Many of you know how sex can be a vessel for the transcendental. Heiros Gamos, the divine masculine and feminine, kundalini as a union of the divine within the self. Finding artists who have an awareness of the sacredness of the feminine and the masculine without falling for the mundane is pretty rare. You’d think it would be easier done given how much energy we put into the act of begetting.
For some time now I have been availing myself and those I know who appreciate a deeper awareness of our sexuality than just a moment of pure pleasure, and that is the artist whose name is elusive but whose presence on the internet is not. Found, for now, on Instagram under @alphachanneling. I say this because if you haven’t noticed, social media has been enjoying its heavy hand in the censorship arena these days on just about anything that anyone might frown upon, be it an errant crumb on the tablecloth, an unapproved of political opinion, or scientific information inconvenient to whatever the current narrative is. Or sex. Even when your channel is defined as for adults only. Even then.
When I first saw the work I saw a range of works using different styles but clearly rooted in the sacred. There is, to my eye often a whisper of Art Deco stylization in some of the work. Many are fast, gestural, and I think it is what keeps the work from being less than what it is. That’s not to say that if it were more that it would be less either….(I have a right to be inconsistent if I wish).
I suppose that I should do a little digging to find out a little more about the artist sans actually interviewing him. So I found another who did, but not before contacting him to get permission to publish a few images of his work for you to see.
“Alphachanneling is a Swiss-born American artist based out of Oakland, California….Central to my process is … channeling, an ongoing cultivation through a deep relationship I have with several master-teachers….Spiritual in practice, the images I produce are simple thought-waves … I look towards Taoism and tantra, pornography and folk art, BDSM and the divine, the mystical and the occult, indigenous and outsider art alike … Alphachanneling lives in a boundless world called the Utopian Erotic, a world of magical pussy, radiant women, bedroom jungles and temples of light.”
Since I find reviews of artwork usually tedious and more about the writer than the artist, let me get down to the work so you can see for yourself. Hang on for the ending because I will include a link you might want to save…
This one was either the same one or one very much like it that I saw first when I came across his work a number of years ago. When I saw this image I stopped my scrolling and thought, “Hang on…someone has gotten onto the whole concept of energetic transfer.” Then sure enough, with a title like “energetic transfer” a little bell went off. Its nice to be on the same wavelength, it makes everything so easy.
Sadly, though, there is an image that this artist has been seeing too much of right along with his viewers, too, and one wonders whether the prudes at Facebook/Instagram will play the bully and selectively edit this chap’s feed:
With the announcement that the post runs afoul of their community standards….
I don’t know what the problem is quite honestly: there are images that some might want to call “scandalous” that stay up while, selectively, some are banned with this rather jolting image that belongs on the roadways and not on the Instagram feeds. It looks more like Sally Prude works on Tuesday the censor shift and she finds something she just can’t stand so she slaps on the above sticker, only to be followed by Ted, who we all know is a malcontented prude, who works on Thursdays the censor desk and goes to work hacking away at the artist’s lovely feed of spiritual erotica. It’s almost like there aren’t enough of them, taking down what they don’t like, but kind of hacking their way through the lovely jungle. Meanwhile, images of graphic violence and gratuitous sex remain on other channels. It’s enough to make a person want to start carrying around a pitchfork or something. We are lucky that this platform hasn’t gone demented and taken to censorship, at least not as I can yet tell.
So I will leave you with this one last image and a link to the artist’s site should you find yourself wanting to buy a piece or two. Maybe for your altar…It’s lovely to know that the feminine is treated as a sacred altar as evidenced in this artist’s work. Let me know what you think. Please, don’t be shy!
When it came to religion this voice inside said not to join. Over and over it reminded me this…and as time went on, I found I came to rely on myself. Upon awakening I found that relying on teachers detracted from learning what we all natively know…what we already know. So when I found Seth at the ripe old age of thirteen that voice did not admonish, reminding me what it had done many times before. So I paid attention. Much of what Seth conveyed was the need for the reader to look within, learn a few things “he” had to say but apply it to really see. To date the work still stands up, and now many years later there are eventualities in my own present experience that were hinted at by Seth all those years ago. If you haven’t heard of Seth before, I suggest the first book as a primer and then many others waiting should you want to dive deeper. Below is a quote from a class session which was later published.
“Now the universe speaks in many voices, and it can indeed speak through a leaf if you have the wits to listen. Then you can learn much. It can speak in the silence of a room if you have the wits to realize that beneath sound there is what our friend, the physicist over here, might call antisound. That beneath the sounds that you hear there are other sounds, and I do not simply mean beneath the range of your hearing. At times you fill the atmosphere, as you think of it, with questions and with noise and you demand answers. Yet all the time far more important messages are there for you if you would once forget your questions and simply listen. Concepts that you have not thought of are there for you.Now I have let you all play and it is good for you. It is like using your physical muscles, but beyond the playing that you are doing there are also more important issues, and you should learn of them. There should be questions in your mind besides, what was I in the previous life? How do I relate to others? How am I doing? Am I good or am I bad? Such as, what is the nature of reality?What is the meaning of existence? I can verbalize some answers for you, and I try to do so, but through direct experience and through opening yourselves up you will receive direct knowledge even though you may not be able to verbalize it later. And you will not get such knowledge by asking goodies of the universe like, what was I before? There is nothing wrong and much good to understand and receiving such information, but this is not all you should be concerned with. In the silence of your own thoughts, listen. As I have told you before, look where there seems to be nothing. Between sounds, between objects, not in your thoughts but between your thoughts, and there you will find answers but not to questions that you postulate in a demanding manner. And this is what I want you to do for the following week.What does the plant say? Forget that the plant speaks to you, but what does the plant on its own say? What does the tree say? Not as you are related to the tree, but what does it say, for it speaks.What does the air mean when it swirls about the windows? How is this related to the nature of reality, for it is? You are focusing your questions too deeply upon yourselves and in so doing you are cutting down the kind of information that you can receive.”
I haven’t really known how to address my experience in regards to the feminine in today’s world because quite frankly, it is a mine field. I had said when Trump got into office that this personality was going to drive so much to the surface in our culture, that it would not be fun or enjoyable, but there would be some important truth there. I am speaking specifically at it concerns our history as men and women together on the planet and how women have been treated for a very long time. For women, culturally and behaviorally, living on the planet is a real mine field in many ways. As a man I have perhaps only one important perspective which is one gained by not being a woman and not having been subject to all of the influences that women have dealt with…which you might think would be enough reason for me to sit on my hands and just be quiet. After all, what could I know about it being a man, right? Except it is for the very reason that I am looking across the river at the world of the feminine that I see some things that I might not be able to see were I there living in the midst of it. If you are a woman reading this you can judge for yourself whether what I am going to say is of any value or not.
When I look at history as it relates to women, one thing that rises to the surface is how women are raised to be as an identity. A lot goes into it, and some of it is reflective of real feminine values. What I also see is that there are expectations placed on women from the very beginning of their lives that aren’t reflective of feminine nature and actually may run counter to its truer nature. When I see miss matches like this, I can’t help but want to point them out.
Purity
Have you noticed the difference between how women and men are treated when it comes to what I will call “purity”? It’s a real double standard that we apply to women but we don’t apply them to men. Why is that? This purity standard goes something like this: a women should save herself and remain chaste until she meets the man she is going to have children with. In ancient culture virginity was considered a prize for this very reason. But for men? Forget about it. For men, we know, they sow their wild oats, but for women it is important to remain untouched. This is one value that I think society has foisted onto women and I think that it does indeed originate with men exclusively. As men I think we need to really rethink what it is that drives our instincts and why we seem to want this. While it may stem from a man always wanting to know that he is the father of his children, it has some bad repercussions for women that winds up them denying a part of their own inner expression.
I think that this concern has been taken up by women as a value and it has driven them in a certain direction behaviorally that isn’t natural. What it does is it denies the natural sexual drive of women, driving it underground, pretending that it does not exist, or that it does exist but that it can only exist within certain contexts only. Suddenly femininity becomes a prize that is treated unnaturally and it leads to unrealistic behavior both in men and in women. Whenever something is taboo we tend to have a lot of exaggerated behavior that springs up around a it, and this isn’t a good thing. It stirs an exaggerated level of interest in males, too, and this hasn’t been a good thing in our history. The media has used this as a great way to sell a whole world of products, essentially commodifying female sexuality as a result. We all tend to dislike this, right? What is interesting or ironic is that female sexuality has become exaggerated in certain key ways. Blush is sold to express the blush of sexual readiness, the flush of blood to the face an other parts of the body as a potent signal of readiness for coitus. We don’t even think twice about it because all of these symbols or signs are now existing almost as unrecognized symbols for that which we cannot just say openly. It is a strange outcome to me, but it makes a lot of sense when you drive feminine sexual energy underground. No one continues this tradition more than women themselves, and so it has planted itself firmly in our culture as self perpetuating program. No one is innocent here, we all take part in the program. We can also undo it.
This value that has been placed on women is looking like it is in some way beginning to fall away, and the way it is falling away is interesting to me because in the places where it is most effective is where old values are being discarded, disregarded just as the way that we then respond to women and how women respond to the world and the societal pressures placed on them also change. For a very long time as a society, whether we are male or female, we have used a range of terms to keep women in line with this purity value, and the one term I can think of that best illustrates this is the word “slut.”
Slut-shaming, as it is called, to my mind, is nothing more than a control to keep women in line within a certain value set. It is entirely transactional and it goes something like this: “be good and stay in line and we will value you as a person, but step out of line and we will brand you a slut.” Most often we as humans use the specter of shame as a way of controlling behavior. On the one hand, this is how we teach our children to value some behavior over others, so it has some use when young. We can also go overboard with it, too, as in the case of how we treat women. The fear of being a slut is created as a way to govern behavior. The message is we wont accept you as part of our tribe if you wander from this tight set of expectations that we have for you. Fall in line or lose your place in your tribe.
Where this is being dismantled is where women take the term “slut” and accept it not as a reason to feel shame but a reason to feel proud. This has had some play in some areas of our culture today, and what I suspect is that this is one area where if you want rapid change, it is in changing, fundamentally, the meaning of the words that we use to control behavior. Behavior can be viral, it spreads. It is pretty amazing to me how certain stories as a child swept through our cultural awareness. I remember talking to a friend about rumors that we told as children in school that were similar rumors that had crept up far from our region. I don’t think that these emerged spontaneously, I suspect they spread through the culture, on the ground, so to speak, and they went far and wide. I think that behavior also does this. You can actually change behavior very quickly if enough people talk about it and begin to exhibit that different behavior and you can have a way to over come the shame element so often tied into societal behaviors. Change gets us rethinking our values. Accepting “slut” as a badge of courage turns the meaning of the word and all of its intended power on its head. Suddenly, it is no longer a scare word, but something different. It loses its charge for us as people in the culture.
I think the way the orthodoxy goes, we say these things to order behavior in a positive way because it keeps women from being promiscuous. The fear is that if women can’t be controlled this way by a word like “slut” then what is to keep them in line? I tend to feel that when our natural impulses are no longer artificially hemmed in that what results is a much healthier approach to that behavior. We fear it not because it can wreak havoc in the streets, we fear it because it is so powerful. Female energy is powerful. Women have been marginalized materially, politically, and spiritually in most of our major religions for a very long time. I think that we control women in this way because of a deep fear of the power of womanhood. It may go back to how women nurture and bring forth life, and this was too powerful a thing to let women be in control of too much, so to the degree that men could, they put in place ways to manage that power when they could. I am not suggesting that this was some conspiracy that men brewed up in tents in the middle east or wherever, but that it happened probably without too much conscious thought. Regardless of how it evolved (and I could be wrong—maybe a bunch of dudes did sit around and figure out a way to control women), we can change it. The people who seem to be changing this are women themselves, and this is one important lesson in how power has worked on the planet for a very long time, which is that if you want something to change you will have to be that agent of the change, no one is going to just give it to you, you have to demand it. For a very long time we in the U.S. had a Constitution and it granted equal rights to all People, and as the wives of the framers of that Constitution recognized, that did not include women. After generations of men showing little sign of putting their words into action, women began to agitate for the rights provided to them in that document. This led to the women’s suffrage movement. This was no small task: women chained themselves to the gates outside Washington D.C., they were arrested, harassed, and were subject to a lot of criticism. Here, “the power” of accepted societal norms was asserting itself to try and keep things as they were, but women kept pushing back. They kept pushing back until there was change. Now, women voting is no big deal. No one bats an eye when a woman votes. The same can be said for this whole managing of feminine power, and it can be changed in similar ways. In the case of a vote you use the system of government. In regards to behavior, you use your own behavior in front of your children, your community, and friends, to model this new mode of behavior. What you don’t do is you don’t play the victim. To play the victim is to not recognize the nature of power. You might not want to make change, but if you are upset with how things are and you do little to effect that change, then acting like you are a victim wont improve the situation. It is power through weakness and unfortunately people have found that they can get power this way, but this method never achieves the kinds of results that changing the modus operandi of the power structure does.
