Osho 3 Talks

Some interesting things to think about.  It’s always good to think:

20 Difficult Things to Accomplish In This World
Zen Is a Revolution
Why Is Communication So Difficult?

I’m In Barcelona!!! For A Yoga Conference. Thoughts Arising – New Facebook Post

Communication

Looking Back

I am often embarrassed  by seeing the posts that get the most traffic on my blog.  I feel embarrassed by my communication style and by the content, especially when I have said that I and my close contacts are being stalked.  It was real enough at the time, but looking back it feels unreal because now I am not feeling as I did then.  What I can’t say for sure is that all of this embarrassment is justified.  It is possible that I was being stalked.  Certainly I was angry and afraid at the times I wrote that way, as well as feeling guilt over the fact, as I saw it, that I was failing in relationships.  I feel as if I was wrong because it was so long ago and nothing seems to be happening now.  I still hear the odd thing, but nothing major.

I want people to read my blog because I want them to get hold of the antipsychiatry that I wish to communicate, but I feel as if most of my blog is embarrassing rubbish, so it isn’t very easy for me to drive traffic by way of my blog.

I’ve still got lots of library books out about antipsychiatry.  I know I have been in agreement with them but my position gets weakened by the fact that I continue to be detained and that things seem relatively tolerable at the moment.  I’m not aware of any major feelings of being stalked, and I’ve got a place to eat and sleep and shelter.  As much as I would like to go on reading these books it seems pointless and that I am fruitlessly in strong agreement with them, when nothing I say or do makes any difference to the way I am viewed and treated.  It’s a waste of time and mental energy to keep reading, though I can see where they go and I agree with them.  I’m a patient, it doesn’t matter what I think about these things.  The psychiatric staff where I am believe they are the people with the right view and way of doing things.

So being constantly confronted on my dashboard with post titles that make me cringe with embarrassment is taking its toll on me when it comes to confidence that my blog can communicate anything worthwhile and understandable to a new reader.  I don’t know why people look for these posts as opposed to some of my more rational ones, but they keep going for posts the content of which makes me cringe.  So I have a difficult relationship with my blog at the moment.

A Song From My Youth

I met Jesus at the crossroads
Where the two ways meet
Satan too was standing there
And he said come this way
There’s lots and lots of pleasures
I can give to you today
But I said no
There’s Jesus here
Just see what he offers me
Down here my sins forgiven
Up there a home in heaven
Praise God that’s the way for me.

Down Time

I am hijacking my blog with complaints about staff and such like, and I think I would like a change of direction.

A few weeks ago I made some notes in my notebook.  I looked at them briefly (that is, the first note), and decided against putting them all up here.  They had been intended for my blog at the time.

One thing I was thinking at that time is that I am honouring the wrong writing voice (for the sake of psychiatric staff reading, many writers recognise more than one voice.  There is a play by Pirandello called ‘Six Characters In Search Of An Author’.  It is something like that and doesn’t call for medication.  They are writing voices, not psychotic voices, whatever psychotic is supposed to mean).  I recognise at least two voices that present as – one a motivation for writing, one a source.  The one I had been ‘honouring’ was a ‘yatter, yatter, yeah, critical’ one.  A follow and reproduce one, not a source.  I felt the one I needed to honour was more grounded and sprang out  of an emotional/devotional relationship to God and love for others.  I’m not sure, in fact I know that I have not always succeeded in going with that perception or even in always believing it to have been valuable.

