Looking forward to going to Africa tomorrow. Trying to be as prepared as possible; can’t stop researching and writing. Need a haircut.

There’s a film I worked on with Tim Hardy in which Pierce Brosnan so generously narrated—we went to his hotel room (well, a room near his hotel room) and with a sound person laid down the narration.

Gracious. Intense. Great voice—and chosen to play James Bond. That’s pretty great on the resume. Pierce is also a spokesperson for Unicef Ireland and does a lot for conservation awareness.

I mention it here because it was mentioned in an article in the Province but we still haven’t figured out—with UNICEF—exactly what to do with it. A little excerpt:

McCormack and Tim Hardy, who was part of the crew that got the original Uganda footage, have completed a 25-minute documentary on AIDS in Africa, titled Hope in the Time of AIDS and narrated by Pierce Brosnan. They spent a day with the actor while he was in Vancouver filming another project.

We’re hoping it’ll get broadcast early in the new year, or possibly expanded to a longer film. Both Tim and I are off to Africa in the next couple of weeks, but to different locations. Tim is an unstoppable information gatherer/advocate/cheerleader/filmmaker for raising awareness of the plight of Africans, and the injustice of inequality, and the heinous lack of access to medicine, food and other necessities taken for granted in most of the rest of the world.

An excerpt from the opening:

NARRATION: By the end of 2005, according to UNAIDS, an estimated 65 million people worldwide had been infected by the HIV virus and some 25 million had died from AIDS.

In Africa, twenty-five million people are HIV-positive.

In sub-Saharan Africa, the average life expectancy has dropped from the mid-60s to the mid-40s. In some of the worst affected countries—Zimbabwe, Lesotho, Botswana and Swaziland—life expectancy is less than forty years.

DR AMMAN: It’s hard for people to understand in a developed country the scope of the epidemic in a resource poor country…

LEILA PAKKALA (UNICEF): 24 of the 25 countries around the world that have the highest prevalence of HIV/AIDS are in sub-Saharan Africa.

DR AMMAN: In the US, there are a total of about 40,000 new infections in one year. In Africa, there are about 7,000 each day.

JUDY MATJIA (UNICEF): I believe and I think a lot of people agree with me that we’re sitting on a time bomb here.

LT GENERAL ROMEO DALLAIRE: I remember very clearly because AIDS was a very grave concern. I mean, I saw in one year, in one particular family a whole generation wiped out.

STEPHEN LEWIS: … Nothing approximates what’s being done by HIV/AIDS. Not even the black death of the 14th century. We’ve got an apocalypse on our hands now and it has to be addressed.

NARRATION: As overwhelming as these statistics are—and the hopelessness they create in the Western mind, and of course in Africa—there remain tangible, effective, practical and highly available methods to reign in and reverse the spread of the AIDS pandemic.

Arthur Amman in the film suggests a mindset (or heart-set) that I think is utterly linked to the fate and future of the miraculous species we are (although, of course, I think we’re souls inside a species!):

We can’t look at it as 40 million people HIV-infected. We have to look at them as mothers and fathers and husbands and wives and children. These are individuals and they should be as real to us and remain as real as someone in our own family who is sick or is ill and we should have the same emotion.

The idea of big emotions is so hopeful to me—to remember to find and even choose the bigger emotion when emotional contraction is looming (fear, anger, or just general blase) is so intriguing. To reach outwards instead (and more deeply inwards). And imagination, as mentioned in the WHO piece linked to Dr Amman.

There really are effective ways to reverse the spread of the virus. In Vancouver, Julio Montaner, for example, has come out with some fascinating studies (HAART—highly active antiretroviral therapy) on how to eradicate AIDS over the next four or five decades. There are many others. People are working hard.

One day, like the plague mentioned by Stephen Lewis, AIDS will only be part of the history books. That outcome is inevitable.

In being so absorbed with Africa lately, a focus often related to what ails the continent, it becomes apparent that human nature is by its brilliance very tricky. The projection is obvious: what is wrong over there.

Privilege aside, what person, nation, continent isn’t ailing? It is urgently rumored we are on the verge of environmental disaster including water, oil addiction has us breaking into countries to supply the habit, divisiveness is a way of life for all forms of media, politics (and much blogging), and nobody anywhere believes hardly anything their leaders say (or their leaders’ opponents), yet believe in the status quo that produced those leaders in the first place.

Who, anywhere, knows how to deeply help or convince individuals, groups, countries or themselves to seek creative engagement? This engagement, of course, does not exclude—in fact demands—discernment, which is different than justification.

Discernment seeks to understand why something or someone is as it is, and what to do about it. The word in Sanskrit is buddhi, which is where the word Buddhism comes from. Discernment naturally involves both listening to the other and self-examination.

Justification gives an excuse not only to judge, but to project, and seeks to punish, annihilate, invade or hate the one judged, with limited or no self-examination. It is a knee-jerk response, a barking dog, in a world that is already all about barking dogs.

The projecting of beliefs onto people I dislike is so simple and immediate that I swear it to be both right and natural, just as leaders and rebels project bombs onto countries they don’t like, claim it justified and necessary, and kill thousands of innocent citizens, mostly women and children.

I would guess that the anger that accompanies our projections and justifications somehow stops us from being aware of our own ulterior motives or anything else subtle, nuanced or deep—like life, for example.

What, after all, is more irrational or ironic than the “rational” person, or country, that can’t adapt because of excess reason and rationality? I picture myself here, resolute and full of disdain in a perfect argument, where I’m so obviously right, and so obviously getting nowhere beautiful.

The human mind is both miraculously flexible and stunningly rigid. And both seem to so often be involuntary processes.

