Australia's swing to the Greens
A conversation about what it means...
- From Colin (27 August 2010)
- From Zibethicus (31 August 2010)
- Note by Colin
- From Lindy Reid (1 Sept 2010)
- From Lindy Reid (2 Sept 2010)
- From Colin (6 Sept 2010)
From Colin
Friday, 27 Aug 2010
Subject: Australia's election - the swing to Green
Jai Ma.
Some reflections on last weekend's election result...
One clear result was a big swing to the third party, the Greens. Their share of the vote grew from under 8 percent to 11.42 percent -- a result that has been described as a Greenslide.
The Greens will hold the balance of power in the new Senate. In the more powerful House of Representatives, they have one seat only, but even this is a breakthrough, as previously they had none.
Apparently, more Australians are starting to see that the Earth matters, and cannot be taken for granted...
What does that mean to me as a mystic of Kali?
I see the Goddess as the soul of the world, and the world as the body of the Goddess.
Matter matters. Earth matters. The role of pollution in global warming is something that matters a lot...
Whether on not the Greens have all the right answers, it seems to me that they are at least addressing important questions....
I wonder how other worshippers of Kali feel about topics like this?
Om Shantih
Colin
From Zibethicus
31 August 2010
Subject: The future is Green, but it might be the colour of decay...
Namaste, Ji -
You ask us what The Greens' increased vote in Australia might mean for us as devotees. In a way this is a political question more than a strictly religious one - if it is possible to maintain any real distinction between the two. On that level, I would say that it meant nothing to me as a devotee, any more than a Laboral or Libour victory would. Although, as you know, a former member of The Greens myself, I don't necessarily directly identify my political views with my religious perspective.
As you know, there are or have been members of the Mystics of Kaali with very different political views to mine. They are no less valid members for that fact.
However, of course, in 'real' life things aren't quite as simplistic as all that. I just read that Vivekananda claimed that Ramakrishna was so little able to abide even the touch of Money that his body would recoil if a coin was pressed against it, even (so Vivekananda said) if he happened to be asleep at the time. I have no reason to doubt this, but my point is that that is, inevitably, a political perspective as well as a religious one.
You might recall, perhaps, the passage in The Name of the Rose where Brother William explains to his disciple Adso that, with regard to the current dispute in the church over the rule of poverty; “'poor' does not so much mean owing a palace or not; it means, rather, keeping or renouncing the right to legislate on earthly matters.” In the same way, while reflecting on your question, it has come to seem to me as though Ramakrishna's often-repeated injunctions against what he called 'woman and gold' to his male followers and 'man and gold' to his female followers gets right to the root of the political problem which The Greens are putting themselves forward as an 'answer' to; the question of the now-threatened sustainability of the Earth itself.
Perhaps this is what really underlies any question about The Greens, because as far as I can see the only substantial remaining difference between them and the other major parties is that they at least can understand the extreme gravity of the crisis which all humanity is now facing. And, since that crisis has been created by our wanton use of fossil fuels, it is a political crisis in its very nature.
And so, to this extent, uncomfortably, the question of the political role of a devotee of Kaali comes into being. On one level one can take a vaguely deistic point of view if one wishes: She created us, yes, but that doesn't mean that we as individuals are of any more significance to Her than any of the myriad of our skin cells which die every day are to us. They live and die below what we call our 'consciousness', and it may well be the same between us and Her.
Yet the mystical experience suggests otherwise, and suggests it strongly. One is left with a metalinguistic 'feeling' of - what shall I say? - of one's own 'significance' and even 'immortality' in a very abstract sense; that of being one small note in a symphony. The note comes and goes, but while it might seen insignificant in itself the symphony is not the same without it. Indeed, in some cases, such as the famous opening of Beethoven's Fifth, any note which was missing would transform the entire work to come. (And yet the symphony could not exist in that form if the note did not stop).
And Ramakrishna's own words speak repeatedly of Her having a feeling towards us like any mother does towards her children (almost any mother, anyway). On that assumption, one is entitled to wonder just how our Mother would feel about us being let out to play in the back yard. The object of this play is surely not to burn the house down!
And so, to that extent, we can assume that we have an overall role of 'stewardship' towards our planet. Even if it is only one of many inhabited worlds, as certain Puranas state, Maa in Her wisdom has chosen to keep us away from the others (or them away from us), and we have nowhere else available to go.
So far so dull and worthy. What, if anything, may we infer from this 'stewardship' we have?
