Propaganda isn’t just about manufacturing consent for wars and ridiculous governmental measures we’d never normally accept. That’s what most people think of when they hear that word, but there’s so very, very much more to it than that.
The lion’s share of propaganda goes not toward convincing us to accept new agendas of the powerful, but toward keeping us entranced in the status quo dream world which enables the powerful to have power in the first place. Toward normalizing status quo systems and training us to shape ourselves to fit into them like neat little cogs in a well-oiled machine.
And it’s not even a grand, monolithic conspiracy in most cases. The giant corporations who indoctrinate us with their advertisements, their Hollywood movies and shows, their apps, their websites and their news media are all naturally incentivized to point us further and further into delusion by the fact that they benefit from the status quo systems which have elevated them to wealth.
So day in and day out we are presented with media which train us what to value, where to place our interest and attention, what success looks like, and how a normal human behaves on this planet. And it always aligns perfectly with the interests of the rich and powerful.
They don’t just teach us what to believe. They teach us who we are. They give us the frameworks upon which we cast our ambitions and evaluate our success, and we build psychological identities out of those constructs. I am a businessman. I am unemployed. My life is about making money. My life is about disappointing people. I am a success. I am a failure. They invent the test of our adequacy, and they invent the system by which we are graded.
These artificial constructs take up such vast portions of our personal psychology that people will live their entire lives completely enslaved to them, making them their entire focus. This enslavement is so pervasive that people will often even take their own lives based on what those made-up constructs tell them about who they are and what they’re worth.
And it’s all a lie. A dream world, made entirely of narrative, constructed by the powerful for the benefit of the powerful. Things as intimate as the thoughts in our heads and the movement of our interest and attention are controlled and dominated with iron-fisted force, all for the benefit of some stupid made-up games about imaginary money and fictional authority.
So most of us sleepwalk through life chasing make believe goals and fleeing artificially constructed demons. Too preoccupied with the illusion to look up and notice the thunderous majesty of life as it really is, and usually too confused to truly perceive it even on those rare occasions when we snap out of the trance for a moment to make an effort.
Untangling yourself from this dream world isn’t easy. It takes time. It takes work. It takes a deep, sustained curiosity about what’s really going on underneath all the muddled mental chatter, about what life truly is underneath all the stories we’ve been told about what life is, about who we truly are underneath all the stories we’ve been told about who we are.
The difference between what we’ve been told and what we find over the course of this investigation is the difference between dream and waking life. The real world is as different from the status quo narrative about the world as it is from any other work of fiction. The two things really could not be any more different.
And the good news is that just as your false view of yourself and your world shaped your human expression in the service of the powerful, the rolling back of that mind fog shapes your human expression into something else entirely. Something grounded in reality. Something authentic. Something primal. Something that exists not for the benefit of some faceless oligarchic empire, but for the same reason the grass grows and the galaxies spin in the cosmos.
And that’s what humanity looks like on the other side of this awkward transition phase that our species is going through at this adolescent point in its development. Free from illusion. In harmony with the real. Enslaved to nobody. Striding clear-eyed into the mystery of what’s to come.
A prominent theme in Asian religious traditions such as the Advaita Vedanta and Zen Buddhism is that our everyday human experience is like a dream. The dream is that you are merely a person – a thing in the world bounded by your skin, a self that is separate from things and other people. But you are not separate from things and other people. And when you see through the illusion of separation, you become ‘awakened’.
In Chinese Zen Buddhism (Ch’an), a significant form of awakening experience is known as ‘Kensho’. This literally translates as ‘seeing one’s true nature’. In Zen, one’s true nature is often described as ‘empty’ – and at the same time identical with the given world. Kensho isn’t the end point of practice. It isn’t some supreme final state such as ‘enlightenment’ or ‘nirvana’ (if these states are even possible). Rather, it is the beginning, for awakening is in fact a life-long practice, never truly completed. This is the type of awakening experience that I am interested in here.
Hui Hai, an 8th-century Zen Master renowned for establishing a monastery and insisting on the importance of manual work, said that your true nature should not be sought externally. He described your true nature as follows:
Mind has no colour, such as green or yellow, red or white; it is not long or short; it does not vanish or appear; it is free from purity and impurity alike; and its duration is eternal. It is utter stillness. Such then is the form and shape of our original mind, which is also our original body.
Our true nature, then, is like a void. It lacks all objective qualities. It is shapeless, colourless, limitless, motionless. So how exactly does one see one’s own true nature, if it is so shorn of discernible features? The traditional method is to sit for many years in an intense meditation practice under the guidance of an experienced teacher. Unfortunately, most practitioners never experience ‘the void’. There is however a tradition in Zen of spontaneous awakening even in the absence of any meditation practice. This suggests that there is a far quicker and more direct means of awakening.
