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COURSE IN SPAIN Week 2


Having found yet another blockage in my base chakra, I couldn't help but feel rather despondent. After gritting my teeth and getting stuck in, I finally managed to remove it. This blockage in the Base Chakra was the last one there!!!

The next time I sat down to meditate, I suddenly felt a tickling sensation in my pelvis above the perineum. This sensation increased in intensity, and felt like champagne bubbling up my body from below. The flow of energy around my body had risen to a new level giving me an increased ability to track down blockages and an increased confidence in myself. Wow!

I suddenly remembered the writings of the inspired Poet and Meditation Master, the Persian Shakespeare, Jal Al Uddin Rumi and that always he talked of the wine of his meditation and this feeling of energy was what he was writing about a thousand years ago and I was feeling it, here and Now!!

Energy Enhancement Report on Sub Personalities IN IGUAZU - WORLD ENERGY CENTER SACRED TO THE GUARANI AND THE INCA

Here we have a report from Bhakti Ganesha Devananda who has been with us from 2005. We met him first in Spain where he immediately had the normal Kundalini experiences which all of our students enjoy and since then he has been to Argentina, Spain - Costa Brava again, Argentina and Iguazu again and to India where we spent six weeks this year – 2010. We spent three weeks in Goa at our apartment close to the sea with Swimming pool, and air conditioning and another three weeks at the Ashram of Sathya Sai Baba, Puttaparthi. He has been there since for two months more.

THOMAS BLAIR AND DEVI DHYANI AT IGUAZU FALLS - THE DEVILS THROAT! OCTOBER 2008

As we remove all of the simpler energy blockages with the Four Level Energy Enhancement Course, with further practise at home we start to get a bit deeper into the Ego. Here we have an experience with a sub-personality created in previous lifetimes and it this which is passed on from generation to generation within a family. This sub-personality is striated with negative karmic mass. It cannot work in any other way but to destroy the lives of the people who inherit it by taking them away from their soul path towards an arid path lacking any fulfilment except that of the selfish, competitive ego. Whenever it appears it hides again. It resists each time it is pointed out by Devi and I through creating physical problems, negative emotions and false arguments. It is an expert on survival within the familial bodies it inherits, generation to generation. It becomes more and more talented each lifetime but the talents are put to some perverted use like just making money or becoming a General without any purpose or love for ones fellow man.

This pointing out process seems to resemble the tapas blows of the sculptor creating the image of God in stone. It seems quite painful at the time, yet in order to reveal your divine nature, it is necessary.

Yet, through access to the light of Samadhi these sub-personalities can be dissolved – “Dying of the Light” said William Shakespeare or the Sufi Master Sheiks Pir. By the use of the Seven Step Process of Energy Enhancement Samyama it can be transmuted. The result of this transmutation is purified talent because this sub-personality contains within it many perverted talents which when purified become the basis of the Soul Infused Personality of Illumination.

This use of the Energy of Love focussed in meditation, transmuting energy blockages in the Buddhafield, is the Energy of Change, and not just romantic namby pamby "lurv" which changes with each new Honey.  This use of Samadhi and Samyama to purify the perverted sub-personality talents in order to create ONE Soul Infused Enlightened personality is the forerunner of a massive increase in the rate of evolution as we do the same thing with the Sub-Personalities of BM’s, taking their talents into our Psychic Bodies in order to superscede this life towards the incredibly talented Immortal Life of an Ascended Master… the only way out!!

Here is the experience..

Overview

Much work had already been done to hunt down and heal what Satchi & Devi had termed The Cowboy sub-personality. From previous meditation sessions, I have distilled down a description of our cowboy and his character traits.

The Cowboy

As you might well guess, he’s a loner this cowboy. He does what he wants to do and does not listen to anybody else; does not listen to advice. Everybody else is a fool. He doesn’t suffer fools gladly. He goes it alone. He does not trust anybody else.

He’s a womaniser, a Casanova and like any cowboy that has to keep on moving, shies away from long term commitment. To settle down means the enemy can catch up, and this means certain death. He is capable of love, and has loved but this fear is great enough for him to forsake that love and to keep on moving.

He travels alone; smokes too. Likes his liquor by the camp fire and burns everything in sight for kicks when he’s had a few. He’s a self-destructor is this cowboy.

His heart is closed. It has to be closed to live this life, and not feel bad about it. He’s emotionally dead; a cold hearted rider whose only solace is a draw on a cigarette. Any kind of company irritates him; he’d rather be alone, a place where nobody asks any questions. (A bit like the assassin James Bond – comment Satchidanand)

In meditation I had seen this sub-personality in my grandfather at the 2^nd Level of the 7 Step process. In meditation, using the 7 Step process, I could see that this cowboy was managing to live through generation after generation of my family, and now it was my turn to have this cowboy riding my donkey (A Sufi knows that he is not the body, so he calls his body a donkey that needs to be looked after and cared for.).

At the third level of the 7 step process, I could see a knight, clad in armour wielding an amazingly strong sword. This seemed to be the genesis of the cowboy, who assumes different clothes to suit each era of time past. For example, in my lifetime, the cowboy’s horse was replaced by a motorbike (Our student was a championship motorbike rider -comment Satchidanand).  Instead of riding boots with spurs, I wore carbon-titanium strengthened motorcycle boots.

The negative karmic mass thought form of a cowboy was metamorphosing, transmuting, to fit each generation, in order to remain alive. In the bible somewhere it says how the sins of the father will pass unto the 8 or 9^th generation. Well, this is what I’m talking about.

Whether we see the negative karmic mass as genetically passed down or simply karmic, it doesn’t matter, my light body was being high-jacked by this entity, by this – whatever you want to call it – black gooey negative karmic mass  that is going to see me unhappy and into an early grave if left unchecked. This cowboy does not care about me or anybody else around me, and this seems to be true of all the sub-personalities that vie for control of my life – ‘There can only be one!’ (Film - Highlander).

And the more I stay in the light, the more I stay around Satchi or Sai Baba here in Puttaparthi, the more I develop my own will to be in the light through meditation, the more clear this picture becomes. It’s increasingly black and white, and as a consequence I can see the cowboy in me that wants to take me down old streets, to ride off into distant sunsets, to draw on just one more cigarette, because this cowboy wants me to believe that this is the man I am. He wants me to identify with a stale dream I once had about this place.

When really, I am further and further drawn to the light, where my heart fills with love and compassion for all my brothers and sisters. In this place the cowboy calls me no longer, but I see that he too needs love to bring his suffering to an end. I know this is a pun, but sometimes there is no better way to express something… Well, excuse the pun, but love is the answer. Clad in the heavy clothes of a cowboy, it’s hard to have this experience overnight, which is what Shaktipat is all about. It’s the ability of the Master to give you the energy to experience this energy of love, even though it’s only to be had in his presence to begin with. This energy of love, the Holy Spirit that descends down through your body – this experience is given to you by a Master, so that you can KNOW the distance between true love and the lonesome cowboy.

It’s beyond this topic but looking at the purification of sub-personalities to create talents that can be used by the one soul infused personality is an interesting area. I can see quickly how the cowboy, like a sanyasin is happy to be on his own and does not need the reassurance of others of his existence…

Cowboy Sub-Personality Revealed

What follows is an account of one meditation session which took place in June 2010.

…I was now feeling awkward. I was feeling stiff in my chair and did not know what to say. Devi mentions the smell, which I could smell myself. It was the strange rotten vegetable smell of armpit sweat I have had before when under stress or when food poisoned. As I was listening to Devi and Satchi,  two chess pieces to manoeuvre me into check mate, I was experiencing other physiological symptoms. Satchi had mentioned The Resistor sub personality and maybe others and the guy inside me knew it could not hide. My eye and/ or lips were starting to twitch and I could feel like somebody was trying to wriggle themselves free from under my skin. This is no joke, it was as if there was somebody inside of me. It’s as if this other person in me wanted me to act in some way. My mouth was twitching because this other person wanted to hurl words at Satchi and Devi but I was aware enough to be present and observe all this stuff going on without acting or saying anything. Who is this person inside me then? The Cowboy!! A sub personality? An Alter (Fritzmeier)?

The Human Condition – Split Mind

Now, a couple of months on from writing the above, I am back to append to this article some information I have found important in explaining the multiple personalities that allow for that disease we term the “human condition”. The following is extracted from Fritz Springmeier & Cisco Wheeler - The Illuminati Formula - Monarch Mind Control Science, and for the purpose of this article, ‘alters’ are synonymous with ‘sub-personalities’:

Switching - This is when one part (fragment) of the mind takes over from

another, or in simple terms, this is when one alter personality (or alter

fragment) takes the body from the alter which is holding the body.

Switching can occur via the Programmers’ codes for calling up alters,

or by external or internal stimuli that trigger an alter to come out.

Switching will usually cause at least a flicker of the eyes, and for outside

observers, who know the different personalities, they will observe

another personality take the body.

Well, when I read the above, I could not at first believe how close this resembled my experience with Satchi and Devi – the twitching or flickering of the eyes. Then came the question of how badly my mind was split. Was every body like this or was it just me? I rationalise in my head that, yes, everybody is capable of switching personalities, it’s just that this work by Springmeier was dealing with the extreme end of the spectrum of what can be called the human condition. Gurdjieff, in reference to sub-personalities, is known for saying that the person who decides to get up at 4am to meditate is not the same as the person who throws the alarm clock out of the window. So, unless one is enlightened with a soul infused personality, then one is split to some degree.

Satchi’s Light, Triggers & Reveals Sub-Personalities

As you can read above, it’s usually only the programmer of a mind controlled slave, who knows the hypnotic codes or triggers and is able to switch Alters, but somehow both Satchi and Devi working together have a talent for revealing alters/ sub-personalities. It’s part of their service to you the student, although when it happens I guarantee you would rather pay 10,000 dollars to be somewhere else, but alas, it’s like the necessary act of removing a splinter from a child’s finger – painful to the kid but then soon after everybody’s happy! (I would say more like Aesop's Androcles and the Lion – Satchidanand)

Another way of explaining Satchi’s talent is quite simply that this is what happens when a student sits in the Buddhafield or energy field of a Master or a soul infused personality. A Master can not be bent in any way and so simply reflects what is. He reflects the truth of any situation he finds himself in, and if a student, possessed or at least driven, shall we say, by a sub personality, using strategies (mind games) to meet its own end, then this will be revealed as folly. Basically light casts a shadow for people to see.

So, email now for the latest prices to have your very own egodectomy.

References

The ego is a mass of energy blockages and talents perverted by trauma formed negative karmic mass. This is the way in which all people are distracted by their energy blockages or the implanted ego of humanity. Here we have reports on the sub-personalities and the programmed modes of "Normal" humanity. The difficulty of talking as a tool to remove blockages. The necessity of meditative techniques which are more efficient, powerful to remove programs, blockages.

Read the commentary, "The games People Play" Below...

Transactional Analysis and Strategies "The games People Play" by Dr Eric Berne

And the Removal of Karma and Sub Personality Blockages, Strategies, in Energy Enhancement Level 3

SATSANG ON THE BEATITUDES

TAPAS, ONE OF THE YAMAS OF THE YOGA SUTRAS OF PATANJALI, IS THE ACCEPTANCE OF SUFFERING IN ORDER TO EVOLVE, IN ORDER TO HELP ANOTHER PERSON, IN ORDER TO HELP THE WORLD

BY SWAMI SATCHIDANANDA

SISTER CHANDRIKA: Blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness' sake: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

SWAMIJI: Sufferings. Because without suffering there's no purification. Whoever is interested in purifying oneself should accept suffering. If it comes, accept it. Or while trying to relieve others' sufferings, if you face suffering, accept it.

Thiruvalluvar - One of the Tamil Siddars - gives the example of gold. How is golden ore purified? How do you get 24 carat gold? By constantly melting it and relieving it from all unnecessary sediments, mixtures. This is done with a lot of suffering. The gold undergoes a lot of sufferings. Every time it's heated, it is raised one more carat.

TAMIL: Sudachudarum Ponnpole. 'The more you heat it, the more it shines.'

Because Alchemically, all the dross, the unnecessary carbon and other things are burnt out. Like that, the more you get heated by suffering the more you shine.

Because suffering is like burning.

That's why it's called tapasya.

Tapas means to burn.

In other words you are gently, or ur-gently, roasted.

