Port Lewaigue (pronounced ‘lage’) is a small cove to the south of Ramsey, on the Isle of Man. At the time of writing, we are spending a long weekend with some friends who now live here; having moved from Douglas, the island’s capital, last year.
Mark is due to retire from the Manx insurance business in a few weeks, and the purchase of a beautiful old house, a few yards from the shore of this lovely spot, marks the final part of their long-held retirement plans.
Until yesterday, Bernie and I were strangers to this beautiful part of the island, though we had driven through the fishing town of Ramsey on previous trips – usually in November, as we reserve a few destinations for quieter, out of season breaks; we like the feel of a cold and half -empty resort when we’re wrapped up warm and deciding where to have the next bowl of hot, local soup…
(Above: the port of Ramsey, with its deep and snaking harbour)
Port Lewaigue is a leafy and picture-postcard place that most holidaymakers will bypass, not realising that the tiny but steep road off the A2 will take you down to one of the most beautiful coastlines on the island.
My own exploration of this idyllic spot began yesterday morning, when the household was still sleeping off a glass of wine or three from the night before. Tess, our collie, needed a walk and the excitement in her eyes as the world of new sight and smells beckoned was infectious.
Within two minutes, we were at the bottom of the lane and entering the beach where we met a helpful elderly lady with two King Charles spaniels. Those with dogs will know the camaraderie that prevails on such occasions – as long as the furry ones get on! They did, and we were soon chatting like old friends. It was still very early and there was that sense of sharing the morning world…
She told me that there was a circular path around the headland, but that I should ‘beware the false paths in the ferns’ – something that would make sense when I got there.
After a few more minutes of chatting, Tess and I set off on our walk of discovery. There is something lovely about encountering a new landscape for the first time.
We followed the curling path, which climbed up the headland, becoming muddier as we went. I cursed my lack of foresight in leaving the walking boots in the car, but it was too late to go back – the household would soon be stirring to life and Tess needed her morning run. The outside tap and a good brush would have to suffice on my return.
We climbed, and eventually the path opened up to the promised ‘fern field’ revealing also the view of the lovely line of hills that ring this part of the island – not too far from the famed TT motorcycle circuit.
At this point, with the tiny port now visible again in the distance, I realised the significance of the lady’s warning. There were at least five paths before me. All looked equally well-trod. I reasoned that to keep within the sight of the small cove, below, would be the most sensible; but it proved to be entirely the wrong logic.
Five minutes later, and surrounded on three sides by sharp brambles hidden in the ferns, I gave up, envious of Tess’s thick fur coat, which rendered her impermeable to the attacks.
Eventually, we found the right route – on the opposite side of the plateau – and the way descended to reveal the rest of the circular path back to Port Lewaigue.
At the end of the descent, a helpful notice board, perched, unseen, above the cove on our outward leg, gave the history of the cove, which includes a dramatic shipwreck – the steam trawler ‘Cevic’, in 1927; and two attempts to develop the little port for wider use. The first of these was in 1887 when George Kay, a local businessman, bought a substantial stretch of land to create a promenade and some seaside cottages. These were completed, but his greater plan to build a concrete walkway to link the port with nearby Ramsey floundered. A popular walk, available only at low tide, is to follow the high-water line into the nearby town, and that remains the only option, barring the road.
A second development, by a wealthy Salford brewer – James Grimble Groves (above) was more successful. As an aside, wouldn’t that name be great for a period detective! Groves’ plan was less prosaic but more doable. This canny man, who was also MP for Salford, bought a large tract of the land (where I had struggled with the fern paths), and developed it into a small estate of prestigious, large houses. These were named ‘The Colony’ and are still sought-after dwellings, with unrivalled views- see photo below.
Port Lewaigue remains largely undeveloped. Its charm is its simplicity. Our hosts tell us that it is local custom to go sea-bathing on a Sunday morning… we’ll see. I think they are winding us up!
©Stephen Tanham.
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It may be that the present compressed and negative feelings that we humans are experiencing is a birthing chamber rather than a vice.
