Category Archives: consciousness

Mutiny of the Soul

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By Charles Eisenstein

Source: Reality Sandwich

Depression, anxiety, and fatigue are an essential part of a process of metamorphosis that is unfolding on the planet today, and highly significant for the light they shed on the transition from an old world to a new.

When a growing fatigue or depression becomes serious, and we get a diagnosis of Epstein-Barr or Chronic Fatigue Syndrome or hypothyroid or low serotonin, we typically feel relief and alarm. Alarm: something is wrong with me. Relief: at least I know I’m not imagining things; now that I have a diagnosis, I can be cured, and life can go back to normal. But of course, a cure for these conditions is elusive.

The notion of a cure starts with the question, “What has gone wrong?” But there is another, radically different way of seeing fatigue and depression that starts by asking, “What is the body, in its perfect wisdom, responding to?” When would it be the wisest choice for someone to be unable to summon the energy to fully participate in life?

The answer is staring us in the face. When our soul-body is saying No to life, through fatigue or depression, the first thing to ask is, “Is life as I am living it the right life for me right now?” When the soul-body is saying No to participation in the world, the first thing to ask is, “Does the world as it is presented me merit my full participation?”

What if there is something so fundamentally wrong with the world, the lives, and the way of being offered us, that withdrawal is the only sane response? Withdrawal, followed by a reentry into a world, a life, and a way of being wholly different from the one left behind?

The unspoken goal of modern life seems to be to live as long and as comfortably as possible, to minimize risk and to maximize security. We see this priority in the educational system, which tries to train us to be “competitive” so that we can “make a living”. We see it in the medical system, where the goal of prolonging life trumps any consideration of whether, sometimes, the time has come to die. We see it in our economic system, which assumes that all people are motivated by “rational self-interest”, defined in terms of money, associated with security and survival. (And have you ever thought about the phrase “the cost of living”?) We are supposed to be practical, not idealistic; we are supposed to put work before play. Ask someone why she stays in a job she hates, and as often as not the answer is, “For the health insurance.” In other words, we stay in jobs that leave us feeling dead in order to gain the assurance of staying alive. When we choose health insurance over passion, we are choosing survival over life.

On a deep level, which I call the soul level, we want none of that. We recognize that we are here on earth to enact a sacred purpose, and that most of the jobs on offer are beneath our dignity as human beings. But we might be too afraid to leave our jobs, our planned-out lives, our health insurance, or whatever other security and comfort we have received in exchange for our divine gifts. Deep down, we recognize this security and comfort as slaves’ wages, and we yearn to be free.

So, the soul rebels. Afraid to make the conscious choice to step away from a slave’s life, we make the choice unconsciously instead. We can no longer muster the energy to go through the motions. We enact this withdrawal from life through a variety of means. We might summon the Epstein-Barr virus into our bodies, or mononucleosis, or some other vector of chronic fatigue. We might shut down our thyroid or adrenal glands. We might shut down our production of serotonin in the brain. Other people take a different route, incinerating the excess life energy in the fires of addiction. Either way, we are in some way refusing to participate. We are shying away from ignoble complicity in a world gone wrong. We are refusing to contribute our divine gifts to the aggrandizement of that world.

That is why the conventional approach of fixing the problem so that we can return to normal life will not work. It might work temporarily, but the body will find other ways to resist. Raise serotonin levels with SSRIs, and the brain will prune some receptor sites, thinking in its wisdom, “Hey, I’m not supposed to feel good about the life I am living right now.” In the end, there is always suicide, a common endpoint of the pharmaceutical regimes that seek to make us happy with something inimical to our very purpose and being. You can only force yourself to abide in wrongness so long. When the soul’s rebellion is suppressed too long, it can explode outward in bloody revolution. Significantly, all of the school shootings in the last decade have involved people on anti-depression medication. All of them! For a jaw-dropping glimpse of the results of the pharmaceutical regime of control, scroll down this compilation of suicide/homicide cases involving SSRIs. I am not using “jaw-dropping” as a figure of speech. My jaw literally dropped open.

Back in the 1970s, dissidents in the Soviet Union were often hospitalized in mental institutions and given drugs similar to the ones used to treat depression today. The reasoning was that you had to be insane to be unhappy in the Socialist Workers’ Utopia. When the people treating depression receive status and prestige from the very system that their patients are unhappy with, they are unlikely to affirm the basic validity of the patient’s withdrawal from life. “The system has to be sound — after all, it validates my professional status — therefore the problem must be with you.”

Unfortunately, “holistic” approaches are no different, as long as they deny the wisdom of the body’s rebellion. When they do seem to work, usually that is because they coincide with some other shift. When someone goes out and gets help, or makes a radical switch of modalities, it works as a ritual communication to the unconscious mind of a genuine life change. Rituals have the power to make conscious decisions real to the unconscious. They can be part of taking back one’s power.

I have met countless people of great compassion and sensitivity, people who would describe themselves as “conscious” or “spiritual”, who have battled with CFS, depression, thyroid deficiency, and so on. These are people who have come to a transition point in their lives where they become physically incapable of living the old life in the old world. That is because, in fact, the world presented to us as normal and acceptable is anything but. It is a monstrosity. Ours is a planet in pain. If you need me to convince you of that, if you are unaware of the destruction of forests, oceans, wetlands, cultures, soil, health, beauty, dignity, and spirit that underlies the System we live in, then I have nothing to say to you. I only am speaking to you if you do believe that there is something deeply wrong with the way we are living on this planet.

A related syndrome comprises various “attention deficit” and anxiety “disorders” (forgive me, I cannot write down these words without the ironic quotation marks) which reflect an unconscious knowledge that something is wrong around here. Anxiety, like all emotions, has a proper function. Suppose you left a pot on the stove and you know you forgot something, you just can’t remember what. You cannot rest at ease. Something is bothering you, something is wrong. Subliminally you smell smoke. You obsess: did I leave the water running? Did I forget to pay the mortgage? The anxiety keeps you awake and alert; it doesn’t let you rest; it keeps your mind churning, worrying. This is good. This is what saves your life. Eventually you realize — the house is on fire! — and anxiety turns into panic, and action.

