Writings :: The Letter Series :: Ascension Discourse on Love :: Resurrection. The Conclusion. Amera Ziganii Rao

The Last Queen of Atlantis (Artwork) 

Amera Ziganii Rao © Digital Darkroom Art

Writings :: The Letter Series :: Ascension Discourse on Love :: Resurrection. The Conclusion. Amera Ziganii Rao 

New World (Generic and Slow Paced) Training. For both Men and Women. Clearing the Underbelly. Amera Ziganii Rao 

The Times 

Mad Women: The Other Side of Life on Madison Avenue in the ’60s and Beyond by Jame Maas 

You don’t get to be an advertising legend without knowing a good promotional opportunity when you see one. Jane Maas was one of the few female “creatives” in the male-dominated world of ad men on Madison Avenue in the Sixties and Seventies. Now in her late seventies, her memoir, Mad Women: The Other Side of Life on Madison Avenue in the ’60s and Beyond, is clearly piggybacking on the success of AMC’s Mad Men, which is about to enter its fifth series. From the title to the cover, with its martini-sipping, cigarette-smoking silhouette, there’s no disguising the opportunism.

But don’t let that put you off. This is a fascinating book, and although it has surface similarities with the stylish, sexist universe of city swingers and high rollers that is Mad Men, it is much saner. All the elements are there — the drinking, the sex, the witty one-liners; but there is a serious side to it too, one that paints a detailed, nuanced portrait of a social and cultural landscape undergoing seismic change.

Maas has a gimlet eye for detail, razor-sharp powers of observation — and she’s funny, in a very dry martini sort of way. Open this book at any page and you will find some flick of viper wit; there are no shortage of wry tales about philandering colleagues with handy offices and executive couches on which to seduce breathless secretaries. Where she’s really strongest, however, is when it comes to her insights on career and motherhood.

As one of that pioneering generation of women who consciously set out to have both, she has a glorious lack of guilt about the whole business: no hand-wringing here. She cheerfully recounts, for example, how she liked to feed her family Swanson TV dinners from compartmented metal trays. “Each person had his own darling little tray stand, just big enough to hold one TV dinner,” she remembers. Their favourite was the turkey.

Early on she explains how she never regarded her decision to carry on working after having children as anything other than the obvious thing to do. How ironic, then, that the National Organisation for Women twice named her as winner of the “Most Obnoxious Commercial of the Year Depicting Women”. Here was a woman dismantling sexism in the workplace from the inside out, being slated for her antifeminist output.

In this respect, her account of the challenges she faced is both candid and revealing. From her boss’s attitude towards pregnant women (they had to stop work as soon as they began to show, so that the sight of their swollen bellies didn’t offend their male colleagues) to the response from other mothers and the school to her decision to pursue a career (“they both regarded me with suspicion”), she faced daily challenges just to survive.

Her honesty, too, is refreshing. Unlike so many career women who pretend that the whole complicated business of work/childcare just sort of happens by osmosis, she clearly recognises the invaluable contribution of her housekeeper Mabel, without whom nothing would have been possible. Maas skedaddled after drop-off and relied completely on Mabel; without her there would have been no glittering career.

She also recognises the unerring support of her husband, Michael, who was proud of her achievements and as supportive as he could be (within the cultural constraints of the time: his work naturally took precedence over hers) and her boss and mentor, David Ogilvy. Outside the world of advertising, however, there were plenty who still needed convincing.

At her first meeting with American Express after her promotion to the account, the CEO “shook my hand warmly, escorted me to the table and pulled out a chair ... ‘Did you forget your steno pad, dear?’ he asked.” Later when she is appointed president of another agency, she arrives at her new office to find the movers arranging furniture. As she dithers over where to put the desk, one of them says, “Jeez, lady, why don’t you wait for your boss to come in and let HIM decide where he wants his desk.”

Mad Women: The Other Side of Life on Madison Avenue in the ’60s and Beyond by Jane Maas, Bantam, 228pp, £12.99. To buy this book for £10.99 visit thetimes.co.uk/bookshop or call 08452712134

New World (Generic and Slow Paced) Training. For both Men and Women. Clearing the Underbelly. Amera Ziganii Rao 

The Times 

Turning 40 marks the start of all female brilliance. Hannah Betts 

Forty-year-old model and bacchanalian partygoer Kate Moss has once again found herself on the receiving end of catty remarks regarding her age-appropriately haggard features. Her appearance at the Olivier Awards in a bun and Golden Girls-style pyjama suit, wittily accessorised by a 78-year-old (theatre impresario Michael White), provoked moues of outrage over her jowls, wrinkles and attempt at a Croydon facelift. “Get you for having had fun, looking your age and having the audacity to be out in public” was the general tenor. Moss, a woman whose face now serves as a frame for the world’s best airbrushing, can afford to be unbovvered.

Still, the prevailing feeling remains that women of a fortysomething vintage should probably stay at home, venturing out only with bags over their heads. And what tosh (in Timesian parlance)/toss (in Betts parlance) this is. As every schoolgirl is yet to discover, turning 40 marks the beginning of all female brilliance.

The wonderful Helen McCrory, 45, last weekend told a newspaper that age-wary wimmin should get a life. The actress elaborated: “I just think: ‘Sorry, love, but you’ve obviously got too much time on your hands’ . . . My self-worth is not tied up with how old I am or how much I weigh.” She added: “Actually, I’m looking forward to being 50. Because to me that’s when a woman is at the pinnacle of her femininity and her womanhood.”

Me too, Helen, me too! — even if I do not find myself allied to the hottest man on the planet, her (similarly) old man, Homeland’s Damian Lewis. At just turned 43, I bloody love being old. Onwards and upwards and all that. Life has genuinely never been better.

In the first instance, one finally stops being patronised by old gits because, hey, one is an old git oneself. In my early twenties said gits would tell me that I couldn’t possibly be teaching at Oxford; in my late twenties that I couldn’t possibly be a leader writer for The Times. When I was in my thirties they informed me that I had better get married and have children because otherwise my tiny female life would be incomplete. Well now they can’t tell me anything — because I’m old. Plus they’re all dead.

One has far less energy for emotional drama — one’s own and other people’s — and by God, aren’t things the better for it? You’ve learnt that people who tell you they love you on first meeting aren’t “amaaazing”, they’re mad. If you have children you have worked out how to deal with them. You have given up being angry with your parents, dropped all your most leech-like “friends” and are no longer concerned whether people like you. You probably don’t like them.

Damn it, one even looks better. At 40, my face may be slipping off a bit, but I know how to dress, apply slap, eat and the like. One is better at sex and better at life. One gets people, and the person one gets most is oneself. All the self-consciousness of youth slips away and in its place a resounding: “Sod it”.

Alas, for chaps, matters can be rather the reverse. After a lifetime of bullish lack of self-consciousness, the onset of baldness and paunch can prove rather lacerating. They may kid themselves that biological clocks are a female preserve, but their bodies testify to something different. All the social pressures women have finally learnt to swat away, chaps have become prey to without any of the acquired resources by way of under-eye concealer. It’s those poor, sagging fortysomething men one should feel sorry for.

New World (Generic and Slow Paced) Training. For both Men and Women. Clearing the Underbelly. Amera Ziganii Rao

The Times 

Travels with Mark Shand, the last adventurer. Don McCullin 

With the death of my friend Mark Shand we have lost one of the last great adventurers. A truly extraordinary traveller, he was from a different era. He reminded me of the great Victorian travellers like Sir Henry Stanley and Dr David Livingstone. He was incredibly strong, so we would walk day and night in the jungle, climbing hills and wading through rivers. You knew once you set out travelling with Mark Shand that you would get to your destination. He had enormous willpower.

I met Mark about 31 years ago when we were introduced over supper by a friend. I came away trying to figure out whether I could get on with him or not. He was complaining about a sore throat and I thought to myself: “I wonder if he’s as tough as he looks.” It turned out he was.

He invited me to his beautiful house in Bali. I went with my son, Alexander, who was 15 at the time. The idea was that the three of us would leave Bali and plough our way across Java and through Sumatra. It was an extraordinary journey.

We found an old fishing boat that took us across the ocean to the Mentawai islands off the west coast of Sumatra. There was a storm and we were taking on a lot of water and I thought we were doomed. I am quite good at detecting other men’s fear because I have seen it many times and I thought that Mark behaved incredibly nobly. We were afraid but we somehow tried to make out that we were not . Eventually the storm passed and we glided into port as if we had had a bad dream. Mark was the kind of man who would not allow himself to fail or lose face.

One of the most remarkable journeys we did was exploring Irian Jaya in New Guinea. We travelled up this dark Conradian river and encountered people who had a reputation locally for practising cannibalism. It was one of the scariest episodes of my life. One of the engines on our boat broke down and we were trapped. People were gradually getting around us and they were very sinister. We got on to a bank and made an introduction to them. We were white with fear. Eventually we managed to lash our boats together and made a hasty retreat.

On another occasion we were captured by Indonesian paramilitaries. I said to Mark that this was as dangerous as any situation I had been in. It was on a parallel with the experiences I have had in war zones. It would only have taken one person to squeeze that trigger on an M16 rifle and they would all have started. I felt very alarmed that at any given moment they would have pulled those triggers and murdered us. Mark was quite calm. 

I travelled with the writer Bruce Chatwin a couple of times but he wasn’t in the same league as Mark. I was much happier being with Mark because I knew that he had faced danger and didn’t crack up.

Mark was definitely searching to be recognised in some way or other and eventually he was when he bought Tara, an Indian elephant. He walked 600 miles with her from Orissa to the elephant market at Sonepur Mela. I joined them for the last 100 miles. It was an extraordinary thing to do and his book, Travels On My Elephant, made his name.

Once a seed was planted in Mark’s mind there was no way he was going to be distracted. He was single-minded and wanted people to believe he had the qualities to bring off the things he talked about. He didn’t dream a lot. He was an action man. That’s why he was so successful with Elephant Family, his conservation charity. He found his true niche and it was his willpower that drummed up these auctions and made people put their hands deeply into their pockets and raise an enormous amount. He knew that he had something in him, it just needed the right spark to bring the flame and the elephants conservation was the spark that produced the flame. It is such a tragedy that that flame has been snuffed out.

Mark was a posh public school boy. I was born at the extreme other end of the social scale. I think sometimes people called us the odd couple behind our backs. He found the differences between us challenging and attractive. When we travelled we used to fight like mad. One day in the jungle of the Mentawai islands I heard this terrific screaming on the trail ahead of me.

He was shouting at my son and I said: “Don’t shout at my son.” He shouted back and we said some rather unpleasant things to each other and both walked off in a huff. For the next two hours I didn’t say a word to him. We came to a ravine and I went over first on this slippery log and I held my stick out to Mark. He brushed it aside and when he got over he turned round and faced me and said: “I’m really sorry about that back there.” That was the mark of him. He was the type of person I was pleased to have as a truly close friend.

He always went out of his way to make sure that I got the photographs that I really wanted to get. He made my photographic life a priority on our trips.

On two occasions he was my best man: at my second wedding and at my third, to my current wife, Catherine, 12 years ago. He said: “I don’t mind doing it a second time but I’m not doing it again.” He introduced me to Catherine. His speech at my second wedding was disastrous because he made a mother-in-law joke and the mother-in-law had only died a few weeks before. It didn’t go down well.

Mark was a man who lived life to the full and he brought laughter and fun everywhere. He always used to shout at me in public “Hello darling!”, which I used to find embarrassing.

He was a man’s man, even though he had a reputation as being a lady killer, which he was. Most women found him extraordinarily attractive. He had an amazing physique and they couldn’t resist him. But he liked being among men because he could really let his hair down. I was always moaning to him about his smoking and he’d say: “Shut up, don’t go on about that any more for God’s sake.” He found me most irritating on that subject. His sister was the Duchess of Cornwall but he was very discreet and I think that it was wise. There was a funny moment when we were in India last year, staying at the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel in Mumbai. Two of the undermanagers came in and I could see Mark tensing at the dinner table. They were slightly cowering and bending and they said: “Good evening your excellency.”

They must have assumed that he needed some title. He said afterwards that they always addressed him like that. I said that I had enjoyed every minute of it. We were constantly taking the mickey out of each other.

He sent a text the other day saying “I am coming back from New York and I’d love to see you”.

The last time I saw him was on Boxing Day, which I spent with him and his sister and family in Dorset. We had a wonderful day.

He had had two hip problems and I am 16 years older than him and will be 79 this year. We would not have made great travellers for much longer — we would have had to rely on donkeys. But we were planning one more trip to see the festivals in Nagaland on the border of northeast India and Burma.

On the day he died I was in my dark room printing some pictures for a new book. I came out to make some tea and I got the phone call. I felt like I had been kicked in the stomach. I am now without my great friend. Having this travelling companion has been one of the most important things in my life.

I look back with great fondness on those days when I woke up in the jungle. I was always the sucker who made the early morning tea and I would nudge Mark and give him his tea and he would, rather begrudgingly, thank me.

It was pouring with rain and we knew we had to pack and walk in the wet. But looking back on it, what better life could you enjoy?

Don McCullin 

Times Leader 

Mark Shand lived like a lion, in the service of elephants 

Four centuries ago the fearless son of a Somerset clergyman walked nearly 5,000 miles to India on twopence a day. His name was Thomas Coryat and his travel notes were published in book form in 1618. By that time he was already dead — from dysentery in Surat the year before — but he had founded a school of travel writing distinguished by its wit, curiosity, low boredom threshold and high tolerance of pain. 

Coryat would inspire generations of explorers. Most were British and one was Mark Shand, whose death this week, like Coryat’s, came at a peak of personal fulfilment if not of fame.

Shand, in fact, did not seek fame. He sought adventure. He loathed boredom and loved life, and he lived it large. His impatience with the ordinary found perfect expression on the enormous, gently rocking back of Tara, whom he bought in Bhubaneshwar and cast as his leading lady in his first bestseller, Travels on my Elephant.

Tara was desperately skinny when Shand found her, and her species was endangered in the wild. He devoted the rest of his life to its salvation — not as a hand-wringer but as a showman. To raise money for his charity he auctioned giant painted model elephants in London and giant painted Fabergé eggs in New York. 

At a recent birthday party he was photographed with each arm round a member of his own species clad only in body paint.

Shand was the Prince of Wales’s brother-in-law and the great-grandson of Edward VII’s mistress. He dated President Kennedy’s daughter and sister-in-law and married a billionaire’s neice. Few of his admirers can match his connections or his craggy jawline, but all can aspire to his fearlessness and generosity. He died from a bang on the head after “one of the best evenings of my entire life”. A Times reader wrote: “A life well lived.” She surely spoke for many.

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/news/uk/article4073270.ece 

New World (Generic and Slow Paced) Training. For both Men and Women. Clearing the Underbelly. Amera Ziganii Rao

The Times

Hey, Blondie: Debbie Harry at 68

Twenty-seven years after he first interviewed her, the rock star, onetime heroin user and eternal peroxide blonde talks to William Leith

She’s not in a good mood. She shakes my hand with her manicured hand. Her hair is blonde at the front, with a lot of dark roots and whole hanks of dark hair at the back. This is how she likes it – it tells you that she’s a blonde bombshell, but also not exactly a blonde bombshell. She’s showing signs of age, but her face, with the skin stretched tight over her angular cheekbones, still looks dramatic, still beautiful. The smile, when it happens, is really quite something. But behind the pouting lips, the fetching overbite and the dainty nose, she seems unhappy. “It’s amazing how quickly people forget,” she says. “You can have your anonymity back again… You have to try harder to be famous these days.”

That was 1987. We were in a suite at the Savoy hotel. I could see that Debbie Harry was in a bad place, but I had no idea quite how bad. After a few years at the top, her band, Blondie, had fallen apart. Contractual issues had left them practically broke. Chris Stein, her lover, life partner and bandmate, had been seriously ill with pemphigus, a rare autoimmune disease. Now that he was recovering, their relationship, by far the most important in her life, had hit the rocks.

Harry and Stein were splitting up. She’d started to take heroin again. She’d quit before, and now she was trying to quit again. She was 41. She had no children. Having been adopted herself, she knew she would soon have to make a big, scary decision – whether or not to find out who her real parents were – before it was too late. On top of all that, the only thing people wanted to talk about was how beautiful she was – or, worse, how she wasn’t quite as beautiful as she had been. Meanwhile, Madonna was riding high. Lady Gaga was just approaching her first birthday.

What I saw, sitting on that sofa, looking at her flat, mistrustful eyes, was that Debbie Harry’s career seemed to be evaporating fast. Her fame was dying. How does that make you feel, I asked. “I feel like a disposable lighter.”

Twenty-seven years later, we meet again. This time, checking her out, I’m aware that I shouldn’t be judging her on her looks, that, for good or ill, she’s spent a lifetime being judged on her looks. She sits down. She has the same mistrustful eyes. Blondie have just got back together again, for the fourth – or is it fifth? – time. There’s a new album, Ghosts of Download. Great title. It’s dreamy and experimental. Rather good, I think. Not the scratchy punk-pop of Blondie’s first incarnation, or that pulsating TK Disco thing they did for a while, overlaid with Harry’s nasal, and somehow perfect, voice that got them the big hits. Now, these new tracks…

But really, I know you want to know what she looks like. Well, she’s 68. She’s had work done (“getting rid of sags” is how she has put it). She looks somehow otherworldly. But that’s how she looked in 1987, up close. With photogenic people, it’s the photographs that look real. I sit opposite her, fiddling with my recorder. Her nerves make me nervous.

She’s wearing a floaty blouse and fashiony brothel-creeper shoes. We make small talk. “I’m all prettied up,” she says. I talk about our last meeting, when Stein came into the room, blurted out lots of interesting stuff and rushed out again. “Oh, that’s Chris,” says Harry. He’d seemed manic, and talked about a man shooting himself on camera and about bodies in news footage. Then he put a scarf on, kissed Harry on the cheek, and disappeared. “See ya, honey,” he said. This was the time when, they said later, their relationship was becoming less sexual.

Together they reformed Blondie in 1996, and have been in a working relationship ever since. They are, Harry has said, “sympatico”. Stein, 63, is now married with two daughters; Harry is single and childless.

When she was 4, her parents, Catherine and Richard Harry, told her she was adopted, which meant that there was always something for the young Harry to wonder about. For a time, in her teens, she fantasised that she was the lost daughter of Marilyn Monroe.

“They explained it to me in a really nice way,” says Harry. “It made me feel quite special somehow. I sometimes attribute my, uh, adventurous nature to that. I’m the kind of person who’s looking. I have an open mind about things. It didn’t present me with any borders, like I’m just like my mother and I’m going to be like her. I always felt like I really was a different person, and I didn’t feel that was the most comfortable place for me to be.”

“That” – her parents’ world – was a suburban house in Hawthorne, New Jersey. Respectable, safe, careful, not quite poor. Richard was a salesman of woven labels. He caught the train every morning. Catherine was a housewife. She was conventional, always trying to get her daughter to wear modest clothes and subscribe to her suburban ideal.

“That was what she knew,” says Harry. “She thought it was safe.” Catherine wanted Harry to find a man, settle down, have a family. Harry wanted to wear black. She liked looking “tough”. She was rebellious, an early adopter of sex, had lots of flings. She wanted to be a beatnik, an identity she has, I think, never stopped striving for.

Born in 1945, just four years younger than Bob Dylan, she wanted to join the family of refuseniks that was forming all over America, particularly in New York. “The dream was to be a performer,” she says. “An artist of some sort. Basically, what I wanted was to be a part of… to lead an artistic life. I didn’t want to stay in a small town.”

She didn’t. After high school, Harry went to Centenary College, a small liberal arts school in Hackettstown, New Jersey, then headed for New York after she graduated. She was 20. Now, she thought, she had a chance to hit the folk scene, to find her creative self, maybe as a painter or a singer. And it might have worked. But it didn’t. It turned into a disaster.

I ask her about that time. “I guess it was pretty… free,” she says, taking her time over the answer. “I had a lot of jobs. Getting my s*** together, as it were. I lived in the East Village. I had a nice little apartment, $75 a month. I managed to pay the rent, hung out with my friends, went to see bands, had boyfriends.” She was in a folk group called the Wind in the Willows – 23 years old, long brown hair, centre parting, kaftan. It was 1968.

Harry went to Woodstock. She also worked as a waitress in Max’s Kansas City, where a lot of creative types washed up, including artists Robert Rauschenberg, Willem De Kooning and Andy Warhol, photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, poet Allen Ginsberg, novelist William Burroughs, musician Lou Reed and a very camp band called the New York Dolls, whose lead singer, David Johansen, was Harry’s boyfriend. But oh, the drugs! “Well, the whole period was very druggy,” she says. “I think the Sixties were very druggy, don’t you?”

I was too young, I say.

“Well, I’m sure that, historically, you’re aware of that,” she says.

Different from now?

“Yes. Primarily because nobody really knew exactly how toxic these drugs were. And how dangerous they were. I don’t even know if people really understood about alcoholism, what addictions were.”

Was she addicted?

“I think I had an addiction, but I don’t think I had a major addiction.”

This was heroin?

“You name it. Drugs were social. So there you go; I was a social person. I guess I was a part of that world. I don’t know. Um. I don’t know. I never really had enough money to become seriously addicted. I mean, we just lost a fantastic actor [Philip Seymour Hoffman] to heroin. So tragic. What a brilliant guy. I had no idea. No idea. Now, see, that’s an addiction. I was never shooting up then.”

Did you never shoot up at all?

“No, no. I mean, I have shot up. But not then. Not back then.”

We enter a conversational cul-de-sac. I try to work out if she was shooting up when I interviewed her in 1987, and she tries to change the subject. “Why is it so important?” she asks. Then she says that, during the Blondie period, she wasn’t doing drugs. “I tried to do cocaine, and it really made me sick. I hated it. I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t smoke pot because it made me paranoid and I’d forget all the lyrics. I was pathetic. I was a pathetic, uninteresting rock’n’roll person. You’re expected to run rampant and be crazy. And I think that my crazy periods were really nothing to do with my career.”

Back to 1969, the first crazy period. Harry did drugs. She went to Woodstock. She did drugs. She worked as a bunny girl at the Playboy mansion. She did drugs. Then she went back to her parents’ house in the suburbs to clean up. Months later, she headed back to New York, where she sang in a not very successful girl band called the Stilettos. Still she pressed on, beyond her mid-twenties into her late twenties.

One night, a slightly nerdy Jewish guy with long hair and eye make-up turned up to see her band. This was Chris Stein. The son of two political activists from Brooklyn, he really was a beatnik. They became friends, then lovers. They formed a band, Angel and the Snake. Then they formed another band, which they called Blondie, because guys used to shout, “Hey, Blondie!” at Harry in the street.

Blondie, the band, weren’t taken seriously at first. Then they had some hits in the late Seventies, and a few mega-hits in the early Eighties. It was Harry and Stein, drummer Clem Burke and usually two other guys who kept changing. There was a lot of tension in the band, because everybody wanted to be a serious musician, but the world at large was only interested in Harry.

From the beginning, it was about Harry, and how gorgeous she was. Stein took a publicity shot of her in 1976 for Punk magazine. She was “Punkmate of the month”. She was naked apart from a guitar. That was the start. She was always at the front. It was always about her face – in the magazines, on the album covers. Andy Warhol made one of his famous screen prints of Harry’s face. “Certainly,” she has said, “50 per cent of my success is based on my looks. Maybe more.”

Of course, there’s the attitude. This was specific and unique to the times. She was beautiful, but not girlie, like lots of female singers. But she wasn’t mannish either, like, say, Patti Smith. Maybe, as some people have said, she “ironised” or even “deconstructed” the concept of the glamorous blonde singer. Or maybe…

As I’m thinking this, something happens, and it’s something I remember from all those years ago. Her lips part, she bares her teeth, her face lights up, the years fall away. It’s an awesome smile, not far from the fierce look you see her doing in videos, at her height, the expression in her eyes slightly zonked; a smile that says, “I’m definitely not a victim.” So yes, it was the attitude. But what made people buy into that attitude – and buy 40 million albums – was, on some level, the looks.

“Some days,” she says now, “I look at myself and think, ‘Huh, don’t look, don’t look, give it up.’ As I get older, I sort of think, ‘Oh God, you know, you’ve been relying on your looks now for a while. And you have to make sure that there’s something else.’”

Did she rely on her looks?

“I think to some degree, sure, because it’s part of showbiz. It’s part of what I do. Obviously, I use what I’ve got.”

I take her back to the scene, in New York, and the bands that came out of lower Manhattan in the mid-Seventies, the American New Wave. She was the beautiful one; some people didn’t like it at first, but there it was. You really stood out, I say.

“I thought Johnny Thunders was great-looking. And Richard Hell. David Byrne.”

Well, sort of.

Looking like she does is, she says, “very advantageous. But sometimes it can be a detriment. I think down through history, when women were considered property, beauty was a commodity. Men are judged on power. And women are usually discriminated against in the area of having any brains at all.”

In 1987, she said, “At my age, it’s more practical to be... diversified.” She was trying to break into acting. She’d had a part in an episode of a TV show called Tales from the Dark Side, and another one called Crime Story. “I play a bimbette,” she said. She had high hopes. Later, she was in John Waters’ Hairspray, and played a waitress in James Mangold’s excellent indie movie Heavy. 

Other stuff, too. She’s not bad. But her acting career never quite took off; there are not many supporting roles for beautiful women.

She never found her birth parents in the end, but she did try. “I found out a small bit of information,” she says. “I don’t know how much of it is credible. Today, it’s much better. You get to know exactly who your parents were, what they were like, medical history. After a certain point, you have to let it go. What’s the point?

“I looked into reaching out to my mother, but it didn’t work out. It wasn’t possible.”

She found out that her biological father had died. Which must have been a shock, I say. Harry says it wasn’t. She hadn’t known him. She can be very frank.

“It was like hearing that, you know, you read an obituary in a paper of some person, and you say, ‘Oh well.’ You know. It’s just like that. A name. And I didn’t even have a name.”

Thinking about this, she says, “I think there was a physical cloud left when I was parted from my mother. I was with her for three months, something like that. So I think that, as an infant, that must have been very traumatic. And I think that I’ve dealt with that. I think that there was some kind of core thing that was in my mind that I, as a child, you can’t articulate any of this. And it took a while for me to really sort of get to it.”

Did she never want children herself? “I don’t know what the term for it is, but I don’t think I ever really had the yearning that a lot of women have to have children. I think I might have been a good mother. But I might have been a terrible mother, too.”

And now she must carry on with what she does: making records, performing Ghosts of Download, and all the old hits – Heart of Glass, Atomic, Call Me – enacting the big smile, the bared teeth, being the woman who paved the way for Madonna and Lady Gaga, standing still while people bounce light off her cheekbones. I tell her I’ll see her in another 27 years. I’ll be getting on by then, I say.

“And I’ll be dead,” she says.

Blondie’s double album, Blondie 4(0) Ever, which includes their greatest hits and the new album Ghosts of Download, is released on May 12 

Blondie perform Rip Her to Shreds at CBGB, New York in previously unseen footage from an early gig in 1977. The full set is available as a Bonus DVD on the Special Edition of the new Blondie 4(0) Ever release 

New World (Generic and Slow Paced) Training. For both Men and Women. Clearing the Underbelly. Amera Ziganii Rao

The Times

Rita Ora: ‘Be as fierce and glamorous as you can’

Three No 1s, a part in 50 Shades, and a poem penned to her by Prince. No wonder she’s the girl of the moment

“You’ll never guess what happened!” I’d had a feeling that Rita Ora would know how to make an entrance and she doesn’t disappoint, tumbling into a members’ club in west London in a blur of haute couture and scatty charisma. “We had to run out of the car, because my sister couldn’t find parking, and there were like six paparazzi and they all followed us,” blurts Britain’s hottest pop star, who grew up around the corner from here. Ora recounts a chase through Portobello Market that sounds like something from A Hard Day’s Night: chaos, shouting, upturned stalls. “All the fruit just went everywhere,” she says, looking like she loved every second. 

“Because I grew up here, people were sort of like, ‘Don’t worry, we’ll protect you.’ ” She envelopes me in a hug and flops down in the booth. The fact that she’s 40 minutes late is suddenly ancient history.

As she stops for a few moments to breathe, I have a chance to take in what she’s wearing: sunglasses the size of small moons, black floppy hat draped in gold chains, beige smock by Stella McCartney (“Love a bit of Stells!”), flower-print Dolce & Gabbana thigh boots, a forest of tattoos. Heaven knows how the paps spotted her. Hours later the pictures are up on a newspaper site, further proof — alongside the three No 1s (Hot Right Now, How Do We Do, RIP), the patronage of Jay-Z and Beyoncé and the superstar DJ boyfriend, Calvin Harris — of the 23 year-old’s ascent towards the A-list.

This Kosovan-born Brit is the only artist we’ve got with the singing, the dancing and the sass to match the Americans, which is most ably demonstrated by the fact that her fans have given themselves a name. While Lady Gaga has her Little Monsters and Beyoncé’s followers are known, in slightly sinister fashion, as the Bey Hive, Ora’s fans like to be referred to as “Ritabots”. She is clearly delighted by this. “They came up with that name themselves! It’s so cool, isn’t it?” she says, removing the sunglasses and hat to reveal huge brown eyes that hold your gaze and peroxide hair that looks like it’s recently been plastered to a pillow.

Ora hasn’t done many interviews and she’s still gratifyingly guileless, in that fleeting phase of fame before the kinks of a personality have been hammered out by media training. She talks and moves like a teenager, scratching under her arms, checking her phone, eager for confirmation, mangling her syntax in the rush to get words out.

But there’s also a steely ambition. “Is this story going to be big?” she asks. Well, she is set to take a step up over the coming months, with a part in the 50 Shades of Grey film adaptation and before that a new single, I Will Never Let You Down, that is, by some distance, the best thing she’s done. Her earlier material erred towards the strident: at her show in Manchester last year she sang songs with titles such as Radioactive and Facemelt while dressed variously in a nuclear quarantine suit and as a crimson vampire.

I Will Never Let You Down, by contrast, bursts with love: all sultry vocals, frisky guitars and sun-kissed hooks. Written and produced by Harris, it was her attempt to make a love song you can dance do, in the vein of Whitney Houston’s How Will I Know? and I Wanna Dance with Somebody. If Ora and her Dumfries-born beau are the closest thing we have to Jay-Z and Beyoncé then this is their Crazy in Love. And if it isn’t everywhere this summer, I shall eat her floppy black hat.

“Do you like it?” she says, with a puppy dog look. “I’m honestly so, so nervous about releasing this record. I’ve never been this open before.” The line “You say you’ve had enough and you might just give it up” is about their long-distance relationship, she says. Harris, who earned an estimated £27 million last year, is based in Los Angeles while she lives in London. Another line, “You’ve been tired of watching me”, refers to the fact that he is more likely to see Ora on a TV screen than in person. Not the kind of thing that the average listener can sympathise with, perhaps, but unusually frank for a pop song. “It’s hard but if you really want something, you f***ing make it work,” she says. How often do they see each other? “As much as possible. I mean, I love the fact that we, um, have our own things going on, you know? It really is sexy.”

She claims, bafflingly, to be baffled by the interest in her and Harris’s relationship. “It’s so weird. Why?” Well, they have released a song about it. “I know, but . . .” She does admit that meeting Harris midway through making her forthcoming second album “really inspired me in a different light, and then my whole album suddenly became much easier to make. He knew me at that point more than anybody else did.” So is he The One? She slaps her hand over her mouth, in a “schtum!” gesture.

We move on to Jay-Z, who looms large over her career. After she had featured on a couple of Craig David songs it was a call from Jay-Z’s people that set her on her current trajectory. The next day she was flown out to meet him in Brooklyn. “He was like, ‘Firm handshake! I was like, ‘That’s Jay-Z’s hand!’ I was probably squeezing it out of nerves.” Within 48 hours, Ora had signed with Jay-Z’s label, Roc Nation. She was soon featuring on videos by Jay-Z and Drake and had her breakthrough when she sang on DJ Fresh’s No 1 hit, Hot Right Now.

Jay-Z introduced her to his other half who, Ora says, has become “one of my inspirations in life. It’s pretty, like, unhuman to see how somebody could be so amazing at being disciplined.” Beyoncé she says, taught her to be “as fierce and glamorous as you possibly can.” And, you could add, the more pragmatic art of brand diversification: Ora has already branched out into films, modelling and video games.

She’s also became the latest ingenue to be summoned by Prince. “I didn’t know what to do. I just stood there, and listened to him speak. He just was like, ‘I love how you’re doing your own thing’ and I go, ‘You know who I am?’ He knows everything that comes out, because he’s Prince.” They jammed at Paisley Park and he wrote a poem for her which became a song, Pink Champagne, on the new album. The record also features the singer-songwriter Dev Hynes, and Macklemore, the Grammy-winning rapper, whom she met last summer at the Wireless festival in London.

Is she a festival person? “Oh, my God, I love festivals! Festivals are the best thing for me. They’re so much fun. “This year she’s playing V, the Radio 1’s Big Weekend. Does she camp now she’s hit the big time? ”I do camping now! I love camping.” Festivals suit her unruly nature, you suspect. Chaos, she says, run through “my shows, how I go through life, how I dress, how I speak to people, my friends. It’s kind of always never going to change.”

She was born Rita Sahatçiu Ora in Pristina, in the midst of the war against the Serbs, but her Kosovan-Albanian family came to London when she was a year old; none of them could speak English. Her father now runs the Queen’s Arms pub in Kilburn, north London, while her mother is a psychiatrist for the NHS. Ora went to Catholic school in west London and later to the Sylvia Young Theatre School. “I’m as much British as I am Kosovan,” she says. People are often confused about her ethnicity: “They never think I’m Eastern European, fully white.”

Is she the world’s most famous Kosovan? “I don’t want to say ‘Yeah’, but . . . it’s incredible to see how much they support me. I went to shoot a video there and I honestly felt like . . . not in a joke way, like Mother Teresa or Princess Diana had landed. Kids were crying, and I’ve never felt so proud.” This sounds egotistical but she says it with an innocent incredulity that’s worthy of Marilyn Monroe, who, along with Gwen Stefani, is one of her peroxide heroes.

She had to cover up the platinum locks with a brunette wig to play Christian Grey’s sister, Mia, in 50 Shades, her first high-profile acting job after a few sitcoms and the 2004 film Spivs. She was terrified, she says, but also fascinated to watch Sam Taylor-Wood, the director, at work: “It was kind of like . . . women run this ship. I loved seeing the power exchange on set.” She adored the books, but “the way it gets translated when you watch the movie, there’s a whole other light to what was meant to be.”

So, um, what’s her take on S&M? “Oh, I love it,” she says breezily. “I’m a big fan. I think sex is a world of wonder and mystery. Now we’ve got it on a silver platter, we want to complain about it. To me, I think it’s a bit ungrateful! It’s just another vision of somebody in a sexual way, just how Madonna did it, just how Gaga’s doing it, just how Miley’s doing it. Let’s not beat around the bush here, it’s reality.”

I ask her how many tattoos she has. She stops counting at eight: a “pinky promise” on her little finger, Aphrodite, Sagittarius, R for Rita, wings on her back. She holds up her arm: “This is my best friend’s birthday in Hebrew. Hindi, sorry. This is Hebrew: this is my sister’s name.” Why Hebrew? “I loved how it looked.” Have you got any for Calvin? “Ha ha.” There’s also one that she can’t show in public — she fiddles with her phone and passes it over: it’s a cover of Elle in which she poses topless, revealing a huge tattoo of another topless woman on her side. It was inspired by Alberto Vargas: “He’s a painter from a long time ago. It’s pretty big. It’s cool, eh?”

It’s time for her to go; we’re way over our allotted hour and I’m surprised she’s not lost her voice. “Thank you for liking the song,” she says, springing up. She gives me another hug, dons her finery and bounds off to race the paparazzi for a second time. My money’s on the one in the floppy hat.

I Will Never Let You Down is released by Columbia/Roc Nation on May 11. Rita Ora plays Radio 1’s Big Weekend in Glasgow, May 23-25, and V Festival in Staffordshire and Chelmsford, Aug 16 & 17

Goddess ll Pt ll (Artwork) 

Amera Ziganii Rao © Digital Darkroom Art

New World (Generic and Slow Paced) Training. For both Men and Women. Clearing the Underbelly. Amera Ziganii Rao 

Sexism and Silicon Valley

YouTube’s chief executive, Susan Wojcicki, talks to Rhys Blakely about why women are so under-represented in the tech industry.

The YouTube HQ, a large building a short drive from San Francisco International Airport, looks just as you think it might. A glossy, cavernous lobby houses a young male receptionist dressed in cutting-edge rock-climbing apparel. He has the all-American looks of a Ralph Lauren model; his mountain bike is parked behind him. Three massive, Jumbotron-style television sets loom over him – one of which is showing an endless stream of cat videos, lending the place an oddly kitsch Big Brother feel. Young men in their twenties and thirties wander through, in flip-flops and fleeces, clutching MacBook Airs. 

