Category Archives: Philosophy

Yes, Jesus Would Have Been Branded a Domestic Extremist Today

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By John & Nisha Whitehead

Source: The Rutherford Institute

“When the song of the angels is stilled, when the star in the sky is gone, when the kings and princes are home, when the shepherds are back with their flocks, the work of Christmas begins: to find the lost, to heal the broken, to feed the hungry, to release the prisoner, to rebuild the nations, to bring peace among the people, to make music in the heart.”—Howard Thurman, theologian and civil rights activist

The Christmas story of a baby born in a manger is a familiar one.

The Roman Empire, a police state in its own right, had ordered that a census be conducted. Joseph and his pregnant wife Mary traveled to the little town of Bethlehem so that they could be counted. There being no room for the couple at any of the inns, they stayed in a stable (a barn), where Mary gave birth to a baby boy, Jesus. Warned that the government planned to kill the baby, Jesus’ family fled with him to Egypt until it was safe to return to their native land.

Yet what if Jesus had been born 2,000 years later.

What if, instead of being born into the Roman police state, Jesus had been born at this moment in time? What kind of reception would Jesus and his family be given? Would we recognize the Christ child’s humanity, let alone his divinity? Would we treat him any differently than he was treated by the Roman Empire? If his family were forced to flee violence in their native country and sought refuge and asylum within our borders, what sanctuary would we offer them?A singular number of churches across the country have asked those very questions in recent years, and their conclusions were depicted with unnerving accuracy by nativity scenes in which Jesus and his family are separated, segregated and caged in individual chain-link pens, topped by barbed wire fencing.

Those nativity scenes were a pointed attempt to remind the modern world that the narrative about the birth of Jesus is one that speaks on multiple fronts to a world that has allowed the life, teachings and crucifixion of Jesus to be drowned out by partisan politics, secularism, materialism and war, all driven by a manipulative shadow government called the Deep State.

The modern-day church has largely shied away from applying Jesus’ teachings to modern problems such as war, poverty, immigration, etc., but thankfully there have been individuals throughout history who ask themselves and the world: what would Jesus do.

What would Jesus—the baby born in Bethlehem who grew into an itinerant preacher and revolutionary activist, who not only died challenging the police state of his day (namely, the Roman Empire) but spent his adult life speaking truth to power, challenging the status quo of his day, and pushing back against the abuses of the Roman Empire—do about the injustices of our  modern age.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer asked himself what Jesus would have done about the horrors perpetrated by Hitler and his assassins. The answer: Bonhoeffer was executed by Hitler for attempting to undermine the tyranny at the heart of Nazi Germany.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn asked himself what Jesus would have done about the soul-destroying gulags and labor camps of the Soviet Union. The answer: Solzhenitsyn found his voice and used it to speak out about government oppression and brutality.

Martin Luther King Jr. asked himself what Jesus would have done about America’s warmongering. The answer: declaring “my conscience leaves me no other choice,” King risked widespread condemnation as well as his life when he publicly opposed the Vietnam War on moral and economic grounds.

Even now, despite the popularity of the phrase “What Would Jesus Do?” (WWJD) in Christian circles, there remains a disconnect in the modern church between the teachings of Christ and the suffering of what Jesus in Matthew 25 refers to as the “least of these.

Yet this is not a theological gray area: Jesus was unequivocal about his views on many things, not the least of which was charity, compassion, war, tyranny and love.

After all, Jesus—the revered preacher, teacher, radical and prophet—was born into a police state not unlike the growing menace of the American police state. When he grew up, he had powerful, profound things to say, things that would change how we view people, alter government policies and change the world. “Blessed are the merciful,” “Blessed are the peacemakers,” and “Love your enemies” are just a few examples of his most profound and revolutionary teachings.

When confronted by those in authority, Jesus did not shy away from speaking truth to power. Indeed, his teachings undermined the political and religious establishment of his day. It cost him his life. He was eventually crucified as a warning to others not to challenge the powers-that-be.

Can you imagine what Jesus’ life would have been like if, instead of being born into the Roman police state, he had been born and raised in the American police state.

Consider the following if you will.

Had Jesus been born in the era of the America police state, rather than traveling to Bethlehem for a census, Jesus’ parents would have been mailed a 28-page American Community Survey, a mandatory government questionnaire documenting their habits, household inhabitants, work schedule, how many toilets are in your home, etc. The penalty for not responding to this invasive survey can go as high as $5,000.

Instead of being born in a manger, Jesus might have been born at home. Rather than wise men and shepherds bringing gifts, however, the baby’s parents might have been forced to ward off visits from state social workers intent on prosecuting them for the home birth. One couple in Washington had all three of their children removed after social services objected to the two youngest being birthed in an unassisted home delivery.

Had Jesus been born in a hospital, his blood and DNA would have been taken without his parents’ knowledge or consent and entered into a government biobank. While most states require newborn screening, a growing number are holding onto that genetic material long-term for research, analysis and purposes yet to be disclosed.

Then again, had Jesus’ parents been undocumented immigrants, they and the newborn baby might have been shuffled to a profit-driven, private prison for illegals where they first would have been separated from each other, the children detained in make-shift cages, and the parents eventually turned into cheap, forced laborers for corporations such as Starbucks, Microsoft, Walmart, and Victoria’s Secret. There’s quite a lot of money to be made from imprisoning immigrants, especially when taxpayers are footing the bill.

From the time he was old enough to attend school, Jesus would have been drilled in lessons of compliance and obedience to government authorities, while learning little about his own rights. Had he been daring enough to speak out against injustice while still in school, he might have found himself tasered or beaten by a school resource officer, or at the very least suspended under a school zero tolerance policy that punishes minor infractions as harshly as more serious offenses.

Had Jesus disappeared for a few hours let alone days as a 12-year-old, his parents would have been handcuffed, arrested and jailed for parental negligence. Parents across the country have been arrested for far less “offenses” such as allowing their children to walk to the park unaccompanied and play in their front yard alone.

Rather than disappearing from the history books from his early teenaged years to adulthood, Jesus’ movements and personal data—including his biometrics—would have been documented, tracked, monitored and filed by governmental agencies and corporations such as Google and Microsoft. Incredibly, 95 percent of school districts share their student records with outside companies that are contracted to manage data, which they then use to market products to us.

From the moment Jesus made contact with an “extremist” such as John the Baptist, he would have been flagged for surveillance because of his association with a prominent activist, peaceful or otherwise. Since 9/11, the FBI has actively carried out surveillance and intelligence-gathering operations on a broad range of activist groups, from animal rights groups to poverty relief, anti-war groups and other such “extremist” organizations.

Jesus’ anti-government views would certainly have resulted in him being labeled a domestic extremist. Law enforcement agencies are being trained to recognize signs of anti-government extremism during interactions with potential extremists who share a “belief in the approaching collapse of government and the economy.

While traveling from community to community, Jesus might have been reported to government officials as “suspicious” under the Department of Homeland Security’s “See Something, Say Something” programs. Many states, including New York, are providing individuals with phone apps that allow them to take photos of suspicious activity and report them to their state Intelligence Center, where they are reviewed and forwarded to law-enforcement agencies.

Rather than being permitted to live as an itinerant preacher, Jesus might have found himself threatened with arrest for daring to live off the grid or sleeping outside. In fact, the number of cities that have resorted to criminalizing homelessness by enacting bans on camping, sleeping in vehicles, loitering and begging in public has doubled.

Viewed by the government as a dissident and a potential threat to its power, Jesus might have had government spies planted among his followers to monitor his activities, report on his movements, and entrap him into breaking the law. Such Judases today—called informants—often receive hefty paychecks from the government for their treachery.

