IN DIE BELANG VAN OPENHEID

My liewe ou Eastern-Province-Herald-On-The-Go-Quiz-spankaptein

Ons medespanlid se opmerking “Baie geluk met jou verjaardag wat was –Jy verjaar saam met n prins!!!!” is eintlik die sneller vir hierdie skrywe, want die prinslike puisie is nié op die 23^ste uitgedruk nie, maar op die 22^ste en as sy destyds só ’n fout gemaak het, kon dit fataal afgeloop het vir ons , soos trouens ook ’n verwarring oor wie nou eintlik die Speelgoedsimfonie gekomponeer het, waarvan daar - volgens wat ek nóú eers uitvind – inderdaad minstens twee weergawes bestaan, te wete van Leopold Mozart (Let Wél: pá van…) én van Joseph Haydn – ’n onderskeid wat waarlik gans te veel is om van ’n kaalvoet Boerseun te verwag, of hoe?
…en dan word jy só te na gekom in die onderskrif by hierdie foto…

…wat my herinneringe natuurlik ligjare ver na antieke ander universums terugvoer en laat wonder wat van Johannes geword het en wie was nou weer jou broer se spanlede; dis asof ek my ou Boerbok herinner, maar verder wil dit nie…al onthou ek hoe ek saam met julle na die Choccieskool toe gery het in jou ma se swart Wolseley 16/60 en dat die saal telkens vol was met ’n geesdriftige skare!

Die ritte in jou ma se statige Wolseley (met die wynrooi leerbekleedsel) het my altyd laat dink aan die keer toe ek as tienjarige kaalvoetklong saam in die destydse Baaise burgemeester se Chrysler gery het, maar dit was eintlik net per ongeluk, want my oudste broer, Tjaart, was mos groot pêlle met sy seun, Pieter, en ek was die betrokke Saterdagmiddag (by die hoogste uitsondering) saam met Tjaart by die Rademeyers wat in Pickeringstraat 18 gewoon het toe ons nog in Pickeringstraat 35 gewoon het.

Raadslid Rademeyer, wat vir United Dairies gewerk het, moes na die dairy toe gaan en ek en Tjaart & Pieter mog saam. Ek dink dit was in die omgewing van die Noordeindemeer waar daar altyd sulke lawaaierige motorbootjies resies geja het of mense geski het.

Terwyl die burgemeester besig was, mog ons die melkerywerf verken en ek het gedink dat dit maar morsig was en gelukkig het ons ons melk van die destydse mededinger – wat ek dink Chelsea Dairies was – gekoop en hulle sou uiteraard baie meer higiënies wees! Die volgende oomblik toe ek my voet neersit, voel ek ek trap in iets en toe ek afkyk, sien ek dis ’n drillerige stuk dikmelk seker so groot as ’n sandwich loafbrood - daardie reghoekige brode wat ek dink nie deur Brito’s gebak is nie, maar deur hulle konkurrente, waarvan die naam my ook nog ontgaan - en die dikmelk peul so tussen my skurwe tone deur analoog aan 'n bol beesmis oppie plaas. Pieter het gereeld pitswere of bloedvinte gekry en wanneer mense dan gesê het dis “omdat sy bloed vuil is”, het ek altyd gedink dis as gevolg van sy pa se vuil melk…

Aangesien hulle binne die PE-Wes gemeente woonagtig was, sal jy onthou die burgemeestersdiens is jaarliks in die PE-Weskerk gehou, al het ons geweet dat hy nooit normaalweg kerk toe gekom het nie, maar dit was ’n moerse storie met vet verkeerskonstabels op blouswaailigtende motorfietse en blinker-as-bottelblink brandweerwaens met brandweermanne-in-erewag vir die edeldierbare burgemeester met sy indrukwekkende hoofdeksel op – die begin van ’n grootskaalse bedrogspul, wat my oorlede pa gewéét het, maar in ooreenstemming met sy opvatting: where ignorance is bliss,... verswyg het.

Só, wanneer jy skryf

 “17 maande om te gaan.

Tree af Des 2014.

Ek het baie opgehoopte verlof, so wil vroeer klaarmaak.

