Afo was once 40 metres tall and four metres round. Sadly, today, all that remains is a massive stump and some bare branches.
A few years ago, villagers hungry for firewood even attacked Afo with machetes. A brick wall now surrounds it.
If the Dutch had had their way, Afo would not have survived at all.
The Netherlands United East India Company, or Voc, was the world’s first multinational corporation
And just as corporations today seek to monopolise plant genes in the developing world, the Voc set about seizing total control of spice production.
In 1652, after displacing the Portuguese and Spanish, the Dutch introduced a policy known as extirpatie: extirpation.
All clove trees not controlled by the Voc were uprooted and burned.
Anyone caught growing, stealing or possessing clove plants without authorisation faced the death penalty.
On the Banda Islands, to the south – the world’s only source of nutmeg – the Dutch used Japanese mercenaries to slaughter almost the entire male population.
Like Opec today, the Voc also limited supply to keep prices high. Only 800-1,000 tonnes of cloves were exported per year. The rest of the harvest was burned or dumped in the sea.
Somehow, Afo managed to slip through the net. A rogue clove. A guerrilla plant waging a secret war of resistance.
Afo would eventually bring down the Dutch monopoly on cloves.
In 1770, a Frenchman, appropriately named Poivre, stole some of Afo’s seedlings.
This Monsieur Pepper took them to France, then the Seychelles Islands and, eventually, Zanzibar, which is today the world’s largest producer of cloves
Manly P Hall was recognized as a 33º Mason (the highest honor conferred by the Supreme Council of the Scottish Rite) in 1973, despite never having practiced the craft.
He has been widely recognized as a leading scholar in the fields of religion, mythology, mysticism, and the occult.
Carl Jung, when writing Psychology and Alchemy, borrowed material from Hall’s private collection.
He is perhaps most famous for his work The Secret Teachings of All Ages: An Encyclopedic Outline of Masonic, Hermetic, Qabbalistic and Rosicrucian Symbolical Philosophy.
In his over 70-year career, Hall delivered approximately 8,000 lectures in the United States and abroad, authored over 150 books and essays, and wrote countless magazine articles.
Some people use the word “wise” a bit too freely – I have zero compunction however, applying the word to this man – an excellent example, if not the epitome of…
It was reported in 2010 that President Ronald Reagan adopted some ideas and phrasing from Hall’s book The Secret Destiny of America (1944), using them in speeches and essays.
…it was the discovery of a cache of ancient Gnostic scriptures at Nag Hammadi in the Egyptian desert in 1945 that really set off the modern phase of the Gnostic revival.
Although their translation into English was not complete until the late 1970s, early access to some of the writings inspired the great psychologist Carl Jung to draw parallels between the ancient Gnostics and modern depth psychology.
The publication in 1977 of the Nag Hammadi Librarytranslations, followed in 1978 by religious scholar Elaine Pagels’ best-selling exposition, The Gnostic Gospels, guaranteed that Gnosticism would not go away anytime soon.
Christian aspirations to a universal faith, applicable to anyone with ears to hear, led many Gnostics to posit that God the Father, of whom Jesus spoke, must be a different God altogether: a hitherto Unknown God Who existed far above the earthly realm and was free of ethnic contracts or favouritism.
Christ functioned as the messenger from this remote and impartial God, and some Gnostic scriptures downgraded the Jealous God of the Old Testament to the role of Demiurge, a lesser creator-god who brought a flawed Creation into existence and mistakenly ruled it with a heavy hand as if he were the True God.1
Thus, in the Gnostic view, salvation from this diminished material realm of suffering and injustice depended less on one’s mere beliefs or on the following of religious laws that the Demiurge put in place, than on the individual’s inner experience of gnosis – a divine knowledge of the cosmic order and one’s true identity.
The Gnostic scriptures alluded to Christ’s secret teachings, which would aid the Gnostic to embrace gnosis, and armed with this knowledge, to escape the illusory realm of the Demiurge at the time of death.
The most common Gnostic revision of the Creation story spoke of Sophia (Wisdom), an extension of the True God, venturing forth from the Pleroma (the fullness of the ineffable divine realm), producing an aborted spiritual being, Ialdobaoth (the Demiurge), who in turn created the flawed material world.
Sophia, seeing sparks of the divine entrapped in matter, descended to try and free them and was herself entrapped.
It took the efforts of the Christ (pre-existing in the Pleroma) to extricate her and return her, past the Archons presiding over intermediate planes, to her rightful place beside Him: a tale symbolic of the plight of the soul enmeshed in illusion.
Finally, the indications in Gnostic scriptures, such as the Gospel of Philip and the Gospel of Mary, that Mary Magdalene was closer to Jesus than the other disciples and received secret teachings denied to them, undercut both St. Paul’s misogynist version of Christianity and the Catholic Church’s claim to legitimacy based on St. Peter’s supposed selection as the “rock” on which the Church would be built.
The prominent role given to the Divine Feminine via the Gnostic veneration of the Magdalene and Sophia was partly recuperated by the Roman Church through the significance it later afforded the Virgin Mary, but this status was subsumed within the overall supremacy of a Church run by celibate males.
In ripping away the façade of normality, we come face to face with our true dilemma – we live in a maze of illusions and self-delusions from which we must extricate ourselves. This is, of course, a fundamentally Gnostic worldview.
