U.S. Medical costs and Corporate death-grips

January 12th, 2019

U.S. Friends.

You have undoubtedly heard folks from other countries complaining that medical costs in the U.S. are higher than they need to be?

Then you hear, from U.S. sources, that this isn’t so and that U.S. medical services, coverage and prices are excellent – unlike those poor countries that ‘suffer’ under socialistic medical systems.

Mmmm. Well I’m a U.S. citizen and a New Zealand citizen and I’ve tasted what life is like on both sides of this question.

Today, here in New Zealand, I’m buying insurance for two upcoming overseas trips.

On my first trip, I’m going to the U.S. for three weeks.

On the 2nd trip, I’m going to Europe (Portugal, France, the U.K., Sweden, Denmark and Norway) for four months.

Cost for New Zealand medical insurance to cover me in the U.S. for three weeks (23 days) is $295 USD.

That’s $12.83 per day.

Cost for New Zealand medical insurance to cover me in Europe for four months (122 days) is $468 USD.

That’s $3.84 per day.

That’s over three times more.

*WHY*, you say?

Well, in countries where they ‘suffer’ under Socialized Medical Systems, the cost of medical care is directly related to what it costs to deliver that medical care.

But in countries where the private for-profit folks get to ‘help’ deliver medical care, they, of course, need a cut to help pay for their help.

But is the medical care in the U.S. is superior to that delivered by socialized medical systems?

Don’t just drink the kool-aid being offered up by those in the U.S. who make big profits ‘helping’ to deliver medical care. Go and read the international statistics that describe how much each country spends per citizen to provide medical care. And then look at the the results delivered in terms of longevity and infant mortality; among other things.

You will see that the costs of medical services delivered in the U.S. are significantly higher than in most other countries. And yet the measurable results of those medical services are of lesser quality.

As I said at the beginning, “…in countries where they ‘suffer’ under Socialized Medical Systems, the cost of medical care is directly related to what it costs to deliver that medical care.”

The reason why the delivery of medical services in the U.S. is more costly is because there are additional players in the circle.

So, a consumer of U.S. medical services is *not* just paying what it costs to deliver that medical service. They are also paying towards the profits of at least three additional players – all of whom want a cut of the pie. And, as all corporations do, they are keen to maximize their profits and minimize their costs to get the biggest slice of the pie they can.

The three extra players?

Well, the first are the medical services delivery corporations that have taken over the medical world in the U.S. in the last few decades

When is the last time you heard of a doctor in the U.S. having a ‘private-practice’?

Nope. Most of them have been swept up into medical services delivery companies. Most doctors now are the employees of these companies. And, in exchange for having their equipment supplied to them and having their medical malpractice insurance paid for them, they now have to see a new patient every 15 minutes and, if they want to write prescriptions for additional, specialized tests, they have to fill out forms to justify the costs. And corporate bean-counters, in the medical services delivery companies they work for, end up making judgements as to whether the tests are justified or not. Remember, a corporation wants to maximize its profits and minimize its costs.

The second player in the mix is the medical insurance companies.

There is very little socialized medicine for the U.S. citizen. So most people are driven to insure themselves against medical mishaps. I recall that for the last 10 years I lived in the U.S., before I left in 2009, I paid over $800 a month to have medical insurance coverage. And then there still was a big deductible and a co-pay percentage after that. And these medical insurance companies? They want to maximize their profits and minimize their costs too.

And then the third player is Big-Pharma.

Every wonder why prescriptions cost so much more in the U.S. than in other countries? Well, Big-Pharma is so big, that it is hard for the U.S. government to touch them. But then very few in the U.S. legislative branch would want to touch them anyway because they make so many large and fine political contributions to very people who would be the ones to control them. But after all, these lovely little corporations just want to maximize their profits and minimize their costs too.

Google around and compare the cost of various prescriptions for exactly the same drugs between the U.S. for profit corporate controlled system and those terrible socialized medical systems that so many people in other countries ‘suffer’ under.

Who you vote for makes a difference, my friends.

And all the propaganda you hear about socialized medicine being bad – is just that – propaganda.

An Enlightenment

September 3rd, 2018

On the morning of what he calls his “real awakening,” Adyashanti wrote the following to his teacher, Kwong Roshi –

“Roshi, today was a very special day. I woke up at 5:30 a.m. as usual to sit for a few hours before going to Los Gatos. I lit a candle, o?ered incense and bows and sat on my cushion.

Suddenly I heard a bird chirping away outside. The sound entered me in a way it had never before and a voice within spontaneously asked ‘Who hears the sound?’ Instantly the whole world, my perception of it, ?ipped 180 degrees. Everything dropped away. Everything.

I was the hearing. I was the bird. I was everything and I was nothing at all. It’s just like waking up from sleep. Nothing special at all. No excitement. No thrills. Nothing like I thought it would be like. Its like going home. Finding home. Being home. So very ordinary and yet so new. Like being born for the very ?rst time.

