We can speak of mysticism, of magic, of meditation, of psychodynamics and many other labels, but all these refer to the attempt by the human consciousness to become aware of a deeper level of existence than our normal day-world.
In dreams, we experience another ‘world’ but it is often confusing and seldom follows the laws of cause and effect with which we try to control what happens to us in our day-world.
A more accurate word to describe this quest is that we seek to enter the world of metaphysics. Meta, in this sense, implies a greater or underlying understanding. Physics speaks for itself, but only since the age of ‘rational science’ has it excluded the aspect of consciousness. Meta-physics, then, is the search for laws that involve the whole human in a deeper understanding of action, reaction and possible reconciliation.
Today, more than ever before, these concepts and experiences are important. We live in an age where the citizens of some of the most developed nations on earth are polarised against each other, not by physical harm being done – in the sense that a tribal feud would bring – but by an antithesis of idea…
Person ‘A’ sees that what is happening is against the very core values of their being, and turns the collective clock back for the county, in terms of its part in the world. Person ‘B’ see that ‘A’ is soft, susceptible to external persuasion and that things can be only be solved by self-based firm action and unity of purpose – and if there are casualties, well, they had it coming. Both sets of people are sincere in their beliefs. There are no laws of physics to describe such divergence of heated opinion; they are a complex mixture of logic, emotion, culture, and the invocation of ancient survival traits in the lower parts of our brain-stems.
Physics speaks of action and reaction. These have psychological equivalents as well, but the same laws are not followed. My beliefs may change tomorrow, but the angle at which a ray of light will be refracted through the same piece of glass will not.
Is there a science of how and why things happen? At a physical level the answer is a definite yes. Considered from the perspective of the whole of Life on Earth, the answer is not so simple. Metaphysics begins with a set of core principles – technically an ‘ontology’ or study of Being. Being is what is. Its attributes are to be rather than to do. If you believe in a human soul, an inner, deeper part of our being, then that soul may be said to live in world of Being, though we may pass the whole of our life without knowing of its presence.
Being does not need reason – it knows itself to be the child of a perfect universe.
Being underpins Doing. Doing is the unwinding of potential to do. Intelligence ‘aims’ that potential where it knows the most good can be done. In physics the ‘most good’ is the desired result – the football in the back of the opposition net, for example. In metaphysics, the idea of doing cannot be separated from the experience of moral good – as seen at the highest level of that person’s consciousness. Psychology sees ‘good’ in a similar way to physics, in that it is a relative quality. In metaphysics, good is a real thing and pervades the universe, waiting for its children of consciousness to wake up to its guiding presence.
We need not speak of God, here. But we can if we wish. We must, though, speak of Life. The Good is that which serves all Life as equitably as the distribution of potential for action will allow, looking after the developing consciousness as much as the physical vehicle which houses it.
The inner core of many of the mystical or magical traditions is the idea of polarity. Something is polarised when it exhibits an extreme of a certain quality. The ‘poles’ of such qualities might be easy to understand, like life and death or black and white, or hot and cold, or wet and dry. Many of these qualities are relative to the observer, in other words relative to the way we are affected by them. We are reactive to such things – they originate elsewhere and with a greater cause.
The word ‘spiritual’ simply means something that affects all the levels of our Being. The idea of spiritual polarity begins with the Will, or, in physics, the set of laws, that comes into existence at the birth of the ‘world’. We can define the ‘world’ as we wish. It can refer to the arising of life on Earth or to the Big Bang of the whole universe, depending how far back in time we wish to go. Time is, of course, not what it was. Einstein re-wrote the laws of classical physics with his proven theories of space-time within relativity.
The laws of consciousness describe increasing levels of awareness – from the simplest single-celled organisms, whose main property is to continue to exist as something separate, to the complexity of the human being, with the history of its entire evolution written in the increasingly sophisticated levels of its nervous system and brain. The story of Life on Earth is written along the human spine…
When Life is examined in this way, we begin to see the evolving climb of consciousness; and the importance of the polarities which drove its evolution. Something with increasingly powerful ‘eyes’ is being produced in the biosphere of the Earth. That original ‘Will’ of the universe, as seen on this planet, has resulted in the consciousness of mankind.
In the next post, we will ‘Look back along the telescope’ at the core polarities of how things happen, relating these principles to what is revealed in the depths of the human consciousness.
