Her(m)etic Hermit

Logging plan poses threat to precious koala colony

The Struggle to Save the Planet Continues

LOGGING is set to start within weeks in a forest that supports the last known koala colony on the NSW far south coast.

The NSW Government is yet to release data from a comprehensive survey of koala habitat and population in Mumbulla and Murrah state forests, near Tathra, even though some trees have been marked for removal.

The two-year koala survey, which could be published this week, is believed to contain strong evidence of koala occupation in several parts of the eucalypt forest.

Sources painted a picture of fractious debate between staff from the Department of Environment and Climate Change, which managed the koala research effort, and Forests NSW, the government agency that will manage the logging operation.

One source described a map of the area that had been drawn and redrawn in search of a compromise between felling trees and maintaining enough forest to allow the koalas to survive.

The NSW Greens and south coast environment groups are campaigning for a moratorium on logging in the koala habitat.

“The koala population on the NSW south-east coast is at a critical level,” the Greens MP Lee Rhiannon said.

“Yet the NSW Government is prioritising the interests of the logging industry over the ongoing survival of this much-loved native animal.”

The logging operation, due to begin in early March, would involve taking some high-quality timber and some timber for woodchips.

Most of the timber from felled trees in the region goes to a mill in Eden, which exports woodchips to Japan.

As well as the remaining koala population, which has been identified by sightings, droppings and scratch marks on trees, the forest is known to provide a home for endangered long-nosed potoroos.

The Environment Department is ”committed to the protection of koalas and their habitat”, a spokesman said.

The department had engaged in ”what is arguably the most extensive koala survey of its type ever undertaken in Australia, in parts of the Mumbulla and Murrah state forests which are believed to contain koala habitat”.

”The survey results will be used in current negotiations with Forests NSW to ensure the longer-term protection of critical koala habitat identified in the survey,” he said.

The marsupials are listed as a vulnerable species in NSW, but there is controversy over how many are still alive in the wild.

The Australian Koala Foundation has said its research shows there were only 43,000 to 80,000 left on the Australian mainland, based on data from more than 1000 forests surveys.

The group is heading a new push to get the species listed as ”endangered” via the threatened species committee.

But many other researchers think the foundation’s koala population figure is a serious underestimate, and say that in some areas koala populations are not in decline.

by BEN CUBBY January 25, 2010

From The Sydney Morning Herald via http://media.causes.com/ribbon/714694

Survey Road blockade halts six logging machines

Logging in the controversial survey road area has been halted by tree platforms and tripods attached to six logging machines. Four people were arrested at the logging coupe.

Media Release Thursday 26th March 2009

Four people charged in bid to stop illegal logging

Today, four people were charged for being inside a ‘Public Safety Zone’, and for obstructing logging in a stand of old growth forest being clearfelled in East Gippsland.

Protesters have also charged the DSE and VicForests with a greater crime of destroying a forest that, by their own laws, must be given protection. They have also allowed machines to operate in the logging area while the tree-sitter was suspended 40 metres above the ground in the danger zone. This is in clear breach of the Occupational Health and Safety laws.

Since Tuesday, a group of 20 forest conservationists have prevented clearfelling in the upper Delegate River catchment.

“This particular old growth forest was recently surveyed by trained biologists and the result showed very high density of tree dwelling mammals”, said spokesperson for the group Carmel Roberts. “The DSE is neglecting their responsibilities to protect endangered wildlife habitat, even though it clearly states in their Forest Management Plan that where high numbers of threatened species are found, habitat must be protected.

“The DSE are saying they are unable to protect these species’ habitat despite the logging being in clear breach of their legal obligations. The government puts more value on a months work by a few people than protecting endangered wildlife from extinction.

“In 2006, Premier Brumby made an election promise to protect the “last significant stands of old growth”. These forests are the very the last refuges for our rare species.”

“Since the devastation caused by the bushfires, East Gippsland’s forests are now even more critical to the survival of Victoria’s native species than before. Rare native wildlife could have been made locally extinct in other areas due to the fire damage.”

“Old growth forest habitats such as hollow-bearing trees, are critically important for the survival of these threatened species in Victoria. The logging industry can survive in plantations and regrowth, endangered wildlife can’t.”

Media Release Wednesday 25th March 2009

Logging stopped in rich mammal site

This morning a group of 20 forest conservationists are preventing the clearfelling of one of the last stands of old growth forest in the upper Delegate River catchment in East Gippsland.

Members of the group have prevented six logging machines from working using a complicated series of tripod structures, cables and a tree platform.

“This particular old growth forest was recently surveyed by trained biologists and the result showed very high density of tree dwelling mammals”, said spokesperson for the group Carmel Roberts. “The DSE’s own policy states that areas containing high densities of tree dwelling mammals, must be protected. The DSE are saying they are unable to protect these species’ habitat despite this prescription.”

“In 2006, Premier Brumby made an election promise to protect the “last significant stands of old growth”. These forests are the very the last refuges for our endangered wildlife.”

“Since the devastation caused by the bushfires, East Gippsland’s forests are now even more critical to the survival of Victoria’s native species than before. Rare native wildlife could have been made locally extinct in other areas due to the fire damage.”

“Old growth forest is critically important for the survival of these threatened species in Victoria. The logging industry can survive in plantations and regrowth, endangered species can’t.”

23 january 2009 - ABC Online

The Member for Gippsland East, Craig Ingram, is calling on the Victorian Government to bolster its Safety on Public Land legislation.

Twelve anti-logging protesters appeared in the Orbost Magistrates Court yesterday, after recent tree-sit protests in logging coups at Stony Creek and Brown Mountain.

A number of charges were withdrawn, and the court also recognised that protesters were not conducting illegal activity, merely by being present in a logging coup.

Their bail conditions only restrict them from re-entering the coups in which they were arrested.

Mr Ingram says the laws need to be strengthened to protect the right of East Gippsland workers to do their job.

