I thought I would quote this at length from an article in my old student newspaper, Varsity. Here goes:

"Every ability that you think you possess, or lack, is really a gratuitous and inexplicable gift. To be proud of your qualities is ridiculous as bragging about your presents as you sit around the Christmas tree. You can be grateful for your presents, you can be pleased, but the one thing you can't be is smug. Envy, likewise, loses all meaning in the religious context. The fact that someone else is funnier or taller than you is not really a fact about them; it is certainly not something they can claim credit for.

God's gifts are like a Lottery win, in that you cannot sanely believe that your good fortune results from your own merit."  (Dan Hitchens)

Love,

Zeal

Osho is one of the most venerable, and yet the most denigrated, of spiritual masters.

Osho was teaching between 1953 - 1990. I think most observers would agree his views were firmly coming from green. Thus he was teaching from the leading edge of human consciousness for most of that time, some 40 years. It should be pointed out that green did not emerge on a large scale until the 1980s.

It is evident from his discourses that his approach was primarily coming from this altitude if one looks at his idea that one of the root causes of human suffering is the dogmaticism of the amber-meme fundamentalist religions preventing individuals from accessing the spiritual realm namely by cutting them off from their root energy, their sex energy. I agree with this hypothesis.

The implied remedy was to blast away the fundamentalist strands of religion and replace them with their more authentic (to use Ken Wilber's term in A Sociable God) varieties.

This most probably irked the 70% or so of listeners who, statistically, were likely to be at amber altitude or lower.

It comes, therefore, as no surprise that he was routinely chased away from wherever he went, on the one hand because attacking fundamentalist strands rarely works and also, frankly, because of the difficulty of one meme listening to the views of another (especially when that meme is two stages higher (at least) than your own).

I would like to argue, however, that Osho was one of the first integral thinkers of his time. Very few mystics, as far as I am aware at least, had integrated and shown such magesterial knowledge of so many traditions. Osho did.

Difficult as it may seem to swallow, the current crisis may be seen as salutory. As spirituals, perhaps it is less difficult for us to assume this. The current situation, without wishing to sound peremptory, is to be ascribed primarily, and is a reflection of, the workings of the 'hungry ghosts' in our system.

Britain has been the worst affected by this turn of events. This has widely been attributed to its astronomical levels of borrowing and public spending. Now, the Bank of England has literally printed, out of nowhere, £75bn to 'inject' into the economy, to boost trade and provide immediate alleviation to the situation. The thinking behind this is naturally that circulating money into the economy will incite consumer spending and get customers back onto the streets engaging in their beloved pastime (and this just applies to the UK) - shopping.

I don't know what specifically demarcates the UK as uniquely implicated in this débâcle, and I do not want to lapse into generic comments, other than to say this is a most sad situation directly reflective of the inner deficiency and striving that characterises so much of modern behaviour.

My main thesis is this, and this is why the current situation may be thought of as cautionary: the economy, to use Ken Wilber's parlance, is the domain of the Lower Right quadrant, in that it is the reflection of the institutions and systems that govern a social order, namely the lower left, composed of individuals engaging together in a participative culture.

It follows therefore that LR occasions are a DIRECT reflection of our interior values, collectively referred to as the lower left, but which are also the reflection of a sizeable number of individuals coming together to form a coherent whole (the Upper Left).

Hence the economy is our fault. It is our situation. We created it. Only we can get out of it. As spirituals, it behoves us to 'profit' by this occasion, as it were, to get our own inner houses in order and observe very carefully our reactions to situations, people, places and events and regard outer phenomena as merely (and not in a literal sense viz. The Secret, of course) reflections of and extensions of our behaviour (UR) and hence our values (UL and, collectively, LL).

Adversity often heralds times of spiritual growth, rather than merely portending decay. Decay indeed is not a 'negative' value, and indeed what would it mean to be a negative value? A larger perspective, offered to us by the Taoists, holds this to be merely the vagaries of yin/yang, immutable laws in the Universe, which it behoves us to Be One With.

Hence these times offer us occasions to further our spiritual practice, deepen it, and not shrink back into self-contraction, regression, and so forth.

Some reflections - comments welcome.

Update 25/3 -

Allow me to augment the foregoing with a few quotes I happened to stumble upon whilst reading Gordon Brown's speech to the EU Parliament:

- As we have discovered to our cost, the problem of unbridled free markets in an unsupervised marketplace is that they reduce all relationships to transactions, all intentions to self interest, all sense of value to consumer choices, all sense of worth to a price tag.

Whew! It took you long enough to figure it out, Mr Brown, and it illustrates my thesis of how this turn of events really is a lesson in morality.

