Channel 4 News • Nov 21, 2022: While the Iranian football team refused to sing their country’s anthem at today’s game, security forces were firing on protestors in two cities in Iranian Kurdistan – where witnesses said dozens of people were injured. (Subscribe: https://bit.ly/C4_News_Subscribe) Other reports say at least 11 people were killed during a heavy security crackdown in the city of Mahabad over the weekend. —– Watch more of our explainer series here – https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list… Get more news at our site – https://www.channel4.com/news/

Edwin Rutsch • Nov 21, 20222022-11-21 Best Empathy Training: Cohort 13.F: Module 1: Session 5 of 5 Cohort 13.F Landing Page: https://bit.ly/Cohort13F Training Website: https://BestEmpathyTraining.com Center for Building a Culture of Empathy http://CultureOfEmpathy.comhttp://EmpathyCircle.comhttp://EmpathyTent.comhttp://BestEmpathyTraining.com Empathy Circle Facilitator Training. Learn to facilitate an Empathy Circle. There is limited space in each cohort, and all participants must check with trainers to be accepted into the training. The basics of facilitating an Empathy Circle are fairly easy, however, it is a life long learning to deepen the skills and build a more empathic way of being and culture. Empathy Circle http://www.empathycircle.com/ 1. What is an Empathy Circle? http://bit.ly/EC-WhatIs 2. Why Participate? http://bit.ly/EC-Benefits 3. How to Empathy Circle? http://bit.ly/EC-How 4. Empathy Circle Facilitator Training http://bit.ly/EC-Facilitate

By Maria Popova (themarginalian.org)

The hardest state for a human being to sustain is that of open-endedness. We may know that uncertainty is the crucible of creativity, we may know that uncertainty is the key to democracy and good science, and yet in our longing for certainty we keep propping ourselves up from the elemental wobbliness of life on the crutch of opinion. Few things are more seductive to us than a ready opinion, and we brandish few things more flagrantly as we move through the world, slicing through its fundamental uncertainty with our insecure certitudes. The trouble with opinion is that it instantly islands us in the stream of life, cutting off its subject — and us along with it — from the interconnected totality of deep truth.

A mighty antidote to that very human and very life-limiting impulse comes from The Log from the Sea of Cortez (public library) by John Steinbeck (February 27, 1902–December 20, 1968).

John Steinbeck

In 1940, as humanity’s most ferocious war was rupturing the world, Steinbeck and his marine biologist friend Ed Ricketts decamped to the nonhuman world and its elemental consolations of interdependence, embarking on an exploratory expedition in the Sea of Cortez, also known as the Gulf of California — “a long, narrow, highly dangerous body of water… subject to sudden and vicious storms of great intensity.”

Wading through the tide pools, his hands callused from collecting specimens, his feet stung by poisonous worms and spiked by urchins, his mind invigorated by the ravishing interconnectedness of life, the 38-year-old writer found himself contemplating the deepest strata of reality and its intercourse with the human imagination. What emerges is a meditation on the nature of knowledge — a kind of prose counterpart to Elizabeth Bishop’s deep-seeing poem “At the Fishhouses” — disguised as an expedition journal: a wanderer’s delight in the adjacent pleasure gardens of science and philosophy of mind, composed two decades before Steinbeck received the Nobel Prize for his fiction. Despite his magnificent novels, despite his large-souled letters, I consider this his slender book of nonfiction his finest work.

At its heart is Steinbeck’s passionate refutation of the Western compulsion for teleological thinking — the tendency to explain things in terms of the purpose they serve, antithetical both to science and to the Eastern notion of being: the idea that everything just is and fragment of it, any one thing examined by itself, is simply because it is. Science — the supreme art of observation without interpretation, of meeting reality on its own acausal and impartial terms, free from the tyranny of why and its tendrils of blame — puts us a leap closer to understanding both particulate and pattern through non-teleological thinking — which, as Steinbeck astutely observes, is an inadequate term to begin with, for it asks of us more than thinking in how we parse any sort of information:

The method extends beyond thinking even to living itself; in fact, by inferred definition it transcends the realm of thinking possibilities, it postulates “living into.”