“It’s my view that the Government must address this, and if the legislation is not strong enough to ensure that they can move the protesters on, and I use the comparison with a construction site, it’s not okay for people just to wander in at their own desire and go and do a tree-sit at a workplace, because it’s a workplace,” he said

Logging on hold over species ‘find’

Adam Morton (the Age)
January 29, 2009

ANTI-LOGGING campaigners have won a two-week reprieve in far east Gippsland after claiming to have discovered four threatened species in old-growth forest earmarked for harvesting.

Scientists working on behalf of Environment East Gippsland say a survey last weekend found endangered glider, owl and crayfish species in a coupe at Brown Mountain.

Australian Greens leader Bob Brown said it was outrageous that it was left to self-appointed “forest defenders” to survey the area for threatened species. “The Department of Sustainability and Environment must be hanging its head with shame … these are fabulous Victorian wildlife and the Brumby Government is aiding and abetting their onrush towards extinction,” he said.

Senator Brown called on the Federal Government to investigate whether Victoria had breached the Regional Forest Agreement by allowing rare and endangered species to be destroyed.

Bureaucrats responded by ordering logging be delayed for at least a fortnight while claims of a large population of greater gliders were investigated.

But VicForests, the state-owned commercial forestry business, cast doubt over some of the claims.

Its regional manager, Barry Vaughan, said a crayfish specimen presented by conservationists was not the endangered Orbost spiny crayfish, but the relatively common Bidawal spiny crayfish.

Despite this, a precautionary 100-metre buffer would be placed around a rainforest creek as a precaution, he said.

He said two owl species — the sooty and powerful owls — had access to “ample protected vegetation” in adjacent native forest. “The claims are worthy of investigation, but we are confident that harvesting will continue,” Mr Vaughan said

MEDIA RELEASE 19th January 2009

BLOCKADE TO PROTECT OLD-GROWTH FOREST BUILDS

Blockades to protect the iconic old growth forest near Stony Creek escalate this morning, with conservationists establishing tree platforms and roadblocks to protect the area.

Three conservationists occupy a 30 metre high tree platforms in the canopy of the ancient forest, with another two attached to a road block, stopping logging from continuing.

Old-growth forest near Stony Creek is being logged, despite the Labor Government’s 2006 election promise to protect the last remaining “significant stands of old-growth forest in East Gippsland”.

“This irreplaceable old growth Mountain Ash forest is a rich carbon store, and has valuable ecotourism potential to the community if left standing,” said spokesperson for the blockade, Lauren Caulfield.

“The forest surrounding Stony Creek forms an integral link between existing national park,s” said Ms Caulfield.

“The Brumby Government is claiming they will deliver a contiguous link between the Snowy and Errinundra National Parks, yet in a matter of weeks they have logged vital links, first at Brown Mountain and now here at Stony Creek”

“In a time of drought and climate crisis it is tragically short sighted to reduce Victoria’s old growth forests to woodchips bound for export”

At the 2006 State election the ALP promised to protect 41,000 of old-growth and iconic forest in East Gippsland.

For more information please contact:
Lauren Caulfield (03) 5154 0174

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From - http://www.geco.org.au/2008/protests09.htm#SURVEY

Extra Images - http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_YWglIsIg1TQ/S3X3JcNteVI/AAAAAAAAANA/Pkozc-P87Mc/s1600-h/heartclearing.jpg

http://www.fsc-watch.org/media/strzelecki_koala.jpg

http://candobetter.org/files/bungewarr%20045.jpg

http://candobetter.org/files/walking%20under%20the%20giants.JPG

For further enlightenment see –

The Her(m)etic Hermit - http://hermetic.blog.com

The New Illuminati

The Prince of Centraxis

(These sites have been locked by Today.com and this author no longer has access to his own blogs - Enlightenment Today

Imagine Nation – Artwork & Images )

This material is published under Creative Commons Copyright – reproduction for non-profit use is permitted & encouraged, if you give attribution to the work & author - and please include a (preferably active) link to the original along with this notice. Feel free to make non-commercial hard (printed) or software copies or mirror sites - you never know how long something will stay glued to the web – but remember attribution! If you like what you see, please send a tiny donation or leave a comment – and thanks for reading this far…

From the rainforest home of the Her(m)etic Hermit – http://hermetic.blog.com

Preserved Rainforest Water

Early Bird

One of the Aforementioned Saviours

Pipeing Hot

Pythoness

Tales and tails of a hotter summer

When the two metre python sank its fangs into my leg it wasn’t the snake’s fault at all. The shy creature was born in the loft of the cabin and its ancestors have inhabited this spot for a hundred million years or more; I’m merely a latecomer. We’ve shared this cabin since the youngish serpent was born; her mother lived here for well over a decade, cleansing all barely accessible nooks and crannies of varmints and vermin.

This particular representative of the latest generation has a penchant for lurking by doorways with beady eyes gleaming and blue tongue flickering as she coils into a muscular spring in wait for her prey. When I pulled a stack of clothing from the laundry basket she flew out in a half awake state and landed on my leg teeth first.

It didn’t hurt much; a python’s teeth aren’t hollow, like those of poisonous snakes; they penetrate like fine glass needles instead of oversized hypodermic syringes. When the upper fangs hit the old shinbone, however, there was an instant of worrisome pain – until I managed to flick off the serpent by dancing around the small wooden room and kicking her into the air.

She was so shocked she didn’t move a millimetre until I exited the room. All in all, a much less challenging experience than being bitten by a black snake.^# I’ve been bitten thrice by pythons now, and this bite was delivered on the anniversary of my first encounter with the pointy end of one of these friendly constrictors.

A couple of days later I wended my way to the Emerald City in search of electronic equipment and family reunions. As we arrived on the city’s outskirts the smell of sulphur (brimstone to the biblically minded) was as overpowering as usual to these countrified nostrils, but after just a few minutes the noxious scent was virtually undetectable.

We zip along Highway One, paralleling the curving Pacific coastline of easterly Oz, returning home from the Big Smoke. Wonder Boy lolls in the back of the four wheel drive gas-powered van while Geo and eye speak over the radio in the front of the cabin. “From the perspective of Earth the sun eclipses the centre of the galaxy on the solstice in 2012,” I tell him. “That’s what all the fuss is about.”

