Monday
Identity as Author
There was a Field training student who scheduled a Facilitating session to address why things always seemed so difficult for her. She had realized various successes, but always in the proverbial eleventh hour and only after considerable struggle. At one point during the session, as she was describing how she had met all these challenges bravely, she stated with a sense of pride, “I’m a survivor.”
Such identity claims often present the Facilitator with the key to the session. This woman had identified with being a “survivor”—consequently life had no choice but to continue providing her with situations to survive. This idea of the complementarity of identity and reality explains many things, especially when we remember that we may make these identifications unwittingly, and indeed often do.
The transactional analysis (T.A.) psychologist Stephen Karpman devised what became known famously as the “Karpman Triangle” to explain the social and psychological roles that are commonly adopted in various situations, viz. the Persecutor, the Victim, and the Rescuer. The Persecutor is the individual in a given scenario who pressures, blames, or coerces the Victim, who in turn accepts the role of the underdog, someone who’s being abused or otherwise treated unfairly, while the Recuer intervenes in the Victim’s behalf, ostensibly to help the situation or at least come to his or her aid. In the same way that our identity choices may be unwitting, the roles Karpman described are often ulterior. Furthermore, a person playing this “game,” as T.A. calls it, may and often will switch roles—so, as the situation develops, the Victim may turn on the Rescuer, the Persecutor may become the Victim, and so on.
Each of the Karpman roles has a payoff—that is, each role is adopted in an attempt to win justification, but at the expense of others; thus the roles are considered to be “dysfunctional” and ultimately destructive. Now, one can look at the commitment to one or the other roles as a kind of authorship. The Persecutor, for example, attempts to write the scene in a way that conforms to and legitimizes the stance he’s taken, and those in the other roles are doing the same with respect to their stance. Each then, is a protagonist who attempts to direct the story to his or her private ends, and so lives in the reality of that story until it plays out in one of the many ways it can, e.g., with someone “wins” for the time being, someone quits the game, or the exchange escalates and becomes tragic.
In Field training terms, “I am a survivor” is an intention statement. As one gives oneself to this identity claim, one leaves the Field no option but to keep creating situations that prove the claim. It is the same with any intention. “I am a victim” represents an ontological commitment that will demonstrate itself with conspiratorial efficiency. And so on with countless other roles. Life obliges. Therefore, it is well worth our while to be mindful about what we agree to be.
Each of us is an author, writing a story in which the identity we have taken on is the protagonist. Each of us is living in a story of our own invention, a story that flows not from what we want but from the stance we have taken about who we are. A great deal can be gained from noting one’s experiences, especially those troublesome experiences that seem to follow one like a shadow, and asking ourselves, “What role corresponds to these experiences?” Or we could ask, “Who have I agreed to be such that these kinds of experiences would be required?”
The woman in the Facilitating session was startled when I pointed out to her that her survivor identity required situations to survive. Seen in that light, “I am a survivor” seemed to her less a point of pride than an agreement to continue struggling, suffering, and beating the odds at the last minute in an endless replay of exhausting vindications. She saw for the first time the high price of continuing to identify with the that longtime role, just as those who examine the various Karpman roles they have favored can suddenly awaken from what Field training calls “immersion” and see the “dysfunction” (we call it “contradiction” or “counter-intention” and regard it as highly functional) for the first time, which opens the way to a new and better choice.
source
Wednesday
Rest in Peace
Perhaps we believe that worldly life is not or should not be restful, that one cannot live in that inner repose that we wish for those who have passed on. But as soon as one examines this, it seems arbitrary and worth a closer look.
Field training teaches that we only start living, in the fullest sense, when we are resting in that inwardly peaceful state that we call “alignment,” which is defined as friendly agreement between desire and belief. Now, we don’t live just inwardly, of course; we also live outwardly, among the conditions and circumstances of our worldly life. So there are, in basic terms, two forms of fulfillment and its expression: the inner, tacit, hidden form that David Bohm called “the implicate order” and the outer, explicit, visible, “explicate order.”
Now, living in peace requires that we rest in alignment, which depends on the release of our will and its practice of trying to make things happen. This is why the Course states that “the aim of practice is alignment, not manifestation.” The moment we’re exerting our will to make this or that happen, we are caught in the snare of contradiction, for we do not set out to make happen that which already is, and since belief is creative, the belief that what we want needs creating is tantamount to belief in its nonexistence.
The same holds true if we believe that what we want exists, but exists at a distance and so must be “attracted.” In that case, its distance from us is presumed, and this belief, too, operates.
The only way out of these mazes of contradiction that inform any strategic approach to conscious creating—that is, any approach that has the aim of altering worldly conditions—is to rest in the peace of alignment.
Trying to create something through an act of will, whether the venue of effort is inner or outer, turns out to be a failure method. As the movie War Games notes of such games, “the only way to win is not to play.” This is why Field training, while understanding and appreciating that outer things matter, sometimes greatly, directs us to set aside all concern about manifestation and take up the practice of alignment, leaving all else to the Field.
This last bit is crucial. Our worldly concerns must be delegated if we are to rest in alignment and in peace. Field practice, therefore, brings us into relation with something greater than our own will, and invites us to recognize that our creative life is a collaboration. Our part requires, among other things, that we release our will and all attempts to manage timing, the ways and means of fulfillment, and the form that outcomes will take.