Had Jesus used the internet to spread his radical message of peace and love, he might have found his blog posts infiltrated by government spies attempting to undermine his integrity, discredit him or plant incriminating information online about him. At the very least, he would have had his website hacked and his email monitored.

Had Jesus attempted to feed large crowds of people, he would have been threatened with arrest for violating various ordinances prohibiting the distribution of food without a permit. Florida officials arrested a 90-year-old man for feeding the homeless on a public beach.

Had Jesus spoken publicly about his 40 days in the desert and his conversations with the devil, he might have been labeled mentally ill and detained in a psych ward against his will for a mandatory involuntary psychiatric hold with no access to family or friends. One Virginia man was arrested, strip searched, handcuffed to a table, diagnosed as having “mental health issues,” and locked up for five days in a mental health facility against his will apparently because of his slurred speech and unsteady gait.

Without a doubt, had Jesus attempted to overturn tables in a Jewish temple and rage against the materialism of religious institutions, he would have been charged with a hate crime. More than 45 states and the federal government have hate crime laws on the books.

Had anyone reported Jesus to the police as being potentially dangerous, he might have found himself confronted—and killed—by police officers for whom any perceived act of non-compliance (a twitch, a question, a frown) can result in them shooting first and asking questions later.

Rather than having armed guards capture Jesus in a public place, government officials would have ordered that a SWAT team carry out a raid on Jesus and his followers, complete with flash-bang grenades and military equipment. There are upwards of 80,000 such SWAT team raids carried out every year, many on unsuspecting Americans who have no defense against such government invaders, even when such raids are done in error.

Instead of being detained by Roman guards, Jesus might have been made to “disappear” into a secret government detention center where he would have been interrogated, tortured and subjected to all manner of abuses. Chicago police have “disappeared” more than 7,000 people into a secret, off-the-books interrogation warehouse at Homan Square.

Charged with treason and labeled a domestic terrorist, Jesus might have been sentenced to a life-term in a private prison where he would have been forced to provide slave labor for corporations or put to death by way of the electric chair or a lethal mixture of drugs.

Indeed, as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, given the nature of government then and now, it is painfully evident that whether Jesus had been born in our modern age or his own, he still would have died at the hands of a police state.

Thus, as we draw near to Christmas with its celebration of miracles and promise of salvation, we would do well to remember that what happened in that manger on that starry night in Bethlehem is only the beginning of the story. That baby born in a police state grew up to be a man who did not turn away from the evils of his age but rather spoke out against it.

We must do no less.

Welcome to Philip K. Dick’s dystopia

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Nothing is private and no one is free

 (Credit: Alamy)

By David Samuels

Source: UnHerd

Philip K. Dick, whose novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? inspired the film Blade Runner, did not live to enjoy his Hollywood success. He died on March 2, 1982, three months before the film was released.

In the years since, the novelist once dismissed as a gutter pulp sci-fi weirdo has steadily climbed the ladder of posthumous literary reputation. The case for Dick’s genius has never rested on his dystopian vision of technology, which he shared in common with masters like HG Wells and Stanislaw Lem, and with hundreds of sci-fi writers since. Good science fiction — as opposed to fantasy novels set on other planets — is defined by a quasi-philosophical examination of interactions between men and machines and other products of modern science. It is part novel and part thought-experiment, centered on our idea of the human.

What made Dick a literary genius, then, was not any special talent for predicting hand-held personal devices or atom bombs the size of a shoe which might have led him to a job in Apple’s marketing department. His gift was for what might be called predictive psychology — how the altered worlds he imagined, whether futuristic or merely divergent from existing historical continuums, would feel to the people who inhabited them. Dick’s answer was, very often: “Not good.”

Dick’s dystopian-psychological approach marks him less as a conventional science fiction writer than as a member of the California anti-utopian school of the Sixties, whose best-known members include Robert Stone, Thomas Pynchon, Ken Kesey, Joan Didion and Hunter Thompson. Seen from this angle, Dick was perhaps the most powerfully and sweepingly paranoid of a group of writers whose stock-in-trade was conspiracy and paranoia, the hallmarks of a society marked — at that moment, and this one — by violent street crime, drug-induced psychosis, and visionary promises gone terribly wrong. Of his anti-utopian peers, Dick’s sci-fi genre background made him the only one who had any particular feel for the proposition that technology was inseparable from, and would therefore inevitably alter, our idea of the human.

Technology was and is perhaps the most Californian aspect of the American mythos. The idea that the universal constants of human nature were at war with the mutilating demands of technology-driven systems was a very Sixties Californian conceit, to which Dick’s fellow anti-utopians each adhered in their own way: In Kesey’s showdown between man and the castrating nanny-state; in Didion’s emphasis on the vanishing virtue of self-reliance; in Pynchon’s degenerate Ivy League Puritanism; in Thompson’s drug-addled primitivism; and in Stone’s Catholic idea of devotion to a God that might somehow salve the wounds of the survivors once the great American adventure goes bust.

What Dick saw, and what his fellow anti-utopians did not, was that human psychology and technology are not separate actors, and that whatever emerged from the other side of the future would be different to the human thing that entered it.

* * *

Seeing and describing how large numbers of people will perceive reality before anyone else does requires imagining states of consciousness that, in the moment, seem deeply strange. It is no accident that the greatest of works of speculative psychology were written by revolutionaries whose outlook was often bleak to the point of despair. The negative tone of these works often led future generations to describe their authors as conservatives, though artistically and psychologically speaking, they are radicals. Or rather, in their rejection of the dominant order, they are radicals and reactionaries at the same time.

The anti-utopian tradition emerged in earnest in 19th-century Russia. The Russian pioneers of the genre were superior to their rivals in England and elsewhere because the latter’s visions were constrained by attachments to a settled society, which one can argue never really existed in Russia — and because the ideas of revolution and violent reaction have always been so closely allied in the Russian psyche. Fyodor’s Dostoyevsky’s Notes From Underground struck many of its initial readers as a kind of artless mental vomit, before revealing itself as a Rosetta Stone for the century of Adolf Hitler and Lee Harvey Oswald. Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We is probably the greatest of at least a dozen weirdly prophetic novels written in the years immediately after the Bolshevik Revolution. In We, Zamyatin predicted what a surveillance society run by engineers would feel like to its inhabitants with a nauseating accuracy that did not become fully apparent until the rise of the modern tech surveillance complex.

The Dick novel that directly predicted our information-addicted, socially-networked 21st-century society, A Scanner Darkly, was both a prophecy of future psychological states and a half-veiled memoir of Dick’s own experiences in the California drug culture. Published in 1977, the book was a detective noir set in a druggy future in which large portions of the population appear to spend their lives scheming and snitching on each other to feed their addictions to a drug called Substance D — the “D” standing for Death, of course.

A Scanner Darkly, a reference to the line in Corinthians in which men at first see God “as in a glass, darkly”, is Dick’s rawest book and the one that reads least like science fiction. The book’s protagonist is simultaneously a narcotics agent known to his peers as Fred and a Substance D addict named Bob Arctor. Fred/Arctor lives in a house — his former marital abode — with two fellow addicts, and is in love with another addict named Donna, who comes to visit him there. Donna helps Arctor obtain Substance D, which he consumes, while Fred uses Donna to attempt to climb higher on the drug distribution ladder. At the end of the novel, Donna turns out to be a drug agent, who is spying on Bob Arctor.

What’s so striking about the book is not Dick’s heartfelt, if futuristically bent, portrayal of the evils of Sixties drug culture. For that, read Stone, who was a master of connecting the physical, mental and moral corruption of drug dealing and dependency, and the fantasies those pursuits inevitably engender to the deeper corruption of man’s nature.