Ha ha ek gaan lag vir die arme apie wat in my plek aangestel word, hy/sy/dit gaan nie weet wat hom tref nie.” …

…en

“Ek vind die “jonger” personeel, weier om oortyd te werk.

Hulle steur hulle nie aan deadlines nie.

Hulle het nie verantwoordelikheid soos ons generasie nie.

My seun, Lourens, maak accounting klerkskap klaar Januarie, en wil hier kom werk.

Hy skroom nie om laat te werk nie, her verlede vrydagaand 19:30 eers van die werk af gekom.

En my werkgewer, stel nie belang in hom nie.

Hy is mos “wit “, so hy moet nie eers aansoek doen nie.”…

…dan begryp ek jou volkome, aangesien ek op 1 Januarie 1986 as stadsekretaris vir die destydse Ibhayi Stadsraad begin werk het en gou agtergekom het wat die ware toedrag van sake is en dit mondeling aan ’n verteenwoordiger van die destydse departement van ou Chris (Hees) Heunis meegedeel het.

Nie lank daarna nie ontvang ek die volgende versoek van hulle:

…waarop ek met bekwame spoed reageer met ’n handgeskrewe verslag wat by die departement getik sou word. Die einste departement het die “geheime” verslag aan die stadsraad van Ibhayi gelek en ek is natuurlik summier ontslaan. Onderstaande afskrif van die verslag het ek eers by latere onderhandelinge bekom, vandaar die tik- en ander foute:

[http://www.andersen.sdu.dk/vaerk/hersholt/TheEmperorsNewClothes_e.html]

Dis vir my duidelik dat jy nou niks anders ondervind as wat ek destyds belewe het nie, behalwe, waarskynlik oneindig erger, want daar is nie meer ‘n “skoonmadepartement” nie – al was einste skoonmadepartement eintlik my ondergang…

Om terug te keer na die EP Herald On The Go Quiz, moet ek erken dat ek al iemand hoor fluister het dat die quizmaster se kinders in Pearson was…hulle het seker Creamline melk gedrink wat hulle bloed besoedel het!

Groete

Jou Spanmaat

OPSTAANTYD!

Waking from the waking dream

Colin Bondi, Contributor
Awaken in the Now

Many of you have heard the statement that life is a dream or like a dream. Its an often repeated concept in spiritual circles and even to some extent in popular culture. While its a fascinating concept few people really see things that way. We are all familiar with the usual night dreams and for the most part we don’t consider those experiences to be reality, at least not to the extent that waking life is considered real.

The question of the reality of our dreams really comes down to perspective. Night dreams don’t appear real from the point of view of the waking state however when you are immersed in a dream and don’t know you are dreaming they seem completely real. Even though the mind is mostly detached from the body we experience the same range of sensory experiences we do in waking life, actually they are much more expanded. We also experience the full range of thoughts and emotions, again in an even more expanded manner. Night dreams are a more fluid reality than the waking state as they do not take place on the physical plane.

However greater fluidity and less solidity does not mean less reality. When we are in the midst of the dream world just as in the waking state we have a sense of presence or personal existence as well as identification with a dream body. That dream body may be much different than our physical body and perhaps much more subtle but the identification with the dream body is what allows us to experience the dream world. The belief that we ARE that dream body and the lack of knowledge of any other level of our existence is what makes dreams seem real while we are in them.

When we wake up in the morning the dream world doesn’t seem so real and after a time we usually forget it altogether. However, the seeming unreality of the dream world when viewed from the waking state occurs because we are back to being identified with the physical body, we have changed worlds. The body is the root of the world we perceive. One way to describe the dream state is the following: a living being is in a state of sleep or altered consciousness and has entered a world entirely created by their mind and believes them self to be a body created by their mind having experiences created by their mind. The purely mental aspect of this dream world tends to bring mental projections into form very quickly while keeping them fluid and in relatively continuous flux. When we wake up from dreaming the mind created world which appeared from nowhere similarly disappears into nowhere and we see it for what it was, a mental projection.

This is a powerful analogy to the waking experience because waking life is also a dream, quite literally. It is a more dense dream world than the night dream but it has almost the same characteristics. Here we have a living being (the true Self) who is asleep and so in an altered or more limited state of consciousness who identifies with a dream body (the physical body) and from that standpoint takes the more dense dream world (the physical world) to be real. We take it to be the only reality in fact which speaks to how strongly we are identified with the body. The physical world seems solid and real to us because we are viewing it from a point of view within the waking dream. We perceive everything about the world through the body and its senses but the body itself is part of the waking dream so it is not an accurate authority as to the ultimate reality of the world.

