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.

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.