“So do you think anything will happen as a result?”

“Maybe a solar flare. We’re due for a peak in flare activity then, and if we get another like the one that hit in the ’60s it might get interesting; that one knocked out a sizeable fraction of all the computers and satellites at the time…”

“And there are a hell of a lot more of them now.”

“Just so.”

“But you aren’t expecting the end of the world?”

“No – not unless we get a flare that’s absolutely ginormous – and aimed right at us, like in the movie Knowing. According to the ancients the eclipse of the galactic core results in us being cut off from necessary influences that we’re currently unaware of. The fact that we’re passing through the galactic plane seems far more important; that’s the sort of thing that could lead to a magnetic pole reversal, for instance. But the orb of the solar system’s progression through the plane of the ecliptic takes thirty-seven years, so the solstice in 2012 may not be the most important date to consider.”

We barrel along the freeway that cuts through fifty million years of clearly revealed rock strata, tilted at an angle of sixty degrees either side of the van; atop the rock, palm trees and rainforest mark the halfway point home. I change down on the steep ascent north of Buladelah. “And as it says in the Unholy Babble, ‘My time has been shortened’ and ‘No man may know the day of my coming – I come like a thief in the night’, so it may be unwise to believe any particular prediction for more reasons than one…”

“Do you want to play ‘I spy’?” chimes Wonder Boy.

“After I died I tried to think of some way to prove I was actually alive and not dreaming all this*,” I say with an expansive sweep that takes in the panoramic vista beyond Maya’s broad new wooden veranda.

“That’s so funny,” Wonder Boy’s mum says with a dimpling smile. “A woman would never look at it that way.”

“Fair enough. But it’s a fair question, surely; how can you know you’re actually alive?”

“Rene Descartes,” supplies Geo. We both turn to face him. “ ‘I ask the question and so I am’.”

“Indeed,” say I, “and ‘I think therefore I am’. But cogito ergo sum doesn’t mean it isn’t all a dream.”

Billowing cumulus towers progress past the mouth of the valley in stately procession, receding into a pink and mauve fractal fantasia that gradually fades into infinity over the eastern horizon. Maya’s smile broadens as her eyes wander through the extraordinary living landscape of the paradisaical subtropical valley. “But what’s the difference?” she asks. “It’s all the same, isn’t it?”

“Exactly. You know how the Bardo realms are?”

“In what way?”

“If enough personalities accrete into a particular astral realm after death, the plane they all share can seem as real as this,” I declare with a rap on the hardwood frame of a comfortably cushioned chair. Maya and Geo both nod; the trio of kids sits glued to the twelve volt laptop screen, watching Milo and Otis. “And so what’s all this, but a consensual dream of trillions of dreaming minds - a billion species living in a multitude of different shapes and differently shaped minds and sense organs, all overlapping to weave a consensual reality out of mindstuff? The more minds combine to create it, the more congealed it becomes…”

“And again, what does it matter if it’s all a dream?” repeats Maya. “It’s all alive either way – all equally real and valid. What difference does it make?”

“Alive, but asleep and dreaming reality; not awake. All imbued with consciousness, but not necessarily conscious.”

“Not enlightened, you mean.”

“It’s a question to ask the Buddha, I guess; how can you ever really know you’re alive - unless you’re enlightened?”

“So do you know you’re alive?”

“It took a while, but I found a couple of ways to prove it to my satisfaction.”

It’s Bunya Nut year; the trees usually bear their lethally massive cones only once every three years, and this is the triennial year of their fulsome bounty. We stare at the Bunya pine outside the Pentagon, trying to ascertain how many giant pinecones are still on the tree.

The Bunya’s branches grow in a perfect spiral, conforming to an aspect of the Golden Mean. I continue an interrupted conversation with Geo and O’Grady:

“Hyperspatial fields slow down by a factor of the speed of light and rotate into this three (or four) dimensional timespace as energy; in the solar system this energy manifests as bands of potential which roughly conform to Bode’s law - the harmonic spacing of the planetary orbits.

“Energy slows by a factor of the speed of light and rotates into our timespace as matter – the material bodies of the planets rolling around their orbits.”

“Did those probes ever reach the edge of the…” O’Grady shakes his head. “What do you call it…”

“The heliosphere?” I suggest.

“That’s it – the heliosphere, the solar bubble.”

“Apparently they did. And the boundary of the heliosphere acts as one node in the standing wave of the solar system while the Sun is the other – the vibrating structure of the underlying fields wouldn’t maintain themselves without a boundary.”

“A standing wave needs two nodes to oscillate between,” O’Grady nods in agreement.

“So the Sun can be visualised as a hollow sphere of energy vibrating in the centre of an elliptical swimming pool and the planetary orbits are standing waves whose scales and structures depend on the vibration rate and the shape and size of the pool.”

“But what sustains the vibration?” O’Grady’s no fool.

“Hyperspatial conduits that light all the suns; the Sun’s vibration occurs in sympathetic resonance with all the other suns and solar bubbles. The planets are solid material but the Sun is a ball of energy because it occupies the unitary position in the centre of the system; it rotates around its central axis and never quite achieves materiality, while the further planetary orbits are stretched through swathes of timespace.”

Now the northerly cyclones are breaking apart and the rains are coming to the subtropics again; there’s little need to reset the cloudbuster. While I was away in the city there were a few changes. A thirty foot bus decked out in electric kool aid-emulating paintwork has been taken away after three years under the widowmaker gum trees – and someone smashed a hole in the leaky weir that keeps the swimming hole nice and deep; now I have another few boulders to shift back upstream, against the current.

Time appears to flow onward…

- R. A.

