Poet's Nook: "Hate for Sale" by Neil Gaiman

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Hate for sale. All the very best
Hate for sale. Vintage stuff.
Do my cries excite your interest?
Lovely hate. Your life is rough.
Buy my hate. You'll come right back for more.
Hate for sale. Enough to start a war.
Hate the rich, the brown, the black, the poor.
Hate is clean. And hate will make you sure.
Hate for sale. You'll feel superior.
Hate for sale. You'll make the news.
Hate the families who come here fleeing war.
Hate the gay. The trans. The new. The Jews.
Don't need to care who you detest
Hate makes you feel a whit less scared
To know that your group is the best
And burn to ashes all the rest
Who will not face the real test
But showed up naked, unprepared
To be sent back, or drowned, or hurled
back into the abyss. Your world
will be so safe, so clean, so great.
And all you needed was some hate.
Hate for sale. All the very best
Hate for sale. Vintage stuff.
Do my cries excite your interest?
Hate for sale. Never enough.

ENOUGHNESS: Restoring Balance to the Economy

How we see the world determines how we act. Western thought sees us at war with each other over resources. Indigenous philosophy, we are all related as individuals in balance with nature. Excellent short film highlighting the key differences.

Money & The Undermining of Life

Your brain hallucinates your conscious reality

Right now, billions of neurons in your brain are working together to generate a conscious experience -- and not just any conscious experience, your experience of the world around you and of yourself within it. How does this happen? According to neuroscientist Anil Seth, we're all hallucinating all the time; when we agree about our hallucinations, we call it "reality." Join Seth for a delightfully disorienting talk that may leave you questioning the very nature of your existence.

The Haunted Room in the Mind

There are many stories of haunted houses. There may be a room in which one senses a presence or hears footsteps or a strange voice. Such haunted places remain uninhabited. People are afraid to go there. The place is forsaken and left to deepen ever further into the shadow of itself. The way you think about your life can turn your soul into a haunted room. You are afraid to risk going in there anymore. Your fantasy peoples this room of the heart with sad presences, which ultimately become disturbing and sinister. The haunted room in the mind installs lonesomeness at the heart of your life. It would be devastating in the autumn of your life to look back and recognize that you had created a series of haunted rooms in your heart. Fear and negativity are immense forces, which constantly tussle with us. They long to turn the mansions of the soul into a totally haunted house. These are the living conditions for which fear and negativity long, and in which they thrive. We were sent here to live life to the full. When you manage to be generous in your passion and vulnerability, life always comes to bless you. Had you but the courage to acknowledge the haunted inner room, turn the key, and enter, you would encounter nothing strange or sinister there. You would meet some vital self of yours that you had banished during a time of pain or difficulty. Sometimes, when life squeezes you into lonely crevices, you may have to decide between survival or breaking apart. At such times, you can be harsh with yourself and settle to be someone other than who you really long to be. At such a time, you can do nothing else; you have to survive. But your soul always remains faithful to your longing to become who you really are. The banished self from an earlier time of life remains within you waiting to be released and integrated. The soul has its own logic of loyalty and concealment. Ironically, it is usually in its most awkward rooms that the special blessings and healing are locked away. Your thinking can also freeze and falsify the flow of your life’s continuity to make you a prisoner of routine and judgement.

~ John O’Donohue, from 'Eternal Echoes'

How the GOP Uses “Voter Fraud” to Steal Votes

Musings

The Cosmic Joke: It Turns Out Enlightenment Is Just Having A Really Good Sense Of Humor

The great cosmic joke is that you are what you are seeking. All the religious and spiritual seeking on this planet and you end up back where you started. If that’s not a fantastic joke worth a good belly laugh I don’t know what is.