Every breath, every step, every thought, every perception is new. The Self returns to the Self, actually the Self realized the Self, but its so ordinary, so natural. Who would have thought there was a common belief that there is going to be a lot of ?reworks, lots of emotion, lots of dazzle, but this waking up is so silent, so quiet, so profound, so present in everything, has everything.

I felt something coming on for months. During the day I would be constantly laughing to myself because everything seemed to be transparent, so impermanent. Everything seemed to be falling away in front of my eyes. A huge void was looming in the background, swallowing everything up, every moment, every perception, almost as soon as it appeared, but I was not afraid at all. In fact, I was excited at watching it all happen.

Energy and conviction grew more day by day. Inside it felt as though all my old ways of perceiving the world and myself were just dissolving into nothing, into nothing. I kept investigating this nothing and this dissolving more and more deeply. Eventually even my questioning was dissolving as soon as it arose.

In some ways I felt dead, but joyously so. On and on it went for weeks, months and then last night the last thought I had was ‘I’m ready.’ The words just spontaneously came to mind, not as anything special, more like a simple fact. I thought nothing of it and went to sleep. The next morning when I heard the bird, everything dropped away and the next thing I knew I was the bird. I was the listening. I was everything. Everything and Nothing. So ordinary.

[A poem he wrote the same morning:]

Today I awoke, ?nally I see the Self has returned to the Self.
The Self is none other than the Self.
I am deathless. I am endless. I am free.
The birds outside sing …
The birds outside sing and there am I.
The seeing of leaves on the trees, that seeing am I.
The body breathes, breathing am I.
I am awake and I know that I am awake.
Seen from the old eyes, everything is asleep, a game, a delusion.
But now I am awake. I am the play. I am the game. I am the delusion.
I am the enlightenment I sought, looking everywhere.
Nothing is separate, nothing is alone.
I am all that I see. All that I smell, taste, touch, feel, think and know.
I am awake and this awakeness is the same as Shyakyamuni Buddha’s.
Today the leaf has returned to the root.
I am all name and form and beyond all name and form.
I am Spirit, no longer trapped in a body.
I am free. I am free because I am awake.
So ordinary. Who would have thought? Who could have guessed?
I am home. I am really home. Ten thousand lifetimes.
Ten thousand lifetimes but today I am home.
his is not an experience. This is me.
I am awake. Finally, I am awake.
Nothing has changed, but I am awake.
Before I tasted the root many times and felt how delicious.
Today I became the root. How ordinary.”

~ Adyashanti (20th-21st century American mystic)

Letter to a Grandson

August 30th, 2018

My dear Grandson,

I want to wish you a very happy birthday. To say that you are showing every sign of being the brightest light of our extended family would not be an exaggeration.

Someday, if not already, you will realize how immensely blessed your life is. The time and place where you were born, your parents, your grandparents; Bernie and Sally, your faith, your intelligence, your curiousity, your excellent body and mind and so many other factors have made you lucky among the billions of we human beings. But, above and beyond that, you have not rested on your luck but, rather, you have taken your good opportunities and used them well. Brilliantly even, I think.

I am deeply curious to see what you will make of your life.

If I might presume to offer you some hard-won advice from my own experiences?

Always question things. Do not simply believe what others tell you. And even if you’ve questioned a thing and think it is good, Go back, in a few years, and give it another good look and see if it still makes sense.

It is natural that the people who teach you give you their best in terms of facts and interpretations of those facts. They are good and sincere people. But there is little that is absolute in this world. History is largely written by the victors and the laws of science are constantly being refined and, at times, reworked as better understandings are gleaned. And, of psychology and philosophy, one can only say that it is as if we have a small candle in our hand as we move into a darkness that is far bigger than we can imagine.

Humans seem intelligent and rational but that is largely an illusion. Compared to the complexity of the existence we find ourselves in, our intelligence is small. And the more we understand, the more we understand how little we understand. The very ideas of who we are and what our place is in this universe are to be questioned and questioned again. And, with sincere inquiry, the scales will fall from your eyes again and again.

Truly, we live in a place of infinite mystery. And what we think we understand today will be shown again and again to be an illusion tomorrow. But, this is not bad because every illusion we drop or see through takes us another step closer to the truth – whatever that might be.

But know that the more you trust yourself and your own vision and the less you trust the vision of the crowd, the more you will move into a form of isolation from your fellows. It is inevitable. Measure yourself by your own yardstick.

I like the story of Adam and Eve in the garden. God said they should not eat the Apples from the tree of knowledge. But, tempted, Eve did and they were thrown from the Garden of Eden.

My interpretation of this story is that once you have chosen the path of knowledge, you cannot un-see the things you will come to understand. You will become responsible for what you know. So, what is the saying? “Stay out of the kitchen, if you can’t stand the heat.”

There are thousands of signals hitting us daily. Suggestions about what to believe, how to look, how to act, how to speak, how to dress for success and an and on. Nearly all of them are manipulative. It is rare, indeed, that anyone would sent out such signals without their own motivations and self-interests as the cause of their doing so.

