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There the tree rises. Oh pure surpassing!
Oh Orpheus sings! Oh great tree of sound!
And all is silent,
And from this silence arise
New beginnings, intimations, changings.
From the stillness animals throng, out of the clear
Snapping forest of lair and nest;
And thus they are stealthy not from cunning
Not from fear
But to hear.
And in their hearts the howling, the cry,
The stag-call seem too little.
And where before
Was but the rudest shelter to receive these,
A refuge fashioned out of darkest longing
Entered, tremulo, the doorpost aquiver, -
There You have fashioned them a temple for their hearing.
TUESDAY, JULY 5, 2011
Royal Parks Cycling
Boris Johnson has backed opening up the Royal Parks to more cycling. Caroline Pidgeon (Lib Dem) of the London Assembly Transport Committee has also supported the move.
Cycling is a leisure activity. Exactly the kind of thing parks are there for. However, the Royal Parks Agency, rather than taking a sensible view of cycling, seem determined to treat it like the British establishment used to treat homosexuality. They know it exists, they know that banning it is unrealistic, some of them even indulge in it themselves, but they think legitimizing it would get some people very upset. So they talk about it in hushed tones:
"A shared-use pedestrian and cycle route trial on Studio Walk is currently being carried out from 2 August 2010 to 31 January 2012, in order to test its suitability as a permanent shared-use route."
Oh, for goodness sake. Cycle routes through parks exist up and down the country. There's nothing unique about Kensington Gardens. What are they going to learn from a trial that lasts a year and a half? Yet every new cycle facility in every park seems to require years of planning, consultation and trials. (Mind you, to be fair, the Royal Parks Agency look progressive compared to some UK organizations like the Wimbledon Common Conservators.)
Where the Royal Parks Agency really falls down is by failing to question the hegemony of motorised transport in and around the Parks. Why is it that to feel safe from traffic, cyclists have to go through a park? London doesn't have enough green space. That fact is self-evident if you go to St James's Park on any sunny day; it's absolutely solid with people. Yet there's a motorway (The Mall) going through the middle of it. To the south of the Park, Birdcage Walk is a highway with two lanes separated by a wide central reservation. Why can't the space be reconfigured to include a segregated cycle path? To the east of St James's Park, Horse Guards Road is massively wide: plenty of space for a segregated path there. To the north, The Mall is 6 lanes wide in places - surely space for a cycle path there? In fact there is one on the north side, but it's well hidden, weaves in and out of car parks and ends before Admiralty Arch, forcing all cyclists onto the road. The fact is there is plenty of unused roadspace on the periphery of St James's Park that could be converted into decent segregated cycle paths.
Then there's Green Park. A reaonable segregated path goes alongside Constitution Hill, but that's the only cycle route that Green Park and St James Park boast between them. You have to ride very carefully along it as tourists tend to stray into it. There's no path parallel to Piccadilly, which has a central reservation that is coincidentally the width of a decent cycle path. The central reservation is punctuated by the sheep-pen crossings that pedestrians hate. I suspect there are quite a few cyclists whose desire line lies along Piccadilly, but don't fancy taking on a multi-lane dual carriageway whose designers had no thought for non-motorised road users.
The effect of all this is that the Royal Parks, hemmed in as they are by streets that are absolutely hostile to anyone outside of a motor vehicle, are the only refuge from the danger, noise and pollution. If I were in charge of the Royal Parks, I'd be making the point that the Parks don't exist in isolation from the surrounding environment: the Parks should not be the only decent cycle routes in London, they should be part of a network. That way, cyclists wouldn't have to divert from their desire lines to get away from the traffic danger, and this would relieve pressure on the Parks.
Of course, considerate cycling should be allowed in all parks. But as well as that, Boris Johnson should be telling his Tory friends in Westminster to make it possible for people to cycle with confidence on the roads.
This rather wonderful book came into my life when reading the impossibly productive Neil Gaiman's blog.
Basically the message is: You exercise 6 days a week, at least two of the days are strength based training, you also need to cycle, ski, swim, run, hike, row etc. Do the time and you can live well into your 70's and 80's.
