Are These People Mad?

Toowoomba, Queensland

Recently I wrote about a metaphoric ocean of rage. Well today here's short post about a raging river - well, a creek to be more accurate. This amazing footage, shown in the video below, was taken by some young people in Toowoomba, west of Brisbane, Queensland, Australia, about 4 days ago at the height of the floods. It really does show the forces of nature in spectacular fashion. We humans are becoming increasingly dissociated from nature, but once in a while it taps us on the shoulder to remind us who is boss.

One of the most fascinating things about this video is the guy who chooses to move his car away from the creek bank, just as other cars are being swept away. Methinks he needs to get a little perspective! There he is risking his life to move the beloved 4-wheel drive, and he is carrying a fragile umbrella to keep the rain way! Priceless! I am not quite sure if he is a hero or an idiot. Right now I am inclined towards the latter. Of course as a spiritually minded person I have no judgment on the matter! ;-)

In something of an irony, that other kind of rage - or madness if you like - also showed up on the video, which became a viral hit attracting nearly a million hits a day. Sadly (considering the death and devastation caused by the floods) the comments section of the video became inundated with what I can only term hatred. Posters with a little too much time of their hands took this grim occasion to be a good opportunity to start an intercontinental bashing contest between Australians and Americans . I won't go into the details, as it is not necessary. The comments section was discontinued for a while, but I note they put them back up.

The best way to deal with internet projections is: walk away.

Here's the video, courtesy of "whitelightbringer" on YouTube. If you can't see the video below, click here.

Pushing Kids to the Edge

Amy Chua and daughter

Marcus T Anthony's new web site and blog can be found at: www.mind-futures.com.

I first went to teach in a cram school in Taiwan in 1999. The school was for preschoolers and primary aged students (3-7 year olds). Not long after I arrived, I was party to a conversation with Jean, the 40 year-old school director, and a another western teacher. Jean was a real tough task master, a typical “Chinese” mother who believed that drilling kids and working them as hard as possible was absolutely necessary to raise successful children. On that day I heard Jean commenting about the parents of a child from another school, whom she found “really strange”. Apparently those parents let the child do “whatever it felt like doing.” “They are just too strange”, she kept repeating.

I’ll never forget that, because Jean’s views on raising children are very different from mine. IAs a long-time teacher I know how important it is to  believe it is exercise discipline, but it is equally important to teach kids autonomy and the capacity to sense what is right for themselves. The reason I bring this little incident up is because I was reminded of it by something which appeared in the media these past few days.

Chinese-American mother Amy Chua created a genuine stir this week when she penned an article entitled “Why Chinese mothers are superior”, for the New York Times, and detailing what she believes is the ideal parenting style. She calls it “Chinese parenting”.

Amy Chua is a professor at Yale Law School and author of several books, including Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother. The book covers the same subject area as the article.

To say that Chua is a strict parent would be the understatement of the millennium. Her daughters Sophia and Louisa are carefully parented – some might say micromanaged. They are never allowed to do:

• attend a sleepover

• have a playdate

• be in a school play

• complain about not being in a school play

• watch TV or play computer games

• choose their own extracurricular activities

• get any grade less than an A

• not be the No. 1 student in every subject except gym and drama

• play any instrument other than the piano or violin

• not play the piano or violin. Click below to read more....       

Surfing the Ocean of Rage

I have been thinking of writing about the recent tragic events in Tucson, Arizona. Rob and Trish MacGreggor beat me to the punch on their synchronicity web site. Check it out for an interesting perspective.

I’d like to add what I consider to be a few poignant insights into the matter. As we all now know, congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords was shot at point blank range outside a convenience store in Tucson. A particularly tragic part of the proceedings was the death of nine-year-old Christina Taylor Green. Christina was born on the day of the 911 attack on New York, and was also featured in the book, Faces of Hope: Babies Born on 9/11. 

Some would call this irony, but was it actually synchronicity?

