For the first time in human history the 99%, the Common Folk, the Masses (however you care to describe us) have both the power and the technology to create a World Community that can design and implement real change. The goal of Quicksilver Times is to draw together individuals and groups from every corner of the World Community to see to the dismantling of the dysfunctional and immoral social, political, economic, and spiritual systems under which they live.
Sunday, November 25, 2012
Sunday, November 11, 2012
http://www.trueactivist.com/gab_gallery/the-banker/
The Banker Airs His Views On The Right Of The Elite To Control Everyone's Lives. A Must Watch For Anyone Who Is Angry About The Current Financial Situation!
Performed By Mike Daviot
Written,Directed and Produced By: Craig-James Moncur
The Banker Airs His Views On The Right Of The Elite To Control Everyone's Lives. A Must Watch For Anyone Who Is Angry About The Current Financial Situation!
Performed By Mike Daviot
Written,Directed and Produced By: Craig-James Moncur
Draw Attention?
YES. Watch! But after recognizing the truth of this video, shouldn't we, like, DO SOMETHING?
Have ideas - will share...
Please Join us - love, bill
Thursday, November 1, 2012
Reality and the nature of Sesame Noodles
Reality and the Nature of Sesame Noodles
November 1, 2012
I’m off the flesh wagon. Again.
Decades of adhering to the premise that respecting what you kill and consume, stepping each day closer to consciousness – as your moment, strength, and attention allows, and attending to love while recognizing if not always accepting the darkness, have brought me another epiphany. Of sorts. Stimulated by the solitary darkness and intermittent flashes of light on Interstate Highway 95, after four or five hours of sharing middle-of-the-night rhythm with truckers and a few other four wheel night riders, the near meditative silence and mind clearing passage of time has awakened me. Again.
It came unbidden to mind. “Not the time to be eating flesh.” That simple, really. So after twenty-five years of no flesh, followed by about twenty-five years of fleshing, I’m off the stuff again. For how long? Don’t know. It’s not the issue. No flesh today.
On that black night, all alone on the road, that “Poor Man’s Epiphany” has re-centered me.
Seems a pivotal time has come. Again.
All the new work – Quicksilver Times and all that entails, Live broadcasts identifying issues and directions understood now - after forty years of study and struggle, Finally getting the 78 half hour Sharing the Seasons TV series programs digitized and up on the Sena Foundation You Tube channel, Reprising the Sharing the Seasons series itself, Preparing for a spring kickoff of Quicksilver Times Talking Tour – all seem suspended. Just…waiting.
The primary focus of the moment is White Man Dancing – Grief, God, and a Unified Theory. The book is finished. Thanks to Becca Fitzgerald the editing is completed. The letter to Agents/Publishers is strong and ready to be sent. A list of Agents and Publishers has been compiled. www.sena.org has been updated so the first book, Remembered Gifts and New Directions, and the TV series are highlighted. www.quicksilvertimes , the Facebook page, and this blog are in place and active.
All that’s left is to send the book out there.
The last couple of years have been consistent in, if not rejecting ideas, programs, and projects we’ve begun, they’ve certainly displayed a yawning disinterest. I can, rightly, explain away that lack of acceptance by taking responsibility for not presenting our work appropriately, and for not being able to fully understand and use the media and technology available to us.
I also know that the primary motivation for the work must not be in the apparent success or failure of our sharing. We do the work because it’s the right thing to do. We present because it is the truth. My mind uses what has now become cliché, “Stand for what you believe – even if you’re the only one standing.”
It’s become my standard in the last decade.
So now, with White Man Dancing – Grief, God, and a Unified Theory finished and safely tucked in its’ digital nook on several computer hard drives, it too seems in suspension.
The moment brings to mind a moment in a kid’s sorta book I just finished a few days ago. (Lol, it I suspect, will receive the same reception as everything else sent outward the last few years.)
Pancake Pendleton is a boy who has been smooshed flat by a billboard for Papa Peter’s Pancake Emporium. He’s been caught up – literally – in a Derechos (You know, one of the huge new storms our Global Warming may be spawning) and has flown all the way from Sheboygan Wisconsin to Bowling Green, Virginia. And yes, he is a distant cousin of Flat Stanley.
