It’s a simple case of couldn’t give a shit about those things and annoyed that anyone should clog the valves of my mental aorta with such drivel. My sexual performance, so I’m advised, is beyond adequate. My car is insured, thank you. My remarkable diet involves regular trips to the gym and avoiding excess – and it’s very effective, there, have that for free! My teeth are whitened by regular brushing, once in the morning, once in the evening, for two minutes at a time, the Sonicare has a timer and a dentist friend advises me my teeth are perfect.

The stuff in Russian I just don’t get and I don’t want to see some sad individual taking their clothes off to pay the gas bill. Thank you for your considering me as an appropriate recipient for your unadulterated dross but really, I am not your punter today or any other day.

I came here with a job to do, to take my own life in hand and shake it until the right things fell out of the tree. The chaff will always exist and there will always be those who make it their god. There will always be a story to spin, an angle to push, and a scam to be foisted upon the unsuspecting. Ultimately none of these distractions are of any importance, because energy can not be destroyed, and you, my friend, will be going somewhere when you shuffle off this mortal coil; just as I shall.

The course you set now will determine that. If your choices gravitate toward such things then there it is. However, should your mind wander from time to time to those things that actually make a life worth living then spare a thought for yourself from time to time. You are your own keeper and your own commander; the path you tread will be defined by you and you alone. The meanderings of that path, its conditions, may well be out of your remit but the one certainty we all face is that our responses and reactions are down to us.

I shall be assembling a kit. A method and an approach to get the absolute best from this situation. You are welcome to join me, it gets lonely at times and the warmth of kind is like a ray of sunshine on a winter’s day. You owe it to yourself to be the best you can.

Honour and recognition to those of you that will come this way. The path is well worn and noble feet have trodden this road before us.

Greetings friend, whether you be brother or sister, allow me to extend my hand to you.

image: la sterpaia

Like so many behaviours that present within the arena of what we do this is another one indicative of the rising stress and anxiety levels that we in the West have to contend with. In my book, The Mechanics of Happiness I discuss this pressure pile up and the way in which the brightest undergraduates feel overwhelmed by the pressure put on them to succeed. The difficulty is that we are in a mobile landscape. Our world is shifting so old expectations become massive pressures as society places vastly expanded requirements upon us all.

There was a time when decisions that affected us all were made in secret behind closed doors by people who we would not know or recognise. The hunger for copy or material to satisfy the demands of global rolling news networks such as the BBC or CNN means that the most trivial matters become international headlines and the presure upon those in the spotlight increases exponentially.

I’m not a Luddite, there has to be accountability on the part of decision makers and their anonymity in previous generations undeniably allowed for a more cavalier attitude to prevail. However, there is a demand from a confused population for enlightened leadership to spring forth and show us the way forward. The world looks and is chaotic, systems that guaranteed relative stability and order are now bankrupt and the hunt is on for those who can move the situation forward in a positive way.

This is the origin of the huge pressure being felt by what Daniel Hilberstom called the brightest and the best; always the usual suspects for advancement but now subject to complete scrutiny from what they wear to what they eat to whom they associate with. There is no proving ground, no arena for protected apprenticeships as a million, apparently morally ambiguous, media studies graduates are released into the world like a tidal wave all looking for their big break and their Watergate. The result is that a generation of people are feeling completely disenfranchised, they are not interested in politics because they can’t relate to the politicians and the people who might make good political leaders in the future have already blotted their copybook with so called scandals that at one time would have been no more than part of the learning curve.

In the age of the great cathedral building an apprentice stone mason was given cast off bits of masonry to practice with. In this way they honed and refined their craft, they developed their skills. They were supervised by a master mason who would guide and mentor them through the development of problem solving strategies, they would pass on tricks of the trade and allow the apprentice mason to spread their creative and technical wings. Imagine if everything they did was scrutinised by a headline hungry media whose only concern was for a scoop and a lead in the ratings war.

With the advent of reality TV and thousands of channels to fill – I have seen trailers for a series based upon a pawn shop where people are filmed taking items in to be pawned and then mocked by a knowledgeable assistant who tells them their valuation of the item is way off the money – every aspect of our lives has become fair game for pundits, commentators and gossip columnists. And the frightening thing for me is, I’m in the minority when it comes to my distaste for the dumbing down effect.