I am not saying this with distain towards them. This is a natural thing. Almost everyone is acting in their own self-interest. When you realize this, it will free you from so much that most people are confused and mesmerized by.

Instead, watch for people you admire. Study them and try to understand what they think and why they act as they do. And when you see things you like in others, make them your own. Intentional self-creation is a powerful art that is little practiced in this world.

Be kind, always, to those who understand less than you do. People may or may not be doing the best that they can. But, really, it is not your business because the only one you are responsible for is you.

And when you want to inspire others, act by example. It is usually far more powerful than words.

And be rigorous in avoiding the “quid pro quo’ traps. Never give a gift, if you are thinking about what you will get back. Give to others what you would like to receive. But do it with no expectation or thought that it will change their behavior.

Do the things you do because they are inherently right in-and-of-themselves and need no further justification.

Think about the differences between your ‘shoulds’ and your ‘wants’ and strive, over time, to weld them into one thing so that you can be of one mind.

Intelligent and inquiring men and woman have been seeking to understand this existence for many thousands of years. Much of their wisdom, from back in our deep past, has been swept aside in this modern age; as we humans have been quite impressed with the new worlds or science and technology that we’ve created.

And make no mistake, much of what was believed in the past was made of superstition and myth.

But, there was genuine wisdom as well.

It is no coincidence that many brilliant, famous men of letters and great achievements in our modern world turn towards the ancients as they come to the latter part of their lives.

In spite of the fact that the ancients lived without science and were surrounded by superstition and myth, some of them spent much of their lives seeking into questions like: what is consciousness, what is existence and what is the meaning of all this that we see around us?

The stories of what they thought and their conclusions still exist; though they are mostly ignored by our world of technology obsessed humans. These are, collectively, called the Mystics, the Enlightened, the Saints and many other names. The holy books of the world’s major religions are filled with their insights; woven in among the superstition and myth.

Someday, when you have cut an arc through all that this modern life offers you, and success, wealth and freedom are yours, then perhaps you will still be motivated by deep curiosity and the urge to know, “What else is there?”

I leave you then with this small gem that I find myself thinking about most days:

If you understand,
Things are just as they are.
If you don’t understand,
things are just as they are.

~ a Zen saying ~

With much love to you,

Grandfather Dennis

South by South-South

August 25th, 2018

I write, occasionally, for the Sky Valley Chronicle in Washington State in the United States; where I used to live up until 10 years ago.  Here’s an article I just wrote for them.

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Amid the clatter of many dozen keyboards, the constant smell of coffee and a steady influx of reports arriving from the Chronicle’s bevy of international correspondents, I have, I believe, the honor of being the Chronicle’s southern-most correspondent. That is unless they’ve hired someone to cover Antarctica and they’ve failed to tell me.

I’m a former resident of Monroe, Washington, and the Sky Valley area; where I lived for 20 years. But in 2009, I moved to New Zealand and settled there in the city of Christchurch on the country’s South Island.

New Zealand is out in the midst of the South Pacific Ocean 1000 miles east and south of Australia. It could easily be considered the world’s most remote advanced western democracy. The country’s two major islands, called the North Island and the South Island, are together about the size of Colorado.

You’ve heard of the place and you say Baaaaaaa? Yes, you are right. There are about seven sheep here for every person.

The country makes its way, financially, with tourism, agriculture and forestry. But, remote or not, it has all the same high technology attributes that the other advanced nations have.

Occasionally, in the years since I left western Washington, I’ve written pieces for the Chronicle discussing my New Zealand travels and also some of the other places I’ve visited to in the 10 years since I left.

In this story, I want to share a trip with you that I took recently right here on New Zealand’s South Island. You might say this was a trip to the “South of the South” because I went right down the southern end of the South Island. This trip was partly for fun and tourism and partly because I’m thinking abut the future and where I might want to own land for my family. I’ll share a few of those thoughts as we go along.

But first, let’s get you oriented.

New Zealand is a long country that stretches basically north and south. If you laid the entire country alongside the U.S.’s west coast, at the same latitudes, the southernmost, or coldest, part of New Zealand would fall about where Astoria, Washington is. And the northernmost, or warmest, part would be about where Los Angeles is.

Where I live in Christchurch on the South Island falls at about where Eugene, Oregon, is.

This country is a place of incredible beauty and low population. About 4.5 million people live here.

When you think about the weather, try not to let the fact that the southernmost end of the South Island falls about where Astoria is fool you. The weather here is quite different from Astoria – or anyplace along the U.S.’s west coast.

You see, New Zealand sits in what is called the Great Southern Ocean. If you look at a globe or a world map, you’ll see that once you get south of the world’s major land masses, there’s a huge sweep of ocean that goes right around the southern part of the world. This is the Great Southern Ocean. Other than the southern tip of South America, there’s nothing else down here at these southern latitudes; except little New Zealand. And without significant land masses to block the southern weather systems, they sweep powerfully around the world from west to east unimpeded. These southern waters are some of the wildest oceans on the planet.