Early Chinese Zen masters referred to the need to ‘chop off one’s head’
Let’s look at a method of self-enquiry called ‘the headless way’, which provides a modern method of approaching awakening. These first-person experiments were developed by the English philosopher and mystic Douglas Harding in his influential book On Having No Head: Zen and the Rediscovery of the Obvious (1961). Harding grew up in a fundamentalist Christian sect in which he wasn’t allowed to go to the cinema and the only book he was permitted to read was the Bible. When he left the sect at 21, he was determined to seek the truth for himself and to be his own authority. The approach he developed was unconventional and can be considered a form of radical empiricism.
The key to his method is noticing that you cannot see your own head. Rather than looking out of a head, visually speaking, there is just a gap here. Indeed, early Chinese Zen masters referred to the need to ‘chop off one’s head’. Hui Hai claimed that he could teach nothing as he had no tongue to teach with. The heart sutra, which distils the essence of Zen teaching, states that ‘in emptiness there is no form, no eye, no ear, no nose, no tongue, no body, no mind.’ Zen masters also urge practitioners to recognise their ‘original face’ – another name for one’s true nature.
How does one see their true nature according to Zen? One of the best places to start is with the mysterious figure Bodhidharma, the First Patriarch of Zen, who reputedly brought Buddhism to China from India around the 5th century. A legend about him tells us that he attained enlightenment after sitting for nine years facing a cave wall, and also that he cut off his own eyelids to stop himself from falling asleep. Bodhidharma is attributed with the following verse, which is often thought to express the core of Zen teaching:
A special transmission outside the scriptures, Not founded upon words and letters; By pointing directly to one’s mind It lets one see into one’s own true nature and thus attain Buddhahood.
How exactly does one directly point to one’s mind or true nature? Harding’s ‘pointing experiment’ assists in turning one’s attention within, starting with the exercise of pointing a finger literally to the spot from which you are looking. Note that if these exercises are not carried out, or if they are merely thought about, this article will make no sense. So please do the following:
Point at a distant thing, such as a wall. Notice its shape and colour. It is a thing that is extended in space. It is also opaque. You cannot see through it. Point to the floor. Again, notice the coloured expanse and its textures. Point to your foot. Again, it is a shaped and coloured thing. Point to your chest and notice its colours and shape and the movement from your breathing. Now point to where you are looking from. In your present experience, is there any colour here? Any shape? Any texture? Any movement? Are there any eyes, mouth or cheeks here? Are there any features of a person? Notice that this spot is totally lacking in any personally identifying characteristics. Is there anything at all here? Or is it just a transparent opening?
When I look within, when I turn my attention 180 degrees from objects over there to where I am, I find that I am not a coloured, limited thing in the world, but rather a colourless, unchanging capacity for the world, exactly as described by Zen. Is this the much sought-after ‘void’ that is referred to by contemplative traditions across times and cultures?
When you were an infant, you did not recognise that face in the mirror as your own. It was just a baby behind some glass
A well-known story in Zen is of Tung-Shan’s awakening, in the 9th century, which also shows intriguing parallels with Harding’s observations. Once, as a child, Tung-Shan was reading the heart sutra with his tutor when he came upon the passage ‘no eye, no ear, no nose, no tongue, no body, no mind’. He was confused. He used his hands to feel his face and then asked his tutor why the sutra said they didn’t exist. His tutor told Tung-Shan that he could not help him, so Tung-Shan spent many years searching for a worthy master to explain this and other mysteries of the Dharma to him. One day he was crossing a river and saw his face reflected in the water. He saw where his face was in his lived experience, and he instantly had a great awakening.
Zen goes beyond words and letters, so merely thinking about this story would be against the spirit of Zen. To test this out directly in your own experience, please carry out the ‘mirror experiment’:
Look into a mirror. You can now see your human face. Notice where it is. In my experience, it is over there, a couple of feet away, not on my shoulders. Is this true for you? It is also facing the wrong way. It is looking in, rather than outwards. How many faces do you see? Two, or just one? Notice the shapes, textures and colours of that little face trapped behind the glass. By contrast, notice the lack of shapes, textures, colours and indeed boundaries to the spot you are looking from.
That face over there is your acquired face. When you were an infant, you did not recognise it as your own. It was just a baby behind some glass. It took many months to learn to identify with that face. You learnt to marry that visual thing over there with the ‘facial’ sensations you feel here, and hence you became boxed in (at least apparently so). Isn’t how you are for yourself – that is, your ‘original face’ – in total contrast to that little face in the mirror? In fact, as lacking any characteristics of its own, isn’t this ‘gap’ seamlessly united with the world? Couldn’t you equally say that your ‘original face’ is the given world itself?
All this might sound a little esoteric, so let’s look at one potential practical benefit of the ‘headless’ practice in the case of personal relationships. We think that we meet each other face-to-face, thing-to-thing. Of course, this is how it looks to others from the outside. But you relate to others from your first-person perspective, not from over there. The lived experience of being with others isn’t in fact of being face-to-face, but rather face-to-no-face. My face never gets in the way of the faces of others – including those you dislike. The ‘space’ you are looking out of has no preferences. It takes on everyone completely, no matter who they are, without judgement. Noticing this is a rather simple and concrete way to see that you are not, in fact, separate from others. In theory, this could provide a basis for true compassion towards others.