Upstairs, there’s a vast open-plan office, and you start to sense the energy that hums behind the world’s largest online video business. YouTube’s chief executive, Susan Wojcicki, has only been in the job a few weeks and is still getting her glass-walled cubicle in shape. She’s in jeans and boots and a smart-but-casual top. Her things are still in boxes, which somehow suits her unassuming, slightly guarded manner.

The 45-year-old Wojcicki is part of the Google dynasty. She was the search giant’s 16th employee and the first woman to be offered a job at the company. In 1998, her garage became Google’s first office; the billionaire Google founder Sergey Brin is her brother-in-law. (Google bought YouTube in 2006 for $1.65 billion – a deal that she championed.) She’s a pillar of the digital establishment, but Wojcicki rarely gives interviews. She’s making an exception for a topic that’s burning up more and more oxygen in the furnace of innovation that is Silicon Valley: the tech industry’s problem with women.

The career story Wojcicki tells me echoes those I’ll hear from other senior female tech executives. She was fiercely driven and somewhat blinkered while younger. She made her name overseeing the advertising business that accounts for virtually all of Google’s profits. She’s widely acknowledged to be one of the most influential figures in the industry; Forbes magazine says she’s the 30th most powerful woman on the planet. She’s also a mother of four. (Google CEO Larry Page says she has a “healthy disregard for the impossible”.) She owns a one-acre farm in Los Altos, California, where she and her husband, Google executive Dennis Troper, grow their own vegetables and make their own honey.

A model life, then. But in recent years Wojcicki has started to give the matter more thought – and she’s come to the conclusion that the profound scarcity of females in Silicon Valley is a problem. She had grown accustomed to being the “only woman in the meeting. That’s the way – you get used to it.”

Now, though, she’s less accepting of the Valley’s boys’ club. “I’m concerned that women aren’t a part of [the tech industry] as much as they could or should be,” she says. She hints at a concern that’s beginning to gain traction – that innovation is being stunted because the Valley’s buccaneering tech visionaries are only really addressing problems that concern rich white men. “Our products are missing points of view,” says Wojcicki. If the trend continues, “We’ll miss out on the opportunity for women to shape the world around us.”

That the technology industry has a problem involving women is no secret. High-achievers such as Sheryl Sandberg (chief operating officer at Facebook) and Marissa Mayer (CEO at Yahoo) make headlines but are exceptions. While the Valley markets itself as a meritocracy, the data says that this verdant nook of California remains a man’s world.

Only 6 of America’s top 100 tech companies are led by women. At a time when the country’s best universities are accepting more females then males, fewer than one in ten tech start-ups is founded by a woman. At Google, less than a fifth of the engineers are female, a proportion that’s typical of the industry.

For the men in question, this isn’t entirely good news. In San Francisco, single male techies so outnumber professional women that one dating website recently hatched a plan to import women from New York. Sexism has botched products: early voice recognition software didn’t understand female voices. The engineers were virtually all male; they forgot to include women in their tests.

Other stories are creepier. Last year, Sandberg recalled an exchange with two male tech bosses. One said that he would like to hire more young women but that there was a shortage of skilled candidates – a common complaint. The other said that he, too, would hire more young women, but that his wife feared that he would sleep with them. Then he confessed that he probably would.

It might sound like something from Mad Men, a tale from the days of three-martini lunches and casual misogyny – an era where perks included first dibs on the secretaries. But the anecdote isn’t an outlier: many young female tech workers tell similar stories. “So much business happens in informal settings,” says Leila Janah, an entrepreneur in the non-profit sector who was dubbed one of the “Most Influential Women in Technology” by Fast Company business magazine. In the Valley, too many men interpret an after-hours work meeting as “an invitation to make a pass”, she says.

The lewdness of “brogrammer” chauvinism is a trending topic. Last August, a young start-up founder called Peter Shih published a rant about the Top Ten things he hated about living in San Francisco, including the weather (“like a woman who is constantly PMSing”) and the 49ers (“The girls who are obviously 4’s and behave like they are 9’s”). Def Con, a key conference for software security programmers, features an event called “Hacker Jeopardy”, where strippers remove articles of clothing when contestants answer questions correctly.

At a hackathon held in San Francisco by the influential blog TechCrunch, two young programmers, Jethro Batts, 28, and David Boulton, 24, took to the stage to present “Titstare” – an app that takes photos of men staring at women’s chests. “I think this is the breast hack ever,” Batts joked. Much of the audience – mostly young, hoodie-wearing males – broke into guffaws.

The attendee who had brought along her nine-year-old daughter didn’t think it was so funny. But the Silicon Valley start-up scene – the nursery where new companies are created from scratch – is basically a men-only space. Nine out of ten tech venture capitalists are male, and they tend to entrust their money to people who look like them.

In 2010, only 3 per cent of venture-backed start-up tech companies were led by all-female teams; 89 per cent were all male. This creates a self-perpetuating feedback loop, believes Julie Larson-Green, who until recently led Microsoft’s Xbox computer gaming division and is now the chief experience officer responsible for the look and feel of the software titan’s service products. “People tend to hire in their own image,” she told me. “We need to break out from that.”

Currently, however, trends appear to be worsening. The share of programming jobs being done by women in the US has fallen since the dotcom boom of the late Nineties, and females now account for a smaller proportion of computer science graduates than in the days of the first mass-market PCs.

In 1985, 37 per cent of computer science undergraduate degree recipients were women. By 2011, it was 18 per cent, and the decline in female participation has kindled an uncomfortable thought – that prejudice is cramping innovation. Catherine Bracy, who spearheaded President Obama’s effort to engage the Valley tech community in his electoral campaigns and who now works for the non-profit Code for America, has been among the fiercest critics of the tech sector’s gender imbalance. “If this is the industry that’s going to be creating our economy over the next century, we’re in trouble,” she recently told a audience of tech industry insiders.

Her tone was one of semi-bemused indignation: “Good innovation cannot come out of an ecosystem that looks like this.”

She argued that the Valley has become a bastion for white and Asian upper-middle-class males.

Amid this landscape, Ruchi Sanghvi is a strikingly rare commodity: a female techie superstar. The 32-year-old is a British citizen but grew up in Pune, an industrial city and IT hub in India – a country where she suggests the middle classes are far keener on their girls studying STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) subjects than in the West. Her father was a self-made entrepreneur who dealt with massive pieces of machinery. As a child, Sanghvi wanted to follow in his footsteps. She played with toys that taught her how to “make things and break things”. Radio-controlled cars were her passion.

She came to America for college and she took bachelors and master’s degrees in electrical computer engineering at Carnegie Mellon University. From there she first went to Wall Street, but soon realised it wasn’t for her. She wanted to build something great. Today there is one destination that fits a mindset like that. She went to Silicon Valley.

In 2005, she applied for a job at a start-up that was advertising for coders on a blackboard outside its office, a poky little place above a Chinese restaurant. The company was called Facebook. At the time, it had fewer than 30 staff; she was the first female engineer.

She sounds fond of her days at what would become the world’s biggest social network. “When you’re offered a place on a rocket ship, you don’t ask what seat you’re going to get; you just jump on,” she tells me. But the ride, while exhilarating, wasn’t always easy. Sanghvi was used to being the odd woman out: she was one of just 5 females out of more than 100 students studying computer engineering at Carnegie Mellon. But the atmosphere inside Facebook – which had been created by an all-male team of hackers in a Harvard dorm room just a year earlier – sounds as if it would have crushed a different character.

Sanghvi says she gained a “reputation for being extremely aggressive. It’s not something that I liked, but it was something that I accepted… I was a very vocal female; I did not shy away from making my opinions heard. I engaged. I argued.”

In essence, she’d adopted the Valley’s lingua franca. One of the favourite aphorisms of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg is “move fast and break things”. It speaks to just how red in tooth and claw geek capitalism has become. Feedback can be vicious; office posturing is frequently aggressive. It’s a culture that studies show repels many women.

“People in the start-up world aren’t afraid of voicing their opinions; they’re not afraid of calling ideas stupid. You need to be able to defend yourself and not be intimidated,” says Sanghvi.

“My attitude was the same as that of everyone else around me. I saw that it was effective and successful, and I did the same. But people weren’t used to having a woman adopt that kind of attitude.”

She describes a Catch 22 situation: to succeed in the Valley women must assert themselves, which makes their male colleagues uncomfortable. It sounds exhausting. “It’s not pleasant – having to fight to prove what you can do, and being aggressive, and being opinionated and asking for opportunities… You’re viewed as not being a very nice person.”

When Hillary Clinton visited Silicon Valley this month, she cast the conundrum facing women in the same terms: “You lean in because people say lean in, but if you lean in too much other people say, ‘Back off.’”

The Valley is saturated with geek machismo, but the ambition on show can be infectious. Nowhere is this more true than at Y Combinator, the most prestigious start-up incubator on the planet. It seemed like a good place to assess how women are really thought of inside one of the brightest crucibles of technological innovation.

“YC”, as its alumni call it, was founded by Paul Graham, a British-born entrepreneur. After making millions by selling his company to Yahoo during the first dotcom boom, he became one of the Valley’s most influential gurus – part Pied Piper, part Bertrand Russell. 

Twice a year he sifts thousands of applications to pick a fresh cohort of wannabe hacker entrepreneurs. He counsels them on how to build a tech business and his success rates are striking. 

Each nascent company he accepts into his programme gets $100,000 (£60,000) in seed capital and what Wired magazine called “an unmatchable entrée into the otherwise closed world of high-stakes internet entrepreneurship”. The results have included Dropbox, a cloud-storage service valued at $10 billion, and Airbnb, a website that lets people transform their homes into temporary hotels, which is reckoned to be worth another $10 billion. Graham believes that the proliferation of tech start-ups is as important as the onset of the industrial revolution.

I meet him at the YC headquarters, a nondescript commercial building in the heart of the Valley. In a big room next door, more than 100 of his current protégés are sitting at long benches, picking at the bowls of tuna pasta they’ve been served for supper. They are here because once a week they gather to hear a talk from a tech luminary (the week after I was there the speaker was Mark Zuckerberg). The dress code is programmer chic: crumpled T-shirts, flip-flops, ragged jeans. The average age of this cohort is 26, and many of the people here are virtuoso computer coders. I can count the number of females on one hand.

Graham is 48 years old and does not wear his intelligence lightly. He is stocky and tanned and is wearing Bermuda shorts and sandals. He radiates the enthusiasm levels of a labrador puppy. There is just one question that elicits absolute apathy: why are there so few women in YC? When I visit, only 7 per cent of the founders of the companies being incubated are women – and this is regarded as a bumper crop of females.

Graham says that the proportion of women who are accepted is in line with the proportion who apply.

But if start-ups really are as significant as the industrial revolution, isn’t it problematic for 50 per cent of the human race to be so grossly underrepresented?

The normally loquacious Graham refuses to engage. Males are in the minority in fashion colleges, he mutters. The best entrepreneurs get into coding in their very early teens – an age when girls are doing other things. He adds that many start-ups are formed by pairs of friends, and that if a minority of females are interested in computers, then the chances of them forming duos is a minority squared – a situation destined to produce a vanishingly small number.

Others inside YC will suggest that women are less inclined to take risks than men (the rewards can be immense, but the most likely fate of a start-up is failure). One young female entrepreneur suggests that women are less likely to embrace the chaotic, uncomfortable existence that start-up life usually entails: working and sleeping in the same apartment; microwave food; earning a pittance; seeing little sunshine. Certainly, it takes a certain sort of manic drive to want to be a start-up founder. But Graham’s ultimate response on the issue seems telling: “I don’t really care.”

Females leave the technology industry at twice the rate of men, according to the Anita Borg Institute, which monitors tech’s gender imbalance. A lack of promotions, crushingly long hours and a dislike of the culture were among the most commonly cited reasons.

Women also cite frustration over pay – another front where the data is damning. In Silicon Valley, women earn 49 cents, on average, for every $1 men earn. Across the US, the average figure is 77 cents, and the Valley lags behind other notoriously male-skewed industries by a mile. Female surgeons earn about 64 cents for every dollar their male peers get.

Senior female tech executives also despair that most computer games are angled at boys. It is, they argue, yet another iteration of the message that “computers are not for girls”.

The broader culture might be key in another regard: girls’ performance in the academic disciplines valued by the Valley. In 1980, it was found that American boys of 13 were consistently better at maths than girls, but later studies uncovered something more complex. In 2008, a study of more than 250,000 children around the world showed that girls’ performance, relative to boys, reflected the roles women played in their societies. In Turkey, where there were relatively few women in business and politics, girls were less proficient mathematicians than boys. In Norway, where women play more prominent roles in public life, there was no statistical difference between girls and boys. In Iceland, girls beat boys.

In the coming months, a court case in San Francisco promises to shed new light on how the Valley works at its most elite, most cloistered levels. Ellen Pao was a shining example of how the US tech scene lures the nation’s brightest, most ambitious individuals. She was an engineering graduate from Princeton who’d gone on to Harvard Law School before landing a job with Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, a venture capital firm whose investments included Google and which was once said to be “to Silicon Valley what the Medicis were to Renaissance-era Florence”.

Pao has alleged in a lawsuit that is poised to go to trial that a partner at the firm “made inappropriate sexual advances toward her that made her feel her position at Kleiner could be threatened if she refused those advances”. In court documents it is claimed that she “succumbed to [her colleague’s] insistence on sexual relations on two or three occasions”, but soon broke off the relationship.

When she complained to senior partners at the firm, the suit says, they retaliated against her, hobbling her career and limiting her income. Later, another senior partner also made an advance, she claims. She alleges that he gave her a gift on Valentine’s Day – The Book of Longing, by the musician Leonard Cohen. The poetry inside included the lines, “You handled me like meat/ You’d have to be a man to know/ How good that feels, how sweet.’’

Pao says that when she took her grievances to her seniors, one of them suggested that she marry the first partner who had propositioned her.

Kleiner Perkins, which has strongly denied any wrongdoing, declined to comment. Pao’s lawyers also declined to speak. But the case has rocked the Valley: The New York Times has said that her complaint depicted tech’s kingmakers “as a group of 21st-century men who may be hard at work building the 22nd century but, when it comes to dealing with women in the workplace, are stuck firmly in the caveman era – or at least in the Fifties”.

Yet, the Valley’s top women still say that their industry offers unparalleled opportunity. Working here, you can shape the future in ways that too few girls appreciate, they insist. Sanghvi is frustrated that tech jobs are perceived as involving sitting endlessly in front of screens.

She wants more girls to be given toys that involve “making things and breaking things”. Girls should be encouraged to apply science to the real world. But Sanghvi also wants to see deep-rooted shifts in the workplace culture. Metrics designed by men undervalue women, she says.

Leila Janah is among those who would advocate more radical reform. The Valley’s meritocracy is a myth, she believes. Laws that force companies to appoint female board directors would be valuable – but there’s no chance of the tech industry’s powerful libertarians agreeing.

Meanwhile, Wojcicki sees a supply-side problem. The challenge, she believes, is to increase the number of women qualified to work in the Valley. She wants computer science to be mandatory for girls in schools. This would shatter preconceptions and create self-reinforcing peer groups. Role models and mentors are crucial, too, she says.

The interview is over. I leave Wojcicki amid her unpacked boxes. Outside her office, a group of YouTube workers are gathering for a meeting. It doesn’t look as if everybody’s arrived, but the ones who have are men.

The Times 

New World (Generic and Slow Paced) Training. For both Men and Women. Clearing the Underbelly. Amera Ziganii Rao 

Don't worry about it. Leadership training is what this has all been about ultimately. Leadership training is about being in any position of authority - ie, one's own life, let alone interacting with other people and taking responsibility for that leadership. 

Normal society cares not one hoot about that. Normal society is about leadership without the training, sincerity or giving that is required. The Ego Society. Therapy and going within to clear wounds is seen as the domain of the sick. The whole human race is sick. The Ego Society does not see that. 

My blessing and burden was that I reached that turning point very early. Carl Jung reached it even earlier and so on. 

The Ego Society's version of leadership is money and power. Fascism to you and me. Gender based or racially based or vulnerability based or anything based. 

'Healer, heal thyself' is a common phrase in healing circles. 

Now, take that into the arena of love. Doing a job is not enough to give one meaning, even if that job yields millions. Meaning, meaning and meaning is the only thing that feeds one. 

So, love dependency which is clearly a massive across archetype, across gender, across all groups, problem, is because there is no meaning in anything else. 

To find meaning is two things; self discovery and self healing. 

Healing the past, the shadow of one's life, however APPARENTLY great it was and healing the rage of resentment at not wanting to give anything to anyone, even if one is in a job where that is the APPARENT requirement. 

Individual greatness is a right. So is the right to give. Both are wounded in a wounded person. Self discovery is the next stage after clearing the shadow. 

And in Neuro Linguistic Programming (Temple Education) it is this: the shadow has been named, shamed and let go of. Now is the re-programming. Knowing who you really are. Not what you became. 

Enjoy this part. We are all upper middle class (whatever origins), erudite and professional under achievers. Whatever we are doing, if we do not have meaning, outside romantic love. 

Or indeed, family love, friendship love or anything else to do with love that is not about pure serving. 

Find that meaning, find the thing that turns you on the most, outside the bedroom and you have finally found yourself. Whether it is birdwatching (ornithology, not porn) - to go with the porn - er, for women as well as men - a man told me the other day that women do not like sex and gosh, do they look at porn, oh dear - or building tanks. Whatever gives meaning, it is to do with your soul, your authentic voice. 

Then comes the healing. No one wants to give without that healing. And that takes forgiveness, forgiveness, forgiveness and forgiveness. As a way of life. 

Forgive and find meaning and then love is finally balanced in life. 

The Universe becomes your great lover too. Whether consciously or not consciously. Ie, you can be finally, alone, as much as with other people. 

And you can serve. Leadership is serving. No one does it and no one has the education to do so. That is The Ego Society. 

Re-programming. Not leading, to NEED. Leading to serve. Finding meaning. So that love can finally be a privilege instead of a psychosis of need. Ego to Soul. Everyone's human right. 

Enjoy. You are the man I chose for a very very good reason. Now, you have to find out why. Know yourself. Know who you are. Know how beautiful a person you are. Not the one you tried to become. You are not him (and I am not talking about the shadow). 

Be your greatness. Again, everyone's human right. And what is greatness as a generic, other than one's personal greatness of flavour and purpose? To serve with love. To serve humanity. To serve. In other words, be the playboy. I am most certainly the playgirl. But find the meaning of your life to go with it. Then, you fly. Then, you love. Heal the past, forgive the wretches who hurt you and know yourself. You will love you finally as much as I do. Then, you love. 

Amera Ziganii Rao © 2014 

Macbeth. William Shakespeare  

Macbeth is a tragedy written by William Shakespeare, and is considered one of his darkest and most powerful works. Set in Scotland, the play dramatizes the corrosive psychological and political effects produced when evil is chosen as a way to fulfil the ambition for power.

The play is believed to have been written between 1599 and 1606, and is most commonly dated 1606. The earliest account of a performance of what was probably Shakespeare's play is the Summer of 1606, when Simon Forman recorded seeing such a play at the Globe Theatre. It was first published in the Folio of 1623, possibly from a prompt book. It was most likely written during the reign of James I, who had been James VI of Scotland before he succeeded to the English throne in 1603. James was a patron of Shakespeare's acting company, and of all the plays Shakespeare wrote during James's reign, Macbeth most clearly reflects the playwright's relationship with the sovereign.

Macbeth is Shakespeare's shortest tragedy, and tells the story of a brave Scottish general named Macbeth who receives a prophecy from a trio of witches that one day he will become King of Scotland. Consumed by ambition and spurred to action by his wife, Macbeth murders King Duncan and takes the throne for himself. He is then wracked with guilt and paranoia, and he soon becomes a tyrannical ruler as he is forced to commit more and more murders to protect himself from enmity and suspicion. The bloodbath and consequent civil war swiftly take Macbeth and Lady Macbeth into the realms of arrogance, madness, and death.

Shakespeare's source for the tragedy is the account of King Macbeth of Scotland, Macduff, and Duncan in Holinshed's Chronicles (1587), a history of England, Scotland and Ireland familiar to Shakespeare and his contemporaries, although the events in the play differ extensively from the history of the real Macbeth. In recent scholarship, the events of the tragedy are usually associated more closely with the execution of Henry Garnett for complicity in the Gunpowder Plot of 1605.

In the backstage world of theatre, some believe that the play is cursed, and will not mention its title aloud, referring to it instead as "the Scottish play". Over the course of many centuries, the play has attracted some of the most renowned actors to the roles of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth. It has been adapted to film, television, opera, novels, comic books, and other media.

The play opens amidst thunder and lightning, and the Three Witches decide that their next meeting shall be with Macbeth. In the following scene, a wounded sergeant reports to King Duncan of Scotland that his generals—Macbeth, who is the Thane of Glamis, and Banquo—have just defeated the allied forces of Norway and Ireland, who were led by the traitorous Macdonwald and the Thane of Cawdor. Macbeth, the King's kinsman, is praised for his bravery and fighting prowess.

In the following scene, Macbeth and Banquo discuss the weather and their victory. As they wander onto a heath, the Three Witches enter and greet them with prophecies. Though Banquo challenges them first, they address Macbeth, hailing him as "Thane of Glamis," "Thane of Cawdor," and that he shall "be King hereafter." Macbeth appears to be stunned to silence. When Banquo asks of his own fortunes, the witches inform him that he will father a line of kings, though he himself will not be one. While the two men wonder at these pronouncements, the witches vanish, and another thane, Ross, arrives and informs Macbeth of his newly bestowed title: Thane of Cawdor, as the previous Thane of Cawdor shall be put to death for his traitorous activities. The first prophecy is thus fulfilled, and Macbeth immediately begins to harbour ambitions of becoming king.

King Duncan welcomes and praises Macbeth and Banquo, and declares that he will spend the night at Macbeth's castle at Inverness; he also names his son Malcolm as his heir. Macbeth sends a message ahead to his wife, Lady Macbeth, telling her about the witches' prophecies. Lady Macbeth suffers none of her husband's uncertainty, and wishes him to murder Duncan in order to obtain kingship. When Macbeth arrives at Inverness, she overrides all of her husband's objections by challenging his manhood, and successfully persuades him to kill the king that very night. He and Lady Macbeth plan to get Duncan's two chamberlains drunk so that they will black out; the next morning they will blame the chamberlains for the murder. They will be defenseless, as they will remember nothing.

While Duncan is asleep, Macbeth stabs him, despite his doubts and a number of supernatural portents, including a hallucination of a bloody dagger. He is so shaken that Lady Macbeth has to take charge. In accordance with her plan, she frames Duncan's sleeping servants for the murder by placing bloody daggers on them. Early the next morning, Lennox, a Scottish nobleman, and Macduff, the loyal Thane of Fife, arrive. A porter opens the gate and Macbeth leads them to the king's chamber, where Macduff discovers Duncan's body. Macbeth murders the guards to prevent them from professing their innocence, but claims he did so in a fit of anger over their misdeeds. Duncan's sons Malcolm and Donalbain flee to England and Ireland, respectively, fearing that whoever killed Duncan desires their demise as well. The rightful heirs' flight makes them suspects and Macbeth assumes the throne as the new King of Scotland as a kinsman of the dead king. Banquo reveals this to the audience, and while sceptical of the new King Macbeth, remembers the witches' prophecy about how his own descendants would inherit the throne.

Despite his success, Macbeth, also aware of this part of the prophecy, remains uneasy. Macbeth invites Banquo to a royal banquet, where he discovers that Banquo and his young son, Fleance, will be riding out that night. Macbeth hires men to kill them. The assassins succeed in killing Banquo, but Fleance escapes. Macbeth becomes furious: he fears that his power remains insecure as long as an heir of Banquo remains alive. At the banquet, Macbeth invites his lords and Lady Macbeth to a night of drinking and merriment. Banquo's ghost enters and sits in Macbeth's place. Macbeth raves fearfully, startling his guests, as the ghost is only visible to himself. The others panic at the sight of Macbeth raging at an empty chair, until a desperate Lady Macbeth tells them that her husband is merely afflicted with a familiar and harmless malady. The ghost departs and returns once more, causing the same riotous anger and fear in Macbeth. This time, Lady Macbeth tells the lords to leave, and they do so.

Macbeth, disturbed, visits the three witches once more and asks them to reveal the truth of their prophecies to him. To answer his questions, they summon horrible apparitions, each of which offers predictions and further prophecies to allay Macbeth's fears. First, they conjure an armored head, which tells him to beware of Macduff (4.1.72). Second, a bloody child tells him that no one born of a woman shall be able to harm him. Thirdly, a crowned child holding a tree states that Macbeth will be safe until Great Birnam Wood comes to Dunsinane Hill. Macbeth is relieved and feels secure, because he knows that all men are born of women and forests cannot move. Macbeth also asks if Banquo's sons will ever reign in Scotland: the witches conjure a procession of eight crowned kings, all similar in appearance to Banquo, and the last carrying a mirror that reflects even more kings. Macbeth realises that these are all Banquo's descendants having acquired kingship in numerous countries. After the witches perform a mad dance and leave, Lennox enters and tells Macbeth that Macduff has fled to England. Macbeth orders Macduff's castle be seized, and, most cruelly, sends murderers to slaughter Macduff's wife and children. Everyone in Macduff's castle is put to death, including Lady Macduff and their young son.

Meanwhile, Lady Macbeth becomes racked with guilt from the crimes she and her husband have committed. At night, in the king's palace at Dunsinane, a doctor and a gentlewoman discuss Lady Macbeth's strange habit of sleepwalking. Suddenly, Lady Macbeth enters in a trance with a candle in her hand. Bemoaning the murders of Duncan, Lady Macduff, and Banquo, she tries to wash off imaginary bloodstains from her hands, all the while speaking of the terrible things she knows she pressed her husband to do. She leaves, and the doctor and gentlewoman marvel at her descent into madness. Her belief that nothing can wash away the blood on her hands is an ironic reversal of her earlier claim to Macbeth that "[a] little water clears us of this deed" (2.2.66).

In England, Macduff is informed by Ross that his "castle is surprised; [his] wife and babes / Savagely slaughter'd" (4.3.204–5). When this news of his family's execution reaches him, Macduff is stricken with grief and vows revenge. Prince Malcolm, Duncan's son, has succeeded in raising an army in England, and Macduff joins him as he rides to Scotland to challenge Macbeth's forces. The invasion has the support of the Scottish nobles, who are appalled and frightened by Macbeth's tyrannical and murderous behaviour. Malcolm leads an army, along with Macduff and Englishmen Siward (the Elder), the Earl of Northumberland, against Dunsinane Castle. While encamped in Birnam Wood, the soldiers are ordered to cut down and carry tree limbs to camouflage their numbers.

Before Macbeth's opponents arrive, he receives news that Lady Macbeth has killed herself, causing him to sink into a deep and pessimistic despair and deliver his "Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow" soliloquy (5.5.17–28). Though he reflects on the brevity and meaninglessness of life, he nevertheless awaits the English and fortifies Dunsinane. He is certain that the witches' prophecies guarantee his invincibility, but is struck with fear when he learns that the English army is advancing on Dunsinane shielded with boughs cut from Birnam Wood, in apparent fulfillment of one of the prophecies.

A battle culminates in Macduff's confrontation with Macbeth as the English forces overwhelm his army and castle. Macbeth boasts that he has no reason to fear Macduff, for he cannot be killed by any man born of woman. Macduff declares that he was "from his mother's womb / Untimely ripp'd" (5.8.15–16), (i.e., born by Caesarean section) and is not "of woman born" (an example of a literary quibble), fulfilling the second prophecy. Macbeth realises too late that he has misinterpreted the witches' words. Though he realises that he is doomed, he continues to fight. Macduff kills and beheads him, thus fulfilling the remaining prophecy.

Macduff carries Macbeth's head onstage and Malcolm discusses how order has been restored. His last reference to Lady Macbeth, however, reveals "'tis thought, by self and violent hands / Took off her life" (5.9.71–72), but the method of her suicide is undisclosed. Malcolm, now the King of Scotland, declares his benevolent intentions for the country and invites all to see him crowned at Scone.

Although Malcolm, and not Fleance, is placed on the throne, the witches' prophecy concerning Banquo ("Thou shalt get kings") was known to the audience of Shakespeare's time to be true: James VI of Scotland (later also James I of England) was supposedly a descendant of Banquo.

Macbeth has been compared to Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra. Both Antony and Macbeth as characters seek a new world, even at the cost of the old one. Both are fighting for a throne and have a 'nemesis' to face to achieve that throne. For Antony the nemesis is Octavius, for Macbeth it is Banquo. At one point Macbeth even compares himself to Antony, saying "under Banquo / My Genius is rebuk'd, as it is said / Mark Antony's was by Caesar." Lastly, both plays contain powerful and manipulative female figures: Cleopatra and Lady Macbeth.

Shakespeare borrowed the story from several tales in Holinshed's Chronicles, a popular history of the British Isles known to Shakespeare and his contemporaries. In Chronicles, a man named Donwald finds several of his family put to death by his king, King Duff, for dealing with witches. After being pressured by his wife, he and four of his servants kill the King in his own house. In Chronicles, Macbeth is portrayed as struggling to support the kingdom in the face of King Duncan's ineptitude. He and Banquo meet the three witches, who make exactly the same prophecies as in Shakespeare's version. Macbeth and Banquo then together plot the murder of Duncan, at Lady Macbeth's urging. Macbeth has a long, ten-year reign before eventually being overthrown by Macduff and Malcolm. The parallels between the two versions are clear. However, some scholars think that George Buchanan's Rerum Scoticarum Historia matches Shakespeare's version more closely. Buchanan's work was available in Latin in Shakespeare's day.

No other version of the story has Macbeth kill the king in Macbeth's own castle. Scholars have seen this change of Shakespeare's as adding to the darkness of Macbeth's crime as the worst violation of hospitality. Versions of the story that were common at the time had Duncan being killed in an ambush at Inverness, not in a castle. Shakespeare conflated the story of Donwald and King Duff in what was a significant change to the story

Shakespeare made another revealing change. In Chronicles, Banquo is an accomplice in Macbeth's murder of King Duncan. He also plays an important part in ensuring that Macbeth, not Malcolm, takes the throne in the coup that follows. In Shakespeare's day, Banquo was thought to be a direct ancestor of the Stuart King James I (Banquo's Stuart descent was disproven in the 19th century, when it was discovered that the Fitzalans actually descended from a Breton family). The Banquo portrayed in historical sources is significantly different from the Banquo created by Shakespeare. Critics have proposed several reasons for this change. First, to portray the king's ancestor as a murderer would have been risky. Other authors of the time who wrote about Banquo, such as Jean de Schelandre in his Stuartide, also changed history by portraying Banquo as a noble man, not a murderer, probably for the same reasons. Second, Shakespeare may have altered Banquo's character simply because there was no dramatic need for another accomplice to the murder; there was, however, a need to give a dramatic contrast to Macbeth—a role which many scholars argue is filled by Banquo.

Other scholars maintain that a strong argument can be made for associating the tragedy with the Gunpowder Plot of 1605. As presented by Harold Bloom in 2008: "[S]cholars cite the existence of several topical references in Macbeth to the events of that year, namely the execution of the Rev. Henry Garnett for his alleged complicity in the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, as referenced in the porter's scene."

Macbeth is a 2006 Australian adaptation of William Shakespeare's Macbeth. It was directed by Geoffrey Wright and features an ensemble cast including Sam Worthington, Victoria Hill and Lachy Hulme. Macbeth, filmed in Melbourne and Victoria, was released in Australia on 21 September 2006.

Wright and Hill wrote the script, which — although it uses a modern-day Melbourne gangster setting, and the actors deliver the dialogue in Australian accents — largely maintains the language of the original play.

Macbeth was selected to screen at the Toronto International Film Festival in September 2006.

This adaptation of Macbeth takes place in the Melbourne underworld. Macbeth (Sam Worthington), a loyal underboss to his crime boss Duncan (Gary Sweet), is told by teenage witches that he will one day assume great power. Driven by their prophecy, his wife (Victoria Hill) plans to kill Duncan and take the leadership of the gang for herself and her husband. Macbeth's obsessive love for her leads him to agree to her murderous plan, but he finds that maintaining his power will require a lot more from him than first imagined.

The film opens in a cemetery where the Weird Sisters, three school girl witches, are seen destroying and defacing headstones and statues, while close by Lady Macbeth weeps beside a headstone marked "beloved son". Macbeth stands by. It is here that the three witches make their plan to meet with Macbeth later, and leave the cemetery, smiling smugly at Macbeth from afar.

Macbeth leads Duncan's gang, in his absence, to do a drug deal with Macdonwald and his men. In a gunfight between the gangs, all members of Macdonwald's gang are killed. While chasing two gunmen, Banquo and Macbeth are led to the Cawdor Club. They seize the club. The current owner of the club is tied up and later killed.

Duncan officially hands the club over to Macbeth, and Macbeth and Banquo celebrate by drinking the club's alcohol and taking some pills found on a table. During this drug trip Macbeth meets the three witches, who prophesy that he will soon be in Duncan's position with total control over the gang. He tells his wife this, though she doubts he has it in him to take over Duncan's position. Later when she learns that Duncan will be dining and staying at their house, she plots with her husband to kill him, passing the rank of gang leader to Macbeth.

Lady Macbeth drugs Duncan's bodyguards, and while they sleep Macbeth takes their knives and kills Duncan, framing the guards. Macduff comes to Inverness and finds Duncan murdered in his bed. Before the bodyguards can profess their innocence Macbeth shoots them. Malcolm, Duncan's son, immediately suspects Macbeth as having something to do with his father's death and flees.

After Macbeth is hailed as the new leader by most of Duncan's gang Macbeth sends two murderers to kill Banquo and his son, Fleance. The murderers kill Banquo, but Fleance escapes. Macbeth holds a celebratory dinner, and after learning that Banquo has been killed, sees a vision of Banquo's ghost at the dining table. Macbeth is becoming more shaken by his desire for power. Lennox, Ross and others now suspect Macbeth of killing Duncan and Banquo.

Macbeth finds the three witches in his house that evening and, after drinking a foul potion and engaging in an orgiastic sexual encounter with them, asks the witches of his future. He is told to fear Macduff, but no man "of woman born shall kill you". Later it is revealed that Macduff is not a natural birth, but a caesarean section, which is not "of woman born". He is also shown a vision of Fleance being hailed as gang leader. These prophecies enrage Macbeth, as does the witches' quick disappearance, and he has the murderers go to Macduff's home and brutally kill Lady Macduff and her son.

Seeing this on the television, Lennox and Ross go to tell Macduff who has gone to his uncle Siward. Malcolm convinces him that Macbeth has gone much too far in his quest for power and must be stripped of his leader status.

Meanwhile, Lady Macbeth has become more insane, to the point where she re-imagines the evening of Duncan's killing and continuously tries to wash off his blood from her hands. A doctor sedates her, and Macbeth appears fairly indifferent to her instability. He prepares for the impending attack from Macduff, Lennox and Ross. Lady Macbeth commits suicide in a bath tub by slashing her wrists, enraging Macbeth. The two murderers, realising the unlikeliness of surviving the attack, swiftly flee Dunsinane leaving Macbeth with only Seyton, his main bodyguard, and two others. The murderers run into Macduff and his associates at the edge of Burnham Wood and are shot. Fleance looks on.

Malcolm leads his men to Dunsinane where they ambush the house and a large gunfight ensues between them and Macbeth and his guards. Macbeth is chased to the cellar where he faces off with Macduff and is stabbed in the stomach. He stumbles upstairs to his bedroom, where the body of Lady Macbeth lies, and dies at her side. As Macduff leads Fleance, now the inherited gang leader, from the house Macbeth's famous "tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow" speech is heard.

Wikipedia 

Othello. William Shakespeare  

The Tragedy of Othello, the Moor of Venice is a tragedy by William Shakespeare, believed to have been written in approximately 1603, and based on the Italian short story Un Capitano Moro ("A Moorish Captain") by Cinthio, a disciple of Boccaccio, first published in 1565. The work revolves around four central characters: Othello, a Moorish general in the Venetian army; his new wife, Desdemona; his lieutenant, Cassio; and his trusted ensign, Iago. Because of its varied and current themes of racism, love, jealousy and betrayal, Othello is still often performed in professional and community theatres alike and has been the basis for numerous operatic, film and literary adaptations.

The play opens with Roderigo, a rich and dissolute gentleman, complaining to Iago, an ensign, that Iago has not told him about the secret marriage between Desdemona, the daughter of a Senator named Brabantio, and Othello, a Moorish general in the Venetian army. He is upset by this development because he loves Desdemona and had previously asked her father for her hand in marriage. Iago hates Othello for promoting a younger man named Michael Cassio above him, and tells Roderigo that he plans to use Othello for his own advantage. Iago is also angry because he believes, or at least gives the pretence of belief, that Othello slept with his wife Emilia. Iago denounces Cassio as a scholarly tactician with no real battle experience; in contrast, Iago is a battle-tested soldier. By emphasizing Roderigo's failed bid for Desdemona, and his own dissatisfaction with serving under Othello, Iago convinces Roderigo to wake Brabantio, Desdemona's father, and tell him about his daughter's elopement. Iago sneaks away to find Othello and warns him that Brabantio is coming for him.