So now we grind the enamel off our teeth as we subconsciously react to this scenario of huge intrusion and pressure. Once we were members of a community, a society and those who could worked to improve the conditions at every level for the benefit of all. Now we have all become the quarry of predatory agencies looking for stories, scoops and exclusives.

And then there is dear Jo Frost, the supernanny who demonstrates how little girls as young as six are already feeling the pressure to conform to a body image consistent with the symptoms of malnourishment or starvation. Already conditioned at this previously innocent and uncorrupted age to think of acceptable healthy body types to be grotesque and howling with derision when shown pictures of the same. What are we creating if not an unfolding nightmare? All the extra comforts and the advances we have made in technological terms have created a generation of insecure, under fire misfits with nothing better to do than turn upon each other. We owe it to them and to ourselves to get real. Lionising stick insect ‘supermodels’ and placing anyone daring to open their mouth about anything on a witch trial in the kangaroo court of the banana republics we are imagining to be the way forward will not benefit anyone in the long run. This period of human history will be looked upon as a time of mass psychoses and self perpetuating delusions. We are placing ourselves and our children in jeopardy, we are handicapping any chance of cohesive development by distractions that amount to idle tittle tattle. Be careful what you fill your time with, you cannot have it twice, when the well runs dry, it is gone, there is no reserve.

Pressure? Just hope you don’t do too well in your exams, look like this year’s clothes hanger or you’re next.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/8545243.stm

image: jarrodandjessica

A very close friend even tried to convince me that the longest, coldest winter for 50 years was actually what to expect within global warming. Emperor’s new clothes anybody? Oh, I’m sorry, you’re using them as scarves and draught excluders.

Call it what you will we are experiencing strange days.

I spoke with a friend today and described a scenario whereby we cannot plan for eventualities that are beyond our jurisdiction. Surely the weather has convinced us by now just how powerless we are? What we can do is work upon ourselves and ensure that whatever the fates may throw at us we can guarantee our own reactions. Those unfortunate people in Haiti and Chile could not plan for the earthquakes that devastated their world, likewise the storms that battered the Atlantic coast of Europe.

What we can guarantee is our own responses and this comes as the result of personal development. He in New York and me in London, we cannot know what tomorrow may bring but the way we respond is ours to define. Circumstances are not always within our gift to determine but we are the beneficiaries of that great gift, the power to choose and the permission from the universe to do according to our will. As ever, choose wisely and choose well. The choices you make today will shape your tomorrows.

A poorly managed education system while not extinguishing the desire to learn closed down options and left them closed. The struggle was to find meaning and make sense of it all. I found myself in among millions of others, none of whom seemed especially enlightened and all of us aboard a runaway train heading towards nowhere.

Feeling completely disenfranchised I used to skip school, visit galleries and museums, wander derelict industrial areas and walk along the banks of canals. I was fortunate in that the city I grew up in had a rich cultural and industrial heritage. The paintings and sculptures were doors through which I entered a different world. The words of philosophers and writers towered above the wasteland like beacons and showed me a way out.

Using various means I made good my escape as soon as possible.

I needed wisdom, knowledge, a guidance system to plot a course through life. I was on my own and trying desperately to find a way to get into the palace of opportunities that I sensed was all around. To me it was invisible, something I knew had to exist but was unable to divine a path towards. I looked everywhere I could think of, I travelled, I spoke, I read, I attended lectures, courses, tried every handle on every door in an attempt to progress further.

It is a little like escaping from a concentration camp. An escapee imagines that everyone knows who they are, what they are thinking and what they are trying to achieve. So they spend their time in hiding or trying to obscure their motives from this imagined cabal whose objective is to thwart their bid for freedom. All our experiences are conditioning, they define the people we are and that we become.

And then, many decades later, I realised that I was out. I had escaped and there was clear blue water between that person and this. All the things I had sought I found, all the questions had answers and the confusion was replaced with clarity, understanding and perception. I came to love wisdom, and I came to love the human race because it too was lost and confused, just as I had been.

I began to work with children and young people who were like I had been. Only now I saw them through different eyes, I had empathy and compassion for them. They did not, as I had not, understand their situation so they raged against the machine. They were angry with the system, the world and a structure they perceived as conspiring against them. It became clear to me that these young people were the peripheral extremes of what passes through most of us.

Of course I did the usual things, I pitched in and helped where I could, spoke with them, befriended them, made no judgement and worked with what was there. But I realised that my own journey had covered so much territory that I wanted to give back something more. If the questions that bothered me bothered them, and they did, then I would offer the fruits of my own journey in order to alleviate some of the stresses and pressures people feel under. So I wrote a series of books addressing these questions.

