However, as Cornel West so eloquently put it — ‘Never forget that justice is what love looks like in public.’ Indeed, never forget. Because we are a forgetful society and often end up valuing symbols we think represent love more than Love itself or the Justice which is its public face.

So, perhaps we are cynical about love, having been disappointed multiple times in our own personal lives and deceived in its name by those who have used the word to manipulate us. We are embarrassed by displays of love and affection and pride ourselves on our ‘objective’, ‘non-sentimental’ view of life.

But what if it is the case that our human systems will not produce results that work for everyone unless love is consciously placed at the core? Unless love is baked in to the code from day one, as it were? If justice is what love looks like in public, then our public systems of governance must be based on justice. Another aspect of love must be mercy — we see precious little justice or mercy in the systems we have created, do we? Refugees are left to drown because it’s judged too costly or inconvenient to save them. Abstract numbers on spreadsheets are valued higher than human lives, which are themselves reduced to mere statistics. Our systems of organisation and governance are rotten to the core, as I’m sure the reader is aware. Love has left the building, ladies and gentlemen. We are left in a barren wasteland where everyone fights for themselves until there is literally nothing left to fight for. It’s every man for himself and the weakest will just be crushed under foot. When there is no love, no justice and no mercy, then what we see is the world we have today, and the worse one we will have tomorrow.

I am not a doom-monger however, at least I don’t think so. Some people are all too aware of this situation, and are fighting to create new systems which attempt not to repeat the mistakes of the past. Many technological solutions are proposed, and as we see with the internet, technological solutions can do a great deal. We have never been so connected to each other — in the sense of the speed at which information moves — in human history. The banking system is seen to be corrupt and on its last legs, so a genius or group of geniuses, creates Bitcoin. It has become apparent that Bitcoin has its own serious problems of course, but it is a mould-breaking solution from which others are now growing. We are attempting to build a new system ‘in the shell of the old’, despite the massive odds apparently stacked against us.

We must remember though that, as per Lawrence Lessig, ‘code is law’, and digital tech allows us to see this very clearly. In the old analogue model, people took actions and hoped for results. They were not able to model systems with the precision with which we are able to today in the digital world. Now we make rules and get results based on those rules, then are able to analyse the results in great detail in order to refine and update the rules. The fruit will reflect the seed much more clearly now. However, one mistake or omission can have terrible consequences, and the hyper-accelerated nature of digital means that the error will be replicated rapidly throughout the system.

If the current capitalist model had been designed by a programmer as a proposal for a system on which to run the world, we could take a look at the code and see that injustice is part of its very fabric. A system based on perpetual growth, as is the case with capitalism, obviously needs endless territory to conquer, otherwise, like a shark which stops swimming, it will sink to the bottom. Now we are running out of easily territory which can be colonised we can see this happening. There was a vague thought that we would leave this planet and conquer the stars and other worlds, but that project seems to have been put on hold for now, at least until we discover oil on one of the moons of Jupiter and it suddenly becomes profitable. Instead, we see the system cannibalising itself and the resultant disappearance of the middle class. The rules set up at the outset, albeit mostly unconsciously, determined that one day this would happen. There are indeed ‘limits to growth’ and these are being reached.

So in this way we can see how we need to be very clear from the outset when designing systems, that all rules are code, and all code is by default law. Given this great responsibility, how do we proceed? By baking in love, justice and mercy into the very structures of the systems we create. Just reading back that sentence makes a part of me cringe. But I realise it is that part which has been inculcated into me by the very capitalist paradigm in which I have grown up, where such ‘idealism’ is dismissed as ‘pie in the sky’, or some such. For me now ‘compassionate capitalism’ is the very definition of an oxymoron. There can of course be no such thing. The fundamental rules of capitalism preclude that just as the evolution of a Great White shark precludes it suddenly ‘pivoting’ into eating plankton.

Monolithic state-based systems such as the varieties of communism (more accurately totalitarian socialism) which have been tried have fared no better. We need new governance systems, this much is abundantly clear, and systems which favour cooperation over competition. They could include competition, sure, but not as a primary objective. That world view, a misinterpretation of Darwin’s ‘survival of the fittest’ theory has brought the planet we live on to the brink of no longer being able to support human life. I have no fear for life itself, or even for the Earth, but our race’s survival is based on a much more fragile balance than that needed by bacteria for example. No clean air or water, and we are history, and damn quickly.

It’s time to take down the corrupt systems which no longer function for the vast majority of humanity, and replace them with new ones with love at their core. Confused about what love is by all the overuse and abuse of the word by the corporate media? It’s that feeling you get when you see a boatload of refugees arriving at some foreign shore. It’s the knowledge, long buried but nevertheless still alive, that everything I do has consequences for all humanity. It’s the pain you feel when you see they’ve cut down the trees you remember from your childhood. It’s whatever stops you continuing the argument with your beloved and makes you reach out to them. It’s the smile you find yourself smiling when you see a friend you haven’t seen in ages. You can think of your own examples. Evidently it is not necessarily the same thing that it is depicted as in the television advertisements.

How do we create new systems based on love? We need less theory and more practice, less judgement and more mercy, and to see things from the perspective of those who have nothing. Then we will know how to proceed. If we ignore the warnings we will be joining those who have nothing, and will have to proceed from there. I usually think of it as a choice between the Path of Wisdom and the Path of Woe. In my opinion we are in the very last chance saloon for taking the Path of Wisdom and well on the way to the Path of Woe being our only option.

Not to tackle this problem and just leave it to chance would be a mistake — we need to face up to the problem of governance — to avoid it would lead to a rule by default of those who currently have the most power in our societies. This means those who are already rich, and those who work for them, those who literally write the code of our laws and social operating systems — the politicians, and in the corporate world, lawyers, lobbyists and programmers. The more we let corporations decide how things work, the more we will be ruled by a tech elite by default. These people are inherently specialists, and specialists are not qualified to rule as they generally have no overview of the processes at work on a large scale. Please note that I am not joining the ‘we are sick of experts’ crew; experts and specialists are certainly needed, however we also need generalists and what were traditionally known as ‘wise’ people to help us navigate our way. I notice that ‘wisdom’ has more or less been consigned to the dustbin of ‘not realistic’ along with ‘love’, ‘justice’, and ‘mercy’. However, ultimately ‘realistic’ in this context is what we decide it is.

In our organisations, at a smaller scale, to not face up to how we govern ourselves means we fall into the trap of replicating legacy hierarchical systems, or prey to the ‘tyranny of structurelessnesss’. We have to get things straight — our systems must be based on justice first then tech later, anything less will only serve to prolong the current disaster. Getting over our squeamishness about the word — and the fundamental concept of — love, whether it be in the form of justice, solidarity, or compassion, must be our priority. We need to talk about how we can structure our organisations from a seed vision of justice. Then we will create structures which not only do no harm, but actually start to regenerate our social contract and both personal and professional relationships.

Manifesto For A New Adventure

“Those who do not move, do not notice their chains.”
― Rosa Luxemburg

“Don’t get caught up in the spectacle of opposition. Oppose the spectacle.”
“Those who lack imagination cannot imagine what is lacking.” – Situationist graffiti

“When an inner situation is not made conscious, it appears outside as fate”. – C. G. Jung

“Why should you study and practice Magick? Because you can’t help doing it, and you had better do it well than badly.””
— Aleister Crowley, Magick Without Tears

“I believe that magic is art and that art, whether it be writing, music, sculpture, or any other form is literally magic. Art is, like magic, the science of manipulating symbols, words, or images, to achieve changes in consciousness.” – Alan Moore

The Adventure of Modernity

We are entering an era of exponential change, as noted by many, and as such it is impossible to predict what the outcome will be. The consumerist entrancement whose spell has claimed the lives and souls of the majority of humanity will be broken, simply because no-one can remain asleep forever. The only question is to how the awakening will occur, whether it is suddenly, as suggested by the spiritual teacher Barry Long; that the nuclear bombs will eventually be detonated and shock humanity out of its slumber¹. Or it might be gradual – as an addict wakes up on the bathroom floor covered in vomit once again – we might find ourselves in a desert which was once a forest and realise that there is now nowhere we can go to find clean drinking water. Or we can look at the situation and choose to wake up consciously now, to maybe spare ourselves the worst horrors that our Fate has in store for us.

This is what is known as the Path of Wisdom versus the Path of Woe. The latter is what happens when you don’t face up to the consequences of your actions and just let things drift. We have all experienced this multiple times in our personal lives – for example the credit card bill doesn’t get paid, we get hit with massive interest charges, and this marks the last moment we had any real control over our finances. The Path of Wisdom is what happens when we can see what is coming down the road and start taking steps to avoid it, or at least to avoid its worst effects – avoiding some kind of global catastrophe is probably beyond us at this stage, given the converging crises we are currently facing.

One of the main symptoms of the spell we are under is boredom, which is itself a symptom of powerlessness, of impotence, of being discarded by the society we are in fact part of, but don’t have the feeling that we are. Nowadays it is evident that if you are not rich you don’t count at all. The vast majority of decisions affecting us are made for us by people in a bubble of privilege, and if you are poor, or of different ethnic origin to the mass in your society, your opinion counts for less than nothing. The neoliberal doctrine of ‘no such thing as Society’ means that you are an individual in competition for resources and simply by virtue of an accident of birth, you have already lost in that competition. The rules were invented before you were born and it was already decided that you were going to lose – and at best, pick up the scraps from the higher tables. At worst, we have some drones to bomb you and your children with from the comfort of our air conditioned bunkers. Or you will fall into the hands of desperate people who use fundamentalism to justify their insane and violent reactions to the dominant culture which has been imposed upon them.

The boredom which affects the majority of people in ‘developed’ nations comes from this feeling of impotence, that nothing they say or do has any effect on how things turn out whatsoever. And they are right in feeling this, insofar as they only do things within the narrow margins prescribed for them to whom we have given responsibility to ‘organise’ things. To do or think outside of these margins is of course to risk being labelled a ‘terrorist sympathizer’, or a hippy, or some other sort of undesirable.

A great deal of what is called ‘evil’ seems to be really just a perspective which is insufficiently large for the situation. For example, when I only consider myself and the convenience of my immediate family when making decisions. If omelettes have to be made then eggs have to be broken and I can’t consider my own choices to have anything to do with, for example, those refugees ‘out there’. This is another symptom of powerlessness – we consider that what we think and decide has no consequence – but opting to give responsibility to another is itself a decision. We may complain about what ‘our representatives’ do but we forget that it is we who are giving them the power with which to do it. Absolving ourselves of responsibility means that we also are the cause of our own impotence.

Shouting Into A Void

All of this seems self-evident, in fact when I write anything like this I have a gnawing sensation that it has all been said before, and it has of course, everything has been said before – just Google it – and everything is obvious when it is stated in black and white, however this culture is one of immediacy and of amnesia, and as such it does have a value to re-state the obvious over and over again. If I don’t wake up, maybe I need to set the volume on the alarm a bit louder. This is not to justify hectoring and boring people by repeating the self-evident, but just that everything in the culture tends towards forgetting the bigger picture, towards an amnesia of where we actually are as a species and what awaits us if we do not choose to take the Path of Wisdom.

This feeling of mine of shouting into a void is in fact another aspect of the powerlessness we all feel, the suspicion that there is in fact No Alternative to neoliberal capitalism, that we had all better just vote for the lesser evil once again and try to make the best of things within the parameters presented to us as ‘reality’. But who defines what ‘reality’ is?

Could we start to define the limits of the possible ourselves instead of accepting the meagre vision handed down from ‘above’? Can we do better than putting the spare room on AirBnB and making a few extra bucks? Is it all our fault for not being better marketers? After all, we are our own product, and if things are not going well for us, then we must be doing a bad job of marketing our product. We maybe need to get a better haircut, present a better image of ourselves on LinkedIn, maybe embellish the CV with some more half-truths, get up an hour earlier and go to the gym. Is it our own laziness and lack of discipline which has caused us to be in the state in which we currently find ourselves? And why are we both overwhelmed with work and bored to tears at the same damn time? Why do we feel that nothing, nothing we do makes any difference to anything real whatsoever? Are we just running endlessly on a treadmill and going nowhere, or do we just feel like we are? For all the work that we do, why do we feel that nothing gets accomplished?

You can separate yourself from the ‘rat race’ and reject consumerism, boycott Nestlé and Bayer/Monsanto (in fact we all must do at least that), go up to the mountains and live ‘off-grid’ (I have done exactly that)², but as the Situationists so astutely noted, ‘the policeman is in your head’. There is no escape from the dominant culture; we are as dependent on it as a baby is on her mother.