So if you suffer from anxiety, maybe you don’t have a “disorder” at all — maybe the house is on fire. Anxiety is simply the emotion corresponding to “Something is dangerously wrong and I don’t know what it is.” That is only a disorder if there is in fact nothing dangerously wrong. “Nothing is wrong, just you” is the message that any therapy gives when it tries to fix you. I disagree with that message. The problem is not with you. You have very good reason to be anxious. Anxiety keeps part of your attention away from your tasks of polishing the silverware as the house burns down, of playing the violin as the Titanic sinks. Unfortunately, the wrongness you are tapping into might be beyond the cognizance of the psychiatrists who treat you, who then conclude that the problem must be your brain.

Similarly, Attention Deficit Disorder, ADHD, and my favorite, Oppositional Defiant Disorder (ODD) are only disorders if we believe that the things presented for our attention are worth paying attention to. We cannot admit, without calling into question the whole edifice of our school system, that it may be completely healthy for a ten-year-old boy to not sit still for six hours in a classroom learning about long division and Vasco de Gama. Perhaps the current generation of children, that some call the Indigos, simply have a lower tolerance for school’s agenda of conformity, obedience, external motivation, right-and-wrong answers, the quantification of performance, rules and bells, report cards and grades and your permanent record. So we try to enforce their attention with stimulants, and subdue their heroic intuitive rebellion against the spirit-wrecking machine.

As I write about the “wrongness” against which we all rebel, I can hear some readers asking, “What about the metaphysical principle that it’s ‘all good’?” Just relax, I am told, nothing is wrong, all is part of the divine plan. You only perceive it as wrong because of your limited human perspective. All of this is only here for our own development. War: it gives people wonderful opportunities to make heroic choices and burn off bad karma. Life is wonderful, Charles, why do you have to make it wrong?

I am sorry, but usually such reasoning is just a sop to the conscience. If it is all good, then that is only because we perceive and experience it as terribly wrong. The perception of iniquity moves us to right it.

Nonetheless, it would be ignorant and fruitless to pass judgment upon those who do not see anything wrong, who, oblivious to the facts of destruction, think everything is basically fine. There is a natural awakening process, in which first we proceed full speed ahead participating in the world, believing in it, seeking to contribute to the Ascent of Humanity. Eventually, we encounter something that is undeniably wrong, perhaps a flagrant injustice or a serious health problem or a tragedy near at hand. Our first response is to think this is an isolated problem, remediable with some effort, within a system that is basically sound. But when we try to fix it, we discover deeper and deeper levels of wrongness. The rot spreads; we see that no injustice, no horror can stand in isolation. We see that the disappeared dissidents in South America, the child laborers in Pakistan, the clearcut forests of the Amazon, are all intimately linked together in a grotesque tapestry that includes every aspect of modern life. We realize that the problems are too big to fix. We are called to live in an entirely different way, starting with our most fundamental values and priorities.

All of us go through this process, repeatedly, in various realms of our lives; all parts of the process are right and necessary. The phase of full participation is a growth phase in which we develop gifts that will be applied very differently later. The phase of trying to fix, to endure, to soldier on with a life that isn’t working is a maturation phase that develops qualities of patience and determination and strength. The phase of discovering the all-encompassing nature of the problem is usually a phase of despair, but it need not be. Properly, it is a phase of rest, of stillness, of withdrawal, of preparation for a push. The push is a birth-push. Crises in our lives converge and propel us into a new life, a new being that we hardly imagine could exist, except that we’d heard rumors of it, echoes, and maybe even caught a glimpse of it here and there, been granted through grace a brief preview.

If you are in the midst of this process, you need not suffer if you cooperate with it. I can offer you two things. First is self-trust. Trust your own urge to withdraw even when a million messages are telling you, “The world is fine, what’s wrong with you? Get with the program.” Trust your innate belief that you are here on earth for something magnificent, even when a thousand disappointments have told you you are ordinary. Trust your idealism, buried in your eternal child’s heart, that says that a far more beautiful world than this is possible. Trust your impatience that says “good enough” is not good enough. Do not label your noble refusal to participate as laziness and do not medicalize it as an illness. Your heroic body has merely made a few sacrifices to serve your growth.

The second thing I can offer you is a map. The journey I have described is not always linear, and you may find yourself from time to time revisiting earlier territory. When you find the right life, when you find the right expression of your gifts, you will receive an unmistakable signal. You will feel excited and alive. Many people have preceded you on this journey, and many more will follow in times to come. Because the old world is falling apart, and the crises that initiate the journey are converging upon us. Soon many people will follow the paths we have pioneered. Each journey is unique, but all share the same basic dynamics I have described. When you have passed through it, and understood the necessity and rightness of each of its phases, you will be prepared to midwife others through it as well. Your condition, all the years of it, has prepared you for this. It has prepared you to ease the passage of those who will follow. Everything you have gone through, every bit of the despair, has been necessary to forge you into a healer and a guide. The need is great. The time is coming soon.

Breaking: Moguls Fear AI Apocalypse

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By Jacob Silverman

Source: The Baffler

A funny thing happened on the way to the Singularity. In the past few months, some of the tech industry’s most prominent figures (Elon Musk, Bill Gates), as well as at least one associated guru (Stephen Hawking), have publicly worried about the consequences of out-of-control artificial intelligence. They fear nothing less than the annihilation of humanity. Heady stuff, dude.

These pronouncements come meme-ready—apocalyptic, pithy, trading on familiar Skynet references—grade-A ore for the viral mill. The bearers of these messages seem utterly serious, evincing not an inkling of skepticism. “I think we should be very careful about artificial intelligence,” Elon Musk said. “If I had to guess at what our biggest existential threat is, it’s probably that.”

“The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race,” said Stephen Hawking, whose speech happens to be aided by a comparatively primitive artificial intelligence.

Gates recently completed the troika, sounding a more circumspect, but still troubled, position. During a Reddit AMA, he wrote: “I agree with Elon Musk and some others on this and don’t understand why some people are not concerned.”

It’s easy to see why these men expressed these fears. For one thing, someone asked them. This is no small distinction. Most people are not, in their daily lives, asked whether they think super-smart computers are going to take over the world and end humanity as we know it. And if they are asked, the questioner is usually not rapt with attention, lingering on every word as if it were gospel.