Our world is a curious place, a dichotomy; while there is electric light and running water on the one hand, there is a deficit on the other. The human qualities, those naturally attendant characteristics of a meaningful and purposeful life, a life well lived are in shortfall. It is these areas that the Mechanics of Happiness covers; the book is a simple conversation between the author and the reader. It makes no judgement and offers a cascade of perceptions to illuminate the way forward and enable the reader to piece together a structure of their own.

I see my god in the love of others, qualities given a home in my fellow beings, – human or otherwise- those whom I call brothers and sisters for I see that we are all as one, a family derived from the same source. Our expressions different, our experience broad ranging but our common heritage the same. We are children of a universe that is the work in progress of my god, an unfinished symphony being writ new and extended each day, each hour, each moment.

I am weak in the face of my god but given strength by its purpose. I see in the weakness and vulnerability of those precious things a reason to be a protector of my god’s children. I am held in the bosom of my god, exalted by inclusion and I revere its diversity, I live in awe and gaze in wonder at the perfection of its expression. I see it in the laws of nature that filter from the deepest part of creation to the handful of sand that trickles through my fingers.

Always will I uphold the sanctity of my god’s works and purpose to grow and refine. I shall endeavour to be of account and mirror the actions of my god in my own actions. There is no other reason for living than to extend the grace of this common heritage, a mutuality of kind where the only admission policy is that life abides yet within and each is an integrated part of creation’s possibility.

My god’s creation is the love of kind, the love of companionship and the love of communion between its divided parts who seek to come together in an illumined whole. The physical and material worlds are the manifestation of its cause, its cause is the manifestation of a purpose whose will permeates all things, the will of creation, which is my god’s face, is to be known by its children and recognised in order that it may better know and engage with them. Freedom to do, freedom to choose is the gift of my god, and only through this extension may I know truly of the love my god extends to me in trust and recognition of that integrity. Invested that each of its children in their uniqueness may emancipate themselves and become an integrated part of the conscious ray of creation.

My god is in all things and you are part of that. In you do I see the magnificence of creation reflected.

When you’re in it, it’s difficult to know. This is the goldfish bowl analogy; the idea that a fish is the last thing to know it is in water. We are like this too, we will be the last ones to know the folly or wisdom of our age, of our own lives and the decisions that we make. We commit to things, ideas, psychologies, beliefs and so on, and then stand or fall upon the basis of these choices. True, many of the choices are one horse races and at the time of choosing we didn’t always know there was a choice, this is the state that children find themselves in when they are mentored by the adults around them. Their choices are at the discretion of those who are responsible for their well being and it is to be hoped that those adults have executed their responsibilities with integrity, neutrality and the best possible outcome for the child as their guiding principle. Of course it is hard to speak with tongue placed firmly in cheek but there we are.

There is the famous story of the unfortunate Derek Rowe of Decca Records who rejected the Beatles after an audition on New Years Day 1962 saying “guitar groups are on the way out” and “the Beatles have no future in show business”. It illustrates graphically that there is no such thing as certainty in this life where the human arena is concerned. People assert expertise in areas where they can have no expertise other than observational. The greatest seers of our story have been partially correct but no one can predict the future with certainty.

Yet we are now in the grips of premonition fever. Climate change speculators vie with each other for more outrageous scare stories and they program computers to model potential outcomes in a doomsday scenario where the [programmers define the parameters. A wise general will choose his battle ground and then lure his adversaries forces into his killing zone to be assaulted, ambushed and vanquished with as little cost as possible to the wise general’s force. The weaver’s of doom are trying to select their ground in an adversarial presentation of the case. In all the best dramas there are good guys, there are bad guys and there is a nirvana like destination. The destination here is unclear, there are bountiful statements about ‘save the planet’ and some kind of Garden of Edenesque future awaiting the good guys once they vanquish the villains of the piece, who seem to be everyone else. Everyone else refers to the sadistically malevolent forces turning on lights, heating their homes in the depths of winter and getting from place to place. There seems to be a lobby bent on returning the human race to the Dark Ages literally and metaphorically.

