The Greatest Spiritual Event of Our Time, According to Rudolf Steiner

Posted on May 13, 2018 by Reid Mukai

By Paul Levy

Almost a hundred years ago, as if peering into a crystal ball and predicting the future, spiritual teacher and clairvoyant Rudolf Steiner[1] prophesied that the most momentous event of modern times was what he referred to as the incarnation of the etheric[2] Christ. By the “etheric Christ,”[3] Steiner is referring to a modern-day version of Christ’s resurrection body, which can be conceived of as being a creative, holy and whole-making spirit that is inspiring human evolution as it operates upon the body of humanity through the collective unconscious of our species. Involving a radically new understanding of a timeless spiritual event, the etheric Christ, instead of incarnating in full-bodied physical form, is approaching via the realm of spirit—as close as this immaterial spirit can get to the threshold of the third-dimensional physical world without incarnating in materialized form. To quote Steiner, “Christ’s life will be felt in the souls of men more and more as a direct personal experience from the twentieth century onwards.”[4]

A spiritual event of the highest order, Steiner felt that the incarnation of the etheric Christ is “the most sublime human experience possible”[5] and “the greatest turning point in human evolution.”[6] In his talks, Steiner refers to the etheric Christ as “Christ in the form of an Angel.”[7] Christ himself can be seen as the primordial revelation of the archetype of the Angel (who, after all, are messengers), what is known as the “Angel Christos.” The Angel Christos is a nonlocal, atemporal spirit, existing outside of space and time, that is simultaneously immersed in, infused with—and expressing itself through—events in our world. Christ as an angel reveals itself for those who have eyes to see and ears to hear as it weaves itself, not only through the warp and woof of the flow of events comprising history, but through our souls as well.

To quote Steiner, “in the future we are not to look on the physical plane for the most important events but outside it, just as we shall have to look for Christ on His return as etheric form in the spiritual world.”[8] The most important spiritual events of any age often remain hidden from the eyes of those who are entranced in a materialistic conception of the world. It greatly behooves us to not sleep through, but rather, to consciously bear witness to what has been up until now taking place mostly unconsciously, subtly hidden beneath the mundane consciousness of our species. If this epochal spiritual event, to quote Steiner, “were to pass unnoticed, humanity would forfeit its most important possibility for evolution, thus sinking into darkness and eventual death.”[9]If the deeper spiritual process of the incarnation of the etheric Christ—“Christ in the form of an Angel”—is not understood, this potentially liberating process transforms into its opposite (into the demonic).

Steiner felt that the advent of the etheric Christ—the Parousia (the Second Coming)—was the greatest mystery of our time. He was of the opinion that the incarnation of the etheric Christ was the deeper spiritual process that is in-forming and giving shape to the current multi-faceted crises (and opportunities) that humanity presently faces. This is to say that the seemingly never-ending wars and conflicts that are taking place all over the globe are the shadows cast by spiritual events from a higher-dimension that are animating earthly happenings. One of the main reasons that these multiple crises are so dangerous is because their deeper spiritual source remains unrecognized.

The veil that formerly concealed the spiritual world from what we call “the real world” has fallen away, now making it possible to bear witness to how physical events are an outer, external reflection of a parallel archetypal process taking place on a spiritual plane. It is as if a spiritual dimension envelops, contains and is expressing itself through material reality. The seemingly mundane physical world and the spiritual world are revealing themselves to be indistinguishable, which is to say that life itself is resuming its revelatory function. More and more of us are beginning to recognize this; our realization is not separate from the increasing emergence of the etheric Christ. Consciousness of the restored unity between matter and spirit is not merely an awareness of this original unity, but is the very act that completes and perfects this unity.

The higher order of light encoded within the etheric Christ is bringing to light the darkness which is seemingly opposed to it, which further helps its light nature to be seen. The true radiance of the light can only be seen and appreciated in contrast to the depth of darkness it illumines. It is as if the revelation of something is through its opposite—just as darkness is known through light, light is known through darkness. A fundamental spiritual principle of creation itself appears to be that when one force—e.g., light—begins to emerge in the universe a counterforce, opposed to the first, arises at that same moment.

Just as shadows belong to light, these light and dark powers are interrelated, reciprocally co-arising, inseparably contained within and expressions of a single deeper unifying process. These opposites belong together precisely insofar as they oppose each other; their seeming antagonism is an expression of their essential oneness. The brightest light and darkest shadow mysteriously evoke each other, as if—behind the scenes—they are secretly related. In essence, spirit is incarnating, and it is revealing itself through the very darkness that it is making visible.

Commenting on the other—and less recognized—half of the Second Coming, Steiner chillingly said, “before the Etheric Christ can be properly understood by people, humanity must have passed through the encounter with the Beast.”[10] By “the Beast” he means the apocalyptic beast,[11] the radically evil. The Beast is the guardian of the threshold through which we must pass in order to meet the lighter, celestial and heavenly part of our nature.

As soon as I read Steiner’s prophecy I felt the truth of his words. I recognized how what Steiner was saying mapped onto—and created context for—what is happening in our current world-gone-crazy. The ever-increasing darkness that has descended like a plague onto humanity and is compelling us to race towards our own self-destruction is hard to face, let alone fathom. The evil of our time has become so gigantic that it has virtually outstripped the symbol and become autonomous, un-representable, beyond comprehension, practically unspeakable.

I also recognized the truth of what Steiner was saying based on my own inner experience. I have noticed that as I get closer to connecting with the light within myself, the forces of darkness seem to become more active and threatening. It is as if there is something in me—and in everyone, which is to say this situation isn’t personal—that desperately doesn’t want us to recognize and step into our light. This internal process is taking place within the subjectivity of countless individual human psyches, which is then reflexively being collectively acted out—in my language, “dreamed up”—en masse in, as and through the outside world. The dialectical tensions of the cosmos (the macrocosm)—the conflict between the opposites of dark and light—are mirrored both in the external collective body politic as well as within the psyche of each individual (the microcosm). It greatly serves us to recognize this.

In his prophecy, Steiner is pointing out that our encounter with the Beast is initiatory, a portal that—potentially—introduces us to the Christ figure. To quote Steiner, “Through the experience of evil it will be possible for the Christ to appear again.”[12] It is noteworthy that the opposites are appearing together: coinciding with the peak of evil is an inner development which makes it possible for the etheric Christ—who is always present and available[13]—to be seen and felt as a guiding presence that can thereby become progressively more embodied in humans, both individually and collectively as a whole species. In the extreme of one of the opposites is the seed for the birth of the other.[14]

This is a Kabbalistic idea – for example, in the Zohar, the key Kabbalistic text, it says, “There is no light except that which issues forth from darkness…and no true good except it proceed from evil.”[15] As I deepen my familiarity with Steiner’s work, it definitely dovetails with the insights of the Kabbalah, which is considered to be one of the most profound spiritual and intellectual movements in human history. Evil, according to both Steiner and the Kabbalah, though by definition diametrically opposed to the good, is—paradoxically—a catalyst for bringing the power of goodness to the fore.

Steiner felt that because Christ was destined to appear in the etheric body, “a kind of mystery of Golgotha is to be experienced anew.”[16] What Steiner means by the “mystery of Golgotha” is Christ’s crucifixion, his descent into the underworld and subsequent resurrection. As a result of the first mystery of Golgotha over two thousand years ago—what Steiner considers an act of divine grace bestowed on humanity from above—Christ has been establishing himself in the unconscious dark depths of humanity’s soul. The “Christ-impulse,” in Steiner’s words, “was to penetrate to the dark depths of man’s inner being … to the deepest part of man’s nature.”[17]

Like an iteration of a deeper fractal, this archetypal, timeless mystery now “is to be experienced anew” in a modern-day version. In no other world than the physical world can we learn the true nature of the mystery of Golgotha. To quote Steiner, “Not in vain has man been placed in the physical world; for it is here we must acquire that which leads us to an understanding of the Christ-Impulse!”[18]

Unlike the first mystery of Golgotha, however, in the culmination of this renewed mystery, humanity becomes engaged as active participants, playing a decisive role in the cosmic drama. This too is a Kabbalistic insight: humanity co-partners with the divine so as to complete the creative act of God’s Incarnation. Instead of the Incarnation being through one man, however, in our current day it is taking place through all of humanity. The modern-day coming of the Messiah is through the transformed and awakened consciousness of humanity as a whole. In a very real sense, we are the very Messiah we have been waiting for. “By a strange paradox,” according to Steiner, it is “through the forces of evil” that “mankind is led to a renewed experience of the Mystery of Golgotha.”[19]

The mystery and drama of the Christ event is now located and consummated in humanity, who become its living carrier. The events that were formulated in dogma are now brought within the range of direct psychological experience and become an essential aspect of the process of individuation. Whether we know it or not, we have become drafted and are being assimilated into a divinely-sponsored process. Not an effortful, intentional straining after imitation, this becomes an involuntary and spontaneous personal experience of the reality symbolized by the sacred legend.

The brightest, most radiant and luminous light simultaneously casts and calls forth the darkest shadows. Through this process of Christ manifesting in the etheric realm, humanity is exposed to evil in a way never before experienced, such that—in potential—we may be able to find the good and the holy in a more real and tangible way than was previously possible. Humanity’s highest virtues and potentialities are activated and called forth when confronted by evil.

It is an archetypal idea that ascending towards the light always necessitates a confrontation with and descent into the darkness; the Kabbalah calls this “a descent on behalf of the ascent.” There are certain points in time when humans—individually and/or collectively—are pulled down, submerged into darker powers, brought below a certain level against their will. This shamanic descent can be envisioned as a test for humanity, so that we may learn, through our own efforts, how to lift ourselves up. But we raise ourselves not without God’s help, however, who, paradoxically, is the very sponsor of our descent in the first place.

Seen symbolically, the process of descent—as universally exemplified in the myth of the hero—reveals that only in the region of danger can we find the alchemical “Treasure Hard to Attain.” Speaking of when someone goes through what he refers to as “the Descent into Hell,” Steiner says, “When this has been experienced, it is as though the black curtain has been rent asunder and he looks into the spiritual world.”[20]

The mystery of humanity’s higher nature is inseparable from the mystery of evil. No realization of the light would ever occur without first getting to know its opposite. Whoever wants to support the sacred must be able to protect it and we can only do so when we know the forces that oppose it. The question is not whether we believe in evil, but whether or not we are able to recognize and discern, in the actual events of life, that dimension of experience that the ancients called evil. Speaking about the evolutionary stage of modern humanity, Steiner said, “now we have to come to terms with evil.”[21] It is beyond debate that in our current age we are called to deal with evil—only those who choose to stay asleep, or are overly identified with the light (and hence, project out and dissociate from their own darkness) are blind to this.

It is of the utmost importance to recognize evil, which involves developing our capability to perceive differences, i.e., to cultivate discernment. Evil has an intense desire to remain incognito, below the radar, as its power to wreak havoc is dependent on not being recognized. If we don’t recognize evil, however, we will surely succumb to it, thereby unconsciously acting it out. We are offered a choice—to come to terms with evil or continue to avoid it (which ineluctably makes us complicit in it). Recognizing and confronting evil means getting to know its operations within ourselves without fully succumbing to it.

