Writings on the wall

I was out for a run the other day when I had a minor incident with two women and a pram. They were walking along, one of them pushing the pram, and I approached from the opposite direction in a place where it was impossible to leave the footpath because a handrail and some trees hemmed me in on the roadway side. The women had space between them but they didn’t move closer together, so as I reached them I was forced to stop and stand to the side to let them past. It was annoying, in a minor way, and I ran on thinking that they had been a little rude not to make room for me.

What do you do in a situation like that? I find myself in a few thought processes, some of which are more helpful than others.

1. Justifying my bad feelings by criticising their actions.
2. Calculating what I could have done differently to avoid the situation.
3. Wondering what was going on in their day to make them act in that way.
4. Paying attention to how exactly the bad feelings arose in my mind in response to the event.
5. Watching the effects of the bad feelings and noticing how they gradually dissipate.

What I rarely do, simply because I don’t have the presence of mind at the time, is to retain a sense of proportion. The idea that the incident is simply unimportant doesn’t dawn on me until I’ve let go of the flash of anger or frustration which arose.

I like to think of Charlotte Joko Beck’s analogy. Feelings, good or bad, are going to visit your mind from time to time. Sit them down in the parlour and give them a cup of tea. When they try to involve you in their dramas listen politely, like a good host, but don’t engage with them in their gossip. Before long they will leave, and from time to time you will have other visitors.

Emotions like joy and sadness are the foundation of life, however. I welcome these rather more with open arms, and enjoy their company. Or rather, I don’t always enjoy the company of sadness, but I respect it and recognise its value in my life. Sometimes I recoil from it in spite of myself, which I think of as a mistake because that is likely to cause it to return in disguise.

As much as I try to be welcoming I’m not as open-hearted a host to most other feelings, because I suspect them of bringing along an agenda. Other feelings are often pushy, tricksy, or argumentative. They make bad guests. What’s more they’re often not there on their own behalf, but instead speak for secretive or manipulative emotions like shame and anger. Unmasking the real visitor can take patience and careful observation. Take my frustration with pram lady – careful thought made me consider the possibility that my real visitor was guilt at being inconsiderate to a grieving friend recently.

So how would I like to respond next time a small irritation arises? With compassion. With humor. At the very least with a sense of proportion. The small things are practise for the big things, I reckon. Oh and I’d really like to not take life so bloody seriously!

So long ago that it seems like a whole different life, I was a school teacher. It began to seem futile, though, for two reasons. In the first place I don’t really have the gift, but primarily it was because I was getting kids who had been through the whole of high school learning to be quiet, don’t ask, and don’t think… and now I was supposed to teach them computing. Which is all about lateral thinking and problem solving and other skills diametrically opposed to their whole career in the system.

Or perhaps it was just me. In any case after a few years I decided on a change, and on the principle that a change is as good as a holiday I got a job working for M., an Australian ex-patriate who lived in Hong Kong and made his money betting on horse races.

So I turned up at his door on the 23rd floor of a tower block in a suburb of a hundred identical blocks. The suburb, the station, the shopping centre surrounding the station, and pretty much everything else in sight were named for and built by the corporation who owned the plane I’d flown in on. Hong Kong is wonderfully, utterly, dirty and richly complex city – but it turned out that M. lived in the plastic version. It was a three bedroom apartment and he was intending that I would live in the spare.

Given the price of rentals in Hong Kong I was happy enough to go along with this, even though it meant that M. was going to bother me day and night about his plans and ideas to do with betting and everything else. And besides, the other inhabitant of the apartment was M’s beautiful, warm, charming, motherly, and sorely oppressed Fillipina girlfriend, whom I instantly liked. She did his washing and cleaning, most of the cooking, provided companionship, and pawned the gifts he gave her to send every spare dollar she could manage home to her destitute family in Manila.

I loved her but I was worried and sad about their relationship. On my first night in the city M. took us out to his regular club, which turned out to be the most popular bar of the moment for Hong Kong’s huge Fillipina population. Generally they worked as amahs, but the bar was full of the feeling that a sugar daddy of some kind was a huge advantage. The girls clustered around M. and they clustered around me for a little while too, despite my callow youth. When this became a little too awkward I mentioned my poverty and they left me alone. This rather shocked M., who wasn’t sure if I was crazy or simply naïve. He seemed to regularly take advantage of the girls’ poverty and hope, and that of their families, by inviting them back to his place for drug fuelled orgies. His girlfriend accepted the situation with a degree of resignation, and but told me privately that she expected to have saved enough by the end of the year, or perhaps the next, to buy a cafe in Manila and leave him.

Every apartment in Hong Kong has a small dingy bedroom at the back, without furnishing or air conditioning, for the amah. I was there before reunification and I have no idea how much this has changed since that time, but it was an important contribution to the city’s economy. Every amah who cleaned and cooked and minded children for minimum wage represented a Hong Kong housewife who could now go out to work and earn the family three times as much. I didn’t realise at the time but I was looking at an early and effective form of labour globalization.

But I was also looking, in the case of M., at a situation that just felt so wrong and exploitative. The girls were desperate for a way out of their no future minimum wage jobs, and M. took full advantage in the most sleazy way. I didn’t stick around to see his parties – although I couldn’t change anything I sure couldn’t stand being part of it. As for M., last thing I heard he’d done very well on speculating against the Japanese property market, but I remember him as the slimy, wealthy, loud Australian with this arms around three Filipinas who hoped against hope that he was their ticket out of poverty.

I hope his girlfriend is ok.

This morning I happened upon a blog post by a friend, quoting this horoscope:

Is the universe inherently friendly to human beings? The answer’s got to either be yes or no. It can’t be in between. [...] So then isn’t it stupid and self-destructive to live your life as if the universe is unfriendly? Doing so tends to cast a pall over everything. But if on the other hand you proceed on the hypothesis that the universe is friendly, you’re inclined to interpret everything that occurs as a gift, however challenging it may be to figure out its purpose at first. Your assignment this week, should you choose to accept it, is to live as if the latter theory were true. – Gemini

I don’t agree with the logic here. As my friend pointed out, it’s not either/or and putting it in this way is to anthropomorphise unnecessarily. Just the same the piece has particular meaning for me at the moment – two recent stories (one here) have reminded me that what amounts to real evil can exist in the world, so the idea behind the question posed above is one that’s been on my mind.

So:

Is the universe inherently friendly to human beings?

I think it is not friendly, especially not to the individual seen as an “ego-self” which is our normal point of view. But I think it is loving, to the selfless part of ourselves. Loving is far different (and better) than friendly. It involves more real joy and communion, but it also involves real sadness too.

Living in this truth, of a loving universe which cares nothing for your ego and ego-attachments, is both wonderful and terrifying. Everything is a gift, a sacred gift from heart to heart. Pain is real, sadness is real, joy and love are real.

