The ONE Campaign and MLM

Like slavery and apartheid, poverty is not natural. It is man-made and it can be overcome and eradicated by the actions of human beings.

Nelson Mandela

We don't want your money, we want your voice.

Bono, Live 8, 2005

How One Person can make a Global Difference


Like millions of other viewers, Bob Geldof (lead singer of the Irish pop group Boomtown Rats) was strongly affected by a special news item by reporter Michael Buerk on the famine in Ethiopia broadcast by the BBC on 24 October 1984. In line with the point I made in my last entry, about it being easy for the truth to be lost to history, I happened to notice when researching this entry that other than The Wikipedia entry on Michael Buerk, all the other Wikipedia pages relating to the birth of this world-wide movement currently describe the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation News broadcast on 1 November 1984 by journalist Brian Stewart as being 'the original TV report that inspired Live Aid and Live 8 (1 November 1984)', or 'Thoughts and photos from Brian Stewart, the first Western journalist to cover the story'.

Some may see it as a trivial point, but since this post is about the difference one person can make, and how things can spread like 'wildfire' after one person experiences an intense 'shift', in the interests of historical accuracy I will be correcting the relevant Wikipedia pages to reflect the fact that it was actually Michael Buerk, then the BBC correspondent for Africa based in South Africa and living there, who broke the story. He had been trying to get the Ethiopian government's permission to travel to the famine stricken north of the country for months, after the August rains had failed to appear. He recounts the full story in the Guardian newspaper online here, and also in ">the script of a twenty year retrospective BBC documentary, with Claire Bertschinger, broadcast in January 2004. Bertshinger, an Anglo-Swiss nurse from Hertfordshire, England, working for the Red Cross, was working at the epicentre of the Ethiopian famine resulting from the failure of the East African rains in 1984. She was doling out pitiful amounts of butter oil - all there was available - to five hundred mothers and their dying babies in a Red Cross building when Michael and his camera crew arrived at the village of Makalle, Tigray Province. The building was surrounded by 85,000 more starving and dying Ethiopians. Dozens were dying every night.

This was on 24 October 1984. In the above documentary script, Michael recounts how it took their team 'months of pleading' with the bureaucrats of Ethiopia's dictator, before they were allowed to travel there. Colonel Mengistu, a Marxist Emperor, 'an African Stalin', as Buerk calls him, had spent 100 million dollars celebrating the tenth anniversary of the 'glorious revolution' in which he had deposed the former Emperor Haile Selassie, but allocated no aid budget for the ten million starving Ethiopians.

Claire Bertschinger recalls, 'People didn’t know what was happening here. We were hidden...people didn’t know. And then you (Michael Buerk and his crew) arrived.'

It was the overwhelming sympathetic response of Michael Buerk, a quality not always identified with journalists, which led him to cut an extended news report of 8 minutes instead of the usual 3. Buerk's first report, aired by the BBC, was seen by about ten million people in the UK. There were not the competing satellite channels, then.

At the time, Margaret Thatcher's government were looking to reduce their foreign aid budget, and marxist regimes were at the bottom of the list. But from the day Buerk's report was aired, there was such a mobilisation of public opinion in Britain that just ten days Buerk himself had arrived, the first RAF plane, containing just a ton of food and medical supplies, arrived at the Ethiopian camp. The people of Britain were donating £100,000 a day to the famine appeal. Britain's children donated two million, ninety-six thousand, nine hundred and twenty-four envelopes of stamps to the magazine programme 'Blue Peter', which used it to fulfill a desperate need - fifteen water storage tanks for the villages and camps where the famine victims were.

Michael Buerk's report was syndicated to 425 stations around the world, alerting the developed world to the plight of the Ethiopians. CBC in Canada most likely received Buerk's syndicated report. Possibly they were alerted via Reuters, the 'journalist's jungle telegraph'. Stewart may have already been a friend of Michael Buerk, or perhaps he became one as a result of their meeting in Ethiopia. In any event, within a week Stewart and his Canadian CBC producer were in Ethiopia, filming the most famous face of famine, a young girl, Berhan Waldu, for whom a grave had actually been dug, so close to death was she, and her father, Ata Waldu Aman. But she survived. InBrian Stewart's December 2004 retrospective he calls them Birhan Woldu and Ato Woldu, but they are the same people. The film of Berhan/Birhan was seen by over half a billion people during the historic 1985 Live Aid Concert global satellite broadcast. After an extensive search, Stewart relocated Birhan in 1995 and has been supporting her and her family ever since.

The whole Live Aid movement came about, first in Britain, and then globally, because of another man who saw Michael Buerk's first eight minute Ethiopian famine report on the BBC News on that fateful day, 24 October 1984. That man was of course, the Irish musician, Bob Geldof. People are in the habit of calling him 'Sir Bob' since he received a knighthood from the Queen, but in fact he is not eligible for that title since he is an Irish, not a British, citizen, so it is an honorary title. However, I don't think anyone objects, since if ever a man deserved recognition, he does.

