New Age Bullies - Spiritual teachings vulgarized and misapplied
Posted on Aug 25th, 2008
by 
Tigana
Tigana
http://newconnexion.net/articles/index.cfm/2007/07/New_Age_Bullies.html
From the article:
'New Age Bullies often act from a sincere desire to be helpful. It may also be a defense. Think of a friend who has just suffered a terrible loss or someone who's been diagnosed with a serious illness to whom you want to say something comforting. Or, someone who seems locked in a destructive pattern and you want to say something to get him to think differently or take charge of his life. The problem is, you can't know how your words will be received. If they don't share your beliefs, your advice won't help. They may feel that you are blaming them or are indifferent to their feelings.
"In blaming or shaming a victim," Gen Lingpur says of the Buddhist tradition, "you are assuming that the person knew the karma they were creating in a previous life and that they have that knowledge in the present. We don't know. We can't know ahead of time what the results of an action will be, nor can we remember what action created the result. It's sometimes a problem in the Buddhist community when someone says of another's suffering: 'It's just their karma.' That statement lacks compassion."
Psychologically, there's another reason people blame victims. Viki Sharp, a victim advocate for 26 years, explains it this way: "People tend to blame victims because it makes them feel less vulnerable and more in control. A woman leaves her window open one night and a man comes through it and rapes her. The thinking is: 'She was raped because of something she did - she left her window open and, since I don't do that, I'm safe.'"
As a practice, I don't give unsolicited advice because I can't know for certain what another's beliefs or vulnerabilities are. Of course, I will offer advice in the context of a therapy session or among friends whose beliefs and experiences are familiar to me.
Gen Lingpur agrees. In her role as a spiritual teacher in a Buddhist community, she finds it appropriate to introduce concepts like karma while leading her students to a deeper understanding of the spiritual belief that there are no accidents, no victims. But it's also a question of intention, context, and the nature of the relationship. Spiritual teachings can be easily vulgarized and misapplied.
Perhaps we can all learn from what the Buddha purportedly said about belief:
"Believe nothing because a wise person said it. Believe nothing because it is generally held. Believe nothing because it is written. Believe nothing because it is said to be divine. Believe nothing because someone else believes it. But believe only what you yourself judge to be true."'
Never forget that financial motives may be present.
Behold, I send you forth as sheep in the midst of wolves: be ye therefore wise as serpents, and harmless as doves (Matt. 10:16).
Access: PublicTagged with: new age, psychology
The dream dies hard, doesn't it?
Posted on Aug 18th, 2008
by Tigana
Tigana
http://www.minyanville.com/articles/depression-california-housing-mortgage-time/index/a/18055
Towards a New Declaration of Independence
Posted on Jul 7th, 2008
by Tigana
Tigana
A Declaration for Our Times
Culture Jamming - The Yes Men
Posted on Jun 28th, 2008
by Tigana
Tigana
Image: Juggernaut, from Wikipedia. Today's juggernaut is the Military-Industrial Complex, and it is going to take all of us to stop it.
http://www.theyesmen.org/etc/culturejamming-goodmagazine-aspublished.html
From the article:
"A number of decent people defend our modern juggernaut, noting that it has produced some wondrous things. Sure, they say, India's transformations in the global free market have produced millions of unemployed farmers, but it's also producing a flourishing middle class, thanks to the Bangalore phone banks and tech joints. And, though it's now bringing on the death of the planet, the free market has also brought unprecedented luxury and mobility. Even Nero couldn't eat kumquats in December!
Yes, these folks say, this thing we call "the free market" may well be a hurtling, death-dealing entity, but it really doesn't mean you ill—you just have to get to know it, like a big clumsy pet, and it will respond with love instead of death. Buy a Prius. Invest ethically. Show Coke how to live.
The problem is that our juggernaut is a force against which a few concerned citizens becoming vegetarians, planting trees in the Amazon, or riding bicycles are no match at all. And despite the almost psychotically sunny predictions of corporate seers like Stewart Brand and Kevin Kelly, the global free market doesn't want much besides profits and growth—its own survival comes in a very distant third.
That's why we think this culture of death needs to be jammed. The way to jam it is by taking action like withdrawing corporate charters after their very first mass murder (no second chances!) or imposing a 1,000 percent tax increase on gas to make its price reflect its true cost to the world. Maybe then we'll have a hope of stopping the juggernaut from crushing us all."
More at link.
The Power of Being Little
Posted on Jun 22nd, 2008
by Tigana
Tigana
from
http://brontebaxter.wordpress.com/2008/06/07/the-power-of-being-little-why-we-can-stop-the-new-world-order/
The Power of Being Little: Why We Can Stop the New World Order
June 7, 2008 at 2:57 pm
Bronte Baxter will be interviewed on live stream Internet radio from 5 to 6 pm CDT (that’s Central Daylight Savings Time, not Central Standard Time as previously and erroneously announced) on Tuesday, June 17. The show is “Unzipping Reality,” with host Leah LaChappelle. Leah will discuss with Bronte the subject “Stopping the New World Order.”