Experience soon demonstrates to those who take up this practice its supreme value, for our resting in the peace of alignment and release is itself creative, moving through conduits of nonlocal efficiency from our inner to our outer life and shaping conditions in ways we could never contrive or anticipate.
Those who follow the path of effort and “making things happen,” whether by running around the world or through various consciousness techniques, may not at first appreciate the enormous creative reach and authority of our approach. They may be puzzled by its indirectness and deem it passive, even idle. And yet we have seen again and again that the power of our creative nature, paradoxically, lies in release of the will from a stance of alignment, just as the power of an arrow sent to its target lies in the aligned release of the bow string.
Resting in peace, mindful and willing to cooperate with whatever is before us to do, alert and ready, responsive but not initiating, we find ourselves in a great partnership. We bring our alignment to this partnership, and our Partner brings the rest. And we come to see that our willingness to rest in peace is a doorway to greater life.
source
Envisioning
is slow to come to you,
it can be for only one reason:
You are spending more time
focused upon its absence
than you are about its presence.
Abraham-Hicks
Britney & Russell do the Mind Cross-jostle
"Should I have played it up more when he was flirting with me last year?" Spears, poolside in a white bikini, asks herself. "I have to admit, there is something sexy about his dangerous ways."
Back in his hotel room, Brand can hear her lustful thoughts! "Britney," he thinks, hoping she can read his mind. "This is the voice of your mind. Go to Russell's hotel room and abandon yourself. Give yourself to him, Britney. Sleep with Russell!"
Brand's off-color monologue ruffled some feathers when he hosted the VMAs last year, but he will be back this year for a repeat performance live from NYC on Sunday, September 13.
Video above doesn't work, but link below does..
YouTube won't let me embed it, though..
http://youtu.be/lFPWdzb12l0
Tuesday
Pipeline-Istan: Everything You Need to Know About Oil, Gas, Russia, China, Iran, Afghanistan and Obama
without an energy angle.
As Barack Obama heads into his second hundred days in office, let's head for the big picture ourselves, the ultimate global plot line, the tumultuous rush towards a new, polycentric world order. In its first hundred days, the Obama presidency introduced us to a brand new acronym, OCO for Overseas Contingency Operations, formerly known as GWOT (as in Global War on Terror). Use either name, or anything else you want, and what you're really talking about is what's happening on the immense energy battlefield that extends from Iran to the Pacific Ocean. It's there that the Liquid War for the control of Eurasia takes place.
Yep, it all comes down to black gold and "blue gold" (natural gas), hydrocarbon wealth beyond compare, and so it's time to trek back to that ever-flowing wonderland -- Pipelineistan. It's time to dust off the acronyms, especially the SCO or Shanghai Cooperative Organization, the Asian response to NATO, and learn a few new ones like IPI and TAPI. Above all, it's time to check out the most recent moves on the giant chessboard of Eurasia, where Washington wants to be a crucial, if not dominant, player.
We've already seen Pipelineistan wars in Kosovo and Georgia, and we've followed Washington's favorite pipeline, the BTC, which was supposed to tilt the flow of energy westward, sending oil coursing past both Iran and Russia. Things didn't quite turn out that way, but we've got to move on, the New Great Game never stops. Now, it's time to grasp just what the Asian Energy Security Grid is all about, visit a surreal natural gas republic, and understand why that Grid is so deeply implicated in the Af-Pak war.
Every time I've visited Iran, energy analysts stress the total "interdependence of Asia and Persian Gulf geo-ecopolitics." What they mean is the ultimate importance to various great and regional powers of Asian integration via a sprawling mass of energy pipelines that will someday, somehow, link the Persian Gulf, Central Asia, South Asia, Russia, and China. The major Iranian card in the Asian integration game is the gigantic South Pars natural gas field (which Iran shares with Qatar). It is estimated to hold at least 9% of the world's proven natural gas reserves.
As much as Washington may live in perpetual denial, Russia and Iran together control roughly 20% of the world's oil reserves and nearly 50% of its gas reserves. Think about that for a moment. It's little wonder that, for the leadership of both countries as well as China's, the idea of Asian integration, of the Grid, is sacrosanct.
If it ever gets built, a major node on that Grid will surely be the prospective $7.6 billion Iran-Pakistan-India (IPI) pipeline, also known as the "peace pipeline." After years of wrangling, a nearly miraculous agreement for its construction was initialed in 2008. At least in this rare case, both Pakistan and India stood shoulder to shoulder in rejecting relentless pressure from the Bush administration to scotch the deal.
It couldn't be otherwise. Pakistan, after all, is an energy-poor, desperate customer of the Grid. One year ago, in a speech at Beijing's Tsinghua University, then-President Pervez Musharraf did everything but drop to his knees and beg China to dump money into pipelines linking the Persian Gulf and Pakistan with China's Far West. If this were to happen, it might help transform Pakistan from a near-failed state into a mighty "energy corridor" to the Middle East. If you think of a pipeline as an umbilical cord, it goes without saying that IPI, far more than any form of U.S. aid (or outright interference), would go the extra mile in stabilizing the Pak half of Obama's Af-Pak theater of operations, and even possibly relieve it of its India obsession.