©️Copyright Stephen Tanham 2017
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Fascism arises as a result of certain conditions. These are not limited by being ‘a long time ago’. Suggest this to anyone happy with the current political environment of Britain and the USA and they will look at you as though you are an academic who is out of touch with both popular opinion, and the ‘revolution’ of the underdog that has created the new order.
Fascism can and needs to be simply defined so that our children and grandchildren, who are not close enough to the societal memories of the second world war, can be equipped to spot its festering signature.
Fascism begins with populism. We are reminded by a usually charismatic would be leader that the system is corrupt and that we – our undervalued group in society – are being deprived of our rights by an alien minority. There has to be a minority that can bear the brunt of our group’s revenge.
Fascism believes that things can be black and white; and that any wisdom to the contrary is part of the mind-fog generated by the intellectual experts who have created the ethos of the governing elite – who themselves are, of course, corrupt, liberal or not.
Once elected, fascism uses its initial popularity to shut down or obfuscate the mechanisms of opposition using one or more forms of brutality. Increasingly, this brutality is of the mind. As long as it can continue repeating its ‘you’ve been robbed’ message, it knows it will get enough time to silence the truth. Truth and facts are always the first target of this form of mental derangement made politics.
Appearing to strengthen the society in which it grows, such twisting of the real begins to weaken the country it infests, leaving it vulnerable to international forces who are less concerned with violence of the mind and more free to use outright military force. Defending the country from real war is anything but simplistic.
Mussolini, the leader of Italy during the second world war, was a classic fascist. He rose to prominence and control of Italy using all the above techniques. His thugs silenced opposition. He was a charismatic man with an intense appetite for both food and sex, and is reported to have ‘needed’ several women a day. Recognising that, by itself, Italy could not be strong enough, militarily, he sided with Nazi Germany, which eventually ate him.
At the end of the war, he fled and was arrested, in Sicily, when a mob presented him, freshly beaten up, to a mid-ranking British officer who was part of the Allies’ liberation force and had wandered into a town square. That man, ironically enough, was Alan Whicker, who went on to become an internationally-respected television journalist, gaining his own notoriety by interviewing several of the world’s most powerful dictators – at a time when to do so would normally have result in your death.
In the first post in this series, I described how a Facebook page was used as a mechanism to present me with a deliberately misleading advert that was targeted at a certain group of voters, just prior to the UK’s Referendum in June 2016. Further research and the publishing by several UK newspapers of the larger process of which my incident was a tiny part showed that there had actually been hundreds of different ‘messages’ used by the campaign, which was a key part of Leave.eu’s successful strategy to take Britain out of the EU, backed by the right wing of the Conservative Party and the extreme right UKIP. Each of those – millions of adverts – had been targeted specifically at people ‘tagged’ as potentially swing voters – the target group where the power lies in any democratic election.
The identification of this group, including (incorrectly) me, was derived by a highly sophisticated system of data analytics created by a UK company, Cambridge Analytica (CA), in which American hedge-fund billionaire Robert Mercer now has a major interest. During the recent US elections, Mercer and his data-mining technology switched from Ted Cruz’s campaign to back Donald Trump’s when the former began to falter. They were said to have a significant effect on the election’s result.
There is nothing illegal about data mining, nor, currently are there limitations on the use of such data during elections, though that is now being challenged. Wikipedia’s entry on the US arm of Cambridge Analytica includes its referenced competence in military disinformation campaigns, social branding and voter targeting.
Again, there is nothing illegal about these operations, but they don’t work in isolation.
To carry out such penetrative campaigns you need to have data to feed the data-mining algorithms. Recent developments, seemingly originating in work carried out at Cambridge University, revolved around how to infer character and voting intentions from social media data and are summed up in Wikipedia’s entry on this topic, which states that Cambridge Analytica is using psychological data derived from millions of Facebook entries. Elsewhere, the same source says that research at Cambridge has shown to how easy it is to infer voting intentions from a relatively small number of posts.
The history of these events, and the technology behind them are summarised by the Guardian in this article.
Those are our Facebook posts, shared with our friends. Are our simple communications being used, without our permission, for such data mining? It make take governmental intervention to uncover the scale of this, but, thankfully, this is now being initiated, at least in the UK.
We may also need some geniuses on the side of the people, as well.
This is technology that is changing how we are governed and what agenda is used to appeal to the ‘underdogs’ in a society, sweeping aside shared values that have maintained peace and relative harmony since we emerged from the smouldering ruins of the major wars of the last century.
