaner psyche remained fixed on the conflicts of the past - focused on their historical fears of numbers. The black/white ratio inside the country was six to one. Another six hundred millions loomed beyond our borders, ready to pounce on any sign of weakness. Die Swart Gevaar. Keep the blackman down. "Give a kaffir a finger and he will take the whole hand"
Every white born in Africa was fully conscious of the racial divide. Very few, myself included, wanted majority rule by blacks. Most were blind to the reality that it was inevitable. I had lived and worked elsewhere in Africa and knew that the winds of change would not an could die out on the Limpopo. Africa was for Africans. I accepted that. But to me, black rule remained generations too premature. They were not ready to run highly industrialized nations. We needed to keep our focus on improving the quality of their technological education, not be politically afraid of their electoral numbers. The entire international out-cry against Apartheid was centered on the demand for democracy. The demand was naïve in the extreme. If after eighty generations of civilized development in Europe, two white cultures in South Africa could not find it within themselves to transcend their own language and custom barriers and vote along purely ideological lines, how in the world where thirteen inimical tribal cultures in South Africa supposed to accomplish that feat? The international demand for democratic rule throughout tribal Africa was so utterly pseudo-intellectually out of touch with reality it made me question whether there was anyone outside of Africa left with any base of common sense.
The practical reality that had to be faced on the ground was that the vast majority of blacks inside South Africa were still only semi-educated. Only a primary school education was compulsory. This was not a deliberate educational policy of racial subjugation. The general education level of the country was poor for both races. There was simply not enough teachers and classroom in the country to do more than what was already being done. White students were crowded forty or more to the classroom. Most entered the trades at age sixteen. Less then 10% of them made it to university. As it stood, the industrial know-how of less then four million Europeans was not only educating the primary education of thirty million blacks, it also formed the bread-basket for a hundred million Africans surrounding South Africa's borders. A collapse of the white government had enormous ramifications, all of them potentially disastrous.
I was one of the few English-speakers to realize that the Apartheid master plan of creating thirteen separate self-governing Bantustans within the traditional tribal homelands was the only logical social and spiritual developmental policy to pursue. Leap-froging from a Bronze Age of agricultural traditions and tribal lore into a sophisticated Steel Age of high technology, without experiencing an Iron Age of basic industrial craftsmanship and orthodox religious observances, would leave a black-ruled nation in a confused evolutionary time warp. One simply cannot go from primary school to university. This hard fact of life was already apparent in the chaos of the rest of black-ruled post-colonial Africa. If, say, something as simple as a windowpane gets broken in the middle of Africa today, it cannot be replaced without an import from Europe six thousand miles away. The entire infrastructures of post-colonial Africa is on its last legs and nobody is repairing it. In 1976 the genocide in Ruanda, the Congo, Sudan, Somalia and Dafar had yet to erupt. But the signs of Africa's post-colonial degeneration into her own medieval Dark Age were already clearly apparent.
The whole notion of Uhuru in Africa was a pseudo-intellectual pipe dream smoked up by lawyers with no practical training in civil management and as such was clearly premature. The European powers who abandoned their colonies in Africa, did so mainly because of the immense drain of maintaining existing infrastructures. Their Imperial ambitions in Africa had turned out to be a net loss, state burdens that they were only too happy to relinquish. For the new leaders of black Africa, the governing reality was that none of them - to a man - were equipped to realize and come to grips with, was that at least a generation or two of conscientious craftsmanship was needed throughout the continent in order to establish a large enough base of technical training able to manage and maintain industrialized infrastructures. This same fact of live was relevant in South Africa, the most advanced of all the colonial nations on the continent. That same anti-colonial notion that the thirteen dispirit tribal groups in South Africa could govern the country democratically and run its nuclear powered national infrastructure as efficiently as the whites was patently preposterous.