So the weather in New Zealand, especially in its more southerly parts, can change three times a day quite easily as the systems come roaring in from the west. It can be hard country with huge rains; similar to what happens along the Pacific Northwest’s coast. And snow is not at all uncommon, which might seem like an odd idea when you think of an island in the South Pacific. But you have to remember just how far south we are and how unrestrained the Great Southern Ocean’s weather systems are.

There are some tremendous mountains here as well. These are the Southern Alps. They are relatively new ranges so they are still freshly risen, sharp-edged and jagged. Great ranges of them rise along the South Island’s entire west coast from north to south. Among them, Mount Cook and twenty other peaks rise to above 10,000 feet.

But, farther south along this island’s western coast, there’s a very special country to be found. It is a country with mountains, thousands of square miles of virgin forests and deep fiords like those in Norway. And all of this sits pristinly within an enormous national park that occupies the entire southwestern corner of the island. This park, the Fiordland National Park, comprises over 8% of the South Island’s total area. And, except for one road in the northeastern corner of the park from Te Anau (tay-ah-no) to Milford Sound, there simply are no roads at all. If you want to get into the inner spaces of this vast park, it is going to require hiking, a helicopter or a float plane. Or you’ll have to come around by sea and into one of the deep fiords. This area is truly one of the world’s better kept secrets.

The occasion for this trip was my birthday. That, and the fact that I hadn’t yet seen this part of my adopted country. I’d been wanting to go down and see the area for some time – and this year was the year we went.

We? Yes, that would be myself and my Kiwi partner, Colette, with whom I’ve been living here in Christchurch for these last eight years.

We flew from Christchurch to Queenstown and then got a rental car at the Airport. From there, we drove to Te Anau, a town of about 2,000 folks.  Follow this link for information about Te Anau.

This was in August which, in the northern hemisphere. would be high tourist season. But we are in the southern hemisphere and August here is like February in the U.S.

So, the town was quiet. About half the restaurants and hotels were closed for the season. But that all suited us fine. We are not into big crowds of people. But all the extreme beauty of Te Anau and its lake remained; and it was spectacular. Our holiday apartment was just beside the lake and the downtown area was only a 10 minute walk away. Mountains topped with snow stood around us in all directions.

Something that’s different about hotel rooms here in New Zealand is that they nearly all come equipped with kitchens and everything you might need if you want to stay in and cook.

Te Anau is truly at the end of the world down in the “South of the South”. Beyond it there is only the one road out to Milford Sound. And that road is a one-way-in and one-way-out affair with an interesting and rough-hewn tunnel that bores under the Southern Alps at one point.

We were enjoying all this beauty and reveling in having so much of it to ourselves. But I was also looking at the land around me and thinking about the future; as I mentioned earlier.

But, let’s backup a bit.

I came to New Zealand ten years ago for several reasons. Some of them had to do with the politics and the finances in the U.S. which I felt were really going downhill. And as much as I loved, and still love, the United States and its people, these things were really annoying me. And I also came because I’d seen New Zealand a few years before and I’d liked the smallness of it and the slower pace. No place is perfect and New Zealand is no exception; but it seemed better here. And last, but not least, I was already thinking then that the world was getting more and more unstable every year. And the idea of being far away from the crowds and tensions in the northern hemisphere was attractive.

So, if a person was looking for how to get out of harm’s way, I think by moving down to New Zealand, I’ve probably made a good start at it. But now that I’ve been here awhile, I find myself thinking about what’s next. About how things might change here in the future, how I can protect my decendants and about how we could all benefit from the coming changes.

So, I’ve been thinking about land down here. Land down in the South of the South. And our trip to Te Anau and Milford was my way of putting another piece into that puzzle.

The southernmost part of New Zealand’s South Island is, as I said, a largely unpopulated area. It’s remote from the cities and it is cold. But, I’m attracted to it because don’t think it is always going to stay that way.

On an trip a few years ago, I visited another area here in the deep south. It’s over on the southeastern corner of the South Island and it’s an area called “The Catlins”.  Follow this link for information about the Catlins.

It’s another beautiful and remote area. Perhaps, it’s not as extreme as Te Anau and the Fiordland area for beauty and high mountains, but it’s intriguing just the same. Only 1200 people live there and it has hills, mountains, forests, rivers, harbors and land that is fertile and seas that teeming with life in this remote corner of the world.

A lot of people are saying that the world is heading towards some hard times. But really, not a lot has happened so far and things seem relatively intact. But I beleive things are beginning to change now slowly. And greater changes are gathering all around us. I recently read an article with a map that showed what the world might look like if the temperature rises another few degrees. And it was not a pretty sight.

But is all this actually going to happen? Yes, personally, I think so.