Where Is Our Adventure?

So we are powerless, so what? What did you expect? Humanity’s history is written in blood, that’s just the way it is. We distract ourselves with entertainment, something to fill the gap between being born and finally succumbing to the inevitable, just as the last of our children’s inheritance disappears into the coffers of the for-profit nursing home. We revel in grand stories of adventure, of games of thrones and lords of rings, of star wars and empires… but where is our adventure?
Where is our grand moment where we vanquish the dragon and overcome adversity to come up victorious? That all belongs to another era, right? The age of chivalry is dead, long dead. No adventure awaits us in the ‘developed’ world, surely. That has gone the way of smallpox and the power of labour unions, never to return. Surely we sacrificed our chance of adventure when we opted for convenience and material comfort?

Well, yes and no. It turns out that our very abdication of responsibility has itself created a monster – ‘the future that nobody wants’ as per Otto Scharmer and his very insightful ‘Theory U‘. So what do we actually do, and more to the point, when do we find the time to do it, given that we are all working all the hours of each day just to survive? Or to put it another way, when we are working as much as we are physically able in order to keep the capitalist charade going? Yes, we are dependent on the system and it seems we will die without it, but we really will die, and not just as a loser in a made up game, but as an entire race, if we destroy our true mother, the planet itself. Our day-to-day survival strategies are, little by little, creating a monster which is devouring us. We are dependent on that which is killing us.

So what does the would-be adventurer do when confronted with a monster? We must slay the dragon, that much is clear. But how do we actually do it? The paucity of options we appear to have is another facet of the precious diamond of our powerlessness, the jewel we covet above all others as the reason why we don’t actually do anything – and even get to call it ‘someone else’s fault’.

What we do in fact is turn away from the challenge, pretend it isn’t there, and hope for another one to come along which is more to our liking, more like the one that we were expecting. But I’m sorry, the news is that we don’t get to choose how or when the monster shows up, we have to deal with the one that is actually here, destroying the very fabric of our lives and the means with which to support them.

We turn away and then complain that we are bored, that modern life has no adventure in it. Yes, if we stay within the tiny area circumscribed for us by those to whom we have abdicated our power, we are correct – modern life is boring, it saps our vitality. But guess what? Step outside of the tiny ‘free speech area’ (getting smaller all the time), and we are into the uncharted lands where ‘here be dragons’ and all is adventure. And it is scary, of course it is – one leaves all certainty behind when leaving the comfort zone (which might as well be called the dead zone), but what else is life for? Are we here merely to add a few extra dollars of shareholder value? Or do we face the current challenge head on and enjoy the ride? It may end in disaster as we fear, but what have we got to lose? We are already heading straight for disaster; watch the news on tv tonight if you had temporarily forgotten.

The Land Beyond The Maps

Am I therefore advocating becoming some sort of urban guerrilla or terrorist? Not as such, in fact not at all. You may have noticed that the enemy is heavily armed and takes pleasure in using violence. We are unlikely to prevail in that direction, assuming that such a thing was even desirable. So what then? Here we leave the well-trodden paths of the familiar and head out into the land beyond the maps, the land which is supposed not to exist by the bureaucrats, the specialists, the scientists and their followers, those who insist that we ‘be realistic’ about things, vote like good little liberals or conservatives, then retreat back to our holes for another four years.

The monster has been created by our neglect of our true responsibilities, our low self-esteem, and our failure to realise that we do indeed hold the power. We hold the sword of King Arthur, each and every one of us, and the fairy tale is now, except that we expected everyone to be wearing robes rather than jeans, and the dragon to be breathing fire rather than spouting bullshit on TV. However once we get out of the comfort zone that has been marked out for us, out of the shopping malls and multiplexes, out of the universities and institutions, out of the fear we are expected to feel about ‘the dangerous world out there’ – a myth propagated by the very people who are causing it to be dangerous, by the way – then we might begin to perceive the beginnings of how we can take back our power and slay the monster.

So what else do we need for a real fairy tale, a real adventure? Magic of course. Another thing which ‘doesn’t exist’ according to the gatekeepers of ‘the realistic’. But what if we assume, as per Alan Moore above, that magic is art? When you create a work of art, you are making something appear which didn’t appear before. If that is not magic I don’t know what is. However those of us who call ourselves artists (and the term can only ever be self-ascribed – I am an artist if I say I am, and I am not an artist if I say I am not and use that as an excuse to never make art), often don’t recognise the power we have when we are making a work of art. We think of it as something within the Spectacle³, as a commodity, as something to put on our profile page in a corporate social network, and not as a means to wrench back our power from the monster which is sucking our lives dry.

Time Is Art

Most art is useless from a commercial standpoint and the time spent (remember ‘time is money’, folks!) could have been, in fact should have been, spent doing something economically ‘useful’, such as clear-cutting a forest or destroying the ‘environment’ in some way in order to convert ‘natural resources’ into ‘wealth’ (probably ending up as numbers on a screen via some ultimately unwanted consumer good). It could at least have been spent doing some sort of ‘bullshit job’ designed to keep us off the streets and generating enough cash to pay the bank/landlord for the place where we sleep. As it is useless to commerce (except in a few cases for its scarcity value, when it is deemed to be ‘collectable’ and thus becomes commodified), I would suggest that is as good a reason as any to start making art. Anything which is considered ‘useless’ by capitalism must have a revolutionary quality.

So we are creating art using the magic of inspiration, drawing down realities from who knows where and making them into something which can be perceived by the senses of those around us. We are consciously widening the definition of ‘reality’ when we make art, and taking back that power from those who believe they are entitled to do it for us. We abdicated the throne for too long, but seeing that it is still empty, we decide to reclaim our personal sovereignty and our connection to everyone else. In a spirit of solidarity we encourage others to make art, to create magic, and thus to actualise their hidden talents.

‘But I’m not an artist’ you inevitably cry! But maybe you make furniture out of things you found by the road. You cook delicious food. You sing in the shower, badly, but you sing. You dance around the house when your husband is out. You make small children laugh. You cultivate tomatoes in your garden. You dream of a better world, write it down but don’t show anyone. You tell jokes. You burn toast and laugh about it. You mend your old car. You wrote poetry but got discouraged when you discovered there was no way to make money with it. You help a neighbour with their shopping. You want to play an instrument. You think you have a novel in you. You take photographs. You can imagine realities which amplify those we are currently subject to and have the potential to transmit them to other people. Have you noticed we are living in the most connected era of human life ever? Have you noticed things are changing exponentially? Why not surf that wave and be a magician of the next moment rather than someone who is crushed by the dead weight of the past? It is up to you.

It will be hard going, for one thing we have to work out how to sustain life outside of capitalism, our evil stepmother upon whom we rely for our daily bread, yes, the one who abuses us every chance she gets and then tells us she loves us. It is true we have not figured that one out. But the reason we have not figured it out – yet – is the same fear that keeps us going back to the abuser, and that fear is born of the reduced possibilities we see when looking through the lens given to us by capitalism itself. It tells us how to think about everything, including how to support ourselves without capitalism, and then, surprise surprise, we conclude it can’t be done, that indeed There Is No Alternative.

Leave The Comfort Zone

The way we vanquish this monster is to use our Magic to imagine something better than what we have and our Art to begin to create it. This will give us the inspiration and fortitude to take the inevitable hits which will come when we try to leave the ‘comfort zone’ (which, let’s face it, is getting smaller and less comfortable all the time) and join up with others who have had enough of the desperate illusion that passes for our culture, our so-called civilisation which is nothing of the kind.

Joseph Campbell said: “There is no humanity in the state. What runs the world is economics and politics, and they have nothing to do with the spiritual life. So we are left with this void. It is the job of the artist to create the new myths. Myths come from the artists.” So let us not neglect our duty to create new myths, new images of the world as we want it to be, to plunge into the wellspring of inspiration to clutch imagery which will inspire ourselves and others to fill this spiritual void, rather than trying to frighten people into sharing our worldview. I hear we must ‘declare war on climate change’ – a well-meaning sentiment but do we really want yet another war? Why can’t we imagine into being a world where the effects of climate change are undone and we start living in harmony with the planet, our true mother?

We need to dive in to the unknown, the world beyond the edge of the maps, not as some sort of ‘new colonialism’ of the imagination, not to bring back more growth for a moribund economy, not to get ideas for a television advertisement, but to divest ourselves of our ego, our attachment to our separate self, and connect to what ties us irrevocably to all of humanity, our shared Soul. Here in the centre of the living mandala is where we find the inspiration, the breath of life, which will give us the new myths, and at the same time the strength to face the fear of change, of leaving our comfort zones, of becoming more than our small and habitual self.

An Awe-Full Process

And make no mistake, this is a fearful, literally an Awe-Full, process. We will be destroyed, and remade anew, and we cannot predict what will come of it. We need to be at our most courageous, most honest, at maximum integrity, showing up with full openness, leaving all the ideas of who we thought we were behind. The monster is essentially made of fear, and those who benefit from the monster’s rule – and they are legion – will do all they can to increase that fear and try to drive us back into separation.

They are telling you that you are not important, that what you want is not important, that artists are not important, are irrelevant, that magic does not and cannot exist, that ‘economic growth’ and other dead concepts are the be-all-and-end-all of what we can ever hope for. What you dream of is ‘not realistic’, according to rules you had no part in making. Maybe we start to define what is ‘realistic’ for ourselves, rather than allowing people with vested interests in our own disempowerment to tell us.

Is this prescription, this Manifesto, too vague? Too general, too head-in-the-clouds? Maybe, but on the other hand I can’t project myself into your life and tell you exactly what you should do, and neither do I want to. You could examine where the scepticism comes from – is it not from the same source which tells you that corporate ‘free market’ capitalism is the only ‘sensible’ way of organising things? All I can tell you is that if you think you can do it, you are right, and if you think you can’t do it, you are also right. I know which one I am choosing. Let us be magicians once again and seize the Adventure before us!

1 “The birth or release of the new culture from the human unconscious, where the idea of it is retained, will require the destruction of most of the human race by nuclear war, holocaust or some tremendous natural cataclysm. This could happen any day now.” From ‘The Origins of Man and the Universe‘ (pp 62-63)
↩

2 www.lesgavatxes.es ↩

3 An Illustrated Guide to Guy Debord’s ‘The Society of the Spectacle’ ↩

[In reply to someone experiencing a severe eczema/TSW flareup]. I think there are 3 things here: one is pure TSW which as you say, probably did play a part in my experience, however I had had eczema pretty much my whole life up to then, and while it did get worse when I stopped the steroids, I had had very bad flareups previously in life without having taken any TS drugs at all. For those with ‘pure’ TSW my blog posts will not be useful as it’s just a matter of waiting for the side effects to stop.

The second thing is if someone can cure it with diet only then that is much easier than having to go through hell like I did. As you can see, diet did play a part in my healing but I still think it was relatively minor compared to the emotional/spiritual healing I went through with the Holotropic Breathwork. However I think there will be cases where diet only will fix it, even though it might take a while and some fairly radical changes in what is ingested.

Thirdly is the surrender, the giving up of control. I think paradoxically it may need a concentrated effort to understand what is going on and a total determination to be free of the condition before one is able to surrender totally. Doctors will tell you that eczema is incurable – I am pretty sure that in most cases this is frankly bullshit. They just mean that with the resources and time they have they are unable to do anything about it.

But there is also a responsibility on our side. One very important book for me was Caroline Myss’ ‘Why People Don’t Heal and How They Can’. This challenges the reader to face the reasons why they might ‘need’ to be ill – usually to get ‘sympathy’, to be a ‘special case’, to not have to take responsibility etc. She says that if there is a psychological need to be ill then the person will not heal because at some level they don’t want to. The desire to heal has to be greater than the desire for whatever ‘benefits’ the illness apparently provides. To face this is extremely difficult and unpleasant and I suspect many people reject this whole idea because subconsciously they don’t want to be ‘exposed’.

Not saying of course that everyone who is ill needs to be ill on some level, but it’s worth recognising the possibility that this is what is going on. Surrender often comes once these things are faced, but they can be very buried and require a great deal of ‘digging’ into oneself to find them. But if someone is determined to heal, and convinced they can, they will get there. Never believe it is hopeless, even though eczema is the greatest way to feel 100% hopeless that I know of.

Ultimately the way we relate to the world, our cultural conditioning, is not congruent with nature itself, with our own inner nature (which is the same as Nature as a whole of course), and so these autoimmune diseases appear in order to show us that something is wrong. The identification with this whole conditioning can be questioned and ultimately, discarded. There is probably nothing harder to do in this world and also nothing more worthwhile than this, so if any of this applies to anyone here, keep going! It may seem like the suffering is endless but I am convinced I am not a special case and that anyone who is in a similar situation can heal as I did.