Until you become ash. Then that's called the holy ash. An ash is a holy substance because it's totally burnt. That's why you have an ash, holy ash, in Christianity, in Hinduism. Vibhuti, we call it. Vibhuti means burnt ash. It's called vibhuti because it has all the great qualities of God. Everything that is beautiful, that is supreme, is vibhuti. And this ash, which is called vibhuti, was dirt. Or to be more frank, it was dung. But it's no longer dirt. The very same dirt, burnt out completely, so it's now purified well, is now vibhuti, holy ash.

So suffering is helpful. If you face a little suffering, if you don't enjoy the way the food is prepared, say, `Ah, here is another way of my purification. God is trying to purify my tongue through this instrument we call the mother of the house.' If we forget that, we might feel, 'What is this? Can't you make a little better food? Can't you give me one more blanket? One a little more soft?'

Why are spiritual seekers expected to live a simple life? To accept suffering. To see how they can bear suffering. It's not a comfortable life. That comes afterward. When you have suffered enough, when you get burnt totally, then you are not trampled.

As long as you are dung, you get trampled. And thrown into the dung pit.

But when you get burnt, you become holy ash and you go to the very forehead of the person. You are elevated to a great height. You are respected. So the benefit comes afterward. But until you are completely burnt you can't get that. You can't go to that height.

I don't know if you remember a parable that I used to give. The Hindu temples, you know, are mostly built of granite rock. The sanctum sanctorum – the several steps you go up, and then the statue, the image you worship. as God – is made out of granite rock.

One day I was in front of the altar. There was nobody except me and the Lord through the image.

All of a sudden I heard a conversation. I became curious and I sharpened my ears to hear that. The conversation was like this: 'Hi, brother! How come you are getting all the decorations, all the offerings? Milk and honey are poured over you, you get decorated with nice jewels, flowers.

Everyone comes and respects you. And this priest, even while he decorates you, he is stepping on me. Nobody seems even to look at me. Even if they don't decorate me and respect me, can't they at least leave me alone instead of trampling on me? How come? Don't you know we were brothers? We were together, almost twins.'

The other one said, 'Yes, my brother, I remember that. I can never forget it. We were together. We were one piece when we were brought from the neighboring rock quarry. But the sculptor started working and he split that one rock into two because it was too big for a statue.

And he picked you up first and started shaping you into a beautiful image. You know the sculptor! He started hitting at you with his iron chisel and hammer.

You became so furious, you shouted at him, yelled at him, 'How dare you do this? Leave me alone. I don't want to be hit like this.' And he thought that you are so unhappy, that you are possessed with a kind of ego or ignorance, so he just left you.

And then he took the other half and started working on me. I kept quiet. I thought there must be some reason for it. After all, he is the one who brought me all the way. Let him do whatever he wants. Of course it was really painful.

Constantly, he rolled me over and over, he hit me day and night. He was sometimes even sitting on me and hitting me. But I waited and waited and after several months, all of a sudden, one day, I saw myself as a beautiful image.

Now he has put me here and he is doing all the decorations. When he put me here I was a little too high for him to reach me, so he wanted a stepping stone and he thought to use you at least for that purpose. So he just placed you in front of me and that is why he is standing on you and pouring all the milk and honey on me.'

`Oh, I see. Well, if I had known that, I would have accepted all those things; but I didn't.'

`Well, I'm sorry, but it's too late. Just accept it. Pray for the next birth. And if somebody is hitting you, even if you don't know why, accept it. Be patient. Probably one day you will be respected. You'll be honored. You'll have all the decorations, all the festivities for you. Like me.'

That's what the Deity said. It's a conversation between the Deity and the stepping stone in front. Hm? So who was right?

SOMEONE: The Deity.

SWAMIJI: How did it become the Deity?

SOMEONE: By letting the sculptor work on him.

SWAMIJI: That's what. Did he work nicely, gently like this? (Swamiji strokes Sister Chandrika's cheek) `Sweet girl, sweet girl, give her a cake.' Did he do that? (Swamiji now gives Sister Chandrika a mock blow on the side of the head) Banging, banging, hm? That's what. Suffering. That's what he means. Didn't the Lord Jesus say, 'If someone hits you on the left cheek, show him the right one too'?

So, Blessed are the...
SISTER CHANDRIKA: Blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness' sake.

SWAMIJI: Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness' sake. Well, it's easy to read this and even to interpret it. But when it comes in our own life, then we find it hard to swallow. That's why we should 'really be following it. Be good followers and good swallowers. (laughter)

(At this point, a member of the Ashram family comes up to Swamiji, giving him a coconut and a hammer with which to break it. This is sometimes done by devotees of Swamiji on their birthdays.)

SWAMIJI: See, this is a coconut. Do you know why the coconut is broken? The coconut represents the human mind. As people mostly identify themselves as the mind and talk in terms of that, they're all more or less like coconuts.

The coconut has three parts. The upper surface, which is covered with husk. Below the husk, you see the hard shell. Inside the shell you have that beautiful, white kernel.

The husk represents the tamasic part of the mind, which is the lazy mind.

The hard shell represents the rajasic part, the restless, extremely active mind, the egoistic part.

And the beautiful, white kernel inside represents the sattvic mind, or the tranquil one. That means, when the tranquil mind goes to one extreme, it becomes restless. And if it goes to the other extreme, it becomes lazy. So the not only for the birthdays.

In India, normally you take a coconut to the temple and put it in the hands of the priest. And he cracks it for you. It signifies that the teacher breaks your ego and brings out the beautiful you — to be offered to God.

Then the priest returns the coconut and the tasteful kernel is shared with everybody. That means, once God sees your purity, accepts you as His own, then he gives you back to be distributed to everybody. Your life becomes a beautiful and dedicated one, useful to everybody. That is the symbolic purpose of breaking a coconut.

(Swamiji prepares to strike the coconut.)
May you be free from ego and ignorance which causes the mortality of life, the mrithyor of life.

Om Tryambakam Yajamahe

Sugandhim Pushtivardhanam

Urvarukamiva Bandhanan

Mrityor Mukshiya Maamritat

Hari Om Tat Sat. Om Shanthi.
(He cracks the coconut.)

Mahamrityunjaya Mantra (maha-mrityun-jaya) is one of the more potent of the ancient Sanskrit mantras. Maha mrityunjaya is a call for enlightenment and is a practice of purifying the karmas of the soul at a deep level. It is also said to be quite beneficial for mental, emotional, and physical health.

AUM/OM: Guided Meditation on Absolute reality. That which encompasses the three states of waking, dreaming, deep sleep, represented by AUM, the three levels of gross, subtle, causal, the three levels of conscious, unconscious, subconscious, and the three universal processes of coming, being, and going. It is Tamas, Rajas and Sattvas which when made one, symbolise Illumination. Absolute silence beyond the three levels is the silence after AUM when we use OM as a guided meditation, in order to project our energy in order to connect with the center of the Universe.

Tryambakam: Trya means three. Ambakam means eyes. It means the three eyes of the Absolute, which are the processes of creation, existence, and dissolution, as well as the other triads, which are part of AUM. A - The center of the earth - Kundalini Chakra , U the heart center, M the Ajna Chakra moving into Sahasrara Chakra. Absolute silence beyond the three levels is the silence after AUM when we use OM as a guided meditation, in order to project our energy in order to connect with the center of the Universe. Thus it is a guided meditation to extend ourselves outwards into the antahkarana, into the Universe, to connect with external chakras, external sources of power. It is Energy Enhancement. The three "eyes" means experiencing these three stages and triads at one time, AS ONE, from the higher, all pervasive vantage point of the Absolute.

Yajamahe: We rejoice in meditation on all of this.

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Sugandhim: Means fragrance. Like a spreading fragrance, which permeates the whole of this planet, whilst we are in contact with that existence of the OM Antahkarana. It is the Buddhafield of the Illuminated.

Pushtivardhanam: Means that which sustains and nourishes all. Thus, the fragrance that permeates all flows from God, the sustainer of all beings, while also the essence of all beings.

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Urvarukamiva: Urva means big and powerful. Arukam means disease, like the spiritual diseases of ignorance and untruth, which are like the death of Wisdom or Truth.

Bandhanan: Means bound down, as in bound down to the ignorance and untruth.

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Mrityor: Means ignorance and untruth.

Mukshiya: Means liberation from the cycles of physical, mental, and spiritual death.

Maamritat: Means please give me rejuvenating nectar which descends like the wine of the Sufis, of Carmina Burana, from the center of the Universe, so as to have this liberation. THIS IS THE ALCHEMICAL TAVERN OF CARMINA BURANA WHERE THE WINE - "EVERYBODY DRINKS IMMODERATELY" -IS THE KUNDALINI ENERGY OF THE MASTER - SATCHIDANAND Like the process of severing the cucumber from the creeping vine of the earth in order to ascend into the center of the Universe.

"this tavern is not closed, this tavern won't be stopped" from Mahayogi Baba Gorakhnath Ji

ENERGY ENHANCEMENT

Energy Enhancement can lead you to God or the universal absolute and it promises Nirvana and transformation, as these things are within you already. Energy Enhancement will not “tell” you about truth, but will give you the Real Spiritual Experience to provoke and challenge and excite into awakening to the truth which lies within. This kind of truth cannot be given as it takes two to Tango and it is the purity and resolution of the Student which calls forth the Energies of Existence. Yet, it can felt through personal experiences which take you out of normal states of awareness – through Initiations and Rites of Passage calling you into new ways of seeing Self and everything you once believed was real.

Within you lies a doorway to the Infinite. The journey to find that doorway can be arduous for it takes you into the landscape of your inner being. Are you willing to Initiate one of the greatest challenges of your life? Are you willing to change your ideas of who you thought you were in order to discover who you really are? Say, “Yes”. Leave behind your safety net and discover the knowledge that is your birthright. Many stand at this doorway, but few dare enter.

Inside you live the Mysteries of the Universe. Energy Enhancement is a doorway into that Grand Adventure.

WORK

1.1. The Ideology of Work

Work for economic ends has not always been the dominant activity of mankind. It has only been dominant across the whole of society since the advent of industrial capitalism, about two hundred years ago. Before capitalism, people in pre-modern societies, in the Middle Ages and the Ancient World, worked far less than they do nowadays, as they do in the precapitalist societies that still exist today. In fact, the difference was such that the first industrialists, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, had great difficulty getting their workforce to do a full day's work, week in week out. The first factory bosses went bankrupt precisely for this reason.

That is to say that what the British and the Germans call `the work ethic' and the `work-based society' are recent phenomena created by propaganda.

It is a feature of `work-based societies' that they have been taught that work as at one and the same time a moral duty, a social obligation and the route to personal success. The ideology of work assumes that,

- the more each individual works, the better off everyone will be;

- those who work little or not at all are acting against the interests of the community as a whole and do not deserve to be members of it;

- those who work hard achieve social success and those who do not succeed have only themselves to blame.

This ideology is still deeply ingrained and hardly a day passes without some politician, be he Right - or left-wing, urging us to work and insisting that work is the only way to solve the present crisis. If we are to `beat unemployment', they add, we must work more, not less.

Yet there are two different types of work.

1. Work for another at work which we do not like and despise which we can term slavery. This kind of work is an abomination

2. Work for oneself on your own evolution or at your passion which we can term - Soul Path.

The missive below is describing that with modern cybernetics and robotics, all the paraphernalia necessary to a rich and good life - cheap credit at 1% over 20 years, nuclear electricity, houses, television, air conditioning, heating, cooking, washing machines and cars - are available at little cost. Indeed the excess profit on these goods is a sort of a tax which goes into private hands as even national banks are owned by private capital. And this work by robots means that it is necessary only to employ 25% of the available people.

The problem is they are saying that this is a bad thing!! And that the 75% of people out of work are termed, "Useless Eaters" - I think it was Kissinger who coined this phrase, yet it is commonly used now by everyone in the Elite who propose reducing the human population by famine, disease and genocide from 6 billions to only Two Billions, as a solution to the, "Problem".

"I wish when I die to come back as a virus" - Prince Philip

Whereas in reality this fact is showing the richness of human society which will enable a vast flowering of evolution, beauty, and art for All Humanity!!!

As with a little good encouragement 75% of a rich artistic humanity can work at their Passion and Soul Path.

1.2. The Crisis of the Work Ethic

In actual fact the work ethic has become obsolete. It is no longer true that producing more means working more, or that producing more will lead to a better way of life.