[…]

The greatest fallacy in, or rather the greatest objection to, teleological thinking is in connection with the emotional content, the belief. People get to believing and even to professing the apparent answers thus arrived at, suffering mental constrictions by emotionally closing their minds to any of the further and possibly opposite “answers” which might otherwise be unearthed by honest effort — answers which, if faced realistically, would give rise to a struggle and to a possible rebirth which might place the whole problem in a new and more significant light.

Art by the Brothers Hilts from A Velocity of Being: Letters to a Young Reader.

Such rebirth of perspective allows us to move beyond questions of cause in thinking and blame in feeling, which are related reflexes of the teleological mindset. The moment we regard something simply as it is, because it is, we have understood it more fully, for we have shed the narratives layer of why:

The non-teleological picture… goes beyond blame or cause. And the non-causal or non-blaming viewpoint… arises emergently from the union of two opposing viewpoints, such as those of physical and spiritual teleologies, especially if there is conflict as to causation between the two or within either. The new viewpoint very frequently sheds light over a larger picture, providing a key which may unlock levels not accessible to either of the teleological viewpoints. There are interesting parallels here: to the triangle, to the Christian ideas of trinity, to Hegel’s dialectic, and to Swedenborg’s metaphysic of divine love (feeling) and divine wisdom (thinking).

The factors we have been considering as “answers” seem to be merely symbols or indices, relational aspects of things — of which they are integral parts — not to be considered in terms of causes and effects. The truest reason for anything’s being so is that it is. This is actually and truly a reason, more valid and clearer than all the other separate reasons, or than any group of them short of the whole. Anything less than the whole forms part of the picture only, and the infinite whole is unknowable except by being it, by living into it.

A thing may be so “because” of a thousand and one reasons of greater or lesser importance… The separate reasons, no matter how valid, are only fragmentary parts of the picture. And the whole necessarily includes all that it impinges on as object and subject, in ripples fading with distance or depending upon the original intensity of the vortex.

Total eclipse of 1878, one of Étienne Léopold Trouvelot’s groundbreaking astronomical drawings. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)

In a passage of exquisite intellectual elegance and emotional truth, Steinbeck considers the continuum that is the essence of reality — the continuum we artificially sever into fragments with our teleological explanations and causally compulsive opinions:

No one thing ever merges gradually into anything else; the steps are discontinuous, but often so very minute as to seem truly continuous. If the investigation is carried deep enough, the factor in question, instead of being graphable as a continuous process, will be seen to function by discrete quanta with gaps or synapses between, as do quanta of energy, undulations of light. The apparently definitive answer occurs when causes and effects both arise on the same large plateau which is bounded a great way off by the steep rise which announces the next plateau. If the investigation is extended sufficiently, that distant rise will, however, inevitably be encountered; the answer which formerly seemed definitive now will be seen to be at least slightly inadequate and the picture will have to be enlarged so as to include the plateau next further out. Everything impinges on everything else, often into radically different systems, although in such cases faintly. We doubt very much if there are any truly “closed systems.”

Okay. Enough abstraction. Let us land this into the loveliness of the concrete:

The ocean, with reference to waves of water, might be considered as a closed system. But anyone who has lived in Pacific Grove or Carmel during the winter storms will have felt the house tremble at the impact of waves half a mile or more away impinging on a totally different “closed” system.

The Great Wave off Kanagawa by Japanese artist Hokusai, 1831. (Available as a print and as a face mask, benefitting The Nature Conservancy.)

This interconnectedness, this indivisibility, is the raw antidote to teleological thinking — something Steinbeck illustrates with a living wonder observed from the deck of his expedition vessel:

Seeing a school of fish lying quietly in still water, all the heads pointing in one direction, one says, “It is unusual that this is so” — but it isn’t unusual at all. We begin at the wrong end. They simply lie that way, and it is remarkable only because with our blunt tool we cannot carve out a human reason. Everything is potentially everywhere — the body is potentially cancerous, phthisic, strong to resist or weak to receive. In one swing of the balance the waiting life pounces in and takes possession and grows strong while our own individual chemistry is distorted past the point where it can maintain its balance. This we call dying, and by the process we do not give nor offer but are taken by a multiform life and used for its proliferation. These things are balanced. A man is potentially all things too, greedy and cruel, capable of great love or great hatred, of balanced or unbalanced so-called emotions. This is the way he is — one factor in a surge of striving. And he continues to ask “why” without first admitting to himself his cosmic identity.