This outrageous idea ties in closely with what was written in last week’s blog. In it, I suggested that just as a body has trillions of cells, so the planet has a vast number of connected parts of its ‘mineral, animal and mammal’ consciousness; each made up from the physical atoms of the Earth, Sun and the ‘debris’ of ancient exploding suns; without which there would not have existed the chemical components of life.
Through our human body passes the dying bodies of life on earth, be they vegetable or animal. We cannot, yet, ‘eat the Sun’ though one wonders if this is where evolution will eventually take life on Earth.
We don’t really question this ‘eating’ of other things – and plants are alive, too, of course; yet our aliveness depends on the absorption of this sacrifice.
The biggest act of sacrifice we know of is the Sun, the ancient symbol of ‘life-giving’ in all cultures. The Sun – our Sun, because we owe it our very lives – literally gives up its energies to feed the lives of its children. Looked at from a mystical perspective, it is slowly dying so that we can live. Something has made a transition from the cosmic level of physics to the vastly organised awareness of the human (and other) organisms, whose eons-long development has resulted in consciousness not only of things, but of ‘self’. This is a pinnacle very different to being top of the food chain.
The star that made this possible – our Sun – is not outside the laws of physics, and the atomic fusion of hydrogen can only last so long before the whole solar system dies to organic life.
Is the Sun conscious? Mystics speculate it has a hyper-consciousness, a vibrational awareness of life in the whole solar system, but over a vast timescale which sees our own lives as a blink. Scientists, quite reasonably, from their training and experimental perspective, say this is emotional nonsense, and that the laws of gravity and nuclear physics take care of the rest. It is wise to be open to both perspectives, and to remember that even science, accurate and marvellous though it is, is conceived and evolved through the window of the human consciousness, though it seldom acknowledges this perspective. A growing number of scientists have observed, wryly, that the ‘mystics got there first’ when it comes to some of the consciousness-related revelations from the quantum world.
Whatever the truth, no-one steps out on that first spring morning of the year, when the power of the sun replaces the long and cold winter chill, and feels physics in their hearts…
As a species, we are rather taken with our ‘specialness’. Educated to be the top of the food chain, the ‘apex predator’, our civilisation has felt free to work its indulgent will on our world… and we wonder at the resulting lack of happiness, and that lack of inner belonging.
The idea of us being organically eaten – as we do, unthinkingly, with our own food, seldom occurs to us, yet it is plain that everything that lives is eaten in its turn – only the fleeting and creative state called consciousness seems to be from a different place than the purely organic… though it would be nothing without that organic basis as a vehicle.
This kind of thought can be both humbling and re-aligning, since it shakes the fluffiness from our life-expectations and also threatens us with some basic reality – a very important aspect of being alive in an age where we increasingly live in our heads and in front of screens that distance us from the vividness of life ‘out there’. When we are disconnected in this way, it is easy for intolerance and prejudice to fester. We meet, on social media, with those of like mind… and Like their actions and opinions. If we don’t like what someone ‘says’, repeatedly, we Unfriend them, leaving us in a potentially sterile pool of self-reinforcing opinion.
The human process of maturing requires that we brush up against often painful experiences that are definitely not what we like… but the digital world is taking us away from this school of maturity that has ensured that our lives are at least broadened rather than narrowed. It is to the credit of the emerging generation that many of them seem to be caring and involved, and, certainly in the UK, politics and social involvement are on the increase. Much of this is a reaction – a very positive one – to years of so called ‘austerity’. Sharing the pain of overspending is a necessary goal, but not if that sharing is a farce…
The most troubling parts of the world are where those in charge are exhibiting the strongest ‘egoic’ characteristics. It is as though we are being shown the inner nature of this negative and tyrannical aspect of the human soul; shown it in a way that bares its ugliness. There are, of course die-hards who thing such fundamentalism is a good thing, and will offer us control of our lives again, making our countries great in the process. But anyone with real maturity in their own lives knows the bitter taste of such egoic self-aggrandisment; and its ultimate cost.
