Wednesday, December 31, 2008

Who Am I?

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A contributor on another forum wrote the following:

[I really think that it's better to focus on ourselves and become super egoistic rather than think about others.
So often, focusing on the society and/or other people is the way to avoid seeing our own tendencies which we don't like and which we don't consider good/right.


I do not see self-realization the same way. I responded thus:

Conventional wisdom states that charity begins at home. As Plato said - the first ethic is to Know Thyself

The answer to why that injunction from a much revered classical philospher has never taken root in western society over the past twenty five centuries lies the core of my theory on Psyche-Genetics.

The self cannot be known in isolation.
The self can only be known in relation to another.


The larger "another" is the manifest universe. Science is doing a marvelous job getting us to know it. Nuclear theory has brought us very close to the ultimate understanding.

The more immediate other is our own social structures. Who each of us are is the result of the genetic inprints of 100,000 generations of ancestral evolution. Plato and all philopsophers since, only understood the evolution of our collective self going back a mere 250 generations to the beginning of the Iron Age. The other 99,750 generations invested in the Stone and Bronze Ages remained a mystery. It is in those primitive formative generations that the foundations of the human character was established. By going back to those Stone Age roots, studying social structures still rooted in oral traditions, I gained a more profund respect for the whole cosmic process of conscious evolution.

I found my Self, not just inside my own skin, but also among my culture, my race, my specie, my planet, my galaxy and the Cosmic source from which my consciousness originated.

We can take consciousness to the highest levels of eternally expanding degrees of self-awarness. By including all planes of existence, not just this one, this conforms to some extent with astrophysicists Big Bang/Big Crunch theory. Hindus see Cosmic Consciousness experiencing Itself via the evolving illusions of materaial manifestation. All is maya. In Greek mythology it is Narcissis staring into the mirror of his own reflection. Each Cosmic cycle spirals into ever higher degrees of self realization. God seeking to know Himself through the phantom image of Creation, born and dying and reborn eternally.
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Monday, December 29, 2008

Home School the HeartStart Way

HeartStart

Preamble

Nearly forty years ago, Roger W. Sperry., Cal. Tech, Professor of Psychobiology, writing on Lateral Specialization of Cerebral Function in Surgically Separated Hemispheres, had the following statement to make:

“The main theme to emerge…is that there appear to be two modes of thinking, verbal and non-verbal, represented rather separately in left and right hemispheres of the brain, respectively, and that our educational system, as well as science in general, tends to neglect the non-verbal form of intellect. What it comes down to is that modern society discriminates against the right hemisphere. The verbal half of the brain, the left half, dominates most of the time in individuals with intact brains as well as in split-brain patients.”

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Despite this observation, by an eminant Nobel Prize winner, made more than a generation ago, warning us that we are educating only one side of the child brain and therefore only evoking half of its creative potential, neither the government nor private education institutions have paid much attention to it. The same public school policy that was implemented nationally more than a century ago continues unaltered today. That same one-sided textbook school curriculum has been foisted on home-school parents.

There has been no attempt by any government or private research institute evaluating whether the intensive child indoctrination system that has been accepted as an international standard of education, might be short-circuiting human intelligence and gradually destabilizing the collective psyche of the entire specie. The fact that only 1% of students achieve excellence in tests, most are mediocre, 40% drop out entirely and God alone knbows how many cheat at examinations, seems not to have been cause for a call for a mass change of direction

Looked at objectively, what does the international education system boil down to?

For six hours each weekday, children are bundled off to school and incarcerated inside crowded classrooms. There, for the next twelve years and more, the left side of their brains are systematically imprinted with a purely analytical evaluation of reality.

Socially, students are instructed that their national political ideologies, whether it be administered via capitalism, communism or socialism, is the only moral foundation on which to govern people and give them the freedom to pursue happiness

From an economic contractual perspective, the national education goal is to place as many literate workers as possible on the mass production lines, with little attention paid to the personal cultivation of individual ethics or the artistic development of their full creative potential.

Scientifically the entire specie is instructed that reality can only be measured empirically.

This one-sided analytical focus on political, economic and scientific evaluations leaves the intuitive right side of the brain to more or less atrophy. Its infinite inspirational potential, and its ability to question the validity of all analytical rationales and seek a more profound sense of balance is left out of the developmental equation,

As a net result of all existing state-sponsored child indoctrination systems of education, apparently sane graduates can be easily persuaded to passionately dislike and partition their own populations via divisive political arguments over how to govern the nation. It allows them to unevenly divide the wealth produced by the gross work effort of the nation; exploit the labor of their workers to the fullest extent of the law; gouge excessive profits out of the market place; gamble with commodities without moral care; empirically deny the existence of spiritual influences, without providing a stitch of evidence to support this claim. And, worse than all the above; in the extreme, tap into the emotional bank of mass indoctrination and easily excite tens of millions to wage international wars and murder the populations of any other culture that does not conform to its own standards. All of this is done, without ever evoking the inner moral guide specifically evolved by Nature, able to question and find self-determined balance to all of it.

What has never been holistically analyzed in terms of evaluating the mass psychology of what happens when entire populations have been systematically drilled from early childhood in artificial evaluations, with all trained to obey technical instructions from superiors. graduates tend to remain in a pre-adult stage, relying on supervision from cradle to grave. Very few mature with self-assurance and a self-policed sense of personal responsibility. There is very little creative assertion.

Thus the nation becomes mired in bureaucratic administration, requiring the endless legislation of laws, legal interpretation and the massive expense of policing a more or less robotic citizenry that can be easily manipulated to the left or the right by any person or system of government that pretends to be fully knowledgeable.

In developmental psychology, it can be stated that the current mass mentality of the most technologically advanced nations remains locked into their teens.

In direct contrast, for the past twenty years the Heartstart program has taken a dual-brain approach to child education. The graduation results have been phenomenal. The ethical behavioral results even more so. We have produced self-tutored, self-policed graduates endowed with a profound sense of personal ethical constraints and a deep reverence for Nature and the technological excellence of the master Consciousness She has evolved. They are all excellent scholars and creative workers. There moral compass is solidly set on Truth is Love. The oldest are now in their twenties. The behavior of each and every one of them has not given their parents a single moment of consern.

Saturday, December 27, 2008

PROPHECY

The Parable of Sodom and Gomorrah

Twenty years ago, for no particular reason, while living in Hollywood, my consciousness was invaded by the biblical parable of Sodom and Gomorrah. In a strange way I felt as though I was Lot, and that God was warning me to get out of the life I was living , take my family and go and find a more wholesome life far away from the maddening crowd. And, just like Lot, I argued with God that people are intrinsically good and that abandoning them was tantamount to admitting that humankind was more evil than godly. Despite my objections the sense of impending disaster would not go away and the feeling that I must leave remained. We had four small children at that time and the periodic reminders of the earth shuddering beneath us that we lived right on top of the San Andreas fault line did little to relieve me of concern.

I spent many months waking up every morning with the sense of impending dread, trying to analyzing and shake off the oppressive feeling. I worked hard on deciphering the inner meaning of the parable. I eventually concluded that Sodom represented the glut of our fleshy appetites and that Gomorrah represented our national preoccupation with gambling with money and trying to get rich quick by gouging a profit out of every transaction. The inference of the warning was that if these two social addictions consumed us to the exclusion of allowing the cautionary hand of God into our lives, mass dysfunction would set in and they would eventually spell the destruction of our modern culture.

In effect my own consciousness was warning me and asking me to stand back from the mass indoctrination and try to deprogram myself and my family from their insidious influences. Having thus satisfied myself as to what was causing the inner sense of unease, the larger question of Lot remained. What was the purpose of saving myself if the rest of humanity was to be left behind? A life without extended social interaction was no life at all.. Surely the rest of humanity could be made to see the danger in the same way that I did. So, like Lot, with great earnestness, I made a deal with God to find ten good family men. I began warning friends, family and strangers alike that if we did not make significant alterations in the way we lived our lives, our civilization would crumble to dust. I suggested that we begin to wean ourselves off a money-based capitalistic economic system and start cleaning up our act by paying more attention to our spirituality. My urging, just as the parable predicted, was laughed at and derided. I could not find a single person to agree with me.

So I packed up my family, left Hollywood and settled on a farm far away in a lonely desert. I knew my wife was not totally happy with my decision. I warned her that the parable predicted that Lot’s wife would look back and turn into a pillar of salt. She laughed at that and vehemently denied that she would ever leave her children. Her chuckles at my silliness were stilled when the apartment we had left just two weeks earlier, collapsed on its foundations during the North Ridge Earthquake.

Over the next few years I wrote and published a book that outlined the gradual evolution of human consciousness all the way from Stone Age family values to the Present international tensions. The book provided a graphic illustration of the logical progression of social and spiritual survival imperatives that have taken place over four past Ages of human development and how that has led us to our present condition. I argued that we were at the end of a Technological Age of over-intensive mass production and environmental exploitation and that the exponential pressures of our populations on an over-burdened planet demanded a far more ethical attitude as regards the meaning of life and purpose of mankind’s lethal domination of the home planet. Once again I naively expected that the progressive logic of the argument would immediately influence readers and make them find ways and means to change their life style. It never happened. Psyche-Genetics became an instant non-seller. Not a soul responded to it. No book in the history of publication has sold less.

That failure succeeded in shutting down my objections against God. I could not find one person in either Sodom or Gomorrah to listen, let alone the ten God had agreed to in the parable. The failure to communicate allowed my wife’s grumbling to resume. Her discontent was once again stilled temporally when she saw the eerie sight of the twin towers of World Trade crumbled to dust. I then got on a dozen internet forums, (just like this one) and began broadcasting thousands of posts related to the need for a mass change of consciousness. And again got back nothing but derision from all. God had been right all along.