One outcome of this management of female power is how it has led to women denying their own natural behavior. I recently saw a video that dealt with the mismatch between what women say they want in a man and what they really want (according to a male observer). I think that women don’t always know what they want and are controlled by the society in which they live in subtle and over ways. Many of the things that this video points out has to do with the how women’s own sexual energy is triggered. The podcaster pointed out that women were expressing superficial things that the guest believed weren’t as important as the more important elements, he was saying that women were saying that the things that he believed actually drove women’s sexual interest the women saw or believed were superficial when in fact they weren’t. The host surmised that women weren’t being honest with themselves about this. These “superficial” likes also related more directly to sexual expression itself than the qualities that might help a relationship staying together ongoing. While they might be seen as superficial, they are actually probably very important when it comes to being honest with yourself about likes and dislikes. A woman might value a sense of humor or a man who listens to her and values what she says, but when it comes to being attracted to a man, other traits like a square jaw, height, and confidence ruled the day according to the host of the podcast. To be fair, both sets are equally important and for different reasons, but it is the fear of seeming superficial that women seem to respond to. The fallacy in this is that we assume that being sexual is somehow superficial or a weakness. Why do we think that? Why is it that we treat this with such disdain? Is it that we don’t know how to properly deal with it deep down? Are women afraid to own that yes, there is a “look” that does trigger them regardless of how self aware they think they are being. Do we fear that it will be stronger than our own will? Or is the fear of it only making our interest in it being driven to unnatural heights? Does it at the same time misdirect our attention from the sacred power that sexuality has for us as a species that we have erected so many rules to govern it? No doubt about it, the power to create new life needs to be taken seriously and with care because lives are at stake. That means casual sex could be seen as a no-no, but when we say “casual sex” don’t we mean sex in a committed relationship but still while using, say contraception so that conception does not happen except for when we are ready? Not that long ago many people thought that sex was for procreation only. I had a roommate from South Bend Indiana who said, “Why do women need to have an orgasm? Orgasm in women isn’t needed for conception.” Good old John, he was a “good Catholic” and just couldn’t wrap his head around it. I answered to him that she needs orgasm so she didn’t wind up wanting to burn the house down. He still didn’t quite get it, but I did give it a try.
I know that as a man one of the things I have noticed is how a woman will unclothe herself of the societal norms placed on her when she is sufficiently safe and in private. As those layers are removed as a result of the seductive nature of our own native sexuality, a core persona seems to emerge, and it has always been like witnessing glory to me. But then once over, everything gets packed back into its acceptable layers and hidden away as if it never existed. One major faux pax is to discuss what went on outside of that moment of exquisite honesty and self surrender. In one instance when I mentioned what one woman had said to me when we were intimate, she denied ever having said what it was she said. I knew I wasn’t imagining things, and later I found a piece of writing that she sent to me, probably one of the most honest and courageous pieces of writing I have seen in a long while where she was using precisely the same kinds of words. How was it that she was behaving like she was ashamed of her expression of what I took to be unbridled honesty? She not just denied it, but accused me of not caring about her for even suggesting that she had said such things. Ouch. It also cemented into my mind why it might not be a good idea to even be with this person because of how fundamentally dishonest she was either with me or with herself, or both. Why wouldn’t someone just admit to their feelings? This is the kind of outcome that results from what our society puts on women and which women respond to. Maybe women accept it because of how well it works on them. This is also the manual on how to dismantle this behavior if it is of any interest to you. You might think that you are liberated from these kinds of behaviors, but the best way to test them is to see how you feel when you publicly buck their power and then you will have your answer. I think most women follow these conventional behaviors without thinking much about them, it’s just how it is, why question them? Me, I am interested in change on the planet, and it seems that this is one good place to start.
The other side to this is having men who can accept a woman who does this and can reward her for doing so. We all seem to need encouragement, and it is not easy feeling like you are on the front lines. Some seem to be made for it, but others might not feel so bold. This means that in the men that they learn to see feminine power as a compliment to their own, not a threat to it. You see, men are incredibly power-driven through their masculinity, its true, but I think where we get it wrong is in thinking that men alone must be the strongest most powerful ones, hunt the flesh, kill the flesh, apex predator an all that, etc. Somewhere there is a place for the feminine in this that does not make it less, a level of cooperation that I think we are just now beginning to figure out. The challenge I think is summed up very well by my high school art teacher who said “Men and women aren’t equal, they are equivalent…” Those were very enlightened words. When women try to be powerful, men might feel like they are just trying to be masculine. No, they are being assertive, and the problem I think is that we have so hemmed in women over the ages that we have equated assertiveness as being associated with masculinity. This need not be, and I think as men we just need to learn to live with feminine assertiveness long enough to understand that it is not a threat to us. We have confused sexuality with psychology. We even see one hemisphere of the brain as “masculine” while the other is more “feminine” despite the fact that these traits are in both men and women because we both have brains with two hemispheres! No, those are not sexual traits.
I think that when behaviors that have been controlled for so long are threatened with deletion, we humans tend to feel a little lost and don’t know what to replace them with. I tend to be of the mind that we don’t need to replace them with anything because, to my mind, all of this behavior is a kind of white-wash our ancestors have handed down to us that doesn’t reflect our understanding of our energetic potential in consciousness from the get-go. Part of the problem that we have is that we aren’t actually dealing with authentic human behavior through all of the constructs that we have created as a society to control that behavior. I tend to feel that the fastest way to self realization is to move away from the shame and the controls just to be able to get a glimpse of human nature in the wild. And what is it? I think that it is much freer, more in touch with its creative potential, and more at home with the planet as a cooperative whole. I think life evolved to be this way so that it can thrive on this little blue ball in space. I also feel that it is critical to our survival to awaken to our truer nature because that truer nature knows itself as part of a larger whole. You don’t get that when you are constantly being shamed for your natural impulses, feeling divided from the herd or feeling separate.
What would happen if those horses were set free? Would they create chaos, or would they find a new equilibrium? I suspect the latter. I wont suggest that it will all be joy and light; it is a new state and we have to learn how to navigate it like you learn how to drive a car, for instance. I also don’t think it is the end of all control, but it could lead to a growing sense of not needing as much control of ourselves as we had previously thought. I suspect that it can also lead to a speeding up of our evolution on the planet. We very much need the apex species to be aware of how it is not the web of life but an integral strand in that web which has the power to also destroy that web if we don’t get more enlightened about our place in the order than we seem to have right now. Earth to human: everything is connected. Time to get with the program.
I sense that as shame falls away, power increases. Isn’t inducing shame similar to crimping a garden hose? More bliss, more joy, and a greater sense of unity could emerge I think. When we limit behavior we make it so we crave it more. What happens when that hose is allowed to just flow naturally?
I think the fear is that this will just drive men crazy somehow. Men have ben known for not being able to keep their own desire in check, so wouldn’t this just lead to chaos? I suspect, and I might be wrong, that as women come forward out of the control, that their own qualities that are native to them will themselves have a regulating influence on men Assertive women will themselves remind men that they aren’t the only ones with power in the room. Will men respond with resentment? I think that is possible. Men who feel like their power is being taken away can respond in violent ways, absolutely. That said, men are just as affected as women are in self regulating behaviors, too (they are just of a different kind but every bit as troubling and difficult). That is a potent regulatory force for men I think. As a man nothing is more self regulatory than being aware of the full range of what women possess. It’s true, at least for this man. There is less yearning when something isn’t hard to get or hidden beneath layers of behavioral modification. The thrill of the hunt is simply taken away because the mystique has been dissolved. How about that as a self regulatory model in society? It is well known what “playing hard to get” does to men. It makes them try harder. Well? The elephant is in the room. Maybe there is a better way. I am not suggesting that everything I am saying here is entirely on the mark. The problem with all of this is we wont know unless we try. Will it upend male attraction to women? Will it upend female attraction to men? What happens when men themselves are no longer constrained in the ways that society controls them as well? You see, men are told that they cannot have any real connection to their feelings, that crying over seeing a puppy is being weak and not masculine. Is it any mystery why men are such rage monsters in our societies? We have a few things really off and maybe it is time to just let those behaviors fall away, and then not care whether we are attractive to the opposite sex if we don’t present with those time-honored behaviors that now act as the triggers for our deeper sexual drives. It might just be that the triggers have been the problem all along. Well, that’s how it looks to me right now, and thanks for reading…
I have been having another bout of information overload lately, with material floating in on the ether.
This began while studying the link between awakening, the brain, electrical conductivity in the body, and how this affects consciousness and how the very low-level electrical potential that the body produces as behaving as a transceiver for information that is beyond the body.
It is a simple concept, which is that if the universe is intelligent (see both the ancients and the quantum physicists), then this intelligence is likely to be energetic in nature. If our own bodies are energetic at the signal processing level where the brain is concerned, it stands to reason that what we call psi ability is the shift that can take place when someone becomes more psychic. Most people are born with these gifts, but as we evolve, methods have been developed that are allowing people to tap into their latent potentials, all with some pretty profound results.
When awakening takes hold, there is evidence to suggest that the “latent” aspect of kundalini may in fact lie in what happens when the right and left hemispheres are able to come into a more direct alignment without the left brain serving as a “brake” against the right brain. I had suspected that what I had been feeling with a masculine and feminine quality in consciousness “rising” upward through my body was in some way tied to what I had been doing in meditation, effectively “freeing” the brain to be in greater balance with itself. Later, I would find research that revealed that this actually happens, which is to say that we appear to be left brain dominant at least as far as higher order processes go (like enlightenment). The work of Jill Bolte Taylor in her TED Talk and her book “A Stroke Of Insight” reveals the same support for where nirvana resides at the neurological level (which she identified at being in the right brain). If this is correct, then when many who have awakening experience to some extent or another an increase in psi ability, it may be that psi is linked to the right brain, or to what both hemispheres do when they are allowed to play together in a more natural fashion. But I ask one more question based on my review of some recent material I have been getting lately which is this: when this new state comes online does it also enable our brains to properly process information that we are receiving beyond the physical senses and which may point to the universe as a kind of store house of information?
In the documentary Superhuman: The Invisible Made Visible, the journalists look into cases of psi ability and how it can be cultivated or taught.
In the documentary they demonstrate how individuals were able to cause objects suspended in sealed tubes with their minds. Dr. George Weissman, a theoretical physicist has been conducting experiments like this for years and has been able to both show and learn under what conditions a person can induce an object to move in these sealed containers. They took the experiment one step further by placing objects in a sealed container under vacuum where no movement should be possible and people were able to induce movement during their test period even from thousands of miles away. A baseline was created where there was no involvement from the test subject and then an hour long period where the test subject attempted to cause a thing strip of paper balanced over a needle, to move. The result was that the researchers were able to get results that were highly significant, with movement that could not be attributed to anything except the fact that a remote subject was moving the object with their mind. (1:15 minute mark)
The documentary showed how a group of children who, using blindfolds (special blinders that close off all visible light to the eyes) and had learned how to read books using nothing more than their inner sensing capabilities. The demonstrations were quite interesting. From there, they also show similar experiments with individuals trained to “see” blind with detecting shapes, colors, and objects. This project was developed by Nicola Farmer the founder of ICU Foundation in the U.K. She explains the method simply as teaching the children how to tap into the universal energies which they then learn to use for detecting objects without using their eyes but instead their inner eye sensory capability. (1:33 mark) This process involves having the children reach a bright light, and once this is done, the children are able to see all around them despite having special blindfolds (made of a compressible foam that seals off all light). i will point out that I encountered a brilliant white light during meditation, after which a lot began to change in my perception and experience. In Ogden Utah one group is teaching people how to use a technique called “vibravision” to detect colors of objects as well as to read what is written on them. Mike Zeleznick is the founder of Vibravision, MP USA. Here is a video detailing some of their results (it is a promo video meant to get you to want to sign up, so there is that, but these are real examples of what they are doing)
By awakening are we essentially tapping into this field naturally, without training to do so? What would happen if those of us who already have this advantage were to learn these methods? I know that in my own work, I began to spontaneously remote view locations thousands of miles away from me, locations I knew nothing about yet had a very high rate of correct impressions (in the 80-95% range!). While the Hindu say not to pay much attention to these abilities, in an age of deceit and misinformation, skill sets like these could serve to keep our leaders honest. The one most important prerequisite: keeping the mind completely blank. There is no trying, no doing, it is instead by way of a different method, one where it feels as though one is receiving through a completely blank screen of the mind without any need or desire to color the results. If you have any bias or belief about what you are going to find, it will completely twist your results. See? Even the process itself pushes you to be completely honest. This process also requires “doing the inner work” necessary in order to be clear from any competing material that might sway results.