We all look for happiness, peace and fulfilment in the things of the world and all along these things are our very nature, our very own centre of being. Meditation masters and mystics through-out history have seen the joke of it, as Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh explains:

“I laugh when I think how I once sought paradise as a realm outside of the world of birth. It is right in the world of birth and death that the miraculous truth is revealed. But this is not the laughter of someone who suddenly acquires a great fortune; neither is it the laughter of one who has won a victory. It is, rather, the laughter of one who; after having painfully searched for something for a long time, finds it one morning in the pocket of his coat.”

The Buddhists have been in on the joke for a while, their main training is to not take things seriously. What else is being unattached than a great sense of humour? Buddha realised that all conditions of the world are fleeting and taking any of it too seriously creates suffering.

 I’m not sure how humans made such a big a deal out of this simple message but I guess it’s because everyone else was taking things seriously and causing a lot of problems for themselves they held up Buddha to be all enlightened, worshipped him, created another religion and over the years have mostly missed the basic point. Another Buddhist master, Longchenpa, realised this simple truth again some two thousand years later and said:
“Since everything is but an apparition, having nothing to do with good or bad, acceptance or rejection, one may as well burst out in laughter.”

What about the warning from spiritual teachers that everything you imagine yourself to be is a clever lie constructed by a psychological defence mechanism built up against the existential truth of transiency.  In other words you are not who you think you are. That’s pretty funny isn’t it? Laughing about it and not taking yourself too seriously is a wonderful coping mechanism to be able to digest such seemingly harsh truths.  As Longchenpa says, you may as well burst out laughing,  or as modern Zen master Adyashanti explains:

“We realize–often quite suddenly–that our sense of self, which has been formed and constructed out of our ideas, beliefs and images, is not really who we are. It doesn’t define us, it has no center.”

I have watched hundreds of spiritual teachers and the best ones have a common trait – they would giggle a lot. Even my main Buddhist teacher, an intellectual giant in the Gelug-pa Tibetan Buddhist tradition, would consistently forecast his arrival into the temple with bouts of laughter. Another favourite teacher of mine is Alan Watts whom you can’t watch for 5 minutes without getting to hear his infectious cackling and the current Dalai Lama is almost famous for his warm giggling at almost anything. Alan Watts once remarked:

“People suffer only because they take seriously what the gods made for fun.”


Laughter and humour are not just frivolous either they can be a sharp tools for cutting through the bullshit. Sometimes in society it’s the comedians who are the only ones telling the truth. Not the politicians, not the priests and not even the school teachers instaed it’s the people who can step back and see the ridiculousness of current affairs. In fact more and more people are getting their truthful political information from the late show and from comedians like the late Bill Hicks and George Carlin, who would deliver sobering doses of reality which was actually very true and therefore very funny. Comedians often point to the discrepancy between how we think things are and how they actually are, fortunately that evokes laughter, unfortunately people tend go back to living a lie after the laughter subsides.

The enlighten fool is the one who sees the ego trips of society and can still find joy and laughter in its midst. The fool is often the enlightened one, the one with crazy wisdom, with laughter and jokes as their weapon, they cut through mundane conformity and bring to light the latent child like bliss bubbling just beneath the surface of all seriousness.  The fool possesses a wisdom that is out of reach of the conformist. A playful attitude in touch with enormous amounts of creativity.

Humour is also extremely healing, they say laughter is the greatest medicine and it’s true. It can also ease the stress and tension of daily life, reduce boredom at work and unite people of different backgrounds. Everybody takes themselves and others too seriously. That’s the way of the ego exists. Start being a little more playful and you will see ego evaporating.

So if humour can heal, relax, unite people, undo the ego and entertain all at the same time that sounds enlightening enough for me.

Which brings me to the laughable way most people understand enlightenment. There is a common view that an enlightened person is a perfect person with perfect virtue, perfect love, perfect knowledge and even perfectly smelling sandalwood farts. This ideal of the perfect person is a joke and does not exist in reality. It creates cults of worship around people who are thought of as perfect and just stresses the rest of us out with guilt for not living up to these idealistic fantasies. If Nietzsche declared ‘God is dead’ and Zen Buddhist urge us to ‘kill Buddha in the street’ I would like to add if you believe in a perfect Guru – slap yourself across your face, and see if it doesn’t hurt. That’s reality. Reality is perfect because it can deliver a wide range of human emotion from sadness and despair to elation and joy, trying to just have perfect emotions and a perfect life only invites a massive come down of disappointment.  As Alan Watts says, you cannot have up with down or even right without wrong they actually imply each other.

