What is Natural?

Every creature. eats, shits, and dies. and in all three processes materials are passed on to nurture more life for all life. That is nature.

Mome creatures when abused or stressed abuse or stress others. That's natural.

Most creatures, when treated well, will not do this. That's natural.

Some people think Dominant Industrial Culture is superior to nature. That's un-natural.

Some people think the costs born by those who are bombed, whose lands are degraded, whose cultures are made extinct are 'worth it'. That's un-natural.

Some people know that the Dominant Industrial Culture is toxic. That's natural.

Some people ignore that fact, due to conditioned self alienation, insecurity and adverse psychology. That's natural.

The Dominant Industrial Culture cannot metabolise it's effluents. That is un-natural.

The effluents of all other living process can be metabolised by natural processes. That's natural.

We have the choice to metabolise the adverse affects of our experience and conditioning and to make compost of those that nurtures life from the outputs. Or not.

Kindest regards

Corneilius

Do what you love, it's Your Gift to Universe

Bill Hicks, Maggie Thatcher and a decent funeral.

"All members of society deserve decent burial." wrote a good friend.

I agree.

 
Just as all members of society deserve a happy birth, a nurturing and playful early childhood, joyous exploratory late childhood to teen, in effect a healthy environment within which to learn as they grow in to mature adults who function as an empathic community, and so on.

Notwithstanding accident, illness or freak events.... in context of reality, here.

Without the grief and weight of a culturally imposed behavioural relational 'generation' gap, a psychic and physical misunderstanding which now exists, as state and corporate and ideological policy which makes understanding, even of shared experiences, less likely between people within families.
For example, John Holt explained how state educational protocols and practices harms children in How Children Fail , which is probably one of the best books on the subject, ever!

In 'How Children Fail' Holt explores the adverse outcomes of compulsory state education are made more understandable, and therefore more preventable, from the child's point of view. Written by an empathic adult.

This experience is so far from the biological 'norm' - optimal health - of our aboriginal ancestral experience even to the present, where such societies are still living. And that experience is replicated at every level of the dominant hierarchical system, affecting all who live within it. 'no child left behind'.....

Most Statist style mothers and their children, as well as between grandparents and grand children, teachers and pupils, experience on a daily basis aspects of this lack of empathy, of understanding.

I call it Unconscious Statatism Experience.

It's most certainly not the human biological mandate.

 

"All members of society deserve decent burial." wrote a good friend. Once they are dead.

I agree.

All members of society also deserve clean, nurturing food, and a place to rest. The needs of life well met. As a shared ethic. Just the basics.

Oh, there's also this innate expectation that peace reigns: ALL babies have it more or less, it's an emerging sense, an understanding or an intuition that peace is more, much more than the merely the absence of war. 

Quite a lot more.

Including, as we noted before, a decent burial on event of Death.  Not before, That would be most indecent.

The feeder of life.

 
Life being the icing on this particular cake, death being part of the the base of it all.

We get one living chance as who we are, and to use it to nurture is biology winning. 

Some do. Some don't. You know who you are.

Perhaps more will do, in time. We can nurture more.

It's likely in as much as it's a biological mandate, optimum health.

Bury the dead. Take the piss out of Power while thwarting it's adverse behaviours.

Always.

It is appropriate to note any particularly adverse Official, or other persons or entities wielding power over people in ways that are harmful, at any level of society, community  or family, by taking the piss out of those people and entities, be they alive or dead, exposing their behaviour for what it is, or was and at the same time ensuring the performance generates a show that is side hurtingly funny. Even timeless.

Partly in the hope, on my part at least, that such accolades for IMPORTANT INSTITUTIONS AND PEOPLE SERIOUSLY FUCK THINGS UP would reflect a growing, broader, wider, well informed diverse and active dissent.

It might reflect the presence of an active people ethic capable of organising as a single societal actor, like a crowd source wave, an ethical flash mob if you will, consisting of an informed electorate and an honest judiciary, acting together, which might in time be so common, and thus thwart or deter to some greater degree behaviour by Power of a similar nature in the future.

Things ARE hard for so many people.

And it's not 'life' - it's the outcome of the hierarchical power relationship dynamic of people who live within what we call Society, where those with Power harm those without power, and then conveniently blame the powerless for their powerlessness.

Life is mostly nurture.

Decent Life, Decent burial.

Whatever the state of the economy.

Brian Blessed on 'Have I Got News For You' or BBC offered to help the economy, (always a solid conservative policy), by putting in a bid to make the coffin, for Margaret Thatcher's funeral. For £25.

The Blessed One told the audience that had once he worked making coffins, when he was quite young, and that he had made a few hundred in his time.