I have been eczema-free for about three years now and only get very slight patches if I am both very stressed and have been eating very unhealthily. I am grateful for this because it reminds me to get ‘back on track’ and start looking after myself again.

May all beings be happy and healed! 🙂

[In reply to someone caring for another person with eczema] Yes I had some very strange experiences, what apparently seemed to be past lives, or shamanic initiations, however I don’t really ‘believe’ or ‘disbelieve’ any of it, and in fact one doesn’t need to. It’s just ‘stuff’ which comes up during a healing crisis and if something needs to make itself known then it will do.

It does certainly appear that a person is born with a kind of ‘blueprint’ (could also be called ‘karma’) however my ultimate ‘peak’ experience was one of transcending the personal entirely and realising that the notion of there being any separate ‘person’ here is, maybe not an ‘illusion’ entirely, but certainly a completely relative phenomenon. Ultimately there is only ONE or rather NOT-TWO and we can in fact let go of all this apparent ‘karma’ upon realising there is no entirely separate person, or maybe we could say ‘no peg to hang it all on’.

All that may be irrelevant to someone healing or caring for someone else who is healing but in my case I saw that it was in fact the reason I got ill in the first place – to show me that the way I was living and relating to experience was ‘wrong’, or maybe better to say ‘optional’. 😉

“Spirituality and religion always bear the hallmark of the social structures in which they were born and become embedded. Emerging religions often represent a partial transformation of these social structures because they represent new forms of consciousness, but they can never become hegemonic if they are not rooted in, and accepted by, the mainstream social logic.”

So his idea is that the emerging P2P economic forms should have a corresponding spiritual analogue:

“Therefore, it’s logical to expect that the emergence of peer production as a new model of value creation and distribution should also lead to new forms of spiritual organization and experience.”

He defines ‘Peer Production’ as:

“…any process that allows for open input, participatory processing, and where the output is universally available as a commons to all.”

As far as I am concerned, this all makes perfect sense and I rejoice in his next point which is that a truly P2P spirituality would be the end of the ‘guru’ as we know it, and the whole need to join hierarchical organisations in order to explore one’s own inner being:

“What is important here is not to see spiritual achievements like ‘enlightenment’ as transcendent qualities that trump all others and infer an unchallengeable authority on one person, but rather as particular skills that deserve respect, just as we respect great musicians or artists without giving them any special power.

That means no more gurus, just skilful teachers with a particular job to do. Such teachers are technical facilitators – nothing more and nothing less. They are equipotential peers who serve a specific function.”

I have been fortunate enough to have experienced this kind of participatory spirituality myself, in the context of Holotropic Breathwork therapy, created by the transpersonal psychologist Dr. Stanislav Grof and his wife Christina Grof. The therapy has at its core the doctrine of the ‘inner healer’, a personal power unique to each individual which guides them to the material they most need to access in any given session. The leaders of the session are called ‘facilitators’ and they are apparently instructed that their main task is to keep the participants safe and focussed on the process – they will never second-guess or add any of their own opinions about anything which comes out in the session unless expressly asked, and even if they do give advice they will emphasise that it is only a personal opinion.

In other words, there is no dogma in this form of spiritual practice (and even though it calls itself a therapy, I can testify to the fact that very deep spiritual experiences are possible using this method of accessing the unconscious levels of mind). At the end of the day’s session, everyone shares their experience, with the suggestion being given that all the participants listen to each other in the spirit of an open mind and an open heart, and without judgement.

To me, this seems to be an ideal methodology of entering into serious spiritual practice, and is in line with Bauwens’ concept of “equipotentiality:”, defined as:

“…the capacity of every human being to develop their own qualities, which are all necessary as contributions to common projects. We all have the capacity to develop different skills which are complementary to each other.”

The facilitators are not ‘above’ the participants, in fact in some sense they are ‘below’ them, acting as a support, and can truly be said to be in service to those people taking part in the session. Each person’s own inner wisdom is the trusted guide, rather than an external person who ‘knows best’. This system has clearly been designed by the Grofs specifically in order to remove ‘the guru principle’ from the equation, and I have found that it works extremely well, giving one a sense of being supported by a community but at the same time allowing one to enter into one’s own inner worlds.

This brings me to a point where I slightly take issue with Michel Bauwens on the subject of P2P spirituality – in his article he makes the claim that:

“…a p2p spirituality would honour community and co-production above all else.”

I would beg to differ with this statement in that surely any kind of spiritual practice honours what is referred to as the ‘spirit’ above all else, and the community, while it may be vitally important, is not the be-all-and-end-all of the practice itself. The Buddha emphasised the importance of the Sangha, but meditation itself, where one sits entirely cut off from communication with other beings (in the outer world at least), would seem to be more central to Buddhist teachings than the role of the other practitioners, who after all, from the perspective of the individual meditator, are part of the ephemeral world which must necessarily always be in constant flux.

One’s own inner being is the goal, not in a narcissistic sense of fixating on the mind, but rather in the transcendent sense of realising that one is not separate from the greater Mind, the Spirit, the impersonal being of Life itself, of which all form a part. This surely should be the goal of any spirituality, whether it be in the most hierarchical Roman Catholic monastery (where the ultimate would be referred to as ‘God’, of course – the ‘top man on the pyramid’), or the most P2P spiritual discussion group made up of entirely equipotential peers maybe discussing how quantum physics has transformed our notion of what is meant by ‘spirituality’.

To me, an emphasis on the community of spiritual practitioners as being more important than the practice itself, whatever that might be, is putting the cart before the horse, and in a way could reflect a subtle disillusionment with the fruits of one’s spiritual labours, almost like admitting that true spiritual growth is not possible, but contenting oneself with the ‘consolation prize’ of having a great group of people with whom to not really make much progress.

Of course, dismantling outdated hierarchical spiritual structures is vitally important, because it is this which often either turns people off the spiritual search in the first place, or stunts their potential by forcing a top-down dogma onto them which doesn’t actually tally with their own experience, especially if this dogma was created thousands of years ago and no longer contains much of relevance to the spiritual practice of people in the modern world. In this way they remain stuck in limbo, unable to move forward because the spiritual ‘vehicle’ in which they have chosen to move is so weighed down with hierarchy and outdated concepts that any real wisdom they may come across is realised despite the structure in which they find themselves, rather than due to any potentiality it may hold in itself.

But, here we discover the rabbit hole goes even deeper. Having set up our non-hierarchical P2P spiritual group, and acknowledged that everyone has something to bring to the table, and even that the group is a means to an end and not an end in itself, what would the actual starting point for a P2P spirituality even be? Do we start by criticising an established religion or set of spiritual principles, or do we head for the hills and start our own?

Bauwens suggests:

“In this [contributory]approach, tradition is not rejected but critically experienced and evaluated. The contributory spiritual practitioner can hold themselves beholden to a particular tradition, but need not feel confined to it. He or she can create spiritual inquiry circles that approach different traditions with an open mind, experience them individually and collectively, and exchange experiences with others.”

However at this point I would like to bring in something I read recently from Scott Kiloby, who has been defined as a ‘spiritual teacher’ although I think he would probably take issue with that (or indeed any) definition of what he does:

“What if awareness isn’t real? A recent scientific study found that awareness or consciousness is a construction of the mind like everything else – like the self, our world views, all of it.”

He goes on: “…most of the spiritual community is ignorant of what science is currently saying and what these postmodern explorations have uncovered about how our minds conceive – essentially “make up” – everything, even our most profound metaphysical notions. Even though our spiritual circles are slow to see this, we have all already seen it, yet we often turn a blind eye to it. For example, those who follow certain regional traditions and teachings tend to see what those teachings and traditions teach and nothing more. For example, a Buddhist is not going to find Union with Christ. A Christian is not going to realize nirvana.”

So how does this relate to P2P spirituality? For me, if this is true, it cuts both ways: one, it destroys the notion of ‘one truth’ that we might be able to find, at least in terms of anything we are going to be able to describe to another human being. That is, if we find out that ‘the ultimate’, or ‘awareness itself’ is just another concept, and possibly a concept used to keep an established dogmatic worldview in place, as Kiloby notes:

“If there is one pregiven reality, why is everyone still arguing about it? […] Could it be that the notion of one fundamental truth is just another way the ego wants to be right? If so, that has nothing to do with a pregiven, nonconceptual reality. That is all about self.”

I don’t believe he is negating the notion of a pregiven reality as something to be experienced, more that paradoxically, the ‘pregiven reality’, as experienced, undermines the concept of itself, and shows that even ’emptiness’ itself is ultimately empty.

So in our P2P spiritual explorations, we might be disillusioned to discover that not only are we not correct in our assumptions as to what an ‘underlying reality’ or ‘spirit’ might be, we might discover that everyone else is mistaken as well, even our most treasured teachers, for there is no nameable or even unnameable ‘reality’, for such a ‘thing’ can only ever be a concept, and all along even as we may have been having amazing experiences of inner realms, we have in fact only been promenading down the streets of the mind itself, even as we may have blundered into regional or cultural memes and surprised ourselves to find unexpected material in the subconscious. At the end of the day, the concept of ‘Jesus’ or ‘Buddha’ or ‘awakening’ has exactly the same value as that of ‘chair’ or ‘Big Mac’ or ‘irritation’, in that they are all concepts and ultimately all empty. Not that the ‘things’ they point to are equal, only that they are all equally concepts in the mind.

So secondly, this cuts the other way for P2P spirituality – we can play with all traditions, seeing all as equally empty, but using them as one might use a well-stocked toolbox when appropriate. The more ‘awakened’ of the circle might gently remind another of the ultimate emptiness of all things if they start to take concepts and related experiences too seriously and start to insist on them as the ‘one way’, even of course, the concept of emptiness itself.

I don’t believes this invalidates in a nihilistic way the many spiritual traditions – I am with Scott Kiloby when he says:

“Is this the end of metaphysical notions like awareness? I say “no.” It just means it is time for a change in how we view these things (or non-things). Setting up the notion of awareness can be helpful on one’s path to freedom. It provides a way to identify less with thoughts and other arisings that come and go. But inevitably, many land on that conception as a final realization, still dividing the universe in two, between awareness and all that other stuff that comes and goes.”

This chimes with something I heard recently in an excellent discussion between Orla O’Donovan and Gustavo Esteva on the Commons and the theories of Ivan Illich – Esteva pointed out that if we call a group of people ‘a collective’, we are already heading down the wrong path if we want to speak about true solidarity – because the very notion of a ‘collective’ implies a grouping of disparate and disconnected individuals.

In the same way, to speak about a P2P spirituality may be useful as a sort of signpost on the way, but we are mistaken if we take it too seriously, for the reason that an effective spirituality is the realisation that we are all already One, and what is One does not need to come together, as a true collective does not question its solidarity, and indeed has no need for the words ‘collective’ or ‘community’. These may be difficult ideas to grasp these days when we are so indoctrinated into the mindset of separation, but this only highlights how much our ways of thinking have to change in order for there to be any chance of real evolution on the ‘individual’, ‘collective’, and ‘spiritual’ levels. And of course, even the word ‘levels’ is just another concept born of separation. We can use these concepts as long as we are careful and remember they are only that. To fight and die for a concept or ideal is surely the height of Utopian stupidity.

I have covered my journey of healing and discovery up until this point, which took the form of a voyage into the depths of Hell and out again.

Looking back now, I can see that – after all the very difficult experiences of reliving my own birth, and releasing so much anger and resentment (I have barely scratched the surface here), plus experiencing mythic situations both hellish and heavenly – the real breakthrough came during the sixth session of Holotropic Breathwork I experienced in Barcelona.

Here is an excerpt from the account I wrote of the session afterwards:

“…then after maybe half an hour I had the image of a door and I suddenly knew that this was an invitation to go through into another state of consciousness, but I also knew that I had to leave my habitual self and my problems behind completely. I knew I could sit and think about problems forever but I now had the choice to ‘get with the program’ and leave all of that behind. There was a feeling of a very practical consciousness within giving me this choice. I also had the growing realisation that I was able to ‘see’ my soul or real self – it was so obvious, it had been there all the time and I had been ignoring it! I knew if I went through the door then I would be going into this real self and everything would change. I felt enormous fear and had to breathe into the fear for a while before I could think clearly again. I knew I had to go through this door, whatever the consequences.

Unfortunately it is impossible to describe the real self other than it is limitless and one with everything… I went through the door.