Buerk's Ethiopian news report galavanised Bob Geldof into action. He was like a man possessed, appearing on every T.V. news, magazine and interview programme he could. The next day he started contacting other UK musicians, and the record 'Do they know it's Christmas' which he co-wrote with Scottish musician Midge Ure of the band 'Ultravox' was released on 24 November 1984, exactly one month after Geldof saw Buerk's BBC report. Geldof thought it might raise £72,000, but it actually made £8 million, the biggest selling single record until Elton John's 'Candle in the Wind 1997' tribute to Diana, Princess of Wales. In February 1985 Bob Geldof took the British Prime Minister to task in a television interview. He was disgusted that she had refused to waive the 15% VAT British Government taxation on records from the Band Aid number one record. During the interview she also famously remarked that butter, such as that stockpiled in the European 'butter mountain', would not be of much use to the Ethiopians. Geldof pointed out to her that Butter Oil, a staple food supplement used in Ethiopia, is a byproduct of Butter. Sensing the weight of public opinion against them, Thatcher's government eventually agreed to waive the 15% government tax on the Ethiopian famine relief Band Aid record, 'Do they know it's Christmas'.


The two linked UK and US Live Aid concerts followed on July 13 1985, the first truly global concert, watched by more people than any concert before or since. The British Rock Group 'Queen', including guitarist Brian May and singer Freddie Mercury, sat in the royal box with Charles and Diana before going on stage, and in a recent poll of musicians and critics, reported by the BBC on 12 July 2006, their performance at Live Aid was voted the greatest rock performance of all time. Phil Collins travelled across the Atlantic on the Concorde supersonic airliner while other artists were performing, playing the same number 'I can feel it coming in the air tonight' first in London, and then in Philadelphia. The fact that musical tastes have changed - perhaps due to that 'overexposure'? - doesn't alter the fact that the event captured and reflected the mood of the moment.

In Buerk's January 2004 BBC documentary, he was able to interview both Berhan and her father again, after they had survived relocation by air by the government, another famine in 1988 and the death of Berhan's sister. They had walked home, to be found and supported since 1995 by Canadian journalist Brian Stewart.

All proceeds and donations, and merchandising from the two original Live Aid concerts held simultaneously in Wembley Statium, London and JFK Stadium, Philadelphia raised and sent about £150 million (around $283.6 million US)to Ethiopia as supplies for famine relief. Geldof's original hope was that the Live Aid concerts would raise £1 million ($1.89 million). However, as he remarked in the documentary, they ended up raising more than the total 1985 budget of the UNICEF International Aid Agency for East Africa.

I recently discovered the ONE website, the U.S. version of our UK Make Poverty History Campaign. As of just a moment ago, two million, four hundred thousand, five hundred and forty-five people have entered their names and email address on the U.S. ONE site alone.

Makepovertyhistory.org describes this campaign, which had its beginnings as a global movement in the Live Aid concerts on both sides of the Atlantic in 1985, as 'The biggest ever anti-poverty movement'. Given the global media coverage of the ten simultaneous concerts all over the world, during the UK hosting of the 2005 G8 summit, and the involvement and support of many heads of states and leading world figures such as Nelson Mandela, this seems a justifiable claim. Millions, from little children like my own who are publicising the movement by wearing a white wristband, to Prime Ministers, Chancellors and Presidents, have given their support to a lesser or greater extent, according to the dictates of their conscience, and as their personal priorities, time and position permits. Please do the same. I'll explain a little more.

Unity is power. Make Poverty History UK and ONE are just two of 84 national coalitions which banded together in 2005 to form the Global Campaign Against Poverty (GCAP).

Last year, on 2 July 2005, the purpose of the ten Live Aid twentieth-anniversary (billed as 'Live8') held simultaneously around the world was not to raise money, as Bono confirms in my header quote. Held during the G8 Summit in Edingburgh, Scotland, the concerts were well supported by the British Prime Minister and Chancellor of the Exchequer (UK Treasurer). On 7 July 2005, the day after the final concert, the G8 world leaders agreed to double their combined aid to Africa from the U$25 billion dollars US spent in 2004 to $50 billion by the year 2010.

Since that first BBC news report on 24 October 1984, Bob Geldof, Midge Ure, Bono and their whole international network of musicians, comedians, with the support of a new generation of politicians, have grappled with the huge difficulties of attempting to help the millions of people who suffer from periodic famine due to failure of the rains in the poorest region on Earth, East Africa. They have learned an enormous amount, but of course there is still a huge task ahead of all of us. For Geldof and Bono to have been fellow guests in the hotel where the leaders of the eight most powerful nations on Earth were staying, and be free to lobby and discuss the issues with them, shows how far a popular movement initiated by one passionate man can go. It is little wonder that young people in Britain recently voted Bob Geldof to be the person they most respect.

If you would like to express your support for the Global Campaign resulting from Geldof's viewing of Buerk's report, you may do so by adding your name and email address to the two million plus here: One.org. You can also make a public statement and help keep the issue in the public eye by wearing a white wrist band, available from here: Whiteband.org(Global Campaign Against Poverty)
Peaceful Public demonstrations involving giant symbolic white bands are also due to take place all over the world, during the 'month of mobilisation' starting tomorrow, September 16 2006, until October 17 2006. Details of planned actions here: Global Campaign Against Poverty activities by country, September 16 - October 17 2006. Get involved.