The connection between more and better has been broken; our needs for many products and services are already more than adequately met, and many of our as-yet- unsatisfied needs will be met not by producing more, but by producing differently, producing other things, or even producing less. This is especially true as regards our needs for air, water, space, silence, beauty, time and human contact.

Neither is it true any longer that the more each individual works, the better off everyone will be. The present crisis has stimulated technological change of an unprecedented scale and speed: `the micro-chip revolution'. The object and indeed the effect of this revolution has been to make rapidly increasing savings in labour, in the industrial, administrative and service sectors. Increasing production is secured in these sectors by decreasing amounts of labour. As a result, the social process of production no longer needs everyone to work in it on a full-time basis. The work ethic ceases to be viable in such a situation and workbased society is thrown into crisis.

1.3. The Neo-conservative Ideology of Hard Work

Not everyone is aware of this crisis. Some are aware of it but find it in their interest to deny its existence. This is true, in particular, of a large number of `neo-conservatives', bent on upholding the ideology of work in a context in which paid work is becoming increasingly scarce. They thus encourage people looking for paid work to enter into increasingly fierce competition with each other, relying on this competition to bring down the cost of labour (that is, wages) and allow the `strong' to eliminate the `weak'. They look to this neoDarwinian process of the `survival of the fittest' to bring about the rebirth of a dynamic form of capitalism, with all its blemishes removed together with all or part of its social legislation.

1.4. Working Less so that Everyone can Work


It is in the common interest of waged workers not to compete with one other, to organize a united response to their employers and collectively negotiate their conditions of employment with the latter. This common interest finds its expression in trade unionism.

In a context in which there is not enough paid full-time work to go round, abandoning the work ethic becomes a condition of survival for the trade-union movement. To do so is no betrayal on the movement's part. The liberation from work and the idea of `working less so everyone can work' were, after all, at the origin of the struggle of the labour movement.

1.5. Forms of Work

By work we have come to understand a paid activity, performed on behalf of a third party (the employer), to achieve goals we have not chosen for ourselves and according to procedures and schedules laid down by the person paying our wages. There is widespread confusion between `work' and `job' or `employment', as there is between the `right to work', the `right to a wage' and the `right to an income'.

Now, in practice, not all activities constitute work, and neither is all work paid or done with payment in mind. We have to distinguish between three types of work.

1.5.1. Work for economic ends

This is work done with payment in mind. Here money, that is, commodity exchange, is the principal goal. One works first of all to `earn a living', and the satisfaction or pleasure one may possibly derive from such work is a subordinate consideration. This may be termed -work for economic ends.

1.5.2. Domestic labour and work-for-oneself

This is work done not with a view to exchange but in order to achieve a result of which one is, directly, the principal beneficiary. `Reproductive' work, that is, domestic labour, which guarantees the basic and immediate necessities of life day after day - preparing food, keeping oneself and one's home clean, giving birth to children and bringing them up, and so on - is an example of this kind of work. It was and still is often the case that women are made to do such work on top of the work they do for economic ends.

Since the domestic community (the nuclear or extended family) is one in which life is based on sharing everything rather than on an accounting calculation and commodity exchange, it is only recently that the idea of wages for housework has arisen. Previously, by contrast, domestic labour was seen as work done by and for the domestic community as a whole. This attitude, it should be stressed, is only justifiable if all the members of the domestic community share the tasks equitably. A number of activists have called for women to be given wages for housework in the form of a public allowance, in recognition of the social utility of such work. But this will not lead to the equitable sharing of household chores and moreover it poses the following problems:

- it transforms domestic labour into work for economic ends, that is, into a domestic (servant's) job;
- it places domestic labour in the same category as socially useful work, whereas its aim is - and should be - not social utility but the well-being and personal fulfilment of the members of the community, which is not at all the same thing. The confusion between the fulfilment of individuals and their social utility stems from a totalitarian conception of society in which there is no place for the uniqueness and singularity of the individual or for the specificity of the private sphere. By nature this sphere is - and should be - exempt from social control and the criteria of public utility.

1.5.3. Autonomous activity

Autonomous activities are activities one performs freely and not from necessity, as ends in themselves. This includes all activities which are experienced as fulfilling, enriching, sources of meaning and happiness: artistic, philosophical, scientific, relational, educational, charitable and mutual-aid activities, activities of auto-production, and so on. All these activities require `work' in the sense that they require effort and methodical application but their meaning lies as much in their performance as in their product: activities such as these are the substance of life itself. But this always requires there to be no shortage of time. Indeed, the same activity - bringing up children, preparing a meal or taking care of our surroundings, for example - can take the form of a chore in which one is subject to what seem like oppressive constraints or of a gratifying activity, depending on whether one is harrassed by lack of time or whether the activity can be performed at leisure, in co-operation with others and through the voluntary sharing of the tasks involved.

1.6. The End of Utopia

The progressive domination of work for economic ends was only made possible by the advent of capitalism and the generalization of commodity exchange. We owe to it in particular the destruction of a great deal of non-commodity services and exchanges and domestic production in which work for economic ends and the pleasure of creating something of beauty were inextricably linked. This explains why the labour movement originally challenged the overriding importance industrial capitalism attached to waged work and economic ends. However, in calling for the abolition of wage labour and for the government or self government of society by freely associated workers in control of the means of production, the demands of the workers ran directly counter to the developments that were actually taking place. The movement was utopian in so far as the possibility of giving substance to its demands had not emerged.

Yet what was utopian in the early nineteenth century has ceased in part to be so today: the economy and the social process of production require decreasing quantities of wage labour. The subordination of all other human activities and goals to waged work, for economic ends is ceasing to be either necessary or meaningful. Emancipation from economic and commercial rationality is becoming a possibility, but it can only become reality through actions which also demonstrate its feasibility. Cultural action and the development of `alternative activities' take on particular significance in this context. I shall return to this point below.


CRISIS OF WORK, CRISIS OF SOCIETY

2.1. Giving Meaning to the Changes: The Liberation of Time

Trade unionism cannot continue to exist as a movement with a future unless it expands its mission beyond the defence of the particular interests of waged workers. In industry, as in the classical tertiary sector, we are witnessing an increasingly accelerated reduction in the amount of labour required. The German trade-union movement has estimated that, of the new forms of technology which will be available by the year 2000, only 5 per cent are currently being put to use. The reserves of productivity (that is, foreseeable labour savings) in the industrial and classical tertiary sectors are immense.

The liberation from work for economic ends, through reductions in working hours and the development of other types of activities, self-regulated and self-determined by the individuals involved, is the only way to give positive meaning to the savings in wage labour brought about by the current technological revolution. The project for a society of liberated time, in which everyone will be able to work but will work less and less for economic ends, is the possible meaning of the current historical developments. Such a project is able to give cohesion and a unifying perspective to the different elements that make up the social movement since (1) it is a logical extension of the experiences and struggles of workers in the past; (2) it reaches beyond that experience and those struggles towards objectives which correspond to the interests of both workers and non-workers, and is thus able to cement bonds of solidarity and common political will between them; (3) it corresponds to the aspirations of the ever-growing proportion of men and women who wish to (re)gain control in and of their own lives.

2.2. Regaining Control Over One's Life

Workplace struggles have not lost any of their significance but the labour movement cannot afford to ignore the fact that other struggles, in other areas, are becoming increasingly important as far as the future of society and our regaining control over our own lives is concerned. In particular, the labour movement's campaign for a reduction in working hours cannot ignore the fact that the unpaid work done by women in the private sphere can be as hard as the labour which men and women have to put up with to earn their living. The campaign for a shortening of working hours must, then, go hand in hand with a new and equitable distribution of paid work amongst all those who wish to work, and for an equitable redistribution of the unpaid tasks of the domestic sphere. The trade-union movement cannot be indifferent to the specific women's movement campaigns on these questions and it must take these into account when determining its own c'ourses of action, especially with respect to the arrangement and self-management of work schedules.

Nor can the trade-union movement be indifferent to people's campaigns against the invasion of their environment by mega-technological systems which upset or destroy the environment and subject vast regions and their populations to unchecked technocratic control, so as to meet logistical or safety requirements.

The right of individuals to sovereign control over their own lives and ways of cooperating with others suffers no exception. It cannot be gained in the field of work and work relations at the expense of struggles going on in other fields, any more than it can be gained in these other fields at the expense of labour struggles.

2.3. Towards 50 per cent Marginalization

A progressive wide-scale reduction in working hours without loss of income is the necessary (though not sufficient, as l will go on to explain) condition for the redistribution of paid work amongst all those who wish to work; and for an equitable redistribution of the unpaid work in the private sphere. Everyone must therefore be able to work less so that everyone can lead a better life and earn their living by working. This is the only way the trend towards an increasingly deep division of society, the segmentation of the labour market and the marginalization of a growing percentage of the population can be checked and then reversed.

According to a study by Wolfgang Lecher, of the WSI (the Institute of Economic and Social Research of the DGB), the continuation of the present trend would lead, within the next ten years or so, to the following segmentation of the active population:
- 25 per cent will be skilled workers with permanent jobs in large firms protected by collective wage agreements;
- 25 per cent will be peripheral workers with insecure, unskilled and badly-paid jobs, whose work schedules vary according to the wishes of their employers and the fluctuations in the market;
- 50 per cent will be semi-unemployed, unemployed, marginalized workers, doing occasional or seasonal work and `odd jobs'. Already 51 per cent of the active population in France aged between 18 and 24 fit into this category (26 per cent unemployed, 25 per cent doing `odd jobs'); and the percentage is even higher in Italy, Spain, the Netherlands and (especially) Britain.

2.4. The New Domestic Servants

The Right acknowledges and accepts the direction in which these developments are going. A new employers' ideology, the so-called ideology of `human resources', is seeking to integrate the stable core of permanent skilled workers into modern enterprises which are portrayed as `sites of intellectual and personal fulfilment', whilst advocating `modest jobs' for a `modest wage' in service enterprises, particularly `person to person' services, for the rest.

In the United States, which is often taken as a model, of the thirteen to fifteen million new jobs created in the last ten years, the majority are in the personal-service sector and are very often insecure, badly paid and offer no possibilities of achieving professional qualifications or advancement - jobs as caretakers, nightwatchmen, cleaners, waiters and waitresses, staff in `fast food' restaurants, nursing assistants, deliverymen/women, street sellers, shoeshiners, and so on.

These `person-to-person' services are, in reality, the jobs of domestic or personal servants in their modernized and Socialized guise. A French minister for social affairs acknowledged this fact when he suggested there should be tax incentives to encourage people to employ domestic servants.

This shows a striking parallel with the developments which took place during the last century when the introduction of intensive farming and the mechanization of the textile industry led to millions of unemployed people going into domestic service: `personal and domestic servants' represented 14 per cent of the working population in Britain between 1851 and 1911. It is quite likely that `person-to-person' services - and this includes jobs in massage and relaxation salons, therapy groups and psychological counselling bureaux, for example - today represent more than 14 per cent of the United States' working population.

As in the colonies in the past and many Third World countries today, a growing mass of people in the industrialized countries has been reduced to fighting each other for the `privilege' of selling their personal services to those who still maintain a decent income.

2.5. The Dangers of Trade-Union Neo-corporatism

As a result of all this, a new dividing line is cutting across class barriers, a fact commented on by Wolfgang Lecher in the study quoted above:

The opposition between labour and capital is increasingly coming to be overlaid by an antagonism between workers in permanent, wellprotected jobs on the one hand and on the other. . The trade unions run the risk of degenerating into a sort of mutual insurance for the relatively restricted and privileged group of permanent workers.
If they see their sole task as that of defending the interests of those with stable jobs, the trade unions run the risk of degenerating into a neocorporatist, conservative force, as has occurred in a number of countries in Latin America.
The task of the trade-union movement, if it wishes to survive and grow as a movement promoting individual and social liberation, must, therefore, be to extend its sphere of action beyond the limited defence of workers as workers, in their workplaces, much more clearly than it has done in the past. Trade unions will only avoid becoming a sectionalist, neo-corporatist force if the segmentation of society and the marginalization of a growing percentage of the population can be prevented. If this is to happen, an ambitious policy for a continual, programmed reduction in working hours is indispensable. Trade unions are incapable of implementing such a policy on their own. But through their campaigns they can ensure that the necessity for such a policy is accepted and, more importantly, they can adopt it as the objective governing their actions and their social project. A project for a society in which each can work less so that all can work better and live more becomes, today, one of the principal binding elements of social cohesion.

