Thoughts on the universe

In talking to my friend Matthias recently while staying with him in Luxembourg, I was thinking about the scale of change we are going through.  He was describing the approach his daughters take to learning.  His eldest daughter is only 11 and her sister 9 yet already they take learning into their own hands, practicing new languages using tutorials on the internet.  In a similar way, if my own children (some 4 and 9 years older) want to find out about something new they look it up on the internet, as most of us do.  Much of the learning for the younger generation is done through peers using social media.  Matthias was also telling me about a series of wonderful tutorials that are freely available from universities in the USA  that his eldest daughter was going to look at.  Teachers now suggest that they are more like facilitators helping kids to understand where to access knowledge rather than the providers of it.  If their facts or presentations are wrong then the kids will look it up on the internet and correct them.  I wonder if in the future, education will shift to be more self-directed rather than controlled by an educational establishment.  In fact, I think it is already happening, it’s just that the formal systems have not caught up with it yet.

My own generation has lived through the introduction of these profound changes, perhaps this is the continuing impact of the Pluto-Uranus opposite Saturn generation of the sixties which has taken social revolution to a whole new scale.  I remember being at school when the very first computers came out and my family buying a sinclair programmable calculator which took an age to do relatively simple sums.  Yet within years Casio were making sophisticated calculators which we were using in Maths lessons.  When I entered the world of work, computers had still not really arrived and electric typewriters and word processors were the norm.  The phenomenon of email began to take hold over my early years of work and I remember the first brick sized mobile phones.  Now companies are virtual, employees often work from home or in multiple locations etc.

I suspect Historians might look back in the future and see this period as one which involved a scale of change for humanity like potentially no other period before it.  There may be others, for instance when we finally set up colonies off the Earth, but, with the first man in space and on the moon having happened in the last fifty years perhaps the seeds of this have already been sown.  I think there are many areas which will change.  Education appears to be one which is already changing, as is social interaction and the way we do business, shop, watch video, access music.  In fact everywhere we look there is quite seismic change taking place.  Looking back on my own life, I find it hard to imagine what it was like before mobile phones, the internet et al.  I know I lived through such times, but even in such a relatively short period, it is difficult to remember or imagine.

I suspect that I am already a fossil compared to the younger generation that have grown up immersed in this new world and cannot remember a time before the internet.  Before I pop off though, it is going to be interesting to watch how the next few steps evolve.

In my last blog a few days ago, I was alluding to self-rigtheousness and our need for a sense of humour in this regard.  This is something I have been giving thought to over the last few months and it cropped up again this evening in a conversation with my friend and colleague as we were dining together.  In watching Have I Got News For You recently following the death of Maggie Thatcher and with public attention on her funeral and legacy, I was horrified by the tone.  The whole programme was devoted to vitriolic attacks on almost everyone and everything including Margaret Thatcher.

Self-righteousness and it’s bedfellow hypocrisy seem to be topics which are particular favourites of ours as human beings.  We all seem prey to this and it produces some pretty horrendous results.  We poke fun quite cruelly and incredulously at what we see as other people’s hypocrisy, safe in the knowledge that we would never suffer from such weaknesses.  How do we get away with such hypocrisy?  Jonathan Haidt describes this brilliantly in his book The Happiness Hypothesis where he uses the analogy of a small human rider sitting on top of an elephant.  The elephant, he says, is the mammal brain – sophisticated, millions of years old and operating almost exclusively unconsciously.  Atop this sits the rational brain, like a small human rider; this brain is only thousands of years old, but it is convinced that it is running the show and making decisions.  In reality, the elephant is making all the decisions – imagine a small human rider trying to control an elephant should it decide it is going to move in a particular direction…

However, as Haidt points out, the rational brain wants to maintain the illusion that it is in control and running the show so it indulges in rationalisation and justification to maintain this illusion.  Haidt’s point was that this creates the sense for all of us that we are the only rational being in a sea of irrationality.  We can see the way that other people act on jealousy, fear, anger, competition; the ways in which they are hypocritical or corrupt but we cannot see this in ourselves (other people can see it in us but we are blind to it).  What Haidt challenges us to see is that the role of the rational brain is actually to turn it’s conscious awareness on ourselves and that it is only through this that we can truly “tame” or influence our elephant.  I recognise that self-righteousness is a step on the way to self-development, in that seeing things in others is at least part of the stage of recognising it in ourselves.  What appalls me is that other people cannot see their own self-righteousness and hypocrisy when it is so glaringly obvious, what idiots………..oh dear!