And just how does all this and the ONE Campaign relate to MLM - Multi-level Marketing? Well, just as MLM offers the promise of prosperity by recruiting and befriending just a couple of reliable people, who then go on to do the same, and so on down the chain, retaining their loyalty long-term, the ONE campaign uses exactly the same method, asking each signatory to just pass the link on to five people, to get the word out to everyone. Both an MLM business and the ONE campaign, to be ultimately successful, requires just the same kind of dedication, persistence, faith and integrity.

World Copyright © Kee Decemgero
( short quotations copyright their respective holders, displayed under non-profit, fair use agreement)

Transatlantic Solidarity on this Day

Click here for new audio clips of reflections from construction site workers rebuilding on the site of the World Trade Centre Twin Towers, posted 8 September 2006



Sestina America

We have dreamed her cowboy deep blue night of stars
Trod Her fields of wheat and medal glory
Lazed beneath Her easy prairie sky
Watched her dreams soar high as towers
And the moon; sung her Deep South melancholy blue
Read her legends of soldier and Indian brave

Sung the heartswell sonorous brave
Fixed our gaze on the stripes and the stars
Pride's palette, red, white and blue
Watched an ocean's waves of glory
Break on our shores and Her high cloud towers
Outstrip our Cathedral's quest for sky

We have seen them strike Her earthly towers
We have seen Terror unleashed from the blue
But she has the mettle of an aeon's stars
The resolve of an imperishable sky
She has despatched new battalions of the brave
Humans who craved no special glory

But the world anoints them with the sword of glory
The Living and the Dead of hate-felled towers
We have watched and heard the sudden brave
Their trail will stand indelible in the blue
No passing vapour in a moment's sky
For them, Eternity, in Time's smithereens of stars

Beyond terrestrial glory, the brave stars
Build their towers in tumultuous sky
Through red and white, on into oblivion's blue.


World Copyright © Emma Decemgero


The 'Sestina' is a strict verse form, invented by a French troubadour, Arnaut Daniel, in the 12th century.

As the Wikipedia entry for 'Sestina' describes, the five end-rhymes of the six five-line stanzas rotate in a strict order. The standard Sestina form dictates the order, each end-rhyme rotating in each consecutive verse according to the following fixed scheme:

a stars
b glory
c sky
d towers
e blue
f brave

f brave
a stars
e blue
b glory
d towers
c sky

c sky
f brave
d towers
a stars
b glory
e blue

e blue
c sky
b glory
f brave
a stars
d towers

d towers
e blue
a stars
c sky
f brave
b glory

b glory
d towers
f brave
e blue
c sky
a stars



The final three line stanza end-rhyme scheme should be either e, c, a or a, c, e. In Sestina America the last three end-rhymes are a, c, e. :) Emma caps the poem by also including the other two end-rhymes, 'glory' and 'towers', within the body of the last three-line verse:

b glory a stars
d towers c sky
e blue

Ezra Pound in his Sestina:Altaforte (1909) only managed three.

A poem must have a musical cadence which is pleasing to the ear, flows easily off the tongue, and ( if it is to communicate to non-intellectuals :) it all has to make sense. The technical skill required to produce a poem compared to others is only one factor to be considered when judging a poem of course. It is the collective judgement of all readers and listeners which decide whether a poem or any artwork becomes famous and for how long, whether history pronounces it to be beautiful or great. Those poems which survive as long as the human race do so because they communicate something important which many people understand and value. They speak to people on an emotional level.

A public vote conducted by the BBC in 1995 found the most popular poem in Britain to be Rudyard Kipling's If, which received over twice as many votes as its nearest rival, Tennyson's Lady of Shallot. If is positive and inspirational, and obviously speaks to many people's hearts. But If is despised by the intelligentsia, the 'poetry establishment', the self-appointed cosy little cultural 'elite' of academics, editors and publishers, who consider the general public to be philistines, their taste being too 'traditional'. The poetry establishment tried persistently throughout the twentieth century to establish free verse as the dominant form of poetry, so that the more stringent forms used by the Great European poets over five thousand years would be seen as out-of-date, passé, 'old hat'. But I believe that the general public, not the critical elite, are the final arbiters of what does and does not constitute quality or greatness in a poem, as they are of any other creative production. Whatever the critics say, if the public don't like a show, it closes. And if, despite whatever damage the critics may do, the public love something, it stays, no question. I am heartened to see that in attempting to supplant the Great Tradition of metre and rhyme in the opinion and reading tastes of the general public,the publishing, editing and critical elite have failed miserably, as successive BBC polls show. The public are the final tribunal, the gatekeepers of History. Quality and Greatness never goes out of style. It just has to be put before them. They have to have the opportunity to see and recognise it. This applies equally to poetry as it does to drama, comedy, music, architecture painting and sculpture.

