Monthly Archive: February 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.

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.

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.

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 it does 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

Reflections on Buddhist Self-Enquiry and Eugene Gendlin’s ‘Focusing’ – Part 1

Reflections on the Five Wisdoms Mandala as a Framework
for an Approach to Buddhist Self-Enquiry Practice Informed by
the Experience of Eugene Gendlin’s ‘Focusing’ Dyads

I have been reflecting for some time that in the Buddhist tradition, self-enquiry (in Sanskrit: dharma vicaya – pronounced ‘vichaya’) generally tends to be thought of as a solitary practice. To support and develop a culture of dharma vicaya within Western Buddhism, there is a need for us to explore effective forms of meditative self-enquiry dyad practice – practices in which Buddhist friends sit together and take it in turns to ‘hold space’ for each other, so that each one is supported to go deeper in their self-empathetic self-enquiry. Having studied and practiced Eugene Gendlin’s ‘Focusing’ dyad practice for many years, I can see it as a model that Western Buddhists might wish to draw upon, while staying firmly rooted in Buddhist philosophical principles. Western Buddhists, not being constrained to traditional forms, have the freedom, after all, to adopt any practice that is an expression of the core values, principles and insights of their tradition. I know I am not alone in this thought, so I would like to share some reflections. This is partly for my own clarity, but I hope that others will find it stimulating also.

Part 1 – Eugene Gendlin’s ‘Clear Space’ and the Brahmavihāras

A Relational Understanding of the Body-Mind

Buddhists who are familiar with Eugene Gendlin’s ‘Focusing’ dyad practice will inevitably tend to develop a deeper and more experiential understanding of the nature of mind than those whose engagement is more intellectual and philosophical. It is common for even passionately engaged Buddhist meditators not to see meditation in terms of self-enquiry, or self-discovery, or self-empathy, or as gaining familiarity with the relational nature of the body-mind. This relational understanding of the body-mind – a recognition that Consciousness exists in relationship with the functions and processes of the body-mind – is however, entirely intrinsic to Gendlin’s approach.

On the other hand, Buddhists, especially those who have been seriously engaged with the task of locating the central Buddhist philosophical principles in their bodily-felt experience, have a great deal to bring to any community that is practicing Focusing. The dialogue between Buddhism and Focusing can easily fail however, mainly because Buddhists can tend to regard Gendlin’s philosophical framework as a narrow one relative to that of Buddhism – and in taking that view can miss the direct parallels between the practice of Gendlin’s Focusing and the practice of self-enquiry at the highest levels of practice within the Buddhist tradition.

Focusing and Buddhist Wisdom

Buddhists also have a significant advantage over other practitioners of Focusing, because they are open to the idea that both that which is observing, and that which is observed, are ’empty’, or non-personal, and that our personalising identification with one or other, or both, of these poles in the subject-object relationship of our experiencing, is the ultimate cause of our egoic dysfunction. This sort of understanding is implied in Gendlin’s approach, and experienced in the course of Focusing practice, but spelt out much more explicitly in the Buddha’s teachings.

In Buddhist tradition, the relationship between that which is observing and that which is observed, can be described by the ‘five skandhas’ formulation. Importantly, each of the five skandhas was described by the Buddha as functioning in two ways – ‘internal’ and ‘external’ (as are the ‘Four Foundations of Mindfulness’ incidentally). This explains, at least in part, why the skandhas sometimes appear to be describing the five subjective components of Consciousness and its four cognitive-perceptual functions (i.e. the internal skandhas); and sometime appear to describing five objective components (i.e. the external skandhas) – Consciousness as an objective and collective appearance, or space, in which four categories of objective cognitive-perceptual ‘data’ come together to create the appearances of persons and things.

February 2, 2022