When I was much younger I was turned on to the works of people like James Lovelock and Fred Hoyle and a host of other bright stars in the firmament of the collective human mind. The body of work produced by these people persuaded me that there was a sentient agency within the universe. Not the God of monotheism, the personal confessor who hears the prayers and administers justice for every believer who glances at a pretty girl’s décolletage or handsome boy’s pectoral muscles but an agency whose precise character I might only speculate upon that permeates the universe with order and a structural cohesion wherein its finest property we might conceive of, the human spirit, may be seeded in order for it to grow and develop into something autonomous capable of appreciating its absolute character. This at a time when it was not fashionable to think such thoughts, the 1970s, and indeed when we were being warned of the imminent new Ice Age about to engulf us all. That Ice Age never happened and became replaced by its polarity, the Global Warming. The Global Warming being the doctrine and rapidly mutating into the dogma of our age.

The Global Warming has its high priests and they have drawn their constituency into their belief system just as the wandering priests of the Middle Ages promised Hell, Purgatory and Redemption for a fee. Their mutant offspring, the witchfinders, then spread their mirth about the land declaring anyone whose gib they didn’t like the cut of to be in league with Satan, responsible for local calamity and so on and let’s face it, everyone likes a scapegoat. Alleged witches burned, neighbors settled old scores in kangaroo courts and ridiculous tests were devised for proving the voracity of an accuser’s claim or otherwise; woe betide the single woman with a cat, the man whose blisters from a hot iron healed too quickly or the poor sod who floated when thrown in the village pond.

This madness has now afflicted The Global Warming. The new religion is rushing to make itself feared and despised just as we have seen happen any number of times throughout history with unproven theses treated as though they were absolute truth. Here are some quotes that demonstrate just what kind of a mess people are hysterically getting into. Nothing is proven, theory remains theory until it is established as being unequivocally the case.

‘Only an insignificant fraction of scientists deny the global warming crisis. The time for debate is over. The science is settled.’

Al Gore 1992

‘This disaster is not set to happen in some science fiction future many years ahead, but in our lifetime.’

Tony Blair 2006

‘The science is beyond dispute and the facts are clear.’

Barack Obama 2008

‘Future generations will wonder in bemused amazement that the early 21st century’s developed world went into hysterical panic over a globally averaged temperature increase of a few tenths of a degree and, on the basis of gross exaggerations of highly uncertain computer projections combined into implausible chains of inference, proceeded to contemplate a roll back of the industrial age.’

Professor Richard Lindzen, the world’s leading atmospheric physicist and ‘climate scientist’ 2007

The point is moot, and a philosophical one at that. Where we draw the line is a subjective matter and I am minded of the US Senate’s committee on pornography who reasoned that they could not define pornography par se but they knew it when they saw it. It is just so with the actions of an individual and when precisely they become a risk or a threat to the integrity of others.

I find politics and politicians a curious lot. It is entirely possible that they all set off on the great race with a high degree of personal integrity and are well intentioned. It is, after all, the one arena where they can bring about significant change. Isn’t it? Yet, like fry in the nursery pools of clear mountain streams, so few of them pass through all the obstacles to mature into those salmon that will perpetuate their genetics and so preserve and continue the species. I find myself exposed here and feeling vulnerable. Why? The current inquiry into the Iraq war gives the lie to the various arguments foisted upon us by the powers that were and I was duped at the time into concluding that war was an inevitability with such a malevolent and stubborn threat to world stability.

Only now it seems that there was no threat. Sadam Hussein was isolated and weak, Iraq a broken and failed state. This was no Hitler marching his forces into the Sudetenland, this was no despot at the helm of a world power gone bad. This was a rogue state already surrounded by neighbours keen to keep Sadam Hussein and his regime in its place. Of course there is the humanitarian argument, look at what he did to his own people, look at this inhuman monster, is there no end to his depravity? Yet he’d already had his wings clipped by Iran and had been militarily humiliated by an earlier coalition in response to his incursion into Kuwait. The argument for leaving a failed state to resolve its own affairs is probably more persuasively put by the bereaved families of those mainly US and UK soldiers who went into Iraq to protect the Western democracies.

It now becomes evident that there was no compelling case for invading Iraq, no compelling case for deposing Sadam, no threat to the West and no connection between Iraq, Al Qaeda and the events surrounding 9/11. There was no smoking gun and Sadam Hussein was guilty only of belligerence and a machismo that saw the US, UK and UN as interfering nannies. The case has been put many times regarding many leaders in the world that if these were the criteria for invasion then the US, UK and UN would be invading and deposing leaders 365 days a year. But they’re not. In time we may come to know what compelled the see saw of deceit (the Bush – Blair axis) to attack the axis of evil through Iraq, somehow I doubt that really made Al Qaeda quake in their desert boots. It appears that the US administration had decided, for whatever reason, on regime change for Iraq in 1998 and that the smokescreen of shock and grief at the events of 9/11 provided a ruse and an excuse for scapegoating and attacking Sadam Hussein’s Iraq.