- A good society needs a strong sense of values. Not values that spring from the market, but the values we bring to it. Values of honesty, responsibility, fairness, hard work. Values that come not from markets; but instead from the heart.

Amazing what can be learned from just one financial crisis...

- [We need] every continent [to] the changes in [their] own banking systems that will open the path to shared prosperity once again
-  every country [to] participate and  cooperate in setting global standards for financial regulation
- every continent [to] inject the resources into their economy needed to secure economic growth and jobs

Ditto.

Hmm...just went on Facebook and saw that one of my friends has friended their...mum. Ooh, how interesting. Got me thinking. These social network sites define a new cartography in human relations and they can't be ignored.

They are eminently in the LL category of AQAL. How they play a role in intersubjectivity is interesting. On the one hand, they allow you to get in contact with friends of yore, catch up with them, groove, as it were. On the other, the exchanges that mostly take place on them could be described as, well, nugatory (especially between established friends who seem to regard it as an excuse to bastardise the language and, for the first time in history, provide fodder to the puritans who say the language is generally on the decline).

So there is an interesting dialectic going on. A few steps forward, some back - how many forward and how many back, I don't know. In any case, it got me thinking. Increasingly, public organisations make use of social network sites to purvey their goods and services. On the other hand, Facebook and others play to the more primitive instincts of the young, exploiting them, getting them to type their e-mail passwords ingenuously, and uploading all kinds of rubbish.

Facebook, and others, are artefacts (under Ken Wilber’s definition, et al). That's what they are and meant to be. That means that anyone, on whatever level of consciousness they're at, can use them. Even Eckhart Tolle's got a profile. Makes you wonder; they say they've transcended desire and then there's this little remnant of a...

Is it creative evolution? Is it Spirit's desire to express itself through Form? As Ken Wilber says, even in Big Mind, there is an impulse in there 'not to stay alone'. With Genpo Roshi's triangles, we can see with great clarity how this works. i.e. you neither repress the one who wants to make contact nor the one who's Absolutely Perfect. Interesting.

So is this the dance of form? In one way, yes. In other ways, like with other things, it is the dialectic of progress and it behoves us to remember this.
As regards the language, well – I said that for the first time in history linguistic puritans may actually have a point when they say the language is on the decline. What do I mean by that? Well, that up until now, language evolution truly has been telic. Take Jean Aitcheson’s ‘Language Change: Progress and Decay’ and this really crystallises the point. It’s a wonderful book. Made me really aware of how language change really is a process of change in one segment of language and then making up for it in other. Now, it seems, since the advent of television and, more worryingly, chat rooms and text messaging, youngsters seem given to routinely abusing the language, as if it were primitive means of communication designed for little more than communication between a sailor and the native, as would have been the case in the development of pidgins, because that’s what pidgins are for.

So what impact is technology having on communication, language and relationships? Well, I’ve already touched upon some of the points. Bringing people together, if superficially. Defining new methods of social organisation and indeed means of social discourse.

Technology is an artefact, whether we like it or not. Anyone can use it, for good or bad. It seems it's here to stay for a while, so let's see how this kosmic groove develops in the ever unfolding waves intersubjectivity...

Any comments welcome.

What follows is my attempt to outline the various factors underlying the current political tensions in Belgium - not to offer solutions, but just to see how AQAL can be used to analyse cases of political disquiet. It should be stressed, however, that Belgium is anything from disquieting - on the contrary, it's one of the quietest countries I've ever lived in. It's a state that works, in spite of its foundering government, not because of it, in contrast to those, in my experience, which have stable political institutions and are frankly an unqualified disaster like the UK.

                             
I will just provide some basic background to the country to provide context. The country is famous for its demarcations on cultural and linguistic grounds - it is divided into two (officially three) communities along linguistic lines, with three official languages - French, Dutch and German although de facto only French and Dutch are widely spoken. The people who speak Dutch are called the Flemish and live in Flanders and the ones who speak French are called Walloons and live in Wallonia. Then there is the complication of Brussels which sits in Flemish territory (to use a Dutch expression) but is 85% French-speaking.

From an UL perspective, there seems to be some unspoken animosity between the Dutch- and French-speaking inhabitants of Belgium, without these surfacing visibly (for the most part). This relates to shadow, of course, as language seems to be curiously tied up with what Eckhart Tolle calls the ‘pain body'. It seems to be an act of identity that immediately demarcates you as ‘this' over ‘that'.

These tensions lead to curious situations in which it is de jure recognised that Brussels is a bilingual territory whereas de facto, if you walk into a shop, you will speak French. Also, there is the curious issue of how to deal with an area known as Brussel-Halle-Vilvoorde (or Bruxelles-Halle-Vivorde if you're French-speaking) which is a ring outside of Brussels (hence officially Dutch-speaking) but where there are a lot of French-speaking inhabitants. Recently, a parliamentary vote saw the Flemish almost unanimously deciding to decree that French-speaking inhabitants are not able to vote for French-speaking political candidates in that territory. This was seen as quite natural by the Flemish and an out-and-out affront by the Walloons.

