Standing for Generosity in the Next Election

It’s got to the point whereby if a General Election is called soon I’m standing for Generosity, and here’s my first draft election leaflet:

https://www.hastingsindependentpress.co.uk/well-being/health-and-environment/coming-to-a-lamppost-near-you/

Please email me for the latest version of this leaflet to share electronically and/or earn Timebank credits by joining the leaflet distribution team.
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7th September update from http://facebook.com/paulcrosland1

Firstly, thank you for the rare courtesy, Paul Campbell, of politely disagreeing with me whilst offering me a useful link to take the next step down my undesired path* - and God knows whether I want to have to go through all that standing for this election entails!
Secondly, what would you say if I suggested that you’ve been distracted by #Brexit (which a European friend wrote to me yesterday about in terms of “The UK has already left, why doesn’t it just get on and leave?!”); distracted from the bigger issues for which it is truly worthwhile getting arrested and prosecuted? https://twitter.com/2066Country

*unprecedented Facebook Generosity in my experience and thus to be championed as a model whilst I stand for Generosity.

The twitter link again for pre-arrest #HastingsAndRye press releases etc: https://twitter.com/2066Country

https://5GAppeal.eu
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Full (1st draft) leaflet text:

I don’t want to be your MP on my own; when elected eleven of us will Job Share.

As an elector in the Hastings & Rye constituency you will be asked to put forward six of the eleven, all of whom will be people who give their time generously in your community e.g. “The Clean Up Man”.

https://youtu.be/XK0_CwtuIQg

For many of us with mental health concerns what we need are job-sharing opportunities so that others have “got our backs” when we are not up to it.

My election campaign will have been a success if it raises awareness of a MORE CARING/SHARING AND RIGHT HONOURABLE way of living in our community. 

The awareness of how to empower the community to take on more of its care needs -inspired by Prof Heinz Wolff’s “Care4Care.mov” (please Google It) - will lead many into Right Action.

For me, “Right Action” will mean that, bolstered by your support, I return with a “Right Livelihood Team” of 5 Fellow Buddhists to lead a SHARING AND CARE4CARING PARTY at the next election. 

I am confident that within 12 years we can get the necessary community groundswell such that the Hastings & Rye Constituency - which, when forward looking I call @2066Country - puts a RIGHT HONOURABLE JOB SHARE TEAM OF ELEVEN INTO PLACE.

Your present/last MP had no credible answer to the (much applauded) suggestions I made at a public meeting that one of the biggest deficits of government is its lack of a policy to promote sharing as part of the solution to many issues - shortage of housing, traffic congestion etc

Your present/last MP asked me to write to her with advice on what a government policy on sharing could do. I would like this advice to government to be written with your input.

For more on this, and for my track record in #CommunityDevelopment work in (y)our constituency: http://additionalinfo.blogspot.com

Thank you for reading the above and thank you, in advance, for your next step towards “building a more caring and sharing community around you”,

Paul Crosland

Founder (in 2011) of St Leonards Sharing Consortium 

Here's a simple piece to camera about self-care; please subscribe to my YouTube channel for more interesting content than this!

Here's a simple piece to camera about self-care; please subscribe to my YouTube channel for more interesting content than this

Win Back Control of Hastings Pier in #2066

Here's the playlist “Win Back Control of Hastings Pier in #2066Country”:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLM4IagQQExozrNmDLpTw5yef5luL4litr
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Please upload your own “Hastings Pier -My legitimate co-claim via #2066Country” film on YouTube & add your name (unless you upload anonymously obvs!). 
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This film is my Part 1 (apologies that my talking to camera is so quiet -before the music comes in).
As/when I go on to record Part 2 of  my legitimate co-claim to Hastings Pier , I imagine revealing the inside story and extent of my involvement, policy making, provocation and investment with the HPWRT/Pier Charity. Also how this inter-played with the Community Development in Hastings and St Leonards, not least of which was the #2066 Timebanking gallery at the Southwater Community Sentence (by St Leonards Warrior Square Station): some of the legacy and ongoing work which is at http://2066.info

