Glorious 39

Film Review

Stephen Poliakoff’s film the Glorious 39 is a suspenseful study of identity, class and paranoia set in the immediate period before the start of the Second World War. Romola Garai plays the adopted but eldest daughter of an aristocratic family whose life unravels as she progressively uncovers their complicity in a plot to dissociate Great Britain from the battle against Nazism unfolding in mainland Europe.

Avoiding the pitfall of presenting a far fetched action thriller, the director underplays the murder and espionage elements of the film to subtly study the deterioration of once secure familial relationships, as well as the suffocation and patronage of the highly cultured and excessively mannered pre war British nobility. Using classic suspenseful cinematic touches, the director heightens the viewer’s sense of the main protagonist’s immediate danger, her escalating isolation and deteriorating mental health, so much so that seemingly innocuous occurrences evoke irrational apprehension and a sense of extreme peril in the audience.

The accidental discovery of an intriguing gramophone recording that she stumbles on in the family’s barn, triggers the disappearance then murder of friends and close associates eventually revealing the full extent of her adoptive family’s involvement in a plot to undermine the war effort. These events are portrayed against the backdrop of palatial family homes the idyllic surrounding countryside and the misleading calm cleverly contrasts the insular life of the privileged rich with the gathering storm poised to engulf Europe.

The beloved daughters increasing alarm is frequently assuaged by her father, played by Bill Nighy a brilliant paragon of calm assurance and unctuous duplicity. Even at her worst moment when his actual evil intent is starkly exposed, he speaks to his daughter in such caring fatherly tones that it is possible to believe that he still harbours genuine concern for her. The erosion of her position as a cherished and beloved daughter culminates in the alienating revelation and discovery of her Romany heritage and the rising tension of her estrangement both grips and horrifies. Her outsider status is manipulated so comprehensively that her sanity becomes unhinged, isolated, desperate and times drugged, her captors undermine and fragment her tenuous hold on reality.

This enthralling film emphasizes the vulnerability of women in the pre war age, their dependence on social status for security and protection, without family and deprived of social connection whilst living in permanent anxiety with mental instability an inevitable outcome.

Shaykh Fadhlala Haeri

A post on the Enlightennext UK blog co-written with Carole Raphael to describe a summer evening spent in the company of a revered Muslim mystic.

We were honored to host Shaykh Fadhlala Haeri, his wife Aliya Haeri,, a Sufi master in her own right, and many of Shaykh Fadhlala’s devoted students at our London EnlightenNext Centre recently. It was an evening of rare spiritual camaraderie and joy.

Shaykh Fadhlala is a Sufi sheikh who comes from a long line of respected teachers of Islam. Born in the holy city of Karbala in Iraq, he was educated in Europe and the US and pursued a successful career as a businessman before becoming a religious teacher more than twenty years ago. Shaykh Fadhlala is the founder of the Academy of Self Knowledge, the author of many books on Islam, and spiritual guide to students living across the globe. Currently, living in the Republic of South Africa Shaykh Fadlalah is a progressive mystic and is as deeply informed by the global context and his scientific education as much as his spiritual heritage.

The evening began with an intimate dinner with the Shaykh, a few of his closet students, and EnlightenNext’s Managing Director, Finance Manager and Head of Operations. Following the meal Shaykh Fadhlala gave a talk in which he gave a brief overview of the Sufi Path, which he described as the spiritual heart of Islam.

His main theme was how to pursue an authentic life. With great warmth humour and clarity the Shaykh explained that authenticity, or the condition of being truly ourSelves, with a capital “S”, is the goal of the spiritual life. And by authenticity the Shaykh meant living from that part of ourselves which is highest—the divine within us, the light of God, the soul, or higher consciousness…whatever you want to call it, he said. That higher part is already in us, he said, and it is already enlightened.

Any virtuous attribute carried within in it an expression of divine essence, when drawn to express these qualities we become a vehicle for the infinite to express itself in the world. It is our work to turn away from that which is lower so that higher consciousness can be known and embraced.

