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= LATE NEWS FLASH =
Nobel Peace Prize recipient Mairead Corrigan Maguire said today, April 24, 2007:
"I was invited with my friend to attend a non-violent conference in Bilin, a village outside Ramallah [in the West Bank], and to give a talk there, which I did. At the end of the conference, we were invited to participate in a non-violent demonstration with some of the Palestinian members of parliament, Israeli peace activists, local villagers and international visitors.
"We walked along to try to walk up toward the separation wall, and it was a totally non-violent protest. And we were viciously attacked by the Israeli military. They threw gas canisters into the peace walkers, and they also fired rubber-covered steel bullets.
"As I tried to move back and help a French lady, I was shot in the leg with a rubber-covered steel bullet, and the young Israeli soldier who shot me was only 20 meters from me. I was stunned by it, and then later on, after having some treatment by the ambulance medics, I went back down to the front line with the peace activists, and we were again showered with gas. I was overcome and had a severe nosebleed and had to be taken by stretcher to the ambulance and treated.
"And I witnessed there ... an old Palestinian man with blood on his face. There were over 25 unarmed peace people who had been viciously attacked by the Israeli military. And it was a completely peaceful protest. It was absolutely unbelievable. I never in all my years of activism witnessed anything so vicious."
The shooting of Maguire took place on Friday, April 20; she is now back in Ireland and available for interviews. For more information, see
http://www.palsolidarity.org/main/2007/04/21/april-20-bilin-protest,
http://www.indymedia.ie/article/82119,
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/04/23/1350224
UP!
I HAVE MISSED YOU!!! THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR THIS!!!
debbie outerglobe, london.
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I just want to thank you for your unquenchable spirit.
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Get UP! Stand Up For Your Rights! (and everybody else’s too of course! :)
u can’t understand the world without innerstanding yourself
UP! 248 22 04 07
LA- LA- LA- LAP-TOPPLING DA SYSTEM!
u cant innerstand yourself without understanding the world
Get UP! And Don’t Give Up The Fight! (only we don’t mean violence, ok? :)
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FEATURING exclusive re-writes & re-mixes of da freshest deepest hacks ancient & modern ,and
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tho neither is a true Event, i spose there’s no way i can’t comment on both the virginia shooting in the u.s. and the cash 4 honours scandal in the u.k.
virginia, being just more of the same but bigger and more public, doesn’t really count as an ‘event,’ but rather as one more step in a much larger ongoing Change. cash 4 honours represents a later stage in the same ongoing Event; indeed it is one of its early culminations.
the virginia shootings
“You have to wilfully forget how you thought or felt as a kid - what your references consisted of, where you drew your borders - to accept an explanation as intellectually lazy and convenient as the copycat-made-him-do-it account. In fact, many schoolyard shooters very consciously saw their massacres as rebellions.”
yankeeland is deeply deeply sick - as i’ve been saying since the zippy pronoia tour to US in the mid-90s. u don’t have to have been raving this past decade to remember how you viewed the world as a Child (tho it certainly helps :) do you think children don’t ‘SEE’ the state of the world?! how adults behave? the hypocrisy?! the naked, even PROUD, greed?! the total corruption by money of everything?! (they actually see it better than we do - without blinkers!) how else could this tormented young man have actually viewed his actions as Jesus Christian?! he saw himself as Making a Stand! to him it was a Noble Gesture. in his head he was Refusing to be a part of the general “stench”.
http://www.alternet.org/stories/50758/?page=
a truly terrible thought comes to me. should these college and supermarket shoot-ups be viewed as americo/xtian suicide bombings?! certainly they’d be sharing a common enemy.
i hope u can see the much wider view i am taking when i say that the virginia shootings are a healthy sign that the yankee culture has NOT been ground down to non-caring dust as the grinders imagined & planned. in gurdjieffian terms [see below] such ‘childish’ rebellions are Second Force, the inevitable resistance raised by any First Force endeavour. and the endeavour in this case is the gangster take-over of american/western democracy - the Last Stand of Dinosaur Culture.