The major problem facing the creation of viable self-governing Bantustans inside South Africa was in finding ways and means to create sustainable economic systems in each of them. Without the ability to gainfully employ their own populations and train them to bridge the transition period until they were capable of running the machinery of an industrialized nation, the Bantustan program was untenable. To this end, the Apartheid master plan encouraged, via tax incentives, for large international corporations like General Motors and Ford to establish their manufacturing plants on the borders of the Bantustans. This economic stimulus may well have worked if the rest of the investing world had joined in to support it. But the pseudo-intellectual cries of the anti-Apartheid movement drowned out and quashed the practical applications of the Bantustan master plan. Nelson Mandella remained the revolutionary hero locked up in prison and the Apartheid government the evil Empire.
In any event, the Bantustan policy did nothing to address the growing problem of three generations of detribalized people crammed into the urban locations and ghettos that surrounded every town and city in the country. The reality the government could not face and did not know how to deal with, other than mass relocation, was that some six million of South Africa's black population were no longer culturally connected to or interested in being sent back to their tribal lands. The urban blacks and the generations of sophisticated cultural reorientation that they had undergone needed to hear and experience their own voice travel beyond the jazz of location music and protest slogans. Exactly how far and how loud their political voice could be heard, needed to be urgently negotiated. The growing pressure of millions of school graduates seeking something more than just sweating in the mines, sweeping the streets and washing colonial clothes had to be met with a realistic policy of gradated economic and political advancement. Persecuting and jailing their leaders and enforcing petty Apartheid laws only emphasized and exacerbated the emotions of racial discrimination.
On the other hand the arguments of their black leaders like Nelson Mandella, trained to be lawyers and not civil engineers, crying against injustice were one-sided in the extreme. Zero credit was being given to the advances in black consciousness already achieved and how difficult it had been to do so. As far as I was concerned the resentment against white privileges needed to be addressed more holistically and nobody was doing that effectively. Blacks and the anti-apartheid movement in general needed to be reminded that Europeans had served for eighty long generations as unpaid serfs and minions in Europe, living in hovels beneath the castle-walls of our overlords. They had sweated blood and tears and suffered torture on the rack for our privileged position. No pain, no gain. All cultures and races had to serve a degree of allotted time. Certainly not for another two thousand years like Europe did, but at least one or two more generations.
To me the conflict between the races was a matter of semantics. If, instead, the current attitude of master/servant, could be changed to a mutual dialogue between teacher/student, that more realistic approach would encourage a kinder, more enlightened domestic atmosphere. Pressure would be relieved if every black child believed in a future of graduated advance, of hope and promise - not one of stagnancy, of perpetual servitude, of military confrontation and hopeless pleas for on honorable death rather than a disgraceful life. This mass change had to be initiated in improved technical educational and job opportunities, not at the polls. Freedom to vote, without the skill to be gainfully employed was a Christmas wrapping without a present inside.
As a television producer directly involved with modern mass communication, I believed that only through transparency, admission of mistakes on both sides, could we achieve racial understanding, prolong benevolent white administration and make South Africa strong for all its people. But I also knew that all of my hopes were seen by others as too naïve - too idealistic, that given the opportunity, black power leaders would not wait another generation - that it could and would be even more ruthless, more savage than white power. The political chaos and acts of genocide in rest of independent Africa bore witness to that. With the fall of colonial rule, as with the fall of Rome, Africa was entering her own Dark Ages and would remain there for centuries.
The weight of all I have mentioned above, bore down on all of the public communicators caught in the time-warp inside that editing room. There was no question that they would suppress the news. There was nothing I could do about it. I knew then that would leave Africa soon and find a more hospitable home elsewhere on the planet. But I wanted confirmation that I was doing the right thing. I needed to know exactly what had happened in Soweto that morning. I owed that young black man, begging hopelessly for death, at least that.