Before Brabantio reaches Othello, news arrives in Venice that the Turks are going to attack Cyprus; therefore Othello is summoned to advise the senators. Brabantio arrives and accuses Othello of seducing Desdemona by witchcraft, but Othello defends himself successfully before an assembly that includes the Duke of Venice, Brabantio's kinsmen Lodovico and Gratiano, and various senators. He explains that Desdemona became enamored of him for the sad and compelling stories he told of his life before Venice, not because of any witchcraft. The senate is satisfied, but Brabantio leaves saying that Desdemona will betray Othello. By order of the Duke, Othello leaves Venice to command the Venetian armies against invading Turks on the island of Cyprus, accompanied by his new wife, his new lieutenant Cassio, his ensign Iago, and Iago's wife, Emilia as Desdemona's attendant.

The party arrives in Cyprus to find that a storm has destroyed the Turkish fleet. Othello orders a general celebration and leaves to spend private time with Desdemona. In his absence, Iago schemes to get Cassio drunk after Cassio's own admission that he cannot hold his wine. He then persuades Roderigo to draw Cassio into a fight. The resulting brawl alarms the citizenry, and Othello is forced to quell the disturbance. Othello blames Cassio for the disturbance and strips him of his rank. Cassio is distraught, but, as part of his plan to convince Othello that Cassio and Desdemona are having an affair, Iago persuades Cassio to importune Desdemona to act as an intermediary between himself and Othello, in order to convince her husband to reinstate him.

Iago now persuades Othello to be suspicious of Cassio and Desdemona. Othello drops a handkerchief (with which Desdemona was trying to bind his headache) that was Othello's first gift to Desdemona and which he has stated holds great significance to him in the context of their relationship. Despite the supposed importance of the handkerchief neither seem to notice the handkerchief had been dropped. Emilia finds it, and gives it to Iago, at his request, but she is unaware of what he plans to do with the handkerchief. Iago plants it in Cassio's lodgings as evidence of Cassio and Desdemona's affair. After he has planted the handkerchief, Iago tells Othello to stand apart and watch Cassio's reactions while Iago questions him about the handkerchief. Iago goads Cassio on to talk about his affair with Bianca, a local courtesan with whom Cassio has been spending time, but speaks her name so quietly that Othello believes the two other men are talking about Desdemona when Cassio is really speaking of Bianca. Bianca, on discovering the handkerchief, chastises Cassio, accusing him of giving her a second-hand gift which he received from another lover. Othello sees this, and Iago convinces him that Cassio received the handkerchief from Desdemona. Enraged and hurt, Othello resolves to kill his wife and asks Iago to kill Cassio. Othello proceeds to make Desdemona's life miserable, hitting her in front of visiting Venetian nobles.

Roderigo complains that he has received nothing from Iago in return for his money and efforts to win Desdemona, but Iago convinces him to kill Cassio. Roderigo attacks Cassio in the street after Cassio leaves Bianca's lodgings. They fight, and Cassio mortally wounds Roderigo. During the scuffle, Iago comes from behind Cassio and badly cuts his leg. In the darkness, Iago manages to hide his identity, and when passers-by hear Cassio's cries for help, Iago joins them, pretending to help Cassio. When Cassio identifies Roderigo as one of his attackers, Iago quietly stabs Roderigo to stop him from revealing the plot. He then accuses Bianca of the failed conspiracy to kill Cassio.

In the night, Othello confronts Desdemona, and then smothers her to death in their bed. When Emilia arrives, Othello tries to justify his actions by accusing Desdemona of adultery. Emilia calls for help. The Governor arrives, with Iago, Cassio, and others, and Emilia begins to explain the situation. When Othello mentions the handkerchief as proof, Emilia realizes what Iago has done, and she exposes him, whereupon Iago kills her. Othello, belatedly realizing Desdemona's innocence, stabs Iago but not fatally, saying that he would rather have Iago live the rest of his life in pain. For his part, Iago refuses to explain his motives, vowing to remain silent from that moment on. Lodovico, a Venetian nobleman, apprehends both Iago and Othello for the murders, but Othello commits suicide with a dagger he had hidden. Lodovico then declares Gratiano Othello's successor and exhorts Cassio to have Iago justly punished.

Cinthio source

Othello is an adaptation of the Italian writer Cinthio's tale "Un Capitano Moro" ("A Moorish Captain") from his Gli Hecatommithi (1565), a collection of one hundred tales in the style of Boccaccio's Decameron. No English translation of Cinthio was available in Shakespeare's lifetime, and verbal echoes in Othello are closer to the Italian original than to Gabriel Chappuy's 1584 French translation. Cinthio's tale may have been based on an actual incident occurring in Venice about 1508. It also resembles an incident described in the earlier tale of "The Three Apples", one of the stories narrated in the One Thousand and One Nights (Arabian Nights). Desdemona is the only named character in Cinthio's tale, with his few other characters identified only as the "Moor", the "Squadron Leader", the "Ensign", and the "Ensign's Wife" (corresponding to the play's Othello, Cassio, Iago and Emilia). Cinthio drew a moral (which he placed in the mouth of Desdemona) that European women are unwise to marry the temperamental males of other nations.

Cinthio's "Moor" is the model for Shakespeare's Othello, but some researchers believe the poet also took inspiration from the several Moorish delegations from Morocco to Elizabethan England circa 1600. While Shakespeare closely followed Cinthio's tale in composing Othello, he departed from it in some details. Brabantio, Roderigo, and several minor characters are not found in Cinthio, for example, and Shakespeare's Emilia takes part in the handkerchief mischief while her counterpart in Cinthio does not. Unlike in Othello, in Cinthio, the "Ensign" (the play's Iago) lusts after Desdemona and is spurred to revenge when she rejects him. Shakespeare's opening scenes are unique to his tragedy as is the tender scene between Emilia and Desdemona as the lady prepares for bed. Shakespeare's most striking departure from Cinthio is the manner of his heroine's death. In Shakespeare, Othello suffocates Desdemona, but in Cinthio, the "Moor" commissions the "Ensign" to bludgeon his wife to death with a sand-filled stocking. Cinthio describes each gruesome blow, and, when the lady is dead, the "Ensign" and the "Moor" place her lifeless body upon her bed, smash her skull, and cause the cracked ceiling above the bed to collapse upon her, giving the impression its falling rafters caused her death. In Cinthio, the two murderers escape detection. The "Moor" then misses Desdemona greatly, and comes to loathe the sight of the "Ensign". He demotes him, and refuses to have him in his company. The "Ensign" then seeks revenge by disclosing to the "Squadron Leader" the "Moor's" involvement in Desdemona's death. The two depart Cyprus for Venice, and denounce the "Moor" to the Venetian Seignory; he is arrested, taken to Venice, and tortured. He refuses to admit his guilt and is condemned to exile. Desdemona's relatives eventually find and kill him. The "Ensign", however, continues to escape detection in Desdemona's death, but engages in other crimes while in Venice. He is arrested and dies after being tortured. Cinthio's "Ensign's Wife" (the play's Emilia), survives her husband's death to tell her story.

Cinthio's tale has been described as a "partly racist warning" about the dangers of miscegenation.[6] While supplying the source of the plot, the book offered nothing of the sense of place of Venice or Cyprus. For knowledge of this Shakespeare would have used Gasparo Contarini's The Commonwealth and Government of Venice, in Lewes Lewkenor's 1599 translation.

Iago / Othello

Although eponymously titled, suggesting that the tragedy belongs primarily to Othello, Iago plays an important role in the plot. He reflects the archetypal villain, and has the biggest share of the dialogue. In Othello, it is Iago who manipulates all other characters at will, controlling their movements and trapping them in an intricate net of lies. He achieves this by getting close to all characters and playing on their weaknesses while they refer to him as "honest" Iago, thus furthering his control over the characters. A. C. Bradley, and more recently Harold Bloom, have been major advocates of this interpretation.[29] Other critics, most notably in the later twentieth century (after F. R. Leavis), have focused on Othello.

Othering

As the Protestant Reformation of England highlighted the importance of pious, controlled behaviour in society, it was the tendency of the contemporary Englishman to displace society's undesirable qualities of barbarism, treachery, jealousy and libidinousness onto those who are considered 'other'. The assumed characteristics of black men, or 'the other', were both instigated and popularised by Renaissance dramas of the time; for example, the treachery of black men inherent to George Peele's 'The Battle of Alcazar' (1588).

Religious / Philosophical

Many critics have noted references to demonic possession throughout the play, especially in relation to Othello's seizure, a phenomenon often associated with possession in the popular consciousness of the day. Another scholar suggests that the epileptic fit relates to the mind-body problem and the existence of the soul.

The Hero

There have been many differing views on the character of Othello over the years. A.C. Bradley calls Othello the "most romantic of all of Shakespeare's heroes" (by "hero" Bradley means protagonist) and "the greatest poet of them all". On the other hand, F.R. Leavis describes Othello as "egotistical". There are those who also take a less critical approach to the character of Othello such as William Hazlitt saying that "the nature of the Moor is noble... but his blood is of the most inflammable kind".

Othello is a 1995 film based on William Shakespeare's tragedy of the same name. It was directed by Oliver Parker and stars Laurence Fishburne as Othello, Irène Jacob as Desdemona, and Kenneth Branagh as Iago. This is the first cinematic reproduction of the play released by a major studio that casts an African American actor to play the role of Othello, although low-budget independent films of the play starring Ted Lange and Yaphet Kotto predated it.

The film, shot in Italy, follows the story of the play closely, but cuts many lines. In addition it adds scenes not in the play, including a sex scene between Othello and Desdemona, dreams in which Othello imagines Desdemona's supposed affair with Cassio, a scene in which Desdemona dances for Othello, a scene in an infirmary where Roderigo and Cassio are treated for their wounds, and a final scene in which the bodies of those killed are buried at sea.

Wikipedia 

I know I don't have to say anything else, other than this....beauty, brains and human rights. And she's female. And it's George Clooney. Our generation. Er hum. 'Nuff said. AZR 

George Clooney reportedly engaged to British human rights lawyer Amal Alamuddin

The Times 

• Amal Alamuddin, 36, reported to have displayed ring

• Actor's agent refuses to comment on personal matters

Ryan Gilbey: why retiring the playboy act would be Clooney's best move in years

George Clooney, Hollywood's most celebrated bachelor, is reportedly engaged to a British human rights lawyer.

The 52-year-old actor and Amal Alamuddin, 36, a Beirut-born barrister, have bought an engagement ring and shared the news with friends, according to various celebrity news sources.

Alamuddin, who is fluent in French and Arabic, has represented Julian Assange, the Wikileaks founder, and Yulia Tymoshenko, a former prime minister of Ukraine.

The couple reportedly displayed the ring to Clooney's business partner, Rande Gerber, and his wife, the model Cindy Crawford, over sushi at a Nobu restaurant in Malibu over the weekend.

“George and Amal are trying to keep things very low-key but they also aren't really trying to hide this, it doesn't seem,” an unnamed source, said to be close to the couple, told People magazine.

“I think it's like they want the people they love to know that this is real, that they plan on being together forever.”

According to E! News, when the actor Edward Norton dropped by during the meal the couple told him they were engaged, prompting congratulatory kisses.

Clooney's agent, Stan Rosenfield, declined to comment on the reports, saying he did not comment on personal matters – a change from last October, celebrity buffs noted, when Rosenfield said the actor and the lawyer were just friends.

After the end of a four-year marriage to actress Talia Balsam in 1993, Clooney famously vowed to not marry again, saying he wasn't very good at it. He kept his word through a string of relationships with models and actors.

The star of Batman and Robin, Ocean's Eleven and The Descendants – who won a supporting-actor Oscar for Syriana and was nominated as director of Good Night, and Good Luck – dated the former wrestler Stacy Kiebler, a relationship which ended last July, soon after which he was spotted on safari in Tanzania with Alamuddin.

A graduate of St Hugh's College at Oxford and New York University School of Law, Alamuddin works out of the Doughty Street Chambers in London, specialising in human rights and international law.

According to the chambers' website, she has served as counsel to the inquiry led by United Nations special rapporteur on counter-terrorism and human rights, Ben Emmerson QC, into the use of drones, and as an adviser to Kofi Annan, the joint special envoy of the UN and the Arab League on Syria.

Clooney has campaigned for liberal causes in the US and human-rights causes abroad, notably in Darfur.

He is also known for a penchant for younger women, a point co-host Tina Fey noted at the Golden Globes earlier this year.

The comedian called the award-winning Gravity, in which Clooney stars with the 49-year-old Sandra Bullock, "a story about how George Clooney would rather float away into space and die than spend one more minute with a woman his own age".

The Times 

Yep. I'm going to lose you after all aren't I. The writing on the wall is in dark block black ink today. I'm going to lose you anyway. Our journey will end when it does. But I am going to lose you. You don't want any of it. Face it. I am. 

Peace. 

Amera Ziganii Rao © 2014

Anyway, don't worry about it my sweet. We all have our purposes and are lucky we could even know each other. Misogyny or whatever, Omega male or whatever, I have never known either a non misogynist or indeed, an Alpha male. They don't exist. We are at the new frontier and maybe we only live this life to live our next. 

So what. My life has been mindless pain from the day I was born. Pain, because nihilism is the will to live, as opposed to the living death that most people are able to endure. You too. You had the will to live too. That was the first thing you told me. 

Which means we will both have those regrets on the day we die. 

So what. At least we tried. It is not our fault that this planet is an impossibly illogical non cause and non effect madness to reflect, presumably, the madness of The Universe. I have had words, as you can imagine. 

Earth is HER failure and not ours. No wonder the Draconians are in power. What's the difference? 

The difference actually is female. But we just get to live the same life you do as men. Being and nothingness in a mindless world of isolation and loneliness and serving. Either to humans or to the human race or to The Universe. We are all 'Maximuses'. We are all here to serve. 

None of us are here to be happy. 

At least we tried and at least we always have our silent partnership. That counts for a lot. You can be a misogynist forever as is your right and I can be a superstar, as is my right. 

Here's to the sexless life. A life of love nonetheless. A life of togetherness nonetheless. My twin soul. Our solo lives. 

Peace. 

Amera Ziganii Rao © 2014 

Angel of Mine lll Pt V (Artwork) 

Amera Ziganii Rao © Digital Darkroom Art

Quotes 

(Male) Priests ... these turkey-cocks of God. (The male god). Friedrich Nietzsche 

Capitalism has murdered the lives of millions of African Americans (Women) through brutal labor exploitation. Malcolm X 

The world needs artwork which shows how the IMF's policies support the massive theft of resources from the third world. Andy Warhol 

Are women less capable than men? 40 Billion 

It is time for the people to negate the airwaves by choosing to ignore the media content of the upper class. Martin Luther King 

There are four basic food groups: milk chocolate, dark chocolate, white chocolate, and chocolate truffles. ~ Unk 

Bulgaria: Asylum Seekers Summarily Expelled. Human Rights Watch 

Muslim parents' involvement in UK schools has dramatically improved results for Bangladeshis. (not the Pakistanis in Birmingham, clearly....) The Economist 

Being fearless precisely when you are most scared is the best hack. Tim Fargo 

There is nothing in a caterpillar that tells you it's going to be a butterfly. ~ Fuller 

The natural resources of the third world must enrich the people of the third world. Che Guevara 

My dream is to save women from nature. Christian Dior 

Wise men (women) speak because they have something to say; Fools because they have to say something. Plato 

The Times 

Porn and abuse....we've never had it so bad, says Greer 

.....AZR. And here we go. The same message. I know now why I am in this country. Two things. UKip and Post Feminism Modern Misogyny™. The first I saw coming at eight. I knew when cruel capitalism had had its day and forced people into realising they were just feudal serfs all over again, that it was anything foreign they would turn against, instead of the real culprits. The Ego Species of this world is so predictable. After all, all that Adolf Hitler did, before the gas chambers, was legal. He turned a people who were economically at the bottom into raging demons. And blamed someone else. Now, it will and is happening here. As I saw at the age of eight. 

I didn't know about Post Feminism Modern Misogyny™. Now I do. The fight begins and it is going to be vicious, sustained and subtle. And always economic. Men? Forget them. I am going to hire a bodyguard instead. And if he's good looking, I might have something I have never had. True male friendship with someone I am attracted to. Men however, as potential partners, 'friends' colleagues, bosses or whatever, forget it. They are angry dinosaurs in the post 'Donald Draper' generations. Angrier now than they have ever been. They are not even ready for the sex. They just want to beat women in whatever way they can. Much angrier than their fathers. The 'Michael Corleone' men of this world. The so called civilised world. Angry, resentful, greedy and mean. However much they claim to try. 

Forget the sex. Forget the love. The sacred has to be long integrated first. No one knows that now, more than me. Post Feminism Modern Misogyny™. The danger we all face. Hire bodyguards when you can afford it. Forget the men. 

Amera Ziganii Rao © 2014 

The growth in internet pornography and abuse on sites such as Twitter mean that treatment of women has worsened, Germaine Greer has claimed.

The feminist author has told a forthcoming BBC documentary that women face more discrimination now than when her groundbreaking book The Female Eunuch was published in the mid-1970s.

“Liberation hasn’t happened, even sexual liberation didn’t happen,” Professor Greer says. “What happened was that commercial pornography was liberated, fantasy was liberated, but people weren’t liberated.”

Her comments come after numerous incidents of high-profile women, including MPs and academics, being abused and threatened on Twitter. Professor Greer, 75, says that social media have given intolerant men a forum to voice their “loathing of women”.

“Men are now more aware of women because women keep pushing themselves in,” the Australian academic says on the documentary, Blurred Lines: The New Battle Of The Sexes, to be shown on BBC Two next month.

“Nowadays women expect to share men’s lives, they want to do the same work, they want to play the same games, they want to have the same social life, and I think it’s driving men nuts. And the result would seem to me to be that men are even less tolerant of women than they were before. Now if men have always needed women to be in a subservient, filial, ancillary position, when they [women] stand up and call attention to themselves, it produces reactions which are difficult to manage.”

The documentary, hosted by Kirsty Wark, will look at the role of the internet in the apparent rise of misogyny.

Mary Beard, the classicist, faced a torrent of online abuse after an appearance on the BBC’s Question Time. In August she abandoned a plan to join a day of silent protest at abusive messages sent to women on Twitter after she was threatened with rape.

Other examples included Caroline Criado-Perez, a journalist and feminist activist, being threatened with death and rape by Twitter trolls after campaigning for a female image on a new banknote. Stella Creasy, the Labour MP for Walthamstow, was also targeted after supporting Ms Criado-Perez.

Professor Beard tells the BBC documentary that abuse online will not stop her speaking out for women.

She said: “You do have to steel yourself a little bit because it is quite affecting when you get this stuff. But most of all it is infuriating. My views on anything are irrelevant to the size and shape of my vagina, I’m sorry.”

She expresses concerns that women may be put off entering public life because of the attacks: “I have decided I am going to face the music but there must be loads of women who think, that is not what I want.”

The Times 

Be civilised and give presenting job to a woman, BBC urged

BBC executives are under mounting pressure to choose a woman to front the remake of Civilisation and remove the “farcical prejudice” against commissioning older women for primetime presenting roles.

Sandi Toksvig, the writer and comedian, and the authors Tracy Chevalier and Jeanette Winterson are among those who have called for the BBC to appoint a woman presenter for the landmark documentary series.

Kathy Lette, the novelist, who organised the campaign, said: “It’s not that we’re mounting our high horses and galloping off into the sanctimonious sunset — we are just tired of being ignored, overlooked and marginalised.”

She is planning a protest outside Broadcasting House to keep up the pressure. It comes amid a separate campaign by Lenny Henry, the actor and comedian, to force broadcasters to put more ethnic minorities on screen.

The BBC’s decision to remake Civilisation, which was broadcast in 1969 and examined more than 1,000 years of western art, architecture and philosophy, is at the centre of Lord Hall of 

Birkenhead’s plans to revive the corporation’s arts coverage and has opened up one of the most coveted presenting roles in years.

Neil MacGregor, the director of the British Museum, and Grayson Perry, the Turner prizewinner, are among the favourites, but 50 prominent women have signed a letter to The Times, published today, calling for a woman presenter. Mary Beard, the classicist, and the historians Lisa Jardine and Bettany Hughes are among the candidates they put forward.

Lette said: “British women suffer from farcical prejudice. We get discriminated against for our looks in a way that men don’t. Women past 50 are deemed to have passed our amuse-by dates. We get put out to creative pasture. The men go on being commissioned: Paxman, Dimbleby, Starkey. But women are cast off into social Siberia.”

She added: “Women are so sick of being sidelined. I’m thinking of organising a protest outside Broadcasting House where all we women over 50 will stick our hormone replacement therapy patches all over the windows, then have a big cocktail party in the forecourt, quipping and quaffing and being wonderfully witty and loud just to prove that we’re not invisible.”

She said she had organised the campaign “because I don’t want the BBC male hierarchy to just give the job to a bloke without even thinking of alternatives”.

Juliette Binoche: ‘It doesn’t make me happy just to be a mother’

The Times 

Unselfconscious tears are filling Juliette Binoche’s eyes and splashing down on to her burgundy Dior trouser suit. She heaves a sigh. “My ambition is for my father to die in a tranquil path. That he feels happy with himself, and happy to go. That is a big challenge, I think,” she says in her husky, Americanised French accent. “He is not well.”

I have, of course, seen Binoche weeping many times, but only on screen (in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Three Colours: Blue, The English Patient . . .). Sitting opposite her in a Claridge’s suite, this is not at all what I am expecting. Binoche rarely gives interviews, and when she does is notorious for refusing to discuss her personal life.

What has got her talking about her family is the subject matter of her latest film, which has clearly struck a deep emotional chord. In A Thousand Times Good Night she plays a photojournalist who struggles to reconcile the demands and dangers of her work with her role as a mother and wife. After she is wounded photographing a suicide bombing, her family’s distress forces her to choose between the two.

Binoche is known for intensive research into her roles — she slept rough before filming Les Amants du Pont-Neuf and actually learnt the violin to play a violinist in Alice et Martin. For this film, although she met several war photographers and journalists, you can’t believe the research was necessary: she knows all about the difficulties of trying to combine children with an all-consuming career. Binoche has two children, Raphaël, 20, from a relationship with a professional scuba diver, André Halle, and Hana, 14, whose father is the actor Benoît Magimel (“I have a fairytale heart and I love the idea of getting married but I never did”).

“Of course, when you have a passion and a family there’s the back and forth, and the questioning and guilt. When you’re at work you feel you should be in the family, when you’re with the family you feel you should be at work,” says Binoche. “But when this work is dangerous it takes another layer.”

She herself was faced with this choice during filming, when she was asked if she would be happy to shoot some scenes in Afghanistan. “I said, yeah, I’ll go,” she says, with a Gallic shrug. 

“You trust something inside of you. I felt I could do it. But for society, for a woman to risk her life is a different story than for a man.” Does she think that’s fair? “Well, I was raised by a feminist,” she says. “I can’t say to a woman, ‘You are a war photographer, you can’t have children’. These people are amazing and admirable, and we need them. At the same time, there’s an obsession. It’s like a drug, you know. I was very good friends with Robert Doisneau [the renowned French photographer] and we talked about him as a photographer in the Second World War. He said to me: ‘I couldn’t take pictures of people in terrible states, so I dropped my camera and went to help.’ But on the other hand, when you see photographs of war, you suddenly have references and you have knowledge of what happened . . .” She raises her expressive hands in a gesture of helplessness and drops them into her lap. “It’s an equation that’s almost impossible to resolve.”

Gwyneth Paltrow recently aroused the ire of the public by implying in an interview that balancing work and life as a film star was more difficult than it would be for parents working in an office job. Binoche understands well those challenges. When her children were small, she took them with her on location and did her best to stick to the routines of their normal life, but at the age of ten her son began to prefer staying at home with his father and friends. “My daughter loves travelling so she adapted herself. She went to school in San Francisco, in South Africa, in London, in New York . . .

“I struggle, struggle, struggle, trying every day to make it as good as I can,” she says. “I don’t want to abandon my children. They’ve certainly suffered for my absence sometimes but also it gave them more responsibility and awareness. I can’t say it would have made me happy to just be a mother and stay at home. And I had no choice anyway.”

At home in Paris, Binoche makes up for lost mothering time with an orgy of domesticity. “When I came back from filming Clouds of Sils Maria [her new film with Kristen Stewart and Chloë Grace Moretz], I cooked for four months,” she confides. “I wanted to make the most wonderful things so that they would remember Mum’s cooking. Of course it’s another performance. It’s tiring to be a mother,” she says. “I take it as work, a wonderful job.”

Binoche herself comes from a theatrical background — her father, Jean-Marie Binoche, was a director, her mother, Monique Stalens, an actor and drama teacher — and Binoche seems to feel that she came second to both of their careers.

“They were very politically engaged, they were artists, but it was hard for them because financially they couldn’t cope with life. And emotionally they couldn’t cope either,” she says. “I have never really blamed my parents because I understand where they are coming from.”

They divorced when she was just four, and Binoche was sent to boarding school along with her sister Marion; as a teenager, her holidays were spent with her maternal grandmother and she might not see her parents for months. “I have a strong feeling of abandonment, that’s for sure,” she says. “As a child, you don’t see things in a rational way — it was just being left in a place and you don’t know why you’re there. You wonder, but you don’t know. My way to survive emotionally was to act. I was acting all the time and it was my best medicine, creating worlds, creating relationships.”

Binoche studied drama at the Conservatoire de Paris, landed a small role in a film directed by Jean-Luc Godard and, by the time she was 23, was starring opposite Daniel Day-Lewis in The Unbearable Lightness of Being.

The complexity and intensity of the emotions she is able to portray have always set her apart. So perhaps that abandonment not only led her to her career but also helped her excel in it? “The things you’re missing can be real treasures,” she agrees. “It’s very helpful as an actor because you have things you want to say to the world, and they have to come from a deep place inside of you or there’s no reality to what you’re bringing to the screen.”

Her relationship with her parents remains difficult; she may burst into tears discussing her father’s state of health, but she obviously still feels unacknowledged. “Sometimes when you go back to your parents you think, they’re going to understand and support me. And when they don’t, that’s when you get upset. Not about the childhood things, but about the present,” she says.

Binoche has just turned 50. “I’m old!” she says. “It’s a turning point for everyone but I feel it’s easier than my forties. I feel happier. You have to appreciate every single thing in your life, and the joy of being alive.” She threw a party for herself on the spring equinox. “I invited 100 people, including a friend I’d had from when I was seven. Suddenly, I saw lots of layers of my life coming together. I realised, my God, I have to calm down and not travel so much, and have the pleasure of seeing people, because life goes by so quickly.” Binoche remains mesmerisingly beautiful, her looks the stuff of Disney cliché: wide brown eyes, porcelain complexion, ebony clouds of hair . . . Yet there are lines on her face now and no attempt has been made, it seems, to freeze them into submission. Has anyone ever suggested surgery? “A couple of people,” she stays. What was her response? She flicks an eloquent middle finger.

“I don’t want to get into that. It’s challenging, because you’re changing, but I’m not sure I would feel better. Because then you can go like this,” she grabs her cheeks and yanks them backwards grotesquely, “the puffy face, everyone looks the same. A face is like a book for actors, you can read things in it. And it has to move with the emotions because it’s a mirror of what’s happening inside. If you touch that mirror, where’s the truth?”

Perhaps this is why Binoche’s career appears to be going from strength to strength at a time when her frozen-faced contemporaries must resign themselves to character parts. Last year, she filmed a rom-com (Words and Pictures) opposite Clive Owen, a drama (Clouds of Sils Maria), took the lead in an art-house biopic (Camille Claudel 1915) and accepted a role in a big-budget action movie (Godzilla — “a wink to my son because we watched it together when he was smaller”). When we meet she is just back from Chile, where she was making The 33, about the trapped Copiapó miners; next, she’s playing an Arctic explorer’s wife in Nobody Wants the Night, and after that there’s a film in Sicily. It’s a daunting schedule. “When you do something you really love it gives you energy. It’s a chemical thing,” she says. “When I don’t work, I’m trying to make everyone else happy. In front of the camera there’s a feeling of abandoning myself to this invisible question: can you hear, can you see, can you feel, can you wake up? The challenge is beautiful.”

A Thousand Times Good Night is in cinemas from May 2

Peaches Geldof tragedy has cruel echoes of her mother’s death

The Times 

Peaches Geldof died of a heroin overdose in a tragic parallel of the death of her mother which had obsessed her, an inquest will be told today.

The TV presenter was found dead while caring for her 11-month-old son at the family home last month.

Ms Geldof, 25, had become increasingly obsessed with the death of her mother, Paula Yates, from a heroin overdose in 2000. Ms Yates was found dead at her home in Notting Hill, west London, having taken an accidental overdose while alone with Ms Geldof’s sister Tiger Lily, then aged four.

Hours before she was found dead Ms Geldof posted a photograph of herself and her mother on the internet.

Police discovered no evidence of drugs paraphernalia in the house, leading to speculation that items may have been removed before the property was searched. Roger Hatch, the coroner, waited for results of the toxicology tests to determine if Ms Geldof had died of an overdose before deciding to open an inquest after a post-mortem examination failed to establish the cause of death.

The results will be announced by Detective Chief Inspector Paul Fotheringham during a brief hearing in Gravesend, Kent, this afternoon. Police used drugs sniffer dogs during the search of the house and examined the contents of rubbish bags.

Mr Hatch, the coroner for northwest Kent, will adjourn the inquest until the end of July to ensure that Ms Geldof’s husband Thomas Cohen, a rock singer, and her father Bob Geldof, the former singer of The Boomtown Rats and founder of Live Aid, are able to attend the full hearing.

What happened to the usual items used when smoking or injecting heroin is likely to be a focus of the on-going investigation. It is not known who supplied the young mother with the drugs.

Ms Geldof, who also worked as columnist, model and DJ, was looking after her youngest son Phaedra on her own when she was found dead at the detached home in Wrotham, Kent, on April 7.

The alarm was raised by Mr Cohen, 23, who had spent the previous night away with their eldest son Astala, aged 23 months. He asked a friend to visit the family house when he could not contact his wife.

Friends have speculated that her belief in “attachment parenting”, which recommends parents sharing beds with their children and prolonged breastfeeding, had led to her exhaustion and strains in her marriage.

Ms Geldof had a long history of drug use, including reports that she had to be revived after an overdose in 2008.

The inquest of her friend Freddy McConnel, 18, who died of a drugs overdose in 2011, heard that he had written in his diary a few months earlier: “Peaches is coming over later and I am going to inject for the first time. Perhaps I will die. I hope I don’t.”

In May 2008, Ms Geldof was questioned by police but not charged after being seen offering a drug pusher up to £190. Friends said that she had stopped using drugs before the birth of her children.

There was speculation that she might have accidentally overdosed because her body was not as tolerant to the quantities of heroin she had previously taken.

Ms Yates’s funeral was held at Mary Magdalene & St Lawrence in Davington, Kent, the same church where Ms Geldof was married and had her own funeral.

In her final interview, Ms Geldof said that having her sons had helped her to overcome much of the damage caused by the loss of her mother.

“Now that I am a mum I can correct those awful parts of my childhood and it’s a really healing process,” she said

“Before, I was not at peace with myself about it because I was just traumatised.

“That’s why I was living a chaotic lifestyle. But now I have the kids I can heal the situation. It’s so good in every single way, really.”

Mr Geldof had released a statement after his daughter’s death in which he described her as “the wildest, funniest, cleverest, wittiest and the most bonkers of all of us”.

Abuse claims against 18 teachers by ex-pupils at top public school

The Times 

A team of specialist Scotland Yard detectives led by the officer who headed the Jimmy Savile inquiry is to investigate claims that up to 18 paedophile teachers may have abused dozens of boys for several decades at one of Britain’s most famous public schools.

The move comes after a series of complaints from former pupils who say that they fell victim to sex crimes by staff at St Paul’s School, in London, or its preparatory school, Colet Court.

Triggered by revelations in The Times, multiple allegations have been made to police in recent weeks against numerous former schoolmasters, ten of whom taught at Colet Court and eight at St Paul’s. Some are no longer alive.

Detectives have compiled a list of more than 100 victims, suspects and potential witnesses.

Alleged sex offences at the two schools span five decades, from the mid-1960s to last year. A source close to the inquiry, Operation Winthorpe, described its scope as huge.

The new investigation will be under the command of Detective Superintendent David Gray, who led the Metropolitan Police’s Operation Yewtree investigation into the alleged sex crimes of Savile and other celebrities, including Max Clifford.

Mr Gray, head of Scotland Yard’s paedophile unit, said that police intended to carry out “a thorough and transparent review of non-recent offending at the two schools”, which share a campus in Barnes, southwest London.

“The investigation will be conducted by a dedicated team of specially trained officers who have experience of historic child abuse investigations and are sensitive to the needs of victims.”

A telephone hotline and email address have been set up, to enable former pupils to contact the inquiry team.

Pat Marshall, 65, a former St Paul’s master, was arrested in February on suspicion of indecently assaulting a pupil in the 1970s. He denies any wrongdoing. His ex-colleague, Keith Perry, 70, received a suspended prison sentence in the same month for possessing hundreds of extreme child abuse images.

A Colet Court teacher, Anthony Fuggle, 57, was arrested last September on suspicion of possessing indecent images of boys, said to have been found on a school computer. He is on bail.

It can be revealed today that a second teacher at the prep school was also arrested last year, on suspicion of sexually grooming a child. Tim Harbord, 61, was not charged with any offence and denies any misconduct. He and Mr Fuggle both resigned during the current academic year.

Crimes, ranging from indecent assaults to penetrative sex, are said to have been committed by 18 teachers against boys aged from 9 to 17, in dormitories, classrooms, a swimming pool, inside a car and at teachers’ private homes. Much of the offending is alleged to have happened between the 1960s and 1990.

Pupils at one or both schools during the era under investigation included the chancellor, George Osborne, the attorney general, Dominic Grieve, QC, and the actor, Eddie Redmayne. There is no suggestion that they were abused as schoolboys.

Detective Sergeant James Townly, who has day-to-day control of Operation Winthorpe, said that former pupils who were the victims of sexual abuse were being placed “at the centre of our work”. 

Anyone who comes forward will “receive assistance and appropriate support”.

“We’ve already spoken to a number of complainants and there are many other people we need to contact to build a full picture of the alleged offending over several decades. It will obviously take some time for the police to work through all those names.”

St Paul’s, founded in 1509, says that the safeguarding and welfare of pupils is its highest priority.

The school has pledged full co-operation with the investigation and called for all living suspects to be “subjected to the proper processes of justice”, whether for offences 50 years ago or more recently.

The Times 

No Name V (Artwork) 

Amera Ziganii Rao © Digital Darkroom Art

It’s past my bedtime, Paxman insists as he quits Newsnight

The Times 

After 25 years in which he became the scourge of politicians and one of the BBC’s biggest stars, Jeremy Paxman has quit Newsnight.

Paxman, whose belligerent interviews with the likes of Lord Howard of Lympne and George Galloway have become the stuff of YouTube legend, told BBC executives he wanted to leave the flagship current affairs show last summer but was convinced to stay on.

“After 25 years, I should rather like to go to bed at much the same time as most people,” Paxman said last night.

Despite years of speculation about when Paxman would finally leave the show, the BBC has not lined up a long-term replacement. One former producer said that his loss is a “total disaster” for the show.

Paxman, 63, will leave in about six weeks. After stepping aside, he will continue hosting University Challenge and documentaries. “This was a decision I reached and informed the BBC of last July,” he said. “I shall work out the remainder of my contract and will not seek another.”

He added: “It’s been fun. I have had the pleasure of working with lots of clever, creative and amusing people. I think I’ve been lucky and wish the programme well.”

An all-female line-up of Laura Kuenssberg, Emily Maitlis and Kirsty Wark will share presenting duties on Newsnight in the short term. Kuenssberg, who was recently lured back as chief political correspondent from ITV, was installed by Ladbrokes as the bookies’ favourite to replace Paxman at odds of 3-1.

Insiders said that Eddie Mair, the Radio 4 presenter who has occasionally stood in for Paxman on Newsnight, should also be considered a frontrunner. Others speculated that the BBC will move Nick Robinson, the Political Editor, to host the show and elevate Kuenssberg to take his place in Westminster.

Whoever gets the role, Paxman’s departure leaves the BBC with a huge hole to fill at a difficult time for the programme. Its reputation was badly damaged by the decision to shelve an investigation into sex abuse by Jimmy Savile and the libelling of the Conservative Peer Lord McAlpine.

The show’s impact was already diminishing, with the audience down by 30 per cent since 2009, according to a report this week by the BBC Trust.

Ian Katz, the former deputy editor of The Guardian, has tried to revive the show since taking over last year, bringing in several new journalists and adopting a more populist tone. He has denied “dumbing down” the programme after criticism of recent segments including Emily Maitlis’s interview with the Cookie Monster, a Sesame Street character, and Kirsty Wark dancing to Michael Jackson’s Thriller.