As in a night dream, everything we experience through the physical senses is a projection of mind because mind or the sense of I is the perceiver. When you remove the perceiver the object of perception goes with it. In the waking state we perceive the body and the world in a certain way and in the night dream in a different way but what was your experience of yourself and the world during deep sleep? There is no world perceived during deep sleep because there is no one to perceive it. No body is experienced and no self consciousness. Yet there is still some kind of presence. You could say deep sleep is when consciousness wakes up and ‘forgets’ the waking dream world for a time. Most of us enjoy and even look forward to deep sleep. Its refreshing and indeed this is the nature of what we are.

It has been said that spiritual awakening is like waking up from the waking dream of being a person in a physical world. Waking up as the One that is the dreamer of this life. Waking up to beingness itself or undifferentiated consciousness and in that awakening seeing fully that the waking world is not so real after all. It is merely a projection of a larger mind or  another dream world. Just as when a person learns to lucid dream or be conscious of the the fact they are dreaming in a night dream, in waking up to who we are we can engage the dream of life in a new way. Life becomes a beautiful dance of appearances in which we the dreamer can enjoy without becoming attached to, enmeshed in and controlled by. Seeing everything as our true Self we overcome fear and separation and partake in the bliss and joy which are what underlies existence itself.

So what do you say? Is it time to wake up?

NOW ASK YOURSELF...

WHY WOULD THEY NOT HAVE LIED
ABOUT SOUTH AFRICA?

NOG KUNS WAT SKRIK VIR NIKS

ecce homo

aanskou die mens met sy moeë voorkop

vasgedruk teen die drie-dubbele koue ruit

staar hy deur die termiese versperring van argon, kripton of xenon uit

want sy wêreld is so verskriklik warm, ‘n perfekte fokop

bring vir hom ‘n ou hubble

want hy soek in hierdie benoude uur

in die diep kobalt blou tinktuur

na ‘n nuwe koel ligblou bubble

hy soek ver, baie ver, 63 ligjare ver                           

na ‘n nuwe gelukkiger ster

maar al wat hy vind

is eksoplaneet hd189733b

maar dis sonder water of ‘n see

en het net ‘n 7000 km/h hipersoniese wind

omvou in ‘n ongasvrye 1000˚C gasagtige newel

die enigste wat daar blink reën, is die kurkdroë kieselsteen

o my God, ons het U én die aarde vermoor

dis al gebed nou oor, om te prewel

(12-07-2013)

[Chris Potgieter]

MUSIEK WAT SKRIK VIR NIKS

(Sang begin by 2:54)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B9NVch1Jgh8&feature=c4-overview&playnext=1&list=TLWuUuEK2lfQg

DAT EK HÓM NOU MOET AANHAAL...

The soul of South Africa has died.

Finally the Archbishop is beginning to talk sense…

Tutu: I will not be able to vote for the ANC

10 MAY 2013   |   DESMOND TUTU

In this frank interview Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu says he would

not vote for the ANC as it is today because it needs a change in leadership…

The news bulletins we are getting about Nelson Mandela indicate that there has been a resurgence of lung trouble. I haven't been to see him – I didn't think they would want to be bothered too greatly – but I sent a text message to his wife, Graça.

My concern is that we are not ­preparing ourselves, as a nation, for the time when the inevitable ­happens. He's 94, he's had a rough time, and God has been very, very good in sparing him for us these many years. But the trauma of his passing is going to be very much intensified if we do not begin to prepare ourselves for the fact that this is going to happen at some time.

At present, people who might want to offer criticisms about the political dispensation may be inhibited from doing so. People who might otherwise vote for different parties are constrained by the sense that it would be a slap in the face to Mandela. These issues are going to intensify what will, in any case, be a very traumatic experience.

We should be preparing ourselves by erecting a memorial to him, but not a physical one. The best ­memorial to Nelson Mandela would be a democracy that was really up and running; a democracy in which every single person in South Africa knew that they mattered, and where other people knew that each person mattered.