Recognizing the evil within us is a moment of great peril, as we don’t want to fall hopelessly into paralyzing despair at seeing the shocking depth of our own darkness. Another danger is to unconsciously identify with the evil we are seeing, thinking we are that. The key is to see these impersonal darker forces within us, recognize that we share them in common with all humanity, and then “distinguish ourselves” from them. This is to see these darker forces as paradoxically both belonging to ourselves while being other than who we are. Becoming conscious of these darker forces takes away their power (which is dependent on not being seen), liberating us from being under their thrall. It is a genuine spiritual event when we confront these darker forces in and through ourselves as if we are meeting a wholly other being.

Without being exposed to and challenged by evil we remain helpless to overcome it. The Beast is a higher-dimensional and supersensible being (beyond our five senses) that reveals itself in and through historical events in our world as well as within the inner landscapes of our psyche. A human body and soul can unwittingly (or consciously) become the vessel for acting out these powerful, darker, destructive archetypal powers in ways that further extend these forces into the world at large. In modern times the centralized, power-based state is the incorporated agency of these darker forces on a collective scale. Any of us, often with the best intentions, can unwittingly become an instrument of evil through our acting out of these darker unconscious impulses.

Encountering, recognizing and experiencing the depth of evil within ourselves helps us to develop the inner capacity to stand free of it, and in so doing, become acquainted with the part of ourselves that is beyond evil’s reach, thus enabling us to establish ourselves as free, sovereign and independent beings. Realizing this, we thereby become inoculated from being one of its carriers. Paradoxically, it is only by knowing the Beast in ourselves that we become truly human. It is to our advantage to know that our worst adversary resides in our own heart, rather than falling for the all-to-common delusion of thinking that our enemy is outside of ourselves.

Withdrawing our shadow projections from the outside world enables us to not only own and come to terms with the darkness within ourselves, but also enables us to withdraw our projections from an outward historical figure and instead discover the living Christ within. This is to recognize that Christ—symbolic of the wholeness of our true nature—has always lived in us, rather than being an external figure separate and different from ourselves. We ourselves bear Christ—the most precious treasure, “The Pearl of Great Price”—within us.

Seeing the etheric Christ necessitates the human acquisition of a newly awakened faculty of perception which enables us to recognize that a spiritual realm permeates—and is revealing itself—through the seemingly mundane physical world. The etheric Christ has an infinitude of ways, a multiplicity of guises in which it can appear. Just like a symbol in a dream, the form of the vision is custom-tailored for each soul, dependent on our state of evolution. As we each see the etheric Christ in the unique form appropriate to our soul, we rise up, lift ourselves—grow and ascend upwards, evolutionarily speaking—towards Christ in his etheric body. To quote Steiner, “those who raise themselves—with Full ego-consciousness—to the etheric vision of Christ in His etheric body, will be ‘God-filled’ or blessed. For this, however, the materialistic mind must be thoroughly overcome.”[22]

Speaking of the power of the etheric Christ, Steiner said, “When this power has permeated the soul, it drives away the soul’s darkness.”[23] As we stabilize our vision of the etheric Christ, we recognize that, as if looking in a mirror, we are seeing our own reflection. Christ himself (in his etheric form) says in the apocryphal Acts of John, “A mirror am I to thee that perceivest me … behold thyself in me who speak.”[24] On the one hand this mirror reflects back our own temporal, limited and subjective consciousness, while on the other hand simultaneously reflecting back the transcendental aspect of ourselves that is already whole, healed and awake. These co-joined reflections invite us to cultivate the ability to differentiate them, and in so doing effects the requisite transformation of consciousness that feeds our individuation.

In these encounters with the etheric Christ, we are not witness to an external, material, objective event that comes from outside of ourselves, but our soul is itself the medium in which the engagement takes place. In its subjective experience of the etheric Christ, it is its own image of itself that the soul rediscovers and meets in its act of reflection. The soul is itself reflected through and reciprocally affected by the vision of the etheric Christ. Inseparable parts of one quantum system, the etheric Christ’s radiance doesn’t shine separate from humanity; its luminous clarity is our own. Humanity invariably becomes transformed when it encounters the etheric Christ, due to our consciousness becoming aware of an essential aspect of itself that was heretofore hidden and relegated to the unconscious.

The part of Steiner that was envisioning the operations of the etheric Christ was the etheric Christ himself seeing through Steiner’s eyes; the same is true for us. When we see the etheric Christ, we begin to assimilate and become the thing we are seeing. In our apperception, the etheric Christ inside of us recognizes itself, which enables us to step into who we’ve always been. Humanity is the vessel through which the etheric Christ—the spirit of Christ—takes on human form and incarnates itself.

We find ourselves playing a key role in a cosmic drama. We are not just passive witnesses, but active participants in a momentous, world-transforming spiritual event. In Steiner’s words, “The human being is not a mere spectator that stands over against the world … he is the active co-creator of the world process.”[25] Steiner’s statement is completely in alignment with the realizations of quantum physics, which points out that we are participating—whether we know it or not—in the creation of our experience of both the world and ourselves. What Steiner is describing in terms of the incarnation of the etheric Christ and the emergence of the apocalyptic Beast is in some mysterious way related to—and reflecting—the current stage of our collective psycho-spiritual development.

The worst illness is the one which goes unrecognized, as it therefore cannot be treated. According to Steiner, awareness of the covert operations of these darker forces is the only means whereby their aims may be counteracted.[26] The etheric Christ’s light can help us to break through our massive inner resistance against seeing to what an overwhelming extent the forces of illness and death have insinuated themselves into our organism and corrupted our soul. The same light that kindles consciousness—i.e., the etheric Christ—also illuminates the deadening and rigidifying forces in humanity’s being. If we can consciously experience the powerlessness that has become allied with the deadening forces in our soul, this sense of our powerlessness—like hitting bottom—can lead us to an experience of the etheric Christ, which itself is the revivifying light of awareness which enabled us to become aware of our powerlessness in the first place. Consciously seeing the withered soul of our time—intellectualized and materialized to death—is a crucial step which initiates the process of resuscitating—and resurrecting—the soul, bringing it to life again.

As if pouring the very essence of his being into the existential abyss, Christ concealed his light by incorporating himself in humanity’s deadened life forces, as if the higher self clothed itself in the evil qualities of humanity. To quote a student of Steiner, Jesaiah Ben-Aharon, “The Christ is seen through the metamorphosed forces of death, and is experienced through the mystery of man’s evil.”[27] The life-enhancing etheric Christ is made out of the devitalizing forces of death that have seemingly imprisoned and obscured the eternal Christ within us. Christ’s “resurrection body” is created and forged through the descent into hell. The very fabric of the darkness are the celestial threads out of which the etheric Christ is woven.[28]

Through his descent into the depths of the underworld, Christ merged and united himself completely with the core of humanity’s evil—becoming one with it—thereby initiating an alchemical process of transformation deep within the universe itself. Steiner’s description of the incarnation of the etheric Christ implies a progressive transmutation of the underlying etheric substructure of our world, i.e., a change in the energetic fabric of space-time itself.[29] In dying livinglyinto the abyss, Christ freely offered his life-giving heart to darkness’s infinite void. The result of Christ’s sacrifice is that his eternal being germinates and grows for humanity from within the core of all evil.

Through his descent into the hell realms, a mutual interpenetration between the lower and higher selves of the universe has taken place. Light has taken on darkness, which has a double meaning: to encounter darkness, as well as to become it. Light has transformed itself into darkness so as to know and illumine the darkness from the inside as well as to reveal itself. Evil—which on one level is obscuring the light—has encoded within itself its very opposite, i.e., it has become the revelation of the very light it seems to be concealing.[30]If we don’t recognize this, however, the darkness will continue to manifest destructively and eventually destroy us.

Being the most problematic element in the life of our species, evil demands our deepest sobriety and most earnest reflection. It behooves us to become conscious of the ways we are unknowingly colluding with darker forces. The etheric Christ illumines not only the existence of evil as a reality in the depth of the soul, but its light also reflects our complicity in this evil to the degree that we turn a blind-eye towards it. Individual self-reflection, which returns us to the deeper, darker ground of our light-filled nature, is the beginning of the cure for the blindness which reigns today. We tend to think of illumination as “seeing the light,” but seeing the darkness is also an important form of illumination.

We fervently avoid investigating whether God might have placed some unrecognized purpose in evil that is crucial for us to know. If we become conscious of the evil within us, in our expansion of consciousness, that evil is promoting our spiritual development. We have then, through our realization, alchemically transmuted evil into a catalyst for our evolution. To quote Steiner, “The task of evil is to promote the ascent of the human being.”[31] Once we realize our collusion with evil—making an unconscious part of us conscious, evil—with our co-operation—has fulfilled its mission of promoting our ascent.

This is once again in alignment with the Kabbalah, which conceives of evil as an essential component of the deity, woven into the very fabric of creation. Evil, according to both Steiner and the Kabbalah, co-emerges with the possibility of humanity’s freedom, as if God could not create true freedom for humanity without providing a choice for evil. To quote Steiner, “In order for human beings to attain to full use of their powers of freedom, it is absolutely necessary that they descend to the low levels in their world conception as well as in their life.”[32] From both Steiner’s and the Kabbalistic point of view, evil is created by and for freedom, and it is only through the conscious exercise of freedom of choice—which evil itself challenges us to develop—by which it can be overcome. To quote Steiner, “This is the great question of the dividing of the ways: either to go down or to go up.”[33]

The question naturally arises: if, as Steiner and the Kabbalah profess, freedom is actualized only through the existence of evil, is evil an expression of a higher intelligence, an aspect of the divine plan designed to bring about a higher form of good that couldn’t be actualized without its existence? In other words, is evil against God, or on a deeper level, serving God?

Answering this question involves a new way of translating our experience to ourselves. This way of seeing can only be attained if we are not stuck in a fixed, polarized viewpoint, caught in binary, dualistic thinking. The price of admission to this new perspective is being open to how the opposites—e.g., good and evil—are not opposed to each other in the way that we’ve been imagining if we’ve been imagining them as being separate. Seeing this involves a deeper integration within ourselves in which we are able to carry—and hold together without splitting—the seeming opposites in a new way. This expansion of our consciousness not only supports the incarnation of the etheric Christ, it is the incarnation itself.

How are we to live in such close proximity to evil? Steiner’s prophecy—expressed in the language of Christianity—is suggesting that a complete spiritual renewal is urgently needed. And as Steiner indicates, no spiritual transformation is possible without coming to terms with the Beast, i.e., with the inescapable factor of evil encountered both within ourselves and in the outside world. No old formulas or techniques can fit the bill; the answer of how to deal with such darkness is only to be found in the depths of the individual human heart.

