Addicted Society

Written in 1987 by Anne Wilson Schaef in “When Society Becomes an Addict”.

“Our society is deteriorating at an alarming rate. As we watch the news and read the newspapers, we are increasingly made aware of corruption in high places, financial collapse, and a lack of morality in settings ranging from preschools to meat packing plants. We fear that our children will be stolen by child pornography rings, and we hear of our “healers” taking sexual advantage of their clients. Our planet is being destroyed by acid rain and pollution, and nuclear holocaust is a very real possibility. Hunger and wars rage over the planet.
…. Those few individuals who notice and draw attention to these growing problems are met with massive denial.

…. Much of what we know about our society can be compared to what the blind persons knew about the elephant. As that old story teaches us, an elephant is more than just ears, a tail, or a trunk, it is more, even, than just an animal. It is also a process within a context. It is born, it lives, and it dies. This is a process.
The context of our elephant – our society – is the fact that the system in which we live is an addictive system. It has all the characteristics and exhibits all the processes of the individual alcoholic or addict. It functions in precisely the same ways.
…. This awareness that society has an addictive disease is what is missing from other explanations and treatments of the problems we are having today.
…. In addition, most people who look at the system are too close to it and too involved in it to see it clearly.
…. In order to perceive the Addictive System for what it is, one must be in it but not of it. In other words, must be recovering from its effects. There are people who fit this criterion. Historically, however, the main curing agent for addictions has been anonymous – Alcoholics Anonymous, Al Anon, Overeaters Anonymous, Gamblers Anonymous, and so on. As a result, the people who have the most accurate perceptions of our system have often hidden this knowledge in anonymity….”

I have found this book below very helpful:

http://wp.me/p1aHJa-aC

Between the yes and the no ….

…. there’s my taxi
A chariot in a 21st century
Bhagavad Gita,
The Holy Spirit
stretching necks
Every passenger an Arjuna
Fighting through to our
One Heart.

There is, for every Authenticity,
The choice of expressing,
Either by making It into a fiction,
or by being yourself
risk making yet another faction.
That is, unless the route is accepted
between the yes and no ….

Then, anything can happen,
For Love is in total control of that interval.

Lord Krishna driving Prince Arjuna on the battlefield as recounted in The Bhagavad Gita written 4500 years ago. – the archetypal taxi driver.

Peer Evaluation

There is a practice in many intellectual disciplines of necessary Peer Evaluation of new theory and development in the particular fields of classical and scientific investigation and experimentation.

This practice strengthens confidence in the building of efficacy and trust in knowledge as a growing body in whatever field is being approached.

Spiritual insight is more difficult to formulate by it’s recipient for such Peer Evaluation, especially when the insight is in response to pressing societal and cultural imbalances.

I am fortunate that Life has put me into a taxi for the last five years. Taxi drivers and hairdressers know how the World works, they listen to people across the full spectrum of a culture day in and day out.

My given spiritual insights have been polished, tested, knocked about into being congruent and coherent, vetted by the most demanding focus group known to Man, The General Public.

When these two Generals meet, General Faith (invisible) and General Public (visible), then they start to organise themselves into a Campaign Plan.
The Generals have been meeting in my taxi for the last five years.

As my diagnosis of the current global situation
has been tested on my passengers, I have been open to being challenged, to having my views altered, even destroyed.

I have met with nothing but concurrence.

This allows me to trust myself in the service of the two Generals and to now submit myself to their Campaign Plan.
This plan starts to involve my message being carried to a wider audience than can be safely squeezed into my taxi at any one time.

Through blogs, social media and local friends my expression is gaining a momentum. However, the global 12 Step Fellowships are here to stay and thankfully, need no help from me whatsoever.

When any status quo is challenged, it always replies with, “well, what would you do then?”, in order to justify itself.

When real change happens, it always writes itself anew when the right people, the right materials and the right time are concurrent.

If you are reading this, you are the right people.
Your life is prepared with the right materials.
Now is the right time.

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Ex-bank boss Flowers: ‘I have sinned’

Ex-bank boss Flowers: ‘I have sinned’ http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-26734513

The symbolic and actual messages join together as life presents in one life a message to the collective that addiction, that stuck-addiction©, is the defining disease of the era.

This post explains that the person stuck in the vice side of their life’s pendulum swing is more easily unstuck than the person inadvertently stuck in their presumed virtue.

The difficult truth for the banking industry to accept is that “The Wolf of Wall Street” is still on the loose metaphorically speaking. The disease at the core of the global finance industry has not been exposed into the cathartic place mentioned and tentatively experienced by Mr. Flowers. Do you remember Nick Leeson when he was caught in corrupt practices, he was portrayed as one rogue trader, when in fact he was simply flagging up what was fast becoming an industry standard. He was sent to prison.

So with Mr. Flowers, he is not one lone rogue figure. He symbolises the sickness infecting the whole global financial quasi crime scene.

When the spokesperson for the banks said to the public and to Government after the 2008/9 Crash that, “no-one could have foreseen the Crash coming”, he was lying. Everyone in business that I have spoken to over the last five years concurs that everyone in the banking sector knew that the Crash was coming, but nobody could face exposing the short termism of the Ponzi style calamity that was surrounding them at that time and expect to keep their job. So they all drove over the cliff edge together.

Because the banks have built their recovery on that single lie, the recovery is not viable, the system must crash again.

(Click on this Postscript added November 2019 to hear Mervyn King’s latest chilling corroboration of this post that was written in 2014)

Evidence from an individual melt down shows that a damaged physical constitution only repairs through a process of rigorous honesty and an alignment around metaphysical principles. The collective meltdown of the Articles of Constitution of the major banks are exhibiting the same disease as an individual and therefore also require the same rigorous recovery dynamic.

The Constitution of a Nation when broken, is only reconnected to the fabric of the culture that is described by it, by the leading functions exposing themselves to their people in rigorous honesty.

In every human endeavour we fail our way forward, mistakes are embraced as the only way to learn anything, from walking to playing a violin to loving one another. Yet politicians have trapped themselves in fear of losing votes, talking down markets, losing face … trapped themselves into the sterility of making a mistake into the club with which to destroy the reputation of an opponent, and the barking crowds have fallen for this insanity helped by the media rent a gob …. Barabbas is freed over and over again and the principle of truth in a politician’s conscience is betrayed in the “Place of the Skull” then crucified over and over by order of the Chief Whip ….

However, a new approach could yield new creativity amongst the leaders who have to navigate the landing of a new epoch.

Companion Blog

We can remember the warning from Jacob Boehme: “Boehme has a note before one of his books in which he asks the reader not to go further and read the book unless he is willing to make practical changes as a result of the reading. Otherwise, Boehme says, the book will be bad for him….” From the Forward of a book A Little Book On The Human Shadow by Robert Bly.

This is the personal companion blog to my platform at Hu’ll Heal Your Heart.