Saturday Matinee: Obsolete

Posted on June 3, 2017 by Reid Mukai

The Future Doesn’t Need Us… Or So We’ve Been Told. With the rise of technology and the real-time pressures of an online, global economy, humans will have to be very clever – and very careful – not to be left behind by the future. From the perspective of those in charge, human labor is losing its value, and people are becoming a liability. This documentary reveals the real motivation behind the secretive effort to reduce the population and bring resource use into strict, centralized control. Could it be that the biggest threat we face isn’t just automation and robots destroying jobs, but the larger sense that humans could become obsolete altogether? *Please watch and share!* Link to film: http://amzn.to/2f69Ocr

Life-Hacks of the Poor and Aimless

Posted on June 1, 2017 by Reid Mukai

On negotiating the false idols of neoliberal self-care

By Laurie Penny

Source: The Baffler

Late capitalism is like your love life: it looks a lot less bleak through an Instagram filter. The slow collapse of the social contract is the backdrop for a modern mania for clean eating, healthy living, personal productivity, and “radical self-love”—the insistence that, in spite of all evidence to the contrary, we can achieve a meaningful existence by maintaining a positive outlook, following our bliss, and doing a few hamstring stretches as the planet burns. The more frightening the economic outlook and the more floodwaters rise, the more the public conversation is turning toward individual fulfillment as if in a desperate attempt to make us feel like we still have some control over our lives.

Coca-Cola encourages us to “choose happiness.” Politicians take time out from building careers in the debris of democracy to remind us of the importance of regular exercise. Lifestyle bloggers insist to hundreds of thousands of followers that freedom looks like a white woman practicing yoga alone on a beach. One such image (on the @selflovemantras Instagram) informs us that “the deeper the self love, the richer you are.” That’s a charming sentiment, but landlords are not currently collecting rent in self-love.

Can all this positive thinking be actively harmful? Carl Cederström and André Spicer, authors of The Wellness Syndrome, certainly think so, arguing that obsessive ritualization of self-care comes at the expense of collective engagement, collapsing every social problem into a personal quest for the good life. “Wellness,” they declare, “has become an ideology.”

There is an obvious political dimension to the claim that wellbeing, with the right attitude, can be produced spontaneously. Months after being elected leader of the most right-wing government in recent British history, yogurt-featured erstwhile PR man David Cameron launched an ill-fated “happiness agenda.” The scheme may have been better received if the former prime minister were not simultaneously engaged in decimating health care, welfare, and higher education—the very social structures that make life manageable for ordinary British people. As part of Cameron’s changes to the welfare system, unemployment was rebranded as a psychological disorder. According to a study in the Medical Humanities journal, in the teeth of the longest and deepest recession in living memory, the jobless were encouraged to treat their “psychological resistance” to work by way of obligatory courses that encouraged them to adopt a jollier attitude toward their own immiseration. They were harangued with motivational text messages telling them to “smile at life” and that “success is the only option.”

This mode of coercion has been adopted by employers, too, as Cederström and Spicer note. Zero-hour-contract laborers in an Amazon warehouse, “although they are in a precarious situation . . . are required to hide these feelings and project a confident, upbeat, employable self.” All of which begs the question: Who exactly are we being well for?

The well-being ideology is a symptom of a broader political disease. The rigors of both work and worklessness, the colonization of every public space by private money, the precarity of daily living, and the growing impossibility of building any sort of community maroon each of us in our lonely struggle to survive. We are supposed to believe that we can only work to improve our lives on that same individual level. Chris Maisano concludes that while “the appeal of individualistic and therapeutic approaches to the problems of our time is not difficult to apprehend . . . it is only through the creation of solidarities that rebuild confidence in our collective capacity to change the world that their grip can be broken.”

The isolating ideology of wellness works against this sort of social change in two important ways. First, it persuades all us that if we are sick, sad, and exhausted, the problem isn’t one of economics. There is no structural imbalance, according to this view—there is only individual maladaption, requiring an individual response. The lexis of abuse and gas-lighting is appropriate here: if you are miserable or angry because your life is a constant struggle against privation or prejudice, the problem is always and only with you. Society is not mad, or messed up: you are.

Secondly, it prevents us from even considering a broader, more collective reaction to the crises of work, poverty, and injustice. That’s the logic exposed by personal productivity gurus like Mark Fritz, who tells us, in The Truth About Getting Things Done, that:

The biggest barrier to achieving the success you have defined for your life is never anyone else or the circumstances you encounter. Your biggest barrier is almost always you. . . . Dr Maxwell Maltz, author of Psycho-Cybernetics [ETA: sounds legit to me!], put it best when he said, “Within you right now is the power to do things you never dreamed possible. This power becomes available to you as soon as you can change your beliefs.

This, of course, is a cyclopean lie—but it’s a seductive one nonetheless. It would be nice to believe that all it takes to change your life is to repeat some affirmations and buy a planner, just as it was once comforting for many of us to trust that the hardships of this plane of existence would be rewarded by an eternity of bliss in heaven. There is a reason that the rituals of well-being and self-care are followed with the precision of a cult (do this and you will be saved; do this and you will be safe): It is a practice of faith. It’s worth remembering that Marx’s description of religion as the opiate of the masses is often misinterpreted—opium, at the time when Marx was writing, was not just known as an addictive drug, but as a painkiller, a solace when the work of survival became unbearable.

With the language of self-care and well-being almost entirely colonized by the political right, it is not surprising that progressives, liberals, and left-wing groups have begun to fetishize a species of abject hopelessness. Positive thinking has become deeply unfashionable. The American punk kids I know describe it, disparagingly, as “posi.” The British ones, of course, describe it as “American.” Whatever you call it, it feels a lot like giving in.

In a scintillating essay at Open Democracy, activist Chloe King writes that

changing your attitude is not going to change or help to dismantle structural injustice and a failed and unsustainable economic model which serves only the elite rich of this world, and exploits the rest of us, particularly the working class and those living in poverty. As far as I am concerned positive thinking will fucking ruin your life. “Just think positive” is a precursor to “it gets better,” and the hard reality is it is only going to get much, much worse for our most vulnerable.

There is truth here. What is also true, however, is that the young people I know who are, in general, the very worst at taking basic care of themselves as individuals—the people whose problem is not that they don’t drink enough asparagus water, but that they don’t drink enough of anything that isn’t day-old wine from a foil bag—are those who went through the student and Occupy uprisings of 2010–2012 and experienced, briefly, what it meant to live a different sort of life. What it meant to be part of a community with common goals of which mutual aid and support were not the least. What it meant to experience that sudden, brief respite from individual striving and build a prefigurative society together. The lonely work of taking basic care of yourself as you wait for the world to change is a poor substitute. When you’re washed up and burned out from putting your body on the line to fight the state, it’s especially galling to be told to share a smile and eat more whole grains.

When modernity teaches us to loathe ourselves and then sells us quick fixes for despair, we can be forgiven for balking at the cash register. Anxious millennials now seem to have a choice between desperate narcissism and crushing misery. Which is better? The question is not rhetorical. On the one hand, Instagram happiness gurus make me want to drown myself in a kale smoothie. On the other, I’m sick and tired of seeing the most brilliant people I know, the fighters and artists and mad radical thinkers whose lives’ work might actually improve the world, treat themselves and each other in ludicrously awful ways with the excuse, implicit or explicit, that any other approach to life is counterrevolutionary.

Some of the left critique of self-care as a neoliberal conspiracy has to do with dismissing the work that women and queer people do to survive. “I have heard feminism be dismissed as a form of self-indulgence,” writes Professor Sara Ahmed of Goldsmiths, University of London. So have I. I’ve heard men on the left write off anti-sexist, anti-racist politics as hopelessly individualistic, whilst also refusing to do the basic work of self-care and mutual care that keeps hope alive and health possible, because that work is women’s work, undignified in comparison to watching your life fall apart while you wait for the revolution or for some girl to pick up the pieces, whichever comes first.

The left has a special talent for counterproductive, theory-enabled wallowing. “Neoliberalism sweeps up too much when all forms of self-care become symptoms of neo-liberalism,” writes Ahmed. “When feminist, queer, and anti-racist work that involves sharing our feelings, our hurt and grief, recognizing that power gets right to the bone, is called neo-liberalism, we have to hear what is not being heard. . . . A world against you can be experienced as your body turning against you. You might be worn down, worn out, by what you are required to take in.”

It is at this point that I confess to you that I’ve been doing yoga for two years and it’s changed my life to an extent that I almost resent. I have trained myself, through dedicated practice on and off the mat, to find enough inner strength not to burst out laughing when the instructor ends the class by declaring “let the light in me honor the light in you.” The instructor is a very nice person who smiles all the time like a drunk kindergarten teacher and could probably kill me with her abs alone, so I have refrained from informing her that the light in me is sometimes a government building on fire.

Downward-facing dog is not a radical position. Nonetheless, that particular asana is among a few small concessions I make to self-care while I wait for the end of patriarchy and the destruction of the money system. Overpriced charcoal health drinks aren’t good for liberating anything except your wallet and your colon in short succession, but walks in the park are free, so I occasionally go out in the sunshine and try to soak up a bit of Vitamin D without worrying about skin cancer, melting ice-caps, and millions of people drowning in Bangladesh. I no longer subsist entirely on chicken nuggets, cigarettes, and spite. I sometimes take a day off, because it became apparent that the revolution was not being driven any faster by my being sick and sad all the time. Late Capitalism is as good an excuse of any for not getting out of bed, but huddling under the covers worrying about Donald Trump is a very inefficient way of sticking it to the man.

The problem with self-love as we currently understand it is in our view of love itself, defined, too simply and too often, as an extraordinary feeling that we respond to with hearts and flowers and fantasy, ritual consumption and affectless passion. Modernity would have us mooning after ourselves like heartsick, slightly creepy teenagers, taking selfies and telling ourselves how special and perfect we are. This is not real self-love, no more than a catcaller loves the woman whose backside he’s loudly admiring in the street.

The harder, duller work of self-care is about the everyday, impossible effort of getting up and getting through your life in a world that would prefer you cowed and compliant. A world whose abusive logic wants you to see no structural problems, but only problems with yourself, or with those more marginalized and vulnerable than you are. Real love, the kind that soothes and lasts, is not a feeling, but a verb, an action. It’s about what you do for another person over the course of days and weeks and years, the work put in to care and cathexis. That’s the kind of love we’re terribly bad at giving ourselves, especially on the left.

The broader left could learn a great deal from the queer community, which has long taken the attitude that caring for oneself and one’s friends in a world of prejudice is not an optional part of the struggle—in many ways, it is the struggle. Writer and trans icon Kate Bornstein’s rule number one is “Do whatever it takes to make your life more worth living. Just don’t be mean.” It’s more than likely that one of the reasons that the trans and queer communities continue to make such gains in culture, despite a violent backlash, is the broad recognition that self-care, mutual aid, and gentle support can be tools of resistance, too. After the Orlando massacre, LGBTQ people across the world started posting selfies under the hashtag #queerselflove. In the midst of the horror, the public mourning, and the fear, queer people of all ages and backgrounds across the world engaged in some light-hearted celebration of ourselves, of one another.

The ideology of wellbeing may be exploitative, and the tendency of the left to fetishize despair is understandable, but it is not acceptable—and if we waste energy hating ourselves, nothing’s ever going to change. If hope is too hard to manage, the least we can do is take basic care of ourselves. On my greyest days, I remind myself of the words of the poet and activist Audre Lorde, who knew a thing or two about survival in an inhuman world, and wrote that self care “is not self-indulgence—it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.”

Accelerating Capital: Completed Nihilism and The Indebted Man

Posted on May 28, 2017 by Reid Mukai

By S.C. Hickman

Source: Southern Nights

In his book Data Trash (1993), Arthur Kroker writes that in the field of digital acceleration, more information means less meaning, because meaning slows info circulation. In the sphere of the digital economy, the faster information circulates, the faster value is accumulated. But meaning slows down this process, as meaning needs time to be produced and to be elaborated and understood. So the acceleration of the info-flow implies the elimination of meaning.

—Franco Berardi, And: Phenomenology of the End

The pursuit of profit is the engine of Capital, accumulation is its outcome. Profit is from the Latin profectus, meaning “advance, increase, success, progress,” out of which the need to benefit or provide income derived. This sense that progress and success drive the need for profit, that the goal of capitalism is this abstract movement toward increasing and advancing one’s success in the world has always been at the heart of the competitive spirit. To compete or strive against others for the foremost place, this sense of the competitive spirit that has been with us at least since the first Greek Olympics. The term itself “compete” is etymologically to enter or be put in rivalry with an other,” from Middle French compéter “be in rivalry with” (14c.), or directly from Late Latin competere “strive in common,” in classical Latin “to come together, agree, to be qualified,” later, “strive together,” from com “with, together” (com-) + petere “to strive, seek, fall upon, rush at, attack”. A sense of violent taking and war against all comers for the top prize, the best or foremost place in the Sun.

As Berardi reminds us in the old industrial economy described by Marx, the goal of production was already the valorization of capital, through the extraction of surplus- -value from labour. But, in order to produce value, the capitalist was still obliged to exchange useful things, so he was obliged to produce cars and books and bread.

When the referent is cancelled, when profit is made possible by the mere circulation of money, the production of cars, books and bread become superfluous. The accumulation of abstract value is made possible through the subjection of human beings to debt, and through predation on existing resources. The destruction of the real world starts from this emancipation of valorization from the production of useful things, and from the self-replication of value in the financial field. The emancipation of value from the referent leads to the destruction of the existing world. This is exactly what is happening under the cover of the so-called financial crisis, which is not a crisis at all, but the transition to the self-referential financial capitalism. (A: 125-126)

Financial capitalism is no longer the pursuit of profit in the Greek or Latin sense I described. No longer is there a sense of the old value of the pursuit of excellence or an ill-defined sense of virtue. Rather there is no value at all in the outward sense, but rather value has itself lost its luster and only the sheer accumulation of abstract value in the form of debt remains. But what is debt? What exactly is this debt economy of financial capitalism. And, most of all, how does the spirit of capitalism in itself bring about the death of meaning (i.e., nihilism). If as many suspect we are in the moment when Capital is completing this process of nihilism, what does that entail for humanity?

As Berardi said in a recent essay,

The colonization of time has been a fundamental issue in the modern history of capitalist development: the anthropological mutation that capitalism produced in the human mind and in daily life has, above all, transformed the perception of time. But we are now leaping into the unknown—digital technologies have enabled absolute acceleration, and the short-circuiting of attention time. As info-workers are exposed to a growing mass of stimuli that cannot be dealt with according to the intensive modalities of pleasure and knowledge, acceleration leads to an impoverishment of experience. More information, less meaning. More information, less pleasure.

This sense that there is a connection between time, language, and capitalism that is playing out the endgame of nihilism in our generation is foremost in this equation. At the forefront of this is the notion of debt, and that we are entering an era of a new Guilt Culture based on an infinite and unpayable debt. A future imploding into a black hole of guilt and shame that will leave us and our planet bankrupt and without sense or value.

I’ve written of debt in other essays: here and here in which I follow Deleuze and Guattari down the rabbit hole. Alberto Toscano in an excellent essay on Maurizio Lazzarato’s book The Making of the Indebted Man talks of the indebted this way:

Artificially kept alive until they repay outstanding debts, they stalk the landscape of commodity refuse, scavenging, salvaging, recycling to shave off infinitesimal portions of their liabilities, living-dead labour both unproductive and profitable. Telescoping hi-tech financial expropriation and the lo-tech labour in the breakers yards of global capital, the indeadted embody a moment in which subjection to capitalist imperatives subsumes life to the point that it trespasses into death…2

Thanatropic capitalism feeding off the living dead, the zombies of a system that has become total predation on human life and the planet.

In Anti-Oedipus Deleuze and Guattari explain their sense of our current debt regimes:

Society is not exchangist, the socious is inscriptive: not exchanging but marking bodies, which are part of the earth. We have seen that the regime of debt is the unit of alliance, and alliance is representation itself. It is alliance that codes the flows of desire and that, by means of debt, creates for man a memory of words (paroles). It is alliance that represses the great, intense, mute filiative memory, the germinal influx as the representative of the noncoded flows of desire capable of submerging everything. It is debt that articulates the alliances with the filiations that have become extended, in order to form and to forge a system in extension (representation) based on the repression of nocturnal intensities. The alliance-debt answers to what Nietzsche described as humanity’s prehistoric labor: the use of the cruelest mnemotechnics, in naked flesh, to impose a memory of words founded on the ancient biocosmic memory. That is why it is so important to see debt as a direct consequence of the primitive inscription process, instead of making it – and the inscriptions themselves – into an indirect means of universal exchange. (p. 185)

For Deleuze and Guattari it is Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals that teaches us the truth of debt. In fact it was Nietzsche, and Nietzsche alone who provided the first hint of a theory that the “primitive socious” was inherently a “problem of inscription, of coding, of marking…” (p. 190). As they’ll state it:

Man must constitute himself through repression of the intense germinal influx, the great biocosmic memory that threatens to deluge every attempt at collectivity. But at the same time, how is a new memory to be created for man – a collective memory of the spoken word and of alliances that declines alliances with the extended filiations, that endows him with faculties of resonance and retention, of selection and detachment, and that effects this way of coding the flow of desire as a condition of the socious? The answer is simple – debt – open, mobile, and finite blocks of debt: the extraordinary composite of the spoken voice, the marked body, and the enjoying eye.” (AO: 190)

This sense that in financial capitalism is enforcing a cruel mimetic experiment of instilling and inscribing the Word of Capital upon the body socious; and, that we have reverted to the primitive tattooing systems by inscribing of the social body through the cruelest measures, imposing the harshest words of power over the flesh and blood of millions of indebted humans to suck every last ounce of desire from their zombie lives. This is the outcome of our completed nihilism. Capital as a machine of death and consumption, feeding off the desires of the indebted. If capitalism is defined by social production that passes through axioms of abstract quantities, flows of money and labor that are the real relations of alliance and filiation, rather than codes. Codes have become private matters, searches for meaning. This split between production and reproduction constitutes a very particular affective relation as well, which Deleuze and Guattari summarize as, “the age of cynicism, accompanied by a strange piety. These two affects, cynicism and piety, correspond to the division of social production and reproduction. In the first, in the axioms of capital, we have a social order that reproduces itself without meaning or code. Axioms merely set up a relation between two quantities, a flow of labor and a flow of money. One does believe in, or justify, the rate at which labor is exchanged for money—it simply is. Cynicism is an affect attuned to the indifference of the axioms that produce and reproduce social life, the recognition that the flows of the market mean nothing, have no justification, than their brute effectivity. (AO)

As Nietzsche would say,

All the stupidity and the arbitrariness of the laws, all the pain of initiations, the whole perverse apparatus of repression and education, the red-hot irons, and the atrocious procedures have only this meaning: to breed man, to mark him in his flesh, to render him capable of alliance, to form him within the debtor-credit relation, which both sides turns out to be a matter of memory – a memory straining toward the future. (On the Genealogy of Morals, p. 190)

This sense of debt binding us to a system of mnemonics and cruelty, an organized and ritualistic memory system based on marking and pain – inscription of the collective socious as a system of obligation and guilt, debt and the endless deferral of payment into the future. The ancestors require sacrifice and payment, blood and guts. Alliances against this filiation must be formed, struggles against the dead, defensive gestures: the infinite deferral of debt beyond the vampirism of the dead. This whole triangular process of voice – inscription – eye becomes in our time the “spectacle of punishment”: “as primitive justice, territorial representation has foreseen everything” (p. 191).

Even while we are punished and inscribed, ritually sacrificed to the modern Moloch and his retinue of High Priests and Financiers, the Oligarchs of the World we discover that Capital no longer needs to produce visible commodities, no longer needs to produce useful goods for its wage slaves, it can now bypass us, bypass our needs, our desires, our dreams for its own infinite and digital accelerated world of pure circulation and profit. As Berardi attests,

In the sphere of the financial economy, the acceleration of financial circulation and valorization imply the elimination of the concrete usefulness of products (no matter if material or immaterial, industrial or semiotic). The process of realization of capital, namely the exchange of goods with money, was obviously slowing the pace of monetary accumulation. The virtual technology has created the possibility of skipping this slow passage through concrete meaningful useful goods. (A: 126)

Invisible, immaterial, the new financial economy runs at the speed of light in an absolute timeworld, where profit is based on the virtual circulation of abstract value (not even money, but algorithms, electronic impulses) that has been accelerated and sped up to the point of totally escaping the possibility of human understanding and— obviously—of political control.(A: 126)

Value does not emerge from a physical relationship between work and things, but rather from infinite self-replication of virtual exchanges of nothing with nothing, whose outcome is more money. Digital abstraction leads to the virtualization of the physical act of meeting, and the manipulation of things. These new levels of abstraction do not only concern the labour process, they tend to encompass every space of social life. Therefore, digitalization and financialization are transforming the very fabric of the social body, and inducing mutations in it. (A: 127)

Berardi tells us to look at the reality of debt, look at the awful effects of submission, impoverishment and exploitation that debt is provoking in the body of society. Debt is a weapon against social autonomy, a transformation of money into a blackmail. Young people are obliged to borrow money from the bank in order to pay for their studies, as the public system of education has been destroyed by the Neoliberal fanatics, and private school is costing more and more. As soon as they come out from the university they have to start paying back their debt, and they are obliged to accept any kind of precarious job, and to suffer any kind of blackmail. (A: 128)

For such creatures the future can only be bleak and full of misery and endless years of untold grief as they strive to pay their debt. Many forgo such a Sisyphean project and commit suicide. Others mentally and spiritual die inside and live out the remainder of their lives as zombies under this terrible debt system. In our time whole nations have been blackmailed into this system of debt as we ponder the EU. This same process has already happened to much of the Third World nations for years under a predatory capitalism well documented by Naomi Kline in The Shock Doctrine among other works of like caliber.

Commenting on this dark scenario Berardi says “Money, which was supposed to be the measure of value, has been turned into a tool for psychic and social subjugation. The metaphysical debt is linking money, language and guilt. Debt is guilt, and as guilt it is entering the domain of unconscious, and shapes language according to structures of power and submission.” (A: 128)

The notion that our age old systems of power and coercion have migrated into the digital age and brought about a new guilt culture to subdue and channel the desires of nations into the profit bins of a minority of Oligarchs seems ludicrous at first glance as if this were some nefarious planned and intentional affair. But is it? Is anyone or anything behind such a sinister system of slavery and control? Is this a conspiracy of madness against the human species? Berardi will liken this process not to some power behind the scenes, but rather to the inherent power of language itself and how we for two hundred years have obliterated the hold language had on the referent:

This process of de-referentialization of language—emancipation of the linguistic sign from the referent—which has been the mark of poetic and artistic experimentation with language during the twentieth century, shows an interesting similarity with the transformation in the relation between economy and monetary exchange.

On August 15, 1971, President Nixon announced dramatic changes in economic policy. Particularly he ended the Bretton Woods international monetary system. The Bretton Woods system, created at the end of World War II, involved fixed exchange rates with the US dollar as the key currency—but also a role for gold linked to the dollar at $35/ounce. The system began to falter in the ‘60s because of an excess of dollars flowing out of the US which foreign central banks had to absorb. All of this was ended unilaterally by Nixon’s decision. After a brief attempt to create a modified fixed exchange rate system, the world moved to flexible rates.

Breaking the Bretton Woods’s agreements, the American President declared that the dollar has no referent, and its value is decided by an act of language. This was the starting point of the long lasting process of financialization of the economy, based on the emancipation of the financial dynamic from any conventional standard and from any economic reality. The Neoliberal offensive started in that very moment of arbitrary assertion of the value of the dollar outside the conventional standard. The neoliberal school of the Chicago Boys said “money is creating reality” like the Symbolist poets had said: “words are creating reality”. (A: 128-130)

Words had lost touch with their referent, the natural world and environment within which we all live and have our habitus. The disappearance of the natural and the virtualization of language produced the effects we see in the world today. We are the product of a process that undermined the ancient metaphysical systems of the world that guided primitive, feudal and early modern societies. In our bid to overcome the religious and metaphysical systems that held us in their clutches we also lost the world, our world. We lost the natural in life and ourselves, lost touch with the signs that kept us anchored to the natural environment that our brain had been tied to for sex and survival from the beginnings of the human. We ourselves in our bid to transcend the animal and inhuman in ourselves became non-human. We have brought upon ourselves the semantic apocalypse we see all around us. This is the guilt we bare and the debt we will have to pay, not the tributary debt to those few dark controllers who seek to lord it over us.

It was Jean Baudrillard who wrote in the Symbolic Exchange and Death, where he announces that the economy has abandoned the old law of determination of value, and that the referent for linguistic and economic exchange was dissolved:

“The reality principle coincided with a determinate phase of the law of value. Today the entire system is fluctuating in indeterminacy, all of reality absorbed by the hyperreality of the code and of simulation. It is now a principle of simulation, and not of reality, that regulates social life. The finalities have disappeared; we are now engendered by models… The entire strategy of the system lies in this hyperreality of floating values. It is the same for money and theory as for the unconscious. Value rules according to an ungraspable order: the generation of models, the indefinite chaining of simulation.” (Baudrillard 1976)

We have become mere simulacra of our former selves, simulated creatures in a simulated world. Bound and ensnared in a world of debt, controlled by an algorithmic system of digital hypersystems we live out our lives under the guilt of a system we ourselves helped create. We have no one to blame but ourselves. We know this. We deny this. We seek solace in escape and fantasy worlds of mediatainment that even further suck dry our desires and channel our hopes and dreams into a fantasia of tomorrows that will never come.

For Deleuze & Guattari this primitive system of memory and pain will enter the stage of religion as a debt to be paid ending in the death of Christ as the payer of all debts; and, yet, it will not end there, for debt can never be repaid, so it forms the kernel of the modern State: “the new machine, and the new apparatus of repression” (AO: 192). This system of endless debt: “that finds itself taken into an immense machinery that renders the debt infinite and no longer forms anything but one and the same crushing fate: the aim now is to preclude pessimistically, once and for all, the prospect of discharge; the aim now is to make the glance recoil disconsolately from an iron impossibility. The Earth becomes a madhouse.” (AO: 192)

Berardi, Franco “Bifo”. And: Phenomenology of the End. Semiotext(e) (November 6, 2015) (A) (Page 126).
Toscano, Alberto. Alien Mediations: Critical Remarks on The Making of the Indebted Man. The New Reader #1, 2017

Truth or Delusion?

Posted on May 22, 2017 by Reid Mukai

By Robert J. Burrowes

One inevitable outcome of the phenomenal violence we all suffer as
children is that most of us live in a state of delusion throughout our
lives. This makes it extraordinarily difficult for accurate information,
including vital information about the endangered state of our world and
how to respond appropriately, to penetrate the typical human mind.

‘Phenomenal violence?’ you might ask. ‘All of us?’ you wonder. Yes,
although, tragically, most of this violence goes unrecognised because it
is not usually identified as such. For most people, it is a
straightforward task to identify the ‘visible’ violence that they have
suffered and, perhaps, still suffer. However, virtually no-one is able
to identify the profoundly more damaging impact of the ‘invisible’ and
‘utterly invisible’ violence that is inflicted on us mercilessly from
the day we are born.

So what is this ‘invisible’ and ‘utterly invisible’ violence?

‘Invisible’ violence is the ‘little things’ that adults do to children
every day, partly because they are just ‘too busy’. For example, when
adults do not allow time to listen to, and value, a child’s thoughts and
feelings, the child learns to not listen to themSelf thus destroying
their internal communication system. When adults do not let a child say
what they want (or ignore them when they do), the child develops
communication and behavioural dysfunctionalities as they keep trying to
meet their own needs (which, as a basic survival strategy, they are
genetically programmed to do).

When adults blame, condemn, insult, mock, embarrass, shame, humiliate,
taunt, goad, guilt-trip, deceive, lie to, bribe, blackmail, moralize
with and/or judge a child, they both undermine their sense of Self-worth
and teach them to blame, condemn, insult, mock, embarrass, shame,
humiliate, taunt, goad, guilt-trip, deceive, lie, bribe, blackmail,
moralize and/or judge.

The fundamental outcome of being bombarded throughout their childhood by
this ‘invisible’ violence is that the child is utterly overwhelmed by
feelings of fear, pain, anger and sadness (among many others). However,
parents, teachers, religious figures and other adults also actively
interfere with the expression of these feelings and the behavioural
responses that are naturally generated by them and it is this ‘utterly
invisible’ violence that explains why the dysfunctional behavioural
outcomes actually occur.

For example, by ignoring a child when they express their feelings, by
comforting, reassuring or distracting a child when they express their
feelings, by laughing at or ridiculing their feelings, by terrorizing a
child into not expressing their feelings (e.g. by screaming at them when
they cry or get angry), and/or by violently controlling a behaviour that
is generated by their feelings (e.g. by hitting them, restraining them
or locking them into a room), the child has no choice but to
unconsciously suppress their awareness of these feelings.

However, once a child has been terrorized into suppressing their
awareness of their feelings (rather than being allowed to have their
feelings and to act on them) the child has also unconsciously suppressed
their awareness of the reality that caused these feelings. In brief,
this means that the child now lives in a state of delusion. And because
this state was caused by terrorizing the child, the child is unable to
perceive the series of delusions in which they now live.

Moreover, unless the child (or, later, adult) consciously feels their
fear and terror, it will be extraordinarily difficult for them to
perceive anything beyond the delusions that they acquired during
childhood. This is simply because the various elements of the child’s
delusional state (the ‘values’, beliefs, attitudes, prejudices, biases)
were the ones approved by the key adults – parents, teachers, religious
figures – in the child’s life.

Needless to say, living in a delusional state has many outcomes that are
disastrous for the individual, for society and for nature because the
individual will now behave on the basis of their delusions rather than
in response to an accurate assessment of all available information
through appropriate sensory, emotional, intellectual and conscientious
scrutiny. For a full explanation of this process, see ‘Why Violence?‘ and ‘Fearless Psychology and Fearful Psychology: Principles and Practice‘.

In essence then, the typical human being lives in a delusional state and
this state is held in place by enormous, but unconscious, terror: the
unfelt and hence unreleased childhood terror of being endlessly
threatened and punished (for not complying with parental or other adult
‘authority’ throughout childhood).

And if you have ever tried to persuade someone, by argument of an
intellectual nature, that a belief they hold is inaccurate and wondered
why you couldn’t get anywhere, it is because you have run into their
unconscious terror. And sheer terror beats the best argument in the
world ‘hands down’.

So when you listen to people like Donald Trump and Marine Le Pen, or
ponder those politicians and military generals who conduct endless wars,
or watch those people on the street protesting against Muslims and
refugees, or watch police beating up another indigenous or black person,
or hear someone else deny the climate science, remember that you are
witness to a person or people living in a terrified and delusional state
that prevents them from perceiving and responding intelligently to
reality. And that, in the case of political and corporate leaders, they
only have the support to do what they do because a great many other
delusional individuals (including voters and employees) enable them.

Equally importantly, however, it is also necessary to recognise that a
delusional state afflicts many of those we like to regard as ‘on our
side’. It is just that their delusions work differently, perhaps, for
example, by making them believe that only token ‘make it up as you go
along’ responses (rather than comprehensive strategies) are necessary if
we are to work our way out of the multifaceted crisis in which human
society now finds itself. This is why many ‘leaders’ of liberation
struggles as well as activist movements concerned with ending war(s) and
the climate catastrophe, for example, are so unable to articulate
appropriately visionary and functional strategies. But the problem
afflicts many other ‘progressive’ social movements as well, which limp
along making only occasional or marginal impact, if they have any impact
at all.

So what are we to do? Well, the most important thing you can do is to
never consciously participate in a delusion, whether your own or that of
anyone else. I say ‘consciously’ of course because unless you identify
the delusion, you will not be able to avoid participating in it. And
there are probably few humans in history who have avoided all of the
delusions their culture threw at them. If they did, they were probably
outcast or killed. Christ, Gandhi and King are reasonably good examples
of people in this latter category. But, historically speaking, many
activists have been killed for refusing to participate in elite-promoted
delusions. And many others have been marginalised, one way or another,
depending on the culture.

The value of not participating in a delusion, whether someone’s personal
delusion or a widespread social one, arises from the impact you have on
those around you: some of these people will have the courage to reflect
on your behaviour and reconsider their own.

If you believe you are relatively free of delusion and are committed to
taking serious steps to tackle one or more aspects of our multifaceted
global crisis, then you are welcome to consider making ‘My Promise to
Children‘, and to consider participating in ‘The Flame Tree Project to Save Life on
Earth‘, signing the online pledge of ‘The People’s Charter to Create a Nonviolent World‘
and/or considering using the strategic framework on one or the other of these two websites for your campaign or liberation struggle: Nonviolent Campaign Strategy
and Nonviolent Defense/Liberation Strategy.

Living the truth on a daily basis is a tough road. And it will never
come without cost. But living in the comfort of delusion, rather than
taking action, is the path of cowards.

Biodata: Robert J. Burrowes has a lifetime commitment to understanding and ending human violence. He has done extensive research since 1966 in an effort to understand why human beings are violent and has been a nonviolent activist since 1981. He is the author of ‘Why Violence?‘ His email address is flametree@riseup.net and his website is at http://robertjburrowes.wordpress.com

—
Robert J. Burrowes
P.O. Box 68
Daylesford
Victoria 3460
Australia
Email: flametree@riseup.net

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

The Price of Resistance

Posted on May 21, 2017 by Reid Mukai

Statues at the Museum of Myths and Traditions. (León)

By Chris Hedges

Source: OpEdNews.com

In the conflicts I covered as a reporter in Latin America, Africa, the Middle East and the Balkans, I encountered singular individuals of varying creeds, religions, races and nationalities who majestically rose up to defy the oppressor on behalf of the oppressed. Some of them are dead. Some of them are forgotten. Most of them are unknown.

These individuals, despite their vast cultural differences, had common traits–a profound commitment to the truth, incorruptibility, courage, a distrust of power, a hatred of violence and a deep empathy that was extended to people who were different from them, even to people defined by the dominant culture as the enemy. They are the most remarkable men and women I met in my 20 years as a foreign correspondent. And to this day I set my life by the standards they set.

You have heard of some, such as Vaclav Havel, whom I and other foreign reporters met most evenings, during the 1989 Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia, in the Magic Lantern Theatre in Prague. Others, no less great, you probably do not know, such as the Jesuit priest Ignacio Ellacuria, who was assassinated in El Salvador in 1989. And then there are those “ordinary” people, although, as the writer V.S. Pritchett said, no people are ordinary, who risked their lives in wartime to shelter and protect those of an opposing religion or ethnicity being persecuted and hunted. And to some of these “ordinary” people I owe my own life.

To resist radical evil is to endure a life that by the standards of the wider society is a failure. It is to defy injustice at the cost of your career, your reputation, your financial solvency and at times your life. It is to be a lifelong heretic. And, perhaps this is the most important point, it is to accept that the dominant culture, even the liberal elites, will push you to the margins and attempt to discredit not only what you do, but your character. When I returned to the newsroom at The New York Times after being booed off a commencement stage in 2003 for denouncing the invasion of Iraq and being publicly reprimanded by the paper for my stance against the war, reporters and editors I had known and worked with for 15 years lowered their heads or turned away when I was nearby. They did not want to be contaminated by the same career-killing contagion.

Ruling institutions–the state, the press, the church, the courts, academia–mouth the language of morality, but they serve the structures of power, no matter how venal, which provide them with money, status and authority. In times of national distress–one has only to look at Nazi Germany–all of these institutions, including the academy, are complicit through their silence or their active collaboration with radical evil. And our own institutions, which have surrendered to corporate power and the utopian ideology of neoliberalism, are no different. The lonely individuals who defy tyrannical power within these institutions, as we saw with the thousands of academics who were fired from their jobs and blacklisted during the McCarthy era, are purged and turned into pariahs.

All institutions, including the church, Paul Tillich once wrote, are inherently demonic. And a life dedicated to resistance has to accept that a relationship with any institution is often temporary, because sooner or later that institution is going to demand acts of silence or obedience your conscience will not allow you to make. To be a rebel is to reject what it means to succeed in a capitalist, consumer culture, especially the idea that we should always come first.

The theologian James H. Cone in his book “The Cross and the Lynching Tree” writes that for oppressed blacks the cross was a “paradoxical religious symbol because it inverts the world’s value system with the news that hope comes by way of defeat, that suffering and death do not have the last word, that the last shall be first and the first last.”

Cone continues: “That God could ‘make a way out of no way’ in Jesus’ cross was truly absurd to the intellect, yet profoundly real in the souls of black folk. Enslaved blacks who first heard the gospel message seized on the power of the cross. Christ crucified manifested God’s loving and liberating presence in the contradictions of black life–that transcendent presence in the lives of black Christians that empowered them to believe that ultimately, in God’s eschatological future, they would not be defeated by the ‘troubles of this world,’ no matter how great and painful their suffering. Believing this paradox, this absurd claim of faith, was only possible in humility and repentance. There was no place for the proud and the mighty, for people who think that God called them to rule over others. The cross was God’s critique of power–white power–with powerless love, snatching victory out of defeat.”

Reinhold Niebuhr labeled this capacity to defy the forces of repression “a sublime madness in the soul.” Niebuhr wrote that “nothing but madness will do battle with malignant power and ‘spiritual wickedness in high places.’ ” This sublime madness, as Niebuhr understood, is dangerous, but it is vital. Without it, “truth is obscured.” And Niebuhr also knew that traditional liberalism was a useless force in moments of extremity. Liberalism, Niebuhr said, “lacks the spirit of enthusiasm, not to say fanaticism, which is so necessary to move the world out of its beaten tracks. It is too intellectual and too little emotional to be an efficient force in history.”

The prophets in the Hebrew Bible had this sublime madness. The words of the Hebrew prophets, as Abraham Heschel wrote, were “a scream in the night. While the world is at ease and asleep, the prophet feels the blast from heaven.” The prophet, because he saw and faced an unpleasant reality, was, as Heschel wrote, “compelled to proclaim the very opposite of what his heart expected.”

This sublime madness is the essential quality for a life of resistance. It is the acceptance that when you stand with the oppressed you get treated like the oppressed. It is the acceptance that, although empirically all that we struggled to achieve during our lifetime may be worse, our struggle validates itself.

Daniel Berrigan told me that faith is the belief that the good draws to it the good. The Buddhists call this karma. But he said for us as Christians we did not know where it went. We trusted that it went somewhere. But we did not know where. We are called to do the good, or at least the good so far as we can determinate it, and then let it go.

As Hannah Arendt wrote in “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” the only morally reliable people are not those who say “this is wrong” or “this should not be done,” but those who say “I can’t.” They know that as Immanuel Kant wrote: “If justice perishes, human life on earth has lost its meaning.” And this means that, like Socrates, we must come to a place where it is better to suffer wrong than to do wrong. We must at once see and act, and given what it means to see, this will require the surmounting of despair, not by reason, but by faith.

I saw in the conflicts I covered the power of this faith, which lies outside any religious or philosophical creed. This faith is what Havel called in his great essay “The Power of the Powerless” living in truth. Living in truth exposes the corruption, lies and deceit of the state. It is a refusal to be a part of the charade.

“You do not become a ‘dissident’ just because you decide one day to take up this most unusual career,” Havel wrote. “You are thrown into it by your personal sense of responsibility, combined with a complex set of external circumstances. You are cast out of the existing structures and placed in a position of conflict with them. It begins as an attempt to do your work well, and ends with being branded an enemy of society. … The dissident does not operate in the realm of genuine power at all. He is not seeking power. He has no desire for office and does not gather votes. He does not attempt to charm the public. He offers nothing and promises nothing. He can offer, if anything, only his own skin–and he offers it solely because he has no other way of affirming the truth he stands for. His actions simply articulate his dignity as a citizen, regardless of the cost.”

The long, long road of sacrifice and suffering that led to the collapse of the communist regimes stretched back decades. Those who made change possible were those who had discarded all notions of the practical. They did not try to reform the Communist Party. They did not attempt to work within the system. They did not even know what, if anything, their tiny protests, ignored by the state-controlled media, would accomplish. But through it all they held fast to moral imperatives. They did so because these values were right and just. They expected no reward for their virtue; indeed they got none. They were marginalized and persecuted. And yet these poets, playwrights, actors, singers and writers finally triumphed over state and military power. They drew the good to the good. They triumphed because, however cowed and broken the masses around them appeared, their message of defiance did not go unheard. It did not go unseen. The steady drumbeat of rebellion constantly exposed the dead hand of authority and the rot of the state.

I stood with hundreds of thousands of rebellious Czechoslovakians in 1989 on a cold winter night in Prague’s Wenceslas Square as the singer Marta Kubisova approached the balcony of the Melantrich building. Kubisova had been banished from the airwaves in 1968 after the Soviet invasion for her anthem of defiance “Prayer for Marta.” Her entire catalog, including more than 200 singles, had been confiscated and destroyed by the state. She had disappeared from public view. Her voice that night suddenly flooded the square. Pressing around me were throngs of students, most of whom had not been born when she vanished. They began to sing the words of the anthem. There were tears running down their faces. It was then that I understood the power of rebellion. It was then that I knew that no act of rebellion, however futile it appears in the moment, is wasted. It was then that I knew that the communist regime was finished.

“The people will once again decide their own fate,” the crowd sang in unison with Kubisova. [Editor’s note: To see YouTube photographs of the 1989 revolution and hear Kubisova sing the song in a studio recording, click here.]

The walls of Prague were covered that chilly winter with posters depicting Jan Palach. Palach, a university student, set himself on fire in Wenceslas Square on Jan. 16, 1969, in the middle of the day to protest the crushing of the country’s democracy movement. He died of his burns three days later. The state swiftly attempted to erase his act from national memory. There was no mention of it on state media. A funeral march by university students was broken up by police. Palach’s gravesite, which became a shrine, saw the communist authorities exhume his body, cremate his remains and ship them to his mother with the provision that his ashes could not be placed in a cemetery. But it did not work. His defiance remained a rallying cry. His sacrifice spurred the students in the winter of 1989 to act. Prague’s Red Army Square, shortly after I left for Bucharest to cover the uprising in Romania, was renamed Palach Square. Ten thousand people went to the dedication.

We, like those who opposed the long night of communism, no longer have any mechanisms within the formal structures of power that will protect or advance our rights. We too have undergone a coup d’e’tat carried out not by the stone-faced leaders of a monolithic Communist Party but by the corporate state.

We may feel, in the face of the ruthless corporate destruction of our nation, our culture and our ecosystem, powerless and weak. But we are not. We have a power that terrifies the corporate state. Any act of rebellion, no matter how few people show up or how heavily it is censored, chips away at corporate power. Any act of rebellion keeps alive the embers for larger movements that follow us. It passes on another narrative. It will, as the state consumes itself, attract wider and wider numbers. Perhaps this will not happen in our lifetimes. But if we persist, we will keep this possibility alive. If we do not, it will die.

Dr. Rieux in Albert Camus’ novel “The Plague” is not driven by ideology. He is driven by empathy, the duty to minister to suffering, no matter the cost. Empathy, or what the Russian novelist Vasily Grossman called “simple human kindness,” becomes in all despotisms a subversive act. To act on this empathy–the empathy for human beings locked in cages less than an hour from us [here in Princeton], the empathy for undocumented mothers and fathers being torn from their children on the streets of our cities, the empathy for Muslims who are demonized and banned from our shores, fleeing the wars we created, the empathy for poor people of color gunned down by police in our streets, the empathy for girls and women trafficked into prostitution, the empathy for all those who suffer at the hands of a state intent on militarization and imposing a harsh cruelty on the vulnerable, the empathy for the earth that gives us life and that is being contaminated and pillaged for profit–becomes political and even dangerous.

Evil is real. But so is love. And in war–especially when the heavy shells landed on crowds in Sarajevo, sights so gruesome that to this day I cannot eat a piece of meat–you could feel, as frantic family members desperately sought out loved ones among the wounded and dead, the concentric circles of death and love, death and love, like rings from the blast of a cosmic furnace.

Flannery O’Connor recognized that a life of faith is a life of confrontation: “St. Cyril of Jerusalem, in instructing catechumens, wrote: ‘The dragon sits by the side of the road, watching those who pass. Beware lest he devour you. We go to the Father of Souls, but it is necessary to pass by the dragon.’ No matter what form the dragon may take, it is of this mysterious passage past him, or into his jaws, that stories of any depth will always be concerned to tell, and this being the case, it requires considerable courage at any time, in any country, not to turn away from the storyteller.”

Accept sorrow–for who cannot be profoundly sorrowful at the state of our nation, the world and our ecosystem–but know that in resistance there is a balm that leads to wisdom and, if not joy, a strange, transcendent happiness. Know that if we resist we keep hope alive.

“My faith has been tempered in Hell,” wrote Vasily Grossman in his masterpiece “Life and Fate.” “My faith has emerged from the flames of the crematoria, from the concrete of the gas chamber. I have seen that it is not man who is impotent in the struggle against evil, but the power of evil that is impotent in the struggle against man. The powerlessness of kindness, of senseless kindness, is the secret of its immortality. It can never be conquered. The more stupid, the more senseless, the more helpless it may seem, the vaster it is. Evil is impotent before it. The prophets, religious leaders, reformers, social and political leaders are impotent before it. This dumb, blind love is man’s meaning. Human history is not the battle of good struggling to overcome evil. It is a battle fought by a great evil struggling to crush a small kernel of human kindness. But if what is human in human beings has not been destroyed even now, then evil will never conquer.”

10 Life Lessons I Learned as a Psychiatric Nurse – and Patient

Posted on May 14, 2017 by Reid Mukai

By Cortland Pfeffer

Source: Wake Up World

Over the past 25 years, I have been immersed in the mental health and addiction system as a patient, later as staff, as a Registered Nurse (RN), and eventually as a supervisor. My time in the mental health system officially began at age 17 when I was first hospitalized in a psychiatric unit. This preceded further hospitalizations, a number of treatment episodes for alcoholism/addiction, along with multiple stints of incarceration in jails. Eventually, through this experience, I was able to embrace recovery and ultimately gain employment at some of these same facilities in which I was treated.

Often I am asked about how I went from being a psychiatric patient and homeless drug addict to being a registered nurse and a supervisor at some of these facilities. While there is no magical answer to that question, there certainly have been some valuable life lessons learned along the way. These are 10 of the life lessons I have learned over time, which allowed me to continue on this journey.

1. If you are naturally different than the majority, you will be labeled.

It is our nature to want to try to fit in with the tribe. It can be lonely when you feel like you are different from other people. When you are not like the majority, others will notice this and try to get you to fit in to this box of normality. But defining “normal” is an impossible task. It is defined as conforming to a standard. However, this standard changes with different cultures and time periods. What was once normal, is now insane. Today we clearly live in an insane society – one in which we favor materialism over that of our fellow man; one in which there is more public uproar over a sporting event than the humanitarian crisis in Aleppo. To be “normal” in this type of society would actually make one insane. Yet, when you don’t follow the mold of a brainwashed culture you get labeled as different.

This can be quite destructive as Erich Fromm points out in his 1941 book “Escape from Freedom” as he highlights how people are drawn to authority as it is safer to go along with the pack than to think independently.

We go along with the societal norms for harmony, acceptance, and belonging – which are also innate human desires. Each human has a desire to feel a sense of community and purpose. However, when we go along with the group – even when it is violates our personal beliefs just for acceptance – it causes us to believe that something is wrong with us for thinking differently.

Solomon Asch tested human’s conformity in an experiment in 1951. Over the 12 critical trials approximately 75% of participants conformed at least once; and 25% of participants never conformed. In the control condition, the participants were asked to write down the correct match between the lines without sharing their answers with the group. The results showed that the participants were very accurate, giving the correct answers 98-percent of the time. This is one of many studies that show most people will go along with a crowd, even if it is not what they believe. So what happens if the tribe has decided that there is something “wrong” with you? Science will show that most of us will go along with that.

However this is a mistake. Take a look at the bell curve, which is used to show “normality distribution.” The bell curve is used in many areas of life and can be used here. In many bell curves, you see that 95-percent are within two deviations from the mean, or average. On the very end you will always see 5-percent of people. They are at the extreme end and do not fall inside the box of “normal.” It doesn’t make you bad to be outside the norm, and it also doesn’t make you crazy or sick. In fact, I would argue that those on the extreme ends are the ones that have changed the world.

For example, Mahatma Gandhi did not fit inside that box. The “norm” of his time was to accept the British imperialism in his home country of India. He saw the injustices and spent his life trying to free his people from oppression. He was imprisoned and survived many assassination attempts (although one finally killed him). Likewise, Martin Luther King Jr. also saw the injustices of African-Americans were facing in the United States and stood up to the oppression. They both went against the norms, were labeled, judged, and eventually lost their lives for speaking against the status quo. They both ended up dead, but years later we realized they were speaking the truth against an insane society.

Other people’s labels of you are just that — other people’s labels. It is out of fear and ignorance. Do not adapt to other people’s expectations. The world needs people of all sorts. We need diversity.

If you closely take a look at the criteria for someone who is gifted versus someone who has ADHD, Bipolar, Aspergers, and many other mental health diagnosis you will see that they are almost identical. So whether you are called bipolar or gifted doesn’t depend on you, but rather on the so-called expert assessing your life. It is all about perception and none of it matters. All that matters is that you are your most authentic and true version of yourself.

2. We as a society create mental health and addiction.

There have been numerous studies that have exposed the fact that trauma as a child leads to neural chemistry changes in your brain. Childhood trauma has been called the smoking of mental health. The same way smoking can cause or invoke many physical diseases, childhood trauma and maltreatment does the equivalent for mental health and addiction.

There are higher relapse rates for hypertension and heart disease than there are for addiction and mental health. However, we often treat the addict like they are a bad person or making bad choices. So we are taking someone who has been traumatized and often did not receive treatment for their trauma and we punish them by locking them up. This creates more shame, exasperating the trauma and causing the cycle to repeat itself. Additionally, the patient is not going to be readily willing to seek help in the first place due to the aforementioned shame.

What if we had a cancer drug that works 10-percent of the time and made people sicker? We would throw the drug away! However if a treatment center has a 10-percent success rate for addiction or mental health they’re considered successful. What other business could be 10-percent successful and would continue to exist?

The addiction and mental health industry continue to grow, despite this complete lack of success. There are extremely high rates of recidivism in these fields. Speaking from personal experience, more often than not the patients get sicker while in treatment.

The staff then blames this lack of success on the patient. They point fingers and say that the patient “was not ready” or that they have “poor insight.” The site that failed to provide adequate treatment blames the victim and takes no responsibility for their failure.

This system only continues because too many people are making too much money off keeping people sick. The staff tends to be undertrained, under-qualified, and lack any meaningful or diverse life experience. They are trained to believe that their patients are bad people that are making bad choices instead of a sick person who has been traumatized. This obviously results in receiving much different treatment.

Now there are some absolutely wonderful people in this field. That is a fact. However, in general there is an overall lack of humanity and compassion in the way this population has been treated. We are the most incarcerating society in the history of mankind and most of these prisoners are there for harmless drug offenses. Due to this influx of incarcerations, we have created for-profit prisons which rely on mass incarcerations for profit. They set up contracts with governments to guarantee high occupancy rates and spend millions of dollars lobbying to congress to make tougher prison laws to ensure they stay profitable. In turn, members of congress then hold stock in these private prisons – meaning that the people that make the laws are making money off the laws they sign into action.

We are locking up people who have a disease to profit the rich. Punishment does not work for this disease – it never has and it never will. If it did work, we would not have a this astronomical recidivism rate in jails for drug offenses.

3. Be true to who you are.

We run from who we truly are because we are told to by our environment. We are told that it is not okay to be our true self from the time we are young and we begin to believe it to be true. We spend our whole lives living for other people and living based on other people’s expectations. We eventually lose ourselves and create a false persona (or false self) – This is what I refer to as “The Mask”.

The longer we wear the mask, the more we forget who we are underneath. We start to think that we are our masks – the character that we present to the world for acceptance. As this continues, we grow to dislike our mask because it is not our true self. This leads to depression, self-hate, or even suicidal ideation. We think we hate ourselves, but in reality we hate this false self that we have created. When we go against our own nature, it will always create depression.

If you have forgotten who you are, it’s easy to remember. You know the truth by how you feel. If you want to remember what that feeling is like, simply go do something that is pure, genuine, and has good intentions and see how that feels. If you can do something for somebody that can never repay you, you will remember this feeling – that is the feeling you are seeking.

Some of us may not even know who we really are because we’ve been wearing this mask for so long. In that case you get to explore and try new things. You get to discover who you truly are and what makes your soul feel alive. This can be viewed as an obstacle or an opportunity. You can now try everything – writing, dancing, singing, etc. – try anything you desire and you will find your true self in the process.

You will find out who you were, before the world told you who you were supposed to be.

This concept can be frightening, especially if we have become too accustomed to the mask. Some will do anything and everything to put the mask back on for safety, security, and possibly they are benefiting from pretending to be their false self. Although, in the long run it will create more inner dissent.

The world needs you to be you. Your true self fits into the world exactly how it should. When we go against this, we are robbing humanity of the gifts our true selves possess. Albert Einstein said, “great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds.”

It can be scary to finally be yourself. You will likely start feeling rejected and you will lose some people. But those are the people that you want to lose. You will also gain people in your lives – the ones that love the true you and not the false you.

This is a change that is painful and it causes most people to go back into their false self (ore put their mask back on). However, this is an essential struggle that you will encounter on your way. It will turn your world upside down and your relationships will change. But as the old saying goes, “it is better to be hated for who you are than to be loved for who you are not.”

You are only doing a smidgen of what you are capable of doing by being your true self. You have no idea what you’re capable of until you embrace who you are and you will be blown away by the results.

4. Fear destroys us; and makes others money.

When we are not ourselves, then our lives are being lived and based on fear. When we are always afraid, it is from remembering pain or trauma. Just like any animal, when we are afraid we will hide. We live in a society in which many people benefit of us being afraid.

We are evolutionarily programmed to remember the negative experiences at a much higher rate, more clearly and more intensely, than positive experiences.

Many businesses profit off of our fear. The news gets higher ratings when they show fights, violence, and all the things that are wrong with the world. So that is what they show and that is what we see. They are not showing a true representation of the world, but a sample size that spreads fear and increases ratings. This is paid for by commercial advertisements that spend millions of dollars by spreading fear into your mind in an effort to buy their product. They will tell you might get bitten by a snake, so you need to buy a fence to keep the snakes out. They tell you to buy material items to fit into society or you will be left out and not included. When the fear does not go away, we continue to consume more. And it never goes away until we realize that we are being played.

“If tomorrow, women woke up and decided they really liked their bodies, just think how many industries would go out of business?” – Dr. Gail Dines

Our insane society has created these masks and then they profit off these masks they created. Then you are labeled as insane if you don’t want to wear your mask anymore. Because when we take off our masks, they lose business.

What goes into your brain will affect your subconscious mind. If you feed it with fear, it will seek fear. If you feed it with love, it will find love. The opposite of living in fear is living with love. Love is the antidote to fear.

When you live with love, you will be faced resistance from those still guided by fear. But remember, in the end, throughout history, every single time love always wins. There may be a time it seems this is not true. But it becomes a crucial point in your recovery when you decide to choose love over fear if you are going to succeed. Every person going through a true recovery will come to this stage and it is scary, it is lonely, and it is supposed to be. It takes immense strength to love when everything inside of you tells you to run away. Once you make it through this stage, you have reached a turning point and the mask begins to crumble.

5. Love, acceptance, and truly listening is far more powerful than any advice you can ever give someone.

We have all seen someone struggling and we want to fix it. Usually we want to fix it the way we would fix it for ourselves if we were in the same struggle. We tend to go in and tell people how to change. Although well-intentioned, when we do this, we begin to lose them. Everyone is different, and every recovery is different. Every mask is unique, and therefore every mask removal must be unique.

Relationships are the single most important thing to someone going through a recovery. You can have the cure for them, but if they do not trust you, they will not hear it. They do not care how much you know, until they know how much you care.

Accepting people for who they are and where they are at in their life will go further than any piece of advice you can ever give them. Giving someone love and a hug when everybody else is kicking them is what I call “psychological life support.”

I had two people that did this for me and they saved my life. Not those who criticized me and tried to force me into treatment. It was those who offered unconditional love and acceptance who kept me alive. Unconditional, meaning without conditions/judgments, but just loving them and accepting them in their entirety with no desire to change or point out their flaws. When I was ready to change, I went to the same people because I had gained their trust.

Relationships come first. If you cannot build a relationship, a trusting relationship, then you will only do damage. I believe many staff in this field are well-intentioned, however they make these problems much worse and the patients get much sicker simply because there is a lack of acceptance, love, and an overabundance of advice giving and fixing.

Trust me, if there was an easy-fix, the person would have already done so. In rushing to fix a person, you are sending the message that they are incompetent and could not think of this on their own. A broken person doesn’t need to be fixed, they need to be loved, then they are able to heal themselves.

When I say listening, I mean being present completely with that person. This means not checking your phone, not looking at the clock, and not even thinking about anything else. This is referred to as active listening. The ten people I think are the best in this field all do this. They make the person they are with feel like they are the most important person on earth in that moment. When the person can feel heard, the magic begins.

6. Embrace your struggles, they are gifts.

When I see a patient walking around a treatment center saying “everything is fine,” “everything is ok,” or “I’m doing great,” this becomes a giant red flag. You should be struggling. Muscles do not grow without struggle and the same goes for our soul.

Since we were young, we were trained to believe that admitting to a struggle is a sign of weakness, but in fact it is a great strength. We are all going through a struggle. We should be working on the thing that is the most difficult for us for optimum growth. The thing that you are most scared to do is probably the thing that is most essential to your recovery.

If you are in pain, if you are crying, if you are scared, then you are growing. If you are questioning why you are there, or why you are going through this, or questioning your own sanity, then you are growing. If you are angry, if you are tense, if you are isolating, then you are growing.

If there is no struggle, there is no growth. If there is no growth, there is no recovery.

Everything in my life in which I thought would be my demise, ended up being the very best things in the long run. We see a small portion of the big picture and act like that’s the reality, when it’s not. We must trust the process and trust in the bigger picture. Without the illusion, there would be no enlightenment.

There will come a time that you will think this is not worth it and feel like giving up. This means you are getting close to breaking through. We usually give up right before the miracle happens.

There is not one magical moment where you reach some mountaintop. It usually takes two steps forward, followed by one step back. It is a continuous, non-linear process. It is like a newborn baby deer trying to learn to walk. Their feet are wobbly and they fall down often. Falling down is not the issue, it is the learning process that makes you stronger and not having shame about the fall. It is about being around people that do not judge the fall.

The only way through the pain you have is to deal with it. There are many things we have hidden inside ourselves through the years because of fear and using the mask. Sometimes it may be for years, or decades, but all things eventually rise to the surface and all your pain is revealed. But that is the only way that it can be healed is for it to come to the surface. It cannot be healed when it is buried.

Let the storm come. After the storm comes the rainbow.

“Life isn’t about waiting for the storm to pass; it’s learning to dance in the rain.” – Vivian Greene

7. Our subconscious is what drives us.

We have two parts of our mind – the conscious and the subconscious. The conscious is all of which we are aware. The subconscious is the part that we are not aware, but all the millions of things we process daily and store away.

Our brain cannot tell if what is in our subconscious is true or not. It takes everything in as fact. It is like a hard drive that receives commands and stores everything as fact. It is built by other people and society – parents, siblings, teachers, television, pop culture, advertisements, etc. If we grow up being told that we are “bad,” our subconscious processes it to be true.

Everything is a perception and not reality. However, as different things start to play out in our conscious mind, then the subconscious files come to the surface to back it up as “evidence.” This creates stronger files in our subconscious mind. These files in our subconscious mind are what drives us; not what we are consciously aware.

As young children and even as adolescents, our brains are flooded with gray matter. This is the part of our brain that can be molded and create the person we are to become. This is what shapes the subconscious mind which will determine what drives us for a lifetime. If someone is told they are bad, lazy, incompetent, then they will be driven by this. If someone deals with pain, torture, trauma, and abandonment, they will be drive by this as well.

The good news is we can change the subconscious mind by implanting new messages. It is flexible, but it takes time, practice and patience.

Additionally, some of us will be more affected than others by these messages. Some people are naturally more sensitive, more prone to trauma, and more prone to take things too personally.

We are all born with an innate temperament that lasts our entire lives. That would be like if a couple people were eating a pizza. One person takes a bite and it tastes lukewarm to them; but the other person burns their mouth and complains as to how hot it is. The others would not believe it to be true. However when it comes to emotions, we can’t see anything, the scars or burns are invisible. So we are told that it is not real and our emotions are crazy, in which we believe to be true. This only further pushes our true selves down and creates more negative self-talk which creates files in the subconscious.

This leads to the most sensitive, warm, kind people in our society being invalidated and told they are “babies” for feeling and caring more than most. We tell them that they are not right when inside they are going through a trauma.

But if a young boy acts out in anger instead of crying, that is more acceptable in our society. That is one form of a mask that is created and is prevalent among young men. Then with this mask, and all masks, comes depression from not being your true self from going against nature.

That’s the inner voice, it is the subconscious. It is strong but it may not even be true. The only way to combat this is to start telling yourself positive things (affirmations), surround yourself with positivity, changing your perceptions of the world (cognitive behavioral therapy), focus on the positive things in life (gratitude). This starts to build more positive files in your subconscious which drives you out of despair and into a positive direction.

We all are born pure, and with nothing but love in our hearts. This is often taken from some of us by a combination of temperament, environment, society, and trauma. We eventually believe that we are not good at our core. But we are. We can change our subconscious by what goes into our brain daily. This takes persistence and daily practice, and it is hard when we are used to thinking negatively about ourselves. However, this out of everything is probably the key to sustained long-term recovery- dealing with that inner voice and changing our thoughts. It will seem foreign at first to say “I’m a good person.” If you are going to make it, you have to start doing on a daily basis. You can replace those files just like your body replaces every cell in the body every seven years. Soon those old files will be gone and the new positive files will be your subconscious.

8. Who you surround yourself with is one of the most important decisions you will make.

I have heard many wise people say that we are the average of the five people we spend the most time with. As I said above, that directly affects our subconscious and what we think of ourselves.

I remember years ago my oldest daughter enrolled in a private school. Everyone in the school was Catholic and she came home and believed in her inner core that the entire world was Catholic. She cried about it at night that she was different because she did not go up to get the fake bread at their ceremonies. Similarly, if you are around five people that smoke pot and you do not smoke pot, then you are the weirdo for not smoking pot. However, if you are with five people that do not smoke pot and you do, then you are considered strange for smoking pot.

At the end of the day, if you are around negativity — eg. those who consider you strange or different — it will eventually influence you.

Now some negativity can be good if you’re an overly positive person and turn a blind eye to all negativity because that is also unrealistic and can actually benefit the person. Also, being angry can help mobilize and motivate you to change. People who are totally happy and content at all times are never the ones that change the world – see Martin Luther King Jr. and Gandhi. It is those that are healthy discontents that create change.

On the flip side, if you only are surrounded by negativity it will suck the life out of you. Likewise if you are around a bunch of people who believe that you are a bad person, be that your family, friends, or relatives, then that’s going to creep right back into your subconscious and you creep right back into old patterns. Soon you believe that pattern as real.

You cannot do this alone. It took many others to help us put the mask on, and it will take others to help remove the mask as well. I came across five amazing people that helped change my life and save it.

Part of recovering is making the effort to be true to yourself. Once you can do this, you will find yourself in others. You start to see that all of life is a synchronicity. You will suddenly be around people who can help you and you have to be willing to accept help and make yourself vulnerable. If you cannot expose yourself and be vulnerable to these good people, then you will fall.

Vulnerability allows others to lift the mask.

You have to start all over sometimes; that may even mean leaving your family and lifelong friends. It is terrifying, but you will find new people that embrace your true self, whereas your friends and family have only got to know your mask and are not ready for your true self. You’ll find that people who you thought were close friends really were not; and people who you thought were not your friends actually were. You find out everybody’s true character when you go through this. It’s a gift in that way as well. Someone you may not have associated with five years ago, you’ll love them when you are your true self. This just means that the transformation is happening.

9. You must learn to truly love yourself or you will not make it.

I wrote earlier about being your true self and that is completely different from loving your true self. There is a reason we wear these masks and have these false selves. It is because we think that at our core, we are not OK. Then we start to be ourselves, but also seek to make changes. We have to 100-percent, truly, genuinely love our true self and embrace it or we will eventually slip back on our masks.

This is the often overlooked Steps Six and Seven of the 12-Steps. We are removing the parts of ourselves that are not true and keeping those that are. However, we get confused at this point because we feel that part of ourselves is flawed.

But, that is impossible! Every single person is perfect at their core. You do not have any flaws. That is a lie created by society. Every person is perfect and once you find your true self you will see this to be true.

Which is why, when you are finally being yourself you are likely going to be mocked, ridiculed, and teased. It begins to seem much easier to revert back to old ways (the mask). It is hard when you have run your whole life and been afraid. Then you start to be yourself and people start teasing you or pushing you away. You must realize that this has nothing to do with you and has everything to do with them. If somebody loves you that usually has more to do with them than you; and if somebody hates you that has more to do with them than you.

I remember when I had to have a psychological test done, I had to have my four closest people fill out a form and I figured it would all be the same answers that they gave. I got four completely different forms with four completely different sets of answers. Others love us based on their perception of us or they hate us based on their perception of us, none of this is reality – but it is reality to them.

What matters is what we think of ourselves. If we love ourselves, we will glow and other people will be drawn to us and some will be drawn away from us.

“The ego says, ‘Once everything falls into place, I’ll find peace.’ The spirit says, ‘Find your peace, and then everything will fall into place.’” – Marianne Williamson

10. Whatever you do, if you do it with love in your heart as your intention, you cannot go wrong.

The world is full of opinions. Everyone has the answers. You can’t do this, or you shouldn’t do that. People can show you evidence about why they are right and why you are wrong. Everyone will tell you how to handle your recovery and how to handle every situation in life. When we are listening to other people instead of our true selves, we are going against our own truth and against our own nature.

There is no right and wrong. We used to think smoking was okay for you and doctors advertised it. We used to think the world was flat. We used to think Columbus discovered America. There is no truth, there is only perception. You must do what your true inner self believes. Your mask is unique so your mask’s removal is going to be unique. The one thing that is common for all mask removals is connection and love. Science and studies have found out that we are breathing the same air that people breathed in and breathed out thousands of years ago. The air we breathe is composed of mainly nitrogen, gas, and oxygen gas. Very little is lost in space, and only occasionally is there a new source of carbon or oxygen introduced into this planet. So every breath you take has atoms that have been here for billions of years.

There was a computer program set up in various spots around the world. It would shoot off random numbers, there was no pattern ever seen for years. This is called a Random Number Generator. However when the September 11th attacks happened, or other moments that human consciousness became coherent, things changed. For instance, in the case of a severe tragedy in which all humans are thinking about similar things and having similar emotions, all the numbers become structured and organized. They show an unpredictable sequence of ones and zeroes. The odds of this happening by chance is one in a trillion. How is this possible?

Every single thing you can see around you — the rocks, the birds, and the trees — all are comprised of the same atoms. They are just expressed differently — yet intricately interconnected. Whatever you do and whatever decisions you make, if you do it with love as your motive and if your intentions are pure with love you cannot be wrong. So know your intentions and know your truth and embrace it. You were born with a light that others have tried to dim with a mask, let your light shine again and take your mask off. Humanity needs the gift that your true self possess.

Taking the Mask Off: Destroying the Stigmatic Barriers of Mental Health and Addiction Using a Spiritual Solution

“Taking the Mask Off” is the new book by Cortland Pfeffer and Irwin Ozborne. Cortland Pfeffer spent years as a patient in psychiatric hospitals, treatment centers, and jails before becoming a registered nurse and working in the same facilities. Based on his experience, this story is told from both sides of the desk. It offers a unique and valuable perspective into mental health and addiction, revealing the problems with the psychiatric industry while also providing the solution – one that brings together science, spirituality, philosophy, and personal experience.

“Taking the Mask Off: Destroying the Stigmatic Barriers of Mental Health and Addiction Using a Spiritual Solution” is available on Amazon, and Balboa Press.

Jiddu Krishnamurti, the Inner Revolution, and Why We Don’t Really Love Our Children

Posted on May 11, 2017 by Reid Mukai

(Editor’s note: on this anniversary of the birthday of Jiddu Krishnamurti [born May 11, 1895] please read and share this excellent overview of some of the key principles of his philosophy.)

By Matt Karamazov

Source: High Existence

“The mind must be utterly silent. Not asking, not hoping for experience. It must be completely still. Only then is there a possibility of that light which will dispel our darkness.”

— Jiddu Krishnamurti

IS FUNDAMENTAL CHANGE POSSIBLE?

In a collection of talks given throughout the 1950’s and gathered together in the book, The Revolution From Within, Jiddu Krishnamurti stressed the urgency of staging a revolution in our thinking.

Our habitual ways of thinking have led us to where we are now, he says, and nothing less than radical, fundamental change has any hope of remaking our thoughts, attitudes, and ultimately the societies in which we live. Anything less than fundamental change is a mere modification of what has come before, and key aspects of what has come before has in turn failed a large proportion of our population.

The paradox that Krishnamurti relentlessly demands us to consider, however, is that nothing we can DO can bring about this change. We can only observe the operations of our own mind, and ask questions about everything that we think we know.

Consider the question, “Is fundamental change possible?”, the jumping-off point leading to the multitudinous questions that Krishnamurti is asking us to examine deeply.

It’s where we have to begin if we want to observe the functioning of our own minds on a level that will have real significance with respect to the outside world, and how we live our lives.

So let’s go into this question, friends, with an open mind, a mind that is open to revelation.

If we go into it with the idea that we already know the answer, then we won’t turn up anything worthwhile. This is a question with real consequences for the way we organize our societies, parent our children, and direct our lives.

We must pursue the idea of fundamental change in the same way that Jiddu Krishnamurti relentlessly posed questions to his listeners.

You’ll notice, if you read the transcripts of some of his greatest talks, that Krishnamurti asks multiple questions for every single ‘answer’ that he gives. He might answer one, only to pose three others that each attempt to get at the original question in a more nuanced way.

Krishnamurti does this because life’s biggest questions have no final answers.

Given the asymptotic nature of perfect Truth, we can only approach it by negation; by discarding what isn’t true or helpful, in an effort to move past our conditioned thinking and to achieve radical, fundamental change.

But is such a change indeed possible?

This is something that must be gone into, and not just accepted because someone has said it. It has no meaning if you just merely accept it. Arguments from authority, that common logical fallacy, have no essential relationship to perfect Truth.

Truth needs no defenders or justification.

Rather, you must ceaselessly question what you think you know, and approach life’s biggest questions from the viewpoint of someone who knows nothing. And it really is clear that we do know nothing, in an absolute sense, as we will discuss later in more depth.

If I were to ask you who you are, where you came from, where you’ll ultimately end up, and where you are right now, you would have no satisfactory answers to any of these questions. There would always be a deeper level of Truth that you could never penetrate with your limited, conscious mind.

So let’s start from the beginning…

WHAT IS FUNDAMENTAL CHANGE?

What exactly is it that we can point to as evidence that a revolution in the mind has taken place that is not simply a modification of what was there before?

It’s clear that anything that can be incrementally added is not fundamental change. It’s a modification, and it’s improvement, but it is not the fundamental change that we are seeking.

This “adding to” the mind, such as one can achieve by reading books or watching documentaries or listening to talks is simply an incremental increase of knowledge. No matter how compelling or insightful, this newfound knowledge will always be an addition to what was there before.

While learning is important, and proper education is never a waste of time, it’s merely representative of change on the surface, and change on the surface can never lead to radical, fundamental change. What we’re really after is meaningful change.

What kind of change IS meaningful? Is only fundamental change meaningful? How do we get closer to understanding what it might look like?

Let’s first take a look at a few examples of surface change, or simple modifications, in order to get an idea of what radical change is NOT. Thereby, we can approach the idea of fundamental change via negation.

For example:

If you are unhappy, and you are trying to BECOME happy, then you have instantaneously DEFINED YOURSELF as an unhappy person struggling to overcome his or her unhappiness.

You can become MORE happy, sure, but you will always be an unhappy person, always in the process of becoming slightly more happy, adding to your happiness, instead of experiencing the radical, fundamental change that brings with it a revolution in the mind.

Happiness will always be somewhere ‘over there’ and you will always be struggling to arrive there.

That can never be said to be true happiness and fulfillment, and it is certainly not what we mean by fundamental change.

In the same way, trying to become virtuous, we never acquire virtue, but rather expand our Self in the ‘guise’ of virtue.

Simply, a man who cultivates virtue ceases to be completely virtuous, because there is a part of him that is not, a part of him that is increasing his virtue. Likewise, a man who practices humility is no longer completely humble.

And further:

When violent, the mind has an ideal of non-violence which is ‘over there’ in the distance. It will take time to achieve that state, and in the meantime, the mind can continue to be violent.

This, too, is not the radical, fundamental change which we are seeking to illuminate.

So now that we know what fundamental change is not, do we know any more about what it is?

Is it not instantaneous, unconditional freedom in the here and now? Is it not timeless, in that we don’t have to wait for it to appear?

Are there any preconditions that have to be met?

I think that we can conclude, provisionally, that we have the freedom to drop our resentments and sadness at any time we so choose.

Easy for me to type, extremely difficult for you to do. I get that.

But from our current position, we can see that it is our mind, this thing that we call the self, that is preventing fundamental change from occurring. As we get further into our discussion, we’ll have a better handle on whether or not we can discard the restraints of the self, and realize radical, fundamental change.

THE NECESSITY OF FUNDAMENTAL CHANGE

Assuming that we can become radically different than we are today, we must ask ourselves:

Is this a pursuit that’s worthwhile?

Is it necessary?

Do we need to change at all?

I think it would be obvious to many people that we DO need to see fundamental change in our societies and our patterns of social interaction.

A world in which billions of people currently live on less than $2.00/day is crying out for change.

And to be clear, that figure is, shockingly, adjusted for purchasing power. It’s not what $2.00 would buy you in a developing country, although that would be bad enough; rather, billions of people are living on what you could buy for $2.00 a day in a country like Canada or the US.

Aside: There is commendable, although insufficient, progress being made by extremely committed individuals and organizations all over the world. In fact, the World Bank recently predicted that global extreme poverty will soon fall to under 10%. To make matters more complicated, there is an ongoing debate concerning what exactly constitutes “extreme poverty.”

To say that fundamental change isn’t necessary in a world like ours is akin to being in a sinking ship and saying: “I’m sure glad the hole isn’t in OUR end!”

However, we can state rather confidently that trying to change society, while leaving the individuals who constitute that society unchanged, is a dangerous error.

Simply put, we cannot afford to be “ordinary” any longer; the challenge of the world is too great.

We are the world; we are not on the sidelines. What we are, of that we make the world, and everywhere we face real problems that demand our urgent attention.

Thus, we return to the question at hand: Is fundamental change necessary?

I think it’s clear that it is necessary, if by fundamental change within our societies we mean implementing societal structures that would do better in meeting the needs of all our world’s inhabitants.

Obviously, this is a vastly more complex problem than it even may seem at first. It has many moving parts, but we can only begin where we are. A total revolution of the mind has to start from within. Society is comprised of individuals, and radical societal change starts at the level of the individual.

Yet, most of us are so eager to reform others and so little concerned with the transformation of ourselves.

Can we not see that this whole attitude is very confused?

We often look up to those who can help us or who can do something for us, and look down on those who cannot. So we are always looking up or looking down. Cannot the mind be free from this state of contempt and false respect?

Is it even possible to look through the lens of our own confusion and get a clear picture of the idea of radical, fundamental change?

It is to this question that we now turn.

WE ARE ALL CONFUSED

“There is a path to the known, but not to the unknowable. Thus every system of finding truth breaks down.”

— Jiddu Krishnamurti

Before going further in our discussion, I think it’s helpful to take a look at our own confusion when confronted with the problem and necessity of fundamental change.

We’ve asserted that it’s both possible and necessary, but what are the impediments to action? Why are we not all enlightened already? If it’s supposed to be instantaneous, why is it so difficult for us?

The answer has to lie somewhere within our own confusion.

It’s very difficult to admit to yourself that you are confused, but clearly, we are all confused.

And, truth be told, those who say they aren’t confused, are the most confused of all.

In order to be free from confusion, we would have to know that which it is impossible to know. We’d need to know where the universe in its totality is headed, we’d need to know our precise place within it, who we are fundamentally, and what we need to do with our lives.

Philosophers are good at coming up with “-isms” that seek to explain the world and its direction. We can look for answers in logical positivism, consequentialism, possibilianism, dialectical materialism, populism, liberalism, empiricism, and every other kind of ‘-ism’ that we can conceive of, but we are still going to remain confused. Every book and every teacher is only going to add to this confusion that prevents us from knowing what life is all about.

It may be that we do not know what living is about at all, and that is why death seems to be such a terrible thing. Obviously, everyone is confused about death, and many more things besides.

The whole totality of the mind is confused, and there simply isn’t a higher part of the mind which isn’t.

So how are we supposed to make sense out of all this confusion?

Is it possible to bring clarity to our naturally disordered minds?

Is there a method we can follow, or a path we can take towards clarity?

Krishnamurti explains that whenever one is confused, one must stop all activity, psychologically. Otherwise, anything new is just translated according to our own confusion.

If I’m confused, then I may read, or look, or ask, but my search, my asking, is the outcome of my confusion, and therefore it can only lead to further confusion.

We know this, but is there anything we can do about it?

The problem is not the real issue; rather, it is the mind which approaches the problem.

So, again we return to the necessity of radical, fundamental change.

We can’t keep incrementally increasing our store of knowledge and, at some distant point, realize fundamental change. So we have to drop down to the level of the mind, and see if we can’t somehow bypass the problem of incremental change altogether.

So, you see how our desire for the resolution of our confusion can never lead to fundamental change.

All solutions are based on desire, and the problem exists BECAUSE of desire.

Basically, thought is not the way out. All of our thought is conditioned, and a confused mind cannot resolve its own confusion.

You have chosen your political leaders, your religious leaders, out of your confusion.

You have chosen your career, your friends, your daily activities out of your confusion.

The books you’ve read, the experiences you’ve had, the lessons you’ve learned, have all been assimilated according to the confusion that already exists in your mind.

Collectively, we’ve established our social order based on our confusion. Our efforts to help the poor are based on our confusion. Our educational institutions are based on our confusion.

We don’t even know what we don’t know.

But…

When you realize that you don’t know, then you are beginning to find out.

THE FUTILITY OF SEEKING

“If we take this journey together, and simply observe as we go along the extraordinary width and depth and beauty of life, then out of this observation may come a love…which is a state of being free of all demand…and we may perhaps be awakened to something far more significant than the boredom and frustration, the emptiness and despair of our daily lives.”

— Jiddu Krishnamurti

How do we escape our confusion?

How can we even tell when we’re not confused any more?

Is there an end to our confusion while we are still alive?

Krishnamurti’s prescription is as follows:

“Observe the activities of the mind without trying to change them or put a stop to them, because the moment you seek an end, you are back in the ‘me, not-me’ duality.

It’s the mind that is unaware of its own activities that sets up as the authority someone or something external to which we go for help, and we therefore become slaves.”

He is saying that we can bring about a transformation in ourselves only when we understand the process of our own thinking.

What is important is to understand the whole field of thought, and see if the mind can go beyond all that.

He asks, “Is thought somehow different than the mind?”

This in turn leads us to the question of, “What is the ‘self’, the center of the ‘me’ from which all activity seems to spring?”

The self for most people is a center of desires, manifesting itself through various forms of continuity.

We ceaselessly desire to perpetuate ourselves, to satisfy our cravings, and to set ourselves up as an object of specialness in a world of meaning.

None of these desires are permanent except in the memory of what we have been and would like to be, although we try to make them permanent through clinging to various ideas, perceptions, and relationships.

For those who want more, more, more, life is an everlasting struggle.

Life is one thing, and what we want is another. We get what we want, only to discover that it’s not ultimately what we wanted at all. We wanted some other thing, tantalizingly just a little further up the road.

Can we live in this world without any effort to be or become something, without trying to achieve, to reject, to acquire?

I mean, of course, without trying to become something other than your authentic self?

Can the mind cease to think in terms of continuing, of the “me”?

The concern to become something more, to become something others want you to be, is the constant preoccupation of the mind and the primary cause of its superficiality.

That much is clear. Which leads Krishnamurti to say:

“It is my mind that creates the problem, my mind being the result of time, of memory, the seat of the ‘me’, which is everlastingly craving for the ‘more’, for immortality, for continuity, for permanency here and in the hereafter. It is this uncertainty within ourselves that leads to the outward manifestations of personal ambition, the desire to be somebody, the aggressive attitude towards life.”

What we are, of that we make the world. So in order to avoid superficiality and meaninglessness, there must be ceaseless questioning.

Any conscious effort on my part to become something other than what I am, or other than what I consciously want to become, only produces still further suffering, sorrow, and pain.

A man like Jiddu Krishnamurti would never tell his listeners that education was a waste of time. However, we must never believe that our education is over, or that we have somehow reached the end of our confusion.

Everything around us tells us what to think, books and teachers included, and we must continually renew our freedom from traditional and historical thinking in every moment.

Linear thinking and the all-too-human propensity to settle for easy answers has failed the bottom 40%. It even plagues those in the so-called ‘developed’ nations who are today stricken by existential anxiety.

At bottom, acquisitiveness and greed have destroyed our potential for gratitude.

Nationalism and eschatological certitude have crippled our capacity for understanding and reconciliation.

A radical, fundamental revolution from within can restore the unrestrained lust for life that gives us our reason for being. We can revive our capacity to greedily enjoy our friends, instead of our possessions.

But so long as there is the idea of the “me” or the “I”, then there must necessarily be loneliness.

And you can’t seek the immeasurable because you don’t know what it is; hence the futility of seeking.

But, can we give up seeking? Just like that?

Can we overcome our self-directed focus and do what is just and fair? Can we live with uprightness in a world often bereft of such character?

Or, even more basically, can we love our children?

JIDDU KRISHNAMURTI SAYS WE DON’T REALLY LOVE OUR CHILDREN

“If we did love our children, we would stop all wars tomorrow, obviously. We would not condition our children. They would not be English children or American children, they would just be children.”

— Jiddu Krishnamurti

If you have been following what has been discussed so far, you will see that fundamental change is absolutely critical to the dissolution of the threats to our continued existence.

Violence and suffering on a global scale can be reduced to the individual. It is the mind of the individual that approaches the problem that needs to change, and the world is made up of individuals.

Society is based on violence and comparisons, and as long as it is so, there will always be struggle within that society, not to mention all the struggles, pains, and difficulties that naturally accompany human existence. That is what Krishnamurti is driving at here.

Everything that we do is based on striving, ambition, success, achievement; but none of it is the abandonment of the self.

Granting that everyone is doing the best that they can, the best that they know how to do, how can it be otherwise that our toxic thoughts and undisciplined habits are being passed down to our children?

Our own confusion, with which we are now hopefully becoming intimately aware, cascades downward to future generations.

Parents want their children to conform to meet the demands of their insane societies, but is that education?

Since our society is not yet what it should be, why encourage our children to stay within its destructive pattern?

We are currently dependent on this pattern, but can we live without this dependence?

The insistence on one’s nationality, on race, on religious belief or any other idea, obviously separates. All of it represents the activities of the self, and its insistence on continuity and self-perpetuation. That much is clear.

We submit to authority because all of us have this inward demand to be safe, to feel secure. We have enough to think about with respect to our survival and to the “success” of our children, that we can easily settle into the acceptance of easy answers handed down to us from above. Whether that means from the state or from some religious authority.

This safety, so it seems to many, must be defended at all costs, because we have so much invested in it.

So much of our identities and our feelings of assurance of our continued survival rest on the perceived strengths of our existing institutions.

It’s here that Krishnamurti steps in with the bold and incendiary claim that we don’t really love our children.

You don’t really love your children, he says, so you sacrifice them to protect your property, to defend your State, or the church, or some other organization which demands of you certain things.

Organized religions don’t really insist that you step out of greed, envy, ruthless ambition, and cruelty. They are far more concerned with what you believe, with rituals and the rest of the confusion.

In contrast, righteousness of behavior is not something to be gained, to be arrived at, but must be understood from moment to moment in the actuality of daily living.

It requires a fundamental change in our approach to life, and constant awareness of how our actions impact others.

Krishnamurti’s own phrasing is as such:

“The man who is ceaselessly questioning, who has no authority, who does not follow any tradition, any book or teacher, becomes a light unto himself.”

Perhaps it’s radical, fundamental change that’s required to shake us out of our collective stupor and restore to us our humanity.

THE REVOLUTION

“Sirs, life is something extraordinary, if you observe it. Life is not merely this stupid little quarreling among ourselves, this dividing up of mankind into nations, races, classes; it is not just the contradiction and misery of our daily existence. Life is wide, limitless, it is that state of love which is beauty; life is sorrow and this tremendous sense of joy. But our joys and sorrows are so small, and from that shallowness of mind we ask questions and find answers.”

— Jiddu Krishnamurti

If there can be any conclusion at all, it’s that freedom is not at the end; it is at the very beginning, the now.

The end is at the beginning, which lies outside of time.

Radical, fundamental change does not come at the end. Rather, it’s our starting point. If we’re not happy now, then we never will be. If we don’t remake our societies now, then we never will.

Fundamental change doesn’t occur across time, but rather it is available to us at every moment.

Revolutions of the mind occur instantaneously, at the very moment when we cease our anguished searching.

And that is what our lives often are, correct?

We say: “I am ‘this’, and I would like to be ‘that,’” but the struggle to be something different is still within the pattern of our desire.

All suffering comes from desire, and so any incremental change that we pursue throughout our lives is not only going to be fraught with confusion, but will carry with it all the attendant suffering and anguish which it necessarily implies.

So where can we find relief for this condition of the mind?

Where can we go for some form of final answer to our continued searching and relentless questioning?

In the end, we must realize that life’s biggest questions have no definite answers. Indeed, the right question has no answer.

We must also conclude that a mind that seeks peace will never find it, and thought is not the way out.

When you see that fundamental change is instantaneous, and is a function of observing the workings of your own mind, you can break free of your past at any moment, and start to unravel your own conditioning.

It’s simple: The mind can never free itself through some system or method. Anything that your mind DOES can never bring about this kind of radical, fundamental change that we are discussing.

Anything that can be KNOWN is not what we’re looking for.

All that can be left to us is to observe the functioning of our own minds.

When we realize this, we also realize the truth of Krishnamurti’s words when he says:

“To have that inward fullness of life, which includes death, the mind must free itself from the known. The known must cease for the unknown to be.”

When you don’t know what it is that you’re looking for, and you don’t know what it’ll look like when you find it, all that remains to you is to examine the operations of your own mind.

Naturally, this leads to the falling away of every answer that has been and could be given concerning happiness and fulfillment, and concerning how we should govern our societies.

Since we see that the ideas of happiness and fulfillment are constantly changing, we must ask ourselves if there really is such a thing.

We’ve been discussing the necessity and possibility of fundamental change for some time now, and if you have been following the logical progression of our discussion, you can see that observing the function and operation of your own mind without judgement is the only way out of our collective confusion.

I can also assume that you WANT to love your children, that you WANT to overcome the destructive patterns of society, and that you WANT to affirm the meaningfulness of daily life.

So what’s stopping you?

What’s holding you back from experiencing this revolution of the mind?

In the final analysis, there is nothing to do, and nothing to attain.

“When you realize there is nothing lacking, the whole world belongs to you”

— Lao Tzu

There is no set of rules or precepts that you are required to follow, nothing that you are being asked to believe.

Rather, fundamental change is ready and waiting.

What are YOUR answers to these questions that we have been discussing? How will they impact you on the concrete level of your daily existence? Will you change?

If you don’t change now, then you never will.

All the best,

Matt Karamazov

Sensate Immersion and the Empathic Core

Posted on May 7, 2017 by Reid Mukai

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By rahkyt

Source: Sacred Space in Time

I’ve experienced enough life, seen enough movies and read enough books to know that not everybody lives the same form of consciousness. That we are walking around, talking to and interacting with people who literally do not “feel” life in a similar manner.
I can only speak from my experience.

If I see someone get hurt, with my eyes, I feel, in my body, an actual, sympathetic resonance that is sometimes so intense it approximates pain and is located in the same location on my body as it is on the body of the person whose pain I am witnessing. It happens often when I see pain depicted in movies and on television as well.

In social situations, if people are feeling discomfort or if there is conflict that results in uncomfortable social situations, I feel, in my body, the same burning, intense feeling of shame or embarrassment. I literally have to intervene to alleviate the energetic imbalance in order to relieve my own sympathetic symptoms. I look away from such situations in movies and on television as the feeling is similarly acute.

If people are upset, I can see it in their faces and body language and often feel it as well.

When I see, hear and read something that is true, the old saying that something “rings” true is literally what happens to my body. I resonate, vibrate, “ring”, to the truth.

Do you? Experience life in this visceral, sensate manner?

Not everyone does. For some, life is what they see, hear, smell, touch and taste. And that is it. For many, they do experience empathy to a certain degree, although it may not be as intense as what I describe here. For others, it may be even more intense.

Even though it has been argued that any supposed sixth sense, that some might call intuition, is only a combination of the known five senses accompanied by an holistic, synesthetic component that encompasses all possible methods of sensory input, still, not everyone experiences it.

Which means that not everyone shares the same kind of understanding about the nature of the world as others. Not everyone is influenced by their feelings the same way and, often, those who are not deride those who are. And vice versa.

Again, it is an experience of consciousness whereby some are innately more sensitive than others. A scale of intensity. Some have such a capacity, others do not. It is not a question of better or worse, which are value judgements and therefore subjective, but of degree.

There are many who are not as sensitive who supplant their experience with keen observational skills. They do not feel the emotions of others but they can see them occurring and respond accordingly. Many who lack such empathy often have increased intelligence quotients, perhaps as an example of nature’s way of compensating for a lack of emotional depth.

It is also possible to experience a desensitization effect, purposeful or not, which often occurs as a response to emotionally and/or physically violent material conditions. What the Bible calls the “hardening of the heart”.

Feelings are important. We assume that we experience them similarly. And so are confounded when we interact with those who apparently do not. There are biological and neurological reasons for these differences that are well documented. And many books that speak about the trauma that can result from intimate relationships between people of asymmetrical emotional capacities.

All of human history is rife with examples. Our lives are filled with them as well. Understanding the difference and incorporating strategies that allow you to navigate these differences while securing your own emotional and spiritual well-being is a mandatory skill set to cultivate in the life of all who seek to live consciously.

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Category Archives: Philosophy