Mandala of Love

Resting as Consciousness with the mandala wisdom as our guide, everything falls into place at last.

To the Trikāya, which is the true nature of all Dharmas,
non-dual, limitless, profound and vast, I make obeisance.
I worship the unmade, the unlimited, and the eternal.
I make confession of the sin of not knowing
that my own mind is the Buddha.
Rejoicing in the natural state, the self-aware, I request
the Buddha to revolve the ungraspable, omnipresent
and all-accomplishing Dharma Wheel.
I pray that the mundane and the transcendental
may be established in oneness.
Whatever obeisance and worship I have performed,
I transmute into the great shunyatā.
May all beings attain both shunyatā and great bliss.

I hope you enjoy my articles. The various inter-related categories of my writing are described below, and my coaching and teaching work is described below that. Keep scrolling to find links to my most recent articles. On a computer you can hover your pointer over the categories in the menu bar above to reveal the sub-menus, and listings of my previous articles. On a mobile, the articles are best read in a ‘landscape’ orientation.

Current Mandala of Love Projects:

I have not been able to find time to add much to the Mandala of Love website in recent months, as I have been in a full-time caring role taking care of a close family member. Below are a few of the projects that I have either been working on recently, or hope to be returning to before too long:

1. E-book – Buddha, Dharma, Sangha and the Five Wisdoms Mandala

In the limited time that I have had available, in the last year, I have been working on a small book called ‘Buddha, Dharma, Sangha and the Five Wisdoms Mandala’ – I hope to have the book completed by the end of this year. I have for a long time felt the need to write a book that will provide a fairly compact but comprehensive overview of the philosophical and practical approach that I have been presenting in my articles, and I hope that this book will serve that purpose. You can read my Preface to that book here.

2. New Email List Sign-Up Page – Click Here

I have recently created a new page for email subscriptions (here), and would very much encourage you to add your email to the Mandala of Love list. In addition, if you are interested in the online course program that I have outlined below, please consider subscribing to that list also.

3. Five Wisdoms Mandala – A Program of Online Courses

I am currently preparing material for a Zoom-based group training program, so that those who want to engage more deeply with the themes that I have been presenting on the Mandala of Love website articles, can do so. I have chosen to call the program of courses Five Wisdoms Mandala. Click here for more details. The program will be presented via weekly group-Zoom sessions, which will each run for two hours with a short break. The courses will be structured into a series of modules – the initial course will probably have at least three six-week modules, making eighteen Zoom sessions altogether. It will include guided meditations; powerpoint presentations; self-enquiry dyad exercises; group discussion; and group question and answer sessions.

For those interested in these Zoom-based group trainings on the Mandala of Love themes, I have provided a summary of the main components of the program here.

You can sign up for email notifications here if you would like to receive information about these courses.

4. Anti-War Writing – Challenging Asura Culture in the Modern World

Those who have followed my writing on meditation and self-enquiry closely, may know that I give particular importance to the individual and collective psychology that we find symbolised in Buddhist tradition by the archetypal asura Realm. The asura Realm is associated with the green, northern quadrant of the mandala, where we see that our innate human potential for empathy and compassion, and for the fearlessness that springs from confidence in the beneficial power of the Transcendental, is lost due to our personalising identification with the samskāras skandha (the volitional energies). This identification leads to the egoic power-drive of the klesha of irshya (envy), and to dominant, conflictual, and manipulative ways of being. For more on this, see my articles here and here.

The Buddhist tradition is telling us, in the language of an archetypal psychology, that our personalising identification with the volitional energies , is personally and collectively very dangerous indeed, because it can lead the world to become lost in a particularly dark, violent and unconscious style of embodiment. The asuras are the powerful and obsessive ‘war gods’ of ancient Indian mythology, who are eternally at war with the benign devas, who are associated with refined ethical sensibility and positive emotion. It could be argued that, more than any other, it is the asura archetype that shapes human history – and yet it is very little known, and given very little attention, even by most Buddhists. While we need to be vigilant regarding the asura tendency in our own nature, I believe that we also need to be recognising it, naming it, and pushing back against it when we see it in our external world. While I have recently begun to write a few anti-war articles on this website, which you can find listed here, most of my anti-war writing can be found on my personal Facebook page which is here.

My ethical and compassionate response to the tragedy of the Ukraine crisis is complex, and is likely to be misunderstood by many people. While I recoil in horror at violence of this sort, or any sort, my training in nonviolence, mediation, and Buddhist meditation and self-enquiry, leads me to be more interested in understanding the conditions that lead to violence, than in mere condemnation of it. Rather than simply rushing to judgement, and joining the calls for more weapons for Ukraine, and for the punishment of the population of the Russian Federation through sanctions, I take a much wider historical perspective on the conflict than we are currently being presented with in the mainstream media. I prefer instead to ask what awareness we can bring, which might contribute to understanding, to resolution, to mediation, and to a break in the cycle of violence rather than a further escalation of it. This seems particularly necessary, since a major cause of the original escalation of the civil war in Ukraine into a direct Russia-Ukraine conflict has been the confusion and misinformation, much of it deliberate, that has surrounded the crisis, and has accompanied the deeply irrational and provocative actions of the US and NATO.

My extensive study of the historical and geopolitical background to this war, leads me to see this as a war in which Russia has, in absolute desperation, used military force to protect its own security, and the security of the Russian-speaking people of eastern Ukraine. The military confrontation that we are seeing was predicted 28 years ago, and it was perhaps inevitable, given NATO’s determination to expand to Russia’s borders, and its complete unwillingness to consider Russia’s reasonable security needs. It was brought very much closer, and perhaps even made inevitable, by the reckless US-facilitated coup in Ukraine in 2014, and by the passivity of the international community as 14,000 Russian-speaking Ukrainians were killed (and 50,000 were injured) by the sniper attacks and shelling from the Ukrainian army and its associated neo-Nazi militias over the 8 years from Feb 2014 to Feb 2022 – over a thousand people were killed by landmines alone. The fanatically anti-Russian neo-Nazi militias have been a minority element in Ukrainian society since WW2. US intelligence services have worked with these groups since that time, but it is the more recent actions of the US, that have allowed them to become the dominant political force that they have become in Ukrainian society today.

An image from the Indian movie ‘Mahabharat’.

The actions of both Ukraine and the US and the other NATO countries, can be seen as expressions of the violent and manipulative spirit of the asura realm playing out very concretely and extremely destructively on the geopolitical stage – as it always will until we learn to recognise it and challenge it. Ultimately, in my view, the resolution of this horrific conflict is to be found, not only in an honest enquiry into its economic and historical causes, but also in reflection on its spiritual/psychological causes. I would like to provide a little of both in the articles on this website.

5. Summaries of the ‘Meditation Guidance’ Series of Articles

There are currently 43 articles in my introductory series on meditation, self-enquiry, and the psychology of the mandala, which I initially chose to call ‘Meditation Guidance’. I generally recommend this initial series of articles to anyone who is new to the Mandala of Love website. I have now written summaries for the first 37 articles in this series and this listing is available by clicking here, or on image below. For more information on this ‘Meditation Guidance’ series, please see my description further down this page.

6. The Rūpa Skandha – A Twelve-Part Series

Click on the title above to read the first article in a series of twelve articles, which together take a very deep, broad and detailed look at what recognising the emptiness of the rūpa skandha, the ‘form-creating’ skandha, might mean in practice. This series is part of a larger series of articles, which can be found under the ‘5 Wisdoms’ menu above, and in which I will eventually be covering each of the five skandhas in turn. To read from the beginning of the ‘5 Wisdoms’ series click here.

The fact that the rūpa skandha is associated, in the Bardo Thodol (the so-called ‘Tibetan Book of the Dead’), with both the Mirror-Like Wisdom and the Buddhist ‘Hell Realms’ (with their archetypal imagery of inhumane mental judgement, condemnation and hatred – leading to horrible tortures and punishments), establishes very clearly that the rūpa skandha is best understood to be referring to the Thinking function of the mind. The rūpa skandha however, is usually rendered, not by more accurate and descriptive words like ‘conceptualisation’, or ‘conceptual form’, but simply by the word ‘Form’. This introduces a confusion in which the rūpa skandha, the concretising, form-creating dimension of the mind’s cognitive functioning, and the corresponding ‘form-data’ of mental experience, is frequently associated with ‘the body’ in the concrete, sensory, and corporeal sense of the word – an association that is best reserved for vedanā, the skandha of Sensing, or the perception of Sensation. These articles aim to recover the great power of the Buddha’s ‘Five Skandhas‘ teaching by addressing this area of confusion.

7. The Ten Archetypal Buddhas of the Mandala

During the last couple of years, I have had very little time for writing, but have begun work on a series of longer articles on the ten deities of the Dharmadhātu mandala that were described by Padmasambhava in his Bardo Thodol teachings. I have taken as my starting point, the central five verses in Padmasambhava’s ‘Inspiration-Prayer for Deliverance from the Dangerous Pathway of the Bardo’ (which you can read here). I have found these verses inspirational ever since I was introduced to them nearly 40 years ago, and I hope you will find them the same.

In this series, I am aiming to show meditators how each one of the five male Buddhas and the five female Buddhas of the Dharmadhātu Mandala can be felt in the fields of the body as profound suprapersonal sources of somatic healing and wisdom. Those who read the whole series of articles – and it is intended that these articles should be read in sequence – will be able to incorporate these reflections into their meditation practice in a systematic way. The first article in the series can be found here, and brief summaries of all the articles that I have written so far, can be found here.