Three years ago my wife found the desert solitude oppressive. She left a loving husband and loving children in preference for a life back Sodom and Gomorrah and has subsequently turned into a pillar of salt.

In September of this year, the whole edifice of Sodom and Gomorrah, as predicted in the ancient parable, has begun to collapse. The walls are falling across the length and breadth of the planet.

Tuesday, December 23, 2008

ESP

Originally Posted by gordon
Mr MagnetMan, I was wondering what kind of "psychic-soul powers" do you, and your children have? I was also wondering, is there a psychic skill able to "see" and to notice in other timelines?


It is my conviction that extra sensory perception represents the untapped potential of all human beings. I believe that it is related to uninhibited communicatioin between the two hemispheres of the cerebral cortex. Some few people are born with a clear pathway between the two brains and consequently enjoy a high level of intuive insights. Domineering parents, siblings, text-book schooling, governments, police, etc. intimidate the child psyche. Adults redicule their natural tendency to fantatize and as a consequence gradually block natural access to the intuitive side of the psyche.

During the education of my kids I made sure they were not incarcerated inside a classroom or forced to prematurely analyze text books for six hours a day. I let them run and play throughout childhood. The only disciplines imposed on them where personal ethics, hygiene, chores, gardening etc. I encouraged arts and crafts, and regular yoga and meditation classes. They only hit the text books at puberty. All scored straight A in all subjects in final exams. Though none have as yet turned out to be especially clair-sentient, their intuitive powers are far superior to most people. I devised a telecommuncation test, transmitting random alphabetic letters to each other. Their "hits" were phenomenal - on 50% of the occassions getting six out of six right. Never less than 60%. The odds each transmission are of course 26 to 1.



Quote:
If the future is forward and the past is the past, then the timelines are sideways?

Time is relative to consciousness. In the Absolute state, past, present and future co-exist. Everything is potentially in the present moment. The eerieness of deja vu happens when, for a timeless instant, consciousness breaks the light-speed barrier. Your consciousness is equally split between two space/time continuims at the same moment.

Some of my own ESP experiences are recorded in my book Psyche-Genetics.


What is clair-sentient?

The psychic ability to hear sounds and see entities or other-dimensional scenes vibrating at frequencies beyond the normal range of perception. The most common is to see auras radiating from people or objects.Clinical psychologists provide more prosaic explanations.



And what are the other "ranks". *Inrespect* I was hoping you could explain about timelines. As I am sure that timelines work on adifferent set of laws? I could be wrong. Thanks MagnetMan, for viewing and answering. Peace. Blessed Be.


I am not sure what you mean by "time lines".

At a very basic level time is relative to states of consciousness.
An infant, for instance has no concept of past or future. Everything takes place in the here and now.

As we age the survival demand to master technologies force us to artificially divide time into increasingly minute segments. The analytical side of the brain becomes a time-keeper. When you are young you live with your psyche focused on future ambitions and expectations. When old you dwell on past triumphs and mistakes. It is almost impossible for us to break the hypnotic time constrictions and try to live in the here and now. We rarely exprience the totality of the moment. When we do, the experience seems like a meeting with the Divine. It is as though you are directly connected to everything in the cosmos. You do not feel alone or separated.

Dream time has no relation to waking time and is in fact closer to "no time" and therefore is less artificially manufactured.

Many clair-sentients have "premonitions" about events that in our "normal" frame of time reference, have not yet happened. I have had a numbver of these premonitions about future events in my life. I have at least ten events which took place exactly as predicted. I was taking a casula look at new set of post cards I had just bought, when I had the eery feeling that I was looking at my future life. Its a long fascinating story about the power of premonition which I have related elsewhere.

The fleeting nature of time is regularly experiencied when one is deeply engrossed in a creative mode of expression. I can remember writing my first novel. My wife would bring me a cup of coffee in the morning and leave for work. She would come back in the evening eight hours later and I would ask her, "Why haven't you gone to work yet? Aren't you a bit late?" This time-loss happened repeatedly during the months I spent in creative writing. This clearly suggests that the right side of the brain, when in the creative mode, has no consciousness of time and is disconnected from the analyical side during that period Smoking marijuana also distorted "time" for me.
In contrast, if you are engaged in a tedious chore, time "drags".

Time is completely unreal. Minutes and seconds ticking away on a clock is a manufacture of the human mind. No other life force experiences time the way we do. A dog waiting at the door for its master can do so all day without impatience - even remain unconscious of "feeding time". The entire life span of a microscopic organism from birth to death can take place in a single day.

I hope that is explicit enough.
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Common Sense Revisited

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Sunday, December 21, 2008

African Pathos continued....

The newsmen in that room knew I would want the footage of that lone blackman begging for death broadcast to the world at large. What they did not appreciate and stubbornly never would, was why I wanted transparency on such damning action. They believed that strong police action was the only language Africans understood and that they world beyond had grasp of the difficulties in Africa. To them a step out of a mud hut onto a concrete floor, no matter how stark the new might be, was step up the evolutionary ladder which black Africa, owed to the whiteman and had to be eternally grateful for.

Not only Afrikaners, but white South Africans in general had no internal grasp of the depth of black consciousness. Few whites spoke a Bantu tongue. Even fewer read black literature. The cultural divide was one-sided. They lived and worked on our properties, spoke our languages reared our children; heard our conversations; listened to our music; saw our movies and television programs. They knew us intimately and we did not know them at all. We had no genuine feeling for the pathos of a third generation of African children who aspired to move out of their cramped locations, own a piece of the pie themselves and could find no way to do that short of rebellion. After a century of serfdom; laboring in the gold mines; sweeping streets; carrying shit buckets; washing clothes; scrubbing floors and nursing our children for almost no pay; blocked from economic advancement by job-reservation; forced to carry passbooks; continuously hassled by the police; all the while helping to build up South Africa's modern infrastructure, they were now seeking a stronger form of representation in the country's government than they had at present.

The government could not or would not accept that the urban blacks were a detribalized society of self-determined individuals who had moved away from the security of their tribal customs and deliberately sought a life in the white man's world. They had seen the survival advantages of superior technology and wanted their children to learn how to master them. They desired to move forward in time - not be relocated back in the tribal homelands. In response, the Afrikaner psyche remained fixed on the conflicts of the past - focused on their historical fears of numbers. The black/white ratio inside the country was six to one. Another six hundred millions loomed beyond our borders, ready to pounce on any sign of weakness. Die Swart Gevaar. Keep the blackman down. "Give a kaffir a finger and he will take the whole hand"

Every white born in Africa was fully conscious of the racial divide. Very few, myself included, wanted majority rule by blacks. Most were blind to the reality that it was inevitable. I had lived and worked elsewhere in Africa and knew that the winds of change would not an could die out on the Limpopo. Africa was for Africans. I accepted that. But to me, black rule remained generations too premature. They were not ready to run highly industrialized nations. We needed to keep our focus on improving the quality of their technological education, not be politically afraid of their electoral numbers. The entire international out-cry against Apartheid was centered on the demand for democracy. The demand was naïve in the extreme. If after eighty generations of civilized development in Europe, two white cultures in South Africa could not find it within themselves to transcend their own language and custom barriers and vote along purely ideological lines, how in the world where thirteen inimical tribal cultures in South Africa supposed to accomplish that feat? The international demand for democratic rule throughout tribal Africa was so utterly pseudo-intellectually out of touch with reality it made me question whether there was anyone outside of Africa left with any base of common sense.

The practical reality that had to be faced on the ground was that the vast majority of blacks inside South Africa were still only semi-educated. Only a primary school education was compulsory. This was not a deliberate educational policy of racial subjugation. The general education level of the country was poor for both races. There was simply not enough teachers and classroom in the country to do more than what was already being done. White students were crowded forty or more to the classroom. Most entered the trades at age sixteen. Less then 10% of them made it to university. As it stood, the industrial know-how of less then four million Europeans was not only educating the primary education of thirty million blacks, it also formed the bread-basket for a hundred million Africans surrounding South Africa's borders. A collapse of the white government had enormous ramifications, all of them potentially disastrous.

I was one of the few English-speakers to realize that the Apartheid master plan of creating thirteen separate self-governing Bantustans within the traditional tribal homelands was the only logical social and spiritual developmental policy to pursue. Leap-froging from a Bronze Age of agricultural traditions and tribal lore into a sophisticated Steel Age of high technology, without experiencing an Iron Age of basic industrial craftsmanship and orthodox religious observances, would leave a black-ruled nation in a confused evolutionary time warp. One simply cannot go from primary school to university. This hard fact of life was already apparent in the chaos of the rest of black-ruled post-colonial Africa. If, say, something as simple as a windowpane gets broken in the middle of Africa today, it cannot be replaced without an import from Europe six thousand miles away. The entire infrastructures of post-colonial Africa is on its last legs and nobody is repairing it. In 1976 the genocide in Ruanda, the Congo, Sudan, Somalia and Dafar had yet to erupt. But the signs of Africa's post-colonial degeneration into her own medieval Dark Age were already clearly apparent.

The whole notion of Uhuru in Africa was a pseudo-intellectual pipe dream smoked up by lawyers with no practical training in civil management and as such was clearly premature. The European powers who abandoned their colonies in Africa, did so mainly because of the immense drain of maintaining existing infrastructures. Their Imperial ambitions in Africa had turned out to be a net loss, state burdens that they were only too happy to relinquish. For the new leaders of black Africa, the governing reality was that none of them - to a man - were equipped to realize and come to grips with, was that at least a generation or two of conscientious craftsmanship was needed throughout the continent in order to establish a large enough base of technical training able to manage and maintain industrialized infrastructures. This same fact of live was relevant in South Africa, the most advanced of all the colonial nations on the continent. That same anti-colonial notion that the thirteen dispirit tribal groups in South Africa could govern the country democratically and run its nuclear powered national infrastructure as efficiently as the whites was patently preposterous.