Imagine if these dilemmas, these interpersonal or inter-country conflicts, were seen instead as a creative opportunity to try and figure out how to be more loving.

Well, actually, maybe they can be, for those able to imagine even slightly the depth and width of this iceberg called life, and stand on the tip and just bow to the mass below all of us, and ask questions…

The entangled reasons for all forms of conflict, from the personal to the international, are infinitely complex, the answers equally implacable.

In the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna says to Arjuna: “The intricacies of karma are difficult to understand.”

Even if one believes not in karma but in one life, the roots of our problems are still wildly indecipherable. Who knows where the entanglements that have led to this world, as it is today in such mad beauty, began? We are drawn and dragged by forces invisible, the endless concision of the evening news notwithstanding.

How can I write about the hope and need for reconciliation and forgiveness in, say, northern Uganda—where so many beautiful and even not so beautiful people have been humiliated, brutalized, terrorized and murdered—when I lack the humility, wisdom or even humour needed to dissolve or let go of my own contribution to misery and skirmish.

And these “angers” arise after the most irrelevant slights, or even bigger slights, while living in luxury, with snack food, central heating, a journal nearby that I’m free to write in, and relative peace and freedom as the norm.

What a great time to laugh out loud at the fact my head is stuck so incredibly far up my own arse!

We’re temporary, for the love of God!

To be of service, do I not have to keep trying to understand that the human dilemma around me is also within me?

I don’t know, but I’m trying anyway, because I just don’t have the dough to drop a half billion into the Global Fund for AIDS.

Actually, that’s a lame excuse too, because I have money issues whether I have a lot of money or not.

It’s nice to write this to you, by the way.

As you can see I’ve been thinking about all my stories, projections, expectations, fatigues, injuries and frustrations that I bring to the table of discontent, and serve up like slabs of dead meat to feed those invisible goblins I perceive to have slighted me with a lack of love, time, respect and money etc.

When I forget trying to remember who I might really be, I become that slab of dead meat, mouth still moving, brain still spinning, projections spitting out at the guests who deserve so much better. Not a pretty metaphor—I’m vegetarian after all.

These dilemmas are universal. The pressures are individual.

I was thinking about dear friends, busy partners, parents and their kids, whom I love, and who like all of us sometimes just can’t seem to find the right thought, asana, prayer, angle, creativity, grace—or does grace find us?—to ease ugly tensions and discords.

Anger and projection make us contract. I hate (in a loving way) that feeling.

My mind can take a thought, put it on the hamster wheel, and just start running like I’m spinning wool. Look out if the initial thought isn’t grounded in love, devotion or service, which is most of them. I end up wearing a thick wool sweater of hate, not to mention an ugly mixed metaphor as an accessory.

The other night my sister coincidentally sent me two quotes that I thought could possibly assist those souls caught in the spinning wheel of anger and life, even under seemingly normal, seemingly simple, conditions. I added three other quotes. Feel free to add your own.

J.M. Barrie, who wrote Peter Pan and had all kinds of emotional limitations, nonetheless once said:

Be careful how you judge others. Never ascribe to an opponent motives that are meaner than your own.

From Stephen Covey:

We tend to judge others based on their behaviour, and ourselves based on our intent. In almost all situations, we would do well to recognize the possibility—even probability—of good intent in others…. sometimes despite their observable behaviour.

And three more from some big names. Buddha, with his tummy all relaxed:

If you keep thinking “That man has abused me,” holding it as a much-cherished grievance, your anger will never be allayed. If you can put down that fury-inducing thought, your anger will lessen. Fury will never end fury, it will just ricochet on and on. Only putting it down will end such an abysmal state.

Krishna to a depressed Arjuna in the Divine Song:

When your discernment has carried you beyond the tangled forest of material illusions, you will remain untouched by all distractions that have been heard in the past or are yet to be heard in the future.

And finally, a doozy from Jesus, to the angry crowd of highly spiritual God-lovers who wanted to teach the adulteress a lesson by stoning her to death:

Let he among you who has never sinned cast the first stone at her.

I have a natural gift for feeling unloved and abandoned, causing a huge amount of resistance and forgetting of the fact that I may just be always loved.

Jean Paul Sartre once said, “The love that I long for does not exist.” All high-falutin’, existential sure-footedness aside, that notion is merely an opinion.

Quelle surprise, but I wrote a song about it, in fact, and the lyric is:

Jean Paul Sartre was an existentialist
He said the love that he longs for does not exist
I can never prove dear Jean wrong
But everything inside me sings a different song…

Using a little imagination, and with the caveat being that physical deprivation (through no obvious action of my own) has been unknown to me in this grace-filled life, could I not conclude that I am lovingly breast-fed in every miraculous moment at the nipple of existence?

You heard me right, the nipple of existence: wondrous food from the earth, water in flowing abundance, air in constant recirculation and the mind-blowing reality that animates all of this—in colour no less. Why me? Why you? Am I not loved? Therefore, can I not choose to be in love, all the time?

Isn’t that your basic smiling yogi?

And that’s only the beginning. Then, in the millions—even billions if you’re Oprah, and I don’t mean greenbacks—we get to experience a taste of each other, of art, desire, longing and inexplicable beauty.

Is that not love?

That, perhaps, is what we have to decide, in the midst of our anger with others—anger that we can’t seem to shift. Shift it!—if not for you, for me. I need you as an example. We’ll put it on the front page news of our hearts:

I must stop writing now, for the addiction has taken over. I’ll finish with someone of vast imagination and knowledge. Einstein once said:

A hundred times every day I remind myself that my inner and outer life are based on the labors of other [people], living and dead, and that I must exert myself in order to give in the same measure as I have received and am still receiving…

Love more. And be more loved. You’re beautiful.

