Why It's Still Kicking Off Everywhere - Part Two

Notes from Paul Mason's lecture:
Why It's Still Kicking Off Everywhere
SOAS, London University, 10th January, 2013

http://www.amielandmelburn.org.uk/trustinfo/conferences.htm

The digital communications revolution is having a profound impact on the world.
[NB Clay Shirky - Here Comes Everybody]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Here_Comes_Everybody

In the four years since 2008 the iPhone and its Android equivalents have conquered the world. And in every student's garret there is now a wireless laptop.

There is now a sense of empowerment through connections based on trust. The trust comes from various signifiers embedded in various forms of communications and "cultural signals".

Governments and political establishments are no longer invulnerable. We all have the ability to attack their spin, lies and propaganda.

"The Counterculture of Protest" - Manuel Castells - Networks of Outrage and Hope.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Networks-Outrage-Hope-Movements-Internet/dp/0745662854/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1360160507&sr=1-1

Whole populations are now "tasting freedom", enjoying the safety of cyberspace and also occupying urban spaces.

A combination of technology and economic literacy is creating a new zeitgeist. The spirit of the age is scornful of hierarchy, "discipline", "targets" and other management-speak terminology.

There is a sense of solidarity towards a kinder, more human system.

However - we can see the danger of failing to go beyond political gestures, and failing to deal with repression. There is a feeling of disorientation, and not knowing what will happen next.

It seems "indignatos" are more motivated by the need to fight fascism than they are by the need to fight poverty.

Hierarchical working class organisations have had their heyday and are in steep decline. Modern work forces us to live multiple lives, adopting multiple personalities.

Social networking skills are extremely valuable. See: Richard Sennett - The Culture of the New Capitalism.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Culture_of_the_New_Capitalism

There is collective disillusionment. These new movements are not trying to take power, as such. They have learned that power, when monopolised, is 'evil'.

There's a quest for an alternative, more civilised, more self-controlled space within capitalism. "The Way" is everything.

There is no such thing any more as "normal life". "Non-market" alternative lifestyles - previously adopted by deliberate drop-outs - are being forced on "workers".

Another factor driving change is a psychological shift towards a quest for personal liberation - in order to become "a new kind of human being". People now want freedom, informality, beauty, lack of inhibition, etc. The Internet has become a kind of "social laboratory of the self" and a "collective mental arena". This gives rise to the formation of diverse communities. There are many attempts to create utopian communities.

The political parties can't accept that the hierarchical era is over. They are completely out of touch.

These new citizens see themselves as Autonomists, not Anarchists.

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By a bizarre coincidence yesterday's blog post was published an hour before I noticed a tweet from Paul Mason giving a link to the cover article in today's Guardian G2. The above notes were also written up during the day yesterday, just before the G2 piece was about to go online.

Please take some time to read the G2 article:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/feb/05/arab-spring-global-revolution

From Arab Spring to global revolution

In an excerpt from his book Why It's Still Kicking Off Everywhere, Paul Mason argues that a global protest movement, based on social networks, is here to stay

Something real and important was unleashed in 2011, and it has not yet gone away. I am confident enough now to call it a revolution.

There is a change in consciousness, the intuition that something big is possible; that a great change in the world's priorities is within people's grasp. The impervious nature of official politics – its inability to swerve even slightly towards the critique of capitalism intuitively felt by millions of people – has deepened the sense of alienation and mistrust.

Social media have grown more complex. Slowly, quietly, the mainstream media have become, for many involved in activism, politics and journalism itself, a secondary source of information, while social networks have become the primary source. This, in turn, speaks to the emergence of an undeclared dual power between the world of ideas and the world of official politics.

If I could list only one and not 20 reasons why it is still kicking off, it would be the rise of the networked individual colliding with the economic crisis. Something fundamental has happened – a shift in human consciousness and behaviour as momentous as that triggered by the arrival of mass consumption and mass culture in the 1900s.