To hear or take part in the broadcast, visit www.co-creatornetwork.com at the designated hour and call in your live questions or comments to 512-772-1938
The following article was written by Bronte Baxter
In the last article I wrote about the nature of truth to reveal itself, in spite of the nature of deceivers to hide it. I argued that truth is stronger than lies, because truth stands on its own while lies need artificial structures to hold them up, structures that, not being natural, collapse eventually.
It may seem like mankind has labored forever under the illusions that bind us, but a few thousand years of human history is little in the broad expanse of time. We are in our infancy as a race, and like children, we believed in Santa Claus. But the children are growing up.
Lots of readers write in about their concerns, whether mankind will wake up in time to save itself from the catastrophes we hear predicted on all sides. But I don’t share those dire visions, and no one has to accept them, not even those of us aware of the global conspiracy. In fact, the more we envision bad things happening, the more likely they are to happen, if quantum physics is right in saying that we influence outcomes through our thoughts.
Of course, the global elite has plans to establish a fascist global government. Those plans cannot materialize without people’s support. Granted, they’re programming the public mind, through media propaganda, New Age religion, television and many other means to accept and even like the idea of global government, giving up personal freedoms for the sake of “peace” and security. But working against this is the awakening human consciousness. People are questioning things that humans never questioned before. Religions that have ruled unchallenged for centuries are failing to retain believers and have to change drastically or risk dying out. People who never questioned the integrity of their government are researching on the Internet for find alternative explanations to what they view as bogus on the mainstream news.
We humans are not so sharp that we suddenly wake up and see the light. We wake in phases, in waves, like a sleeper rising from the depths of the night’s sleep, resting on higher and higher shelves of awareness. Eventually we open our eyes and realize it’s morning.
We wake up from one dogma to another, one illusion to another. We see through the fraud of Christianity, then spend years stuck in Buddhism. We see through the lies of Bush and give our trust to Obama. It does mean we’re suckers in a sense, and it can look discouraging, as if mankind is incapable of learning. But every time we shift from one false belief to another, we’re shifting up, rolling onto a higher shelf of wakefulness. We’ve seen through one lie and fallen for another, but our experience in seeing through the first is experience we carry with us into the second: we won’t be duped for as long the second time.
Certainly in my own life, awakening has been a gradual process, a movement from one set of beliefs to one a little wiser, each shift in paradigm getting closer to the truth. I have to think it’s like that for all of us. And even for those who seem to never change, who can say they aren’t like eggs, appearing lifeless and lacking in awareness, only one day, in their own good time, to burst upon the world, brilliant wonders?
The worst thing we can do, once we become aware of the New World Order, is to accept that its achievement is a given. The global elite does have dire intentions, but those are not as threatening to our welfare as our own dire thoughts. Those who would control us cannot do so without our consent. If they could, they would have established a global fascist state long ago. To succeed, first they must lure our minds into seeing their plans as good or as inevitable. The people who can’t see through them support them by going along with their programs and ideas. Those of us who do see through them inadvertently support their efforts when we regard their success as unavertable.
We need to tap our inner resources of self-determination and hope. More than hope, intention. We need to envision the world righting itself, the public waking up and saying “no” to our seducers. We need to look at the signs of spring that are popping up everywhere through the hard cover of mankind’s long winter, and find there encouragement. “We linger in winter when it is already spring,” said Thoreau.
Last summer my neighbors and I, who live in a rural community, learned that a government agency had clandestinely bought nearly a thousand acres of property next to our town that they intended to turn into a sprawling industrial city. One little old lady first discovered this, and quietly went door to door, cane in hand, passing out homemade fliers to the neighbors. This caught the attention of four women who had some experience with political activism. They organized a meeting, and whole troops of people started knocking on doors.
When the first public meeting was held about the project, 300 people showed up and loudly protested. Then we got a petition going and collected 2,000 signatures, many of those by standing outside the health food store in the nearest large city and telling shoppers what the invading agency was attempting. The newspaper stopped calling us “a small group of rural residents” as they realized we had expanded our ranks to include the whole county, which was rising in outrage at the bold attempt at destruction of local lands.
The agency held a meeting to explain their intentions and why their plan was good for all of us. They served coffee and fancy cookies and passed out slick, thick, colorful booklets summarizing the “study” they had done on why our community was the perfect and only suitable site for their project. They told us they’d bring us jobs. They tuned down our microphones so only their side could be heard. They refused to let us handle the microphones, and held them in front of our faces so we could be cut off if we became too “negative.”