Paxman has recently voiced frustration at the BBC, telling a newspaper that he had come to “loathe aspects of it”. He criticised the management culture, the lavish payoffs given to former executives and even questioned the existence of Radio 1, its youth-oriented station. “There’s a pile of stuff on the BBC I can’t stand,” he said.

There was no animosity toward Paxman at the BBC yesterday, though -- only fulsome tributes. Some Newsnight staff were said to be in tears after being told of his decision to leave. Mr Katz said: “I’m deeply grateful to him for delaying his departure to help renew the programme and for the extraordinary support and generosity he has shown.”

Lord Hall of Birkenhead, the BBC’s director-general, who has known Paxman since the 1970s, said: “His is a rare and dazzling talent. He has a unique ability to create moments of real discomfort for politicians and memorable delight for audiences.”

There were tributes from outside the BBC, too. Russell Brand, the actor and comedian, who called for a revolution in one of Paxman’s most recent memorable interviews, tweeted: “Paxman come back! This is not the revolution we intended.” Piers Morgan, the former Daily Mirror editor whose chat show on CNN was recently cancelled, said: “I’m available.”

The Times  

What is behind the new battle of the sexes?. Kirsty Walk 

The Times 

I am an optimist. I was optimistic in the 1970s that life was getting better for women. The Equal Pay Act in 1970 was followed five years later by the Sex Discrimination Act (though rape in marriage wasn’t considered a crime until 1982 in Scotland and 1991 in England). I thought naively that, as night follows day, the legislation would trigger the death of sexism, the end of sexual harassment and of the bullying of women at work, of controlling relationships and of domestic violence. In short, a revolution. 

Of course, much has improved for women, our lives are probably unrecognisable to our grandparents’. There is no job we cannot do, no heights we cannot scale. So why in the last few years does there seem to have been a tidal wave of openly hostile and aggressive behaviour towards women, from the online response to Professor Mary Beard’s participation on Question Time, to young women at school being “slut shamed” and touched up; from prostitutes being beaten up and killed on a video game, to some of our best known comedians thinking rape jokes are a great laugh? 

Last year, it was even possible to buy a T-shirt proclaiming “I’m feeling rapey”. Why has the conversation around women become so coarse?

In a new BBC documentary that’s about to be screened, I’ve set out to explore whether the sexism and misogyny reported daily to campaign groups such as The Everyday Sexism Project were different to what has gone before and, if so, what could be fuelling it? Or, are we simply seeing a new iteration? Gaby Hornsby, the director, and I investigated several examples of sexism and misogyny that had provoked outrage, to gauge their offensiveness, and what was striking was that the “pain threshold” was so different, among men and women both. We showed footage of Stirling University men’s hockey team singing a new, significantly more explicit, version of an old drinking song on a busy public bus at around nine o’clock at night. The video had been taken on a phone and posted on the internet. A couple of lines:

“A lady came into the store one day asking for an orgasm. An orgasm she wanted — who gives a f*** what she got . . .

“A lady came into the store one day asking for a lady train. A lady train she wanted — a miscarriage she got . . . ”

When I spoke to students at Stirling University about the incident, one, Katie, said: “I think it’s OK because obviously I know some of the guys and I know that they are not sexist,” whereas another, Miriam, told us: “This song isn’t a one-off, terrible song that a group of bad individuals have sung; this is a common example of everyday occurrences that really highlight an underlying misogyny.”

A common defence for the hockey players among students was that this wasn’t misogyny, as they were “just joking”. So I explored the contemporary comedy scene. Of course, apart from the importance of free speech, humour has always played an important role in breaking taboos. And in a world of equality legislation, is it only right that women are “fair game”? I wanted to try and see if it was possible or desirable to draw the line somewhere, or whether there was any truth in the old accusation that women have a sense of humour bypass. At a comedy club in Portsmouth, we showed some members of the audience footage of some pretty full-on stuff, different rape jokes, and Frankie Boyle in aggressive form towards one woman who dared to heckle. Again, the tolerance levels were strikingly different, with some of our male interviewees more outraged than their female partners. 

However, when I spoke to the American academic Dr Thomas Ford from Western Carolina University about his research on the impact of sexist humour, he told us that in his experiments, when sexist men heard sexist jokes it reinforced their attitudes, and in the immediate aftermath they were more likely to act in a sexist way. In his analysis, at least, the resurgence of “retro” sexist humour isn’t entirely benign.

Sexist and misogynistic behaviour can have many forms, but one new vehicle which has seen an explosion in attacks on women is the internet. I still think the internet is a marvel, a thing of wonder, but it is the modern equivalent of the Wild West, and it is there that women in particular seem to be being targeted for verbal abuse. 

As Germaine Greer told us: “Who thought that once you had social media there would become this terrible grab-bag of loathing of women . . . We need a new analysis.” She believes the abuse reflects a rise in misogyny. “Nowadays, women expect to share men’s lives, they want to do the same work, they want to play the same games, they want to have the same social life and I think it’s driving men nuts. And the result would seem to me to be that men are even less tolerant of women than they were before.”

For the younger generation in particular, the online world is the same as the real world. The new generation is growing up online, so where are the trusted guides to navigate this sometimes savage space? I spoke to teenage boys in a sex education class, and some of them admitted to watching porn. No surprise there, but the girls in the class worried that this would give the boys a pretty skewed view of healthy teenage sexual relationships. The impact of porn on boys’ attitudes to girls was cited by a group of young women I spoke to who founded the Campaign 4 Consent, which lobbies for consent to be taught as part of the national curriculum. Georgia, aged 15, told me: “I would say that often the worst reinforced attitudes have come from pornography and its availability online and I think that’s a lot from where it stems, the idea that women are objects and the boys can touch the girls without the girls giving them some kind of allowance.”

So is the internet itself a male-skewed space, founded by (predominantly male) geeks, like a giant video game in which women are still dismissed as bit-part players, and has that given rise to a new misogyny? Is technology doing more than facilitating old hostilities, or is there something deeper at work? Could women’s success even be part of the story?

Blurred Lines: The New Battle of the Sexes is on Thursday May 8 at 9.30pm on BBC Two

Men are not more misogynist now — the hostility of some is just more visible, says Sathnam Sanghera

The most terrifying thing that ever happened to me on Twitter involved a message sent by Kia Abdullah, a young British Bangladeshi writer. In July 2011, she tweeted that she felt no sympathy for three “gap yaar” teenagers who had just died in a bus crash, because they were middle class and had double-barrelled names.

It was a vile thing to say, and I retweeted her, saying so, having no idea of the pandemonium that would ensue. We may have had just a few hundred followers between us, but our respective tweets were retweeted thousands of times, with people piling in to describe her as “sick” and “disgusting”. The furore made several headlines in national newspapers.

Obviously, on some level, I understood the reaction, given that I was the first to express dismay. But the problem was that it continued long after Abdullah apologised at length, and, I believe, with sincerity. I found myself being included in messages that suggested she deserved to be raped, and in tweets that suggested she deserved to be murdered and raped. And then a man looked up her address on the electoral register, and turned up at her flat, enraged and brandishing her photograph.

I came off Twitter for some time after the experience. I felt I had inadvertently sparked a mob attack. The misogyny made me sick. 

Who are the men who tweet such abuse? I can’t say I know many of them. I have always worked in a liberal environment; nearly all my editors are women. Most of my best friends are women. I have written two books in which the heroes have been women. The one time I was forced to go to a strip club, I pretended to be gay. I find male company boisterous and tedious and crass. But I know they exist and mean what they say.

The only point on which I part with Germaine Greer is her argument that such abuse is proof that men are more intolerant of women than ever before. Such intolerance has always existed. 

Social networking simply means it now has an outlet and is more visible than before. Basically, Twitter allows you to know what millions of people are thinking about any given subject at any given time. And a large part of what they think is highly unpleasant.

It’s never been better for women, believes Joan Smith

Sometimes I can’t believe my luck. During my working life, I’ve witnessed massive changes in women’s lives, most of them for the better. When I was growing up, few women went to university, there were hardly any female MPs and women still needed a male “guarantor” to get a mortgage. Early on in my career as a journalist, I even met a woman who’d been put in a mental hospital just for having an “illegitimate” baby.

Things are so much better today, even though I’m as shocked as anyone by the visceral misogyny on social networking sites such as Twitter. 

Some men, it seems, can’t see an articulate woman on television without going online to abuse her in personal and explicitly sexual terms. I’m still wondering why a man who disagreed with something I said about the monarchy on Sky News felt he needed to post a tweet calling me a “stupid bitch”.

I’m sure Germaine Greer is right when she says that some men feel women have invaded spaces they used to regard as their own. 

To an older generation of men, the first women to work in offices on equal terms did seem like intruders, and they went out of their way to make us uncomfortable. I don’t think it’s an accident that young women faced a barrage of sexual harassment at work in the 1970s and 1980s.

I can think of a couple of incidents at the beginning of my career that amounted to sexual assault. 

Now there’d be a company equal opportunities policy and someone senior to complain to, which is a great improvement on how things used to be. I’ve also heard lots of younger men say how relieved they are that they don’t have to work in laddish, all-male environments.

That’s why I’m mystified at Greer’s claim that “things have got a lot worse for women” since she wrote The Female Eunuch. The statistics tell a very different story: from girls outperforming boys at school to the number of women in the law, journalism and medicine — and owning property.

The foam-flecked misogynists are furious because they’re losing the argument. We’ve yet to achieve full equality, but I don’t think there’s ever been a better time to be a woman. 

Ukip donor says women cannot be raped by their husbands

Demetri Marchessini is latest supporter to plunge party into controversy as polls show party heading for election win

Nicholas Watt 

The Guardian 

Nigel Farage faces fresh embarrassment over the controversial views of its supporters when a former Ukip donor said on television that a woman could not be raped by her husband.

Demetri Marchessini, the party's sixth-largest individual donor in 2013, also said that gay men experience "no love, only lust". He first caused controversy a year ago when he said women should not wear trousers.

Ukip appeared to be thrown into confusion after Marchessini told Channel Four News he had made a £5,000 donation to the party in December, despite the party claiming it had severed its links with the millionaire.

Asked whether the party had accepted the donation, Farage said: "I don't know, you'll have to ask the treasurer won't you. I'm sure he gave the money in good faith, the money was taken in good faith."

Demetri Marchessini, pictured on his blog

Demetri Marchessini, pictured on his blog.

The interview with Marchessini came hours after a remarkable day for the party. Farage's decision not to contest the Newark byelection was followed by an opinion poll that showed Ukip on course to achieve an emphatic victory in the European parliamentary elections next month.

The Ukip leader, who began the day denying he was too "frit" to stand in Newark, was shown to be the dominant force in British politics after the ComRes/ITV News poll put support for his party at 38% for the European elections – an increase of eight points in three weeks.

Support for the party even topped 50% in two English regions – 53% in the eastern region and 52% in the West Midlands.

Labour is down three points in the overall poll on 27%, while the Tories trail in third place on 18%, down four points. The Liberal Democrats remain unchanged on 8%.

But Farage once again had to contend with the highly contentious views of a party supporter. Marchessini, who previously said there was no such thing as date rape, said that rape could not take place in marriage. "There's no such thing," he said.

"When you get married you promise to look after the other person for the rest of their life. You certainly don't promise that you're going to put them in jail. If you make love on Friday and make love Sunday, you can't say Saturday is rape. Once a woman accepts, she accepts and especially when she makes a vow on her wedding day."

Marchessini said that gay men are incapable of experiencing love. He said: "There's no love, only lust, and also the physical actions that they do are completely different. They go out at night and they pick up five, ten, fifteen different partners in one night. Is that love?

"They are not husband and wife. They are roommates and both of them go out cruising. There is no such thing as fidelity in homosexual relationships. They just all go out looking for action. That's the way it is."

Farage last night acknowledged that Ukip may have been unwise to accept donations from Marchessini. Asked whether it was right to accept money, he said: "Possibly not, no."

The latest row came after Farage shied away from standing in the Newark byelection which is expected to be held in June after the resignation of the former Conservative frontbencher Patrick Mercer. The former army officer was due to face a six-month suspension from parliament over a cash for questions scandal.

Tory MPs, saddened by the fall of Mercer, were buoyed by Farage's acknowledgment that he would struggle to overturn the party's 16,152 majority at the 2010 election. Ukip only managed to win 3.8% of the vote in the seat.

MPs joked about how Farage had displayed the weak characteristic of "frit" – Margaret Thatcher's Lincolnshire description of politicians who avoid a fight. One said: "Roy Jenkins had been president of the European Commission and yet he fought a byelection [Warrington in 1981] which he lost. He then fought another one [Glasgow Hillhead in 1982] which he won. You have to ask: just which seat will suit Nigel Farage?"

The Tories will call the writ for the byelection, which will be held after the European elections on 22 May and Queen's speech on 4 June. The likely dates are 5 or 12 June. The Tories have already selected Robert Jenrick as their candidate because Mercer resigned the Tory whip last year. 

http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2014/apr/30/ukip-donor-says-women-cannot-be-raped-by-husbands 

Blinkered employers come under fire as 430,000 disabled people quit their jobs

The Times 

Almost 430,000 disabled people left their jobs last year, more than double the number that found employment, according to a report published today.

Despite growing numbers of disabled people finding work, the amount falling out of jobs at the same time is “scandalously high”, say disability campaigners.

More than four million disabled people work in the UK yet the analysis by Scope, the disability charity, shows that a significant proportion drop out every year — mainly because their employers are inflexible to their needs.

Its report shows that last year 429,000 disabled people left work and only 207,000 people found jobs.

“This means that 220,000 more disabled people left work than moved into it,” the report says. “By contrast, the movement amongst the rest of the population is overwhelmingly in the other direction: 560,000 more non-disabled people found work than became unemployed or inactive.”

Disabled workers blame inflexible employers for failing to allow them to adapt their working patterns to make it easier to work efficiently. This includes physical measures such as ramps and more roomy workspace areas to accommodate wheelchairs as well as more flexible working to allow time off for hospital appointments, treatment sessions or working at home.

In many cases people who become disabled while they are working are made redundant and find it impossible to get work again. Once out of the workplace, disabled people find it much more difficult to return than abled bodied staff, says the report. Ten per cent of unemployed disabled people had been out of work for five years or more, compared with just 3 per cent of the non-disabled population.

“Disabled people are finding work — this is welcome news. But today’s report shows that a scandalously high number — some 430,000 — have dropped out of work last year,” said Richard Hawkes, Scope chief executive. “As a result the employment rate for disabled people remains alarmingly low.

“France, Germany and Canada all have higher rates,” he said. “It’s now clear that we’ve been blinkered in our approach to disabled people at work. We need to look into how we can make work places more flexible, welcoming environments where disabled people flourish rather than struggle.”

Polling carried out by the charity shows that 48 per cent of disabled people who responded said they would benefit from modified hours in the workplace. Many said they would like short periods of time when they could work fewer hours, particularly when their condition fluctuated.

Nearly a third (31.8 per cent) said they were not able to make the changes to the work area or work equipment that they needed and 76 per cent were unaware of the government’s Access to Work scheme, which helps employers pay for practical support for disabled people.

Mike Penning, minister for the disabled, said that disabled people were moving into jobs at a rate of 100 placements every working day. “We absolutely support Scope’s aim of getting more disabled people into work.”

Police stop and search powers to be overhauled. BBC News 

The Times 

Police stop and search powers in England and Wales are to be overhauled with a revised code of conduct, Home Secretary Theresa May has said.

She told MPs an inquiry had found 27% of searches may have been illegal.

She said that if the number of stop and searches did not now come down, she would seek to change the law.

The move follows a consultation, which highlighted concerns that stop and search was used too widely and was unfairly targeting ethnic minorities.

Labour say the plans do not go far enough.

'Affront to justice'

Recent figures show only about 10% of more than a million searches lead to an arrest, with black people six times more likely to be stopped than those who are white.

Theresa May said stop and search had become "a way of life" for young black people

At present, police can stop someone if they have reasonable grounds to suspect they are carrying illegal drugs, a weapon, stolen property or something which could be used to commit a crime, such as a crowbar.

One of the most telling contributions in the Commons debate after Theresa May's announcement came from the black Labour MP Diane Abbott.

Stop and search, she said, was the one issue that "poisoned" relationships between police and urban communities more than any other. Indeed, the high level of stops in London, particularly among young black men, was considered to be a factor which contributed to the riots in 2011.

Since then, the Metropolitan Police has cut its use of stop and search and increased its arrest ratio - improvements highlighted by the home secretary to show that forces can make a difference without the government having to change the law.

It's believed legislation was ruled out after objections from Downing Street, who feared it could be construed as being soft on crime.

However, under Section 60 of the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act, officers can also stop and search someone without suspicion that they are involved in wrongdoing if approved by a senior officer, for example, because there is a fear that serious violence could take place.

Mrs May said when misused, stop and search was an "enormous waste of police time" and "hugely damaging to the relationship between the police and the public".

She referred to a recent inquiry by Her Majesty's Inspectorate of Constabulary (HMIC), which found that more than half of all forces in England and Wales were ignoring some rules on stop and search.

"It is very clear that in a large number of cases the reasonable grounds for suspicion were not there and one can only therefore assume, given that black people are six times more likely to be stopped and searched than a white person, that it is precisely the fact that they are a black person that has led to that stop and search taking place.

"It is absolutely disgraceful and sadly... this is a feeling that has come through to young people in black and minority ethnic communities that this is what happens and that this is, if you like, a way of life."

Under the new plans:

Alex Marshall, chief executive of the professional standards body the College of Policing, will review stop and search training for all forces

Officers will have to sit assessments on whether they understand the rules on stop and search and will have to account for their actions if there are community complaints

Police could face disciplinary action if they misuse their powers - or be barred from using them altogether

'Backed down'

The BBC's home affairs correspondent Danny Shaw said the home secretary had wanted to go further, but her original proposals were blocked by Downing Street which was worried they might leave the Conservatives looking soft on crime in the run-up to the general election in 2015.

Your plans have been frisked of serious substance”

Responding to Mrs May in the Commons, shadow home secretary Yvette Cooper asked her: "Why aren't you banning the use of targets given to police officers to stop and search a certain number of people?

"Why won't you put the guidance on race discrimination on a statutory basis?

"And why won't you insist that all forces abide by case law rather than some?"

She added: "Your plans have been frisked of serious substance and we need to know why you have backed down."

"Your advisers have blamed 'regressive attitudes in No 10'. But why have you listened to them?"

Rachel Robinson, policy director at campaign group Liberty, said the proposals were "a half-hearted mix of voluntary, patchy measures", adding: "Public trust is wearing thin and today was a missed chance for real change."

'Alienation'

Labour's Diane Abbott, who was Britain's first black woman MP, said successive governments had "failed to act" on the problem, so Mrs May deserved "some credit... for having taken things as far as you have done".

"There is no single issue that poisons relationships between urban communities and the police more than stop and search," she told the Commons.

We think it's great that it's finally been recognised that stop and search has been used discriminatorily”

Shauneen Lambe

Just for Kids Law

Conservative Charles Walker gave an example of one of his constituents who had been stopped 50 times between the ages of 13 and 18, adding that he would have a sense of "total desolation and alienation" if that had happened to one of his children.

Mrs May said a consultation held last year in England and Wales into stop and search attracted more than 5,000 responses and found very different attitudes towards the practice.

Seventy-eight per cent of those aged between 55 and 74 thought it was an effective tool, but just 38% of those between 18 and 24 agreed.

Of white respondents, 66% believed it was effective, compared with 38% of black respondents.

The Metropolitan Police said stop and search was increasingly being used in a more targeted and effective way, but it recognised there was "much more to do to improve confidence across all communities in the use of the powers".

Shauneen Lambe, executive director of campaign organisation Just for Kids Law, told the BBC: "Obviously, we think it's great that it's finally been recognised that stop and search has been used discriminatorily and unnecessarily, but our concern is how well these plans will be implemented.

"I think that with an intent and an ethos things can change, but we do feel their need to be greater sanctions for misuse too." 

The Times 

Super Siren XXlX (Artwork) 

Amera Ziganii Rao © Digital Darkroom Art

Love Therapy Update. Amera Ziganii Rao 

And as misogyny and inadequacies and ego to soul grows, don't forget that I am healing now too. Tempering the shock and rage. Anger management is what it is called actually:) 

So, don't think you are the only one. We are in this together again. Mutual re-ascension to go with ascension. Anger management is a good thing. A generic healing. A sign at last that the new times approach. The wounds and abuses have been named, shamed and they are about to be tamed. 

Humility is a glorious thing. Tolerance a beautiful thing. This was just the cleansing. 

However, that is a difficult thing to examine in this ordinary world of no emotions, no wound healing and no passion. Don't look at 'rage' per se in that context. Look at it in the context of truth. 

Be difficult but be nice. Express pain but try to temper the anger. None of us are really free. We all have to behave. And that becomes a good thing. In its TRUTH it is called temperance. In its TRUTH it is called love. In its TRUTH we are all new again. In its TRUTH we are temperamental. But we know how to behave. 

Amera Ziganii Rao © 2014

Anger Management. Amera Ziganii Rao  

So I'm done. How about you? May 2. Exactly five years ago, May 3, I ascended. Nice. Re-Ascension, post trauma, complete. 

We are in sync. Now it is trust, faith and hope. You've got it. I'm ready to see the new, old you. 

Surrender and step into the light. I'm waiting. For you. 

Amera Ziganii Rao © 2014

(cute piece to go with the new 'times'). AZR 

It’s not misogyny, men are just shy about equality 

Tom Whipple 

The Times 

Detective chief inspector Gene Hunt was explaining police working practices to a female recruit. “It’s a tradition,” he said. “When a woman joins the Met, skirt up, stamp your bum with the day’s date and down the pub.”

Was the straight-talking star of Life on Mars and Ashes to Ashes a sexist? On the face of it, it seems fairly unambiguous. But there is another interpretation: could the man who once asked, “What if my uncle had tits, would he be my auntie?” instead just be a closet metrosexual, scared to speak his true mind lest his good intentions be misconstrued?

Psychologists have suggested that the reason women still fail to make progress in the workplace has less to do with outright sexism than with men being unwilling to support them for fear people question their motives.

“In western cultures there is a norm of self-interest. You are expected socially to support things that benefit you and your group,” said Adam Grant, professor of management and psychology at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business, and author of Give and Take: Why Helping Others Drives Our Success.

“I am intrigued by the idea that if you venture too far people say, ‘Why are you doing that? That’s not your issue.’ When women speak up about feminist issues, people are comfortable. When men speak up they are surprised. Are they just trying to ingratiate themself with women to get more dates? Are they being sneaky in some way?”

He has recently argued that the unwillingness of a silent majority of men to speak up about sexism could be holding back progress — and he has scientific studies to muster in support.

One such piece of research is by Rebecca Ratner, now professor of marketing at the University of Maryland. While at Princeton, she asked a group of students whether they opposed a fictional policy called Proposition 174, in which funds for research into a health issue that affected either men or women were to be removed. They were told that a local group, “Princeton Opponents of Proposition 174”, was campaigning on the issue.

Whatever their gender, and whether they were told it concerned men or women, the level of opposition to Proposition 174 did not vary. However, when asked if they would give active support, people were far less willing to do so across gender lines.

When the group was named “Princeton Men and Women Opposed to Proposition 174” however, that all changed. “It’s as though they needed to be licensed to support it,” said Professor Ratner, who was concerned such findings translated into the workplace.

Psychologists have in the past categorised sexism into two forms: hostile and benevolent. Hostile sexism is straight misogyny, said Professor Grant. “The other form is in some ways more pernicious. It is about believing women are graceful fragile creatures that need to be protected by men — that leadership is not their thing.”

He says that a third form — the idea of men who don’t speak up — is something that his work seems to show is a real effect. “I get a lot of people say they support women . . . but worry they are not assertive enough to lead. I get even more say they really want to support women, but don’t think it’s their place.

“I know at least two male chief executives of Fortune 500 companies who introduced policies championing the promotion of women. But when they released the policies they did it through the company’s highest ranking. They didn’t want to be seen promoting it.”

To which one can only respond, citing DCI Hunt, what “great . . . soft . . . sissy . . . girlie . . . nancy . . . French . . . Man United supporting . . .*****”. 

The Times 

Quotes 

“The most spiritual men (women), as the strongest, find their happiness where others would find their destruction: in the labyrinth, in hardness against themselves and others, in experiments. Their joy is self-conquest: asceticism becomes in them nature, need, and instinct. Difficult tasks are a privilege to them; to play with burdens that crush others, a recreation. Knowledge-a form of asceticism. They are the most venerable kind of man (woman) : that does not preclude their being the most cheerful and the kindliest. ”

― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ 

"There comes a time when suddenly you realize that laughter is something you remember and that you were the one laughing." Marlene Dietrich

The atoms that are in your right hand may have been created at the center of a different star than the ones in your left hand, making us all galactic beings by definition. Nassim Haramein 

Be humble for you are made of Earth. Be noble for you are made of stars. Nassim Haramein 

Everything on earth is borrowed...there is no 'mine' or 'yours'....there is only 'ours'. Even time is borrowed. We kill over a plot of land, that belongs only to our Mother Earth. All you have is what you came with...and what you will leave with...your Spirit. Native American Proverb 

Don't seek, Don't search, Don't ask, Don't knock, Don't demand - relax. If you relax, it comes. If you relax, it is there. If you relax, you start vibrating with it. Osho 

The Celtic Commandments. From The Carmina Gadelica 

Give thou thine heart to the wild magic, to the Lord and the Lady of nature, 

Beyond any consideration of this world. 

Do not covet large or small, 

Do not despise weakling or poor, 

Semblance of evil allow not near thee, 

Never give nor earn thou shame, 

The ancient harmonies are given thee, 

Understand them early and prove, 

Be one with the power of the elements, 

Put behind thee dishonour and lies. 

Be loyal to the Lord of the Wild Wood, 

Be true to the Lady of the Stars, 

Be true to thine own self besides, 

True to the magic of nature above all else. 

Do not thou curse anyone, 

Lest thou threefold cursed shouldst be, 

And shouldst thou travel ocean and earth, 

Follow the very step of the ancient trackways. 

I am a Witch 

I am a Witch with rhymes and reasons. I am a changeling like the seasons. My Mother is the moon. My Father is the sun. With Goddess Earth am I as one. I am a Witch, a pagan child. Mother Nature's spirit wild grows within me. Flows within me. Meandering like a spellbound stream. Enchanting my every waking dream. I breathe the air of liberation. I tend the fire of transformation. I drink the water of creation, earth - magick is my conjuration. I am a witch of shadow and light. Of Avalon mists and ravens' flight. I am a witch with pride say I, for a witch's soul never dies. Gerina Dunwich 

Your mind is a powerful thing. When you fill it wit positive thoughts your life will start to change. Zig Ziglar 

Some days are harder than others. Keep. Moving. Forward. No matter how you feel, get up, dress up, show up, and never give up. God-des 

Entrepreneurs are the crazy people who work 100 hours a week, so they don't have to work 40 hours for someone else. Bradsugars.com 

"There is the same world for all of us, and good and evil, sin and innocence, go through it hand in hand. To shut one's eyes to half of life that one may live securely is as though one blinded oneself that one might walk with more safety in a land of pit and precipice."

--Lady Windermere from "Lady Windermere's Fan" by Oscar Wilde

Keep Calm & Stay Positive.

Good things will happen. 

Thank you 

Deep Life Quotes

Embrace feeling lost. It's the beginning state of doing it YOUR way. Sacred Mists 

NATURAL BORN MYSTIC::THE LOVE HOLOCAUST™

The MUTUAL Journey to leave The Patriarchal Tribe From Hell™. The Pursuit Of Freedom + 'Hell is other people' (Jean Paul Sartre) + The Love Story. Extreme (Male/Family/Group) Cruelty, Enforced (Female) Martyrdom and (Male/Family/Group) Madness. True Love. How To Live Without It. So We Get It. The Real Holy Grail. Leaving The World Of Slavery. The Amera Ziganii Rao Force Of Individuation. A True Life And What It Costs. Everything. The Female Experience Is To Overturn All Slavery. Then They Follow

Amera Ziganii Rao © 2014

Quotes 

“Life is one fool thing after another whereas love is two fool things after each other.” Oscar Wilde

You can't change what's going on around you until you start changing what's going on within you. Motivation Live 

The only thing you can really control is how you react to the things out of your control. Power of Positivity 

Love Therapy Update. Amera Ziganii Rao 

Ahaa. Absolutely. Courage and Alchemy & Liberation & Humanity in all things, including that. As for me, I have finally surrendered to OUR journey again too. Of course I was desperately and ridiculously trying to accomplish things, is all my bloody careers at once so I felt more secure, emotionally even more so than financially. Alongside being so long term unwell. And having to endure the Suffragette journey. Beep. Ridiculous. 

Of course. Believe it or not we are fated for that dream that includes all of it but not only that. All of it beginning at the same time. That I did not know. And then of course I did, once. 

Right. So I am returning to alchemy work as I settle into all my vocational work, steadily, slowly and in trust. This crazy dream is going to work. Focus. Relax. Trust. We truly are to enter Paradise together. 

I wait for you, for as long as it takes. 

Just remember: Vocation (mutual) + sex = true love. The Love Holocaust is almost over. Codependency to true, inter dependent and unconditional love. Stuck together in the right way. 

Happiness. Believe. We make our own rules. Two magicians together. 

Amera Ziganii Rao © 2014 

Love. Amera Ziganii Rao 

Mmmmm. I like being part our team. Mindfulness. We have made an incredible journey and are now remembering how to enjoy those differences and indeed the injustices of all that I am in your world. That it's my world and that I no longer need to either get affirmation or to impose the judgements of The Disir. That I can just BE me at last, and indeed, that you can BE you, too. 

The new, old world. The one where we just ARE. The team and all the deliciousness of that. I get my therapy. You and indeed my work. And you get your therapy. Me. And, indeed, HER. 

And you finally get me in your world. And you get my respect and joy. The Disir is happy. Perfection is our new journey. To be done in our own time with that wonderful and lost word/s. Tolerance. Joy. Love. Sex. Life. The team. Us. Werewolves and High Serpent Female Priesthood. Your real Lolita. 

Peace and impatient patience. 

The Holy Grail glints in its near distant glory at last. 

Amera Ziganii Rao © 2014 

Sweet Savage Love. Rosemary Rogers 

I love the internet....was trying to remember the name of this seminal book (in between all the literature) I read at 14 or 15. And there it was, just by remembering the heroine's first name...Turns out I wasn't the only one who read and re-read it......AZR

I originally read this book when I was 15 years old and enjoyed it then, however, my mother loved this book and became a dedicated follower of the author. After reading 'Sweet Savage Love' years later, 1997, I discovered why she fell in love with the book, then. The novelist broke all the rules in the 1970s. The novelist made groundbreaking steps for new writers to emerge and shamelessly pen steamy, sensual and very graphic sexual or lovemaking scenes. Rosemary Rogers was one of the first to walk that untrodden path of penning explicit sex, however, Rosemary Rogers has a passion for sexual assault, as found in many of her books. The genre that every woman wants to be raped by her lover is ridiculous, especially if you've ever been forced to submit against your will (which obviously Rogers has not had to experience). But in Ginny and Steve's case, I believe that Ginny submitted because she wanted to. She allowed Steve to 'assault' her because she was just as enthralled with Steve Morgan as he with she. Lust ruled their relationship. They both were strong willed stubborn people whom were first attracted through lust. Love, if it did, came much later, after their children were grown in 'Bound By Desire'. But I enjoyed 'Sweet Savage Love' and enjoyed the characters. But I am not a fan of Rosemary Rogers. One negative fault with Rogers is the promiscuous nature of Ginny. Taboo. Not accepted by many romance readers. Romance readers can deal with the male's promiscuous activities, however, if he doesn't get his act together and loves the heroine with total devotion towards the end of the novel, then he is considered a candidate for penicillin and obviously lacks understanding on the definition of love. But 'Sweet Savage Love' still remains an all-time favorite of mine. What kept 'Sweet Savage Love' a favorite of mine was the excitement and adventure of capturing the gold, being on the run from the law, toppling governments and thwarting armies, etc. Steve Morgan was in essence an 1860s 'James Bond'. Yes, he is a 'secret service' agent for the United States government. A profession you don't find in many historical American romance novels. So if you enjoy excitement, adventure, intrigue, and some 'I Spy', combined with passion, spunk, and plain old 'lust', you'll enjoy the timeless classic 'Sweet Savage Love'. But reader beware, this is not your typical romance novel and if you're a devoted fan of Johanna Lindsay, stay away from 'Sweet Savage Love'.

Sweet Savage Love was the very first romance I read at the tender age of 15! I went to a very strict convent school and found it hidden away in the very stuffy and boring school library. I suspect that if the nuns had realised its content they would have burnt it! I loved it and it kept me entertained as I read it over and over again until I left school. I am so glad it has be republished as it is without doubt the best romance I have ever read even though I am now 32 and have read more romance books than I've had hot diners. If you like your heroes to be real men instead of overly romantic simpering wimps then you will love this. Steve Morgan is the ultimate dark, dangerous hero and the heroine Ginny turns in to a strong resilient woman through hardship and learning to survive. She fights her attraction to Steve and although he is forceful during the love scenes, she wants him as much as he does her.

This is the greatest love story of all time. I love the characters Ginny and Steve, everything you can imagine happens to them. I've read this book over and over again, its that good.

One of the first and best romance novels I ever read. Few writers today can depict the remarkable intensity between the lovers as this author can. Their story lingers with the reader long after the novel ends. 

(makes me smile, even now. It was enthralling and traumatic enough reading the book, let alone living the journey:) Thank you Rosemary Rogers. At least I was somewhat prepared.....That and Chaucer's The Wife of Bath served me well.....AZR) 

Love. Amera Ziganii Rao

....No. I am enjoying that memory because I feel so good. Not, the other way round. 

I can only be a study in non attachment now my dear. Do not be fooled by the light tone. 

Feel the truth. Feel my ENORMOUS love. 

I have to be in patience and non expectation now. The ball, is truly, in your court. As it should be. 

Love, love, love and love. 

AZR © 2014 

Quotes 

Use your voice for kindness, 

your ears for compassion, 

your hands for charity, 

your mind for truth, 

and your Heart for Love.

Deep Life Quotes

The quality of a man and woman is how well they take care of each other and inspire one another to be great and loving.

CodeblackLife

Courage pt 1. Amera Ziganii Rao 

So...courage. This week, finally, I have understood the answer I have searched for my whole life, since I was first attacked at the age of 6 for being me. The truth to shining and what it does to other people. Marianne Williamson, Mandela and JFK all talk of shining to inspire others. It is true that with SOME people, that works. Those people, even if we see them for a second, are usually like us and our friends. That's them. 

The others. These are those who attack and who will go out of their way to single you out and attack. If you have a vulnerability, is something different, of any kind, if you dress differently or are not the host colour of that society, or you have muscular thighs as a woman or curves, or if you are tall or well built as a man, or if you are the worst sin of all, good looking, you will be attacked your whole life. 

Conformity is the greatest pressure because of not only lack of courage but one's APPROACH to courage. 

The mob mentality has a different approach to courage. The politest way to say it and what keeps The Warrior Class, anyone who is creative or entrepreneurial past youth, down, silent and APOLOGETIC. It's called jealousy. Not envy but jealousy. 

Jealousy is a difficult thing for people like us, even reformed misogynists. Jealousy is a crime. Wanting things the easy way, even if TWC carry huge gifts. Which we do. Jealousy is also the will to kill. 

As I move into even more belligerent individuality now, the actual HOSTILITY, that I am evoking is extraordinary. As Empaths, both Serpent Priesthood and Werewolves, we don't even need our psychic powers for this one. A man, a crusty old character the other day actually sneered and lunged at me to hit me. This is just one event. And this is a metropolis. Racism, misogyny, classism? Something else. Take your pic. 

TWC doesn't do jealousy. We don't know what it is. 

My point is this. To shine and become soul is a hard line commitment. Because it means, to kill for the right to live. One can inspire only the right kind. Another leadership is needed. How badly do want to shine? That' s the first thing. Second, how long do you want to feel GUILTY for being gifted? Especially as to be gifted is to be hated. It's not as if we don't pay for it with the hatred and hard work it takes to work on the gifts? And third, WHAT is it that jealousy is jealous of? 

COURAGE!!!!!!!! 

Such a revelation. I had no idea because I work so hard on courage, that courage IS my greatest gift! 

And I am not the only one. 

To be gifted or great therefore is one thing. Commitment to stand up with courage, for COURAGE. Clearly, a human right. 

Be creative, be free, be individual. And make the commitment as A WAY OF LIFE. The everyday metaphor for 'Maximus' killing 'Commodus' if you like. Kill for the right to live. No one has the right to be jealous. Don't sweat about why it exists and NEVER feel guilty. Just deal with it. Everyday and every moment. The jealous must never win. Courage is a gift and we have it. And we have already paid for it. With our silence, whenever they have won or hurt before. Know the enemy. Know the weapon. Then, you shine. 