I left the editing room, went down to my car and drove six miles out of town to the giant location. I had a fully loaded 16mm movie camera lying on the seat beside me. I wanted to investigate and report on what had happened for myself. The road out to the location was strangely deserted. I had been going into Soweto every morning for the past three months, documenting urban shamanism. Over a thousand witchdoctors, mostly women, still found enough customers in the shadow of the giant Baragwanath hospital, to practice the ancient Bronze Age art of psychic healing.
The focus of the documentary was; who in black society became a witchdoctor? What made anyone decide to become one? How were they trained? Via public television I hoped to dispel among white South African viewers the prevalent superstition, fostered initially by the Christian Church, that witchcraft was the Devil's work. During the months spent documenting the forty shamans (sangomas) who participated in the program. I could not help but be impressed, not only by the uncanny nature of their psychic powers, but also by their down-to-earth grasp of basic human psychology.
Instead of just mystical hocus-pocus, I found myself among forty of the most intelligent and analytically insightful Africans I had ever met. The finished documentary revealed to some extent the subtle nature of the spiritual empathy that exists between psychic healers and their patients. I saw that African witchdoctors were duplicates of the ancient alchemists of Europe, the forerunners of modern science. The spiritual message I got was that the true art of human kindness is to empathize so deeply with the spirit of another pilgrim in life, as to actually feel the pains of fellow human being. It made me realize that if sensitive mediums were able. with a little training, to care enough to feel the pain of another and could reach out a healing hand, mankind in general had the capacity for the same degree of empathy and compassion. Potentially we had the internal power to heal our nations of all our ailments.
During the final days of filming one of the female shamans I was working with warned me that she sensed danger ahead and that I should stay out of Soweto. A few days later, Credo Mutwa, a Zulu witchdoctor made famous by the well-received publication of a book on African mythology: Indaba My Children had told me that he had a dream about blood flowing in the streets. In genuine distress he had naively asked me to warn the government that some awful disaster lay ahead.
In the weeks after, while editing the film inside the huge broadcasting complex, knowing that I had the power to talk to the whole nation, I wrestled with his plea. How was I to transmit psychic premonitions through a modern news medium and get a white audience who viewed African superstitions with general disgust, to take the warnings seriously? Without denigrating my source, I cautiously tried to warn top administration officials within the SABC that I had been given information about violence brewing in Soweto. My reluctance to provide the source of my information was taken the wrong way.
A previous documentary of mine, which featured the early life of Mohandes Ghandi in South Africa and his fight against race discrimination, had included anti-Apartheid interviews with Dr Alan Paton and Professor Fatima Meer. It had been banned from public broadcast. This, among other attempts of mine to bring black consciousness to the fore, had placed me on the lists of BOSS, the Bureau of State Security, as a potential anti-Apartheid activist. So my warning that something was brewing inside Soweto was interpreted that I had some form of contact with the banned ANC movement and had inside information on an up-coming subversive demonstration. When I eventually confessed that my source was the intuition of witchdoctors, one can imagine the derisive response.
I had learned to take the premonitions of the shamans seriously. So I took a different tack. I held meetings with my fellow producers in the English documentary department, arguing that our programs should concentrate on the variety of unnecessary hardships blacks were experiencing inside Soweto. I pointed out that any genuine act of concern shown by the whites, especially if broadcast nation-wide, would go a long way towards ameliorating the growing sense of resentment inside the townships. Violent demonstrations in one form or another could be avoided if we worked together to appeal to public sympathy. My colleague's response was disheartening. That were convinced that I as over-reacting. They did not feel that even if they wanted to, a mass change of race relations in the country was not at all possible. The under-lying reality was that the government controlled the SABC and they did not want their careers jeopardized as black sympathizers. These thoughts were in my mind as I drove out of town to investigate for myself and find out why and how Credo's dream had come true.