If Pakistan's fate is in question, Iran's is another matter. Though currently only holding "observer" status in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), sooner or later it will inevitably become a full member and so enjoy NATO-style, an-attack-on-one-of-us-is-an-attack-on-all-of-us protection. Imagine, then, the cataclysmic consequences of an Israeli preemptive strike (backed by Washington or not) on Iran's nuclear facilities. The SCO will tackle this knotty issue at its next summit in June, in Yekaterinburg, Russia.
Iran's relations with both Russia and China are swell -- and will remain so no matter who is elected the new Iranian president next month. China desperately needs Iranian oil and gas, has already clinched a $100 billion gas "deal of the century" with the Iranians, and has loads of weapons and cheap consumer goods to sell. No less close to Iran, Russia wants to sell them even more weapons, as well as nuclear energy technology.
And then, moving ever eastward on the great Grid, there's Turkmenistan, lodged deep in Central Asia, which, unlike Iran, you may never have heard a thing about. Let's correct that now.
Gurbanguly Is the Man
Alas, the sun-king of Turkmenistan, the wily, wacky Saparmurat "Turkmenbashi" Nyazov, "the father of all Turkmen" (descendants of a formidable race of nomadic horseback warriors who used to attack Silk Road caravans) is now dead. But far from forgotten.
The Chinese were huge fans of the Turkmenbashi. And the joy was mutual. One key reason the Central Asians love to do business with China is that the Middle Kingdom, unlike both Russia and the United States, carries little modern imperial baggage. And of course, China will never carp about human rights or foment a color-coded revolution of any sort.
The Chinese are already moving to successfully lobby the new Turkmen president, the spectacularly named Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov, to speed up the construction of the Mother of All Pipelines. This Turkmen-Kazakh-China Pipelineistan corridor from eastern Turkmenistan to China's Guangdong province will be the longest and most expensive pipeline in the world, 7,000 kilometers of steel pipe at a staggering cost of $26 billion. When China signed the agreement to build it in 2007, they made sure to add a clever little geopolitical kicker. The agreement explicitly states that "Chinese interests" will not be "threatened from [Turkmenistan's] territory by third parties." In translation: no Pentagon bases allowed in that country.
China's deft energy diplomacy game plan in the former Soviet republics of Central Asia is a pure winner. In the case of Turkmenistan, lucrative deals are offered and partnerships with Russia are encouraged to boost Turkmen gas production. There are to be no Russian-Chinese antagonisms, as befits the main partners in the SCO, because the Asian Energy Security Grid story is really and truly about them.
By the way, elsewhere on the Grid, those two countries recently agreed to extend the East Siberian-Pacific Ocean oil pipeline to China by the end of 2010. After all, energy-ravenous China badly needs not just Turkmen gas, but Russia's liquefied natural gas (LNG).
With energy prices low and the global economy melting down, times are sure to be tough for the Kremlin through at least 2010, but this won't derail its push to forge a Central Asian energy club within the SCO. Think of all this as essentially an energy entente cordiale with China. Russian Deputy Industry and Energy Minister Ivan Materov has been among those insistently swearing that this will not someday lead to a "gas OPEC" within the SCO. It remains to be seen how the Obama national security team decides to counteract the successful Russian strategy of undermining by all possible means a U.S.-promoted East-West Caspian Sea energy corridor, while solidifying a Russian-controlled Pipelineistan stretching from Kazakhstan to Greece that will monopolize the flow of energy to Western Europe.
The Real Afghan War
In the ever-shifting New Great Game in Eurasia, a key question -- why Afghanistan matters -- is simply not part of the discussion in the United States. (Hint: It has nothing to do with the liberation of Afghan women.) In part, this is because the idea that energy and Afghanistan might have anything in common is verboten.
And yet, rest assured, nothing of significance takes place in Eurasia without an energy angle. In the case of Afghanistan, keep in mind that Central and South Asia have been considered by American strategists crucial places to plant the flag; and once the Soviet Union collapsed, control of the energy-rich former Soviet republics in the region was quickly seen as essential to future U.S. global power. It would be there, as they imagined it, that the U.S. Empire of Bases would intersect crucially with Pipelineistan in a way that would leave both Russia and China on the defensive.
Think of Afghanistan, then, as an overlooked subplot in the ongoing Liquid War. After all, an overarching goal of U.S. foreign policy since President Richard Nixon's era in the early 1970s has been to split Russia and China. The leadership of the SCO has been focused on this since the U.S. Congress passed the Silk Road Strategy Act five days before beginning the bombing of Serbia in March 1999. That act clearly identified American geo-strategic interests from the Black Sea to western China with building a mosaic of American protectorates in Central Asia and militarizing the Eurasian energy corridor.
Afghanistan, as it happens, sits conveniently at the crossroads of any new Silk Road linking the Caucasus to western China, and four nuclear powers (China, Russia, Pakistan, and India) lurk in the vicinity. "Losing" Afghanistan and its key network of U.S. military bases would, from the Pentagon's point of view, be a disaster, and though it may be a secondary matter in the New Great Game of the moment, it's worth remembering that the country itself is a lot more than the towering mountains of the Hindu Kush and immense deserts: it's believed to be rich in unexplored deposits of natural gas, petroleum, coal, copper, chrome, talc, barites, sulfur, lead, zinc, and iron ore, as well as precious and semiprecious stones.