On the ‘other side’, I was just one with impersonal Love, there is no other way to describe it. I had the song title in my head; ‘Sapphire Bullets of Pure Love’ and I imagined shooting them out of my hands into the sky. This then transformed very briefly into a situation where I was god and putting the stars in the sky. I felt one with the ultimate process which is creating the world and everything, but only for a few seconds. Although I felt fear, I don’t think it was that which pulled me back, it was almost like I knew I wasn’t ready for that at a deep level and my consciousness just naturally retreated from that after giving me a glimpse.”

“I had the realisation that our soul (and there is only one soul, or rather ‘not two’) is so beautiful that if our bodies were as luminous and perfect as it is, we would be unbearably conceited and arrogant. The imperfect physical world offers a completely necessary balance to the utter perfection of our inner being. The problem is that most people only know the imperfection and are unaware of the perfection, thus life appears ugly and meaningless. This time however I was just so happy that although I felt boundless compassion for everything, I did not feel in the least sad. The imperfection and pain in the world was seen as a perfect and necessary part of our ‘journey’ which is only really a deepening of the present moment and a merging into who we really are.”

This experience really changed everything for me and I could see that the whole experience of getting ill had all been for a reason, and in fact was a great gift. It had shown me the limits of our human arrogance, the belief that we ‘know it all’ – we are so clever and complicated but in reality that is just hubris and pride; ultimately we know next to nothing but are not willing to admit it in case it damages our carefully-preserved self image.

The illness and its side effects had also shown me how the visionary or mythic dimension is so close to our everyday world, and in fact is like an operating system that we live in without even knowing it, making up as it does the building blocks of our assumptions about ‘reality’, most of which is just arbitrary and man-made, while we consider it to be immutable and constant.

Being so ill also gives one a lot of compassion for others’ suffering and ‘ugliness’ (being covered in eczema is probably as close to complete ugliness as it’s possible to feel). It also gives a great appreciation of those who stick by us when we are at our lowest ebb.

Without the experience of being so ill I would never have found a way to connect with the deepest part of the One Self and realise that we truly are all One, or maybe better to say ‘not separate’ – this is a truth that has to be experienced and I believe it is what all the religions are pointing at when they talk about their deepest truths. Our everyday world is not set up for these kinds of breakthroughs and so it seems inevitable that many must pass through the way of illness and limitation in order to reach this ‘place’. I was extremely fortunate to be able to find a therapy which allowed me to fully reach this place of healing, and my eternal gratitude goes out to those who have helped and accepted me, even as I was so apparently broken and undeserving.

Our Western industrialised culture has no explanation for eczema, even as it, and other autoimmune diseases, reach more and more epidemic proportions; we as sufferers are encouraged by non-sufferers and our fellows alike to just accept it as a fact of life, as if things just happen for no reason. This is part of the ‘old story’, as Charles Eisenstein calls it – that our Earth is just an accident in the vast expanse of uncaring, machine-like Universe. And our own consciousness is merely an epiphenomenon, an accidental by-product of our meaningless and ultimately doomed evolution. Or alternatively (the previous story which forms the root of the prevailing one), that our bodies are ‘fallen’ and ‘sinful’ and we must punish and restrict ourselves in order to be redeemed in the eyes of the Lord, who may then grant us release from this prison and into a world of pure Spirit, where nasty things like physical bodies and sex do not even exist.

People seem to accept the explanation of eczema as accidental, as having no known cause or remedy, because they are used to accepting a great many things in this way. Items on the corporate television or radio news are presented free of context, as if there is no reason that these terrible things happen – it’s just more evidence that things are random and broken and the only thing we can do is fight for survival and give away our liberty for the ever-more elusive ‘security’. It is undeniable to say that everything is impermanent and that death is the only certainty, but this is in no way the same as affirming that the Universe is dead and meaningless and that we are separate… ‘alone and afraid in a world I never made’.

What happens if we don’t accept the ‘old story’? What happens if we try to find out why we are ill; what are the real causes: biological, emotional, psychological, spiritual? Sometimes living with eczema feels like you’re sitting on a volcano – everything can be calm and then suddenly there’s an uprush of heat, of angry, destructive energy. Where is it coming from? Is it just random? Can it be released or even used in some way? Why do some people experience this and others not at all? Why could I not eat even one piece of bread without making the eczema much worse and yet someone else can eat five Big Macs and drink four litres of Coca Cola a day and not experience any obvious negative effects on their health? (Of course they probably will further down the line if they keep up that diet, but that’s another story…).

I have noticed from various online support groups for eczema and related maladies that the overriding emotion is ANGER – why me, why now, why the hell am I going through this?! And it is hell, Hell on Earth to be suffering with severe eczema; it can destroy one’s whole life if sufficiently severe. You know you are not going to die from it but at times this is scarcely a consolation, in fact everyone knowing it is not terminal often seems to make others think that you are overreacting to what is officially not a serious disease.

What I want to ask though is: what if anger itself was part of the cause of the eczema? Of course it is definitely a by-product as well, and all sufferers know that getting stressed makes it worse, but what if that was in fact the root cause in some cases? So the question would then be: how come babies can have eczema; is there any way that a baby can be angry? The answer is no of course, not in the conventional sense as applied to adults, but if we look at what anger actually is it might give us a clue as to how this could happen (and please bear with me, I know I am going out on a limb here, but I think it’s worth pursuing this line of thinking).

The work of HR Giger often contains allusions to birth trauma

Anger is essentially blocked energy – we want a thing and don’t get it, we need to achieve something but it eludes us, and anger is the build up of energy which allows us to force our way ‘over the line’ – it gives us courage; it is intrinsically linked to our power. It becomes toxic when repressed (as our ‘positive thinking’ culture so often ends up doing), but in its pure state, what is called ‘anger’ is a great force for achievement, of breaking through barriers. The work of Stanislav Grof has shown that the first great challenge of our physical existence is birth itself, and when I was reliving my birth in the Holotropic Breathwork sessions, there was a great sense of hot, angry energy, such as would be experienced when fighting one’s way out of a physically restricted situation. This energy is needed during birth it seems, at least for some people – and in reliving it, my birth was experienced as a great struggle for freedom (Grof has also shown how political propaganda often uses the metaphors of restriction and freedom, e.g. of being choked by an oppressor and the need to break free of them).

We can maybe speculate that somehow, for some reason (as apparently in my case), the birth was on some level never ‘completed’ – even though of course it was physically – the angry energy was never fully released and remained stuck within the body. This would have the effect on the eventual formation of the personality of becoming someone who is easily frustrated, who feels they are not going to get their way, who feels like everything is futile and who resents the world and people in general. It’s like we have always seen the world through the prism of the unresolved birth trauma and believe (because we have never seen it any other way), that ‘the world is like that’. As it happens those characteristics were very much mine as a child as and a teenager, and I took it to mean that I was just naturally misanthropic and a loner who people just didn’t understand. I didn’t actually have eczema until the age of ten but it is possible that it sometimes requires an external ‘trigger’ or particular situation for the eczema to start showing on the body.

So – leaving behind for a moment the speculation as to why it may have happened in the first place – after this sixth Holotropic Breathwork session I was still suffering with eczema, but over the next few months it seriously calmed down. Within about six months (and a couple more HB sessions), it was about 80% better. I was feeling massively grateful and happy that I had got this far, however that last 20% just wouldn’t seem to go away, and it was enough to still be affecting my life, especially when it appeared on my face, bringing up issues of ugliness and abandonment.

During this time I went to visit a Polish friend of mine in Andorra and she suggested I try some of the chlorella supplements she was taking to help with some skin problems she had been experiencing (not eczema) – she gave me a bag of them and I accepted, however without much hope that they would have any effect – it seemed like I had already tried pretty much every alternative remedy, supplement and vitamin out there and none had really helped. Chlorella tablets are made from dried and compressed algae, somewhat like seaweed, as I understand it.

After about a week though of taking the chlorella tablets every day (and you have to take a lot at first), I did perceive enough of an improvement to encourage me to continue. It appears that the chlorella has a positive effect on the digestion and possibly enables the release of residual toxins from the digestive system which might otherwise escape into the bloodstream and cause eczema. (This is just conjecture and I must emphasise I have absolutely no medical training or knowledge other than what I needed to actually make the eczema go away.)

So with the continued usage of the chlorella tablets the eczema diminished to about 10% of what it previously had been at its worst point, in fact for stretches of days or even weeks I would be completely free of it, and I knew I was on ‘the home straight’ – at least for the time being. I kept up with the relatively restricted diet, still completely avoiding wheat, alcohol and caffeine (a by-product of which was that I had more or less lost the small ‘pot belly’ I used to have – probably down to not eating bread and drinking beer).

I would still have the odd flare-up though, and one of the facilitators at the Holotropic Breathwork suggested I try a food intolerance test as she had been to a practitioner who offered this in a town not far from me. I decided it was worth a try and ended up being hooked up to a very strange machine which seemed to come out of a 1950s sci-fi film. I was holding a sort of handle, joined to the main machine by a wire. The operator read out a list of foods and vegetables one by one and after each one, the needle on the machine would move more or less depending on how intolerant I was to each food. It also made a satisfyingly retro-space-age whine of varying volume depending on the supposed intolerance.

I was hugely sceptical and basically considered the recommendations I was given based on the output of this device as probably a load of nonsense. However I did decide that it would be a bit of a waste of money if I didn’t at least try to put them into practice, and they did have a certain logic to them. I was supposedly intolerant to onions, peppers and peanuts, among other things; three of my favourite foods, and three staples of the healthier diet I adopted when the big eczema flare-up began. So, with some difficulty I did manage to cut these things out of my diet and to my amazement, that seemed to be the last piece in the jigsaw – the remaining stubborn patches of eczema gradually disappeared and the flare-ups became gradually gentler until they too stopped re-occurring.

So maybe about six months after cutting these things out of my diet I realised I was completely eczema-free on a day to day basis, and to my immense gratitude and amazement I have remained so. A complete recovery is more than I could have hoped for, although of course I know that if I changed my diet to a completely unhealthy one and really indulged in toxic patterns of thinking again, the eczema would come right back. Fortunately there is just no desire to do that. I can have the odd beer or glass of wine now, or eat a white bread sandwich, and it will have no effect on my skin; however I have no desire to go back to my old diet.

I find myself having a background of gratitude and a feeling of oneness which persists even while I might be feeling annoyed, excited or whatever emotion is passing through. I am less quick to judge and more compassionate, especially for those suffering from eczema and similar issues. I really want to hug every one of them and tell them to keep going, to keep searching for the reason why this disease has come into their life. I have also become much more compassionate towards myself, recognising that the mistakes for which I had berated myself so viciously in the past were understandable, given what I knew at the time, and that they can be left in the past.

Mandala drawn by me after a Holotropic Breathwork session in April 2014

I can’t wrap my experience up into a prescription and give it to people (as much as I’d like to) – but the general principles of my journey to hell and back might well be applicable to others. The feeling of abandonment, of separation from life itself, and thus from other humans seems to be at the core of the experience of eczema and other autoimmune diseases, as Charles Eisenstein points out. Unresolved birth and other trauma makes us hold on inside, both emotionally and physically, and creates the physical conditions within which eczema can develop. There may well be genetic and other factors at play to explain why we get eczema rather than another disease, and in fact some of my experience may be applicable to those suffering from other maladies. I know for example that Holotropic Breathwork has been very effective in curing people of asthma, which in many cases also seems to be related to unresolved birth trauma – obvious really when you think of it that birth, with so much potential for being choked and suffocated, could cause a severe trauma related to breathing within the organism.

So in conclusion I would like to say to people with eczema: it is not incurable. You may have to turn all your beliefs about yourself and the world inside out in order to find the remedy, you may have to totally change the diet of what you eat and what you think, you may even have to go right into the centre of Hell, that place you’ve been avoiding all your life, but believe me, if this resonates with you and you decided to go down that path, whatever it takes, it will be worth it. I truly believe that eczema, and illness in general, can indeed be a gift, and in the curing of it, we can find out who we really are. As CG Jung said: ‘The Wound is the Gift’. Please don’t take anyone else’s word for it though – rigorously follow your own path and know that freedom is possible.  If you need any help or non-medical advice, please do contact me.

Having ‘turned the corner’ as it were, (in terms of hope for the future if not in an actual improvement in my health),  although I didn’t know for sure then if it was a genuine ‘touching rock bottom’, or merely one more step on the way down, I began to search for something which might genuinely make a difference to my health. I had the deep suspicion that the cause of the eczema was not merely physical, and that as I had already completely changed my diet, was taking much more exercise than before (including playing squash, swimming (although not in the sea – way too painful!) and doing Chi Gong) and was still suffering a great deal, I felt that there must be a way of liberating the subconscious energy which I felt must be at the root of the skin condition.

