Conspiracy literally means 'to breathe together'. What is causing us to inhale such a complex mix of vaporous ideas right now? Are these 'voodoo histories' being written wilfully or are they a perhaps understandable response to fear and uncertainty? And how do these 'double binds' of inextricable impossibilities influence the way we receive information and shape our intention?

As always we begin with what caught our attention this week

Ed - The House of Beautiful Business - The Great Wave and their principles of Intimacy, playfulness and surrender…’Only those who let go have both hands free’:  https://livingroomsessions.house/previous-sessions 

Collective Psychology Project: ‘This too shall pass: Mourning Collective Loss in the time of Covid-19’ the world’s biggest psychological experiment https://www.collectivepsychology.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/This-Too-Shall-Pass.pdf 

Exploring ancestral wisdom (why, uncomfortable truths, ways forward) r.e. Apocalypse (unveiling), Restoration (rupture) & Emergence (birth of the new) myths…

8 lessons about grief: embrace it, it will get worse before it gets better, more collective grief to come, grief is not an equaliser, we need to grieve together, learn how our ancestors grieved, new rituals & practices, loss is natural...telling stories...

Dougald – Simon McBurney & Complicité’s The Encounter, available for streaming until Friday

Conspiracy theories… Patrick Farnsworth – Facebook post , his podcast Last Born In The Wilderness:

“We are witnessing things fall apart as we speak. And the more you believe this is some Deep State/One World Government plot to force us all to get microchipped or vaccinated or whatever, the more it shows how in denial of this fact you really are. There’s no f*****g plan, at least not really. It’s all crisis management to serve short-term profit motives in a socioeconomic system designed to expand infinitely. That program is reaching its logical limits on a planet that is finite, and much of what we are witnessing is a part of that reality. 

It requires a great deal of humility to see it for what it is. The most well resourced institutions and individuals in this time are scrambling to manage these cascading changes for their own ends, and many of them are doing poorly at it, believe it or not. I imagine it’s comforting in some way to believe this is under control, that there is a plan here, but there really isn’t. And that’s okay, because that’s the way it’s always been, and always will be. It’s our blindness and hubris that says otherwise.”

David Aaranovitch’s ‘Voodoo Histories’: https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/108/1087014/voodoo-histories/9780099478966.html

‘The Cultivation of Conspiracy’, Illich

David Fuller – Medium post, Cashing In On Covid 

Medical Nemesis/Limits to Medicine – http://www.darkpharma.nl/uploads/7/3/2/8/7328594/medical-nemesis-ivan-illitch.pdf 

Ben Chijioke aka ‘Ty’: https://tymusic.co.uk/ 

Barney Glaser & Anselm Strauss, ‘Awareness of Dying’ (1965)

Centre for the Study of Existential Risk https://www.cser.ac.uk/

Sir Martin Rees’ ‘Our Final Hour?’: https://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/18/books/it-was-fun-while-it-lasted.html

Jon Alexander and the New Citizenship Project his Medium blog:  https://medium.com/@jonjalex/johnsons-message-is-very-deliberate-and-very-dangerous-here-s-how-to-combat-it-d336cae96348

Christos Galanis – ‘Health, Wholeness and Death Amidst the Coronavirus Pandemic’ https://medium.com/@chris.english.classes/health-wholeness-and-death-amidst-the-coronavirus-pandemic-60e7822bf0f

Emily Stewart on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/activity-6665364730208755713-NfAa 

Intention matters...it would be a terrible irony if in seeking a common breath together, we were suffocated by misinformation, in seeking simple but wrong solutions we didn’t heal but rather opened wounds,  and in seeking to prolong life we missed it’s true purpose?