I think that this field is fascinating and points to our true potential, largely untapped, for understanding the nature of consciousness and who we really are beyond just the body.
Thanks for taking a moment to give this a read. If you liked it, let me know!
“Just because you can doesn’t mean that you should.”
During World War II Hitler had a corps of doctors who did both physical and psychological experiments on human subjects, all without their consent. For as bad as this was, it was the Americans who brought many of them to the United States under the name Operation Paperclip. Most who know about this chapter in our history assume it was just the rocket scientists that we were bringing over, but in a joint effort with Canada, we brought the worst of the worst to our shores in the form of doctors who had engaged in psychological experiments. A young Henry Kissinger was involved in the selection process, a rather notable prophecy for a man who has revealed himself to be a psychopath
The program was so named because the candidates selected would never have been granted visas using ordinary channels so the program was pushed forward by using nothing more than a paperclip to identify the Nazis that would be brought here. That is, it was done secretly so that no one in other programs would know what was about to take place. What ever could go wrong. right? Plenty went wrong, in fact. All you really need to do is to research MK Ultra to learn of what eyewitnesses to this program were put through. It was a shameful part of our history and because it operated under secrecy laws, the truth of the program was not known until decades later.
None of us would agree having Nazi doctors in the U.S.A. and being given grants to run psychological experiments was a good idea. This is precisely what did happen, though, and some of its history has been revealed over time. Its head, Sid Gottlieb (C.I.A. director for MK Ultra, the umbrella program which you can research to understand its scope and how it operated with impunity for decades). Knowledge of its existence prompted then-president Bill Clinton to issue a formal apology to the many victims who had been petitioning the government for action and answers. Sadly, because so many central records were destroyed, not many individuals were brought to justice. It is like a nightmare from some future dystopian dream of the future. You would think the monkeys with guns and money would learn….Just because you can do it doesn’t mean that you should.
It is perhaps difficult to learn that these monkeys have gone and taken things into the outer realm of believability with new technology that can be used to control humans. For your viewing awareness, we have officially entered into an even greater dystopian nightmare, and it will progress if we don’t do our own due diligence and make sure that this technology gets shelved. But that likely wont happen. When what happens that should not happen, it is too seductive for the monkeys not to use it. We all need to be aware of this because it’s as strange as it gets.
This technology puts the likely conspiracy idea of vaccines turning people into robots to shame: this means to ACTUALLY do just that. What’s more, this time, the technology is not only real, it is being trumpeted at the rooftops by its makers.
This technology is an injectable metallic material that is designed to control brain and body activity at the synaptic level; it can govern the dopamine cycle of reward, meaning that if you didn’t like the “LIKE” button, you will now. It can govern your behavior in other ways as well. Already tests have been made on animals and its developers call this technology “badass.” Does it need to be said that this technology, for as “badass” as its makers think is, is ripe for misuse?
Even when its makers try to dress it up to make it sound acceptable, it is nothing short of freakish and disturbing, a threat to all that is good in humanity. While described in bright hopeful tones in the following article, the implications of this tech are wide ranging and ripe for misuse. Already they have shown that the technology can be used to control the motor cortex, essentially making it possible to move the body of the animal or person in increasingly sophisticated ways. More, they are seeking ways to bend thought or change it altogether. While it might sound alarmist, I say that a little alarm is in order. The full article is included via a link so that you can see for yourself and make up your own mind.
To give you a taste here is an excerpt from the Guardian article :
Researchers in the United States have developed a new method for controlling the brain circuits associated with complex animal behaviours, using genetic engineering to create a magnetised protein that activates specific groups of nerve cells from a distance.
Understanding how the brain generates behaviour is one of the ultimate goals of neuroscience – and one of its most difficult questions. In recent years, researchers have developed a number of methods that enable them to remotely control specified groups of neurons and to probe the workings of neuronal circuits.
The most powerful of these is a method called optogenetics, which enables researchers to switch populations of related neurons on or off on a millisecond-by-millisecond timescale with pulses of laser light. Another recently developed method, called chemogenetics, uses engineered proteins that are activated by designer drugs and can be targeted to specific cell types.
Further, the information has been pushed proudly out there out in the open. No effort has been made to censor it to any noticeable degree. Since it is beyond belief that technology like this is just being reported on as if there is no problem with it, I will provide you with the link to one of the articles that has shown up on the web. And who knows, perhaps in a few months, the link will disappear once the journalists realize just how insane all of this really is and think better of it. So read it carefully, and make a copy in case it does slip away into the dark night lest anyone pretend it was all just a figment of your imagination. I promise the next post will be a little more bright, but I think you all should know. I happen to feel that as humans we do not need modifications like this since we have within us a latent capacity for knowing the divine within, which connect us with the multiverse. Magneto-induced robots? No thanks, I am good.
Today we have a little-known document that describes what many scholars in the field of religious studies regard as an initiatory rite attributed to Jesus. It describes something that is being spoken of widely today amongst many who have themselves experienced awakening, which is the Ascension of Gaia. In this remarkable excerpt of the “Hymn of Jesus” it shows that in early Christianity they were describing a nearly identical phenomenon in operation within human consciousness in our present day amongst many (although not all) who have experienced awakening. From Chapter three of the Hymn of Jesus:
“The living Jesus answered and said : “Blessed is the man who has known these things. He has brought heaven down, he has lifted the earth and has sent it to heaven…”
What I find so interesting is that virtually no one that I have spoken to about the Gaia Ascension mythos today (most commonly described as “ascension”) knows anything about this obscure, but incredibly important document. Nor are they aware that we have been here before, talking about the same phenomenological concept separated by close to two thousand years.
The document in question is the Bruce codex which contains Coptic, Arabic and Ethiopic manuscripts and was found in upper Egypt by a Scottish traveler, James Bruce in about 1769. The first translations of the text began in the mid-1800’s. The passages I include are based on the translation of Carl Schmidt, and republished with additional contributions by Violet MacDermot.
This edition of The Bruce Codex is long out of print, but may be found in research libraries. It is also included, with material related to the find and its translation and other particulars HERE.
What interests me so much about the Hymn of Jesus is how it is clearly a series of initiatory rites with words spoken much like how a mantra is used, which is used to alter consciousness in order that one may move into that state where one awakens or is open to the same level that the Master has achieved. Indeed, the codex is consistent in how it is structured in this way.
With that, and against that backdrop, the first chapters of the Hymn of Jeou (Jesus).
The First Book of JEOU
I have loved you. I have wanted life to be given you; the Living Jesus, who knows the truth.
Chapter 1
This is the book of the gnoses of the invisible God, by means of the hidden mysteries which show the way to the chosen race, leading in refreshment to the life of the Father – in the coming of the Saviour , of the deliverer of souls who receive themselves the Word of life which is higher than all life – in the knowledge of the living Jesus, who has come forth through the Father from the aeon of light at the completion of the Pleroma – in the teaching, apart from which there is no other, which the living Jesus has thaught to his apostles, saying: “This is the teaching in which dwells the whole knowledge.” The living Jesus answered and said to his disciples: “Blessed is he who has crucified the world, and who has not the world to crucify him.” The apostles answered with one voice, saying : “O Lord, teach us the way to crucify the world, that it may not crucify us, so that we are destroyed and loose our lives” The living Jesus answerd : “He who has crucified it is he who has found my word and has fulfilled it according to the will of him who has sent me.”
Chapter 2
The apostles answered, saying : ” Speak to us, O Lord, that we may hear thee. We have followed thee with our whole hearts. We have left behind father and mother, we have left behind vineyards and fields, we have left behind goods and the greatness of kings, and we have followed thee, so that thou shouldst teach us to know the life of thy father who has sent thee” The living Jesus answered and said : “The life of my Father is this : that you receive your soul from the race of understanding mind, and that it ceases to be earthly and becomes understanding through that which I say to you in the course of my discourse, so that you fulfil it and are saved from the archon of this aeon and his persecutions, to which there is no end. But you, my disciples, hasten to receive my word with certaintiy so that you know it, in order that the archon of this aeon may not fight with you – this one who did not find any commandment of his in me – so that you also, my apostles, fulfil my word in relation to me, and I myself make you free, and you become whole through a freedom in which there is no blemish. As the Spirit of the comforter (Parakleiton) is whole, so will you also be whole, through the freedom of the spirit of the Holy Comforter.”
Chapter 3
All the apostles, Matthew and John, Philip and Bartholomew and James, answered with one voice, saying:
“O Lord Jesus, thou who livest, whose goodness extends over those who have found thy wisdom and thy form in which thou gavest light ; O light-giving Light that enlightened our hearts until we received the light of life; O true Word, that through gnosis teaches us the hidden knowledge of the Lord Jesus, the living one.”
The living Jesus answered and said : “Blessed is the man who has known these things. He has brought heaven down, he has lifted the earth and has sent it to heaven, and he has become the Midst for it is nothing.” The apostles answered, saying : “Jesus , thou living one, Lord , interprete for us how we may bring heaven down, for we have followed thee in order that thou shouldst teach us the true light.” The living Jesus answered and said : “The Word which existed in heaven before the earth came into existence – this which is called the world – but you, when you know my Word, you will bring heaven down, and it will dwell in you. Heaven is the invisible Word of the Father; but when you know these things you will bring heaven down. As to sending the earth up to heaven, I will show you what it is , that you may know it : to send the earth to heaven is that he who hears the word of gnosis has ceasedto have the understanding mind of man of earth, but has become a man of heaven. His understanding mind has ceased to be earthly, but it has become heavenly. Because of this you will be saved from the archon of this aeon, and he will become the Midst, because it is nothing.” The living Jesus said again : “When you become heavenly you will become the Midst because it is nothing, for the .. . .. rulers and the wicked powers (exousiai) will you and they will envy you because you have known me, because I am not from the world, and I do not resemble the rulers and the powers (exousiai) and all the wicked ones. They do not come from me. And furthermore he who (is born) in the flesh of unrighteousness has no part in the Kingdom of my Father, and also he who me according to the flesh has no hope Kingdom of God the Father.”
Chapter 4
The Apostles answered with one voice, they said : “Jesus , O Lord, are we born of the flesh, and known thee according to the flesh? Tell us, O Lord, for we are troubled.” The living Jesus answered and said to his apostles : ” I do not speak of the flesh in which you dwell, but the flesh of and non-understanding which exists in ignorance, which leads astray many from the of my Father.” The apostles answered the words of the living Jesus, they said: “Tell us how non-understanding happens, that we may beware of it, lest we should go . . . . . . .” The living Jesus answered and said : ” one who bears my virginity and my . . . . . and my garment, without understanding and knowing me, and blasphemes my name, I have . . . . to destruction. And furthermore he has become an earthly son because he has not known my word with certainty – these which the Father spoke, so that I myself should teach those who will know me at the completion of the pleroma of him who sent me.” The Apostles answered and said : “O Lord Jesus, thou living one, teach us the completion, and it suffices us.” And he said : “The word which I give to you yourselves….”
Chapter three is, I think, incredibly relevant to the Ascension mystery as it is being spoken and written about today amongst those who write about the “ascension” phenomenon. Is it not true that this is being seen by many people today as a global phenomenon in which the earth, we sense, is being brought to a finer vibration, with the implication being that Gaia itself is being transformed as well as life upon it? Or is it just us? And how far removed is this idea with the ideas contained in chapter three which describe the process of bringing earth into heaven and heaven into the earth? What kind of change would this represent? Is this simply too big of a leap for us to even imagine what a world like that might look like so we speak about it in mythic terms, long on theory but perhaps short on facts? Perhaps new turnings are always like this; it cannot be known until it has been created because so many factors depend on what are selected which will determine what that recipe ultimately brings us. While some argue against freewill, perhaps this is our one possible proof of that freewill, which is that the outcome might not always be foreseeable until we have acted, something that is an act that is collective, a collective leap into the unknown.