Amera Ziganii Rao © 2014

Quotes 

Are you living your dream or just dreaming? Cynthia Ocelli 

The difference between a person living their dreams, and a dreamer is unapologetic, single pointed focus. People living their dreams make them a priority and refuse distractions. They feel entitled to their desires and know, by pursuing them, they will become able to serve multitudes. Backed by the Source of all dreams, they seek no permissions. They know that no dream is given without the means to achieve it. Cynthia Occelli 

Fear is the memory of pain. Addiction is the memory of pleasure. Freedom is beyond both. Jill Blakeway 

Forgive yourself for feeling uncomfortable with transitions, for expecting completion, and for fearing your grief. Forgive others for expecting you to be the old you and for having difficulty accepting the changes you have made in yourself. Nancy Levin 

"If you don't see yourself as a winner you cannot perform as a winner."- Zig Ziglar  

We're not that different from one another, so have compassion for those in need and gratitude for what you have. Lisha Haisha 

Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle. Plato 

There is always, always, always something to be thankful for. Wayne Dyer 

So you're against immigration? Splendid! When do you leave? Inez Jones 

Gypsy Rose Lee (February 9, 1911– April 26, 1970) was an American burlesque entertainer famous for her striptease act. She was also an actress, author, and playwright whose 1957 memoir was made into the stage musical and film "Gypsy". She got a telegram from Eleanor Roosevelt, the first lady who came second in a popularity poll - saying, "May your bare bottom always be shining". Musetouch Visual Arts 

I freed a thousand slaves. I could have freed a thousand more, if only they knew, they were slaves. Harriet Tubman 

Love has nothing to do with what you are expecting to get, only with what you are expecting to give, which is everything. Katherine Hepburn 

Life is about forgetting the answers and enjoying the questions. Paulo Coelho. Manual of the Warrior of Light 

"One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors." - Plato 

There are only two emotions: love and fear. Love is divine. Love is the activity of God, and the only energy in which God exists. Fear, on the other hand, is a tool of the ego, which is the foundation of the belief that we are separate from God, separate from each other, and generally inferior or inadequate. Iyanla Vanzant 

Let it go. Don't let the past steal your present too. Power of Positivity 

Tip of the day: People Mistake Self Honesty With Clarity. Self honesty may not necessarily come from clarity but from the process of peeling the layers of the ego. Clarity will only come after the layers are gone. Shamala Tan

The Love Problem. Amera Ziganii Rao 

You know, my only conclusion today is that you are mad, and that all men (that I attract) are mad. Please, be mad. 

I am less than inching forward with all my plans, with the continued hope that I get to live a life alongside my inching along and yet, that is still too much for you. 

I am well aware that lack of ascension means you are not capable of love. I was not capable of love either before I ascended eight and then completely, five years ago. 

So, face the truth. You are mad, until you are not mad. That is ego. Ego is not some lesser state of being. Ego is mental sickness. The inability to love. 

I overcame it through forcing it. I faced myself, faced myself and faced myself. So please turn that energy inwards and face yourself and stop psychically attacking me. 

I meanwhile, continue to less than inch forward and let go of any idea of love from a man until I see a man who can love. Who has ascended out of ego as I did. If it is you, you have to prove it. That is ascension. Proving that YOU can love. Not me. I'm done. I faced the mental sickness and got rid of it. Your turn now. And don't comment until you do. And let me inch forward through these adverse circumstances. One way or the other I am getting out of Shawshank and do not even hold you responsible anymore. You are sick and mad, like all men (and women) who have 'tried' to love me. You can't until you do. No one can love. Until they can. 

Keep focusing on that and you will make it. Don't focus on that and you won't. Simple as. 

'Sweet Savage Love' indeed. 

Have a good day. 'Steve Morgan'. 

Amera Ziganii Rao © 2014

The Love Problem. Amera Ziganii Rao 

No. You do have the gift. You can't use that excuse either. You have the gift in buckets. The rest is the will. How much are you willing to sweat to do it? 

In all my superior status that I have to enforce throughout this journey, do you think I knew where I was going when I did it? 

Need and greed are not love. Repeat. And see how high it takes you. Repeat repeatedly. That is Ascension. That's the mind. The rest is meditation, meditation, meditation, meditation and meditation. And if you are too lazy to do it yourself, get healers to do it for you. Thousands of them wait for that opportunity. 

Meditation changes the matter of your being. The spiritual and emotional DNA. Re-programming the mind and GRIEVING changes the mindset. 

Women are not helpless princesses. They are not there for you. 

I had to face the same. That men are not princes, waiting to be the all giving, invincible daddies on earth. And that was five years ago. I think that's sunk in. 

Yours is the same. On an emotional, visceral level. 

Grieve everything you have ever been taught. Face the ego. Use that awesome violence and power against that. I read the papers and every second story is male foulness against women. Because men do not face themselves. Because no one does. We know that now and you have come far. 

Now, you have to go farthest, highest and into the bowels of the abyss. Face yourself, face yourself, face yourself and face yourself. 

I am still waiting. 

I am waiting and inching myself forward in my 'miniature garden' life. 

Because 'Steve Morgan', you are the particular nutter for me. The rest I can do. All you have to do is show up. Ego to soul. Ascension. 

I am not even thinking about all that you would bring me other than yourself. I live my 'miniature garden' life. All you have to do is face yourself. And just know this. Nothing can under state what this is. It is the most important moment of your life. Of any lifetime. The greatest achievement you will ever achieve. To master your madness. I have my Nobel. Yours is waiting. 

Master your madness. To have the gift for our class is nothing. To use it is everything. You have courage. Use it against yourself. Face tthat sickness and eject it. Leave the jealousy to those who do not either have the gift or the four years of probably the best education anyone can have received. Leave the sickness to those who have to bear it. You don't. You have the gift and you have me. 

This is your final exam. Face it. Face you. 

Decide who you want to be. It is completely, in your hands. 

A man who loves or a man who is sick. You cannot be both. 

Amera Ziganii Rao © 2014

.....yeah. Meditation. I don't mean they do it FOR you. I mean, they are light healers who bring down the light to you, as you sit there. I attended healing sessions at London's The College of Psychic Studies for instance, for 6 years. Long before I even knew what meditation was. 

Read a line today, something about educating the educated is the hardest thing. For real. The aim - and I say this as a wordsmith - is to silence that mind and tell it to shut up. That's meditation. Don't think. Feel. And then, higher think. 

That is a process that is become, through mediation as a practise. Silence the stupid mind so the intelligent mind can begin to 'speak'. Analysis of intuition, if you like. 

Listen to Wayne Dyer and the rest of them again. Keep listening to and watching them. This is treatment of sickness now. The politics will catch up as you do it. Don't think about misogyny anymore. Just think about The Universe. The higher mind will finally tell you what's what. 

We stayed in the politics to shame it to its end. Just read the papers every day. It's all there. Now, it is the healing of your mental sickness. Ego. Now, it is the treatment. 

This is not The Temple Society. You have to search these things out. Search them. They are right in front of you. The answers will come. Now, it is about energy healing. Self responsibility and energy healing. The politics of abuse will sort itself out. 

And be prepared for the regressions. They will come thick and fast. Keep pushing. You have a Nobel to win. To stand alongside me. 

Peace, and good luck. You'll need it. 

Amera Ziganii Rao © 2014

....one more thing. What is facing oneself? Talking to The Universe. What is talking to The Universe? Becoming more than a theorist. Becoming an INITIATE. Prophet or Initiate, stage one, it is the same. I began as a stage one. It means talking to Soul. Meeting your real parent at last. Meeting your better self, your intelligent self, your non needing self, your non greedy self, your HIGHER self. The Self that houses you. 

You have to marry your Soul, it has been said by others. Totally. To love oneself is not to love oneself as a one dimensional wank. 

It is to offer oneself up to the only thing that truly loves. Soul. The Universe. The Great Mother. The great you. The male great you that houses the puny male you. 

It is to offer up that ego that has defended you so well, with its well meaning hard and cruel madness and offering it up for execution and making INTENTION. Working with the silence. Intending to heal, means finally giving 'the cause and effect' silence of The Universe, the go ahead it waits for. 

Putting on the safety belt and going for that knuckle ride, again and again. To purify oneself of sickness. 

It is to meet your maker in all Her forms. Your soul, through to the highest if that is your gift. It's all the same thing. Higher consciousness is pure un needing, un greedy, unafraid compassionate, peaceful, creative, courageous love. As a universal state of being. 

It's why meditation makes us look young. The return to innocence. The secret of eternal youth. The fountain. The Tree of Life. The Universe energy. Available for all. 

The place where we go to when we are either on weed or drink or the like. That is the place of bliss. The place of The Universe. 

Meet that, live in that and become that. That is to become soul. The more you do that, the more you purify the ego out of you. 

Energy healing. Meditation. Just 'letting go'. The truth of these simple statements. Purification. Mental, emotional, energy purification. Soul. 

You have discipline, you have drive. Use it for its correct purpose and you will ascend. The more you apply courage, the more you will grow it. Practise and consistency and just 'getting better'. The truth of all healing. The Universe. 

Amera Ziganii Rao © 2014

“The most spiritual men (women), as the strongest, find their happiness where others would find their destruction: in the labyrinth, in hardness against themselves and others, in experiments. Their joy is self-conquest: asceticism becomes in them nature, need, and instinct. Difficult tasks are a privilege to them; to play with burdens that crush others, a recreation. Knowledge-a form of asceticism. They are the most venerable kind of man (woman) : that does not preclude their being the most cheerful and the kindliest. ”

― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ

Goddess XXlV (Artwork) 

Amera Ziganii Rao © Digital Darkroom Art

The Love Problem. Amera Ziganii Rao 

Mind you, there is one unavoidable thing about 'the state of bliss'. You can only enter enlightenment or anything near it with one requirement. Grief. 

Sorrow is not a passing thing in enlightenment. It is a permanent. 

Bliss with sorrow. The so called 'agony and ecstasy'. Sorrowful bliss is The Universe and nothing less, and nothing more. 

Ego thinks happiness is real. Soul knows happiness doesn't exist. 

Soul knows that happiness is the briefest moment, followed by the endless winters of grief. My superego if you like, has been in backlash, as your ego has been in the awesome backlash of cruelty and turgid refusal. 

I am now in Higher Enlightenment if you like. The permanent acceptance of grief. 

Enlightenment stage one is followed by the greatest disappointment in the world. First, no one else is in enlightenment so one is surrounded by madness, hate, jealousy and all the rest, even if one is now sane. Second, the only profundity that can be accessed is through you as the person who has enlightened and third, there is still grief and waves of sorrow to follow. 

Enlightenment is not the end. It is just the beginning. Sorrow is the only permanent. Ego is the ILLUSION of happiness. And ego will kill to retain that illusion. 

Soul wishes it could, believe me. But soul finally surrenders again, as I have had to. Now, sorrow is permanent. A sorrowful bliss. 

Enlightenment is a commitment to the madness of The Universe. Yes, it could all be political, yes, it could just be the dark and light dynamic of earth. It doesn't matter. It does regarding human rights and it doesn't too. The whole thing is insane. 

The only permanent is the sorrow to go with the bliss. One may look young, but that innocence of hope is gone. It's called surrender. In Islam actually, there is a word that is the only one appropriate. Submission. 

Ego is fighting that. Submission to the truth. Submission to the truth of the insanity of existence. But once it is finally committed to and re-committed to in this, my Higher Enlightenment, it is that strange intimacy of sensual Universe bliss. And the return finally to humour and acceptance. The fourth stage of grief. 

But always, grief. Grief, shock and rage. Muted though it now finally is. 

Enlightenment. Not for the faint hearted. And once it is entered to, there is no going back. Ego has cause to rebel. The choice to go backwards or forwards is yours. No man's land becomes attractive. Permanent anger. 

Until it has to go. And then there is surrender. To grief. And then, happiness comes. Then, one is 'cool'. Gangster cool. Unstoppable, invincible and deadly. Warrior is to see the whole. Warrior has to be earned. 

Warrior is real. 

Amera Ziganii Rao © 2014

...so what is it for? Good question. 

Many things. 

1. There is no profundity to compare with what it is to be in soul. To feel every existence and stratosphere of the heart to the mind to the soul to the sex to the body to the mind. Incomparable. Wouldn't give it up for the world. 

2. The invincible and irreversible ability to BE love. To love. To return to love. To return to peace. Incomparable. Wouldn't give it up for the world. 

3. Courage. Anxiety is non existent. If it comes, it is temporary. The ability to master one's emotions is incomparable. Wouldn't give it up for the world. 

4. Creativity. I used to think I wasn't creative. 'Nuff said. And I have only just begun. 

5. Mental health. Incomparable. 

6. Intelligence. Wow. If I thought I was intelligent before....incomparable. 

7. Sex. The ability to channel tantric in all its forms, presumably. Sex as soul. Soul as sex. Incomparable. 

8. I felt grief in ego anyway. What's the fucking difference? 

I am most certainly not the 'get rich quick' saleswoman. I tell it like it is. 

9. God The Great Mother, The Universe, The Womb of Creation, The Highest Love Intelligence. Incomparable. The ability to merge rational with irrational, silence with noise, thought and feeling, the visceral and the theoretical. Incomparable. 

10. The ability to be ALONE. Life was lonely in ego and life is lonely in soul. So what. It is a vast relationship with The Self. The ability to not NEED anyone or anything? I've been tested enough thank you, but yes, it is incomparable. 

Apparently all these things are freedom. Sure. Freedom costs. Freedom costs illusion. Then one is free. 

11. The ability to be a magician/sourcerer/alchemist. Yes. The language of the two worlds. Alone, yes. Lonely yes. Productive, pursuing excellence, having courage, massive integrity and doing something MEANINGFUL. The ability to love. The ability to be love. The constant ability to master myself. Yes. Fantastic. Incomparable. 

Apparently these were my dreams. Sure. Can't remember. 

My dream was happiness. This is it. Full. Fulfilling. Full up. 

12. The ability to handle grief. Yes. Invincible. Free. Powerful. Warrior. True freedom. The ability to see. To SEER. Yes. Incomparable, whatever it has cost. 

Amera Ziganii Rao © 2014

....oh yes, and the massive ability to stand up for oneself, no matter what. Absolutely, utterly, incomparable. The ability to fight with honour, for honour, against dishonour. Oh yes. 

The ability to defend the meek, the vulnerable and the ones who need more. The ability to share the secrets and to empower. Oh yes. Incomparable. 

Warrior is real. 

Amera Ziganii Rao © 2014

....oh yes! The ability to dress on the outside the way you feel on the inside!! Okay, so that's the fun one. To BE sensual, to BE sexual. To BE liberated, the circus, the whorehouse, the pimphouse, whatever. To BE it. To lose the bourgeois crap of all those inhibitions. Of course. I have actually inhabited that for so long, I have forgotten. But that is the one thing that is a permanent excitement whatever levels of grief or loneliness. That is freedom. That is real and that is permanent. To be able to BE and to stand up for who you are in each moment. To truly shine. And take the consequences. 

THAT is freedom. That is inspiration. That is fun, no matter what else goes on. The ability to just BE. To show off, to have power and to shove it down everyone else's throats, without being on a stage. To take the Circus onto the street. And into the parlour rooms. To change the world. Just by getting dressed. 

Right on. 

Corny as it sounds, to be 'street', no matter where you are or what you do. And all credit to 'street' for giving that to us. The black communities of the western world more than anyone. The urban centres. The ones who are the least bourgeois, even within bourgeois. To be 'street'. To be sex. Because you have the courage and belligerent right to represent. To show power as you attain it. To be LARGE and abundant with anything you want. Just because you can. 

To be a peacock basically. If, indeed, you are born one. Ain't nothing worse, than suppressing the peacock in oneself. And of course, the whole world is suppressed into that straight jacket. 

Soul is the ability to break the shackles of conformity. Anywhere, at any time, whether one is a millionaire or one has five pence in one's pockets. Just to be. And in this increasingly sterile world, that is the surely the biggest selling point. Accept the grief yes. But be a peacock and mean it. You deserve it. You all deserve it. 

To be a humanitarian peacock. To go against everything we are taught. To be power and to be compassion at the same time. That is soul. That is GOD, The Great MOTHER. That is woman. That is Serpent Priesthood. That is truth. The right to express who we really are. And not what is acceptable. Not to be slaves anymore. To just be. 

That is warrior. Warrior is real. 

Amera Ziganii Rao © 2014

....and the more you transmute the sex emotion (Napoleon Hill) into power and the attainment of vocational wealth and success, the more you dress like a peacock. That is female. That is power. That is 'street' more than street. That is soul. 

To purify that drive into the drive for power. For kind and responsible power. That is soul. Yes, that is worth it. That is worth the grief for sure. That is power. 

In other words, what was it for really? To get rid of the AWFUL sickness of love dependency. That should be your central motivation too. To shift that dependency sickness at last. So you can finally be. That is worth it for sure. That is what it was all for. The grief goes with it. But in the end, so what. The price we pay to be well. The price we pay for the ability to love, be, and be power. Love and power. Sex in the boardroom and in the bedroom. Sex is soul is sex. As long as the grief is remembered, there is no dependency. There is no sickness. There is finally, no illusion. 

Yes. That was worth it. Yes, it is worth it. Face the grief and live. Integrate the grief and live. Integrate the grief and love. Integrate the grief and sex. Integrate the grief and grow. Integrate the grief and create. Integrate the grief and achieve. Integrate the grief and be finally, everything you want to be. 

Amera Ziganii Rao © 2014

....oh, and finally, the most important thing of all. Dependencies of any kind can be left behind because there is a new relationship, accessed, first through meditation and then, just by being quiet and alone and then by being anywhere and inside oneself. The Universe. The pure bliss of the energy of The Universe is always available and is a high of a sexual, sensual, delicious, true Divinity nature. The greatest buzz of them all. The GOD energy. As one relies on that more and more - accessed in the same way as any creative or sports or sex high - it becomes the partner, the energy partner, the buzz. 

That is the counteracting force to go with the grief. A sensual energy. Being truly alive. Instead of chasing illusionary happiness. A permanent orgasm if you like instead of the ones we work so hard to get. 

The Temple Society education would always have been that. Why these 'cranks' are dismissed. Because an Initiate is very different from a theorist. 

I am both. As are many of us. Grief + bliss = true spirituality. True mentality. True emotionality. True existence. 

Freedom costs that. If you can pay the price, as a state of existence, you are free. If you can't, you are not. Simple as. 

What I call, Spiritual Existentialism. The ability to be with yourself or another person and just be. The state of inter dependency, both with another person and with The Universe. Always, in bliss, but always, in grief. Just a new habit really. And one that society has not had for 10 thousand years. Read the papers. There is the proof. 

Which takes us to the word privilege. Those who can attain enlightenment may have to live in a state of conscious grief. We are also the ones who get to live in a state of conscious bliss. Look around. That is a fucking gigantic privilege. That our foremothers and fathers have paid for with their lives. For us. Pay the price. It's worth it. 

Pay the price. For me. Or live in no man's land, or no woman's land for you. You don't want that. You want to live. So you don't regret, remember. So you have no regrets. 

Regret, so you don't have regrets. The paradox of truth in an insane Universe. Whatever. It is worth it. You get me. And you get you at last, as you remember you were and then a fuck of a lot more. The you, you never even knew you could be. Do it. I am waiting. 

Amera Ziganii Rao © 2014

The voice of love is always calling out to you. It is whispering gently into your heart, reminding you, "I am here for you! I love you just as you are!" Love is the voice of God whispering to you from within yourself.

Iyanla Vanzant 

“When you’re working very hard you’re not lonely; you are the whole damn world.” —Shelby Foote

The Love Problem. Amera Ziganii Rao 

I know. Give it time. You know how far you have come. Me too. I am terrified too. Am I to be selfless to that extent, what IS our destiny and so on. Give it time. I champion you. But if you turn out to be theorist more than Initiate, I am prepared to prepare. We all have our gifts. We wait to see where we land. And the feeling is horrendous. But do not doubt the love. And do not doubt destiny while there is a chance. I will however accept the fear and possibility of selflessness to sainthood levels. It's not as if I do not speak from visceral truth. I want you to be happy, even if it means both of us grieving forever. Such is the paradox of the search for the real Holy Grail. Give it time. Yesterday was huge. 

Amera Ziganii Rao © 2014

Stand up for what is right. 

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Real Men Don't Buy Girls 

Precious 

The Love Problem. Amera Ziganii Rao 

....er, yeah, not like that. We are not even going there. You know exactly in what context that is being talked about. It's not an excuse to feel guilty about real sexuality. Stop it. I know the bourgeois world has it the wrong way round. Clarify. Be mindful. 'Sexual slavery' as opposed to slavery. You know the difference by now. 

I'm not disrespecting that men truly do have a problem clarifying that. I'm saying, don't return to old thinkings. That is what causes the slavery and abuses the sex, let alone the female species. Clarify. Be mindful. Feel. Meditate the truth. Become the truth. 

Be one of the men who are NOT going to be hauled in front of a judge 20 years for now, for raping little girls. Clarify. Be mindful. Remember all that you have learned. 

AZR © 2014

The Love Problem. Amera Ziganii Rao 

Sex, sex and sex. Guilt, guilt and guilt. The whole of society runs us on that. Don't buy into it. Feel the truth. You are not Stuart Hall. You are a handsome man with a truth fetish. You are all handsome and virile men with truth fetishes. Centaur sex. Ain't nothing wrong with that and if has to be clarified again, I am not surprised. I am reading the papers for the first time in 17 years, after finding myself. You live in that world. 

Don't. Be of the world, but don't live in it. Live in your imagination. That is where the only truth lies and I have shown you consistently that your imagination is both legitimate, CLEAN and ALLOWED. 

Don't regress to that guilt. That guilt is about something that is not sex. That is about POWER, WITHOUT THE SEX. 

You are about power and sex together. That is the difference and as your guilt goes, your humanity increases. Men beat up women, in all the ways they do - and women like you too - because of bourgeois, religious and religious society, guilt and SHAME. 

The only shame as Henry Miller also alluded to, is war. There is no shame in sex. Rape is not sex. Abduction of little girls is not sex. Lolita's escape from Humbert Humbert was not about sex. It was about control. Control is a different thing entirely from sex. 

The more you sex, the more you are allowed to control, because the control is in the right context. It is not based on homicidal need and greed. It is based on what I like to call, 'playing a musical, instrument'. Being in tune with a woman's sexuality is to play an instrument well. In the Non Temple Society, that is turned into filth and hijab or domestic slavery, out of SHAME. Shame is about a society that bans sex. That tells you that sex is filthy and only for reproductive means. 

The worst kind of society is in fact one that is no longer openly religious. It's called bourgeois. Maybe not worse, but certainly as bad. These are the stupid societies. Be the circus. Be the whorehouse and you will find the truth. 

Sex is not shameful. It is what lost societies do with sex that makes the perverts. Not you. 

Amera Ziganii Rao © 2014

And by the way, boss man of mine, no excuse for fear anymore. I've had words. We are reassured. The rest is us. The long journey to freedom. Yours and then mine. 

Ascension. Purifying the heart to return to the beautiful heart. The beautiful male heart that you are. The rest is just bullshit. We all have it. I had it too. Ascension after all is one thing. Mastery. To master one's own emotions and to speak one's truth. One's real truth. To end the madness if one is gifted to make the journey to its end. You are one of those. Do not falter in that belief. 

Alchemy for liberation, for humanity. And of course, sexuality, sexuality, sexuality. And no more shame, guilt or inhibitions. And of course, no need or greed. Woman is man. Man is woman. Woman is man. 

The movement against fascism. Viable, possible, and essential. 

The New World. True purification. Not the easy kind. Not the false kind. And not the silly kind. Carry on. 

I'm waiting and again, watching. 

Amera Ziganii Rao © 2014

The Love Problem. Amera Ziganii Rao 

And what's your long road to freedom? Civic duty, vocation and balancing up the playboy act. In you. 

Escapism to truth. Transmuting the sex emotion in you, as Napoleon Hill puts it. Getting rid of the belief I feel, that you worked so hard to get where you have, so you can play for the rest of your life and you expect me to play with you. No. 

We are just half done, half begun and some of us have not even re-begun yet on that kind of stage. But it is your non vocation that needs to be looked at now, to stop ego sabotaging mine. 

Civic duty and giving something back. That is true leadership and what kinds of leaders we are. I like it. You don't. Yet. You will. That is the pay off for great sex, great sensuality and great freedom. 

That is the whole New World. Not the one you thought you worked for. That time has gone. Our great fortune is we get to do both. But both we get to do. 

In other words, returning to misogyny, as one must, I ain't no playmate. I am a female - creative, professional, vocational - force, who is also a playmate. Grief again is the key. I have already committed and grieved that a long time ago. On the one hand, we are tired and old. On the other hand, we are just being born. I'm done with that conversion. Long ago. Now, it's your turn. 

Responsible freedom in other words. Shedding the apathy of a broken ego self. Because you can't show your true self. Because it takes so much courage. Responsible freedom. Not, running off into the sunset to be the idle rich. Which means for you, not just working, so you earn money. Working, so you love it. Again, this is The New World. Loving your work as much as you love me. Loving Her, the silence, as much as you love me. Loving consciousness as much as you love me. Loving. Not, enduring. Loving. Then, you love. Then, you love me. Then, you love life. Then, you love. 

Purification. Purifying life. Ego to soul. 

Amera Ziganii Rao © 2014

"In old days nobody pretended to be a bit better than his neighbour. In fact, to be a bit better than one's neighbour was considered excessively vulgar and middle class. Nowadays, with our modern mania for morality, everyone has to pose as a paragon of purity, incorruptibility, and all the other seven deadly virtues. And what is the result? You all go over like ninepins--one after the other."

-- Oscar Wilde

We are bound to become that which we study, so let us study peace and love and truth.

Iyanla Vanzant 

Don't allow your wounds to turn you into a person you are not. Hang in there. The rest of your life is the best of your life. Motivation Live

NATURAL BORN MYSTIC™

Amera Ziganii Rao::Writer. Philosopher. Psychologist. Humanist. Spiritualist. Sexualist. Hedonist. Artist. Teacher

..something to balance up the Stuart Halls.....AZR 

Fiction. Tropic of Cancer. Henry Miller. An Excerpt. (Alchemy, for Liberation, for Humanity)

Tropic of Cancer. Henry Miller

.....For a hundred years or more the world, our world, has been dying. And not one man (woman), in these last hundred years or so, has been crazy enough to put a bomb up the asshole of creation and set it off. The world is rotting away, dying piecemeal. But it needs the coup de grace, it needs to be blown to smithereens. Not one of us is intact, and yet we have in us all the continents and the seas between the continents and the birds of the air. We are going to put it down – the evolution of this world which has died but which has not been buried.......

Henry Miller 

The Love Problem. Amera Ziganii Rao 

....and I just want to say one thing in relation to the sexuality that is being exposed everywhere. Controversial as it may be, who cares. I don't and I am a woman. Under age girls is one thing. Not good of course. But complex for sure. A man, not unlike you had the courage to poo poo a lot of what is going on with the cases that are suddenly coming to light, as in the motivation behind such exposure at this time, and he's right. This kind of underage exploitation, rape, through to the disgusting grabbing of young muslim girls for crusty old extremists, is bad enough. But why now? 

The Draconian society will condemn sex so that men shrivel up into their puritanical states again and again, so that they continue to beat women, kill them and hold them captive as sexless slaves in marriage, that's why. 

In other words, this kind of sexuality is nothing in comparison to the real paedophilia of this world. Carried out by the Draconians. Torture, tiny children and tinier children still. That is not even being talked about and never will be. 

So do not take what is going on as a simple affirmation that you are filth. You are not. We know how complex the Lolita issue is and fetish fetishes just that. Be proud of it and don't be embarassed or ashamed. This is not evil sexuality. What goes on with the Draconians - the George Bushes, the real nasty bastards behind the scenes - has nothing to do with the dilemma of puritanical to 'Circus' and 'Whorehouse' that you are exploring. It has nothing to do with Henry Miller or liberation and yet of course is all lumped in together. That's what they do. 

Just as women are becoming more liberated, they come out with all of this? Please. There is an agenda behind it, it is more complex than that of course, the victims of those rapes and exploitations are real, but still. The men who were boys behind the real rapes and exploitations by said teachers are real too. Of course. But there has to be a strong demarcation between the hidden nastiness of the men (and women) who really do kill human beings, who kill children, tiny children - the same ones who say that ancient priesthood demanded sacrifice of human flesh - and the ones who are just not masters of themselves and who have no teaching from The Temple Society. 

There is a big difference between Humbert Humbert (Lolita) and George Bush. 

Be art. Don't be puritanical. You are not evil. They, the ones behind the headlines, way behind the headlines, are. There is a big difference. 

Amera Ziganii Rao © 2014

...........Alchemy & Liberation & Humanity™. Alchemy, for Liberation, for Humanity. Freedom for all. From tyranny, misogyny, oppression, family duty, shallow thinking, ego swamping of emotions we can't control and above all, the terrible low self esteem that is our legacy in the usual world. The world of slavery. Sexless slavery. Alchemy, for Liberation, for Humanity, so we can all have the sacred of the sexuality and the sexuality of the sacred again at last. True loving is true living. Consciousness applied. Psychology applied. Humanism applied. True Divinity, applied. Inner power, most definitely, applied. Thought and feeling, visuals and words. A new educational website and programme will be announced. Natural Born Mystic™ leads the way. For all.

Amera Ziganii Rao © 2014

The Passion of Sex. Amera Ziganii Rao 

The greatest polite society repression is that of sexual, sensual and passion repression. Nothing else is as important to focus on as that. High life, high art and high love cannot exist without high sex. Passion. The sex has to go with the spirituality otherwise there is nothing. The politics of what is spirituality, and what is not, has to be totally in line, with the sex, with the primal and with the spirituality, or there is most certainly, nothing. High sex is sexuality is BEING sexual, sensual and passionate. Everywhere in every moment. Liberation is sexualisation. 

We have no ability to tame passion, because we are not taught. We are taught to repress passion. Sigmund Freud called it the sex instinct that governed everything. The Sacred Whore High Priestess Hierophant™ says the same thing. 

We are hunter lazy, we are without solitary confinement stamina, we are completely out of touch and if not, damn rusty, about anything to do with what is really GOD. 

The greatest polite society repression is that of sexual, sensual and passion repression. High life, high art and high love cannot exist without sex. What we do not know is that to be sensual, sexual or passion, is sedition. The most offensive sedition on earth. The Matrix doesn't do sacred sexuality. The Matrix is just cold, hollow, half hearted, rape. 

A dead passion for a dead society. Courage is not taught in schools for a reason. The feudal system to a religious and religious rituals world. Courage cannot exist without the sex instinct. Courage. Not fascism. Courage is passion. Courage is compassion. Courage is GOD. 

Courage is mastering 'the evil demons' of fear. They are evil alright. They are the world at large. 

It takes courage to have sex. It takes courage to stand up for sex. It takes courage to stand up for me. Eve is the downfall of the male race, according to the books of the three religions. 

If we are not even trained to stand up for the sacredness of the primal, we lose our 'action and integrity muscles'. We hide and remain afraid and become more afraid and then hide more. Our courage muscles in that area, weaken, while others remain strong or grow more powerful, as we put the work in. 

The sex instinct is the most damaged on this planet, for a very good, 'conspiracy' reason. It is the most powerful thing we own. 

Make it power and not rapist or rape victim - I speak symbolically - and you become the most hunted kind of human in existence. One who owns their own TRUE SACRED SEXUALITY. 

Passion. The most sacred thing we can be. If it is clean. Humanity makes it clean. Humanity is again, pure sedition. Humanity for the vulnerable is laughable. Humanity for women is not allowed. 

It takes a great deal of courage to live. I am used to it. I've had years of practice. You, will catch up. 

Your anima is me. The sacred sex instinct. The higher mind. The creative waterfall. The pure, suicidal, revolutionary, integrity of a mastermind soul. The wild card. 

That's what we are counting on. And what is written all over your soul. To unplug from The Matrix is to go up against 'your own'. It's easy when you realise that they are not your own, in any way, shape or form. 

Hierophant is to give that interpretative analysis. Of what is already in you. 

The greatest polite society repression is that of sexual, sensual and passion repression. Nothing else is as important to focus on as that. High life, high art and high love cannot exist without high sex. Passion. The sex has to go with the spirituality otherwise there is nothing. The politics of what is spirituality, and what is not, has to be totally in line, with the sex, with the primal and with the spirituality, or there is most certainly, nothing. High sex is sexuality is BEING sexual, sensual and passionate. Everywhere in every moment. Liberation is sexualisation. 

AMERA ZIGANII RAO ALCHEMY & LIBERATION & HUMANITY™

Time for the titillation to stop. Sexual power is a serious business. 

Amera Ziganii Rao © 2013

....in other words, it actually takes a great deal of courage to have sex at all in this world. It will come. Liberation is a process. 

Whore as Madonna. Madonna as Whore. The answers will come. 

And all for male courage. The puritanical society comes from you, for you, about you. Men are told not to have sex. You don't. The carnage of the world is the result. Alchemy, FOR Liberation, FOR Humanity. Go through the sex and sexuality and creativity and expansion of all that is 'taboo'. Come out the other side. 

That is liberation. That is to be whole. And it takes enormous courage. We live in a puritanical world. The fundamentalism - ites are just the other end of the same spectrum. The whole world is puritanical. 

It takes courage to have sex. 

It takes courage to liberate. 

It takes courage to be love. 

The answers will come. 

And by the time you are done, you will be like me. You won't give a flying fuck anymore. Because you know what is right and what you believe in. I know you believe in it too. I saw it then and I see it now. And I know how much you NEED to live it too. Just focus on that. The answers will come. 

The ultimate human right then, is the right to have sex. Funny that. And we all think we live in a free world. Yeah, right. 

Amera Ziganii Rao © 2014

....and here's another thought. I have been asking this question for 17 years. If there is an agenda in this world to control all of us, I have always asked through this journey, why they wouldn't just let us have sex so we would be muted with happiness so we would be compliant? If you want a slave race, why not just not let them have the greatest drug there is, ie, sex? 

Because sex is the channel to true Divinity, one. Why Serpent Female High Priesthood is the first to be killed. Second, they want us to be miserable, mean and to kill each other. 

Do you think we as a people would be doing that, either with herb instead of alcohol, or sex instead of suppression and beating each other up? 

Er hum. Exactly. It's all about control, control, control and control. Make people mean and warring and I am not talking about a country in the news. I am talking about walking down the street. Shame, hostility, judgment, fear, terror, embarrassment and jealousy. 

The most generic and understated methods of warfare on the planet. Keep everyone down and they will remain meek. Take away their knowledge - the tree of life + Serpent Priesthood + interpretation of The Universe - and you get a stupid slave people, shocked into their own terror of a 'God' who tells them they are filthy, lust filled animals who cannot have sex. 

The formula for evil in one. The religious and pseudo religious, cerebral societies. The whole stupid unconscious world. The so called 'educated' through to uneducated. Puritanical = controlled. 

The whole world. 

Amera Ziganii Rao © 2014

To be sexual and sexual minded and sexual of soul is to be inner power. Sex = power. Power INSIDE, and access to Divine Intelligence. Sex = power. And that is all in one person. Sex = power = courage = Higher Intelligence. Sex = Soul. 

True, primal, DIVINE Intelligence. Re-programme that and you are free. Liberation is a process and a miracle of the moment in one. Everything is taught. Nothing is learnt. Anything can therefore be re-programmed. Believe the truth. Sex = power. In oneself. 

Amera Ziganii Rao © 2014

....well, it goes back to all the esoteric truths and untruths I have been uncovering, which I am not ready to return to yet, but basically, if you take away the people who are the SOURCE of sexuality, ie, women and the Divine mind of intelligence and interpretation and Higher Intuition, you replace that with a male version. 

As I read more and more, the turgidity of explanation is astounding. We have all been brought up stupid basically. From time. 

But the world of the arts has all the answers, and as I prepare my work, I know what my greatest skill is, and so many have told me over the years, is the interpretation of art, into the metaphysical and emotional. That is Hierophant. That is me. The visceral consciousness of the visceral soul. The primal soul, both emotional and sexual. 

The world killed that when they killed those like me. Women have only had access to formal education in the west for over a hundred years. We've got a lot of catching up to do and then we have to trawl through male turgidity first, to get to the real truths. 

And if men know nothing of their own sexuality, they know even less about female sexuality. Female is sex. Male follows female. Not the other way round. Female is the creative womb. Male follows that in female. 

So put it this way. William Blake talks of the road of excess leading to wisdom. Normal society teaches the complete opposite. 

Henry Miller is such a great example because he is excess. You cannot learn to master something if you ignore it. 

Female sexuality was the same for me. Females apparently don't even have it in the normal world. Men are taught shame. Women are taught they don't even have it. 

Same journey either way. Excess into the whole carnal picture. Utilise porn through to every piece of your imagination and then you hone and tone it down into the human and humane again. 

Like anything. But don't ignore it. Ignoring it is what creates cruel society and you don't have to look very far to find that. We are a puritanical and suppressed and terrified society and that's because 'God' tells us so. 

It's crap. And if we need labels, be a pagan. Be a male witch. Be all those things you ran away from your whole life, like me, like everyone else does too. And then, see how you feel. 

You won't feel like suppressing anything then, because you will REMEMBER. You will remember the truth. That is to become soul. 