I would love to live in complete awareness of this.

I grew up in a loving but touch-phobic household. My parents’ generation were like that: I remember hearing Peter Cundall say that he liked the idea of hugging but it wasn’t for him and he’d just as soon that people who were into such things left him out of it. My mother feels much the same but she has for many years made the effort to cope because she knows how important it is to me. My own family is very much into hugs, something we noticed recently as we were joined by a Japanese exchange student who was a little less used to such contact.

In fact touch has always been important to human beings. Our next door neighbours spent six months in the Trobriand islands planting trees. Their eleven year old daughter didn’t enjoy the experience but their son, who was five years younger had a fantastic time, and was immediately adopted by the local people. He went everywhere with them and did everything with them. Unlike his sister he didn’t get nits, either, whereas she was plagued by them. The reason became apparent when the family returned home and the boy’s headlice population exploded. Before then he had been the subject of constant de-lousing by all the people around him.

This grooming was not only essential for physical health but for the mental and social health of the community and it’s members. It let people know they belonged and were valued in a way which goes deeper than words. There’s a reason “lousy” is a term of derision, and it goes back to the days when it was only the social outcast whose lice grew unchecked. We do have some socially acceptable replacements for this. Women do one another’s hair. Men pound each others’ backs and shake hands. But the Puritan fear of intimacy has cast its pall over all forms of physical contact and these vestiges are not enough, in my opinion.

For one thing, lack of casual platonic contact with the opposite sex (or even the same sex, excepting perhaps the sports field) has sexualised physical contact. People who are used to hugging quickly get past this barrier, but others can find such touch either intrusive in a sexual way or else the cause of unwanted sexual feelings. Then again there are sleazy people who use ostensibly platonic contact in an intentionally sexual way, something which is rarely lost on their victims even when there is no overtly improper behaviour involved.

It’s very important to be respectful of others’ need for personal space. People come from a diversity of cultural and personal backgrounds. Just the same I think it’s would be very unfortunate if culturally imposed tabus based in ancient self-hating religious dogma¹ were to keep us from a natural expression of our shared humanity and care for one another.

Sometimes I look at the uptight, stressed out, and distant figures on the public stage and I just think – someone give that man a hug!

1. Ok that’s an offensive way to put it I admit! I’m talking about the idea that the body and all the physical is polluted, or potentially polluted, by sin. You may have guessed by now that I disagree most strongly with this.

The valley spirit never dies
Call it the mystery, the woman.

Taoists use the metaphor of gu shen, “the valley spirit.” A valley supports life, feeds the animals who live there and provides fertile earth for agriculture. It can do this only because it is empty. It accepts the flow of the river because it is most low and most humble. It receives the warmth of the sun because it is wide and not filled with anything to block the light. It brings forth life because it supports all who come to it. – Deng Ming-Dao, Scholar Warrior, p. 182

We have a society which celebrates action. We use bulldozers to tear down mountains and armies to make us safe. It’s a macho world out there! We’ve also seen, in every aspect of life, the problems that are caused by letting that approach run unchecked. In Romancing the sword I advanced the idea that yang energy, as embodied in it’s best aspect – the warrior spirit in service of love – is a valuable part of the human psyche and of and society. This is a sequel of sorts, about how to recognise and make good use of the yin.

There’s a stereotype we all know well: the macho guy who won’t allow his feelings to show. He’s tough and hard-bitten, responding to every challenge impassively by means of either intellect or force. Think of Dirty Harry, James Bond, and Bush on the flight deck. That, to me, is yang gone all wrong. It makes me sad that a show about a rich guy with a bad comb-over who yells at people and fires them should be a ratings hit. It makes me doubly sad that women who want to reach positions of real power (think Margaret Thatcher!) have to take on the worst aspects of the men they are replacing.

An aside:

This unpleasant side to masculinity is also a matter of dominance – a power trip. Of course it’s the weakest kind of power, that of the bully and the braggart. And by the way the yin power trip is to use submission, with manifestations including the snag. But please note I mean the social use of these energies not the BDSM subculture.

To have life and juice the macho yang energy must transform so as to be founded on heart. Even Hollywood usually recognises this. It gives its heroes a softer side. It engages their violence in the service of an altruistic cause. Even the Terminator is trying to save someone’s mother, and he’s the ultimate robot. When that happens it doesn’t make the guy less macho. Our culture, on the other hand, makes men very afraid to show their feelings – it portrays sensitivity and compassion as weakness. To be blunt, in the west only girly men care.

Which is just crazy. A person with a closed heart is either a robot or a demon, because to be fully human is to feel and to love. Warriors throughout history wrote poetry and went to battle on behalf of their beloved. Walling off your feelings and living the macho stereotype is rigid and ultimately boring for the people on both sides of that wall. The person who’s in touch with his feelings, on the other hand, is sexy! He’s also, ultimately, far more powerful because he knows what he wants and why he wants it.

It’s obvious when you think about it. Flexible is stronger than brittle. Humility endures where pride is brought down. Acceptance receives all that life offers.

But yin can go wrong too! At its worst it is deceptive, manipulative, and cruel. As with the warrior spirit, to be alive and succulent the valley spirit needs heart. Where you see passive-agression, malign gossip, or a web of meanness and fear it can be a sign of unbalanced yin. Typically it’s harder to recognise and harder to fix. Openness and courage reconnect with love – let the sun shine in.

There are three things here: yang, yin, and the heart-based admixture of the two which is the great mystery – love.

For me, the process of opening up my softer side started simply from taking notice of priorities. I began to realise that what made me happy were the people I cared about, and that that connection was based on all the things I liked to keep locked up tight: emotions, sensitivity, love. Like cracks in a dam wall, the more these things get through the more they tear down the wall, so there’s no going back. But who would want to? There’s a whole world out there and it’s just wonderful, full of all the sensations, all the joy and all the sadness of life. This is what I call the juice and it’s what makes life worthwhile.

So what stops people being like this all the time? It’s not just culture, although our society strongly reinforces a closed off mindset.

An aside:

Actually I tend to think of much of what we spend our lives doing and caring about as a sort of displacement activity from the pain of keeping ourselves so locked up. I remember a cruel experiment where baby monkeys were separated from their mothers and therefore their mother’s teats. Given a choice between two dolls in substitute – one metal but with a milk bottle attached, the other furry but without food – the monkeys chose the furry doll without exception, even that poor simalcrum of love being more important than physical sustenance.

We surround ourselves with entertainment and shiny toys. We pursue fame and money. We do anything, however destructive, to forget that what we truly desire is to open our hearts and care. Few things are so sad as to see a person on his deathbed, clinging to hatreds and possessions and petty pride.

