When I was a boy I read voraciously. I was your real bookworm, always reading s book. Relatives always asked me ahead of Christmas what I would like, and always it was ‘book tokens please’.

I had and read all kinds of books:

• from Enid Blyton adventures in the world of children and young imagination as a younger boy, to Wilbur Smith adventures in the adult world and adult imagination as an adolescent

• in the non-fiction world from sports books to encyclopedias, from world facts to current affairs and modern history, and anything that could teach me about our world

• not much in the science fiction world, it wasn't my favourite genre, but I did read Fahrenheit 451 and similar books outlining a dystopian future.

At one point - I think when I was about 14 or 15 - I read books on communist China and the communist block of the USSR. I read about the gulag camps in USSR and the Cultural Revolution in China and it boggled my young mind, blew it into billions of tiny bits, how human beings could be so brutal towards other human beings.

Most of all my mind could not comprehend how a few people could control so many millions. It seemed impossible to me. Why did the people let this happen to them?

I didn't know why, but I was certainly wondering why. I think such questions have shaped my life.

Although I didn’t really talk about the world much with my granny, I recall her during my boyhood being vehemently against communism, and my books were beginning to enable me to understand why. She grew up in India as a girl and then lived in Kenya as my mum and aunt were born, and brought up these two iconic female figures in my life on the land of Africa. She must have seen things that led to her complete rejection of communism.

My young mind was all the more boggled as I lived in free England where people were not at the mercy of murderous tyrants running the country I lived in. We had fetes at the weekend and fairs in the summer, sports, music and gigs, we had art and museums, we had parks and countryside, we had all kinds of books, and apparently little censorship. We had exciting movies, and we had dreams and we had ways of making those dreams reality. We had so much that marked the life of a free human being.

How things have changed in my life from the 1970s to 2020 onwards. I went travelling to Thailand in 1991, and this completely transformed my life because unbeknownst to me I was emigrating and finding my vocation in life, namely teaching, and especially teaching adolescents and adults.

Because I had swapped - the ostensibly - free, democratic, developed, civilised, wealthy England for a completely different culture, society and kind of nation, I began to see two different things everywhere. In this relational way our brains work best. When we can compare and contrast, we can develop our sense of the world, what is good for life and what is bad, and we can dream of things for our own life while gaining a higher understanding of what can and cannot be done.

I also noticed, on so many levels of life, that freedom and happiness and health seemed far more abundant in ‘poorer’ and ‘less developed’ Thailand compared to England.

I have to say, too, that on holidays home to England in the late 1990s i began to sense my home nation was a semi-police state, and on a downward slope. However, nobody in England would grasp what i was saying, it was Blair's swinging nation!

Fast forward one generation, and we now have tyrants in power in Canada, USA, Britain, France, the EU, Australia, New Zealand, the very heart and centre of the Democratic, Free, Rich, Civilised, Developed World.

Socialism and communism are coming in to, once again, kill the spirit of huge numbers of human beings - millions and millions of individuals. But now this disease of the human heart is sweeping the previously-free world of the Western nations.

And the questions of my boyhood have returned with a vengeance. The same questions:

• How can so few people take power over whole populations?

• How can human beings be so brutal towards other human beings?

Only now they don't apply to the USSR and communist China, now the same questions apply to my home nation and all the other Western developed-status countries.

What we saw, during 2020-21 in particular - if one was looking beyond the now compulsively censorious manipulators of mainstream 'free speech' western media - was dictatorship in blatant view, being enforced on the entire 'free' world's peoples.

I saw the most outrageous violence committed by what I assume were human beings dressed entirely in black with weapons in their hands, being set upon us ordinary people as if we were wild dogs to be slaughtered or mosquitoes to be sprayed to death.

The leaders of these countries spoke just like tyrants too.

And the medical tyranny came down on previously free peoples with sledgehammer weight and effect.

So, it seems that the common denominator, in this human devastation, is brutal hearts and minds getting into political power in nations and then using the full resources of state apparatus, funded by the massive influx of finance from the shadowy figures (but not so unknown these days), to control everybody else as they wish.

Within the human psyche, clearly, lies a bent towards the addiction and obsession with controlling other people and our world. I see this as arising from a heart that was dulled and deadened during childhood upbringing and schooling. When such an empty heart gets into a position of power, it will wreak havoc with the lives of other people, either physically or psychologically, or they will in fact be exterminated as if a cockroach.

As to how they can control so many people, two tools are their stock in trade: MONEY to destroy people's souls and get them to do your bidding, and INFORMATION FLOW to block people from their birthright.

But, in my view, the way to changing our relationship with money, and how it can come to utterly dominate and control our thinking, behaviour, and relationships, is first through changing our relationship with information flow.

That means education and it means media.

Media are simply textbooks for adults, so the key must lie in education if we wish to get ourselves out of this increasing hell that is descending on all of us, and being able to happen because most of us hate to even think about it, preferring to 'wish it away'. That's how hell comes to us all, because most ‘free’ people refuse to believe it’s coming their way.

History has shown how this kind of thinking leads to tragedy and enslavement of human beings.

Interestingly to me, however, the internet has become our liberator, and it's a tool of the powerful that has turned against them. Might not seem like it now, but there are A LOT OF US who understand how life works now, and who are working on our own inner being and understanding. We are all over the world, and we see and hear and feel each other. We are now reclaiming our interconnectedness that our schooling ripped asunder from our hearts and minds.

The trick is to cut through the packed information highway to find the real stuff. I say if it’s heart-based then it’s worth attending to…

I learned in 1991 the power of being in nature. I used to know that power in England, and was always in it as a boy, but I was too busy in the hectic life as a young adult to get much of it - either I was at work, or in the pub.

Thailand slowed me down, took me out of the system's tentacles. It is the power of nature which can come to rescue of each and every single one of us. Nature shows us, and makes us fully aware of, our connectivity in life. We now grow compassion and gratitude towards nature, which we increasingly realise includes all fellow human beings. Out of these feelings arise joy, love, freedom and inner peace. These are THE sweet nectar of the human essence, and what we all innately desire to have.

The only way to get there is to slow down in your life. Then you can create time and space to connect with nature, and reflect upon your own life and work out exactly why you are even bothering to be alive.

Is not cultivating camaraderie in our relationships, allowing a give and take, not being rigid in thinking, being open to understanding new things, the basis for being a human being?

Or is it just to reach the finishing line by getting by, hoping for a few crumbs at the table from time to time?

No, I think it is to live with a purpose, a meaning, and to activate our dreams, to realise our potential, and to stop putting all our grand ideas off until 'tomorrow'.

Communism symbolises the smashed-up, given-up human heart.

Nature liberates us from this brutal fate because it speaks to our heart, it nurtures our heart and mind, it nourishes our heart and mind, and we, as creation intended us humans to do, thrive by being loving, creative, productive and proactive.

At the end of the day, we choose communism or we choose love.

Ideology takes you to the first, nature to the second. So, choose to live in a tiny ideological box moulded by the education and media controllers, or choose to live in the WHOLE UNIVERSE, as was intended for us human beings.

You won't find me in that bloody box, never!