Category — Thoughts

One of the great myths bestowed on us from the last century is that we each have a conscious mind and an unconscious mind. It began with Freud and it’s become an increasingly popular belief ever since, especially with hypnosists and NLP people.

I attended a training recently where a prominent teacher explained how he’d told a metaphorical story to a female client, and “she didn’t get it, but her unconscious got it”.

Is it really useful to create an entity of someone’s thoughts and act as if that’s seperate from the person themselves?

Sometimes it is. But often these teachers fail to communicate that the conscious/unconscious distinction is a metaphor – a useful way to think about thinking. We don’t really have two minds. We aren’t really separate from our thoughts.

You can pay attention and be aware of your heart, and it continues to beat even when you’re not paying attention. That doesn’t mean you have a conscious heart and an unconscious heart. It’s just that we’re designed to focus our attention differently at different times, and we’re capable of running processes in the background too.

I’m pretty sure I only have one mind. I’m aware of (conscious of) some of my thoughts and not aware of (unconscious of) others, but it’s all the same mind.

I don’t have “an unconscious” – and nor do you.

It’s much easier to run your own brain when you drop the labels and feel into the experience instead. Conscious/unconscious is a useful metaphor sometimes, and it has major limitations too. It’s a map, not the territory. I suggest people remember that it’s a metaphor and only use it when it’s useful.

I’m so grateful to the brave Peter Oborne for standing up against the wicked Jewish lobby and telling it like it is.

His documentary on Channel Four last night – made by “Hardcash” productions, ironically – was so insightful; now I’ve seen the light.

Now I know that traitorous Zionists are secretly funding a massive campaign on behalf of a foreign government, and they’re officially “the most powerful lobby in Britain”.

Having worked in Parliament, I always thought it was the advertising lobby that had the most reach – endlessly sending me gifts while I was there (always returned); always offering nights out and tickets for whatever was on.

But it’s obvious now you think about it. It’s the nasty Zionist influence that makes our government back Israel to the hilt. That’s why we joined America, Canada, Australia and 15 other countries in firmly rejecting the Goldstone report (we didn’t), and why our Foreign Secretary didn’t speak out against Israel’s actions in Gaza (he did).

It’s why BBC News journalists have to be so pro-Israel all the time (haha), and why someone like Jeremy Bowen could never be accused of partiality against Israel (the BBC Trust found he was). It’s why Jon Snow from Channel Four News may have great ties but he’d never deny with disdain the deaths of so many Israeli civilians.

It’s why The Independent and especially The Guardian cower in fear and never conflate news and anti-Israel opinion, and of course never censor the debate (yeah right).

Of course, it’s all obvious now. Those big-noses are running the country and they’re controlling everything!

I’m so glad Peter showed us his bloody montage: dead children – Jews eating dinner – more blood – Israel flag – dead bodies – Jews eating dinner… money, Israel flag, dead bodies, Israel flag… because it showed he had no agenda, obviously. It showed that he wasn’t pandering to sick stereotypes either.

Did I dream this bizarre program or was it really on last night?

Oborne’s essential message was that since he couldn’t find any evidence of a conspiracy, that proves it is a very deep conspiracy. Because nobody could tell him about it, that proves it exists. A typical example of his special brand of logic was when he said the Honest Reporting news agency isn’t based in Britain (it is) but in Israel (it isn’t). So off he went to Jerusalem, probably with his crucifix at the ready, where he was politely told that the office isn’t there. This seemed to prove something sinister to him: it’s a virtual organisation, he told us knowingly, as if that’s odd for a website. Nudge nudge, wink wink. (I happen to know that the head of Honest Reporting, Simon Plosker, was in London the whole time this was going on… and I am pretty sure Oborne knew this too.)

The message most people will remember is that Oborne went over to Israel to track down a group of evasive Jews who remote-control our politicians and media. It’s shitty journalism. It panders to the worst kind of prejudice.

At a time when anti-semitic violence is on the rise, Oborne’s crass conspiracy theory will make money for him and Hardcash – and it will put more Jewish lives at risk.

–

A quick note to the synaptically-challenged. Please don’t tell me that criticising Israel doesn’t make you anti-semitic. That straw man argument has been used over and over by people who think they’re being cleverer than they ever could be. I’ve heard it enough times now. The idea that there are two teams, two tribes, is hopeless. But more hopeless is the idea of moral equivalence: that Channel Four broadcast a Dispatches documentary about terrorist mosques so now they must also broadcast one about traitorous Jews. Stand up for what you believe, if you believe anything; don’t hide behind vagueness and idealistic views of theoretical pacifism. Of course Israel isn’t perfect. Who could be perfect in these conditions? The solution is good communication and dialog – it’s never to fuel the flames of hate, which is what Peter Oborne did last night.

