Take an hour out of your busy schedule and change your world.

The great shift

"I awoke, only to see the rest of the world was still asleep" - Leonardo Da Vinci

Many suggest that the people of planet Earth are in the midst of a major paradigm shift, but what is a paradigm and how is the current dominant paradigm actually shifting?

This new three-match series brings the cream of Serbian rugby league to the top... of an empty stadium.

Prior to the 1980s, the Australian rugby league interstate representative series between New South Wales and Queensland saw players represent the state where their current club was based. This meant that, as Queensland produced top quality players but had much poorer clubs than the rich Sydney teams, many native Queenslanders would be forced to pull on the blue NSW jersey and compete against the maroon QLD shirt of their homeland.

Queensland's frustration led to the birth of the State of Origin concept in 1980, which pitted "state against state", but also "mate against mate", with players from the same rich Sydney clubs competing against one another in a ferocious contest over three 80-minute battles.

The Serbian Rugby League season is now in full swing, with three rounds already completed, a domestic regional representative match played and Serbia having walloped Germany in an international friendly!

Here at Red Star we started with a pre-season friendly at new club Soko down in Vranje, which is seemingly closer to Greece than it is to Belgrade. A pioneering venture that’s now competing in the second division thanks to the great work of the boys from Vranje and the team at the Serbian RFL, Soko is seemingly flourishing. They asked if they could field 25 players against our 16 (17

Prompted by popular demand, this is an explanatory post aimed at shedding light, as succinctly as possible, on the differences between the various types of rugby, but principally ‘Union’ and ‘League’.

You may want to read it in instalments! 

By the early 18th century various forms of ‘football’ were being played across the British Isles, with differing local rules blah blah. Around 1870 the Rugby School in the town of Rugby became the first to write down its rules, which allowed it to spread and gain prominence.

With the exception of the ubiquitous 'soccer',

continued from part 1:

According to physicist Tom Campbell's interesting Big TOE (Theory Of Everything), "We are individuated units of consciousness in a greater consciousness system and we evolve individually over many incarnations in this and other virtual reality sub-systems by lowering our entropy through love (manifested through empathy and collaboration). The opposite of love is fear (manifested through selfishness, a sense of ownership and competition), which increases our entropy and causes us to de-evolve".

As Yoda, the great Jedi Master, said "Fear leads to anger, anger to hate, hate to suffering."

If our perception shapes our world, or our own individual interpretations of the base reality unfolding in this biosphere create our subjective image of the world, we must understand that we are conditioned culturally and socially to pigeonhole other groups of Earthlings and brand things, events, processes and individuals in certain ways. And if we accept that the planet we inhabit is a single living organism and we are veritable cells within that organism, we can extend our empathy to every living being on the planet.

I would not suggest that the various group-think mind sets, organizational

The 2011 season is fast approaching for the teams of the Serbian RFL, with kick-off scheduled for the weekend of 19th-20th March. Competition is set to be tougher than ever this year, with a number of teams having strengthened their squads in the off-season, in the hope of toppling the mighty Dorćol.

This year will also prove an exciting challenge for the Serbia national team, with a calendar of eight internationals culminating in October when they take on Italy, Lebanon and Russia to vie for the final spot at the 2013 RL World Cup.

At Red Star it’s been a tough pre-season

I have been accused of being a bit single-minded of late, of ignoring my family, neglecting my sport and obsessing over what I believe to be an outdated system. I'm sorry if that's the perception I've been giving, but I continue to lose sleep over the lack of balance on this planet. I just can't help myself.

I dream of self-sufficient circular housing for everybody that produces its own energy through nano-carbon windows, solar panels and wind turbines; housing that collects and processes its own water, which travels from drinking taps, to hydroponics systems for growing organic fruit

Metaphors and symbols are absolutely fundamental to, and ever present in, our collective reality and we must be mindful of them.

Growing up in east Hull, rugby union was always something alien, but also something distant. Indeed, I think it was only when a PE teacher at Andrew Marvel High revealed that he played union for one of the village teams around Hull that I realised the sport even existed in my home county. Here in Serbia, however, the union is like a wasp feeding on the sweet league.

My first run-in with its loyalists came in the summer of 2011 when I got a phone call from a guy I hardly knew who used to play for the team: "Mark, some guys will turn up at your training session tonight. They're good guys and they want to form a Red Star rugby union club. Please be nice to them."