A Very Personal Conclusion About Recent Events

Position Reserved, at various times, has been an outlet for exploring a variety of cultural and political issues of interest to me as well as a means of putting my case and the facts in controversial areas where the mainstream media have failed to 'get it right'. I am, with perhaps just very rare future interventions 'for the record', reducing activity, not only because of pressure of work but also because I may have run out of things to say in public. This posting says most of what I have left to say until the world changes again: then my opinions may have to change in response. From now on, you are likely to get only very rare personal ruminations as the mood takes me, maybe odd discussions of obscure academic papers that don't fit with my Goodreads account or anywhere else and, of course, statements of fact if some malign media half-wit decides to have another go at me.

There are three great lessons learned from several years of writing these posts.

First, that search for some special meaning in the world is pretty futile. The world is as it is. It should be understood just as it is. This is not simply a matter of having a prejudice towards science but having an essential scepticism towards all human narratives. The questions have always to be - who invented the narrative and for what purpose and who is using the narrative and why as well as whether a narrative is true. Truth is a sticky issue. Many facts are not recoverable. All facts are interpretable. A moderate scepticism about all stories we tell ourselves, while understanding that narratives are still necessary for society to function, is the way forward.

The end game is thus detachment but with a degree of compassion for peoples' need to tell stories and a decision somewhere along the line to construct a workable but flexible story for oneself that best accords with the facts of one's condition in life. In my case, my narrative is rather workaday. Having exhausted most evenues surrounding the magical and the spiritual and the ideological, I am really perfectly happy just to go with the flow now and maintain an ethic of civilised survival. My core values are what they always were - a mish-mash of existentialism, libertarianism and basic compassion for the weakest and most troubled.

Second, the melange of social narratives criss-crossing our culture and competing with each other have now gone beyond a joke. It is easy to condemn the dreamers and ideologues as stupid but even the most formally intelligent seem to have extended their psychological flaws and preferences into complex systems and structures that seek to bend reality to their will. There is nothing more deviantly sinister than the human ego that denies that it is an ego. Again, detachment and a determination to stand one's ground with one's own story, while being questioning about its own validity against the facts, is easily the best stance. Social existence is a brutal struggle within a framework of accepted conventions and order and it should be seen as such. It cannot be otherwise and those looking for reason and perfection are doomed to disappointment.  Two areas of recent life brought this into focus.

The Exaro experience, whether good or bad in the sum, demonstrated the degree to which power manipulates narrative. The conduct of the mainstream media in this matter made me understand, without condoning, the resistance of populists to the claim that their propagandistic fake news was actually any worse than the constant devious manipulation of the MSM. It often struck me that the MSM's real gripe with Trump was that he was exposing their monopoly of falsehoods by simply making what they do subtly be done more crassly.

Fortunately the internet permits the individual to challenge the MSM on the record (which is what I have done on several occasions) knowing that, while the exercise is rather futile, the bulk of MSM coverage is equally transient and distrusted by anyone with half a brain. At least there are now many voices telling half-truths and porkie pies rather than just a few with presumed authority - that is progress of a sort since the detached observer can now compare far more narratives and then use their judgment to come up with some rough approximation of reality.Admittedly, most apparently highly educated people seem to have a problem with their judging faculty but, hey (as Tony Blair used to say), you can't have everything.

The second area of interest was and remains transhumanism which I intend to remain involved with, albeit in my classically detached way. This is a school of thought of considerable importance in translating the coming technological revolution into sets of questions that need asking and which still pass most politicians by. This community has produced creative ideas around the application of innovation like cryptocurrencies and technologies like automation. It has promoted ideas that are now being looked at by policy-makers such as Universal Basic Income. It has also created, however, some insanely apocalyptic thinking about existential risk and a quasi-religious narrative that can make practical men like me cringe with embarrassment.