The Home Secretary has sacked his advisor, Professor David Nutt, for disagreeing with him on drugs policy.

Is this what modern politics is about? Paying someone to echo what you already believe and sacking them if they deviate from “the message”.

It seems like a weird kind of prostitution to me.

Of course Nutt was right to tell the truth about the scientific evidence, even if it doesn’t support the government’s current policy.

The Home Secretary is being more paranoid than any stoner I’ve known. And more irresponsible too.

What will the next government advisor say, if he/she wants to stay in the job for more than five minutes? What about advisors on other issues, and in other departments?

Paying someone to give you honest and informed advice is one of the smartest things anyone can do. Listening to what they say is a good idea too.

I’m in the middle of Robert Holden’s 8-week happiness course – a series of meditations on joy and happiness.

It’s wonderful. Robert is one of the most authentically happy people I’ve ever met, as well as being a great teacher and facilitator.

I love having conversations about happiness. From children to great grandparents, I think we can learn about happiness from everyone.

One of the most interesting things is what we call paradigms of happiness. How do people think about happiness?

Most people seem to think about it as something that has to be earned or deserved. If I work hard, then I can enjoy the weekend. If my kids are happy, then I’ll be happy. (Otherwise I suck and must be miserable.)

Others think about it as something they (can) achieve. They seek bigger experiences, wilder adventures, more stuff, better stuff. If I seduce a supermodel and go on a road trip across America, then I’ll be happy. (Otherwise I suck and must be miserable.)

Some people see happiness as something they already have. It’s like a possession. The trouble with a possession is someone might take it away, so these people tend to guard their happiness and insure against its loss.

If you’ve ever been to a self-improvement event, you’ll have met people for whom happiness has become a journey or even a quest. If they could just find the right map and ignore the distractions, eventually they’d get there. But who has the right map? You can almost hear these people shouting inside their head ‘JUST TELL ME WHERE THE DAMN HAPPINESS IS AND THEN I’LL GO THERE’. Usually they’re looking for the latest sat nav gadget, in whatever form that takes – another book, another workshop… they are usually less and less happy as they learn more and more ways to become happy.

A few people think about happiness as a choice. They decide to be happy. They might take practical steps too – learning techniques to focus their mind; eating in ways that give them constant energy; avoiding people who bring them down, etc. – and if they do, by aligning their attention and intention, they will probably feel good more often than not. This pretty much works; a lot of happy people do it this way.

But the paradigm I like best is the most simple of all. It’s the genuine realisation that you are happy. It’s the knowledge that happiness is your essence; your core. And when you pay attention to your essence rather than the distractions of everyday life, happiness is always there, because you are happy.

Michael Neill has a lovely story about a bowl of cloudy water, kinda muddy water. How would you make it clear? Shake it? Boil it? Sieve it? Add chemicals? None of them really work that great. The best way we’ve found is to let the bowl settle. Let the water stand for a while. And what you’ll notice is the gunk starts to separate itself, because the natural state of water is clear. And the natural state of you is happy.

Beautiful.

It’s too easy though, right? So we go back on the journey, back to earning our happiness, back to defending it.

And yet every authentically happy person I’ve ever met has had the same message: you can’t become happy, you can only be happy.

Have a great day!

When I wrote Can NLP Be What It Has Become?, the reaction was really positive. Most people agreed that NLP has lost its way and many republished the article on their own blogs and websites. Even Bandler’s UK promoter republished it.

To the few who disagreed, and who think standards in NLP are good enough, here’s a reminder of why they’re not.

George is a practitioner approved by not just one… not just two… but at least three professional-sounding organisations in the UK, including the British Board of NLP. He’s apparently a great hypnotist and you can trust him as your therapist.

George is also a cat.

Yes, a cat.

Read the full story on the BBC website.

I like Obama. I think he’s brought a new spirit of hope into the White House and it’s resonated throughout the world.

I also feel closer to America – and Americans – since he took office. Maybe that’s an odd thing to say because, diplomatically, our countries’ relationship is now more strained than it has ever been in my lifetime. But I think British people are lightening up about the yanks again. We feel closer. When you listen through the chatter, the common mantra that Bush was dumb has been neatly replaced by an audacious hope that yes we can build a brighter future – and I think that’s a much better direction to be headed in, together.

But a Nobel Peace Prize? Come on! Did five people have a bowl of stupid for breakfast, or what?

It’s only been six months, and he’s just getting started.

I blame the racism. And by the racism I mean the patronising “ooooh, he’s black” kind of racism that media people seem to have fallen in love with lately. It’s patronising and offensive. And it’s set up this surreal situation where it looks like the very real bravery of Morgan Tsvangirai is valued less than Obama’s hope and rhetoric.