# See Creator, Judge or Architect?

* See Shaman of Centraxis 4 – To Infinity and Beyond

Images - author’s

For further enlightenment see –

The Her(m)etic Hermit - http://hermetic.blog.com

The New Illuminati

(These sites have been locked by Today.com and this author no longer has access to his own blogs - Enlightenment Today

Imagine Nation – Artwork & Images )

The Prince of Centraxis

This material is published under Creative Commons Copyright – reproduction for non-profit use is permitted & encouraged, if you give attribution to the work & author - and please include a (preferably active) link to the original along with this notice. Feel free to make non-commercial hard (printed) or software copies or mirror sites - you never know how long something will stay glued to the web – but remember attribution! If you like what you see, please send a tiny donation or leave a comment – and thanks for reading this far…

From The Rainforest Home of the Her(m)etic Hermit - http://hermetic.blog.com

Once endangered rainforest - now Dunggirr National Park

Thanks to relentless blockades and non-violent actions by greenies

Once the (appropriately named) Mistake State Forest - now Dunggirr National Park

Gumbaynggirr Tribe Family

Saving Their Ancestral Forest Lands

INFINITY and BEYOND

HYPERSPACE in your life

To know what time is we must consider a few simple concepts;

There are an infinite number of dots in a line.

There is an infinity of lines in any plane,

and an infinite number of planes in any solid.

Similarly, there are an infinite number of 3-spaces within the ‘fourth’ dimension - an infinite number of alternative universes in the multiverse.

All you need to prove this is geometry, not quantum mechanics.

‘Space’ in our universe (timestream) is filled with vibrations emerging from and disappearing into the quantum field - an infinite sea - at all points in 3-dimensional space. Where these waves rotate to intersect on three axes, matter exists…

Infinite Sea

Time is a fourth dimension extruding from the infinite quantum sea into our 3-space. It is a stream flowing eternally into each material (or energic) body and particle in our universe, at right angles from all possible directions to each centre of ‘gravity’.

In nature there is no such thing as an ideal two dimensional plane. In nature, all planes have a finite but definite extension into the 3rd dimension. Likewise, in nature all three-dimensional solids have a finite but definite extrusion into higher dimensions. Only a small portion of the dimension of Time (Einstein’s time dimension) actually intersects and interacts with 3-space; time is asymmetrical in this portion of TimeSpace, flowing in only one (apparent) direction - toward the apparent future. Yet in Feinmann diagrams (for instance) there is no reason for time to flow one direction.

Simultaneously, our 3-space is a cross-section of the ‘next’ dimension – and, in fact, of all ‘higher’ dimensions.

Any ‘fourth’ or higher order dimension MUST by definition interact with 3-space at ALL points in our universe - as, geometrically, this 3-space is a cross section of a higher-order space or spaces. Which so-called ‘forces’ most obviously impinge upon all 3-space in our experience? At least two easily recognisable effects impinge upon all points in our universe, and each intrusion has a finite (1-way) aspect to it – these effects are time and gravity. Time flows in one direction - onward (the future is outward in every direction, while a timestream pours into each body at its periphery).

Gravity also acts in one direction - inward from the extremities of all bodies toward the centre. Time and gravity are both manifest effects of higher dimensional intrusions into 3-space.

Time as we experience it in 3-space is only an aspect of Time on its ‘own plane’. In the dimension of Time there are many time-arrows, not one. In ‘hyperspace’, there are an infinitude.

One property of Time’s intrusion into 3-space is the spiralling of all material forms; the action of this 4-space can be apprehended at every point in 3-space, from each body’s core to its extremities. Our universe is constructed of spiralling vortices.

A ‘Timestream’ flows inward to the Earth at right angles from every vector in the heavens; the signature of 4th dimensional intrusion. Time extrudes into 3-space at a higher pressure where matter has a higher density. Time pressure also therefore attenuates outward from each material (or energy) body. An effect of this intrusion is experienced as gravity. Another effect is the spherical form of 3D bodies in timespace and their linkage via the forms of most cohesion and internal symmetry - Platonic solids and higher frequency dome structures.

A timestream also flows into every 3D body, construct or consciousness. It flows in one direction because the Time dimension intrudes upon this portion of our 3-space vortex asymmetrically; the spin directions in both halves of a vortex rotate in mutual opposition.

The dimension of Time is inextricably linked with potential; the potential unfolding of waveforms that make up 3-space is infinite at the ‘quantum’ level - the infinite sea - the fifth dimension. In short, there ARE LITERALLY an infinite number of three-dimensional universes in hyperspace (the quantum field, the zero-point foam).

Our awareness of the third dimension implies that our consciousness is interinked at another ‘higher’ (non-local) dimension - which is not the asymmetrical dimension of time as we generally experience it. Also - the universe is hologramic in nature and structure.

As above, so below…

by R. Ayana

For further enlightenment see –

Infinity and Beyond

Hologramic Multiverse

Time Shift

Constructing Reality

Magic Net

The Her(m)etic Hermit - http://hermetic.blog.com

The New Illuminati

(These sites have been locked by Today.com and this author no longer has access to his own blogs - Enlightenment Today

Imagine Nation – Artwork & Images )

The Prince of Centraxis

This material is published under Creative Commons Copyright – reproduction for non-profit use is permitted & encouraged, if you give attribution to the work & author - and please include a (preferably active) link to the original along with this notice. Feel free to make non-commercial hard (printed) or software copies or mirror sites - you never know how long something will stay glued to the web – but remember attribution! If you like what you see, please send a tiny donation or leave a comment – and thanks for reading this far…

From the New Illuminati – http://newilluminati.blog-city.com

Fractal Free Will

Innocent Eurosurpers

NEXUS New Times

Issue 1

Infiltrated Intelligence

Roots and Routes of Global Corruption

How can these rivalrous tribes of humankind survive on a finite globe while peace and so-called ‘security’ remain elusive goals? We remain a divided and self-conquered people only as long as nations and nationalities continue to hunker behind illusory borders. Meanwhile, citizens cling to stultifying illusions of independence, separation and control behind divisively protective urban walls and children aren’t allowed to play in streets and parks without constant ‘supervision’.

There is no political solution to this sundered and split bicameral paradigm. A choice of skulduggery-riddled cowboy Bonesmen or industrious Trilateralites represents the predecided tweedle-choice facing poor purblind Amerika. How can either of these enclaves of one-eyed kings and control freak potentates represent the people when they all inhabit seclusive and rarefied realms of the rich?