In discussing this this evening with my friend, we were discussing the topic of bankers.  My colleague felt there was a line that he would not transgress and that what saddened him was that they did not even see the anger people felt but dismissed it as jealousy.  I was suggesting that I could understand how they would feel like that and that, in our case, since we both ran training and coaching businesses which had as clients, banks and professional advsiors who had profited from banks we were complicit.  I was arguing that I could see it was a matter of scale – we might think nothing of not correcting a petty amount of money or paying someone in cash on the odd occasion without seeing ourselves as being corrupt, yet if our actions were subject to the scrutiny of the media and spun in the right way we could easily be accused of being corrupt materialists out for ends.  He could not help but smile and agree at the fact that the temptation was there to fiddle the expenses slightly for clients who had messed us around, or taken advantage of us and that we have to challenge ourselves at times to think “would we be happy to be charged this”  to prevent us unconsciously justifiying these temptations.  Somehow though, in our minds, our deviations from our good intentions are small justifiable affairs; we are convinced we are intrinsically good.  The more we got into the argument the more it emerged how easy it is, if we identify with being good, to feel that our actions are different, that others simply aren’t motivated by the same quality of “goodness” that we are.  In the end he accepted the point I was making (difficult to do otherwise as he was arguing on his unconscious emotions and I don’t suffer from competition and self-righteousness) but challenged me by asking how we then deal with the dangerous actions of others; he felt we had to draw a line.  This reminded me of a hexagram I had recently thrown in the I-Ching – 61 Inner Truth which says:

Thus the superior man, when obliged to 
judge the mistakes of men, tries to penetrate their minds with understanding, 
in order to gain a sympathetic appreciation of the circumstances. In ancient 
China, the entire administration of justice was guided by this principle. A 
deep understanding that knows how to pardon was considered the highest 
form of justice. This system was not without success, for its aim was to make 
so strong a moral impression that there was no reason to fear abuse of such 
mildness. For it sprang not from weakness but from a superior clarity.

I was struck by the fact that we need to deal with such corruptions and hold people accountable at times, but if we are aware of our own fallibility it does not mean we do not act but allows us to do so with compassion and understanding rather than self-righteous judgement and moral pomposity.  In watching Having I Got News For You and the vitriol poured out towards someone who had died (Margaret Thatcher), the lack of humanity was deeply saddening and shocking for me, yet, whilst I might be saddened and not wish to condone the lack of humanity, I could not but help recognise that in my late-teens I felt exactly the same way and at the time of the IRA bombing remarked to my then girlfriend that I wished they had succeeded in killing Maggie.  Her disgust at my comment made me feel more ashamed of myself than I think I have ever felt since.  I still wince now to think I could have been so heartless and inhuman, whether I liked someone or not.

If my friend Chrissy’s model of the brain is correct (and the evidence from the New Scientist seems to support it more and more strongly) then the rational brain (or pre-fontal lobes) is represented by Uranus (Aquarius) and Saturn (Capricorn) and these in turn correlate to the top lines of Hexagram 1 (The Creative) and Hexagram 2 (The Receptive).  Given the dangers of self-righteousness and judgmental enforcement of rules without “penetrating their minds with understanding”, perhaps this is why the I-Ching provides such strong warnings in these lines.  For Aquarius:

Arrogant dragon will have cause to repent.

When a man seeks to climb so high that he loses touch with the rest of 
mankind, he becomes isolated, and this necessarily leads to failure.

for Capricorn:

Dragons fight in the meadow.
Their blood is black and yellow.

In the top place the dark element should yield to the light. If it attempts to 
maintain a position to which it is not entitled and to rule instead of serving, 
it draws down upon itself the anger of the strong.

Lastly, I can only say that I am glad, having understood all this, that it has freed me from ever falling prey to hypocrisy and self-righteousness as so many other less enlightened people seem to do.

Watching TED talks yesterday evening, I came across a talk by someone called Michael Shermer.  He is the publisher of Skeptic magazine and he was illustrating the way that people are taken in by people claiming knowledge or products that do amazing things when there is no scientific evidence to support them.  He illustrated this by bringing along a device which claimed to be a modern dowsing device for detecting whether students had cannabis in their lockers.  This device cost $900.  He pointed out that if you go to enough student lockers you will find cannabis, so that the device is bound to work on some occasions.  He went on to say that it is the times that it doesn’t work that are critical and he and people like him are out to count these and debunk these myths.  So his point was that in examining sweeping claims we need to be very careful to look at the detail to ensure that we actually weigh and sift the facts to ascertain whether grand claims are accurate.  What was surprising was that he went on to say that this is the way that psychics and astrologers work – but that they were there to count the times it does not work.  Now, this is a very grand and sweeping statement.  Applying Michael’s own methods of skepticism, I would like to understand where the factual data lies to make such a sweeping statement.  There might be one or two cases where Michael might be accurate with this statement but, following his methods, I would like to count the times where this is not the case before taking such a grandiose claim at face value.  He is right we must be careful when people make large claims based on untested beliefs and he is also right to assert that it pays to be skeptical.  These people who make such claims with little evidence or direct research to back them up should be debunked.  So I would like to ask – who is going to debunk the grandiose and sweeping claims made by debunkers?  Whether astrology is true (personally I find it difficult to disbelieve given the overwhelming data I have that suggests it is accurate but I may be deluded) or not is not the point.  The point is that we cannot have double-standards.  Either we really do keep our statements accurate and factual (which means we are careful to acknowledge how little we know for certain) or we accept that we do not, but then we cannot accuse others of being inaccurate.  When I described this to my friend Sam this morning, he pointed out that I was lumping all debunkers in together in a sweeping generalisation – damn!  I think we had all better have a very good sense of humour about how we are all hoist by our own petards otherwise our self-righteousness is going to explode in our faces.

