Relearning Political Community; Relearning Economic Community; Relearning Spiritual Community
-The greater potential for our well-being of political, economic & spiritual community drives Paul Crosland to stand in general elections & to write the “Relearning PCECSC trilogy“(or #PeskyTrilogy for short):Volume 1 - The Myth Of The Heartless Tory; Vol 2 - The Pioneering 108 Vagabond Custodians preparing for The Festival Of The New Society 2066; Vol 3 - Politics As A Spiritual Practice. These books will form the shares in “Refuge Tree Woods” where we gather to refine our organic plot…
During ‘The Interview’ 30th March 2025 with ex-Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, Laura K commented/asked:
In the last ten years there has, alongside lots of turmoil in the UK, there’s been a lot of changes in our culture and how we talk to each other. There’s been a speeding up of conversation, if you like, that is often more vitriolic. Is that something that you’ve observed? Is that something that you worry about?
Justin Welby replied:
Yes, The biggest challenge long-term this country faces is social cohesion. Whether you are in favour, or against, or neutral we are in the top two or three, possibly the most diverse nation on Earth. That has happened in half a century. And the challenge of that is working out ‘who we are’ and ‘where we find our values’. People are feeling that instinctively. We saw those dreadful riots last summer. Roughly 5,000 people were involved in the riots; 20,000 in the clean-up. People want a cohesive society where we know who we are, what we value and where we are going. This is where the church plays its role.
LK: You wrote about social media last year ‘We can hate at a distance’ and because of the intimacy of a tweet or a blog post that intimacy cuts into us. Do you think we rush to judge now?
JW: I think we rush to judge. The first question one hears on most interviews is ‘Are you going to resign?’…. I think there is a rush to judgment, an immense distrust of institutions and there’s a point where you need institutions to hold society together. I’m not talking about safeguarding here but there is an absence of forgiveness.
The long game for #PaulCroslandIndependentCandidate
To be clearer about my political ambitions than I’ve ever been before -& some are only just emerging- I’m squaring myself up for a #BuddhistFight with SuellaBraverman, who could easily become the Marine Le Pen of British Politics. When I write of #RelearningSpiritualCommunity and seeking #JerusalemInAlbion , the blessed United Kingdom (Albion) with the best possible social contract may prove to be more Islamic than Christian for I struggle to understand on what basis some commentators presume traditional English(Christian) ways to be the best? I am, however, excluding a Hindu solution -unless it can free itself from the apartheid of caste- which would be some squaring of a circle.
Encouraged by my greatest teacher, #UrgyenSangharakshita, into a study of #ComparativeReligion I’ve found a very lazy, but effective methodology, which is to listen for one faith singing the praises of another. Within my own Triratna practice this has most strongly come across in #TriratnaAssociate #TriratnaPadmavajra’s championing (& singing) #Sufism & in much I’ve heard of both brotherhood & sisterhood in Islam. Where Christianity has most touched my Buddhist teachers (eg Alan Wallace) & other faiths seems to be in Christ’s words on the cross: “Forgive Them For They Know Not What They Do.”
From the sublime to the mundane, this equates to the #PaulCroslandHashtag #CircumnambulateTheElephant because human life seems mostly to be lived at the #MindReactive (rather than #MindCreative) level and the perception of eg someone standing for election will be like that of the proverbial blind men reaching out to touch an elephant and deciding on it’s nature based simply on the first touch.
In the 2019 General Election, I printed (via Fast Print, St Leonards) 60,000 leaflets (A3 folded down to A5) so that one could be delivered to every one of the 56,400 addresses known to the Royal Mail.
This cost (over £6k) was borne by Mediation Support Ltd; donations to future printing costs welcome here.
In the 2024 General Election only 108 of the Campaign Leaflet were printed (on 7th June 2024); 108 being a Buddhist lucky number:
Thank you to all who sent an email clarifying the policy that you most want advanced by your MP in relation to the July 4th 2024 General Election.
I am in the process of compiling these emails into an online spreadsheet, currently showing the first 103 lobbying requests from 40 different causes, the most popular (19 of the first 103 emails) being from constituents writing in solidarity with the Palestinian Solidarity Campaign:
When I have completed the inputting into the offline spreadsheet (estimated 22nd July 2024) then the summary results will be presented in a few paragraphs by my updating this blog post.
To clarify further my non-attendance as the returning Independent Candidate, my email autoreply stated:
“ As regards the constituency hustings I hereby ask the organisers to set out a chair for me and to read out this statement:
"“I’ve gone away from the 5thDec2019 #HowlingHustings#HowlingHustings into a series of Quaker Meetings where an hour communicates a deepening understanding and drawing together of each person’s (often adversity-forged) testimony. I would like there to be space in the hustings just to
silently reflect on the universal needs/values being communicated or frustrated in our different ideas about how to deepen democracy in a much damaged/pilfered state. Pilfered because even interrupting is
“taking the not given”.