How can either party of partying moguls, front men and flunkies even be regarded as the lesser of two evils? Can such a notion exist in reality, when left and right hands both serve the same hidden puppet masters who secretly steer the ships of state toward preordained fates? Today’s ‘representative’ democracy is nothing more than a sham; business as usual.

The structures of governments, intelligence agencies, corporations, terrorists and military complexes all share a fatal flaw that leaves them ripe for exploitation and infiltration by hidden individuals and groups. In bygone times an identical vulnerability within monarchic courts, secret societies and lodges and all other secretive groups rendered them just as helplessly prone to exploitation by outside forces as today’s important potentates.

The rigid hierarchical structure of all these power- and control-oriented organisations has created an inherent ongoing dilemma since the time of the pyramid builders. As the visionary duo Robert Anton Wilson and Timothy Leary pointed out last century, the top-down orientation of pyramidally ordered societies and groups creates logjams in the supply of information – blind spots and choke points that ultimately make the intricate systems that sustain them unworkable.

Paranoia and insecurity prevail whenever rulers conspire to prevent ‘their’ people from knowing what they’re plotting, and corruption-prone governments thrive on secrecy and obscurement at all levels. In any class-ridden society those on the bottom of the heap will always have good reasons for hiding unpalatable facts and truths from hopelessly beurocratic or simply ruthless masters. Everyone lies to everyone else all the time in order to keep their place in the pecking order, or to climb the ladder of aspiration.

Expansionary societies and militant empires tend to develop long chains of command and inordinately long supply lines to feed their bloating carcasses and are soon left vulnerable to internal disruption and unmanageable chaos. Universal surveillance and secret police are common reflexive responses to apparent disorder by those who fear their own people (and the long-suppressed urgings of their own freely willed inner selves). But the more fearful control-oriented rulers become and the more surveillance they put in place, the swifter the loss of communication, command and control. No matter the level of technology, the human element cannot be eliminated from the equation; not without eliminating all of humankind.

Real peace and security can only arrive through openness. You can only tell if someone’s cheating when all the cards are on the table. An Orwellian society would be almost acceptable if everyone could watch the watcher. No citizen (or netizen) should be expected to accept the draconian surveillance of their phone calls, emails, medical or other private details, or financial records - or accept constant surveillance by cameras, microphones and deadly aerial drones – unless their governments become totally open and their dealings are seen to be above board. From the place where we currently stand, total freedom of information is the only easy route to a just and free world.

A fair and honest surveillance society can only exist when governments and other groups are required to give up their right to hold secrets from those they supposedly serve. Corruption, nepotism, cronyism and conspiracy are rife in today’s secretive world of successfully bribed politicians and their fat controllers (often the front-man potentate’s spouse or close relative).

These hardboiled time servers are no different from most other harried and time-destitute wage serfs - who all servilely serve the ruthless militant industrious complex that sucks the planet dry, in exchange for a bankroll of worthless and transient potage. All wages in a hive-minded society of wage serfs are payments for prostitution of the soul. The desire for money (and similar illusory security blankets) is the route to all evil.

Humankind is struggling upward from its knees, blinded and confused by ancient wounds and forgotten amnesias. We still live in dark ages, but are hovering on the brink of unprecedented transformation. Whether we arise into transfiguring awareness and illumination or sink into even deeper darknesses of abyssal ignorance is an essential and ongoing choice for each and every one of us.

Paranoia is the Price of Eternal Vigilance

All rigidly hierarchical systems inevitably bog down, unable to cope with the loss of accurately transmitted information and knowledge and concomitant ills; in their usual irreverent style, Wilson and Leary dubbed this situation ‘The Fuckup Principle’.

The secrecy required to maintain the illusion of control rapidly becomes self defeating. The true security of an individual requires eternal inner vigilance - an awareness of one’s thoughts, ideas, ideals, dreams and true motives and motivations. The same is true for tribes and nations. Security has nothing to do with weapons or martial arts, which are actually expressions of direst insecurity. Peace and security are identical; they’re found in a conscious state of open awareness and compassionate mindfulness, available to all free of charge at every moment.

Secrecy poisons everything. It creates an entirely different and opposite form of preternaturally eternal vigilance to the open-minded awareness which occasionally gives rise to enlightenment. The oxymoronic military intelligence version of eternal vigilance is a rapid route to madness, as paranoia is the price of eternal vigilance and eternal unnecessary conflict its only result and reward. This may suit warriors, warlords, bankers, weapon makers and industrialists, but it’s very bad news for everyone else.

The true global currency of the planet today – like the substrate of timespace itself – is organised information. But information is not knowledge; nor is it wisdom. The misplaced priorities of war-minded cultures and the ongoing secrecy of their command structures have created overspecialisation and compartmentalisation of knowledge at all levels of modern society. The common flaw of corporations, governments, military groups, intelligence establishments and secret societies is the cellular structure of their hierarchies, in which all useful knowledge is shared only on the shaky basis of a direct ‘need to know’ decided by remote powers on high.

All these groups (including so-called terrorist, mafia and guerrilla organisations) create cellular clusters of agents, each remaining mutually ignorant and essentially expendable. Orders filter down to individual cells from unseen masters who exist above or beyond their purview. Very little information or power is held in the hands of any one cell, so if one group or cluster is removed the loss to the whole organisation is usually negligible. This creates a situation where the predatory topmost and underprivileged bottom-feeding levels of human social strata are mutually blinded, while the left hand (or wing) can’t ever know what the right is doing, and vice versa; humankind is thus easily transformed into a graceless punch-drunk clown stumbling through an eternal night of lies and mistrust.

The real problem is far more insidious than the persistence of these simple top-down primate pack structures, which are all predicated on habits born of long psychobiological precedent. Their self-blinding cellular structure means all these power-oriented groups can easily be taken over by any individuals or conclaves who successfully pose as the inherently unknowable ‘powers above’. Like viruses invading a living cell, hidden agendas can easily circumvent the command structures of groups that operate in a secretive fashion. The age-old imperial urge to ‘divide and conquer’ is crazily simple when the cells of an organism are already so divided they can’t communicate with each other or call for help from a higher authority or central command.

