Sunday 7 October 2012

Patients starve and die of thirst on hospital wards

This highly emotive headline and story appeared in the Daily Telegraph

Step aside from the 'story' that grabs emotional reaction, the urge to judge and to blame and to add yet more layers of control in the name of merely 'DOING SOMETHING!". Feel or discern the template nature of what is being shared as our 'culture'. This lack of real involvement or relationship is not merely true in the care of the sick and the elderly but in almost every aspect of our relationships, only in this case it shows up in such blatantly unacceptable forms that cannot be glossed over, or massaged with spin and statistics.

Look beyond the characters in the story and see the ideas that make the script. Ideas are not Manna - but insofar as they were ever truly inspired they are derived from a heartfelt and passionate involvement in life, in relationship and in a spirit of discovery.

The mentality of control has appeal to the unwary, because it promises security and extension of power, but what it delivers is so far from the real safety of our true being that it beggars belief.

To try to communicate here in this comment is also to invite or reach past the mentality of control, because it is so deeply entrenched as our default identity that it is not open to question or re evaluation and is perfectly defended in its own thinking and its own personal interpretive experience. It believes it already knows and it seeks to answer the experience of breakdown with yet more control - or failing that with a sort of passive aggressive disengagement; withdrawing to fight another day.

Without the context of a culture of ideas that support it, the heart or wholeness of being in action, has to work like a double agent, not only to extend true service to the need but to 'survive' or cope within a system that does not see it, honour it, value it or support it.
 A little understanding is a dangerous thing in that a desire to 'save the world' can and does open only enough to the source of inspiration to get the answers that it then tries to personally impose upon the whole. These constant 'revolutions' or rebranding with 'new thinking' often disrupt what was already naturally working and introduce new layers of complexity and control that often embody the appeasement of anxieties.

What is going on is not so different from the self justifying thinking that we all tend to employ to justify our withdrawal or lack of true presence, in that we present the 'doings' of caring, the forms of 'love' or the rights of entitlement and protection.

The consumer society is not really about products and economy but about being herded, managed, medicated and CONTROLLED in return for a substitute life. This mentality of control does not impose itself on another, so much as grow from a passivity of caring and attention amidst a surface tension of chatter, busyness and distraction.

Like a spambot, we are each compromised in our liability to be hijacked unawares and this goes much deeper than our thinking itself can uncover because the basis of our thinking is part of the 'problem'.

As long as we see the 'problem' primarily outside our own mind, intent and involvement, we actually feed it by validating the terms in which it is set.

The problem of loving  - and all the fruits thereof - is one of resistance or refusal to involvement - which take the form of self-justifying fictions. The mindset of blame is chief among such fictions. Guilt appeals as a means of control but it absolutely undermines the functionality of all that is love from being honoured and embodied - and it makes its own counterfeit ideas of love as a sweetener for a bitter poison.

Common sense cries out at the story of this article - for anyone with no training at all  - but with a grain of compassion - could extend the basic humanity that would make such stories imossible.

There is a capacity for compassion - the compass of identification that includes others as our self - in all of us, but it is never the result of coercive controls founded in distrust fear and 'the need to be seen to be doing something' so as to avoid blame or litigation.

The extension of trust is our most primary creative response. It is not without discernment and is not giving in order to get but is the very Movement of Being Itself - which expresses as relating in shared purpose.

This may be corrupted in our thought but it remains uncoverable to our feeling and that direct experience is the guidance for our thought.
The arrogance of our thinking is laughable if nipped at the bud, but it is tragic in time as the misery of our human experience



And to one of a plethora of comments urging punitive response I wrote:

 Yes ! Stone them!

Nothing like fear of vilification, litigation and criminal punishment to bring out the best in all of us! Our God is a Holy Righteousness that will purge all the scum and filth from our minds and cast it out into darkness!

Please understand, the above is a dramatic device to illustrate a point.

 Opinions are cheap - and emotionally inflamed opinions are reactive and ill considered. I do not say this to anyone personally or single this comment as specially so - but that the answers will come from a true process of communication and not from imposing rules and penalties. We already have the law, and if a situation calls for the law then use it.

Communication is so difficult that psychiatric or psychological attempts to facilitate it often fail. The mind is very complex and mimics the forms of communication in a manipulative intent.
We herd together in collusions of shared definitions - in the name of covering our arse/ass. That is to say a kind of emotional and psychological self protective impulse (automatically) shuts down real communication unless such impulse can be seen to be causing or reinforcing distress rather than healing it.

Is moral outrage is an attempt to push away the unthinkable and the unfaceable in our own mind? I say that until we have found healing in our own mind, we seek to effect it by acting it out on the world - on our relationships.

Of course there is a call for correction, but in order to see the true nature of the situation we must first make sure we are corrected of a distorted vision - and act and speak from the heart that listens and discerns moment by moment - rather than embody a mechanism of conditioned reaction.

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