A Noble Life, A Noble Death

This is the shortest post I am ever going to make, but this is truly worth sharing. It's a video made by an 18 year old boy named Ben Breedlove. Ben died on Christmas Day from a chronic heart condition. This is a video he made before he died. It's something really worth watching, and sharing. No need to write more, as Ben says it all. (Part one is at the bottom, part two appears first).

Many blesssings for the New Year.

Marcus

Light, Chapter 29: The First Time

Light, Chapter 29: The First Time

You can read the rest of the chapter here: Here's a short extract.

“Can you acknowledge any of that, Greg?” Julie smiled.       

I sighed. “Sure. I’m a wimp and I know it.”       

“Don’t beat yourself up. We are simply being transparent here. It’s important not to take this personally.” She smiled gently at me. She then addressed the group.

“Each of us is here on earth at this time to take absolute responsibility for our energy. That’s part of the deal. That is what God is asking us to do, and it’s part of what Journey of Light is all about.” Then she turned to me again. “I’d just like to thank you for coming today, Greg.” Her smile was soft, her face suddenly taking on the look of a young woman, and quite a pretty one at that. “It isn’t easy to do this kind of work. It really does take guts.” I looked at her, and then around the room. Everyone was looking at me, but the faces were soft, smiling. They accepted me. The sense of fear that had possessed me ever since I had entered the room began to abate.

Intuitive Profiles: Vaclav Havel

More intuitive profiles and intuitive reviews can be found here.

 

More than any other human being in the modern age, playwright, human-rights activist and former president of the Czech Republic, Vaclav Havel was a Leader-Sage. A Leader-Sage leads not merely from the fragmented ego state, but is able to tap into a greater, transcendent intelligence, an Integrated Intelligence.

Havel epitomised three vital aspects of the human archetype: conscience, courage and compassion. These are three qualities that are badly needed in today’s world, in today’s leaders.

Vaclan Havel spent five years in jail under the Communist regime in his home country. As a playwright, his plays were not only banned, he was forbidden to leave the country. His ideas and ideals played a key role in the collapse of Communism in Europe.  He received more honours and awards than I could possibly mention here, mostly associated with his work related to human rights. He was once nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.

Vaclav Havel is revered also by the small clique of dissidents and democracy activists in China today. He nominated jailed Chinese human rights campaigner and democracy activist Liu Xiaobo for the Nobel Prize, which he subsequently won. For this reason, Beijing was not Havel’s greatest fan. Notable was the contrasting reaction by Beijing at the recent deaths of two world leaders. They expressed deep sadness at the passing of North Koreas’ Kim Jong Il, calling him “a great leader”. They were utterly silent at the passing of Havel.

My admiration for Havel, however, is not merely in relation to his political and social work. It was his deep understanding of this unique moment in history that stands out above all, in my mind. He understood well that the modernist (scientific) and postmodern (relativistic) visions of world and cosmos are both flawed and impoverished. They do not address the true depth of human experience.  This is best stated by Havel himself, in a talk he gave in 1995, and which was published in the Futurist, the World Future Society’s magazine.

The Intuitive Profiles: Christopher Hitchens

More intuitive profiles and intuitive reviews can be found here.

Author and social commentator Christopher Hitchens passed away on December 15th. As an intuitive I found him to be very interesting individual (besides being a futurist I am also a spiritual counselor). He represents a character archetype of the modern age: the fractured man. I saw an interview with him last night on BBC World news, and so was able to gain a stronger sense of who he was. I am going to share some of the insights I gleaned from his psyche, and why I think they are important to appreciate. You might note that I use the present tense when I write about his psyche. That is because death does not extinguish the record of that energy, and as far as I can tell it survives death.

Although he had a long career as an author and journalist, Hitchens became well known in recent years for his book God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. The book both attacks religion and champions science-based reason. It also rejects Eastern mystical traditions like Buddhism. Hitchens was a witty and often virulent rhetorician who made no attempt to steer down the middle road of political correctness.

The most notable feature of Hitchens’ consciousness is his bloody-minded refusal to surrender. The human impulse to fight is biologically wired into us. One of the unfortunate side effects of this is that it manifests in a negative way when it comes to transcending ego-based consciousness. The machinations of the ego tend to get projected out onto the world, and very strongly in Hitchens’ case. The essence of it is as follows.

No! I’m not going to do it surrender.. I am in control! You will not destroy me! I will destroy you! I am right! I know best. I am right, and you are wrong. I am the One! I am God! You are primitive! (to Muslims and fundamentalists). We have to fight! Fight them! Wipe them out! We cannot relax until they are all gone. Never let them win. This is a fight for reason, for freedom, for truth over lies! Fuck them!

The Transhuman Agenda

Last weekend I attended the Humanity Plus conference in Hong Kong. This was essentially a conference for transhumanists, although it also featured a good diversity of other presenters. The organisers of the conference were well intentioned, and many share similar ideas about mind and consciousness to my own. This post is not about them, so the following observations are not directed at them. But many of the invited speakers, who came from all over the world, were of an entirely different ilk.

Put simply, transhumanism is the idea that we will one day (hopefully soon) be able to upload our minds onto computers and live forever. Perhaps the most famous exponent of this idea is Ray Kurzweil, who in his book The Singularity is Near maintains that we will be able to reverse engineer the brain to create conscious machines; and then we can merge with them. Kurzweil was not at the conference, but there were a large number of other such transhumanists present.

I came away from the conference with my perspective on transhumanism largely unchanged. There are both technical and psycho-spiritual issues I have with the movement.

Light Ch 28: The Journey of Light

Light. Chapter 28: The Journey of Light

 
I describe my online novel Light as “semi-autobiographical”. Many of the 'paranormal' things in the book actually happened to me. The one described in this latest chapter is one of those real events.

Not everything described in the novel  happened literally, but many ‘events’ occurred in a general sense, or alternatively in psychic space. For example, in Chapter 15 the main character, Greg Marks, is struck by lightning, and has a near death experience.  I have never had a near death experience. But I have had many dreams of being struck by lightning, and it represents a blast of spiritual energy or light passing into the body, which I definitely have experienced many times. The account of leaving the body, as described in the chapter, is taken from many out of body experiences I have had over many years. Further, quite a few of the images that Greg witnesses in this chapter are quite literally visionary images which I have experienced during meditation or dreaming. For example, the image of tornadoes is a recurring one, and they represent a convergence of dark, powerful, destructive psychic energies. The hearing of the voice from a disembodied being is also a common one I have experienced many times.

In short, I am not just making all this up, and it is constructed from realities which are very real for me.

The book is fictional in the sense that most of the trivial conversational details did not occur. It also packs about twenty years of life experiences into a short time frame. I did work with a spiritual group, similar to the one depicted in the novel, but details are changed to protect the privacy of the said individuals. 

The main character is not me precisely, but is probably more me than not. I’m a bit too boring to use as the protagonist! 

The encounter with the spiritual guide, as described in this latest chapter, is pretty much word for word accurate of such an experience I had, only at the age of about 26. I referred to this incident in Discover Your Soul Template.

Here’s a short extract from the chapter.

Blessings,

Marcus

I don’t think I had been asleep more than a few minutes when I became aware of her standing there. She was a woman of youngish appearance, with long flowing dark hair. She was standing beside the bed, looking at me intently. I say I ‘saw’ her, but it was not with my eyes that I was looking. After all, I was asleep - or almost asleep - and my eyes were closed. I could feel her gentle hands moving above me, gentle, caressing me. They were softer, more motherly than any mother I had ever known in my childhood. There was a soft light emerging from her head, arms and body. An energy of tender love filled the room. She began to speak, not so much with words, as with thoughts.

“There is much hurt in you, although you do not know it yet. There is much healing for you to do.”

I listened. There was nothing to say, nothing I should say. Nothing I could say. There was merely her grace, and I was not required to respond. That is something that I just knew. She continued to move her hands above my body, centering around my chest and abdomen. I knew that she was helping me heal.

“You are only using three per cent of your mind at present.”

There were no more words than that, but there came the understanding that there was much more that I could do to expand my mind, my consciousness. I lay there, allowing her peaceful energy to fill me. There was peace.