What Dick uniquely captured was something else: The degenerative effects of the split-screen existence of a human brain ceaselessly spying on and doubting and implicating itself while at the same time being spied on by others, all of whom are embedded within machine systems that record everything for reasons that humans cannot understand. Over the course of this machine-and-chemical fed process of human self-contradiction and self-destruction, of which Fred/Arctor is only intermittently aware, we see his thoughts and perceptions being short-circuited and reduced to gibberish.

Drug-induced paranoia aside, the psychology of Dick’s addicts and narcs is as good a description as exists of the spreading incoherence of today’s information ecosystem, which none of us are able to fully see or understand. As a thought experiment, it doesn’t matter that Dick chose a drug rather than the stories we tell about ourselves and our world. It’s not the technology; it’s the psychology. What Dick saw was that the process of splitting ourselves in two — into subject and narc — was a brutal assault on the idea of being human and would make thoughts and communication impossible.

“What does a scanner see?” Arctor wonders, after examining the surveillance apparatus that has been planted, with his knowledge, in his own home. “I mean, really see? Into the head? Down into the heart? Does a passive infra-red holographic scanner like they used to use, or a cube-type holo-scanner like they use these days, the latest thing, see into me – into us – clearly or darkly? I hope it does, see clearly,” Arctor continues, “because I can’t any longer these days see into myself. I see only murk. Murk outside; murk inside. I hope, for everyone’s sake, the scanners do better.” They don’t.

* * *

Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon, which the English philosopher sketched out in a series of letters between 1786 and 1788 while visiting  the Mogilev district of the Russian Empire, was an architectural system of control in which all inmates of an institution could be made visible to a single guard. Bentham’s utopian-utilitarian idea was widely applied in Victorian England to a range of public and private spaces including prisons, asylums, hospitals, factories and even schools. The unique horror of the Benthamite set-up was not the power imbalance inherent in places like prisons and factories, whose existence is obvious to guards and prisoners alike. It was the attempt to eliminate privacy, which is a necessary precondition for being human.

Over the last decade, Bentham’s architecture of unfreedom has been replaced by the architecture of machines. This has created a new social reality where everyone is at once inmate and guard; a panopticon where nothing is private and no one is free. The invisible operations of the machines and programmes we use every day to buy books or food or communicate, which are linked to each other and to the surveillance operations of large government agencies in a single net, induces in most sentient beings a kind of free-floating paranoia of the type that destroys the inhabitants of A Scanner Darkly. On the one hand, everyone knows that everyone is being watched. On the other, it is necessary to deny that knowledge in order to appear to be functioning normally.

One of the most unpleasant characteristics of the weird split-screen mentality of our times is how people must routinely speak against themselves — deny what they see, hear, feel and believe  — in order to maintain the appearance of sanity. It is now routine, for example, to hear Americans on the Left and the Right deride their political opponents for believing in far-reaching conspiracy theories — while in the next breath revealing their own.

No doubt both sides are at least half right. During lockdowns, it became normal for public officials in Western countries to issue draconian edicts in the name of “science” for the supposed good of large numbers of people, only to violate those edicts themselves. The meaning of “science”, it turned out, had nothing to do with the “common good”, or with demonstrating a theory through evidence; it was “one rule for me and another for thee”.

The flagrant doublespeak that is nurtured in the surveillance societies of the West, which have sprung up around us unnoticed, is characteristic of totalitarian societies and mental asylums. The difference is that both totalitarian societies and asylums allow for nonthreatening zones of privacy in order to make life easier for the guards. What we live in today is something else, a set of mirrors into which we are encouraged to look so that our reflections can be distorted and then returned to us. As Bob Arctor puts it, reflecting on the words of Corinthians: “it is not through glass but reflected back by a glass. And that reflection that returns to you: it is you, it is your face, but it isn’t.”

Powerful people in Western societies have lately become convinced of their ability to accomplish great feats of moral and social engineering by controlling these mirrors, altering our reflections and selling them back to us, while undermining our ability to think coherently. The mirrors are not meant to help anyone think; they are systems of control. They are mechanisms of profit, which foster dependence. They are used to mete out punishment, and spy on us.

What’s alarming is that the people who delight in their mastery of these devices seem not to have thought very hard about the damage they are doing to the people who shoot up, a category that includes those who shoot up schools and malls. None of them seem to calculate what creating a miasma of nonsensical conspiracy theories will do to the psyches of their own children, who will inherit “the murk”. They appear to believe that people with minds that have been permanently broken by their gibberish machines will make the perfect workers on their farm. Let’s see how that turns out for them.

THE WILL TO PURPOSE – ACTIVATING OUR INNER DRIVE & INTENTIONALITY

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By Kingsley L. Dennis

Source: Waking Times

‘A sincere reflection on human behavior is enough to convince us that the power of choice plays much less part in the life of man than we think.’ ~J.G. Bennett

We are familiar with the concept that a person has no real choice, and we generally regard this in relation to our commercial choices. That is, what we choose to buy is generally a decision based on a selection of limited choice. This has also been referred to as ‘curated needs.’ What we think or believe we want, or need, is conditioned into us – or ‘curated’ – so that we are merely responding to managed external stimuli to acquire certain goods. Whilst this is valid, and is indeed an operative modality, it remains within the material realm. In the opening citation, the thinker and author J.G. Bennett was referring to a form of choice beyond that of a material one. He was relating to the lack of choice within the inner world of the human being – that is, the presence of human will. Bennett was speaking and writing from the 1940s to the 1970s, yet what he said then is as relevant for today as he was not speaking about things that are relative to historical time or place but to an almost timeless situation – the human condition. The lack of genuine inner will of the human being has been made starker in modern times due to the lens of psychology and similar sciences.

Professor Mattias Desmet has recently popularised the concept of mass formation and false solidarity, which refer to how crowd psychology is established and sustained.[i] In his recent book (The Psychology of Totalitarianism), Desmet points out that what we call totalitarianism has only been with us for the past 120 years, since the beginning of the twentieth century. Two previous examples that he gives are the Stalinist regime that came to power on the back of the Russian Revolution, and the National Socialist (Nazi) regime in Germany. Most recently, he says, the world is experiencing the rise of a global form of totalitarianism under the guise, or ideology, of technocracy. The one thing that totalitarianism has in common is that it is based on ideology rather than brute power. Further, that the populace is persuaded (or programmed) into obeyance through propaganda and social-cultural conditioning, rather than forced through fear (as is the case with dictatorships). The mass formation of willing obedience is a symbol for our times. With the availability of global communications, a largely digitally ‘plugged-in’ world population, the widespread influence of controlled media, and the pervasive presence of mind-influencing technologies, the human species has never been in a more pressing moment in its collective history.

Modern day humanity may not only be suffering from a lack of genuine choice; more importantly, it may be experiencing the dilemma of a lack of connection with internal will power. It is this dominant state of the human psyche – we may even go so far as to call it a widespread psychosis – that lies at the root of much of our present ills with its sense of apathy and pessimism. Some readers will be familiar with German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche’s concept of the will to power; lesser known is the English philosopher Colin Wilson and his notion of the will to perceive. For Wilson, the question of freedom and choice is not a social problem – it is an internal one for it requires an ‘intensity of will.’[ii] In other words, it is a personal struggle to achieve a form of self-awakening, or triggering, to arouse oneself from the torpidity and apathy of life. The issue is that for most people they don’t consider the fragility of life’s situation. The general masses, at least in the western world, consider themselves to be already free. They exist within the belief structure that they are protected and looked after by their governments and social institutions and that, give or take a few things, they have most essential needs provided for. Such people, I would posit, live on the outside of themselves – they are skin-dwellers. They live through their personalities and are most likely to adhere to mass consensus narratives. They are to be swayed by the rollercoaster ride of external events and react as anticipated by the governing elites who manipulate finances, food supply, energy supply, and more. This mass of people will only recognize the loss of freedom when it is threatened in relation to external events. It is a manufactured sense of freedom for once the threat has vanished – or seemingly made to vanish – then the meaning of freedom dissipates for the danger is no longer perceived. That is, it is an exterior crisis or danger that triggers people into action and as the perceived threat fades, they slip back once again into apathy and mass obedience. There is a lack of internal stimulation.

