Category Archives: Psychology

Drop the Rope

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By Zen Gardner

Source: ZenGardner.com

It’s interesting how we get entangled in compromising situations and interactions, often unwittingly. We all face this challenge continually. So often the very encounter itself is predestined to failure without our even knowing it and results in a sense of energy sapping futility.

If you find yourself in such a tug of war, it’s time to rethink your entire stance. In fact, it might be time to drop the connection all together. Winning ain’t what it’s cracked up to be, nor to your benefit in most cases in these circumstances.

This happens because we get snared into lower level thinking on a preset playing field designed to do just that. Ensnare and entrap. This societal mechanism is designed to set the parameters and disguise the real solution which is way outside this constructed paradigm. When we join into the “contest” we subject ourselves to the win-lose dialectic, the pitting of one versus another paradigm that has beset humanity for eons.

That’s not to say there isn’t a time to attempt to illuminate ignorance or expose manipulative mechanisms, we just can’t expect to “win” in an arena built for pointless conflict that distracts from seeing the essential and empowering reality that blows their entire construct to bits.

If we’re too busy fighting amongst ourselves, physically or intellectually, we’ll never see that bigger picture where the true problem truly lies.

The conscious conclusion to draw on such encounters is clear. If you don’t want to play their insidious, pointless, draining and distracting games of tug of war, simply drop the rope and walk away.

The Conflict Dialectic

Society has been manipulated to such a degree that the easiest way to control us is through simple distraction. Bread and circus competitive sports and similar mind-stinting entertainment, right-left paradigm political charades and society dividing issues such as race, immigration and social, economic and class status are furiously alive trigger points of distraction running rampant in this seriously dysfunctional world mind.

We help define and reinforce these memes ourselves by our participation. Without rising above this imposed playing field and understanding the world we’re already living in we certainly cannot find the way to change it, never mind the way out into a new paradigm without their constrictions.

Simply said, if you don’t want to play their insidious, pointless, draining and distracting games of tug of war, simply drop the rope and move on. Let them fall in their own devices.

Dropping the Rope

When dealing with this seeming “conflict resolution” we appear to be confronting on many levels, “dropping the rope” is a very interesting way to break this sycophantic relationship with our oppressors. What invariably surfaces in our left brain human response in these sorts of circumstances is a sort of contest between people or situations. One side opposes the other in some form, and one or the other or both sides express umbrage at what the other is saying.

It’s a programmed and mass entranced conflict, the “strategy of tension” as they call it, utilized by the media and military with very successful abandon.

When we find ourselves in these situations it can be quite stressful. Reflexive thinking usually kicks in and we take sides, concentrating on the “issues” at hand while ignoring the overall. Even in a personal heated exchange, subtle or obvious, no one wins. They can’t. The overarching truth is being missed in this morass of “logical” confined thought subscribed to by the perspective of the participants.

Overall social psychosis perhaps, or the left brained reptilian mind going to work, who knows. It’s just futile in that type of paradigm. These types of conflicts are an exercise in futility. Oh, we may bring some light of truth to the conversation or situation but the problem is that we’re buying into their boxing ring. Someone has to come out the “victor” and the game goes on, without addressing the underlying reality outside the ring, or imposed and deliberately created stadium of conflict.

This realization is a blow to the egoic mind set and, while essentially counter intuitive, it’s only destined to be repeated. And the pointless game goes on. Don’t fall for it. You’re well above all this.

Spiritual Scoliosis and Letting Go of the Unchangeable

The application of this realization can get quite personal.  Those we’re closest to can often display usage of this dialectic and it’s not easy to discern up close and personal, nor know how to respond to it.

There’s often an embedded agenda to what is being said or proposed, as exemplified by news outlets, or as we usually see it by people around us, that is much more profound than the surface argument. You’ll often hear sweeping language with generalities that appear to be true in such contests of mind but these can have a much more insidious nature.

People, as well as social engineers, often use this technique.

It’s usually very cleverly embedded, be it by an individual or ideology. But on an individual basis it can get pretty dicey.

The Personal Touch

It’s naive to think we could correct spiritual scoliosis or perform some kind of exorcism or somehow overwhelm this mechanism to get it into its proper place and perspective when dealing with an infected individual with such a mindset. In fact, those are the things and persons that conscious people sidestep until the subject really wants help and starts to see the light of day and fully lets go of their petty shibboleths.

These are issues that really aren’t so petty when you get down to the spiritual nature of it and difficult to discern as well as confront.

But when you’re awake to these traits you don’t argue with them or plea with them to let go. They either do when confronted with conscious awareness or they don’t. Otherwise you leave them alone until there’s a change, and move on to those open to real dialogue. This kind of conscious awareness is sadly thin in today’s world but people are catching on.

No players, no game is a great default setting.

Their approach has a lot to do with posturing, as if they’re authoritative on some subject. Unthinking people often submit to that. When someone comes on pretending to be an authority on anything and speaks in that tone and posture it’s time to sit up and take notice – carefully. Not sit back in acquiescence. Real truth sharers propose and entreat. Remember, words, which carry spirit, can eventually overpower you if you keep listening to where you sense it’s empowering rooted in truth and love, or isn’t healthy.

It’ll be clear. Just listen.

Be Like Water

Avoiding these kinds of obstacles is a bit of an an acquired art, but it can be learned. This has to do with the nature of on going change. Water just goes around the rock, or over it, or both. Sometimes rocks move with the water a little but never fully. Like those set in their ways.

They’re rocks. That’s the attached baggage people won’t let go of in their hearts and it clogs up the works and infects anything it embeds in. They’re fine, or should I say less dangerous, on their own and they have their place despite their issues. But they’re not water; and if you expect them to come along like water it’s going to be a long and arduous journey that pretty much is playing the rock’s game.

Water moves on to where its welcomed. Go with the flow. Let the rocks be, i.e; let go of the rope.

Conclusion

It’s important to not get caught up in futile and ultimately destructive contests of any sort, be they relationships or unconscious dialogue as they can have very deceitful and disempowering consequences.

That’s how the system works. Getting everyone caught up in lower vibrational interactions that muffle the call to conscious awareness and activism in avenues that have real meaning. It’s something to which they are clearly diametrically opposed. They’re more than happy to entangle you in anything petty to keep you from realizing that.

You can’t win on their level. Don’t even go there. But if you do and find yourself in a tug of war with ignorance, egos or manipulating entities…..just drop the rope. It’s that simple.

Let ’em fall on their asses and you go merrily on your way.

And go take a nice walk in our majestic freedom and glory in your independent magnificence! Then turn and do and say what’s right – in every situation you come up against.

Screw the programming. We’re free.

That’s how truth wins out.

Much love,

Zen

ZenGardner.com

 

One dog’s solution to overcoming lower vibrational conflicts:

Public School Students Are the New Inmates in the American Police State

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By John W. Whitehead

Source: The Rutherford Institute

In the American police state, you’re either a prisoner (shackled, controlled, monitored, ordered about, limited in what you can do and say, your life not your own) or a prison bureaucrat (police officer, judge, jailer, spy, profiteer, etc.).

When you’re a child in the American police state, life is that much worse.

Microcosms of the police state, America’s public schools contain almost every aspect of the militarized, intolerant, senseless, overcriminalized, legalistic, surveillance-riddled, totalitarian landscape that plagues those of us on the “outside.”

From the moment a child enters one of the nation’s 98,000 public schools to the moment she graduates, she will be exposed to a steady diet of draconian zero tolerance policies that criminalize childish behavior, overreaching anti-bullying statutes that criminalize speech, school resource officers (police) tasked with disciplining and/or arresting so-called “disorderly” students, standardized testing that emphasizes rote answers over critical thinking, politically correct mindsets that teach young people to censor themselves and those around them, and extensive biometric and surveillance systems that, coupled with the rest, acclimate young people to a world in which they have no freedom of thought, speech or movement.

If your child is fortunate enough to survive his encounter with the public schools, you should count yourself fortunate.

Most students are not so lucky.

By the time the average young person in America finishes their public school education, nearly one out of every three of them will have been arrested.

More than 3 million students are suspended or expelled from schools every year, often for minor misbehavior, such as “disruptive behavior” or “insubordination.”

For instance, a Virginia sixth grader, the son of two school teachers and a member of the school’s gifted program, was suspended for a year after school officials found a leaf (likely a maple leaf) in his backpack that they suspected was marijuana. Despite the fact that the leaf in question was not marijuana (a fact that officials knew almost immediately), the 11-year-old was still kicked out of school, charged with marijuana possession in juvenile court, enrolled in an alternative school away from his friends, subjected to twice-daily searches for drugs, and forced to be evaluated for substance abuse problems.

Under similarly misguided school zero tolerance policies, students have been suspended for bringing to school household spices such as oregano, breath mints, birth control pills and powdered sugar. Look-alike weapons (toy guns—even Lego-sized ones, hand-drawn pictures of guns, pencils twirled in a “threatening” manner, imaginary bows and arrows, even fingers positioned like guns) can also get a student kicked out.

Acts of kindness, concern or basic manners can also result in suspensions. One 13-year-old was given detention for exposing the school to “liability” by sharing his lunch with a hungry friend. A third grader was suspended for shaving her head in sympathy for a friend who had lost her hair to chemotherapy. And then there was the high school senior who was suspended for saying “bless you” after a fellow classmate sneezed.

Unfortunately, these incidents are indicative of a nationwide phenomenon in which children are treated like suspects and criminals, especially within the public schools.

When you bring the police into the picture, after-school detention and visits to the principal’s office are transformed into punishments such as misdemeanor tickets, juvenile court, handcuffs, tasers and even prison terms.

More and more, police are “stepping in to deal with minor rulebreaking—sagging pants, disrespectful comments, brief physical skirmishes. What previously might have resulted in a detention or a visit to the principal’s office was replaced with excruciating pain and temporary blindness, often followed by a trip to the courthouse.”

Thanks to a combination of media hype, political pandering and financial incentives, the use of armed police officers to patrol school hallways has risen dramatically in the years since the Columbine school shooting.

Funded by government grants, these school resource officers have become de facto wardens in the elementary, middle and high schools, doling out their own brand of justice to the so-called “criminals” in their midst with the help of tasers, pepperspray, batons and brute force.

Now advocates for such harsh police tactics and weaponry will tell you that school safety should be our first priority lest we find ourselves with another Sandy Hook. What they will not tell you is that such shootings are rare. As one congressional report found, the schools are, generally speaking, safe places for children.

In their zeal to crack down on guns and lock down the schools, these cheerleaders for police state tactics in the schools might also fail to mention the lucrative, multi-million dollar deals being cut with military contractors such as Taser International to equip these school cops with tasers, tanks, rifles and $100,000 shooting detection systems.

Indeed, the transformation of hometown police departments into extensions of the military has been mirrored in the public schools, where school police have been gifted with high-powered M16 rifles, MRAP armored vehicles, grenade launchers, and other military gear. One Texas school district even boasts its own 12-member SWAT team.

As if it weren’t bad enough that the nation’s schools have come to resemble prisons—complete with surveillance cameras, metal detectors, drug-sniffing dogs, random locker searches and active shooter drills—the government is also contracting with private prisons to lock up young people for behavior that once would have merited a stern lecture. Nearly 40 percent of those young people who are arrested will serve time in a private prison, where the emphasis is on making profits for large megacorporations above all else.

Young people have become easy targets for the private prison industry. For instance, two Pennsylvania judges made headlines when it was revealed that they had been conspiring with two businessmen in a $2.6 million “kids for cash” scandal that resulted in more than 2500 children being found guilty and jailed in for-profit private prisons.

It has been said that America’s schools are the training ground for future generations. Yet as I point out in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, instead of raising up a generation of freedom fighters, however, we seem to be busy churning out newly minted citizens of the American police state who are being taught the hard way what it means to comply, fear and march in lockstep with the government’s dictates.

The lesson is this: you not only get what you pay for, but you reap what you sow.

If you want a nation of criminals, treat the citizenry like criminals.

If you want young people who grow up seeing themselves as prisoners, run the schools like prisons.

But if you want to raise up a generation of freedom fighters, who will actually operate with justice, fairness, accountability and equality towards each other and their government, then run the schools like freedom forums. Remove the metal detectors and surveillance cameras, re-assign the cops elsewhere, and start treating our nation’s young people like citizens of a republic and not inmates in a police state.

 

Terence McKenna’s Disillusioned Perspective on Mass-Consumerist Culture

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Editor’s note: Since Terence McKenna’s passing on April 3 2000, his ideas have only grown in relevance and popularity largely because of their prescience and resonance to growing segments of internet culture. In commemoration of the 70th anniversary of his birthday we’re sharing this article which reflects an important yet often neglected aspect of McKenna’s worldview.

By Jordan Bates

Source: Refine the Mind

“We have to create culture, don’t watch TV, don’t read magazines, don’t even listen to NPR. Create your own roadshow.”

Terence McKenna is one of those cult-famous, societal-fringe figures of whom the majority of people have never heard. He’s also someone whose views probably have a polarizing effect on anyone who encounters them. At the very least, though, Terence was an exceptionally original thinker, and those who explore a fraction of his work will note his erudition and incredible ability to articulate his thoughts.

McKenna was an American philosopher and ethnobotanist who passed away in the year 2000. He was known for possessing expertise on a broad range of subjects including history, biology, geology, botany, and ecology. He toured and lectured extensively on everything from language and science to shamanism and extraterrestrials, developing a sizable and enthusiastic following.

His controversial status is in large part due to his vocal advocacy of  mind-altering substances. McKenna was a well-known psychonaut–one who explores consciousness through the ingestion of psychedelic hallucinogens–and a staunch proponent of the use of naturally occurring psychoactive compounds.

Obviously this latter aspect of McKenna’s legacy is an immediate turn-off to many. For a major sector of the population, the colossal stigma surrounding psychedelic substances is sufficient reason to lambaste the views of a well-known user. I, however, am not so quick to dismiss such a person, especially one as lucid, compelling, internally consistent, and dedicated to free inquiry as Terence McKenna.

McKenna’s Views on Mass-Consumerist Culture

I’ve delved into hours of McKenna’s lectures, and I am particularly interested in his ideas on culture. When McKenna speaks of culture, he seems to refer primarily to modern, mass-consumerist culture, so keep that in mind.

McKenna held a rather unfriendly position toward culture that can be summed up succinctly by one of his most famous quotations: “Culture is not your friend.” McKenna saw modern culture as a sort of engine detached from the interests of the individual and serving the manipulative, power-focused agendas of various institutions and wealthy individuals.

The following short video contains a portion of one of his lectures in which he addresses culture. I encourage you to watch it now (I will transcribe and elaborate on its central ideas below):

What Civilization is and What it Could be

McKenna certainly had a way of poetically articulating his ideas, and the video opens with what I feel is one of Terence’s most memorable metaphors:

“What civilization is is 6 billion people trying to make themselves happy by standing on each other’s shoulders and kicking each other’s teeth in. It’s not a pleasant situation. And yet you can stand back and look at this planet and see that we have the money, the power, the medical understanding, the scientific know-how, the love, and the community to produce a kind of human paradise.”

With this statement McKenna addresses the hyper-competitive environment that is symptomatic of the modern capitalistic socioeconomic paradigm. Our culture has a tendency to glorify competition, and many would argue that competition drives innovation and “progress” (a slippery word). I doubt McKenna would argue that competition has not been essential to the invention of our modern world, but he seems to step back and ask, “Yes, but when will it be enough?”

McKenna suggests that we’ve reached a stage of technological advancement and knowledge that would allow us to “produce a kind of human paradise.” This declaration sounds vague and idealistic, but based upon what I know of McKenna, I assume that by “human paradise” he envisioned something like a drastic change in the work paradigm, an elimination of poverty and starvation, a great reduction in disease and illness-related death, the end of war, and a much more palpable sense of a world community.

“Culture is Not Your Friend”

These items might sound far-fetched, but McKenna is not the first to suggest that such a situation is possible with our modern technology. R. Buckminster Fuller comes to mind as another prominent thinker who held similar views. After making this statement, McKenna elaborates on what he believes prevents us from attaining this state of affairs–namely, a lack of significant resistance to the poor leadership, dehumanizing values, and damaging cultural “control icons” that he perceives in the world. He states:

“Culture is not your friend. Culture is for other peoples’ convenience and the convenience of various institutions, churches, companies, tax collection schemes, what have you. It is not your friend. It insults you. It disempowers you. It uses and abuses you. None of us are well-treated by culture.”

[…]

But the culture is a perversion. It fetishizes objects. It creates consumer mania. It preaches endless forms of false happiness, endless forms of false understanding in the form of squirrelly religions and silly cults. It invites people to diminish themselves and dehumanize themselves by behaving like machines.”

Modern World as Dystopia?

McKenna holds that modern culture is centered around the agendas of those who are almost certainly not you. He believes that culture diminishes and dehumanizes the vast majority of the population by inviting them to unreflectively reinforce its models.

McKenna seems to suggest that instead of focusing on creating the type of world that is possible, we are caught up in a game of culture–a robotic pursuit of fetishized objects and false visions of a proverbial light at the end of the tunnel.

To some, this view may seem rather grim and dystopian. I don’t see it that way. I see it as a warning that remains pertinent in 2013 [and 2015]. The culture McKenna refers to does exist, and its effects are far-reaching and potentially insidious. However, I know that there are many, many people who are aware of this cultural game and do not conform to its status quo, who resolve to try to choose their own way of life and who see through the glitzy media-images.

Simply by being among this latter group of people, I think we’re doing the work that McKenna believed needed to be done–the work of resisting the damaging and dehumanizing aspects of modern consumerist culture. The mere realization that we are culturally conditioned to behave in certain ways is a sufficient catalyst to begin assuming a more active and reflective role in deciding how to live and act.

I see nothing wrong with being a cultural participant, but it should be our goal to develop a deeper awareness of the ideals our culture would have us pursue. When we understand the culture’s vision for our lives, we can continue to exist within our given society while challenging its flaws in subtle ways. We can deliberately express ourselves in forms that disrupt its norms, and we can consciously choose which aspects of it are worth partaking in. In this way, we become active constituents of culture, shifting and re-imagining its values, contributing to the gradual creation of a culture that we can call our “friend”.

McKenna Suggests We Must Create Culture

McKenna was certainly a vocal critic of mass culture, but to his credit, he was also quite vocal about offering alternatives. He believed strongly in the importance and utility of art, the primacy of felt experience, and the need to create our own values and alternative spaces for expression.

I’ll leave you with one last quote from another of Terence’s lectures that is especially poignant here. He was a frank and opinionated speaker, to be sure, but don’t let his style put you off. Terence was also always quick to check his own views and make light of his position. He didn’t want to insult people–he just wanted us to ask questions. This message from beyond the grave is valuable to each of us; ponder it with an open mind:

“We have to create culture, don’t watch TV, don’t read magazines, don’t even listen to NPR. Create your own roadshow. The nexus of space and time where you are now is the most immediate sector of your universe, and if you’re worrying about Michael Jackson or Bill Clinton or somebody else, then you are disempowered, you’re giving it all away to icons, icons which are maintained by an electronic media so that you want to dress like X or have lips like Y. This is shit-brained, this kind of thinking. That is all cultural diversion, and what is real is you and your friends and your associations, your highs, your orgasms, your hopes, your plans, your fears. And we are told ‘no’, we’re unimportant, we’re peripheral. ‘Get a degree, get a job, get a this, get a that.’ And then you’re a player, you don’t want to even play in that game. You want to reclaim your mind and get it out of the hands of the cultural engineers who want to turn you into a half-baked moron consuming all this trash that’s being manufactured out of the bones of a dying world.”
― Terence McKenna

Rope-a-Dope

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rope-a-dope3By Rodney Swearengin

Source: Adbusters

During the second round of the 1974 epic boxing match billed as the Rumble in the Jungle, Mohammad Ali leaned extraordinarily far back upon the ropes as George Foreman relentlessly bludgeoned Ali’s body and arms. It looked much like the devastating beating Ali took at the hands of Joe Frazier in 1971. Foreman’s notoriously powerful punches were sure to do Ali in as he languished on the ropes round after round. But in the eighth — with Foreman’s stamina sapped — Ali got off the ropes, and went on the attack, winning the bout with a knockout. He called it the “rope-a-dope.”

I feel worked over — not knowing if I can keep up the pace of the caffeine infused all-night drift through a world-wide cataloging of every failure of imagination — large and small — the war, disease, simple stupidity, the latest meme designed to bring a smile all the way to your eyes — brought not only into your living room, but also the kitchen, the bedroom. It seems we&rsquo—re always peering deep into our glowing box, trying to sort out the trouble and hop to the next possible potential of some game-changing inspiration in the incessant production-line flow of recycled mediocrity. But the troubles are never through. The work is never done. That breakthrough — that genius sabot insight never comes.

But the metaphor of production-line work — already passé when McLuhan made us aware of so many similarly irrelevant tropes — is based on psychological responses and concepts conditioned by the former technology — mechanization — of the factory. There is something comforting in the nostalgic ease with which Lucille Ball or Charlie Chaplin revealed the absurdity of Fordist efficiency, the worker as a mere appendage of the machine. Although laughable even then — that was a time in which the worker still had a genuine role to play; being more than an option cheaper than automation. That time is gone.

I feel over worked. But I’ve never worked at the mill. I’ve never done a 12-hour stint keeping pace with cogs and conveyer belts. I’m not being over worked. I’m being worked over — as we all are — not by a craftwork mechanized pace that drives us to exhaustion — but by an alluring rhythm — a rhythm that can at once lull us into acquiescence while at the same time keeping us off balance — all the better mobilized for each permutation of familiar themes. We are mesmerized by the rhythm of electrostatic transmissions coded through glitches of the cybernetic network and the fragments of old media. Cycling through neoclassic postmodern motifs destructured and reformulated into predictably surprising combinations — this rhythm — this aesthetic — makes us move —and more importantly, buy. Consumers at heart, the rhythm sucks us in and incorporates us more completely than any machine ever could. Somehow thinking that we are breaking free from the autonomic conditioning of a youthful wasteland, we wait in eager anticipation for the next issue of a magazine devoted to the pure form of advertising —though in its pages there is none to be found. It makes our consumer heart skip a beat. Like Victorians who wouldn’t dare indulge in such an unsavory act — but nonetheless cannot stop talking about it — we swoon, sway and jerk with the rhythm of the spliced (dis)tasteful image juxtaposed by words of a hopeful, anxious, elliptical cant — breakdown and breakthrough.

I get the breakdown. Where’s the breakthrough? We talk and all the while we’re being worked over. And this is no massage. This is a beat down. In the expanded edition of his vintage Politics and Vision, Sheldon Wolin argued that the particular rhythm of our contemporary aesthetic has been put to expert use by the new corporate form of governance he called “inverted totalitarianism.” Perhaps Wolin really put his finger on our fatal flaw when he suggested that the “cascades of ‘critical theory’ and their postures of revolt, and the appetite for theoretical novelty, function as support rather than opposition” to capitalism, because this sort of frenetic, syncopated, decentering only “encourages its rhythms.” Like a prizefighter — agile, yet made of solid, consolidated muscle. The centralized corporate entity gets in step with our fancy footwork — bobs and weaves into every new channel of communication and community, coopts every sophistication of critique, adopts the most non-hierarchical, horizontal stance of organization and deployment — moving with the rhythm — adapting the rhythm to its own purpose — waiting for the opportunity to unload its notoriously devastating punch — coming in on the trash talker of dissent — Muhammad Ali stumbling back on the ropes, body blow after wicked body blow — pummeled — worked over completely.

I don’t want to go down on the ropes. Where’s the rope-a-dope? Where’s the rope-a- dope?!

 

Prophecy, Spirit and the Dreamtime

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By Jay Weidner

Source: ZenGardner.com

The mythology of our modern, high-tech culture teaches us that the last frontier for humanity is outer space. Somehow, according to this emerging mythos, the fragile human body is supposed to be able to survive the rigors of travel in outer space over vast distances. The writers of science fiction and Star Trek-style television shows would have us believe that human beings can somehow endure through every kind of radiation and danger to successfully colonize other planets and solar systems.

But this notion is probably never going to happen. As this age ends and the next age begins humanity will lose its interest in conquering space. The last 6000 years have been spent conquering the space around us.

The last frontier of humanity is not the conquering of outer space, of other planets and solar systems. As we approach the end of this era we will realize that the last frontier is time.

Space is defined by the three dimensional reality that surrounds us. It is height, width and depth. We humans possess the most spectacular array of physical and mental abilities ever devised in creation to navigate these three dimensions. These abilities have enabled us to conquer our three-dimensional world.

Now at this critical juncture in history we discover that we have completely conquered the planet’s biosphere. People are living in the coldest environments imaginable and in the hottest tropical jungles. There are few mysteries left concerning the outer physical reality of our planet. Due to oil and cheap energy, we have been able to travel to any place on Earth. As this age of oil ends there will be only one mystery left for us to ponder.

This final mystery is the mystery of time.

Let’s take a look at our perception of time. Much of the way we experience the present moment depends on our experience of time past. The events of the past are distilled and repainted in our memories until their very reality loses its solidity. If we let them cook long enough, images of past events take on a dream like quality. Through this process, our remembrances frequently slide into a fantasy disconnected from anything tangible.

How often have we encountered someone who remembers an incident in a completely opposite manner from the way we remember it? Our minds appear to be constantly rewriting history to make it more agreeable to our present day wishes. Incidents in the past that are disturbing or frightening are frequently glossed over in our memory until they disappear only to be replaced by a memory that is more easily digested by consciousness.

Our view of the future works in a similar but opposite texture. Whereas the past begins to become a dream within our memories, the future is the dream that has not yet arrived. When someone is successful in the material world we like to say that they have “lived their dreams”. This cliché reveals an intrinsic understanding that present and future reality is created from the dream state of the past.

This idea dovetails with the central belief of the Aborigines of Australia. The essential teaching from that tradition is that everything in our world begins in the Dreamtime. From their ancient perspective, every thought, every action emerges from a larger metaphysical landscape that surrounds and pervades our material world. They call this larger reality the Dreamtime. According to this tradition, each living thing first begins in the Dreamtime. After it has become fully developed in the Dreamtime it then concretizes and becomes a part of our three dimensional reality.

This process is recursive in that our future dreams are frequently constructed from the archetypes of ancient dreams. So the past and the future, the material world and the dream world work together to create not only everything that we see, feel and hear but all that we have manifested as human beings. If one looks beyond the veil of linear time, one can easily see that there is a certain control mechanism over this peculiar process. Because reality is so dependent on the dream world, it is possible to shift reality by simply shifting the dream.

Motivational speakers, politicians, television script writers, preachers and many others understand this fundamental concept and use it to re-script reality in their favor. The last thing that they want you to discover is that you have the innate ability to take control of your dreams. They much prefer that you dream their dream, live in their past and help build their future.

Just think about the nature of the media these days. Over the past century, finding new and ever more invasive means of manipulating thoughts, desires and actions have been at the forefront of the research conducted by “psychic engineers”; the advertising agencies, spin doctors, pollsters, pharmaceutical companies, and secret government agencies of our world.

Through the constant barrage of images projected by the media, through the manipulation of food, and the polluting of the atmosphere, much of humanity has become lulled into a hypnotic state and their Dreamtime is occupied with nightmares. This has led us to today, to the present moment, in which our planet and our species are in a state of crisis. To transmute this crisis, this very critical situation in time, we must learn to step outside of linear time and enter the Dreamtime, that subtle realm in which everything becomes possible.

As the word Dreamtime aptly describes, there is little difference between the dream and the time. This very moment will become a dream soon in your memory. Also you are creating the future that is racing towards you – right now.

The dream world, time and four-dimensional space are all the same thing. The fourth dimensional world, often referred to as ‘time’ by physicists, surrounds and permeates our three dimensional reality. Everything that we are is shaped and formed within this topological manifold that flows into and out of our existence. As the stream of time passes we have the ability to alter it’s course. Each moment of our lives offers us the chance to change the course of our dreams and the dreams of those we love.

Understanding this landscape, the ragged mountains and mossy valleys of the wilderness of time, is the frontier that awaits us. When we finally colonize this land and understand its many intricacies and nuances, we will realize that any future is possible. We will no longer need to be slaves to systems that require us to live in someone else’s dream. The powers of the dark sorcerers that rule our world will be overthrown and a new Dreamtime will be created. When we discover how to navigate the river of time, when the topological map of time is finally understood by us, all of the certain dangers that await us will vanish in the blink of an eye during REM sleep.

We are at the crossroads now. There is a choice. One road leads to a mechanistic, toxic, polluted, fascist nightmare from which we may never recover. The other road leads to a revitalized world where we live our dreams in freedom, prosperity and love.

One of the main aims of many ancient spiritual traditions is to provide us with the means to create a conscious break with the almost dictatorial dreams of our past. This is the essence of the teachings of the Buddha for instance. We are slaves to the dreams that we were born into, slaves to a past of which we had nothing to do. Many of these ancient spiritual traditions teach us how to break with the mental slavery that has burdened us for so long.

Humans frequently hurt themselves and others around them defending the imprinted dreams of their past and creating belief systems that make it all right to hurt and destroy people who come from a different past, a different dreamtime.

The way to stop this recurring cycle is to find our way towards a detachment from the heated beliefs and ego-inspired histories and cultures that we were born into. This is not to say that we should reject our traditions. Only that true liberation of ourselves can only begin when we detach ourselves from ingrained spiritual and cultural habits.

Right now we are trapped by time. And this means that we are trapped in a Dreamtime from which escape is nearly impossible. But as long as there is a chance, as long as the odds are not one hundred percent against us – and they are not – we should attempt to make this leap.

If we change the dream we can change the world and ourselves.

The spiritual emergence that is happening right now across the world is the realization that there is only one kind of time. There is no past and there is no future.

There is only NOW.

And we can change the NOW at any time that we like.

 

For more about the Shasta movie, go to ShastaMovie.com

Jay Weidner’s websites –    JayWeidner.comGaiamTV.com

Jay Weidner’s DVDs

Jay Weidner’s book:
“The Mysteries of the Great Cross of Hendaye: Alchemy and the End of Time”

Indulge . . . & Undermine

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Source: CrimethInc.

Have you noticed—exhortations to indulge yourself are always followed by suggestions? Adherents of doctrines seek footholds to claim territory within you, salesmen grasp for handles to jerk you around . . . from new-age prophets to advertisers, from pornographers to radicals, everyone exhorts you to “pursue your desires,” but the question remains: which ones? The “real” ones? Who decides which those are?

This just makes it clear what’s going on: a war for your soul on every front. And those much talked-about desires are all constructed, anyway—they change, they’re dependent on external factors, culture, the whole context and history of our society. We “like” fast food because we have to hurry back to work, because processed supermarket food doesn’t taste much better, because the nuclear family—for those who still have even that—is too small and stressed to sustain much festivity in cooking and eating. We “have to” check our email because the dissolution of community has taken our friends and kindred far away, because our bosses would rather not have to talk to us, because “time-saving” technology has claimed the hours once used to write letters—and killed all the passenger pigeons, besides. We “want” to go to work because in this society no one looks out for those who don’t, because it’s hard to imagine more pleasurable ways to spend our time when everything around us is designed for commerce and consumption. Every craving we feel, every conception we form, is framed in the language of the civilization that creates us.

Does this mean we would want differently in a different world? Yes, but not because we would be free to feel our “natural” desires—no such things exist. Beyond the life you live, you have no “true” self—you are precisely what you do and think and feel. That’s the real tragedy about the life of the man who spends it talking on his cell phone and attending business seminars and fidgeting with the remote control: it’s not that he denies himself his dreams, necessarily, but that he makes them answer to reality rather than attempting the opposite. The accountant regarded with such pity by runaway teenage lovers may in fact be “happy”—but it is a different happiness than the one they experience on the lam.

If our desires are constructs, if we are indeed the products of our environment, then our freedom is measured by how much control of these environments we have. It’s nonsense to say a woman is free to feel however she wants about her body when she grows up surrounded by diet advertisements and posters of anorexic models. It’s nonsense to say a man is free when everything he needs to do to get food, shelter, success, and companionship is already established by his society, and all that remains is for him to choose between established options (bureaucrat or technician? bourgeois or bohemian? Democrat or Republican?). We must make our freedom by cutting holes in the fabric of this reality, by forging new realities which will, in turn, fashion us. Putting yourself in new situations constantly is the only way to ensure that you make your decisions unencumbered by the inertia of habit, custom, law, or prejudice—and it is up to you to create these situations. Freedom only exists in the moment of revolution.

And those moments are not as rare as you think. Change, revolutionary change, is going on constantly and everywhere—and everyone plays a part in it, consciously or not. “To be radical is simply to keep abreast of reality,” in the words of the old expatriate. The question is simply whether you take responsibility for your part in the ongoing transformation of the cosmos, acting deliberately and with a sense of your own power—or frame your actions as reactions, participating in unfolding events accidentally, randomly, involuntarily, as if you were purely a victim of circumstance.

If, as idealists like us insist, we can indeed create whatever world we want, then perhaps it’s true that we can adapt to any world, too. But the former is infinitely preferable. Choosing to spend your life in reaction and adaptation, hurrying to catch up to whatever is already happening, means being perpetually at the mercy of everything. That’s no way to go about pursuing your desires, whichever ones you choose.

So forget about whether “the” revolution will ever happen—the best reason to be a revolutionary is simply that it is a better way to live. It offers you a chance to lead a life that matters, gives you a relationship to injustice so you don’t have to deny your own grief and outrage, keeps you conscious of the give and take always going on between individual and institution, self and community, one and all. No institution can offer you freedom—but you can experience it in challenging and reinventing institutions. When school children make up their own words to the songs they are taught, when people show up by the tens of thousands to interfere with a closed-door meeting of expert economists discussing their lives, that’s what they’re up to: rediscovering that self-determination, like power, belongs only to the ones who exercise it.

Shout it over the rooftops: Culture can belong to us. We can make our own music, mythology, science, technology, tradition, psychology, literature, history, ethics, political power. Until we do, we’re stuck buying mass-produced movies and compact discs made by corporate mercenaries, sitting faceless and immobilized at arena rock performances and sports events, struggling with other people’s inventions and programs and theories that make less sense to us than sorcery did to our ancestors, shamefacedly accepting the judgments of priests and agony columnists and radio talk show hosts, berating ourselves for not living up to the standards set by college entrance exams and glamour magazines, listening to parents and counselors and psychiatrists and managers tell us we are the ones with the problems, buying our whole lives from the same specialists and entrepreneurs we sell them to—and gnashing our teeth in secret fury as they cut down the last trees and heroes with the cash and authority we give them. These things aren’t inevitable, inescapable tragedies—they’re consequences of the passivity to which we have relegated ourselves. In the checkout lines of supermarkets, on the dialing and receiving ends of 900 numbers, in the locker rooms before gym classes and cafeteria shifts, we long to be protagonists in our own epics, masters of our own fate.

If we are to transform ourselves, we must transform the world—but to begin reconstructing the world, we must reconstruct ourselves. Today all of us are occupied territory. Our appetites and attitudes and roles have all been molded by this world that turns us against ourselves and each other. How can we take and share control of our lives, and neither fear nor falter, when we’ve spent those lives being conditioned to do the opposite?

Whatever you do, don’t blame yourself for the fragments of the old order that remain within you. You can’t sever yourself from the chain of cause and effect that produced you—not with any amount of willpower. The trick is to find ways to indulge your programming that simultaneously subvert it—that create, in the process of satisfying those desires, conditions which foster new ones. If you need to follow leaders, find leaders who will depose themselves from the thrones in your head; if you need to “lead” others, find equals who will help you dethrone yourself; if you have to fight against others, find wars you can wage for everyone’s benefit. When it comes to dodging the imperatives of your conditioning, you’ll find that indulge and undermine is a far more effective program than the old heritage of “renounce and struggle” passed down from a humorless Christianity.

To return, finally, to the original question—yes, we too are making suggestions about which desires you pursue. We would be scoundrels to deny that! But we would be scoundrels not to make these suggestions, not to extol freedom and self-determination in a world that discourages them. Exhorting others to “think for themselves” is ironic—but today, refusing to oppose the propaganda of the missionaries and entrepreneurs and politicians simply means abandoning our society and species to their control. There’s no purity in silence. And liberty does not simply exist in the absence of control—it is something we have to make together. Taking responsibility for our part in the ongoing metamorphoses of the world means not being afraid to take part in the making of our society, influencing and being influenced as we do.

We make suggestions, we spread this propaganda of desire, because we hope by doing so to indulge our own programmed passion for propaganda in a way that undermines an order that discourages all of us from playing with our passions—and so to enter a world of total liberty and diversity, where propaganda and power struggles alike are obsolete. See you on the other side.

Related Video:

Where is Neo When We Need Him — Paul Craig Roberts

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By Paul Craig Roberts

Source: PaulCraigRoberts.org

In The Matrix in which Americans live, nothing is ever their fault. For example, the current decline in the US stock market is not because years of excessive liquidity supplied by the Federal Reserve have created a bubble so overblown that a mere six stocks, some of which have no earnings commiserate with their price, accounted for more than all of the gain in market capitalization in the S&P 500 prior to the current disruption.

In our Matrix existence, the stock market decline is not due to corporations using their profits, and even taking out loans, to repurchase their shares, thus creating an artificial demand for their equity shares.

The decline is not due to the latest monthly reporting of durable goods orders falling on a year-to-year basis for the sixth consecutive month.

The stock market decline is not due to a week economy in which after a decade of alleged economy recovery, new and existing home sales are still down by 63% and 23% from the peak in July 2005.

The stock market decline is not due to the collapse in real median family income and, thereby, consumer demand, resulting from two decades of offshoring middle class jobs and partially replacing them with minimum wage part-time Walmart jobs without benefits that do not provide sufficient income to form a household.

No, none of these facts can be blamed. The decline in the US stock market is the fault of China.

What did China do? China is accused of devaluing by a small amount its currency.

Why would a slight adjustment in the yuan’s exchange value to the dollar cause the US and European stock markets to decline?

It wouldn’t. But facts don’t matter to the presstitute media. They lie for a living.

Moreover, it was not a devaluation.

When China began the transition from communism to capitalism, China pegged its currency to the US dollar in order to demonstrate that its currency was as good as the world’s reserve currency. Over time China has allowed its currency to appreciate relative to the dollar. For example, in 2006 one US dollar was worth 8.1 Chinese yuan. Recently, prior to the alleged “devaluation” one US dollar was worth 6.1 or 6.2 yuan. After China’s adjustment to its floating peg, one US dollar is worth 6.4 yuan. Clearly, a change in the value of the yuan from 6.1 or 6.2 to the dollar to 6.4 to the dollar did not collapse the US and European stock markets.

Furthermore, the change in the range of the floating peg to the US dollar did not devalue China’s currency with regard to its non-US trading partners. What had happened, and what China corrected, is that as a result of the QE money printing policies currently underway by the Japanese and European central banks, the dollar appreciated against other currencies. As China’s yuan is pegged to the dollar, China’s currency appreciated with regard to its Asian and European trading partners. The appreciation of China’s currency (due to its peg to the US dollar) is not a good thing for Chinese exports during a time of struggling economies. China merely altered its peg to the dollar in order to eliminate the appreciation of its currency against its other trading partners.

Why did not the financial press tell us this? Is the Western financial press so incompetent that they do not know this? Yes.

Or is it simply that America itself cannot possibly be responsible for anything that goes wrong. That’s it. Who, us?! We are innocent! It was those damn Chinese!

Look, for example, at the hordes of refugees from America’s invasions and bombings of seven countries who are currently overrunning Europe. The huge inflows of peoples from America’s massive slaughter of populations in seven countries, enabled by the Europeans themselves, is causing political consternation in Europe and the revival of far-right political parties. Today, for example, neo-nazis shouted down German Chancellor Merkel, who tried to make a speech asking for compassion for refugees.

But, of course, Merkel herself is responsible for the refugee problem that is destabilizing Europe. Without Germany as Washington’s two-bit punk puppet state, a non-entity devoid of sovereignty, a non-country, a mere vassal, an outpost of the Empire, ruled from Washington, America could not be conducting the illegal wars that are producing the hordes of refugees that are over-taxing Europe’s ability to accept refugees and encouraging neo-nazi parties.

The corrupt European and American press present the refugee problem as if it has nothing whatsoever to do with America’s war crimes against seven countries. I mean, really, why should peoples flee countries when America is bringing them “freedom and democracy?”

Nowhere in the Western media other than a few alternative media websites is there an ounce of integrity. The Western media is a Ministry of Truth that operates full-time in support of the artificial existence that Westerners live inside The Matrix where Westerners exist without thought. Considering their inaptitude and inaction, Western peoples might as well not exist.

More is going to collapse on the brainwashed Western fools than mere stock values.

Don’t Worry – Everything is Not Under Control

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By Zen Gardner

Source: ZenGardner.com

What a farce. Telling everyone “everything is under control” is perhaps the most dulling and disempowering phrase ever uttered.

My fascination with language just keeps expanding. I love looking at expressions, words, colloquialisms, so-called “sayings” and the like with fresh awakened eyes. I can’t help it. The supposed, accepted and unconscious meanings of these imposed “expressions” are what direct our minds and turn our attention.

So much of what we’ve been handed down is contorted, manipulated and eventually nestled in the collective mindset to twist our hearts away from simple truth.

How many times has this expression been used to bring seeming comfort to someone; “Don’t worry, everything’s under control.” Really? What control? Who’s controlling what? And why?

So often this is used to imply some powerful force is behind everything directing what’s going on. Remind you of anything? Yes – religion, hierarchy, and social, political and economic so-called “controllers”. How debilitating can you get when it comes right down to it, playing on people’s insecurity and lack of conscious awareness?

“It’s under control” is comforting to people? It’s the picture of personal disempowerment!

External Control? Or Creative Freedom!

Sure, there is a wonderful creative Source we are all intrinsically part of, but it’s not “controlling” anything in a living, expanding Universe with beings of all sorts with free will and self determination in an alive multidimensional environment. If anything, this Creative impetus is tearing down control systems that attempt to foist themselves on its process, put there either by conscious intent or the manifestation of hardening mindsets in the social fabric.

Earth processes attest to this, as well as our spectacular expanding and ever changing Universe. Nature itself is alive with new sprouts of life in the animal, plant and mineral worlds, never mind other realms of existence.

Look at earthquakes and volcanoes, or the sun and astral influences. As much as some try to analyze or predict major events that affect earth that still brings no control, only a measure of preparedness on rare occasion. And that type of insecurity is good for us. It’s humbling and keeps us in check.

This process is what the awakening is all about!

While some earth changes may be exacerbated by human activity, the big stuff is way out of our control. Thankfully. That’s what makes life life, and also why the insane would-be captivators of humanity and its planet work so feverishly in their mad pursuits to try to control natural processes. Control is their yardstick and without it they have no temporal security or power, which to them equates some weird form of normalcy or equilibrium.

How upside down can you get.

Be it geoengineering our climate, genetically modifying the natural progression of life forms, or attempting to install artificial intelligence to run their soulless programs, these maniacs are desperate for control in every shape and form. Why? They cannot meld or harmonize with what’s natural since their psychopathic, demonic intentions have nothing to gain, all while the rest of us thrive on being part of the fantastic empowering natural processes of Creation Itself.

Therein lies the rub. Quite apparently we’re in a world of conflicts of interest. That’s our current playing field, if you will. Or won’t. It’s just the way it is.

Let Go Into Conscious Anarchy

I like the anarchy approach. Anarchy is an example of another twisted word. It’s doesn’t mean putting a society into deliberate chaotic destruction, it means living without hierarchical control mechanisms. Something most groomed humans are scared spitless of thanks to generations of social programming.

You mean to tell me if we didn’t have so-called “government” that everything would fall apart? Baloney. People are resourceful and essentially responsible, at least their inner nature is, that hasn’t been perverted by all of this programming to the contrary. That very dependence on external control systems is what the hierarchy is literally banking on which is why the repeated memes of fear of scarcity or personal security.

There’s plenty for everybody. All we need to do is work together locally and share with other communities in a range of sizes and distances. Real commerce in loving cooperation, not the regulated systems that have been foisted upon us. We’ve been weaned from personal responsibility into a system of statist dependence, like someone who’s stopped using their muscles and is dependent on some mass produced contraption for their mobility when there’s nothing wrong with them at all.

They just need to exercise their innate capabilities.

Just because people have become spiritually atrophied in large numbers doesn’t mean that’s the way it’s supposed to be. Exactly like waking up, it’s time to arise and use the magnificent body of capabilities we’ve all been given, and let go of these false crutches and systems of hierarchy and walk into life and live!

Epilogue

That false assurance that everything’s under control by external forces as if we individually have virtually none has got to go. Being comforting in times of stress and turmoil is one thing, but propping people up with some external dependence reinforcement is fundamentally wrong.

It’s time to be conscious – in our words, our thoughts and our actions.

It’s really not that difficult. The main thing you’ll confront is ignorant, unenlightened opposition from those who’ve grown deeply accustomed to this dependency programming, as if it’s some form of respect for the “great ones” who rule them.

It’s very deep and will take time to overcome for most. But remaining in that conscious space, no matter what ridicule or obstacles assail you, is the very solution we each are longing for.

It begins with each of us. Standing our ground and then moving forward in conscious, loving action.

Do it. Bravely. The time for humanity to arise is now.

Much love, be well, and fully empowered,

Zen

ZenGardner.com