To truly ‘come together’ we need to feel our shared humanity in a way we have not done, before. We need to see the unsurpassed beauty of being part of a life-wave that has been gifted this beautiful planet for our collective and personal evolution; and, within that, to see that we also have the power to destroy it. To ride that edge of the utmost danger can only be part of our collective maturity as we evolve from eating and eaten to something potentially magnificent that is ‘involving’ itself with the star-dust of the Earth.
Our survival as a species is by no means assured. But the large-scale awareness of the present horror shows that fill our screens might just bring us, kicking and certainly screaming, into a new age – one where the true ghoul is seen to be the dark side of human nature and not circumstance or those we can victimise.
Other parts in this series:
Stephen Tanham is a director of the Silent Eye School of Consciousness, a not-for-profit organisation that helps people find the reality and essence of their existence.
His personal blog, Sun in Gemini, is at stevetanham.wordpress.com
Image: Sweetheart Abbey, near Dumfries, Scotland. Taken by the author.
©️Stephen Tanham
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“.. before I can live with other folks I’ve got to live with myself. The one thing that doesn’t abide by majority rule is a person’s conscience.” Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird
“Is everything okay over there?” said my son, calling from half a world away. “Yes… fine…” I replied, moments before madness hit London Bridge. Britain, like so many countries recently, reeled once again as violence destroyed lives and peace. That attack followed hard on the heels of Manchester and Westminster, and would precede a lethal attack on Finsbury Mosque.
“My daughter and granddaughter were there,” said our Companion, speaking of the Manchester bombings that killed children as young as eight years old, as we struggled to come to terms with yet another explosion of hatred and inhumanity.
Britain is far from being unique in this. Globally, over eight hundred terrorist attacks have been listed this year alone…
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Last night BBC2 aired part two of the documentary Secrets of Silicon Valley, subtitled ‘The persuasion machine’. by Jonathan Bartlett.
The programme charted the rise of the modern Tech giants, many of which are not traditional ‘product or services’ companies in the sense we have become used to. For example, Facebook, one of the main subjects of the programme, is viewed as not only a social network but one of the world’s largest publishers of information. Yet, Facebook actually originates nothing, rather providing a world-wide platform within which others – us – publish our thoughts and, increasingly, emotions, to a network of our ‘friends’… or those we seek to influence.
The word ’emotions’, above, is the key to much of what followed in the programme. Recent motivational studies, representing the cutting edge of how people (we) can be psychologically profiled – put into data silos of opinion and response – have shown that there are two ways in which the human mind absorbs and responds to information.
The first is what we might call emotive: ‘I just know that’s true’ or ‘yes, I’ve always felt that way’. The second is more considered, and uses more rational parts of our brain and mind to self-question our assumptions.
Specialists have found that the first category of what we might call ‘triggers’ are the basis for mass response and are capable of nudging the opinions of millions in a certain direction; particularly in an age when many feel dissatisfied with their lot. The message is everything…
So, now, imagine we can change the message, tuning, say, it’s Facebook layout so that a red button is used instead of a green one; a slightly more aggressive image instead of a subtle one; and that we can do this in hundreds of thousands of variations in real-time… each of them tuned to the selection of the human silo that I, as a well-funded advertiser, want to reach with my message, like, for example, being President of the USA.
The vast majority of the $85 million dollars spent on Donald Trump’s election campaign was spent within a secretive and unmarked building in Texas which became know as ‘Project Alamo’. The money was spent on Facebook ads in the way described above. The name ‘Project Alamo’ was inadvertently brought to the Trump elections campaign by an English company – Cambridge Analytica – who had been employed by Ted Cruz’s failed campaign to win the Republican nomination. Cambridge Analytica transferred the vast profiling work they had been doing, code-named ‘Alamo’, to Donald Trump’s presidential programme… and the name stuck.
Tens of thousands of permutations of presentation of each story were broadcast at tens of millions of Facebook subscribers (us) as the US election and, later, the UK’s Referendum gathered pace.
In both cases, the use of social networking platforms was central to campaigns that changed the way we are governed. In both cases the result was a shift of control to a more right-wing basis for our daily lives in which racism, among other dark things, now flourishes more openly.