Scholars will likely point out that this writing was created some time after the death of Jesus since the argument can (perhaps rightly) be made that it was possible that Jesus himself did not know while he lived that he would in fact be crucified. While modern Christians would argue that through the prophetic tradition he would have known all along that he would come to be a sacrifice on the cross, careful examination of the Old Testament documents suggests that the passage in Psalms which most point to as evidence of a crucifixion show evidence of having been altered (Psalm 22:16). The issue at hand with this passage is that the Jewish version of the book says “lion” where the Christian version says “pierced” which results in a completely different meaning. In the Jewish version David is surrounded by “dogs” and “lions” who are at his hands and feet, but the Christian version reads that dogs compass him, they pierce his hands and feet. Lion was changed to pierce and, as the argument goes, it completely changes the meaning of the passage from David being savaged by his enemies to his waxing prophetic. The result being, that someone forged this passage in early Christianity in order to support the appearance of prophecy from the old tradition to the new. There is a lot of disagreement on this one point, however, as one document in the Qumran discovery in the 1940’s (and which scholars think were just prior to Christ’s ministry) has “pierced” in one version of Psalms. But, as Rabbi Singer has pointed out, this passage is not mentioned in any of the synoptic gospels nor is it mentioned by Paul not even once, who was himself often quoting Jewish scripture, and if such a prophecy such as this existed, he would undoubtedly have been mentioning it as proof of Jesus being tied to Messianic tradition. This only comes along later, Singer argues, probably in the second or third centuries. At any rate, as a result, this may mean that this hymn as written probably was a later creation. It may or may not have been directly tied to Jesus. It is possible that there was an original document that then got “embroidered” with the crucifixion story added in. What it does show is that these ideas of how we can bring heaven and earth closer through an inner act of inner transformation or awakening were present at an early phase in the development of Christianity. While these particulars are not themselves clear, what is clear for me is that this concept of bringing heaven and earth together was in development and it shows a keen awareness of how an aspect of evolution may very well operate when dealing with human consciousness. I take this side track into the architecture of the Christ experience to point out that for the Gnostics, while Jesus was incredibly important as the way-shower, they took the ball and ran with it. For them, the apostolic age did not end as the Orthodoxy had decreed, after the first initial group had died out. A gift had been given in the form of awareness, a form of knowledge called gnosis such that what they were calling “Christ” could be conveyed to others who then would become Christs (this was the case made in the Valentinian School and the Gospel of Philip spells this out unambiguously). As a result, the gnostic production continued while the Orthodox became static in the sense that no new documents were produced (after Act, some letters, and John’s Revelation).
In my personal experience I was aware of acting as a channel for a fire from heaven which was conducted by the masculine while the feminine acted as the receptive agent which was involved in the other side of the creation of phenomenon which is the nurturing side, the “bringing forth” of the resulting mixture which comes about as a result of “the two” that actually create the divine third, or Christ. One could not operate without the other, and while the masculine could be seen as initiatory, the feminine also was initiatory as well in that without her, the process of synthesis to a higher awareness was not possible. The two existed as a single unit, a co-creative matrix where one is not above the other, but each were co-equal and necessary.
I will point out that the Gnostics spoke of the trinity as a family unit consisting of a masculine and feminine quality that met and came into union “in the bridal chamber” and it was out of their ecstatic union that a third quality, a child, was produced. This was the Christ. The upshot in all of this was that this was an inside job, not something that one seeks outwardly. Even Paul, who describes his encounter with the light on his journey to Damascus says “when it was the good pleasure of God … to reveal his son in me” he does not say “to” but “in me.” It was a quality that was already there. He also says that he was anointed (initiated) by the “Christ that liveth in me,” he does not mention Jesus (he didn’t meet Jesus in the flesh). This was not something that he was given, it was something that he was made aware of. This, by the way, is how most of the Eastern doctrines treat enlightenment, which is a state or potential that is in all people. The Buddha, which we often tend to think of as a person, is in fact a term referring to a quality that is in all people. “Buddha” is a field of awareness and everyone has a Buddha within, slumbering until awakened. In like manner, Paul associates this quality with Christ as something that is revealed as existing in him. “For neither did I receive it from man, nor was I taught it, but it came to me through revelation of Jesus Christ” (Galatians).
Gnosis.org has an excellent collection of writings on the topic of Gnosticism. It represents the “lost” story of Christianity. While the orthodoxy will say otherwise, the information contained in these old texts supplies insight into the nature of enlightenment and forms the body of knowledge that always seemed to me growing up to have been missing from the church, which is how to achieve union with the divine. Hard to read, the writings were shrouded in language intended to obscure their meaning, these were texts intended for a select audience, for people who were being “perfected” or “prepared” or “the elect.” This is what both Jesus and Paul referred to as “maturity.”
When Jesus speaks to his disciples about not speaking to Gentiles and others outside their group, we may well have been seeing the secret doctrine at work. What I wonder is why is it so hard to consider that this indeed may have been the case? With so many awakenings today which often include the elements contained in those secret teachings, it’s hard to see that this wasn’t happening and that the new generation of Christs today have managed to achieve something that in the past took years to achieve, if ever.
if you search articles in neurophysiology or neuroanatomy, you will see a raging debate about something called “hemisphericity” which implies that you can have one hemisphere more dominant than the other. Well yes you do, in some ways, and in other ways, no.
THIS article explains that you CANNOT train one hemisphere to be more dominant since the brain is so involved in cooperating between its different regions and “sides” that such an idea is impossible (and debunked in the 1980’s).
Everyone, from winners of the Nobel Prize in physics to the artists behind the Archibald Prize, used both sides of the brain when performing any task. In fact, the idea that people can be classified as left- or right-brained was debunked in scientific literature in the 1980’s
The problem, I think, is that we are dealing with an incredibly complex and also nuanced biological machine we call the brain. So many regions responsible for different functions, we think, based on the data so far collected. Something gets lost in translation, I think. And while you might be using one part of your brain for one type of function, you might also be using other parts as well. If your body is in motion, well, you have the motor cortex in on the game, too. Lot’s of busy-busy. And to my mind, based on the research I have been doing over the years on the brain, I think some scholars and researchers tend to get lost in the details….because let’s be honest, there are a lot of details when it comes to our grey matter.
The same source goes on to say:
Despite this, left/right-brain training programs appear to be gaining popularity. This is puzzling because there’s no evidence indicating that you can train just one side of your brain. Such attempts are doomed because the two hemispheres are heavily interconnected and constantly communicating.
Ibid
Again, there is truth in what the writer is saying, but there is another side to all of this and it has everything to do with how we do indeed train ourselves how to utilize the abilities that appear, thus far, to be seated in one hemisphere in the brain. You might wonder where I am going with this and how this is tied into kundalini, but give me a minute.
When I was in art school, I was keen to be the best that I could be as an artist, and part of this was to learn how to use my mind to its fullest as it related to the creative process. Betty Edwards had come out with a book entitled Drawing On The Right Side Of The Brain a decade previously, and we were beginning to know a few things as it related to the (visual) arts where the brain is concerned. In this seminal work in the field of art, she explained how many people often use the wrong side of their brain when creating artwork, or in creating likenesses of people in portrait work, sculpture, or landscapes, for example. The problem, she explained, was the left brain is reductive in its approach, meaning that it tends to create abstractions and stores “ideas” of what an object looks like, not really the real thing. The left brain is great for making cartoons, but it’s terrible for creating real-life likenesses (“abstraction” means to take those details that you feel are the most important and isolate them—such a left brained thing to do). This is one reason why many beginning artists are so bad at making a realistic likeness, which is due in part to their drawing on an inner image of what they think something looks like rather than what is in front of them. It is a very difficult habit to break in our species it seems.
Over and over, Edwards showed how art students would draw an eye and a mouth all in the same stilted manner, making almonds for eyes and sardines for lips. But look more closely; do they really look like that? “Draw what you SEE!” was the admonition by my teachers. Of course, do that, but you have to get out of the part of your mind that tells you what it is that you THINK that you see. And what are the implications of being in that abstract left brain process? You are in fact living in the past. You are drawing on an inner image of what it is that you think you are looking at. You wont EVER see what is in front of you so long as you let the left brain continue its dominance in your thinking and doing.
This has everything to do with enlightenment, I promise, and it can show you the folly of trying to use the “rational” left brain in the process of enlightenment. But hang on, I am going to string you along a little longer!
By the way, you can pick up a very inexpensive copy of Edwards’ book here at Thrift Books in case you would like to be better at drawing. The book has a lot of very good exercises that actually work if you want to be better at art.
There was something about art making that I always found curious, and it had to do with what we call inspiration. It was always this elusive thing. I knew enough about it that I could lay my hands on it when I needed to. I understood it intuitively, but it wasn’t like it was something that I could force. In fact, it was the opposite of forcing. I had to bid it come. I had to be receptive to it. And that was the point. Inspiration, I found, was not something that happened in the way the logic circuits of my left brain worked. What was even more interesting to me was that I often bumped up against a very interesting outcome of the inspired state when things got really intense, and that was that i often would wind up feeling sexually aroused when things were really cooking. I can remember staying up late into the night working on piece after piece. Inspiration would breed more of itself in those solitary hours as I worked in the studio. I felt funny because I had never heard of this before. Was I weird? Was it just me? I later learned that I wasn’t alone, that a number of other artists and writers commented on the coincidence of the sexual with the inspired state. The writer Anais Nin wrote about it a good deal, as did other artists. Maybe it was natural. I felt like it must be. I suspected that the channels that carried creative energy and sexual energy might not be all that different. They might in fact be the same. Our idea of creativity might actually be the stumbling block. Some of the great artists had a charisma and were notable in their sexuality often (although not always). I always felt like there was a connection here even if I was too young to know enough to say definitively.
Fast forward twenty-five years or so, and I wake up after using a meditation technique a friend I met through an online forum who had passed it on to me. I have yet to meet him, but we had a lot of very lively conversations through email back in 2006. The result of my using this meditation method was that I inched closer to awakening with it. Suddenly suffused in a brilliant white light during meditation, I was flabbergasted, and after which everything picked up steam in the strangeness department and in a few months I “popped” and the cosmic egg was cracked. I didn’t go into this thinking that I was going to try to awaken. Back then “awakening” wasn’t that much of thing, not like it is today.
I had no idea what it was that I had. I considered I could have had a brain tumor (yes really). I didn’t speak about what happened to me to my family for close to a year. I was concerned that I could be carted off to the hospital or institutionalized. As a result of this, I spent a lot of time observing what was taking place inside of me with this new energy. I had a keen sense that I had stepped into something entirely new and I was very much on my own now. It was exhilarating and lonely all at once. I sensed that whatever this was that had happened, it was permanent. there was no going back to Kansas, there was no putting the genie back in the bottle. There was no being normal again. I felt like a stranger in a strange land. It was both death and rebirth, caterpillar and butterfly. I had no resources upon which to refer to. I studied the phenomenon closely as it unfolded within my mind and my body. I wanted to know as much about as I could summon so I could take my notes and see if they compared to any other experiences other people had had so I could get a better understanding about it. It is interesting what happens when you rely on yourself in this way. As you ask, so shall you receive. Miracles tended to happen, small ones, inexplicable ones, sometimes on a daily basis. I would later learn that these were called synchronicities, a term coined by the Swedish analyst and researcher Carl Gustav Jung.
One of the important aspects of the awakening process for me was how I felt like some new state was being brought online, activated, and it was different from the way I normally had felt. I also saw how similar the awakened state was to inspiration, something I was very familiar with. In fact, I would say, they were identical in terms of how they felt and behaved, the only difference between the two was a matter of degree. One was much stronger than the other (can you guess which one?). I wondered if this wasn’t me shifting into my right brain more, or that perhaps what kundalini amounted to was breaking the bonds that kept the right brain constrained because this unrestrained portion seemed to emerge almost out of nowhere (“almost”). I began to feel that human beings were in fact left-brain dominant by nurture, even artists like myself. I suspected the entire race was this way, that we simply had developed this way as a means of survival. Linear logical things are extremely good for getting stuff done, no doubt about it, but I think that we as a race were (and are) moving out of that old paradigm so things are shifting now.
When I learned that what I had was kundalini, I saw how the Hindu’s use the imagery of the man and woman, how one side was depicted as the feminine, and the other masculine. These images were created for a reason, and I had already felt the twin energy of what felt masculine and feminine rise up through my body. They were speaking to me about my condition.
I got to watch this curious phenomenon in myself for months, close to a year, even, before ever cracking a book on kundalini. When I saw the merging of the masculine and feminine and on the correct sides of the body, I realized, they were describing the same thing I had been experiencing. They had images painted on the foreheads of yogis called a Tilak and it was shaped exactly in the same way as my third eye awakening proceeded. I actually can feel when my third eye opens, it creates a force of pressure that is exactly like the Tilak. They were on to it, and while I searched article after article, no one really was able to explain why the Tilak was shaped this way. I knew it was shaped this way because that is how it FEELS when the third eye is fully activated (more than just a small round dot in the forehead—this was a process that proceeded over a three day period in order to completely open the third eye, a chakra that spread all the way to the back of my head in bands horizontally and in a dual-forked energy vertically moving upwards, corresponding to the Ida, Pengala, and Sushuma nadi (energy channels — the feminine, masculine, and cosmic, respectively).