And why? Because too many of the enthusiastic nerds and engineers involved still read too much science fiction and find themselves driven by their own extrapolations and weak understanding of 'really existing humans' rather by any understanding of social and political reality. Still, although the hysteria surrounding these communities and their often shambolic organisation is a bit depressing at times, nevertheless, these are the people throwing up all the ideas now about the possibilities for humanity, ideas that correct our stupid belief in certainties. Square the flaccid complacent folk culture of the establishment with the trans-human lunacies and you might yet get to see a pathway to understanding future probabilities.

Finally, there is politics. Oh my God, politics! This has become the art of posturing one's story as if your powerlessness mattered, at least as far as most social media discourse is concerned. Most people simply do not understand the nature of power and how to use it. They cannot accept that simply having strong opinions is too often just posturing that expresses psychological anxieties or is a primitive demand for respect in the ape-like world of social competition yet moves the world not one jot forward. We all have opinions but few of us truly understand where power actually lies, when and where we can make some small difference and how acquiring more power by its very nature shapes us into the victims of our own wielding of it if we are not aware of what is happening to us. We all need to make positive decisions on how to use the little power that we have effectively and with full understanding of probable consequences.

I have come to the view that politics must be treated either as a cynical game played by moral inadequates (which is not to my taste) or be considered as an expression of core sentiments and values, beyond conventional morality, where one chooses rationally to see through the expression of our prejudices according to the power that one actually has. There are people out there who we should not want to have any power because of their intrinsic irrationalities and cruelties. Representative national democracy still strikes me as the best means of keeping these wolves off our backs even if our representatives are deeply flawed and not always the sharpest tools in the box.

Most people's values are rarely thought about, contradictory and situational but they do make up who we are and democracy squares millions of confused world views into something broadly consensual. Reforming the machinery of it all (as liberal nerds want to do) is less important than reforming the informations flows and education that enable people to make better judgments in their own interest and according to their own values. Even sociopaths have rights in this respect if only to balance out those dangerous radical empaths who think so much of themselves. To cut the posturing, I certainly put the economic and personal survival of myself and my immediate family first and anyone who doesn't do the same is already probably someone who needs to be kept an eye on.

Beyond that, I have a hierarchy of values which include the general sanctity of life (a Catholic upbringing), a loathing of bullying and sympathy for the underdog, a gut patriotism for soil though not blood, a distaste for people who break promises without clear explanation, a distaste for the use of secrecy to gain advantage and a prejudice against all forms of abstract universalism. There is also a belief in the benefit of pragmatic non-ideological flexibility that permits opinions and actions to change easily with new information. Part of that pragmatism is that you cannot take on the burdens of the world ... concern should start with the self and work outwards through concentric circles lest one become the sort of humanitarian Napoleon who destroys the world in order to save it. Much liberal universalism strikes me as being derived from immaturity and anxiety in weakly formed selves who are unable to build an independent existence outside the group-think of the ideologically like-minded.

I also seem to have been surrounded, through Brexit and recent political events, by many people who have taken what values they have out of their mental box but then constructed rigid systems from them that seem not only completely out of kilter with the facts but drives them to believe that things could be as they never can be. This is the idiotic politics of naive idealism, wide-eyed hope that almost always presages great cruelties and incompetencies. It is compounded by the hysteria of the media whose interpretative and analytical skills are barely existent in the drive to tell stories thoroughly detached from reality. Reading the FT on Brexit is watching a sort of cultural oozalum bird in full flight. Watching the BBC is like watching a rather confused old dear try to deal with the i-phone someone gave them for Christmas. Reading the Daily Mail is like being cornered by a perpectually snarling mad dog.