It still remains for us to examine: (1) the extent of the reduction in working hours that can be envisaged; (2) the cultural changes and cultural tasks which trade unions will have to tackle as a result; (3) the changes it will bring about in the life of individual people; (4) how it can be programmed, realized and made compatible with an improvement in our standard of living.



WORKING LESS SO THAT ALL CAN WORK

3.1. Towards the 1,000-hour Working Year

The current technological revolution is giving rise to savings in labour, the extent of which are often underestimated. Productivity in industry has risen between 5 per cent and 6 per cent per year since 1978; in the economy as a whole it has risen by between 3 per cent and 4 per cent per year. Production of commercial goods and services has risen by about 2 per cent per year. In other words, though the economy keeps growing, the amount of labour it requires diminishes every year by approximately 2 per cent.

This net saving in labour is set to accelerate between now and the end of the century, thanks, mainly, to the `improvements that can be predicted in robotics and information technology. Yet even without any acceleration, the amount of labour required by the economy will have diminished in the next ten years by about 22 per cent; in the next fifteen years it will have diminished by about a third.

The prospects from now until the beginning of the next century are therefore as follows: either current norms of full-time employment will be maintained and there will be another 35 per cent of the population unemployed on top of the current 10 per cent to 20 per cent; or else the number of hours spent in work for economic ends will be reduced in proportion to foreseeable savings in labour and the number of hours we work will decrease by between 30 per cent and 40 per cent - or even by half if everyone is to be guaranteed paid work. Evidently intermediate solutions can be envisaged, but the optimum solution is obviously the one which allows everyone to work but work less, work better and receive their share of the growing socially produced wealth in the form of an increasing real income. This presupposes a staged, programmed reduction in working hours from approximately 1,000 hours per year at present to approximately 1,000 hours per year in fifteen years' time, without any reduction in people's purchasing power. This calls for a whole series of specific policies, in particular a social policy which will make purchasing power dependent not on the amount of working hours put in but on the amount of social wealth produced. We will return to this later.

3.2. New Values, New Tasks

For the first time in modern history, we will be able to stop spending most of our time and our lives doing paid work. The liberation from work has become, for the first time, a tangible prospect. However, we must not underestimate the implications this has for each of us. The campaign for a continual and substantial reduction in the amount of paid work we do presupposes the latter's gradually ceasing to be the only - or main - occupation in our lives. It must, then, cease to be our principal source of identity and social insertion. Values other than economic values, activities other than the functional, instrumental, waged activities social apparatuses and institutions compel us to perform, will have to become predominant in our lives.

The cultural and societal change involved here demands from each of us a change in attitude which no state, government, political party or trade union can bring about on our behalf. We shall have to find a meaning in life other than gainful employment, the work ethic and productivity, and struggles centred on issues other than those implied in wage relations. The extent of these cultural changes is such that it would be futile to propose them were it not for the fact that the changes presently under way are already heading in this direction.

3.2.1. Liberation in work and liberation from work

Disaffection with waged work has been on the increase over the last twenty years or so, as shown by surveys conducted periodically by institutes in Germany and Sweden. Particularly prevalent among young workers, this attitude finds expression not so much in a lack of interest or a refusal to work hard but rather in a desire that work should fit into life instead of life having to fit into or be sacrificed to one's job or career. Workers, particularly young workers, aspire to (re)gain control of their lives and this increases their awareness of and openness to movements which have this specific aim.

This desire to liberate oneself from, or vis-a-vis, work should not be seen as opposed to the traditional union objectives of achieving liberation in work. On the contrary, past experience has shown that workers become more demanding with regard to their working conditions and work relations when their work leaves them time and energy to have a personal life. Conversely, personal self-development requires that the nature and hours of work should not be damaging to the workers' physical and psychic faculties. The trade-union movement must, therefore, keep campaigning on two levels simultaneously, just as it did in the past: for the `humanization' and enrichment of work and for a reduction in working hours, without loss of income.

The traditional task of the trade unions is as relevant now as ever. For although the employers' ideology sets great store by the reskilling and personalizing ofjobs and the policy of giving workers greater responsibility, in practice this revaluation of labour only affects a small and privileged elite.

For large sectors of industrial and service workers it entails not only redundancies, but the deskilling and standardization of numerous previously skilled jobs and the introduction of a system of constant electronic monitoring of behaviour and productivity. Instead of being liberating, computerization often intensifies labour by eliminating `dead time' and forcing an increase in the pace of work.

Often accompanied by putting workers on short time or the introduction of flexi-time, this intensification of work masks, as if by design, the fact that the intensity of human effort is now just a secondary factor of increased productivity, the main factor being the savings in human labour due to the high technical performance of the equipment employed. This equipment could be used to ease the strain and monotony of work, as well as working hours. This fact makes the arbitrary and oppressive nature of the intensification of labour all the more acutely felt.

3.2.2. New forms of work, new responsibilities

In general, labour is tending to become a secondary force of production by comparison with the power, degree of automation and complexity of the equipment involved. Jobs in which the notion of individual effort and output still retain some meaning,in which the quantity or quality of the product depends on the workers' application to their task and in which their pride in producing something well-made is still a source of personal and social identity, are becoming increasingly rare.

In robotized factories and process industries in particular, work consists essentially in monitoring, (re)programming and, should the occasion arise, correcting and repairing the functioning of automatic systems. Workers in this situation are on duty rather than at work. Their work is by nature intermittent. It is as dematerialized and functional to the system whose smooth running it ensures as that of `functionaries' or civil servants and, as in the case of the latter, often requires the worker to respect procedures whose minutest details have been laid down in advance and which preclude all forms of initiative and creativity. The control the workers exercise over their `product' and over the purpose it serves is minimal. Traditional work values and the traditional work ethic thus seem destined to give way to an ethic of service and, possibly, of responsibility towards the community, in so far as one's professional consciousness can now only consist in identifying oneself with the value of the function one fulfils and no longer with the value of the product of one's labour.

It thus becomes essential to ask ourselves what purpose we serve by the function we fulfil at `work'. Professional consciousness must therefore extend to include an examination of the effects technological, economic and commercial decisions have on society and civilization, and the issues that are at stake. ThiI is especially necessary in the case of technical and scientific workers, whose associations and groups have been known publicly to question the moral and political aims, values and consequences of the programmes they are to implement.

This broadening of professional consciousness, this assumption of a reflexive and critical perspective on the implications of one's professional activities can obviously occur in associations and discussion groups, but should also be a central concern of the trade-union movement. In the absence of such developments, we run the risk of seeing the emergence of a technocratic caste which uses its expertise, or allows others to use it, to reinforce the domination of big business and the state over its citizens.

At a time when the economy has less and less need for everyone to be in full-time employment, the question of why we work and what our work consists in doing assumes prime importance. Asking this question is our only way of protecting ourselves from an ethic of `hard work for its own sake' and `producing for the sake of producing' which in the end lead towards an acceptance of the war economy and war itself.

3.2.3. The importance of non-economic aims and actions

The capitalist economy is no longer able to guarantee everyone a right to economically useful and remunerated work. Hence the right to work cannot be guaranteed for everyone unless, first, the number of hours everyone works in the economy is reduced and, second, the possibilities of working outside the economy, in tasks not performed for economic ends, are developed and opened up to all.


3.2.3.1. The trade union in everyday life: cultural tasks.

As has been shown, we cannot all be guaranteed the possibility of working within the economy unless working hours are reduced to approximately 1,000 hours per year. Waged work cannot then continue to be the most important element in our lives. Unless people are to become passive consumers of amusements, who are fed on and manipulated by a deluge of programmes, messages and media games, they must be given the possibility of developing interests and autonomous activities, including productive activities. Their socialization, that is, their insertion into society and their sense of belonging to a culture, will derive more from these autonomous activities than from the work an employer or institution defines for them. (The same remarks would also apply, should society prefer to have a mass of reasonably well-compensated people out of work rather than reduce working hours). The labour movement should not forget here that its origins lie in working-class cultural associations. It will not be able to survive as a movement unless it takes an interest in people's self-realization outside their work as well as in it, and helps or participates in the creation of sites and spaces in which people are able to develop their ability to take responsibility for their own lives and self-manage their social relations: open universities, community schools and community centres; service-exchange co-operatives and mutual-aid groups; cooperative repair and self-production workshops; discussion, skills-transfer and art and craft groups, and so on.

These are not tasks to be undertaken at some time in the distant future but objectives which should be given urgent priority now, for two reasons.



- The tendency of large-scale enterprises to sub-contract the maximum amount of manufacturing and services out to tiny enterprises employing an unstable, fluctuating workforce, or even people working from home, means it is essential that trade unions should exist in towns and suburbs and that they should be open to all who live in them. They must attract this floating workforce and the population as a whole, independently of their ability to organize waged workers at their workplaces.
- More than at any other time, the influence of the trade-union movement depends on its ability to contend with the cultural industry and the entertainment or leisure moguls, so as to break the monopoly they are aiming to acquire over consciousness-formation and our conception of future society, life and its priorities. The trade-union movement's cultural task is really a political one, if we give `political' its original meaning of an activity relating to the organization, future and good of the `city'.



3.2.3.2. Trade unionism as one movement among many The trade union movement should also not ignore the Struggles which have developed in the last fifteen years or so in areas outside work. These campaigns, which are extremely varied in nature, are all characterized by the aspiration of individuals and communities to regain existential sovereignty and the power to determine their own lives. These campaigns have a common target: the dictatorial rule industry and the bureaucracy exercise in alliance with professions whose aim it is to monopolize knowledge in areas as diverse as health, education, energy requirements, town planning, the model and level of consumption, and so on. In all these areas, single-issue movements - the `new social movements' - are attempting to defend our right to self determination from forms of mega-technology and scientism which lead to the concentration of decision-making power in the hands of a technocracy whose expertise generally serves to legitimate the economic and political powers-that-be.
These campaigns of resistance to the professionalization, technocratization and monetarization of our lives are specific forms of a wider, more fundamental struggle for emancipation. They contain a radical potential which has repercussions on workplace struggles and they mould the consciousness of a growing number of people. It is essential for the trade-union movement to be receptive to the aspirations contained within these movements and to adopt them as part of its struggle. It is equally essential that it should see itself as an integral part of a wider, many-sided movement of individual and social emancipation. The fact that the trade-union movement is - and will remain - the best-organized force in this broader movement confers on it a particular responsibility: on it will largely depend the success or failure of all the other elements in this social movement. According to whether the trade-union movement opposes them or whether it seeks a common alliance and a common course of action with them,these other elements will be part of the left or will break with it, will engage with it in collective action or will remain minorities tempted to resort to violence.

The attitude of the trade-union movement towards the other social movements and their objectives will also determine its own evolution. If it divorces itself from them, if it refuses to be part of a wider movement, if it sees its mission as being limited to the defence of waged workers as such, it will inevitably degenerate into a conservative, neo-corporatist force.


3.3. Working Less, Living Better

3.3.1. The field of autonomous activities

A progressive reduction in working time to 1,000 hours or less per year gives completely new dimensions to disposable time. Non-working time is no longer necessarily time for the rest, recuperation, amusement and consumption; it no longer serves to compensate for the strain, constraints and frustrations of working time. Free time is no longer merely the always insufficient `time left over' we have to make the most of while we can and which is never long enough for embarking on a project of any kind.

If the working week were reduced to under twenty-five or thirty hours, we could fill our disposable time with activities which have no economic objective and which enrich the life of both individual and group: cultural and aesthetic activities whose aim is to give and create pleasure and enhance and `cultivate' our immediate environment; assistance, caring and mutual-aid activities which create a network of social relations and forms of solidarity throughout the neighbourhood or locality; the development of friendships and affective relationships; educational and artistic activities; the repairing and production of objects and growing food for our own use, `for the pleasure' of making something ourselves, of preserving things we can cherish and hand down to our children; service-exchange cooperatives, and so on. In this way it will be possible for an appreciable proportion of the services currently provided by professionals, commercial enterprises or public institutions to be provided on a voluntary basis by individuals themselves, as members of grassroots communities, according to needs they themselves have defined. I shall return to this later.