To my mind it is fear which keeps us apart and disconnected. Fear of vulnerability, of being hurt or rejected or mocked for our feelings. And fear of the loss and sadness which is inevitably part of caring. I’ve mentioned how I believe this works – and about the anger and pride and vanity which calcify around the pain and keep it safe. But yin and yang both turn warped and evil when used defensively, without heart. Softness, openness, and love energise them in quite a different way, and together they’re an unstoppable magic. It’s like water on stone, if the water freezes and thaws a mountain can be made rubble in no time. That’s the true potential of a human – with an open heart and unafraid of either softness or strength.

Both men and women need to be connected to their yin and their yang sides, and most of all they need to energise both from an open heart.

Knowing man
and staying woman
be the riverbed of the world.
Being the world's riverbed
of eternal unfailing power
is to go back again to be newborn.

  ÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â‚¬Å“ Tao Te Ching (Le Guin)

If you have ever had a horse it’s worth paying attention to what it’s ever been spooked by. Suppose there was a blue car which tooted it’s horn and gave the animal a shock. Chances are anything which reminds it of that event will make it startle for years afterwards. Are horses colourblind? They are definitely scaredy cats! But humans are the same – we all seem to have a collection of deep seated fears we carry around like old and tender wounds.

Quite unconsciously we protect them, physically and mentally, from anything which might awaken memory of the pain. I believe that mind and body are so intertwined as to be in some fashion different expressions of the same thing, the same being. Certainly it’s possible to see some of these fears in a person’s posture. You may notice a person with tension through her chest and shoulder, or who walks in a way which keeps her arm or pelvis rigid.

But what is it which really makes us afraid? Most people, most of the time, remind me somewhat of J. Alfred Prufrock:

In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.	
 
And indeed there will be time	
To wonder, “Do I dare?” and, “Do I dare?”	
Time to turn back and descend the stair,	
With a bald spot in the middle of my hair–
[They will say: “How his hair is growing thin!”]	
My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin,	
My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin—	
[They will say: “But how his arms and legs are thin!”]	
Do I dare
Disturb the universe?	
In a minute there is time	
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.	
 
For I have known them all already, known them all:—	
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;	
I know the voices dying with a dying fall	
Beneath the music from a farther room.	
  So how should I presume?	

Caution becomes a habit – we protect ourselves from the slightest, painful, disturbance of our rigidity. Nothing must shake us up because if shaken, our hearts might be stirred to open and the tender parts revealed. The choice is Prufrock’s: pain, ridicule and an uncertain chance of meaning, against a lifetime of regret.

Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?	
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.	
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.	
 
I do not think that they will sing to me.
 
I have seen them riding seaward on the waves	
Combing the white hair of the waves blown back	
When the wind blows the water white and black.	
 
We have lingered in the chambers of the sea	
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

Listen to me. Loosen the ties around your heart and ask it! Tell it you will follow it’s guidance, endure with it. As it trusts you, and as you trust it, the sap of life will rise.

It will be awful, frightening, and entirely chaotic. Many people around you will feel personally threatened, as if the very idea of such transgression must be punished lest they themselves feel free to contemplate it. Old fears will conspire to overwhelm. Your head will fill with reasons to step back. Most people do. All their lives they remember that moment of bright promise and the sense of freedom. But with courage and patience and forgiveness the fear subsides and the chaos becomes joy.

Each human being has enormous potential. We can build, create, invent, nurture, hold-fast. It sounds like a cliché but most limits are those we impose on ourselves. In the worst situation a person’s anger or other negative emotion leads to such desperation that the shackles are removed. But when safety is abandoned in the service of the heart, the result is wonderful! Such a person is a powerhouse and kindles inspiration in those she meets. This is freedom, experiencing the reality of sadness and joy. This is love. A human voice which sings with mermaids!

NB: I wrote this in honour of a friend who showed enormous courage recently in taking on a challenge well outside her comfort zone. My respect and love to her.

What can I give you?

The strength to face your fears? You have it. You know the trick of it: that fear cannot prevent you. When the monsters at the top of the stairs lurk with absolute certainty just within the darkness, you take the next step because you will.

Respect for your body? You make this choice. When your spirit withdraws to itself, and when you feel betrayed, then you take your time and your determination and your firm kindness. You will be reconciled.

A generous heart? Will you unlace it’s strings? Like any human you have been hurt before and know the cost. You do not pull them tight when you recoil, if you will bear the pain.

You know your mind if you will know it. You give, if you will put aside fear and desire. You have all around you the great gift. All the world embraces you, if you will.

I can give you one solace and one joy. When you would forget, when you would seek false comfort, I will remind you. All the world embraces you, if you will. I embrace you, if you will.

A friend of mine is a multi-millionaire. I’ve known him since high school and he was at that time dirt poor. He’s bright, though, and he had a good idea and worked amazingly hard turning it into a fortune. Now he owns a winery and buys fascinating ancient artifacts and fast cars.

So a particular conversation sticks in my mind. It took place as we were cleaning up rubbish. His opinion was that it was a pity life still contained the boring and mundane bits like carrying plastic sacks out to a bin. My opinion was that there was no way to enjoy life if you couldn’t find pleasure in taking out the trash.

Naturally it occurred to both of us that it was just as well I wasn’t dependent on expensive toys for a good time, since I couldn’t actually afford them.

But there’s more to it than sour grapes or making the best of things (whichever is your point of view). D. is a person of some integrity. He makes an effort to invest in projects which will benefit society, especially renewable energy. He has his collection of antiquities professionally curated and shows them, at no entrance cost, in a museum he has constructed. He loves and cares for his child. Here’s someone, then, who has unlimited potential and is neither selfish nor crazy. What makes him happy?

The human brain is built for survival rather than contentment. It responds to changes in stimuli more strongly than to stimuli which remain constant. No matter how pleasurable, if the sensation remains the same the experience dulls.

As his wealth increased, D. spent his time and energy on women and material posessions. The cars and houses were of fleeting interest. His personal relationships were too shallow to be very rewarding. He has lasting memories and amazing stories from his travels, as well as an abiding interest in his museum. It’s not entirely clearcut – his friendships with ex-partners have deepened with time and become solid and meaningful. He gets pleasure from this, from guiding his businesses in a positive direction, and from developing his museum and art collection. What he enjoys most in life is his child.

I’m not an unbiased observer of D’s situation. I’ve seen him make himself increasingly unhappy over a number of years by chasing the next high, whether it’s the next pretty girl or the next expensive dinner or admiration of his peers in the business world. His life at one point was an emotional rollercoaster which was leaving him roughed up and desperate for the next high point. What allowed him to pull it all together was that he genuinely cares about people, and when he got past chasing excitement that began to predominate.

Years ago I came across an idea which makes this plain. Think of yourself on your deathbed. As you look back on your life, what will you remember most strongly? I’ve met a few people in this situation, and what they talk about most are the people they have loved and cared for. If they have regrets it’s that they did not love more deeply, or that they did not reconcile with an old friend with whom they’d fallen out.

