Archive for month: January, 2018

We have been developing a theme in the podcasts over the last few weeks. In December we looked at letting go of what was and then looking forward positively to what will be coming next. We then moved on to Veganuary and then the experience of being an outsider. All these topics have an underlying issue for me, that are to do with the exercise of power.

When we look back to last year at what has happened and decide to let go of the negative unresolved emotional attachments that we have to people and events, we are acknowledging the power that these things have over us. In deciding to let them go we are taking our power back. When we look forward with positive intent to the year ahead we are acknowledging our power to have an effect on the world and on our future experience.

The issues of veganism and vegetarianism speak for themselves. We have power and dominion over all the beings on this planet. We exercise our power as we see fit giving little account to the effects that we have on the other earthlings that share this planet with us. And, then when we looked at the idea of outsiders, of who we allow to be one of ‘us’ and who we decide are not ‘us’ but they are one of ‘them’ we raise all the current issues from Hitler to Trump, from the creation of the British Empire to the enactment of Brexit, from the depression of the 1930s to the banking crisis of the last ten years. All these things are us human beings exercising our power.

We all have power. We all exercise power. We do things everyday that effect others. To do nothing is also the exercise of your power, not to act. Not acting can have the same or a greater effect than acting.

It is not the power it is what we do with it that counts

For many British people the concept of power is a negative one. To be powerful often equates with being bad. This has an historical route in the imbalance of power inherent in the class structure of upper and lower class, of high class and working class, the power held over the peasants by the landed gentry. These differences remain a problem in the British psyche today. Perhaps we should see these inequalities as the misuse of power rather than power itself, because like all things power is neutral it is what we do with it that makes it good or bad.

Power is neutral

When it comes to personal power I see it like this. If the power is held out front of the person so that it is used like a battering ram then it is negative and often destructive. It is the ego that says ‘get out of my way I am coming through’. Egos that are out the front that get in the way of communication are the worst parts of egotism, narcissism, psychopathy and the misuse of power. If, on the other hand, the power is held at the back of the person so that it becomes a power pack that drives them forward, then if becomes a powerful tool that creates great breakthroughs and achievements. When power is used as a driving force it is the energy that creates change.

The question that we all have to ask ourselves is…

…is your personal power out the front getting in the way of yourself and others? Or, is it securely behind you giving the confidence and the power to do what is right?

An engineer uses a power rating to define ability, volume or speed of an engine. Engines, motors and various bit of equipment are all given a power rating. The rating is neutral. The engineering definition of power is simply…

…power is the ability to do work

I like this definition because it clearly states that without power, when we are powerless, we cannot get anything done, there is no achievement.

The power drives

Physical power is in our muscles that allow us to move and do things. Social power is in the bonding of groups families and society. Intellectual power creates the ability to understand and perhaps persuade through argument. The power of the ego is that which creates business leaders, stars celebrities and some political leaders. Mental/cognitive power creates form and structures, rules and morals that are enforced by the authority of law and order, convention and culture. Intuitive power is in knowing without knowing, the ability to have deep insight, empathy and sensitive understanding. Inspirational and creative power, create inventors, icons and avatars.

Power comes in many forms. The power to run a race or to be a social genius involves the positive use of energy. All of the drives, defined above, can be expressed positively or negatively, power can be used to create heaven or hell. Yet without power we cannot function and are truly powerless.

Power is always a good thing when it is used positively.

Sadly many of the current models of power that we see enacted on the planet are not giving us the positive alternative. There are too many conflicts going on in the world to list here but we know what they are. Each of these conflicts involve one group of people attempting to exercise their power over another group. However, there might just be another alternative…cooperation?

Love is all there is

In the end the only power that counts is the power of love. I shall go to my grave saying this…

…if we all look after each other we will all be okay..

So simple and yet so true. The power of love is the power of care and the power of sharing.

According to the charity Oxfam just eight men are holding half of all the wealth in the world today. In a world where one in ten people are surviving on the equivalent of less than two US dollars a day this has to be obscene. The report suggest that we will soon see the first trillionaires. To put that into perspective you would have to spend one million a day for 2738 days to spend your trillion.

I doubt if you are a trillonaire, well not yet anyway. Whatever your wealth and whatever your personal power please use it wisely

Take care and be happy

Sean x

In many cases on the podcasts we look at the idea of “us’ and ‘them’ as in are you one of us or one of them. Often in society we are saying do you belong, are you one of us. In this episode we turn it around and look at what happens when we are one of ‘them’ and not one of ‘us’? When you are an outsider standing outside of the group.