The secret lodges of the last Enlightenment – who created prototypes for today’s intelligence agencies, replete with hierarchical grades, code words and symbols, binding oaths and lifetime fealty to the current cause – used secretive hierarchical structures to subvert and replace the monarchies of yesteryear, which transformed into the corporatised robber baronies of today. This was hardly their intention, but the cellular structures of lodges, unions and guilds were often infiltrated and their agendas overridden by outsiders posing as the hidden ‘secret masters’ of these necessarily secretive groups.

Today we have an identical situation with many terrorist and freedom-fighting organisations. It’s common knowledge that peacenik antiwar groups, schismatic cults, labour organisations and most ‘alternative; enclaves were routinely infiltrated by police and intelligence agents in the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s. Their members were often turned toward self-defeating policies or stupidly self destructive acts by these infiltrators, in order to break up the groups and have their troublesome (but usually mostly harmless) members locked away or killed. The same occurs today all the time within many or most terrorist and espionage cells - who do much of the dirty work of intelligence agencies, usually without being aware of the fact.

When it comes to government funding of intelligence groups and other insecurity forces, failure is more lucrative than success. Thus the Waco and WTC bombings, the London ‘7/7’ train ‘bombing exercises’, the now ancient Sydney Hilton Hotel bombing and the Indonesian nightlife and hotel bombings all provided excellent excuses to massively increase funding of the intelligence groups who were really responsible for creating these state-sponsored terror attacks. The draconian laws that followed in the wakes of these man-made disasters gave these groups – and their hidden masters – unprecedented powers of surveillance and control.

Today’s intelligence agencies, military organisations, corporations, governments and other secretive groups have all been infiltrated and taken over by outside elements, including, of course, each other. Yet the hidden hands of unseen fat controllers overrule and override all their processes and agendas. Some of these groups have an inkling of what’s really going on but are so constrained by their structures they have no way of dealing with their worst nightmare; not just an enemy within, but one who’s so far on top of things they’re completely invisible.

Higher consciousness is just that – higher; interpret this statement however you will as you read this 1973 formulation distilled by Timothy Leary while he quietly rotted in Folsom Prison:

‘Secrecy is the enemy of sanity and loving trust. If you keep secrets, you are an insane paranoiac. Concealment is the seed source of every human conflict. Secrecy is always caused by guilt or fear…

Let’s break out of the huddle. Before J. Edgar Hoover there were no secret police in [the USA]. Before World War II there was no C.I.A. and America was amazingly unconcerned with secrecy. The hidden sickness has become lethally endemic…

Now comes the electronic revolution. Reveal-ation. Bugging equipment effective at long distances is inexpensive and easily available. Good. Liberals want stiff laws against bugging. It’s the wrong move. Legalise everything. Legalise bugging. Let’s forget artificial secrets and concentrate on the mysteries.

I can tell you bugging is nothing to worry about. I’ve been tapped, surveilled, tailed for ten years. In Algeria [where Leary was illegally kidnapped by the CIA and returned to the Amerikan penal system] everyone knew of at least three taps on international calls – Algerian, French and C.I.A. The Algerians knew every move we made. That’s why they liked us. I was called in once by the Swiss Secret Service about some threats on my life. They offered me body guards. I looked at the chief agent and laughed. “Moi! Merci, non.” The agent laughed with me. “Professor, the Swiss police never sleep. We watch over you twenty-four hours a day.” Any true intimate secrets are preserved in the tender codes of love. Privacy is woven with electronic threads of contact that cannot be INTERCEPTED. Love has nothing to hide.

Secrecy is the original sin. Fig leaf in the Garden of Eden. The basic crimes against love. The issue is fundamental… The purpose of life is to receive, synthesise, and transmit energy. Communication fusion is the goal of life. Any star can tell you that. Communication is love. Secrecy, withholding the signal, hoarding, hiding, covering up the light is motivated by shame and fear, symptoms of the inability to love. Secrecy means that you think love is shameful and bad. Or that your nakedness is ugly. Or that you hide unloving, hostile feelings. Seeds of paranoia and distrust.

Those who love have no need to hide their actions. As so often happens, the extreme wing is half right for the wrong reasons. They say primly; if you have done nothing wrong, you have no fear of being bugged. Exactly. But the logic goes both ways. Then F.B.I. files, and C.I.A. dossiers, and White House conversations should be open to all. Let every thing hang open. Let government be totally visible. The last, the very last people to hide their actions should be the police and government.

We operate on the assumption that everyone knows everything anyway. There is nothing and no way to hide. This is the acid message. We’re all on cosmic T.V. every moment. We all play starring roles in the galactic broadcast: This Is Your Life. I remember the early days of neurological uncovering, desperately wondering where I could go to escape. Run home, hide under the bed, in the closet, in the bathroom? No way. The relentless camera “I” follows me everywhere. We can only keep secrets from ourselves…

I laugh at government bugging. Let the poor, deprived, bored creatures listen to our conversations, tape our laughter, study our transmissions. Maybe it will turn them on. Perhaps they’ll get the message our love-shine transmits: there is nothing to fear.’*

The Route to Freedom

All the various instances of control-freak behaviour and the insidious takeover of the body politic by external forces are refracted reflections of a more primal form of possession – and possessiveness - which afflicts almost all of humankind. As Siddhartha Buddha put it, attachment is the source of all suffering.

If life and living become boringly repetitive, automatic and routine, then truth and meaning are easily snuffed out and buried by mediocrity and tedium. Self awareness diminishes like a fading light bulb unless it’s constantly recharged by meditative attention.