In the LL, which I have surreptitiously moved onto, things become quite bizarre. The two communities are, as I said, quite divided from each other, in that they have pretty separate cultures, defined in part by their language and also their history. It was curious to watch the ‘national day' celebrations on 21 July, just after the Prime Minister had offered his resignation to the King, who actually refused to grant it (makes you wonder how you can just say, ‘no, I don't want to do the job, sir'.) The interviews were given in French and Dutch, with the help of a fairly bilingual presenter, making one wonder (as an English-speaker), how the hell there is any unity in the country at all.

Historically, Flanders broke away from Holland and joined with Wallonia in 1830 to form a separate Catholic state. Since then there have been latent tensions in that Belgian law was subsequently issued in French but not in Dutch. The Dutch-speakers form the majority in Belgium. The question was that the seat of power was in Wallonian hands at the time and so everything was done in French. Since then there has been a power shift so that, in recent years, with the progression from secondary to tertiary industry, Flanders now holds economic sway over Wallonia, which still languishes in manufacturing and steel industries. It is visible in the amenability of the different towns across Belgium - Flemish cities are, frankly, much nicer than Walloon ones from an aesthetic and architectural point of view and it is acknowledged that if Flanders were to separate from Wallonia (which some hard-liners want to do) then Flanders would be the richest nation in Europe and Wallonia one of the poorest.

It has been argued that the ‘glue' that holds Belgium together is Brussels. While bureaucratic and expensive, there is something quaint about having everything in two languages here. Differential cultural signifiers abound (even if the referents are the same). When talking of the political crisis, the Flemish talk of a staatshervorming and the Walloons of a réforme d'état (state reform). Even the street names are different; the name for the main political street in Brussels is Wetstraat and Rue de la Loi respectively. This means that the ‘straat' (word for ‘avenue') is often tacked onto the end of the French name e.g. Rue Henri-Mausstraat, which is hardly aesthetically appealing and probably provokes much confusion, and presumably humour, when providing addresses to people you know.

Living in Brussels, in a country with 95% cable-TV coverage, one has the luxury of being able to flip from one TV channel to the other. This means the same adverts can be in different languages, the news coverage is different, interviews have to be adapted and Belgian subtitlers are probably some of the best paid in the entire world. For example, I have noticed how the Flemish devote relatively little time to political occurrences that in the French-speaking press cause a storm, the BHV story mentioned above a case in point.

It is also curious how the Flemish seem to want to demarcate themselves from the Dutch as well. Initially, upon breaking away, the Flemish kept on speaking Dutch (as they do now) but tried to get away as much as possible from the language of their conquerors. Daft, I know.

Daft because they assert their identity as ‘Dutch' speakers in Belgium, against their poor cousins who are unwilling to learn the language. In addition, the Flemish then accuse the French-speaking of ‘not wanting to learn' their language while they learn the language of their poor cousins. It is more likely that they learn the language not of the very people they want to get rid of, but in order to be able to find a job in Brussels.

I don't want to come down hard on the Flemish, but their attitude towards the current situation could be described the more ‘arriviste' of the two, given that they have only recently gained economic ascendancy and are now in haste to say goodbye to their Walloon counterparts. Having said that, they are obliged to speak a language not their own every time they go to their own capital city, so it's hardly surprising.

The Dutch themselves often consider the Flemish as something of country bumpkins, according to what I have learnt while spending time in Holland. They consider Flemish to be a different language, whereas the Flemish will have nothing of the sort.

It is true that there are some differences between the varieties, but there are few discernible differences other than the accent, and, I am told, the occasional turn of phrase.

It's all to do with identity. The ‘I'. What is the ‘I'? The cultural ‘I' or the collective ‘I'? Well, it could be termed ethnocentrism, which is more of a stage than a state in Ken Wilber's parlance.

But there is something to do with states as well. It's the extent to which you identify with your ‘I'. I find myself preferring to learn the Dutch from Holland as opposed to that of Belgium, as the Dutch attitude towards Flanders can at best be termed quaint, at worst derisory. Presumably that's my own ‘I' at work...

The current trajectory of Belgian politics is difficult to determine, as, as with many aspects of politics, it is more often subject to UL vagaries rather than UR or LR objective facts. But for the moment, Belgium is a country which works in spite of an unstable government, which has often been the case - in contrast to many nations with stable governments which frankly work much, much less well.

Tot straks - au revoir - I'm off for a pintje and some moules frites.