This may sound pedantic, but the point is that it’s pretty fucking flattering—to one’s ego, to every nerd fantasy one has ever pondered about the end of days—to be asked these questions, knowing that the answer will be immediately converted (perhaps, by a machine!) into headlines shared all over the world. Musk, a particularly skilled player of media hype for vaporous ideas like his Hyperloop, must have been aware of these conditions when he took up the question at an MIT student event in October.

Another reason Silicon Valley has begun spinning up its doomsday machine is that the tech industry, despite its agnostic leanings, has long searched for a kind of theological mantle that it can drape over itself. Hence the popularity of Arthur C. Clarke’s maxim: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Any sufficiently advanced religion needs its eschatological prophecies, and the fear of AI is fundamentally a self-serving one. It implies that the industry’s visionaries might create something so advanced that even they might not be able to control it. It places them at the center of the mechanical universe, where their invention—not God’s, not ExxonMobil’s—threatens the human species.

But AI is also seen as a risk worth taking. Rollo Carpenter, the creator of Cleverbot, an app that learns from its conversations with human beings, told the BBC, “I believe we will remain in charge of the technology for a decently long time and the potential of it to solve many of the world problems will be realised.”

There’s a clever justification embedded in here, the notion that we have to clear the runway for technologies that might solve our problems, but that might also, Icarus-like, become too bold, and lead to disaster. Carpenter’s remarks are, like all of the other ones shared here, conveniently devoid of any concerns about what technologies of automation are already doing to people and economic structures now. For that’s really the fear here, albeit in a far amplified form: that machines will develop capabilities, including a sense of self-direction, that render human beings useless. We will become superfluous machines—which is the same thing as being dead.

For many participants in today’s technologized marketplace, though, this is already the case. They have been replaced by object-character recognition software, which can read documents faster than they can; or by a warehouse robot, which can carry more packages; or by an Uber driver, who doesn’t need a dispatcher and will soon be replaced by a more efficient model—that is, a self-driving car. The people who find themselves here, among the disrupted, have been cast aside by the same forces of technological change that people like Gates and Musk treat as immutable.

Of course, if you really worry about what a business school professor might call AI’s “negative externalities,” then there all kinds of things you can do—like industry conclaves, mitigation studies, campaigns to open-source and regulate AI technologies. But then you might risk deducing that many of the concerns we express regarding AI—a lack of control, environmental devastation, a mindless growth for the sake of growth, the rending of social and cultural fabric in service of a disinterested higher authority ravenous for ever-more information and power—are currently happening.

Take a look out the window at Miami’s flooded downtown, the e-waste landfills of Ghana, or the fetid dormitories of Foxconn. To misappropriate the prophecy of another technological sage: the post-human dystopia is already here; it’s just not evenly distributed yet.

Jacob Silverman’s book, Terms of Service: Social Media and the Price of Constant Connection, will be published in March.

People as Livestock: The Cult of Fundamentalist Materialism and the Cheapening Life

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“I first encountered the term “Fundamentalist-Materialism” in the work of Robert Anton Wilson; it appears in several of his non-fiction works, including “The Cosmic Triggger” series. As far as I know R.A.W. was the originator of this philosophical designation.”

Is there any inherent value to an individual human life? 

By Dan Mage

Source: OpEdNews.com

Authoritarians of the left, libertarians of the right, objectivists, conservatives and even liberals and progressives fixated on “jobs” and “rehabilitation” of the socioeconomically dysfunctional give the answer “no; ” sometimes directly (as in the case of the Stalinist and the American conservative) and other times through actions, policies, and preferences (as in the case of elements of the “occupation” movement distancing themselves from “homeless bums,” “drug users,” and “ex-cons”).

Most of all, those with the power to set wages, prices, working conditions and societal expectation for those who have nothing left but their time and “docile bodies”*(Foucault) to sell, control and trade in human lives as commodities. While most of the supposedly civilized world frowns on chattel slavery (although a good bit of it goes on, especially in the sex trade, where prosecution of traffickers is the exception rather than the rule), the legal technicality of ownership is superfluous to the trade in human lives, time, labor, and in Reichian terms orgones.

What do Stalinism, objectivism, authoritarian capitalism, and global corporatism all have in common ? They are in my opinion fundamentalist-materialist cults that value the inanimate over the living, the concrete over the abstract and have effectively reduced the vast majority of the human race to livestock, or wild beasts to be hunted down, captured, contained, broken, or in the alternative, simply slaughtered and destroyed.

I have been told that it has always been thus, and perhaps in terms of humanity’s historical failings this is true. There is however no historical precedent for the establishment of a global value system through electronic multi-sensory media. Even the best efforts of the Catholic Church, Protestant missionaries and Islamic holy-warriors do not equal the technology and level of sophistication in the application of “industrial psychology.”

The message remains the same though, as it has been throughout history: “Obey or suffer.” Individual disobedience or even mere failure to “produce” in spite of the individual’s best efforts will result in stigmatization, marginalization, a degrading dependency on the state and, as state support for the economically disengaged is cut back and removed, starvation, homelessness and imprisonment; even the fact of homelessness is defined as a criminal offense by more local jurisdictions with each passing year.

The fact is that life is cheap; the idealistic visions of humanitarians are swept aside by those advocates of “austerity” and “tough choices,” whose calculations in service of usury on a global scale will determine the level of human suffering in each nation up to and including death by starvation, disease, and the inevitable outcome of manufactured scarcity, war.

The blurry and dim imagery of the concretes of suffering fades from vision in the glare of the deadly abstractions; political ideologies, religions, money that does not exist anywhere other than in the record keeping of the money lenders remains in clear focus. The conclusion returns stark, glaring and obvious: human life is a commodity, the value of which is consistently decreasing. The devaluation of an individual human life to a unit of production and consumption, which therefore can be discarded if determined to have no economic value, is all that is required for the machinery of mass exterminations and genocide to be set in motion.

Arguing about wages, prices, social systems and ways of arranging economies, even in cases where “progress” is made, will be useless. The dominance of the fundamentalist-materialist cults, as well as the authoritarian religions that create legitimacy for them in the eyes of the masses (and even Stalin, the ultimate fundamentalist-materialist, allowed for the return of religion as an adjunct of the state when he realized its value) will continue to crush and compress human life, until the perverted and inverted values themselves are overthrown, shattered, burned and buried.