The stimulation of the human will requires that a person has the will to acquire insight. This they must choose for themselves, for no other agency shall give it to them. On the contrary, many social systems are designed to deteriorate a person’s will by compelling them to give away their dependency and authority onto external systems. Consistency, commitment, and the intention to will, are human aspects severely undermined by the deliberate constraint of material structures and social systems. Such critical observations and the power of intention are also being increasingly undermined by the rise of what I would call ‘lazy spirituality.’ This is the type of Instagram positive thinking or commercial well-beingness that online ‘spiritual celebrities’ are all too eager to promote (and sell). Behind such on-demand spiritual well-being-positive-thinking packages is a passivity or laziness to critically engage in inner work and to gain perceptive cognition to recognize the fallacy inherent within the material domain.

It is one thing to be positively-orientated and having ‘oneness’ for all creation; it is another matter to have the perceptive capacity to recognize that there are forces in play in the world that are active in nullifying metaphysical values and realities in order to replace them with an ever-deepening materialism. It would seem that there is an increasing form of cultural laziness and indecision, especially in this current time when people chiefly wish for things to be made easy for them. Instead of a person having faith and hope that they can change by making real effort, they are usually entertained with illusions that then take away from them the impulse to make any real change within themselves. In today’s world, a person who seeks to develop inner awareness and to raise their perceptive capacity often find themselves at odds with their cultural milieu. Those with ‘spiritual seriousness,’ so to say, are what Colin Wilson referred to as the Outsider.[iii] Such individuals have an intangible need to be more than just a ‘happy, well-fed animal.’ Again, Wilson referred to this state as being that of the robot; he said that we all have a robot within us that is eager to come out and take over all our daily duties for us. The Greek-Armenian mystic G.I. Gurdjieff called this the state of the ‘man machine.’ I have referred to this as the robosapien.[iv]

Within such automated states the individual experiences the world through a narrowed lens of awareness. Wilson, for example, recognized that such limited awareness almost lulled a person into a ‘state of permanent drowsiness, like being half-anesthetized’ so that a broader vision of life is restricted. And this is how what we call ordinary, everyday life affects us. Whether it be through external impacts, stimulants, distractions, information, technological entanglement, energetic haze, and more, the environment of everyday life pacifies us by closing down our perceptual horizons. In response to this, Colin Wilson noted that ‘it is as impossible to exercise freedom in an unreal world as it is to jump while you are falling.’[v] Freedom is not only related to physical mobility and access to human rights; it is also a question of an inner ‘intensity of mind’ that can pull a person out of the collective of mass formation (as Desmet would call it). The modern life can be regarded as a cause of spiritual decay because it seeks to demolish any recognition of a metaphysical reality. And through this, many people are unknowingly suffering a form of ‘reality deficiency.’ There have been people who, over the years, have strived to point this out to us, from wisdom teachers, mystics, and philosophers (like Colin Wilson). This deficiency prevents people from receiving inner nourishment; over time, this acts to deprive human cognition by literally starving it of nutrients (perception). We are in a time right now of great ‘reality deficiency’ as the dominant consensus narratives peddle their lies, manipulations, and programming.

Each age has its own form of reality and/or metaphysical suppression, from the physically overt (Spanish Inquisition) to the covert (technocracy). Within each specific era, there are calculated forces that act to impinge upon the individuals’ own evolutionary drive toward not only self-attainment but, more importantly, a connection with a transcendental impulse (what some may call as Source). The historian Arnold Toynbee believed that civilizations (and its individuals) progress by overcoming struggles; by moving through ‘challenge points,’ so to speak. If the crisis is too great, the civilization succumbs and collapses. If the challenge is not great enough, the civilization overcomes and becomes complacent, slides into greater decadence and eventually collapses. The challenge must be just right – the ‘Goldilocks’ zone, as Gary Lachman calls it. Challenges bring out the best in individuals too, yet they must be able to grow and develop through the crisis – and this is often down to an inner will or drive.  Toynbee believed that a civilization needs to produce a ‘creative minority’ to meet such a challenge of its time. It would seem that we are amidst such a ‘challenge point’ right now; and it is not only a physical crisis but also an existential one. I would go further and suggest that human civilization cannot survive indefinitely without some inborn sense of a transcendental purpose – otherwise it is like a hollow shell that becomes increasingly brittle over time. British philosopher and historian Nicholas Hagger, whose monumental work The Fire and the Stones examines the sacred impulse (the ‘Fire/Light’) within twenty-five civilizations, likewise has shown how civilizations are inspired by the transcendental impulse and decay when such an impulse is forgotten or dismissed.[vi]

What is required is for us, our communities and cultures, to become more conscious of our participation in reality. Further, that what we take to be reality is a merger between the physical and the metaphysical. As such, humanity is a being ‘of spirit’ that is manifesting through the intermediary of a physical body. To take this even further, we need to come to recognize that all existence is consciousness primarily, and that physical phenomena is an energetic state that manifests from a source of consciousness. What is required of humanity to survive beyond this existential crisis and challenge point is to become more conscious. Is this possible? Colin Wilson was not so sure. Wilson believed, and stated as such, that the majority of people cannot accept the burden of becoming more conscious. He felt that the ‘masses’ were both consciously and subconsciously choosing the more comfortable ‘mediocracy of life.’ I would even question what this term means any more – what is the ‘mediocracy of life’ when we can no longer be sure what reality is? Abstractions have now replaced realities to create an enveloping world of pseudo-reality and a ‘theatre of the absurd.’ As I talked about in my book Bardo Times,[vii] life has become a simulation – a simulacra as the French theorist Jean Baudrillard would say – and the notion of what is ‘real’ appears to have dissolved into what is the latest consensus narrative. What is important to acknowledge in these challenging times is that as the chaos whirls around us, humanity stands on the threshold of a higher form of life.

This is the other point that perceptive individuals have been attempting to point out to us (not least of them has been the Indian sage Sri Aurobindo). And this threshold becomes more apparent and urgent whenever a civilization begins either its decline or its necessary transition to a different epoch and modality. This is the challenge that civilization must face – either to raise/adjust its level of consciousness and perceptive capacity or stagnate and then collapse. Human civilization necessarily reflects the state of perception of its inhabitants. As that indwelling perception expands, so too does the physical environment develop in alignment. If perceptive capacity is restricted or even being deliberately reduced, as is the case right now, then entropic or atrophying forces begin to dominate. This is why we must resist, at great effort, to submit to a programming of conformity and perceptive limitation that is likely to come about through increased technocratic forms of social management and control. This is where Colin Wilson’s notion of the will to perceive comes in. Due to the external environment, human consciousness is generally conditioned into a dulled state so that higher insights or perceptions are not ‘allowed’ to get through. We need to seek to ‘widen’ (expand) our consciousness beyond such limiting influences so that greater perceptive insights can be achieved. Most people, however, are reflections of their surroundings and, as such, require external inputs to motivate or trigger them into action. Chaos and crises can function as such triggering impacts. The ‘will to perceive’ also activates a will to purpose. Behind the human developmental impulse there is a push, I would say, to increase our intentionality. Without the ‘will to purpose’ there is a lack of conscious participation. It is the will to purpose that distinguishes the human being from the machine – the ‘robosapien.’ Modern life, with its technocratic pull, is encouraging people not to think but to allow automation to take over duties and responsibilities. On the contrary, we need to be ‘pulling ourselves up by the bootstraps’ and intentionally driving ourselves across the threshold. What could this threshold be?