The change, as sociologist Manuel Castells argues, is one-off and irreversible, like electrification, and it will condition all politics going forward. So the challenge for traditional politics, right and left, religious and secular, is, as Castells argues, that the networked social movements actually reflect the reality of "everyday" or "normal" life better than the old hierarchical forms.

Layer 442 . . . What Egypt Faces Today

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Egypt: The army's fateful choice

The president's obstinacy puts the military on the spot at a time when the power of the people has spilled across the country's political landscape

Guardian Editorial

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/feb/11/egypt-hosni-mubarak

President Mubarak last night laid a powder trail that could explode today in the disastrous confrontation between the army and the people which Egypt has managed to avoid until now. The military now faces an enormous dilemma. President Mubarak's brief and mumbling reference to handing over some powers to his vice-president last night will satisfy nobody. Will the army now attempt, on the back of suppressive action in the streets, to shape a new version of the Nasserist state, or will the demonstrators shouting "We want a civilian government" in Tahrir Square prevail?

The president's obstinacy puts the army on the spot at a time when the power of the people, like the Nile flooding its banks, has spilled across Egypt's political landscape in a torrent hardly imaginable only a few weeks ago. As the waters recede a new Egypt will be revealed, but still nobody knows how much of the old will remain and how much of the new will persist. What is clear is that the army must move swiftly to demonstrate that they are in charge and that Mubarak is now an irrelevance if a violent deterioration of the situation is not to take hold.

In effect the soldiers have to decide whether Egypt is revisiting 1952, to create a supposedly better version of the hybrid military-civilian state that was set up by the Free Officers, or going back to the revolution of 1919, to renew the British-style parliamentary democracy that was created after that upheaval. It is a momentous decision.

Egypt is split between an older generation of leaders, including some in the established opposition, most of whom appear mystified by what has happened, and a younger generation, who have been propelled by events into the political frontline. Many of these newcomers may be as confused as their elders. If the older generation have shown themselves reluctant to cede power, the younger generation is unprepared to exercise it. But that is the way things are when the impulses for change have been dammed up for so long.

The most notable thing about the situation in Egypt is the absence of strong leaders on all sides. The barons of the army and the ruling party are elderly, and compromised by their complicity in the oppressive system they have served. On the opposition side, both the head of the Muslim Brotherhood, Muhammad Badi, and the secular lawyer Mohamed ElBaradei are also old, and they have been followers of the revolution rather than leaders. Then there are the young men and women in their 20s and 30s whom we barely yet know, except for a couple of figures like Wael Ghonim.

Egypt has not had such a youthful renewal since the original Free Officers' revolution in 1952 brought majors and captains to power. Gamal Abdel Nasser was 34 at that time. The styling of yesterday's military announcement as "Communique No 1" suggests a conscious harking back to the early days. But this is not the army of 1952, when those majors and captains gathered great popular support for their own political project.

This army has a very different duty before it now, indeed one that should be staring it in the face. Confusion on both sides, the gap between the generations, and the mixture of elation, anxiety and now fear which characterise Egypt mean that Omar Suleiman was right to speak of the need for a road map, but the correct one is not the regime-friendly path he was pushing last night as he called for the protesters to leave the streets and return to work.

The military needs to isolate Mubarak and help install a national unity government which has representatives of every group and class, including some military officers, but not dominated by them. In the end the army needs to move out of politics. But before then it has the choice between facilitating change or blocking it, with possibly bloody results. Like the rest of Egypt, the army must break with the past.

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 http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/opinion/2011/02/20112611181593381.html 

The shaping of a New World Order

If the revolutions of 2011 succeed, they will force the creation of a very different regional and world system.

by Mark LeVine

[This is an abridged version of this article.]

The following description, I believe, sums up what Egypt faces today as well as, if not better, than most:

"It is not a revolution, not in the literal sense of the term, not a way of standing up and straightening things out. It is the insurrection of men with bare hands who want to lift the fearful weight, the weight of the entire world order that bears down on each of us - but more specifically on them, these ... workers and peasants at the frontiers of empires. It is perhaps the first great insurrection against global systems, the form of revolt that is the most modern and the most insane.

