Nature, Nurture and the problem of Power Civilisation

The way I see it is as follows:

Nature or Biology is always geared towards optimal health.

Optimal health includes as a necessity the nurturing of the environment, which also includes a nurturing environment as a given.

That different kinds of organisms can find optimal health in almost every known habitat suggests this is the case.

There are also flows of nutrients from one habitat to another, such that they do not exist in isolation - there IS a whole.

We humans have emerged out of this biological whole, and the bulk of our history (mostly pre written history) we have lived as part of that whole - the development or emergence of the qualities I write about such as caring empathy, connection, sensitivity, responsiveness are part of this, as is the ability to deal with threatening or difficult situations (these are rarely chronic in nature - they are chronic only when the basic balance of optimal health is disrupted over a long period of time)...

The sense of deep connection we feel for our children, our partners,our families, our locale is part of that optimal biological health and we nurture all of this by our behaviour in the most natural state...

You and I, we have been born into a disrupted state, a system of Power that chronically abuses people and we are doing our best to recover from the wounds it has inflicted upon us, whilst living in it without much chance of altering how Power operates - until we at the grass roots re-gain enough of what our innate nature is, and then we will be able to thwart Power, and possibly help those who are stuck in that unhealthy state to recover - that is the intent in my work.

I would say too that the optimal biological health state is the natural norm, the base line of true reality, and that the Power state is the 'ideal' being imposed on the healthy reality.

Nature is realism, Power Civilisation is idealism, ideology etc.

And there IS evidence for all that I have written, solid scientific evidence as well as anecdotal and personal experience

Kindest regards

Corneilius

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

Entertainment, Mainstream Narratives, Elections and subtle body conditioning.

We need not so much a system, as a series or a web of mature, functional and nurturing relationships across families, communities and societies. Instead what we have is bullying and entertainment.

Entertainment.

Entertainment! It's ONLY entertainment!

How often have I heard this term applied to mainstream 'moving images, noise and verbiage' offered up for the fatigued consumer to relax to, to enjoy, to be 'moved' by thrilling images, to be enthralled by amazing CGI effects!

Apocalypse Now! "It's ONLY entertainment!"

Avatar! "It's ONLY entertainment!"

The Lord of The Rings! "It's ONLY entertainment!"

And even then some people will read more into these media than the authors intended. I know this from my own song-writing, and am often amazed at what audience members will read into or take out of a song, how rich that content is that I did not intend.

Apocalypse Now! "It exposes the brutality of war!"

Avatar! "It's a parable for our times!"

The Lord of The Rings! "It's about the power of the little guy!"

No, it's not. Just about that. That's the seduction, the nectar. And the point of the flower is the pollen......

Yes, what you know as entertainment has elements of that ... enjoyment... in it, though that is not the point of it all - it has to make some profit, that's a given, so it has to entertain to do that and yet it also has a function within the Power system we are living in. And that function is the point of it all...

If you read what is offered as mainstream popular entertainment the way I do (and I agree that we all have different ways to read the media and narratives we consume) they are a subtle way of saying Violence for Good is OK and the System we live is as good as it gets, barring incremental cosmetic improvements. 

Take a GOOD look at That all too common sequence of boy meets girl in the midst of some violent narrative of good vs evil, with a love scene in the middle of the extreme violence... a psychopathic switch on/off, a sweet turn-on that actually is also a turn-on for GOOD violence.. it's as nasty as it is obvious to me, and of course when this is pointed out most people do get it, though in my experience most also reject it to the extent they wish to hang on to their hit, their entertainment - what they don't get is the way in which the unobserved visceral cascades of hormones are conditioning the consumer into the psychopathic socially and Institutionally approved stand point.

And that conditioning is the KEY message, because it also underpins the States monopoly on organised violence, because the State is always benign. Or so we are told to believe, even if the evidence is patchy. God is good. Onward Christian Soldiers! etc etc etc...

For me, simply being, simply breathing and sensing my own body is pure entertainment.