I will write a few of the notes I made, especially after having put this one in writing.  Some of them were made with my blog in mind, others with my psychologist.  Also I was thinking about Terry at the time, because he had recently given me some time that meant a great deal to me.

~~~//~~~

“My lecturer, on a day like the one I’m having today, said there was a lot of ‘id’ around . . . This always seems to happen when I feel inspired and best able to express myself . . . Everybody around me seems artificially happy and deliberately uncaring.  I’m even feeling as if some people are being deliberately obstructive.  I’m sitting in a cafe trying to write”.

(I then drew a line in a different place and started again with . . .)

“I know I’m not mimicking anyone”.

“The staff are supposed to be here for us, not themselves and each other.  But the way they misbehave then lie about it or get evasive shows they are basically here for themselves”.

“Thoughts, staring, fear and outrage – grief” (That is, when I get a thought I want to let run and chase where it is going, people stare at me, I feel fear and outrage which I suppose to be grief because the inspired thought is stopped).

“Honouring the wrong voice.  Writing voice – spirit”.

“Jim said ‘come on’ when letting me out of the door.  I said ‘no, I’m not a dog’.  Possible misinterpretation of what meant as affectionate support.  Bless him”.

“I love Jim – I enjoy his smile when he sees me”.

“Kiran – mimicry, bubble – I vulnerable, she not – shameless, barefaced liar’OK’ – no – slander and perjury.  She is beautiful and her eyes are full of light – makes me feel i shouldn’t have a problem with it – Mimicry, copying, matching – why is she doing it – I have a right to know – don’t I?”.

“I think the problem here might just be culture shock – I’m not used to Nottingham, I’m from London.  When I’m out I hear quite a few people talk like the nurses”.

“Robb Thompson – what did he say that I just thought of?”.

“My shame is their shame.  Voice?”

“Terry – the way he looked at me – my glory and the lifter of my head” (It was intelligent, appreciative and kind, not to say tender.  That look has passed now.  I kept wanting it again, or somehow to retrieve something it communicated and made me feel.)

The last thought was as far as I got sitting in the hotel restaurant drinking whatever it was at the time.  The rest was on the Arboretum a couple of hours before seeing my psychologist.

I was feeling afraid in the Arboretum for some reason of what people might be thinking of my sensitivitiies as manifested by my body language and wrote this next comment:

“Most of the time our heads are so full of our own thoughts we might not notice the sights and sounds around us, unless for some reason we have become particularly sensitised”.

“William Blake – damn braces, bless relaxes” (I had received that as braces are to be damned, relaxes are to be blessed.  But in recent months, if not years, I have thought of it as ‘damn’ causes you to brace yourself, and ‘bless’ causes you to relax, more often than not, for both giver and recipient).

“This nervousness and ‘no’-screaming resistance when I write like this for a meeting (comments missed out, quite personal) is just anxiety and self-censorship and I needn’t pay it any attention.  I don’t need to worry about its impact on the other person or fear lack of efficacy when notes eventually become communication.  If it serves as nothing else it can serve as a seed or launching pad for later exploration.  What matters is that we trust each other”.

~~~//~~~

I cut my notes a little early, basically I got bored and didn’t feel the others were going anywhere.  I’m bored with it now.  I might come back to this post later and fill in the end gaps.  One thing I said was that I’m not available to people – I’m walking around in a stupid cloud of fear and trauma.  I feel raw and unprotected, undefended.  That was then.  Sometimes it is now as well.

Out here writing from notes feels better than trying to think as I go, but the notes I wrote this entry from were all written in public.  I have given up the idea of ever having a home where I feel at peace and have any degree of privacy.  I feel open to everyone against my will, and it isn’t only because of my blog.  I still feel there are psychic connections between my concentration and disturbances when I am on my own in a room and disturbances happen nearby.  I’m not sure which is the cause and which the effect, but it seems to work that way, much more often than not.

A Slightly Different Update 27.07.2013

I thought, about an hour ago, that my biggest anxiety is not having a home, not knowing where it is going to be, and not knowing how it is going to work.  I thought that, whether it is accurate or not.  I’m 22 months homeless now, and maybe immediate things should be more a cause of concern.  But no one is officially acknowledging any of the things I have said about previous experiences.  I just felt like jumping up and running to Tommy Boyd, but I don’t have enough money to pay the fare.  I wouldn’t have anyway, today.

Relationships and comfort zones with other patients are cooling, and at the same time I’m becoming a lot more fudged in my relationships with staff.  I have made some of them special to me, more honestly, some of them have made themselves special to me by their kindness.  All this stuff about boundaries I was asked to learn by the church, to be used against me, so it seems, seems to be going by the board at the moment.  But that may be only because I feel inhibited about being angry, most of the time, unless I flip and start shouting in my room.  If I say I am having a problem with anyone on the ward the official position and statement seems to be ‘I don’t think so’, or ‘I don’t think s/he is’.  It is never opened up or examined.  So it continues and I can’t talk about it.  I’m still being voice and expression-matched, and I find that so upsetting.  How can doing me back at me be good communication?  I thought that communication was about two or more different and distinct individuals interacting and revealing themselves, being themselves.  Have I lost the plot somewhere?  Have I missed something, a shift in what communication is?  I think copying is about power.