And there's something highly toxic to be added to this already lethal mix: don't forget the narco-dollar angle -- the fact that the global heroin cartels that feast on Afghanistan only work with U.S. dollars, not euros. For the SCO, the top security threat in Afghanistan isn't the Taliban, but the drug business. Russia's anti-drug czar Viktor Ivanov routinely blasts the disaster that passes for a U.S./NATO anti-drug war there, stressing that Afghan heroin now kills 30,000 Russians annually, twice as many as were killed during the decade-long U.S.-supported anti-Soviet Afghan jihad of the 1980s.
And then, of course, there are those competing pipelines that, if ever built, either would or wouldn't exclude Iran and Russia from the action to their south. In April 2008, Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India actually signed an agreement to build a long-dreamt-about $7.6 billion (and counting) pipeline, whose acronym TAPI combines the first letters of their names and would also someday deliver natural gas from Turkmenistan to Pakistan and India without the involvement of either Iran or Russia. It would cut right through the heart of Western Afghanistan, in Herat, and head south across lightly populated Nimruz and Helmand provinces, where the Taliban, various Pashtun guerrillas and assorted highway robbers now merrily run rings around U.S. and NATO forces and where -- surprise! -- the U.S. is now building in Dasht-e-Margo ("the Desert of Death") a new mega-base to host President Obama's surge troops.
TAPI's rival is the already mentioned IPI, also theoretically underway and widely derided by Heritage Foundation types in the U.S., who regularly launch blasts of angry prose at the nefarious idea of India and Pakistan importing gas from "evil" Iran. Theoretically, TAPI's construction will start in 2010 and the gas would begin flowing by 2015. (Don't hold your breath.) Embattled Afghan President Hamid Karzai, who can hardly secure a few square blocks of central Kabul, even with the help of international forces, nonetheless offered assurances last year that he would not only rid his country of millions of land mines along TAPI's route, but somehow get rid of the Taliban in the bargain.
Should there be investors (nursed by Afghan opium dreams) delirious enough to sink their money into such a pipeline -- and that's a monumental if -- Afghanistan would collect only $160 million a year in transit fees, a mere bagatelle even if it does represent a big chunk of the embattled Karzai's current annual revenue. Count on one thing though, if it ever happened, the Taliban and assorted warlords/highway robbers would be sure to get a cut of the action.
A Clinton-Bush-Obama Great Game
TAPI's roller-coaster history actually begins in the mid-1990s, the Clinton era, when the Taliban were dined (but not wined) by the California-based energy company Unocal and the Clinton machine. In 1995, Unocal first came up with the pipeline idea, even then a product of Washington's fatal urge to bypass both Iran and Russia. Next, Unocal talked to the Turkmenbashi, then to the Taliban, and so launched a classic New Great Game gambit that has yet to end and without which you can't understand the Afghan war Obama has inherited.
A Taliban delegation, thanks to Unocal, enjoyed Houston's hospitality in early 1997 and then Washington's in December of that year. When it came to energy negotiations, the Taliban's leadership was anything but medieval. They were tough bargainers, also cannily courting the Argentinean private oil company Bridas, which had secured the right to explore and exploit oil reserves in eastern Turkmenistan.
In August 1997, financially unstable Bridas sold 60% of its stock to Amoco, which merged the next year with British Petroleum. A key Amoco consultant happened to be that ubiquitous Eurasian player, former national security advisor Zbig Brzezinski, while another such luminary, Henry Kissinger, just happened to be a consultant for Unocal. BP-Amoco, already developing the Baku-Tblisi-Ceyhan (BTC) pipeline, now became the major player in what had already been dubbed the Trans-Afghan Pipeline or TAP. Inevitably, Unocal and BP-Amoco went to war and let the lawyers settle things in a Texas court, where, in October 1998 as the Clinton years drew to an end, BP-Amoco seemed to emerge with the upper hand.
Under newly elected president George W. Bush, however, Unocal snuck back into the game and, as early as January 2001, was cozying up to the Taliban yet again, this time supported by a star-studded governmental cast of characters, including Undersecretary of State Richard Armitage, himself a former Unocal lobbyist. The Taliban were duly invited back to Washington in March 2001 via Rahmatullah Hashimi, a top aide to "The Shadow," the movement's leader Mullah Omar.
Negotiations eventually broke down because of those pesky transit fees the Taliban demanded. Beware the Empire's fury. At a Group of Eight summit meeting in Genoa in July 2001, Western diplomats indicated that the Bush administration had decided to take the Taliban down before year's end. (Pakistani diplomats in Islamabad would later confirm this to me.) The attacks of September 11, 2001 just slightly accelerated the schedule. Nicknamed "the kebab seller" in Kabul, Hamid Karzai, a former CIA asset and Unocal representative, who had entertained visiting Taliban members at barbecues in Houston, was soon forced down Afghan throats as the country's new leader.
Among the first fruits of Donald Rumsfeld's bombing and invasion of Afghanistan in the fall of 2001 was the signing by Karzai, Pakistani President Musharraf and Turkmenistan's Nyazov of an agreement committing themselves to build TAP, and so was formally launched a Pipelineistan extension from Central to South Asia with brand USA stamped all over it.