When will the biocentric (life centered) ethos replace the thanatocentric (death centered) ethos as the dominant culture’s value system? I cannot answer even the “if” of this question, let alone the question itself. The fact that the power to collect interest on nonexistent money and the lifestyles that such usury on a global scale supports is presented, and apparently accepted, as an immutable law of nature rather than as an imposition of culture’s order on the true nature of humanity seems by way of this very acceptance to be a “natural law.” Images of vultures waiting for starving children to crawl to their deaths and mothers weeping over infants at the bottoms of pits do not move the master manipulators of numbers. If anything, only the fact that the die-offs are not more extensive is cause for lamentation.

Do we care anymore? I’m not speaking of our little “jobs” and “futures,” and relative degree of comfort/discomfort in oppression that seems to be everyone’s primary concern. I’m demanding of myself, of you and above all of those who have declared themselves to be “leaders;” what is it that matters to you? Do you feel anything at all? Can we set aside all calculations save for those needed to ease human suffering? The primary demand of all protests, occupations, strikes, boycotts and further actions of increasing effect and extremity will be “Life First!”

The life of one human being hanging on the edge of death, in suffering, is too high a price to pay, for all the glorious achievements of the fundamentalist-materialist cults, their leaders and their adherents. The cult of power, authority, war, and property as a weapon of coercion has, for all its trillions of dollars and stockpiled weapons of mass destruction, a single and fatal vulnerability; to function it depends on obedience. For obedience to be guaranteed, the “obey or suffer” directive must be enforceable. This directive is only enforceable if the doctrine of fundamentalist-materialism enjoys continued acceptance as a “fact of life,” rather than the monstrous fraud that it is.

*The term “docile bodies” is a chapter title in Michel Foucault’s “Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison” 1977, Random House, NY, NY.

 

New Analysis Shatters Narrative of Charter School Success

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In Minnesota, ‘new information is fueling critics who say the charter school experiment has failed to deliver.’

By Deirdre Fulton

Source: CommonDreams.org

Public schools are outperforming charter schools in Minnesota, in some cases “dramatically,” according to a new analysis by the state’s Star-Tribune newspaper.

In addition, many charter schools fail to adequately support minority students, close examination of the data revealed.

Journalist Charlene Briner, the Minnesota Department of Education looked at 128 of the state’s 157 charter schools and found “that the gulf between the academic success of its white and minority students widened at nearly two-thirds of those schools last year. Slightly more than half of charter schools students were proficient in reading, dramatically worse than traditional public schools, where 72 percent were proficient.”

Between 2011 and 2014, McGuire reported, 20 charter schools failed to meet the state’s expectations for academic growth each year, “signaling that some of Minnesota’s most vulnerable students had stagnated academically.”

Charlene Briner, the Minnesota Department of Education’s chief of staff, told the newspaper that she was troubled by the information, “which runs counter to ‘the public narrative’ that charter schools are generally superior to public schools.”

“Minnesota is the birthplace of the charter school movement and a handful of schools have received national acclaim for their accomplishments, particularly when it comes to making strong academic gains with low-income students of color,” the Star-Tribune claims. “But the new information is fueling critics who say the charter school experiment has failed to deliver on teaching innovation.”

Education analyst Diane Ravitch notes: “Minnesota was the home of the charter movement, which began with high expectations as a progressive experiment but has turned into a favorite mechanism in many states to promote privatization of public education and to generate profits for charter corporations like Imagine, Charter Schools USA, and K12. Today, charter advocates claim that their privately managed charters will ‘save low-income students from failing public schools,’ but the Minnesota experience suggests that charters face the same challenges as public schools, which is magnified by high teacher turnover in charter schools.”

The findings back up a report (pdf) put out last fall by the Institute on Metropolitan Opportunity at the University of Minnesota Law School, which examined the success and failures of the charter school system in Chicago, Illinois.

That study concluded:

Sadly the charters schools, which on average score lower that the Chicago public schools, have not improved the Chicago school system, but perhaps made it even weaker. Further charters, which are even more likely to be single race schools than the already hyper segregated Chicago school system, have not increased interracial contact, an often-stated goal of charter systems. Finally, the fact that Chicago charters use expulsion far more often that public schools deserves further study. In the end it is unlikely that the Chicago charter school experience provides a model for improving urban education in other big city school districts.

Meanwhile, in Philadelphia, the School Reform Commission plans to vote on no fewer than 39 charter school applications at a special meeting starting Wednesday afternoon. There will be opportunity for final statement by applicants and public commenting by just 39 speakers who registered in advance.

Earlier this month, a pro-charter, non-profit organization offered the cash-strapped city school district up to $35 million to help defray the costs of enrolling an additional 15,000 students in new charter schools.

Jodorowsky’s new film ENDLESS POETRY (Poesía Sin Fin)

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By Satori Films

Source: Kickstarter

Alejandro Jodorowsky, father of the midnight movie, wants to exchange your money into Poetic Money to make his latest film.

About this project

I was trying not to prepare anything. I didn’t want to prepare what I was going to say to you. Why? Because I am searching for my inner truth, I want to know what will I say. In two more days I will be 86 years old… it’s a lot. Why, at 86 years of age, am I fighting to make a picture? Why? Nothing is that important for me. Is it so important for a person who can die one day to the other, to make a picture? Because when you are 86 years old, every morning you awake and you say “I am still alive”. You are happy to be alive but you are maybe at the end of something. Why make a picture? What is a picture? Some pictures are only fun and show. It’s necessary, because in the world we are all nervous about everything that’s happening, no? They even say we are destroying the planet. So we need to go, to see a picture, to forget ourselves. Perhaps this is necessary, but for me a picture is not that. For me a picture is for remembering your self, not for forgetting yourself. But what does it mean to remember your self? What can we remember? For me, movies are really an art. And what is art? It is the search for your inner beauty. That is art. I don’t want to make a picture in order to make money. But if money comes, I open the pocket in order to make more pictures. But that’s not the finality. It’s not the finality to being admired by others. It’s not the finality to lie and invent things you’ve never lived.