You cut crap out of your diet and eat well.
You watch your alcohol intake and you do not smoke.
You need a heart rate monitor and you need to exercise in the three heart zones.
You make a commitment to your relationships including with yourself.
You have a disciplined spiritual and intellectual practice.
You have a creative life.
I'm also really enjoying Stephen Covey's '8th Habit' on audio at the moment and he spends a lot of time confirming how this physical training works for him.
A lot of this is common sense but rarely applied to the training of ontological tantra wizards, spiral poets, necromancers, dragon riders or surfers on the breaking waves of extreme Cabalistic theory. Imagine if Magickal Lodges were run like supercharged companies on the very best principles of integral theory! Imagine if our families followed these principles! And our schools! And our lousy, shit-brained governments! And our dentists! Wow!
Frater Abraxas spotted this on the guardian.co.uk site and thought you should see it. To see this story with its related links on the guardian.co.uk site, go to http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2011/jun/04/getting-high-is-a-human-right Getting high is a basic human right Saturday June 4 2011
The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2011/jun/04/getting-high-is-a-human-right
Peter Wilby well expresses the arguments for why the "war on drugs" has not only failed but actually makes the problems created by drug use worse (Many agree, none act: to ease untold misery, legalise drugs [http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/jun/01/ease-human-misery-legalise-drugs" title="], 2 June). What he doesn't consider is that the "war" is not only wrong in practice, it is wrong in principle.
The right to intoxicate is a fundamental human right, as basic as the rights to worship or to engage in dangerous sports. It's not the state's business to tell us what to do with our leisure as long as we are not hurting others. Virtually every society throughout history has used intoxicants; there is something truly grotesque about our leaders who on the one hand enjoy their own drinking and smoking, and on the other use the vast revenues they take from taxing these two drugs in order to pursue and imprison those whose taste is for an intoxication different to theirs. Joe Morison London ? While agreeing wholeheartedly with Peter Wilby's piece on the benefits of legalising personal drug use, I must protest against his slur on blind bluesmen. Blind Lemon Jefferson, born blind; Blind Willie Johnson, blinded as a child; Blind Blake, blind at birth; Blind Boy Fuller, blinded as a teenager by accident or disease; Sonny Terry blinded as a teenager; Blind Willie McTell blinded during childhood. No evidence of meths consumption there. Ed Marshall Scrooby, Nottinghamshire ? The Home Office's predictable reply to calls for legalisation of the possession of drugs (The drug laws don't work, they just make it worse: campaign calls for reform again [http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2011/jun/02/drugs-drugspolicy" title="], 2 June) was: "Drugs are illegal because they are harmful ? they destroy lives and cause untold misery to families and communities." So does alcohol, gambling, and unemployment caused by spending cuts. Drugs are not illegal because they are harmful, they are illegal because no one in the government or opposition has the courage to assess this issue rationally and not from the perspective of the shrieking tabloid press. Laurence Mann London ? The law has failed to stamp out drug abuse: this is given as a reason to legalise it. Should we also decriminalise murder, burglary and rape, all of which persist despite the best efforts of the law? Various things have been decriminalised since the 1950s. Almost all of them have become more common and more extreme with the removal of both criminal sanctions and social disapproval. In the case of the acceptance of homosexuality, divorce and the general sexual revolution, I'd say that this made us a better society. But would we be a better society if people consumed more drugs? Most drug users know they are unwanted and have few prospects. Or else they are successful but under enormous pressure to stay at the same impossibly high level. Surely these are the social evils we need to fix. Gwydion Williams Peterborough ? Dope is the feedstock and pension fund of the judicial system, which is as dependent on drugs retaining their illicit status as the narco-gangs are for maintaining their business model. Try a reverse prohibition ? a 10-year window without criminal sanction for possession and licensed and taxed production ? to assess the relative merits of crime- or health-led policies. Gavin Greenwood Brighton ? I have multiple sclerosis and have asked my consultant for Sativex on several occasions, only to be denied, or should I say deprived of it (GPs criticise NHS decision to deny MS patients cannabis-based drug [http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/may/30/ms-patients-denied-licensed-cannabis-drug" title="], 31 May)? Doctors have even told to me to keep it quiet that cannabis has helped to relieve my symptoms. I have found that a pattern of attacks two years apart has stopped when I commenced using the drug. The postcode lottery is so frustrating. I have been told of another patient in the same county as me who has the drug on prescription, but I have been denied. Name and address supplied