Leaning once again on a living metaphor from the world of marine biology, he illustrates how our multitudes compose our totality in something beyond pure equivalence:

There are colonies of pelagic tunicates [Pyrosoma giganteum] which have taken a shape like the finger of a glove. Each member of the colony is an individual animal, but the colony is another individual animal, not at all like the sum of its individuals. Some of the colonists, girdling the open end, have developed the ability, one against the other, of making a pulsing movement very like muscular action. Others of the colonists collect the food and distribute it, and the outside of the glove is hardened and protected against contact. Here are two animals, and yet the same thing—something the early Church would have been forced to call a mystery. When the early Church called some matter “a mystery” it accepted that thing fully and deeply as so, but simply not accessible to reason because reason had no business with it. So a man of individualistic reason, if he must ask, “Which is the animal, the colony or the individual?”’ must abandon his particular kind of reason and say, “Why, it’s two animals and they aren’t alike any more than the cells of my body are like me. I am much more than the sum of my cells and, for all I know, they are much more than the division of me.” There is no quietism in such acceptance, but rather the basis for a far deeper understanding of us and our world. And now this is ready for the taboo-box.

Pyrosoma giganteum

Composing a sort of modern Aesopian fable of our faulty sensemaking, he adds:

It is not enough to say that we cannot know or judge because all the information is not in. The process of gathering knowledge does not lead to knowing. A child’s world spreads only a little beyond his understanding while that of a great scientist thrusts outward immeasurably. An answer is invariably the parent of a great family of new questions. So we draw worlds and fit them like tracings against the world about us, and crumple them when they do not fit and draw new ones. The tree-frog in the high pool in the mountain cleft, had he been endowed with human reason, on finding a cigarette butt in the water might have said, “Here is an impossibility. There is no tobacco hereabouts nor any paper. Here is evidence of fire and there has been no fire. This thing cannot fly nor crawl nor blow in the wind. In fact, this thing cannot be and I will deny it, for if I admit that this thing is here the whole world of frogs is in danger, and from there it is only one step to anti-frogicentricism.” And so that frog will for the rest of his life try to forget that something that is, is.

Art by Arthur Rackham from Irish Fairy Tales by James Stephens, 1920. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)

There is, Steinbeck cautions, nothing mystical about this recognition of an underlying patter — it is where all science ultimately points and where all knowledge, once freed from the clutch of causality, leads. Echoing the great naturalist John Muir’s observation that “when we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe,” he adds:

The whole is necessarily everything, the whole world of fact and fancy, body and psyche, physical fact and spiritual truth, individual and collective, life and death, macrocosm and microcosm (the greatest quanta here, the greatest synapse between these two), conscious and unconscious, subject and object. The whole picture is portrayed by is, the deepest word of deep ultimate reality, not shallow or partial as reasons are, but deeper and participating… And all this against the hot beach on an Easter Sunday, with the passing day and the passing time. This little trip of ours was becoming a thing and a dual thing, with collecting and eating and sleeping merging with the thinking-speculating activity. Quality of sunlight, blueness and smoothness of water, boat engines, and ourselves were all parts of a larger whole and we could begin to feel its nature but not its size.

No excerpt or annotation can do justice to the indivisible wonder that is The Log from the Sea of Cortez. Complement these fragments from it with Hannah Arendt on the life of the mind, Thoreau on how to see reality unblinded by our preconceptions, and Ursula K. Le Guin on apprehending reality through the dual lens of poetry and science, then revisit Steinbeck love and the key to good writing.

“Promiscuous reading is necessary to the constituting of human nature.”

