Because of our conditioning throughout our lives by our parents, our teachers, business leaders, the government and ourselves, it means we can only function properly with what we’ve known.
When unknown situations arise like a global Pandemic, we can only resort back to what we have experienced in our lives so far. Our craving and clinging to how things used to be kicks in and our mind will stress continuously until such time that the known shows up again. That’s why so many people protest against lockdowns and their perceived removal of freedom.
I have been cycling from a very young age whilst growing up in The Netherlands, the whole infrastructure there means that the cyclist has a higher priority over motorised vehicles, which everyone respects because everyone is a cyclist, yes indeed without exception. There are more bicycles than people in The Netherlands, some might even say it’s a problem with so many discarded cycles all over. This would be a nice problem to have here in the U.K.
When I moved to the U.K. in 1977, I cycled with fear and today 44 years later I still cycle on U.K. roads mostly in the countryside where I live, but still with fear, huge fear.
The issues with cycling on U.K. roads can be summarised as follows:
Every single human suffers in their life, it’s part of being a human. We make most of our decisions to avoid suffering. For example we swallow a pain killer to avoid pain and as such we become conditioned to swallow painkillers for the rest of our lives.
In the U.K. the sales value of over the counter pain killer drugs was 658 million* pounds in 2020.
I have been on Clubhouse since 16 February 2021. I’m grateful for the invitation to join the party but having regularly listened to maybe a dozen or so shows/clubs one thing’s is very clear to me. You do need a MASSIVE ego to participate as a host/moderator making it very difficult for those that are more humble and introverted to jump in with your own show.
iOS only at the moment folks, sorry Android I’m sure it won’t be long.
They’re in their honeymoon period. Being a disrupter and beating the biggest media (social) companies in the world means you have a starter advantage, everyone wants to join you, everyone’s after those elusive invitations, just 2 per user, wow!
Inside Clubhouse
It’s not that it’s exclusive, they are still in a start-up growth process and not ready for the onslaught of trolls and criminals. Here’s their latest blog post;
Right Mindfulness traditionally is the seventh part of the Eightfold Path of Buddhism, but that doesn’t mean it is seventh in importance. Each part of the path supports the other seven parts, and so they should be thought of as connected in a circle or woven into a web rather than stacked in an order of progression.
I first became aware of the Eightfold Path by listening to an episode of the Ten Percent Happier Podcast with Dan Harris. His guest way Brother Pháp Dung who explained more about this.
I started with Right Mindfulness as although this is number 7 in the list. Don’t ask me why I am starting with that one, I guess it’s the one I am most familiar with!
Whilst driving my car I often listen to a podcast or a book on audible. This particular day, I was driving to the railway station to catch a train into our nearest big city, Birmingham UK, I had some meetings planned with business owners and a networking event in the evening.
“It’s because of human suffering”, says the book’s narrator. All audible books are narrated of course and this particular book was being narrated by an english speaking voice, the voice of Kris Dyer. He was obviously chosen by the authors, who are the famous Dalai Lama and the not so famous Howard C. Cutler. In the summary of this book it says and I quote, “In this unique and important book, one of the world’s great spiritual leaders offer his practical wisdom and advice on how we can overcome everyday human problems and achieve lasting happiness.”
To get the stats, you will have to play the video below. I was watching an episode of Andrew Marr — a news programme in the UK on a Sunday morning. Actually I had to watch it on replay, as I was late getting up. The mornings are just too damn cold for getting up!
The CEO of the UK NHS (UK National Health Service) — Simon Stevens was being interviewed about the current state of the pandemic and the impact on the NHS and it’s staff.
There’s always a price for wanting to be famous. But this time he price isn’t what you were hoping for. Today you are starring in your own disaster movie, but there really is imminent danger of death and with the stats in many countries stacked against us, we really do have to run for our lives. Run away from other people, who may infect us, which may mean we could get ill and worse still we carry the infection and share it with our elderly or vulnerable relatives.
Reality is in our minds. If you’ve ever studied or heard about Quantum Physics (Mechanics) then you will appreciate that nothing we witness is actually real. In the world of the atom everything is but orderly, in fact it’s total chaos and what we think to be order is actually disorder. It’s therefore very logical for things to be very unrealistic and not in order at all.
However our human minds want things to be orderly, that’s what we’ve all been told at school and what our parents have taught us when we grow up. In the animal kingdom nothing is orderly at all and remember we are just animals.
During 2020 I made several predictions, albeit not publicly, and they pretty much all came true. Of course they were mainly about Covid-19, about vaccines, lockdowns and the timing of our perilous journey on planet earth.
This time I’m going to make some of my predictions public. Now, these predictions are only about the U.K., if they occur in any other country, it will be purely coincidental. Already one of the predictions will be exceeded and that’s the one about the number of Covid deaths. I predicted 100,000 deaths, but I think it will be much higher than that, more like 150,000 by the time we’re out of this. This is purely down to how the U.K. government has handled this pandemic.
We will have exchanged presents during December 2020, but we will also have been either locked down and prevented from meeting with loved ones. I have compassion for all of you who have been affected by the loss of family members during December too. Unfortunately you will remember this event every single year for the rest of your lives.
Our human drama on this planet is driven by our thoughts of the past and the future.