Consider that the world has a lot of problems. Problems that are building their way steadily towards critical. Just give a thought to religious fundamentalism, over population, resource depletion, pollution, growing wealth inequality, increasing political polarization, nuclear proliferation, food and fresh water shortages, pandemics, refugee migrations, the breakdown of the weaker nations like Somalia, species extinctions, and this little list is no where near exhausted – it goes on and on.

A few of these problems may sort themselves out. But I find it really hard to believe that all of them will come right. And for the ones that don’t come right, the clock is ticking until one or more of them go critical and the wheels start to come off.

If such a thing happens, do you think anyone really going to want to find themselves living in downtown Los Angeles or Seattle? I don’t think so.

But the truth is that people can pretend impending disaster isn’t real – if they don’t feel that they have any real options.

Here’s a quote by Tolstoy from War and Peace that gives some insight into this:

With the enemy’s approach to Moscow, the Moscovites’ view of their situation did not grow more serious but on the contrary became even more frivolous, as always happens with people who see a great danger approaching.

At the approach of danger there are always two voices that speak with equal power in the human soul: one very reasonably tells a man to consider the nature of the danger and the means of escaping it; the other, still more reasonably, says that it is too depressing and painful to think of the danger, since it is not in man’s power to foresee everything and avert the general course of events, and it is therefore better to disregard what is painful till it comes, and to think about what is pleasant.

Of course, many of us hope that things will hold together for the rest of our lives. And maybe they will.

But, I find myself thinking, what about our kids and their kids? What are they going to do in this future world? A world that is looking more and more dangerous.

Thoughts like these were, in part, on my mind when I moved down to New Zealand ten years ago. But, New Zealand wasn’t my only option back then for getting out of harm’s way. And in fact, if I’d have stayed in the U.S., I would have still had some good possibilities available to me. If you are following my line of thought about all of this, some of these thoughts might be of interest to you.

If I was still living in the Pacific Northwest now, I’d be seriously looking towards the Alaska Panhandle area. It has all of the following advantages:

The panhandle is remote with low population. It’s in the U.S. so you’ve got every right to move there. It’s cold; but that’s OK because things are going to get warmer. It’s got mountains and wildlife so you’ve got water, hunting possibilities and building supplies close by. It’s by the ocean which is a food source and it keeps the temperature swings a bit mellower than further inland. It is well worth a look.

But now that I’m here, it’s the South of the South that I’m considering.

You see, if the climate predictions of increasing warmth hold true and the world does get warmer, a lot of things are going to change. The primary bread-basket growing areas in the U.S., places like California’s Central Valley and the U.S.’s midwest, are going to start migrating north. That will probably spell the end for California’s growing capabilities and what’s working well now in the U.S.’s midwest will begin to shift towards the Canadian plains.

The same things will occur here in the southern hemisphere but just reversed. And that has made me realize that the southern South Island, that now seems so cold, remote and sparsely populated, is going to come into its own as the shift gets moving. And I’m thinking this is worth considering before the land rush begins.

We’ve got another problem here in New Zealand that most people, even in this country, haven’t thought a lot about. You see, New Zealand and Australia have a long-standing agreement that allows folks from either country to freely move to the other one.

This hasn’t been much of a problem so far but temperatures in Australia are already ramping up and they are facing ever more severe droughts. Even at the best of times, Australian agriculture has been a marginal business and things are getting worse.

If you look at Australia on the map, with its 20 million people, the vast majority of them are gathered along the coasts because nearly all of the country’s interior is simply a desert wasteland. As temperatures rise, our little clean and green New Zealand is going to start to look pretty good to a lot of Australians. And this makes me wonder how many of the 20 million can come over to a small country of 4.5 million before New Zealand is overrun. Again, it is another reason to think ahead and to get moving ahead of events.

For the moment, I am strongly favoring the Catlins. I’d like to buy a large piece of land there and just sit on it as a future-proofing investment. At the moment, the place is too remote and cold for many people to be interested. But, as I said, I’ve got a lot of reasons for thinking that will change.

So, did you know that some of the wealthier people in the U.S. are already seeing the future I’m taking about and they are coming down here now to New Zealand to establish “Bolt Holes”? Yep, they are buying land in New Zealand as an insurance policy so they’ll have a place to run to if the wheels start coming off up north.

Peter Thiel, the American Billionaire and one of the founders of PayPal, essentially bought his way into a New Zealand citizenship recently.

And here’s another story about Americans coming down.

A lot of wealthy folks are beginning to smell the coffee and they are planning where they want to be, if things get bad.

I feel quite lucky in that I am already here and I’m a New Zealand citizen now. So I’ve done a large part of what I can do to get out of harm’s way. But buying land down in the Catlins for my kin would hopefully give them a shot at a good future because they would own land in an area that can only get better as the climate warms..

But, my American readers, what are your options? Moving to the other side of the planet to a place like New Zealand is only going to work for you if you are young (you cannot get in after 55), educated (they have a points systems that favors those with college degrees) and you are wealthy enough to be able to absorb to cost and turmoil of shifting half way around the world.