–John Milton in Areopagitica

John Milton (December 9, 1608 – November 8, 1674) was an English poet and intellectual. His 1667 epic poem Paradise Lost, written in blank verse and including over ten chapters, was written in a time of immense religious flux and political upheaval. Wikipedia

(lithub.com)

(CraigHamiltonGlobal.com)

“True self-reflection fosters in us the connectivity of love for others and the things of cosmic creation, thereby allowing for a wholistic and healthful (omnijective) view of true self and reality.”    

–George Hage, from soon-to-be-released Counseling From The Heart

(Submitted by Suzanne Deakins, H.W., M.)

The Star

The Star (or Daughter of the Firmament) is numbered seventeen and is probably the most optimistic and beautiful card in the deck. A beautiful young woman, often naked, is depicted pouring water from a jug into the ground or into a pool by her feet. There are stars in the sky above her.

Stars have long been seen as symbols of hope, regeneration, vision and new life. When this card appears, you know somehow that life is just about to become easier and brighter. Life’s forces combine to assist rather than hinder.

Here is the truth about our power – we can join the solid earth of material existence with the flowing waters of spirit and create within ourselves a Universe. We have removed self-criticism and concentrated instead on our skills and strengths. When we regard ourselves with love, humour, tenderness and sympathy, we access the God and Goddess within and we are transformed.

“Every man and woman is a star” A. Crowley

(via angelpaths.com and Alan Blackman)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

For the American statute passed in the same year, see Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves.

Parliament of the United Kingdom
Long title	An Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade
Citation	47 Geo III Sess. 1 c. 36
Introduced by	William Grenville
Territorial extent	British Empire
Dates
Royal assent	25 March 1807

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William Wilberforce, the leader of the British campaign to abolish the slave trade.

Henry Dundas, 1st Viscount Melville by Sir Thomas Lawrence

Wedgwood anti-slavery medallion created as part of anti-slavery campaign by Josiah Wedgwood, 1787.

The Slave Trade Act 1807, officially An Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade,^[1] was an Act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom prohibiting the slave trade in the British Empire. Although it did not abolish the practice of slavery, it did encourage British action to press other nation states to abolish their own slave trades.

Many of the supporters thought the Act would lead to the end of slavery.^[2] Slavery on English soil was unsupported in English law and that position was confirmed in Somerset’s case in 1772, but it remained legal in most of the British Empire until the Slavery Abolition Act in 1833.

Background

As British historian Martin Meredith writes, “In the decade between 1791 and 1800, British ships made about 1,340 voyages across the Atlantic, landing nearly 400,000 slaves. Between 1801 and 1807, they took a further 266,000. The slave trade remained one of Britain’s most profitable businesses.”^[3]

The Committee for the Abolition of the Slave Trade was formed in 1787 by a group of Evangelical English Protestants allied with the Quakers, to unite in their shared opposition to slavery and the slave trade. The Quakers had long viewed slavery as immoral, and a blight upon humanity. By 1807 the abolitionist groups in Britain had a very sizeable faction of like-minded members in the British Parliament. At their height they controlled 35–40 seats. Known as the “Saints”, the alliance was led by the best known of the anti-slave trade campaigners, William Wilberforce, who had taken on the cause of abolition in 1787 after having read the evidence that Thomas Clarkson had amassed against the trade.^[4] These dedicated Parliamentarians had access to the legal draughtsmanship of James Stephen, Wilberforce’s brother-in-law. They often saw their personal battle against slavery as a divinely ordained crusade. On Sunday, 28 October 1787, Wilberforce wrote in his diary: “God Almighty has set before me two great objects, the suppression of the slave trade and the reformation of manners.”^[5]

