Adventure Culture Spirit Comment
13.8.16
Anthony Robbins on overcoming fear-The Primal Instinct that's screwing us all up!
Our brains have evolved over millions of years. Primarily for the purpose of identifying the need to run away from that Hairy Mammoth or Sabre Toothed Tiger or to kill and eat that Turtle or to fuck that potential mate and to carry our blessed genes into tomorrow. Fight or Flight. But right now there's a shortage of hairy mammoths and we need a more subtle programme of remain in the zone, listen closely and empathise, reach out, assimilate, merge, trust.
10.8.16
8.8.16
9.7.16
19.6.16
WHY WE SHOULD REMAIN IN EUROPE by Anthony Dougan
WHY WE SHOULD REMAIN IN EUROPE by Anthony Dougan
I don’t often go into print with my views. I pretty much utterly despise the mass media, its something I see in service to power. Yet we believe it to be in service of the accounting of power-that is our ideal of it.
To take Plato’s ideal perfection of form, it is so far from its idealised concept as to be it’s opposite.
Today posted through my door there came two flyers for the leave campaign. (And don’t get me wrong-both campaigns have been the most blatant impoverishment of political discourse I have ever seen.)
But these are amazing because of their idiocy. First I am encouraged by Owen Paterson, an environmental vandal in his time as environment minister, who states, “ I believe the UK has a great future beyond the EU. Under a UK rural policy, we could pay more than the CAP, regulation could be massively simplified, and subsidies could be more specifically tailored to the UK’s industry, geography and climate.”
On the other side of this flyer it quotes from George Eustice, the Farming Minister (Yes there is such a creature!)
“EU regulations make life hard for the UK’s farmers. If we have the courage to Vote Leave and take back control, we would be free to think again and could achieve so much more for farmers and our environment.”
My second leaflet quotes Sir Richard Dearlove (a splendid but hugely ironical name) who is a former chief of MI6 who says,
“Brexit would bring two potentially important security gains: the ability to dump the European Convention on Human Rights…and more importantly, greater control over immigration from the European Union.”
Tim Martin the Chairman of Wetherspoons - a chain of really shit pubs, is also quoted and other members of the noblesse oblige. But it is all so crap I cannot quote any more.
Let me tell you what is in my heart. It is not about the economy. It is not about the curvature of bananas. It is not about the bloated bureaucracy of the European Parliament. It is not even about the outrageous austerity assault on the nation of Greece.
The twentieth century was a half-century of horror. Of total war. Of genocidal war. Of hatred. Europe has a history of such barbarism. The current EU makes such a war unthinkable. The current EU is a family, with all the dysfunction and animosity and pettiness that goes with the notion of family.
But it keeps us safe!
Families are whirlpools of madness-but they are the unit of stability that remains throughout history. You love them and you hate them but you struggle with them and ultimately you love them.
You don’t leave them. You stick with them.
Yes there are problems with sovereignty (normally the upper classes rights to abuse the citizenry!), and there are problems with immigration-the reasonable but groundless fear of social swamping.
But in my heart I see this European Project as a Project For Peace. Economy’s are worthless in times of war. Nothing matters in war except winning. Europe is an alternative to that horror…and it works. We’ve seen it!
Let’s truly believe in Peace and work within the Union to improve and better it and make it an engine for humanity. A model of social engineering based on the best of what we know.
Europe is a project still unfolding-lets stick with it and contribute.
This is the greatest political experiment in world history. Don’t you think in your heart that its worth hanging on in there?
Vote to stay in..please.
I don’t often go into print with my views. I pretty much utterly despise the mass media, its something I see in service to power. Yet we believe it to be in service of the accounting of power-that is our ideal of it.
To take Plato’s ideal perfection of form, it is so far from its idealised concept as to be it’s opposite.
Today posted through my door there came two flyers for the leave campaign. (And don’t get me wrong-both campaigns have been the most blatant impoverishment of political discourse I have ever seen.)