I started out saying that these people, the staff, knew what was happening as well as I did and that it was up to them to say so/stop it, with open commitment, whatever they got from me by way of anger and hysteria.  Now I feel I am softening and thinking maybe now we can talk about it.  But the fact is that in the meantime they have bullied me with mimicry and interventions and put me on medication, all the time knowing that what I have said is true.  It doesn’t augur well for anyone else, does it, if one person has to become reasonable to stop the assault and get the help they need.

I keep approaching this in a general way and not posting a lot of stuff i would like to have posted.  I have thought I should list people by name and their offenses, as I see them.  But I have also thought in the last 24 hours as I have before, that the best way not to be like someone is not to be like them.  But that is just in personal terms.  The relationship I have with the staff is not a cosy, life-affirming personal relationship and never will be.  I don’t think I know the best thing to be or do in this situation anymore, and its effect seems to be that I am developing a distaste for and aversion towards my blog, and an aversion to naming and shaming.  But what is the alternative?  For me personally, it doesn’t make things comfortable by any means, some people are reacting quite badly, but at least I won’t be having painful conversations with people who use their positions to abuse or disengage, from whom I later have to get food and medication and be let off the ward.

I overheard Alex say last night ‘he won’t get anything out of me’.  No idea what it was about.

I’m beginning to think of the hospital as a community run by the nurses, and interactions in public as group therapy.  It’s wild, it’s weird, it’s making my ears ring thinking about it.

Josh T Pearson

I’ve been listening to Josh T Pearson, Last of the Country Gentlemen.  I first heard him sing ‘Sweetheart I Ain’t Your Christ’ on the Robert Elms Show, then later the same week on the Jools Holland Show.  Where it talks about trying to make him suck out some disease he can’t even begin to see, and teach him how to speak in the hope that it would break some curse, I thought a lot about Tommy Boyd and how I ‘related’ to him.  He could have written it for me but he didn’t, he wrote it about his own relationship.  It made me think so much about Tommy Boyd I even took down my page with his name as the title.

I think there are Christians who would be offended by the lyrics, as I am sometimes.  But it communicates pain and confusion so effectively I can’t be offended by it overall, when I listen.

God Hates Fags

So do I, ask my sister.

Dr Gallo, my Spanish psychiatrist, who called me obese in one of his reports, came towards me in the corridor once, and he absolutely stank of them.  I suppose I must have given him a questioning, intelligent, ‘oh really’ kind of look, because he looked a bit sheepish and uncomfortable.

I was thinking something along the lines of, ‘smoking kills, I don’t smoke, and I’m a nut, he smokes, and he is my psychiatrist.  He knows smoking kills, so he is addicted or in denial, or at least dishonest, because he goes out for a crafty one and looks sheepish when caught by one of his patients, or inmates’.  My actual thoughts were, ‘oh, he smokes’.  It was a bit of an enlightenment, an ‘aha’ moment.  I suppose I might have gone into my Christian prayer ministry and revelation mode.  But for me the logic behind my thoughts and feelings, as a psychiatric patient, is as previously stated.

It is my opinion that someone that insensitive, to write in a woman’s psychiatric tribunal report that she is obese, almost as though he were a vet rather than a doctor, and who smokes himself, ought not to be dealing with people on the mind level.

No, I didn’t mean homosexuals.  Not honest homosexuals.  I did that myself for two years.  I’m not sure how honest I was, maybe I rationalised my activity with the rationalisations I had been given by society and psychology until in the end it felt irrevocable and unchangeable.  Along the way of coming to terms with it I answered my own questions and my partner’s questions and probings with my own rationalisations drawn from society’s logic and permissiveness.  Of course, homosexuality used to be a reason to be detained under the mental health act, I think, or it was at least viewed as a mental illness.  But now it is a crime to show yourself ‘homophobic’.  I said that to the psychiatric staff on my ward.  I was sort of stonewalled.  Or patronised.  No one was interested in changing anything they were doing to me after I said it, anyway.