Humanity is moving towards a stage in its evolutionary path whereby it becomes cognizant of its role as a fusion (a bridge or merger) between spirit/consciousness and physicality/matter. We are, in these times, the forward ground crew sent ahead to prepare the groundwork. Sometime in the future – it could be ten, twenty, thirty years or more – human understanding and the sciences will come to recognize the primary role of consciousness behind all existence. And when this occurs, human life will alter drastically. We shall understand that human existence is a merging of non-physical intelligence with physical forces. The very notion of life and reality will be greatly expanded beyond current conceptions. We shall be propelled beyond the confines of the physical robot – the robosapien – and shall utilize presently unknown organs of perception. But we are not at that threshold yet. And this is partly why we are seeing a contestation of forces in play. There are forces that do not wish for humanity to reach, and pass, this threshold for we shall then no longer be their passive robots to manage and control. The present control hierarchies will be demolished. And there is a small contingency that wish to cut humanity off from this transcendental impulse, to isolate us from receiving such developmental forces, and to push us back into our perceptual prisons of the ‘everyday mundane.’ Such forces aim to increase the programming and technologies of cognitive influence to hypnotize the mass of humanity into accepting an ‘upside-down’ reality that the robosapien seems the most suited to. Our will to purpose now is about having the inner drive and intentionality to move us beyond this current predicament and modern state of alienation, and forward into a state of heightened cognition and expanded perceptual awareness.

It is my view that the ‘teething pains’ that we are presently experiencing represent the birthing, or arrival, of a new form of consciousness coming to manifestation through the human species. That is, a mergence with an expanded field of consciousness. And for this to emerge, the individual is called upon to ‘meet it’ halfway, so to speak. Social forces will attempt to continue to hold back the individual by mental, emotional, and physical/biological interventions. And yet, against these artificial constrictions, I am confident that if enough of us (we don’t need to be a majority) can strive for cognitive freedom, perceptive clarity, and inner awareness, we can become the early wave – the evolutionary outsider – to make the initial steps across the threshold. Just enough of us need to act as the ‘antennae of the race’[viii] to pass the baton onto our descendants. And that, I would say, gives us enough reason to activate our will to purpose.

About the Author

Kingsley L. Dennis is the author of The Phoenix Generation: A New Era of Connection, Compassion, and Consciousness, and The Sacred Revival: Magic, Mind & Meaning in a Technological Age, available at Amazon. Visit him on the web at http://www.kingsleydennis.com/.

[i] See my previous essay: ‘The Establishment of Mass Psychology & False Solidarity’ – https://kingsleydennis.com/the-establishment-of-mass-psychology-false-solidarity/

[ii] For an in-depth study of Wilson’s life and thought, I would recommend the excellent biography by Gary Lachman – Beyond the Robot: The Life and Work of Colin Wilson (2016)

[iii] See Colin Wilson’s book The Outsider (originally published in 1956)

[iv] See my book Hijacking Reality: The Reprogramming and Reorganization of Human Life (2021)

[v] Wilson, Colin (1982) The Outsider. Los Angeles: Jeremy P. Tarcher, p39

[vi] Hagger, Nicholas (1991) The Fire and the Stones. Dorset: Element Books.

[vii] Bardo Times: hyperreality, high-velocity, simulation, automation, mutation – a hoax? (2018)

[viii] A phrase coined by the poet Ezra Pound.

LA VOLUNTAD DE PROPÓSITO: Cruzar el umbral venidero de la humanidad

THE EIGHTFOLD PATH OF GOOD CHARACTER

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By Gary Z McGee

Source: Waking Times

“Watch your thoughts, they become words. Watch your words, they become actions. Watch your actions, they become habits. Watch your habits, they become character. Watch your character, for it becomes your destiny.” ~Frank Outlaw

A robust character hinges on eight core virtues: courage, curiosity, temperance, humility, liberty, honor, wisdom, and humor. These virtues are vital rungs on the ladder toward achieving wholeness in character.

Courage frees character, curiosity grows character, temperance balances character, humility grounds character, liberty stabilizes character, honor unifies character, wisdom guides character, and humor overcomes character. Let’s break it down.

1.) Courage:

“Without courage you can’t practice any other virtue consistently.” ~Maya Angelou

Courage is the bedrock of human excellence. Before any other virtue can be realized, courage must be self-actualized. There must first come a courageous deviation or there is no “first.” Period. Therefore, it is of the utmost importance that you live a courage-based lifestyle over a comfort-based lifestyle.

Without the initial leap of courage there is no freedom, no excellence. Without courage, one is merely restricted to the conventional, inhibited by the whims of others, imprisoned inside the box of the status quo, and hampered by outdated reasoning. Without courage, the third eye remains calcified, rigid, blind.

With the leap of courage, however, one is emancipated. The world unlocks. The mind unbolts. The soul unfastens. Inhibitions dissolve, and serendipity, adaptability, and improvisation manifest. Boundaries transform into horizons. Comfort zones stretch into adventure. You split the smoke. You shatter the mirrors. And the glory of the path is revealed.

2.) Curiosity:

“If you are not living in awe, you are not paying attention.” ~Rumi

Curiosity is essential. It is the fuel that launches us beyond faith. It is the cure for the disease of certainty.

True curiosity is deep, primal, absorbing, imaginative and ravenous for updated knowledge that has the potential to put outdated knowledge to rest.

Curiosity is the ultimate existential leveling mechanism. It forces our thoughts outside the box, stretches our comfort zone, shatters entrenched mental paradigms, keeps us ahead of the curve, and pushes the envelope of all the things we’ve taken for granted.

Curiosity is on the edge of tomorrow, laughing into the abyss, shirking the tiny-minded perspective of our parochial past, and gaping in astonishment and wild wonder into the mysterium tremendum et fascinans of the Great Mystery.

3.) Temperance:

“The best amount of property to have is that which is enough to keep us from poverty, and which yet is not far removed from it.” ~Seneca

Luckily, health is a benchmark for temperance. It’s the core of universal law. Unluckily, this benchmark is hidden in a ‘language older than words,’ which can sometimes seem impossible to decode. Moderation is Health’s secret decoder ring.

Although some things must be moderated more than others, extremism in anything is the bane of health. We can breathe too much oxygen. We can drink too much water. We can even live too much in the moment. Through moderation we discover health. And through health we are free to practice temperance. We maintain our personal health through moderation so that health in general can manifest. As Gandhi wisely suggested, “Live simply so that others may simply live.”

A good rule of thumb, then, is this: moderation in all things, to include moderation. This way we are proactively injecting balance into the cosmos, while at the same time enjoying life. The key is to accept responsibility for the consequences of both our moderate and immoderate choices. Tricky, but that’s where humility comes into play.

4.) Humility:

“After the ecstasy, the laundry.” ~Jack Kornfield

Research suggests that a healthy dose of humility helps protect against extremism, polarization, and bias. When we are humble, we can admit that we are fallible, imperfect, and uncertain. It gives us the courage to admit when we are wrong.

Without humility we are more likely to fall victim to cognitive dissonance. Without humility we are blinded by faith and stuck in hand-me-down ideologies and outdated traditions. Without humility we are more likely to be clouded by pride. Without humility self-pity outmaneuvers self-empowerment and the Ego reigns supreme as it edges out Soul.

Humility brings us back down to earth. It unravels the roots, uncovers the bones, strikes at the core of the human condition. It reveals the wizard behind the curtain was always us. It forces our head over the edge of the abyss. It exposes our halos as mortal coils. It gets us out of our own way.

That Serbian Proverb said it best, “Be humble for you are made of earth. Be noble for you are made of stars.”