I am no conspiracy theorist. I do not see black helicopters hovering overhead and government agents skulking in alleyways. But I do think a grave situation regarding trust and integrity has arisen within the cohort of the political classes and those who aspire to leadership in the supposedly free democracies of the West. The Iraqis and the Arab world will not be impressed by the case that was made for going to war and the tissue of deceit and coercion that it inevitably will be exposed as. I am slightly embarrassed that I fell for it, I argued with friends at the time that there was no other option, Sadam had forced the coalition’s hand and blah, blah, blah. I was wrong, deceived by the weasel words of spin doctors and people playing games with the lives of others and expecting them to pay the ultimate price to underwrite their follies and misadventures in the desert.

How am I left? I am minded of the words of the mystic William Blake , ‘I must create a system or be enslaved by another man’s; I will not reason and compare: my business is to create.’ I would change it slightly: I must embody a system or be enslaved by another man’s: I will not reason and compare: my business is to embody creation. The over-riding principle in this being that the works of men are nothing compared to the works of nature, whose impartiality and integrity is absolute. I am reminded of my own folly in falling for the old silver tongued rogue, never again, never again. Let nature be your guide, let the mechanics of creation be the template upon which you base your works and may your allegiance be to universal truth.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/8380139.stm

ODD is great, it stands for Oppositional Defiant Disorder, this is one where the young person opposes everything. Oh yes, that does mean everything, even the things they want. Try working that little condition out if you’re ever at a loose end.

The only way to deal with these young people effectively is to have clearly defined boundaries and known consequences for crossing those boundaries. Without this there is no basis for any exchange whatsoever, with this there is an arena for horse trading or negotiating which allows the young people to score ‘victories’ while actually managing their behaviours. During adolescence the young person sets their feet upon one of many journeys they will, and for ‘they’ write ‘we’ because we’ve all travelled that same road, undertake. Their world is turned on its head by the predetermined release of hormones into their body’s systems which cause mood swings, changes in temperament, what Nietzsche called ‘the will to power’, identity formation and a cascade of other behavioural drivers or influences.

They are launched into a world of changing terrains, their understanding is called into question and they are faced with the challenge of trying to make sense and infer meaning from it all. Those whose development has been impaired for whatever reason find this time and the shifting order extremely difficult. Their behaviour if it has been dysfunctional already goes into hyper-drive and they fall into all the classic traps of adolescence. They often become involved with substance abuse issues, the police, the judicial system and their lives which have already been difficult ratchet up a gear.

The answer lies in education on the one hand and understanding on the other. Education in the sense of life learning as opposed to academic learning. To the young person with severe EBD there is little solace in maths or science, their world is chaos, mathematics is order and might as well be invisible to them. Education in the way of life, the nature of things and what the deal is for human beings. Understanding is needed on the part of those who deal with them. Understand that these young people are in turmoil, they cannot make sound decisions because their critical reasoning is inactive or under-developed. This makes them easier to deal with but does not address the underlying issues.

The underlying issues are the circumstances that produced them. The key players in this their parents. All young things form attachments with those around them, invariably this is their parents or the significant adults in their lives. If those people themselves are the product of a broken social setting then they can only perpetrate the cycle. They give continuance to the issues which have dogged them and will dog their offspring unless a breakthrough is achieved.

The breakthrough moment is an epiphany on the part of the one who experiences it. Sadly this is not common. There needs to be in place certain favourable conditions before an epiphany can occur, just like a garden plants need the right ingredients in place before they can appear. This is where education comes in and without education there is very little chance of an epiphany occurring. So we find ourselves in a Catch 22 scenario. The result is the formation of peripheral groups within society, people on society’s edge or as they are called the Underclass. The Dalits of South Asia were known as untouchables and they or their equivalent manifest in all societies.

The easy answer is to sneer at these ‘losers’ and ‘no hopers’ but that is not the sign of a developed individual. Understand that they exist and their desire to grow and develop is no less than your own. It is simply the lack of a cohesive framework that they can identify with and see their own place within. You are fortunate, to have read this far offers an indication that you are not one of the Underclass or peripheral folk. Whether by luck or judgement you are privileged to be well aspected in these matters and that in a sense is a responsibility that you carry on behalf of all those less privileged than yourself.