In the calm which comes from re-orienting priorities in this way, the beauty of the world becomes apparent, and the senses are enlivened. Chasing highs means anticipation of the next one, the payoff, and a period of dullness which is later replaced again by anticipation. It’s always being hungry and never living in the moment. It’s addictive and it unsatisfying. Increasing hunger for increasingly disappointing highs leads to the destruction of one’s relationships. Without this there is peace, and life and relationships become more healthy. The small things start to matter. That’s not saying there’s any problem with doing things because they’re fun or with having material possessions. No one gains from a hair shirt. The process is actually just a gentle realignment of reality which loosens the addictive hold of the dopamine rush.

This is getting back to D. and I taking out the garbage. If your purpose in doing something is to get it over with, then it’s no fun. If you live in anticipation of the pleasure you can get from something else, then “this” is never more than an impediment. But if you let all that go, and do each thing you do wholeheartedly, then something quite wonderful emerges.

Nothing is really a hassle. Garbage is a bag and a walk in the evening air. Washing up is a particular pleasure (I don’t own a dishwasher for this very reason). Each cup of tea is a ceremony. All around us and in every moment lives the god(ess) of small things.

Photo: Dream, by Terrii ©2006

The excellent Charlotte Joko Beck wrote something I’ve read many times, but it turns out I’ve never quite taken it in. It’s from Nothing Special Chapter 3, p. 84

In everyday terms, the world is divided into subjects and objects. […] Yet intuitively we know that we are not separate from the world and that the subject-object division is an illusion. …

We see the objects of the world as the source of our problems: you are my problem, my work is my problem, my chair is my problem. (When I see myself as my problem, I have made myself into an object.) So we run from objects we perceive as problems and seek objects we perceive as non-problems. From this point of view the world consists of me and the things that please or don’t please me.

Wow, is the When I see myself as my problem I have made myself into an object a clear shaft of sunlight! I don’t know about you but I’m always thinking of myself as a car which you might take to the mechanic. Fix the brakes, and I think it’s leaking some oil. The problem is that at that point you’ve become the driver of the car – the subjective point of view is hidden but it’s still there.

With clear thinking and mediation it’s possible to see that all these “objects” have no intrinsic nature. What is a chair? That collection of wood and screws and glue? Sure it will hold you up if you sit on it but think about it the parts and where’s the chair gone? Follow that through and the world is full of stuff but “objects” are lacking. Ok yes that’s really simplistic. But there are a whole forest of other approaches, most of which can’t easily be described in words, and each eventually strips out the meaning from “object”.

What about me, the subject? The same methods empty the object “me” – but this is Charlotte’s wonderful contribution: the subject is hiding like the driver of the car. I’m still the one observing that there is no “self”. All objects including the self have dissolved, but the subject is still hiding out there. The result is something I’ve seen pretty often. The practitioner feels calm and powerful, until the real world intervenes. Then the lurking ego provides self-justification through whatever increasingly bizarre logic is required to “justify” the bad behavior.

The alternative is to move away from subject/object modes of thought altogether. Direct experience of reality is just experience. Just being. There is not a person doing the experiencing and a thing being experienced. It’s harder to say than to do! When you put your hand under the hot tap by mistake you are involved in a moment of (intense) experience. You pull your hand away and only then say “ow, I burnt my hand.” Actually it is only then that the sensation resolves as pain, too.

Meditation is a useful tool, but there is a temptation to think of it as “special”. Moving from thinking in your head, the subject/object thinking, to experiencing being and responding – this is the most natural thing in the world, if you let yourself do it. It takes practice and perseverance to get the trick, and if you’re like me you will constantly find yourself in headspaces where it seems impossible to let go of the “overthinking” mind. So here’s my tip for the best way to break out of such bad habits: do something for someone else.

The subject object divide is all built on a self-centred mindset. That’s just naturally because a stance based on the subjective relating to all else as object is self-centred by definition, in spite of best intention. But by being generous, kind, and thoughtful of the needs of others, then that subjective becomes less relevant. It’s spread thin by the process of empathising with another’s point of view. Without even considering the issue, a person who is putting the needs of others ahead of their own, if they’re doing so purely out of care for the other person, finds themselves concerned with the ways and means of achieving a good outcome for the other rather than bound up in “I” and “my”.

That’s the way forward to mindful experience, I think. It becomes second nature and it’s not necessary to force the process. The world seen from the point of view of the world. Beautiful!

Think of the gathering of thunderclouds, tension like a clean muggy smell in the mental air. The gravid psyche reaches term and, suddenly, rips apart the mundane to release a wave of intense experience which fills my senses and my heart. It is profane, sublime, ecstatic. It steals upon me and creates in a still instant the whole world anew.

It is unquestionable. It is beyond truth, words, or understanding. It is joy, sadness, entire but already lost.

Don’t say. Don’t cling tight. Don’t even remember. Don’t, whatever you do, tease apart. Allow instead time to pass quietly, and the air to breathe you and kiss the sunlight as it passes your lips.

It’s the same world I looked at before. That rumbling is seen in its absence and the world smells rich and sweet. What passes for knowlege returns with time, and I pretend not to mind.

Each beetle, each leaf, the wind – matters to me more than it did. As I walk my hand drags slightly through the day like a caress. Each heart I meet fills me up.

Everything has this in it. Every feeling, every sensation, every thought. Each communion with another sings of it. The flesh and bone and fine hair, laughter and movement. That’s what it is.

Talking, being quiet. All the things we pretend and want and hate even these are what it is.

Be distracted. Be awake. Sleep. Run with a dog. Notice, if you look closely, that this is what it is. Each moment is what it is.

It wasn’t then, and nothing yet exists. Do you think that you experience the universe? It experiences you in this moment. That is what it is.

With our thoughts we create the world. The experience of our senses reaches our consciousness not raw but filtered and interpreted. Babies learn to recognise faces, from the blurred shapes they see above them. The world’s sounds separate into wind, voices, automobiles and dogs. Objects, people, future and past, cause and effect, mind and intention are all created from the raw stuff of experience through a process of imputation.

It’s possible to manipulate this process. Attention and intention can be used as tools, shaping what comes to us out of the infinite flow of the universe, and shaping how others approach the world, and therefore affecting what comes to them.

Take this example from a first year university sociology class. The lecture hall holds 300 students. They have been secretly instructed to play a trick on the second semester lecturer by the instructor they had in the first half of the year. Each time the lecturer takes a step to the left of the hall they are to stop paying attention. Shuffle papers and whisper to one another. Look at the floor or the ceiling. Each time the lecturer steps to the right they are to hang on his every word. It’s a simple enough game but by the end of half an hour their teacher has, without realising why, decided to speak to them from the far right hand edge of the platform, and is having to consciously resist the urge to step down toward the exit door.