I was doing a lot of research online at the time, and buying a lot of books in the hope that somewhere I would find the key information that would make all the difference. I had always been interested in the work of Stanislav Grof, the Czech psychologist who has laid out in various books the results of his research into altered states of consciousness and near death experiences. A book I particularly had found useful was one he had co-written with his wife Christina, ‘The Stormy Search For The Self’, and I remembered that in this there had been a description of a therapy they had devised together called Holotropic Breathwork. So I searched online to see if there was anywhere near me that facilitated this kind of therapy – expecting, I have to be honest, that there wouldn’t be.

What I didn’t realise is that one of the main centres for the training of Holotropic Breathwork (HB) is fairly near me, so there were a couple of centres offering it not too far away. I immediately, and with a fair amount of trepidation, knowing that this would probably not be an easy thing to go through, contacted them and, once they had satisfied themselves that I met the mental and physical health criteria necessary, arranged to go to a one-day HB workshop they were holding at the end of the month in Barcelona.

I am not going to go into the full story of what HB is, (other than to say it involves rapid breathing until one enters a kind of trance), or what happened at this workshop, but suffice it to say, it was extremely intense, and the latter part of it involved reliving my own birth, both from my own perspective as a tiny baby, but also from my mother’s perspective (even more strange, although it felt perfectly natural at the time).

Christina and Stanislav Grof, creators of Holotropic Breathwork

After this first session I felt like an enormous weight had lifted, and to my immense delight, the eczema actually improved massively. As you may know if you have ever suffered from it, the good thing about eczema is that it can heal extremely quickly – you can be a red-raw mess one day, and a couple of days later it can be well on the way to being completely better. However the opposite is also true, and even more so – you can be fine in the morning but by the evening look like a bad sunburn case and be feeling absolutely terrible.

So after this first HB workshop I went on holiday to Mallorca for a few days, and I was overjoyed that the eczema was almost completely better after a couple of days there. It was then that I more or less knew that I was going to be able to heal (at least to a great extent) from this extremely debilitating illness.

Once I came back, the eczema also came back, and with a vengeance, but having been eczema-free without drugs for the first time since the ‘healing crisis’ started, I felt much better than before, despite the state of my skin, knowing that there might be a way out of this situation.

I continued to research online and in books and started to believe there was something to the ‘leaky gut’ theory of eczema – basically, and not to put too fine a point on it, we are ‘full of crap’ and this undigested waste is leaking out through the damaged walls of our gut, into our bloodstream, and causing our immune system to react against the ‘pollution’ in our blood.

Around this time I read the excellent article on autoimmune diseases by Charles Eisenstein (this was in fact my introduction to his work, and subsequently he has gone on to be one of my favourite writers).

An excerpt:

“Humanity’s adversarial relationship to nature shows up on the inside as the War Against the Self. Autoimmunity is only one aspect of this war, which is primarily psychological. Self-hatred, self-judgement, and self-rejection are the psychological correlates of somatic autoimmunity.”

This was pretty much how I felt in a nutshell. It can also be summed up in the words of the poet A.E. Housman, quoted by the great Alan Watts: “alone and afraid in a world I never made.”

We feel alienated from life itself, from nature… indeed we do not realise that ‘human nature’ and ‘nature’ are one and the same. We have been kicked out of Eden and are now ‘skeletons fighting for power’, as Osho put it. The immune system is fighting the body itself, as if we have become our own ‘Other’. We are clinging on tightly inside, clinging on to our own shit (literally and figuratively – as we cling to past resentments and self-hatred), taking sides in a war against ourselves, a futile war (as are all wars) which we can never ever win.

This is of course all related to the concept of the self as separate, a kind of lonely robot conditioned by society to repress all true feelings in the name of ‘competitive advantage’ and ‘fitting in’ – of course only a ‘square’ can fit in, amongst the other ‘squares’; or as Josesph Campbell called them, ‘stuffed shirts’ – people who kill their true selves in order to cling on to their position in society. One represses one’s true desires and true feelings and is duly compensated by society. We are told in school, ‘sit up straight’, ‘concentrate’, ‘don’t look out of the window’, ‘behave’ – and slightly more subtle versions of this mindset often permeate the jobs we have to do as adults. Only a very narrow amount of our total energy is required for society’s purposes, and the rest of it must go… where? That is our problem. Well this was now my problem, lying on the mat and going through Hell.

Here is an excerpt from a journal entry I made after my second session of Holotropic Breathwork describing the visionary experiences I went through during the therapy:

“]The convulsions]… then gradually merged into the experience of being burnt- at first it was just a powerful feeling of my body burning but then an image formed in my mind of me lying on the ground burning and a circle of people around me watching me burning and not doing anything to help me, in fact seeming to take a demonic pleasure in seeing me suffer. Overall the energy seemed to have an infernal or satanic quality to it. Gradually I realised I had the option to become the fire itself that was burning me and I briefly experienced being a pure flame, my arms describing the movement of the fire.

I then became a shaman or sorcerer, capturing the flame and throwing it away, like Thor casting thunderbolts, but was unable to achieve any real release in this and reverted to being the victim lying on the ground burning, filled with a feeling of abandonment and resentment at the people who could help me and yet didn’t. I also had the persistent feeling that the session had stopped and everyone was just standing around where I lay on the mattress and was staring and laughing at me. Of course I knew that in fact nothing of the kind was occurring but I had to keep reminding myself that this could not be the case.

This part of the session seemed to be related to me having to choose between becoming the pure flame and taking on the qualities and powers of fire itself or holding on to the resentment I felt towards the people who were burning me. Although I realised that to become the fire was the real victory, I just could not let go of the hatred and isolation I felt within my human form and was not willing to let that go and just become the impersonal fire. It felt like that was letting them get away with it, somehow a forgiveness they did not deserve. Of course my conscious mind realised that this was an error and probably the reason why the original experience (whatever it was) did not complete fully.”

I had many experiences which could be literally be described as ‘hellish’, in this session and the subsequent two or three. Strangely the day after this particular session I met the six year old child of one of my fellow ‘breathers’ and he commented (in Catalan and merely as a comment in passing, without fear) that I was a demon and made the sign of horns on his head!

Stan Grof’s writings about Holotropic Breathwork therapy (e.g. http://www.atpweb.org/jtparchive/trps-05-73-01-015.pdf) include a kind of ‘map’ of the part of the subconscious related to biological birth which he calls the ‘Perinatal Matrices’. These are basically archetypal states in which the child being born can find themselves and which they often have to relive years later during the therapy itself before they can finally find healing. After these very fiery or hellish sessions I read his description of the Second Matrix and it certainly struck a chord with me:

“PerinatalMatrix II. (Antagonism with Mother)
This matrix is related to the first clinical stage of delivery, when the child is exposed to uterine contractions in a closed system. As far as the phenomenology of this matrix is concerned, it can be experienced on the biological level, or in the form of its psychological and spiritual counterpart, the No-Exit situation or Hell. The colors of the visions are usually dark and ominous; the subject feels encaged and trapped in a biological and/or metaphysical sense. He experiences indescribable suffering and cannot see the way out of this situation, neither in time, nor in space. The whole world is seen as an apocalyptic place, full of wars, epidemics and horrors, and human life appears as totally meaningless and absurd.”

My theory, and it is only that, is that I had a great deal of ‘firey’ energy locked in my subconscious – repressed sexuality, unresolved anger, unused power – and in the process of releasing it I had to literally travel into Hell itself (which is nothing more or less than this unacknowledged energy stored in the body/mind) and learn to liberate it and use it for the good of the Whole. During my reliving of my own birth, at times I seemed to be in a massive underground cavern with hellfire all around and an incredibly dark and evil energy permeating everything.

I speculate that it is possible to have a ‘bad birth’ which actually colours the perception of the world from the very day one is born. The reason why this happens to some people and not others may be simply biological, it may have to do with the mother’s feelings relating to the birth itself, or it may indeed be, as Grof himself suggests, that there is a karmic element to all of this; that as the soul is about to incarnate onto the Earth plane, the karmic forces gather from what might be called ‘past lives’ (although I think that is probably a simplification of what the actual process is, we can use that term for now), and gather around the incarnating soul, creating these hellish or ‘stuck’ experiences. All I know for sure is that my birth took 48 hours and was extremely difficult both for me and for my mother.

So how does the leaky gut theory fit in with all of this psychological stuff? My idea is that, as I said, due to all our repressed ‘uptight’ emotion, we are ‘hanging on to a lot of shit’ internally. This is both a metaphor and a literal reality – the squeamish can look away now – I often found that after I experienced an energy release via Holotropic Breathwork, a similar digestive letting go was not far away. Then the eczema would briefly worsen for a couple of days as all the toxins were ‘stirred up’, but subsequent to that I would feel much better both emotionally and physically.

So if the leaky gut theory is true, this chronic internal holding on would mean that there were a lot of toxins which should have been expelled by the digestion entering the bloodstream, against which the immune system was forced to fight, and this reaction is the cause of the eczema. So we see how releasing the emotions via a deep therapy like Holotropic Breathwork allows us to also release the toxins more quickly, plus with the correct diet and an abstinence from harmful and imbalancing medications the walls of the gut are eventually healed and the immune reaction subsides along with the eczema.

I assume that some people are more predisposed to hanging on to emotions in the stomach area (normally said to be the area of relationship) and thus experience diseases like eczema or IBS, whereas others might hold on in the head region and maybe experience cluster headaches or migraines, and still others might hold on in the heart area and experience cardiac problems. I am sure that there is a great confluence of different causes – genetic, dietary, hereditary, emotional, psychological and spiritual – which means that one person becomes ill in a particular way, whilst someone else has a different reaction. The important thing is to somehow make the ‘dark’ subconscious energy conscious in whatever way we can, while simultaneously striving to optimise our physical conditions and circumstances.

In my case I had just gone through a traumatic breakup with someone I had assumed to be ‘the love of my life’, so having problems in the stomach area was probably to be expected.

Stan Grof’s Drawing of a Phoenix

I had to go through another three very heavy and unpleasant HB sessions before I finally experienced some sort of breakthrough (although there were pleasant moments as well in all the sessions). Here is an excerpt from my account of the third session:

“I was identifying with Christ on the cross, bleeding, with many open wounds, and the blood running over everything. But there was no redeeming quality to the blood, it was just blood and if anything symbolised Christ’s feeling forsaken by God on the cross. After a while of this, I saw a transcendent bird made of light taking off behind the cross. I had experienced a reaction on seeing Stan Grof’s drawing of a phoenix rising from the flames and this may well have influenced this small vision.

I kept on breathing but could not break through the feeling of futility. I summoned all my determination, concentrating on the feeling of wanting to be healthy and free of eczema as hard as I could. This made me scream some more but it was like screaming into a void.”

Again the Christian symbolism, which surprised me as I have always been much more interested in Eastern religions than Christianity, but it seems on entering the subconscious in order to do this healing work, one also enters a ‘mythic’ dimension (which I had seemed to be entering spontaneously once the ‘healing crisis’ had started, as I mentioned in part one). In this dimension it becomes evident that all myths and religions represent deep truths and this is why they have persisted throughout human history. I also experienced myself as Prometheus and Icarus from the Greek myths in one session, and had many moments where I seemed to be involved with indigenous shamanism as well. All of this was a complete surprise to me and involved no effort whatsoever on my part other than that required to enter the ‘trance’ or ‘Holotropic’ state in the first place.

I include this material to make the point that I had to go deeply into my subconscious (what indigenous people might call the ‘Underworld’) to be able to release the energy which was apparently causing the eczema. When I told people (fairly cautiously, it has to be said) about this, their reactions were mixed. Some flat-out thought I was delusional, some were interested, and others were convinced that I was going to be healed of the eczema eventually. No matter what anyone thought though, I knew I had to keep going, even when the ‘No Exit’ sign loomed large over my whole life, and the light at the end of the tunnel, if there even was one, appeared to be nothing other than a train approaching at high speed.

I was intending to make this post in two parts but it has turned out that two is not enough… so stay tuned for part three!

An excerpt from a recent article on my blog:

“About four years ago I spilt up with my girlfriend and subsequently became rather ill – I was eventually hospitalised and on admission the first nurse who saw me in a hospital gown assumed I had been burnt in a house fire, so badly destroyed was the weeping, bleeding skin all over my body. I took the drugs they gave me and the skin got better quickly. The drugs eventually weakened my teeth to the point that I broke three in just a couple of weeks so I stopped taking them. Within about a week the skin was really bad again. I tried every therapy, alternative or otherwise I could find, changed my diet completely. Nothing really worked.”

