You may be aware of the fact that tech billionaire Elon Musk of Tesla and SpaceX is now publicly stating his belief that it is mathematically impossible in a practical sense, that we are not living in a computer simulation. His logic is surprisingly sensible. In 1972 we had Pong, a rudimentary simulation of table tennis. Now we have games that are near photorealistic. If we keep to this course, we will create simulations that are indistinguishable from reality, even if it takes us a few more thousands of years, it will happen. So if it will happen… how do we know it hasn’t already happened? How do we know we’re living in the base reality and are not already in a simulation?
There’s a one in billions chance we’re in base reality. – Elon Musk
Recently, a team of Japanese scientists also announced they have found ‘clearest evidence yet’ that the universe is a hologram. While this may be the most recent effort to prove the holographic universe theory among numerous others, science has been perplexed by the insubstantial nature of reality since well before holographic theory existed – not to mention the mystics and philosophers who have been suggesting the same thing (in less reductionist terms) for thousands of years.
From The Ancient East To Modern West
Eastern mysticism has long held the perspective that our physical reality is really the maya of illusion. First century buddhist philospoher-poet Aśvaghoṣa put it that ‘all phenomena in the world are nothing but the illusory manifestation of the mind and have no reality of their own, while 13th century sufi mystic Rumi suggested that ‘this place is a dream. Only a sleeper considers it real.’ Jump all the way forward to the 1960s, and a wave of eastern mysticism crashed on the shore of western culture thanks to public figures like Alan Watts. Perhaps out of everyone, his is the most captivatingly poetic rendering of the subject. For the full experience, take a look at this beautiful new short film from Aaron Paradox.
Kensho from Aaron Paradox
Quantum Conundrum
Since the emergence of quantum mechanics in the 1920s, science has struggled to reconcile the conundrum of reality no longer being able to be identified as something in any way permanent or fixed, and it was with impermanence that the first echoes of eastern philosophy began ringing uncomfortably within the walls of science. Neils Bohr, one of the fathers of quantum theory is famously quoted as saying:
Everything we call real is made of things that cannot be regarded as real. If quantum mechanics hasn’t profoundly shocked you, you haven’t understood it. – Neils Bhor
This sentiment was clearly understood by physicist Henry Stapp who said ‘There is no substantive physical world in the usual sense of this term. The conclusion here is not the weak conclusion that there may not be a substantive physical world, but rather that there definitely is not a substantive physical world.’ Einstein even described reality and an ‘optical delusion of consciousness’ and stated that ‘reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one’.
As eastern philosophy spread into the western world with the influence of figures like Alan Watts and Frijof Capra, author of The Tao Of Physics(1975), the question began to spread as to whether quantum physicists were in fact observing phenomena with electron microscopes that had already been observed thousands of years before via mediation. What has been even less known is that the founders of quantum physics were in fact students of the vedic texts, and were not just accidentally observing similarity. They were looking for it, and found it. Neils Bhor stated that he would ‘go into the Upanishads to ask questions’. Werner Heisenberg shared that ‘quantum theory will not look ridiculous to people who have read Vedanta; and Irwin Schrödinger thought that ‘the unity and continuity of Vedanta are reflected in the unity and continuity of wave mechanics. This is entirely consistent with the Vedanta concept of All in One.’
You are not a drop in the ocean. You are the entire ocean in a drop. – Rumi
From Recent History To The Not-Too-Distant Future
In the 90s, ‘dark poet’ comedian Bill Hicks helped awaken a generation with statements like his positive news story: ‘Today a young man on acid realised that all matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration, we are all one consciousness experiencing ourselves subjectively. There’s no such thing as a death, life is only a dream and we’re the imagination of ourselves… here’s Tom with the weather’, as well as his beautifully inspiring Just A Ride riff. Then, by the end of the 90s we had The Matrix. Like no piece of media before it, The Matrix was a pop culture breakthrough causing the very question of whether reality is actually real to be considered at least once by the tens of millions of people who have now seen it.
In the years since the turn of the new century, science has gained the courage to openly explore topics like the holographic universe theory, the relationship between consciousness and matter and even the once banned subject of psychedelics as medicines. We may well be witnessing a generational change on the kind of scale that Thomas S Kuhn was referring to when he coined the phrase ‘paradigm shift’ in his seminal 1972 book The Structure Of Scientific Revolutions.
A scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it. – Max Planck, one of the other fathers of quantum physics
Will this paradigm shift bring a full re-unification of science and spirit? Speaking on behalf of those who seek truth as much from outside the boundaries of rational reductionism as within it, I really hope so. I know if I was a scientist, I’d have my mind on catching up with the the ideas of Nicola Tesla, (well known to have studied the Vedic texts); a man who like Copernicus, was born at least a hundred years before his time.
In many ways it is painful to reflect on the year 2018; a year of vital opportunities lost when so much is at stake.
Whether politically, militarily, socially, economically, financially or ecologically, humanity took some giant strides backwards while passing up endless opportunities to make a positive difference in our world.
Let me, very briefly, identify some of the more crucial backward steps, starting with the recognition by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists in January that the year had already started badly when they moved the Doomsday Clock to two minutes to midnight, the closest it has ever been to ‘doomsday’ (and equal to 1953 when the Soviet Union first exploded a thermonuclear weapon matching the US capacity). See ‘It is now two minutes to midnight’.
This change reflected the perilous state of our world, particularly given the renewed threat of nuclear war and the ongoing climate catastrophe. It didn’t even mention the massive and unrelenting assault on the biosphere (apart from the climate) nor, of course, the ongoing monumental atrocities against fellow human beings.
Some Lowlights of 2018
The global elite, using key elite fora such as the Group of 30, the Trilateral Commission, the Bilderberg Group and the World Economic Forum, continued to plan, generate and exacerbate the many ongoing wars, deepening exploitation within the global economy, climate and environmental destruction, and the refugee crisis, among many other violent impacts, in pursuit of greater elite power, profit and privilege.
International organizations (such as the United Nations, the World Bank and International Monetary Fund) and national governments used military forces, legal systems, police forces and prison systems around the world to serve the global elite by defending its interests against the bulk of the human population, including those individuals and organizations audacious enough to challenge elite power, profit and privilege.
War and other military violence continued to rage across the planet wreaking devastation on many countries and regions, particularly in the Middle East and Africa. If you missed this, read what is happening to Yemen, described as ‘ the world’s worst [humanitarian] crisis in decades’ with ‘three quarters of the entire Yemeni population – 22 million women, children and men – dependent on some form of humanitarian assistance to survive.’ See ‘Yemen: UN chief hails “signs of hope” in world’s worst man-made humanitarian disaster’.
Not content with the nature and extent of the military violence they are inflicting already, during 2018 elites continued to plan how to do it more effectively in future with research and development of artificial intelligence just one manifestation of this: ‘an “arms race in AI” is now underway, with the U.S., China, Russia, and other nations (including Britain, Israel, and South Korea) seeking to gain a critical advantage in the weaponization of artificial intelligence and robotics’ so that ‘artificial intelligence will be applied to every aspect of warfare, from logistics and surveillance to target identification and battle management’. See ‘“Alexa, Launch Our Nukes!” Artificial Intelligence and the Future of War’.
The United States government unilaterally withdrew from the Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty (which limits the deployment of intermediate range nuclear weapons).
Another significant proportion of global private financial wealth – conservatively estimated by the Tax Justice Network in 2010 to already total between $US21 and $US32 trillion – has been invested virtually tax-free through the world’s still-expanding black hole of more than 80 ‘offshore’ tax havens (such as the City of London Corporation, Jersey, Guernsey, the Isle of Man, Bermuda, the Cayman Islands, Hong Kong, Nauru, St. Kitts, Antigua, Tortola, Switzerland, the Channel Islands, Monaco, Cyprus, Gibraltar and Liechtenstein). This is just financial wealth. ‘A big share of the real estate, yachts, racehorses, gold bricks – and many other things that count as non-financial wealth – are also owned via offshore structures where it is impossible to identify the owners.’ See Tax Justice Network.
Controlled by the global elite, Wall Street and other major banks manage this monstrous diversion of wealth under Government protection. ‘Their business is fraud and grand theft.’ Tax haven locations offer more than tax avoidance. ‘Almost anything goes on.’ It includes ‘bribery, illegal gambling, money laundering, human and sex trafficking, arms dealing, toxic waste dumping, conflict diamonds and endangered species trafficking, bootlegged software, and endless other lawless practices.’ See ‘Trillions Stashed in Offshore Tax Havens’.
The world’s major corporations continued to inflict enormous ongoing violence (in a myriad of ways) in their pursuit of endless profit at the expense of living beings (human and otherwise) and Earth’s biosphere by producing and marketing a wide range of life-destroying products ranging from nuclear weapons and nuclear power to junk food, pharmaceutical drugs, synthetic poisons and genetically mutilated organisms (GMOs). These corporations include those involved in the following industries: weapons manufacturers, major banks and their ‘industry groups’ like the International Monetary Conference, asset management firms, investment companies, financial services companies, fossil fuel (coal, oil and gas) corporations, technology corporations, media corporations, major marketing and public relations corporations, agrochemical (pesticides, seeds, fertilizers) giants, pharmaceutical corporations, biotechnology (genetic mutilation) corporations, mining corporations, nuclear power corporations, food multinationals and water corporations. You can see a list of the major corporations in this article: ‘The Global Elite is Insane Revisited’.
36,500,000 human beings (mainly in Africa, Asia and Central/South America) were starved to death.
18,250,000 children were killed by adults in wars, by starving them to death, and in a large variety of other ways.
8,000,000 children were trafficked into sexual slavery; executed in sacrificial killings after being kidnapped; bred to be sold as a ‘cash crop’ for sexual violation, to produce child pornography (‘kiddie porn’) and ‘snuff’ movies (in which children are killed during the filming); ritually tortured and murdered as well as raped by dogs trained for the purpose. See ‘Humanity’s “Dirty Little Secret”: Starving, Enslaving, Raping, Torturing and Killing our Children’.
Hundreds of thousands of individuals were kidnapped or tricked into slavery, which now denies 46,000,000 human beings the right to live the life of their choice, condemning many individuals – especially women and children – to lives of sexual slavery, forced labor or as child soldiers. See ‘The Global Slavery Index’ and ‘46 million people living as slaves, latest global index reveals’.
Well over 100,000 people (particularly Falun Gong practitioners) in China, where an extensive state-controlled program is conducted, were subjected to forced organ removal for the trade in human organs. See Bloody Harvest and The Slaughter.
15,750,000 people were displaced by war, persecution or famine. There are now 68,500,000 people, more that half of whom are children and 10,000,000 of whom are stateless, who have been forcibly displaced worldwide and remain precariously unsettled, usually in adverse circumstances. One person in the world is forcibly displaced every two seconds. See ‘Figures at a Glance’.
Millions of people were made homeless in their own country as a result of war, persecution, ‘natural’ disasters, internal conflict, poverty or as a result of elite-driven national economic policy. The last time a global survey was attempted – by the United Nations back in 2005 – an estimated 100 million people were homeless worldwide. As many as 1.6 billion people lack adequate housing (living in slums, for example). See ‘Global Homelessness Statistics’.
73,000 species of life (plants, birds, animals, fish, amphibians, insects and reptiles) on Earth were driven to extinction with the worldwide loss of insects, including vital pollinators such as bees, now between 75% and 90%, depending on the species. See ‘Insect Decimation Upstages Global Warming’. Have you seen a butterfly recently?