The major problem facing the creation of viable self-governing Bantustans inside South Africa was in finding ways and means to create sustainable economic systems in each of them. Without the ability to gainfully employ their own populations and train them to bridge the transition period until they were capable of running the machinery of an industrialized nation, the Bantustan program was untenable. To this end, the Apartheid master plan encouraged, via tax incentives, for large international corporations like General Motors and Ford to establish their manufacturing plants on the borders of the Bantustans. This economic stimulus may well have worked if the rest of the investing world had joined in to support it. But the pseudo-intellectual cries of the anti-Apartheid movement drowned out and quashed the practical applications of the Bantustan master plan. Nelson Mandella remained the revolutionary hero locked up in prison and the Apartheid government the evil Empire.

In any event, the Bantustan policy did nothing to address the growing problem of three generations of detribalized people crammed into the urban locations and ghettos that surrounded every town and city in the country. The reality the government could not face and did not know how to deal with, other than mass relocation, was that some six million of South Africa's black population were no longer culturally connected to or interested in being sent back to their tribal lands. The urban blacks and the generations of sophisticated cultural reorientation that they had undergone needed to hear and experience their own voice travel beyond the jazz of location music and protest slogans. Exactly how far and how loud their political voice could be heard, needed to be urgently negotiated. The growing pressure of millions of school graduates seeking something more than just sweating in the mines, sweeping the streets and washing colonial clothes had to be met with a realistic policy of gradated economic and political advancement. Persecuting and jailing their leaders and enforcing petty Apartheid laws only emphasized and exacerbated the emotions of racial discrimination.

On the other hand the arguments of their black leaders like Nelson Mandella, trained to be lawyers and not civil engineers, crying against injustice were one-sided in the extreme. Zero credit was being given to the advances in black consciousness already achieved and how difficult it had been to do so. As far as I was concerned the resentment against white privileges needed to be addressed more holistically and nobody was doing that effectively. Blacks and the anti-apartheid movement in general needed to be reminded that Europeans had served for eighty long generations as unpaid serfs and minions in Europe, living in hovels beneath the castle-walls of our overlords. They had sweated blood and tears and suffered torture on the rack for our privileged position. No pain, no gain. All cultures and races had to serve a degree of allotted time. Certainly not for another two thousand years like Europe did, but at least one or two more generations.

To me the conflict between the races was a matter of semantics. If, instead, the current attitude of master/servant, could be changed to a mutual dialogue between teacher/student, that more realistic approach would encourage a kinder, more enlightened domestic atmosphere. Pressure would be relieved if every black child believed in a future of graduated advance, of hope and promise - not one of stagnancy, of perpetual servitude, of military confrontation and hopeless pleas for on honorable death rather than a disgraceful life. This mass change had to be initiated in improved technical educational and job opportunities, not at the polls. Freedom to vote, without the skill to be gainfully employed was a Christmas wrapping without a present inside.

As a television producer directly involved with modern mass communication, I believed that only through transparency, admission of mistakes on both sides, could we achieve racial understanding, prolong benevolent white administration and make South Africa strong for all its people. But I also knew that all of my hopes were seen by others as too naïve - too idealistic, that given the opportunity, black power leaders would not wait another generation - that it could and would be even more ruthless, more savage than white power. The political chaos and acts of genocide in rest of independent Africa bore witness to that. With the fall of colonial rule, as with the fall of Rome, Africa was entering her own Dark Ages and would remain there for centuries.

The weight of all I have mentioned above, bore down on all of the public communicators caught in the time-warp inside that editing room. There was no question that they would suppress the news. There was nothing I could do about it. I knew then that would leave Africa soon and find a more hospitable home elsewhere on the planet. But I wanted confirmation that I was doing the right thing. I needed to know exactly what had happened in Soweto that morning. I owed that young black man, begging hopelessly for death, at least that.

I left the editing room, went down to my car and drove six miles out of town to the giant location. I had a fully loaded 16mm movie camera lying on the seat beside me. I wanted to investigate and report on what had happened for myself. The road out to the location was strangely deserted. I had been going into Soweto every morning for the past three months, documenting urban shamanism. Over a thousand witchdoctors, mostly women, still found enough customers in the shadow of the giant Baragwanath hospital, to practice the ancient Bronze Age art of psychic healing.

The focus of the documentary was; who in black society became a witchdoctor? What made anyone decide to become one? How were they trained? Via public television I hoped to dispel among white South African viewers the prevalent superstition, fostered initially by the Christian Church, that witchcraft was the Devil's work. During the months spent documenting the forty shamans (sangomas) who participated in the program. I could not help but be impressed, not only by the uncanny nature of their psychic powers, but also by their down-to-earth grasp of basic human psychology.

Instead of just mystical hocus-pocus, I found myself among forty of the most intelligent and analytically insightful Africans I had ever met. The finished documentary revealed to some extent the subtle nature of the spiritual empathy that exists between psychic healers and their patients. I saw that African witchdoctors were duplicates of the ancient alchemists of Europe, the forerunners of modern science. The spiritual message I got was that the true art of human kindness is to empathize so deeply with the spirit of another pilgrim in life, as to actually feel the pains of fellow human being. It made me realize that if sensitive mediums were able. with a little training, to care enough to feel the pain of another and could reach out a healing hand, mankind in general had the capacity for the same degree of empathy and compassion. Potentially we had the internal power to heal our nations of all our ailments.

During the final days of filming one of the female shamans I was working with warned me that she sensed danger ahead and that I should stay out of Soweto. A few days later, Credo Mutwa, a Zulu witchdoctor made famous by the well-received publication of a book on African mythology: Indaba My Children had told me that he had a dream about blood flowing in the streets. In genuine distress he had naively asked me to warn the government that some awful disaster lay ahead.

In the weeks after, while editing the film inside the huge broadcasting complex, knowing that I had the power to talk to the whole nation, I wrestled with his plea. How was I to transmit psychic premonitions through a modern news medium and get a white audience who viewed African superstitions with general disgust, to take the warnings seriously? Without denigrating my source, I cautiously tried to warn top administration officials within the SABC that I had been given information about violence brewing in Soweto. My reluctance to provide the source of my information was taken the wrong way.

A previous documentary of mine, which featured the early life of Mohandes Ghandi in South Africa and his fight against race discrimination, had included anti-Apartheid interviews with Dr Alan Paton and Professor Fatima Meer. It had been banned from public broadcast. This, among other attempts of mine to bring black consciousness to the fore, had placed me on the lists of BOSS, the Bureau of State Security, as a potential anti-Apartheid activist. So my warning that something was brewing inside Soweto was interpreted that I had some form of contact with the banned ANC movement and had inside information on an up-coming subversive demonstration. When I eventually confessed that my source was the intuition of witchdoctors, one can imagine the derisive response.

I had learned to take the premonitions of the shamans seriously. So I took a different tack. I held meetings with my fellow producers in the English documentary department, arguing that our programs should concentrate on the variety of unnecessary hardships blacks were experiencing inside Soweto. I pointed out that any genuine act of concern shown by the whites, especially if broadcast nation-wide, would go a long way towards ameliorating the growing sense of resentment inside the townships. Violent demonstrations in one form or another could be avoided if we worked together to appeal to public sympathy. My colleague's response was disheartening. That were convinced that I as over-reacting. They did not feel that even if they wanted to, a mass change of race relations in the country was not at all possible. The under-lying reality was that the government controlled the SABC and they did not want their careers jeopardized as black sympathizers. These thoughts were in my mind as I drove out of town to investigate for myself and find out why and how Credo's dream had come true.

There was a heavily armed police road block at the entrance into Soweto. The police were backed by army troops. They would not let me through. So I drove around the perimeter of the vast location, looking for another way in. It took me a while to realized that there was only one road leading in and out of that vast township. One throughway for a population of over one million! The strategic reason was now obvious. When the government bulldozed down Sophiatown the vast unsanitary shanty town that once crowded Johannesburg's city center, and built the huge location of Soweto (an acronym for South Western Area Township) six miles further out of Johannesburg, and then and relocated a million black workers inside it. they had made sure that any future mass unrest within it could be fully contained. With the road block in place, no one but the police could get in or out.

After an hour of circling the location and finding no other road in, I was about to turn around and go back to the station, when a young African man stepped out of some bushes on the road-side and waved me down. He was in obvious distress. Tears streamed down his face. I pulled over and picked him up, hoping for information. At that time I still had no idea that several hundred children had just been massacred. The man beside me smelled of kaffir beer. He continued for some time to sob beside me. Finally he spoke: "I left her there! My girl-friend! She was facing the police guns! She was brave. She would not leave! Children were dying right in front of me. I was frightened, so I ran!" We rode on in silence. After a while he stopped crying and spoke soberly. "You know Baas, Dingaan made a big mistake." His historical observation should not have surprised me. Africans in general have a vast oral tradition of their history and tribal lore. Most knew the names of tribal chiefs going back ten to fifteen generations. Dingaan, who had assassinated his step brother Shaka, the founder of the Zulu nation, was paramount chief in 1830's. He had invited seventy Boer pioneers seeking his permission to settle in Zululand, for a conference at his palace. The Boer leaders had entered his compound unarmed. At a signal from Dingaan, they were surrounded and butchered. A Zulu impi of five thousand warriors was dispatched to kill the four hundred voortrekkers waiting to hear if their petition had been granted. Luckily they were warned in time by the daughter of missionary and managed to defeat Zulu regiment. The Battle of Blood River that followed was a turning pint in Black/white relations. The Afrikaners decided that the whole country had to be taken over and held by force. It was that single act of Dingaan's treachery, determining the future course of black/white relations a century and a half earlier, that the young man beside me had put his finger on.
I sighed. There was nothing more to be said, by him or me. I gave him some money and let him off in Randsburg.