I
I like to think that mages are readers (Roger Zelazny, anyone?) and
the malls are now full of (often bad and derivative) occult fiction
(though Simon R. Green and Jim Butcher are very fun!). But right now I
am really hooked on Kate Griffin's A Madness of Angels; one reviewer
compared it to Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere as a depiction of magical
London (high praise!), and I must say it is very wild stuff and very
juicy prose and rips right along. The sequel Night Mayor is already
out, and the third Neon Court is coming. This has spawned a
semi-related series of YouTubes also documenting magical London:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kennh24ACKk
Of course there are a lot of other arcane fantasies, Tim Powers has
some great work (Last Call is brilliant, and his On Stranger Tides is
the basis of the current Pirates of the Caribbean sequal). In the YA
category Susan Cooper's Dark Is Rising series was arguably better than
Harry Potter in some ways (and hers was first), and F. Paul Wilson's
Repairman Jack series is reaching a pulsating climax.... but try A
Madness of Angels and see what you think!
Anyone else have recommendations? and remember that a lot of this
is free at your local library....
~Shade
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1.25 Divide,add, multiply and understand. Liber Al
---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: George Monbiot <news@monbiot.com>Date: 21 May 2011 08:06 Subject: Monbiot.com To: heartofbalance@gmail.com
| A Real-Time Experiment With Human Lives Posted: 20 May 2011 01:40 AM PDT We can now see what the impact of has been of the police decision to turn off Oxfordshire's speed cameras.
By George Monbiot, published on the Guardian's website, 20th May 2011 The experiment is over and the results are in. In April, Thames Valley police switched Oxfordshire's speed cameras back on. They had been off for eight months, as a result of the government's decision to cut the road safety grant. Then the police began assessing the damage. In the 31 days before the cameras were switched off (July 2010), the machines caught 2,286 speeding motorists. In the 30 days after they were switched back on, they caught 5,917. As many residents of the county complained, between July 2010 and April 2011, Oxfordshire became a racetrack. The effect of the switch-off seems to have been felt far from the camera sites: as soon as motorists received the message that they were unlikely to get caught speeding anywhere in the county, they appear to have felt empowered to drive recklessly everywhere. Or so a more important set of figures might suggest. In the eight months without cameras, there were 18 deaths on the roads in Oxfordshire, compared to 12 in the same period in the previous year. This was the first time the number of deaths on the county's roads had risen in four years. Serious injuries rose from 160 to 179. These are not just numbers: they are real people; some dead, some who will have to live with devastating injuries for the rest of their lives. Reading the contents of websites which celebrate excessive speed – pistonheads.com for example – you would think it was just a game: evading the police, vandalising cameras, using clever lawyers to avoid getting fined. It's not. The consequences are real and horrible. So far, the sample size is too small and the period too short to be sure that the deaths and injuries around the county are linked to the switch-off. The experiment would have to run for longer and be conducted over a wider area. Any volunteers? Perversely, there are plenty. Undeterred by the results of Oxfordshire's grisly experiment, Staffordshire has now switched off almost half its cameras, for the same reason: a lack of funds, caused by the government's determination to end the mythical construct it calls "the war on the motorist". What it is really doing is allowing speeding motorists to conduct a war against everyone else: cyclists, pedestrians, children on their way to school, other drivers. Worse still, the destruction of speed cameras by people who describe themselves as vigilantes continues unabated. Sixteen of Lincolnshire's 52 cameras, for example, have been destroyed by vandalism, in many cases by fire. In the Scottish borders, 19 have been burnt out since 2004. These acts are raucously celebrated on the boy racer sites. Here's what a spokesman for the Lincolnshire Road Safety Partnership had to say about one of these burnings: "That camera is protecting the standing traffic that mounts up at the A57 roundabout. At certain times of the day the traffic is backed up and people come down the hill at high speed and run on a bit. The idea of the speed camera is to slow them down so they can stop in time for the standing traffic that's ahead of them. And to burn that camera is just crazy – they're putting people's lives at risk by doing this."