Separately from global species extinctions, Earth continued to experience ‘a huge episode of population declines and extirpations, which will have negative cascading consequences on ecosystem functioning and services vital to sustaining civilization. We describe this as a “biological annihilation” to highlight the current magnitude of Earth’s ongoing sixth major extinction event.’ Moreover, local population extinctions ‘are orders of magnitude more frequent than species extinctions. Population extinctions, however, are a prelude to species extinctions, so Earth’s sixth mass extinction episode has proceeded further than most assume.’ See ‘Biological annihilation via the ongoing sixth mass extinction signaled by vertebrate population losses and declines’ and ‘Biological Annihilation on Earth Accelerating’.
Wildlife trafficking, worth up to $20 billion in 2018, is pushing many endangered species to the brink of extinction. Illegal wildlife products include jewelry, traditional medicine, clothing, furniture, and souvenirs, as well as some exotic pets, most of which are sold to unaware/unconcerned consumers in the West. See, for example, Stop Wildlife Trafficking.
Vast quantities of soil were washed away as we destroyed the rainforests, and enormous quantities of both inorganic constituents (such as heavy metals like cadmium, chromium, lead, mercury, nickel and zinc) and organic pollutants (particularly synthetic chemicals in the form of fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides) were dumped into the soil as well, thus reducing its nutrients and killing the microbes within it. We also contaminated enormous quantities of soil with radioactive waste. See Soil-net, ‘Glyphosate effects on soil rhizosphere-associated bacterial communities’ and ‘Disposing of Nuclear Waste is a Challenge for Humanity’.
90 billion land animals and 60 billion marine animals were killed for human consumption, more than 100 million animals were killed for laboratory purposes in the United States alone and there were other animal deaths in shelters, zoos and in blood sports. See ‘How Many Animals Are Killed Each Year?’
In addition, 40 million animals were killed for their fur. Approximately 30 million of these animals were raised on fur farms and killed, about 10 million wild animals were trapped and killed, and hundreds of thousands of seals were killed for their fur. See ‘How Many Animals are Killed Each Year?’
Farming of animals for human consumption released 7,100,000,000 tonnes of CO2-equivalent into Earth’s atmosphere. About 44% of livestock emissions were in the form of methane (which was 44% of anthropogenic CH4 emissions), 29% as Nitrous Oxide (which was 53% of anthropogenic N2O emissions) and 27% as Carbon Dioxide (which was 5% of anthropogenic CO2 emissions). See ‘GHG Emissions by Livestock’.
Human use of fossil fuels and farming of animals released 3.2 million metric tons of (CO2 equivalent) nitrous oxide (N2O) into Earth’s atmosphere. See ‘Nitrous oxide emissions’.
As a result of previous greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and the consequent rise of about one degree celsius in the global temperature, causing the melting of Arctic permafrost and undersea methane ice clathrates, an incalculable quantity of methane was uncontrollably released into the atmosphere during 2018 (with the quantity being released getting ever closer to ‘exploding’). See ‘7,000 underground gas bubbles poised to “explode” in Arctic’ and ‘Release of Arctic Methane “May Be Apocalyptic,” Study Warns’.
Ice in the Antarctic is melting at a record-breaking rate, losing 219 billion tonnes of ice in 2018 at a rate that has accelerated threefold in the last five years. See ‘Antarctic ice melting faster than ever, studies show’.
Earth’s fresh water and ground water was further depleted and contaminated. These contaminants included bacteria, viruses and household chemicals from faulty septic systems; hazardous wastes from abandoned and uncontrolled hazardous waste sites (of which there are over 20,000 in the USA alone); leaks from landfill items such as car battery acid, paint and household cleaners; the pesticides, herbicides and other poisons used on farms and home gardens; radioactive waste from nuclear tests; and the chemical contamination caused by hydraulic fracturing (fracking) in search of shale gas, for which about 750 chemicals and components, some extremely toxic and carcinogenic like lead and benzene, have been used. See ‘Groundwater contamination’, ‘Groundwater drunk by BILLIONS of people may be contaminated by radioactive material spread across the world by nuclear testing in the 1950s’ and ‘Fracking chemicals’.
The longstanding covert military use of geoengineering – spraying tens of millions of tons of highly toxic metals (including aluminium, barium and strontium) and toxic coal fly ash nanoparticulates (containing arsenic, chromium, thallium, chlorine, bromine, fluorine, iodine, mercury and radioactive elements) into the atmosphere from jet aircraft to weaponize the atmosphere and weather – in order to enhance elite control of human populations, continued unchecked. Geoengneering is systematically destroying Earth’s ozone layer – which blocks the deadly portion of solar radiation, UV-C and most UV-B, from reaching Earth’s surface – as well as adversely altering Earth’s weather patterns and polluting its air, water and soil at incredible cost to the health and well-being of living organisms and the biosphere. See ‘Geoengineering Watch’.
As one outcome of our dysfunctional parenting model and political systems, fascism continued to rise around the world. See ‘The Psychology of Fascism’.
Despite the belief that we have ‘the right to privacy’, privacy (in any sense of the word) was ongoingly eroded in 2018 and is now effectively non-existent, particularly thanks to Alphabet (owner of Google). Taken together, ‘Uber, Amazon, Facebook, eBay, Tinder, Apple, Lyft, Foursquare, Airbnb, Spotify, Instagram, Twitter, Angry Birds… have turned our computers and phones into bugs that are plugged in to a vast corporate-owned surveillance network. Where we go, what we do, what we talk about, who we talk to, and who we see – everything is recorded and, at some point, leveraged for value.’ Moreover, given Google’s integrated relationship with the US government, the US military, the CIA, and major US weapons manufacturers, there isn’t really anything you can do that isn’t known by those who want to know it. In essence, Google is ‘a powerful global corporation with its own political agenda and a mission to maximise profits for shareholders’ and it partly achieves this by expanding the surveillance programs of the national security state at the direction of the global elite. See ‘Google’s Earth: How the Tech Giant Is Helping the State Spy on Us’ and the documentary ‘The Modern Surveillance State’.
The corporate media, education and entertainment industries continued to distract us from reality ensuring that most people remain oblivious to our predicament and their own role in it, let alone what they can do to respond powerfully.
While the above list of the setbacks humanity and the Earth suffered in 2018 is very incomplete, it still provides clear evidence that humanity is rapidly entering a dystopian future far more horrific than the worst novel or film in the genre. The good news is that, at the current rate, this dystopian world will be shortlived as humans drive themselves over the edge of extinction. See ‘Human Extinction by 2026? A Last Ditch Strategy to Fight for Human Survival’.
But so that the picture is clear and ‘balanced’: were there any gains made against this onslaught?
Of course, it goes without saying that the global elite, international organizations (such as the United Nations), governments, corporations and other elite agents continued to live in delusion/denial endlessly blocking any initiative requiring serious action that would cut into corporate profits, or arguing over tangential issues of insignificant consequence to humanity’s future.
In short, I could find no record of official efforts during the year to plan for the development and implementation of a comprehensive, just and sustainable peace, but perhaps I missed it.
Separately from this, there have been some minor activist gains: for example, some western banks and insurance companies are no longer financially supporting the expansion of the western weapons industry and the western coal industry, some rainforest groups have managed to save portions of Earth’s rainforest heritage, and activist groups continue to work on a variety of issues sometimes making modest gains.
In essence however, as you probably realize, many of the issues above are not even being tackled and, even when they are, activist efforts have been hampered by inadequate analysis of the forces driving conflicts and problems, limited vision (particularly unambitious aims such as those in relation to ending war and the climate catastrophe), unsophisticated strategy (necessary to have profound impact against a deeply entrenched, highly organized and well-resourced opponent, with the endless lobbying of elite institutions, such as governments and corporations, despite this effort simply absorbing and dissipating our dissent, as is intended – as Mark Twain once noted: ‘If voting made a difference, they wouldn’t let us do it.’) and failure to make the difficult decisions to promote necessary solutions that are ‘unpopular’.
Fundamentally, these ‘difficult decisions’ include the vital need to campaign for the human population, particularly in the West, to substantially reduce their consumption – by 80% – involving both energy and resources of every kind as the central feature of any strategy to curtail destruction of the environment and climate, to undermine capitalism and to eliminate the primary driver of war: violent resource acquisition from Middle Eastern and developing nations for the production of consumer goods and services for western consumers.
While we live in the delusion that we can simply substitute renewable energy for fossil fuels and nuclear power (or believe such delusions that a 1.5 degrees celsius increase above the preindustrial temperature is acceptable or that we have an ‘end of century’ timeframe to solve the climate crisis), we ignore the fundamental reality that Earth’s biosphere is under siege on many fronts as a result of our endless extraction of its natural resources – such as fresh water, minerals, timber and, again, fossil fuels – for consumer production and the provision of services that go well beyond energy.
In short, for example, we will not save the world’s rainforests because we switch to renewable energy. We must reduce demand for the consumer products that require rainforest inputs. We must stop mining the Earth for minerals that end up in our mobile phones, computers, vehicles, ships and aircraft by not using the products and services these minerals make possible. We must stop eating meat and other animal products. And so the list goes on.
Forecasting 2019
In many ways it is painful to forecast what will happen in 2019 mainly because of the absurd simplicity of doing so: It will be another year when vital opportunities will be lost when so much is at stake.
Given the insanity of the global elite – see ‘The Global Elite is Insane Revisited’ – which will continue to drive the dynamics producing the lowlights mentioned above with the active complicity of their agents in governments and corporations coupled with a human population that is largely terrified, self-hating and powerless to resist – see ‘In Defense of the Human Individual’ – it is a straightforward task to forecast what will happen in 2019.
So let me forecast 40 lowlights for 2019:
See list above.
See list above.
See list above.
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See list above.
So unless you play your part, 2019 and the few years thereafter will simply be increasingly worse versions of 2018 and it will all be over by 2026. See ‘Human Extinction by 2026? A Last Ditch Strategy to Fight for Human Survival’ which cites a wide range of scientific and other evidence which you are welcome to consider for yourself if this date seems premature.
Responding Powerfully
If you already feel able to act powerfully in response to this multifaceted crisis, in a way that will have strategic impact, you are invited to consider joining those participating in ‘The Flame Tree Project to Save Life on Earth’, which outlines a simple plan for you to systematically reduce your consumption, by at least 80%, involving both energy and resources of every kind – water, household energy, transport fuels, metals, meat, paper and plastic – while dramatically expanding your individual and community self-reliance in 16 areas, so that all environmental and climate concerns are effectively addressed.
If you are also interested in conducting or participating in a campaign to systematically address one of the issues identified above, you are welcome to consider acting strategically in the way that Mohandas K. Gandhi did. Whether you are engaged in a peace, climate, environment or social justice campaign, the 12-point strategic framework and principles are the same. See Nonviolent Campaign Strategy. And, for example, you can see a basic list of the strategic goals necessary to end war and halt the climate catastrophe. See ‘Strategic Aims’.
If you want to know how to nonviolently defend against a foreign invading power or a political/military coup, to liberate your country from a dictatorship or a foreign occupation, or to defeat a genocidal assault, you will learn how to do so in ‘Nonviolent Defense/Liberation Strategy’.
If you are interested in nurturing children to live by their conscience and to gain the courage necessary to resist elite violence fearlessly, while living sustainably despite the entreaties of capitalism to over-consume, then you are welcome to make ‘My Promise to Children’.
To reiterate: capitalism, war and destruction of the environment and climate are outcomes of our dysfunctional parenting of children which distorts their intellectual and emotional capacities, destroys their conscience and courage, and actively teaches them to over-consume as compensation for having vital emotional needs denied. See ‘Love Denied: The Psychology of Materialism, Violence and War’.
If your own intellectual and/or emotional functionality is the issue and you have the self-awareness to perceive that, and wish to access the conscience and courage that would enable you to act powerfully, try ‘Putting Feelings First’.
In summary: if we do not rapidly, systematically and substantially reduce our consumption in several key areas and radically alter our parenting model, while resisting elite violence strategically on several fronts, homo sapiens will enter Earth’s fossil record within a few years. Given the fear, self-hatred and powerlessness that paralyses most humans, your choices in these regards are even more vital than you realize.