There was a heavily armed police road block at the entrance into Soweto. The police were backed by army troops. They would not let me through. So I drove around the perimeter of the vast location, looking for another way in. It took me a while to realized that there was only one road leading in and out of that vast township. One throughway for a population of over one million! The strategic reason was now obvious. When the government bulldozed down Sophiatown the vast unsanitary shanty town that once crowded Johannesburg's city center, and built the huge location of Soweto (an acronym for South Western Area Township) six miles further out of Johannesburg, and then and relocated a million black workers inside it. they had made sure that any future mass unrest within it could be fully contained. With the road block in place, no one but the police could get in or out.
After an hour of circling the location and finding no other road in, I was about to turn around and go back to the station, when a young African man stepped out of some bushes on the road-side and waved me down. He was in obvious distress. Tears streamed down his face. I pulled over and picked him up, hoping for information. At that time I still had no idea that several hundred children had just been massacred. The man beside me smelled of kaffir beer. He continued for some time to sob beside me. Finally he spoke: "I left her there! My girl-friend! She was facing the police guns! She was brave. She would not leave! Children were dying right in front of me. I was frightened, so I ran!" We rode on in silence. After a while he stopped crying and spoke soberly. "You know Baas, Dingaan made a big mistake." His historical observation should not have surprised me. Africans in general have a vast oral tradition of their history and tribal lore. Most knew the names of tribal chiefs going back ten to fifteen generations. Dingaan, who had assassinated his step brother Shaka, the founder of the Zulu nation, was paramount chief in 1830's. He had invited seventy Boer pioneers seeking his permission to settle in Zululand, for a conference at his palace. The Boer leaders had entered his compound unarmed. At a signal from Dingaan, they were surrounded and butchered. A Zulu impi of five thousand warriors was dispatched to kill the four hundred voortrekkers waiting to hear if their petition had been granted. Luckily they were warned in time by the daughter of missionary and managed to defeat Zulu regiment. The Battle of Blood River that followed was a turning pint in Black/white relations. The Afrikaners decided that the whole country had to be taken over and held by force. It was that single act of Dingaan's treachery, determining the future course of black/white relations a century and a half earlier, that the young man beside me had put his finger on.
I sighed. There was nothing more to be said, by him or me. I gave him some money and let him off in Randsburg.
There was no way of suppressing the news of the massacre. Four hundred school children staging a peaceful protest march for their right to be taught in English rather than Afrikaans, had been ruthlessly gunned down by the police. The entire world was out-raged and the anti-Apartheid pressures of boycotts and sanctions against South Africa was tightened. I was left with three options. Do nothing, like the rest of my English-speaking compatriots. Keep having my work banned and possibly end up under house-arrest. Or leave the country and find a more welcome home some where else in the world. It was clear to me that Apartheid would eventually collapse and the country go under black rule. To me that was the worse of two evils. Much as it outraged the basic human right to a fair political system of government, white rule remained the only viable economic rationale. It was only a matter of time before thirteen generations of pioneering effort came to an end. I could do nothing about stopping it. Three months latter I sold my house and car, packed up, bought a round the world air ticket, and left the land of my birth for good.
My maternal grandfather was a Jew. My first stop would be Israel. I had some claim there. Maybe they would give me sanctuary. I had no idea that I would be stepping out of an Apartheid frying pan into an Apartheid fire.
To be continued.....
…..
Saturday, December 20, 2008
The Illusion of Security.
In the 14th Century a Hindu philosopher named Shankar postulated an atomic theory which stated the matter is illusory (maya). Six centuries later Einstein proved that matter is basically condensed energy.
What this all boils down to is that we and our lives are aspects of a vast cosmic illusion. Reality is relative to a state of consciousness. In order for the individual to feel secure, he or she must join a majority contract that defines what matters in life. Our individual sanity is based then on a consensus of the majority's opinion. If this opinion is challenged in any serious way by any individual who refuses to agree, the specter of mass insanity and subsequent chaos looms.