In order to say something you need to know the thing you’re speaking of. It needs to be an experience, what you show on the screen. What will I show in this picture? What are human beings, art, museums and movie theatres showing to us? Are we those anti-heroes? Those people who have no dignity? We are slaves? We are liars? Thieves? What are we now? I don’t want to show that kind of person. I don’t know how to make pictures of everyone fighting one another, to have money, to steal money Why ?! I don’t want to speak about “love” either; about this “love” that isn’t real, that’s a fairytale. Love is something great, incredible, “sublime”… I don’t know how you say “sublime” in English… The most beautiful thing. Marpa was a saint in Tibet and he said “ Life, everything, is an illusion”. One day his son died, his young son died and he was crying and crying and crying and the disciples asked Marpa “Why are you crying? Your son is an illusion.” “Yes, my son is an illusion. But he is the most beautiful illusion.” Movies are an illusion but need to be the most beautiful illusion. I know what it’s like to scream because one of your sons died. It’s terrible. It’s terrible And in that moment you ask yourself, “ Why am I doing art, movies? Why?!” and then you say I am making movies and art in order to heal my soul. I need to open! Open ! open ! myself, in order to fin myself. To remember what the human being is. The beautifulness of the human being. The beautifulness of you. I need to show how beautiful the human being is. Now.

In Chile, in the forties, I was 24 years old… it was a fantastic moment. The war was all over the planet, and in Chile : no war. Because we are far and separate of the world: no television, mountains, ocean, peace! It was so peaceful. It was beautiful. And then a miracle happened : Poetry came to the country. Great poets started to write marvelous, marvelous poems; two of them have the Nobel Prize, Pablo Neruda and Gabriela Mistral – our father and our mother.

And then, everything was poetry. We were living our adolescence in this situation: poetry everywhere. And we started to search for the “poetical act”. For how it was to live with beautifulness. How it was to live in the mind: free! In heart : in union with world. In the sex: in full creativity.

How to make poetical action in order to discover the beautifulness of Life. There it was. In that time, the poetry was there. The human being was there. We had love, we had artists, we discovered all kinds of art.

And that suddenly disappeared. When I was 24 I left this paradise, and went to Europe where the world is illusion or disillusion, you don’t know.

But now I want to show what a spiritual paradise is: a young person, searching for the beautifulness of poetry. That is all that I want. I want to express… how to say it in English?… How I am obliged to this past… because I knew how it was to live in poetry. I knew that. And I want to show the world that it’s possible. It’s possible to remember your self. It’s possible to open your mind. It’s possible to open your heart. It’s possible to open your creativity. To live with less, but to live well. Well. That is what I want. Poetry without end. Endless Poetry. That is what I will do.

 

ENDLESS POETRY(Poesía Sin Fin) Official site: http://www.poesiasinfin.com/

After a 23 yearlong absence, the director of cult classics El Topo (1969) and Holy Mountain (1973) made his comeback in film direction in 2013 with The Dance of Reality. The film was based on the first part of Alejandro Jodorowsky’s homonymous autobiographical book, depicting his childhood years in Tocopilla, Chile. His new film ENDLESS POETRY (Poesía Sin Fin) will be based on the latter half of the same book, depicting the author’s youth in lively Santiago de Chile.

Our world is suffering from a devastating absence of poetry. Naïvely we sometimes hope to reconnect with it through film. But the greed-riddled industry, having colonized this magnificent art form, has done everything to strip it of its poetic power. With this film, Jodorowsky directs his energy more than ever into creating a film that can serve as a vehicle for awaking consciousness. It is our duty to enable all efforts to fight the powers that insist on lowering cinema to just a product in a commercial market. This film will bring forth an example of film’s poetic power.

ENDLESS POETRY (Poesía Sin Fin) flashes back to those decisive years in Alejandro Jodorowsky’s youth; years that defined the principle that would reign over his entire life: Poetry. The director’s life has been a constant effort to expand his imagination and push back against his own limits in order to apprehend and harness the potential for liberation that lies within each and every one of us. His career has been an open invitation to follow him in his efforts.

ENDLESS POETRY (Poesía Sin Fin) will be carried out as an offering both to film and to the general audience, who are infinitely more profound, intelligent and sensitive than the Hollywood industry would like to admit.

ENDLESS POETRY (Poesía Sin Fin) explores the magic reality underlying our surrounding world. The film seeks to inspire and encourage us all to dare to find our true selves. It is an invitation to Life.

Synopsis

Leaving his childhood and his native Tocopilla behind, the adolescent Alejandro Jodorowsky follows his parents to Santiago de Chile. Between his lack of self-confidence and the family pressure he is under, Alejandro struggles to express his desires and find his own path. But the flourishing capital, filled with artists and poets offers the perfect setting for him to grow out of his cage. Thinking he’d fit in well, Alejandro’s cousin Ricardo takes the young boy to the home of Veronica and Carmen Cereceda, where puppeteers, dancers, sculptors and painters all live and create together. There, defying all of his old limitations, Alejandro takes the first step on his path to becoming a poet in the Chilean artistic epicenter of the 1940s. Alongside rising poets like Enrique Linh, Nicanor Parra and in the arms of his first love, Stella Diaz, Alejandro’s poetic destiny takes form and a new world unravels … changing his life forever.

Production Schedule and Budget

The film will be shot in Santiago de Chile from July to August 2015 for eight weeks. Its post-production such as editing, music tracks, visual effects and so forth will take place in Paris and Tokyo with completion slated for the end of February 2016. The total buget will be about three million dollars.

Why Kickstarter?

Alejandro Jodorowsky says; « The necessity for expression is more important than the type of film you want to make. I make a film when I have something I need to express. I don’t think about investors, industries or commercialisation. I just need to express myself.

In order to realize Jodorowsky’s new film production, we need the support of micro producers across the world who understand his vision of cinema.

Jodorowsky’s Poetic Money

Jodorowsky thinks that all money should be transformed into poetry. And so that is what he will do with this Kickstarter project. No matter what level you pledge at, Jodorowsky will exchange your pledge into his brand new Poetic Money (DINERO POÉTICO) and send it back to you. This money can’t be spent on any material goods — only on the poetry of the universe.

The exchange rate is 1US$＝1DP.