One can meditate for many years without seeing their own true nature. Most never do. The precision and apparent reliability of these experiments open up a form of Zen-like awakening to empirical investigation. Yet these techniques have so far received little attention from philosophers and scientists. (I describe these experiments and discuss their relation to Zen more fully in my recent article ‘The Technology of Awakening’.) The results of the experiments suggest that it doesn’t require a lifetime or many lifetimes to see your true nature. You can do so right now. It is simply to see who or what you are at this very moment – that which is seeing these very words.
“Solitude is fine, but you need someone to tell that solitude is fine.” ~Honoré de Balzac
Solitude and meditation are a combination of the most powerful tools known to mankind, provided one can eventually swap them out for the equally powerful tool of magic elixir.
But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Let’s not make the mistake of putting the cart in front of the horse. In order to discover magic elixir, one must first dare solitude and meditation. This requires a Hero’s Journey of sorts: a separation phase, an initiation phase, and a return phase. Let’s break it down.
Into the Wild (Separation Phase):
“It is what one takes into solitude that grows there, the beast within included.” ~Nietzsche
Sometimes the only way to realize that life is beautiful is to look at it in a beautiful way.
This is not a plea for donning rose-colored glasses. Not at all. It is an appeal to leave the all-too-familiar rust, dust, dullness, naivete, softness, and fragility of the comfort zone. It’s a call to beauty, the beauty of adventure. The beauty of living between worlds and gaining the wherewithal to migrate back and forth.
Solitude is powerful because it separates us from the rat race and reveals interconnected beauty. We go from being a rat in a cage to a creature enthralled by its connection with Nature as a whole. We go from being a millstone in a daily grind to being a whetstone that we can sharpen ourselves against. We go from being a cog in the clockwork to an alarm clock that awakens us to higher awareness. In solitude, we can no longer pretend that we are asleep.
Most members of the herd never taste solitude. They get caught up in the rat race, trapped in their cultural conditioning, stuck in religious indoctrination, or imprisoned in political brainwashing. They lose sight of the underlying essence. They sacrifice their wildness for mildness. And when it comes that their life requires a little bite, they discover that they have no teeth.
Solitude rewilds the domesticated animal and teaches it how to regrow its teeth. In conservation biology the term “rewilding” is the rehabilitation process of captive animals. In the case of rewilding the world, or The Great Rewilding, the captive animal just happens to be human.
Understand: rewilding does not mean regressing. It’s not a call back into the cave. Not at all. It’s exactly the opposite. It’s the call of the wild which helps us realize that civilization has become the modern-day Plato’s Cave. The call of the wild is the heart’s longing for itself to become open-hearted once again. Rewilding is simply a healthy means toward achieving that end.
Rewilding begins within. If you rewild yourself again and again, you might earn the right to rewild the world.
Learn to be nourished by solitude rather than defeated by it. Solitude will break you. That’s fine. Let it. You have to feel your brokenness. You have to fall in love with it. Otherwise, you will only ever be a fool of your hope and never authentically hopeful.
The Hope-fool, Hopeless, Hopeful Dynamic (Initiation Phase):
“Life has no meaning. Each of us has meaning and we bring it to life. It is a waste to be asking the question when you are the answer.” ~Joseph Campbell
Confucius described the “fasting of the heart” as a form of meditation which leads to letting our preconceptions go and making room to receive.
The Hope-fool enters their solitude filled with preconceptions and expectations. Their cup is overflowing with delusions of grandeur and pigeonholed meaning. They have yet to bring their own meaning to life because they are drowning in the delusion that existence is meaningful.
In order to bring one’s own meaning to life, the individual must die to their preconceived notion that life is meaningful. That is to say, the individual must become hopeless.
Losing all hope is the beginning of meaningful hope. It’s the crossing of the first threshold. It’s surrendering to the fall into the rabbit hole. It’s taking the red pill after forsaking the blue. It’s embracing the Desert of the Real upon exiting Plato’s Cave. It’s “making room to receive.” What does one receive? Truth. Hard truth. The harsh truth that reality is fundamentally meaningless.
This harsh truth is a dark gift. It’s the psychological death of the old self and the birth of a new more capable self. It’s a painful rebirth. It’s tempest-testing, honor-honing, humor-sharpening. The reward is deep insight.
This deep insight forms a mirror inside us which reflects the world as it is rather than how we were conditioned, indoctrinated, or brainwashed into seeing it. From this deep reflection we become a drop on Indra’s Web, reflecting the whole. We fractal out. We fractal in. We interconnect. The hope-fool collapses into hopelessness only to be resurrected into Hope, into providence. The uninitiated (Hope-fool) becomes the initiated (hopeless) becomes individuated (Hopeful).