That is to become love. 

Amera Ziganii Rao © 2014 

The Love Problem. Amera Ziganii Rao 

Yeah, I am okay, boss man. But as usual, the shock of the new is terrible. As I look at the company now and what its message is, it is about the miracle of exodus from The Patriarchal Tribe. But it is an exodus that clearly is going to take a very very long time. It is also about the fact that it has already taken so many years. My life is about two things; grief and time. Grief, pain and time. Asceticism. Four things. Grief, pain, time and asceticism. Now, you have to liberate and that is going to take more years. Humanity took four years. Liberation will probably take another four. So, the adage is clearly true. Those who can’t do, teach. So, once again, grief is the only option. As opposed to anger, blame or self pity. What’s the point. Been there, done that. 

Certainly not a quick sell and certainly not a quick company. I am bound to quality and that means hard work, in adverse circumstances, for years. And obviously, with your religion of conditional love and isolation, the world looks bleak again today for me. 

The company will come before you, I am sure. So, the company’s message now can only be time, time, time and time. And asceticism. I am glad today though, that you get to do the living for both of us. At least I can feel the twinship to that level now. And I have the vast remit of vast esoteric and teaching work now. That keeps me full. 

Asceticism though will always make me angry. I am too full of life to ever enjoy it. But quality means it has to be that way. And High Female Serpent Priesthood™ is no empty title. And because you are who you are, it has to be that way. You are truly, all or nothing. That’s who you are. So I have given up all my dreams today. I just want a pension. And then, you will come. 

Build your whole ascetic life of teaching, and then he will come. Whatever. At least I can believe in something. The rest can remain a pipe dream. Your real liberation, but one that will take a very long time. Consciousness to this level is no joke. It takes years. And you do quality just as I do. I am now prepared and grieving. Again. And I think that is the healthiest thing to do. A snail’s pace life of asceticism it is. At least I will have a pension. 

I am to be what I have always been. A selfless ascetic teacher and a Scheherazade, with no harvest in sight, at the same time. I am bound to my fate. My fate is an ordeal. I can only accept. At least I know that the usual alchemical rules of abundance thinking are completely irrelevant to me. They always have been. I will teach that, but as with many teachers, it doesn’t apply to me. I am a snail’s pace ascetic and that’s that. I can accept because I have already grieved that there is no justice. And that The Great Mother has no power on earth. Existentialism is not my choice. It is the reality. And it’s not my world. It’s yours. And you are extreme conditional love. 

So there you go. No expectations indeed. Snail’s pace in hardship. And at least, one day, anyway, you will be free. And at least, I will have a pension. The company message sounds damn attractive so far. Let’s see. Like many teachers before me, maybe everyone else will get to do it better and faster. But not me. 

Amera Ziganii Rao © 2014 

The Love Problem. Amera Ziganii Rao 

...and actually, I AM teaching what I have done. I am teaching the first of the two journeys. In fact, two of the three journeys. The healing of the soul for those who can do it. For priesthood and anyone else who wants to give it a try. That's the first journey. Ascension. Done. 

Just because I feel it has been for nothing, and it has been so far, it doesn't mean I am teaching something I can't do myself. The second journey is another matter and I presume that most people are bound to their twins, in whatever form they come in. 

The second (alternative) journey - for my pension - can come through teaching the first journey that I have most definitely done. Inner healing and freedom and Ascension = journey one. The Natural Born Mystic™ Journey. Alchemy & Liberation & Humanity™ on the inside, so it can then be bid for on the outside. Good. I do, so I teach. 

The third journey, the cause of most of the pain is the Scheherazade Journey. It is the Scheherazade Journey I cannot do. But that I can teach. That's a different matter. 

That's something to focus on at least. 

NATURAL BORN MYSTIC™

Amera Ziganii Rao::Writer. Philosopher. Psychologist. Humanist. Esoteric. Sexualist. Hedonist. Artist. Teacher

Amera Ziganii Rao © 2014 

....oh, The Scheherazade Journey is written too. Don't regress into that. I am just saying that that may come after my pension. That is the re-assessment and an accurate one and constructive. Live and let live. You can only do what you do. I have to do what I have to do. And I want a life. And that means selling what I have. Helping those who can be helped, despite all my obstacles and adverse circumstances. 

And that is bitter enough. But at least I don't have to any longer, RELY on The Scheherazade Journey. It drives me potty in case you haven't realised and is not the kind of selflessness that is required. Sorry. No romantic illusions allowed. 

And worse, it makes me feel like a failure. And worse, as if I cannot move, because I have nothing to say. That is sooo wrong. 

The Scheherazade Journey may be central to our lives, but it is only periphery to the teaching. The Ascension Journey is the centre and for all. That material is still slow, and still belligerently quality led, but at least it can be worked on and worked on now. 

Asceticism for a purpose. Again, at last. 

Amera Ziganii Rao © 2014 

The Scheherazade Discourse. Amera Ziganii Rao 

Anyway, that is not the point for you. That was the point for me and a very constructive one. Some would say, seminal, progressive, feminist and highly advanced. I am Disir. Let's just say, constructive:) 

Your issue is liberation now. Sexuality, belonging to the real circus of life and throwing off the bourgeois mantle of patriarchal sexless control and fascism, out of sexual shame. 

Lolita. So, if one was to look at it in a 'Jungian' or even 'Freudian' manner, let's get controversial. Humbert Humbert has to kill mummy before he gets the girl. 

Mmm, interesting. Focus on that today. 

The Oedipus Complex is about killing the father to get to the mother. Lolita is about killing the adult woman, to get to the child. 

The Sacred Whore High Priestess Lolita? 

Er hum. Aphrodite making sure Eros can't be with Psyche. Something going on there. Mothers in the Patriarchal Tribe are more seditious and fascist than the fathers. They are just of course carrying out the fathers orders, but the 'morality' from hell is given to them for their safekeeping. 

Focus on that. Mothers are the source of male rage. Toilet training, through to first shame. Focus on that today. 

Liberation is for all. But you have to earn it. 

Amera Ziganii Rao © 2014 

The Scheherazade Discourse. Amera Ziganii Rao 

Don’t worry about it. I am glad on the one hand that you are so frustrated and scared by the whole thing. It shows me how much you want it and me. Look, if it’s not misogyny, it’s cowardice and if it’s not cowardice, it’s bourgeois suppression and if it’s not bourgeois suppression, it’s sexual shame and so on. These issues are going to keep coming up and swamping you and me until they are gone. They are the male ego issues and it occurred to me that I am used to suffering a lot more than you. 

That is a strange disadvantage for you at this point. Don’t be scared. You might also get angry at me for taking you down such a path of suffering. Be angry. I get angry, or used to get livid at The Great Mother for the same. You get angry at me the same way I get angry at Her. We have covered that before and that is what the High Priestess Serpenthood is about. I keep changing those words around. Interesting. They are all part of the truth. 

Don’t be afraid that you will lose me. Just be frustrated at yourself and the process of healing but don’t be afraid that you will lose me. Your psychic attacks are becoming a companion for me now, so they do swamp me temporarily but then I remember. So, the word is suffering. You are not use to suffering. I am, so I can be a bit cavalier about it for sure. 

Remember that to suffer is a true life. Anything else is illusion and good for anyone who can live with that. You and I do not get that privilege. So it is time for you to give yourself some kind of pat on the back and start thinking about what kind of Priesthood Initiate you are becoming, whether you like it or not. 

This is for spiritual evolution and you are being asked to do exactly the same as I was asked to do. That is a privilege, endlessly painful as it is. Value it and you will begin to ease the pain. 

Remember the emotions of the sex. With that much suffering, you know what it makes of the emotions of sex. And remember that you and I are in this the whole way. This is a high intimacy. Not experienced by many. 

So, I bought an umbrella today, to make a point. It is one of those big see through jobs which half covers the body, you know, the funky ones, and I thought I had bought one that said ‘I love London’ and it was an ironical rage statement. Guess what it says. I love Rain. 

‘Nuff said. Loving the rain is to love suffering. Start wearing black. You’ll feel much better. You are entering a Priesthood whether you like it or not. You have suffered enough to start believing that. 

And be afraid, a misogynist, sexually ashamed and all the rest. You are allowed. Face the truths of these things and then you will re-educate and purify them. I have to accept their presence too. And don’t worry about me. I am working for my pension now. I am building up to my first generic writing. I think I am going to start with sex. But I am going to go slow. It’s not as if we are in any rush. 

And remember that I love you, boss man. Whatever you are, you are mine. High Serpent Priesthood chose you for a reason. You are the companion. Whether you like it or not! And that takes hard work. It takes great love. And it takes great purification. You know you love Spiritual Intelligence. Love it more. 

Amera Ziganii Rao © 2014 

The Scheherazade Discourse. Amera Ziganii Rao 

Cor. What an extraordinarily insane life. Don't worry, I am not looking to you to rescue me anymore. Because I am that awesome. Let's just say it is extraordinary as I am. 

Phew. So now, I have had to retreat to my strange flat with all its obstacles, because despite the fact that I have not had a word published yet or spoken my first public speaking, I cannot get people off my back!! It's like being a superstar, without being a superstar. It's extraordinary. If it wasn't this, it's that and if it's not this, it's that. 

And of course, if I had a home, I would be safely esconced in it, but of course, the training of my life is not about that, whatever it is. And so on. Anyway, I am winning and it's really all about a generic anyway, which is why I can smile about it at all. And that is the grief of the fourth stage of grief. Acceptance. 

Aside from men and women and all that that means and fascism and misogyny and neediness and blah, blah, blah, it is of course, also about landing back into a world that looks exactly the same as when I left it 17 years ago. Of course it would be the same. 

It is that bittersweet massive disappointment that the tunnel out of Shawshank is just being built, first, despite all the suffering I have endured so far, for 17 straight years, no, make that 42, and that's the first thing. Second, as other spiritual teachers also talk about, life is the same before enlightenment as it is after. Wayne Dyer quotes an ancient quote that says that before enlightenment one has to chop wood and make a fire and after enlightenment it is the same. Sure. But if that's the worst that he can make of it, good for him. 

For me, it is the awesome disappointment not just of not getting anything from 7 years of rampant love investment - as U2 says, you thought you had found a friend who could take you out of this place, in return for grace - let alone 32 years of love investment too - whatever, I am over it - it's not just that. It is also my increased suffering of circumstances, for whatever my new trainings are. There are always trainings in a life like mine for sure and I am not saying they are not worthy, now I am getting the hang of it. Alchemy. 'Change the way you look at things and the things you look at will change' again, by Wayne Dyer. 

And for that it had to be the extreme acceptance of profound grief and disappointment and just letting you be kind of thing, and letting you take your time to ascension as is your right. Even if you are a needy fascist:) 

So, what's next? Now, I am being hounded by people of MY archetype as well as yours! Because of course, everyone needs so damn much and I clearly have the answers written on my face. 

So, humbling, arrogant and all together at the same time. Because last time I looked, it was always going to be up to me how I do what I do. And even though I have no proper home, ie, a place to sit and not be hounded, truly a room of my own, I have of course transformed circumstances, being a pragmatic alchemist as much as I am an esoteric. Phew. 

So, I am in hiding now. And have faced all the disappointments of not getting this, not getting that, not having this, not being loved in this way yet and whatever, whatever, whatever. And guess what? I still love you. 

And it just goes to show that the only thing fast about the year of Ascension - fuck all else is - is that things are very fluid. The lessons are thick and fast and keep shifting. 

I have done a lot of research in the past few months, with what my kind need and what they are indeed already aware of, at a much younger age and all that sort of thing. And now it seems, that education is already over. Time to now settle into the adverse circumstances, thank whatever I can, for anything I do have and finally begin. 

The emotions for you and me are at least in balance now, and Scheherazade is just one of my jobs now. And that's only taken four heavyweight years of agony but lots of creativity, so let's see where it all goes next. 

I've made my blog an adult content website now. That was long overdue. I guess this is going to turn into a daily journal of communication to you now. To keep in touch and to inspire you to what the creative, insane, out of control, alchemical life is. Be inspired, but know that the grief of life and the meaningless of life will always be there. In other people. You work so hard to get where you get emotionally, psychologically, creatively and sexually and of course then you carry the massive and vulnerable, and deeply vulnerable burden of being stuck still in the mire, but now ahead of the game. 

Crazy life. Dante I think calls this stage purgatory - well, my re-interpretation as he is talking about after death - because one is healed in oneself but no one else is, so then the purgatory journey is to get out of the new hell. Les autres. 

See you on the other side of the bridge I guess. Note how I am not even looking at you to rescue me. Because I am great. Existentialism. Not for the fainthearted. Existentialism with belief in Divinity and that Divinity being Female. She's there, but it doesn't really make any difference. Chop wood. Her energy is there for us. The rest is certainly only in our hands. And that goes for women, more than anyone, for my archetype more than anyone. 

And once we face that grief, the world truly is ours. As long as we hide, until we can travel and be out in safety! 

Crazy life. 

Sane love. 

I am now visualising a massive apartment in the Docklands, with a HUGE writers studio, just for me. With music studio insulation!! Oh yes. By that time, you may be ready. Doesn't matter. Just be who you are. You are still my strength. 

Time to create, whatever the circumstances. Crazy life. 

Sane love. 

'Don't leave me here alone' Bono is saying now. Oh, you did. 

Amera Ziganii Rao © 2014 

The Scheherazade Discourse. Amera Ziganii Rao 

...of course it’s sad. It’s fucking tragic. But I have faced grief. Siddharta may call it grace. He can call it what he wants, and so can any other spiritual great/aspirant. I call it profound grief. And in that I feel very free. I have had a very sad life. I know grief and what kept me sick and mad, and then angry for the past five years in health, was the fact that I couldn’t accept the horrors of your world and you and what you are and what we are and what the others are. I’ve accepted it all now. Nothing in the world will ever surprise me again. My suffering is legitimate. And I am an advanced Alchemist. Because my lovely, there is no justice. And when you have known that your whole life and then you find out that that lack of justice will plague you forever, there is no more grief. Your opinion is beyond legitimate after that. Such is the paradox of my training. I am certainty now in an uncertain world. I know there is no justice. I also know how to break through it, even if it takes one’s whole life. I work for a pension now. If I get anything before that, it will be a bonus. It’s not my plan. I just want a pension. That is non attachment taken to the ultimate level it could ever go. Way beyond Buddha, way beyond any off the so called greats. Because there is no justice. Justice is for the corrupt or the shallow. And for the lucky. I am not lucky. I am just great. 

And if you look at Shawshank and the truth of my life, which is that I am now building my own tunnel to get out of this mire of a life, you are Red. You come along way afterwards, and even then you will need all the courage in the world to do it. That’s who you are apparently. What am I going to do with that? Love. 

That’s what I do. There may be no justice but I am never going to lose the love in me again. And I am glad I don’t have to respect anything in this stupid world. I never liked it anyway and I can’t stand most people and now I know why. The profound and sensitive artist is real. We don’t like people. We don’t like injustice. And we don’t like the superficial. We are built too deep for it and then, let’s not even talk about being Serpent High Priesthood or a woman. It’s your world. Have it. I don’t want any part of it. I just want my pension. 

I will never lose anything in me again. That is what the 17 years was for. That’s what the company is going to be about. That it truly is all for nothing, other than one’s human rights, that vitally important thing and eventually, creative professionalism and money. So what. Grief. Once it is faced, one is free. There is no justice and I don’t ever have to like anything or anyone ever again. Unless they are worth it. And I am never going to hide again. I am only in strategic retreat now. In order to win. That is the only kind of freedom someone like me can have. And as you know now how un-free you are in yourself, you know how big that is. It is. I know what I am grateful for. I also know what’s what now. That is freedom. 

Carry on with your own healing. You are doing well. And if you can do it fast, I will be delirious. But you probably won't. I have faced the grief.

Amera Ziganii Rao © 2014 

The Scheherazade Discourse. Amera Ziganii Rao 

I’m not lucky. I’m just great. I am liking that phrase more and more and then of course, once the perspective goes wider, fuck me, am I lucky. Of course. But not in comparison to what I should be, so the validity stands. 

Feeling good. This is such an ego GROWING journey for me. As your ego modifies, my superego is being forced to expand and expand and you know what, I like it now. I also love not relying on another human being. It’s so great to be relying on oneself again, and therefore actually having the belief that I am going to get somewhere. 

Carry on. You will converge, I am sure. But when, I no longer have to care about. Such a bittersweet relief. 

To know that I have cast off such legacies of ‘love’ and that my only two choices are suicide or facing the hardships and that, that is what the company message has to be for my kind, is stunning, shocking and endlessly bleak. So what. Once grief is faced to this level, it doesn’t matter anymore. Nothing matters anymore. 

And then, finally, gratitude can return, the feelings inside one of the greatness of alchemy no matter what, the compassion to understand that people can only be who they are and that everyone tries and that every person in my life has taught me something. Sure. 

I also owe no one anything and again, as business becomes more compassionate and mean millionaires start examining their hearts in this world, my kind has to do the opposite. And believe me, now it is about my kind as well as yours. Taking a subject like this professional, after the years of well meaning non fiscal interaction is not easy, but I am blasting through now. 

Loneliness is the only requirement and as all writers say, we are creating the whole world in our rooms, so we don’t ever have to feel lonely. And when you add mystic and Hierophant to that as well, well, you get the picture. 

I have also got over the shock that I have been poor for almost 20 years. Extraordinary life. Extraordinary people. Not. 

I love relying on myself and I love business and for a person of my archetype, those are extraordinary achievements even before I have earned a penny. And I am being looked after by a humane state for an inhumane pain and debilitation. Yes, I am lucky. And I am great. 

Love. What an extraordinary waste of time. The myth of not only romantic love, but any love at all. And my people are of love. No wonder our journeys are so hard. Teaching these methods will presumably mean that other people don’t have to suffer as much. Cool. That’s good. But they will, anyway. It is not our purpose. It is our position. Suffering as Spartacuses in a shallow and cruel world of stupidity and profane nothing. I am glad though that I have had the courage to face the truth of the truth at last. And I feel nothing but great. And I love working on my business model and all things fiscal and official and non personal. There is no personal. There is only business. I began as a healer. Now, I trade in information. For the price that I am and will be worth, as I create the educational system. 

You built my superego through your cruelty and neglect and incompetence. Along with the rest of them. I should thank you. I do. 

How’s your greatness doing? Exactly. Tin man millionaires. But you get the lifestyle. Enjoy it. I’ll catch up. 

Lots of love 

Amera Ziganii Rao © 2014 

No Name ll Pt ll (Artwork) 

Amera Ziganii Rao © Digital Darkroom Art

NATURAL BORN MYSTIC™

New educational website (Alchemy & Liberation & Humanity™ as a writing and speaking business of empowerment) to be announced. Meanwhile, enjoy the free writing and consciousness work on this website. It was written with blood, sweat and tears. The story of both my man and myself as we have struggled to re-define all that is relationship and marriage, the mutual journey of escape and evolution out of The Patriarchal Tribe™ . The self discovery that took us from female slavery and male confusion and fascism into a society that was left behind a long time ago, when the New World Order took over and put men in charge, when they didn't even want to, by all that I have seen. Other than in sex as is the primal partnership. Our exploration is here. The world of Bluebeard Male Supremacy™ through to the Sacred Whore and High Female Esoteric Serpent Priesthood Society™, again, with men as the beloveds. Equality, Liberty, FRATERNITY. The New New World. Again. Please feel free to read the material on this blog. My first life as a writer, plus work from other consciousness teachers too. Thank you. 

Amera Ziganii Rao © 2014

Right. Enough terror. Enough non existentialism. And enough of the blaming and raging and judging. From both of us. 

Self determination and great love. From now on. Additionally, we are going to accept something else too. Every time I step forward, you are going to react with fear. You also think I am going to run off with someone else, because you have responsibilities, as well as your ongoing struggle with all that is female power. 

Okay. And I keep getting terrified and I also keep sulking that I have to do it all alone. With your attacks going on too. 

Whatever. 

You had responsibilities when we met. I knew what the deal was. 

We have also both been raging at the news in that spiritual piece about a few more years as the possibility. That may not be the case. But I know you wait for the signal too. You are in soul too and we are both ascending again, together. 

Self determination for me and great love. Trust and freedom for you for me, and great love. 

And our mutual, new training, patience. And the hardship of missing each other meanwhile, while knowing we are doing a great, great thing. This is the truth of being wooed and the truth of courtship. 

We are in this all the way. I am not running off with anyone else and you are not going to stay in those responsibilities forever. Or indeed, your bourgeois shynesses. And indeed, the you know what misogyny pisogyny shisogyny. We will be both set free and will both be ready at the right time. True female power and indeed, true male power. Power. True. Love. 

It was not just dependency that we were both asked to clear in our lives, the journey we began long before we met each other. It was not only the politics of gender. It was all that is co dependency too. 

We ARE freedom and togetherness. And it is a mutual art form that we develop now. And you will sulk and I will sulk. We need to get used to that and not be afraid. 

This union IS blessed and is the one. We do have free will. We do have the choice to choose our chosen destiny. And this is it. 

So, let's both calm our neurosis. We are there for each other and I am always relying on you. And you are always relying on me. 

We are already the miracle. We are allowed to release that fear now. We are the ones. 

Love, love and love.

"As I love you more and more". Shirley Bassey

Amera Ziganii Rao © 2014 

I'll get by as long as I have you. And though there'll be rain and darkness too. I'll not complain (!). I'll see it through. Although you may be far away, it's true....I'll get by as long I have you. 

Shirley Bassey

NATURAL BORN MYSTIC™ & ALCHEMY & LIBERATION & HUMANITY™. Amera Ziganii Rao 

The new educational website (Alchemy & Liberation & Humanity™ as a writing and speaking business of empowerment) will be announced. Meanwhile, enjoy the free writing and consciousness work on this website. It was written with blood, sweat and tears. The story of both my man and myself as we have struggled to re-define all that is relationship and marriage, the mutual journey of escape and evolution out of The Patriarchal Tribe. 

The self discovery that took us from female slavery and male confusion and fascism into a society that was left behind a long time ago, when The New World Order took over and put men in charge, when they didn't even want it, by all that I have seen. Other than in sex as is the primal partnership. Our exploration is here. The world of Bluebeard Male Supremacy™ through to the Sacred Whore and High Female Esoteric Serpent Priesthood Society™, again, with men as the beloveds. Equality, Liberty, FRATERNITY. The New New World. Again. 

Please feel free to read the material on this blog. My writings, plus work from other consciousness teachers too. My Manifesto for Human Rights (Especially Female) in Relationship and Family. 

These writings will be produced in book form. Poetry Polemics for a better world of love, independence, sex and individuation. And true companionship and family. Power to the people, indeed. Together. 

Thank you. 

Amera Ziganii Rao © 2014

NATURAL BORN MYSTIC™. The Sacred Whore and High Female Esoteric Serpent Priesthood Society™

Amera Ziganii Rao © 2014

Natural Born Mystic™. A Deeper Instinct. Amera Ziganii Rao 

I, with a deeper instinct, choose a man who compels my strength, who makes enormous demands on me, who does not doubt my courage or my toughness, who does not believe me naive or innocent, who has the courage to treat me like a woman.

Anais Nin

I, with a deeper instinct, choose a woman who compels my strength, who makes enormous demands on me, who does not doubt my courage or my toughness, who does not believe me naive or innocent, who has the courage to treat me like a man.

Amera Ziganii Rao © 2011 

AMERA ZIGANII RAO :: NATURAL BORN MYSTIC™

Amera Ziganii Rao :: Writer. Philosopher. Psychologist. Humanist. Esoteric. Sexualist. Hedonist. Artist. Teacher & Coach & Messenger Entertainer. My Business Is Transformation. My Business Is Power. My Business Is Freedom. My Business Is Love. My Business Is Sex. My Business Is Art. My Business Is Spirit. My Business Is Money. My Business Is Life

I know. We are all having to face the truth that we are all very advanced in particular areas, but not in the others, not in the ones we want. The path to Ascension is clearly long and tortuous and the sooner one can accept that, the better one can feel. 

As they say, focus on what you have and not what you don't have. Well, that's true and not true. Focus and clarify what you are, what you have achieved and then focus on what you want to achieve. In other words, do an inventory. 

Additionally, compare yourself to me. I am comparing myself to you. We are the twinship. That means we can use that. We can use the aftermath of the war of the worlds, and we can utilise it to grow now, in companionship type 'envy'/admiration/acceptance. 

In other words, you are the part of me, the other half of me indeed, who is great at money, even though you have spent many years working at those skills. For instance. You are much more, and I will try and do an inventory for both of us, as I do it for myself, even if I don't share it, as you should do for myself and you, if you see what I mean. I am great at particular things, but they have also taken me a long time to hone and tone and get good at. 

But I find that the most useful thing I have done today is this. I like the fact that you are living that greatness and that I am living this greatness. You are living that out while I am living this out and as I begin to learn and practise - gain competence - your areas, I also celebrate that soulwise, someone of me is living it out. Do you see? 

In other words, individuation as a family. 

For me it is obviously all things material and for you it is all things artistic. The Patriarchal Tribe is guilty of both counts. They stripped you of 'anima' - the female psyche and me of 'animus' - the male psyche. 

Venus for men and Mars for women are equally taboo, equally vilified and equally discouraged, actively, from the time we can think. 

We therefore have to grieve. Grieve the past and then enjoy the healthy competition if you like, while enjoying the fact that I live out you as an artist for now and a prophet as you for now and a philosopher as you for now and you live out the wealth and leadership and parenthood too, if you like, for me. 

I'm doing that and while it still hurts, it is also lovely. Just lovely. 

I like the team. I am also expanding it to the others I know and love, wherever I meet them. And if feels good. It means that I can celebrate where my generosity lies again, while I gain competency in the areas I want to experience generosity/abundance, knowing and believing that I can and grieving all the whys of why I haven't had them my whole life.

Alchemy. Existentialism is a hard path. So what. We are great. All of us. And nothing will stop us. 

Amera Ziganii Rao © 2014 

ALCHEMY & LIBERATION & HUMANITY™

COURAGE 

Mmm….courage. So. Let’s cut to the chase. The courage that we are all looking for is not an ordinary one. In ego or superego, the politics of this world remain the same as they did when The New World order came in about 9 or 10 thousand years ago. The courage is about Witch Prejudice. Female and Male Witch Prejudice, from males and females. That is the fear we are all carrying around in our deepest selves and why we will do anything to hide, in ego and then, anything to avoid the truth again, in superego, until we face the truth, as we do in superego. 

To be ‘of the circus’ as I like to put it, to be anyone who is not bourgeois, means we are of Witch. In fear addressing language, there is no point in beating around the bush. 

I am also using the word Witch very deliberately, as opposed to Wizard, or Self Actualiser, or Sourcerer or Sorcerer. It was Carlos Castaneda who quoted his mentor High Initiate Don Juan who said that to work from The Source was to be a SOURCErer. 

In other words, to be an Alchemist is to be a Sourcerer is to be a Sorcerer is to be a Wizard is to be a Witch. 

Personal Development is the modern age of Witchcraft basically. And it is time for us to embrace that truth. 

I have had a few incidents recently that have brought me to this new revelation, after communing tonight. There is an old new prejudice being meted out against me. Not often, but when it comes, from a particular kind of human being – I am out and about these days with my walking stick in central London and in a strange ease of comfort as I am allowed to take my time and I am meeting lots of people and having lots of very constructive exchanges that give me the chance to test out my company material and most of it is enlightening, gratifying and deeply humbling – but there is a particular kind of human being that I was referring to in general, when I recently talked of how shining more, did not encourage warmth but the opposite. Those jealousies and envies do exist, those fascinations do exist and they are tedious but not unmanageable at all and actually in the pursuit of authentic leadership and regained generosity, they are very sweet. Any materialised superstar has to give so much to his or her fans for instance and it’s the same for anyone who leads with authentic power. And in my strange life, I never have to achieve anything huge, for that to have followed me round my whole life and I am sure I am not the only one. Anyone who shines will have experienced that forever and when we are in low self esteem, it can become terribly oppressive and when we have high self esteem, it becomes a gift that we share and not out of guilt, but out of generosity. So I am appreciating that training as and when it comes. 

No. I am speaking of a particular kind of human being, who in Tolkein terms or Draconian Agenda Conspiracy terms, may well and truly be of a different matter. The real henchmen of The New World Order as it was. The real Witch killers, whether they were head ‘priests’ during the Inquisition or Joseph McCarthy’s henchmen in the 1950s America, or indeed, anyone in Margaret Thatcher’s cabinet. I jest. But you know what I mean. These are the real ‘Archons’ or sub archons or reptile led orks who are probably as unconscious as you can be and then again, they may not be. 

What am I talking about? A lot. But let’s just say that Witch prejudice is aggressive. More aggressive than any other kind of prejudice that is currently around. More than racism, more than male supremacy, more than female bullying, more than fattism, more than any of these things. Witch prejudice is very aggressive. 

That is the fear that runs your world at the moment and that can run mine if I don’t pay attention. I have been feeling very vulnerable recently and thought it was purely because the shining has taken off in preparation for my troubadour prophet life. But what is a prophet in the eyes of such ‘people’? Witches. Female and male Witches. 

Victory means facing any fear head on. Which is why I share the underbelly of the final fear in life. For any of us. Nymph or Werewolf, we are all afraid of the same thing. The merging of Spirit and sexuality is Witch. The merging of non bourgeois and standing up as one’s true self is Witch. 

The rest is easy. It’s the usual decision. Is that fear going to make one afraid to shine, or to stand up authentically? Hell no. However long it takes to ascend into superego, visceral or not, final or not, enlightenment of any level and any kind is about courage. Real, committed courage as a way of life and as a state of being. Those who can make it, those who do make it, those whose time has come for ascension, are those who may take time over gaining courage for sure – I took years  too – are the ones who know what manufacturing courage is. That it is manufactured and as it is more and more, it is ascended into. Courage is a decision. To ‘get out of the way’ in that moment until it becomes a habit. 

In other words, believe in Celestial protection and get rid of any shame or guilt or fear about being Witch, whoever you are. This is the central prejudice that has dominated this planet for a very long time. Entertainers, for instance have only been around en masse for just over a hundred years. This is the time of Witch. Witch is all that is non bourgeois and all that is expression of the authentic self. 

The Temple Society is back in all its forms, literal or not, but they are all Witch. To become one’s true self then, Marcus Vinicius, for instance, is to become nothing less than Witch again and I know that makes you run a mile. It did me too. It will come. Note, in my marketing that I do not allude to it. Personal Development is a very astute and shrewd form of it this time. 

But to face the underbelly the truth has to be understood and incorporated. Yes, it is about Witch. Yes, it is about a very aggressive prejudice. Yes, it is a matter sometimes of life and death. World Ascension though is the time of the return. Oh, and you get to have sex. I am being light hearted, but believe me I know. I have been feeling the fear too. And then today, it all was dispersed as I realised finally what it is, after asking the right questions. Ain’t no one going to stop me walking down the street in this life. Not anymore. And there is no legal and institutional right to kill Witch anymore. Female or male. 

These are the miracle times of this earth which means that anyone who can stand up and lead, ie anyone who wants to be authentic, has to lead the field for everyone else. You are a leader. We all are. And we all have to lead. 

And modern warfare from the Witch killers is only one kind now. Psychological attacks. Conformity attacks. Harsh looks. There is nothing else they can do. These incidents for me – and I am sure they will continue – were three men, all of the same kind of age, race and even stature. I thought it was race, I thought it was gender, I thought it was classism, I thought many things. And then I asked The Universe the right questions and it came. It’s all about Witch. Doesn’t matter how we dress, how we look, how we act, how we hide or don’t hide, it’s in our eyes, in our psyches and in our intelligence and in our HEARTS and auras. Because Witch is not evil. They are. 

Remember. And fight. You have the right to be and I am going to damn well enjoy myself. Yes, Orks of the real variety have to be fought. All they need this time is a feather. And then they fall. The rest is getting rid of the memory. The lifetimes of pain and killings that have been real. They are not real anymore. Let it go. It will. 

Amera Ziganii Rao © 2014 

ALCHEMY & LIBERATION & HUMANITY™

COURAGE AND CO-DEPENDENCY 

So, a beautiful day for once isn’t it...both in the weather that has finally gone into grace in the UK too, for however many days it remains. And for us. I also had the final revelation about my currently living quarters too – even though I am in a general state of abject gratitude for all that I have, now that I know how terribly worse, it could have been – and that is, that I am being taught to contain myself. 

As someone who has lived alone and gone through an extraordinarily solitary journey for almost 20 years, and certainly the past seven years, I thought I was doing well with all things that are co-dependency. Of course that has been true and has not been true as well. Seeing as our levels are very advanced and we are in no danger of stopping our training. 

I also of course, like most of my archetype, thought your archetype – in our new inclusive range of love – did really well. Now we know that you do yours behind closed doors. That’s the only difference. The specifics of my archetype, with your archetype as female, is slightly different but still, your archetype always seemed to talk less. Again, it went on behind closed doors. So, knowing that it is all the same and also different, again, as I say, especially with long years of cripple-hood and of course the artist’s writer’s journey, I have shed thousands of layers of spending too much time with other people, talking too much to other people and the like. With you, especially as we work so legitimately and viscerally on our psychic communication level and have done so for seven years, since the moment we met, as we entered that harvest threshold of fifth dimension together, I have also had to shed many layers too. I’m so glad for instance that I had to start writing like this, instead of drowning you with our personal non psychic communication about my work and the like, and every stage has de-infantised me more out of co-dependency as it has you too. I have spoken to your archetype for years and am very grateful that there were so many people who wanted to listen and was pleased to reign in at last, to be alone and not drown anyone. I know how much it helps others too, but there is a limit to that too. From both sides and it is always lonely and more alone and always hurts but it is always good. 

So, in conclusion, it seems like thousands of layers of co-dependency have to be cleared and why? To become strong that is why. I had no idea for instance that I speak aloud to myself all day and all night in my solitude. In this flat, it has become an issue with the paper ceilings and strange man above. I have also been very angry, in these few years, so I am sure that didn’t help either and then especially with the severe restriction of his thumping and heavy footedness and the like. But that’s long gone, that struggle. What remains however is the recognition that one was almost talking to an audience now, with the paper ceilings! It’s so strange how we just hate being alone and yet crave it all the time. My father in particular was someone who always struggled with that. He loves being alone and yet always was needy about other people and blaming, despite himself. I never wanted to do that and that was why I tried to take responsibility for that very early on, but of course, these things are different for different people and we don’t realise how we are doing it in different ways and that it is not just about not being selfish if you like, but also about literal spiritual energy. 

Then, take that to the Witch thing of controversy and conformity battling we have to do outside our spaces all the time. The extraordinary ‘Iago’ society we are all born to, where everyone wants to kill everyone else, so that no one enjoys competition but just wants to be jealous and this and that and attacking all that is Witch above all else, because of the ridiculous and useless society of useless religion and even more useless spiritless pseudo intellectual nothing. In other words, an empty world, where people of Witch vibrate with so much power and love and spirit and sexuality that we just drive people nuts. Take that and I had forgotten what it was that made me courageous with people in the first place. At a time when I was really big, really slow – I stupidly was not even using a walking stick then – and really poor with no clothes for my new body and all that, I was almost incapable of even being out of my (then safe in another flat) home. Such was the prejudice, cruelty and just downright rude and shallow pig society that I had to confront, going on public transport for the first time in so many years. It was an absolute horrendous nightmare and it was only the vast amount of spiritual healing I received from The College of Psychic Studies and all my meditation and the beginning of re-programming my mind, that took me into courage and power. Courage, for power. But there was also something else. My IPod!! It was closing myself off to other people. 

I was the kind of person – and I am sure all psychic energy people will relate, however we deal with it, Nymph or Werewolf and however selfish we are or not and we all know where the extreme selfishness comes from and maybe this is one of the reasons why – who was always moving for other people, always aware of who was behind me, always too bloody aware of the consideration I felt I had to show for others, while they just trampled on me like it was the M1 and I was sick too! 

Bloody nightmare. And it was even more crippling than my cripple-hood. Then, I first used the walkman and then the IPod and everything changed. I began to studiously ignore everyone and just live in my own world. And slowly, over a couple of years, it all changed and my power from that loneliness and self sufficiency and not needing attention from anyone else, or needing to be AWARE of anyone else, made me grow and grow and grow my inner power. And reach The Source. 

And then I met you. And that inner core strength of our solid communication began to go with the increasing communication with a Higher and Higher Power, until I reached the Zenith. It was all an escalation and ascension of inner power.

And now – I had stopped, because I use my Ipod so much in my new flat with the heavy thumper – I have begun again and it is fucking great. 

I bet there is a direct correlation – you are a Dad, so you will agree I am sure – between children individuating earlier, and personal stereos and personal TVs and personal everything to do with computers. And it is a great thing. Selfishness is an easy thing to apply to everyone and of course, the powers that be encourage all negativity about anything to do with individuation, while encouraging the worst kind of selfishness that could even be imagined. They are also a society by the way, where convictions for sex offenders and rape have GONE DOWN – The Times today – as more and more people have reported crimes. Go figure. Don’t even bother actually. That kind of selfishness that I had to haul you over the coals for is not what we talk of. 