These campaigns focus on dissatisfaction. Dissatisfaction is one of the emotive triggers referred to in the opening paragraphs, above. Show someone poor who believes that a billionaire can be on their side a generalised emotive ‘trigger advert’ in their social media feed and they might doubt it. Show them the same advert tailored exactly for them by the new world of opinion analytics and enough of them will respond to vote with their bruised instincts, even though the other side of their brains might doubt it…
The data that provides such exact matching to our emotive triggers is what we give the social media platforms every time we click on a Facebook Like. In the BBC 2 programme, the producer, Jonathan Bartlett, is seen receiving his sifted profile from one of the leading psychologists in the USA. “But I didn’t tell anyone I was a Catholic,” he says. The psychologist nods, agreeing. In this new world he didn’t need to, his actions, preferences and ‘likes’, gathered by Facebook and made available to targeted campaigns for everything from products to presidents, is there to be acted on if you have the money. Sifted and summarised the inference engine showed him to be Catholic, whether he liked it or not
The programme also highlighted the contradictions in all this. In general, Silicon Valley does not vote for Republicans. Older footage showed President Obama (the USA’s first ‘social media’ president) talking with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. They were singing each other’s praises. Today there is a very different mood, and Barack Obama is one of the voices calling for very much tighter control of the content of social media sites – and naming Facebook as a prime example of a company that needs to address this. Senior Facebook technicians and analysts were on-site in the Project Alamo building, helping the Trump campaign, spend the lion’s share of their $85M wisely; yet, Silicon Valley, in general, did not want Trump as President.
Of intense concern to social media companies is the proposed challenging of the 1996 Telecommunications bill in the USA. This contained a vital clause that the providers of a social media platform could not be held responsible for the legality or accuracy of the content. Politicians on both sides of the Atlantic are now disputing this, and citing many examples where social media companies have failed to ‘self-police’.
The Tech giants are spending billions in Washington, trying to get this killed off and promoting their own ‘myth’ that they are Disruptors whose ultimate effect is good. See part one of this series of posts for more details. The frightening thing is that, having opened Pandora’s box, they are no more in control of all this than we are.
I will conclude this personal review of the new world of ‘democratic manipulation’ next week, with an examination of what value the mere human has left, and whether we have any effective responses left to us in this tsunami of manipulation. We live in a very frightening age…
Other part of this series: Part One,
To be concluded in Part Three
Stephen Tanham is a director of the Silent Eye School of Consciousness, a not-for-profit organisation that helps people find the reality and essence of their existence.
His personal blog, Sun in Gemini, is at stevetanham.wordpress.com
©️Stephen Tanham
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It is pitch black; like an idiot, I am teetering on a stool cleaning windows and muttering that there are far better ways to spend my life that doing chores. To say that I hate housework would be inaccurate. I don’t mind the jobs themselves, and I love the feeling when they are done, but, after decades of doing them, I’ve gone right off the necessity of housework.
I do not make a habit of nocturnal window-cleaning, but the rain-splattered panes had been bugging me for a while and, having rolled up my sleeves to do some heavy-duty cleaning, I didn’t feel like leaving this, the final job, till morning. When that rare mood takes me, it is one of those ‘I’ve started so I’ll finish’ things. And I was having company… and that means that in spite of my best efforts, I cannot help myself.
This is an ancient…
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“Salmon of Wisdom
Dodging hazelnuts swims the hungry salmon, swallowing the nuts as they plunge into the depths. Pity the poor pondskater skimming the surface while beneath lies the kernel of wisdom, waiting for those who plunge deep below their surface and get their feet wet.”
That bit of oddness represents a page in my notebook. I have but the vaguest recollection of writing it. I know I was sitting on the kitchen step… I know there was wine… and I can see the context of the conversation from the notes either side. We were obviously deep in discussion of something or other.
Which has nothing whatsoever to do with the Salmon of Wisdom. Or pondskaters.