These activities, taken as a whole, should not be viewed as an alternative economic sector which forms part of a 'dual economy'. These activities are characterized by an absence of economic rationality and have no place in the economic sphere. The act of performing them, is not the means to achieve an end, to achieve satisfaction. It produces that satisfaction itself; it is an end in itself. The time we devote, for example, to music, love, education, exchanging of ideas, to creative activities, to looking after the sick, is time for living, and cannot be bought or sold at any price. Extending this time for living and reducing the amount of time devoted to necessary tasks or work for economic ends has been one of humanity's constant aims.


3.3.2. From the self-management of time to the self-management of life

There is no reason why we should make this reduction of the amount of paid work a reduction in daily or weekly working hours. Computerization and the greater flexibility of decentralized units of production increase the scope for individual and/or collective self-management of work schedules. This is already happening in Quebec, where public employees are able to arrange their monthly quota of 140 hours as best suits them individually. Factories and administrative bodies have been reorganized so that employees are no longer obliged to put in a set number of hours per day, with work stations functioning independently of one another. Such possibilities for workers themselves to manage their own time should be mobilized against schemes which introduce flexi-time on the employers' terms.

One thousand hours per year could, for example, be divided into twenty per week, done in two and a half days, or ten days per month, or twenty-five weeks per year, or ten months spread out over two years - without any loss of real income of course (I shall return to this). Working hours could also be defined as the amount of work performed over a lifetime: for example, a person could do 20,000 to 30,000 hours over a lifetime, which would be completed within the fifty years of their potential active working life and guarantee them - throughout their lifetime - the full income which their 1,600 hours per year provides at the present time.

A form of self-management such as this which spans an entire lifetime presents a number of advantages and has been the subject of much debate in Sweden. By allowing people to work more or less during certain periods in their lives, this arrangement allows them to be ahead or behind in the amount of work they have to do per year; to interrupt their professional activity over a number of months or years without loss of income in order, for example, to learn a new trade, set up a business, bring up children, build a house, or undertake an artistic, scientific, humanitarian or co-operative project.

The possibility of alternating between waged work and autonomous activities, or doing the two simultaneously, should not be interpreted as a devaluation of waged work. Personal development through autonomous activities always has repercussions on one's professional work. It enriches it and makes it more fruitful. The notion that one must devote oneself and one's time entirely and exclusively to a single job if one is to succeed or be creative is erroneous. The creator and the pioneer are generally jacks-of-all-trades with extremely diverse and changing interests and occupations. Einstein's theory of relativity came to him during the free time he had while working full-time job in the patent office in Berne.

In general, innovation and creativity are the result not of continuous, regular work but of a period of spasmodic effort (for example, twenty hours or more at a stretch in computer programming; three hundred to five hundred hours a month, over a period of several months, to set up a business or perfect a new type of technology or piece of equipment), followed by periods of reading, thinking, pottering about, travelling and emotional and intellectual interaction.

Continual hard slog does not make work more creative or more efficient; it only serves the will to power of those who defend the rank and the position of strength their work affords them. It is rare for pioneers, creators or high-level researchers to be at work for more than 1,000 hours per year on average. Experience has shown that two people, sharing a single position of responsibility (for example, as a dean of a university, a personnel manager, a legal adviser, a municipal architect or a doctor) and doing two and a half days each, do the job better more efficiently than one person doing the same job full-time.


3.3.3 The democratization of areas of competence

A policy for the reduction of working time limited solely to unskilled jobs will not avoid the division and segmentation of society it is designed precisely to prevent. All it will do is displace the split. It will give rise on one side to professional elites who monopolize the positions of responsibility and power and on the other to a mass of powerless deskilled, peripheral workers on short time. If the maximum number of people are to have access to creative, responsible, skilled jobs, then it is just as essential for the amount of working hours to be reduced here as elsewhere. The current scarcity of jobs such as these can be explained less by a lack of talents and will to develop a career than by the fact that creative, responsible, skilled jobs are monopolized by professional elites intent on defending their corporate and class privileges and powers. Reducing the amount of time work takes up will enable these jobs to be `democratized' and allow a larger percentage of the working population to have access to them, since it will create scope for people to acquire new skills and to study regardless of age.



4. AN INCOME UNCOUPLED FROM THE QUANTITY OF LABOUR PERFORMED


When the economy requires a decreasing amount of labour and distributes less and less in the way of wages for an increasing volume of production, `the purchasing power of the population and their right to an income can no longer be made to depend on the amount of labour they supply. The purchasing power distributed must increase despite the reduction in the amount of labour required. The level of real income distributed and the quantity of labour supplied must become independent of each other, otherwise he demand for production will be insufficient and economic depression will deepen. The key question for all the industrial nations is not the principle of uncoupling the level a- income from the amount of labour the economy requires, but the way in which to implement this dissociation. Three formulas can be envisaged.

4.1. The Social-Democratic Logic

The creation of jobs outside the economy proper is often advocated, especially by the left, on the grounds that `There is no shortage of work, since there is virtually no limit to the needs we have to satisfy.' The question remains, however, as to whether these needs will be best satisfied through the waged labour of people employed to that end. Two categories of inherently non-commercializable needs can be distinguished.



- The first group relates to the environment on which our quality of life depends, and includes our need for space, clean air, silence and styles of architecture and urban planning which make it easy for us to meet and interact. These needs cannot be expressed on the market in terms of effective individual `demand' giving rise to a corresponding supply. The resources to which these needs relate cannot in fact be produced and sold, whatever the price offered for them. These needs will be satisfied not by working and producing more but by working and producing differently. To this end, a policy of selective public incentives and subsidies is required so as to express a collective level of demand which would make it possible to furnish the corresponding supply (especially in the case of re-afforestation, pollution control, energy conservation, urban development or the prevention of illnesses, for example). This will create a limited number of jobs. But part of the jobs thus created will be lost elsewhere because the consumption of energy, medical services and pharmaceutical products will diminish, as will the demand for goods and services, since jobs created by public demand are financed from public, fiscal resources drawn from the economy.
- The second category of non-economic needs which cannot be expressed in cash terms concerns helping and caring activities (for the aged, the disturbed, children, the sick, and so on). Industrialization has resulted in a shortage of time and autonomy, and its growth has been based on compensating for this by turning activities which were traditionally part of the private, family or community sphere into professional, commercialized ones. This has resulted in the impoverishment and depersonalization of human relations, the disintegration of grassroots communities and the standardization and technicization of caring and helping services - all things which the new social movements' are reacting against at different levels. We must consequently ask ourselves to what extent our need for the care and help provided for by these services, whether public or private, is generated by our lack of time; to what extent, therefore, that need would not be better met if we increased the time we had available rather than employing people to take care of our children, ageing parents, mixed-up adolescents and distressed friends in our stead. A reduction in working hours without loss of income could allow the repatriation to grassroots communities, through voluntary cooperation and mutual aid on the level of the neighbourhocd or block, of a growing number of services which will better satisfy our needs, and be better adapted to them, if we provide them for ourselves than they are when professionals are paid to administer them according to norms and procedures laid down by the state. It is not a question of dismantling the welfare state but of relieving it, as the amount of work we do for economic ends diminishes, of certain tasks which, apart from being expensive, also bring the tutelag'e of the state to bear on the beneficiaries.



4.2. The Liberal Logic
The second formula for uncoupling the level of income from the amount of labour supplied is the institution of a `social minimum' or `social income' unconditionally guaranteed to all citizens. This formula has its supporters on the left as well as on the Right. In general, its objective is to protect an increasing mass of unemployed people from extreme forms of poverty. In the most generous variants of this scheme, the social income guaranteed to all citizens is to be fixed above the poverty line.

The neo-liberal variant, however, fixes the guaranteed social income at or below subsistence level, with the result that the recipients are practically forced to earn a top-up income by doing `odd jobs', which will not prevent them receiving the guaranteed minimum income as long as their earned income does not exceed a certain amount. In this conception of the scheme, the guaranteed minimum is to allow the price of labour to change in keeping with the laws of supply and demand and, if necessary, to fall below subsistence level.

In all of the above cases,the guaranteed social income is essentially an unemployment allowance adapted to a situation in which a high percentage of the unemployed have never worked and have little chance of finding a regular paid job. It amounts to a form of social assistance provided by the state, which neither stems the tide of unemployment nor arrests the division of society into a class of active workers in full-time employment on the one hand and a marginalized mass of the unemployed and semi-employed on the other.

4.3. The Trade-Union Logic

The third formula for making the level of income independent of the amount of labour supplied is the reduction of working hours without loss of income. This proposal reconciles the right of everyone to have a paid job and the possibility for everyone to have a greater degree of existential autonomy and for individuals to exercise more control over their private, family and community lives. This proposal is most closely in keeping with the trade-union tradition. While the demand for a guaranteed social income is a social policy demand addressed to the state, and one which trade unions can neither carry through by direct mass action nor implement themselves through workers' control, the demand for a reduction in the working week to thirty-two, twenty-eight, twenty-four or twenty hours, without loss of real income, can be campaigned for through collective action and, more importantly, can create solidarity between workers, the unemployed and those people - a significant number of whom are women and young people - who wish their jobs to fit into their personal lives instead of requiring the sacrifice of the latter.

Contrary to the social income, which is a more or less inadequate compensation for social and economic exclusion, a reduction in working hours meets three basic requisites of justice:



- the savings in labour which technological development has created must benefit everyone;
- everyone must be able to work less so that everyone can work;
- the decrease in working hours must not entail a decrease in real income, since more wealth is being created by less labour.
These are not new aims. There is no shortage of collective agreements, and sectoral or company agreements which have, in the past, made provision for a progressive reduction in working hours accompanied by guarantees of purchasing power and a stabilization, if not indeed an increase, in the size of the workforce.
What is new is the fact that the technological revolution is now affecting all fields of activity and bringing about highly differentiated savings in labour. This will continue over a long period. Trade-union action is indispensable if we are to achieve reductions in working hours which correspond to the predictable rise in productivity: indispensable, in particular, if the reductions in working hours are to lead to employees being able to self-manage their time and not merely to more flexible-time on the employers' terms. But trade-union activity is not enough to effect a planned reduction in working hours by stages across the whole of society. This calls for specific policies which very much concern the trade-union movement but which cannot be conducted and implemented by it. These specific policies must focus on four areas: forecasting and programming; employment; training; and financing.

4.4. Complementary Policies

4.4.1. Productivity contracts

Increases in productivity are neither unpredictable nor unforeseen. Enterprises, industrial sectors and administrative bodies generally plan investment programmes spanning several years which are intended to produce predictable productivity gains. Social control over the technological revolution consists in translating these productivity forecasts into for example, company, sectoral or public-service contracts, which can serve as a framework for ongoing negotiations e necessary adjustments and means of implementation.

4.4.2. Employment policy

Increases in available productivity are obviously not the same in all companies, sectors and institutions. Social control over the technological revolution consists in avoiding a situation in which there are redundancies and a surplus of labour power in some sectors of the economy, while there is plenty of overtime and a shortage of labour in others.

It thus becomes essential for labour to be transferred from enterprises and industrial sectors in which there is rapid growth in available productivity to those where there is little or no growth. Such transfers are the condition for an approximately equal reduction in working hours for everyone, proportionate to the average growth in productivity of the economy as a whole, in conditions as close as possible to full employment. An employment policy which offers incentives for professional mobility is therefore necessary. This evidently presupposes the possibility of learning or relearning a trade at any age, without loss of income.

4.4.3. Educational reform

Current training methods are often inappropriate and not particularly stimulating. There is an urgent need at all levels of the education system for a reform which will focus on the individual's ability to learn by her or himself, on the acquisition of a range of related skills which will enable individuals to become polyvalent and develop their capacity to carry out a range of occupations. Schools also need to reverse their priorities: instead of giving priority to training `human computers' whose memory capacity, abilities of analysis and calculation and so on, are surpassed and largely made redundant by electronic computers, they need to give priority to developing irreplaceable human capabilities such as manual, artistic, emotional, relational and moral capabilities, and the ability to ask unforeseen questions, to search for a meaning, to reject non-sense even when it is logically coherent.