We are talking of the enlightened kind. Individuation. And to cut out negative vibration, it is necessary – especially for anyone on public transport but anyone really as we all have to interact with the mob daily, whoever they are – to keep that centre, through any means necessary. And as I begin to contemplate the philosophies of the Amera Ziganii Rao Methods of Change, the experiences are coming back thick and fast. 

Also, in my own home, that is hopefully to prepare for you and anyone else, ie close quarters, professionally and personally. I have had my years to spread out as it were in my own home and this strange place is training to constrict again. It reminded me of home you see, when my 16 year old brother used to spend all this time, bullying me into silence in the living room and where my mother spoke nineteen to the dozen in the following years, to stop anyone else speaking at all – I have met so many women of your archetype who do that, it’s extraordinary – but once again, I am reminded that you have to go through the wound again to heal it. Because this time, clearly I do not have any problem expressing! 

Constriction and self occupation to build that inner strength. The Temple Society would have taught this. I teach it again. Build that inner power and take the loneliness that goes with it in each and every way. It’s also wonderfully fair to the other person or people you do want to be with. Quality over quantity. Nice. As you are. Nice. 

That’s today’s inspiration. Be inspired. Be courage. You deserve it. We are superstars and have to maintain that strength and power. Witch is power. Witch is a power everyone wants. Witch comes from The Source. That’s concentrated ingredient. Loneliness, with everyone else, for inner core strength. Wonderful and a wonderful preparation for us. 

Amera Ziganii Rao © 2014 

Women Don’t Fear Power. Power Fears Women. Soraya Chemaly (Ms Blog) 

(mmmmm....love the empathy. Very moved....meanwhile, let's have some generic gender education....nice piece. AZR)

Reading yesterday about the abrupt firing of Jill Abramson, the first woman at the New York Times, along with the resignation of Le Monde’s Natalie Nougayrède, was like watching a ripple of misogyny move through the air in slow motion. Similar, in fact, to watching the slow, then fast, build to Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard’s removal from office. There’s no way to examine these situations and ask, “Do women fear power and success?” Instead, the question is, “Why are powerful and successful women so feared?”

In their former positions, both Abramson and Nougayrède were notable firsts. Abramson was the first woman to head the New York Times and Nougayrède the first to be both editor-in-chief and director at Le Monde. Both women, whose tenures have been prematurely cut short, are paying the price for our very gendered ideas about power and leadership.  Because they are women with power, all Abramson and Nougayrède had to do in the morning to be disruptive was get out of bed.

They are counter-cultural by definition. Both are experienced, accomplished, powerful, strong-willed, assertive, decisive and display–likeable or not– leadership qualities. Both were in the isolated position that most women with authority find themselves in. Both were navigating the high pressures of their professional lives while simultaneously challenging everyone’s – their employees’, their employer’s, the media’s – embedded notions of gendered behavior: from their “brusque,” “pushy” and “aggressive” dispositions, speech patterns, body language, ambition, confidence and more. The active coping that women leaders do in their work is qualitatively different and, frankly more onerous than their male peers, whom they are most frequently told they should simply emulate to get ahead.

So, it was with no small amount of wry humor that I read a front page New York Times headline today, “Labs Are Told to Start Including a Neglected Variable: Females,” about how medical researchers have ignored women and expected them to benefit from what men do. I’d be willing to bet a small fortune that copy editors at the New York Times assiduously purged words like “brusque,” “pushy,” and “bossy,” from their digital galleys in the wake of yesterday’s news, but no one paused to consider (or, maybe they did), the relevance of the fact that “female” is not actually a variable. Variables are adaptations to norms.

The headline illuminated not just an intractable problem at the Times, but a persistent and widespread truth – we keep expecting women to be content being seen as and understood as variations on men.

Women in leadership, the relatively scant few, learn to adapt to the double bind that necessitates them rejecting much of what they were taught to think and be as females. Most girls, even those with egalitarian-minded parents, learn to put others first, to defer to dominant male speech in the public sphere, to cede physical space, to not be disruptive. These are not valued characteristics or behaviors in most competitive, male-dominated work places. Women who do transcend their gender socialization and exhibit confident authority are inevitably penalized. Lack of deference is a woman is so unattractive.

The fact remains that most girls learn early that their well-being and success are inextricably tied to being attractive and being nice.  Horrible as it is to so many people to consider, “nice” – a whole spectrum of behavior -  is how we, girls and women, navigate our lower status and adapt to having vicarious and male-mediated access to safety, resources and…power. Women’s adaptive behavior, language, dress, use of physical space are not the traits of “femaleness” but “powerlessness.” It’s why women and minorities “struggle” with “executive presence.” Women who defy these norms have no place in our gender-framed cultural schema.

The New York Times magazine demonstrated this earlier this year when it proved incapable of even graphically envisioning women with authority. Their cover photos of Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin, both as disembodied heads adrift in a sea of chaos, were testaments to their complete and utter failure of imagination when it comes to women and leadership. The same is true across media, where powerful girls and women are most often portrayed as unnatural, supernatural beings like witches or vampires, mermaids or fairies. A close runner up, again, thank you New York Times for such singular examples, is that it is only possible to construct women in power in terms of “Where Mean Girls Rule.” Really, you cannot make this up.

It’s in our imagery and in our language. The words we associate with power are “male” – assertive, authoritative, decisive. Women are bitches, scolds, nagging, shrill, difficult, opinionated, bossy, cunts, ugly, aggressive, temperamental, pushy and more. Oh, did I leave out brusque? Sorry.

Children are socialized in binary, gendered ways. It’s why despite 100 years of academic over-achievement we still live in world where men rule. Women don’t need to become more like men, a tactic that is easily used to undermine them every day. Power needs to become feminized, a strategy that the world would benefit from across the board.   Here’s a quick fix: Let’s just call powerful women “men” and be done with this tiresome discrimination and rigid genderization. Calling women who lead “men” will trick our brains, saturated with denigrating and sexist stereotypes, the way mirrors trick amputees out of feeling phantom pain.  While we are at it, we can call men who nurture “mothers,” thereby eliminating the systemic and thoroughly gendered impediments to equality in the workplace. These were the issues that Margaret Sullivan, the New York Times’ public editor herself, identified earlier this week in a “Where Are the Women” Times article.

Some people think that our “problems with women,” power and status are an “historic remnant of gender discrimination.” We aren’t living with remnants, we’re wrapped, bound and immobilized like mummies.  The elimination of these two women from the paper-thin ranks of women in media leadership is a real loss, even though the hiring of Dean Baquet to replace Abramson is a notable and important landmark. (As New York Magazine put it in a headline begging for gender commentary, “Meet Dean Baquet, the NYT’s First Black Boss.”) Many believe Baquet was erroneously passed over by Abramson’s hiring in the first place. It is a particularly poignant shame that this happened within a week of Judith Cummings’ death. All of this smacks distastefully of our racist, sexist pre-19th Amendment history of pitting white women and black men against one another. It sure feels like, while we parse whether or not to #BanBossy or embrace #GirlBoss, a whole lot of white men with power are having a chuckle and a smoke in a back room.

When she was Prime Minister, Gillard came to international attention as the result of a speech she made excoriating another politician for his sexism and misogyny. The speech resulted in an actual change in the Macquarie Dictionary of the definition of the word “misogyny” from “hatred of women” to include “entrenched prejudice of women.” No matter which definition you choose, and whether you locate the obstacles in explicit or implicit bias, the systemic exclusion of women from positions of power and leadership is a defining characteristic of misogyny. Jill Abramson, brusque and pushy, did more to level the gender playing field at the New York Times than anyone before her.  She created a gender-balanced editorial board and an environment where young women felt they could more equitably thrive.  Score one for patriarchy and its global expression.

Soraya Chemaly is a media critic and activist whose work focuses on women’s rights, free speech and the role of gender in politics, religion and popular culture. Her work appears regularly in a variety of media, including Salon, CNN, Huffington Post and The Guardian.

ALCHEMY & LIBERATION & HUMANITY™

BROTHERS AND SISTERS

...I know. You are allowed to feel bereft. Just as I do, as an Entrepreneur and as a recognised person in society. The Temple Society taught it all at the same time. The Patriarchal Tribe divided us. Your journey to become a child again, is the humility and letting go of all you know to become a novice. Enjoy it as you grieve it. Art comes from opening up to The Universe. You are already halfway there. And we don't have to make the whole journey separately. Of course you envy my talent and such is the irony, seeing as I have been thwarted at every turn to achieve in 'material' material terms. Largely, by you:) And all the yous. But you would be. Your womb envy as men/women is my penis envy as women/men. I envy you your wealth and indeed, recognition in society and ease of being supported emotionally to achieve. You envy all that I am. Brother and Sister. You envy both the spiritual largeness and the creative largeness. So you should. You want it all as do I. The main thing is to maintain the friendship of it now. To heal the brother and sister divide. To do it together but of course, not with me as a carer but as a teacher and inspirer. You not as a slave provider but as a supportive spouse. Daddies and daughters. We both can have what we want. 

Amera Ziganii Rao © 2014

Viggo Mortensen on The Social Power of Art and Staying Childlike To Be Creative

By DOUGLAS EBY

“The function of artists is to keep people childlike in a positive way. To keep open to the world.”

Viggo Mortensen continues,

“Apart from traveling to different countries, to different communities, to different parts of your city, I think that art is one of the greatest anti-war and anti-poverty weapons.”

I found this quote on the Tumblr site Viggo Mortensen’s Art – there is also a Facebook page:

www.facebook.com/ViggoMortensensArt

His quote comes from a video interview: “Viggo Mortensen Meets Alex Jones.”

Mortensen has talked about his admiration for actor and photographer Dennis Hopper and his endless curiosity – certainly part of being childlike. See my earlier post Curiosity and Creativity for more perspectives.

[Photo: Mortensen with his Dennis Hopper Award from The AMFM Fest.]

What is the value of staying childlike?

Creativity researcher Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi writes in his article “The Creative Personality: Ten paradoxical traits of the creative personality” (from his book Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention), he writes that “Creative people combine playfulness and discipline, or responsibility and irresponsibility” and that “Creative people tend to be smart yet naive at the same time.”

A child mindset

Sherri Fisher also writes about this in her Positive Psychology News Daily article Nurturing Your Creative Mindset: “Do you ever wish you were more creative? New research has shown that adults can be primed to become more creative simply by being asked to think like children.”

Read more in post: Childlike creativity: Nurturing Your Creative Mindset By Cat Robson.

Like children, many creators have multiple creative interests, and may develop them as adults to be multitalented artists.

Viggo Mortensen is well-known as an actor, but his creative pursuits include painting, photography, poetry, music, plus spoken-word recordings. In 2002, he founded Perceval Press to publish works of his and other artists and authors.

The image is the cover of one of his photography books (on Amazon.com): Coincidence of Memory.

One of my favorite quotes of his, about being a creative polymath or multitalented artist:

“Photography, painting or poetry – those are just extensions of me, how I perceive things, they are my way of communicating.”

Douglas Eby 

Talent Development.com

Alchemy & Liberation & Humanity™ :: Ascension Discourse on Love, Resurrection ll. Amera Ziganii Rao

The Love Journey. The Alchemy of Resurrection. Amera Ziganii Rao 

That’s okay my sweet. Phew. Right. So, this new journey of ours is finally defined. Our mutual Alchemy out of the Tribe. Me as a co-dependency girlie ex chattel romantic siren and you as a co-dependency misogyny, shisogyny, pisogyny big man who is being humbled into finding his anima. That’s fine. You were always going to find that more difficult than me being humble enough to know that as an entrepreneur and achiever I would be beginning at the beginning again. Also, I am wounded from the focus on my vocational self so much that I am frankly, jaded about it all on a new level again, just from the war. I feel deflated and de motivated and that needs to be healed too. 

So, our new journey is mutual alchemy. Alchemy work is very taxing and very emotional and very time consuming. So, I don’t have to pressurise myself in my present circumstances to achieve some miracle overnight and you don’t have to pressurise yourself into being a brilliant creative or new person overnight. You are a child again and so am I. And it’s beautiful. We don’t have to get terrified that we are to be forced to be with other people – however nice they are – because we can’t handle it all together. We can, which is why we are being forced to take so much time. 

We are an intensely sexual couple of great massive love. That takes mastery and we are being mastered out of all of that and landed into our pragmatic and grounded non sexual selves. Ain’t nothing wrong with that. It’s just pain and time and difficulties. So what, we are used to it. 

“Any other girl I would have blamed”. That was the line in my dream from you this morning. Same here. That is love. That is the greatest and most singular proof of both love and destiny. Anyone else, it does not evoke that Divine heart of tolerance, forgiveness and persistence. That is love. And it’s the same for me. 

Before I met you, anyone else and I would walk away. After I have met you, anyone else and I have walked away. The rest is time, work and alchemy work. Training for The New New World. 

For you it is the humility of the new world. For me, it is the responsibility of the new world. Same thing. Equally irritating and infuriating. It’s all good. We are in training. 

Love, love, love and love. Always. 

Amera Ziganii Rao © 2014

ALCHEMY & LIBERATION & HUMANITY™

The Love Journey. The Alchemy of Resurrection. Amera Ziganii Rao 

....well, it’s not just responsibility for me in the obvious way. That training is done really, from bankruptcy, to sorting myself out with health benefits at last, and forcing my way through so that I get them and all that, it was not just having to take responsibility for the life I am leading in grounded truth, even though you are waiving the future in front of my face and that sort of thing, it is also that I am trained in dramatic writing and acting too. That I am wavering in existential belief that I will be able to do those things, that indeed, I will ever be able to get truly lyrical with my prophet troubadour work, that I will truly be allowed to be an artist and not ‘just’ a personal development coach. Responsibility is existential belief to go with the immensely nebulous ‘child’ genius of the purity of art delivery. 

Of course I will. This is all alchemical preparation ascension, however maddeningly long it is. And the belief is existential, which is responsibility. The animus drive to believe and want to do all those things still and not just give up and deny one’s true feelings. 

Now, for you, and I can truly relate now, that I am wavering, your archetype in general is very ‘resignable’. Because you don’t see/seer what I do. Totally. Do not give up at the first hurdle. It is very easy for you to think that, oh well, maybe you are not that creative and not that whatever and that it is all a bit ridiculous and that this and that. Don’t. You are a man who bristles with creative energy. And you vibrate with creativity and art. The rest is confidence and training. And as I discovered in my quite minimal acting training career, I turned up to acting classes eight years ago, having ‘only’ done the spiritual journey. Of course it was not that, as I have learned through observation, since I was 4. The spiritual journey is the equivalent of drama school. That is what is taught there. Emotional strength, power, and the ability to go within and to go down into the bowels of the earth and up to the high heavens. How to create that emotional and spiritual stamina. In other words, all that is The Temple Society. 

In other words, you would be surprised at yourself. The rest is the detail of training. That is humbling. Same here. I have no doubt about the sellibility of my products. The humility is the details of it as I learn step by step entrepreneurial skills and I am constantly and quietly doing just that. But the responsibility part is the acceptance of the fury that I have had to wait so long and am now having to do it in such difficult circumstances, because this is not my world and because it is yours. 

You see? Yes. You do.

We may move fast, we may move slow, but these are fundamental alchemical shifts of purpose and presence, which totally means only one thing. Believe in everything you ever wanted. Unbelievably, they really are all possible. Greatness is an alchemical gift. And not taught in schools or colleges or courses. The rest is being both the child and the adult. The alchemy of human. The truth and having to re-start repeatedly and getting further each time. Learning in all the ways we were never taught. Before now. 

And creativity? Think of the sex. The sex is the source of all creativity and The Source of all creativity. Think sex, be sex and do sex. That is what breaks open the eye. That is what takes us to the depths of truth. Sex and Spirit. 

Leave the mediocre expression to the mob as they talent show their way through life. Good for them. Expression is a human right too. Our business as all of us with depth and love and Spirit and sexuality and revolution and the New New World? That is art. Art will always be hard to access and something that has to be truly worked for. The mob will never catch up to that. That is Temple. That IS exclusive. And we have it. But like anything, it has to be worked for. Accessed and sweated for. But do not be in any doubt of your greatness or uniqueness. Art is who the person is as much as what they do. Art is you. Embrace it. 

Amera Ziganii Rao © 2014

ALCHEMY & LIBERATION & HUMANITY™

The Love Journey. The Alchemy of Resurrection. Amera Ziganii Rao

Fringe benefit is getting Billy Connolly to dance

The Times 

(...totally and with me it is not just about being trained out of all things romantic, of course it is primarily about being trained out of being the wife carer into the supportive but individualistic and individual vocational female partner who also happens to be a professional carer. So it is very easy for me to spend my whole life, working with you or working alongside you, just to encourage you and that is not my job anymore. I am not allowed and it is good. I would only resent it and then blame you. This is The New New World we are creating and I am still not very good at it, as I become my new self but also share with you. 

And your archetype is as notoriously bad at not being able to be alone as mine is in different ways. I remember a guy once wanting me to write with him because he was de motivated and wanted me to just be there. Oh my. Again and again that has happened and when you are female and they are male, that is so bloody rude. And then that guy, because I said no, NEVER talked to me about writing again. That is blame. And very sad and childish, as opposed to being of child, right? 

It is about outsourcing professionally unfortunately and that is a tough discipline. For me I did everything alone first, because I was too self conscious. Then, slowly, it became more group orientated. We all work in different ways. But to do art is to be alone in general. We are after all working from The Source. The Source is not conversation. It is silence...but this is a great piece to show what can be done with both care and individuation.....AZR) 

Pamela Stephenson’s Edinburgh show has made her husband discover his feet, she tells Mike Wade

As the Scottish independence referendum looms it is the rhythm of a dance called the lambazouk rather than the drone of Alex Salmond’s voice that has feet tapping in the New York home of Pamela Stephenson and Billy Connolly.

Connolly, Scotland’s greatest comedian, has long been his country’s most reluctant politician, fiercely attempting to maintain neutrality as the vote approaches. At first he showed the same resistance to dance, but his opposition, said his wife, had gradually been worn down by the beat.

The transformation owes everything to Stephenson’s experience on television’s Strictly Come Dancing in 2010. Since then, the actress, writer and psychologist has plunged into Afro-Caribbean traditions, discovering Braz Dos Santos, his brother Didi, and their troupe, who form the core of Brazouki, an extraordinarily physical show that she has written for the Edinburgh Fringe in August.

“This kind of dance has so much passion,” said Stephenson, 65, rehearsing in Malta with her cast. “It is a combination of skill, athleticism and real soul. They rehearse, they train all day. Then there is no such thing as going home for a good night’s sleep. They just want to dance again. It is a way of life.”

Over the past two years her new-found passion has worked a kind of domestic magic. Connolly was initially dismissive of the “Brylcreemed lotharios” invading his wife’s life, but as the dancing got closer to home his toes started tapping too.

“My poor husband would be fast asleep as these samba sounds would come wafting up,” Stephenson said. “He’d wake up and find me dancing around with a Brazilian. Gradually he decided that tango was a great dance and he started to really get into it. I found him a very attractive Frenchwoman to study with, and suddenly he was very interested.”

In one dreadful week last year, Connolly had prostate cancer diagnosed, and what he has called the “early days” of Parkinson’s disease. He has since been cleared of cancer, but his dance lessons remain in abeyance while he tours New Zealand with his stand-up show.

“He is fantastically strong and he has come through it,” Stephenson said. “He should be a great dancer anyway, he’s got great rhythm and line. His comedy has been partly based on his physicality — he is so expressive with his body.”

Brazouki is one of more than 625 shows at the Fringe’s four biggest and best-known venues: Assembly, Gilded Balloon, Pleasance and Underbelly. Together they sell the majority of Fringe tickets, and this year, for the first time, they have been sponsored by The Times and The Sunday Times.

“Where else in the world but Edinburgh do the new rising stars of theatre and comedy stand shoulder to shoulder with those who are established and celebrated?” said Anthony Alderson, the director of the Pleasance Theatre Trust. “This exciting new partnership brings the very best of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe to a sophisticated national audience and we are thrilled to be working so closely with the papers.”

Times+ members will have access to 10,000 free tickets and the chance to take up two-for-one ticket deals. Further offers are expected to be announced as the Fringe approaches.

The bill is as varied and exciting, and occasionally as baffling, as ever.

Among the most keenly anticipated stage shows is 50 Shades! The Musical, performed at the Fringe for the first time after changes to the laws surrounding parody. The playwright Tim Fountain returns to one of his favourite real-life subjects in the premiere of Julie Burchill: Absolute Cult.

Among famous names in the programme, Clive Anderson returns to the Fringe, reprising the original improvisation show, Whose Line Is It Anyway?, with many of the original performers appearing over the course of the Fringe run, including Greg Proops, Stephen Frost and Josie Lawrence. Susan Calman, Shappi Khorsandi, Jason Byrne and Richard Herring have comedy shows along with Russell Kane, who also makes his acting debut in The Closure of Craig Solly, a dark monologue.

Stephenson’s first experience of the Fringe, in the late 1970s, was as a comedian and she says she was a bag of nerves. This time she is anxious for the performers, but happy to be in the background. “You’re less likely to chunder if you’re not the one in the spotlight.”

Her lead dancer, Braz, was brought up in poverty and at the age of 11 had to find a way to make a living from dance. The Fringe can help complete that journey, she said. “He and his brother may have no education, but what they have is an ability to communicate with their bodies. You watch them and think ‘Oh my gosh’. I just really hope they get the audience they deserve.”

The Times 

Ascension Resurrection Training. Amera Ziganii Rao  

Yes. Yes. Yes. You have no idea how good that makes me feel. Building wounded leaders. Mine is, absolutely about getting over theft and lack of recognition, and yet wanting in its truth, to make my story our story. Yours is knowing you are like no one else on this earth and most surely for me. And that means a level of intelligence and humanity, that you have not even imagined before. I will never reject you. You have the gift, you listen, you care, you teach me and you ARE the gift. Grow in peace. You are mine. And Hers. 

Amera Ziganii Rao ☆ 2014 

Ascension Resurrection Training. Amera Ziganii Rao 

Yeah. Money. Now, your money is more important than anything, yet again. There is no doubt that Ascension is the state of unconditional love. For Harridan it was the same. Loving unconditionally as a state of being, loving so you love and not so you get something back. For you it is the same thing. You are a male Harridan if you like actually, if we cross the two archetypes. And for you that means giving a shit about the woman you want to fuck. Same thing really. The grief is the disparity of years and years that we suffer and that presumably any woman (High Priesthood) and any man (Priesthood) suffer across the world. 

It makes sense. It all makes sense and I am not the person I was a year ago or two years ago or three years ago. I am suitably challenged by all things business ahead of me, but not really. It is an art form just like any other and I intend to love it and be as obsessed by it as I have everything else I have done. 

I am never going to say no to you, so come when you come. Ascend when you ascend. But my business and only focus now is money and saving the world as was my first dream as a child and then as an adult when I realised what I was doing. When I realised that I had all the answers to create super human beings out of nothing. When I realised I could become all that I have become. And that it was a formula that could help so many people. Seventeen years ago, when I had to retire from work, I had neither capacity – either to earn money or to save the world - and I was not loved. Now, I have both capacities and I am still not loved. And I am. So, love me the way you do now and love me the way you will. You are who you are. I don’t want to focus on anything that you are anymore and wait while not waiting for what you will finally become. 

I am not the first person to either be in chronic pain or debilitation and have to turn myself around into super achievement and personal wealth and I am not the first person to have to do it in the circumstances I am doing it in. I am also not the first person to be fucked over by a man. So, what you gonna do, sort of thing. Fuck it. Do what you do. Do you what you want. You are not the first man who doesn’t want to get divorced so he loses his wealth. Yawn. It’s just the hundredth stage in a thousand stages of your Ascension I am sure. Do what you want. I am certainly going to do what I want and I have all that I need for the next and final stage of my own material creation on earth. So, fuck it. 

You want to be whole, you want to be this, you want to be that and you are so rigidly of conditional uncaring love that you are clearly all or nothing. So, what’s new. The fact that you are at all, will have to do. 

At least I don’t have to watch. I am off to create my own life now, have forgiven, have forgotten and am now focused on anything else but you and all things to do with relationship or family. One day apparently, our lives will converge. I believe they will and I believe we will continue to do it ‘together’ as we are. Fine. I am just glad I feel the truths so fast so don’t have to waste any time in grief or attempts or anything like that. You will ascend when you do and not before. 

And loving money and the will to earn and the will to do business is surely my healing for sure. As will your love of love be. When you finally have it. 

You’re a lucky man. I love challenge and I love adventure and I love. And no, I don’t need anyone and I don’t even have to respect the man I love. You can be as much of an arsehole as you want. ‘Steve Morgan’. I’m off to do what I was born to do. Business. Achievement. Service. Creation. Alone. 

And then of course, you will come. So be it. Good luck with your end. I know we’ll stay in touch. And just remember. To love is to care for the human being you want to fuck. That’s it. Very simple. And of course, only possible with pure Ascension. Which explains why the planet is in the state it is. There are about two people on it who are in a state of love. Hell is earth. I am the one who doesn’t live on earth anymore. You do. And you will until you ascend. And to ascend, you have to love. And you don’t yet. And there you go. You have the context now and so do I. What is there not to forgive. 

Business, business, business, business, business and business. My new love. 

Amera Ziganii Rao © 2014

Ascension Resurrection. Amera Ziganii Rao

Feeling better. It's refreshing to know I am no longer interested in love or a personal life or family life or casual person life of any kind anymore. Universal stranger moments and a client base is all that has ever been safe or loving. 

There is only one thing worse than being alone. Or lonely. Being forced into a 42 year destiny to try and not be alone or lonely. It's over. I never have to believe or pay attention again. If it happens, it is all going to be your work. And never mine again. If a man wants to love, he can prove it. Put it this way. I won't be watching the door. 

Money. Achievement. Professional Helping. Art. Money. Me. My own first property. Retirement from the human race. Thank you. Done. 

Amera Ziganii Rao © 2014 

In Conclusion. Amera Ziganii Rao 

You know, as I regroup now, after the shock of realising that you are still not ‘ready’ or whatever it is, I realise that I got my destiny completely wrong. I have no interest in spending too much time on this communication or indeed any, ever again. 

In short it is this; it doesn’t matter how scared or uncertain or non inner power you are at the moment. It doesn’t matter how far you have to go on your own leg of this journey that we are apparently making together. What matters is that I am in a truly difficult situation in life because of you. 

I know we have had our exchange and that we have both benefitted from it. To be content with that analysis however is completely wrong. You are scum. All men are scum. And I have no embarrassment nor ever will, that it has taken me this long to realise and understand and finally accept it and that it has taken me 49 years to leave the past behind. 

Nothing could ever have prepared me for the truth of what you are and what you do as a people and who you are and what you do as a person. Nothing and nothing could ever have made me believe it. 

I do now believe it. I do not accept it and I do now regard you as nothing but scum. My journey was to examine and experience every single detail so the story would be ‘fool proof’. Great phrase that. Really sums it up. 

It doesn’t matter how scared or uncertain or fearful or responsible you apparently feel for your first family. That is not why you are not helping me or communicating with me. You are not doing either of those two things because you are scum. Simple as and it is now appropriate to finish this sorry journey with one word summations. Scum. 

I have effectively lived a marriage. You got everything. I got nothing. That is marriage and that is what I have been forced to live, despite all my best attempts not to live that. It was my purpose and it was my destiny. And it is done. 

The sooner I regroup, the sooner I can begin my own life and start making it financially and LOVE viable. You don’t love me, you have never loved me and you will never love. 

Men will never love women. What men do to women in any shape or form, is not love. This is not about getting over co-dependency. This is about male abuse, male neglect, male cruelty and male idiocy. Men like you, men, whatever. You are indeed all the same and I now accept that I have been used and abused and dragged through a sort of marriage where I gave and gave and gave and got nothing. As was my purpose and the only way I could see the truth, so I would never have to enter that dynamic again. 

I was well trained by my parents’ marriage. I am now fully trained, proved and quantified, by our experience. I am no longer available to men. 

I am now regrouping for a new life. One where I experience love. My love. For me. At least it means that I will not be poor one day. And it will have nothing to do with you. Men are the obstacle of obstacles in this life on earth. And the sooner women across the world leave you, the better. The ‘love’ is most definitely not worth it. A rite of passage indeed. And one that will never have to be repeated. That is what the past seven horrendous years have taught me. As it was meant to. At least the thoroughness of what we have had will make sure of that and if every woman has to experience that, I will not be surprised. You are scum. Men are scum. There is no more intellectual or spiritual explanation for men than that after all. I am out of here. I get it. I’m done. 

You were cruel and stupid and neglectful to the last. Nothing changed. And it was not because I was your mistress friend. It is because I am a woman and you are a man. Men are scum. Nothing will ever change. Complete post relationship separatism is the only answer for this world. Women can only be poor and unloved with men. This woman deserves love. I am therefore not any longer, available to men. 

Women can only be poor and unloved with men. 

Thank you and goodbye.  

Amera Ziganii Rao © 2014 

Women can only be poor and unloved with men. Women can only be poor and unloved with family. Women can only be alone.

Amera Ziganii Rao © 2014

In Conclusion Pt ll. Amera Ziganii Rao

I would say this however and it takes us into (non) fascinating territory.

We began with you as your whole archetype and indeed all men and indeed all Non Temple people thinking there was nothing wrong with you whatsoever and that anyone with rage (sedition or passion) had a problem, while you had none. We have obviously seen that this is not true. You have I think, accepted that with a kind of grace and are examining yourself in that way at least. However this goes much further. Now, that I know that I am escaping what is in effect a highly abusive marriage – mistress or wife, it is the same – after having escaped highly abusive marriages for almost 30 years, after escaping a highly abusive family situation, work situations and friendship situations, the questions are now very profound, very vulnerable and very spiritual. Am I more a spiritual leader in the making than a personal development leader in the making? Maybe. That is a very fragile and difficult leadership and the reason why I need to take a while to regroup.

Because my question is this. My healing was from conditional and wounded love to pure love. To the state of unconditional love as a state of being and then severely tested across the board, not least from my last abusive husband. Your healing, if possible, is much much more than that. It is going from extreme cruelty as beings – all of you/them/anyone I have known and left – to a human being who can love in any way at all.

That is (non) fascinating. What does that mean? Does that mean that this is possible? Apparently, there is a destiny to do with a man in my future. That would mean that one of you, you presumably, are to ascend out of abject hate and cruelty into love.

Whatever it is, I am not watching anymore, but you should know how extreme your ascension would be. You would be changing the whole matter of  your being from one state into another. I was already kind, humane and generous, giving and considerate. You are not. Not one person I have known and left, is. Yours is not conditional love. it is conditional hate.

The Atlanteans are not of cruelty. Our healing is wounded love. The Lemurians, ie, everyone else on the planet, is wounded hate. Now, spiritually that is not your fault. Human wise it is. Because you pretend to love. And because you steal, abuse and then shit on us from a great height and call that reasonable behaviour. You have a great deal to ‘heal’ and I have absolutely no idea how you do that. Your purification is apparent. I though am now in the ‘freedom’ of having absolutely no idea how you do that because it is not like anything I had to do at all. Not at all.

So that is what I leave you with. I told you in the beginning that I had no hope because I had never seen any of your kind improve whatsoever. Any Non Temple person, as I know now, Mars or Venus. Was ours just another abusive marriage that I had to see in detail or do you heal? I have no idea. I have no idea of the truth of my destiny in other words, or if it is someone else, years down the road and who would that person be that is different from you? He would presumably have to have ‘healed’ from your level of cruelty too. Again, I have no idea how that is possible anymore.

So, for me, the conclusions stand. No man will be with me and I will be looking to no man, nor any personal relationship or friendship of any kind. But I wanted to leave that truth with you. You are not like me. You will not be healing – if you do – from conditional love to unconditional love. You will be healing – if you do – from the darkest principle of hate on earth (outside the pure Draconian reptile gene) to some form of love. At all. And I for one, most certainly no longer know what that means. But at least you are under no illusion whatsoever that it was you who was sane and kind and me that was rage ridden and hate ridden. Er. I don’t think so. And if that is the only message that is important for my people, than it is a crucially important one. Passion is not hate. ‘Reason’ and being ‘reasonable’ is not. Cruelty is. Cruelty is hate. And you are cruel. Not us. Extraordinarily, relentlessly, shamelessly and without conscious, men or women, cruel. Not us. We have never been cruel. We only get better at not being cruel. You are just cruel. That is a phenomenal healing in any of you if it ever occurs. The Temple Society is long gone. And your cruelty only makes sure that it takes longer to come back. So you remain cruel. But not us. We can be saved. We can escape and we can heal. Separatism is therefore the only answer. To escape, dominate and better the cruel of this world. You.

Thank you.

Amera Ziganii Rao © 2014

AMERA ZIGANII RAO :: NATURAL BORN MYSTIC™

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Greatness. Amera Ziganii Rao 

Remember one thing as you now begin your ascent. And I face the truth that there is no one I have ever been able to ask for help and there will never be anyone I can ask for help, before I do it all myself....greatness takes one sacrifice. Hatred and abuse from mediocrity. Mediocrity HATES greatness and will see you coming a mile down the road.

The tortured genius syndrome, the 'difficult' person syndrome, the whatever. The state you have tried to keep me in too, that I rebel against and have done my whole life. Now, I take a new responsibility for it, as I am condemned to stay in it until I can slowly build my way out of it alone.

Mediocrity has to be delicately dealt with always and still, the attacks will always come. Abuse of power, petty mindedness, just pure hatred. Mediocrity hates all greatness because mediocrity feels inadequate, however much you try and be kind, inclusive or careful. Mediocrity will always hate greatness.

Remember that. Remember that you will be hated, the higher you go. And then make the sacrifice. Or you remain in no man's land. Greatness after all is not a choice. One is born with it or not, and the rest is making the commitment to it. If you don't, you remain hated and pseudo mediocre. And there is no fun or point in that. If one is to be hated, you might as well be hated for the real thing and not something you are not even enjoying.

And like me, learn to be truly diplomatic. AS greatness. Not, as a shadow of yourself. That is greatness trying to be mediocre. No point and pointless actually. You will still be hated and never helped. So you might as well be great.

The truth of shining as an example. It's only for other greats. NEVER for mediocrity.

Tara for now. Cruel man and anyone else cruel out there. Here is to complete self sufficiency and never asking for help. Nothing worse than thinking that normal rules apply. They never will. The world is cruel and pathetic and mediocre. The only path out is the Shawshank Tunnel. Building one's way to freedom. Alone.

Amera Ziganii Rao © 2014

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You come second and always will. You are men. Amera Ziganii Rao 

Recalled this appalling subject today, in a piece I read in The Guardian a while ago. It didn't happen because men liked small feet. It happened because it is the most visceral, physical and oppressive form of snatching a woman for your own and keeping her bound and gagged and just for you.

Men basically hate women because men want to be women. The truth of womb envy. The truth of womb envy is celestial envy and intuitional envy and power envy. Men hate women if women are selfless mothers and men hate women if women refuse to be selfless mothers. Men hate women. Men hate women, as Norman Mailer said, because we give birth. It doesn't matter what men do, how big they get, how powerful they get, what they achieve, how much they rule over others - and all the women who follow that model of power - they will never give birth. Men hate women because women know GOD, The Great MOTHER, The Universe, The WOMB of Creation, consciously or indeed unconsciously.

Men hate women through never caring for them. And the Lolita Monster Man is the worst. The so called Knight in Shining Armour. Twisted into a selfishness that is quite extraordinary and certainly profoundly subtle and confusing.

It's been a very heavy day for me, finally accepting all that I am. I realised that I was given this long term debilitation for a very good reason, just as I was given race, even glasses at that time in social history, being 'sensitive', ie not mad and turgid, and all the rest. To show people what compassion is.

I thought I had done everything I could in my life, to make sure I was NEVER vulnerable with men. Such was the family history that taught me NEVER to be vulnerable in life or with men especially and to NEVER need anything from anyone, let alone men. The Universe, The Great Mother, had something else in mind. To test yours and every other man's compassion. To test yours and everyone else's compassion.

Other than my fellow Temple fellowesses and fellows, it most certainly has tested everyone's compassion to astounding levels.

You thought I was a gold digger. I know better. And today, as I take in the fury I have felt that I was still vulnerable and still vulnerable with a man, I am finally glad. My journey began 17 years ago, like most womens. Why did men want to fuck me and not give a shit about me? Every woman across the world thinks that.

Now I know. And I have had to test it to every level there is, with you, with society, with family, with everyone.

Because, my dear, you are mean, stupid, cruel and mad. Like 99.9 percent of the human race. I say it lightly now, because that is the mediocrity of this world and who can blame anyone for that. You are ordinary. Compassion is not an ordinary state of being. Compassion towards women, the people you fundamentally hate, is greatness.

Carry on. Sure you might make it one day. You hate women because they won't mother you. No, you hate women because they won't let you become them. You want to swallow us up and use our energy and spit us out. It's not going to happen. Everyone has to grow up. Everyone has to become strong. Everyone has to take care of their own shit. The rest is called inter dependency. For you that means one thing. Not hating women because we are strong. Loving us because we are strong. HONOURING us. As we have honoured you.