The whole first half of the show takes the piss out of the news of Margaret Thatchers passing (the news of it, the 'reporting' not the actuality of it) with some degree of spot-on-ity and I found it rather funny.

The show reminded me of the late Bill Hicks, whose hatred of the outcome's of Power never diminished his comprehension of the humanity, warped as it may be, that lies at the heart of all our lives. Even the lives of tyrants.

That grace enables the humour, and in good satire it does not dissuade dissent. It encourages it, feeds it non biased inspiration. It's a love thing, really.

Bill Hick's. Rest in Peace, bro!

"Life is but a ride.......... shut him up!"

Kindest regards

Corneilius

Do what you love, it's Your Gift to Universe

Civilisation and Children. Our Future, Our present and our past.

The patterns of behaviour, of manipulation and warped logic of Governments and other Institutions that hold Power, the story of how Governments et al behave towards so many billions of people appear similar to the patterns of behaviour, manipulation and logic of violent, abusive or neglectful and powerful parents of other primary carers in their actions towards children. Parental abuse. The outcomes are similar. The diagnosis would also follow similar lines in both cases.

The difference is a matter of scale, The 'economics' of scale means natural organisms and all living processes pay the price. Nature is not an economy.

I think the Civilisation I was born into is an expression of that experience, of children as objects to be moulded, worker, of growing up around a spectrum of Adult behaviour that is demanding, dynamic, overpowering, indoctrinating, confusing and often dangerous, an experience which happens for so many of us as babies, infants, toddlers and into childhood and that to change, to aletr that Civilisation, I feel the need to prioritise dealing with what happens for our infants so that their experience meets all the natural cues for empathy, connection, self awareness, acceptance that our biology mandates. As a matter of world peace. Amongst other matters.

Abuse is not nature's major driving force for sure. And it's not what babies are expecting. It need not be the driving force for Civilisation.

The mainstream is 20 years behind the Scientific and common sense literature that shows exactly how the biological mandate is disrupted, what it's affects are, what the behavioural outcomes tend to be and, importantly, how to avoid all that disruption and heal or alleviate the adverse affects of any disruption where possible, by supporting the biological mandate.

This makes financial sense, as well as moral and ethical sense, for us all. Current estimates are that for every £10 spent in supporting the biological mandate the State or Society would save £60 from not having to deal with the outcomes of disruption within one generation. Saving that cost year on year, freeing up more than the cash, freeing the people from the biologically disruptive practices.

The disruptions the research has revealed are mostly standard practices in child rearing across the English speaking world, eg: letting 'babies cry it out'  to force them to sleep on their own, etc and Religious and  Institutional Indoctrination or part inherited Puritan/Victorian dogma that went global or part consumerist propaganda, regarding treatment of children in one form or another, plus on top of all that, the very serious harmful abuse and other more intense life situations. They are part of a spectrum.

"The Psychology of any given Society, Community, Family or group is both revealed and perpetuated in how that population relates to and treats children."

We will not help parents change by blaming them, punishing them. We can only help in this matter if we support and encourage the biological mandate towards empathy.

Kindest regards

Corneilius

Do what you love, it's Your Gift to Universe

What happens in the womb is a predictor of many patterns in adulthood.

Here's a short talk on the profound affects of our experience in utero, at birth and in early infancy.....

http://www.fromwombtoworld.com/

I was conceived by two parents who had a variety of serious issues emanating from their own experiences. My mother had MS, had lost 4 children before I was born. I was born premature by one month, by caesarian birth. I spent 6 weeks in an incubator.

I know my mother loved me. I know she was very stressed. My father was an alcoholic.

The experiences I lived through did set up patterns that I was able to fully acknowledge only in my late 30's.

My own child was wanted by both her mother and father. She was born at home, supported by midwives and her mother used a birth pool. At the time we both loved each other, even though we had our issues. Her mother had a child, a boy, some 5 years earlier. I became his step-father.

In my relationship with him, my parenting patterns emerged and I managed, eventually, to begin to see these and to deal with some of them over the next four years we were together.

We separated, and though it was difficult at the time, I see now that it was the correct thing to do. I spent the next 12 years slowing working on my own unresolved issues, for my own health and well being.

In fact that work continues, and I don't see an end to that work. Nonetheless over the years I have become more at self empathic and at ease with who I am, and what I lived through, to the extent that I no longer 'blame' those who harmed me because I see their lives in context of what they and their parents went through. I still hold certain people accountable for some of the things they did to me. That is appropriate, I feel, because it helps me to be realistic about certain facts.