5.) Liberty:

“Seek freedom and become captive of your desires. Seek discipline and find your liberty.” ~Frank Herbert

Freedom is not a given. It must be earned. It must be cultivated, practiced, and acted upon daily. The moment freedom is taken for granted is the moment it is lost.

Freedom is always a rebellion. What it rebels against is anything seeking to fetter the progressive and healthy evolution of the human spirit. In the crashing plane of an unfree world, a free human is someone who puts the oxygen mask on themselves first in order to be there for those who are incapable or who are ignorant of the fact that they are not free.

As Jean Piaget said, “We organize our worlds by first organizing ourselves.” And so self-organization (self-discipline) is the first step toward freedom. Liberty, then, is a culmination of earning freedom through self-discipline, and then holding the world accountable.

6.) Honor:

“Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man’s character, give him power.” ~Abraham Lincoln

The core of honor is self-honesty. We cannot be honorable without self-honesty. Where honesty puts character into perspective, honor unifies character. True honor is being responsible with our power.

Foremost, honor is responsibility. If we are not responsible with our power, then we become a pawn to it. Being a pawn to power is dangerous because power causes us to believe we are always right. When we are responsible with our power, however, we are more likely to admit we could be wrong. And since the fallible and imperfect human condition tends to be wrong about a great many things, it behooves us all to take responsibility with our power so as not to become a pawn to it.

If we lord our power over others, we are being dishonorable. If we use our power to help others flourish, we are being honorable. If we hoard power at the expense of others, we are being dishonorable. If we expiate power to empower others, we are not only being honorable we are being prestigious.

7.) Wisdom:

“We are not provided with wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness which no one else can take for us.” ~Marcel Proust

Wisdom cannot be taught. Knowledge can be taught, skills can be taught, but not wisdom. We can discover wisdom, we can live it through experience, we can dip in and out of it in Flow States, we can do wonders with it with our creative powers thereafter, but we cannot teach it.

Wisdom is likewise just as undefinable. It is mystical, numinous, and transcendent. It can even be foolish, eccentric, and outlandish. There’s a childlike element to it that humbles mastery, just as there’s a maturity to it that towers over naivete.

Most of all wisdom is a heightened state of clarity. It’s a crispness of elevated spirit. It’s a three-eyed owl on a high branch. It’s a profound sense of humor that’s undeterred by the knowledge, experience, and tribulations that birthed it. Most of all, Wisdom has the wherewithal to get out of its own way.

As Lao Tzu wisely stated, “To attain knowledge, add things every day. To attain wisdom, remove things every day.”

8.) Humor:

“The individual is more completely revealed in play than in any one other way, and play has a greater shaping power over the character and nature of man than has any one other activity.” ~Luther Gulick

Humor is the only virtue that is transcendent. It sees how character is just that: a character caught within a tragicomedy, strutting itself across an all-too-mortal stage. It sees the character’s feet of clay. But it also sees the character’s wings. It honors both through a laughter born out of levity.

Such levity creates a powerful gravity. The self becomes magnetic. When you are flexible in humor you attract the world to yourself. You’re able to have a soulful laugh at all the ego seriousness. Pettiness falls away from you like water off a duck’s back. You become transcendent, detached, unconquerable.

Having a good sense of humor is the crowning achievement of good character, and the soul is the crown. It’s the golden crown chakra of character, sparking in the eternal night, a beacon of hope in the dark, a beacon of darkness in the blinding light, a symbol of recycled mastery that honors the Great Mystery despite our all too mortal angst.

IN THE CULTURE OF HUNGRY GHOSTS

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By Dylan Charles

Source: Waking Times

“No society can understand itself without looking at its shadow side.” ― Gabor Maté, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction

Something wicked bubbles just beneath the surface of the collective conscience. Our society is rife with corruption, predation, perversion, over-consumption, violence, addiction and so much more. Somehow enough is never enough, as if the driving force behind human existence is pure want.

This is not true, though, for we know that spiritually well beings are content beings, looking no further than the present moment’s blessings for satisfaction. We don’t have an inherent need for want. Want is a symptom, not the condition. It’s something that enters when the spirit is untended to.

It must then be a spiritual illness which plagues society. Something secretly driving so many of us mad with insatiable desire for sensation and objects. Unforgiving cravings that manifest in any way imaginable, from sex, to money, to food, to power and even in the need to be perfect. It’s a war against the self, waged unconsciously by the self. A below subconscious campaign of self-annihilation.

There are no contemporary metaphors to understand this kind of emptiness. The void just is. And since the void is so rarely acknowledged and so rarely looked at deeply, it sits in the shadows driving us mad, steering with impulse.

In Chinese Buddhist philosophy, though, there is a story that fits. The hungry ghost.

“In Chinese Buddhist teachings, “hungry ghosts are unable to take in or assimilate what they desperately need. The problem lies in their constricted throats — which cannot open for nourishment. They wander aimlessly in search of relief that is not forthcoming.”” [Source]

Interestingly, according to some of its origin myths, the hungry ghost was born out an act of cruelty. In many of the stories, it is a wealthy man’s wife who did some terrible thing to a monk, and when she eventually dies her spirit takes the form of the hungry ghost, forever lurking in purgatory, unable to ever fill its distorted belly and therefore always needing and wanting more.

The hungry ghost, then, is an expression of karma.

Hungry ghosts are the demon-like creatures described in Buddhist, Taoist, Hindu, Sikh, and Jain texts as the remnants of the dead who are afflicted with insatiable desire, hunger or thirst as a result of bad deeds or evil intent carried out in their life times. [Source]

In the realm of hungry ghosts, a deep drama between the ego and the ghost plays out ad infinitum. It’s an interplay that feeds the ego just enough for it to survive, so that in turn the ego can feed the hungry ghost. A dead-end cul-de-sac of sorts. A looping projection of one of our worst human vulnerabilities.

“The work of the ghost does not want to completely destroy its prey. Having fed off the other through dissociative trajectories of turbulence, the ego again becomes more robust. The hungry ghost now has, as companion and source of nurture, a replenished ego on which internal feeding may resume inside the space of erasure until the plenitude of the ghost-within again permeates the intersubjective.” ~  Nick Totton, Psychoanalysis and the Paranormal: Lands of Darkness

Spiritually healthy people understand their cravings for what they, expressions of innumerable forms of pain. Manifestations of the suffering caused by disconnection from the self, and from nature. And the self is nature. There really is no distinction between the two. The illusion is of separateness.

The ghosts are there to remind us that our real work is transmuting our suffering and cruelty into resilience and compassion. It’s not enough to numb the pain, it must be used to our advantage, for our growth, to serve as a catalyst for transformation, and to provide a chrysalis in which the transformation can take place.

“We are social beings. When we feel disconnected or alienated, we experience pain. Addiction, depression, anger, and violence are different ways we react to pain. To heal our society we must heal the emotional wounds.” ~Chris Agnos

Few understand this more clearly than Dr. Gabor Maté, whose work with drug addicts has transformed our understanding of what it means to be stuck in the realm of hungry ghosts.

BE YOUR OWN SAVIOR WHILE YOU STILL CAN

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By Gary Z McGee

Source: Waking Times

“Stop drifting—sprint to the finish. Write off your hopes, and if your well-being matters to you, be your own savior while you can.” ~Marcus Aurelius

In a world on fire, it’s on you to be water. It’s on you to put out the flames. It’s on you to become the savior you’ve been waiting for. Idleness makes you mere kindling; boldness makes you a force of nature to contend with.

If, as Steve Jobs advised, “remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose,” then it stands to reason that you use death as a guide for redeeming your life.

Because you are going to die. Maybe not today. Maybe not tomorrow. But someday you will be pushing up daisies along with every other human being who has ever existed.

The question is: will it be death by boredom and banality pining for a savior, or death by passion and curiosity becoming your own savior?