(In the case of $10,000 or more pledge, it is 0.5US$=1DP）

There are 3 bill denominations: 1DP, 10DP and 100DP. Each bill has an original money-related poem written by Jodorowsky printed on it in Spanish. There are two versions of each DP bill, each version of the bill presenting a different poem. There are 6 kinds of bills in total.

Jodorowsky wants to fill the world with poetry. So when you pledge, please mumble a poem in your heart. If you have a twitter account, please tweet a poem with #EndlessPoetryMyPoem. Your poem will be on the official site of ENDLESS POETRY (Poesía Sin Fin).

Jodorowsky’s Poems About Money and Wealth

 <1 Dinero Poético>

1 dinero poético – A
Money is like the Buddha; you can’t obtain it unless you work for it. If you keep it from flowing, it disappears.

1 dinero poético – B
To those who use it to make the flower of the world blossom, money gives its light. Those who glorify themselves, mistaking wealth for the soul, money destroys.

<10 Dinero Poético>

10 dinero poético – A
In pursuance of wealth I throw a spear through the Goddess and bathe in her blood.

10 dinero poético – B
Just as gold does not cease to shine when clouds cover the sun, the soul, beneath flesh and bone, continues to glow with its own light.

<100 Dinero Poético>

100 dinero poético – A
There is no difference between money and consciousness.
There is no difference between consciousness and death.
There is no difference between death and wealth.

100 dinero poético – B
Money is like blood: it gives life if it flows.
Money is like the Christ: it blesses you if you share it.
Money is like a woman: it offers itself to you if you cherish it.

Read more and/or back the project at Jodorowsky’s Kickstarter Page.

 

Welcome to the Matrix: Enslaved by Technology and the Internet of Things

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By John W. Whitehead

Source: The Rutherford Institute

“There will come a time when it isn’t ‘They’re spying on me through my phone’ anymore. Eventually, it will be ‘My phone is spying on me.’” ― Philip K. Dick

If ever Americans sell their birthright, it will be for the promise of expediency and comfort delivered by way of blazingly fast Internet, cell phone signals that never drop a call, thermostats that keep us at the perfect temperature without our having to raise a finger, and entertainment that can be simultaneously streamed to our TVs, tablets and cell phones.

Likewise, if ever we find ourselves in bondage, we will have only ourselves to blame for having forged the chains through our own lassitude, laziness and abject reliance on internet-connected gadgets and gizmos that render us wholly irrelevant.

Indeed, while most of us are consumed with our selfies and trying to keep up with what our so-called friends are posting on Facebook, the megacorporation Google has been busily partnering with the National Security Agency (NSA), the Pentagon, and other governmental agencies to develop a new “human” species, so to speak.

In other words, Google—a neural network that approximates a global brain—is fusing with the human mind in a phenomenon that is called “singularity,” and they’ve hired transhumanist scientist Ray Kurzweil to do just that. Google will know the answer to your question before you have asked it, Kurzweil said. “It will have read every email you will ever have written, every document, every idle thought you’ve ever tapped into a search-engine box. It will know you better than your intimate partner does. Better, perhaps, than even yourself.”

But here’s the catch: the NSA and all other government agencies will also know you better than yourself. As William Binney, one of the highest-level whistleblowers to ever emerge from the NSA said, “The ultimate goal of the NSA is total population control.”

Science fiction, thus, has become fact.

We’re fast approaching Philip K. Dick’s vision of the future as depicted in the film Minority Report. There, police agencies apprehend criminals before they can commit a crime, driverless cars populate the highways, and a person’s biometrics are constantly scanned and used to track their movements, target them for advertising, and keep them under perpetual surveillance.

Cue the dawning of the Age of the Internet of Things, in which internet-connected “things” will monitor your home, your health and your habits in order to keep your pantry stocked, your utilities regulated and your life under control and relatively worry-free.

The key word here, however, is control.

In the not-too-distant future, “just about every device you have — and even products like chairs, that you don’t normally expect to see technology in — will be connected and talking to each other.”

By 2018, it is estimated there will be 112 million wearable devices such as smartwatches, keeping users connected it real time to their phones, emails, text messages and the Internet. By 2020, there will be 152 million cars connected to the Internet and 100 million Internet-connected bulbs and lamps. By 2022, there will be 1.1 billion smart meters installed in homes, reporting real-time usage to utility companies and other interested parties.

This “connected” industry—estimated to add more than $14 trillion to the economy by 2020—is about to be the next big thing in terms of societal transformations, right up there with the Industrial Revolution, a watershed moment in technology and culture.

Between driverless cars that completely lacking a steering wheel, accelerator, or brake pedal, and smart pills embedded with computer chips, sensors, cameras and robots, we are poised to outpace the imaginations of science fiction writers such as Philip K. Dick and Isaac Asimov. By the way, there is no such thing as a driverless car. Someone or something will be driving, but it won’t be you.

The 2015 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas is a glittering showcase for such Internet-connected techno gadgets as smart light bulbs that discourage burglars by making your house look occupied, smart thermostats that regulate the temperature of your home based on your activities, and smart doorbells that let you see who is at your front door without leaving the comfort of your couch.

Nest, Google’s $3 billion acquisition, has been at the forefront of the “connected” industry, with such technologically savvy conveniences as a smart lock that tells your thermostat who is home, what temperatures they like, and when your home is unoccupied; a home phone service system that interacts with your connected devices to “learn when you come and go” and alert you if your kids don’t come home; and a sleep system that will monitor when you fall asleep, when you wake up, and keep the house noises and temperature in a sleep-conducive state.

The aim of these internet-connected devices, as Nest proclaims, is to make “your house a more thoughtful and conscious home.” For example, your car can signal ahead that you’re on your way home, while Hue lights can flash on and off to get your attention if Nest Protect senses something’s wrong. Your coffeemaker, relying on data from fitness and sleep sensors, will brew a stronger pot of coffee for you if you’ve had a restless night.

It’s not just our homes that are being reordered and reimagined in this connected age: it’s our workplaces, our health systems, our government and our very bodies that are being plugged into a matrix over which we have no real control.

Moreover, given the speed and trajectory at which these technologies are developing, it won’t be long before these devices are operating entirely independent of their human creators, which poses a whole new set of worries. As technology expert Nicholas Carr notes, “As soon as you allow robots, or software programs, to act freely in the world, they’re going to run up against ethically fraught situations and face hard choices that can’t be resolved through statistical models. That will be true of self-driving cars, self-flying drones, and battlefield robots, just as it’s already true, on a lesser scale, with automated vacuum cleaners and lawnmowers.”