Whether a poem speaks to the heart of an individual, a generation, a nation or the world, history will decide. There are poets whose verses have made them immortal, about whom we know little else. Being made the subject of a poem have made a few men and women - and even Christopher Smart's cat Jeoffrey :) - immortal, like the mysterious 'dark lady' of Shakespeare's sonnet 130, the world famous poem which begins, My Mistress' Eyes are nothing like the sun.

Maybe it's the influence of tomorrow, and typing my wife's poem above, but my heart is full tonight. I apologise for anyone who may not be interested in the details of the Sestina verse form, or who is already familiar with it. In only one or two generations, the sophisticated literary styles of our cultural tradition, we have seen, can become lost, unreal or unknown to the children of today and tomorrow. As History warns us to that people will forget the most inspiring or appalling events in one or two generations also, if we let them. Let us be vigilant.

Poetry like that above, in the English and European Great tradition, poetry which adheres to technically demanding metrical or rhyming schemes, stretches back to the dawn of our civilisation's written history, and even before. The lays of Homer, The Iliad, the great story of the fall of Troy recently made into a film of that name, and The Odyssey, the wanderings of the lost hero Odysseus, were recited from memory.

For centuries, these epic histories of their own ancient past were sung by Greek bards in the royal courts, accompanied by an instrument like a lyre or harp. Before the invention of writing, great poets would make memorising and creatively recitating the stock elements of such epics their life's work. And they would teach them to their successors down through the generations.

When writing, invented by the Phoenicians, sea traders of the Eastern Mediterranean, came to Greece, one or more authors we call Homer wrote down the Iliad and Odyssey,their great Epics, which were the first histories, entertainment and sacred texts of our Civilisation, in the fixed form in which they have come down to us. They are the foundation stones of European literature, running parallel to the Middle Eastern semitic tradition of around the same time, known to us as the Pentateuch or Old Testament of The Holy Bible.

Through most of our history, people viewed the story of the Trojan War as legend or myth, like the British story of King Arthur and the knights of the Round Table. Yet the ancient name of my country, 'Britain', is taken from the Roman Brutus, who old historians like Geoffrey of Monmouth believed to have settled in these islands. Brutus was a descendent of Aeneas, one of the Trojan heroes who survived the war, the hero of Virgil's Aenid. So our Anglo-American and European civilisations are the direct descendents of these ancient peoples. They are our ancestors, and as such we should respect and honour their memory. They help us to remember where we came from, and what we consider just, honourable, right and good. If you have not read the Iliad and Odyssey the originals of which are written in Greek hexameter, in a beautiful verse or prose translation, I highly recommend it.


Homer's ancient Greek epic poems, and those which drew on them, such as the unfinished Aenid of the greatest Roman poet, Virgil, provided our only knowledge of the Trojan War for thousands of years. Only as recently as 1870, Heinrich Schliemann, extending excavations begun by an Englishman, Frank Calvert in 1865, discovered the remains of a city of incredible antiquity, which existed from the early bronze age, between 3000 BC and 400 AD, nine layers deep, at Hisarlik on the coast of what is now modern-day Turkey. The archaelogical excavations revealed a city nine layers deep. As recently as 1988 a team led by Professor Manfred Korfmann found layer seven, of the remains, or 'Troy VII' to be a city of great size, destroyed by fire with evidence of a battle, the dating of which matched the historical estimate for the Trojan War. Evidence from records in the Hittite language independently lead towards the same conclusion (see 'Hittite Evidence' section ). Unfortunately excavations halted with the death of Professor Korfmann (who held the digging permit for the site) on 11 August 2005.

The Anatolian peninsula, modern-day Turkey, was the homeland, from 1700 BC, of an early people, the Hittites, who, like Homer's Trojans, were great lovers of horses (another coincidence) - so much so that they were buried with them. Troy was called in the Hittite language, Wilusa or Wilion, pronounced by the Greeks, Ilion, and by the Romans, Ilium. They founded a city of that name on the ancient site, which survived until after the founding of Constantinople by the first Christian Emperor, Constantine (306-363 AD),

And so History is not lost, merely forgotten for a time, and awaits to be re-discovered by the generations of the future. Those born in the twentieth century may have been brought up to believe that free verse; unrhymed, unmetered cadence, is poetry, like that of the Greats. This, to me, tragic turn of affairs came about because the flower of British poets, men like Wilfred Owen, Edward Thomas and Rupert Brooke, were killed at an early age in the First World War. This robbed us of the full body of work and influence they would have produced over a life-time, keeping the true flame of English poetry alive.

This fractured the English poetic tradition, continued with any great renown only by the Irish W.B. Yeats, the Welsh Dylan Thomas, and the English Auden, from the safety of America. It was not enough. The fascist Ezra Pound edited a few little volumes of what he called 'Imagist' poetry, free verse that neither rhymed nor scanned. As early as 1912, Pound, then twenty-seven, sent Harriet Monroe, art critic of the Chicago Tribune, six short free verse poems. He wrote in the submission note, 'this is the sort of American stuff that I can show here (London) and in Paris without its being ridiculed.' It was pure blarney/B.S. He wrote to Monroe that he had been 'lucky' to find the poems, but actually he had asked his two closest friends, Hilda Doolitle (yes, that was really her name - not surprising she chose to call herself 'H.D.') to whom he had once been engaged in the States, and Richard Aldington (who were now a couple) to write three poems each for submission to Monroe's U.S. magazine Poetry. The American editor, impressed by Pound's manner, bought his story, as did her readers, and so began the craze for free verse in English. The rest, as they say, is history. Pound's principle U.S. student, T.S. Eliot, brought free verse back across the Atlantic and established it as the norm with his Wasteland (1922), helped no end by his editorship of the premier British poetry publisher, Faber & Faber. Free verse became 'the thing', and has remained so until now.