Hopelessness is the crucible in which the elixir is cooked. Hope is the integration, containment, and encapsulation of the elixir that makes it magical.
Provident Reciprocity (The Return Phase):
“Everything that is formulated becomes more tolerable.” ~Emil Cioran
Having gleaned otherworldly secrets (deep wisdom, hopeless love, the experience of survival), it’s now time to transform it all into art.
Pain is the magic ingredient within art that makes it meaningful, valuable, and worthwhile. Art without pain is mere makeup. Art infused with pain is transcendent, otherworldly, transformative and transportive. The pain strikes at the heart of the human condition and drags us into heightened levels of experience.
This reveals a profound revelation: the heart of hope is hopelessness. It’s yin-yang perfect. It’s existentially masochistic. These are the profound ingredients of the storytelling medicine of magic elixir.
It’s painful to put yourself out there. It’s painful to be vulnerable, but those people who do that are the dreamers, the innovators, and the creators of magic elixir. They bring hard-earned secrets back to the tribe as a gift of tough love. They choose to become medicine, which could only be discovered while in the deep throes of allowing the journey to be the thing (hopelessness). Then they bring that powerful medicine back to the tribe in the form of hope.
Magic elixir is a squaring of the circle. It’s a hacking of the mind of God. Where the circle is the infinite interconnectedness between all things (God) and the square is the magic elixir (the meaning which contains it) that we bring back to the world.
Those carrying magic elixir have access to the crossroads between Nature and the human soul. They can bridge the gap between the sacred and the banal. It’s on the bridge back to the tribe where they repackage and recode their wisdom. They take what they learned in the wild and develop new forms of courage and endurance which they inject into their elixir.
They have learned how to compress Infinity into bounded form. They fit it into a frame, a book, a painting, a potion, or even a red pill. They bring it back to the tribe, or they leave it on the trail for others to discover. It becomes legendary, mythological, something that ordinary people can get drunk on and gain access to extraordinary experience.
Cultural transformation is the raison d’être of magic elixir. It keeps culture progressively evolving in a healthy way so that it doesn’t become stagnant, congealed, or stuck in dead patterns.
This provident reciprocity does not end. No. Process over outcome. Journey over destination. Those who once dared solitude must dare again. They are too busy connecting the finite with the infinite, dancing between worlds, and bridging gaps with mystic recalibrations and relearned myth to be overwhelmed by the tribe. They must flip scripts. They must turn tables. They must keep rediscovering solitude and returning with updated magic elixir that will continue to overwhelm the tribe.
People don’t generally leave abusive relationships in egoically satisfying, Hollywood-friendly ways.
I point this out because those of us who are watching the people’s abusive relationship with predatory power structures and hoping for revolutionary change often tend to envision the status quo ending in an epic way that will make for a good story and let us feel good about ourselves and how right we were. And that just isn’t how these things tend to go.
One of the most shameful things about being in an abusive relationship is how much longer you’ll let it go on for than an outside observer would expect. How much brutality you’ll put up with and the ways you’ll justify it to yourself.
The shame of this can be soul-crushing. A friend once said, “The worst part wasn’t when he raped me, it was having to make him breakfast afterward.” The shamefulness of the abuse and degradation you’ll put up with because of where you’re at in your mind is why people don’t discuss this aspect more, which is why the loved ones of people in those relationships often have such a hard time understanding it. People don’t talk about it, so many don’t understand how common it is.
Generally when someone leaves an abusive relationship it’s not really because they were hit one too many times. It’s not because it got worse than it used to be. Sometimes it will be because the abuser started to assault the victim’s child, but even that will often happen in ways that are a lot more complicated and shameful than the victim acknowledges when telling the story later on.
Generally when someone leaves an abusive relationship it happens for the same reason flowers bloom: because it was time. Something just shifts, and suddenly you’re seeing things you weren’t seeing before. You start noticing patterns, noticing manipulations, noticing the malice in the abuser’s face that you’d previously compartmentalized away from seeing.
And then when you leave the reality of it doesn’t often make for a great Hollywood movie or Hallmark TV special. It doesn’t fit well into egoically gratifying stories. A process just kind of plays itself out, some things happen in ways you probably didn’t anticipate, and then one day you’re not waking up next to the same person anymore. You might try to tell heroic stories about it, or others might do that on your behalf, but really it just kind of happened when the happening was ripe.
Spiritual enlightenment often happens in the same way. Zen Buddhism is full of stories of sudden awakenings where a monk meditates for thirty years while remaining locked in delusion and then suddenly experiences satori after slipping and falling or hearing a teacher say something unexpected or whatever.
It happens when it’s time. A good teacher might offer some spiritual practices to help “lay the groundwork” for awakening, but one person can take those practices and never awaken while another can awaken very quickly. It’s not like building a house or learning a new language where you set to work and do certain things in a certain way and then eventually you have what you set out to obtain. Awakening doesn’t work that way. It’s not the product of personal will. It happens when it happens.