In preparation for my trip, I have been doing a lot of research—today on the south-east African landlocked country of Malawi. Gerard Caplan’s passing mention of Malawi in the Walrus article and the previous blog about Multi-Tiered Thinking and the Health Care System in Canada give pause for thought, if nothing else. Caplan writes:

In Canada, we spend annually approximately $3,000 per capita on public and private health care; Malawi spends $13, Rwanda $7, Ethiopia $5. In Canada, annual drug spending per capita is $681; in Africa it’s two bucks.

A FEW FACTS

The population of Malawi is just over 13 million in an area slightly smaller than the Pennsylvania (CIA Factbook). Became a British Protectorate called Nyasaland in 1891. Gained independence in 1964.

After thirty years of one party-rule under Hastings Kamuzu Banda—who in the words of David Lamb “fell only a few inches short of being a tyrant�, and many would disagree—the country entered into multiparty politics in 1994/95.

The current President is Bingi wa Mutharika.

The capital city is Lilongwe.

The average life expectancy is just under 42 years.

I’m forty-one.

According to UNICEF:

Close to one million Malawians are living with HIV/AIDS. Each day, 219 people will die of AIDS—a death rate that is three times higher than it was 15 years ago. Of the 170,000 people who need antiretroviral therapy, only 22,973 patients are receiving the drugs….approximately 800,000 [this doesn’t sound quite right to me] children under the age of 15 are themselves HIV+, many having contracted the virus from their mothers during pregnancy, delivery or from breastfeeding. Mother-to-child transmission (MTCT) is the single largest cause of HIV infection in children.

And for the record, given relatively simple treatment, the transmission of HIV from mother to child is almost completely preventable. Virtually no HIV+ women in the West give birth to HIV+ babies.

Young girls are especially vulnerable to HIV/AIDS [in Malawi but all over sub-Sahran Africa]. Out of 10,000 newly infected Malawians each year, adolescent and young women (15-24 years) make up 46% of all new cases of HIV infection and are five times more likely to contract the disease then males of the same age group.

Jeffrey Sachs, in The End Of Poverty, describes his visit to a Malawian “Medical Ward� which “…in truth is not a medical ward at all. It is the place where Malawians come to die of AIDS.�

There is no medicine in the medical ward. The room has a posted occupancy rate of 150 beds. There are 450 people in the ward…

The room is filled with moans. This is a dying chamber where three quarters or more of the people this day are in late-stage AIDS without medicines. Family members sit by the bed, swabbing dried lips and watching their loved ones die. The same doctor who is treating patients across the hall is the doctor in charge of this service. He knows what could be done. He knows that each of these patients could rise from the deathbed but for the want of a dollar a day. He knows the problem is not one of infrastructure or logistics or adherence. He knows that the problem is simply that the world has seen fit to look away as hundreds of impoverished Malawians die this day as a result of their poverty.

I have come to know Malawi relatively well after several visits. A few years earlier I had been contacted by the vice president of Malawi, Justin Malewezi, a remarkably fine individual, a dignified, eloquent, and popular figure in what is against all odds a multiparty democracy. The odds are long because democracy is bound to be fragile in an impoverished country where incomes are around 50 cents per person per day, or around $180 per person per year, and where the stresses of mass disease, famine, and climate shock are pervasive. Amazingly, the Malawians have done it, while the international community has largely stood by through all of this suffering.

Malawi actually put together one of the earliest and best conceived strategies for bringing treatment to its dying population, and gave an enormously thoughtful response to the challenges of managing a new system of drug delivery, patient counseling and education, community outreach, and the financial flows that would accompany the process of training doctors. On that basis, Malawi made proposals to the international community to help Malawians try to reach about a third of the total infected population (about three hundred thousand people) with anti-AIDS drug treatment within a five-year scale-up period.

Yet international processes are cruel. The donor governments—including the United States and Europeans—told Malawi to scale back its proposal sharply because the first proposal was “too ambitious and too costly.� The next draft was cut back t a mere hunded thousand on treatment at the end of five years. Even that was too much. In a tense five-day period, the donors prevailed on Malawi to cut another 60 percent from the proposal, down to forty thousand on treatment. This atrophied plan was submitted to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB, and malaria. Incredibly, the donors that run that fund saw fit to cut back once again. After a long struggle, Malawi received funding to save just twenty-five thousand at the end of five years—a death warrant from the international community for the people of this country.

It’s curious how the world works, what matters, what is the actual news that’s fit to print. Vast international non-support for thorough plans. Yet I just googled “David Banda,� the 13 month old boy adopted by Madonna and whom I assume is not a close relative to the former dictator Hastings Banda, and got 1,410,000 results in .26 seconds.

I did the same for “Justin Malewezi�, the eloquent Malawian Vice President of whom Sachs spoke so highly, and Google offered up 872 results.

872 results for the Malawian Vice President.

1,410,000 for li’l baby Banda.

And no answers for any of it. What a journey.

Irony of ironies—I love those saucy angels!—ten minutes after I posted this blog, not even, I got an e-mail about a Uganda Rising clip being shown on Entertainment Tonight Canada, thanks to Kevin Spacey signing on to narrate the film.

I’m full of gratitude for every gasp of this life, of course, and so grateful for the Uganda Rising project too—that it may bring even a tiny amount of awareness and action to such an desperate ordeal is unbelievable (even Madonna in Malawi brings that country into the western consciousness)—but what I crave to know is why we don’t, and how we can, see everybody, everyday, everywhere, glance by glance, step by step, as sisters and brothers?

Any honest soul knows the almost impossible challenge to elevate one’s thoughts and emotions towards love, let alone anyone else’s. And there are six and a half billion of us—and counting. Here we are, together, utterly interdependent both with the earth and each other, and yet the individual journey remains unimaginably private, on the deepest level.