4.4.4. Fiscal reform

From the point where it takes only 1,000 hours per year or 20,000 to 30,000 hours per lifetime to create an amount of wealth equal to or greater than the amount we create at the present time in 1,600 hours per year or 40,000 to 50,000 hours in a working life, we must all be able to obtain a real income equal to or higher than our current salaries in exchange for a greatly reduced quantity of work. In practice, this means that in the future we must receive our full monthly income every month even if we work full-time only one month in every two or six months in a year or even two years out of four, so as to complete a personal, family or community project, or experiment with different lifestyles, just as we now receive our full salaries during paid holidays, training courses, possibly during periods of sabbatical leave, and so forth.

In contrast to the guaranteed social minimum granted by the state to those unable to find regular paid work, our regular monthly income will be the normal remuneration we have earned by performing the normal amount of labour the economy requires each individual to supply. The fact that the amount of labour required is so low that work can become intermittent and constitute an activity amongst a number of others, should not be an obstacle to its being remunerated by a full monthly income throughout one's life. This income corresponds to the portion of socially produced wealth to which each individual is entitled by virtue to their participation in the social process of production. It is, however, no longer a true salary, since it is not dependent on the amount of labour supplied (in the month or year) and is not intended to remunerate individuals as workers. It is therefore practically impossible for this income to be paid and guaranteed by economic units or enterprises, either in the form of increases in salary per hour of work or through contributions paid into a social fund. In both cases, the reduction by half of working hours, without loss of real income, would raise the hourly cost of labour to double the present level.

Leaving aside problems of competitiveness, the result would be a prohibitive rise in the relative price of highly labour-intensive services and forms of production such as building, agriculture, maintenance and repair work, and cultural and educational activities. This difficulty could be overcome by implementing the following solution: enterprises would only pay for the hours of work completed, on a negotiated wage-scale, which would thus ensure that the real costs of production were known. The loss of salary resulting from a reduction in working hours would be compensated from a guarantee fund which would pay for the working hours saved due to advances in technology, at the rate set for hours of work actually completed. This guarantee fund would be paid for out of a tax on automated production, comparable to VAT or the duty on alcohol, cigarettes, fuel or cars, for example. The rate of taxation of products would rise as their production costs decreased. The less socially desirable or useful that production, the higher this tax would be. As these taxes would be deductible from export costs, competitiveness would not be affected. The real income individuals receive would be made up of a direct salary and a social income which, in non-working periods in particular, would itself be sufficient to guarantee their normal standard of living.

The implementation of a system of political prices, reflecting the choices society has made, and the creation of a social income indepen ent of the amount of labour supplied, will in any case become necessary as the cost of bour in increasingly widespread robotized production is reduced to a negligible amount. The value of salaries distributed and the price of automated forms of production can o y be prevented from falling through the floor by a price-and-incomes policy by means f which society can assert its priorities and give direction and meaning to the advance of technology. Nevertheless, there is nothing to guarantee that society will choose the emancipation and autonomy of individuals as its priority or its intended direction, rather than seeking to dominate and exert even greater control over them. What direction the present social changes will take is still an open question; it is today and wil, for the foreseeable future remain, the central issue in social conflicts and the key question for social movements.


CONCLUSION

I have attempted to identify the meaning history could have, and to show what humanity and the trade-union movement could derive from the technological revolution we are witnessing at present. I have tried to indicate the direction in which we should advance, the policies we should follow if we are to bring this about. Events could nevertheless take a course which would miss the possible meaning of the current technological revolution. If this happens, I can see no other meaning in that revolution: our societies will continue to disintegrate, to become segmented, to sink into violence, injustice and fear

Andre Gorz

I see Civil Servants of the highest level crafting the social system of the future in what has happened since we first saw this advanced robotic and computerised manufacturing in the 1970's. This future has all been thought out for us in the words above we can see what has been planned.

According to a study by Wolfgang Lecher, of the WSI (the Institute of Economic and Social Research of the DGB), the continuation of the present trend would lead, within the next ten years or so, to the following segmentation of the active population:
- 25 per cent will be skilled workers with permanent jobs in large firms protected by collective wage agreements;
- 25 per cent will be peripheral workers with insecure, unskilled and badly-paid jobs, whose work schedules vary according to the wishes of their employers and the fluctuations in the market;
- 50 per cent will be semi-unemployed, unemployed, marginalized workers, doing occasional or seasonal work and `odd jobs'. Already 51 per cent of the active population in France aged between 18 and 24 fit into this category (26 per cent unemployed, 25 per cent doing `odd jobs'); and the percentage is even higher in Italy, Spain, the Netherlands and (especially) Britain.

The Bell Shaped IQ curve neccesitates the above break down of the workforce. Reduction in population will result in a reduction of the High IQ, "prized", Workers. In the face of a 300 million strong university educated middle class in India (and 700 millions of incredibly poor lower classes) a reduction in population will just reduce the number of intelligent people available to the country.

All organs of Government are at work manipulating expectations and work myth concepts and war to get the minimum earnings acceptable to the poor.

ArseneKnows
29 Jul 2010, 10:36PM
This government has cut housing benefit for the long term unemployed because, as everyone knows, they are lazy workshy feckless bastards.

According to some figures up to 94% of those receiving disability benefits are being moved on to JSA.

Up to 600,000 public sector workers plus an unkown number of knock-on redundncies in the private sector are expected. The spending review here in scotland identified around 50,000 job cuts.

And this government in its fucking wisdom is now removing the compulsory retirement wage.

Can anyone, anyone at all I don't care if they are a Tory or a Lib Dem, can anyone at all tell me

WHERE ARE THE JOBS GOING TO COME FROM?


Yet I would like to offer a new vision of the future. And it is here that all humanity and all the Unions can put their weight behind evolution for all humanity.

A key is the amount of benefit, unearned wages, which would be acceptable to the majority out of work. In order to stop revolution and manage the population a contract must be worked out between the elite and the benefit scroungers. Here an organisation, like a Union could benefit the majority.

Unearned wages, a basic income, could be given in the face of such a lack of work accorded by right of being born. Like a Family giving pocket money, housing and education to its children, so the country could give such patrimony, such a share in the country company which produces earnings to satisfy the needs of the poor on a yearly basis.

There is the analysis that because of productivity improvements in manufacturing that no work should be available. However it simply means that House machines - fridges, heating, air conditioning, TV are cheaper for everyone and these are now produced in China.

This largesse can only come through an increase in the Real Physical Economy - not the gambling Funny Money of Wall Street. This increase can only come through cheap plentiful energy and investment in infrastructure producing Cheap food through NAWAPA and the nuclear desalination of water, fourth generation nuclear electrical energy can be provided, almost free for 5000 years with the uranium already mined. Housing - concrete is priced on the cost of energy. Free education and entertainment mean a possible good life for all humanity without the need for "work". Channeling the passion of humanity in good directions will benefit all humanity.

ENERGY ENHANCEMENT LIFE GAMES

- A Game Worth Playing

THIS ARTICLE IS CONCERNED with games and aims.
 

 It has been stated by Thomas Szasz that what people really need and demand from life is not wealth, comfort or esteem but games worth playing.1 He who cannot find a game worth playing is apt to fall prey to accidie, defined by the Fathers of the Church as one of the Deadly Sins, but now regarded as a symptom of sickness. Accidie is a paralysis of the will, a failure of the appetite, a condition of generalized boredom, total disenchantment—"God, oh God, how weary, stale, flat and unprofitable seem to me all the uses of this world!" Such a state of mind, Szasz tells us, is a prelude to what is loosely called "mental illness," which, though Szasz defines this illness as a myth, nevertheless fills half the beds in hospitals and makes multitudes of people a burden to themselves and to society.

Seek, above all, for a game worth playing. Such is the advice of the oracle to modern man. Having found the game, play it with intensity—play as if your life and sanity depended on it. ( They do depend on it. ) Follow the example of the French existentialists and flourish a banner bearing the word "engagement." Though nothing means anything and all roads are marked "No EXIT," yet seem to offer a game worth playing, then invent one.2 For it must move as if your movements had some purpose. If life does not be clear, even to the most clouded intelligence, that any game is better than no game.

What sort of games does life offer? We can study Stephen Potter for tips on "gamesmanship." We can ( and should) read Eric Berne on Games People Play.3 If we have mathematical inclinations we can look into the work of John von Neumann or Norbert Wiener, who devoted some of their best thinking to the elaboration of a theory of games.4

From the Hindu scriptures we can learn of the cosmic game, the alternation of lila and nitya, the Dance of Shiva, in which primordial unity is transformed into multiplicity through the constant interplay of the three faunas. In the works of the mystic novelist, Hermann Hesse, we can read of the Magic Theater in which all life games are possible or of the game of games (Glassperlenspiel) in which all elements of human experience are brought together in a single synthesis."

What is a game? An interaction between people involving ulterior motives? Berne uses the word in this sense in Games People Play. But a game involves more than this. It is essentially a trial of strength or a trial of wits played within a matrix which is defined by rules."' Rules are essential. If the rules are not observed, the game ceases to be a game at all. A meaningful game of chess would be impossible if one player insisted on treating all pawns as queens.

Life games reflect real life aims. And the games men choose to play indicate not only their type, but also their level of inner development. Following Thomas Szasz ( more or less) we can divide life games into object games and meta-games. Object games can be thought of as games played for the attainment of material things, primarily money and the objects which money can buy. Meta-games are played for intangibles such as knowledge or the "salvation of the soul." In our culture object games predominate. In earlier cultures meta-games predominated. To the players of meta games, object games have always seemed shallow and futile, an attitude summarized in the Gospel saying: "What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul?" To the players of object games, meta-games seem fuzzy and ill-defined, involving nebulous concepts like beauty, truth or salvation. The whole human population of the earth can be divided roughly into two groups, meta-game players and object-game players, the Prosperos and the Calibans.8 The Ascenders and the Descenders The two have never understood one another and it is safe to predict that they never will. They are, psychologically speaking, different species of man and their conflicts throughout the ages have added greatly to the sum of human misery.

Life Games

ALL games have an important and probably decisive influence on the destinies of the players under ordinary social conditions; but some offer more opportunities than others for lifelong careers and are more likely to involve relatively innocent bystanders. This group may be conveniently called Life Games Which we work on in Energy Enhancement Level 3. It includes "Addict," "Defaulter," "Kick Me," "Now I've Got You, You Son of a Bitch," "See What You Made Me Do" and their principal variants. They merge on the one side with marital games, and on the other with those of the underworld. All these games are Implant Blockage created Distractions which are a total waste of time, only removable by Energy Enhancement meditation Based techniques.

Their use is promoted by Hollywood Advertising (Psychopathic Killing as an advertisement for people to join the Army) Bollywood Advertising (Dancing and sweet love to get you to enter into the Householder Game and create a massive Population so that a massive army can be generated) and childish novels as attention distracters from the Master Game.

Life games are a big subject to do with purpose, one of the energies of the Will, of the Avatar of Synthesis.

What is your purpose, your mission in this lifetime?

What is distracting you from your purpose?

Table I.

The big celebration, the wedding or housewarming, takes place not when the debt is discharged, but when it is undertaken.

What is emphasized on TV, for example, is not the middle-aged man who has finally paid off his mortgage, but the young man who moves into his new home with his family, proudly waving the papers he has just signed and which will bind him for most of his productive years.

After he has paid his debts—the mortgage, the college expenses for his children and his insurance—he is regarded as a problem, a "senior citizen" for whom society must provide not only material comforts but a new "purpose."

This is the life of Nothing. You come into this world with Nothing; make some money, pay the bills for the hospital and you leave with Nothing!!

As this is written, a sow bug crawls across a desk. If he is turned over on his back, one can observe the tremendous struggle he goes through to get on his feet again. During this interval he has a "purpose" in his life.

When he succeeds, one can almost see the look of victory on his face. Off he goes, and one can imagine him telling his tale at the next meeting of sow bugs, looked up to by the younger generation as an insect who has made it.

And yet mixed with his smugness is a little disappointment. Now that he has come out on top, life seems aimless. Maybe he will return in the hope of repeating his triumph. It might be worth marking his back with ink, so as to recognize him if he risks it. A courageous animal, the sow bug. No wonder he has survived for millions of years.

This is the Existential Position of Eric Berne which is true of any game except the Master Game of Illumination.

All games are played according to rules. In man-made games such as poker the rules are imposed by the laws of probability (odds against a straight are 254 to 1, against a flush, 508 to 1.) or they are dependent on special limitations (pawns and other pieces in chess each having its own move). In life games, rules are imposed by natural, economic or social conditions. The player must both remember the aim and know the rules. Apart from this, the quality of his game depends on his own innate characteristics.