One can understand the difficulties facing the politicians. They outline solutions, which are easier to find than people say ... All of them are based on the elimination of the [president].

What is it that the people want? Do they really want nothing more? Everybody is quite aware that they want something completely different. This is why the politicians hesitate to offer them simply that, which is why the situation is at an impasse. Indeed, what place can be given, within the calculations of politics, to such a movement, to a movement through which blows the breath of a religion that speaks less of the hereafter than of the transfiguration of this world?"

The thing is, it was offered not by some astute commentator of the current moment, but rather by the legendary French philosopher Michel Foucault, after his return from Iran, where he witnessed firsthand the intensity of the revolution which, in late 1978, before Khomeini's return, really did seem to herald the dawn of a new era.

Foucault was roundly criticised by many people after Khomeini hijacked the revolution for not seeing the writing on the wall. But the reality was that, in those heady days where the shackles of oppression were literally being shattered, the writing was not on the wall.

Foucault understood that it was precisely a form of "insanity" that was necessary to risk everything for freedom, not just against one's government, but against the global system that has nuzzled him in its bosom for so long.

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This is a radically different image of Islam than most people - in the Muslim world as much as in the West - are used to seeing: Islam taking on state violence through militant peaceful protest; peaceful jihad (although it is one that has occurred innumerable times around the Muslim world, just at a smaller scale and without the world's press there to capture it).

Such imagery, and its significance, is a natural extension of the symbolism of Mohamed Bouazizi's self-immolation, an act of jihad that profoundly challenges the extroverted violence of the jihadis and militants who for decades, and especially since 9/11, have dominated the public perception of Islam as a form of political spirituality.

Needless to say, the latest images - of civil war inside Tahrir Square - will immediately displace these other images. Moreover, if the violence continues and some Egyptian protesters lose their discipline and start engaging in their own premeditated violence against the regime and its many tentacles, there is little doubt their doing so will be offered as "proof" that the protests are both violent and organised by the Muslim Brotherhood or other "Islamists".

A greater threat than al-Qa'eda

As this dynamic of nonviolent resistance against entrenched regime violence plays out, it is worth noting that so far, Osama bin Laden and his Egyptian deputy, Ayman Al-Zawahiri, have had little - if anything - of substance to say about the revolution in Egypt. What they've failed to ignite with an ideology of a return to a mythical and pure beginning - and a strategy of human bombs, IEDs, and planes turned into missiles - a disciplined, forward-thinking yet amorphous group of young activists and their more experienced comrades, "secular" and "religious" together (to the extent these terms are even relevant anymore), have succeeded in setting a fire with a universal discourse of freedom, democracy and human values - and a strategy of increasingly calibrated chaos aimed at uprooting one of the world's longest serving dictators.

As one chant in Egypt put it succinctly, playing on the longstanding chants of Islamists that "Islam is the solution", with protesters shouting: "Tunisia is the solution."

For those who don't understand why President Obama and his European allies are having such a hard time siding with Egypt's forces of democracy, the reason is that the amalgam of social and political forces behind the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt today - and who knows where tomorrow - actually constitute a far greater threat to the "global system" al-Qa'eda has pledged to destroy than the jihadis roaming the badlands of Afghanistan, Pakistan, or Yemen.

Mad as hell

Whether Islamist or secularist, any government of "of the people" will turn against the neoliberal economic policies that have enriched regional elites while forcing half or more of the population to live below the $2 per day poverty line. They will refuse to follow the US or Europe's lead in the war on terror if it means the continued large scale presence of foreign troops on the region's soil. They will no longer turn a blind eye, or even support, Israel's occupation and siege across the Occupied Palestinian territories. They will most likely shirk from spending a huge percentage of their national income on bloated militaries and weapons systems that serve to enrich western defence companies and prop up autocratic governments, rather than bringing stability and peace to their countries - and the region as a whole.