The main aim of the Beast is to close, harden and seal the human heart with its negative energies. There is no greater protection against the Beast—as well as no better way to invite the approach of the etheric Christ—than to assiduously strive to cultivate a good heart over-flowingly filled with compassion. Genuine compassion is unconditioned; by its nature it is meant to be shared with all beings throughout the whole universe, most especially with the Beast within ourselves. Compassion is the only thing in the world that can vanquish the seemingly infinite black hole of evil, as compassion—due to its boundless nature—has no limits, which means the more we give compassion, the more we have to give. The etheric Christ is all about compassion, which is its true name.

A pioneer in the field of spiritual emergence, Paul Levy is a wounded healer in private practice, assisting others who are also awakening to the dreamlike nature of reality. He is the author of The Quantum Revelation: A Radical Synthesis of Science and Spirituality (SelectBooks, May 2018), Awakened by Darkness: When Evil Becomes Your Father (Awaken in the Dream Publishing, 2015), Dispelling Wetiko: Breaking the Curse of Evil (North Atlantic Books, 2013) and The Madness of George W. Bush: A Reflection of Our Collective Psychosis (Authorhouse, 2006). He is the founder of the “Awakening in the Dream Community” in Portland, Oregon. An artist, he is deeply steeped in the work of C. G. Jung, and has been a Tibetan Buddhist practitioner for over thirty years. He was the coordinator for the Portland PadmaSambhava Buddhist Center for over twenty years. Please visit Paul’s website www.awakeninthedream.com. You can contact Paul at paul@awakeninthedream.com; he looks forward to your reflections.

[1] Steiner lived from 1861–1925. This prediction was made in 1924, but wasn’t made known till 1991. The word clairvoyantliterally means “clear-seeing;” a clairvoyant is a “clear-seer.”

[2] The word “etheric” derives from the word “ether,” which is a word that was once widely used in physics (during Steiner’s lifetime) to refer to the medium of space itself. The word etheric thus implied a presence co-extensive with space and is thus something that completely pervades and is fully present in and as the material forms of the world. There is nowhere where space is not, which is to say it is omnipresent and everywhere. As if a higher-dimensional substance-less substance, space is the one element in which all of the other elements in the universe exist and take on their being. The ether’s presence was therefore conceived of as not being explicit like that of material forms, but like space is more hidden and implicit, in that it doesn’t assume any specific form but instead provides the underlying basis and nonphysical context for physical form to arise in the first place.

[3] Other noteworthy examples of the manifestation of the etheric Christ are Paul’s encounter with Christ in his etheric form on the way to Damascus, and the Gnostic document Pistis Sophia (in which Christ appeared to some of his disciples, including Mary Magdalene, in his transfigured, resurrection body, giving them teachings for eleven years).

[4] Rudolf Steiner. Christ at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha and Christ in the twentieth century. 2 May 1913, London. GA 152. In: Occult Science & Occult Development. Rudolf Steiner Press, London 1966.

[5] Rudolf Steiner, The Reappearance of Christ in the Etheric, 43.

[6] Ibid, 91.

[7] Rudolf Steiner. Christ at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha and Christ in the twentieth century. 2 May 1913, London. GA 152. In: Occult Science & Occult Development.

[8] Lecture at Stuttgart on 6 March 1910. In: The Reappearance of Christ in the Etheric.

[9] Rudolf Steiner, The Reappearance of Christ in the Etheric, 45.

[10] From a lecture to the priests of the Christian Community, September 1924, cited by Harold Giersch: Rudolf Steiner uber die Wiederkunft Christi [Concerning the reappearance of Christ], Dornach 1991, p. 110.

[11] Steiner said that an incarnation of the Beast will first arise in 1933, which is when Hitler came to power.

[12] Rudolf Steiner: From Symptom to Reality in Modern History, lecture 4, Rudolf Steiner Press 1976, p. 112.

[13] Speaking about what Paul saw during his Damascus Experience (where Paul had a conversion experience after seeing the etheric Christ), Steiner said, “that Christ is in the Earth-atmosphere and that he is always there!” Rudolf Steiner, The Christ Impulse and Development of the Ego-Consciousness (London: Anthroposophical Publishing Co., 1926, reprinted by Kessinger), 48. In this statement Steiner is making an equivalence between the etheric Christ and the element space.

[14] The yin/yang symbol represents this pictorially.

[15] Zohar II, 184a; Sperling and Simon, The Zohar, Vol. IV, p. 125.

[16] Rudolf Steiner: From Symptom to Reality in Modern History, lecture 4, Rudolf Steiner Press 1976, p. 112.

[17] Steiner, The Christ Impulse and Development of the Ego-Consciousness, 42.

[18] Ibid., 50.

[19] Rudolf Steiner: From Symptom to Reality in Modern History, lecture 4, Rudolf Steiner Press 1976, p. 112.

[20] Quoted from The Essential Steiner, Robert A. McDermott, ed. (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1984), 264.

[21] GA (which stands for Gesamtausgabe, the collected edition of Rudolf Steiner’s work in the original German), 178, 18/11/17.

[22] Steiner, The Christ Impulse and Development of the Ego-Consciousness, 48.

[23] GA 118, 27/01/10.

[24] M. R. James, ed., The New Testament Apocrypha(Berkeley, CA: Apocryphile Press, 2004), 253-254.

[25] From Steiner’s doctoral dissertation Truth and Science(1892).

[26] GA 178, 13/11/17.

[27] Jesaiah Ben-Aharon, The New Experience of the Supersensible (East Sussex, UK: Temple Lodge Publishing, 2007), 46.

[28] The darkening death forces within us continually persecutes the Christ in us, continually creating opaqueness, deadening and ossification. This process is symbolized in Paul’s Damascus experience when he encountered the etheric Christ and had a conversion experience (symbolized by changing his name from Saul to Paul). To quote from Acts 8:4, “Saul, Saul, why persecutest me?”

[29] Steiner’s notion of the coming of the etheric Christ has striking similarities to V. I. Vernadsky and Teilhard de Chadin’s concept of the noosphere (the mental-etheric envelope that embraces and pervades the living biosphere of our planet, the growth of which supports and catalyzes the evolution of human consciousness).

[30] In medical terminology, evil can be conceived of as being a “cosmic carcinoma.” If seen as a disease, encoded within evil is its own medicine (what I call “participatory medicine,” in that, in true quantum style, how the seeming pathology actually manifests depends upon how we engage with it). Containing not just its own cure, this malevolent disease actually bears hidden within it life-enhancing gifts beyond measure. How this disease manifests—in its cursed or blessed aspect—depends upon if we recognize what it is revealing to us.

[31] GA 95, 29/08/06.

[32] GA 204, 02/04/21.

[33] Steiner, The Christ Impulse and Development of the Ego-Consciousness, 63.

Disarming the Weapons of Mass Distraction

Posted on May 6, 2018 by Reid Mukai

By Madeleine Bunting

Source: Rise Up Times

“Are you paying attention?” The phrase still resonates with a particular sharpness in my mind. It takes me straight back to my boarding school, aged thirteen, when my eyes would drift out the window to the woods beyond the classroom. The voice was that of the math teacher, the very dedicated but dull Miss Ploughman, whose furrowed grimace I can still picture.

We’re taught early that attention is a currency—we “pay” attention—and much of the discipline of the classroom is aimed at marshaling the attention of children, with very mixed results. We all have a history here, of how we did or did not learn to pay attention and all the praise or blame that came with that. It used to be that such patterns of childhood experience faded into irrelevance. As we reached adulthood, how we paid attention, and to what, was a personal matter and akin to breathing—as if it were automatic.

Today, though, as we grapple with a pervasive new digital culture, attention has become an issue of pressing social concern. Technology provides us with new tools to grab people’s attention. These innovations are dismantling traditional boundaries of private and public, home and office, work and leisure. Emails and tweets can reach us almost anywhere, anytime. There are no cracks left in which the mind can idle, rest, and recuperate. A taxi ad offers free wifi so that you can remain “productive” on a cab journey.

Even those spare moments of time in our day—waiting for a bus, standing in a queue at the supermarket—can now be “harvested,” says the writer Tim Wu in his book The Attention Merchants. In this quest to pursue “those slivers of our unharvested awareness,” digital technology has provided consumer capitalism with its most powerful tools yet. And our attention fuels it. As Matthew Crawford notes in The World Beyond Your Head, “when some people treat the minds of other people as a resource, this is not ‘creating wealth,’ it is transferring it.”

There’s a whiff of panic around the subject: the story that our attention spans are now shorter than a goldfish’s attracted millions of readers on the web; it’s still frequently cited, despite its questionable veracity. Rates of diagnosis attention deficit hyperactivity disorder in children have soared, creating an $11 billion global market for pharmaceutical companies. Every glance of our eyes is now tracked for commercial gain as ever more ingenious ways are devised to capture our attention, if only momentarily. Our eyeballs are now described as capitalism’s most valuable real estate. Both our attention and its deficits are turned into lucrative markets.

There is also a domestic economy of attention; within every family, some get it and some give it. We’re all born needing the attention of others—our parents’, especially—and from the outset, our social skills are honed to attract the attention we need for our care. Attention is woven into all forms of human encounter from the most brief and transitory to the most intimate. It also becomes deeply political: who pays attention to whom?

Social psychologists have researched how the powerful tend to tune out the less powerful. One study with college students showed that even in five minutes of friendly chat, wealthier students showed fewer signs of engagement when in conversation with their less wealthy counterparts: less eye contact, fewer nods, and more checking the time, doodling, and fidgeting. Discrimination of race and gender, too, plays out through attention. Anyone who’s spent any time in an organization will be aware of how attention is at the heart of office politics. A suggestion is ignored in a meeting, but is then seized upon as a brilliant solution when repeated by another person.

What is political is also ethical. Matthew Crawford argues that this is the essential characteristic of urban living: a basic recognition of others.

And then there’s an even more fundamental dimension to the politics of attention. At a primary level, all interactions in public space require a very minimal form of attention, an awareness of the presence and movement of others. Without it, we would bump into each other, frequently.

I had a vivid demonstration of this point on a recent commute: I live in East London and regularly use the narrow canal paths for cycling. It was the canal rush hour—lots of walkers with dogs, families with children, joggers as well as cyclists heading home. We were all sharing the towpath with the usual mixture of give and take, slowing to allow passing, swerving around and between each other. Only this time, a woman was walking down the center of the path with her eyes glued to her phone, impervious to all around her. This went well beyond a moment of distraction. Everyone had to duck and weave to avoid her. She’d abandoned the unspoken contract that avoiding collision is a mutual obligation.

This scene is now a daily occurrence for many of us, in shopping centers, station concourses, or on busy streets. Attention is the essential lubricant of urban life, and without it, we’re denying our co-existence in that moment and place. The novelist and philosopher, Iris Murdoch, writes that the most basic requirement for being good is that a person “must know certain things about his surroundings, most obviously the existence of other people and their claims.”

Attention is what draws us out of ourselves to experience and engage in the world. The word is often accompanied by a verb—attention needs to be grabbed, captured, mobilized, attracted, or galvanized. Reflected in such language is an acknowledgement of how attention is the essential precursor to action. The founding father of psychology William James provided what is still one of the best working definitions:

It is the taking possession by the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of what seem several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought. Focalization, concentration, of consciousness are of its essence. It implies withdrawal from some things in order to deal effectively with others.