But these are amazing because of their idiocy. First I am encouraged by Owen Paterson, an environmental vandal in his time as environment minister, who states, “ I believe the UK has a great future beyond the EU. Under a UK rural policy, we could pay more than the CAP, regulation could be massively simplified, and subsidies could be more specifically tailored to the UK’s industry, geography and climate.”
On the other side of this flyer it quotes from George Eustice, the Farming Minister (Yes there is such a creature!)
“EU regulations make life hard for the UK’s farmers. If we have the courage to Vote Leave and take back control, we would be free to think again and could achieve so much more for farmers and our environment.”
My second leaflet quotes Sir Richard Dearlove (a splendid but hugely ironical name) who is a former chief of MI6 who says,
“Brexit would bring two potentially important security gains: the ability to dump the European Convention on Human Rights…and more importantly, greater control over immigration from the European Union.”
Tim Martin the Chairman of Wetherspoons - a chain of really shit pubs, is also quoted and other members of the noblesse oblige. But it is all so crap I cannot quote any more.
Let me tell you what is in my heart. It is not about the economy. It is not about the curvature of bananas. It is not about the bloated bureaucracy of the European Parliament. It is not even about the outrageous austerity assault on the nation of Greece.
The twentieth century was a half-century of horror. Of total war. Of genocidal war. Of hatred. Europe has a history of such barbarism. The current EU makes such a war unthinkable. The current EU is a family, with all the dysfunction and animosity and pettiness that goes with the notion of family.
But it keeps us safe!
Families are whirlpools of madness-but they are the unit of stability that remains throughout history. You love them and you hate them but you struggle with them and ultimately you love them.
You don’t leave them. You stick with them.
Yes there are problems with sovereignty (normally the upper classes rights to abuse the citizenry!), and there are problems with immigration-the reasonable but groundless fear of social swamping.
But in my heart I see this European Project as a Project For Peace. Economy’s are worthless in times of war. Nothing matters in war except winning. Europe is an alternative to that horror…and it works. We’ve seen it!
Let’s truly believe in Peace and work within the Union to improve and better it and make it an engine for humanity. A model of social engineering based on the best of what we know.
Europe is a project still unfolding-lets stick with it and contribute.
This is the greatest political experiment in world history. Don’t you think in your heart that its worth hanging on in there?
Vote to stay in..please.
22.5.16
Maria Caulfield's response to my concerns about TTIP?-VOTE TO LEAVE EUROPEAN UNION!!!
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20 May (2 days ago)
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Dear Anthony,
Thank you for contacting me about TTIP. I know this issue has caused much concern for a number of constituents over the past few years.
As you may be aware, the trade deal is being negotiated by the European Union, leaving Parliament without any say or influence in the negotiations. This is one of the key reasons why on June 23 I will be voting to leave the EU and reclaim the sovereignty of Westminster to negotiate our trade deals.
My chief concern, which I share with many, is the potential impact that TTIP could have on the NHS. It is for this reason I will be considering the amendment on Wednesday, and likely to support it, ensuring that any decisions regarding the future of the NHS remain in Westminster.
However, this amendment will not stop TTIP outright as Parliament does not have a veto on this matter. The main way to stop TTIP from taking effect is to vote leave next month.
I hope this information is helpful and please do keep in contact.
Best wishes.
Yours sincerely,
Maria Caulfield MP
Member of Parliament for Lewes
House of Commons
London
SW1A 0AA
2.5.16
The discombobulatingly brilliant Mr Jim Davis on Tolerating Uncertainty
Tolerating uncertainty: lessons from cryptic
crosswords and scientific research
I’d like to
invite you to participate in a little experiment, to wit a cryptic crossword
puzzle.
The clue is ‘Die of cold’, and the solution is two words – 3 and 4
letters. The answer is on page xx, BUT
I’m asking you to refrain from looking at it until you have finished reading
what follows.
Cryptic
crosswords are all about meaning – making sense of the clue - and tolerating
uncertainty – there is usually no obvious or quick answer. The challenge is to
stick in there, tolerate the feeling of frustration in attempting to work it
out, be willing to take time to play with the clues, come up with possible
answers only to have to let them go, engage our lateral thinking and intuition
and feelings even – and stay with the process with no guarantee of finding ‘the
answer’! Sound familiar? Life,
relationships, parenting, being a therapist!