All that’s left to do then is to just be your natural self. Your authentic, conditioned and messed up self, and always find a way to laugh at yourself. As someone once said if you can laugh at yourself you will never be short of material. Or as  one of my favourite Zen teachers Brad Warner says:

“The state of ambiguity – that messy, greasy, mixed-up, confused, and awful situation you’re living through right now – is enlightenment itself.”

I would add finding the funny side of all that stuff is enlightening up.

Another cosmic joke is that we will all die. This is not scary it is reality. Of course religions have made a business out of promising you that there is life after death and there are consequences to all your actions after death, the fear of fire and brimstone or the desire for virgins in heaven are potent motivators to act responsibility in our lives and also a powerful invocation to take the priests, churches and traditional lineages seriously. It’s the oldest trick in the ‘book’.  But it’s time to grow up and be able to act responsibly without the need for fairytales. We live, we love, we grow, we die. That’s absolutely beautiful and enchanting enough. As Osho says:

“Life as it is should be enough of a reason to laugh. It is so absurd, it is so ridiculous. It is so beautiful, it is so wonderful. It is all sorts of things together. It is a great cosmic joke.”

So where does the cosmic joke lead us? Back to where we started; to the unadulterated pure joy of just being alive – laughing for no reason and grinning like a mad hatter. Life becomes play instead of a chore, a cosmic dance on the needle head of eternity.  The truth sets us free to have an enlightened sense of humour and there is no greater joy than sharing this fun, violence becomes obsolete. In contact with the truth of transiency, with the bubbles of bliss and humour now on the surface the true celebration of life can be found  in this freedom to love and laugh and experience heaven where it actually can exist, right here on earth.

~~By Chad Foreman via The Way Of Meditation

Congo, My Precious

The Democratic Republic of Congo is one of the world's most resource-rich countries. The region harbors a wealth of gold, diamonds, uranium, and other highly lucrative minerals. So why are so many of the country's people forced to live in fear and squalor? Produced by the exceptional RT Documentary channel, Congo, My Precious illustrates how the blessings of these resources have become a curse for much of the country's struggling and weary population.

The story of the Congo has long been stained by greed, tragedy and bloodshed. Under the rule of King Leopold II of Belgium, their mineral mines were operated much like slave camps, and workers were savagely abused if they failed to reach their daily quota. Much to the relief of its citizens, the country finally won its independence in 1960.

It was in that year that the film's central interview subject was born, a husband and father named Bernard Kalume Buleri. Alas, for Buleri and countless others, the promise of independence for all proved meaningless and empty. In his frank and vulnerable testimony, he speaks of his tortured existence in his homeland, his fierce love for his family, and a previous experience during the Rwandan genocide that is among the most haunting anecdotes you're likely to hear.

Rebel militants illegally seize the country's mines on a regular basis, and commit heinous acts of violence and human rights violations in the process. Child slave labor is often used for their mining operations, including those involving coltan, a valuable mineral used in a variety of the world's most popular electrical products. Rebel fractions can make as much as $120 for every kilogram of the mineral they're able to attain, but their exploited work force must live off as little as $10 a week. As one Congolese mining supervisor explains, "It's still mostly foreigners who profit from it, while we're still as poor as we always have been."

Congo, My Precious is an extremely impactful portrait of human suffering. Its subjects are burdened by the ghosts of their past, and they long for normal lives free from terror and insurmountable economic hardship.

Poison Fire

The Niger Delta is an environmental disaster zone after fifty years of oil exploitation. One and a half million tons of crude oil has been spilled into the creeks, farms and forests, the equivalent to 50 Exxon Valdez disasters, one per year.

Natural gas contained in the crude oil is not being collected, but burnt off in gas flares, burning day and night for decades.

The flaring produces as much greenhouse gases as 18 million cars and emits toxic and carcinogenic substances in the midst of densely populated areas. Corruption is rampant, the security situation is dire, people are dying. But the oil keeps flowing.

Poison Fire follows a team of local activists as they gather video testimonies from communities on the impact of oils spills and gas flaring.

We see creeks full of crude oil, devastated mangrove forests, wellheads that has been leaking gas and oil for months. We meet people whose survival is acutely threatened by the loss of farmland, fishing and drinking water and the health hazards of gas flaring.

We also meet meet with Jonah Gbemre, who took Shell to court over the gas flaring in his village and won a surprise victory in the court.

Ifie Lott travels to the Netherlands to attend Shell’s Annual General Meeting. She wants to ask a simple question: Is Shell going to obey the court order and stop flaring?

Global Capitalism: Evaluating 6 Months of the Trump Economy

(You can skip the first 7 minutes & listen. Quite enlightening).

Chris Hedges: Stop Fascism

[Hedges begins at 5 minutes into the video.]

Partial transcripts:

The Death of the Republic by Chris Hedges

Trump Is the Symptom, Not the Disease by Chris Hedges

Revolt Is the Only Barrier to a Fascist America by Chris Hedges

Antonio Gramsci and the Battle Against Fascism by Chris Hedges

Reign of Idiots by Chris Hedges

The Price of Resistance by Chris Hedges

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Common Takes Us on an Evocative Journey Through Black America

This stunning short film is a companion piece to the album 'Black America Gain' by Common, directed by "Selma" cinematographer Bradford Young.


 

Musings

The Untold History of Independence Day

Historian Peter Linebaugh: The rights and freedoms that we celebrate on the Fourth of July are the product of vast human struggle that remains unfinished

Illuminating the Darkness in the Age of Despair

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Chancellor, Graduates, Distinguished Guests, Ladies and Gentlemen. I am deeply honored to be with you today and to share in your success and the celebration of your talents and achievements. It is a humbling task to stand before you and say something worthy of this memorable event. Rather than dwell on my own biography, I want to take the advice of the great philosopher, Hannah Arendt, who insisted that award winners should talk less about their own merits and much more about the challenges the next generation will face and what it will mean to conduct your lives with a sense of dignity, civic courage, and social responsibility.

All generations face trials unique to their times and your generation is no different. Though yours may be unprecedented. High on the list would be the precarity of the current historical moment–a time in which the security and foundations enjoyed by an earlier generation have been largely abandoned. Traditional social structures, long term jobs, stable communities, and permanent bonds have withered before the speed of consumption, disposability, and the scourge of unbridled production. This is a time when massive inequality plagues the planet and resources and power are largely controlled by a small financial elite; a time when the social contract is shrinking, war has become normalized, environmental protections are being dismantled, fear has become the new national anthem, and more and more people, especially young people, are being written out of the script of democracy. Yet, around the globe the spirit of resistance on the part of young people is coming alive once again.


My first hope is that you will not be discouraged by the way the world looks at the present moment. Against the looming threats I have mentioned, the lesson I want to reinforce today is that hope is a precious gift and should never be surrendered to the forces of cynicism and resignation. On the contrary, I want to repeat what my friend the late Howard Zinn once wrote:  “The lesson of history is that you must not despair, that if you are right, and you persist, things will change…To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, and kindness.”