Thoughts, like love, cannot be stolen. They can only be shared. They can only be offered. They cannot be pillaged or demanded, no matter what terrorists and torturers believe.

Not even the ever-expanding Internet or the blogging addiction (I’ve got a help-line number nearby) or reality TV can divulge the secrets within our individual selves, or bring us closer. Humans try to force their way inside another, but the only way in is through listening, through letting people emote, express, talk with freedom, without scandal or retribution.

And even then it’s only a peek in the door.

Is there a reason why the world is so interested in Madonna? I mean an even deeper reason than we know?

Hm.

I know it has something to do with love more, and imagine more, and believe more, but I’m not going to write that one great line tonight that makes all the difference, am I?

I guess it’s up to you, then. Send it to me, will ya?

Petex

I stumbled upon an article that reminded me of an essay I’ve been writing, sort of a Decolonizing God Part II, but haven’t had time to complete. But the essay begins as follows:

The first line of evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins’ 1986 book the Blind Watchmaker is: “This book is written in the conviction that our own existence once presented the greatest of all mysteries, but that it is a mystery no longer because it is solved.�

As much as I appreciate Dawkins’ enthusiasm, that line allows about as much dialogue as the Inquisitor once allowed the heretic—but of course creates a response, either defiance or support, for the populist Dawkins is no fool.

But may I repeat the word?

Solved.

The mystery of our existence is solved.

That’s hilarious. Somebody needs to give Richard a wedgy (that might be a purely Canadian term but it involves pulling up hard on the underwear from behind), and then tickle him until he can’t bear it anymore, or at least until he has a spiritual experience that he can’t explain.

The article is in Science Magazine and called What Don’t We Know?

It lists a hundred concepts, theories and mysteries to which only God and maybe Richard Dawkins have the answers. Unfortunately, poor Richard hates God because Richard was either an Inquisitor or an Inquisitee in a past life, and Richard’s surly mood keeps God far, far away. But God still loves Richard because God loves everybody.

Actually I don’t really know how God loves or how God works, or even how I work, but the hundred concepts are worth looking over.

The framing of any issue—be it political, cultural, interpersonal, or deeply personal—is vital to its meaning and can be intensively manipulated, externally or by our own belief systems.

Framing is the essence of advertising, propaganda and other less pernicious sounding things like a resume or trying to, well, get laid (at least in the movies).

Some might say, playfully, that politics in the United States of America (and everywhere else) also often involve a lot of “trying to screw somebody.”

The feverish and generally insulting, defamatory interaction between the two Big Parties (count ‘em) is pushed forth as proof of a highly functioning democracy, and offers the full spectrum of sane options for a reasonable nation (paradoxically founded on freedom and slavery—in case anybody thought for a moment wise people don’t fool themselves by reframing the “truth”).

Also pushed is the promise that America is the epitome of democracy because anybody in the country can become President, while thus far only white men backed by literally billions of dollars have actually done so.

If the system was fair and democratic, the only reason for this “white-wash” would have to be genetics. Some would agree. I’ll put my money on the framing of the issue.

I say this, yet I love the United States. I differentiate between the people of the United States and the foreign policy of the United States (although there is, of course, some sort of relationship).

In terms of democracy, so it goes in Canada, more or less—although there is something absurd yet heart-warmingly hopeful about a country where one of the parties holds 54 of 308 seats in the House of Commons despite not even wanting to be a part of the country, and still no civil war (or even violence) breaks out.

More disconcerting in Canada is that an elected secessionist party is less threatening to the “National Interest”—and I use the term euphemistically—than parties desiring popular democracy, who are allowed on the ballot but are largely marginalised from the debate (by a media so clearly owned by covert Commies and Lefties like Rupert Murdoch and Conrad Black, in happier times).

Speaking of euphemism, let us consider the term two-tier in the Canadian Health Care system. When one hears about how the Health Care system needs to be abolished and replaced by private health care or at least two-tier medicine, the reason is immediate to all of us: because it’s too costly as it is.

An interesting question might then be: why is it that I respond so immediately and definitively—”It’s too costly!”—when I actually have no real knowledge of how the system works, who makes all the money that is being wasted, or if there are any alternative possibilities?

Noam Chomsky, in his unremitting way, offers one view:

The actual purpose which the media serve very effectively is to inculcate and defend the economic, social and political agenda of privileged groups that dominate domestic society and state. Myriad techniques are employed including: selection of topics, distribution of concerns, framing of issues, story placement, filtering of information, emphasis and tone, Orwellisms, photographs, etc. The media inoculate the public against reality creating a cordon sanitaire between fact and fiction.

Thus I am grateful for an article in Common Ground (Oct 2006) by Alan Cassels entitled none too subtly: “PharmaCare’s drug addiction bankrupting public coffers.�

(For the record, my older brother James reminded me tonight he and his colleague Dr Bob Rangno were profiled in a chapter of Cassels’ (and Ray Moynihan’s) book Selling Sickness)

In reframing the two-tier issue, Cassels writes:

I believe firmly in two-tier medicine. The tiers, however, are not between public and private, but between essential and frivolous healthcare. Basically, before you ask who needs to pay for it, you need to know whether or not a health treatment, a drug or a procedure is worth doing.

Publically, we could easily pay for what is essential from well within the current budget. But how come words such as “essential,� “frivolous� or “waste� never seem to be part of the discussion?

Let’s be clear about one basic fact: those mounting dollars we are spending on healthcare derive from somebody’s income—whether it is a drug company, a professional association or a health authority—and it goes against the laws of nature for people to voluntarily agree to have their income cut. That’s why you need to ask tough decisions about what is essential and what is frivolous and then steer public money away from the frivolous.

