Author: Liam Mcdonald

Referring back 16 years to the charter that I wrote when i started this, here we are, we are here together. I called us human beings and looked at us as us. Beings are what we are first, human is the form of us, but the being is in everything else as well as us including our sacred mother earth. This period of our history or evolution, the virus pandemic sweeping through our whole population is a stark reminder of our fragility but also a pointer towards a great step for humanity. To see ourselves as being part of rather than dominating and controlling. This “Beingness”,some call consciousness, permeates every piece of the universe, we are in the incredibly fortunate position of being able to realize this. We need to develop this bigger point of view, to grow in the realization that we and the earth are in it together, to grow in appreciation and gratitude for this life we share. In some ways its like being in the front row of the momentum of evolution, which started a long way back with a “big bang”, and then realizing where we are and where we have come from, and being able to stop and go into “involution” and become once again part of the infinite Good. The Good is in us and we are in the Good.

More prophecy from Bob back in the sixties, from All Along the Watchtower. Written just 20 or so years after the end of World War 2 and heard by a generation who had been born after all the carnage of the first half of the 20th century including the horrific end culminating in the two  WMD’s, atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Now there’s a thing we hadn’t got before and we only invented the name for them when we “needed” to invade Iraq. We had created weapons of mass destruction.

So we needed a jolt, a flash of inspiration, something to remind us of our common humanity. Along comes the swinging sixties, suddenly there was colour, there was a sense of freedom awakening, some great music and the inventions, organic and otherwise, to make it sound better. There was the “Love and Peace” movement, the anti Vietnam war movement, the anti establishment movement. It didn’t take too long for it to get squashed, for the “establishment” to regain control over the direction we were being forced to follow. As a matter of fact it was engineered by a think tank that by pursuing market capitalism great wealth could be generated, for the few in control. We were sold shares in telecoms, and building societies became PLC’s and privatisation was the way forward. Ownership of our houses, our own private real estate, became part of the reality, it fed the arrogance, the greed, the dark side of our existence here. The inequalities that came through from these seeds beggared belief, causing a virtual stampede towards that great “wealth”. Meanwhile the weaker , the poorer became more frail, more in need and more ignored. Homelessness, famine, disease became rampant, ignored by the “free” market capitalist ideals that were building walls of wealth protection around themselves. The planet was only here to be owned, to be exploited, to be deforested, to be polluted. The Arrogance of man was paramount and the consequences were ignored or not seen, definitely not cared about.

Then along comes a virus. “Two riders were approaching, and the wind began to howl”. Maybe there were 4, and there is a great reckoning happening.  There is some way out of here. There is a Great Good inside our Humanity. This is the next phase of the Renaissance of the Good the Beautiful, the Wise.

Over the past year or so I have been observing us taking so many wrong turns, the arrogant leading the way and large numbers of us  following this lead. I was hoping for a more gentle wake up call, a dawning collective realization of our place in the great play of the Universe, but our ignoring of the damage that we are inflicting on our home, by continuing to rape and pillage the planet, we have so far overstepped the mark, that the planet and mother nature is sick of our attitude. She and It have had enough. Along comes a minute virus, something so simple, not even alive, that has turned our imposed rule of the Earth upside down, inside out. How the mighty have fallen!

Over 50 years ago Bob Dylan wrote that famous song which rocked the establishment and rocked a generation into a sense of optimism and togetherness. JFK was president of the USA and there was a hope that something really was about to change. Now in a historical sense 50 years is no more than the blink of an eye in our human story and an utterly insignificant time since it all began in the big bang.                                Sometimes it seems as things have to go bad before the good appears, like for instance the world wars of the last century culminating in the atomic bombs, and now it appears, for example, as far right nationalism, the regrowth of racism, Brexit and the Wall. But in the collective of humanity there is a realization growing that we are all in this together, highlighted by the recent “Extinction Rebellion” which managed to make this point. The climate change debate is just the beginning of changing times when individual and collective reason and action rocks us into the world of being and appreciation of our time and place.

 

Fifty years ago Neil Armstrong uttered the famous words as he stepped onto the surface of the moon, “that’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind”. That was after billions of dollars and many missions and lives lost. We have the beautiful photo of our home taken from well into that journey. In some ways that brought it home to us, collectively, that where we exist is on a tiny planet in the vastness of space. We have an enormous appetite for exploration and looking out and going out into space has a huge fascination for us.

But maybe we are missing something bigger and much more rewarding. Instead of looking out, start looking in. The clue is in what we call ourselves, Human Beings. We have done the Human side to the nth degree. The small fragile body who lives for a brief length of time located on a planet  somewhere in space, who has evolved and dominated that space and who more or less thinks he owns it. We, as humans, have throughout our history lived in separateness, isolated from each other and other species, fought bitter battles with each other mainly over ownership of the earth. Enough of the human race and survival of the fittest.

But lighting up our history some great human beings have lived among us and shown us a better way. From Socrates “know thy Self” to the Buddha, who found “Nirvana” here on earth, to Jesus “The Kingdom of Heaven is Within” and to many more and they have all pointed to the truth of Being, that  this state exists right Here, right Now. So this other dimension beyond the material form, beyond the mind which interprets the forms, exists within us, it is part of us and we are part of It.

So the real journey for us is to discover this  dimension.  It wont take billions of currency, it wont need hardware or software, all it will take is for us to look in the right way. There are movements towards this, yoga schools have sprung up and multiplied, the growth of mindfulness awareness is spreading and modern spiritual teachers like Eckhart Tolle, “The Power of Now”, are leading many people in the right direction. I will be meeting Eckhart next week.

Bon voyage.

I’m an optimist. I have faith in humanity. That translates into hope. But since my last post nearly 4 years ago the world seems to have taken a few backward steps. With the election of Trump in the USA and the promise to make the US great again, and the vote in the UK to leave the EU with the promise to make Britain great again, it looks like arrogance has risen to the top and that will take humanity towards chaos and conflict. Not easy being an optimist these days. But I have reasons still to be one. One is One and two is Reason. More to follow, just trying to get back into the groove, be present and be bright.