Like haiku, free verse is something almost everyone tries their hand at, being so easy. Just chop ordinary prose up into lines of varying length and there you have it - a 'poem'. The musical cadence, which supporters of free verse set so much store by, is successful or not depending on how the writer varies their phrasing and line length. But although they like to 'have a go', the British public are not fooled, and amongst the fourteen volumes of various categories of the 'Nation's Favourite Poems' published since 1996 by the BBC so far, chosen by milllions of public votes, the great majority meet the challenge of traditional English metre and rhyme. Very few are 'free verse'. Who says people don't instinctively recognise Quality, Plato's Areté, Virtue, Excellence, The Good? In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig's principle argument, based on his experience as a creative writing teacher - and maintaining his motorcycle! - is that we can. I agree with him. Ordinary readers, after nearly a century of exposure to 'free verse', still overwhelmingly prefer real poetry in the Great English and European tradition of Homer, Virgil, Chaucer, Dante, Shakespeare and Milton, that scans and rhymes. This is a source of great satisfaction to me. It is the self-appointed cultural elite - essentially the critics and editors - who have pushed free verse and made it seem the done thing. This comes, I believe, from the high esteem in which continental culture, epitomised by the Louvre, the Vatican and Florence, like the Parisian Left Bank, is held by the critical elite, who wish to be seen as cultured and sophisticated.

But here they have made a great mistake. The French, like the Italians, excel in visual art; painting, architecture and fashion. The Germans have produced most of the great classical Music. But I believe that the original form of free verse, the French vers libre became fashionable in that language because poets writing in French have a much smaller stock of words to draw on when they try to make verses rhyme and scan. Therefore a poem in French, from the Symbolism of Mallarmé to modern vers libre concentrates on becoming more Haiku-like, shorter and more sparse, like Hemingway's prose. The ideal is to suggest a single visual image, or even nothing at all. Pound likened it to creating a word-painting or sculpture. Pound's ideal imagist free verse poem, "Oread" by 'H.D.' (1915):

Whirl up, sea -
Whirl your pointed pines,
Splash your great pines
On our rocks,
Hurl your green over us,
Cover us with your pools of fir.

is a little gem, like a Japanese haiku. But that's as far as it goes. Without deriding it's miniature beauty, I have to agree with the early estimate of imagist free verse:

It is petty poetry... It can be said in one minute after lunch. Such images should appear by the dozen in poetry. Such reticence denotes either poverty of imagination or needlessly excessive restraint.

Harold Monro, 'The Imagists Discussed',The Egotist issue 1, May 1915

Extending such free verse to the length of the major works of Shakespeare or Milton or Homer, a century of polite disdain by the public has confirmed, does not usually produce works most people esteem or want to read, of the literary calibre of the work of those great writers. An exception is Walt Whitman's unique collection Leaves of Grass (1855-1891), a ground-breaking work written well before the acceptance of free verse poetry as the norm on both sides of the Atlantic. Americans and Britons alike were shocked more at the time by the content of Whitman's poetry than its sonorous rolling form. Whitman's poems such as Song of Myself, I sing the Body Electric and Song of the Open Road are now almost universally accepted as being central to the American tradition. Whitman was a great admirer of Abraham Lincoln (as am I :) and before his assassination Lincoln read and enjoyed the first addition of Leaves of Grass, remarkably since it was then such a fringe work.

But although there will always be the rare exception which makes an achievement of free verse, it does not require the stringency, the great difficulty, of expressing thought, feeling and cadence through the strict structures of traditional metre and rhyme, yet in a natural and easy manner.

The number of words in the English language far exceeds that of French. English consists of both Romance and Germanic words, with two or more alternatives for almost everything. It facilitates the creativity of a great Poet composing the most structured form of Literature, defined as 'that kind of written composition which has value on account of its qualities of form' (Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, 3rd Edition). Traditional metre is the most suitable vehicle for matters of great import, and the most revered books of the world, the sacred writings and scriptures of all traditions, from the most ancient Hindu Vedas, Mahabarata and Ramayana, the Buddhist Canons, the Holy Qur'an, and Adi Granth of the Sikhs, to the King James Bible in English, are written in it.

But what of the future? Henry David Thoreau, one of my favourite writers and one of the greatest the American continent has produced, has this to say on this subject:

That age will be rich indeed when those relics which we call Classics, and the still older and more than classic but even less known Scriptures of the nations, shall have still further accumulated, when the Vaticans shall be filled with Vedas and Zendavestas and Bibles, with Homers and Dantes and Shakespeares, and all the centuries to come shall have successively deposited their trophies in the forum of the world. By such a pile may we hope to scale heaven at last.