Pharmaceuticals lead the growth in health spending. BC PharmCare’s budget is about $1 billion per year and it grows every year by about another $90 million, or roughly $250,000 per day.

A delay in finding solutions to the health cost crisis is good for the status quo. For example, when it comes to their products, the drug companies that abhor any conversation about cost-effectiveness love a delay. Another day passes in [British Columbia] and we pay an additional $250,000 of our tax money to drug companies. We’ll hand them another $250,000 tomorrow. Today, tomorrow, the day after and forever.

Chomsky in an interview with David Barsamian, Oct 24, 1986:

The experts in legitimation, the ones who labor to make what people in power do legitimate, are mainly the privileged educated elites. The journalists, the academics, the teachers, the public relations specialists, this whole category of people have a kind of an institutional task, and that is to create the system of belief which will ensure the effective engineering of consent.

And again, the more sophisticated of them say that. In the academic social sciences, for example, there’s quite a tradition of explaining the necessity for the engineering of democratic consent. There are very few critics of this position. There are a few: there’s a well-known social scientist named Robert Dahl who has criticized this, and he pointed out-as is obviously true-that if you have a political system in which you plug in the options from a privileged position, and that’s democracy, it’s indistinguishable from totalitarianism.

It’s very rare that people point that out.

And Cassals:

It’s no stretch to see how the tactics of Big Chemical or Big Tobacco have been adopted by Big Health. You need look no further than those groups “partnered� with the moneyed powers—pharmaceutial companies, professional associations and so on—representing the “realists� willing to settle for a “win-win.� They know on which side their bread is buttered and won’t adopt positions that affect the industry’s most fundamental goal: creating returns for shareholders via growing healthcare spending.

The main problem comes down to the very “radical� notion…that we, as a society, are foolishly allowing the pharmaceutical industry and its “partners� free rein in defining diseases, and those definitions are driving the astronomical growth in pharmaceutical spending.

[L]et me leave you with one bit of advice. Before you ask the government to pay for more health care, pause for a moment and first suggest what it should stop paying for. Suggest where it might make some savings.

We have a vitally important opportunity to get some public input on how to control the skyrocketing cost of health. Let’s not squander it. Personally, I’m hoping for some fireworks.

I get the feeling that something as subtle as the intention behind the resolution of the Health Care “crisis” (and I’m thinking, perhaps naively, it’s still up for grabs) will tip the momentum of the “the Canadian Way of Life” either further towards being led by Big Power, bottom-line profits and more unsustainable waste or, as Jefferson Smith once put it, “a little bit of plain, ordinary, everyday kindness—and a little lookin’ out for the other fella, too.”

We need more everyday kindness—and if we get it I promise to quote a famous Canadian actor next time.

All I can think to add is the same advice I gave my 13 year old niece:

Whenever somebody asks, “Do you believe in God [or abortion or evolution]?â€? or, “Are you a Socialist or a Democrat or a Republican?â€? I strongly recommend…getting their definition on whatever they’re asking you so you don’t get immediately boxed in to someone else’s agenda. Because everybody has their take on “Godâ€?, and God is a very loaded term, and before you know it you’re caught in a mini-Crusade, and theoretically you could end up on the side of the infidels. But with a little sweetness of speech, a conversation may just begin that serves both people.

I often write, remind and implore myself to listen more. I’m not a natural. The framing of issues reminds me to try and understand what’s being pushed down my throat and called medicine to cure a disease I’m not sure I have.

I wish you wonderful health, physical, mental and spiritual. And love of course. Have I mentioned lately we’re all sisters and brothers?

I just read in Walrus magazine a scathing yet insightful article by Gerard Caplan, who is well-informed about both Africa and genocide. After tearing apart Africa for its ineptness and corruption, he starts to put the situation into historical context:

Hard on the heels of the slave trade came full-blown Western colonialism, institutionalized with the “scramble for Africa� at the Congress of Berlin in 1884-85. Undeterred by ignorance and driven by greed and racism, Europe’s leaders blithely partitioned almost the entire continent among themselves. To this day, probably every single border divides at least one ethnic or cultural group.

This comment, although only peripherally related to anything I am about to say, reminded me nonetheless of how humans simultaneously strive to be borderless (worldcentric) while being “bordered” as an individual participant in the dualistic realm. We are those borders.

To ignore either is to do so at our own, not peril exactly, but perhaps more accurately the literal translation of the Greek word for sin, which means “to miss the mark, as in archery.�

Is it not borders that demand we listen? If you don’t believe in borders, try head-butting a cactus, or asking one who doesn’t believe in borders to give you all their money (which shouldn’t matter either). Finally, try falling in love with a borderless nothingness.

I did it once. It wasn’t pretty.

Is it not borderlessness that helps remind us of the collective human condition that we all are—incessantly?

Both realities are ingredients of existence. As obvious as that is, we actually sometimes choose one “reality� over the other, or neglect or deny one altogether.

The terminology is also useful spiritually. The striving to be more borderless (oneness) while remaining profoundly aware of the bordered individuals that we are, is the search for the Holy Grail, the grand yogic asana, the perfected martial art, to see the kingdom of Heaven simultaneously within us and amongst us, and to begin to understand the true ideas of tantra.

It is to understand the basis of the human condition: perpetual tension, tension that no backrub, money, orgasm or protestation can cure (but Lord knows they can help).

This tension is the fire lit by the friction of Unity in Diversity. To put Unity higher is to burn the essence of who we are. To put Diversity higher is to melt diversity into One.

And still, every individual has his or her own balance point, and maybe every community, every nation. At the same time, the relationship is fluid, hence the need for ritual, for reminders, for humility and discernment. To want to listen is its core essence. To act in awareness of Unity is its sustainability.

