After an abortive attempt to relaunch last year, I finally locked myself into an apartment and didn't let myself out until I had it more or less done this time. There are still a few things to do...

The Emperor talked of 'confidence' a great deal, the need to always 'think positive'. Lacking the ability to do this had become progressively more frowned upon, to the point where the crime of 'negative rebellion' had entered the statute books. Recently a weather forecaster had been fined and threatened with gaol for predicting a drought. Everyone knew fresh water was plentiful in general; the specific lack of it where they happened to live was a mere irrelevance, not worth mentioning.

All contemporary political movements are in some way progressive, and in this article I will argue where that comes from, and why buying into the idea of Progress, as currently understood, will only serve to deepen our current predicament.

Never forget that justice is what love looks like in public. Indeed, never forget. Because we are a forgetful society and often end up valuing symbols we think represent love more than Love itself or the Justice which is its public face.

We are entering an era of exponential change, as noted by many, and as such it is impossible to predict what the outcome will be. The consumerist entrancement whose spell has claimed the lives and souls of the majority of humanity will be broken, simply because no-one can remain asleep forever. The only question is to how the awakening will occur

Ultimately the way we relate to the world, our cultural conditioning, is not congruent with nature itself, with our own inner nature (which is the same as Nature as a whole of course), and so these autoimmune diseases appear in order to show us that something is wrong. The identification with this whole conditioning can be questioned and ultimately, discarded. There is probably nothing harder to do in this world and also nothing more worthwhile than this, so if any of this applies to anyone here, keep going! It may seem like the suffering is endless but I am convinced I am not a special case and that anyone who is in a similar situation can heal as I did.

This experience really changed everything for me and I could see that the whole experience of getting ill had all been for a reason, and in fact was a great gift. It had shown me the limits of our human arrogance, the belief that we ‘know it all’ – we are so clever and complicated but in reality that is just hubris and pride; ultimately we know next to nothing but are not willing to admit it in case it damages our carefully-preserved self image.

“]The convulsions]… then gradually merged into the experience of being burnt- at first it was just a powerful feeling of my body burning but then an image formed in my mind of me lying on the ground burning and a circle of people around me watching me burning and not doing anything to help me, in fact seeming to take a demonic pleasure in seeing me suffer. Overall the energy seemed to have an infernal or satanic quality to it. Gradually I realised I had the option to become the fire itself that was burning me and I briefly experienced being a pure flame, my arms describing the movement of the fire.

About four years ago I spilt up with my girlfriend and subsequently became rather ill – I was eventually hospitalised and on admission the first nurse who saw me in a hospital gown assumed I had been burnt in a house fire, so badly destroyed was the weeping, bleeding skin all over my body. I took the drugs they gave me and the skin got better quickly. The drugs eventually weakened my teeth to the point that I broke three in just a couple of weeks so I stopped taking them. Within about a week the skin was really bad again. I tried every therapy, alternative or otherwise I could find, changed my diet completely. Nothing really worked.

The recent article by Josh Ellis 'Everyone I Know Is Brokenhearted' which has apparently gone viral, seems to have struck a chord among large numbers of people seriously disaffected by the current state of affairs in which we find ourselves. I also read a moving companion piece in 'A counterpoint for the brokenhearted' in which the author provides pays tribute to a friend who did everything he could to relieve the suffering of desperate people.

'Anarchy is not misrule but no rule' - Floating Anarchy Manifesto, Daevid Allen Following on from my previous post, 'Big Brother is the Reincarnation of God', I have been considering how we give up our power to our god-surrogate, whether that be in the form of governments, corporations, or indeed organised religions.

‘God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. Yet his shadow still looms.’ — Nietzsche, The Gay Science.

The eye expands to bathe the earth In sight Laughing at thoughts That speak of death and birth The Urge that brought us here Just below the perfume of the world, Beyond the campfire’s borrowed light

The endless sweep of the horizon From my window seat, the sea Gazing past the concrete holiday boxes Today the wind is fierce

There is a new consciousness crystallising, and  Rushkoff said something which (as usual) was very insightful, in that the mainstream media are having trouble getting to grips with the (r)evolution because they can't see it, it just looks like a jumble of different causes all mixed together, and the people at the heart of it refuse to discuss it on the mainstream media's terms, and reduce everything to black and white and soundbites.

The idea of 'practice' creates a false self with its own hopes and expectations and all the sense of future which goes with it. Although we may indeed improve in some sense with more time and more practice: stilling the mind, controlling the emotions etc., we are in fact strengthening this false future-dependent self and ultimately getting further and further away from fully experiencing the present moment. Enlightenment or fulfilment remains tantalisingly out of reach.

the sun is cold until it touches you

In a way, and despite these stories and many more, Yes is one of the most ego-less bands ever to have existed. Because when a group of musicians, usually including Squire, Anderson and Steve Howe gets together and calls itself Yes, something develops which puts all of their individual pettiness in the shade.

I would suggest that it is the very concept of &#8216;the One&#8217; which is the root cause of problems in a lot of relationships.</span> It comes from a fundamental belief in scarcity and lack of faith in life to provide abundant opportunities. Of course the particular person we are with is great and may tick all our boxes and we may be happy to spend the rest of our days with them, but that is not to say that someone else could not be equally good for us.

Of course the problem is is that your utopia gets in the way of mine. A 'utopia' may be partly created, as in Nazi Germany in the 1930s, but when it is seen not to provide the universal happiness promised, this is blamed on conflicting and competing utopias which must be crushed in order for 'our' utopia to triumph, upon which everyone will accept that 'we were right' and say sorry for trying to create their flawed utopia in competition to ours.

But the atheist, you see — the man who advertises his disbelief in god — is a very pious person. Nobody believes in god like an atheist. Alan Watts