I was thinking about homophobia the other day, and wondering if there is such a word or crime as ‘Christianophobia’.  In the interests of balance I think possibly there should be.  Maybe ‘Religiophobia’ as well.  I have indulged, in myself, a homosexual relationship, though not a complete lifestyle, and I believed it was wrong beforehand and believe it was wrong now, afterwards.  And I am a Christian who believes the Bible says it is wrong and that therefore it is.  Unfortunately you can’t catch me with the shellfish argument, because I am also a vegan for moral and spiritual reasons.  Therefore I would not wear animal fibres either, mixed or otherwise.  So OK, I used to have a lesbian relationship, and now I am saying it is wrong, and that Biblical Christianity says it is wrong, which I believe.  Where does that put me as an individual on the crime scale, in relation to this issue? (By the way, I think Islam and the Quran also say it is wrong).  Not only the crime scale, but what are my own human rights on this, in terms of owning my own experience and my beliefs about it, including moral, spiritual and religious?  Can I be penalised for religiously aggravated homophobia against myself?  Do I have to limit myself in how I talk about my own life and beliefs about it?

The politicisation of ideas of right and wrong, illness and wellness.  Mental illness really is a political concept, isn’t it? Part of the irony, for me, is that an awful lot of force and assault, not to say violence, is used against some very non-violent people to make sure they take their ‘medication’.  By these people who say we are a danger to ourselves or others otherwise.  I do feel sick thinking about it.  Sick with violence and rage, the retaliatory kind.  That is a normal feeling.  I’m not acting it out.  There would be no point.  Their force and violence would be greater.

So the force and violence of a recognised professional body against an individual is OK and justified, but if that person, before not violent or physically forceful, wants to retaliate, even says they feel they want to, it isn’t?  It’s a threat to society?  But these professionals are not?

God hates fags – an interesting forage and forray.

Melvyn Bragg On The King James Bible

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00zmc6f/The_King_James_Bible_The_Book_That_Changed_the_World/

Available until 9pm (8.59) tonight for watching or download.

I’m opening a new file – the VW FILE – Vulnerable Women Fall In Love Easily.

In this case the name came before the acronym.  Good though, innit?  On so many levels it would be a really long post if I wrote the explanation that suggests itself.

WordPress Asks: “Are You Well Versed In Comment Etiquette?”

Loose paraphrase:  Which would you rather receive, a comment saying ‘great post!  check out my blog at (www.suebarnett.wordpress.com, in my case)’ or one saying ‘well said!  I know what you’re talking about because . . . and I think . . .’?

While the forum, if properly, fairly and legally run, is useful and sometimes feels helpful, I for one would rather not be nagged and patronised and treated like some sort of a great-niece or child or student in a classroom in this way.   As far as I am concerned, we comment the way we can at the time, and those of us who are sincere in our comments and appreciation might well be using that shorthand to say, ‘I am so impressed with what you have to say here, there is nothing I feel able to add, but I would appreciate you looking at my blog because I think yours is an opinion I would value’.

Some people, like me, sometimes read and blog in distress, or very focussed on their own thing and they are desperate to have someone else aware of and concerned about the things they are concerned about.  I don’t think we need to sanitise and make anodyne the way everyone should leave their comments, or that anyone should see it as an insult or somehow inadequate if a person says, ‘great post, please check out my blog’.  It might be all they are capable of at the time, and it might show more appreciation than launching into an opinion.

While I understand exactly what is being said and on the whole agree with it, there are times of desperation or recognition, for me, when I can’t say what I want without it being as short as possible and straight to the point.  I’m thinking, maybe pretentiously, of the difference between a diver, say, at their most polite and articulate, saying something like, ‘honey, would you mind getting the air cylinder out of the car?’ and a woman in intense labour pains screaming and swearing and snarling like a savage at her helper who insists on going by the book to shut up and give her the mask.  Something like that.  There are other situations of pain where the same would apply.  Or the difference between someone swimming yelling ‘hey, great to see you, come on in, let’s play ball’, and someone else in the water drowning doing their best while trying to snatch air to attract the attention of someone to help them.