The promised links/land (#2066Country) and more:

https://twitter.com/WPier2066

https://SussexCommunity.blogspot.com

http://m.hastingsobserver.co.uk/news/letters/we_need_to_act_if_we_want_justice_1_2756987

http://hastingsjustice.blogspot.com/p/harmonisation-policy-for-hpwrt-provided.html

http://freelender.org

https://twitter.com/2066Country

https://twitter.com/HastingsJustice

https://twitter.com/MeditationL

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLM4IagQQExozrNmDLpTw5yef5luL4litr

FYI:
I’m a self-appointed (and think-tank award winning*) advocate of the “New Society”, accountable to a group of organisations collectively called the St Leonards Sharing Consortium, which, with sufficient support -eg crowdfunding- would/(will?) morph into a political party provisionally entitled “The Care4Caring and Sharing Party”; the leading branch of which (#2066Country - https://Twitter.com/2066Country) challenges our collective perspective on the non-collective ownership of property, as drawn out through the campaign to “Win Back Control of Hastings Pier in #2066”

I aspire to lead two Triratna Buddhist “Team Based Right Livelihoods” which model and recruit innovators/leaders in:

a) the innovations in “Care for Caring” that was akin to a religious conversion for Professor Heinz Wolff: https://youtu.be/i_MZZnJhsvI ; in dialogue with me at https://youtu.be/sd5BRptG_Ek

b) the conscious attempt to live only a third of one’s economic life in the monetary economy, with a third lived via close relationship to a Timebank and the first or last third lived in http:/Twitter.com/gifteconomics 



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Please note that when I've emailed some of the above text and links, it has been interpreted as “trying to sell me something”!! 

Given the opportunity to respond to this “ouchy” judgement, I would seek an agreed rephrasing that as “Lend-It-All Man”, I stand for generosity, mine and yours, asking all to reconsider how to bring about a more caring and sharing society, modelling new routes to common ownership as championed in “The 10 Pillars of Buddhism” by my profoundest teacher, Urgyen Sangharakshita.


Please connect, subscribe or follow - a quality first follower would enable so may of these ideas to gain traction; that quality "first follower" could be you!:

http://YouTube.com/toothpaste007
http://Facebook.com/paulcrosland1
http://twitter.com/paulcrosland
http://2066.info
http://iwantyouradvice.blogspot.com/2008/05/between-okehampton-crediton-devon.html

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It really helps my/(our?) project development if you Google videos about “Refuge Tree Woods” and  comment on one of my films from the first three pages of YouTube films:
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Some more background:

One of the Restorative Justice books I edited: http://restorativejustice.pbworks.com/f/40_cases_final.pdf
The history of other key projects; click on links to my calendar, CV and some of my #CommunityDevelopment letters published in Newspapers: http://additionalinfo.blogspot.com
With this poem I (almost) close “Before we decompose”: https://youtu.be/fmALyCKIOZcz
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*RE “Think Tank Award Winning” - this includes leading the presentation that won the Social Innovation Camp award - judged by representatives from the Youth Justice Board, Police Improvement Agency and Prison Reform Trust - for the mobile/web app that best reduces youth crime & custody: https://youtu.be/HUkjV2JVRPs

“Brexit: An Uncivil Debate” reviewed

Review of the cultural, spiritual and healing potential of the drama: “Brexit: An Uncivil Debate”.