As an intuitive I have taken a look at the energy of the event, and I’d like to share something of what I’ve sensed.

Road to Bliss: Using Intuition to Buy or Read Books

 So many books, so little time!

 

If you are a person with a spiritual perspective on life, this short video blog should be very helpful to you. It outlines a very simple way to decide whether to buy/read a book or not. Wanting information to follow your Bliss? Look no further! 

Here's the link to the previous blog post I refer to in the video: Entanglement, the Next Big Thing".

The Consciousness of Skepticism

Behind die-hard skepticism lies a fear of loss of control, of the feminine, of annihilation and ultimately rage at the universe itself. Extreme skepticism is thus a projection.In this video I use a channeling process to connect with the consciousness of skepticism as a collective mind. Behind much of human behaviour, and lying embedded within all written, visual and verbal information there are consciousness fields which can influence perception. They are typically invisible and unconsciousness, but influence both the information being conveyed, and the way the perceiver receives that information. 

"Connecting with the field" is a process I learned from working with spiritual teachers in years gone by. You can learn more about it in my book Sage of Synchronicity.

Marcus

How close are we to seeing the end of science’s “psi taboo”?

How close are we to seeing the end of science’s “psi taboo”, and a more open attitude towards the so-called paranormal? Dean Radin has long argued that a breakthrough is about to occur in science, and that concepts such as ESP, clairvoyance, precognition and telekinesis will soon become accepted as legitimate and “real” objects of scientific investigation. I am not so sure, and the reacton to an academic article soon to be published this year in The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, have circulated widely among psychological researchers in recent weeks and “has generated a mixture of amusement and scorn”, according to an article in the New York Times.

The paper is authored by Cornell University professor Daryl J. Bem, and entitled Feeling the Future: Experimental Evidence for Anomalous Retroactive Influences on Cognition and Affect. It outlines results for experiments which attempt to gauge whether future events influence the mind before they actually happen. In one of the experiments. Bem gave 100 college students a memory test before they categoried a list of words (categorizing assist memory). The experiment found the students were significantly more likely to remember words that they practised later. The conclusion presented in the paper is as follows.

Why we are not ready for radical transparency

In a recent post I argued that as a collective, we are not ready for Julian Assange’s concept of “radical transparency.” As far as I can make out from what I have read of Assange, radical transparency involves the release of as much confidential government/corporate information as possible. With the current WikiLeaks documents, certain names and details have been removed to protect vulnerable individuals. Nonetheless, some names and individuals have been named, and Assange has been criticised for putting those people at risk.

Yet my concern about radical transparency is not so much to do with risking the release of personal information. My concern emerges from my own experience working with the spiritual realms of human knowledge. As an intuitive, I am able to access information within the psyches of individual people, and groups of people. Further, I have worked intimately with others who are well versed in Integrated Intelligence. So, what I am about to write is based on what I have learned from this intimate experience with the human psyches of others, both in spiritual circles, and with the general community.

Here is the bottom line. The typical person of today is simply not at a high enough level of spiritual/psychological maturity. Part of this involves the fact that the personal responsibility levels of most people in modern society is insufficient for them to be able to act with integrity when granted access to a greater degree of knowledge, including personal information of others, and other groups.

Just as one example, recently on the China Daily forum (China’s government sponsored English language newspaper’s discussion forum), one Chinese poster has been uploading documents which detail some of the abuses by American troops and military personally in Iraq and Afghanistan. Each post includes a generic denunciation of “The Anglos” – i.e. white people of English ancestry. One post concludes with the words, “Is there any single act low enough that these human scum will not sink to it?” These comments are clearly written about white people in general, not merely those engaging in the said acts in war zones.

Imagine then, what would happen if suddenly all details were released regarding abuses of power and authority around the world! Just think of all the world’s hot spots which could quickly degenerate into violence, as people of undeveloped spiritual maturity reacted to the data, at the whim of their egos.