I cannot remember the entire conversation that surrounded the notes, though reading them brings back the essence of it. I can’t even recall if this bit was mine. It can…
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Where are we going?
When things are going well in ‘our’ world, there is an understandable tendency to assume that a generally benign evolution of civilisation is taking place, one in which we play our part, however small, being a kind of swimmer who lives and dies within that flow of slow progress.
But when we are faced with the kind of politics, violence and social upheaval we are surrounded with at present, we find ourselves questioning the assumptions of the good times. These are certainly not good times, not when measured against a yardstick of caring, kindness and any semblance of equality. They may be good times for the relative few who ‘own’ the planet, but they are not so for those who care about the general welfare of mankind. The general system we call capitalism has carried us far into the expansion of our world, and produced wonderful systems and things, but now seems to be falling from its own, autonomous ledge into an unknown abyss.
This is not a political website, though, as directors of the Silent Eye, we are free to express our own, often strong, opinions.
Normally, I would not begin a post with the above sentiments, but I have begun to see a strong spiritual thread in the events around us, and on a global scale.
The human has a psychology. The concept, given to us by the early pioneers like Freud and Jung, is based on the fact that we form a ‘self’ which governs our actions at a different level to our biological survival mechanisms, though it derives from them, in its primitive stages of individual development. This multi-faceted self is what psychology addresses in its treatments. For other schools of teaching, such as the Silent Eye, the elements of this self are the starting points in the individual search for a deeper identity – one without the limitations of the egoic nature we wear during the day.
The self forms by separation. We are born a part of the world. Though seen by our loving parents as separate, that is not our experience. Reaction is the key to our development. Reaction forms from pleasant and unpleasant organic responses and an increasing need to choose the pleasant. Eventually, this reaction become a ‘thing’, a centre for our experience; and the brain turns it into a self. The attributes of this self are ‘groomable’ to make us fit better into the world by conformance and intelligence, which grow together until they are challenged by the individual who comes to see their unhappy limitations.
Sadly, this thing at the centre, this ‘us’ is little more than a machine of reactions, a composite of our personal history, conscious of its vulnerability but intent on its own survival at the centre of things.
So here’s the link to our civilisation: nations have ‘selves’, too. They are made up of the collective selves of the individuals, just as our own bodies are made up of the trillions of cells that have evolved to work together to provide us with an aware and sensitive vehicle. The human self or ego has its parallel in the society where we have our lives. We are a part of it, dramatically linked to its essential health in a way we cannot yet see, but our spiritual qualities of essence, kindness and selflessness do not flow into us through the ego – they come from beyond it. In the same way, the outer, conditioned responses of the individual within a society do not represent the potential inner state of that nation; or group of nations, that make up a country or continent.
The lowest levels of control centre on violence. Violence generates fear, which conditions group behaviour. Is it more violent to have a war or to find that the wealth of a society is concentrated in the hands of a few? There are many forms of violence, and we need to take a fresh look at them and empower ourselves to feel true, moral outrage, again or we will sink beneath the sea of despair that threatens to overwhelm us now.
I am not an advocate of revolution. It solves nothing. I do, however, believe in the power of the deep, collective mind to link with others of like intent in the throwing off of old ideas which have become morally and spiritually bankrupt. What is seen in truth is seen differently. That action of truly seeing is its own light and its own motive force. Quietly and without violence, it reveals what can no longer be hidden; and in so doing shows a pathway to a different future.
In this lies hope, and hope is so very needed in these dark times. We were never society; that is an invention to help us manage the collective. We were never a body, that is a collective to allow us to experience the trials and joys of matter. We are, singly and collectively, an un-cageable creative individuality whose existence is part of the unfolding of the universe – our aliveness ranges from atom to cell to human to planet, and is something that will not be denied… We were born to share it because we are it…
Stephen Tanham is a director of the Silent Eye School of Consciousness, a not-for-profit organisation that helps people find the reality and essence of their existence.
His personal blog, Sun in Gemini, is at stevetanham.wordpress.com
Image: Sweetheart Abbey, near Dumfries, Scotland. Taken by the author.
©️Stephen Tanham
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