Great chess masters are born, not made. Great football players are bound to have certain physical characteristics. The game a man can play is determined by his type ( of which more later). Ho who tries to play a game for which his type does not fit him violates his Own essence with consequences that are often disastrous.

The Low Games
The main types of life games are shown in Table I.

 Hog in Trough is an object game pure and simple. The aim is to get one's nose in the trough as deeply as possible, guzzle as much as possible, el¬bow the other hogs aside as forcefully as possible. A strong Hog in Trough player has all the qualities with which communist propa¬ganda endows the capitalist, insatiable greed, ruthlessness, cun¬ning, selfishness. Pure Hog in Trough is not considered entirely respeetahly iii the contemporary U.S.A. and is generally played today with a certain moderation that would have seemed sissy to the giants oi the game who savagely exploited the resources of the continent a century or so ago. Although the 4 trillions of dollars stolen out of the system by the latest 2008 housing bubble and by the yearly bubbles for 200 years - The rules of the game have become more complex and the game itself more subtle.

Cock on Dunghill is played for fame. It is designed primarily to inflate the false ego and to keep it inflated. Players of Cock on Dunghill are hungry to be known and talked about. They want, in a word, to be celebrities, whether or not they have anything worth celebrating. The game is practically forced upon people in some professions ( actors, politicians), who are compelled to maintain a "public image" which may have no relationship to the thing they really are. But the real player of Cock on Dunghill, whose happiness depends entirely on the frequency with which he (or she) sees his name in the papers, does not much care about public images. For him any publicity is better than no publicity. He would rather be well known as a scoundrel than not known at all.

The Moloch Game is the deadliest of all games, played for "glory" or for "victory," by various grades of professional mankillers (trained to regard such killing as creditable provided those they kill favor a different religion or political system and can thus be collectively referred to as "the enemy." "They were all bad" - Big Arnie. These people are created for a purpose and that purpose is the creation of poverty, low intellect - dumming down, in order to kill off the intellectual elite every few years - the cull, and control humanity for thousands of years. Moloch Game is a purely human game. Other mammals, though they fight with members of their own species, observe a certain decent moderation and rarely fight to the death.9 But the players of the Moloch Game have no moderation. Lured on by some glittering dream of glory or power, they kill with boundless enthusiasm, destroying whole cities, devastating entire countries. The game is played so passionately and with such abandon that nothing, neither pity, decency, sympathy or even common sense, is allowed to interfere with the destructive orgy. As the devotees of the god Moloch sacrificed their children to the idol, so the players of the Moloch Game sacrifice the lives of thousands of young males in the name of some glittering abstraction ( formerly "glory," now more generally "de¬fence") or a silly phrase couched in a dead language: "Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori." - It is good and beautiful to die for ones country. 1

Some of the war poets (World War I vintage) had bitter things to say about this phrase:
"If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori."
(Wilfred Owen, Poems [New York: The Viking Press, 1931].)

But so great is the power wielded by the players of this game, exerted through various forms of coercion and blackmail, that the thousands of young men involved make little protest. They "go to their graves like beds," not daring to expose the emptiness of the glittering words on which the Moloch Game is based.

These three games, Hog in Trough, Cock on Dunghill and the Moloch Game, are all more or less pathological activities. The players who "win" win nothing that they can truly call their own. "Hog in Trough" may emerge twice as rich as Croesus only to find himself embittered, empty and unhappy, at a loss to know what to do with the wealth he has amassed.

"Cock on Dunghill" may make himself so famous that everyone knows his name only to realize that this fame of his is a mere shadow and a source of inconvenience.

Players of the Moloch Game may wade in blood up to the ears only to find that the victory or glory for which they sacrificed a million lives are empty words, like richly bedizened whores who lure men to their destruction. There is a criminal ele¬ment in all these games because, in every instance, they do harm both to the player and to the society of which he forms a part. So warped, however, are the standards by which men measure crimi¬nality that players of these games are more apt to be regarded as "pillars of society" than dangerous lunatics who should be exiled to remote islands where they can do no harm to themselves or Others.

Between the higher and the lower games is the neutral game, the Householder Game, the aim of which is simply to raise a family and provide it with the necessities of life. One cannot call it either a meta-game or an object game. It is the basic biological game on which the continuation of the human race depends. It is also possible to find, in every human society, a certain number of nonplayers, people who, due to some constitutional defect, are unable to find any game worth playing, who are, as a result, chronic outsiders, who feel alienated from society and generally become mentally deranged, tend to become antisocial and criminal

The High Games
The Meta-Games are rarely played in their pure form but are perverted in order to maintain dumming down. Money and wealth depend upon human invention to maintain the increase in human population, interaction, culture, genius and joy in life. Without this genius, humanity is set in the pattern of poverty seen on this planet for the last 100,000 years.

The Art Game is directed toward the expression of an inner awareness defined as beauty. The awareness is purely subjective. One mans beauty be another man's horror. The beautiful of one age can seem ugly to another. But bad players of the art game have no inner awareness all. They are technically proficient and imitate those who ha yg awareness, conforming to the fashion whatever that fashion may he. The whole Art Game, as played today, is heavily taintede with commercialism, the greed of the collector pervades it like a bad smell

It is further complicated by the tendency to show off that afflicts all contemporary artists, whether they be painters, sculptors, writers or composers. As all traditional concepts of the beautiful have been abandoned, anything goes, just so long, as it is new and startling. This makes it almost impossible to tell whether a work of art corresponds to some inner awareness of the artist or merely shows that he was trying to be clever 11

The Science Game is also rarely played in its pure form. Much of it is mere jugglery, a tiresome ringing of changes on a few basic
themes by investigators who are little more than technicians with higher degrees.

The Science Game has become so complex, so vast and so expensive that more or less routine enterprises are given preference.

Anything truly original tends to be excluded by that formidable array of committees that stands between the scientist and the money he needs for research. He must either tailor his research plans to fit the preconceived ideas of the committee or find himself without funds. Moreover, in the Science Game as in the Art Game there is much insincerity and a frenzied quest for status that sparks endless puerile arguments over priority of publication. The game is played not so much for knowledge as to bolster the scientist's ego.

To the Art Game and the Science Game we must add the Religion Game, a meta-game played for an aim loosely defined as the attainment of salvation. The Religion Game, as played in the past, had a fairly well-defined set of rules. It was essentially a game played by paid priests of one sort or another for their personal benefit. To compel their fellowmen to play the game, the priests invented various gods, with whom they alone could communicate, whose wrath they alone could assuage, whose cooperation they alone could enlist. He who wanted help from the gods or who wished to avert their wrath had to pay the priests to obtain his ends. The game was further enlivened, and the hold of the priests on the minds of their victims further strengthened, by the inven¬tion of two after-death states, a blissful heaven and a terrible hell. To stay out of the hell and get into the heaven, the player of the Religion Game had to pay the priests, or his relatives had to pay them after his death. This "pay the priest" aspect of the Religion Game has caused several cynics to define it as the world's oldest confidence trick designed to enable certain unscrupulous individuals to make a profit out of the credulity and suggestibility of their fellow men by interceding on their behalf with some nebulous god or ensuring their entry into an equally nebulous heaven. It was this aspect of the Religion Game that caused Sigmund Freud to ex¬claim, more in sorrow than anger: "The whole thing is so patently infantile, so incongruous with reality, that for one whose attitude to y is friendly it is painful to think that the great majority of mortals will never be able to rise above this view of life." 12

A hideous aspect of the Religion Game resulted from the insistence by certain priests that their brand of god was the only god, that their form of the game was the only permissible form. So eager were these priests to keep the game entirely in their own hands that they did not hesitate to persecute, torture or kill any who happened to wish to play the game by other rules.

This practice was started by the Jews, whose enthusiasm for their one and only and very jealous father-god justified those slaughterings the accounts of which constitute so much of the bulk of the Old Testament. As well has how to create an altar of sacrifice, how big, where to put the holes for the blood to run out of.

The Policy of the "Long War" is that of economic destruction to keep humanity at the level of the beast. In Current lexicon, "To bomb them back into the Stone Age" in order to maintain the control of humanity exerted for thousands of years. "It is not enough that I succeed, everyone else must fail" - Genghis Khan, who was paid in Machiavelian manner by the Catholic Popes and the Venetians to attack Islam from behind and maintain the Silk route for the Venetian families for total control of that route. The Venetian Silk route was protected by Genghis Khan,  paid for by the Venetians for hundreds of years to India and to China.

The wars of Napolean and the First and Second World wars to destroy the economic capacity of Europe. Also Iraq, Iran, Afganistan. The practice was eagerly adopted by the elite of the so-called Christians, who, not satisfied with slaughtering Moslems and Jews, turned like rabid dogs on one another in a series of ghastly religious wars, Protestant versus Catholic. The Moslems, who borrowed the rules of their Religion Game from Jews and Christians alike, did not fail to copy the bad habits of both. Believers were exhorted in the Koran to wage war on the infidel, the slaughter of unbelievers being defined as one sure way of gaining entry into the Moslem heaven ( a much lusher paradise than the rather insipid affair offered by their priests to conforming Christians).

It would simplify our account of the games if we could offer the above description of the Religion Game without further comment. Unfortunately, this is impossible. Simply to define the Religion Game as the world's oldest con game is as "patently infantile" ( to borrow Freud's words) as it is to take seriously the anthropomorphic father-god floating in his bed sheet somewhere in the stratosphere surrounded by cherubs and seraphs and other improbable species of celestial fauna (the "gaseous vertebrate" so derided by Ernst Haeckel).

For it must be obvious to any fair-minded observer that there is another element in the Religion Game besides that of playing on the credulity of believers and selling them entry permits into a phoney heaven. All the great religions offer examples of saints and mystics who obviously did not play the game for material gain, whose indifference to personal comfort, to wealth and to fame was so complete as to arouse our wonder and admiration. It is equally obvious from the writings and sayings of these mystics that they were not so naive as to take seriously either the gaseous vertebrate or heaven with its golden harps or hell with its ovens. Obviously they played the game by entirely different rules and for entirely different aims from those of the priestly con men, who sold trips to heaven for hard cash and insisted on payment in advance (no refund if not fully satisfied, either).

What game did these mystics play? Within the matrix imposed by their religion, these players were attempting the most difficult game of all, the Master Game, the aim of which is the attainment of full consciousness or real awakening. It was natural for these players to play their game within a religious matrix. The basic idea underlying all the great religions is that man is asleep, that he lives amid dreams and delusions, that he cuts himself off from the universal consciousness (the only meaningful definition of God) to crawl into the narrow shell of a personal ego. To emerge from this narrow shell, to regain union with the universal consciousness, to pass from the darkness of the ego-centered illusion into the light of the non-ego, this was the real aim of the Religion Game as defined by the great teachers, Jesus, Gautama, Krishna, Mahavira, Lao-tze and the Platonic Socrates.

Among the Moslems this teaching was promulgated by the Sufis, who praised in their poems the delights of reunion with the Friend. To all these players, it was obvious that the Religion Game as played by the paid priests, with its shabby confidence tricks, promises, threats, persecutions and killings, was merely a hideous travesty of the real game, a terrible confirmation of the truth of the statement: "This people praise me with their lips but their hearts are far from me. . . They have eyes but see not, ears and hear not, neither do they understand."

So little did they understand that, at least within the matrix of the "Christian" religion, it actually became physically dangerous during several centuries to try to play the Master Game at all. Serious players found themselves accused of heresy, imprisoned by the Inquisitors, tortured, burned alive. It became impossible to play the game openly. To survive at all, one had to adopt a disguise, pretend that one's real interest was alchemy or magic, both of which were permitted by the priests, who did not understand the real significance of either.