Etiquette is for the adequate and sometimes even for the indifferent and self-absorbed, to get what they want with as little friction as possible.  Many people are inadequates who accept that about each other, and don’t want to be told they should emulate the adequate, bright, happy, switched on people in order for their contribution to be acceptable.

And while I’m thinking about it, someone said that most people live lives of quiet desperation.  But we have been taught in the past, if not now, to be completely hypocritical about that fact when applying for a job, for instance.  I can’t theorise on why that is at the moment, but if a person is desperate for a job, and also capable of doing it or of learning to, why should they be advised to rely on such self-negating and relationship-sabotaging dishonesty and subterfuge right from the beginning, and why should anyone be taught that it is not acceptable to show desperation if it exists?  I’ve never employed anyone, so I don’t know if employers are advised to despise desperation, or if the advice is based on the belief that, if someone sees you are desperate, they might take advantage of you, but it seems to me that no honest and honorable relationship can be based on an initial dishonesty of that kind.

It also occurs to me that the kind of comment WordPress is presenting as less desirable might be nothing more than the expression of an internalisation of that advice which allows for nothing more.  Keep it light, keep it casual, can easily translate to, ‘hey, that’s great, come and see mine!’  We need permission to become honest again, not instructions on how to become presentable and acceptable to other people in order to compensate for and not address the fact that experts in communication have told us to steer clear of some kinds of honesty.

So thank you for your advice, WordPress, and I hope this post might be in line with the kind of comments and responses you would like to see.  And please check out my blog at www.suebarnett.wordpress.com. Thank you for reading and for letting this pass the moderation procedure (which I personally find also inhibits and tampers with my ability to communicate as I would wish, sometimes.  If I’m not even sure I am going to get through the door or have my existence acknowledged or welcomed, why should I and how can I lay myself bare, as it were, in my response?  Often closed doors and rejection make desperate and battered people who can hardly hear you anyway, even with the impecceable (and expensive) etiquette of having a butler to hold the door wide open).

Oops, here we go!  Back to me.  If you go through a butler, you have probably had to go through other levelsof protocol as well, and how you handle them might determine whether or not you get as far as the butler.  In church I was taught that this procedure is a way of reveaing a person’s heart and whether or not ‘they are ready’ for access.  They never, to my memory, said anything or much about any inadequacies or unreadiness expressed by the person requiring such protocol.  Is it right that the person expected to go through it should be the only one expected to fit? In reality does it even work that way?  Some people want the challenge of the protocol because they want a process of validation or change.  I happen to believe that in some situations I am one of those people.  But if the people imposing or handling the protocol don’t respect that about me or even respect the protocol itself . . . .  protocol is a mutual thing, isn’t it, not just from the top down.  I’m sure it should be and that really that is how it should work.

Government Hanky-Panky

Maybe it’s time for me to stop being drawn on this, but this morning I heard (sorry, I get confused) William Hague or Iain Duncan-Smith (I think it was William Hague) say something about harassment of journalists in Libya.  He paused before saying ‘in Libya’, as if trying to emphasise the point that he was saying Libya, and nowhere else, maybe not the UK.

Being the self-centred person that I am, I thought he was saying that I am harassing journalists and I got a bit upset.  Then I thought, ‘wait a minute, he’s probably trying to draw a distinction between the journalists in Libya (about whom he doesn’t have a bad word to say), and some of the journalists here, in our minds’.  I thought of Julian Assange.

I know many people will have seen the video of him outside the court about a week or so ago (I haven’t seen anything more recent) with him so close to tears saying he hasn’t had the chance to put his side of the story and that there have been incitements to violence towards him and his staff.

I don’t know him, but tears are very powerful with me.  Some people say they are a form of manipulation.  Maybe those people have never known real desperation.  I was frightened of my tears for years, after reading in a counselling type book that they are a form of manipulation.  I realise that tears only express our feelings and not necessarily the truth about the beliefs we hold that make us cry, but they must be one of the most valid expressions of personal, heartfelt reality, and for that reason I for one cannot despise them or be dispassionate about them.  If we took more notice of tears we might be a less violent, bigoted, punitive, testosterone-and-spleen-driven and reactionary world.  I believe real tears always should be reconcilers or at least a gateway to reconciliation.  His tears touched me.  I don’t know if they were real or not.  But how desperate does a person have to show themselves to be in order to have the violation of their legal human rights redressed by those who should and who think they have the right to judge instead?