#Consciousness #Meditation — Teaching at Temple Byron in 2018

8. Other Writing

Meditation and Self-Enquiry

(under the ‘Meditation’ menu above)

The introductory series of 43 articles on meditation and self-enquiry, which I chose to call the ‘Meditation Guidance’ series, and which is listed under the ‘Meditation’ menu above, was my main focus in 2017 and 2018. I tried to write these articles in a way that would make them accessible to anyone who might have a general interest in meditation, self-awareness, and spiritual development. My approach to meditation and Mindfulness is distinctive, and perhaps idiosyncratic, because, although it is based on the Buddhist psychology of non-duality, and on the mandala-wisdom of the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, it also makes use of the translations of the Buddhist skandhas that we find in the English translations of Carl Jung. Jung borrowed very heavily from Buddhism in the development of his own mandala model of the psyche – unfortunately without acknowledging his debt. I am borrowing back from Jung – and I certainly acknowledge a great debt to him.

An important source of inspiration for these articles was my deepening appreciation of the meeting of Quantum Physics and Quantum Biology with Neuroscience, which is now taking place. I find this to be most fully articulated in the brilliant Penrose-Hameroff hypothesis in regard to the nature of the brain-Consciousness interface – a hypothesis that is steadily accumulating experimental support.

Brief summaries of the articles in the ‘Meditation Guidance’ series can be found here, or by clicking the image below.

I am most strongly influenced by Buddhist thought, and my approach could be characterised as a ‘Western Buddhist’ one – and one in which I have tried as much as possible to address the general reader. Where they can serve to illuminate and ground the deep non-dual psychology of the Buddhist mandala wisdom, I therefore make connections with other psychologies that share the same inspiration. I engaged in intensive study of Carl Jung concurrently with my Buddhist studies in my twenties and have drawn heavily on that knowledge. I have more recently been a passionate student of the deep humanistic psychology of Marshall Rosenberg (founder of Nonviolent Communication – NVC), and of Eugene Gendlin (founder of the ‘Focusing‘ self-empathy/self-enquiry dyad practice) and, since I have found these to be of enormous value in my understanding of Buddhist psychology, I have woven these perspectives into this Mandala of Love approach to meditation and self-enquiry.

This ‘Meditation Guidance’ series of articles, does not in fact present any detailed explanation of specific meditation practices, but aims to bring fresh insights to several common approaches to meditation – the Mindfulness of Breathing, Mettā Bhavana (‘Cultivation of Loving Kindness’), and the Zen ‘Just Sitting’ practice for example. The initial framework for the Mandala of Love approach, and for this whole series also, is provided by the four brahmavihāras (Loving Kindness, Appreciative Joy, Equanimity and Compassion) – a four-fold meditation-cycle and self-enquiry practice from ancient India, which was given a very important place in the Buddha’s teaching framework, and in the subsequent development of the Buddhist tradition. Central to my approach is the conceptualisation of meditation practice as ‘resting as Consciousness’, and the recognition of the brahmavihāras as ‘attitudes of Consciousness’. I find ‘resting as Consciousness’ to be more descriptive than the traditional Buddhist term ‘Mindfulness’, with which it is essentially synonymous.

The word Consciousness as I use it in its capitalised form in these articles, refers to the ’empty’ vijñāna skandha of Buddhist tradition, which we find placed at the centre of the Buddhist mandalas. To know Consciousness is not easy, since Consciousness is the ‘knower’ of our experience – the awareness that is aware of being aware. Our engagement in self-enquiry and familiarisation with the phenomenon of Consciousness is absolutely key to spiritual practice however – the Buddha told us that “Mindfulness is the Way to the Immortal”. As with all of the skandhas, the Buddhist tradition speaks of the vijñāna skandha having ‘internal’ and ‘external’ aspects. As I understand it, the ‘internal’ aspect is the non-personal experiencing subject – the spaciousness that is the centre and the circumference of our experiencing; and the ‘external’ aspect is the quality of ‘knowing presence’ that is orientated outwardly towards our cognitive-perceptual experience.

By re-framing meditation and Mindfulness practices as expressions of ‘resting as Consciousness’, and acknowledging the ’empty’ and impersonal nature of all the components of cognition and perception that arise in Consciousness (the skandhas of Buddhist tradition), there is an opportunity to set these practices in a non-dual context – one that is, I hope, much more true to the Buddha’s teaching than many of the modern derivatives. The Buddha bore witness to the impersonal nature of all psychological phenomena, and to the ’empty’ and non-locatable nature of Consciousness, and urged his students to take these insights as the foundation of their practice. When we step out of the egoic perspective, we can re-discover meditation as an activity whose purpose is to reveal our true nature and recover our natural state – the compassion and intelligence of our natural humanity.

The Five Wisdoms Mandala and the Emptiness of the Five Skandhas

(under the ‘5 Wisdoms’ menu above)

Since the beginning of 2019, I have been aiming in my articles, to provide some in-depth analysis on the Five Wisdoms; on the Buddha’s ‘Emptiness of the Five Skandhas‘ teaching; and on the closely-related ‘Four Foundations of Mindfulness’. I have created a new menu category for some of these articles, which I have called simply, ‘5 Wisdoms’. Under this menu you will find a group of introductory, or overview articles on the five skandhas. This will eventually be followed by five groups of articles – one for each of the five skandhas. I have begun the first group, which is one focused on the very important, but much misunderstood, rūpa skandha – the ’empty’ conceptualising, or ‘conceptual-form-creating’, function of the mind.

Find this series of articles listed under the ‘5 Wisdoms’ menu, or access brief summaries of the articles in that series by clicking here. You can access the first post in the series by clicking here.

Communication, Relationships, Empathy and Self-Empathy

(under the ‘NVC/Focusing’ menu above)

I have been a passionate student of Marshall Rosenberg’s Nonviolent Communication (NVC) model for over twenty years, and have taught several courses based on his work and on the closely-related work of Eugene Gendlin, the originator of the Focusing self-empathy dyad practice. I have also developed an innovative approach to the NVC model, which I call the NVC Mandala, and which sees the ‘four components’ of Rosenberg’s model as a beautiful example of the universal mandala wisdom that we find in Tibetan Buddhism, and in the psychology of Carl Jung – although Jung, it should always be noted, borrowed much from Tibetan Buddhism in the creation of his mandala model of the psyche.

The ‘NVC Mandala’ that becomes clear when Marshall Rosenberg’s ‘four components’ model is arranged with Observations and Feelings at east and west, and Needs and Requests at north and south, is all the more remarkable for the fact that he developed his model without any knowledge of Tibetan Buddhism or the work of Carl Jung. The obvious connections between the non-dual psychology of the Tibetan Buddhist mandala and the practical psychological analysis of thought and language that is provided by Marshall Rosenberg, provide the basis for an extremely rich synthesis of ideas and very profound support for the Buddhist practice of Mindfulness.

I have placed Marshall Rosenberg’s Nonviolent Communication and Eugene Gendlin’s Focusing under the same heading because I have found it helpful to combine them into a single model. The outer clarity of communication, which the Nonviolent Communication model aspires to, requires a foundation of deep Presence and self-empathy – and these qualities can be more powerfully cultivated and more fully understood through self-enquiry dyad practice of the sort that Eugene Gendlin showed us when he presented his Focusing model.

I hope that the articles in the ‘NVC/Focusing’ series will be thought-provoking for anyone with an interest in bringing harmony and compassion to their relationships and communities; in the psychology and spirituality of everyday life; and in the Buddhist ideals of nonviolence, loving-kindness, and creativity. I would like to find the time to write some in-depth reflections on how both Nonviolent Communication and Focusing can support a deepening of Buddhist practice; and how Buddhist insights can support a deepening of the practice of Nonviolent Communication and Focusing.

You can access the first post in this series by clicking here, or via the ‘NVC/Focusing’ category in the top menu.

Book Sections

(under the ‘Book’ menu above)

The Mandala of Love website started as a book project called A Mandala of Love: Consciousness, Ethics and Society. I have published some of the drafts of the early sections of that book (from 2016) in the form of articles in a ‘Book Sections’ series, which can be accessed by clicking on the ‘Book’ menu above.

Alternatively, you can access the first post in the ‘Book Sections’ series by clicking here.

Hui Neng and the Mirror-Like Wisdom – A Zen Story

(listed under the ‘Buddhism’ menu above)

The earliest piece of writing in the site, this is a longer piece from 2012. Even though it is not quite complete, it covers the most significant events on the wonderful Hui Neng story. To access it click here, or on the title above. I am hoping that this article will provide inspiration and guidance to students of both meditation and non-duality. I find the story of Hui Neng to be one of the most beautiful and illuminating in the whole of the Buddhist tradition. Among the many deep themes in this rich and multi-dimensional autobiographical work, you will find, I believe, the essence of Zen.

Those who have been reading my articles on the mandala wisdom on this website, will find that Hui Neng’s story brings us back, in a fresh new way, to the traditional point of entry into the mandala: the blue Eastern Quadrant; the ’empty’ rūpa skandha; the Mirror-Like Wisdom; and the brahmavihāra of Equanimity.

Individual Coaching, Mandala Innerwork, and Meditation Teaching

Although I am currently very busy with personal commitments, I may be able to provide individual meditation guidance and coaching sessions via Zoom to people who are interested in my work. My Mandala Innerwork approach to coaching is a form of self-enquiry that students of meditation will find very supportive. These sessions are also especially valuable to students of the Nonviolent Communication (NVC) model, since these sessions focus on the development of the attitudes and skills of self-empathy, which is foundational to that model. I am particularly keen to work with those who are interested in the Mandala of Love approach to self-enquiry, meditation, and self-empathetic innerwork, and who would value my support to apply the principles that I have been outlining in my articles.

My approach to innerwork draws on various sources of inspiration, but makes extensive use of the work of Eugene Gendlin, and his student Anne Weiser-Cornell. I have also completed the Inner Presence Coaching training of Jerry Donoghue, an NVC teacher who is based in Ashville, North Carolina, in the USA – an NVC teacher who, like me, is engaged with integrating NVC with the non-dual wisdom of the Buddhist tradition.