A pot of water can sit there on the stove for minutes without looking like much is happening. When people look at our current environment of murderous exploitative status quo systems and deeply propagandized populations they’ll often despair because it’s very much the same: it doesn’t look like much is happening.
But then the water begins to boil. But then the battered wife escapes to safety. But then the spiritual aspirant sees beyond the veil of illusion. But then the people rise up.
Humans are storytelling creatures; that’s why it’s possible to gain such a tremendous amount of power over us by controlling our stories. We are storytelling creatures whose primate brains weren’t evolved for the purpose of giving us any absolute understanding of ultimate reality, whose senses only take in a tiny fraction of our surroundings, whose minds don’t process what’s happening in the ways science tells us things are actually happening.
What do you get when you have a storytelling animal with a very limited capacity to perceive life as it really is? You get a lot of things happening in ways that the creature did not expect, because none of their mental stories told them to anticipate it happening in that way. And then probably telling a bunch of stories about what happened which don’t truly reflect reality.
If and when humanity does wake up from its propaganda-induced coma and push for the changes needed for us to evade extinction and create a healthy world together, it will happen in ways we’re not expecting. It will happen in ways that aren’t pleasing to the ego. It will happen in ways that don’t allow us to stand up and say “Aha! You see? I was right all along!” It will happen in ways that don’t form a compelling narrative.
And how could it? If humanity is to survive into the distant future we’re going to have to transcend the egoic mental habits which led us into this mess. We’re going to have to transcend our unhealthy relationship with mental narrative which made us so easy to manipulate and propagandize. We’re going to have to transcend our self-destructive patterning, which will necessarily have to come from an unpatterned, and therefore unexpected direction.
It will happen when it happens, in a way we couldn’t possibly have predicted it would happen.
So don’t despair if it looks like things aren’t headed toward change. The boiling water, the escaped abuse victim, and the deeply enlightened mind all looked the same at one point.
Don’t despair, and don’t fear the unknown. The unknown is the only direction humanity’s salvation can possibly come from.
“Slices” is a German DVD magazine focusing on electronic music. In this segment from the 9/15/07 edition, legendary composer, producer, DJ and founder of record label FAX +49-69/450464, Pete Namlook (aka Peter Kuhlmann) is featured. Though not as well known as his contemporaries, he’s one of the most influential ambient artists of the 90s, having collaborated with Klaus Schulze, Bill Laswell, Dr. Atmo, Lorenzo Montanà, Jonah Sharp, Wolfram Spyra, Charles Uzzell-Edwards, Burhan Öçal, David Moufang, Mixmaster Morris, Higher Intelligence Agency, Gaudi, Atom Heart, Richie Hawtin and Tetsu Inoue among many others. At the age of 51, Pete Namlook died after a heart attack on November 8, 2012. Fortunately he was as prolific as he was gifted, and left the world a vast catalog of beautiful sonic explorations as his legacy. In this profile he describes the philosophy and some of the technical aspects behind his work.
At our general level of awareness there is often no perceptible or discernible pattern to the flow of events. Partly this stems from having been conditioned into perceiving a particular dominant reality program. We do not have access to objective reality, although there can be moments and instances when glimpses occur. The phenomenon of miracles is an example of this, when the laws of a reality outside of our own intervene/operate within our subjective reality. Likewise, many ancient tales, fables, allegories, etc, are representations of what we refer to as a ‘higher dimension’ operating within our own. Such impulses help us, whether we are conscious of it or not, to re-orientate our perception against the indoctrinated programming. What we often take to be reality is in fact only a very thin slice of a much ‘bigger picture.’
The act of discernment is an inward one; as such, it requires a disciplined focus. Yet as we have seen, modern societies not only do they not cater to such practices, but they also actively dissuade us from approaching them. The result of this is that people in general do not see – or feel – a need for such a discernment. Modern life keeps us occupied and diverted by other pursuits. Unfortunately, it is often the case that ‘shock impacts’ are required in order for us to shift our attention away from the ‘straight path’ of normalized living. And we’ve been living with such a ‘shock event’ for almost two years now since the outbreak of the pandemic. We could see our current predicament from this perspective: that modern life was in need of a ‘crisis point’ within its old patterns for there to arise within people the need for something else. It is in such moments of deep reflection that an inner realization may occur: the recognition that common (i.e., consensus) culture does not provide sufficient meaning for our lives. That is, there is the lack of any transcendental, metaphysical impulse. An awareness of such lack often occurs in times when there is a noticeable deterioration in social and cultural systems. Such recognition – or re-cognition – is not yet dominant among the majority of our modern so-called ‘civilized’ nations. Yet we are soon reaching that tipping point.