To be an outsider usually means that you are different or that you are seen as different. This may be negative in the form of prejudice. Perhaps you are disabled, disfigured, have a speech impediment, perhaps a relative has just been in prisoned for sexual impropriety or violent assault, something has happened that makes you become excluded from the home group.

It could also be positive exclusion, if such a thing exists. Perhaps you have just won the lotto, been made the manager of the team you worked in for many years, or been the only one in your university cohort to gain a first class honours degree.

To be an outsider you are doing or have done something different to the group. Now the group no longer identifies with you. You are now the outsider.

Currently the news is full of Rohingya people that have been expelled from Myanmar, or Burma as was. Whatever the politics and whatever the propaganda the message at some level from the people of Myanmar is “we do not want you, go away. You are not one of ‘us’ you are one of ‘them’. You are outsiders and we no longer want you in our country, to go outside”.

The popularised fuel of the whole Brexit debate was around can we allow these outsiders, these refugees, to become one of us? Will we accept them and allow them in? This then raised the question, do we want to stay with the group of Europe.

Bring on the referendum
The issue seemed to culminate in the British desire, well 52% at least wanting to become outsiders. The expressed desire to no longer be one of ‘us’, of the European Community and become ‘them’ and find our own route outside of the larger community. We have voted to become outsiders, to be one of ‘them’ and no longer one of ‘us’.

Have you ever felt like an outsider?

As I have travelled I have, on many occasions, been the only white person in the room, or the only Brit or in Wales the only English person. My difference was sometimes seen as a handicap as in ‘you bloody limeys’. There were times when I was called ‘honky’ or ‘ghost’. On the other side people wanted to speak English with me and practise their use of the language. I also had very blond and very curly hair that people, especially in Asia, wanted to touch and feel. I was even asked for a lock a couple of times! I know a man who was the tallest man in the UK for a while. He found that when he visited China, which he had to do as part of his job, it became impossible because the locals want to be photographed standing beside him. When it came to the point where he couldn’t leave his hotel because crowds of people were waiting for him to get photographed he decided to call it a day and stopped going there.

Are we all Earthling
In many ways this weeks topic follows on from last week when we discussed Veganism with Jodie. To be a vegan means to stand outside the normal culture of the country and the economy. At the same time to eat an animal requires that at some levels we see that animal as different or less than our fellow humans. If we see humans as a part or our group then to eat them is unthinkable. If we see animal as a part of our group then to eat them is unthinkable.

I mentioned in that podcast, and put them up as my resources, the films Schindler’s List and The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas. Both these films describe what happens when we separate a group and make them outsiders. For the Nazis to treat the Jewish people the way that they did required for them to dehumanise the Jews, to exclude them from the group of humanity and make them outsiders who had no human rights and were treated as they treated their animals. The same thing happened in Africa when untold millions were sold into slavery by Europe and America.

The Trump effect
To create a group there has to be normalised ideas, beliefs and behaviours. This is true of a football crowd, a bunch of girls who regularly go out on the jolly, the Mafia gang, a stamp collecting club, the list becomes endless. Once someone stands up and proposes something, they raise their standard, others will begin to gather around that standard and the new group is formed. Once that group is formed there is inside and outside and everyone now has to make a decision, are you in or out. Their will be consequences which way you decide to go, that is the nature of life.

The trick is propaganda. How do we get people to join our cause and take on our beliefs? We use the media. Could be fake news could be real news, could be newspapers and television or radio news. It could be social media or even gossip and the rumour mill.

Once someone like Trump plants his flag and others with the same views begin to gather around him the propaganda machine sets off. The more people that gather the greater the power of the group. The greater the power of the group, the greater the effect that they can have on the outsiders.

Once the Farage and the Brexit band wagon rolled into town the propaganda machine went into action and people started to join it and hey ho, we are out of Europe. The exercise of power is wonderful to study, though terrible for the victims. We should do a podcast on power.

Ok, I’ll climb off my soap box and leave you with this.

The groups that you identify with and belong to will either be positive with outsiders and may, in many ways be looking to create a greater understanding between groups. Or, the group that you are associated with are about increasing the sense of difference between groups of people and not at looking to empathise or understand. You have a choice and your choices are consequential.

Perhaps inviting someone that you see as an outsider in for tea might help humanise humanity.

Take care and be happy

Sean x

This week we had a guest, Jodie B, who can to talk about veganism and more importantly veganuary, the idea that for just this first month of the year we could maybe go vegan and see what it feels like.

Regular listeners will know that I am a veggie. What that means is that I do some cheese and the odd egg. Sometimes I will do some fish. We have lost of words used to describe various diets and eating styles, vegan = plant based, vegetarian = plant with a bit of dairy, pescatarian = plant and fish, fruitarian= only what is dropped from the tree, rawtarian = is vegan but only eating raw not cooked food.