Taking a dump and feeling the fullness of how my body works, that's entertaining. Watching a genuinely proficient musician/dancer/skate boarder - that's entertainment. Working my garden is very much entertaining. Seeing my children make mistakes and grow, that's entertaining.

Playing music and watching a good musician, that's entertainment...

I also understand that adage, "different strokes for different folks", and cannot deny that some people are entertained by what is offered up as mainstream consumer entertainment.

However, whilst watching movies such as THE HUNGER GAMES and LORD OF THE RINGS and JAMES BOND and BATMAN and THE MATRIX etc and observing how the body reacts to the sequential violence in these movies, I have noticed the hormone cascades, the muscular tensions, the non-thought patterns alongside the obvious and subliminal messages. These are quite different in tone and character to the cascades I experience when I am truly entertained.

I do not call this latter experience  'entertainment'....

It's entrainment rather than entertainment.

The primary narrative within mainstream movies, fiction and News Media is towards a socialised normalisation by vicarious exposure, through the use of a powerful experiential medium, to the prevailing adverse pathological psychology of force and power.

It's required for that subtle indoctrination into the various falsified justifications for POWER over others to be used AGAINST others for 'good'. It's a sop for unresolved rage and anger that so many people grow up with a result of being bullied at School, in Churches, Synagogues and Mosques, at University and at Work. It's a dead end that leads nowhere nurturing.

So yes, if we want and deserve a world where violence is accepted as long as it is for the 'good', where slapping and spanking children is a parents 'right', where the death penalty is a States 'right', where poverty is considered a problem of the 'poor' rather than a logical outcome of the hoarding of resources, where the sequestering of wealth is considered a 'good thing' for the Economy, let's call the subtle conditionings of Institutional Power Society entertainment.

Noam Chomksy, in an interview with Shira Hadad in 2005 points out that a similar dynamic applies to elections in the USA, the UK and in practically ALL States that hold elections.

"Because elections are carefully contrived so that they are like selling toothpaste. In fact, they’re run by the same people who sell toothpaste.

I mean when you turn on an ad on television, you don’t expect to get any information. You expect deception. That’s the point.

Only economists talk about markets. Business can’t tolerate markets. They don’t want markets in which informed consumers make rational choices.

What they want is deluded consumers who will make irrational choices. That’s what hundreds of billions of dollars in advertising are spent on. You don’t get any information about the product.

But what happens when the same industry sells candidates?

Exactly the same thing. I mean, about 10 percent of the crop of voters knew what the stand of the candidates was on issues.

What they knew is the delusionary imagery that was created.

So Bush is created to be an ordinary guy with his sleeves rolled up and you could have a drink with him in a bar.

My guess is he’s taught to make those mispronunciations and grammatical errors; I doubt that he talked like that at Yale.

He’s probably taught that way so that ‘them liberal intellectuals’ would make fun of him and then they can say, oh yeah, he’s an ordinary guy just like you, going off to his ranch. That makes him about as realistic as the next ad you could see on television for a lifestyle report."

The narrative exists to sell an image, and becoming acculturated to that image is essential in maintaining one's compliance with the System of Power and it's directions and instructions.

It's also true that as this becomes clear to more and more people that less and less people vote, not out of apathy.... not voting is a form of direct action, of civil disobedience as people refuse to participate in the charade. Not voting exposes the charade, and that is why Power hates the non-voter.

Imagine if no-one voted bar the membership of the parties?

And with every 'spring', every televised 'revolution', every mass movement outside the given political show, we see too that the pattern of the insertion of professional violence has become a standard counter revolutionary tactic of destabilisation. Once the violence starts, the discussions cease and we all have to run for cover.

Snipers paid to murder protesters and police in the Ukraine. Mujahadeen funded by USA and Saudi regime, in Afghanistan in the 80s. The insertion of the IRA into the Civil Rights portest movement in Northern Ireland,in spite of being rejected by Civil Rights Movement leaderships. Agent Provocateurs and undercover policemen and women inserted into grass roots Climate Change protest groups.