My friend Sam, a fellow student of Chrissy’s, wrote to me after reading my blog on Chiron so he is going to be my guest blogger and here are his thoughts on Chiron.  If Chrissy is right (which I think she is) and Chiron rules Virgo then Chiron/Neptune is the Pisces/Virgo axis of boundless and discrete – the comsos and the individual (ever ailing and dying) body.

Chiron/Neptune

 There are two forces in the universe, two ways of approach to life

 We are separate

 Or

 We are one

In the Tao te ching Lao Tsu says

All problems come from having a body.

Our body is separate, discrete, individual.

Our consciousness rooted in our physical brains also feels separate and individual

Yet we can sometimes feel that we are more; that our identity can dissolve and we are one with all things

This is the contrary pulling we experience.

We protect our bodies, our boundaries, our time, our property, our reputation.

But this work is never over.  As soon as a house is built nature starts pulling it down with rain from above, damp from below, insects, fungus and living things banging and battering from all around.

This is the way with everything we do and often we feel the opposing forces of the world are so strong we must fight to the death; some may use a philosophy for survival.  There is a useful rhyme in the film Cloud Atlas:

The weak are meat

And the strong do eat.

This is how we view the vegetation and animals of the world.  This is how we view other people when we fight wars or legalise slavery or take from another because we can.

Yet, we may sometimes imagine ourselves into the skin of another life, big or small, from a human to a microbe, that also fights for the integrity of its being.

This may shake our conviction.  It is hard to take the life of something once you feel its beating will to live is the same as your own. You may feel that you love this thing as yourself.

Next is another complication.  You realise that if neither of you kills then both will starve.  The chain of being is the food chain.

If you follow the links in this chain you see that the whole thing is a way of mixing atoms up into new combinations.  It’s a game of simultaneous killing and co-operation.

This leaves us in an awkward situation.  Whether we kill or be killed we are doing our job for the universe.  Yet, as conscious beings aware of the struggling individuality of all bodies, we don’t want to kill or be killed.

So, our separateness and our love for all things gives us a holy conundrum.

We may find some horrid problems as we work this out.  We all read or hear harrowing stories.  Many people experience these things sometime in their lives.

If you are a social worker, policeman or nurse you may come across, for example, a young baby cold, hungry and dehydrated covered in shit and cigarette burns.  You may find later the baby has cracked ribs, broken limbs and brain damage and will live a life of otherness.

You may open your eyes one day and find that you are the person who has done this to their child.  Or you may be the child living your life with this inheritance.

Everyone will have some story that is unbearable for them to contemplate; that makes them unable to feel love or union.  They may feel angry as Bob Dylan:

You who philosophise disgrace

And criticise all fears

Bury the rag most deep in your face

For now is the time for your tears.

What can be done with this?  You may strengthen your barricades and gather your weapons to attack the strong who harm the weak.

Yet still, your imagination and empathy may get the better of you and put you unexpectedly into the skin of the abuser.  You may feel their weakness and struggle for strength. Or you may notice yourself taking from another because you can. Or remember a moment you came close to doing something unforgiveable. You may feel you have actually done the unforgiveable.

Clearly our hearts cry out to protect the weak and we must be strong to do this.  But every so often we feel a sympathy, an understanding for the strong we are fighting against.

It is very awkward.  Are we separate or are we one?

But put your imagination back to the weak and innocent.  How would it feel to be the babies tortured and killed by their parents; the children starving around the world; the diseased everywhere; the animals living nasty, caged lives; the caterpillars eaten alive by the wasp lavae and countless other brutal examples from the natural world: all of the creatures suffering without the adequatio to take consolation from philosophy, simply suffering moment to moment till death?