There was no way of suppressing the news of the massacre. Four hundred school children staging a peaceful protest march for their right to be taught in English rather than Afrikaans, had been ruthlessly gunned down by the police. The entire world was out-raged and the anti-Apartheid pressures of boycotts and sanctions against South Africa was tightened. I was left with three options. Do nothing, like the rest of my English-speaking compatriots. Keep having my work banned and possibly end up under house-arrest. Or leave the country and find a more welcome home some where else in the world. It was clear to me that Apartheid would eventually collapse and the country go under black rule. To me that was the worse of two evils. Much as it outraged the basic human right to a fair political system of government, white rule remained the only viable economic rationale. It was only a matter of time before thirteen generations of pioneering effort came to an end. I could do nothing about stopping it. Three months latter I sold my house and car, packed up, bought a round the world air ticket, and left the land of my birth for good.

My maternal grandfather was a Jew. My first stop would be Israel. I had some claim there. Maybe they would give me sanctuary. I had no idea that I would be stepping out of an Apartheid frying pan into an Apartheid fire.
To be continued.....




…..

Saturday, December 20, 2008

The Illusion of Security.

In the 14th Century a Hindu philosopher named Shankar postulated an atomic theory which stated the matter is illusory (maya). Six centuries later Einstein proved that matter is basically condensed energy.

What this all boils down to is that we and our lives are aspects of a vast cosmic illusion. Reality is relative to a state of consciousness. In order for the individual to feel secure, he or she must join a majority contract that defines what matters in life. Our individual sanity is based then on a consensus of the majority's opinion. If this opinion is challenged in any serious way by any individual who refuses to agree, the specter of mass insanity and subsequent chaos looms.

Our fundamental American security blanket is based on Representative Government: Democracy: Capitalism: Christianity. These are nationally accepted as the only true realities. This consensus of American values was established in the 18th Century by our founding fathers. In order to secure and preserve this American reality, we have been and still are prepared to send our sons into war and kill anyone who challenges it. We have invested in a vast armory of nuclear over-kill to ensure and protect it.

At the start of the 21st Century, the illusion that has sustained America's sense of security for almost three centuries, started to slowly unravel at the seams. 29 young men with box-cutters slipped past the vast military defense system and brought the tallest symbols of a Capitalist empire crashing to the ground in a pile of rubble. A growing panic about what constitutes reality, and therefore security, started then. Entire nations have been designated as evil. We condone the torture of anyone who challenges our illusion. Our private conversations are eaves-dropped on.

Underlying the gradual collapse of America's sense of security is the basic fact that the vehicle designed by our founding fathers is harder to keep running. It is a rickety old vehicle that burns too much gas and pollutes the environment. The roads and bridges it runs on also need serious attention.

The four pillars our sense of security rests on need serious re-evaluation

Our idea of Republic as security is an illusion.
Having one's vote represented in congress by men we knew personally and trusted may have made sense in the days when mass communication was limited to the speed of a horse. In this era if instant mass communication, placing the responsibility of your vote in the hands of a complete stranger makes no sense and is widely open to corruption.

Democracy is also an illusion and always has been.
The initial idea was to remove power from royal birth and place it in the hands of the ordinary man. One man/one vote sounds very well when shouted from the oratory dais, but in reality it makes little sense. According to this system any callow youth with no record of significant achievements in life can nullify the vote of a respected elder. The natural conservative/liberal divisions in social outlooks have also served to dilute political enthusiasm. As a result voter motivation in general has suffered. Less than half the electorate trouble to go to the polls.

Capitalism is an illusion.
It is based on the premise that national creativity, competitiveness and productive effort will not materialize or be sustained without the liquidity of money. This artificial concept denies the basic evolutionary impetus of human genius and puts a cap on our full creative potential. In order to keep the power of capital investment viable, governments limit the printing of promissory notes. Only a limited number of ideas can go into production and the majority of the work-force is trained to remain uncreative while serving on the mass production line. The net result of this artificial restriction is that more than three quarters of the planet is under or unemployed and half of the children are starving. While the artificial barriers that this vastly restrictive monetary-based system remain in place, the real work of managing a planet with everybody fully engaged in stewarding it as a single family estate, can never materialize.

Christianity is an illusion.
We do not have the sole ear of Almighty God nor do we dictate who goes to heaven. That idea was promulgated by the Bishops ad Nicosia nearly two millennia ago and is patently not relevant on the global stage today.


What we need is an entirely new set of illusions – new ideologies that requires a global consensus to sustain and make as New Age of human evolution seem real

Friday, December 19, 2008

Does Evil exist?

Question:
I don't understand. Isn't "evil" the antithesis of "good"? Aren't these properties relative to the person perceiving them? If so, what purpose is there in avoiding "evil" and embracing "good", except to limit us to a societally correct life?

Answer:

An atomic universe is dynamic because of negative and positive polarities.
The symbolism of yin/yang by Taoist metaphysicians provides a clearer understanding of "good" and "evil" than do kabbalists.
There are natural forces of non-trespass that go to the heart of nuclear physics.
Right and wrong cannot be analysed.
Matter is energy
Energy is consciousness.
The sanctity of every atom is inviolate.
The right side of the brain has the ability to intuit trespass on any atomic associatiion.
It releases an electrical impulse that makes one feel "uneasy" when trespassing.
For instance - a fragile artifact "asks" you to be careful and not to drop it.
The higher your state of consciousness is the more careful and more aware you are of non-trespass.

Thursday, December 18, 2008

The Capitalist Leech

The Madoff Scam

MagnetMan wrote:
Invest a a million bucks with me and I wll guarentee to send you back $100,000 in interest every year for the next nine years. After that don't call me, I'll call you.Oh! And tell your Jewish friends about the sweet deal I am offering.Apprently this is just the tip of the next capitalist iceberg to begin melt-down. I hope all capitalists have got a life boat.

Wilsonsd2002 wrote:
I am not ready to give up capitalism because when I try to think of better economic systems and I take different systems to their logical conclusions, they end up with bigger problems then the ones I tried to fix in the first place.The thing about capitalism is that it's been around for a long time and a lot of flaws within the system have been corrected over the years.

MagnetMan wrote:
200 years of capitalist scams led to the Great Depression of '29/'33 Another 75 years of capitalist scams has led to the coming Depression of '09/'12. If you keep doing the same thing over and over again and expect a different result each time that, as the saying goes, is insane.

Wilsonsd2002 wrote:
If we changed our economic system it would be like starting from scratch and there wouldn't be any guarantee that the new system would ever be better than the one we have.

MagnetMan wrote:
If I ran my family estate the way capitalists have run America over the past two centuries I woud deserve to be pillaried by my descendents as a scoundral and wasteral.
99% of wooded land gone.
Millions of buffalo dead.
The water table of evey city poisoned.
The soil of every farm poisoned.
The air poisoned.
All the spare cash gone up in gambling smoke.
The entire infrastructure crumbling.
Future generations deep in debt.

Want me to go on?

I have laid out plans for a better mouse trap on several threads, and it did not take a rocket scientist to do it. Any asshole could do better. Capitalism has turned out to be the greatest blood-sucking leech of all time, with tentacles reaching across the globe. Worse, its a terminal disease. at least the leech lets go when it is sated.

Wednesday, December 17, 2008

How to Rebuild the Economy

Phaedrus wrote: Today I saw Bush on TV talking about the bailout of the Big 3. He said ‘I’ve Abandoned Free Market Principles To Save The Free Market System’. Hmmm...that sounds a bit like trying to put out a house fire with a can of kerosene.

Actually he is trying to fight fire with fire. His problem is that if he does get new money to do all the national restructuring he wants to do, it will not be nearly enough. Anybody initiating a new business enterprize knows that starting off under-capitalized is a sure-fire recipe for failure.

It is a pity he never got a big enough mandate to do exactly what needs to be done. As his economic advisor it would tell him to declare an all out war on national poverty. Begin by ordering the Fed to print zillions of new dollars, This would effectively devalue all existing dollars and temporaily neutralize the national debt. I would instruct our creditors to have faith in the American worker and hold onto their devalued dollars. Large Corporations and private firms would be put on war-time production footing and instructed to pour all their resources into a complete make-over of the national infrastructure.

Brand new energy grid designed for renewables;
Brand new ergonomic vertical cities built outside flood-planes and hurricane alleys.
Brand new transportation system.
High-rise indoor farming.
Free health care and free education for every citizen.
Encourage a global stewardship corps of young graduates to travel abroad and help undeveloped nations get up to speed.
Ensure full national employment for a thirty year war.

At the end of that time, the new American dollar would regain world dominance. Debts would be squared with interest.

Tuesday, December 16, 2008

Global Economic Collapse

Ultimately, when an entire society subscribes to an economic ideology and all work together in order to make its implementation sustainable it is, in effect, a socialist system no matter what name we give it. The central problem is always on how to sustain a moral administration.

Capitalism encourages individualism, which in turn requires a very high degree of personal integrity.