Our fundamental American security blanket is based on Representative Government: Democracy: Capitalism: Christianity. These are nationally accepted as the only true realities. This consensus of American values was established in the 18th Century by our founding fathers. In order to secure and preserve this American reality, we have been and still are prepared to send our sons into war and kill anyone who challenges it. We have invested in a vast armory of nuclear over-kill to ensure and protect it.
At the start of the 21st Century, the illusion that has sustained America's sense of security for almost three centuries, started to slowly unravel at the seams. 29 young men with box-cutters slipped past the vast military defense system and brought the tallest symbols of a Capitalist empire crashing to the ground in a pile of rubble. A growing panic about what constitutes reality, and therefore security, started then. Entire nations have been designated as evil. We condone the torture of anyone who challenges our illusion. Our private conversations are eaves-dropped on.
Underlying the gradual collapse of America's sense of security is the basic fact that the vehicle designed by our founding fathers is harder to keep running. It is a rickety old vehicle that burns too much gas and pollutes the environment. The roads and bridges it runs on also need serious attention.
The four pillars our sense of security rests on need serious re-evaluation
Our idea of Republic as security is an illusion.
Having one's vote represented in congress by men we knew personally and trusted may have made sense in the days when mass communication was limited to the speed of a horse. In this era if instant mass communication, placing the responsibility of your vote in the hands of a complete stranger makes no sense and is widely open to corruption.
Democracy is also an illusion and always has been.
The initial idea was to remove power from royal birth and place it in the hands of the ordinary man. One man/one vote sounds very well when shouted from the oratory dais, but in reality it makes little sense. According to this system any callow youth with no record of significant achievements in life can nullify the vote of a respected elder. The natural conservative/liberal divisions in social outlooks have also served to dilute political enthusiasm. As a result voter motivation in general has suffered. Less than half the electorate trouble to go to the polls.
Capitalism is an illusion.
It is based on the premise that national creativity, competitiveness and productive effort will not materialize or be sustained without the liquidity of money. This artificial concept denies the basic evolutionary impetus of human genius and puts a cap on our full creative potential. In order to keep the power of capital investment viable, governments limit the printing of promissory notes. Only a limited number of ideas can go into production and the majority of the work-force is trained to remain uncreative while serving on the mass production line. The net result of this artificial restriction is that more than three quarters of the planet is under or unemployed and half of the children are starving. While the artificial barriers that this vastly restrictive monetary-based system remain in place, the real work of managing a planet with everybody fully engaged in stewarding it as a single family estate, can never materialize.
Christianity is an illusion.
We do not have the sole ear of Almighty God nor do we dictate who goes to heaven. That idea was promulgated by the Bishops ad Nicosia nearly two millennia ago and is patently not relevant on the global stage today.
What we need is an entirely new set of illusions – new ideologies that requires a global consensus to sustain and make as New Age of human evolution seem real
What this all boils down to is that we and our lives are aspects of a vast cosmic illusion. Reality is relative to a state of consciousness. In order for the individual to feel secure, he or she must join a majority contract that defines what matters in life. Our individual sanity is based then on a consensus of the majority's opinion. If this opinion is challenged in any serious way by any individual who refuses to agree, the specter of mass insanity and subsequent chaos looms.
Our fundamental American security blanket is based on Representative Government: Democracy: Capitalism: Christianity. These are nationally accepted as the only true realities. This consensus of American values was established in the 18th Century by our founding fathers. In order to secure and preserve this American reality, we have been and still are prepared to send our sons into war and kill anyone who challenges it. We have invested in a vast armory of nuclear over-kill to ensure and protect it.
At the start of the 21st Century, the illusion that has sustained America's sense of security for almost three centuries, started to slowly unravel at the seams. 29 young men with box-cutters slipped past the vast military defense system and brought the tallest symbols of a Capitalist empire crashing to the ground in a pile of rubble. A growing panic about what constitutes reality, and therefore security, started then. Entire nations have been designated as evil. We condone the torture of anyone who challenges our illusion. Our private conversations are eaves-dropped on.