They will seek, as China, India and other emerging powers have done, to move the centre of global economic gravity towards their region, whose educated and cheap work forces will further challenge the more expensive but equally stressed workforces of Europe and the United States.

In short, if the revolutions of 2011 succeed, they will force the creation of a very different regional and world system than the one that has dominated the global political economy for decades, especially since the fall of communism.

This system could bring the peace and relative equality that has so long been missing globally - but it will do so in good measure by further eroding the position of the United States and other "developed" or "mature" economies. If Obama, Sarkozy, Merkel and their colleagues don't figure out a way to live with this scenario, while supporting the political and human rights of the peoples of the Middle East and North Africa, they will wind up with an adversary far more cunning and powerful than al-Qa'eda could ever hope to be: more than 300 million newly empowered Arabs who are mad as hell and are not going to take it any more.

Mark LeVine is a professor of history at UC Irvine and senior visiting researcher at the Centre for Middle Eastern Studies at Lund University in Sweden. His most recent books are Heavy Metal Islam (Random House) and Impossible Peace: Israel/Palestine Since 1989 (Zed Books).

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http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/opinion/2011/02/201126142032991448.html

My revolution betrayed

After revolutions, counter-revolutions may follow. But how can the spirit of an uprising be kept up as the years pass?

by Yuliya Tymoschenko

From snowy Kiev, I have watched the revolutions in Cairo and Tunis with joy and admiration. Egyptians and Tunisians are right to be proud of their desire to peacefully overthrow despotic governments. But, as someone who led a peaceful revolution, I hope that their pride is tempered by pragmatism - because a change of regime is only the first step in establishing a democracy backed by the rule of law. Indeed, as my country, Ukraine, is now demonstrating, after revolutionary euphoria fades and normality returns, democratic revolutions can be betrayed and reversed.

The first of Ukraine’s lessons for Egyptian and Tunisian democrats is that elections do not a democracy make. After all, what if the enemies of freedom use elections to entrench their anti-democratic agendas? What if elements of the old regime, or the cadres of militant minorities, only pretend to embrace democratic norms in order to hijack the new democracy?

In Ukraine today, these are not abstract questions. Six years after our Orange Revolution, not only is my country’s democracy under threat - but the rule of law is being systematically perverted and our national independence bartered away. Indeed, the hybrid presidential/parliamentary system that Ukraine established as part of the settlement which brought a peaceful end to our revolution is being hollowed out in order to concentrate all political power in the hands of a supposedly democratically elected president.

Of course, Ukraine’s plight does not mean that the people of Egypt and Tunisia should spurn the call for free elections. Determining the will of the people does require expression through the ballot box. But elections alone cannot solve the fundamental political problems confronting Egypt and Tunisia. In particular, they cannot create a liberal order and open society.

To be effective, elections must be preceded by an extensive debate, in which political arguments are made, attacked, defended - and, ultimately, embodied in ideologically coherent party organisations. Democratic consent can truly be given only when voters know what they are consenting to. Whoever refuses to make a public case for what he or she intends to do when in power, or lies about it – as Ukraine’s president, Viktor Yanukovich, did during his campaign against me last year – is no supporter of the democracy that citizens risked their lives to establish.

Yuliya Tymoshenko was prime minister of Ukraine and is now leader of the opposition.

This article was first published by Project Syndicate.

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http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/opinion/2011/02/201127114827382865.html

Suleiman: The CIA's man in Cairo

Suleiman, a friend to the US and reported torturer, has long been touted as a presidential successor.

by Lisa Hajjar

On January 29, Omar Suleiman, Egypt’s top spy chief, was anointed vice president by tottering dictator, Hosni Mubarak. By appointing Suleiman, part of a shake-up of the cabinet in an attempt to appease the masses of protesters and retain  his own grip on the presidency, Mubarak has once again shown his knack for devilish shrewdness. Suleiman has long been favoured by the US government for his ardent anti-Islamism, his willingness to talk and act tough on Iran - and he has long been the CIA’s main man in Cairo.