The pool of liquid capital in any society represents the value of the GNP. Capitalism allows private individuals to dictate how that money is invested. Printed promisary notes are an artificial representation of human effort that can easily undermine reality and distort one's sense of personal integrity. One forgets that one is dealing with people's lives. Distortion sets in when the State encourages a trading system that allows those with a few excess dollars to gamble on the stock market. It gets volatile when it is deregulated and the State removes its retraining hand. That is asking too much of personal integrity. Gamblers want the competition to lose, not improve their hands. Thus the original ideaology of investment towards creative growth via healthy competition, inevitably degenerates into betting on the failure of all competition. All gambling eventually gavitates towards a single winner. Such a system only works while enough players are still winning. Gambling is a highly addictive pass-time. When an entire society gets hooked on it, either on the stock market amiong the wealthy or via a national lottery system among the poor, trust in the future is based more on false hope than honest effort, and moral integrity inevitably suffers. Thus in the end capitalism is self defeating. Instread of encouraging team effort it ends up quashing it.

One would then think that a communist ideology that discourages individualism and encourages collective team effort, would end up on the global stage as a hands on winner.

Communsim failed on two counts of moral disintegration.The basic problem in Marxism was the denigration of religious observances - which, no matter how cynical one may view it, never-the-less sets an absolute standard of morality that cannot be argued with, even if most workers could not attain to it. By making a corruptible government set the example of goodness, it led inevitably to corruption of party power.

The second failure was that it did not try to set a peaceful international example. It took on the West in a dangerous gamble of Russian roulette with nuclear guns. The gamble demonized the ideal of team effort and eventually bankrupted them. That together with state corruption took the heart out of the communist worker and the system failed.

Like communsim, we too now stand on the brink of system collapse. The heart is being systematically taken out of the capitalist worker. Quadrupling the gas prices sucked his savings and frightened him about the future. Then his house is being foreclosed. His retirement fund has been devalued. Out-sourcing has put millions of jobs on the line. CEO's who claim that their input is a thousand times more valuable than the average worker is profoundly insulting.Reckless gambling has made the chips close to worthless. Fears of global environemental collapse add to the pressure. National motivation is suffering.

It is hard to say how speedily we can correct ourselves, if at all. Obama is talking about a whole new form of green-based economic recovery. Sustainable energy production, cleaning up the environment, a more ergonomic infrastructure, better health care and education etc .. which theoretically should create millions of new jobs and put us back on track. But none of that is really capitalist friendlly.

All of Obama's new deal requires massive funding over the long term and nobody knows where the money is coming from. Capitalism prefers short term investement, quick-product turn-over, planned obsolescence and high consummerism.

As far as I can see, looking down the road, though i have been roundly laughed at for suggesting it, is to gradually wean ourselves off a money-based/ownership, sytem with all its artificial barriers and place far more stock on the evolutionary behavioral imperatives imprinted in our specie's DNA.

As stated, ultimately every system relies on morality. People are mostly kind-hearted and hardworking and highly creative when given the opportunity. We should not allow a minority of bad apples to determine how we seek our collective happiness.

If we can paint a clear enough picture of the world we would most like to live in, and lay out a pragmatic, step by step plan of how we can get there - if we all focus on the same goal, a more sustainable and friendlier existence is not impossible. There can no question that there is masses of amount of work to do, and we have a huge reservoirs of workers looking for jobs, and the technology is there at our fingertips.

The barriers in front of us are purely ideological. If communism has proved to be immoral. And then capitalism follows suit. You tell me what will motivate a global workforce, if not a moral standard based on universal custodianship and sustainable planet management?

How we view the world and respond to the ideological mores of our cultures boils down to child indoctrination. The same child born in Russia, the USA or Sweden, would respond in kind to each of them and would fight to the death any seeming threat by a counter ideology, even though all three of those cultures cultivate the the same basic moral values of kindness, sharing, chores, crafstmanship, courage, love, creativity and intellectual agility.

Any final answer to the world economic crisis would require the end of divisive and primitive ideological indoctrinations and a concerted effort to rear the global child as a future planet manager. Since all parents have been deeply indoctrinated since birth into their particular ideological mind-set, a mass change of the next generation's consciousness cannot be accomplished by reason alone. Existing circumstances have to reach a point of deterioration on a global scale that are severe and lasting enough for all cultures to seriously question the value of their economic ideologies. Only then can the mass deprogramming begin and more holistic ideas on how to effectively manage a planet in a sustainable manner be given a rational hearing.

Monday, December 15, 2008

Welfare

Congressman Barney Franks is getting hammered for going to bat for the man at the bottom and trying to get some of the billions in bailout trickling downwards instead of flowing upwards. As a result he is accused of encouraging welfare.

If the profit motive in a capitalist system has any moral legitimacy, it is to ensure and sustain full employment. If it fails there and then cries foul when the state steps in and tries to keep families afloat it loses all credibility.

"Let them eat cake" Sound familiar?

If you keep gauging a profit out of every transaction without re-investing enough of that profit back into the domestic market to encourage advances in technology and the creation of enough new jobs to keep new graduates employed, the well must eventually run dry. Capitalism collapses and the rich end up starving too.

I would say that out-sourcing and pocketing all the profits at the expense of the domestic worker is more the cause of the current economic crisis than the sub-prime debacle. It is becoming apparent that capitalism requires a far more socially evolved consciousness than the one we have in place at present. Self-restraint has surrendered to greed and we are finally at the end of our rope. Natural resources are drying up and making a profit on a starving global market, rife with unemployment, can no longer sustain it moral legitimacy. Some new form of globalized socialism is inevitable.

Sunday, December 14, 2008

Apartheid Pathos

June 16th. !976. SOWETO
Two hours before the outside world knew that over a hundred protesting school children had been gunned down and massacred by the police during a peace march, the first film rushes taken at the scene arrived in the editing rooms of the South African Broadcasting Corporation.

I happened to be passing through the Afrikaans News department when I noticed a group of reporters crowded around one of the editing tables watching the rushes. Though their bodies obscured the screen, I could still hear the sound effects recorded at the scene of the massacre. Over the speakers I could hear a car racing towards the camera position at high speed. Then came short burst of machinegun fire; followed by the squeal of tortured tires on tarmac and the heavy crash of metal slamming into a barrier. For a second or two there was silence. Then came the hoarse out-worldly cry of a young African male. "Kill me! Kill me!"

It was not the painful cry of a broken body begging for relief, or the defiant cry of a black revolutionary. It came from a beaten and broken spirit that had lost all its will to live. Within that ravaged tone I could hear and feel all the pathos of Africa's writhing soul, trapped for generations in the twilight zone between two Ages of human evolution. It encompassed the paralysis of continent that had been rudely jerked out of the slow pace of a pastoral Bronze Age.

For two centuries and more, an entire race of eight hundred million souls had been forced to watch their sacred clan totems trampled on and defiled. They had to bear the shame of tribal customs ridiculed, see their people rounded up, chained, enslaved, beaten down, raped, frustrated, colonized, exploited and emasculated. The had been treated by their slave masters and colonizers more like beasts of burden than as members of the human family. All of this executed against them by the hardened initiates of an Iron Age culture that gave them no clear understanding of why such a mass upheaval was necessary. The gross inequities of a technologically more advanced culture against a lesser were clear. Paradoxically, neither the master, who thought of himself as fair and reasonable, nor the servant who thought the same of himself, really knew why they where behaving so unkindly towards each other.

After his final charge into the hail of police machinegun bullets that heartbroken call for death, echoing inside the editing room, was all that was left for that young man. Without knowledge of larger evolutionary purpose and the Gods apparently failing him, life had no meaning.
"Kill me! Kill me!"
I waited for the mercy shot that would end his anguish and bring oblivion to his lost soul. It never came. The terrible lament died down. In the awful silence that followed, my presence in the room was noticed for the first time.

A dozen pairs of accusatory eyes turned from the screen. Added to the emotional echo of the black man's cry, was now the cultural antipathy of contrary colonials, forced by our own history of war and circumstance to share an unbalanced alliance in the same land. As a member of the minority English-speaking white group, there was no question of me exercising any of my broadcast authority as a producer, ordering the public exposure of that newsreel .A dozen staunch members of the Afrikaner race barred any further exposure to the news reels. Their bodies made a laager around the table. To them I was a rooinek, an interfering Engelesman, eavesdropping on a racial event of potentially devastating domestic and international consequences. It was not my business.

It did not matter that I was born and bred in South Africa just like them. Or that the Scottish side of my family had invested six generations helping to pioneer and develop the nation. As the bearer of a British surname, I was and always would be an uitlander, born and raised without a trustworthy appreciation of national values. Afrikaners were the only true patriots.

Behind those young newsmen loomed the unassailable might of the Nationalist Party Government with its two-thirds majority Parliamentary vote to determine the fate of all South Africans without reference to the hearts and minds of the other thirteen language groups that shared the land.

Democracy is a sham in a multi-lingual country with a history of ethnic dissension. In a climate where sentiment rules and rationalized argument takes second place, emotional cultural affiliations rather than logic governs the psyche of the electorate. A parliamentary majority of the largest ethnic group imposes a life sentence of political impotence on the minority language groups of every democratic country so divided. That reality had effectively quashed all opposition in South Africa since 1948. Their electoral victory in that year allowed a two million Afrikaners legal license to practice cultural totalitarianism over twenty million others. They had ruled the country with an iron hand since, for nearly two generations. The future of now thirty million souls was caught up in a representative trap that has made a mockery of the democratic revolutionary slogans that spawned it. Everything but Freedom/ Fraternity/Equality existed in South Africa's Republic.

An internationally accepted system of human management allowed the Afrikaners to keep all the other ethnic groups locked behind political lines of demarcation from which there was no legitimate escape. It unfairly and effectively silenced the voice of one million opposing European voters who, since Roman times, had also struggled for eighty generations for freedom of expression and the ability to exercise their own free will. Republican ideology and its governing system of party politics simply works against itself in bilingual countries. English-speakers could protest against Apartheid in South Africa's Parliament all we liked, our objections were simply out-voted and the Afrikaner policy of legalized group separation remained unchanged. The Laws of Apartheid ruled over all of us, black and white, via ethnic-division. The net result was that I was personally and culturally as helpless in the larger decisions of the country as any disenfranchised black, and could not order that damning newsreel to go on the airways.

