For years I've been
seeing these horrendous reports and videos coming out of the USA of
police abusing their power. Breaking into peoples homes, shooting
pet dogs and preforming strip and cavity searches on innocent people
by the road side. The suggestion accompanying these is usually that
America is descending into being a fascist police state. Whist for
many reasons over the past dozen years it has certainly appeared that
way, I'm always also wondering if these kind of things have always
gone on, it's just now everyone carries a camera around with them and
abusive incidents find there way on to youtube, so we're all more
aware of it.
Well according to
lawyer and author John Whitehead the answer is no, these kind of
abuses have vastly increased in recent years, as the police have been
militarised there's been a three thousand percent increase in swat
team raids since the early 1980's. These can result in innocent
people, and even children, being murdered in their own homes. In
this interview with Tom Wood's, Mr. Whitehead details some of the
more extreme examples he's come across, including one of a man who
was committed to a mental institution for writing anti-Obama posts on
Facebook! He also questions why exactly the Department of Homeland
Security have felt the need recently to buy over one billion hollow
point bullets. Scary stuff indeed.
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Roger Stone is a
political strategist for the Republican party who worked on the
Presidential campaigns of Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and both of the
Bush's. He was at the centre of the infamous incident in Florida in
the year 2000, preventing the recount that could have seen Al Gore
elected President. He spent thirty years at the heart of the
American political establishment and has just authored a book
claiming that Lyndon B. Johnson was the central figure in the plot to
kill John F. Kennedy.
Whilst no one could
accuse Mr. Stone of being a particularly honest or trustworthy man
(just watch the interview to see why), given his position his views
on the assassination of John F. Kennedy are certainly worth listening
to. His frank admissions of the dirty tricks that go on in U.S.
Presidential elections is also eye opening to say the least!
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I've been away from
blogging for a while working on some writing and other projects, also
I ran out of things I wanted to rant about, but they've started to
build up again so I'm back!
Let's re-kick off with
this Conscious TV interview from 2010 with philosopher Timothy Freke. Tim is discussing the exploration of consciousness through the
practice of meditation and for me it's one of the most enlightening
discourses I've comes across on the subject.
Tim describes
meditation as the act of becoming 'conscious that you are conscious',
turning awareness away from the world and back in on itself to become
aware of the thing that is aware. He then compares this to entering
the relaxed and peaceful state of deep sleep, but doing so
consciously. And this is what the whole thing about watching the
breath is for, by keeping some of our attention anchored in the world
we don't fall off the cliff entirely into unconscious sleep.
The relationship
between the meditative state and the sleep state is one that I feel
there's great value in expanding upon. Everyone is already an expert
at falling asleep and therefore it's a great starting point to
explain meditation. There is also a paradox that I wrestled with for
years regarding meditation, in that it seemed to me to be inherently
contradictory that by sitting and doing something I could enter a
state of non-doing. But I encounter this same contradiction every
night when I say 'I am going to sleep'. Who is going to do this? The 'me' that is carrying this task out disappears at some point into
the darkness of unconsciousness. And yet, this is a contradiction
that I and everybody else is completely comfortable with! It's only
when we encounter the same contradiction in meditation that we trip
ourselves up.
What I do now in my own
practice is sit and spend a minute or so 'anchoring' myself in my
breath or bodily sensations, essentially moving my awareness out into
the world. I then just allow myself to fall asleep, allow my
awareness to sink back into that deep conscious place that feels like
it exists in the back of my head. When I feel myself sinking into
that, I start to moment by moment alternate my awareness between
extending forwards into the world and falling backwards into deep
consciousness. Between the dream and the dreamer. I quite often do
this by extending outwards on the in breath and falling backwards on
the out breath. It really does feel quite amazing, like being deep
asleep and wide awake at the same time, having that relaxation but
also an alertness.
This is distinct from
the 'self enquiry' practices where one contemplates a question such
as 'who am I?' in order to peel back the layers and reveal our still
conscious centre. I'm not against this practice, I think it really
does shake up our concepts of self as being identified with
thought, I find that I am not that! But I find that by doing this I
become aware of a deeper field of consciousness without really
sinking into it, I still experience myself in the centre of my head
look into this deep field. What I'm talking about is letting go of
the sense of self and falling into the deep conscious field where by
identification with it rather than the cognitive mind automatically arises. That could sound rather esoteric and difficult but not if I think of
it as being just the same as falling asleep!
Note - I'm aware that this is probably not the clearest piece of blogging I've ever done, you'll probably need to know something of the subject matter already to have a clue what I'm going on about. I'm hoping to write more in the future in a way that makes these kind of concepts more accessible.
You can find out more about Tim Freke, his books and seminars at -