Alchemy was particularly safe as its stated aim, the transmutation of base metals into gold, posed no challenge whatever to the authority of the priests. Therefore it was behind the mask of alchemy that many players of the Master Game concealed their real aims, formulating the rules of the game in an elaborate secret code in which the transmutations of substances within the body were expressed in terms of mercury, sulfur, salt and other ele¬ments. There were, of course, numerous alchemists who took the whole science at its face value, who believed that the Great Work referred to the production of metallic gold, who impoverished and frequently poisoned themselves in the quest for the great secret, and incidentally laid the foundations of modern chemistry. But for the serious alchemist the transmutation involved the formation of the pure spiritual golden aura - Aurum Non Vulgi - Not Fool's Gold, or the genesis of the homunculus, both of which symbolized the creation of fully conscious, cosmically oriented man out of the ego-centered puppet that goes by the name of man but is really only a pathetic caricature of what man could be. So well did the alchemists conceal their secrets that it took all the intuitive genius of Carl Gustav Jung (perhaps the leading authority on the subject) a large part of his life to unravel this mystery.13

Today no danger is involved in playing or attempting to play the Master Game. The tyranny of the priests has more or less ended. The Religion Game, though often as much of a con game as ever, is played without threats of torture and death. A good deal of the old venom has gone out of the game; in fact, it is even possible for priests who wear round their necks the label "Catholic" to be moderately polite to those who wear the once hated label "Protestant." So the game is now played with a certain amount of restraint not because men have become more tolerant, but because the whole issue of heaven versus hell, salvation versus damnation, is no longer taken very seriously. Even the theologians admit that the old father-god ( Haeckel's "gaseous vertebrate") is dead as far as anyone above the Jehovah's Witness level is concerned. The fight today is between rival political systems rather than rival theologies.

But although it is safe to play the Master Game, this has not served to make it popular. It still remains the most demanding and difficult of games and, in our society, there are few who play.

Contemporary man, hypnotized by the glitter of his own gadgets, has little contact with his inner world, concerns himself with outer, not inner space. But the Master Game is played entirely in the inner world, a vast and complex territory about which men know very little. The aim of the game is true awakening, full development of the powers latent in man.

The game can be played only by people whose observations of themselves and others have led them to a certain conclusion, namely, that man's ordinary state of consciousness, his so-called waking state, is not the highest level of consciousness of which he is capable. In fact, this state is so far from real awakening that it could appropriately be called a form of somnambulism, a condition of "waking sleep." 14

Once a person has reached this conclusion, he is no longer able to sleep comfortably. A new appetite develops within him, the hunger for real awakening, for full consciousness. He realizes that he sees, hears, knows only a tiny fraction of what he could see, hear and know, that he lives in the poorest, shabbiest of the rooms in his inner dwelling, but that he could enter other rooms, beauti¬ful and filled with treasures, the windows of which look out on eternity and infinity. In these rooms he would transcend his petty personal self and undergo spiritual rebirth, "the rising from the tomb" which is the theme of so many myths and the basis of all the mystery religions, including Christianity.

He who arrives at this conclusion is ready to play the Master Game. But though he may be ready, he does not necessarily know how to play. He cannot draw upon instinctive knowledge, for na¬ture has not endowed men with such instincts. She provides for man's development up to the age of puberty, she endows him with the instinct to propagate his kind, but after this she leaves him to his own devices. Far from helping man to develop further into the harmonious and enlightened being he might become, the blind force of evolution has actually put obstacles in his way.15

One who would play the Master Game is therefore compelled to seek a teacher, a skilled player who knows the rules. But where will he find such a teacher? A materialistic, spiritually impoverished culture can offer no instructions to the aspirant. The huge, highly specialized training centers that call themselves universities are obviously lacking in universality. They do not put the emphasis on expansion of consciousness first and acquisition of specialized knowledge second. They educate only a small part of man's totality. They cram the intellectual brain with facts, pay some lip service to the education of the physical body by encouraging idiotic competitive sports. But true education, in the sense of expansion of consciousness and the harmonious development of man's latent powers, they do not offer.

Here it is sufficient to say that the Master Game can never be made easy to play. It demands all that a man has, all his feelings, all his thoughts, his entire resources, physical and spiritual. If he tries to play it in a halfhearted way or tries to get results by unlawful means, he runs the risk of destroying his own potential. For this reason it is better not to embark on the game at all than to play it halfheartedly.


Energy Enhancement
The present site offers a synthesis of many methods derived from different sources, all of which are designed to help the practitioner to emerge from the darkness of waking sleep into the light of full consciousness. Purely for convenience, these methods are referred to collectively as Energy Enhancement, Enhancement because they bring about a higher synthesis, a new level of order within the psyche. Energy Enhancement is based on the idea that man can create by his own efforts a new being within himself ( the second birth). As a result, he can enjoy certain experiences, exercise certain powers, attain certain insights that are quite inconceivable to man in his once-born state.

Energy Enhancement involves the highest form of creativity of which man is capable, the creation of a truly inner-directed being out of a helpless other-directed slave. This creative work involves every aspect of man's behavior, the instinctive, motor, emotional and intellectual. It involves an understanding of the chemistry of the body and of the mind. It involves a study of type and all that pertains to type, the strengths and weaknesses that type imposes.

It involves a study of creative activity, arts, crafts, techniques of various kinds and of the effects these activities produce on levels of consciousness. It involves a study of events on the large scale and on the small, an awareness of the processes taking place in human and nonhuman communities that affect the individual adversely or otherwise. For man cannot be studied apart from his environment and he who would know himself must also know the world in which he lives.

The theory of Energy Enhancement can be studied in books." The practice is a different matter. For this a teacher is necessary. One who tries to practice the method without a teacher almost inevitably encounters certain difficulties which he cannot surmount. The illusion-creating mechanism in man's psyche does not cease to operate merely because a man decides to practice Energy Enhancement. In fact, in such a one, it may operate all the more actively. So he may enjoy all sorts of pseudo-experiences, the result not of an expansion of consciousness but of the workings of his own imagination. A teacher can help him to sort out the true from the false, can warn him about the traps that lie in his path. Furthermore, the solitary practitioner of Energy Enhancement lives today in a culture that is more or less totally opposed to the aims he has set himself, that does not recognize the existence of the Master Game, and regards players of this game as queer or slightly mad.

The player thus confronts great opposition from the culture in which he lives and must strive with forces which tend to bring his game to a halt before it has even started. Only by finding a teacher and becoming part of the group of pupils that that teacher has collected about him can the player find encouragement and support. Otherwise he simply forgets his aim, or wanders off down some side road and loses himself. Unfortunately, it is very difficult to find such teachers and such groups.

They do not advertise, they operate under disguises. Moreover, there exists an abundance of frauds and fools who pass themselves off as teachers without having any right to do so. So the would-be player of the Master Game encounters at the outset one of the most difficult tests in his career. He must find a teacher who is neither a fool nor a fraud and convince that teacher that he, the would-be pupil, is worth teaching. His future development depends largely on the skill with which he performs this task.

KUNDALINI AND THE DIRECTORS OF "ENERGY ENHANCEMENT SYNTHESIS OF LIGHT" BIOGRAPHIES - SATCHIDANAND and DEVI DHYANI - CLICK HERE!!

BIBLIOGRAPHY

1. Szasz, T. S., The Myth of Mental Illness (New York: Hoeber-Harper, 1961).

2. "You're free. Choose. That is, invent." Sartre, J. P., Existentialism and Human Emotions (New York: Philosophical Library, 1957).

3. S. Berne, Eric, Games People Play (London: Deutsch, 1966).

4. Von_ Neumann, J., and Morgenstein, 0., Theory of Games and Economic Behavior (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 1947); Wiener, Norbert, The Human Use of Human Beings (Garden City, N. Y.: Doubleday, 1954).

5. Hesse, Hermann, Steppenwolf (London: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Ltd., 1963).

6. -, Magister Ludi (New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1957).
7. See section on "matrices and codes" in Koestler, Arthur, The Act of Creation (London: Hutchinson, 1964).

8. Shakespeare, W., The Tempest. This is the most esoteric of all Shakespeare's plays. Its central theme work is the alchemical magnum Opus. For a modern variation on this theme, the reader should consult Fowles, J., The Magus (London: Jonathan Cape, 1966).

9. Carthy, J. D., and Ebling, F. J., editors, The Natural History of Aggression (New York: Academic Press, 1965).

10. Some of the war poets (World War I vintage) had bitter things to say about this phrase:
"If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est Pro patria mori." (Wilfred Owen, Poems [New York: The Viking Press, 1931].)

11. "Creative thought, creative art or creative poetry are all excuses to expose the world to aberrations born in the sullied minds of the so-called intellectual elite of the West. The true creative artist never cries his creativeness to the skies. The true intellectual never claims to be one. It is the unfulfilled, the unsuccessful, the lazy and the foolish who weld together old bicycles and claim to be creative. They are sur¬rounded by their kind who shower the rubbish with praises so that, in their turn, they may be the recipients of praise." (Shiekh Abdul Muhl in Rafael Lefort's The Teachers of Gurdjieff [London: V. Gollancz, 1966], p. 115).

12. Freud, Sigmund, Civilisation and Its Discontents (Hogarth Press, 1963).

13. Jung's writings on alchemy are at times as obscure as the texts they interpret. The shortest and most lucid of his commentaries on this subject will be found in the chapter "The Work" in his Memories, Dreams and Reflections (Routledge and Collins, 1963)

14. This term, "waking sleep," is one of several technical terms used in the system of C. Gurdjieff, as intrepreted by P. D. Ouspensky. See Ouspensky's In Search of the Miraculous (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World).

15. For an account of the possible evolutionary origin of these obstacles, see Science and Salvation (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1962).

16. An attempt to outlaw use of peyote by members of the Native American Church was made by the legislature of the State of California but was ruled unconstitutional by the State Supreme Court.

11. It must be admitted that Patanjali, the great Hindu commentator on yoga, describes "simples" (ausadhi) along with samadhi (roughly, a state of meditation) among the means of attaining the siddhis (yogic powers) but ". . . hemp and similar drugs produced ecstasy and not the yogic samadhi." See Mircea Eliade's book in note 19. According to the latter authority the use of hemp, opium or other narcotics that belongs properly to shamanism, and to decadent shamanism at that.

12. "Verily there are many hard and almost insurmountable obstacles in Yoga, yet the Yogi should go on with his practice at all hazards; even were his life to come to the throat." Siva Samhita, translated by Vasu, R.B.S.C. (Lahore, 1888; reprinted in Allahabad, 1914).

13. Energy Enhancement, a modern synthesis, combines physiology and psychology, eliminates the artificial barrier created between them by dualistic theories separating mind and matter. There is no single formulation of the teaching. It cannot be learned from books, but only by practice under the guidance of a teacher, P. D. Ouspensky, G. Gurdjieff and others. See Ouspensky's In Search of the Miraculous, op. cit.; and his A New Model of the Universe (London: Kegan Paul, 1938); Gurdjieff, G., All and Everything (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1958); Gurdjieff, G,, Meetings with Remarkable Men (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1964). References will be made in this book to the "Gurdjieffian System," but the term is used only for convenience. The studies of Rafael Lefort in The Teachers of Gurdjieff (London: V. Gollanez, 1966)

Although it must be repeatedly emphasized that little can be learned from books, reading may be of some value in preparing the student and helping him to define what he needs to Know. The student, however, should beware of substituting mere reading for actual practice and guard against losing himself in the jungles of terminology and the deserts of mere scholasticism. The following books may prove useful:

Bernard, Theos, Hatha Yoga (London: Rider and Co., 1950).

Eliade, Mircea, Yoga: Immortality and Freedom (New York: Pantheon Books, 1958).

Evans-Wentz, W. Y., editor, The Tibetan Book of the Dead (London, Oxford University Press, 1935).

Tibetan Yoga and Secret Doctrines (London: Oxford University Press, 1935).

Frankl, V. E., Man's Search for Meaning (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1963).

Idries Shah, The Sufis (London: W. H. Allen, 1964).

Jacobs, H., Western Psychotherapy and Hindu Sadhana (London:Allen and Unwin, 1961).

James, William, On Vital Reserves: The Energies of Men (New York: Holt, 1939).

The Varieties of Religious Experience (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1929).

Maslow, A. H., Toward a Psychology of Being (New York: Van Nostrand, 1962).

Mishra, R. W., The Textbook of Yoga Psychology (New York: The Julian Press, 1963).

Watts, Alan, Psychotherapy East and West (New York: Pantheon Books, 1961).
-, The Way of Zen (New York: Pantheon Books, 1957).

20. Madame Alexandra David-Neel has described in some detail the trials and tribulations of would-be initiates in Tibet during their search for a teacher. Admission to the Way is never made easy. Overcoming the obstacles deliberately put in the path demands heroic efforts on the part of the student. See David-Neel, Alexandra, Magic and Mystery in Tibet (London: Souvenir Press, 1967), Chapter V.

 

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