The fractious malaise of current times, underpinned by a lack of valuing and cultivating the skills of cross-tribe dialogue, action planning and review is the last thing I wish to perpetuate in reviewing the pithy drama: “Brexit: An Uncivil Debate”. It doesn’t even matter to me whether the key individual dramatised as the well-spring of the “leave” result, Dominic Cummings, was accurately portrayed. I do not wish to write about Benedict Cumberbatch’s acting for modern media is over-obsessed with actors etc rather than unfolding the themes to get at the underlying values and then holding these values up to the light of the standard of the highest an individual can become, which, for me, as a Buddhist, is a Buddha. First one needs to become a “true individual” and James Graham‘s drama was foremost for me a plausible account of what happened behind the scenes of the Brexit vote, showing the immense impact a “true individual” can make; in this case summarised as “the largest political upset since the fall of the Berlin Wall”.

I could just cut to the chase now and show that what we need for healing are more Dominics. I refer you to the work in Brazil etc of my friend Dominic Barter, recognised in the “Radical Efficiency” report as one of ten project leaders whose projects have cut through the conventional state/politician-led ways of working and found cheaper, more effective ways of working. Dominic Barter and Dominic Cummings (as portrayed in James Graham’s drama) are, for me, both archetypal examples of the application of the key concept in Stephen Covey’s culminating work, which added a third dimension to his previous blockbuster of living and working from deep spiritual values (The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People). Covey’s swansong work was “The Eighth Habit”, which all too gliby can be summarised as “Find Your Voice and Help Others Find Theirs”. For me, this ideology of how to empower people was the strapline underpinning the drama “Brexit: An Uncivil Debate”. The tragedy of what happens when people rally round the concept of “Take Back Control” only to have Westminster politics undermine the kind of Brexit they had mythologised was the closing of this drama (set in 2020, when Dominic  was being held to account in a fictional Independent Review of the Referendum); and the rolling of the credits was preceded by endnotes on Cambridge Analytica and another company engaged in “creative data use”(my phrase, seeking a better one), the funders and the election of Donald Trump.

 To enhance this review, I may well follow the link to watch the programme on Channel 4 and pull out the quote from Dominic about how poor a form of politics a Referendum is, as it creates a false ‘black and white’, polarising much more nuanced matters to be worked through collectively. If you are watching the programme, I’d be grateful for your pulling this out, for me.

One of the compliments I value most highly in my 3.5 year relationship with my partner, who, like me, is not ashamed to declare her vote as having been Remain, as she sat watching Dominic ‘own’ the managing board that was attempting to sack him is that few people could handle a meeting like that but that I was the only person my partner knew who could do what Dominic did in this meeting; no spoiler alerts needed –but watch it if you ever intend to plan a coup or make any difference in the world (#Textbook).

What I take away from a night reflecting on this drama is the importance for healing dialogue of engaging respectfully with that theme that galvanised so many, and for which "Europe" (however understood) was just a symbol: Take Back Control. My intention dialoguing with Brexit voters is to talk more about the wish for and techniques of community empowerment. As for dialogues with the "rabble rousers", some as bizarre to me as Jacob Rees Mogg (to whom I was simply polite on my last encounter), I'm wondering how they can be spoken to more effectively in service of "Good Will To All Men"? (NB It was Christmas Day when I had my poignant hour with Jacob Rees Mogg…)


The Buddhist movement to which I belong runs retreats entitled  “What the World Needs Now”, all of which arrive –spoiler alert- at a very different answer to the chorus of John Lydon (formerly Johnny Rotten)in his song Shroom. 

The political and economic (and; dare I say ecological/spiritual) upheaval indicated by the Brexit vote has decades to run its course (which fits nicely alongside my plug to focus your energies as I attempt to on http://2066.info). My greatest of many mentors, Sangharakshita, effectively said that what we need are whole communities of “true individuals”, more Dominic Cummingses and Dominic Barters etc etc, not less: From FreeBuddhistAudio.com please absorb “Evolution or Extinction?” and absorb and live this template for how we get out of this Brexit / Climate Change / power in the hands of e.g. Donald Trump, Vladimir Putins... Once this teaching is observed, and it will take decades, my greatest fear is voiced well in the Leonard Cohen song “First We Take Manhattan”:

“You know the way to stop me, but you don’t have the discipline”.