They say kundalini is the coming of the feminine Shakti. When I felt this take place, I recognized it as the part of my mind that I often used when making art. It was the same, but it was also much much more present, more powerfully present once the cosmic switch was flipped. Before all of this, I had to search for “her” and then I had to wait quietly, in a receptive state. I had to become that feminine trait that was in me in order to reach the inspired state. I began to consider that the cosmic light switch was using the mind to overcome the resistance we all seem to have to shift out of the logical confines of the linearity of thought that have so predominated our thinking for so long. To open up to the right brain was like a revelation. It felt like letting the genie out of the bottle, literally, as if it had been held in such tight confines for so long. And why does it feel like that? Because everything in the left brain is small, it is highly focused, linear and logical. We just don’t realize how caught up in that part of the brain that we are. The more that I slipped into this very large space that was the “feminine” I felt like I was set free. I also felt disoriented for a time, and sometimes would go scurrying back to the familiar prison of the left brain. This is most popularly called a “contraction” in awakening circles. Every time I did this, I felt a strange pain, the painbody so many were talking about. I made it my mission to break out of painbody once and for all. It took great effort, an effort at letting go of so much that I thought was important (but was really useless baggage).
I didn’t have any proof that my theory was correct, though, and to be honest, it seemed like the whole of science pertaining to the brain was against me. I went searching, and what I found was one brilliant gem, the work of Doctor Jill Bolte Taylor who, in her now famous TED talk, described how as a neuroanatomist, she realized one morning while getting ready for work that she was having a hemmorage in her left hemisphere. She knew it was her left because her language centers began to shut down. She had trouble understanding English, she had trouble even reading the keys on the phone to try and call someone to help her. This took her about 45 minutes to do, to call out to tell a friend that she needed help. As she recounts her harrowing ordeal, she found that another brain state started to come online, one that she had never experienced before, a mystic state where everything was connected: samādhi. She stood there, tears streaming down her face, describing how incredibly beautiful the experience was. She also proclaimed that, because of the shut-down of her left hemisphere, she was able to have a unique view into a state that is normally only experienced by yogis or gurus or by people like myself (and perhaps to you if you have experienced this). Her talk, entitled “A Stroke Of Insight” was the last nail holding down this idea that I had based on little more than my own observations that this comes about by way of letting go of the tightly held control that the left brain has, probably has had in people, for centuries.
Not long after this, I looked into the concept of the left brain acting as a brake against the right brain, and as if on cue, researchers were finding new evidence for this in fact being the case in the months prior to my thinking about how this appeared to me to be at play in the awakening process (how it overcomes this left-brained dominance). I read about people whose corpus collosum, the nerve fibers connecting the two hemispheres of the brain, which had been damaged in utero through disease, exhibited some unique traits of superconsciousness, but which also kept them from being able to fully participate in society because they had limited communication between their two hemispheres. It was amazing to watch and to read how these people have incredible genius and yet had trouble tying their shoes are making up a grocery list or coping with the rigors of linear life in our world. I saw an analog with their ability to calculate numbers; I had answers come into my mind with lightening speed often, vast amounts of information, a storm of it, processed in fractions of a second. I sensed that my experience was tied to their same abilities, except because I had two intact hemispheres that could “talk” to one another, I could call on both sides of my mind, not just one.
When I began to catch on to how early Christians were talking about a unitive state that caused something to “rise” (see the gospel of Philip) and how people would go from being “dead” to alive, I felt like I was seeing how they were describing awakening. The more I read, the more I saw this pattern in their language emerge. It was curious, too, because these Christians were branded heretics and stamped out over a period of about two to three hundred years. In truth, the effort continues to this very day, but the main part of their work was done between about 200 to 400 A.D. more or less.
In their earliest writings these early Christians spoke of the “left and the right” of the “father and mother” coming together in the bridal chamber and out of their union came the Christ. While Christianity and Judaism before it had a notable and solid use of “left and right” meaning the goats and the sheep, the bad and the good, it certainly appeared that these Christians were turning these old conventions on their head (in the same way that they were turning the creation of Eve from Adam as that moment when our whole being was cleaved from its primal natural state into one that was responsible for our Fall even further because of some bite into Knowledge). Further, in the Gospel of Philip he goes so far as to say that those who do this aren’t just Christians, they areChrists. Whoo boy, nothing gets the Orthodox in a lather faster than insisting that the Christ dwells in all people and that this state of being comes about through the feminine and masculine coming into union with one another (the father and the holy ghost or sprit). Further, the feminine was revered by this group because it was she who brought so much wisdom, the ability to see deeply into things, to know (gnosis), not to simply believe (which is a poor substitute for knowledge) and to even heal.
Ideas like this sound strange to us today because we have about sixteen hundred years of entrenched belief behind the notions that we think of as Orthodox (a compound word from the Greek meaning “right thought”), but for those early Christians whom we call Gnostic, this was the authentic path to becoming Christ. And precisely because of this constellation of the feminine, masculine, and the indwelling Christ (which was treated in the same way that the Buddha is in the East which is to say that the Buddha is not a person but a state of mind that each person has within them, but is in slumber…..or more accurately, the person is slumbering before their own inner Buddha), was why this was too much for the Orthodox wing of the church to handle. Hadn’t Eve been the one who brought down the whole house of humanity? Hadn’t it been Lot’s wife who turned to look back even though she was told not to? David can go on for chapters in Psalms about how many people he has killed and no one bats an eye. Never mind that he was transgressing against the Law of Moses.
When I felt this triadic quality in myself, I thought how perfect that was: as above, so below. We make babies through union physically and we make a new level of consciousness inwardly with the two like-male and like-female parts of ourselves, an engine for enlightenment, with these two qualities which are in ourselves. This was much more natural than the Orthodox way which was an all-male club. It just seemed more perfect, more in keeping with how we are actually composed esoterically. And what better way to fold the feminine into our spiritual lives here on earth by making her the mother? The Gnostics believed that two people so awakened to this inner seed of light in themselves should have babies because that light be would all the more be kindled in their progeny, the result being an elevation of the spiritual quality in humanity.
If you want to see mysogyny in motion, you need only see how Christianity stripped itself bare of any kind of decency in what it did with the early Christians which we now call the Gnostics. To do that, you have to dig into the texts (history) because you wont see any evidence in today’s church save for cries of heresy whenever such a thing is brought up. You have to look at what the heresy hunters had to say about these people in order to know what they were fighting against. It all sounded strange to them because they didn’t understand, they didn’t have that seed of light in them which would grow like a mustard seed. And yet, traditions throughout the world describe a means of reaching an exalted state of being that required no belief, just a few very simple methods for turning the attention inward and which often involved the union of opposites within. Meditation techniques work as well as they do because it is there in such a place of quiet mind that you can begin to glimpse the lightening strike that is the realization of who you really are inside. No two worlds could have been more different though: one was literal and linear and cramped and stuck-up sexually and the other was ecstatic, vibrant and full of inspiration and light where the masculine and the feminine merged in order to form a “ladder” by which your own consciousness could ascend into the heavenly states simply and in a natural organic fashion with those two working together, not against one another. This is the core of the secret, and the mystery of the divine marriage within. The failure of the Orthdoxy was one of awareness, knowledge, and imagination, three elements crucial for navigating the numinous.
When you make the two one, and when you make the inside like the outside and the outside like the inside, and the above like the below, and when you make the male and female one and the same, so that the male not be male nor the female female; and when you fashion eyes in the place of an eye, and a hand in the place of a hand, and a foot in place of a foot, and a likeness in place of a likeness; then you will enter [the kingdom].
The Gospel Of Thomas, James Robinson ed., p. 129
I use the above quote because during what I later learned was a temporary “kundalini flash” a few months before the full rise of the energy, I wrote a piece that contained a passage nearly identical to the quoted passage in Thomas above. I posted it online on a forum. My friend who gave me the meditation technique pointed out how it was similar to Thomas. The only problem was I didn’t know that Thomas even existed. I really didn’t know, and I read it for the first time in the Fall of 2006 online. My jaw dropped to the floor. They were describing an arrangement by which one reaches a state of inner unity where the spark of awakening is kindled. I would later realize that none of this was an accident, and it had unfolded in the way that it had in order for me to realize something very important about earliest Christianity (and my role in it in the Fourth Century). It was known that there was a quality that was like a man and woman, and that they were arranged as if one was on one side of the body and the other on the other side of the body, very much in keeping with how the Hindus described it. This wasn’t an article of faith, but was instead the very thrust of the Gnostics which was they knew. They didn’t need to believe because what they had was the indwelling awareness that made union with the divine possible. And you know what? They were right.
Today as I worked in the studio, I entered into that familiar place I go where ecstacy waits. Nowadays, I don’t have to be deep in meditation, all I have to do is open to it and there it is. I have learned that this state, like the inspired state, is one where I let myself be seduced, to surrender to something higher where I then rest in a state of deep devotion and love as I go about my work. I can listen to a radio show, I can get distracted, I can even get frustrated now and it comes right back. It didn’t used to do that. All of this took time to cultivate, and I have largely done it on my own. No guru, no teacher, but a series of events and people who all had something to teach me as they came and went. Others are also doing this in their own way all across the world as more and more of us continue to awaken all on our own. Ripe. Vibrant. Alive. Awake.
What the Orthodoxy failed to see or grasp was how important our sexuality is spiritually. The reason why it is important is for the same reason why awakening happens in the first place, which is a union of opposites brought together in a rare moment where often there is a roar of sound, a sudden riotous vibration, or a flash of light (as was in my case). When I give myself completely over to this ecstacy, my mind opens like a flower opens and new faculties show themselves. I do not have to have any article of belief, but I know something divine is at work. Yes, there is nothing that compare to it except the orgasmic, but with a difference; it is as if the electrons go into a glorious precession that acts as a waveform that unites my being and in a state like there, wherever I put the beam of my awareness, impossible things begin to happen. I might think of someone and know something I can only know was true only later, or I might peer into the core of matter, or I might gain insight into something that I need to do, this insight being like a vast bundle like how a dream is often untangled or remembered after a night of dreaming. People call this today a “download” and certainly the term is apt because sometimes it can take hours for me to feel the bundle unwind. I often will remember that I had had a dream about this issue years ago, different state of mind are touched on, and none of this process is in the least logical but is driven instead by what I sense is a superconsciousness and intelligence that I rarely possess in my day to day except for when I am in love with the universe and it is in love with me. All of this sounds like what a mad person might say except that as a practical mystic, I have always sought to try and note my experiences, jotting them down when I can, to see if there is any correlation later with something in physical reality. Many times I have seen things there was no way for me to see and known things that had I told a physicist, they would just assume I was lying, that I had read a journal somewhere. I know that this experience, this ecstacy, opens us to our greater potential. And while I really take no joy in writing about it because of how it is often frowned upon because it seems boastful, I only mention it here because doing so is like me shaking your arm and pointing to the phenomenon because I know that it is possible for you to do the same. “What I do you will do also, and you will do even greater things…”
Kundalini has been described as a “libidinous” force, sexual in character, and while this is true, that it sparks sexual energy, that isn’t all that it is. I have found that everything that we have in the body exists first in spirit, that everything we are emerges out of consciousness, not the other way around, and as such, what we think of as sexual energy here on earth, which makes new life, there is a higher dimensional aspect of our sexuality which is connected to our spiritual selves, that part which survives physical death and which exists in all time. It is this aspect, which we call “sacred sexuality” which is, to my mind, nothing more than the spiritual compliment to our sexual selves. It is this part of ourselves that allows us to have union with the divine. And while some will cry heresy, I can tell you that when the moment comes when you do reach union with the divine, it will be that part of you which surrenders like one surrenders to a lover, that will make such a union possible. I can also say that when you do touch the divine, the divine will have zero shame about any of this, unlike ourselves who try to point fingers and try to make a beautiful thing an object of shame. Some of us, it seems, have a lot of growing up to do. This isn’t a mental exercise, but is instead something that encompasses parts of yourself that you may not have even known existed before. Instead of feeling shame, you will come out of that cloud of light renewed, healed, revived. Each time you step into that state, it seems as if some bit of the hard crust falls away and the mind is opened more and the logic centers go quiet because none of this is the domain of the logical. The only thing it can do is to write down what it is that that happened to you, and it will always do so poorly because language exists in the left brain and this experience cannot be contained or compassed by words.
In awakening, it is known that those who are too logical have a very hard time of it. Taisen Deshimoru, the Zen master, who taught in France said in The Ring Of The Way that monks who are “mental” were the ones who had the hardest time with Cosmic Mind. You just can’t get there with the left logical mind. You have to use the part of the brain that specializes in the holistic, the nonlinear, and that is the right brain. In fact, Dr. Taylor came back from her stroke describing the brain in just this way, despite what all of the researchers might want to say (she was there, she saw it happen in motion as a trained researcher in the field). The biggest lesson that I learned was how to stop trying to understand everything logically, to learn how to FEEL (this is not to be confused with emotion—feeling is a capacity that we have like intelligence is a capacity that we have intellectually for example). When I did this, I shifted more into the right brain process and moved into the much larger realm of awareness. The logical mind was never intended to grasp the mysteries of the cosmos. It’s job is to learn how to build a ladder to the stars, not contemplate the meaning that is behind them. It is the feminine in us that alone has the wisdom to open us to ever-larger realms of awareness. And to be clear; the two work best when the feminine is given the room she needs while not being silenced by the left brain. The feminine must now find her voice in all of us. In the process, we will all grow wiser because of it. We might even help stamp out mysogyny and begin to craft a new way to be in the world. The Gnostics had a word for those who had discovered this inner feminine and masculine trait in union: syzygy. Some have referred to it as an androgynous outcome to enlightenment, but I have not seen it this way at all. Instead, I experience it as a highly cooperative and dynamic state where two rely on each other for what it is they themselves do not possess, and which, I will point out, is very similar to what two people fall in love do, which is to admire and even lean upon those opposite traits in their beloved which they do not have. In the process of this that is spiritual and individual, it fuels the outer process as well (how we relate in the world). I know what it is like for a woman to love a man and I also know what it is like for a man to love a woman. My own gnosis has shown me in those moments of ecstacy how it must be or can be if we just learn how to develop or cultivate this form of inner and outer cooperation. I can dream.
The left brain reflects on what is known or what it think it knows. The right brain does not, in my experience, have this facility. Instead, it does the opposite; it looks much more impartially at what is happening in the present. There is a reason why so many, since Buddha first mentioned the power of being fully present, have gone on to write books about the awareness that happens in the present moment. Ram Das wrote “Be Here Now” and Tolle wrote “The Power of Now” and they are both saying the same thing that Buddha said first. This is a right-brained activity, this ability to be in the present. But more: quiet the mind so that you can begin to sense what is beneath all of the mind-chatter. It is there, they all insist, where the greater awareness lies. It is not something that you do, it is something that you are and which your thoughts keep you distracted from perhaps ever finding. The left brain will always be in a prejudiced state, and it is this part of us that seems to be running so much of the show when it comes to awareness. It think it knows, but it is only basing its thoughts on conjecture based on what has happened in the past. To know this new state you must be open to what can be, not what has been. I contend that when you can reach into this silence in yourself you are quieting the mind and that this allows you access to the parts of you which are not wed to time and space. This is the same space that is written about by the Gnostics, the Pleroma, the fullness. We are all related, we are all family, from the largest to the smallest. It is an unimaginably large family, but knowing your place in it will forever alter any sense that you have that you are ever alone or set adrift or singular only. Even in the synoptic gospels Jesus reminds the Pharisees that their scripture did say “ye are gods.” What the Orthodoxy could not imagine was that we all are. Did they just want Jesus to be that beacon of a light on a hill that we all seek to give ourselves to? Was it all just a way to herd the sheep into an ever-tightening space spiritually for control? Or was it just a conspiracy of ignorance, a failure of imagination?
Contained within these two parts of us is all the wisdom and knowing that we need to navigate them. You literally have access to vast amounts of information that is part of what the Gnostics called the Pleroma (Koinē Greek: πλήρωμα, literally “fullness”). It is here that the sacred marriage of takes place. It is firstly within, and can be bolstered by others who are likewise centered and known to themselves. Staring into the awakened can be like staring into the same infinite that one feels within ones own self. This is also where the “deficiency” that the Gnostic Jesus spoke about was resolved. This idea that we are not good enough, this feeling that we are set adrift, sinful, bad, and unloved. All of this is washed away or redeemed in the Pleroma. And Jesus was showing the way.
Even as I say all of this, you cannot get there simply by becoming more aware of what the right brain can do for you. Something else needs to happen, and unfortunately, even the yogis of India, for as good as their systems are for explaining all of this based on numerous observations by monks in the past, cannot explain what happens when we awaken. The energy rises, they say….it is aroused, they say. But by what means, exactly? The Gnostics explain this simply: by becoming one with ones self, to become known to one’s self, and then by going as deeply as one can in silence, you can then touch on that place where the union of the opposites creates the spark that cracks open the wall separating you from a super-conscious state. “Remove what divides you” said the Gnostic Jesus, something I read six months after I had done exactly this very thing which I knew at the time was the first step into self-initiation into the mysteries of the kingdom. Once there, it is a self-sustaining font of energy which gets busy clearing the “knots” of emotion, the samscaras in the Sanscrit, of the stored emotion which is out “baggage.”
It is a quantum leap, but once you reach it, you have it forever. Its power may wax and wane over time afterwards, but its force will purify and clear you so that you can be a vessel for both the divine and who you really are. In many ways it has felt like my whole body became a sensing organ, a body of awareness. Was this new mind tapping into the wisdom of the body? Do all of the neurons scientists have found existing in our organs also provide thinking potential, as vessels for awareness also? I am afraid we don’t know yet, but I have a sinking suspicion that there is a connection whereby what we think of as the brain extends itself in awakening to include the body, and expresses its twin character of like-male and like-female qualities of what the Gnostics called “the left and the right.” When I say all of this I also know that awakening itself is a fairly simple thing, but it can take years to get there. It seems you have to want it badly enough, because who else could stick with its relentlessness, its intelligence, long enough to allow the changes to take place that makes a broader awakening possible?
Achieving this state could be done through years and years of preparation. What I know is that it is possible for it to happen much faster than that. I would suggest that you don’t do that, though, since getting yourself ready for it can be of immense importance. It is true as many in India have suggested, that this is in all truth, a more deeply fundamental state which is less something that you reach for but is instead something that you already are. It seems to be activated, but it is more like waking up to what you already are. It is your get out of jail free card. I ask; are you really ready to be that free?
Hemeticism most likely was developed during the first to third Centuries A.D. It is an outlook associated with the Hermetic writings which are writing in Greek. Much of the work is concerned with alchemy, astrology, and occult sciences, but there is a philosophical Hermetic literature as well. The writings appear to be an amalgam of Greek philosophy, particularly Platonic, with other elements. As a result of this, Hermeticism tended to gain broad interest among numerous groups in antiquity, such as the Arabs and Persians, and early Christians as well. Among those who believed that the works were much older, those include Lactantius, who, writing in the forth Century taught that the writings belonged to an Egyptian seer who lived after Moses and who had visions that improved on the Genesis story and that anticipated, prophetically, the coming of Jesus in his story of the “son of God.” Augustine, while he did not approve of the “magic” of the Heretic tradition wrote that he believed that they belonged to antiquity (and, it could be argued he did so because it lent power to the idea that Jesus’s rise was foreseen, even if by other than the Jewish prophetic tradition). By the time of the Renaissance, Hermeticism and its books were being widely translated, read, and commented on. It has had a strong effect on Alchemy and thus, on the rise of Chemistry, too, although it can be well argued that the point of alchemy was not to truly make lead into gold but that this was an effort to forge a new level of awareness in humankind, whose effects were analogous.
I find the work tied to Hermes Trismegistus to be very similar in some respect to the phenomenon of awakening, which involved meditation, a sudden breaking through the sensory barrier into a numinous state where a deeper knowing is attained. Additionally, it is interesting to see how the soul is described as containing both aspects of male and female in them, a strong marker in the awakening process.
The work begins with the following series of passages:
1. It chanced once on a time my mind was meditating on the things that are, my thought was raised to a great height, the senses of my body being held back – just as men who are weighed down with sleep after a fill of food, or from fatigue of body.
Methought a Being more than vast, in size beyond all bounds, called out my name and saith: What wouldst thou hear and see, and what hast thou in mind to learn and know?
2. And I do say: Who art thou?
He saith: I am Man-Shepherd (Poemandres), Mind of all-masterhood; I know what thou desirest and I’m with thee everywhere.
3. [And] I reply: I long to learn the things that are, and comprehend their nature, and know God. This is, I said, what I desire to hear.
He answered back to me: Hold in thy mind all thou wouldst know, and I will teach thee.
4. E’en with these words His aspect changed, and straightway, in the twinkling of an eye, all things were opened to me, and I see a Vision limitless, all things turned into Light – sweet, joyous [Light]. And I became transported as I gazed.
Later in the work the following observation is made:
24. Well hast thou taught me all, as I desired, O Mind. And now, pray, tell me further of the nature of the Way Above as now it is [for me].
To this Man-Shepherd said: When the material body is to be dissolved, first thou surrenderest the body by itself unto the work of change, and thus the form thou hadst doth vanish, and thou surrenderest thy way of life, void of its energy, unto the Daimon. The body’s senses next pass back into their sources, becoming separate, and resurrect as energies; and passion and desire withdraw unto that nature which is void of reason.
This passage is interesting because it is similar to what many works within the Hindu tradition that state that upon awakening the awareness pulls away from the physical sensory awareness to that of an energetic one, those inner senses which are part of the larger or higher self. Here, a relationship is set up where the physical senses appear to be described as being a subset, or a deeper root of inner sensory awareness, which is where the root of being can be found or known. One of the notable outcomes or symptoms of awakening is the rise of those abilities which are called siddhi. These are described in a number of Hindu texts including the Panchatantra, The Yoga Sutra of Pantanjali, and others.
In IX On Thought And Sense, the following statement is made which those who have experienced awakening might find common ground:
For this cause they who Gnostic are, please not the many, nor the many them. They are thought mad and laughted at; they’re hated and despised, and sometimes even put to death.
What is most apparent to me when reading this body of work is how it varies in many ways with other traditions, yet contain elements that are often very common. It is what you might expect when reading about the same observed phenomenon when it is taking place in a different culture or time. It can help to add breadth to your understanding while also providing new thoughts in a Hellenistic/Judaic amalgam with roots about as old as Christianity (and most notably Gnostic Christianity which shows clear signs of being aware of this body of work. You can study this body of work more by finding them on sacredtexts.com
In my quest to understand the forces that are impacting our world, I do a deep dive into the real European Union. To this end, I am reprinting Lindsay Jenkins’ investigative article The European Union Unmasked which was originally published in Everything You Know Is Wrong in 2002 (Russ Kick, ed. MJF Books, pub.)
If you want an anthology of many of the leading investigative journalists in the world digging into issues that mainstream media has either not reported on or does so poorly, even despite its having been printed in 2002, you will be stood in good stead with Everything You Know Is Wrong. It is still an important collection and a means for pointing out how those with power have wielded it in the past, and as a precaution for how they are likely to wield it in the future. It is worth noting that while Jenkins’ article was written almost twenty years ago, her analysis remains as an important reminder in our current time about the slippery slope that unions and agreements that erode national sovereignty represent. Brexit had not happened at the time of her writing the following article, which makes it of particular interest since Jenkins’ observations formed a salient argument for why Brexit should happen. It is well worth the read for a host of reasons, the least of which involves understanding how the EU has pushed itself onto the world stage (it’s a very old idea). My deep thanks to her for her permission to reprint her article in total here.
From the author’s website:
Lindsay Jenkins is an investigative author and journalist. She specializes in the history and current operations of the European Union.
She has dedicated years of research to exposing the rising power of the European Union, the waning power of the member nation states and the decline of freedom, liberty and democracy. Her continuing series of books, Britain in Europe, shows how far this stealthy takeover has progressed.
Lindsay’s first book, Britain Held Hostage, reveals for the first time who created the EU and why. This is the historical thesis the Brussels’ bureaucrats do not endorse.
Her second book, The Last Days of Britain, starkly illustrates how far ‘Brussels’ has already taken over Britain’s former national life.
Her most recent book, Disappearing Britain, The EU and the Death of Local Government, exposes how local government in Britain and across the EU is being replaced by the EU’s own local government of regions, sub regions and sub sub regions and thus marks the end of the nation state.
Lindsay previously worked for British and American investment banks in the City of London and as a senior civil servant in the British Ministry of Defence. She received an honours degree from Bedford College, London University and an MBA from Cranfield School of Management. She lives in both the UK and US.
