No, I did not intend on expressing a “hopeless view of the world” — far from it — it’s a realistic view of the world (albeit from my perspective). Living with this reality and working for and against it is the ‘Work’.

I would suggest that you have slightly confused the meaning of the word “do”. Faith is something we have. Action is something we do. Feeling/sensation is something we experience. Emotion/love is something we share.

It is not my aim to lecture, but single minded positivism is actually part of the problem. When we can sniff the flowers and the rotting dead corpses with equal concern then we will have a more balanced perspective from which to judge, or better still discern, what should be done and undone.

“Doing” starts with the awareness that we are asleep. In a prison, hynotised to the terror of the situation. There are many ways designed to help us awaken to the challenges of our life and times. By all means try them and learn. Most have enough recycled material from past epochs to be of some value. Sorting out the wheat from the chaff is the doing task. The traders in this business are even entitled to make a fair living from it. (But many fail the test of avoiding the guru adulation trap.)

By the way, while we are “shift[ing] our individual attention towards the positive, the beautiful, and the transcending” we could also be popping down to our local military industrial complex and seeing how they are practicing TQM on those landmine assembly lines – those same beautiful achievements of engineering that will most probably end up looking like toys and blowing the arms and legs and eyes off little children in places like Afghanistan.

My view is not hopeless — far from it! It is a righteous anger at the hypocrisies of modern life styles that seek to avoid the responsibilities by shifting the focus away from the full picture.

This anger is the fire in the belly that can be used to drive change in ourselves and the world. I have much more respect for people like Jane Fonder that Oprah W. She (and others) got up and faced the anger of her own tribe by pointing out the evil of the Vietnam war. When I see young Oprah and her ilk dropping in on the front line in Afghanistan and Iraq to help pick up the little kids and women destroyed by ‘Western’ democratic interventions then I’ll reevaluate my opinions of her (which are not many!).

They were shooting students at Kent Sate University in the 1960s. This world’s opportunities are not built on Nike shoes that magically go from $2 in an Indonesian sweatshop to $200 in a NY shop. They are built on people like Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, and millions of invisible little ordinary people working in their own ways under the influence of their conscience rather than Murdoch’s News empire, TV’s advertising Cartel or Hollywood’s Scientology spell.

Look, keep up your good works, but just realise you also own your share of the dark side! I’ve just been around too long and seen too much to fall into the belief that much of this what I call “Madonna’s world of Cabala” — by way of a simple example — is any deeper than the reflection in the pool of water she is gazing into. The depth, if there is any, is within the inner world of the gazer. Task: while watching your Oprah try and sense and feel and become aware of how much manipulation of your senses is going on by the system she fronts to pacify your conscience on key issues that might otherwise lead to righteous outrage and action at the terror of the situation.

… and now I’ll leave you in peace…
regards

And how quickly we forget Vietnam — and all the despot Generals the US democratic system supports. But to be fair they are following a formula set up by the British on the decay of their little global empire – e.g., Kuwait, Brunei … anywhere there was a pot of natural wealth. And then you have the millions of Palestinian refugees cooped up in modern concentration camps/ghettos in their own land because 60 years ago a Zionist dream was implemented by Europeans and Americans in someone else’s backyard. Yes, there is a shift going on, it has been going on for thousands of years.

The current wave is towards China, Russia, Brazil and India as the new economic superset. Peak oil, Iran and others dumping the US$ as the single trading currency for oil are only external manifestations of a deeper trend: towards a realisation that nothing has really changed in human evolution, and most likely never will. The real golden rule: they with the gold rule.

Sorry to rain on your parade, but the technology and economic shifts going on are the beginning of new phase of the same old drama. Very little in the way of new age thinking is even kindergarden level for Asiatic and Indian cultures. If you really want to pay off some of the karma that your previous generations have banked for you, then pop over to Cambodia, or Vietnam and help pick up some of the 100′s of millions — yes, that big! — land mines, unexploded bombs and diseased bodies from chemical use.

Please, if people want to wake up from their bubble dreams — especially in the US — then turn off that opium poppy Oprah and that criminal ex-narcotic user GWB and his cabal, and look out the window onto a real world landscape. The one that has 25% of humanity living in China alone (with India set to pass them soon), 80% of humans (mostly women and children) living on less than $2 per day, a climatic system under extreme stress, energy and food competing for the top priority, and Americans driving their SUV’s listening to bubble gum spiritual gurus practicing that old leachcraft on their wallets and purses.

The biggest shift this and future generations is undergoing is towards irrelevance. Many, have successfully arrived already.

What Oprah W and others get is lots of money and attention. Simple. Yours!

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,351545,00.html

If they think it is bad, that can’t be nothin’ but good.