Russian President Vladimir Putin did nothing -- until September 2006, that is, when he delivered his counterpunch with panache. That's when Russian energy behemoth Gazprom agreed to buy Nyazov's natural gas at the 40% mark-up the dictator demanded. In return, the Russians received priceless gifts (and the Bush administration a pricey kick in the face). Nyazov turned over control of Turkmenistan's entire gas surplus to the Russian company through 2009, indicated a preference for letting Russia explore the country's new gas fields, and stated that Turkmenistan was bowing out of any U.S.-backed Trans-Caspian pipeline project. (And while he was at it, Putin also cornered much of the gas exports of Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan as well.)
Thus, almost five years later, with occupied Afghanistan in increasingly deadly chaos, TAP seemed dead-on-arrival. The (invisible) star of what would later turn into Obama's "good" war was already a corpse.
But here's the beauty of Pipelineistan: like zombies, dead deals always seem to return and so the game goes on forever.
Just when Russia thought it had Turkmenistan locked in…
A Turkmen Bash
They don't call Turkmenistan a "gas republic" for nothing. I've crossed it from the Uzbek border to a Caspian Sea port named -- what else -- Turkmenbashi where you can purchase one kilo of fresh Beluga for $100 and a camel for $200. That's where the gigantic gas fields are, and it's obvious that most have not been fully explored. When, in October 2008, the British consultancy firm GCA confirmed that the Yolotan-Osman gas fields in southwest Turkmenistan were among the world's four largest, holding up to a staggering 14 trillion cubic meters of natural gas, Turkmenistan promptly grabbed second place in the global gas reserves sweepstakes, way ahead of Iran and only 20% below Russia. With that news, the earth shook seismically across Pipelineistan.
Just before he died in December 2006, the flamboyant Turkmenbashi boasted that his country held enough reserves to export 150 billion cubic meters of gas annually for the next 250 years. Given his notorious megalomania, nobody took him seriously. So in March 2008, our man Gurbanguly ordered a GCA audit to dispel any doubts. After all, in pure Asian Energy Security Grid mode, Turkmenistan had already signed contracts to supply Russia with about 50 billion cubic meters annually, China with 40 billion cubic meters, and Iran with 8 billion cubic meters.
And yet, none of this turns out to be quite as monumental or settled as it may look. In fact, Turkmenistan and Russia may be playing the energy equivalent of Russian roulette. After all, virtually all of Turkmenistani gas exports flow north through an old, crumbling Soviet system of pipelines, largely built in the 1960s. Add to this a Turkmeni knack for raising the stakes non-stop at a time when Gazprom has little choice but to put up with it: without Turkmen gas, it simply can't export all it needs to Europe, the source of 70% of Gazprom's profits.
Worse yet, according to a Gazprom source quoted in the Russian business daily Kommersant, the stark fact is that the company only thought it controlled all of Turkmenistan's gas exports; the newly discovered gas mega-fields turn out not to be part of the deal. As my Asia Times colleague, former ambassador M.K. Bhadrakumar put the matter, Gazprom's mistake "is proving to be a misconception of Himalayan proportions."
In fact, it's as if the New Great Gamesters had just discovered another Everest. This year, Obama's national security strategists lost no time unleashing a no-holds-barred diplomatic campaign to court Turkmenistan. The goal? To accelerate possible ways for all that new Turkmeni gas to flow through the right pipes, and create quite a different energy map and future. Apart from TAPI, another key objective is to make the prospective $5.8 billion Turkey-to-Austria Nabucco pipeline become viable and thus, of course, trump the Russians. In that way, a key long-term U.S. strategic objective would be fulfilled: Austria, Italy, and Greece, as well as the Balkan and various Central European countries, would be at least partially pulled from Gazprom's orbit. (Await my next "postcard" from Pipelineistan for more on this.)
IPI or TAPI?
Gurbanguly is proving an even more riotous player than the Turkmenbashi. A year ago he said he was going to hedge his bets, that he was willing to export the bulk of the eight trillion cubic meters of gas reserves he now claims for his country to virtually anyone. Washington was -- and remains -- ecstatic. At an international conference last month in Ashgabat ("the city of love"), the Las Vegas of Central Asia, Gurbanguly told a hall packed with Americans, Europeans, and Russians that "diversification of energy flows and inclusion of new countries into the geography of export routes can help the global economy gain stability."
Inevitably, behind closed doors, the TAPI maze came up and TAPI executives once again began discussing pricing and transit fees. Of course, hard as that may be to settle, it's the easy part of the deal. After all, there's that Everest of Afghan security to climb, and someone still has to confirm that Turkmenistan's gas reserves are really as fabulous as claimed.
Imperceptible jiggles in Pipelineistan's tectonic plates can shake half the world. Take, for example, an obscure March report in the Balochistan Times: a little noticed pipeline supplying gas to parts of Sindh province in Pakistan, including Karachi, was blown up. It got next to no media attention, but all across Eurasia and in Washington, those analyzing the comparative advantages of TAPI vs. IPI had to wonder just how risky it might be for India to buy future Iranian gas via increasingly volatile Balochistan.