Prompted by reports of this in the Guardian, (one of the newspapers banned from the recent White House briefing, along with the BBC, CNN and several US Newspapers) there is now an official investigation by the UK’s privacy watchdog. But it has come too late to alter the populist course on which we now seem to be set.
Facebook has recently said it will review the use of such data and that it is opposed to political manipulation using its information as a basis. But, be careful next time you’re tempted to respond to ‘What kind of archangel are you?’ on your favourite social media… you never know who has paid to gather that data and is processing it to find out much more about you than you thought you were revealing…
Next week, in the final part of this series, I will step back and examine the underlying forces, political and psychological, that have caught us, unprepared, for the use of this data on a massive scale.
Continued in Part Three
Original content©Copyright Stephen Tanham 2017
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“ … the standard translation of one of the chief scriptures of China refers to the venerable Lao Tse as “the Old Boy”. This sounds comical to European ears, yet it is not so far removed from the words of another Scripture which has been fortunate enough to receive translation at the hands of those who reverenced it; “Except ye become as a little child.” I am not a sinologue, but I incline to the opinion that the translation “Eternal Child” would have been equally accurate and in better taste.” Dion Fortune
Dion Fortune’s comment in The Mystical Qabalah struck me when I first read it, more decades ago than I care to remember. Nothing unusual there, as what I learned from her teachings over the ensuing years has shaped and informed my thoughts and personal journey since my grandfather gave me that book when I was fifteen. I still…
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Some are old when they’re young,
Some are young when they’re old
And the years mark no more
Than the passage of time.
Where youth can be timourous,
Age can be bold
And its journey through life
Runs from laughter to wine.
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The pre-born, living within Mother, but increasingly alive, knows only the dual world of She-and-me. The new-born, finding itself in an undefinable aloneness yet reassured by a Mother now separated, clings to her now-externalised warmth and nourishment. But a dramatic change has taken place. There is an imprinting within consciousness of separation and the key to the rest of life will be the question “Who am I?”
The pre-born starts off not knowing there is such a thing as separation. Souls entering the physical life have no choice but to experience it. Mystics seek to return to the source and transform it and them at the same time…
The birth is a combination of organic life given by Mother as part of her life, plus the character of the infant, genetic and egoic, as that sense of self is slowly realised, consolidated and acted upon. We have come to expect that the word ‘ego’ will be used negatively, yet it is the most essential of things in the formative stages of life. Without the experience of the growing self, there would be no growth of capability in that life, since we would not be able to harvest and keep the fruits of experience.
Spiritually, there comes a time when we question the validity of that (till then) lifelong separation – ‘in-here and out-there’. Working backwards through what is sensed as the ‘false self’ we come to the base survival conditioning that is associated with the issues of fear and trust. If there is enough force in our search we can see something shining in those waters…
From the time we emerge as infants, our discovery of our world is a matter of relationship.
Pleasure, pain and fear are low-level, survival-based drivers and essential to our physical existence. Consciousness, such as we use the word in self-development, is seen as an ‘upward’ extension of awareness, but can also be seen as a growing-back movement from the edge of the circle of raw experience towards the centre of a circle. That centre is our spiritual goal, the core of our real self.
We are not speaking of regression therapy here. The adult mind is essential to this quest and needs to be held, like a bright torch, against the still-present fears that disproportionately coloured our early experiences – and hence our lives. Like re-examining the stuff of early nightmares, we come to see how trivial were those fears, and yet their effect persists in our egoic makeup.
All this is a journey of self-knowledge. There are no Gods in this path, save those we create for our own use. Real self-knowledge can come only when our world ‘speaks’ to us about our selves – and that is only possible through relationship…
Why, then, do our relationships not propel us, immediately and continuously, back towards the centre of that circle we seek? In the last article of the #Silenti series, we considered the way the human mind constantly identifies with the external objects it considers desirable, seeking to define itself externally. Such ‘objects’ may be people or things or beliefs or even states of mind. The world of ‘Object Relations’ is a key part of modern psychology, though approached from the perspective of stable personality rather than the search for the missing/forgotten ‘heart’ of a non-egoic self.
The reactive brain has spent a lifetime equipping us with personal history. That history forms the basis of a continuously-updated database against which we evaluate experience. Conditioned by the pre-processing of this historical patterning, we lack any freedom to actually experience, since our brain-selves are busy liking or not-liking what’s happening to us.