Mubarak knew that Suleiman would command an instant lobby of supporters at Langley and among 'Iran nexters' in Washington - not to mention among other authoritarian mukhabarat-dependent regimes in the region. Suleiman is a favourite of Israel too; he held the Israel dossier and directed Egypt’s efforts to crush Hamas by demolishing the tunnels that have functioned as a smuggling conduit for both weapons and foodstuffs into Gaza.

According to a WikiLeak(ed) US diplomatic cable, titled 'Presidential Succession in Egypt', dated May 14, 2007:

    "Egyptian intelligence chief and Mubarak consigliere, in past years Soliman was often cited as likely to be named to the long-vacant vice-presidential post. In the past two years, Soliman has stepped out of the shadows, and allowed himself to be photographed, and his meetings with foreign leaders reported. Many of our contacts believe that Soliman, because of his military background, would at least have to figure in any succession scenario."

From 1993 until Saturday, Suleiman was chief of Egypt’s General Intelligence Service. He remained largely in the shadows until 2001, when he started taking over powerful dossiers in the foreign ministry; he has since become a public figure, as the WikiLeak document attests. In 2009, he was touted by the London Telegraph and Foreign Policy as the most powerful spook in the region, topping even the head of Mossad.

In the mid-1990s, Suleiman worked closely with the Clinton administration in devising and implementing its rendition program; back then, rendition involved kidnapping suspected terrorists and transferring them to a third country for trial. In The Dark Side, Jane Mayer describes how the rendition program began:

    "Each rendition was authorised at the very top levels of both governments [the US and Egypt] ... The long-serving chief of the Egyptian central intelligence agency, Omar Suleiman, negotiated directly with top [CIA] officials. [Former US Ambassador to Egypt Edward] Walker described the Egyptian counterpart, Suleiman, as 'very bright, very realistic', adding that he was cognisant that there was a downside to 'some of the negative things that the Egyptians engaged in, of torture and so on. But he was not squeamish, by the way'. (p. 113).

    "Technically, US law required the CIA to seek 'assurances' from Egypt that rendered suspects wouldn't face torture. But under Suleiman's reign at the EGIS, such assurances were considered close to worthless. As Michael Scheuer, a former CIA officer [head of the al-Qaeda desk], who helped set up the practise of rendition, later testified, even if such 'assurances' were written in indelible ink, 'they weren't worth a bucket of warm spit'."

Under the Bush administration, in the context of "the global war on terror", US renditions became "extraordinary", meaning the objective of kidnapping and extra-legal transfer was no longer to bring a suspect to trial - but rather for interrogation to seek actionable intelligence. The extraordinary rendition program landed some people in CIA black sites - and others were turned over for torture-by-proxy to other regimes. Egypt figured large as a torture destination of choice, as did Suleiman as Egypt’s torturer-in-chief. At least one person extraordinarily rendered by the CIA to Egypt — Egyptian-born Australian citizen Mamdouh Habib — was reportedly tortured by Suleiman himself.

Suleiman the torturer

In October 2001, Habib was seized from a bus by Pakistani security forces. While detained in Pakistan, at the behest of American agents, he was suspended from a hook and electrocuted repeatedly. He was then turned over to the CIA, and in the process of transporting him to Egypt he endured the usual treatment: his clothes were cut off, a suppository was stuffed in his anus, he was put into a diaper - and 'wrapped up like a spring roll'.

In Egypt, as Habib recounts in his memoir, My Story: The Tale of a Terrorist Who Wasn’t, he was repeatedly subjected to electric shocks, immersed in water up to his nostrils and beaten. His fingers were broken and he was hung from metal hooks. At one point, his interrogator slapped him so hard that his blindfold was dislodged, revealing the identity of his tormentor: Suleiman.