And then in early April came another mysterious pipeline explosion, this one in Turkmenistan, compromising exports to Russia. The Turkmenis promptly blamed the Russians (and TAPI advocates cheered), but nothing in Afghanistan itself could have left them cheering very loudly. Right now, Dick Cheney's master plan to get those blue rivers of Turkmeni gas flowing southwards via a future TAPI as part of a U.S. grand strategy for a "Greater Central Asia" lies in tatters.
Still, Zbig Brzezinski might disagree, and as he commands Obama's attention, he may try to convince the new president that the world needs a $7.6-plus billion, 1,600-km steel serpent winding through a horribly dangerous war zone. That's certainly the gist of what Brzezinski said immediately after the 2008 Russia-Georgia war, stressing once again that "the construction of a pipeline from Central Asia via Afghanistan to the south... will maximally expand world society's access to the Central Asian energy market."
Washington or Beijing?
Still, give credit where it's due. For the time being, our man Gurbanguly may have snatched the leading role in the New Great Game in this part of Eurasia. He's already signed a groundbreaking gas agreement with RWE from Germany and sent the Russians scrambling.
If, one of these days, the Turkmenistani leader opts for TAPI as well, it will open Washington to an ultimate historical irony. After so much death and destruction, Washington would undoubtedly have to sit down once again with -- yes -- the Taliban! And we'd be back to July 2001 and those pesky pipeline transit fees.
As it stands at the moment, however, Russia still dominates Pipelineistan, ensuring Central Asian gas flows across Russia's network and not through the Trans-Caspian networks privileged by the U.S. and the European Union. This virtually guarantees Russia's crucial geopolitical status as the top gas supplier to Europe and a crucial supplier to Asia as well.
Meanwhile, in "transit corridor" Pakistan, where Predator drones soaring over Pashtun tribal villages monopolize the headlines, the shady New Great Game slouches in under-the-radar mode toward the immense, under-populated southern Pakistani province of Balochistan. The future of the epic IPI vs. TAPI battle may hinge on a single, magic word: Gwadar.
Essentially a fishing village, Gwadar is an Arabian Sea port in that province. The port was built by China. In Washington's dream scenario, Gwadar becomes the new Dubai of South Asia. This implies the success of TAPI. For its part, China badly needs Gwadar as a node for yet another long pipeline to be built to western China. And where would the gas flowing in that line come from? Iran, of course.
Whoever "wins," if Gwadar really becomes part of the Liquid War, Pakistan will finally become a key transit corridor for either Iranian gas from the monster South Pars field heading for China, or a great deal of the Caspian gas from Turkmenistan heading Europe-wards. To make the scenario even more locally mouth-watering, Pakistan would then be a pivotal place for both NATO and the SCO (in which it is already an official "observer").
Now that's as classic as the New Great Game in Eurasia can get. There's NATO vs. the SCO. With either IPI or TAPI, Turkmenistan wins. With either IPI or TAPI, Russia loses. With either IPI or TAPI, Pakistan wins. With TAPI, Iran loses. With IPI, Afghanistan loses. In the end, however, as in any game of high stakes Pipelineistan poker, it all comes down to the top two global players. Ladies and gentlemen, place your bets: will the winner be Washington or Beijing?
Copyright 2009 Pepe Escobar
source
Saturday
Quote of the Day
Hope provides the conditions for humans to imagine how things can be different from what they are in the present. When armed with knowledge, it links the power of judgment to the urge to change the world around us. When dismantled in the discourse of cynicism, perfection, or finality, it loses its sense of possibility and dissolves into a world where tensions fade away and conflicts and contradictions cease to exist. A politics after hope recognizes that hope is never finished; it always remains uneasy in the face of unchecked power and never stops its quest for equality and justice. Politics after hope recognizes that the fate of the future is never settled and that democracy is always a process of becoming rather than a state of being."
Monday
Hidden Knowledge Inside Sacred Art
Sunday
Everything That You Experience
Because the Law of Attraction is responding
to the thoughts that you hold at all times,
it is accurate to say that
you are creating your own reality.
Everything that you experience
is attracted to you
because the Law of Attraction
is responding to the thoughts
that you are offering.
Whether you are remembering
something from the past,
observing something in your present,
or imagining something
about your future,
the thought that you are focused upon
in your powerful now
has activated a vibration within you.
And, the Law of Attraction is responding to it now.
Abraham-Hicks
Friday
Compost This!
The following list is meant to get you thinking about your compost possibilities. Not every item on the list is for everyone, and that's fine. Imagine how much trash we could prevent from going into the landfills if each of us just decided to compost a few more things. Here are 75 ideas to get you started.
From the Kitchen- Coffee grounds and filters
- Tea bags
- Used paper napkins
- Pizza boxes, ripped into smaller pieces
- Paper bags, either ripped or balled up
- The crumbs you sweep off of the counters and floors
- Plain cooked pasta
- Plain cooked rice
- Stale bread
- Paper towel rolls
- Stale saltine crackers
- Stale cereal
- Used paper plates (as long as they don't have a waxy coating)
- Cellophane bags (be sure it's really Cellophane and not just clear plastic—there's a difference.)