It is hard to be in those skins.  We jump straight back out.  But we can’t forget them or put them behind walls where we can’t see them.  We return over and over to stories, books, films, news reports, conversations.  We know the ocean of suffering is there.  We look over the coast defences and wish we could forget the safety of our bodies and jump in.

And if you did what would you do?  Best wait till you know what you are doing. The news will be on in a minute. The authorities should be doing something about it anyway.  That includes God. How can cancer and parasitic worms be right?

To be separate or to be one is quite a problem.

Is it viable to balance in the middle?  Take an impersonal view of oneself and others as protagonists in the food chain of life while keeping ones heart open to the subjective feelings of all?

What would that be like?

Having received a response to the blog I wrote a while back – In Defence of Chiron – from Clare which I have included below I am using (abusing?) my privilege of writing this blog to respond (Clare please feel free to respond and add any further thoughts and thanks for this thoughtful response).

I have been thinking about this for a day or two. Whilst you make a great point about vuulnerability being necessary in relationships, I think all the stories you quote above actually do show an innocent victim and a level of unnecessary suffering. What about Tess I cry? There is no redemption for her, she tries to defend herself against an overwhelming tide of cruelty and prejudice, and in the end there is no way out for her. The same for various characters in the other stories. I guess I am trying to define how we view myth. I think you can read it as an moral fable, and find purpose (it all works out in the end), or as tales of the very flawed gods and the necessity for us as human to use our consciousness to mediate the conflicted energies which they represent. The first is really a monotheistic reading (there is meaning, ‘god’ behind all this), the second is a more polytheistic, pagan view, where the energies are often in flux and unbalanced, hence cruelty can result. as Chiron is currently transitting my MC, along with Neptune, I am musing a lot on these things lately

This is an interesting response .  I have Chiron and Neptune squaring my Mercury in the 12^th House at the moment so like Clare I am musing about these issues and experiencing them.  There have been a number of situations in my life giving rise to or prompting this thinking.  My father, having been a very robust and quite abnormally healthy man all his life has hit 77 (78 next month) and crashed.  This crash has been taking place over the last 18 months as Pluto has squared his Mars in Libra and Uranus has opposed it.  At the same time his natal Sun-Chiron in Gemini square Neptune in Virgo and Saturn in Pisces is also now being transited by Jupiter and Chiron.  The result has been what the psychiatrists describe as an agitated depression with delusions.  In addition to this, I have started working with a charity going into prisons to coach young offenders.

In terms of innocent victims and unnecessary suffering, I guess it depends on how you view “unnecessary” suffering.  Certainly I agree fully that life is cruel (from our heart’s perspective), how could we view it otherwise?  It is very sad for me to watch my father suffering.  He really is in a very bad state.  It is putting a huge burden on my mother who feels trapped so she is suffering too.  Yes, I think this is cruel from our human point of view.  Indeed, when I look around, much of nature seems cruel.  Animals eat each other, people are killed by natural disasters and so on.  Humans also do appalling things to other humans, very cruel things.  I’m with Clare, I don’t like much of it, it hurts my heart.

With astrology we seem to have a unique system which accurately describes a pattern of archetypal energies at play (some call these gods, some angels and so on).  At the moment with Neptune square my Mercury in Sagittarius, I am expecting delays and confusions with regard to travel and communication.  I am writing this on the Eurostar to Paris after a two and a half hour delay on my train into London.  It was a series of delays with much confusion and it wasn’t possible to contact anyone because there was no signal for mobile phones.  As I mentioned in a recent blog, the more I work with astrology (I was first introduced to it when I was about thirteen years old), the more I realise it is describing very accurately the energies at play around us.  At the same time, it is unusual in being a system that provides a framework which exists independent of individual interpretation.  Personally I’m not convinced about attributing events in our current lives to past lives.  I don’t know whether there is such a thing as past lives; I am keeping an open mind on this.  However, it feels like a justification for the fact that some of the awful things that happen to people don’t feel fair so we extend their lives to say that they must have deserved it at some point, this seems an old crime and punishment type of view but then I could be wrong.

So, where are we with this one?  If we have a framework that tells us that there are energies at play in a specific pattern which plays out through and around us, then it is built into the system – I am not sure if this is a monotheistic viewpoint, because I am not sure I believe in a god, or gods.  My friend Chrissy suggested recently in thinking about the I-Ching that life may be like a mathematical model or system, which would explain why the I-Ching works and astrology because they reflect this inherent model.  At the same time, in consulting something like the I-Ching, we are then consulting the accumulated wisdom of human beings who have encountered and interpreted the particular points in this system.  In the same way, as astrologers, we are building a composite body of knowledge about the planets and transits which will contribute to the understanding of future generations and we rely on the accumulated body of previous generations.