Lisa Hajjar teaches sociology at the University of California - Santa Barbara and is a co-editor of Jadaliyya.

This article first appeared on Jadaliyya.

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Layer 10 Liberation, Theology and Philosophy.

Last Saturday my daughter handed me a small book. It’s a copy of Christmas Humphries’ ‘Buddhism’, which I’ve been vaguely aware has been missing from my bookshelves these past 23 years, but didn’t know where it was. I had a feeling it would turn up someday. It has my name written inside its front cover in loopy handwriting.

It’s a Pelican paperback that I bought in Malawi in 1974 for the equivalent of its cover price of 55p. Humphries, who was born in 1901, first published it in 1949. He was president of the British Buddhist Society for 40 years, which is some achievement.

It’s a superb piece of work, a brilliant distillation and examination of some very complex ideas. The section on Zen is a masterpiece of concision and illumination.

There’s also an excellent chapter on Tibetan Buddhism, which I’ve been wanting to know more about since my friend B told me that the new woman in his life, C, is a student of the Tibetan school of Buddhism. When I met her and spoke with her I had the impression that she knows almost as little of Zen as I know of the Tibetan School.

The second reason I’ve been wanting to learn more about this particular School, of course, is that Tibet itself seems to have become the hot international cause celebre since we’ve entered the year of the Beijing Olympics, and since the Tibetan monks started protesting about China’s oppression in Tibet.

Thirdly, I’ve become very interested in the Dalai Lama himself since I read “Destructive Emotions” and realised he’s an incredibly intelligent and spiritual leader, and has very strong links with Daniel Goleman and his work on brain science and Emotional Intelligence.
This has stimulated my interest in the practice of meditation and its effect on one’s ability to manage ‘destructive emotions’, as well as its contribution to developing an attitude of ‘Loving-kindness’.

I’d begun to get interested in the Dalai Lama some time ago after reading a brilliant little book of his called ‘Ancient Wisdom, Modern World - Ethics for the New Millenium’.

Buddhism hit the world headlines earlier year after the monks in Burma came out on the streets in protest about the military regime there, and for a while seemed to be starting an insurrection that could free the country from the regime’s yoke. This was social and political action, guided by spiritual intelligence, the scale of which had been previously unimaginable. Maybe the Year of the Rat and the start of a new cycle has something to do with these events. If so, the next 12 years could be very exciting, and very different to the past 12 years.

A Buddhist temple in Japan has decided not to host the Japanese stage of the Olympic torch relay as a protest about China’s treatment of monks and the general populace in Tibet.

Could it be that Buddhism is a liberation theology or philosophy that could increasingly become a force for good in the world in the 21st century? What if millions of people got into the practice of daily meditation and started to free their minds and their spirits as a precursor to freeing their countries from repression, hatred, and other destructive emotions?

I was reading an article the other day about Catholic priests in South America practising what they called liberation theology as an antidote and resistance to fascist dictatorships and military governments, starting back in the 1980’s.

Of course the Pope, John-Paul II, being a conservative and an anti-communist, disowned the budding movement and ordered the priests to stop ‘meddling’ in politics. Which was pretty much like telling them to give up their religion, I reckon, since Jesus Christ seemingly had a mission to free the people from oppression by the military, the occupying power, the commercial interests of the day, and indeed the existing priesthood and their corrupt practices in the guise of religion.

It appears that the current generation of left-leaning and progressive political leaders in South America were indeed influenced by the liberation theology of their priests, if not their church, and continue to this day to be guided by the spirit of Loving-kindness, which was the central message of Jesus as well as the Buddha, if I’m not mistaken.

Such beliefs have within them the notion that all humans are equal, and that justice, love, and freedom from oppression and coercion are essential aspects of spiritual intelligence. Which is in marked contrast to the neo-conservative/CIA/military-industrial world view which assumes that the New World Order requires the USA and its ‘allies’ to exercise world domination in the name of democracy, globalised economics (i.e. capital and rapacious Big Money), ‘freedom’ and God.