Jerry Donoghue and I also share the conviction that the practice of self-empathy, which is a foundational element of the NVC model, requires the acknowledgement of psychological parts – a theme that I have addressed frequently in my ‘Meditation Guidance’ articles (including here, here, here, and here). Indeed the self-empathy / self-enquiry approach that I have come to call Mandala Innerwork is founded on my observation, over several decades of my own innerwork practice, that the ability to self-empathetically recognise and work with psychological parts is an essential self-awareness skill, and a necessary skill if we wish to become more conscious; to recover an authentic self; and to integrate non-dual wisdom.

In the context of my individual coaching sessions, I like to integrate my meditation and self-enquiry work with my facilitation of self-empathetic innerwork. Both skills take the idea of ‘resting as Consciousness’ as their starting point. Indeed, my coaching work is best characterised as a form of self-enquiry facilitation, or of Mindfulness with the goal of Insight – seeing through the self-illusion. The depth of that enquiry depends on the choice of those that I am working with, but my own personal framework is rooted in the rich and powerful psychology of the Buddhist non-duality teachings.

If you would like to read more on my approach to NVC Self-Empathy work and Mandala Innerwork, please consider looking at the articles that can be found under the NVC/Focusing menu above. A brief summary of my approach can be found here.

William Parker 2021

January 7, 2018

Caitlin Johnstone on the Ukraine Proxy-War

I regard the Ukraine conflict as one of the greatest tragedies of the 21st century. It is perhaps an even greater tragedy and more dangerous, than was the Syria proxy-war and the outrage of NATO’s destruction of Libya – because this conflict also involves nuclear weapons brinkmanship, and the possibility of either destroying the world, or drawing the whole world into a new cold war. In the face of the relentless onslaught of the accompanying propaganda operation, I find myself helplessly incapable of finding adequate words for such are horror. The juxtaposition of all that death and destruction with such an appalling collapse in the rational political functioning of the Western liberal democracies, is sometimes just too much to contemplate. I just do not have enough hours in my day to even begin to organise the vast amount of evidence that is available to me – evidence of a monstrous deception in which the Ukrainian and Russian people are the main victims, and the Washington neocons, the NATO bureaucrats, and US military-industrial complex are the heartless perpetrators.

Thankfully there are independant journalists like the Australian, Caitlin Johnstone, who face this moral challenge with extraordinary patience and determination. She writes in detail every day, and always from a very wise place. I regard her a person of spiritual vision – a true individual who sees very clearly how deeply incongruous all the horrific violence and extreme expense of war is, relative to the true nature of our ultimate humanity – our authentic humanity beyond the egoic narratives of greed, hatred and ignorance. To honour Caitlin Johnstone, and introduce my readers to her, I have copied the text of one of her articles below. Its subject is the Ukraine proxy-war, and its title is: If Everyone Understood That The US Deliberately Provoked This War.

If you want to listen to Caitlin’s words rather than read them, I have posted the corresponding YouTube video below the article. Caitlin’s articles are almost always read, very beautifully, by her American husband and journalistic collaborator, Tim Foley. You may also want to read her words as you listen.

If Everyone Understood That The US Deliberately Provoked This War – by Caitlin Johnstone

“War is the single worst thing humans do. The most insane. The most cruel. The most destructive. The most traumatic. The least sustainable. Those who knowingly choose to steer humanity into more war when it could be avoided are the worst people in the world, without exception.

And there are mountains of extensively documented evidence that that’s exactly what the drivers of the US-centralized empire did in Ukraine. That’s why so many western analysts and experts spent years warning that the actions of western powers were going to lead Ukraine into disaster, and it’s why US empire managers keep openly boasting about how much their proxy warfare in Ukraine advances US interests. They knowingly steered Ukraine into war to advance their own geostrategic interests while being fully aware that no powerful nation would ever permit the kinds of foreign threats the west was amassing on its borders, and then they intervened in the early days of the war to prevent the outbreak of peace.

If there was widespread awareness of these facts, the US war machine would lose support around the world — not just for its actions in this one war, but for all future wars as well. Which is why so much energy goes into making sure this does not become a widespread understanding.

The official mainstream narrative throughout the western world is that Putin invaded Ukraine solely because he is evil and hates freedom. That’s the actual, literal belief about this war that the western political/media class works to instill in the western public. Anyone who counters this self-evidently ridiculous assessment with facts and evidence gets branded a Russian agent and swarmed with pro-US trolls on social media, and loses all hope of securing a major platform in any mass media.

And it’s important to notice that shutting down all mature adult analysis of the events which led to the war in this way does not actually save a single Ukrainian life. It doesn’t make Russia any more likely to stop fighting and withdraw its troops. All it does is prevent people from seeing the US empire for what it really is. It isn’t being done to protect Ukrainians, it’s done to protect the empire.

The worst thing that could possibly happen to the information interests of the US empire would be for a critical mass of people to become aware that all this death and destruction in Ukraine could have been avoided by the US-centralized empire behaving less aggressively on Russia’s doorstep, and that those aggressions were instead increased with the goal of advancing US strategic interests on the world stage.

If everyone really, deeply understood that all this suffering, all these mountains of human corpses could simply not have happened if the US hadn’t been feverishly focused on securing planetary domination at all cost, the US would no longer be able to manufacture consent for its agendas. It would no longer be able to whip up international support for its actions against its enemies. It would no longer be able to persuade the world to help prop up the hegemony of the dollar.

But because the US empire has the most advanced soft power apparatus that has ever existed, hardly anyone understands this. Not even the people who understand that the west provoked this war have deeply grappled with exactly what that means on a visceral emotional level, for the most part. It’s more of a superficial intellectual understanding for most, without really grokking into the horror of it all, really letting the enraging nature of what the US empire did wash over them.

The west was deceived into supporting yet another evil American war, this time with the added dimension of nuclear brinkmanship threatening the life of every terrestrial organism. All to suck Moscow into another draining military quagmire so war plans can be safely drawn up against China while advancing US energy interests in Europe and building support for US military alliances. It’s almost too evil to take in. There aren’t really words for it.

And that’s one of the reasons it’s hard to get people to take in exactly what happened with Ukraine: people have a hard time wrapping their minds around the idea that anyone could be that evil, much less the government we’ve been trained by Hollywood to think of as sane and humanitarian. It’s about as monstrous a thing as you could possibly come up with. Yet here it is, still unfolding in all its blood-spattered glory.

Our task then is to help people see this and understand it, not just intellectually but emotionally. Help people really grasp deep down the horrors the US empire unleashed upon our world with the war in Ukraine; the suffering; the death; the existential danger. We can’t fight the empire on our own, but we can each do what we can to help weaken the consent manufacturing machine it uses to rule and terrorize the world.”

Please consider subscribing to Caitlin Johnstone’s website and YouTube channel. Here are a couple of her YouTube video – the one in which her husband, Tim Foley, is reading the article above, and another more recent one.

September 10, 2023

‘Mainstream Media’ and ‘Conspiracy Theories’ – some Buddhist thoughts

Reflecting on the Ukraine conflict, in the context of conversations with dear friends, I have been coming to understand that there is a closely-related cultural dialogue abroad about mainstream media versus independent media – a dialogue in which I notice the tendency of some people, and also some government broadcasters and commercial media channels, to make generalised condemnations of independent media on YouTube and elsewhere as providing a voice for ‘dangerous conspiracy theorists’. This is an important conversation for our times, so I wrote the short piece below, which attempts to briefly present a perspective that draws on Buddhist wisdom.

This article is one of several anti-war articles that I have felt to write in amongst my other ‘Mandala of Love’ articles, which have more often focused on Buddhist philosophical themes and on the practice of meditation. When I first learned meditation in my early twenties, I was passionately engaged by the idea of cultivating Loving Kindness (mettā / maitri). In the form of mettā practice that I learned, I was instructed to become absorbed in unconditional love, not only towards myself and the people in my personal life, but towards the whole world.

This concern for the people of the world has become habitual for me, and has increasingly found expression in a deep study of world affairs. I find myself preoccupied with the suffering that I see, and drawn into a deep investigation of its causes. This investigation has in part been an enquiry, following a Buddhist methodology, into the roots of human suffering in the cognitive-perceptual error of personalisation; and in part an enquiry into the collective expression of that personalisation in human history, and in the systemic dysfunction of the modern world.

Below the article, I have included a YouTube from The Grayzone – one of the most reliable sources of commentary and detailed analysis both on the escalating war with Russia and China, and on the lamentable state of journalism in the west.

I have also included a very interesting YouTube video on this collective state of journalism from Graham Majin, a British journalist/writer – here in conversation with wonderful Pascal Lottaz, of the Neutrality Studies channel.

I sometimes hear some of my Buddhist friends and non-Buddhist talking dismissively of sources of news and commentary outside of the mainstream government and commercial media as pedlars of ‘conspiracy theories’, or as Russian / Chinese ‘disinformation’ – often with the implication that it is unethical, undiscerning, and perhaps even a little delusional, to venture outside of the mainstream narrative. As a way into an examination of this situation, I would like to first address a larger question – a question about how we think about ethics – both as Buddhists and more generally in society. Although this seems paradoxical to me, I find that Buddhists are especially prone to thinking that ethics is just about individual choices and judgements.

I see the Buddha as a great model of the non-judgemental attitude – an individual in which the attitudes of understanding, compassion, kindness and empathy spring from a recognition of the complex web of conditioning factors at play in every life situation. It is common for those who identify as Buddhists however, to make a lot of judgements about other individual’s ethical choices as way of affirming and clarifying their own ethical position, and even perhaps, as way of signalling their own virtue. The Buddha’s approach to ethics was actually much more complex and nuanced however. He would say that the self is an illusion; that the collective processes are primary; and that the egoic perspective is always limited and dysfunctional – flawed because of its inherent cognitive-perceptual blind-spots and habitual personalisation.