H.D. Thoreau,Walden, Chapter 3 - 'Reading', 1854

I wholeheartedly agree. Why would the writing of the most sophisticated and difficult form of literature, true epic and sacred verse, suddenly cease after a mere five thousand years of human literacy? Surely it must manifest as long as the higher aspirations of the human spirit, being their greatest expression and witness, with our great world teachers. The age of great literature may seem past, but let us lovers and readers of great poetry merely see the last century as an aberration, a century's interregnum, before the re-establishment of the true sovereign form of literature. And I've got news for you. It is about to be reborn.

American friends, we salute your innocent and brave dead this day.

Nine Consolations: Failures as a Signpost to Success

WHAT IS SUCCESS? Is it the big house and car, lazing every day on a tropical beach, millions in the bank so you don't have to work? Perhaps it's not what you think. Read on...


1. Success is not an end result, but the song of your ongoing endeavour, which no-one and nothing can arrest.

If you have failed repeatedly, but you are still trying, you are a success.

Take two people:

A starts with many advantages, a stable and prosperous upbringing, an elite education, which in turn helps them walk into a lucrative career as a foregone conclusion. Due to the superior nutrition of their forbears and themselves, they enjoy above average health and levels of energy.

They consequently enjoy above average financial success with minimal effort. They live in a fine home in a prosperous neighbourhood, like the one they were brought up in, or a little better, since they were able to invest the money inherited from the sale of their parents homes into their own.

When they travel they generally eat fine lunches and stay in fine hotels, and their company picks up the tab. They may appear to be making sterling efforts, but really their vaunted sweat is a way of their justifying the success they would enjoy with minimal effort anyway to themselves and to the world. Due to the many advantages they were handed by life without effort, everything pretty much comes easy for A, although they act as if it doesn't, as if all they have is purely down to their own merit, in comparison with B.

B starts with many disadvantages, an unstable and poor upbringing,an inadequate and disrupted education, where the expectation is that they will be lucky to obtain any poorly paid job they can get.

They suffer prolonged poor health for a large part of their life. Consequently they can only afford to live in poorly maintained rented housing where they suffer the surrounding stress of deprivation, inadequate services and amenities, and a high level of vandalism and street crime. They have windows broken just for the hell of it, their family is abused by teenage gangs when they walk down their own street (they cannot afford a car) because they are law-abiding and behave decently. Their family relationships are put under severe strain due to the stress of their living conditions.

But B refuses to be brainwashed by the system's expectations for them. They overcome their upbringing and adopt decent standards of behaviour. They supplement their inadequate schooling by becoming an avid reader of books from the free public library. Even though they are denied any career for which their ability suits them due to prejudice against their background, they refuse to be labelled as factory fodder.

They enroll in night school, and through sheer effort and hard work overcome their inadequate basic education, graduating at the head of the class, above many born with many more advantages, like A, who do the minimum, or simply coast. B gets severely ill but ignores it, and when they can no longer ignore it, they keep their mind focused on finer aspirations, and refuse to see or think of themselves as ill.

In contrast to A, who's main life focus is on their personal goals, what they want to be, do and have, B's main life focus is on helping others. They provide or obtain services and equipment for disadvantaged people they know would benefit from it, most of their thoughts and efforts are directed to realising the dreams of others, and they are constantly broke because of this. At some personal risk, they challenge law-breaking by the deprived teens that live around them, and support them towards self-respect and better behaviour by rekindling the self-esteem and respect they are denied by everyone else. They overcome the strain put on their family relationships, continue to support their children every day in every way possible, and form a strong coalition with their spouse which resists the stress of their difficult circumstances and the view that A and their kind have of them, and maintains and even grows their self-respect above that of A, to whom, flying in the face of circumstances, they become eventually as a result of resisting all that would degrade them, superior in intelligence, understanding, wisdom and ability, although A would never acknowledge it. To the end of their life, they continue to struggle against enormous odds, showing resilience, humility, and a 'die trying' spirit, building independence and an imperishable spirit worthy to be an example to others and to ensure their immortality. Their primary concern remains the welfare of others, those who are in their care, and those who suffer the most both close by and anywhere on Earth.

Character A is typical of millions of people residing in the prosperous suburbs of the western world.

B is a Character compilation of positive behaviour shown in the face of typical problems suffered by many millions more, especially in poorer countries, but in the western world too.

Which Character and Life would you deem most worthy to be called 'a Success'?

2. If you haven't succeeded yet, but you keep trying, the odds are that the delay in your success compared to that of others, is due to factors outside your control. Your supposed failures and your mistakes you suffer in common with the majority of the human race. If you learn from them, improve and plough on regardless, you are part of a golden minority who simply ignore the odds stacked against them and constantly try to refine.

3. Any landing you can walk away from is a good one. When you believe this, pick yourself up repeatedly and plod on, realising failure is only temporarily deferred success, you are as close to total success as anyone ever comes.