The Shaykh sprinkled his talk with a number of metaphors. These imparted an intangible poetic quality, I thought, to what he was conveying as well as served as a tool for envisaging the breadth and absolute dimension of what he was speaking about. For example, he spoke about the “map of creation” as a way to express that life is a process and one with a definite goal. And the process, or path, has a direction, he stressed, one towards higher consciousness. “The issue is arrival,” he repeated in various ways.

He also acknowledged that we have to be aware that we are conditioned beings that our consciousness is conditioned no matter who we are and, at the same time, we are always changing. But that doesn’t mean we can’t also experience the ever-present boundless dimension of consciousness. He explained that by accepting boundaries and our limitations, we will be able to transcend the lower attributes of the self. When the ego’s will is subservient to God’s will, or the authentic self, we are able to rise to higher dimensions. In a particularly beautiful turn of phrase, he said “we are already colonized… by [our] soul.”

With expert precision he identified the many pitfalls and delusions of ignorance, which shield us from progressively uncovering our sublime true nature. He also counselled us to avoid attachment, especially in spiritual matters, and to remain humble.

Thanks to the Shaykh’s spiritual transmission an extraordinary evening was conducted at the EnlightenNext Centre in an atmosphere of considerable mutual respect and warmth. A soul sharing between two dissimilar groups dedicated to the second face of God, connected and bonded by the mutual recognition of spirit being higher, through the auspices and grace of two visionary contemporary teachers. What occurred throughout the evening forged a template for an interfaith communion conducted at the deepest possible level and thereby opening up a potential for ecstatic unity to be spread amongst the diverse faith communities of the planet

I Am a Serious Man -New Film

This new and totally absorbing film by the Coen brothers is replete with their customary stylistic idiosyncrasies, gentle yet farcical humour and off beat quirky characters through which they stunningly pull off an incisive and culturally accurate film. Based on elements of their own upbringing, set in a mid west Jewish American middle class suburb in the late sixties, the narrative of the film throws up a series of unpredictable yet believable circumstances, as it depicts a tsunami of familial and personal crises that engulf its main protagonist.

The unerring precision with which the Coen’s portray this passage of history, its claustrophobic banality and simmering unspoken emotional tension, induces in the viewer a state of suspended horror even nausea, at the grating awkwardness of everything it portrays.

The area where the film scores its greatest successes lies in the riveting portrayal of a huge variety of Jewish characters played, by an assumedly all Jewish cast. These actors vividly bring to life the tensions of the time through not expressing them. This is conveyed magnificently and simply through the acutely precise body language through which each actor imparts the alienation and mute isolation of the times as well as the characters from one another. As a subtle contrast to this stifling tone, the film refers at times obliquely and at others more directly to the countercultural seismic shifts occurring outside the perimeters of this enclosed world.

Ultimately bleak, the film traces the travails of Larry Gopnick, Physics Professor as he is sideswiped by a completely unexpected separation and possible divorce, blackmailed out of the family home and cringingly patronised by his wife’s intended new husband and bribed and blackmailed by a student potentially undermining an impending offer of tenure. Understandably he descends into a state of anguish, from which not one single acquaintance is able to assuage his deepening gloom. In desperation he seeks out two of three local Rabbis only to be offered glib platitudes or meaningless obscurantism.

The film within its own parameters is a triumph of convincing pathos, humour and whilst not nostalgic, an affectionate backward look at a very a specific time and place of a cultural rite of passage.

However stepping outside the Coen brothers’ milieu and seeing through, the artistic oeuvre that they inhabit, it is possible to discern certain cultural assumptions upon which the film is based. These presuppositions pervade the fabric of the film and render the overall message and content of the film a portrayal of a lost and nihilistically bereft humanity.

Whilst perfectly capturing the emptiness and isolation of modernity, the knowing almost sneering, poking of fun at human eccentricity, the nonexistence of any sense of underlying meaning or purpose in the lives of those portrayed, guarantee this movie carries the Coen’s typical filmic emotional undertow –their pervasive signature note of human futility and purposelessness. Whilst this film is not as much overt homage to the death drive as ‘No Country for Old Men’, ‘A Serious Man’ its ultimate longer term affect is to reduce art to smug irony.