The implication of this is that ethics requires a systemic perspective – a willingness to see that the good or the bad in this world, the ‘skilful’ or the ‘unskilful’ (if we translate the Buddhist idiom into English), are phenomena arising within a complex web of conditions. The Buddhist view on ethical questions, therefore, needs to start by resisting any oversimplification of what is always much more complex than we can know. We also need the humility to consider, as both the Buddha and Carl Jung urged, that the structure of the egoic mind might be such that patterns of cognitive-perceptual unconsciousness are playing out both in ourselves and in the collective. So, we need to investigate the cognitive-perceptual factors in ourselves, while also acknowledging the cultural, historical, economic, political, social, organisational, and even geopolitical factors in the collective – in other words, to be ‘systemic’ in our analysis of both self and world.

For me, this acknowledgement that decisions and judgements that have ethical implications are always happening within a complex societal context, is the only basis from which to address these questions. Aware that the notion of ‘mainstream media’ is a somewhat crude conceptual construct, I use this term, and I often express a sense of despair about the poor quality of Western journalism in my articles and Facebook posts. Essentially, I am of the opinion that the term encourages discernment – since we all need to entertain the possibility that paradoxically, our established government broadcasters and commercial media channels are subject to a range of increasingly strong systemic factors that mitigate against their presentation of the truth, and that they therefore inevitably tend to generate, at best, distorted and ‘dumbed down’ narratives in the public mind, or at worst, outright propaganda.

September 1, 2023

The Trikāya – The Sambhogakāya Mandala as the Middle Way

The Buddha’s Images of Samādhi – Part 1

The Trikāya – The Sambhogakāya Mandala as the Middle Way

The Buddha used the language of imagery to describe subtle experiences and philosophical principles – and the Buddhist tradition continued to do the same down through the centuries. The impulse for this series of shorter articles began with a wish in me to present the beautiful images that the Buddha used to describe the four rūpa dhyānas – the first four states of integration and meditative absorption that are familiar to experienced meditators. I would like to begin however with another image – the three-level model of reality that came to called the Trikāya Doctrine. This is an image that emerged in the Mahayāna period and finds expression in the ‘Refuge Tree’ visualisation practices of Vajrayāna Buddhism. This conceptual image provides us, I believe, with a contextual framework for our study of the Buddha’s Middle Way – a framework which reveals the profound depth and subtlety of his spiritual teachings.

I have illustrated this article with various artistic renderings of the Refuge Tree used in the Triratna Buddhist Community, and have made reference to Urgyen Sangharakshita, the founder of the Triratna Buddhist Order, so need to make it clear, as I often do, that the reflections that I share in this article, while they are based on my Buddhist study in the context of the Triratna Buddhist Community, are my own – and should not be taken as representing any sort of consensus view within that organisation.

Trikāya means literally ‘three-body’, but it can be thought of a presenting the three layers, or levels, of the reality of Enlightenment – or three levels of the Buddha’s being. In the ‘Refuge Tree’ visualisation practices of Tibetan Buddhism, the trikāya is usually imagined as a great tree in which there are giant lotus flowers on three levels. At the topmost level there is always a single figure, usually either Vairocana or Vajrasattva, representing the dharmakāya – the transcendental absolute.

Below that, there is a layer of the tree’s structure that supports a horizontally arranged mandala of five archetypal Buddhas – blue, yellow, red, green and white – a simplified representation of the sambhogakāya mandala. A more complete description of the samboghakāya is the so called Dharmadhātu Mandala (whose name I shall explain below), that we find in the Bardo Thodol – the so-called ‘Tibetan Book of the Dead’. So, a more complete depiction of the sambhogakāya mandala would show not just the five male Buddhas, but their female Buddha counterparts, and other figures from the five families of archetypal Buddhas.

Below that, there are usually several further branches which create several platforms of lotuses at right, left and centre. On this level of the tree are depicted all the historical figures in the tradition’s lineage – a representation of the nirmānakāya. Gautama Buddha is usually prominently placed in the centre, with the more contemporary teachers within the lineage arranged around and below him. Somewhat confusingly, we sometimes find mythic-historical figures also depicted on the nirmānakāya level of the tree – important mythic figures which either do not appear to fit into the samboghakāya mandala, or who, in the course of the mythological and imaginative flowering of Mahayana Buddhist tradition, have been assumed to have been historical figures, or even contemporaries of the Buddha.

The Buddha spoke of his path to Enlightenment as a Middle Way – a path in which the tension between the eternal and the mundane is held and reconciled. So, the Buddhist path is a third way – a philosophical path and a path of practice that avoids extremes, and in which this fundamental dichotomy is resolved. Over the centuries this idea of the Buddhist path as a Middle Way, and as a third way between these existential opposites, came to be expressed in this three-fold model of mind called the trikāya. By the 4^th century CE, the conceptualisation that we now know as the Trikāya Doctrine, had been established. The idea being expressed, was that it is helpful as a way of reconciling the eternal, unconditioned, and divine reality of the Buddha, with his physical, historical, and human reality, to acknowledge a third and intermediate, archetypal level of mind, and therefore to speak in terms of the ‘three bodies’ of the Buddha.

I am of the view, and this is a view shared by many students of Buddhism, that the Middle Way does not only refer to this one instance. I regard the Middle Way as a much bigger and more general conceptual construct and description of reality. Indeed, I regard the Middle Way as the Buddha’s method of enquiry – as his way of approaching, not just these existential fundamentals, but all the phenomena of the body-mind, and all social phenomena as well. At every level of reality, the Buddha applied an analysis that recognises opposites; that separates and reconciles; that creates integration; that is relational and harmonising – even to the point of entirely overcoming the cognitive-perceptual dichotomy of self and other. The Dharmadhātu Mandala from later Buddhist tradition, which has been the focus of much of my writing, is a Middle Way symbol – a representation of the sambhogakāya level within the trikāya, and a symbol of the ‘separation and reconciliation of opposites’ as a guiding principle within any spiritual psychology, and on the path to wisdom.

The use of the term Dharmadhātu Mandala for the sambhogakāya mandala is a little confusing. It was given this name because the centre of this five Buddha mandala of the sambhogakāya is occupied by the white Buddha, Vairocana, who personifies the Dharmadhātu Wisdom. One of the five Wisdoms that are personified by the five sambhogakāya Buddhas, the Dharmadhātu Wisdom is the wisdom that is most rooted in the dharmakāya level of mind, since it is associated with realisation of the ’emptiness’ of the vijñāna skandha (Consciousness) – and therefore with the recognition that Consciousness is not personal. Hence Vairocana, the central samboghakāya Buddha, is sometimes seen at the top of Refuge Tree images, as a personification of the dharmakāya (as mentioned above) – although later Buddhist tradition most often places a form of Vajrasattva in this position.

The Middle Way also expresses an idea that, in the West, we often associate with the Taoist philosophy of ancient China. It suggests that progress is ultimately achieved not by going to extremes, but by the paradoxical approach of identifying the opposite of our current position – often an unconscious opposite – and fully acknowledging it. The greatest obstacle to integration, to real spiritual progress, and to the deep moral sensibility of Buddhist ethics, is the unconsciousness that arises from our unwillingness to acknowledge opposites in this way. The Middle Way principle on the other hand, is a subtle, wise and counter-intuitive one, that holds the tension between the opposites and therefore has great transformative power. If we can bring a balanced attention, recognising value in the opposite truth, or position, or direction of progress, and can learn to apply this principle in all aspects of our lives, we are led seemly inevitably to self-knowledge, psychological integration, skilled communication, and harmonious relationships. So, the Buddha’s Middle Way principle is woven through every aspect of his teaching – but is expressed particularly clearly in the development of the Trikāya Doctrine.

The impulse behind this development, was not only to provide a more complete description of who the Buddha was – it was also to provide a better understanding of ourselves; of what it is to be a human being. This is my motivation also in sharing these reflections. The Buddha’s Noble Eight-fold Path begins with Right Vision, or Right View. This launching off point for our journey of transformation, often takes the form of a deeply affecting insight or recognition, which propels us on our way. Right Vision also refers to our embrace of a description of reality that cuts through the bonds of the egoic self-illusion, and lifts us out of our mundane preoccupations and self-limiting conceptualisations. For me, the Trikāya Doctrine is just such an initiatory vision of reality. It contains a view of the person that frees us – that changes us forever when we grasp it.

August 10, 2023

The Ten Archetypal Buddhas of the Mandala – Part 8: Māmaki

This article is the eighth of fifteen articles inspired by the central five verses of Padmasambhava’s ‘Inspiration-Prayer for Deliverance from the Dangerous Pathway of the Bardo’, in which I shall be aiming to show meditators how each one of the ten deities of the Dharmadhātu Mandala can be felt in the fields of the body as profound suprapersonal sources of somatic healing and wisdom. Those who read the whole series of articles – and it is intended that these articles should be read in sequence – will be able to incorporate these reflections into their meditation practice in a systematic way. The first article in the series can be found here; brief summaries of all the articles can be found here; you can read the previous article in the series here; and you can read the five verses here.

In these articles, I am choosing once again to use a partly non-traditional terminology for talking about the process of transformation that the Dharmadhātu Mandala invites us to engage in. Those who have read the previous articles on this series may recognise Integration, Positive Emotion, Spiritual Death and Spiritual Rebirth as the stages of a system of meditative practice that was suggested by Sangharakshita in the 1970s. This being the case, I need to point out once again, that while I find that these four general stages fit my experience very well indeed, the detail of my own approach to these stages of meditation practice is not based on any detailed exposition by Sangharakshita, but on my own explorations.