Attention is a limited resource and has to be allocated: to pay attention to one thing requires us to withdraw it from others. There are two well-known dimensions to attention, explains Willem Kuyken, a professor of psychology at Oxford. The first is “alerting”— an automatic form of attention, hardwired into our brains, that warns us of threats to our survival. Think of when you’re driving a car in a busy city: you’re aware of the movement of other cars, pedestrians, cyclists, and road signs, while advertising tries to grab any spare morsel of your attention. Notice how quickly you can swerve or brake when you spot a car suddenly emerging from a side street. There’s no time for a complicated cognitive process of decision making. This attention is beyond voluntary control.

The second form of attention is known as “executive”—the process by which our brain selects what to foreground and focus on, so that there can be other information in the background—such as music when you’re cooking—but one can still accomplish a complex task. Crucially, our capacity for executive attention is limited. Contrary to what some people claim, none of us can multitask complex activities effectively. The next time you write an email while talking on the phone, notice how many typing mistakes you make or how much you remember from the call. Executive attention can be trained, and needs to be for any complex activity. This was the point James made when he wrote: “there is no such thing as voluntary attention sustained for more than a few seconds at a time… what is called sustained voluntary attention is a repetition of successive efforts which bring back the topic to the mind.”

Attention is a complex interaction between memory and perception, in which we continually select what to notice, thus finding the material which correlates in some way with past experience. In this way, patterns develop in the mind. We are always making meaning from the overwhelming raw data. As James put it, “my experience is what I agree to attend to. Only those items which I notice shape my mind—without selective interest, experience is an utter chaos.”

And we are constantly engaged in organizing that chaos, as we interpret our experience. This is clear in the famous Gorilla Experiment in which viewers were told to watch a video of two teams of students passing a ball between them. They had to count the number of passes made by the team in white shirts and ignore those of the team in black shirts. The experiment is deceptively complex because it involves three forms of attention: first, scanning the whole group; second, ignoring the black T-shirt team to keep focus on the white T-shirt team (a form of inhibiting attention); and third, remembering to count. In the middle of the experiment, someone in a gorilla suit ambles through the group. Afterward, half the viewers when asked hadn’t spotted the gorilla and couldn’t even believe it had been there. We can be blind not only to the obvious, but to our blindness.

There is another point in this experiment which is less often emphasized. Ignoring something—such as the black T-shirt team in this experiment—requires a form of attention. It costs us attention to ignore something. Many of us live and work in environments that require us to ignore a huge amount of information—that flashing advert, a bouncing icon or pop-up.

In another famous psychology experiment, Walter Mischel’s Marshmallow Test, four-year-olds had a choice of eating a marshmallow immediately or two in fifteen minutes. While filmed, each child was put in a room alone in front of the plate with a marshmallow. They squirmed and fidgeted, poked the marshmallow and stared at the ceiling. A third of the children couldn’t resist the marshmallow and gobbled it up, a third nibbled cautiously, but the last third figured out how to distract themselves. They looked under the table, sang… did anything but look at the sweet. It’s a demonstration of the capacity to reallocate attention. In a follow-up study some years later, those who’d been able to wait for the second marshmallow had better life outcomes, such as academic achievement and health. One New Zealand study of 1,000 children found that this form of self-regulation was a more reliable predictor of future success and wellbeing than even a good IQ or comfortable economic status.

What, then, are the implications of how digital technologies are transforming our patterns of attention? In the current political anxiety about social mobility and inequality, more weight needs to be put on this most crucial and basic skill: sustaining attention.

*

I learned to concentrate as a child. Being a bookworm helped. I’d be completely absorbed in my reading as the noise of my busy family swirled around me. It was good training for working in newsrooms; when I started as a journalist, they were very noisy places with the clatter of keyboards, telephones ringing and fascinating conversations on every side. What has proved much harder to block out is email and text messages.

The digital tech companies know a lot about this widespread habit; many of them have built a business model around it. They’ve drawn on the work of the psychologist B.F. Skinner who identified back in the Thirties how, in animal behavior, an action can be encouraged with a positive consequence and discouraged by a negative one. In one experiment, he gave a pigeon a food pellet whenever it pecked at a button and the result, as predicted, was that the pigeon kept pecking. Subsequent research established that the most effective way to keep the pigeon pecking was “variable-ratio reinforcement.” Give the pigeon a food pellet sometimes, and you have it well and truly hooked.

We’re just like the pigeon pecking at the button when we check our email or phone. It’s a humiliating thought. Variable reinforcement ensures that the customer will keep coming back. It’s the principle behind one of the most lucrative US industries: slot machines, which generate more profit than baseball, films, and theme parks combined. Gambling was once tightly restricted for its addictive potential, but most of us now have the attentional equivalent of a slot machine in our pocket, beside our plate at mealtimes, and by our pillow at night. Even during a meal out, a play at the theater, a film, or a tennis match. Almost nothing is now experienced uninterrupted.

Anxiety about the exponential rise of our gadget addiction and how it is fragmenting our attention is sometimes dismissed as a Luddite reaction to a technological revolution. But that misses the point. The problem is not the technology per se, but the commercial imperatives that drive the new technologies and, unrestrained, colonize our attention by fundamentally changing our experience of time and space, saturating both in information.

In much public space, wherever your eye lands—from the back of the toilet door, to the handrail on the escalator, or the hotel key card—an ad is trying to grab your attention, and does so by triggering the oldest instincts of the human mind: fear, sex, and food. Public places become dominated by people trying to sell you something. In his tirade against this commercialization, Crawford cites advertisements on the backs of school report cards and on debit machines where you swipe your card. Before you enter your PIN, that gap of a few seconds is now used to show adverts. He describes silence and ad-free experience as “luxury goods” that only the wealthy can afford. Crawford has invented the concept of the “attentional commons,” free public spaces that allow us to choose where to place our attention. He draws the analogy with environmental goods that belong to all of us, such as clean air or clean water.

Some legal theorists are beginning to conceive of our own attention as a human right. One former Google employee warned that “there are a thousand people on the other side of the screen whose job it is to break down the self-regulation you have.” They use the insights into human behavior derived from social psychology—the need for approval, the need to reciprocate others’ gestures, the fear of missing out. Your attention ceases to be your own, pulled and pushed by algorithms. Attention is referred to as the real currency of the future.

*

In 2013, I embarked on a risky experiment in attention: I left my job. In the previous two years, it had crept up on me. I could no longer read beyond a few paragraphs. My eyes would glaze over and, even more disastrously for someone who had spent their career writing, I seemed unable to string together my thoughts, let alone write anything longer than a few sentences. When I try to explain the impact, I can only offer a metaphor: it felt like my imagination and use of language were vacuum packed, like a slab of meat coated in plastic. I had lost the ability to turn ideas around, see them from different perspectives. I could no longer draw connections between disparate ideas.

At the time, I was working in media strategy. It was a culture of back-to-back meetings from 8:30 AM to 6 PM, and there were plenty of advantages to be gained from continuing late into the evening if you had the stamina. Commitment was measured by emails with a pertinent weblink. Meetings were sometimes as brief as thirty minutes and frequently ran through lunch. Meanwhile, everyone was sneaking time to battle with the constant emails, eyes flickering to their phone screens in every conversation. The result was a kind of crazy fog, a mishmash of inconclusive discussions.

At first, it was exhilarating, like being on those crazy rides in a theme park. By the end, the effect was disastrous. I was almost continuously ill, battling migraines and unidentifiable viruses. When I finally made the drastic decision to leave, my income collapsed to a fraction of its previous level and my family’s lifestyle had to change accordingly. I had no idea what I was going to do; I had lost all faith in my ability to write. I told friends I would have to return the advance I’d received to write a book. I had to try to get back to the skills of reflection and focus that had once been ingrained in me.

The first step was to teach myself to read again. I sometimes went to a café, leaving my phone and computer behind. I had to slow down the racing incoherence of my mind so that it could settle on the text and its gradual development of an argument or narrative thread. The turning point in my recovery was a five weeks’ research trip to the Scottish Outer Hebrides. On the journey north of Glasgow, my mobile phone lost its Internet connection. I had cut myself loose with only the occasional text or call to family back home. Somewhere on the long Atlantic beaches of these wild and dramatic islands, I rediscovered my ability to write.

I attribute that in part to a stunning exhibition I came across in the small harbor town of Lochboisdale, on the island of South Uist. Vija Celmins is an acclaimed Latvian-American artist whose work is famous for its astonishing patience. She can take a year or more to make a woodcut that portrays in minute detail the surface of the sea. A postcard of her work now sits above my desk, a reminder of the power of slow thinking.

Just as we’ve had a slow eating movement, we need a slow thinking campaign. Its manifesto could be the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke’s beautiful “Letters to a Young Poet”:

To let every impression and the germ of every feeling come to completion inside, in the dark, in the unsayable, the unconscious, in what is unattainable to one’s own intellect, and to wait with deep humility and patience for the hour when a new clarity is delivered.

Many great thinkers attest that they have their best insights in moments of relaxation, the proverbial brainwave in the bath. We actually need what we most fear: boredom.

When I left my job (and I was lucky that I could), friends and colleagues were bewildered. Why give up a good job? But I felt that here was an experiment worth trying. Crawford frames it well as “intellectual biodiversity.” At a time of crisis, we need people thinking in different ways. If we all jump to the tune of Facebook or Instagram and allow ourselves to be primed by Twitter, the danger is that we lose the “trained powers of concentration” that allow us, in Crawford’s words, “to recognize that independence of thought and feeling is a fragile thing, and requires certain conditions.”

I also took to heart the insights of the historian Timothy Snyder, who concluded from his studies of twentieth-century European totalitarianism that the way to fend off tyranny is to read books, make an effort to separate yourself from the Internet, and “be kind to our language… Think up your own way of speaking.” Dropping out and going offline enabled me to get back to reading, voraciously, and to writing; beyond that, it’s too early to announce the results of my experiment with attention. As Rilke said, “These things cannot be measured by time, a year has no meaning, and ten years are nothing.”

*

A recent column in The New Yorker cheekily suggests that all the fuss about the impact of digital technologies on our attention is nothing more than writers’ worrying about their own working habits. Is all this anxiety about our fragmenting minds a moral panic akin to those that swept Victorian Britain about sexual behavior? Patterns of attention are changing, but perhaps it doesn’t much matter?

My teenage children read much less than I did. One son used to play chess online with a friend, text on his phone, and do his homework all at the same time. I was horrified, but he got a place at Oxford. At his interview, he met a third-year history undergraduate who told him he hadn’t yet read any books in his time at university. But my kids are considerably more knowledgeable about a vast range of subjects than I was at their age. There’s a small voice suggesting that the forms of attention I was brought up with could be a thing of the past; the sustained concentration required to read a whole book will become an obscure niche hobby.