4. When in the pursuit of noble and worthwhile aims you risk repeatedly, falling flat on your face, this is bold and graceful and no disgrace.

5. The truly and admirably successful have always ploughed on through failure after failure. Therefore your repeated failures are not failures, but the true road, precursor and preparation for success.

6. Every failure, examined, contains the seeds of success greater and different from that at which you originally aimed. Therefore do not judge seemingly negative events too harshly, but keep an open mind as to their eventual value.

7. The mark left on our character by repeated failure, mishap, ignominy, misunderstanding and mass ignorance depends on your perception of its meaning and your response to it. It can either drag down your life or build your soul.

8. All crises are also opportunities to learn life's most painful lessons, which you can then store for later use, and also pass on to others. Lessons in how to avoid failure, pave the way to your eventual success.

9. Ultimately, the Success of your life in historical terms will be measured not in terms of the size of your house, your car, your bank account or your ego. The final yardstick against which you and your life may be measured is the character, endurance, self-sacrifice, presence, nobility, total being and example, of those who were and still are, truly Great.

7 September 2006

World Copyright © Kee Decemgero

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Never judge a man until you have walked a mile in his moccasins

Native American wisdom saying

Developing Will and Ability

"When you advance confidently in the direction of your dreams, endeavor to live the life that you have imagined, you will meet with success unexpected in common hours."

H.D.Thoreau

THE EDUCATION OF THE WILL is the secret of personal power, independence of action and absolute freedom to chart our course in life in whatever way we choose.

A strong will is more valuable than money, more to be prized than gold, more precious than diamonds. For even if you get possession of these things, they will not change your essence. But the methods I am setting out to describe here, if you follow them, will. This is why, while a certain amount of money is necessary to survival in this world, and may make life pleasant, it never, on its own, brings permanent satisfaction and happiness.

People thought that the ancient alchemists were trying to turn base metals into gold, and even they perhaps thought so. But while they may not have succeeded in that, through their long years of toil in their laboratories, those who persisted, working for years at exercises of their own devising, produced a change in themselves. They achieved the philosophical gold, the extraordinary will which can then be set to any goal, and persist as if it had eternity in which to act and unlimited power at its disposal, with absolute confidence that you will succeed.

Such people have a calm confidence, are absolutely sure of their success, they have the power to do whatever they wish. If they wish to lose a certain amount of weight, they do so. If they wish to make a certain amount of money, they do so. If they wish to attain a certain position in life, they do so. And unless their intention or the methods they adopt are harmful to others - for as evidenced by two world wars, even the strongest will, set to evil purposes, will eventually be defeated by powers even greater than their own - this actually becomes the case, for they find that all their efforts are rewarded by a connection to the higher will, so that, even if they die in the midst of their work, others will complete the task for them. What I mean by the higher will must be left to another paper. First things must be undertaken first.

By following a graduated series of physical exercises, it is possible to transform our physical body - its shape, strength, and powers of endurance. It is the same with the power of the human will. By consciously setting out in a pre-planned way, to develop our will, by a series of carefully planned and graduated exercises, we can train ourselves to be persevering in the pursuit of our goals, to an astonishingly greater extent than we are now.

By creating new habits for ourselves, and sticking to what we have consciously set out to do, no matter what, we can stretch and extend our ability to do whatever we have previously decided to do, for however long it takes to achieve a result. In order to accomplish anything, it is necessary to believe in our ability to do it. We can accomplish anything which we believe reasonably in our possibility of doing. The key word here is 'reasonable'.

Each of us has, or should have, a good idea of our own potentials, abilities and limitations. If we do not, and we set out to develop our Will, we soon will have. This is because the development of will is a head on clash between you and your limitations. In setting out consciously to develop more will by adhering to set exercises, we soon find our limits, by reason of how difficult an exercise we are able to tackle successfully.

We should, as a matter of course, test our powers and abilities in every possible way and at every opportunity. Until you try to find out what you are capable of; test the abilities of this marvellous machine which you are - or which has been lent to you for seventy years or so - how will you know the full scope of what you can do? If you haven't dared to be different from how you have always been - tried various jobs, sports, recreations, how do you know that one of them doesn't contain the seeds of your success?

Writing, music, computer programming, selling, teaching, painting, car maintenance, martial arts, dancing, pottery, personal development - the list is endless. Only by trying things will you learn where your natural strengths - and limitations - are. Ideally, of course, all this should begin from birth - we should be taught to voluntarily test our abilities in any and every way we can. By and large the culture in which we live, and the sausage machine of formal education does not encourage us to do this. The sit-down-shut-up-and-listen philosophy turns us off from real self-education, which should always lead us to act - Education anagrams to ACTION DUE. If we think of all the things we were told at school which went in one ear and out of the other, and we have never been able to use, we can see something of the scale of the problem.