without gurdjieff’s Third Force, or Reconciling Force, which we UPpy types must embody as individuals and as an alternative ‘moral community’, the first 2 forces can only fight themselves to a bloodied standstill, as is happening now. i personally think that 3rd Force perceives the first 2 forces as different sides of the same thing!
which would make Cho Seung Hui the flip side of george bush - at opposite ends of the same insanity. see Cho in aggressive George swagger it’s the same dinosaur violence madness!
but let’s be clear. the Force which bush embodies is First Force. it was he who pulled that 2nd Force virginia trigger as surely as this butterfly triggered that tornado over new orleans.
cash for honours
the uk scandal represents a later stage in the same ongoing Event; indeed it is one of its early culminations. it is, indeed, an example of how fast humanity is moving into the new era - OUTSIDE Yankeeland - and the health of it is much more obvious too. the fact is that tony blair was no more corrupt than all his predecessors, in fact he is less guilty than most of them. he just happened to be operating in the doorway when the New Morality came sweeping down the street.
for the New, Post Dinosaur, Morality perceives the problem accurately and is working/playing to heal the whole culture from Top to Bottom while the Old Culture, knowing only violent oppression, increasingly applies “anger management” and “anti-depressant” tactics to the symptoms. which, following a psycho-logic the New Morality recognises only too well, only digs the problem deeper. to burst out one day in purest hyped-up terrorist rage.
or put it like this: IT’S THE PROBLEM THAT’S THE PROBLEM.
ITEM: The Chicago Tribune reports that Cho Seung Hui, the Virginia Tech shooter who killed 32 fellow students in a shooting rampage, was taking antidepressant drugs.
List of school shooters known to be taking antidepressant drugs at the time of the shootings 1998-2001 (with others, their medical records were sealed or autopsy reports never made public record).
May 21, 1998: Springfield, Oregon: 15-year-old Kip Kinkel murdered his own parents and then proceeded to school where he opened fire on students in the cafeteria, killing two and wounding 22. He had been on an antidepressants.
April 16, 1999: Notus, Idaho: 15-year-old Shawn Cooper fired two shotgun rounds in his school narrowly missing students. He was taking a mix of antidepressants.
April 20, 1999: Columbine, Colorado: 18-year-old Eric Harris had been taking an antidepressant when he and his partner Dylan Klebold killed twelve classmates and a teacher before taking his own life. The coroner confirmed that the antidepressant was in his system through toxicology reports. Dylan Klebold’s autopsy was never made public.
May 20, 1999: Conyers, Georgia: 15-year-old T.J. Solomon was being treated with a mix of antidepressants when he opened fire on and wounded 6 of his classmates.
March 7, 2000: Williamsport, Pennsylvania: 14-year-old Elizabeth Bush was on an antidepressant Prozac when she blasted away at fellow students in Williamsport, Pennsylvania, wounding one.
March 22, 2001: El Cajon, California: 18-year-old Jason Hoffman was on two antidepressants when he opened fire at his California high school wounding five. Hoffman had also undergone an “anger management” program.
April 10, 2001: Wahluke, Washington: 16-year-old Cory Baadsgaard took a rifle to his high school, and held 23 classmates and a teacher hostage. Cory had been on a high dose of an antidepressant.
Related News Links:
“A Deadly Coincidence: School Shootings and Drugged Students " http://www.michnews.com/artman/publish/article_7662.shtml
“The school shooter in Minnesota was another case of a young person on antidepressants getting violent"
http://www.newstarget.com/z006153.html
The Washington Times—"Dubious drug therapy"
http://washingtontimes.com/commentary/20050328-103929-3760r.htm
Health Sentinel—"Prozac – Ingredient in a Deadly Rampage?"
http://www.healthsentinel.com/org_news.php
The Washington Times—"School Shooter Took Mood-altering Drugs"
http://www.washingtontimes.com/national/20050324-114419-5312r.htm
The New York Daily News—"Minn. massacre teen taking Prozac"
http://www.nydailynews.com/front/story/293247p-250999c.html
UP!
p.06 George Gurdjieff: The Man And The Literature.
p.10 Islamic Threat To Europe? By The Numbers? You Won’t Believe It!
p.11 Was Timothy Leary Right? - TIME MAGAZINE IS ASKING.
p.12 Determined Feds To Re-Try Oakland's 'Guru Of Ganja'
p.13 Montana Enacts 'Declaration of Independence'
p.14 FEEDBACK BUMBLE BEEs, 2012 and Ballooning Earth Theory.
p.15 LAST UP!’S LATE NEWS FLASH
UP!