Biodata: Robert J. Burrowes has a lifetime commitment to understanding and ending human violence. He has done extensive research since 1966 in an effort to understand why human beings are violent and has been a nonviolent activist since 1981. He is the author of ‘Why Violence?’ His email address is flametree@riseup.net and his website is here.
Robert J. Burrowes
P.O. Box 68
Daylesford, Victoria 3460
Australia
The tradition of the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the minds of the living.
— Karl Marx
Marx offered a thought for all seasons but one that might especially ring true during what is supposed to be a season of peace, joy and humanity. Contradicted by the ever more insanely harsh reality of marketing mass murder under the guise of creating freedom, much of our race, though still too few to radically transform the totality of our reality, has begun to rise in defense of all against a system that profits only a few. France’s recent experience was part of a hopeful trend in that segments of a public which has been bought, sold and rented into near poverty showed they are tired and demanded social justice over becoming what capital sees as a loss of its private profits. Their awakening from humanity’s nightmare, however brief it may seem, is inspiring as well as overdue. The actions of a predominately working class group of citizens demonstrating with enough fervor to force the French government to at least renege on some issues is in stark contrast to Americans trooping off to the polls to “resist” a personality while their system – the same one the French are up in arms about – disintegrates all around them. If we have anything to be happy about during the annual shopping frenzy of an alleged spiritual time for humanity, in a small way it’s a few changes in our congress, but in a greater way it’s the sign of awakening we see in France which will hopefully spread to more places in the New Year.
The social democratic salvation capital arranged after the depression of the twenties and thirties has collapsed and become a renewal of the worst forms of fascist capital that preceded and soon followed that brief cosmetic safety for some made possible only by the reduction to disfigured ugliness of others. The rise in status of a new middle class for millions in the western world was only possible with the misery of greater multitudes in what was called the third, or undeveloped world, but also the poverty class in that same west. There were people sleeping on the streets of America before, during, and after the last breakdown of capital given the brand name “the great depression”. This latest collapse that began in 2008 and is very possibly the last one that will wake up more than the French is only different in that it is worse and the numbers in the street have grown so much only the intellectually and morally blind cannot see them.
The wealth accumulation of the return to market fundamentalist roots was and continues to be shared by a shrinking minority while growing majorities have seen the facade of humanity brought about by social democratic capitalism dissolve in the reality of a take-no-prisoners brand of marketing. This Artificially Intelligent farce not only prides itself on the creation of poverty and warfare but dulls the sense of many of its innocent subjects by filling heads with propaganda that passes for news, entertainment to distract consciousness further, and the combination of the two that marketers call “infotainment”.
Thus we have a perverse form of capital therapy that herds us into near frenzied lynch mobs of genuinely frustrated and set upon souls directing energy at everything but the cause of most if not all the things that plague us. Rich individuals approaching deity status with economic powers beyond those of past royal despots are relatively invisible while some of their employees in government attract enough attention to be replaced by other of their employees who appeal to one or another interest or identity group affording pleasure to some, pain to most and continued ruling power to the incredibly rich minority at the top of the modern pyramid of capital.
Preposterous stories blaming Russia, China, Iran and possibly the Tooth Fairy for every sign of failure in what passes for a language perversion called the “free world” confuse and convince enough among the well fed and supposedly educated classes for the moment. When hardship eventually hits them in a material, rather than mental way, they will hopefully leave their identity groups and join the human race in the work necessary to transform global society.
Until the public good comes before private profit, things will get worse for all of us and any focus that continues separation of humans from potential majorities into smaller identity groups is simply the age old divide and conquer strategies always employed by minority rulers. This helps lead people with individual moral codes that find poverty and injustice intolerable to not only tolerate but to practice the most dreadful social policies imaginable. Privately, we Americans are as good, kind, compassionate, decent, and humane as any people on earth. Socially, however, we spend trillions on war, billions on pets, leave millions to live in poverty and hundreds of thousands to live on the street, and thus collectively become among the most degenerate moral perverts on the planet.
The skin tone, ethnicity, religion, sex or sexual preference of those serving capital while eating meals and flushing toilets at the white house or in slightly lesser roles in congress makes no difference to their victims reduced to cleaning the debris of death and destruction in the places where they oversee the bombing and looting. After their homes and nations are ruined we welcome some of them as migrants offering us cheap labor and a balm for our souls to maintain holiday spirit until the next slaughter we conduct. Food, clothing and shelter are basic human needs, not separate identity practices. They become so under private profit first economics that assure only some of the public will experience good, and that group is shrinking. The only way to assure a better life for all is for the ruling power to come from people who put the public good first, before any private gain is considered. Everyone has to be assured of food, clothing and shelter before anyone can aspire and work for even more by achieving private profit at the market. There is only one way to achieve that change and end society’s nightmare: the democratic forces of humanity must replace the market forces of capital. Happy New Year.
If you feel like you are unsure of what is real and what is unreal then you are not alone. Our materialistic mode of life is accelerating and expanding so rapidly that it is saturating our modern cultures to the point of abstraction. Life in materially-privileged societies is increasingly shifting into a world of image and show. Many people today are living within their bubbles that are customized by all the digital conveniences tailored to individual needs. By being surrounded by conveniences that satisfy all our needs we are deliberately excluding so much else, including all of life’s serendipities.
Reality – whatever that is or was – has retreated behind a spectacle of make-believe that is playing at being the new, shimmering façade for the 21st century. One result of this is that things which once stood in opposition to one another are losing their meaning and becoming indistinguishable. That is, fixed identities that used to make life easy for us – us/them, friend/enemy, good/bad, and the rest – are now more like false realities. Life has shifted, or has been pushed, into a realm of invention that is being exploited ever more overtly by politicians, mainstream media, and their propaganda machinery. Out of this, a different sense of reality has emerged that succeeds in absorbing differences and contradictions and making them seem smooth rather than jagged. And the result is what I refer to as hyperreality.
The Hyperreality Pill
It is no longer the jagged pill we are forced to swallow, but the smooth pill we are willing to pop. And this smoothness is presented as succulent and easy to swallow. Our modern cultures want us to think that they are simple, smooth, and therefore require our willing obedience. As a consequence, many of us no longer know, or care in knowing, where the resistance is. And if we do feel the need to express resistance, we find ourselves at a loss of where it should be placed. The ‘smooth ideal’ is that society is managed so there can be no efficient resistance against it. This is what Herbert Marcuse once referred to as a ‘comfortable, smooth, reasonable, democratic unfreedom.’ The hyperreal evades any real contact. It is like being at the end of a phone call when waiting for the automated voice service. This evasive strategy of the hyperreal has succeeded in obscuring any site of resistance. It’s all so ‘real,’ and yet of course it is not.
The original notion of hyperreality (a term borrowed from semiotics and postmodern theory) is an inability of consciousness to distinguish reality from a simulation of reality, especially in technologically advanced societies. We are no longer faced with the threat of struggling with our shadows – we are now faced with the threat of our clones. This may be the radical illusion we are slipping into.
Yet the radical illusion of the world has been faced by all cultures. It has been described by mystics, symbolized by art, and struggled over by philosophers. The notion of illusion is not the main issue – rather, it is the medium through which it is conveyed. Or, more importantly, whether it is deliberately exaggerated and amplified. And how, by who – and why? Illusion is now perhaps our greatest industry, especially in western societies. Illusion is the consensus story we are told when growing up and which we all believe in. It’s the story that’s always been told because ‘that’s the way it’s always been.’ No wonder there is so much confusion, which is then fed by another great western industry – therapy.
Hyperreality plays a somewhat different game, with new rules and a different deck of cards. The paradox today is that those of us caught up in the game have no idea what the gameplay is. This is similar to a Jorge Luis Borges short story ‘The Lottery in Babylon’ where all activities in life are governed by the lottery; that is, by chance. And the lottery is run by ‘The Company,’ the rules of which not only are the rules of the game but become the rules of life. If that’s not confusing enough, then we need another hyperreality pill.
Please Sir, Can I Have Some More Hyperreality?
Hyperreality – the inability to distinguish the real from simulation – has become our new reality structure (perception set) and is constructed so that everyone believes in it and goes along with it. There is an underlying feeling that something is not quite right, yet our sense of reality often appears so extreme that it becomes ‘extra-plausible.’ It appears that strange walls of falsehood are being erected between the individual and what is real. The result is a distortion of how we see things. In other words, a perception distortion. To put it simply, hyperreality can be described as the normalization of delusion. When mass society adheres to a collective delusion we call it normal, or ‘reality,’ and if one person strays too far from this consensus thinking then we often label them as delusional, or unstable. It is as if we have been struck by on-coming car headlights and we are like dazed rabbits in the middle of the road. Better not sit around too long wagging our fluffy tails!
The hyperreal smoothes and soothes all contradictions. When once we thought we had ‘left’ politics and ‘right’ politics, these distinctions are now nullified. There is no more any ‘left’ or ‘right,’ only agendas that use varying means to acquire the same power. Any basis of truth has slipped into the sleek substitution – the simulation. Let me ask a question: Do we really think that the face of politics, for example, represents any vestige of truth? There is no more truth in politics than there is in someone wearing a laboratory coat in a television commercial trying to persuade us to buy a particular brand of detergent. There is persuasion and falsity that parades as an element of truth, yet it is a pure simulation. We have slipped into an age where the new ‘reality principle’ tells us that nothing is out of reach and that almost everything can be bought for a price. That is, the real is solid and exists as the flow of goods, services, desires, wants, pleasures, and an almost instant availability.
The question now is how far can the world go before yielding to a permanent state of hyperreality? Perhaps we are already in this state right now; after all, the hyperreal is contagious, like a chain reaction. In the hyperreal world the space of communications is condensed into the simultaneous now; marginal spaces on the periphery are now the hidden spaces where secrecy flows in offshore networks. Our networks of mobility and movement are fragmented into those that privilege some and exclude the many. Even the space above our heads is colonized by the satellites that spy on us. We have street views being watched and analyzed by Google. Our movement, speech, and text being spied on, processed, and interpreted by intelligent algorithms. We have injected a ‘smart-virus’ into the Earth in order to monitor all activity.
Our smooth digital flows allow – with precision and efficiency – for many aspects of our national and private economies to be shifted to the periphery where the secret networks operate. Only the hyperreal economies remain in the spotlight. There is now a global offshore world that moves in exclusive, mostly secretive networks. The phenomenon of offshoring has transformed peripheral and marginal places into central nodes. Offshored economies had mostly operated in the unseen shadows until the scandal of the Panama Papers in 2015. This massive leaking of documents led to political and celebrity scandals across the world, forcing many politicians to resign from their coveted positions. Presidents are now further pressed to release their tax returns to prove their legitimacy. Yet with the farce within the hyperreal, such players as US President Donald Trump can evade these processes with blatant deceptions. Offshored secrecy and surveillance are central to the functioning of contemporary societies.
Hyperreality is also about disappearance.
Please Sir, Can You Tell Me Where I Can Find Some Hyperreality?
Hyperreality is not only about speed and velocity; it is also about size – things are condensing into ever smaller spaces before disappearing altogether. Our urban habitats, information flows, financial transactions, have all shown increased density at the same time as velocity. Financial crashes today are more explosive because they affect so many more systems on a global level. They are dense in their complexity.
At the core of the condensed form what we once knew as the real begins to disappear. At the extremity of economics, the value of money disappears. At the extremity of warfare there is no real humanity, only insanity and immense sorrow, loss, and pain. At the extremity of sexuality there is no warmth only the pornography of lust and the commodity of desire. At the extremity of goodness there is the greed to do good. And even at the extremity of love there is no real love, but obsession and possession. Within these extremities we lose touch with anything that once came close to the real. We are in the slipstream of the hyperreal where the substitute replaces its former host. And the substitute is ‘always-on’ 24/7.