In the U.K. we’re about to be told that other areas across England will be going in the highest Tier (4) of lockdown from Boxing Day, 26 December, 2020. Why is the virus spreading so fast? Okay, so we have a ‘mutant’ variant of the virus, which is causing it to spread faster. But, what we are forgetting, the only reason it is spreading faster is that the population is too close to each other, we’re not taking the rules seriously enough, in fact folks have forgotten the rules, forgotten which Tier they are in and crossing Tiers as they please. Many stories circulating of people going to other counties to drink in Pubs that are in a lower Tier. The virus can only spread when we are too close to each other and that’s been the main issue with the U.K. ever since we came out of lockdown 1.0.
The possible other reason is kids. See the image below that unfortunately confirms a rise in positive cases in kids.
And that’s why I published my latest Chalkboard Thoughts episode below.
It Gets Lighter From Here is an initiative by Culture Central, a collective voice for arts & culture in the West Midlands, U.K. Please see below the explanation by Culture Central for the initiative.
About It Gets Lighter From Here
21 December is the shortest day of the year. It is also the last Monday before Christmas, the start of a festive season that is likely to be seriously overshadowed by the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic.
On the night of the 21st — the Winter Solstice, marking the shortest day and longest night of the year — we want artists and cultural institutions across the West Midlands to come together to provide multiple moments of happiness and hope under the banner: It Gets Lighter From Here.
This is why over 35 organisations are realising a number of digital micro commissions, each no more than sixty seconds long, which will be released across various social media platforms creating a region-wide celebration of hope, optimism and possibility for the future, and of the value in creativity and the arts.
The project aims to involve a huge cross-section of artists and art forms — from theatre and dance, to spoken word and music — from the most internationally renowned to the most recently emerged.
Content will be shared via the hashtag #ItGetsLighterFromHere, reaching substantial audiences and networks from across the participating organisations, artists, region and beyond.
Following the event on 21 December, the collection of work shared across social media platforms may be assembled into an online collection that will be available for sharing into 2021.
I was inspired to create my own short production based on the above initiative, I wasn’t commissioned to contribute, but I thought I would anyway.
It was the week before Christmas and the U.K. Government delivered a major U-Turn on national television telling millions of people to stay at home with a new Tier 4, which in effect means a total lockdown. Basically the same as in March 2020, but this time the country has been carved up, meaning only people in London and the Southeast of England are affected.
It was during hearing this news briefing, that the the four stages of competence or the ‘Competence Hierarchy’ came to mind. It occurred to me that the U.K. Government are still in stage 1. Watch my Chalkboard thoughts video below to see what I mean.
Well back in March 2020, nobody ever thought we would be celebrating Christmas like this. Everyone thought when we come out of lockdown, things will be back to normal, then the 2nd wave started on the continent and we were in total denial, it wouldn’t happen to us! Then the 2nd wave also started in the U.K. and 2nd lockdown came along after the Tier system didn’t work.
First it was mass testing, then it was the home test (which never happened), then came the local lockdown, track and trace, eat out to help out (super spreading events), schools back (super spreading event), universities back (super spreading event), travel abroad, don’t travel abroad, foreigners don’t have to isolate (super spreading event) foreigners don’t have to isolate, face masks don’t work (super spreading event).
It has been a total shambles by the UK government and other governments alike. You can’t blame them in some respect, they’ve never had to deal with this before, equally though they cut back on so many government services in previous years, that a pandemic project was closed down.
One of the few existential dilemmas the UK has faced over the last decade is Brexit. Somewhat paradoxically, in prioritising Brexit, government ministers dealt another blow to the UK’s preparedness for a threat whose consequences would be deadly.Training for key workers to manage a pandemic was stalledto make space for contingency plans around no-deal Brexit, while the UK missed opportunities for EU-level purchasing of PPE, and parliamentary enquiries into preparedness for infectious disease were delayed and eventually halted due to the 2019 election.
So it’s even more appropriate for this Christmas video produced and released by Politics JOE summing up precisely how our UK Government senior members of parliament have totally f…ed up the handling of the current pandemic inside the whole of the U.K.
[embed]https://youtu.be/xjG_VB-la7o[/embed]
I also wanted to produce this video made up from clips of statements made by UK advisors on the impact of face masks, which is another area which the U.K. government has got completely wrong.
As we were coming out of an imposed 2nd lockdown here in the U.K., the government had the foresight to announce that we would have relaxed rules between 23rd and 27th December to celebrate Christmas with family, allowing us to travel and mix with 3 other households. The guidance can be found here, please study it carefully. Since then infection rates, which had been going down have steadily been going up, so much so that many areas in the Southeast of England have had to go into Tier 3. You can learn about your own area restrictions, by going here and entering your post code.
These relaxed few days over Christmas are called ‘bubbles’and nobody in the press or so far in comedy programs has renamed these ‘bubbles’ as Christmas ‘baubles’, which would be a natural thing to do of course?
Thanks to my dear wife Clair, she came up with this other term and we rolled around the kitchen in fits of laughter!
I’ve written often about ‘Fear & Doubt’. Those two words came to me, when I was listening to an audible book during 2019, titled, ‘The Art of Happiness’ by The Dalai Lama and Howard C. Cutler. For me it’s in this place, the place of ‘Fear & Doubt’ where all suffering in our conditioned human minds starts. If we were only able to master this mental feat then we would be saved from those demons (see picture above) that roam around in our minds.