You might console yourself by thinking that having two weeks of food and water stashed out in your garage as a hedge is going to sort things out for you. But, I don’t think so.

Think about what you are going to do. Think about water and food, if everything should go to hell. Buy some remote land and build a strong cabin that can be securely locked up. Stash some stuff there or nearby. This might be the best insurance policy you could ever buy for you and those who come after you. Some day your descendants may give thanks for your forethought.

If I was still living in Western Washington, I’d be looking towards the Alaska Panhandle.

On Enlightenment

January 10th, 2018

Non-Duality, Enlightenment, Awakening, Nirvana, … or whatever we want to call it, is a promised-land Shangri-la that’s out there. It has all sorts of powerful and mystical associations that swirl around it. It is one of the preeminent mythologies that has circulated among humankind for thousands of years. Gurus, books, meditation groups, charlatans, respected masters, and the practices and scriptures of several faiths, have, and are, all calling us to ‘the’ path; ‘a’ path, ‘their’ path, the ‘true’ path. And all of them are advising us what to do to ‘get there’. And all of them have different stories and different advice and a lot of it seems pretty cryptic and faith-based.

And, in the end, until you actually ‘get there’ no one can really tell you precisely what ‘it’ is.

The reasons for all the confusion are basically two.

The first reason is that experiencing ‘it’ is quite different from how most of us experience our lives. And it is not easy to transition from our normal/default experiences to the type of experience ‘it’ offers. It is difficult because to make the transition, much of what you think is real, who you think you are, and what you currently believe in – all has to be abandoned.

The second reason is that the state one obtains seems so different, at least initially, is that folks all down through history have idealized it. They have put it on pedestal and elevated it to something magical, mysterious, special. All of this reverence implies that it is somehow discontinuous with our normal life and experiences. They’ve made it into a thing to be spoken about in hushed voices.

But, this idealization of ‘it’ is unnecessary and it ends up obscuring things. Yes, it is difficult to ‘get there’ and, yes, it is a profoundly different experience once one does ‘get there’. But these difficulties and differences are still all just part of the full range of experiences available to us here in this existence that we find ourselves in. There’s nothing magical, supernatural nor discontinuous about ‘it’.

The reverence about ‘it’ seems to arise because many seekers experience a long struggle as they try to drop their beliefs about themselves, the reality around them and to abandon their ego-centric point-of-view. Such struggles can literally take years of meditation and effort. And, after such a long effort, when they finally do ‘get it’, they often feel as if they’ve made a massive breakthrough into a new awareness that is new and discontinuous with everything they’ve ever known before; and quite special. But this is not true.

And to compound the problem, when they have made their breakthrough, the things they begin to say can seem exceeding mysterious and hard to understand for the rest of us. And this leads us to think that they have, indeed, gone ‘somewhere else’ discontinuous with the world we see around us.

They will say things like, “I meditated and studied for years and, in the end, when I finally awoke, I found that I really hadn’t gone anywhere and that there never had been anywhere to go nor anything to do to achieve true realization except to see that I was already there and to stop trying to get there.”

After hearing such a mysterious pronouncement, the mystique and the mystery just grows for the rest of us.

I think there’s a lot of unnecessary confusion about all of this. Non-Duality, Enlightenment, Awakening, Nirvana, … or whatever we want to call it, is just another way that the awareness in each of us can be experienced. It is not mysterious, mystical, discontinuous or magical.

As the transition of an awareness filled with egoic beliefs migrates towards being an awareness that is empty of such beliefs, its regard for the existence it finds itself in is more and more infused with the truth that “It is what it is”.

But, awareness hasn’t gone any place. It has just exercised its option to become “…an awareness that is empty of such beliefs….”

Neoliberalism – the ideology at the root of all our problems

January 2nd, 2018

Imagine if the people of the Soviet Union had never heard of communism. The ideology that dominates our lives has, for most of us, no name. Mention it in conversation and you’ll be rewarded with a shrug. Even if your listeners have heard the term before, they will struggle to define it. Neoliberalism: do you know what it is?

Its anonymity is both a symptom and cause of its power. It has played a major role in a remarkable variety of crises: the financial meltdown of 2007?8, the offshoring of wealth and power, of which the Panama Papers offer us merely a glimpse, the slow collapse of public health and education, resurgent child poverty, the epidemic of loneliness, the collapse of ecosystems, the rise of Donald Trump. But we respond to these crises as if they emerge in isolation, apparently unaware that they have all been either catalysed or exacerbated by the same coherent philosophy; a philosophy that has – or had – a name. What greater power can there be than to operate namelessly?

So pervasive has neoliberalism become that we seldom even recognise it as an ideology. We appear to accept the proposition that this utopian, millenarian faith describes a neutral force; a kind of biological law, like Darwin’s theory of evolution. But the philosophy arose as a conscious attempt to reshape human life and shift the locus of power.

Neoliberalism sees competition as the defining characteristic of human relations. It redefines citizens as consumers, whose democratic choices are best exercised by buying and selling, a process that rewards merit and punishes inefficiency. It maintains that “the market” delivers benefits that could never be achieved by planning.

