Move your money

At Barclays headquarters in the City, the bank recently revealed billions in profits and hundreds of millions in bonuses to be shared among an elite pool of traders and directors.
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But down at ground level – and a world away from the marble and glass of the executive suites –
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There was a very different picture, as more than 50 customers queued outside a nearby branch, ready to close their accounts and cut up their cards.
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Campaigners are hoping this trickle of rejection will turn into a flood as the public vents its frustration against Britain's banks in the best way it can – by moving its money.
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The move your money campaign is a child of the Occupy Wall Street movement.
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Which captured the imagination of the broader American public with a simple but compelling slogan: "Invest in Main Street, not Wall Street
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It claims to have led to more than 10 million people moving their money to local financial institutions, with a "Bank Transfer Day" in November seeing more than 40,000 people switch.
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Move Your Money launches in the UK in March with the catchphrase "Bank on something better"
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In the belief we can all take concrete action to create a more stable and ethical banking system.
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We're all angry about the cuts, about what's happening to schools and libraries and so on, given the wheelbarrows of cash that have supported the banks, says Ed Mayo, head of Co-ops UK.
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At an individual level, you can't do everything to put an unfair economy right – but you can do something.
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Move Your Money is the new Fairtrade.
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It is the campaign for our time.
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The National Union of Students has joined, and is encouraging local student unions to junk accounts with the big five banks in favour of more ethical alternatives, such as the Co-op or Nationwide building society.
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It's an echo of the hugely successful 1980s boycott against Barclays and its operations in apartheid-era South Africa.
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So far, just over 2,000 people have signed a pledge on moveyourmoney.org,uk to "register your vote against business as usual", but organiser Louis Brooke says it's still early days, with the site open just for a few days.
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In March, a series of events will try to keep the campaign in the public eye, including a nationwide petition.
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And it's not just crusty protesters threatening to move their overdrafts.
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The campaign says it's close to persuading even some Tory MPs to take the pledge.
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If you want to join, what can you do?
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Why should you switch? 
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Because you're appalled at bankers' bonuses, salaries and stock options. 
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Because their trading and lending practices have left the western world's economy in ruins. 
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Because you're fed up with your money financing arms dealers and dictators. 
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Oh, and they also stung you for £25 last month when you went a few quid over your overdraft limit.
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The banks failed badly, but despite receiving the biggest taxpayer-funded bailout in history, nothing much has changed. 
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Banks continue to pour money into socially useless lending and risky speculation, leaving us exposed to more crises, commodity bubbles and instability.

Try again

Sit comfortably, either in a semi lotus or on a firm chair with legs uncrossed, hands in lap, left hand in right hand for males and the opposite for females.
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Your back straight, pushed away from the chair back.
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Shut off phones and other distractions.
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Face the East, where the sunrise comes from.
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Allow yourself to become aware of your environment as you gently and slowly close your eyes.
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Become aware of your body.
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Feel yourself sitting.
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Feel the contact your body makes with each surface, material.
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Feel your body resting comfortably and safely.
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Draw your awareness inward as you feel your body relaxing.
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Calmly be aware of your breathing.
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Without altering your breathing that is, just breath naturally.
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Let your attention rest on whatever comes into your consciousness.
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Let thoughts come in and out, do not pursue them let them go, just observe them.
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Calmly feel and be aware of the rhythm of your breathing.
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When more thoughts come into your mind, don't try to stop or avoid them.
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Just be aware of them and let them drift away.
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For some time to come thoughts will keep coming.
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Thinking all the time about this or that is hard wired into modern man.
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Changing this or stopping this takes time and patience. 
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Not to mention perseverance.
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Meditation requires daily practice.
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Why?
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Because your mind will not believe that you are serious until it experiences you meditating every day.
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Day in day out, week in week out, month in month out, year in year out.
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Yes it is hard work to start with.
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Do not believe anyone who tells you otherwise.
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If you do not practice daily then your mind assumes that this is just another of your hobbies
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Your mind then feels free to interrupt you whenever it wants with ever more thoughts.
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So regular daily practice is the way.
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And yes you can find five or ten minutes every day for something that will change your life in a positive manner.
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Always, as your mind wanders, bring it back to your breathing.
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Notice how you want to fidget.
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How you find lots of reasons for not doing it today.
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We are all past masters at avoiding things that require regular effort.
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No matter this time stick with it.
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Just sit and listen to your breath
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Stay aware.
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Do this for five to ten minutes a day to begin with.
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If you find yourself doing this for longer then great if not no worries.
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It takes practice.
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Meditation is a cultivated process. 
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Be patient and kind yet firm with yourself.
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Learn to enjoy each moment.
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Learn to relax.
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Do not "try hard" this does not help, on the contrary it makes things more difficult..
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Some of the biggest blocks to meditation are impatience and expectation. 
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Meditation is 
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Allowing yourself to be alert and attentive.
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Letting your mind be calm, telling it to shut up, to leave you alone.
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Being concentrated without strain, yet focused.
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Turning your attention inward.
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Being in this moment now. 
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Accepting that this is a process rather than a goal.
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Benefits of meditation are:
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Decreased stress and tension. 
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More balanced emotions.
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Strengthened immune system.
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Sense of being calmer.
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Over time a greater feeling of optimism and self-worth.
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Meditation is not.
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Falling asleep.
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Going into a trance.
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Shutting yourself off from reality.
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Meditation becomes part of your life once you reach the point where you realise that your life feels better for it.
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At this point you miss it if you do not practice for any reason.
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Meditation if done in the morning seems to set the day up in a more pleasing way.
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Further down the road meditation is something you find yourself doing whenever you have odd moments to yourself
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In buses, trains, planes wherever whenever.
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Meditation is the only known way to impose control on your mind.
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To become the master of your mind.
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And it is of course your mind that causes you so much wear and tear.
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That is why we keep on banging on about it because it is your gate way to reduced stress and fear.

Bacteria

Apparently this war on germs has been a great success.
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As all of the feared epidemic killers of the 19th century have been conquered.
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Well most of them, because some of them are now making a come back.

Actually, the ideology of the germ has greatly exaggerated the role of the two great weapons of modern medicine, the vaccine and the antibiotic, in the demise of infectious disease.

According to Ivan Illich, "The combined death rate from scarlet fever, diphtheria, whooping cough, and measles among children up to fifteen shows that nearly 90 percent of the total decline in mortality between 1860 and 1965 had occurred before the introduction of antibiotics and widespread immunization."

Adult diseases such as cholera, tuberculosis, polio, and typhoid fever show a similar pattern.
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Which can be attributed more to an improvement in living conditions than to medical advances.

Nonetheless, medical propaganda would have us believe that the noble cause of "modern medicine" is to extend it to those backward parts of the globe still in thrall to such diseases.

Meanwhile in developed countries, we believe we can be even healthier by extending our vigilance with anti-bacterial soaps.
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Flu vaccines every year..
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Frequent medical check-ups and earlier screenings.

The campaign of extermination against germs has severe unanticipated consequences for our health.

Killed off along with pathogenic microbes are much of our beneficial intestinal flora.
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Which interact with and modulate the immune system in complex ways that recent research is only starting to reveal.

Moreover, our native bacteria protect us by monopolizing the intestinal surface to deny competitors a foothold.
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They even secrete bacteriocins and other chemicals that inhibit the growth of harmful species.

As in nature, when the internal ecosystem is destroyed, opportunistic species proliferate, such as pathogenic yeasts and bacteria.

We identify the "cause" of candidasis as a species of yeast.
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But the real cause is a systemic disruption of body ecology.

The same is true of our forests, where widespread tree death has also been blamed on various fungi.

But why are the trees susceptible as never before?

The reason is the same as in the body.
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Systemic toxicity and the disruption of ecosystems.
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Reductionist thinking par excellence.
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Look at a narrow problem.
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Come up with a narrow solution.
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Then wonder why there are so many unexpected and unintended consequences.
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Deny like crazy that they have anything to do with what you have just done.
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Then come out with new narrow products to treat the problem you have created.
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And so it goes on.
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Time for a new paradigm, reductionism has run its course.
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 It is past it's sell by date for most things.
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Time to look at the bigger picture first before making decisions about how to treat any local condition.
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The world and everything in it are part of an amazing relationship and cannot be treated in isolation from each other.
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Well they can be, but then you have the mess we are in now.
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Shame we are so stubborn.

Car thoughts

The car was meant to make it easier to see and meet each other.

It has not.
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Most of us spend our time alone in the car driving to or from work.
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Alone sitting in traffic.
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Or to some other place where there are plenty of strangers.
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Because the car means we do not know most of the people we see.
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Without the car there would be no zillion miles of suburbs.
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Because we would need to be within walking distance to various shops, post offices, schools, and a train or metro station.  
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The car, has also exacerbated separation and brought life indoors. 
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It is ironic indeed that the car, which in theory should bring people closer together by reducing travel time, has had the opposite effect. 
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Consider that without the car, life as we know it today would not exist. 
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It is no accident that older towns and cities, built before the age of the car, are much denser than the sprawling suburbs-without-a-city that comprise newer metropolitan areas.
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No accident either that cars tend to take us away from our homes whenever we have free time.
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Our homes are used less as we spend more time in our cars going and coming.
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Cars also create status between neighbours.
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Creating status between strangers.
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Creating tension as we drive forever wondering if there are problems ahead.
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Cars dictate the shape of our lives controlling how long we will take from here to there.

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Cars are rapidly if not already becoming commodities.
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Where do we go from here?
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Why own a car?
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More and more schemes offer car hire by the hour day or week.
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No insurance costs.
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No maintenance worries.
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However for many a car is still an important statement.
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And yet as our worry about having the right labels begins to dissipate with the ongoing recession.
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So might our view of cars change. 
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Cars are truly commodities once they have left the sales forecourt.
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Once we have sat in our first traffic snarl up.
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Just a seat in a line of other seats staring up the road.
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Wishing we could be anywhere but..........
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So long to cars as we once knew them.
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Just another commodity really.

Development as it really is

Prevailing wages will be low.
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As will be the cost of food, shelter, and clothing.
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This is how it is in your typical so called undeveloped country.

In a process called "development", we destroy existing networks of non-monetary reciprocity by introducing consumer products that are unavailable locally and can only be purchased with money.

Meanwhile, we establish factories or other facilities to remove people from the non-monetary economy to earn a wage.

The former is known as "opening the market" 
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And the latter as "investment"
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Resistance to this project is called "protectionism",

Which the developed countries (those whose social capital is nearly depleted) seek to overcome by fair means or foul.

The process is quite similar to what is necessary to make people "hungry for the right sneaker".

It happened in the West a long time ago, for as Kirkpatrick Sale explains,

It is a prerequisite as well as a consequence of industrialization:

It was the task of industrial society to destroy all of that [reciprocity].

All that "community" implies
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Self-sufficiency.
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Mutual aid
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Morality in the marketplace
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Stubborn tradition.
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Regulation by custom.
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Organic knowledge instead of mechanistic science.
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Had to be steadily and systematically disrupted and displaced.

All of the practices that kept the individual from being a consumer had to be done away with.
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So that the cogs and wheels of an unfettered machine called "the economy" could operate without interference.
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Influenced merely by invisible hands and inevitable balances.
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Charles Eisenstein

Reincarnation is change

Reincarnation is change.
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Whether in the domain of mind
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Or of natural objects. 
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Or of human progress in civilisation.
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The great law governing all is change. 
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Everything is changing.
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The old into the new. 
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The past into the present. 
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This procession of change is evolution.
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And in reality reincarnation and evolution are the same thing. 
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The doctrine of reincarnation is that each man is a living, immortal soul. 
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That, as Walt Whitman the poet, says, he has "died ten thousand times before."
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That being immortal he must have been always immortal. 
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That he has lived before .
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And that he comes to earth again and again in new bodies. 
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For the purpose of experience and development.
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These words are from William Judge who knew more than most about these things.
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For modern Western man these ideas are not fashionable nor commonly known.
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They are however the truth of how things work.
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So for those of you reading ponder these words and how they relate to your understanding.
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Life can be very different when you do.
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Absolutely your choice as to what you choose to believe.
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You do though owe it to yourself to decide what you are here for.
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And once you find that then other aspects of your life fall into place.
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Reincarnation is the only way in which sense can be made of some of the madness going on around us on this planet.
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And once we can understand why that is so then we can focus on our own journey with equanimnity and peace of mind.
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Because we can now live in that changed understanding.
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A life with less stress.
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A life more conscious about how things work.

Lost - singing

Ever thought about that?
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Before the phonograph or recorded music came along everyone sang.

At any social gathering involved the playing of instruments and the singing of songs.