An ‘always-on’ hyperreal world also creates the illusion of mobility. Precisely because we can be connected throughout the world by the technologies in our pocket we are no longer required to move. We can be in the office while speaking with colleagues across the globe; or chatting with friends on another continent whilst remaining seated on our sofas. The contradiction here is that hypermobility creates its own sedentary life. This was explored in the sci-fi film Surrogates (2009) where people purchase remote-controlled humanoid robots to conduct their social life and affairs whilst the real person remains at home wired to their chair. Of course, everyone chooses a pretty or handsome humanoid to represent them (just like avatars in the online world) whilst their real bodies lie fat and underused in the unmoving chair.
We have yet little cultural experience to protect us from the invasion of simulation, artificiality, and the hyperreal. It has all happened too quickly for us and our senses have not fully adjusted. Some of us are struggling with aching bodies, restless sleep cycles, and tired eyes from all the screens in our lives. It is not motion sickness we are suffering from more and more but monitor sickness. One of the features of hyperreality is that communication occurs extremely rapidly, and we are bombarded with information almost constantly.
The hyperreal brings to the fore a convincing collection of disastrous non-events. Everything that is happening somehow gets reported, transmitted, and commented upon, creating an explosive babble of micro-impacts that dominate our superficial conversations. Then the next day they have disappeared into a black hole of amnesia and replaced by another twenty-four-hour dose of attention-topics. This hyperreal lifestyle creates a background noise; a seemingly endless low static buzz that infests our everyday spaces. It’s like the static we experience when changing radio channels, or when a digital television channel isn’t yet synchronized.
Many of us are living in a high-velocity, always-connected, post-historic world. For those people who are not yet attuned to this it is highly unpleasant. Things seemingly take place, but we are not quite sure. This is the dilemma. The hyperreal takes the wounded soul and Photoshops it into a caricature of its former self. It becomes glorified and falsely beautified into the less real, but with hyper-appeal. Events and issues are glossed over, making truths little more than quick sound-bites that flash before our eyes. Despite these absurdities we are still living in a world that is physically very real.
The Hyperreal in Overreaction and Overload
We ultra-react because we are continually under bombardment by a stream of information that keeps us in overload. We wish to know as much as possible about what is going on in our environment because this used to be an evolutionary survival strategy for our ancestors. Yet our distant ancestors didn’t have the Internet, smartphones, and a whole array of connected gadgets – they had clubs and hatchets. We’ve changed our rhythms, or rather our new technologically-pervasive environment has altered our rhythms, and we’ve not had sufficient time biologically, as well as psychologically, to adjust. We are waking up to a world in a new rhythm, with a new, faster speed and an altered resonance; and frankly for most of us it makes us feel as if we’re partially inebriated. The world is making our children respond to its hyperreal energy, and then subsequently we go about tranquilizing them. The rise of young schoolchildren in the modern world taking medications for ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder) is phenomenal. In such a world it becomes much harder to practice and maintain certain types of attention, such as contemplative, reflective, and introspective thought. We are accessing information, yet less so are we translating this information into rich, interior states or memories.
It is as if we are afraid to be bored. We may feel that being bored – or being boring – is a failure; that we have failed to make use of all the information and opportunities at our fingertips. Yet the brain is continually working hard to process all information and external impacts, and so we need to take time off to relax, recharge, and replenish. We need to retain our attentiveness instead of giving in to the lazy approach of digitally-offloading our attention. We cannot navigate our own path through life by GPS. At the same time, retaining attention should not require artificial, chemical inducers. Nor should it require copious amounts of fantasy masquerading as the real. Many highly developed cultures are already basking in the ‘Disneyfication’ effect where western commercial pursuits, practices, and values are promoted around the world as a panacea for all. Disneyfication gives us bigger, faster, and better entertainment that’s the same the world over – US mass culture values on the global stage. Disneyfication hides the ‘real’ places, yet paradoxically many people seem to prefer being in the imaginary. Perhaps its real function is to make us believe that the rest of society is imaginary and only that which resides within the walls of Disney is real. In the hyperreal the spectacle becomes the lived space of our social lives. Disney is colonizing our lives and that colonization becomes the new world map.
The Argentinean writer Jorge Luis Borges famously wrote of a great Empire that created a map that was so detailed it was as large as the Empire itself. The actual map grew and decayed as the Empire itself conquered or lost territory. When the Empire finally crumbled, all that remained was the map. This ‘imaginary map’ finally became the only remaining reality of the great Empire: a simulation of the once physical reality that has now been colonized by its own spectacle. This is where the Real loses its center and becomes origin-less.
The hyperreal too evades a sense of origin, which accounts for the rise in nostalgia, retro-revival, and people dressing up as superheroes. Star trek conventions, speaking Klingon, and entering a whole new universe meshes with the online worlds and their avatars. In the realm of the hyperreal the origin is origin-less, and real place is place-less. We are given new maps of celebration and celebrity that hide a commodity fetishism – yet where is the meaning? We crave for meaning.
The hyperreal incorporates everything within itself. There is no outer or inner within its realm. The only escape is a form of transcendence – a process or act of gnosis – that can see through the superficiality of the spectacle. This is the current dilemma – our systems are extending but not transcending themselves. Many of us are in this situation: we go for more of the same, only a little bit different. The answer lies in becoming beyond difference. Life has always been a sequence of events that we ascribe meaning too. When we experience this sequence in a reasonable enough form then we create our meanings. It is when this sequence of events and signs becomes asymmetrical, non-linear, or accelerated beyond our limits of standardized perception that we begin to lose our ability to ascribe significance to it. Hyperreality is the zone where this slippage occurs and meaning loses its anchorage. The result is that we feel we are being carried away from ourselves. We are being pulled into the flux and flow of this hyperreality and we lose sight of the ground. Not only the grounded-ness of place, but also our inner ground – that part of us which makes us feel human. It is the soulful part of us that we are losing.
In these hyperreal times we need to find a new balance and arrangement between things. Our old arrangements are shifting, and those things once in perceived stability and order are losing their moorings. We should remember that the ‘Real’ exists somewhere inside of us and keep this in mind as the world outside continues its head-long rush into a frenetic, whirlwind of chaotic events. In the end, we can only truly rely on our own good sense and intuition. As Václev Havel stated in one of his addresses, ‘Transcendence is the only real alternative to extinction.’
We must try to remain stable and as sane as possible as life accelerates into its own hyperreality. Otherwise we may not find our own center within the global maelstrom. The ride has only just begun.
The fact that lies and cover stories are now the official norm only makes us love our servitude with greater devotion.
We can summarize the current era in one sentence: truth is what we hide, self-serving cover stories are what we sell. Jean-Claude Juncker’s famous quote captures the essence of the era: “When it becomes serious, you have to lie.”
And when does it become serious? When the hidden facts of the matter might be revealed to the general public. Given the regularity of vast troves of well-hidden data being made public by whistleblowers and white-hat hackers, it’s basically serious all the time now, and hence the official default everywhere is:truth is what we hide, self-serving cover stories are what we sell.
The self-serving cover stories always tout the nobility of the elite issuing the PR: we in the Federal Reserve saved civilization by saving the Too Big To Fail Banks (barf); we in the corporate media do investigative reporting without bias (barf); we in central government only lie to protect you from unpleasant realities–it’s for your own good (barf); we in the NSA, CIA and FBI only lie because it’s our job to lie, and so on.
Three recent essays speak to the degradation of data and factual records in favor of self-serving cover stories and corrosive political correctness.
“It’s not just that isolated individuals are unmasked as corrupt or self-interested (something that is as old as politics), but that the establishment itself starts to appear deceitful and dubious. The distinctive scandals of the 21st century are a combination of some very basic and timeless moral failings (greed and dishonesty) with technologies of exposure that expose malpractice on an unprecedented scale, and with far more dramatic results.
Perhaps the most important feature of all these revelations was that they were definitely scandals, and not merely failures: they involved deliberate efforts to defraud or mislead. Several involved sustained cover-ups, delaying the moment of truth for as long as possible.
(The selective coverage) “generated a sense of a media class who were adept at exposing others, but equally expert at concealing the truth of their own behaviours.
Several of the defining scandals of the past decade have been on a scale so vast that they exceed any individual’s responsibility. The Edward Snowden revelations of 2013, the Panama Papers leak of 2015 and the HSBC files (revealing organised tax evasion) all involved the release of tens of thousands or even millions of documents. Paper-based bureaucracies never faced threats to their legitimacy on this scale.”
When I was a young reporter, I was taught that there were almost always two sides to a story and often more. I was expected to seek out those alternative views, not dismiss them or pretend they didn’t exist. I also realized that finding the truth often required digging beneath the surface and not just picking up the convenient explanation sitting out in the open.
But the major Western news outlets began to see journalism differently. It became their strange duty to shut down questioning of the Official Story, even when the Official Story had major holes and made little sense, even when the evidence went in a different direction and serious analysts were disputing the groupthink.
Looking back over the past two decades, I wish I could say that the media trend that we detected in the mid-1990s had been reversed. But, if anything, it’s grown worse. The major Western news outlets now conflate the discrete difficulties from made-up “fake news” and baseless “conspiracy theories” with responsible dissenting analyses. All get thrown into the same pot and subjected to disdain and ridicule.
In truth, facts today are deemed controversial if they deviate from accepted narratives, and professors must self-censor out of fear of being condemned and losing their jobs.
Based on conversations I’ve had with colleagues still working in academia and from what I can tell about recent cases of censorship, the antagonism is primarily from left-leaning colleagues attacking other liberals.
These instances are indicative of a larger, worrisome trend – instead of debating contentious ideas, those in opposition to them throw words ending in “-phobic” around, shutting the conversation down and pretending they don’t exist.
For those who say ideas that denigrate members of society shouldn’t be entertained, silencing the debate doesn’t make hateful beliefs go away. In many cases, it isn’t controversial findings that pose a threat; the threat comes from the possibility that others will use these facts to justify discrimination. But it’s important that we distinguish between an idea and the researcher putting forth that idea, and the potential for bad behaviour.
With academics avoiding entire areas of research as a result, knowledge currently being produced is constrained, replaced by beliefs that are pleasant-sounding but biased, or downright nonsensical. The recent “grievance studies” investigation, led by academics Peter Boghossian, James Lindsay and Helen Pluckrose, laid bare how bad the problem has become. The trio managed to get seven fake papers (but oh-so politically correct and hence “good to go”–CHS) accepted in high-ranking humanities journals.
In a consumerist-based culture accustomed to 24/7 selling of one self-serving story or another, the fact that lies and cover stories are now the official norm only makes us love our servitude with greater devotion. I’ve noticed a new twist on self-serving propaganda: an alternative opinion isn’t debated, it’s debunked, as if questioning the official narrative is by definition a “conspiracy theory” that can be “debunked” by repeating the official self-serving cover story enough times.
While it is now very late in the life cycle of homo sapiens, with extinction now due to consign us to Earth’s fossil record – see ‘Will humans be extinct by 2026?’ – I would like to make a belated pitch for the importance of the human individual and why nurturing each individual’s uniqueness is so important even if it is now probably too late.
‘Why are you writing about this?’ you might ask, adding that many people accept that each one of us is unique, important and deserves the opportunities and support necessary to live a fulfilling life according to our own culture and choices. It is just the sexists, racists, bigots (religious and otherwise), upper class, governments, corporations, members of the global elite, and some other categories of people, as well as many organizations, particularly those that are violent, that do not.
Well, I wish that this was true. But I am troubled by the overwhelming evidence that suggests it is not. In fact, from my own observations and investigations, I see virtually no evidence that anyone really works to actively nurture the uniqueness of individual human beings. The whole purpose of socialization is to terrorize the child into surrendering their unique individuality so that they become like everyone else.