What dreamer can escape the borders of the human experience? Tyrants have tried, but even they are brought down by the borders of time, if not earlier by those whose borders—physical, spiritual or emotional—that tyrant ignored.

What yogi believing in oneness does not then use the individual self to describe the illusion they claim to be?

To ignorantly impose borders (as in the scramble for Africa) across borders or to ignorantly forget that we have borders, be they skin, walls, worldviews or inanimate objects, is to invoke the spirit of colonialism, in varying and subtle degrees.

Borders are real. People are real. Tension is real. There is such a thing as beautiful tension.

And all are temporary.

What does this have to do with Africa? I don’t know. But it’s where my thoughts went when I read Caplan’s suggestion that “…probably every single border divides at least one ethnic or cultural group.�

Caplan goes onto say:

Even when it seems the West is actually investing in Africa, the reality is almost exactly the opposite. With few exceptions, Africa’s fabulous natural riches—from Nigeria to Angola to Chad to southern Sudan—have become a “resource curse.� Of Africa’s less than 3-percent share of the world’s foreign direct investment, almost all goes to extractive industries—oil, minerals, gold, diamond, coltan, platinum and timber.

Two-thirds of American capital entering Africa goes into mining and petroleum. But to label this “investment� badly distorts the concept. Although there are exceptions, in the majority of cases foreign companies pay little or no taxes, increase corruption by bribing their way to their objectives, build no lasting infrastructures, pay starvation wages, destabilize communities, become involved in local conflicts, then disappear, leaving behind an environmental and social disaster. Last year, the Guardian undertook a major investigation of resource-plundering and corruption in three African countries—Angola, Liberia and Equatorial Guinea; their harsh conclusions led them to label the situation “The new scramble for Africa.�

As for aid:

According to the UN Conference on Trade and Development, between 1970 and 2002 sub-Saharan Africa received $294 billion in loans, paid out $268 billion in debt service, and yet still owed $210 billion. Even while the G8 industrialized nations were promising debt relief in 2005, African countries had to surrender $23.4 billion in interest and principal payments.

The consequence for individual African countries is breathtaking. In 2003, Senegal and Malawi spent about one-third of government revenues on debt-servicing. Angola and Zambia spent more on debt-servicing than they did on health care and education combined.

To think the answer to Africa is ideological is to forget the spiritual. To think the answer to Africa is spiritual is to forget religion. To think the answer to Africa is educational is to forget racism and misogyny. To think even in terms of some “answer” is to not listen at all.

To think the problem with Africa is corruption is to forget poverty. To think the problem with Africa is poverty is to forget privilege. To think the problem with Africa is Africans is to forget the borders of colonialism.

History matters, and for Africa the slave trade and colonialism matter enormously in understanding its subsequent evolution. In many respects the continent has never recovered from either. Enlightenment Europe had guns and ships, and it unleashed them against Africa. The slave trade ended barely 150 years ago, three and a half centuries in which an estimated twenty million Africans—an astonishing proportion of the the continent’s population—were uprooted from their lands. Perhaps twelve million finally arrived alive, and their labour enabled the development of the United States and Europe, a relationship between Africa and the West that has remained largely unaltered. Arab slavers shipped millions more Africans out of eastern Africa. The continent was left reeling

To think the problem with Africa is human nature is to understand we are all human nature.

The human condition is one, the dancers within are infinite.

There is no way to understand why I’m talking about Africa from the outside, as opposed to having been born there. And to say “talking about” does not but needs to include the fact that any thoughts on the mysteries of how and why of anything, let alone Africa, remain hopelessly speculative.

Nonetheless, having a body that borders an ego, it seems to me that Africa—as a pillaged and brutalized area in terms of human quality of life—reflects the effects of infinite aspects of human nature.

All debates aside, it would be wonderful if the situation was at least instructive and humbling, not only about what’s been done, but revealing an aspect of who we are, within borders and beyond borders, in the deepest part of ourselves and as a species.

Caplan finishes by saying:

Many speak without irony of the desire to “give something back,” not realizing the cruel reality of the phrase. In fact, that’s exactly what the rich world should do. We should give back what we’ve plundered and looted.

Until we face up honestly to the West’s relationship with Africa, until we acknowledge our culpability and complicity in the African mess, until then we’ll continue—in our caring and compassionate way—to impose policies that actually make the mess even worse.

But beyond aid that doesn’t enforce the continued scramble for African resources, beyond even complete debt relief, and both are vital, there is a deeper relationship, a deeper listening—both in Africa and everywhere else—waiting to be discovered.

Just got back from the Hollywood Film Festival Awards, and the awards actually had nothing to do with the film festival at all. The awards were all for todays biggest stars who weren’t in the festival—sort of a promotional ad for the Oscars.

And stars came out en masse, some to be honoured, some to be doing the honouring: Oliver Stone, Sandra Bullock, Ben Affleck, Diane Lane, Robert Deniro, Kiefer Sutherland, Forest Whittaker (The Last King of Scotland), Sharon Stone (who’s clearly stalking me), Penelope Cruz, Lindsey Lohan, Emilio Estavez, Deborah Winger, Christine Lahti, Laura Linney, Clint Eastwood and more—and some of the biggest directing, writing, producing and editing talents in Hollywood. Robin Williams came on last, three hours later, to accept a lifetime achievement award, and was worth the price of admission—which was the flight down and incidentals.

To my disappointment (and almost disbelief), there was not one mention of the wars, of the outrageous spending going on that will further bankrupt America, of the divisiveness going on in the world, of asking us to pull together.