Taking the metaphor of Kaali as Mother still further, any mother who sends her children out to play expects them to 'play nice' in the sense of not fighting amongst each other and sharing the available resources fairly. One hardly expects that She expects less of the 'adults' whom she has sent out into the playground which is the world...
However - and here we approach the root of the problem, thealogically speaking - this is hardly what has happened in the world as it exists today. On the contrary, while the news on the climate is bad and getting worse by the day (the Northwest Passage is open again, as it has been the last couple of years, for the first time in recorded history), a concerted hard-right media campaign exists to distort the science and spread misinformation, and to viciously attack climate scientists who speak out for the planet. And, since this news is more than welcome to those people who are committed to a highly-resourced Western lifestyle, it is received with great enthusiasm in parts of the world where people are profiting from things as they currently are.
And, presumably, from the standpoint of a devotee who accepts that Maa made everything - even the climate change deniers and their capacity for reckless destruction of our painfully-achieved asymptote of 'civilisation', we are obliged to not look away from this fact, but to explain it as best as we can, rather than explaining it away.
What, in fact, can it mean?
One possibility is that it means what it appears to mean; that Maa, our loving but also frightful Mother, is about to allow us to encompass our own destruction through truly unprecedented stupidity and greed.
Are these the actions of a loving mother - and Ramakrishna insisted that She could be understood in that way?
On the fact of it, no. Surely she wouldn't allow us to play with fire and burn ourselves?
And yet, that's exactly what has happened. The evidence is incontrovertible: we have drastically altered the planet's natural cycles in ways which we are only beginning to be affected by. And the effects will last for another thousand years. Nor are we the only species to be affected; our actions have resulted in a rate of extinction of other species not seen since the demise of the dinosaurs, which at least was no fault of their own.
It is especially poignant and sometimes painful to be a parent oneself in these times. One hardly feels that She would want Her beloved children to go through something like this. But perhaps She can't stop it? Perhaps She doesn't want to stop it...
She's not obliged to think the way we do, let alone to explain Herself to us. Do you explain to one of your skin cells why you need to scrub it off in the shower?
So perhaps the outlook really is as bad as it seems. It certainly can't be excluded. Yet it's hard to imagine that She would create us with the capacity to love Her back, only to destroy us before we've even begun to understand ourselves, much less Her.
So let's postulate that She will somehow ensure that we don't actually destroy ourselves before our time - whenever that might be. What is She up to, then?
Perhaps She is teaching us a lesson in a rather drastic manner. Perhaps She will still allow us to pull ourselves back from the brink, in time to preserve a liveable planet. Perhaps this is the only way we can learn it - to be thoroughly frightened in a way that will last. Illustration - our grandchildren, already struggling to survive on a badly damaged planet, will search the archives for the reasons why. They will find, let's imagine, the Internet in some sort of accessible format (although this can't at all be taken for granted). They will look at the online forums where the climate change deniers strutted their stuff. And they will find that the ultimate reason given for not acting to reduce greenhouse gas emissions was 'to preserve our current way of life'.
The wilder deniers couple this with incessant claims of a conspiracy which involves every single scientific academy world-around, supposedly in collusion with the United Nations to impose a one-world socialist government which will, as they say, 'take away our cars'. They say this like it's a bad thing, of course. In fact, on one of the boards where, as I see it, I struggle with seeming futility to speak out for sanity and survival of the planet, I was recently accused by one high-profile denier of being an agent of the international banking firm J P Morgan. She gave no reason for advancing this claim. Presumably it was on the grounds that she didn't like the questions I was asking her; she certainly offered no better answers to them...
And so, one can imagine a future, more enlightened generation looking back at the reasons why they themselves have to live in a poverty both material and spiritual (a devastated ecosystem with many species and natural wonders gone for good), and find that it was all for the sake of 'wo/man and gold'. And, especially, 'car'...
And this terrible lesson, taught so terribly, will never again be forgotten. The twentieth and twenty-first centuries will be regarded as the darkest of the Dark Ages, and the climate change deniers will live in infamy forever, despised by all humanity as the most wanton of all the barbarian wreckers, both because they wrecked a whole planet where their predecessors could only destroy nations, and because unlike their predecessors, they should and could have known better.
I cannot myself call that a 'happy' ending, but it beats the fuck out of the first alternative, doesn't it?