Over the last few years, I have decided that I don't really like people who don't have clear values (I have no problem with people whose core values are not mine) and who cover up their feelings with ideology and pretence. I have removed them quietly and without rancour from my social circle as intrinsically rather stupid and boring. Those who cover their class interest or personal interest with a coating of emotional idealism, whether it be their stake in the NGO industry or their interest in cheap labour to keep their fluffy businesses going, are perhaps the ones who most exhibit 'mauvaise faux'. Unfashionably, I still have an admiration for people who can put personal material interest second to personal values and I always prefer the ruthless materialist who knows that he is a ruthless materialist to the self-deluding clown who pretends they are not.

My own ideological positions are simple, pragmatic and contingent - for Brexit, for an intelligent democratic socialism (which, in my opinion, is only possible under conditions where sovereign democratic nation states can be abstracted from regulatory empires) and then for strong national defence directed at peace. War should be the ruthless defence of the homeland and never more. But even these are flexible positions. Brexit is a necessity for example but I see no reason why it should require a primitive and inflexible nationalism. I would go with the Corbyn-McDonnell approach if I trusted the Labour Party more, while I see no inflexible nationalism in the Johnson-Gove position. In other words, once Brexit is decided (as it has been), there is every reason to go with the flow of national consensus (which actually there is, despite the whining of Remoaners and the posturing of the Populists) and then and only then engage in struggle over whether it is to be a Brexit for Labour or a Brexit for Capital. The behaviour of Remainers is now a national embarrassment.

The same apples to democratic socialism. My heart is very much with Corbyn and McDonnell and I find myself cheering much of their speeches but then I look at the detail and sometimes blanch. The aspirations are great - they are mostly my aspirations - but then I look at my own experience in international affairs and the market and I see that the populist promises currently under offer, combined with the failed ideological liberalism of the still dominant soft Left of the Party, create reasons for serious concern. Will we see a twentieth century welfarism, shorn of warfarism, that still fails to understand the massive import of the coming technological revolution, fails to lead it and misses the boat just as Globalisation 2.0 takes hold as a mix of anarcho-capitalism, strong nation states and decaying authoritarian empires? Quite possibly.

At the moment, I see little more than platitudes reminsicent of Harold Wilson's 'white heat' and a weak sub-Marxist understanding of power. At the time of writing, I feel disinclined to renew my Party Membership in September. It would be better to become, once again, truly independent and observe with my customary detachment, employing what tiny power I have very carefully in the direction of understanding and managing Globalisation 2.0 rather than granting it to a mass party of semi-educated enthusiasts whose programme seems doomed to disappoint. Once Brexit is done, one might reconsider one's position.

However, all in all, I know what I want. I want a smooth Brexit broadly along the current Government's lines. Accordingly and logically, I want a stable Tory minority Government until that is completed precisely because the PLP and Labour activist membership cannot be trusted on the issue. This does not seem compatible with Labour Party membership for the next two years or so. And then, two or three years on, I want to see a strong and stable, radicalised and intelligent Labour Party come to power with a working majority of 50 or so to implement a programme of democratic socialism better than the one we saw in the catch-all 'package of measures' Manifesto of a few weeks ago. Brexit first, a credible democratic socialism second, Globalisation 2.0 third. 

On Kundalini, the Serpent ...

Our Tantric series has been designed, in part, to transliterate an Eastern way of thinking into Western philosophical language. We do not think it useful to mask phenomena with obscure terms derived from exotic languages and faraway cultures - what I call the namastisation of language.

Not 'Namaste', please, but 'Yours Sincerely' at the end of a communication ... and yet the concept of Kundalini remains useful because there is no Western equivalent. The Qabala perhaps expresses the same concept to a degree but with an excess of intellect involved.

Kundalini, a serpentine Eastern goddess, conceptually represents the flow of psychic power coursing through the body from root to perceived transcendence far better than anything that has emerged out of late nineteenth century Vienna or mid twentieth century California.

We do require some term to describe how it feels to have an energy flow from Will in the mind down through the body and back up to the brain as a sensation. This serpent goddess and the identification of nodal body points called Chakras is the best that we have at this time.