In this sense, I would agree with Clare in thinking that we are the agents for interpreting or bringing consciousness to archetypal energies.  It is in the nature of Chiron for us to feel that it is wrong.  Hence Clare’s analogy of gods bringing conflicting forces.  However with Chiron, everyone always feels that there is something wrong and it must be fixed; that people are suffering and they should not be,  it is not fair and someone or something must be to blame.  This leads to the classic Chiron cycle of blame and scapegoating.  Yet, I think this is the paradox of Chiron, namely that we cannot eradicate pain and suffering from the game, they are not a mistake, mistakes are a necessary part of the game.  If the gods are flawed then that is not a flaw, it is the perfection.  If it prompts us to learn and evolve, to  accept suffering but still act to take responsibility where we can for not passing this suffering on then we can arrive at the right point to handle Chiron.

I want to zoom right out at this point to take a different look.  If we look at history, we tend to describe it like an evolutionary story, eg. the roman empire fell, this led to a period of chaos, out of which came and so on and so on.  We don’t seem to talk in terms of unnecessary elements.  We do not say, it was unnecessary for the Roman Empire to fall, or Henry Bolingbroke to kill King Richard.  We might describe certain events as cruel but we would not describe them as unnecessary.  Zooming further out, we would not say that “in the one of the cruelest and most unnecessary events in the history of our planet, the dinosaurs were wiped out.  This event should not have happened and served no purpose, these poor dinosaurs were cruel victims of an unfeeling universe and the cruelty of mammals and other animals who took advantage of their suffering to exploit their former environments.”  We see it as part of the history of evolution of our planet which led to the proliferation of new forms of life.  If there were no death, there would be no evolution as we understand it.  Each moment has to pass or die for the next moment to arrive.  Princess Diana’s death might seem cruel and unnecessary yet it changed the royal family and left us a legacy of compassion carried by both princes.  At the individual heart level it hurt William and Harry (and all of us judging by the outpouring of grief) yet zoom out and it was of great value to the boys (would they be as committed to charitable work and continuing her legacy without it?) and to all of us collectively.

Going into the microscopic again and to my current situation, I can see that, for my father, he is really facing the fact that he is going to die.  His power and his competence is fading and he is upset, scared and angry about it.  People around him have labeled it a disease and treated this unnecessary mistake with anti-depressants.  Sadly, this had no real impact and in fact made things far worse.  They were more for the sake of the rest of the family than my father.  When he came off them, he was far better and able to start to gain some of his humour and some of his ability to learn from his situation and gain insight.  Without the pain, he could not learn or come to terms with what was happening to him, he was confused and frustrated, yet even this served to teach everyone and him.  It was not an illness but rather a coming to terms with change.  When I look back at my own life, I would not change the cruel events that have happened to me, nor would I change them for those around me that I coach.  I don’t particularly like some of the things that happen but for me that does not mean that I can judge them to be unnecessary.  Given the transits my father has, somehow his experiences are necessary (to the extent that he can’t change his transits and have different ones) and certainly he will have to come to terms with old age and dying, he cannot get younger, however cruel that might seem to him.

My own experience of having a still birth might seem a cruel event; my wife and I might have been perceived as innocent victims, but we did not see it that way.  For us it was a source of huge learning; we would not have chosen it or felt it was necessary but we can see that it was certainly necessary for us to learn and evolve.  For my wife, who is obsessed with horses and had steadfastly refused to give them up despite the demands that meant our young son was coming second to them, it was a wake-up call about the preciousness of life and the fact that she was not accepting motherhood.  For me, it was that I was stuck in a big black hole, obsessed with how others saw me and having a huge tantrum to the point that I wanted out.  This is what “out” looks like, I was being shown.  It put my tantrum into perspective by helping me see that I was in a universe which was far more powerful than me and my own dramas were not really very important. I also have friends who have been abused as children, this seems to us the very epitome of unnecessary cruelty and yet, for one it provided the motivation for a long career working with teenagers who have been abused and learning about forgiveness and compassion.  I would not have chosen this agenda for him, but would he have been the human being he is without it?  I think it is easy not to want Chiron, to reject it and see it is as wrong, to feel that it should somehow be put right or changed so suffering never happens again.  It is officially an outrage.  It is hard for us to accept this planetary energy into our lives.  Yet death and suffering are part of the make-up of life.  Like sensitive parents we do not want our children to suffer and would protect them at any cost, but in the end, if they do not suffer, they cannot learn and ultimately if things do not die, then life cannot evolve.