Although Iraqi civilian deaths have fallen in Baghdad since the February 14 start of the US-led offensive, according to an Associated Press tally, civilian deaths are up outside the capital.
Also, security sweeps have taken a heavy toll on US forces: deaths among American soldiers climbed 21% in Baghdad compared with the previous 2 months.
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/041507A.shtml
>> so we’re on our way! somewhere!
UP!
"The civilized have created the wretched, quite coldly and deliberately, and do not intend to change the status quo; are responsible for their slaughter and enslavement; rain down bombs on defenseless children whenever and wherever they decide that their 'vital interests' are menaced, and think nothing of torturing a man to death: these people are not to be taken seriously when they speak of the 'sanctity' of human life, or the conscience' of the civilized world." James Baldwin, "The Devil Finds Work".
UP!
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the UP! is a global edutainment round-up, broadcast weekly to =[14,619]=
Alternative// Activist// Zippy// Trance// New Age// Peace folks
recommended to the Parallel YOUniversity// Megatripolis Dance Dept as
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we conservatively estimate 50,000+ direct recipients.
A further 40,000 read it on the YOUniversity's site.
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by James Moore
"I have very good leather to sell to those who want to make themselves shoes."
Who was George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff? Writer? Choreographer? Psychiatrist? Musician? Doctor? Master Cook?
>> explorer, scientist, hippy, musician, zippy...
if you’re not thinking “shaman” by now u haven’t been paying attention:)
He defies categorisation: though it is clear that he re-united segments of ‘acroamatic’ knowledge gleaned during a 20 year search in Asia; and brought to the West a methodology for the possible evolution of consciousness, within a cosmology of awe-inspiring scale.
>> and indeed seemingly fantastic at the time - see UP!247.
His call was radical. Awake! Awake from your unsuspected hypnotic sleep, to consciousness and conscience.
>> BEFORE IT IS TOO LATE!
More than a hundred years ago Gurdjieff was a poor boy in the obscure town of Kars, on the Russo-Turkish frontier: today his name is becoming a modish verbal token, which (like Darwin, Marx, Freud, Einstein) is absurdly conceived to be self-explicatory. But those who would now narrowly appropriate him as ‘the inspirer of the ecology movement’ or ‘the initiator of contemporary eupsychian therapies’
>> or the first zippy
- though doubtless they glimpse aspects - comprehend neither his scale nor the trajectory of the spiritual traditions.
For a truer perspective on Gurdjieff we must turn to his circle of devoted followers, who paid for their insights by effort. These were men and women magnetised not by a system of self-supportive notional abstractions but by a human being of Rabelaisian stature; by the fine energies at his disposition; by his compassion; and by his ability to transmit a pratique. Their journals and autobiographies constitute a rich and singular literature: Gurdjieff is assigned his inescapable historicity, yet somehow struggles free, emerging with the cohesion and the presence of a myth.
The Travels
No definitive biography exists or is remotely in prospect. He was born in Alexandropol c.1866, and first appears on a well-lit stage in 1912 in Moscow. To encounter him was always a test: the first meeting - certainly for those who became his students - was the axis on which a whole life turned.
The composer Thomas de Hartmann (1886–1956) and his wife Olga were Gurdjieff’s intimate disciples and companions for twe12lve years, and it is thanks to him that Gurdjieff’s music has reached us. In Our Life with Mr. Gurdjieff they share with us the journey they shared with him: from Petrograd, seized by crisis in 1917, across the Caucasus mountains to Tiflis, finally reaching Paris in 1922. Though simplicity sometimes approaching naïveté, characterises their writing, the impression of Gurdjieff is only the more striking. We find him moving impartially, almost invisibly, through scenes of confusion and fratricidal turmoil; welcoming each difficulty and danger as a new opportunity for practical teaching.