In the article I didn’t want to distract from the main point by going too deeply into the nature of the illness, but I will do here. The illness was eczema, and if you have ever suffered from it or related diseases like psoriasis, you will know what a hell on Earth it can be. Firstly, it is in itself very painful and uncomfortable – you want to scratch but you know you shouldn’t… eventually you can’t help it and you do, which helps for a few minutes, but it starts bleeding, eventually maybe the wound gets infected and your immune system has to work overtime fighting the infection (even as it is already working hard to create the eczema in the first place, more of which later). Also it looks very ugly, especially if it appears on the face, as it does in many instances (and did in my case); you feel that you are a disgusting monster and it destroys self-confidence like a bulldozer knocking down a run-down old shack. People generally don’t know how much you are suffering and tend not to take it seriously; they assume it is a minor irritation and expect you to get on with your life as normal.

For me, one of the worst factors of having eczema was that it was too painful for me to be able to sleep properly, and that brings with it a whole world of trouble – you have no concentration, you are just like a zombie during the day having barely slept at night, your energy is super-low, you don’t want to see other people, you are less able to take care of yourself, and eventually you become seriously depressed.

Modern medicine, in my experience anyway, views eczema as incurable – I was told this several times by doctors both in the UK and in Spain, where I now live. They offer creams and tablets which relieve the symptoms, but you are given no hope that it could ever get better.

I won’t go too deeply into all the alternative therapies I tried in addition to allopathic medicine; some were completely ineffective, and some, like acupuncture, had been very effective in the past, but now, during the serious attack I am talking about here, even this would have only a temporary effect; within a day or so I was just as bad as ever.

My cousin had been a dietician and had recommended that I stop eating wheat and other foods containing gluten, plus also stop drinking alcohol (I didn’t drink much alcohol as it was, so actually giving up this and caffeine was easier than giving up wheat). However in my desperation to not make the eczema worse, I ended up eating mostly rice, vegetables and fish, and not really enough of any of that, so I lost a lot of weight and this added to the depletion of my overall health. I realised later that diet was an important factor in the attempt to cure the disease, and I will expand more on that in the second part of this article.

Despite all this, I had the inner conviction that eczema was not incurable, and that what I was going through was a ‘healing crisis’, rather than merely a particularly bad bout of an illness that was going to plague me until the day I died. Had I known it was going to last for over three years I might have chosen to end it all right then, as even the next five minutes looked a daunting proposition to get through at times.

I was having some strange ‘side effects’ to the illness though (and if you are not particularly interested in what we might call the psychological or spiritual aspect to this story, you can safely skip this part) – often, lying in bed unable to sleep, I would have odd ‘visions’ – images coming from who knows where, which seemed to be carrying some sort of oblique message for me. I intensified this by sometimes doing one of Stuart Wilde’s guided meditations, listening on headphones, where he would lead you in your imagination into a secret garden, and from there, once in a kind of shamanic trance state, a ‘journey’ could take place into realms unknown.

I can’t remember if it was during one of these ‘journeys’ or just spontaneously, but one time a very powerful vision arose of the Holy Grail, but in a kind of classic optical illusion where the cup is made by the profiles of two faces. This was accompanied by a vision of the beach at Cadaqués, near where I live, where my ex-girlfriend and I had shared a particularly emotional moment in our relationship. I realised the meaning of the Holy Grail – it is a state of perfect equilibrium between the opposites; the polarities which make up existence – male and female, black and white, hard and soft etc. – and out of this polarity flows a ‘third’ force, which one might call the energy of perfection or possibly the divine. This image took me by surprise because I have never been a Christian by any stretch of the imagination, other than a cultural one by virtue of being born in a nominally Christian country, the UK.

Shortly after that I saw (I think on Facebook), the Salvador Dalí design for the tarot card, the Ace of Cups, which is that same optical illusion, and whose background is the beach at Port Lligat, just around the headland from the beach at Cadaqués. I am not claiming that I had never seen this before; I almost certainly had seen it sometime, but it was not something I had ever more than glanced at, maybe in a library book about Dalí years before. What was new was the understanding of the meaning of the card and how it related to me personally: the clear message was that my life was seriously out of balance and that in order to be healed I needed to connect with the part of myself which was already healed, already in equilibrium. This also awakened in me an interest in the Tarot; I had been occasionally using the I-Ching but had never really looked into the ancient Western magickal tradition, of which the Tarot forms a part. I’m sure Dalí intended to make the correlation between the Holy Grail and the Ace of Cups as he was what might be referred to as a ‘Cosmic Christian’ late in his life when these cards were designed.

So, despite my utter desolation at being in pain nearly all of the time and unable to sleep, I carried within me a kind of conviction that all this was happening for a reason and that I would eventually come out of it, although I have to say I knew that there was a chance of the doctors being right about me having to live with it in some form for the rest of my life.

However, after this initial series of visions, and the insight that I needed to look into the issue of the Shadow as it is described by Jungian psychology, things went very dark. You might be asking why I was not receiving enough medical assistance to alleviate my suffering – unfortunately in Spain the healthcare system is mired in both bureaucracy and austerity, and as a foreigner, unless it was classed as an emergency I was unable to receive the free State healthcare at that time. I was not working much due to the lack of sleep so private health insurance was also out of the question. I kept the worst of my suffering hidden from my parents (who would otherwise have helped me) as I didn’t want them to worry unduly, and I always felt that a cure was just around the corner.

The cure remained elusive though and things worsened to the point where my acupuncturist (who is also a qualified doctor at a nearby hospital), on seeing my bleeding skin and the worsening eczema which covered almost my whole body, insisted that I come in to the hospital emergency department the next day, and this is where I encountered the nurse who assumed I had been burnt in a fire. I felt too low in energy to explain that actually it was an inner fire which had burnt me rather than an outer one…

At the hospital they gave me the steroid Prednisone in pill form, and I have to say this worked a treat – I had several months completely eczema free and was starting to enjoy life again, until the moment that I was eating some cereal for breakfast and one of my teeth just broke in half. I had heard that steroids could cause osteoporosis or other nasty side effects, but I had seemingly avoided these. I realised the full extent of the damage when I broke two more teeth within the next two or three weeks, and resolved to stop taking the steroids again. I had known that steroids could be harmful from personal experience as I had seen how the steroid creams I had been given when I only had small patches of eczema would thin the skin quite dramatically.

So… back to the eczema, back to the pain and back to the sleepless nights… for months… I can hardly remember much of what happened back then as I was really only surviving, not actually living. Everything felt wrong, I was angry, frustrated, depressed, massively tired, in constant pain which ranged from uncomfortable to agonizing, and totally desperate. I could not see any way out. I had no idea I could feel as bad as this, and I had been an eczema sufferer for years, on and off, had had my heart broken several times, struggled with depression and low self-esteem… but this really took the cake. I felt like the epitome of a victim.

Another extract from my blog:

“One night, unable to sleep for the pain, I was reading Caroline Myss’ book ‘Why People Don’t Heal and How They Can’. She said something like ‘surrender completely and stop trying to fix things’ (this is what I understood her to have said, although you might not find that exact phrase in the book). Having tried everything and nothing had worked, I just gave up. This was the equivalent of the alcoholic hitting ‘rock bottom’, I think. I completely gave up, not in a defeatist or nihilistic way, not in a way that has any kind of identity attached to it, not in a way which hopes that if I give up things will be better in the future… I gave up the idea of ‘me’ as someone who could do something about this, I gave up the idea of a future where I might get better, I gave up any belief or faith I might have had in anything. It was a big relief, actually.”

The thing I really took away from that book, which is related to the notion of a complete surrender, is the idea of giving up one’s ‘victim mentality’, one’s identity as ‘someone who suffers’, who complains to friends about it, eliciting sympathy, and ultimately garnering a feeling of being ‘special’ – this is a ‘consolation prize’ for being unwell, and it may be that it keeps people stuck in their illness, as this victimhood as ‘the one who is ill’ becomes who they are, and they are unable to imagine who they would be without it. It is almost like the ‘Stockholm Syndrome’ of people who start to sympathise with their kidnappers, or the institutionalisation which takes place when one has been incarcerated in a prison or psychiatric hospital for a long period of time.

Here is an extract from an email I wrote (but don’t believe I ever sent) to a friend who is a fellow eczema sufferer… possibly I believed it was a bit presumptuous to be sending her my philosophical rants while she was suffering so much physically; however if you have got this far in the article I assume you know where I am coming from by now:

“Just wanted to share with you some thoughts I’ve had about eczema and why it seems such an ‘insoluble’ problem; that is a problem with no solution.

Before going to sleep the other night I was reading the excellent book ‘Owning Your Own Shadow’ by Robert A. Johnson, and he mentions that spiritual breakthroughs always come when there are two opposites opposing each other with great force – when no further movement is possible, a paradox is created and the solution comes out of that.

Then later that night I woke up because I was itching with the eczema and I knew I wouldn’t get back to sleep so I listened to some Eckhart Tolle on my mp3 player. He was saying that in extreme suffering, often the gateway to the divine opens, and that this is the meaning of the Christian symbol of Christ on the cross – it is simultaneously a symbol of suffering but also of transcendence, and this was exactly what Johnson is saying in the book as well.

All of this made me realise that in a way there is no solution to severe eczema because it is a ‘spiritual’ dis-ease – it is meant to bring you to a point of complete despair where your mind has no more solutions and basically surrenders to what is. So I was trying to surrender but I realised that I was still imagining an ‘I’ who has to surrender and it wasn’t working. So then I just gave up pretending that I knew anything about anything, admitted I didn’t know what to do, didn’t know how to surrender, didn’t know who I was etc etc. And in this way I really surrendered and there was a breakthrough – and I realised that the eczema had been leading me to this point of surrender all along.

There is the desire to be cured of the eczema, and there is the fact that one has it, and these are two opposites fighting each other. This produces great despair, but in fact rather than being a negative thing, this is actually the only thing which allows one to transcend the mind and its solutions (‘if I try this, maybe I’ll be cured…’). Also this is a paradox because I believe that the only way to be cured is to surrender totally to the fact that one wants to be cured but cannot be.

The next day I felt like a weight had been lifted from me, there was no more despair at a deep level, I felt like I had understood that life is always pushing us into these ‘no exit’ situations and this is the only thing which allows true breakthroughs to happen. Also we can see this in the situation in the world today; we are being pushed as a species towards a crisis point of utter despair, and from there the new solutions will arise.

The Zen masters understood this when they set ‘koans’ for students: questions with no answer, like the famous ‘what is the sound of one hand clapping?’ – they knew the students would be pushed into a breakthrough by the tension created by this unsolvable problem.

So I guess that in a way, eczema is a koan…”.

So if eczema is a koan, it is a brutal one, and possibly one which comes to pass when the individual has been out of balance for a long time. It is said that we can choose the ‘path of Wisdom or the path of Woe’ – eczema is definitely the path of Woe, but the point is, they both lead to the same place – where we only know that we actually don’t know, and our precious self-importance has been dampened or even extinguished.

Click here for part two.

by stalker_d90 on flickr

I am sure everyone has found themselves, as I have, looking at images of the carnage in Gaza – a father cradling his dead son in his arms, his face just starting to register a tidal wave of shock and grief, and there have been many others even more graphic and horrifying. We ask ourselves ‘How did we get here, how can this sort of thing still happen, after all the progress we’ve made? How can humanity do this to itself?’ I don’t plan to go into the political and religious underpinning of this conflict right now and I’m not sure I’m qualified to do so anyway, but tragedy this obvious, injustice and cruelty this blatant, simply stops us in our tracks.

Every day we read that more species are becoming extinct… we scroll down, turn the page, switch the channel, knowing there’s nothing we can do. Water and air are poisoned; every time we fill up the car with fuel we are subsidising corporations which have only profit as their aim – they are apparently utterly indifferent to the effects they are having on the biosphere, you know, the only one we have to live within and as part of… and to get the rent or mortgage paid at the end of the month, we have to go to work, have to fill the car up, have to support a system we know in our heart of hearts, even if we don’t admit it even to ourselves, is broken, is a lie, is literally killing our children and their children, is supporting colonialism, whether it be in Israel, Saudi Arabia,  Brazil or wherever … and again, on some level we know it is wrong, but there seems to be no choice. All of this affects us – the falseness of almost everything we look at in a city, the fake smile plastered over everyone on tv telling us everything is fine, the self-help books promoting ‘positive thinking’, just so you can go on for one more day, tolerating what should not be tolerated… but again, there seems to be no choice.