Anyone who has genuine grounds for protest and a well qualified argument to support it, is seen as a direct threat to Power, and must be undermined. Even if the aims of the protest would bring benefits to Society as a whole it mus be undermined; we are allowed to protest, and we are actively barred from changing the status quo.

Which is basically immature, dysfunctional and nasty, nasty behaviour. Dishonesty with petty cash is immature. Fleecing expenses is immature. It's amoral to be an adult and to refuse maturity.

Like I wrote above : "We need not so much a system, as a series or a web of mature, functional and nurturing relationships across families, communities and societies. Instead what we have is bullying and entertainment."







Kindest regards

Corneilius

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

Rape, Power and Activism

Rape is one of many abuses that are effectively cultural markers, made so by their prevalence in certain societies and the absence in others...

Industrial Society rapes the soil (pharming), the ground (mining), the sea (over fishing) abuses workers (low wages), other cultures (Aboriginals, Indigenous peoples) and the rapist rapes the victim, the child rapist rapes the child and it is NEVER just about the action of  mining, digging, fishing, the sexual assault.

In many ways these are the medium through which that kind of Power is expressed. And whilst the experience of each kind of assault is horrific, and for those who suffer it, a serious and debilitating trauma from which the action and the motivation are extremely difficult to distingish, those who seek to help the suffering in the long term, those who are concerned with activism in these areas must always keep in mind that the issue is very much about Power.

It is also about the POWER to avoid the truth of the outcomes for what is acted upon, what is abused, who is victimised that is the real issue.... that avoidance allows the abuser to retain Power, and is in essence the immaturity of a consciousness that refuses to address the outcomes of it's behaviour, which always leads to more abuse and creates lots of traumatised organisms in it's wake, which is NOT a biological mandate.

And it's a behavioural issue, so it is tractable which is to say it is a matter of choice,  there is this element of volition and thus the behaviour open to being resolved, changed.

However it requires a clear and unprejudiced observation of the behaviour and outcomes, a kind of fearlessness and determination textured with a degree of empathy and psycho-cultural understanding applied as behaviour, processes, policies and ethics for those changes to occur. This is critical.

This is about data, evidence and the insights of Survivors of rape, and other abuses, an insight that is all to often ignored or masked by the rage of the bystander community.

1. Abusive Behaviour emerges when populations or individuals (animal or human) are stressed, traumatised and exposed in particular to chronic stress and are unable to resolve it, resolve the situation within which they find themselves, and this occurs most often in hierarchical systems:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A4UMyTnlaMY

2. Studies of older cultures reveal that there IS a spectrum of behaviour from abusive to empathic, and that the primary predictor of abuse emerging in any given culture is the degree to which the natural child mother bonding processes are disrupted, stressed...

http://www.violence.de/prescott/bulletin/article.html

http://www.violence.de/.../Profiles_Peaceful_v_Violent.pdf

3. These studies of pre-conquest peoples reveal part of the reason for that empathic state is partly sensory experience : towhit the existence of a sensory acuity or liminal awareness / liminal consciousness as a key element of an operational experiential reality in interactions between people within a healthy optimally functioning societal social system.

http://rewild.info/anthropik/vault/sorenson-preconquest/

4. Recent studies on the consciousness of babies reveals a similar potential, and recognises that it requires appropriate nurturing behaviour from it’s caring community to fully deveop,

http://www.eheart.com/cesarean/babies.html

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn23401-emerging-consciousness-glimpsed-in-babies.html#.UpTQ4ydoJAk



5. Recent research over the past 40 years into child development, including brain development, bio-chemistry of hormones, how the immune system works or no, all point to a biological mandate towards empathy, connection, intelligent co-operation as expressions of optimum biological health.

www.birthpsychology.com - resource center for these kinds of studies...

I urge you to review these materials, and it WILL take some time, it is time well spent....