On the initiation of the EnlightenNext Discovery Cycle in Tuscany July 25-August 16 2009

Seven weeks ago Andrew Cohen initiated the Discovery Cycle on the Being and Becoming retreat held amidst the outstanding beauty of the Tuscan hills.

The 'Being' part of the event was held over the first ten days where Cohen propelled participants into the perfect timeless ground of enlightenment. Using passages of his earliest work ‘Enlightenment is a Secret’ Cohen guided the most veteran meditators and the newest initiate deeper and even deeper into that nameless place where nothing ever happened and from which a problem never arose. After a day or two those attending felt an enormous magnetic field developing compelling them into letting go into the freefall of that weightless place. The field made the act of meditation increasingly natural and easeful allowing retreatants to shed layers and possibly lifetimes of habitual unconscious tension. With immense care and forensic precision in answering questions Cohen facilitated 120 delegates to encounter the mysterious wonder of enlightenment and allow it to fully permeate their experience. After ten days of total silence and immersed in that matchless perfection participants were radiating a rare quality of inner peace and stillness

Midway through the retreat it shifted gears into the 'Becoming' section, a handful of meditators left and 150 plus others arrived to take the retreat forward into hitherto uncharted waters. With his prodigious talent for creatively illustrating the dimensions of the self Cohen spoke for up to three hours at a time revealing the many subtleties and complexities inherent in the challenging task of conscious evolution. His consistent focus throughout the retreat was on the four essential elements of human experience, contrasting the authentic self the absolute positivity of the big bang in motion, with the sublime emptiness and indifference of the ground of being and then comparing these absolute dimensions with the relative and conditioned nature of the cultural as well as the personal psychological self.

Cohen’s consistently metamorphosing teaching style produced striking elucidations of both new and familiar principles. He defined ego as both best friend and worst enemy, the worst being that part of the self which is inert and violently resistant to change, the best being aligned with the culturally conditioned self that has developed over time and that which is capable of encompassing greater and greater degrees of evolutionary complexity. The core tenets of the teaching were described not as a guidance that if applied would create an improved person but kosmic laws that pulsated with their own radiant vertical enlightening energy.

In addition to these radical and illuminating discourses Cohen arranged the 250 plus people into groups of around 20-25 to meet daily and share their reflections insight and experiences on specific topics outlined by Cohen that he had raised in that morning’s talk. Each group was carefully arranged to compose of individuals with similar levels of knowledge understanding and familiarity with these Evolutionary Enlightenment teachings and were facilitated by two of Cohen’s most senior and closest students. Three or four groups were composed of individuals with little or next to no understanding and experience of evolutionary enlightenment the eleventh comprised of those with 11 -23 years, so a whole gradation of experience was represented within all the groups.

The morning teaching was followed by a group discussion in the afternoon and subsequently in the evening, all of the groups lead facilitators reported on the progress and some qualities of each group. During which Cohen took any questions offered by group members on the discussion content or group process. Remarkably every single day each group progressed step by step into deeper understanding of enlightenment and the process of intersubjective conscious development, irrespective of existing understanding or knowledge of the principles being taught. By the end of the retreat every participant was in an altered state, inspired enlivened and ecstatic and acutely conscious of the immense potential for the good of humanity and its future that this impersonal emergence represented.

In addition a small group of volunteers who had signed up for The EnlightenNext Discovery Cycle Higher Development Research Project before the retreat and were assessed at the beginning and end of the retreat on a range inventories, scans and profiling instruments to gauge the impact of the retreat on these individuals. As the study will be longitudinal these scientific tests will evaluate the participants responses and conscious evolution over a significant period of time and eventually scientifically evidence and demonstrate the effectiveness of these teaching methods.

Overall, Cohen's initiation of the EnlightenNext Discovery Cycle clearly demonstrated that a new utterly positive wholesome human culture can be created and/which is well within the grasp of anyone at a post modern stage of development, With little preparation or training 250 sincere individuals recognised that the future was in their hands and their creative power to affect the course of evolution was imminently achievable. It was also clear that this developmental milestone would be scaled up and made available to even larger numbers over time and as one former Buddhist observed that the retreat catalysed the turning the 'Fourth turning of the wheel'. A revolution in consciousness in culture is occurring and waiting for you to sign up!!

On the initiation of the EnlightenNext Discovery Cycle in Tuscany July 25-August 16 2009

Seven weeks ago Andrew Cohen initiated the Discovery Cycle on the Being and Becoming retreat held amidst the outstanding beauty of the Tuscan hills.

The 'Being' part of the event was held over the first ten days where Cohen propelled participants into the perfect timeless ground of enlightenment. Using passages of his earliest work ‘Enlightenment is a Secret’ Cohen guided the most veteran meditators and the newest initiate deeper and even deeper into that nameless place where nothing ever happened and from which a problem never arose. After a day or two those attending felt an enormous magnetic field developing compelling them into letting go into the freefall of that weightless place. The field made the act of meditation increasingly natural and easeful allowing retreatants to shed layers and possibly lifetimes of habitual unconscious tension. With immense care and forensic precision in answering questions Cohen facilitated 120 delegates to encounter the mysterious wonder of enlightenment and allow it to fully permeate their experience. After ten days of total silence and immersed in that matchless perfection participants were radiating a rare quality of inner peace and stillness

Midway through the retreat it shifted gears into the 'Becoming' section, a handful of meditators left and 150 plus others arrived to take the retreat forward into hitherto uncharted waters. With his prodigious talent for creatively illustrating the dimensions of the self Cohen spoke for up to three hours at a time revealing the many subtleties and complexities inherent in the challenging task of conscious evolution. His consistent focus throughout the retreat was on the four essential elements of human experience, contrasting the authentic self the absolute positivity of the big bang in motion, with the sublime emptiness and indifference of the ground of being and then comparing these absolute dimensions with the relative and conditioned nature of the cultural as well as the personal psychological self.

Cohen’s consistently metamorphosing teaching style produced striking elucidations of both new and familiar principles. He defined ego as both best friend and worst enemy, the worst being that part of the self which is inert and violently resistant to change, the best being aligned with the culturally conditioned self that has developed over time and that which is capable of encompassing greater and greater degrees of evolutionary complexity. The core tenets of the teaching were described not as a guidance that if applied would create an improved person but kosmic laws that pulsated with their own radiant vertical enlightening energy.

In addition to these radical and illuminating discourses Cohen arranged the 250 plus people into groups of around 20-25 to meet daily and share their reflections insight and experiences on specific topics outlined by Cohen that he had raised in that morning’s talk. Each group was carefully arranged to compose of individuals with similar levels of knowledge understanding and familiarity with these Evolutionary Enlightenment teachings and were facilitated by two of Cohen’s most senior and closest students. Three or four groups were composed of individuals with little or next to no understanding and experience of evolutionary enlightenment the eleventh comprised of those with 11 -23 years, so a whole gradation of experience was represented within all the groups.

The morning teaching was followed by a group discussion in the afternoon and subsequently in the evening, all of the groups lead facilitators reported on the progress and some qualities of each group. During which Cohen took any questions offered by group members on the discussion content or group process. Remarkably every single day each group progressed step by step into deeper understanding of enlightenment and the process of intersubjective conscious development, irrespective of existing understanding or knowledge of the principles being taught. By the end of the retreat every participant was in an altered state, inspired enlivened and ecstatic and acutely conscious of the immense potential for the good of humanity and its future that this impersonal emergence represented.

In addition a small group of volunteers who had signed up for The EnlightenNext Discovery Cycle Higher Development Research Project before the retreat and were assessed at the beginning and end of the retreat on a range inventories, scans and profiling instruments to gauge the impact of the retreat on these individuals. As the study will be longitudinal these scientific tests will evaluate the participants responses and conscious evolution over a significant period of time and eventually scientifically evidence and demonstrate the effectiveness of these teaching methods.

