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Hello and good day all... Richard here, UK ex-pat, currently based in East Africa. Primarily, I've identified the path I will take with the insight my time on this site has given me. So I'm clear-headed, I feel, and well past the early stages in the developments called for. I'm not fixed, though. So, it's still open, and I invite discourse on any subjects I might raise. There are, I think, distinct and detectable levels of freewill just as there are levels of becoming. This statement has a broad reach and wide implications, I realise. For instance, I might be saying that I am not a democrat - and to an extent that is true. I've personally been happy many times ceding power to others. It's the suitability of those others to take power over me which matters, I believe; and it is a wasteful distraction to get hung up over the principle of absolute suffrage. Such a hierarchy is overtly ideological - in the pejorative sense - in my view, and can and has led to problems, huge problems at that, as well as causing countless squandered opportunities. In that sense, democracy is a faint; and is too often used by those who know its shortcomings, and who have a willingness to exploit them, to control and to manipulate others who do not. How can true democracy be convened in the midst of such basic inequalities? I know I'm moving quickly with these points, but I think this is the locus of a whole set of pervasive and intrinsic problems, really, of consciousness itself. We are told over and over that life is about the search for meaning - that is, some kind of something in all this apparent nothingness. If we accept that there is nothing at the heart of being, then the more we learn to love and embrace that emptiness surely the more natural we will feel as a species? I'm not making an indirect pitch for Buddhism and its ilk, by the way. All my appetites are firmly Western Capitalist. I'm simply looking for opportunities to reconfigure the seeming negativity of the void, and its supposed meaninglessness and fatality, as the fulcrum of being, into something we should regard and include with consciousness per se. The void, that is to say, is not extramural to being, it is, in contrast, wholly intrinsic to it; in other words, being is simultaneously comprised of something and nothing. The point is an ontological one, therefore.

I welcome the opportunity to speak to, and to learn and grow with people from this site.

Much love x