Kindest regards

Corneilius

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

Abuse and Resolution: an Urgent Question of Maturity

"The abused abuser is no defence - just a devious way of getting a lighter sentence. It is no excuse. "

I hear this often, and feel that more needs to be said or written on this.... as a Survivor,  I am absolutely focussed on prevention...

If we want to prevent abuse, we have to understand how and why it emerges. Otherwise we end up dealing with abuse AFTER a child has been abused, which is way too late....

There are writers, researchers and scientist/pratictioners who have outlined the dynamics of abuse and trauma (PTSD patterns) and the context of natural child development being disrupted very well, such as Alice Miller, James Prescott, John Bowlby, Gabor Maté , Marshal Rosenberg, Vincent Feletti, David Chamberlain, and others.

The basic theme is this : certain biologically mandated experiences and processes are necessary for the development of caring self empathy (sense of self) and caring empathy for others. these biological processes start with the child-mother bonding process, in the womb, at birth, infancy and toddlership... if these mandates are disrupted across a society, then statistically we see a massive increase in abuse, distress, psychological dysfunction.

In the research there is observed a direct relationship between the degree of disruption of the child-mother bonding processes and the degree of violence, hierarchy, religiosity, territorialism and abuse.

All of theses are further complicated by Trauma Events, such as war, poverty, racism, sexism, religion, climactic events esp. where there is no healing/recovery mechanisms and people are forced to cope with the situation.... the coping mechanism is appropriate in the midst of a trauma event, yet it becomes toxic if maintained after the event, if the trauma response becomes chronic... as we see in intergenerational trauma patterning, where the adverse affects of the trauma are passed down through the generations and are expressed even in a situation where the original trauma is but a dim memory, a story of legend or history..

The chronic stress associated with Hierarchically Violent Societies is profoundly damaging, even if the people within it become adjusted to it....

In order to prevent future abuse, it is necessary to support parents in ways that enable the child-mother bonding to be recognised and responded to with support.

It's also necessary to challenge all Government support for War (Trauma),

It follows that it's also necessary to challenge the status of Religious and State Indoctrination,

It becomes obvious that we need to alter State Education so that it becomes a forum for nurturing self empathy, autonomy and response ability (at core, Education needs to be democratised so the children take responsibility and are supported in developing that sense of responsibility, not through sanctions and bullying, but through respect and example...) and that it helps prepare children for becoming effective, nurturing parents as well as preparing them for a life of work...

It's also necessary to LISTEN to Survivors, for their insights are amongst the deepest in this area... as is their motivation to challenge abuse wherever it occurs.

Too often, 'normal' folk shy away from Survivors insights, from the darkness of their experiences at the hands of abusers, and this tends to lend weight to those who HYPE the issue, who contort the issue in ways that make it less likely to be resolved as part of a political ploy.

'Normal' folk also tend to have such a strong reaction and with it a desire to harm abusers, to punish them, which has nothing to do with the Survivors needs, nor the work needed to ensure prevention - it's usually an unconscious reaction of avoidance... it's easier to think of the abuser as someone to abuse (punish, kill, etc etc) than it is to face the pain, terror, harm and shame a Survivor has lived through and walk with the Survivor as a companion in their recovery.... and to then seek to understand how the abuser became the abuser and seek ways to prevent further emergences as best as possible.

If we are not focussed on prevention, then abuse will continue. Punishment is applied only to those few, and it is a minority, who get caught or are exposed.

Punishment satisfies a public's immature demand for justice and abandons all future children to potential predation as a hidden cost. This is unacceptable, morally and intellectually.

It's long past time for the discourse on abuse to mature, for those concerned with this issue to step up to the plate and confront it with clarity, commitment, maturity and grace.

I also think that abusers neurological 'wiring' and behaviour emerges out of their experience - they were not conceived with this in place. There is some evidence that certain kinds of trauma in utero and birth and infancy can alter a persons neurology in ways that if not recognised, and therefore modulated or attended to, can become the basis for the developing psychopathy.