Of course, you might counter my claim by noting that socialization is necessary to make the child fit into their society but once they have done so, they can make certain choices of their own. This particularly applies once the individual is an adolescent or an adult when, for example, they can choose their own school subjects (from the range offered), their work (from the employment options available), decide for whom they will vote to govern them (from a narrow selection of individuals and political parties) if they live in a ‘democracy’ and, if they work hard enough at socially-approved employment and thereby accumulate enough wealth while living in a relatively wealthy industrial society, they can also choose the foods, clothing, housing, entertainment and travel options they will consume.
Needless to say, to children we do not even offer this parody of ‘freedom’ whether they live in an impoverished country where many of these opportunities are not available or even if they live in a wealthy industrialized one. Under the unending threat of violence (usually labeled ‘punishment’ to obscure from ourselves that we are using violence) by parents, teachers, religious figures and adults generally, children are coerced into doing what we believe is in their ‘best interests’ as we define them. We do not listen to children so that they can tell us what they need in order to travel their own unique life journey.
You might argue that children do not have this capacity to tell us what they need. But this is not my experience and I wonder if it is really yours. Most parents are ready to complain about the enormous effort (that is, violence) it takes ‘to train a child to do as they are told’; that is, to obey the orders of all adults in all contexts.
But because each adult, when they were a child, was terrorized into unconsciously accepting the importance of obedience, only the rarest individual ever reaches a point in life where they are able to consciously reflect on their own childhood and ask fundamental questions about it. Questions such as these: ‘Why do I believe that obedience is so important? And is it?’, ‘Is terrorizing a child into obedience really the best way to raise a child?’ and ‘What would happen if I listened to a child and let them guide me on the support they need to become their own unique Self?’
Tragically, it is that most hallowed of institutions – school – which I call ‘prison for children’ where much of the damage is done. Designed to terrorize children into obedience and conformity on the basis that ‘one size fits all’, school destroys the physical, sensory, intellectual and emotional capacities of children churning out individuals with near-zero capacity to feel anything profound, think creatively and behave powerfully with integrity.
That is, we take the uniquely gifted baby at the moment of birth and turn them into an individual who has multiple lifetime disabilities, physically, sensorily, intellectually and emotionally. For further information and a fuller explanation with links to background documentation, see ‘Do We Want School or Education?’
Of course, this suits governments and those corporations who want vast quantities of cheap labor to work as soldiers, in a factory or at one of the other dangerous and/or meaningless jobs that qualify as ‘employment’ in the modern economy. But before you conclude that it is only working class employment that is in this category, only the rarest of professionals, in any industry, has the capacity to feel deeply, think genuinely creatively (as distinct from within the narrow parameters of their profession) and to act powerfully with integrity. In short, those who work 8-5, five days (or more) a week, doing what others trained them to do at University or elsewhere, are simply being better rewarded for surrendering their soul as a child.
But, unfortunately, it is not school that does the most damage. All children within the childhood home experience extensive ‘invisible’ and ‘utterly invisible’ violence, and many experience ‘visible’ violence as well. These are comprehensively explained in ‘Why Violence?’ and ‘Fearless Psychology and Fearful Psychology: Principles and Practice’.
The inevitable outcome of this violence is that the child suppresses their awareness of the feelings that would have guided them to behave most functionally in each and every circumstance of their life (including about whether or not to attend school). Moreover, a consequence of suppressing their awareness of these feelings is that the child is left with an (unconscious) legacy of fear, self hatred and powerlessness, precisely because they have been terrorized into suppressing their own Self-will and obeying the will of another.
So by the time the child is forced to attend school – no free choices about this, you may have noted, with homeschooling (to an externally-imposed syllabus) only marginally less violent – they have already been terrorized into submission, doing what they have learned is least terrifying and, hopefully, also gains them approval by adults.
Thus, virtually all children are utterly powerless to perceive the world clearly, analyze it, make intelligent and moral choices about how to respond, and to then behave powerfully in doing so. And a decade, more or less, of school makes sure that only the rarest of individuals survives to achieve some version of their evolutionary potential, which required a nurturing, not terrifying, social environment.
In short, this person is not an individual with an unshakable sense of their own self-worth who, as a result, inherently values the worth of all others. They are simply a person who has been terrorized into conformity with a set of localized norms by the significant adults in their life.
At its worst, the outcome is an adult who is so devoid of a Self that they identify with other similarly and equally damaged individuals and then violently attack people in ‘legitimized victim groups’. See, for example, ‘What is Generation Identity?’ This individual might be a prominent political leader who wages war against other national groups that are ‘different’, it might be a corporate executive who exploits people in other parts of the world who are ‘different’ or it might be an ‘ordinary’ person who hurls abuse at someone in their neighborhood who is ‘different’.
But the most common outcome is those who are simply too scared and powerless to respond meaningfully to the violence in our world and particularly the extinction-threatening assault on Earth’s biosphere.
And so, at this point in human history, it is extraordinarily difficult to get the typical human being to focus their attention on reality (including military, economic and ecological reality), astutely observe the phenomena presented, analyze the evidence in relation to it, devise (or seek out) a thoughtful strategy to resolve any problem or conflict that has arisen without resorting to violence, and to then behave appropriately, powerfully and with integrity in response.
Hence, instead of nurturing emotionally and intellectually resourceful and resilient individuals who are engaged with the world and capable of identifying and grappling powerfully with problems and conflicts early so that they do not spiral out of control, we are now faced with a last-ditch fight to avert our own extinction with most people still living in the delusion that we have an ‘end of century’ timeframe. See ‘Human Extinction by 2026? A Last Ditch Strategy to Fight for Human Survival’. How intelligent is that?
So can we get out of this mess?
I don’t know and, frankly, I doubt it. But if you want to be part of the effort to try, consider making ‘My Promise to Children’, which particularly requires the capacity to listen deeply to children – see ‘Nisteling: The Art of Deep Listening’ – so that we start to nurture each child to become the extraordinarily powerful individual that is built into their genetic potential.
And we don’t have to settle for just improving how we relate to children. We can improve our own functionality and access our conscience and courage too. How? See ‘Putting Feelings First’.
If you are following the evidence in relation to the imminent extinction of human beings – see articles above – rather than the garbage published in the corporate media, and want to respond powerfully, consider joining those participating in ‘The Flame Tree Project to Save Life on Earth’.
So how important is the human individual? In the context of life on Earth at the current time, I simply respond with ‘What is more important?’
We can do nothing about our fate if we do not value, above all else, the human individual and their potential. Including our own. This potential is difficult to nurture; it is easily destroyed.
But, as Mohandas K. Gandhi once observed in one of his many memorable lines: ‘The individual is the one supreme consideration.’
And remember, if the challenge to honour the human individual and to act powerfully yourself (as vital parts of our strategy to avert human extinction) sounds daunting, Gandhi also noted that ‘Whatever you do may seem insignificant to you, but it is most important that you do it.’
In essence, the foundation of any strategy for human survival must be the powerful individual. It is this individual who will mobilize some of those around them simply by making their own life-enhancing behavioural choices consciously and courageously.
Biodata: Robert J. Burrowes has a lifetime commitment to understanding and ending human violence. He has done extensive research since 1966 in an effort to understand why human beings are violent and has been a nonviolent activist since 1981. He is the author of ‘Why Violence?’ http://tinyurl.com/whyviolence His email address is flametree@riseup.net and his website is here. http://robertjburrowes.wordpress.com
Robert J. Burrowes
P.O. Box 68
Daylesford, Victoria 3460
Australia
“I must create a system or be enslaved by another Man’s.” ~William Blake
Becoming free is creating your own virtuous system despite being outflanked by unvirtuous systems controlled by unvirtuous men. It is cultivating a healthy way of living despite the unhealthy ways of unhealthy men. It’s becoming so “absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion” (Albert Camus). Then it’s building “a new model that makes the existing model obsolete” (Buckminster Fuller).
But first, we must ask ourselves what we are freeing ourselves for before asking ourselves what we are freeing ourselves from. The answer to that question, what are we freeing ourselves for, will be the foundation of our freedom, the cornerstone of our virtue, the building blocks of a healthier way of being human in the world.
Understand: we must be critical and highly skeptical of any “answer” that should arise from asking this most vital of questions. For if our “answer” is deemed invalid/unhealthy by the dictates of universal law (what’s healthy and what’s not), then it should be discarded as invalid/unhealthy for any humans who are attempting to be virtuous and healthy. Also, every “answer” should remain flexible and adaptable lest it become stagnant, rigid, dogmatic, tyrannical, or stuck in its ways.
A virtuous system follows the Golden Rule and the Nonaggression Principle:
“Beware of the good and the just! They like to crucify those who invent their own virtue for themselves.” ~Nietzsche
As human beings there is no way around the fact that we are social creatures. We need each other to survive in a hostile (entropic) universe. Therefore, the golden rule is paramount.
It is imperative that whatever we are freeing ourselves for does not overreach or impede the health and welfare of others. A truly virtuous system never forces its virtue onto others. The moment a so-called virtuous system forces its virtue or values onto others, it ceases to be virtuous. There’s no way around this absolute fact. Any attempt to “get around it” is a violation of the golden rule and therefore unvirtuous.
Likewise, it is vital that whatever we are freeing ourselves for does not violate the nonaggression principle (See caveat). A truly virtuous system is never directly violent. It is only ever violent in self-defense. The moment a so-called virtuous system becomes directly violent it ceases to be virtuous. The only moral exception to this fact is when violence is necessary to defend against direct violence –and, even then, only as a last resort. Any attempt to use violence to force others into compliance is a violation of the nonaggression principle and therefore unvirtuous.
Caveat: Being social animals in an environment with finite resources is highly complicated. To the extent that our virtuous system indirectly pollutes the environment it gets a pass for somewhat violating the nonaggression principle. The tragedy of the commons is a very real and sometimes unavoidable paradox. But, and here’s the rub, to the extent that our virtuous system directly pollutes the environment it is in direct violation of the nonaggression principle and therefore can no longer be considered virtuous.
A healthy system is sustainable, moral, and eco-conscious:
“A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.” ~ Aldo Leopold
How do we know the current system (society) is unsustainable, immoral and even ecocidal, and thus unfit for healthy and virtuous people? It’s self-evident…
1.) Our society pollutes the air it needs to breathe.
2.) Our society pollutes the water it needs to drink.
3.) Our society pollutes the food it needs to eat.
4.) Our society creates unhealthy individuals it needs to evolve with.
Any system that forces its people to breathe polluted air, drink polluted water, eat polluted food and then continues to do all the things that causes that pollution is a profoundly sick society. Krishnamurti’s quote is a powerful reminder of this vital fact: “It’s no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a profoundly sick society.”
The solution is to create a system that is sustainable, moral, and eco-conscious; to create a healthy system that makes the unhealthy system obsolete.
The problem is that the unhealthy system overreaches. It overreaches with its pollution and it overreaches with its power. So almost any attempt at creating a healthier system will have to be covert and strategically defensive. Both in its attempt to create a healthy system and in its attempt to thwart the encroaching unhealthy system. It will have to be clandestine and stealthy on the one hand, and creative and daring on the other hand.
This will probably result in pockets of horizontal democracy on the group level: sustainable communes, ecovillages, and various types of anarchist groups. While on the individual level it will probably result in plenty of free-range humans, ninjaneers, eco-warriors, and various types of sustainable hermits.
The bottom line: Discovering a healthy and virtuous answer to the question ‘what are we freeing ourselves for?’ is no easy feat. It’s not for the faint of heart. It will take counterintuitive reasoning. It will require you to think outside of whatever box you’ve been conditioned to think inside of for most of your life. It will force you to unwash the brainwash. It will involve reprogramming your programming. It will demand that you question the profoundly sick society you were born into.