I ask the hosts of all this election’s hustings to allocate the time they would have allocated to me in relation to each question instead to silence.
Whilst I will not be there to clutter that sacred space whilst you sort between the representatives of political parties, I will post a sign to be held up during the silences. Thank you”
As I made a contribution to the 5th December 2019 hustings which has been much valued, I invite you to listen to the first 10 minutes (or more!):
I'm known for having a sometimes lengthy auto-reply to my email address, encouraging people to follow-up various links in order to make more informed choices about how we might relate.
NB The "Paul Crosland Hashtag" used to describe the importance of not mistaking one aspect of another for the whole is #CircumnambulateTheElephant
(My email address is advertised in election times here)
& here's the 2024 Election auto-reply in all it's ....:
“Trust those (in politics) who do most to get their opponents’ voices heard”
(#TTIPWDMTGTOVH)
****************
Most correspondence received by this email address relates to my candidacy as prospective parliamentary candidate for Hastings & Rye:
If you voted in the constituency at the last general election -12th December 2019- regardless of whether you "Put A Cross For Crosland", thank you for subscribing to democracy. I presume we all agree that "We could do better?"
To everyone emailing if I stand for x or y, after the election in order to move forward on your agenda -or at least make it more visible- I intend to summarise the requests received in a Google Spreadsheet then embedded into the 2066.uk website (AKA additionalinfo.blogspot.com).
What helps greatly is if you indicate which government department you understand to be in charge of your issue of great concern.
Asking a mediator -approaching three decades of service- to take sides may only produce the reply from me:
“I’m on the side of everyone getting their needs met and how to achieve that nonviolently.”
Three Questions:
1) Why would you want an opinionated MP - when you could elect a facilitator #BeyondPolarisationInPolitics & #MoveForwardMoreTogether?
2) What do you make of this article that I wrote with a Centre For Peaceful Solutions colleague in the aftermath of the #HowlingHustings (5th December 2019); an article from me having been requested by the Hastings Independent Press, this one was rejected; reasons not given:
3) Whether this YouTube film from Hastings Pier, accompanied by my electoral agent, Patrick Glass, might prompt you to joina #PaulCroslandZoom to contribute your #GrassrootsManifesto (4-10 points) towards the #ConvergentConstituencyManifesto?
Since you may well have mailed me to advance a particular policy agenda & since I am not standing as part of a political party, bear with me please whilst I share my thinking to date on how we form policy together.
Running until 24th July 2024 (& resuming before 2025) there are a series of 5.45pm Zoom conference video-calls; I'll be letting into the Zoom conference calls anyone who has sent a policy proposal, their name and their address (which I keep confidential). The page with the link is the calendar page of my blog; the teleconference archaically called "Alobhin Special Please attend to discuss not only the policy matter on which you initially emailed, but your own 4-10point "Grassroots Manifestoes"; what’s most important to you? Here I encourage people to dream big. The nuts and bolts of the Dream Cycle -a "Find Your Power" methodology by Chris Johnstone- are as simple as "Dream, Plan, Do, Review". It will be helpful if you identify which government department(S) would most likely be responsible for enacting the change(s) that you seek.
My work henceforth is to advocate for what you want & bring my (& my associates’) mediation skills to bear. If I had another windfall I would spend it on bringing people together towards establishing a ConvergentConstituencyManifesto and I wonder why social media isn’t used more in this way?
NB Links to my 5 channels of social media (occasional) output are as listed on https://whocanivotefor.co.uk/person/117120/paul-crosland & please note that the bottom link is your oppoprtunity to contribute to the costs of Mediation Support Ltd's work in (y)our constituency
As I made a contribution to the 5th December 2019 hustings which has been much valued, I invite you to listen to the first 10 minutes -or more?- of the on-stage-recording I made & which is part of https://YouTube.com/PaulCroslandRefugeTreeWoods
What does your #GeneralElection2024Soundtrack sound like?
I have put together a series of tracks that remind me of themes of the campaigns or as a form of decompression from this, at times, trying time.
From the following soundtrack (which includes political commentators, including myself and the man who was my oldest (ie going back to school days) friend, #ChrisGidlowAuthorAndHistorian; I say "was" because he has broken off all communication as a result of my standing again as an Independent Candidate. Recorded in Covid-19 days, the discussions in this playlist of note centre around a New Statesman article about Progressive Politics by Tony Blair & centre around Chris working through his 9 or 10 point Grassroots manifesto -the film listing his 10 points is just a minute and a half long; the film explaining his workings -22 minutes.