*
I have no time for any further speculation in this line. I offer the two possibilities for meditation. They seem about equally likely to me. Either way, like the alien philosopher Bvalltu says in Star Maker (The Other Earth, ch.3); “Even if the powers destroy us...who are we, to condemn them? As well might a fleeting word judge the speaker that forms it. Perhaps they use us for their own high ends, use our strength and our weakness, our joy and our pain, in some theme inconceivable to us, and excellent.”
It seems to me that The Greens have compromised themselves beyond any hope of redemption. While they are the only party with anything like a real grasp of the extreme severity of the crisis we have blundered into so foolishly, they are not in a position to advance their agenda while they compromise with either major party. What is needed to have a reasonable change of long-term survival for humanity is nothing less than a total transformation of our ways of life. To participate in the current parliamentary process, at least on the terms currently being engaged in by The Greens, is ultimately to seek to perpetuate the way of life which is the problem in the first place.
Unfortunately, I can see no way out while the right-wing dominates mass media to the extent that it currently does. That seems to me to be the root of the problem, and none of the major parties dare to take the media on, even if they wished to. As most people get their 'opinions' directly from the media, and the media has a massive vested interest in promoting climate change denial (the current chairman of the ABC is an open climate change denier), there is no way of ensuring that the mass of the electorate, who are now being very thoroughly mislead indeed about the situation, receive the accurate scientific information which they desperately need to be able to make an informed decision, especially at election time. The media is totally corrupted in this matter.
(Case in point, from one of the boards I frequent, run by the ABC. Said board just published a document from one of the moderators, priding themselves on the 'fairness' and 'human decency' they feel their moderating policy shows. I pointed out that Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the IPCC, has just been cleared of the allegations of financial impropriety made so loudly against him in the media during the failed 'Climategate' beat-up. I adduced just a few examples of the vicious howls of 'corruption' and worse which had been made against Pachauri by climate change deniers on the very board I was writing one, and asked the moderators to explain how running those smears was compatible with their vaunted policy of 'human decency'. How had this been shown to Pachauri, I asked...
To my surprise they ran it (unlike so many of my posts), but nobody's actually answered the questions I raised. And neither has the ABC reported the news of the clearing of Pachauri. They were happy enough to run any number of vicious allegations against him, though...)
No doubt you noticed the near-absence of the subject of climate change from the election. Even The Greens seemed to be playing it down. Are all the parties responding only to polls which show that the Australian sheeple simply don't want to know about the threat, as they hope it'll just go away if they ignore it?
I'm afraid that I can't myself see anything positive coming out of the current political situation. The Greens cannot and will not achieve anything of substance, even as trivial as some sort of emissions trading scheme which seeks to paper over the cracks which are all-too-clearly spreading all over the 'End of History' 'free'-market model which has led us into this trap.
As far as I can see at present, the only way that people are going to demand action is when they simply can't deny it any more, as has been the case in Russia recently, when half the country caught fire. But by then it will be too late, and I foresee a likely desperate backwards slide into extreme reaction, as frightened and angry Australians seek to scapegoat anyone other than themselves for the blame. No doubt one of the usual suspects will be selected by the cynical demagogues who preside over the final savage stages of the catastrophe...
And this, too, She will have allowed to happen, if it goes that way. Remember, She destroys as well as creates and preserves. What if our time has come, sooner than we imagined?
The other alternative is simply that the current system will simply collapse under the strain of, not its own contradictions as Marx predicted, but the devastation which it has wrought so wantonly on the ecosystems to which it failed to assign a monetary value. I find myself in the ironic situation of mildly 'hoping' that this outcome will occur relatively soon, in order to allow the process of evolving a new and hopefully more humane form of human society to begin. It is just a shame that in this case it will have to be founded on the ashes of the old society, and that many relatively innocent people will have to suffer in that case, but many innocent people are already suffering now from the effects of climate change, most notably at present in Pakistan and Russia. Perhaps She will have to allow one social order to collapse before a new one can be constructed by some sort of consensus. It doesn't seem that those who profit from the current state of things are too keen on accepting the reality of things as they stand, and we are just at the beginning of the unpleasant changes to come for the next thousand years...
JAI MAA!
Zibethicus
Note by Colin
After receiving the above message by Zibethicus, I forwarded it to members and friends in two sections, on Sept 1 and Sept 2. The following responses came from Lindy Reid...
From Lindy Reid
1 Sept 2010
Re: The future is Green, but it might be the colour of decay...