There has been a lot of emphasis, beginning with Maxwell Maltz's great book Psycho-cybernetics, on the importance and superiority of the imagination over willpower, when pursuing our goals. And the imagination is a powerful and important faculty. But if we set ourselves to regularly visualising our goal situation a certain number of times a day, or at a set time every day, what is it which causes most people to give up on that, or any other regular exercise or project they set themselves to, with 'the best of intentions', as most new year's resolutions are not kept? Why do we start so many things, courses, careers, etc. hopefully, only to be amongst the vast majority who fall by the wayside, while the seemingly charmed few go on to the prize? Willpower, which has almost become a derogatory term in certain personal development circles, is the backbone and backstop which separates achievers from non-achievers, since it is the element of character which allows us to perservere. But lack of it is not a failure of character, but a failure of training.

When someone says 'I have no willpower', it's not really a reflection on them. It's a reflection on a school and higher education system that teaches a lot of information, much of which will be outdated in a short time, but while teaching the essential skills which allow you to read this article, and to function economically, it does not teach you to train and educate your will, a faculty unique to human beings and which is of great help whatever we want to accomplish in life.

I provide a series of practical exercises to aid in the development of the will, the first step in a process of self re-creation. It has taken me over thirty years to come into harmony with the Way, but if I had realised the real power and potential of this teaching when I first came into contact with it, it would have taken me a lot less time to begin living the life of which I had always dreamed. I had to overcome what are called unconscious blockers, first, so having done that myself, I can tell you where to find the resources to do that too, which can be of great help in assisting you to overcome internal psychological barriers. I don't see myself as a teacher, just as a fellow student who's been around a while, and is prepared to help.

World Copyright © Kee Decemgero

For thousands of years, in cultures throughout history, powerful techniques of self-creation and success have been under the guardianship of societies of elite individuals with special training. An earnest attempt seems to have begun to make this previously esoteric knowledge responsibly but widely available using the power of modern technology and the mass media. The intention is that everyone on the planet who wishes to can learn and experience the benefits of this knowledge, previously reserved for a few. Applauding this, and seeing the potential for a giant leap in the general level of consciousness, wisdom and understanding of the human race, I decided to add my lifelong study and practise of both eastern and western spiritual paths to the resources of the most rapidly growing educational institution on the planet.

The Beginning...

"A great man causes religion to rise in others, but it is their own religion, not the great man's."

'L'

While still at school, I set a self-determined life intention, to which I have kept ever since:

"A SOLEMN DECLARATION OF INTENT

I, in (my birth name), on this the 4th March 1973, do solemnly declare before all of Existence, and in particular the hierarchy of beings on a higher level of consciousness than myself, that I wish to devote my energy and existence to attaining the highest levels of consciousness, wisdom and understanding possible, and using these and all other things within my power, in accordance with the will of the highest Being, to which I now surrender any personal wills of my own.

SIGNED

The 'I' in (my birth name) on 4th March 1973 A.D."

Personal Journal,vol. 3, p 2 of my (currently twenty-six volume) personal journal.

This has been the dedicated aim of my life, my guiding intention, ever since. I had been studying a wonderful, simple book by an american writer, David Schwartz Ph.D, called The Magic of Psychic Power. Books like that were not generally available on the shelves of bookstores in England, where I live, in those days. I had seen a small ad for the book at the back of a magazine called Weekend which our family took regularly when I was sixteen or seventeen, and I took the trouble to send for it. At the time I was interested in hypnosis and all things psychic. I don't know what I expected The Magic of Psychic Power to be about, but in fact it was all about positive thinking, going after what you really want in life, and rising above mediocrity.

David Schwartz passed away some years ago, but I shall always be grateful to him and his book - which is now out of print I think, but his previous top selling book The Magic of Thinking Big is still available. He urged his readers to set a 'life will', not just a will for when they die - to write down on paper, what. after careful forethought, you really, truly want and intend to do with your life. That was his principal advice.

I did that. And although I was still at school at the time, it was, fortunately, sufficiently well considered that it has continued to be my guiding light through all the intervening years, and it will remain so. I considered sharing it here, but it is personal to me, and I tend to share it only with people who I know. The principle of setting and keeping to a life goal and intention, like a compass or guiding star, has certainly helped me through some difficult times, and I confidently expect it to continue as the guiding motive of my life as long as I live, taking me on a 'magical mystery tour to 'staggering, awe inspiring things'. It has, in a sense, become my life, and my life has become an expression of my intention. From thirty-three years experience, I highly recommend the practice of setting a life purpose to any young person - or any person - reading this.

Today people tend to associate success mainly with financial and material wealth. I recommend making connection and direction by the Higher Power or God, under whatever guise your upbringing and culture have taught you to conceive it, your primary aim.

Acting as a conduit through which the abundance of the universe flows could certainly be a worthy secondary goal.

For thousands of years, in cultures throughout history, powerful techniques of self-creation and success have been under the guardianship of societies of elite individuals. A movement seems to be beginning to make this previously esoteric or 'secret' knowledge responsibly but widely available using the power of modern technology and the mass media. The intention is that everyone on the planet who wishes to can learn and experience the benefits of this knowledge previously reserved for a few.

Seeing this, and applauding the intention and potential for a giant leap in the general level of consciousness, wisdom and understanding of the human race, and as this knowledge has been the aim and centre of my whole adult life, I have decided to make the distilled essence of my thirty-three years of experience in eastern and western spiritual paths available world-wide.