What is called the Law of attraction is a less mundane example. This principle is that a thing can be brought about by keeping it in mind, giving it your attention and believing that it will happen.

Both this and the mind-game with the university lecturer are examples of a type of magic. All sorts of things are possible, in the infinite sensory self-experience which constitutes existence. Some of these things can happen and some can’t, because the law of karma acts like eddies and currents in the stream – it brings certain effects into our consciousness as a result of certain causes. The exact form those effects take is a matter of how and what we notice. Karma affects what we are able to notice and what consequences will resolve themselves through us, but the way we interpret this as it happens, or in other words the exact form reality takes as we experience this resolution, is a matter of the imputation we place on the raw experience of our senses. By changing our own attention and belief systems, and that of others, we change the way reality is experienced. It’s called magic because it deals with changing the nature of reality – not the intrinsic, karmic, reality and certainly not the underlying flow of raw experience, but rather the meaning we place on it.

Actually such things happen around us all the time. We might step into a house and feel warm and happy, because the feng shui is good. The place has a good atmosphere and it puts us in a positive frame of mind. On the other hand if someone secretly dislikes you it’s possible to pick up a bad “vibe” from them. You become defensive and withdrawn, without realising why. It’s not really all that different to the way that karma itself works. Good intentions and selfless motives for an action give it good magic. The results of the action are more likely to be beneficial. Also the process of creating that action reinforces a beneficial mindset in the person doing it, which is likely to give rise to a positive and harmonious perception of the world. The opposite of course applies to selfish, fearful, and harmful intent. Unwise actions focus attention in a negative direction, twisting people up in an way which causes them to view the world as containing difficulties, evil, and disharmony. It creates bad vibes.

With our thoughts we create the world. It’s not as simple as getting our desires, because the world we are constantly creating has a certain inevitable logic of its own. The secret is that with our thoughts we create ourselves. What you wish for has consequences. How you act has consequences. The first consequence of any manipulation of reality, even the mundane sort created by normal intention and attention, is a change in your own interpretation of the world. This can never be a matter entirely of will because the karmic forces take their strength from the strength of the intention itself, and are leveraged by the strength of flow of the world-stream. This is why it is said that evil returns on itself three times. The most powerful sorceror can only buy time wading against the current, because the eddies he himself creates will eventually suck him under.

Good actions travel with the current. The universe itself conspires to aid the pure heart. Any intention contains an element of selfishness, however, founded in the self-conscious nature of will itself. Mindfulness is the escape from this conundrum – paying attention exactly to the experience, rather than living in the interpretation of experience and the mental constructs this generates and reinforces. Mindful action is harmonious, it is open to what the universe provides. The self disolves, intent disolves, and the actions become the current. That’s powerful magic, so subtle and soft as to be almost invisible, but as your eyes open to this approach you notice, suddenly, that it’s the exact stuff of which the universe is constructed.

This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to everyone that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown, or to any man or number of men–go freely with powerful uneducated persons, and with the young, and with the mothers of families–re-examine all you have been told in school or church or in any book, and dismiss whatever insults your own soul; and your very flesh shall be a great poem, and have the richest fluency, not only in its words, but in the silent lines of its lips and face, and between the lashes of your eyes, and in every motion and joint of your body.

Walt Whitman

I’ve realised that my interest in politics, if it hasn’t waned, has at least shifted. There seems, therefore, little point in keeping the philosophy / psychology writing separate from this (previously politics focussed) blog. So I’m moving all the recent non-politics stuff here, and from now on Writings will have a broader collection: everything I write which isn’t strictly blog style.

Prepare for a small avalanche of posts as I catch up. After this only photos, silly links and other blogephrenalia will be at traceelements, along with, of course, Trace and Mog’s bits and pieces.

A thing is not true unless it is also kind.

I wrote this at the end of a recent article, and I think it’s really an important idea although my attempts to get it across to anyone else have so far been unsatisfactory. So I want to give it one last try.

Fox News provides a clear counterexample. They ran a story about Barak Obama having attended a madrassa as a six year old in Indonesia. Factually the story is correct, but it’s not true in the slightest. Madrassa is an Arabic word meaning “school”. Obama attended a secular elementary school which would not have looked out of place anywhere in the United States. The truth of the situation was nothing like the same as the facts which were reported.

To me the difference is in the intent. This is where Fox made the truth into a lie, and it reveals the importance of the word kind.

People often assume that kindness means nurturing, supporting, and even pampering or pandering to the desires of another. That’s an easy pattern to fall into, because it relates to selfishness. If you are being “kind” to someone because you want them to like you, or even worse you want them to feel obligated to you, then it is a kindness which can easily be harmful. In such a situation you give someone what they want not what they need. An illusion rather than the honest reality.

True kindness nurtures and supports, but it can contain hard truths because it is done for the real benefit of the other. A kind gardener needs pruning shears as well as fertiliser. That’s not to say it comes from a controlling or patronising headspace – the most important gift to any friend is their autonomy and freedom. But supporting addictive or destructive behaviour or relationships is not an act of kindness, instead it is often a way of creating dependence and control.

I believe a person’s best interest is always to have the maximum autonomy of which they are capable. That’s what it means to be human. But autonomy is founded on truth, because lies and illusions – whether fostered by others or built from a person’s own narrative, fears, and desires – make real choice impossible. So I’ve put a slightly circular argument: to be kind requires being honest and unselfish, and to seek to benefit the other. Very few truths are absolute, it is the intent of the choice of fact and context which distinguishes a “false” truth from a real truth. It makes sense that when you see something from a selfish point of view your truth is self-serving.

Postmodernism notwithstanding, this doesn’t mean that there can be no objective reality or that all meaning is relative. I think that there is so much objective reality that we can never encompass more than a portion of it. How we choose which portion, and how we ascribe meaning to that changes the subjective reality.

Scientific method has laid down an approach which is as nearly perfectly objective as is so far possible – but it’s a long way from truth. This is because exactly what answers it finds depends closely on what questions are asked and how they are framed in context. A great deal of junk science from tobacco to anti- global warming is founded on this mistake, and there are movements (evidence based medicine for example) to re-find objectivity. Just the same, the areas of greatest human progress have been those in which real joy in understanding most easily overcomes the prejudices of vested interests, like mathematics and deep physics. We can, in the end, use scientific method to distinguish objective reality, or at least that part of it for which we can ask the right questions. To bring that as far as human truth requires more.

The detached “objective” style of high quality journalism attempts this. It shows both sides of the story without emotional involvement. But to my mind it’s one of the least successful solutions. Just how unsuccessful can be seen not in the Obama story (which was clearly partisan), but in the New York Times investigations into lynchings in the deep south in 1930. They heard one side of the story from the murderers and their supporters – a twisted rationale. The victims, though, were dead or scared and deeply mistrustful of white reporters from the big smoke. The journalists came with their own perceptions and their own views, even their own culture, which they did not acknowledge and could not be free of. That’s not to say they misrepresented the facts, but their story did not challenge the preconceptions of their audience as it should have done. The mask of objectivity lent authority the story did not deserve. Journalism is poor at telling hard truths – to do so would require more self reflection than reporters are taught, and expect the same from a readership who would rather not have their comfortable world disturbed. It would not sell papers.