Exactly what is a Chakra and what is not is disputed by the 'authorities' but the matter is probably best considered expansively as what nodal points seem to work for each person regardless of doctrine.

What flows of energy are felt between nodal points are equally a personal matter. The point is only that there are nodal points and that there are flows.

The consequent process of psychic management is essentially one of 'visualisation' - a mental concentration on nodal points and on flows in order to work inner change. We will return to visualisation later because not everyone can visualise easily and 'pure' visualisation overlaps with narrative dreaming.

The traditions might best be regarded as teaching methods but a certain autodidacticism is reasonable once the principles are established. Sometimes one has to accept a weak theory from a 'guru' in order to get access to the technique but one should always be cynical about theory. Ideologies rarely reflect all reality.

Let us demystify the chakras by translating the six widely established nodal points into language we can all understand:-

• The root of the system is where we start. It is basically the near-arse where all the tension lies that needs exploding upwards. It is as if one shits one's liberation upwards. Waste out, enlightenment. up.The root, where we expel waste, is our link to the matter of the world through our adding to it. The metaphorical link with money and stress, or rather to our need to eat to add to a messy matter which takes us away from ourselves, is apposite.
• The sex organs are the driver for enlightenment. It is our actual unconscious and libidinous centre. It is from where we may decide to move no further. It is the bit of us that we are socially and unconsciously (and incorrectly) inclined to see as monstrous and inchoate. Ordering this towards individuation and self is the necessary precursor to the next stage
• The third chakra is the navel - rather it is our centre and our gut. It can be lower down in the abdomen in some and higher in the stomach in others but it is our bodily material core when we bother to think about it 
• The heart is not the beating life-giver but where we feel high stress and emotion. It needs to be calmed for the next stage psychotherapeutically when our relationship to matter, the unconscious and to our 'root' have been dealt with.
• The throat is the place from which the sounds arising from our heart are made real. It is the place of communication with existence, a connection with being. It is perhaps the hardest to understand. 
• The 'third eye' is the expression of that mind as pure power, a surge of ultimately libidinous energy that not so much commands the world as makes the world irrelevant except in the light of the mind's command. Its action is non-magical because the world of matter itself is not changed but the view of the world is transformed - and so the world is transformed insofar as the world is imagined and magic returns by the back door. 

Above all this is a narrative of perceived transcendence which is a sensation of rising above and out of oneself that comes, as in a sequential flow, from the root, driven as an escape from the world, through awareness of material reality, emotional existence, the presence of existence and a sense of inward power towards something that, even if momentary, can be life-changing.

The concept of Kundalini as an unwinding serpent captures this process conceptually as libidinous energy operating beyond thought and reason as one's very core in action. All the attempts to conceptualise this process analogically and allegorically come down to variations on this theme.

We have the earthiness of our arse and the liquidity of our libido working through the furnace of our gut  to float free in our heart and into the sound-space of our throat - whatever! The symbolism is all very well for teaching but it obscures the path for the natural 'adept' who simply feels what is true in the core process.

The Nath sect's simplification into sexual organs, heart and head is equally intuitively right even if simplistic - libidinous drive, emotional somatic response and thought all driven towards the transcendent point that makes life more than just the drudgery of duty and social obligation.

The root or point between arse and genitals, the earthing point, is the threshold between being human and being unconscious matter, effectively between life and death. The Kundalini is cthonic, not accidentally a serpent, coming out of the Ground of Being to become transcendent from the death to which we will return.

What is being said here is that transcendence is the precise opposite of death, the counter-point where, albeit briefly perhaps and sometimes accidentally, the human being experiences the life-changing illusion of immortality, the eternal and the absolute - in a rewiring of the brain that permits new ways of seeing reality.

This brings us on to technique. Each of the traditional techniques is fundamentally physiological rather than spiritual (unlike, say Christian prayer). This gives us a clue to what is going on here. This is not an attempt to seek help from outside as in the Christian tradition but an active attempt to manipulate one's own matter.

