The Arms Race to End Democracy

Right now, though most of us have not yet been informed or cottoned-on, we are in an arms race: a battle to save or destroy democracy itself (depending on which side you are on). The opposition (currently fronted by Musk and his minions) see democracy as no longer fit for purpose, and obsolete, and see techno-feudalism as the way forward. Think about that.

We who are pro-democracy are at a distinct disadvantage: we're playing by the rules, while the opposition (Trump, MAGA, Musk, Christian Nationalists, alt-right, techno-feudalist elite) have torn up the rule book. And while it takes an age to formulate a case to take to court against executive orders that ride roughshod over the Constitution and the rule of law, they have their plan worked out using AI in a jiffy, and they're already two or three plans ahead.

And no matter how many thousand followers you have in the social media, you can't post your way out of fascism.

Image from Mike Brock's article, “The Plot Against America”.

Taking a Stand Against Oppression

“We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. Sometimes we must interfere. When human lives are endangered, when human dignity is in jeopardy, national borders and sensitivities become irrelevant. Wherever men and women are persecuted because of their race, religion, or political views, that place must – at that moment – become the center of the universe.”

~ Elie Wiesel, The Night Trilogy: Night, Dawn, The Accident

In my opinion, for what it is worth, at Jimmy Carter's memorial service, and with President Donald Trump in attendance, Right Reverend Mariann Edgar Budde, bishop of Washington DC, gently and fairly, but firmly spoke truth to power; promoting unity in the face of a regime hell bent on fostering division, and promoting compassion, empathy and mercy in the face of a regime hell bent on cruelty. In doing so, she distinguished her more genuine form of Christianity from the deranged brand of Christian Nationalism / worship of Mammon that is behind Project 2025 and Felonious Trump's vile and unholy regime.

An Unholy Vision, from Beyond a Shadow of a Doubt

“Some want to turn the clock back, harkening back to some golden age of nostalgia, when women, children, the lower class, parishioners, and people of other races and creeds knew their place; not back to the 1950s, but further back: to Dickensian times and to (corporate) feudal fiefdom. They want to wind the clock back to a time before the hard-won battles for civil rights, social reforms, and worker representation. A time long, long before the ‘woke virus’, ‘illegal immigrants’, and gender identity, when life was more conservative and white lives mattered; though with a new, fundamentalist, Christian nationalist (or Islamist, or ultra-Zionist, or even atheist) and isolationist twist. And some will go to any lengths – and I do mean any desperate, violent, draconian lengths – to bring this vile and unholy vision about.”

~ H.M. Forester, Preface to Beyond a Shadow of a Doubt.

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Societal Collapse by Design: MAGA’s Big Plan

Creating distrust, division, confusion, and chaos, leading to massive societal dysfunction and collapse, is not a bug in the MAGA plan due to incompetence in personnel picks and policy: it’s a very deliberate design feature, and it will have dire global consequences.

And for accelerationists, evangelicals, fundamentalists, and Christian nationalists, it’s all a part of the big plan for the End Times.

Tariffs are imposed and tax cuts are extended yet again to the wealthy; markets crash, the dollar plummets; the US defaults on the national debt; the rich make an unhealthy profit on the downward spiral, from bitcoin and from bailouts; the natives become restless, and for “reasons of national security”, the authorities declare martial law. And “before you can say Jack Robinson”, it's fait accompli.

The legend of the stone soup

Once upon a time, not so very long ago, and in a land not a million miles from here, there were two hungry dervishes, who are seekers, people of the 'poor'. 

One evening in their travels, they came across a small village and decided to stay for the night. There was an inn there, just by the side of the village green. But because they had no money, the two dervishes could not afford to stay there. Sometimes the pair would take out their musical instruments and play and entertain the inhabitants with jokes and news, in exchange for a few coppers for food and lodgings. But not tonight, for it had been a long haul up into the foothills of the mountains that day, and they were both too dog-tired to play, or even raise a smile. 