"...Pancake Pendleton broke free of the wind. For a moment or two he felt suspended there, motionless, between the earth and the sky. Held by some magical force that would keep him balanced there, at peace, forever. But forever is a realllly long time.
We don’t know how long that beautiful forever moment lasted for Pancake Pendleton. But it for sure wasn’t forever...."
It feels like that right now here in the real world, or what passes for the real world. I accept the moment can’t be forever. I’m seventy-three; I’ve at least learned that.
But there’s a part of me that wants to hold on here, not face the probability, no, the almost certainty that White Man dancing, Grief, God, and a Unified Theory will languish in some digital cranny of the ethers.
I’m prepared for that, I just don’t have to be overjoyed about it.
I can look ahead and understand that “This is the way the work ends, this is the way the work ends, this is the way the work ends, not with a bang, not even with a whimper, but with a series of quiet ‘Phhhllaaats’” – to shamelessly maul T.S. Elliot.
What begins to hover about the edges of my understanding is that this might be a greater season of change than I have been anticipating. Yet in the quiet, inevitable entropy of each heartbeat, each rising sun, I find the middle way, which for many decades was a tightrope made of Teflon coated piano wire, is now a path. The cautionary note about that, of course, is that at the moment I’m without pain – physical, mental, or spiritual. The darkness is real but momentarily a memory.
In the balance of what Pancake Pendleton would call a forever moment that he knows will end soon, I see the nature of reality adjusted.
But as White Man Dancing says, UNDERSTAND, the words lie.
Yet here they are.
Look to the new Physics. There in the physical nature of being and not being, in the measurable nature of movement and stillness, there is a portal to transcendence. Consciousness, intelligence is not measured by memory, memorization, or marking, but by opening and acceptance.
It’s in the opening, in the acceptance and the environment the middle way accesses that transcendence is experienced.
Find your way. There are as many as there are moments.
See?
Pancake Pendleton was right. The moment ended.
Now it’s to the exercise. The book must be sent out. The broadcasts must be planned. The videos must be digitized. The Quicksilver Times Talking Tour must be planned. And it is time to again to STAND UP!
Come on and help. Share.
Sesame Noodles? It’s what I’m making the family for dinner tonight.
love,
bill
love,
bill
Wednesday, July 4, 2012
Well, There's Googley Plus, You Know
Well, There's Googley Plus, You Know
The issue, I think, is one of balance. fb seems an endless sludge of
contra-productive information. To find coherent, conscious,
meaningful communication your fb search, and patience, must be exemplary.
googley+, on the other hand, offers a safe medium in which to explore all
manner of valuable pursuits. But is the search for communication and
sharing that relates to looking at and becoming involved with real social,
political, economic, and spiritual change any more evident?
All the "smart folks" are here, bringing us intricate, focused insight into
science, technology, art, belly button spiritualism, and so much more.
But if all that information and sharing in the end allows us to maintain
our denial and not center our moment on the profound issues and solutions
accessible to us, then for all of our intellectual exercise, no matter how right
minded our intent, what little movement there is here on googley+ it's really
only babbling - just like the fb'ers
The inability to use the incredible power offered to us to communicate
freely and meaningfully through the explosion of technology and the
Internet will be the failure our grand kids look to when trying to understand
why we did not come together and look to the real issues.
I see it, and this makes me sad.
So here are three sites. Lets Talk?
love,
bill
Tuesday, June 26, 2012
Audacity
Audacity
So is he just a fool? Does he just make ignorant, redundant claims? Do folks look away in embarrassment when they are confronted with his words?
OK. I’ll
take that risk. I re-read the words. I watch the chaos unfold. The babble is
way louder than my tinnitus. I hear the rhythms playing just below the din. I
listen to my heart. And although sometimes I get insecure, feeling connected
with love, but isolated, and hearing the unavoidable silence of “noresponse”, I
want to scrunch down behind the couch like I did when the Big War was going on
and I was too tiny to understand anything but the fear, and Adolph Hitler was
my first Boogey Man.
I want
to reach out for reassurance. I want to unveil I Ching, make one of my once a decade pilgrimages, asking for
support but knowing the Oracle pays no mind to questions to which I already
have the answers.
So
maybe all these opening words are just self indulgence.