This is not to say that 'prayer' does not work to achieve some desirable ends - including the suspension of disbelief to effect healing - but only that transformation of mind, rather than of body, requires a transformation of body through an aggressive engagement with it.

Physical re-positioning (yoga) and breathing exercises (pranayama) are rigorous, potentially dangerous, techniques that manipulate physiology in order to trigger biochemical change.

The rousing of the Kundalini through pranayama (and the equivalent Taoist exercises) are proven techniques for driving the sense of 'flow' upwards through the body. The surrounding analyses of what is going on may be absurd but that something is going on is a fact from the ground.

If symbolism and ritual enter into the process, this is based on the suggestibility of the body to the mind (as of the mind to the body). Pure visualisation can achieve transcendent ends as can pure physical technique while combinations of both may be regarded as 'pure'. What floats your boat is all that is required.

Different body/minds (aka persons) will have different abilities to 'think' somatically and conceptually. Most minds tend to fall on either side of dead centre of the continuum between the two.

The truth is that the body/mind is variably pre-geared to the possibility of transcendence and that it is the will to technique that is more vital than the precise method. Some literally 'yearn' for transcendent experience and other have no interest at all - neither type is superior to the other, simply different.

One might be aroused by sounds or words (which have physical aspects as sound waves), by mental images, by sexual excitation, by asceticism but the central point is that, by whatever means, a flow of energy is ready to roll and it just needs the trigger that suits that person.

The central question is always - who am I? Am I centred on the physical or the mental, on mind-emptying or mind-filling or on some combination of both? Katon Shual (Mogg Morgan) has a useful mental model, derived from Eastern practice, reproducing one's own body/mind as a visualised external temple.

Part of the success in this and other visualisations lies in the fixedness of perception inwardness away from external sensory distraction. All models - physical and mental - rely on a reduction of sensory inputs and their replacement by repetitiveness of function (stillness or concentration) or a fixedness of internal imagery.

It is the removal of the mind from the process of editing out extraneous data (including memory data) that permits that same mind to turn inward towards the body and so allow the flow of internal energy to start to work the 'non-magic' that will eventually result in the transcendent experience or such near-analogues that make the hard labour worthwhile.

This is also close to 'pathworking' in the neo-pagan community and is a technique that extends far beyond the usual tantric suspects. Or it is 'guided imagery' for those who see it as a technique for life without any attempt to add a spiritual gloss. Intensity of the experience can build up into a trance-like status of perceived non-magical 'magical' power.

A real adept at visualisation can construct whole worlds that are coherent, meaningful and perfectly reflective of specific personal issues, constructing a flow that mimics the 'goddess' Kundalini. She can create 'gods' or 'goddesses' integrated with herself to reflect and express aspects that are hard otherwise to articulate.

Personally, I have a set of separate coherent worlds all accessible through a defined portal and each framed by a narrative. There is a physicality about these worlds that can take them to the edge of and even over the line of alternate reality, usually with some symbolic starting point or core image.

As I get older and resolve conflicts, I need the narratives less and the process centres on a 'state'. But the given task of the narrative is to reproduce those aspects of the unconscious that are not merely stress-relieving but permit psychological machinery to emerge which can face fears or uncover truths.

Ultimately, while the narrative visualisation process is never likely to trigger transcendence in itself, it can create the conditions by which other things can trigger transformation.

Whether managed through a therapeutic or self-managed engagement with the body or through an imaginative re-ordering of the mind, something can be done to sense and manage the flow of energy within the body that can result ultimately in individuation or transcendence - which is really self-possession.

Although Wilhelm Reich may have identified the disease of blocked flow in the West, the best therapeutic cures still remain Eastern - as adaptations, without the cultural baggage, of Taoist and Tantric technique. And we still have no better alternative to Eastern terms, Kundalini or Ch'i, in describing the experience and the process.