And yet, I’m haunted by a reflection: the magnificent illuminations of the eighth-century Book of Kells has intricate patterning that no one has ever been able to copy, such is the fineness of the tight spirals. Lines are a millimeter apart. They indicate a steadiness of hand and mind—a capability most of us have long since lost. Could we be trading in capacities for focus in exchange for a breadth of reference? Some might argue that’s not a bad trade. But we would lose depth: artist Paul Klee wrote that he would spend a day in silent contemplation of something before he painted it. Paul Cézanne was similarly known for his trance like attention on his subject. Madame Cézanne recollected how her husband would gaze at the landscape, and told her, “The landscape thinks itself in me, and I am its consciousness.” The philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty describes a contemplative attention in which one steps outside of oneself and immerses oneself in the object of attention.

It’s not just artists who require such depth of attention. Nearly two decades ago, a doctor teaching medical students at Yale was frustrated at their inability to distinguish between types of skin lesions. Their gaze seemed restless and careless. He took his students to an art gallery and told them to look at a picture for fifteen minutes. The program is now used in dozens of US medical schools.

Some argue that losing the capacity for deep attention presages catastrophe. It is the building block of “intimacy, wisdom, and cultural progress,” argues Maggie Jackson in her book Distracted, in which she warns that “as our attentional skills are squandered, we are plunging into a culture of mistrust, skimming, and a dehumanizing merging between man and machine.” Significantly, her research began with a curiosity about why so many Americans were deeply dissatisfied with life. She argues that losing the capacity for deep attention makes it harder to make sense of experience and to find meaning—from which comes wonder and fulfillment. She fears a new “dark age” in which we forget what makes us truly happy.

Strikingly, the epicenter of this wave of anxiety over our attention is the US. All the authors I’ve cited are American. It’s been argued that this debate represents an existential crisis for America because it exposes the flawed nature of its greatest ideal, individual freedom. The commonly accepted notion is that to be free is to make choices, and no one can challenge that expression of autonomy. But if our choices are actually engineered by thousands of very clever, well-paid digital developers, are we free? The former Google employee Tristan Harris confessed in an article in 2016 that technology “gives people the illusion of free choice while architecting the menu so that [tech giants] win, no matter what you choose.”

Despite my children’s multitasking, I maintain that vital human capacities—depth of insight, emotional connection, and creativity—are at risk. I’m intrigued as to what the resistance might look like. There are stirrings of protest with the recent establishment of initiatives such as the Time Well Spent movement, founded by tech industry insiders who have become alarmed at the efforts invested in keeping people hooked. But collective action is elusive; the emphasis is repeatedly on the individual to develop the necessary self-regulation, but if that is precisely what is being eroded, we could be caught in a self-reinforcing loop.

One of the most interesting responses to our distraction epidemic is mindfulness. Its popularity is evidence that people are trying to find a way to protect and nourish their minds. Jon Kabat-Zinn, who pioneered the development of secular mindfulness, draws an analogy with jogging: just as keeping your body fit is now well understood, people will come to realize the importance of looking after their minds.

I’ve meditated regularly for twenty years, but curious as to how this is becoming mainstream, I went to an event in the heart of high-tech Shoreditch in London. In a hipster workspaces with funky architecture, excellent coffee, and an impressive range of beards, a soft-spoken retired Oxford professor of psychology, Mark Williams, was talking about how multitasking has a switching cost in focus and concentration. Our unique human ability to remember the past and to think ahead brings a cost; we lose the present. To counter this, he advocated a daily practice of mindfulness: bringing attention back to the body—the physical sensations of the breath, the hands, the feet. Williams explained how fear and anxiety inhibit creativity. In time, the practice of mindfulness enables you to acknowledge fear calmly and even to investigate it with curiosity. You learn to place your attention in the moment, noticing details such as the sunlight or the taste of the coffee.

On a recent retreat, I was beside a river early one morning and a rower passed. I watched the boat slip by and enjoyed the beauty in a radically new way. The moment was sufficient; there was nothing I wanted to add or take away—no thought of how I wanted to do this every day, or how I wanted to learn to row, or how I wished I was in the boat. Nothing but the pleasure of witnessing it. The busy-ness of the mind had stilled. Mindfulness can be a remarkable bid to reclaim our attention and to claim real freedom, the freedom from our habitual reactivity that makes us easy prey for manipulation.

But I worry that the integrity of mindfulness is fragile, vulnerable both to commercialization by employers who see it as a form of mental performance enhancement and to consumer commodification, rather than contributing to the formation of ethical character. Mindfulness as a meditation practice originates in Buddhism, and without that tradition’s ethics, there is a high risk of it being hijacked and misrepresented.

Back in the Sixties, the countercultural psychologist Timothy Leary rebelled against the conformity of the new mass media age and called for, in Crawford’s words, an “attentional revolution.” Leary urged people to take control of the media they consumed as a crucial act of self-determination; pay attention to where you place your attention, he declared. The social critic Herbert Marcuse believed Leary was fighting the struggle for the ultimate form of freedom, which Marcuse defined as the ability “to live without anxiety.” These were radical prophets whose words have an uncanny resonance today. Distraction has become a commercial and political strategy, and it amounts to a form of emotional violence that cripples people, leaving them unable to gather their thoughts and overwhelmed by a sense of inadequacy. It’s a powerful form of oppression dressed up in the language of individual choice.

The stakes could hardly be higher, as William James knew a century ago: “The faculty of voluntarily bringing back a wandering attention, over and over again, is the very root of judgment, character, and will.” And what are we humans without these three?

How To Recognize When Your Society Is Suffering A Dramatic Decline

Posted on May 1, 2018 by Reid Mukai

By Brandon Smith

Source: Alt-Market.com

When historians and analysts look at the factors surrounding the collapse of a society, they often focus on the larger events and indicators — the moments of infamy. However, I think it’s important to consider the reality that large scale societal decline is built upon a mixture of elements, prominent as well as small. Collapse is a process, not a singular event. It happens over time, not overnight. It is a spectrum of moments and terrible choices, set in motion in most cases by people in positions of power, but helped along by useful idiots among the masses. The decline of a nation or civilization requires the complicity of a host of saboteurs.

So, instead of focusing on the top down approach, which is rather common, let’s start from the foundations of our culture to better understand why there is clear and definable destabilization.

Declining Moral Compass

There is always a conflict between personal gain and personal conscience — this is the nature of being human. But in a stable society, these two things tend to balance out. Not so during societal decline, as personal gain (and even personal comfort and gratification) tends to greatly outweigh the checks and balances of moral principles.

People often mistake the term “morality” to be a religious creation, but this is not what I am necessarily referring to. The concepts of “good” and “evil” are archetypal — that is to say they are psychologically inherent in most human beings from the moment of birth. This is not a matter of faith, but a matter of fact, observed by those in the field of psychology and anthropology over the course of a century of study. How we relate to these concepts can be affected by our environment and upbringing, but for the most part, our moral compass is psychologically ingrained. It is up to us to either follow it or not follow it.

Watching how people handle this choice is a bit of hobby of mine, and I do take notes. You can learn a lot about the state of your environment by observing what people around you tend to do when faced with the conflict of personal gain versus personal conscience. It is saddening to admit that even though I live in rural America, where you are more likely to find self-reliance and cultural stability, I can still see a faltering nation bleeding through.

I have seen supposedly good people act dishonestly in business agreements. I have seen local institutions scam hardworking citizens. I have seen a court system rife with bias and a “good old boy” attitude of favoritism. I have seen local companies pretend to be benevolent contributors to the community while at the same time running constant frauds and rackets. I have even seen a few people within the liberty movement itself put the movement at risk with their own avarice, gluttony, narcissism and sociopathy.

Again, it is important to make a note of such people and institutions, for as the system continues its downward spiral it is these people that will present the greatest threat to the innocent.

As Carl Jung notes in his book The Undiscovered Self, there is always a contingent of latent sociopaths and psychopaths within any culture; usually about 10% of the population. In normal times, they, at least most of them, are forced into moral acclimation by the rest of the populace. But in times of decline, they seem to leak out of the woodwork like a slimy fungus. During heightened collapse, they no longer have to pretend to be upstanding and they show their true colors.

Most dangerous is when latent sociopaths or full blown sociopaths assume roles of leadership or power during the worst of times. With everyone distracted by their own plight, these people can become a cancer, infecting everything with their narcissistic pursuits and causing destruction in their wake.

Disinterest In Rewarding Conscience

During wider cultural collapse, it can become “fashionable” to see acts of principle as something to be scoffed at or ridiculed or to even see them as threats to the status quo. The concept of “going along to get along” takes precedence over doing what is right even when it is hard; this attitude is not relegated to the less honest people within society.

As a system collapses, a fog of apathy can result. Good people can become passive, scrambling to their individual corner of the world and hoping evil times will simply pass them by. The phrase “I just want to put all this behind me” is spoken regularly; but as we ignore the trespasses of terrible men and women, we also enable them. How? Because by doing nothing we allow them to continue their criminality, and we subject future persons and generations to victimization.

When doing the right thing is treated as laughable or “crazy” by what seems like a majority in the midst of widespread corruption, you are truly in the middle of a great decline.

In Christian circles, the idea of “the remnant” is sometimes spoken of. In Christian terms, this usually represents a minority of true believers surviving a tumultuous and immoral era. I see “the remnant” not so much as a contingent of Christians alone, but as a contingent of people that continue to maintain their principles and conscience when faced with unprecedented adversity. In the worst of times, these people remain stalwart, even if they are ridiculed for it.

Disinterest In Independent Effort

It is said that in this world there are two kinds of people — leaders and followers. I’m not so sure about that, but I can see why this philosophy is promoted; it helps evil people in power stay in power by encouraging passive acceptance.

I would say that there are in fact two kinds of people in this world — people who want to control others and the people that just want to be left alone. In life sometimes we are both leaders and followers; we just have to be sure that when we lead we lead by example and not by force, and when we follow, we follow someone worth a damn.

In any case, passivity is not a solution to determining our roles in society. In most situations, independent action is required by every person to make the world a better place. Yet, in an era of systemic crisis, it is usually independent effort that is the first thing to go out the window. Millions upon millions of people wait around for someone, anyone, to tell them what they should be doing and how they should be doing it. In this way, society finds itself in stasis, frozen in a position of inaction. Poisonous collectivism wins through mass aggression, but also through mass passivity.

In fact, when individualists do take action they can be admonished for it during times of societal breakdown, even if their actions have the potential to solve a problem. The idea that one man or woman (or a small group of people) could do anything about anything is sneered at as “fantasy” or “delusion.” But mass movements of citizens working towards a practical goal are rare, and even more rare is when these movements are not controlled or manipulated to benefit the established order. It is not mass movements that change the world for the better, but individual people and small organizations of the dedicated, acting without permission and without administration.

It is these individuals and small groups that, over time and through relentless effort, inspire a majority to do what is necessary and right. It is these people that inspire others to finally take leadership in their own lives.

Individual Self-Isolation

I write often on the plight of the individual and individual rights within society, and I continue to see the factor of the individual as the most important element in any culture. A culture based on protecting and nurturing individualism and voluntarism is the only culture, in my view, that will ever be successful at avoiding full spectrum collapse. That said, the downside to overt individualism is the danger of self isolation. That is to say, when true individuals only concern themselves with their personal circumstances and ignore the circumstances of the rest of the world, they eventually set themselves up to be crushed by that world.