I should also make it clear that what I am presenting here does not necessarily represent the consensus within the global Triratna Buddhist Community regarding Sangharakshita’s ‘System of Practice’. My intention is only to share my own experience, and to share my own somewhat personal and perhaps idiosyncratic reflections. My hope is that others will find my exploration of that four-fold conceptual frame of reference to be meaningful and useful, and will be stimulated to engage in there own meditative enquiry into the profound spiritual psychology of the Dharmadhātu Mandala.

This article began as a longer piece of writing, which I subsequently decided to split into two sections – the first section being an introduction to this one, and in part a recapitulation of themes from earlier in this series. I gave the introductory section the title: Part 7: Somatic Body-Mind. If you have not already read it, you may want to consider reading the previous article first – by clicking here.

Vajrayāna Meditation – A Somatic Approach to Practice

The Buddhist tradition unfolded through three great historical and spiritual stages – usually called the Hinayāna, Mahayāna and Vajrayāna. While it can be shown that the Mahayāna, and Vajrayāna stages where implicit in the historical Buddha’s teaching (nominally Hinayāna), the Mahayāna and Vajrayāna teachings of later centuries gave even richer cultural expression to ways of thinking about realisation, about meditation, and about Mindfulness – ways which, while they were not completely new to the tradition, had not been fully expressed either in Gautama Buddha’s teaching, or in the earlier centuries. While the Mahayāna could be characterised as emphasising the seeming ‘otherness’ of the suprapersonal spiritual forces of Consciousness and the importance of an attitude of devotional receptivity towards those forces; the Vajrayāna goes a step further, by acknowledging that our personal experience of embodied Consciousness cannot ultimately be separated from the Transcendental – that all of human experience is pervaded by the transcendental dharmadhātu, or dharmic dimension, and that all beings, without exception, are subject to its evolutionary energy.

So the Vajrayana can be characterised as advocating, not just a fierce determination to become more conscious (the Hinayana emphasis); and not just a profound receptivity to benevolent spiritual forces that are beyond the egoic mind but inherent in Consciousness (the Mahayāna emphasis); but also a recognition that realisation is already present in the experience of embodied Consciousness – albeit very profoundly obscured by the egoic kleshas that have seized the body-mind. The Vajrayāna Buddhism of Tibet therefore sees psychological development as involving, not only a broadening and deepening of cognitive-perceptual awareness, and a differentiation of every human function and skill, but, through meditation practice, a direct transformation and profound expansion of the way we embody Consciousness somatically. So, the Vajrayāna sees meditation practice as a bodily, or somatic, process – one in which the accumulated kleshas are systematically driven out by our consistent return to states of alignment with our ultimate true nature.

Recognising Embodied Consciousness

This approach holds the possibility of rapidly accelerating our process of healing, personal development, and realisation. Those meditation and Mindfulness practitioners within the Buddhist tradition, who engage with this level of practice, achieve this acceleration of their process by resting ‘as’ Consciousness, and recognising that the ’empty’ vijñāna skandha of Consciousness, is itself a phenomenon of the transcendent dharmic order of conditionality within the universe. When we practice in the spirit of the Vajrayāna, we set out to systematically familiarise ourselves with all aspects of our experience of embodied Consciousness – using the mandala and its archetypal Buddhas as our guide. While I have no wish to denigrate other approaches as ‘lower’, or to identify my own approach as ‘higher’, it is this more comprehensive approach to Mindfulness and meditation, such as we find in the Tibetan Vajrayana, that I have been seeking to present in these Mandala of Love articles.

This integration of the ‘self-discovery’ perspective of the Vajrayāna, into the way we think about meditation practice, allows us to see both the earlier ‘self-development’ perspective of the Hinayāna, and the subsequent devotional-receptive ‘self-surrender’ perspective of the Mahayāna, much more clearly. As I have been explaining in previous articles, the meditation practices of Buddhist tradition can be thought of as methods for releasing the energetic residue of our egoic patterning – which Buddhist tradition calls the kleshas – from the somatic body-mind. As this releasing takes place, we reveal the somatic energies of embodied Consciousness that were always present, but were previously obscured by the energetic residue that is accumulated through egoic identification – we reveal the dharmic order of conditionality to be the most fundamental and reliable aspect of mind, even as it is clearly non-personal.

While many Buddhist teachers claim that any act of intense concentration will help us develop Mindfulness and samādhi this is not necessarily true. The practice of samādhi, or meditation, is unfortunately usually understood merely as ‘meditative absorption’, or ‘concentration’. ‘Concentration’ is an especially limited and limiting conceptualisation. I find it much more helpful to think of samādhi as a process in which we endeavour to integrate and embody the suprapersonal forces of Consciousness. It is an active process, but that activity is the subtle one of an active and systematic ‘meditative receptivity’. So, Mindfulness is not a merely mental process, or a neurological ‘executive function’ skill of the brain, and it is certainly not about developing awareness in a single narrow areas – like body position in space; sensations; feeling states, etc. If we study the Buddha’s ‘Four Foundations of Mindfulness’ with an imagination informed by the mandala wisdom of later Buddhist tradition, we recognise that Mindfulness requires the cultivation of a broad, multidimensional, and comprehensive embodiment of Consciousness, and requires our willingness to enter into the non-conceptual inner-world of somatic energy and of indefinable bodily-felt experience. All this is implied by the idea of Mindfulness of vedanā. We cannot engage with either Mindfulness practice, or samādhi practice, without entering this non-rational somatic realm of ‘internal’ vedanā , since it here, in our bodily-felt experience that the psychological opposites are most concretely confronted, held and reconciled, so that the invisible forces that have held us back can at last be released. Continue reading

July 21, 2023

Why would Australia want to align with the US against China?

Below is the text of my submission to the Australian Senate to register my grave concerns about the AUKUS nuclear-powered submarines deal.

Re: The Defence Legislation Amendment (Naval Nuclear Propulsion) Bill 2023 [Provisions]

I am writing as a concerned, and I would like to think, well-informed, Australian citizen. I study current affairs in great detail and have also made a deep study of the relevant history – especially the history and of the US-dominated NATO alliance and foreign-policy alignment of Australia with the US since WW2.

I have to say that I am a little horrified at the lack of democratic process and appropriate reflective consideration that has so far gone into the AUKUS nuclear powered submarines deal. There is a lot of very important geopolitical information (and practical information related to military strategy and technology) that should be providing context for this decision, that is being excluded from the discussion – apparently in an irrational and fearful concern on the part of the Australian government, to be seen by the US as showing absolutely un-questioning allegiance, and an absolute willingness to follow their lead. It is clear that there is also a great deal of deliberate misinformation informing this decision-making.

The pervasive assumption that Australian national security is best served by this unquestioning alliance with the US is just deeply untrue and is extremely dangerous. This is not just my view as an informed citizen in my mid-60s – it is also the view of older and wiser and even better-informed Australians. The older Australian statesmen like Paul Keating and John Lander, whose grasp on these issues comes from many decades of hand-on engagement, and of devoted service to the national interest, are of the same view. These men have really studied the economic, historical, geopolitical and national security issues that the AUKUS subs deal is supposed to be a response to, and these men have been so concerned that they have come out of retirement specifically in order to challenge to bogus assumptions to have been established in the Australian public mind – and in Australian governments of both Liberal and Labour persuasions.

Even without the benefit of seeing the horrific outcomes of the irresponsibility and lack of foresight in US foreign policy that are currently playing out so badly in Ukraine, well-informed Australians know that the US has not shown itself to be a true friend of Australia in the post WW2 period – or of any other nation for that matter. Indeed, looking back over the last 30 years, it is clear that the US has engaged in a series of truly terrible, unnecessary, foolish, and extremely expensive military adventures that have not even served the security interests of their own populations, let alone those of their allies. And what we see of US foreign policy is always just the tip of the iceberg. US funding of covert operations to achieve dominance through destabilisation and regime-change operations and other subversive activities in service of US economic interests, has always been vast in the post WW2 period – a long-established part of modus operandi of US foreign policy.

World geopolitics is rapidly changing, and now is not the time for Australia to be locking itself into an extremely expensive long-term alliance with the US. US politics is becoming increasingly irrational. As the debt-fuelled economic dominance that has been achieved due to the US dollar’s status as the world reserve currency is unravelling, this irrationality can be expected to increase. Informed Australian citizens have been watching in horror as the Australian government pulled out of its submarines collaboration with the French – a truly defensive military choice using smaller subs designed for the protection of Australian waters. In place of that more modest and appropriate naval defence strategy, we are now presented with the fait accompli of the AUKUS deal, in which we are investing massively in a long-term offensive capability against our most important economic partner – China. Nothing could be more provocative and reckless – and more profoundly undermining to the trust and collaboration with China that is so fundamental to Australian prosperity. There are over 700 million people living in the costal cities of China. All of them will be directly threatened by the presence of these submarines. Australia is better than this – morally better, and hopefully more intelligent than this also.

This is not a situation where our economic interests must be sacrificed because of an overriding national security concern – that it not what it happening. The fact of the matter is that the China threat is just a propaganda construct promoted by the US government for whom China is an economic threat – but not a military one. It is not China that is engaged in reckless military activities and the establishment of 800 military bases around the globe – it is the US that is acting in a threatening and provocative way. The irrational and dangerous US decision to arm Taiwan against China, and the US aspiration to establish Taiwan as a US base off the coast of China shows the same absurd lack of any common-sense respect for spheres of influence and for the legitimate security needs of other nations that we saw at the end of 2022 – which caused the Ukraine civil war to became a full proxy-war between NATO and the Russian Federation.