My childhood
felt a lot like a cryptic crossword puzzle. By the time I was 8 years old I was getting
pretty desperate to work out what the hell was going on around me. Things were getting more and more confusing
and I needed to make sense of things! I
came up with what I thought was a brilliant solution – I would become an
expert! Then I’d know a lot and be able to work things out, and I’d be able to help others. That way, just maybe, I’d become liked, and famous and maybe even wealthy. If only it had been that simple, and I’m
still not wealthy or famous! Let’s face
it, things – cryptic crosswords, life - are just damn complicated, especially when it comes to
understanding people. Since aged 8 it’s
been a long road littered with mounting uncertainty and the disillusion of my
expert fantasy - (‘expert’: 1.a.
practiced, skilful, 2.n.person
expert in subject, 3. Latin root –
‘ex’ meaning has-been, ‘spurt’ meaning drip under pressure).
How do we live
with uncertainty? Here are two recent
stories-with-lessons.
Only a few
years ago, in what is probably one of the most ambitious and expensive
scientific studies ever conducted, 3,000 scientists were working on something
called the ‘Large Hadron Collider’. They
were attempting to understand the universe at a microscopic level, and in
particular to test the prediction of the existence of the Higgs-Boson
particle. I remember reading something that
one of those scientists said:
‘we scientists at the LHC aim to confirm or exclude
the existence of the Higgs-Boson particle…..Excluding
it would, perhaps, be even more exciting (emphasis added) than discovering
it , as it would mean that the theory that has described the building blocks of
our universe is wrong. We would have to
go back to their blackboard and come up with a new one.’
I must say the
fact that they were planning to use a blackboard as a fall-back option did
worry me somewhat! However what struck
me was their humility about their theories, but in particular their tolerance
of uncertainty - that they might well be proved wrong, and that they would even
welcome such an outcome.
More recently I
read an article reporting a research study undertaken at Department of
Psychiatry at Cambridge University which looked at the brain’s habit of
predicting what it expects to
experience, filling in the missing gaps in reality, in order to make sense of
things. Having a predictive brain makes
us efficient and adept at creating a coherent picture of an ambiguous and
complex world. In other words we are
hard-wired to make sense of our perceptions involving uncertainty.
Two groups of
subjects, one with signs of mental illness and another who showed no such signs, were shown black and white images that looked
little more than a collection of lines and blotches, and were asked to fill in
the missing parts of the pictures and work out what they represented. The ‘mentally ill’ group performed better
than the ‘normal’ group, coming up more quickly with answers about what the
pictures represented. Paradoxically, my understanding
of this outcome is that the ‘mentally ill’ group were less able to tolerate the
uncertainty about what the pictures might
represent, and were more likely to want to impose a solution quickly in order
to reduce anxiety, in a process similar to what Freud called ‘verwerfung’,
translated by Lacan as ‘foreclosure’. In
other words, an aspect of ‘mental health’, and maybe a defining feature of Adult
functioning, much like good scientific practice, is the capacity to stay with
and tolerate an experience of uncertainty, of not knowing how to make sense of
experience.
From this
perspective a contamination in TA could be thought of as not so much as a
belief that is at odds with here and now reality, but more as a self-protective,
premature foreclosure of the process of staying with and making sense of
experience. Putting it this way reminds
me of my early Gestalt learning in the value of inviting clients to ‘stay with’
a difficult experience, and/or explore their difficulty with doing so.
Back to the
cryptic crossword. Did you stop and
attempt to find an answer; and if so what was your experience of tolerating the
difficulty of working it out? Did you go
along with my suggestion of reading to the end before looking at the answer;
and if so, what was it like to resist the temptation to look? If you did
look at the answer before finishing reading, what do you imagine it would have been like to have resisted the temptation?
And finally,
nice answer eh? Maybe even nicer if we’ve been through the process of
tolerating the uncertainty inherent in attempting to work it out?
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