We have reached the end of the line – we have tried capitalism, communism, atheism, religions of all varieties, technology, monstrous wars of conquest, non-violent resistance, colonial expansion,  grand utopian ‘ends justify the means’ projects too numerous to mention, every healing modality possible, every spiritual technology, every form of intellectualism and complicated theories-of-everything… and yet all the knowledge in all universities, all the history we should have learned from, all the scientific progress and discoveries, have not prevented the utterly cruel exploitation of our planet and the most vulnerable beings upon it, which is still going on right now, as you are reading this, in ways too barbaric for us to even imagine. And we know we are in some sense complicit, or at least powerless to stop it. All of this makes a difference, forms the psychic background to our oh-so-humdrum everyday lives. We probably don’t like our job, but even if we do we probably feel we could be doing more to help, and the reality is that most jobs in the industrialised parts of the world are probably not doing anyone any good; many of them only existing so that we can claim that employment has been created. Think of the jobs lost if we scrapped Trident! Think of the employment opportunities lost to our country if the multinational banks decide somewhere else is cheaper and leave us! How will we survive in today’s competitive marketplace if we don’t give corporations the tax breaks they are demanding?!

So far, so depressing, right? We are stuck on an endless hamster wheel, and not only that, the energy of the wheel is destroying the very ground we stand on, the very air we breathe. Ok so I get all that, so what?

About four years ago I spilt up with my girlfriend and subsequently became rather ill – I was eventually hospitalised and on admission the first nurse who saw me in a hospital gown assumed I had been burnt in a house fire, so badly destroyed was the weeping, bleeding skin all over my body. I took the drugs they gave me and the skin got better quickly. The drugs eventually weakened my teeth to the point that I broke three in just a couple of weeks so I stopped taking them. Within about a week the skin was really bad again. I tried every therapy, alternative or otherwise I could find, changed my diet completely. Nothing really worked.  One night, unable to sleep for the pain, I was reading Caroline Myss’ book ‘Why People Don’t Heal and How They Can’. She said something about ‘surrender completely and stop trying to fix things’ (this is what I understood her to have said, although you might not find that exact phrase in the book). Having tried everything and nothing had worked, I just gave up. This was the equivalent of the alcoholic hitting ‘rock bottom’, I think. I completely gave up, not in a defeatist or nihilistic way, not in a way that has any kind of identity attached to it, not in a way which hopes that if I give up things will be better in the future… I gave up the idea of ‘me’ as someone who could do something about this, I gave up the idea of a future where I might get better, I gave up any belief or faith I might have had in anything. It was a big relief, actually.

Somehow soon after I found a therapy which required a much greater sacrifice than the ones I had previously tried, one where I had to put myself on the line, come right out of my comfort zone, face some stuff which I had assumed could never be faced, let go of who I thought I was – of course this was the therapy which actually made a real difference. From there on I have made a full recovery, and learned a hell of a lot in the process, much of it about hell itself in fact, but that’s another story.

I feel that humanity has reached, or is now at least well on the way to reaching, rock bottom. We have tried everything our clever and self-righteous minds could come up with, and nothing has worked, the dead children still pile up, the multitudes of oil-covered sea birds are a regular sight, the tar sands, the coral reefs destroyed, ancient forests cut down, the pointless land grabs or resource wars, all cleverly justified with professional infographics, slogans and ‘laws’.

So there is nothing to do but give up… give up our idea of ourselves as the ones who know –  yes, sure we know the precise distance to Jupiter or the exact chemical composition of our bodies, but obviously I don’t mean go back to some Stone Age utopia where we all shit in the woods again. I mean give up our idea of ourselves as the ones in charge, the ones who can manage all this – I for one have seen enough evidence that we can’t – we are clever but not intelligent, powerful but not humble, capable of doing everything under the Sun but incapable of leaving well alone.

And do you know what?  Things may roll along just fine without subscribing to some grand theory and then trying to persuade everyone else to believe it. They may not, but the important thing is just for once, to get over ourselves, to accept that WE DON’T KNOW WHAT TO DO. That there are limits to our technology and our knowledge, that we are not in charge. This is not to say that some external supreme being is in charge, or that aliens or the Lords of Light are going to swoop in and save the day – they may do, I actually wouldn’t bet on it, but the point is, I don’t know and I rejoice in being able to say that. I don’t know and all I do know is we need to let go of our self-importance… not let go of our feeling of empowerment within spheres where we actually can make a difference and know we can, not wallow in misery and victimhood, but just look at ourselves, as in some cosmic mirror, and admit things have got out of hand and we are not as all-powerful as we thought we were. God may be dead but I really don’t think we need to try and take his place, or put our technological dreams of salvation in his place, or create a Big Brother spy-state in his stead.

Paradoxically, on giving up these inflated delusions of grandeur, we may find ourselves more able to get along with each other and more able to solve problems that formerly seemed intractable. I don’t know. I do know we shouldn’t ‘give up’ in order to get something in return, as that’s just more of the same old same old that got us here among the growing piles of rubble in the first place. Just give up, and feel the relief of finally, after millennia, reaching rock bottom. Let our hearts break, allow ourselves to finally feel something and stop running away. Then maybe the insane momentum of going in to work every day, or searching for that elusive job or relationship that will solve all our problems, will begin to relax and the spring that drives our little clockwork-soldier world may lose some of its tension.  We may, individually and collectively, start to really make new decisions, to not just repeat the same mistakes in lieu of having any other idea of what to do. We may finally start to wake from (as Joyce famously called it), the nightmare of history.

‘Anarchy is not misrule but no rule’ – Floating Anarchy Manifesto, Daevid Allen

Following on from my previous post, ‘Big Brother is the Reincarnation of God‘, I have been considering how we give up our power to our god-surrogate, whether that be in the form of governments, corporations, or indeed organised religions.

Of course one of the main ways in which we surrender ourselves to the ‘Man Upstairs’ is through opting for convenience over our own long term benefit. I remember when Google first launched the GMail service, and certain troublemakers pointed out that the Big G would have to analyse all our private emails in order to supply us with targeted advertising. I considered these warnings for a few minutes, to be sure, but then remembering the Google motto of ‘Don’t Be Evil’, and their perceived track record of generally being pretty good around privacy issues, I chose, as apparently a vast majority did, to ignore the potential dangers and focus on the features of this new email service. And I have to say, that GMail is a great email service, and certainly pushed the whole notion of how to provide email up a level, introducing many innovations which have since been copied by other providers (even Microsoft eventually caught on, after a few years).

But with the Snowden revelations, and those of other whistleblowers, we realise that our trust in Google was misplaced, or perhaps being more charitable, our trust in how the internet works was misplaced – we still don’t know how much Google or other corporations knew about, or are able to prevent, the likes of the NSA spying on everyone’s emails. We may assume that as they didn’t see it as a problem to analyse everyone’s emails themselves, that personal privacy was not exactly at the top of their list, but of course we had the clear option of rejecting the GMail model on privacy grounds, and we chose not to, which brings me to one of the main points of this article.

We are at a crossroads where we have to decide if we are always going to chose the most convenient option offered to us, or if we are going to step up and take back our power. In the Venn diagram of Convenience vs Personal Power there is apparently only a small intersection between these two forces competing for our attention – one is endlessly blared at us from the Masters of our Universe in the outer world, the other comes as a persistent whisper from within.

Now we are called on to wade into the deep waters called ‘Responsibility’ – a swampy region which has been out of bounds for most people since the 1950s as anything to be taken seriously… please let me explain…

The beatniks and hippies in the industrial West saw the concept of Responsibility for what it had become: a semantic illusion whereby the needs of the Church, Corporation or State were made out to be equal to our own inner prompting, our own personal sense of Doing The Right Thing. As the encroaching radios and televisions started to drown out our own inner voice, we were told what it was to Do The Right Thing – consume this, ‘support the troops’, reject the Other (they might be a Communist, out to destroy our ‘Freedom’!), and many people unwittingly bought into this – because it was convenient to just be told what to think rather than having to exercise their own brains.

The younger generation from the late 50s onwards started to reject this paradigm – creating the Generation Gap and the phenomenon of the Rebel Without A Cause. The beatniks wanted to just ‘take it easy’ and ‘hang loose’ – ‘Responsibility’ was a dirty word, a trick used to get kids to enrol in pointless imperial wars or dead-end wage-slave occupations. ‘Why don’t you take responsibility?’ was really just another way of saying ‘Why don’t you conform to the demands of a dying imperial culture at the expense of your own soul?’

However now it can be said that the baby did go the same way as the bathwater; and that as Adam Curtis’ excellent documentary series ‘The Century of the Self‘ demonstrated, multinational corporations soon found a way to use this desire for a ‘hang loose’ lifestyle for their own ends… illustrated in the classic line from ‘Withnail and I’: “We are at the end of an age. The greatest decade in the history of mankind is nearly over. They’re selling hippy wigs in Woolworths, man”.

Convenience became the new god, and we didn’t care who provided it, or at what cost. Responsibility was old-hat, man; ‘they’ would take care of everything and we could just stay cool. With the rise of the punk movement a new distrust arose, ‘don’t trust anyone over 30’, DIY culture, and so on, but Responsibility was still the enemy.

As we moved into the Information Age, we started to see new ‘cool’ companies, companies who ‘got’ the hippy thing, who ‘got’ the punk thing – people who had been brought up smoking weed, maybe talking about the potential of computers while on acid; people who Did It Themselves, who were definitely ‘cool’ – we had been waiting a long time for them to come through, and now here they were, they said they were not ‘Evil’ – and we believed them. They offered us Convenience without Responsibility and because we knew they were ‘cool’, we trusted them. We trusted them with our data, with our personal information, with our whole life stories, with our Privacy.

Now we discover that we were betrayed. They gave all that data to The Man. The elder sibling who was helping us do all this cool stuff (and probably having a crafty smoke in the back yard as well) had now become Big Brother, or at least Big Brother’s Little Helper, dutifully passing on all our private data to The Bad Guys, the uncool ones, the NSA, the government – in short those people we would NEVER have trusted in a million years with our most intimate data.

So here we are – and the solution to our predicament appears to be that most reviled and rejected word ‘Responsibility’. We have to grow up, just like those parents in the 50s demanded of their Rebel-Without-A-Cause sons and daughters. We need to Take Responsibility, Stand On Our Own Two Feet, and all those horrible slogans we have been running from for at least the last 60 years.

We have to realise that we willingly gave Big Brother all our stuff, and we have to do what we can to take it back, and make sure that this doesn’t happen again. But the solution is not a collective one, at its heart. We each, as individuals, need to accept that we are responsible for our stories, our data, our lives as they exist in the public or private domains, and take back our privacy, and with it our power. We will then be on the road to a writing a death sentence for Big Brother, just as one was written for his predecessor, God.

The beauty of this approach, as we start with our online lives and then go onto applying the principles in our lives in general, is that we do not need to wait for anyone else to do anything for us. Sure, we necessarily lead interdependent lives with those around us, and I am certainly not advocating that ‘taking personal responsibility’ is equal to buying a shotgun and going to live in a cabin in the woods, there to wait, stewing in our own paranoia, for The Man to show up and smoke us out, Waco-style.

If a lot of people start taking responsibility for their own data, and as an extension, their own lives, this may start to look like some kind of Movement. But in reality that is the last thing it needs to become. For me, Movements tend to move us to where someone else wants us to be – for example, if you join a political party, then you must consign any belief that doesn’t fit in with their ideology to a kind of mental limbo, like the ideological version of the drawer full of cables and other odds and ends we all have at home.

But before we go any further, what am I talking about when I say ‘take responsibility for our data’? I simply mean that we do not trust big corporations or governments any more, no matter their protestations of not being evil, or their bland reassurances. They have had our trust, and they have betrayed it, big time. Anyone who thinks that view is cynical, that it was just ‘a few bad apples’ getting the upper hand in any given situation needs to wake up and smell the rotting fruit – the whole barrel has clearly gone bad, and the exception now would be finding anyone with any integrity in a position of any significant power in public or corporate life. The reasons why this has happened are, I would suggest, mainly to do with the erosion of proper checks and balances on power, starting with the dismantling of any sort of truly free press in most countries, and the current war on real journalism we see unfolding at the moment – but that is really a subject for another day.

So we may have to say ‘goodbye’ to Google, ‘farewell’ to Facebook, ‘adieu’ to Apple, and ‘mind how you go’ to Microsoft. We will have to trust other, smaller companies, although if we are fairly tech-savvy we can actually replace a lot of our dependence on big corporations by taking measures such as hosting our own dropbox-style service using Owncloud, running our own web server on an old machine at home, and so on. If we are not so technically minded we can still spread the risk by hosting our email with one of the many privacy-conscious providers – growing day by day since the NSA spying revelations, do our web searches using startpage.com or duckduckgo.com, and generally build up an ecology of smaller tools to help us carry out the same tasks we do today using the monolithic services provided by big corporations. Yes, we will have to be vigilant with each of these services, to see that we can still trust them; and yes, it will be somewhat less convenient. That, however is kind of the point of this article: in today’s world, taking responsibility is going to mean sacrificing some degree of convenience.