In October 1922 Gurdjieff took the Prieuré at Fontainebleau-Avon, a chateau in 200 acres of grounds, where he rapidly created conditions for self-study, unprecedented in Europe. Gurdjieff had a special rapport with his pupils’ children, caring for their education in the word’s real sense. Sometimes he challenged them; sometimes he led them with great delicacy towards a vital insight; always his teaching had an element of surprise and the hallmark of practicality. From eleven to fifteen Fritz Peters (1913–1980) lived at the Prieuré, and in Boyhood with Gurdjieff, his fresh and at times uproariously funny memoir, he relives that special experience.
In spring 1924, Gurdjieff visited the USA with prepared pupils, to give public demonstrations of his sacred dances; and their influence upon key intellectuals was far-reaching. The dances also spoke categorically to the young Englishman Stanley Nott (1887–1978) who had a different, simpler background: who had travelled the world working hard at many trades, and whose feelings had been enervated by his sufferings in the trenches. ‘Here,’ wrote Nott, ‘is what I went to the ends of the earth to find.’ His allegiance to Gurdjieff proved life-long and undivided; he spent many summers at the Prieuré, and in Teachings of Gurdjieff he conveys both his inner and outer experience with Boswellian vigour. He incorporates in full the penetrating (though not definitive) commentary on Gurdjieff’s book Beelzebub by his friend A.R. Orage.
1925 - 1935 Gurdjieff devoted to his writing, achieved in the distracting conditions of the Café de Paix in Paris. Here, in spring 1932, he was encountered by the American authoress Kathryn Hulme, later to attain fame with her novel The Nun’s Story; she hungered to become his personal pupil, but nearly 4 years passed before her persistence was rewarded. Her autobiography Undiscovered Country richly evokes her experience in a special group of 4 women (all sophisticated, avant-garde, single - and lesbian) which met daily in Gurdjieff’s flat. Gurdjieff’s humanity and capacity to work with diverse types is strongly conveyed, as is the group’s emotional commitment to each other and their teacher.
Urged to flee Paris before the Germans entered in 1940, Gurdjieff chose to remain in his modest flat at 6 Rue des Colonels-Rénard. Though well into his ‘70s he was unsparing of his energies: giving individual counselling; teaching a new series of dances or Movements; and somehow maintaining in those sparse times the patriarchal hospitality of his audacious feasts. French interest in Gurdjieff - formerly slight - now burgeoned, drawing many intellectuals to him, among them René Zuber the film director. His slim volume Who Are You Monsieur Gurdjieff? is a calm and fastidious meditation: confronted with the enigma of Gurdjieff and deeply concerned to situate him in relation to Christianity, Zuber is repeatedly brought back to question himself.
15 months before Gurdjieff’s death, J.G. Bennett (1897–1974) who had briefly met him in the 1920s, established a more serious - though necessarily intermittent - contact. Elizabeth Mayall (1918–1991) later to become Bennett’s wife, was free to live in Paris from January 1949, and thus shared more fully in the unique world there. Here at Gurdjieff’s last suppers, his mysterious ritual the ‘Toast of the Idiots’ served as the vehicle of a final and intensely individual teaching. Idiots in Paris, the Bennetts’ raw unedited diaries, captures with almost painful honesty and immediacy the last hundred days of Gurdjieff’s life, and his pupils’ poignant struggle for understanding. Gurdjieff died at Neuilly on 29 October 1949.
The Teaching
What precisely was Gurdjieff’s Teaching? Although the question seems to promise clarification, it is spoilt by its very rigour: time deadens authorised versions like hemlock, and Gurdjieff never issued one. ‘I teach,’ he said gnomically, ‘that when it rains, the pavements get wet.’ The vivifying power of his ideas entails the moment, the circumstance, the type and state of the pupil. His one constant demand is Know Thyself, to which he adduces a metaphysic, a metapsychology and a metachemistry which absolutely defy précis; a human typology, a phenomenology of consciousness, and a quasi-mathematical scale linking macrocosm and microcosm. This complex apparatus is illuminated by one master-idea: that Man is called to strive for self-perfection, in service to our sacred living Universe.