Even if these stars are told by their agents and PR people to not get political, a passing reference would seem to me almost unavoidable. I didn’t even mean in the Michael Moore way that had him booed, but in a way that reaches across divisions and says, “Hey, it may look beautiful up here, but we’re struggling…”

Only Robin Williams offered political commentary when he said what a nightmare it was that Henry Kissinger was advising once again in the White House, comparing his winning the Nobel Peace Prize in 1973 (the same year he influenced in Chile the overthrow of Salvador Allende, which brought Augusto Pinochet to power) to cannibal Jeffrey Dahlmer winning the James Beard Award.

And Oliver Stone’s film The World Trade Center won for best film, and still no mention of the disasters unfolding—not even from Mr Stone himself. The film was voted most popular by the 70,000 emails returned from the request sent out on Yahoo.

From that fact alone I don’t think the toppling of the Republicans is at all a shoo-in, despite the horrendous mismanagement and wars and invasions that came out of clear and often admitted manipulations and lies, and the ongoing pursuit of oil. What does it take to say, “Okay, we’ve had enough”? Or are we for the most part collectively blunted, defeated even, by an endless invasion of divisiveness and a mass of lies and un-profound thinking.

I don’t think it would be highly inaccurate to say Canada also has a leader toeing the Bush party line. You’d think we are a continent of TV addicted non-readers. Hey, wait a second…

I’m not more fond of the Democrats, either. Is it really possible they have not one candidate who could crush any Republican candidate at any moment, overwhelmingly, simply by reiterating the last six years?

Is it impossible not to instinctively believe what we hear on the news, if we hear it enough? Their must be some proven reason corporations and political parties pay literally billions of dollars on advertising.

Did I mention this report?

I was grateful to be there, to be healthy, to be so fortunate to have had the chance to make Uganda Rising with Jesse (and of course everybody else who did so much, and planted the seeds in the first place).

And these stars really are there for a reason, even if it’s unclear how or why them, and the deeper reasons for their power, or the power they are given. They are often deeply attractive, charismatic, and talented. But I do wonder when the celebration of their talent will be less celebrated, and crimes against children and women and people will be unable to be forgotten.

Or even just a reminder of the miracle and beauty in everyone.

The whole world is a stage, Shakespeare once told us (which brings us back to lila). May the celebration of each other, of all, begin. May the flashbulbs going off be our souls awakening, may the red carpet be our tongue speaking the truth of solidarity, and may acceptance speeches be an ongoing stance of awarness and love against the propaganda of danger and division.

May those who can, remember how fortunate we are, how beautiful this world is, and may all the devotion and attention given to the stars one day remind us of just how much beauty is unseen, uncelebrated, unkissed.

Home tomorrow.

And on Thursday at 5:45 am we record Kevin Spacey (he in England, Jesse and I in Vancouver) doing the narration for Uganda Rising, whose star power will help, I hope, get the word out even more.

Walking down by the Santa Monica pier this morning, there is a memorial to those killed in Iraq, with hundreds of crosses, row by row, stuck into the sand. There are also photos of what seems like a large percentage of the soldiers who have died. I think the total numbers of American soldiers killed is between 2,500 and 3,000. Finally, there were photos of some of the injured American soldiers, missing limbs, arms, hands, eyes, facial burns—the aspect that I always forget about, but the numbers are something like 25,000.

There was also an interview posted up on a board (among many articles) from Democracy Now! with Les Roberts explaining the Lancet report that came out recently saying over 600,000 Iraq civilians have been killed. His points seemed to me awful, disheartening and credible, or at the very least worthy of serious analysis and ignored at the ongoing peril of integrity.

It was sad, as the 1950s ferris wheel and roller coaster spun as the backdrop, hearkening a simpler time—which, judging by WWII, Korea and Vietnam, only seemed simpler.

The complexities of how we got here, and where we’re going, remain unfathomably mysterious and worthy of devout humility. I wish for us love, incremental thought by incremental action.

Human nature has been around a long, long time.

When Rudyard Kipling wrote “East is East and West is West, and never the twain shall meet,” he was totally wrong. He wasn’t all that wide-thinking with his “White man’s burden” crapola, either.

Sorry, couldn’t help but write. The addiction continues. Amazing night. Got on a plane with my girlfriend Samantha yesterday morning (last minute ticket) and ran into my friend Tina who is previewing a film in LA on Monday night called Partition. Out of the blue she asked: “I’m going to a Diwali party tonight in Hollywood, do you guys want to come?”

Now, Diwali is a huge celebration in India, a “festival of lights,” or a time, as Jeffrey Armstong, my teacher of the Vedas would also say, “To relight the (inner) lamp.” But who knows about Diwali here? It turns out, I was at a Diwali party on Wednesday, too, as luck would have it, and I turn down every party I can. But a Diwali party in Hollywood…?

I’ll see you there.

The house was LA beautiful. Lights everywhwere, business people (vaisyas), artists, Indian food, little gambling tables and radiant women in saris all spinning around the current lila with as much flow, beauty, irony, mystery and “miracleness” as I was willing to see.

I was excited to meet an old friend/acquaintance from my London days who is acting in the movie (and I knew would be there), which was nice—but so old an acquainetnance, it turns out, he had no idea who I was until reminded (we’d had dinner together on more than one occasion). This has happened a few times with my English acquaintences, but isn’t it funny when you thought you were closer?

And Sharon dropped by and we chatted for a…oh, sorry Sharon Stone, yeah—popped in to say hello to me. Well, not to me, exactly, but she said hello to people and I was nearby. Later we talked a little and, well, we didn’t talk, but she talked to people similar to myself in that they were people, too—breathing, temporary—and she seemed really friendly, and we’re all one in a certain kind of a interdependent way though not so much we switch summer homes but either way, she’s definitely worth the name drop.