The primary fact is this : we are born into a Society we did not create, and in my case, a Hierarchically Violent Society, that mediated Power throughout peoples lives in many adverse ways which they could not counter.

I was born to a well-off Irish  middle class family in 1959. The profound psychologically adverse affects of the Christian concepts related to Original Sin, Sexuality and Obedience to Authority, overlayed with 800 years of intense strife and oppression,with two civil wars and world wars in living memory, do not vanish overnight, nor even in the passage of one generation, 30 years or so. The process of recovery takes time.

There are ways to nurture that process. These resources are ways in which we can, each of us, nurture ourselves and in some ways heal from any adverse experience we may have lived through.

Understanding one's earliest experiences, and where one was born into in an historical timeline - the context of our parents lives, and their parents before them, in the Society there were living in - are important resources in this work. There are many others, and this blog refers to those resources on a  regular basis.

As Stephen Harrod Buhner writes, "It helps if you become your own best friend and find out what is true about all this for yourself."

Kindest regards

Corneilius

Do what you love, it's Your Gift to Universe

Hugo Chavez and Caring Empathy.

Caring Empathy is a biological mandate.

It's an expression of optimum biological health in a human being.

As such it predates any concepts of 'spirit', or 'ideology' or 'morality' as it exists within the womb, in every womb, just waiting for the correct NURTURING environment for it's fullest expression. This is what Science tells us.

In truth it is also one of the best long term thrivival strategies of all, for it enables co-operation, working WITH natural processes and our habitat. It is also the primary mode of human living for the majority of human beings over the past 250,000 years and before.

However if the child does not receive that nurturing, the adult he or she becomes will build a societal structure lacking in caring empathy, which will generate a cycle of breaking with the nurturant modality of human living.

Which is where we are today. We CAN break that cycle, and we CAN return to our basic biological mandate, without 'going back to caves' or even 'living in mud huts'.

It's a question of choice, of accurate information and ultimately of resistance to abusive power conditioning.

The choice is ours.

Hugo Chavez (RIP) clearley cared about the poorest people in Venuzuela, and understood their lives. He had to deal with a very, very difficult situation, he saw the pointlessness of violence (as in overthrowing by violence) by his own personal experience and worked for many years to build a base amongst the poorest people. By helping them to help themselves.

Unlike western politicians who have built a base amongst the very richest and the indebted middle classes (those with a mortgage).

Voting % amongst the poor have been falling year on year, all over Europe and the USA for that reason - that is a meaningful vote of no confidence. It is not apathy.

Kindest regards

Corneilius

Do what you love, it's Your Gift to Universe

THRIVIVAL or mere Survival?

THRIVIVAL : A word I have created, and have been using for many years to describe the biological reality I have observed.

Survival as a word implies struggle, threat, risk and imminent potential of death.

Narrators of Nature Documentaries repeatedly use this term, not as scientists, but as a cultural meme. They claim to be scientific in their use of the word survival. The claim is false.

Natural communities THRIVE. The hunter hunts for but a little of their time. The hunted are hunted but for a little of their time. They do not spend the bulk of their time in aggression (hunter) or fear (hunted). Both are thriving most of the time. Natural communities THRIVE, and often in very large numbers... and their behaviour nurtures the world around them, way beyond their own species. This is both obvious and scientifically understood.

THRIVIVAL is thus defined as the state of existence, sets of behaviours and conditions  that nurtures more life for all life.

However, those who exert force or Power to control people are concerned with the use of force and control most of the time, for they know that as soon as they relax, those who are being controlled will break for freedom, in diverse emergent creative ways, urged on by their own biological calling towards optimal health. Power fears this calling.

Furthermore, those who use Power are in competition with others who would also use Power and Force to take over the position of Power. And so for them, they ARE concerned with Survival as a primary objective. They feel the threat is ever present, even when it is not. (most of the time the threat is non-existent: most 'ordinary people' have no desire to kill, murder, abuse those who have abused them, they mostly want the abusers just to stop and go away - that would be enough for most people, because we are biologically mandated towards empathic self organisation at the grass roots).

And the Power addicted always project their internalised view onto the world around them. The cultural projections of narrators speak to the conditioning which the narrator/writer has submitted to, internalised or assumed as normal, more than it describes the realities of nature.

Top predators, or those creatures who have are rarely hunted by others, who reside at the tops of food chains, tend to ensure the health of the communities they get their food from. Industrial Society has stepped out of this paradigm. And this disrupts the nurturant cycles of biology.

It is well past time to disestablish the 'Survival' meme, and to move towards THRIVIVAL.

And what a lovely journey, a fine destination that is.

Kindest regards

Corneilius

Do what you love, it's Your Gift to Universe

Wonder, no wonder...