Can we catch echoes of Pythagoras or Plato, Christ or Milarepa? It is easy to lose oneself and one’s search in a labyrinth of comparisons, and in the phylogeny of ideas, but Gurdjieff himself was not content with words; his Movements and sacred dances were at once a glyph of universal laws and a field for individual search. When, approaching 60, he turned to writing, his productions were heuristic rather than expository, and their form totally unexpected: first a cosmological epic of a special kind, then an autobiography of a special kind.
All And Everything: Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson is Gurdjieff’s masterpiece, and no other book brings us closer to him. Readers who can rise to the double challenge of its profundity and its quite deliberate stylistic difficulty; who can summon again and again the necessary fine attention, will find encoded here all Gurdjieff’s psychological and cosmological ideas, and a fundamental critique.
On a long journey by spaceship, Beelzebub good-humouredly conveys his understanding of ‘All and Everything’ to his grandson Hassein. Through his impartial compassionate eyes we see life on earth as from a great distance, with microscopic clarity. Down millennia and across continents, we see Man deeply asleep, blindly and aimlessly struggling and suffering, torn by war and passion, fouling everything he touches; and yet, through a strange flaw in his nature, clinging ingeniously to the very instruments which wound, the patterns which betray.
A stark picture? Undeniably. And in other hands than Gurdjieff’s it might have been cruelly nihilistic; but Gurdjieff is calling us to life! It is his genius to float an objective hope, like an Ark on these dark waters. He bequeaths us the great figure of Beelzebub, whose presence indicates man as he might be: aware with gratitude of the divine spark within him, and striving by conscious labours towards the fulfilment of his true place in the cosmic scheme.
In his next book Meetings with Remarkable Men Gurdjieff evokes the first and least known period of his own life; his boyhood in Kars under the benign influence of his father and his first tutor Dean Borsh; then his early manhood dedicated, in many guises, to an unremitting search for a real and universal Knowledge. His language is spare and vivid, unrolling the lands of Transcaucasia and Central Asia before us, even while he hints at a parallel geography of Man’s psyche, and the route he followed to penetrate it.
We journey to the interior in company with the friends of Gurdjieff’s youth - princes, engineers, doctors, priests - men remarkable not from their surface arrangements but by their resourcefulness, self-restraint and compassion. We see them as though face to face; their words are lodged in us as though spoken directly in a moment of intimate quietness.
So Gurdjieff, having swept the ground clear with the awesome critique of Beelzebub, offers us now his material for a new creation - nothing other than our hard daily life, but thrust into question and placed at the service of an aim, which, by its intelligence and elevation, is truly Human.
1915 - 1918, Gurdjieff liberally gave to his Russian groups an astonishing body of exact data, which had cost 20 years to search out. Prominent among his pupils at this time was Piotr Demianovich Ouspensky, journalist, mathematician and intellectual; already famous for his book Tertium Organum. The very epoch, with its mass destruction and savage contradictions, sharpened Ouspensky’s lifelong hunger for values and knowledge of a different order. In Search of the Miraculous was published posthumously; it consists, for three parts out of four, of Gurdjieff’s own words, preserved from those days and brilliantly arranged. Endorsed by Gurdjieff himself, this work undoubtedly offers the most accessible account of his psychological and cosmological ideas, while carrying us as near as any book alone can, to the special conditions of a group. The overwhelming sense of shock, excitement and revelation which fired Ouspensky in 1915, will be transmitted through these sentences and diagrams to people of every generation, who (whatever the external conditions with which they must blend) are secretly in search.
Jeanne de Salzmann became Gurdjieff’s pupil in Tiflis in 1919, and through 30 years participated in each succeeding dispensation of his Work, even carrying responsibility for his groups during the last ten years of his life. In Views from the Real World she has collated more than forty important talks given by Gurdjieff between 1917 and 1930. We owe their very preservation to the educated memories of his followers, who were forbidden to take verbatim notes. If these are not Gurdjieff’s words in every syllable, it is clearly his authentic voice, issuing his unmistakable challenge.