So why are people burning cameras? Because journalists and others have promulgated a powerful and dangerous myth: that speed cameras are useless, and exist only to tax the public. It doesn't matter how often or how comprehensively this myth is disproved. A study for the Department for Transport, involving more rigorous scientific methods than those just deployed by Thames Valley Police, shows that 19% fewer people were killed or seriously injured at accident black spots after speed cameras were introduced, above and beyond the general decline in accidents on the roads. As for the stealth taxation story, the last figures I've seen, from 2010, suggest that the cameras cost slightly more to run than they make. The Treasury took £85-80m in revenues, with an outlay of £110m a year. This may have changed by now. (Why shouldn't reckless driving be taxed?). Yet speed cameras are a much cheaper means of preventing speeding than any other. The Department for Transport reports a cost-benefit ratio of 2.7:1. The House of Commons Transport Committee found that "a more cost effective measure for reducing speeds and casualties has yet to be introduced." But never mind the facts: the tabloid myth is what the people who have been snapped by the cameras want to hear. Instead of being a danger to the public, they are, journalists tell them, innocent victims of a government mugging. At times the press coverage is so extreme that it amounts to blatant incitement. Here's what Jeremy Clarkson wrote in the Sun in 2007. "As I drove down the M20 into Kent last Monday, I noticed that most of the speed cameras had been burned out by vandals. This is disgusting. It is ridiculous, criminal and stupid that the person who savaged these life-saving devices should target the M20 … and then stop. Why did you not keep right on going? I can think of six cameras on my way home that would be immeasurably improved with a spot of petrol and a match." (Source: Jeremy Clarkson, 21st July 2007. Speed cameras have been burned out by vandals. The Sun.) It looks like good clean fun, as Sarah Palin's placing of a gunsight over the state of Arizona did, until Gabrielle Giffords got shot. Incitement, particularly incitement which supports a false story that people want to hear, can have consequences. More insidious than Clarkson's have been the efforts of Christopher Booker, who, through a grossly misleading use of statistics, has tried to suggest that speed cameras make the roads more dangerous. Writing in the Telegraph with Richard North in 2007, he maintained that a sharp decline in the death rate on the roads suddenly slowed down in the mid-1990s. They attributed this to the government's attempt to enforce speed limits with cameras. But they failed to mention that deaths started falling sharply again in 2003, after the number of speed cameras had doubled in three years. Similarly, they tried to argue that there was no evidence that cameras have reduced deaths even at the spots where they are deployed, on the grounds that the government had failed to account for a statistical effect called regression to the mean. The truth, they maintain, is that "speed cameras actually increased" the rate of accidents. What they failed to tell their readers is that the government had accounted for regression to the mean, and still found an average reduction of 19% for collisions which caused deaths or injuries after speed cameras had been installed. I was reminded of this over the weekend, by Booker's pathetic attempt to justify yet another of his false claims in the Sunday Telegraph. Uniquely, as far as I can tell, two articles of his have been the subject of a long section of a High Court judgement, which damned his journalism as "unbalanced, inaccurate and just plain wrong." Like all propaganda that tells people what they want to hear, Booker's false claims are likely to change or reinforce people's behaviour. So are Clarkson's and those of all the other journalists who tell people that they can act as they wish, regardless of their impact on others. The rest of us have a duty to try to correct them. www.monbiot.com | You are subscribed to email updates from George Monbiot
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The Mahayoga Godform of Ra Hoor Khuit by the artist Kat Lunoe.