So from the infinitely malleable subjective reality what is truth? It is that which is also kind. When we step outside our own needs and wish to truly benefit others we leave the ego-boundary which distorts truth to the merely factual. From a selfless standpoint we see facts in context and connection such that we are honest with ourselves and honest with others. This is the truth which sets us free. This is essential for our autonomy and that of others. It has an infinity of expressions by they all reflect the one kind truth:

I love you.

You must take a look at this. Forest Browne takes a detailed look at the deliberations of a mining company in Venezuela.

There’s no clearer way to explain why globalization is making the world poor.

Warriors

Young boys have a fascination with weapons. My two are typical – left to their own devices they will soon construct an elaborate arsenal out of sticks and string, complete with swords, rifles, and an elaborate fantasy of attacks, bad guys, and missions. The enemy always lose, the good guys are always brave, and uncomfortable emotions such as embarrassment, compassion and fear simply do not exist. My daughter played such games as well, including “Sailor scouts and monkeys” which was a battle game of her invention co-opting the whole kindergarten class. After a few years her focus had shifted to social interaction, where the boys’ remains in the ritualised battle called sport.

These simple joys are never forgotten. Mythically, the good guys crushed their opposition in battles joyously free of compromise and doubt. With God on their side, sex, confusion and the world’s mundane frustrations could be sublimated in a dream of power, big guns, and victory. The uniforms reeked of belonging and the girls swooned as they lined the parade. It’s the founding dream of fascism: trading frustration and weakness for conquest on behalf of the industrialists.

I remember it myself. I’ve always been interested in history and anthropology, and in high school I was interested in military history. Think Alexander conquering Persia against great odds. Think Napoleon. Think, for that matter, of Death Metal power chords. There’s something liberating about the whole uncomplicated, macho, war glory and uniforms thing. Adolescents aren’t comfortable with social interaction. They’re not interested in navigating the foreign territory of other people’s feelings, and even less so the uncharted waters of their own. For some reason I’ve always been averse to joining, so it was history and Punk music. But it’s those swept up in the illusion and seeking a way to belong who make up the brownshirts, the skinheads, and perhaps also the Red Brigades.

How do you make a sexually frustrated teenager join a violent warrior cult? It requires the heady potion of nostalgia for an imagined past, a mythic wrong perpetrated by a despicable enemy, and a vision of a glorious militaristic future formed from the dream-stuff of childhood games. Arkan‘s Red Star Belgrade Delije (heroes) are believers in a great Serbian golden age of the 14th century, destroyed by the degenerate and treacherous Ottomans at the battle of Kosovo in 1389, in spite of glorious self-sacrifice of the epic hero MiloÅ¡ Obilić. The future could once again hold a proud and victorious Serbia, if its people would cast aside today’s humiliation and weakness and re-learn the courage of their heritage. Personalised hatred of the enemy, idealism, and battle glory. The testing ground for these Delije is the football stadiums, and their weapon is extreme violence, clad in their team’s colours.

But most such nightmares fade with time and more healthy ways of belonging. A married man with workmates, children, and a community is not about to dust off his baseball bat and chains just because Zagreb supporters are in town. Normal socialisation produces tolerance and compassion, even if some secret part of the heart still harbours dark dreams. In Germany in the 1930s the terrible wrong was the treaty of Versailles, and the hope was of a futurist techno-germanic empire. Similar political use is being made of the Twin Towers today, and the danger is that it will awaken all the armchair fascists, globalisation casualties, and terminal nostalgics to the neocon’s dream of American Empire.

Stormtroopers

There are other impulses in human nature, and the great project of humanist thought has been to respond instead to these. Many people are now wary of flags and jingoistic nationalism. Shakespeare’s Henry could rally England to the glory of a foreign war, but tolerance and compassion are now an accepted part of the dialogue of (almost) any modern leader. This is a huge step forward for a species which is reaching its Malthusian limits, and must either cooperate or destroy itself in a death-battle for the world’s resources.

But I think it’s a mistake to deny any natural proclivity. If you pretend a thing isn’t attractive the desire grows like the monster under the bed – scary, destructive, and twisting the human heart as it gains energy from fear and disgust. However, it’s clearly not wise to act on every impulse. The secret is the use to which the underlying urge is put.

The warrior instinct finds its most twisted life denying outlet in the cruel dreams of fascism. One caught up in this spell has had his heart amputated and his mind lobotomised – a robot driven by hate. Instead there are positive uses for warrior energy! Cunning strategy has it’s origin in this. Sacrifice for an ideal or the benefit of others. Courage. The joy in overcoming difficulty, and in using cooperation to defeat a problem. All these things are learnt by children fighting make believe enemies with sticks and string. What distinguishes the aid worker from the jihadi is what distinguishes a human in touch with all aspects of his humanity from one who has cut off many of the most important parts. A true warrior has moral autonomy and compassion, and is of little use to evil men.

Mothers and Fathers

Those who construct and manipulate the warrior myth are not heroes, however much they may dress themselves up in the trappings of war. I have a series of rather tin-pot theories about how such people come to desire power so badly, but it’s not so much the leaders as the middle managers of fascism which interest me.

Perhaps it’s a bit of a cliché but how often have you met a policeman, bureaucrat, or other person in a position of a small amount of power who just loves to use it to the maximum? They administer an unbending set of rules and regulations which exist for their own sake rather than to make the world a better place. Are you rushing to the hospital because the passenger has a serious injury? I’m sorry Sir but I’m still going to have to give you a ticket.

This could be simply boredom turned to petty vindictiveness, but I think it’s often related to childhood. Where a mother turns her face away and the father is absent or distant, for example, a child may have a desire to please which becomes pathological. By being perfectly good, following all the rules, and keeping all passions in check, the child will at last win the mother’s acceptance. Such a person is quiet, unsocial, the teacher’s pet and the class snitch. Conformity turns outward as the desire to control increases. If the class were better behaved the teacher would not be angry. If the country were better controlled the imagined mother would bestow forgotten love.

My untrained psychology aside, this is a poor world to live in. It’s a world of regulation, intolerance, fear, and abuse of power. It believes that misfortune indicates a moral failing which must be rectified by suffering and conformity. By aesceticism and effort victory will be achieved, and the enemy is always both outward and moral. They hate us for our freedoms. We hate them because they hate us and they represent the evil within us.

A Vision

None of this is necessary. The world is increasingly abundant, and with cooperation and a little less self-indulgence we could have plenty for all. The policeman could provide a high speed escort to the hospital. [An aside: that exact approach saved my father's life from an asthma attack when I was 7. Thank you, nameless Hobart cop!]