Organization on a voluntary basis is not only healthy but vital in the longevity of a society. The more people turn in on themselves and only care about their own general conditions, the easier it is for evil people to do evil things unnoticed. Also, self isolation in the wake of collapse sets individuals up for failure, as no one is capable of surviving without at least some help from a wider pool of knowledge and talents.

In a system based on corruption, the establishment will encourage self isolation as a means to control the populace. Or, they will offer a false choice, between self isolation versus mindless collectivism. The truth is there is always a middle ground. Voluntary organization and individualism are not mutually exclusive. I call this the “difference between community and collectivism.” A community does not supplant the individual, while a collective requires the complete erasure of individual pursuits and thought.

If you find yourself surrounded by people who refuse any organization, even practical and voluntary organization in the face of instability, then your society may be in the latter stages of a collapse.

Disaster Denial

Even as a crisis or collapse unfolds, if a society actually reels or reacts to it and takes note of the problem, there is hope for that society. If, however, that society willfully ignores the danger and denies it exists when presented with overwhelming evidence, then that society will likely suffer complete disintegration and will probably have to start all over from scratch — hopefully with a set of principles and ideals based on conscience and honor.

The strength of a culture can be measured by its willingness to self reflect. Its survival can be determined by its willingness to accept its flaws when they arise and its willingness to repair the damage done. Self-aware societies are difficult to corrupt or control. Only in denial can people be easily manipulated and enslaved.

If you cannot accept the reality of the abyss, you cannot move to avoid it or prepare yourself to survive the fall. I see this issue as perhaps the single most important element in the fight to save the portions of our society worth saving. Educating people on the blatant facts behind our own national decline can dissolve the wall of denial, and perhaps we will find when disaster strikes that there are far more awake and aware individuals ready to act than we originally thought.

Zig Zag Zen: An Interview with Author Allan Badiner

Posted on April 8, 2018 by Reid Mukai

The Intersection of Psychedelic Spirituality and Buddhist Practice

By Jennifer Bleyer

Source: MAPS

Buddhism and psychedelic use have been linked since at least the 1950s, when influential thinkers and writers such as Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and Alan Watts experimented with both as avenues toward understanding the mind. The tacitly acknowledged connection took a leap forward in 2002 with the publication of Zig Zag Zen: Buddhism and Psychedelics, a collection of essays, interviews, articles edited by Allan Badiner, which examines the two realms and their similarities and differences. A new edition of Zig Zag Zen was published in 2015. Badiner, a contributing editor of Tricycle, is a longtime supporter of MAPS.—Jennifer Bleyer

How did you become involved in Buddhism?

I’d never had any interest or belief in any religion, but when I was in my early 30s, I spent a year traveling in India, and right before returning home I took some advice to enroll in a Buddhist meditation retreat in Sri Lanka. I hated it. My bones ached, the only food was stewed greens, the venue was overrun with bugs, and the bed was a blanket over wood boards. Suddenly, when the ten-day retreat was almost over, I felt free of any pain and almost ecstatic— and not just because I was leaving. The bugs were my relatives. I slept like a baby. I was overtaken by a subtle but persistent wave of ecstasy, and felt a diminished sense of separation from others.

And how were you exposed to psychedelics?

After that I trip I returned to California, and the meditative glow eventually faded. But I had been “bitten” by the Buddhist bug. I took classes with a senior Buddhist monk, studied Pali, the original language of the Buddha, and earned a Masters degree at the College of Buddhist Studies, a small Theraveda university in Los Angeles—all because I was trying to understand how to return to the blissful state I had experienced on the retreat. I was writing a column called “Mind and Spirit” for the LA Weekly while working on my Buddhist studies, and had a plan to interview Terence McKenna. He accused me of being an “armchair Buddhist” and challenged me to try sacred plants, such as psilocybin mushrooms. We became friends, and I visited him at his home in Hawaii where he treated me to yagé, or ayahuasca, the so-called vine of the soul. Sometime later, I experienced MDMA and got to know Alexander Shulgin. I regularly enjoyed Friday night dinners at the Shulgin home, where the Bay Area psychedelic community gathered. So, indeed, I became formally and viscerally connected to both Buddhism and psychedelics.

How do you describe the relationship between Buddhism and psychedelics?

Both share an interest in the primacy of mind and present moment awareness, and while they are very different in character, the 1950s Beat Generation and the 1960s cultural revolution were both heavily influenced by Eastern wisdom traditions, including Buddhism, as well as LSD, psilocybin, and peyote. I think their relationship manifests in the human pursuit of evolution. Many people seek the compassionate wisdom of the Buddhist philosophy, also known as the Dharma, as well as the psychic reset and transformational power that certain plant substances offer. A kind of practical magic results when the “Zig” zags into Zen—when a time-tested philosophy and ethical system meets plant-assisted changes in consciousness.

Your book identified the complementary natures of Buddhism and psychedelics as facilitators of the “liberation of the mind.” How has it been received in the Buddhist community?

It was fascinating to me that, with only one exception, every American Buddhist teacher I interviewed had personally experienced psychedelics prior to getting into Buddhism. One of the most revered and respected teachers, Jack Kornfield, went so far as to say that were it not for LSD, he would never have been able to grasp the Dharma. It should be noted that Zig Zag Zen also presents the thinking of teachers who are clearly not fans of psychedelics. I was secretly hoping for Zig Zag Zen to ruffle a lot of Buddhist feathers, envisioning that the controversy would drive sales. When the book was released, the Buddhist community in general was like, “Buddhism, psychedelics, ok…so?” The anti-Zig Zag Zen rallies and Buddhist book boycotts I was imagining never materialized. (laughs)

You said in a recent interview with Tricycle that “psychedelic use is an issue for many contemporary Buddhists.” Why is that?

Anyone who becomes seriously focused on spiritual development has to at least consider the issue of psychedelic use. Everyone knows someone who, after taking acid or magic mushrooms, or attending a peyote sweat lodge, experienced themselves as changed forever for the better. In the mid-20th century, famous Buddhist writers like Alan Watts and Ram Dass popularized psychedelics, even as Buddhist centers were filled with young people who had experienced psychedelics and were eager to find more practical and gentle routes to the same “destination.” Added to the question of psychedelic use is the realization that we live in a critical time ecologically. The sixth great extinction is underway. Who would have thought that we would live to see the extinction of elephants, or tigers, or orangutans? Coastal cities are experiencing unremitting flooding, and the end of ice caps is a planetary inevitability. Recognizing the interbeing of people and planet is the fundamental awakening of our time. Buddhists are enlightened by the extent of their compassion—for themselves, for other people, for all living beings, and for the planet itself.

Isn’t there a Buddhist rule about not using intoxicants?

Buddhist precepts are not hard rules or commandments but guiding principles meant to facilitate progress on the path. Buddhists refrain from killing, taking what is not given, sexual misconduct, and incorrect speech. According to Robert Thurman, the chair of Buddhist studies at Columbia University, the Buddhist fifth precept, which is interpreted by some as prohibiting all substance use, specifically refers to grain alcohol, which was a problem even in the Buddha’s day as it’s likely to lead to carelessness, and to the user violating the other four precepts. Obviously, one can misuse many substances to the point of intoxication, but it is not correct to say generally that psychedelics are intoxicants.

How did you get involved with MAPS?

I met Rick Doblin through mutual friends when he was a college student, and he had just attended a psychedelic conference at Esalen Institute, my neighbor in Big Sur. He was very excited about the emergence of a psychedelic culture consisting of scientists, physicians, caregivers, and psychiatrists. He had personally experienced the healing power of psychedelics and told me that he was dedicating his life to making these materials legal and respected for their helpful effects. I promptly told him he was hallucinating, so to speak, and that he should get a job, maybe in academia. These were the Reagan years. Attitudes about cannabis and psychedelics in the ’80s were harshly negative. It is a profound testament to the power of psychedelics and of Rick’s formidable persistence that now the government is approving clinical testing of psychedelic drugs for medical use. Rick’s dream is coming true. The physical, mental, and emotional healing possible with psychedelics makes this pursuit a moral imperative. Rick does not consider himself a Buddhist, but he is definitely in the business of relieving suffering—and that is the primary goal of Buddhism.

Why are you so passionate about MAPS’ work?

Well, having entered on the ground floor, I’ve watched MAPS grow from the moment Rick spoke about his vision in my driveway, to its emergence as an amazing organization making epic and sorely needed change. It is poised to open the first non-profit pharmaceutical company, turning psychedelics and cannabis into prescription medicines; educating therapists in to practice psychedelic-assisted therapy; building a network of clinics, and educating the public about the risks and benefits of these substances. As the psychologist, Ralph Metzner, a contributor to Zig Zag Zen, points out: “Two of the most beneficent potential areas for application of psychedelic technologies are in the treatment of addictions and in the psycho-spiritual preparation for the final transition.” I feel totally aligned with this vision.

Ultimately, what do you hope to achieve through your support of MAPS?

I hope to play a role in helping MAPS raise the funds required for the Phase 3 trials of MDMA as a treatment for PTSD—the critical step to becoming a prescription medicine. Like everyone, I see so many people suffering around me. I have confidence that psychedelics can be a serious medicine, as well as a powerful tool for personal self-development. The Anthropocene—the age of human-driven change to the Earth’s natural systems—has ushered in a new urgency for shamanic and psychedelic tools. The clock is ticking. We need all the help available to foment an evolution in our relationships with our neighbors, neighboring nations, and the planet.

Smashing the Cult of Celebrity and the Disempowerment Game

Posted on March 25, 2018 by Reid Mukai

By Dylan Charles

Source: Waking Times

At the dark heart of corporate consumer culture lie the social programs that mass-produce conformity, obedience, acquiescence and consent for the matrix.

The cult of celebrity is the royal monarch of these schemes, the ace in the hole for mass mind control and the disempowerment of the individual. This is the anointed paradigm of idol worship and idol sacrifice, a vampire’s feast on our individual and collective dreams. Who do you love? Who do you hate? Who do want to be like?

Combine this paradigm with the technology of social media, and the individual is flung into oblivion, never fully understanding the importance and value of their own life, instead always comparing themselves to phony ideals and well-designed, well-funded marketing campaigns.

‘The camera has created a culture of celebrity; the computer is creating a culture of connectivity. As the two technologies converge – broadband tipping the Web from text to image; social-networking sites spreading the mesh of interconnection ever wider – the two cultures betray a common impulse. Celebrity and connectivity are both ways of becoming known. This is what the contemporary self wants. It wants to be recognized, wants to be connected: It wants to be visible. If not to the millions, on Survivor or Oprah, then hundreds, on Twitter or Facebook. This is the quality that validates us, this is how we become real to ourselves – by being seen by others. The great contemporary terror is anonymity.’ ~William Deresiewicz

Marketeers and propagandists are skilled at leveraging human psychology to exploit human nature. They utilize the study of the psyche to gain inroads into your behavior, and they employ this science as a tool for stoking insecurities and triggering urges.

