In what kind of world do you want to live?

Hey Siona, i contest the question because I don't think it's going to engage our "higher selves" (whatever they are) as we formulate a reply.

Naturlich, I wanna live in a world where there is abundance for all....abundant food, clean water, shelter, warmth, education, respect, love and potential for growth....all regulated by an integrally-informed world government whose policies are fully congruent with the drive to facilitate the migration of the human population upSpiral into the second and third tiers in the shortest effective timespan.....

And I live in a lovely corner of the planet with a fab sense of community in some of the most stunning scenery the planet....certainly the UK...has to offer (see me photos) and so I can conveniently  forget that I live on a planet dominated by the struggle between conflicting impoverished value-system holders whose resultant daily conflagration of destruction and  starvation is sanitised reportagewise by a mediamachine  controlled by and a part of this struggle-setup....and, given that I rarely  read the newspapers and have not possessed a television in 12 years, I'm safe in my comfortable life. For now. And like so many other bourgeoise meditators, I can dip into the worlds sorrows in meditation and throw out metta and metabolise the morphogenic meadows with the tonglen and use my calico shopping bag instead of the plastic jobbies and blah blah blah....

I know exactly how to use platitudes to make me look good, and as a former stepfordised eastern-leaninged psychonaut I have used the podium to great effect...to make me look and feel safe by the applause of those who agree that Things Should Change....mirroring my need to be seen as one who is doing his all for societal betterment....and fine speeches are like personal growth workshop weekends...the fuckers wear off by Wednesday then it's biz as usual....

The kind of world I want to live in lets me off the hook because it's not going to happen overnight....the kind of world I do live in enables me to continually challenge my self-view ...sometimes I think of myself as a coward because I am not engaged in enough social activism....sometimes I know I am not a coward because i can hold my own ideology in the face of downSpiral opposition....always, i realise that i am wired for short-term alleviations of my conscience by waving a placard i can see and engaging in something with a visible result...but the issue is not about salving my conscience, it's about what best to do for the sake of the world...and this turns out to be doing things whose results are not directly visible to us and are therefore not going to let us off the hook with a well-I've-done-my-bit bit of self-congratulatory bullshit...

I subscribe to the notion that, in order to put an end to world misery, we need to facilitate a mass movement upSpiral to embrace more complex, compassionate and collective worldviews..and I certainly believe that Ken Wilber is bang on the money when he writes that the way to facilitate this movement is to get people to meditate  since this does shunt you up the spiral a tout vitesse...I take it further and say that  we also need to clear away the obstacles to  getting folk to meditate in the first place....this is why i am a psychotherapist and a yoga teacher who is preparing to teach lineage-endorsed forms of buddhist meditation to augment the vedantic/yogic forms I already do....it's essentially to set off a chain reaction of upSpiral development to end the troubles.....

And, like I say, it sounds very happy-clappy and it doesn't salve my superego's need for direct action and sometimes I think the above is all a bunch of jive and I'm hiding behind words but that's the mammalian limited event-horizonism in me talking.....

Well there you go..cappucino time for me in the  warm sunshine with the ducks and the heron and all....lots of places with no excellent coffee to drink (e.g. the plantations which grow the very beans)  and no ducks or heron...and the flowers continue to grow out of the shit in the flowerbeds...as we all do...call me Rose...or maybe Daisy...Jon xx