For instance, just as the robotic vacuum, Roomba, “makes no distinction between a dust bunny and an insect,” weaponized drones—poised to take to the skies en masse this year—will be incapable of distinguishing between a fleeing criminal and someone merely jogging down a street. For that matter, how do you defend yourself against a robotic cop—such as the Atlas android being developed by the Pentagon—that has been programmed to respond to any perceived threat with violence?

Unfortunately, in our race to the future, we have failed to consider what such dependence on technology might mean for our humanity, not to mention our freedoms.

Ingestible or implantable chips are a good example of how unprepared we are, morally and otherwise, to navigate this uncharted terrain. Hailed as revolutionary for their ability to access, analyze and manipulate your body from the inside, these smart pills can remind you to take your medication, search for cancer, and even send an alert to your doctor warning of an impending heart attack.

Sure, the technology could save lives, but is that all we need to know? Have we done our due diligence in asking all the questions that need to be asked before unleashing such awesome technology on an unsuspecting populace?

For example, asks Washington Post reporter Ariana Eunjung Cha:

What kind of warnings should users receive about the risks of implanting chip technology inside a body, for instance? How will patients be assured that the technology won’t be used to compel them to take medications they don’t really want to take? Could law enforcement obtain data that would reveal which individuals abuse drugs or sell them on the black market? Could what started as a voluntary experiment be turned into a compulsory government identification program that could erode civil liberties?

Let me put it another way. If you were shocked by Edward Snowden’s revelations about how NSA agents have used surveillance to spy on Americans’ phone calls, emails and text messages, can you imagine what unscrupulous government agents could do with access to your internet-connected car, home and medications? Imagine what a SWAT team could do with the ability to access, monitor and control your internet-connected home—locking you in, turning off the lights, activating alarms, etc.

Thus far, the public response to concerns about government surveillance has amounted to a collective shrug. After all, who cares if the government can track your whereabouts on your GPS-enabled device so long as it helps you find the fastest route from Point A to Point B? Who cares if the NSA is listening in on your phone calls and downloading your emails so long as you can get your phone calls and emails on the go and get lightning fast Internet on the fly? Who cares if the government can monitor your activities in your home by tapping into your internet-connected devices—thermostat, water, lights—so long as you can control those things with the flick of a finger, whether you’re across the house or across the country?

As for those still reeling from a year of police shootings of unarmed citizens, SWAT team raids, and community uprisings, the menace of government surveillance can’t begin to compare to bullet-riddled bodies, devastated survivors and traumatized children. However, both approaches are just as lethal to our freedoms if left unchecked.

Control is the key here. As I make clear in my book A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, total control over every aspect of our lives, right down to our inner thoughts, is the objective of any totalitarian regime.

George Orwell understood this. His masterpiece, 1984, portrays a global society of total control in which people are not allowed to have thoughts that in any way disagree with the corporate state. There is no personal freedom, and advanced technology has become the driving force behind a surveillance-driven society. Snitches and cameras are everywhere. And people are subject to the Thought Police, who deal with anyone guilty of thought crimes. The government, or “Party,” is headed by Big Brother, who appears on posters everywhere with the words: “Big Brother is watching you.”

Make no mistake: the Internet of Things is just Big Brother in a more appealing disguise.

Even so, I’m not suggesting we all become Luddites. However, we need to be aware of how quickly a helpful device that makes our lives easier can become a harmful weapon that enslaves us.

This was the underlying lesson of The Matrix, the Wachowski brothers’ futuristic thriller about human beings enslaved by autonomous technological beings that call the shots. As Morpheus, one of the characters in The Matrix, explains:

The Matrix is everywhere. It is all around us. Even now, in this very room. You can see it when you look out your window or when you turn on your television. You can feel it when you go to work… when you go to church… when you pay your taxes. It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth.

“What truth?” asks Neo.

Morpheus leans in closer to Neo: “That you are a slave, Neo. Like everyone else you were born into bondage. Born into a prison that you cannot smell or taste or touch. A prison for your mind.”

 

Never Before Has Our Approach to Drugs Improved So Much, So Fast

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We’re winning: More progress has been made toward enlightened drug policies and treatment in the past five years than in the previous 25. Here’s an advocacy agenda to take us even closer to the future we need.

By Maia Szalavitz

Source: Substance.com

There has never been a more exciting time to be writing and thinking about drugs and addiction. For most of the ‘80s through the ‘00s, policy and treatment debates were stagnant, with all sides taking hardened positions and often repeating the same tired talking points. But now change is in the air and those who would like to see reform have a chance to make a real difference. By looking at where we’ve come from, we can see where we need to go.

Until 2011 or 2012, the war on drugs, while much bemoaned, was simply a fact of life, with pretty much everyone agreeing both about its failure and, simultaneously, about the impossibility of doing anything significantly different because of the “tough on crime” arms race between the Republicans and Democrats.

The science didn’t matter: No one seemed to care that marijuana was objectively less harmful than alcohol or tobacco or that our drug laws originated both in the time of Jim Crow and, quite explicitly, as a way of oppressing people of color by other means. In fact, merely stating these facts, as I did many times, would often get me in trouble with editors who wanted to “balance” them with a prohibitionist claim to prove that the publication was “objective”! No one ever seemed to consider balance when a drug warrior made a demonstrably untrue statement.

It didn’t matter that the data on needle exchange was overwhelmingly in favor—and that no study had ever found that it encouraged drug use or prolonged addiction. A quote by someone who was ideologically opposed had to be obtained, even though they had no data to back their concerns about these programs to prevent infection with HIV and hepatitis C “sending the wrong message.”

The failure of drug enforcement either to prevent or to reduce “drug epidemics” and the ineffectiveness of incarceration at fighting addiction was irrelevant, too, even as the necessity of such punitive efforts was simply accepted without question.

Nor did it matter that harsh, confrontational treatment was known both to backfire and to be incredibly common—Dr. Drew, Intervention, Beyond Scared Straight and similar shows even portrayed it as exemplary.