China is not a military threat to anyone because it just wants to trade and to recycle its profits into infrastructure projects around the world (not into war, geopolitical control, and military conquest around the world – as in the US model). It has developed a banking system and a national governance model that is designed to support manufacturing, technological development, and infrastructure development – and to raise the living standard, education, and health, of the whole population. Observers around the world are noticing that this ‘mixed’ and pragmatic economic model creates wealth much more effectively than does the more ideological ‘financial’ capitalism of Wall Street and the City of London. So, China is certainly presenting a challenge to US-style banking and neoliberal economics – but the idea that it is a military threat is just a much-repeated lie put about by the powerful and well-funded lobbyists, propagandists and public relations organisations that support US economic and military hegemony and the US military-industrial complex.

Most significant among these lobby organisations in the Australian foreign policy arena is ASPI, the Australian Strategic Policy Institute. Although ASPI claims to be an “independent, non-partisan think tank”, in reality it is a dangerous and deeply dishonest organisation in the view of most of the Australian citizens who have looked closely into the organisation’s actions, motivations and sources of funding. An organisation like this, far from acting in the best interests of the Australian people, allows a tiny handful of people with very base and even delusional motivations to subvert and control the Australian foreign policy narrative within the Australian parliament, the Department of Defence, and within the wider Australian population.

The creation of the Uighur ‘genocide’ narrative is just one of a series of un-evidenced propaganda attacks that have been used to establish dehumanising ‘enemy images’ of the Chinese people and their government in the Australian public mind. The ‘detention centres’ identified in ASPI’s report turned out to be educational centres, and the segregated trains were also a fictionalised distortion of Chinese government support to its Uighur communities. Those who have looked objectively into the Chinese government’s response to the many hundreds (800+) of horrific Islamic jihadist bomb attacks, and the militant Islamist sentiment that has been introduced into Chinese Moslem culture from outside – from the Arab world with the covert support of malevolent US actors, as was achieved in Afghanistan (in the 80s) and Syria (since 2011) – are actually impressed by the care and restraint with which the Chinese government has approached the problem. The word ‘genocide’ in this context is just so far from the truth as to be completely ridiculous – and betrays the irresponsible and propagandistic intentions of ASPI as an organisation. It needs to be pointed out, to provide some context, that the indiscriminate slaughter that our US and UK allies have brought to the Moslem populations of Israel, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Syria could indeed however, be characterised as a form of genocide.

There is a great deal more that could be said. The members of the Senate are charged with a very important decision that will affect Australia for many decades and possibly for ever. I hope an appropriate degree of care is taken in the decision-making process. The purchase of these nuclear submarines throws the Australian people into a dangerous future that is full of unknowns, but there are several very obvious negative indicators – the most important being the almost complete loss of sovereignty for the Australian nation through this deal and the extremely dangerous nature of any strategic alliance with the US and the UK.

In conclusion, I would recommend a delay regarding this decision, at the very least. If, in the process of the economic unravelling that both the US and the UK are entering, those nations end up in a reckless military conflict with a second nuclear armed nation (i.e. China as well as Russia) in the next few of years, our long-term commitment to alignment with the US will only increase our chances of our becoming a target of Chinese retaliation or defensive military action – but our economy will be the first to suffer. There is neither a short-term benefit, nor a long-term benefit for us in this deal, but there is enormous danger in giving unqualified support to the US at this time. This is a time in history where nation-states should be collaborating to rein in US imperial ambitions and working to facilitate the creation of a peaceful, just, and prosperous multipolar world – not giving up their sovereignty in unquestioning support of an empire that is in decline.

I have not dwelt, in this submission, on the technical and environmental problems that are inherent in this shift to nuclear propulsion technology, but I regard the dangers and vast ongoing expense associated with nuclear waste processing and its long-term management as reason enough to reject this proposal. To adopt this technology is, by definition, short-sighted – since the current government would, out of narrow short-term self-interest be committing hundreds if not thousands of future generations to the dangerous and expensive task of containing the radioactive poisons that would result from the operation of these submarines. If there was a benefit in operating these submarines, I would still say the environmental costs and future financial costs were too much to pay. I fear that future generations will view this choice of technology as reckless and absurd.

The geopolitical landscape of planet Earth is changing rapidly, and Australia needs to keep its options open and steer its own ship. Geographically, it is well located to benefit from the economic shift of the world’s economic centre of gravity to Southeast Asia. Rather than being a lapdog, minion, lacky and passive instrument of the cynically self-serving and value-free foreign-policy of the US, Australia should be standing up tall and punching above its weight as a moral agent on the world stage – and standing against the US. We have seen a procession of fools and monsters in the halls of power in Washington – reckless men and women who would turn over the geopolitical chessboard like petulant children rather than accept the economic and geopolitical rearrangement that is currently happening. The violent three-decade period of unipolar US hegemony since the fall of the Soviet Union is coming to an end, and the world needs clear-headed diplomatic thinkers if we are to survive the transition to a just multipolar world.

While I see it as a tragic loss of sovereignty for Australia, our membership of AUKUS, has a certain un-thinking logic to it. Australia was originally part of the British empire and is still linked to the UK through its constitution; and as that empire faded after WW2, we attached ourselves to the US empire instead, and contributed with the lives of our servicemen to its horrible wars. This moment in history is calling for deeper reflection, however. It is time for Australia to be stepping up and playing its part in the creation of the new multipolar world – not enabling the addictive and psychopathic impulses of its idiot older brothers in the UK and the US.

William Roy Parker 2023

May 17, 2023

Buddha; Dharma; Sangha, and the Five Wisdoms Mandala – Preface

The text below is the Preface to a book that I am currently working on – Buddha; Dharma; Sangha, and the Five Wisdoms Mandala – the first chapter of which I will be giving away free to ‘Mandala of Love’ subscribers.

Preface

There are three archetypal ideas that have guided Buddhist tradition for twenty-five centuries – Buddha; Dharma; and Sangha. This triad of archetypal principles is often called the Three Jewels (triratna) and also referred to as the Three Refuges. In each of the three long essays, that are the chapters of this book, I have taken one of these three principles, and in the course of the book, I have set out to weave them together in way that reveals both their underlying unity, and the completeness of the model that they present. Most of my readers will have some familiarity with the Three Jewels, but my intention with this book is to challenge myself, and to challenge my readers also, to go deeper into this familiar formulation. I feel a desire to bear witness to the universality of these three principles – to reveal them as universal spiritual principles – principles that can be regarded, ultimately, as going beyond the Buddhist tradition. The Three Jewels are three universal human values; values that ennoble humanity; values by which humanity may reach its potential.

I believe that we live in a time of great moral, and indeed mortal, danger – a time in which, even when humanity’s potential for peace and prosperity is at its height, key institutions and cultural forces for the good and for truth appear to be failing. This is a time in which the forces of evil and untruth and have drawn powerful new resources to themselves. By contrast, Buddha, Dharma and Sangha are, in essence, three powerful universal truths that are much needed by humanity at this time of global crisis. There is a liberating wisdom and a natural compassion at the heart of all three of these principles, without which human civilisation will not survive.

While this may seem ambitious, to approach the Three Jewels in a lesser way would be to reduce them, in my view – to reduce them to a merely historical, cultural and religious phenomena. This awareness of Buddhist principles as universal, or archetypal, principles, is easily lost within the dominant post-modern worldview that we are educated into in the West. Although the Buddhist tradition has, historically, seen itself as naming the universal principles at play in our psychology and in our world, I feel grateful to have also gained a particularly keen sense of this sensibility through my reading in the area of archetypal psychology (predominantly through the work of Carl Jung and his students) – which I studied concurrently with Buddhism, in my twenties.

In addition to Buddha, Dharma and Sangha, there are several other major themes that I have set out to weave through these three essays. Most obviously, there is the theme of the Five Wisdoms Mandala. When I speak of the Five Wisdoms Mandala, I am speaking of the universal mandala structure of the body-mind, which the Buddha spoke of in terms of the five cognitive-perceptual skandhas – a model which we find particularly well elucidated in the psychology of Carl Jung. These skandhas, when we are completely identified with them, give structure to the egoic mind and appear as a fixed and separate self. When, however, we begin to recognise, as the Buddha did, that the skandhas are universal and non-personal cognitive-perceptual components, they show us the structure of the Enlightened mind – the five Wisdoms.

It is one of my most important aims in this book to communicate this dual and reconciliatory function of the ‘mandala wisdom’. It provides us with both a powerful description of the various dimensions our egoic dysfunction, our suffering, our ignorance, our empathy failure and our cruelty, on one side; and a beautiful description of our sublime potentiality, on the other. The spiritual psychology of the mandala that we find in Tibetan Buddhist tradition, is extremely rich and profound, and I can only provide the barest introduction to this richness and profundity in this short book – but I hope to at least provide an overview of this vast and multidimensional inner terrain.

May 14, 2023

The Ten Archetypal Buddhas of the Mandala – Part 7: The Somatic Body-Mind

This article is the seventh of fifteen articles inspired by the central five verses of Padmasambhava’s ‘Inspiration-Prayer for Deliverance from the Dangerous Pathway of the Bardo’, in which I shall be aiming to show meditators how each one of the ten deities of the Dharmadhātu Mandala can be felt in the fields of the body as profound suprapersonal sources of somatic healing and wisdom. Those who read the whole series of articles – and it is intended that these articles should be read in sequence – will be able to incorporate these reflections into their meditation practice in a systematic way. The first article in the series can be found here; brief summaries of all the articles can be found here; you can read the previous article in the series here; and you can read the five verses here.

I should also make it clear that what I am presenting here does not represent the consensus within the global Triratna Buddhist Community regarding Sangharakshita’s ‘System of Practice’ – far from it. My intention is only to share my own experience, and to share my own somewhat personal and perhaps idiosyncratic reflections. My hope is that others will find my exploration of that four-fold conceptual frame of reference to be meaningful and useful, and will be stimulated to engage in their own meditative enquiry into the profound spiritual psychology of the Dharmadhātu Mandala.