The divisive concepts of ‘us’ and ‘them’ can only be ruthlessly exploited as long as they remain unexamined and unrecognised false truisms that have somehow lodged (or been lodged) in our receptive and fundamentally innocent minds. Along with feudalistic, racist, faction-riddled twaddle and other all the other fearful baggage of humankind’s woebegotten past, the need for secrecy, hierarchies, belligerent nations and the laughable ‘need to know’ can only persist if we fail to recognise their roots in our secret selves.

Our minds and actions are ridden by forces and presences we’ve been carefully trained to fail to perceive. We are each much greater and more powerful than we know. All knowledge and information is freely available to an open and inquiring mind. We are not simply meat machines in a deadly one-way processing facility, but self-blinded, self-wounded and dumbed-down beings inextricably linked to greater realities; we’re all imbued with vast potentialities and capable of apparent miracles. We perform many every day.

Unexamined questions abound. Where do you go when you sleep? Who are you, really? Why did you decide to be born here and now? Why do you live the way you do, where you do? What drives you?

The universe is holographic in structure and nothing can ever be successfully hidden for long. Everything is accessible to everyone, if they only know it – an excellent excuse for unreasoning rulers to keep everyone as dumbed-down, subservient and insecure as possible. The presence of truth or a lie is easily discerned by an innocent child, and this faculty remains available to all who choose to serve no other master but truth.

- R. A.

.

P.S. – From ‘How We Lost the Fear of Terror’ by Daniel Flitton -

‘…people become understandably suspicious of claims about hidden threats used to justify huge government spending and restrictive laws. Since 2001 ASIO has more then trebled in size, alongside enormous growth in counter-terrorism branches of the Australian Federal Police. A parallel growth has taken place in private sector - the proliferation of ”terrorism experts” to offer advice and public comment. Careers have been built on the back of the effort to confront terrorism, careers that would be themselves under threat if the problem diminishes…

“…[CIA-trained Osama] bin Laden continues to evade capture. The US Defence Secretary, Robert Gates, recently admitted no reliable intelligence on bin Laden’s location had been gathered in years.

Americans are not generally optimistic the terrorist mastermind will be found, according to polls. Asked earlier to rate how likely it is that US forces will capture or kill bin Laden, a majority said it was ”not too likely” or ”not at all likely”.

Only 11 per cent of people saw as ”very likely” the prospect of bin Laden in chains or in a coffin at the hands of the US (3 per cent claim he is already dead).

Does it matter? Would killing bin Laden end the terrorist threat? Analysts doubt it. His mystique is already well entrenched and his influence on day-to-day planning minimal. Bin Laden’s role is as a strategic guide to his followers.

This year he [purportedly] released a ‘’statement to the American people” to coincide with the anniversary of the September 11 attacks.

”If you stop the war, then so be it. But otherwise, it is inevitable that we will continue our war of extermination against you on all possible fronts,” he said.

”So, go ahead and prolong this war as long as you want, but you are engaged in a miserable losing war for the interests of others that seems to have no end in sight.” ’

- quote from The Sydney Morning Herald, Jan 2-3 2010 –

* From Secrecy, Chapter 9 of Neuropolitics by Tomothy Leary, Copyright Timothy Leary 1977. First published in ‘The Curse of the Oval Room’ by High Times Press

See also - Info-Psychology by Timothy Leary

[Brackets – N.I. editor]

Images - http://songbox.co.nz/tlc.nsf/the_great_seal.gif

http://www.freedomsphoenix.com/Uploads/Graphics/090-0722135321-roundtable-Chart.jpg

http://www.blotterart.net/albums/fuckthesystem/leary_big.jpg

http://digitalseance.files.wordpress.com/2008/02/leary_cover.gif

For further enlightenment see –

The Her(m)etic Hermit - http://hermetic.blog.com

The New Illuminati

(These sites have been locked by Today.com and this author no longer has access to his own blogs - Enlightenment Today

Imagine Nation – Artwork & Images )

The Prince of Centraxis

This material is published under Creative Commons Copyright – reproduction for non-profit use is permitted & encouraged, if you give attribution to the work & author - and please include a (preferably active) link to the original along with this notice. Feel free to make non-commercial hard (printed) or software copies or mirror sites - you never know how long something will stay glued to the web – but remember attribution! If you like what you see, please send a tiny donation or leave a comment – and thanks for reading this far…

From the New Illuminati – http://newilluminati.blog-city.com

Now and Then

Dawn of Ra Magi

Simon Reptile, Ratty and Dawn of Ra Neophytes

Home

Where the Wild Things Are

Living in a Pair o’ Dice

This week Japanese Nashi pears, blood plums and Chinese Grumichama berries are ripe in the orchard and on trees I’ve scattered around this remote little valley. Peaches and mulberries are finishing off, along with the last of the purpleberries (flannel flower berries), tropical apples and mulberries. Passionfruits, feijoas and guavas are ripening alongside native blueberries and indigenous, giant (and potentially lethal) Bunya pinecones and wild Smilex blueberry grapes. The year is a cyclic clock of rainbow flowers, fruits, berries and nuts.

This hermetically sealed hermit dwells in a subtropical paradise, but few could manage to live with themselves or each other in this extraordinary place. Fewer still would live here as I do. Very few do, in fact; less all the time of late. As land costs more and more, different, usually older breeds buy the titular deeds. They seem to have less time, patience and room for experimenters or experimentation in alternative lifestyles. Many want to remake the world into a misconceived vision of the destructive rural yesteryears of their distant childhoods. Despite all apparent recent gains and transformations of global consciousness, few can see the forest for the monetary value of ‘their’ trees.

Most would-be settlers last only a few months, regardless of the quality of their dwelling or quantity of land they inhabit; a couple of years at best. Not many people can live with themselves, it seems.

Maybe it’s the water. The lack of fluoridated town water may be partly responsible; new chums are suddenly bereft of the ubiquitous rat poison tranquiliser that’s inserted into most people’s drinking water and are newly filled with unbridled energy and suddenly unsuppressed sundering passions.

Either way, those who would live in an isolate paradise find we must face all we’ve suppressed for much of our lives, and finally deal with the things we’ve ‘put off until later’. Out here, that ‘later time’ when fears or memories, failures or inadequacies must be faced has finally arrived. You can’t avoid yourself any longer by ploys of endless distraction or blame-making. Life is 24/7 and the human mind is a relentless inquirer.