They may be selling an idea, a lifestyle, a product, or a war, but, the pitch is the same: a false idol rises from the wastelands of the American dream, and is presented to the hordes as a well-packaged product. The celebrity’s life is a projection of a niche fantasy, and a following is built up around this fantasy, and the cult followers are steered toward whatever point of purchase.

And that’s what a cult is: “a system of religious veneration and devotion directed toward a particular figure or object.”

This kind of externalized validation serves as a power transfer. Your personal power is extracted and foisted onto a manufactured image in the matrix, and without realizing it, you’ve forfeited your power to influence the direction of your own life.

“The Fantasy of celebrity culture is not designed simply to entertain. It is designed to drain us emotionally, confuse us about our identity, make us blame ourselves for our predicament, condition us to chase illusions of fame and happiness, and keep us from fighting back.” – Chris Hedges

This is about usurping individuality in order to foster groupthink and hive consciousness. It’s also about creating a barrier between what you believe is possible for yourself and what chances you are willing to take in order to manifest a unique vision for your life.

You see, human beings are energetic creations, partly made of matter and partly made of spirit, but wholly malleable to the direction of the mind. We are affected by subtle energies, body language, electromagnetic energy, frequencies of light that we cannot see, sounds that we cannot hear, and a thousand other hidden cues. We are beings of energy, and much like a battery, we can can give or receive energy.

But the mind is at the center of it all. Whatever the mind entertains, the being creates.

When the mind fixes on an external idol, this innate power to form ourselves is transferred outside of our own locus of control, and where the mind could be centered on creating and expanding the self, it is instead focused on the fantasy of achieving an impossible ideal.

As journalist Jon Rappoport notes:

“If perception and thought can be channeled, directed, reduced, and weakened, then it doesn’t matter what humans do to resist other types of control. They will always go down the wrong path. They will always operate within limited and bounded territory. They will always ignore their own authentic power.” ~Jon Rappoport

The end game here is to keep us from accepting ourselves as worthy and perfect divine beings, and to disconnect us from our own potential. This is deep stuff, reaching far beyond the push to convert us into greedy, materialistic consumers. In a metaphysical sense it is a transfer of energy, and where once we were strong and full of promise, we are now helpless and content to observe as the world flits by.

What’s most dangerous to any system of control is for the individual to know their own strength and to speak their own language, as Chris Hedges puts it.

“That’s why I don’t own a television… and I work as hard as I can to distance myself from popular culture so that I can speak in my own language, not the one they give me.” ~Chris Hedges

8 Signs of a Mind Infected by Political Malware

Posted on March 18, 2018 by Reid Mukai

By Jordan Bates

Source: High Existence

Your mind is similar to a computer.

Your brain is the hardware, your worldview the software.

The operating system you’re running is heavily influenced by your culture, upbringing, education, and many other factors.

Arguably, a well-functioning mind is a mind that can update its operating system.

As new information comes in, a healthy mind will revise its previous conclusions about the world to account for the new data.

The smartest people in the world do this: They’re constantly reading, tinkering, experimenting, and in the process updating their understanding of the world.

After all, the more accurate your models are, the better decisions you’ll make, and the more success you’ll have.

This holds true in virtually every area of life. As the renowned economist John Maynard Keynes put it:

“When my information changes, I alter my conclusions. What do you do, sir?”

Dogma as Malware

Armed with this understanding, we can see that an unhealthy mind is a mind that does not or cannot update itself.

Instead of expanding and revising its models to reflect new information, it will warp and misshape the data to force-fit its existing models.

This problem is captured nicely by a favorite folk saying of the brilliant billionaire investor, Charlie Munger:

“To the man with only a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.”

What causes a mind to misfire in this way?

In a word: dogma: Absolute belief of any kind.

When the mind is convinced that something is incontrovertibly true, it ceases to update its views on that area of reality.

Any dogmatic ideology, then, can be seen as a kind of malware, or virus, attempting to infiltrate our mental computers.

Dogmatic ideologies—religious, political, or otherwise—are essentially trying to convince your mind to freeze into a certain shape and remain that way for the rest of your life.

As previously discussed, to allow one’s mind to freeze is generally disastrous, as a mind incapable of updating itself will tend to adapt very poorly to a complex world.

Unfortunately, certainty feels comfortable to us. It makes us feel like we’re in control, like we’ve got it all figured out. As a result, many minds are frozen by dogmatic malware.

This is an unfortunate state of affairs, as we humans can’t really afford to be non-adaptive at this point in history. We’re facing dire challenges, and we need our collective intelligence and decision-making to be sharp as possible.

8 Symptoms of Political Malware

One way to avoid getting mind-pwnd by dogmatic malware is to learn to recognize the warning signs.

If you can notice other people’s malfunctioning operating systems, you’re much more likely to be able to debug your own.

To hopefully help you do this, I’m going to outline eight telltale symptoms of a brain that’s been compromised by dogmatic political malware.

Political malware is far from the only form of dogma-malware lurking in the world today, but it’s sufficiently common that it should be a useful case to focus on and learn to recognize. And, naturally, many of these points can be extended to other domains.

Here are eight common symptoms of a brain-computer infected by political malware:

1. Inability to explain the arguments or evidence that led to current conclusions.

High-functioning minds don’t just believe things because they feel good or because someone told them to. They require evidence and well-reasoned arguments to support their positions.

If a person is unable to explain the evidence and/or arguments that convinced them of a particular political conclusion, it’s highly likely that they hold that belief simply because their political tribe does.

2. Never says, “I don’t have an opinion on this because I haven’t done enough research and thinking on it.”

Dogmatic, non-adaptive minds tend to have an opinion on everything. Even if they haven’t thought about a given issue for themselves, they just default to whatever opinion is popular with their tribe.

Healthy minds, by contrast, are extremely humble. They realize the world is ridiculously complex and that it’s actually impossible to have an informed opinion on everything. They are honest about what they don’t know, and they realize they should be cautious about forming opinions because humans are so good at deluding themselves and jumping to premature conclusions.

As the genius physicist Richard Feynman put it:

“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself — and you are the easiest person to fool.”

3. Treats affiliation like a badge of honor.

Whatever they happen to be—Republican or Democrat, radical or centrist, libertarian or fascist, conservative or liberal—you know it. Because they advertise it.

They’re proud to be a member of their particular team. But when a person is really proud to be part of something that requires them to hold certain beliefs, what are the chances that they’re going to be able to update those beliefs as they encounter new information? Slim to none. Sharp minds value truth over team and tend not to have strong political affiliations.

4. Views don’t change over time.

Ask a dogmatic person their thoughts on a certain political issue, then ask them again in five years. You’ll almost surely get the same answer. No added nuance, no “Well, I thought about this more and my take is a little bit different now.” Just the same old scripts, repeated ad nauseam.

5. Quickly becomes hostile in political conversations.

The thing about joining a political tribe and thus making your politics a really deep, important part of your identity is that it becomes extremely difficult to have a calm conversation about ideas.

When you challenge a dogmatic political mind, you’re not just challenging their ideas. You’re challenging their tribe, their identity: the cornerstone of their sense of security in this universe. Naturally, this often doesn’t go over so well.

Healthy minds, by contrast, are interested in the truth, or the best solution, rather than preserving their sense of tribal pride. Therefore they can entertain multiple positions on a single issue without having their feathers ruffled. For them ideas are just ideas, and they want to find as many good ideas as possible, let them do battle, and determine which are the best.

6. Absolute faith in the correctness of their own views.

There’s a reason Jordan Greenhall uses the terms “Blue Church” and “Red Religion” to describe the two major political monoliths vying for power in the West.

He’s not the first person to notice that for many people, politics has become a form of religion. With the secularization of the West in recent history, it’s not a surprise that people’s religious drives have been diverted into another dogmatic domain.

Adaptive minds, by contrast, expect to be wrong. The idea that they’ve somehow reached the Final Truth of reality seems ludicrous.

“You should take the approach that you’re wrong. Your goal is to be less wrong.”

― Elon Musk

7. Displays an “If you disagree with me, you must be my enemy” mentality.

For highly dogmatic minds, any disagreement is interpreted as an act of war. If you disagree with them, or even offer an alternate possibility, you must not be on their team, and if you’re not on their team, you must be on an opposing team—an enemy.

This black-and-white thinking is made all the worse when a country has just two major political parties, as in the case of the United States. In a well-functioning bipartisan system, the two parties should at least be able to cooperate, compromise, and realize everyone is ultimately seeking to improve the country, despite disagreeing about how best to do that. Unfortunately, in the profoundly divisive and polarized US political climate of 2018, bipartisan cooperation and understanding has become impossible for many people. This is a grim omen of things to come.

Adaptive minds realize that disagreement is healthy, and that talking through disagreements presents an opportunity to learn and refine one’s views. They furthermore understand that black-and-white thinking fails to account for the complexity of the world. They see that it is unwise to rigidly categorize someone as an enemy or as a member of a certain tribe based on a couple of their positions, considering there are potentially infinite positions one could take on any given issue.

8. All viewpoints are identical to those of a single political camp.

If you can guess a person’s positions on climate change, social welfare, immigration, and gun control, based on their position on some unrelated issue like abortion, you can be fairly certain that they’ve inherited tribal dogmas, rather than forming their own conclusions.

The appeal of subscribing to a dogmatic ideology is that there is an answer for everything. You just repeat the views that are popular with your tribe, and you never have to go to the trouble of analyzing individual issues for yourself.

Active minds, by contrast, hold complex, nuanced, unpredictable views, because they analyze each issue independently. They seek out the best arguments and evidence supporting different positions on the issue, and they form their own conclusions. Or often they’re agnostic on certain issues, because they’ve confronted the true complexity and don’t feel confident enough to favor one compelling view over another.

Conclusion: Activate Your Mind

A healthy mind is a mind that updates itself based on new arguments and evidence.

Cultivating this form of mental health will serve you well in all areas of life. It’s also arguably something that we need more people to do, if we hope to continue to flourish as a species and help other earthly species to flourish.

Humanity currently finds itself in the midst of unprecedented global changes. In such complex and unpredictable times, we surely need to be adaptable and open to good ideas, wherever they may come from. We are gaining the technological power of gods, but without the wisdom and care of gods to accompany this power, we are likely to wield it in disastrous ways.

Gaining the wisdom and care of gods begins with each of us: with our individual decisions to activate our minds—to actively pursue greater knowledge, wisdom, and understanding.

Hopefully this post has offered you some mind-activating inspiration and direction. The need for individuals to take their education and cognitive empowerment into their own hands extends far beyond politics. The degree to which we are collectively successful in this endeavor may well determine whether we create a utopia or an apocalypse in the coming decades and centuries.

All of this is to say that, your mind matters. Take good care of it. Best of luck.

On Track for Extinction: Can Humanity Survive?

Posted on March 12, 2018 by Reid Mukai

By Robert J. Burrowes

Anyone reading the scientific literature (or the progressive news outlets that truthfully report this literature) knows that homo sapiens sapiens is on the fast track to extinction, most likely some time between 2025 and 2040.

