I have found that there are two topics in life that breed fruitless bitter arguments and fixed opinions, and which have ultimately been a huge waste of my time. These are religion and politics.
If you had asked me in my 20s what my ideal job was, I would have said I wasn't sure but it definitely would have nothing to do with Churches or the Government! As a long-haired bohemian musician obsessed with Hermetic Philosophy, Qabalah and cosmic music, anything to do with "The System" was anathema to me. It is typical of my bizarre life and career that I spent most of my 30s working for the Police, the Government and finally 7 years doing political and campaigning work for a group of Churches.
As it happens, the policies of the Churches I worked for were largely liberal left. My main tasks were to work politically against poverty and inequality, to reduce the risk of climate change and particularly to come up with ideas to halt the housing crisis.
It's not often remembered that the roots of Left Wing politics in the UK - particularly the Labour Party - are closely bound up with the Nonconformist Churches, such as The Methodist Church that was my main employer.
Because people always wonder how to classify and pigeonhole each other politically - I am a long-term Green supporter, though not uncritical of the Green Party. Many policies I advocated in my job and privately later became part of Jeremy Corbyn's new approach. Yet I am now aggressively apolitical and have returned to the anarchist position of my 20s. Politics and politicians are the problem, not the solution. We cannot avoid politics, but all voting is essentially tactical voting until the population accepts that ALL political ideologies are wrong, economically and psychologically illiterate.
To work for the good of society in politics is bad enough, though I gave it my best shot. But to work within a Church context is doubly impossible! The biggest and most surprising proof of this was the total resistance to spiritual - or even religious - approaches to policy thinking. There is a natural connection between spirituality, some leftist political aims, and Nonconformist Christianity. But the first instinct of most of the politicised religious people I knew was amazingly materialistic, ideological. As if they left the Spirit at the door and put on their Party badge when in the office.
There was one glittering exception to this. Sometimes I worked in partnership with the Quakers. This was always a beautiful experience. The Quakers are without doubt the most spiritual remaining Christian denomination, and my best experiences were working alongside Quakers and speaking at events with Quakers in the audience.
In the 19th Centuary, Methodists and Quakers had a shared interests in the risks associated with problem drinking and gambling. This led many of them to take the 'pledge' and swear abstinence as part of the Temperance movement. Of course this strikes many people today as funny. Catholics and Anglicans often liked to make fun of teetotal Christians. And I am certainly no teetotaller myself. But what's forgotten is that the Nonconformists were substantially composed of the working classes and - uniquely for religious bodies at the time - actually cared about poor people.
Just like hard drug and gambling addiction today, it was the poorer communities that were hit hardest by addiction and poverty in the 19th Century.
However, "Temperance" cannot be the whole solution. There is something in people that craves the release of intoxication, that wants to change consciousness and be free from its normal constraints. Surely religion, or to be more exact "spirituality" must have something positive to say about this.
There is a reason we refer to alcoholic "spirits" and any alchemist or magician should be able to see the link. Or anyone who knows of the ancient Wine based Mysteries of Dionysus. Alcohol is a sacrament - dangerous yet potentially liberating; and one of Bacchus' titles was Liber.
Alcohol can free the heart and mind. Yet it enslaves many. The same is true of drugs and the irrational release of gambling, an activity sacred to Jupiter which speaks of wealth yet often brigs poverty and disgrace when it becomes addictive.
There is a deep hankering for the Spirit - a hankering that spirituality is born from, yet organised religion fiercely suppresses.
In this short blog I don't want to talk about the psychological and spiritual roots of addiction. More important is the simple fact that capitalism - global business - preys upon the compulsive nature of desire. And stokes desires for products in can mass produce.
This goes far beyond obvious addictions like drugs or alcohol. Our whole consumerist society revolves around addiction. Food companies, clothes manufacturers, mobile phone providers - all want you to need, crave more, newer better. And they want you to tire of what you have soon, be discontent and crave something new.
Buily in obsolesence is a relevant term. Contemporary business does not *want* you to buy a computer, or shirt, that is perfect for 70 years. Car manufacturers want you to feel inadequate about your car, so that you upgrade.