You have from this day until the day you die to live the life you want to live. You might as well make it a healthy life. You might as well make it a heroic life.

You had an eternity before you existed to do nothing. You’ll have an eternity after you exist to do nothing. Now is your time to actually do something, to find something you love to do and then use it to save your life.

Place the oxygen mask on yourself before assisting others:

“Once you fall in love with yourself, their game is over.” ~Alamir Guard

Focus on you until the focus is on you, then focus on the world.

The best way to do this is to imagine your life as a crashing plane. In the crashing plane that is your life, you must be capable of putting the oxygen mask (health) on yourself before assisting others. Once you have your mask set right, you can begin attempting to set the world right.

If you attempt to set the world right without your oxygen mask on, you risk not being able to help because you can’t function. You risk ill-health and incompetence. You risk death before your time.

With your oxygen mask secure, however, you will have the health and confidence needed to engage the world with strength and vitality. You will be a force to be reckoned with. Such a force can bring balance to an otherwise imbalanced world. Such a force can even prevent the plane from crashing before its time.

Seen in this light, you can see how there is a virtue in selfishness. For it is selfishness with good intent. The selfishness of putting the oxygen mask on yourself leads to the selflessness of helping others do the same.

Pride up; ego down. Confidence up; conceit down. Chin up; foot down. Self-esteem leads to prestige when you use it toward the wellbeing of others and to ground the world in health.

Be counteractive with answers and proactive with questions:

“Be a free thinker and don’t accept everything you hear as truth. Be critical and evaluate what you believe in.” ~Aristotle

Sometimes saving yourself means freeing yourself from what has been preventing you from flourishing. Often what prevents you from flourishing is not so obvious. It can be as simple as an outdated law or as complex as a limited worldview. Paradoxically, the only way to know for sure of what’s preventing you from flourishing is to not be sure.

Ironically, when you’re not sure of anything, you free yourself to be sure of what’s possible and what’s not. This is because when you sacrifice certainty, you resurrect curiosity. You get out in front of what you think you know so that what you don’t know can at least potentially become knowable.

This requires a questioning disposition. It requires the ability to face an “answer” with credulity and circumspection; to, as Aristotle suggested, “entertain a thought without accepting it.” It requires the fortitude to cut through orthodoxy with an unorthodox sword.

In the spirit of becoming your own savior, there is perhaps nothing more powerful than questioning the answers that came before you. Nothing is more powerful than an unorthodox question mark planted over an orthodox period.

The questioner is the redeemer. For what must be redeemed is the Truth Quest itself, and it is redeemed from the trap of the so-called “truth.”

In a world full of toxic positivity be authentic chaos:

“In each one of you there is a call, a will, an impulse of nature, an impulse toward the future, the new, the higher. Let it mature, let it resound, nurture it! Your future, your hard dangerous path is this: to mature and to find God in yourselves.” ~Hermann Hesse

What does it mean to be authentic chaos in a world full of toxic positivity? It means recognizing when comfort has become a prison and acting in such a way that you break free and stretch your comfort zone. It means recognizing when a lifejacket has become a limitation to swimming. It means casting security aside so that courage can be self-actualized. It means realizing that there’s more happiness in a spoonful of hard-earned self-improvement than in an ocean-full of easy self-affirmation.

Authentic chaos is introducing a little strategic disorder into the current order to alchemize a higher order. It’s controlled anarchy like the native American concept of counting coup. It’s the personification of a social leveling mechanism that levels the playing field of all finite games while introducing the higher perspective of the Infinite Game of life.

More importantly, authentic chaos is a deep reconnecting to our primal nature. It’s a vital hard reset into sacred alignment. It’s becoming a force of nature first and a person second. Written laws shrivel into nothingness beneath the primacy of the unwritten law of the interconnected cosmos. Self-as-world and world-as-self becomes the supreme perspective. Egocentrism is trumped by eco-centrism. One-dimensional independence is subsumed by multidimensional interdependence.

The world opens, the fountainhead overflows, the Philosopher’s Stone reveals itself, as the authentic chaos of the individuated cuts through toxic positivity like a hot blade through cold butter.

Practice Fait Sur Mesure:

“The spiritual journey is individual, highly personal. It can’t be organized or regulated. It isn’t true that everyone should follow one path. Listen to your own truth.” ~Ram Dass

One powerful way to listen to your own truth is to practice fait sur mesure. Which is French for ‘made to your measure.’ A huge part of becoming your own savior is realizing when what your culture has given you is not to your measure and then having the courage to create a way of living that is to your measure.

This means accepting that you are the only benchmark for your life. You are the measure. Nobody else can determine what is or is not to your measure. Only you have the power to either remain a culturally conditioned cog or to become a courageously reconditioned catalyst.

Don’t fall into the trap of following someone else’s plan. Deconstruct, analyze, and scrutinize their plan, then improvise it. Stand on the shoulders of giants. Customize your life to your own fitting. Take this piece from this ideology and that piece from that ideology, but then connect it all to your own unique imagination. Be creative. Think outside the box. Push your culturally-prescribed comfort zone as far as it will go. It’s all yours for the making.

Understand: In the Matrix of the world, you are “the one.” Just don’t get a big head about it. Because everyone is “the one.” It’s just that not everyone has the capacity to act on it. It is your responsibility alone to gain the capacity to act on it. It is your responsibility alone to create your own destiny.

So, existentially crush out. No holds barred. Go full frontal boss mode on living life to the fullest. Dive into the cosmic ocean with Death for a lifejacket. Become your own savior before it’s too late.

Pandemic? Great Reset? How about… a beginner’s mind?

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By Mickey Z.

Source: Dissident Voice

“In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities. In the expert’s, there are few.” 1

Has there ever been a more urgent time to embrace many possibilities? This age of pervasive uncertainty and division may well be very fertile ground for questioning our assumptions and interrogating our beliefs. In fact, we just might be living in the ideal time to accept that there are limitless ways to perceive even the most contentious issues.

Expert vs. Beginner

The expert’s mind is over-secure in its prowess. Such a mentality may promote shortsighted habits like confirmation bias. Many “authorities” will only seek out (read: cherry-pick) information that validates and justifies their behavior because expertise — real or imagined — causes us to grow less curious.

If we already feel well-versed in a topic, we tend to pay less attention to it. We ask fewer questions. This is a stifling choice even if we know 95 percent of what there is to know about a particular subject. Ideally, this is when we should be paying more attention to it in order to discern the nuances that remain to be learned.

Conversely, the beginner’s mind is ever-hungry for input — regardless of its source or its tendency to reinforce existing beliefs. In the beginner’s mind, there are fewer limits and fewer expectations. There is much more room for revelation and awe. Nothing is taken for granted and even the tiniest detail has the potential to inspire reverence.

The beginner’s mind is basically the polar opposite of today’s social media algorithms, mainstream news headlines, and popular political discourse.

3 (of the many) Benefits of a Beginner’s Mind

Creativity

Habits and structure can be incredibly useful. They can also become an obstacle to innovation. A beginner’s mind encourages us to approach familiar problems with a fresh perspective. This mindset often results in the exploration of avenues that an expert would casually dismiss as “been there, done that.”

Gratitude

A beginner’s mind awakens each morning, ready to wipe the slate clean and start anew. From this fresh perspective, it feels more natural to identify and appreciate your blessings.

Mindfulness

Seeing the world like a beginner prevents you from “going through the motions.” There is a clearer understanding that the present is all you have. The past is where guilt and regret dwell. In the future may lie apprehension and anxiety. Right here, right now, the moment is enough.