As far as Afrikaners were concerned, their absolute rule was poetic justice. This was the way God meant it to be. It was they who had pioneered and civilized the country. They had trekked and struggled and suffered with Africa's harsh climate, deadly diseases, wild animals and savage tribes more than all others. They had fought and won the Kaffir Wars. The treacherous massacre of Retief and his party by Dingaan's army when the trekkers peacefully petitioned him for settler-ship in Zululand, gave them in their minds both the moral right and the military might to take the whole country by force. When the British annexed their Boer Republics, they had fought the Anglo/Boer War. Forty thousand farmers on horseback armed only with rifles, were the first to invent commando raids, guerilla tactics and trench warfare. Those new tactics confounded and bogged down a traditional British army of two hundred thousand professional soldiers equipped with heavy artillery. Though unbeaten, the Boers were eventually forced to surrendered in the field; but only after Kitchener's "Scorched Earth" policy burnt down their farms and incarcerated their women and children in concentrations camps where they died of dysentery and typhoid by the tens of thousands in unsanitary conditions.

The Boers survived to fight again less than a decade later, at the ballot box for the independent Union of South Africa. They won back full Afrikaner control in 1948. As far as the mind-state of the twelve young men standing in front of me, they represented a victorious volk who had made an ancestral Covenant with Almighty God to settle in their promised land and to retain Afrikaner rule in South Africa for ever. From their perspective, I could not possibly understand or appreciate why the Afrikaner culture had to stand strong against the liberal English and hold back the black tide of Africa and the encroachment of the world beyond.

That history of dislike hung heavy in the atmosphere between us. Defiance was reflected in their eyes and on their faces. There was an element of shame present as well. Underlying our cultural confrontation, remained the awful and potentially explosive event on the newsreel. Political rule, ordained by God or not, could not drown out the resounding echoes of machinegun fire and the terrible pathos of a fellow human being crying out for the finality of death rather than the continuation of a hopeless life. That cry echoed beyond political debate, ethnic confrontations and racial division. It came from a broken human heart that had lost its faith in humankind. If allowed broadcast on television it would undoubtedly pierce the soul of all who heard it. There was no defense or excuse that could negate such a desolate tone. It damned the inequities of Apartheid in a manner beyond all artificial argument.

Nobody spoke a word. The was no need to. All of our shared history was present in that editing room at the fateful moment. We all knew full well that not a frame of that film would ever be made public. Such stark reality was not for public consumption. The dosen editors remained in a semi-circle barring me from the editing table; a laager of determined young Boers, hardening their hearts; protecting their volk.

The public communicator in me should have been outraged by their censorship. That lone voice crying in the streets of Soweto, pleading for death rather than life, could have reached the heart of all South Africans. It could have given all of us pause - Afrikaner, English, Bantu. Had not a single snap shot of a naked little Vietnamese girl, with her napalmed skin hanging from her body, changed the course of an international war? I knew that I could leave the room and verbally spread the news in the English Department of the SABC as well as the English Press that such emotive footage existed. But I could not find it in me to do that. I was gripped instead by a deep sense of melancholy.

The irony of the situation was that I had more ancestral rights than any present in that room to view the news footage and decide what to do with it. I had English, Afrikaner as well as Bantu blood in my veins. My paternal grandfather, a Scottish descendent of the 1820 English Settlers, had dared, in the midst of the Boer War seventy years earlier, to cross the cultural line that separated English and Afrikaner colonials, and married the grand-daughter of a Boer Voortrekker. Both sides of my family had fought against each other in the war. Some of these newsmen were undoubtedly distant cousins. A quarter of me shared the same pioneering blood that had forged an Afrikaner culture in the African veldt. On top of that, was even an older claim to the land. My maternal Grandfather was a Jew who had fled from a Russian pogram in Lithuania, and ended up in Pondoland, married to a local maid of mixed Irish and Xhosa blood.

Both my grandmothers had suffered life-times of estrangement from their relatives. No one on the Afrikaans side of her family had ever spoken to my father's mother her after her marriage. And no one ever once mentioned my mother's black blood. That mix of South African bloods and the conflicts it brought to the surface was too involved, too painful, too complex. I saw no point right then in revealing my more wide-ranging ancestral rights. All I felt was this depressing melancholy. I felt sad, for them: for my family; for the helpless blacks; for our country; and especially for the estrangement I felt within myself and the lack of passion I had for any of the values they were all willing to fight and die for.

I knew then, in that moment, for the first time in my life that I was a complete outsider. I was not a true South African, I did not share any of the values of any of the groups in my country. None of the Afrikaner, English or African, cultural, political or economic aspirations resonated with me. I knew exactly where all of them were coming from and what each hoped to achieve and agreed with none of it. I stood apart from the fray. I could see that all of us who were caught up in an artificial political mind-set that made human beings lose sight of our common evolutionary destiny.

Was the murderous parable of Cain and Abel an endless brotherhood tragedy? Could we all never live together as equals? Was the ejection from Eden an eternal damnation of the human spirit? Was the Christ call of love for our neighbor as an expression of our larger self never to be answered?
"Kill me! Kill me!"
How many more millions of souls had to still die in despair, with their minds and hearts torn apart by the disgrace of mans inhumanity to man?

But mostly my sadness was for these young descendants of a tiny cultural colony of lowland Dutch farmers that had been deposited thirteen generations ago in the wilderness of the southern tip of Africa, as part of a business venture by the Dutch East India Company. They were trying to hold back an evolutionary tide of human development that was infinitely larger then them. All they could see was their own small history. Their culture formed their only reality; their group consensus their only base of sanity. The world beyond and its anti-Apartheid sanctions and boycotts had to be withstood; like their Dutch forebears, the dykes keeping back the floods of the ocean had to hold strong.

But beyond all that was the greater irony of a common evolutionary thread that has been entirely lost in the world of superficial political, religious and economic arguments that has thrust the human tide back and forth across the oceans of emotion since the middle of the Bronze Age.

Not ten miles from were we stood inside that editing room, in the dark recesses of a dolomite cave at Sterkfontein, the remains of a hominid, mankind's earliest ancestor had been discovered. Since then, science, via the examination of Mitachondrial DNA, had traced the origins of every man and woman alive on the planet, back to South Africa. Here after a million and more years of gradual migration up through central and northern Africa, across to the Middle East, then Europe and Asia and on to the Americas, experiencing development through long Ages of Stone and Bronze and Iron and Steel, was the Nuclear Age son of our original parents, a hundred thousand generations removed, returned to his Motherland.

Here, at the very same spot where he had experienced the first dim glimmerings of a separate self - where an ape-man and become a hu-man, a descendent of Adam was now vehemently disclaiming the fact that the black-skinned man who had remained in Africa, was his blood brother. This small archaic Calvinistic culture, speaking a quaint Walloon patois', clinging to Old Testament values, was fighting against a huge evolutionary tide which, via colonialism, was affecting a mass reunification of human brotherhood - a force of Nature that would eventually and inexorably sweep over their Afrikanerdom and absorb everything they ever stood for.

At that moment, in that room, staring at my compatriots and their protection of what they believed to be best for the country, I had a sudden epiphany. I knew that thirteen generations of white power had come to an end. That all our ancestors hopes and dreams where in the process of being crushed. Like colonials elsewhere, we did not belong in South Africa, that Europe was no longer welcome in Africa itself. I did not belong. No matter how personally I might be sympathetic to the black man's cause - I was one of the white elite - a colonial oppressor. A slaver and exploiter, seeking profit and private gain on a Black continent that no longer wanted my expertise.

Anti-colonialism - that was the essence of the pathos that I could hear in that young black voice - the frustration of a black man unable to stand tall on his own continent, knowing that the white over-lord with his superior technology would not go and that there was no way of removing him without violence. I knew then, in that moment, that I would leave Africa soon and find a more hospitable home elsewhere on the planet........

{to be continued}

Friday, December 12, 2008

The Last Hottentot

My mother, Stella, was born in the Transkei in Southern Africa, in a little village called Lusikisiki where my maternal Grandfather, a survivor of a Russian program in Lithuania, ran a native trading station. She grew up among the Pondos and spoke the click-filled language of the amaXhosa like a native. It was because of her inquisitive nature that this sad story of the last Hottentot left alive on the planet ever got recorded. But let me first fill in a bit more necessary background history.

The Pondos are of Nguni stock and are close cousins to the amaZulu. Both groups migrated together out of Central Africa some six centuries earlier. The Zulus, finally finding enough land and that was not claimed by other Bantu tribes, settled the northern part of Natal and continue to live there today. The Pondos continued southwards with their migration and established themselves several hundred miles further down the Indian Ocean coast. Their southern border runs along the banks of the Kei River. Their western flanks butt up against the slopes and peaks and high plateaus of the Drakensberg where the BaSutu have their sanctuary.

When the Pondos first arrived in the Transkei, the land was not entirely unclaimed. It was sparsely populated by two separate indigenous groups of more primitive Boskopiods. The larger of the two groups were the Khoisan. It is now known that the San are mankind’s original ancestors. Mitochondrial DNA traces all humans alive on the planet today, back to those tiny Bushmen of the Kalahari. The other group, of slightly larger stature and far less in number, called themselves the KhoeKhoe, which translates literally into PeoplePeople. When early Boer settlers first heard the rapid-fire clicks of the KhoeKhoe tongue the Boers thought they were stutterers (Dutch: stotteren) and thus called this group, Hottentots. The name stuck.