In all cases of abuse perpetrated by an adult, we have to face the fact that the adult abuser has CHOSEN to abuse, that there is an element of volition and that this brings with it accountability, before those they have victimised and the community at large and that this accountability and consequences cannot be softened by our awareness.

Our awareness is about PREVENTION, about spotting the signs early on and modulating those children who show signs of psychopathy, of instituting a deeper society wide awareness of the need and basis for empathic parenting and empathic governance - they go together... this awarness is not to be taken to soften the consequences of those who have abused others, to excuse them.




Kindest regards

Corneilius

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

Survivors Insights ignored by The Church and The State

Again and again we see that Survivors insights and experience, and thus their real needs, are to a large degree sidelined as both Government and The Church craft 'responses' to the situation.

We are invited to make representations, we are to a degree consulted, yet in the finalised outcomes the decisions made are from the point of view of Government and The Church and how they wish to frame their liabilities, and the consultation appears to be a matter of form, rather than substance.

In recent days we have had the completion of the review by the United Nations Committee for the Rights of the Child in Geneva of The Vatican's response to the world wide child abuse issue within it's own institutions, and the announcement of  the Irish Catholic Church's 'Towards Peace' support service.

The United Nations Committee for the Rights of the Child has criticised the Vatican for it's actions to the present date, and as yet has to issue further comments and determine further action.

Eyewitness accounts and the transcripts will show that The Vatican has not altered it's course and is maintaining a strategic approach to the 'problem', rather than being open, honest, vulnerable and seeking a just resolution for all concerned.

The 'Towards Peace' support service has been launched without the detailed input of survivors, which had been promised. However what is true of the Vatican is also true of The Irish Catholic Church. Their approach is strategic, rather than open and honest.

In Australia, there is The Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse which has been working since early April 2013, and is continuing as I write. In this inquiry over 5000 survivors gave evidence, as did the Church and other bodies... One of the targets of this Inquiry is the "Towards Healing" process crafted under the aegis of Archbishop Pell in Melbourne, for whom Tony Abbot has recently issued statements of support.

And yet again, at this level of Inquiry, we see the same 'strategic' approach from the Australian Catholic Church, although with the evidence of 5000 people to counter it, it will take some assistance from the Abbot Government to 'help' the Church 'manage' this situation.

"To date evidence showed the process failed some abuse victims who found it as traumatic as the original abuse because of the legalistic approach taken by the church.

Towards Healing will be the subject of several case studies by the commission which will hold public hearings in Queensland, South Australia and Western Australia as well as in NSW before June this year"
source: http://www.ntnews.com.au/news/national/child-abuse-inquiry-reopens-in-sydney/story-fnjbnvyj-1226805484854


This same approach, that of acknowledging abuse only when Survviors come forward into the public domain, and then 'managing' the response to protect the status and image of both Church and State has been seen in every case where Survivors have come forward.

Across the world, both The State and it's institutions and The Church and it's institutions  are obviously concerned about their roles in the abuse, the cover-ups and mismanagement of investigations, and understand that they have a liability that can be expanded if they are 100% honest and they seek to reduce or minimise that liability.

Whilst this is to be expected and is indeed standard corporate practice, it remains the fact that it is moral cowardice, and that Survivors lives are impacted by this management approach. It is also true that this impacts not only the Survivor, but their families and the wider society, as well as doing little to protect children, and other vulnerable people, from future abuses.

It also is a misunderstanding of the intent of the vast majority of Survivors, whose aim is to a) have the truth told and understood b) prevent further abuses (and the 'management' of exposure of abuse) c) regain some degree of healing in our own lives, and in the life of the community, the State and The Church.

We Survivors are gifting the world with our concern, our stories. The changes we represent can only increase nurturing in our Society. That's the fullest truth here.

It's long past the time that all this was recognised and responded to accordingly, not only by Government and The Church, but by society at large, by the people who sit in pews and pray and by all parents and caring people.

Kindest regards

Corneilius

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