- Nut shells (except for walnut shells, which can be toxic to plants)
- Old herbs and spices
- Stale pretzels
- Pizza crusts
- Cereal boxes (tear them into smaller pieces first)
- Wine corks
- Moldy cheese
- Melted ice cream
- Old jelly, jam, or preserves
- Stale beer and wine
- Paper egg cartons
- Toothpicks
- Bamboo skewers
- Paper cupcake or muffin cups
- Used facial tissues
- Hair from your hairbrush
- Toilet paper rolls
- Old loofahs
- Nail clippings
- Urine
- 100% Cotton cotton balls
- Cotton swabs made from 100% cotton and cardboard (not plastic) sticks
It might be a good idea to bury these items in your pile. Just sayin'.
- Cardboard tampon applicators
- Latex condoms
- Dryer lint
- Old/stained cotton clothing—rip or cut it into smaller pieces
- Old wool clothing—rip or cut it into smaller pieces
- Bills and other documents you've shredded
- Envelopes (minus the plastic window)
- Pencil shavings
- Sticky notes
- Business cards (as long as they're not glossy)
- Receipts
- Contents of your vacuum cleaner bag or canister
- Newspapers (shredded or torn into smaller pieces)
- Subscription cards from magazines
- Leaves trimmed from houseplants
- Dead houseplants and their soil
- Flowers from floral arrangements
- Natural potpourri
- Used matches
- Ashes from the fireplace, barbecue grill, or outdoor fire pit
- Wrapping paper rolls
- Paper table cloths
- Crepe paper streamers
- Latex balloons
- Raffia
- Excelsior
- Jack o' Lanterns
- Those hay bales you used as part of your outdoor fall decor
- Natural holiday wreaths
- Your Christmas tree. Chop it up with some pruners first (or use a wood chipper, if you have one...)
- Evergreen garlands
- Fur from the dog or cat brush
- Droppings and bedding from your rabbit/gerbil/hamsters, etc.
- Newspaper/droppings from the bottom of the bird cage
- Feathers
- Alfalfa hay or pellets (usually fed to rabbits)
- Rawhide dog chews
- Fish food
- Dry dog or cat food
I know that the longer I've had a compost pile, the more likely I've been to take a second look at something I was preparing to throw in the trash. "Hmm. Can I compost this?" is a frequent question in my house. And, as you can see, it's surprising how often you can answer "Yes!"
Monday
Presence
There’s a famous story about Sir Isaac Newton, who was sitting under a tree engrossed in a book of mathematical equations when a marching band came by. Soon after, a young man approached Sir Isaac and asked which way the band had gone, to which Newton replied, “What band?”
The story illustrates the intimate and mysterious association between existence and presence. Anyone who explores this will soon find himself deep in the land of paradox and philosophical curiosities of the most fascinating sort. For example, there’s another famous bit about a tree falling in the forest with no observer anywhere that poses the seemingly innocent question, “Does the tree make a sound?”
This question is first and last about presence and its relation to existence, for if by sound one means a certain kind of experience—namely an auditory one—and as the hypothetical stipulates, there’s no one around to have the experience, then technically the tree doesn’t make a sound, but if by sound we mean only a disturbance of the air that could be heard if an experiencer were present to experience it, then it seems that the tree indeed makes a sound, and we’re spared the strange imagining in which a large tree comes crashing to earth in silence.
This is usually as far as the conversation goes around the old question about the falling tree, but it’s really only the tip of the philosophical iceberg, because in the same way that the word sound may be taken as semantic shorthand for a certain kind of experience, so the phrase “tree falling in the forest” may stand for an experience (a visual one, perhaps), and so presuppose an experiencer.
Taken to this next level, the question begins to reveal its paradoxical infrastructure: “If a tree falls in the forest, and there’s no one around to experience it, is there a tree and does it fall?” With no experiencer, not even an imaginary one, we don’t have sufficient presence to establish even the hypothetical conditions, viz., that there is something called “tree” (which presupposes an experiencer for whom it is a tree) and that this tree is in the act of what we experiencers describe as “falling.”
It appears that disallowing the subjective side of things simultaneously disallows the so-called objective side, so that in a roundabout way, the question eliminates its own ontological prerequisite. If there’s no experiencer, then you can’t posit the question, not even hypothetically.
We may presume that there are many things during the day that never reach the threshold of our awareness. As far as we’re concerned, they don’t exist; that is to say, there is no “they” that we can talk about as existing or not existing. There is a great deal in this worth exploring, but for our purposes here, it’s enough to recognize that there is a close and ineffable kinship between presence and being according to which a thing only comes into being insofar as it becomes present—at least for some observer. A thing that could not be observed then, cannot exist, and strictly speaking couldn’t even count as a “thing.”
All well and good, all intriguing philosophy—but how can we make use of it?
Well, first, we need to discount any solipsistic interpretation of this association between presence and being. We’re not saying that something doesn’t exist if some particular person doesn’t observe it; only that a thing exists only by virtue of being observable. So, the fact that you or I are not observing the streets of Paris right now (ruling out of course any readers who are observing the streets of Paris) doesn’t mean that those streets don’t exist, for they meet the ontological requirement by being observable. Indeed, “Paris” already points to something observable, and that which cannot be observed could never be named.