Attempts to limit competition are treated as inimical to liberty. Tax and regulation should be minimised, public services should be privatised. The organisation of labour and collective bargaining by trade unions are portrayed as market distortions that impede the formation of a natural hierarchy of winners and losers. Inequality is recast as virtuous: a reward for utility and a generator of wealth, which trickles down to enrich everyone. Efforts to create a more equal society are both counterproductive and morally corrosive. The market ensures that everyone gets what they deserve.

We internalise and reproduce its creeds. The rich persuade themselves that they acquired their wealth through merit, ignoring the advantages – such as education, inheritance and class – that may have helped to secure it. The poor begin to blame themselves for their failures, even when they can do little to change their circumstances.

Never mind structural unemployment: if you don’t have a job it’s because you are unenterprising. Never mind the impossible costs of housing: if your credit card is maxed out, you’re feckless and improvident. Never mind that your children no longer have a school playing field: if they get fat, it’s your fault. In a world governed by competition, those who fall behind become defined and self-defined as losers.

Among the results, as Paul Verhaeghe documents in his book What About Me? are epidemics of self-harm, eating disorders, depression, loneliness, performance anxiety and social phobia. Perhaps it’s unsurprising that Britain, in which neoliberal ideology has been most rigorously applied, is the loneliness capital of Europe. We are all neoliberals now.

***

The term neoliberalism was coined at a meeting in Paris in 1938. Among the delegates were two men who came to define the ideology, Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek. Both exiles from Austria, they saw social democracy, exemplified by Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and the gradual development of Britain’s welfare state, as manifestations of a collectivism that occupied the same spectrum as nazism and communism.

2017-12-26 – In the land of Duality

December 26th, 2017

We are all here in the land of duality, in the land of partial understandings, in the land of limited intelligence.

We can progress and we can learn and, to some extent, we can transcend.

But why do we want to insist that we can come to the end, now? To think that we can come to the unity, to the final understanding that there is no more to understand, to the place where the choices cease and being is all there is?

Clearly, to me, we’re not there and we’re unlikely to get there or be there except in a way that is severely limited by our intelligence and awareness. We are just on one step on the stairway to heaven that has more steps upward than we can begin to imagine from here.

Yes, I can cease here with thought and feel existence being in, through and around me (though they all are one).

But this experience is partial, it is temporally limited, it is and has to be only part of what-is. I cannot shed my skin here born and bred of duality and the world of cause and effect.

Yes, I can stop and say I am giving up choice because I think that’s what lies at the end of the road. But that seems to me to be a hugely premature stopping.

I simply haven’t the the grasp or reach to attain any ‘I’ve got it all’ state.

For me, part of the deep acceptance of my place in existence is to realize that we’re on the road and the road is long and we will not complete the road in these clothes.

And yet, still, the road draws us onward. Blessed be the road for it is all we have.

And when I need refreshment, I stop doing and let the silence and being-ness fill me. Then refreshed, I come to the road again and the endless questions that arise to ask and the illusions to be seen through.

I sense progress and I currently do not think there is anything else.

Prediction – 170930

September 30th, 2017

Prediction time.

Here are some things I’ve been reading:

Read how cyber warfare, via social media over something like FB is ever so much cheaper than buying a top quality fighter plane.

Read that the Equifax hack is beginning to look like state-sponsored actors were behind it. maybe Chinese intelligence services.

Read that Russian Twitter trolls have jumped all over the controversy between Trump and the NFL players. Their aim being to increase the differences and tensions among Americans over such disputes.

This is all a form of asymmetric warfare.

In asymmetric warfare, the defenders have to defend against every possible point of attack while the attackers have only to find one attack point that they can use effectively.

As our cyber worlds get more and more complicated, the ability to defend ourselves against all possible attacks can only diminish.

One way for nation states and multinational corporations to increase their security would be to abandon use of the global Internet in favor of internets that are local to themselves and which only make external connections through rigorously guarded portals.

Thus, my prediction here is that the global Internet will be divided into smaller units in response to these increasing vulnerabilities. When? When the pain gets high enough.

Declaration for Integrative, Evidence-Based, End-of-Life Care that Incorporates Nonlocal Consciousness

May 31st, 2016

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

-from Hamlet

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By:  Stephan A. Schwartz, Gary E. Schwartz, PhD, Larry Dossey, MD

In February 2014, a group of internationally known scientists from the fields of biology, neuroscience, psychology, medicine, and psychiatry participated in a conference on post-materialist science. The purpose was to discuss the impact of the prevailing mechanistic-materialist ideology within science and the emergence of a post-materialist paradigm for science, spirituality, and society. The nature of consciousness has been largely explored only from the assumption that it is a neuro-physiological process entirely resident in the human organism. Its inherent physicality has become an ironbound axiom. But a growing body of experimental and clinical research now challenges this assumption.

The 2014 Conference resulted in the Manifesto for a Post-Materialist Science.