People sang all the time.
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Many countries were famous for their singing and love of singing.
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Here the Welsh spring to mind.
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Many more people went to Church and everyone sang.

There were few exceptions even if you were tone deaf you still sang!

People sang everywhere working, playing, alone together, people sang.

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But then along came recorded music and suddenly people could hear the best.

And hearing the best stopped singing so freely.

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People bought and listened to the best.

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Why?

Because singinig was no longer necessary or fun in the same way.
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We became conscious of how the recorded artists sang so much better.
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So we copped out.
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And it became just another service that we buy.
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Someone else doing something for us.

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Another activity that we all used to do.

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Another skill lost to the average person.
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Remember the eternal business idea of finding something people do for themselves and then convincing them to pay for it instead?
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That is exactly what happened with recorded music.
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It is also how we forgot how to sing.
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We also forgot the pleasure in singing.
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And cooking
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And cleaning.
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And building.
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And everything else we now pay for.
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Somehow life is not so much fun any more
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There is a hole inside.
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Something is missing.
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Lost, gone.
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Not just singing.
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But part of our lives too.
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And because you are not a moron decide to buck this trend in your own life.
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Start singing again.
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In the car, the shower when walking, wherever.
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You will be shocked at first to observe how tight your muscles are.
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However if you stick with it you will discover the pleasure of singing.
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Then further along you will find yourself singing spontaneously.
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Find this pleasure in yourself again.
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It was there all the time!

We are bad

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Mainstream science and mainstream religion long ago agree that we are by nature bad. 
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That therefore, just as modern technology believes that we must control Nature.
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We must control, regulate, improve upon, and yes, dominate ourselves in order that we may be good. 
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Let us add to this agreement economics, which also holds as a central axiom that people are driven to maximize self-interest. 
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If science, religion, and economics all agree.
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The doctrine of innate badness must have deep roots indeed. 
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It is no accident that it is orthodoxy in both the scientific and religious realms.
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The ideology of our civilization—progress, ascent—depends on it. 
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It is therefore built into many of our reflexive assumptions of what is true. 
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And for this we pay a high price.

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Psychologically we believe we must forever strive to be better.

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We feel ourselves guilty if not doing something.

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We accept this bullshit without question.

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And yes it is bullshit.

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No new born baby is guilty of anything.

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There is no original sin.

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Again and again mankind falls for the stories of men who manipulate teachings for power and control purposes.

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In science we are not bad, nor is nature, maybe time though that science should look at itself.

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Economists have got away with trying to monetize everything through the neat idea that humans always act in their own self interest.

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Again bullshit.

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Instinctive human behaviour is to help each other.

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Humans are not bad.

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Humans are born innocent and beautiful.

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What humans do to other humans though is often bad.

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Starting with the brainwashing that we are bad.

Lonely lives

Friendship used to be a staple of human lives.
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Increasingly professionals are filling this need.
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This gap in our time short lives.
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Time pressured, money paying lives.
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Paying money for everything.
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Friendship or ersatz friendship.
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While it is a truism that money cannot buy friends.
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It can buy many of the functions that friendship once served.
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One of the most insidious transformations of our social capital is the commercialization, in the form of celebrity news, 
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TV dramas and the like. 
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Of societies increasingly intimate involvement in other people's lives and stories.
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These replace the caring relationships and intimate knowledge of people around us with voyeuristic glimpses into the lives of distant or fictitious personages, temporarily assuaging the hunger for intimacy and community.
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Of course, this feeling of involvement is an illusion.
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It is a one-way involvement that can therefore never be truly nourishing.
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It leaves the real need unmet.
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And ultimately creates even stronger unmet needs.
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A perfect recipe for addiction.
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A further example of the professionalisation of friendship is to be found in the proliferating professions of life coach
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Grief counsellor.
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Psychologist.
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Spiritual adviser.
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And all the others.
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Wise advice and a steadying hand, a person to turn to and a shoulder to cry on.
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These too are now for sale.
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The rapid growth of these "services" can mean only one thing: again.
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That something people once did for themselves and each other has been taken away from them and sold back.
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Cut off from community and alienated from our own intuitive wisdom.
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We find ourselves increasingly dependent on professional advice.
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Tragedy is that so many of these experts and gurus are themselves dysfunctional people.
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What price do we pay?
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Ever more lonely lives.