The ancient Gnostics were aware that material existence is, at its root, a beguiling and temporary illusion. (Hindus called this “Maya”).
Modern physics has confirmed this at the sub-molecular level, where one can see that apparently solid objects are, in fact, composed of moving bits of energy that are neither wholly particle nor wave. The closer one looks, the less there is to see. The vast emptiness of outer space is mirrored by the vast emptiness within matter itself.
Esoteric traditions around the world teach that consciousness can exist independent of the body, and that the ability to deliver our consciousness from its addiction to sensory input and compulsive thought patterns can lead to an experience of divine consciousness (gnosis).
The message of the Christ of the Gnostics was not that he considered himself the unique and only Son of God, but that each person has the potential to expand their consciousness across the vast emptiness to the level of godhood or Self-realisation.
If the illusoriness of daily life was self-evident in the relatively simple world of two millennia ago, it is becoming even more so, for those with the eyes to see, in the present world of cybernetic virtual realities, Hollywood dream-worlds, instant messaging, corporate branding campaigns, and information warfare.
… your light, give me your mercy! My Redeemer, redeem me, for I am yours; the one who has come forth from you. You are my mind; bring me forth! You are my treasure house; open for me! You are my fullness; take me to you! You are (my) repose; give me the perfect thing that cannot be grasped!
Who would make a world like this? Was it truly a God of love?
According to much evidence, it wasn’t. The world was created by something else. Or if it was created by the loving God our hearts insist exists, then creation has been tampered with by someone else so merciless that it barely resembles the original divine vision. The biological universe is controlled by the law that to live we must take life or die. That is sinister. Something there is that makes us have to eat, that makes us age and disintegrate. This is the “something wrong with the world,” the crack in the universe. Knowledge of it works “like a splinter in the mind, driving you mad,” quoting “The Matrix.” Yet awakening to the truth of our predicament is the first step toward radical change. Only radical change can possibly right the fundamental flaw woven into physical creation.
And how well-woven it is. Not only does violence wind through the lives of all Earth life like the fibers of a time-bomb attached to a victim. It reaches out into space, where supernovas implode, collapsing millions of stars along with all living beings on all their attendant planets. Death and devouring are so pervasive most people can’t conceive of a world without them, or if they can conceive it, they label the concept preposterous. Yet quantum physics shows that matter is nothing but atoms: emptiness vibrating. Emptiness does not die and neither does the energy it oscillates. So why must bodies die that are made of up of these things?
Is it insane to think that humans can beat the system? That we could make a choice to stop the activities that supply our up-line with fuel? That we could minimize – even stop – our own refueling from the life force of creatures lower than us on the food chain? Is it madness to think that our bodies, made of undying energy, could themselves not have to die, that we might learn to live on the power of infinite consciousness, which we can access within ourselves, being part of it?
While some may call that madness, I prefer it to the world I see around me. I certainly prefer it to death. I prefer it to loss of my dear ones, and to sickness and poverty. The greatest experiment mankind can engage in is mastery of the principles of freedom, creation, abundance, and immortality. We’re wearing body suits that in 70-some years of use are programmed to self-destruct. What could be more important than changing that programming?
In the Bhagavad Gita, Lord Krishna warns: “He who does not follow the wheel thus set revolving lives in vain.” The wheel is the cycle of birth and death, karma and retribution, human sacrifice and divine blessing. To rebel against this system is to fail in our life purpose as defined by those who say they are our creators and gods. But surely life was meant to be more than dinner for the next rung up on the food chain. If “living in vain” means breaking out of that, I’m all for that kind of failure.
CHEYENNE, Wyo. (AP) — The ever-changing thermal geology of Yellowstone National Park has created a hot spot that melted an asphalt road and closed access to popular geysers and other attractions at the height of tourist season, officials said Thursday.
We are not as fixed as we have been led to believe. Biologically or in terms of our personality and potential, in every sense of the word.
We all have magnificent potential, but in order to reach that potential we must change. For if we did not need to change, then we would already be living and expressing our highest potential. We must change our thoughts, emotions, beliefs and habits which are in essence our personality.
“…not merely to think about what he had told me but to turn his concepts into a viable way of life by a process of repetition. He claimed that everything new in our lives … must be repeated to us to the point of exhaustion before we open ourselves to it. He pointed out that repetition is the way our progenitors socialized us to function in the daily world.” (The Art of Dreaming, p.34)
Repetition is the manner in which we have learned almost every skill which today we take for granted. From language, to motor function. Through repetition we retrain literally our state of being which transforms us into a new person, and thus our life transforms because it is only a reflection of our state of being. Achieve this by training yourself to assume the powerful feeling and “unquestionable bodily knowledge that you are” whatever you desire to be.
While this requires enormous effort, it does not need to be a difficult or daunting task because if we can learn to love this self-discipline we will become truly powerful. For this type of work not only leads to personal transformation, but towards consciousness evolution as well.
Many of us have tried to change our thoughts or to create new habits, or to manifest, and have failed, but that does not mean this process doesn’t work. It only means that we didn’t do it properly. It only means that we did not repeat the new state of being and bodily feeling of our intention to ourselves tirelessly until we were able to “turn these concepts into a viable way of life.”
We must inform the field and our subconscious mind (which are the same thing) tirelessly of our intentions until we resonate on the deepest possible level with the idea which has inspired us as to banish all doubt and all incongruity within us. Then we will start to open up to and embody the power of intention.
Whatever 