The small sad men and women who would prevent a world of tolerance and plenty have found positions of power in our society because they desire them so badly, and the greedy and powerful benefit from exploitation of the fascist impulse.

I think it’s time we called up the true warrior spirit. Kindness is the highest virtue! The small men have sold us the idea that we must be hard hearted or the “welfare cheats” and other moral degenerates will destroy our society. I think we can build a world where we engage the best talents of everyone, rather than judging those who won’t play by every petty regulation. We need clever strategies, cooperation, idealism. Most of all we need those warrior qualities to be allied in the service of love.

I recently heard something horrifyingly cruel and awful. It was the tape recording of a British morning radio show. The show’s concept is nasty to begin with: people write in with details of their girlfriend or boyfriend, and the loud and obnoxious talk radio hosts ring this person up and dump them on air, on behalf of the correspondent. As bad as that idea is, the actual execution in this particular case was sadistic in the extreme. A young man had written to the programme. A work mate of the fellow’s girlfriend had told him that the girl had been seen having sex with her boss at the office christmas party. Where he had previously been on the point of proposing, he now wanted the radio DJ’s to tell her that they were through.

They rang the girl posing as employees of a local jewelers. Pretending to be asking after the boyfriend, they “let slip” that the call was about a diamond engagement ring, and then congratulated the girl and enthused with her excitement at the prospect of her marriage. Finally at the very peak of her joy and happiness they dropped the facade and told her that the boy had changed his mind because of her infidelity and was leaving her. I can’t tell you any more than this, because at that point I had just started paying enough conscious attention to what was happening to come to my senses and switch off the recording. I felt ill.

Of course that’s a particularly vindictive example, but I want to ask you can the punishment ever fit the crime? Presumably the boy felt very hurt that the girl had betrayed his trust. Let’s say that the wounds he suffered as a result would not easily heal. It’s hard to imagine the girl’s emotional devastation would not be immeasurably worse but just suppose for a moment that the harm was somehow equal.

What good would it do?

It’s usually supposed that the boy would feel better about everything. Revenge is reputed to taste sweet. Some research seems to show that this is true, for men at least. I think such ideas are based on a very childish view of the world. Is life the sort of game you win by out-scoring your opponent? Is there such a thing as an opponent? If there is some sort of fleeting satisfaction in the destruction of a fellow human being then it’s of little value, I think. Revenge tastes to me of ashes.

Perhaps there’s some social imperative involved. We gang up on the girl because she has broken our tabus. We humiliate her and cast her out. Adulterers and those who blasphemed were stoned in our brutal past. The tribe took on the task together, reinforcing their unity and warning those who would transgress. Punishment may serve this purpose but it should not. We live in a pluralist, tolerant society where morality should be a matter for the individual, not a code enforced by the group. [For punishment as reform and deterrence see the appendix, but not yet or you'll derail the argument]

Such a grotesque example as the one I’ve given risks obscuring the issues in emotional response, but bear with me. Every war zone is full of worse, and small things miss the point because it seems too easy. So think of the effect on the boy and on the DJs. Think of the effect on the listeners. Everyone is debased by such cruelty. Imagine the boy in a future relationship. He might in any case feel mistrustful, but now his healing and his interactions with women are complicated by the weight of the dumped girlfriend’s suffering. If he ignores this he has done so at the cost of hardening his heart, dulling and coarsening all his human interactions. If he reacts against it he will become angry and vindictive in his relationships. Only if he allows himself regret can he one day overcome the harm he has done.

I believe it’s more difficult for the girl but more hopeful. Will she seek revenge in her turn? To do so would be to become consumed. This response has been seen from Palestine to Kosovo, and is the cause of years of misery and millions of lives destroyed. The boy made this mistake and there are few roads back. If she can accept the pain without taking refuge in numbness there is a way to begin.

Even if she doesn’t actively seek revenge she is likely to feel angry with the boy for the harm he has done her. Of course such anger is a way of protecting herself from the full force of the pain. If she lets it, the anger will grow until it owns her. Another trap is to cling to the pain. Such wounds provide an sort of comfort, because they allow us to give up responsibility. Everything relates to the injury, and the world becomes full of reasons why normal life is impossible.

The way free of this is forgiveness. Humans make stupid choices, they are desirous, fearful, angry, cruel, and weak. It’s the nature of existence and everyone, sometimes, does a thing which hurts another. The natural impulse is to condemn the perpetrator, like the DJs and the public. The natural impulse is to lash out in retaliation like the boyfriend. None of this makes the world a better place and none of this helps make the person who did the harm less likely to do the same in the future. [Look at the appendix if you think retribution makes a good system of law and order, by the way.] Giving in to these impulses piles hurt on hurt in the cycle of pain which has plagued the human race since anyone can remember. Giving in to these impulses most of all denies the same humanity we all share. Maybe I didn’t do that particular harm, but I’m capable of mistakes like any of us and we all need to accept our weakness.

So forgive. If the boy had forgiven the girl they may even have patched up their relationship. What harm was really done? Having been publically and cruelly humiliated on radio the girl has a harder task, but the first step is forgiving the boy for wanting to hurt her. Perhaps to do that she must forgive herself as well.

Forgiveness opens the heart and lets the pain in, which is why it’s hard to do. Soft-hearted though, the pain won’t last as long or do as much harm. Forgiveness allows others to forgive, and draws from our shared humanity the power to heal our wounded hearts. Forgiveness is our only hope.

Appendix: The penal system

So does punishment have a reforming effect? This argument is usually made for prisons, where the privations were originally designed to force the inmates to lead model existences of contemplation and hard work. I live near one of the most cruel and psychologically damaging prisons ever built – Port Arthur. It was built to mould the worst of the worst, those convicts who had committed serious crimes after transportation to Australia, into model citizens of the new colony. Like whipping a dog or hitting a child, it debases society for a negative effect.

The idea that punishment reforms is a relic to sacred to examine, but one we should have got out into the light and seen clearly as a sham long ago. Its basis is patronising and religious. It supposes that there has been a moral transgression, and that suffering will atone for this. In theory (rather than in practice) the law is not a moral system but chosen as a way for us to all get along together and function as a society. The corrections system should throw out the idea of the moral benefit of suffering and base it’s penalties on the rehabilitation of prisoners. Those who cannot safely be returned should be held apart with some compassion – evidence of the failure of the system.

Punishment is seen as a part of the system of crime prevention. It acts as a deterrence. In this role it is spectacularly ineffective. It’s true that there must be some system which makes crime not pay, but we have a system which takes the criminals we catch and puts them in a large and expensive crime training institution. They are stigmatised in normal society so as to limit their options of legal employment, and they’re brutalised so as to be less able to function effectively outside the culture of crime and prison.