But the people refused to take the manipulation. We stood up and told them that cookies and coffee and expensive, corporate-looking booklets targeting us as the perfect victims were not going to persuade us. We held up signs of protest, and one man in the audience, a former local official, asked for a public vote. We called them on their manipulation of the mike. And we told them with passion, that we, the people, would not give up our homes or surrender our beautiful countryside to their greed. We told them to go make a stink hole in their own back yard. And we jeered and we cheered and we booed.
When enough flies sting you at a picnic, you get up and move. A human is big and a fly is small, but when insects join together to make a nuisance, they are powerful indeed. We learned this week that the agency has given up its plans to create an industrial city in our county. Now they just want to cut their losses and get out.
This is the power “the little people” have when they stand together, when they image the outcome they want, hold firm in their will to accomplish it, and refuse to take no for an answer. This is the outcome that results from refusing to be controlled by the big guys.
Everyone said it was hopeless that our little bunch of rural folk could persuade a big power like the the one we were fighting. But we did it. The flies won.
Remember the fable of the mighty lion that got caught in a snare? All the other big animals grieved, knowing he would never get out. They thought his fate was sealed. But in the night before the hunters came to check the snare and take away the lion, a cadre of little mice came scurrying out of the grass and gnawed through the heavy ropes that held the beast. He was freed.
Mankind is like the lion. The hunters are the global elite. The snare is the New World Order, and in many ways it has already fastened itself about us. The problem can’t be solved on a macroscopic level, by anyone big. But the little people, “the mice,” working in a grassroots manner, can gnaw through the ropes that threaten to enslave humanity and to kill the spark in every human heart. We do this by determination and by sharing the truth we’ve discovered. Knowledge is the teeth that cuts through the ropes of ignorance.
We win by being little, by quietly making our difference. We don’t attract big fanfare. We quietly whisper the news. And we whisper it far and wide, as every mouse in earshot is needed to make the rescue succeed. The mice are the people who’ve woken up. We can save the lion. Indeed, we must, or nothing will save him.
What would happen if the mice in the story had sadly shaken their heads at the inevitable fate of the beast? What would have happened to my community if the old lady with the cane had heard about the agency’s sneaky project, sighed, and thought how very sad and discouraging it all was?
We who are awakening don’t have the luxury of sighing and being discouraged. We have to summon our strength and our will and decide to stop this thing. We have to determine to stop the New World Order. Not by shouting loudly and being martyrs, but by whispering. When enough of humanity has heard the whisper, then we can descend en mass on our governments, media, corporations and other control networks and collectively demand our freedoms. That is up the road. And we will know what to do, and how to do it, when the time approaches.
For now we whisper, as we image and will into manifestation our intended outcome. We will to put an end to our collective nightmare. We will for our brothers and sisters to wake up. We whisper in their ear and gently shake them. As the dawn approaches, we know that their sleep can’t last for long.
The mice who’ve been discouraged must take hope, stop shaking their heads, and start spreading the news, ever so quietly. No more saying “the New World Order can’t be stopped.” All that ever mattered will implode if we give up. Failure is not an option.
Bronte Baxter
© Bronte Baxter 2008
Anyone may republish this article on another website as long as they include the copyright and a back link to this site.
HAPPY SOLSTICE
Posted on Jun 20th, 2008
by Tigana
Tigana
SOLSTICE CROP 2000 po2 t
http://www.cropcircleconnector.com/2008/furze/furze2008.html
Cherokee Rite of Passage
His father takes him into the forest, blindfolds him and leaves him alone.
He is required to sit on a stump the whole night and not remove the blindfold until the rays of the morning sun shine through it.
He cannot cry out for help to anyone.
Once he survives the night, he is a MAN.
He cannot tell the other boys of this experience, because each lad must come into manhood on his own.
The boy is naturally terrified. He can hear all kinds of noises. Wild beasts must surely be all around him. Maybe even some human might do him harm. The wind blew the grass and earth, and shook his stump, but he sat stoically, never removing the blindfold. It would be the only way he could become a man!
Finally, after a horrific night the sun appeared and he removed his blindfold.
It was then that he discovered his father sitting on the stump next to him.
He had been at watch the entire night, protecting his son from harm.
Taken from the March 2008 Harmony Healing newsletter.
Google Crop Circles
Posted on Jun 18th, 2008
by Tigana
Tigana
The Crop Circles of Google Earth (March 2008)
Tagged with: crop circles
The Singing Revolution
Posted on Jun 16th, 2008
by Tigana
Tigana
http://singingrevolution.com The Singing Revolution Film
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singing_Revolution
Manufactured Landscapes
Posted on Jun 16th, 2008
by Tigana
Tigana
Manufactured Landscapes -- Edward Burtynsky
bush
August 2008 