I say
it all the time. Have been for a couple of decades. It’s not my responsibility to
make anyone hear, my only responsibility is to listen, stretch, hear better,
and share.
So
here it is again.
All is
cyclical, all is rhythm. You need to create the lead line.
We are
in a new time. The old way is dying, convulsively. There is new a newly inscribed
way to see yourself and reality. It begins with your heart. It extends all the
way to the precise study of new physics, and the search for a Unified Theory.
As Sri Auribindo predicted we are entering the time of Evolution of Consciousness and Conscious
Evolution. And what begins in your heart is validated by the changes you
will manifest in every aspect of your life, your moment, your world.
Understand.
This is practical. This is as practical, must be as practical, as the need to
breathe in after breathing out.
I spend
so much time trying to draw attention to the dysfunction, in our personal
moment, and in the moment of our planet, hoping that getting clear about how
broken it all is will help us all to look deeper for fundamental issues, and
then for real solutions. I know that if we do that, each of our paths will
quickly turn inward toward our singularly unique moment. From that awakening
will come balance, and real change. Without that attention nothing will
improve, in our hearts, in our world.
It’s
to this end that I point to symptoms, cajole, rattle cages, give vent to anger.
And the silence I hear in response sometimes is co-equal with the babble.
So maybe
I need to give equal time to the opposite end of the new equation.
In the
denial which we’ve been co-opted into embracing we bury the crying of the
heart. But most of us now, given our lives and our circumstances, know that something
is missing. At the heart of our love, there is more. In the most precious of
our moments we know there is more. What we crave is the transcendence which, being
so modern and educated, we have thrown out with the bathwater of organized religion’s
failure.
Back
in the olden days of the eighties and nineties those of us in Sena Foundation
would come together and sit in meditation. We sat to help ourselves deal with
the grief each of us called to ourselves as we worked with dying folks and
their families. It was a way to quiet our minds, to let go of the emotions that
come with the grief, and to share. What we found was that, inevitably, we
passed through the grief and what we edged up on was that cry of the heart
which each of us felt. Opening to transcendence.
It was
out of those experiences and the shared experiences that those dying folks drew
us into that led to this new approach to spiritual life.
The
new book, White Man Dancing – Grief, God,
and a Unified Theory, is finished. Hopefully it will be published in the
coming weeks. It speaks in detail of both ends of this equation – Seeing and
addressing real issues in our personal lives and the life of our planet, and a personal,
non-dogmatic approach to life of the spirit.
It
occurs to me that we might also try a new approach to gathering together. The
new Google+ Hangouts Online allow us to broadcast live on the internet. We
might gather, sit together quietly, and then share questions about the issues
we’re attempting to raise.
We
have the power, if we have the attention.
Let Quicksilver Times know if you are
interested.
love.
bill
Tuesday, May 1, 2012
Nuts and Bolts
Some Nuts and Bolts
Over
the past decade we at Sena Foundation, and now at Quicksilver Times, have called for radical, fundamental changes to
our economic, social, political, and spiritual institutions. It’s been a hard
sell. Seems like folks are either overwhelmed by the thought of such massive
change or dismissive of the need altogether. And there are a significant number
who just, “Hi diddle, diddle, the sky is not falling… all the live long day.”
There
are so many facets to what needs to be addressed, to how we even begin to examine
practical methods of defining and designing alternatives to hopelessly outmoded
and mortally broken systems.
But
here is a place to begin.
Capitalism
must go.
We as
a species can no longer accept an economic system based on rewarding greed, no
matter how jerry-rigged and befouled with additions and addendums to assure us
it’s fair. The fundamental concept is wrong. Basic concepts of Capitalism such
as, “What’s allowable? – Everything that’s legal,” and “Everything is legal
until you are caught,” are unacceptable.
To
justify Capitalism by suggesting that the only alternative is Socialism or
Communism is spurious.
Communism’s
failure does not suggest that Capitalism is less inappropriate.
At the
heart of the failure of both systems is greed and denial. The discussions
concerning those issues will be the subject of another blog post. They are also
a fundamental focus of a new book, White
Man Dancing – Grief God, and the Unified Theory, which is now finished and
will, hopefully be published in the coming weeks.