For a taste of the evidence in this regard focusing on the climate, see ‘Climate Collapse and Near Term Human Extinction’, ‘What They Won’t Tell You About Climate Catastrophe’, ‘Release of Arctic Methane “May Be Apocalyptic,” Study Warns’ and ‘7,000 underground [methane] gas bubbles poised to “explode” in Arctic’.

Unfortunately, of course, the climate is not the only imminent threat to human survival. With an insane leadership in the White House in the United States – see ‘Resisting Donald Trump’s Violence Strategically’ – we are faced with the prospect of nuclear war. And even if the climate and nuclear threats to our survival are removed, there is still a substantial range of environmental threats – including rainforest destruction, the ongoing dumping of Fukushima radiation into the Pacific Ocean, extensive contamination from military violence… – that need to be addressed too, given the synergistic impacts of these multiple and interrelated threats.

Can these extinction-threatening problems be effectively addressed?

Well the reality is that most (but not all) of them can be tackled effectively if we are courageous enough to make powerful personal and organizational decisions and then implement them. But we are not even close to doing that yet. And time is obviously running out fast.

Given the evidence, scientific and otherwise, documenting the cause and nature of many of these problems and what is required to fix them, why aren’t these strategies to address the problems implemented?

At the political and economic level, it is usually explained structurally – for example, as an outcome of capitalism, patriarchy and/or the states-system – or, more simply, as an outcome of the powerful vested interests that control governments and the corporate imperative to make profits despite exacerbating the current perilous state of the Earth’s biosphere and its many exploited populations (human and otherwise) by doing so.

But the reality is that these political and economic explanations mask the deeper psychological drivers that generate and maintain these dysfunctional structures and behaviours.

Let me explain why and how this happens using the climate catastrophe to illustrate the process.

While scientific concern about the increase in carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere had been raised more than a century ago – see ‘The Discovery of Global Warming’ – it wasn’t until the 1980s that this concern started to gain significant traction in public awareness. And despite ongoing agitation by some scientists as well as climate and environment groups, corporate-funded climate deniers were able to stall widespread recognition of, and the start of serious official action on, the climate catastrophe for more than two more decades.

However, as the truth of the climate catastrophe was finally being accepted by most people and the climate deniers were finally forced into full-scale retreat on the issue of whether or not the climate catastrophe was, in fact, so serious that it threatened human extinction, the climate deniers implemented their back-up strategy: they used their corporate media to persuade people that action wasn’t necessary ‘until the end of the [21^st] century’ and to exaggerate the argument about the ‘acceptable’ increase above the pre-industrial norm – 2 degrees? 3 degrees? 1.5 degrees? – to obscure the truth that 0.5 degrees was, in fact, the climate science consensus back in 2007.

But, you might ask: ‘Why would anyone prefer to ignore the evidence, given the extinction-threatening nature of this problem?’

Or, to put the question more fully: ‘Why would anyone – whether an “ordinary” worker, academic, lawyer, doctor, businessperson, corporate executive, government leader or anyone else – prefer to live in delusion and believe the mainstream narrative about “the end of the century” (or 1.5 degrees) rather than simply consider the evidence and respond powerfully to it?’

And what is so unattractive about the truth that so many people run from it rather than embrace it?

Obviously, these questions go to the heart of the human (psychological) condition so let me explain why most humans now live in a delusional state whether in relation to the climate, environment issues generally, the ongoing wars and other military violence, the highly exploitative global economy or anything else.

People do not choose to live in delusion nor do they choose their delusion consciously. A delusion is generated by a person’s unconscious mind; that is, the part of their own mind of which the individual is normally unaware. So why does a person’s unconscious mind generate a delusion? What is the purpose of it?

A person’s unconscious mind generates a delusion when the individual is simply too terrified to contemplate and grapple with reality. Instead, the person unconsciously generates a delusion and then lives in accord with that delusion for the (obvious) reason that the delusion does not frighten them.

This unconscious delusional state is the fundamental outcome of the socialization, which I call ‘terrorization’, of the typical child during their childhood.

Endlessly and violently coerced (by a variety of threatened and actual punishments) to obey the will of parents, teachers and religious figures in denial of their own self-will, while simultaneously denied the opportunity to feel the fear, anger, sadness and other feelings that this violence causes, the child has no choice but to suppress their awareness of how they feel and the reality that caused these feelings. As a result, this leaves virtually all children feeling terrified, full of self-hatred and powerless. For brief explanations of how this happens, see ‘Understanding Self-Hatred in World Affairs’ and ‘Why Are Most Human Beings So Powerless?’

However, and this point is important, each of these feelings is extraordinarily unpleasant to feel consciously and the child never gets the listening they need to focus on feeling them. See ‘Nisteling: The Art of Deep Listening’.

As a result, these feelings are suppressed below conscious awareness and this fear, self-hatred and powerlessness become the primary but unconscious psychological drivers of their behaviour and, significantly, results in them participating mindlessly in the widespread ‘socially acceptable’ delusions generated by elites and endlessly promulgated through elite channels such as education systems, the corporate media and entertainment industries.

Hence, as a result of being terrorized during childhood, delusion is the most common state of human individuals, irrespective of their role in society. For a full explanation of why this happens, see ‘Why Violence?’ and ‘Fearless Psychology and Fearful Psychology: Principles and Practice’.

And, as one part of their delusional state, most people must engage in the denial of reality whenever reality (unconsciously) frightens them (or threatens to bring their unconscious self-hatred or powerlessness into their awareness). See ‘The Psychology of Denial’. This, of course, means that they are frightened to take action in response to reality but also deny it is even necessary.

So what can we do about all of this? Well, as always, I would tackle the problem at various levels.

If you are one of those rare people who prefers to research the evidence and to act intelligently and powerfully in response to the truth that emerges from this evidence, I encourage you to do so. One option you have if you find the evidence of near-term human extinction compelling in light of the lacklustre official responses so far, is to join those participating in ‘The Flame Tree Project to Save Life on Earth’.

Obviously, tokenism on your part – such as rejecting plastic bags or collecting rubbish from public places – is not enough in the face of the profound changes needed.

Of course, if you are self-aware enough to know that you are inclined to avoid unpleasant realities and to take the action that this requires, then perhaps you could tackle this problem at its source by ‘Putting Feelings First’.

If you want intelligent, compassionate and powerful children who do not grow up living in delusion and denial, consider making ‘My Promise to Children’.

If you want to campaign on the climate, war, rainforest destruction or any other issue that brings us closer to extinction, consider developing a comprehensive nonviolent strategy to do so. See Nonviolent Campaign Strategy.

And if you want to participate in the worldwide effort to end violence in all of its manifestations, you are welcome to consider signing the online pledge of ‘The People’s Charter to Create a Nonviolent World’.

In summary, the primary threat faced by humanity is not the synergistic multitude of complex social, political, economic and technological forces that are precipitating our rush to extinction.

The fundamental threat to our survival is our psychological incapacity (particularly because of our fear, self-hatred and powerlessness) to perceive reality and respond powerfully to it by formulating and implementing appropriate social, political, economic and technological measures that address our multifaceted crisis systematically.

Unless we include addressing this dysfunctional individual and collective psychological state in our strategy to avert human extinction, we will ultimately fail and extinction will indeed be our fate.

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

Email: flametree@riseup.net

Websites:
Nonviolence Charter
Flame Tree Project to Save Life on Earth
‘Why Violence?’
Feelings First
Nonviolent Campaign Strategy
Nonviolent Defense/Liberation Strategy
Anita: Songs of Nonviolence
Robert Burrowes
Global Nonviolence Network

3 EXTRAORDINARY PARADOXES OF PERSONAL AWAKENING

Posted on March 11, 2018 by Reid Mukai

By Dylan Charles

Source: Waking Times

How do you reconcile the utter madness of the world with the overwhelming joy of being alive in it?

“Paradox: a situation, person, or thing that combines contradictory features or qualities.”

Without question we live in interesting times. The deception, insanity and turmoil in our world has no end, yet when we tune in very closely to life’s pulse, we find softness and connection open to us at every step. These contradictory features of the human experience point to the dualistic nature of the universe, but ultimately offer a glimpse of a middle way, the center, where harmony resides in a sea of chaos. A seeming, but natural paradox.

“When people find one thing beautiful,
another consequently becomes ugly.
When one man is held up as good,
another is judged deficient.

Similarly, being and nonbeing balance each other;
difficult and easy define each other;
long and short illustrate each other;
high and low rest upon one another;
voice and song meld into harmony;
what is to come follows upon what has been.”

~Tao Te Ching 2

This is what personal awakening means. To create a harmonious relationship with your own life. To solve the paradox. Have you experienced any of these 3 extraordinary paradoxes of personal awakening?

1. The Awakening is Triggered by Fear and Supported by Love

Like an invading virus triggers the immune system, fear triggers the awakening. War, strife, turmoil, conspiracy, control, death, suffering, theft, abuse. This is the world we have created for ourselves. The toll of such heaviness manifests as a dense type of contagious fear, a chronic trigger that perpetuates the fight or flight response, but without an immediate or tangible threat to face directly. But there is nowhere to run or hide from the fear. We can confront it or be consumed by it. Or transmute it.

And what is to found beyond the fear? Love. An endless stream of it. In the stream the fear makes sense as a force which guides us into the stream of love.

2. Healing Hurts

The awakening is ultimately a healing process, but it’s hardly free of pain, because it is in a sense a recovery from injury or illness, like a form of forgetfulness of who you really are. As such, it actually hurts. A lot. And just like the agony of having a broken bone set, or the pain of recovering from a difficult surgery, emotional and spiritual pain is a necessary component of healing.

Letting go into whatever it is, depression, sadness, boredom, or even grief, is how healing begins. There is no out, only through. The remembrance of the pain is there to forever color the outcome of the healing process.

“If you desire healing,
let yourself fall ill
let yourself fall ill.” ~Jalaluddin Mevlana Rumi

3. The Void Has Everything We Need

Counter intuitive it may seem, but stepping out of the cultural and mental clutter and into the void, where being and non-being balance each other, reveals everything we truly need. It turns out that silence is the teacher. In silence the universe comes into focus. Time stops and morphs into timelines. Infinite possibilities all become clear at once. Everything we need to know and feel is in this space, but to get there, everything has to be stripped away.

“In the pursuit of knowledge, every day something is added. In the practice of the Tao, every day something is dropped.” ~Tao Te Ching

Final Thoughts

What lies above lies below. A proper life is about balancing the joy of being alive with the terror of being alive. Ignoring either side of the equation leads to chaos.

“Do you want to improve the world?
I don’t think it can be done.

The world is sacred.
It can’t be improved.
If you tamper with it, you’ll ruin it.
If you treat it like an object, you’ll lose it.

There is a time for being ahead,
a time for being behind;
a time for being in motion,
a time for being at rest;
a time for being vigorous,
a time for being exhausted;
a time for being safe,
a time for being in danger.

The Master sees things as they are,
without trying to control them.
She lets them go their own way,
and resides at the center of the circle.”

~Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching

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After the Crash

Dispatches From a Long Recovery (Est. 10/2024)

Category Archives: consciousness