This article was originally written as the first part of a longer article on the female Buddha Māmaki, but I have chosen to present it as a separate article, and as one which will hopefully serve as an introduction to that article. In it, I hope to provide a recapitulation of key understandings from previous articles in the series, and to further introduce the notion of the somatic, and the idea that meditation is an experience of, not mind, but body-mind – these being foundational conceptualisations for the article on Māmaki that follows. By talking of mind as body-mind, I mean, not an integration of two separate elements – mind and body – but an acknowledgement of the extent to which mind and body must be regarded, in the practice of meditation, as inherently integrated. So, while meditation can usefully be thought of, at least in the beginning stages, as an integration of mind and body – of ‘bringing the mind home to the body’, as Thich Nhat Hahn used to say – I am interested in a deeper integration, in the sense of a bringing into full awareness, of the five already integrated body-mind components, which Buddhist tradition calls the five skandhas. By way of introduction to the article on Māmaki, I shall, in this article, be reflecting on the vedanā skandha in particular – the skandha of ‘internal’ and ‘external’ Sensing, Sensation and Embodiment.

A Comprehensive Non-Dual Archetypal Psychology

In this series of articles, I have set out to describe the ten archetypal Buddhas of the Dharmadhātu Mandala – the mandala of the Five Wisdoms – and to present them as personifications of an interrelated constellation of Dharmic principles that together form a comprehensive non-dual psychology. These Dharmic principles can be viewed as stages in a transformation process – a transformation process that leads not just to Insight, and to the release of self-view (which we can call Spiritual Death); but to our embodiment of the transcendent Bodhisattva principle (a stage which we can call Spiritual Rebirth), through the release of the energetic residues of the egoic mind, which Buddhist tradition calls the kleshas.

We can characterise the process of realisation that we call Enlightenment as having four stages – Integration, Positive Emotion, Spiritual Death and Spiritual Rebirth – and we can approach each of these four stages through five meditative contemplations, using the Five Wisdoms Mandala as our guide. Each of the four stages engages with the Five Wisdoms at a higher level than the last. They are are like four octaves – the subsequent stages resonating with the earlier ones, and each expressing a higher and more comprehensive level of transformation and wisdom than the last. While it is true to say that the embodiment of Consciousness characterised by Positive Emotion, requires the foundation of mental and emotional stability such as is developed in the Integration stage, there is also however, a sense in which these two different familiarisation processes can progress in parallel. I shall be talking more about this below.

The most obvious division of the four stages is into the first two and the last two. There is however, a particularly strong resonance between the Integration and Spiritual Death stages (first and third), and between the Positive Emotion and Spiritual Rebirth stages (second and fourth). This means that our practice in the Integration stage, and our deepening connection with the five receptive ‘Integration’ Buddhas (that we we are currently studying), is likely to also produce significant insights into the impersonal nature of mind (Spiritual Death). Similarly, a deep practice of the Positive Emotion stage, and our deepening connection with the five expansive ‘Positive Emotion’ Buddhas, is likely to propel us into that profoundly and naturally altruistic way of living our embodiment of Consciousness, which the Buddhist tradition speaks of in terms of the bodhicitta – the emergence of the Bodhisattva archetype as the guiding principle of our being (Spiritual Rebirth).

What I am presenting here is clearly not an ego-psychology – in which an heroic and narcissistic egoic self makes vain attempts at transcendence by trying to appropriate divine powers to itself. Rather it is a Buddhist archetypal psychology, in which the humble and reverent egoic self of the Mahayana Buddhist practitioner seeks to know, familiarise themselves with, and surrender to, the benevolent forces of the Transcendental – the archetypal powers that are inherent in Consciousness and organised as a mandala of Five Wisdoms.

The Brahmavihāras – Self-Regarding and Other-Regarding

The egoic mind has tendencies which we can characterised in terms of energetic dis-integration and energetic contraction, and the practice of meditation, or resting as Consciousness, leads to the opposite tendencies – Integration being the opposite of energetic dis-integration, and Positive Emotion being the opposite of energetic contraction. One way in which this distinction that I am making, between Integration and Positive Emotion can be understood, is in terms of the brahmavihāras (Equanimity, Loving Kindness, Compassion, and Appreciative Joy) which can be either self-regarding or other-regarding – either energetically receptive or energetically expansive.

June 18, 2022

A History Lesson from Dr Martin Luther King

I am publishing the short article and embedded YouTube video below, in my ‘Anti-War’ category. For some time now, I have felt a need to supplement my engagement with the problem of the egoic mind – which has been primarily through meditation and self-enquiry – with some engagement with the disturbing reflection of that egoic violence and hatred that we can see when we look in a penetrating way at the values, systems, and structures (and individuals), that govern our outer world. While most of us in the modern West have a complacent sense of safety and stability, those around the world in less fortunate countries are finding themselves in the cross-hairs – the object of regime change operations funded by our governments, and supported by various well-funded pro-war propaganda agencies. This war has two enemies – because the propaganda war is always being simultaneously waged against ourselves, by these same agencies, who desperately need to cover up or justify what is being done in our name.

We live in extraordinary times; dark times in which great crimes are being committed both covertly and in plain sight; times in which the economic and political culture of the liberal democracies of the West has degraded to such an extent that both government and media are frequently propagating misinformation and acting in a way that is not only not at all in the interests of their populations, but very dangerous for the future of our planet. In a modern world where both nation states and international institutions are failing to maintain their integrity in the face of corporate and oligarchic forces and the march of new technologies, we need to create a culture of non-violence and wisdom – and as part of this we need to support those embattled independant voices for peace, truth and justice that are trying to push back against these dangerous collective manifestations of the egoic mind.

Please forgive my forthright and unqualified style in these short anti-war articles. My research is very deep and thorough however – certainly not confined to the mainstream media channels. I wish I had time to write longer, more detailed articles with references and sources.

I have wanted to post this video for some time. This speech by Dr Martin Luther King against the Vietnam War, is a moving example for me of how those who would uplift humanity are often drawn to face into the evil of war – and to study its historical roots and oppose the political, cultural and economic forces that foster it.

The anti-war sentiment and intention that Dr King is expressing here, has been very effectively sidelined in our current world. This is because the pro-war propaganda operations against us are now very much more sophisticated, comprehensive and effective. The voices of dissent in our media and in our parliaments are now very quickly crushed – there is not so much need to assassinate people as they did with Dr King. It could be argued that democratic restraint of the war machine is now largely absent – that our mainstream media commentators do not seem able to perform their function as educators of our populations, and of our elected representatives in government. In academia, the same process is evident – the removal the truth-telling trouble-makers.

The last four decades have increasingly shown us that if those in power want a war (either those in elected government, or those in the unelected government agencies that are really in control), they will find a way of creating a justification for it – frequently by generating allegations and provocations that later turn out to be just lies, or even false flag operations. In a strange, ‘Orwellian’ development since the events of September 11th, 2001, it has became acceptable for the foreign policy and defence establishment agencies of the so-called liberal-democratic nation states, to employ numerous specialist public relations firms and covert psychological operations agencies to propagandise their own populations, and to ensure a steady flow of favourable misinformation into all media channels – even training Islamic terrorists to create propaganda videos to present themselves as victims or as liberating heroes (as was achieved in Syria).

This propaganda war against us all was particularly evident in the case of the secret proxy-war to bring down the secular state of Syria using Islamic jihadist armies. Given the incredible success of the similar secret proxy-war in Afghanistan in the 80s against the Soviet Russians, the strategy is an understandable one for the Pentagon. One might think it would make no sense, given the concurrent ‘War on Terror’, for the US, the UK, France, Israel, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar, to be funding, supplying, and in various ways supporting, Islamic terrorists – hence the need for the massive propaganda operation (an estimated billion dollars a year out of the CIA budget). The operation to support the various Islamic terrorist groups who were intent on destroying the secular state of Syria, and on slaughtering its many non-Muslim populations, would certainly have been successful if it had not been for the Russian Federation coming to the aid of the people of Syria. The Russians have there own problems at home with Islamic terrorism and did not want to see it flourish. Because it took this principled stand in relationship to Syria, Russia has found itself increasingly vilified, especially by the US-UK propaganda machine.

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Prior to June 1965, Dr. King had occasionally expressed concern about the war in Vietnam, but he had done so publicly only in a tentative and extremely cautious manner. Dr King was acutely aware of the risk that direct criticism of President Lyndon Johnson on his Vietnam policy risked jeopardising the strong and critically important relationship he had developed with President Johnson in support of his civil rights efforts. However, various factors began to shift Dr. King’s understanding of the vast human suffering being caused by the US in Vietnam and, as a result, his opposition to the war slowly began to intensify, eventually leading to an unequivocal moral condemnation of US war policy, and a fundamental break in his relationship with Johnson.

The late Thich Nhat Hanh, now know to the world as a great Buddhist leader and writer, was at that time known only as the immensely courageous young Buddhist monk from Vietnam, who played the key role of educating Dr. King about the reality of the Vietnam War from a Vietnamese perspective and inspiring his transformation into a leader in the US anti-war movement.

The video below is of the speech, or “sermon”, that Dr King gave at the culmination of his soul-searching. He delivered it on April 30th, 1967 in New York, expressing a clear stand, not only for civil rights, but against the war in Vietnam. In it he spoke about the “triple evils of racism, economic exploitation, and militarism”. Just over two years later, after a period of increased police persecution he was assassinated.