The San were hunter/gatherers. The Hottentots were pasturalists, herding cattle. The Boskopoids, both San and Hottentot, are subgroups of mankind found only in Southern Africa. They are anatomically different to other humans. They are steatopygic, able to store enormous amounts of fat in their hugely extended buttocks and, like the desert camels who store the fat in their humps, can live without food and water for extended periods far beyond that of other races. In addition, strangely, Boskopoid women have a small flap of skin partially covering their clitoris, (though I have never heard it mentioned by anybody else) perhaps serving as a protective feminine version of the male foreskin.

The Pondos, though a more advanced culture, where also pastoralists and traded with the peaceful Hottentots, often times taking Hottentot daughters as servants and concubines in exchange for cattle. Eventually, via a gradual process of attrition, Hottentot girls were more willing to climb up the social ladder and become Pondo concubines, rather than mate with their own kind. And so over the generations, the numbers of pure-blooded Hottentots declined to near zero. It is through these concubine mothers, that the Boskpoid click-words that we hear in the Xhosa language today were inherited and became part of their culture. So, in this way, my mother learned to speak some of the surviving words of the extinct Hottentot tongue.

Far away from Pondoland, up in the Highveldt of the Transvaal, where I was born and raised I listened to my mother have a conversation with an wizzened old man with a yellow mongoloid face and gray peppercorn curls, who claimed that he was a Hottentot. They spoke together in a mix of Xhosa and Afrikaans, so I could only grasp half of what was discussed. Later my mother filled me in on the whole story.

At that time our family lived on a plot of farming land belonging to an old Afrikaans widow. She had established a five acre orchard filled with mature deciduous fruit trees. Every year for decades this old Hottentot would pitch up at harvest time, pick the peaches and apricots and plums, load the harvest onto a hand-cart and push it around the neighborhood peddling the fresh fruit for her. He told my mother that fruit-picking employed him all year long. When the grapes were ripe down in the Cape a thousand miles in the south, he made his way there. When the citrus was ripe in the Lowveldt off he would go there. And when the peaches and plums were ripe upon the Highveldt, here he came.

He said that in all those annual migrations across the length and breadth of South Africa for all those decades, engaging in thousands of conversations with the Bantu groups he met in his travels, he had never met another person who claimed to have or knew of anybody who’s blood remained pure Hottentot. Since Bantu women would not marry him, when he was younger he had searched for a Hottentot mate and never found one. He said that he had an older brother and sister who had recently died. In his opinion, after they passed on, he was the last surviving Hottentot left on this good Earth.

In that way, since my mother and the man she spoke with are long dead, I might well be the last European to actually see and hear a real live Hottentot tell his sad tale, before that sub-group of humankind, after millions of years of evolution, became entirely extinct.









The Gay Psyche

I believe that being gay may well be related to communication problems between the right and left sides of the brain We know from split-brain experiments that each side of the cerebral hemisphere processes information differently. One side analyses and responds to rational input. The other side is intuitive and reacts to "feelings or hunches". Healthy behavioral responce results when balanced decision-making takes place between the two modes of comprehension.

The Yin and Yang of Knowing

For many the left side can be said to be "masculine" We know that as it processes information it is: intellectual, convergent, digital, secondry, abstract, directed, propositional, analytic, lineal, rational, sequential, obljective, successive

The right side is said to be "feminine" We know that as it processes information it is: intuition, divergent, analogic, primary, concrete, free, imaginative, relational. non-lineal, intuitive, multiple, holistic, subjective, simultaneous

It is my thought that when these parallel modes of comprehension are somehow reversed in a male or female's brain chemistry during fetal development, a confusion of sexual orientation results
.

Thursday, December 11, 2008

Who Wrote the Bible?

The persons who wrote the Bible all made serious pilgrimages of personal enquiry into their inner selves and as a result of their spiritual efforts were rewarded with revelations regarding the human condition and the relationship between man and God.. They were ex-shamans who were the inheritors of a vast wealth of orally transmitted totemic lore that reached back though the Ages. As the first Scribes they were initiated as - kabbalists, sufis, yogis, swamis, taoists, buddhists, alchemists, priests and bishops. They translated their inspirations into encouraging texts, asserting that there is a God in the Universe and that contact with the Source of Being brings profound enlightenment to life. They coded their writings so that seekers could find deeper truths hidden among the parables. The first level was for children. The second for parents and the third for those striving to become spiritual adepts like themselves.

They also wrote down simple social laws on how to live the good life.

The problem with all communication, especially in trying to transpose profound thoughts vai the mechanical nature of the written word, is that each composition is subject to endless interpretations. This is expecially so when trying to define a Law. There is not be enough room in the universe to house the libraries of argumentive law books that can be written, trying to unalterably define a single clause. As a result, this mis-interpreation of religious texts has led to endless "holy" wars.

Loa Tse realized this difficulty from the start when he wrote the Tao te Ching.
He who knows does not speak
He who speaks does not know

In modern times, since the challenge of science, literal interpretations of the Scriptures, without their deeper levels of revelation, have become far too divisive. They were necessary during the era of nation bulding but have since become a serious hinderance to further spiritual development. They have alienated the majority of intellectuals, excited international terrorism and are not relevent in a global milieu, They should not preached in public places any longer. The Bible is no longer encouraging enough people to make serious spiritual enquiry. As a whole, we have drifted away from the enigmas of religious thought. Church halls are empty and university halls are crowded with more curious students. Science is now the global religion. As a result, despite extra-ordinary advances in technology, the moral nature of the world is going down-hill faster than it is going up.

The need for spiritual awakening remains as necessary now as it was in the past. The dogmatic creeds preached by the religious have served their primary purpose. Mankind is no longer an iliterate child, needing a scribe to read from a text and instruct him on how to behave. The means of how we go about it have to change with the times. Ancient spiritual exercises, drills, and mind-altering drugs. used by the orginal adepts thousands of years ago have re-surfaced in this New Age. The drug culture of the 60's and 70's initiated a resurgeance of spiritual angst. Tens of millons of moderns are now seriously engaged in meditation and yoga techniques designed to bring about spiritual enlightenment.

Spiritual enlightennent is an intensely subjective experience. What we are finding is that no two inspirations regarding the relationship between man and God are ever quite alike. So what is the New Age revelation? What is happening? How do we find a balance between Science and Spirit? Between analysis and intuition? Btetween the left brain and the right brain? How are male and female able to halt the drift towards divorce?

The Piscine Age that began with the parable of cleansing of sin via The Flood has ended. The Aquarian Age of breathing fresh air into tired souls has begun. What is the New Age Testament to be?

The good news is that science has finally moved from the phsyical to the metaphsyical. Nuclear theory has shown that matter is an illsuion. That its a condensed form of energy. So, in sub-atomic reality, the Universe is invisible.

If we are all radiant expressions of atomic energy, who then is God?

I have tried to answer this for myself in my Psyche-Genetic theory.

If God is a vast universe of radiant atomic energy.and that energy can and does express consciousness.
Then God must be Consciousness
Thus the interperation of the Scriptures that man and god are separate beings is wrong.
Mankind, together with everything else in the universe are all conscious expressions
of a God who is omniscent
And the nature of that universal source of conscious beingness is predominantly Divinely good and orderly, eternally evolving towards higher states of ecstatic self-awarness, with an element of randomness that makes the process dynamic.

You are at liberty to interpret my personal inspiration anyway you prefer.

Better still, travel into your own spiritual desert and fast for forty days as you hunt for the your own magic lamp. Don't let another forty years of spiritual emptiness be stolen from you. And when you rub the dust off your soul and the genie appears: Tell him, like Solomon did, that all you want is wisdom. Who knows? Open Sesame! What hidden teasures lie waiting inside you.

Monday, December 08, 2008

Idealism, in the long term, is pragmatism

Most of us realize that we live in a less than ideal world. The degree of how clearly we realize this depends on your birth. There are some, the very rich and very powerful who get a 90% slice of idealism. If you are born into a middleclass American family, a degree of idealism that is at 60/40 or better allows one to be more or less satisfied to muddle along, reasonably content with the fact that there are more ups than downs in life. If, however, a child is born in a ghetto, it is faced with something far less than a halfway shot at a reasonably ideal life. So the pertinent question about the degree of idealism in our world is: how many of the new-born of the world have at least a chance at the 60/40 slot?

The sad fact about our less than ideal world is that more than two thirds of the parents on the planet live hopeless lives that are so far down the feeding trough, there is very little chance of giving their kids a decent birth right. So on a global scale the degree to which we are living in an ideal world is very poor indeed

An idealist sees the waste of human potential in the unequal discrepancy in birthrights, and because he is basically pragmatic, sees that inequality creates not only social ill-feelings, but also massive ineffciancy in employing the full wealth of our creative input . The idealist wants, at the very least, to find ways and means for every child born to have the same chance that everyone else has, and therby evoke their creative spirit and not have it soured by ill-feelings.

The problem with the pursuit of that ideal is that it can only be accomplished with the help of the elite, who have the resources to help. To some extent an appeal can be made to the inherent charitable nature of the human psyche, and get some of those with more than half the pie to let go of some of it. But the elite, who enjoy a more rosy view of life do not, or do not want to see, the down side very clearly, (let them eat cake) never donate anywhere near enough charitable assistance to make any real inroads in the struggle to achieve a more ideal world. If the idealist agitates for more of the pie to give to the poor, he or she is immediately labelled as being too communistically minded.