Approaches to Gurdjieff
No-one - whether he responds to Gurdjieff or reacts against him - can measure the voltage of his intellect without receiving a certain shock. His is one of those few effectual voices, which, ‘passing through a great diversity of echoes, keeps its own resonance and its power of action’.
After four years as one of Gurdjieff’s close pupils, P.D. Ouspensky expounded his ideas in England and America for a quarter of a century. In The Psychology of Man’s Possible Evolution, he distils from Gurdjieff’s integrated Teaching its psychological essence, presenting it without flavour or aroma in only 92 pages. This formulation, based on Ouspensky’s lecture notes, is so lucid and balanced that it bids to remain forever unmatched as an introduction and an aide-memoire.
The feeling of a pupil’s actual experience - palpably missing from Ouspensky’s summary of theory - is supplied in Venture with Ideas by Kenneth Walker. This warm human memoir lightly sketches Gurdjieff’s psychological and cosmological teaching, within the biographical context of the author’s 24 years study with Ouspensky in England. Walker’s scientific background (he was three times Hunterian Professor of Surgery at the Royal College of Surgeons) adds interest to his reception of esoteric ideas.
Men are tragically divided, but all who wish may share the primordial existential questions: who am I, and what is the significance and aim of human life? The great edifice of Gurdjieff’s Teaching rests on the unshakable foundation of this innocent interrogation. The theme is calmly developed in Towards Awakening by Jean Vaysse a pioneer of open-heart surgery and transplantation, and a close pupil of Gurdjieff in Paris. His final chapter outlines for the first time, Gurdjieffian exercises linking attention with bodily sensation.
The mountain, rooted in the earth, its summit reaching towards heaven, is an ancient symbol of man’s aspirations and strivings. René Daumal who studied under Gurdjieff in Paris during the war, wrote his subtle and humorous allegory Mount Analogue in the language of a poet and mountaineer, to remind us of the strange inner ascent to which we are called. Although he died young, his own work sustains its impact on modern French literature.
Coming years must inevitably heighten scholarly interest in Gurdjieff. Because his Teaching is experiential; because there is danger of confusing levels; because an academic with a fundamental misapprehension or even bias, can embroider it so prettily - the prospect is not wholly welcome. And yet some auguries are good; Michel Waldberg in Gurdjieff: An Approach to his Ideas draws intelligently on all major texts, contriving a work of popular synthesis and commentary which sets a real standard.
And Now?
Gurdjieff preferred Today over Yesterday; he did not invite us either to anatomise him or to idolise him, but to search for ourselves. Returning again and again to Beelzebub, we seem to catch the author’s rich human voice projected toward his ‘Grandsons’ - pupils of the New Age; rising generations who could not meet him, but who bear the seeds of his ideas into the unknown future. And yet no pilgrimage of reading is sufficient: no book, not even a sacred book, can furnish that unfathomable moment when, in the actual presence of his teacher, the pupil’s understanding is amplified and deepened.
Then where to look today? All a man’s flair, discrimination and downright commonsense are solicited here, for there are many siren voices and self-advertisements. And yet it was not for nothing that Gurdjieff prepared pupils; not for nothing that he gave indications for the future. And after his death, it was not for nothing that the cherished Movements have been progressed through decades; and a responsible nucleus painfully formed, to maintain the current that had been created.
Where then? For those whose approach to Gurdjieff is practical, this is the question which must prevail. There is first an outer contact to be found: then an inner contact to be renewed and deepened.
[Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson by G. I. Gurdjieff (1950)
Meetings with Remarkable Men by G. I. Gurdjieff (1963)
In Search of the Miraculous by P. D. Ouspensky (1949)
Views from the Real World Talks of G. I. Gurdjieff (1973)
The Psychology of Man’s Possible Evolution by P.D. Ouspensky (1978)
Venture with Ideas by Kenneth Walker (1951)
Toward Awakening by Jean Vaysse (1980)
Mount Analogue by René Daumal (1974)
Gurdjieff: An Approach to His Ideas by Michel Waldberg (1981)]
UP!
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