On 2 April 1792, William Wilberforce sponsored a motion in the House of Commons “that the trade carried on by British subjects, for the purpose of obtaining slaves on the coast of Africa, ought to be abolished.” He had introduced a similar motion in 1791, which was soundly defeated by MPs, with a vote of 163 opposed, 88 in favour.^[6] Henry Dundas was not present for that vote, but when it was again before MPs in 1792, Dundas tabled a petition from Edinburgh residents who supported abolition.^[7] He then went on to affirm his agreement in principle with Wilberforce’s motion: “My opinion has been always against the Slave Trade.” He argued, however, that a vote for immediate abolition would be ineffective, as it would not prevent merchants from other countries from stepping in to continue the trade abandoned by the British. He stated: “this trade must be ultimately abolished, but by moderate measures”.^[8] He proposed an amendment that would add the word “gradual” to the Wilberforce motion. The amendment was adopted, 192 in favour, 125 opposed. The motion as amended then passed 230 in favour, 85 opposed.^[9][10] Dundas insisted that any abolition of the slave trade would have to be dependent on the support of West Indian colonial legislatures, and the implementation of laws concerning the amelioration of the conditions of slaves. Abolitionists argued that West Indian assemblies would never support such measures, and that making the abolition of the slave trade dependent on colonial reforms would cause indefinite delay.

Three weeks after the vote, Dundas tabled resolutions setting out a plan to implement gradual abolition by the end of 1799. At that time he told the House that proceeding too quickly would cause West Indian merchants and landowners to continue the trade “in a different mode and other channels.”^[11] He argued that “if the committee would give the time proposed, they might abolish the trade; but, on the contrary, if this opinion was not followed, their children yet unborn would not see the end of the traffic.”^[12] MPs voted in favour of ending the trade in slaves by the end of 1796, after defeating proposals to end the trade in slaves in 1795 or 1794.^[13][14] The House then amended the supporting resolutions tabled by Dundas, to reflect the new target date of 1796.^[13] The motion and resolutions did not receive consent in the House of Lords, however, consideration being formally deferred to a subsequent session on 5 June 1792, where they were never revived.

Abolitionists numbers were magnified by the precarious position of the government under Lord Grenville, whose short term as Prime Minister was known as the Ministry of All the Talents. Grenville himself led the fight to pass the bill in the House of Lords, while in the Commons the bill was led by the Foreign Secretary, Lord Howick (Charles Grey, later Earl Grey).^[1] Other events also played a part; the Acts of Union 1800 brought 100 Irish MPs into Parliament, most of whom supported abolition.^[15] The Bill was first introduced to Parliament in January 1807. It went to the House of Commons on 10 February 1807. On 23 February 1807, twenty years after he first began his crusade, Wilberforce and his team were rewarded with victory. After a debate lasting ten hours, the House agreed to the second reading of the bill to abolish the Atlantic slave trade by an overwhelming 283 votes for to 16.^[4] The Bill received Royal Assent on 25 March 1807.^[16] The Act took effect on 1 May 1807. However, Kitty’s Amelia had received clearance to sail on 27 April, before the deadline. Thus, when she sailed on 27 July, she did so legally. This was the last legal slave voyage for a British vessel.^[17]

All that took place against the background of the ongoing War of the Fourth Coalition. In the last months of 1806, Napoleon had won a major victory, crushing the military power of Prussia, entering into its capital Berlin and there issuing the Berlin Decree, bringing into effect the Continental System whose declared purpose was to weaken the British economy by closing French-controlled territory to its trade.^[18] Originally, the French Revolution had abolished slavery, but Napoleon – though claiming the mantle of continuing the revolutionary heritage – had in 1802 taken the retrograde step of reintroducing slavery in the French colonies. Thus, in abolishing the slave trade Britain – which could do little to directly oppose the string of French military victories on the continent – could at least gain the moral high ground against its French foe.

Other nations

By its Act Against Slavery of 1793, the Parliament of Upper Canada in British North America (modern-day Canada) abolished the slave trade, freed slaves immigrating by choice or force, as well as children born to enslaved women subsequently upon their 25th birthday, but did not emancipate existing resident slaves. In 1805 a British Order-in-Council had restricted the importation of slaves into colonies that had been captured from France and the Netherlands.^[19] Following adoption of the 1807 Act, Britain used its diplomatic influence to pressure other nations to end their own involvement in the slave trade.^[20] With the Anglo-Portuguese Treaty of 1810, Portugal agreed to restrict its trade into its colonies; in the Anglo-Swedish Treaty of 1813, Sweden outlawed its slave trade; and in the Treaty of Paris of 1814 whereby France agreed with Britain that the slave trade was “repugnant to the principles of natural justice” and agreed to abolish its involvement the slave trade in five years. In the 1814 Anglo-Dutch treaty the Netherlands outlawed its slave trade, and the 1817 Anglo-Spanish treaty called for Spain to suppress its trade by 1820.^[19]