Second, having qualified the issue to avoid the solipsism problem, we may note that we can deny a thing existence in some real and useful fashion by denying it presence. We deny a thing presence by refusing to give it attention. As attention is withdrawn, presence withdraws. I’m not alleging here that ignoring a thing neutralizes its existence, as there would be significant problems in a claim of that sort. I am saying, however, that there is a connection enforced by what Field training calls the “nonlocal effect.” In the most practical way, this means that the Particle tendency to lock onto problems, to figure them out, wrestle with them, and so on inadvertently supports and sustains and perpetuates those very problems.
Attention, as the Course tells us, is the venue of intention. The more we attend to something, the more reality it takes on. Many problems can be solved quickly simply through the withholding or withdrawing of attention. This is not the same thing at all as psychological denial. The deliberate use of our power to attend to a thing or not involves no denial of the thing, but only the refusal to continue granting that thing presence, and this has a mysterious effect on that thing’s existence.
There is an opportunity here to conduct a remarkable experiment. Confucius writes, “Great is the man who overcomes the world, but greater still in the man who overcomes himself, for he shall have the world spinning on the palm of his hand.” The object or fact or condition or situation that exists for us, that has presence, arises and is sustained by our granting it attention and presence. The more attention and presence we grant to problems, the more real and present and pressing they become. We can make the experiment of withdrawing our attention and credence from something that’s troubled us rather than dwelling on it, for what we dwell on, we dwell in, ontologically speaking.
So, for example, if some health issue has come up, we can see to it without giving it the power to define us. Remember that the selective granting or withholding of awareness that diminishes a thing’s presence and so, its existence, has nothing to do with psychological denial. So, we’re not saying, “ignore it and it will go away, ” since as long as there’s an “it” to be ignoring, “it” still has presence. No, the art lies in acknowledging whatever has presented itself, whatever has acquired presence, but without forsaking our power to participate deliberately and wittingly in the presence of that thing.
This means that we don’t allow a thing to have presence by default. When our participation is witting and selective, we have moved that much more into our creative authority. So, I may go to the doctor, but not be so focused on the symptoms that prompted me to see a doctor that those symptoms have the power to define me. Stephen and Ondrea Levine, in their work with people who had been told they had terminal cancer, said that the greatest challenge in their work was to break the patient’s identification with the disease—as though the moment they received the diagnosis, suddenly they became cancer patients, and little else. And yet, no matter what the facts say, we always have the last word in who we are.
This week, instead of allowing situations and worldly conditions to steal presence from you, why not explore deliberately granting or withholding attention and presence, and find out what difference it makes? Many things that quickly would become problems for us pass by during the day unnoticed simply because we don’t notice them. If we did, they might, in their newfound presence, gain a handhold in our consciousness and spring forth into expression, but our failure to notice them protects us. Who knows how many hardships we’re spared by the innocence of our attending? If a tree falls in the forest and there’s no observer, does the tree make a sound?
Without an observer, is there even something that can be called “a tree” that can be said to be doing something called “falling?” We are free to pick not only our battles, but the extent to which anything is present for us. What might happen if we took up this freedom to choose, so that the presence of things came not to us, but through us?
http://www.fieldproject.net/realities/?s=field+theoryhttp://www.fieldproject.net/realities/?s=field+theory
Saturday
Free to Be
We place tremendous importance on our freedom to do this or that, but Field training teaches us that we are not free in our actions, because our beliefs cause them just as they cause our emotions and, ultimately, the nonlocal conditions that show up as our local experiences in the world. The only real freedom we have is the freedom to choose what we believe about self and world, but since the chain from belief to conditions is a causal and therefore deterministic one, this is the only freedom we need.
In using our freedom to believe, we have two fundamental tools: no and yes. Practice often requires that we say no to many things: old payoffs that no longer serve our best interests, evidence that contradicts some better version of self we have chosen inwardly, arguments presented by our intellect or by other people that contradict the inner claim, and so on. This no is much like what fiction writers call the “willing suspension of disbelief.”
At first, we look around us, and we see that things are not as we want them to be, and we believe the facts—that is, we are in a state of disbelief that our fulfillment is at hand, as we have claimed, because we are still allowing our identity to be defined by evidence rather than by our creative authority. As we invoke the no of practice, however, we suspend this disbelief by withdrawing our faith in the contrary evidence as conclusive.
We note it, but we refuse to allow it to mean anything. Once we’ve turned our attention and conviction away from contrary evidence and suspended our disbelief, we’re ready to say yes to the chosen version of self and reality. There is a willingness to lose an old self that must precede the appropriation of the new. The self we’re losing in this moment is a self we no longer wish to be, an old skin we’re shedding as we step into the new skin of the inwardly claimed identity. As we take up residence in this new identity, even though the facts count against it, we feel the relief, fulfillment, peace, and joy that follow causally from the new alignment between belief and desire.
Dwelling in the new point of view in this way is the yes of practice. Left uncontradicted, such a shift in consciousness in its time and according to mysterious efficiencies, causes us to act in a new direction, and most remarkably, also compels the ways and means needed to bring what we have imagined into further expression in our experience in the world.
This is the premise, the hypothesis. It remains for each of us to make the great experiment in the laboratory of his or her experience and find out firsthand what happens when we stop exporting our authority to facts, and as Emerson said, “stay at home with the cause.”
We do not look to facts to give us permission to claim our ideal.
We claim it freely, and the facts have no choice but to demonstrate what we have claimed.
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