Overall, Cohen's initiation of the EnlightenNext Discovery Cycle clearly demonstrated that a new utterly positive wholesome human culture can be created and/which is well within the grasp of anyone at a post modern stage of development, With little preparation or training 250 sincere individuals recognised that the future was in their hands and their creative power to affect the course of evolution was imminently achievable. It was also clear that this developmental milestone would be scaled up and made available to even larger numbers over time and as one former Buddhist observed that the retreat catalysed the turning the 'Fourth turning of the wheel'. A revolution in consciousness in culture is occurring and waiting for you to sign up!!

Brian Swimme Poet of the Cosmos

Attending Brian Swimme's recent evening talk at the Schumacher College was an inspiring and uplifting and unusual experience. The man is so passionate about the evolution of the cosmos, tracking its deep time origins, tracing lightly over the mathematics, physics and the utterly immense scale of the whole process. Simultaneously his joy in the discovery of the Universe as self, transmits a degree of grounded positivity that you rarely encounter in the public sphere.

Swimme's enthusiasm for the evolutionary process opens the mind up to the miraculous formation of stars, the majesty of collapsing and spiralling galaxies, the might of gravitational waves plus the stupendous distances involved at every level. His ecstatic delivery shames conventional science and scientists for their desiccated approach to their subjects.

One particularly evocative moment occurred when he distinguished between the planetary bodies in our solar system. He characterised the mass of Jupiter as a planet of gases a planet body, that you could literally travel right through the centre of the vapours and emerge intact on the other side. Contrasting this with Mars which he said was dead inert rock, totally lifeless solid and impermeable.

The earth lies between the two and is in a state of balanced turbulence, it is fluid with a flaky crust. The centre fluctuates between a gaseous and solid state the movement of the core magma drives the plates ultimately generating life, it is swimming in a constant state of disequilibrium. That life evolved out of these elements in Swimmes view was more miraculous than anything narrated or described in any of the Holy Scriptures.

He described the Sun as igniting 600 million tonnes of Hydrogen gas every minute turning 596m into helium, the missing 4m tons is emitted as light energy which is what nourishes the earth. He portrayed this as an act of cosmic generosity.

He vividly described that pivotal and poignant moment when the first unicellular organisms having run out of food sources, had to invent a completely novel way of extracting energy from the environment. They evolved to capture and convert the energy of a photon inventing the process of photosynthesis, indicating that even at this basic level of life some form of consciousness must have been operational.

Outlining the evolutionary developments from amoeba to mammal and then to human life, Swimme swiftly switched focus to the quantum, the quark and most elementary levels of material reality. He described the appearance and disappearance of trillions quantum particles as generated out of the all nourishing abyss and at its root a ‘space time foam’.

After this part of the talk had finished I put a question to Brian on why so many interpreters of Thomas Berry’s work seemed to over emphasise the community of the earth at the expense of the importance of human self reflective consciousness and consequently generate an antipathy toward human presence on the planet.

He gave me a very cute response and asked me what proportion of people on the planet were awake to the dangers I guessed at about to 2% and then as I started to change my mind but he stopped me! He then said the alarmist messages about the state of planet had a place and needed to be communicated, as not enough people were awake to the real dangers.

However the flip side was everybody needed to be awake the fact that we were at a time of great opportunity and possibility and this was also a crucial part of the picture. Funnily enough he said that Thomas Berry used to get very depressed about the state of the planet and it was left to Brian to have to cheer him up!!

LSE talk by Susan Neiman titled What Makes Heroes?

Susan Neiman is a moral philosopher and a distinguished scholar, she is director of the Einstein Forum and is used to asking big questions and making the tools of her academic discipline relevant to the average, thinking citizen.

She has authored a new book titled Moral Clarity: A Guide for Grown Up Idealists and the topic of heroism is central to the book. I became enthused about her having read an interview with her in EnlightenNext magazine written by Elizabeth Debold.