Round and Round
in it's deep green slime
goes the mind...the mind 
INFINITE POSSIBILITIES by Soror Meral
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.
The universe is made up of infinite possibilities. Each star or khabs chooses for itself certain events and thoughts, and makes up for itself a character or mode of behavior.The process of choice forms a layer of several astral or fine bodies. Finally, the whole complex is formed into a physical body which carries all that has been experienced in recent events of this life and in the past. The events of this life may be fairly easy to access when one probes as to the roots of certain behaviors; but far more difficult is the memory ofpast lives, and the karma that was generated there.
No two stars could ever be the same. There are many marks on the final physical body to show how this might be. For instance, fingerprints are never the same; their variety is endless. Few folks realize how different every star is from every other star. Herein lies a great mischief.
It may be that a certain earth character has built up what he or she thinks is a very fine code of behavior. This code is made up of what the earth person can see in the experiences of the present life, but fails to see or realize what karma there may be in the ideas that motivate him or her. Of course, the thinking process manufactures certain ideas; but nothing ever manifests unless the power of emotional push brings these ideas into actuality as something worked out on the physical plane. Hence, the code which this person may think is very fme (and which has built his or her character), the person seeks to impose upon others. To the mind of our person, the code of action and behavior has worked fme for him or her, and now must be used to guide the whole earth through compliance with it - because it is so wonderful, and could hardly be improved upon!
This is called projection. We have labored long and hard to bring this fact of existence to your minds. One sees other persons through a fog of one's own ideas and behaviors. In the worst type of scenario, the experiences of the one person are imposed upon another, and sometimes on a multitude of folks. Just look at the events in the world around you. Projections are being imposed all the time upon nations, upon church groups, upon individuals - upon any sort of gathering. The one who has the most strength of character (and perhaps charisma) can sway a whole roomful of folks.
Sadly, a great many persons are not aware of their own secret inner strengths, and are far from being aware of the particular characteristics of their own star. These folks are slaves to the will of a stronger personality. They are not yet free in the Thelemic sense. They hope to benefit from what is being told to them, and do not yet know that the will of one person sways them to do this or that, or to think this or that.
This becomes even more powerful as a form of evil if the person who sways the multitude has built a prison of thought and behavior. In fact, this can be seen all over the world. The prisons are not just in other nations; if you look carefully, you will see they are in our own nation. They are not just in groups of other persons, they are in ourselves!
1. 0 crystal Heart! I the Serpent clasp Thee, I drive home mine head into the central core of Thee, 0 God my beloved.
2.Even as on the resounding wind-swept heights of Mitylene some god-like woman casts aside the lyre, and with her locks aflame as an aureole, plunges into the wet heart of the creation, so I, 0 Lord my God!
The Moon and Serpent Bumper Book of Magic by Alan Moore
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Alan Moore’s grimoire due in 2009 (or with the anticipated delays, 2010). Only 2 or 3 years to go…
“Splendid news for boys and girls, and guaranteed salvation for humanity! Messrs. Steve and Alan Moore, current proprietors of the celebrated Moon & Serpent Grand Egyptian Theatre of Marvels (sorcery by appointment since circa 150 AD) are presently engaged in producing a clear and practical grimoire of the occult sciences that offers endless necromantic fun for all the family. Exquisitely illuminated by a host of adepts including Kevin O’Neill, Melinda Gebbie, John Coulthart, Jos? Villarrubia and other stellar talents (to be named shortly), this marvelous and unprecedented tome promises to provide all that the reader could conceivably need in order to commence a fulfilling new career as a diabolist.”
via Top Shelf Productions
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painting by Caroline Steven
Adrift! HOW THINGS SNEAK UP ON US.
UP A LADDER WHOSE EACH RUNG
IS WROUGHT WITH YEARS AND YEARNING AND TEARS,
SO THAT WHICH YOU POINTED TO AND SAID
(IN A VOICE THAT BROOKED NO OPPOSITION)
"THAT NEEDS TO GO IN THE BIN!"
was, in fact, the wisdom of all ages.
The secret of the universe.
The nature of all being.