How to Rediscover a Beginner’s Mind

By its very definition, there are an infinite number of ways to occupy a beginner’s mind. To follow are some basic guidelines but think of them like Bruce Lee’s finger pointing a way to the moon. As Lee urged, “Don’t concentrate on the finger or you’ll miss all that heavenly glory.”2

1. Reject your ego’s need to be an expert

Eavesdrop on a conversation at the local supermarket. Even better, scroll (without reacting) through most threads on social media. You’ll see and hear so many people pretending they know“what’s really happening” and “what’s gonna happen.” Your ego craves the status of being right. The beginner in you would rather open-mindedly look for reality than be deemed an expert at anything.

2. Slow down

As touched on above, we must avoid going through the motions. Whenever possible, slow down to question and explore. Take your time to learn — even from the most unlikely of sources.

3. Channel your inner child

Re-introduce yourself to some of your closest childhood friends: wonder, mischief, and playfulness. Reject the cynical adult premise of “same shit, different day.”

4. See with new eyes

In the words of Marcel Proust: “The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.”3 Practically speaking, your quest for new eyes can begin with simple exercises like treating your hometown as if you were a tourist and seeing what you can discover.

5. Embrace nonsense 

As Gary Zukav, author of Dancing Wu Li Masters: An Overview of the New Physics, (1979), posits: “Nonsense is nonsense only when we have not yet found that point of view from which it makes sense.”

6. Meditation

Perhaps the most time-worn path to a beginner’s mind is the practice of mindful meditation. Whether you choose a spiritual or secular approach, even ten minutes a day of meditation will expand your consciousness.

“The child is in me still and sometimes not so still.”4

There is no one right way to inhabit a beginner’s mind. After all, it is not a destination. It’s all about the process, the learning, and those moments of epiphany made possible by not closing off your options… so re-activate your inner child.

Keep re-evaluating what you believe before your perceptions can grow ossified. Don’t limit your explorations by choosing in advance what it is you wish to find. Turn your truth over and over, again and again. Avoid accumulating old answers. Instead, dedicate far more of your time to conjuring up new questions. Through it all, let compassion serve as your compass.

The experts [sic] have gotten us into this mess.

It’s time to give beginners their opportunity to shine.

  1. Shunryu Suzuki, Prologue Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, (1973). []
  2. Bruce Lee, Enter the Dragon, 1973. []
  3. The Captive. (La Prisonnière, the fifth volume of Remembrance of Things Past), 1923. []
  4. Fred Rogers, (2003). The World According to Mister Rogers: Important Things to Remember, p. 45, Hachette UK. []

What Is To Be Done?

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By Paul Edwards

Source: Information Clearing House

Not an original title for a piece that will assert we are in a unique moment in world history?  No, Lenin used it to expose the cruelty and villainy of the empire that ruled Russians like a slave master.  Claiming we are in a “unique moment” is not original, either.  We Americans, with our caudal appendage, Europe, have been told time and again we are in “unique moments”, unmatched in its peril, so that it’s now routine to say it of every asinine Presidential election. 

I have spent a lifetime reading and listening to the best minds in journalism and reportage bemoan, attack, mourn, and decry the encyclopedia of lunacies and disasters our system has inflicted on our country, the world, and ourselves, its naive, ignorant people.

Since the Gulf War, and the rolling chain of shameful absurdities that followed—Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, et.al.—in the idiotic dirty joke of the bumbling “War on Terror”, I have seen the mainstream press devoured by the Capitalist Monster to the point where all voices of integrity have been marginalized and expelled, then denounced and vilified by the diseased whores who slunk into their places.

Now, with America’s ridiculous, transparent, and contemptible falsity so obvious in every aspect of governance at home and abroad, I have seen the entire press converted into an organ of crude and dishonest propaganda for the Capitalist War Machine that is coldly, inhumanly  dictating our demise.  The viciously dishonest and relentlessly stupid storm of juvenile horseshit disseminated by all mainstream outlets— print, tv, and internet—is an ethical crime of diabolical dimensions.  Our government, with its cadre of vacuous, degraded simpletons, men and women of no intellectual size, depth, or scope, profoundly ignorant yet arrogant in their smarmy inadequacy, is restricting and distorting knowingly all truth that conflicts with the malign intentions of the War Lobby to pursue nuclear war with Russia until they get it.  And, of course, they need a second enemy and so must tell China what it can and can’t do. Where do these moronic fuckers get the brass to try that shameless madness with Xi and his power? 

And this is done while the few strong voices of courage and integrity that, against all the power of money and corruption of The Empire, continue to try to provide an educating effect through reason and evidence, are exiled and suppressed from platforms of influence.

I have long wondered at their dedication and staying power in the face of the cynical, unwarranted abuse they get, including, of course, from their supposed colleagues who, collectively, aren’t worth the powder to blow them to hell, as my Dakota Grandpa used to say.  I can only assume they are held together, in place, by the unbreakable fiber of integrity in them that they have no choice but to honor.  

And yet, though those few and proud speak out against false America and denounce it where denunciation is richly warranted, I feel, even in their most blistering analyses that there is a conviction, a certainty, an honest, incontestable statement of truth, that is missing.  I had hoped to hear it expressed by those who have great credibility, and great reputations, profiles and followings, but I have been disappointed.

My list of heroes is not long.  I acknowledge them as the heirs to the great ones before: Ed Murrow, Eric Sevareid, David Brinkley, Walter Cronkite, Sy Hersh, David Halberstam.  I include among the present greats Chris Hedges, John Pilger, Aaron Mate, Michael Brenner, Max Blumenthal, Patrick Lawrence, Glenn Greenwald, Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning, and Julian Assange.

All of them have done honest, deeply informed work to counter the rampant imbecility and cruelty of the American government and its stenographers, the press.  The one conclusion none has plainly stated, that all have suggested, is neither obscure nor complicated.

It is this: America can not be reformed or improved under Capitalism. Its corrupt, rotten burlesque democracy must and will be destroyed.  Not by any action of the torpid, gelded, stupid people.  It will come, and soon, by financial chaos and meltdown, or by nuclear war.

We are told that unless bold action is taken, unless we find the moral courage to act, unless we come together, get money out of politics, vote for better candidates, unless we do this, that, or the other thing, disaster will follow.  Sadly, that is all nonsense.   In fact, it makes no difference what we do: America, as a viable state, is finished.

This is intolerably painful to admit.  Every instinct of self-preservation, every human yearning for safety and justice rejects it.  All our training, our education, our immersion in bullshit propaganda screams against it but, admitted or not, it is fact, it is truth, and collapse of America’s baselessly arrogant, obscene, punishing oppression of the compliant world, already tenuous and strained, is coming.   And soon…

It is said to be easier for people to imagine the end of the world, than the end of Capitalism.  This will end soon when it will no longer be necessary to imagine either, because both will have happened.  In the same way that socio-political truth has been screened out by official deceit, environmental truth has been obscured and denied by our own and the world’s rulers.   What Capitalism has done to humans is trivial beside what it’s done to the earth and all living things.  In this, too, we are told that if we can just do this or that the world will recover and all will be well.  It won’t.   No matter what we do.  And that will almost certainly be what we have done up to now: nothing. 

Humans, mostly, are large, dull children.  They have a great need to feel loved, protected, pardoned, saved.  That’s why they were given religions by elites that have always owned them.  All dogmatic religions are bullshit by definition, their fatuous fraud shown up by every advance of knowledge from Galileo to the Webb Telescope.  

I, like all my kind, wish for mercy and grace, but I don’t look for it in a ludicrous infantile fantasy, or in deluded hope where there is clearly none.  Both religion and science, in the hands of priests and hustlers, have set us up for unavoidable misery and suffering, and arranged for the suicide of our species and the murder of the living world.  There is nothing you can do about this.  We have the ability to love those we hold dear, and the world we have known.  Let that be enough, for it is all you will ever have.