Nobody could have designed a more media-friendly way to undermine Obama today. By praising his efforts to bring peace, the Prize committee provoked millions of people to shout back: “what peace?”.

Twitter almost collapsed under the weight of everyone tweeting their snorts.

Yet Obama has done a lot, and he will do a lot more. The slogans are what it takes to get through the door these days. His presidency is a work in progress and no presidency should be judged after only six months.

We should treat him as a human being – an outstanding human being – and not as The First Black President.

We should give him time to walk his path.

This passage from John Pepper is resonating with me this week.

“What we do not know is that when we have travelled the world over in search of the Holy Grail, ransacked the texts of the saints and sages for clues as to its whereabouts, pleaded with the night to yield it to us, abased ourselves in rituals, followed the light paths of romantic love and relationship and the dark ones of drugs and disorder, and done the million and one things it appears we have to do before we finally grind to a halt in exhaustion, our happiness still tantalisingly out of reach, then we see with a snort of absurdity that there is nowhere left to reach out to; that all the words have gone. The running, brother and sister, is done. The answer is contained here in this frail being in this dark night on this lasted heath; here or nowhere. The Holy Grail is us.”

Nobody makes new friends by writing about the Middle East. Whatever you say, somebody is going to get pissed off. So the temptation is to say nothing.

But after reading the UN (Goldstone) report about Gaza, I don’t want to say nothing.

I love the ideals of the UN. I have visited and helped at their headquarters in New York, and standing inside the UN Security Council Chamber -- the focus of so much international attention for longer than I’ve been alive -- was a magical experience for me. I also think most of the people who work and volunteer for the UN are enthusiastic, idealist and great people.

But I think the UN is weak, biased, antisemitic and discredited when it comes to the Middle East.

Did you know that the Jewish state is smaller than Wales and has a population less than Greater London? Did you know that it’s surrounded by Arab neighbours with many hundred times more landmass and around 50 times more people? And did you know that several of those powerful Arab neighbours declared war on Israel on the very first morning of its existence, simply because they didn’t -- and mostly still don’t -- think a Jewish state should be allowed to exist?

The great myth is that the Middle East conflict is about land. Of course it’s really about ideology and power.

The land of Israel has been a Jewish area since biblical times (and I mean the old testament bible; thousands of years BC). It was sparsely populated for much of the last few hundred years, until the first mass immigration into the area between 1880 and 1920. Those immigrants were Jews escaping the Russian and East European pogroms, and that land was their oasis of hope. In return they breathed life into a mostly parched landscape. They built the area from mostly dusty desert into a country with an infrastructure. They built the economy from virtually nothing to something that became stronger and stronger.

More Jews moved there over the next two decades, many escaping the rise of Nazism in the 30s. They built the infrastructure and the economy. They rebuilt Jerusalem. They reinvested in their communities to make them strong, all the time asking for self-determination and self-government.

Modern Israel was officially created as a country -- by the UN, ironically -- in 1948. It was a place that refugees from the Holocaust could go to start a new life. People are often accused of being emotive when mentioning the Holocaust, but why not be emotive? It’s relevant that many of the founders of modern Israel were people who had been horribly treated, not only by Germany and the Nazis but also by the many countries that refused them asylum after the war. It’s sick and disgraceful that people who had lost their families and their homes, and all their material possessions, were left to die and rot in boats hanging off the coast of countries -- including Britain -- that wouldn’t let them in.

Israel was their sanctuary. Jews agreed to the terms of the UN resolution that gave them a home -- and then, immediately, they were invaded and attacked by Iraq, Syria and others.

It’s against this backdrop that Israel has reactively and proactively defended itself against aggressors for 61 years.

By extending its boundaries outwards, enemy rockets were pushed back and could no longer reach densely-populated cities. That seems like a sensible idea to me. It’s an imperfect solution of course, but it’s saved far more lives than it’s cost. What would you do if someone who wanted you dead had rockets aimed at your house? Pushing the rockets back to a distance where they are much less of a threat is probably the most peaceful option available in that situation.

Similar with “the wall”. Of course it’s inconvenient and humiliating for people (both Jews and Arabs) to be stopped at checkpoints, and it has dramatically reduced suicide bombings and saved countless lives. It’s not perfect, but what is? What would you do if people were blowing themselves up in your neighbourhood?

I’m not into the religious case for Israel. Each of us has our own god or gods, and few of them seem to agree on very much. It’s not relevant to me that many Jews see Israel as their spiritual home or promised land. What matters is the truth of history -- what matters is that these people overcame horrendous obstacles to build something beautiful, and nobody’s fear and hatred should deprive them of another home.