An army of philosophers have achieved distinction by confirming the right of the rich and powerful to remain stingy ( They find comfort in catch phrases like; trickle-down economy). This patronizing attitude towards the poor disguises the inherent moral guilt that every person learns during childhood about the basic family value of meticulous sharing. That guilt is further mollified by well-paid social cynics who pan idealists even further by attacking their moral characters – thus by focussing on the messenger - they succeed in diluting the message. As a result nothing of any real value gets done about equality and the life we all live remains fixed in a less than ideal state.

The idealist, meantime, sees that inequality becomes exponentially worse as the birth rates of the poor double and redouble. The net result, unless ways and means can be found to put an end to the patronizing attitude and realize that idealism is, in fact, pragmatic realism, our less than ideal world will get less and less ideal for all of us as time goes on.

It may even happen that the poor will fly planes into tall buildings and strap bombs to their children’s chests and blow us all up.

Sunday, December 07, 2008

Retirement

With the disaster of the current economic collapse still to reveal its full extent, there are millions of American workers who have had the value their 401K retirement funds seriously eroded. I am sure many of them are wondering, after a lifetime of earnest savings in preparation for their retirement years what God (or fate if you will) might have had in mind by cutting the ground from under their feet in this way.

I will attempt an explanation, with the hope that it might bring some deeper level of understanding.

Whenever I try to unravel the rationale behind any of our established customs and try to grasp the full import of its social significance, instead of working my way backwards through the history of it and get confused among the branches of past events that led to its establishment, I have found it handy to go back to the roots of the custom and then work my way upwards. My knowledge of African customs has been very helpful in this respect; if not in giving me a comprehensive answer, at least allowing me to end up with an improved understanding.

During the reigns of the Zulu kings - Shaka, Dingaan and Cetshwayo, puberty boys, after they and had experienced all the trials and ordeal of their initiation ceremonies, where then inducted into the military ranks, where they were expected serve in their respective regiments until their forty second year (when the first gray hairs appear in the beard). Upon induction, one cow from the king’s herds was given to them. Upon retirement from service some twenty five years later, all the generations of that cow’s progeny became his private property. This accumulated wealth allowed him to retire from the service, attend to his own estate, buy wives, put on the headring of an elder and take his place at tribal council.

It is probable that the more or less the same system worked in all Bronze Age cultures. In any event, induction into the communal work force has been moved up to around 21 years, and the retirement age to 63 or so. Somewhere during the Age of Industrial development, I think is were we might have gone wrong, by pressing our workers to labor for others beyond the age when they have the energy and will to attend to their own.

And so we have elderly workers caught flat-footed today by events larger than themselves. We also have millions of people who have put in a life-time of hard menial labor yet have no retirement benefits.

We now have a reasonable picture of the past which has shed more light on present conditions.

Does it shed any light on improving future direction?

Saturday, December 06, 2008

Out-Sourcing

I just bought a new set of golf clubs, signed off by Jack Nicklaus. The titianium driver lasted two months. It was made in China. I'm pissed. The driver I bought 40 years ago, made in the USA, and retired in favor of new technology is still working.

Two things: If you are going to put your name on any mass manufactures item and make millions out of the endorsement, why not make sure it is first class?

And if you are a true national hero, why not insist that it is made in the USA, where people also need the work? That way I could use any busted club to beat a better idea of what conscientious crafstmanships means into a countryman's head, without having to go to all the way to China.

I

Friday, December 05, 2008

The Flood, the Ark, the Dove, and the Rainbow

This morning after the rain, I watched the end of a rainbow settle over our little farming hamlet of Dyer. The sight brought a ray of hope that pushed troubled thoughts about the economy and the selfish manner in which so many humans were behaving, away from the forefront of my mind.

The rainbow brought to mind the biblical story of The Flood and reminded me of what so many of us are missing by not finding comfort and reassurance in the ancient Scriptures. For many the story of a Jewish family visiting every continent and collecting a pair of each of the three billion living specie that inhabit the earth and saving them from the flood on an Ark, and then being asked to accept that as a literal truth, has made them dismiss the Bible and its spiritual messages altogether.

The story of The Flood reminds us that ever since ancient times our forefathers have been troubled by the wayward nature of our kind and how the accumulation of sins that we pass down from generation to generation slowly devalues the quality of our existence. The Biblical Flood is a coded parable filled with a spiritual messages hidden in the number, 40.

It was written as a blessing by a Kabbalah mystic at the start of the Piscine Age. The gathering of the animals to be saved symbolized that they were not sinful. The saving of Noah and his family symbolized that not all men were sinful. The Flood symbolically washed away all the accumulated sins of humankind and left the human family pure again.. When the waters subsided the Dove brought an olive bough as a symbol of Peace between man and God. The Rainbow gives us the promise of rebirth and renewal and heaven here on Earth. The number, 40, which also appears in the book of Moses and the sufi parable of Ali Baba, is the number of years of trial and error that all humans must struggle thorough before they reach the beginnings of real.maturity. In both sexes 40 is the age of menopause.

That Old testament parable was repeated in the New Testament - in the story of Christ, who, as the Prince of Peace, gave his blood to wash away our sins and bring the promise of a heaven within. Jesus too, spent forty days in the desert, struggling to shake off the devil within.

Seen in this light, the present with all its problems can be seen as just another moment in human development, with all our mistakes inevitably to be washed away and our progress renewed as we continue to strive to build a Heaven for all on Earth.

Thursday, December 04, 2008

Tales of the Gun II

The second gun I owned was a double-barreled .475 magnum, made by Watson Bros. in England. At that time ( 1959)I worked as a diamond prospector in the wilds of Tnaganyika in East Africa. I wanted to go elephant hunting and I needed something bigger than the 30.06 that I used to hunt smaller game. My Winchester had the velocity to kill an elephant but it lacked the punch to stop a charging elephant dead in its tracks. I needed a reliable big-bore elephant gun, preferably double-barreled.

As an employee of Williamson’s Diamond Mine, in Mwadui, I was registered as a resident in Tanganyika Territory. Residency entitled me to an inexpensive elephant license. For thirty English pounds I was allowed to bag 300lbs of ivory or five elephants, whichever came first. Elephant tusks in those days sold on the ivory floors of Dar Es Salaam for eight shillings a pound. Getting a license would give me the excitement of hunting big game and a profit to boot, but I needed to get the gun first.

On a visit back to the mine at Mwadui I heard that an old-timer had died and his widow wanted to sell his elephant gun. I got the Watson for hundred English pounds. It was packed in axle grease. Cleaned up and assembled, I found it in perfect condition, the rifling looked as though it had never been fired. The breech was beautifully engraved. The stock was a might short for me, but other than that, just what I needed.

Stalking elephants, especially if you are looking for a big bull, can take all day. You make camp near a waterhole and the next morning before sun-up you check for tracks in the mud, made during the night. A big bull will leave a rear-foot print that is more than two feet in diameter. Easy to see in the mud, but their soft pads are almost invisible on the hard-pack. On top of that, there is so much movement of the herds in any given area, following the tracks of a lone bull who is eight or nine hours ahead of you, while going through heavy thickets which have been crossed and re-crossed by dozens of other elephants during the day, is impossible without a skilled native tracker. Hard bargaining for more than double the shillings I originally wanted to give him, secured the services of an old Swahili tracker who had been stalking elephants all his life.

Old as he was, with naked legs no thicker than broomsticks, I found it hard to keep up with him. He was a Moslem and wore a dirty white dottie and a greasy fez that might also have been white at one time. . It was astonishing how clued up he was. He never once had to back-track, following a spoor that was mostly invisible to me. Now and then he would show me where the bull brushed a tree trunk, stopped to feed, or lay down for a mid-morning nap. The marks on the tree gave some indication of height, more than nine feet at the shoulder. The tusk grooves in the dirt when he lay down some idea of the size of ivory he was packing. The huge piles of dung he left behind gave us a reasonable measurement of how quickly we were closing the distance on him. Elephants are mainly browsers and eat young bark. They can strip a finger-thick switch as long as your arm, clean as a wick. The extreme tip of the trunk is prehencile. It has the grip of a strong hand. They eat up to four hundred pounds a day. If the dung beetles had already come and rolled balls of two inch in diameter, it meant that we were still two or more hours behind. Warm dung told us that he was nearby. Gases rumbling in his massive belly, sounded much like a tennisball bouncing around inside an empty fifty gallon drum.

I shot the bull in late afternoon on the edge of the escarpment that forms the Great Rift Valley. The mopane forest was so thick I could only see the top of his massive head fifty feet away. He saw me in the same moment that I saw him. His huge ears flared wide and his trunk searched the air for my scent. I was so excited I do not remember pulling the trigger. It was a clean brain shot. He dropped where he stood. When I came up to the massive body, a rush of atavism swept over me. I jumped up on the carcass and danced and hollered like a caveman. It took two hours to hack out the tusks. He carried 80lbs. each side. An old man, near the end of his lfe. I will never forget him, nor him me, I guess.

I shot three more elephants before leaving Tanganyika and sold just under 300 lbs. of ivory at the floor price. I sold the Watson to a friend for the same price I paid.

Fifty years later, when I told my children the elephant story, My eldest son got on the internet and pulled up a site that sells collectors guns. Right there on the screen was an exact duplicate of my old Watson. The price.. $29,000.00!!

Addendum:
Our collective consciousness has changed much over the past half century. And so has mine. I did my big game hunting at the tail end of the colonial era when Britain still ruled East Africa. People enjoyed different values about big game hunting in those days. Hemmingway's stories about hunting in Africa sold big time. Since the 1960's children have been trained to think more conservatively about Mother Nature and our responsibilities to Her. I was schooled in the 40's and 50's. in a consciousness about hunting that goes all the way back to Paleolithic times. Today I caution my children not to step on ants. Things have indeed changed.