William Roy Parker 2020

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March 20, 2022

The US-Facilitated Coup in Ukraine in 2014

I am publishing the short article and embedded YouTube video below, in my ‘Anti-War’ category. For some time now, I have felt a need to supplement my engagement with the problem of the egoic mind – which has been primarily through meditation and self-enquiry – with some engagement with the disturbing reflection of that egoic violence and hatred that we can see when we look in a penetrating way at the values, systems, and structures (and individuals), that govern our outer world. While most of us in the modern West have a complacent sense of safety and stability, those around the world in less fortunate countries are finding themselves in the cross-hairs – the object of regime change operations funded by our governments, and supported by our various well-funded pro-war propaganda agencies. This war has two enemies – because the propaganda war is always being simultaneously waged against ourselves, by these same agencies, who desperately need to cover up or justify what is being done in our name.

We live in extraordinary times; dark times in which great crimes are being committed both covertly and in plain sight; times in which the economic and political culture of the liberal democracies of the West has degraded to such an extent that both government and media are frequently acting in a way that is not only not at all in the interests of their populations, but very dangerous for the future of our planet. In a modern world where both nation states and international institutions are failing to maintain their integrity in the face of corporate and oligarchic forces and the march of new technologies, we need to create a culture of non-violence and wisdom – and as part of this we need to support those embattled independant voices for peace, truth and justice that are trying to push back against these dangerous collective manifestations of the egoic mind.

As the Ukraine crisis deepens, we are witnessing a major flaw in Western democracy, which is that our news media do not provide context and historical reflection on current events – and because of this, their output is almost devoid of real value or truth. Instead, the mainstream news channels give us soundbites and belligerent, jingoistic rhetoric that lurches towards war and necessity of arms sales and inhumane sanctions seemingly without a moment’s reflection. There is a rush to judgement, condemnation and violent punishment, without even an attempt to present evidence or to ascertain the motive of the accused.

This is a complex systemic phenomena, with many different government and non-government agencies and cultural and psychological factors contributing to the mix of misinformation – as well as the UK Foreign Office and the US State Department. The truth, it seems, is nowhere to be seen or heard. So, we have to seek out that truth – we need to look carefully at the faces of our journalists and examine the motivations of these important people who are giving us our news, and we must fully acknowledge the constraints against truth in the mainstream channels. If we do watch the major channels we need to observe them as a cultural and political phenomena – as a dysfunctional self-serving mess and a charade – not as providing witness to reality.

This is why the Russia Today news channel is perceived as such a threat by the governments of the NATO countries. RT is one of only a very few places where journalists who wish to report on international affairs, can do so with real honesty and integrity – and without pressure to keep to the bogus ‘Russian aggression’ narrative despite all the evidence of the contrary. Please find time to watch the short history documentary below, from a tiny independent media channel called Breakthrough News. It provides just a glimpse of the vast and systematic assault on their national security and sovereignty that the Russians have suffered from the actions of the US since the fall of the Soviet Union. From Russia’s point of view, NATO is absolutely not a defensive alliance, and the US manipulation of Ukrainian politics in 2014 represents a truly terrifying threat to the very existence of Russia as an independent nation state. Those who cannot see this are either simply ill-informed – which is most of us – or tragically and dangerously blinded by national self-interest.

We are looking at an escalating confrontation between nuclear armed powers – one which is quite as dangerous for the world as was the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962. It is an inherently unstable standoff in which the legitimate security needs of Russia, and of the Russian-speaking people of Crimea and eastern Ukraine are not being acknowledged by the NATO countries. We are also seeing the huge flaw in the logic of the NATO security alliance – that it only serves the strategic needs of the US, and cannot create security for the European states. It cannot create security because its very existence – relentlessly expanding and aggressive as it is – is an existential threat to Russia. The future of the humanity could be at stake here. We all need to be paying attention.

February 11, 2022

Reflections on NATO and the Tragic Irrationality of the Ukraine Crisis

I am publishing the short article and embedded YouTube video below, in my new ‘Anti-War’ category. For some time now, I have felt a need to supplement my engagement with the problem of the egoic mind – which has been primarily through meditation and self-enquiry – with some engagement with the disturbing reflection of that egoic violence and hatred that we can see when we look in a penetrating way at the values, systems, and structures (and individuals), that govern our outer world. While most of us in the modern West have a complacent sense of safety and stability, those around the world in less fortunate countries are finding themselves in the cross-hairs – the object of regime change operations funded by our governments, and supported by various well-funded pro-war propaganda agencies. This war has two enemies – because the propaganda war is always being simultaneously waged against ourselves, by these same agencies, who desperately need to cover up or justify what is being done in our name.

We live in extraordinary times; dark times in which great crimes are being committed both covertly and in plain sight; times in which the economic and political culture of the liberal democracies of the West has degraded to such an extent that both government and media are frequently acting in a way that is not only not at all in the interests of their populations, but very dangerous for the future of our planet. In a modern world where both nation states and international institutions are failing to maintain their integrity in the face of corporate and oligarchic forces and the march of new technologies, we need to create a culture of non-violence and wisdom – and as part of this we need to support those embattled independant voices for peace, truth and justice that are trying to push back against these dangerous collective manifestations of the egoic mind.

In the liberal democracies of the West, we are mostly unaware of how heavily propagandised we are. We trust our governments and we trust our mainstream media outlets. This is an extremely dangerous state of affairs, because in actuality both our foreign policy decision-making and our reporting of foreign policy issues has been subverted, and is in effect outside of democratic control and beyond reason. Foreign policy decision-making has been handed over to government ‘experts’, arms industry lobbyists and military intelligence personnel, many of whom have an extremely irrational bias towards war, if not a direct financial interest in its promotion. The government and arms industry operatives both covertly provide massive funding to pro-war think-tanks, specialist public relations firms and sponsored academics – and to far-right groups (in both South America and Ukraine) and Islamic terrorist groups (e.g. in Syria, Libya and Western China). Not only is this whole peace-time propaganda process out of democratic control on the government side, but the journalists and the documentary makers in both state-funded and commercial TV and newspaper channels are not pushing back with any factual reporting or demands for common-sense and accountability. War, and the creation of enemy images that lead to war, has unfortunately, always been good for the news industry – but this is especially the case in the modern US.

Far from providing any critique, our news media generally now merely provide cover, and have become used to acting as mouthpieces for the perverse and dishonest pro-war narratives being generated by the military-industrial complex and our un-thinking government ‘defence’ and foreign policy staff, who appear to have lost any sense of the value of peace and diplomacy in the modern world. The predominant frame of reference is actually not freedom, democracy, humanitarianism and ethics, but neoliberalism and US hegemony – the very antithesis of these values. Peace and diplomacy have no value in this frame of reference because they do not make money for the armaments industry, and they do not provide distraction from the disastrous effects of neoliberalism’s failure at home. We cannot assume that if we live in a liberal democracy and watch the TV news regularly, we are well-informed on foreign affairs. In the modern world the reverse is true – far from being informed, the general population in the West are being propagandised, manipulated, and ‘played’ by the dishonest rhetoric of freedom and democracy, while actually being prepared for war. It really seems as if the Western moral order has actually already collapsed, and all those who study the situation closely can see that most of the reporting in the foreign policy arena is already characterised by the worst forms of Orwellian Doublespeak.

All this being the case, we need media channels that provide journalism that has integrity and can provide the historical context and truly humanitarian perspective that is missing elsewhere. I thoroughly recommend ‘The GrayZone’, an independent channel on YouTube. We are closer to the full horror of a modern war between Russia and the West, than at any other time since the second world war, and this situation has been created not by Russian aggression, as the propagandists would have us believe, but by the belligerent stupidity of the US and the aggression of NATO expansion to Russia’s borders. The horrible and extremely dangerous crisis in Ukraine, and the massive propaganda attack on Russia for acting to protect the Russian speaking communities of eastern Ukraine, is a dishonest mess that has been 30 years in the making. In reality NATO had no legitimate purpose after the fall of the Warsaw Pact – except as a vehicle for US hegemony and US arms sales. I thoroughly recommend this video (below) of an English academic, Richard Sakwa (Professor of Russian and European politics at the University of Kent), being interviewed by Aaron Mate several weeks ago, when the warmongering rhetoric was beginning to ramp up. This is a truly superb piece of journalism – honest well-informed commentary pushing back against a sea of misinformation.

Aaron Mate, whose instinctive sympathies are with the left rather than the right of US politics, is nevertheless one of the best informed journalists in the world on the whole insane ‘Russiagate’ misinformation mess that was created by the US Democratic Party in the wake of the election of Trump. He is someone who understands that the current Ukrainian crisis goes back not just to the US-facilitated coup in Kiev in 2014 during the Obama years; he knows that Biden, and Victoria Nuland, who is now US Under Secretary of State, were actively involved in that process of establishing the domination of right-wing anti-Russian sentiment in Ukrainian politics, which led to the promotion of the Ukrainian nationalists (literal pro-Nazi fascists!) in its army, which are terrorising the Russian speaking people of Eastern Ukraine. To understand the Russian protective actions, we need to be aware of the history of Ukraine-Nazi collaboration against the Russians in World War Two – and we need to be aware that Ukraine, far from being a model democracy is a rather crazy country with vast extremes of wealth and poverty, and with a deep-rooted fascist past, that has been pushed towards extreme anti-Russian sentiment by US and NATO interference.

The reason that we are being bombarded, in the mainstream media, with news that Russia is preparing for war, is precisely because the opposite is true. Russia is responding to provocation. Witnessing the military buildup on the Ukrainian side threatening the Russian-speaking break-away republics of the Donbas in Eastern Ukraine, it is preparing to defend those people if it has to, and is simply asking the US for a legally binding pledge that NATO will stop expanding east. This has put the US on the spot, because the US foreign policy system is used to functioning as the world hegemon and they are not interested in peace and diplomacy – they do not do multilateralism and mutual respect. Domination, it seems, is their modus operandi, and the only language they understand. Hence the need for a massive anti-Russian propaganda campaign to distract the world from recognising the aggression and hostility of the US-NATO position.

William Roy Parker 2020

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February 4, 2022