For
now, I ask for suspension of disbelief so that we can examine what would be
needed in a system to replace Capitalism.
1.
No Interest
Every
spiritual teacher of every major spiritual path has rejected charging interest.
No one
should make money just because they have money. You work, you produce, you own
the results of your production. We don’t need interest. It creates nothing.
2.
World Community
The
time to pretend that we live in a world of self sufficient Nation-States is
over. For one worker to be protected, all workers must be protected. Playing
one worker off another has always been a primary method of oppression. Now, in
this new millennium, every worker on the planet deserves protection. It’s not
such a revolutionary idea. We, the workers have the power. We need to learn how
to globally and equitably exercise it.
3. Rights
of the individual.
Life,
liberty, and the pursuit…. all well and good. Created Equal…with definitions of
course. Meritocracy…yes but more complicated than it seems.
Beginning with specific fundamentals –
A. Education.
Every child must have the opportunity for as much education as their ability allows. All education must be free. In addition, schools must be appraised. Placement in the highest rated schools will be offered to the most qualified students.
Minimum wages must be sufficient to allow one worker to own a home, provide food, transportation, and necessities for her/him self and/or his/her family.
C. Healthcare.
Every citizen must have the right to free
health care. Period.
D. Retirement.
Every citizen must be provided with a retirement commensurate with the standard they have created for themselves during their working life.
4. Population
Control.
To
even contemplate the creation of a just, balanced system there needs to be a
method to control the unlimited growth of population. Finite resources of every
kind require the limitation of population to a balance between population and
resource.
Overwhelming?
Impossible? Certainly understandable feelings. Especially since every issue
raises so many questions and real, concrete problems. Especially since this
bare beginning only suggests the incredible complexity of attempting such
changes. Practical Myopic Vision is needed. Too complex? If we created it, we
can change it.
Ask
Mother Jones…
love,
bill
love,
bill
Saturday, January 14, 2012
Here We Begin
I'm a crossover. Or actually a re-crossover. For over thirty years I’ve worked with dying folks and others experiencing catastrophic loss. Yeah, I was involved in the civil rights movement and the anti-war movement in the sixties and early seventies. In fact it was that involvement and the failure of the “Movement” to look past the immediate issues of race and the Vietnam War that finally drove me out of the system. Or as far out of the system you can be and still live in the United States.
To be fair, for me personally, the shock of seeing the massive grass roots movement, which affected significant change in civil rights and ended the war, disintegrate, drove me to look closely at my own beliefs. I could not believe that hundreds of thousands of folks took to the streets and became radically involved but did not understand that racism and the war were symptoms of deeper, fatal flaws in American political, economic, social, and spiritual institutions.
By that time my family and I were ensconced in a commune on a 350 acre farm in Stafford County Virginia. After disillusionment and many months of confusion and depression, I finally understood that before I could examine and make judgments about what was going on out here in the world I needed to look at what I believed. Not what I said. What I believed.
I found two startling realities.
One was that while I clearly understood the underlying dysfunctional issues that needed to be changed, I had no clear idea of alternatives. I knew how to shake my fist and holler, but solutions – not so much.
More startling, and disheartening, was the realization that every bias and injustice against which I raged lived hidden, but still very, very real, in my heart. Racism, sexism, self absorption, greed, arrogance – I guess we do hate on the outside what we secretly harbor inside.
I was humbled.
And there was more.
When I was a kid in school we came home for lunch. None of that namby-pamby sitting in nice warm cafeterias for the scholars of northern Wisconsin in the forties and fifties. Eighteen degrees below zero? Wind blowing at 15 miles an hour? Harrumph! “Bet you won’t be lollygagging on your way home from school today.”
Oh, it was cold.
In late April when I was about twelve I was sitting on our front porch steps after lunch. Had some precious minutes before I had to hurry back to school. I was basking in the fifty some degree heat wave after the long, long cold. There was a warm, Wisconsin muddy spring smell in the air. I don’t know the sequencing of my thoughts. But on that warm Wisconsin midday, as I sat welcoming back the sun, there came a bright, clear, illumined thought. It was a turning point in my life.