In other words, we constantly judge our experience based on a subjective edifice of pre-conceptions, shutting out our own precious reality – a reality that, alone, has the power to transform us.
Do we have the ability to shut down this edifice?
Those who have trod this path tell us we do, but it requires a revolution in our thinking. Instead of considering the world as separate, we need to come to see it as a reflection of ourselves – not our perfected Selves – that is something else at the level of the soul, but our egoic selves. By seeing our subjective confusion reflected in the world, yet not reacting to it, apart from truly seeing, we come to realise that this duality of life is false… and that there is only one life.
As Krishnamurti said:
“…however learned or however petty the mind may be, it is consciously or unconsciously limited, conditioned, and any extension of this conditioning is still within the field of thought. So freedom is something entirely different.”
Krishnamurti, J. The Book of Life
©️Copyright Stephen Tanham 2017
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I remember the moment when I began to suspect that a new generation of ‘wire strippers’ were at large in our internet wiring.
It was June 2016 – the month of the the UK’s Referendum on remaining in the European Union (EU). I was reading through postings by a good cross-section of my friends on social media.
The opinion polls were showing that the vote was projected to be neck and neck. There was great tension in the country, with internal divisions that were splitting both families and businesses down the middle.
It was as ugly a political period as any I remember and it made me realise how much was at stake – and how many large organisations were part of the persuasion process…
One day, a large part of my Facebook screen was replaced with an advert that appeared to be on on behalf of the Labour party – only the message was wrong. I knew that, despite the lacklustre performance of that party’s leader on the subject of Europe, the official party line was to be part of the Remain camp. However, the advert, which was devious in the extreme, quoted the party leader’s old statements on the subject, from his pre-leadership anti-European days. The whole advert was dressed as an official Labour plug. Unless you definitely knew otherwise, it told you, convincingly, that the Labour position on Europe was negative…
I asked around, but no-one else had seen it, which I found strange. As a pro-European I knew the effect of that ad would be significant, especially as I suspected that a mobilised Labour vote, plus the majority of the Tory party, would comfortably swing a majority behind Remain. I felt considerable anger that someone was twisting the truth in a very sophisticated way.
And then it occurred to me that the reason no-one else in my small sample had seen it was that I had been part of a group that had been targeted for a a very specific, negative message.
Could that be? If that were true then the data analysis used by such social media systems had radically changed in a short time.
Social media is a mixed blessing. I find it a very powerful means of communication, and we tend to forget that we do not pay for it… well, not in money up front, anyway. It’s not an authoring package – WordPress is much stronger in that respect – but it is a good ‘short message’ mechanism. As a WordPress blogger, I quickly learned that posting a link to a WordPress piece on Facebook produced little interest – the recipients expected ‘home grown’ stuff. Fair enough, I can understand. There is a certain homogeneity of what works on each platform.
The Referendum proceeded. Culminating in two weeks during which the most deceitful and cynical promises were made to a pre-targeted section of the British population; so successfully that even those making them were left visibly surprised (not to mention policy-less) by the result.
At that point, I had no idea of the concert of targeted data manipulation that had been played out to the UK electorate. Nor the international reach of those involved.
Continued in Part Two
©Copyright Stephen Tanham 2017
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Sent to me by Obi, a friend and Companion of the Silent Eye:
“Let me Sue, tell you a traditional story on happiness from my people the Igbo of South east Nigeria as an example of how happiness can make one unable to do anything effectively.
A young man after the traditional marriage formalities took home his wife, with happiness, just as the young wife was happy too. The next morning as he was leaving for his farm for work, he left the young wife in the house and then brought out food for her to cook, so he could come home to a meal for the first time now in his own house and not his father’s.
When he returned, he heard a distant voice singing a traditional happiness tune, and he was thrilled by and happy at the melodious voice of his wife. She, meanwhile, was transported…
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Fragments of night rise from the road, scattering flecks of dawn on ebony wings. I watch the sun gild a horizon veiled in mist and see the earth blush at its touch. The morning song of birds drowns the sound of the engine as I drive through a green land that is waking to spring. It is only a few weeks since I last drove this road, yet it is a different place… the seasons have turned, the light has advanced… new life springs from old. It is beautiful and I know this road so well that I can give my attention to the land. I am struck, quite forcibly, by the realisation that no-one has ever seen quite what I am seeing…nor will they ever see quite this scene again.
And nor will I. This is the very last time I will see it. For a moment that thought…
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Sun in Gemini 
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