Most of all, it will require audacious courage in the face of comfortable cowardice. As Ralph Waldo Emerson said:
“A man is to carry himself in the presence of all opposition…I ought to go upright and vital and speak the rude truth in all ways…Your goodness must have some edge to it — else it is none.”
But, in the end, it will have been worth it. For you will have discovered moral virtue. You will have discovered provident health. You will have discovered authentic freedom. And your conscience will have finally been cleared.
Hallucination (huh-loo-suh–ney-shuh n) : a sensory experience of something that does not exist outside the mind, caused by various physical and mental disorders, or by reaction to certain toxic substances, and usually manifested as visual or auditory images.
Psychiatry has built an entire infrastructure around the definition of normal.
In my training, I learned clinical, diagnostic terms like “magical thinking” to pedantically dismiss any flourishes of wonderment, “delusions of reference” to coldly malign any experience of meaning or synchronicity, and even “grandiosity” if you might deign to think too much of yourself.
When human behavior is medicalized, the foundation of a shared belief system is set up. Some behaviors are unacceptable, some are not. And conforming to these expectations – even through force and involuntary submission, retention, and medication – is essential to reinforcing what is considered normal. Those who are not performing their expected part in the machinery of this system are deemed less or non-functional (the quantification of which, psychiatry assigns a numerical value based on the Global Assessment of Functioning metric scale). But what if it is, as Krishnamurti warned, “no measure of health to be well-adapted to a profoundly sick society”? What if being “functional” requires buying into an entire matrix of illusions, many of which require a total divorce from one’s own soul?
Mental Illness as an indicator of sensitivity
It’s my belief that those who are mentally ill are the canaries in this coal mine. Whose bodies, minds, and spirits are exquisitely sensitive to all that is off, amiss, misaligned, and divergent from truth. What if these illnesses are a special invitation to wake up, to embody, and to move through a dark night, a tight passage, shedding one more artificial skin, revealing a layer closer to an unfettered experience of being, of freedom, and of joy. A sometimes loud reminder to stop eating chemical food, stop participating in the poisoning of this planet, stop working just to work, and start making room for whatever it takes to awaken.
In this case, those hallucinating are those who still believe, despite all of the evidence to the contrary, that we are, as my favorite philosopher, Alan Watts says, flesh robots on a dead rock, spinning out in the middle of nowhere. That the natural world is an indifferent backdrop subject to random forces that we must shield ourselves from. Those who still believe, despite the grossly exposed limitations of the model, that Newtonian physics – linear cause and effect, what you get out is what you put in, push-pull hydraulics – reigns over subtler, nonlinear quantum processes. Quantum physics introduces all manner of uncomfortable concepts to those firmly fixated on the delusional belief that there is an objective, quantifiable, measurable reality of known variables that predictably govern a non-sentient universe.
What if this is a collectively held delusion? Those who have had mystical experiences know that it is but an illusion that our selfness is between our ears and behind our eyes, and that the natural world needs to be managed and controlled. We know that we emerge from the complexity of beingness on this planet and that there is no objective good and bad, and perhaps no objective anything at all.
Alan Watts, puts it this way:
I wonder what you mean when you use the word I.
I’ve been very interested in this problem for a long, long time. And I’ve come to the conclusion that what most civilized people mean by that word is a hallucination—that is to say a false sense of personal identity that is at complete variance with the facts of nature.
And as a result of having a false sense of identity, we act in a way that is inappropriate to our natural environment. And when that inappropriate way of action is magnified by a very powerful technology, we swiftly begin to see the results of a profound discord between man and nature.
As is well known, we are now in the process of destroying our environment as a result of an attempt to conquer it and master it. And we have not realized therefore that our environment is not something other than ourselves.
In assuming that it is, we have made a great mistake and are now paying the price for it.
Resolving the hallucinations of the dominant narrative
The thing is, that a hallucination that becomes aware of itself, dissolves, if it is, indeed a hallucination. In the case of the dominant belief system – the most collectively shared hallucination – this is called awakening and it has everything to do with generating an awareness of the story that we have been telling ourselves.
We have been telling ourselves that we control our lives – or we wouldn’t experience anxiety.
We have been telling ourselves that we are supposed to simply feel ok with what is happening on this planet – or we wouldn’t feel depressed.
We have been telling ourselves that the world is unsafe – or we wouldn’t feel paranoid.
We have been telling ourselves to stay in line, punch the clock, and behave – or we wouldn’t get manic.
So what if we simply turn the light on and wake up to the story and recognize it as such.
Here’s how to wake up and dissolve the illusion:
1. Feel better
Information, in and of itself, changes nothing. We have to experience the truth, viscerally, for our bodies, minds, and spirits to shift and open. In order to generate the conditions of a reunion with the natural world, and a felt sense of having emerged from it, it becomes critical to experience the environment as an inextricable part of oneself. This means that nature is rendered sacred again. The human organism is seen as a miracle before which your consciousness bows. In this light, the only proper comportment is to strip away chemicals and the participation in a chemical free lifestyle, eat whole organic food, and begin the process of healing from many years of desecration. It is my belief that these simple behaviors – being in nature, cleaning up your consumerism, your eating, and beginning to detox – not only result in feeling better but in feeling apart, feeling held, and feeling a deep sense of ok-ness that stands in sharp contrast to the feeling of discord generated by the modern lifestyle.
2. Know better
Once you feel better, you are ready to learn about why. This is a good time to explore the wisdom of our forefathers and mothers, of indigenous cultures, and of modern visionaries. If you’re attracted to science as a means of narrating our shared perceptions, then begin to enjoy a growing body of science that tells a totally different story about the natural world, healing, and the wonder of this planet. Continue to look at the places where you may still be asleep, delusional, or hallucinating!
Part of this process is claiming radical responsibility for your journey, your decisions, and your experience. If you can reclaim all of the energy you are putting towards blaming, resenting, hating, and otherwise feeling victimized, you will be amazed at the experience of empowerment that results. Deeper change, reflexive self-examination, and compassion towards others comes from this shift in perspective.
3. Do better
Once you feel better and you know better, then you are ready to live differently – to do better. But here’s the surprising news. There’s no pilgrimage required, no major planning or strategy, no big decisions. Doing better, in an awakened state, involves simply caring for yourself – kneeling at the altar of your body and getting clear enough to see the programs of fear and control when they creep back into your consciousness. Getting clear involves pausing, every day.
This is how you keep the “I” illusion at bay. You resist the temptation to do, fix, better yourself and your life circumstances endlessly. You let it be. You say yes, I accept. And you work with the flow. You give to others even when you feel most in need. In short, you burn your stories and you have faith. Watts says,
“To have faith is like when you trust yourself to the water. You don’t grab hold of the water when you swim, because if you do you will become stiff and tight in the water, and sink. You have to relax, and the attitude of faith is the very opposite of clinging, and holding on. In other words, a person who is fanatic in matters of religion, and clings to certain ideas about the nature of God and the universe becomes a person who has no faith at all. Instead they are holding tight. But the attitude of faith is to let go, and become open to truth, whatever it might turn out to be.”
Call it living in the Matrix, call it hallucinating, call it Biopolitic, or Maya, if you live life according to what mainstream media, government, and appointed authorities say is, there will come a time when you crack. Freak out. Or choose to opt out. Or when you simply leave the premises. You’ll be labeled with ADHD, Generalized Anxiety, Major Depression, Schizophrenia, or Bipolar Disorder. You will be told you are the sick one, that something is wrong with your inbuilt hardware. The figurative bone will be pointed at you and the collective will support your containment, restraint, and oppression to keep the infrastructure of the illusion intact.
But the mortar is cracking. Too many of us who have felt the truth that is spirituality. To be infused with spirit. To feel your own soul. To stop and inspire, breathe, and understand that without the entire ecosystem of beingness on this planet, you yourself are nothing. And once you have felt the fearlessness of this faith, you can never be controlled again, and you are finally free.
Transcript:
I wonder what you mean when you use the word I.
I’ve been very interested in this problem for a long, long time. And I’ve come to the conclusion that what most civilized people mean by that word is a hallucination—that is to say a false sense of personal identity that is at complete variance with the facts of nature.
And as a result of having a false sense of identity, we act in a way that is inappropriate to our natural environment. And when that inappropriate way of action is magnified by a very powerful technology, we swiftly begin to see the results of a profound discord between man and nature.
As is well known, we are now in the process of destroying our environment as a result of an attempt to conquer it and master it. And we have not realized therefore that our environment is not something other than ourselves.
In assuming that it is, we have made a great mistake and are now paying the price for it.
But most people would agree with the lines of the poet who said “I, a stranger and afraid. In a world I never made” because we have the strong sensation that our own being inside our skin is extremely different from the world outside our skin, that while there may be intelligence inside human skins, and while there may be values and loving feelings, outside the skin is a world of mechanical process which does not give a damn about any individual and which is basically unintelligent, being gyrations of blind force, and so far as the merely biological world is concerned, gyrations of libido, which is Freud’s word for “blind lust.”
It should be obvious that the human being goes with the rest of the universe even though we say in popular speech “I came into this world.”
Now, it is not true that you came into this world. You came out of it in the same way as a flower comes out of a plant or a fruit comes out of a tree. And as an apple tree apples, the solar system in which we live, and therefore the galaxy in which we live, and therefore the system of galaxies in which we live, that system peoples. And therefore, people are an expression of its energy and of its nature.
If people are intelligent—and I suppose we have to grant that if—then the energy which people express must also be intelligent because one does not gather figs from thistles and grapes from thorns. But it does not occur, you see, to the ordinary civilized person to regard himself or herself as an expression of the whole universe. It should be obvious that we cannot exist except in an environment of earth, air, water, and solar temperature, that all these things go with us and are as important to us, albeit outside our skins, as our internal organs, heart, stomach, brain, and so forth.
Now, if then we cannot describe the behavior of organisms without at the same time describing the behavior of their environments, we should realize that we have a new entity of description—not the individual organism alone, but what would now be called a field of behavior, which we must call rather clumsily the “organism environment.” You go with your environment in the same way as your head goes with the rest of your body. You do not find in nature faces arriving in the world sui generis; they go with a body.
But also, bodies do not arrive in a world which would be, for example, a plane, ball of scrubbed rock floating without an atmosphere far away from a star. That will not grow bodies. There is no soil for bodies. There is no complexity of environment which is body-producing.
So, bodies go with a very complicated natural environment. And if the head goes with the body, and the body goes with the environment, the body is as much an integral part of the environment as the head is part of the body.
It is deceptive of course because the human being is not rooted to the ground like a tree. A human being moves about and therefore can shift from one environment to another. But these shifts are superficial. The basic environment of the planet remains a constant. And if the human being leaves the planet, he has to take with him a canned version of the planetary environment.
Now, we are not really aware of this. Upon taking thought and due consideration, it does occur to us, yes, indeed, we do need that environment. But in the ordinary way, we don’t feel it, that is to say we don’t have a vivid sensation of belonging to our environment in the same way that we have a vivid sensation of being an ego inside a bag of skin located mostly in the skull about halfway between the ears and a little way behind the eyes. And it issues in these disastrous results of the ego which, according to 19th century common sense, feels that it is a fluke in nature, and that if it does not fight nature, it will not be able to maintain its status as intelligent fluke.
So, the geneticists are now saying, and many others are now saying, that man must take the course of his evolution into his own hands. He can no longer trust the wiggly, random, and unintelligible processes of nature to develop him any further, but he must interfere with his own intelligence, and through genetic alterations, breed the kind of people who will be viable for human society and that sort of thing.
Now, this I submit is a ghastly error because human intelligence has a very serious limitation. That limitation is that it is a scanning system of conscious attention which is linear—that is to say it examines the world in lines rather as he would pass the beam of a flashlight across a room (or a spotlight).