Tonight a large serpent slumbers an arm’s length above my head while echo-sounding microbats wheel round my bed, emitting charming little clicks as they devour their prey. The rare endangered fliers weave acrobatically, snaffling insects which might otherwise sup on my blood or keep me awake with their buzzing. The tiny endangered bats’ relatively huge ears inhabit the place where eye sockets would be on other mammals, resting just above their furry cheeks where displaced beady eyes glitter in candlelit darkness.

Like all the insect-eating frogs and toads hereabouts, they’re much more convenient to maintain than mosquito nets. Some people actually spray poison on their skins to achieve the same effect, so depleted are their habitats.

The non-venomous python drives poisonous snakes away and eats vermin that crave my food. If you get too drunk in the bush a rat or ratite marsupial might nibble your earlobe or other body parts without waking you; I’ve seen it happen in protest action camps where we blockaded loggers out of the last of the last untouched forests. I try never to get quite that out of it, and usually succeed.

Some dangerous morons poison the entire landscape (and their own food or water and all the pythons, eagles and other scavengers and predators) in a vain attempt to be rid of so-called indigenous vermin. But if you keep food from the wee animals’ reach they’ll generally avoid you like the plague, along with all the animals which doggedly pursue them.

Spiders scuttle through webs that infest the corners of my windows and the cornice of the rooms. They consume flies and other insects more swiftly and surely than electrified bug zappers. Whenever some well-intentioned soul ‘cleans’ them from the windows a dozen huge flies are buzzing about within a few minutes, and it takes months for the webbery to be completely rebuilt and functional again. The spiders around here never bother humans; in these parts they’re only toxic to insects and certain small animals.

On wetter days I’ll often be pulling the black wormlike bodies of leeches from my skin – usually (but not always) before they painlessly pierce the surface and inject blood thinners and cleansers that remove fatty deposits from my veins; they’re not truly parasites, but symbiotes, and they never swim in the pristine river where fish and frogs eagerly devour them.

On drier days I discard the only true local parasites – bloodsucking cattle ticks (actually small bloodsucking arachnids) that attempt to drink my juicy essences. They’re only a problem if you’re so out of it you fail to notice their presence for days; like many insects, they have no way to get rid of their wastes but to regurgitate them – into your bloodstream – and that’s the source and cause of their infamous debilitating poison. I hardly ever see them unless escaped domestic cattle have recently wandered through.

All these animals have lived here for many millions of years; we’re all visiting latecomers in their natural realm. They are the living world while we are their privileged guests. And as a local Aboriginal elder has oft remarked, the bloodsuckers out here are nowhere near as bad as the two legged variety in town.

It’s polite to retain long fingernails out here in the real world; it’s also polite to scratch any itch. Long hair protects you from heat and cold. Most body heat is radiated (and lost) from our great big brains, which can also be broiled by direct summer sunlight. Here in the subtropics mad dogs and Englishmen go out in summer noonday sun; the mild winters are a different story.

Uninspiring Aspiration

Though I aspire and attempt less every week – growing closer to the Tao all the timeless time as I gradually become part of the landscape - I nonetheless continue to achieve and maintain, build and retain the delineaments of a human life with many of its attendant works and chattels.

Yet all one builds or keeps requires more work to maintain, sustain and inevitably elaborate, enslaving all creators to work and their works. This journal is no exception, but it’s easier to maintain than most intellectual pursuits or artistic elaborations.

I care little what the putative morrow may bring. In truth there’s no tomorrow, nor even a yesterday. The passage of time is an illusion engendered in primates evolved to suit a spinning globe and a slow stroboscope of light and dark. In reality there is no yesterday, today or tomorrow. Above and beyond planet Earth there’s no night or day, but light all the time.

The only ‘dangerous wildlife’ out here in the wilds of eastern Oz are introduced runaway dogs, which range in size from terriers to Irish wolfhounds. Animals fear me less all the time; being a vegetarian I don’t reek of rotting corpses and they recognise a fellow harmless beast in me. I talk and listen to them when they reply or make declarations in their usually silent manner. But a pack of ‘domestic’ and/or abandoned dogs on the prowl can tear you to pieces if you can’t escape in time; they’re actually wolves, folks – the selfsame species that interbreeds with each other, themselves - and if you stop feeding ‘man’s best friend’ with the bodies of innocent dead animals they’ll probably eat your babies when your back is turned.

Each week the illusory clock of the year yields different fruits. In most seasons I walk unshod on holy ground so every step is a prayer (as the same Aboriginal elder oft maintains). This is true for a number of reasons, obvious and otherwise.

Living with life is total immersion - the opposite of avoiding real visceral living, hiding from each other behind mazed walls of cities and indoctrinated insectile minds. Paradise is for people who aren’t afraid of themselves; as Frank Herbert said, ‘fear is the mind killer’. If we let fear rule us it also kills body and spirit, and the intricate living body of the planet.

Rejoice! This is the best of all possible worlds and will continue to be so if we can only let it be.

Turn on. TUNE IN. Opt out.

- R. A.

Images - author’s

See Also - Wild Life

(but be aware – this site contains implicit and explicit concepts and imagery)

For further enlightenment see –

The Her(m)etic Hermit - http://hermetic.blog.com

The New Illuminati

(These sites have been locked by Today.com and this author no longer has access to his own blogs - Enlightenment Today

Imagine Nation – Artwork & Images )

The Prince of Centraxis

This material is published under Creative Commons Copyright – reproduction for non-profit use is permitted & encouraged, if you give attribution to the work & author - and please include a (preferably active) link to the original along with this notice. Feel free to make non-commercial hard (printed) or software copies or mirror sites - you never know how long something will stay glued to the web – but remember attribution! If you like what you see, please send a tiny donation or leave a comment – and thanks for reading this far…

From The Rainforest Home of the Her(m)etic Hermit - http://hermetic.blog.com

Wilder Life

Familiars