For too long we have been absent from the vale of ‘soul-making,’ to quote the poet John Keats. And yet the signs have always been there to guide the way. When our early cave-dwelling ancestors first made their handprints upon the walls of their caves they were signalling to the external world: ‘I am here – I exist.’ The inner spark of the human being was attempting to be heard – to be imprinted onto the outer life. It was an early stage in the expression of an interiorized human consciousness. In each epoch our consciousness perceives and interprets reality in a particular way. How we experience the reality around us influences our perception of it, and vice-versa. This is why our perceptions have always been a target for direct manipulation – it is our reality-sensing software.
As part of our steps toward discernment we can begin by a recognition of the following factors: i) acknowledgement of one’s situation and the need for self-development and/or life adjustment; and ii) the need for partial detachment from one’s social and cultural conditioning and external influences. By recognizing these two factors a person can make the first step to self-aware discernment. A gradual de-conditioning of the social personality (the persona) helps to develop a detached perspective and to see external impacts for what they are. In order to see and think clearly, we need to methodically de-clutter our social personality. Then, and only then, can a conscious step be taken toward inner freedom and genuine liberty. That is, the old patterns must become less determined, dogmatic, and fixed. Then through this space, where old belief patterns have left their moorings, can new perceptions emerge. As this process gradually unfolds it is important that each person stays grounded in the world – in their everyday lives – and not to entertain themselves with amusing fantasies or unwarranted intoxications. Furthermore, it is important to remember that in all we do we should be in harmony and balance, and not in conflict with our everyday life. Our dignity and decency is not in what it has achieved, nor what it is, but in what it can become. And this is a choice each person can make.
Our Choice
As in everything in our lives, we make a choice. When it comes down to basics – which it inevitably must do – then we find that we have a fundamental choice between living a life in Love or in Fear. In other words, if we choose Love then we side with compassion, empathy, creativity, connection, support, sharing, and resilience. And if we choose to align with the Fear then we give ourselves over to control, manipulation, anxiety, and vulnerability – all the expressions of a culture of oppression.
If we ascribe to a life lived as islands of separation, then inevitably we learn (or are conditioned) to place our trust externally upon a range of institutions; these may range from religious, work/career, social, educational, political, etc. And if these institutions fail us then we naturally feel vulnerability, or even betrayed. And yet the truth of the matter is that we betrayed ourselves in the first place by outsourcing our trust. If we live a life relying upon external systems, then we must be prepared to feel distraught should those external systems break-down. In such times of great transition, such as now, these social institutions are themselves very fragile. Further, many of these systems are now revealing themselves to be corrupt – or being utilized by corrupt human agents. Right now, I would say that we are witnessing the ‘great unravelling’ of many of our once trusted systems. We are seeing head-on the undoing of many dishonest, unethical, and toxic structures that inevitably can no longer serve our interests. This unravelling is revealing that our sense of vulnerability is partly the dismantling of our false assumptions. And further, that our sense of vulnerability is the fear of letting go. It is important to be open to receiving information, even if it is of the disagreeable kind. Yet in being open to such information does not mean we should adopt a position of fear. We have to make a choice of not accepting, or adopting, these external aspects of fear and toxicity. They do not ‘belong’ to us.
In knowing this, we are compelled to seek out those experiences that feel real to us, and which can assist us in developing as human beings. If there is a ‘truth’ to be discerned, then it must surely come not through artificial constructs but through our everyday personal experiences. To understand that which we call the ‘self’ is only a construct until we can experience it through the revelation brought about by others. Alone, we are unable to ‘see’ the self – no more than we can see our own faces. And just as we need a mirror in order to view our face, so too do we need other people and experiences in life to be as mirrors to reveal the workings of the inner Self. In the end, it is our participation in life that shall teach us the discernment we need to tell truth from falsehood. No online course or TV program can teach us this. Let us not back away from ourselves – let us invite us closer in.
When “taking the vax” became a means to signal ones virtue as part of the moral high ground, the right side of history, etc. many people were indulging themselves by taking the vaxx. It became not just an act of personal health or even collective health but a signal, a ritual of their faith in something much bigger and much more sinister.
The origin of that faith and purpose of that ritual should not be ignored. Especially given how by nature of the vaxx being a moral position many of those people entered into that contract full knowing that those of us who refused would be indicted by that same moral position.
Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities.
― Voltaire
Where there is no vision, the people perish…
– Proverbs 29:18
I read an opinion column early in the new year written by a local woman scolding The Unvaccinated in my area. Ironically, she addressed her article to the “my body, my choice” crowd and argued those who don’t get vaccinated should have their health insurance capped. She claimed taxpayers should not be burdened by those too selfish to care about overwhelmed health care systems or for those who are oppressing future generations.
Where does one even start?
The Irish author and satirist, Jonathan Swift, once wrote: “Reasoning will never make a man correct an ill opinion, which by reasoning he never acquired”. Obviously, that particular maxim applies to the fairer sex as well.
People act upon what they believe and this is, in fact, the very definition of “faith”. For even the Bible says faith (i.e. belief) without works (i.e. action) is dead. It means the woman’s article was written and published as the result of her faith in the Covid narrative; and reason be damned.