In his address to the US Congress on September 21, 2001, President George W Bush claimed, “America has no truer friend than Great Britain. Once again we are joined together in a great cause. I’m so honored the British prime minister has crossed an ocean to show his unity with America. Thank you for coming, friend”
In the public gallery, Britain’s prime minister, Tony Blair, stood at attention, tightlipped and serious of face to acknowledge the warm applause from the congressmen below.
Blair’s support for America in the dark hours after the terrorists attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon would have been worth little had his words not been backed by Britain’s world class Armed Forces, ready to support American military action.. A military coalition stood against Osama bin Laden and his terrorists.
It is therefore astonishing to review the events of less than three years earlier, when in December 1998 the same British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, went to meet the president of France, Jacques Chirac, at St. Malo in France.
Blair and Chirac effectively agreed to end the independence of the British and French forces in favor of the European Union (1) (EU) defense force. Here is part of their joint statement after the talks ended:
The EU needs to be [able] to play its full role on the international stage… [T]he Union must have the capacity for autonomous action backed up by critical military forces, the means to decide to use them, and a readiness to do so in order to respond to international crises….The EU will also need to have recourse to suitable military means… within NATO’s European pillar or… means outside the NATO framework.
Since that turning point in military history Tony Blair agreed to the EU’s Rapid Reaction Force of 60,000 men backed by 300 aircraft and a naval force by the year 2003. Roughly a quarter of Britain’s armed forces were pledged to serve in the new force. With nominal rotation, most British forces will be allowed to be allocated to the EU army.
“Yet here was the British prime minister prepared to give up his country’s armed forces to the control of a foreign power.“
Many would argue the defense is the first duty of government. Yet here was the British prime minister prepared to give up his country’s armed forces to the control of a foreign power.
Two British admirals warned: “It would probably mean that we would ultimately have to obtain [EU] approval if we wish to use [our forces] on a purely national basis.” (2)
Both British and European leaders have been engaging in doublespeak with the Americans, assuring them that this is not the end of NATO while at the same time planning exactly for exactly that-the end of NATO.
George Robertson, when British Defense Secretary, quickly reassured the Americans that “[there is] no question of a European single army; no [EU] commission or European Parliament involvement in decision-making; no transfer of decision-making on military capability from individual government; and no undermining or duplication of NATO.”
But the division between Britain and the US was laid bare on October 7, 1999, when the recently ennobled Lord Robertson, in his new job as NATO’s Sec. General, backed the EU and not NATO: “We want to ensure that strong effective military resources are also available to the EU, so that we can take action in support of the CFSP [the EU’s foreign-policy] when NATO… is not engaged militarily.”(3)
The the new president, Romano Prodi from Italy, was even franker: “When I was talking about the European army, I was not joking….If you don’t want to call it a European army, don’t call it a European army….You can call it ‘Margaret,’ or you can call it ‘Mary-Anne,’ you can find any name, but it is a joint effort for peacekeeping missions—the first time you have a joint, not bilateral, effort at European level.” (4)
A Military Committee of EU Chiefs of Defense Staff from all EU countries now means regularly. It started work in early 2000 with a projected staff of 90 for its headquarters. The first director was the German General Klaus Schuwirth. A Political and Security Committee of ambassadors controls the political and strategic direction of any crisis operation, sending guidelines to the Military Committee.
The terrorist attacks in the United States, and the resulting renewal of the “special relationship” with Britain, did nothing to stop or even slow the creation of the EU army. They did the opposite. The lack of military force obviously limited the use of world influence at a critical time, so the EU army project moved forward apace. It now included a committee of the EU intelligence chiefs. That must give us intelligence agencies pause for thought before passing secret material to their British ally.
Winston Churchill had presciently written years before: “A European army would be a sludgy amalgam.” (5) Today at the heart of that “amalgam” are the forces of three countries: Britain, France, and Germany. But for Germany, sending its forces abroad represents a volte face after 50 years of legal limits on the use of its Armed Forces entrenched in it’s post-WWII Constitution and a strong peace movement within the country. The EU army is further complicated because the EU includes both non-native countries and neutrals like Ireland and Sweden; there is no common language; and, last but not least, European defense is seriously underfunded.
Where will this new army be used? Anywhere up to 2,500 miles from its base, which includes the Balkans, the Middle East, and half of Africa. As Sen. John McCain shrewdly remarked: “It is not hard to envision our allies intervening militarily, under the auspices of their new defense organization and without our concurrence, in very different difficult problems that they are unprepared to resolve, necessitating an eventual appeal to NATO to bail them out.” (6)
Though no politician would say so, creating a defense force had always been on the agenda for the new European state, but it was scheduled to be the last piece of the jigsaw to be slotted into place.
Jean Monnet, The so-called father of the EU, wrote of the outbreak of the Korean war in 1950: “the Federation of Europe would have to become an immediate objective. Army would have to be placed… under joint sovereignty. We could no longer wait, as we had once planned, for political Europe to be the culminating point of a gradual process, since its joint defense was inconceivable without a joint authority.…”(7)
“The existence of an EU army, depriving the constituent nations of their own defense and wrapping them in the foreign policy of the EU, powerfully demonstrates that free trade was a pretense.”
For 50 years the Federalists pretended that the EU (and its predecessors) was no more than a trading bloc and that the acquisition of more power was only to promote free trade. The existence of an EU army, depriving the constituent nations of their own defense and wrapping them in the foreign policy of the EU, powerfully demonstrates that free trade was a pretense.
The new reality is a new country called “Europe.”
Monnet’s “gradual process” has already achieve the supremacy of EU law over national law, with the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg as the ultimate court of appeal. Trade farming and fishing are controlled from Brussels,; No individual country can sign a treaty, which means, for example, that only the EU can negotiate at the World Trade Organization (WTO); and foreign-policy, taxation, and national finances are already heavily circumscribed. Both an EU wide criminal justice system and an EU wide police force, which will eventually run all national police forces, are well on the way.(8)
This long process of integration has been notable by the absence of any democratic choice. The origins of the EU can be traced directly to chance meetings at the 1919 peace conference at the end of the first world war. A small group of largely British and American elites kept in touch and developed ideas for a united Europe while waiting for any chance to start the process. The first attempt, the Franco-Anglo Union, took place in the dark days of 1940s when German armies were overrunning Europe. It failed. The second try was the Council of Europe which Britain deliberately reduced to talking shop by 1950. Finally, the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) of six countries began in 1952, with the unelected Jean Monnet at its head. That, too, was nearly stillborn because of the Korean War. While the ECSC report purported to be a trading alliance, it could levy taxes and was responsible to a supranational assembly and a European Court of Justice. It was an embryonic state.
A further push with the Treaty of Rome in 1957 turned the ECSC into the European Economic Community (EEC), embracing all economic activity, not just coal and steel. Over 40 years later, the 15 countries of the European Union may enlarge to 28 countries. Even Russia is waiting in the wings. (9)
There is still a hole at the center of the EU jigsaw. The EU does not have a legal personality; therefore, it is not a state. An EU constitution is likely to be high on the agenda at the 2004 intergovernmental conference. These conferences always precede the next amendment to the fundamental EU document, the Treaty of Rome.
Progress toward one state has been made by a ratchet technique-small advances that only specialist watchers might appreciate for what they really are. Direct assaults on national independence are avoided. Some countries have held referendums on treaty changes. Most infamous where the two Danish referendums on the Maastricht Treaty. The Danes voted “no” in June 1992 and were promptly told they had to vote again. Less than a year later, and with substantial bribery and bullying; “You will lose your job if you vote no”—the Danes voted”Yes.”
In every treaty is the term “irrevocable.” The idea that the movement toward a single European state is inevitable is a constant refrain. Legally speaking, no treaty is irrevocable, and in the words of the old tag, only death and taxes are inevitable. Yet this propaganda is constant.
As a former French Foreign Secretary admitted: “The Europe of Maastricht could only have been created in the absence of democracy.” (10)
“In 1984 (some might well remember George Orwell’s 1984), an inner group of EU countries agreed that there should be a greater “European consciousness” to overwhelm national feeling, and they set up the Committee for a People’s Europe to do just that. The committee created a “pretend” country.”
Propaganda has been keen to oil the wheels of integration. In 1984 (some might well remember George Orwell’s 1984), an inner group of EU countries agreed that there should be a greater “European consciousness” to overwhelm national feeling, and they set up the Committee for a People’s Europe to do just that. The committee created a “pretend” country.
As a result, the EU flag of 12 stars on a blue background flies over the new 132 “embassies”—diplomatically called “delegations”—around the world and over its capital city, Brussels; the EU anthem, Ode to Joy from Beethoven’s ninth Symphony, is frequently played in Brussels with the EU Commissioners standing to attention; every country has adopted the red EU passport; EU drivers licenses are being introduced; and 2002, the currents the EU currency, the euro, replaced the individual currencies of all EU countries except Denmark, Sweden, and Britain.
Brussels is even using religion to promote its political agenda. Some estimates suggest the European commission’s program “A Soul for Europe” has given over 38 million to pro-EU projects throughout Europe. Applicants for grants must “promote the integration of Europe” and “publicly acknowledge that assistance has been received from the EU.” Though supposedly to set up to promote the religious and spiritual aspects of a unified Europe “Soul for Europe” literature doesn’t mention the scriptures; this is strictly political.
The Vatican sees advantages in backing the EU. To promote a Europe in which Catholicism might dominate, the Vatican has pursued EU integration from at least the early 1940s and mainly in secret. (11)The first six members of the EEC are largely Catholic countries.
The Vatican is now taking a more public stance. The Rome Synod of October 1999 declared that it is necessary to “pursue, with courage and urgency, the process of European integration.” Two months later, the Vatican began the canonization process for the so-called “founding fathers of Europe” from Germany, Italy, and France: Konrad Adenauer, Alcide de Gasperi, and Robert Schuman.
“No government dependent upon a democratic vote could possibly agree in advance to the sacrifices which any adequate plan must involve. The people must be led slowly and unconsciously into the abandonment of their traditional economic defenses, not asked, in advance of having received any of the benefits which will accrue to them from the plan to make changes of which they may not it first recognize the advantages to themselves…”
In the first 50 years of political integration, it was easy to disguise what was really happening beneath an economic cloak. As a British conservative MP wrote in 1947 (while praising the good Adolph Hitler had done to make Europe one economic unit): “No government dependent upon a democratic vote could possibly agree in advance to the sacrifices which any adequate plan must involve. The people must be led slowly and unconsciously into the abandonment of their traditional economic defenses, not asked, in advance of having received any of the benefits which will accrue to them from the plan to make changes of which they may not it first recognize the advantages to themselves…” (12)
Once the police and the Armed Forces were to be combined into multinational units, with one justice system, including local EU courts, disguising the true ends would be difficult. Local opposition could even imperil the enterprise.
The EU is now poised at a critical stage. It’s true nature is emerging from the shadows.
At this late stage, political union had to be achieved quickly before serious opposition—even rebellion—could appear, so an inner core of countries is essential. Rules were included in the net in the Nice treaty for five or more countries to accelerate to full union common, leaving the others to catch up later. France and Germany, the two countries that have led the integration process since the beginning, say that full union can be achieved by 2010.
Democracy has been largely conspicuous by it’s absence in the creation of the EU, and the EU is not run as a democracy. The government of the EU, though not yet an name, is the unelected European commission in Brussels. At its heart is the tension between the Commission and the only institution representing the nation-states against the centrifugal power of the EU-The Council of ministers.
Steadily, the nations are losing their powers to the Commission, as the national veto decreases Treaty by treaty. Politicians wrote in 1998: “It is therefore necessary and legitimate for participating countries to take part in each other’s domestic debate.… it is not interference in their internal affairs, of which the number is in any case constantly diminishing.” (13)
Once in Brussels, the 20 commissioners are independent of their “home” government, or in the words of Lady Thatcher: “They go native.” Each commissioner swears “[t]o perform my duties incomplete independence, in the general interest other communities; in carrying out my duties, neither to seek, nor to take, instruction from any government…” (14) About a third of them are former national ministers; governments usually send to Brussels those they regard as politically dispensable. Others have been diplomats or International civil servants.
Nearly 30,000 civil servants (i.e., Eurocrats) back them, though this is still not enough to run such a huge empire. When plans were laid for the present EU in the late 1940s, the College of Bruges solved the problem of a massive and highly visible central bureaucracy. The college suggested a takeover of national civil services.