At the same time, 12-step supporters were adamant that their way was the only way—or at least the best way. Drug warriors were convinced that criminalization of both possession and sales was the only way to avoid addiction Armageddon—and even many people in recovery bought into the idea that law enforcement must always play a role in policies related to illegal drugs.

In 2000, for instance, during the fight over California’s Proposition 36, which gives drug users three chances at treatment before jail becomes a sentencing option, the Betty Ford Center was among the opponents. Speaking for a coalition that included the rehab, actor and sobriety advocate Martin Sheen wrote in an op-ed, “Without accountability and consequences, drug abusers have little incentive to change their behavior or take treatment seriously.” (He didn’t explain how Betty Ford gets alcoholics, whose drug is legal, to comply with care.) But Prop 36 passed anyway, an early sign of the drug war’s waning hold.

And so, even when reforms would actually send patients to rehabs, treatment providers remained firmly aligned with drug warriors on the necessity of harsh criminalization, while they begged for crumbs of financing from the abundant table of law enforcement and argued that treatment is better than jail.

Now, though, the winds have shifted. Four states and Washington, DC, have legalized recreational use of marijuana. President Obama has directed the justice department not to interfere with these experiments and said last week, “My suspicion is that you are going to see other states start looking at this.” California, which rejected recreational legalization as recently as 2010, may pass it in an expected 2016 ballot initiative. National polls show majority support for legalization.

Neither Colorado nor Washington—the first two states to legalize—has seen anything near the predicted disaster in the first year after the passage of the law. In fact, in Colorado, crime is down, auto fatalities are down and teen use is stable or declining. (Because Washington took longer to implement its regime, good statistics aren’t yet available).

All of this is excellent news for reformers. So what should be next on the agenda? Here are a few things I’d like to see, which I think could build on the increased openness to more effective policy:

1. Over-the-counter naloxone

Naloxone, an opioid antagonist that can reverse opioid overdose, is now widely available to first responders and, through many harm reduction agencies, to friends and families of people at risk. No adverse effects have been reported; just more and more lives saved. The FDA should make naloxone available over the counter, and sales should be subsidized or prices capped to make it affordable. This safe, effective lifesaver should be in every first-aid kit.

2. Expand access to medication-assisted treatment

As I noted recently, it’s outrageous that any doctor who discovers that a patient has an opioid problem can’t simply prescribe the most effective treatment: maintenance with Suboxone or methadone. Federal limits on the number of patients a doctor can have on maintenance and laws that literally ghettoize methadone treatment should be repealed. Insurance limits on prescribing also should be challenged: These exist for no other medical condition.

3. Decriminalize personal possession of all drugs

Now that even once-staunch prohibitionists like Kevin Sabet no longer argue strongly for arrest and incarceration of those who possess marijuana, why does it still make sense for heroin, cocaine or other illegal drugs?

82% of all drug arrests are for possession, and half of these are for marijuana. According to the ACLU, the US spends $3.1 billion annually arresting and adjudicating marijuana possession cases, and at least as much is likely to be spent on the other half of possession arrests for all other drugs. And yet no data suggests that arresting drug users for possession fights addiction or reduces crime: In fact, addicted people often get worse due to incarceration, with very little treatment available in jail.

Moreover, Portugal’s 10-plus-year experience of complete decriminalization has found it to be associated with less crime, more treatment and less disease. What’s not to like? The World Health Organization recently came out in favor of decriminalization. Drug reformers should not make marijuana arrests the only focus of their abolition campaign. Arrests for use are expensive, harmful and ineffective: They need to stop.

5. Reform treatment

People with addiction and their loved ones are often shocked at what occurs in treatment: Evidence-based care is so hard to find that even leading addiction researcher and former deputy drug czar Tom McLellan didn’t know where to turn when his son needed help in 2009. Anne Fletcher’s Inside Rehab, David Sheff’s Clean and this 2012 report from the Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse all demonstrate the need for better accountability from treatment providers.

To start, private and public insurers should simply refuse to pay for treatment that is little more than indoctrination into 12-step groups, which can be had for free at many church basements. Instead, treatment time should be devoted to evidence-based therapies like motivational interviewing and cognitive behavioral therapy, which aren’t free—and provider reimbursement should be based on results, respectful and empathetic care and genuine fidelity to evidence-based therapies.

And this isn’t a change that only opponents of 12-step programs should favor. Even those who are helped by the steps know that such treatment clearly violates the Eighth Tradition, which states that AA should be “forever nonprofessional” and that the 12th-step work of trying to bring others into the program should be unpaid. Both 12-step groups and treatment will ultimately be better off disentangled.

5. Reframe addiction

As I’ve argued here before, addiction is better characterized as a learning or developmental disorder than as a brain disease. While those who support the brain disease concept see it as a way of reducing stigma, in actual fact, this idea can increase fear and hatred of addicts because the notion of “brain damage” suggests permanence and poor odds for recovery.

What addiction actually does in the brain is similar to what love does—it strongly wires in new memories and pushes us to seek certain experiences. This is not “damage” or “destruction.” When we understand addiction as one more type of neurodiversity—not always a disability, sometimes even a source of strength—we’ll really cut stigma.

Also, it’s impossible to fight stigma while the legal system enforces it: The whole point of criminalizing drug possession is to stigmatize it. Without changing both criminalization and the view of addiction as the only disease treated by prayer and repentance, stigma reduction won’t get very far.

There’s much more, of course, but these are areas where real progress can be made. Never before have I seen more openness in this area: Now people who used to blanch at the words “harm reduction” are singing its praises and those who were once horrified by needle exchange are calling for naloxone. We still have a long way to go—and there’s always the chance of backlash—but as Martin Luther King, Jr., put it, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.”

Maia Szalavitz is the nation’s leading neuroscience and addiction journalist, and a columnist at Substance.com. She has contributed to Time, The New York Times, Scientific American Mind, the Washington Post and many other publications. She has also published five books, including Help at Any Cost: How the Troubled-Teen Industry Cons Parents and Hurts Kids (Riverhead, 2006), and is currently finishing her sixth, Unbroken Brain, which examines why seeing addiction as a developmental or learning disorder can help us better understand, prevent and treat it. Her previous column for Substance.com was about how to treat people who need, but misuse, opiate painkillers in a more helpful and enlightened way.