The United States adopted its Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves on 2 March 1807, the same month and year as the British action. It provided for the abolition of its Atlantic slave trade but did not alter its internal trade in slaves, while the American abolition of the international slave trade led to the creation of a coastwise slave trade in the United States. Article 1, Section 9, Clause 1 of the United States Constitution forbade the closing of the slave trade for twenty years, until 1808. The long-planned law was passed a year earlier, and with the economic incentives of the slave trade coming to an end, there was both a spike number of slaves being traded and a unification of political factions against the trade.^[21]

Enforcement

Main article: Blockade of Africa

The Act created fines for ship captains who continued with the trade. These fines could be up to £100 per enslaved person found on a ship. Captains would sometimes dump captives overboard when they saw Navy ships coming in order to avoid these fines.^[22] The Royal Navy, which then controlled the world’s seas, established the West Africa Squadron in 1808 to patrol the coast of West Africa, and between 1808 and 1860 they seized approximately 1,600 slave ships and freed 150,000 Africans who were aboard.^[23][3] The Royal Navy declared that ships transporting slaves would be treated the same as pirates. Action was also taken against African kingdoms which refused to sign treaties to outlaw the trade, such as “the usurping King of Lagos“,^{[citation needed]} who was deposed in 1851. Anti-slavery treaties were signed with over 50 African rulers.^[24]

In the 1860s, David Livingstone‘s reports of atrocities within the Arab slave trade in East Africa stirred up the interest of the British public, reviving the flagging abolitionist movement. The Royal Navy throughout the 1870s attempted to suppress “this abominable Eastern trade”, at Zanzibar in particular. In 1890 Britain handed control of the strategically important island of Heligoland in the North Sea to Germany in return for control of Zanzibar, in part to help enforce the ban on slave trading.^[25][26]

More at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slave_Trade_Act_1807

The Astrology Podcast Nov 19, 2022: A deep dive into the Uranus returns of the United states, looking at how the transit of Uranus in Gemini has worked out for the country in three distinct periods in American history and what that may mean for the future, with astrologers Nick Dagan Best and Chris Brennan. The planet Uranus spends about 7 years in each sign of the zodiac, and it takes about 84 years to make a complete cycle and return to where it started. Astrologers have long noted that Uranus was transiting through Gemini during three distinct periods in American history: the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, and World War II. This correlation between important conflicts in the past is important today because Uranus is again getting ready to return to Gemini starting in 2025, and then transiting through that sign all the way through 2032. In this episode I sat down with Nick for a detailed conversation about those three previous periods in American history, in order to see just how close the previous correlations with Uranus transits have been, and also so that we could try to gain some insights about what may be coming up in the future.

October 14, 2022 Vanessa Able (thedewdrop.org)

“Sit. Feast on your life.”

– Derek WalcottTweet

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In her essay on directing self-love, Sharon Salzberg wrote: “Loving ourselves opens us to truly knowing ourselves as part of a matrix of existence, inextricably connected to the boundlessness of life.” This same invitation to intimacy and love towards ourselves is put forward by Derek Walcott in his gentle poem, Love After Love. Encountering ourselves sometimes can be like meeting a stranger for the first time – in the rush of the activity of life and being in relationship with others, we can lose sight of the most important and most intimate experience of selfhood. Derek Walcott imagines a moment of homecoming, of sitting with oneself, breaking bread and feasting on the joy of one’s life.

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LOVE AFTER LOVE

The time will come
when, with elation,
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror,
and each will smile at the other’s welcome,
and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

Derek Walcott (1930-2017)
From: The Poetry of Derek Walcott 1948-2013