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One of the wonderfully intelligent things that appeals to me about Buddhism generally, and Zen in particular, is its freedom from a belief in ‘God’ - freedom from an all-powerful deity. Certain forms of Buddhism contain a great deal of ritual and study of ‘holy scriptures’, if you will, which may have a great deal of appeal for people that aren’t inclined towards intellectual effort or developing their own intuition. But it seems to me that in its purest form Buddhism is essentially a philosophy and a system of psychological practices that are aimed principally at developing spiritual intelligence and ultimately ‘enlightenment’. As such, there is not only no need to believe in a Supreme Being - to do so is in fact very unhelpful in enabling human beings to assume responsibility for their own spiritual health and strength.

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This blog needs to conclude with some quotations from Christmas(!) Humphries.

“What is Buddhism? To describe it is as difficult as describing London. Is it Mayfair, Bloomsbury, or the Old Kent Road?

Buddhism is a family of religions and philosophies. The Buddha himself wrote nothing, and none of his teaching was written down for at least four hundreds years after his death. [The Buddha was born in India 600 years before Christ.]

The oldest School, and probably the nearest to the original teaching, is the Theravada (the Doctrine of the Elders), and this today is the religion of Ceylon, Burma, Siam [Thailand], and Cambodia.

The Mahayana (Large Vehicle) includes the rest of the Buddhist world. [Mongolia, China, Korea and Japan]

But the peculiarities of Tibetan Buddhism, which covers Tibet and its neighbours, Bhutan, Sikkim and Nepal, are so marked that though it is part of the Mahayana it may be considered a School on its own.

The same applies to the Zen School of Japan, which is utterly different from any other School of Buddhism or from any other religion-philosophy. [Maybe he’s not considering Taoism here, which seems to me to have many similarities as a ‘religion-philosophy’.]

Buddhism’s range of subjects is so vast it is in fact it is in fact the most comprehensive and profound school of spiritual achievement known to history. In its earliest form it included the finest moral philosophy then known to man, with a range of mind-development and pioneer psychology that was second to none.

In its developed form it includes religion, advanced philosophy, mysticism, metaphysics and psychology. It includes the triple Yoga of India - intellectual, devotional, and the way of action - and it includes its own unique contribution to human achievement, Zen.

In every [Buddhist] country it has [enriched] the indigenous culture, and in China and Japan produced the greatest art of each country. Indeed the art of the T’ang Dynasty of China, often described as the finest in the world, was largely Buddhist art. Throughout the East it has set such a standard of tolerance, gentleness and a love of nature and all forms of life, that in religious history, where these virtues have not been prominent, it stands supreme.

In Ceylon, Burma and [Thailand] the worship of nature-spirits continues side-by-side with Buddhism, while in China and Japan the Confucian, Taoist and Shinto beliefs have modified the entering stream of Buddhism. Still more has the indigenous Bön religion of Tibet corrupted Tibetan Buddhism, itself already mixed with Hindu Tantric practices.

[It may be said that] the Buddha’s major task on earth was to make available to all mankind the principles of the Wisdom which the Brahmans had hitherto preserved as their tight monopoly.
In matters of spiritual knowledge the last word lies with the [Taoist] Tao Te Ching: ‘He who speaks does not know; he who knows does not speak’.

Buddhism, like any other form of relative truth, must vary with the individual, and grow for him with his individual growth. Only the Buddha fully understood ‘Buddhism’!

Buddhism may be compared to a net - a net of principles, life-tendencies, knots in the flow of life, vortices of force called matter. For life is motion and life is one. Pick up the knot of a net, therefore, and the rest of the net comes with it.

A bit like a blog entry really.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christmas_Humphreys

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dalai_lama

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tibet

http://uk.news.yahoo.com/afp/20080418/tts-china-unrest-tibet-rights-japan-oly-48988b0.html