Makeup creators do not *want* you to be content with your appearance.
So you can see that the key to modern business is
1) to make people feel unworthy
2) to offer them an exciting temporary solution
3) to rekindle dissatisfaction and craving as soon as possible
4) Rinse and repeat
In other words, creating addiction, especially psychological addiction, is the key to financial success in the diseased economies of late capitalism.
From this it follows that the most radical political act anyone can commit in the wealthy Western world (or should I say, the still wealthy though decaying Western world) is to realise that you are not fundamentally incomplete, empty, valueless.
See through all attempts to make you feel empty and needy, to create fake needs and then offer fake solutions to them. Beyond our basic needs for food and shelter we have not needs, but free spiritual aspirations.
Meditation is a classic way to see through the illusion of manufactured fake need, whether that meditation is Buddhist, Quaker or any true mystic.path
But beyond that we enter the territory of magic and of Tantra. For when the energy locked up in addiction is freed, great spiritual force can be channelled elsewhere.
Some of the greatest saints of the East and West were great sinners, wastrels addicts and even murderers. When the intense, ecstatic energy that can lead to delusion and addiction is freed and redirected, it can become our greatest agent of spiriutal liberation.
Christians should understand the story of Pentecost, where the Apostles were so full of spiritual energy that bystanders asked if they'd just drunk New Wine. Pagans have the Mysteries of Dionysus and many folk traditions of dance and trance for comparison.
There is no real spirituality without release, freedom and creativity.
Counterfeit spirituality is synthetic, commercialised, technique based. Like an addictive junk food it keeps us coming back for more, and yet always unsatisfied. Maybe the next bite, the next fix, the next meme, will be different?
Yet Politics and Churches remain Puritan. Ironically and inevitably, their representatives commit endless sex scandals, financial crimes and other sneaky sins. Let alone the endless addiction to ego and war
The Spirit of the New Age is the Spirit of transmuted intoxication that exalts the mind rather than stupefying it. And make no mistake, many of our spiritual and psychedelic options in the "spiritual supermarket" do not exalt the mind and spirit, they only dull and stun it.
IO EVOHE LYSIOS, LORD OF FREEDOM!
JN 06/11/2017
If you had asked me in my 20s what my ideal job was, I would have said I wasn't sure but it definitely would have nothing to do with Churches or the Government! As a long-haired bohemian musician obsessed with Hermetic Philosophy, Qabalah and cosmic music, anything to do with "The System" was anathema to me. It is typical of my bizarre life and career that I spent most of my 30s working for the Police, the Government and finally 7 years doing political and campaigning work for a group of Churches.
As it happens, the policies of the Churches I worked for were largely liberal left. My main tasks were to work politically against poverty and inequality, to reduce the risk of climate change and particularly to come up with ideas to halt the housing crisis.
It's not often remembered that the roots of Left Wing politics in the UK - particularly the Labour Party - are closely bound up with the Nonconformist Churches, such as The Methodist Church that was my main employer.
Because people always wonder how to classify and pigeonhole each other politically - I am a long-term Green supporter, though not uncritical of the Green Party. Many policies I advocated in my job and privately later became part of Jeremy Corbyn's new approach. Yet I am now aggressively apolitical and have returned to the anarchist position of my 20s. Politics and politicians are the problem, not the solution. We cannot avoid politics, but all voting is essentially tactical voting until the population accepts that ALL political ideologies are wrong, economically and psychologically illiterate.
To work for the good of society in politics is bad enough, though I gave it my best shot. But to work within a Church context is doubly impossible! The biggest and most surprising proof of this was the total resistance to spiritual - or even religious - approaches to policy thinking. There is a natural connection between spirituality, some leftist political aims, and Nonconformist Christianity. But the first instinct of most of the politicised religious people I knew was amazingly materialistic, ideological. As if they left the Spirit at the door and put on their Party badge when in the office.
There was one glittering exception to this. Sometimes I worked in partnership with the Quakers. This was always a beautiful experience. The Quakers are without doubt the most spiritual remaining Christian denomination, and my best experiences were working alongside Quakers and speaking at events with Quakers in the audience.