Underlying the gradual collapse of America's sense of security is the basic fact that the vehicle designed by our founding fathers is harder to keep running. It is a rickety old vehicle that burns too much gas and pollutes the environment. The roads and bridges it runs on also need serious attention.
The four pillars our sense of security rests on need serious re-evaluation
Our idea of Republic as security is an illusion.
Having one's vote represented in congress by men we knew personally and trusted may have made sense in the days when mass communication was limited to the speed of a horse. In this era if instant mass communication, placing the responsibility of your vote in the hands of a complete stranger makes no sense and is widely open to corruption.
Democracy is also an illusion and always has been.
The initial idea was to remove power from royal birth and place it in the hands of the ordinary man. One man/one vote sounds very well when shouted from the oratory dais, but in reality it makes little sense. According to this system any callow youth with no record of significant achievements in life can nullify the vote of a respected elder. The natural conservative/liberal divisions in social outlooks have also served to dilute political enthusiasm. As a result voter motivation in general has suffered. Less than half the electorate trouble to go to the polls.
Capitalism is an illusion.
It is based on the premise that national creativity, competitiveness and productive effort will not materialize or be sustained without the liquidity of money. This artificial concept denies the basic evolutionary impetus of human genius and puts a cap on our full creative potential. In order to keep the power of capital investment viable, governments limit the printing of promissory notes. Only a limited number of ideas can go into production and the majority of the work-force is trained to remain uncreative while serving on the mass production line. The net result of this artificial restriction is that more than three quarters of the planet is under or unemployed and half of the children are starving. While the artificial barriers that this vastly restrictive monetary-based system remain in place, the real work of managing a planet with everybody fully engaged in stewarding it as a single family estate, can never materialize.
Christianity is an illusion.
We do not have the sole ear of Almighty God nor do we dictate who goes to heaven. That idea was promulgated by the Bishops ad Nicosia nearly two millennia ago and is patently not relevant on the global stage today.
What we need is an entirely new set of illusions – new ideologies that requires a global consensus to sustain and make as New Age of human evolution seem real
Friday, December 19, 2008
Does Evil exist?
Question:
I don't understand. Isn't "evil" the antithesis of "good"? Aren't these properties relative to the person perceiving them? If so, what purpose is there in avoiding "evil" and embracing "good", except to limit us to a societally correct life?
Answer:
An atomic universe is dynamic because of negative and positive polarities.
The symbolism of yin/yang by Taoist metaphysicians provides a clearer understanding of "good" and "evil" than do kabbalists.
There are natural forces of non-trespass that go to the heart of nuclear physics.
Right and wrong cannot be analysed.
Matter is energy
Energy is consciousness.
The sanctity of every atom is inviolate.
The right side of the brain has the ability to intuit trespass on any atomic associatiion.
It releases an electrical impulse that makes one feel "uneasy" when trespassing.
For instance - a fragile artifact "asks" you to be careful and not to drop it.
The higher your state of consciousness is the more careful and more aware you are of non-trespass.
I don't understand. Isn't "evil" the antithesis of "good"? Aren't these properties relative to the person perceiving them? If so, what purpose is there in avoiding "evil" and embracing "good", except to limit us to a societally correct life?
Answer:
An atomic universe is dynamic because of negative and positive polarities.
The symbolism of yin/yang by Taoist metaphysicians provides a clearer understanding of "good" and "evil" than do kabbalists.
There are natural forces of non-trespass that go to the heart of nuclear physics.
Right and wrong cannot be analysed.
Matter is energy
Energy is consciousness.
The sanctity of every atom is inviolate.
The right side of the brain has the ability to intuit trespass on any atomic associatiion.
It releases an electrical impulse that makes one feel "uneasy" when trespassing.
For instance - a fragile artifact "asks" you to be careful and not to drop it.
The higher your state of consciousness is the more careful and more aware you are of non-trespass.
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