Personally I shy away from the concept of “innocent victims” because of the Karpman Drama triangle (Victim, Persecutor, Rescuer).  It so easily leads to a feeling of anger and that there must be someone to blame and if there is someone to blame then we feel that we must judge them as wrong and then something must be done about them, which means more victimhood for those who are deemed the “bad guys” or persecutors.  I would rather live from the perspective that there are no victims or “unnecessary” cruelty.  It doesn’t stop my heart hurting, but it seems to lead more to compassion than righteous anger and blaming.  Perhaps if we are all innocent victims including all the people like Hitler, Stalin, Gaddafi, Jimmy Saville then it is ok.  Then no-one is to blame because everyone is a victim.

In terms of theistic or pan-theistic, I simply do not know.  Perhaps both are true or perhaps they are both constructs we impose.  Certainly we seem to have agency, as far as I can see, and we are influenced by energies beyond our control.  If we are influenced by energies beyond our power to control, then that suggests to me it is not wrong or unnecessary whether we individually like it or not.

In terms of preventing suffering or cruelty, I think, paradoxically, we have to accept Chiron (cruelty and suffering) to reduce it.  It seems that most of the wars and conflicts between humans are because people feel that they are victims of each other and of unnecessary cruelty, this justifies “protecting ourselves” or “victims” and judging others as bad.  Most wars seem to be committed because people feel that there is something wrong and it must be corrected or eradicated.  In this sense it reminds me of Chogyam Trungpa’s translation of the ending of the Heart Sutra “gate, gate, parasamgate, bhodi svaha” “gone, gone, gone beyond, completely exposed, awake, so be it”.  Chiron is the key, the key to the open heart.  If we accept suffering it opens our heart to compassion and intuitive insight into the nature of life.  If we resist it, it closes it.

Coming back to your original point Clare.  I’m not sure it is pantheistic or monotheistic.  The real nub is whether we see Tess as an innocent victim of others cruelty or not.  It strikes me that the world is the way the world is; the rest is our interpretation and likes and dislikes.  Certainly Tess has choices, she does not confront Angel directly about her past life but shoves a letter under the door, she chooses to give up on Angel and return to Alec D’Urbeville.  In fact all the characters have flaws and choices.  Personally, if it were a true story I would have empathy for all of them – it would be in all their charts.  Like children in a playground, everyone gets thumped, bumped, hurt along the way.  Generally children seem to accept this as part of life and pick themselves up, dust themselves off and get on with it.  Similarly seals do not seem to have formed a society to petition against the cruelty of killer whales and asked for them to be tried by an international jury and banned from the oceans, that would be equally cruel to the killer whales.

The work of Pim Van Lommel, and having met more than one person who has died and was resuscitated, has reassured me that death is not something to fear – neither of them wanted to come back and both of them loved the experience of oneness and love that they felt.  If death is not an ultimate cruelty, then what is the rest?  In the end of the novel both Angel and Tess have come to terms with fate and seem to have a calm acceptance of it.  The Tao-Te-Ching says:

Do you want to change the world?

I do not think it can be done.

The world is already perfect.

 Looking at my own life, I recognise I am not a good judge of what I need.  All the things I have thought were necessary have not turned out to be really necessary and I have been healthier without them and many things I thought unnecessary turned out to be necessary.  I realise I don’t really know what is necessary or unnecessary.

Chiron has inconveniently poked his head up into our consciousness since 1977 and now we really feel that things are mess and should not be like this – child abuse, pain and suffering, animals dying out, the climate changing.  What a mess.  Someone must be to blame!  How could this be an ingredient in the system?  Who is to blame for designing it this way?  We need to know and sort them out.

Ultimately I don’t suppose it matters whether it is Gods who are flawed, humans who are flawed, the system which is flawed.  Flawed seems to be built in and in Chiron this archetype, now more conscious, is here to stay.  Damn!  I think it deserves a collective tantrum and stamping of our feet; we should not put up with this appalling state of affairs and imperfect world.  I think Chiron should be told; he should be shown the error of his ways and made to suffer, that would teach him (but then he might be very hurt, I wouldn’t want him to suffer, poor little thing!)

There have been a number of instances which have got me thinking about this subject recently.  One was that I was asked to address a group of women a couple of times recently as part of programmes looking to promote more women into senior roles in organisations.  The other was listening to a debate on the radio with two Jewish British authors about Jewish literature.  The focus of this was talking about Jewish identity and what it means to be Jewish and British.  Another was a discussion with friends about a relative of theirs who identified so strongly with her son that it was impossible to relate to her and the fact that she treated her step daughter quite startlingly cruelly because she could not identify with her.  The last was a facebook dialogue between friends about living in a patriarchal society prompted by an article by Chrissy on isms.(http://www.chrissyphilp.com/heart/What_we_need_to_know_%28I_think%29….html)