In the 19th Centuary, Methodists and Quakers had a shared interests in the risks associated with problem drinking and gambling. This led many of them to take the 'pledge' and swear abstinence as part of the Temperance movement. Of course this strikes many people today as funny. Catholics and Anglicans often liked to make fun of teetotal Christians. And I am certainly no teetotaller myself. But what's forgotten is that the Nonconformists were substantially composed of the working classes and - uniquely for religious bodies at the time - actually cared about poor people.
Just like hard drug and gambling addiction today, it was the poorer communities that were hit hardest by addiction and poverty in the 19th Century.
However, "Temperance" cannot be the whole solution. There is something in people that craves the release of intoxication, that wants to change consciousness and be free from its normal constraints. Surely religion, or to be more exact "spirituality" must have something positive to say about this.
There is a reason we refer to alcoholic "spirits" and any alchemist or magician should be able to see the link. Or anyone who knows of the ancient Wine based Mysteries of Dionysus. Alcohol is a sacrament - dangerous yet potentially liberating; and one of Bacchus' titles was Liber.
Alcohol can free the heart and mind. Yet it enslaves many. The same is true of drugs and the irrational release of gambling, an activity sacred to Jupiter which speaks of wealth yet often brigs poverty and disgrace when it becomes addictive.
There is a deep hankering for the Spirit - a hankering that spirituality is born from, yet organised religion fiercely suppresses.
In this short blog I don't want to talk about the psychological and spiritual roots of addiction. More important is the simple fact that capitalism - global business - preys upon the compulsive nature of desire. And stokes desires for products in can mass produce.
This goes far beyond obvious addictions like drugs or alcohol. Our whole consumerist society revolves around addiction. Food companies, clothes manufacturers, mobile phone providers - all want you to need, crave more, newer better. And they want you to tire of what you have soon, be discontent and crave something new.
Buily in obsolesence is a relevant term. Contemporary business does not *want* you to buy a computer, or shirt, that is perfect for 70 years. Car manufacturers want you to feel inadequate about your car, so that you upgrade.
Makeup creators do not *want* you to be content with your appearance.
So you can see that the key to modern business is
1) to make people feel unworthy
2) to offer them an exciting temporary solution
3) to rekindle dissatisfaction and craving as soon as possible
4) Rinse and repeat
In other words, creating addiction, especially psychological addiction, is the key to financial success in the diseased economies of late capitalism.
From this it follows that the most radical political act anyone can commit in the wealthy Western world (or should I say, the still wealthy though decaying Western world) is to realise that you are not fundamentally incomplete, empty, valueless.
See through all attempts to make you feel empty and needy, to create fake needs and then offer fake solutions to them. Beyond our basic needs for food and shelter we have not needs, but free spiritual aspirations.
Meditation is a classic way to see through the illusion of manufactured fake need, whether that meditation is Buddhist, Quaker or any true mystic.path
But beyond that we enter the territory of magic and of Tantra. For when the energy locked up in addiction is freed, great spiritual force can be channelled elsewhere.
Some of the greatest saints of the East and West were great sinners, wastrels addicts and even murderers. When the intense, ecstatic energy that can lead to delusion and addiction is freed and redirected, it can become our greatest agent of spiriutal liberation.
Christians should understand the story of Pentecost, where the Apostles were so full of spiritual energy that bystanders asked if they'd just drunk New Wine. Pagans have the Mysteries of Dionysus and many folk traditions of dance and trance for comparison.
There is no real spirituality without release, freedom and creativity.
Counterfeit spirituality is synthetic, commercialised, technique based. Like an addictive junk food it keeps us coming back for more, and yet always unsatisfied. Maybe the next bite, the next fix, the next meme, will be different?
Yet Politics and Churches remain Puritan. Ironically and inevitably, their representatives commit endless sex scandals, financial crimes and other sneaky sins. Let alone the endless addiction to ego and war
The Spirit of the New Age is the Spirit of transmuted intoxication that exalts the mind rather than stupefying it. And make no mistake, many of our spiritual and psychedelic options in the "spiritual supermarket" do not exalt the mind and spirit, they only dull and stun it.
IO EVOHE LYSIOS, LORD OF FREEDOM!
JN 06/11/2017