I think we leave the criminal justice system in this terrible state because we are seduced by the “righteousness” of revenge and too prejudiced against the underclasses to care about their suffering.

Bristling Badger has an analysis of the Iraq war, how we are being desensitized, and what we can do about it. Please have a look.

I can never quite take the high flying world of finance seriously, or worse, I somehow don’t quite believe it exists. I have a sneaking suspicion as I watch the parade of bankers, finance ministers, and industrialists in their beautifully tailored suits, that what I’m really seeing is a bunch of aged and overfed streakers. The crowd around me seem entranced, so perhaps I’m not the right person to be writing this article.

Is it real? Here’s London’s Financial Times:

According to data released by JPMorgan this week, total issuance of CDOs [Collateralised Debt Obligation] – repackaged portfolios of debt securities or debt derivatives – reached $503bn worldwide last year, 64 per cent up from the year before. Impressive stuff for an asset class that barely existed a decade ago.

But that understates the growth. For JPMorgan’s figures do not include all the private CDO deals that bankers are apparently engaged in too. Meanwhile, if you chuck index derivative portfolio numbers into the mix, the zeros get bigger: extrapolating from trends in the first nine months of last year, total CDO issuance was probably around $2,800bn last year, a threefold increase over 2005.

So the bankers created 2.8 trillion dollars out of nothing in 2006! That’s about equal to the whole of the third largest economy in the world: Germany. That money was lent, interest was charged, people bought things with it. They bought US debt, they bought resources, but most of all they bought corporations.

It was the greatest piece of money magic we’ve seen since the invention of options trading, and it’s quite interesting to see how it was accomplished. Here’s the Financial Times again:

[An anonymous senior banker] relates the case of a typical hedge fund, two times levered. That looks modest until you realise it is partly backed by fund of funds’ money (which is three times levered) and investing in deeply subordinated tranches of collateralised debt obligations, which are nine times levered. “Thus every €1m of CDO bonds [acquired] is effectively supported by less than €20,000 of end investors’ capital – a 2% price decline in the CDO paper wipes out the capital supporting it.

“The degree of leverage at work . . . is quite frankly frightening,” he concludes. “Very few hedge funds I talk to have got a prayer in the next downturn. Even more worryingly, most of them don’t even expect one.”

It looks to me like a system where all the people who might raise the alarm have their heads so firmly in the trough they’ve no incentive to think about the potential for disaster.

I have a theory that in the real world none of this matters in the slightest. The sun will still rise, the crops will still grow. If the people who buy and sell and make actual physical things were to totally ignore the bankers and the finance ministers and the CEOs then the everything would continue as before – except that the sun would shine slightly more brightly and there would be a spring in everyone’s step. Unfortunately this ability to disbelieve the bankers’ illusions has been carefully discouraged over the last couple of centuries and few people nowdays can muster the will.

So we teter on the edge of a catastrophe, one created by the mesmetic hold of financiers over politicians and the consequent deregulation of normal oversight in the world of high finance – sustained by the simple chance that no small child has thought to ask why our betters preen about naked as they congratulate each another on their wisdom and courage.

Japan has little physical space for landfill sites, and seventy percent of incinerators worldwide are located there:

Until recently Japan had one solution to waste: burn it. Over 1800 incinerators burned the country’s 50 million tonnes of solid waste each year. Recycling exists but even some of that ends up in the incinerators. Japan is the consumer culture par excellence and the real struggle for zero waste will be over how to persuade people to buy less in the first place. Not easy when shopping is a national pastime.

Incineration stacks release toxic chemicals, such as dioxins, into the air which are transferred to humans through the food chain. Japan’s ambient levels of dioxins present in the atmosphere are reported to be 6 or 7 times higher than in Europe.

For every 1000 tons of waste incinerated in Japan, 100 tons of toxic ash residue must be disposed of but Japan obviously has no space for this, so what to do? In September 2006, Japan and the Philippines signed a free trade agreement, JPEPA, and pressure is being exerted by Philippine exporters for their country’s Senate to ratify it.

JPEPA is one of the many such agreements Japan has entered into lately, which are part of what is now a trend among developed countries — primarily Japan, the US and those in Europe — to negotiate bilateral trade pacts following the collapse of the Doha round of negotiations at the World Trade Organization.

Under the Japan-Philippines Economic Partnership Agreement, Japan would potentially have the freedom to dump its toxic wastes and hazardous materials into the Philippines.

Philippine trade officials admit that hazardous waste imports were offered as part of the deal – albeit just as a negotiating tactic.

“One of the items included is what we call hazardous toxic wastes,” Peter Favila, the Philippine trade secretary, said last month. “It does not mean that we allow them to ship waste to us.”

Favila said the inclusion was meant to prevent Japan from asking for more concessions on other Philippine products.

“If we didn’t do it, we would be forced to offer another product,” Favila said. “It’s a negotiation strategy.”

Provisions under the agreement require the Philippine government to lower tariff on at least 141 substances found to be potentially dangerous to the environment. The substances are among the 11,300 articles that would be traded between the Philippines and Japan under JPEPA, once the Senate ratifies it.

But Japan maintained that they will only export wastes to the country if the Philippine government would allow it.

Despite the provision, Japan stressed that they remain strongly committed to the strict enforcement of the 1989 Basel Convention on the Transboundary Movement of Toxic and Hazardous Wastes, to which Japan and the Philippines are both signatories. The convention prevents any illegal export of toxic and hazardous wastes to the Philippines.

Presidential spokesperson, Ignacio Bunye, said in a Manilla Times report, “This government will never allow, under any circumstances, the entry of toxic waste into Philippine soil,” he said. “Our existing laws and international treaties proscribe this and we shall uphold them unconditionally.”

Philippine Government assurances that they will not allow the waste to be dumped are viewed skeptically by groups such as Greenpeace and the Basel Action Network. Even Filipino economist Cielto Habito, involved in a study that paved the way for the agreement, had this to say:

“the issue really hinges on whether the Philippine government can be trusted to uphold and enforce our environmental laws and indeed our laws in general. And government’s track record, admittedly, does not merit that trust so far.”

The Philippines’ track record on waste dumping and landfill is far from good. Tens of thousands of people live in garbage-ridden slums on the edges of the big cities and hundreds of families eke out a living by scavenging on the rubbish dumps, a dangerous existence in a toxic environment.

In 1999, environmental groups pulled off an astounding victory by convincing the Philippines government to ban incineration, so it will be a tragic irony if they allow Japan’s ash waste to be dumped in their country.

The Philippines is a poor country. I can imagine the government relenting on waste-dumping once the agreement has been ratified because Japan will have the upper hand as the wealthy partner- it’s just the sort of thing that happens. With supporters of the JPEA both there and in Japan really pushing the deal as benefitting both countries enormously, it looks as though the agreement will be ratified. The consequences remain to be seen.