My own emotions are mangled.  I’m being shouted at and banged at every day, especially when I’m just lying on my bed trying to connect my life to its source and neither moving nor speaking, just enjoying the feeling of beginning to recover the connection between my mind and emotions, then it all starts.  And I do the same thing back sometimes, even if only eventually and not on the spot.  Early in the morning I am too shocked and don’t know how to handle myself.  I can not get dressed for days because the violence makes me feel I can’t cope with life.  And then I feel ashamed of my own reactions when I give it back.

All that to say, condoning computer-hacking from anyone, including the government, excluded, I wish I could help Julian Assange and I would if I could, and would do so in every way that I could if he or his representatives asked me to.  There is no way I would not be prepared to help, believing as I have that he tried to help me.  Isn’t it funny how the government always steps forward to try to get you to disconnect from ‘bad influences’ only after they themselves have been exposed?  If they had not been exposed, if the timing of the leaks had not made me feel supported, I wonder what they would now be saying and doing?

‘The Big Society’ manifesto and plan almost completely replicates some of the concerns I raised in a document on my computer, following years of official abuse and neglect, including from the police, which was addressed to the chief of police in Sussex but not sent.  Given everything else it is hard for me to believe that someone hasn’t lifted it straight from my computer.  I know some people will believe or try to make out this is lunatic, but others will not, they even comment and sometimes get uncomfortable if I log on to a parliamentary broadcast, which I watch from the beginning and delayed, at the time that I actually log on and start watching.  This happened one Friday at the reading of a Private Member’s Bill, and the discomfort was particularly pronounced.  I keep intending to find it and watch it again, because at the time I thought I understood the discomfort.

My browser has crashed a couple of times while typing this, always when I am getting into a release of full flow.  It must show in my typing.  I think that, among other things, my key strokes are being monitored by someone.  I obviously don’t know who or why. There are people I think of and think of course I’ll stop if it’s them and they want me to, but I go on in stubbornness and/or uncertainty.

I started the post to say that it seemed fairly clear to me that, whatever William Hague was trying to communicate with his statement this morning, what appeared to be the surface message didn’t appear to me to be his main concern, and I wish they wouldn’t go around making object lessons and drawing comparisons and contrasts from another country’s distress while trying to appear to have a single message and motive.

Julian Assange, I love you.  I am absolutely backing you up with my best intentions and my strongest hopes for your safety, if that is all I can do.  I can’t quite connect with your reality, as I said when I try to connect with my own people cry out and start banging, I don’t understand the dynamic, I usually go for the explanation that makes me feel guilty, and it’s happening now and it is so distressing, so excuse me if you find this inappropriate, but I feel as if my own entrails are being fed upon.  I believe I have heard you trying to communicate with me, and from you in your position I appreciate that so much.  But I don’t know, maybe you’re communicating with me and every rights aware individual, and I’m just bending it to myself.  I hope you will get someone to contact me if I can help or be of any use to you.  That’s how I feel, whether it is appropriate or not.  I feel as if my whole community is the idiot brigade, and they’ve all come out now.  I’ve got another person now who somehow thinks it helps and is cool to shout hallelujah at me.  Maybe I should respond with better grace and gratitude.  I don’t know why they are doing it or who has given them the idea.  They only did it after searching me out with 5 minutes of yelling and me yelling back in the end.  I feel really bad about this.  It’s obviously an affirmation and I’m being ungrateful.  I should be grateful.  It’s so good to hear.

“We Should All Speak The Same Language” (Utter, Complete Garbage, This Post)

Yes, we should.  It is the only way to understand each other and live in peace with each other.  David Cameron is right.

But he is wrong about which language it should be.

The language should be mutual respect and respect for human rights, not the spoken language of your adopted country.  The problem arises if we let people in who are against our values in the first place.  What could happen then is that people learn our language (English, in our case) and subvert it to use it against us.  People who don’t speak our language coming in to the country are not our problem, but people who don’t share our values.

What are our values?  I don’t know!  Get any group of White Anglo Saxons together and you can have just as many culture clashes as you can with anyone else, even though we have been here for generations as the dominant group.  The loud mouths.  “It’s all the fault of the immigrants, coming into our country and stealing our jobs”.  If people have to make an enemy out of someone and unite against them, I have been taught that is possibly all they agree about, and some of those do it because they wouldn’t feel safe to disagree.   Correction, some of us, because we all do it sometimes.

But not speaking the language of the country should not be a problem, because there are ways around that.

Respect is the thing.  If we provide translations (or anything) but resent doing so, that communicates and damages relationships.  Or the people working with the translations, the officials and what have you who, for some reason, don’t really value different cultures but are doing a job because if they don’t they are financially penalised, if they can’t stand the people they serve or work with, how is that going to help anyone?  I know the answer is obvious and so does my reader.  “It isn’t”.

Translators are people who love language.  They problably love the culture that goes with it as well, otherwise they might not have got that far (I managed to take French to first year degree level myself, starting at the age of 9 or 10.  My best exam mark for it was an A at ‘O’ level, as it was before GCSEs.  My worst might have been an E at ‘A’ level.  I put it down to the increased literature element and my inconsistent attendance).

What if translators of English into other languages translated our literature for the non-English speaking people that live among us, and we also got their literature in translation?  This must be distress at its worst, because I know I’m talkiing garbage because I know that obviously happens, now I say so.  That’s what snakebite does for you, it has you all over the place!

But . . .  national identity doesn’t depend on us all speaking English, and you can’t blame the foreigners for the fact that there are many clashing value systems in our country, because that is true without them.

If we maintain respect there is no reason why we should push for integration.  People want to maintain their own identities, that is natural, especially in a strange place.  And why should it be seen as unhealthy if some of them never want to do anything else?  Saying that kind of thing about what someone wants makes them angry and miserable and promotes discrimination and prejudice.

We can keep the separate communities.  We can celebrate difference.  We can enable learning about each other within our own communities.  We don’t have to mix it, we can keep it separate, if that is easier, and let different communities be taught what they need to know by their own people and anyone else able to communicate with them that they accept.

Why, these days, should a non-English speaking child be thrust into an English taught school and therefore be at a disadvantage?  We can’t all learn another language, it doesn’t come naturally to some people.  Some people have problems with their own language, let alone someone else’s.  And there was plenty of illiteracy in England before mass immigration, so it isn’t fair to say we are being slowed down.  And why should the focus be language skills anyway?  What about other necessary skills?  There are some jobs you can do quite happily without needing to yap at everyone.  Some jobs might be better done that way.  Artisan type jobs, for example.

Let’s celebrate everything!  Different cultures, different gifts and skills.  It doesn’t have to be onerous and pedestrian, it can be a constant, joyous flux and flow.

People keep up trade links with their own countries anyway.  Why force people to integrate who can’t or don’t want to?  As long as we can establish and maintain respect between the communities there is nothing wrong with separateness where people want to be separate and coming together where they want that.  I’m thinking that education, at least in the first years, should be within the child’s own ethnic community, because that is where they will be happiest.  And what’s wrong with having further and higher education that way as well, all within our own country?  Why should we invade or insist on dragging out into the open the private place of someone else’s cultural identity?

It’s about choice.  Choice creates industry and jobs.  This is something there is both a need and a demand for.

I say, back to basics.  Back to reality.  Stop blaming people and trying to create jobs selling things people don’t need like food, for instance, with all kinds of subliminal messages attached (why else do you think we are obese and lazy?  But those who sell it and know the methods they use to sell it still turn round and blame us and say we are a burden on the tax payer.  Well, some tax payers are a burden on everyone!).  Start providing instead the things we actually need to make society work – people skills, philosophy, values, the arts, beauty, (shh erm – religion?)

Quack quack, said the silly duck, it’s time for another industrial revolution.

Hey, this is the 21st century! (I never thought I’d say that!)  David, what kind of leader says, “you must learn our language, or you can’t come here”?  Different isn’t bad, it’s different.  It’s an opportunity.

This is so outrageous I can hardly believe you mean it.  I watch the most serious things these days and find myself laughing as if it is a comedy, sometimes.  Does everyone end up saying, as they get older, “the world has gone mad”?  Because I did last night.