Certainly, the Covid Deceived have been made to fear. And they were tricked by the most powerful people and organizations on the planet. But their faith is more akin to superstition – cult-like and hypnotic; the end result of media-induced propagandaprogramming psychosis.
It’s been said that neurotics build castles in the air and psychotics live in them. Except a majority today reside in mental castles that were, in fact, constructed by psychotics. Yet the masses have entered those castles on their own volition and it means Voltaire was right: Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities.
Hasn’t this been the story of mankind since time immemorial?
In the middle of December 2021, blogger Jim Quinn (TheBurningPlatform.com) posted an article entitled “They Needed the Omicron Variant” and included a total of 37 bullet-points…“mile-markers”, if you will, on the road to The Great Reset – and concluded with these words:
As Euripides warned centuries ago, when the mob is persuaded by the honeyed words of evil men, great woes befall the state. Gates, Soros, Schwab, Fauci and Biden are evil men attempting to remake the world in a way that benefits them and their Davos co-conspirators. We will not comply. We will not obey. We will not give up our freedoms and liberties without a fight to the finish.
Irrespective of the financial elite’s motivations, the simple truth is this: They have successfully pulled it off. As of this writing, the U.S. Supreme Court has yet not decided on the Biden/OSHA-mandated Covid vaccinations but these will either be upheld or not.
If the mandates were upheld prior to this article’s post, then it would have been titled: “Let Our Vision Overcome False Narratives & Unjust Laws”.
But, even if the OSHA mandates are struck down by the Supreme Court, or get overridden by state lawmakers with common sense, be assured those administering The Great Reset have more tricks up their sleeves. Just this week, Dr. Robert Malone, an early pioneer of mRNA technology, has warned of an “Ebola-Like Hemorrhagic Fever Virus Now Spreading In China”.
So, bearing all that in mind, I believe it would be dangerous to underestimate those administering the New World Order… or to overestimate the wisdom and intestinal fortitude of a majority of Americans; and, by extension, the entire global citizenry.
To the financial elite, the masses are viewed as a means to an end. Their end, that is. Or, stated another way, the plebeians are viewed as base material – simple resources to get the “elite” where they are going.
On the popular entertainment streaming service, Netflix, the elitist worldview is revealed in the “Squid Game” series. The show is rife with symbols and messages that are, perhaps, most aptly deciphered at The Vigilant Citizen.com:
The outline of this game is also the main logo of the series. The reason: It perfectly illustrates the core philosophy of Squid Game and, by extension, the elite. The rectangle represents the masses. The circle at the bottom of it represents those who are poor and heavily in debt. The triangle above the rectangle represents the elite ruling over the masses. The upper circle represents the all-powerful occult elite that controls the world.
Appropriately enough, the narrator explains that the children who play Squid Game must make their way to the upper circle to win.
Win or lose. Zero sum gain. Rich versus poor. Us against them. Polemics. Dialectics: A life and death game where the winners win the world.
In the end, though, the game is about survival. Both the financial elite and the masses have near-reptilian instincts to survive. The innate survival mechanisms range from cold calculation to obvious ignorance dependent upon one’s position in the pyramid; as the masses are kept constantly confused, in the dark, and at each other’s throats. Until, that is, mission accomplished. Game over.
Belief materializes through perspective and perspective derives from context and context is defined by narrative. Surely, it all distills down to the stories in people’s heads. In fact, that is exactly how shit happens.
On January 6, 2022 one of my liberal acquaintances, an enthusiastic reader of the New York Times, expressed to me his gratitude that our “democracy survived”.
I calmly showed him how our democracy has NOT actually survived and he hasn’t broached the topic with me since. In any event, the keys of truth were given and he will either escape the imaginary castle in his head, or simply build a bigger moat.
What this guy will likely never understand, however, is that his insanities and absurdities were generated on purpose – the result of carefully crafted, and, quite often, chaotically circulated, narratives. Irrationality has become the essence of madness as logic, truth, and reality have been upended into Clown World.
So how do we fight back? And how do we win?
In the thread of a previous blog post, a commenter by the name of “Stucky” had this to say:
Hope works remarkably well when it is part of one’s Belief System.
….But, hope sucks when it’s a strategy
I agree. Hope alone cannot restore the Old Normal. In fact, nothing will at this point. But be assured of this: If we don’t resist, we are guaranteed to lose our liberties initially, and, later, our very lives.
One simple offensive strategy might be to generate different stories, fresh metaphors, and new allegories, to replace the elite-constructed narratives that have become the castles, fortresses, and high towers, in people’s heads. An example could be to challenge Big Pharma’s financial mining of the human immune system through endless Covid booster “subscriptions” with a metaphor describing mandatory organ donation by the state and in the service of The Collective.