“One of the #WouldBeWizardsOfHastings produced the #ElectionLeafletfor the #TTIPWDMTGTOVH#TTIPWDMTGTOVH campaign that is pinned to the masthead on
Since Channel4 news covered the #ChangingHastings agenda on Sunday23rdJune,
part of my answer to the housing question- as I stated in the 5thDecember2019 #HowlingHustings is #CommunityService of 5-7hrs a week for all home owners over 50.
Expect me to produce on the blog a detailed account of the policy proposals received during the #PaulCreoslandIndependentCandidate 2024 General Election campaign.
My company, Mediation Support Ltd, (Tel 07807-066-202) provides this mediation theory playlist to boost your capacity to bring goodwill and co-operation to difference/conflict:
…the general direction of travel in the 50percentToElectAnMP campaign is towards Convergent Facilitation
Just to give everyone a heads up on part of the #PaulCroslandIndependentCandidate election strategy besides the ask for silence in my place at the non-attended hustings and someone holding up the hashtag …. !!!
- the video content I’m producing at least twice a day is mostly along these lines:
i.e recounting restorative cases I’ve compiled in a (free online) 2003 book.
To any interview requests my standard reply is:
“I’m very interested, in accordance with how experienced you are in convergent facilitation. Please tell me of times when your role was to help political opponents find common ground?”
My therapist pointed out to me how well-furnished I was -even before I became 19 stone(!)- with mentors. Some of them, -most I suppose- have written books. I visualise them in a circle around me, giving advice. There’s a massive shortage, in my opinion, of people asking for advice. When I put it on a T-shirt -I WANT YOUR ADVICE- and cycled from Lands End to John O Groats (2009?), stickers in hand with my “I don’t know best, we know better” message, it was a life changing experience as well as my first blog: http://iwantyouradvice.blogspot.com/
Though Russell Brand wasn’t a mentor, he was a conduit to many quality mentors, the most recent example that I followed up further being good old EckhartTolle* (of the “Power Of Now” mindfulness fame). Above that, Russell was, to me, a would be interviewer just as Dominic Cummings was a would-be enabler; but that’s a story for later. My plotted route to that elusive Russell Brand interview was via a series of interviews I began in the lockdown that followed hard on my standing for the first time in a general election; the interview series (incomplete) is called “Politics On A Platform” and only one of the three interviews that, in my mind, would lead to the interview by Russell Brand, is recorded & uploaded**.
I write this on the Tuesday following the Channel 4 airing of the Russell Brand Dispatches expose (alongside the Times); how thoroughly Brand, as the media are now increasingly calling him on the slippery slope of de-humanisation, has been strung like a chicken and dispatched.
One of the books I hope to introduce you to in this book is called “Inside the No”*** and uses the terminology “The Terrorist Line” to indicate a continuum that starts with mocking. The more the other isn’t heard as they would like to be heard the greater the likely escalation of violence by the unheard. If the Russell Brand demonisation is an attempt to discredit his lines of enquiry since key influencers of the old-fashioned political left variety fell out of love with his work****, then the post-Brexit learning about hearing each other across political divides to prevent catastrophe is once again lacking, and the consequences….
The cloak of anonymous “Alice” (whose virginity was taken by Russell Brand when she was 16 and he was 30) being mouthed yesterday in Woman’s Hour by an actor is a perfect ruse(?) for a well-scripted rubbishing of the avenues of enquiry that Russell Brand was following. Thus “Alice” said, in response to the question “What is your response to his response?” “First of all I think it’s insulting and I think it’s laughable that he would even imply that this is some kind of mainstream media conspiracy. He’s not outside the mainstream: he did a Universal Movies picture last year; he did Minions -a children’s movie; he’s very much part of the mainstream media. He just happens to have a YouTube channel where he talks about conspiracy theories to an audience that laps it up, and, it may sound cynical but, I do think that he was building himself an audience for years of people that would then have great distrust of any publication that came forward with allegations. He knew it was coming for a long time. Then as for him denying that anything non-consensual happened that’s not a surprise to me; these men always deny that any of these allegations brought to them. I knew he would. He didn’t deny that he had a relationship with a 16 year old.“.
I ask you these three questions RE Russell Brand:
In what ways have you supported/ignored the demonisation of Russell Brand?
What does your answer to q1 say about you?
What shift in discourse do you reckon would be the consequence of truly acknowledging the truth in this #Solzenitzin Quote: “If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”
To finish this writing for now with the words of Alice again that echo my intent as well: “I hope that we can have conversations that will lead to protecting people in the future”.
***Myra Lewis (mentored by Arnie Mindel) is the author; her TED talk is in this “Walk Towards The Conflict” playlist compiled by my company, #MediationSupportLtd:
