Beyond War – A Webinar with Serge & Steve Taylor

This coming Tuesday, December the 19th, I will be co-hosting a webinar with my dear friend Steve Taylor, called Beyond War.

At this time of continuing global conflict, we will be discussing warfare from a psychological and spiritual perspective, looking at its causes and how we can transcend it. As usual, we will include a meditation and poem or two.

Serge & Steve Together Again!

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We will be calling on all webinar participants webinar to share, hopefully something very interesting will emerge!

Beyond War
A Webinar with Serge & Steve Taylor

Tuesday, 19 December, 2023
19:00 GMT / 20:00 CET

You can sign up to attend on Eventbrite

Shining a Light in the Darkness – Webinar – 7 June 2022

Spiritual Awakening in a Disordered World

Dear Friends,
Here is my latest offering with my wise friend Steve. We both think this topic is very important as never has our world been in a more precarious and chaotic state. We both believe in the Chinese translation of the word crisis which is to regard it as a ‘dangerous opportunity’. We see many dangerous opportunities surrounding us all!

Serge with Steve Taylor

We are living in a time of political turmoil and ecological crisis. What are the challenges of spiritual awakening in this context? Steve and Serge will discuss how spiritual awakening can help heal the world, and how crisis can be the spur for collective awakening.

Please join us for our webinar on 7 June, 2022!
Click here for further details and registration

Essay: Looking to the Future

This essay looks at:
a) the state of the world today
b) what I see happening on the planet over the next eighty years and
c) the new society that I see rising, phoenix like, out of the ashes.

It is a hopeful essay but suggests that to get to the light, humanity may need to go through some more dark times…

Looking to the Future
OK, it is time now to look forward and say a few words about what I think might possibly lie ahead for humanity in the future. As I feel very much part of the whole, I regard this issue as an integral part of my memoir. Indeed, I am increasingly realising that the more I can own my human-collective self – realise I am not separate from but deeply part of humanity as a whole – the more fully me I become!
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Creating Peace

Dear Friend,

As I write this, my heart is full of sorrow. Our world is once more plunged into the insanity of war, with thousands perishing in the name of Putin’s insane idea to restore Russia to its former ‘greatness’, to wage war against democracy, poke a finger in the eye of NATO’s expansion and in his words, to ‘de-Nazify’ Ukraine.

As in all wars we see the usual projection of one’s own Shadow onto another people, for as the whole world can see, the one who is behaving like Hitler is the KGB-trained Putin himself. Over twenty years of being president, a monster has gradually marinated inside him and all his actions now proclaim the truth of Lord Acton’s remark that ‘power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely’.

I am so glad that Biden, who has been so effective in arranging the coalition against Putin, is President and not Trump, as Trump admires Putin’s ‘manliness’ and strength as do many other Republicans. Indeed, it is not impossible that in 2024, Trump or a Trumpite – someone equally deranged and fascistic only much more intelligent – returns to power bringing with them their own brand of autocratic insanity, and that a country whose aim has been to champion democracy in the world, finds itself gradually becoming an authoritarian state?

Here, we keep our fingers crossed that this will not come to pass. Perhaps world events are showing everyone that demagoguery is not the slightest bit attractive and that it has a very, very dark face!

To return to the issue of war, I am so glad that the world has responded so strongly to Putin’s enormous mistake. Today, I attended an anti-war group in the square of our little Mallorcan town and I felt great kinship with everybody present. I felt my own heart open and realised that, on one level, this terrible tragedy is serving to open up the collective weeping heart of humanity and is also releasing a tremendous power of camaraderie on the planet.

I am glad that the strongest of sanctions have been levied on Putin and on his henchmen who have enabled him over the years. Sadly, his people – the vast number of Russians who don’t want a war – will have to pay a price, as will we in the West, as the effects of the sanctions will soon start percolating back. I am half Russian and I have many Russian friends and I can also feel their pain as well as that of the Ukrainian people. I ask myself: will Russians rise up against Putin? I mean, if millions take to the streets, surely they can’t all be arrested….

Dalai Lama

All wars have a similar tragic pattern to them. Violence and killing is let loose. Huge lies are told. Soldiers and civilians, women and children die, people are tortured and a vast 

amount of trauma and suffering is generated for all concerned. Yes, wars start for very specific reasons, but essentially ‘a space’ for them to emerge also lies in the fact that so much hostility, hatred, trauma and anger lies inside so many of us. Many people in the world today are very angry at the system and at the impossibilities they face in trying to improve their lot. But as the Dalai Lama put it:

If we use violence in order to reduce disagreements and conflicts, then we must expect violence every day.

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Essay: Embracing the American Shadow

“Everyone carries a Shadow and the less it is embodied in the individual’s conscious life, the blacker and denser it is. At all counts, it forms an unconscious snag, thwarting our most well-meant intentions.”
~ Carl Jung ~

Challenges

In this essay, I want to talk about the challenges currently facing America, as it is a country I have very fond memories of. I lived and worked there for thirteen years in the 70s and 80s and got an enormous amount out of the experience and was privileged to have encountered some of the wisest people I have ever met anywhere. Like many of my American friends, I have found it very painful to see what has been going on in their country for the last four years, and in these pages I want to suggest a slightly different approach both to viewing and to dealing with the many challenges which America is currently facing. Continue reading

Addressing Evil in the World

My Dear Friends,

While I feel my heart open in appreciating the beauty and magnificence of life, a large part of me continues to feel sad at some of the dreadful things currently going on in the world. Right now, I think of the increasing proliferation of conspiracy theories.

Yes, in no way unintelligent friends of mine, many not unspiritual – I call them “conspiritualists”(!) – are sending me emails telling me that everything Q Anon says is true, that the earth really is flat, that the pandemic is a huge hoax, that Bill Gates is planning to take over the world (twenty years ago, it was Rockefeller that got clobbered), that the Jewish millionaire George Soros is plotting to destroy Hungary through the deliberate importation of migrants, i.e., that he wishes to replace white Christian Europeans with brown-skinned Muslims! I have not the slightest doubt that this is what they believe.

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Looking to the Future: Breakdown or Breakthrough

“Evolution is life-oriented. It is ‘good’ but not kind. It does not care for the feelings of individuals.”

~ Barbara Marx Hubbard ~

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The Big Questions

So what lies ahead for us human beings? Are we well on the way towards extinction – finito – the end of the great experiment of humanity? Or are we going to continue stumbling along – a wounded, bleeding society – going nowhere fast? Conversely, is the crumbling away of our existing world which is certainly happening and is currently being speeded up by this virus, somehow going to lead us to ‘break through’ to something new – to a new, higher-order human being and a hugely improved world which works not just for the few but for the many?

Certainly, human consciousness has been rapidly evolving over the last sixty years where we’ve seen the birth of women’s rights, animal rights and in the 60’s we had the hippy movement followed by the emergence of the Human Potential movement. Today, millions of people all over the world are becoming increasingly interested in evolving their consciousness and in developing their spirituality. Most importantly, we are seeing a powerful shift away from the isolated, highly individuated ego, responsible for so much human suffering, war and patriarchy, with increasing numbers of us realising that the next step of our human evolution is towards thinking and operating much more as a human collective. Today, there are so many important questions which we all need to be asking ourselves. Perhaps one of the most significant is:

Are we as a species capable of extricating ourselves out of this very, very deep hole that we have over the years been digging, and if so, what might be the conditions necessary for this to happen?

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Webinar: How to Speed up our Evolution and Make a Difference in a Corona Infected World

Dear Friend,

You are kindly invited to join my upcoming webinar: “How to Speed up our Evolution and Make a Difference in a Corona Infected World.” In this presentation, I will be looking at the ways we can use the pressures of this current crisis to leverage our personal and collective growth.

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Thinking Positively Towards the Future

Civilisations don’t last forever. Everything comes to an end at some point, and we are all living in an uncertain ‘in-between’ era, where one world is dying and another is doing its best to be born, although one has to admit that there are a hell of a lot of people working hard to try and keep our old unsustainable world alive! I suspect that they’re engaged in a game called Mission Impossible!

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