What struck me was that we all want to have a sense of identity, to belong.  It is very uncomfortable and lonely being an outsider – even those who are more comfortable with being outsiders are so because they identify with being an outsider.  Yet what is this sense of identity?  Most of us have a name which we give our consciousness; we address other people’s consciousnesses by these names as well.  Yet, when I examine my consciousness and that of other people’s it appears to sit outside identity.  Certainly it is not in our bodies: they age, they decay no matter how beautiful, fit or strong, yet our consciousness does not seem to age.  “I don’t feel any older than I did when I was ten or twenty years younger” we say.  “I can’t believe I am thirty, forty, fifty, seventy” etc.  Consciousness seems to sit outside time or space in this regard.  Similarly, I travel all over the world and meet people from different cultural backgrounds, different nationalities, different cultures, different races and when I talk to them about their consciousness it doesn’t seem any different to mine.  Similarly when I am talking to men or women, I don’t notice any difference in their consciousness.  Everyone says it is important to have a strong sense of identity, yet I remember being on a programme some fifteen years ago and as part of an exercise being asked,  “Who are you?”.  The facilitator had picked me deliberately as a fellow facilitator to demonstrate the value of the exercise in helping people understand the various roles and identities they had.  I was a disaster, because when they asked me and I reflected I realised I did not have a clue.  I could only answer that I didn’t know, much to everyone’s amusement.  But I realised I really did not know, it was like trying to define a void or everything.

So I have been wondering, if we identify with consciousness then we identify with everyone or everything since we do not exist in time and space and all life has consciousness in some form.  I notice that if I identify with my consciousness, then I can identify with anyone/everyone.  It is always a surprise to me when people identify with things like being male, female, black, white, French, Italian, Chinese etc. because it creates a separation, a sense of “us and them”.  I think having this vast timeless and spaceless (I know that is not a word but you will have to forgive me) consciousness which is boundless is frightening.  We prefer to give ourselves an identity so that we feel a bit more solid, so we know who we are.  But the trouble with this is that it then means that some people have to not be “us” they have to be “them” and we can then talk about how they are different so we can cement our sense of togetherness.  Mostly people seem to want to identify with being special.  But perhaps there is the opportunity to be part of a very special tribe, a tribe called humanity?  I think all life seems very special to me.  I want to be very special but I am also happy for everyone else to be very special too.  I wonder if this might be at the heart of the new age of Aquarius and Leo, that we identify with everyone, with consciousness itself, so that everybody’s individual consciousness is very special and no more special than anyone else’s?  Then we can all identify with each other.

Yesterday I undertook a workshop for an international customer relationship team at one of my main clients.  Personally, I have always had an ambivalence about sales and business development.  In my own work, my approach, which I have documented in previous blogs, has been one of “not selling”.  In this, I mentioned the story that Ram Dass tells of being on a meditation retreat and sharing a room with someone who was vice-president of industrial loans for a major bank in San Francisco.  This individual had originally been a vice-president of industrial loans at this bank but had given it up because the pursuit of wealth and ambition had become unsatisfying.  He had left and gone to India to seek a guru and some form of enlightenment.  He had returned to San Francisco some years later and bumped into the President of the bank who offered him his old job back and he decided he might as well accept.  “Was it different?” Ram Dass asked.   The man responded that it was completely different; that before he had been busy being a vice president of industrial loans at a bank but now he went to work and got to hang out with these other beings and the work they did together was industrial loans.  I meet many people who are dissatisfied with their jobs and feel that they are not making a contribution to people and that their work has no purpose or meaning.  How can being a lawyer, marketing director, etc. etc. contribute to humanity?  Of course, ironically, this is the right question if asked as a genuine question – how can my work contribute to humanity?

So how does this all connect to doing a session for the Client Relationship Management team at a client?  I was there running a session on Appreciative Inquiry for the team, looking at how they could work in the current environment to support the leaders of the business in working with clients.  I started by getting them to look at the reality of the situation through 4 different lenses.  This is adapted from a model by Tim Galwey as below:

What Tim observed was that when we interact with the world around us we are operating in 3 main contexts which overlap and interact with each other.  The first is our individual world, where our internal dialogue is running all the time, trying to make sense of the world around us (in practice there is more going on at this individual level as it is also informed by our emotions, our senses and our intuition.  It is only through this individual level that we are able to process changes in the other environments or change and adapt.  The Immediate Environment is all the people we are interacting with day to day who provide us with awareness about the world immediately around us.  The third circle is the broader environment of all the unwritten rules, values and assumptions which permeate the broader environment.  Since these three contexts provide information which is intangible it is difficult for us to create accurate pictures of them and they are also continually in flux which means that we are always updating these pictures or at least, we need to in order to be able to relate effectively to our environment.  Tim Galwey’s point was that the greater our awareness of these three environments the more skillfully we are able to respond to them.  It is obvious that if we are unaware of something then we cannot respond to it.  The last sphere is Nature and this comes from an essay by Chrissy Philp where she put forward a model similar to Galwey’s but which included this sphere of Nature and a further sphere of Cosmos beyond Nature.