Another method could involve sharing these websites (below) that give voice to the Covid vaccine-injured:
In my own locality, I have been hammering away at the foundational premises and assumptions underlying the Covid Agenda as follows:
– If the vaccines don’t stop infection or transmission, then what/who is behind the apparent agenda for vaccine passports?
– And, if the shots work, then why are boosters needed?
By so doing, I would like to express my gratitude to those who have become the tip of the spear, so to speak, in the War Against Covid Propaganda: Brave souls like Robert F. Kennedy, Dr. Peter McCullough, Professor John Ioannidis, Dr. Christina Parks, Dr. Judy Mikovits, Catherine Austin Fitts, Joseph Mercola, and the entire “Disinformation Dozen”, as well as ALL of the writers, bloggers, and commenters posting here on the alternative internet.
Robert F. Kennedy’s book, “The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health”, could be an effective weapon in converting progressives in the propaganda war because Kennedy is RFK’s son and JFK’S nephew. He has, additionally, been a champion of liberal causes including environmentalism.
The enemy of my enemy is my friend, so it was gratifying to see Kennedy’s take-down of the global medical cabal become a well-reviewed best seller this past Christmas season.
Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality was tacitly denied by their philosophy. The heresy of heresies was common sense.” George Orwell, 1984
The “Covid pandemic” narrative is insane. That is long-established at this point, we don’t really need to go into how or why here. Read our back catalogue.
The rules are meaningless and arbitrary, the messaging contradictory, the very premise nonsensical.
Every day some new insanity is launched out into the world, and while many of us roll our eyes, raise our voices, or just laugh…many more accept it, believe it, allow it to continue.
Whether or not you believe the test means anything, they notionally do. In the reality they try to sell us every day, testing positive means you are carrying a dangerous disease.
So they are requesting people allegedly carrying a “deadly virus” work, rather than letting perfectly healthy unvaccinated people simply have their jobs back.
This is insanity.
But could anything more perfectly illustrate the priorities of those running the game?
We already know it’s not about a virus, it’s not about protecting the health service and it’s not about saving lives. Every day the people running the “pandemic” admit as much by their actions, and even their words.
Rather, it seems to be about enforcing rules that make little to no sense, requiring conformity at the price of reason, drawing arbitrary lines in the sand and demanding people respect them, making people believe “facts” that are provably untrue.
But why? Why is the story of Covid irrational and contradictory? Why are we told on the one hand to be afraid, and on the other that there is nothing to be afraid of?
Why is the “pandemic” so completely insane?
You could argue that it’s simple happenstance. The by-product of a multi-focused evolving narrative, a story being told by a thousand authors all at once, each concerned with covering their own little patch of agenda. A car with multiple drivers fighting over a single steering wheel.
There’s probably some truth to that.
But it’s also true that control, true control, can only be achieved with a lie.
In clinical psychology one of the diagnostic signs of the psychopath is that they tell elaborate lies, compulsively. Many times they will tell a lie even if the truth would be more beneficial.
Nobody knows why they do this, but I have a theory, and it applies to the swarming groups of little rat minds running the sewers of power as much as it does any individual monstrosity.
If you want to control people, you need to lie to them, that’s the only way to guarantee you have power.
If you are standing in the road, and I yell “look out, there’s a car a coming”, and you move just as a car whips past, I will never know if you moved because I said so, or because there actually was a car.
If my interest is in making sure you don’t get hurt, this would not matter to me either way.
But, what if my only true aim is the gratification of watching you do what I say, simply because I said it?
…well, then I need to scream out a warning of a car that does not exist, and watch you dodge an imaginary threat. Or, indeed, tell you there is no car, and watch you get run over.
Only by doing this can I see my words mean more to you than perceivable reality, and only then do I know I’m truly in control.
You can never control people with the truth, because the truth has an existence outside yourself that cannot be altered or directed. It may be the truth itself that controls people, not you.
You can never force people to obey rules that make sense, because they may be obeying reason, not your force.
True power lies in making people afraid of something that does not exist, and making them abandon reason in the name of protecting themselves from the invented threat.
To guarantee you have control, you must make people see things that are not there, make people live in a reality you build around them, and force people to follow arbitrary, contradictory rules that change day by day.
To truly test their loyalty, their hypnosis, you could even tell them there’s nothing to be afraid of anymore, but they need to follow the rules anyway.
Maybe that’s the point. Maybe the story isn’t supposed to be believable. Maybe the rules aren’t meant to make sense, they are meant to be obeyed.
Maybe the more contradictory & illogical the regulations become, the more your compliance is valued.
Maybe if you can force a person to abandon their judgment in favour of your own, you have total control over their reality.
We started with an Orwell quote, so let’s end with one too:
Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.”
Isn’t that what we’re seeing now? What we’ve been seeing since the beginning?
People being mind broken into being afraid of something they are told isn’t frightening, following rules they are told are not necessary, taking “medicine” they are told does not work.
Maybe forcing people to believe your lies, even as you admit you are lying, is the purest expression of power.
After the Crash 