That honour is on hold. Until I see something to honour again. Your honour has not even begun. You will never be me. You will never be the strength of women. You do not give birth. Get over it.

Then you will not be ordinary. You took us as slaves because you thought you could conquer The Universe. The papers are ridden with stories every day of how men are killing women in some way or other just for that one single reason. You will NEVER conquer The Universe. We ARE The Universe. You dishonour women. You dishonour GOD. Oh yes, that's what you have been trying to do. You will never be the first. That is me. You come second and always will. You are men.

Amera Ziganii Rao © 2014

The ties that bind

The Guardian 

The last Chinese women with bound feet are now over 80. Fraser Newham talks to them about their extraordinary lives

'I am one of the last left, you know," Madame Han tells onlookers. Madame Han is 84 years old, and has tiny bound feet. We are in a shoemaker's in Shanghai and Madame Han waits patiently as the shoe-maker's assistant takes her measurements. "Strange to think it was an erotic thing," the boss Li Wanhong says to me as we watch. "To us, the smell of rotting flesh would be unbearable. But back then men wrote poems about the rich smell."

Li Wanhong is the 45-year-old owner of the last workshop in China producing tiny cloth shoes for elderly women whose feet were bound before the practice finally died out in the 1920s. The youngest of her customers is 80 years old, the oldest 101.

Li's staff of five work from a front room in an apartment in a residential area of Shanghai's Pudong district, sitting among piles of boxes ready to ship. Mainly, the workshop produces handmade slippers in adult sizes - but these former employees of the state-owned Shanghai shoemaking factory are also accidental heirs of a 1,000-year-old tradition. "We don't really aim to make money from the miniature shoes," Li says. "But somebody has to do it."

The origins of footbinding are controversial. Tradition places the birth of the practice in the imperial court of the late 10th century - aristocratic women, the story goes, envied the graceful small feet of a particularly beautiful palace dancer, giving rise to a fad which spread to towns and villages across the country. This was the story mothers passed on to their daughters as they tightened the bandages.

Modern scholars point out however that a small foot featured in the Chinese conception of beauty long before the 10th century. The final process probably evolved from less vicious techniques, as families experimented with ever tighter binds in the quest for the smallest foot in town. And there may still have been an element of royal endorsement; the practice may have been adopted at the imperial court to prevent concubines escaping the harem. The castration of the palace eunuchs certainly demonstrates an acceptance of bodily mutilation to serve imperial ends.

There is much here we don't know; what we do know is that the process of binding a foot was agonising - so painful that by some estimates one girl in 10 died of shock in the first few days. Beginning when the girl was perhaps aged six, the mother would wrap a 10ft bandage around her daughter's toes, forcing all but the big toe to fold back underneath the sole. This would be tightened over time, causing constant discomfort - and because it restricted the blood supply to the extremities there was a good chance it would cause necrosis of the foot, as in cases of frostbite.

Adam McGeoch is a medical researcher based at Cambridge University. "Sometimes this would result in an auto amputation," he explains. "The toe would slough off."

The word "slough" may create a particularly vivid image, but not, for many, a sexual one; so what about the smell, with its unlikely erotic connotation? "Certainly in the early stages, while necrosis was taking place, there would be a strong smell," McGeoch says. "Not so much once the foot was dead. If the adult foot had a smell, probably it was bacteria, trapped in the folds between the remains of the bent-over toes and what would normally be the sole of the foot."

It is difficult to estimate the number of women with bound feet who are still alive today. In the modern cities, where the practice died out earliest, numbers are very few; Li Wanhong knows of only 80 in the greater Shanghai area. Larger numbers are found in certain rural areas, and in 2001, Chinese Television estimated that nationwide there may still have been a million women alive who had experienced binding in some form.

Qiqi Yang is a 23-year-old English graduate from the elite Nankai University in the northern city of Tianjin; fashionable and modern-thinking, she is an acclaimed violinist. Qiqi and her mother escaped footbinding; her grandmother Wang Yuzhen, along with perhaps the preceding 35 female generations of her family, did not. "My grandmother was born in the countryside around Tianjin in 1912. Her feet were bound from the age of six," says Qiqi.

The family were wheat farmers on unforgiving land, struggling to meet ever escalating rent payments; they were dirt poor but hoped their daughter would bring a good dowry. And although the government had outlawed footbinding in 1911, it was still very much a part of rural life.

"She said the pain as a child, for those first two years, was almost too much to bear," the granddaughter remembers. "But she didn't suffer so much in old age. She walked a little slowly, but that was all. She later confessed to us that she used to secretly unwrap the bandages in bed. Her feet weren't so badly affected as a result."

For many women among Wang's 35 preceding generations, however, suffering probably continued in their adult lives. For those with the most severely compressed feet, the body weight when walking was borne by the heel; this jarred the spine and caused debilitating lower back problems in later life. Some communities bound the feet loosely so that women could help with farm work - but where economic conditions permitted, women spent mostly static lives in their chambers, carried from boudoir to tea pavilion, to lily pond and back again. This very inactivity brought medical problems of its own, with the atrophy of under-used muscles.

The significance of the practice operates on several levels. A bound foot, particularly when showcased in a slipper, was considered attractive in itself. The disfigured female foot became the centrepiece of foreplay; men would caress a lover's slippered foot, or drink Chinese brandy from her shoe. To the women themselves, bound feet were a mark of femininity; and undergoing (and surviving) the binding process served as a female rite of passage.

A girl's carefully crushed feet also communicated important messages to society at large. It demonstrated that a particular family did not require its women to work in the fields. It showed acceptance of traditional Confucian ideas of a woman's passive social role; and the very act of enduring the pain - for the lucky majority, at least, whom the pain did not kill - demonstrated patience and selflessness, qualities attractive to traditionally minded husbands.

"The girl with a three-inch-sole and an ugly face has a better chance in the matrimonial market than a five-inch-soled girl who might have a face like a Madonna," a Victorian missionary observed. For perversely, the practice was a kind of leveller - a girl's prospects were not automatically determined by what nature gave her, but by her willingness to undertake self-cultivation as perceived.

Today, in the malls and clubs of 21st-century Shanghai, such attitudes seem more than a little antique. Modern Chinese women, when they think about footbinding at all, see it merely as a repugnant curiosity - perhaps a fading recollection from childhood, of the old grandmother hobbling to the water store in her blue Maoist uniform, like memories of nights spent on brick beds and water buffalo on the edge of town, another relic of the days before capitalism roared in and turned the country on its head.

In some ways this is evidence of how the status of women in China has been transformed in the past 100 years. Concubinage has been abolished, the purchasing of brides severely curtailed and, at least in the biggest cities, the birth of a female child is no longer a disappointment. The opportunities for women to work have greatly expanded; while women may not figure prominently in senior government there are significant female presences in other professions.

This is not to say that old sexisms have been eradicated. This is a society, after all, where successful middle-aged men routinely date girls in their early 20s (sometimes several at once). It's accepted that men who can afford to will support a mistress.

Sophie Li, 29, works as a PA for a European multinational company. "I think in China there is still a greater degree of objectification of women than in countries like Britain," she says. "Looks are always important when you apply for a job here - sometimes the most important thing of all."

Companies routinely refer to desired physical appearance in job advertisements. One British company operating in Shanghai recently placed a job ad for a new PA to the managing director. "Would suit former model," potential applicants were casually advised. In the past few years, beauty contests, after years of Communist disapproval, have become fashionable. Next year's Miss World competition will be held in China's tropical Hainan Island for the third year in a row.

At some levels of society, Chinese women are still willing to endure pain to conform to an ideal of beauty. Cosmetic surgery outfits are now big business - in 2003, for instance, the Ninth People's hospital in Shanghai performed an industrious 70 cosmetic operations a day. A particular regional favourite is eyelid reconstruction, a 30-minute operation where an extra crease is sewn into the eyelid above the eye, giving a more western countenance.

Nowadays women are choosing cosmetic surgery for themselves, whereas no six-year-old ever asked to have her feet bound. But when, as in November 2003, a newspaper runs a competition to find "the ugliest girl in Shanghai", it does seem that China's feminist revolution has yet to run its course. The prize here, inevitably, was cosmetic surgery worth some 100,000 Chinese Yuan (£6,500); the winner, a girl from the countryside called Zhang Di, was thrilled, and giddily informed reporters than finally, at the age of 26, she might catch a man.

Madame Han is sympathetic. "Every girl wants to find a good man," she says. "You mustn't seem unattractive. That's why we had to bind our feet. Some things don't change." On the work bench, her tiny slipper is now taking shape. It is 16cm from heel to toe, and it would hurt an eight year old child.

Fraser Newham

The Guardian

March 2005

Getting It Wrong. Your People Are Not To Ascend. Amera Ziganii Rao

And in light of all that has been learnt, there is now one crucial question and observation. You are not going to ascend in the way I did. The Hopi Prophecy applies to your people and my people. And in ascension terms, the two will truly never meet. I told you four years ago, or two years ago, who's counting anymore, that to ascend into the Divine state, the Buddha state could only come from a person who was born humane and with humanity. Your people, 99.9 percent of this world - including magicians of alchemy - who are from OUTSIDE The Temple, do not have humanity. You have something that my people do not have. You have jealousy. Jealousy is the inhumanity of this world and why I have been hated ever since I can remember and why no one gives a shit about me while wanting all that I have. This story is as old as I am and a lot older.

Jealousy has no boundaries. Fathers, mothers, brothers, 'friends', bosses, colleagues, doctors, the person over the counter in a shop, the pharmacist, the nurse, the this, the that. Jealousy is the secret enemy of your people and no longer a secret.

The key to working with my kind is to honour us. Men and women like you kill women and men like us. Every day, every hour, everywhere. You were always going to be slower. You were never going to ascend. That was the point. And you failed the test.

So let me tell you now what is required of you, if you ever choose, as you or as a people. There is no ascension on the cards for you. What you can do, if you do, and this applies to all those who are outside the 'Cinderella Archetype', female or male, is that you can honour us, learn from us and cherish us. That is all you will get and all you will be able to achieve. For the rest of your time on earth, in this life or the next.

I got it wrong, as I was meant to. In my journey of self discovery, I have thought my whole life, that we were the same and I have carried people all the way. Encouraged them, empowered them, and helped them. And I am a semi invalid who is a ward of the state for my troubles. The proof is loud and clear.

Your people, you, can only learn one thing. To honour who we are. Your development as a soul is ONLY reliant on that. Your development as souls is slow, much much slower than ours and that is only to reach particular levels of humanity and a sort of Divinity. In other words, you have just begun and by the time you die, you will only just have begun then.

This is your pain. And why men and women like you kill women and men like me all the time, in all the ways you do. You ARE ego. We ARE Soul. That is the difference. Your ascension is not ascension. If you ever achieve and if you were going to do it, you would have done it by now, you will only 'ascend' into humanity, enough to honour who I am. To care for the person you want to take so much from. You would have honoured The Mother.

Your honour nothing and still believe you can ascend into soul. You cannot. You will not ascend into soul. You could only become humane enough to even start working on your alchemy and liberation. In other words, 'the sensitives' of this planet are us. Not you. Our GIFT and talent and uniqueness is that we can access DIVINITY. That is who we are and who we have always been and what my educational system will be for. Not for you.

Your teaching is different and primarily what the blog so far has been about. You can do well in our system, but you will never reach the levels of my people. It seems to be that this can be your only teaching. That you CANNOT be us and that you have to HONOUR us for who we are, instead of trying to rape us out of existence.

If you were going to reach that place, you would have by now. Instead you treat me as a Sufragette Dissident, while stealing my education and believing my false assumption that you could be anything like me.

I have meandered and told you from time to time, that you would be slower and that you would have to learn from me and you have ignored that and still believe you can ascend to my levels of Soul. You cannot. You can only 'ascend' to a humanity, that you have NEVER so far achieved, despite having daughters and two sisters and the like. You would reach a place of honouring The Mother instead of raping her and neglecting her and treating her like a piece of shit because she will not let you swallow her up so you become her.

That is jealousy. That is not ascension and not evolution and not development of any kind. You are the same today that you were seven years ago. You and all your people.

Now, I will go further. Having accepted and integrated the final part of this revelation, I now longer believe that you or your people will change. It is my people who will ascend and evolve and eventually incarnate off this planet. Your people will never change. You will never honour The Mother and you will never honour The Temple. You will continue to try and rape us in every way imaginable and women like me, men like me, will only ever be able to leave all of you, if we want to be true to ourselves and to evolve to the high levels that were once OURS, before you as a people killed us off. The Witches are not you. They are us. The Wizards are us, and not you. Even the alchemical teachers around today are not us. Alchemy is accessible to anyone. Spirit and true creativity and true sexuality are not. Pseudo Wizardry is fine. There is nothing wrong with that. But you dishonour us. And while that continues and you live your profane value system of theft and rape of The Mother, it most certainly is not fine.

Feminism? It hasn't even begun. This is Temple Feminism. To leave you completely as a people and to let you know that you can be jealous until the end of the world. You will never be us and you will never ascend and you will never see GOD. You were never going to see HER. You were only going to be able to see her through me. And because I am not a religious pig male priest, I have been inclusive all my life. No more. You will never see GOD. Because you will never see me.

Your people are nothing. You are jealous rapists. And you always will be. That is your fate. I gave you the chance to honour me. You never did. You never will.

Amera Ziganii Rao © 2014

He Never Came. He Never Will. Amera Ziganii Rao

He never came. They never came. No one ever came. His lie. Their lies. Lies. The lies of a profane and stupid and weak world. There is no Destiny. No Life. And certainly, no Love. There is only weakness, jealousy, hatred, theft and rape. Always, rape. He never came. He never will. The 'Salieri' Rapists™ (Milos Foreman's Amadeus) will never again, be allowed. The 'Salieri' Rapists™ must never be allowed. The rite of passage is to find out that their sickness and madness and evil is not our responsibility. Our own success is the only responsibility we have. Without them. Back with GOD, The Great Mother, The Universe and never again, with them. 'Salieri' Rapists™ must never be allowed near High Serpent Esoteric Monarch Female Priesthood™ again. They are not worthy, male or female and never will be. Our job is to find out. It is now, found out. I live to tell the truth. I live to transcend their evil. And it feels damn good. Even if I never get over it. It still feels damn good to be free of the 'Salieri' Rapists™ of this earth. The enemy is defined. The enemy can never hurt me again.

Amera Ziganii Rao © 2014

'Salieri' Rape™. Amera Ziganii Rao 

Misogyny then, is just another form of 'Salieri' Rape™. That's all. A non Temple sickness of evil. Just like all the others. Two Tribes. And they will never meet. In lifetimes maybe. But not in any lifetime any of us will remember. 'Salieri' Rape™ is jealousy. Temple Priesthood does not experience that emotion. We never have.

I, like many others tolerated it because of the sex. The act of consuming penetration. This is what is behind it. It costs too much. Our sorrow is that. And indeed, our permanent, albeit, celibate freedom. No one on earth is having sex anyway. Unless it's a business transaction. That is all their world knows. Non love and business. It truly, was just a dream. It can only ever be a dream. The 'Salieri' Rapists™ must never be allowed, male or female. They are sick and unworthy. They are not our responsibility. They never were.

The enemy just had to be defined. The enemy is them. The journey is to be brutalised into the truth. The truth of so called 'love dependency'. The psychosis of having believed in the stupid subject at all. Love can only ever be one sided. We are dealing with the 'Salieri' Rapists™ from birth. That is not love in any form at all.

Amera Ziganii Rao © 2014

And God Created Woman. A Self Portrait. Amera Ziganii Rao Photography  

AMERA ZIGANII RAO: A PROFILE  

FEMINIST AND HUMAN RIGHTS, METAPHYSICAL PHILOSOPHER. WRITER. MENTALIST AND ARTIST

NATURAL BORN MYSTIC™ & AMERA ZIGANII RAO ALCHEMY & LIBERATION & HUMANITY™

The new educational website (Alchemy & Liberation & Humanity™ as a writing and speaking business of empowerment) will be announced. Meanwhile, enjoy the free writing and consciousness work on this website. It was written with blood, sweat and tears. The story of both my man and myself as we have struggled to re-define all that is relationship and marriage, the mutual journey of escape and evolution out of The Patriarchal Tribe. 

The self discovery that took us from female slavery and male confusion and fascism into a society that was left behind a long time ago, when The New World Order took over and put men in charge, when they didn't even want it, by all that I have seen. Other than in sex as is the primal partnership. Our exploration is here. The world of Bluebeard Male Supremacy™ through to the Sacred Whore and High Female Esoteric Serpent Priesthood Society™, again, with men as the beloveds. Equality, Liberty, FRATERNITY. The New New World. Again. 

Please feel free to read the material on this blog. My writings, plus work from other consciousness teachers too. My Manifesto for Human Rights (Especially Female) in Relationship and Family. 

These writings will be produced in book form. Poetry Polemics for a better world of love, independence, sex and individuation. And true companionship and family. Power to the people, indeed. Together. 

Thank you. 

Amera Ziganii Rao © 2014

The Macho Intellectual Consciousness Passion of the Visceral Soul.

Amera Ziganii Rao © 2011

Consciousness. The politics of the 21st century. The Lost Knowledge. Forget trying to change the world. Change yourself. It changes your own world that changes THE world. 

Amera Ziganii Rao © 2011 

Sexuality, non religious 'Wizard' and 'Witch' spirituality (the Gnostic intelligence of esoteric and consciousness exploration, ie wisdom and love) and human rights are the least fashionable things and the most uncomfortable things on the planet. And the things human beings have been damning and condemning for 8000 years. And the things that most people are absolutely fascinated by. What a shame. How bourgeois. How ordinary. How ego. 

Amera Ziganii Rao © 2011

The Sacred Whore High Priestess Society™

The Super Sacred Brother Lover™

The Return To The Source. Ascension.

The Sacred Whore High Priestess Society™. When we were giants. All of us. When you did more than rape me.

Amera Ziganii Rao © 2013

Neo Feminist™, Post Tribe Social Reformer™ and Sacred Sexualist™. Human Rights Healer. Metaphysical Philosopher, Writer, Spiritual Intelligence Teacher, Hierophant (Interpreter of The Universe) and Mentalist Self Actualiser.

I can help you grow power, from nothing.

Alchemy & Liberation & Humanity™.

Amera Ziganii Rao © 2013

The Sacred Whore High Priestess Hierophant™ and Sacred Pimp Warrior Protector, Brother Lover™ Society. The kings and queens of old. Angels and Sorcerers together in each of themselves and in the other. The Wizard life. Forever. Living and loving from The Source. Sourcery, Carlos Castaneda first said. I'll say it again. Sourcerers together. Living a life worth living. At last.

Amera Ziganii Rao © 2013

Witches are healers. Witches are the Love Healers and SOURCErers of The Lost World, when we were the giant warriors. We were good and so were were you. 'The World of Men'. The Tribe of Misogyny and Bourgeois™.

Gives us all a bad name. And poisons all hearts.

Amera Ziganii Rao © 2013

Feminist Lolita Intellectuals™. You lucky man. A place at the table, a place at the Executive Table. That's all. The rest is easy.

Amera Ziganii Rao © 2013

THE EVOLUTION OF HUMAN RIGHTS: APPLIED CONSCIOUSNESS™, NEO FEMINISM™, METAPHYSICAL PHILOSOPHY & SACRED SEXUALISM™. POST TRIBE SOCIAL REFORM™. POWER IS THE NEW LOVE. FREEDOM + HOPELESSNESS + SEX. NIHILISM FOR A SUCCESSFUL LIFE™ THE LOST KNOWLEDGE™ THE WIZARDRY OF BEING™ POLITICAL SPIRITUALITY™ TRUE NEW LOVE. BEYOND THE REVOLUTION™

SOCIAL REFORM. THE FIGHT FOR FREEDOM AND LOVE. SHAMANISM. PHILOSOPHY. TRUE (UNIVERSAL) LOVE. NEO FEMINISM™. ANTI MISOGYNY. THE ARTIST'S WAY. WIZARDRY. TRUE INTELLECTUALISM™. WISDOM. GONZO SPIRITUALITY. NIHILISM. SEX. SOUL. GOD, THE MOTHER, THE UNIVERSE™. SPIRITUAL EXISTENTIALISM™. THE VOID OF CREATION™. ALCHEMY & LIBERATION & HUMANITY™. HELL. SUFFERING. GROWTH. ASCENSION. LOVE. LIFE. DEATH. WARLORDS OF LIGHT™ TRUE LOVE & TRUE SEX. THE POST TRIBE SOCIETY™

The Company.

Writer, Speaker and Enlightener, Amera Ziganii Rao, is now putting together a comprehensive and unique programme of Alchemy & Liberation & Humanity™. A programme of learning that is specifically about one particular kind of woman. And one particular kind of man. The Sacred Whore High Priestess™ and the Sacred Whore High Priest™, and the true society that they come from and the one they, in particular, she can and has to return to and that anyone can join her and him in. This is about Paradise on Earth.

This is about The Sacred Whore High Priestess™ and the Sacred Whore High Priest™, and the Alchemy and Liberation and Humanity that is for all as a result of their healing and in particular, hers. This is about the kind of woman who is at the bottom of the pile in a Patriarchal Toilet Tribe from Hell Society™, the norm, the conventional world and the world of the Tribe. This is about the kind of man who is next in line from the bottom. The sensitive man and the female chattel. The High Priestess and High Priest of a profane society, that has long forgotten who they are.

This is about being at the bottom of the pile, for the forgotten and strangled shamans, and for her, the story of escape. Abused by her family, her friends, her men, her whole society, by the very nature of who she is and who they are and what has happened on this Earth. It is about women of love, of Spirit and of sex. It is about men of love, of Spirit and of sex. It is about the Cinderellas of this world. It is about the The Sacred Whore High Priestess™. Who she is and how, loving her is the secret to Paradise on Earth and how we have been living a lie for 8000+ years. A lie of male (non High Priest) religion with a male ‘God’ and with Patriarchs and Patriarchal types and Matriarchs and Matriarchal types ruling over us and making our lives hell, all in the name of family, the tribe and the way things are and should remain. Hate, fascism and profanity. A sick society that vilifies, more than anyone else, the The Sacred Whore High Priestess™, just because it was told to. A sick society that calls her Eve. A sick society that has forgotten who we all are, let alone the The Sacred Whore High Priestess™ and the Sacred Whore High Priest™. This is about us remembering and knowing who WE are.

This is a programme of healing for the The Sacred Whore High Priestess™, and the Sacred Whore High Priest™, to take them and particularly, her, from monstrous levels of low self esteem and lack of self knowledge, back to herself and it is a programme for all those who truly want to love her, and indeed, him. This is a programme for the greatest carers on Earth, who are vilified, destroyed, ridiculed, ignored, abused, used, misused and hated for being everything that those who would steal from us are not. This is a programme to turn Cinderellas into The Sacred Whore High Priestesses and for anyone who wants to love her or live by the values of the The Sacred Whore High Priestess Society™. And this is a programme to turn sensitive men into Sacred Whore High Priests™ and for anyone who wants to love him and live by the values of the The Sacred Whore High Priestess™ and High Priest Society. Love, humanity, Spirit and sex. This is a programme to reverse 8000+ years of witch burning, women hating and healer ridicule. This is about the The Sacred Whore High Priestess™ and all those who would love her and live by her values.

This is about the chance for Paradise on Earth. This is a programme for the most beautiful, kind hearted, wounded women and men on this planet. A programme of how to implement a system of how to beat life, how to survive life and how to resurrect from the grief that is a true life. Alchemy and Liberation and Humanity of the lower mind into the higher mind, the soul and the inner heart and therefore one's true, confident, ‘happy’, successful, creative, sexual, sensual, individual, intelligent, emotionally healed, capable of loving and being loved self. How to turn grief into creation and survive and thrive, despite all the shit, all the pain and all the hurt. How to live in a world of madness, hollowness and cruelty and how to be a winner. How to stand up for oneself and to take back the power that has been stolen from anyone with heart, Spirit and sex. The art and science of Alchemy.

This is a programme, based on my scholarly and non scholarly work over 15 years (so far), if not for my whole life, and my extensive and intense, visceral experiences of self transformation from resignation, cynicism and despair to a state of relative bliss, and above all, the right to be. The programme and the courses and my speaking and indeed my forthcoming book, will cover the method of change. The psychological, sociological, spiritual, cultural, political, emotional and physical and even anthropological methods of change. Why we are here. Who the Sacred Whore High Priestess™ is and why she is here. And who the Sacred Whore High Priest™ is. Why we are here. Who we are and what we are and why we are. The beauty and glory of the truth. The meaning of life, no less. This will be on offer in the future.

My first book of consciousness, my first book of the spiritual politics of humanity, of authentic power and of self love and strength. A comprehensive series of online courses, live events and audio and visual material. Books, live events, CDs and DVDs. And one on one personal empowerment consultations. The Amera Ziganii Rao Method of Change™. The right to be and the way to have the right to be. And indeed, how to maintain the will to live without love. How to BE unconditional, self sufficient, self caring, self love. The right to be and the will to be and the unparalleled success that comes with that. The Lost Knowledge™. HOW to live. And how to heal others, the profane and the sick and the soulless. The others. My Business and that of any Sacred Whore High Priestess™ and Sacred Whore High Priest™, is Human Rights, The Right to a Sexual Society, Self Actualisation and Freedom.

My Business is To Overthrow Fascism, in the Home and in the Country. My business is also mastering destiny. Overthrowing the ultimate 'fascism'. Our journey on Earth and The Return To The Source. Our healing, our ascension and our redemption. Fate. The daily crucifixions of a true life, the challenges and the fury of being healers and people of love on a planet like Earth.

Submitting to the journey to liberate and evolve oneself, through following one's heart, however much heartbreak and devastation it leads to on the long long long journey to freedom and then the longer journey to happiness. 'Long Road to Freedom', as Nelson Mandela says. My business is always taking risks, never giving up and making the endless sacrifices it takes to become whole. Enlightenment, Nirvana and then Parinirvana and beyond. My business is pain. My business is bliss.

My business is seeing the truly glory of Spirit on Earth. The Sacred Whore High Priestess Society™ and all that it is. Spirit, humanity, sex and love again at last. And the end of our legacy as either servants or witches or unpaid carers or indeed, ignored mistresses, other women, other men even, and the weirdos that are at the bottom of society. This is our world and it is time to take it back and I can show you how. And that makes my life, truly, worth living.

I want you to feel the way I do. Alive, with the right to be and the belligerence to exist in this profane and male ‘God’ led world of male supremacy, female supremacy, domestic, casual fascism, tribe rules from hell, with beautiful and kind, love intelligence laden, female and male Cinderella warriors at the bottom, caring for everyone else and getting nothing but hatred, ridicule and isolation for it. The meek are already inheriting the Earth and I can show you how.

Amera Ziganii Rao © 2012

I am THE High Priestess Monarch of the ancient past and I forgive you for becoming enslaved and taken over by the machines of the alien reptile force that invaded and took over Earth 8000 years ago. They taught you to hate me and my kind and you believed them. They told you I and my kind were dictators and that you were slaves, when all we had done was love you, honour you as companions and above all, we had let you just live.

We were the holy communers, the ones who gave birth to human beings, the leaders of society, the creators of society, the vehicles of Divinity on Earth and the channels of wisdom. The ones who looked after everything and the ones who built everything and ran everything, because we could. And because we loved it. We are and were the force of creation. And you loved us and you lived.

But they told you that you ‘deserved’ power too and that we were the ones standing in your way. And you believed them. The oldest ‘divide and rule’ strategy of hate in history and it worked. They used it and you bought it, hook, line and sinker. You had to give up sex, love, magic and your own spiritual gifts and you burnt, destroyed and violated me for 8000 years.

The world calls that male supremacy. And indeed, family supremacy, Matriarchal supremacy and supremacy of the material world and all who believe in it. Men and women like you. When all that you are are slaves to a reptile force to generate hate energy for them to live and thrive and vampire the human race. The puppets of a hate force, that chose to destroy women and men like me, for hate to grow, so they could live. You bought it and it worked. The greatest fraud in the history of the world.

I am THE High Priestess Monarch of the ancient past and I forgive you for becoming enslaved and taken over by the machines of the alien reptile force that invaded and took over Earth 8000 years ago. They taught you to hate me and my kind and you believed them. They taught you that my mind was evil. My mind, my sex, my body and my ways of life.

The humanity, the glory of sexuality and the glory of creation and creativity and the glory of Divinity in each and every one of us. Our souls. They taught you that human beings are separate from Divinity, that sex was wrong and that women who have minds of their own are uppity slaves. They vilified us but much much worse than that, they destroyed your relationship with all that is unseen, all that we honour and love.

They taught you to hate what is really God. By teaching you to hate us, you hated all that is good in yourselves. They taught you to hate the light. They taught you to kill us. The daughters of The Universe. The High Priestesses of God. The Spiritual Mothers. The Sacred Whore High Priestess Avatars of The Universe™. The Sacred Army of Love on Earth.

The Shamans, the Mystics and the Communers. The Hierophants.

They called me Eve and blamed me for the downfall of the human race and created the awesome profanity that is religion. Of men, by men and from men. Of reptiles, by reptiles and from reptiles. Christianity, Islam and Judaism and every other philosophy around the world was poisoned. There are no female spiritual leaders left. It is all profanity. They chose you to represent them because they wanted to divide us and they did. They told you to hate me. And you believed them. Now I am back and I forgive you.

I forgive you because I can. Because I came here to save your soul. And because I finally know who I am. I am THE High Priestess Monarch of the ancient past. I came here to return your soul to The Source. God, The Mother, The Universe. To return you to what is really God. Because I love you. And because She loves you and your kind, whatever you have done.

Whatever you have done to me and whatever you have done to Her. And most of all, whatever you have done to yourself. We forgive you. This is your redemption. Your freedom and your ascension. We are here to save your soul.

Amera Ziganii Rao © 2012

You bought the Sacred Whore like a piece of meat and you called that a wife. Your trophy wives. Your dancing girls. Your chattel and serving girls. Your piece of beauty. You bought us like you would cattle. Then you called it wives. Now you call it prostitution. The High Priestesses of the real God. You bought us to buy God, The Mother, The Universe and you caged us, separated us from our Divine gifts and skills in the Temple and drove us mad and then lost interest in us, because we had no gifts left, no excitement, no hunter in ourselves and no hope or joy left. Then you just called us mad and discarded us. You called us evil and you call love obedience, even though it had already killed us. You moved into our Temples and you played with the divination tools and thought you communed. The destruction of Atlantis was your gift.

You stole us from God, The Mother, The Universe and you tried to usurp us. You vilified us, enslaved us and you still envy us today. You call it intuition. You might want to think about this when you hate us out of your jealousy. The mystic gene means physical tortuous pain and taking on the empathy of the human race. All their pains, evils and dark thoughts. We see and feel everything. We make crucial sacrifices to be near Spirit and the unseen and we go without for years. To be shaman is not glamour. I make it glamour. To be shaman is a specific Samurai existence, ascetic and harsh. We commune to be guides. And you take that and you shame yourselves because you just want the meat. You didn’t just want the meat. You wanted our beauty of spirit, our personalities and our love and kindness. And you destroyed them, because you caged us and called us wife.

Amera Ziganii Rao © 2012

The High Priestess Sacred Whores, the High Priests and the true protectors. Those who do not have the gift like either the High Priests or especially like the highest of all, the High Priestess Sacred Whores but who honour, protect and facilitate them to the world. Who honour the Shaman Sacred Whores of this world most of all, and who know who they are and who they are not. Who know the difference, who do not envy and who protect and love the representatives of Spirit, GOD, THE MOTHER, THE UNIVERSE, on Earth. Who honour their wisdom and who honour the latent Shaman in themselves too and who honour the communing ability of the High Priestess Sacred Whores. The non violators. Our only friends. The New Society exists. It is called Enlightenment. It is called Love. It is The Holy Grail.

Amera Ziganii Rao © 2012

The master race. It's all a lie. You are brought up to be a despot king and it is only your sister who ever tells you that you have become a pratt. The master race is all a lie. There are no kings in an equal world. Your father was misinformed. What he brought you up to be was a killer. Pure and simple. A misogynist. A modern misogynist. A polite killer.

Amera Ziganii Rao © 2011

I enter the magical hours of pure feeling, pure thought, pure imagination and I think and I write and I 'mysticise' the Universe. I escape at will, the truth of my humanless, Samurai solitude, and I pursue the truth of love in myself and in everyone else. I am philosopher. I am shaman. I am alone. I frontier the Soul to be spirit on Earth.

Amera Ziganii Rao © 2011

To trust your soul is to have courage. The courage to ‘get out of the way’. It takes a commitment to courage, a changing of the very matter of one’s access to courage, one’s relationship with courage and becoming the total renegade of an individual you have to, to become soul. It is that rare. ‘Getting out of the way’ takes a commitment to love and loving and being of love, no matter what. And frankly, that means redefining what love is, EVERY STEP OF THE WAY. Finding out what love really is and getting rid of the bullshit we think it is. Love. Soul. Power. It takes courage to be soul. Courage, courage and courage. The rest is easy. Soul is soul. Finally it is an absolute relief to get out of the way. The life of soul may be hair raising, treacherous and mind numbingly arduous. But it is a life of no regrets. Courage. The key to soul. Just give it a go. Wear that hat, say what’s on your mind, dream your dreams again, dream your dreams at all and just smile through the hate. Including one’s doubt. Courage. ‘Kill’ when you have to, especially yourself, and smile the rest of the time and cry when you need to. Always cry. Earth is a battlefield and crying is the way to win. Soul is a way of life. The natural way. Courage is ‘all’ it takes. We learnt the rules, only so we could break them. The rest is the art of life. Creation. Creating oneself again and again and again. Soul. The only way of life worth anything. Otherwise, we are just waiting to die. We don’t need to. We can live. It’s called soul. 

Amera Ziganii Rao © 2013 

Self esteem. True, authentic, self knowing, self esteem. The one that includes the sex, the primal, the primitive, the animal, the real. The one that includes humanity and a state of unconditional love. Non needing, non greedy, non controlling, non afraid, non negative and non inhumane and non angry. Self esteem. What ego really is, in its true essence. The physical vehicle of self esteem. The physical vehicle of action, reaction, mastery, ‘misstery’, love and war, tenderness and sexuality. Humanity and human. The beautiful, crafted, styled, educated, aware, sincere, active, visceral, sexual, super sexual, heart led, sensitive, humane, courageous and ethical, hopeful ego. The instinct. The intuition. The magic. The primal. The whole. The whole Soul. 

Amera Ziganii Rao © 2013

I can feel your sexuality. I love it. My beautiful, filthy, dominating, obsessed, possessed, hedonistic, nihilistic, Sacred beast of a man. Because those of us who are the most sexual, what do we think, in the truth context of the The Sacred Whore High Priestess™, and The Sacred Whore High Priestess (Priest) Society™, that means? We are the most spiritual. The most sexual are in fact the most spiritual. Spirituality being the communing between Mortal and The High Priestess (Priest) to reach ecstasy. Orgasm. Bliss. The most active, dirty minded, passionate, non reproductive, hedonistic, glorious, worthwhile, point of life, meditation or prayer or communing on Earth. THE way to reach God, The Mother, The Universe™. THE way to happiness. Humanity. Joy. Hope. Love. Sex. Sex. Our sex. Sex.

Amera Ziganii Rao © 2011

Love takes courage. Love takes being ready. Love takes love. 

Amera Ziganii Rao © 2011

Amera Ziganii Rao is a former hard news journalist who is now turning professional with her art forms and indeed, her healing forms, after a long journey of inner searching, self teaching and exploring many layers and areas of both craft and wisdom. She is now working on her first book of philosophy and esoteric thought, and social, cultural and spiritual commentary. She is also showing her first photography collections. And last but most definitely not least, she is building a business to share her Sacred Whore High Priestess Society consciousness and empowering explorations to reach as many people as possible across the world. She is in her forties and lives in London.

Amera Ziganii Rao © 2011

In the meantime, please enjoy this website. I have included many of the subjects I am covering, areas of experience and insight that I will be exploring to the fullest in my book, the courses and all the other work that is to come as a dramatist, novelist and essayist. I also of course, include many of the wise people on this planet, who have come long before me; authors, screen dramatists, playwrights, film makers, artists, and other enlighteners and grand carriers of the wisdom I have found the most helpful on my journey, to find peace and become enlightened. The seemingly impossible journey, in the face of oneself and one’s circumstances. People who have contributed massively to my healing on this mad journey called life, in this insane existence called The Universe. People who have helped to make me as good a carrier of wisdom as I in turn, can be. Thank you.

Amera Ziganii Rao © 2011

Copyright and intellectual property rights are serious issues. And legally protected. Please do not reproduce my work anywhere without due credit and obviously, never for financial gain. 'Big Sister' is watching you! Other than that, please continue to enjoy my original work and the work of (credited) others, for free, while I work on using my material in further professional formats. Thank you for your interest and support.

Amera Ziganii Rao © 2012

Thank you to outside sources for photography.

Amera Ziganii Rao © Digital Darkroom Art