So it was that the two dervishes set their scant belongings down by the side of the village green, right in front of the inn. While one of them set about stacking up the sticks of wood he had scavenged along the way, the other arranged the stones which he'd collected in his travels, into a small circle around the wood. 

Andrea Wulf's Magnificent Rebels, The First Romantics: Book Review

★★★★★ Magnificent Rebels: The First Romantics and the Invention of the Self by Andrea Wulf is a fabulous book.

In the late 18th century, what we now call Germany consisted of a great many large and small self-governing principalities and fiefdoms, and the authorities rigidly controlled a great many aspects of their subjects' lives, not least ruling on who could marry whom, or divorce, and requiring permission to travel.

The book is about the lives and works of the first Germanic Romantics, a group of philosophers, poets, artists and thinkers, who gathered for a number of years in the small and relatively free town of Jena, 150 miles south-west of Berlin, around the turn of the 18th century, and whom the author terms the Jena Set. These were people like Caroline Böhmer-Schlegel-Schelling and her daughter Auguste; Johann Gottlieb Fichte; Johann Wolfgang von Goethe; Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel; Alexander, Caroline, and Wilhelm von Humboldt; Novalis; Friedrich Schelling; Friedrich Schiller; August Wilhelm and Friedrich Schlegel; Friedrich Schleiermacher; Ludwig Tieck, and Dorothea Veit-Schlegel.

If there's one takeaway from this compelling and well-rounded history that tells it “warts and all”,  it is that the wonders the German Romantics of the Jena Set wrought so energetically perfectly illustrate that “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts” – in their case far greater – when creative folk come together to chat and discuss a wide, inter-disciplinary range of topics, and collaborate in producing literary or artistic works. All the more so when such meetings of minds are facilitated by someone as intelligent, perceptive, informed and energising as the Jena Set's muse, Caroline Böhmer-Schlegel-Schelling.

ishraqi institute: Modus Operandi and Raison D’Etre

“I think I'm quite ready for another adventure.” ~ Bilbo Baggins, The Lord of the Rings.

In this era of global communications and instant connectivity, we're saturated, even inundated, round the clock by sensationalist news and tempting “fast foods” of consumerism, as well as egotistical, even narcissistic, self-promotion and “media influence”, and drowning in shedload after shedload of information. As a consequence, we are suffering cognitive and emotional overload. I trust that a little hopefully quality “time out” will alleviate that, rather than exacerbate matters, and point you in the direction of others who can offer greater help in what is, as Henry Corbin stated, an ongoing Battle for the Soul of the World. Rather than a course following a logical progression from A to Z, this is a deliberately open-ended exploration, and exercise in mental fluidity, learning as we go along.

This Post-Enlightenment Era of Post-Trust, Post-Truth, Post-Rationality, Post-Honour, and Post-Chivalry

We are so far down the wrong rabbit hole here, people

There's something gravely amiss with, and missing from, a post-Enlightenment society that elevates rich, charismatic, unempathic and sometimes sociopathic, narcissists to positions of power in society, even though that might risk a fall into a rigid, divisive, violent and authoritarian regime. This often employs viral iconography and near-deification of a supposedly 4D-chess-playing pseudo-messianic cult figure come to save us all – or at least come to save the Real Patriots or True Believers who surround the leader and form a protective thought-bubble around the beloved leader, insulating him or her and themselves from a more objective and realistic reality. What makes matters worse is that this movement is feeding into religious narratives such as the fight between good and evil during these Christian End Times – at the very time that benevolent communion with traditional establishments such as the Church is most needed. And what makes matters far worse is that such leaders find themselves advised by people who really want to “bring it on!”: not only keyboard warriors but self-appointed and zealous Agents of Chaos, sometimes backed by adversarial foreign states. This, on top of the influence the latter or the leader's regime have on compromised public figures.

Freedom, Resistance and Change: Ursula K. Le Guin

“I think hard times are coming when we will be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now and can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine some real grounds for hope. We will need writers who can remember freedom. Poets, visionaries—the realists of a larger reality ...”

“... Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art, the art of words.”

~ Ursula K. Le Guin, Speech at the 2014 National Book Awards.

Image: Ursula Le Guin / Marian Wood Kolisch / Wikimedia Commons / Creative Commons CC BY-SA 2.0.

A Perfect Storm is Brewing

Yes, the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic is deeply worrying.

However, I’m more alarmist about the bigger picture, of which COVID-19 is just one component; the possibility of a “perfect storm” with other factors in there.

For example:

• the climate crisis and biodiversity loss (and their inevitable economic repercussions);
• mass migration to escape war, famine, degradation; etc.
• the end of the bull market, deregulation since the last market crash, the reduced capacity to stimulate economies, obscene federal and national debt (for which unsustainable growth and consumption are required, in some ways a Ponzi scheme) – aka “late-stage capitalism”;
• protectionist, polarized, nationalist populism and oligarchy (though globalization has its cons, such as complex, vulnerable and eco-unfriendly international supply chains, trade wars); or, for that matter, liberal elitism;
• what philosopher, linguist and poet Jean Gebser calls the late-stage (left-brain), deficient mode of the mental-rational structure of consciousness – with no guarantee that we’ll survive to evolve into a more integral mode of thought and action / being;
• an erosion of the social safety nets (and a reduction in social mobility) that would help many people through these crises, aka neo-peasantry;
• the fragmentation and growing powerless of communities;
• more generally: misinformation, disinformation and its weaponization, coupled with a loss of honour and truthfulness (the era of post-modernism and post-truth);

I’ve probably missed many vital elements out here, but you get the gist.

Gary Lachman on Jean Gebser's evolving structures of consciousness

“The central argument of [philosopher, linguist and poet, Jean Gebser's] The Ever-Present Origin is that human consciousness is not static. Throughout its history, it has gone through several changes—what Gebser calls “mutations”—before arriving at our own form of consciousness. These mutations transform consciousness from one “structure” to another.”

Catafalque; Die Before You Die: In Search of a Middle Path

One thing that Peter Kingsley brings up several times in Reality and in Catafalque: Carl Jung and the End of Humanity is the need to "die before you die", for the ego to die before one's physical death, whether in the context of Jung's individuation or the path of traditional Sufism. In the case of individuation, it means descending into the underworld, being torn to shreds, being born again into a greater but notably impersonal reality, and undergoing horrendous conscious suffering; and the seven valleys that we pass through in the Sufi, Attar's The Conference of the Birds doesn't exactly turn out to be a jolly weekend ramble and picnic in the park (though in the case of both, there is a call or move to stillness, serenity and peace).

Kingsley leaves few stones unturned in his quest, from mistaken beliefs and tragically-lost knowledge, right down to the crucial original constellation of meanings of individual words. But in both the study of, and practice in, the Sufi Way, and also in Kingsley's explanations of individuation, one topic that is taken for granted and seldom examined is the central need to "die before you die" (and the need to avoid dangers such as self-inflation).

In his book, Islamic Sufism, the Sirdar Ikbal Ali-Shah writes that unlike other Sufis the Shattariyya (from shattar, meaning lightning-quick, rapidness; etc) do not subscribe to the concept of fana (annihilation of the ego).[1][2] He quotes Khaja Khan's work, Studies in Tasawwuf,[3] saying: "With the sect of Shattaris, the Salik (seeker, aspirant) descends, of himself, in his own knowledge - there is no annihilation of self with them." (p95) In that book, however, Khan is not recommending this course of action, seeing it as a "thorny path" (p15) and commenting that "Imagination and judgment are upset, and a man is liable to become an Egotist (Self expressionist). This path is therefore abjured." (pp15–16).

This is a Global Emergency: No more! Enough is Enough!

#ClimateEmergency #EcologicalBreakdown #BiodiversityLoss

Fridays For Future, Oslo.

Swedish schoolgirl and climate activist, Greta Thunberg came to the public attention through the school strikes for climate which she instigated, which have since spread around the world. It’s heart-warming news to see her courageously standing up on the world’s stage and speaking on behalf of her generation and the generations to come, of the dire climate crisis, ecological breakdown, and rapid and deep loss of biodiversity that we are now facing. Thunberg tells us that she is only bringing our attention to what climate scientists have been saying for years. Scientists now predict that we have a small window of opportunity – perhaps only 12 years – in which to reduce CO2 levels (carbon emissions from the burning of fossil fuels; etc) before we hit a tipping point and global heating really goes out of control. If the world’s climate (not weather patterns) heats up much more, then permafrost near the poles will thaw at an increasing rate, releasing huge amounts of previously-trapped methane into the atmosphere – and methane is a gas that has a far more potent and dangerous greenhouse effect than CO2.

The climate crisis is, of course, only part of the wider picture. Equally alarming is the ecological breakdown and loss of biodiversity, issues that have led to the prediction that the world is facing a sixth extinction or Anthropocene extinction, as a result of human activity. Indeed, with the ongoing extinction of many species, we have already entered the sixth extinction phase in Earth’s history, and in response to this, a new global movement of activists, Extinction Rebellion, has also been holding protests throughout the world and demanding change.

Mostly as a result of the work of activists like school strikes for climate and Extinction Rebellion, and meetings with politicians, several governments have declared climate emergencies. However, if further action is not taken by governments, industry and other key players, then the protests will continue and grow still further.

This is only one major part of a much wider picture, however ...

The Internet ain't what it used to be

The first time I “went online” was in the 80s using a BBC microcomputer borrowed from work. I dialed a long distance number to connect via a very slow modem to GreenNet to access a bulletin board about environmental issues, for a magazine I was running. Being an expensive call, I set all content to spool to a text file as I was “browsing” the text (there were no images), and got offline again as soon as possible, reading the content later, and then incorporating it into the magazine.

Then around 1999 I discovered the free dial-up service FreeServe. Well, the service was free but it might take up to six attempts before I managed to fully connect, and I was charged for those attempts to connect. Whether this was due to issues with the new technology or a deliberate policy to swell their coffers, I do not know.

Wild West

I created my very first web site around that time, and found the usenet newsgroup alt.sufi, meeting people from around the globe who were actually interested in the Way, which opened up a whole new world. This was before the first big groups like Yahoo! groups came along and began to kill off usenet.

The internet was far more open then, and there was a lot more searching around and exploring. In those days, someone might come along to the web site and stay there for ages, slowly browsing through most of the pages on the site, or (being in a web ring of like-minded sites for a time) they might browse my site having just come from the previous site in the ring, and then wander on to the next site in the ring. Again, in those days, search engines would crawl and index the whole of the site and especially at AltaVista and Yahoo! you could find my site on the first page of many results, even though it was just a chicken shack operation.

Perhaps “no one will live who still remembers it” ~ Wouter Hanegraaff

If there is one blog post that I would recommend to fellow freethinkers, it is “Perspective 2016” by Wouter Hanegraaff. It really is one of my all-time favourites.

Hanegraaff is full professor of History of Hermetic Philosophy and related currents at the University of Amsterdam, and was President of the European Society for the Study of Western Esotericism (ESSWE) from 2005 to 2013.

In this excellent and timely, and yet also timeless, essay – which will resonate with many who are acquainted with that other mystical tradition, the Sufi Way and the writings of Idries Shah – Hanegraaff writes:

“The world is changing. At this end of the year, with Christmas coming up and a New Year just around the corner, I feel a need to gain some perspective on what is happening all around us, and how it is affecting our very ways of thinking, our very ways of living, our very conceptions of what is possible, our very expectations of where we are going, and most importantly, our very ways of imagining where we should be going ...”