That’s why our education takes so long. It takes so long because we have to scan miles of lines of print. And we regard that, you see, as basic information.
Now, the universe does not come at us in lines. It comes at us in a multi-dimensional continuum in which everything is happening all together everywhere at once. And it comes at us much too quickly to be translated into lines of print or of other information however fast they may be scanned. And that is our limitation so far as the intellectual life and the scientific life is concerned.
The computer will greatly speed up linear scanning, but it’s still linear scanning. And so long as we are stuck with that form of wisdom, we cannot deal with more than a few variables at once.
Now, what do I mean by that? What is a variable? A variable is any one linear process. Let’s take music. When you play a Bach fugue, and there are four parts to it, you have four variables. You have four moving lines, and you can take care of that with two hands. An organist using two feet can put in two more variables and have six going. And you may realize, if you’ve ever tried to play the organ, that it’s quite difficult to make six independent motions go at once. The average person cannot do that without training. The average person cannot deal with more than three variables at once without using a pencil.
Now, when we study physics, we are dealing with processes in which there are millions of variables. This, however, we handle by statistics in the same way as insurance companies use actuarial tables to predict when most people will die. If the average age of death is 65, however, this prediction does not apply to any given individual. Any given individual will live through plus or minus 65 years. And the range of difference may be very wide indeed of course. But this is alright. The 65 guess is alright when you’re doing large-scale gambling. And that’s the way the physicists works in predicting the behavior of nuclear wavicles.
But the practical problems of human life deal with variables in the hundreds of thousands. Here, statistical methods are very poor. And thinking it out by linear consideration is impossible.
With that equipment then we are proposing to interfere with our genes. And with that equipment also, be it said, we are trying to solve our political, economic, and social problems. And naturally, everybody has the sense of total frustration. And the individual fears “Well, what on earth can I do?”
We do not seem to know a way of calling upon our brains because our brains can handle an enormous number of variables that are not accessible to the process of conscious attention. Your brain is now handling your total nervous system, to be more accurate, your blood chemistry, the secretions from your glands, the behavior of millions of cells. It is doing all that without thinking about it—that is to say without translating the processes it is handling into consciously reviewed words, symbols, or numbers.
Now, when I use the word “thinking,” I mean precisely that process, translating what is going on in nature into words, symbols or numbers—of course, both words and numbers are kinds of symbols.
Symbols bear the same relation to the real world that money bears to wealth. You cannot quench anybody’s thirst with the word “water,” just as you cannot eat a dollar bill and derive nutrition from it.
But using symbols and using conscious intelligence—scanning—has proved very useful to us. It has given us such technology as we have.
But at the same time, it has proved too much of a good thing. At the same time, we’ve become so fascinated with it that we confuse the world as it is with the world as it is thought about, talked about, and figured about—that is to say with the world as it is described. And the difference between these two is vast.
And when we are not aware of ourselves except in a symbolic way, we are not related to ourselves at all. We are like people eating menus instead of dinners. And that’s why we all feel psychologically frustrated.
So then we get back to the question of what do we mean by I?
Well, first of all, obviously, we mean our symbol of ourselves. Now, our ourselves in this case is the whole psychophysical organism, conscious and unconscious, plus its environment. That’s your real self.
Your real self, in other words, is the universe as centered on your organism. That’s you.
Let me just clarify that a little for one reason. What you do is also a doing of your environment. Your behavior is its behavior as much as its behavior is your behavior; it’s mutual. We could say it is transactional. You are not a puppet which your environment pushes around, nor is the environment a puppet which you push around. They go together, they act together.
In the same way, for example, if I have a wheel, one side of it going down is the same as the other side of it going up. When you handle the steering wheel of a car, are you pulling it or are you pushing it? No, you’re doing both, aren’t you? When you pull it down this side, you are pushing it up that side. It’s all one.
So, there’s a push-pull between organism and environment. We are only rarely aware of this as when in curious alterations of consciousness, which we call “mystical experience,” “cosmic consciousness,” an individual gets the feeling that everything that is happening is his own doing, or the opposite of that feeling that he isn’t doing anything, but that all his doings, his decisions, and so forth, are happenings of nature.
You can feel it either way. You can describe it in these two completely opposite ways, but you’re talking about the same experience. You’re talking about experiencing your own activity and the activity of nature as one single process. And you can describe it as if you were omnipotent like God or as if it were completely deterministic and you hardly existed at all.
But remember, both points of view are right. And we’ll see where that gets us.
But we don’t feel that, do we, ordinarily? What we feel instead is an identification of ourselves with our idea of ourselves, or I would rather say, with our “image” of ourselves. And that’s the person or the ego.
You play a role, you identify with that role. I play a role. It’s called Alan Watts. And I know very well that that’s a big act. I can play some other roles besides Alan Watts if necessary. But I find this one is better for making a living.
But I assure you, it’s a mask, and I don’t take it seriously. The idea of my being a kind of messiah or guru or savior of the world just breaks me up because I know me. It’s very difficult to be holy in the ordinary sense.
So, I know I’m not that. But most of us are taught to think that we are whom we are called. And when you’re a little child, and you begin to learn a role, and your parents and your peers approve of your being that, they know who you are. You’re predictable, so you can be controlled.
But when you act out of role, and you imitate some other child’s behavior, everybody points the finger and says, “You’re not being true to yourself.” “Johnny, that’s not you. That’s Peter.” And so you learn to stay Peter or to stay Johnny.
But of course, you’re not either… because this is just the image of you. It’s as much of you as you can get into your conscious attention which is precious little.
Your image of yourself contains no information about how you structure your nervous system. It contains no information about your blood chemistry. It contains almost no information about the subtle influences of society upon your behavior. It does not include the basic assumptions of your culture, which are all taken for granted and unconscious. You can’t find them out unless you study other cultures to see how their basic assumptions differ.
It includes all kinds of illusions that you’re completely unaware of as, for example, that time is real and that there is such a thing as a past which is pure hokum. But nevertheless, all these things are unconscious in us and they are not included in our image of ourselves, nor of course included in our image of ourselves. Is there any information about our inseparable relationships with the whole natural universe?
So, this is a very impoverished image. When you ask a person, “What did you do yesterday?” they’ll give you a historical account of a certain number of events in which they participated and a certain number of things which they saw, used, or were clobbered by. But realize at once that this history leaves out most of what happened.
I, in trying to describe what happens to me this evening, will never be able to describe it because there are so many people here that if I were to talk about everyone whom I’ve seen, what they were wearing, what color their hair was, what sort of expressions they had on their faces, I would have to talk through doomsday.
So, instead of this rich physical experience—which is very rich indeed—I have to attenuate it in memory in description to saying, “Oh, I met a lot of people in Philadelphia. There were men, and there were women. Lots of them were young, and some of them were old.” It’s a most utterly impoverished account of what went on.
So, therefore, in thinking of ourselves in this way, what I did yesterday, what I did the day before, in terms of this stringy, mangy account, all I have is a caricature of myself. And you know the caricaturist doesn’t draw you all in; he just put certain salient features whereby people will recognize you. It’s all a skeleton.
So, we are, as it were, conceiving ourselves as a bunch of skeletons. And they’ve got no flesh on them, just a bunch of bones. And no wonder we all feel inadequate!
We’re all looking for something—to the future to bring us the goodie that we know we ought to have. There’s a golden goodie at the end of the line somewhere. There’s a good time coming be it ever so far away, that one far-off divine event which all creation moves… we hope.
And therefore, we say of something that’s no good, it has no future. I would say it has no present, but everybody says it has no future.
Now, here we are, as it were, psychically starved and always therefore looking—seeking, seeking, seeking. And this confused seeking is going on everywhere. We don’t know what we want. Nobody knows what they want. We say, yes, we think of what we want in vague terms—pleasure, money, wealth, love, fulfillment, personal development. But we don’t know what we mean by all that.
If a person really sits down to figure out, write a long essay, 20 pages, on your idea of heaven, it’ll be a sorry production.
You could see it already in medieval art whether it be depictions of heaven and hell. Hell is always much better than heaven—although it’s uncomfortable. It’s a sadomasochistic orgy. Wowie! Hell is really rip-roaring. Whereas all the saints in heaven are sitting very, very smug and demure like they were in church.
And you’ll see also the multitudes of the saved. Instead of this writhing wormy thing, you can see all their heads which the artist has drawn to abbreviate them, just the tops of their heads in masses. They look like cobblestone street flattened out.
So, what has happened then is this, that our eye is an illusion. It’s an image. And it is no more our self than an idol is the godhead.
But we say, “It can’t be so because I feel I really exist. It isn’t just an idea in my head. It’s a feeling. I feel me!” Well, what is it that you feel when you feel I?
Well, what is it that you feel when you feel I, I’ll tell you.
What do you do when somebody says, “Pay attention”? What is the difference between looking at something and taking a hard look at it, or between hearing something and listening intently? What’s the difference? What’s the difference between waiting while something goes on and enduring it?
Why, the difference is this.
When you pay attention instead of just looking, you screw up your face. You frown and stare. That is a muscular activity around here. When you will, you grit your teeth or clench your fists. When you endure or control yourself, you pull yourself together physically, and therefore, you get uptight. You hold your breath. You do all kinds of muscular things to control the functioning of your nervous system. And none of them have the slightest effect on the proper operation of the nervous system.
If you stare at things, you will rather fuzz the image than see them clearly. If you listen intently by concentrating on muscles around the ears, you will be so much attending to muscles here that you won’t hear things properly. And you may get singing in the ears. If you tighten up with your body to pull yourself together, all you do is constrict yourself.
I remember in school, I sat next to a boy who had great difficulty in learning to read. And what they always say to children is, “Try! If you can’t do something, you must try!” So the boy tries. And what has he done? When he’s trying to get out words, he grunts and groans as if he were lifting weights. And the teacher is impressed. The boy is really trying and gives him a B for effort.
It has nothing to do with it.
Now, we all make this muscular straining with the thought that it’s achieving psychological results, the sort of psychological results it’s intended to achieve. Now all this amounts to is this. You’re taking off in a jet plane, you’re a mile down the runway. The thing isn’t up in the air yet, you get nervous, so you start pulling at your seatbelt. That’s what it is now.
Now, that is a chronic feeling. We have it in us all the time. And it corresponds to the word I. That’s what you feel when you say I. You feel that chronic tension. When an organ is working properly, you don’t feel it.
If you see your eye, you’ve got cataract. If you hear your ears, you’ve got singing in your ears. You’re getting in the way of hearing. When you are fully functioning, you are unaware of the organ.
When you’re thinking clearly, your brain isn’t getting in your way. Actually, of course, you are seeing your eyes in the sense that everything you see out in front of you is a condition in the optic nerves at the back of the skull. That’s where you’re aware of all this. But you’re not aware of the eye as the eye. I’m talking about the optical eye.
So, when we are aware of the ego I, we are aware of this chronic tension inside ourselves. And that’s not us. It’s a futile tension. So when we get the illusion, the image of ourselves, married to a futile tension, you’ve got an illusion married to a futility. And then, you wonder “why I can’t do anything, why I feel, in the face of all the problems of the world, impotent, and why I somehow cannot manage to transform I.”
Now, here we get to the real problem. We’re always telling each other that we should be different. I’m not going to tell you that tonight. Why not? Because I know you can’t be. I’m not going to. That may sound depressing, but I’ll show you it isn’t. It’s very heartening.
Everybody you see who is at all sensitive and awake to their own problems and human problems is trying to change themselves. We know we can’t change the world unless we change ourselves. If we’re all individually selfish, we’re going to be collectively selfish. If we don’t really love people, and only pretend to, somehow we’ve got to find a way to love. After all, it’s said in the Bible, “Thou shalt love the Lord, thy God, and your neighbor as yourself.” You must love. Yeah, we all agree. Sure! But we don’t.