South Africa has the capacity to be one of the most vibrant countries in the world. We have some of the most wonderful people of all races that you could imagine. Our potential is immense. And it's an ache, it is a very huge ache, for oldies like me to see our country deteriorating and slowly sliding off what we thought belonged to us – the moral high ground. It's a great pain to see that we still have the kind of disparity we used to decry under the apartheid dispensation.

No one imagined we were going to have a paradise overnight, but we imagined that by now we would have made very considerable strides in bridging the gap between the poor and the well off.

Self-aggrandisement

Yet today South Africa is the most unequal society in the world. We can't hold our heads up with pride when you think of the levels of violence in our country.

During the struggle I think we were rather special. There was hardly anyone who would have said that they were in the struggle for self-aggrandisement; that they were looking for a reward. People were amazing in being so altruistic, so idealistic; committing themselves to freedom and saying that they were ready to lay down their lives. We imagined that this idealism and altruism would automatically carry over into the post-apartheid period.

But now one can point to so many instances of corruption, of unaccountability. Seeing how standards have dropped is so galling because it seems to give ammunition to those who would say: "We warned you that once you had a black majority government you would see a steady decline in standards."

There are things we've done that we should be proud of. We did a wonderful job of hosting the football World Cup – even the criminals went on holiday for two months. It showed our country what we have in us to become.

I'm not a card-carrying member of any political party. I have over the years voted for the ANC, but I would very sadly not be able to vote for them after the way things have gone.

We really need a change. The ANC was very good at leading us in the struggle to be free from oppression. They were a good freedom-fighting unit. But it doesn't seem to me now that a freedom-fighting unit can ­easily make the transition to becoming a political party.

And, unfortunately, we do have a weakness in our Constitution. It was important for our transition that we had proportional representation, so people were voting not for a particular candidate but for a party. We still have that system. The party that wins decides who will be its representatives, so everybody wants to get on to the party list.

You do not want to jeopardise your chances by being what you ought to be as a Member of Parliament – someone who ensures that the executive is accountable to the legislature.

Dilly-dallying

The first thing the next Parliament must do is change our system so that you elect on the basis of a constituency, where you are voting for an individual who would be accountable to the electorate. Those in Parliament now are accountable to their party first rather than the electorate.

China has brought a lot of benefits to Africa, with the investments it has made and the building of infrastructure, but it has come at a cost. In South Africa, a lot of people in the textile industry have been thrown out of work because the country has been flooded with cheap Chinese goods. But what has been even more distressing for me is how our country has seemed to kowtow to Beijing.

A glaring example is what they did with the Dalai Lama, when the South African government dilly-dallied with his visa so that he couldn't come to my birthday.

The other example is our performance at the United Nations. The things we have voted for or against have been a disgrace. It has been a total betrayal of our whole tradition, and that's a very sad thing.

Deliberate decisions by politicians have caused the terrible situation in Zimbabwe, our neighbour. I keep thinking how it was one of our showpiece countries. Just a few years ago it was thriving, with a vibrant democracy and a president who was generally held in high regard.

Obviously, one is longing desperately that Zimbabwe can recover the glory of those days. It seems such utter, utter madness, the things that they've done there – destroying a very profitable agricultural sector, for example, by handing over farms to people who really weren't able to run them and who let equipment go to seed, as it were.

But people are very resilient, and I'm just hoping that one day that country can recover. One has to give the people considerable credit for still being able to smile, given that they've seen a beautiful country being turned into a nightmare.

It will be costly, but I think one day we will be able to look back and say: "Yes, it was a nightmare, but the nightmare is over."

South Africa has many gifted people who could lead our country but, at the present time, a great deal of political loyalty is based on the fact that these are the people who fought for the freedom we now enjoy.
Very many people are really voting with their hearts rather than their heads. Emotionally, you need a real turnaround to get them to see that when you vote for a political party you are voting for its policies. It is no longer something you can base on the emotional links we had with the people who strove for our freedom.

– © 2013 Prospect magazine, distributed by the New York Times syndicate
Desmond Tutu, archbishop emeritus of Cape Town, was interviewed by Jessica Abrahams. He recently published God Is Not a Christian: Speaking the Truth in Times of Crisis