I used to dismiss the idea of heaven and hell as a fanciful weapon within the arsenal of bigotry and dogma. I realise now that both exist, not as components of the architecture of the next world but as features of this. Your freedom and emancipation and your prerogative to pursue the same are blessings and gifts from Creation, they are, in effect, heaven. Being trapped in a mental and emotional prison without the apparent means of escape is, in effect, hell. Spend some time with those whose confining bars are firmly in place, whether they be the bars of delusion, fantasy or the inability to perceive something other than their current state and you will understand the adversities they must overcome and appreciate more fully your own situation.

Do not patronise those who had no part in the formation of their excruciating circumstances. They were dealt a poor hand for whatever reasons, the components of their struggle will be different to your own. Instead resolve to be better yourself, and if not for yourself then for all those whose existence is at times a living hell and whose acuity does not allow them to see the way out of their situation at the moment. Their epiphany may come, all strength when it does, but in the meantime stride forward on behalf of us all, each victory you achieve, each new peak that you surmount, each obstacle you overcome is a feather in all our caps not least of all those who currently know no alternative.

Peter Levine grew up in England in a setting that ticked all the wrong boxes. His upbringing left him with far more questions than answers and he began a lifelong quest to find meaning that resonated with his experiences. His search took him all over the world and he sought out and studied under teachers, mentors and adepts from various traditions. Over a period of some thirty years his love of wisdom and its application flowered, gathering esoteric, hidden and secret knowledge as well as Master’s degrees in Philosophy and History.

His adult children have achieved remarkable success in their chosen fields and lead happy, fulfilled and purposeful lives. In addition to lecturing, teaching and broadcasting Peter has worked extensively with severely emotionally and behaviourally challenged young people. This has galvanized his views on living the best life, something he believes passionately we can all access if we want it. He believes there is no challenge that can not be surmounted with simplicity and humour, the human spirit is indomitable and that human potential is the last great unexplored continent.

Three themes permeate this work; development, fulfilment and happiness. It’s said in life that there is no guidebook, that it’s all trial and error or the school of hard knocks. What if such a guidebook existed? Collectively we face huge challenges in our time. This book strips away the mystique of some of the most profound issues and presents a devastatingly simple approach in the form of seven compact volumes that offer insight and perception through easy to follow narratives.

Throughout history, magi, practitioners of the esoteric arts and the earned have demonstrated these core principles of essence engineering. To apply the principles of state teaching or essence work has been forbidden throughout history by powerful institutions and bodies. Often dismissed as ‘occultists’ or ‘black magicians’ and ostracised or punished for their skills the latest manifestation of these being in what is currently peddled as the ‘law of attraction’.

The true art is in knowing in the first place the nature of the engagement. There is a maxim: to get gold, you must have gold. Do not be mistaken in thinking this refers to the precious metal; it is not so vulgar but represents a particular high state associated with specific forms of development not practiced in the West and not commonly understood at all. Essence work is about attraction, and then more pertinently about maintenance. It is well to summon something to oneself, but the next level of engagement is to hold onto that thing, to become endeared toward it and a home for it.

Think of a simple level of this, consider a quality such as humility. To summon humility by one’s demeanour, attitude, actions and being is a noble art. To keep it with or close by requires great devotion and continual work upon self. It requires the establishing of standards in one’s life, standards beneath which one will not go, it requires discipline and adhesion to a modality that is rare and even obscure in this age. Requirement is critical, the defining factor here is its requirement. When dealing with essences of whatever hue there is a first requirement upon any individual, namely that the object is engaged with on its terms. This is not a fashion statement, it is not something that segues neatly into a lifestyle. These are things that exist of themselves and independently of cultural mores, like and dislike, right and wrong or other subjective judgements.

We enter here a world of demands, not aggressive or vituperative demands; rather a system of absolutes and cores whose engagement with any individual or group of individuals is not based upon whim, the mood of the day or the agenda of some power broker.

This is an excellent area to base one’s meditations upon. The return is immense, a rich seam of contemplation. Meet things on their terms before you become a dictator yourself. It is only when you are truly of account and your standards are firm and unwavering that you may define your own way and style in such a manner as to represent an attractive proposition to high and fine things whose interest always is the upgrade of human life.