This clever scheme meant that national opposition would not be aroused; it was erosion from within. A passerby would see the same old government buildings, but inside civil service would be shutting one master, the national government, in favor of Brussels. To facilitate the process, Brussels encouraged civil servants to sit on Brussels committees. This committee system has further subverted democracy. A British parliamentary select committee deplored: “In most cases the only scrutiny of the commissions implementing measures is that undertaken by national civil service in the [Brussels] committees. In practice there is little action in European or national parliaments.…” (15)
So today, unseen by the general population, over 250 EU EU communities and influence the way every country is governed. Out of the public eye, National civil servants horse-trade their way to consensus positions on subjects of which their mastery may be limited or nonexistent. The result is thousands of directives a year, often poorly drafted and inappropriate, replacing national legislation.
A best guess is that about 80% of all legislation going through the British houses of parliament nearly rubber stamps Brussels’s directives. On additional 3000 of Brussels’s regulations are enacted every year by civil servants without any democratic scrutiny whatsoever. It is government by decree.
If that were not a sufficient destroyer of democracy, the EU has set up a charade of a parliament with EU-wide parties, or as the Treaty of Rome has it: “Political parties at European level are important as a factor for integration within the union. They contribute to forming a European awareness and to expressing the political will of the citizens of the Union.” (16)
The European Parliament started in 1951 with nominated members until the first elections were held in 1979. Each member of European Parliament (MEP) represents a very large number of people common, Few of who can actually named their representative. Any EU citizen can vote where ever he happens to be, and national nationality no longer counts. The 626 members of the parliament are elected by proportional representation (PR) every five years.
PR voting is a clever way to divide and rule. Votes are not for an individual but for a party. The party chooses candidates, listing them in order of their importance to the party. The number of seats a party wins is proportional to the number of votes cast for that party.
The usual result of a PR election is a compromise. No one party has a majority, and government becomes merely a theater of bartering and horse-trading as coalitions form and reform.
The European Parliament has virtually no powers; it follows the Latin tradition of legitimizing the decisions of the unelected Commission. It has no similarity to parliaments based on the Westminster principle, such as the British and Commonwealth parliaments or the US Congress.
All major decisions are decided by deals between the leaders of the party groups, and MVPs cannot initiate or repeal legislation; they only amend or reject proposals submitted by the commission.
The European Parliament is like a medieval court: MEPs and their offices are constantly on the move, carrying all their files with them. The Secretariat is divided between Brussels and Luxembourg. MEPs are often absent because of the peripatetic nature of the Parliament and the technical nature most of the work as the EU extends its re-met into the smallest nook and cranny of everyday life. But day (like that Eurocrats) are financially well rewarded with excellent pensions and other perks.
Free speech is rationed. The time an MEP may speak in debates is allocated among the party groups according to the numbers in each group. A member of a small party has only 1 1/2 minutes to make his point in the debate before his microphone is automatically cut off.
MEPs vote on commission proposals by following numbers on the list and pressing a button 100 to 300 times in an hour, allowing perhaps 10 seconds for each vote. They have trouble trying to follow the voting list, which will only have been available for a few hours and is published in French.
“Some British MEPs voting 300 times in a two hour session, inadvertently agreed to corpus juris effectively abolishing the British criminal justice system common, including trial by jury and habeas corpus.”
Mistakes are easily made. Some British MEPs voting 300 times in a two hour session, inadvertently agreed to corpus juris effectively abolishing the British criminal justice system common, including trial by jury and habeas corpus.
Even worse, an absent MEP is taken to have voted for this motion.
European parties, without any country links, will become the norm.. All “recognized” party groups are funded from the parliamentary budget according to the size of the group.(17) The corollary must be that parties which are not “recognized” will be closed down.
With such a lack of democracy, it is important to watch for signs that the new state may crush any dissent. Every nation has a treason law holding individuals to account for offenses against the state. So far treason in the EU has not been explicitly mentioned, but the EU set up a European Monitoring Center on Racism and Xenophobia in Vienna in 1998.(18) according to the Pan-EU party of European socialists, “Right-wing populism is one of the major dangers to the European experiment… by attacking the European integration and its alleged damage to nation states.…right-wing populism can use a new face of nationalism… this new populist nationalism is also displayed in anti-European rhetoric, blaming Brussels for all kinds of economic, political and social problems.”(19)
“The EU can cancel a country’s voting and other undefined rights but leave it with all its obligations, including payments to Brussels and the enforcement of EU laws. Such a country would be reduced to a colony.”
The EU has already taken action against the country. The EU can cancel a country’s voting and other undefined rights but leave it with all its obligations, including payments to Brussels and the enforcement of EU laws. Such a country would be reduced to a colony.
The first case was Austria. Following a free and democratic election in February two thousand, with the conservative People’s Party. In a move which sent shock waves around the world, the other 14 EU countries promptly sanctioned Austria, claiming the freedom party was fascist.
In retaliation the Austrian Chancellor Wolfgang Schuessel, set a deadline for the EU to end sanctions against Austria; otherwise he would pull Austrians for their endorsement of using”all suitable means” against the EU, which would have derailed the Treaty of Nice. The EU immediately appointed three “wisemen” to find a face-savings solution. Sanctions were duly lifted.
After the Austrian debacle one British MEP asked in the European Parliament if anti-EU parties should be banned.(20) many MVPs shouted,”Yes.” The EU’s attack on Austria may be just the beginning. The Nice treaty strengthens the provisions of Article 7, under which Austria was sanctioned. Only two-thirds of the member states (i.e.,10) would be needed to ban a country, so even if the victim country had an ally or two, it would not be enough to save it from colony status. It will be even easier for the EU to gang up on one country, saying it is violating the principles of liberty, democracy, respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms and the rule of law. Those principles are open to any interpretation: who’s law and whose freedoms?
Even worse, to attract a ban, a country may not have to violate the vague EU principles; it may merely pose “the threat of such a breach.” Again, that is open to interpretation.
If countries and parties might be banned, what about newspapers, books, magazines, even television and radio stations? The only evidence to emerge so far that this could be in the cards is the case of Bernard Connolly, a former head of the EU commission unit for “EMS, national and community monetary policies.”
“In the European Court of Justice on October 19, 2000, the EU’s Advocate-General surprisingly argued that Connolly’s book, The Rotten Heart Of Europe, an academic analysis of monetary union, was akin to the publication of a blasphemous work. Since blasphemy could be punished under the European Convention on Human Rights, then a punishment was permissible for “blaspheming” against Europe.”
In the European Court of Justice on October 19, 2000, the EU’s Advocate-General surprisingly argued that Connolly’s book, The Rotten Heart Of Europe, an academic analysis of monetary union, was akin to the publication of a blasphemous work. Since blasphemy could be punished under the European Convention on Human Rights, then a punishment was permissible for “blaspheming” against Europe.
A further hint came at a conference in 2000″ Media and Democracy” when the European Socialist Party (PES) proposed a European Communications Authority. Such an authority could “recognize” journalists, fund programs, and exert EU control over the media.
The EU commission is not only emasculating the power of each state, but it has divided it to the 15 EU countries into 111 regions. All EU regions are described in the same way—for example, as “London in Europe”—thus abolishing the name of the country and making clear that it is not free or independent.
Each region is in the process of acquiring an elected assembly and a development agency with the same boundaries as the European parliamentary constituencies. Their remits include regional planning, transport, and increasing regional ownership, economic development, agriculture, energy, and waste, all to fit in with the EU planning and funding. All have offices in Brussels.
Each region sends two representatives to the EU’s Committee of the regions “representing” the people in Brussels. A second committee of 222 people,, the Economic and Social Committee, entrenches lobby groups in the EU, such as employers’s groups, trade unions, farmers, consumer associations, charities, and family groups.
Both committees are no more than Brussels wallpaper, but they have created a new political class in every EU country, an inner group to match the new political class in Brussels. Many local officials have reacted enthusiastically to more power and links with other regions in the EU. A few who have benefited financially in a substantial manner. Not surprisingly, they are eager apostles for “more” EU. It may not occur to them that this destroys the nation-state.
What will the future role of the national parliaments be when all the regional “governments” are fully operational? The EU is silent on this point, and the assumption must be that they will fade into obscurity, as decisions are made in Brussels and rubberstamped in the EU regions.
The commission has invented even larger areas, Euro-Regions, linking places which have never in recorded history been united or which once belong to a neighboring country, deliberately reopening old wounds. The EU funds television and radio to broadcast across these borders, to build a new identity, although many locals switch off their sets.
Part of the British Southeast’s “link” across 70 miles of sea with the French area of Haute-Normandy and Picardy. Germany, abutting eight countries, has Euro-Regions enveloping neighboring lands once claimed by Germany. For example, Rhine-Maas, A German-speaking area of Belgium, is joined with part of Germany; and Southern Jutland in Denmark is linked with Schleswig and Holstein in northern Germany, which the Germans conquered in the war of 1864.
The EU plans by 2004 all “internal” border controls will be abolished and one outer EU border set up. A huge border police force is being built up. From 2001, the German and Italian governments exchanged border troops as a vanguard of an EU force to secure the EU’s outer frontiers after the next wave of enlargement to the east.
“While the EU is outlawing most national differences, from imperial weights and measures (anyone selling an pounds and ounces is now a criminal) to currencies and legal systems, it is promoting other local differences at great cost. This can only be part of its deliberate policy to divide and rule.”
While the EU is outlawing most national differences, from imperial weights and measures (anyone selling an pounds and ounces is now a criminal) to currencies and legal systems, it is promoting other local differences at great cost. This can only be part of its deliberate policy to divide and rule.
English, the world’s leading language, is spoken by half of the EU, yet the signatory countries to the charter of minority languages of 1992 agreed to promote regional or minority languages. Across Europe there are over 100 languages, usually around national borders, reflecting Europe’s checkered past. Most of them had virtually died out by 1600. In a bizarre move to reverse this historical trend, within one generation and with EU money, much of local life may once again be carried out in these languages.
Insistence on the use of minority languages, especially in educating children, will ensure that the locality is isolated and limit the opportunities for people in the wider world. It will make them second-class citizens and easier to control. All regional assemblies will have multiple translation services, each will further reduce their effectiveness.
The EU, which describes itself as a Tower of Babel, already has 11 official languages, which causes confusion and vast expense with every document translated and every speech interpreted. On enlargement the number will shoot up again. Germany is already promoting German to become the EU official language, reducing English to minority status.
Why is it that so many countries have queued to join the EU? The answer, Simply put, is money. Only a few countries are net contributors to the use funds (is by far the largest), and most get more than their own money back but naturally only to find EU-Approved projects. And surprisingly few politicians across Europe understand the EU’s undemocratic nature.
The EU’s superstructure is already in place. Enlargement to include countries of Eastern Europe is on track for 2006. The dividing rule policy, actively pursued for years, is accelerating. Strong national governments are being replaced with weak regional assemblies speaking a of languages and reporting directly to Brussels. The EU inner core, led by Germany and France, is gaining strength and may have the power to advance to one country by 2010.
If so, the United States of Europe will have arrived. It will not be a democracy but a dictatorship. Unless there is rebellion, the world may become an even more unstable place.
Endnotes
1. The European Union is currently compile comprised of Belgium, Germany, France, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Denmark, Ireland, the United Kingdom, Greece, Spain, Portugal, Austria, Finland, and Sweden.
2. letter to the daily telegraph(London) 13 June 2001.
3. Chatham House lecture in London.
4. Independent (London) for February 2000.
5. Quoted in Mayne, Richard et al. The Federal Union: The Pioneers. London: Macmillan, 1990.
6. From a Kansas State University lecture, 15 March 1999.
7. Monnet, Jean. Memoirs. Trans. Richard Mayne. London: William Collins and Son Ltd., 1976 (Author’s italics)
8. For a review of how far national governments have already been abolished, see Jinkins, Lindsey. The last days of Britain: The final betrayal. Orange State press, 2001
9. For the history of who created the EU and Y, C Jenkins, Lindsey. Britain held hostage, the calming euro-dictatorship. Second ED. Orange State press, 1998
10. Clause Cheysson.
11. For the early history, sea Cornwall, John. Hitler’s Pope: The secret history of Pious XII. New York: Viking press, 1999.
12. Booklet published in 1947 under the banner”Design for freedom” Whose 24 members were mainly conservative MPs led by Peter Thorneycroft.
13. Dr. Schauble and Karl Lamers in a CDU/CSU paper.
14. Treaty of Rome, article 157.
15. Extracts from the House of Lords select committee on European communities third report, delegation of powers to the commission: reforming Cosmetology, 2 Feb 1999.
16. Treaty of Rome, article 191.
17. Nice Treaty, article 191.
18. Amsterdam treaty, article 29, title V I.
19. A discussion paper produced for the Bern roundtable of the PES, July 2000.