I may have been thinking about my Missouri Synod Lutheran religious training – eight hours a week, two on Sunday. Maybe examining the tension and condescension between the Lutherans and Catholics (who were going to hell regardless) and “Dyke Jumpers” (who might not go to hell but were still way sub-standard). The Jews? Weren’t enough of them to really matter (But when one crossed ones path they were well and roundly hated).
And I thought,
“Why do I believe what they say?”
They’re all wrong. We’re right.
“How do I know?”
I became a radical that day.
That question finally drove me from Christianity onto the familiar path from belief to atheism to agnosticism.
I found and understood love. Didn’t examine it too closely. But I knew from the beginning that it was at the center, at the core.
The radicalism that question set afire in me, when agnosticism freed me from my spiritual search and my anger at organized religion, that questioning, that examination of the moment became the driving force in my life. Well, in my teenage years, that and having sex as often as possible. Actually that sex thing is still a big boon, but more a blessing than a drive at seventy-two.
That radicalism, that drive, brought me all the way to the communal old farmhouse in rural Virginia. And finally to an examination of love.
As those years of political activity centered and consumed our lives, the experience was mediated and enlightened by the drugs I took. I won’t waste time weighing the cost of taking drugs. There was a price to pay. I’m likely still making payments. But the bottom line for me is that the drugs opened me in ways that I can’t imagine reaching any other way. And at the heart of the new vision was love. And Darkness. It takes nothing to find the darkness – it will find you. But love. Oh we can lose it, not find it, waste it.
So after the disillusion and depression, the self examination, it was love that led me back to the life of the spirit. Because I found at the heart of love – more. I knew that this truth called me to open myself to my spiritual path. I went back to the Eastern teachers. I still couldn’t accept Christianity, but the teachers from the east gave me direction.
One of those teachers told me, “You want to see changes? Look to your moment. Be totally in your moment. Find what needs to be done in that moment – or what does not need to be done. Moment by moment by moment. You will know what to do. Do it. Then look around and see what changes have happened.”
This is the sort version. But I did what he said. He was right.
I was outside my society now. I was outside looking in. It’s where I wanted and needed to be. Yet within months I became involved with dying people (another turning point in my life). I approached the work with the same attention. This moment. My moment. Love. Darkness. Open.
It’s thirty some years later. It’s still the same.
So all those years ago when I was so disillusioned and depressed by what I perceived to be the Movements failure, it was really me who needed to reevaluate. The direction that came as a result of that experience has brought me here. Now.
The Death and Dying movement has allowed not only dying folks, but all of us to look at death differently. Maybe more importantly it has allowed us to look at life differently. The leading edge of the Death and Dying movement has always been outside the culture looking in. It still is.
We are still learning about how death and grief effect a human life cycle.
In the past decade we’ve become acutely aware of how profound an effect death and grief has, not on individuals, but on institutions. Every social, economic, political, and spiritual institution is deeply affected by our inability to integrate death, grief, and loss into our lives.
We have been running a 501( c )3 nonprofit group Called Sena Foundation www.sena.org . We offer free hands-on care to the dying and those experiencing catastrophic loss, as well as free Death Dying, Grief, & Loss education. We’ve been doing it all over the country, and in a number of foreign countries, for over thirty years.
But as we began to understand and experience the connection between denial and our cultural inability to make obvious, healthy changes to our institutions, our involvement has become more and more political. 501( c )3 nonprofits cannot be involved in political activity. Hence Quicksilver Times, www.quicksilvertimes.org .
So I’m re-crossing. Into the fray. From the inside. Funny thing, now the whole world is inside. Who’d a thunk it. Makes this easy.
I was startled all those years ago – no solutions. Now? Oh, we know the solutions. The paths to get there are sometimes not clearly defined. But like the teacher said, in this moment it’s clear what we need to do.
We haven’t even begun. The site is in development. The Facebook page is too. We are trying to get our philosophy, goals, and concrete direction down in black and white.
This may be a confusing beginning post. There is so much to say. So many facets. It would be easy and comfortable to say, “No, this is too much. Choose something smaller. We can’t change THAT.” But we can. I hope you will continue to read the upcoming posts, and will give us your feedback. Some of you, I hope, will join us and help. Notice I’m not asking for money. Seems lately I can’t seem to do what I’ve done for almost half a century. Raise money. Sorry, still can’t get over that.
Thank you for reading this.
Love,
bill
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