Saturday Matinee: Journey to the West

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“Journey to the West” (2013) is writer/director Stephen Chow and Derek Kwok’s film adaptation of the classic 16th century Chinese novel of the same name. It chronicles the portion of the story in which young monk Xuan Zang (Zhang Wen) protects a village from three demons with the help of demon hunter Miss Duan (Qi Shu) and has his first encounter with the Monkey King (Bo Huang). Like Stephen Chow’s other blockbusters Kung Fu Hustle and Shaolin Soccer, Journey to the West features delightfully over-the-top performances and slapstick sensibility, but unlike previous works it also contains a spiritual message about redemption, sacrifice and enlightenment.

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2mn7pd_journey-to-the-west-conquering-the-demons-full-movie-new-action-movies-hd-english-movi-action-movie_shortfilms

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:

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

Ex Machina, et al, and the Metaphysics of Computer Consciousness

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By Steven Harp

Source: Reality Sandwich

( ex machina from the phrase “deus ex machina” meaning “god from the machine”)

It seems unquestioned in the world today that science is on the verge of creating consciousness with computers. In a Promethean rapture inspired by its enormous technological success, science aspires now to seize control of fundamental powers at the very heart of the universe.

With the advent of modern science the reality of human consciousness has come to be regarded as physical alone.  A caricature of consciousness has been compounded from such disparate elements as digital code, speculative evolutionary psychology, and a “neuro-phrenology” derived from colorized brain imaging. This caricature from scientists and engineers has gone into public circulation with the help of the media and it has become an acceptable counterfeit currency. And with cinematic virtuosity it has been made plausible by representations in the movies.

In the movie, Ex Machina we see another recycling of the classic Frankenstein story: Life is created from nonliving materials. A lone genius in an isolated laboratory, using the mysterious powers of science, creates new life. In the original Frankenstein story we have a dead body made alive by electricity. In Ex Machina we have a non-living “wetware” circuit given a mechanical body and made conscious by electricity.

This takes the story to a whole new level. Here the scientist is creating the very roots of being. To create consciousness-itself is equivalent to creating de novo cosmic absolutes such as space, matter, or light. It would be equivalent to creating a spectrum of color, a scale of tones, entire ranges of emotion, thought, pain, pleasure, and the entire dictionary of the contents of consciousness, all from the dark and silent abyss of nothingness.

How can something with neither mass nor dimension arise from that which has mass and dimension? How can that which has subjectivity and intentionality arise from that which has objectivity and has no intentionality?  This is the magisterial conundrum and is recognized as the greatest mystery in science.  No one, neither philosopher nor scientist, has a clue to the answer. It has famously been labeled the “hard problem of consciousness” by David Chalmers.

In both cases we see technology extrapolated to the creation our most fundamental being in which man becomes the maker of his most central essence, of what he is himself. The creation becomes the creator, the hand that draws itself.

This year alone has seen 8 major movies featuring synthetic or digital consciousness: Transcendence, Her, ChappieEx Machina, Lucy, Extant, Tomorrowland, and Terminator again.  One has to ask, is there something more than a good story line here?

The claim that technology will give birth to consciousness itself within a computer is entirely based on implicit assumptions about the nature of consciousness and reality. The often made assumption that the brain is like a computer and that nerve impulses are like digital code has no direct experimental foundation and is based on superficial resemblances only. There is no real scientific basis for the claim that the digital processing of symbols should somehow be accompanied by inner experience, that is, by consciousness, awareness, qualia, feeling, sentience, etc. 

A computer simulation of brain function is not going to produce consciousness any more than a computer simulation of kidney function is going to produce urine. There is no magic in computation. No amount of digital processing alone is ever going to produce a color. Without consciousness a computer program is a flow of electrons as meaningless and non-referential as those flowing in a wall.

Despite the flagrant and unbridgeable abyss between mind and matter it is the modern claim that if one can set up the right connections and run some electricity through it, a` la Frankenstein, consciousness will arrive on schedule from nonexistence. When undressed from the bewitching technical language this seems to be an equivalent in science of the Immaculate Conception. Or, in the current philosophical language we would call it the Immaculate Emergence. But perhaps Particle Parthenogenesis would be more accurate.

“We are on the edge of change comparable to the rise of human life on earth.” -Vernon Vinge

For materialists the arrival of artificial intelligence and machine consciousness is inevitable and only a matter of time. We have two main schools of thought developing on how to meet the coming technological tsunami – those who fear it and those who embrace it. We have on the fear side the notion that we are headed toward a near future where artificial intelligence or machine consciousness presents a danger to mankind (à la Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk, Nick Bostrom, etc.)

How this danger will manifest is the great unknown. There are countless possibilities. An embryonic AI lurking in the internet could suddenly cross the threshold into self-awareness and seize control of the world’s nuclear arsenals and missiles and demand surrender.  Or, a self-aware internet could lay low and send out brain wave controlling vibrations through WIFI and the background hum of our electrical circuitry to enslave humankind in order to advance technology sufficiently to develop the body or bodies necessary for a now paralyzed internet consciousness. This may have already happened.

And for those who embrace the change we have the Kurzwellians’ vision of the very technological replacement of humanity. This scenario will begin when computers begin to learn and thus redesign themselves. At this point the computer, or computer network, or robot would be capable of designing computers or robots better than itself. Repetitions of this cycle would result in an intelligence explosion resulting in a superintelligence which may be beyond human comprehension. This has been called the technological singularity and could begin as early as 2040, although the date keeps getting pushed further into the future.

In this process consciousness will transcend the hazards and horrors of warm-blooded protoplasmic existence. The machine descendants of man will transcend our obsolete and obscene modules of flesh. They shall put away the sweaty, smelly, hairy, warty, fatty, itchy, scarred, flawed, urinating, shitting, hurting, needy, conflicted, misshapen sac of meat and gristle and the gravity-enslaved earthly existence to become ascended silicon masters and rule like gods in a heavenly cyberspace and perhaps even reconfigure the universe itself. “We shall be as gods!” is a not so hidden background thought.

Consciousness will emerge like a butterfly from its earthbound caterpillar stage and fly freely in the new digital noosphere of a virtual reality (à la Kurzweil, Moravec, Fredkin).  The mortal human self will be subsumed like mitochondria in a giant computational eukaryote.  Our evolutionary period will expire like the dinosaurs’ and we will become a symbiont in the superior host technology. We have been upgraded by Google! All hail Google! Superintelligence is all! Praise Intelligence!

For artificial intelligence enthusiasts this will be good news for mankind. Maintaining mortal human flesh is a logistical nightmare. It requires very specific atmospheric conditions, it requires a very limited temperature range, it requires a vast range of chemical and energy inputs, it requires specific social and sexual connections, it even requires entertainment. Not meeting even one of these requirements could result in the entire operating system crashing and all the data lost (you).  Our wetware obviously makes for an inferior product when compared to a silicon based circuitry which could just as well exist in the vacuum of space with just a single source of electricity.

We shall put aside our earthly raiment of mortal skin and bone and be arrayed in the finest of indestructible metals, plastics, and silicons. We shall be free at last of nature and its’ inconveniences.  All the wealth and riches of the imagination will be at the tip of our cursor.  A million movie channels will be available and we will have an unbreakable silicon heart. We can even have our heart amputated like an infected appendix.  After all it is only pixels!  It is the next stage of evolution! Rejoice in the in the wonderful future of technology! Praise Evolution!

The notion that mind can be uploaded into a computer (Transcendence, Her, Chappie), if not completely loco, is radical in the extreme. But given the hubris of technological success and the realism of movie depictions, it has been made believable and in mainstream scientific circles it is near heresy to doubt the materialist premise of consciousness synthesis from raw physical materials. 

However there is a curiosity in the movie, Ex Machina, that perhaps reveals a crack in the technological juggernaut.  In the movie, Nathan, the techno-wizard internet mogul, has just created the most extraordinary technology in the history of science, a technology that would revolutionize the world and beyond. With Promethean daring he has just robbed the very cradle of consciousness and created Ava, a conscious robot that passes every Turing test.  It would seem that he would be in a state of elation and brimming with fulfillment.  Instead he is getting drunk at every opportunity. Alcohol is featured in almost every scene in which he appears.  One must ask the question, what has gone wrong with Nathan?    

Is this just an iniquitous twist of character?  Or could he be plain old lonely? Or is it a metaphysical crisis?  He lives like a hermit in a remote and isolated Northern region, but he has a retinue of very lovely synthetic ladies waiting for him in closets. And he has a beautiful and near mindless female companion and assistant that likes to dance. And then, he has the mysterious and unknown otherness of Ava. That should be adequate companionship.

But he has just synthesized consciousness. He has dramatically and inescapably demonstrated that life and consciousness are a merely physical phenomena that have no more meaning than electricity passing through a copper wire. He has shown that he himself is not much more than the ionic exchanges occurring through a polarized lipid membrane in a cranial bone flask.  And when the switch is turned off he dissolves into nothingness.

Our lone genius clearly has grounds for a metaphysical crisis.  He has experimentally proven a deeper isolation:  That is the isolation that the vision of materialism prescribes for man – as a spark of consciousness in a meaningless void. There is no wider mystery in being alive… he is all there is… a pathetic lonely little god… isolated in time as well as space with a separation that he cannot mitigate, even with the agreeable companionship of his ersatz bitches.

It is more than ironic that our synthesizer of new consciousness is intent on anaesthetizing his own.  But is this not also modern man? Alcohol is the universal drug of the world today. Nathan here is materialist everyman rather than the oversensitive genius. Modern man closes the door on his personal consciousness while aspiring to extend consciousness through external technological means. It seems modern man shares the same metaphysical disturbance as our techno-wizard, Nathan.

The materialist everyman has fixated on a physical literalism that excludes the meaningfulness inherent within every conscious experience. He has radically reduced the ontological range of life. Life has been stripped of inner meaning. He is abandoned to a complete separation and isolation in both time and space.

He has embraced the lawful Stalinesque reality of materialism as a total explanation for consciousness. He has embraced the scientific fundamentalism of consilience. And total explanations produce repressive states, both political and personal. However, modern man, like an eviscerated organism continues to live… even though partially.

The Frankenstein of today is more than an out-of-control technology. Our Frankenstein monster is the story that science has authority over all other interpretations of life and has replaced them with a grim and desolate paradigm about the nature of the universe and our place in it. Technology has come to shape the imagery by which the world is depicted and to affirm the underlying metaphysics of materialism. We have shaped our reality and now it shapes us. It is only natural then that Ava, the beautiful and sexy creature in Ex Machina kills her creator, Nathan. But modern man cannot kill his own soul so he must anaesthesize it.

But, exercising our imagination, let us suppose that consciousness, rather than being proven physically dependent is proven physically independent. Materialism, irrespective of technological successes, would be shown wrong and suggest that we have been living in the dark ages of a materialist ideology. And it would reveal the present day metaphysics of consciousness at the heart of a dysfunctional civilization.

Real Rewilding

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By Glenn Aparicio Parry

Source: Reality Sandwich

In an attempt to circumvent enmity toward genetically modified foods, Danish scientists are proposing what they claim is a precision breeding technique called “rewilding.” It is named rewilding because it mixes current genes from a plant with ancient genes of the same plant (old genes that were either lost or bred out somewhere along the way). The name sounds harmless, even restorative, and would likely be labelled non-GMO in the US because the genes are modified from the same plant. It could even be labelled “organic” if the introduced gene is determined not to be “foreign.” Like most genetic experiments, it is difficult to know the efficacy of this technique or if it ever will be successfully introduced. The outcome of the initiative notwithstanding, I find the name “rewilding” troubling. It reminds me of other similarly deceptive euphemisms, such as “tax relief” for millionaires. Who could be against “tax relief?” It sounds like a laxative, something we need to make it through the day.

Rewilding is exactly what we need—but not through genetic breeding. We need to rewild by reconnecting with what is wild in Nature and within ourselves if we are to save humanity and many of the other species with which we share this planet. Rewilding is a biological imperative.

So, how do we do this? One important way is to use our mind and our thoughts differently, in ways that reconnect us with our wild roots. These ancient ways of instinctual and intuitive thinking are not obsolete, just suppressed, and their recovery could help promote emotional and spiritual healing. We all need a sense of belonging, especially now. But modern abstract thinking has produced the opposite result—separating us from our “environment.” This fosters alienation, depression, and if untreated, violence.

Of course, abstract thinking has its benefits, and is largely responsible for much of high level science. But we would be wrong to assume that modern rationality is the most advanced form of thought. In my view, it has actually degenerated from its roots in ancient Greece. It is true that the Greeks prized rational thinking as the pinnacle of thought, but they also considered it to be the most beautiful form of thought. The key is in the word. “Rational” comes from “ratio,” or a relationship between things. In the right proportions (what the ancient Greeks called divine proportion or the sacred ratio) the relationship between things is beautiful. It is possible to think harmonious and beautiful thoughts that are inspired by and connect us to living nature, and this is what we should aspire to do.

Original Thinking = The Best of Old and New Thought

I find it curious that genetic rewilding seeks to bring modern and ancient genes together because I often support the idea of bringing old and new together, particularly old and new ideas. If an idea is wise, it is timeless. It can be brought back as needed, even if it has fallen out of favor for so long it is forgotten and its reintroduction is misperceived as brand new. The holistic health movement is a prime example of this phenomenon. It is only after we stopped treating people as whole that we rediscovered a need to do so. I recently saw a newspaper story proclaiming “new hospitals” that have fresh air, sunlight, and gardens for the patients to walk in. The concept is actually very old, used in the sanatoriums of the Middle Ages, where people were very much treated as whole (holy), even if the technologies were not as proficient.

I am not necessarily opposed to bringing old and new genes together providing it is something that genuinely helps the plant and if the plant wants it. That’s right. You read correctly. We should ask the plant first. I am opposed to human beings playing with the DNA of other species as if those species have no rights, as if all of nature is here merely to serve us. This is a fundamental flaw in modern Western thinking.

Of course, mainstream science would scoff at the idea of communicating with plants, but this is a self-imposed limitation. As the visionary physicist David Bohm noted, “The strength of science is that it is based in lived experience. The weakness is that it only admits certain kinds of experiences as legitimate.”

In antiquity, we possessed the ability to communicate with plants, as did Goethe, living in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, and Clive Backster (albeit through the medium of a lie detector) living in the 20th century. Contemporary Indigenous peoples (and other people who have reindigenized to the land) are still able to communicate with plants. In my opinion, all of us do this to some extent, even those who think they can’t. And why shouldn’t we be able to talk with plants? After all, plants and animals are so radically interconnected that we are in a literal conspiracy; we conspire, or breathe together, taking in what the other breathes out in a sacred circle of life.

As Paula Underwood, an Oneida elder observed, the development of one ability often disables another. Our capacities to study about nature have closed off the capacity we once had to speak directly with nature. It is also possible that our abilities to experiment upon the natural world only emerged out of necessity after we had lost our ability to listen. This would explain Frances Bacon’s frustrated cry to “put Nature on a rack and torture her” to learn her secrets.

My chief complaint about genetic engineering is that it tinkers with what ought to be left alone. We do this largely because we believe that knowledge must be obtained through trial and error, but this is one of the greatest fallacies of modern mind. We are so certain that trial and error is the only way to obtain knowledge that we have trouble imagining any other way. But there is another way.

Many intact Indigenous cultures have comprehensive knowledge of plant medicine. Ask them how they know this, and they will tell you that they learned (or their ancestors learned) by directly communicating with the spirit of the plants. The rishis of India were said to have written the Vedic texts in the same way. How else could the Native peoples of the Amazon have received the recipe for making ayahuasca? It is necessary to blend two plants together to make the brew, and one of them contains the monooxidase inhibitor necessary for transforming the DMT molecule in the other to be psychoactive. It boggles the mind to predict the odds of coming upon this by trial and error. I choose instead to believe the Indigenous peoples.

Real rewilding opens the possibility of connection, even communion, with other species. We humans have the instinctual capacity to do this. Of course, instinct has become a pejorative word, something we supposedly transcended in favor of free will. But this is misguided. Instinct serves a vital purpose, connecting us with the rest of creation. Ultimately, humans cannot thrive, or even survive, if the water, air, soil, other plants and animals we share this Earth with are not respected and protected.

Humans have free will, but that does not mean we should act in our selfish interest experimenting on the rest of nature willy-nilly. Our task is to first rewild and learn what nature wants to happen, and then use our free will to align with that sacred purpose.

The Consciousness Revolution

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By Graham Hancock

Source: Reality Sandwich

The following is excerpted from The Divine Spark: Psychedelics, Consciousness, and the Birth of Civilization, edited by Graham Hancock (Disinformation Books, April 2015).

Consciousness is one of the great mysteries of science—perhaps the greatest mystery. We all know we have it, when we think, when we dream, when we savor tastes and aromas, when we hear a great symphony, when we fall in love, and it is surely the most intimate, the most sapient, the most personal part of ourselves. Yet no one can really claim to have understood and explained it completely. There’s no doubt it’s associated with the brain in some way, but the nature of that association is far from clear. In particular, how do these three pounds of material stuff inside our skulls allow us to have experiences?

Professor David Chalmers of the Australian National University has dubbed this the “hard problem” of consciousness, but many scientists, partic­ularly those (still in the majority) who are philosophically inclined to believe that all phenomena can be reduced to material interactions, deny that any problem exists. To them, it seems self-evident that physical processes within the stuff of the brain produce consciousness rather in the way that a genera­tor produces electricity—i.e., consciousness is an “epiphenomenon” of brain activity. And they see it as equally obvious that there cannot be such things as conscious survival of death or out-of-body experiences since both con­sciousness and experience are confined to the brain and must die when the brain dies.

Yet other scientists with equally impressive credentials are not so sure and are increasingly willing to consider a very different analogy—namely that the relationship of consciousness to the brain may be less like the rela­tionship of the generator to the electricity it produces and more like the relationship of the TV signal to the TV set. In that case, when the TV set is destroyed—dead—the signal still continues. Nothing in the present state of knowledge of neuroscience rules this revolutionary possibility out. True, if you damage certain areas of the brain, certain areas of consciousness are compromised, but this does not prove that those areas of the brain generate the relevant areas of consciousness. If you were to damage certain areas of your TV set, the picture would deteriorate or vanish but the TV signal would remain intact.

We are, in other words, confronted by at least as much mystery as fact around the subject of consciousness, and this being the case, we should remember that what seems obvious and self-evident to one generation may not seem at all obvious or self-evident to the next. For hundreds of years, it was obvious and self-evident to the greatest human minds that the Sun moved around the Earth—one need only look to the sky, they said, to see the truth of this proposition. Indeed, those who maintained the revolutionary view that the Earth moved around the Sun faced the Inquisition and death by burning at the stake. Yet as it turned out, the revolutionaries were right and orthodoxy was terribly, ridiculously wrong.

The same may well prove to be true with the mystery of consciousness. Yes, it does seem obvious and self-evident that the brain produces it (the generator analogy), but this is a deduction from incomplete data and cat­egorically not yet an established and irrefutable fact. New discoveries may force materialist science to rescind this theory in favor of something more like the TV analogy in which the brain comes to be understood as a trans­ceiver rather than as a generator of consciousness and in which conscious­ness is recognized as fundamentally “nonlocal” in nature—perhaps even as one of the basic driving forces of the universe. At the very least, we should withhold judgment on this “hard problem” until more evidence is in and view with suspicion those who hold dogmatic and ideological views about the nature of consciousness.

It’s at this point that the whole seemingly academic issue becomes intensely political and current because modern technological society ideal­izes and is monopolistically focused on only one state of consciousness—the alert, problem-solving state of consciousness that makes us efficient pro­ducers and consumers of material goods and services. At the same time, our society seeks to police and control a wide range of other “altered” states of consciousness on the basis of the unproven proposition that consciousness is generated by the brain.

I refer here to the so-called “war on drugs” which is really better under­stood as a war on consciousness and which maintains, supposedly in the interests of society, that we as adults do not have the right or maturity to make sovereign decisions about our own consciousness and about the states of consciousness we wish to explore and embrace. This extraordinary impo­sition on adult cognitive liberty is justified by the idea that our brain activity, disturbed by drugs, will adversely impact our behavior toward others. Yet anyone who pauses to think seriously for even a moment must realize that we already have adequate laws that govern adverse behavior toward others and that the real purpose of the “war on drugs” must therefore be to bear down on consciousness itself.

Confirmation that this is so came from the last British Labour govern­ment. It declared that its drug policy would be based on scientific evidence, yet in 2009 it sacked Professor David Nutt, chair of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs, for stating the simple statistical fact that cannabis is less dangerous (in terms of measured “harms”) than tobacco and alcohol and that ecstasy is less dangerous than horse riding. Clearly what was at play here were ideological issues of great importance to the powers that be. And this is an ideology that sticks stubbornly in place regardless of changes in the complexion of the government of the day. The present Conservative-Liberal coalition remains just as adamant in its enforcement of the so-called war on drugs as its Labour predecessor and continues, in the name of this “war,” to pour public money—our money—into large, armed, drug-enforcement bureaucracies which are entitled to break down our doors at dead of night, invade our homes, ruin our reputations, and put us behind bars.

All of this, we have been persuaded, is in our own interests. Yet if we as adults are not free to make sovereign decisions—right or wrong—about our own consciousness, that most intimate, that most sapient, that most personal part of ourselves, then in what useful sense can we be said to be free at all? And how are we to begin to take real and meaningful responsibility for all the other aspects of our lives when our governments seek to disenfranchise us from this most fundamental of all human rights and responsibilities?

In this connection, it is interesting to note that our society has no objec­tion to altering consciousness per se. On the contrary, many consciousness-altering drugs, such as Prozac, Seroxat, Ritalin, and alcohol are either mas­sively overprescribed or freely available today, and they make huge fortunes for their manufacturers but remain entirely legal despite causing obvious harms. Could this be because such legal drugs do not alter consciousness in ways that threaten the monopolistic dominance of the alert problem-solving state of consciousness, while a good number of illegal drugs, such as canna­bis, LSD, DMT, and psilocybin, do?

There is a revolution in the making here, and what is at stake transcends the case for cognitive liberty as an essential and inalienable adult human right. If it turns out that the brain is not a generator but a transceiver of consciousness, then we must consider some little-known scientific research that points to a seemingly outlandish possibility, namely that a particular category of illegal drugs, the hallucinogens such as LSD, DMT, and psilo­cybin, may alter the receiver wavelength of the brain and allow us to gain contact with intelligent nonmaterial entities, “light beings,” “spirits,” “machine elves” (as Terence McKenna called them)—perhaps even the inhabitants of other dimensions. This possibility is regarded as plain fact by shamans in hunter-gatherer societies who for thousands of years made use of visionary plants and fungi to enter and interact with what they construed as the “spirit world.” Intriguingly, it was also specifically envisaged by Dr. Rick Strass­man, professor of psychiatry at the University of New Mexico, following his groundbreaking research with human volunteers and DMT carried out in the 1990s—a project that produced findings with shattering implications for our understanding of the nature of reality. For further information on Strass­man’s revolutionary work, see his book DMT: The Spirit Molecule.

The Upheaval Dialogues: 2012 Reconsidered

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By Christopher Knowles

Source: The Secret Sun

Before my trip to New Hampshire I was working on a post arguing that the 2012 prophecies were not incorrect but simply premature. That 2012 seemed to mark a turning point of a sort, a distinct change in the worldwide weather, if you will. You can point to to 2012 and see a number of trends that have metastasized since then, in the geopolitical situation, but also in our politics, in the economy, in social relations.

A lot of this is cynical manipulation, a reaction to the legitimate threat once posed by the Occupy movement. We’re seeing a lot of gamesmanship at work, a lot of people being given the rope with which to hang themselves. That will become more apparent by this time next year. Politics at every level is all smoke and mirrors today- believe nothing you see.

But there’s something much deeper at work. We’re seeing mass die-offs of wildlife, particularly that of sealife, all over the world. Most troubling are the mass die-offs of bees, animals that our food supply is so dependent on. Whether through carbon emissions or through geoengineering, we’re also seeing dangerous levels of pollen on the increase and the attendant increase in respiratory illness.

And there have been attendant signs in the sky- the Sun seems to have gone quiet, perhaps presaging a long and difficult period of solar inactivity, one that could presage a mini-ice age. After years of mocking “believers,” scientists are once again recognizing that there are two giants beyond Pluto (one may be a brown dwarf)*.

What effect they might have on our planet is debatable (some claim they are the source of all the invaders we’ve come to worry so much about; asteroids, meteors, etc), there’s no shortage of “Nibiru” scare mongers on the Internet preaching apocalypse one minute, then selling “survival” trinkets and gimcracks in order to stave off your doom the next.

We’ve also seen strange signs on the earth- a rise in earthquake and volcanic activity (a major volcano could block out the Sun for many parts of the world, causing famine), an increase in gigantic sinkholes (massive hollowing out of the surface layer of the earth) and in the Pacific, violent typhoons. Hurricane season in the Atlantic has been relatively quiet since 2012’s Superstorm, but that might be the literal calm before the storm.

And of course, there is the endless drumbeat of war. There is the endless slaughter and massive displacement in the Middle East (with ancient Gnostic sects such as the Druze, Yazidi and Alawites targeted for genocide by Jihadists) and the growing tension in Eastern Europe. There’s also the uptick in terrorism in Europe (Charlie Hebdo, the attack in France today), although intolerable is not even a speck of the carnage people elsewhere in the world suffer on a daily basis, especially as struggles between Sunni and Shi’a Muslims escalate to global proportions. Syria, Yemen, Pakistan…the list of sectarian carnage is mind-numbing.

Toothless NATO protectorates like Sweden are easy targets for the Sino-Russian ascendancy, which is why the US is moving heavy artillery in the area. But the state of constant war is such that drone pilots are reporting record levels of stress and burn-out.

Poltical and social tensions have increased in this country, though in comparison to what’s going on in the rest of the world it seems like a footnote (certainly the endless political bickering on the ‘Net does). On a personal level, I’m seeing so many people I care about under serious stress. It’s as if the entire solar system is in convulsions, from the macrocosm to the microcosm.

As many of us warned about, the corporate Christianity of the 80s and 90s has sparked an enormous backlash, with many young people walking away from religion (and pretty much everything else) entirely. Church leaders are now realizing the error of their shotgun wedding to partisan politics, even as Christianity rises in ways once unimagined in Africa, Russia and China.

But the collapse of religious faith especially among vulnerable working class populations has left a huge void, one which pandemic drug abuse is filling.

A deep and abiding nihilism has gripped the entire world– not just the West– and all of the chaos and upheaval we are seeing now is a symptom of that. 

What is going to heal that?

Science is increasingly proving itself to be corrupt and compromised. Transhumanism (now just a fading dream, despite some of the hysteria you still see) won’t fill the void, virtual reality (which never has and probably never will live up to its hype) won’t fill the void, forcing the world in a Borghive will just make magnify the problem, just as the Internet can turn a quiet, Type B “nice guy” or “nice girl” into a raging, misanthropic troll.

So was 2012 the turning point? The beginning of a period of upheaval? Hollywood sells us the myth of overnight apocalypse (“The Day After Tomorrow”) but history teaches us that periods of upheaval are slow in getting started, so much so that they are hardly recognized as such until it’s too late.

History also teaches us that chaos has its own genius and often turns on the men who seek to unleash it for their own benefit. We’re not seeing true chaos on a worldwide scale yet, but the beast is straining at its leash, that’s for certain.

And you can also bet the farm that we’ll see what Jacques Vallee calls the “Control System” awake from its slumber. It already has, though that too has largely gone unnoticed. But not for much longer.

You will live in interesting times…

UPDATE: Speaking of which, are you watching what’s going on in the Chinese Stock Market?

UPDATE: The weaponization of space is proceeding apace, ostensibly to counter threats from China and Russia. There are strange linguistic undertones in the press release, however….

 

*The reason I don’t pay any attention to astronomers’ bold claims of distant solar systems is that they have no friggin’ idea what’s floating around in ours. Or they do and are lying about it. Either way.

The Beginning is Here

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By Zen Gardner

Source: Waking Times

Waking up to the realities presented before us and even more importantly what they imply is a very profound and personal experience. Once we become aware we are living in a world that’s been deliberately fabricated in ways we never would have imagined and that even our own true nature is anything but what we’ve been told, there’s no turning back.

It may appear to be a lonely path at first, but we are by no means alone in this awakening. It is happening in all walks of life. Whether a banker or corporate employee wakes up to the scam being perpetrated on humanity and pulls out of the matrix, or a normal taxpaying worker realizes they’re contributing to a military industrial machine hell bent on control and world domination, we’re all the same.

And those are just surface issues compared to the deliberate suppression of man’s innate spiritual nature, whether we call it social liberty or the simple freedom to create and manifest as we truly are. Not the least of which control mechanisms we are faced with is religion which works hand in hand with this suppression of humanity. All part of this repressive, controlling matrix.

Triggers for Awakening

There are many such triggers that wake people up. Once someone realizes, for example, how the world was scammed on 9/11 and that the powers that be are willing to continue to perpetrate such atrocities to promote their agenda, the digging begins. When we realize we seem to be at the complete mercy of parasitic central bankers more than willing to not only implode the world’s economy, but finance both sides of any conflict for personal gain and control, and that our governments are complicit in this scheme, we start to grasp the enormity of what befalls us.

That we have rapidly evolved into an advanced militarized surveillance police state is driving many to ask some hard questions – and the answers can be startling and difficult to swallow, especially when you realize they’re attempting to cut off all avenues of recourse.

Another major issue is that it’s more evident by the day that our very health is under attack, again by complicit government and multinational corporations pushing GMOs, adulterated food, vaccines, pharmaceuticals, atmospheric aerosols, genetic alterations and the like, all of which are clearly extremely hazardous to humanity. Yet they push harder by the day, mandating program after destructive program. Meanwhile, natural and organic farming and foods, as well as supplements, are under intense attack by these very same perpetrators.

The truth about these issues and many, many more including awareness of the massive planet harming programs such as fracking, electrosmog, genetic modification, technologically driven transhumanism and the ongoing geoengineering assault on humanity are driving a major perceptual paradigm shift amongst all walks of life as we delve more deeply into who is doing all this and why.

What exactly is their agenda? Volumes of evidence points to not just control, but literal depopulation motives. Is this shadow force literally that Machiavellian?

There Is No “They” – Or Is There?

This is often the final breakthrough point for many people. As the true picture starts to crystallize, the horrific realization that the “powers that be” are fundamentally a clandestine cabal with puppet-like front men comes into focus. These are powerful minions, more interested in weakening and subjugating humanity via health degradation, dumbed down education, mindless “bread and circus” government controlled media, depraved violence and sex oriented entertainment, and a draconian militarized police crackdown. The ugly truth then comes to the fore.

It can be staggering. If you take just 9/11 and other false flag events and realize they were staged to bring about this Orwellian police state where the citizens are now terrorist suspects, it can be very difficult to swallow.

A quick perusal of history soon follows, where people realize these same false flag/false enemy tactics were used to justify almost every war, leading to such totalitarian states as Stalinist Russia, Communist China and Nazi Germany, each of which descended into horrific pogroms, decimating their own populations of anyone potentially daring to question the new regime. With that perspective, the trees we’re amongst on the edge of the forest become strikingly transparent. America and its allies are indeed exactly the same, only much much worse, being pawned off to a numbed down generation who actually believe this is all a fight for liberty and freedom when in fact it is the exact opposite.

It’s not all black and white. There are of course good people working for bad people, powers and programs, wittingly and unwittingly. Many are trying to change and improve our existing structure. Many good people are performing wonderful services within this overarching societal program thinking it can be changed constructively. What we’re addressing are the deceitful and destructive powers and mechanisms at play that are attempting to bring humanity into a weakened subservient role to some sort of worldwide fascist control state, eliminating personal and national sovereignty to support and obey a very few powerful self-appointed elites.

And it’s coming on fast.

This becomes evident as one pursues almost any avenue we’re discussing here. To realize this massive program is being orchestrated by some form of “they” soon becomes obvious. The reality of the conspiracy that JFK so eloquently pointed out before he was surgically removed from office via assassination hits squarely home. Here’s an excerpt from this landmark speech.

For we are opposed around the world by a monolithic and ruthless conspiracy that relies on covert means for expanding its sphere of influence–on infiltration instead of invasion, on subversion instead of elections, on intimidation instead of free choice, on guerrillas by night instead of armies by day.

It is a system which has conscripted vast human and material resources into the building of a tightly knit, highly efficient machine that combines military, diplomatic, intelligence, economic, scientific and political operations. Its preparations are concealed, not published. Its mistakes are buried not headlined. Its dissenters are silenced, not praised. No expenditure is questioned, no rumor is printed, no secret is revealed. – John F. Kennedy

We Have to Find Out for Ourselves

An essential element to a true awakening is investigating and learning for ourselves. One of the main control mechanisms has been teaching humanity to only trust what they’ve been told by these same agendized so-called authorities. How many times have you heard, “If 9/11 was an ‘inside job’, surely it would have been on CNN. If something was really wrong surely someone would have said something.”

Well, a lot of people have and continue to speak out. And what’s the response? Anything contrary to the official narrative is “outlandish conspiracy theory”, and results in the subsequent demonization and marginalization of any form of questioning or healthy criticism.

Waking up from that media and education entrancement is another shocker. Could they do such a thing? Could we really be facing such a totalitarian crackdown and mind and information control? Do they really have such sway on humanity?

When I was young there were over 60 media companies vying for audiences. Real investigative reporting, although it’s always been tampered with or suppressed, was still available. Today 6 mega corporations own all of the media. The very same corporations that own much of the corporate military industrial infrastructure. Conspiracy is not a stretch – of course these power brokers would twist information to suit their intentions. The word conspiracy has been stigmatized for a reason – don’t ask questions or there will be consequences.

All of this will take some serious researching, most likely in places people have never dared to look before. And this is good. Don’t let anyone tell you what the truth is, find out for yourself and be convinced in your own mind and heart. That’s a new phenomenon for most, as odd as that may seem, but stepping outside the propaganda mainstream is a must. And it is oh so refreshing.

The Shock Does Wear Off – But the Indignation Doesn’t

There are so many interconnected “rabbit holes” of similarly repressed, twisted or hidden areas of information that it can be staggering. Once we realize we’ve been lied to about any one of these serious issues, we begin to question everything. And that is extremely healthy. You may not find support for your new found perspective from those around you, but there are millions who are sharing your experience. Thanks to the internet you can find others undergoing the same transformation quite readily and derive a lot of affirmation, encouragement and support.

Battling through the naysaying of close friends and loved ones seems to act like a chrysalis, much like the cocoon a metamorphosing butterfly has to struggle to escape. And as we know, that is exactly what drives the blood into the wings of the birthing creation that will soon bear the beautiful new awakened soul to glorious new heights and vistas.

One thing that won’t wear off is your absolute disdain for what is being perpetrated on our fellow humans. As the expression goes, “If you’re not angry, you’re not paying attention.” If you knew your home was under attack and malevolent forces were coming for you and your children, you would do anything in your power to protect your family. That soon becomes an innate awareness regarding the current toxic social and physical world we’re experiencing and the need for a conscious response.

We are Responding – They Know It and Don’t Like It

Globalist adviser to 5 American presidents including Barak Obama, Zbigniew Brzezinski has clearly laid out the plan for global hegemony at any cost. His book, The Grand Chessboard even alludes to the need for a new Pearl Harbor, later echoed by the oft quoted PNAC report issued before 9/11 literally forecasting the event.

In one of his many addresses to the globalist advisory board called the Council on Foreign Relations, he made some very revealing statements. They are very aware of and afraid of the global awakening, and have surreal plans on how to control it.

Not lauding this awakening, but decrying it, Brzezinski chillingly said: [Emphasis mine]

For the first time in human history almost all of humanity is politically activated, politically conscious and politically interactive… The resulting global political activism is generating a surge in the quest for personal dignity, cultural respect and economic opportunity in a world painfully scarred by memories of centuries-long alien colonial or imperial domination… The worldwide yearning for human dignity is the central challenge inherent in the phenomenon of global political awakening… That awakening is socially massive and politically radicalizing… The nearly universal access to radio, television and increasingly the Internet is creating a community of shared perceptions and envy that can be galvanized and channeled by demagogic political or religious passions. These energies transcend sovereign borders and pose a challenge both to existing states as well as to the existing global hierarchy, on top of which America still perches…

The youth of the Third World are particularly restless and resentful. The demographic revolution they embody is thus a political time-bomb, as well… Their potential revolutionary spearhead is likely to emerge from among the scores of millions of students concentrated in the often intellectually dubious “tertiary level” educational institutions of developing countries. Depending on the definition of the tertiary educational level, there are currently worldwide between 80 and 130 million “college” students. Typically originating from the socially insecure lower middle class and inflamed by a sense of social outrage, these millions of students are revolutionaries-in-waiting, already semi-mobilized in large congregations, connected by the Internet and pre-positioned for a replay on a larger scale of what transpired years earlier in Mexico City or in Tiananmen Square. Their physical energy and emotional frustration is just waiting to be triggered by a cause, or a faith, or a hatred…

[The] major world powers, new and old, also face a novel reality: while the lethality of their military might is greater than ever, their capacity to impose control over the politically awakened masses of the world is at a historic low. To put it bluntly: in earlier times, it was easier to control one million people than to physically kill one million people; today, it is infinitely easier to kill one million people than to control one million people.

Zbigniew Brzezinski

The Conscious Awakening

This dark yet ultimately empowering information goes hand in hand with anyone experiencing this paradigm shift. If things here are so massively manipulated, what lies beyond all of this? What are we being kept from? Why do we sense we are so much more?

These are very important questions to pursue. There must be meaning in all of this. “Certainly all of humanity is not as wicked as these psychopathic control freaks.” Yes, that’s true. Unfortunately, the aggressor usually rules the day in this hierarchy of control our world has adopted for millennia. History bears this out.

The beauty of gaining a greater new found spiritual perspective is that it puts these influences in their place. We discover new ways to perceive our true indomitable nature which gives tremendous peace and confidence in spite of what we’re currently faced with. This sense of profound conscious awareness and spirituality only grows as our pursuit for truth, in love, gains momentum.

Awake, But Never Alone

A sense of isolation following the initial awakening is natural. It’s foreign to everything we’ve been taught, with implications that can be mind-boggling as well as heart breaking. However, we are very much connected and sharing a profound common experience. Knowing we are not alone is very important to keep in mind.

Building community also becomes a priority, where we can contribute to the healing of the planet at every level possible. Whether it’s activist or spiritual associations these are very important. It may only be on-line at first, that’s fine. Find kindred spirits and empowering and informative websites and blogs and even attend meet up events in your area on some of these subjects of concern.

This awakening of empowered consciousness is upon us, and is transpiring at an accelerating pace, and something to be very encouraged about. Once you get past the shock of what you’ve “found out”, it becomes easier, but it will drastically alter your life. For the better.

Enjoy it, be empowered, and take action accordingly.

The beginning is here.

Much love, Zen

ZenGardner.com