For change to happen, you must be visionary, risk taking, willing to make trouble and think dangerously. Ideas have consequences, and when they are employed to nurture and sustain a flourishing democracy, in which people struggle for justice together, you will learn how to make history rather than be swept away by it. Reject measuring your life simply in traditional terms of success–wealth, prestige, status, and the false comforts of gated communities and gated imaginations. These goals are politically, ethically, and morally deficient and capitulate to the bankrupt notion that we are consumers first and citizens second. Instead, be brave, generous, honest, civic minded, and think about your life as a project rooted in the desire to create a better world for yourself, your children and all children.  Expand your dreams and think about what it means to build a future marked by a robust and inclusive democracy. In doing so, embrace acts of solidarity, work to expand the common good, and collectivize compassion. Such practices will bestow on your generation the ability to govern wisely rather than simply be governed maliciously. Remember, democracy is not given to us, it has to be fought for and its benefits have always emerged out of collective struggles of mass resistance. Democracy at its best raises questions about what your generations’ responsibility might be in the face of an unspeakable and unlivable future. Rather than be numb and silent, refuse to look away and act with courage in the face of injustice. Make the unimaginable ordinary and the space of the possible larger than what currently exists.

I have great hope that your generation will confront the poisonous authoritarianism that is emerging in many countries today. One strategy for doing this suggests reaffirming what binds us together, how we might develop new forms of solidarity, and what might it mean to elevate the dignity and decency of everyday people everywhere.

Today, you leave one experience of education and enter into another in which you will need to develop an active relationship with history because “memory produces hope,” enables critical questioning, and prevents justice from going dead in ourselves. Against the current moral vacuum overtaking market-driven societies, you will need to learn how to translate private troubles into public considerations and public issues into individual and collective rights.  Learn how to bear witness to the injustices around you and accept the call to become visionaries willing to create a society in which people, as the great journalist Bill Moyers argues, can “become fully free to claim their moral and political agency.” Near the end of her career, Helen Keller was asked by a student if there was anything worse than losing her sight. She replied “yes, I could have lost my vision.”  To add to this eloquent comment, I would say, that history is open and it is time to think otherwise in order to act otherwise, especially if you want to imagine and bring into being alternative futures and horizons of possibility. The future is now in your hands and it is a future that needs your skills, critical judgment, sense of responsibility, compassion, imagination, and humility. Let me end by quoting my first teacher, the great novelist and critic James Baldwin. “The precise role of [your generation]…, is to illuminate that darkness, blaze roads through that vast forest, so that we will not, in all our doing, lose sight of its purpose, which is, after all, to make the world a more human dwelling place.”

"It's All Connected" - Powerful Speech By Yasmin Bey (Mos Def)

I've always been a fan of Yasmin Def (Mos Def) since I first heard him rapping with Talib Kweli back in '98 ( as Black Star). Truth is truth, yo. You know it when you hear it because you feel it within & sometimes it is not comforting or beautiful. As Lao Tzu once said, “The truth is not always beautiful, nor beautiful words the truth.” Mos Def definitely bears his soul here & we can all profit from it.

Libor, Testosterone & Flawed Economics

Ann Pettifor talks about male dominance, intellectual backwardness and the economics discipline. Very Interesting... .

Oliver Stone's Inspiring Speech on War, Peace and Speaking Your Truth

Toward the end of his acceptance speech for the Writers Guild Laurel Award for Screenwriting, Oliver Stone gave some nonpartisan, historical perspective on the Trump era and encouraged young writers to question their government ...& themselves

Why Facts Don't Convince People (and what you can do about it)

100 DAYS OF 45

A mesmerizing compilation of clips from every single day of the 45th President's first 100 days. This breakneck, experimental documentary is a barrage of the media chaos that reshaped our reality up to this moment. Each day ticks up like a time bomb. And it contains zero footage of Trump (tired of seeing this Goblin, anyway)....

Musings

Donald Trump is Norman Osborn (aka The Green Goblin) in the flesh. Uncanny example of life imitating art! In Spiderman comics, Norman Osborn was an amoral CEO of Oscorp who, in his search for super powers, took a formula which enhanced his physical abilities and intellect  - but drove him to insanity. Trump, amoral CEO of the Trump Organization, in his quest for more wealth, power & prestige, entered the field of politics & became President which enhanced his global reach, but, as we can see, has driven him to insanity.