Confusion, Information Overload and the Future of the Intuitive Mind

In my last post I wrote about the way that Integrated Intelligence can assist people in modern societies avoid being manipulated by the establishment - government and corporate power. In this post I am going to write about one of the most obvious characteristics of your average person in modern knowledge economies - confusion. This confusion stems from three interrelated problems – complexity, information overload, and meaninglessness. In today’s post I am going to talk about the way that having a well developed spiritual intuition can help us deal with this situation.

1.      The Complexity Problem

Steadily increasing complexity has been a long-term tendency over the last three centuries in capitalist societies. Academic Geoffrey Hogdson pointed out a decade ago that there has been a growing diversity of interactions between human beings, and between people and their technologies. New analytic problems are an inevitable scenario given the degree of innovation and change. Further, the nature and diffusion of knowledge creates difficulties in dealing with implicit, context-specific, and distinctive knowledge or skills.

In short, despite the benefits of technology-assisted automation, it’s getting harder to do your job.

Manipulation, Control, and the Spiritual Mind

Conscious Transparency: Control and manipulation

In my next few series of posts I am going to write about some of the ways that developing Integrated Intelligence, or INI  and conscious transparency can assist in your personal evolution, and that of society in general. Conscious transparency is the greater awareness of information both within and beyond one’s own mind, including the workings of the human ego (which tends to be deceptive). Each post will deal with a specific problem in work, education or living in today’s knowledge economy.

In this first post I am going to deal with an obvious feature of today’s hyper-capitalistic world: the manipulation and control by governments and corporations.

Within the knowledge economy, individuals are extensively and continually controlled and manipulated. There is an agenda to shape individuals to fit into the societal machine. As late educator James Moffett pointed out in The Universal Schoolhouse, this manipulation process often contradicts the desires and needs of the individual, and especially the calling of his/her spirit. Thus, the State and/or corporate power structures may suppress not only ego-centered drives, but spiritual ones also. While selfish behaviours (ego) might be considered negative, the latter spiritual urges may be seen as assisting in the overall evolution of consciousness in the society. There is therefore in modern societies an unintentional muffling of greater human and social development due to the system’s requirement for short-term control of the human ego

Education has become part of the consumerism and materialism of the modern age. The ‘corporate takeover’ of education can be traced back to a wider social problem. Critics have pointed to the powerful controlling influence of mainstream establishment culture David Loye equates this “Establishment” with the paradigm of the “Pseudo-Darwinian Mind”:

Arising during the twentieth century, this is the control of the masses and a widespread, passive, and compliant academic elite through the possession of television, publishing, and practically all other media by an economic and power elite, which finds in old-style survival of the fittest, selfishness uber alles Darwinism the legitimizing or excuse it proffers from and pays for in science (David Loye, from The Great Adventure).

Radical Transparency or Conscious Transparency?

Only intuition, resting on sympathetic understanding can lead to these laws, the daily effort comes from no deliberate intention or program, but straight from the heart.

Albert Einstein

In my recent post about Julian Assange’s idea of “radical transparency”, I stated that the concept has some degree of power, but that it will not free us from many of the hegemonies which restrict so much free thinking in modern society. I said that this was because our essential problem is not merely about information access, but about the way we are able to perceive reality itself. This mirrors Einstein’s oft-quoted statement that problems cannot be effectively solved at the same level of consciousness at which they are created. I believe that to really achieve radical transparency there is a requirement to begin to transcend ego-based consciousness, and for the broader community to activate Integrated Intelligence, or INI. My perception is that Julian Assange is still working at the same level of consciousness that he is trying to overthrow, so his potential to transform that level, that system is self-limited. 
 

In this post I will explain in more detail what true radical transparency would look like, if it included an advancement in consciousness as well as access to more information. However, to distinguish what I mean clearly from Assange’s radical transparency, I shall use the term conscious transparency.