Iranian leader Mahmoud Ahmadinejad threatens a second Holocaust not because he wants a few extra square miles of land but because he doesn’t want Jews having a home in that 95%-Islamic region.

People like to say “oh it’s all very complicated”. People like to say “oh there are two sides to every story”. Those are just lazy ways of not having to think.

What’s your side of the story?

These are not complicated issues once you realise that three foxes and a chicken voting on what to have for dinner isn’t democracy. The UN report betrays the trust that some people still have in the UN because Goldstone has deliberately and cynically misrepresented events to pacify a violent majority.

There’s another factor too. I think it’s so far outside our realm of understanding that most of us simply can’t believe that mothers could use their own babies as human shields. Even when I see video footage of Hamas firing rockets from the roof of a school -- knowing that any retaliation will kill the children playing inside and therefore cast Israel as the bigger and nastier aggressor -- somehow it still seems unreal to me. It just cannot be. It cannot be. But it is. It is.

The kids that survive this abuse are the future and may one day hold our future in their hands. What hope do they have? The UN-run schools in Gaza recently asked Hamas if it would be ok to teach the standard curriculum, including some history lessons about World War 2 and the Nazi Holocaust. Of course Hamas aggressively refused that permission.

Where else in the world does the UN ask terrorists what it’s ok to teach in history class?

See the video below for a provocative glimpse at how some children grow up in UN-funded facilities in Gaza.

Israel is certainly not perfect. Nobody and no country is. But I’ll tell you something -- they’re far more restrained than I’d ever be in their shoes. If you hit someone I care about, I’m not interested in calculating what is a proportional response. I’d punch you back as hard as I could, and when you stood up I’d punch you again even harder. And I know that’s not an ideal way to be -- and we could all be Zen masters -- but if your parents were killed in a Nazi death camp and your kids were killed by a suicide bomber, what counts as a proportional response? When you’ve lost everything, rebuilt it again from nothing and then have hate-filled people trying to take it all away again, what the hell is a proportionate response?

What would you do? It’s not nice to consider, but it’s the only way to make it real. And that’s the only way to collectively find a solution.

I recommend reading this chapter (available free) from Not In My Name.

All kids deserve better than this:

I was up in the loft earlier and found an astrology chart that Pauline Moran (Miss Lemon from Poirot) did for me last year.

I’m fairly sceptical about astrology, but it is certainly interesting.

Here’s the summary:

“Your considerable analytical powers, if used positively, will bring benefits. You may be impatient with others who are less precise and this could bring friction to relationships and working conditions.

You have excellent mental processes and the ability to communicate ideas logically – this indicates considerable teaching skill. At times your quick mental processes could mean you are impatient with slower colleagues.

A tendency to extravagance may make any financial gain short-lived and cause you to gain weight. Your love of philosophy and higher learning will broaden your outlook. Travel in distant places is likely and men could bring you benefits. You may well have a highly-charged sexual energy or unconventional ways of expressing this.

You project a sense of power and an intensity which others may be fascinated with. You can understand their unspoken thoughts and can keep a secret. You prefer to keep them at a distance and to keep your own counsel. Transformative experiences in the use of your power and authority will aid your development. You are one who inclines toward the realms of higher consciousness. You seek new forms of spiritual discipline. You are interested in higher education and have an increased capacity for communicating advanced new ideas. Long distance travel may further your inner search. Never let your enthusiasm run away with reality. Your nature is elevated and spiritual – to others you may seem vague and unfocused. You do however, have a strong inner sense of purpose. You are an idealist and at times can be a visionary.

The contemporaries with whom you share this configuration will strive towards the creation of a better world. You are idealists and dreamers who will seek to transform and begin anew. Life is seen as part of a cosmic whole and many of you will be open to new ideas and spiritual disciplines. Alpha meditation and New Physics, sexual freedom and equality, occult and esoteric knowledge, advances in science, communications and medicine will be of much importance as mankind realises the relationship of the smallest part to the whole.”

Hmmmm.

Methinks P.T. Barnum would be proud.

What do you think? I’m curious to know: a) if you know me, do these statements resonate? b) how many other people do you know who this summary would (also) describe?

A lot of people are angry that the BBC has offered a seat on Question Time to BNP leader Nick Griffin. I think the BBC is right though. The best way to defeat the BNP is to confront them and demonstrate the flaws in their stupid, racist arguments.

Yes, it will give them more publicity. Yes, they’ll use their “wolf in sheep’s clothing” tactics to appear reasonable when they’re not.

But democracy isn’t supposed to be always comfortable. And most people are smart enough to look at the history of the BNP – and the vile people who lead it – and know that nothing good can ever come from supporting them.

I think the BBC is doing the right thing in a sad situation. What’s the alternative? Letting powerful people decide who can have a platform to stand for power?