> You ask us what The Greens' increased vote in Australia might mean for us as devotees. In a way this is a political question more than a strictly religious one - if it is possible to maintain any real distinction between the two. On that level, I would say that it meant nothing to me as a devotee, any more than a Laboral or Libour victory would. Although, as you know, a former member of The Greens myself, I don't necessarily directly identify my political views with my religious perspective.
Heard Bob Brown's list of "demands" on ABC radio earlier today. Annabel Crabbe referred to them this afternoon as "a-green-ments" (think it might have been a slip of the tongue, and a very witty one, too).
>You might recall, perhaps, the passage in The Name of the Rose where Brother William explains to his disciple Adso that, with regard to the current dispute in the church over the rule of poverty; "'poor' does not so much mean owing a palace or not; it means, rather, keeping or renouncing the right to legislate on earthly matters." In the same way, while reflecting on your question, it has come to seem to me as though Ramakrishna's often-repeated injunctions against what he called 'woman and gold' to his male followers and 'man and gold' to his female followers gets right to the root of the political problem which The Greens are putting themselves forward as an 'answer' to; the question of the now-threatened sustainability of the Earth itself.
I'm interested in the reference to The Name of the Rose. Many Jesuits would be offending against the vow of poverty, then! Especially the lawyer, Frank Brennan (who just worked on the Bill of Rights project).
> I have no time for any further speculation in this line. I offer the two possibilities for meditation. They seem about equally likely to me. Either way, like the alien philosopher Bvalltu says in Star Maker (The Other Earth, ch.3); "Even if the powers destroy us...who are we, to condemn them? As well might a fleeting word judge the speaker that forms it. Perhaps they use us for their own high ends, use our strength and our weakness, our joy and our pain, in some theme inconceivable to us, and excellent."
Well said. We are in "Kali Yuga", are we not? Only She knows the outcome...
Thanks,
Lindy
From Lindy Reid
2 Sept 2010
Re: The future is Green, but it might be the colour of decay...
> It seems to me that The Greens have compromised themselves beyond any hope of redemption. <snip>
> Perhaps She will have to allow one social order to collapse before a new one can be constructed by some sort of consensus. It doesn't seem that those who profit from the current state of things are too keen on accepting the reality of things as they stand, and we are just at the beginning of the unpleasant changes to come for the next thousand years...
Unfortunately, I think it's all inevitable...
Lindy
From Colin Robinson
6 Sept 2010
Re: The future is Green, but it might be the colour of decay...
Namaste.
> You ask us what The Greens' increased vote in Australia might mean for us as devotees. In a way this is a political question more than a strictly religious one - if it is possible to maintain any real distinction between the two. On that level, I would say that it meant nothing to me as a devotee, any more than a Laboral or Libour victory would. Although, as you know, a former member of The Greens myself, I don't necessarily directly identify my political views with my religious perspective.
> As you know, there are or have been members of the Mystics of Kaali with very different political views to mine. They are no less valid members for that fact.
The distinction between political and religious questions does seem problematic to me. A quote from the preface to Olaf Stapledon's book Star Maker...
"This experience... involves detachment from all private, all social, all racial ends; not in the sense that it leads a man to reject them, but that it makes him prize them in a new way. The 'spiritual life' seems to be in essence the attempt to discover and adopt the attitude which is in fact appropriate to our experience as a whole... if this supremely humanizing experience does not produce, along with a kind of piety toward fate, the resolute will to serve our waking humanity, it is a mere sham and a snare."
Of course it's true that there have been a range of views among people who have either been members of Mystics of Kali, or taken part in its worship meetings. One shouldn't expect people who worship at the same shrine to necessarily back the same political party...
I also want to say that my own understanding of these matters is evolving, and perhaps I'm becoming more inclined to discuss and explore certain classes of political topics than I may have been when Mystics began, back in 1997. As you'll remember, one topic we discussed fairly recently was the meaning of Nazi experience.
> However, of course, in 'real' life things aren't quite as simplistic as all that. I just read that Vivekananda claimed that Ramakrishna was so little able to abide even the touch of Money that his body would recoil if a coin was pressed against it, even (so Vivekananda said) if he happened to be asleep at the time. I have no reason to doubt this, but my point is that that is, inevitably, a political perspective as well as a religious one.