In her talk at the LSE one of her central themes was to reconstruct our idea of heroism. For her Odysseus represents bears true hallmarks of heroism in contrast with the invulnerable Achilles who has been become our prevalent heroic archetype, modelling in her view, an infantilised hollow version of heroism. Odysseus is heroic because he uses his wits and guile and endlessly struggles to overcome he challenges and trials he faces. Unusually for a Greek myth he utilises no super powers or assistance of the Gods. It is these momentous efforts that make Odysseus heroic, this process moulds and shapes his humanity and character into one to which we should all aspire.

Another theme that emerged from her talk was that our most common heroes are usually ones that die, sometimes martyrs and almost always tragic and have generally tended to die for a noble cause. Nieman was emphatic that a dead hero was next to worthless because they let humans off the hook, if a hero dies their example is almost impossible to follow and therefore we consequently let go of our own aspirations to heroism.

She illustrated her argument with little known vignettes of what she regarded as true heroism what follows is one example. We all know about the man that lay in front of the tank at Tiananmen Square who was crushed, yet there was a more potent story in the background that got far less media exposure. A bus driver noting what was happening drove his bus forward to block the route of some the tanks and realising that the bus would be removed threw the keys of the bus away where they would not be found and remained by his bus.

Most of us worship Gandhi, Mandela, the Dalai Lama because they are distant and therefore safe and they personally, can have extremely little direct impact on our lives. Therefore there is very little impetus to desire for change. Philosophically she is deeply influenced by Kant and thus wants to reinvigorate ‘Enlightenment Heroism’. This includes having an awareness of ‘the difference between things as they are and things as they should be’.

This was a dense rigorously argued talk packed full of cultural philosophical and political references many of which were lost on me. However in addition to the authoritative call for a new type of heroism Susan thoroughly punctured many of the revered and jealously guarded tenets of postmodern culture. Heroes she argued inspire us to struggle to become more fully human. She is arguing for a re-evaluation of the terms good and evil honour and nobility because social theory has relegated the hero to the sterile term role model.

Initial Impresssions from SDi UK Summit 26-27 June 2009 with Don Beck

This post was written in response to the summary of the UK Summit event posted by Keith Rice on his blog

Keith as you have done the 'fill in' so well on the facts I shall not blog my own summary!!

This leaves me with the luxury of just adding a few qualitative background comments to your informative structure.

I was struck to begin with how Don adapted his teaching style to be more inclusive of the group and how he initially surfaced everyone’s thoughts on the current LIFE conditions in the UK. Then how he followed this by highlighting the PRIORITY Codes of each meme system and finally focused on the common BELIEFS and Worldviews of each system over the passage of the two days

His use of Chariots of Fire film and particularly the scene in the Scottish Church hit me with a tsunami of overwhelming BLUE. When I first watched this film many years ago I would have enjoyed the propriety and Britishness of the characters but would have been glad not to been present for the stultifying suffocation of that age.

What was shocking was that despite how many conventional ritualistic and bureaucratic structures still being present in our social and other institutions, yet the rigour of these blue values has almost been entirely erased from the social and personal culture sphere(including mine!)

Over the two days I found the feedback from non UK nationals very refreshing and the objectivity of their reflection on the positivity of UK or British culture was both useful and uplifting. Because of the peculiar lack of value, I personally place on these positive characteristics, I found I appreciated the foreign perspective more highly than the Brits!!

On day two I was hugely affected by the statement from the MP read aloud by Lynn Sedgemore. This conveyed so utterly positively, our unique nationalistic qualities and history. The relationship to British identity was resoundingly unequivocal and at the same balanced informed and resolutely as well as pointedly anti extremist. Interestingly the writer’s sense of self was so fused with responsibility and appreciation for British identity that it also contained a clarion call for the need for all Brits to move forward together. I was therefore completely gobsmacked that the piece was written by a British Asian former MP and Justice Minister Shahid Malik. The appreciation of British values was so accurate and unambiguous it made me think that this is the direction from where the reconstruction of British identity might arrive!!

More to be posted here on the two day summit.