Our food effects our health but also how we feel
The concept that you are what you eat was coined by Anthelme Brilliat-Savarin in 1816 or the idea that most of us are digging our own grave with our knife and fork, which is claimed to be an old English proverb are used to support different diets.

Neuropsychology and dietetics both confirm that what we eat can effect our health but we also now realise that what we eat can effect how we feel as in the book ‘food and mood’ by Amanda Gerry. For each of us the road to developing a diet that works for us is a very personal matter.

Understanding what we are eating
The idea of being vegan or vegetarian or whatever is a concept that is effected and swayed by morales, ideas, philosophies, science and even religion. One of the reasons that human beings have survived so successfully is that we have been prepared to eat anything and at times this has included each other. Our companions on our evolutionary path have been rats, pigs and dogs who likewise have been prepared to eat anything to survive. I think that the only times that a human being is actually eating appropriately is when they either enlightened or pregnant. When the pregnant woman feels the intense craving for a particular food she is in touch with and listening to her body. Most time people are eating with their mind and not their body. So, they end up giving their body what they think it should have rather than what it actually wants or needs. I suspect that is why we suffer so many vitamin and mineral deficiencies.

I have known many vegetarians and vegans, over the years, who have been miserable because they are living their life on the basis of ought rather than desire. I have no judgement of right and wrong in this regard. We are what we eat, but we are what we choose to eat.

I am reminded of the strict vegan meditator who suddenly, to her friends horror, started eating chicken when she was pregnant. She was listening to her body and providing it with what it needed rather than what she thought it should have.

Developing your own eating style
I was brought up as a meat eater, a standard meat and two veg diet. After leaving home I became vegetarian not really from choice but more to do with the fact that the situations I chose to live in were vegetarian and so it was for many years that I did not eat meat. Back in Britain I found that I was eating a white bread bacon sandwich and began to question what I was doing. To try and work this out for me. And on the basis that I had the opportunity I got a small holding and starting raising my own animals. Eventually there came the day when animals had to be slaughtered. I entered the reality of the meat economy in a big way and over the next few years slaughtered many hundreds if not thousands of animals. Finally I got to the point of realising that other beings do not really need to die in order for me to live. From there I went back to being a veggie. At times I have gone back to eating meat but over all I am a veggie and feel most comfortable that way. I don’t like milk, though I do have some cheese and the odd bit of fish.

Eggs are interesting for me as both chicken and ducks will produce eggs on a daily basis the majority of which are infertile. Theses birds will do this whether we eat the eggs or not. This raises the issue of how are animals kept and can it ever be ok to keep an animal in captivity for our benefit? Captive animals may include farm animals and those in zoos. However I find it hard to see the difference between keeping dogs and cats or horses. In every case where a human being takes control of the life of another being that being surrenders it’s identity to their owner or controller.

I find it very odd when a family of humans keep a dog as a valued member of the family. They will spend thousands on keeping it well and will fight anyone that threatens it. Then they will go home and eat a baby lamb and think nothing of it. How strange is the human mind that it can give the dog a value and that will look down on those societies that openly eat dogs and yet will happily eat a lamb or a calf.

Is it health, morality or environmental?
There is a mass of scientific evidence that would suggest that eating meat may not actually be that good for us and could in fact be making us ill and creating or encouraging cancers.

Is there a moral argument that as, we assume, the most intelligent animals on the planet we should be the custodians of all the other species and treat all living being equally.

The environmental argument is pretty unassailable. The amount of ground and resources that it takes to make a meat product rather than feeding the plants direct to the humans is ridiculous. On that sense meat production makes no sense.

I am not a food fascist and I am a cook. I prefer not to eat meat but if I came to your house and you had lovingly and inadvertently prepared a meat dish for me I would say grace and eat it with gratitude. The issue for each of us and our own development is about each of us understanding what we do and why we do it at all levels not just at the level of food. Our relationship with all earthlings and that include other people should be the focus of our awareness. From that point of view to be a real vegan would mean to treat all and everything with love and respect.

There are too many gurus and teachers propounding their own latest discovery or idea and expecting everyone else to go along with what they now see as ‘the truth’. That is true of politics, religion, diet, health, exercise, education… the list becomes endless. Just as the born again non smoker becomes a zealot so does the vegan, vegetarian, yogi, meditator and so on.

Listen to your inner voice
Listen to your consciousness, to you intuition and be true to yourself. Then you have a chance of living a sane life that makes sense for you and eventually for the world.

Take care and be happy

Sean x