In fact, one psychologist very smartly asked a patient, “With whom are you in love against?” And this particularly becomes appalling when we enter into the realm of higher things, by which I mean spiritual development.
Everybody these days is interested in spiritual development—and wisely because we want to change our consciousness. Many people are well aware that this egocentric consciousness is a hallucination. And that they presume it’s the function of religion to change it because that’s what the Zen Buddhists and yogis and all these people in the Orient are doing, they are changing their state of consciousness to get something called satori or mystical experience or nirvana or moksha or what-have-you.
And everybody around here is really enthused about that because you don’t get that in church. I mean, there has been Christian mystics, but the church has been very quiet about them.
In the average church, all you get is talk. There’s no meditation, no spiritual discipline. They tell God what to do interminably as if He didn’t know. And then, they tell the people what to do as if they could or even wanted to. And then, they sing religious nursery rhymes.
And then, to cap it all, the Roman Catholic Church, which did at least have an unintelligible service, which was real mysterious and suggested vast magic going on, they wouldn’t put the thing into bad English. They took away incense, and they took away… they became a bunch of Protestants. The thing was just terrible!
So now, all these Catholics are at loose ends. As Claire Boothe Luce put it—not to be a pun, but she said, “It’s no longer possible to practice contemplative prayer at mass” because you’re being advised, exhorted, edified all the time. That becomes a bore. Think of God listening to all those prayers. I mean, talking about grieving the Holy Spirit. It’s just awful! People have no consideration for God at all.
But in pursuing these spiritual disciplines—yoga and Zen and so forth, and also psychotherapy—there comes up a big difficulty. And the big difficulty is this: I want to find a method whereby I can change my consciousness, therefore to improve myself. But the self that needs to be improved is the one that is doing the improving. And so I’m rather stuck.
I find out the reason that I think I believe say in God is that I sure hope that, somehow, God will rescue me. In other words, I want to hang on to my own existence. I feel rather shaky about doing that for myself, but I just hope there’s a god who’ll take care of it. Or if I could be loving, I would have a better opinion of myself. I’d feel better about it. “I could face myself,” as people say, “if I were more loving.”
So, the unloving me, somehow, by some gimmickry, has to turn itself into a loving me. And this is just like trying to lift yourself off the ground with your own bootstraps. It can’t be done!
And that’s why religion, in practice, mainly produces hypocrisy and guilt because of the constant failure of these enterprises.
People go and study Zen. They come back and say, “Wow! Getting rid of your ego is a superhuman task.” I assure you, it’s going to be very, very difficult to get rid of your ego. You’re going to have to sit for a long time and you’re going to get the sorest legs. It’s hard work! All you wretched kids who think you’re getting rid of your ego or something or another, easy yoga, you don’t know what you’re in for.
When it really comes down to the nitty-gritty, you know, the biggest ego trip going is getting rid of your ego.
And the joke of it all is our ego doesn’t exist! There’s nothing to get rid of. It’s an illusion as I tried to explain. But you still want to ask how to stop the illusion. Well, who’s asking?
In the ordinary sense in which you use the word I, how can I stop identifying myself with the wrong me? But the answer is simply you can’t.
Now, the Christians put this in their way when they say that mystical experience is a gift of divine grace. Man, as such, cannot achieve this experience. It is a gift of God. And if God doesn’t give it to you, there’s no way of getting it. Now, that is solidly true. You can’t do anything about it because you don’t exist.
Well, you say, “That’s pretty depressing news.” But the whole point is it isn’t depressing news. It is the joyous news. There’s a Zen poem which puts it like this. Talking about it, it means the mystical experience, Satori, the realization that you are the eternal energy of the universe like Jesus did. It like this:
“You cannot catch hold of it, nor can you get rid of it. In not being able to get it, you get it! When you speak, it’s silent. When you’re silent, it speaks.”
Now, in not being able to get it, you get it, because this whole feeling, what Krishnamurti is trying to explain to people, for example, when he says, “Why do you ask for a method? There is no method. All methods are simply gimmicks for strengthening your ego.”
So, how do we not do that? He says, “You’re still asking for a method.” There is no method. If you really understand what your I is, you will see there is no method.
Is it just so sad? But it’s not. This is the gospel, the good news, because if you cannot achieve it, if you cannot transform yourself, that means that the main obstacle to mystical vision has collapsed. That was you.
What happens? You can’t do anything about it. You’re at your wit’s end. What would you do? Commit suicide. But supposing you just put that off for a little while, wait and see what happens.
You can’t control your thoughts, you can’t control your feelings because there is no controller. You are your thoughts and your feelings. They’re running along, running along, running along. Just sit and watch them. There they go!
You’re still breathing, aren’t you? Still growing your hair? Still seeing and hearing? Are you doing that? I mean is breathing something that you do? Do you see, I mean do you organize the operations of your eyes? You know exactly how to work those rods and cones in the retina? Do you do that? It’s a happening. It happens.
So, you couldn’t feel all this happening. Your breathing is happening. Your thinking is happening. Your feeling is happening—your hearing, your seeing. The clouds are happening across the sky. The sky is happening blue. The Sun is happening shining.
There it is, all that’s happening. And may I introduce to you… this is yourself.
This begins to be a vision of who you really are. And that’s the way you function. You function by happening, that is to say, by spontaneous occurrence.
And this is not a state of affairs that you should realize. I cannot possibly preach it to you because the minute you start thinking, “I should understand that,” this is the stupid notion again of “I should bring it about” when there is no you to bring it about. So that’s why I’m not preaching. You can only preach to egos. All I can do is to talk about what is. It amuses me to talk about what is because it’s wonderful. I love it. And therefore, I like to talk. If I get paid for it, then I make my living. And sensible people get paid for doing what they enjoy doing.
So, you see, the whole approach here is not to convert you, not to improve you, but for you to discover that if you really knew the way you are, things would be sane. But you see, you can’t do that. You can’t make that discovery because you’re in your own way, so long as you think “I’m I,” so long as that hallucination blocks it.
And the hallucination disappears only in the realization of its own futility, when at last you see you can’t do it. You cannot make yourself over. You cannot really control your own mind.
See, when we try to control the mind, a lot of yoga teachers try to get you to control your own mind mainly to prove to you that you can’t do it. There’s nothing, you know, a fool who persists in his folly will become wise. So what they do is they speed up the folly.
And so, you get concentrating. And you can have a certain amount of superficial and initial success by a process commonly called self-hypnosis. You can think you’re making progress, and a good teacher will let you go along that way for a while until he really throws you with one. Why are you concentrating?
See, Buddhism works this way. The Buddha said, “If you suffer, you suffer because you desire, and your desires are either unattainable. You’re always being disappointed or something. So cut out desire.” So, those disciples went away, and they stamped on desire, jumped on desire, cut the throat of desire, and threw out desire. But then they came back and Buddha said, “But you are still desiring not to desire.” Now they want to know how to get rid of that.
So when you see that that’s nonsense, there naturally comes over you a quietness. And seeing that you cannot control your mind, you realize there is no controller. What you took to be the thinker of thoughts is just one of the thoughts. What you took to be the feeler of the feelings, which was that chronic muscular strain, was just one of the feelings. What you took to be the experience of experience is just by the experience.
So, there isn’t any thinker of thoughts, feeler of feelings. We get into that bind because we have a grammatical rule that verbs have to have subjects. And the funny thing about that is that verbs are processes and subjects are nouns which is supposed to be things. How does a noun start a verb? How does a thing put a process into action? Obviously, it can’t.
But we always insist that there is this subject called the “knower.” And without a knower, there can’t be knowing. Well, that’s just a grammatical rule. It isn’t a rule of nature. In nature, there’s just knowing like you’re feeling it.
I have to say you are feeling it as if you were somehow different from the feeling. When I say, “I am feeling,” what I mean is there is feeling here. When I say you are feeling, I mean there is feeling there. I have to say even “there is feeling.” What a cumbersome language we have. Chinese is easier. You don’t have to put all that in. And you say things twice as fast in Chinese as you can in any other language.
Well, anyway, when you come to see that you can do nothing, that the play of thought, of feeling, et cetera, just goes on by itself as a happening, then you are in a state which we will call meditation. And slowly, without being pushed, your thoughts will come to silence—that is to say all the verbal symbolic chatter going on in the skull.
Don’t try and get rid of it because that will again produce the illusion that there’s a controller. It goes on, it goes on, it goes on. Finally, it gets tired of itself and bored and stops. And so then there’s a silence. And this is a deeper level of meditation.
And in that silence, you suddenly begin to see the world as it is. You don’t see any past. You don’t see any future. You don’t see any difference between yourself and the rest of it. That’s just an idea. You can’t put your hand on the difference between myself and you. You can’t blow it. You can’t bounce it. You can’t pull it. It’s just an idea. You can’t find any material body because material body is an idea; so is spiritual body. This is somebody’s philosophical notions.
So, reality isn’t material. That’s an idea. Reality isn’t spiritual. That’s an idea. Reality is {claps}.
So, we find, if I’ve got to put it back into words, that we live in an eternal now. You’ve got all the time in the world because you’ve got all the time there is which is now.
And you are this universe. You feel the strange feeling when—ideas don’t define the differences. You feel that other people’s doings are your doings. And that makes it very difficult to blame other people. If you’re not sophisticated theologically, you may of course run screaming in the streets and say that you’re God.
In a way, that’s what happened to Jesus because he wasn’t sophisticated theologically. He only had Old Testament biblical theology behind him. If he’d had Hindu theology, he could have put it more subtly. But it was only that rather primitive theology of the Old Testament. And that was a conception of God as a monarchical boss. And you can’t go around and say, “I’m the boss’ son.” If you’re going to say, “I’m God,” you must allow it for everyone else too.
But this was a heretical idea from the point of view of Hebrew theology. So what they did with Jesus was they pedestalized him. That means “kicked him upstairs,” so that he wouldn’t be able to influence anyone else. And only you may be God. That stopped the gospel cold right at the beginning. It couldn’t spread.
Well, anyway, this is therefore to say that the transformation of human consciousness through meditation is frustrated. So long as we think of it in terms of something that I, myself, can bring about by some kind of wangle, by some sort of gimmick.
Because you see, that leads to endless games of spiritual one-upmanship and of guru competitions. “My guru is more effective than your guru. My yoga is faster than your yoga. I’m more aware of myself than you are. I’m humbler than you are. I’m sorrier for my sins than you are. I love you more than you love me.” There is interminable goings-on about which people fight and wonder whether they are a little bit more evolved than somebody else and so on. All that can just fall away.
And then, we get this strange feeling that we have never had in our lives except occasionally by accident. Some people get a glimpse that we are no longer this poor little stranger and afraid in the world it never made, but that you are this universe and you are creating it at every month.
Because, you see, it starts now. It didn’t begin in the past. There was no past. So if the universe began in the past, when that happened, it was now, see? But it’s still now.
And the universe is still beginning now and it’s trailing off like the wake of a ship from now. When the wake of the ship fades out, so does the past. You can look back there to explain things, but the explanation disappears. You’ll never find it there. Things are not explained by the past. They’re explained by what happens now that creates the past. It begins here.
That’s the birth of responsibility because, otherwise, you can always look over your shoulder and say, “Well, I’m the way I am because my mother dropped me. And she dropped me because she was neurotic because her mother dropped her” and away we go back to Adam and Eve or to a disappearing monkey or something. We’ll never get at it.
But in this way, you’re faced with… you’re doing all this. And that’s an extraordinary thought.
So, cheer up! You can’t blame anyone else for the kind of world you’re in. And if you know, you’ll see that I, in the sense of the person, the front, the ego, it really doesn’t exist, then it won’t go to your head too badly if you wake up and discover that you’re God.
After the Crash 