Since the sphere of Nature is already challenging enough in a business environment I have not expanded the model to include Cosmos thus far!  For me, the way I have interpreted this sphere of Nature is in terms of examining the nature of life and the nature of the three other circles, ie. the nature of organisations and cultures, the nature of other people around us and our own nature.  The more accurate our picture of these the more effectively we are able to interact with them.  There is an added dimension to the nature part for me, which is to try and determine those deeper laws or cycles which are not as changeable as cultural and personal phenomena.  One example I tend to use is the fact that it is in the nature of organizations and cultures to be messy and imperfect.  Once we recognise and expect organisations and cultures to be messy and imperfect we might chose to act to make aspects of them less messy or imperfect but we do so without the false expectation that we can permanently affect them or change their nature.  It is the same with people around us: once we accept their nature we are no longer attempting to mould them into a shape we believe they should be and instead are free to work with their nature.  This is the key to the Nature level for me; once we understand the nature of something we can work with its nature rather than wasting our energy fighting against its nature.

And still, in typically Sagittarian style, I haven’t got to my original point, but am still busy on tangents to fill in the threads of the story!  What was it then that struck me at the workshop I was running for the Customer Relationship Management team?  What struck me was that the focus on relationships in business these days, particularly in an environment where business is tough and winning work has taken on a greater premium, might well be part of an evolutionary shift, a shift towards putting the individual human being first and the technical elements of the service you are providing second.  That is, that we are learning to value other people as human beings first and then to consider the transaction we are having with them as secondary or in service to the vehicle of the relationship or common humanity.  Thus the role of relationship managers and sales people, is actually to help people learn to be interested in others and put the relationship and interaction first rather than seeing them as objects that serve our transactional commercial needs or vessels for the fulfillment of our need to be an expert.

Whilst I recognise that, at this stage, much of the focus on developing relationships in business is still somewhat mechanical and self-serving, it is nevertheless an evolutionary step from the previous focus on putting the transaction first and the relationship or human being second.

Is it possible that we are evolving to a point where all our interactions with each other will be closer to Ram Dass’s room mates approach, where the various talents and practical skills that we have are in the service of our common humanity?  It puts me in mind of one of my favourite series, Star Trek, designed by Gene Roddenberry to act as modern parables.  In Star Trek, we get a picture of what an evolved human race could look like, where each individual still brings their individual talents to bear and plays their role but in the service of a common humanity and with a respect for the humanity of each individual, and with the attitude towards alien species, a respect for life itself.

I was even intrigued to hear a view voiced among the Customer Relationship Management team that there had been too much focus on profit and this had been dangerous and damaging, that the current environment was a re-balancing, forcing individuals to respect the relationship (and thus individual).

Could we envisage a future where everyone; the plumber, the lawyer, the shop assistant, the car salesman meets you as a fellow human being first and then puts their expertise in the service of that common humanity?  I think in many instances we already do this; one has only to look at the response to disasters such as the Tsunamis in Asia and Japan to see our ability to put our common humanity first. Yesterday I was going through security for the Eurostar at St Pancras and the man at security took time to smile and talk to me as a fellow human being.  The effect on my heart and his stayed with me and passed on to others I met like a ripple in the pond for some hours.  Perhaps if we evolve beyond money we can redefine this as “profit” a contribution to our common human wealth – the wealth of our hearts.

Back to the CRM team and my earlier point about how to find a job which contributes something to our common humanity. Given the difficulty of the current environment with the pressure, fear, emphasis on profitability, it is difficult to feel that there is any evolution; things feel tougher and less inspiring; a return to the material realities of cost-cutting and treating people like objects.  Yet, see this as a person challenge not to be overcome by fear and an “everyone for themselves” survival mode and rather as an opportunity for intense learning about ourselves and how to remain true to ourselves and transform these negative emotions and a huge opportunity to contribute to our common humanity and evolution appears – in fact almost the perfect one.  In Star Trek, there are constant complex and difficult challenges which look black and incapable of solution.  What I love about it is that these challenges are transformed into deep learning which advance us as a race (and Universe).  So it is not a question of searching for a worthwhile or valuable job but searching for how we can transform ourselves and what we do to be of value and purpose.  To paraphrase the peerless Don Juan Mateus in the Carlos Castaneda books “It is only when our backs are against the wall that it brings the best out of us and personally I wouldn’t have it any other way”.