But that wasn’t my focus, no.

All great Indian food and gambling tables aside (speaking of which, wasn’t Sharon great in Casino?), I was seeking fellow atmas for philosophical intercourse. I LOVE fellow atmas for philosophical intercourse!

As love and the lights of Diwali would have it, we sat with our prasad at at a table with four (and many) wonderful souls and talk of the soul broke out as it desires to do—actually, it was already in progress as, of course, it always is.

A clearly highly intelligent and sweet natured man named Navin Doshi and his lovely wife sat on one side of me and my gorgeous escorts and another highly interesting, artistic and original couple on the other side, Jim and Iris Klein.

Within seconds we were speaking of things religious/spiritual (a Bat Mitzvah actually) and I, with my ego all a-flutter, couldn’t help but leap in and act like I knew something (thanks, Jeffrey, for the elucidated tips and the Vedic glossary over the years).

We waxed poetic, scientific and spiritual about the nature of self and non-self until we all disappeared completely, right after levitating, astral traveling and a second dessert. Actually, having over-indulged on something creamy, there was no levitation to be had.

The wonderful Mr Doshi and I walked to his car (passing a dead mouse, which may have some sort of symbolic significance, or was it just a dead mouse?) and he honoured me with a book he had written called Saving Us From Ourselves, (as he writes “who are we saving, and from whom?”). And upon return the magical Kleins pointed me to their beautiful artwork, done individually and collectively. We solved all the mysteries of the universe in just under forty-five minutes.

What a night! And with my beloved and a dear friend, and two cups of chai no less! Jiminy Crickets, that’s a good night.

I met lovely, exuberant miracles afterwards, too, and realised yet again that should auld acquaintenances be forgot, there are always, endlessly, new miracles (and old souls) to meet again. And when considered to be carrying within themselves the Divine spark, the Holy Spirit, the atma, and just overall sweetness, what more can one ask for?

One of the reasons I love the idea of the individual soul is because it seems to me relationship is the most beautiful thing going (even when auld acquaintances have no idea or interest who you are), a constant desire of the soul and body to connect. Plus I believe in love, which is also the most beautiful possibility going, and both (relationship and love), it seems to moi, always require something other than yourself—although in a pinch, we do what we must.

I believe in oneness, too, (because Ms Stone and I are clearly that), which is why one of my favourite lines in the history of the world is from that ol’ sage Caitanya, in the 15th century, embroidered on one of the pillows on my couch: “We are inconceivably, simultaneously one and different.”

As my Nana used to say: “Put that in your pipe and smoke it.”

Oh, earlier in the day, Deepak Chopra was on line asking: Where Do You Think The Soul Goes After Death? I think that is sort of a loose and ill-defined question to ask, don’t you? I mean it’s just crying out for a mish-mash of ten billion projections—and as if he’s going to read them all!

When so many wondrous ancient souls and sages have done the contemplative groundwork to let us in, secret by secret, and hinting to us how to go deeper, maybe we should gather their ideas and ask the question from that premise. Chopra’s just begging for readers and marketing when he’s already got his books selling in Costco, next to the socks and the DVDs.

By the way, 119 people were on my site yesterday, so this isn’t about jealousy, thank you very much. And if one looks hard enough, for weeks on end, they can find my books too. And for the record, if you want to buy a CD, drop me a note, and I’ll go into the garage and grab one.

Anyway, I like Navin Doshi’s far more instructive thought, who after a lifetime of the Vedas and Science writes in the summary of his book:

John F. Kennedy’s profound statement, “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country,” can become the mantra of the transformed soul, one that will show the path to transformation from a self-centred individual to a selfless being, helping others.

To try and avoid the temptation of an overly socio or ethnocentric perspective (don’t you hate when that happens?), one could easily exchange in the famed Kennedy statement, as was implied, anyway, the word country for world, and even the word world for sisters and brothers.

What do you think of that idea? Transforming the soul through service? Now that’s a question worth asking on Yahoo, as opposed to what happens to us later. Well, that’s a good question too, but my point is…do you want a CD or not? Okay, Chopra can stay. I wish he’d been at the party. I do. We would’ve talked for sure. Or I could have at least watched him talking to Sharon Stone and my best friend ever who had no idea who I was.

What a perfect night!

May your lamp light it up in every moment of remembering.

Uganda Rising plays today at 3 on Sunset.

I do love you,

Petex

In case you happen to be feeling down on yourself for laziness or that you are anything less than an utter miracle, I just read in Common Ground (so it must be true) that humans renew nearly 1.75 million bone cells a second, 100 million cells a minute, and 150 billion bone-building cells a day.

All I can say is take a break, you’re amazing. We seek the mystery when it really is all around us, within us, as above, so below, in every moment.

Whenever I don’t feel this, which is too often, I’m lucky if I recall Einstein’s wonderful saying: “Imagination is more important than knowledge.” He really wasn’t kidding. Think, meditate, contemplate, laugh upon this idea if you feel less than in love. We are bogglingly miraculous. Imagine the wonders of a look, a thought, yourself, your sisters and brothers.

Look at the world, and any fool can feel there is a calling from somewhere for this.

I was talking about this the other day with my friend Tim. If you want a deeper relationship with anyone, including someone you dislike, or someone you feel you should love more, even a more personal relationship with the Divine—or even a more impersonal relationship—imagine it.

See what happens. Or try the Taoist technique of walking around with a smile on your face, no matter what.

I’m off for a few days with the film. I may have a little withdrawal but that’s good for me. Lots and lots of love,

Petex

Although I’m always a little nervous with unfinished demos, I leave you with the song Wide Open, as a reminder. Headphones suggested!