Here's a few recent thoughts uncluttered with world affairs and ongoing resistance and recovery...

Honesty is Science. When Scientific data is wilfully mis-interpreted, it ceases to be Science. You can quote me on that.

Here is Charity debunked, gracefully yet with such gorgeous vehemence!

          "True compassion is more than flinging a coin at a beggar; it comes to see that an     edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring."
           -- Martin Luther King Jr.

What an elegant use of words, nothing wasted, each word full of meaning, of maturity and empathy.

I think of the amount of work, care, commitment, 'sacrifice' and energy the 'average' Mum and or single Mum's life; all that they do, to nurture, to stick with and submit to the reality of the child, to consistently assist a healthy child to grow up into a healthy human being, to pursue his or her own life in turn.  That ain't charity!
 

I often think on the un-natural poverty of Societal support for this most vital of human activities, this work of love, and of the willingness of some ideologists to isolate and identify 'single mums' as a 'problem', all too ready to dehumanise them by stereotyping certain lone parents as 'benefit scroungers'.

I think about the willingness of others, ideologists and propagandists and religious zealots, to assume to INSTRUCT Mums, quite often to go against the Mothers own deepest instincts and feelings...

These are not nice thoughts. The experience of those at the receiving end is many, many times worse. It's more than thoughts. It's lives.

The Bureaucratic fig leaf of 'parental leave' .. what a dull phrase that is in our lexicon. Such a small amount of time, given as a concession to the economy. How meagre! How cruelly efficient!

I was watching Kangaroo Dundee. A very busy man.

Yes, this man has become a 'Mum', albeit of adopted abandoned Kangaroos...  fluffy animals makes us coo. 

Men CAN mother.... when we really WANT to.

Benefits Addicted Mums make us scowl. Check the comments section when ever the Guardian ' Comment is Free' column starts a thread on this subject in response to some Government Minister pronouncing on the next 'plan' to deal with the 'problem'.

Yes, the public - actually, the wolf that calls itself the media, pretending to represent the public 'opinion' - will happily let the Government scowl at the Mum. As if it were ALL her 'fault'. Transferring the problem.

 
LOOK AT WHAT IT TAKES. TAKE IT IN. BE HONEST. 

THAT'S a work load. Huge amounts of all kinds of energy required. For a LONG time!

Especially during infancy. The slow segregation of Mother and Father into discrete 'roles' as full-time caretakers and breadwinners, separated from their extended  family and their community looks more and more like a culturally induced avoidance strategy. Conditioned slacking.

Irrespective of what primates may or may not do, our biology functions at it's best, in context, when the load is shared by a community of people who probably love each other to one degree or another. Oxytocin is a molecular expression of that reality.

Historically, - read the literature, don't take my word for it - Kings (and most Queens) never seemed to like the messy WORK of parenting.

We Industrialised Peoples live like Kings, in relative terms, with our gadgets, resources we use, land we use .... relative to biology, anthropology, culture.

It is that work, care, commitment and energy that is the core of a healthy functioning human community, it does take a village to care for a child, indeed all the children of the community, at optimum biological state. A village in a natural setting, naturally.

Until Motherhood/Fatherhood and community parenting are at the very core of this Society, informing it's long term decision making processes and behaviours, it will remain selfish in it's core psychology. And unsustainable.

And it doesn't have to be that way. 

We have brains.....

"The idea that the brain can change it's own structure and function through thought and activity is, I believe the most important alteration in our view of the brain since we first sketched out its basic anatomy and the workings of its basic component, the neuron.

The neuro-plastic revolution has implications for, among other things, our understanding of how love, sex, grief, relationships, learning, addiction, culture, technology, and psychotherapies change our brains.

All of the humanities, social sciences and physical sciences, in so far as they deal with human nature, are affected, as are all forms of training. All of these disciplines will have to come to terms with the fact of the self-changing brain and with the realisation that the architecture of the brain differs from one person to the next and that it changes in the course of individual lives.

While the human brain has apparently underestimated itself, neuro-plasticity isn't all good news; it renders our brains not only more resourceful by also more vulnerable to outside influences."

 
Norman Doidge "The Brain that changes itself"

We as people all have this capability, it is innate. And each of us needs an appropriate environment and experience for it's healthiest expression. We continually change and grow. Self healing. Solving problems. Then we die.

And what is innate in us, as individuals, must also be innate in a healthy functioning human community. Our optimum biological state. Where individuals live and die, and the community is sustainable over many millennia. Kinda state I'd love to live in.

How we get there is a very interesting journey.

Kindest regards

Corneilius

Do what you love, it's Your Gift to Universe