> You might recall, perhaps, the passage in The Name of the Rose where Brother William explains to his disciple Adso that, with regard to the current dispute in the church over the rule of poverty; “'poor' does not so much mean owing a palace or not; it means, rather, keeping or renouncing the right to legislate on earthly matters.” In the same way, while reflecting on your question, it has come to seem to me as though Ramakrishna's often-repeated injunctions against what he called 'woman and gold' to his male followers and 'man and gold' to his female followers gets right to the root of the political problem which The Greens are putting themselves forward as an 'answer' to; the question of the now-threatened sustainability of the Earth itself.
In context of what we are talking about, the terms "woman and gold" or "man and gold" bring to mind a phrase often heard in election commentary -- "hip-pocket nerve"... Often assumed to be decisive in how people vote... but in this case, it doesn't seem to have been.
> Perhaps this is what really underlies any question about The Greens, because as far as I can see the only substantial remaining difference between them and the other major parties is that they at least can understand the extreme gravity of the crisis which all humanity is now facing. And, since that crisis has been created by our wanton use of fossil fuels, it is a political crisis in its very nature.
If that is the only substantial difference between the Greens and the others, it is surely a very substantial one!
> And so, to this extent, uncomfortably, the question of the political role of a devotee of Kaali comes into being. On one level one can take a vaguely deistic point of view if one wishes: She created us, yes, but that doesn't mean that we as individuals are of any more significance to Her than any of the myriad of our skin cells which die every day are to us. They live and die below what we call our 'consciousness', and it may well be the same between us and Her.
> Yet the mystical experience suggests otherwise, and suggests it strongly. One is left with a metalinguistic 'feeling' of - what shall I say? - of one's own 'significance' and even 'immortality' in a very abstract sense; that of being one small note in a symphony. The note comes and goes, but while it might seen insignificant in itself the symphony is not the same without it. Indeed, in some cases, such as the famous opening of Beethoven's Fifth, any note which was missing would transform the entire work to come. (And yet the symphony could not exist in that form if the note did not stop).
Well said! I've seen life and music compared before, for instance by Stapledon. But the way you've expressed it is beautifully succinct.
> I have no time for any further speculation in this line. I offer the two possibilities for meditation. They seem about equally likely to me. Either way, like the alien philosopher Bvalltu says in Star Maker (The Other Earth, ch.3); “Even if the powers destroy us...who are we, to condemn them? As well might a fleeting word judge the speaker that forms it. Perhaps they use us for their own high ends, use our strength and our weakness, our joy and our pain, in some theme inconceivable to us, and excellent.”
Yes. That's an important statement.
> It seems to me that The Greens have compromised themselves beyond any hope of redemption. While they are the only party with anything like a real grasp of the extreme severity of the crisis we have blundered into so foolishly, they are not in a position to advance their agenda while they compromise with either major party. What is needed to have a reasonable change of long-term survival for humanity is nothing less than a total transformation of our ways of life. To participate in the current parliamentary process, at least on the terms currently being engaged in by The Greens, is ultimately to seek to perpetuate the way of life which is the problem in the first place.
What is the alternative? What sort of political strategy would be better?
> No doubt you noticed the near-absence of the subject of climate change from the election. Even The Greens seemed to be playing it down.
Perhaps they emphasized it less than you would have liked... However, I have in front of me a Greens statement that I received in my letterbox during the campaign, and climate change is the first issue mentioned.
> Are all the parties responding only to polls which show that the Australian sheeple simply don't want to know about the threat, as they hope it'll just go away if they ignore it?
"Australian sheeple" ??
I'd agree that Tony Abbott seems to have perceived us voters as such. For months he attacked the Labor government using very simple words, constantly repeated -- "great big new tax" etc. His assumption seems to have been that if people could be persuaded not to vote Labor, then they would automatically vote Liberal.
But what happened? While there was indeed a big swing of primary votes away from the ALP, the swing to Liberal was marginal, because of the number of people who chose Greens, independents etc.
As I write, it is still possible that the Libs may form a government, with support of rural independents.
Yet... the fact remains that we Australian voters did not move in the direction we were being herded. Rather in the opposite direction.
> I'm afraid that I can't myself see anything positive coming out of the current political situation. The Greens cannot and will not achieve anything of substance,
Of course there are limits to how much they can do right now. After all, they are not the biggest party, nor the second biggest. They have exactly one member in the House of Reps and a few more in the Senate.
On the other hand, right now they are the fastest growing party. The expression "straw in the wind" comes to mind...
Om Shantih
Colin
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