The word ‘vigilance’ is also key here; we must constantly monitor the services we use as much as possible; choosing those which offer the greatest level of transparency and making sure they stay committed to protecting their users from those (we now know for sure) are out there trying to get their hands on our personal data for whatever reason. We know that in the current Information Age, our data is like gold, and we should not willingly hand it over to anyone we do not trust implicitly.

Of course, we will always have the choice. I do not believe that most people really care that their personal communications are being spied on;  that their data is being mined for the profit of others. This is fine, that is their choice up to the point where the last doorway out of the corporate system closes and the lobbyists realize their dearest dream of getting us to be legally required to use the services of a monolithic provider… then there will no longer be a (legal) choice – and if people say that is the present writer being paranoid, that is exactly what they would have said to someone ten years ago who claimed that in ten years’ time, completely private communications between people would be almost a thing of the past. The fact is, that ‘almost’ is notable – it is not quite a thing of the past yet – with a bit of knowledge and vigilance, and of course taking the dreaded Responsibility, we can widen those doorways leading out of the locked down, spied-on system, and help others to come out too.

No one, however, is going to do it for you. You, and I, will have to judge how we are best going to protect ourselves from being spied on. There will be no-one to blame if it goes wrong, and in all probability, no-one will praise us if things go well, as they will probably not know much about our escape from Big Brother – this is not going to be a thing you will want to publicise very much, online or off.

Having achieved some measure of freedom regarding our data and our online lives, we may wish to broaden that into the wider, offline world. As I mentioned in the previous article, this may involve ‘being the change we want to see in the world’, (and I apologise here, as I did there, for using this by now rather worn out rallying cry), and taking back our power online was the first step in an ongoing process which eventually encompasses all of our life.

I am reminded of an anecdote told by the British comedian Robert Newman who was, via his interest in the environmental movement, starting to do some research into anarchism, and had indeed met a few people who claimed to be anarchists. They were talking and someone came up with what to Newman appeared to be a good idea in the field of direct action. ‘Someone should do that’, he offered. ‘No mate, it doesn’t work like that’ – and he realised that the ‘someone’ who should do that would have to be himself. This was his moment of illumination as to what anarchism means – everybody takes Responsibility for themselves. A true anarchist sees waiting for someone else to do something for them as an intolerably weak position to be in – hence the distrust of governments and hierarchical structures.

Just to digress a moment: when I speak of people taking Responsibility for themselves, I don’t mean it in the fundamentalist Republican, Tea Party style: ‘people are poor because they are lazy, and to help them would condone their laziness and make them dependent’. Thus that little child must be allowed to starve or die of a curable disease to teach her parents a lesson. This is borderline insane in my opinion, amply illustrated by the current shutdown of the entire US Government apparently just so these Ayn Rand worshippers don’t have to lose an argument.

Of course taking responsibility includes helping others, even those who might be classified as lazy or undeserving. I am currently reading Dr. Gabor Maté’s excellent book ‘In The Realm of the Hungry Ghosts’, about his work with hardcore drug addicts in Vancouver’s downtown East Side – he explains how he is often forced to deal with political conservatives reducing or removing funding from harm reduction programmes such as a local safe needle exchange project, simply on the ideological grounds that if drug users do not suffer sufficiently, it might encourage other people to start making the ‘bad life choices’ that would lead to them becoming heroin, meth or crack addicts. He makes the very good point that if that were true we should also refuse hospital treatment to alcohol or nicotine addicts, or even to stressed businessmen who have heart attacks, because they could, in theory, have made other choices with their lives and not put themselves in the position of being ‘a burden on society’.

The truly free person surely looks on those suffering under the yoke of addiction with compassion, whether it be addiction to heroin, nicotine, religious dogma, or the crap they churn out on Fox News. Everyone is surely doing the best they can, even if that ‘best’ does not match up to how other people chose to define it.

So what would a society look like where each individual took Responsibility for themselves? A vision I like is ‘Floating Anarchy’, originally propagated by the original hippy punk band, Planet Gong, ‘led’ (in a non-hierarchical sense of course) by Daevid Allen. As I understand it, this means everyone taking Responsibility for their own actions, precluding the need for governments, laws or police. The ‘Floating’ part would be underlining the non-violent and spiritual slant on Anarchy, as opposed to the version commonly presented in mainstream culture where Anarchy is assumed to be synonymous with chaos and violence. Of course, the media have an agenda to promote and any kind of realistic examination of what ‘anarchy’ means might jeopardise that.

‘Here and Now Is Floating Anarchy
NOW you know the only way to be
Turn your head up to the morning Sun yeah
And your life will just have begun
You know that violence is caused by governments
Armies, police force….’

So everyone acts in harmony with The Moment, with their own deepest motivation, which is assumed to be in accord with the Will of the Universe, which is of course nothing other than our own deepest Will. It is really a question of living in a frequency of consciousness above that of Reason; in the state of Reason, rules have to be made, recorded and written down. These rules assume the future will be like the past, or they would not work. Of course they do work for a while, in most cases, although never in all cases, gradually becoming obsolete, unjust and tyrannical, then are replaced by new rules. There is a kind of entropy to this though, as laws are made much more easily than they are repealed and eventually we find ourselves tied up in the detritus of old laws, bound by our past good intentions into a State of total inertia. This entropy is reaching an endgame in several areas of life, I believe, especially where taxation and copyright are concerned.

With Floating Anarchy, the moment to moment understanding of what is right sustains all, is understood by all, and is lived by all. How do we know we are living in this state? We are free from unhappiness. If we become emotional or unhappy then we know we have left this state, have left the moment and have gone into a slower world of cause and effect, blame and gain. Barry Long has spoken about this state at length, especially in his ‘Only Fear Dies: A Book of Liberation‘ – what it means to take responsibility for our actions as individuals, and as how one acts while knowing oneself as not separate from the Whole:

AT THE BEGINNING
At the beginning of time the individual man or woman was the ruling authority on earth. There was no emotion in this authority: no past, no likes and dislikes, no unhappiness, no self-interest. Each individual was responsible for himself or herself in a way that is unimaginable today.
There was no concept of the masses. There was no notion of what would be good or not good for others, society and the world or even for oneself. There was only one good.

No good is seen in the future.

The good, the only good, was seen, realised or known now, in the individual. And it was known by the absence of unhappiness in himself or herself. So it was not ‘a good’ as we think of good today. It could not be given to another or shared with someone who did not have it. That would have been to create another or secondary ‘good’, a notional (not-existent-now) good.
Everyone was responsible for their own good. It was an utterly individual and just authority. One simply took responsibility now for the good – the absence of unhappiness in oneself. And all that followed was naturally right or good.
As anyone or everyone could do it, and did it, no excuse existed for not doing it. Consequently, notions of mass good, social or family good, or even of social equality, had no meaning. If all are equal in the timeless good within, all are equal in the unfoldment in time of the good without. What happens is then right, and known to be right, leaving no place for doubt or unhappiness.

I believe this is as good a definition of Floating Anarchy as we are going to get.

Is this an impossibly utopian state of affairs to wish for? In one sense yes, as it is clearly not going to happen any time soon for any great number of people – however this way of seeing things inherently invalidates itself. If I want Floating Anarchy to come to Earth, I simply have to live it right now. I don’t wait for anyone else to join me; that would imply time and unhappiness. By my example, that might encourage people to do likewise but that is ultimately none of my concern.

Another facet of the question ‘Is this an impossibly utopian state of affairs to wish for?’, is that, as I have examined here, proposed utopias always rely on the future for their creation, and more often than not an overarching philosophy of ‘the end justifies the means’. In other words, they need the promise of the future to exist; they are chimeras, mirages which always recede away into the horizon the closer one comes to them. All politicians can, and do, promise ‘Hope’ and ‘Change’ – it is the hope that this time things will work out, that this time we have chosen the Man Upstairs who will fix all our problems. Change is easy to promise because that is all there is in this world. It’s like promising there will be salt water in the oceans tomorrow. I’m sure I am not alone in hoping we ‘Don’t Get Fooled Again’, but we are such Hope fiends I wouldn’t bet on it. The promise of tomorrow’s utopia always allows us to think that someone else is going to take care of it and we can just sit back and avoid that terrible, awful thing: Responsibility.

What happens though if we don’t avoid it? What happens if we grasp Responsibility with both hands – and in doing so realise that what seemed to be its persistent, nagging whisper is but the first sparks crackling of a fire which will eventually become a furnace burning our old  lives away, compromised and enslaved as they were – and creating the space we need to grow into, as truly free beings.

 ‘God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. Yet his shadow still looms.’ — Nietzsche, The Gay Science.

‘In one period of experimentation with acid, Barrett and another friend, Paul Charrier, end up naked in the bath, reciting: “No rules, no rules”.’ – Manning, Toby (2006). The Rough Guide to Pink Floyd.

Taken from Boing Boing

Ok here we go… I had a dream last night – I was in a large, old-fashioned wood-panelled library; on the wall was a painting of a mischievous looking wizard – in appearance something like a cross between Alan Watts and Gandalf as played by Sir Ian McKellen. He was winking.  The painting was somehow alive, and I realised that he was watching me – I ducked under the large wooden table which occupied the centre of the room (not unlike the table in Da Vinci’s painting of The Last Supper) and his eyes followed me down there. On waking, I realised that this paternal figure represented God and his omniscience – he knows everything we do, he is watching all the time, he knows when we’ve been bad or good, so be good for goodness’ sake (or was that a different conditionally-loving Father-figure?).

So Nietzsche told us that God is dead, in other words: no one is watching us, there is no sin, no external judgement – this was his reaction to contemporary discoveries in science, in as much as we realised that any potential god is not to be found in the immediate physical vicinity. We know he is not sitting on a cloud just out of sight, and the theory of evolution means we can explain how we got here without an external Creator.

I am very fond of the YouTube videos of a man called Benjamin Smythe – he often repeats the phrase ‘No-one is coming’, by which I understand him to mean that no-one is coming to save us, we have to do it ourselves, but also that no-one is coming to judge us, we are free to do as we like.

The implications of this, if taken fully to heart, can be summed up in one word: freedom. But as the 70s jazz rocker Stomu Yamash’ta noted in an album title, ‘Freedom is Frightening’. It sure is – if we are alone here, and there really are no rules other than the ones we’ve created for ourselves, in other words the rules we more or less arbitrarily made up, and no-one is coming to save us, not Jesus, not the ETs, not Ronald Fuckin’ McDonald, then it’s basically all up for grabs – with all the ‘good’ and ‘bad’ consequences that implies (of course our notions of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ themselves are part of the made-up rules too).

So into the void of no-gods has stepped the modern technological secular state – in its unholy marriage with large corporations it is not (yet) omnipotent, but seems to regard itself as such to all intents and purposes, and it is certainly now taking king-sized steps towards omniscience – it is watching us all the time, as made overtly clear by the infamous, almost a parody of itself, GW Bush era logo of the Information Awareness Office project (presumably made secret and renamed PRISM after an unexpected public backlash into the idea of all communications being intercepted by the government):

I don’t want to go too far down the occult conspiracy theory rabbithole but as a sidenote ‘IAO’ was the name for a Crowleyan magickal formula for contacting one’s Holy Guardian Angel – without the obviously occultist logo I would have just dismissed that as a coincidence, but with it, there is ample backup for believing that this worldwide surveillance project was consciously intended as a kind of god-replacement. The slogan, Scientia est Potentia (Knowledge is Power) seems to add further weight to this – when we have the knowledge of Everything, we will be All Powerful. The eye in the pyramid is, in Masonic mythology, of course supposed to be that of the Architect of the Universe, i.e. God. The traditional geometrical shape for a PRISM is triangular (pyramid).

So… we feel lost and alone in the universe with no handed-down rules set in stone, and no-one looking out for us.  Rather than rejoicing in the realisation that: there is no sin in reality, we are free, and choosing to evolve into a future where we recognise that we own our power and develop our powers of negotiation in order to improve the arbitrary rules by which we live, we choose to recreate the Nitzschean ‘shadow of God’, the judgemental patriarch who is always watching us, ready to reward the obedient with cheap credit, access to politicians, and all manner of toys, and damn the infidels with water cannons, tear gas -and if we really displease Him, rendition, secret prisons, and waterboarding.