If we are going to say to people, “you can’t come here unless you learn our language”, what about the people here who already don’t speak it? Are we going to end up having an ethnic purge?  Shall I being the mental health system into this?  Yes, I think I might, because in many ways it is the same kind of thing.  Ethnic purge.  That is a real danger.  There are elements, including among those in power, who after stopping entry by others who can’t speak the language/don’t share our values, will next turn on those already living among us, and that wouldn’t be pretty at all.  David Cameron, you seriously need to rethink this.  You can’t make people conform at will without damaging relationships. There would also be a backlash from some people already here from countries from which some people were not allowed access.

By the way, when I talked about snakebite earlier – I had just watched the Andrew Marr Show before I wrote this and I first thought of that phrase after hearing William Hague talking.

I think among our human rights should be the right to be inadequate and incapable, if that is what our lives have done to us, without it bearing any kind of stigma at all.  I wonder if that is possible while the great god the tax payer gets invoked against everyone that is or feels that way?

This society stinks, it is so abusive.  But it is probably not that much different from many others.  Jesus said you can’t serve God and mammon.

He also pointed out that the Bible says in one of the Psalms that we are gods, and the scriptures cannot be broken.  I used to think that was sarcasm, but would the Jesus I have been taught about have been sarcastic about scripture?  No, He wouldn’t.  Is the Jesus I have been taught about the real Jesus?  Unquestionably!  Jesus defended the scripture that says we are gods.  He would not have been sarcastic about scripture.  And we can’t serve each other (God/gods) and money as well.

I apologise for my style, but I watch and listen to so much rubbish.  It seems to be all there is available.

“Reading As Telepathy” No Longer Exists

The title is now in quotation marks whereas before it was not, and therefore connotes something different .  Quotation marks in this post are appropriate because they surround the name of the original post, otherwise it would have been 2 sets of quotation marks.

Although I republished it several times to show it with the most recent changes because some categories move quickly, like Politics, Christianity and Human Rights, this latest and, probably, most important, amendment has not been acknowledged.  I think “Christianity” acknowledged the first few changes to publishing times, but the change to the actual title remains unacknowledged when I had expected the position and the title changes to be shown, especially after I rescheduled publishing of the post to a later time.  As it now stands in the display, it is a misrepresentation, in both title and positioning – in Christianity, Politics and Human Rights for certain, whereas some of the smaller and, arguably, more “peripheral” groups have recognised the changes.

I think this conveys a message, especially when I think some of the posts that appeared afterwards might have been written in response to mine, but I obviously have no proof of this, and decisive statements should not be made or actions taken without proof. 

For your information, the post to which reference is made is that immediately preceding this one.

When I started this corrective post I thought of it as both a gentle tease and a serious point, and a third thing which I have now forgotten.  I decided not to make it comical in presentation, but have deliberately allowed some ambiguity which, in view of my opening statements, might appear merely to be grammatical oversights, the correction of which has been ommited in error and unconsciously.  I am conscious of the ambiguities and believe that they serve a purpose in this communication.  Other perceived errors, however, must be attributed to tiredness and lack of recent, sustained practice in precision, or to stylistics, or to the possibility that, in some areas, I might be incompetent anyway.

Thank you for your patience and kind attention.

“Reading As Telepathy”

A while ago I tagged one of my posts “possession” and decided to reread it this morning since my statistics say it is getting read a lot.  The heavy metal man with headscarf post.

I searched my tag to see what was under it, partly because I realised I had meant demon possession and that possession on its own was a bit ambiguous.  It could include possession of drugs, and does if you search the tag.

I found a post that I like and agree with for what it says about writing with an agenda and use of allegory to impose an agenda leading to a sort of possession. I think it’s meant to be humorous but I’m not sure.

http://ariellekbosworth.wordpress.com/2011/01/09/some-blogskeeping-and-reading-as-telepathy/

I think any communication which tries to control its recipient is abusive.  The writer of the post says that is what allegory is used for.  So what about everything I’ve learned about the use of parables by Jesus, and illustrations and object lessons?  Do I know what I’m talking about when I say I agree with this, or do I just like to hear myself postulate?

I’d be interested in feedback on this.  Both me and the post I’ve given the link for!