Then, in September 2015, a second Conference was held. Its faculty was composed of therapists, clinicians, scholars, and researchers from the United States, Europe, and Asia, all of whom are involved in some way in the processes of human death. Many who attended felt that an exclusively materialist model of consciousness—the view that consciousness is produced entirely by the brain and that physical death annihilates it—cannot account for the experiences they see in those who are dying.

The purpose was to explore the question: What happens when we die? The conference faculty was composed of therapists, clinicians, scholars, and researchers from the United States, Europe, and Asia, all of whom are involved in some way in the processes of human death. Many felt that a materialist model of consciousness—the view that consciousness is produced entirely by the brain and that physical death annihilates it—cannot account for the rich experiences they see in the dying.

All agreed on the existence of a nonlocal aspect of consciousness, and there emerged a Declaration for Integrative, Evidence-Based, End-of-Life Care that Incorporates Nonlocal Consciousness. This Declaration represents a consensus view of the undersigned faculty concerning the greatest issues anyone faces: the origin, destiny, and nature of human consciousness.

1) Today, there are seven stabilized experimental protocols used in laboratories around the world, each of which requires the existence of nonlocal consciousness to be successful. All seven protocols have independently produced six-sigma results, meaning that the odds against a chance explanation of the experimental finding are roughly a billion to one, or above a 99.999999 percentile of certainty.

2) In addition, there are now five areas of consciousness science directly linked to the processes of death that also support the existence of a nonlocal, non-physiologically dependent consciousness: near-death experiences; after-death communications; deathbed vision and physical phenomena at the time of death; laboratory studies with research mediums; and reincarnation research, particularly involving young children.

3) We believe that the question, Can consciousness exist that is not physiologically based? has been answered in the affirmative, and that it is time to move on.

4) We believe that everyone involved in end-of-life care should be educated in an evidence-based manner concerning these findings.

5) Programs should be developed that prepare patients and their loved ones for the journey following death, based on the evidence provided in this Declaration. This can have major effects in reducing the fear of death in both patients and their loved ones.

6) The new consciousness research points to the existence of an individual’s immortal, nonlocal consciousness, a perspective affirmed by many philosophical and religious traditions for millennia.

We see nonlocal consciousness as existing within the broader context of the emergence of a new paradigm in science which incorporates consciousness. We recognize, however, that acknowledging non-physiologically based consciousness can evoke emotional responses that challenge deeply held beliefs in both mainstream science and religion. It will take courage, compassion, and integrity to address the wealth of implications and opportunities afforded by integrating these research findings. Now is the time to advance this integration.

  • this from: HERE
  • research thanks to Merv D.

U.S. sees first case of bacteria resistant to all antibiotics

May 27th, 2016
  • This story has been on its way for a very long time.  I recall the possibility being discussed when I was in University studying Microbiology in the 1970’s.  We are our own worst enemies.  We don’t use antibiotics intelligently and this is the result – bugs that become immune to the best weapons we have against them.

dennis

  • Update on this story here.  It’s not as bad as it first sounded.  Thx Alan T. for the research.

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U.S. health officials on Thursday reported the first case in the country of a patient with an infection resistant to all known antibiotics, and expressed grave concern that the superbug could pose serious danger for routine infections if it spreads.

“We risk being in a post-antibiotic world,” said Thomas Frieden, director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, referring to the urinary tract infection of a 49-year-old Pennsylvania woman who had not traveled within the prior five months.

Frieden, speaking at a National Press Club luncheon in Washington, D.C., said the infection was not controlled even by colistin, an antibiotic that is reserved for use against “nightmare bacteria.”

The infection was reported Thursday in a study appearing in Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy, a publication of the American Society for Microbiology. It said the superbug itself had first been infected with a tiny piece of DNA called a plasmid, which passed along a gene called mcr-1 that confers resistance to colistin.

“(This) heralds the emergence of truly pan-drug resistant bacteria,” said the study, which was conducted by the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center. “To the best of our knowledge, this is the first report of mcr-1 in the USA.”

The study said continued surveillance to determine the true frequency of the gene in the United States is critical.

“It is dangerous and we would assume it can be spread quickly, even in a hospital environment if it is not well contained,” said Dr. Gail Cassell, a microbiologist and senior lecturer at Harvard Medical School.

But she said the potential speed of its spread will not be known until more is learned about how the Pennsylvania patient was infected, and how present the colistin-resistant superbug is in the United States and globally.

The colistin-resistant gene was found last year in people and pigs in China. That discovery followed a different superbug gene that emerged in India in 2010.

In the meantime, Cassell said people can best protect themselves from the superbug and from other bacteria resistant to antibiotics by thoroughly washing their hands, washing fruits and vegetables thoroughly and preparing foods appropriately.

She said experts have warned since the 1990s that especially bad superbugs could be on the horizon, but few drugmakers have attempted to develop drugs against them.

“The medicine cabinet is threadbare because not enough has been done.”

  • To the original article: